When students study a new topic, they often turn to a search engine to get a better understanding of the topic. Those search results take them to Wikipedia, where (hopefully) they find a comprehensive and understandable summary. As they begin to understand the concept, they scroll to the bottom to find sources for further reading. Students find links to academic articles within their university libraries and click through for a deeper reading.
That’s how it works for students. But what about the rest of the world – those who can’t access those journal articles? Wikipedia may be their only source of information.
That’s one of the reasons we launched the Wikipedia Year of Science. If Wikipedia is the general public’s science primer, we believe it should be as comprehensive and accurate as possible. Most importantly, it should be understandable.
This year, science students all over the United States and Canada have participated in our initiative to create science content that your typical non-scientist can understand. They’re educating the public while learning how to communicate science. Students are already making Wikipedia better for the world. But we’re not satisfied yet!
That’s why we attended so many science conferences this summer—to spread the word about teaching with Wikipedia.
In July, we attended the Allied Genetics Conference, where we met dozens of university instructors who want the public to understand how geneticists’ research is transforming the world. We joined plant biologists at the American Society of Plant Biologists’ annual meeting, where scientists stressed the importance of educating the world about increasing the food supply over the next century. Again, Wikipedia is the place to do so. Later in August, Wiki Ed attended the Botanical Society of America’s conference, the Joint Statistics Meeting, MathFest, the Ecological Society of America’s conference, and the American Chemical Society’s fall meeting.
The common thread across all of these events? Science communication. In fact, a quick search of these conferences’ programs turns up nearly 100 results for sessions about science communication and public engagement. In a digital world that provides so much information to the curious among us, scientists need to learn how to speak to people without their expertise and rigorous research background. Writing Wikipedia is one way our future scientists can develop this skill.
Won’t you join us? If you’d like to work with us during the Year of Science and beyond, we’d love to hear from you. Whether you’re a higher education instructor looking to bring Wikipedia into your course, a librarian looking to expand access to your special collections with a Visiting Scholar, or you’re interested in offering financial support, reach out to us: contact@wikiedu.org.
The Classroom Program has been busy onboarding instructors for the fall term. The fall marks the second half of the Year of Science, and continues Wiki Ed’s trend of growth. We’ve nearly doubled the number of supported courses compared to this time last fall.
Wiki Ed staff was on the road in August, promoting the Year of Science with instructors at the Joint Statistics meeting, MathFest, the Ecological Society of America, and American Chemical Society events. These events create an environment for face-to-face contact with experts in the sciences, and provide an opportunity to raise awareness among the scientific community.
We’ve opened new Visiting Scholars positions: Brown University, which focuses on ethnic studies, and Temple University, which is seeking to contribute to the improvement of articles about Philadelphia history and/or the Holocaust.
Wiki Ed has produced a new subject-specific brochure for students developing Wikipedia content on topics related to linguistics. The guide is a nod to our partnership with the Linguistics Society of America, and discusses scaffolds and frameworks for articles related to dialects and concepts in linguistics.
Wiki Ed’s Student Learning Outcomes research project’s surveys were approved by the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Human Subjects Research Protection Office and Internal Review Board. These voluntary surveys were distributed to students via the Wiki Ed Dashboard, and will form the core of Research Fellow Zach McDowell’s analysis.
Programs
Educational Partnerships
An instructor at the Botany 2016 Conference in Savannah, Georgia learns more about Wikipedia as a teaching tool.
August was a busy month for the Educational Partnerships team. Staff traveled to several academic conferences to promote the Wikipedia Year of Science. Educational Partnerships Manager Jami Mathewson attended the Botanical Society of America’s annual meeting in Savannah, Georgia, where she spoke with botanists about plant physiology and taxonomy. While there, she talked to instructors about the role their students can play in improving Wikipedia articles related to the plants they study.
Director of Programs LiAnna Davis speaks to a MathFest 2016 attendee.
Outreach Manager Samantha Erickson attended the Joint Statistics Meeting in Chicago. This visit focused on increasing communication skills in students through Wikipedia, encouraging instructors to see the role our assignments have in elevating the public understanding of statistical concepts.
Director of Programs LiAnna Davis joined Jami at MathFest in Columbus, Ohio. Math instructors expressed an increased interest in Wikipedia writing assignments, based on the communication experience they provide. Students need to develop communication skills during their studies. Math departments want to help their students be more competitive when they enter the workforce. A Wikipedia assignment is an excellent fit, since math articles on Wikipedia, though often accurate, are difficult for laypeople to comprehend. When students translate that content and make it accessible to the general public, they build skills otherwise overlooked in the math classroom.
Educational Partnerships Manager Jami Mathewson speaks with an attendee at the Ecological Society of America conference.
Jami and Samantha went to Fort Lauderdale for the Ecological Society of America conference. There, instructors and students alike were interested in Wiki Ed’s Ecology handbook, which aids ecologists and experts in editing Wikipedia.
Wrapping up the month of travel and outreach, Jami attended the American Chemical Society’s fall meeting in Philadelphia, PA. There, she presented to attendees about using Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool in the chemistry classroom. She also joined the Simons Foundation’s edit-a-thon, where participants learned how to contribute and focused on articles about chemistry or women chemists.
Classroom Program
Status of the Classroom Program for Fall 2016 as of August 31:
138 Wiki Ed-supported courses were in progress (69, or 50%, were led by returning instructors)
720 student editors were enrolled
86% of students were up-to-date with the student training
Students edited 32 articles and created 2 new entries.
The Fall 2016 term has started, and we’re well on our way to supporting our largest number of classes to date. This time last year, Wiki Ed had 86 courses in progress, compared to 138 this term. In Fall 2015 as a whole, we supported 162 courses, just 24 more than where we stand today, with the fall term yet to begin. This growth is due in large part to our outreach team and to our ability to provide instructors and students with meaningful learning experiences.
As the Fall term begins, we’re also entering the second half of the Year of Science. So far for Fall 2016, we have 82 courses in STEM and social science fields, and we anticipate many more to come on board as the term progresses. In Spring and Summer 2016, we supported 130 courses and over 2,300 students during this year-long initiative to improve science content on Wikipedia and science literacy and communication among our students. Our Year of Science courses have ranged from genetics to archaeology and from sociology to plant biology. With a half year still to go, our students have already made a significant impact on Wikipedia. They’ve added over 2.3 million words, edited over 2,300 articles, and created almost 200 new entries. We’re excited to see what the second half of the Year of Science brings!
Some examples of article expansions are coming in from summer courses:
Tamarins are small monkeys found in Central and South American. The black tamarin, one of the smallest primates, is found exclusively in northeastern Brazil where it is threatened by habitat destruction. At the start of the summer, the Wikipedia article on the black tamarin was a two-sentence stub. Students in Nancy Clum’s Biology 124 BKclass spend the summer expanding the article. They added a section describing the species, and others about its distribution, behavior, feeding, reproduction, and conservation status. And in so doing, they turned a stub into an informative article.
Kathryn Grafton’s course from the University of British Columbia took advantage of the shorter term length in the summer to investigate a specific kind of content gap: omissions in articles themselves. Students looked at articles related to knowledge mobilization, a term describing how research is or could be brought out of academia and into public use. Students looked at research, knowledge mobilizations and scholarly analysis, highlighting where Wikipedia did not include important, relevant information, often from outside the west. Because all our student editors are wikipedians, they didn’t stop with criticism and have proposed changes with sources from their research for each article!
Community Engagement
This month we are happy to announce two new opportunities for Visiting Scholars. The first is through Brown University’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, which is looking for a Wikipedia to improve articles about ethnic studies. Supporting the position at Brown are Jim McGrath, Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Public Humanities, and Susan Smulyan, the Center’s Director. The second position is at Temple University, which would like to support a Wikipedian’s work on subjects related to the history of Philadelphia, the history of African Americans in Philadelphia, and/or the history and study of the Holocaust. Associate University Librarian Steven Bell is supporting the position at Temple University Libraries. There’s more information about these positions in our blog posts about them:
Community Engagement Manager Ryan McGrady is focused on recruiting experienced Wikipedians for the open positions. He also continued to work with several other sponsors at various stages of the onboarding process and new contacts thanks to Jami and Samantha’s outreach at recent conferences.
The current Visiting Scholars continued to produce some stand-out work. George Mason University’s Gary Greenbaum brought Mr. Dooley up to Featured Article status. At the end of the month, it was also selected as “Today’s Featured Article” on Wikipedia’s main page. Barbara Page’s article, Serial rapist, was also featured on the main page in the Did You Know section with the following: “[Did you know] … that serial rapists are more likely to be strangers to their victims than single-victim rapists?”
Program Support
Communications
Communications Manager Eryk Salvaggio worked with Product Manager for Digital Services Sage Ross to organize a touchup of the Wiki Education Foundation’s website. The new site encourages deeper reads for specific audiences with visual cues directing readers to the blog, teaching resources, and fundraising pages.
In August, we also announced publication of a new subject-specific brochure, Editing Wikipedia articles on Linguistics. The guide was written with input from Dr. Gretchen McCulloch and Wikipedia editors User:Cnilep, User:Uanfala, and our own Wikipedia Content Expert in Humanities, Adam Hyland. It takes student editors through the process of writing or improving Wikipedia articles, with templates for structuring articles on languages, dialects, and linguistic concepts.
Eryk worked with Wikipedia Content Expert in the Sciences Ian Ramjohn to complete some updating of our training modules for students and the instructors’ orientation.
Чому Вікіпедія важлива для жінок у науці Eryk Salvaggio, “Why Wikipedia Matters to Women in Science,” translation by Vira Motorko for Wikimedia Ukraine. (August 1)
With the Fall term ramping up, Sage spent much of August fixing bugs in the course creation and course cloning features, adding Dashboard features that make it easier for Wiki Ed staff to onboard and monitor new courses, and updating the dashboard survey functionality for UMass Amherst’s Internal Review Board’s requirements for the Student Learning Outcomes Research. Work also continues on making the dashboard codebase easier for new developers to get started.
Among the more noticeable improvements:
The ‘Overview’ tab of each course now shows the number of images uploaded.
Students can now see and edit the article(s) they are working on directly from the course Overview. (This feature debuted earlier, but had been disabled for the last few months.)
Research and Academic Engagement
Research
In August, Data Science Intern Kevin Schiroo analyzed the portion of academic content produced by Wiki Ed students. This came in two parts. First, Kevin uncovered and incorporated new “signals” within an article that identified it was related to academic content. That classifier pulled information from references, introduction text, templates, and the use of academic words to classify articles as academic or not academic with a high degree of accuracy.
After constructing the classifier tool, Kevin applied it to a sample of Wikipedia pages to calculate the total productivity of Wiki Ed students within topics deemed academic.
Percent of general academic content contributed by Wiki Ed student editors.
When we consider all academic content, we saw some substantial contribution rates. Over the spring term, Wiki Ed student editors averaged 2.6% of all content. However, the entire term can be misleading, since we do not expect significant contributions early in the term, when most classes aren’t active. Shortening the window to 30 days shows that we produced 4.6% of all content between mid-April and mid-May.
Percent of early-stage academic content contributed by Wiki Ed student editors.
We also examined contribution rates for early academic content, since this is a focal area for Wiki Ed. Here, we see substantially higher contribution rates. Over the whole term last term, Wiki Ed’s student editors produced 6.6% of this content; during our most active period (between mid-April and mid-May) we produced 10.1% of all early academic content, that is, either new articles or articles that were in a fledgling stage of development when students first encountered them.
Details can be found on meta and a general overview is available on Wiki Ed’s website.
Student Learning Outcomes Research
The Human Subjects Research Protection Office / IRB at the University of Massachusetts Amherst approved the protocol titled “Student Learning Outcomes using Wikipedia Based Assignments,” in just three weeks from submission. Research Fellow Zach McDowell worked with experts from various fields (particularly, Information Literacy and Composition and Rhetoric) that have taught with Wikipedia-based assignments to refine the survey’s assessments. Zach constructed the initial assessment and survey tool on the Wiki Ed dashboard, engaged the Wiki Ed in a round of testing and feedback, and implemented those changes. Additionally, Zach gathered valuable feedback from board members, helping to further improve and shape the research questionnaires. These changes were re-submitted to IRB and approved.
Helaine, Eryk, and Zach worked on refining a communications strategy to instructors and students, including a script for an introductory video for the research project, which will be shown to students before they are provided with a consent form.
Final approval for this phase of the project was received in late August. The survey has been released, with emails sent in waves to students and instructors that had already on-boarded. These emails are sent out multiple times a week to students and instructors as they sign up for classes, informing them of the study and encouraging them to participate.
Finance & Administration / Fundraising
Finance & Administration
Monthly expenses for the Wiki Education Foundation in August 2016.
For the month of August, expenses were $150,664 versus our planned spending of $208,033. The variance of $57k was primarily due to the departure and vacancy of two staff positions ($21k), as well as some cutbacks and savings with travel ($26k) expenses.
Year to Date expenses for the Wiki Education Foundation as of August 2016.
Our year-to-date expenses are $335,774 versus our planned expenditures of $436,676. Along with the staff vacancies and cutbacks in travel mentioned above, the $101k variance is also a result of deferring our fundraising and marketing campaigns ($49k) until later in the year.
Fundraising
Current priorities:
Securing new funding for fall 2016
Renewing major institutional funders in early 2017
Office of the ED
Current priorities:
Securing funding
Preparing for the strategic planning process
In August, Executive Director Frank Schulenburg started the “Executive Director’s Major Gift Campaign,” reaching out to high net-worth individuals via personalized solicitation letters, followed by phone calls with prospects. The goal of this new initiative is to measure the effectiveness of an in-house mail campaign based on a highly-curated list of contacts. Also, using A/B-testing, we’ll be comparing the results of using different messages and the return from different target groups. Inspired by the #100wikidays challenge, we’re aiming at sending 100 letters in 100 days.
Frank began preparing for the upcoming strategic planning exercise. With our current strategic plan running out in 2017, Frank and the board will create a new strategy for the next two years. In preparation for the kick-off, Frank started drafting a process and gathered materials for distribution among the participants of the planning exercise.
Finally, Frank and the members of the senior leadership team used the first iteration of the new “Executive Director’s Summary Report” which aims at increasing our effectiveness in keeping track of organizational performance indicators on a monthly level. Based on the feedback received this month, we’ll further improve the usefulness of the report card in future iterations.
We are happy to announce that the 6th Civil Court of Jacarepaguá in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil has ruled in favor of the Wikimedia Foundation in an injunction claim filed by Brazilian musician Rosanah Fienngo.
Ms. Fienngo had filed a lawsuit objecting to the inclusion of information about her personal life on her Portuguese Wikipedia page. The court stated that although the information available on her Wikipedia page concerned her private life, Ms. Fienngo had already disclosed that information to the media herself, so its inclusion on Wikipedia was not an invasion of her privacy.
