The Wiki Loves Monuments Android App is a great way to take photos and upload them to Wikimedia Commons during the world’s largest photo contest throughout September. But what if you are shooting with a camera and don’t see yourself taking too many photos with your mobile phone? You can now use the app as a convenient travel log and make it much easier to organize your photos when processing and uploading them at home.

Here’s how you use the app as a travel log. As you walk around finding monuments nearby to shoot with your camera, use the app on your phone to find the monuments and take a picture of them to upload, either on the road or when you get home. Back on your computer, your uploaded mobile photos will be a convenient record of all the monuments you visited, sitting on Commons under “My uploads.”

As an added bonus, every mobile upload you add to Commons will include a link to the Special Upload Wizard that automatically allows you to upload and categorize more photos of that monument based on its campaign and reference number. This is similar to clicking the “upload photo” button on the monument lists in Wikipedia, but it is right there in your travel log.

A screenshot of the new travel log feature associated with WLM app photos uploaded to Commons.

To see your travel log and use this feature, you must login at commons.wikimedia.org and click on “My uploads” at the top. Click on the name of any uploaded photo and the file page of that photo will open. Scroll down and below the description you will see the link, “Upload more photos of this monument.”

The travel log can help you in two ways:

1. you will see a sequential list of the monuments you visited, which helps in identifying the monuments taken on your camera
2. you can submit the photos from your camera for each monument directly from the travel log

The latest app, version 1.2.3, has been published in the Google Play store and that version has this new feature. Please update the app if you downloaded it before and do not have auto-updates turned on. If you have good ideas about photo uploads in general, or improvements for next year, feel free to post feedback or send an email.

You may also download the app here, or on the F-Droid market.

We appreciate your support. Happy uploading!

Phil Chang, Product Manager, Mobile

The Wikimedia Foundation’s mobile team is proud to release the first official way for users to contribute to Wikimedia projects via mobile: Photo uploads for the Wiki Loves Monuments contest, a worldwide event to contribute freely-licensed photos of cultural heritage sites to Wikimedia Commons, which started in over 30 countries on September 1.

With the Wiki Loves Monuments Android app, you can easily see monuments near you or browse through a country and its regions. In addition to finding monuments on the local map or in a list, photos can be taken from within the app or chosen from the phone’s gallery, to be uploaded immediately, or to be saved for later so they can be uploaded in batch with a better data connection.

Please download the app and participate in the contest! More than 30 countries are participating this year, so it is very likely that you will find a monument near you to photograph, either in your home town or during your travels. This is an ideal way to add more meaning to your holiday by contributing to the record of national heritage sites on Commons and Wikipedia.

The app is currently available for Android in the Google Play store in the Photography category, and for direct download. It has been developed using the open-source framework Cordova (formerly PhoneGap) and the free content maps from OpenStreetMaps, which are used in all our mobile apps. The intention is to learn from this experience and integrate much of the same functionality in the Wikipedia mobile site and apps.

One of the key features of this app is the ability to upload photos to Commons with a streamlined process that includes all the templates, license info and metadata that are required for Commons and the WLM contest. This is a new take on the uploading process, which is the first step toward making photo contributions to Wikipedia a mobile reality.

Due to the popularity of Android devices in many of the participating countries, the initial focus was on Android, but an iPhone version is also possible because of the Cordova framework. Developers are welcome to fork the source code and develop other apps or help with integration in the existing Wikipedia mobile projects.

If you have feedback about the app, please post comments on the feedback page or send us an email.

Phil Chang

Product Manager, Mobile

Wiktionary, the online dictionary that anyone can edit, is now available as a mobile app for Android in Google Play (formerly Android Market). With the official Wiktionary App, you can:

• Read Wiktionary in over 150 languages
• Share pages with friends
• Listen to word pronunciations
• Save your favorite pages
• Read the Word of the Day
• … and more!

Expanding the reach of Wikimedia projects on Android is an important contribution to spreading free knowledge globally. And this is a great example of the motto, “Fork our code, reach millions, and help educate the world!”

A volunteer development effort, the Wiktionary App was developed in collaboration with Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects. Four Canadian undergraduate Computer Science students built the app as volunteers, using the code of the existing Wikipedia App, and adding additional features for Wiktionary.

Like the Wikipedia App before it, the Wiktionary App is committed to Open Web technologies. It is built using the open source framework PhoneGap, and uses HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript. The code is completely open source, and available on GitHub. Anyone can get involved – by submitting code, adding translations on Translatewiki, or by becoming a contributor to Wiktionary.

We’re excited to release this app and get Wiktionary into the hands of more mobile users. We hope you are as excited as we are!

Patrick Hayes, Volunteer

With feedback from interested members of the community, the mobile team has made many improvements to the look and feel of Wikipedia Mobile in recent months – and that has helped us surpass our target of two billion monthly page views. But we need to do more – a modern and well-organized user interface opens the door to many exciting features, including forms of mobile contribution.

To see an early release of the new look and feel, opt-in to the mobile Beta site at bit.ly/wmoptin^[1]. (This shows the English Wikipedia, for other languages see below^[2].) Please note that the visual design and functionality are not final.

            

On the top left, next to the search field, is the Main Menu button, and on the top right is the Action Bar button; the Main Menu is revealed on the left side.

The Main Menu contains general functions, such as accessing a random article or the “settings” page, and the Action Bar exposes actions related to the article you are reading, such as the table of contents and interwiki links to other language versions. With this user interface there is room to grow in an organized way.

We appreciate the community feedback we have received so far, and please add yours on this page, or email us. This is an iterative design process that relies on your input and even better your direct involvement. You can see the design thinking to date on the project page, including research about other mobile sites and apps.

This is an early design, so it is not too late to make an impact! Subscribe to the mobile-l mailing list to receive updates and participate in future design decisions. Once the design is relatively settled, we will embark on a similar design across the Android and iPhone apps.

Let us know what you think! And feel free to visit the mobile team on IRC at #wikimedia-mobile on Freenode.

1. ↑Once you have opted in to the Beta site, you can opt-out using “Settings” in the Main Menu.
2. ↑In the Action Bar, tap “Language” and choose a language. If the language icon is grayed out, that page does not exist in other languages.

Phil Inje Chang

Product Manager, Mobile