Share a fact with friends on the Wikipedia Android app

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File:Share-a-Fact on the Official Wikipedia Android app.webm

You can now easily share facts from the Wikipedia Android app. Watch this video for a quick preview. You can also watch it on YouTube or Vimeo. Video by Victor Grigas, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.

Have you ever won an argument by finding a fact on Wikipedia? Or maybe you love sharing Wikipedia articles with your friends and family?

If that sounds like you, there’s a new feature on the Wikipedia Android app you might enjoy! Now, you can easily and quickly create Wikipedia fact cards — images overlaid with whatever text you choose from an article — that can be shared with anyone via social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.), email, or text message.

Anyone can generate and share fact cards from the official Wikipedia Android app developed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Simply choose your favorite article, select some text, and then click the “Share as image” option. The app will pull the main image from the article and apply selected text on top. This card can then be shared with your friends, family, and the world on your communication channel of choice. You can also choose a text-only option if you prefer.

Quick guide

Step one: Choose and highlight text.

Share a fact
Strasbourg Wikipedia article with highlighted text to be shared.
Image by Dan Garry, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo by Jonathan Martz, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Step two: Click share.

Share a fact2
Share options for card creation.
Image by Dan Garry, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo by Jonathan Martz, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Step three: And the card is created!

Card to be shared on media channels. Image by Dan Garry, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Card to be shared on media channels.
Image by Dan Garry, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo by Jonathan Martz, CC BY-SA 3.0.

This is just one of many other existing features available on the Android app.

Other recently added features include:
• Read more feature at the end each article, to encourage further exploration
• Lead image at the top of each article, to engage readers in the topic
• Image gallery that lets you swipe left or right through all of an article’s images
• Nearby articles that suggest content related to your location
• Saved pages that allows you to read articles while offline

What do you think of this new feature? Let us know in the comments here — or share your own Wikipedia fact cards with us on Facebook or Twitter.

Dan Garry, Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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#23724

Nice, but to use our Open Content we need open access to this app, not via Play Store. So can we expect this app being available on Fdroid?

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#23725

When I choose Share as Image, facebook does not well. It says ‘Attach only photos or video…”.
But email does work very well.

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#23726

Great idea, thanks!

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#23727

Dan, you claim a copyright for screenshots an drelease them under CC by-sa 4.0. But you do not name the authors of the pictures that you display in those screenshots.
It looks like your app also does not pass along the attrbution nor the licence of shared images.
If so, the the “Share as image” option of your app would be a massive systematic copyvio.

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#23728

One tiny, tiny, tiny flaw: CC-BY-SA –> attribution desired.

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#23729

Sadly I have to agree with Martina. Images can have a wide range of possible licenses and most of them requires crediting the author and the specific license.

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#23730

+1 Martina and Raymond.
The share feature is a well meant, but poorly executed idea.
Especially multi-licensed files could become a problem, since uploaders usually don’t designate their preferred license for re-use.

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#23731

Allowing to share only facts with public domain photos would be the fastest solution to fix that Copyvio problem.
Creative Commons license text permits sharing works mentioning author, the correct license (including portation and version) and the source. Nothing of that I can see in those pictures.
Actually, I’m quite disappointed that even the Legal Team passed that. That feature is an obvious massive copyright violation.

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#23732

Please do not encourage people to share pictures of text; they are impossible for many people with visual impairments to see (with out alt (text alternative) attributes). We should strive to comply with WCAG accessibility guidelines (the ISO standard for such matters), in all we do.
BTW, are we any nearer to seeing the return of the map-based, scrollable “nearby”, which was such a benefit of v1.0 of the app?

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#23733

Aside from the serious copyright violation issue, I’m concerned people might edit fraudulent text into articles to cook up viral share-a-facts.

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#23734

When I try sharing an image through Tweetcaster, it doesn’t include the image in the tweet.

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#23735

i was wondering, since wikimedia is so active on making apps for ios and android, will you folks make a windows phone app? (i have no idea where to ask this question) nick.awkward@gmail.com

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#23736

Why is it not possible to simply send the wikipedia link? Opening the article from Google opens it in the app, meaning I’m not able to share it. This is a deal breaker for me.

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#23737

dan,i think it is a great idea, i really was amazed when i discovered it in the app; i wanted this for the web recently and couldnt find a good tool. is the technology available to be used on any url or as a wordpress plugin etc?

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#23738

When I try sharing an image through Tweetcaster, it doesn’t include the image in the tweet.

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