Wikimedia mobile grows up, offers opt-in beta features

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The Wikimedia mobile project has reached a really exciting point. When we launched our mobile extension last month, we were replacing a really complicated and critical piece of the mobile infrastructure with a much simpler system. I’m happy to say that it’s worked out so well that we’re taking off the beta logo for the production Wikipedia mobile site.
What does this mean for our everyday user? It means that our mobile site has stabilized as a piece of our infrastructure, and that we’re keeping it. But also…
Since we had a lot of users who really enjoyed being part of the mobile testing community, we’ve retained the beta concept for new, pre-release features. All you have to do going forward is opt-in to the beta program.
By setting this option, you’ll have the ability to test out new features on our mobile site before anyone else. This is great if you want to help steer our mobile projects and don’t mind a little instability here and there. We’ll keep track of how many users opt in and out and individual feature usage so that we can know what’s worth keeping.

If you’re ready to continue as a tester then join the beta and send us feedback. We have two new features available for testers:

  • Search suggestions
    • Typing on mobile devices can be a pain so were showing you search results as fast as we can
    • Huge thanks to Ross Bender for doing the initial work on this
  • Interwiki links
    • Now any of our multi lingual speakers can just tap the W to switch languages
    • This was our most requested feature after launch
Search suggestionsSearch suggestions

We’re really eager to get your feedback so let us know how well the features do on your phones. You can also send us an email or tweet @WikimediaMobile with your feedback.
Come help make Wikimedia projects on Mobile better for everyone.
Tomasz Finc
Director of Mobile & Special projects

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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“The Wikimedia mobile project has reached a really exciting point.”A good news.

While I like the language selection, I’d give two pieces of feedback.
1- don’t hide it in the W. Give it a logo or a text link of its own. I don’t think anyone would think to click on the W.
2 – automatically changing language on list selection is, I think, a mistake. It’s too easy to miss-click. Make it a positive action which requires the user to select the language then hit the go button.
Other than that, no complaints!
(Couldn’t submit this on mobile for some reason)

1. Think of that as a placeholder for now. We all know that its not ideal but our users really wanted it to just start using it. You’ll see some features like that pop into the site before we do a full UI revamp. To get an early preview of how one of our designers is seeing the revamp; take a look at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Athena 2. We’ve been noodling on this as iOS requires a confirm while Android does not. Plus it might be nice to style the language selection on our own. Send us over a mockup and we’ll see… Read more »

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As one of the requesters can I just say thanks!

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