en.planet.wikimedia

Wikipedia has a number of articles listing public artworks (statues, murals, etc) in counties, cities and towns, around the world. For example, in Birmingham. There’s also a list of the lists.

Boulton, Watt and Murdoch (1956) by William Bloye.
Image by Oosoom, CC BY-SA 3.0

There are, frankly, not enough of these articles; and few of those that do exist are anywhere near complete (the best is probably the list for Westminster).

How you can help

I invite you to collaborate with me, to make more lists, and to populate them.

You might have knowledge of your local artwork, or be able to visit your nearest library to make enquiries; or to take pictures (in the United Kingdom, of “permanent” works, for copyright reasons — for other countries, read up on local ‘Freedom of Panorama‘) and upload them to Wikimedia Commons, or even just find coordinates for items added by someone else. If you’re a hyperlocal blogger, or a journalist, perhaps you can appeal to your readership to assist?

Practical steps

You can enter details of an artwork using the “Public art row” family of templates. A blank entry looks like:


{{Public art row
| image =
| commonscat =
| subject =
| location =
| date =
| show_artist= yes
| artist =
| type =
| material =
| dimensions =
| designation =
| coordinates =
| owner =
| show_wikidata= yes
| wikidata =
| notes =
}}


(change “yes” to “no” if a particular column isn’t wanted) and you simply type in the information you have, like this:


{{Public art row
| image = Boulton, Watt and Murdoch.jpg
| commonscat = Statue of Boulton, Watt and Murdoch, Birmingham
| subject = ''[[Boulton, Watt and Murdoch]]''
| location = Near the House of Sport – Broad Street
| date = {{Start date|1956}}
| artist = [[William Bloye]]
| type = statue
| material = Gilded [[Bronze]]
| dimensions = 10 feet tall
| designation = Grade II listed
| coordinates = 52.478587,-1.908395
| owner = [[Birmingham City Council]]
| show_wikidata= yes
| wikidata = Q4949742
| notes = <ref>http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/whats-on/things-to-do/top-5-statues-birmingham-5678972</ref>
}}


Apart from the subject, all the values are optional.

In the above (as well as some invented values for illustrative purposes):

• Boulton, Watt and Murdoch.jpg represents the image at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boulton,_Watt_and_Murdoch.jpg (pictured above)
• Statue of Boulton, Watt and Murdoch, Birmingham represents the collection of images of the object on Wikimedia Commons, at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Statue_of_Boulton,_Watt_and_Murdoch,_Birmingham
• the '' marks italicise the title of the work
• {{Start date|1956}} wraps around the year
• [[ and ]] make a link to another Wikipedia article
• Q4949742 is the identifier for the item on Wikidata
• <ref> and </ref> wrap the web address, or name of a book, where you found the information

but if that’s too complicated, you can just enter text values, and someone else will come along and do the formatting (experienced Wikipedians can use the {{Coord}} template for coordinates, too). If you get stuck, drop me a line, or ask for help at Wikipedia’s Teahouse.

What this does

The “Public art row” template makes it easy to enter data, keeps everything tidy and consistently formatted, and makes the content machine-readable, That means that we can parse all the contents and enter them into Wikidata, creating new items if required, as we go.

We can then include other identifiers for the artworks in Wikidata, and include the artworks’ Wikidata identifiers in other systems such as OpenStreetMap, so everything becomes available as linked, open data for others to reuse and build new apps and tools with.

The ACLU and Wikimedia Foundation have filed to oppose the US government’s motion to dismiss our case against the NSA. Photo by Sam Howzit, freely licensed under CC-BY 2.0.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed another motion on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation and our eight co-plaintiffs in Wikimedia v. NSA. We promised to keep the community informed of the lawsuit’s progress, and today we are happy to provide another update.

Wikimedia v. NSA originally began in March, when the Wikimedia Foundation and our co-plaintiffs challenged the United States National Security Agency’s (NSA) large-scale search and seizure of internet communications known as “upstream” surveillance. This lawsuit is part of our ongoing effort to stand up for free expression and protect the privacy rights of our users around the world. In June, we filed an amended complaint in response to the Government’s motion to dismiss our case. As we explained then, motions to dismiss are a basic procedural hurdle common to most lawsuits in the United States.

Last month, as expected, the government moved to dismiss our amended complaint on “standing” grounds. In this type of motion, the government argues that the plaintiffs, including Wikimedia, have not demonstrated a harm that they can challenge in court (i.e., that they do not “have standing”). Yesterday’s filing opposed the government’s recent motion, point by point, underscoring the harm to Wikimedia and the illegality of the NSA’s dragnet surveillance, as spelled out in the amended complaint. It is the result of hard work and extensive collaboration between our excellent attorneys at the ACLU and Cooley LLP, who are representing us pro bono on this filing. The Wikimedia Foundation’s legal team and staff also provided support.

This is just the next step in a long process. The government will have a chance to reply, and then both sides will present oral arguments at a hearing in the U.S. District Court of Maryland on September 25, 2015. Regardless of the outcome, we anticipate other motions before a decision on the constitutionality of the surveillance. We will continue to work with the ACLU and Cooley to put forward the best possible case, and we are eager to have our claims heard by the Court. As before, we promise to post future updates as events unfold.

For more on this case, you can read about mass surveillance and Wikimedia on our new public policy portal or see the pleadings that have been filed to date.

Michelle Paulson, Legal Director
Geoff Brigham, General Counsel

Special thanks to all who are supporting our efforts in this matter in a variety of ways, including Patrick Toomey (ACLU), Jameel Jaffer (ACLU), Alex Abdo (ACLU), Ashley Gorski (ACLU), Aarti Reddy (Cooley), Amanda Levendowski (Cooley), Patrick Gunn (Cooley), Ben Kleine (Cooley), and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Victoria Baranetsky, Zhou Zhou, Aeryn Palmer, Jim Buatti, Oliver Keyes, Kevin Leduc, Faidon Liambotis, Andrew Otto, Dan Andreescu, Grace Gellerman, and Dario Taraborelli.

This post has been updated to clarify that Cooley LLP is representing the Wikimedia Foundation on a pro bono basis for this filing.

George Pendergast survived a kamikaze attack in the Second World War. Today, he edits Wikipedia. Both photos—from 1943 and earlier this year, respectively—are courtesy of George Pendergast.

Over seventy years ago, the US destroyer Mahan was patrolling off Ponson Island in the Philippines when eleven Japanese kamikaze aircraft appeared over the horizon and attacked. The bombers in the group bored in with bombs armed. US Army fighter aircraft shot down three and damaged two; Mahan‍ ’​s gunners took out another four.

George Pendergast, who edits Wikipedia with the username Pendright, was eighteen years old when he joined Mahan‍ ’​s crew in April 1944. About half of the ship’s crew at that time was made up of green, untested teenagers. Pendergast served aboard the ship as a fireman, second class, a low-end position that “required little brainpower but much speed and dexterity.”

He would function as one of a three-part crew: one each for oil, air, and water. These individuals had to work very closely together when hunting a submarine, a process that required the destroyer to run quickly at varying speeds. “Through a system of communication, the bridge would send down an order for ‘full steam ahead’: that meant the fireman had to bat open twelve burners, feeding oil into the firebox, as quickly as possible; the man on the air had to feed the air simultaneously for proper combustion; and the water checker had to feed more water into the boiler, or it might go dry and blow. Now, five minutes later, the next order might be ‘stop’, which meant all twelve burners had to be batted closed, the air guy had to cut the air, and the water checker had to cut the water, so it would not overflow and kill the fire.” The steam produced through this process would be fed to the engine room, which controlled the propellers that actually moved the ship.

Pendergast’s position kept him in the often unbearable heat of the fireroom, blind to the world outside. Pendergast would stand watches of four hours on and eight or twelve off. If he was off watch between 8am and 4pm, however, he would have to report to the fireroom regardless. “You might chip paint, do some painting, clean burners and floor plates, or do other menial tasks,” he said. “The Navy made sure you kept busy—no days off!” Still, when the sailors were off duty, there was little more to do besides sleep, eat, read, and write home. Many men took to gambling their salaries, a problem so pervasive that the navy limited salary dispersal while underway to just five dollars every two weeks—the sailors were paid in cash.

Wartime US film depicting kamikaze strikes and the explosions they caused. Video by the US Department of Defense, public domain.

If the ship was in battle, the stress level changed. Being below Mahan‍ ’​s deck, Pendergast had little clue as to what was going on outside. They were forced to use the tempo and weight of the ship’s armament to compensate. “The guns told you what was happening,” he told me. “If you heard the five-inch guns booming away, the enemy was still at a distance. When the 40-mm anti-aircraft guns started blasting away, they were getting closer. When you’d hear the 20-mm guns, you knew it was time to worry.”

On 7 December 1944, those 20-mm guns were used extensively. Mahan was not a large ship, displacing only 1500 to 1800 long tons. Furthermore, it was primarily intended for surface and anti-submarine warfare, and as such was not heavily armed with anti-aircraft weapons—by 1944, wartime refits brought the major weaponry to four 5-inch, two twin 40-mm, and four to six 20-mm guns.

Exactly three years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the battle that brought the US into the Second World War, Mahan faced down the eleven Japanese aircraft off Ponson Island. Despite its crew’s best efforts, the ship was hit by three Japanese kamikaze aircraft. The kinetic impact of these strikes was augmented by the fuel they were carrying. One struck the superstructure, where the bridge—staffed by the captain and crewmen at the helm—was located.

After receiving the order to abandon ship, Pendergast and his crewmates climbed up to emerge into a world that had changed greatly since they last saw it:

Training crewmen aboard the Mahan-class destroyer Shaw to use an unshielded 5″/38 caliber gun. Photo by the US Navy, public domain.

Pendergast went on to serve in the much quieter Caribbean and European theaters aboard Cone from 18 August 1945 until 21 March 1946. He later got a degree and became a government accountant and auditor.

In his mid-80s, Pendergast got involved with Wikipedia after a local military museum asked him to write about women in the military. Accordingly, his first edits on the site were to Cadet Nurse Corps in October 2011. He was motivated by the idea of contributing to something with a lasting sense of value and by bringing his shipmates’ war history up to the “level they rightfully earned.”

In the years since, he’s turned 90 and written featured articles on Mahan and the Mahan-class destroyer, which examines the eighteen identical warships that Mahan led. The class article was featured on Wikipedia’s main page on 16 January 2015 and was visited approximately 48,000 times in a four-day period. He has had a very positive experience on the site, and plans to keep contributing for as long as he is able to.

I asked Pendergast whether the current generation of US history enthusiasts—people who have had little direct experience with conscription, let alone war—is missing crucial life experiences that derogatorily affect their views and writing. He does not think so. “There have been many successful coaches in sports—yet some of them never played the game or ever played it very well. Historians are another example.”

For older individuals who want to contribute, Pendergast advises that they should make use of Wikipedia’s mentoring processes, such as the Teahouse, the adopt-a-user program, or the upcoming co-op, and choose a subject that they are both passionate about and knowledgeable in. He also noted that studying articles near their preferred topic would help them learn the intricacies of wiki markup, and that they should join Wikipedia groups and activities when offered. Finally and most importantly, “be bold, but don’t bite off more than [you can] chew.”

Near the end of our correspondence, I backtracked to ask Pendergast about his most vivid memory from that day.

Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate
Wikimedia Foundation

This blog post was originally published in the Signpost, a news journal about the English Wikipedia and the Wikimedia community. It was slightly edited and updated for publication on the Wikimedia blog.

Mahan‍ ’​s sister ship, Shaw, in 1942. Photo from the Library of Congress, public domain.

Another month is starting, and we have several significant fixes in ContentTranslation deployed this week:

• On Friday morning (UTC) articles could not be published from ContentTranslation because of an issue with the connection to the Parsoid server. This was fixed on Friday early afternoon. (bug report)
• In a rare case, when a logged-in user published an article after having logged out in a different browser tab, the translated article was marked with an IP address. A fix for this was deployed on August 31: now, if a user becomes logged-out during the translation, he will be asked to log in again. Our thanks go out to Katie Filbert from the Wikidata development team, as well as to Antoine Musso and Željko Filipin from the release engineering team for their assistance with the deployment. (code change)

• For the last couple of weeks it could happen that the same footnote with a template like {{cite web}} (or similar) would appear several times in the translated text, instead of the different footnotes that were supposed to appear. This happened in several languages, among them French, Afrikaans and Hebrew. A fix for this was deployed on September 2. (bug report)

• Several bugs with the support for the two varieties of the Norwegian language were fixed: Link adaptation, categories adaptation and starting a translation using the gray interlanguage link.
• Certain types of references were causing the publishing to fail. A fix in the Parsoid service now makes publishing the translation possible, although the problematic references will not appear in the published article. (bug report)
• If a long string or URL appeared in a reference card in the sidebar, it could show up as overflowing outside the boundaries of the card. This was fixed. (bug report)
• Some language names were appearing in a messy manner on the Content Translation Statistics page. All the names are supposed to be aligned nicely now. (bug report)

In other news:

• According to our logs, the number of publishing errors went sharply down thanks to several fixes that were made in the code of ContentTranslation, Parsoid and Flow in the recent weeks:

• The 18,000th article was written: Monoculture, translated from English into Serbian.
• About 1,200 articles were created using ContentTranslation in all languages each week in August. On the average, 63 articles created using ContentTranslation were deleted every week.

Photo by Ktr101, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Last year, a small group of volunteer Wikipedians—researchers, programmers, and editors—wanted to build a help space that automatically matched editors to mentors and allow new editors to more easily decide how they want to contribute.  Through an Individual Engagement Grant (IEG), the team conducted research, design work, and testing, which culminated in the Co-op, a mentorship space now available to everyone on the English Wikipedia.

If you have an idea like or completely different from this that will improve a Wikimedia project, consider participating in IEG’s open call for proposals from August 30th through September 29th on Meta.  If your idea is still a seed, you can share it in our IdeaLab to seek staff mentorship, community feedback, and a team of collaborators to help it evolve.  If your idea has community support and your team is developed enough that you just need funding to launch your project, you can easily transform it into a grant proposal with the Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) program and submit it for review.  

In the current round, proposals for IEG funding will be accepted through September 29, 2015.  The program has a flexible schedule and reporting structure and staff will be available on Meta to support you through all stages of the process.  Proposals for up to $30,000 are considered; most grantees are awarded between $300 and $15,000 to support a wide range of activities and expenses, including project management, consultants, materials, and travel.

Image licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

After you submit your proposal, it will undergo review to make sure it meets all eligibility criteria. Proposals should support the achievement of Wikimedia’s mission and strategic priorities. We are looking for experiments with strong community engagement and a high potential for learning and impact, among other selection criteria.  Proposals are commented on by the community and reviewed by the committee before grantees are announced on December 4.  We are accepting new committee candidates through September 9.

During the month of September, we’ll be hosting several online Google Hangout sessions for real-time help on how to make your proposal better. The first one will take place on September 8 at 15:00 UTC.

Image by Emily Temple-Wood, freely licensed under CC-BY 1.0.

What’s new for 2015?

With help from the Engineering Community Team, we have made IEG more friendly for technical projects.  Software features requiring code review and integration will now be eligible for funding, so long as grantees and their advisors have the appropriate skills and credentials to plan, perform code review, and deploy the software independently.  We still need tech-savvy volunteers to join our committee.  If you’d like to engage with the new ideas coming out of the engineering community, contact iegrants@wikimedia.org.

By working together we can make an impact on the future of Wikimedia projects. We are excited to see the new ways your project ideas can support the Wikimedia community! Share your idea in IdeaLab or begin your IEG request in September. You can start today!

Marti JohnsonProgram Officer Individual GrantsWikimedia Foundation

Imagine a world where everyone can freely access, share, create, and remix knowledge. Spock Monroe” by Ludovic Bertron, freely licensed under CC-by-2.0.

The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to introduce the new Wikimedia Public Policy site. Public policy is vital for a world where everyone can freely access, share, create, and remix knowledge. The new site presents five policy areas that are most important for our mission and projects: access, censorship, copyright, intermediary protection, and privacy. Wikimedians can take action to support public policies to expand free knowledge. With the right laws, policies, and principles, free knowledge will be easier to collaboratively create, share, and remix.

This site is another important step toward protecting Wikimedians from censorship or reprisal due to sharing free knowledge, problems we have faced before. In 2011, the Italian parliament considered a law limiting free speech. The Wikipedia community took action to oppose it. For three days, Italian Wikipedia showed a message explaining how this proposal could endanger free knowledge. In 2012, the Wikipedia community came together to blackout the English-language Wikipedia for 24 hours in opposition to SOPA. That same year, the Russian Duma passed legislation that promoted censorship of sites the government found inappropriate, so the Russian Wikipedia went black to bring attention to free speech concerns. More recently, the Russian Wikipedia responded to threats of censorship with a steadfast commitment to delivering neutral, reliable information. The public policy site is a place to coordinate new types of policy actions to support our mission without interfering with sharing of knowledge on Wikipedia.

This year, Wikimedians advocated together to preserve the freedom of panorama so Wikimedians can upload outdoor images without fearing unfair legal suits. And on Meta-Wiki, the community has worked hard to build a consensus on how governments’ actions affect our values. Furthering these same goals, the new site gives the Wikimedia community a greater voice in public policy.

We invite you to learn about Wikimedia’s public policy positions at this site and join the policy discussion list. The material on the site will be maintained as a living document, and edits are welcome on this wiki version.

Yana Welinder, Legal Director
Stephen LaPorte, Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation

Special thanks to Mule Design and Heather Walls for their work on the policy site and the rest of the Legal and Communications teams for their help with this project.

Here are some of the global news stories covered on Wikipedia this week:

• New Zealand announces a shortlist of four flags to be voted on in a referendum.
• Google radically changes its logo for the first time in sixteen years.
• Mt. McKinley is officially renamed “Denali”, ending a 40-year dispute.
• The 2015 World Athletics Championships conclude in Beijing.
• The Temple of Bel is destroyed by jihadist group ISIL in Syria.

New Zealand flag debate

The current flag of New Zealand may soon be under threat. Photo by Edward Hyde, freely licensed under CC-BY 2.0.

Some residents of New Zealand have long pushed for a move away from their current flag and for the use of a more distinguishable flag to represent them. The debate has recently led to a series of referenda in which citizens will vote for a new design, before voting on whether to change at all. This week, four flag designs were shortlisted to go to a public vote later this year. However, critics argue that changing the national flag is low on the public’s list of issues, and say the money put into the referendum plan might have been better used elsewhere.

Learn more in these related Wikipedia articles: New Zealand flag debate

Google changes logo

Google’s latest logo matches their new Alphabet branding. Image a trademark of Google Inc, available under public domain as not meeting threshold of originality.

Tech giant Google topped its recent restructuring into Alphabet Inc with a new logo mirroring that of the new umbrella company. The logo, announced today (September 1), switches to a sans-serif typeface—the tailor-made Product Sans—for the first time in the company’s history, as well as softening the colour palette. It is the first major change to their logo in sixteen years. The announcement was made, in part, through a “Google Doodle” for which their search engine is famous.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Google logo

Mount McKinley renamed

The renaming ends a forty-year dispute. Image by Dubhe, freely licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

This week, Mount McKinley, a mountain in Alaska named after assassinated U.S. president William McKinley in 1917, was officially renamed back to Denali. “Denali”, which translates to “the high one” in the Athabaskan languages spoken by Alaska Natives living around the mountain, has been in common use in the state despite the renaming. In 1975, the state began a dispute to have the mountain renamed back to Denali, a move oft blocked by Congressional delegation from McKinley’s home state of Ohio. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced the name change on Sunday, August 30.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Denali–Mount McKinley naming dispute

World Athletics Championships conclude

Ashton Eaton, pictured in 2011, set a new world record score in the Men’s Decathlon. Image by Erik van Leeuwen, freely licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

The 2015 World Championships in Athletics, hosted by Beijing, China, concluded on Sunday, August 30, following a week of competition. 43 nations made it to the medal table, which was topped by Kenya for the first time in the event’s history; the African country ended with seven gold medals over the week. The event saw the debut competition for new IAAF member state Kosovo; South Sudan‘s first athlete did not show up. American decathlete Ashton Eaton set a new world record for highest points tally with 9045, breaking his own record set at the 2012 US Olympic trials.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: 2015 World Championships in Athletics

Temple of Bel destroyed in Syria

The temple is one of the many cultural artifacts now destroyed by the group. Image by Bernard Gagnon, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

The Temple of Bel, located in Palmyra, Syria, was one of the best-preserved ruins in the ancient city. It was dedicated in 32 AD, and was a major temple in Palmyrene culture. On Sunday, August 30, the temple was attacked by jihadist group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, causing severe damage to the main building as well as to a row of columns nearby. The destruction of the temple follows a similar attack earlier in the year on the nearby Temple of Baalshamin; both attacks have been condemned by world leaders and UNESCO.

