Small (native) apps can do Wikimedia work quite effectively using the api Upload image File categorisation New page patrol Flagged revs/Pending changes OTRS
John Vandenberg. sent from Galaxy Note On Dec 12, 2012 7:04 AM, "MZMcBride" <[email protected]> wrote: > Brion Vibber wrote: > > Over on the mobile team we've been chatting for a while about the various > > trade-offs in native vs HTML-based (PhoneGap/Cordova) development. > > > > [...] > > > > iOS and Android remain our top-tier mobile platforms, and we know we can > do > > better on them than we do so far... > > > > Any thoughts? Wildly in favor or against? > > It's unclear from your e-mail what the goal of mobile interaction (for lack > of a better term) is. Are you trying to build editing features? File upload > features? Or do you want to just have a decent reader? This seems like a > key > component to any discussion of the future of mobile development. > > Looking at the big picture, I don't think we'll ever see widespread editing > from mobile devices. The user experience is simply too awful. The best I > think most people are hoping for is the ability to easily fix a typo, > maybe, > but even then you have to assess costs vs. benefit. That is, is it really > worth paying two or three full-time employees so that someone can easily > change "Barrack" to "Barack" from his or her iPhone? Probably not. > > Perhaps mobile uploading could use better native support, but again, is the > cost worth it? Does Commons need more low-quality photos? And even as phone > cameras get better, do those photos need to be _instantly_ uploaded to the > site? There's something to be said for waiting until you get home to upload > photos, especially given how cumbersome the photo upload process is > (copyright, permissions, categorization, etc.). And this all side-steps the > question of whether there are better organizations equipped at handling > photos (such as Flickr or whatever). > > That leaves reading. If a relatively recent browser can't read Wikimedia > wikis without performance issues, I think that indicates a problem with > Wikimedia wikis (way too much JavaScript, images are too large, etc.). > Mobile browsers are fairly robust (vastly more robust compared to what they > used to be), so I'm not sure why having a Wikipedia reader is valuable or > why it's worth investing finite resources in. Occasionally I'll hear "but I > want to have a favorite pages feature or I want to support offline > reading," > but the phone's OS should be able to handle most of this from the built-in > Web browser. Or not, but I think if a phone is incapable of a feature such > as "e-mail this Web page (article) to a friend," it's not an important > enough feature to devote resources to. > > Wikimedia wikis have a lot of bugs and the Wikimedia Foundation has finite > resources. I personally only use the "Messages" and "Music" apps on my > phone, so I'm not the best person to make the argument for additional > mobile > development, but when I look at how terrible the user experience continues > to be for desktop users, it becomes difficult for me to understand why the > Wikimedia Foundation would delve into the world of mobile (apart from > initiatives such as Wikipedia Zero). What benefit to the creation or > dissemination of free educational content are we seeing (or hoping to see) > from native apps? > > MZMcBride > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
