Beautiful video about the work Derby Museum has been doing with Wikipedia & QRpedia.
Derby Museum using multilingual QR codes from Andrew James Sykes on Vimeo.
In 2011 Wikipedians wrote and translated 1200 new articles to allow the museums objects to read in over a dozen languages using QRpedia codes.
The "Wiki Loves Monuments" project in Russia has been featured on Russian TV. Check out the QRpedia codes!
You can see all the articles (and their QRpedia codes) - there is also a list of articles which need translating.
There is some confusion about QRpedia's name.
The answer is very simple. The "pedia" isn't from "Encyclopedia". It isn't from "Wikipedia". It's an acronym.
The "QR", of course, standing for "Quick Response".
I hope that clears up the matter ;-)
Humans have devised hundreds of thousands of languages with which to express themselves. Some, like Cornish are on the verge of extinction. Others, like Catalan and Welsh, are only used by a small number of speakers. Some, like New Norse, are created for political purposes.
All these languages are valuable and hugely important to their communities. Many have Wikipedia version written in their language.
Unfortunately, very few phones support these languages.
This poses a problem for QRpedia. They way the system works is this:
Suppose The National Library of Wales has a QRpedia code for the Black Book of Carmarthen.
A Welsh speaker will probably wish to go to the Welsh version of the article.
However, their phone does not support the Welsh language (unless it is a Samsung S5600) and is set to English.
QRpedia, therefore, redirects them to the English version and doesn't give them a chance to read in their native language.
This is a problem we have faced with both Catalan and Norwegian.
Catalan faces the very same problem as Welsh does in the previous theoretical example. Many people speak it but, because it's rare for a phone to support it, their phones are set to Spanish.
This was how we solved the problem:
QRpedia doesn't store the user's language choice - so the user has to choose every time the scan which language they want.
The reasons we don't store the language choice is that it would be very hard to undo if the user made a mistake, or ever wanted to change their language.
The Norwegians have two languages - Bokm%C3%A5l and Nynorsk.
The standard language codes are NB and NN. However, most phones only support NB - with the language header of NB-NO.
To complicate matters, the NB Wikiedia is located at NO.wikipedia!
So, after much discussion with some Norwegians, I discovered that comparatively few people read NN. So, we came up with the following fix.
However, very few phones support NN (none have ever used QRpedia) so I'm not sure if this is the correct approach.
There are lots of other languages with Wikipedia supports, but which aren't well supported on phones. Wikipedia is available in nearly 300 different languages - from Scots and Simple English to Esperanto and Latin. Although, curiously, there's no separate Wikipedia for British English - or other regional English variants, nor is there one in Klingon
So, what should QRpedia do in the future? How should it handle all the thousands of languages in conjunction with the hundreds of Wikipedia languages?
That's where you come in.
If you've got a good idea on how we handle your favourite language - drop a comment on this blog.
If you're a coder, QRpedia is open-source. Check out the code and leave a comment, or raise a bug.
We need your help to determine what we do next.
You know Jimmy Wales, right? He's the guy co-founded Wikipedia - and, possibly, its most prominent face.
So, a few days ago, he popped down to The Children's Museum of Indianapolis to see the work the museum is doing with its Wikipedian in Residence - Lori Philips.
What else did he do while he was there? Why, scanned some QRpedia codes!
You can see all the photos of his visit on Wikimedia Commons.
My highly placed sources tell me that Mr Wales was highly impressed with the work the museum had done, and loved their innovative use of QRpedia.
If you'd like to get started with QRpedia - visit the main site to get started.
It's free, fast, and fantastic!
QRpedia is designed to offer a single QR code which points to the same article in multiple languages.
The most common question about QRpedia is "What does it do if the article doesn't exist in my language?"
Consider the following example...
This has been a matter for much debate in the QRpedia team. I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on the subject.
As we see it, our choices are...
At the moment, we do the smart search. In this case, we point to the French Wikipedia search for Nelahozeves - which has a couple of relevant results.
This isn't ideal. Often there are no suitable results - especially as we are searching French Wikipedia for a German word or phrase.
So - over to you. What should we do? Please leave your comments and suggestions.