Learn more in these related Wikipedia articles: Temple of Bel, Destruction of cultural heritage by ISIL

Photo montage credits: “NZ flag Photo.jpg” by Edward Hyde, freely licensed under CC-BY 2.0; “Ashton Eaton 2 Daegu 2011.jpg” by Erik van Leeuwen, freely licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License; GoogleLogoSept12015.png” a trademark of Google Inc, available under public domain as not meeting threshold of originality; “Temple of Bel, Palmyra 02.jpg” by Bernard Gagnon, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0; “0751 – mckinley.jpg” by Dubhe, freely licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. Collage by Joe Sutherland

To see how other news events are covered on the English Wikipedia, check out the ‘In the news’ section on its main page.

Joe Sutherland, Communications Intern, Wikimedia Foundation

In mid-August, I joined 17,000 chemists in Boston for the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

Among sessions ranging from phytochemistry to nanomaterials, the ACS chemical information division hosted a symposium on Wikipedia, collaboration, and education. That symposium attracted speakers from the Wikipedia community, academia, and government.

Dr. Ye Li is the chemistry librarian at the University of Michigan, and has been supporting and teaching Wikipedia assignments there. Together, we presented a workshop on contributing to Wikipedia through classrooms. ​Dr. Li presented lessons from her experience with courses at the University of Michigan.

In particular, she outlined how Wikipedia assignments helped her students read source material more critically. Students working with Dr. Li reported that writing articles for public review and feedback was a great motivating factor during the assignment. She found that giving students time to respond to volunteer feedback during the course of the assignment was a crucial part of the Wikipedia assignment for students.

Other presentations covered collaboration between volunteers and chemical databases like PubChem and CAS to add and validate information on chemical structures and reactions. Elsa Alvaro from Northwestern University measured the scope and scale of Wikipedia’s coverage of chemistry, exploring nearly 22,000 articles to show the distribution of contributions and contributors. Jian Zhang from the National Institute of Health went into greater detail on the means by which outside organizations can check the validity of information on Wikipedia. The verification fields on chemical infoboxes help ensure that Wikipedia points to the right information in the publicly available databases. Martin Walker from SUNY Potsdam gave a survey of the tools and projects developed by volunteer editors to support that collaboration.

Later in the week, Dr. Li (User:ChemLibrarian), Martin Walker (User:Walkerma), and Keith Lindblom of the ACS facilitated an edit-a-thon, creating new Chemistry-related articles on the English Wikipedia, such as Römpp and a biographical page about Charles P. Casey.

Adam Hyland
Content Expert, Humanities

Photo: “Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge – Boston, MA” by Wsvan – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Vol: 5 • Issue: 8 • August 2015 [contribute] [archives]

OpenSym 2015 report; PageRank and wiki quality; news suggestions; the impact of open access

With contributions by: Morten Warncke-Wang, Brian Keegan, Piotr Konieczny, Andrew Gray, Tilman Bayer, Srijan Kumar, and Guillaume Paumier

OpenSym 2015

The Presidio and Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco (the conference venue is in the left center)
“Main ggate” by Robert Campbell, under CC BY-SA 3.0

OpenSym, the eleventh edition of the annual conference formerly known as WikiSym, took place on August 19 and 20 at the Golden Gate Club in the Presidio of San Francisco, USA, followed by an one-day doctoral symposium. While the name change (enacted last year) reflects the event’s broadened scope towards open collaboration in general, a substantial part of the proceedings (23 papers and posters) still consisted of research featuring Wikipedia (8) and other wikis (three, two of them other Wikimedia projects: Wikidata and Wikibooks), listed in more detail below. However, it was not represented in the four keynotes, even if some of their topics did offer inspiration to those interested in Wikimedia research. For example, in the Q&A after the keynote by Peter Norvig (Director of Research at Google) about machine learning, Norvig was asked where such AI techniques could help human Wikipedia editors with high “force multiplication“. He offered various ideas for applications of a “natural language processing pipeline” to Wikipedia content, such as automatically suggesting “see also” topics, potentially duplicate article topics, or “derivative” article updates (e.g. when an actor’s article is updated with an award won, the list of winners of that award should be updated too). The open space part of the schedule saw very limited usage, although it did facilitate a discussion that might lead to a revival of a Wikitrust-like service in the not too distant future (similar to the existing Wikiwho project).

As in previous years, the Wikimedia Foundation was the largest sponsor of the conference, with the event organizers’ open grant application supported by testimonials by several Wikimedians and academic researchers about the usefulness of the conference over the past decade. This time, the acceptance rate was 43%. The next edition of the conference will take place in Berlin in August 2016.

An overview of the Wikipedia/Wikimedia-related papers and posters follows, including one longer review.

• “Wikipedia in the World of Global Gender Inequality Indices: What The Biography Gender Gap Is Measuring” (poster)^[1]
• “Peer-production system or collaborative ontology engineering effort: What is Wikidata?”^[2] presented the results of an extensive classification of edits on Wikidata, touching on such topics as the division of labor (i.e. the differences in edit types) between bots and human editors. Answering the title question, the presentation concluded that Wikidata can be regarded as a peer production system now (i.e. an open collaboration, which is also more accessible for contributors than Semantic MediaWiki), but could veer into more systematic “ontology engineering” in the future.
• “The Evolution Of Knowledge Creation Online: Wikipedia and Knowledge Processes”^[3]: This poster applied evolution theory to Wikipedia’s knowledge processes, using the “Blind Variation and Selective Retention” model.
• “Contribution, Social networking, and the Request for Adminship process in Wikipedia “^[4]: This poster examined a 2006/2007 dataset of admin elections on the English Wikipedia, finding that the optimal numbers of edits and talk page interactions with users to get elected as Wikipedia admin fall into “quite narrow windows”.
• “The Rise and Fall of an Online Project. Is Bureaucracy Killing Efficiency in Open Knowledge Production?”^[5] This paper compared 37 different language Wikipedias, asking which of them “are efficient in turning the input of participants and participant contributions into knowledge products, and whether this efficiency is due to a distribution of participants among the very involved (i.e., the administrators), and the occasional contributors, to the projects’ stage in its life cycle or to other external variables.” They measured a project’s degree of bureaucracy using the numerical ratio of the number of admins vs. the number of anonymous edits and vs. the number of low activity editors. Among the findings summarized in the presentation: Big Wikipedias are less efficient (partly due to negative economies of scale), and efficient Wikipedias are significantly more administered.
• “#Wikipedia on Twitter: Analyzing Tweets about Wikipedia”: See the review in our last issue
• “Page Protection: Another Missing Dimension of Wikipedia Research”^[6] Following up on their paper from last year’s WikiSym where they had urged researchers to “consider the redirect”^[7] when studying pageview data on Wikipedia, the authors argued that page protection deserves more attention when studying editing activity – it affects e.g. research on breaking news articles, as these are often protected. They went through the non-trivial task of reconstructing every article’s protection status at a given moment in time from the protection log, resulting in a downloadable dataset, and encountered numerous inconsistencies and complications in the process (caused e.g. by the combination of deletion and protection). In general, they found that 14% of pageviews are to edit-protected articles.
• “Collaborative OER Course Development – Remix and Reuse Approach”^[8] reported on the creation of four computer science textbooks on Wikibooks for undergradaute courses in Malaysia.
• “Public Domain Rank: Identifying Notable Individuals with the Wisdom of the Crowd”^[9] “provides a novel and reproducible index of notability for all [authors of public domain works who have] Wikipedia pages, based on how often their works have been made available on sites such as Project Gutenberg (see also earlier coverage of a related paper co-authored by the author: “Ranking public domain authors using Wikipedia data“)

“Tool-Mediated Coordination of Virtual Teams”

Review by Morten Warncke-Wang

“Tool-Mediated Coordination of Virtual Teams in Complex Systems”^[10] is the title of a paper at OpenSym 2015. The paper is a theory-driven examination of edits done by tools and tool-assisted contributors to WikiProjects in the English Wikipedia. In addition to studying the extent of these types of edits, the paper also discusses how they fit into larger ecosystems through the lens of commons-based peer production^{[supp 1]} and coordination theory.^{[supp 2]}

Identifying automated and tool-assisted edits in Wikipedia is not trivial, and the paper carefully describes the mixed-method approach required to successfully discover these types of edits. For instance, some automated edits are easy to detect because they’re done by accounts that are members of the “bot” group, while tool-assisted edits might require manual inspection and labeling. The methodology used in the paper should be useful for future research that aims to look at similar topics.

Measuring Wiki Quality with PageRank

Review by Morten Warncke-Wang and Tilman Bayer

A paper from the WETICE 2015 conference titled “Analysing Wiki Quality using Probabilistic Model Checking”^[11] studies the quality of enterprise wikis running on the MediaWiki platform through a modified PageRank algorithm and probabilistic model checking. First, the paper defines a set of five properties describing quality through links between pages. A couple of examples are “temples”, articles which are disconnected from other articles (akin to orphan pages in Wikipedia), and “God” pages, articles which can be immediately reached from other pages. A stratified sample of eight wikis was selected from the WikiTeam dump, and measures extracted using the PRISM model checker. Across these eight wikis, quality varied greatly, for instance some wikis have a low proportion of unreachable pages, which is interpreted as a sign of quality.

The methodology used to measure wiki quality is interesting as it is an automated method that describes the link structure of a wiki, which can be turned into a support tool. However, the paper could have been greatly improved by discussing information quality concepts and connecting it more thoroughly to the literature, research on content quality in Wikipedia in particular. Using authority to measure information quality is not novel, in the Wikipedia-related literature we find it in Stvilia’s 2005 work on predicting Wikipedia article quality^{[supp 3]}, where authority is reflected in the “proportion of admin edits” feature, and in a 2009 paper by Dalip et al.^{[supp 4]} PageRank is part of their set of network features, a set that is found to have little impact on predicting quality. While these two examples aim to predict content quality, whereas the reviewed paper more directly measures the quality of the link structure, it is a missed opportunity for a discussion on what encompasses information quality. This discussion of information quality and how high quality can be achieved in wiki systems is further hindered by the paper not properly defining “enterprise wiki”, leaving the reader wondering if there is at all much of an information quality difference between these and Wikimedia wikis.

The paper builds on an earlier one that the authors presented at last year’s instance of the WETICE conference, where they outlined “A Novel Methodology Based on Formal Methods for Analysis and Verification of Wikis”^[12] based on Calculus of communicating systems (CCS). In that paper, they also applied their method to Wikipedia, examining the three categories “Fungi found in fairy rings“, “Computer science conferences” and “Naval battles involving Great Britain” as an experiment. Even though these only form small subsets of Wikipedia, computing time reached up to 30 minutes.

“Automated News Suggestions for Populating Wikipedia entity Pages”

A paper accepted for publication at the 2015 Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2015) by scientists from the L3S Research Center in Hannover, Germany that suggests news articles for Wikipedia articles to incorporate.^[13] The paper builds on prior work that examines approaches for automatically generating new Wikipedia articles from other knowledge bases, accelerating contributions to existing articles, and determining the salience of new entities for a given text corpus. The paper overlooks some other relevant work about breaking news on Wikipedia,^{[supp 5]} news citation practices,^{[supp 6]} and detecting news events with plausibility checks against social media streams.^{[supp 7]}

Methodologically, this work identifies and recommends news articles based on four features (salience, authority, novelty, and placement) while also recognizing that the relevance for news items to Wikipedia articles changes over time. The paper evaluates their approach using a corpus of 350,000 news articles linked from 73,000 entity pages. The model uses the existing news, article, and section information as ground truth and evaluates its performance by comparing its recommendations against the relations observed in Wikipedia. This research demonstrates that there is still a substantial amount of potential for using historical news archives to recommend revisions to existing Wikipedia content to make them more up-to-date. However, the authors did not release a tool to make these recommendations in practice, so there’s nothing for the community to use yet. While Wikipedia covers many high-profile events, it nevertheless has a self-focus bias towards events and entities that are culturally proximate.^{[supp 8]} This paper shows there is substantial promise in making sure all of Wikipedia’s articles are updated to reflect the most recent knowledge.

“Amplifying the Impact of Open Access: Wikipedia and the Diffusion of Science”

Review by Andrew Gray

This paper, developed from one presented at the 9th International Conference on Web and Social Media, examined the citations used in Wikipedia and concluded that articles from open access journals were 47% more likely to be cited than articles from comparable closed-access journals.^[14] In addition, it confirmed that a journal’s impact factor correlates with the likelihood of citation. The methodology is interesting and extensive, calculating the most probable ‘neighbors’ for a journal in terms of subject, and seeing if it was more or less likely to be cited than these topical neighbors. The expansion of the study to look at fifty different Wikipedias, and covering a wide range of source topics, is welcome, and opens up a number of very promising avenues for future research – why, for example, is so little scholarly research on dentistry cited on Wikipedia, compared to that for medicine? Why do some otherwise substantially-developed Wikipedias like Polish, Italian, or French cite relatively few scholarly papers?

Unfortunately, the main conclusion of the paper is quite limited. While the authors do convincingly demonstrate that articles in their set of open access journals are cited more frequently, this does not necessarily generalise to say whether open access articles in general are – which would be a substantially more interesting result. It has previously been shown that as of 2014, around half of all scientific literature published in recent years is open access in some form – that is, a reader can find a copy freely available somewhere on the internet.^{[supp 9]} Of these, only around 15% of papers were published in the “fully” open access journals covered by the study. This means that almost half of the “closed access” citations will have been functionally open access – and as Wikipedia editors generally identify articles to cite at the article level, rather than the journal level, it makes it very difficult to draw any conclusions on the basis of access status. The authors do acknowledge this limitation – “Furthermore, free copies of high impact articles from closed access journals may often be easily found online” – but perhaps had not quite realised the scale of ‘alternative’ open access methods.

In addition, a plausible alternative explanation is not considered in the study: fully open access journals tend to be younger. Two-thirds of those listed in Scopus have begun publication since 2005, against only around a third of closed-access titles, which are more likely to have a substantial corpus of old papers. It is reasonable to assume that Wikipedia would tend towards discussing and citing more recent research (the extensively-discussed issue of “recentism“). If so, we would expect to see a significant bias in favour of these journals for reasons other than their access status.

Early warning system identifies likely vandals based on their editing behavior

Accuracy of VEWS system with ClueBot NG and STiki

Summary by Srijan Kumar, Francesca Spezzano and V.S. Subrahmanian

“VEWS: A Wikipedia Vandal Early Warning System” is a system developed by researchers at University of Maryland that predicts users on Wikipedia who are likely to be vandals before they are flagged for acts of vandalism.^[15] In a paper presented at KDD 2015 this August, we analyze differences in the editing behavior of vandals and benign users. Features that distinguish between vandals and benign users are derived from metadata about consecutive edits by a user and capture time between consecutive edits (very fast vs. fast vs. slow), commonalities amongst categories of consecutively edited pages, hyperlink distance between pages, etc. These features are extended to also use the entire edit history of the user. Since the features only depend on the meta-data from an editor’s edits, VEWS can be applied to any language Wikipedia.

For their experiments, we used a dataset of about 31,000 users (representing a 50-50 split of vandals and benign users), since released on our website. All experiments were done on the English Wikipedia. The paper reports an accuracy of 87.82% with a 10-fold cross validation, as compared to a 50% baseline. Even with the user’s first edit, the accuracy of identifying the vandal is 77.4%. As seen in the figure, predictive accuracy increases with the number of edits used for classification.

Current systems such as ClueBot NG and STiki are very efficient at detecting vandalism edits in English (but not foreign languages), but detecting vandals is not their primary task. Straightforward adaptations of ClueBot NG and STiki to identify vandals yields modest performance. For instance, VEWS detects a vandal on average 2.39 edits before ClueBot NG. Interestingly, incorporating the features from ClueBot NG and STiki into VEWS slightly improves the overall accuracy, as depicted in the figure. Overall, the combination of VEWS and ClueBot NG is a fully automated vandal early warning system for English language Wikipedia, while VEWS by itself provides strong performance for identifying vandals in any language.

“DBpedia Commons: Structured Multimedia Metadata from the Wikimedia Commons”

Review by Guillaume Paumier

DBpedia Commons: Structured Multimedia Metadata from the Wikimedia Commons is the title of a paper accepted to be presented at the upcoming 14th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2015) to be held in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania on October 11-15, 2015.^[16] In the paper, the authors describe their use of DBpedia tools to extract file and content metadata from Wikimedia Commons, and make it available in RDF format.

The authors used a dump of Wikimedia Commons’s textual content from January 2015 as the basis of their work. They took into account “Page metadata” (title, contributors) and “Content metadata” (page content including information, license and other templates, as well as categories). They chose not to include content from the Image table (“File metadata”, e.g. file dimensions, EXIF metadata, MIME type) to limit their software development efforts.

The authors expanded the existing DBpedia Information Extraction Framework (DIEF) to support special aspects of Wikimedia Commons. Four new extractors were implemented, to identify a file’s MIME type, images in a gallery, image annotations, and geolocation. The properties they extracted, using existing infobox extractors and the new ones, were mapped to properties from the DBpedia ontology.

The authors boast a total of 1.4 billion triples inferred as a result of their efforts, nearly 100,000 of which come from infobox mappings. The resulting datasets are now included in the DBpedia collection, and available through a dedicated interface for individual files (example) and SPARQL queries.

It seems like a missed opportunity to have ignored properties from the Image table. This choice caused the authors to re-implement MIME type identification by parsing file extensions themselves. Other information, like the date of creation of the file, or shutter speed for digital photographs, is also missing as a consequence of this choice. The resulting dataset is therefore not as rich as it could have been; since File metadata is stored in structured format in the MediaWiki database, it would arguably have been easier to extract than the free-form Content metadata the authors included.

It is also slightly disappointing that the authors didn’t mention the CommonsMetadata API, an existing MediaWiki interface that extracts Content metadata like licenses, authors and descriptions. It would have been valuable to compare the results they extracted with the DBpedia framework with those returned by the API.

Nonetheless, the work described in the paper is interesting in that it focuses on a lesser-known wiki than Wikipedia, and explores the structuring of metadata from a wiki whose content is already heavily soft-structured with templates. The resulting datasets and interfaces may provide valuable insights to inform the planning, modeling and development of native structured data on Commons using Wikibase, the technology that powers Wikidata.

Briefly

Wikipedia in education as an acculturation process

This paper^[17] looks at the benefits of using Wikipedia in the classroom, stressing, in addition to the improvement in writing skills, the importance of acquiring digital literacy skills. In other words, by learning how to edit Wikipedia students acquire skills that are useful, and perhaps essential, in today’s world, such as ability to learn about online project’s norms and values, how to deal with trolls, how to work with other in collaborative online projects, etc. The authors discuss those concepts through the acculturation theory and develop their views further through the grounded theory methodology. They portray learning as an acculturation process that occurs when two independent cultural systems (Wikipedia and academia) come into contact.

Other recent publications

A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue – contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

• “Depiction of cultural points of view on homosexuality using Wikipedia as a proxy”^[18]
• “The Sum of All Human Knowledge in Your Pocket: Full-Text Searchable Wikipedia on a Raspberry Pi”^[19]
• “Wikipedia Chemical Structure Explorer: substructure and similarity searching of molecules from Wikipedia” ^[20]

References

Supplementary references and notes:

Above is #Edit2014, the first Wikipedia Year-in-Review video. You can collaborate to make #Edit2015 here. Video by Victor Grigas, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation published our first ever video year-in-review which covered some of the major news events of 2014 through the lens of Wikipedia. This year, we’re opening up the idea development and pre-production process of making a video for 2015 to everyone. This is an opportunity for you to help shape the narrative of the events of 2015.

