On Sun, Aug 10, 2014 at 4:24 AM, Dan Garry <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 10 August 2014 08:34, Monte Hurd <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> The existing app also has a flood of users based on name recognition >> alone. Although I suppose we could call it "Wikipedia Games"... >> > > That's an idea worth exploring. Having a "Games" button in the left nav, > that when tapped launches the "Wikipedia Games" app which has a collection > of different games you can play. We know we have tons of people interacting > with the left nav, so there's no worries about discoverability. The app > would start a shell which contains many separate submodules, each of them a > game developed by a different group. On the user-facing end, it'd be a big > list of games that people could play to help Wikipedia! Our work would be > to create this shell. Then we can even make our own games to plug in to it! > > There are benefits of this: > > - There will be less concerns about the games "bloating" the app. The > main app will continue to be lean and lightweight. > - It's a great framework for volunteers to build out games to be > included in the official games app. > - As we would have +2 in the repo for the app, we would still have > quality control of what goes in the app. > > This does not preclude us from incorporating one or two games, like the > Wikidata label thing that Mobile Web is doing, into the main app. > > The question is, what is required from us to make this happen? I think it > would be worth us chatting briefly when we're all back from Wikimania to > define the minimal viable product for this, to assess how achievable it is > for us to work on it, and see where it fits into our priorities. > I agree with Monte that, while these are cool ideas to explore in the future, now might not be the time to dive too deeply into them. If I understand the original proposal correctly, the idea was to add a launch-point somewhere in the Wikipedia app that would simply take you to the mobile view of Magnus's games (and potentially any new volunteer-created games that were developed in the future) – however, it's important to remember that the currently existing Wikidata games aren't formatted for mobile and may not necessarily make sense in the mobile context. At minimum, an MVP would need some design work to ensure the UX of the games isn't broken, and some selection and special-casing of games that are appropriate for mobile users. And that's just the Product/Design piece – in addition to implementing visual design/UI improvements, I imagine there would also be some technical hurdles like doing a spike around Magnus's codebase to ensure we didn't melt a game by sending (potentially) hundreds of thousands of people into it all at once; finding a way to hook into CentralAuth/OAuth to ensure these edits are attributed to logged-in users; etc. If you factor in some analytics to determine how people are making it through the funnel, the inevitable round of design and UX refinements, potentially figuring out how to throttle the feature to avoid too many bad edits or edit conflicts... you're talking potentially a quarter's worth of work. But the main concern for me isn't so much the workload this would introduce as the fact that this workload would be done without the initial validation of whether our app audience (still primarily readers, but also probably a lot of editors who don't necessarily know that much about Wikidata) would even be interested in/understand these games. Our initial user testing of the first WikiTinder prototype showed that we'll need to think hard about how to frame this feature to users in a way that a) they understand, and b) provides them with sustained value, that proverbial "a-ha!" moment – because it's pretty clear from the reactions we got that just throwing people at the experience only works for the tiny subset of users who already know what they're doing and is potentially very off-putting/scary to those who don't. I think that through WikiTinder work over the coming months, the Mobile Web team will have a much clearer idea of whether and how this can be done, and this knowledge can help guide how we think of the Wikidata games app experience if/when we choose to tackle it. -- Maryana Pinchuk Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org
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