Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Toby Negrin]

Hi all -- I wanted to follow up on this thread with the results of the test:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Finland_Banner_Test

TLDR: While we saw a big increase in installs and opens, we found that the
campaign did not significantly increase pageviews, leading us to conclude
that readers are interested in using an app, but given the current
experience would  rather use the mobile web than the native app.

-Toby

On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 11:51 AM, Ryan Lane  wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 7:08 AM, Adam Wight  wrote:
>
> >
> > Another misconception or oversight I want to bring up is that Fundraising
> > is the team pioneering the 2/3-page or full-page banners.  We're driving
> > readers from the website to completely closed and somewhat evil payments
> > platforms.  If there's any relevant or even irrelevant research about
> > interstitials, please apply it to our work, cos we're about to have a
> huge
> > impact on the English-speaking community in December.  Any complaints
> about
> > the Finnish mobile experiment and dogpiling on the awesome apps
> developers
> > seem incredibly misplaced while I'm walking around with this "Kick Me"
> sign
> > on my backside.
> >
> >
> I'm couldn't fully grok what point this was making, but whether it's this
> mobile experiment or fundraising doing 2/3 or full-page banners, they're
> terrible. This has been a major complaint by numerous people over the past
> few years. Please tell me you're not considering interstitials, 2/3 page,
> or full page banners for fundraising? This may be the year I actually start
> boycotting the Wikimedia fundraiser, if so.
>
> - Ryan
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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Ryan Lane]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2015 at 7:08 AM, Adam Wight  wrote:

>
> Another misconception or oversight I want to bring up is that Fundraising
> is the team pioneering the 2/3-page or full-page banners.  We're driving
> readers from the website to completely closed and somewhat evil payments
> platforms.  If there's any relevant or even irrelevant research about
> interstitials, please apply it to our work, cos we're about to have a huge
> impact on the English-speaking community in December.  Any complaints about
> the Finnish mobile experiment and dogpiling on the awesome apps developers
> seem incredibly misplaced while I'm walking around with this "Kick Me" sign
> on my backside.
>
>
I'm couldn't fully grok what point this was making, but whether it's this
mobile experiment or fundraising doing 2/3 or full-page banners, they're
terrible. This has been a major complaint by numerous people over the past
few years. Please tell me you're not considering interstitials, 2/3 page,
or full page banners for fundraising? This may be the year I actually start
boycotting the Wikimedia fundraiser, if so.

- Ryan
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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Adam Wight]

Brandon, great to hear from you!  I think you're working off of old
information--like Matt said, you can edit via the app now.  It's cool that
you're inspired to bring up more questions, though, and I'm glad you're
focusing on the design phase of the next experiment.  Are you busy for the
next ten years?

Another misconception or oversight I want to bring up is that Fundraising
is the team pioneering the 2/3-page or full-page banners.  We're driving
readers from the website to completely closed and somewhat evil payments
platforms.  If there's any relevant or even irrelevant research about
interstitials, please apply it to our work, cos we're about to have a huge
impact on the English-speaking community in December.  Any complaints about
the Finnish mobile experiment and dogpiling on the awesome apps developers
seem incredibly misplaced while I'm walking around with this "Kick Me" sign
on my backside.

Thanks,
Adam

On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 12:12 PM, Brandon Harris  wrote:

