en.planet.wikimedia

Howard Rheingold and Pascal Zachary at the Future of Text Symposium, 2015.

Futurists are fond of predicting that, one day, humans will communicate telepathically, thus drastically reducing the need for the written and spoken word. Until that day arrives, however, mere mortals must continue to communicate primarily with text,  a vehicle fraught with pitfalls but loaded with  potential.

It is the latter that will be the focus of a fast-paced, one-day symposium in the Bay Area August 25. The Future of Text Symposium is most certainly becoming one of the most esoteric intellectual endeavors of our time.

And while it has been steadily evolving since first presented in 2011 at the British Library in London, the concept remains the same: Brilliant minds gather to share their most cogent thoughts on where text has been, where it is and where it’s going–and they do it within a interactive structure that keeps the idea stream rushing along in a  torrent.

We must say with considerable pride that Wiki Strategies is both a sponsor of this year’s FOT, and, through founder Pete Forsyth, a participant. Pete, like the others on the panel, will have his 15  minutes of, if not fame, foment–10 minutes to present his most critical thoughts on text, and what lessons about its future may be drawn from 15 years of Wikipedia, followed by 5 minutes of discussion.

He’ll be sharing the stage with, among others, the following luminaries:

• Peter Norvig, director of research for Google.
• Ted Nelson, thinker, poet, philosopher, coiner of the word “hypertext.”
• Bruce Horn, Chief Scientist for Smart Devices, Intel and creator of Macintosh Finder.
• Marc Canter, tech evangelist known as the “godfather of multimedia”
• Livia Polanyi, consulting professor of linguistics, Stanford University. Formerly principal researcher for Microsoft, focusing on natural language processing.
• Heather Gold, stand-up comedian and champion of interactive, online shows.

The symposium is presided over by Frode Hegland, self-described as the developer of “the powerful OS X utility Liquid | Flow and Liquid | Author, a new perspective in word processing. He is collaborating on The Time Browser project and is part of the Knowledge Federation.

His co-host is Houria Iderkou, founder and owner of skin care company Néfertari. She and Frode have worked together on various projects for more than  a decade, and have nurtured FOT along  since its inception.

We’d love to have everyone come to  Mountain View on the 25th to join in the repartee, but, unfortunately, the event is already  maxed out capacity wise. You see, the in crowd in the text world avidly awaits the announcement of upcoming symposia and seats disappear quickly. But we intend to do a bit of filming while we’re there, and we’ll be writing about the event in this space. So stay tuned and we’ll bring you the highlights–in text and video, and, hopefully, so robustly communicated that you will feel as though you were there in person.

These organizations are cosponsors of the Symposium:

• The Liquid Information Company
• Google
• Nefertari
• Institute For The Future

Dr. Debby Walser-Kuntz taught with Wikipedia in her immunobiology course at Carleton College. Rachel Cheung and Dana Paine were students in that class. In this collaborative post, they describe the experience, identifying benefits to their research and science communications skills.

When I was deciding whether or not to incorporate a Wikipedia writing project into my upper level biology course for the Wiki Education Foundation’s Year of Science, I weighed the potential benefits and drawbacks to replacing the more traditional short research paper I had previously assigned.

Students in the Immunology course already complete a community-based academic civic engagement (or academic service learning) project with a community partner. One aspect of the community-based projects I appreciate is that they provide an authentic audience for the students, one that reaches beyond my office as I sit grading at the end of the term.

Wikipedia intrigued me as a different form of engagement, one of public scholarship, defined by Imagining America as “diverse modes of creating and circulating knowledge for and with publics and communities”. As the students and I came to appreciate, Wikipedia embodies both the “for” and the “with” communities, as individuals beyond our classroom read, commented on, and continue to edit our Wikipedia articles.

Many undergraduate science majors will go on to graduate or medical school, or into fields such as public policy or public health, where clear communication is essential. The past five to ten years have seen several science organizations host conferences to help scientists develop tools to effectively engage with the public. The purpose of improved communication is not only to share scientific findings, but also to shape policy and public perception.

There were two key goals for the Wikipedia assignment: build research skills using the scientific literature and practice translating science effectively for a general audience. A short nine weeks after working their way through the Wikipedia tutorials, the students’ completed articles had been peer reviewed, edited, and posted.

Students reflected on this process in their portfolios. The following excerpts, written by two students enrolled in the course, demonstrate the depth of learning provided by this assignment.

Building Research Skills

Although prior science courses had taught me how to approach reading primary literature and write lab reports, this experience required me to go one step further. I had to shift the focus from simply reading the literature to searching for a comprehensive slate of relevant sources, assessing their credibility, and building an article from scratch.

Finding sources, while seemingly simple in theory, ended up being incredibly difficult. My topic, for instance, was C3a, one protein in a complicated complement cascade triggered during an immune response. Typing C3a into the PubMed database yielded 3,042 results, far more than I could possibly read and evaluate. While this meant there was plenty of readily available information about the topic at hand, our goal was not to summarize every study that had ever included our subject. With limited time, we had to distill an immense amount of information into a few key ideas.

To shape what I might want my article to look like, I read through general reviews of complement and formulated an outline of what my Wikipedia article would look like. I defined four core sections of my article (structure, formation, function, and regulation), and sketched in the specific information I already knew from my readings and the immunology course. From there, I was able to complete much more specific searches and find the information I needed without wading through marginally relevant articles and low-impact clinical trials.

However, from here I needed to assess the validity of sources; beyond checking how many times an article had been cited or journal impact factors, I gained experience reading dense scientific papers and evaluating the validity of their results. This part of the research, while the most time consuming, let me take ownership of the article I edited. More than that, it enabled me to engage deeper with my course material, connecting it to laboratory methods, clinical research, and other biological networks.

Communicating Science Effectively

After we had completed the research component, the next step was to write. Although most of our science classes involve a scientific writing component, it is usually in the form of a scientific “journal-esque” lab report. As liberal arts students, we had experience writing for a more general audience in our humanities and art classes. Scientific and nonscientific writing have distinct forms, and as students we are working on developing our voices in both.

But the Wikipedia assignment introduced a skill that I think often gets overlooked in science education: translating complex scientific ideas so that they can be communicated to the general public. It takes a thorough and sophisticated understanding of any topic to be able to communicate it in a clear and effective way for a general audience.

I found that the process of finding a voice to communicate these scientific ideas, organizing my thoughts, and deciding upon the essential information forced me to more deeply and completely understand the research that I had been doing.

The Roman philosopher Seneca famously said, “While we teach, we learn,” and I think that it is that same teaching and learning philosophy that allowed us to gain a deeper understanding of scientific concepts through the process of writing. Our Wikipedia articles were supposed to synthesize the detailed, specific, and highly scientific research that we did in a way that informs a lay audience about the subject. Through our articles we took on the role of teacher.

Instead of simply summarizing the details of the papers we read, it was important that we interpret the most important aspects of the papers and communicate them in a way that eliminated scientific jargon and focused on the key concepts – this required both a deepening and broadening of our understanding of the research.

I realized the gaps in my own knowledge and the areas where I needed to do more research as I considered how to fully explain a particular idea without using highly specific scientific terms. Ultimately, the process of writing for a general audience helped us to think about science and writing in a different way, forcing an expansion and synthesis in our knowledge and understanding.

Concluding Thoughts

It was not until I read through their portfolios that I recognized the students had achieved more than the original goals for this assignment. Students not only gained useful practice in both the process of scientific research and writing, but reported additional unexpected benefits, such as the discovery of the “Talk” and “View history” pages, which allows them to assess the accuracy of articles, or the experience of publishing original illustrations under a Creative Commons license.

And, finally, many students expressed a sense of pride – and sometimes, surprise – that as undergraduates they had already learned enough to share in a broad public conversation about science.

If you’d like to get involved in integrating a Wikipedia-driven science communication assignment into your own course, Wiki Ed can help. Find out more about our Year of Science initiative, which is still recruiting for fall, or connect to us at contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo: Bust of Seneca, by Jean-Pol GRANDMONT – Self-photographed, CC BY 3.0.

Sorry, it had to be done :}  I’m delighted that the Open Education Team at the University of Edinburgh where I work has been nominated for the ALT Learning Technologist of the Year Community Choice Awards, and y’know, if you feel that way inclined, you might like to vote for us.  You can find out more about the Community Choice Awards here Finalists and Community Choice Voting and you can vote for us by sending an email to LTAwards-vote@alt.ac.uk with the subject line #LTA6.  Or alternatively you can tweet a message with the hashtags #altc #LTA6. Those clever people at ALT have even set up a link to generate the tweet for you

The Open Education Team at the University of Edinburgh is a virtual team within the Information Services Group, Learning, Teaching and Web Services Division and our role is to coordinate open education and open knowledge activities across the University.

The team is made up of Lorna M Campbell, OER Liaison – Open Scotland, Stuart Nicol, Learning Technology Team Manager, Stephanie (Charlie) Farley, OER Advisor, Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian-in-Residence, Jo Spiller, Head of Educational Design and Engagement, Eugenia Twomey, Student Engagement Officer, Anne-Marie Scott, Head of Digital Learning Applications & Media, Susan Greig, Learning Technology Advisor and Martin Tasker, Open Content Curation Intern.

You can find out more about our work in the video below which, you’ll be relieved to hear, is not filmed in the style of Trainspotting ;}

Tuesday 16 August 2016, Perth City Library

I've long felt that MediaWiki categories introduce too much confusion. In most wikis they're thought of as a hierarchy, but actually the software just structures them as a directed graph. So lately I've been tinkering with the idea that instead of categories being linked together at all they could be thought of as 'tags' or keywords. This would mean that they would not have any sort of structure to themselves beyond a name and a description (the latter being just the contents of the category page).

Because categories never seem to be detailed enough—or they're too detailed. For example, say you have a set of pages describing the working habits of novelists: who they were, where and how they worked, that sort of thing. So there would be categories about the people ('Australian', 'Female', 'Born in 1883', 'Deceased'), their working environment ('Urban', 'Rural', 'Wrote in longhand', 'Refused to have a radio in the house'), and their work ('Fantasy', 'Pastoral', 'Boring'). How is one to get a list of male novelists who wrote crime-fiction on a typewriter? The various cross-sections of the categories can never be fully defined and even trying to do the more popular intersections is tedious and full of redundancy.

FlatCats[edit]

I'm working on a little extension that chucks all this away, and instead works on the idea that each page has a set of categories (as is currently the case) and that's all; there are no parent categories. So, it becomes simple to produce a list of any given category, as well as any category intersection (or complement).

The extension provides a special page, Special:FlatCats, which initially presents a list of all (or the top n) categories and displays no pages. Each category has a plus and a minus icon next to it, which the user selects in order to include or exclude that category from the list of displayed pages. When a category has been selected, the category list is reduced to only include those categories that are referenced by at least one page in the current set (or exclude all that are referenced, in the case of negative selection).

So it is easy to select all female non-Australian novelists with something like: [+Female -Australian +Novelist].

The other part of the extension is to automatically include the selection part of this searching interface at the top of Category pages, so that navigating to a category not only provides the normal list of pages in that category but also gives an easy way to view related lists of pages (i.e. what would currently be thought of as subcategories).

The Wikipedia Year of Science has had a significant impact on Wikipedia’s coverage of STEM fields. But we’ve also seen significant improvements of articles in political science.

One of the best examples comes from Columbia University’s Order and Violence course, led by Dr. Christopher Blattman.

The Arab Spring was a series of revolutionary protests across the Arab world, starting in Tunisia in 2010. The wake of those protests in inescapable among foreign policy discussions today. A student in Dr. Blattman’s course reworked the Wikipedia article on the Arab Spring, contributing nearly 3,500 words to the article. It had been flagged for improvement for at least a year. Thanks to this student editor, the article was expanded to include a summary of expert analysis and the role media played in the protests.

Incredibly, since that student took it on, it’s been seen 238,798 times. It’s the first search result for “Arab spring” on Google. That’s a pretty staggering impact for an undergraduate homework assignment. It’s clear evidence of the power that Wikipedia has for classroom assignments. It transforms passive learning into an act of contributing knowledge.

It’s just one example of the kind of Wikipedia article likely to be referenced by the public, particularly during an election year. Students in the course tackled a broad scope of topics. The article on Warlords was just a list. It’s now a deep, thoughtful summary of thinking about the forms of warlords around the world. Another tackled the article on the broad, and difficult to write, topic of Rebellion itself. Two student editors expanded the timely article on Ethnic conflict. Those interested in the refugee crisis can find an excellent article on Western European colonialism and colonization.

Articles from Dr. Blattman’s class have been seen, collectively, a staggering 3.5 million times. That shows what’s possible when higher education classrooms connect to Wikipedia: Literally millions of people gain access to thorough, thoughtful, and deeper information about the political issues that move the world.

