Have you ever wondered how millions of Wikipedia articles stay accurate, up to date, and vandalism-free? It all starts with the watchlist, a feature available to everyone who signs up for a free account on any Wikimedia project. This week, the Wikimedia mobile web team is releasing the ability to log in or create an account and view or add pages to your watchlist—all from the comfort of your mobile device. We’re hoping this simple but powerful feature will empower existing users and entice new users to sign up and start contributing.

The watchlist is the backbone of Wikipedia’s quality. Most people don’t realize that the articles they read are constantly being modified, sometimes hundreds of thousands of times, by volunteer contributors from all over the world. Wikipedia users who have an account can keep track of these changes by adding pages they care about to their watchlist; this way, they can monitor their favorite articles for vandalism or spam. It is in part through this process of collaboration that one-sentence article stubs evolve into high quality encyclopedic content and malicious or joke edits disappear as quickly as they were added.

With the steady growth of mobile traffic—three billion mobile page views to our projects last month alone—we want to provide important features like these for users on their Internet-enabled device of choice. Unlike the desktop view, however, on mobile we’re showing the watchlist star to all users, as an incentive for long-time editors and curious newcomers alike to log in.

We hope that this simple feature will draw in new users, who may not even be aware that Wikipedia can be edited, and educate them about the constantly evolving nature of our content. To make viewing the watchlist more newbie-friendly, we’ve included a full view of all pages you’ve starred, which also functions like a reading list. This can be toggled to show the “modified” view, with pages that have recently been modified, as well as the changes that were made to them.

Enabling account login and creation on the mobile web also opens the door for additional types of mobile contribution. Our next step will be building and releasing features that allow anyone to add photos to articles, make small edits, and more. If you’re interested in staying up to date and giving feedback on new features, subscribe to our mailing list and lend your voice to our current and future work on mobile web and apps.

Maryana Pinchuck, Associate product manager

At the end of January, we reached another milestone:  3 billion mobile page views in one month.   This means 14.5 percent of Wikipedia page views now are to the mobile site, up from 9.9 percent a year ago.  Our target in the 2012-13 annual plan is to hit 4 billion monthly mobile page views by the end of the fiscal year (June 2013).

The “Why” of Mobile

The data speaks for itself. Mobile page views rose over 75 percent in 2012, while desktop traffic grew at just under 20 percent ^[1]. It is clear that much of Wikipedia’s growth is happening on mobile.  We know that two things contribute significantly to this: 1) With mobile internet, readers have new reasons to look things up on Wikipedia, be it either related to context and location or convenience and availability, 2) Many readers in developing countries, specifically where there is limited broadband penetration, are using mobile devices as their first or only means to access the internet.

A look at the data accompanying past mobile milestones reinforces these reasons.  In the 15 months it has taken for mobile traffic to triple (from 1 billion to 3 billion), overall Wikipedia traffic grew just 33 percent, indicating that many loyal readers are shifting their time to mobile devices^[2].  Secondly, when Wikipedia hit 500 million mobile page views two years ago, 71 percent of that traffic was to the English Wikipedia.  Today, only 52 percent of mobile traffic is to English Wikipedia, illustrating that mobile growth has become a global phenomenon.

The “How” of Mobile

The question is no longer about why mobile matters, but instead how to manage it.  It raises two challenges for Wikimedia — contribution and distribution.   Editing Wikipedia has traditionally happened with a keyboard and monitor, but now smaller screens and touch interfaces are critical to figure out.  Similarly, mobile contributions are likely to be more dependent on the context of the user — where they are, what they are doing, and how much time they have.  With each of these questions, though, also comes immense opportunity to experiment with new editing behaviors like photo upload and micro-contributions. The product team at WMF is tirelessly working on these experiments, with significant headway already made in photo contributions.

The second challenge of the new mobile landscape is how to distribute Wikipedia.  In a purely desktop world, many people discovered Wikipedia through search engines, and high rankings on search results provided credibility and brand equity for the site.  With mobile, though, sessions originate in a more diverse fashion, be it through apps, bookmarks, or even the ‘old-fashioned’ method of direct domain access to familiar sites.  Our official Android and iOS apps cover a lot of this territory, and we see around 40,000 device installs per day on Google Play and approximately 10,000 through the Apple App Store.  Wikipedia Zero, with a current reach of 330 million mobile subscribers, drives awareness of Wikipedia in mobile-centric developing countries and eliminates the cost barrier to accessing it.  Finally, plans are underway to pilot ways to read Wikipedia by text message, and we’re looking at additional app platforms as well. Of course, new mobile readers today become potential new contributors tomorrow, so each of our mobile efforts are part of a virtuous circle of free knowledge.

