This is the first out of four essays surrounding the open-source Wikipedia Android app. In this essay, we will focus on the product vision behind the app.

Project Characterisation

The most important aim of the Wikipedia Android project is to bring the Wikipedia encyclopedia to Android devices making it accessible to millions of users. The co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, described the product vision of Wikipedia as: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.”¹ However, since Wikipedia is a website that can already be accessed on Android devices, the Android app has more functionality than that. The goal the team had in mind when creating this app is more focused on tailoring the Wikipedia browsing experience to your personal preferences, bringing the knowledge accumulated on their site as close as possible to you and giving you something interesting to read whenever you have some spare time (for example during your commute or while waiting on something).

An app has a number of advantages over the browser version of Wikipedia. The team mentions four main aspects that can be maximized in an app ²:

Responsiveness: Using native apps allows the project to use native features (e.g. swiping to open or close a menu), that can be faster and more responsive than can be done in the browser.
Integration: An app can easily send notifications that are relevant to you based on your usage history, giving the user a more integrated experience.
Style: The user base of this app is relatively small compared to the browser version, allowing the developers to experiment more with different ways to style the articles.
Impact: By having a dedicated app for the Wikipedia project (and the foundation), they can also have an impact on how mobile applications are designed.

Application Context

That leads us to the context of the application. One of the most important external systems the application interacts with is of course the Wikipedia site. This is where the majority of the content displayed in the application comes from. Furthermore, the application interacts with its users. For users, there are two types of interaction: Users can read through Wikipedia articles, and they can help create or edit them. As mentioned in the previous section, the mission of Wikipedia is to make information available for every human. In order to contribute to that mission, the application should also be usable for people with many different backgrounds and levels of understanding of technology.

Finally, the Android application is developed in parallel to the iOS application. They are separate projects but are sometimes synchronized by recreating features from one project to the other.

Stakeholder analysis

Wikipedia has an ecosystem consisting of millions of people from all over the globe. Such a system has many different stakeholders that all participate in this ecosystem perhaps with different goals, creating a diverse community.

First and foremost there are the users of Wikipedia who access the platform without any costs via the website, the various apps and integrations in other platforms (e.g. DuckDuckGo). These users constitute the largest group of stakeholders by far. We can divide the users of Wikipedia into two important subgroups: readers and contributors. Readers solely use the website as an information source and do not write articles or participate in community discussions. Contributors on the other hand additionally contribute to the information on Wikipedia by improving and creating articles and participating on the community discussion forums, often debating the quality of the information on Wikipedia. Amongst these contributors are also moderators who are tasked with moderating the discussions and article content on certain topics or specific languages. The moderators are helped by the ORES artificial intelligence tool that attempts to detect damaging edits on Wikipedia articles.³ The ORES tool is trained on assessments made by contributors in the past.

A group of stakeholders similar to the Wikipedia contributors are the volunteers that contribute to the open-source Wikimedia software. Over half of the commits on Wikimedia software are done by volunteers outside of the Wikimedia Foundation.⁴ The Wikipedia contributors and the Wikimedia contributors have in common that they are all volunteers who work on the Wikimedia mission without directly profiting from their work.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the organization that both provides infrastructure and develops the Wikimedia systems. A lot of resources are needed to host the Wikipedia project due to its high traffic. Last year the costs for hosting Wikipedia were 43% of the complete budget of the foundation.⁵ The Wikimedia Foundation is financed by foundations from individuals and large corporations.⁶ Although the foundation hosts and develops the Wikimedia infrastructure and software, they do not contribute to the content of Wikipedia. It is the responsibility of the community to keep the information on the website up to date and correct.

Domain concepts

In the following section, we will be highlighting concepts that are important within the Wikipedia Android app, as well as the Wikipedia infrastructure as a whole.

General concepts

Firstly, we will describe concepts that exist on every platform Wikipedia runs on. Wikipedia is entirely based around articles, the pages that inform readers about a certain topic. These articles have certain features and properties: every article is written in different languages and it is possible to switch between these languages when reading it. The articles consist of a title, body, references and related links. In the body of an article, concepts that are referenced are hyperlinked so that a reader can easily jump from one article to a related article. Each article has a history of all the edits done throughout the existence of the article. These articles are created by the Wikipedia community, where anyone can contribute to any article. The articles are checked by bot and human editors to verify that edits are correct. Wikipedia also has a search feature that can be used to easily find an article. If multiple concepts have the same name, they are disambiguated by having a short description or what subject it falls under behind the title of the article. Lastly, Wikipedia has a saved reading list where articles can be saved to be read later.

App-specific concepts

The app itself has some special features that are not highlighted as clearly on the website itself. For example, you start off on an “Explore” tab, where you can read a feature article, trending articles or articles recommended based on previously read articles. This tab is fully customizable, so the user can have it only show the articles he is interested in. It is also possible to save articles in the app, which are synced to your account so they can be accessed anywhere. To easily switch between different articles, tabs are used so a user can have multiple articles open at the same time. It is also possible to search and edit articles in the app. The search feature shows a history of all the searches of a user in the app, which can be filtered to view all previous searches related to a certain term.

Key quality attributes

As an app used to access a worldwide multiplatform system, many of the intuitive quality attributes are primarily with respect to Wikipedia itself, but it is critical for an app such as the Android one to be able to make sure none of them are lost. Some of the key quality attributes have been highlighted below:

Modularity: Because the mobile interface is programmed separately between the two main platforms, namely Android and iOS, it is important that the design is modular so that the results can be achieved consistently among them. Because of its open development nature, this attribute is also relevant to ensure that many people can work together even if there is minor 1-to-1 communication among them.
Accessibility: Because of its open knowledge nature, it is extremely important that anyone can access and understand it. One of the main attributes of the Wikipedia system, it also is very relevant to the android app.
Compatibility: Following the open knowledge value, compatibility is also relevant, as lack of backwards compatibility could limit the system to only modern systems, which indirectly could limit the access of people without financial power to keep up with technology.
Security: The app should not provide a way for a malicious user to get access to the system’s resources he would otherwise to be authorized for.
Integrity: Because of many different systems ultimately working on the same data, it is important that data integrity is ensured among them.
Maintainability: a critical aspect for a system intended for an open and crowd developed system.

Product roadmap

As part of the development organization, Wikimedia provides a list of milestones separated yearly, with the most recent one spanning 2021-2022. They mostly include changes regarding user experience, such as showing more statistics to the user, improvements on the reviewing process and on the app usage. Minor new features are also planned, such as edit history. On a yearly basis a wishlist survey is held, and the results from it can add new features to the roadmap. An example of such a case for this year is making the categories of a page visible. Overall, the app seems to be in a quite stable state, with no significant/critical feature missing or planned to be added.

Wikipedia Android: Product Vision and Problem Analysis