Last year’s video was made largely by myself and another video editor over about 8 weeks at the end of 2014. I spent the first half of my 8 weeks researching news, comparing that to view and edit counts of Wikipedia pages, and searching for media to illustrate those events. After I had that media, it was a matter of taste to place them in a video editing timeline. When we published it, the press and the general population on the Internet reacted positively. All things considered, I think that #Edit2014 was a good start, and I’m happy with the final result—but I’d like to improve a few things for #Edit2015.

Here’s the plan

The negotiations about the Iranian nuclear deal framework has been ongoing in the international press. Photo by United States Department of State, public domain.

These images of Pluto by the New Horizons space probe made the international news. Photo by NASA, public domain.

Je suis Charlie is an example of a major global news event that was well documented with freely-licensed media. Photo by Olivier Ortelpa, freely licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Citizenfour (trailer above) won an Oscar for best documentary feature. Video by Laura Poitras, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Cecil the Lion‘s death made international news. Photo by Daughter#3, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Open Collaboration: I’m opening up the whole idea-development and pre-production process (research, scriptwriting, brainstorming, finding media, etc.) for making #Edit2015 to on-wiki collaboration. While experimental, we have #Edit2014 as a guide to show that a final product can be done; it taught me that year-in-review videos cover international news events through a brand (in this case Wikipedia) by telling each news story in about 5 seconds and then cutting to the next one. After being multiplied by around 20 stories, your video will be upwards of two minutes long when the credits, logos and titles are included. If you watch other year-in-review videos (like Google Zeitgeist Year In Search) you’ll see how each will spend 5 seconds on a topic and then jump to the next.

First drafts of #Edit2014 were half global news and half wiki-world news. I wanted to showcase as many Wikimedia tools, events and projects as possible. What I found was that since this is for a wide audience, and it’s only a few short minutes long, we only have a chance to communicate one or two new ideas (for an ordinary person who uses the internet), so we had to be very selective about what was showcased. In this case, it was a chance to talk about the edit button and Wiki Loves Monuments briefly. Then we have to get back to those global shared news events that the public may have experienced. Aspects like ‘going down the rabbit hole,’ clicking link after link, was something that ordinary people were familiar with, so this is something we used to bridge stories.

The idea-development and pre-production process does not require any fancy video equipment—just a wiki page and an internet connection. I used post-it notes on my wall to organize my ideas. I think that we—that is, the Wikimedia crowd—can be very good at story development and collaboration. I’ve been collecting imagery and ideas online, and I’d like to allow anyone to use this space as a place to collaborate on this project.

An idea I had for this year is to somehow showcase the talk pages about Wikipedia articles, to show how we arrive at consensus and a neutral-point-of-view. Finding the right article(s) and talk page quotes to use to illustrate that would be key. Last year, we showcased the edit button using the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. For that, we see closeups of ‘citation needed’ and ‘disputed-discuss’ then we cut to the different languages of that article. Imagine if you saw a tiny fraction of the behind-the scenes talk about an article like that and how it aims for objectivity?

Rules: These are some basic criteria I made to guide what content got into #Edit2014:

• Has the event made it to the international press or wide regional press?
• Does the event have corresponding view or edit counts?
• Do we have freely licensed imagery for the event?
• Was there a special circumstance about this event per Wikimedia projects?
• Does this illustrate some aspect of Wikimedia that the public should know?
• Is the media beautiful?
• Does the Wikimedia Foundation legal team approve of the media?
• Do we have some media and news from every major region of the world?

As for production and post-production – Continuity, music, audio mixing, et cetera are all things that should ideally be online and in a collaborative manner but currently there is no system in place to collaborate on those things using Wikimedia projects. I’d love to develop that system, but I don’t think that it is practical for this year. I’d also like to aim to make the video as close to 2 minutes in length as possible.

Schedule: So the logical publication date for #Edit2015 is December 15th because that’s when the press, who would republish and spread the video on social media, are still at work and this is an easy story for them to publish before they go on vacation at the end of December. Getting this in the press gets more eyeballs on the video. That means that actual video editing should be well on its way in October and November. This is my current schedule (for now):

• Brainstorm and pre-production: now – October 1st
• Production (assemble the footage): October 1st – November 15th
• Post-Production (lock all the details): November 15th – December 1st
• Distribution (captions and translations, thumbnails, text copy, uploading, and any last-minute edits): December 1st – December 15th

Internationalism: My biggest problem with #Edit2014 was that so much of it was in English. While we tried to cover as many regions and languages as possible, a non-English speaker probably had to watch it with the captions on—and then your eyes are stuck reading text on the bottom of the screen rather than viewing the interplay of images and text. I think that opening up the development and pre-production phase would flatten out the perspective quite a bit, or at least help to point out flaws and suggest other ideas. We shouldn’t have to rely on captions to make it universally understandable, and since we’ll be jumping from one story to the next in 5 seconds, we can express a story in any local language. There may also be ‘universal’ communication media like video, imagery or numbers that are associated with the text that they can understand.

Media Content: There are a few sources for freely-licensed imagery that we can use for #Edit 2015: still imagery, video imagery, Wikimedia project pages, audio, and imagery we make ourselves. I’d love if we could somehow have more audio/video content for #Edit2015. I looked for freely-licensed video and .gifs on Wikimedia Commons, Vimeo, Internet Archive and YouTube, and I know there are many more I could have used. The first few versions of #Edit2014 incorporated more video than the final cut did, but much was cut out because it was too busy or complicated to communicate an idea quickly. Sometimes a still frame of a Wikipedia article or a still photo might communicate the idea more neutrally or succinctly than portions of freely-licensed videos could.

For every still image you see in #Edit2014, there’s probably 10 more that didn’t make the final cut. It took a lot of research to find appropriate and compelling imagery.

I’m very optimistic that this will be a fruitful initiative, and I can’t wait to see all the usernames of everyone who contributes. Please share this link with your friends. Let’s collaborate and tell the story of Wikipedia and 2015 together.

Victor GrigasWikimedia Foundation Storyteller and Video Producer

Jubilee Church in Tor Tre Teste, Rome, the winning picture of the 2014 Wiki Loves Monuments contest in Italy. Photo by Federico Di Iorio, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The month of September is well known as the beginning of spring or fall, depending on the hemisphere. In Europe, it is also known as the month of the European Heritage Days, a joint action by 50 states who celebrate the common European cultural heritage. In the Wikimedia movement, September holds a special place as the period during which the annual Wiki Loves Monuments contest is traditionally held.

Certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest photography competition in history, Wiki Loves Monuments aims to involve the general public with contributing to Wikipedia, raise awareness of the cultural heritage around them, and document it in photographs that would be free to use for anyone, for any purpose.

Organized for the first time in 2010 in the Netherlands and led by Wikimedia chapters, groups and volunteers, the contest has grown over the years to involve almost 70 countries from all over the world, including Norway and Ireland in Europe, Tunisia and Kenya in Africa, Canada and Argentina in the Americas, and Nepal and Thailand in Asia, among many others. In just 5 years, thousands of amateur and professional photographers alike uploaded over 1.2 million pictures of culturally significant buildings and structures, many of which are used to illustrate articles on Wikipedia and are viewed by millions of readers every month.

The 2015 Wiki Loves Monuments will include over 30 countries, among them the new starters Brazil and Latvia. It’s also the fourth time that the contest is taking place in Italy, a country renown for its eclectic and diverse architecture that includes buildings from the Ancient Greece, the Ancient Rome, the Gothic and the Renaissance. Italy is also the country with the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites (51 as of 2014), and the cities of Rome, Milan, Venice and Florence are ranked in the top 40 city destinations in the world.

Despite its rich architecture, however, Italy does not currently enjoy the so-called freedom of panorama, which is a provision in copyright law in many states that permits taking photographs of works—such as buildings—that are permanently located in a public place. This means, in effect, that no architecture in Italy can be photographed without explicit permission from the owner of the structure. To allow Wiki Loves Monuments to take place in their country, Wikimedia Italia, the Italian chapter of the Wikimedia movement, have over the years partnered with more than 300 cities, towns, parishes, dioceses and other institutions to “free” Italian monuments so that they can be photographed for use on Wikipedia. Thanks to those efforts, Italian architecture aficionados can now take pictures of thousands of buildings in all Italian regions and provinces.

Submissions for Wiki Loves Monuments 2015 will be open throughout September. After that, pictures from all participating countries will be judged by their respective national juries, and up to ten best photographs from each country will be nominated for the international stage of the competition, whose winners are usually announced at the beginning of December.

If you are interested in participating in this year’s Wiki Loves Monuments in your country, please visit the main page of the contest on Wikimedia Commons. You can also view a gallery of last year’s international and national winners as well as an automated category listing featured pictures and quality images from last year.

For a gallery of all past Wiki Loves Monuments winners, see below.

Tomasz W. Kozlowski, Wikimedia community volunteer

Highlights

September 1, 2015. The registration for the next SMWCon Fall in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain (October 28-30, 2013) is now open. All interested participants can register at the ticketing site. The early bird registration period with reduced prices runs until October 5, 2015.

See also our Call for Contributions and for more information on the conference, see the SMWCon Fall 2015 homepage.

Hundreds of ‘black hat’ accounts on English Wikipedia were found to be connected during the investigation. The usernames (green) and IP addresses (yellow) have been removed from the image. Graph by James Alexander, freely licensed under CC-by-SA 3.0.

After weeks of investigation, volunteer editors on English Wikipedia announced today that they blocked 381 user accounts for “black hat” editing.^[1] The accounts were engaged in undisclosed paid advocacy—the practice of accepting or charging money to promote external interests on Wikipedia without revealing their affiliation, in violation of Wikimedia’s Terms of Use. The editors issued these blocks as part of their commitment to ensuring Wikipedia is an accurate, reliable, and neutral knowledge resource for everyone.

The community of volunteers who maintain and edit Wikipedia vigilantly defend the Wikimedia sites to ensure that content meets high editorial standards. Every day, volunteer editors make thousands of edits to Wikipedia: they add reliable sources, introduce new topics, expand articles, add images, cover breaking news, fix inaccuracies, and resolve conflicts of interest. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit, and its open model makes it a rich and reliable resource for the world.

Neutrality is key to ensuring Wikipedia’s quality. Although it does not happen often, undisclosed paid advocacy editing may represent a serious conflict of interest and could compromise the quality of content on Wikipedia. The practice is in conflict with a number of English Wikipedia’s policies, including neutrality and conflict of interest, and is a violation of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Terms of Use.

With this action, volunteer editors have taken a strong stand against undisclosed paid advocacy. In addition to blocking the 381 “sockpuppet” accounts—a term that refers to multiple accounts used in misleading or deceptive ways—the editors deleted 210 articles created by these accounts. Most of these articles, which were related to businesses, business people, or artists, were generally promotional in nature, and often included biased or skewed information, unattributed material, and potential copyright violations. The edits made by the sockpuppets are similar enough that the community believes they were perpetrated by one coordinated group.

Community opposition to undisclosed paid advocacy editing on English Wikipedia has a long history, reaching back to at least 2004 when the first conflict of interest guidelines were introduced. Since then, the English Wikipedia community has been vocal about its opposition to this practice. In October 2013, Wikipedia volunteers blocked hundreds of accounts related to the consulting firm Wiki-PR. The Wikimedia Foundation responded with a formal statement, which described undisclosed paid advocacy as “violating the core principles that have made Wikipedia so valuable for so many people,” and sent a cease and desist letter. The Foundation later amended its Terms of Use to clarify and strengthen its ban on the practice.

Not all paid editing is a violation of Wikipedia policies. Many museum and university employees from around the world edit by disclosing their official affiliations, and several prominent public relations firms have signed an agreement to abide by Wikipedia’s paid editing guidelines. Editing Wikipedia is completely free, and only requires compliance with the project’s editorial guidelines. If someone does have a conflict of interest or is uncomfortable editing the site directly, there are several other options to bring the subject to a volunteer’s attention.

Readers trust Wikipedia to offer accurate, neutral content, and undisclosed paid advocacy editing violates that trust. Sadly, it also deceives the subjects of articles, who may simply be unaware that they are in violation of the spirit and policies of Wikipedia. No one should ever have to pay to create or maintain a Wikipedia article. Wikimedia volunteers are vigilant, and articles created by paid advocates will be identified in due time. The Wikimedia Foundation stands with the Wikipedia community in their efforts to make reliable, accurate knowledge available for everyone.

More information about this case is available in the community announcement, and editor community discussion is ongoing.

Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate
Juliet Barbara, Senior Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

[1] Wikipedia editors are referring to this case as “Orangemoody” after the first sockpuppet identified during the investigation.

This post has been updated to clarify that blackhat editing involves both accepting and charging money to promote external interests, as well as clarify our position that no one should ever have to pay to create or maintain a Wikipedia article.

Emily Temple-Wood discusses lessons learned running Wikipedia workshops. You can also view the above video on YouTube and Vimeo. Video by Victor Grigas, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Emily Temple-Wood, a Loyola University student studying molecular biology and a veteran Wikipedia editor, is a familiar face on this blog. Last time we wrote about her in 2013, she had spearheaded the WikiProject Women Scientists and continues to contribute to various projects and articles today.

Temple-Wood has been editing Wikipedia since she was 12. She is the vice president of Wikimedia D.C., despite living in Chicago. Her work goes far beyond editing and writing: It extends to running workshops and doing outreach work. For these, she made use of Wikimedia grants—a versatile method of funding for Wikipedia-related projects.

Temple-Wood’s first project and event grant was used to run a series of workshops on contributing to Wikipedia. She said a huge lesson from running these workshops was that social media advertising was integral to boosting attendance.

“When we advertised the workshops just using flyers, only three people came,” she says. “And that was my roommate and her boyfriend, mostly because I promised them that there’d be free pizza.”

But because the grant program was flexible, Temple-Wood says her first experience running workshops ended up an invaluable learning experience stemmed from a low turnout and free pizza.

“We started off with no impact, no people and a total disaster. But I ran ten workshops, or even more,” Temple-Wood says. “In the end we had a really successful smooth model [for workshops].”

Temple-Wood has been an editor of Wikipedia since she was 12.Image by Emily Temple-Wood, freely licensed under CC-BY 1.0.

Indeed, her determination for project work shows through with her “baby”, WikiProject Women Scientists. This project, she says, potentially doubled coverage of women scientists on Wikipedia in a year and a half.

“We were missing 1,500 women scientists [in 2013],” she says. “What’s the next massive content gap we’re going to find because we engaged someone who wasn’t engaged before?”

Temple-Wood’s workshops also resulted in materials that can help others hosting similar projects to boost coverage on Wikipedia. “I’m kind of … inspiring people to teach others to focus and run workshops on things that matter to them,” Temple-Wood adds.

If you have an idea but are unsure of how to turn it into a successful grant proposal for the Wikimedia Foundation, turn to IdeaLab. It’s a place where you can meet, and get feedback from, veteran Wikipedians who can help you through the process of applying for a Wikimedia grant.

“We’re really into community collaboration,” adds Temple-Wood.

IdeaLab also supports those who are interested in Individual Engagement Grants, which is currently accepting proposals from now until September 29.

“The grant application can be about anything. That’s how fluid and flexible the grant programs are. So if there is something that you want to try, submit it to the IdeaLab,” Temple-Wood says.

For those who just want to start off small—perhaps to get Wikipedians together to discuss a new project idea, or to educate others on Wikipedia editing—Temple-Wood recommends the project and event grant, which she dubs the “buy-pizza-grants.”

“Really the three things you need for a successful workshop are Wikipedians, pizza and social media advertising,” she laughs.

Interested in learning more about grants? Click on the links in this article to learn more about what you can get done.

Interview by Victor Grigas, Storyteller and Video Producer, Wikimedia Foundation
Profile by Yoona Ha, Assistant Storytelling Intern, Wikimedia Foundation

Though Wikipedia’s content in the science is often well-represented, it isn’t always well-presented. Many articles could benefit from smoother, more accessible writing, or through illustrations that make the concept visually clear.

In Dr. Kermit Murray’s Mass Spectrometry course, students at Louisiana State University contributed information about that analytical chemistry technique to Wikipedia. Students are typically advanced undergraduates, graduate students, or doctoral candidates in chemistry. Their work has resulted in making some of these concepts easier for readers with an active interest in the topic to understand, whether through crafting simpler prose, adding relevant diagrams, or creating new diagrams when nothing else did the trick.

Student editors made the Fragmentation (Mass Spectrometry) article more accessible not only by adding clearer prose, but by creating four new illustrations of chemical structures.

For the Capillary electrophoresis–mass spectrometry article, students improved the clarity of the text while expanding it from 111 to 927 words — and adding four original illustrations.

In the article on Spark Ionization, student editors expanded what had been a brief stub from 135 to 785 words. They also added a historical outline of the technology.

Finally, for the Protein Mass Spectrometry article, students editors added a section on the history of the technology that drew from six sources. They also added a schematic that depicts how the process works.

Thanks to Dr. Murray and his students for contributing to a better understanding of science topics through Wikipedia!

Google PageSpeed Insights writes:

Redirects trigger an additional HTTP request-response cycle and delay page rendering. In the best case, each redirect will add a single roundtrip (HTTP request-response), and in the worst it may result in multiple additional roundtrips to perform the DNS lookup, TCP handshake, and TLS negotiation in addition to the additional HTTP request-response cycle. As a result, you should minimize use of redirects to improve site performance.

Let’s consider the situation where you run MediaWiki as the main thing on your domain. When user goes to your domain example.com, MediaWiki by default will issue a redirect to example.com/wiki/Main_Page, assuming you have configured the recommended short urls.

In addition the short url page writes:

Note that we do not recommend doing a HTTP redirect to your wiki path or main page directly. As redirecting to the main page directly will hard-code variable parts of your wiki’s page setup into your server config. And redirecting to the wiki path will result in two redirects. Simply rewrite the root path to MediaWiki and it will take care of the 301 redirect to the main page itself.

So are we stuck with a suboptimal solution? Fortunately, there is a way and it is not even that complicated. I will share example snippets from translatewiki.net configuration how to do it.

Configuring nginx

For nginx, the only thing we need in addition the default wiki short url rewrite is to rewrite / so that it is forwarded to MediaWiki. The configuration below assumes MediaWiki is installed in the w directory under the document root.

location ~ ^/wiki/(.*)$ {
	rewrite ^/wiki/(.*)$ /w/index.php?title=$1&$args;
}

location = / {
	rewrite ^ /w/index.php;
}

Whole file for the curious.

Configuring MediaWiki

First, in our LocalSettings.php we have the short url configuration:

$wgArticlePath      = "/wiki/$1";
$wgScriptPath       = "/w";

In addition we use hooks to tell MediaWiki to make / the URL for the main page, not to be redirected:

$wgHooks['GetLocalURL'][] = function ( &$title, &$url, $query ) {
	if ( $title->isExternal() || $query != '' ) {
		return;
	}

	$dbkey = wfUrlencode( $title->getPrefixedDBkey() );
	if (
		strpos( $dbkey, '%3F' ) !== false ||
		strpos( $dbkey, '%26' ) !== false ||
		strpos( $dbkey, '//' ) !== false
	) {
		global $wgScript;
		$url = "$wgScript?title=$dbkey";
	} elseif ( $title->isMainPage() ) {
		$url = '/';
	}
};

// Tell MediaWiki that "/" should not be redirected
$wgHooks['TestCanonicalRedirect'][] = function ( $request ) {
	return $request->getRequestURL() !== '/';
};

This has the added benefit that all MediaWiki generated links to the main page point to the domain root, so you only have one canonical url for the wiki main page. The if block in the middle with strpos checks for problematic characters ? and & and forces them to use the long URLs, because otherwise they would not work correctly with this nginx rewrite rule.

And that’s it. With these changes you can have your main page displayed on your domain without redirect, also keeping it short for users to copy and share. This method should work for most versions of MediaWiki, including MediaWiki 1.26 which forcefully redirects everything that doesn’t match the canonical URL as seen by MediaWiki.

With only a few days left in August, it is time to get your cameras, and make some amazing photos of your cultural heritage again! For 31 countries the competition has been prepared to take off in the coming days (please note in a few countries, different dates are being used), and you can once again participate in their national competitions. More news on the international competition is to follow later.

You can find a full and up to date overview of the participating countries on this page. Click on the country to find out more about the national competition.

The new guidelines encourage app innovation. Image by VS-QQ freely licensed under CC-by-SA 3.0.