The Portuguese Wikipedia article about Ms. Fienngo contained information about her as a notable public figure in Brazil. This information included some details of her personal life, but this information was derived from public sources, most of which Ms. Fienngo had provided herself, such as an interview Ms. Fienngo gave to the gossip website O Fuxico.
In 2014, Ms. Fienngo filed an indemnification claim against Google Brasil and “Wikipedia,” apparently believing that Google was responsible for the content of Wikipedia. In November 2014, the Wikimedia Foundation received word that a Brazilian court had ruled against “Wikipedia” in Ms. Fienngo’s suit. The Wikimedia Foundation was not a party to this action and received no notice of the case in advance. The court order required removal of the article about Ms. Fienngo, and imposed a daily fine if the article remained intact. The article was then removed from Portuguese Wikipedia by community members.
In response, the Wikimedia Foundation argued that the article was written using information already publicly available online, including statements Ms. Fienngo had made in published interviews. Additionally, as a public figure, Ms. Fienngo has a reduced “sphere of privacy,” and celebrities do not need to approve articles written about themselves using publicly available information.
This decision confirms that the information that was in the article about Ms. Fienngo was appropriate to host on Wikipedia in both Brazil and the United States. It should be noted, though that Ms. Fienngo retains the right to appeal to the Brazilian State Court of Appeals, but we believe that the decision was strong enough that community members should feel free to make editorial decisions to write articles like the one about Ms. Fienngo, which is as of publishing time still deleted.
Overall, this decision is a positive outcome for Wikimedia. This ruling supports the ability of Wikipedians in Brazil and all around the world to create accurate and well-sourced articles, even if the information in those articles may sometimes be unflattering to the article’s subject. Those who share personal information with the media should expect that it will be available to a large number of people, and may someday appear on Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia Foundation will continue to support you, the global community, in constructing the best encyclopedia possible to aid in the dissemination of free knowledge.
We would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to Koury Lopes Advogados for their excellent representation in this matter, especially Tania Liberman, Eloy Rizzo, Tiago Cortez, Daniel Rodrigo Shingai, and Yasmine Maluf. We would also like to extend special thanks to legal fellow Leighanna Mixter for her assistance in preparing this blog post.
Wikimedia UK evaluation panel, June 2016. Photo by Wolliff (WMUK) CC BY-SA 4.0
Wikimedia UK will soon be applying to the Wikimedia Foundation for an Annual Plan Grant (APG) in 2017 – 18. Longstanding volunteers, members and other stakeholders will be familiar with this process but for those of you who aren’t, an APG enables affiliated organisations around the world – including country ‘chapters’ of the global Wikimedia movement, like Wikimedia UK – to access funds raised by the Foundation through the Wikipedia banner campaign.
The deadline for proposals is 1st October and we will need to submit our draft delivery plan for next year as well as the proposal itself. On Saturday 24th September we will be holding a day of meetings to discuss and develop our proposal and our delivery plans for next year alongside the wider Wikimedia UK community. These include a meeting of the Evaluation Panel in the morning followed by a discussion focused on education from 12 – 3pm and a Planning Lab from 3 to 5pm.
The education meeting will give participants the opportunity to feed into our emerging plans for education and help us to shape an education conference in early 2017. At the Planning Lab we will share our plans for partnerships and programmes in 2017, with a view to incorporating feedback and ideas into our proposal to the Wikimedia Foundation, and enabling volunteers to identify how they might get involved with Wikimedia UK over the next year.
All meetings will take place at Development House near Old Street, London and are open to all, but signing up in advance is essential (see below for links). Refreshments including lunch during the education meeting will be provided, and support for travel is available if Wikimedia UK is notified in advance by email to karla.marte@wikimedia.org.uk.
tl;dr: Open licensing works when you strike a healthy balance between obligations and reuse. Data, and how it is used, is different from software in ways that change that balance, making reasonable compromises in software (like attribution) suddenly become insanely difficult barriers.
In my last post, I wrote about how database law is a poor platform to build a global public copyleft license on top of. Of course, whether you can have copyleft in data only matters if copyleft in data is a good idea. When we compare software (where copyleft has worked reasonably well) to databases, we’ll see that databases are different in ways that make even “minor” obligations like attribution much more onerous.
In software copyleft, the most common scenarios to evaluate are merging two large programs, or copying one small file into a much larger program. In this scenario, understanding how licenses work together is fairly straightforward: you have two licenses. If they can work together, great; if they can’t, then you don’t go forward, or, if it matters enough, you change the license on your own work to make it work.
In contrast, data is often combined in three ways that are significantly different than software:
Scale: Instead of a handful of projects, data is often combined from hundreds of sources, so doing a license conflicts analysis if any of those sources have conflicting obligations (like copyleft) is impractical. Peter Desmet did a great job of analyzing this in the context of an international bio-science dataset, which has 11,000+ data sources.
Boundaries: There are some cases where hundreds of pieces of software are combined (like operating systems and modern web services) but they have “natural” places to draw a boundary around the scope of the copyleft. Examples of this include the kernel-userspace boundary (useful when dealing with the GPL and Linux kernel), APIs (useful when dealing with the LGPL), or software-as-a-service (where no software is “distributed” in the classic sense at all). As a result, no one has to do much analysis of how those pieces fit together. In contrast, no natural “lines” have emerged around databases, so either you have copyleft that eats the entire combined dataset, or you have no copyleft. ODbL attempts to manage this with the concept of “independent” databases and produced works, but after this recent case I’m not sure even those tenuous attempts hold as a legal matter anymore.
Authorship: When you combine a handful of pieces of software, most of the time you also control the licensing of at least one of those pieces of software, and you can adjust the licensing of that piece as needed. (Widely-used exceptions to this rule, like OpenSSL, tend to be rare.) In other words, if you’re writing a Linux kernel driver, or a WordPress theme, you can choose the license to make sure it complies. Not necessarily the case in data combinations: if you’re making use of large public data sets, you’re often combining many other data sources where you aren’t the author. So if some of them have conflicting license obligations, you’re stuck.
How attribution is managed
Attribution in large software projects is painful enough that lawyers have written a lot on it, and open-source operating systems vendors have built somewhat elaborate systems to manage it. This isn’t just a problem for copyleft: it is also a problem for the supposedly easy case of attribution-only licenses.
Now, again, instead of dozens of authors, often employed by the same copyright-owner, imagine hundreds or thousands. And imagine that instead of combining these pieces in basically the same way each time you build the software, imagine that every time you have a different query, you have to provide different attribution data (because the relevant slices of data may have different sources or authors). That’s data!
The least-bad “solution” here is to (1) tag every field (not just data source) with licensing information, and (2) have data-reading software create new, accurate attribution information every time a new view into the data is created. (I actually know of at least one company that does this internally!) This is not impossible, but it is a big burden on data software developers, who must now include a lawyer in their product design team. Most of them will just go ahead and violate the licenses instead, pass the burden on to their users to figure out what the heck is going on, or both.
Who creates data
Most software is either under a very standard and well-understood open source license, or is produced by a single entity (or often even a single person!) that retains copyright and can adjust that license based on their needs. So if you find a piece of software that you’d like to use, you can either (1) just read their standard FOSS license, or (2) call them up and ask them to change it. (They might not change it, but at least they can if they want to.) This helps make copyleft problems manageable: if you find a true incompatibility, you can often ask the source of the problem to fix it, or fix it yourself (by changing the license on your software).
Data sources typically can’t solve problems by relicensing, because many of the most important data sources are not authored by a single company or single author. In particular:
Governments: Lots of data is produced by governments, where licensing changes can literally require an act of the legislature. So if you do anything that goes against their license, or two different governments release data under conflicting licenses, you can’t just call up their lawyers and ask for a change.
Community collaborations: The biggest open software relicensing that’s ever been done (Mozilla) required getting permission from a few thousand people. Successful online collaboration projects can have 1-2 orders of magnitude more contributors than that, making relicensing is hard. Wikidata solved this the right way: by going with CC0.
What is the bottom line?
Copyleft (and, to a lesser extent, attribution licenses) works when the obligations placed on a user are in balance with the benefits those users receive. If they aren’t in balance, the materials don’t get used. Ultimately, if the data does not get used, our egos feel good (we released this!) but no one benefits, and regardless of the license, no one gets attributed and no new material is released. Unfortunately, even minor requirements like attribution can throw the balance out of whack. So if we genuinely want to benefit the world with our data, we probably need to let it go.
So what to do?
So if data is legally hard to build a license for, and the nature of data makes copyleft (or even attribution!) hard, what to do? I’ll go into that in my next post.
Generating Article Placeholders on the Welsh Wikipedia
The Welsh Language Wicipedia already punches above its weight with seventy thousand articles. That’s roughly one article for every eight Welsh speakers. But now a student in Germany has developed a new tool which can fill in the gaps on Wikipedia by borrowing data from another of Wikimedia’s projects – Wikidata.
The aim of this new feature is to increase the access to open and free knowledge in Wikipedia. The Article Placeholder will gather data, images and sources from Wikidata and display it Wikipedia style, making it easily readable and accessible.
Currently the Article Placeholder is being trialled on a few smaller Wikipedia’s and after a consultation with the Welsh Wicipedia community it was agreed that we would activate the new extension here in Wales.
An Article Placeholder for Hobbits on the Welsh Wikipedia
The most obvious advantage of this functionality is the easy access to information which has not yet been included on Wicipedia, and with 20 million items in Wikidata, it’s not short on information. This in turn should encourage editors to create new articles using the information presented in the Article Placeholder.
But perhaps the most exciting aspect of using Wikidata to generate Wikipedia content, is that Wikidata speaks hundreds of languages, including Welsh! This means that many pages it generates on the Welsh Wikipedia appear entirely in Welsh.
If the Wikidata entry being used hasn’t yet been translated into Welsh, the Placeholder will display the information in English, however it is now easier than ever to link from the Placeholder to the Wikidata item and add a Welsh translation. And plans are underway to hold Translate-a-thons with Welsh speakers in order to translate more Wikidata items into Welsh.
Welsh can easily be added to any Wikidata label
It is hoped that embedding this feature into the Welsh language Wicipedia will provide Welsh speakers with a richer Wiki experience and will encourage more editors to create content and add Welsh translations to Wikidata, cementing the place of the Welsh language in the digital realm.
Update (15 September 2016): The EC has released their official proposal for the Directive. It differs in some minor ways from the leaked version. Those differences do not substantially affect the analysis and concerns discussed in this post.
Several documents by the European Commission (EC) leaked during the past couple of weeks, giving us a clear view of the Commission’s plans for EU copyright reform. The EC had great ambitions to modernize copyright and to “ensure wider access to content across the EU.” However, its proposals do not look good for the public’s ability to access and share knowledge on the Internet. The burden is now on the European Parliament and the EU Council to balance the proposal.
The EC proposes creating a new copyright for publishers that would make it harder for the public to find news articles online and restrict their freedom to share the articles they do find. Another proposal targets online platforms built on user contributions—as the Wikimedia projects are—forcing them to implement technology to monitor for copyright infringement. Just as important are what the EC left out of its proposal, such as an EU-wide freedom of panorama copyright exception to give people the right to share photographs of public spaces. Some of the proposed rules would benefit libraries, museums, schools, and other important institutions for public knowledge. However, these benefits are highly circumscribed and far from outweigh the recommended measures’ harms.
As part of its public consultation in preparation for its proposal, the EC asked for input specifically on the topic of freedom of panorama. We focused much of our comments on that exception, which has already been adopted in many EU member states. With a full freedom of panorama exception, it does not infringe copyright for people to take and share pictures of art and buildings in public spaces. It is a sensible copyright reform that redounds to the public’s benefit without significantly harming artists’ and architects’ ability to make a living. It is also a major topic in European copyright discussions and within the Wikimedia communities. While the EC does recommend all EU Member States incorporate freedom of panorama into their national law, and it recognizes that “the current situation holds back digital innovation in the areas of education, research, and preservation of cultural heritage”, it does not even consider harmonizing freedom of panorama EU-wide. In its study of possible reforms, it relegates the freedom of panorama issue to a single footnote.
While failing to propose positive reforms like freedom of panorama harmonization, the EC pushes for regulations that are potentially harmful to Wikimedia. The EC wants to force sites that host “large amounts of works” to enter agreements with rightsholders that would require the services to monitor for copyright infringement on their platforms. The EC seems unconcerned with the difficulty in determining which platforms the law would affect, saying it would be based on “factors including the number of users and visitors and the amount of content uploaded”. Based on those factors, however, the Wikimedia projects may meet the criteria for regulation. There are tens of millions of articles on Wikipedia and media files on Wikimedia Commons, and hundreds of millions of monthly visitors to the Wikimedia sites. However, as seemed to be the consensus at a multistakeholder discussion of similar requirements in the US, it would be absurd to require the Wikimedia Foundation to implement costly and technologically impractical automated systems for detecting copyright infringement. The Wikimedia projects are dedicated to public domain and freely licensed content and they have dedicated volunteers who diligently remove content suspected of infringing copyright. Furthermore, beyond Wikimedia, this proposal would lead to over-removing non-infringing content, with a corresponding chilling effect on free expression and creativity.
The EC’s recommendations also include the creation of a new 20-year copyright for press publishers—even more extreme than we and others feared. The concern behind the publisher’s right is that sites like Google News that aggregate news articles and list their headlines (accompanied by brief excerpts or summaries) are reducing traffic to news sites and thereby diminishing publishers’ ad revenue. The publisher’s right would force news aggregators to pay fees in order to aggregate articles—potentially including to simply list article headlines—or else be liable for copyright infringement. This proposal would make it more difficult for the public to find and access news articles, because there would be additional financial barriers to providing that access. It would also make it more difficult for new news aggregators to emerge to challenge existing ones. The extraordinarily long term for this right exacerbates these problems. Creating a new copyright for publishers could impair the public’s ability to learn about important events in the world around them.
The proposal does contain small steps in the direction of positive copyright reform. It grants an exception to “cultural heritage institutions” who make copies of works for preservation purposes. However, “cultural heritage institution” is narrowly defined to include only libraries, archives, museums and film heritage institutions, with apparently no consideration of entities like Wikimedia and Internet Archive that are important for cultural heritage but do not fit a traditional mold. Limiting who is allowed to preserve works makes it more likely that the world will lose them. The proposal also recognizes the value and importance of text and data mining for research. Unfortunately, the proposed exception only covers public interest research institutions.
These few brighter spots in the EC’s proposal are overshadowed by its many problems. Altogether, the Impact Assessment’s language and focus suggest that the EC’s primary concern is the amount of money legacy publishers are making. They try to frame this as concern for long-term “cultural diversity”, but they offer no support or argument for why it will diminish cultural diversity for businesses built on ink-and-paper revenue models to fail. They appear to give no credit, or even consideration, to the democratic cultural production that has flourished thanks to technological developments and Internet platforms. Instead, they paint these platforms as mostly indifferent to copyright infringement and as obstinate for refusing to capitulate to rightsholders’ demands for overzealous takedown systems.
