Submissions/The Wikipedia Smartphone Apps Story

From Wikimania 2012 • Washington, D.C., USA

This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2012.

Submission no.
683
Title of the submission
The Wikipedia Smartphone Apps Story
Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)
Presentation
Author of the submission
Yuvaraj Pandian
E-mail address
yuvipanda@wikimedia.org
Username
yuvipanda
Country of origin
India
Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)
WMF
Personal homepage or blog
http://yuvi.in
Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

We try to make sure that whatever way you access Wikipedia, you have the best experience possible. While you could always access Wikipedia from your smartphone's browser, to truly take advantage of your device's capabilities and provide the best experience possible (for both consuming and contributing to Wikipedia), we needed to build smartphone apps. And we needed to build them for all major platforms (currently iOS & Android). This talk is about why we did it, how we did it while making sure we used open tools (to avoid lockin) and most importantly, all the super cool stuff that is coming down the pipeline.

The talk would primarily cover:

  1. Why we built the Wikipedia Mobile App?
  2. How popular is the Wikipedia Mobile App?
  3. How are we building the Wikipedia Mobile App across platforms?
    1. In a way that makes it super easy for people to contribute code to?
    2. In a way that makes sure we use only open standards and tools, so that we can avoid vendor lock in?
  4. So what can the app do right now?
    1. Geo data integration, multiple language switching, page sharing
  5. Nice! What will the app be able to do 6-12 months from now?
    1. Media contributions (Photos, Videos, Audio, Geo data)
    2. Text contributions (Sentence editing, Infobox fixes, etc)
    3. Meta contributions (Article Feedback/Rating, Wikiproject Assessments, Edit patrolling, Commons patrolling, etc)
    4. Offline facilities (Read entire wikis without internet access)
    5. But would about the other Wikimedia projects and apps?
  6. How can you help?
    1. 'But, my favorite phone platform isn't being served!' (Volunteers have ported our app to Playbook, WP7, Nokia N9. You could do it too for your platform!)

This talk is for anyone with a smartphone who wants to know how they can soon contribute to Wikipedia from their phones

Track
  • Technology and Infrastructure
Length of presentation/talk
25 Minutes
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
No
Slides or further information (optional)
Special request as to time of presentations


Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with four tildes. (~~~~).

  1. Ironholds (talk) 21:57, 18 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Amir E. Aharoni (talk)
  3. Tfinc (talk) 01:14, 19 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Logicwiki (talk) 07:44, 22 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  5. NaBUru38 (talk) 17:26, 7 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Shujenchang (talk) 07:49, 26 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  7. iwilsonjr (talk) 16:36, 10 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Nataev (talk) 18:17, 13 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Add your username here.
Retrieved from "https://wikimania2012.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Submissions/The_Wikipedia_Smartphone_Apps_Story&oldid=35936"