commons-app-documentation
Volunteers welcome!
We are always looking for volunteers, feel free to step in! It’s very easy to get started - have a look at the roles that you fancy below. Thanks a lot!
Developers
- Set up your working environment by following the quick start guide.
- Choose an unassigned bug that sounds interesting to you, and ask to be assigned the issue. If the issue was assigned to someone who has been inactive for over 1 month, you can bring this to the attention of collaborators who may ping them for updates and possibly re-assign the issue to you.
- If you are a new contributor, please only ask to be assigned to issues with a “bug” or “good first issue” label. Issues labeled “enhancement” will usually only be assigned to contributors with more than 5 merged pull requests to this repo. Exceptions may be granted if multiple collaborators agree, but it will take time for approval. (rationale)
- Follow the Contributing Guidelines.
It is also recommended that you actually try the app and upload pictures with the app. Become familiar with the various workflows. Notice what kind of categories are suggested depending on where the picture is taken or what you type. Check what people consider excellent pictures and get inspired by their rich descriptions and accurate categories.
Please create and use your own Wikimedia account. By default you will be using the beta server. Using the production server (by switching the build flavor) is OK for read-only operations. If you must perform operations that modify data on the production server, please make sure that each of your actions is a good change.
- If you must upload pictures to the production server, please only upload encyclopedia-worthy pictures you took by yourself. You can also ask Nicolas Raoul to provide encyclopedia-worthy pictures for you to upload.
- If you must modify metadata on the production server, only modify in a way that results in better metadata.
- If you must nominate pictures for deletion on the production server, find pictures (uploaded by other people) that actually must be deleted (for instance because they are copyright violations). Uploading test pictures then nominating them for deletion will get you blocked.
Testers
Use the beta version and report bugs to the issue tracker.
Choose the beta version if:
- You want to test only relatively stable versions of the app.
- You consider that uploading your pictures is more important than finding the app’s bugs.
- You don’t want to receive many app updates, because you don’t have access to unlimited Internet.
How to install the beta
The beta version might have bugs, your role is to find them all so that we can make a bug-free stable release :-)
| 1. Install the app from the Google Play Store. | 2. Scroll down until you see a box mentioning the beta program. |
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- After some minutes or hours of enrolling, update your app to get the beta version. Please be patient.
How to install the test flavor
The test flavor allows you to use a server different from the Commons server. Only needed if you plan to upload many test images with no encyclopedic value. You must compile this version by yourself, from the source code.
Stress-testing
To detect more crashes, we encourage testers to sometimes enable “Don’t keep activities” (In Developer options), for instance one day per week.
Translators
See Translating the App.
Patrollers
See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Mobile_app#We_need_your_help:_please_monitor_uploads
Documentation writers
Be it this wiki, the Wikimedia page, the official webpage or the source code, documentation always needs to be improved and updated