MobileFrontend/Photo upload/Use cases

Sharing

Sharing refers to the behavior of sending chosen photos to friends or online destinations when viewing them in a phone's gallery. This use case applies primarily to Android because the system of Intents on that platform enables extremely flexible forms of sharing. It also applies to a starting context not controlled by our app or mobile site. Being part of the native photo gallery on a device is ideal in terms of where people are most likely to consider sharing. However, a fairly limited audience will be aware of Wikimedia Commons and so it may be helpful to name the function in a way that includes the word Wikipedia.

Articles nearby missing photos

There are two forms of nearby article search: articles near me and articles near this article. In both cases, there are articles that will be missing photos, and surfacing those articles with a form of invitation to contribute a photo is the ideal starting point of this use case. Arguably, articles near me may be the more useful variation, but it is also possible that people will plan travel in advance to notable landmarks and monuments, making the second variation also useful. For example, the Wiki Loves Monuments use case involves users planning to visit monuments that may or may not be near them, and certainly the organizers of the contest organize monuments in different areas.

Articles missing geo-data

Articles that are missing geo-location data can be easily enhanced by extracting geo coordinates from the EXIF data of mobile photos. So surfacing such articles in a way that invites contributions on a mobile device is a potentially useful function. The difficulty here is knowing which articles deserve coordinates, since such articles will not appear in nearby searches and categories may or may not be geographical in nature. One approach is to rely on categories that are obvious, such as "San Francisco." Another approach is to rely on categories relating specifically to monuments or landmarks in a given region, such as the National Register of Historic Monuments in the US.

A different approach already implemented by Multichill of the Wiki Loves Monuments team is to automatically extract geo data from all photos that are submitted, and presumably this means that when such photos are incorporated in articles, the geo data is available for inclusion.

It is possible that the geo data extracted from photos are not 100% reliable or accurate enough. Some monuments are so large that a specific point is not the best way to represent their location. These issues can be addressed by cross-referencing the location in other online resources during the article editing process and that will almost certainly fall outside the purview of the mobile use case.

Wiki Loves Monuments

The Wiki Loves Monuments contest is a primary use case of Photo Upload. A description of this contest is available in the overview. Functionally, this use case is similar to the "Articles nearby missing photos" use case mentioned above. Some functionality may overlap directly, and ideally game dynamics incorporated in the Advanced Workflow of Photo Upload will support or complement Wiki Loves Monuments.