>
> > On Sep 2, 2015, at 3:53 PM, Toby Negrin  wrote:
>
> > 1. We're moving people from an open platform to a closed platform: I
> think
> > this is an oversimplification of the situation -- as has been noted
> before,
> > the android app is 100% open source and while the data is not, in my
> > opinion, comprehensive, it's inarguable that a large percentage of mobile
> > traffic on the internet is from apps. It's not possible to fulfill our
> > mission[4] if Wikipedia and sister project content is not available in
> > widely used channels.
>
> I'm not sure this makes a lot of sense.  The widest, most-open
> content channel that the projects have is through the web interfaces:  all
> phones, all devices, all computers can access the same content in the same
> manner.  That is to say: 100% of our readers have the ability to use the
> web versions (either desktop or mobile web) where as only a subset can use
> the Android app, which is a different subset that can use iOS.  (They also
> end up having fragmented experiences, which is sub-optimal.)
>
> So it seems to me that the apps are not required to fulfill the
> mission.  They feel like distractions, and - quite possibly - negatives to
> the mission (in that we can't convert Readers into Editors through the app).
>
> (Which, by the way, this whole "focus entirely on readers" shift
> seems counter-intuitive to me.  Having a billion readers doesn't mean
> anything if there aren't any editors anymore. It's a complete failure at
> that point.)
>
> > 2. The campaign was not publicized before launch: We notified the Finnish
> > community on their Village pump before the campaign began[5] and the
> > campaign is detailed on the central notice page[6]. We felt this was
> > appropriate considering the scope of the test.
>
> Restricting the conversation to two very small, almost
> impenetrable discussion areas seems unwise.  It seems obvious to me that
> this idea and action would cause friction with the community.  I don't
> think there's any bad-faith going on here, but this definitely feels like
> an oversight.
>
> > 3. Banners/Interstitials don't work/suck/etc: There's a difference
> between
> > a forced install and letting users know that an app exists and our
> > designers have worked hard to make the banners effective without being
> > excessively intrusive. You can see the designs on the Phab ticket above.
> I
> > don't generally place a great deal of faith in blog posts or other
> > company's data -- the google study showing the ineffectiveness of
> > interstitials has already been challenged by other similarly reputable
> > sources [7,8]. For this and other reasons, I believe that we need to
> gather
> > our own data.
>
> Is "our own data" more important than the goodwill of our users or
> developers?  I think that's a big part of why people might be upset about
> this: it's a step away from what had classically been the principles
> underlying the movement's activities.
>
> Even that said, though:  this is the first anyone is saying "yes,
> we did some research about interstitials".  It seems to me that the Google
> study was something that could have been discussed ahead of time.   I also
> don't understand why we can't do the whole Open Source thing and make use
> of other people's research, unless this indicates a further shift into "not
> invented here" territory.
>
> > 4. We don't understand what success looks like: We are planning a meeting
> > with our Research team[9] to assess the statistical validity of our
> > results, but the basic question is if users read more content using the
> app
> > than the mobile web. This information will help guide us on future
> product
> > decisions and will be shared with the community.
>
> An experiment without a box isn't an experiment.
>
> "We would like to determine if people read more through
> the apps than through the web interface" is a _great_ question (but also
> on

Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Matthew Flaschen]

On 09/04/2015 03:12 PM, Brandon Harris wrote:



On Sep 2, 2015, at 3:53 PM, Toby Negrin 
wrote:



1. We're moving people from an open platform to a closed platform:
I think this is an oversimplification of the situation -- as has
been noted before, the android app is 100% open source and while
the data is not, in my opinion, comprehensive, it's inarguable that
a large percentage of mobile traffic on the internet is from apps.
It's not possible to fulfill our mission[4] if Wikipedia and sister
project content is not available in widely used channels.


I'm not sure this makes a lot of sense.  The widest, most-open
content channel that the projects have is through the web interfaces:
all phones, all devices, all computers can access the same content in
the same manner.  That is to say: 100% of our readers have the
ability to use the web versions (either desktop or mobile web) where
as only a subset can use the Android app, which is a different subset
that can use iOS.  (They also end up having fragmented experiences,
which is sub-optimal.)


Some fraction of our users have the ability to go a library and read
Wikipedia there.  That doesn't mean publishing Wikipedia in library 
kiosk form would fulfill their needs.  A lot of them don't *actually* go 
to libraries, even though they could.  Analogously, a lot of people 
prefer apps to web.


We need to share content in ways our readers and editors want, not in
the ways we prefer they do it.

(There is also a huge role for reusers sharing our content in other
interesting ways, but that's another matter).


So it seems to me that the apps are not required to fulfill the
mission.  They feel like distractions, and - quite possibly -
negatives to the mission (in that we can't convert Readers into
Editors through the app).


Why not?  The app already supports editing.  True, you can't do every 
possible kind of edit/operation, but people don't do all of those as 
early editors anyway.  It certainly provides a way to become an editor, 
and get editing work done.


Matt Flaschen

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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[David Gerard]

On 4 September 2015 at 20:12, Brandon Harris  wrote:

> So it seems to me that the apps are not required to fulfill the 
> mission.  They feel like distractions, and - quite possibly - negatives to 
> the mission (in that we can't convert Readers into Editors through the app).


It's worth stressing here that our app is really good for reading. I
have kept a gaggle of 7-8yo children amused while they were playing
"guess the animal" by calling up the animal in question on Wikipedia
on my S4 Mini, complete with that picture in the header. It was better
than trying to do the same on the website has been on the same phone
in the past. So let's not forget to give the app at least some love
:-)


- d.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Brandon Harris]

> On Sep 2, 2015, at 3:53 PM, Toby Negrin  wrote:

> 1. We're moving people from an open platform to a closed platform: I think
> this is an oversimplification of the situation -- as has been noted before,
> the android app is 100% open source and while the data is not, in my
> opinion, comprehensive, it's inarguable that a large percentage of mobile
> traffic on the internet is from apps. It's not possible to fulfill our
> mission[4] if Wikipedia and sister project content is not available in
> widely used channels.

