Hi. Historically Meta-Wiki was where wikipedia.org was hosted and its content was discussed there. A small Wikimedia Foundation team has moved the portal's hosting, moved the discussion about the portal's content to mediawiki.org, and now proposes adding advertisements for Apple and Google to the home page. Wow.
Topic on Talk:Wikipedia.org add mobile app badges
Hi @MZMcBride. Do you think it's appropriate to repeat wrong statements like "A small Wikimedia Foundation team has moved the portal's hosting" in order to misguide other readers on this discussion page?
Hi Malyacko. What specifically about my statement(s) is wrong? The www.wikipedia.org portal was previously hosted on Meta-Wiki (meta.wikimedia.org). That's a fact. This portal's contents, and the contents of the other www portals, were moved by a small Wikimedia Foundation team without any community consensus. That's also a fact.
Instead of discussing the portal's contents on the established Wikimedia community site (Meta-Wiki), this discussion is taking place on an obscure part of mediawiki.org, a wiki that's used for technical documentation of the MediaWiki software. Nothing untrue there!
What are you disputing exactly? Or are you just using your volunteer account to cast aspersions on people who are deeply critical of the unsavory ways in which the Wikimedia Foundation has acted here?
>now proposes adding advertisements for Apple and Google
In developing these links the portal team actually shied away from using the vendor-specific 'badges' for their respective stores. The desire is for these links to be unobtrusive, not advertisements for particular vendors.
>The www.wikipedia.org portal was previously hosted on Meta-Wiki (meta.wikimedia.org).
Yes and after a lengthy discussion with the community, including the primary volunteer maintainer of the portal, it was moved to gerrit. You know this as you took part in that conversation.
>and the contents of the other www portals, were moved
I don't think this is true. IIRC, only the content of the Wikipedia.org portal was moved to gerrit. The resulting code after running this module for the other portals is hosted in (and deployed from) gerrit. The content of the other portals are still updated through a meta wiki page. You, or others reading, might be more familiar with how this works than I. Please correct me if that's not the case.
>by a small Wikimedia Foundation team
Small is subjective. Yes, the portal team is small in comparison to other WMF teams, but the decision to work on the Wikipedia.org portal was made by the Discovery department. These improvements, tests, etc. were not done on a lark by a small team.
>without any community consensus
Again, see above.
>Instead of discussing the portal's contents on the established Wikimedia community site (Meta-Wiki), this discussion is taking place on an obscure part of mediawiki.org,
Well, you found it, so I guess it’s not that obscure! :) I did include a link to active and backlog tasks on the Project Portal page.I also recently updated that page to reference the WMF's work around the Wikipedia.org portal specifically. A small gesture admittedly, but the team is not trying to subvert anything here. When I first started at the WMF I saw that not every team had a page to document and discuss their work. WMF engineering teams have had documentation on their projects and work on MediaWiki.org for quite some time. When the product manager asked where to have a chat about her team’s work with the portal I suggested having it along side the other team pages on MediaWiki.org. I think it's great to have more documentation about what our product teams are working on. I hope you agree. It was an oversight on my part to not consider Meta. My apologies.
I’ve also been trying to update said information on Meta to be more clear on how the portals are updated. If you think we should have this conversation at meta:Talk:Project Portals then let’s do so.
>What are you disputing exactly?
I can't speak for Malyacko, but my impression is that your comments (here and in general) are not in good faith.
Chris addressed the look of the "badges".
Speaking as an android user, and not as staff, I appreciate knowing when apps are available, so I can make an informed decision whether or not to use them. In some cases, the app offers amazing features and is vastly superior to the web. In other cases, the app is either terrible, or simply not compelling. Since our apps exist, I think it would be unfair to our users NOT to let them know they exist, so they could make up their own minds whether or not to use them. This isn't about doing favors for Google or Apple--it's about empowering users by giving them options. Again, that's just my personal opinion.
Victor hints at a solution that I also think would be acceptable: a "Mobile apps" link that shows can index of available Wikipedia apps. This is similar to how others have solved the problem Legoktm mentions regarding out-of-date browsers. Instead of suggesting a particular browser, sites suggest that users visit an index page such as <http://browsehappy.com/>. This gives the user a choice among vendors and doesn't advertise for a specific vendor in the way that, for example, File:Version B-02-Wiki-Mobile Portrait 375w.png would.
Thanks for your constructive and positive feedback!
I added that suggestion to the phabricator ticket on this topic. In order for this approach to work, we'll have to display some sort of download badge to all users - not just to targeted mobile devices. Using a single index page, users can can decide which Wikipedia app to download by vendor and OS platform.