en.planet.wikimedia

Photo by 2sarojkumar, CC BY-SA 4.0.

With the Odia Wikipedia and its sister projects, a handful of dedicated volunteer editors are taking the Odia language to the world outside. The editor community that has recently celebrated Odia Wikipedia’s 14th anniversary in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India is collectively growing two more projects; Odia Wikisource, an online library that already has over 300 volumes of text, and Odia Wiktionary, an online dictionary that has over 1 million entries. With these live projects and more projects in the pipeline, this community is bringing a digital revolution in Odia by sharing valuable content online and creating many language tools inside and outside the Wikimedia projects.

The Odia Wikipedia community had gathered in the city for a two-day long event to celebrate the anniversary. These two days were spent in intensive capacity building activities as the community is quite dispersed in many places in Odisha and outside, and are all volunteers. Odia Wikipedia, the flagship project was started as one of the first four Indian language Wikipedias along with Assamese, Malayalam and Punjabi Wikipedia in 2002, a year after the English Wikipedia was made live. The project was quite dormant for more than nine years and got revived by a group of editors in Bangalore during 2011. Then the project became much of a household name when more Odia speakers living in Odisha and outside joined contributed in writing and editing articles of several different subject areas. Odia Wikipedia is part of the 292 language Wikipedia family and a larger global family of hundreds of other free knowledge projects that are collectively known as Wikimedia projects. “Odia Wikipedia is officially available online at https://or.wikipedia.org and is free for anyone to create articles on notable topics, and edit and enhance those articles”, says Mrutyunjaya Kar, one of the administrators of the project. Aliva Sahoo, one of the active editors, shares, “being a student of Odia-language I was seeking information on musical instruments and could not find much. So I started translating from English and now it is one of the longest articles on Odia Wikipedia.” As part of the WikipediansSpeak project, we have tried to capture the voice of the community of Aliva and a few other contributors.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): How did the two-day long capacity building activity go? What was the outcome of the different sessions?
Jnanaranjan Sahu: This event was useful in bringing most of the active contributors under one roof as we are working online. This event helped us learn from each other and impart knowledge so that everyone can go back and use them.

SP: What are the problems you faced before coming to this event and how these sessions are going to help you in future?
Abha Pradhan: I was not sure of the copyright part while uploading images on Wikimedia Commons. A lot many pictures got deleted because of my own ignorance. Similarly, I got to learn a lot about linking multiple language entries using Wikidata. These two are my biggest lessons of all that I learned from the sessions taken by other experienced Wikipedians.

SP: What did you learn from these sessions?
Rajalaxmi Mishra: I got to learn about basics of Wikipedia editing, rules and guidelines, several technical aspects like using templates, uploading and adding images to articles and dealing with copyright issues on Wikipedia.

Subas Chandra Rout, one of the long time active Wikimedians has been the single most contributor to grow the medical science-related articles on Odia Wikipedia. Subas is the only Wikimedian who has translated all the medical science-related article from Wikimedia Medical Project run by the Wiki Project Med.

“We have several subject areas covered on Odia Wikipedia – from the elaborate rituals of Jagannatha temple to medical science. Interestingly, almost all the articles on medical science are written by a retired assistant professor Dr. Subas Chandra Rout and needless to say those articles are of really high quality”, explains Pritiranjan Tripathy, an editor who is based in the Indian city of Kolkata.

It was like a “Catch me if you can” challenge when I started to translate medical topics into the Odia language as part of Wiki Project Med on March 5, 2015 with my first article on African trypanosomiasis. There were more than 150 articles in the project. Gradually the number of topics in the project increased and so did my translated article on Odia Wikipedia. After completion of the 345th article (Marfan syndrome, on May 6, 2016), I looked at the Wikipedia project dashboard, and I saw that I was the only person to complete all the articles in the project among all the world’s contributors.

“The next big goal is to enhance the quality of the existing articles by adding more images, references from external sources and expanding small articles by adding more information”, said long-time contributor Shitikantha Dash. Shitikantha, who is also an administrator of Odia Wiktionary, says, “it is important that more people contribute to the Odia Wiktionary so that words of all times and all genres, especially the technical and loan words make their way to this free multilingual dictionary. A 10 day-long campaign is going to be organised to celebrate the 11th anniversary of Odia Wiktionary so that every Wikipedia editor adds at least one word. And we are also using these words to create a spell check that will be freely available for anyone to use”.

The contributor community that is collaboratively building these projects has been also creating many tools and technical resources like editor manuals. The script encoding converters that the community has built is helping a lot of online users to be able to share their writings on blogs and social media. “Before the onset of these converters, a vast majority of the people working in press and media were stuck with outdated encoding systems like Shreelipi and Akruti. Mrutyunjaya Kar, a long time contributor and administrator of two projects; Odia Wikipedia and Wikisource explains, “Odia Wikipedia is available at https://or.wikipedia.org and we encourage more people to join us in this movement.”

“This is a way to bring digital freedom for everyone and share the world’s knowledge in our own language.”

Chinmayee Mishra, Odia Wikimedian
Subhashish Panigrahi, Odia Wikimedian, and Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society
Sailesh Patnaik, Odia Wikimedian, and Programme Associate, Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K), Centre for Internet and Society

India is well known throughout the world for its diversity, and even in the Wiki world, this diversity exists. In India, there are a total of 22 Indian language projects including the latest Konkani Wikipedia which came out of the Incubator just last year. One of the major activities which had taken place at the national level was the Wiki Conference India, way back in 2011  . That Conference indeed gave a major boost to the Indian Wikimedia Community as a whole. But since then, there has been no major Community led event which has had a huge impact.

When you look at the usual “Wiki Loves” type of photo uploading competitions which are organized in India, there have been a few happening every year like Wiki Loves Monuments – 2012 ,2013 & a  very humble Wiki Loves Earth in 2014. All these very limited to a few organizers & volunteers. There was obviously a good Social media outreach for all these competitions which saw a very good turnout amongst the Public. But, never did the Indian Wikimedian Community ever feel that they were part of this.

In February 2015, when we at Wikimedia India decided to launch a “Wiki Loves” type event, we had already zeroed in on the topic of food. India due to its diversity also has a similar diversity in its cuisine. It was also observed that there was a dearth of good images of Indian food & drinks which was the original plan behind running our first Pan-India Photo uploading competition called “Wiki Loves Food”.

We were very clear that this should be a community run competition. This was in fact the situation where there was no major collaboration of volunteers on a National level . As always, next came the difficult task of pitching the idea to the community on the India mailing list. As usual, there were a lot of initial apprehensions and doubts, not forgetting the friction in community engagement, which was quite expected anyways. Most of the volunteers who signed up were just curious about the competition but felt that this project had potential. The real good part of this was that the volunteers were not from one region but were spread across the different language communities and  regions. Without any doubt, we can say that Wiki Loves Food was the first major program from Wikimedia India after a long time that actively involved  the pan-Indian community.

The  first ever edition of Wiki Loves Food started on 15th May 2015 and ended by June 15th. The competition saw 15+ volunteers work day and night to make this possible. By the time the competition was over and results were announced, the team of volunteers were elated that they pulled off such an campaign with 10,000+ images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. As mentioned by Bodhisattwa Mandal of Bengali Community – “The event helped to bring together active members from all Indic communities discuss, plan and successfully execute the event in a coordinated way. It also deepened the relationship with Wikimedia India and the Indian language communities, which was a great achievement according to us”

The Impact of having such a campaign has had an enormous impact of how the Indian Wikimedian community has worked. This is one of the stepping stones for the planning for the WikiConference India 2016 . Most of the volunteers who were active for Wiki Loves Food are now involved in the planning of the conference.

This level of inter community partnerships amongst the different  Indic language Wikimedia projects is a new chapter in the growth of the Indian Wikimedian Community, I  look forward to the continuation of similar acts. Who says diversity can be an obstacle,  in this case diversity was a huge asset,  which we as Indic Wikimedians celebrate and  will always be amongst our strengths.

Written by Yohann Thomas

Posted by JimCarter

Day 2 of Wikis and Wikipedia for Endangered Languages at CoLang

These are a few of our slides - you can view the full set of slides (where all the blue underlined links work) at bit.ly/lingwiki-colang2.

Dr. Elizabeth De Wolfe is a Professor of History at the University of New England. Her “Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies” course assigned students to expand women-focused content on Wikipedia.

As historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has famously stated, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” And in addition to history, women — the well-behaved and otherwise — are often absent in contemporary society. We see this from an under-representation in Congress, to a dearth of statues of women in Chicago public parks, to phone emojis that reduce women to stereotypes, to a lack of women editors and women-centered content on Wikipedia. In my spring 2016 undergraduate course, Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies, the primary goal was for students to gain an understanding of the origins and ramifications of gendered invisibility, and to seek ways to redress the invisibility of women’s lives and accomplishments.

Reading about the masculine skew of Wikipedia really struck a chord with me. My students, I realized, could connect classroom knowledge to real-world action by writing women-centered Wikipedia entries. What I had not realized was the tremendous personal impact this project would have on my students’ sense of self. In addition to discovering for themselves the gendered nature of information, students came to understand — and use — their voices to enact change. This project empowered.

This assignment grew out of my participation in the University of New England’s Digital Humanities Faculty Seminar, part of a three-year program funded by the Davis Education Foundation. In spring 2015, I was one of four faculty members to participate in the second of three small group seminars introducing liberal arts faculty to digital literacy. We read articles on the origins, goals, and diversity of digital humanities, and experimented with various digital technologies. As we read about, debated, and discussed digital humanities and our own classroom pedagogies, each faculty participant developed a digital humanities project to implement in the 2015-2016 academic year.

The Wiki Education Foundation’s case studies, syllabi templates, and editing guides provided invaluable resources for crafting this project. Online tutorials and handouts introduced the students to the philosophy of, and guidelines for, Wikipedia entries. Students moved through this material independently, then transitioned to the how-to of writing, editing, and posting a Wikipedia entry. Classroom workshop days provided open time for students to identify their entry topics (assisted by UNE’s reference and special collections librarians). In a second workshop, students drafted and edited entries; and in ten-minute Wikipedia check-in moments that were carved out of the end of class sessions, students assisted each other with technology-related problem solving.

Make no mistake: researching and writing a Wikipedia entry was as rigorous as the typical term paper. Students wrote formal topic proposals and submitted bibliographies. They conducted research with scholarly and authoritative sources. Students wrote multiple drafts and received feedback from peers and their professor. While exploring Wikipedia and conducting their research, students recognized key course concepts such as male privilege and gendered language.

Student experiences

Students were surprised to find that on Wikipedia, a husband’s accomplishments often overshadowed his wife’s equally laudatory achievements. Student Emma Steinbach argued of the sexologist Bonnie Bullough: “Her work was as important as her husband’s, and it was time for her to no longer be mentioned only in reference to him, but in her own honor.”

Similarly, Abby Lachance, editing the entry on author and Arctic adventurer Josephine Diebitsch Peary, noted: “One thing I noticed about the original article was that a vast majority of the small amount of information pertained to her husband.”

Writing a new entry on attorney Gail Laughlin, Megan Galley concluded: “A woman as accomplished as she was should have been on Wikipedia a long time ago.”

Several students, interested in careers in the health professions, undertook entries on early women physicians. They discovered a paucity of information.

“I had never really thought about how the medical profession historically has been fundamentally hierarchical, with females holding separate and inferior positions to men,” said Kathryn Cawley. “It only makes me want to change that in the future.”

Psychology students, looking into the history of their own future careers, saw a similar lack of attention to women. Jacqueline Parent stated: “We helped bring one woman’s life and contributions into the light, which is part of a bigger project to bring many women to the same level of visibility as men. That is invaluable.”

Students saw how their efforts could grow beyond the classroom.

“I am not going to be upset if another Wikipedia user decides to edit my article,” said Jaymi Foster. “The way I see it, if the edits … provide more information, more sources, or more insight into Sara [Roosevelt’s] life, then it is a beneficial thing.”

The project pushed sometimes hesitant students toward new skills. Meghan Gould wrote: “Prior to this assignment, I envied the people who knew how to edit and publish Wikipedia articles. [Now] I am . . . proud of myself for learning how to use Wikipedia.”

Students were proud that they had contributed meaningfully to the corpus of knowledge about women’s history, and that their efforts had the potential to affect others.

“I feel a great sense of success in knowing that I am now a contributing editor to one of the largest sources of information online,” said Kathryn Cawley. “Maybe next I will be a published writer with my own book on women’s history in medicine. Or better yet, perhaps I will enter the medical profession and make history that future students will write Wikipedia pages about.”

While I have, on occasion, seen students transformed by individual research projects, the collective sense of power and passion in this classroom was like nothing I’ve experienced before. Students came to see the world and themselves in a new way, were moved to share their knowledge publicly, grew to be confident in themselves, and felt empowered to use their voices to raise awareness and affect change.

Briana Goud, who created a new entry on the author and philanthropist Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat, pinpoints the power of this class project:

“As a woman, I felt that I connected with my subject, and wanted to express her life and accomplishments in a page that could be viewed around the world . . . this is strictly one woman to another. We, as women researchers, are connecting our academic knowledge and our freedom of speech to shine light on the importance of historical women.”

The Wiki Education Foundation offers support to higher education courses where students are assigned to write Wikipedia articles. If you’re interested in tapping into the power of this assignment for your women’s studies course, or any topic area, reach out to start a conversation: contact@wikiedu.org. 

Photo: Wikipedia Project Research at the Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England, Portland, ME By Edw04005 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,

Photo by Luisella Aliprandi, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Vassia Atanassova is leaving her home in Sofia, Bulgaria this week, bringing a decade of rewarding collaboration with educational and cultural heritage institutions. Satdeep Gill is leaving his home in Punjab, bringing the languages and customs of the state in northern India. Isla Haddow-Flood is leaving Cape Town, South Africa, bringing with her motivation to share her continent’s everyday realities, heritages, and cultures.

They’re coming together in the small, northern Italian town of Esino Lario, bringing the pieces that make up Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Each year, members of the Wikimedia community convene in one location to share experiences, learn from each other, and discuss the most critical issues of the movement. Wikimania 2016 will draw over a thousand attendees from more than 60 nations to Esino Lario, which has a year-round population of less than 800, from June 24-26. This year’s unique location reflects the Wikimedian belief that anyone, anywhere can contribute to the world’s knowledge.

For the first time the conference will be moving away from the metropolis and into the countryside. (Past Wikimanias have been held in Mexico City, Hong Kong, and Washington, D.C.) Overlooking beautiful Lake Como surrounded by the Alpine mountains, attendees will participate in meetings, panels, working sessions, and trainings — all in support of free knowledge. This is not just an opportunity for community members to connect with each other,  but also to get to know the local people from Esino Lario, who have opened their doors for this conference.

“Wikimania reveals the potential of Esino Lario and places like Esino that we imagine to be generally isolated and trapped in the past,” says Iolanda Pensa, lead organizer of Wikimania 2016. “On the contrary, I have a deep conviction that in any place and inside any person, there abides the ability to produce and participate in global knowledge.”

Like past conferences, Wikimania is a community driven event; as they say, it takes a village. This year’s conference is co-organized by a group of international volunteers, including Italian Wikimedians, members of Wikimedia Italia and Wikimedia Switzerland, and many other volunteers and inhabitants of Esino Lario who have come together to prepare for Wikimania.

The program focuses on “Wikipedia as a driver for change.” Speakers from the Wikimedia community, the broader free knowledge movement, and the Wikimedia Foundation will share research, discuss challenges, and share experiences, all with a focus on the impact Wikipedia has on the world. Session topics include:

• Approaching global barriers to accessing knowledge
• Wikipedia’s role in preserving cultural heritage
• Adapting Wikipedia for mobile consumption
• The impact of Wikipedia in education
• Promoting healthy community interactions

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will kick off the conference with an opening speech in the surroundings of Lake Como on June 24. A pre-conference is taking place ahead of the event, including a hackathon where attendees make technological contributions to the open source software MediaWiki, and for other Wikimedia projects. Local organizers are also hosting a pre-conference meeting about the free use of Italian cultural images in relation to current regulations.

With nearly 40 million articles in hundreds of languages languages, Wikipedia is the largest free, shared knowledge resource in human history. Its volunteer-contributed content receives 17 billion page views per month globally. People around the world look to Wikipedia for everything from preserving cultural heritage, to improving cancer detection, to doing homework.

That impressive accomplishment is built one Wikipedian at a time. At Wikimania, they come together, bearing gifts to the open-access movement they love.

 About Wikimania

Wikimania is the annual conference celebrating the Wikimedia projects–Wikipedia and its sister projects–and the Wikimedia community of volunteers. It features presentations on Wikimedia projects, other wikis, free and open source software, free knowledge and free content, and the social and technical aspects that relate to these topics. Wikimania 2016 in Esino Lario, Italy marks the 12th year of the conference.

About Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a collaborative, free knowledge resource for the world. It has been added to and edited by millions of people from around the globe since it was created in 2001: anyone can edit it, at any time. Wikipedia is offered in hundreds of languages and contains nearly 40 million articles, . It is one of the largest collections of free knowledge in human history, and today its content is contributed and edited by nearly 80,000 active editors per month.

Juliet Barbara, Communications Director
Jeff Elder, Digital Communications Manager

Wikimedia Foundation

View from the road to Esino Lario. (Ed Erhart, CC-BY-SA-4.0)

At this very moment, Wikimedians are traveling from all over the world to attend Wikimania, the annual conference for Wikipedia and its sister projects. When the main conference kicks off this weekend, for the first time in five years, I won’t be among them. The controversial selection of Esino Lario, a tiny Italian village in the Alps 40 miles outside of Milan, certainly figured into it, but for me it’s also a very busy summer, and one with plenty of other travel. I regret having to bail on it but, having heard about the touch-and-go logistics from the few I know who are following through, I can’t really say I regret the decision.

The biggest reason why I might is because a presentation I’d submitted was accepted. My absence interrupts what would have been a hat trick of delivering a presentation about the complicated matter of “paid editing”^[1]To use just one several inadequate summary phrases for this multifaceted topic. at consecutive Wikimanias. Fortunately, it remains on the schedule, because my co-presenter, Andrew Lih, is committed to making the heroic journey to the Lake Como region of Italy.^[2]I understand this is mostly to maintain his perfect Wikimania attendance, but it’s as good a reason as any. It is called “Found in Translation: Comparing paid editing policies in the top Wikipedia language editions” and if you are attending this Wikimania, I think that you should go see it!

You can read more about it at the link above, but the gist is this: the “conflict of interest” guideline on the English Wikipedia has been a matter of controversy and debate for at least a decade. When the self-reference averse Wikipedia actually has a long article on the topic, you know it’s a big deal. However, much less has been said about this issue on Wikipedia’s many other language editions, which are smaller and less prominent, but sometimes still deal with these issues. Since 2015, we have been reaching out to Wikipedians involved in the top 30 language editions of Wikipedia to find out: what official rules does each edition have about paid editing? What are the community norms? Have there been similar controversies?

As it turns out, this qualitative research is much harder to pull off than we’d first hoped. Whereas we had hoped to present our findings at this conference, instead we will be using this Wikimania to draw additional attention to the topic. And that is what this blog post seeks to do as well. If you are interested in helping us understand better how the multivarious Wikipedia communities approach this thorny topic, and you contribute to one of the top 30 language editions,^[3]Besides English, of course. To see if yours is one, click here and sort by Active users. then please consider taking the survey here. And if you have any questions about the project overall, hit me up using the contact link above.

That’s all from me! Alas, my non-attendance at Wikimania means I am unlikely to write a summary post like I have in past years. Instead I’ll aim to stay part of the conversation on Twitter via @thewikipedian, and I’ll look forward to seeing you next year in Montreal.

Highlights

• May essentially marks the completion of the spring 2016 term, and with it, our first term in the Year of Science. The Classroom Program had its best term yet, with 215 courses contributing 3.5 million words. Of those, 116 were Year of Science participants. Those courses contributed 2 million words to Wikipedia. An analysis of student contributions for April 2016 revealed that Wiki Education Foundation students were responsible for 6% of all science contributions to Wikipedia that month.
• Wiki Ed published a new guidebook for students editing in articles in the environmental sciences. The guidebook explores topics related to writing about conservation efforts, campaigns and environmental organizations. It was written with input from experienced Wikipedians and instructors, and will be sent to environmental science courses starting in the fall 2016 term.
• We’ve expanded our Dashboard to accommodate a variety of Wikimedia sister projects, including additional language editions of Wikipedia. This is part of an effort, supported financially by the Wikimedia Foundation, to add flexibility to our Dashboard to be adapted to international use.

Programs

Educational Partnerships & Outreach

In May, Outreach Manager Samantha Erickson and Educational Partnerships Manager Jami Mathewson visited San Francisco State University. While there, they met with the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability to investigate collaborations that will improve Wikipedia’s coverage and representation of disabilities. Wiki Ed presented to faculty, primarily who teach composition courses, about the Classroom Program and its value to students.

Samantha spent the month helping instructors develop assignment plans for their summer and fall 2016 courses. She also experimented with virtual outreach, joining faculty at Georgetown University and Northern Illinois University for webinars and video calls to introduce them to the benefits of joining the Classroom Program. At Northern Illinois, the women’s studies department is eager to participate in the National Women’s Studies Association initiative to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of women and women’s studies.

The team spent May finalizing and coordinating Wiki Ed’s presence at various conferences this summer. Wiki Ed plans to attend the following meetings to promote the Year of Science ahead of the fall 2016 term:

• Festival of Learning (June 7, Burnaby, British Columbia)
• American Astronomical Society (June 12—16, San Diego, California)
• Wikimedia Diversity Conference (June 17–18, Washington, DC)
• American Society of Plant Biologists (July 9–13, Austin, Texas)
• Genetics Society of America (July 13–17, Orlando, Florida)
• American Statistical Association (July 30–August 4, Chicago, Illinois)
• Botanical Society of America (July 30–August 3, Savannah, Georgia)
• Mathematical Association of America (August 3–6, Columbus, Ohio)
• Ecological Society of America (August 7–12, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale)

Now that the spring 2016 has mostly wrapped up, we’re excited to report that students participating in the Classroom Program through educational partnerships have expanded or created 2,615 articles on Wikipedia.

Classroom Program

Status of the Classroom Program for spring 2016 in numbers, as of May 31:

• 215 Wiki Ed-supported courses were in progress (93, or 43%, were led by returning instructors)
• 4,137 student editors were enrolled
• 46% were up-to-date with the student training
• Students edited 4,620 articles and created 489 new entries.

The majority of our courses have finished their Wikipedia assignments, and already Spring 2016 term is our most successful to date. This term, we’ve supported our largest number of courses, 215, with our largest number of participating students (4,137). They’ve contributed over 3.5 million words to Wikipedia.

