adding some people for input.... On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 6:52 AM, Jan Ainali <jan.ainali(a)wikimedia.se> wrote:

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(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi Tomasz, thank you for your e-mail; we appreciate your time, your involvement and your work on software issues critical (or just needed) to make Wiki Loves Monuments better. We understand the issues that made you abandon the 2012 WLM Android app, and we're grateful for the effort that the whole mobile team put into it last year. We are aware that the app might not have met your goals about the number of unique uploaders, but it has still provided us with valuable content and experience, and we hope it will also be the case this year. So, if I understand your e-mail correctly: * (1) The mobile team is going to work on improving a generic photo-taking application that has nothing to do with Wiki Loves Monuments (directly); * (2) You are going to work on implementing already existing UploadCampaigns within the mobile app, which includes the creation of a new Campaign: namespace using JSON (similar to the Schema: namespace on Meta Wiki), which fixes bug 30645[1]. At the beginning of your e-mail, you wrote that you "wanted to use this thread to collect our ideas". I'm not exactly sure what this means, because what you wrote sounds to me like you're going to continue your work as if Wiki Loves Monuments did not exist, not like if you really wanted to collect opinions from us. It so happens that the Foundation's annual plan for fiscal year 2013-14 has been released today, and I took some time to read it. Unsurprisingly, Wiki Loves Monuments is mentioned there a couple of times, just as it was mentioned in the AP for 2012-13 and in plenty of WMF reports, interviews, blog posts and other PR materials during the past year or two. That said, I'm quite suprised to see how low on the Foundation's list of priorities supporting Wiki Loves Monuments lies. Don't get me wrong: I do appreciate the work put into the creation of the new Campaigns: namespace (bug 30645 is truly horrible), the inclusion of UploadCampaigns in the mobile app and all the other small changes to come, most of which are linked from [2] -- but it doesn't change my feeling on discovering that the Foundation's pet community project and the source of hope among the ever-decreasing editor numbers so visible on monthly charts is actually left without almost any organization support. /Disclaimer:/ The views expressed in this e-mail are solely mine, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the whole Wiki Loves Monuments international team or other organizations with which I am or might be associated. == References == * [1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42164 * [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42164 -- Tomasz

Just adding to the discussion based on SJ's suggestion: If 'any WLM-loving developer(s)outside of the staff submit a short-term grant proposal to update/maintain the old WLM app', would they also please consider adding a "Take a WLM walk!" function to the app that links monuments-with-no-photo to Google walking directions? This would be great to have for "Wiki Takes xxx" meetups during September. The functionality could be based off of the app C:Geo, which is open source. 2013/7/12, Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com>om>:

On 26 June 2013 14:17, Cristian Consonni <kikkocristian(a)gmail.com> wrote: Perhaps the words "wiki loves monuments" could be added to the description of the Commons app, so that a search for them will find it? -- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk