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.

Mobile[edit | edit source]

  • Tomasz Finc, Director of Mobile

  • Ryan Kaldari, Software Engineer (Web)

  • Arthur Richards, Senior Software Engineer (Web)

  • Jon Robson, Senior Software Engineer (Web)

  • Max Semenik, International Software Engineer (Web)

  • Monte Hurd, Software Engineer (Apps)

  • Yuvaraj Pandian, International Software Engineer (Apps)

  • Brion Vibber, Lead Software Architect (Apps)

  • Dmitry Brant, Software Engineer (Apps)

  • Yuri Astrakhan, Senior Software Engineer (Zero)

  • 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]

An Open Letter to Wikipedia by the students of Sinenjongo High School.
  • 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]

Agile[edit | edit source]

The mobile team runs an agile ship.

Useful links:

Contact us[edit | edit source]

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
In October, following on from the successful launch of Nearby on iOS in September, the Wikimedia Apps team released Nearby on Android as well. Nearby allows you to see articles about things that are near you, and read their articles to learn more about them. The team also released features that roll up disambiguation and page issues into a button underneath the page title, so that the content of the article is brought closer to the top of the article. We also released a refactor of the technical architecture of the app to bring the app closer to compliance with Google's standards for Android apps, which also brought a few minor UX improvements. On the iOS side, a bug fix build was released which improved the UI scaling on iPads, fixed a few minor issues with the table of contents, and fixed miscellaneous crashes. At the end of the month, a build was submitted to Apple which reworked the way the app retrieves information from the servers, which should increase the stability of the app and reduce crashes.
(status as of 2014-10-monthly) [edit] [add new]
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
During October 2014, the Partners engineering team enhanced the partners portal (ZeroPortal) extension to improve security and maintainability, added better font support for the Wikipedia Zero end user experience, migrated the remainder of operator partner configurations to use the unified design in support of lowered cache fragmentation on the mobile web Wikipedias, improved the fidelity of zero-rated Graph extension pageview statistics relative to the legacy Limn graphs while streamlining batch processing, made Wikipedia Zero end user information screen overlays follow MobileFrontend style, created Cucumber tests for the partners portal, added colorized crouton support to the Android app while reducing intrusive warnings on the Android and iOS apps for zero-rating (colorized iOS banner code also merged, will be in forthcoming release), prepared analysis and code for language-aware redirects from the m.wikipedia.org webroot, consulted with partners on API usage and app preloads and HTTP header enrichment and language aware redirects, and examined the interplay of Wikiipedia Zero with CentralNotice (e.g., fundraising) banners; currently, CentralNotice is suppressed when Wikipedia Zero page rewriting is in force, but in the future it would be nice to show non-fundraising CentralNotice content.
(status as of 2014-10-monthly) [edit] [add new]
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
This month the mobile web team created a new experimental interface for WikiGrok, a feature designed to provide an easy way to contribute structured data to Wikimedia projects. We are currently showing the two different versions of WikiGrok to readers and logged in users on the mobile beta site on English Wikipedia and gathering qualitative and quantitative data on engagement with the feature and quality of contributions. We also focused on backend integration to allow us to generate Wikidata questions on more articles, in preparation for testing at scale on the stable mobile site in the coming months.
(status as of 2014-10-monthly) [edit] [add new]

Inactive projects (completed, planned or on the backburner)

Activity Information
Commons App An iOS and Android app that allows you to upload media to Commons. [edit] Team [edit]: Tomasz Finc, Brion, Yuvi, Shankar
Open maps location of sharer
(status as of 2014-04-21) [edit] [add new]
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