The potential of mobile is extraordinary, and the work is only beginning. Hope to see you soon at 4 billion.

Amit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

1. ↑ From stats.wikimedia.org (December 2011, December 2012,  percent change): Mobile (1.585 B, 2.799 B, 76.5 percent), Desktop (14.069 B, 17.275 B, 18.2 percent)
2. ↑ Total Wikipedia traffic: October 2011 (16.616 B), January 2013 (22.111 B)

Have you ever wondered if there are Wikipedia articles about things near you? Well, wonder no more! Today, we present the GeoData extension for MediaWiki, which now provides a structured way to store geo-coordinates for articles, as well as an API to make queries around this information.

What does it do?

Coordinates added to articles are now stored separately in the database, as opposed to being stored arbitrarily in wiki markup. This makes it easy to query the coordinates of a particular page or a list of pages around a given set of coordinates. The Solr search engine is used for spatial queries, making the searches extremely fast. All the functionality is also available via the API, allowing developers to create tools that use this data.

Where will it be used?

One of the first major uses of GeoData information will be in the experimental mode of the Wikipedia mobile site, which will allow beta users to see a list of nearby articles. We expect to release this feature into our experimental mode in the coming weeks. In the future, we also hope to build this functionality into our contribution tools: for instance, we’d like to be able to show users a map of articles needing images near their location, so that they can easily take and upload photos of subjects around them missing an illustration.

How does it work?

GeoData adds a new MediaWiki parser function called {{#coordinates}} that saves coordinates passed to it into the database. For example, if the Wikimedia Foundation office is located at 37° 47′ 13.09″ North, 122° 23′ 58.84″ West, it can be tagged like that: {{#coordinates:primary|37|47|13.09|N|122|23|58.84|W}} or with decimals: {{#coordinates:primary|37.78697|-122.39967}}. primary indicates here that these are the coordinates of the article’s primary subject, as opposed to other coordinates mentioned in the article.

How do we add it to articles?

GeoData requires some manual setup to start collecting data on a given wiki. The {{#coordinates}} tag needs to be inserted into the template used for geotagging (example change), and the job queue will process the pages that use it. This can be done on all sites where the GeoData extension is enabled: all Wikipedia and Wikivoyage sites, as well as special projects (like Commons). At least four projects are already actively using it: Wikipedia in English, German, Simple English and Chinese.

It’s also recommended to create a tracking category to which GeoData will add pages with invalid coordinates. The name of this maintenance category can be localized by editing the MediaWiki:Geodata-broken-tags-category system message. If you need help setting up GeoData on your wiki, join us on the #wikimedia-mobile channel on Freenode IRC, and we’ll be happy to help.

Max Semenik
Software Engineer, Mobile

We’re excited to announce VimpelCom, the sixth largest mobile network operator in the world, as the newest partner in the Wikipedia Zero program. By waiving data fees to access Wikipedia on mobile phones, VimpelCom will join the Wikimedia Foundation in our effort to give every single person on the planet access to the free knowledge on Wikipedia.

VimpelCom’s footprint covers eighteen countries with a base of almost 210 million mobile subscribers primarily in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. We are setting out to bring Wikipedia Zero to a minimum of 100 million VimpelCom subscribers in developing countries later this year, with more to follow in 2014. Together with the 230 million customers of our existing partners, this makes Wikipedia Zero available to 330 million people.

The primary target of Wikipedia Zero is people whose primary or only access to the internet is via a mobile device, and VimpelCom’s geographies fit this definition very well. In our analysis of the twenty-five countries with the highest percentage of mobile traffic (based on a minimum of 500K Wikipedia mobile page views), VimpelCom operates in five of them (Zimbabwe, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh). The table below shows that nine of their markets exceed the global average for mobile usage, and for those that currently don’t, free access to mobile Wikipedia will help increase that percentage significantly.

In seven of VimpelCom’s operating territories, Russian is the primary language for Wikipedia readership. A quick glance at the readership of Russian Wikipedia shows how fast mobile usage has risen in these countries over the last year. As of December 2012, 14.1 percent of Russian Wikipedia traffic was to the mobile site, on par with the English Wikipedia ratio of 14.6 percent. More telling of this growth is that two years ago, the Russian percentage was half that of English. It’s a testimony of the decreasing price of internet-capable mobile phones having made access to knowledge in local languages attainable for much of the world’s population. By removing data cost as a barrier, VimpelCom will make this even more of a reality.