I'm not sure this makes a lot of sense.  The widest, most-open content 
channel that the projects have is through the web interfaces:  all phones, all 
devices, all computers can access the same content in the same manner.  That is 
to say: 100% of our readers have the ability to use the web versions (either 
desktop or mobile web) where as only a subset can use the Android app, which is 
a different subset that can use iOS.  (They also end up having fragmented 
experiences, which is sub-optimal.)

So it seems to me that the apps are not required to fulfill the 
mission.  They feel like distractions, and - quite possibly - negatives to the 
mission (in that we can't convert Readers into Editors through the app).

(Which, by the way, this whole "focus entirely on readers" shift seems 
counter-intuitive to me.  Having a billion readers doesn't mean anything if 
there aren't any editors anymore. It's a complete failure at that point.)

> 2. The campaign was not publicized before launch: We notified the Finnish
> community on their Village pump before the campaign began[5] and the
> campaign is detailed on the central notice page[6]. We felt this was
> appropriate considering the scope of the test.

Restricting the conversation to two very small, almost impenetrable 
discussion areas seems unwise.  It seems obvious to me that this idea and 
action would cause friction with the community.  I don't think there's any 
bad-faith going on here, but this definitely feels like an oversight.

> 3. Banners/Interstitials don't work/suck/etc: There's a difference between
> a forced install and letting users know that an app exists and our
> designers have worked hard to make the banners effective without being
> excessively intrusive. You can see the designs on the Phab ticket above. I
> don't generally place a great deal of faith in blog posts or other
> company's data -- the google study showing the ineffectiveness of
> interstitials has already been challenged by other similarly reputable
> sources [7,8]. For this and other reasons, I believe that we need to gather
> our own data.

Is "our own data" more important than the goodwill of our users or 
developers?  I think that's a big part of why people might be upset about this: 
it's a step away from what had classically been the principles underlying the 
movement's activities.

Even that said, though:  this is the first anyone is saying "yes, we 
did some research about interstitials".  It seems to me that the Google study 
was something that could have been discussed ahead of time.   I also don't 
understand why we can't do the whole Open Source thing and make use of other 
people's research, unless this indicates a further shift into "not invented 
here" territory. 

> 4. We don't understand what success looks like: We are planning a meeting
> with our Research team[9] to assess the statistical validity of our
> results, but the basic question is if users read more content using the app
> than the mobile web. This information will help guide us on future product
> decisions and will be shared with the community.

An experiment without a box isn't an experiment.  

"We would like to determine if people read more through the 
apps than through the web interface" is a _great_ question (but also one that 
could probably be answered just by looking at squid logs).  I don't know that 
it needs an advertising campaign to create app users to do it (though I could 
be wrong, and often am, and would love to hear how if so).  It further seems 
that advertising the mobile apps would create a biases in the research (if only 
that "newish" app users are likely to use it more often earlier in their 

"We would like to determine if people download the app more 
often if they've been given an interstitial" is also an interesting question 
but it's got a secondary question that no one seems to care about: "How many 
readers have we put off from returning by showing them this interstitial?"  I 
know that I often immediately shut windows and tabs when I'm told "download our 
app!"  

If this were brought to the wider community in a different manner, 
there may have been a completely different response:

"We do not believe that people are aware that there are 
official Wikipedia apps. We would like to run an experiment to see how likely 
people are to switch to

Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Toby Negrin]

Hi all --

I'm going to try to address as many of the issues mentioned in this thread
and the Phabricator ticket[1] as I can. I'm going to preface this by
explaining why we're doing this.

First of all, this is only a test in order to increase our understanding of
how our readers interact with our content. It's limited to a relatively
small but representative sample of our readers and is not permanent. The
results of this test will inform our mobile strategy.

I'd also like to offer that in our community strategic consultation[3],
mobile and apps was the single most commented upon topic, including many
comments that we should build an app.

Specific Issues

1. We're moving people from an open platform to a closed platform: I think
this is an oversimplification of the situation -- as has been noted before,
the android app is 100% open source and while the data is not, in my
opinion, comprehensive, it's inarguable that a large percentage of mobile
traffic on the internet is from apps. It's not possible to fulfill our
mission[4] if Wikipedia and sister project content is not available in
widely used channels.

2. The campaign was not publicized before launch: We notified the Finnish
community on their Village pump before the campaign began[5] and the
campaign is detailed on the central notice page[6]. We felt this was
appropriate considering the scope of the test.

3. Banners/Interstitials don't work/suck/etc: There's a difference between
a forced install and letting users know that an app exists and our
designers have worked hard to make the banners effective without being
excessively intrusive. You can see the designs on the Phab ticket above. I
don't generally place a great deal of faith in blog posts or other
company's data -- the google study showing the ineffectiveness of
interstitials has already been challenged by other similarly reputable
sources [7,8]. For this and other reasons, I believe that we need to gather
our own data.

