Wikimedia mobile engineering
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The Wikimedia Mobile Engineering Department, a part of the Wikimedia engineering team, is responsible for creating, growing, and evolving how the diverse set of Wikimedia projects use mobile technologies. We do this through a diverse set of teams and projects focusing on mobile web, iOS and Android apps, and Wikipedia Zero.
Contents
Mobile[edit | edit source]
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Tomasz Finc, Director of Mobile
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Ryan Kaldari, Software Engineer (Web)
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Arthur Richards, Senior Software Engineer (Web)
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Jon Robson, Senior Software Engineer (Web)
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Max Semenik, International Software Engineer (Web)
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Monte Hurd, Software Engineer (Apps)
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Yuvaraj Pandian, International Software Engineer (Apps)
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Brion Vibber, Lead Software Architect (Apps)
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Dmitry Brant, Software Engineer (Apps)
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Yuri Astrakhan, Senior Software Engineer (Zero)
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Adam Baso, Senior Software Engineer (Zero)
Teams[edit | edit source]
- Mobile web works primarily on Mobile Frontend, a MediaWiki extension providing a mobile web front-end to MediaWiki sites including Wikipedia. The mobile interface of a Wikimedia project can be reached by visiting langcode.m.X.org (where X is the name of a Wikimedia project).
- Mobile Apps. The Mobile Apps team is currently working on native Wikipedia reading and editing apps for iOS and Android.
- Wikipedia Zero. This team partners with mobile carriers throughout the world to provide zero-rated Wikipedia (free of data charges) in developing areas.
Priorities[edit | edit source]
- Mobile support for other product work:
- Mobile first design: mobile web and apps represent both new contexts, and new sets of users where we can create new features from a mobile first perspective. These features will have simpler design - emphasizing easier and more structured workflows.
- Porting existing features to mobile: this includes reader facing, editor facing, and admin facing features that currently exist on the desktop site.
Projects[edit | edit source]
- Wikipedia Zero is an initiative of the Wikimedia Foundation to enable mobile access to Wikipedia free of data charges in developing countries. The objective of the program is to reduce barriers to accessing free knowledge—one of the largest barriers being cost of data usage. The Wikipedia Zero initiative is based on partnerships with mobile phone operators, whereby the operator agrees to deploy a version of Wikipedia in such a way that their users do not need to pay for data access. Follow the Wikimedia Q&A Page and the Wikipedia Zero blog for detailed information on the project. Follow our developments in this project, here.
- The Wikipedia S40 J2ME app is designed for use on features phones (primarily Nokia Series 40) that enables efficient reading of Wikipedia. Despite the fact that J2ME is a dying platform for mobile apps, it is still prevalent in many parts of the world on a wide variety of feature phones. Recent feedback from mobile operators in India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America indicate a high preference for a J2ME app over Android apps and browser-based experiences.
- Wikipedia Over SMS and USSD: This project aims at providing access to Wikipedia over SMS and USSD using an open source project called Vumi.
Other projects[edit | edit source]
| Project | Description | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Open Street Map | OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. | Status |
| Mobile support in MediaWiki core | Building native mobile device support in MediaWiki by porting critical components of Extension:MobileFrontend to core and building additional functionality as needed. | Status |
| Mobile default for sister projects | Migrating our sister projects to default to their own mobile interfaces. | Status |
Roadmaps[edit | edit source]
- Current
- Older
Get involved[edit | edit source]
Readers and editors[edit | edit source]
- Report any issues you encounter casually browsing to our feedback list.
- Become a Wikimedia beta tester and try out new features.
- Help us expand our currently set of tested browsers.
- Test the Wikimedia mobile projects in the languages you know and report any issues. This might be by helping us write browser tests, PHPUnit tests or QUnit tests.
- Help translate the mobile user interface and apps by volunteering at translatewiki.
- Promote the mobile projects among your friends and Wikimedia fellows through Twitter, Facebook and other social networking tools.
- Browse not only Wikipedia but our sister sites on mobile and send us feedback.
- Try the app for: iOS, Android, or BlackBerry.
- Check the App Catalog to find more mobile apps developed by third parties that rely on Wikimedia content.
- Help us brain storm what features you need most on mobile.
Developers[edit | edit source]
- If you receive any errors, report it on Bugzilla.
- Go through the repositories at GitHub and Gerrit and try out the code.
- Report and fix bugs in our beta sites.
- Help us write automation tests.
- Join us at #wikimedia-mobile and get involved and talk about our current projects.
Agile[edit | edit source]
The mobile team runs an agile ship.