We’d love to help more courses like this one get on board. If you’d like to find out more about what’s possible for your own course, get in touch with us: contact@wikiedu.org.

Back in January, I wrote up some things I was aiming to do this year, including:

Firstly, I’d like to clear off the History of Parliament work on Wikidata. I haven’t really written this up yet (maybe that’s step 1.1) but, in short, I’m trying to get every MP in the History of Parliament database listed and crossreferenced in Wikidata. At the moment, we have around 5200 of them listed, out of a total of 22200 – so we’re getting there. (Raw data here.) Finding the next couple of thousand who’re listed, and mass-creating the others, is definitely an achievable task.

Well, seven months later, here’s where it stands:

• 9,372 of a total 21,400 (43.7%) of History of Parliament entries been matched to records for people in Wikidata.
• These 9,372 entries represent 7,257 people – 80 have entries in three HoP volumes, and 1,964 in two volumes. (This suggests that, when complete, we will have about ~16,500 people for those initial 21,400 entries – so maybe we’re actually over half-way there).
• These are crossreferenced to a lot of other identifiers. 1,937 of our 7,257 people (26.7%) are in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 1,088 (15%) are in the National Portrait Gallery database, and 2,256 (31.1%) are linked to their speeches in the digital edition of Hansard. There is a report generated each night crosslinking various interesting identifiers.
• Every MP in the 1820-32 volume (1,367 of them) is now linked and identified, and the 1790-1820 volume is now around 85% complete. (This explains the high showing for Hansard, which covers 1805 onwards)
• The metadata for these is still limited – a lot more importing work to do – but in some cases pretty decent; 94% of the 1820-32 entries have a date of death, for example.

Of course, there’s a lot more still to do – more metadata to add, more linkages to make, and so on. It still does not have any reasonable data linking MPs to constituencies, which is a major gap (but perhaps one that can be filled semi-automatically using the HoP/Hansard links and a clever script).

But as a proof of concept, I’m very happy with it. Here’s some queries playing with the (1820-32) data:

• There are 990 MPs with an article about them in at least one language/WM project. Strikingly, ten of these don’t have an English Wikipedia article (yet). The most heavily written-about MP is – to my surprise – David Ricardo, with articles in 67 Wikipedias. (The next three are Peel, Palmerston, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton).
• 303 of the 1,367 MPs (22.1%) have a recorded link to at least one other person in Wikidata by a close family relationship (parent, child, spouse, sibling) – there are 803 links, to 547 unique people – 108 of whom are also in the 1820-32 MPs list, and 439 of whom are from elsewhere in Wikidata. (I expect this number to rise dramatically as more metadata goes in).
• The longest-surviving pre-Reform MP (of the 94% indexed by deathdate, anyway) was John Savile, later Earl of Mexborough, who made it to August 1899…
• Of the 360 with a place of education listed, the most common is Eton (104), closely followed by Christ Church, Oxford (97) – there is, of course, substantial overlap between them. It’s impressive to see just how far we’ve come. No-one would ever expect to see anything like that for Parliament today, would we.
• Of the 1,185 who’ve had first name indexed by Wikidata so far, the most popular is John (14.4%), then William (11.5%), Charles (7.5%), George (7.4%), and Henry (7.2%):

• A map of the (currently) 154 MPs whose place of death has been imported:

All these are of course provisional, but it makes me feel I’m definitely on the right track!

So, you may be asking, what can I do to help? Why, thankyou, that’s very kind…

• First of all, this is the master list, updated every night, of as-yet-unmatched HoP entries. Grab one, load it up, search Wikidata for a match, and add it (property P1614). Bang, one more down, and we’re 0.01% closer to completion…

• It’s not there? (About half to two thirds probably won’t be). You can create an item manually, or you can set it aside to create a batch of them later. I wrote a fairly basic bash script to take a spreadsheet of HoP identifiers and basic metadata and prepare it for bulk-item-creation on Wikidata.
• Or you could help sanitise some of the metadata – here’s some interesting edge cases:
  • This list is ~680 items who probably have a death date (the HoP slug ends in a number), but who don’t currently have one in Wikidata.

  • This list is ~540 people who are titled “Honourable” – and so are almost certainly the sons of noblemen, themselves likely to be in Wikidata – but who don’t have a link to their father. This list is the same, but for “Lord”, and this list has all the apparently fatherless men who were the 2nd through 9th holders of a title…

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

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

October 11 2015. Semantic MediaWiki 2.2.3, is a bugfix release and has now been released. This new version is a minor release and provides bugfix for the current 2.2 branch of Semantic MediaWiki. Wikis using MediaWiki 1.25+ should update. See the page Installation for details on how to install, upgrade or update.

January 4 2016. Semantic MediaWiki 2.3.1, is a bugfix release and has now been released. This new version is a minor release and provides bugfix for the current 2.3 branch of Semantic MediaWiki.See the page Installation for details on how to install, upgrade or update.

... Mr. Hume who lives in a most picturesque situation high up on Jakko, the house being about 7800 feet above the level of the sea. From my bedroom window I had a fine view of the snowy range. ... at last I stood in the celebrated museum and gazed at the dozens upon dozens of tin cases which filled the room ... quite three times as large as our meeting-room at the Zoological Society, and, of course, much more lofty. Throughout this large room went three rows of table-cases with glass tops, in which were arranged a series of the birds of India sufficient for the identification of each species, while underneath these table-cases were enormous cabinets made of tin, with trays inside, containing series of the birds represented in the table-cases above. All the specimens were carefully done up in brown-paper cases, each labelled outside with full particulars of the specimen within. Fancy the labour this represents with 60,000 specimens! The tin cabinets were all of materials of the best quality, specially ordered from England, and put together by the best Calcutta workmen. At each end of the room were racks reaching up to the ceiling, and containing immense tin cases full of birds. As one of these racks had to be taken down during the repairs of the north end of the museum, the entire space between the table-cases was taken up by the tin cases formerly housed in it, so that there was literally no space to walk between the rows. On the western side of the museum was the library, reached by a descent of three stops—a cheerful room, furnished with large tables, and containing, besides the egg-cabinets, a well-chosen set of working volumes. ... In a few minutes an immense series of specimens could be spread out on the tables, while all the books were at hand for immediate reference. ... we went below into the basement, which consisted of eight great rooms, six of them full, from floor to ceilings of cases of birds, while at the back of the house two large verandahs were piled high with cases full of large birds, such as Pelicans, Cranes, Vultures, &c.

I was certainly not hoping to find Hume's home as described but the situation turned out to be a lot worse. The first thing I did was to contact Professor Sriram Mehrotra, a senior historian who has published on the origins of the Indian National Congress. Prof. Mehrotra explained that Rothney Castle had long been altered with only the front facade retained along with the wood-framed conservatories. He said I could go and ask the caretaker for permission to see the grounds. He was sorry that he could not accompany me as it was physically demanding and he said that "the place moved him to tears." Professor Mehrotra also told me about how he had decided to live in Shimla simply because of his interest in Hume! I left him and walked to Christ Church and took the left branch going up to Jakhoo with some hopes. I met the caretaker of Rothney Castle in the garden where she was walking her dogs on a flat lawn, probably the same garden at the end of which there once had been a star-shaped flower bed, scene of the infamous brooch incident with Madame Blavatsky (see the theosophy section on Hume's biography in Wikipedia). It was a bit of a disappointment however as the caretaker informed me that I could not see the grounds unless the owner who lived in Delhi permitted it. Rothney Castle has changed hands so many times that it probably has nothing to match with what Bowdler-Sharpe saw and the grounds may very soon be entirely unrecognizable but for the name plaque at the entrance. Another patch of land in front of Rothney Castle was being prepared for what might become a multi-storeyed building. A botanist friend had shown me a 19th century painting of Shimla made by Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming. In her painting, the only building visible on Jakko Hill behind Christ Church is Rothney Castle. The vegetation on Shimla has definitely become denser with trees blocking the views.

 

Clearly Shimla empowered Hume, provided a stimulating environment which included several local collaborators. Who were his local collaborators in Shimla? I have only recently discovered (and notes with references are now added to the Wikipedia entry for R. C. Tytler) that Robert (of Tytler's warbler fame - although named by W E Brooks) and Harriet Tytler (of Mt. Harriet fame) had established a kind of natural history museum at Bonnie Moon in Shimla with  Lord Mayo's support. The museum closed down after Robert's death in 1872, and it is said that Harriet offered the bird specimens to the government. It would appear that this collected finally went to Hume.

Hume's idea of mapping rainfall to examine patterns of avian distribution

It was under Lord Mayo that Hume rose in the government hierarchy. Hume was not averse to utilizing his power as Secretary of State to further his interests in birds. He organized the Lakshadweep survey with the assistance of the navy ostensibly to examine sites for a lighthouse. He made use of government machinery in the fisheries department (Francis Day) to help his Sind survey. He used the newly formed meteorological division of his own agricultural department to generate rainfall maps for use in Stray Feathers. He was probably the first to note the connection between rainfall and bird distributions, something that only Sharpe saw any special merit in. Perhaps placing specimens on those large tables described by Sharpe allowed Hume to see geographic trends.

Hume was also able to appreciate geology (in his youth he had studied with Mantell ), earth history and avian evolution. Hume had several geologists contributing to ornithology including Stoliczka and Ball. One wonders if he took an interest in paleontology given his proximity to the Shiwalik ranges. Hume invited Richard Lydekker to publish a major note on avian osteology for the benefit of amateur ornithologists. Hume also had enough time to speculate on matters of avian biology. A couple of years ago I came across this bit that Hume wrote in the first of his Nests and Eggs volumes (published post-ornith-humously in 1889):

Nests and Eggs of Indian birds. Vol 1. p. 199

I wrote immediately to Tim Birkhead, the expert on evolutionary aspects of bird reproduction and someone with an excellent view of ornithological history (his Ten Thousand Birds is a must read for anyone interested in the subject) and he agreed that Hume had been an early and insightful observer to have suggested female sperm storage.

Shimla life was clearly a lot of hob-nobbing and people like Lord Mayo were spending huge amounts of time and money just hosting parties. Turns out that Lord Mayo even went to Paris to recruit a chef and brought in an Italian,  Federico Peliti. (His great-grandson has a nice website!) Unlike Hume, Peliti rose in fame after Lord Mayo's death by setting up a cafe which became the heart of Shimla's social life and gossip. Lady Lytton (Lord Lytton was the one who demoted Hume!) recorded that Simla folk "...foregathered four days a week for prayer meetings, and the rest of the time was spent in writing poisonous official notes about each other." Another observer recorded that "in Simla you could not hear your own voice for  the grinding of axes. But in 1884 the grinders were few. In the course of my service I saw much of Simla society,  and I think it would compare most favourably with any other town of English-speaking people of the same size. It was bright and gay. We all lived, so to speak, in glass houses. The little bungalows perched on the mountainside wherever there was a ledge, with their winding paths under the pine trees, leading to our only road, the Mall." (Lawrence, Sir Walter Roper (1928) The India We Served.)

A view from Peliti's (1922).

Peliti's other contribution was in photography and it seems like he worked with Felice Beato who also influenced Harriet Tytler and her photography. I asked a couple of Shimla folks on the location of Peliti's cafe and they said it was  the Grand Hotel (now a government guest hose). I subsequently found that Peliti did indeed start Peliti's Grand Hotel, which was destroyed in a fire in 1922, but the centre of Shimla's social life, his cafe, was actually next to the Combermere Bridge (it ran over a water storage tank and is today the location of the lift that runs between the Mall and the Cart Road). A photograph taken from "Peliti's" clearly lends support for this location as do descriptions in Thacker's New Guide to Simla (1925). A poem celebrating Peliti's was published in Punch magazine in 1919. Rudyard Kipling was a fan of Peliti's but Hume was no fan of Kipling (Kipling seems to have held a spiteful view of liberals - "Pagett MP" has been identified by some as being based on W.S.Caine, a friend of Hume; Hume for his part had a lifelong disdain for journalists. Kipling's boss, E.K. Robinson started the British Naturalists' Association while E.K.R.'s brother Philip probably influenced Eha.

While Hume most likely stayed away from Peliti's, we see that a kind of naturalists social network existed within the government. About Lord Mayo we read: 

Lord Mayo and the Natural History of India - His Excellency Lord Mayo, the Viceroy of India, has been making a very valuable collection of natural historical objects, illustrative of the fauna, ornithology, &c., of the Indian Empire. Some portion of these valuable acquisitions, principally birds and some insects, have been brought to England, and are now at 49 Wigmore Street, London, whence they will shortly be removed. - Pertshire Advertiser, 29 December 1870.

Another news report states:

The Early of Mayo's collection of Indian birds, &c.

