Talk:Product and Technology Advisory Council/February 2025 draft PTAC recommendation for feedback/Mobile experiences
Add topicPeople first
[edit]I would change from "People can successfully contribute on mobile web" to "People on mobile web can successfully contribute". Sometimes the solution might be for them to switch to a different device, if they can. Nemo 10:00, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
- Hah, the last paragraph of my section below touches on this perfectly. I was a user of mobile web, opened the editor, chose that I needed a different experience, but also successfully contributed :P Would be interesting to dive into the data to try and add that to the user flow graphs. ·addshore· talk to me! 12:06, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
Terminology cleanup & questions
[edit]Reading this through for the first time flagged up a few thoughts and questions for me, that I think could be cleared up with some terminology changes that I believe align with what is intended. (At the hackathon it was expressed that this was particularly talking about mobile web). With that in mind...
- People using mobile devices account for around 60% of Wikipedia traffic and Despite mobile accounting for around 60% of Wikipedia's traffic Does this actually mean people on mobile devices using the web experience?
- successful edits It would be nice with a footnote stating what this means
- but only around 12% of successful edits are made with mobile devices I believe this should also say "made with mobile web on mobile devices"?
Only reading through this page the full picture is not really represented, and I leave with more questions
- Where do mobile app pageviews and edits line up within this data. I assume it is a low count? And or the number of users using app experiences is lower hence mobile web would be more impactful, but this is me making assumptions as this is not covered anywhere.
- Another category that would likely be missed in this full overview that flags up while reading would be mobile focused tools, that again contribute to mobile based editing in some way, this again contributes to the full picture. I see bots are excluded in some of the data, but I imagine tools perhaps even if via mobile would currently be grouped with "desktop"?
Amusingly, I found myself trying to write this comment on mobile web in the session, but ultimately got my laptop out as I wanted the side by side text I was writing about alongside the comment I was writing, so I think I just contributed to your "Editor loaded" drop off (which I then also wonder if there is any more analysis on where when and how this drop off happens). Sorry for the book of a comment, come find me during the hackathon, or happy to continue here etc ·addshore· talk to me! 12:02, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
Low-hanging fruits
[edit]The default mobile experience is simply not useful for editing at all if you want to do more than quickly fixing a typo. There are existing solutions but for some reason they don't get any love from the WMF. Talk page links are disabled for logged-out mobile readers on most wikis despite some large projects (e.g. enwiki, dewiki, ruwiki...) already opting in (phab:T54165). Users should be able to enable Advanced Mobile Contributions globally instead of having to opt-in on each individual project they're contributing to (phab:T233802). In fact AMC should be the default for all users given how bad the current user experience is. Unfortunately I don't see much in Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2025-2026/Product & Technology OKRs that's likely to significantly improve the mobile experience despite the PTAC recommendation. Johannnes89 (talk) 10:10, 24 August 2025 (UTC)