There are more issues with this proposal than can be addressed in one blog post, but it should be apparent by now that the EC’s recommendations must not be enacted as legislation. The European Parliament now has the opportunity to amend or reject the proposal.
tl;dr: Databases are a very poor fit for any licensing scheme, like copyleft, that (1) is intended to encourage use by the entire world but also (2) wants to place requirements on that use. This is because of broken legal systems and the way data is used. Projects considering copyleft, or even mere attribution, for data, should consider other approaches instead.
I’ve been a user of copyleft/share-alike licenses for a long time, and even helped draft several of them, but I’ve come around to the point of view that copyleft is a poor fit for data. Unfortunately, I’ve been explaining this a lot lately, so I want to explain why in writing. This first post will focus on how the legal system around databases is broken. Later posts will focus on how databases are hard to license, and what we might do about it.
FOSS licensing, and particularly copyleft, relies on legal features database rights lack
Defenders of copyleft often have to point out that copyleft isn’t necessarily anti-copyright, because copyleft depends on copyright. This is true, of course, but the more I think about databases and open licensing, the more I think “copyleft depends on copyright” almost understates the case – global copyleft depends not just on “copyright”, but on very specific features of the international copyright system which database law lacks.
To put it in software terms, the underlying legal platform lacks the features necessary to reliably implement copyleft.
Consider some differences between the copyright system and database law:
Maturity: Copyright has had 100 or so years as an international system to work out kinks like “what is a work” or “how do joint authors share rights?” Even software copyright law has existed for about 40 years. In contrast, database law in practice has existed for less than 20 years, pretty much all of that in Europe, and I can count all the high court rulings on it on my fingers and toes. So key terms, like “substantial”, are pretty hard to define-courts and legislatures simply haven’t defined, or refined, the key concepts. This makes it very hard to write a general-purpose public license whose outcomes are predictable.
Stability: Related to the previous point, copyright tends to change incrementally, as long-standing concepts are slowly adapted to new circumstances. (The gradual broadening of fair use in the Google era is a good example of this.) In contrast, since there are so few decisions, basically every decision about database law leads to upheaval. Open Source licenses tend to have a shelf-life of about ten years; good luck writing a database license that means the same thing in ten years as it does today!
Global nature: Want to share copyrighted works with the entire world? Copyright (through the Berne Convention) has you covered. Want to share a database? Well, you can easily give it away to the whole world (probably!), but want to reliably put any conditions on that sharing? Good luck! You’ve now got to write a single contract that is enforceable in every jurisdiction, plus a license that works in the EU, Japan, South Korea, and Mexico. As an example again, “substantial” – used in both ODbL and CC 4.0 – is a term from the EU’s Database Directive, so good luck figuring out what it means in a contract in the US or within the context of Japan’s database law.
Default rights: Eben Moglen has often pointed out that anyone who attacks the GPL is at a disadvantage, because if they somehow show that the license is legally invalid, then they get copyright’s “default”: which is to say, they don’t get anything. So they are forced to fight about the specific terms, rather than the validity of the license as a whole. In contrast, in much of the world (and certainly in the US), if you show that a database license is legally invalid, then you get database’s default: which is to say, you get everything. So someone who doesn’t want to follow the copyleft has very, very strong incentives to demolish your license altogether. (Unless, of course, the entire system shifts from underneath you to create a stronger default – like it may have in the EU with the Ryanair case.)
With all these differences, what starts off as hard (“write a general-purpose, public-facing license that requires sharing”) becomes insanely difficult in the database context. Key goals of a general-purpose, public license – global, predictable, reliable – are very hard to do.
In upcoming posts, I’ll try to explain why, even if it were possible to write such a license from a legal perspective, it might not be a good idea because of how databases are used.
Coffee is an essential part of a million morning rituals every day. For millions of bathrobe-clad and bed-headed people, coffee is a cup of pure vitality.
But there’s a dark side to the dark liquid. For those who experience anxiety symptoms, coffee can encourage the onset of panic attacks. It’s a fascinating and little-discussed side effect, and you can read all about it thanks to students in Dr. Michelle Mynlieff’s Neurobiology course at Marquette University.
Student editors in that course transformed an article that sat at less than 400 words, expanding it by more than 10 times its original length. The article, “Caffeine-induced anxiety disorder,” discusses how caffeine works, and how it effects anxiety.
It’s part of a set of articles improved by Dr. Mynlieff’s students, including a major expansion of the article on neuroscientists themselves! The Neuroscientist article sat at just three paragraphs, with two references (and one of them was a dead link). Students expanded the article with historical context and a summary of existing research projects.
Students expanded the article on Adipsia, the rare decreased sensation of thirst that can be a sign of diabetes. Others expanded Camptocormia, a bent spine often seen among the elderly, and Myocionus dystonia, a muscle disorder that causes abnormal posture. The camptocormia article was expanded from a three-sentence article to discuss the history of the disease, the ways it is diagnosed, and some of the causes, treatments and current areas of research.
They also expanded knowledge available to researchers. For example, students expanded an article on a particular gene — SLC7A11. The absence or impairment of this gene’s expression may play a role in drug addiction and schizophrenia, as well as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson diseases.
These articles have been viewed 610,000 times since these students took them on! Thanks to these students, the entire world has access to knowledge that helps us better understand the way our bodies work.
Think your students might want to share their knowledge to improve the world? Check out our Year of Science initiative, or send us an e-mail: contact@wikiedu.org.
The system described in the paper looks for red links in Wikipedia and classifies them based on their context. To find section titles, it then looks for similar existing articles. With these titles, the system searches the web for information, and eventually uses content summarization and a paraphrasing algorithm. The researchers uploaded 50 of these automatically created articles to Wikipedia, and found that 47 of them survived. Some were heavily edited after upload, others not so much.
While I was enthusiastic about the results, I was surprised by the suboptimal quality of the articles I reviewed – three that were mentioned in the paper. After a brief discussion with the authors, a wider discussion was initiated on the Wiki-research mailing list. This was followed by an entry on the English Wikipedia administrators’ noticeboard (which includes a list of all accounts used for this particular research paper). The discussion led to the removal of most of the remaining articles.
The discussion concerned the ethical implications of the research, and using Wikipedia for such an experiment without the consent of Wikipedia contributors or readers. The first author of the paper was an active member of the discussion; he showed a lack of awareness of these issues, and appeared to learn a lot from the discussion. He promised to take these lessons to the relevant research community – a positive outcome.
In general, this sets an example for engineers and computer-science engineers, who often show a lack of awareness of certain ethical issues in their research. Computer scientists are typically trained to think about bits and complexities, and rarely discuss in depth how their work impacts human lives. Whether it’s social networks experimenting with the mood of their users, current discussions of biases in machine-learned models, or the experimental upload of automatically created content in Wikipedia without community approval, computer science has generally not reached the level of awareness of some other sciences for the possible effects of their research on human subjects, at least as far as this reviewer can tell.
Even in Wikipedia, there’s no clear-cut, succinct Wikipedia policy I could have pointed the researchers to. The use of sockpuppets was a clear violation of policy, but an incidental component of the research. WP:POINT was a stretch to cover the situation at hand. In the end, what we can suggest to researchers is to check back with the Wikimedia Research list. A lot of people there have experience with designing research plans with the community in mind, and it can help to avoid uncomfortable situations.
See also our 2015 review of a related paper coauthored by the same authors: “Bot detects theatre play scripts on the web and writes Wikipedia articles about them” and other similarly themed papers they have published since then: “WikiKreator: Automatic Authoring of Wikipedia Content”[2], “WikiKreator: Improving Wikipedia Stubs Automatically”[3], “Filling the Gaps: Improving Wikipedia Stubs”[4].DV
Ethics researcher: Vandal fighters should not be allowed to see whether an edit was made anonymously
A paper[5] in the journal Ethics and Information Technology examines the “system of surveillance” that the English Wikipedia has built up over the years to deal with vandalism edits. The author, Paul B. de Laat from the University of Groningen, presents an interesting application of a theoretical framework by US law scholar Frederick Schauer that focuses on the concepts of rule enforcement and profiling. While providing justification for the system’s efficacy and largely absolving it of some of the objections that are commonly associated with the use of profiling in e.g. law enforcement, de Laat ultimately argues that in its current form, it violates an alleged “social contract” on Wikipedia by not treating anonymous and logged-in edits equally. Although generally well-informed about both the practice and the academic research of vandalism fighting, the paper unfortunately fails to connect to an existing debate about very much the same topic – potential biases of artificial intelligence-based anti-vandalism tools against anonymous edits – that was begun last year[6] by the researchers developing ORES (an edit review tool that was just made available to all English Wikipedia users, see this week’s Technology report) and most recently discussed in the August 2016 WMF research showcase.
The paper first gives an overview of the various anti-vandalism tools and bots in use, recapping an earlier paper[7] where de Laat had already asked whether these are “eroding Wikipedia’s moral order” (following an even earlier 2014 paper in which he had argued that new-edit patrolling “raises a number of moral questions that need to be answered urgently”). There, de Laat’s concerns included the fact that some stronger tools (rollback, Huggle, and STiki) are available only to trusted users and “cause a loss of the required moral skills in relation to newcomers”, and that they a lack of transparency about how the tools operate (in particular when more sophisticated artificial intelligence/machine learning algorithms such as neural networks are used). The present paper expands on a separate but related concern, about the use of “profiling” to pre-select which recent edits will be subject to closer human review. The author emphasizes that on Wikipedia this usually does not mean person-based offender profiling (building profiles of individuals committing vandalism), citing only one exception in form of a 2015 academic paper – cf. our review: “Early warning system identifies likely vandals based on their editing behavior“. Rather, “the anti-vandalism tools exemplify the broader type of profiling” that focuses on actions. Based on Schauer’s work, the author asks the following questions:
“Is this profiling profitable, does it bring the rewards that are usually associated with it?”
“is this profiling approach towards edit selection justified? In particular, do any of the dimensions in use raise moral objections? If so, can these objections be met in a satisfactory fashion, or do such controversial dimensions have to be adapted or eliminated?”
But snakes are much more dangerous! According to Schauer, while general rules are always less fair than case-by-case decisions, their existence can be justified by other arguments.
To answer the first question, the author turns to Schauer’s work on rules, in a brief summary that is worth reading for anyone interested in Wikipedia policies and guidelines – although de Laat instead applies the concept to the “procedural rules” implicit in vandalism profiling (such as that anonymous edits are more likely to be worth scrutinizing). First, Schauer “resolutely pushes aside the argument from fairness: decision-making based on rules can only be less just than deciding each case on a particularistic basis “. (For example, a restaurant’s “No Dogs Allowed” rule will unfairly exclude some well-behaved dogs, while not prohibiting much more dangerous animals such as snakes.) Instead, the existence of rules have to be justified by other arguments, of which Schauer presents four:
Rules “create reliability/predictability for those affected by the rule: rule-followers as well as rule-enforcers”.
Rules “promote more efficient use of resources by rule-enforcers” (e.g. in case of a speeding car driver, traffic police and judges can apply a simple speed limit instead having to prove in detail that an instance of driving was dangerous).
Rules, if simple enough, reduce the problem of “risk-aversion” by enforcers, who are much more likely to make mistakes and face repercussions if they have to make case by case decisions.
Rules create stability, which however also presents “an impediment to change; it entrenches the status-quo. If change is on a society’s agenda, the stability argument turns into an argument against having (simple) rules.”
The author cautions that these four arguments have to be reinterpreted when applying them to vandalism profiling, because it consists of “procedural rules” (which edits should be selected for inspection) rather than “substantive rules” (which edits should be reverted as vandalism, which animals should be disallowed from the restaurant). While in the case of substantive rules, their absence would mean having to judge everything on a case-by-case basis, the author asserts that procedural rules arise in a situation where the alternative would be to to not judge at all in many cases: Because “we have no means at our disposal to check and pass judgment on all of them; a selection of a kind has to be made. So it is here that profiling comes in”. With that qualification, Schauer’s second argument provides justification for “Wikipedian profiling [because it] turns out to be amazingly effective”, starting with the autonomous bots that auto-revert with an (aspired) 1:1000 false-positive rate.
De Laat also interprets “the Schauerian argument of reliability/predictability for those affected by the rule” in favor of vandalism profiling. Here, though, he fails to explain the benefits of vandals being able to predict which kind of edits will be subject to scrutiny. This also calls into question his subsequent remark that “it is unfortunate that the anti-vandalism system in use remains opaque to ordinary users”. The remaining two of Schauer’s four arguments are judged as less pertinent. But overall the paper concludes that it is possibile to justify the existence of vandalism profiling rules as beneficial via Schauer’s theoretical framework.
Police traffic stops: A good analogy for anti-vandalism patrol on Wikipedia?
Next, de Laat turns to question 2, on whether vandalism profiling is also morally justified. Here he relies on later work by Schauer, from a 2003 book, “Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes”, that studies such matters as profiling by tax officials (selecting which taxpayers have to undergo an audit), airport security (selecting passengers for screening) and by police officers (e.g. selecting cars for traffic stops). While profiling of some kind is a necessity for all these officials, the particular characteristics (dimensions) used for profiling can be highly problematic (see e.g. Driving While Black). For de Laat’s study of Wikipedia profiling, “two types of complications are important: (1) possible ‘overuse’ of dimension(s) (an issue of profile effectiveness) and (2) social sensibilities associated with specific dimension(s) (a social and moral issue).” Overuse can mean relying on stereotypes that have no basis in reality, or over-reliance on some dimensions that, while having a non-spurious correlation with the deviant behavior, are over-emphasized at the expense of other relevant characteristics because they are more visible or salient to the profile. E.g. while Schauer considers that it may be justified for “airport officials looking for explosives [to] single out for inspection the luggage of younger Muslim men of Middle Eastern appearance”, it would be an over-use if “officials ask all Muslim men and all men of Middle Eastern origin to step out of line to be searched”, thus reducing their effectiveness by neglecting other passenger characteristics. This is also an example for the second type of complication profiling, where the selected dimensions are socially sensitive – indeed, for the specific case of luggage screening in the US, “the factors of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, and gender have expressly been excluded from profiling” since 1997.
Applying this to the case of Wikipedia’s anti-vandalism efforts, de Laat first observes that complication (1) (overuse) is not a concern for fully automated tools like ClueBotNG – obviously their algorithm applies the existing profile directly without a human intervention that could introduce this kind of bias. For Huggle and STiki, however, “I see several possibilities for features to be overused by patrollers, thereby spoiling the optimum efficacy achievable by the profile embedded in those tools.” This is because both tools do not just use these features in their automatic pre-selection of edits to be reviewed, but expose at least the fact whether an edit was anonymous to the human patroller in the edit review interface. (The paper examines this in detail for both tools, also observing that Huggle presents more opportunities for this kind of overuse, while STiki is more restricted. However, there seems to have been no attempt to study empirically whether this overuse actually occurs.)
Regarding complication (2), whether some of the features used for vandalism profiling are socially sensitive, de Laat highlights that they include some amount of discrimination by nationality: IP edits geolocated to the US, Canada, and Australia have been found to contain vandalism more frequently and are thus more likely to be singled out for inspection. However, he does not consider this concern “strong enough to warrant banning the country-dimension and correspondingly sacrifice some profiling efficacy”, chiefly because there do not appear to be a lot of nationalistic tensions within the English Wikipedia community that could be stirred up by this.
In contrast, de Laat argues that “the targeting of contributors who choose to remain anonymous … is fraught with danger since anons already constitute a controversial group within the Wikipedian community.” Still, he acknowledges the “undisputed fact” that the ratio of vandalism is much higher among anonymous edits. Also, he rejects the concern that they might be more likely to be the victim of false positives:
“
normally [IP editors] do not experience any harm when their edits are selected and inspected as a result of anon-powered profiling; they will not even notice that they were surveilled since no digital traces remain of the patrolling. … The only imaginable harm is that patrollers become over focussed on anons and indulge in what I called above ‘overinspection’ of such edits and wrongly classify them as vandalism … As a consequence, they might never contribute to Wikipedia again. … Nevertheless, I estimate this harm to be small. At any rate, the harm involved would seem to be small in comparison with the harassment of racial profiling—let alone that an ‘expressive harm hypothesis’ applies.
”
With this said, de Laat still makes the controversial call “that the anonymous-dimension should be banned from all profiling efforts” – including removing it from the scoring algorithms of Huggle, STiki and ClueBotNG. Instead of concerns about individual harm,
“
my main argument for the ban is a decidedly moral one. From the very beginning the Wikipedian community has operated on the basis of a ‘social contract’ that makes no distinction between anons and non-anons – all are citizens of equal stature. … In sum, the express profiling of anons turns the anonymity dimension from an access condition into a social distinction; the Wikipedian community should refrain from institutionalizing such a line of division. Notice that I argue, in effect, that the Wikipedian community has only two choices: either accept anons as full citizens or not; but there is no morally defensible social contract in between.
”
Sadly, while the paper is otherwise rich in citations and details, it completely fails to provide evidence for the existence of this alleged social contract. While it is true that “the ability of almost anyone to edit (most) articles without registration” forms part of Wikipedia’s founding principles (a principle that this reviewer strongly agrees with), the “equal stature” part seems to be de Laat’s own invention – there is a long list of things that, by longstanding community consensus, require the use of an account (which after all is freely available to everyone, without even requiring an email address). Most of these restrictions – say, the inability to create new articles or being prevented from participating in project governance during admin or arbcom votes – seem much more serious than the vandalism profiling that is the topic of de Laat’s paper. TB
Briefly
Conferences and events
Registration is open for WikiConference North America October 7-10. The conference will include a track about academic engagement and Wikipedia in education.
A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue—contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research. This month, the list mainly gathers research about the extraction of specific content from Wikipedia.
“Large SMT Data-sets Extracted from Wikipedia”[8] From the abstract: “The article presents experiments on mining Wikipedia for extracting SMT [ statistical machine translation ] useful sentence pairs in three language pairs. … The optimized SMT systems were evaluated on unseen test-sets also extracted from Wikipedia. As one of the main goals of our work was to help Wikipedia contributors to translate (with as little post editing as possible) new articles from major languages into less resourced languages and vice-versa, we call this type of translation experiments ‘in-genre’ translation. As in the case of ‘in-domain’ translation, our evaluations showed that using only ‘in-genre’ training data for translating same genre new texts is better than mixing the training data with ‘out-of-genre’ (even) parallel texts.”
“Recognizing Biographical Sections in Wikipedia”[9] From the abstract: “Thanks to its coverage and its availability in machine-readable format, [Wikipedia] has become a primary resource for large scale research in historical and cultural studies. In this work, we focus on the subset of pages describing persons, and we investigate the task of recognizing biographical sections from them: given a person’s page, we identify the list of sections where information about her/his life is present [as opposed to nonbiographical sections, e.g. ‘Early Life’ but not ‘Legacy’ or ‘Selected writings’].”
“Extraction of lethal events from Wikipedia and a semantic repository”[10] From the abstract and conclusion: “This paper describes the extraction of information on lethal events from the Swedish version of Wikipedia. The information searched includes the persons’ cause of death, origin, and profession. […] We also extracted structured semantic data from the Wikidata store that we combined with the information retrieved from Wikipedia … [The resulting] data could not support the existence of the Club 27“.
“Learning Topic Hierarchies for Wikipedia Categories”[11] (from frequently used section headings in a category, e.g. “eligibility”, “endorsements” or “results” for Category:Presidential elections)
“‘A Spousal Relation Begins with a Deletion of engage and Ends with an Addition of divorce’: Learning State Changing Verbs from Wikipedia Revision History.”[12] From the abstract: “We propose to learn state changing verbs [such as ‘born’, ‘died’, ‘elected’, ‘married’] from Wikipedia edit history. When a state-changing event, such as a marriage or death, happens to an entity, the infobox on the entity’s Wikipedia page usually gets updated. At the same time, the article text may be updated with verbs either being added or deleted to reflect the changes made to the infobox. … We observe in our experiments that when state-changing verbs are added or deleted from an entity’s Wikipedia page text, we can predict the entity’s infobox updates with 88% precision and 76% recall.”
“Extracting Representative Phrases from Wikipedia Article Sections”[13] From the abstract: “Since [Wikipedia’s] long articles are taking time to read, as well as section titles are sometimes too short to capture comprehensive summarization, we aim at extracting informative phrases that readers can refer to.”
“Accurate Fact Harvesting from Natural Language Text in Wikipedia with Lector”[14] From the abstract: “Many approaches have been introduced recently to automatically create or augment Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with facts extracted from Wikipedia, particularly its structured components like the infoboxes. Although these structures are valuable, they represent only a fraction of the actual information expressed in the articles. In this work, we quantify the number of highly accurate facts that can be harvested with high precision from the text of Wikipedia articles […]. Our experimental evaluation, which uses Freebase as reference KG, reveals we can augment several relations in the domain of people by more than 10%, with facts whose accuracy are over 95%. Moreover, the vast majority of these facts are missing from the infoboxes, YAGO and DBpedia.”
“Extracting Scientists from Wikipedia”[15] From the abstract: “[We] describe a system that gathers information from Wikipedia articles and existing data from Wikidata, which is then combined and put in a searchable database. This system is dedicated to making the process of finding scientists both quicker and easier.”
“LeadMine: Disease identification and concept mapping using Wikipedia”[16] From the abstract: “LeadMine, a dictionary/grammar based entity recognizer, was used to recognize and normalize both chemicals and diseases to MeSH [ Medical Subject Headings ] IDs. The lexicon was obtained from 3 sources: MeSH, the Disease Ontology and Wikipedia. The Wikipedia dictionary was derived from pages with a disease/symptom box, or those where the page title appeared in the lexicon.”
“Finding Member Articles for Wikipedia Lists”[17] From the abstract: “… for a given Wikipedia article and list, we determine whether the article can be added to the list. Its solution can be utilized on automatic generation of lists, as well as generation of categories based on lists, to help self-organization of knowledge structure. In this paper, we discuss building classifiers for judging on whether an article belongs to a list or not, where features are extracted from various components including list titles, leading sections, as well as texts of member articles. … We report our initial evaluation results based on Bayesian and other classifiers, and also discuss feature selection.”
“Study of the content about documentation sciences in the Spanish-language Wikipedia”[18] (in Spanish). From the English abstract: “This study explore how [Wikipedia] addresses the documentation sciences, focusing especially on pages that discuss the discipline, not only the page contents, but the relationships between them, their edit history, Wikipedians who participated and all aspects that can influence on how the image of this discipline is projected” [sic]. TB
↑Aprosio, Alessio Palmero; Tonelli, Sara (17 September 2015). “Recognizing Biographical Sections in Wikipedia”. Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Lisbon, Portugal. pp. 811–816.
↑Hu, Linmei; Wang, Xuzhong; Zhang, Mengdi; Li, Juanzi; Li, Xiaoli; Shao, Chao; Tang, Jie; Liu, Yongbin (2015-07-26). “Learning Topic Hierarchies for Wikipedia Categories”(PDF). Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Short Papers). Beijing, China. pp. 346–351.
↑Ekenstierna, Gustaf Harari; Lam, Victor Shu-Ming. Extracting Scientists from Wikipedia. Digital Humanities 2016. From Digitization to Knowledge 2016: Resources and Methods for Semantic Processing of Digital Works/Texts, Proceedings of the Workshop, July 11, 2016, Krakow, Poland.
The Tech News weekly summaries help you monitor recent software changes likely to impact you and your fellow Wikimedians. Subscribe, contribute and give feedback.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
The Wikimedia Commons app for Android can now show nearby places that need photos. [1]
The RevisionSlider will be available as a beta feature on all wikis from 13 September. This will make it easier to navigate between diffs in the page history. [4]
A new user right will allow most users to change the content model of pages. [5][6]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 September. It will be on all wikis from 15 September (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 13 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
When you search on the Wikimedia wikis in the future you could see results from sister projects in your language. You can read more and discuss how this could work.
Peter Baldwin—a Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles, a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, and co-founder of the philanthropic Arcadia Foundation—has been appointed to the Wikimedia Endowment Advisory Board.
Baldwin joins Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and venture capitalist Annette Campbell-White as the third member of the board that is entrusted with overseeing the Wikimedia Endowment, a permanent source of funding to ensure Wikipedia thrives for generations to come.
Baldwin and his wife, Lisbet Rausing, have a long track record of philanthropic granting. In 2002, they founded Arcadia to focus on preserving cultural heritage, the environment, and supporting open access resources. Baldwin is the chairman of its Donor and Advisory Boards, and as of December 2015, Arcadia has made grant commitments of over $363 million to charities and scholarly institutions globally that preserve cultural heritage and the environment, and promote open access. These include the Endangered Languages Documentation program at SOAS, University of London, the Endangered Archive Program at the British Library, and Fauna & Flora International’s Halcyon Land and Sea fund.
“Arcadia has long supported open access and other ways of disseminating knowledge broadly,” Baldwin said. “Wikimedia’s efforts have been an example and a lodestar to all of us in the field for decades now. Nothing could be more important than to ensure Wikipedia’s continued health, growth and well-being, and I am pleased to be part of that effort.”
Peter and Lisbet have also been long-time donors and supporters of the Wikimedia Foundation.
“Peter brings a deep commitment to free knowledge and in depth experience in nonprofit Board management,” said Annette Campbell-White, fellow Advisory Board member. “We’re looking forward to having his unique expertise and shared passion for the Wikimedia mission on the Board.”
Endowment Board members are selected based on active involvement in philanthropic endeavors, prior nonprofit board experience, fundraising expertise, and a strong commitment to the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission.
In his academic career, Baldwin is a renowned scholar who is interested in the historical development of the modern state––a broad field that has led him in many different directions throughout his career. He has published works on the comparative history of the welfare state, on social policy more broadly, and on public health; his latest book is a transnational political history of copyright from 1710 to the present. He also has projects underway on the historical development of privacy, on the history of honor, and a global history of the state. Baldwin holds a PhD in History from Harvard University and a BA in Philosophy from Yale University.
Marc Brent, Endowment Director
Wikimedia Foundation
These diagrams where created at Wikimedia Deutchland by Jan Dittrich, Charlie Kritschmar and myself for an upcoming presentation I’m doing on the Clean Architecture. There are plenty of diagrams available already if you include Onion Architecture and Hexagonal, which have essentially the same structure, though none I’ve found so far have a permissive license. Furthermore, I’m not so happy with the wording and structure of a lot of these. In particular, some incorporate more than they can chew with the “dependencies pointing inward rule”, glossing over important restrictions which end up not being visualized at all.
These images are SVGs. Click them to go to Wikimedia Commons where you can download them.
The program for SMWCon Fall 2016 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany (September 28-30, 2016) has now been announced. It is compiled from a variety of interesting talks and presentations about semantic wikis and related topics. The keynote will be held by Prof. Dr. Sören Auer of Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS, Enterprise Information Systems. See all the details on the program pages for the tutorial day and the conference days.
All interested participants are encouraged to register at the ticketing site. Note that the slightly extended Early Bird registration period ends on September 14, 2016.
Wikipedia comes in 294 languages … and counting. It’s a drop in the bucket compared with the number of actual languages in the world (after all, Australia alone has more than 250 native languages), but alongside Google Translate (with 104 languages) it makes Wikipedia one of the most ambitious language projects today.
Where the English Wikipedia has more than 5m articles, there are hundreds of much smaller Wikipedias including Abkhazian, Cherokee, Norfolk and Fijian. Sitting in the site’s incubator program, along with 10 other languages, is Wikipedia’s first Indigenous Australian language, Noongar.
There are roughly 35,000 Noongar people today, according to the Noongar Boodjar Language Centre, making it one of the largest Indigenous groups in Australia. For thousands of years they’ve lived on Noongar boodjar (Noongar country), what is now known as the south-western corner of Western Australia and includes the capital city, Perth. Artefacts likely carried by early Noongar ancestors have been dated as far back as 30,000 years.
The Noongarpedia project began in 2014 by a team from the University of Western Australia led by school of Indigenous studies professor and Noongar elder Leonard Collard, with Curtin University’s John Hartley and the Miles Franklin award-winning novelist Kim Scott. Although not yet formally launched, the site is live and users can create an account and contribute by writing or editing articles
Its front page bears a welcome to country, an ancient spiritual greeting practised by many Indigenous Australian nations:
Kaya wanju gnullar NoongarPedia. Gnullar waarnkniy kwop kwop birdiyah wiern, maaman, yorga, koorlinga. Gnullar waarnkiny noonar yoorl koorliny waarnkiny nidja NoongarPedia. / Welcome to our Noongarpedia. We speak in good spirit of our ancestors, spirits, men, women and children. We hope you come and contribute to our Noongarpedia.
It is just one of many subtle but important departures from the larger Wikipedias. For example, Collard says inherent to English Wikipedia is an assumption that “all information is freely available to everybody”. Such a policy would conflict with Noongar knowledge convention and law which places restrictions on who can know what knowledge, so the Noongarpedia community is developing procedures to prevent general access to certain information.
A research associate, Jennifer Buchanan, says Wikipedia convention favours mainstream books, newspapers and scientific journals as creditable sources. For the Noongar people, while published works are also important, their elders are considered the greatest authority in knowledge and culture (meanwhile, inaccuracies about their people run rampant in the media and academic circles).
NASA’s official mural for the OSIRIS-REx mission. Image via NASA, public domain/CC0.
Sometime between 7:05pm and 9:05pm EDT tonight, NASA will launch OSIRIS-REx—a spacecraft that will travel to the asteroid 101955 Bennu. If its four-year journey goes as planned, it will be the first spacecraft to bring asteroid samples back to Earth for study.
Wikipedia tells us that this mission, the third in the space agency’s New Frontiers program (behind Juno and New Horizons), will help us gain a greater understanding of the formation and evolution of the Solar System, among other things.