The Classroom Program has scaled significantly, from 162 courses in fall 2015 and 117 in spring 2015 to the current 215. That’s been achieved without expanding our staff or compromising the quality of student contributions. That’s possible because of digital tools such as our the course Dashboard and our online student training, but also through the close coordination between Classroom Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal and Wikipedia Content Experts Adam Hyland and Ian Ramjohn.

For the first time, we’ve distributed an instructor survey through the course Dashboard. Instructors are now invited to complete their survey based on the specific dates of their course. They also answer questions tailored to their course’s subject, size, and other factors. Survey results are still being collected.

The Wikipedia Year of Science is going strong! As of May 31, the 116 Year of Science courses have contributed more than 2 million words to Wikipedia. These courses and students made up over half of our Spring 2016 cohort, and they worked on subjects ranging from the sociology of women and crime to biogeochemistry and from endangered languages to dinosaur science. The Year of Science continues over the summer and through the Fall 2016 term.

As of May 31, we are supporting 16 summer courses and using this quieter time to gear up for fall.

Student work highlights:

• Students in Alex Session’s Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry created a massive 20,000-word article on hydrogen isotope biogeochemistry, which plays an important role in understanding biological, geological, and chemical processes in the environment. In addition, they have expanded the geobiology article from a short overview into a fairly comprehensive account of that field of knowledge.
• Mary Bernheim discovered monoamine oxidase and joined the faculty of Duke University in 1930, at a time when women were a rarity among research scientists. Despite her pioneering work and the importance of her discovery, her Wikipedia biography was just a short four sentences in late April. That’s when a student in Dr. Heather Tienson’s Chem 153A Honors class began working on it. The student expanded it substantially, adding information about the importance of the discovery, and adding additional information about her career at Duke Medical School. Two students in the class made substantial improvements to articles on the enzymespyruvate kinase and caspase 1, while a fourth expanded the metabolic pathway, a short article considering its centrality as a topic.
• Technology that captures and isolates the carbon released from power plants and cement factories are an important aspect of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Marjorie Went’s Carbon Capture and Sequestration class substantially expanded articles on technologies such as Calcium looping, amine gas treating and membrane gas separation. Students created new articles on ionic liquids in carbon capture and integrated gasification combined cycle, a process for converting coal to syngas, which allows carbon to be removed before combustion.
• Students in Julian Fulton’s ENVS 110 class have been doing good work on topics primarily related to California’s water and protected areas. Water-related articles created by students include theSustainable Groundwater Management Act, Water reuse in California, the Water Commission Act of 1913, the Porter-Cologne Water Quality Control Act, and the Woodland Davis Clean Water Agency. They improved existing articles on Isabella Dam, Keswick Dam, California Water Fix and Eco Restore, Yolo Bypass, Lake Berryessa, the Pajaro River, Lake Oroville, California’s Loon Lake, Trinity Dam, thewikipedia:American River, and Bushy Lake.
• Chris Blattman’s Order and Violence students continued their work expanding articles on theories of the state, the impact of colonialism and political violence. Their work began in February, with students selecting articles, many of them large and unwieldy, and proposing changes which not only added information and references, but re-structured the article to be more clear. User:Jp-columbia re-organized the article on warlord, formerly a loosely geographically ordered list of warlords in history to an article that included theory, history and examples. User:Saw2188 and User:Kevinmccarthy25 faced a similar problem in updating and expanding the article on environmental determinism. The students were careful in summarizing a wide and sometimes sharp academic dispute, and the article is much more clear and complete for their efforts. Two students collaborating on ethnic conflict, User:Akm2173 and User:Amannavani, took on a different task: expanding a small article on a vast topic into a clear but comprehensive whole. Almost all of the students worked on large or complex articles and engaged editors before making major changes by proposing them on the talk page. Students drafted in sandboxes for the most part, but transitioned to making small edits and changes live in their articles quickly. It’s hard to think of a class better prepared to tackle the topics they did, and Wikipedia’s coverage of modern political thought on the State is much better off for it.
• Other students added to popular articles. User:Cmhofley in Diana Strassmann’s Feminist Economics and Public Policy course created an article on Women’s education in Iran. Wikipedia already had articles on Higher education in Iran, Women’s rights in Iran, Women in Iran, and the Women’s rights movement in Iran. None of these completely encapsulated the topic, but all had something to say about it. Not only that, they had to merge a smaller, subsidiary topic (Iranian gender restrictions in education) into their newly created article. Working with Content Expert Adam Hyland, the student was able to cover an important topic with the detail and scope necessary without duplicating or forking content, a tough job in any topic area.
• Diana Strassmann’s other students were quite active. User:Mjiang94 tackled a topic which Wikipedia formerly titled “missing women in Asia“. Through their expansion of the article, it now covers the phenomenon and global discussion under the title missing women. Their work to generalize the topic meant that another student article, from a class in 2014 (The University of Utah’s course on Gender and Economic Development in the Third World), Missing women of China could cover the narrower, but important, topic of Amartya Sen’s work and subsequent reassessment/retraction on sex ratios in China without too much overlap.

Community Engagement

It’s been nearly a year since Wiki Ed took on the Visiting Scholars program. Community Engagement Manager Ryan McGrady spent time this month working on surveys, conducting interviews, and gathering data on the initiative.

Ryan attended a SOWING event (Science Outreach Working to Inspire the Next Generation) at the Simons Foundation office to talk about Visiting Scholars and the Wikipedia Year of Science. He has been busy working with several prospective and existing institutional sponsors and Scholars.

Current Scholars are continuing to produce excellent work. Barbara Page at the University of Pittsburgh improved an impressive 42 articles on biomedical topics this month. Gary Greenbaum at George Mason University brought the high-traffic article on President William Howard Taft to Featured Article status. Meanwhile, Gary’s article on the children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth appeared on Wikipedia’s Main Page on May 28 as “Today’s Featured Content”. Current Scholars have added almost 250,000 words to articles that have been viewed 38,000,000 times.

Program Support

Communications

In May, Communications Manager Eryk Salvaggio published a subject-specific student handbook focused on environmental sciences. The guide, “Editing Wikipedia articles on environmental sciences,” offers guidance for student editors creating new articles about groups, organizations, and programs, and environmental concerns. This guide places special emphasis on the careful evaluation of sources. This guide was created with input from Dr. Becky Carmichael, Louisiana State University; Dr. Rosemary J. Redfield, University of British Columbia; Wikipedia User:DASonnenfeld, and our Content Expert in the Sciences, Ian Ramjohn.

Another handbook is underway. Eryk has spent May preparing an update of the Editing guide, this time aimed directly at students in our program. The Wiki Ed edition looks specifically at what students need to know to contribute to Wikipedia during a class assignment. It also integrates our support and online trainings.

A guest post by Dr. Timothy Henningsen, Assistant Professor of English at the College of DuPage, titled, “The Slow, Necessary Death of the Research Paper (And How Wikipedia Can Revive Composition Instruction)” was the most-read post in May. The author suggests that teaching with Wikipedia offers “the same outcomes that a research paper assignment does, with added benefits.”

Blog posts:

• The Roundup: Cold War Science (May 2)
• Monthly Report for March 2016 (May 2)
• The Roundup: Drugs and drug policies (May 9)
• The Roundup: The little things that fuel everything (May 16)
• The slow, necessary death of the research paper (May 17)
• “Taking Action” in composition and communication courses (May 19)
• The Roundup: Deep breaths (May 23)
• Monthly Report for April 2016 (May 23)
• What can Wikipedia assignments do that this adorable pygmy goat can’t? (May 24)
• Wiki Ed discusses women and Wikipedia at Bryn Mawr (May 25)
• Wiki Ed visits Brown, Northeastern Universities (May 26)
• The Year of Science is coming to a conference near you (May 27)
• Announcing our environmental sciences guide for student editors! (May 31)

External media

• Wikipedia in the classroom Ann Little, Historiann, (May 3)
• The Wikipedia Project Leslea Hlusko, The Hlusko Lab, UC Berkeley. (April 21, shared May 13)
• Edit Wikipedia at Plant Biology 2016 Katie Engen, ASPB Plant Science Today (May 13)
• Why You And Your Students Should Work To Improve Wikipedia Nancy Andrews, Mediashift. (May 26)
• OU History of Science Students Write More than Term Papers University of Oklahoma Public Affairs. (May 27)
• The Year of Science is coming to Plant Biology 2016, Katie Engen, ASPB Plant Science Today (May 31)

Digital Infrastructure

In May, Digital Infrastructure efforts were focused on reinforcing the long-term foundations of the Dashboard.

With funding support from Wikimedia Foundation, Product Manager, Digital Services Sage Ross and our technical partners at WINTR improved the Dashboard’s support for cross-language, cross-wiki courses and programs. The Dashboard now tracks editors’ wiki assignments across any Wikimedia project, from Abkhazian Wikipedia to Zulu Wiktionary — which will improve our ability to support translation assignments. The improvements in internationalization support will also form the basis for Wikimedia Foundation’s “Programs and Events Dashboard”, which is being tested at https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org.

After two unexpected service interruptions for our website, wikiedu.org, we accelerated plans to transition our web services from asmallorange.com to the more robust linode.com. All of wikiedu.org is now hosted on standard virtual private servers with automated backups, and we expect downtime to be much rarer.

Sage has implemented automatic email alerts for course-related events Wiki Ed staff need to track. Examples include messages for class activity after a course end date, or alerts for when students’ articles have been nominated for deletion.

Research and Academic Engagement

Data Science Intern Kevin Schiroo had been working part-time during the academic term, but moved to full-time for the summer in May.

He has already determined preliminary results from a research project looking into Wiki Ed’s impact on science content during the Year of Science.

Research Question

What portion of newly created science content is generated by Wiki Ed students?

Results

During the month of April, Wiki Ed students produced 6% of all science content generated on Wikipedia (as measured by bytes added). The maximum daily peak observed over the Spring semester is 13%.

Methodology

For the purpose of this project, we defined science content to be bytes added to articles tagged as belonging to a science WikiProject. Science WikiProjects were defined as projects listed in the WikiProject Directory under science. A few projects were selected for removal, because they fell significantly beyond our idea of science (for example, “Internet Culture”).

Joining this data set with a data set of WikiProject tags on articles, Kevin selected all articles in the content area of interest. He then used this list of articles, in combination with the most recent database dumps provided by the Wikimedia Foundation, to select all revisions that occurred on the identified science articles. This list of revisions was used to calculate the number of bytes added each day, one number for general contributors and one for contributions by Wiki Ed students. These two data sets were then used to calculate both the daily and monthly proportions of content added by Wiki Ed students. That provided insight into just how much work Wiki Ed has been doing in science topics.

Next steps

The immediate next step is to rerun the analysis once Wikimedia publishes a new database dump detailing the contribution activity in May. These will provide even greater insights into how Wiki Ed performed at the end of the first semester of the Year of Science. Further work will include analyzing spring 2014 science contributions to quantify how much difference the Year of Science initiative has made to the science output of Wiki Ed students.

Also in May, Director of Research and Academic Engagement Tanya Garcia left the organization. We wish Tanya the best in her next opportunity.

Finance & Administration / Fundraising

Finance & Administration

For the month of May expenses were $220,447 versus the plan of $303,407. The variance of $83k is primarily due to our decision to hold off on expanding our office space and staffing.

Our Year-To-Date expenses are $2,673,482 versus the plan of $3,394,241, resulting in a variance of $721k. Approximately 90% of the variance is due to holding back planned expenditures until long-term funding is secured. The remaining variance is a result of the timing of expenses.

Our spending level over the last 3 months has remained steady at 79% of our planned budget.

Fundraising

In May, Wiki Ed released a request for proposals for a major donor communication and activation campaign. Proposals are in review, and we anticipate a contract will be awarded in the near future. The campaign seeks to secure new major support for the organization from individuals.

To prepare for the campaign, the development team attended a Major Gifts workshop at the Foundation Center in San Francisco. Through Greg Boustead of the Simons Foundation, Senior Manager of Development Tom Porter secured introductions to foundations that are part of a STEM funders network. We hope that these valuable introductions from the Simons Foundation will help us earn new support for Wiki Ed.

On May 18, the development team held an FY17 tactical planning retreat. Bank of the West Wealth Management generously donated workspace in their downtown San Francisco office for this purpose. Outcomes of this meeting were first drafts of individual work plans, process maps, and timelines. The Development Committee of the Wiki Education Foundation Board met to approve drafts of three new policies for the department: the Gift Acceptance Policy, the Gifts-in-Kind Policy, and the Donor Bill of Rights.

Planning was also underway for a small donor cultivation event in Houston, Texas. Tom Porter was working closely with Wiki Education Foundation board chair Diana Strassmann, alongside board members Karen George and Karen Twitchell. This event was being held to leverage the outstanding Stanton Foundation challenge grant, which aims to activate the Wiki Education Foundation board in the development process. Wiki Ed received a $25,000 installment of our matching grant from the Stanton Foundation in May.

Office of the ED

Current priorities:

• Finalizing the annual planning and budgeting process for fiscal year 2016–17
• Supporting the fundraising team in securing funding

In May, Executive Director Frank Schulenburg sent the first version of the annual plan & budget for fiscal year 2016–17 to the board for review. The board provided valuable feedback on the document, which provided the basis for the second, improved version, which was sent to the board at the end of the month. Through an improved and more rigorous planning process, senior leadership was able to give the board more time to review and discuss the plan. The board will vote on the 2016–17 plan and budget during its meeting in Houston. Frank also attended board committee meetings and supported board chair Diana Strassmann in planning the meeting in Houston.

Frank began working with Melissa Ganus (User:DrMel), who has taken the lead on planning and organizing WikiConference USA 2016. This year, WikiCon USA will be hosted at the San Diego Public Library in early October. Frank acted as an advisor to Melissa on topics ranging from conference goals to potential options for raising funds.

Visitors and guests

• Cecelia Musselman, Northeastern University

The dashboard software that fuels Wiki Ed’s programs is now available for use across the whole range of Wikimedia projects and languages, from Arabic Wikibooks to Zulu Wiktionary.

In partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, I’ve been working to complete an “alpha” version of the Wikimedia Programs & Events Dashboard — an instance of the Wiki Ed dashboard system that is open for anyone to organize editing projects. That means edit-a-thons, Wikipedia translation drives, and anything else that involves coordinated contributions to Wikimedia wikis. The latest version is up and running here.

This general-purpose, pan-wiki version of the Dashboard has been in the works for a while now. After some exploratory work during the Wikimania 2015 hackathon, Wikimedia Foundation engineers Adam Wight, Andrew Russell Green, and Dan Duvall spent February digging into the dashboard codebase and laying the groundwork.

After that, I gradually chipped away at integrating and testing these changes. In May, we signed a contract with the Wikimedia Foundation to complete a final push to a testable version. This gave me a chance to spend some serious time focusing on internationalization, and on improving the way the Dashboard handles different use cases beyond the basic Classroom Program course. I’m really happy with the results so far.

In the long term, we hope to make the Dashboard more of an open source community project, with contributions from both Wikimedia Foundation staff and volunteer developers. I’ll be spending my time at Wikimania 2016 — in Esino Lario, Italy — talking about (and hacking on) this global Dashboard. Many of the features we’d like to build for Wiki Ed’s programs are also going to be useful for the Programs & Events Dashboard, so the more the Wikimedia community uses the dashboard, the stronger the prospects will be for collaborating with the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia chapters, and others to make the dashboard even better.

If you’re interested in getting involved with the dashboard codebase, let me know! Happy hacking!

Photo: 15-07-15-Hackathon-Mexico-D-F-RalfR-WMA 1056 by Ralf Roletschek – Own work, GFDL 1.2.

Image by Parislumiere, CC BY-SA 4.0.

We are happy to announce that the Paris Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of the Wikimedia Foundation in Teissier v. Wikimedia Foundation. The Court dismissed all claims and declared the Foundation a hosting provider under French law.

Élizabeth Teissier, a French astrologer, originally filed a lawsuit in July 2015 against the Wikimedia Foundation for hosting a Wikipedia article that included several references to her past fortune-telling predictions being incorrect. Teissier claimed that the article damaged her reputation and that she did not receive a proper right of reply, but she did not dispute the accuracy of the article or its sources. The Wikimedia Foundation initially won the case on procedural grounds when the lower court found Ms. Teissier’s claims to be time-barred, and Ms. Teissier subsequently appealed that decision.

The Paris Court of Appeals found the claims were not time-barred and ruled on the merits, dismissing all of Ms. Teissier’s claims and, for the first time on an appellate level in France, stating that the Wikimedia Foundation is a hosting provider under French law. The Court acknowledged that the Foundation merely hosts user-uploaded content and does not have knowledge or control over the data stored as it merely provides, free of charge, “the infrastructures and the organization framework allowing internet users wishing to do so, to build projects by contributing and editing content themselves” without playing any active role. As a result, the Foundation does not have an obligation to allow Ms. Teissier to make her own posting on Wikipedia in response to the article.

The Court also held that while Ms. Teissier may dislike the content of the page about her, the information there remains within the limits of free criticism of her divinatory art and is not insulting.  Therefore, the Court neither allowed her request for the content to be removed, nor her request for compensation.

As a result of this ruling, the article is allowed to remain as is, and Ms. Teissier is required to compensate the Wikimedia Foundation for some of the legal fees it incurred in its defense. Ms. Teissier has approximately a four-month period to refer this decision to the French Supreme Court. If she does not choose to appeal, the Court of Appeals’ decision will be final.

This ruling is a victory for all Wikipedians and freedom of speech on the internet. It supports the ability of Wikipedians in France and around the world to write accurate, well-sourced articles about a variety of subjects, even when the sources are, at times, critical of the subject. Moreover, the integrity and neutrality of Wikimedia projects, like Wikipedia, depends on its status as a hosting provider. The Court’s decision provides critical immunity from liability that allows the Wikimedia Foundation to host open platforms where people are free to learn and share knowledge. This ruling supports the Foundation and you—the global community—in aiding the dissemination of free knowledge.

Michelle Paulson, Legal Director
Jacob Rogers, Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation

* Special thanks to Christine Gateau, Pauline Faron, and Winston Maxwell of Hogan Lovells for representing the Foundation in this case and their dedication to the Wikimedia movement, along with to Meenu Krishnan, WMF Legal Intern, for her assistance drafting this blog post.

On June 19, 1865, Texas announced the abolition of slavery. That decision essentially emancipated African-American slaves throughout the Confederate states. Though a day of celebration, Juneteenth is also a day to reflect on the history of slavery.

The public’s understanding of slavery’s impact has been greatly improved by students who are assigned to create or improve Wikipedia articles that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Students in Dr. Daina Ramey Berry’s “Black Women in America” course at the University of Texas, Austin, were asked to contribute articles on that topic to Wikipedia.

One of those students created the article on The Great Slave Auction. The article describes the largest sale of enslaved people that took place before the US Civil War. 436 men, women, and children were sold over the course of two days just outside of Savannah, Georgia. The sale netted $303,850.

Though this event is a historic moral catastrophe, it wasn’t marked for inclusion in Wikipedia until a student took the project on. It’s also one of the only articles on Wikipedia that describes a specific slave auction.

Another student created the article for Sylvia Dubois, a woman born into slavery. She escaped to the North in 1808, and lived to be about 100 years old. Her life story was documented by a physician in the book, “Silvia Dubois (Now 116 Yers Old) A Biografy of the Slav who Whipt Her Mistres and Gand Her Fredom.”

Another woman, Grace Douglass, worked from the other side. An abolitionist born to a prominent free black family, she helped to create the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society after being forbidden to enter the existing, and exclusively male, Anti-Slavery Society.

Students also created articles on Cherry Turner, the wife of Nat Turner. She was beaten and tortured by authorities seeking plans and maps for Nat Turner’s slave revolt. A student created the article about Lear Green, who fled slavery in Baltimore by hiding in a box en route to Philadelphia. A student expanded the article on Jenny Slew, one of the first black Americans to establish their freedom through a juried trial.

Students who contribute to Wikipedia have an opportunity to correct the historical record. Though the site aims to present “the sum of all knowledge,” it often reflects history through a lens that blurs out underrepresented groups. By using academic resources to find historical records that others can’t, under the guidance of an expert in these subjects, students can make meaningful contributions that help Wikipedia reflect the sum of all history.

If you’re an instructor who is interested in exploring the possibilities a Wikipedia writing assignment makes possible, we’d love to start a conversation. You can reach us at contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo: Emancipation Proclamation Engraving by W. Roberts. – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID pga.04067. Public Domain. 

Image by Stellapark025, CC BY-SA 4.0.

We are excited to announce the successful grantees from the final round of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) program.

IEGs provide funding to individuals and small teams to take on projects with potential for online impact and that advance the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission and strategic priorities. These projects can take on many forms, from building and improving online tools or social processes, to creating new types of partnerships with organizations or conducting actionable research about Wikimedia content and contributors.

The IEG committee typically scores two rounds of grant proposals a year according to specified selection criteria. This year, however, IEG will be replaced by Project Grants starting July 1, 2016 and will transition to quarterly, rather than biannual, rounds.

Our volunteer committee is made up of 16 Wikimedians who come from over 15 different wikis and collectively speak over 10 languages. Outside of our IEG committee work, members edit, review, and translate content; help govern local chapters; write software; organize off-wiki events; facilitate workshops; work as sysops and bureaucrats; verify copyright and licensing permissions; draft and discuss project policies; and recruit and welcome new users to Wikimedia projects. Many members also serve as advisors to new IEG grantees, helping to answer questions, connect them to relevant resources, and comment on monthly and midpoint reports.

In this latest round, a total of 28 eligible proposals were submitted for the committee’s review. The committee recommended that 8 projects be funded to receive $87,332 overall, divided into two themes:  tools and online community organizing.

Online community organizing: two projects funded

Medical images, like this one of a normal barium swallowing, can convey as much content as a whole page of text. “Health images for all” aims to solicit and distribute higher quality medical images on Wikipedia. Photo by Hellerhoff/Anka Friedrich, CC BY-SA 3.0.

• Health images for all:
  • User:CFCF, a veteran grantee from Medicine Translation Project Community Organizing, will return to IEG to coordinate a multi-strategy initiative to bring quality medical images to Wikipedia across many languages.
• Effective Engagement with Health Topic Experts using Guided Checklists:
  • This project will create infrastructure to make it easier for health specialists to contribute their knowledge to Wikipedia.  Through interviews and research, User:FloNight will develop a robust health topic quality checklist that medical experts would use to guide their review of health content on Wikipedia, directing them to make high quality edits.

