Grants talk:Project/Makumbusho: Apps4Museums

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Thank you,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 19:34, 16 March 2021 (UTC) Reply

I just came across this proposal by chance and I have actively contributed to the Kiwix project for many years (In the beginning with some development and lately in Cuba but mainly in Venezuela making content available by making the list of articles to create the specific zim for this country), and as a software engineer I’m interested in this project from the technical point of view and also to be used in institutions, however, I have some questions that I post below:

1. Is there any partnership with a specific museum or institution with which an agreement has been made for this project so that new articles can be guaranteed in editatons?
2. Which local communities have been contacted to establish the difficulty they have in establishing a partnership with GLAM institutions like museums?
3. Is there any model or documentation of this software? or minimally some screen or model of its operation?
4. All museums would have a similar application with a similar interface due to self-generation? It is not clear to me if what is autogenerated is the ZIM or it is Kiwix (Both tools already exist).
5. The information will be taken from Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons, this will create a ZIM file that will be read by Kiwix (desktop and mobile versions respectively), both things have already been developed. Any additional development prior to any other application, will it be used?
6. What similar background exists on this application?
7. The creation of the thousands of photos, articles and Wikipedia entries, I really don't know if it is a creation of these things or it is a simple creation of a ZIM file based on a list of items (as is done today for other zim using a predefined list)?

Thanks in advance for the answers --Wilfredor (talk) 17:33, 17 March 2021 (UTC) Reply

I'm going to ping @Kelson: and I think he could answer it. --Wilfredor (talk) 01:07, 18 March 2021 (UTC) Reply

Hi Wilfredor and thank you vey much for your questions. I will try to answer them here but let me know if you need more detais.

1. Is there any partnership with a specific museum or institution with which an agreement has been made for this project so that new articles can be guaranteed in editatons? >>> Currently we ave been in touch with the french museum Musée Saint-Raymond where there is an active wikimdian working there and they welcomed the idea of having a mobile application. We have been in touch also with the director of the museums in Tunisia from the National Heritage Institute (where there are more than 15 archaeological museums) and we will try to used this project as a motivation to have a partnership with the institute and build a mobile applications for all the museums although the fact that currently there is only one museum with enough content on Wikipedia to have a mobile application which is the Bardo National Museum.
2. Which local communities have been contacted to establish the difficulty they have in establishing a partnership with GLAM institutions like museums? >>> For instance before announcing this project, the local community in Tunisia was not able to establishing a partnership with any museum in Tunisia but so far this project has been used to be a good motivation to start discussing a collaboration with the director of museums from the National Heritage Institute. Also although local communities in Arabic countries have not contacted specifically for this project, we know that there are no partnerships with museums in these countries and this project can be used by them to initiate a GLAM collaboration.
3. All museums would have a similar application with a similar interface due to self-generation? It is not clear to me if what is auto-generated is the ZIM or it is Kiwix (Both tools already exist). >>> Yes all museums will have an application with a similar graphical interface since it will be generated automatically using the new platform that will be built. To simplify the processː imagine you have a platform accessible via a browserː you input a name of a museum in a dedicated form and click on next, if there is enough content on the wiki projects, the platform will generate automatically (based on a automated back office process) a mobile application APK that can be uploaded on the google play. It's based on the Kiwix technology but it's not a Kiwix application like you know now. for instance one major difference is that for the current Kiwix application you have to download content in each different language but with the new museum apk application, it will embed several languages from different Wikis (many zims).
4. The information will be taken from Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons, this will create a ZIM file that will be read by Kiwix (desktop and mobile versions respectively), both things have already been developed. Any additional development prior to any other application, will it be used? >>> It's true that the information will be taken from Wikipedia, Wikidata and Commons but it will create a new multilingual APK application composed of several Zims and not one ZIM that will be read by Kiwix. The interface also will be different from the current Kiwix mobile application as it will be adapted to navigate through the museum collection and to manage different languages.
5. The creation of the thousands of photos, articles and Wikipedia entries, I really don't know if it is a creation of these things or it is a simple creation of a ZIM file based on a list of items (as is done today for other zim using a predefined list)? >>> This is not related to the ZIM file but the purpose is to increase the content related to Museums and collections so they can covered by the project. For exampleː the National Bardo Museum in Tunisia has 43 articles in 14 languages but most of these articles are in french (23 articles) and English (5 articles) so in order to build the mobile application we will need to increase the content in other languagesː instead of having only 2 articles in Arabic we will increase this number to match for example the number of articles in french. For other museums we have only one main article for the museum but not for the collection of the museum so we will work to create new articles about the collection so we can generate the mobile application. Basically if we are able to document all the museums and their collections around the world we can have thousand of mobile application generated by this project.