Amids the cares of empire, the Earl of Mayo, the present ruler of India, has found time to form a valuable collection of objects illustrative of the natural history of the East, and especially of India. Some of these were brought over by the Countess when she visited England a short time since, and entrusted to the hands of Mr Edwin Ward, F.Z.S., for setting and arrangement, under the particular direction of the Countess herself. This portion, which consists chiefly of birds and insects, was to be seen yesterday at 49, Wigmore street, and, with the other objects accumulated in Mr Ward's establishment, presented a very striking picture. There are two library screens formed from the plumage of the grand argus pheasant- the head forward, the wing feathers extended in circular shape, those of the tail rising high above the rest. The peculiarities of the plumage hae been extremely well preserved. These, though surrounded by other birds of more brilliant covering, preserved in screen pattern also, are most noticeable, and have been much admired. There are likewise two drawing-room screens of smaller Indain birds (thrush size) and insects. They are contained in glass cases, with frames of imitation bamboo, gilt. These birds are of varied and bright colours, and some of them are very rare. The Countess, who returned to India last month, will no doubt,add to the collection when she next comes back to England, as both the Earl and herself appear to take a great interest in Illustrating the fauna and ornithology of India. The most noticeable object, however, in Mr. Ward's establishment is the representation of a fight between two tigers of great size. The gloss, grace, and spirit of the animals are very well preserved. The group is intended as a present to the Prince of Wales. It does not belong to the Mayo Collection. - The Northern Standard, January 7, 1871

And Hume's subsequent superior was Lord Northbrook about whom we read:

University and City Intelligence. - Lord Northbrook has presented to the University a valuable collection of skins of the game birds of India collected for him by Mr. A.O.Hume, C.B., a distinguished Indian ornithologist. Lord Northbrook, in a letter to Dr. Acland, assures him that the collection is very perfec, if not unique. A Decree was passed accepting the offer, and requesting the Vice-Chancellor to convey the thanks of the University to the donor. - Oxford Journal, 10 February 1877

Papilio mayo

Clearly Lord Mayo and his influence on naturalists in India is not sufficiently well understood. Perhaps that would explain the beautiful butterfly that was named after him shortly after his murder. It appears that Hume did not have this kind of hobby association with Lord Lytton, little wonder perhaps that he fared so badly!

Despite Hume's sharpness on many matters there were bits that come across as odd. In one article on the flight of birds he observes the soaring of crows and vultures behind his house as he sits in the morning looking towards Mahassu. He points out that these soaring birds would appear early on warm days and late on cold days but he misses the role of thermals and mixes physics with metaphysics, going for a kind of Grand Unification Theory:

And then claims that crows, like saints, sages and yogis are capable of "aethrobacy".

This naturally became a target of ridicule. We have already seen the comments of E.H. Hankin on this. Hankin wrote that if levitation was achieved by "living an absolutely pure life and intense religious concentration" the hill crow must be indulging in "irreligious sentiments when trying to descend to earth without  the help of gravity." Hankin despite his studies does not give enough credit for the forces of lift produced by thermals and his own observations were critiqued by Gilbert Walker, the brilliant mathematican who applied his mind to large scale weather patterns apart from conducting some amazing research on the dynamics of boomerangs. His boomerang research had begun even in his undergraduate years and had earned him the nickname of Boomerang Walker. On my visit to Shimla, I went for a long walk down the quiet road winding through dense woodland and beside streams to Annandale, the only large flat ground in Shimla where Sir Gilbert Walker conducted his weekend research on boomerangs. Walker's boomerang research mentions a collaboration with Oscar Eckenstein and there are some strange threads connecting Eckenstein, his collaborator Aleister Crowley and Hume's daughter Maria Jane Burnley who would later join the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. But that is just speculation!

Dr Roy Vickery displaying some of Hume's herbarium specimens

Specially designed cases for storing the herbarium sheets.

The entrance to the South London Botanical Institute

A herbarium sheet from the Hume collection

 

Hume's bookplate with personal motto - Industria et Perseverentia

An ornate clock which apparently adorned Rothney Castle

• Collar, N. J.; Prys-Jones, R. P. (2012). Pioneers of Asian ornithology. Allan Octavian Hume. BirdingASIA. 17: 17–43.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Octavian_Hume

The typical assignment in most higher education mathematics classrooms is problem sets — but that’s changing, according to attendees of the Mathematical Association of America’s MathFest 2016, held last week in Columbus, Ohio. Leaders in the math community realize their graduates need to know how to write, either to explain mathematical concepts for the general public or for their careers outside of the discipline. Wiki Education Foundation staff were at the conference to showcase how Wikipedia assignments can meet those needs, while also providing students a meaningful service learning opportunity.

“That sounds amazing. I’m all for it!” an excited instructor told us.

“Writing is so important, especially in math,” one attendee explained. “One of the biggest complaints from corporations is that grads can’t write.”

Another professor lauded the “authentic task” of writing for Wikipedia as a class assignment.

Wiki Ed’s Year of Science initiative is aimed at improving Wikipedia’s coverage of STEM and social science topics, while giving students those authentic learning experiences that teach them important skills like writing, research, critical thinking, and collaboration. Several MathFest attendees were excited to participate in our program to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of math topics as part of the Year of Science.

Not only were instructors at the conference interested in improving articles on course related topics, they also expressed desire to see their students expand coverage of mathematicians on Wikipedia. Many instructors also noted that the math coverage on Wikipedia is highly complex, and some of their students in introductory courses struggle to understand Wikipedia’s math articles, even though the articles should be accessible to a general audience; they were interested in asking advanced students to re-write lead sections to make the articles more accessible to the public.

We look forward to seeing many of the instructors we met at MathFest teach with Wikipedia this fall or in future terms. To learn how you can join our program, visit our website, or email us at contact@wikiedu.org.

This post was written by Lorna Campbell and originally posted on her website.

On Saturday I went along to my first Wikipedia AGM in Birmingham.  It was a really interesting event and it was great to meet so many dedicated Wikimedians and also to see more than a few familiar faces. Martin Poulter has put together a Storify of tweets and pictures from the event here Wikimedia UK AGM 2016.

Selfridges Birmingham

The event featured an inspiring keynote on The Open Movement by Andy Mabbett who highlighted the importance of linking Wikimedia initiatives to both Open Government and national heritage organisations and who argued that we need to  do more to welcome people to the open community and communicate why openness is important to everyone.

Andy’s talk was followed by a workshop on Wikidata and a walk around the local area to take photographs for Wikimedia Commons.  Who’d have thought a photography safari of Digbeth could be so fascinating? I just need to remember to upload some of the pictures I took to the Commons.

In the afternoon we had a fascinating series of lightning talks, one of which covered the brilliant Wiki Loves Monuments photography competition which will take place in the UK again later this year.

Of course the highlight of the day was the UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards.  Martin Poulter was a very worthy winner of the individual UK Wikipedian of the Year award; Navino Evans, one of the developers behind the fabulous Histropedia timeline tool, received an Honourable Mention; and I was delighted that the OER16 Open Culture Conference won Partnership of the Year.

The AGM concluded with the Board meeting and I was honoured to be voted onto the Board as a new Trustee of Wikimedia UK.  The University of Edinburgh already has a strong relationship with Wikimedia UK and I hope that I can make a positive contribution to nurturing the development of a supportive and mutually beneficial relationship between Wikimedia and the education sector.  Gill Hamilton, of the National Library of Scotland stepped down from the Board, so I’ll also be doing my best to fill her shoes as the Scottish representative on the Board, though it’ll be a hard act to follow!

With Josie Fraser, Wikimedia UK Trustee and #OER17 Co-Chair

History is one of Wikipedia’s great strengths. It is where millions of people turn first for historical information on just about any topic.

The best history articles take an extraordinary amount of effort and attention to detail. One of the biggest challenges editors of such articles face is access to reliable sources. History journals, ebooks, and specific collections are often behind paywalls or otherwise only accessible to certain people. When volunteers can’t access the information they need to write a thorough article, information about that topic gets neglected.

That’s why Temple University is opening access to its library resources for a Wikipedian interested in the history of Philadelphia, the history of African Americans in Philadelphia, and/or the history and study of the Holocaust.

The beauty of this arrangement is that Visiting Scholars aren’t required to be physically present at the university. Typically, the only expectation is that they bring some of the articles they work on to B-class or better over the course of a year — the kind of article improvement most Visiting Scholars would be doing anyway, but now with access to sources without paywalls standing in their way.

At Temple, the position is supported by Associate University Librarian Steven Bell. For him, supporting a Wikipedian in this way is a way to improve public knowledge as well as to increase the number of people who can benefit from their resources.

If you’re a passionate Wikipedian with an interest in this field, we’d love to help connect you. You can apply for a Visiting Scholar position here and, if you have questions, drop us a line: visitingscholars@wikiedu.org. For more information about the Visiting Scholars program, see the Visiting Scholars section of our website.

Photo: Temple University Paley Library Side View by Dorevabelfiore, CC BY 4.0.

Like every year, Wiki Loves Monuments is supported by an international team. You could already find descriptions about them on Wikimedia Commons, but we wanted to share as well a little more personal insight: through their favorite monument photos. Please welcome… the international team!

Photo: Henny stokseth, CC BY-SA

Erik is from the Netherlands and loves WLM for it’s celebration of beauty and excellence (from) all around the world. Henny Stokseth added humor to the mix in this image of a Norwegian lighthouse. The juxtaposition of lights radiates lightness. It’s humor transcends culture, and is universal.

Photo: Inbal Reavch, CC BY-SA

Ido is from Israel, and chose this picture of a monastery overlooking Jerusalem’s serene Ein Karem neighbourhood, because it embodies the beauty of the hidden places of Israel and it’s cultural complexity. With places that are held sacred by many people with different beliefs, the Israel WLM competition photos is a good reminder for that.

Photo: Cassinam, CC BY-SA

Ilario is a longtime Wikimedian from the Italian speaking area of Switzerland. To him WLM is about discovering people, cultures, and the country where he lives in. This way, he discovered this church, a rare jewel, which was kept intact for 800 years. WLM helps to discover the territory but also to be time travelers.

Photo: Haidamac, CC BY-SA

Ilya is from Ukraine, and likes about WLM that people can know and fixate things that are endangered or disappear. Like this wooden church in Sumy oblast in Ukraine. The church became a national architecture monument in 1979, but this did not stop it from slow decaying since the 1980s.

Photo: Sonoem, CC BY-SA

Jean-Fred is from France, and loves how WLM leads people to discover the heritage that is close to their home, without paying much attention to it before. Like these two teenagers from Timișoara (Romania), who looked up the monuments near them and went on their bikes to photograph this metallic bridge, « to send it to Wikipedia ».

Photo: Kiantavakoli, CC BY-SA

Lily is from Iran and she is passionate about people and their heritage. She likes this picture of Tehran’s City Theater which is the gateway to the world of theater for many Tehranies, and a great place for the students in one of the few nearby universities to spend some time in.

Water mill. Photo: Romaine, CC-zero

Romaine is from the Netherlands and enjoys running the machinery that keeps WLM going. The mill project in the Netherlands was at the foundation of Wiki Loves Monuments, and grew for him the wish to have it just a little bit larger in geography and subject area.

Wiki Ed staff travel around the United States and Canada to present our model to universities, colleges, and academic conferences. Time and time again, we’re asked: “You know Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source, right?”

That’s perhaps the biggest misunderstanding about Wikipedia assignments. Nobody should cite Wikipedia in an academic paper. Our approach to Wikipedia is simple:

“Don’t cite it. Write it!”

We’re inspired by the idea that students have something to contribute. They have books. They have access to academic journals. They have their brains, which can think critically about what they read on Wikipedia. Those same brains can make sense of how to fix problems or gaps in what they find.

But they also have you, their instructor. Students are learning from experts. You can look at Wikipedia and see the gaps and inaccuracies. Some experts see problems, and turn their backs. But whether you use it or not, millions of people turn to Wikipedia every day. More people visit Wikipedia on mobile than visit Fox News, CNN and the USA Today combined. They use it to stay informed and make decisions.

It’s not just lay people satisfying their curiosity, or trying to win bets. Wikipedia was described as “the leading single source of healthcare information for patients and healthcare professionals” in 2014. It’s also used by journalists trying to contextualize a story on deadline. It’s referenced by political staffers trying to understand the ramifications of proposed policies.

For academics concerned about the public’s understanding of their field, walking away from Wikipedia isn’t an option. But academics are busy and pulled in many directions. Time gets swallowed up in the pressure to publish, advise, develop, and engage.

That’s just one reason why the Wikipedia writing assignment makes sense.

You can increase public engagement with your field by assigning students to improve Wikipedia. It’s a more meaningful writing and critical thinking exercise for your students than a traditional term paper. It just so happens to double as service learning.

They don’t just learn how to contribute to Wikipedia, they also learn how to read it. A student compares what they’ve learned to the information presented in a Wikipedia article, and interrogates what they see. They learn to engage in what they read, and they’re empowered to make a difference.

