Editing via the mobile view is made more painful by the use of navboxes, tables
and complex templates of any kind. Even the {{cite}} template can occupy
several lines of the display on a mobile device making it hard to discern the
text. Maybe Wikidata will solve some of this by shifting the creation of
navigation links (for example) out of article editing and into metadata
maintenance. I've not tried working on Wikidata via a mobile device so can't
comment on its accessibility
Neil
---- Risker wrote ----
>On 21 August 2014 05:31, Strainu <strain...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 2014-08-21 9:30 GMT+03:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemow...@gmail.com>:
>> It would *seem* that every user
>> > converted to the mobile site is a step towards extinction of the wiki.
>>
>>
>> That is an excellent point Frederico. In addition to the inherent
>> difficulties of editing on small screen, especially large articles and
>> the "we know better approach" discussed in detail in the last weeks,
>> there is also the problem of navigating between articles - the mobile
>> website arbitrarily skips some elements visible on desktop, such as
>> navboxes and significantly alter some infoboxes because "it doesn't
>> look good". This makes it difficult to just browse the Wikipedia (thus
>> finding mistakes that you might want to correct) and encourages
>> searching for the information, which means going right on target
>>
>> Hopefully the future announced at Wikimania, "no more mobile team, but
>> mobile in every team" will solve some of these problems. It's just a
>> matter of when will this future be.
>>
>>
>
>Well, now. Here's a classic example of what is sometimes called a "first
>world problem". I know that, even on desktops, the more infoboxes and
>navboxes and succession boxes on an article (regardless of article length),
>the longer it takes to load. On a slower desktop collection, some really
>large, complex articles sometimes time out.
>
>I went to look at some of those same articles using my smartphone with the
>"desktop" option turned on. Many of them timed out without fully loading;
>others took several minutes. There was a very, very noticeable difference
>in load time between the mobile view and the desktop view. And that was in
>North America with fast, very good connection on an up-to-date phone. Many
>of our editors and readers don't have this kind of infrastructure available
>to them.
>
>So - we know there is a definite cost to having all these "navigation aids"
>in articles. We need to justify their use, instead of simply adding them
>by reflex. So here is where analytics teams can really be useful: tell us
>whether or not these navboxes are actually being used to go to other
>articles. If they're widely used to leap to the next article, then we need
>to find ways to make them more efficient so that they're suitable for
>mobile devices. If they're hardly ever being used, we need to reconsider
>their existence. Perhaps this becomes some sort of "meta data" tab from
>articles. The current format isn't sustainable, though.
>
>Risker/Anne
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