Commons:Requests for comment/Technical needs survey/Categories on mobile

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Categories on mobile

Description of the Problem

• Problem description: This problem simply is that the mobile website doesn't show files' categories.
  • Lots of contributors spent lots and lots of time categorizing images…they didn't volunteer their time doing so for no reason: categories are (or could be) actually useful in many ways, for example:
    • they often provide additional quick information about the file (such as a year or location not in the description or buried in long text or additional meta-info)
    • they are useful for organization and can be browsed through if the current image (/category) is not exactly what one has looked for but close to the intended/useful category branch (for example: find a similar image via the search engine then click on the category you forgot the name of or didn't know exists)
    • they enable users to find related images (e.g. of a set or of the same subject) as well as finding more images (discoverability)
  • There are many other ways categories can be useful. They're there for a reason and shouldn't only be accessible to desktop users locking out the majority of WMC viewers who use mobile.

• Proposal type: bugfix / feature request

• Proposed solution: Just show the categories on the mobile website commons.m.wikimedia.org. They are shown in the apps and on desktop. They should be shown without having to tap on anything and could merely be links at the bottom.

A nice navigable cat tree explorer module could be possible too but more important would be to at least display them somehow. I think many users would use categories as their main way to use WMC, that's how I mostly use it, and it makes no sense to refuse them access to our category pages.

• Phabricator ticket: (If one exists it's probably stalled for many years despite that all that is needed is briefly showing a few links at the bottom.)

• Further remarks:

--Prototyperspective (talk) 23:13, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Votes

•  Strong support - categories are essential to organize and access the common's contents. --Fl.schmitt (talk) 23:19, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
•  Strong support. Should be almost trivial to implement the links. The lack of this constantly frustrates me when I try to use Commons on mobile: I continually have to break out to the desktop interface to access categories. I understand that good display of the category pages themselves on mobile might be a little tricky (but only a little, I would think), but even having links to anything that even vaguely works for categories would be an enormous improvement. - Jmabel ! talk 23:52, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
•  Strong support per Fl.schmitt and Jmabel. --Adamant1 (talk) 02:03, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
•  Support.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ _{please ping or talk to me}🇺🇦 02:05, 29 December 2023 (UTC)
•  Oppose Sorry to say this, but categories are mostly “inside baseball” for Commons regulars. People from outside don't find images that way and I'd be very sad if we spent precious developer time on this. --Frank Schulenburg (talk) 02:47, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

  @Frank Schulenburg: You're describing exactly a part of the problem - currently, "people from outside" using mobile apps simply aren't able to use categories to access content on Commons if there's no link/information as proposed by @Prototyperspective. With a category link, "people from outside" would be easily able to find more relevant media, e.g. providing different perspectives of an object, thus fulfilling Commons' educational purpose. Fl.schmitt (talk) 07:18, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

  Frank's point is of the order of "People use images via google, not via categories". Categories are for editors. Editors think that outsiders will use them, because we editors are neurotic data sorters that were mostly born before the year 2000 and think that this is how other people work as well. But it's not. Everything that we do here is vastly deviant from 'normal' behavior. And in the grant scheme of things, the fact that Google doesn't index our images is a factor 1000 more impactful to the educational purpose than anything else most likely.. As such, it's inside baseball. Important, but not really to the fact that it will majorly change Commons. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:14, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

  I think Web search engine (Google and DuckDuckGo mainly) indexing is one of the few top issues.

  That doesn't make this issue less important, especially considering that one could at least show the links which doesn't require a large effort but mainly because Web search engines could nicely index category pages as well.

  Moreover, outsiders could benefit from categories; a good point may be that they wouldn't necessarily use them by going to them from the bottom of file pages – that's why there could be a more visible intuitive way they could be included there and why they could show up at the top of the search results (that's a separate issue for another time). Lastly, it's just speculation, ignores the value of this to what he calls "Commons regulars", and it's obvious they "don't find images that way" if categories are as hidden as they currently are where most occasional users probably don't even know they exist. Doubling the viewcounts of category pages for example would make WMC much more useful, it may not change its internal design but it makes the efforts of contributors much more valuable and substantially increases the usefulness of the site. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:53, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

•  Support also missed the categories sometimes. It would make Wikipedia much more interactive and also give the categorizers more value to their work.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 05:22, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
•  Support I experience this problem regularly. Bluerasberry (talk) 16:41, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
•  Support Mobile version shouldn't be less than the desktop one. MGeog2022 (talk) 20:18, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
• yes - Jmabel ! talk 23:52, 21 January 2024 (UTC)
•  Support –IagoQnsi (talk) 03:58, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
•  Strong support Categories are essential to Commons and mobile needs to be better. Abzeronow (talk) 16:42, 22 January 2024 (UTC)
•  Support - Ryan Hodnett (talk) 03:01, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
•  Support We also need a reasonable mobile version of Template:Wikidata Infobox. Jklamo (talk) 08:46, 23 January 2024 (UTC)
•  Oppose the premise of the request is factually incorrect; I am on mobile web view, and I, as can anyone else with mw:Reading/Web/Advanced mobile contributions, can see categories. If you want to enable categories for all mobile users, not just logged in ones, that's a perfectly reasonable request to make, but should be specified as such. Mach61 (talk) 23:17, 23 January 2024 (UTC)

  Yes, this is about the default view also for logged-out users. Thanks for clarifying that for a very small subset of readers of the mobile site it is possible to see the cats if they are not only logged in but have also enabled the Advanced view, a setting that they somehow learned exists.

  It's a bit unclear if you oppose this proposal or just how it's phrased / that info on the Advanced mobile view is missing. I didn't know this way to see cats exists (and I'm pretty sure most readers on mobile don't know either). A setting to hide categories on mobile (that is turned off by default) may be useful. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:38, 24 January 2024 (UTC)

•  Support This is one of the biggest reason why i switch from mobile to desktop view when i am using commons with phone --Zache (talk) 09:59, 26 January 2024 (UTC)
•  Strong support Like other desktop users, I use categories to navigate and search, but an half of the users can't do that because they don't see the categories.--Pạtạfisik 11:27, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
•  Support for the technical ability. But I think when this is turned on we need to block IP edits entirely to prevent a test edit apocalypse. GPSLeo (talk) 17:29, 30 January 2024 (UTC)
•  Strong support Laurel Lodged (talk) 14:02, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
•  Support * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 21:21, 2 February 2024 (UTC)
•  Strong support - sorely needed Royalbroil 00:28, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
•  Support SWinxy (talk) 02:44, 6 February 2024 (UTC)
•  Support💚Kelly The Angel (Talk to me)💚
•  Obviously support, while this hasn't been an issue for me directly as I use the "Advanced mode" I notice here in the rural Philippines that almost everyone exclusively uses smartphones as their only computers, some younger people have never even seen a laptop, desktop, or internet café in their lives, to them the mobile internet is the only internet and the experience for most smartphone users on Wikimedia websites is just sub-par. People don't just look at the top of the page and never scroll down, mobile users are used to scrolling and clicking and just like how TikTok and X (formerly "Twitter") use hashtags at the bottom of posts that allow users to discover similar content MediaWiki categories function in exactly the same way. The move to make categories invisible 🫥 for mobile users many years ago is akin to saying like "nobody on mobile will ever use hashtags to discover content because they only care about what is in the specific content they're viewing now" which was clearly thought up by someone who barely uses a mobile device for browsing online. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 00:28, 14 February 2024 (UTC)