4. We don't understand what success looks like: We are planning a meeting
with our Research team[9] to assess the statistical validity of our
results, but the basic question is if users read more content using the app
than the mobile web. This information will help guide us on future product
decisions and will be shared with the community.

-Toby

[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T103896
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Projects
[3]
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/08/27/strategy-potential-mobile-multimedia-translation/

[4] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement
[5]
https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Kahvihuone_%28uutiset%29#Running_banner_to_promote_Wikipedia_app_downloads
[6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Calendar
[7]
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/07/google-case-study-on-app-download-interstitials.html
[8] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/all-app-promos-bad-googles-omar-restom
[9] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T105561

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 8:21 AM, Tilman Bayer  wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 8:10 PM, Oliver Keyes  wrote:
> >
> > What was the publicising of the campaign prior to its launch?
> >
> > It should be pretty apparent to people with experience within the
> > movement that this would be both entirely novel and pretty
> > controversial.
>
> As mentioned on the Phabricator ticked, this is by no means the first
> banner campaign inviting installation of an app.
>
> In June/July last year, there was a global campaign announcing the
> launch of the new Android app (like now, shown on mobile web for
> Android devices only):
>
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=Wpapp2014Androidmobile_1&uselang=en&force=1
>
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=Wpapp2014Androidmobile_2&uselang=en&force=1
> (also ran in a few other languages besides English)
> I don't recall it being controversial back then.
>
> And in 2013, the late Commons app was promoted in a similar campaign
> on desktop and mobile:
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=CommonsAppnonmobilewp&uselang=en&force=1
> (on desktop Wikipedia)
>
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=CommonsAppnonmobilecommons&uselang=en&force=1
> (on Commons)
>
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=AndroidCommonsApp&uselang=en&force=1
> (mobile Wikipedia on Android devices)
>
>
> > I'd expect some amount of transparency around it (a
> > phabricator ticket is not, in and of itself, transparency).
>
> For those not familiar with the existing processes around banners, WMF
> staff and community members who use this indeed highly prominent space
> have been coordinating for years on this page:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Calendar
> Quite a lot of people who care about banner use are watching it for
> contro

Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Ricordisamoa]

Il 02/09/2015 22:26, Antoine Musso ha scritto:

Le 01/09/2015 17:30, Ori Livneh a écrit :

We appear to be running a banner campaign on the mobile web site, driving
people to download the mobile app:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_2
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_1

Campaign definition:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&subaction=noticeDetail¬ice=Android_app

This isn't cool. This isn't us. We don't drive people from an open platform
to a closed one.

There other Android apps distribution system, the favourite of mine
being [F-Droid] which host only Free and Open Source Software.

The system is open source, all apps are open source and they work hard
on stripping unfree code and notifying privacy infringement.


I have proposed the app back in October 2014 and they apparently keep it
updated. If you look at the app page, they link to the Privacy policy
and Terms of use and warns about the app tracking activity:


https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-May/thread.html#81740



https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.wikipedia


Maybe we can advertise that plaform instead?  Will have to get in touch
with them since our banner could well overwhelm their infrastructure.


[F-Droid] https://f-droid.org/





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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Matthew Flaschen]

On 09/02/2015 03:55 PM, Ryan Lane wrote:

Even ignoring the "is it right and ethical" debate, there's a pretty large
amount of research over the past 6 or so months that show this is a bad
idea.


[citation needed]

Matt Flaschen


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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Antoine Musso]

Le 01/09/2015 17:30, Ori Livneh a écrit :
> We appear to be running a banner campaign on the mobile web site, driving
> people to download the mobile app:
> 
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_2
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_1
> 
> Campaign definition:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&subaction=noticeDetail¬ice=Android_app
> 
> This isn't cool. This isn't us. We don't drive people from an open platform
> to a closed one.

There other Android apps distribution system, the favourite of mine
being [F-Droid] which host only Free and Open Source Software.

The system is open source, all apps are open source and they work hard
on stripping unfree code and notifying privacy infringement.


I have proposed the app back in October 2014 and they apparently keep it
updated. If you look at the app page, they link to the Privacy policy
and Terms of use and warns about the app tracking activity:

https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.wikipedia


Maybe we can advertise that plaform instead?  Will have to get in touch
with them since our banner could well overwhelm their infrastructure.