At the Wikimedia Foundation, we would love to see more app development, especially in today’s environment where users are increasingly migrating to mobile and wearable devices. Therefore, we created new app guidelines that encourage developer innovation while also providing tips on how to use Wikimedia marks and content in a way that properly represents the Wikimedia community.

These new guidelines are based on our Trademark Policy, published last February after a seven month long consultation with the Wikimedia community. The guidelines provide practical examples of how to use the Wikimedia marks and Wikimedia content in apps while also supporting our mission.

For example, the guidelines make it easier for developers to understand how to use Wikimedia marks and content in the following ways:

• Using marks in apps without requesting a license: The guidelines make clear for app developers how to use certain marks without requesting a license as long as such use advances the Wikimedia mission and abides by the Trademark Policy.
• Clearer visual examples of fair use for apps: In our Trademark Policy consultation users expressed confusion over how to use Wikimedia marks. In response, the app guidelines provide clear examples of how to use marks in app buttons, app descriptions, and app titles.
• Location of licenses: The Wikimedia marks and content are released under different Creative Commons licenses. The guide tells developers where to find those licenses and gives examples of how to properly apply them.
• Plain English: Unlike typical legal documents, these guidelines use simple words, short sentences, and straightforward sentence structure to make them easy to follow. They recognize that some readers may not be native English speakers and avoid using legalese to facilitate easy translation into multiple languages. To verify the simplicity of the language, we applied various readability indices for better comprehension, like we did with the Trademark Policy.
• User-friendly layout: Also, as with the Trademark Policy, after considering design techniques, we used visual examples, section breaks, and white-space to make the guidelines both visually appealing and easily accessible.

In a world where people are increasingly accessing knowledge through different devices, the new guidelines are intended to empower designers, developers, and the Wikimedia community to collaborate around the Wikimedia projects while maintaining legal protections. If you have any questions, please email us at trademarks@wikimedia.org.

Victoria Baranetsky, Legal Counsel
Yana Welinder, Legal Director

Many thanks to James Alexander, Community Advocate/Project Manager; Corey Floyd, Software Engineer; Manprit Brar, Legal Counsel; Stephen LaPorte, Legal Counsel; James Buatti, Legal Fellow; and Marshall Olin, Alex Krivit, and Arielle Friehling, Legal Interns for their incredible work on the app guidelines.  We would also like to thank the rest of the Legal Team as well as the Community Engagement and Communications Teams for their assistance and support in this effort.

The Discovery team wrangled referal data to get to the bottom of things. Photo by Luis Llerena, freely licensed under CC0 1.0.

Over the past month, several news articles, based on a report from web analytics company SimilarWeb, stated that Wikipedia’s traffic had dropped by “more than 250 million desktop visits in just three months”. The Discovery team’s research into referrals from Google suggests this news may not be as incredible as it first seems.

One theory as to how this drop came about is that Google began prioritising their own, or other, sources of information like the Knowledge Graph, suggesting that the traffic drop came from a reduction in visits from Google. Oliver Keyes, of the Discovery team, was tasked with investigating this drop and understanding if there was a visible reduction in traffic from the data stored by the Wikimedia Foundation’s servers.

While the Foundation doesn’t track “visits”, pageviews are tracked, as well as whether those pageviews have referers. By investigating the proportion of pageviews that come with Google referrals and identifying whether it has reduced over time, he could go some way towards confirming or rejecting the idea that Google has been impeding traffic to Wikimedia sites.

One factor worth including, however, is that some HTTPS connections deliberately don’t serve any form of referrer data. This means that a decline in Google-sourced pageviews could show itself not as a decline in pageviews from Google, but as a decline in pageviews from nobody. Accordingly, Keyes looked at both the rate at which Google-sourced traffic comes in, and the rate at which traffic that doesn’t have a source at all comes in.

Due to privacy and performance restrictions around the request logs, the period whiched needed to be covered (January–August 2015) is not available unsampled. Instead, Keyes had to rely on the sampled logs, parsing them with the Wikimedia Foundation’s internal R framework for reading and validating this data.

This introduces some risks—the parsing methodology might be different from that used on the unsampled log, or the simple variation in values between sampled and unsampled data could introduce inaccuracies. Comparing the unsampled and sampled logs revealed no major difference in the number of pageviews identified in each dataset. This means the sampled logs can probably be relied on to answer his questions.

Looking at the proportion of pageviews with Google referers, seen in the above graph, we see no decrease in pageviews with Google referers. In fact, based on the localised “smoothing” represented by the blue line, Google refers are actually trending up over the last few months.

The proportion of pageviews with no referer whatsoever, however—seen in the chart above—is trending down. This could indicate a multitude of things, including Google passing more referers through (which would explain the rise in the proportion of traffic traceable to Google). However, it could also indicate that a chunk of site traffic, with no referrer, has been decreasing—which could conceivably be Google-sourced.

Keyes says that, based on the data studied, it can be established that the most obvious avenues for verifying or dismissing SimilarWeb’s claim show no evidence that Google traffic has declined. Ultimately, though, his team doesn’t have the data at their end to eliminate all avenues of possibility.

Joe Sutherland
Communications Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

Only a short update about ContentTranslation software this week: The campaign that suggests users who haven’t tried ContentTranslation yet to translate an article instead of creating it from scratch was enabled in the Italian Wikipedia.

Fixes for issues with link and category adaptation in the Norwegian are ready, but are expected to be deployed next week.

On this occasion I’d like to congratulate the Italian Wikipedia on the creation of the 200th article, watchOS. Another milestone, which happens to also be related to Italy, is the creation of the 17,000th page with ContentTranslation: the article about the National Institute of Statistics of Italy, which was translated from English to Greek.

A class in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh, India, using WikiReaders. 500 of those devices were distributed to schools in India, South Africa and Mexico, in part through a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. Photo by Ashstar01, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Crowdfunding has been steadily growing as an alternative method to fund various projects and ventures on the Internet over the past few years. It has been used to successfully fund video games, a smartwatch, the renovation of a German schloss, a political action committee and, more humorously, the making of a potato salad. You can even crowdfund an online encyclopedia—and people have been doing so very generously over the past 14 years.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that Wikimedia volunteers are increasingly embracing this way of funding their own initiatives to improve Wikipedia and its sister projects.

This year has seen particular activity in that regard, with three campaigns—Wikimédia France’s WikiCheese, Diego Delso’s equipment restoration and Jeevan Jose’s new photography gear fundraisers—receiving over US$13,500 in donations from the public. Following this surge, I asked some of the contributors involved in Wikimedia-related crowdfunding campaigns about the lessons they learned from them and the suggestions they might have for future crowdfunding organizers.

The most popular suggestion is to start with a feasible target. “Indiegogo have a reasonable fee if you meet your target but incur a hefty penalty if you don’t,” says Colin, one of a group of volunteers behind Jeevan Jose’s successful fundraiser that exceeded its target by over fourfold, collecting US$3,150 in total. “That really encourages you to be modest, to work out what you need rather than what is in your dreams,” he adds.

Being able to show a good track record is quite important, too. “People giving their money to non-profit projects want to see a pilot first or some track record that shows you can responsibly use their money effectively to make change in a long-term sustainable way,” says Aislinn D Grigas, organizer of the ultimately unsuccessful WikiReader distribution campaign in 2013. “Tracking success is also essential to discovering the outcome of a pilot project and determining if it is a worthy candidate for more investment.”

Colin adds that you should “make your campaign personal with photos of yourself, and to make it clear why a donation would be for a good cause and would give a good return. In our case, Jee is a very popular member of the Wikimedia Commons community, which definitely helped since many of the donations came from wiki-friends.”

Building a team of collaborators seems to be another crucial factor. “Having a team is recommended … We invited a few of Jee’s wiki-friends to help with the campaign, [and] Christian created an excellent video made from clips of Jee’s work. This really made the campaign look professional,” says Colin.

Asking for outside help is also advised by Aislinn. “One of the things I learned is to reach out to as many people and organizations as possible. Finding partners and collaborators is important and can be a great source of support and help. We didn’t initially think that a Wikimedia Foundation grant would be a match but in talking to enough people, we realized there were other sources that could supplement our crowdfunding campaign,” she finishes.

Tomasz W. Kozlowski
Wikimedia community volunteer

Strategy consultations help us understand where we are and where we’re going. Photo by Martin Fisch, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Earlier this year, the Wikimedia Foundation led a consultation with the Wikimedia community of editors and readers, in order to inform our strategy^[1] for the future. The goal of the consultation was to collect input on how we should respond to future trends that will affect the Wikimedia movement, and incorporate that insight into our emerging strategy. We are pleased to be able to make the complete results of this consultation available to all.

In this post, we’ll provide a brief overview of the consultation and findings. For more detail, please see the full results on Wikimedia Commons, or the metrics presentation at the July 2015 Metrics Meeting on Wikimedia Commons and YouTube.

Design

The consultation consisted of a 10-day global consultation across Wikimedia projects and languages, lasting from February 23 – March 6, 2015. We introduced the consultation by acknowledging that the world is going mobile and the next billion Internet users are coming online. We translated the questions into 15 languages to reflect the international nature of the Wikimedia movement.

The consultation used two open-ended prompts to elicit broad, qualitative feedback and insights:

1. What major trends would you identify in addition to mobile and the next billion users?
2. Based on the future trends that you think are important, what would thriving and healthy Wikimedia projects look like?

This is the second time the Wikimedia Foundation has undertaken a collaborative strategy-setting process. However, this consultation was designed as part of a more nimble process than the previous strategic planning process conducted in 2010, in order to allow the Foundation to respond to a quickly changing world.

Participation

Nearly 1,300 editors and readers offered their thoughts on these questions across 29 languages. We found 69% were anonymous users from 86 different countries, 24% were logged-in users with established records of participation on the Wikimedia projects, and 7% were new users (all of whom registered during the consultation itself). These latter two groups came from 30 different wikis. All of the comments offered were broken down into 2,468 comments on 28 general themes.

Patterns of response during the 2015 Wikimedia strategy consultation. Graph by Wikimedia Staff, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

n = 1295 respondents
Translation languages highlighted

Findings

The report’s findings were multi-faceted, reflecting the many emerging trends and experiences identified by the international participants. We analyzed each of the 28 themes for key takeaways, with interesting perspectives emerging from both anonymous and logged-in users. These complete takeaways can be found in the consultations slides on Commons.

2015 Wikimedia strategy consultation results, qualitative comment categories; n = 2,468 comments. Graph by Wikimedia Staff, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Anonymous and new users tended to focus on the look and feel of the site itself on varied devices. Their feedback focused on the site’s presence on mobile, use of multimedia, accuracy and reliability of the existing content, and integration with social media. The anonymous respondents primarily hailed from the United States, but also included significant contingents from India, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Iran. Seventeen countries had more than ten people answer.

Logged-in users commented on similar topics but from a different perspective. For example, mobile-related comments were typically confined to the feasibility of editing on mobile devices, which are usually much smaller than a desktop window. They additionally commented on citation quality—the use of stronger, more reliable sources—a bureaucratic climate on some wikis, and strategic threats to the projects, in addition to giving the foundation direct feedback. Sites with more than ten respondents included the English, German, and Spanish Wikipedias, along with the Wikimedia Commons. As the IPs of logged-in users are hidden, we have no geographical data for them.

The precise findings from this study are outlined in the complete slides. All themes are being taken into account and can inform our work moving forward. Here are some highlights:^[2]

• Mobile and app: Mobile-related comments reveal an opportunity to improve our existing mobile offerings for both editors and readers and raise awareness about our native apps. Participants (mostly anonymous users) urged us to “make an app,” when one is already available for iOS and Android devices. We also saw comments that stressed the importance of mobile editing, formatting for smaller (mobile) screen sizes, article summaries for different usage patterns, and the value of “going mobile.”^[3]
• Editing and collaboration: In this category, we find requests to make editing simpler, ideas for enhancing collaboration among editors, suggestions for editing tools, and proposals to build editor rating and qualification programs. This is one of the few categories in which logged-in comments, at 56%, outnumber comments from anonymous and new users. This category provides valuable insight for improvements in editor support including Wikipedia’s visual editor and future projects in the newly created Community tech team, as well as potential new editor support initiatives.
• Rich content: Participants requested more rich content on Wikimedia sites, suggesting more video, audio, video, and images. Most (80%) of these comments were submitted by anonymous and new users. One United States-based participant commented: “is there any major website in the world with less video?”
• Volunteer community: We saw a particular interest in improving “community climate” in this category, with a focus on interpersonal dynamics and culture. Participants identified a need to increase diversity (in particular, gender diversity), improve processes and workflows, and address bureaucracy-related challenges. This is another category in which logged-in comments, at 54%, outnumber comments provided by anonymous and new users.
• Wikimedia Foundation feedback: This category focused on the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the volunteer community and includes suggestions of how the Foundation might change its practices and priorities to align with the volunteer community. These comments are from mostly logged-in users (88%), most of them highly experienced users with an average edit count of more than 64,000 edits. Suggestions included providing better support to editors in a variety of ways and continuing to ask for feedback from core community members.
• Content quality (accuracy): These comments emphasized the importance of content accuracy, trustworthiness, and reliability. Comments focused on citation quality, the use of expert editors, and even restricting editing (so that “not everyone can edit”). Most (73%) of comments in this category were from anonymous and new users, signaling an opportunity to communicate to readers about the accuracy and trustworthiness of the content within Wikipedia and sister projects.
• Education and universities: These comments reflected both a concern about the perception of Wikipedia as a (non)credible source for academic inquiry, and also recognition of the growing opportunity for Wikimedia to extend its content, brand, and global presence into online education by developing courses, curricula, and partnering with other online educational resources. Most (76%) of the comments in this category came from anonymous and new users, whereas only 24% originated from logged-in users.  
• Translation and languages: We saw a collective interest in this category from logged in, anonymous, and new users. Key suggestions included a focus increasing translation capabilities and tool, expanding into more languages, and developing the ability to easily translate across projects. These comments validate the need for the Content Translation tool, which is now available on 224 language versions of Wikipedia as a beta feature.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this consultation. The findings of the consultation will play a key role in our work moving forward, influencing how engineering teams develop forward-looking plans and validate proposed roadmaps and projects.

Terence Gilbey
Interim Chief Operating Officer
Wikimedia Foundation

[1] Unlike in past years, we are approaching strategy not as a set of goals or objectives, but rather as a direction that will guide the decisions for the organization.
[2] These examples do not mean that these themes are more important than others. They are simply highlights for this particular blog post. We are assessing all of the themes to incorporate this feedback at all levels of our work.
[3] We realize the mention of mobile in the consultation’s framing may have impacted the prominence of this theme in the comments.

As you probably already knew, Wikipedia is a website. A website has content—the articles, and user interface—the menus around the articles and the various screens that let editors edit the articles and communicate to each other.

Another thing that you probably already knew is that Wikipedia is massively multilingual, so both the content and the user interface must be translated.

Translation of articles is a topic for another post. This post is about getting all of the user interface translated to your language, as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The most important piece of software that powers Wikipedia and its sister projects is called MediaWiki. As of today, there are 3,335 messages to translate in MediaWiki. “Messages” in the MediaWiki jargon are strings that are shown in the user interface, and that can be translated. In addition to core MediaWiki, Wikipedia also has dozens of MediaWiki extensions installed, some of them very important—extensions for displaying citations and mathematical formulas, uploading files, receiving notifications, mobile browsing, different editing environments, etc. There are around 3,500 messages to translate in the main extensions, and over 10,000 messages to translate if you want to have all the extensions translated. There are also the Wikipedia mobile apps and additional tools for making automated edits (bots) and monitoring vandalism, with several hundreds of messages each.

Translating all of it probably sounds like an enormous job, and yes, it takes time, but it’s doable.

In February 2011 or so—sorry, I don’t remember the exact date—I completed the translation into Hebrew of all of the messages that are needed for Wikipedia and projects related to it. All. The total, complete, no-excuses, premium Wikipedia experience, in Hebrew. Every single part of the MediaWiki software, extensions and additional tools was translated to Hebrew, and if you were a Hebrew speaker, you didn’t need to know a single English word to use it.

I wasn’t the only one who did this of course. There were plenty of other people who did this before I joined the effort, and plenty of others who helped along the way: Rotem Dan, Ofra Hod, Yaron Shahrabani, Rotem Liss, Or Shapiro, Shani Evenshtein, Inkbug (whose real name I don’t know), and many others. But back then in 2011 it was I who made a conscious effort to get to 100%. It took me quite a few weeks, but I made it.

Of course, the software that powers Wikipedia changes every single day. So the day after the translations statistics got to 100%, they went down to 99%, because new messages to translate were added. But there were just a few of them, and it took me a few minutes to translate them and get back to 100%.

I’ve been doing this almost every day since then, keeping Hebrew at 100%. Sometimes it slips because I am traveling or ill. It slipped for quite a few months because in late 2014 I became a father, and a lot of new messages happened to be added at the same time, but Hebrew is back at 100% now. And I keep doing this.

With the sincere hope that this will be useful for translating the software behind Wikipedia to your language, let me tell you how.

Preparation

First, let’s do some work to set you up.

• Get a translatewiki.net account if you haven’t already.
• Make sure you know your language code.
• Go to you preferences, to the Editing tab, and add languages that you know to Assistant languages.
• Familiarize yourself with the Support page and with the localization guidelines for MediaWiki.
• Add yourself to the portal for your language. The page name is Portal:Xyz, where Xyz is your language code.

Priorities, part 1

The translatewiki.net website hosts many projects to translate beyond stuff related to Wikipedia. Among other things it hosts such respectable Free Software projects as OpenStreetMap, Etherpad, MathJax, Blockly, and others. Also, not all the MediaWiki extensions are used on Wikimedia projects; there are plenty of extensions, with many thousands of translatable messages, that are not used by Wikimedia, but only on other sites, but they use translatewiki.net as the platform for translation of their user interface.

It would be nice to translate all of them, but because I don’t have time for that, I have to prioritize.

On my translatewiki.net user page I have a list of direct links to the translation interface of the projects that are the most important:

• Core MediaWiki: the heart of it all
• Extensions used by Wikimedia: the extensions
• MediaWiki Action Api: the documentation of the API functions, mostly interesting to developers who build tools around Wikimedia projects
• Wikipedia Android app
• Wikipedia iOS app
• Installer: MediaWiki’s installer, not used in Wikipedia because MediaWiki is already installed there, but useful for people who install their own instances of MediaWiki, in particular new developers
• Intuition: a set of different tools, like edit counters, statistics collectors, etc.
• Pywikibot: a library for writing bots—scripts that make useful automatic edits to MediaWiki sites.

I usually don’t work on translating other projects unless all of the above projects are 100% translated to Hebrew. I occasionally make an exception for OpenStreetMap or Etherpad, but only if there’s little to translate there and the untranslated MediaWiki-related projects are not very important, for example, they are unlikely to be used by anybody except a few software developers, but I translate those, too.

Priorities, part 2

So how can you know what is important among more than 15,000 messages from the Wikimedia universe?

Start from MediaWiki most important messages. If your language is not at 100% in this list, it absolutely must be. This list is automatically created periodically by counting which 600 or so messages are actually shown most frequently to Wikipedia users. This list includes messages from MediaWiki core and a bunch of extensions, so when you’re done with it, you’ll see that the statistics for several groups improved by themselves.

Now, if the translation of MediaWiki core to your language is not yet at 18%, get it there. Why 18%? Because that’s the threshold for exporting your language to the source code. This is essential for making it possible to use your language in your Wikipedia (or Incubator). It will be quite easy to find short and simple messages to translate (of course, you still have to do it carefully and correctly).

Getting Things Done, One by One

Once you have the most important MediaWiki messages 100% and at least 18% of MediaWiki core is translated to your language, where do you go next?

I have surprising advice.

You need to get everything to 100% eventually. There are several ways to get there. Your mileage may vary, but I’m going to suggest the way that worked for me: Complete the piece that is the easiest to get to 100%! For me this is an easy way to strike an item off my list and feel that I accomplished something.

But still, there are so many items at which you could start looking! So here’s my selection of components that are more user-visible and less technical, sorted not by importance, but by the number of messages to translate:

• Cite: the extension that displays footnotes on Wikipedia
• Babel: the extension that displays boxes on userpages with information about the languages that the user knows
• Math: the extension that displays math formulas in articles
• Thanks: the extension for sending “thank you” messages to other editors
• Universal Language Selector: the extension that lets people select the language they need from a long list of languages (disclaimer: I am one of its developers)
  • jquery.uls: an internal component of Universal Language Selector that has to be translated separately for technical reasons
• Wikibase Client: the part of Wikidata that appears on Wikipedia, mostly for handling interlanguage links
• ProofreadPage: the extension that makes it easy to digitize PDF and DjVu files on Wikisource
• Wikibase Lib: additional messages for Wikidata
• Echo: the extension that shows notifications about messages and events (the red numbers at the top of Wikipedia)
• WikiEditor: the toolbar for the classic wiki syntax editor
• ContentTranslation extension that helps translate articles between languages (disclaimer: I am one of its developers)
• Wikipedia Android mobile app
• Wikipedia iOS mobile app
• UploadWizard: the extension that helps people upload files to Wikimedia Commons comfortably
• MobileFrontend: the extension that adapts MediaWiki to mobile phones
• VisualEditor: the extension that allows Wikipedia articles to be edited in a WYSIWYG style
• Flow: the extension that is starting to make talk pages more comfortable to use
• Wikibase Repo: the extension that powers the Wikidata website
• Translate: the extension that powers translatewiki.net itself (disclaimer: I am one of its developers)
• MediaWiki core: the software itself!

I put MediaWiki core last intentionally. It’s a very large message group, with over 3000 messages. It’s hard to get it completed quickly, and to be honest, some of its features are not seen very frequently by users who aren’t site administrators or very advanced editors. By all means, do complete it, try to do it as early as possible, and get your friends to help you, but it’s also OK if it takes some time.

Getting All Things Done

OK, so if you translate all the items above, you’ll make Wikipedia in your language mostly usable for most readers and editors.

But let’s go further.

Let’s go further not just for the sake of seeing pure 100% in the statistics everywhere. There’s more.

As I wrote above, the software changes every single day. So do the translatable messages. You need to get your language to 100% not just once; you need to keep doing it continuously.

Once you make the effort of getting to 100%, it will be much easier to keep it there. This means translating some things that are used rarely (but used nevertheless; otherwise they’d be removed). This means investing a few more days or weeks into translating-translating-translating.

But you’ll be able to congratulate yourself on the accomplishments along the way, and on the big accomplishment of getting everything to 100%.

One strategy to accomplish this is translating extension by extension. This means, going to your translatewiki.net language statistics: here’s an example with Albanian, but choose your own. Click “expand” on MediaWiki, then again “expand” on “MediaWiki Extensions”, then on “Extensions used by Wikimedia” and finally, on “Extensions used by Wikimedia – Main”. Similarly to what I described above, find the smaller extensions first and translate them. Once you’re done with all the Main extensions, do all the extensions used by Wikimedia. (Going to all extensions, beyond Extensions used by Wikimedia, helps users of these extensions, but doesn’t help Wikipedia very much.) This strategy can work well if you have several people translating to your language, because it’s easy to divide work by topic.

Another strategy is quietly competing with other languages. Open the statistics for Extensions Used by Wikimedia – Main. Find your language. Now translate as many messages as needed to pass the language above you in the list. Then translate as many messages as needed to pass the next language above you in the list. Repeat until you get to 100%.

For example, here’s an excerpt from the statistics for today:

Let’s say that you are translating to Malay. You only need to translate eight messages to go up a notch. Then six messages more to go up another notch. And so on.

Once you’re done, you will have translated over 3,400 messages, but it’s much easier to do it in small steps.

Once you get to 100% in the main extensions, do the same with all the Extensions Used by Wikimeda. It’s over 10,000 messages, but the same strategies work.

Good Stuff to Do Along the Way

Never assume that the English message is perfect. Never. Do what you can to improve the English messages.

Developers are people just like you are. They may know their code very well, but they may not be the most brilliant writers. And though some messages are written by professional user experience designers, some are written by the developers themselves. Developers are developers; they are not necessarily very good writers or designers, and the messages that they write in English may not be perfect. Keep in mind that many, many MediaWiki developers are not native English speakers; a lot of them are from Russia, Netherlands, India, Spain, Germany, Norway, China, France and many other countries, and English is foreign to them, and they may make mistakes.

So report problems with the English messages to the translatewiki Support page. (Use the opportunity to help other translators who are asking questions there, if you can.)

Another good thing is to do your best to try running the software that you are translating. If there are thousands of messages that are not translated to your language, then chances are that it’s already deployed in Wikipedia and you can try it. Actually trying to use it will help you translate it better.

Whenever relevant, fix the documentation displayed near the translation area. Strange as it may sound, it is possible that you understand the message better than the developer who wrote it!

Before translating a component, review the messages that were already translated. It’s useful for learning the current terminology, and you can also improve them and make them more consistent.

After you gain some experience, create a localization guide in your language. There are very few of them, and there should be more. Here’s the localization guide for French, for example. Create your own with the title “Localisation guidelines/xyz” where “xyz” is your language code.

As in Wikipedia, Be Bold.

OK, So I Got to 100%, What Now?

Well done and congratulations.

Now check the statistics for your language every day. I can’t emphasize how important it is to do this every day.

The way I do this is having a list of links on my translatewiki.net user page. I click them every day, and if there’s anything new to translate, I immediately translate it. Usually there is just a small number of new messages to translate; I didn’t measure, but usually it’s less than 20. Quite often you won’t have to translate from scratch, but to update the translation of a message that changed in English, which is usually even faster.

But what if you suddenly see 200 new messages to translate? It happens occasionally. Maybe several times a year, when a major new feature is added or an existing feature is changed.

Basically, handle it the same way you got to 100% before: step by step, part by part, day by day, week by week, notch by notch, and get back to 100%.

But you can also try to anticipate it. Follow the discussions about new features, check out new extensions that appear before they are added to the Extensions Used by Wikimedia group, consider translating them when you have a few spare minutes. At the worst case, they will never be used by Wikimedia, but they may be used by somebody else who speaks your language, and your translations will definitely feed the translation memory database that helps you and other people translate more efficiently and easily.

Consider also translating other useful projects: OpenStreetMap, Etherpad, Blockly, Encyclopedia of Life, etc. The same techniques apply everywhere.

What Do I Get for Doing All This Work?

The knowledge that thanks to you people who speak your language can use Wikipedia without having to learn English. Awesome, isn’t it?

Oh, and enormous experience with software localization, which is a rather useful job skill these days.

Is There Any Other Way in Which I Can Help?

Yes!

If you find this post useful, please translate it to other languages and publish it in your blog. No copyright restrictions, public domain (but it would be nice if you credit me). Make any adaptations you need for your language. It took me years of experience to learn all of this, and it took me about four hours to write it. Translating it will take you much less than four hours, and it will help people be more efficient translators.

If you’re starved for wit and wisdom, I have a Tumblr. There may even be occasional relevant content amongst the social justice and cat memes!

Panelists Andrew Lih, Dan Cook, and Liberty Madison share a laugh with moderator Pete Forsyth. This photo and those below by Eugene Eric Kim, licensed CC BY.

We began by asking pairs of participants to discuss a time when Wikipedia delighted them, and a time when it frustrated them.

We hosted a discussion, with the meetup group Hacks & Hackers, last week: The Future of Journalism in a Wikipedia World. (original Meetup.com announcement & description)

My colleague Dan Cook and I wanted to engage journalists to share some of our own thoughts about the intersection of Wikipedia and Journalism — but also to hear from them about what Wikipedia looks like from their vantage point. Do reporters and editors see Wikipedia as a threat? a resource? How do they feel about its coverage of topics they cover themselves?

I suspect some of the side discussions were the best part of the event! Looking forward to hearing them recapped.

I had been inspired by recent gatherings hosted by my friend Eugene Eric Kim (whose photos illustrate this piece); his approach emphasizes participation over pontification. With his help, I devised a format that would help the “audience” engage with the opportunities, risks, and general significance associated with Wikipedia from the beginning, spurring discussion that would last throughout the evening.

After we heard a few observations and anecdotes from the crowd, our panelists presented some ideas. Andrew Lih, a longtime Wikipedian and journalism scholar, presented the idea that Wikipedia fills a void between the cutting edge of news publications and longer-term scholarship and curation typically conducted by, for instance, academia and museums. Liberty Madison, founder of #ThatTechGirl Digital, spoke of millenials’ perception of Wikipedia, and the perception that if something isn’t on Wikipedia, it isn’t true or significant. Dan Cook, an editor and enterprise reporter, presented some case studies from our work at Wiki Strategies, highlighting opportunities for journalists to further their efforts to inform the public by contributing to, or at least commenting on, Wikipedia content. And Jack Craver, who wrote our recent blog post about undisclosed paid editing by PR companies, joined us to recap that piece.

When we wrapped up the panel, the discussion continued over delicious food and drinks from our host, Nomiku; and then spilled over to an impromptu outing to a local bar. You’ll find various links, photos, video, and social media commentary about the event here; if you have further thoughts, let us know in the comments here, or via social media! We look forward to hearing your thoughts, whether your background or interests are in Wikipedia or journalism.

Here are some of the global news stories covered on Wikipedia this week:

• A Hawker Hunter jet crashes into a busy road in Shoreham-by-Sea, England, killing at least 11 people on the ground.
• Jihadist group Islamic State demolishes the ancient Syrian Temple of Baalshamin.
• Global markets seesaw violently in the wake of a Chinese stock market crash.
• The ongoing Okanogan Complex fire becomes the largest wildfire in Washington state history.
• Passengers on an international Thalys train subdue a gunman, potentially preventing a terrorist attack.

Shoreham Airshow crash

The pilot of the Hawker Hunter, pictured in 2013, is in critical condition. Image by Alan Wilson, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0.

On Saturday, August 22, a Hawker Hunter T7 jet aircraft crashed into several vehicles on the busy A27 road during a display at the Shoreham Airshow in Shoreham-by-Sea in England. The plane was performing a vertical loop but, for reasons as yet unknown, failed to complete the manoeuvre and crashed. At least 11 people died on the ground and 16 were injured. The pilot, experienced former British Airways captain Andy Hill, is in critical condition. It is the most deadly airshow accident since the 1952 Farnborough air show crash, where 31 died.

Learn more in these related Wikipedia articles: 2015 Shoreham Airshow crash

Temple of Baalshamin destroyed

The temple had stood for thousands of years before being demolished. Image by Bernard Gagnon, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

The Temple of Baalshamin, an ancient temple in Palmyra which was built in the second century BCE, was destroyed by the Islamic jihadist group ISIL. The temple has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980, and classed as “in danger” since 2013. It comes after ISIL allegedly suggested they would not destroy the site and would instead target statues deemed “polytheistic.” Reports conflict as to the actual date of the demolition.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Temple of Baalshamin

Stock markets seesaw

Stock markets around the world suffered this week. Image by bfishadow, freely licensed under CC-BY 2.0.

This week proved turbulent for the world’s stock markets, following the crash of the Chinese stock market, which began in June and intensified this week. Several factors compounded the event globally, including the Greek government-debt crisis and the collapse in oil prices. On Monday (August 24), the Dow Jones plunged 1,000 points immediately after trading opened. This was briefly offset by a
morning rally on what US media dubbed “Turnaround Tuesday”, but stocks
failed to rebound and ended more than 200 points below Monday’s
closing. Also impacted were the SENSEX in India and the FTSE in the United Kingdom, both of which suffered, and recovered from, heavy losses.

Learn more in these related Wikipedia articles: 2015 Chinese stock market crash, 2015 stock market selloff

Okanogan Complex fire rages on

The fire has been burning since August 15. Image by U.S. Department of Agriculture, freely licensed under CC-BY 2.0.

On Monday (August 24), the Okanogan Complex fire, a wildfire burning in Okanogan County, Washington, became the state’s largest-ever wildfire. It began as five separate fires caused by lightning strikes earlier in the month, and has now burned through more than 400 square miles of land. The fire has caused the evacuation of several towns in the county, and thus far more than 1,250 firefighters have been deployed to tackle the blaze. Irregular terrain means that the fires are proving difficult to deal with using traditional methods.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Okanogan Complex fire

French terror attack foiled

The Thalys train, similar to that pictured, was en route from Amsterdam to Paris when the incident took place. Image by Chris Sampson, freely licensed under CC-BY 2.0.

Passengers onboard a Thalys train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris on Friday (August 21) subdued a gunman as the train passed through Oignies, France. The suspect, armed with a Kalashnikov rifle, a Luger pistol and a utility knife, opened fire near the toilets at around 5:45 p.m. Several passengers were involved in tackling the gunman, two of which were off-duty members of the U.S. Armed Forces. Thanks primarily to the passengers’ actions, nobody on board was killed and only five were injured. Seven of the passengers were awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, France’s highest decoration.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: 2015 Thalys attack

Photo montage credits: “Hawker Hunter T7 ‘WV372 – R’ (G-BXFI) (12863569924).jpg” by Alan Wilson, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0.; “Okanogan Complex Fire – USFS.jpg” by U.S. Department of Agriculture, freely licensed under CC-BY 2.0.; “Temple of Baal-Shamin, Palmyra.jpg” by Bernard Gagnon, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.; “NASDAQ stock market display.jpg” by bfishadow, freely licensed under CC-BY 2.0.; “Gare du Nord, Paris 9 April 2014 004.jpg” by Chris Sampson, freely licensed under CC-BY 2.0.; Collage by Andrew Sherman.

To see how other news events are covered on the English Wikipedia, check out the ‘In the news’ section on its main page.

Joe Sutherland
Communications Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

The WikiConference USA presentation proposal and scholarship deadlines are fast approaching!

Do you have an experience, a problem, a solution, or a question you’d like answered? Have a theory or a new strategy for improving the community, outreach, technological infrastructure, or connections to institutions like museums, libraries, or academia? Then WikiConference USA is your chance to network, brainstorm, collaborate and learn.

Last year’s event saw speakers address a gamut of topics. We saw presentations including MOOCs, socializing students to Wikipedia, and Wiki Ed shared our Seven Biggest Mistakes. There were sixteen panels of interest to librarians, exploring how different types of libraries engage with Wikipedia, including case studies.

This year, WikiConference USA will take place at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C., October 9–11. We’ve watched the connections between Wikipedia and higher education strengthen, and we’re excited to see discussions that highlight the power, challenges, and opportunities that have emerged as a result.

The event is open to anyone with an interest in Wikipedia or related Wikimedia projects. One goal of the conference is to build better connections and understanding between academia and the Wikimedia movement in the United States. That’s why conference organizers are seeking Wikipedia volunteers, researchers, academics, librarians, and curatorial staff to come together and share ideas and perspectives.

Anyone can submit a conference session proposal. There are a list of themes and timelines for proposals, as well as instructions on how to submit, on the WikiConference USA submissions page. You can find a submission template here.

The WikiConference USA planning committee is also making scholarships available to cover the cost of travel and stay in Washington, D.C. Both presentation and scholarship requests must be submitted by August 31, 2015. This is an ideal opportunity for students who have made outstanding contributions to Wikipedia and want to learn more or get more deeply involved in the movement. More information on scholarships can be found here.

Please note that while the Wiki Education Foundation is a sponsor of WikiConference USA, all conference programming and scholarship decisions will be made exclusively by volunteers from the scholarship committee.

We hope to see you in Washington, D.C.!

Photo: “2014 WikiConferenceUSA 06” by AWang (WMF) – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

This week, the Wiki Education Foundation hosted an open house and poster session for about 60 OpenSym conference attendees. During the poster session, people mingled, traded ideas, and learned about research and practices from a variety of participants and attendees. Our Summer Fellow, Andrew Lih, and Wikipedia Content Expert Adam Hyland, also attended the conference.

An emergent theme was how to best encourage users with various levels of experience to make meaningful contributions to open projects.

Benjamin Mako Hill, from the University of Washington, presented research on Wikipedia’s page protection data. He examined when Wikipedia pages were “locked” because of controversial edits. Eva Zangerle of the University of Innsbruck looked at the relationship between Wikipedia and Twitter. The work revealed when and how Twitter communities in certain languages linked to own- and other-language Wikipedias. Michelle Purcell, from Drexel University, examined the process of feature requests in open source projects.

We also heard about technology infrastructure projects, which could someday have an impact on recognizing and categorizing types of edits. Combined with assessment tools, this research could help create tools that identify edits from new users, and react with helpful advice or suggestions.

Finally, we also came across some interesting work exploring gender biases across language Wikipedias. Max Klein’s gender gap poster used WikiData to conduct research on biographies of women. He compared the number of biographies to gender inequality indices. The result suggested correlations between gender inequality and biographical coverage of women on Wikipedia. Based on inequality data from English-speaking countries, English Wikipedia should cover more women than it does now, his poster concluded.

These were just some of the inspiring researchers and conversations at OpenSym this year. You can access most papers or abstracts at the OpenSym website, http://www.opensym.org/

Highlights

• The Wiki Education Foundation released its annual plan for fiscal year 2015–16. The plan reports on the first year of our work, and looks ahead to what we’ll set out to achieve in our next fiscal year (July 1 through June 30). Our biggest goals include scaling the impact of our Classroom Program, the Year of Science initiative, and deepening connections between academia and Wikipedia.
• Sue Gardner and Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer were elected to the Wiki Education Foundation board. Gardner was the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation from 2007 to 2014. Dr. Bartsch-Zimmer is the Inaugural Director of the University of Chicago’s Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge.
• We’ve launched a new course management tool, the Dashboard. The Dashboard fully handles the course setup and assignment design process, and gives an even better picture of what student editors are doing throughout the term. Pages are created on Wiki Ed’s website, wikiedu.org, and mirrored on Wikipedia. This gives Wiki Ed the option of developing the platform independently, and to make relatively quick adjustments as we scale, adopt new programs, and improve our understanding of best practices.
• Our final numbers for the spring 2015 classroom program are in. We supported 117 courses, more than ever before, and up from 98 courses in the fall. We supported 2,326 student editors who contributed roughly 2.5 million words to 3,429 articles, which were read by 101 million readers — that’s more than the population of Germany.

Programs

As outlined in our Annual Plan, we’ve re-organized our former Programs and Research & Development departments into three separate departments: Programs, Program Support, and Program Innovation, Analytics, and Research.

The Programs department houses our core programmatic work: the Classroom Program (led by Classroom Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal), our Educational Partnerships (led by Educational Partnerships Manager Jami Mathewson and assisted by Outreach Manager Samantha Erickson), and Community Engagement work, including the Visiting Scholars program (led by Community Engagement Manager Ryan McGrady).

Program Support work includes our technology development (led by Product Manager for Digital Services Sage Ross), communications work (led by Communications Manager Eryk Salvaggio), and support for new editors (led by Wikipedia Content Experts Adam Hyland and Ian Ramjohn). LiAnna Davis moves to become Director of Program Support, and we are hiring for a new Director of Programs.

We’re slated to begin hiring for the Director of Program Innovation, Analytics, and Research in the fall, with LiAnna overseeing this area in the meantime. As a programs-focused organization, we’re excited to be expanding our offerings.

Educational Partnerships

Jami attended the annual conference for the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) in Berlin, Germany. Wiki Ed and IAFFE members have worked together in the classroom, and have collaborated to find and improve content gaps in economics. Jami, alongside Wiki Education Foundation Board Chair Diana Strassmann and University of Utah Economics Professor Gunseli Berik, hosted a presentation focused on teaching with Wikipedia as a means to improve public scholarship in feminist economics. Conference attendees came from a variety of disciplines, and through discussions, many have committed to teach with Wikipedia in their next course.

Wiki Ed has been discussing a Year of Science collaboration with the Association for Women in Mathematics. The members of this association are a great fit, as their students would edit math articles as well as biographies about women mathematicians.

Jami and Samantha attended the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB)’s annual conference in late July, which served as Wiki Ed’s first in-person roll-out of our new course design and management tools to new instructors. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and we’ve already had ASPB members sign up to teach with us in the fall term. ASPB is recommending Wikipedia assignments to its members, as they wish to expand the quality, depth and breadth of content and experiential learning opportunities on Wikipedia about plant science.

Classroom Program

Our final numbers for the spring 2015 term are in. In the spring, we supported 117 courses, more than ever before and up from 98 courses in the fall. We supported 2,326 student editors who contributed roughly 2.5 million words to 3,429 articles, which were read by 101 million readers — that’s more than the population of Germany!

