Wikimedia Mobile engineering/Strategy/2013-2014 planning

The mobile department held an annual planning meeting to help define the way forward through the 2013-2014 fiscal year. This document contains notes taken during the meeting.

Original etherpad: http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/2012-2013-Annual-Planning-Mobile-Dept

Agenda

• Intro and annual goals presented (30 mins) 1000-1030 [Maryana]
  • Goal: Unify department around annual goals
• Persona analysis (30 mins) 1030-1100 [Maryana]
  • Goal: Develop firm understanding of the types of users for whom we will build features
• Break (5 mins) 1100-1105
  • Goal: Find relief from tedium of meeting
• High-level features brainstorming session (85 mins) 1105-1230 [Arthur]
  • Goal: Generate rich backlog of feature ideas/feature buckets that will help us achieve our 6k contributors goal
  • R36, R63, R64, R66 (remote friendly), collab areas available
• Lunch (30 mins) 1230-1300
  • Goal: Stuff face
• Big-picture strategizing (60 mins) 1300-1400 [Tomasz?]
  • Goal: Develop overarching strategy for achieving our second goal of $goal
• Mobile apps/web cross-pollination 1400-?!
• Get out of the office and use our tools! Play with the commons app, mobile web, etc. out in the wild.

Personas

• Reader
• Newly registered user (0 edits)
• Newish user (1-10 edits, 1-5 uploads)
  • Watchlist user
  • Editor
  • Uploader
• Commons power user (> 100 uploads)
• Wikipedia power user (> 100 edits)

High level brainstorming feature buckets

• categories (+sample images?)
• CTAs
• Article creation
• WikiData Editing
• Authentication

Micro-Contributions

+ Jared + Max +Monte +Kaldari

• Dabsolver
• Adding Geo-coordinates to articles/images
  • Correcting locations on existing articles
  • Matching foursquare locations to article names
    • Collaborate with Foursquare?
• Trump geotagged images with higher quality ones
• Images Actions
  • Flagging as inappropriate
  • Adding tags/categories
  • Rating images within categories
    • Rating on metrics of artistic, technical, educational
    • For automatic lead images for articles?
  • Hot or Not for images within categories (most representative for a place, thing, person, etc)
  • Firehose of new image with swipe gestures for triage (Up - ok, right - copyright, etc.)
• "Rating/approving/reverting" contributions by IP users / Flag content
  • What is a mobile appropriate ammount of "change" to verify via mobile,
    • Diffs are within a sentence
    • Consider only taking action on down-voted "bad" edits
  • Can we test users to determine if someone is a "good reviewer" by showing them fake things to review
    • like on Stack Overflow/Quora/Foursquare: show them stuff that we already know to be good or bad
  • investigate Mechanical Turk interface to verify edits
  • How do you classify "wrongness" and at what granularity, e.g. is badly written, needs citations, photos, inappropriate.
  • Make New Page Triage tool mobile friendly
• Text transcription from scanned Wikisource
• Improve Wikidata Items with properties to wikidata items within specific categories like people, places, etc
  • Is this person alive?
  • What do they do?
  • Male/female/other
• Rating search queries off-site to their target articles as a good match or not to improve article metadata
  • collaborate with Google?
• Translation
  • based on knowledge of a particular user prompt the user to translate all or part of the article

Getting started (newbies) (R 36)

+ Vibha + Maryana + Jon +Adam +Dan

• Post-registration: suggest a task [possibly contextual, based on what you read/have watched]
• Left nav browse tasks & contribute - persistent link in the left nav for all registered users
• Banners to registered users [taking them to contribute page, point them to edit button, features like Nearby]
• Post-registration: takes user to home page w/ some stats about me and a CTA to contribute if I never have
• Post-registration: fill out quick "what do you love?" survey (multiple choice) - we give you tasks based on this
• Post-registration: make an edit to userspace/fill out profile to learn markup
• Different post-registration experience depending on where you came from

Reverts (watchlist, history, RecentChanges Patrol) r66

+ Juliusz + Arthur + May + Howie

Personas for these

• Reader: help them understand WP is written by people, that the content changes
• Newish user/Newly registered: help them understand how WP works, introduce them to these features
• WP Power user: help them get their Wikipedia on

