Commons app and coordinates - Mobile-l

4 May 2013

Hi guys,

Last year we build the Wiki Loves Monuments mobile app [1]. In my 
opinion this was a good learning experience. The app suggested monuments 
to take photographs of based on you location. This information was 
coming from the monuments database [2] using the api we build for that 
purpose [3]. The monuments database contains over a million items [4], 
but the data isn't very clean and i18n was an issue. We had to do a lot 
of hacking to compensate for that.

So we need a better structured source of this information and we now 
have that: Wikidata. Wikidata doesn't support coordinates yet, but 
that's just a matter of time. At some point in the future it will be 
possible to get coordinates for an item. If we harvest these items with 
coordinates and make them searchable by location (point/bounding box) 
using for example Solr/Lucene, we could have a suitable backend for the 
mobile app to get information from. This wouldn't just be monuments, but 
every item with coordinates. We started a task force [5] to import as 
much data as possible about our cultural heritage, thus making the 
Monuments database in its current form obsolete.

User story would be something like this: A user would have a way in the 
app to find things to take photographs of in the app. User selects an 
object, takes a photo. The fields are already filled out with the 
information from Wikidata. The photo is uploaded to Wikimedia Commons 
and tagged with a template like {{Depicts Wikidata|Q12345}}. This 
template can be used by the bot operators on Commons to enhance the 
metadata of the image (for example adding better categories).

Are ideas like this on the roadmap for the mobile app? Do you think I 
missed something here?

Maarten

[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_mobile_application
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Monuments_database
[3] http://toolserver.org/~erfgoed/api/api.php
[4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Monuments_database/Statistics
[5] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Cultural_heritage_task_force