Wikipedia Zero has already proven to accelerate mobile Wikipedia traffic within our existing partners’ networks. The marketing efforts which VimpelCom operators put behind the program will raise awareness of Wikipedia in places where it is less well known, and we hope to see similar spikes in traffic in each of these territories. We look forward to sharing the results, news, and case studies here.

See also the press release: VimpelCom partners with the Wikimedia Foundation to offer free mobile Wikipedia access through Wikipedia Zero, and the accompanying Q&A

Amit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

We’re very excited to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation was named a winner in the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge for our work to expand and improve Wikimedia mobile projects, particularly for users in developing countries.

As mobile technology is increasingly the primary opportunity for billions of people around the world to access the Internet, our mobile teams are working to remove the two biggest hurdles to access free knowledge: cost and accessibility. The $600,000 News Challenge grant will be utilized in four areas:

• Improving the way that users experience our mobile platform on feature phones;
• Expanding Wikipedia Zero, which gives mobile users free access to Wikipedia on their phones;
• Developing features to improve the mobile experience regardless of how feature-rich the device is, including new ways to access Wikipedia via texting;
• Increasing the number of languages that can access Wikipedia on mobile.

“Knight Foundation’s funding will support us making the mobile version of Wikipedia easier to use, as well as enabling us to expand Wikipedia Zero, our project with mobile operators that lets their customers access Wikipedia for free,” said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “I’m very happy Knight has chosen to support us; it’s an important affirmation of our mobile work.”

The Wikimedia Foundation is one of eight mobile projects to receive a total of $2.4 million today through the Knight News Challenge, which aims to accelerate projects with funding and advice from Knight’s network of media innovators. A full list of the News Challenge Mobile winners is at knightfoundation.org.

“Wikipedia has helped define the way that people collaboratively create content. Making the site available to more people  across the world will help foster and spread that culture,” said John Bracken, director for journalism and media innovation at Knight Foundation.

The $600,000 News Challenge grant is for two years and follows a general support grant of $250,000 that Knight Foundation awarded to the Wikimedia Foundation in December 2012.

The Wikimedia Foundation and the other winners of the challenge will present their projects from a gathering on the future of mobile at Arizona State University via live Web stream at 12:30 p.m. ET/9:30 a.m. PT, Friday, Jan. 18 at knightfoundation.org/live. (Follow #newschallenge on Twitter.) For more, visit knightfoundation.org or newschallenge.org.

Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

In the fall of 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation’s mobile team released a new interface to Wikimedia mobile sites, adding a navigation layer that allows for easy opting-in to our experimental Beta site.

We created the Beta site as a prototyping area to house early work on features that could help us meet our goals for 2012–2013, which are to get 1,000 mobile users to upload a file to a Wikimedia project every month, and to explore mobile editing and other contributions to the encyclopedia. The Beta site is giving us room to unleash the full creativity of our engineers and designers without disrupting the user experience for millions of readers.

Since the release of the new interface, the number of users opting into Beta has increased dramatically—we now have over 100,000 Beta users and climbing! If you’re one of our Beta users and you’ve signed up for a free account on Wikipedia or a sister project, you’ll see the following prototypes live and ready for testing:

1. Photo uploads. With the help of volunteer developers at the Bangalore hackathon and inspired by the Wiki Loves Monuments initiative, we’ve made it fast and easy to add an image to a Wikipedia article directly from your image library or the camera on your mobile device. Just look for the call to action at the top of articles that lack images in the lead section. Not only will you be illustrating the encyclopedia, you’ll also be donating your image to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, where it can be shared and reused by anyone in the world for free.

2. Editing. Our goal for editing on mobile this year was to begin experimenting with a mobile editing interface for small, on-the-go contributions, like correcting typos or removing vandalism, and we’ve released a section-level editor on Beta that allows for that. In the future, we’ll be working to make editing more fine-grained, as well as optimizing the interface, so that it’s easier to input text on a smaller screen.

3. Watchlists. The watchlist—a feed of recent changes to articles that a user chooses to “watch”—is vital to the health of Wikipedia content. It’s how experienced editors track changes to the pages and discussions they care about, and it helps keep vandalism and spam at bay. We’re trying out ways to serve this need for our current editors on mobile. We’re also experimenting with a watchlist view for new editors who may not be familiar with the feature, which presents the user with an engaging entry point into articles and highlights their continually evolving nature.

If you don’t have a Wikipedia account, create one on desktop or mobile and give these features a try! Just be aware that, as with all things Beta, features are prone to rapid change as we work to fix bugs and optimize the user experience.

