I don't know about the WMF's position re Wikiwand, but I see Wikiwand as a
more reader friendly way to view Wikipedia. We have far more readers than
editors so in some sense this is a good thing. I can understand a reader
being more interested in seeing the table of contents in the left hand
margin than a bunch of links to "recent changes" and even "what links
here". But the more you hide the various functions that are of interest to
editors the more difficult it becomes to recruit editors from amongst our
readership, and in the long run without new editors we can't maintain the
site. Despite many attempts we don't yet have a viable alternative way of
recruiting new editors other than the edit buttons on our sites, so any
attempt to make the editing features less obvious is a threat to our future

The problem is that most designers don't like clutter, and to a non editor
many of the bits of the interface that are most useful to editors are
clutter. I'm not sure what the solution is to this. One possibility would
be a more gradualised interface, one that always shows you one or more
editing options than you have used, and ideally different ones or in
different form so you notice them. I seem to remember some successful tests
a while back that simply modified the edit button to make it more prominent
or even just different. In theory simply changing the edit button to so
that for a month IPs see it as  "fix this" or "correct an error" should
stop people mentally blanking the edit button out as part of the furniture.

We also have a problem that some of our metrics value visits to Wikimedia
sites above viewing Wikimedia content on mirrors such as WikiWand. We've
had a similar problem in the GLAM program trying to convince museums etc
that such a view is illogical and if your mission is to make content
available to all humanity you should value hits to your content on mirrors
equally to hits to that same content on your own website. Hopefully it is
just a historic problem that will recede as it becomes easier to get
metrics that include mirrors, but it is a barrier that prevents some GLAMS
from sharing media onto Wikimedia Commons and hugely ironic that we have
the problem ourselves in our own metrics.


Jonathan / WereSpielChequers




> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2016 08:39:46 +0200
> From: Anders Wennersten <m...@anderswennersten.se>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Wikiwand
> Message-ID: <56fcc632.2090...@anderswennersten.se>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>
> What is WMFs position on Wikiwand [1]?
>
> is it a complement or a commercial run interface that is  better that we
> can offer?
>
> Anders
>
> [1] http://www.wikiwand.com/about
>
>
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