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

There are many third-party mobile apps based on Wikipedia, and some of them offer unique benefits. The Wikimedia Foundation encourages diversity and innovation using the free content of Wikipedia, as long as some legal guidelines are followed (namely, observe the CC-BY-SA license terms and don’t infringe our trademarks). We want app developers to help spread free knowledge, and now you can do that more easily and reliably.

Most Wikipedia app developers are screen-scraping the mobile site, or using the desktop site’s HTML and applying some home-made transformations to it. Our official apps used to screen-scrape, too, but now there’s a better alternative: over the last half year, the mobile team has developed a specialized API for mobile apps to use.

There are two problems with screen scraping: it’s brittle and slow. Here are the benefits of using the new API:

• You don’t have to worry about unrelated changes to the mobile site breaking the app - Are you grabbing the content of a particular <div>? It may disappear with the next skin update. The API is guaranteed to remain backwards-compatible.
• Structured data – Since the data is a bit more structured, you can easily able to do things like loading images only when their section is expanded.
• Get just what you want, when you want – It helps responsiveness a lot by loading only sections the user wants to see.
• Improved speed, saved traffic – Download speed and bandwidth usage are improved because you are getting just the data you want, without extra formatting and navigation elements.

Our official Wikipedia apps switched over to using the new API, and we have received comments like this:

… the reason why I wrote this review is because of the latest update. It was supposed to make the app faster…. and it did! Seriously, the app loads pages MUCH faster now, and I am very pleased. We’re talking about going from internet explorer speed to any web browser that isn’t internet explorer speed. A+

Max Semenik
Software Developer (Mobile)
Wikimedia Foundation

Free Wikipedia poster from Orange in Kampala

Over the last few months, we have written several blog posts about the launch of our mobile partnerships to provide access to Wikipedia without incurring data charges, so I thought it would be a good idea now to describe what one of these partners is doing to promote our common program. Orange Uganda is a great example.

Orange Uganda was the first Orange affiliate to launch the free access program we announced together in January. Since April 4, Orange customers in Uganda have been able to access Wikipedia on their mobile phones without accruing any data fees. Our shared philosophy is that this should remove barriers to knowledge access, giving people who previously may not have been able to access Wikipedia the opportunity to do so now.

This raises an interesting challenge in itself, though: how do you communicate the offer of free knowledge to the masses, many of them who have never used Wikipedia before and may not know what it is? Businesses deal with marketing products and services all the time, but promoting the availability of knowledge without cost is a creative endeavor that we need to pursue together with our mobile partners.

Orange’s approach in Uganda has been through an “upgrade your knowledge” campaign that is blanketed throughout the country. They’ve put up over 100,000 flyers, 100 street pole posters (pictured), and noticeboards at 11 universities. In addition, they’ve even run radio ads. All this helps get the word out about free knowledge, and for many people in Uganda, it may be the first time they’ve heard of Wikipedia. In an ideal scenario, someone who doesn’t have internet access at home may see one of these messages, turn on their phone’s browser, and look up their first Wikipedia article.

We’re planning to do similar outreach with a number of our current and future partners. If you’re in one of these countries and you come across any of these materials, let us know, or snap a picture and send it to us. Also, tell us your ideas – how would you market free knowledge on mobile?

Amit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

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

Shortcut to Wikipedia Zero on Digi’s portal

For the first time, Wikipedia is now available on mobile free of data charges in Asia. On Monday May 21st, Digi in Malaysia began offering Wikipedia Zero, Wikimedia’s program to reduce cost as a barrier for accessing knowledge on mobile devices. In addition to being the first in Asia, Digi is also the first operator in the Telenor group to roll out the program.

Digi’s 10 million customers can read as many Wikipedia articles as they like (provided they have an internet-capable phone), in any language, through the Opera Mini browser without accruing data fees. The free access applies to the lightweight, text-only mobile version of Wikipedia, which Digi customers can now access by going to zero.wikipedia.org. Adding to the list of firsts, Digi is the first partner we have worked with to release the text-only site, which is especially beneficial to users with slower connection speeds or lower-end phones. Users can of course still see an image if they go one click deeper, but the download of that image may not be excluded from data charges.

Landing page for Digi customers at zero.wikipedia.org

To promote free use of Wikipedia, Digi has placed a link on top of their DigiLive Zero portal on Opera Mini. We are also beginning to work with them, along with all of our current and upcoming partners, to experiment with additional ways to promote the availability of free Wikipedia – and ultimately free knowledge – within their communities.

