Hi dan,

I d like to switch to an expert view where I see the real contents of an
article not just a mock up some machine generates from whatever source. If
generating is your goal you might consider joining google.

I am pretty sure product management is able to design the options so that
they are easy to set and do not become messy :)

BTW where did you invent the text in the headline picture from?

Rupert
On Mar 13, 2015 3:57 PM, "Dan Garry" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Florian,
>
> Thanks for the feedback!
>
> Adding options for everything into the settings is a very slippery slope.
> If you want examples of where it can end up, take a look at your settings
> on Wikipedia! Tabs and tabs of options, many of which you don't even
> realise exist. Ultimate customisation seems like a good thing on the
> surface, but it creates tangled messes like that one. And it creates a
> nightmare for customer support, too; the user has to recount all the
> options they have turned on for you to reproduce their problems.
> VisualEditor is a good example of this, as it frequently breaks due to user
> CSS/JS that the user didn't even realise they had.
>
> The other thing to consider about this is the development overhead. For
> every option we have, we're adding an extra combination of settings that
> we'd need to test and support. Those combinations grow exponentially with
> each option that's added; so if you've got four settings then that's 16
> combinations... and adding a fifth option increases that to 32! So we must
> only add options for things that are truly the most important things, and
> supporting suboptimal layouts with an option doesn't seem worth that
> tradeoff to me.
>
> Thanks,
> Dan
>
> On 12 March 2015 at 23:32, [email protected] <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi Dan!
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I'm fine with solutions, that try to save space and put as much
>> meaningful content as possible to the first view (available without
>> scrolling) to the app. I'm wondering, if this new feature will be behind a
>> feature flag in the settings of the app?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Like you said, stripping (or adding) content to or from a wikipedia
>> article is very controversial, so i think the user should have the
>> possibility to turn on (or off) the feature (i'm fine with default "on") to
>> change the content in this way, or implement a setting to turn off _all_
>> changes to the content, so a user can see the plain wikipedia article
>> without any changes?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Kind reagrds,
>>
>> Florian
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Freundliche Grüße
>> Florian Schmidt
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original-Nachricht-----
>>
>> Betreff: [WikimediaMobile] [Apps] Stripping content inside brackets from
>> the first sentence of articles
>>
>> Datum: Fri, 13 Mar 2015 02:07:34 +0100
>>
>> Von: Dan Garry <[email protected]>
>>
>> An: mobile-l <[email protected]>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>  Hi everyone,
>>
>> *tl;dr: We'll be stripping all content contained inside brackets from the
>> first sentence of articles in the Wikipedia app.*
>>
>> The Mobile Apps Team is focussed on making the app a beautiful and
>> engaging reader experience, and trying to support use cases like wanting to
>> look something up quickly to find what it is. Unfortunately, there are
>> several aspects of Wikipedia at present that are actively detrimental to
>> that goal. One example of this are the lead sentences.
>>
>> As mentioned in the other thread on this matter
>> <https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mobile-l/2015-March/008715.html>,
>> lead sentences are poorly formatted and contain information that is
>> detrimental to quickly looking up a topic. The team did a quick audit
>> <https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/spreadsheets/d/1BJ7uDgzO8IJT0M3UM2q-e5dM5Tzt6p7w1mgNAd-Z3WE/edit#gid=0>
>>  of
>> the information available inside brackets in the first sentences, and
>> typically it is pronunciation information which is probably better placed
>> in the infobox rather than breaking up the first sentence. The other
>> problem is that this information was typically inserted and previewed on a
>> platform where space is not at a premium, and that calculation is different
>> on mobile devices.
>>
>> In order to better serve the quick lookup use case, the team has reached
>> the decision to strip anything inside brackets in the first sentence of
>> articles in the Wikipedia app.
>>
>> Stripping content is not a decision to be made lightly. People took the
>> time to write it, and that should be respected. We realise this is
>> controversial. That said, it's the opinion of the team that the problem is
>> pretty clear: this content is not optimised for users quickly looking
>> things up on mobile devices at all, and will take a long time to solve
>> through alternative means. A quicker solution is required.
>>
>> The screenshots below are mockups of the before and after of the change.
>> These are not final, I just put them together quickly to illustrate what
>> I'm talking about.
>>
>>    - Before: http://i.imgur.com/VwKerbv.jpg
>>    - After: http://i.imgur.com/2A5PLmy.jpg
>>
>> If you have any questions, let me know.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Dan
>>
>> --
>>  Dan Garry
>> Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Mobile-l mailing list
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>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Dan Garry
> Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
> Wikimedia Foundation
>
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