Tools: six projects funded

This photo of fire in the Almora District in India was contributed via the “Upload to Commons” Android app. It was immediately used in the Wikipedia article on the 2016 Uttarakhand forest fires. Photo by Ramwik, CC BY-SA 3.0

• Improve ‘Upload to Commons’ Android App:
  • This project will further enhance ‘Upload to Commons,’ making the Android app more user-friendly by improving categorization tools and providing tutorials to help new users create more useful content for Commons.
• Enhance the ProveIt gadget:
  • The ProveIt gadget is a reference manager that creates a visual interface for easily adding and editing references to a Wikipedia article.  This project will optimise the gadget by connecting it with Wikidata to allow for autocompletion of references with existing data.
• Wikiscan Multi-wiki:
  • This project will expand the Wikiscan site, currently focused on French Wikipedia, to include all Wikimedia wikis with more than 100,000 edits.  It will provide many  daily-updated statistics, such as most active pages and users for each day and month since a project was created.

“A graphical and interactive etymology dictionary based on Wikitionary” will represent extracted etymological relationships using trees. Diagram by Epantaleo, CC BY-SA 4.0.

• A graphical and interactive etymology dictionary based on Wiktionary:
  • This project will extract etymological relationships from Wiktionary to build a database designed for integration into Wikidata.  A second goal of the project is to build an interactive visualization tool to represent the extracted etymological relationships as well as the associated lexical information using trees (see photo).
• Alt text tools:
  • Alternative texts provide in-context descriptions of images to increase accessibility for vision-impaired users.  This project would create a collection of tools to allow volunteers to efficiently add and improve text alternatives on English Wikipedia.
• Lua libs for behavior-driven development:
  • This project will create an extension to support testing of Lua-modules in a behavior-driven development style using spec-like tests.

Analysis

This round, we see two trends that reflect the recent Inspire Campaign focus on Content Curation and Review.

As in the last round of IEG, improving accessibility continues to be a prominent theme, whether by creating new user interfaces to make interpretation of statistical data more intuitive, offering tools to make it easier for volunteers to support access for vision-impaired users, or organizing existing data into systems that increase its potential applications.

Several projects funded this round will focus on making existing volunteer efforts more effective, by adding tutorials to an existing app to teach new users how to avoid common mistakes, by helping Wikipedians to participate in organizational partnerships that will magnify their efforts, and by designing clearly defined workflows that make strategic use of volunteer expertise.

Two projects will take a multi-phased approach to raising the quality of medical information on Wikipedia.   Both projects are led by seasoned Wikipedians with a demonstrated record of successfully leveraging volunteer efforts and improving health coverage on Wikipedia.  Given that Wikipedia is one of the most frequently referenced sources of medical knowledge in the world, the potential impact of these projects is outstanding.

We received many compelling proposals this year that the committee decided not to fund because of concerns about the feasibility of the scope.  We encourage applicants who were not successful in this round of funding to refine and resubmit their proposals in upcoming rounds.  Return proposals that have been revised in response to community and committee feedback are warmly welcomed.

At the close of this round, IEG and Project & Event Grants (PEG) will be redesigned as Project Grants. Project Grants will support both new experiences and proven ideas across the Wikimedia movement. Open call for the first round of Projects Grants start July 1st, with proposals due by August 2nd.

You can read more about the new grants structure on Meta (main page, IdeaLab).

As we prepare to launch our new program, Project Grants, this summer, we invite feedback about how we can improve our grantmaking process. Our goal is to support the enthusiasm and vision behind every proposal we receive, whether or not we are able to fund them.  We welcome participation at every level.  We’re currently seeking volunteers to serve on the new Project Grants Committee.

We look forward to reviewing your suggestions and future submissions, but for now we say congratulations to the successful grantees and encourage you to follow their progress as they begin work in the coming weeks.

Marti Johnson, IEG Program Officer
Wikimedia Foundation

Photo by Mehtab Ahmed, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Sindhi Wikipedia started in 2004, but it grew only slowly until a few enthusiasts, like Asad Jogi, Mohammad Mujeeb and Mehtab Ahmed, started contributing in 2014. These people rejuvenated and breathed fresh air into the project.

Among the three, Mehtab started contributing as recently as August 2015, and yet he has already contributed close to 9000 edits and more that 2600 articles to the site. As this young contributor works in an overzealous manner to enrich the knowledge on Sindhi Wikipedia every day, we decided to interview him and gain insight from his editor experience.

Mehtab Ahmed comes from an educated middle class family from Sindh, Pakistan; his father is a retired bank officer and mother a teacher. He is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Education at the Sukkur Institute of Business Administration. Being a native Sindhi, Mehtab is conscious about his language. He has contributed to Google Translate in Sindhi alongside several other online Sindhi platforms. With this background, he got permission from Encyclopedia Sindhiana and other resources to use their works on Sindhi Wikipedia, which resulted in him achieving the distinction of holding one of the highest number of edits on Sindhi Wikipedia.

As a pragmatist, Mehtab cited the example of how the addition of Sindhi language on Google Translate ensured hundreds people of coming forward to contribute. This event has given him a hope that Sindhi language is going to make a significant place in today’s modern world. More recent examples in this area are the number of apps, websites and blogs in Sindhi that are being created with each passing day. Mehtab believes that one of his most important future tasks will be to tell Sindhi people the benefits of Wikimedia projects and convince them to become volunteers. He is trying via Facebook to convince volunteers to edit for Sindhi projects and is is hopeful of building a strong community in the near future. In order to enlist more users, Mehtab answers and guides volunteers on the Sindhi Wikipedia Facebook group.

Speaking on the efforts aimed at Perso-Arabic collaboration with common goals for expanding Urdu, Western Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi and Baluchi Wikipedia, Mehtab specifically appreciated the efforts of Urdu Wikipedians in this direction.

Mehtab’s future Wiki goals are to continuing adding high quality information on Sindhi projects, and to increase the number of volunteers and representation of Sindhi language on every wiki project. He believes that there is great potential in Pakistan but it needs to be refined and properly guided. And this, he hopes, will definitely result in the growth and expansion of Sindhi Wikipedia on par with many other language Wikipedias.

Syed Muzammiluddin
Wikimedia community volunteer

A concept rendering of the notification feature, subject to change upon further input and development. Underlying photo via Dribbble, modified by the Wikimedia Foundation.

The mobile apps team at the Wikimedia Foundation helps people everywhere access the world’s largest collection of free knowledge—Wikipedia and its sister projects—on mobile devices. Apps play an important part in this effort. Apps provide a unique, high quality mobile experience for our readers, and enable users to access Wikimedia’s freely licensed content across a plethora of devices.

In 2014, we launched our first native mobile apps for iOS and Android, and we’ve been improving over the last two years. Recently, we updated Wikipedia for iOS with new ways to search and explore Wikipedia: we added the Explore screen, which puts the site’s content and personal recommendations in a mobile friendly feed, made it easy to search in your preferred languages, and added integration with OS-level search (called Spotlight on iOS).

Now we’re looking at notifications as another tool for providing users the most relevant information on Wikipedia and its sister projects. Notifications are a widely used way to surface timely or relevant information. They can be “push” or “pull”: someone might, for example, see an alert pushed to them on their phone’s lock screen, or they might swipe down on their lock screen to pull in the latest updates.

Earlier this year, the Collaboration team enabled editing notifications across wikis. Now the Reading team is interested in how notifications could bring more volunteer-created and curated content to readers.

What if, just by looking down, someone could learn about the history of the place they are walking by? What if readers heard about a major world event, on their tablets over their morning coffee, from a free, neutral, source? Notifications have the potential to highlight the most relevant volunteer-contributed information on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects at the right place and time.

We actually had a chance to pilot this idea on iOS 10, the operating system from Apple that will be released this fall. At their 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference this week, Apple showed  this early concept to attendees. We’ll be posting our work on notifications to GitHub, under a permissive free license, as we always do. We’re excited to see open source technology being used in new ways to share knowledge with people around the world.

We’re also starting a conversation on wiki about these initial concepts. We hope the prototypes we’ve built so far will provide tangible examples of how notifications can be used to surface the informative content people expect from Wikipedia.

Privacy is an important value of our movement, and apps allow us to explore features like notifications while protecting user privacy. With notifications on apps, we’re able to send notifications directly from the app to the user, without requiring data to travel through Apple’s servers. And any notification features included on Wikipedia mobile apps will be on a user opt-in basis.

Notifications is just one area we’re exploring. We’re also starting a conversation on wiki about the next generation of map-based browsing and finding content near your location. We’re also working on many other improvements, like making random articles easier to get to, ensuring full accessibility for disabled readers, and other user-requested features.

We look forward to talking with editors and readers to continue to improve the app experience. Notifications could offer a new way of reaching people on mobile apps around the world, and highlight the 15 years worth of free knowledge Wikimedians have created for the world.

Josh Minor, Product Manager, Reading Product Management
Wikimedia Foundation

Photo by Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In recent years, editors have worked hard to address Wikipedia’s gender gap by organizing in-person and online activities to develop inclusive content, and identifying ways to make the movement more welcoming to women. Projects like Art+Feminism, WikiWomen’s History Month, and the Women in Red, among other groups, have made progress creating and improving content, and continue to bring new editors into the Wikimedia community.

But there are other content gaps we need to acknowledge. While women represent roughly half the population, those who identify as LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) or other sexual orientations and gender identities represent a much smaller percentage of the population. The LGBT community has a unique history and culture, which vary widely by geography.

If the cumulative sum of all human knowledge is our goal, then LGBT studies are an important piece of the puzzle.

June’s arrival brought with it Wikipedia’s third annual Wiki Loves Pride campaign, which focuses on improving LGBT-related content across all Wikimedia projects, in all languages. This year also marks my third time spearheading the campaign, along with a handful of other core volunteers.

Wiki Loves Pride is more of a concept than a defined project with specific parameters. Participants contribute in a variety of ways, from organizing edit-a-thons, to photographing pride events, to uploading images to the Wikimedia Commons LGBT Free Media Collective. We have collaborated with cultural and scientific institutions, including the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of American History, and the New York Public Library. We have hosted edit-a-thons at libraries and universities, including George Washington University’s Gelman Library and Portland State University.

Activities have not been limited to the United States, nor to English Wikipedia. Events have been organized in France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, among other countries, and photo galleries have been created for LGBT events around the world, including Cape Town, Seoul, Tel Aviv, Vienna, and Warsaw. Translated campaign pages exist at French Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, and Italian Wikipedia.

In 2014, Wikimedia Commons hosted an LGBT-themed photo challenge, and WikiProject LGBT was created at Wikidata. We would love to see LGBT WikiProjects at Chinese Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, and Spanish Wikipedia, as well as LGBT initiatives at other Wikimedia projects, such as Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikisource, and Wikivoyage’s LGBT Expedition.

Wiki Loves Pride is supported by the Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group, which has been recognized as an official Wikimedia Foundation affiliate. Among other benefits, this recognition provides representation at movement events like Wikimania, the Wikimedia Conference, and the Wikimedia Diversity Conference, which means more opportunities to share our mission and goals with movement leaders from around the world. I’ve had the pleasure of representing the user group at the Wikimedia Conference twice, and both times, I delivered brief presentations about the status of our group and extended invitations to expand the reach of Wiki Loves Pride, our flagship outreach and content development campaign. When I discuss the user group and its initiatives, I always begin my presentation with two disclaimers:

1. We are not an LGBT activist group. Project supporters are not advocating for LGBT rights or same-sex marriage; we are simply adding content about LGBT culture and history in the same way one adds content about any other subject. We abide by the same rules, but recognize that we may have an increased chance of bumping into cultural sensitivities, because levels of acceptance vary greatly around the world. As free culture advocates and open content activists, our goal is to add neutral information to Wikipedia, not to inject bias or persuade others to support specific rights for LGBT people.
2. One is not required to identify as LGBT, or any specific gender or sexuality, to participate. We are simply a group of editors who are trying to address a content gap, just like those focused on tackling Wikipedia’s gender gap. We want Wikipedia to have accurate, reliable information about LGBT culture and history, just as we want the encyclopedia to have high-quality information about baseball, battleships, fungi, and The Simpsons.

So, why do I contribute? I admit, sometimes organizing activities can be exhausting, and I can’t help feeling discouraged when I see some of the negative comments people leave on Facebook when our calls to action are shared by Wikipedia’s account. But the negative comments pale in comparison to the supportive responses. And, sure, every year I get a handful of harassing emails, accusing me of adding immoral content to the encyclopedia and criticizing the Wikimedia Foundation for “taking a stand” on a culturally sensitive issue, but I can brush these off with an eye roll (or two).

The supportive emails that appear in my inbox are what inspire me. Like the one from the man in Iran who wishes he could host a Wiki Loves Pride event, but can’t, because homosexuality is a crime punishable by imprisonment, corporal punishment, or even execution. Or the straight guy from South Africa who was once too embarrassed to document an LGBT event out of fear of being perceived as gay, but now feels empowered to document LGBT culture and history in his country. These are the messages I remember, and the reason I carry the torch.

If you are interested in participating, visit the 2016 project page to see what activities are being organized. Contributing can be as simple as creating or improving LGBT-related Wikipedia articles or taking photos at local pride parades and other LGBT establishments and events. Don’t see your city listed? Create a new entry, or simply add a page with a gallery of your photographs and other contributions once you are done. All contributions are welcome, big or small!

Jason Moore
Wikimedia LGBT+

Middle East

In late March 2016, I attended some Wikimedia gatherings in the Middle East: The WikiArabia conference in Amman (Jordan), a Technical Meetup in Ramallah (Palestinian territories), and the Wikimedia Hackathon in Jerusalem (Israel).

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(Video above by Victor Grigas [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons)

I gave an introduction to the many technical areas in Wikimedia anyone can contribute to. I also gave an introduction how to use Phabricator, the project management suite used (for mostly technical aspects) by the Wikimedia community which allows managing and following progress in projects and collaborating with developers.

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(Video above by Victor Grigas [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons)

As I love discussing society and politics I was not sure initially how much I’d have open and blunt conversations. But on the first evening I was already sitting together with folks from Tunesia, Egypt and Saudi-Arabia who were comparing the situations in their home countries. People also allowed me to learn a little bit about how daily life is in Iraq or Saudi-Arabia.

Petra

Petra

After a short trip to Petra, we spent an entire day to get to and cross the border between Jordan and the West Bank. If you look at the mere distance it feels ridiculous. It definitely makes you appreciate open borders.

At the border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank

Afterwards, we were very lucky that Maysara (one of our hosts) took the time and his car to drive us around in the Westbank to visit a bunch of spots, pass settlements, look at walls, or wonder which streets to take (sometimes a checkpoint with a soldier pointing a machine gun at you helps making decisions).

The old city center of Nablus

Graffiti on graffiti in Ramallah

At some point, Maysara simplified it in a single quoted sentence: For Israelis it’s fear. For Palestinians it’s humiliation.

Street sign in the West Bank

Imagery of dead fighters in Nablus

In Israel, we walked through Jerusalem’s old town, visited Masada and took a bath in the Dead Sea.

Dead Sea: Past war zones

View from Masada (the squares were siege camps)

On the last day I visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial with some co-workers (thanks to Moriel for organizing it). It’s obviously an activity you cannot “look forward to”. I am still impressed by our guide who explained and summarized history extremely well.
The architecture of Yad Vashem makes you go through several rooms on the left and right of the passageway in a chronological way and our guide mentioned several times that you “cannot yet see what is coming a few rooms (means: a few years) later”, and the question “Why did Jewish citizens not flee” got answered by “Where would you try to escape to if even outside of ghettos and concentration camps everybody is hostile”. Which explained very well the self-understanding why to found a state for Jews.

I am incredibly thankful to those many great people I could meet and who shared their points of views on the social and political situation, always in a pretty reflected and respectful way despite of all the frustration being around.
And whatever my question was to locals, the answer pretty much always was “It’s more complicated than you thought.”

India

Afterwards I spent some time in India to attend Rootconf, visit GeekSkool to learn a lot about why the concept works, and attend GNOME.Asia (thanks to Shobha and everybody organizing it!).

Hardware recycling via badge lanyards

Breakdance competitions

In a society where the path of welfare could be expressed by “walk → motorbike → car”, I received some grins admitting I had never had a motorbike ride before. In Indian traffic I’d call that an experience, for a tourist like me.

GNOME.Asia 2016 venue

GNOME.Asia 2016 music

As usual, it’s wonderful to finally meet folks in person who you’ve only spoken to online beforehand, and to hang out with old friends. (I sound like a broken record here. I am sorry I could not see everybody. I’ll be back.)

Wiki Ed staff will present at the Wiki Diversity conference this Friday. The event is hosted by Wikimedia DC at the National Archives. Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, co-founder of WikiProject Women in Red, and a driving force for writing women into Wikipedia, will speak as keynote. The conference aims to focus on “diversity issues throughout the Wikimedia movement.”

Wiki Ed will join Patti Provance from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA).

Together, we’ll showcase how Wiki Ed’s partnership with the NWSA is narrowing the gender gap on Wikipedia. For those of you who can’t attend, I wanted to share five ways this partnership has made an impact.

1. We’re bringing more students and instructors to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s gender gap is old news. In 2008, a study found that Wikipedia was incredibly skewed toward male editors. In the United States, merely 15% of those who contributed to Wikipedia were women. Our partnership with the NWSA is addressing the resulting gap. NWSA encourages Wikipedia writing assignments for higher ed students. NWSA instructors assign students to write about women’s studies topics on Wikipedia.

Those women’s studies courses make up 12% of the courses in Wiki Ed’s Classroom Program, and they’ve contributed 14% of content. That’s improved thousands of articles on women’s studies topics across Wikipedia, from biographies of film makers and authors to the political status of women across the world.

2. Students are contributing on a massive scale.

We knew NWSA students would improve Wikipedia. But thanks to our data science intern Kevin Schiroo, we can finally see how much. Across our partnership, NWSA students contributed 4.3% of new women’s studies content to Wikipedia. That’s a major portion of a site that happens to be the largest volunteer project on the planet.

Looking at all of Wiki Ed’s courses, more than 1,600 students contributed content related to women’s studies last term alone. They’ve added 1.1 million words to more than 1,700 articles, and they’ve created 237. That’s a powerful impact.

3. Thanks to NWSA, we’re keeping up.

Wiki Ed’s partnership with the NWSA helps us reach more instructors, more students and, ultimately, more content. Together, we’ve boosted the number of Classroom Program participants in Women’s Studies courses.

Students produced 35% more content related to women’s studies after the partnership than before. As excellent community-led gender gap initiatives such as WikiProject Women Scientists and WikiProject Women in Red have soared, our students are keeping pace. That means NWSA is part of the solution.

Case in point: Wikipedian Emily Temple-Wood’s work creating biographies of women scientists has had such an impact on Wikipedia that she became an outlier! We were actually interested to see what Wiki Ed students contributed to the pool of editors who weren’t Emily. When we adjusted for Emily’s contributions, we saw that student contributions increased by 10% to 4.8% of overall created content. We’re saying that mostly to say: Good work, Emily!

We’re proud to see an increase in the volunteer editors tackling Wikipedia’s representation of women’s topics. Wiki Ed’s student editors are working alongside those volunteers, and they’re keeping up.

4. Students are contributing quality content.

Students aren’t just adding volume. The quality of that content matters. Students contributing to Wikipedia in a classroom have advantages. They’re better prepared than almost any other new editor. They have trainings, access to vast university resources, and an instructor to guide them.

So it’s no surprise that they’re not just contributing, but contributing meaningful content. Take Dr. Ariella Rotramel’s course as an example. That course made substantive contributions to 16 articles and created four.

That includes a collaboration on the article for Audre Lord’s essay collection, Sister Outsider. One student created the article, another worked to improve it. Together, they created a substantive article on an important collection of feminist writing.

5. It’s not just quality content. It’s overdue content.

We’re filling gaps in areas that volunteers haven’t tackled in the 15 years since Wikipedia’s been here. For example, the article on sexuality and disability. That article, created in 2008, saw a handful of edits. It’s been tagged as “in need of an expert” since 2009. This term, Wikipedia got one: A student in Dr. Juana Maria Rodriguez’s class at UC-Berkeley.

That student rewrote the lead. They added a history section, drawing on some difficult-to-find resources. They expanded the level of detail across every section, especially the section on self-image. That student added about 7,500 words to the article.

That’s just one example. There is still plenty of work to do for articles on women’s studies topics, and across the field of gender and sexuality.

In conclusion, our NWSA partnership has made an impact on Wikipedia’s coverage of women’s studies topics. We think it speaks to the power of our Classroom Program to improve Wikipedia. It also speaks to the power of collaborations between Wiki Ed and academic associations. Wiki Ed is looking for new instructors and partners to work with us to improve Wikipedia in many other topic areas. You can reach us at contact@wikiedu.org to get involved.

“5” Image derived from 5NumberFiveInCircle by Andre666 at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia

06/07/2016-06/13/2016

Mapping

• It looks like the new mapping function of Maps.me creates some false data in OSM (automatic translation from German). Some mappers are collecting questionable edits on a wiki page.
• User JIDB improved his proposal posted in April about extending the tagging of Kneipp facilities based on users comments. Kneipp facilities (in German) are popular in German speaking countries.
• An ambitious discussion takes place on the tagging mailing list about turn lanes.
• Kevin Kohler starts a discussion about bus route 95A  (automatic translation) where the route has two variants, one of which only runs once a day in each direction. The discussion centres around what happens if someone uses OSM and thinks they are on the frequent part of the route when they are not and how can it be tagged or indeed how should it be tagged.
• User Amacri posted a request for a new tag natural=upland as type way or to enable the use of type “way” for the tag “place”. Currently, the tag place=isolated_dwelling is defined as node or a polygon (area), but not as a way.
• A call for a tree mapping party in Basaveshwaranagar (India) on ‘The World Environment Day’.
• A tweet announcing that OSM France is present at the Fujitsu World Tour.
• A cool project to visualize OSM data in 3D and split vertically by year. The developer of the project used the OSM Postgis Script to load the data into PostGIS. The result is a 3D map which can be navigated.

Community

• A paper entitled “Guided Classification System for Conceptual Overlapping Classes in OpenStreetMap” has been just published in the International Journal of Geo-Information. The paper aims at contributing to the validation of OSM datasets. A web-based application called Grass&Green was implemented which provides recommendations for crowdsourcing validation. This research encourages the development of customized applications that target a particular geographic feature.

Imports

• Wojciech Myrda documented his import of GDOS data in Poland.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OSMF License Working Group has submitted the text of the Collective Database Guideline to the OSMF Board for a decision. There is a discussion concerning this matter on the mailing-list Legal-Talk.

Events

• State of the Map US 2016, will be held at Seattle University on the 23rd to the 25th of July and will focus on the importance of free map data in humanitarian efforts of organizations, ranging from Microsoft and the American Red Cross to the Tacoma Fire Department. More information here.
• OSM talks resume at RIOSCRAM 2016 – ISCRAM Conference in Rio de Janeiro.