In the coming months, we’ll be running user tests and collecting data on feature usage to help us figure out what’s working and what’s not. Ultimately, we aim to identify and promote the most promising experiments to the main mobile gateway and/or create apps that focus on specific contribution funnels. Our goal for the long term is to give potential and new editors the opportunity not just to read Wikipedia, but to take an active part in its continued growth.

Maryana Pinchuk, Associate Product Manager

At the beginning of this year, we launched Wikipedia Zero with the aim of reducing barriers to accessing knowledge on mobile devices. Many people in the developing world use mobile phones as their primary–or only–means to access the Internet. Through partnerships with telecommunications companies, Wikipedia Zero removes the cost of data as an obstacle between individuals and the power of knowledge.

There are close to 6 billion mobile subscriptions in the world, but less than 600 million broadband connections, or 1/10th. Broadband connections are relatively scarce in developing countries, with less than 5 connections per 100 people, but there is nearly one mobile subscription per every single person on the planet [1].

As mobile becomes more of a ubiquitous access point in developing countries, it has immense potential to bring knowledge to many people who previously had limited means to access information. We’ve repeated this message throughout the year, and I wanted to share some data that substantiate our target for the Wikipedia Zero program. Below is a list of the top 25 most mobile-centric countries, meaning those that have the highest ratio of mobile to overall traffic on Wikipedia:

Of the top 25, there are 22 countries classified as developing. Twelve of them, including all of the top 8, are in Africa. Even more telling is that 16 of these countries have mobile usage percentages greater than 20 percent. Compare that to the global average of 11.5 percent–and 15.6 percent in the U.S.–and you get a sense for how much potential mobile has to change the world.

In 2012, we announced Wikipedia Zero partnerships in 31 developing countries. Eleven of those have launched so far, and from what we’ve seen, they’ve had measurable impact. In 2013, we plan to bring a lot more partners and countries on board, many of them on the list above. We expect the percentages in the list to increase even more next year, and we hope that our efforts help drive the accessibility and awareness of Wikipedia to accelerate the trend.

(Special thanks to volunteer Kajari Ghosh for helping compile this data.)

Amit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

[1] http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats/a#subscribers

On November 9-11, the Wikimedia Foundation held a developer meetup in Bangalore, India. The gathering provided an opportunity for India-based developers to work with the Foundation’s engineering teams on several projects, such as JavaScript-based language engineering tools, and mobile applications with PhoneGap and LAMP technologies.

The DevCamp focused on Language Engineering, Mobile development and User interaction and experience design (UI/UX). It was attended by more than 85 developers, UX/UI designers, Wikimedians and translators. The work sessions focused on developing various Wikimedia mobile apps as well as language tools. The first day of the DevCamp kicked off on Friday with tutorials on Developing mobile applications with PhoneGap by Brion Vibber and How to internationalize your code by myself. Interactive Q&A after the sessions concluded the day with a lot of challenging and interesting questions after both tutorials.

The second day started off with Santhosh Thottingal introducing Project Milkshake (the team’s JavaScript-based internationalization libraries) and the Universal Language Selector currently under development. The mobile team introduced various mobile projects like native mobile apps, mobile front-end, and VUMI-based feature phone apps that powers Wikipedia Zero. Interaction designer Pau Giner introduced design projects and guided new contributors. People started selecting projects they were interested in and teamed up with Wikimedia engineers. It was exciting to see some contributors make their first-ever open-source commits during the DevCamp. People continued to hack throughout the two days.

The final day of the DevCamp started with stand-up updates from all participants, and ended with demos and presentations of 18 projects by 25 presenters. One of the most lovely updates was presented by Lakshmi, who learned to type in her language, Malayalam, using the typing tools that Wikimedia engineers have developed.

Accomplishments at the DevCamp include contributions to language engineering projects, where contributors added unit tests to jquery.ime (the input method library for multiple language scripts), submitted bug fixes, tested and actively reported bugs on jquery.ime and the Universal Language Selector. Another highlight was Brion Vibber’s integration of Universal Language Selector, WebFonts and support for language variants to the Wikipedia mobile app. One of the contributors, Ershad, built a Google Chrome extension based on the input method jquery.ime and won a Wikimedia shoulder bag for it. Other highlights include patches submitted to MathJax (a library used to render mathematical equations on HTML pages) by Aditya Ravi Shankar and myself to add internationalization support.

On the mobile platform, Swayam made enhancements to the Translate proofreading mobile app. Other mobile apps developed at the DevCamp include a Commons uploader and an app to track recent changes. Patches were also submitted to MobileFrontend, an iOS client library, and a first working version of the Wikipedia FirefoxOS app.

