User:Clovermoss/Mobile editing

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Note: A version of this essay appeared in this issue of The Signpost. This page is the current iteration and is more up-to-date. That piece had a considerable talk page discussion after its release that may be of interest to readers of this page.

Introduction

Sometimes, you hear about editors who edit on their phones. There are two main ways experienced editors edit using a mobile device: using desktop view on a mobile device^[a] or using mobile view through a standard web browser. What you don't usually hear about are people who download the dedicated Wikipedia app on their mobile devices even if it is technically an option. This essay is mostly about my experiences using the android version of the app to gather a baseline to understand what all this is like for someone who is not simply a reader of the site.

What stood out to me immediately was this:

It is impossible to create a new page^[b]
It is impossible to see recent changes
In preview, redlinks show up as blue (or sometimes as bolded text).
There's a box that claims my edit quality is "perfect"
Typically, you can only edit individual sections, but you cannot edit subsections directly. If you know how to access it, there is also a way to edit a page in its entirety.
Most templates do not display^[c]
There is no access to help resources or learning how to contribute literally anywhere unless you manually know how to search for the exact page titles. Almost no new editor is going to know how to do that.
It is impossible to use the Visual Editor

I have an incredibly limited understanding of computer science. I understand how to use source editor but my skills beyond that are non-existent. My perspective is mostly from someone whose grown up in a world geared towards user friendliness and the android Wikipedia app did not perform the way I became accustomed to expect. While mobile view doesn't have the full functionality of desktop view, it functions much better in comparison.

The first few days of messing around

When I first started trying to edit through the app, what got to me most was the sheer frustration of it all. Very few things felt like they were intuitive and it was like learning how to edit all over again. I tried to see if I could create this page through the app and was not able to; it let me search existing subpages of my userpage but it would not let me create a page that did not yet exist. Once I had created this page in desktop view on Chrome, the page automatically loaded because I had previously searched for it. From a reader's perspective, I did not like the default way to browse functions. I didn't even realize there was a way to change this until JTanner (WMF) pointed it out to me. The default option mimics a web browser: unless you click "new tab", you have to click the back arrow x times (depending on how many links you have clicked) to get back to the main page or have the option to see your contributions. This felt clunky and unnecessarily frustrating from my perspective. It took me a few days to even notice that I could access my watchlist. It's hidden behind a menu so it's not immediately obvious.

Technical issues

There was one time I spent 7 minutes trying to type two sentences and the text scrambled across the screen. The end result looked like a test edit: [1]. A previous time, this caused the app to freeze and crash.

I also noticed that whenever I tried to edit an AfD, it would cause the app to crash. I emailed a video documenting the issue since I could not figure out how to upload video to Commons. This actually had a larger impact than even I realized:

Hey there @Clovermoss, nice to meet you.
That crash didn't really have to do with participating in an AfD discussion, but rather with the native wikitext editing interface itself, regardless of which article is edited. The crash occurred when putting the cursor all the way at the bottom of the text and pressing Enter.
When building our native app, we care about squeezing every bit of performance from the Android platform, so that features like editing could be more responsive and usable than the web interface. This often involves some complex logic and system-level optimizations. And although we do as much testing as we can, the occasional crash can sometimes slip through. If you're curious, this is the exact change that fixed the crash. Interestingly, it was a single incorrect character of code that was causing the crash, not even a single line.
— DBrant (WMF), 15:09, 18 November 2022

I try my best to sympathize with people who are actually experienced in regards to technical matters. I don't have the knowledge to offer feasible solutions so to some extent it's impossible to truly understand. I also realize that it must really suck for people to come to you whenever something goes wrong and to not see the massive amount of work that's involved in preventing other massive mistakes. In a manner of speaking, remaining issues are like the tip of an iceberg. However, I do think it's worth pointing out that I've never experienced issues like this on literally any other app and that it's very frustrating from that perspective. The Wikimedia Foundation as a whole exists at a scale that other organizations do not and has access to resources that other open source projects do not have. As someone whose grown up in a user-friendly world, I've never felt frustration to this extent in regards to technical issues with something that is associated with a top website.

Phabricator tickets

While my experiences with this essay have sparked an interest in learning more about the technical side of Wikipedia, I did not file most of these tickets myself. JTanner (WMF) did this for me in response to this essay. The phrasing attributed to me in the tickets are not exact comments of mine, although overall they paraphrase my observations/suggestions.