Status of the Classroom Program for the summer 2015 term as of July 31:

• 14 Wiki Ed-supported courses had Course Pages (5, or 33%, were led by returning instructors)
• 214 student editors were enrolled
• 165 (or 77%) students successfully completed the online training
• Students edited 1370 articles and created 41 new articles

After a busier than usual summer term at Wiki Ed, we are gearing up for the fall 2015 term. We’re anticipating a large number of classes for the fall, and the new Dashboard (see Digital Infrastructure section, below) should help us as we scale.

Student work highlights:

• Behavioral Communication was expanded from 529 to 1509 words by students in the University of Detroit, Mercy’s Social Psychology class. They turned a poorly referenced article written with a distinctly non-encyclopedic tone into a non-biased and well-referenced article.
• Students in Amherst College’s Rotherwas Fellows course added well-written and well-sourced material to Rotherwas Room They also uploaded media and incorporated images from their own library collections.

Community Engagement

July marked the launch of the Wikipedia Visiting Scholars program. A Visiting Scholar is an official university position for experienced Wikipedia editors who are granted remote access to library research resources. These Visiting Scholars use those resources to improve Wikipedia content in one of the university’s focus areas. Ryan announced five open positions at five educational institutions in a Wiki Ed blog post on the program. In preparation for the announcement, Ryan and Eryk continued to develop informational materials for our website and for the program’s Wikipedia page.

The five open Wikipedia Visiting Scholars positions are:

• DePaul University: focused on Chicago history, Catholic social justice studies, and/or Vincentian Studies (including French history during the Napoleonic Era)
• McMaster University: emphasizing peace and war (with a particular emphasis on the Holocaust and resistance), Bertrand Russell, Canadian literature, and/or Canadian popular culture
• Smithsonian Institution: particularly Modern African art and artists
• University of Pittsburgh: focusing on Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania history, Colonial American history, historic American songs, and/or philosophy of science
• University of Washington: interesting especially in labor and working classes in the Pacific Northwest, Pacific Northwest history, Pacific Northwest literature, and/or Pacific Northwest architecture

Each institution is working on its own selection schedule, but every position has received applications from qualified Wikipedians.

Ryan has continued to develop the program and its processes, working with Jami and Samantha on outreach strategies and Sage on adapting Wiki Ed’s tools for Visiting Scholars.

Program Support

The Program Support team spent much of July focusing on preparation for the new term, including rolling out a new course page system and preparing updated training and support materials for next term’s participants.

Communications

Eryk spent much of July updating training materials for instructors ahead of the fall 2015 term, and supporting staff with materials for the Wikipedia Visiting Scholars and Partnerships programs staff.

Eryk has also been working closely with Executive Assistant to the ED Renee LeVesque, Wikimedia DC, and Wikimedia NYC volunteers, and the communications staff at the National Archive to organize and promoteWikiConference USA. The conference will be held at the historic and symbolic National Archive building October 9-11.

Blog posts:

• New Wiki Ed brochure helps instructors teach Wikipedia through a theoretical lens (July 1)
• Visiting Scholars program connects Wikipedians with academic resources (July 13)
• More staff, more tools mean more capacity for partnerships (July 15)
• The Roundup: Environmental history (July 20)
• Wiki Education Foundation 2015–16 Annual Plan Released (July 20)
• Sue Gardner, Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer elected to Wiki Education Foundation board (July 21)
• Student editors contributed 2.5 million words to Wikipedia this term (July 21)
• Looking back at the 2015 spring term (July 22)
• The Wiki Education Foundation is a proud sponsor of WikiConference USA 2015 (July 22)
• Year of Science initiative focuses on science communication, literacy (July 24)
• Welcome Andrew Lih, first Summer Research Fellow (July 27)
• Wiki Ed Dashboard launches course management features (July 28)
• Monthly Report for June 2015 (July 31)

Press Releases:

• PRESS RELEASE: Sue Gardner, Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer elected to Wiki Education Foundation board (July 21)
• PRESS RELEASE: WikiConference USA to be held at the National Archives in October (July 22)

Digital Infrastructure

Sage and the design team at WINTR have been focused on the rollout of our new dashboard.wikiedu.org course page system, which we are using for all courses beginning with the fall 2015 term. Our usability testing with new instructors provided a tremendous amount of information on what we should focus on improving. Most of our development work this month has gone into improving the course creation process. In late July, we opened up the new system for new and returning instructors to set up their courses, and we’re continuing to polish up the user experience, fix bugs, and solve any key unanticipated use cases that come up as instructors put the system through its paces.

Sage also traveled to the annual Wikimania conference, in Mexico City, to connect with the wider Wikimedia world, and to work with developers interested in building on Wiki Ed’s dashboard platform. Our hope has always been that our technology — free software that anyone can use and build upon — would find its way into other Wikipedia projects and other languages. During the hackathon, Sage worked with several Wikimedia Foundation developers to bring our dashboard work to users beyond Wiki Ed’s own programs. The Outreach Dashboard is now up and running for trial projects — like edit-a-thons and other events, or courses outside of the US and Canada — on English Wikipedia. We also began putting together a roadmap for internationalization, so that Wikimedians in many different languages may eventually have access to their own Wikipedia dashboards. While Wiki Ed won’t take on that work directly, we hope to work with others to build a strong community platform.

Program Innovation, Analytics, and Research

Summer Seminar

We kicked off a short pilot to investigate the potential for instructors interested in contributing content in their area of expertise during the summer. Our first Summer Seminar focuses on psychology, and instructors will instructors meet weekly for one month to learn how to edit Wikipedia articles. In July, Helaine and Ian set up the course page for the Summer Seminar in Psychology using Wiki Ed’s new course dashboard. Enrollment for the program closed on July 24, and there are 20 participants signed up on the course page. Participants began doing preliminary work during the last week of July, with the first online session scheduled for August 6. Helaine and Ian are working closely together to make sure that the course covers a range of relevant topics related to editing psychology articles on Wikipedia, including an outline for the weekly online sessions.

Summer Research Fellowship

Andrew Lih joined the Wiki Education Foundation as our inaugural Summer Research Fellow in late July. The Summer Research Fellowship is a month-long pilot for a potential future program in which we’ll host professors or graduate students to help us answer questions about our programmatic work. This summer, Andrew will create a strategy and select case studies for outlining how university libraries, museums, and archives could work with instructors, students, and/or the community of Wikipedia editors as part of the Year of Science.

Andrew is an ideal person to be our first Fellow. As User:Fuzheado, Andrew has been editing Wikipedia since 2003 and was one of the first to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool that year. He’s taught numerous courses where he assigned students to contribute content to Wikipedia, including several affiliated with Wiki Ed’s Classroom Program. His work connecting students to museums in Washington, D.C., as part of his Wikipedia assignment can be found in our Case Studies brochure. He is also a member of the GLAM-Wiki US Consortium Advisory Group.

Finance & Administration / Fundraising

Finance & Administration

Our second-year funding commitment from Stanton Foundation had already been received prior to June 30, 2015. As a result, we are comfortably starting our second year.

The month of July started our new fiscal year. Expenses for the month, and year-to-date, were $264,022 (91%) versus the plan of $291,420. The variance of $27k was mainly the result of delayed timing of expenditures in recruitment ($17k); outside contract services ($6k); and All Staff meeting ($5k), along with savings in promotional items ($7k). These savings and timing delays, helped to offset increased travel expenditures for fundraising and governance.

Fundraising

On July 23, we welcomed Victoria Hinshaw in the new Development Associate role. Victoria will work closely with Senior Manager of Development, Tom Porter, to conduct individual and institutional prospect research, assist with daily development activities, develop and maintain prospect tracking systems, and assist in the planning of fundraising events. Additionally, Tom Porter has activated key Wiki Education Foundation board members to connect to potential funders.

Board

The board welcomes Sue Gardner and Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer as new members. Sue Gardner is the former Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation where she oversaw the creation of the Public Policy Initiative, which later emerged as the Wikipedia Education Program and Wiki Education Foundation. Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer is currently the Inaugural Director of the University’s Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge, which examines the historical, social, and intellectual circumstances that give rise to different kinds of knowledge across different cultures and in different eras.

Office of the ED

• Current priorities:
  • Securing funding for upcoming major programmatic initiatives
  • Filling the Director of Programs position
  • Setting up a monthly report card to track key organizational health and progress indicators

• In early July, staff gathered in San Francisco for Wiki Education Foundation’s second all-staff meeting. During five days, staff built a shared understanding of what the general team mandates and team key focus areas for next year are, kicked off a organization­wide team processes documentation, learned the basics of program evaluation, and set individual milestones for the first two quarters of fiscal year 2015–​1​6. Also, Frank and LiAnna provided every individual on staff with a performance review that covered the last fiscal year. As a social event, staff attended a “A History of the World in Ten Cheeses” presentation at the Cheese School of San Francisco.
• Also in July, Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer hosted a meeting with Diana Strassmann, John Willinsky, Bob Cummings, Richard Knipel, and Frank Schulenburg at the University of Chicago. Board members and the ED discussed opportunities of future cooperation between Wiki Ed and the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge and continued their work on Wiki Ed’s vision statement.
• After signing the official partnership agreement with the National Archives, Wiki Education Foundation officially announced its support for WikiConference USA 2015. Proposals for workshops, tutorials, panels, or presentation can be submitted on the website for the conference.

Visitors and guests

• Sabine Blankenship, Science Liaison Officer at the German Consulate General in San Francisco
• Mathias Haas, Trend Researcher
• Andrew Lih, Summer Fellow

“Did You Know… that the Rotherwas Room, once used as a private dining parlor for nobles in 17th-century England and for public poetry readings by Robert Frost, is now open to visitors in the Mead Art Museum?”

Students from Nicola Courtright’s Amherst College Rotherwas Fellows Summer 2015 course proposed that question as a “Did You Know?” on Wikipedia, and it made Wikipedia’s front page, gathering more than 1,600 page views. Students created the article, drawing from historical books and newspaper articles, and contributed photographs.

The Rotherwas Room itself dates to the 17th century and was reassembled at Amherst College’s Mead Art Museum in 1948. It serves as an example of the Jacobean style of architecture popular at the time.

The article is a great integration of photography into a written Wikipedia assignment, which can create richer articles and deepen the assignment’s media literacy impact. You can read more about photos as a stand-alone assignment, or complement to the writing assignment, here.

Thanks to these students for contributing both text and photos of a local landmark to share with the world!

Photo: “Rotherwas Room East View” by Stephen Petegorsky – Mead Art Museum. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons –here.

Karla Marte at the Wikimedia UK office

This post was written by Daria Cybulska, Head of Programmes and Evaluation

We are excited to introduce to everyone a new addition to the team, Karla Marte, who is joining us as our Administration and Programme Assistant.

Having recently undergone a process of refocusing of our activities, we are now entering an exciting new phase where we want to build on large scale partnerships with external organisations. Strong reporting and administration will be a key element of that.

Karla will be providing both core administration and financial support for Wikimedia UK activities, with focus on its programmes and reporting. The role spans across the organisation though, providing administrative help wherever needed, which will make her much appreciated! She will also be the first port of contact for the organisation, so you will definitely come across her soon.

Karla has a very interesting background, coming to us from the Dominican Republic. Here she’s introducing herself:

“I recently relocated to the UK from the Dominican Republic. I have worked for an international development donor agency in the Caribbean region for the last ten years providing a range of administrative, financial and programmatic support to its education, health, youth, democracy and governance, and environmental programmes. I have an undergraduate degree in Business Administration and a masters degree in Management and Productivity.

“In my spare time I enjoy reading, baking, watching films, exploring museums and historic places and am a big follower of Formula 1.

“I am really looking forward to using what I have learnt from my previous work experience to further Wikimedia UK’s objectives.”

Please join us in welcoming Karla to the team!

• to indicate that the external source is about the same subject
• to acknowledge the external source served as the source for a statement
• to indicate whether shared values match

Mrutyunjaya Kar, Administrator, Odia Wikipedia. Photo by Jasanpictures, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Odia Wikipedia, one of several Indian-language Wikipedia projects, celebrated thirteen years of free knowledge contribution on June 3.

Launched in 2002—just a year after the English Wikipedia was launched—Odia Wikipedia has grown to be the largest content repository in the Odia language available in Unicode on the Internet. With over 8,900 articles and about 17 active editors (also known as “uikiali”) spread across various parts of India and abroad, the project has become more than just an encyclopedia. The voluntary editor community has put its efforts into acquiring valuable content, re-licensing them under Creative Commons (CC) licenses, and building tools for acquiring more encyclopedic content from various sources.

The community has also engaged over 2,500 people through various outreach programs, such as the Wikipedia Education Program. For its thirteenth anniversary, the community released a character-encoding converter that promises to unlock massive amounts of content—from government portals to journals, newspapers and magazines that have their content in various legacy encoding systems other than Unicode. This has been a major roadblock in the search for and reuse of digital content in the Odia language.

During our thirteenth anniversary celebrations, the community spent a day assessing community needs, addressing issues, and identifying priority areas to focus on in the future. This was arguably the first time almost the entire community gathered in a physical space. This allowed Odia Wikipedia administrator, and the most active Odia Wikimedian, Mrutyunjaya Kar and I to design a needs assessment survey. Participating Wikimedians were asked to brainstorm various problems they face in two major areas: editing and outreach.

Two-fifths of participants said that problems with the rendering of Odia characters in different operating systems, ignorance or lack of more documentation about enabling encoding for Odia, input methods and keyboard layouts, and other font- and keyboard-related issues as the major reason for low readership and contribution on Wikipedia.

More than a third instead blamed the lack of good quality content on Wikipedia and the Internet as a whole in the Odia language, in English related to Odia language, and in Odisha on the Internet. A quarter blamed other technical issues, including the lack of mobile input in Odia, for low editorship, while low interest for contributing in Odia language by native language speakers was blamed by eight percent of survey participants.

Aditya Mahar, Wikimedian. By Jnanaranjan sahu, released under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Aditya Mahar, the second-most active editor on the Odia Wikipedia, feels that the biggest setback for the Odia Wikipedia is a lack of interest in contributing in Odia language. He says many Odia speakers feel that Odia is not needed to acquire and share knowledge.

“Like many others, I have been very eager to learn and share more about my home state and culture,” he says. “That’s why I started to contribute to the Odia Wikipedia, to tell my people about our rich cultural heritage in my language.”

He adds that he is concerned by the way many have been alienating Odia with the excuse of learning English to connect to the rest of the world. “I want my future generation to find everything they want to learn in Odia—from the history of Odisha, our art, architecture, Odia language and people, and our cultural extravaganza,” he says.

Mrutyunjaya Kar, an administrator on the Odia Wikipedia and the most active contributor, feels that Wikipedia is like a marathon and there is a great need for fresh blood in the community. Asked if the community will ever die out, Mrutyunjaya feels that even with a small community, the Odia Wikipedia community is always going to thrive, even if, in the worst case, only one active Wikipedian remains. So, we badly need new users to pass the baton. For him, community support and bonding with the fellow editors is the most important thing to lead a community.

Mrutyunjaya adds that creating many short articles, known as “stubs”, is a necessary evil and essential for a project like the Odia Wikipedia, as they are drafted as a by-product of collaborative editing.

“It takes little longer for a small community like Odia to expand and enhance quality of stubs though,” he says. “Many-a-times, new editors learn about Wikipedia editing while creating stubs. However, all the active Wikipedians agreed during the thirteenth anniversary not to create or promote many stubs.”

Sailesh Patnaik, Odia Wikimedian
Subhashish Panigrahi, Odia Wikimedian and Programme Officer, Access To Knowledge (CIS-A2K)

This week’s ContentTranslation software update was a bit different, focusing on stability rather than features or front-end bug fixes:

• A bug in the Flow extension caused publishing failures in ContentTranslation. Although the articles were subsequently published, the contenttranslation tag was missing from the revision history, the edit didn’t appear in RecentChanges, and confusing error messages were shown. This problem has now been resolved in collaboration with the Flow project developers.
• Deletion of references from the source article while the translation was going was causing “503” errors. This has been fixed. (bug report)
• The configuration of Apertium machine translation services has been updated so that they would be consistently stable and not fill up the memory, causing machine translation to stop working. (bug report)

The developers are completing the work on the first phase of the feature that will show article suggestions on the dashboard as well as different bugs in the support of the Norwegian language. Also, a few general fixes in the user interface are expected next week.

Coding da Vinci featured 20 different projects and added 600,000 files to the Wikimedia Commons. Photo by Thomas Nitz/Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland, freely licensed under CC BY 2.0.

An additional 600,000 free files are now available for the Wikimedia Commons thanks to Coding da Vinci, a recent cultural data hackathon held at Berlin’s Jewish Museum. They range from century-old films to recordings of mechanical pianos, World War II photographs, scans of dried flowers, and other art and heritage, all sourced from German museums, archives, and libraries.

Other achievements ranged from including 65 million pieces of metadata, such as the Integrated Authority Files (GND) and inventory of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, and about 180 people came to Coding da Vinci’s 5 July award ceremony, despite heat that reached 34°C, for presentations from the competition’s 20 projects.

Still, you can find all of this information in the competition’s press report, along with the five jury prizes and “everybody’s darling” plant identification app Floradex (i.e. won the audience prize). Instead, this blog post focuses on the competition’s project that, in my personal opinion, epitomizes a very special quality of Coding da Vinci.

The Imperii-Viz project

This deed (a transcription) was proof of Götz von Berlichingen‘s ownership of Hornberg Castle. Photo by Castellan/Burg Hornberg archives, public domain.

Documents similar to the deed above, a remnant from the Holy Roman Empire, are on display in museums around the world. They can be attractive to look at, but very few of us can actually read them—and among the few who can decipher the content, fewer still can understand it.

In Europe, a good number of these documents—most of them deeds of legal transactions—have survived into the present day, despite wars, fires, mold, and voracious bugs, and the sheer amount of time that has passed since they were written. Some are carefully preserved in archives, and non-medievalist historians and similar specialists rarely get to see them; their age alone makes them too precious and fragile.

Now, thanks to the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz, many of these documents are now becoming accessible to a wider audience. The academy is home to the nearly 200-year-long research project “Regesta Imperii” (RI). Here, all administrative documents issued by Roman-German kings and emperors are summarized in what are known as regesta—similar in function to a book’s dust jacket—in a database. At present it contains 130,000 entries, enough that a large team of specialists from various fields was required.

One visit to RI’s website is enough to realize you have to be a specialist yourself not to get lost in the thousands of entries. Goethe once observed that you only see what you know. If you don’t know what you’re looking for because you can’t imagine what these historical documents might hold, then you won’t even be able to think of a research question. When this happens, the documents remain purely decorative: one deed quickly starts to look like a thousand others, and the visitor’s attention soon drifts away.

The dialectic takes hold

The Imperii-Viz team present their app at Coding da Vinci. Photo from Thomas Nitz/Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland, freely licensed under CC BY 2.0.

In order to reach and hold onto these non-specialists, the academy decided to conduct an experiment: what would happen if they enlisted curious hackers to play around with their database? They released the data under a free license specially for Coding da Vinci, thus making them available for use in an app for the very first time. For programmers, 130,000 data sets make for a very attractive offer, and five young IT students from Stuttgart and Leipzig took up the challenge. They called the result Imperii-Viz.

On the web-based app, the RI data sets are expanded with images from Wikimedia Commons and text on the emperors and kings from Wikipedia. When the user selects a king, a heat map appears showing the European regions where this king most frequently issued such deeds.

Dr. Andreas Kuczera, a scientific researcher at RI, is very positive about the results of the experiment:

This assessment reflects perfectly, I believe, the dialectical quality of Coding da Vinci: the dialogue and exchange of experiences between two worlds. In an age of increasingly structured data, cultural institutions can use the technical know-how of programmers to build bridges between us and our cultural heritage—thus making our world a more versatile and richer place, and helping us anchor our present lives in history.

Coding da Vinci was organized by Wikimedia Deutschland together with its partners the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB), the Service Center for Digitization, and the Open Knowledge Foundation; several other reports from the competition are available.

Barbara Fischer
Curator for GLAM Partnerships at Wikimedia Deutschland

Here are some of the global news stories covered on Wikipedia this week:

• A bomb blast near a shrine in central Bangkok kills twenty people.
• Protesters in more than 200 Brazilian cities demand the resignation of Dilma Rouseff.
• A series of massive explosions in Tianjin, China, kill more than 114 people.
• American golfer Jordan Spieth becomes world number one, while Australian Jason Day wins the 2015 PGA Championship.
• A domestic plane carring 54 people crashes in Indonesia, killing all on board.