Humanitarian OSM

• The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team of the University of Vermont reported on its activities in recent months in response to the disasters in Ecuador and Sri Lanka.
• Nirab Pudasaini reports in opensource.com on the role of OSM and other Open Data/Humanitarian projects after the devastating earthquake in Nepal 2015. In summary he explains: Opensource projects save lives.
• Dale Kunce provides in Missing Maps blog a compilation of detected road kilometers, depending on the acquisition year. As examples he uses the United States, the Philippines and Guinea. He thinks that this can indicate which areas are still relatively unmapped.
• On the HOT mailing list some papers on the effective impact of disaster mapping are collected.

Maps

• [1] Peter Liu from Mapbox uses the data from USGS (US Geological Survey) and created a real-time map of all earthquakes, which are measured by the USGS. Please be patient, retrieving more than 9000 quakes of this month takes some time. Hover over each marker to inspect the quake, and click to zoom in and view satellite imagery of the surrounding area.
• The center of Berlin is now represented in Minecraft. The map is based on open geodata from the Berliner Datenportal and OpenStreetMap. It was developed by con terra using FME ™ technology. The map can be downloaded and used freely.
• The piano map is quite new and not yet listed in the map collection.

Open Data

• A paper published at AGILE (A conceptual model to assess the quality of volunteered geographic information for the purpose of flood management that combines cross-platform data, i.e. OpenStreetMap and social media data, and authoritative data. This model is part of an ongoing research for the development of an approach for quality assessment of VGI in flood situations from citizen observers. (Update – Link to the paper fixed!)
• Karin Lindström reports in ComputerSweden on the release of official maps in Sweden (automatic translation). Users Skinfaxi opened a discussion in the German forum in which it is recognised that these data are not yet OSM-compatible (automatic translation).

Licences

• Mapbox has set up a support point for attribution issues on Mapbox hosted maps.
• Sven Geggus asks (automatic translation) at mailing list Talk-de if there are leading cases about the usage of registered trademark symbols in maps.

Software

• Users yogesh10446 points to the Android app mymap. It offers offline maps for Nepal and makes it possible to share location with friends and to edit OSM data as well.

Programming

• James Halliday explains with more technical details how osm-p2p works. The project is a decentralized peer-to-peer database for storing and editing OpenStreetMap data.
• As part of his GSoC project Zabot worked on generating perlin noise to suppress the otherwise visible texture repeats.
• Meteopool.org who make maps for storm chasing and weather watching, wrote about (automatic translation) their switch to OpenLayers 3 and forthcoming relaunch. They are also looking for a student developer or keen storm chaser to help them in creating three smartphone apps.
• The planet dump which is usually published on Thursday was delayed by a few days because a very long comment at a changeset discussion made a script crash.
• Stefan Hahmann reports about an older publication of his about generating incline values for street networks based on GPS traces from OpenStreetMap. Those values might be used for energy-efficient routing or they might be used to reconstruct more detailed elevation data with a method presented in Germany last year.

Releases

Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist

Did you know …

• … the Blender tutorial “Creating a Realistic City With OpenStreetMap in Blender”? On Lesterbanks.com you can see the 90 minutes video with impressive results.
• … the page who shows you an overview of GIS formats?

OSM in the media

• Chefuturo.it: In Lecce, Apulia, 80 volunteers got together along with the disabled people to capture more than 1,100 barriers in town and mapped them. (automatic translation)

Other “geo” things

• Justin O’Beirne, former head of department at Apple Maps,  did a detail analysis of the differences between Apple and Google Maps. The analysis are divided into 4 parts, the part 1 is about the content and their descriptions. The next parts will be published in the following weeks.
• The Indian government denies permission to Google Street View over security concerns.
• Google has developed OpenLocationCode from its Zurich engineering office. With the help of this system a location should be easier to relate to than using Latitude/Longitude. The code is available on Github. The addresses can [be determined] on the map (https://plus.codes/6PVH0000) such as:
  • Olympiastadion, Berlin, Germany 52.51462/13.23952 or 9F4MG67Q+VQ
  • Tatro Carlos Marx, Havanna, Cuba, 23.12933/-82.41934 or 76MV4HHJ+M7
  • Macchu Picchu, Peru, -13.16399/-72.54453 or 57R9RFP4+C4 (Update: codes fixed)
• An article in Wired about Transitland, which collects and standardizes real-time public data sets for public transport. This service, offered by mapping platform Mapzen, provides developers with public transport data of more than 200 regions.
• Current geoinformation is economically more valuable. This is the result of a survey of swisstopo and the Swiss organization for geographical information (SOGI).

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Esino Lario	Mapping party in preparazione di Wikimania 2016	06/18/2016-06/19/2016
Nottingham	Nottingham	06/21/2016
Rapperswil	Swiss PG Day 2016	06/24/2016
Kyoto	京都世界遺産マッピングパーティ：最終回 天龍寺	06/25/2016
Sliač	Mapping párty Sliač	06/25/2016
Colorado	Saturday Mapternoon, Evergreen	06/25/2016
Graz	Stammtisch	06/27/2016
Montpellier	Rencontre mensuelle	06/29/2016
Antwerp	Missing Maps @ IPIS	06/29/2016
Shizuoka	OpenStreetMapワークショップ in 日本平 (Nihondaira)	07/02/2016

Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropiate..

This weekly was produced by Hakuch, Laura Barroso, Nakaner, Peda, Rogehm, Softgrow, derFred, jinalfoflia, mgehling, seumas, stephan75, wambacher, widedangel.

Photo by Tesselate, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Wikimedia is happy to welcome eight students to work on their Google Summer of Code 2016 projects. After completing the initial community bonding period, the eight developers and their Wikimedia mentors are working at full speed, approaching their mid term evaluations.

These are the selected students with their projects and mentors:

• Accuracy Review of Wikipedia, by prnk28 (Goa, India), mentored by James Salsman, Fabian Flock.
• Implementing HTML E-Mail support in MediaWiki, Galorefitz (Hyderabad, India), , mentored by Parent5446, Tony Thomas
• Extension for page creating/editing notification, by Abhinand (Kerala, India), mentored by Yaron_Koren, tosfos
• Automated Testing and Integration of IFTTT support to WikiData, by D3r1ck01 (Buea, Cameroon), mentored by Slaporte, Bene, hoo, Lydia_Pintscher
• Improving static analysis tools for MediaWiki, by Lethexie (Guangzhou, China), mentored by Addshore, EBernhardson, Legoktm
• List of Contributors, by Devirk (Kerala, India), mentored by Addshore, Samtar, Niharika
• Port catimages.py to pywikibot-core, by AbdealiJK (Chennai, India), mentored by DrTrigo, jayvdb
• Pywikibot Support for Thanks, by darthbhyrava (Hyderabad, India), mentored by javydb, legoktm

For the first time we have promoted Community Wishlist projects to candidates for these internships. One of the selected projects (List of Contributors ) ranked #59 out of 107 proposals in the Community Wishlist Survey 2015. Community feedback and support to these projects is very welcomed. We want these developers to feel a home in our community and engaged to continue contributing to Wikimedia after the end of their internship.

Google Summer of Code is an outreach program to encourage university students to get involved in free and open source software development projects guided by community mentors. The selected students get to participate in a three month internship program with their mentoring organization, collaborating by using version control systems, IRC, mailing lists and issue trackers. Google pays a stipend of $5,500 USD to each student upon the successful completion of their project.

Outreachy Round 12

Three of the selected candidates applied also to Outreachy, a biannual program intended at increasing the participation of women and other minorities in free and open source software projects. It is similar to Google Summer of Code in case of stipends and internship structure, but open to women (cis and trans), trans men, genderqueer people. Wikimedia encourages its eligible participants to apply for both programs. Outreachy candidates that are eligible for GSoC obtain the GSoC internship in case of being accepted in both programs. In this round, Wikimedia received 12 Outreachy applications, out of which 6 applicants applied to both the programs.

Tony Thomas, Organization administrator with Sumit

Photo by Jebulon, public domain/CC0.

Two years ago, I was editing the English Wikipedia’s article for taiko, a set of Japanese drums, when I had a disagreement with another editor.  We differed over the inclusion of a glossary of Japanese terms in the article and how best to present it. After some discussion, we eventually came to an agreement.

Most disagreements among Wikimedia contributors are like this; we work things out, in spite of different perspectives. In fact, different perspectives are part of what makes Wikipedia so strong.

Unfortunately, disagreements on the internet can escalate to harassment, and the Wikimedia projects are not exempt. Wikimedia contributors have also reported behavior that goes far beyond ordinary disagreements:

“Someone edited Wikipedia articles about criminals and replaced their names with mine.”

“I’ve … been accused of being a naive teenager, a jealous girlfriend, a bitch… you name it…”

“[I was] hurtfully mocked for my gender and an illness.”

These are just a few examples of threatening and aggressive behavior on Wikimedia sites—harassment creates a hostile atmosphere and can compromise both the ability of individuals to contribute as well as their safety and well-being.  A 2015 survey conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation revealed that 38% of responding users experienced being harassed on or about Wikimedia projects. More than half of the people who reported being harassed this way also reported subsequently decreasing their participation on the project on which they were harassed. This isn’t unique to the Wikimedia projects; online harassment affects roughly 40% of adult internet users according to a 2014 Pew Research study.

To improve the way that harassment is prevented and managed on the Wikimedia sites, we launched an idea-building event on June 1 called the Inspire Campaign. These events, which we’ve run twice previously since 2015, have already tackled some of the biggest challenges in the Wikimedia movement: bridging the gender gap and improving how contributors review and curate project content.  Ideas can be brought back to local communities to help decide on implementation, or can be submitted for a grant offered by the Foundation.

In just the first two weeks of this campaign, more than 200 ideas have been submitted, and around 535 contributors have participated either by submitting an idea or providing feedback. Translations of materials for the campaign have so far been provided for nearly 90 languages, and participants have come from many language communities including Arabic, French, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish.

Here are a few examples of ideas offered during this campaign.  Please consider leaving feedback to support or improve them, or consider joining with others to help implement them:

• Developing help pages on all Wikimedia projects that provide resources on what to do if you are harassed.
• Conducting research on how on-wiki systems handle cases of harassment and their efficacy beyond the research conducted by the Foundation.
• Proposal to semi-protect the User: namespace by default to prevent harassment.
• Making content review more focused on active collaboration to produce content that discourages problematic interactions.

There are many other ideas that could use your help. If you have ideas of your own on how to address harassment, or want to collaborate with others on ideas already proposed, please take part in the ongoing Inspire Campaign! The campaign will be open through June 30, 2016, and Wikimedia Foundation Rapid Grants are currently available to help ideas that need funding.

Chris Schilling, Community Organizer
Wikimedia Foundation

Photo by Sanfranman59, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Last month, the United States Copyright Office held seven discussion sessions focused on section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)—the “safe harbor” from copyright liability provision in US law that allows entities like Google and Wikimedia to operate.

The Wikimedia Foundation, one of only two non-profit platforms in attendance, argued that changing the current law would interfere with Wikimedia sites’ volunteer-driven and effective handling of copyright issues. Section 512 is an integral part of these sites’ continued existence.

These sessions were organized as part of a years-long effort by the United States Copyright Office and members of the US Congress to write the “The Next Great Copyright Act.”  As part of those efforts, the Copyright Office has been looking into the section of US law that protects online platforms from being liable when their users upload files that infringe copyright. Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) creates these “safe harbors” as well as a notice-and-takedown process for rightsholders to request that platforms remove infringement.

Because Wikimedia benefits from these safe harbors and complies with the notice-and-takedown process, we’ve already submitted comments on the section to the Copyright Office, and last month I attended roundtable discussions on the topic as a representative from the Wikimedia Foundation’s legal team.

On May 12 and 13 in San Francisco, the Copyright Office organized seven section 512 discussion sessions, each with 20 participants. The topics of each session, which are listed in the roundtable agenda along with the participants, included the effectiveness and burdens of the notice-and-takedown process, the role of fair use, automated systems for sending and processing notices, repeat infringer policies, voluntary enforcement agreements between platforms and rightsholders, and misuse of the process.

Throughout the sessions, Wikimedia served as an example of how the current copyright enforcement system works for organizations that are neither tech giants nor for-profit rightsholders. We and Internet Archive were the only two non-profit online platforms who sent representatives to the discussions. On the Wikimedia projects, particularly Wikimedia Commons, the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown process plays only a small role in preventing copyright infringement. The community members who voluntarily enforce project policies do the heavy lifting by removing files that infringe copyright. As a result, we receive very few valid takedown notices—only 12 in all of 2015.

The numbers show that Wikimedia’s current systems work well to keep copyright infringement off the projects. Most of the time, volunteers take care of copyright issues before rightsholders even notice them—Wikimedia communities attention to copyright details mean that they regularly perform complex analysis to determine if files are allowed on the projects. When something does stick around long enough, the notice-and-takedown process is an effective backstop. This system can exist because of the current legal regime—but as I argued to the Copyright Office, changing the law could interfere with this system.

In our view, it’s not necessary to burden online platforms further in an attempt to curb copyright infringement. The rightsholder representatives at the roundtable pushed for a requirement that platforms implement filtering systems (also called “notice-and-stay-down”). Once a file has been removed in response to a takedown notice, these systems would automatically prevent users from uploading the file again.

However, it is costly to implement such systems well—and it would be exceptionally hard on nonprofits like us. First, the variety of content and file types hosted on the Wikimedia projects makes it an incredibly difficult technological challenge to build such a tool that both works effectively and doesn’t over-remove files and chill speech. Second, being forced to monitor for infringement ourselves would reduce the Wikimedia communities’ ability to govern the projects. While we did not convince rightsholders to abandon their campaign for requiring filtering, we did convince some that such a requirement should at least not apply to Wikimedia:

Screenshot via Twitter.

In my statements I also tried to remind the Copyright Office of how section 512 fits into broader copyright law. I pointed out how statutory damages—up to $150,000 for a single case of copyright infringement—create strong incentives for platforms to strictly comply with the notice-and-takedown process. Since any mistake in leaving up files that infringe copyright could cost tens of thousands of dollars, the section 512 safe harbors are crucial for platforms’ continued existence.

The fundamental purpose of copyright law is not to benefit authors but to ensure the public is able to enjoy new creative works. It is therefore important to ensure that the voices of the public and public interest are represented in these discussions.

We do our best to give Wikimedians a voice, advocating for the public’s ability to share knowledge and remix creative works, but the Copyright Office would benefit from hearing from you directly.

They will be requesting another round of comments on section 512. We will contribute, and we encourage you to do so as well.

Further reading:

• The Copyright Office page for their section 512 study.
• Techdirt’s overview of the arguments rightsholders made at the roundtable.
• Professor Rebecca Tushnet’s notes from the separate New York roundtable (the Copyright Office held the same discussions in both New York and California).

Charles M. Roslof, Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation

With the first term of the Wikipedia Year of Science complete, and about six months into its launch date on January 1, the Wiki Education Foundation wanted to look at the impact student editors have had on Wikipedia’s science coverage.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn’t label all of its science content as “Science!”, so we had to find a way to see what people were contributing to the sciences. That way, we’d be able to see which portion of that work came from student editors.

Wikipedia provides two pieces of data that we can use to get a pretty good approximation of which topics people write. First, WikiProjects, groups of editors working together to improve content coverage and quality in a given subject area. WikiProjects often leave tags on articles that help identify articles related to the project. Second, the WikiProject directory sorts these WikiProjects by subject. Fortunately for Wiki Ed, one of these subjects is science. Between these two sets of data, we can actually create a list of nearly all science articles.

Using that list of science articles, we can start answering some questions. Digging through the data for the past six months, we saw that Wiki Ed students had added 4,685,882 characters to science articles. Characters aren’t exactly an intuitive measurement, so let’s put this in the context of textbooks.

I have a couple textbooks sitting on my desk. Grabbing one, I see that it has 360 pages. Flipping to a random page, I count 308 words, about 4 characters each — plus one more for a space, giving us 5. Multiply all that together and we get 554,400 characters per textbook.

So, in six months, Wiki Ed students collectively produced 8 and a half new science textbooks.

Is the Year of Science making a difference?

That’s an achievement, but what does it really mean? And how many of those textbooks can be attributed specifically to the Year of Science? After all, students have contributed to science courses before. How much of this content is Wiki Ed just being Wiki Ed?

To get some perspective, I looked at the spring 2015 science numbers. That’s exactly one year before the Year of Science launched.

The graph above shows students’ contributions to science articles plotted over time. The dashed line represents actual daily totals, while the solid line is a smoothed version of the same data to make it easier to read the chart. We clearly see that throughout the semester, Wiki Ed is outperforming itself. In fact, looking at our year-to-year totals, we see an increase of 61.5%.

Student editors are contributing 61.5% more science content this year than last. That proves that the Year of Science has made an impact on student editing. But what does that mean for Wikipedia?

The impact on Wikipedia

Over the last two years, volunteer editors typically added 1.06 million characters a day to Wikipedia’s science articles.

We can use that figure to determine what proportion of science contributions came from Wiki Ed’s students, leaving aside the sporadic spikes in contributions that the graph above makes clear.

There were 151 days between January 1 and May 31. Let’s estimate 151 x 1,060,000 = 160,060,000 characters. During that time period, Wiki Ed produced 4,685,882 characters. That gives us 2.9% of all science activity, which is a pretty large figure. Remember, we’re comparing ourselves to one of the largest volunteer projects on the planet, with tens of thousands of active editors.

While that’s a big number, it also isn’t quite fair. No one really expects that much to be happening in classes in January. Student editors typically start contributing around the start of April to the middle of May.

That’s about 44 days of student activity. Doing the same math as above, 44 days translates to 46,640,000 characters contributed by volunteers. During that same time period, Wiki Ed students produced 2,644,569. This puts us at 5.7%. That is a surprisingly large number, considering the relative sizes of Wikipedia’s volunteer population and Wiki Ed’s student population!

We’re only halfway through the Year of Science, and the results are already impressive. Our students have produced the equivalent of 8.5 new science textbooks. We’ve increased student science output to Wikipedia by more than 60%. And during the most active time of the year, we’re producing 5.7% of all science content on Wikipedia.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the next semester holds!

The Wikipedia Year of Science 2016 is an unprecedented initiative to improve Wikipedia’s potential for communicating science to the public. If you’d like to get involved, please e-mail contact@wikiedu.org. Major support for the Year of Science is generously provided by Google and the Simons Foundation.

Photo: Livros by Farley Santos. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

Drawing by Heinrich Berann, public domain/CC0.

The California legislature is considering AB 2880, a bill that would allow the state and local government to hold copyright on their works. The bill has been widely—and rightfully, in our view—criticized for its negative impact on the public domain and civil discourse. As such, the Wikimedia Foundation has sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee to join other groups in calling for the California senate to reject this bill.

Currently, most works by the California state government are not restricted by copyright—they are part of the public domain, available to be used freely by everyone with no restrictions. The public domain allows everyone to access, copy, share, and remix works, including adding them to Wikipedia articles.

We believe that works produced by the government belong to the public and should stay in the public domain.

The primary purpose of providing copyright protection is to promote creation by rewarding creators with exclusive rights to their works for a limited period of time. Governments, however, do not need this same incentive. Works created by the government are already funded by taxpayers, so the public should have access to the works that their tax dollars fund. In fact, allowing the government to restrict its information with copyright may discourage valuable political commentary.

Under the U.S. Copyright Act, works produced by the federal government are not restricted by copyright. But some states have opted to set a different standard, creating some inconsistency about the copyright status of works produced by various states.

AB 2880 gives California agencies at the state, county, and local level the power to place copyright restrictions on their work. This includes works like research, reports, maps, and photographs produced by the California government and even videos of public meetings. California has a history of strong commitment to enriching the public domain and has limits on how public entities may restrict access to such materials. In the past, California courts have upheld the rule that public entities cannot assert copyright unless they are affirmatively granted the ability to hold copyright by the state legislature. This bill would change California from being one of the most open state governments to one of the least open, in terms of its copyright regime.

AB 2880 appears to be an attempt to solve a specific case where the federal government had improperly contracted to allow a private party to control trademark rights in public property.  This bill is not narrowly tailored to address that case. In fact, this bill may make the problem even worse by increasing the potential for private control and abuse of public property.

The bill was recently amended by the California Assembly, including an attempt to preserve some of the public’s rights to government information and fair use. These amendments do not adequately resolve the public concern with the proposal. The bill still provides broad latitude for the California departments or agencies to restrict their records with copyright. Since federal copyright is automatic, the assumption in this bill is that the government should not be open by default. Although the bill attempts to minimize interference with the right to access public records, adding copyright restrictions will significantly increase the barrier between the government and the public. The bill puts the burden on each department or agency that wishes to maintain even the status quo’s level of transparency. This can result in the law being applied inconsistently or too broadly by different parts of the government.

The public domain makes it easier for the public to access information. The California government should not have exclusive rights to distribute its information. By keeping California works in the public domain, we can all share California’s beautiful photographs, videos, maps, and other documents on Wikipedia and beyond.

You can contact California legislators through the Electronic Frontier Foundation to stand up for the public domain. To discuss the public domain and other important policy issues for Wikimedia, please join the public policy e-mail list.

Stephen LaPorte, Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation

Thank you to Inayat Chaudhry for research and analysis on AB 2880, along with Wikimedia DC and other members of the Wikimedia community who are monitoring this and similar issues to defend the public domain.

Every empty Wikipedia article tells a story. When the public turns to Wikipedia for knowledge and nothing comes back, it tells us something about knowledge, culture, and science. Who tells those stories? Who gets a starring role?

At Emerson College, 50 students in Dr. Magda Romanska’s World Drama class tackled both stories. Looking at the blank or near-blank articles for underrepresented playwrights and authors, they decided to do something about it. The result was an assignment that connected students’ passion for literature and drama to a desire to improve public knowledge.

“We know that Wikipedia is a major knowledge resource for the general public, yet the scope of what it covers is very limited,” Dr. Romanska wrote. “For example, although 14 percent of the world’s population lives in Africa, only 3 percent of Wikipedia entries originate from there.”

She calls the assignment a form of digital activism. Her students have added entries related to writers who are neglected or unknown to Western readers. That includes works by African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy, contributing articles on her plays The Owl Answers, A Rat’s Mass, and Black Children’s Day. Another student wrote about Alice Dunbar Nelson’s 1918 play, found in the pages of the NAACP’s news magazine, Mine Eyes Have Seen. The “lesbian noir” piece, Dress Suits to Hire was tackled by one student; another wrote about Antigona Furiosa, a Latino take on Antigone.

“In our field, it is increasingly important to engage in global outreach and to research, teach, produce, and know works outside of our own culture,” Dr. Romanska writes. “The Wikipedia project has given students an opportunity to contribute to the global discourse in their field.”

That’s clearly motivated students to contribute above and beyond expectations. Student editors in this course were in the top 15% of contributors in our program this term, writing an average of 2,200 words each.

One of her students, Krystyna Resavy, created the article Theatre and Disability.

