QRmedia

QRmedia is a mobile-friendly tool which uses QR codes to deliver access to Wikimedia content to users in their preferred language. It is similar to QRpedia, but instead of being Wikipedia-centric, it aims at featuring the contents we have on all Wikimedia projects. Also, by relying on the Wikidata item QID instead of the Wikipedia article title, it is more stable in time.

The system is freely available for anyone to use at the QRmedia website.

History

The project was started at Wikimédia France in January 2019 for the WikiSevran project, after QRpedia was unreachable for some time. We decided to host our own instance, with the new feature of using the Wikidata qids in the URL.

The first version redirected to the Free Knowledge Portal, but after user feedback, and in order to be able to better track traffic, we switched in February 2020 to our own portal, which features contents (a main picture and several small thumbnails from Commons, the Wikipedia summary, a selection of books on Wikisource if the item is about an author, etc.) from the Wikimedia projects and not only links, in a style similar to the Wikipedia mobile apps.

Features

Easy QR code generation linking to a page portal that showcases contents from the relevant Wikimedia projects (and links to them) in the user language.
The ability to embed two additional informations in the URL: a project tag and the Wikidata id of the place it will be displayed. This allows to track monthly traffic statistics about how many visits the QR codes have received.

Development

The tool is developed in Python (Django) and Javascript (Vue.js). The code is available on Wikimedia GitLab.