Great input, thanks Lodewijk and Tomasz.
Your thoughts echo the thinking of the mobile team in terms of a broader vision of mobile contributions. The difficulty is in biting off smaller pieces that can realistically be achieved.
Making articles that are geo-tagged available is a current initiative and requires new infrastructure. We currently use Geonames in the WIkipedia apps, which is an external service and limited in usage volume. We want to add the nearby function to the mobile site (which has much higher traffic than the apps) and that is what is driving this new infrastructure currently.
Then there is the idea of adding geo tags to articles. What a great usage of mobile! Photos are an easy way to do this (killing two birds with one stone), so your thinking is right in line with what we are hoping to do. But there are some issues around submitting geo coordinates, whether automatically or not, that have to be worked through.
Back to Lodewijk's idea of articles and monuments, we unfortunately have an issue with monuments, simply because the database is not maintainable. However, I have wondered about accessing monuments through the Wikipedia pages that list them.
So yes, there are a number of next steps to be pursued. I will have to defer to Howie and Maryana to pick this up, as today is technically my last day. But as I said, I will be available as a volunteer.
Phil
On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 8:20 AM, Tomasz W. Kozłowski
<odder.wiki@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Philip,
this wouldn't be very related to your question, but I've been recently
pointed to the idea of user notifications; e.g. when user passes by a
building (for instance a monument) for which we have geocoordinates
but no picture, s/he might receive a notification from the app to take
a photo.
This was originally thought as a feature for the WLM app, but it might
be useful for another purposes, too (for instance, for buildings which
are not monuments, etc.).
--
Tomasz W. Kozłowski
a.k.a. [[user:odder]]
--
Phil Inje Chang
Product Manager, Mobile
Wikimedia Foundation
415-812-0854 m
415-882-7982 x 6810