jdlrobson

Hey there. As I mention in my blog post, there are still remaining issues that we are aware of and will fix. We got some consultancy on the remaining accessibility issues, and they were graded with priorities. We took care of all the ones that were flagged as blockers, and are working through the rest of the list over the next three months. You can track progress if you are interested in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T318373.

Some of these are made a little more complicated as they involve different teams - for example the language button is owned by a team who works on a Asia/Europe timezone (compared to our US/Europe timezone).

I think you are specifically referring to https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T325009 (still awaiting discussion) and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T318013 (resolved next week) ?

Hey there, developer here and I can confirm that we are still actively maintaining those skins and preserving them. We have around 101 skins that work with MediaWiki and 7 skins deployed in production.

You might be interested in the sections "WE MADE IMPROVEMENTS TO BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY" and "WE IMPROVED THIRD-PARTY SUPPORT" on https://jdlrobson.com/posts/2023-01-17_the-new-wikipedia-app... which have a few more links that might be of interest.

Using a national flag is a really bad UX pattern given the political ramifications and potentially offensive. Languages are not owned by countries. I am not aware of a multilingual site that provides over 200 languages in such a way that its country neutral (switching to a Spain based shopping site is not the same as switching to Spanish)?

As I've said before the mobile site doesn't remove it. It just changes the mechanism for understandable reasons based on the medium.

Nice to chat to you.

I have 5 items in that bar on my Samsung Galaxy and I have no space for a label. As the screenshot shows the labels are there, just not visible until a certain breakpoint

I agree that the UX could be improved and there is plenty of evidence to support that. On the other hand the edit icon is super discoverable and used without the label so I think the challenge with the language icon is 1) there are not many multilingual sites and 2) the other icons there potentially cause the user to ignore them entirely.

Throw in the 200+ languages and longer labels in some of them and it becomes even more complicated...

Okay but that's an issue with UX and discoverability which is very different from "language editions isn’t there at all".

How would you solve this given the limited space? A label saying languages is the mosy obvious but real estate is a little limited.

I'd hope that if the icon was prominent in desktop with a label that would reinforce its discoverability.

The language button is right at the top of the page. If anything its more accessible on mobile?

Unfortunately certain iPhones do not have MutationObserver support. This is not the case on newer ones.

There's an open bug to allow you to opt out of this however we've been a bit stretched to find the time to work on this.

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T261609

No. This wouldn't be technically feasible at current time even if we wanted to do that.

You dont need to be worried about this. Our morales and principles are not changing.

I built the Wikipedia mobile site and there's a reason our hamburger menu, lazy loaded images and editor actually work without JS. We are for everyone regardless of internet connection speed, device value and internet stability.

That's a a hill at least I as an employee am prepared to die on.

The sample size for those graphs is 1% so you need to multiple that by 100. I personally checked the access logs to check they are consistent. That was where the confusion came from!

:( We miss you! (context: https://ahvalnews.com/freedom-speech/wikipedia-starts-we-mis...)

We're quite transparent about what we release and when - spikes can be easily attributed to events on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Release_timeline if you are interested in what caused them!

That test mode of the desktop theme is actually live but super hidden away. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hacker_News&use... I've been trying to add a preference to allow user's to opt into it - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T186760 - if you can a token of support there might help this get prioritised.

Number was very very very wrong. Actually it's 0.5 million. I've corrected the post.

Hey! (author here)

I sincerely regret the use of that statement "people seem to like it" in my post. I've now removed it as I worry this confuses my message so thank you for pointing it out. This really trivializes all the work that went into A/B testing this and how we measured success. I really recommend a read of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Page_Previews#Success_Metrics... Side note: the volume of traffic was also wrong by several magnitudes... actually 0.5 million)

My main motivation when writing this post was to share how small changes require magnitudes of effort not to express the merits of the feature. As a developer who works with product owners a lot and often get asked how I can build things quicker (I'm sure many can relate). I wanted to provide something useful to other developers that easy looking things are not actually easy to build, so thanks for flagging.

With regards to the user script, yeh that's been around for some time and was the seed for this idea. It's just taken a long time to get that from such a small audience to a mainstream one. It doesn't downplay it in my opinion, just shows how far we've come.

Thanks for reading.

<3 message received from //everyone// involved in its creation. Thanks!