In today’s world, it’s considered almost impossible to go through college or professional education without a little help from Wikipedia. As you might already know, Wikipedia is a non-profit project, and has been running successfully for a long time because a lot of its users are also among the website’s major contributors of data. If you have ever submitted anything to Wikipedia, specially an article containing a media file, then you are probably familiar with Wikimedia Commons. The service allows users to upload photos to a platform from where anyone can access and use them without having to pay anything. The images that appear in Wikipedia articles are generally from Wikimedia Commons as well. Since the world is shifting to smartphones and tablets from computers, it seems like a perfect idea to have a Wikimedia client for major mobile platforms. It has taken some time for the organization to realize that, but the Wikimedia Commons app is finally here. The app has been released simultaneously for iOS and Android, letting users of both platforms upload images to their Wikimedia accounts on the ago...
Wikimedia Commons is nowhere near as comprehensive as the official Wikipedia app that was released last year for Android, but then again, it isn’t supposed to be, since the sole purpose of the new app is to let users upload photos from their camera roll or straight from their phone’s camera. To get started, you have to sign in using your Wikimedia account, but a bit disappointingly, there is no option to sign up for new users of the service.
To start uploading images to your account, hit the icon available in the middle of the bottom bar. Once a photo has been shot or selected, the app takes you to its ‘Details’ page. Make sure that you are uploading a picture that you own, or one that isn’t protected by copyrights and is available for anyone to use for free. Wikimedia Commons is not a photo editing app of course, so the options available on the Details page deal only with textual data associated with the image. You have to provide a title and a brief description of the photo you are uploading, and filling both these fields in mandatory. To view licensing details on a picture, tap the option available at the bottom of the Details page.
The ‘My uploads’ page of Wikimedia Commons shows a preview of all the photos you have shared with the world from your account. To view an image in the default web browser of your device, hit the eye icon. It is also possible to delete existing photos.
It might have been better had the Wikipedia app been updated with the features Wikimedia Commons is offering, since even some third-party web services can do that, but we are sure a lot of users are going to prefer things this way. As you can imagine, Wikimedia Commons is a free app.
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