Wikipedia has been going mobile lately. There's been a lot of effort into making the mobile site better and putting out solid mobile apps. But now Wikipedia is going further and enabling people to contribute via their mobile phones. Granted, this isn't about adding new articles or improving existing ones, it's about the Wiki Loves Monuments.
Starting today, Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the popular site, is encouraging contributors to go outside, take photographs of the world's monuments and upload them to the Wikipedia Commons under a Creative Commons license.
To make it easier for people to get involved, Wikimedia created the Wiki Loves Monuments Android app. With it, anyone can go snap a photo and upload it, just like they would with Instagram or any of the other photo sharing apps.
"With the Wiki Loves Monuments Android app, you can easily see monuments near you or browse through a country and its regions," Wikimedia
wrote.
"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," it explained.
To make it interesting, Wikipedia is turning this into a contest, so everyone who uploads a photo has a chance to win a trip to Hong Kong next year. People have until the end of September to stage their shoots and upload the photos.
The app is
available in the Play Store and for direct download from Wikimedia. If you're interested in the details, it's built with the Apache Cordova framework, formerly known as PhoneGap, which means it's essentially a web app packaged as a native one. The map data is provided by OpenStreetMap.
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