Wiki Loves Monuments mobile application

Rationale
For the Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 contest, running throughout the month of September (coinciding with European Heritage Days), the addition of mobile photo uploads is under consideration. The Photo Upload project will focus on WLM for its initial release in the form of an app for Android initially and iPhone later (time permitting). WLM is more than a use case for mobile photo uploads; it could be a primary driver of usage.

The reasons to pursue this app as a starting point for mobile uploads are as follows:


 * Mobile uploads are not a current feature of the contest and it would broaden participation, especially among southern countries where reliance on mobile for Internet access is more prevalent
 * Discovery of monuments on mobile is new this year for WLM and has been developed in the form of a WLM layer in the Layar app, which does not connect to the upload process
 * Participation in this contest is expected to grow and is already significant - this provides a boost to engaging users in mobile uploads
 * Marketing by WLM can promote mobile uploads and give this feature significant exposure in a number of countries
 * The well organized and serious nature of the event provides a structured way to test and refine this feature

The number of participating countries in 2012 is 31 definite and 17 possible (so far).

Data and feedback supporting the decision to pursue this app can be seen here.

WLM App workflow
The WLM App is built on top of PhoneGap and implements the upload process using the upload wizard api. The app will re-use the Nearby functionality in the Wikipedia apps, and the WLM monuments DB accessed over the WLM API.

The workflow is as follows:


 * 1) User launches app
 * 2) Welcome screen, select campaign, or login
 * 3) Select nearby monuments, by list or map view
 * 4) Select a monument
 * 5) Login or create account
 * 6) Choose gallery or take photo
 * 7) Upload, confirm license (legal language is approved)
 * 8) Modify title, if desired
 * 9) See uploads

Mock-ups will be posted shortly. The wireframes from the Photo Upload project are useful for seeing the upload process from an app perspective.

Development issues
The main technical unknowns in this project are:


 * the monument database is accessible through an API on Toolserver, which is slow and may need to be migrated to WMF infrastructure
 * automatic transfer of metadata, in theory well defined, see below
 * title creation convention using monument name and ID
 * a view of the user's uploads
 * local (on the device), allowing access to "use" wikitext and ability to send a link by email
 * there is currently no API for account creation - this is low priority and will be explored further before a decision is made to pursue it
 * possible repercussions in the community need to be explored
 * potential design issues: permissions, rate limiting account creations, account creations by third parties, spam, exposing CAPTCHA (or equivalent)

Initial prototype
Brion Vibber created an initial functional prototype of the application using Cordova 1.7.0rc1. The prototype works both as an iOS and Android app, and can take a photo with the camera or from the photo library and upload it as

The prototype confirms that we have the necessary infrastructure to build the application. Specifically this proves that PhoneGap/Cordova can do login and token checks via the MediaWiki API and then can use Cordova's FileTransfer class to do the upload.

Related documentation

 * About the Upload Wizard extension, including URL arguments to pre-populate metadata.


 * Potential issues encountered during development of Upload Wizard, including error cases.

Metrics
Data analysis is covered in more detail in the Photo Upload project. Here, the following points are important:


 * the WLM contest runs for one month and we need to collect all of the data that could possibly be useful during that time
 * WLM categories are well defined and should be useful as filters
 * uploads from a mobile source and a particular app or browser should be easily identifiable
 * the measure of quality of uploads could be based on winning photos, following the contest's judging process, as well as whether they are used in articles
 * we need to compare quality of uploads from mobile sources with quality of uploads from non-mobile sources

How the contest works
Heritage societies in the participating countries contribute their monument lists, which become the focus of the contest. Users see the campaign for a particular country on wiki

On this screen, it is apparent that some monuments still lack photos. In 2012, users can also look for monuments out in the field using the Layar app. The monument list is accessible through an API that currently resides on Toolserver:

Photos are typically taken with cameras, and later uploaded on a computer using the Upload Wizard on Commons. The Upload Wizard is configured for the contest by campaign, which is typically at the country level. Here is an example from Germany that is at the municipality level (Germany may be the only exception to campaigns being at the country level):

It is now possible for the list of monuments on the desktop to link straight to the Upload Wizard by campaign and transfer monument ID and other information automatically, though some aspects of this functionality are still under development. This makes the submission of photos more seamless and reduces the amount of typing the user must do during the upload process. Here is the project page, which includes the list of arguments that can be appended to a URL.

There is a panel of judges per country who then review and pick the winning photos.

Campaigns are defined on Commons using a Special Page called Special:Upload Campaigns. There are many parameters that can be set by the administrators of the contest. You can see those here (requires special privileges).

The following attempts to explain the overall process

Note that a virtuous circle is created by the enhancement of Wikipedia and Commons, which then gets fed back to the heritage societies.