Tickets that were started because of my observations	Pre-existing tickets that were relevant to my observations
The possibility of explaining what the syntax highlighting means	The possibility of VisualEditor on the app
Removing prompts for adding short descriptions outside of mainspace Resolved	The possibility of creating articles on the app
Removing "profile" as a description for userpages Resolved	Improving edit summaries
Renaming "quick facts" so there's consistency across platforms	Syntax highlighting speed
Making redlinks actually redlinks in preview	Enhancements to the app editor
Colour consistency in diffs across platforms	Issues with notifications about being thanked on redirects
Whether your contribution is the current version of a page Resolved	Desktop mode on mobile with Google keyboard erasing text in certain contexts
Remove option for thanking IP editors because you can't thank them Resolved
Remove option to thank bots because you can't thank them Not done ^[d]
Investigating how AfDs display through the app
Fixing the "copy a diff" feature on my device Resolved
Change "read article" to "read page" Resolved
Not automatically pinging someone on a reply on their own talk page Resolved
Not automatically showing my edits as changes in my watchlist Not done^[e]
Watchlist shows random byte count for patrolled pages Resolved
Watchlist marking pages as seen outside of the app
Red links are blue links on talk pages
Ability to see templates on watchlist Not done^[f]
Error whenever one uses the reply feature in the Wikipedia namespace Not done ^[g]
Diff link giving wrong diff when user in question has symbols in username Resolved
Edit count on app homepage is wrong
App tags edits that were reverted from your watchlist when it shouldn't Done^[h]
Access to blocklog^[i]
ANI and other noticeboards shouldn't be called stubs Resolved
Scrolling issue on app when viewing diffs

Archived massive talk page discussion

This was initially on my talk page. Due to its size, I have moved it to become a subpage for this subpage: User:Clovermoss/Mobile editing/Talk page discussion. When this discussion was on my talk page it was titled "Software development challenges" and it was used for all my app-related feedback for more than a year.

Conclusion

In general, my experience communicating with WMF staff was fairly positive. I think that if this was considered the norm when the WMF receives feedback from experienced editors, people would typically have a more positive view of the WMF. Instead, I've noticed that there's a lot of precedent for distrust and past conflicts. Ignoring these issues doesn't make them go away and acknowledging them is a crucial part in moving forward.

At the same time, I do appreciate that my concerns were validated, even if it was mostly by chance that I even got to have the opportunity to raise them to someone who was able to fix them. My adventure into learning more about editing via the app started from a tangential discussion at my talk page that had sprung from a previous discussion at Levivich's. I remembered that I had a WMF staff member post on my talk page once two years ago (MMiller (WMF)), pinged him, and he brought my concerns to JTanner (WMF), who could actually do something about any of this. She took the time to write lengthy replies and actually take action, like file phabricator tickets on my behalf. My interactions with both of them have been more positive than what I had been expecting. Maybe it's because I'm mostly used to reading about the times where things go wrong. There's also something weirdly satisfying about my opinion mattering even if I realize that it might not be the best from a PR-perspective to have a random 21 year old identifying such issues. I doubt Facebook or Reddit would care that much about my opinion of their websites, so it's amazing to actually have a voice in a conversation like this.

There was a lot more back-and-forth from May 2022 to December 2022. Most of these were comments pointing out issues as I identified them, what my general thoughts were, what I had written in previous versions of this essay, and JTanner helping me by placing phabricator tickets on my behalf. This discussion actually technically started from a previous conversation about generalized newcomer experiences at Levivich's talk page. Reading all of these conversations would probably take someone a few hours but they're there for anyone to read them (see above for the subpage I created).

My observations and communication with WMF staff have slowed down considerably since then but still happen occasionally. It is also important to mention that I only ever edited Wikipedia through the Android version of the app. The iOS version had different issues (such as not having the watchlist feature until recently). My understanding is that there has been an increased focus on parity between the two versions lately and hopefully that continues to be the case. I think it's crucial that people are able to have the same editing experience no matter the device they use to edit. I admit I also question how some matters get prioritized. I was honoured to be able to give some feedback about Edit Patrol while it was being developed, but I do think that there are more crucial issues with the app that should have been addressed first. For example, the ability to use {{cite web}} templates through the editing interface instead of memorizing the wikimarkup involved or the ability to create a new page or to be able to reply to a comment in the Wikipedia namespace.

Overall, I would say that I had a good experience communicating with WMF staff, but not everyone can say the same. The overlap between the WMF and the community should not be comparable to a Venn diagram. Ideally, there should be more communication to limit misunderstandings and unnecessary conflicts.