User talk:Kaartic

Presenting the Third Edition of the Wikipedia Mobile Apps Newsletter!

Explore the freshest news, enhancements, and additions in our newsletter, keeping you in the loop for an enriched mobile Wikipedia journey. Dive into the content and make the most of your reading!

iOS

From June to August 2023

• We released version 7.3.1 on July 12, with highlights:
  • Fixed character counter in article description editor.
  • Added Gurene, Wayuu, and Angika languages to our language list.
  • Addressed automatic theme switching bug and performed cleanup for performance fixes.
• We're progressing on upcoming features:
  • Redesigning diff view: The "Diff View" displays changes in a Wikipedia article over time, showing additions, deletions, and edits for easy comparison between different versions helping you track content evolution and updates.
  • Coming in 7.4.0:
    1. Unleash the power of "Undo" and "Rollback" with updated diff pages!They let you revert changes made to an article back to a previous version, helping you fix mistakes or unwanted edits quickly.
       As we move one step closer to bringing Watchlist to the iOS app we are aiming to release it in September. We've refreshed our diff pages and added the option for experienced editors to roll back destructive edits. You can check out the updated diff page by tapping "View Edit History" in any article.
    2. A warm welcome to the Tachelhit language Wikipedia!
    3. Connect across language variants with updated codes! When you venture into articles of different language variants, particularly Chinese and Serbian, you should find a smoother experience when using variant codes.

Remember, your feedback powers our journey. You can be a part of our quest to create the ultimate Wikipedia experience by reporting bugs, quirks, or even your magical moments. Reach out through iOS-support@wikimedia.org.

Thank you for being a vital part of our community... Happy exploring!

Android

From June to August 2023:

• We've been finishing up our work on Image Recommendations (a new Suggested Edits task where you'll be able to add images to articles that are currently unillustrated). We plan to release the feature by September.
• We are beginning development on Patroller Tasks (a new Suggested Edits task for patrolling recent edits for vandalism). You can read about the usability testing we’ve conducted for the feature on the project page on MediaWiki.
• On a note of gratitude, we extend our heartfelt appreciation to the dedicated individuals who participated as graders for Machine Assisted Article Descriptions. Your invaluable contributions have significantly contributed to the advancement of our projects, and we look forward to your continued collaboration as we push the boundaries of Wikipedia's capabilities.

Community meetings

On July 30, 2023, the Wikimedia Apps Team had a fruitful meeting with the group behind the Wiki Mentor Africa Initiative. Over 100 participants joined on Zoom, with others watching the YouTube live stream. The presentation covered the Apps' history, roadmap, open questions, feature reviews, and FAQs. Valuable feedback was shared, enhancing the apps' development and user experience. These collaborative engagements are vital to building a more inclusive Wikimedia platform. I am enthusiastic about recreating this experience with other communities; please navigate to the last paragraph to know how to initiate such engagements.

On August 17, the spotlight was on the Apps Team at Wikimania as we presented "There’s an App for that: a mobile-native way to interact with the movement". We appreciate everyone who tuned in virtually to explore the future of interaction with the Wikimedia movement through our innovative mobile app. If you missed it or want to revisit the content, you can find the presentation slides at this link.

We're excited to share that Jazmin Tanner, the Apps Lead Product Manager, contributed to the session titled "Supporting Moderators at the Wikimedia Foundation." As we diligently worked on refining the patroller feature on the apps, Jazmin provided valuable insights that contributed to discussions on enhancing the experience for both moderators and users.

The next office hour

Our upcoming office hour is scheduled for October. Further information regarding the specific date and time will be provided in our forthcoming newsletter.

We are excited and willing to arrange meetings with interested community members.

You may also contact us at aramadan@wikimedia.org to arrange such gatherings.

And you can subscribe to this newsletter from this link.

~~ ARamadan-WMF10:16, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Introducing the Second Issue of the Wikipedia Mobile Apps Newsletter!

Discover the latest updates, features, and improvements in our newsletter. Stay informed and enhance your mobile Wikipedia experience. Enjoy the read!

iOS

From April. to June 2023:

Significant progress was made on the iOS platform. Version 7.2.2 was released on May 10, and version 7.3.0 was released on June 1.

These updates included various improvements, such as simplified state restoration, which improved many of the performance issues we heard about through our support email and app store. We also worked to release a page protection notice on the editor, enhanced reliability of widget data fetching, color updates, and bug fixes. Additionally, we continue to make progress on a native watchlist functionality, Talk page image support, full page editing and enhancements to our native source editor, and language updates.

Android

From April. to June 2023:

We focused on completing our work on our updated design component library, bringing it up to date with the latest Material Design 3 guidelines. You can now view images on talk pages.

We have successfully concluded the experiment on machine-assisted article descriptions and would like to highlight our gratitude to our dedicated volunteers. We are excited to announce that we will be sharing the outcomes of the experiment next month.

Community meetings

• In May, our team member Marina Azevedo participated in the Wikimedia Hackathon, a yearly event held this year in Athens, Greece, aimed at fostering connections among the global technical community. The event provided opportunities for hacking, engaging in technical discussions, and discovering innovative ideas.

• The upcoming meeting between the Wiki Mentor Africa Initiative and the Wikipedia Mobile Apps Team will be an important event covering several key aspects. These include exploring the history of the apps, discussing the roadmap for future development, addressing open questions, conducting comprehensive feature reviews, and providing clarity on frequently asked questions (FAQs).

This meeting promises to be a valuable opportunity for collaboration and innovation, with the shared objective of improving the mobile Wikipedia experience.

We are excited and willing to arrange meetings with other community members who are interested. You may also contact us at aramadan@wikimedia.org to arrange such gatherings.