“I found myself spending hours of research simply because of my interest for the topic,” Krystyna said. “My goal was to do this topic justice, and to give my audience a well rounded article.”

Many students found that contributing articles on important, but little-known works, gave their writing purpose.

“I realized that I was writing the first comprehensive overview of this incredibly important contemporary work,” said Travis Amiel, who wrote an entry for Branden Jacobs Jenkins’ play, An Octoroon. “People’s first impression of the play could be coming from what I wrote.”

He said he imagined auditioning actors, students, and prospective audiences reading the article.

“So I wanted to make this the article I would want and need to read. Every word I wrote gave me pause. How can I prove this? Where is the fact I am citing?”

Katharine Johnson wrote an entry on Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information. She agreed that having an audience for her writing changed the way she wrote.

“It was a refreshing change from writing papers, and it was really great knowing that we were contributing to a much larger community than Emerson,” she said. “We helped to spread the word about theatre and plays, and added diversity to [Wikipedia’s] theatre knowledge. It was very rewarding working on a project that you know will have a larger impact than just in your college community.”

Kenzy Peach worked on an article for David Drake’s iconic play, The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me.

“Knowing … that research is accessible to millions of people is so rewarding. I also was able to share my work with the playwright himself, with the help of my professor, and he was very pleased with the outcome,” Kenzy said. “Unlike many other projects I’ve done in classes, this one had real-world outcomes and consequences, making its success so much more rewarding.”

Dr. Romanska worked with the Wiki Education Foundation, which offered online trainings for her and her students. Wiki Ed’s content expert, Adam Hyland, also worked with the class as it contributed content to Wikipedia.

“Adam was always available and extremely helpful spearheading glitches and any technical problems that the students encountered,” Dr. Romanska said. “Adam also offered editorial suggestions regarding the content and formatting of the article to make sure they fit Wikipedia standards, and won’t be removed by another Wikipedia editor. Working with Adam was a real pleasure as he was very responsive, diligent and thoughtful in his comments to the students.”

Wiki Ed is focused on our Year of Science in 2016, but courses like this one show the value of the Wikipedia assignment across a variety of fields. Connecting students to Wikipedia’s readers helps expand public knowledge, and gives students a sense that their writing is a real contribution.

“The project was a great success,” said Dr. Romanska, “and the students were thrilled to be able to contribute to the large body of knowledge and to share their love of theatre with the world.”

Interested in sharing these benefits with your students? Browse our resources, or start a conversation with us by emailing contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo: Red Curtain by Tom Woodward, CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

Eleanor Gibson was a psychologist who contributed to the understanding of childhood perception. Most notably, she designed the “visual cliff” experiment, which gave psychology textbooks the ubiquitous and horrifying image of a baby crawling off the edge of a tabletop. Her experiment showed that newborns of many species have an instinctual understanding of depth. (It’s OK, no babies were harmed: There was a sheet of plexiglass just over the edge of the cliff.)

Gibson’s contribution to psychology is a major one, taught in many introductory childhood development courses. She won the National Medal of Science in 1992. And yet, her Wikipedia biography was quite thin.

That was until a student from North Dakota State University’s PSYC 480 History and Systems of Psychology course, led by Dr. Jim Council, took it on. The article now has seven sections and details many of her major works and contributions to psychology.

It’s only one example of the knowledge those students are sharing with the world by writing material that goes to Wikipedia instead of writing that goes into a filing cabinet.

Another student expanded the biography of Florence Denmark, the former president of the American Psychological Association and a notable psychologist. Her work has contributed to the understanding of gender effects on experimental psychology.

It’s fitting, then, that her article was expanded as part of our Year of Science efforts to encourage more coverage of women scientists on Wikipedia. A student in that course took what had been a nine-sentence biography and fleshed it out into a multi-section history of her career, including her various honors.

Students have expanded biographies of important women psychologists, but also created important information aimed at improving psychology articles on Wikipedia. These articles require a careful consideration of medical sources, and benefit from small courses with careful supervision from an expert in the field.

For example, a student contributed information about Minor depressive disorder, in which at least two depressive symptoms are present for two weeks. The article had only been a few sentences. After that student’s involvement, it is a deep, informative article about symptoms, their treatment, and even the history of diagnosis.

Psychology articles are a tricky subject. When the public wants to find information about these topics, they often go online. It’s in the best interest of trained experts in the field to make sure the information people find is accurate and up to date. While some bemoan Wikipedia’s presence in the field, others, such as Dr. Jim Council and his students, are working to make sure the information they find is useful and accurate.

Wiki Ed is dedicated to improving medical, science, and psychology topics. Small classes with students capable of contextualizing their knowledge make excellent candidates for improving these topics. They get experience in the public communication aspect of their field, and flex the knowledge they’ve learned by comparing it to what’s presented on Wikipedia.

But as we’ve seen, even students new to their field can make an impact by expanding biographies and historical information about psychologists on Wikipedia, especially women. Women scientists are underrepresented on Wikipedia, and when articles are present, they often just aren’t as detailed as articles about men.

We’d love to talk to more instructors who see a role for their students on Wikipedia, and show you how straightforward a Wikipedia portion of your class can be. Send us an email to start the conversation: contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo: I can see my house! by D’Arcy Norman from Calgary, Canada, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

The Web is highly distributed and in flux; the people using it, even moreso.  Many projects exist to optimize its use, including:

1. Reducing storage and bandwidth:  compressing parts of the web; deduplicating files that exist in many places, replacing many with pointers to a single copy of the file [Many browsers & servers, *Box]
2. Reducing latency and long-distance bandwidth:  caching popular parts of the web locally around the world [CDNs, clouds, &c]
3. Increasing robustness & permanence of links: caching linked pages (with timestamps or snapshots, for dynamic pages) [Memento, Wayback Machine, perma, amber]
4. Increasing interoperability of naming schemes for describing or pointing to things on the Web, so that it’s easier to cluster similar things and find copies or versions of them [HvdS’s 15-year overview of advancing interop]

This week I was thinking about the 3rd point. What would a comprehensively backed-up Web of links look like?  How resilient can we make references to all of the failure modes we’ve seen and imagined?  Some threads for a map:

1. Links should include timestamps, important ones should request archival permalinks.
   • When creating a reference, sites should notify each of the major cache-networks, asking them to store a copy.
   • Robust links can embed information about where to find a cache in the a tag that generates the link (and possibly a fuzzy content hash?).
   • Permalinks can use an identifier system that allows searching for the page across any of the nodes of the local network, and across the different cache-networks. (Browsers can know how to attempt to find a copy.)
2. Sites should have a coat of amber: a local cached snapshot of anything linked from that site, stored on their host or a nearby supernode.  So as long as that site is available, snapshots of what it links to are, too.
   • We can comprehensively track whether sites have signalled they have an amber layer.  If a site isn’t yet caching what they link to, readers can encourage them to do so or connect them to a supernode.
   • Libraries should host amber supernodes: caches for sites that can’t host those snapshots on their host machine.
3. Snapshots of entire websites should be archived regularly
   • Both public snapshots for search engines and private ones for long-term archives.
4. A global network of mirrors (a la [C]LOCKSS) should maintain copies of permalink and snapshot databases
   • Consortia of libraries, archives, and publishers should commit to a broad geographic distribution of mirrors.
     • mirrors should be available within any country that has expensive interconnects with the rest of the world;
     • prioritization should lead to a kernel of the cached web that is stored in ‘seed bank‘ style archives, in the most secure vaults and other venues
5. There should be a clear way to scan for fuzzy matches for a broken link. Especially handy for anyone updating a large archive of broken links.
   • Is the base directory there? Is the base URL known to have moved?
   • Are distant-timestamped versions of the file available?  [some robustlink implementations do this already]
   • Are there exact matches elsewhere in the web for a [rare] filename?  Can you find other documents with the same content hash? [if a hash was included in the link]
   • Are there known ways to contact the original owner of the file/directory/site?

Related questions: What other aspects of robustness need consideration? How are people making progress at each layer?  What more is needed to have a mesh of archived links at every scale? For instance, WordPress supports a chunk of the Web; top CDNs cache more than that. What other players can make this happen?  What is needed for them to support this?

First place: NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured this high-resolution enhanced color view of Pluto on July 14, 2015. Photo by NASA, public domain/CC0.

Over the last several months, a world of Wikimedia volunteer users selected from the year’s “featured” pictures to determine this year’s picture of the year—the tenth since the competition started in 2006. With the votes tallied and validated, here are the top twelve. You can view the rest over on Commons.

Second place: the interior of Nasir ol Molk Mosque, located in Shiraz, Iran. Photo by Ayyoubsabawiki, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Third place, “Heavens Above Her”: the Milky Way, seen from Trona Pinnacles National Landmark, California. Photo by Ian Norman, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Fourth place: the Long Room of the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin. Photo by David Iliff, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Fifth place: sunset view from the back of the Seljalandsfoss waterfall, Suðurland, Iceland. Photo by Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Sixth place: the Pillars of Creation, as seen from the Hubble Telescope in 2014. Photo by NASA, public domain/CC0.

Seventh place: a storm hits Port-la-Nouvelle, in southern France. Photo by Maxime Raynal, CC BY 2.0.

Eighth place: a juvenile Macaca fuscata yawning. Photo by Daisuke Tashiro, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Ninth place: sunrise with Paraná pines as seen at the Serra da Bocaina National Park, Brazil. Photo by Heris Luiz Cordeiro Rocha, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Tenth place: Rådhuset metro station, Stockholm. Photo by Arild Vågen, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Eleventh place: Las Lajas Sanctuary church, Ipiales, Colombia. Photo by Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Twelfth place: a Second World War-era Spitfire over RAF Coningsby. Photo by SAC Scott Lewis/Ministry of Defence (UK), OGL.

Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate
Wikimedia Foundation

When you use any website, you’re subject to that site’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and Wiki Education Foundation’s web properties – our main wikiedu.org website, dashboard.wikiedu.org, ask.wikiedu.org, and playlist.wiki – are no different. We’re updating our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy on July 8, 2016. The revised versions are below.

This update to the Terms of Service includes a provision that requires acknowledgement that users are either 18 or older, or are 13 or older and have their parents’ consent to use Wiki Ed’s sites; limitation of liability and indemnification clauses; language regarding prohibited uses; a provision regarding the use of third party applications; provisions regarding Wiki Ed’s DMCA policy and IP infringement; a choice of law provision; an arbitration and waiver of class action provision; and a forum selection clause. Revisions to the Privacy Policy include identifying that various types of information that Wiki Ed may gather; providing information as to how users may opt out of being on Wiki Ed’s mailing list; including a provision addressing the collection and use of children’s information; describing how Wiki Ed secures the information it gathers; and discussing how Wiki Ed responds to Do Not Track signals.

Users are welcome to comment on the proposed changes by sending an email to contact@wikiedu.org.

We’d like to express our gratitude to Aaron Wright and the Cardozo Tech Startup Clinic for their assistance in this matter.

Frank Schulenburg
Executive Director

Terms of Service

The following terms and conditions govern all use of the Wiki Education Foundation (“Wiki Ed”) website and all content, services, and products available at or through the website, including, but not limited to, dashboard.wikiedu.org, ask.wikiedu.org, playlist.wiki, and wikiedu.org (taken together, the “Sites” or the “Services”). Our Services are offered subject to your acceptance without modification of all of the terms and conditions contained herein and all other operating rules, policies (including, without limitation, Wiki Ed’s Privacy Policy) and procedures that may be published from time to time by Wiki Ed (collectively, the “Agreement”). You agree that we may automatically upgrade our Services, and these terms will apply to any upgrades.

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Please read this Agreement carefully before accessing or using our Services. By accessing or using any part of our Services, you agree to become bound by the terms and conditions of this Agreement. If you do not agree to all the terms and conditions of this Agreement, then you may not access or use any of our Services. If these terms and conditions are considered an offer by Wiki Ed, acceptance is expressly limited to these terms.

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In order to use our Services you need to (1) be 18 or older, or be 13 or older and have your parent or guardian’s consent to the Agreement, and (2) have the power to enter a binding contract with us and not be barred from doing so under any applicable laws. You also promise that any registration information that you submit to Wiki Ed is true, accurate, and complete, and you agree to keep it that way at all times.

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If you create a Dashboard course page, ask or answer a question on ask.wikiedu.org, create a Playlist on playlist.wiki, or otherwise make (or allow any third party to make) material available (collectively, the “Content”), you are entirely responsible for the substance of, and any harm resulting from, the Content and/or your posting, sharing, or distributing of the Content, regardless of the form of the Content, which includes, but is not limited to, text, photo, video, audio, or code. By using Wiki Ed Sites, you represent and warrant that your Content and conduct do not violate these terms or the Wikimedia Foundation’s Terms of Use. By submitting Content to Wiki Ed, and in consideration of the rights granted to you under this Agreement, you grant Wiki Ed a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, perpetual (or in jurisdiction where this is not permitted, for a term equal to the duration of the Agreement plus twenty (20) years), irrevocable, fully paid, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, make available to the public (e.g., perform or display), publish, translate, modify, create derivative works from, and distribute the Content on Wikipedia under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (“CC-By-SA”) License. Aside from the rights specifically granted herein, you retain ownership of all rights, including intellectual property rights, in the Content.

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Copyright complaints and requests can be sent directly to this agent at contact@wikiedu.org. To learn more about the policies and requirements of the DMCA, please visit http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf.

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Wiki Ed may terminate your access to all or any part of our Services at any time, with or without cause and with or without notice, effective immediately. If you wish to terminate this Agreement, you may simply discontinue using our Services. All provisions of this Agreement which by their nature should survive termination shall survive termination, including, without limitation, ownership provisions, warranty disclaimers, indemnity and limitations of liability.

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Our Services are provided “as is.” Wiki Ed and its suppliers and licensors hereby disclaim all warranties of any kind, express or implied, including, without limitation, the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. Neither Wiki Ed nor its suppliers and licensors, makes any warranty that our Services will be error free or that access thereto will be continuous or uninterrupted. You understand that you obtain content or Services through our Services at your own discretion and risk.

17. Limitation of Liability

IN NO EVENT WILL WIKI ED, ITS OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, REPRESENTATIVES, COUNSEL, EMPLOYEES, CONSULTANTS, LAWYERS AND OTHER PERSONNEL AUTHORIZED TO ACT ON ITS BEHALF, OR WIKI ED’S SUPPLIERS OR LICENSORS, BE LIABLE WITH RESPECT TO ANY SUBJECT MATTER OF THIS AGREEMENT UNDER ANY CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY OR OTHER LEGAL OR EQUITABLE THEORY FOR: (I) ANY SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES; (II) THE COST OF PROCUREMENT FOR SUBSTITUTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES; OR (III) FOR INTERRUPTION OF USE OR LOSS OR CORRUPTION OF DATA. WIKI ED SHALL HAVE NO LIABILITY FOR ANY FAILURE OR DELAY DUE TO MATTERS BEYOND THEIR REASONABLE CONTROL. THE FOREGOING SHALL NOT APPLY TO THE EXTENT PROHIBITED BY APPLICABLE LAW.

18. General Representation and Warranty

You represent and warrant that: (i) your use of our Services will be in strict accordance with the Wiki Ed Privacy Policy, with this Agreement, and with all applicable laws and regulations (including, without limitation, any local laws or regulations in your country, state, city, or other governmental area, regarding online conduct and acceptable content, and including all applicable laws regarding the transmission of technical data exported from the United States or the country in which you reside); and (ii) your use of our Services will not infringe or misappropriate the intellectual property rights of any third party.

19. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Wiki Ed, its contractors, and its licensors, and their respective directors, officers, employees, and agents from and against any and all claims and expenses, including attorneys’ fees, arising out of your use of our Services, including, but not limited to, your violation of this Agreement or any portion thereof.

20. Translation

These Terms of Service were originally written in English (US). We may translate these terms into other languages. In the event of a conflict between a translated version of these Terms of Service and the English version, the English version will control.

21. Choice of Law

This Agreement shall be governed by, subject to, and interpreted in accordance with the laws of the State of California, and the federal laws of the United States, without regard to conflict of laws principles. You waive any objection based on lack of personal jurisdiction, place of residence, improper venue, or forum non conveniens in any such action.

22. Arbitration & Waiver of Class Action

The parties agree to arbitrate any dispute arising from this Agreement or your use of the Site on an individual basis. ARBITRATION PREVENTS YOU FROM SUING IN COURT OR FROM HAVING A JURY TRIAL. THE PARTIES HEREBY EXPRESSLY WAIVE TRIAL BY JURY. The parties agree that: (i) any arbitration will occur in San Francisco, California; and (ii) the arbitration will be conducted confidentially by a single arbitrator in accordance with the rules of American Arbitration Association for arbitration of consumer-related disputes, in the English language. At your request, hearings may be conducted in person or by telephone and the arbitrator may provide for submitting and determining motions on briefs, without oral hearings. Other than class procedures and remedies discussed below, the arbitrator has the authority to grant any remedy that would otherwise be available to a court or other tribunal. THE PREVAILING PARTY IN ANY ACTION OR PROCEEDING TO ENFORCE THESE TERMS SHALL BE ENTITLED TO COSTS AND ATTORNEYS’ FEES. THE ARBITRAL DECISION MAY BE ENFORCED IN ANY COURT. WHETHER THE DISPUTE IS HEARD IN ARBITRATION OR IN COURT, THE PARTIES WILL NOT COMMENCE AGAINST THE OTHER PARTY A CLASS ACTION, CLASS ARBITRATION, OR REPRESENTATIVE ACTION OR PROCEEDING.

23. Forum

If for any reason a claim proceeds in court rather than in arbitration, the parties agree that the claim will be brought exclusively in a federal court located in San Francisco, California. The parties expressly consent to the exclusive jurisdiction of, and waive any and all objections to venue or jurisdiction. However, the parties may seek injunctive or other equitable relief to protect its intellectual property rights and any claims regarding infringement or misappropriation of its intellectual property rights in any court of competent jurisdiction.

24. Miscellaneous

This Agreement constitutes the entire agreement between Wiki Ed and you concerning the subject matter hereof, and it may only be modified by a written amendment signed by an authorized executive of Wiki Ed, or by the posting by Wiki Ed of a revised version. If it turns out that any part of this Agreement is invalid, void, or for any reason unenforceable, that term will be deemed severable and limited or eliminated to the minimum extent necessary and the remaining portions will remain in full force and effect. The limitation or elimination of the term will not affect any other terms. A waiver by either party of any term or condition of this Agreement or any breach thereof, in any one instance, will not waive such term or condition or any subsequent breach thereof. You may assign your rights under this Agreement to any party that consents to, and agrees to be bound by, its terms and conditions; Wiki Ed may assign its rights under this Agreement without condition. This Agreement will be binding upon and will inure to the benefit of the parties, their successors and permitted assigns.

25. Entire Agreement

This Agreement sets forth the entire understanding and agreement as to the subject matter hereof and supersedes any and all prior discussions, agreements, and understandings of any kind (including without limitation any prior versions of this Agreement) and every nature between us. Except as provided for above, any modification to this Agreement must be in writing and must be signed by both parties.

26. Questions or Comments

We welcome comments, questions, concerns, or suggestions. Please send us a message on our contact page at contact@wikiedu.org.

Effective Date: July 8, 2016

Thanks for reading to the end. We know terms of service can be quite long!

The Wiki Education Foundation’s Terms of Service are derived from Automattic’s Terms of Service, which are released under a CC-BY-SA license. The Wiki Education Foundation re-licenses our modifications under a CC-BY-SA license as well.

Privacy Policy

Your privacy is critically important to us. At the Wiki Education Foundation (“Wiki Ed”) we have a few fundamental principles:

• We don’t ask you for information that by itself can be used to identify you (for example, your name, email address, postal address, or phone number) (collectively, “Personal Information”) unless we truly need it.
• We don’t share your Personal Information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our programs, or protect our rights.
• We don’t store Personal Information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of one of our programs.

Below is our Privacy Policy, which incorporates these goals.

Wiki Ed operates several websites including wikiedu.org, dashboard.wikiedu.org, ask.wikiedu.org, and playlist.wiki (collectively, the “Sites” or the “Services”). It is Wiki Ed’s policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our Sites.

How You Accept this Policy

When you visit Wiki Ed Sites, sign up for an account, or otherwise provide us with any Personal Information, you consent to the terms and conditions of this Privacy Policy.

What Information Wiki Ed Collects

Gathering of Non-Personal Information

Like most website operators, Wiki Ed collects non-personally-identifying information (“Non-Personal Information”) of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. Wiki Ed’s purpose in collecting Non-Personal Information is to better understand how Wiki Ed’s visitors use its Services. From time to time, Wiki Ed may release Non-Personal Information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its Services.

Gathering of Personal Information

In order to provide you with a high quality service and verify your identity, we collect various types of information when you visit the Sites. When you create a user account, we will also collect certain Personal Information such as your first and last name, username, email address, password, university with which you are associated, and start and end dates of the courses in which you are enrolled or teaching. Additionally, for users of playlist.wiki, Wiki Ed may collect your Facebook or Twitter username and any articles you have added. Wiki Ed also keeps track of your use of the Sites, edits you make to Wikipedia articles, and anything else that you may post. We use this information for internal purposes to understand or improve Wiki Ed or for external marketing or advertising purposes.

With respect to information collected from donors, Wiki Ed may collect such information as name, amount donated, address, telephone number, donor comments, e-mail address, and any other personal information provided to us (“Donor Data”). For donations by check, Donor Data also includes the data visible on the check. For donations by credit card, Wiki Ed does not store credit card information, bank account numbers, or other financial account data sent directly to third-party payment processing services.

Gathering of Potentially Personal Information

Wiki Ed also collects potentially Personal Information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for logged in users and for users leaving comments on the wikiedu.org blog. Wiki Ed only discloses logged in user and commenter IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses Personal Information as described below, except that blog commenter IP addresses and email addresses are disclosed to the administrators of the blog where the comment was left.

How Wiki Ed Gathers Information

Interactions with Wiki Ed

Visitors to Wiki Ed’s Sites may interact with Wiki Ed Sites in ways that require Wiki Ed to gather Personal Information. The amount and type of information that Wiki Ed gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask instructors who create a course page on dashboard.wikiedu.org to provide their real names and email addresses. We also collect metadata about edits that were deleted from Wikipedia. Those who engage in transactions with Wiki Ed—by making a donation to Wiki Ed, for example—are asked to provide additional information, including as necessary the personal and financial information required to process those transactions. In each case, Wiki Ed collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with Wiki Ed. Wiki Ed does not disclose Personal Information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply Personal Information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities. We also have a mailing list, which you can join by providing us with your email address.