[F-Droid] https://f-droid.org/


-- 
Antoine "hashar" Musso


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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Ryan Lane]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 12:13 PM, Oliver Keyes  wrote:

>
> And without any answer to my question about whether this was an actual
> A/B test, and whether you're measuring overall user utility rather
> than 'did they download it', this is also highly subjective and costly
> both in terms of time and emotional resources.
>
> But you're missing...well, two important points. First, as Brandon
> says, these debates /have to happen/. Identifying that something is a
> *right* thing to do, an *ethical* thing to do, cannot happen after
> that thing has been done. And second: costly in terms of time? Costly
> in terms of emotional resources? This thread is costly on both, and it
> is also an inevitable consequence of not having the discussion in
> advance.
>
>
Even ignoring the "is it right and ethical" debate, there's a pretty large
amount of research over the past 6 or so months that show this is a bad
idea. I don't understand why there's even a need for a debate. People hate
interstitials. I know the reasoning is "well, this isn't an interstitial",
but if it walks and quacks like a duck...

Part of good research is using the results of already existing research.

- Ryan
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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Tilman Bayer]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Brandon Harris  wrote:
>
>> On Sep 2, 2015, at 11:17 AM, Gergo Tisza  wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 6:19 AM, Oliver Keyes 
wrote:
>>
>>> For what it's worth, the line " For one thing, they can turn out
>>> negative, in which case we will have been spared a  philosophical
>>> debate about openness." comes off as very snarky and also entirely the
>>> wrong approach.
>>
>>
>> Debates about the Wikimedia ethos tend to be highly subjective and thus
>> costly both in terms of time and emotional resources. Measuring whether
>> banners work is fairly simple and objective. It makes sense to perform
the
>> cheapest prerequisite checks first, to minimize total cost.
>
> Part of the cost of business in being transparent and actually
_having_ an ethos is that these conversations need to be had, regardless of
their cost.
>
> And I seriously doubt that there's any benefit to these banner
ads at all.  Converting a small number of people from using the web version
to an app version is meaningless when operating at this scale.  We're
actually probably _reducing_ the number of readers overall because many
will simply say "screw this if you're serving me interstitials".
>

Agree that that's a downside that needs to be considered, for any banner
actually (be it an invitation to install an app, to donate, or to
participate in a photo contest).  On the other hand, we may very well also
be losing many readers by inactivity here, because they would prefer to
read Wikipedia in an app and are not aware of ours. See e.g. the recently
posted results from the strategy consultation

:



*"Mobile-related comments reveal an opportunity to improve our existing
mobile offerings for both editors and readers and raise awareness about our
native apps. Participants (mostly anonymous users) urged us to 'make an
app,' when one is already available for iOS and Android devices."*

(there's more detail in this slide

)

BTW, since we are talking about the impact on Finnish Wikipedia users, the
link to the community notification there:
https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Kahvihuone_(uutiset)#Running_banner_to_promote_Wikipedia_app_downloads
It
doesn't show any discussion so far; has there been feedback from Finnish
readers in other venues?

-- 
Tilman Bayer
Senior Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB
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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Oliver Keyes]

On 2 September 2015 at 14:17, Gergo Tisza  wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 6:19 AM, Oliver Keyes  wrote:
>
>> For what it's worth, the line " For one thing, they can turn out
>> negative, in which case we will have been spared a  philosophical
>> debate about openness." comes off as very snarky and also entirely the
>> wrong approach.
>
>
> Debates about the Wikimedia ethos tend to be highly subjective and thus
> costly both in terms of time and emotional resources. Measuring whether
> banners work is fairly simple and objective. It makes sense to perform the
> cheapest prerequisite checks first, to minimize total cost.

And without any answer to my question about whether this was an actual
A/B test, and whether you're measuring overall user utility rather
than 'did they download it', this is also highly subjective and costly
both in terms of time and emotional resources.

But you're missing...well, two important points. First, as Brandon
says, these debates /have to happen/. Identifying that something is a
*right* thing to do, an *ethical* thing to do, cannot happen after
that thing has been done. And second: costly in terms of time? Costly
in terms of emotional resources? This thread is costly on both, and it
is also an inevitable consequence of not having the discussion in
advance.

Yes, having discussions takes time and energy. And sometimes you don't
like the outcome. Those are a given outcome of talking to people. But
they are things we do /regardless/ of whether we feel like not talking
to people would be easier (not talking to people is always easier) and
they are things that, nine times out of ten, are actually a massive
saving on time and emotional energy. Because it means you can have
conversations with people exploring the ethical costs and benefits of
doing an action, and then do (or not do) that action, rather than do
that action and then deal with /outraged/ people who are approaching
the situation not as a hypothetical but as something that actually
happened.

