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


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