Third-Party Services

To run Wiki Ed, we often utilize various third-party products and services (collectively “Third Party Services”), such as WordPress to provide a platform for blogs, oAuth to access and authorize users’ Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia accounts, and Akismet to police for spam. To provide donors the best possible experience, we work with service providers and may share Donor Data and other information with, or have it transmitted through, them. Such service providers include, for example, collocation facilities and bandwidth providers as well as organizations that help non-profit organizations with fundraising. Payment processors allow donors to give electronically using a payment services account, a credit card, or other payment method. These processors collect certain information from donors, and you should consult their privacy policies to determine their practices.

If you authorize us to connect with these Third Party Services, you grant us permission to collect certain Personal Information, such as your name, email address, and any other information that the Third Party Services make available to us. Further discussion regarding the information collected by WordPress can be found at https://en.support.wordpress.com/stats/. Please note that your use of these Third Party Services is governed by their respective Terms of Service and Privacy Policies. We use and disclose any collected information in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Wiki Ed uses cookies to help Wiki Ed identify and track visitors, their usage of Wiki Ed Sites, and their Site access preferences. Wiki Ed also uses cookies to track and log emails exchanges with users, including when emails from Wiki Ed are opened and links within those emails are clicked. Wiki Ed visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using Wiki Ed Sites, with the drawback that certain features of Wiki Ed Sites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Comments

Comments and other content submitted to our Akismet anti-spam service are not saved on our servers unless they were marked as false positives, in which case we store them long enough to use them to improve the service to avoid future false positives.

Aggregated Statistics

Wiki Ed may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its Sites. For instance, Wiki Ed may monitor the most popular blog posts on the wikiedu.org site or use the Akismet service to help identify spam. Wiki Ed may display this information publicly or provide it to others. Third party service providers and other persons may also share with us aggregated Non-Personal Information that they have independently developed or acquired.

Communications You Initiate with Us

If you contact us in person, by phone, email, social media, or by some other means, we may keep a record of your contact information, correspondence, and links you open within messages sent by us for later reference (to help improve our Services).

How We Use the Personal Information We Gather

We will not share your Personal Information with third parties who wish to market other products and services to you, and Wiki Ed will not rent or sell potentially Personal and Personal Information to anyone. We use your Personal Information for a variety of purposes, including to:

• Distributing receipts and thanking donors for donations;
• Informing donors about upcoming fundraising and other activities of Wiki Education Foundation;
• Respond to your comments or questions;
• Provide you with additional information according to your preferences;
• Contact you when necessary;
• Generate aggregated statistics to help us improve the user experience;
• Make Wiki Ed Sites easier and more convenient for you (such as by prepopulating forms when you have already provided identical information);
• Send you information and marketing materials about Wiki Ed services and products;
• Train our team members; or
• Other internal business purposes.

Wiki Ed discloses potentially Personal and Personal Information only to those of its employees, contractors, and affiliated organizations that: (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Wiki Ed’s behalf or to provide services available at Wiki Ed Sites, or (ii) have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors, and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using Wiki Ed Sites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them.

Other than to its employees, contractors, and affiliated organizations, as described above, Wiki Ed discloses potentially Personal and Personal Information only in response to a subpoena, court order, or other governmental request, or when Wiki Ed believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Wiki Ed, third parties, or the public at large. If you are a registered user of a Wiki Ed Site and have supplied your email address, Wiki Ed may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Wiki Ed and our programs. If you send us a request (for example, via a support email), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users.

Change of Control

We may choose to buy or sell assets. In these types of transactions, customer information is typically one of the business assets that would be transferred. Also, if we (or our assets) are acquired, or if we go out of business, enter bankruptcy, or go through some other change of control, your Personal Information could be one of the assets transferred to or acquired by a third party. By accepting this Privacy Policy, as outlined above, you consent to any such transfer.

Protection of Us and Others

We reserve the right to access, read, preserve, and disclose any information that we reasonably believe is necessary to comply with law or court order; cooperate with law enforcement; enforce or apply our Terms of Use and other agreements; or protect the rights, property, or safety of Wiki Ed, our employees, our users, or others.

What Personal Information can I access or change?

Because you use our Services by logging in with your Wikipedia, Facebook, or Twitter accounts, we do not require you to create an account or a password. You can review and revise the information we collect from you Wikipedia, Facebook, or Twitter accounts by visiting your profile page for those accounts. If you have any problems, you may also contact us at contact@wikiedu.org. If you decide you don’t want to receive email or other mail from us, you can reply to our communications with a request to be unsubscribed. Unsubscribing will stop you from receiving most types of communication, but it may not apply to emails that respond to your specific request.

Data Retention

Wiki Ed will retain your data for the life of our services. If you delete your account, we may retain some Personal Information that you have provided to us in order to maintain the Site for other members or to comply with relevant laws.

Children

We are especially sensitive about children’s information. We’re not a site targeted towards children and we don’t knowingly collect information from children under the age of 13. If you have questions concerning our information practices with respect to children, or if you learn that a child under the age of 13 has used a Wiki Ed Site, created a member account, or provided us with Personal Information, please email us at contact@wikiedu.org.

How We Secure Your Personal Information

Wiki Ed takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration, or destruction of potentially Personal and Personal Information. Wiki Ed employs several physical and electronic safeguards to keep your information safe, including securing all connections with industry standard transport layer security. If you log into your Wikipedia, Facebook, or Twitter account on a shared computer, be sure to sign out of your account when finished. If you believe a third party has access to your account, you must let us know as soon as possible. Even with all these precautions, Wiki Ed cannot fully guarantee against the access, disclosure, alteration, or deletion of data through events such as, but not limited to, hardware or software failure or unauthorized entry or use.

Online Tracking and How We Respond to Do Not Track Signals

Online tracking is the collection of data about an individual’s Internet activity used to deliver targeted advertisements and for other purposes. Some web browsers (including Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome) incorporate a “Do Not Track” (DNT) or similar feature that signals to websites that a visitor does not want to have his/her online activity and behavior tracked. If an online service elects to respond to a particular DNT signal, the service may refrain from collecting certain Personal Information about the browser’s user. Not all browsers offer a DNT option and there is currently no industry consensus as to what constitutes a DNT signal. Wiki Ed does its best to respond to the DNT signals, but it may not universally across all of the Sites. For more information about DNT signals, visit http://allaboutdnt.com.

International Users and Visitors

Wiki Ed is hosted in the United States. Because the Internet is global, you should note that by providing your personal information as an international visitor or user, you are: (i) permitting the transfer of your Personal Information to the United States which may not have the same data protection laws as the country in which you reside; and (ii) permitting the use of your Personal Information in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

Privacy Policy Changes

Wiki Ed may change its Privacy Policy from time to time in Wiki Ed’s sole discretion. Wiki Ed encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If we do revise this Privacy Policy, we will update the “Effective Date” at the bottom of this page so that you can tell if it has changed since your last visit and do our best to notify you. Your continued use of Wiki Ed Sites after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

Questions

For any additional questions, email us at contact@wikiedu.org.

Effective Date: July 8, 2016

Thanks for reading our Privacy Policy!

The Wiki Education Foundation’s Privacy Policy is derived from Automattic’s Privacy Policy, which is released under a CC-BY-SA license. The Wiki Education Foundation re-licenses our modifications under a CC-BY-SA license as well.

Spain win the UEFA Euro 2012 championship – photo by Илья Хохлов (via Football.ua) CC BY-SA 3.0

As the summer rolls around, there are so many important cultural events which the Wikimedia community can engage with and create content about. The European Football Championships start this week, and the Olympics aren’t far away either. The festival season is already beginning, and there are hundreds of other cultural events taking place across the UK and the world, from religious ceremonies to elections, the London Comic Con, Pride, or any other kind of commemoration or anniversary events.

Wikimedia UK is hoping to support people who want to cover any notable events to create high quality images available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. We have grant funding available for photographers who know how to take great photographs which could be used across Wikimedia projects. We would also be interested to support people who would like to add other content besides photographs. If you are going to particular events, we also may be able to liaise with the organisers to get you accreditation.

You can have a look at some of the featured images Wikimedia UK has helped to create in previous years here.

We normally give project grants up to £250 for expenses. You can refer to the grants application process to get an idea of the kind of projects we support. Projects which address diversity gaps would be of particular interest, or activities which link to our current partnerships with other institutions.

We want to reach out to volunteers and the wider wikimedia community, to support your work and help you to do more. We want to know about your talents and see if we can promote your work in support of Wikimedia projects, so if you have ideas for events you would like to go to and CC content you could produce there, please get in touch with us!

_______________________________________________________

See London events list.

Visit England events.

Global events.

Anniversary and events calendar.

English Heritage events.

05/31/2016-06/06/2016

About us

• We were interviewed about our Wochennotiz and weeklyOSM and took the chance to report at length. Despite the prophets of doom, the project continues and invites new contributors to help.

Mapping

• Carlos Felipe Castillo aka Kaxtillo has released a video in which he demonstrates how to make 360° images, upload these images to Mapillary and then process them in OSM.
• The FAA warns about potential outages of the GPS system in southern California. This seems to be caused by tests of the military.
• Mapillary uploaded a tutorial to Youtube about how to use the Mapillary JOSM plugin to edit OpenStreetMap. (via Twitter) Please note: To install the Mapillary JOSM plugin: Edit -> Preferences -> Plugins -> Search: Mapillary -> Select -> OK and re-start JOSM.
• Jinal Foflia wrote a blog post about the importance and process of interacting with the local mapping community using OpenStreetMap Notes.
• Bryan Housel reports about three new functions that will make editing in iD much more efficient.
• The ‘similar image search‘ in the Terrapattern tool can now be tested in an online map of Berlin.
• On the Bonn (Germany) mailing list, there is a discussion (automatic translation) about how to tag roads damaged and impassable by recent heavy rainfall.
• The Flemish GR organisation (a long distance hiking group) have made their extensive collection of GPX data available in order to improve hiking trails on OpenStreetMap. The participants on the talk-be mailing list are excited but then concerned about the maintenance of long distance relations, not just hiking but also public transport data.
• On the talk-at mailing list a long discussion started (German) (automatic translation) about what is the correct capitalisation of a chain store name “TEDi” for the name=* tag and the inconsistency that can be seen via Overpass-Turbo.

Community

• Jorge Luis Batista gave a talk at TEDx Havana about how he is looking forward to “put Cuba on the map” (OpenStreetMap that is) despite limited internet access.
• Some of the Cuban OpenStreetMappers are trying to activate the Cuban OSM community. More details on the talk-cu mailing list (automatic translation).
• The question how to create a Garmin Custom Map on OSM help is the most popular currently with 23,000 hits.
• … and another new feature: HDYC now also mentions your HOTOSM activities.
• On openstreetmap.cz/sotm colleagues from the Czech Republic and Slovakia have published their presentations (see the links on the agenda).

Imports

• Kevin Kenny reports on the import for the NYC DEP Watershed Recreation Areas. He noticed some misalignment which he is trying to fix.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Frederik Ramm is seeking a volunteer to cross-check the OSMF finances. This may help to recognize early if the treasurer buys a Porsche from foundation money
• Peter Barth recapped the f2f meeting of the OSMF board.
• The OSMF board announced some interesting changes regarding the foundation’s transparency.
• The OSM Foundation is seeking a (paid) administrative assistant and has extended the application deadline by a week to the 10th of June.

Events

• Until June 10th, one can vote on talks for the State of the Map and thus help decide about the program for this conference.
• At the GEOSummit in Bern, Switzerland, there’ll be the opportunity to print large OpenStreetMap maps for free.
• Planning has started for a weekend meeting (in English) at Dresden, Germany for OpenStreetMappers with two days of talks, discussions, networking, mapping and hacking.

Humanitarian OSM

• DaCor has started the second phase of Lesotho Map with the release of eleven tasks in tasking manager on May 30.
• HOTOSM informs about the status of the mapping and the damage resulting after the earthquake in Ecuador.
• The fourth HOT newsletter has been published.

Maps

• The Guardian took maps from Gretchen Peterson’s book “City Maps: A Coloring Book for Adults” and produced a pretty hard Quiz with the title: “can you identify the city from the blank street map”?
• This site provides a map for all in accordance with the proposal for highway=via_ferrata (A mountain route equipped with fixed cables, stemples, ladders, and bridges). This map also includes navigation functionality.

switch2OSM

• The Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (the main public transport company of Berlin) is taking delivery (automatic translation) of a new operational management system which uses OpenStreetMap for its mapping and wants to engage with OSM locally.

Open Data

• German Federal Transport Minister Dobrindt is reported in heise.de (automatic translation) announcing the availability of 100 Million Euro from the “mFund” (automatic translation). These funds will be made available for combining government, public and private data to produce new applications. Examples cited include new navigation, precise weather and sharing platforms.
• Mapbox enters the autonomous vehicle market by introducing Mapbox Drive, a software development kit for cars. It is based on raw data from OpenStreetMap. It is also mentioned on techcrunch.com.
• locr, a provider of personalized maps, creates a giant world map on super wide EFI inkjet printer. locr uses OSM as geo data source.

Licences

• Debadityo Sinha writes that the Geospatial Information Bill will deal a body blow to environmental democracy in India. The bill puts severe restrictions on acquiring, using and disseminating of geospatial information.

Software

• User mmd investigated the creation of areas in the Overpass-API and showed various ways to improve it. Based on this discovery his optimizations brought huge speed-ups in the creation of areas.

Programming

• Joachim explains how EOX calculates the curve for labels for geographic features on a map. The code is published on Github.
• Zabot, a student of this year’s Google Summer of Code, shows the first results of his work. His further plans can be read on his user diary.

Releases

provided by the OSM Software Watchlist

Did you know …

• A map, The Great British Public Toilet Map, shows public toilets in central Brixton
• OpenStreetMap viewer for Amiga-Systems. This map can be moved around and zoomed, waypoints can be set and recorded tracks or waypoints can be loaded from GPX, TCX, KML or KMZ files.

Other “geo” things

• [1] XKCD has published a cartoon for dating world maps. It seems that OpenStreetMap is current but it is still fun to trace through the many decision boxes around geo-political events…
• DLR (automatic translation) has developed a multifunctional crises management system project PHAROS. It is an open and flexible service platform that builds system for satellite monitoring, sensor technology, simulations and various communication techniques. It also uses OSM. This system demonstrates disaster management in forest fires (see video).
• Illegal mapping is a “serious” problem in remote areas of western China, according to five annual announcements on typical illegal mapping practices released by the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation (NASG).
• For a low-lying, densely populated country like the Netherlands, monitoring subsidence is critical. Until recently, tiny displacements in the ground beneath our feet couldn’t be mapped nationally but, thanks to the Sentinel-1 mission, this is now possible.
• The Verge reports that police prosecuting a suspect in a bank robbery in California, USA sought data from Google, used in the Google’s Location History service on Android phones. The reporter speculates about how many requests might have been made of Google for this service that is mainly for geo-targeted advertising.
• Gretchen N. Peterson writes about criticism she got on her coloring book citiy maps and also explains on how she produced the maps.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Wien	57. Wiener Stammtisch	06/02/2016
Dresden	Stammtisch	06/02/2016
Mantova	2016 Mapping party a Volta mantovana	06/04/2016
Bucharest	OSM Bucharest Mapping Party 2016	06/04/2016
Colaboratorio	Mapa Comunitario de Activos de Santurce	06/04/2016
Brasília	Encontro OSM Brasília	06/05/2016
Bucharest	OSM Bucharest Mapping Party 2016	06/05/2016
Brussels	Missing Maps Mapathon @Doctors without borders/Handicap international	06/06/2016
Tokyo	OSM Monthly Mappers “M-eat-ing” – Jun 2016	06/09/2016
Paris	Mapathon Missing Maps Paris #5	06/09/2016
Dresden	Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften	06/10/2016
Besenello Trentino	Portobeseno : several talk about OpenStreetMap	06/10/2016-06/12/2016
Zurich	Stammtisch/Micromapping-Party Zürich	06/11/2016
Passau	Mappertreffen Passau	06/13/2016
Landshut	Landshut Stammtisch	06/14/2016
Edinburgh	Edinburgh	06/14/2016
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle mappeurs	06/14/2016

Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropiate..

Long Term Dates

Where	What	When	Country
Besenello Trentino	Portobeseno : several talk about OpenStreetMap	10.06.2016-12.06.2016
Berlin	DB Open Data Hackday	17.06.2016-18.06.2016
http://osm.org/go/0CmcQnN Esino Lario	“Mapping party a Esino Lario in preparazione di Wikimania 2016”	18.06.2016-19.06.2016
Salzburg	OSM-Sonntag	03.07.2016
Salzburg	”’FOSSGIS 2016”’	04.07.2016-06.07.2016
Salzburg	AGIT 2016	06.07.2016-08.07.2016
Seattle	”’State of The Map US 2016”’	23.07.2016-25.07.2016
Bonn	FOSS4G 2016 Code Sprint	20.08.2016-22.08.2016
Bonn	Workshops at FOSS4G 2016	22.08.2016-23.08.2016
Bonn	”’FOSS4G 2016”’	24.08.2016-26.08.2016
Bonn	FOSS4G 2016 Code Sprint Part II	27.08.2016-28.08.2016
Brussels	”’State of the Map 2016”’	23.09.2016-26.09.2016
Metro Manila	”’State of the Map Asia”’	01.10.2016-02.10.2016
Berlin	Hack Weekend	15.10.2016-16.10.2016
Karlsruhe	Hack Weekend	29.10.2016-30.10.2016

This weekly was produced by Laura Barroso, Nakaner, Peda, Rogehm, Softgrow, derFred, jinalfoflia, malenki, mgehling, seumas, stephan75, wambacher, widedangel.

Next week, Outreach Manager Samantha Erickson and I will attend the American Astronomical Society’s (AAS) annual meeting in San Diego. We’ll have a booth in the exhibit hall to speak to astronomers about how their students can join the Wikipedia Year of Science. If you’re attending the AAS conference, please stop by! We’ll discuss classroom assignments, Wiki Ed’s tools and resources, and how you can help make the Year of Science a success.

The AAS conference is another collaboration with the Simons Foundation, which is promoting the Year of Science through a series of Wikipedia edit-a-thons at scientific conferences. Participants will learn how to contribute to Wikipedia from experienced Wikipedians. We’re particularly interested in celebrating the Year of Science’s mission to diversify Wikipedia by expanding or creating articles about women astronomers and astronomers of color, though we encourage participants to select topics related to their area of research and expertise.

The Year of Science is all about getting students to expand scientific articles on Wikipedia, ensuring the general public can access and learn about important scientific findings and concepts. Attendees at the AAS conference represent courses spanning from astrophysics, to planetary science, to observational astronomy. All of these fields cover topics that deserves good, clear articles on Wikipedia. Students, who already research and write about them, can fill important gaps. Please join us at our events to learn how you can empower your students with this meaningful assignment!

Wiki Education Foundation booth

• Location: Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Exhibit hall
• Exhibit hall hours: Monday, June 13 – Wednesday, June 15, 9:00 a.m. – 6:30 p.m.

Simons Foundation edit-a-thon

• Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Aqua Salon C
• Time: Wednesday, June 15th, 12:30–3:30pm
• Bring your own device; a light lunch will be provided.
• To register, send an email to gina.brissenden@aas.org.

Photo: The photo of Pluto in this post was named 2015’s Picture of the Year on Wikimedia Commons! Pluto-01 Stern 03 Pluto Color TXT by NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute (Converted to JPEG; see also PIA19952), Public Domain. 

I’m pleased to announce that Rollins College has selected a Visiting Scholar.

User:M2545* has been an active Wikipedian since 2009, with a particular interest in timeline and historical articles. She created or made significant improvements to several timelines of cities, such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. She is also a prolific contributor to Wikimedia Commons, having contributed more than 14,000 images. In talking about why she was interested in the Visiting Scholars program, User:M2545 listed three reasons:

“I applied to the Visiting Scholar program firstly to gain access to otherwise paywalled info resources that I can’t get online through my local public library. Secondly, I am interested in Cuba-US relations and the history of urbanization in the US south, which correspond to the focus of this particular scholarship. I would love to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of these areas within the structure of an active project, and in collaboration with staff of the host institution. Thirdly, archives and libraries that initiate Wikipedia projects are showing proof of commitment to providing access to information for all, and I am glad to participate.”

In addition to Cuba-US relations and urbanization in the American South, she might work on topics related to late 19th and early 20th century American writers, American literature and its connections with social and political activism, and aspects of these subjects that connect to Florida and the South.

Rollins College is a coeducational liberal arts college in Winter Park, Florida, on the shores of Lake Virginia. Founded in 1885, it is the state’s oldest college. For 10 of the past 11 years, U.S. News & World Report has named it the top regional university in the South. At Rollins, User:M2545 will be working with Rachel Walton, Digital Archivist and Record Management Coordinator at the Olin Library.

For Rachel, the Visiting Scholars program is a fantastic way to maximize the impact of library resources, increase the discoverability and accessibility of local collections, and support open access publishing by contributing to the corpus of public knowledge on Wikipedia. In addition, Rachel said she looks forward to the opportunity to integrate the products and goals of the Wikipedia Visiting Scholar partnership into the college’s teaching and learning.

The Wikipedia Visiting Scholars program connects experienced Wikipedia editors with research libraries. Together, they find Wikipedia articles to improve using the library’s digital resources. For information about sponsoring or becoming a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar, see our Visiting Scholars page.

*Wiki Ed respects the right of Wikipedians to edit anonymously, including those participating in our Visiting Scholars program.

Photo: View of Rollins College from Lake Virginia by Thomsonmg2000 – Own work, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Photo courtesy Bleacher + Everard.

Craig Newmark has given much to the world of open-source and free information in the past. Now the founder of craigslist and craigconnects is giving to the future of Wikipedia, which he says “is where facts go to live.”

Newmark is giving one million dollars—the largest gift yet—to the Wikimedia Endowment, the fund announced earlier this year as a permanent source of funding to ensure Wikipedia thrives for generations to come.

“Wikipedia is a record of what happened and what is happening in the world, and we need that historical record to make good decisions,” Newmark said, stressing that he values Wikipedia as a crowdsourced, iterative news source of facts and information. “Wikipedia’s democratic process allows everyone to contribute, but requires verifiable sources. That is vital at a changing time in our media culture. Wikipedia has the potential to become the people’s newspaper of record.

This gift from Newmark serves as a cornerstone for the Wikimedia Foundation’s efforts to ensure Wikipedia and its sister projects thrive for generations to come. “Craig’s generosity reflects his deep personal commitment to free information for everyone,” said interim Executive Director Katherine Maher. “He is a great friend to the Wikimedia movement, and the people everywhere who share in our values.”

The Wikimedia Foundation’s goal is to raise $100 million over the next 10 years, to aid in further empowering people around the world to create and contribute free knowledge, and to make that knowledge accessible to every person on the planet.

Newmark began craigslist in 1995 as an email distribution list to friends. The online classified ad index and craigslist community spans 70 countries. Craig’s civic engagement platform, craigconnects, created in 2011, seeks to identify, connect, and promote organizations uniting the world for the common good using the Internet.

