I've split this off because it has the potential to derail the other conversation about Wikidata descriptions.

On 22 March 2015 at 09:53, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

I do wonder if it would be better to focus on encouraging more mobile app users to become Wikipedia and/or Commons contibutors instead of Wikidata contributors. Thoughts?

We've considered such problems at great length, and so far never actually managed to succeed at drawing people in to editing on mobile devices. As always, there are the obvious exceptions to that (people like you and me), but we're by far the minority.

No other mobile app out there has the same kind of barrier to entry for a contribution as Wikipedia. Some of that is a result of the core product (contributing to an encyclopedia requires serious thought!), but some of it is for no good reason (wikitext is scary to newbie).

On the other hand, the mobile uploads feature did draw a lot of people in... to uploading selfies. So that was problematic from the other side: it got a lot of engagement, but of the totally wrong kind. There was considerable backlash, which naturally makes the team want to avoid trying something similar again.

Do you have any specific suggestions?

Dan

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Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation