Tagzania: using and enriching Commons with a geo-guessing game
Speakers
Luistxo Fernandez. Basque Wikipedian, I was for 'president' of Basque Wikimedians User Group during 2021-2024. Active in Basque Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. Also working in an Internet company (CodeSyntax) that works with free software and free content: that company has released some mobile games that make use of Wikimedia content and in a particular new app/game, Tagzania, it also contributes user-content to Wikimedia Commons with an open CC license.
Abstract
Tagzania (Tagzania.com) is a geography guessing app, a daily game. Think of Geoguessr but with OpenStreetMap as the cartogaphic base and Wikimedia Commons as the imagery. Launched in December 2025, with a version in Basque, it will turn multilingual in spring, and be ready in English and French (at least) by the time of Wikimania.
The images shown in the game come from Wikimedia Commons, with creators, licenses and links acknowledged at the results page. But a feature in the game let's players also upload their photos from a given place: only live uploads, geolocated, and with cc-by-sa 4.0 licence explicitly approved. So users can propose new places to appear in the game, to be guessed by other players, and each uploader also gets stats about the appearence of own's places (number of views, median accuracy in distance...).
These uploads by users will also get to Commons soon. We are developing an upload bot, and hope to see it working in march. So Tagzania's usage of Commons wil be bi-directional: get free photos to populate the game, but also the pictures taken by players will end up in Commons, geotagged and categorized. Hope to see it running by Wikimedia time, with stats about usage and uploads.
Additional information
Freedom: Free images used in the gane (from Commons) and the favor is duly returned: free cc-by-sa photos taken by players while playing go to Commons. Equity: A project born in a minority language (Basque, a language with a strong Wikimedia community) will grow and be present in more languages soon. Reliability: app features allow for correct geotagging and categorizing of the content uploaded to Commons.
Fans of: Wikimedia Commons, simple daily games (like Wordle and Linkedin games and the like), geography nerds, people involved in minority-language Wikimedia projects
Everyone can participate in this session