Marc Brent, Endowment Director
Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that supports and operates Wikipedia and its sister projects. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is a 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.

The purpose of the Wikimedia Endowment is to serve as a perpetual source of support for the operation and activities of Wikipedia and its sister projects. It will empower people around the world to create and contribute free knowledge, and share that knowledge with every single human being. The Endowment has been established, with an initial contribution by Wikimedia Foundation, as a Collective Action Fund at Tides Foundation. Tides is a public charity with a 40-year track record of holding and managing charitable funds for nonprofit organizations. An Advisory Board, nominated by the Wikimedia Foundation and appointed by Tides, will make recommendations to Tides related to the Endowment. Tides or the Wikimedia Foundation may choose to transfer the Endowment from Tides to the Wikimedia Foundation, or other charities identified by the Wikimedia Foundation. At that point, the Endowment would continue to be a permanent, income-generating fund to support the Wikimedia projects.

Please visit our website for more information on the Wikimedia Endowment.

Photo from Luz Maria Silva, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Using Wikipedia in education is far from a new or novel idea. “Murder, Madness, and Mayhem” was one of, if not the first, to do it in 2008. The Wikimedia Foundation’s Public Policy Initiative trialed an organized idea in 2010–11. Today, there’s both a Wiki Education Foundation and a Wikipedia Education Program.

Yet it is still a brave academian who tries to bring the unfamiliar tool of Wikipedia into the classroom.

Professor Luz María Silva is of them: her students have been allowed used Wikipedia in the classroom for the last three years. Silva, a Spanish Wikipedia editor herself, has been assigning a Wikipedia article to her students learning about the socio-political history of Mexico. The assignment comes in lieu of a midterm exam, and Silva is supported in her efforts by Wikimedia Mexico.

Silva says of her students that “I am very lucky to work with people as smart as [them]. They are young and committed to their work, and as they frequently use Wikipedia, they find [it] fascinating to contribute to a familiar source, something that many of them had never considered possible before. I hope that, little by little, their conviction will lead them to become active Wikipedians.”

These individuals have certainly had a measurable impact on the site: they have written 221 articles in total, an average of about 36 per semester. The 40 this year have been on a variety of topics, such as “Mujeres en la Guerra de Independencia (Mexico),” or “Women in the Independence War (Mexico).” The article, in lockstep with current historical scholarship, contains several short biographies of important women in the context of Mexico’s fight for independence from Spain.

There are another 15 biographies, six on historical sites, five on services (“hospitals, electricity, the circus, and entertainment”), and three on old manuscripts and books, along with several others.

Regular Wikipedians have both helped and hindered the process. On the one hand, when one student “embedded paragraphs from two sources and thought that just citing them as references was enough,” Wikimedia Mexico and a Spanish Wikipedia administrator taught her “how to [properly attribute] research, which is knowledge that will be with her for the rest of her life and ultimately helped her article stay online. It was a very happy ending.”

On the other, Silva says, occasionally “there’s an incident that makes you and your work feel exposed to the opinion of strangers …  it’s quite frustrating, even if my students get a satisfactory mark on their record. There’s a real pain to see an article erased without further explanations.”

In any case, Silva believes that Wikipedia benefits her students. By “learning to write an article, [they] develop analytical skills, problem solving, and [how] to face a blank page to write without judgment.”

And by the end of the assignment, they end up “learning more than a traditional test.”

Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate
Wikimedia Foundation

Our thanks go to Iván Martínez of Wikimedia Mexico for the original interview, published in the Wikimedia Education Newsletter, and to Andycyca for translating it from the Spanish.

Wikipedia aims to collect “the sum of all knowledge.” But what counts as knowledge, and how we get it, is a complicated, and often untold, story.

That’s why history of science courses can make a real difference on Wikipedia. The history of science calls on students to explore the roots of scientific concepts. They draw from different fields to examine science as an intellectual and cultural pursuit, connecting historical research methods with methods from fields as varied as anthropology, philosophy, sociology, and law.

Writing a Wikipedia article instead of a traditional history of science term paper brings this approach to life. Dr. Peter Ramburg at Truman State University assigns students to write about figures in Western science. This spring, those Wikipedia articles were read 1.29 million times. That included a biography of Caroline Herschel, a German astronomer and first Western woman to be paid for science. At the University of Oklahoma, Dr. Peter Barker assigned students to write about science during the Cold War. Those students added more than 85,000 words to Wikipedia articles.

“The results exceeded my expectations,” he said. “Already, more people have read the student output from this course than can possibly have read my own 40 years of writing.”

Here are five reasons why history of science courses are a great fit for Wikipedia.

1. Readers turn to Wikipedia for information about the historical and social tradition of the sciences.

Wikipedia makes an ideal starting point for inquiries and critiques of how science, like all knowledge, is socially constructed. The authors of Wikipedia reflect a very specific perspective: Most contributors are white, Western, and male. Articles are often incomplete in ways that reflect this audience: Compare the article about Ibn al-Shatir, the Arab astronomer who discovered the laws of planetary motion 150 years before Copernicus, to the article for Copernicus, and you begin to get a sense of how Wikipedia can skew. By working with Wikipedia, students can examine the influence of that perspective, while contributing new information to the encyclopedia.

2. Wikipedia articles are never finished.

When is Wikipedia “complete”? That may be an easy question: never! But when is a science article “finished”? Contributors decide what to include, and what to leave out. Students working on Wikipedia can learn firsthand how communities conduct that debate. It’s a field trip to the public sphere. As students engage with other Wikipedia contributors, they see the process of how knowledge is organized, contextualized, and agreed to. It’s rare that undergraduates have the opportunity to engage in this kind of experience without publishing their work in an academic paper.

3. An essay doesn’t help the public’s understanding of science.

When a student writes an essay, it’s read by an instructor, graded, and tossed aside. By the time these students are in your course, this is a rote exercise, a factory assembly line that transforming their innate curiosity into slivers of dead trees. When that same energy is expended to Wikipedia, students know that they’re really contributing to a greater cause. They’re helping other people learn about what they’ve learned. Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s readership has better access to information that helps them understand, and contextualize, science history.

4. Students compare their knowledge to Wikipedia’s.

A Wikipedia article brings their curiosity to life. It encourages students to read and reflect on gaps in science history and context. But it also dares them to make a difference. We find that students who write for Wikipedia are more deeply engaged with their writing. They think deeply, critique Wikipedia’s presentation of existing knowledge, and then internalize that critique for their own writing. We’ve heard time and time again that this is an empowering moment for students. It transforms the “I know this” thinking required for presenting their knowledge to an instructor. That becomes the “I know this” that students require to apply their knowledge into new contexts with confidence.

5. There’s a lot of work to do.

Wikipedia presents a somewhat limited vision of science. It’s built on the backs of academic research and the consensus that forms that record of scientific history. Left out are various positions of analyzing that history. As we’ve already noted, the history of science on Wikipedia is very often a history of white, male, Western science. That leaves the door open for students to find gaps and identify bias. Students can contribute biographies of women scientists, which are vastly underrepresented on Wikipedia. They can provide a history of science and technology in various regions, time periods, or non-Western methods. In fact, almost any academic topic on Wikipedia can be expanded or improved. Wikipedia is most complete in the areas that have enormous interest among Wikipedians. Consider this: A list of the articles determined to be the highest quality on Wikipedia includes 815 articles about military history, but just 47 about the history of science. There’s plenty of room to make a difference!

Want to get involved?

The Wiki Education Foundation is an independent non-profit organization that has been working with instructors to design Wikipedia assignments since 2013. We can help create a plan that works alongside an existing syllabus, or to create a new one. Crucially, Wikipedia assignments never have to be the focus of the course, or take time away from your instruction. We offer online trainings and printed editing guides, free of charge, for your students to use at home. Our staff is on hand to answer questions about Wikipedia, and let you focus on what you want to teach. We also give you tools to track student contributions, and see the impacts that your course is making on Wikipedia.

If you’d like to start a conversation about what Wikipedia can do for your classroom, let us know!Send an email to contact@wikiedu.org. You can also check out our resources, or our special Year of Science page. And if you still need to be convinced, see what past and current instructors have to say.

“5” Image derived from 5NumberFiveInCircle by Andre666 at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia

June 7, 2016. The location and dates of the next SMWCon, or Semantic MediaWiki Conference, have been announced: it will be held at The German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF) in Frankfurt, Germany on September 28-30, 2016. The first day will include workshops as well as tutorials for beginners to SMW; this will be followed by a two-day regular conference.

For more information, see the SMWCon Fall 2016 homepage. See also our Call for Participation.

Wikipedia’s coverage of linguistic topics is ripe for improvement. Currently, only 12 of the 4,668 highest-quality articles on the English Wikipedia relate to language or linguistics, and many articles about languages are still stubs. As part of our Year of Science initiative, and our partnership with the Linguistic Society of America, we’ve seen some excellent movement to expand Wikipedia’s linguistics information.

From University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Language Endangerment and Revitalization course led by Dr. Monica Macaulay, we’ve seen students develop articles on languages and dialects that were otherwise being ignored.

For example, a student created an article about Wisconsin German. The article describes the social context for the dialect and attempts to document it. Another student tackled an article on the German dialect spoken in parts of Switzerland, Italy, Liechtenstein, and Austria.

Students in that course also contributed to articles about lesser-known languages, such as Cimbrian and Ho-Chunk.

While some students are tackling articles about languages, some are developing articles about linguistics itself.

For example, a student from Grinnell College’s Language Change course, led by Dr. Cynthia Hansen, found the article on Language convergence to be underdeveloped: three sentences with a single example.

The student expanded it, drawing from a variety of excellent academic sources. It now stands at five sections, with a new lead and multiple examples, served with some context and links to broader article pages.

Another student created an article on Subjectification from scratch. That article explains a process behind language acquisition in which words can be used with contextual awareness to convey an attitude or a layer of additional meaning related to the speaker’s position.

We’re proud to see work like this on Wikipedia, and grateful that our partnership with the Linguistics Society of America has such potential to improve public access to knowledge about linguistics. We’re looking to welcome even more linguistics courses for the fall 2016 term.

If you’d like to participate in our Year of Science campaign to improve language and linguistics knowledge on Wikipedia, we’re happy to start a conversation. Just e-mail us: contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo: Dictionary 2 by TEDx NJLibraries, CC-BY 2.0 via Flickr.

A European bee-eater (Merops apiaster) in Ichkeul National Park and Biosphere Reserve, Tunisia. Photo by Elgollimoh, CC BY-SA 3.0.

This blog is also available in French, Spanish and Russian on the Wikimedia Foundation blog.

____________________________________________________

Yesterday was World Environment Day, the United Nations’ designated day for encouraging worldwide awareness and action for the protection of our environment.

Many of us know the world faces unprecedented pressure from human activities. The United Nations Environment Programme Global Environment Outlook reports:

The state of global biodiversity is continuing to decline, with substantial and ongoing losses of populations, species and habitats. For instance, vertebrate populations have declined on average by 30 per cent since 1970, and up to two-thirds of species in some taxa are now threatened with extinction.

Education is key to reversing this decline, to find sustainable solutions to the problems we all face and to learn to live sustainably with the rest of the natural world.

Sustainable environmental action hinges on the education of all citizens, from the earliest age, in sustainable development…..No single country, however powerful, can resolve the challenges of our common environment. (Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO)

UNESCO created the Man and the Biosphere Programme “to establish a scientific basis for the improvement of relationships between people and their environments”.  Biosphere Reserves are areas of terrestrial and coastal/marine ecosystems or a combination thereof, which are internationally recognized within the framework of UNESCO’s Programme on Man and the Biosphere (MAB). Each Biosphere Reserve promotes solutions reconciling the conservation of biodiversity with its sustainable use. Today there are 669 biosphere reserves in 120 countries belonging to a World Network of Biosphere Reserves, all offering us opportunities to explore how to live sustainably.

Carpathian Biosphere Reserve, Zakarpattia Oblast, Ukraine. Photo by Vian and retouched by Iifar, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Wikipedia is where 500 million of us go to understand complex subjects like climate change, biodiversity and sustainability, and give us information about the world around us. It can also foster our appreciation, wonder and empathy with the rest of the natural world through photographs,.

Everyone can contribute to Wikipedia, it gives us the opportunity to share what we know and what we see, in 2015 one trillion photos were created, more than all previous years combined. More people have phones with cameras than ever before and mobile internet is becoming a major education tool for the developing and developed countries.

UNESCO and Wiki Loves Earth have partnered to create Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves, a competition to create photographs free for everyone to use and to enrich Wikipedia. 10 winning images will be shared on the UNESCO website and social media and will be entered into the Wiki Loves Earth international competition. Wiki Loves Earth competitions around the world have created over 180,000 images of protected natural sites.

If you don’t have access to a Biosphere Reserve you can still be involved by promoting the project, adding the photographs to Wikipedia and using them to teach people about the environment.

To help more people to learn about biosphere reserves, UNESCO have made the official descriptions available under a Creative Commons license, which Wikipedia volunteers will use to create missing articles.

Cormorants at dusk on the pond of Vaccarès, part of Delta du Rhone Biosphere Reserve, France. Photo by Ddeveze, CC BY-SA 3.0.

UNESCO’s mandate is to build peace in the minds of men and women. Biosphere Reserves are the places where we discover ways to live in harmony with the environment. Wikipedia is where we inspire and teach each other how.

Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves will run from today until 30 June.

Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves is created in collaboration by the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Programme, Wikimedia volunteers (special thanks to Navino Evans, Mykola Kozlenko and Romaine), John Cummings (Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO), and Wikimedia Ukraine.

John Cummings, Wikimedian-in-Residence at UNESCO

The views expressed in this post are not necessarily those of the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikipedia; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section below.

A European bee-eater (Merops apiaster) in Ichkeul National Park and Biosphere Reserve, Tunisia. Photo by Elgollimoh, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Today is World Environment Day, the United Nations’ designated day for encouraging worldwide awareness and action for the protection of our environment.

Many of us know the world faces unprecedented pressure from human activities. The United Nations Environment Programme Global Environment Outlook reports:

The state of global biodiversity is continuing to decline, with substantial and ongoing losses of populations, species and habitats. For instance, vertebrate populations have declined on average by 30 per cent since 1970, and up to two-thirds of species in some taxa are now threatened with extinction.

Education is key to reversing this decline, to find sustainable solutions to the problems we all face and to learn to live sustainably with the rest of the natural world.

Sustainable environmental action hinges on the education of all citizens, from the earliest age, in sustainable development…..No single country, however powerful, can resolve the challenges of our common environment. (Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO)

UNESCO created the Man and the Biosphere Programme “to establish a scientific basis for the improvement of relationships between people and their environments”.  Biosphere Reserves are areas of terrestrial and coastal/marine ecosystems or a combination thereof, which are internationally recognized within the framework of UNESCO’s Programme on Man and the Biosphere (MAB). Each Biosphere Reserve promotes solutions reconciling the conservation of biodiversity with its sustainable use. Today there are 669 biosphere reserves in 120 countries belonging to a World Network of Biosphere Reserves, all offering us opportunities to explore how to live sustainably.

Carpathian Biosphere Reserve, Zakarpattia Oblast, Ukraine. Photo by Vian and retouched by Iifar, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Wikipedia is where 500 million of us go to understand complex subjects like climate change, biodiversity and sustainability, and give us information about the world around us. It can also foster our appreciation, wonder and empathy with the rest of the natural world through photographs,.

Everyone can contribute to Wikipedia, it gives us the opportunity to share what we know and what we see, in 2015 one trillion photos were created, more than all previous years combined. More people have phones with cameras than ever before and mobile internet is becoming a major education tool for the developing and developed countries.

UNESCO and Wiki Loves Earth have partnered to create Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves, a competition to create photographs free for everyone to use and to enrich Wikipedia. 10 winning images will be shared on the UNESCO website and social media and will be entered into the Wiki Loves Earth international competition. Wiki Loves Earth competitions around the world have created over 180,000 images of protected natural sites.

If you don’t have access to a Biosphere Reserve you can still be involved by promoting the project, adding the photographs to Wikipedia and using them to teach people about the environment.

To help more people to learn about biosphere reserves, UNESCO have made the official descriptions available under a Creative Commons license, which Wikipedia volunteers will use to create missing articles.

Cormorants at dusk on the pond of Vaccarès, part of Delta du Rhone Biosphere Reserve, France. Photo by Ddeveze, CC BY-SA 3.0.

UNESCO’s mandate is to build peace in the minds of men and women. Biosphere Reserves are the places where we discover ways to live in harmony with the environment. Wikipedia is where we inspire and teach each other how.

Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves will run from today until 30 June.

Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves is created in collaboration by the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Programme, Wikimedia volunteers (special thanks to Navino Evans, Mykola Kozlenko and Romaine), John Cummings (Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO), and Wikimedia Ukraine.

John Cummings, Wikimedian-in-Residence at UNESCO

The views expressed in this post are not necessarily those of the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikipedia; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section below.

Photo by Jason Krüger, CC BY-SA 4.0.

For the third straight year, the Wikimedia Conference was preceded by pre-conference Learning Days for affiliates that want to improve their skills in community engagement, program design, and evaluation. The training pre-conference in Berlin was organized by the Learning & Evaluation team in collaboration with Community Engagement teams and dedicated to providing program capacity development resources and opportunities for community leaders. This year the two Learning Days, held April 21-22,  were a highlight for many of the 51 community participants as well as various foundation staff who lent their presence and support for learning exchange, they said in their feedback afterward. Through workshops, panels and presentations, these two days condensed a collaborative platform for program leaders to learn from each other, harvest resources and enhance skills on four priority themes: engaging and retaining volunteers, exchanging best practices, designing Wikimedia programs and events, and measuring and evaluating impact.

Being a predominantly online and diverse community, the individual affiliates that in one way catalyze the growth of the movement face several challenges. Many of these challenges are unique and most of them come with a great amount of learning. Designing Learning Days involves creating a spectrum of lessons learned and sharing them among the leaders. While the main conference works as an avenue for high-level discussions, the Learning Days are meant for more granular understanding of the affiliates and building relations for more engagement in the future.

In order to ensure coverage of most relevant issues for program leaders and best support their work, topics for Learning Days themes were chosen based on the votes of participants when they signed up for the pre-conference. This was the first year Learning Day applications  were integrated into main conference registration, and the interest in taking part was shown by the numbers: 133 (76%) of conference participants indicated their interest in participating in the Learning Days; 52 (30%) of those were “very interested” and 81 (46%) “somewhat interested”.

There were four major areas that surfaced as most important; 1) Engaging and retaining volunteers (participatory engagement strategies, communications and social media), 2) Best practice exchanges with other leaders (lightning talks, creative problem solving), 3) Designing Wikimedia programs and events (program toolkits, creative program design, workshop design), and 4) Measuring and evaluating impact (logic models, outcome mapping, data analysis and metrics).

Photo by Zach McCune, CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Sessions were organized in three types: a) learning exchanges (lightning talks, tools rotations, unconference breakouts); b) training workshops, and; c) plenary sessions (general orientations, reflections); and held in two differently designed rooms to suit the session type.

Lessons learned, from Wikimedian to Wikimedian

In order to promote peer-to-peer learning, program leaders are encouraged to engage in three different ways: submitting a poster, presenting a lightning talk or co-hosting a workshop. These Learning Days had the highest participant engagement rate thus far. On this occasion there were 19 participants who shared lightning talks, 9 who shared poster presentations, and 10 who helped to co-host a workshop.

Out of the total 51 participants, 31 (60%) contributed in sharing feedback in all sessions about what they liked the most from the sessions, wanted to improve in the future, and what they were planning to do in the next 30 days. Learning from others was one of highest appreciated values of Learning Days, as observed in end-of-day plenaries as well as from the analysis of feedback forms. Some of the quotes that highlighted this include “Learning from other groups’ experiences – some ways to engage and retain volunteers and prevent burn-out” and “Kaarel [a community member]’s presentation was awesome and got me motivated. Other speakers also resonated with me.”

The Learning & Evaluation team came up with a new structure for the evaluation form which was used to collect feedback and next steps for program leaders on individual sessions. The evaluation form itself was also useful, participants said, as they noted their time to reflect on what their most important learning was and consider the next steps they should take to apply it.

You can read more about the outcomes and find the presentations and handouts shared on the Outcomes section of the event page on Meta.

Looking ahead

How are participants going to apply the skills gained during Learning Days in the near future? An analysis of the feedback forms reveals that, in the next 30 days, program leaders hope to spread these capacities in two different ways: bringing back processes to their local communities, and applying tools and resources to their projects.

As we continue to support communities and develop capacities with leaders that act on the local level, we are working to prepare our next Learning Days at Wikimania 2016, in Esino Lario, Italy. We are now in the process of inviting program leaders to take part. If you are coming to Wikimania and would like to take part in these next Learning Days and have not received an invitation, please email evalwikimedia.org and tell us more about your interest in participating.

The Learning and Evaluation team is very grateful for all those who engaged in giving feedback, as this evaluation process continues to help us better design our future Learning Days.

We are happy to be part of a movement that is learning together. Don’t forget to share what you learned through a Learning Pattern, and spread the word about any new resources on our Facebook group or Twitter handle. Keep the learning wheel rolling!

Subhashish Panigrahi, Communications Contractor
María Cruz, Communications and Outreach Coordinator, Learning and Evaluation team
Jaime L. K. Anstee, Senior Strategist (Program Evaluation)
Wikimedia Foundation

05/24/2016-05/30/2016

About us

• The English version of weeklyOSM is happy to say, that Alex Sims aka Softgrow from Adelaide joined the team. We welcome our first member from Down Under.

Mapping

• User Reclus started a discussion (automatic translation) about difficulties with the previously agreed public transport tagging (automatic translation) used for public transport in the Rhine Ruhr conurbation. He notices problems with maintenance of the OpenStreetMap data and the variation in data provision between transport operators. Discussion ensues.
• User Blackbird27 wrote a lengthy and detailed article about using Mapillary for mapping in OpenStreetMap with JOSM. Sandra Uddback aslo wrote about using Mapillary in OpenStreetMap in the Mapillary blog.
• User Ukundji began a discussion (automatic translation) about improving the mapping of churches and mosques around Berlin which then provoked a lot of tagging discussion about buildings, religious communities, ways and nodes.
• [1] The Peruvian members of the Spanish team of our sister “weeklyOSM”, Eliane Joyo Meneses and Rubén López Mendoza (both employed by Mapbox Peru) have developed a knife-tool for JOSM, which makes splitting ways at an arbitrary point a breeze.
• The 6.17 release of the iOS MAPS.ME app can search postal codes. The release notes suggest that users should add missing postal codes to OSM. TheFive tweets his doubts that this is not such a good suggestion for newbies.
• User Maturi0n is asking on the German OSM Forum if he can delete the details of private gardens from OSM that were mapped from aerial imagery. His personal opinion is that these details are private and do not belong on OSM. The discussion gets quite heated. (automatic translation)
• There is a discussion in the talk-at mailing (automatic translation) list about whether to include including some spiritual improvised outdoor shrines in OpenStreetMap but there are concerns raised about their impermanence.