“Astronomers are currently functioning with a model called ‘accretion‘ that attempts to explain the formation of the Solar System,” says Wikipedia editor BatteryIncluded, who has worked extensively on the OSIRIS-REx article. “There is very little known, and many hypotheses are advanced. The fact is that the current accretion model cannot explain many phenomena we see today in other solar systems, stars and galaxies, so any in-situ data [like that OSIRIS-REx will obtain] is useful.”
BatteryIncluded and fellow editor Hadron137 have worked on the OSIRIS-REx and Bennu articles. More broadly, they are two of many people who work on Wikipedia’s space-related articles, a topic which has no less than three devoted WikiProjects (focusing on spaceflight, the solar system, and astronomy). Hadron says that many are not experts on the topic, but that isn’t necessarily a negative:
“I don’t think a person needs to … have spacecraft-specific knowledge to contribute; that’s what’s so cool about Wikipedia. It just takes a bit of curiosity. I often read a paragraph in Wikipedia about the spacecraft and it gets me thinking about ‘how does that work,’ or ‘why do they do it like that’? Then I research the answer in credible publications and add the content to Wikipedia.”
Rendering of OSIRIS-REx by NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Lockheed Martin, public domain/CC0.
This cohort of editors is quick to jump on breaking space stories that are covered in reliable sources; on 25 August, for instance, minutes to hours after scientists announced in Nature that they had found an exoplanet orbiting Alpha Proxima, Wikipedia had a comprehensive article.
But if you do have some knowledge of chemistry, physics, planetary science, or any related field, and you’ve been looking for a good place to jump in and contribute to Wikipedia, your easiest opening may be in the years after these events, when scientists begin to relate what we’ve learned from these missions.
As BatteryIncluded related to us, “In Wikipedia we can do better in highlighting that every space probe is more of a scientific ‘mission’ than a flight, particularly with sample-return missions” like OSIRIS-REx. “I tend to revisit old articles and add the most relevant scientific results, which are overlooked by most other WP editors. … Explaining the mission [in simple terms and in the] context of the objectives is important.”
Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate Wikimedia Foundation
In T135327, the WMF Technical Collaboration team collected a list of Phabricator bugs and feature requests from the Wikimedia Developer Community. After identifying the most promising requests from the community, these were presented to Phacility (the organization that builds and maintains Phabricator) for sponsored prioritization.
I am very pleased to report that we are already seeing the benefits of this initiative. Several sponsored improvements have landed on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/ over the past few weeks. For an overview of what's landed recently, read on!
Notice three of those have task numbers lower than 2000. Those long-standing tasks date from the first months of WMF's Phabricator evaluation and RFC period. When those tasks were originally filled, Phabricator was just a test install running in WMF Labs. For me, It's especially satisfying to close so many long-standing issues that have effected many of us for more than a year.
Work in Progress
Several more issues were identified for sponsorship which are still awaiting a complete solution. Some of these are at least partially fixed and some are still pending. You can find out more details by reading the comments on each task linked below.
This very helpful feature displays a graphical representation of a task's Parents and Subtasks.
Initially there was an issue with this feature that made tasks with many relationships unable to load. This was exacerbated by the historical use of "tracking tasks" in the Wikimedia Bugzilla context. Thankfully after a quick patch from @epriestley (the primary author of Phabricator) and lots of help and testing from @Danny_B and @Paladox, @mmodell was able to deploy a fix for the issue a little over 24 hours after it was discovered.
Here's to yet more fruitful collaborations with upstream Phabricator!
When a person think about genetics, she’s often interested in how the study of genes applies to her, her family, or her community. From whom did she inherit a particular trait? Did a genetic mutation lead to her grandmother’s medical condition? How does her genetic makeup inform her ancestry? People looking for better context for how genes work can, and often do, find answers on Wikipedia.
At the The Allied Genetics Conference in Orlando, Florida, biologists, geneticists, and students spoke to me about their research, and how Wikipedia fits into the classroom. Instructors assign their students to edit Wikipedia because they care about a) the public’s access to reliable, current, comprehensible scientific research and b) students doing real-world assignments that build transferable skills as they research and write.
Boosting the public’s understanding of science
We’re proud to say that students in higher ed classrooms are driving a lot of that new science content. At the end of the first term of our Year of Science, 6% of all new Wikipedia content in the sciences came from Wikipedia writing assignments. That’s an incredible contribution to the public’s awareness of science!
For the majority of the people who go online to broaden their understanding of science topics, that means the information they find is more reliable and more complete. It means less knowledge hidden away behind paywalls, and more information carefully presented to the public.
Building transferable skills
Scientists at the conference told me that they liked how Wikipedia was always evolving. Evaluating different versions of Wikipedia articles can illustrate that science is iterative. Scientists build on the work of those who came before them—just like Wikipedians.
When a student looks to improve a Wikipedia article, or even build a new one, it’s the start of a long project that calls on their critical thinking, reading, and writing skills. They have to weigh the information they see, and whether it holds up to the scrutiny of what they know. To challenge it, they have to draw on the resources of their university. They compile a bibliography of reliable sources, and make contributions in their own words.
Those are skills that help students, be it in their future academic careers, or on the job market.
The Year of Science
The Year of Science is in its second half, and we’re still working with new courses in genetics and beyond. If you’re interested in applying your students’ writing and critical thinking skills to a global service learning project, we’d love to hear from you. We provide tools, staff support, and online trainings for you and your students. We even have a guide specifically aimed at students writing Wikipedia articles about genes and proteins. We take care of the Wikipedia side, and let you focus on the material you know best. Get in touch: contact@wikiedu.org.
A car of the taxi company Bruckbacher from Austria with OpenStreetMap – Text on the car: „Better safe than sorry“ 1 | Picture by Günther Zinsberger under CC0
About us
We were asked after publishing issue 319 why MAPS.ME was marked as non-free software. MAPS.ME is not free software because it containsCode2000 font which is a shareware. We mark a software as free software if all its parts are free software as defined by Debian Free Software Guidelines.
Mapping
Johan Gyllenspetz of Mapillary, tweets about their new filter function for traffic signs.
Jochen Topf blogs about a service that Martin Raifer created to show the history of tags in nice graphs. Some more background in a diary entry from Martin. Matthijs Melissen has already used this to find some interesting statistics.
On the Tagging mailing list, Martin Koppenhaofer initiates a discussion on the tagging of the BND (the German intelligence service) in Bad Aibling. He points out that landuse = military doesn’t fit and suggests alternatives.
Swiss OSM community discusses, in the Talk-ch mailing list, whether they should map postal code polygons (as boundary relations) similar to what happened in Germany.
User Nammala from Mapbox updates about progress of reviewing navigation data in Germany in the OSM forum and diary.
Community
This year, for the first time in history of OpenStreetMap, there is a preparation for the OpenStreetMap Awards, they will be presented this September at the State of the Map 2016 in Brussels. Don’t forget to vote for your favourites! Anyone who is registered at OSM may participate. So you are! Please vote.
On the OSM-Talk mailing list, Matthijs Melissa proposed to replace the wiki page Map Features with an automatically generated version from Taginfo.
Martin Raifer has visualized the information of anonymized and simplified log-files of OSMF Tileserver provided by the OSMF.
Imports
Greg shares his idea to import trigonometric points in OSM in the Talk-gb mailing list.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
Brian Prangle communicates in the talk-GB mailing list informing that the statutes of the OpenStreetMap UK Community Interest Company has been reviewed by solicitors.
Events
Geofabrik invites everyone to be a part of the hack weekend on 29th and 30th October in Karlsruhe.
We are going to have two continental State of the Map conferences: in Asia and Latin America.
The State of the Map Asia will take place in Manila, Philippines, on October 1st and 2nd. The program schedule will be published soon.
São Paulo, Brazil, will host the State of the Map Latam from November 25th to 27th. The call for talks, workshops and working groups is still open: submit yours before September 25th! The event accepts activities in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
SB 79 advertises the Elbe-Labe Meeting which takes place from October 7th to 9th in Dresden. Register before September 14 to get a T-shirt.
Humanitarian OSM
Submit your scholarship application for SotM Asia.
Microsoft and Mapzen have built a Augmented reality app which is a navigation system for visually impaired people. It was presented at the SotM-US as well.
The Newton hurricane struck the area of Southern California. Tasking Manager has been made to facilitate mapping by the community. The red zone is the priority area. The whole area is poorly mapped, so the challenge is strong! Please help map!
Mapswipe was probably used with success in Myanmar.
Maps
[1] The Austrian Taxi company Bruckbacher advertises its regional knowledge and therefore painted (automatic translation) a huge OSM map on one of its cars.
The Guardian published an interesting quiz – ‘Can you identify the world cities from their running heat-maps?”. Try it.
switch2OSM
The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, is using OpenStreetMap in their crowdsourcing attempt of getting to know the real reach of their Emergency population warning system, Jan Ainali told us. (automatic translation)
The Overpass API v0.7.53 release comes with a bundle of useful improvements with changes in database and interface, coupled with other useful changes.
Programming
Yves asks in the Dev mailing list, “Along with minutely diffs, I wonder if expired tiles lists would be something to be shared”. Andy Allan justified why that does not happen.
Due to high load on the OSMF tile server, requests without HTTP-Referrer are considered as low-priority processes (that is too slow for interactive maps). This happens even if you include the tiles over HTTP on an HTTPS page,.
Petr Pridall of Klokan Technologies, the project Tileserver GL. This is a tile server written in Node.js that uses Mapbox GL Native (C and OpenGL).
IEEE Spectrum reports a new approach of the University of Texas to reach GPS centimeter accuracy with the help of ground stations.
Arthur Brenaut has published on github a nice game to locate cities. The game has the potential for development.
Here, which belongs to Audi, BMW and Daimler, is “open to for new investors”, the German IT Blog Heise-Online says. (automatic translation) Golem, an other IT news blog suspects two investors: MS and Amazon. (automatic translation)
Network World shows a map by our competitor visualizing which countries in the world have open source laws.
PlaneMad explains why the line on the ground given at the Greenwich Royal Observatory is about 100 metres off zero longitude today.
An Icelandic tourist drew this map on the envelope instead of an address. The postal service delivered!
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, Nakaner, Peda, Polyglot, Rogehm, SrrReal, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia, kreuzschnabel.
“Ich suche mir keine Aufgaben. Normalerweise kommen die Aufgaben einfach zu mir,” sagt Thomas, freiwilliger Entwickler für MediaWiki. Wie sieht eigentlich die ehrenamtliche Tätigkeit eines freiwilligen Entwicklers aus? Wer steckt hinter dem Code und den Features, die tagtäglich von vielen Editoren benutzt werden? Julia Schuetze setzte sich mit Thomas aka tpt zusammen, um einen Einblick in die Programmiertätigkeit eines Freiwilligen zu bekommen.
An interview by Julia Schuetze with Thomas Pellissier-Tanon aka Tpt
“I work on the software behind Wikipedia!” That’s what Thomas aka (Tpt), a Volunteer Developer from France, tells his friends if they ask him about what he does in his free time. Up to ten hours per week he dedicates to free knowledge that way.
In the past two months, I got the chance to talk to some of our volunteer developers about their experience with the Wikimedia movement. I’d like to share Thomas’ story, his views, concerns, ideas and accomplishments with you.
Thomas started in 2009 when he was still in high school. A passion for egyptian history and pharaohs inspired him to contribute to the French Wikipedia. Back then, programming was new to him. He started by writing templates and by learning how to use the functions around Wikipedia.
Starting is not easy. Wikipedia is a project created, maintained and developed by millions of people. Thousands contribute at least once a month. People commit, some stay for longer, some only for a short time. I wondered what made Thomas stick around and become a very innovative volunteer developer in our community for over seven years now.
MediaWiki: “huge, complex and often ugly”
The first few months can be rocky, he says. It was an exploration for him because MediaWiki, the free and open source wiki application, which stores the content into databases, “is huge, complex and often ugly.” “It was a lot of reading code to see how it works and how all the pieces are fitting together,” Thomas remembers. “Some of that can act as barriers. Especially for developers who are not familiar with Wikis,” he explains. It was quite difficult to write code matching MediaWiki standards and conventions and with a good enough level of quality at first.”
By Deror_avi (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0] Thomas (Tpt) at the Wikimedia Hackathon in Jerusalem
Improvements have been made in the past years to make the start for volunteers developers as smooth as possible. The WMDE engineering page for volunteer developers aims to provide relevant links and explains the processes and tools the developers work with on Wikimedia projects. For MediaWiki, the developer hub aims to give new developers an overview and the article “how to become a MediaWiki hacker” tries to give advice for beginners. “The documentation of MediaWiki is good enough to get into it,” Thomas says “because it has nice little schemas.” On this level it is good, but Thomas raises an important point. Good documentation is not always the case for the extensions. That can be problematic if an extension is not maintained and someone wants to pick it up again.
What made him stick around for so long?
An overarching theme during our chat was “need” – the need for this tool or that extension to be developed which made him stick around. When he started “it was very painful because the Wiki source code was breaking because the extension wasn’t maintained. And the system at this time for deployment was kind of bad. So I have written unit tests in 2013. Unit tests are a kind of automated tests that are written in order to ensure that the software still behaves correctly before the deployments”. This shows how the projects have potential but it’s the people who make the Wikimedia projects to what they are today by developing useful tools, features and thinking of ways of how the project can look like in the future.
When Wikidata started in 2012, it was another milestone for Thomas. He was keen to follow the development work and proposed some changes. Questions about how it would be structured and discussions with Denny Vrandecic about if links to external sources should be in the cycling question really got him involved in the project early on. AskPlatypus, aWikidata-based search engine, which can translate natural language to questions Wikidata can answer, should soon become his biggest Wikidata project. That is a good example of how volunteers should and can shape the direction of a Wikimedia project.
Another way Thomas got involved was via the technical wishlist. During the last Wikimedia Hackathon in Jerusalem, he worked on the VisualEditor support for Wikisource. It’s one of the items on the wish list. So that can be a good way to get started as well and find the first tasks.
About the impact beyond Wikimedia projects
Thomas also notes how impactful his work can be to other open source projects. Wikimedia/MediaWiki projects can expand into other projects which are connected or not. One of the ones Thomas mentioned is WSexport. It is a tool that exports Wikisource content into epub, pdf and those formats.
This initiative emerged because the community and him found that it was very painful to read Wikisource content out of Wikisource. “I think Wikisource was losing a lot of contributors because it was quite complicated compared to Project Gutenberg that has quite a lot of tools to read books in a lot of different formats. And for us it was completely different. It’s not very useful, but it’s quite nice and fancy and very interesting to develop.”
