Mobile Editing Experience ☞ Wikidata
Editing wikidata on mobile devices was a long awaited and very often asked for feature by the community.
We wanted to honor this request, making life easier for active editors who might want to edit on mobile occasionally.
My personal motivation was knowledge equity, through enabling communities from mobile first countries. This was my first project at WMDE.
Designing for Wikidata mobile editing
A look inside my figma page for simpler data types
Before I joined, the team had already made key design decisions: editing would happen in separate modals, and the display side had an established look and feel.
I started by designing the basic functions, and then after grouping all the data types by similarity, i worked from the simplest (string) to the most complex, using the design system. For each, I considered the display side,edit flow and specific notifications.
I also defined the AC’s and wrote 160 developer tickets in a close loop with development. As each milestone was released to beta, Daria, our UX researcher, ran user testing, and we turned her findings into improvement iterations.
More complex edit flows, such as coordinates that you can see above, were tested as a prototype first and then also after release. The final step was to adapt all designs to RTL languages.
The feature went officially live in October 2026!
We (me, the data analytics team & the teams project manager) are now collecting data and will compare the results with desktop - particularly reverted edits and errors - and plan to improve the feature accordingly. We strive to bring to quality of mobile edits to the same level as the current desktop ones.
This project was deeply rewarding. I learned a great deal about Wikidata, designed for RTL for the first time, and worked for with a community whose mission I believe in.
It confirmed that Wikimedia is where I want to be.
“I’m just happy to learn that now I can edit Wikidata with my mobile. I’ve never thought I could do [it] with my smartphone. I can say I’ve learned something, that I’m willing to share with my community.”
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