Wikimedia Apps/Commons/Mobile contributions discovery
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Things to Photograph[edit]
There were two major components to the WLM Mobile app that we did:
- Discovery
- Upload
We'll need to replicate both of these, but in a more generic way, for them to make their way into the Commons mobile apps.
Discovery[edit]
Generically speaking, WLM let users discover POIs (Points of Interest) which were 'places to photograph' spread over a geographical region, both via a hierarchical list view and a map. The POIs have attached metadata on them (location co-ordinates, name, address, monument id, etc). While they were publicly editable by editors (the lists were kept on wikis as specially formatted wikitext, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Historical_Landmarks_in_Mendocino_County,_California), they were also machine readable, with fast queries possible (a bot dumped the data from pages into a database, which was then available as an API at http://toolserver.org/~erfgoed/toolbox/search.php). The app was able to query this API to provide our users with mobile friendly hierarchical / spatial ways to narrow down the large 'list of places to photograph' into a much more smaller, actionable list
So for any system we design that must be usable and generic, it must be
- Able to accomodate ad-hoc, structured data
- Live on-wiki in a place where editors can edit easily
- Be machine readable, so that fast and efficient queries can be constructed properly
The current bot-based solution is unusable for us, since it is WLM specific and also hard to host WMF infrastructure (ask MaxSem!).
Proposed Solution[edit]
Wikidata should be able to be our backend for this. It fits all our criteria perfectly, and is supported by the community *and* the WMF.
Potential Roadblocks[edit]
Biggest roadblock would be perhaps the Wikidata community's equivalent of Notability not covering all the differnt types of POIs we'd want people to photograph, hence causing deletions. This can, however, be verified right now by asking someone well versed in the Wikidata community about their Notability guidelines
Upload[edit]
Upload would simply use the campaigns feature of the Mobile apps.