--Yamen (talk) 05:29, 26 March 2021 (UTC) Reply

Hi @Wilfredor:, I can address a couple of your questions:

3. App-wise, it will be a modified/improved version of Kiwix-android-custom. There will be significant changes to the frontend (particularly content navigation), but you get the idea of generating a zim and creating a custom app from it. In order to make the generation of custom apps as easy and straightforward as possible, we will further improve a recent update we made on Kiwix-build that simplifies the work of building a custom app by making it "non-techy"-friendly.

4. We plan on building a web UI where contributors will input the GLAM's name/Wikidata item number. The service will check whether there are enough articles to build a zim from, and if yes will generate the corresponding zim file which will then be appended to the Kiwix-android app. The idea is to have the whole process (from Q input to app on the playstore) as frictionless as possible.

5. As you can see from the table, most of the work will pertain to the zim generation funnel and the app's UI. I am not sure at this stage that we will release the zim files to the main Kiwix library, so even though it technically could work on the generic Kiwix-desktop and Kiwix-android, these are not the target platforms here.

6. Not sure I understand what you mean by "background" but I would say Wikimed is an early precursor. It certainly did lay a lot of groundwork in terms of thinking and learnings.

7. I think the content creation is more of an outcome of the app's creation. If we produce an app that is interesting and slick enough, then there will be every incentive for the partner GLAMs to further open up their collections and encourage the creation of articles as they will ultimately end up in the app at the next update and increase its value to museum visitors. At least that's how I understand it. The other Kiwix guy (talk) 16:11, 26 March 2021 (UTC) Reply

Hello,

Thanks for your proposal. I wonder if it couldn't be coupled/joined with an other project which is about to be planned in a partnership between WMFR and some company to better highlight the use of Wikimedia information in GLAM and tourism activities. @Xavier Cailleau WMFr might better assess than me the possibility of conjointly provide mutual outcomes on such a project and avoid dupplication of efforts. Cheers. Psychoslave (talk) 19:32, 23 March 2021 (UTC) Reply

Hi Psychoslave and thank you very much for your feedback. Yes WMFR are working activley on increasing the content of french museums on Wiki projects like the project Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings or the project initiated last year to increase the coverage of European museums (link). A collaboration with them will certainly create a synergy as the more content is available the more possible mobile applications we can generate. Btw the first museum that we will generate a mobile application for it, if this project is accepted, is the french museum Musée Saint-Raymond as there is an active french wikimedian working there and made available many information on Wikipedia/Wikidata/Commons. Another french museum that we will try to work on it is the french Museum of Grenoble. We will try to contact WMFR in order to fix a list of museums that we can work together in order to build a mobile application for them. --Yamen (talk) 05:50, 26 March 2021 (UTC) Reply

ːːː Hi @Yamen: thank you for your answer, you can contact me directly on my mail in my user page ǃ I'll be glad to speak about this great project ǃ --Xavier Cailleau WMFr (talk) 22:45, 29 March 2021 (UTC) Reply

Thank you Xavier. I have sent you an email and will happy if you have questions to schedule a call with you and Wikimedia France to talk about the project. --Yamen (talk) 19:27, 2 April 2021 (UTC) Reply

== Endorsement

• Support. Doing it here as the main page refuses to detect that I'm logged in. Michaelgraaf (talk) 19:39, 4 April 2021 (UTC) Reply
• Support. Même problème au niveau de la page. Projet très innovant et aura une grande valeur ajoutée pour la notoriété des activités des espaces culturels. Bonne chance et bonne continuation. Tifratin (talk) 10:38, 9 April 2021 (UTC) Reply