We know you know it’s not a reliable source for academic work. But do your students? We can’t think of a better way to engage students in thinking about what makes a source reliable. They’re contributing to a website read by millions of people. Some of their articles will be read by thousands, or hundreds of thousands. They’ll think carefully about what they contribute, and later, they’ll think carefully about what they read. They’ll learn to evaluate the information they find online, and determine for themselves whether or not to trust it. Rather than a blanket ban on Wikipedia (they’re going to use it anyway), we can expand their critical thinking tool box to ensure they use it well.

So, when people tell us: “You know Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source, right?” We say, “Yes. That’s exactly why it belongs in your classroom!”

Wikipedia assignments don’t take over your class. Our tools are free to use. We help students understand how to work on Wikipedia, while you take care of the rest. We have online tools for you and your students to get comfortable with Wikipedia. We have staff members assigned to every course to help your students as they go. And did we mention it’s completely free?

We’d love to help you get started.

Check out our resources, or start a conversation about how Wikipedia can work with your course by emailing us: contact@wikiedu.org. We’d love to hear from you!

Photo: Modified from Pointing hand cursor by Manuel Campagnoli – Own work, CC0. 

08/02/2016-08/08/2016

Mapping

• The University of Washington wants to import sidewalks into OSM. They therefore try to discuss a new tagging scheme presented in a proposal that is supposed to expand upon existing tagging schemes. There’s plenty of criticism on the list, and only limited response to that, but there is more discussion on the wiki.
• The quarterly task “schools” in UK continues – the “dramatic jump in relations” was Christian Ledermann’s “find a school near you and map it” tool.
• Manohar from Mapbox writes about adding turn restrictions in Canada and shares the work-flow used for it.

Community

• We are proud to announce the new OSM Latin America Logo. Big thanks to @mapanauta and @jbtschopp
• Karito Tenorio Palomino and the weeklyOSM editor Edith Quispe trained 100 high school girls in an OpenStreetMap workshop conducted at the Women in Science Camp 2016. The participants were introduced to OSM, how to contribute using iD/JOSM editors and also shared project ideas to work on.
• OpenCageData interviewed Namitala Gertrude about OpenStreetMap in Zambia.
• A map showing the distribution of contributors who are active in the OSMLatam-telegram-group.
• Tom Lee (working at Mapbox) writes down his thoughts on Mike Migurski’s somewhat incendiary blog post.
• weeklyOSM has reported previously on the mapping activities of the Irish OSM group involving among others Dacor in Lesotho. Now the activities are honored by a Mapping Party in the Dublin embassy of the Kingdom of Lesotho.
• Someone’s created a Slack channel for OpenHistoricalMap. The splitting of communications between Mailing Lists Forum, Twitter, Telegram groups and now even Slack makes it more increasingly difficult for beginners and also for weeklyOSM to keep track.
• Martijn van Exel initiates efforts to improve OSM data in Idaho by (in Michal Migurski’s phrase) “craft” mappers. Locally produced and surveyed data is available to work on improving the area on OSM.
• Thomas (malenki) announced a “timeout” from OpenStreetMap activities. So long and thanks for all the mapping!

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OSM Awards is calling for nominees in six categories – Core Systems, Innovation, Writing, Mapping, Community and the Ulf Möller Memorial Award. The awards will be presented at State of The Map conference (SOTM) 2016. The Source code of the website is open for improvements and translation.

Events

• Users SB79 reminds everyone about the Elbe-Labe-Meeting that takes place from 07th until 09th of October in Dresden (Germany).
• INTERGEO, a trade fair for Geodesy and Geoinformatics takes place in Hamburg between 11th-13th October.

Humanitarian OSM

• The Guardian reports about MapSwipe, and almost (but not quite) manages to avoid mentioning Pokémon Go in the article.
• Ann Mei Chang reports about the American initiative against the spread of malaria. For an effective defence, good maps are essential. The OSM Group YouthMappers contributes as an example in Mozambique.

Maps

• The well known guides lonely planet launch an app with offline maps using Mapbox’s mobile SDK.
• The desktop app, GNOME Maps, stopped working when MapQuest discontinued unrestricted tile access to their maps. Mapbox has now stepped in as the data provider for GNOME Maps (one of the most importantant features desired apparently was Latin alphabet “Western” names, even of places not natively using the Latin alphabet).
• Walter Nordmann complains that for weeks the German-French border is damaged near Luxembourg in UMAP. He thinks it looks like “nobody cares“.

switch2OSM

• The information portal Marine Traffic now uses OpenStreetMap to visualize the recent locations of the vessels. (Via twitter)

Licences

• Due to the discussion about the replicas of the map style Mapbox Streets (in JSON format of Mapbox GL) between Mapbox and the OSM2Vectortiles project. Steve Gifford writes about Mapbox GL Style Sheets of the WhirlyGlobe toolkit for version 2.5. Styled Layer Descriptor format support is coming soon. As Steve says: “Not as cool, but a nice safe OGC standard.”

Programming

• Door2Door, a Berlin based startup working in the area of Public Transport is hiring for the position of a GIS Software Developer.
• Pepijn Schoen describes how he created a Docker container to display on a map the routes he has travelled by railway.

Releases

provided by the OSM Software Watchlist

Did you know …

• … the Atlas of Countries That Don’t Exist by Nick Middleton. The book is also published in Italian, Spanish, French and newly in German. A very elaborate made book not only for bibliophile geographers.

Other “geo” things

• The online journal NOSOLOSIG is pubilshed, the recent edition has an essay on the origin of the term “Cartography” (automatic translation) and a how-to to use Stamens (terrain watercolor or toner) in gvSIG.
• Uber invested US$ 500 million in a mapping project to reduce its dependence on Google Maps and to prepare for autonomous driving.
• [1] The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology presented the interactive web app “PHIVOLCS faultfinder” to use different maps (including OSM) to display fault lines in the Philippines.
• AJ Dellinger reported about the research of Prof. Guevara Noubir of Northeastern University in Boston, where an application could use the accelerometer, gyroscope, and compass to track location without being granted access by the user via the typical location permissions process.
• Simon Mikkelsen writes about the Ricoh Theta S spherical camera in the context of Mapillary.

Upcoming Events

Dónde	Qué	Fecha	País
Wien	56. Wiener Stammtisch	11/08/2016
Zurich	Stammtisch Zürich	11/08/2016
Ballerup	OpenStreetMap 12th Anniversary	13/08/2016
Posadas	Segunda Reunión Regional de Maperos OpenStreetMap	13/08/2016
London	OSM anniversary BBQ	13/08/2016
Cochabamba	OpenStreetMap: Nuevas Tecnologías e Investigación en Ciencias Sociales	19/08/2016
Kyoto	京都国宝・浪漫マッピングパーティ：第２回 特別編 サントリー京都ビール工場、恵解山古墳、ねじりまんぽ	20/08/2016
Bonn	FOSS4G 2016 Code Sprint	20/08/2016-22/08/2016

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 Laura Barroso, Rogehm, SomeoneElse, SrrReal, TheFive, derFred, jinalfoflia, mgehling.

If you teach with Wikipedia once, you’ll want to do it again.

At least, that’s the case for respondents of our Spring 2016 end-of-term survey. We ask instructors in our programs for feedback at the end of every term. Every time, we hear that the majority want to teach with us again, and this term was no different. In spring 2016, 98% of instructors said they would teach with Wikipedia again.

That’s astounding. Our survey also asked instructors: Why?

“I believe it challenges students to think about writing from a new perspective,” one instructor wrote. “It also encourages them to identify themselves as scholars and understand how much they have learned during their studies.”

The impact on students was a common theme. The enthusiasm the assignment cultivates in students seems to have a real impact on achieving the outcomes instructors want for their courses.

Instructors also reflected on the idea that writing for an audience of real readers was a motivator.

“The students enjoyed it and found it rewarding,” another instructor wrote. “They got to make their work public in a way that they don’t usually when doing class assignments.”

“It gives the students an audience for their work that raises its importance for them,” another wrote.

But the Wikipedia assignment has benefits outside of the novelty of an audience.

The assignment was considered equally or more effective than a term paper when it came to critical thinking (92% of instructors said so) and writing skills (81%). However, majorities saw the Wikipedia assignment as even more effective than a traditional assignment when it came to developing media and information literacy (87% said it was more effective), collaboration skills (72%), and online communication skills (87%).

“Students tell me in course evaluations that they value the experience,” another instructor wrote. “I see students clearly achieving our program course learning goals in their Wikipedia work.”

The student experience

Some instructors shared (anonymized) student feedback with us, too. Some examples:

• At first I was afraid I would not be able to, but after doing a little research I found it was quite simple and I actually enjoyed doing it.
• Not only will I use and edit Wikipedia articles more myself, but I will share with others how easy and simple it is to take advantage of all Wikipedia has to offer.
• The information I have gained in this class will be very helpful in the future and I would recommend it to anyone who would be interested.
• I did not expect to enjoy the course as much as I did, but the assignments and discussions kept me interested the entire time while teaching me skills and knowledge I can and will use again in the future.

A term paper, with benefits.

In a recent blog post for us, Timothy Henningson described the assignment as “a term paper, with benefits”:

“If one of the main motives of assigning a research paper is to have students engage a discourse and speak to an audience,” Henningson wrote, “then unless that audience is real and tangible, the activity is inherently counterfeit. It might be good practice, but it’s nothing like playing a real game. Which is where Wikipedia comes in.”

Our survey told us that he wasn’t alone in that assessment. Here’s how one instructor put it:

“I honestly think that the Wikipedia assignment was THE most effective teaching tool I have ever used. The fact that the students’ writing was immediately visible by millions of people worldwide really gave them an incentive to produce excellent writing. Also, they gained a critical eye towards the sources they were using and the places these sources were coming from.”

We’re delighted to know that the Wikipedia assignment has helped instructors cultivate excitement for learning among their students. We’re also pleased that so many of them found our tools and support helpful along the way.

Join us!

If you aren’t already leading a Wikipedia in your own classroom, we’d be delighted to help you get started. Our staff can offer expert guidance in instructional design and on the fine points of Wikipedia. We provide online orientations and training for you and your students. We have tools to help follow student work.

Want to transform your term papers into an exciting writing assignment for a real audience? Start the conversation with us by e-mailing contact@wikiedu.org.

I dislike systemic biases; both those caused by our gender, racial, and geographic biases, and those caused by no abstract available bias and its kindred. One of my stronger interests on Wikipedia is making available online in a freely available format content that cannot be currently be found on the Wikimedia projects because of our systemic biases. I think that this is some of the most important work that can be done on Wikipedia at this time.

I had known that he'd been fighting various illnesses for some time, but I was still shocked to hear of Kevin's death; he was far too young. My condolences to his family and his friends and his many collaborators in free knowledge and justice. Kevin and I didn't have that many conversations but in every one I heard his deep passion for the work of improving our culture on all levels; he never ceased to be shocked at things that aren't right, and to channel that shock into activism and organizing. I will miss his dedication and I will remember his ideals.

He was only 24. As I handle more and more death I come to learn which deaths cause more painful griefs. I seem to believe, somewhere deep inside, that people younger than me really shouldn't die, that it breaks an axiom.

And then the next day I learned that Chip Deubner had died. Further shock and grief. I met Chip because we worked together at the Wikimedia Foundation; he was a desktop support technician, and the creator and maintainer of the audiovisual recording and conference systems, and then rose to manage others. And I can attest to his work ethic -- he cared about the reliability of the tools that his colleagues used to do their work, and he was that reliable himself, ready at a moment's notice to take on new challenges. He demonstrated a distinctive combination of efficiency and patience: help from Chip was fast, accurate, effective, and judgment-free. If anything, he was too reticent to speak up about his own frustrations. I was glad to see him grow professionally, to take on new responsibility and manage others, and I'm glad he was able to touch so many lives in his time on earth -- I only had a few memorable conversations with him, since he lived in the Bay Area and I mostly telecommuted from New York, but I know he enjoyed office karaoke and that many WMF folks counted him as a friend, and grieve him as one. He was a maintainer and a keeper and a maker of things, in a world that needs more such people. He will be in my thoughts and my prayers. (I wrote much of this in a guestbook that might decay off the web, so I'm publishing the words here too.)

Chip died of a brain tumor. He knew he was dying, months before, so he left his job and went back to his family home in Missouri to die. He died on July 9th. And I didn't know, and didn't have a chance to say goodbye, and I suspect this is because I am not on Facebook. Thus, for the first time, I am seriously considering joining Facebook.

Sometimes, in the stupor of grief, I find comfort in doing certain kinds of work -- repetitive, well-specified, medium-cognition work without much call for self-expression. So the article about Hari Kondabolu on English Wikipedia is a lot better now. I took it from 22 citations to 78, found an openly licensed photo to use, and even created the stub of a Telugu Wikipedia page. My thanks to the makers and maintainers of Citoid and the VisualEditor -- with these tools, it is a positive delight to improve articles, a far better experience than in 2011.

