A Recent Changes link in the side menu would be useful when browsing wikis on mobile. Maybe it could be an optional link enabled in LocalSettings.php.
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If we don't want to clutter the side menu, we should explore adding the link to the home page.
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Space is a little limited here. I wonder if there is someway to combine Contributions and recent changes.
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We just added Contribution link to the drawer as per community request. after that we have to be extra careful about what we add here because the menu is getting crowded. not to say we won't add any more items but the criteria is much much higher.
there could be a lot of use cases for this but we have to look for common denominator. we do that based on basic and most frequently visited parts of wikipedia by our demographics. readers being a vast majority it definitely is skewed.
I see the use case here but I think we should find a different way. this is definitely a 2nd tier navigation item because the term itself is known among very specific group of our users. it requires additional knowledge of wikipedia community which most of our readers do not have. every top level navigation item has to be self explanatory.
that's why we can include this inside contributions because we filter out a lot users who know what "recent changes" is about, at this stage.
There have been enough research[1][2][3] done on overwhelming users with choice. also space is a constraint.
I will work on how we can incorporate recent changes through contributions and get feedback on that from more community members and the web team.
does that sound like a good plan?
[1]http://mashable.com/2011/12/08/design-navigation-bar/#V1uwAJMKwuqS
[2] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/short-term-memory-and-web-usability/
[3] http://www.humanfactors.com/newsletters/breadth_vs_depth_we_revisit_this_question.asp
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That sounds good, yes.
I actually submitted this issue because the idea came up on a smaller wiki that uses MobileFrontend. For sites like Wikipedia the majority of page views are by people who don't edit, but in my experience smaller wikis seem to have more overlap between readers and editors. If at all possible, it would be nice to add a config setting in LocalSettings allowing smaller sites to make the Recent Changes link more prominent, while it could stay tucked away on larger wikis like Wikipedia.