Talk:Wikimedia monthly activities meetings/Quarterly reviews/Mobile contributions/2013-03-18

Two groups

I read «division into two groups is working»: this slide very helpful, can the division be reflected on the wmf:Staff and contractors section or at least the team's mw: page? I sometimes had problems understanding who to contact for translatewiki.net matters (although the team is helpful) and perhaps I'm not the only confused one. Thanks, Nemo 13:30, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Easy enough. Change made http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Template%3AStaff_and_contractors&diff=90837&oldid=89625 Tfinc (talk) 20:09, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Geographically distribute team

On «one of the most effective/productive/happy engineering teams»: happiness FTW! :) I'd be very interested to know more on how this is affected by the "How we handle a geographically distribute team" point. The comparison with the fundraising team struck me, because we're all used to imagining that one [in the clou/climax of its activity, that is] as a bulk of people working together 24h in a large room for a month ;) — quite the opposite of this team. --Nemo 13:44, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Nemo, I am working on a blog post to cover precisely this topic :) Hopefully it will be out in the coming weeks. Awjrichards (talk) 18:56, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

ArticleFeedbackTool and call to action

Rather cryptic table: is that "3 % AFT" about the AFT call to action? Is it comparable to the 4 % for the mobile call to action (both being experimental), or not?
Nice to read «AFT's initial goal was to improve article quality». Recruiting for the sake of it can be a good goal for a single project, but whatever the goals are please define and communicate them clearly; WLM is an example of straightforward goal, make thousands of people contribute and many more learn about free content collaboration etc. --Nemo 14:24, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

Sorry, there was a longish explanation in my notes, but those didn't get published :) Yes, that's compared to the 3% edit rate for the AFT call to action. RE: AFT vs. mobile editing, it's a fascinating comparison, because editing is only enabled on the Beta version of the mobile site (which requires finding the settings page and opting in), so the majority of new users who signed up on mobile wouldn't be seeing the edit button on mobile at all; furthermore, we weren't explicitly calling out editing in any way or guiding users to try it. The fact that slightly more new mobile users go on to make an edit (on desktop or mobile) than AFT users, who were explicitly guided to do so, and that so many of them (nearly 40%) edit on mobile is really encouraging and definitely makes a strong case for polishing the UI and releasing mobile editing to all users. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 02:36, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

some thoughts

Does the existing app default editors to edit the language of the Wikipedia that matches the language preferences in their mobile?

One big limitation of mobile editing is the size of the screen, could we reduce that limitation by disabling whole article editing for multi section articles, and better still by allowing mobile editors to edit each paragraph as if it was a separate section?

That's exactly what we do in our alpha editing experience. It's all section editing just like you said. Give it a go and lets us know how it works. Tfinc (talk) 20:17, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

With the WLM app would it be possible to build a new version that prompted people as to either:

Nearby monuments which we don't have pictures for (lots of monuments we do have pictures for, some we have hundreds, even thousands of pictures for, but regardless of the quality, the first image on commons for a monument is usually going to be worth having). You'd need to filter out monuments where the prevailing national law does not allow cc-by-sa photography.

Articles which don't have a picture, but which are nearby according to their geocode. I have been doing some work on newbie engagement in the UK using a list of articles which lack images but have a UK geocode. There is an instant satisfaction for new editors in transforming an article by adding a picture, even where they din't take the picture but just chose it from commons. How much more satisfaction will there be for people who take a picture that goes straight onto a Wikipedia article, and whilst we may have pretty good coverage of monuments in some countries there are huge opportunities for nature reserves, villages etc. Judging from the success of the Geograph I suspect we would have Wiki photographers driving miles out of their way to be the first to photograph a nature reserve, reservoir or village. But it would need to be an app that didn't waste their time on articles that already had pictures. WereSpielChequers (talk) 12:56, 24 March 2013 (UTC)