And it's apparent, from the replies to this thread, that this decision
did not save on emotional energy - it just offloaded it. We have
multiple staffers and volunteers sat here sending messages that boil
down to "this does not represent me. This is not the movement I work
towards". That's not a tremendously pleasant experience for us. We
have an expectation on us, as human beings and movement members and
staffers, that we will consider the /systemic/ impact of what we
choose to do and not do. Describing talking about it in advance as too
much of an emotional load makes it appear that that evaluation was not
adequately performed.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Ryan Lane]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 10:50 PM, Gergo Tisza  wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 10:09 PM, Ori Livneh  wrote:
>
> > Just in time!
> > http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/01/death-to-app-install-interstitials/
>
>
> Interstitials are full-page ads where you have to click a link to get to
> the actual content. These are normal banners.
> More importantly, as you can see in the Phabricator task, they are an
> experiment to measure if it is possible to make more people use the app.
> Experiments are good. For one thing, they can turn out negative, in which
> case we will have been spared a  philosophical debate about openness.
>

I don't think anyone would consider Wikimedia's donation banners "normal".
On mobile they take up the entire screen, which makes them as bad as
interstitials. On the desktop they obscure the vast majority of the site,
even on relatively large screens. They are a frequent cause for complaint
on social media when they run.

- Ryan
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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Brandon Harris]

> On Sep 2, 2015, at 11:17 AM, Gergo Tisza  wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 6:19 AM, Oliver Keyes  wrote:
> 
>> For what it's worth, the line " For one thing, they can turn out
>> negative, in which case we will have been spared a  philosophical
>> debate about openness." comes off as very snarky and also entirely the
>> wrong approach.
> 
> 
> Debates about the Wikimedia ethos tend to be highly subjective and thus
> costly both in terms of time and emotional resources. Measuring whether
> banners work is fairly simple and objective. It makes sense to perform the
> cheapest prerequisite checks first, to minimize total cost.

Part of the cost of business in being transparent and actually _having_ 
an ethos is that these conversations need to be had, regardless of their cost.

And I seriously doubt that there's any benefit to these banner ads at 
all.  Converting a small number of people from using the web version to an app 
version is meaningless when operating at this scale.  We're actually probably 
_reducing_ the number of readers overall because many will simply say "screw 
this if you're serving me interstitials".

This was a bad idea.  It remains a bad idea.  It looks bad on the 
movement.

---
Brandon Harris :: bhar...@gaijin.com :: made of steel wool and whiskey




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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Gergo Tisza]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 6:19 AM, Oliver Keyes  wrote:

> For what it's worth, the line " For one thing, they can turn out
> negative, in which case we will have been spared a  philosophical
> debate about openness." comes off as very snarky and also entirely the
> wrong approach.


Debates about the Wikimedia ethos tend to be highly subjective and thus
costly both in terms of time and emotional resources. Measuring whether
banners work is fairly simple and objective. It makes sense to perform the
cheapest prerequisite checks first, to minimize total cost.
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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Tilman Bayer]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 8:10 PM, Oliver Keyes  wrote:
>
> What was the publicising of the campaign prior to its launch?
>
> It should be pretty apparent to people with experience within the
> movement that this would be both entirely novel and pretty
> controversial.

As mentioned on the Phabricator ticked, this is by no means the first
banner campaign inviting installation of an app.

In June/July last year, there was a global campaign announcing the
launch of the new Android app (like now, shown on mobile web for
Android devices only):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=Wpapp2014Androidmobile_1&uselang=en&force=1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=Wpapp2014Androidmobile_2&uselang=en&force=1
(also ran in a few other languages besides English)
I don't recall it being controversial back then.

And in 2013, the late Commons app was promoted in a similar campaign
on desktop and mobile:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=CommonsAppnonmobilewp&uselang=en&force=1
(on desktop Wikipedia)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=CommonsAppnonmobilecommons&uselang=en&force=1
(on Commons)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Random&banner=AndroidCommonsApp&uselang=en&force=1
(mobile Wikipedia on Android devices)


> I'd expect some amount of transparency around it (a
> phabricator ticket is not, in and of itself, transparency).

For those not familiar with the existing processes around banners, WMF
staff and community members who use this indeed highly prominent space
have been coordinating for years on this page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Calendar
Quite a lot of people who care about banner use are watching it for
controversial or problematic uses
(https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=CentralNotice/Calendar&action=info#mw-pageinfo-watchers
), discussion happens on the talk page there or is escalated to other
venues.
I see that the current banners were indeed listed there last week
before the launch.

> To
> contrast, with search when we make /experimental/ modifications to the
> user experience of a tiny sample (through A/B testing) we not only
> list those changes in phabricator but also send explicit mailing list
> announcements - and those effect a smaller chunk of our user base on a
> platform.
Perhaps you could post some advice at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:CentralNotice about how people
running banners could learn from the WMF Discovery team in that
respect?