Bomb blasts in Bangkok

The Erawan Shrine, seen here in May, was targeted. Image by Cantab12, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

A TNT bomb was detonated outside the Erawan Shrine on the busy Ratchaprasong intersection in Bangkok on Monday (August 17). The attack, thought to have been politically motivated, killed twenty people and injured more than 100. Most of those were tourists, though several Thai nationals are among the dead. Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha called it the “worst-ever attack” in the country’s history. So far, twenty-three countries have issued travel advisories in the wake of the attack as Thai police track down the suspect who is as yet unidentified.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: 2015 Ratchaprasong bombing

Brazilians protest Dilma

Protests have been ongoing in Brazil throughout 2015; here, the people of São Paulo demonstrate in March. Image by Agência Brasil, freely licensed under CC-BY 3.0 Brazil.

On August 16, protests took place around Brazil in more than 200 cities across all 26 of the country’s states. Demonstrators were again demanding the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, whose reign has gradually become more unpopular among some sections of the public. Though turnout was smaller than similar protests earlier in the year, sources suggest around 200,000 people took part around Brazil. A July poll found that Rousseff’s approval rating had dropped to 7.7 percent, with almost two thirds of respondents wishing to see her impeachment.

Learn more in these related Wikipedia articles: 2015 protests in Brazil, Dilma Rousseff

Massive explosions in Tianjin

The blasts caused extensive damage to vehicles and buildings. Image by Voice of America, in the public domain.

A series of massive explosions near the Chinese city of Tianjin last week have killed at least 114 people, including more than twelve firefighters. The cause of the blasts is not yet known, though initial reports suggest they were the result of an industrial accident at a dangerous goods containment station near the Port of Tianjin. The explosions also caused extensive damage to nearby buildings, destroying several, and were visible from space. Thousands of residents were evacuated due to the chemicals released in the blast, thought to include sodium cyanide, and most are now staying in temporary shelters.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: 2015 Tianjin explosions

Spieth and Day celebrate golfing successes

Jason Day, pictured in 2011, won his first major at the 2015 PGA Championship. Image by Keith Allison, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Australian golfer Jason Day won his first major at the 2015 PGA Championship on Sunday, August 16. He recorded a score of –20, the lowest score in relation to par ever recorded in a major. Thanks in part to this win, he rose to number three in the Official World Golf Ranking. It was Jordan Spieth of the United States who made most headlines on the day—despite finishing three strokes behind day, Spieth still climbed to number one in the ranking, superceding Rory McIlroy, becoming the eighteenth different golfer to earn this ranking since 1986.

Learn more in these related Wikipedia articles: 2015 PGA Championship, Jordan Spieth, Jason Day

Indonesian domestic flight crashes

The plane involved in the incident, pictured here in 2008. Image by YSSY guy, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Trigana Air Service Flight 257, a 45-minute domestic flight from Sentani to to Oksibil in the eastern Indonesian province of Papua, crashed on Sunday, August 16, thirty minutes after takeoff. The plane was carrying 49 passengers and five crew, all of whom died on impact. It is Trigana Air Service‘s deadliest crash in the airline’s 25-year history, and the third-deadliest in eight months in Indonesia. The cause of the crash is being investigated; analyst Mary Schiavo suggested that “pilots don’t have enough training in their landing sequences and they need more training and more oversight”.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Trigana Air Service Flight 257

Photo montage credits: “Jason Day 2011 cropped.jpg” by Keith Allison, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0.; “Protestos de 15 de março de 2015 em São Paulo-3.jpg” by Agência Brasil, freely licensed under CC-BY 3.0 Brazil; “Tianjin_explosion_scene_20150813_(20).jpg” by Voice of America, in the public domain; “PKYRN.JPG” by YSSY guy, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.; “Erawan_Shrine,_Ratchaprasong,_May_2015.jpg” by Cantab12, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.; Collage by Andrew Sherman.

To see how other news events are covered on the English Wikipedia, check out the ‘In the news’ section on its main page.

Joe SutherlandCommunications InternWikimedia Foundation

Researchers and practitioners of open collaboration will flock to San Francisco from August 19 to 21. They’ll be in town for OpenSym, a conference dedicated to open collaborative projects, such as Wikipedia.

For the Wiki Education Foundation, this is right in our neighborhood. That’s not only because we’re also focused on open access collaboration in classrooms. It’s also literally in our neighborhood, as the Golden Gate Club — where OpenSym is held — is just footsteps away from our office in the Presidio.

This is a great opportunity to meet with the social scientists, digital humanities researchers, and computer scientists who make up the multidisciplinary attendee list of OpenSym. Our Wikipedia Content Expert Adam Hyland will attend the conference, and we’re hosting a Welcome Reception for registered attendees on Wednesday, August 19.

We’re pleased to be joining the OpenSym conference in 2015, and look forward to contributing to the spirit of open, multi-disciplinary research and collaboration.

Photo: “Below Golden Gate Bridge” by Wa17gs – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Wikipedia articles on controversial scientific topics, like ‘Global warming,’ receive more edits. Contrary to recent media reports, this does not make them more inaccurate. Photo by Sir48, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit. This open, collaborative model is what makes it one of the world’s most popular sources of information. It is also what makes Wikipedia reliable and accurate, as everyone can review changes and additions to its articles. Although vandalism and inaccuracies can occur, its community of volunteer editors has established mechanisms to ensure that the vast majority of inaccurate content is addressed within minutes.

Last week, a study was published in the open-access journal PLOS One: “Content Volatility of Scientific Topics in Wikipedia: A Cautionary Tale.” The study prompted a flurry of discussion around the accuracy of scientific articles on Wikipedia. The Wikimedia community has longstanding support for academic research about Wikipedia. However, the media coverage of this particular study has drawn some questionable conclusions.

According to the study, articles on politically controversial scientific articles on English Wikipedia tend to receive higher edit rates and larger edits than scientific articles considered to be politically uncontroversial. The authors cite three topics they identified as politically controversial—acid rain, global warming, and evolution—and four they identified as politically uncontroversial: heliocentrism, general relativity, continental drift, and the standard model in physics.*

It didn’t surprise us to learn that articles considered to be controversial are frequently edited. The nature of controversy, after all, is that it generates discussion and public attention. For example, while the properties of water (H2O) have been well established, the causes of the Arctic sea ice decline are the subject of ongoing scientific inquiry and political debate.

Unfortunately, the study also jumped to conclusions about what this means for Wikipedia’s reliability, overstating findings and inferring facts not in evidence. Much of the press about the study has repeated the assertion that controversial articles are also more likely to be inaccurate, despite a lack of strong supporting evidence: the study only references a handful of anecdotal examples of inaccuracies. Instead, the study simply seems to confirm that the articles chosen as controversial are, in fact, controversial and thus frequently edited. One of the authors has since responded that they intended no claim about a relationship between higher edit rates and lower accuracy.

In fact, several prior studies have found the opposite to be true, demonstrating that more edits are correlated with higher quality articles. For example, a 2007 study published in the peer-reviewed journal First Monday found “a strong correlation between number of edits, number of distinct editors, and article quality in Wikipedia.” Similarly, in 2013 researchers observed that the number of contributions to high-quality articles is about one order of magnitude higher than that of low-quality articles, according to the book Confidentiality and Integrity in Crowdsourcing Systems.

In addition, the study covered a very small sample size, using just seven of the 35 million articles available across Wikipedia’s many languages.

Wikipedia’s community of volunteer editors take the commitment to accuracy very seriously. Many of them have personal academic or data science interests. In fact, a robust discussion critiquing the methodology of this study has taken place publicly on Wikipedia.

The aim of Wikipedia is to make the sum of all knowledge available to every person in the world. External research and observation are critical to helping Wikipedia grow and improve. But in true Wikipedian spirit, we believe any research should be assessed and reported with rigor and care. It is the same approach Wikipedia editors use to keep building Wikipedia as a reliable, accurate, and neutral resource for all.

*We’ll note that we found the inclusion of heliocentrism in the category of politically uncontroversial amusing. Hundreds of years later, we hope Galileo would appreciate the nod.

Katherine Maher, Chief Communications Officer, Wikimedia Foundation
Juliet Barbara, Senior Communications Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

This post was written by Rebecca O’Neill

Just a few of the books Rebecca used during 100wikidays

It is hard to believe that I completed the #100wikidays challenge on the 9^th August, as the time absolutely flew by. The challenge, as many people know, is to write an article a day for 100 days straight and draws on the idea of the 100 days of happiness. Within a few days of the challenge being mentioned to me by Asaf from the foundation, I had fallen down the rabbit hole and created a To Do list in my user space. Unlike the project’s originator, Vassia, I could not place my faith in finding a subject on each day or letting the article subject find you, I needed a plan of attack. As I’m involved in Wikimedia Community Ireland, I had become familiar with the list of Irish National Monuments through our running of Wiki Loves Monuments, and knew that many did not have articles. That was my jumping off point. From there I went to my own areas of interest, Irish naturalists from around the turn of twentieth century, and Irish museums. I choose these areas as I worked for a number of years in the Natural History Museum in Dublin and had become intrigued by the social history and people behind the specimens. My excuse on the museums is a childhood spent in local museums dotted across the county as my parents attempted to entertain children and visitors over the years. Soon enough I had a list of almost 100 potential articles right there.

Although I was not entirely new to creating new articles, I certainly had not created many, so had a lot of the new(ish) editor fears of deletion or criticism. Particularly as I am a woman, you sometimes come primed to expect a little push back, and as I began to focus on women more and more I wondered would I ever have the notability of my articles contested. I was pleasantly surprised. All of my articles are surviving as of right now, and I’m delighted to say that some have been improved upon since I created them. There was no greater pleasure for me than to see an article on an Irish botanical artist or collector edited by someone else adding to the story. It meant that I’m not the only one on Wikipedia who cares!

Soon the Irish naturalists and botanists I was writing about led me to the list of Irish botanical illustrators, which had its fair share of red links. It was finding this that led me to searching the Dictionary of Irish Biography for female entries that mentioned the word “artist”. Suddenly the flood gates opened. Having been an art student in a previous life I have some interest and limited knowledge of art history, and even I was shocked to find the obvious omissions from Wikipedia of Irish female artists. I had found a niche that felt more like a lacuna. If I had fallen down a rabbit hole with 100wikidays, I was through the looking glass now, with a seemingly endless list of artists to write about! Every one artist seem to alert me to at least one or two more red links. As it turns out, 100 days was never going to be enough. It looks as if a second challenge may be on the horizon for me, and rather than just having a general Irish theme it may be 100 Irish women, as there seems to be no end in sight.

Many of the red links languishing in my To Do list are still National Monuments and museums. Non-promotional, non-tourist driven, and comprehensive sources were hard to come by. My hope is to find homes for some of these smaller, or more obscure monuments and institutions, within other articles on their localities etc. Some people I have listed are perhaps not suited to Wikipedia and may be retired from the list, though I hold out hope for some of those early geologists and botanists yet! Doing the challenge has definitely made me a more confident Wikipedian, it has made me feel more like a “real” Wikipedian too, rather than just an enthusiast. I have met some wonderful people both on Wiki and in real life through it, and it has made editing more of a daily habit for me. Saying that I have taken a short break in editing to get PhD and other work done, but it is only a matter of time before another 100 days begins. Having written about everything from the stump of a windmill, to a butter museum, to an almost literal flying nun, I feel like this might only be the beginning.

Wikipedia is capable of covering news like any news agency. Photo by Kai Mörk, freely licensed under CC BY 3.0 (Germany).

For almost fifteen years, the scope of topics that Wikipedia covers has grown steadily. Now, the free online encyclopedia covers everything from music, film and video games to geography, history, and the sciences. It also contains articles on topics trending in the news, updated by tens of thousands of volunteer editors as swiftly as the news breaks.

To investigate aspects of this phenomenon, such as the speed with which breaking news is covered on Wikipedia, the verifiability of information added over time, and the distribution of edits among Wikipedia’s editors, I selected an article for further analysis in the form of a dissertation.^[1]

Comparing page views and daily edit counts for the article, highlight key elements in the story’s development. Image by Joe Sutherland, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The article selected was “Shooting of Michael Brown“, which covered the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by police officer Darren Wilson. The incident attracted much press attention fuelled by local protest in the suburb of St. Louis. I observed the article’s history until January 12, 2015.

The resulting data was split into two “peaks” in the development of this story: the initial media scramble after protests began in mid-August, and the Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson for the teenager’s death in late November.^[2] Each “peak” represented 500 individual “revisions” of the article in question. The use of peaks in this case allowed for cross-case analysis—that is, a direct comparison between two case studies.

Speed of editing

Graphing the speed of editing across both peaks of development. Image by Joe Sutherland, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Notably, pageviews and edit rates didn’t line up as one might expect. Instead, there was a great flurry of edits a few days after the article was created, presumably as the editing community learned of the article’s existence or heard about the event. The speed of editing was incredibly fast during this initial period of rioting and press attention, though these speeds were highly inconsistent. The mean editing rate across this period was 18.57 edits per hour, more than eleven times the overall average for the article.

Media coverage, however, seems to have a much more acute impact on pageviews: upon Darren Wilson’s indictment decision in November, almost half a million people visited the article in just one day. A somewhat surprising observation was that this second peak resulted in much slower rates of editing. The mean for this period was just 7.21 edits per hour, which was two and a half times slower than in the first. It is also very inconsistent, mirroring the first peak—editing speeds varied widely throughout both peaks and were largely unpredictable.

In terms of text added to the article, the first peak—which was observed over a much shorter period of time—saw an average of 501.02 bytes of text added per hour, some 3.6 times quicker than the rate of the second peak. By then, however, the article was much longer and the causation can likely be that there wasn’t much left to add by that point.

Use of sources

To judge the article’s accuracy is a very difficult task, which would by its very nature be subjective and require an in-depth knowledge of what happened in Ferguson that afternoon. To this end, I instead looked at the verifiability of the article—specifically, the volume of sources per kilobyte of text, referred to for this study as the article’s “reference density”.

“Reference densities” over each peak. Image by Joe Sutherland, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Ten samples were taken systematically for this research from each peak, and their references tallied. This was used in conjunction with the page’s size in kilobytes to find the reference density.

In both peaks, the reference density steadily increased over time. It was significantly higher overall in the earlier peak, when the article was shorter and rapidly-changing information required more verification. This rise in reference density over time likely indicates Wikipedia editors’ desire to ensure information added is not removed as unverifiable.

The majority of sources used in the article were from publications which focus on print media. This is more obvious in the second peak than the first, where local newspaper The St. Louis Post-Dispatch became much more common among the article’s sources.

Origins of sources used within the article per peak. Image by Joe Sutherland, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Relatedly, it was discovered that a high volume of the sources were from media based in the state of Missouri, obviously local to the shooting location itself. The proportion falling into this category actually increased by the second peak, from just over 18 percent to just over a fifth of all sources. Other local sources which were regularly used in the article included the St. Louis American and broadcasters KTVI and KMOV.

It was the state of New York which provided the majority of sources, however; this seems to indicate that editors tend towards big-name, reputable sources such as the New York Times and USA Today, which both placed highly on ranking lists. Notably, the state of Georgia was almost exclusively represented by national broadcaster CNN, yet still made up around 10 percent of all sources used.

Range of contributors

Finally, the editing patterns of users were examined to judge the distribution of edits among a number of groups. To do this, users were placed into categories based on their rates of editing—which, for the purposes of this study, was defined as their mean edits per day. Categories were selected to divide editors as evenly as possible for the analysis, and six bots were excluded to prevent the skewing of results.

Clearly, the majority of users in the highly active and power users brackets hold some kind of status, whether that be the “rollback” tool given out by administrators, or elected roles such as administrator or bureaucrat. This at least implies that more daily edits can translate roughly into experience or trust on the project.

Looking at data added per category, highly active users have been responsible for the vast majority of the total content added to the article—over half of the total. However, breaking it down into mean content added per edit for each category provided some intriguing results.

Mean content added per edit, in bytes, per experience category. Image by Joe Sutherland, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

While the highly active users take this crown too, it is a much closer race. Perhaps unintuitively, “casual” editors—those with fewer than one edit per day, but more than 0.1—added an average of 95.81 bytes per edit, and the category directly below that added 93.70 bytes per edit. This suggests that article editing is not just done by the heavily-active users on Wikipedia, but by a wide range of users with vastly different editing styles and experience.

Edits to the article were most commonly made by a very small group of users. Indeed, 58 percent of edits made to the article were by the top ten contributors, while over half of contributors made just one edit. Text added to the article followed the same pattern, though more pronounced: the same top ten contributed more than two-thirds of the content article content. This lends weight to theories that Wikipedia articles tend to be worked on by a core “team”, while other individual editors contribute with more minor edits and vandalism reversion.

Overall, the study shows that Wikipedia works on breaking news much like a traditional newsroom—verifiability is held in high regard, and a “core group” of editors tend to contribute a vast majority of the content. Editing rates, however, do not match up as obviously with peaks of media activity, which is worth investigating in future more qualitatively.

If you’re interested in reading the full thesis, it’s available from my website. For more academic research into Wikipedia, consider subscribing to the monthly Wikimedia Research newsletter.

Joe Sutherland, Wikimedia Foundation communications intern

Notes

1. ↑ Others have done research into this area; their work, methods and outcomes heavily influenced this study. In particular, Brian Keegan‘s work was instrumental in guiding the direction for this research. His 2013 study into breaking news, co-authored with Darren Gergle and Noshir Contractor, covers a far wider range than this thesis did.
2. ↑ The first peak depicted is the 500 edits made between 09:38 UTC on 16 August 2014 and 17:54 UTC on 18 August 2014 (a period of 2 days, 8 hours and 16 minutes); the second is between 00:57 UTC on 23 November 2014 and 22:36 UTC on 01 December 2014 (a period of 8 days, 21 hours and 39 minutes).

The “helper theory” in social psychology is based on the idea that when you help someone, you benefit, too. The theory suggests that helpers draw various benefits from their support, including the meaningful development of abilities through teaching others.

The theory seems like it could explain some of the benefits we see when students help articles improve on Wikipedia. So we were happy to see that the article on helper theory was developed by student editors in Dr. Sheryl Boglarksy’s Social Psychology course at the University of Detroit-Mercy!

Those students expanded the article from a short stub with just 107 words and three references, to a deeper article with 946 words and 15 quality references.

Thanks to Dr. Sheryl Boglarksy and her class of student editors for this great contribution to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s web features let you learn more about what you’re reading than you can from a traditional book. Photo (c) Julia Spranger, licensed CC BY.

Since it launched in 2001, Wikipedia has become the most widely-viewed source of original content in the world. But the way it’s built is utterly different from other publications: newspapers, books, traditional encyclopedias. Most of us have a basic understanding how a traditional publication is created; for instance, the difference between a reporter and a news editor, or the role of a publisher as a gatekeeper in determining what authors get published. But that understanding won’t help much when it comes to Wikipedia.

But there’s plenty you can do to learn about how a Wikipedia article has evolved, and assess things like its accuracy bias. Wikipedia is built on the principle of transparency; with very few exceptions, every edit in an article is preserved, and publicly visible. So is every discussion about how the article should be written or edited.

But if you want to explore these edits and discussions, you will need a basic understanding of how Wikipedia works. Below is an exercise you can complete in 30-60 minutes, designed to help you build some skills as a critical Wikipedia reader.

Before you get started, review this case study of the evolution of the article on Celilo Falls. Don’t worry about absorbing every detail; but take in a view of the kind of things Wikipedia editors do. Keep the case study open in a browser tab while you do the following exercises.

1. Explore that article’s “Talk” page. Read through the beige boxes at the top. Explore some of the links in them. Can you find one or more that were mentioned in the case study? (These beige boxes are typical of an article’s talk page, but they have nothing to do with discussion; it’s just an oddity of Wikipedia that this is where they happen to live.)
   Now explore the rest of the page. Do you see any discussions related to the case study?
2. Explore that article’s “View history” tab. (See below for some help with this one.) Use the date fields at the top of the page to navigate to one of the dates mentioned in the case study. Can you find any of the edits mentioned in the case study? Do you see any others that are interesting?
   Now look at the line near the top of the view history page labeled “external tools.” Try clicking some. Can you find out how many times the article was viewed in the last month? Who has written the bulk of the article? Can you find when a certain sentence was originally added?
3. Look at the public logs for this article. (The link is at the top of the view history page.) Logs will reflect certain administrative actions, for instance, protecting an article from anonymous edits. For the Celilo Falls article, you won’t see any entries; but for a more controversial article, you probably will.
4. Finally, look at the “page information” for this article. (The link is under “Tools” on the lefthand side.) Anything interesting here?