Other reasons for why he is motivated to develop something is because others and him would like this tool, because it would be so useful. So he says: “Hey, I should do it”. Or “Hey, it could be amazing to have such a thing.” For that the community appreciates him. He receives a lot of direct requests. “I don’t have to find tasks. Usually, it is tasks which are coming to me. I just receive an email for each request.” For developer tasks, volunteers use Phabricator and Github. Some tasks are extra marked with ‘volunteers needed’. Talk pages, too, play an important role. Thomas is known in the community, so there are a lot of people who ask him “You should fix it” or “You should implement this”. “Usually, there are a lot of requests, that is a very good side effect of the talk page,” he says.
Thomas’ hope is to find other Volunteer Developers to work with in the future.
By looking at the many ways Thomas has contributed, it becomes clear how diverse the impact of Volunteer Developers on Wikimedia projects can be. Thomas’ hope is to find other Volunteer Developers to work with in the future. “If there were more, some of the extensions could be maintained better.”
Some final advice for us? “If the contribution process is easy enough to make people realise that contributing to MediaWikis is not so difficult and that with a small contribution you can get huge improvement in the Wikis, let’s say contribution of workflows (…) then usually people come up with smart things.”
And wishes for the future?
“In general, for the Wikimedia Movement to have more interest in Wikisource and keeping up the good work for Wikidata.”
At the beginning I asked him which three words he associates with Wikimedia. They were knowledge, sharing and community. And his role in the community, I wondered?
“Maintenance,” he says would be the best word to describe his volunteering position.
I believe caretaker is a good one for Thomas aka tpt, too.
Thank you, Thomas for taking the time to share your experience.
It is all over the news; another psychology study debunked. With two thirds of the repeated studies being debunked, there is a lot in the literature of psychology no longer valid. The source for the article I read is Mr Eric-Jan Wagenmakers professor at the university of Amsterdam.
The NWO, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, is funding 3 million Euro to repeat key research. The problem is that science is in love with what is new and quick results. Three million is at best a start.
When science cannot be relied on, collaboration with scientists and universities easily becomes controversial. The programs taught are inherently point of view and often a conflict of interest is easily established. Consider; when doctors prescribe substances that are FDA approved, it seems obvious that these substances have a positive effect on patients. Then consider that we have a Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane, they make a reputation from debunking much of the use of such substances. We provide end user information and it seems obvious that just repeating the list of FDA approved substances without further information is not at all in our users best interest. It is even likely that we are liable for misinformation under several legislatures.
There is a need to be sceptical about sources. It is important that we not only improve the technology behind our sources, we also need an ability to mark information as debunked and have that information filter through our projects and in the information we provide. Remember, debunked is not a POV it comes with sources of its own. Thanks, GerardM
Many years ago, I was given a school assignment. Each member of our class was given a different artist’s name, and tasked to research it at the local library that weekend. Some got famous individuals such as Leonardo di Vinci or Van Gogh. Unluckily, I got an obscure early 20th-century cubist painter.
After several hours looking through the library’s very limited stock of books on the subject, I had found two sentences of dull information and a small, grainy black and white photograph of one of his works. I was put off art history pretty much for life, but I remember thinking at the time that there had to be a better approach to education.
Some years later, the internet arrived.
I became excited at the realisation that we were entering a new phase of human history, one in which every person—and in particular, every young adult—could have access to first-class, well-written, factual material.
I was fascinated by the idea that, given a similar assignment today, a student should be able to find exciting articles that would set them alight with a love of the subject… If, of course, we combined our collective skills to write them. One of the topics I choose to write about on the Wikipedia are our castles.
The United Kingdom, my home country, is permeated with castles. Almost everyone lives near them; we drive past them on our way to work; we’ve named streets and neighbourhoods after them; our head of state lives in one of the oldest in the land. But normally most of us barely look at them, let alone think about them. Their features blend into the landscape, often covered by the grey haze of our inclement weather.
Norman castles formed part of a terrifying new form of warfare, driving their nobility deep up into our Celtic valleys and hills. For the later English kings, they were the “bones of the kingdom”, combining rugged force with royal symbolism. Styles of architecture came and went, some sites being abandoned, others rebuilt time and time again. Generations of women, men and children lived, loved and toiled within their chambers and walls. If you know how to read them, castles are our crystallised history.
We can retell those stories through good Wikipedia articles.
Stones, bricks and earth become ways of reaching out to invaders, traitors, heroes, gamblers, reclusive old ladies, lovers… I remember discovering one day that a small stone tower in the countryside, built by a nouveau-riche wool merchant, was intended to resemble the massive walls of Edward I’s Caernarvon, which was itself designed to imitate the imagined glories of the Byzantine emperors. A Wikipedia article can be the gateway to new horizons and new ways of seeing.
I find the challenge stimulating: the task is both analytic and artistic, in that as an editor you are constantly choosing which facts to select and how best to present the narrative and characters. It is a bit like completing a cryptic crossword, mixed with writing a bit of historical fiction. Producing good castle articles isn’t necessarily easy though: it takes many hours of research, attention to detail and often a willingness to “go the extra mile” by acquiring access to specialist books and journals.
Of course, it’s made fun by the presence of enthusiastic fellow editors, and nothing can beat finding out that someone has used an article you’ve written when they’ve visited a site, or as part of their own school project.
“Why I …” is an ongoing series on the Wikimedia Blog. We want to hear what motivates you to contribute to Wikimedia sites: send us an email at blogteam[at]wikimedia[dot]org if you know of someone who wants to share their story about what gets them to write articles, take photographs, proofread transcriptions, and beyond.
One takeaway: Michael Phelps is big everywhere, except in Japan. Photo by Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil, CC BY 3.0 BR.
The past few weeks of the Traffic Report/Top 25 have been dominated by the 2016 Summer Olympics. Since the Olympics are truly one of the world’s biggest international events, you might guess that it has also dominated the most-viewed articles of other language Wikipedias.
You would be right—but the topics of interest around the world show interesting variations. We love the Olympics, but also love our own Olympics and Olympians.
Using the Wikimedia Foundation’s data available through TopViews,* we compiled charts of the 15 most popular Olympic-related articles for the period of August 5-21, the official period of the Olympics, for seven-different language Wikipedias: English, Spanish, German, Portuguese (the language of the host country), Russian, French, and Japanese. We considered using but did not include the Chinese Wikipedia due to its blockage in China greatly affecting its view area.
First of all, Michael Phelps really is huge, around the world. Though far and away #1 in English, he was also #2 in Russian and Spanish, #3 in Portuguese, #4 in French, and #5 in German. And just like on the English Wikipedia, Usain Bolt was generally behind Phelps, but solidly the second most popular athlete of the Games. He was #3 in English, #4 in Spanish, #5 in Russian, #6 in Portuguese and French, #8 in Japan, and #11 in German.
But the old saying “big in Japan” did not apply to Phelps, where he placed 12th, the only place where Bolt was more popular, by about 25%. To be big in Japan, though, you really had to be Japanese. The top seven Olympic-related articles were filled by Japanese medalists, not even interrupted by general articles like 2016 Summer Olympics or All-time Olympic Games medal table which were usually popular across the board. Japan’s list was led by Saori Yoshida, who won wrestling silver, and had 240% the views of Phelps. She was followed by many others, presumably now household names in Japan, including gymnast Kōhei Uchimura (#2) and table tennis whiz Ai Fukuhara (#3).
Though Japan is the most extreme case, it is not fair to single them out, because the data also shows that every country likes to favor their own. In France, judo practitioner and gold medalist Teddy Riner also beat Phelps and Bolt. Elsewhere Phelps and Bolt still always led, but local favorites were not far behind. In Spanish, Argentine tennis player Juan Martín del Potro, who won silver, was #5, and Spaniard Rafael Nadal was #9. In German, horizontal bar gold medalist Fabian Hambüchen (#8) was the top local hero. And in English, American gymnasts including Simone Biles (#4) and Aly Raisman (#9), and swimmers Katie Ledecky (#8) and Ryan Lochte (#11), were prominent, though India’s P.V. Sindhu, who won silver in badminton, drew an impressive #6 showing on the American-dominated list. Sindu and those top Americans don’t appear on the other charts. And vice-versa. E.g., English speakers were not focused on the three medals won by Russian gymnast Aliya Mustafina (#6 in Russia), because she doesn’t appear anywhere on the English (or other charts).
Not popular in English, but rather popular elsewhere, was Football at the 2016 Summer Olympics. Perhaps because the American women’s team floundered, no football related articles are in the English Top 15, but such articles hit #3 in Germany (who won silver in both men’s and women’s), #7 in Spanish, #8 in Portuguese, and #14 in Russian. But if your country is good in a sport, like Germany was in football, or France was in the modern pentathalon (women’s silver, #5), that’s what you’re most likely going to watch.
Generally our data collection showed that the Olympics were very popular everywhere. Other non-Olympic topics do appear in their general charts (remember the charts below are Olympic-only articles), just as we see on the Traffic Report, but to about the same extent. The only exception may be Russia, where the popularity of other articles such as the film Suicide Squad seemed a bit higher, perhaps a reflection of the disqualification of many of their athletes.
So, just like the Ancient Olympic Games brought together all of Greece, the modern Olympics does seem to bring us all together. We may celebrate our own victories a bit more, but that is part of a human nature we all share and treasure.
English Wikipedia
Simone Biles. Photo by Fernando Frazão/Agência Brasil, CC BY 2.0.
*One caveat on TopViews: TopViews compiles data on the 1,000 most viewed articles on a Wikipedia for each day. Running charts for longer periods compiles from those daily charts. Thus, when an article drops out of the top 1,000, those views for a day will not be included in the compiled data. Generally speaking, we have found that this gap is not a significant problem when looking at the most popular articles. The English Traffic Report and Top 25 report are usually derived from the 5000 most-popular pages, which includes all viewcount data, but there is no similar source for other-language Wikipedias. On the current WP:5000, the 1,000th most viewed article has under 59,000 views for one day. This number should be significantly lower on other language Wikipedias, which receive less traffic.
**We also reviewed statistics for the Bengali Wikipedia (7th on the list of languages by total number of speakers), but traffic and usage there was too low to yield usable information. Though their page on the 2016 Summer Olympics was in their top 10 (#5), many of the more viewed articles on that project are traditional encyclopedic topics, e.g., #1 was Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding leader of Bangladesh. Only 21 articles (on any topic) had more 5,000 views during the Olympics on that project.
The Arabic Wikipedia was also considered. Though it has more traffic than the Bengali project (their 2016 Summer Olympics article was #1, showing users go there for topical information, the general Olympics Games article was #2, and Phelps was #10 among all articles), but only about 50 articles on that project broke 50,000 views during the Olympics, and primary encyclopedic articles (like Egypt and Saudi Arabia) were among them. Ultimately, space and time limitations led to the selection of seven languages to sample.
Milowent, English Wikipedia editor
This post was originally published in the Signpost, a news journal about the English Wikipedia and the Wikimedia community; it was adapted and lightly edited for publication in the Wikimedia blog. The views expressed are the author’s alone and not necessarily held by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), the largest photography competition in the world, aims to document the monuments and cultural heritage sites of today for others to enjoy tomorrow. For the 2016 competition, being held this month, participants from more than forty countries will photograph tens of thousands of monuments to make them freely available for anyone to view, enjoy, and learn from on Wikimedia sites.
This contest has real-world impact in preserving cultural history, which is often under threat from physical, political, and other outside forces. The minaret of the Great Mosque of Aleppo, for instance, was captured in one of the ten images Syria sent on to the international Wiki Loves Monuments competition in 2014. The mosque itself was one of the oldest in Aleppo, and its minaret, built in 1090, was “quite unique in the whole of Muslim architecture.”
But even before the photograph was submitted to the competition, the minaret had been destroyed amidst the country’s civil war.
The Great Mosque of Aleppo, seen in 2012. Photo by مجد محبّك, CC BY-SA 3.0.
A thousand miles to the north, the house of Ukrainian composer Yaroslav Yaroslavenko, a building recognized for its historical significance, was knocked down in 2008 for a multi-story residential complex. Similarly, two Ukrainian churches, built in 1670 and 1732, burned down in 2006 and 2008.
However, photographer Yuri Voloshchak captured Yaroslav’s house before it was demolished. Other photographers had taken photos of the churches before they were lost to history. All uploaded the photos as part of Wiki Loves Monuments.
The dome atop Russia’s Trinity Cathedral collapsed after a major 2006 fire; only a massive investment in rebuilding the structure prevented it from suffering from the same fate as Yaroslavenko’s house. Wiki Loves Monuments has photos documenting the fire and its post-restored condition. Photo by Олег Сыромятников, CC BY-SA 3.0.
In other parts of the world, different forces are at play that impact the ability to document, preserve, and share photos of monuments with the world. Legislation that limits freedom of panorama, the right for people to capture and share, online or otherwise, the beauty and art of their public spaces, can make it more difficult to participate in Wiki Loves Monuments.
“For each monument, you would have to seek permission from the architect or find their date of death to determine whether you could upload a photo,” said Romaine, a Belgian organizer of Wiki Loves Monuments. “It was holding people back from participating in the competition and sharing free knowledge.”
In July 2016, thanks in part to Wikimedian-activists, more than 1500 images were restored on Wikimedia Commons when Belgian copyright law was amended in support of freedom of panorama.
In Italy, Wikimedians have to seek permission to document specific monuments for the competition. Wikimedia Italy contacted more than 8,000 Italian government and private bodies this year to approve specific monuments that could be documented in each region. Of those contacted, 567 replied, approving a total of 6,011 monuments for the 2016 competition—but this is a total that Wikimedia Italy has grown significantly each year.
Without this enormous effort, monuments in Italy and many other countries can’t be documented or shared.
“Wiki Loves Monuments offers a unique opportunity for people around the world to discover their local heritage and share it with the world through Wikipedia.” said Lily, one of the international organizers for the contest. “I’m particularly excited about Belgium, as this year will be the first year they can photograph all monuments, thanks to a recent new law protecting the freedom of panorama.”
Across the world, Bangladesh is taking part for the first time this year. Bangladesh has 452 government-listed archeological sites, most with no freely licensed images, according to Nahid Sultan of Wikimedia Bangladesh, an independent organization that works to advance the Wikimedia movement. “We have been trying to create a freely licensed image database in Wikimedia Commons for all Bangladeshi archaeological sites,” Sultan says. “Wiki Loves Monuments is the perfect chance.”
You can join these volunteers in documenting your country’s history. More than 1.5 million photographs have been uploaded in the six years Wiki Loves Monuments has been run. This year, organizing teams in over forty countries have coordinated with state and local governments to participate in the contest, including first-time participants Bangladesh, Georgia, Greece, Malta, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, South Korea, and Turkey.
WLM begins in most countries on 1 September and ends on 30 September. The winners will be announced in December 2016, and the photographer behind the top photo will be given their choice of €1,000 or a contribution of up to €2,000 towards a trip to Wikimania 2017 in Montreal, Canada.
The public is yearning for scientific knowledge, and scientists wish to make their findings and expertise available to the world at large. Despite these intersecting goals, the public often struggles to find clear, comprehensible scientific information. Meanwhile, the scientific community often finds its work tightly guarded behind paywalls, or drowned in the sea of media options available today.
