QR Codes for Museums
Tom Morris pointed me to this interesting discussion about using Wikipedia QR codes in museums. I think it's an excellent idea. It's something I've briefly discussed with Cristianno Betta for his 100 Objects project.
There are five key points to the success of such a scheme.
- 100% of visitors will be scanning these codes on their mobile phones. The code must point to the mobile version of Wikipedia.
- <100% of visitors will speak the language of the country where the museum is located (for example, 25% of visitors to the Science Museum are foreign. Pointing to just the English article is unacceptable.
- The QR code should be simple enough to scan quickly. This mean using as short a URL as possible.
- The URL presented must be human readable. The user must know to where they are being directed. The QR scanner may have a "history" option which will allow the user to see the codes they've scanned.
- Statistics must be gathered showing how many people are using the QR codes to assess their effectiveness.
Mobile Redirection is Broken on Wikipedia
The current way that Wikipedia does mobile redirection is broken and should be considered harmful to users. At the moment, a mobile user-agent visiting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rossetta_Stone has to load the entire HTML document, process the complex JavaScript, and only then is redirected to the mobile version of the site.
This means that a visitor incurs a significant wait before they are directed to the correct content. If the visitor is roaming in a foreign country, they may pay significant per-MB costs for this download.
The correct way is for Wikipedia's servers to detect the mobile user-agent and 302 redirect to the mobile version.
Language Detection
I don't know how Wikipedia detects the preferred language of its visitors. Ideally, it should look at the Accept-Language Header of the phone and / or use the IP address of the device (assuming the user isn't using the museum's WiFi).
Finally, the QR/mobile version of Wikipedia should allow a user to easily change the language of the page they are viewing.
Short URL, Human Readability, and Statistics
URL shortening services often produce a jumble of letters and number which, while short, mean nothing to the human user. For example http://bit.ly/fNXn1W. In addition, use of commercial URL shortening services is problematic should the company no longer maintain its service.
Using the "normal" URL gives us this
Using the "mobile" URL gives us this
Using a QR code specifically for QR use gives us this
Finally, there could be a separate short domain for Wikipedia accessed through QR codes.
For example, the currently unregistered qrpedia.org
Obviously, this has branding problems - would people recognise it as being from Wikipedia?
Conclusion
Ideally, we would use a URL like http://wikipedia.org/qr/Rossetta_Stone
When the use scanned the code and requested the URL, Wikipedia would then perform two actions
- Detect the user's preferred language.
- 302 redirect to the mobile version.
If the language detection was incorrect, the user could simply change it.
Wikipedia admins, museum staff, and anyone else, would be able to see which exhibits had the most scans.
Thoughts?
Introducing QRpedia
The initiative is crowd-sourced, so if anyone feels they can help please set up a Wikipedia account and join in. There are a range of international Galleries Libraries Archives and Museums collaborating in different ways, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM for an overview.
The Derby initiative is particularly keen to try and address the multi -lingual approach. We could do with some technical expertise if any readers are available (see link above)
I started building it the other day but haven't got it finished yet. I also don't know how it would be hosted and whether something that's developed indepedently of Wikimedia would be appreciated by those in the WP:GLAM projects.
Victuallers says:
The issue with language recognition is that there is not always a 1-1 relationship. Articles might exist in English, but not some other language, or vice versa; and there is sometimes disagreement over which article matches which. Suppose, hypothetically, the English-language Wikipedia has an article on each of the original iPhone and iPhone 4G, but the French-language article only has a single iPhone article, about both.which English article should English-speaking visitors to a French museum be re-directed to?
As a curator, I'd like a tool that acts like a shopping trolley on a commercial website. i.e I can select the links and QR codes I want, then remove those I no longer require. Having done so, I'd like to be able to drop my selection into a template, ready to print out the set of QR codes, ideally double sided, with the Wikipedia page name on the reverse (so I know what it is should I wish to cut it out)
If the template allowed me to add a line of small text below the QR code, I'd be happy just to put "Wikipedia" to indicate the source. Wouldn't that be enough to show users where they are being taken? With an option to add a header of the Wikipedia page name, plus thin lines around the main code and header/footer to act as guidelines for cutting out, I'd be one contented person.
For saving my QR codes to file, I'd like my selection to be downloadable to my chosen destination with the filename based on the Wikipedia page name so I don't get them confused.
Or am I being a bit too fussy?
http://www.brussels.be/artdet.cfm?id=6464&
Simple URL pointing at a multi-lingual site.
I'm sorry to say that I disagree. The mobile version of Wikipedia doesn't have any links to multilingual version of the page.
If your museum only attracts English speakers - then pointing to en.m.wikipedia.org is acceptable. But for museums with a large amount of international visitors, it's not really a good solution.
T
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