Hey all,
I hope this mail finds you well in this trying times.
Over the last month I invested some time and put a little project
together for personal purpose. Long story short it is a small
Wikidata/Wikibase App for Android.
Currently it has similar capabilities to Termbox of the Webfrontend -
add a new Item, searching for an Item, editing an Item, etc.
The App is build in manner that it should be relatively easy to adapt it
for any instances of Wikibase.
Everything is written in Kotlin[1] and the data layer is forged in a way
to facilitate Kotlin Multiplatform[2] and after turning some screws to
support a given platform. This means writing an App for iOS with the
similar capabilities or a Desktop App would be much easier. For myself I
do not have a stable access to a Mac, otherwise I would made an iOS App
as well right away.
However the user journey is still bumpy, since parts are missing like
loading bars and so on. Also the App only allows users to proceed
without login. Also multi-language support of the UI is missing and the
design needs a lot more love (like bring up a proper color system for
theming). Summa summarum please consider it as an early alpha or an very
very late prototype.
I made a little screen cast which you can find in the endnotes[3]. If
you wish to try it out yourself, you can go ahead[4][5]. But please be
aware even if the packages are tightly tested, I have currently only one
real device to test it on and emulators do not always tell the truth, so
expect app crashes (even there should be none). Also the App is
currently hooked against the test instance of Wikidata[6], so anything
you do will not propagated to main instance of Wikidata and you will not
be able to retrieve data from there.
So why I am writing? Well, I would like to know, if the community has
interest in such a thing - an App for Wikidata/Wikibase. Anything else
can wait until this question is answered, since it will cost time to
bring it into a publishable state. Please consider this would give the
opportunity the obtain access to the sensors of a mobile device like
geolocation, camera, etc and make them usable by Wikibase/Wikidata.
If the community sees the value in this little project, I also like to
ask for support/if there are people who are willing to embark on this
with me.
I hope you have a pleasant rest of the day.
Nice work! Hopefully over time there will be lots of apps that use Wikidata. If there's a desire to have one central app, there's the natural question of who it is for - readers or reader-editor-contributors?
The WWW in '90s sadly lost its early built-insupport for html editing, and wikis were a big part of filling this hole. It would be good to see an app that kept editing and contributing as high profile natural actions for all wikidata users, even while trying to hide the more complex aspects that are better suited to computers with keyboards.
So for example of contributor tasks easy enough for mobile use, quickly flagging a typo, or routing an entry to a wikidata project or subcommunity for review, or putting into a personal queue for later attention. Maybe some tasks that exploit recently-viewed-entity history eg flagging duplicates for review? Or integration of mobile-friendly things like podcast and other media content of interest to the wikidata contributing world?
On the technicalities - apparently Kotlin can run on WASM so there might be a path to this code being usable in webbier settings too; desktop browsers and other mobile platforms, PWAs (Progressive Web Apps etc.).
For example here is Doom running in a VR/XR browser in Oculus, via WASM:
I am sure there will be interesting things done with Wikidata in VR - eg
Dan
Cheers
Matthias
Endnotes:
[1]: https://kotlinlang.org/
[2]: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/multiplatform.html
[3]: https://box.hu-berlin.de/d/66b0055734c3485b8d22/
[4]: https://box.hu-berlin.de/f/45c45774cff14c5fad55/?dl=1
[5]: https://www.javatpoint.com/how-to-install-apk-on-android
[6]: https://test.wikidata.org/
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