Hi Folks,
The Reading team's Q4 goals for 2015-16 are posted on Media Wiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2015-16_Q4_Goals#Reading.  We arrived at these goals by taking the results of the Q4 brainstorming and matching them against our strategy, speed and strengths.

Below is a summary of what we aim to do in the April-June Quarter with more context than what you see on our goals page.  You will notice a lot of cross-platform migration.  That is no accident: we learn faster by launching on one platform and then migrating the idea to others.  The goals are broken out by team or strategic theme.

Community Tech: Community Wishlist items
Ship features and fixes related to three wishes in the Wishlist Survey top 10 

Infrastructure: two-factor authentication
The infrastructure team will enable two-factor authentication via AuthManager on the Wikimedia cluster.  The goal here is to add another layer of security for accounts with important privileges.

New Readers (was: "reach new users in the global south")

Web: decrease load time and cost for low-resource environments on mobile
This will be accomplished through lazy loading of images, and cutting default html size.  This is in beta mobile channel by the end of this quarter and we plan to measure results and roll out to all users over the course of Q4.

Make a better encyclopedia experience

Web: hovercards
Specifically, enable hovercards as default for logged-out desktop users on more than one wiki (this one is dependent on community approval). Hovercards represent a faster way of browsing Wikipedia that most readers prefer (as indicated by this survey).  It has been in beta for more than a year and the mobile version was recently launched to all users on our Android app.  This is not as simple as turning on a switch, there are several improvements that will have to be made.  One reason we are launching this is to clean up our beta site before picking up any new work. This is arguably "New Readers" as well, due to the performance gains from loading fewer pages.

A community initiated proposal is being discussed to enable this on English Wikipedia.  Please chime in! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Proposal:_Enable_Hovercards_by_default

Android: launch the feed
This quarter, the iOS team launched a feed on the app home screen and it looks great and early results suggest users are responding well to it. The goal is to drive user retention by giving readers a reason to open up Wikipedia even if they don't have a specific query in mind.  The Android team will also be implementing backend services to support the feed across platforms.

iOS: Universal links
"Universal Links" (aka deep links) provide convenient re-entry to the app from links and OS search, but do not advertise or promote the app.  This is something that is already live on Android and partially supported on iOS.  It allows users who prefer the app to open it from links or an OS query, since that is how most users get to Wikipedia.  

A Community of Readers (interactive Wikipedia)

This is the third pillar that came out of our strategy process. No active development work is planned here. Future direction for this part of our strategy is currently being explored via a community consultation here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User_Interaction_Consultation


Your feedback or questions are welcome.

Thanks,

J