Wikimedia Apps/Suggested edits

Welcome to Suggested edits
Suggested edits is a new way to edit Wikipedia on Android. We appreciate that you are giving it a try. Do you have any feedback on how we can improve? Let us know via mobile-android-wikipedia@wikimedia.org. We would love to hear from you.

What is Suggested edits?
Suggested edits presents opportunities for small but vital contributions to Wikipedia. We would like to raise awareness that everyone can edit Wikipedia and make contributing easier and more accessible for everyone.

Get started with Suggested edits
The Suggested edits home page consists of two areas: Profile statistics and contribution opportunities. Contribution opportunities are the central element of Suggested edits. Here you can find ways to contribute to Wikipedia. At the moment we offer tasks to add or translate article descriptions and image captions. If you want to know more or learn how to edit like a pro, check out the dedicated sections below:


 * Article descriptions
 * Image captions

We are going to add more contribution types soon, stay tuned.

Profile statistics display information about your activity within Suggested edits. They start to populate once you've made your first Suggested edits.


 * Contributions displays the number of contributions you’ve made with Suggested edits in the past 30 days.
 * Pageviews displays the total number of times in the last 30 days that others viewed items you contributed to using Suggested edits.
 * Edit streak displays how many days without a break you’ve contributed via Suggested edits. If you haven’t contributed in a while, it shows your last contribution date.
 * Edit quality is based on how many times one of your contributions was reverted (that is: undone by another editor). The fewer reverted contributions, the better the edit quality.

What are article descriptions?

 * Short, multilingual descriptions of items (e.g. Wikipedia articles)
 * Article descriptions are not full sentences, but small bits of information.
 * In most cases, the proper length is between two and twelve words.

What are article descriptions used for?
Article descriptions are shown in the apps below Wikipedia article titles to help readers identify the article they're looking for. Article descriptions are stored and maintained on Wikidata and have been designed to disambiguate items with the same or similar labels. Descriptions are also shown outside the Wikipedia site and apps: for example, in Google searches.

Article descriptions summarize an article to help readers understand the subject at a glance. These are known in the Wikimedia community as Wikidata descriptions.

Tips for creating article descriptions
Article descriptions should ideally fit on one line, and be between two to twelve words long. They are not capitalized unless the first word is a proper noun, and do not normally begin with initial articles (a, an, the). For example:


 * painting by Leonardo da Vinci (title description for an article about the Mona Lisa)
 * Earth’s highest mountain (title description for an article about Mount Everest)

Other tips for writing good article descriptions:


 * Avoid information that is likely to change (e.g., ‘current Prime Minister of…’)
 * Avoid opinionated, biased or promotional wording (e.g., ‘the best…’)
 * Avoid controversial claims

More information is available on the Wikidata descriptions help page.

More on article descriptions
Article descriptions are stored and maintained on Wikidata, a project of the Wikimedia Foundation which provides a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary database supporting Wikipedia and other projects.


 * About Wikidata
 * Wikidata help page about article descriptions
 * Guidelines for writing article descriptions in English

What are image captions?

 * Short, multilingual descriptions of image files
 * Limited to 255 characters in length and cannot contain markup

What are image captions used for?
Image captions describe an image to help readers understand the meaning and context of an image. They are also used to provide alternative information for an image if people cannot view it, e.g. because of a slow internet connection or if people use a screen reader.

Tips for creating image captions
Image captions should be short descriptions of what the image shows. They are generally four to twelve words long. They can also contain information about the artist or creator of the image.

Remember to keep your captions neutral. Avoid making value judgements such as "beautiful", "good" or "ugly".

The difference between the image description and the image caption is that the description can have a lot of information about the file. If the image is a scan it can have details about the original photograph or artwork. It can have links. The image caption should ignore all this and just describe what it shows, not the information about the file.

A good image caption should:


 * Aim to briefly describe the contents of an image
 * Describe the image such that those with vision or other impairments can imagine what it looks like
 * Contain some keywords that people are likely to use to search for an image (so a picture of a cat should include the word "cat" somewhere in the caption)

In many cases, the caption will be similar or identical to the description (or even the file title!). For example, File:Fire station Hallstatt - October 2017 - 02.jpg has the English caption "Hallstatt fire station in October 2017".

More on image captions
Image captions are stored and maintained on Wikimedia Commons, a project of the Wikimedia Foundation which provides an online repository of free-use images, sounds, other media, and JSON files supporting Wikipedia and other projects.