On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 8:30 AM, Ori Livneh  wrote:
> We appear to be running a banner campaign on the mobile web site, driving
> people to download the mobile app:
>
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_2
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_1
>
The links don't work for me (maybe because I'm not in Finland right
now); you can append "force=1" to make them show regardless of
targeting:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_2&force=1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_1&force=1



-- 
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Senior Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation
IRC (Freenode): HaeB

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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Oliver Keyes]

For what it's worth, the line " For one thing, they can turn out
negative, in which case we will have been spared a  philosophical
debate about openness." comes off as very snarky and also entirely the
wrong approach. Whether something is /within our ethos/ should not be
something we discuss after doing it, and even then, only if we find
out that it's effective. To put that another way, "sure it might not
be ethical by our standards but hey let's give it a whirl anyway".
That's totally dissonant from our movement and organisation's
principles.

On 2 September 2015 at 09:14, Oliver Keyes  wrote:
> On 2 September 2015 at 01:50, Gergo Tisza  wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 10:09 PM, Ori Livneh  wrote:
>>
>>> Just in time!
>>> http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/01/death-to-app-install-interstitials/
>>
>>
>> Interstitials are full-page ads where you have to click a link to get to
>> the actual content. These are normal banners.
>> More importantly, as you can see in the Phabricator task, they are an
>> experiment to measure if it is possible to make more people use the app.
>> Experiments are good. For one thing, they can turn out negative, in which
>> case we will have been spared a  philosophical debate about openness.
>
> Is this experiment also measuring what those users do on the app,
> versus what the same users (or a users with a similar background) did
> on the mobile web? Is it a formal A/B test?
>
> We seem to be operating under the belief that merely switching users
> is, in and of itself, a victory. It's not; we still have the same
> number of users at the end. A victory is increased activity /due/ to
> the features on the app that cannot be created outside that closed
> ecosystem.
>
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>
>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Oliver Keyes]

On 2 September 2015 at 01:50, Gergo Tisza  wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 10:09 PM, Ori Livneh  wrote:
>
>> Just in time!
>> http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/01/death-to-app-install-interstitials/
>
>
> Interstitials are full-page ads where you have to click a link to get to
> the actual content. These are normal banners.
> More importantly, as you can see in the Phabricator task, they are an
> experiment to measure if it is possible to make more people use the app.
> Experiments are good. For one thing, they can turn out negative, in which
> case we will have been spared a  philosophical debate about openness.

Is this experiment also measuring what those users do on the app,
versus what the same users (or a users with a similar background) did
on the mobile web? Is it a formal A/B test?

We seem to be operating under the belief that merely switching users
is, in and of itself, a victory. It's not; we still have the same
number of users at the end. A victory is increased activity /due/ to
the features on the app that cannot be created outside that closed
ecosystem.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Ricordisamoa]

Il 02/09/2015 07:39, Matthew Flaschen ha scritto:

On 09/01/2015 11:30 AM, Ori Livneh wrote:
We appear to be running a banner campaign on the mobile web site, 
driving

people to download the mobile app:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_2
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_1

Campaign definition:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&subaction=noticeDetail¬ice=Android_app 



This isn't cool. This isn't us. We don't drive people from an open 
platform

to a closed one.


I don't necessarily think it's a great idea to push people from web to 
apps either, especially when we also have people working on mobile web.


I also do most of my mobile Wikipedia browsing on mobile web.

That said, I think that assessment is overly critical.

* The Android mobile app is fully free and open source (obvious, since 
all of our stuff is, but worth re-iterating).


* They've done a great job on the app.  In particular, they've 
implemented features that are easier on app (or only feasible there), 
like a user-friendly saved pages list and a nice UI in general.


* I don't know this for sure, but I would guess the app works on 
fully-FOSS versions of Android (e.g. Replicant), since an updated 
version is in the fully-free app store 
(https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/org.wikipedia).  If it doesn't work on 
Replicant (or some similar fully-FOSS Android), that does seem like 
something important to address.


* No one is going to install proprietary software as a result of this 
ad.  It only shows to people who are *already* running Android and 
asks them to install free and open source software.


It's no different then recommending to a Windows user that they 
install Inkscape because it's a great piece of free and open source 
software.


Finally, this is indeed only configured for Finland.


Linus' birthplace...



Matt Flaschen

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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Gergo Tisza]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 10:09 PM, Ori Livneh  wrote:

> Just in time!
> http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/01/death-to-app-install-interstitials/


Interstitials are full-page ads where you have to click a link to get to
the actual content. These are normal banners.
More importantly, as you can see in the Phabricator task, they are an
experiment to measure if it is possible to make more people use the app.
Experiments are good. For one thing, they can turn out negative, in which
case we will have been spared a  philosophical debate about openness.
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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Matthew Flaschen]

On 09/01/2015 11:30 AM, Ori Livneh wrote:

We appear to be running a banner campaign on the mobile web site, driving
people to download the mobile app:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_2
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_1

Campaign definition:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&subaction=noticeDetail¬ice=Android_app

This isn't cool. This isn't us. We don't drive people from an open platform
to a closed one.