Hari Kondabolu turns his anger into comedy. I turn my grief into Wikipedia edits. We all paint with our pain. If we do it right and we're lucky, the stuff we make helps, even if it's just two inches' worth of help, even if it just helps ourselves.

August 9, 2016. The registration for SMWCon Fall 2016 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (September 28-30, 2016) is now open. All interested participants can now register at the ticketing site. Note that the Early Bird period ends on September 11, 2016.

The conference is organised by German Institute for International Educational Research (DIPF) and Open Semantic Data Association (OSDA). It is kindly supported by Wikimedia Germany (WMDE).

For more information on this and the conference, see the SMWCon Fall 2016 homepage. See also our Call for Contributions.

Dr. Chelse Prather assigned students to write Wikipedia articles as part of her “Insects and Society” course at Radford University. In this post, she discusses the design of that course, and the benefits it brought to her students.

Insects affect human daily life in both positive and negative ways. Most humans are not conscious of these effects, especially not the positive ones.

I’m an insect ecologist with a passion for educating the public about insects, especially the positive and important effects that insects have on daily human life. I have been really excited for years about teaching a course on Insects and Society, and I had the opportunity to do so this past semester.

I wanted students to use the knowledge that they gained from the course to educate others. I saw a great success story of another biologist, Dr. Joan Strassmann, working with Wikipedia to such an end. Dr. Strassmann has been using Wikipedia in her Behavioral Ecology course for several years, creating many new Wikipedia articles and updating many more.

I decided to try incorporating some Wikipedia assignments into my Insects and Society course last spring semester. The course was a small seminar course (nine students) for senior biology majors. None had taken courses on insects, and in reality, they knew very little about insects when the course began. During the first week of the course, I gave the students a short primer about Wikipedia based on Wiki Ed’s instructor tutorial, and the students’ first assignment was Wiki Ed’s online student training.

I assigned each student three orders of insects so that all of the extant orders of insects would be covered—each student was given one order that had a lot of available information, and two orders that didn’t have much. The students prepared fact sheets about each of their assigned orders to teach the other students about them, essentially collectively writing a short primer about the insect orders to use as their textbook.

Part of preparing their fact sheets was reviewing the existing Wikipedia pages for each order, and determining if anything might be incorrect or missing. They especially focused on the relationship between each order and humans. I intentionally left the assignments rather open-ended, with the hope that college seniors would take ownership over their work. I didn’t set a word limit. Instead, I told the students to make substantial, quality changes to the articles.

We discussed how “substantial” may mean different things for pages of different qualities. For high-quality pages (such as this page on mantises), this may be making grammatical changes or adding missing information about the relationship between those insects and humans. For relatively new pages (such as this page on a little-known order of parasitic insects), this may mean adding very basic information about the biology of the insect order.

We then used part of a class period to discuss the changes each student proposed for the Wikipedia pages. We collectively discussed what edits seemed feasible and substantial, and which seemed trivial or not feasible for the student to try and do.

The week after the students’ first round of edits, the pages they were editing had been viewed over 10,000 times. The students and I were both astonished and thrilled that so many people were viewing their work. As we watched the numbers steadily climb throughout the semester, most of the students took the editing much more seriously: they realized that many others were viewing (and often quickly editing) their work, and that their edits may actually make a huge difference in others’ knowledge about insects.

The students went through two rounds of edits on their assigned Wikipedia pages. We also did one fun crowd-sourcing class period to flesh out a new page that lists insect-inspired songs. This exercise included students playing songs for the rest of the class, and discussing how insects were portrayed in music. Students were surprised to find almost every genre of music that we could imagine had songs inspired by insects. We also started to see that certain groups of insects seemed to inspire different types of music; for instance, flies seemed to inspire lots of heavy metal music, whereas butterflies seemed to inspire more romantic and calm music.

I graded the students’ edits on the following criteria: completion for each assigned page; substantial improvement to pages; accuracy; professional conduct; and student’s followed through on comments from other editors. Grading using these criteria did not seem overly cumbersome or time consuming, but this was a very small class. I imagine for larger classes, this type of assignment would be more difficult to assess.

The Wikipedia assignments were not the only assignments in this class. They were graded on their fact sheets, two short exams, several modest in-class assignments, and a written post on a blog I run with another insect ecologist on a topic of their choosing about same facet of the complicated relationship between insects and humans (e.g., one of the students wrote a post about the role of insects in music).

By the end of the class (3 months after the students first began to edit their pages on Wikipedia), the pages that they edited have been viewed over 1.35 million times!

About a month after the course ended, I got the following message from a student:

“….I happened to mention your coordination with Wikipedia for the class and how it was conducive for critical thinking. Long story short, they are interested in perhaps doing something similar, could I put you in contact with them so you can give some of the details on it?”

I’ve never had students email about the assignments in my course well after the course had ended.

Aside from Wiki Ed’s helpful instructor training, which I recommend doing and adhering to, I would suggest the following based on my experience in this course:

1) Engage with likely editors of your pages before the class begins. Check and see who often edits the pages that you’re going to assign. Message them to tell them that you would like to assign your students the page to edit, and that you will appreciate their understanding that these are students and any careful editing they are able to do of the assigned articles.

2) Encourage your students to engage with anyone who edits their work. If they don’t understand why an edit was made, they should politely ask the editor that made the change.

3) Make sure that students avoid major edits of high-quality articles unless there are glaring errors or omissions. If they do find an omission or mistake on a high quality page, have them propose their edits on the Talk page before making changes.

4) Encourage or assign peer review of other students’ edits. Not all pages are closely monitored. This is especially true if your students are creating new pages.

I am so happy that our work helped to educate the public about insects and how insects affect their everyday lives. These Wikipedia assignments also not only enhanced student learning about course content, but also enhanced their critical thinking skills, their ability to take criticism from a very wide audience other than professors, and gave them a sense that the work they were doing was actually very important. For all of those reasons, my students and I will continue to “bug” Wikipedia in the future.

If you’re interested in participating in a science communications exercise for your classroom, find out more about the Year of Science, or send us a message: contact@wikiedu.org. 

Photo: Male Sphodromantis viridis from near Campo Maior (Évora) by Marabuto E, Rodrigues I, Henriques S, CC BY 4.0.

Image by Danny Kingsley & Sarah Brown, CC BY 4.0

It’s a normal part of an academic’s duties to be asked to peer-review papers for academic journals, something they do as part of their salaried position at a university. Equally, publishers rarely even pay the academic who writes the article, as Hugh Gusterson explains:

‘I get paid nothing directly for the most difficult, time-consuming writing I do: peer-reviewed academic articles. In fact a journal that owned the copyright to one of my articles made me pay $400 for permission to reprint my own writing in a book of my essays.’

Academic journals used to not make much money, but in recent years have been taken over by for-profit companies like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell. These companies now make very good profits, as they are in a position to charge a lot for access to their content. Erik Engstrom of Elsevier is the third highest paid chief exec in the FTSE100. He earned £16.18m last year.

A recent review of the benefits of Open Access publishing found ‘several key trends… including a broad citation advantage for researchers who publish openly, as well as additional benefits to the non-academic dissemination of their work.’ The researchers also found that ‘The societal impact of Open Access is strong, in particular for advancing citizen science initiatives, and leveling the playing field for researchers in developing countries.’

So Open Access publishing exists within an Open ecosystem of which Wikimedia is a large part. It supports better knowledge sharing which can help improve Wikipedia and its sister projects by giving readers access to the research used to write Wiki content. There are a number of new initiatives to put pressure on commercial publishers to make more content Open Access, like the Open Access Button, which allows you to search to see if a paper behind a paywall exists for free elsewhere, and to contact the author directly if not. The Directory of Open Access Journals helps academics make informed choices about the journals they submit to, and Wikimedians track down sources. As of writing it catalogues over 9,000 open access journals.

Within Wikimedia there is also the Wikipedia Library, where you can sign up to get access to some journals and databases that are behind paywalls. There are a number of requirements for you to be able to get access. Elsevier, for example, allows Wikipedians access to its Science Direct database as long as you have a track record of editing and are ‘active in content generation, research, or verification work’.

One of our partner institutions, the Wellcome Trust, has also recently announced that it will embrace Open Access and publish its own open academic journal. According to Ars Technica,

‘Wellcome Open Research will exclusively feature the research of people funded by the organization, and it will provide open access for anyone to view it—no subscription required. The journal will also have distinctive twists on what constitutes something worth publishing, as well as the peer review process.’

University College London is also launching its own open access journal to publish enhanced digital editions, scholarly monographs and ‘Books as Open Culture Content’. UCL Press launched last year as the UK’s first open access university publisher. Lara Speicher, publishing manager of UCL Press, says that its new online platform ‘demonstrates UCL’s commitment to broadening access to research via open access and digital innovation, and [will] allow for the publication of non-traditional research outputs that are not suited to a traditional monograph format.’’

In the field of scientific publishing, there have been a number of positive developments, with the EU science chief proposing that all research it funds will be free to access by 2020. A UK government study recommended the same in 2012, saying that although it would have short term costs, “In the longer term, the future lies with open access publishing”, which the government should embrace for its obvious benefits. In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework which influences the allocation of £1.7 billion funding for universities now stipulates that research submitted to the REF must be open access.

Challenges to open access publishing remain, as it seems that Elsevier are attempting to buy up OA publications. In May, they announced that they planned to take over the open access archive, Social Science Research Network (SSRN), which now makes them one of the biggest open access publishers. Unfortunately, the signs are not good that Elsevier intends to get with the Open Access programme, as they have started removing content from SSRN, including papers released under a CC license.

One question for the Wikimedia community is how we can systematically use the knowledge made available in open access journals to improve the quality and reliability of Wikimedia projects. There is a WikiProject Open Access page where you can join in the discussion with other Wikimedians and contribute to improving Open Access resources on Wikimedia projects.

We would like to hear any ideas you might have for how Wikimedia UK should engage with open access publishers to use their research to improve content across our projects. Would you like to help run an editathon, or are there any groups doing work on open access publishing we should develop partnerships with? Get in touch and let us know.

Ecology focuses on the relationships between the living creatures in an ecosystem, so it makes sense to think about ecology on a local scale.

Ecology topics within Canada got a boost on Wikipedia thanks to University of British Columbia students in Dr. Rosie Redfield’s Human Ecology course. In that course, students created a variety of projects, including a community project, a YouTube presentation, and, in pairs, they tackled Wikipedia articles.

They ended up working on 52 articles, improving information about ecology and the environment in a variety of Canadian contexts. These students aren’t biology majors, and the work they do is aimed at using the knowledge they learn about human ecology to better inform the public.

For example: Where does your drinking water come from? Students answered that question for 2.4 million people when they created the Wikipedia article on the Metro Vancouver watersheds. That article details the drinking water supply for many residents of British Columbia. The article describes the dimensions of the watershed, but also describes logging and fishing controversies that surround it.

Sometimes water comes from beneath your feet. But sometimes, it comes from the sky. So students also created an article on rainwater harvests in Canada. This one describes property rights in various provinces, applications of the practice, and a list of impacts and benefits.

Those are some examples of ecology applied to human impacts on the environment. Other articles focus on outlines of the ecology of places. For example, the article about Vancouver’s Everett Crowley Park describes the area prior to its use as a landfill, and afterward, when it was reclaimed as a public park. The article discusses changes in animal populations, such as the disappearance of salmon and cedar trees and the invasion of blackberry bushes.

Another interesting example is an article focused exclusively on the relationship between the indigenous Coast Salish people, a First Nation found along the Canadian Pacific coast, and salmon. The article explores the relationship between the Coast Salish and salmon, and the importance of salmon in daily life.

These are some great examples of students taking knowledge they’ve learned in a classroom, and applying it to articles that inform the public about aspects of the world around them. It’s a science communication experience that improves resources for local communities.

It’s one of the many possibilities that can emerge from adding a Wikipedia course assignment to an ecology course. Wiki Ed can help you get started. We have a variety of online tools for students to show them the way. That includes a free, printed handbook specifically aimed at student editors writing Wikipedia articles on ecology.

Want to find out more? Check our resources, or send an e-mail to: contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo: Tanks for rainwater harvesting by JLPC / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. 

Some thoughts and links about Wikipedia, to support the Professional Development Workshop led by Joe Cox at the 2016 Academy of Management annual meeting.

What is Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is the largest, and most widely read, publication in history; but perhaps more significantly, it has been built by hundreds of thousands of disparate volunteers, making it arguably the most extensive and impactful collaborative project in history.

It’s based on wiki software, invented in 1995. Wikipedia was launched in 2001, initially as an experiment. The policy framework and the social norms are as vital to Wikipedia’s identity as the software; basic principles were articulated early on, and each language edition’s volunteer community writes its own more specific policies.

See: Books about Wikipedia

Why do people contribute to Wikipedia?

Essentially: “I like the idea of sharing knowledge and want to contribute to it,” and “I saw an error I wanted to fix.”

• Forte, Andrea and Amy Bruckman. (2005). Why do people write for Wikipedia? Incentives to contribute to open-content publishing. Position Paper. GROUP 05 workshop: Sustaining community: The role and design of incentive mechanisms in online systems. Sanibel Island, FL. (“getting credit for one’s work”)
• Lavallee, Andrew (2009). Only 13% of Wikipedia Contributors Are Women, Study Says. Wall Street Journal.
• Editor Survey (2011), Wikimedia Foundation.
• Why do people edit Wikipedia? (2012). Wikimedia Foundation. (qualitative study based on open-ended interview questions)

My personal experience: Being part of a learning and teaching community, meeting smart, passionate, and knowledgeable people. This perspective is somewhat “taboo”; strong sense that “we are not Facebook.”

So, what does contributing look like?

• A blog post about the Proposed Columbia Gorge casino article
• Article about Lies and the Lying Liars…; archive of the talk page, continued onto current talk page

How do professionals work alongside volunteers?

• Cultural institutions (GLAM-Wiki): Wikipedians in Residence, content donations/uploads, edit-a-thons.
• Companies: Conflict of interest is an important concern. Employees must disclose their connection to the company, per tradition and, since 2014, per Terms of Use. (See various approaches compared.)

What has been tried to further engage volunteers?

Number of editors, diversity of editors, expertise of editors are all considered priorities. Here are a few things that have been successful, to some degree, at increasing participation:

• Informal/volunteer-initiated “Collaboration of the Week” programs: See Haiyi Zhu, Robert Kraut, Aniket Kittur (2012): Organizing without Formal Organization: Group Identification, Goal Setting and Social Modeling in Directing Online Production
• Wikimedia Education program: Supporting universities in engaging students as editors.
• Grant programs; the “Inspire” campaign.
• Wiki Loves Monuments, The Wikipedia photo contest around cultural heritage.

Software, policies, and cultural evolution: We have to make it easy.

• Software: Pete Forsyth, presentation at the Future of Text Symposium (2015): Seven principles that support effective collaboration
• Policies: Broad community input is necessary, and messy; process of developing/refining policy could use work.
• Cultural evolution: Focus has often been on remedial issues (dealing with harassment, vandalism, etc.); focus on promoting what works well is needed.

I’m pleased to announce a new Visiting Scholars opportunity at Brown University, through the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage.

Brown would like to support an experienced Wikipedia editor interested in improving articles related to ethnic studies. Through the Wikipedia Visiting Scholars program, educational institutions empower Wikipedians who like to edit in particular topic areas by giving them remote access to databases, ebooks, and other research resources available through the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, Brown’s primary research library for the humanities and social sciences. Wikipedians gain access to high-quality materials to write about topics they’re already interested in, and institutions make a contribution to public knowledge in a particular field by broadening the impact of their collections.

Brown University is a private, Ivy League university in Providence, Rhode Island. Founded in 1764 as “The College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine colonial colleges established before the American Revolution. Brown is currently home to more than 6,000 undergraduates and 2,000 graduate students. There are more than 70 concentrations for undergraduates to focus on, and graduate students pursue studies in the university’s 51 doctoral programs and 28 MA programs.

The Brown University community’s investments in various issues related to ethnic studies is evident in the work done at many of its centers and institutes: the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, the Cogut Humanities Center, the Swearer Center for Public Service, The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, and the Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice, among others. Additionally, Brown is currently working on a “Pathways to Diversity and Inclusion” plan that “outlines a set of concrete, achievable actions to make Brown a more fully diverse and inclusive community.”

The John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage is invested in education, research, and public engagement initiatives to connect individuals and communities to art, history, and culture. It has built a strong reputation for programs that connect university humanities expertise with broader audiences, community-based arts and humanities, and in training students for work in a broad range of cultural organizations. It is institutionally tied to Brown’s American Studies department (which also includes a program in Ethnic Studies) and works closely with its faculty and students.

Supporting this position at Brown are Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Public Humanities Jim McGrath, and the Center’s Director, Professor Susan Smulyan. Asked why they would like to support a Visiting Scholar, they explained that “articles related to topics covered in this field may be in need of revision, creation, or other modes of improvement, and our investments in public humanities have led us to consider how we might help facilitate improvements in the world’s largest online encyclopedia.”

Examples of topic areas the Scholar could work in include diaspora, migration, social movements, and/or political economies of social inequality and racial formation. They are also interested in supporting the improvement of articles about literary and historical figures important to understandings of Native American, Latinx, and Asian-American cultural histories.

For more information, see the Visiting Scholars section of our website, or apply here.

Photo: Nightingale-Brown House by Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0.

07/26/2016-08/01/2016

Mapping

• Portable OpenStreetMap (POSM) aims to provide an offline workflow for mapping by integrating with OpenMapKit, FieldPapers, JOSM and others. It enables volunteers to bring OSM data into the field on very small servers that host their own wireless local area network, allowing editing to occur without any access to the Internet at all.
• User geocodec compares the current indoor mapping of the Olympic venues in Rio de Janeiro in OSM and Google.
• The Osmose-QA tool is available with world wide coverage. (automatic translation)
• Coleman McCormick explains how to map OpenStreetMap data with your own captured videos.
• The Education 2.0 proposal in the wiki was rejected.

Community

• Benutzer -karlos- thinks that there should be an OSM Go, similar to Pokemon Go, to gain new mappers. He has some basic ideas, but is seeking for further input and help.
• Australia is moving north – Andy Mabbett asks what the impact of Australia’s plans to change national coordinates will be on OSM. A followup message has lots more detail.
• Lars Ingebrigtsen considers closing the Gmane archive due to hackers and lawyers costing him much time. Gmane mirrors a large amount of OSM mailing lists, too.
• As we reported in Issue 314, the Kickstarter campaign for a $99 “MapClub” started by Steve Coast was canceled. A blog post by Alex Mahrou talks about the reasons. Steve reacts to that post and the cancellation.
• Katrin Humal published a post about Celine Jacquins (mapeadora) work on OpenStreetMap, HOT, Mapillary and her love for Open Data.
• Martien Sch complains about a change a Mapbox employee made, which removed good, locally surveyed data to replace it with bad remote data. She is also not pleased with his answer on her changeset comment. (automatic translation)
• The Spanish OSM community also wants to create a local chapter.
• User marczoutendijk shares his learning from running the “Welcome-to-new-mappers” program – an initiative to help new mappers in The Netherlands get started. Having run the program for over a year, marczoutendijk explains why he will no longer continue the program.
• Michal Migurski explains in his blog why we don’t need “craft mappers” any longer, and why we should surrender those duties to Mapzen, Facebook and the like. Apparently “Facebook’s efforts here are a quantum leap in seeing from a distance” (though incidentally in Thailand their efforts had to be completely reverted and significant problems have been identified with their edits in Egypt). It’s worth reading the full text, if only for Joost Schouppe’s excellent comments.

Imports

• Chetan Gowda discovered a large amount of poor-quality mapping of streets in Egypt. The comments to his post suggest that this has been auto traced by Facebook.
• Meg Drouhard at the University of Washington wants to import sidewalks in Seattle. The discussion continues over the talk-us, tagging and imports lists.
• User schleuss compares building data across a few cities in the U.S and shows the impact of L.A. Building import project in making OSM data ‘building rich’.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Andy Allan explains how to help and test contributions to the Operations Working Group’s work. The OpenStreetMap blog also calls for participants that want to help.

Events

• State of the Map Japan is happening at Tokyo on August 6th. (automatic translation) The theme for this year is “relations” – fostering stronger partnerships between various users of the map. Participation is free of cost.

Humanitarian OSM

• You would like to see MapSwipe in your language? Then translate the few items in the spreadsheet.
• MSF (Medecins Sans Frontières) urgently needs data for teams in Kinshasa that are battling the yellow fever outbreak. The most recent tasks are #2043 and #2045.

Maps

• Mateusz Konieczny compares OSM carto and other map styles with the aim to improve the style. Further comparisons are to follow.
• [1] OpenRouteService, the first routing service based on OpenStreetMap, now provides routing services for North and South America including all the main routing profiles, e.g. for car, pedestrian, heavy vehicles, bikes – the latter with several options from MTB, road bike to safest bike route etc.

switch2OSM

• Mishari Muqbil suspects that Uber is using OSM data. Grant Slater is waiting for a response. Maybe someone who was at the SOTM US Social Sponsored by Uber would know?

Software

• MapSurfer.NET has published a v.2.5 (beta).

Programming

• Anand Thakker has launched a new project. A promising approach: “A pipeline to simplify building a set of training data for aerial-imagery- and OpenStreetMap- based machine learning. The idea is to use OSM QA Tiles to generate “ground truth” images where each color represents some category derived from OSM features. Being map tiles, it’s then pretty easy to match these up with the desired input imagery.”
• Marcos Dione explains how he’s automatically extracting the centerline of riverbanks.
• Mapbox’ lawyer approaches the OSM2Vectortiles project. Following accusations regarding authorship of the project’s PBF files there now seems to be a problem with the BSD-licensed “MapBox Streets Style”.

Releases

provided by the OSM Software Watchlist

Did you know …

• … MapGive, an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Humanitarian Information Unit, provides a step-by-step guide to help volunteers get started with mapping and contribute to humanitarian initiatives?
• … want to explore the possibilities of OsmAnd on your travels? Matthias Grote from heise Download Team succinctly sums up the most important functions of this versatile OSM app.
• .. Go Map for iOS? Matthijs Melissen shares his personal experience of how the mobile editor has minimized the chance of user errors and made mapping easy.
• … the many approaches to include images in UMAP? Please attempt to read the whole thread.

OSM in the media

• José Sierra (Levante el Marcantil Valenciano) reports about the education of geo experts in Valencia focused on “OSM / HOT”. (Automatic translation).

Other “geo” things

• Troy Lambert explains how maps are used to share information in a visual and engaging manner.
• Apparently Apple has opened a secret development office for Apple Maps in Berlin and recruited developers that were also based in Berlin for Here Maps.
• Brian McClendon writes on Uber’s blog about the mapping efforts that Uber are making, including launching mapping cars on the roads of the U.S.
• The UN OpenGIS Initiative is to identify and develop an Open Source GIS bundle that meets the requirements of UN operations. The logo contest invites the artistic minds in the community to develop the official logo of the UN OpenGIS initiative. Deadline – August 31st, 2016
• Gonzalo Ciruelos tries to mathematically determines the roundness of countries with details of the dataset used, algorithm and the code implementation.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Amagasaki	みんなのサマーセミナー	06/08/2016
Taipei	Taipei Meetup, Mozilla Community Space	08/08/2016
Essen	SommerCamp 2016	12/08/2016-14/08/2016
Ballerup	OpenStreetMap 12th Anniversary	13/08/2016
Posadas	Segunda Reunión Regional de Maperos OpenStreetMap	13/08/2016
Kyoto	京都国宝・浪漫マッピングパーティ：第２回 特別編 サントリー京都ビール工場、恵解山古墳、ねじりまんぽ	20/08/2016
Bonn	FOSS4G 2016 Code Sprint	20/08/2016-22/08/2016
Derby	Derby	23/08/2016
Bonn	FOSS4G 2016	24/08/2016-26/08/2016

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, Polyglot, Rogehm, SomeoneElse, SrrReal, derFred, escada, mgehling, wambacher.

A few days ago, Lydia posted about the first prototype of the new structured data system for Commons, based on Wikidata technology. While this is just a first step, structured data for Commons seems finally within reach.

And that brings home the reality of over 32 million files on Commons, all having unstructured data about them, in the shape of the file description pages. It would be an enormous task do manually transcribe all these descriptions, licenses, etc. to the appropriate data structures. And while we will have to do just that for many of the files, the ones that can be transcribed by a machine, should be.

So I went ahead and re-wrote a prototype tool I had build for just this occasion a while ago. I call it CommonsEdge (a play on Common sedge). It is both an API, and an interface to that API. It will parse a file description page on Commons, and return a JSON object with the data elements corresponding to the description page. An important detail is that this parser does not just pick some elements it understands, and ignore the rest; internally, it tries to “explain” all elements of the description (templates, links, categories, etc.) as data, and fails if it can not explain one. That’s right, the API call will fail with an error, unless 100% of the page would be represented in the JSON object returned. This prevents “half-parsed” pages; a file description page that is successfully pared by the API can safely be replaced in its entirety by the resulting structured data. In case of failure, the error message is usually quite specific and detailed about the cause; this allows for incremental improvements of the parser.

At the moment of writing, I find that ~50-60% of file descriptions (based on sets of 1000 random files) produce a JSON object, that is, can be completely understood by the parser, and completely represented in the result. That’s 16-19 million files descriptions that can be converted to structured data automatically, today. Most of the failures appear to be due to bespoke templates; the more common ones can be added over time.