Useful links:
Contact us[edit | edit source]
- Talk and discuss our current projects at
#wikimedia-mobileconnect. - Follow us @WikimediaMobile on Twitter.
- Join the MediaWiki technical mailing list
[email protected]. - Follow the Wikimedia Tech Blog
List of projects[edit | edit source]
| Activity | Information | |
|---|---|---|
| Wikimedia Apps | Wikimedia Mobile Applications for iOS, Android, and new platforms [edit] | Team [edit]: Dan Garry (Product Manager), Yuvi Panda, Dmitry Brant, Bernd Sitzmann, Monte Hurd, Brion Vibber, Vibha Bamba, Moiz Syed, Tomasz Finc |
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Following on from the successful launch to Android, the Mobile Apps team released the new native Wikipedia app to iOS on July 31. The app is the iOS counterpart to the Android app, with many of the same features such as editing, saving pages for offline reading, and browsing history. The iOS app also contains an onboarding screen that is shown the first time the app is launched, asking users to sign up, a feature which was also launched on Android this month (see below).
On Android this month we released to production accessibility and styling features which were requested by our users, such as a night mode for reading in the dark and a font size selector. We also released an onboarding screen that asks users to sign up. Our plan for next month is to get user feedback from Wikimania, wrap up our styling fixes, and begin work on an onboarding screen the first time that someone taps edit. |
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| Wikipedia Zero | Free and zero rated access to Wikipedia through our partners [edit] | Team [edit]: Tomasz Finc (Director of Mobile, Engineering); Carolynne Schloeder (Director of Mobile, Programs), Dan Foy (Tech Manager), Yuri Astrakahn, Adam Baso, Jeff Hobson |
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During the last month, the team worked on software architecture features that allow for expansion of the Wikipedia Zero footprint on partner networks and that get users to content faster with support for lowered cache fragmentation on Varnish caches. Whereas the previous system supported one-size-fits-all configuration for heterogeneous partner networks, inhibiting some zero-rated access, the new system supports multiple configurations for disparate IP addresses and connection profiles per operator. Additionally, lightweight script and GIF-ified Wikipedia Zero banner support has been added and is being tested; in time this should drastically reduce Varnish cache fragmentation, making pages be served faster and reducing Varnish server load. A faster landing page was introduced for "zerodot" (zero.wikipedia.org, legacy text-only experience) landing pages when operators have multiple popular languages in their geography. Work on compression proxy traffic analysis for header enrichment conformance with the official Wikipedia Zero configurations was also performed after more diagnostic logging code was added to the system. Finally, watchlist thumbnails, although low bandwidth, were removed from the zerodot user experience, as was the higher bandwidth MediaViewer feature for zerodot; mdot will have these features, though.
In side project work, the team spent time on API continuation queries, Android IP editing notices, Amazon Kindle and other non-Google Play distribution, and Google Play reviews (now that the Android launch dust has settled, mobile apps product management will be triaging the reviews). In partnerships work, the team met with Mozilla to talk about future plans for the Firefox OS HTML5 app (e.g., repurposing the existing mobile website, but without any feature reduction) and how Wikimedia search might be further integrated into Firefox OS, and also spoke with Canonical about how Wikipedia might be better integrated into the forthcoming Ubuntu Phone OS. Routine pre- and post-launch configuration changes were made to support operator zero-rating, with routine technical assistance provided to operators and the partner management team to help add zero-rating and address anomalies. The team also continued its search for a third Partners engineering teammate. |
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| Mobile web projects | Features and design work on the Wikimedia MobileFrontend mobile gateway [edit] | Team [edit]: Maryana Pinchuk, Jon Robson, Juliusz Gonera, Ryan Kaldari, Max Semenik, Arthur Richards, Michelle Grover, Vibha Bamba, Moiz Syed, Kaity Hammerstein |
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This month the mobile web team, in partnership with the Editing team, launched a mobile-friendly opt-in VisualEditor for users of the mobile site on tablets. Tablet users can now choose to switch from the default editing experience (wikitext editor) to a lightweight version of VE featuring some common formatting tools (bold and italic text, the ability to add/edit links and references). We also began building a Wikidata contribution game in alpha that will allow users to add metadata to the Wikidata database (to start, occupations of people) directly from the Wikipedia article where the information is contained. We hope to graduate this feature to the beta site next month to get more quantitative feedback on its usage and the quality of contributions.
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Inactive projects (completed, planned or on the backburner)
| Activity | Information | |
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| Commons App | An iOS and Android app that allows you to upload media to Commons. [edit] | Team [edit]: Tomasz Finc, Brion, Yuvi, Shankar |
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Open maps location of sharer
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