It’s the beginning of an exciting time, and one in which we hope we can bring the gift of knowledge to a whole new set of people. We’re approaching it in an analytical way, too, and will be measuring the impact these Wikipedia Zero implementations have on both overall page views in the regions along with the increase in local language readership. Malaysia is now the third country in which Wikipedia is available for free on mobile (Tunisia and Uganda are the other two; updates from there coming soon), and many more will be launching in the coming months.

Amit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships
Dan Foy, Technical Manager, Mobile Partnerships

Page views to the Wikipedia mobile site (red: non-English versions) compared to the 2 billion target from the annual plan

How did it happen? As internet usage shifts from a desktop-centric environment to a more mobile-centric one, there’s a migration to smaller screens. Various industries and factors have made that happen, and several things have been done at the Wikimedia Foundation to move with the change. We can’t do justice to all the individual work by attempting to list it here, but amongst the many changes and contributions, a few highlights include the launch of the new mobile site last October, better device detection, and the official Android app announced in January.

Also notable about the 2 billion mark is the way use has evolved globally. A year ago, 67% of all visits to the Wikipedia mobile site were to the English Wikipedia; now that number is 54%. In the Global South in particular, traffic to the mobile sites for certain languages has grown tremendously. Some examples include Portuguese (from 3.9M to 27.4M), Arabic (from 1.7M to 10.2M), and Turkish (from 1.0M to 9.0M). As our partnership programs roll out to allow hundreds of millions to access Wikipedia on their mobile devices without incurring data charges, we expect mobile use to be even more globally distributed over the coming year.

The work on mobile, from both the tech and global development side, is not slowing down in the least however. There’s a lot more to come, but it’s worth taking a moment to recognize the mark we’ve reached, and to thank every community and staff member who played a part.

On behalf of the Mobile Team (Tomasz Finc, Patrick Reilly, Arthur Richards, Jon Robson, André Engels, Kul Wadhwa, Mani Pande, Amit Kapoor, Yuvaraj Pandian, Max Semenik, Phil Chang, Dan Foy):

Amit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

We launched the official Wikipedia application for Android almost two months ago and the response has been tremendous. We’ve had ~2.25 million installations and ~5000 ratings (with a 4.4/5.0 average). Preliminary reports also indicate about 23 million page views per month via the app. In short, it has been doing pretty well!

iOS App Launch

Today we’re excited to announce a new version of the Wikipedia app for iOS. This has all the features from our Android app, styled to be consistent with iOS:

• Search suggestions
• Full text search
• “Did you mean?” results
• Saving pages for offline viewing
• Share pages via Twitter, Facebook
• Save pages to Read It Later
• Read current page in other languages
• Map integration to view nearby articles
• View location of current article + nearby articles in a map
• Set the default language
• Navigation history features
• … and some more!

This release is based on the same code that powers our Android application – an advantage of basing our app on Apache Cordova (previously PhoneGap). This enables us to reach the most number of platforms with the least amount of code. Fully embracing HTML5, CSS3, & Javascript commits us to the open Web technologies of the future.
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A growing number of visitors access the mobile site of Wikipedia and it is an area the engineering team is keen to improve. To do this, we are offering a more functional and polished experience adapted for mobile users, who operate in a much more confined world compared to those on the desktop.

This week we pushed several new and updated design changes to our beta. We hope these changes will provide a more professional look and a better experience for you. These include changes to the footer, a cleaner design for revealing and hiding sections, and a revamped full-screen search experience. The mechanism for toggling between desktop and mobile has also moved from the footer to the top navigation menu to the left of search to allow users to switch more effortlessly.

In addition to this we have also pushed an experimental feature which makes it easier to refer to references on articles without having to plunge to the bottom of the page. Now clicking on a reference will load an overlay which readers can consult without losing their place in the article.

We are keen to gather feedback to stabilise these additions and make these changes available by default to a much larger audience. In particular and as always, we are interested in any device-specific issues being brought to our attention as well as feedback on the new design. Let us know how you find the experience – good and bad and also the quirks that you discover.

We are also experimenting with animations when revealing references and would appreciate thoughts from the community on which is felt to work best. By default, references are revealed by a fade in/out effect but we would appreciate thoughts on whether a slide animation or no animation would be preferable.

Opt in to our beta and try them out today. We look forward to your feedback which can be provided either here or by your involvement in the design process.

– Jon Robson, Software Developer Mobile