Once you are familiar with each of these links, try them all with another article — pick a topic you know or care about. Run through each screen again, and see if you can learn anything interesting about the article’s evolution. In particular, try step #3 with a highly controversial article (for instance, a major politician or political topic).

Guide to the “view history” screen

The “View History” tab of any Wikipedia article is a vital tool in understanding how it has evolved.

The view history tab of every Wikipedia article provides a great deal of information. The color coding here will help you understand what you’re looking at. (In the upper left of the graphic, notice that it’s the “View history” tab for the Article, not for its Talk page; each has its own history.)

Below the header section, each line beginning with a bullet reflects a revision to the article.

• █ The green column has tools for to comparing any two revisions of the article.
• █ The yellow column states the date of that revision; clicking it will take you to the version of the article as of that date.
• █ The grey column tells you who made the revision, and provides links relevant to that user.
• █ The blue column tells you about the size of the article as of that revision (and will indicate if the user labeled the edit as “minor,” and a few other things.) This is probably the least important of the columns.
• █ The pink column shows the edit summary the user provided (and in some cases, additional information).
• ░ The unhighlighted links at the right give you the ability to easily undo recent edits, or thank the user for making the edit. Try both links; don’t worry, neither will take any action without you confirming it first. (You have to be logged into an account to thank somebody.)

For a more thorough overview of the view history screen, see this 10 minute video, which covers each item and link in detail; and see this brochure (designed to be printed) for a general overview of evaluating Wikipedia article quality.

The Wired CD, one of the “bins” I uploaded to Outernet this weekend.

I was recently introduced to Thane Richard, founder of Outernet, and was honored to help him think through the design of Outernet’s first edit-a-thon, held this weekend. Much like our Wikipedia Barn Raising (a year ago to the day!), Thane planned an in-person event, but also invited participation from all over the world.

Amusingly, the Wikipedia Twitter feed referred to it as a chance to “build Wikipedia” — but this was actually a different kind of edit-a-thon, designed to build Outernet, an entirely separate project to help bridge the Digital Divide. Outernet puts old satellites to use, broadcasting “bins” of data to (as of now!) the entire world — even places where the Internet doesn’t reach. It’s one-way communication — you can’t upload, or access the entire Internet through it — but once you have their $150 “Lantern,” you can receive the broadcasts for free, and share them for free on a local network.

This weekend’s event was an opportunity to learn Outernet’s procedures for creating and uploading “bins” — basically, a folder of files in a certain theme, unencumbered by restrictive copyright — for future broadcast via Outernet.

On the surface, it seemed like a cool opportunity to package up Wikipedia articles. I started creating PDFs of the articles about the watersheds of Portland, Oregon (most of which are exceptionally high quality, thanks mostly to the efforts of Wikipedia user Finetooth); however, for reasons I will explore in a followup blog post, I had some issues with providing attribution soon realized that there was no convenient way to upload these in compliance with Wikipedia’s attribution requirements (which means naming all the people who have contributed to the articles). So instead, I uploaded a small bin of articles about Open Educational Resources, and another with the music from Wired Magazine’s 2004 CD “Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.”

I uploaded them just after the end of the edit-a-thon, so I haven’t yet gotten any feedback. I hope these are useful — but it’s possible they won’t be, since in an effort to move forward and actually upload something, I mostly disregarded the guidelines about what kind of content was most desired. But even if this was just a “practice run,” I’m happy to have gotten a feel for how they Outernet is approaching their excellent work, and learn how I can contribute. I could tell from their Etherpad page that a number of people were working at it too; it was fun to work with an ad-hoc global team. I look forward to contributing more substantially to Outernet’s future efforts!

I’m excited to announce that Wiki Ed has signed a partnership agreement with another academic association—the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB). Plant scientists and their students will add important research to Wikipedia, making information available to people outside of the discipline. ASPB’s mission to advance the scientific study of plants aligns with our goal of improving Wikipedia’s science articles, making them the perfect partner for the upcoming Year of Science.

Mission alignment is one of the primary reasons Wiki Ed focuses on building educational partnerships with academic associations. Targeted outreach to experts in a shared discipline means we not only increase Wikipedia’s breadth and depth in that topic area, but we also open the door to systematic support for students. We can create subject-specific handouts, generate content gap lists, and use an association’s resources and expertise to identify women in the field who are underrepresented on Wikipedia.

Outreach Manager Samantha Erickson and I attended ASPB’s conference last month, and we will continue to engage their members to improve Wikipedia’s coverage and quality of plant science. Members can join the Classroom Program by assigning their students to edit Wikipedia, or they can host a Visiting Scholar at their institution’s Biology department or science library.

The Year of Science starts in January 2016, so we’re excited to engage scientists and their students now, as it takes time to develop meaningful, impactful partnerships with like-minded organizations. ASPB is our first partner for the Year of Science, and we are in talks with other experts who have identified Wikipedia as an important resource that needs to reflect the scholarship in their field. We will also continue partnering with non-science academic associations.

If you are interested in starting a Wikipedia initiative or participating in the existing initiatives with the National Women’s Studies Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, or the Association for Psychological Science, please contact me at jami@wikiedu.org.

Jami Mathewson
Educational Partnerships Manager

The Anuradhapura Kingdom, a former state in Sri Lanka (c. 377 BCE–1017), left several paintings and frescoes behind. This one, from Sigiriya, is the oldest and best preserved from that period. Photograph by Chamal N, public domain.

History shows that there is a long list of countries that have simply ceased to exist, but there is no one way to go about it. The Russian Empire dissolved in violence in 1917, and its successor state (the Soviet Union) gave way to present-day Russia in the 1990s. The modern-day split of Czechoslovakia was peaceful, while nearby Yugoslavia broke apart during a civil war into several new countries. The Republic of Texas was willfully annexed by the United States. The Republic of Vietnam was taken over by its northern counterpart; similarly, the Songhai Empire was briefly annexed by Morocco, and the Anuradhapura Kingdom of Sri Lanka was overtaken by armies from India.

To cover this diverse set of geographical entities, the English Wikipedia has formed WikiProject Former countries. The project was created in 2004 and currently boasts 42 active editors; aside from the countries listed above, it includes several states that were critically important in world history, including Assyria, Sumer, the Mongol Empire, and Nazi Germany.

44 of the project’s articles have attained “featured” status, as determined by a peer review from editor colleagues. These include the encyclopedia’s coverage of the Byzantine and British Empires, both sprawling and continent-spanning, along with an entire series on the Brazilian monarchy of the nineteenth century—including the first and second emperors, and the latter’s wife, first son, second son. Another 77 articles are rated as “good.”

Last month, the Signpost, the English Wikipedia’s community-written news journal, interviewed two members of the former countries project about their background and goals for the future.

OwenBlacker noted that his grade school experiences with history as a topic were less than stellar, something that put him off for many years “until I discovered my uncle’s copy of The Times Atlas of World History and realised that learning more about history meant there were even more maps to look at—always a guilty pleasure. That helped me realise it wasn’t history I disliked, just the parts I [had been taught]. Since then I have read (and looked at maps) of history in great quantity.”

OwenBlacker and his fellow project member, MirkoS18, differed greatly in their choices of favorite topics. Owen chose pre-Napoleonic Europe, a topic in which wrote the good article Principality of Stavelot-Malmedy—a small, strangely shaped voting Imperial abbey of the Holy Roman Empire. Mirko—who hails from Croatia—focused on Yugoslavia. He noted that this was a very different choice from much of the project, as it occurred only recently, and he believes that “there is almost no one who would be emotionally distant and neutral. … [their objectives] are glorification or vilification.”

The project’s largest need is in article writing. Owen noted that their coverage of the Global South was sorely lacking and showed on articles like the Songhai Empire, “one of the largest empires in Islamic and African history,” but currently has a low article quality rating.

Ed ErhartEditorial intern

Here’s a summary of the changes in Content Translation software in Wikipedia today:

• On August 12 there was an issue in the machine translation servers, and machine translation didn’t work. It is now fixed, and we are working with the Wikimedia Operations team on making these servers more consistently stable.
• Links in galleries in the translation interface were opening the target page in the same browser tab and closing the translation interface, which was non-destructive, but uncomfortable. Now they open in a new tab. (bug report)
• When the target article title was edited, it was not automatically aligned, and this caused the rest of the paragraphs to be misaligned as well. This is now fixed. (bug report)
• Another bug in support of reference templates was fixed, an edge case of translating the references list first and the text later. (code change) A similar bug with images was fixed as well. (bug report)
  

The team continues to search for the reasons for the loss of translated paragraphs and for publishing errors. Please report any such errors if they still happen. It’s a very high-priority issue, but we need more examples for investigation.

On the new features front, the team is working on the first stage of the feature that displays suggestions of articles to translate in the dashboard.

Content Translation session at Wikimania 2015. Photo by Amire80, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Wikimania 2015, the 11th edition of the annual gathering of Wikimedians from around the world, was recently held in Mexico City. The Wikimedia Foundation’s (WMF) Language Engineering team participated in the Hackathon and Wikimania sessions, hosting several talks and two translation workshops. The primary focus was the Content Translation project—interacting with users, understanding their issues, and raising awareness about this new article creation tool.

During the Hackathon and Wikimania, the Language Engineering team members met with Content Translation users. New users were introduced to the tool and they generally provided encouraging initial feedback. Deeper discussion revealed several issues, some of which were quickly investigated and resolved. The ‘translathon’ sessions on day two and three of Wikimania were well attended and some attendees created their first articles using Content Translation. On the first day, 21 new articles were created in just an hour by 16 participants. While several issues surfaced, the participants provided suggestions that would be helpful to better support article translation. The second translathon was conducted in Spanish and aimed at Central and South American languages. The main conference sessions were not recorded, but you can view the presentation slides.

Upcoming plans

The Language Engineering team follows a three month development cycle that allows us to plan and showcase the outcome alongside the larger departmental and organizational goals. The results from work done between April to June 2015 can be seen in the Quarterly Review presentation. Highlights included making Content Translation available as a beta-feature on all Wikipedias, making it easily accessible for users, and better representation of analytics.

Until end of September 2015, we plan to do the following:

• Resolving blocking problems identified by the community to begin initial preparations in making Content Translation eventually usable as a non-beta tool.
• The initiative to engage translators continues with newer ways to connect with users and to help them return and translate more articles.
• The translated content being generated through Content Translation is an important asset for ongoing development in machine translation systems. Support for parallel corpora from Content Translation would be our contribution in this endeavour.
• Extending support for mobile users is a key focus area for the Wikimedia Foundation. As part of the greater initiative, we will begin an initial exploration of how Content Translation can support this effort.

Interactions and testing sessions

In addition to our usual channels for communication, like the Content Translation talk page and Phabricator, we plan to host another online interaction session shortly. The last session was held in June 2015 simultaneously on Google Hangout and IRC. While we plan to follow a similar format this time, we are open to feedback on what can work best for our participants.

In addition, our UX interaction designer Pau Giner is hosting testing sessions over the next few weeks. Please sign up if you would like to participate in these sessions and provide inputs about the future features of Content Translations.

A round-up of activities from the Language team is available in our monthly report. For Content Translation, we now have a weekly newsletter of the new features and bug fixes.

Runa Bhattacharjee
Language Engineering (Editing)
Wikimedia Foundation

30.06.-27.07.2015

Campus with 3D Buildings [1]

About us

• Since issue #262, Marc Gemis from Belgium has joined the German Wochennotiz team and adds news from Belgium and from the French community.
• We are also happy to announce that Ruben Lopez Mendoza from Ayacucho, Peru has joined the Spanish weeklyOSM team. Bienvenido Ruben!

Mapping

• OSM may continue to use Bing imagery even after the takeover by Uber.
• SK53 asks on twitter how to tag this new electricity tower design.
• Martijn van Exel announces a Maproulette challenge about missing railroad crossings in the USA.
• Mapbox published the internal OSM mapping instructions that are used by their data team.
• Yandex (a Russian search engine with a map portal) now offers a Street View service. The images (not the map and aerial photographs) may be used for mapping. (automatic translation)
• OpenHistoricalMap builds maps on its own infrastructure using OSM tools. (via @GuerrillaCarto)
• On GitHub it has been possible for some time to represent a GeoJSON file via an OSM Layer (example). Now a link to the MapBox “Improve this map” feature has been added to help resolve (via iD or OSM Notes) any map errors.
• On the talk-fr list there has been a discussion about the border between France and Italy in the Mont Blanc area. This was followed by a discussion on the tagging list about how to map border disputes.
• Marc Zoutendijk explains how you can find strange tagged POIs with the OpenPOIMap. To do this click in the top right corner of OpenPOIMap “User POIs” and use a query e.g. amenity=shop.
• In a twelve-part series, Tlatet analysed the quality of POIs in OSM (specifically retail in England).
• Andreas Weber and Dennis Nienhüser (FZI Karlsruhe) have created a system for use with a Segway that recognises traffic signs so that they can be uploaded it to OSM (Video).

Community

• User escada is the belgian mapper of the month of July.
• Chris Rodier introduces its new treelike visualization of the OSM World. (via Twitter)
• edward17 reported by the Ukrainian weekly task no. 18 (building mapping with the HOT-Task Manager) (automatic translation)
• Alex and Michael (two students) are spending their holidays traveling across East Germany to map the railway infrastructure there (automatic translation). See the aims of their project.
• Esri’s on the “vector tile” bandwagon too – they’ve presented their Vector Basemap at the Esri International User Conference, that follows the open Vector Tile Specification.
• After some criticism last year, Mapbox improved the default attribution on their customer maps. Harry Wood asks if there’s been any further progress. (via. Twitter)
• Jochen Topf writes about abnormalities in the decimal places of coordinates of new OSM objects.
• Mapillary discusses how their traffic sign recognition is based on a trainable algorithm and user feedback (to label a road sign as right or wrong), which improves the classification accuracy.
• Three Step-by-Step-Guides help to access the OSM World.
• The mapper’s “uniform” is now available in Portuguese as well.
• That’s pure coincidence.

Imports

• Stephen Dawkins suggests importing bus stops in some areas from the latest NAPTAN dataset.
• In Austria people are discussing whether to import the tree register of the city of Linz into OpenStreetMap.
• The import of trees in the area of the city of Nice is also considered by the French OSM mailing list.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The draft minutes of OSMF´s board meeting as of 2015-06-15 is now available in the OSMF-Wiki.
• On July 20 the first public OSMF board meeting was held. The minutes and an audio recording of the meeting will follow soon.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT would like to publish a quarterly newsletter to improve the communication within the project and is looking for help.
• A request for “OSM Damage Assessment” shows that a lot of the OSM universe is still uncharted territory for researchers.
• A new microtasking platform has emerged at the University of Heidelberg. Currently human settlements and roads in South Kivu in the DRC are being checked for the Missing Maps Project.

Maps

• Users ccalista explains in her blog how current OSM data can be loaded into OsmAnd via Overpass to test the most recent changes with OsmAnd.
• Andy Allan proposes (in an issue of the OSM Carto project) to introduce a directive to decide what new features are to be included in the rendering of the main style on osm.org and which are not.

• Adrien Pavie published OpenLevelUp!, an online map for watching objects in the specific floors of indoor-mapped buildings
• The Austrian “Der Standard” reported on the company Pentamap, a spin-off from the Geodetic Institute of the Technical University of Graz. The company works on an off-road routing in the Alps for mountain rescuers and hunters using aerial photography and digital terrain models and OSM data. (automatic translation)

• [1] The University of Leicester has created a map of the campus based on OSM data and OSM Buildings. (via @GISPowered)
• The GPSies website hasbeen redesigned. See the blog post here.
• Mateusz Konieczny presents a new default map style version and asks for feedback (see other diary entries for previous posts on the same topic).
• On the British OSM mailing list, one topic is a suggestion for a rendering style specifically for the UK.
• Omar Ureta visualised OSM-based tiles with Stamen-Watercolour style with terrain elevation data of the regional administration.

#switch2OSM

• The German Eisenbahn-Bundesamt (Federal Railway Authority) uses OpenStreetMap as a background map for a citizen participation.
• Facebook uses OpenStreetMap data in some places. The data in some places switch with other data sources, so that there are some false error messages. via @penorman)

• The Vehrkehrsmanagementzentrale (traffic management center) of Lower Saxony published a new website. There are shown traffic jams and construction sites all over Germany. The map display on Tablet and Desktop uses OSM maps.

Open-Data

• The Austrian Federal Office of Metrology and Surveying (Bundesamt für Eich- und Vermessungswesen, BEV Österreich) has published all address details with pinpoint accuracy. Thomas Ruprecht is in contact with the BEV, to allow the use of these data and the administrative boundaries for OSM.
• The Belgian Council of Ministers adopted a new open data strategy. Basically, all the records are to be published from 2020 under CC0 license.

Software

• As the main client of MapDB has withdrawn, Jan Kotek is looking for new sponsors for the project.
• Michael Zangl presents the first release of its OpenGL MapView of JOSM, (part of the Google Summer of Code).
• Do you or your company want to sponsor a new QGIS-Feature?
• Developer Dennis Nienhüser has released a new Version 1.11.3 of Marble for Windows.
• The Geometalab of the University of Rapperswil is working on an extract-tool for OSM data for various formats: GeoPackage, Shapefile, FileGeodatabase and Garmin (.img).

• Version 1.1.1 of the iOS-Port of OsmAnd was released.
• The OSM-based and open source Geo Search Engine Photon now also supports “Reverse Geocoding”, i.e. output of address to a transferred X / Y coordinate.
• User Amaroussi asks on Twitter, how to deal with the imminent end of Flash in respect of Potlatch. Luckily in the future there will still be ID, Level0, Merkaartor, JOSM, Vespucci and, er, Potlatch!.
• NGA and DigitalGlobe have jointly published Hootenanny. A free and open project to facilitate the handling of large amounts of spatial data. (via un-spider)
• MapBox published a first release of a minimalist C ++ 11 protobuf de- and encoder. (via @springmeyer)
• Mapbox has created a node.js and browser Javascript client for Mapbox services (geolocation, routing, etc.). (via @tmcw)
• The backend code of the OSRM project can now be compiled under Windows as a DLL. (via @tdihp)
• Omniscale published a tool called Magnacarto, which can convert map styles from CartoCSS format into Mapnik XML or MapServer mapfile.

Did you know …

• … about the 3D rendering from F4Map?

Other “geo” things

• Marina Schwab and Daria Kern of Aalen University compare OSM API with the Google Maps API (German PDF) – apparently OSM scores well with younger audiences.

• With Deep Dream one can visualise neural networks. This also works with maps.
• MaptimeBER (Berlin) now has 500 “Map Lovers”. Congratulations. (via @MaptimeBER)
• The University of Kentucky has some Videos on the theme of “maps”.
• Google has introduced a new (open) hardware system that can be used for indoor navigation.
• Why is Uber buying map companies?
• FixWikiMaps and Nacis announce the MapLift event. During the week from August 28 until September 04 maps are to be improved in Wikipedia.
• FATMAP presented detailed 3D maps for skiers. (via @mprioleau)
• Garmin offers a GPS specifically designed for the needs of caravan drivers.
• HERE now offers highly accurate map data for autonomous driving. (via @here)
• Riccardo compares 6 ways to create online maps.
• Nokia sells HERE maps to Audi, Daimler and BMW for €2.8 billion.
• MapBox has supplemented its Landsat Live pipeline by an automatic atmospheric correction to obtain clearer and more vibrant images.
• Wired reports on Russian maps during the Cold War. (via osmf-talk)
• Osmocoder is a newly developed geocoding service by the company 123map.
• The geocoding module from MapBox now supports auto completion of town or street names as you type in the search box.
• MapBox has opened a development office in Berlin, Germany. The focus of the Berlin employees will be working on OSRM.
• China expanded its own navigation system “Beidou-2” by 2 more satellites.
• The official US government FAQ about … GPS is super interesting (via @konklone)
• Active Wikipedians from Sweden have built an all-round camera of four mobile phones, in particular for recordings for uploading to Mapillary.