The Wiki Education Foundation launched the Wikipedia Year of Science to harness the power of our Classroom Program toward tackling the challenges of science communication. We’re connecting with instructors who assign students to take their learning to the public through Wikipedia. They master science communications skills, and improve the quality of free, open scientific knowledge available on Wikipedia.
Please join us online on Friday October 7, 2016 from 10:00-11:00 a.m. Pacific time. We’ll explore how the Wiki Education Foundation is helping to make scientific knowledge more widely available and breaking down the barriers between expertise and access.
When students contribute to Wikipedia as part of their coursework, they make reliable information available to a wider audience and learn how to be better communicators themselves. Throughout the Year of Science, we’ve made a special push to support courses in STEM and the Social Sciences. We want to improve science content on Wikipedia, but also create a cohort of students who can accurately digest, assess, and communicate scientific knowledge. We’re halfway through the Year of Science, and it’s already been a huge success.
The years 1883-1885 were tumultuous in the history of zoology in India. A group called the Simla Naturalists' Society was formed in the summer of 1885. The founding President of the Simla group was, oddly enough, Courtenay Ilbert - who some might remember for the Ilbert Bill which allowed Indian magistrates to make judgements on British subjects. Another member of this Simla group was Henry Collett who wrote a Flora of the Simla region (Flora Simlensis). This Society vanished without much of a trace. A slightly more stable organization was begun in 1883, the Bombay Natural History Society. The creation of these organizations was precipitated by the emergence of a gaping hole. A vacuum was created with the end of an India-wide correspondence network of naturalists that was fostered by a one-man-force - that of A. O. Hume. The ornithological chapter of Hume's life begins and ends in Shimla. Hume's serious ornithology began around 1870 and he gave it all up in 1883, after the loss of years of carefully prepared manuscripts for a magnum opus on Indian ornithology, damage to his specimen collections and a sudden immersion into Theosophy which also led him to abjure the killing of animals, taking to vegetarianism and subsequently to take up the cause of Indian nationalism. The founders of the BNHS included Eha (E. H. Aitken was also a Hume/Stray Feathers correspondent), J.C. Anderson (who was a Simla naturalist) and Phipson (who was from a wine merchant family with a strong presence in Simla).
Shimla then was where Hume rose in his career (as Secretary of State, before falling) allowing him to work on his hobby project of Indian ornithology by bringing together a large specimen collection and conducting the publication of Stray Feathers. Through readings, I had a constructed a fairytale picture of the surroundings that he lived in. Richard Bowdler Sharpe, a curator at the British Museum who came to Shimla in 1885 wrote (his description is well worth reading in full):
... 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 in Hume's biography on 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.
So there ended my hopes of adding good views (free-licensed images are still misunderstood in India) of Rothney Castle to the Wikipedia article on Hume. I did however get a couple of photographs from the roadside. In 2014, I managed to visit the South London Botanical Institute which was the last of Hume's enterprises. This visit enabled the addition a few pictures of his herbarium collections as well as an illustration of his bookplate which carries his personal motto.
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 at least some part of this collection went to Hume. It is said that the collection was packed away in boxes around 1873. The collection later came into possession of Mr B. Bevan-Petman who apparently passed it on to the Lahore Central Museum in 1917.
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):
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!
1872 Map showing Rothney Castle
The steep road just below Rothney Castle
Excavation for new constructions just below and across the road from Rothney Castle
The embankment collapsing below the guard hut
The lower entrance, concrete constructions replace the old building
The guard hut and home are probably the only heritage structures left
I got back from Annandale and then walked down to Phagli on the southern slope of Shimla to see the place where my paternal grandfather once lived. It is not a coincidence that Shimla and my name are derived from the local deity Shyamaladevi (a version of Kali).
The South London Botanical Institute
After returning to England, Hume took an interest in botany. He made herbarium collections and in 1910 he established the South London Botanical Institute and left money in his will for its upkeep. The SLBI is housed in a quiet residential area. Here are some pictures I took in 2014, most can be found on Wikipedia.
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
An antique book shop had a set of Hume's Nests and Eggs (Second edition) and it bore the signature of "R.W.D. Morgan" - it appears that there was a BNHS member of that name from Calcutta c. 1933. It is unclear if it is the same person as Rhodes Morgan, who was a Hume correspondent and forest officer in Wynaad/Malabar who helped William Ruxton Davison. Update: Henry Noltie of RBGE has pointed out to me privately that this is not the forester Rhodes Morgan. - September, 2016.
We are only five days into Wiki Loves Monuments 2016, and already excited. This year, more than 40 countries with many different cultures are participating in the competition. This is only possible thanks to the teams of volunteers across these countries overcoming the challenges that play a role in organizing this competition on a global scale: complicated legislation, accessing monument data, cultural differences, hesitant partners and even the challenges of polar winter (Antarctica!).
We are delighted to see this level of participation, especially from those countries who are participating for the first time: Bangladesh, Georgia, Greece, Malta, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, South Korea, and Turkey.
We warmly invite you to experience Wiki Loves Monuments: discover the heritage in your own neighborhood and document and share photos of your local heritage with the world. And if your country does not participate? This is a perfect opportunity to make good use of those vacation pictures you made of the beautiful monuments you appreciated so much.
Please help us spread the word about the competition: share your excitement about heritage with your friends, with your colleagues, and lets share more photos through Wikipedia. Not just of the famous monuments that everyone knows – but maybe especially those monuments that are not very commonly known and photographed. Because our shared heritage is as varied as the people and the history it represents.
"Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it." - Andre Gide
Public availability of knowledge is a great idea that should not require selling. The idea that "knowledge" is neccessarily incomplete and constantly in a state of flux is however something that does not go down well with many people. The surety of being right is far more comfortable than having to question what we hear or read. Most people trained in science are expected to be more comfortable with this state of being critical and careful about all knowledge. For a lot of people, however, Wikipedia has been that wakening call - and one of the first ever studies of the accuracy of knowledge available on it focussed on the fact that it had the same number of errors as other sources with a reputation for being accurate.
Given the state of flux it is somewhat surprising that there still are researchers who fail to see the value of contributing to Wikipedia - using it to document and summarize the state of published knowledge. A recent note in the venerable ornithological journal The Ibis - titled - "Why ornithologists should embrace and contribute to Wikipedia" by A. L. Bond (Ibis 153:640–641) is of interest and one would have thought that ornithologists or indeed all scientists would take to Wikipedia without the need for such persuasion.
In countries like India, where the attitude of governance (and government funded research) is not one of being supportive - even organizations dealing with environmental conservation make little effort to supply citizens with information. There is no enforceable principle that the government should supply information proactively (except as an obscure clause in the Right to Information Act 2005 which states that public bodies should NOT wait for citizens to seek information). The Wikimedia Foundation provided me with a travel grant to attend the first WikiConference in Mumbai and at a session (presentation material here) there I pointed out, much to the amusement of the audience, how very intellectually stimulating a visit to the websites of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Zoological Survey of India and Botanical Survey of India are. Indeed there are no government-run place where a citizen can seek knowledge about something around them without having to spend the rest of their life filling forms and sending money orders or registered letters. On the other hand, the experience of someone seeking answers to their queries on the Wikipedia reference desks for science or mathematics is a world apart. Wikipedia articles themselves each have a "talk" or discussion page and one can ask questions, question the legitimacy of information or seek better clarity, something that cannot be done with a textbook and often and sadly enough even with teachers.
Wikipedia articles are often not always in great form, and are only improved when knowledgeable and conscientious editors / readers try to improve them. Since 2002, I have been working on some of the articles and have set upon myself the task of improving the articles on Indian birds. More than anything, it is a very satisfying experience to research the existing literature. I decided to work on the species starting with the most frequently met ones - a working list of which is on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shyamal/todo - and it has to be reiterated that there is no such thing as a complete article, indeed there never will be a book or any other work that is "complete". Some years ago, I attempted to impress upon the more literate bird enthusiasts of India how little we have progressed in terms of collecting, collating, updating and making available new information on the birds in India. (See Shyamal, L. 2007. Opinion: Taking Indian ornithology into the Information Age. Indian Birds 3 (4): 122–137.) The situation in other taxonomic groups can hardly be considered any better - words like "taxonomic impediment" have been invented for the inability of support for identification in zoology. Even the taxonomists working on specific groups seem to believe that they cannot help. In 2001, I was invited to a discussion on using computers in taxonomy - and there were people making it appear like zoologists needed to learn a whole load about relational databases and Codd's rules so that they could contribute. Being a complete outsider to this clique I suggested that they needed none of this obscure additional computer science and that they merely needed to get their act together and post plain documents of their knowledge into the Internet and that other people or other computational systems (such as search engines) would come along and collate the available information in new forms. A decade on, it seems that nothing much has changed and the few "providers" of information still feel they cannot do much, but it is interesting that the "seekers" and "consumers" of information have now empowered into becoming the new "ersatz providers".
I recently decided to see how the "seekers" work with Wikipedia articles and examined the traffic on various articles. I was interested to see if there was a seasonal trend with people looking up information for certain species in winter, however the picture is not so clear. The visitation to Wikipedia articles on a bird species is related to (1) the chances that people know the name for a bird; (2) the nature of the species - how much it influences folks to look it up on the Internet; and (3) the position of the article on Google search results, which in turn is related to the "quality" of the Wikipedia article.
In 2011, the number of visitors per month to the list of Indian birds (and a local Bangalore list for comparison) were (semi-automatially collated from http://stats.grok.se/ ):
Among "lists of birds", the Indian list was second only to the Florida list during January 2011 ! For the species themselves the monthly activity was relatively stable, showing little difference across months in the vast majority of species. A few show spikes, but these appear to be related to either media related interest or due to appearing or being linked to something on higher traffic Wikipedia pages. For a full table of the statistics see here. The overal statistics follow the usual power distribution with the top hundred species getting 60.4% and the top 500 species receiving 90% of the total traffic of 14.46 million visits in 2011.
When people find something interesting in the media, they sometimes look up Wikipedia articles and the results is a surge in traffic on their pages. In the unsorted 30 day traffic one can see a spike in the traffic for the Black-necked Stork - this is probably due to a media event. On the other hand one can see a correlated peaking for the Black and Red Kites for 2012-02-02 - such activity indicates information seekers looking at a cluster of related species, possibly for comparing identifications. This kind of activity holds great promise - and it is doubtless that this will increase as new tools to seek information - that are not based merely on Google searches for names (which means you need to know the name before you seek info on it) - become commonplace. Imagine the day when you describe the colours of a bird on your mobile and it lists you the relevant Wikipedia bird pages, based on the region from where you access it. Until then, one can always seek information by posting images (if you are willing to share them via a non-restrictive Creative Commons license, that would be via http://commons.wikimedia.org - you can use your English or other language Wikipedia login for this site as well ) and asking for the identity on the Wikipedia projects - the extra advantage to this is that a good image might well become useful in one of the articles.
Seek and ye shall find, and when you do, we shall too ...
Postscript - a sample of things that researching for a Wikipedia article can produce
In the last week, I have been researching the entry for Dendrocygna javanica - the Lesser Whistling Teal / Duck. A recent fieldguide for India by an American author P C Rasmussen - has this to say about the family - (Birds of South Asia. p. 67, volume 2) - "Two species in region; rather small, with long neck and legs, and upright carriage. In flight, readily identified by very broad wings and long necked shape; tend to circle around when disturbed. Both species are noisy and have specialised wing feathers that produce noise in flight.... "
This "specialised wing feathers" is not even mentioned in Salim Ali and Ripley's handbook - so I decided to examine this further. It turns out that in 1911, Oskar Heinroth, a German ornithologist, wrote about this idea which was published in the Proceedings of the International Ornithological Congress. The actual text reads as follows (from pages 673 and 696) :
Merkwürdig ist das laute Pfeifen, das Dendrocygna javanica im Fluge hervorbringt. Es wird verursacht durch einen eigenartigen Vorsprung an der Innenfahne der äußersten Handschwinge, die auf der nebenstehenden Abbildung in natürlicher Größe wiedergegeben ist. Den anderen Arten fehlt diese absonderliche Federbildung, und sie fliegen auch anscheinend ohne ein besonders bemerkenswertes Geräusch; bei ihnen werden aber dafür, wenn sie die Flügel öffnen, weil hin auffallende Farben bemerkbar. (Siehe unter "Bedeutung des Flügelspiegels" S. 696.)
This translates as
The strange thing is the loud whistle that Dendrocygna javanica produces in flight. It is caused by a curious projection on the inner vane of the outermost primary feather, which is reproduced on the adjacent image in actual size. The other species lack this bizarre feather structure, and they seem to fly without any particularly remarkable sound, but when they open their wings, they have striking colors. (See "Understanding the wing mirror": page 696)
And page 696 has this:
Von den mir naher bekannten Dendrocygna-Arten hat autumnalis und discolor einen breiten, weißen, arborea einen deutlich silbergrauen Spiegel, bei arcuata, fulva und eytoni sieht man im Fluge eine leuchtende, durch die Seitenfedern und Oberschwanzdecken erzeugte, um das hintere Körperende gehende Binde, viduata hat den abstechend weißen Kopf, und bei D. javanica, die keinerlei helle Farben hat, ist an die Stelle des optischen ein akustisches Lockmittel getreten: an der Innenfahne der äußersten handschwinge findet sich bei dieser Art ein ganz merkwürdiger, zungenartiger Fortsatz (s. Abbildung S. 673), der beim Flügelschlage ein Pfeifen hervorruft. Es wäre mir sehr erwünscht, wenn andere Beobachter diese von mir aufgestellten Behauptungen bei den übrigen Anseriformes, die meinen Studien bisher nicht zugänglich waren, nachprüften !
Which translates to:
From the Dendrocygna species that I know of - autumnalis and discolor have a wide white band, arborea a silvery gray colour, and in arcuata, fulva and eytoni in flight bright colors, produced by the side feathers and upper tail-coverts; viduata has a contrasting white head, and in D. javanica, which has no bright colors, the role of the visual effect is replaced by an acoustic modification:- the inner vane of the outermost primary has a very strange, tongue-like extension (see Figure p. 673), which causes the wing to produce a whistle. It would be very desirable if other observers can confirm my idea with other Anseriformes, that I have not had access to in my studies !
So it is evident that this modification is not found in Dendrocygna bicolor as mentioned in the Birds of South Asia (See a picture of the primaries here). To add to this, the idea that this notch even produces sound needs to be questioned and examined more carefully. It seems highly suspect, particularly because notches and emargination of primaries are quite common. It turns out that the next two primaries have a notch in them. It seems quite unlikely that any significant whistling sound is actually produced by this structure. The only other work that actually questions this idea is from 1922 and is from an amazing four volume work on the "A Natural history of the Ducks" by John C. Phillips. On page 151 - Phillips says "A characteristic peculiar to this species is a projection on the inner web of the outermost primary which Heinroth (1911) pictures, and describes as producing a loud whistling sound during flight. It is remarkable that no observations made in thc field have brought out this peculiarity, but it may be that the loud voice obscures this sound." It is interesting how certain ideas like this from 1911 get perpetuated by repeated citation without actual examination. And it is even more surprising that researchers fail to examine the original literature and take secondary citations for granted. Hopefully the efforts by the Biodiversity Heritage Library to make these and other originals works available to ordinary citizens will raise the standards of research particularly within academia.
