Quick Response (QR) codes \u2014 barcodes for the Internet \u2014 have taken off in a big way with the advent of the mobile revolution. They can be used for ticketing, marketing, product-labeling\u2026you name it. And now there\u2019s an interesting initiative that lets anyone create multilingual QR codes that link to Wikipedia articles.<\/p>\n
QRpedia<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span> was launched initially back in April, but in a blog post<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span> on Wikimedia on Wednesday, it seems its release is now official.<\/p>\n QRpedia emerged from a partnership between the Derby Museum and Gallery in England, and local Wikimedia contributors Roger Bamkin, chair of Wikimedia UK and “Wikipedian in Residence<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/strong>” at the Derby Museum, and Terence Eden, a mobile web consultant.<\/p>\n The combination of QRpedia and Wikipedia\u2019s API enables museums to produce a multilingual experience for visitors for next to no cost. The idea is that an exhibit has a QR code placed next to it, and users simply scan the code and they are taken to the relevant Wikipedia page in their language, reports The Next Web<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/strong>.<\/p>\n How does it work? Well, the language settings of a user\u2019s phone are transmitted during the scan, and QRpedia uses Wikipedia\u2019s API to pull up the relevant language-specific article. If it doesn\u2019t exist in a particular language, it will pull up the most relevant article instead.<\/p>\n