Last modified: 2014-09-24 01:29:14 UTC
Unless I'm missing something obvious, the Wikipedia app is violating the rights of Wikipedia contributors -- there does not appear to be any way to view the contribution history of an article. A quick/easy way to resolve the legal issue might be to include a http link to the history tab that pulls up a web browser. But I would think an app produced by Wikimedia should aim higher than that, and include a native viewer for the article history, to more genuinely honor the contributions of an article's authors.
Thanks for this input. There are also other reasons to do this related to patrolling and later, editing. The functional answer to this is a more general enhancement, and this makes the priority of that enhancement higher. The enhancement will be noted on meta Mobile Projects/features for now.
Oliver suggests this should be high priority.
We can do this once we get a new nav UI. Thats in progress now.
Tomasz, I'm unclear: will there be more releases in between? If so, could a simple web link to the history tab be inserted in the meantime? As a Wikipedia contributor, I think I'm one of the less fussy about my work; but it is frustrating in the extreme that my work is not credited, by the very organization that hosts the primary version of the content. It significantly weakens my ability to persuade other reusers that the "BY" component of the license is actually important. Has the possibility of pulling the app from the market until this legal violation can be fixed been considered? If not, why not? I'm not saying it's necessary to go to that extreme (on my behalf), but that is the level of importance I would think content authors would see for this problem. This problem exists on the mobile site as well; I'm filing a separate bug for that.
New bug filed here: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35616
Interestingly, the "View history" tab has never been present in the iPhone or Android app. This was part of a general strategy of avoiding layouts that would be challenging to render on mobile screens until some significant re-design took place. Now that a new navigation UI is being designed, we can at lead provide a hook of some kind to "View history." This would present the desktop view of that page until a mobile-friendly design can be implemented. The mobile site currently provides a way to access the Desktop view, which allows the "View history" tab to be viewed. But with the new navigation UI, we can use a consistent approach to providing access to "View history."
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 34292 ***