A word about the output: Since the structured data setup, including properties and foreign keys, is still in flux, I opted for a simple output format. It is not Wikibase format, but similar; most elements (except categories and coordinates, I think) are just lists of type-and-value tuples (example). I try to use URLs as much as possible, for example, when referencing users on Commons (or other Wikimedia projects) or flickr. Licenses are currently links to the Wikidata element corresponding to the used template (ideally, I would like to resolve that through Wikidata properties pointing to the appropriate license).

Source code is available. Pull requests are welcome.

Not everybody understands research right from the start. That’s especially true of the lay public’s understanding of research methods. Many may not understand how experiments and surveys are designed, or how to distinguish between good and bad methods.

Wikipedia may seem like an unlikely source for solving that problem. But as the most-accessed educational resource on Earth, it’s a direct path to millions of people seeking to understand the world. Why not make it as comprehensive as it can be?

We think Wikipedia assignments are an ideal place for students to share their understanding of statistics. A student may spend a term identifying arguments about the validity of a certain type of survey. Typically, they’d hand a paper in to a professor, and then everyone would move on. The paper ends up in a folder, at best.

We haven’t done any studies, but we’d say the odds are in favor of that paper ending up in a trash can.

We think that’s a waste. When students contribute their understanding of data and research methods to Wikipedia, knowledge lives on, and the entire world benefits.

Here’s an example from Columbia University’s Computational Statistics Course, led by Dr. Jose Blanchet. A student in that course created the article on exponential tilting from scratch. That process helps price insurance futures, for example, by helping to integrate the occurrence of rare events.

That’s not a glamorous article, but it goes a long way to helping those who want to understand statistics get their head around it. Someone running an analysis may need to know the underlying math. Now it’s at their fingertips.

But Wikipedia has a lot of room for improving how these articles are presenting statistics to the public. In fact, among the articles considered the best on Wikipedia, only two statistics articles are considered the very best, and only 10 are considered “Good.” Certainly, there are a score of statistics articles that could be added to that list with the help of university students.

Another way for students to get involved is in sharing knowledge about survey design and research methods. For example, student editors in Dr. Benjamin Mako Hill’s Designing Internet Research course at the University of Washington think about survey methods. They analyze analysis. Along the way, they collect information from a variety of sources to build an understanding of how to conduct research, and why. That information is added to Wikipedia.

That means Wikipedia gets a summary of reliable information from academic sources: the building block of any Wikipedia article. Students know that they’re contributing to a bigger project. They’re also practicing how to explain research to the general public. They’re developing communication skills that will help their future research to be understood by future readers.

One student in the class wrote a Wikipedia article about online content analysis. It’s a clear outline for other students, for journalists, and for the general public, of the methodologies and challenges of such research. The course also explored the methods and limitations of Web-based experiments.

If you’d like to have a conversation about integrating Wikipedia into your own course, we’d love to hear from you. Send us an email: contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo: Miastootwarte by Sebastian Sikora, CC-BY 2.0 via Flickr.

If you want to understand how a plant works, it helps to be able to see cells and tissues. That’s easy in a biology lab with microscopes and prepared slides.

Once you leave that world, though, it becomes more difficult to see the structures beneath things.

Wikipedia articles tend to be well-illustrated, with pictures of macroscopic plant structures—the kind of thing you can photograph with your average camera—but high quality photomicrographs are much rarer. It’s even more difficult to find images that can be freely reused in ways that help anyone learn.

Leslie Zeman’s Cellular Anatomy class class at the University of Washington helped tackle that problem. Student editors in that class created and uploaded images of the anatomical structures of plants.

Cross sections of Ranunculus roots, like the one above, are commonly used to teach plant anatomy. This image was uploaded by students in that course.

Sundews are carnivorous plants that trap insects using glandular hairs. The hairs are big enough to see with the naked eye, but a photomicrograph like the one above, uploaded by students in the class, give a sense of things at the cellular level.

From my own experience as an instructor, I know how challenging it can be to get students to engage with microscopy. Often, students are only motivated to look for what they’re “supposed to see,” and spend their time trying to match the slide to what’s in their textbook.

When students actually delve into the universe at the other end of the microscope, that’s when the magic happens. When you see the work that students in Leslie Zeman’s class have produced, you know you’re looking at the handiwork of enthusiastic explorers.

Wiki Ed’s tools make it easy to turn a good class assignment into a project with wider, more lasting implications. By adding their images to Wikimedia Commons, students in the class have done something that reaches outward from the microscope, out into the world. They’ve expanded the pool of freely reusable plant anatomy images. They’ve made images available for others to use and learn from, to create new teaching resources for all.

The Wikipedia Year of Science is all about making an individual student’s work more visible than it could ever be. When your students connect their learning to Wikipedia, they’re a part of something bigger than their classroom.

Want to see what your class can do? See how you can get started right away. Or send us an email: contact@wikiedu.org.

Top Photo: Vascular cambium of helianthus stem by Katrina Burkhardt – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Wikipedia is the go-to source of knowledge for human beings around the globe. That’s why the Wiki Education Foundation’s Year of Science campaign works with science classrooms in US and Canadian universities. Together, we’re bringing clearer, more comprehensive knowledge about science to the public.

But just as knowledge transcends borders, so does Wikipedia. So we were excited to watch the Year of Science take on a life of its own in Brazil.

João Alexandre Peschanski is the Cásper Líbero Professor of Political Science and communications supervisor for a Sao Paulo research foundation, FAPESP, working in the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics (RIDC NeuroMat) at the University of São Paulo. He’s been guiding a campaign inspired by Wiki Ed’s Year of Science, through the USP’s Center for Research, Innovation and Diffusion (Cepid). Media there has dubbed their initiative the “Brazilian Year of Science.”

“Our focus has been on the mathematical theory of the brain … We choose interesting concepts in papers our research team have produced, and in a collective effort with scientists, journalists and students, create or improve the pertaining content on Wikipedia.”

João says there was about a 30-year gap between the the science reflected in the sources on Portuguese Wikipedia, and the cutting-edge developments being made in that field.

The Brazilian initiative has added thousands of words on topics pertaining to mathematical properties of neural dynamics to the Portuguese Wikipedia. For example, they’ve expanded the Portuguese language article about Alzheimer’s disease, and more complex topics such as brachial plexus injury. They also created the entry on biological neuron models, and created a video that explains “Spike sorting” — a way of tracking and measuring the electrical properties of cells — which appears on both the Portuguese and English editions of Wikipedia.

In their model, experts and researchers work to explain concepts to volunteers from theWikimedia Community User Group Brasil. They go on to write articles based on that expert engagement. Many of the authors are postdoctoral researchers.

“At this point, we are the largest research organization to have a clear commitment to disseminate science through Wikipedia in Brazil. And we are growing: the University of São Paulo has just awarded us four undergraduate positions to work on fostering a broader engagement with Wikipedia on our campus.”

João, alongside Wikipedian-in-Residence David Alves and long-time Wikipedia volunteer Célio Costa Filho, have been drawing on Wiki Ed’s US-Canadian Year of Science model to expand the program in their own country. David is a journalism graduate who started editing Wikipedia for a class project taught by João. He’s now the first person to receive a state grant to promote Wikipedia in Brazil, thanks to the São Paulo Research Foundation.

“Researchers supply qualified, technical knowledge, and we transform the content to a more comprehensible and clear one,” Alves said.

We’re excited to see the idea and tools we’re creating to help take knowledge beyond classroom walls are, themselves, reaching across borders. The Wikipedia Year of Science really is a global phenomenon, and we’re excited to see the work that volunteer Wikipedians and groups are taking on around the world!

Photo: Flag of Brazil by Governo do Brasil. Similar file available at Portal of the Brazilian Government (accessed in November 4, 2011), Public Domain. 

Wikipedia, love it or loathe it, is one of the most-viewed sources of science information on Earth.

Wikipedia is visited more often on mobile devices than USA Today, Fox News, and CNN combined. If students had an opportunity to communicate science with any of those audiences, most instructors would jump at the chance.

Once those instructors learn about the opportunities with Wikipedia, they do jump. The Wiki Education Foundation supported 116 science courses (more than 2,000 students) in the Spring 2016 alone. Collectively, those students have added information to articles viewed 67 million times.

That’s an incredible opportunity for students.

“I hoped that students would feel more motivation to write a public document than an essay that only their professor would read,” said Dr. Peter Barker, who teaches a course on science history at the University of Oklahoma. “The results exceeded my expectations. Already, more people have read the student output from this course than can possibly have read my own 40 years of writing.”

Imagine telling students that they’re responsible for learning, understanding, and communicating science knowledge for thousands of curious readers around the world. But the assignment is about more than the impact on readers.

Here are five reasons so many science instructors in higher ed are trading students’ final papers for a Wikipedia writing assignment.

1. Students apply their understanding to specific examples.

Science communication can help students apply concepts to specific cases. For example, Washington University St. Louis professor Joan Strassmann’s students study social insects. As students study social behavior, they create articles about specific species. They see the behavior in context. Those students have contributed hundreds of articles about insects, bees, and wasps. We’ve seen others: articles about the surface structures of planets, for example. Currently, Radford University students are doing a similar work with insects. Others have adopted minerals.

Other classes dive in even deeper, targeting one aspect of a species’ behavior or physiology; or about a single atomic bond or family. All of these tie back to broader learnings from the course, allowing students to write detailed examples. By focusing on communicating that knowledge with others, they master it for themselves.

“Articles on African archaeology are few and far between on Wikipedia,” said Dr. Kate Grillo, whose class at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, focused on coverage of those sites. “And those that do exist are often in need of substantial editing. I saw an opportunity, then, to both improve Wikipedia content and to teach my students a new set of skills.”

Some classes are helping to diversify the world’s idea of what a scientist looks like. Instructors can assign students to write about women scientists, black scientists, or others overlooked by history. We’ve seen great examples of Native American scientists, too. That helps students understand the diversity that drives scientific knowledge. It also helps bring more diversity to Wikipedia’s coverage of scientists.

2. Students become the teachers.

Students can challenge themselves to explain scientific concepts in words that their peers understand. Significant portions of Wikipedia articles contain jargon that lay readers can’t easily make sense of. By working to translate that jargon into comprehensible information, students develop their own understanding, and practice science communication skills. Acknowledging the gaps between public knowledge and their own is a valuable lesson for young scientists. Learning how to communicate through those gaps is essential.

Sydonie Schimler, a student whose work appeared on Wikipedia’s front page, told us: “I had to really think about what I chose to include in the article, so that everyone could understand it and gain something new from it. It was a nice change to write something both more general, but also scientifically detailed.”

3. Students contextualize their learning.

A great way to teach communication in sciences is to provide a context around science topics. That can help the public understand why a topic is important. Wikipedia articles often (but not always) improve when students think beyond scientific concepts to scientific contexts. As one student wrote:

“To write an effective Wikipedia article you have to really appreciate context,” he said. “For instance, chemistry students who want to prepare a complete Wikipedia article on a bioinorganic compound need to appreciate the biological, environmental, and historical context of that compound. We are forced to acknowledge aspects of the story that we may have otherwise ignored.”

Students have to understand the history behind a scientific concept, and explain how it’s changed. That gives students a better appreciation of the scientific process, and helps them express knowledge as a fluid, changing thing.

4. The public reads, and writes, Wikipedia.

Students who edit science articles on Wikipedia aren’t operating in a vacuum. Wikipedia’s readers, and other writers, will want to see evidence for what your student contributes. They may have to make compelling arguments about what should be included, in ways that the lay reader of Wikipedia can understand. Typically that means choosing reliable sources, but also learning how to defend their selection of information and how they’re presenting it. That’s a unique opportunity for undergraduates to practice direct engagement with the public about science. It can also offer insight into how the public perceives science information, and the types of questions non-scientists may have about your field.

Students will learn to be more aware of practices that can alienate readers. Wikipedia articles aim to be free of jargon and specialized language. It encourages writing for clarity in ways that academic writing may not.

Dr. Heather Tienson, who uses the assignment in her biochemistry course at UCLA, describes it this way: “I tell them on the first day: to write a good article it needs to be one that a high school student can understand, but also one that I can gain something from.”

5. Students develop media literacy skills.

On the surface, Wikipedia is about as easy as writing a post for Facebook. The difference is in the rigor of fact-finding for the content you share. This encourages students to apply a variety of skills in novel ways. It means media literacy, as students read and critique not just Wikipedia, but also the sources they use to build a reliable article.

We encourage students to approach Wikipedia with skepticism. What makes an article good, and what makes it bad? Once they internalize how to read Wikipedia, they can begin writing it. Once they write it, they develop the confidence to express what they’ve learned, and to fact-check themselves with the same kinds of critique they apply to others. That can transform knowledge from something learned into something known. It takes those media literacy skills and asks them to write to those standards they’ve internalized. That’s an essential skill for science communication.