On the UI/UX design projects, participants worked on ideas for redesigning the translatewiki.net home page, the Mobile Universal language selector, Commons discovery and triaging apps. Here’s a complete list of demonstrations that were made at the Bangalore DevCamp; you are welcome to join the coding fun!

All in all the DevCamp maintained a high energy level throughout the three days, as well as produced a lot of new code, bug fixes, input keymaps, unit tests, mobile apps, translation UI and mobile designs, and positive collaboration across the board.

Amir E. Aharoni, Software Engineer (Internationalization)

A little over six months ago, we deployed our first Wikipedia Zero partnership with Orange in Uganda, offering mobile internet users access to Wikipedia without data charges. Since then, nine additional operators in different countries have launched the program, and twenty-two others are in the current queue. We are now beginning to see the impact of the program, and the first numbers are encouraging: page views from our partners in Niger and Kenya have risen sharply, as have unique visitors in Malaysia.

Context

Our stated mission for the Wikipedia Zero program is to reduce barriers for accessing Wikipedia on mobile devices. From the outset, it has been our goal to manage this program with an analytical lens. With the cost of data removed, we expect an increase in the amount of people accessing Wikipedia for the first time, and also hope that existing readers aren’t deterred from reading more articles. The best proxy to measure this is to look at the growth of Wikipedia page views that come from a mobile partner’s IP address range, and compare it to the growth rate of mobile page views from the rest of that same country. Ultimately, we also want to measure unique visitor additions from the program (to verify that new readers are indeed being introduced), but, internally, we can only measure page views for now.

Page View Growth

Two of our partners agreed to let us publish Wikipedia Zero traffic figures from their network for this blog post. Orange Niger and Orange Kenya both launched the program in July of this year. Both countries are extremely mobile-centric, with 41 percent of all Wikipedia page views in Kenya and 29 percent in Niger coming from mobile (compared to a global total of 12 percent)^[1]. The chart below shows Wikipedia mobile page views for each partner and country respectively:

The news is good. Since the month prior to launch, we’ve seen 77 percent growth in page views through Orange Niger (compared to 7 percent for rest of Niger), and 88 percent for Orange Kenya (compared to -7 percent for rest of Kenya). For each of these two operators, their “Wikipedia share” (the percentage of mobile page views in that country from the partner’s customers) has nearly doubled in that time. Data sets for these two partners are both relatively small, so we’re careful to not to draw too many conclusions from them. However, we’re excited about what it might imply for the future impact of the program.

Unique Visitor Growth

As mentioned before, we’re unable to measure partner unique visitors yet through our internal analytics (our public, global figures for unique visitors are measured by comScore Mediamatrix). However, some partners, such as Digi (Telenor’s subsidiary in Malaysia), do have their own mechanisms for measurement. Since they launched the program in May, unique visitors to Wikipedia on their network have jumped 42 percent, from 91,000 to 131,000. Though it is not yet something we can measure on a recurring basis, it’s a telling indicator that Wikipedia Zero partnerships are successful in bringing new readers to the site.

What’s next

These three data points make us really optimistic. They show growth, though we need to continually manage and measure to see if growth persists when we work with larger bases, and also need to test what happens over time. We’ll share more data as we can, and we also hope to deep dive into a few markets over the next several months to learn exactly what type of partner marketing activity is most effective in driving the growth we described. Stay tuned.

Amit Kapoor
Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

1. ↑ From http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportCountryData.htm, Sept 2012 (mobile site page views / total page views): Kenya (4.1 M / 10.4 M), Niger (69 K / 244 K), World (2.2 B / 18.5 B)

If you’ve paid any attention to the tech press, you may be aware that Microsoft is releasing Windows 8 — and its ARM-based tablet cousin Windows RT — today.

While Internet Explorer 10 works wonderfully with Wikipedia as a regular web site, we wanted to provide a nicely integrated Wikipedia experience for Windows 8/RT users as well, and are proud to announce that our official Wikipedia app is available for free download in the Windows Store.

Style

Wikipedia on Windows 8/RT uses common components from our Android and iOS apps, but fits in natively with Windows’ new styling. Wikipedia languages that provide RSS feeds of featured content display a tiled menu on the home screen:

The article reading view uses a multiple-column layout, which fits the tablet screen better than our current apps do on Android and iPad tablets:

This of course flips to scroll the other direction for right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew.

Search

The app integrates with Windows 8′s global search widget, which can be used both to search while in the application and to launch the app — select Wikipedia from the search providers when doing any search and you’ll pop over to us.

On a laptop or desktop device with a keyboard, you can simply start typing to begin a search, just like on Windows’ Start screen.

(more…)