History

• Sane mobile view that a human can understand with smiley faces
  • simplified version -- includes the most important for information for a editors to make a decision as to whether they want to view diff
  • design this so new editors understand there are people behind the page
  • capture motion of articles, as well as individuals that contributed
• Better entry point into history (from article)
• Direct revert/thanks? (if information can support decision); see below for comments on reverting
• Summaries (e.g., top editors, most reverted editors, etc.); most helpful edits (e.g., large changes that haven't been reverted)

Watchlist

• Different filters
• Same things as above (motion, people)

History and Watchlist

• Friendly Reverting (e.g., ability to revert, but automatically leave a talk page message to user, "Hey, we appreciate your edit, but it was reverted because there wasn't a citation. . .")
• Unfriendly reverting (e.g., ability to warn/block user)
• UX for reverting makes nice the path of least resistance
• Thanking user for contribution

Problems to anticipate

• Reverting too easy, vandalism
• Reverts not possible because of merge conflicts (how to deal with them, what kind of feedback/UI to provide)

Recent changes [WP power]

• Make into an app! AND a view on mobile web
• Could really drive reversions and stuff

Diff

• Better diff management -- fix UX (entry point is history, watchlist, recent changes, etc.)
  • Better way of viewing diffs that aren't next to each other (e.g.,
    • Be able to easily compare multiple and arbitrary revisions
    • Ability to view all changes from one editor (in succession)
  • How much has changed since last time I viewed page
  • Ability to
• Improved diff view
• Entry points into different actions

User contribs (related to all of this; my and other)

• Contribs that doesn't suck

Upload Campaigns

[Tomasz] [YuviPanda] [Brion] (r64)

• Plans starting so far - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Yuvipanda/Mobile_campaigns
• Make a campaign for Nearby?
• campaigns largely a funnel for new users -- let them know what sort of stuff to contribute
• wiki loves monumets is a known funnel
• wiki takes [city] projects are similar in needs, on smaller scale
• decentralize campaign creation and maintenance -- currently restricted because theres no edit history etc
• apps offline functionality -- easy to do fr baic campaigns; harder if we integrate geo search like wlm or nearby
• campaign discovery: featured campaigns, active campaigns, [your interests?], keyword search, nearby
• mixing with categories or wikidata?
• gamification? leaderboards, showing activity, talk page
  • stats shouldnt be hard t generate; might need db tables to hold accumulated data. in the ext that supplies the info
• need machine readable licenses!!!!!
• triage: show a stream [per campaign, per cat, per user?] and have buttons to flag as offtopic, inapprpriate, copyvio, etc
• need to figure out how/if/whrer to use wikidata.
• note: needs some php work! backend and web front
• glam needs?
• Needs Image Info API work to be done!

Big picture strategizing

• Reader apps - do we go native?
  • Brion wants native reader apps!
  • Potentially merge commons app with native reader app(s)?
  • Want *real* interactive stuff in the 'reader' apps
  • DEFINITELY no more phonegap
  • Perhaps things like editing, etc going to web view (at least for now)
  • When do we do this?
    • Depends on Commons app schedule
    • No time currently for seriously focussing on this
    • Probably need 1/4 to get to feature parity with the existing phonegap app
  • Jared has more concerns about lack of parity between apps and web (eg facebook app vs facebook site is what we should strive for)
  • Juliusz conerend about duplicating efforts and work btwn web/app - why double the time to build the same features? Especially if new platforms come out that we need to build for
  • Yuvi - apps can be a great place for experimentation, since you'll get acces to more cutting edge features faster at the native level vs web
  • Currently many problems with webivew in general (particularly in android 2.3)
  • Timeline
    • Q1/Q2 - continue building out commons apps, particularly campaign functionality
    • Q3/Q4 - focus on rewriting existing Wikipedia reader apps for ios/android
  • Open question - how do microapps fit into the above timeline?
• Mobile design... Minerva as a vehicle for change
  • desktop
  • tablets
  • phablets?!

Random notes

• mobile disambig link resolver.... hey that sounds handy. wuold also be handy to integrate into the link dialog in VE, let's share ideas?
• add uploads to article easier.... with VE this should be easier to be flexible
  • (think about the app too; maybe use a webview ;)
• category adder task
• Tablets? STUFF TO THINK ABOUT!
• Ratio of contribute-to-pageview for mobile is below desktop currently