Community

• Gregory Marler continues his review of The OSM book with comments about the interviews in the first half of the book.
• Rome based architect and designer Mateo Prati showcases his 3D views of Manhattan made with Blender and OpenStreetMap data.
• The OpenStreetMap community in Ireland blogged about having finally reached 95% townland coverage. (A townland is the small administrative division of land used in Ireland, there are around 61,000 nationwide.)
• In Latin America the number of country specific Telegram channels within the OSM community continues to increase. (via: Tweet from OSM Argentina).
• H. Albrecht asked (automatic translation) questions about mapping in China a few weeks ago on the talk-de mailing list, now reports back (automatic translation) about his positive experience on his trip through China.
• Humberto Yances again points (automatic translation) to the HOT-Task about mapping the coastal region of Ecuador as there are now new images from drones.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The State of the Map Working Group (WG SotM) published a paper to the topic corporate membership. Source: OSMF-talk
• User malenki reports at his user blog that OSM’s German Amazon Affiliate account has earned about 10,000 EUR since its creation in May 2010. At that time he also opened an account at amazon.com but the US community was not interested in using it.

Events

• Peter Neubauer writes at his user blog about his experiences at SotM France and the Mapillary contributors he met there.

Humanitarian OSM

• Two reports on the effectiveness of OSM by the recent earthquake in Ecuador:
  • Vistazo (automatic translation)
  • PBS
• The Gorilla Highlands Initiative will host a mapping party on 2-3 June. With the help of HOT and Edirisa they hope to significantly enhance the map in south-western Uganda and north-western Rwanda.
• Mapbox announces that their map related tools are now free for humanitarian response.
• Paul Uithiol reports that HOT receives financial support through “Grand Challenges Explorations” (GCE) for pioneering research in global health and development. The GCE initiative was launched in 2008 and supported 1186 projects in 61 countries.
• Mapbox published ultra high-res UAV imagery with a resolution of 7.5cm of Sri Lanka. The images were created by the Sri Lankan Government Disaster Management Center and the Survey Department of Sri Lanka.

Maps

• Kaushik Chatterji describes in detail the effects and implications of the proposed bill [PDF] in India. There is an appeal to all to save the map in India.

Software

• Ladislav Laska announces the availability of nightly build versions for the OSM editor Merkaartor (may be unstable), both for Windows and OSX platforms. Bug reports are welcome e.g. on Merkaartor’s github repository.
• The new Maproulette has reached beta stage and will replace the previous version around the end of June. Try it out and give Martijn a feedback.

Releases

provided by the OSM Software Watchlist

Did you know …

• … the wiki page with commercial providers of OSM services?
• … the next pet project of Steve Coast? This time as an advisor to MapJam Inc..
• … the page raumbezug.eu? Torsten Teubert’s site provides daily updated OSM maps for Garmin devices.

Other “geo” things

• Real Earth wins the Microsoft competition to efficiently map a series of markers that are indoors in 3D with a minimum of error.
• The Tagesanzeiger compares the longest railway tunnels in the world.
• Google extends its ads program by adding “promoted pins” to Google Maps.
• Justin O’Beirne writes about the changes to Google Maps cartography over the years.
• Terrapattern published an alpha version of their “similar images search“. Martin Dittus asks if this could somehow be used for HOT.
• Lauren Young describes 10 techniques to help convert our world into maps.

Upcoming Events

Dónde	Qué	Fecha	País
Wien	57. Wiener Stammtisch	02/06/2016
Colaboratorio	Mapa Comunitario de Activos de Santurce	04/06/2016
Mantova	2016 Mapping party a Volta mantovana	04/06/2016
Bucharest	OSM Bucharest Mapping Party 2016	04/06/2016
Bucharest	OSM Bucharest Mapping Party 2016	05/06/2016
Brasília	Encontro OSM Brasília	05/06/2016
Brussels	Missing Maps Mapathon @Doctors without borders/Handicap international	06/06/2016
Tokyo	OSM Monthly Mappers “M-eat-ing” – Jun 2016	09/06/2016
Besenello Trentino	Portobeseno : several talk about OpenStreetMap	10/06/2016-12/06/2016
Edinburgh	Edinburgh	14/06/2016
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle mappeurs	14/06/2016

OSM Terminausblick

Wo	Was	Wann	Land
Berlin	DB Open Data Hackday	17.06.2016-18.06.2016
Kyoto	京都世界遺産マッピングパーティ：最終回 天龍寺	25.06.2016
Salzburg	OSM-Sonntag	03.07.2016
Salzburg	FOSSGIS 2016	04.07.2016-06.07.2016
Salzburg	AGIT 2016	06.07.2016-08.07.2016
Seattle	State of The Map US 2016	23.07.2016-25.07.2016
Bonn	FOSS4G 2016 Code Sprint	20.08.2016-22.08.2016
Bonn	Workshops at FOSS4G 2016	22.08.2016-23.08.2016
Bonn	”’FOSS4G 2016”’	24.08.2016-26.08.2016
Bonn	FOSS4G 2016 Code Sprint Part II	27.08.2016-28.08.2016
Brussels	State of the Map 2016	23.09.2016-26.09.2016
Metro Manila	State of the Map Asia	01.10.2016-02.10.2016
Berlin	Hackweekend	15.10.2016-16.10.2016
Karlsruhe	Hackweekend	29.10.2016-30.10.2016

Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropiate..

This weekly was produced by Hakuch, Laura Barroso, Nakaner, Peda, Rogehm, Softgrow, derFred, escada, jinalfoflia, malenki, mgehling, stephan75, wambacher, widedangel.

Unless you are a member of the small fellowship of netizens who keep a Google News search for “Wikipedia” bookmarked, chances are you missed out on a truly strange but totally real press release last month from a software company called InstallAware. Its headline: “InstallAware, the Only Alternative to InstallShield, Fails to Get Its Wikipedia Article Published Despite Years of Trying”.

Another reason you may have missed it is because no one picked it up. As far as I can tell, The Wikipedian is the first to write about it at length.^[1]And, this being The Wikipedian, I do mean at length. If it’s a failure as a press release, it is a fitting capstone to a failed attempt on the company’s part to attain the exalted status of mattering on the Internet these days: having a Wikipedia entry of one’s own.

Before I go any further, I actually want to recognize InstallAware for trying, however imperfectly, to do the right thing. Instead of trying to sneak an entry into Wikipedia, they used the Articles for Creation (AfC) process as it is intended. Wikipedia has a big enough problem with anonymous PR activity that—regardless of other mistakes the company and its consultants made along the way—Wikipedians should be grateful they tried to follow the rules and use the appropriate channels.

That said, this is a hot mess of a situation. Eight times since September of last year, using two separate Wikipedia accounts, InstallAware has submitted a draft entry, in slightly different versions, to AfC for review. Eight times they have been rejected, with some reviewers offering a couple of jargon-laden phrases to explain the reason, or nothing more than the required template. Most companies in this situation would slink away, dejected and angry. InstallAware seems to feel that way, too—but took a different tack.

The press release itself suggests a blithe unawareness of InstallAware’s position on Wikipedia, not to mention whether anyone would care. It includes cringe-worthy bravado such as “InstallAware’s significance is beyond question” and a ham-handed critique that “Wikipedia is out of touch with its original egalitarian ideals,” says the company founder himself, and even cites unrelated research by the Wikimedia Foundation’s own Aaron Halfaker in support of its claims. As InstallAware sees it:

InstallAware has been repeatedly frustrated in its efforts to contribute an article about itself to Wikipedia. InstallAware, the largest independent software installation vendor for Microsoft Windows, hired a specialist and conducted months of revisions, which ensured that the InstallAware article had more quantity and quality of citations than InstallShield, a similar product which does have a Wikipedia article.

There are two arguments here: a) InstallAware deserves a Wikipedia entry on its own merits, and b) InstallAware deserves a Wikipedia entry because InstallShield, a rival software tool, has one that contains fewer citations than the one they prepared for InstallAware.

To evaluate the first argument, we must consider the guideline Wikipedia editors use to determine whether a given subject should have its own page: Notability. As far as guideline names go, it’s an undeniably loaded word. If one is told “sorry, you’re not Notable” you can understand why they hear “you aren’t important enough”.^[2]When discussing this topic with non-Wikipedians, I prefer to use the term “eligibility”. It’s a delicate message that is too often delivered with a one-size-fits-all template.^[3]“Don’t template the regulars”, says an essay familiar to Wikipedians. I think this is backward: don’t template the noobs.

The generalized version of the Notability requirement^[4]“If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list.” is very broad and susceptible to interpretation based on wishful thinking. But it isn’t meaningless: it basically says that Wikipedia outsources its judgment about a topic’s significance to sources it considers reliable, which must have written about the subject more than once and with enough information to write a satisfactory entry. When it comes to extant organizations, this often means mainstream and industry news publications.

To apply this standard, we must consider the draft itself.

The draft is at least an honest attempt to reshape a press release into something resembling an encyclopedia entry. It simply tells the company’s story, plus contains some additional information about its software products. Of course it still makes lots of mistakes: toward the end it reads increasingly like a brochure, offering simply too many product details for an encyclopedia. It actually boldfaces InstallAware like that, which is pretty silly in the press release, and completely absurd for an encyclopedia entry. It’s almost a surprise there aren’t little ® symbols after the name of each product.

InstallAware software, via Google Images.

Those problems can be dealt with. The problem we can’t is the sources. The very first draft cited a couple of press releases, and called it good. Once InstallAware was informed they needed better references, what else did they do but add more. Unfortunately, these weren’t much better and the long list now included only makes them look desperate. Among the sources included: InstallAware’s own website (several times), the founder’s own resume, websites of InstallAware partner companies, SEO zombie sites, even Wikipedia itself.^[5]In Wikipedia circles, this is just about the funniest mistake one can make. One thing is definitely missing: serious coverage from recognized news publications. As one Wikipedian put it:

Sorry but it seems the currently listed sources are simply not enough, what is needed is solid in-depth third-party sources such as news (any time of news is acceptable except press release and trivial passing mentions). If there’s not enough, then there’s simply not enough for a solidly acceptable article.

That sounds right. I ran my own search, on Google News and Lexis-Nexis, and I just found press releases. Curious whether they were aware of these issues, I reached out to InstallAware via the media contact listed on the press release. Over the course of a few polite if pithy emails, I got a better understanding of where they were coming from.^[6]Among the questions I asked: Did they know about the WMF Terms of Use disclosure requirements? No, that one had escaped them, and earlier this week the consultant added a disclosure notice to the draft discussion page. An unfortunate error, but a fair course correction. What was their goal with the press release? “To pressure Wikipedia into accountability and rationality.” Which, fair enough.

Did they know about Wikipedia’s Notability requirement? Yes, they said, and pointed me back to some of the citations to InstallAware’s own website I had ignored. It turns out several of the articles they believe support their eligibility are quite old and no longer online. To make them available for inspection, InstallAware simply scanned them and posted them to their own website, without making this clear to anyone.^[7]A simple rule of thumb: don’t expect Wikipedians to read past their initial assumptions, let alone spend time correcting your mistakes.

Did they attempt to discuss the article with Wikipedia editors? Yes, the specialist—whose expertise it turns out is SEO, not Wikipedia—had posted messages on an involved editor’s discussion page, and also the AfC help desk. Click through and you’ll see an unformatted wall of text that is a chore to read. So, guess what: no one read it.

You can find InstallAware’s collected list of sources here, and evaluate them as I have. I think you’ll find, as I did, that the longest article was written by the founder himself, while others are republished press releases, brief mentions in blog posts, pages on commercial websites, and a short product review. There is one bylined Microsoft publication that might be useful if better sources also existed, but it’s still a borderline call. Overall, it is not: InstallAware does not have sufficient coverage to meet the Notability requirement.

Let’s turn to InstallShield.

What’s interesting is that it sure looks like InstallAware has a point here. Indeed, the entry for InstallShield has only two citations, and one of them is actually a press release. The page was flagged more than four years ago for requiring additional citations. Otherwise, the page seems appropriate enough. It isn’t excessively detailed, and it’s reasonable to guess the article was created not by the company that sells it, but by Wikipedia editors who knew both about the software and also how to develop an entry. In fact, the entry has existed since 2004, long before Wikipedia was a place to be seen.

InstallShield software, via Wikipedia.

Then I ran the same search for InstallShield as I had for InstallAware. The results did not bolster their argument. Although the InstallShield entry contains inadequate citations now, they definitely exist. Some of the stories are quite old, so they are not online, but it’s my opinion there is enough substantial reporting to justify their inclusion. There’s Crain’s Chicago Business in November 1997 with “Installation-software firm set for leap into corporate arena: raising money to push beyond vendor market” and InfoWorld with “Installation software vendor to ship enterprise version” from June 1999, and more. The software has received less press recently, but the snarky IT news site El Reg has mentioned it twice in news stories this year. Taken as a whole, it’s my professional opinion^[9]this note is either an appropriate disclosure that Wikipedia engagement is a key service at my firm, Beutler Ink, or an unsubtle advertisement that InstallShield meets the Notability requirement. “Other stuff exists” need not apply.

But there’s something else going on here. Most of InstallShield’s coverage is from the late 1990s, when they were an independent company putting out tons of press releases in an era with many more technology magazines being published than exist today. Do you think it’s possible that InstallAware is at a disadvantage because of the declining journalism industry, to say nothing of the utility of the press release? I do! As noted above, Wikipedia itself outsources many content decisions to the judgment of working journalists, of whom there are fewer than ever. Then again, maybe InstallAware just isn’t very interesting.

None of this is to say all of the mistakes are on InstallAware’s side. Their errors are specific, attributable to individuals, and therefore simple to point out. What happened here was a failure of communication on both sides, and Wikipedia’s mistakes are long-term, systemic, with a collective responsibility that is all too easy to ignore.

Herewith, the most important mistakes I believe made on both sides:

• No one at InstallAware, and neither their specialist, bothered to learn much about Wikipedia. Neither disclosed their conflict of interest nor made any kind of introductory statement to the community about their intention and perspectives. When they finally did try speaking with editors, they didn’t keep it brief, and they didn’t follow standard conventions.
• On the other side of it, Wikipedia editors didn’t immediately offer useful feedback. Instead both InstallAware accounts received only templated messages. Even if they hadn’t responded, Wikipedians never tried to engage on a human level. Yet I noticed something else while researching this: in 2006 the consultant was in a similar COI situation, and at the time received a friendly response from an actual Wikipedia editor. Ten years later, Wikipedia is less hospitable.
• InstallAware was unwilling to reconsider that the sources it proffered actually fit the standards Wikipedians ask for. Over the past several months, at least one Wikipedian declining their submission enumerated the ways in which the various sources were insufficient for the purposes of establishing Notability. Maybe these justifications seemed arbitrary, but they aren’t, and InstallAware should have educated itself after the first couple of rejections.
• The Wikimedia Foundation has not done enough to publicize its disclosure requirements, added to the Terms of Use in 2014, to industry professionals. Likewise, Wikipedians haven’t made this clear enough. Even though the disclosure requirement is featured prominently at AfC, it’s hard to fault anyone for overlooking it. Wikipedia has so many points of advice, it can take years to get up to speed.
• Independent PR consultants take on too many projects they’re not actually qualified for. Relatedly, advice to companies: don’t hire SEO consultants to run a Wikipedia project. SEO and Wikipedia occupy adjacent spaces, as Wikipedia is famously a top Google search result for nearly everything. But the actual knowledge and skills involved in one or the other are vastly different.
• A successful Wikipedia consultant spends less time looking for ways to make something happen—the creation of a new article, for example—and more time looking out for things that may cause it not to happen.



• AfC doesn’t work when submitters don’t know anything about Wikipedia. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about AfC from Wikipedians over time, and they’re right that it often doesn’t work very well. The InstallAware situation is just a more emphatic version of the usual problem. Submitters don’t know what they’re doing, and Wikipedians are too busy to bother with bedside manner.
• Likewise, Wikipedia should define more clearly which kind of publications it considers appropriate for verifying notability for extant companies and organizations. Besides the General notability guideline (GNG), applicable Wikipedia guidelines such as Notability (software) and Notability (organizations and companies) offer some wise and unavoidably vague advisories. After all, Wikipedians can’t anticipate future situations which might be ill-served by too-specific rules. But it could be clearer, and it might not hurt to include some examples of acceptable sources and why they are.

Ultimately, the most salient issue in this whole kerfuffle is that InstallAware was unwilling to take “no” for an answer. But a close second is the fact that Wikipedia editors made only a half-hearted effort to communicate with them, and third is that AfC is just about impossible to navigate for anyone. InstallAware is only one company, and if this is actually the end of the road for them at Wikipedia, there will still be countless more companies asking for an entry after them.

Working with companies may not be what gets Wikipedians out of bed in the morning, but so long as the site remains one of the Internet’s top destinations, and maintains its famously low barriers to entry, it’s in Wikipedia’s best interest to improve these processes. Yes, that process is still mostly going to reject drafts of articles about companies, who won’t be happy about it. Hopefully, they won’t feel like they have to write press releases.

Photo by unknown, public domain/CC0.

Three decades ago, in a buy-sell-trade bookshop in Plattsburgh, New York, I came across a two-volume set of collected Poems published in 1916. Unfamiliar with the poet but intrigued by a platinum print photograph of a woman pasted inside the front board of volume one (above), I purchased the set for $2.50 and went home.

For nearly two decades I wondered over the identity of the woman, and came to find—through an internet search—that it was the poet herself, Florence Earle Coates. Mystery solved. But I would not be satisfied with this knowledge alone. It was merely the beginning of a dedicated search into the life and times of a woman who had become my muse.

Scant information was initially available on the poet. It appeared that her thoughtful, finely crafted works of poetry were important in her day—in her circles—but perhaps had not survived a supposed “renascence [sic] of poetry” or test of time.

I resolved to remedy this by bringing her works back to life, but was at a loss as to how to do so until one of my children informed me that they had “edited” the Dr. Pepper article at Wikipedia. This planted a seed which would germinate a couple years later in 2009, when I created Mrs. Coates’ article at Wikipedia and author page at Wikisource—gradually adding all of her volumes of poetry over the span of about two years.

But my activity did not stop there. To quote another contributor, “the power and potential of [Wikisource] is mind-blowing”: where one work refers to another (via wikilinking), thereby contributing to the “great conversation.” One author, one book leads to another author, another book—another idea.

Seeing a work to its completion is a satisfying thing, but the process is perhaps even more rewarding. Word by word, line by line, page by page, proofreading is an active and learning process, as no two works are formatted alike.

When necessary, there is no shortage of help from other contributors. Each offers different abilities, gifts and perspectives to the site, and I find most are eager and willing to share their unique insights and skills. You get out of proofreading what you put into it. Coates writes, “Great symphonies require more than one hearing; great poems more than one reading.” It is beneficial to first proofread and then re-read, thus ensuring the accuracy of editing, if not the cultivation of the mind.

I developed anxiety following an illness a few years ago, and found proofreading to be a helpful stress reducer. One can develop a rather relaxing rhythm to editing poetry, particularly when proofreading longer works such as The Prelude by William Wordsworth:^[1]

“Now here, now there, moved by the straggling wind,
Came ever and anon a breath-like sound,
Quick as the pantings of the faithful dog,
The off and on companion of my walk;
And such, at times, believing them to be,
I turned my head to look if he were there;
Then into solemn thought I passed once more…”

I use this passage to illustrate how proofreading such poetry, for me, is much like walking in step to the cadence of the panting of a faithful dog—it can be a very relaxing bit of mental exercise; but a word of warning: one must be careful to maintain focus and not become overly transfixed by the rhythmic pattern or fall into reverie too often during proofreading otherwise OCR errors and typos will be overlooked!

I owe much to the works of Mrs. Coates, for her poetry sings of hope and joy, beauty and the ideal. But I am also thankful to Wikisource and its welcoming community for providing a space to showcase her poetry—and to my family, who has tolerated this editing hobby of mine.

I received the following after posting some of Mrs. Coates’ poetry (on loss, grief and immortality) to another website: “Thanks for sharing these poems. I love her perspective on the human condition. I’d never heard of Coates before, but I’ll never forget her now.” My reply to the gentleman included a line from Coates’ “Deathless Death,” which states “no good, once given, can be lost.” I shared the same words a few years back with a woman whose son had died. She spoke of her son’s goodness, and the life-affirming words came to mind.

This in a nutshell is why I proofread poetry. It is the stuff of the soul; it speaks to the body, the mind, and the spirit alike. In the words of Mrs. Coates, “poetry in some form is necessary to all—save, perhaps, to those who are content to live upon bread alone.”

Sonja N. Bohm
English Wikisource contributor

Autograph verse of “Poetry” by Florence Earle Coates. Subsequently published as “To the Muse.” Scan, public domain/CC0.

[1] Florence Earle Coates wrote a poem about Wordsworth entitled “Breathless We Strive.”.

“Why I …” is a new ongoing series for the Wikimedia Blog. We want to hear what motivates you to contribute to Wikimedia sites: send us an email at blogteam[at]wikimedia[dot]org if you know of someone who wants to share their story about what gets them to write articles, take photographs, proofread transcriptions, and beyond.

Next week, I’ll attend the Festival of Learning in Burnaby, British Columbia. The conference brings together educators in British Columbia to celebrate teaching and learning, open education, and the use of technology to advance goals in higher education.

I’ll join Classroom Program instructors from the University of British Columbia, Dr. Rosie Redfield and Dr. Judy Chan, and BC campus staff member and Wikipedian Clint Lalonde for a session about teaching with Wikipedia.

The 3-hour session is a great opportunity for attendees to speak with experienced instructors about the benefits and challenges of a Wikipedia assignment. Our goal is to inspire participants to embrace Wikipedia as a teaching tool, and to share Wiki Ed’s tools, resources and support.

Chan teaches chemistry students and is a participant in the Wikipedia Year of Science. Her experience can help guide others who are curious about what it takes to create their own Wikipedia assignment. We’ll explore why Wikipedia is a powerful platform for students, and how instructors can set them up for success.

This conference is also an opportunity to expand Wiki Ed’s presence in Canada, where we’ve already supported more than 100 courses. Canadian students have improved articles about topics from the history of Canada to zoology. We’re excited to spread the experience to more students! I’m looking forward to hearing from participants about how Wikipedia fits into their curricula.

For instructors interested in attending our session “Out of the File-drawer and into the World” on June 6 from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., see the conference’s registration information, and join us for an educational and fun day in Burnaby!

Photo: Modified from “Almost on top” by Kenny Louie from Vancouver, Canada – Almost on top, CC BY 2.0.