Existing news

There are upcoming opportunities to provide feedback on various tasks related to patrolling. These include offering input on image recommendations, specifically on Android, as well as providing feedback on new diffs in iOS and answering questions about updated watchlist designs; if you are interested in participating, please reach out to me.

You can subscribe to this newsletter from here.

--ARamadan

Welcome to the first edition of the Apps newsletter!

This newsletter informs you about new features, updates, or improvements to the Wikipedia mobile apps. It will be sent every two months, with a brief description of the updates and work progress we have been through.

iOS

From January to April 2023:

Since January, we have finished our work on edit notices, custom block messages, and abuse filter messages. Those features were released in 7.2.0 on March 13. Check here for detailed information.

Android

From January to April 2023:

Since January, we've been completing our experiment with machine-generated article descriptions, refined our feature of shareable reading lists, and begun work towards adopting IP masking functionality. Check here for detailed information.

Office hours

The first Apps office hour was held on the 23rd of March 2023; detailed information about the announcement, agenda, and even the record and presentation deck can be found here.

Community meetings

• We enjoyed meeting the Dagbani user group for a one-hour meeting and answering all of their question about Wikipedia’s mobile applications and how to use them for reading, searching, and editing. The community users expressed that they care about having more offline usage capabilities, and a new section related to this topic will be added to the Apps FAQ soon.

• With pleasure, we had a meeting with the Commons volunteers to explore possibilities for collaboration between them and the apps team within the foundation. We reached an agreement to intervene in critical situations with the play store to ensure that the Commons app remains accessible online.

We are excited and willing to arrange meetings with other community members who are interested. You may also contact us at aramadan@wikimedia.org to arrange such gatherings. ;)

Exciting news: iOS is currently developing a watchlist feature. Stay tuned for our next newsletter release to learn additional details about it.

You can subscribe to this newsletter from here.

--ARamadan-WMF 15:01, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

If the Wikimedia Commons app was made in Flutter, it could potentially benefit the organization in several ways:

Improved user experience: Flutter allows developers to create smooth and responsive user interfaces with a native look and feel. By developing the Commons app in Flutter, Wikimedia could potentially improve the user experience of the app, making it more intuitive and easier to use.

Faster development time: Flutter's "hot reload" feature allows developers to quickly see changes to the app in real-time, making it faster to iterate on and develop new features. This could potentially speed up the development time of the Commons app, allowing Wikimedia to release new updates and features more frequently.

Cross-platform compatibility: Flutter allows developers to create apps that work on both Android and iOS devices, potentially reaching a wider audience. By developing the Commons app in Flutter, Wikimedia could potentially increase the app's user base and engagement.

Community contributions: Flutter is an open-source framework with a growing community of developers. By developing the Commons app in Flutter, Wikimedia could potentially attract new contributors to the project, who could help improve and maintain the app over time.

Overall, developing the Commons app in Flutter could potentially improve the user experience, speed up development time, increase cross-platform compatibility, and attract new contributors to the project, all of which could benefit the Wikimedia organization in achieving its mission of making knowledge freely available to everyone

As mentioned by Nicolas, it would be great to see you progressing on it.

There was an effort on the same some time ago but it has been halted now. The corresponding code is in the following repo: https://github.com/commons-app/commons

It could be a good start.

Hi Kaartic!

You have, of course, perhaps more than anyone given feedback about the Wikipedia app over the years, for which we are immensely grateful. You also answered a survey on communication in the app a while back. This has been very helpful, and instrumental in how we have worked on the design. If you have time, there is another survey up over at Wikimedia Apps/Team/Android/Communication/UsertestingOctober2021.

We appreciate the help you've given us so far, as always.

Hi Johan!

Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad to be of help.

Coming to the October2021 survey. I was actually aware of it before but I refrained from answering it as the questions seemed focused towards editors who have a lot more experience than me with respect to editing and communicating with users on wiki. So, I didn't want to mislead the survey by acting as if I knew appropriate answers to the questions :-)

The previous one wasn't like that as it seemed to be focus around UI related questions which I would be more than happy to answer.

Thanks for taking the time to point me towards the survey. Very much appreciated.

Oh, be assured we'd be very happy to get your feedback, as always!

Could you test the latest version of the Reply tool on the Beta Cluster? The instructions are at Talk pages project/replying/prototype testing#Reply tool version 2.0. Click on https://w.wiki/RZf to post your feedback. (That link is a little slow for me, but it loads the list of questions.) Thank you for your help.

Sure! I'll give it a shot as soon I'm free. Feel free to let me know about things like these in the future, too. :)

• Bare [[w:en:]] : w:en:
• [[w:en:Natural language processing]] : w:en:Natural language processing
• [[en:w:Natural language processing]] : en:w:Natural language processing

Test message.

Hi @Kaartic,

Since you discussed about the Flow:Extension, I imagine you are using the Flow extension on your wiki.

To us, Flow discussion boards are very powerful. However, they can only be used on the discussion page of a specific page. This doesn't encourage collaboration because users usually visit the pages they watch and some discussions remains unanswered for days...

We believe a special page that gather all the discussions of the wiki will improve collaboration between users.

In the meantime, discussions boards are displayed in a separate tab. This can be confusing to newcomers. If the discussion boards were transcluded under the wiki page itself, it'd look like what users are used to see on other sites (like comments on a blog).

As Mediawiki developers, our team have apply for this Grant to develop such features.

If you think this project should be selected for a Project Grant, please add your name and rationale for endorsing at the bottom of this page : https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/ClemFlip/Wikifab/Various_types_of_transclusions_of_Flow_discussion_boards

Of course, other constructive feedback is welcome.

Thanks a lot for your help.