Topic on Talk:Editing team/Community Conversations/Flow

In a future conversation, we might consider reflecting on the current state of the default, full-page mobile editing experience(s).

What are they like to use? What do they require in order for you to use them constructively? In what ways might the assumptions these experiences implicitly make be misaligned with what people who are arriving to them need/expect?

The above was prompted by @Sj who entered this idea on wikimedia-l.

In the time between now an when the synchronous conversation the task description is describing, I wonder if it could be useful to use this thread to share mobile editing/contribution experiences (on- and off-wiki!) we've individually found to be effective and potentially instructive in the context of Wikipedia.

A thread can be a good place for that. Here are a few quick examples from recent experiences:

Effective:

• When on mobile I often have a sentence or two that I want to add or change. Anything that makes this easier is helpful: from section-editing links, to "add section" links on talk pages, to auto-fill options for edit summaries.
• Being able to quickly get to the browser view for any page, in any namespace. The app view is always slightly incomplete or limited. (The less complete the app's implementation of a namespace [like categories], the less likely it is to make it possible to switch to the browser)

Ineffective:

• Anything that greatly increases the number of clicks to get to the page I want to edit. For instance, right now every link followed requires me to choose "open in new tab" or "read article". That makes finding something via browsing take twice as long. Unlike popups-on-hover this doesn't fit smoothly into a reading workflow that invovles lots of link-following. :)
• Anything that is different from browser or desktop editing for no obvious reason. (buttons or interface features not available, text from the default site hidden, &c.) This failure mode is not specific to mobile, but the mobile app interface has a large number of these "spot the difference" changes in one interface. (A non-mobile example of the genre: edits on this talk page, because it is broken up into Topics, cannot receive "thanks" -- in the page + personal edit histories, those edits have a slightly different set of interface links as a result.)

Buggy: slightly more flies in the ointment.

• When trying to edit a protected page, the default error message has a repeated phrase (both branches of an if function in a template appearing as text). When trying to edit the talk page of that template, the wikitext overflows the textarea making it hard to move to the end of the section. (task T367849)

@Sj: a quick note to say...

Might you be available to join the next Editing Team Community Conversation scheduled for Wednesday's (3 July)? The conversation will take place from 17:30 - 18:50 UTC.

I'm thinking this could be a good venue to talk more about mobile editing and the points you're raising above.

I have some morning meetings but will try to join for part of it. I think the recent email thread from people in mobile-heavy countries describing how mobile, and particularly app editing don't work for them because they are stripped of so many functions, also offered a good summary. I also think our energies around this are spread pretty thinly; we still have different feature sets and product focus on clients for different platforms; we should look again at how other web/app ecosystems manage to streamline updating a variety of clients.

Understood! If you can make it, wonderful. If you can't, no worries...the input you've shared here and elsewhere (I owe you a response!) continues to be helpful.

Regarding the mobile-editing focused wikimedia-l thread, I agree with you in seeing that as a tremendous resource for helping us to better understand where/how existing mobile editing experiences are falling short. And falling short in particular for people – if the 2021 Community Insights Survey findings continue to hold true – who are, "...dramatically underrepresented among Wikimedia contributors."