I don't necessarily think it's a great idea to push people from web to 
apps either, especially when we also have people working on mobile web.


I also do most of my mobile Wikipedia browsing on mobile web.

That said, I think that assessment is overly critical.

* The Android mobile app is fully free and open source (obvious, since 
all of our stuff is, but worth re-iterating).


* They've done a great job on the app.  In particular, they've 
implemented features that are easier on app (or only feasible there), 
like a user-friendly saved pages list and a nice UI in general.


* I don't know this for sure, but I would guess the app works on 
fully-FOSS versions of Android (e.g. Replicant), since an updated 
version is in the fully-free app store 
(https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/org.wikipedia).  If it doesn't work on 
Replicant (or some similar fully-FOSS Android), that does seem like 
something important to address.


* No one is going to install proprietary software as a result of this 
ad.  It only shows to people who are *already* running Android and asks 
them to install free and open source software.


It's no different then recommending to a Windows user that they install 
Inkscape because it's a great piece of free and open source software.


Finally, this is indeed only configured for Finland.

Matt Flaschen

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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Ori Livneh]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 8:30 AM, Ori Livneh  wrote:

> We appear to be running a banner campaign on the mobile web site, driving
> people to download the mobile app:
>

Just in time!
http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/01/death-to-app-install-interstitials/
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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Oliver Keyes]

What was the publicising of the campaign prior to its launch?

It should be pretty apparent to people with experience within the
movement that this would be both entirely novel and pretty
controversial. I'd expect some amount of transparency around it (a
phabricator ticket is not, in and of itself, transparency). To
contrast, with search when we make /experimental/ modifications to the
user experience of a tiny sample (through A/B testing) we not only
list those changes in phabricator but also send explicit mailing list
announcements - and those effect a smaller chunk of our user base on a
platform.

On 1 September 2015 at 22:51, Greg Grossmeier  wrote:
> 
>> It's been discussed previously both on this list and elsewhere, but for
>> better or worse the Wikimedia Foundation has an entire "Mobile apps" team
>> that pretty much exclusively works on closed platforms, as I understand
>> it. They've gone as far as to abandon Gerrit in favor of GitHub.
>
> For the record, it's just the iOS team that moved to Github. Android is
> still in Gerrit. The iOS move was for CI reasons (summary: we (WMF
> RelEng) can't support the OSX platform for build and test cases with any
> ease, especially vis a vis other priorities).
>
> https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/status:merged+project:apps/android/wikipedia+branch:master,n,z
>
> Greg
>
> --
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>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Greg Grossmeier]

> It's been discussed previously both on this list and elsewhere, but for
> better or worse the Wikimedia Foundation has an entire "Mobile apps" team
> that pretty much exclusively works on closed platforms, as I understand
> it. They've gone as far as to abandon Gerrit in favor of GitHub.

For the record, it's just the iOS team that moved to Github. Android is
still in Gerrit. The iOS move was for CI reasons (summary: we (WMF
RelEng) can't support the OSX platform for build and test cases with any
ease, especially vis a vis other priorities).

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/status:merged+project:apps/android/wikipedia+branch:master,n,z

Greg

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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[MZMcBride]

Ori Livneh wrote:
>We appear to be running a banner campaign on the mobile web site, driving
>people to download the mobile app:
>
>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_2
>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_1
>
>[...]
>
>This isn't cool. This isn't us. We don't drive people from an open
>platform to a closed one.

It's been discussed previously both on this list and elsewhere, but for
better or worse the Wikimedia Foundation has an entire "Mobile apps" team
that pretty much exclusively works on closed platforms, as I understand
it. They've gone as far as to abandon Gerrit in favor of GitHub. I agree
with the general sentiment of your post, but the issues here are deeper.

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikitech-l] "Try the free Wikipedia app" banners

[Gergo Tisza]

Probably T103896  but in that
case something was misconfigured (those should only show in Finland).

On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 8:30 AM, Ori Livneh  wrote:

> We appear to be running a banner campaign on the mobile web site, driving
> people to download the mobile app:
>
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_2
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/?banner=Aug2015_app_banner_1
>
> Campaign definition:
>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:CentralNotice&subaction=noticeDetail¬ice=Android_app
>
> This isn't cool. This isn't us. We don't drive people from an open platform
> to a closed one.
>
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