If you’d like to explore the science communication potential of Wikipedia, we’d love to help. Our Year of Science initiative is still underway. We’ve already worked with more than 4,000 students this year across disciplines, and we’re looking to make an even bigger impact on sciences in the Fall. We’d love to have you join us, and offer your students a way to unlock their term papers and transform them into a hands-on experience in improving the public’s knowledge of science.

Want to get involved? Click here.

If you’d like to start a conversation about applying these skills to your own course, drop us a line at contact@wikiedu.org.

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

Wiki Loves Monuments, the biggest photo competition in the world, will take place in September 2016 for the seventh time! Throughout September, people in more than 30 countries will be invited to share photos of their national heritage through Wikipedia.

Organizing Wiki Loves Monuments every year relies almost entirely on volunteers who get together to make the contest happen in every participating country. We need people like you to make Wiki Loves Monuments a success again.

If you would like to see your country participate in Wiki Loves Monuments this year, now is a good time to make sure you’re on track. This means:

• Make sure that your country is in  the list of (definitely) participating countries for 2016. You can click on the country name to offer assistance or find out how you can participate.
• Can’t find your country in the list? Are you interested to (help) organise the competition in your country? Then tell the international team about your interest, so that we can connect you with other interested people. Please leave a message here, or if you prefer that, contact us through one of these channels. The international team will work with you to help you make it happen.
• You don’t need to wait for us. Go through the guidelines for local organisers carefully and make sure you have started making progress in each of the categories discussed in that page. If this is the first time your country is participating in WLM, it is especially important to get started on this checklist sooner rather than later. If you have questions or need the international team’s help with any of the items, please post your questions here or contact us through one of these channels.

If you need any help at all, we’re here to for you. You can ask for help from organisers in other countries, or talk with the international team. Please check here to learn how. They usually can remove some of the blockers for organizing the contest in collaboration with you.

Let us have an awesome Wiki Loves Monuments competition this year!

You can also follow us on Twitter or join the Facebook group.

We started the Year of Science because we see Wikipedia as a vehicle for science outreach to the public.

Scientists often do contribute to Wikipedia. It’s a way to bring knowledge about their field to the public. But many don’t have the time to edit as much as they’d like. That’s why instructors consider writing for Wikipedia as a special kind of research assignment.

Students add content from credible sources with a reputation for fact-checking and rigorous peer review. They cite everything they add, so it’s verifiable for millions of readers. Students learn more, apply their knowledge of the field, and contribute to a durable knowledge resource.

At last month’s American Society of Plant Biologists’ (ASPB) conference in Austin, Texas, Outreach Manager Samantha Erickson and I met Dr. Sarah Wyatt’s students from her fall 2015 Writing for the Life Sciences class at Ohio University.

Anne Sternberger, a PhD student in the course, told us, “I always used Wikipedia growing up, but I never trusted it for actual biological information until I took Dr. Wyatt’s class and realized scientists contribute to it.”

So why wait? We asked scientists at the conference to contribute to Wikipedia. ASPB members found Wikipedia articles about plant biology. In 15 minutes, they evaluated an article’s quality, found missing content, and made notes about plant science articles that need work.

This expert analysis served as a starting point for the Simons Foundation’s Wikipedia edit-a-thon at the conference. Together, our workshop offered a quick overview of Wikipedia, and empowered them to contribute. 26 attendees added nearly 7,000 words in just a few hours.

Wikipedia is the world’s most popular open-access educational site. When experts, or students under expert guidance, share knowledge, the whole world benefits.

Dr. Judy Brusslan’s work during the edit-a-thon is an excellent example. During Sunday’s evaluation exercise, she read the article about plant senescence. The information about hormones that cause aging in plants wasn’t quite right. So she joined us at the edit-a-thon to learn how to edit Wikipedia.

After our brief overview, and with facilitators helping new editors dive right in, Dr. Brusslan got to work. She clarified and corrected the first two paragraphs of the article with better information.

Now, when anyone searches for “plant senescence” on Google, Dr. Brusslan’s definition comes right up. You don’t even have to click through to Wikipedia! Google pulled it up and presented it on the search page.

“Wikipedia is going to be a vital part of public science literacy in the future,” said Dr. Wyatt’s PhD student Alexander Meyers.

We agree. That’s why we think Wikipedia literacy is so important. It’s why we support instructors as they develop curriculum for students to edit Wikipedia. They’re training the next generation of scientists.

We’re excited to see the fruits of our partnership with ASPB. If you’re a plant scientist interested in channeling student research and writing projects into a public platform, visit me at the Botany 2016 conference! If you have any questions or want to get started right away, send an email to contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo: Oregon Grape Leaves by Socrtwo. Public Domain.

07/19/2016-07/25/2016

Mapping

• BushmanK feels the need to explain the differences between tag values, value lists and separate keys.
• HermannstadtGeographer tries to argue for mapping cell towers in OSM. Though not every comment likes his reasoning.
• Kaxtillo points out (automatic translation) the availability of Strava data for OSM mapping and Joost Schouppe explains how he utilizes these GPS traces to map forest trails.
• Arun Ganesh summarizes the convention for multilingual name tagging in India.
• [1] Grant Slater shows a picture of his high precision OpenStreetMap survey kit.

Community

• The user HermannstadtGeographer announces the start of a laboratory for creating the Big Map of Sibiu , Romania and calls for volunteers.
• Steve Coast looks for new challenges by finding a private chatroom for GIS professionals and experts, including the most highly ranked luminaries for only 99$. Update: Shortly before our release Steve Coast cancelled the project even though the funding goal had been reached.
• Gregor MacLennan writes about Mapeo, a fork of the editor iD, which helps people in the Amazonas to map their neighbourhood.
• PRX_MPK explains Facebook’s results of automatic detection of streets from aerial imagery.
• Even though not mathematically correct or equivalent, Minh Nguyen’s compares our progressively ever more elaborately detailed mapping to fractals.
• Skippern presents his homemade Mapillary camera mount for his car.
• Mapillary reworked their user interface and the website’s viewer from ground up.
• More than 40 Videos from State of the Map US 2016 available now. From twitter feedback, recommendations goes to: Katherine Maher from Wikipedia, Wikipedia Maps, OSM Past & Future from Alan McConchie, Field Papers from Lindsey Jacks, Portable OSM and OpenStreetView from Navicat
• Clémence Maret (LaCroix)blogs about Vincent, Vice President of the French OpenStreetMap association and his penchant for hydrant mapping. (Automatictranslation.
• Maarten Deen believes that the formula 1 uses OSM data for their rainradar overlay. Several pictures confirm it’s true.

Imports

• Maning Sambale reports about the progress of importing buildings in Los Angeles.

Humanitarian OSM

• Earlier this month HOT launched the new Pacific Drone Imagery Dashboard (PacDID) project to support aerial imagery use in Pacific island communities which have experienced significant typhoon damage in recent years.

Maps

• Mapzen shows on a map, which of its produced extracts get downloaded most often.

Open Data

• After extensive research, the LabGIS, has compiled an extensive base of 587 links to free geographic data for viewing and download. This base is now open to the public and can be accessed by anyone.
• Jan Erik Solem underlines Mapillary’s commitment to OpenStreetMap and open data.

Licences

• On legal-talk there’s a thorough discussion, if the new hotel information and reservation feature in Maps.Me is compatible with the OSM license.

Software

• GSoC student, Zabot shows his latest extensions to OSM2World.
• A new version of Vespucci just arrived. However, due to problems with Google/Android, this version is only available via Github and not via Google’s play store.
• Jennings Anderson presents his tool collection to analyse contributions to OpenStreetMap. These tools are created for the work of his PhD thesis. More details can be found in his user diary.
• The editor OSM2Go got a patch to work with IDs larger than 32 bit.
• Anita Graser publishes a CKAN-Browser-Plugin for QGIS that allows to access the CKAN-data of “Deutsche Bahn”. (via @underdarkGIS)

Programming

• Rory McCann from the Geofabrik presents his port of the OSM-Carto style to vector tiles.

Releases

provided by the OSM Software Watchlist

Did you know …

• … Daniel Hänßgen’s tactile maps? The German newspaper “Die Welt” reported on this work from 2012. (automatic translation). He also wrote a book based on his master’s thesis paperback book named “HaptOSM”.
• … the first “Welcome Map” for refugees in Paris? CitizenPost writes about students Blandine Richard of the Sorbonne university, wo programmed a multilingual (5) map with their friends and who would like to develop it further. (Automatic translation)

OSM in the media

• #MappingEcuador was a citizen initiative started in response to the earthquake disaster, where people from around the world added data to OpenStreetMap, that would help them not only in cases of natural disasters but also to get a better overview of the surrounding territory. Free maps were generated after the earthquake.
• Volunteers work together to map neighborhoods and tell their stories.

Other “geo” things

• Making the most of Open Data, a blogpost from Katrin Humal.
• Simon Kuestenmacher shows a map of all countries that share a border with exactly one other country.
• Finally with what3pokemon and what3ikea, there are coordinate systems that can be accepted by everyone!! (via @Anonymaps)

Upcoming Events

Dónde	Qué	Fecha	País
Tokyo	”’State of The Map Japan 2016”’	06/08/2016
Amagasaki	みんなのサマーセミナー	06/08/2016
Taipei	Taipei Meetup, Mozilla Community Space	08/08/2016
Essen	”’SommerCamp 2016”’	12/08/2016-14/08/2016
Ballerup	OpenStreetMap 12th Anniversary	13/08/2016
Kyoto	京都国宝・浪漫マッピングパーティ：第２回 特別編 サントリー京都ビール工場、恵解山古墳、ねじりまんぽ	20/08/2016
Bremen	Mappingparty POI im Hackerspace Bremen	20/08/2016
Bonn	FOSS4G 2016 Code Sprint	20/08/2016-22/08/2016

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 Laura Barroso, Nakaner, Peda, Polyglot, Rogehm, derFred, jinalfoflia, mgehling.

I recently noted that datafication has a Wikipedia article. This is another term for a phenomenon I usually speak of as quantification, following Ritzer and Rescher. I figured I should start keeping a list of related terms and uses; if you’ve encounter a similar term, please leave it in the comments. If nothing else, this could be used to improve the Wikipedia articles.

For enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion. (AdornoHorkheimer 1979, p. 3)

Calculability or quantity rather than quality: Quality is notoriously difficult to evaluate. How do we assess the quality of a hamburger, or physician, or a student? Instead of even trying, in an increasing number of cases, a rational society seeks to develop a series of quantifiable measures that it takes as surrogates for quality. This urge to quantify has given great impetus to the development of the computer and has, in turn, been spurred by the widespread use and increasing sophistication of the computer. (Ritzer 1983, p. 103)

Synopsis: (1) Measurement is more than a matter of mere quantification; only in special cases do quantities actually measure something. (2) Quantification in and of itself is no guarantor of objectivity. And actual measurements, though indeed sufficient for objectivity, is certainly not necessary to it. Objectivity, after all, does not require quantification. (Rescher 1997, “Objectivity”, p. 75)

The Regime of Computation, then, provides a narrative that accounts for the evolution of the universe, life, mind, and mind reflecting on mind by connecting these emergences with computational processes that operate both in human-created simulations and in the universe understood as software running on the “Universal Computer” we call reality. This is the larger context in which code aquires special, indeed universal, significance. In the Regime of Computation, code is understood as the discourse system that mirrors what happens in nature and that generates nature itself. (Hayles 2005, “My Mother Was a Computer”, p. 27)

This book is not about computers. It is instead about a set of widespread contemporary beliefs about computers [computationaism]—beliefs that can be hard to see as such because of their ubiquity and because of the power of computers themselves. More specifically, it is about the methods computers use to operate, methods referred to generally as computation. Computation—as metaphor, method, and organizing fram—occupies a privileged and under-analyzed role in our culture. Influential new concepts often emerge alongside technological shifts—they emerged alongside the shifts to steam power, electricity, and television, for example (see, e.g., Marvin 1988). (Golumbia 2009, p. 1)

Given this massive scale, it is tempting to understand big data solely in terms of size. But that would be misleading. Big data is also characterized by the ability to render into data many aspects of the world that have never been quantified before; call it “datafication.” For example, location has been datafied, first with the invention of longitude and latitude, and more recently with GPS satellite systems. Words are treated as data when computers mine centuries’ worth of books. Even friendships and “likes” are datafied, via Facebook. (CukierMayer-Schoenberger2013rbd)

However compelling some examples of applied Big Data research, the ideology of dataism shows characteristics of a widespread belief in the objective quantification and potential tracking of all kinds of human behavior and sociality through online media technologies. Besides, dataism also involves trust in the (institutional) agents that collect, interpret, and share (meta)data culled from social media, internet platforms, and other communication technologies. (VanDijk2014ddd, p. 198)