The mobile team has gotten a lot of questions about our level of support for this years wiki loves monuments campaign and I wanted to use this thread to collect our ideas and to give an official response so that everyone knows where we are at.
I'll address two points
* Photo taking * Campaign meta data & Discovery
As everyone knows the Wikimedia mobile team built a custom WLM Android application last year to help support the contest for both discovery and photo taking. We will *not* be bringing this app nor its infrastructure back for a number or reasons including
* WMF moving away from phone gap based technologies * Unsustainable data pipelines * Commons app superseding WLM app
That last point is very important as we still want to be able to support users who want to take mobile photos but our analytics, feedback, etc show that a generic photo taking application gains us more high quality contributions. Last year's WLM app and infrastructure took 6 people over 3 months to be built and rolled out, but only provided us with about 500 unique uploaders over a single month. Given our goal of 6,000 unique contributors per month this year it is important for us to build pipelines that are sustainable year round. Thus the Wikimedia App and Web teams will continue to invest in our generic image pipelines like lead image upload, nearby, main menu side bar, and app uploads.
Now that covers taking photos but what about campaign meta data and discovery? The Wikimedia Mobile App team has been exploring the addition of generic campaigns [1] within the Commons mobile app. This functionality is meant to allow anyone to create a generic campaign and associate photos with it. A lot of the work being done for mobile campaigns(such as improvements to UploadCampaigns[2]) will be useful for WLM, but mobile campaign support is *not* being written specifically for WLM. We hope that it can work for WLM but we are not developing for WLM nor on timeline to meet WLM's requirements for this year.
We advise the WLM team to not explicitly depend on us for any other their functionality for this year.
This in summary we're deprecating the WLM android app, continuing to build our generic commons app for iOS and Android, researching campaigns, and advising the WLM community to not explicitly depend on us for any functionality this year.
Hopefully this clears up some of the open questions. Please let us know if you have any more.
--tomasz
On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 2:46 PM, Tomasz Finc tfinc@wikimedia.org wrote:
Tomasz from the mobile team here. I was already drafting a message about this so give me a day or two to finalize on it.
--tomasz
On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 2:35 PM, Heather Walls hwalls@wikimedia.org wrote:
adding some people for input....
On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 6:52 AM, Jan Ainali jan.ainali@wikimedia.se wrote:
The Engineering Projects roadmap [1] for the Commons app does not say anything about enabling campaigns. Is it already implemented and just awaiting to get started? Or did someone forget to update that row of the roadmap? Or worse, will there be no possibilities for campaigns on the app in September and you have to manually attach the correct template and ID to the photo during upload?
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aoizbfxc5g6KdEkza0xkQnJlM0o0TXl...
Med vänliga hälsningar, Jan Ainali
Verksamhetschef, Wikimedia Sverige 0729 - 67 29 48
2013/6/26 Cristian Consonni kikkocristian@gmail.com
2013/6/26 Stefan Elfving stefan.elfving@hotmail.se
The Android app for Wiki Loves Monuments from Wikimedia Foundation seems to have been redrawn from Google play.
Does anyone know if and when it will be released again on Google play or some other market place for apps?
Hi Stefan,
actually that app has been removed because it has been superseded by the WIkimedia Commons app. Wiki Loves Monuments participant will use that app to upload their photos from mobile.
Cristian
Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org