Show news about ongoing campaigns/competitions

[misaochan]

Suggested by John Cummings at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#IEG_proposal:_Improve_Upload_to_Commons_Android_app

@misaochan:, this has a very large potential to increase participation. I wanted ask a question that is outside the current grant request but is related. I know that there has been some previous work on a Wiki Loves Monuments app and could see a clear use for a similar app for Wiki Loves Earth. I don't understand the technical side of Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth but I can see having an app may help increase the easy of participation for people. Would there be an easy mechanism to have a link somewhere in the front page of the app to contribute to the competitions? I think there are a few advantages of integrating the competitions into a central app rather than having an app for each competition:
If people install the app for the competition it means they can continue to contribute to Wikimedia Commons after the competition has finished
May encourage people to take part in multiple competitions, inccreasing the participation for all of them. E.g someone installs the app for WLE and then continues to add photos afterwards and the app makes them aware that WLM is happening.
Smaller competitions can have contributions by an app without needing to create their own.
Thanks
John Cummings (talk) 13:52, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

[nicolas-raoul]

How about a small "news" that would show up only during such campaigns? since presumably a week or so before.

Implementation could be as simple as loading a text file from a hard-coded URL like https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Commons/Ad (that page would need to be ultra-protected obviously) and ignoring when the page is blank. Loading would need to be asynchronous to not impact app startup speed too much.

This space could also be used for other communication such as "Now is Categorization Week, please join us at http://commons..org/Categorization_Week" or "Help translate the app to your language, see http://some-url"-type information. If we extend to this, the "news" should be dismissable.

Further integration of WLM-type campaigns used to exist but has been removed as we saw no use to it, and it increased complexity. It used to be built as separate apps if I remember correctly.

[misaochan]

Ahh, is that the Campaigns code that we removed previously due to it being unused? That explains a lot. :)

I like the idea of the ad for other WM campaigns. Who would maintain the URL that switches the ads around though? Or is it already done automatically?

[nicolas-raoul]

Maintainance would be done manually by the community at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps/Commons/Ad

[tobias47n9e]

Ideally we could have some kind of plug-in structure. For example a GeoJSON with the location, description etc.. and also the name of the campaign, start date, end date, custom categories. Ideally a user could create a campaign from query.wikidata.org which will also be able to query commons soon (once Wikidata for Commons goes online).

Something like Wiki loves monuments or Wiki loves earth is probably not more than a few lines of sparql to get the desired items. Non location based campaigns query for certain categories or create the JSON manually. If no locations are provided no map is shows, but a list. Gamification would be possible if points (stars, etc..) are assigned to the items.

[nicolas-raoul]

Indeed.
Would you mind designing the ads for two campaigns that have actually happened? And design the JSON that would define each of these campaigns. Agreeing on a solid format is a requirement before we start coding.

[nicolas-raoul]

@tobias47n9e: This issue is only about the ads (news), so your paragraph about SPARQL probably belongs to #100
Cheers! :-)

[nicolas-raoul]

We could load the JSON file from a hard-coded URL like http://commons-app.github.io/campaigns.json
I now see the point of having SPARQL in this file too.
To summarize, the JSON file could contain for each ongoing campaign:

• Name of the campaign
• Area where the campaign takes place
• Start/end date of the campaign
• Explanation text
• Categories to add to categories suggestions
• SPARQL request for nearby campaign-related items

Anyone willing to write a sample for a few real past campaigns?