At Wikimedia, for the last months I’ve been on and off rewriting our on-wiki technical Gerrit/Git/Code Review documentation.
Code review related documentation
That included improving the onboarding steps like setting up Git and Gerrit (related task; 135 edits), the contribution guidelines and expectations for patch authors (related task; 28 edits), and to some extent the guidelines for patch reviewers (related task; 23 edits).
Among the potential next steps there is agreeing on a more structured, standardized approach for reviewing code contributions. That will require engineering and development to lead efforts to have teams follow those guidelines, to establish a routine of going through unreviewed patches, and other potential iterative improvements.
On paper
I’m not a person carrying around a laptop and don’t use mobile phones much. The more text/comments to tackle (or seperate pages covering related topics), the more I prefer working on paper. (That’s also how I started high-level planning the GNOME Evolution user docs rewrite.)
It might be archaic but paper allows me to get an overview of several pages/documents at the same time. (I could probably also buy more or bigger screens?) I can mark and connect sections that are related and should not be in four different places (like Troubleshooting related information or operating system specific instructions). Plus trying to be accountable and transparent I end up performing lots of small atomic changes with a proper change summary message so I can cross out sections on paper that are done on the wiki. Paper especially works for me when thinking about topics that still require finding an approach. So I end up in the park or in a pub.
In a future blog post I’m going to cover what I’ve learned about aspects and issues of code review.
The Tech News weekly summaries help you monitor recent software changes likely to impact you and your fellow Wikimedians. Subscribe, contribute and give feedback.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Word-level diffs now work in longer paragraphs. [1]
Interactive maps now have a frame by default. This is to make them look like other multimedia objects. This affects all Wikivoyages, the Catalan, Hebrew, Macedonian Wikipedias and Meta. [2]
When you preview the MediaWiki:Captcha-ip-whitelist page it will show a validation output of the listed IP addresses instead of the list of addresses only. This can help you to identify if your whitelist rules will work or not. [3]
Changes this week
You will be able to use <maplink> on all Wikipedias. It creates a link to a full screen map. [4][5]
Sometimes when you mention another user they don't get a notification. You will be able to get a notification when you successfully send out a mention to someone or be told if they did not get a notification. This will be opt-in. [6][7]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 6 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 September. It will be on all wikis from 8 September (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 6 September at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Due to changes to Google Maps, an API key now needs to be set. Upgrading to the latest version of Maps will not break the maps on your wiki in any case, as the change really is on Googles end. If they are still working, you can keep running an older version of Maps. Of course it’s safer to upgrade and set the API key anyway. In case you have a new wiki or the maps broke for some reason, you will need to get Maps 3.8 or later and set the API key. See the installation configuration instructions for more information.
Added Google Maps API key egMapsGMaps3ApiKey setting (by Peter Grassberger)
Added Google Maps API version number egMapsGMaps3ApiVersion setting (by Peter Grassberger)
Upgrading
Since this is a feature release, there are no breaking changes, and you can simply run composer update, or replace the old files with the new ones.
Beware that as of Maps 3.6, you need MediaWiki 1.23 or later, and PHP 5.5 or later. If you choose to remain with an older version of PHP or MediaWiki, use Maps 3.5. Maps works with the latest stable versions of both MediaWiki and PHP, which are the versions I recommend you use.
Wikipedia has a category of some 40 Women's hall of Fame. They are women from the past and the present that are seen as exemplary. For all the women who have an English article there is now a statement indicating that they are seen as such.
For many women who are on these lists there is no article. Obviously when the objective is to have quality articles on notable women, it is good when there are lists with articles that could be written.
There are such lists and the best thing is they is some form of automated maintenance. The Women in Red project has such lists. Many of their lists find their basis in Wikidata and it is therefore possible to add people to their lists by adding key data.
All the women who have articles are now known as such, The next thing is to add the missing articles, the red links. So far I have added items for them one by one and stated what they are known for. Obviously this is a stub. More information is needed to state what they are known for, where they lived, why they are notable. It is not only how you enrich the data it is also how you increase diversity. Thanks, GerardM
According to the clinical evidence handbook only 12% of the 2500 most prebscribed substances and treatments by doctors are not proven effective. There is a massive conflict of interest when unsubstantiated facts are allowed in Wikidata. Arguments like "it is NPOV" are used to defend the practice or "it is harmful for patients" when they can find out that a substance is no better than a placebo but does have negative side effects.
When an external source knows about a substance, it is fine to link to that source. This is not the same as importing the data wholesale particularly when the data is so obviously categorically problematic.
The Wikimedia Foundation has a responsibility and it is not in indicating what substances are prescribed. When we are to include information it is not on the basis that it has been approved for use but on the basis of that it is actually proven to be beneficial. An error rate of 12% on such vital information is not acceptable. Thanks, GerardM
Creating content on Wikimedia Commons usually involves developing new and creative ways to increase the number of public domain and freely-licensed high-quality images available for use in Wikipedia articles. However, Wikimedia Commons can also be a great educational resource for art students.
Einat Amir, a video and performance artist and lecturer at the Postgraduate Fine Arts Program at Hamidrasha, the Faculty of Arts Beit Berl College Israel, worked with her students on a special exhibition based on materials from Wikimedia Commons—Unchain My Art.
“I learned about Wikimedia Commons when I started editing the Hebrew Wikipedia,” says Amir. “I was overwhelmed by the richness of the website! You can find historical images, documents and files from all over the world. What makes it even more fascinating is the diverse categorization of images. One can look for one thing and stumble upon another of equal interest.”
This free media file repository is a tool that many professors and students have yet to become familiar with. The loads of images, videos, and sound files in this repository could provide the reference materials that inspire new artwork. As an added benefit, art students inherently learn about the principles of free knowledge and freely-licensed materials.
These concepts challenge the common perception in the art world that copyrights are mandatory. Art students are educated about fair use and copyright infringement law with cases of historical precedent, such as the Cariou v. Prince copyright infringement case regarding appropriated art.
Amir’s course had two sections: the theoretical part where her students learned about different uses of digital archives in contemporary art.
Wikimedia Israel volunteers taught the students about the Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia Commons, and copyright issues. The students created their own accounts on the website and learned how to download photos, give proper credit, and how to upload and categorize new media.
They have also explored creative ways of using media files: each of them was asked to choose 10 pictures that they like for any reason. Then they were asked to do a 15-minute presentation to discuss possible relationships between their selected pictures.
The next phase of the course combined all the pictures selected by the students, shuffled and divided them into new, invented categories (for class use only). Each of these new categories was assigned to a group of students who were instructed to create a new artwork that combines all the different items in their category. Each group of students created their own unique artwork using creativity, inventiveness, and their unique combination of talents.
Amir has also encouraged her students to gain experience verbally articulating their creative decisions: “As an artist, you always need to explain your work to teachers, colleagues, curators, to your audience. The process of selecting and using media from Wikimedia Commons was a good practice exercise to help the students explain every stage of their creative process with their peers.”
By the end of the semester a physical exhibition was held at the art school’s gallery while a virtual one was held on Wikimedia Commons, available for worldwide public viewing. As far as we know, this is the first art exhibition for Wikimedia Commons to showcase.
“Curating Unchain My Art as a virtual exhibition was a very special experience. Each artwork is presented by its sources of inspiration with an explanation of the artistic process that brought it to life.” says Amir, “It was important to me that the students not only use the images they found on Wikimedia Commons, but also contribute to it by uploading their artwork to the place of their inspiration, with the hope that other people will be inspired by their work and the creative cycle continues,” says Amir.
Students that participated in the exhibition include:Alina Deckel, Gad Kozitz, Hadar Reuven, Hani Khatib, Navah Uzan, Gilat Elkaslasi and Moran Victoria Sabag, Ronit Citri, Shulamit Bialy, Sima Kirshner and Vardit Goldner.
We hope that this exhibition will be the first of many educational art initiatives to gain inspiration from the media files available on Wikimedia Commons.
Wiki Loves Monuments begins: The sixth edition of the world’s largest photographic competition has begun. This blog will run a long-form announcement next week; those looking to join the event can find instructions over at Commons.
Tech News: A new edition has been published. Of note: images now no longer load unless a user sees them, which “is to save mobile data and make the pages load faster,” and the name of the “save page” button is changing.
New RAW: The French Wikipedia’s 20 August RAW has details on CollectArt, an effort to get museum visitors to upload their photos to Wikimedia Commons, and a collaboration between Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec and Wikisourcers to upload and proofread a book a day.
Books and Bytes published: The bimonthly newsletter from the Wikipedia Library, the program that helps connect editors with the sources they need to write articles, is out. The team has five new research partnerships, and editors from around the world can sign up for these accounts now; there are also six open Wikipedia Visiting Scholar positions.
Wikimedia in Education out: The September Wikimedia in Education contains the heartwarming story of Armenian children teaching their parents how to edit. Said one parent, “I was worrying that my son spent hours in front of the laptop. But now, seeing the important work he is doing by creating and sharing free knowledge, I’m more understanding. I’m so proud of him!”
Signpost looks at India: The 18 August edition of the Signpostfocused on India, with one story highlighting the recent country-wide conference there; over 450 people from 20 language groups attended. The second main story dove into licensing developments: as the Signpost‘s Tony1 writes, “Last week brought a rare piece of good news in the world’s uncertain progress towards the widespread free licensing of information on the Internet … the government of one of India’s largest and most populous states—Tamil Nadu—has issued an instruction to Tamil University and ‘all other government departments and institutions to release all their publications, archives and collections under Creative Commons by Share-Alike license’.” A separate special report examined Antarctic women scientists.
Funds Dissemination Committee: Four new and reappointed members of the committee have been announced by the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation. They were drawn from a shortlist of six candidates, who were themselves drawn from thirteen initial nominations.
Changes to chapter and thematic organization criteria: Details and a robust discussion can be found on the Wikimedia-l mailing list.
Silesian Wikipedia reaches 5000 articles: On 6 July, the Silesian Wikipedia reached 5000 articles. The milestone article was about the American state of Utah. The Silesian language (or a dialect, depending on the source) is spoken by more than 500,000 people and is used mostly in the Silesia region of Poland. “Creating Wikipedia is is not just about keeping this ethnolect alive, but about making it flourish,” says Lajsikonik, one of the most active editors of the Silesian Wikipedia. “Writing an encyclopedia is an ambitious task, especially when you create it in a language that not so long ago used to be a language of the common people. Advancing in the social ladder required learning German or Polish. But now there is a growing group of well-educated Silesian people who have not forgotten the language which was spoken at their homes. They want to cultivate their culture in many different ways.” Editing Wikipedia is one of them. The Silesian Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia created in that language. (note via Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska, Wikimedia Poland)
Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate
Wikimedia Foundation
Sometimes the notes left by the Navmii users (supposedly to help OSM mappers improve the map) are not very helpful.
All you OpenStreetMappers storing images in Mapillary? Guess what — HERE Maps is going to use them to update their maps too!
A ‘totally confused’ mapper starts a lengthy discussion on the tagging list on how to tag freeway lanes approaching an exit.
Marc Zoutendijk points out an interesting problem in tagging restaurants which offer multiple cuisines. How does one add multiple values to the cuisine key?
The tagging mailing list discussed whether and how speed limits (when there is actually no limit) should be tagged.
Martin Koppenhoefer wonders why name=* tag is used for natural=cave_entrance and suggests using cave:name = * instead.
The official aerial imagery of canton Basel-Stadt (Switzerland), taken in April 2015, is now available for mapping at Mapproxy service of Swiss OSM Association.
Kreuzschnabel gives an example why “armchair” mapping via seemingly good Bing imagery still needs attention in order not to impair our data. (automatic translation
Nammala outlines a way of using Mapillary data to keep OSM turn restrictions up to date.
Community
Falk (if you’re not familiar, think “the German Rand-McNally or Bartholomew”) introduced (automatic translation) their new outdoor navigation device Tiger Blu. It has a Bluetooth interface and offers a range of OSM-based maps covering 31 European countries or regions via Falk Activity Manager.
OpenSnowMap adds a tile usage policy in plenty of time to prepare for the northern-hemisphere winter.
In the city of Duitama, Colombia, a group of OSM enthusiasts collected GPS traces for all bus routes in the city.
Imports
User MiroJanosik has written a diary entry about importing the conscription numbers (a central-European system of house numbers) of one town from cadastre to OSM and then verifying by survey.
Encoding coordinates by combining several words is nothing new. In Nigeria it is already happens, said at least the one who has imported it into OSM.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
Martijn van Exel shares the Corporate Membership’s final draft for review in the OSMF-talk mailing list.
Events
The videos from FOSS4G 2016 in Bonn are now available.
State of the Map Latam (25th-27th of November in São Paulo, Brasil), the annual conference for the Latin America OSM community, invites proposals for talks and workshops. Deadline for submission is September 25th. There are scholarships available and attendance is free.
At FOSS4Gbe (the Belgian edition of FOSS4G), there will be an OSM booth. OSMF is looking for interested volunteers to staff the booth.
Humanitarian OSM
For his PhD thesis, Chul Hyun Park has interviewed members from HOT on their roles as volunteers in crisis management.
Doctors Without Borders introduces a mobile app called MapSwipe to enable smart phone users to help map remote regions. MapSwipe is a part of the larger Missing Maps project.
In wake of the recent earthquakes in Italy, European Space Imaging and Planetek Italia provided high-resolution satellite imagery to HOT to map the damaged infrastructure. To support those concerned, volunteers in Italy created a task to help.
Maps
Laser Atelier created this detailed laser engraved paper map of Tokyo with OSM data.
switch2OSM
Marine Scotland (the Scottish Government department) use OpenStreetMap as their default base map in their National Marine Plan Interactive website. This layer integrates bathymetry data with OSM land data and is provided by Oceanwise, a British company providing Marine GIS services.
Licences
Mozilla “breathes a petition of fire” at EU copyright laws, reports the Register. Mozilla Foundation says: “We need to build into the law flexibility, through a UGC exception and a clause like an open norm, fair dealing, or fair use, to empower everyday people to shape culture and conversations online and keep the Internet awesome.”
Simon Poole asks for feedback on the updated privacy policy for OSMF before it is decided by the board as an official policy.
Software
Mapbox opens up access to the Mapbox Studio dataset editor, a tool for creating and editing geospatial data in your browser.
The next version (0.5.4) of the Python Overpass API wrapper is now available.
Federico has developed a Telegram bot, named SearchAroundBot, for searching and editing POIs on OSM. He also invites people to make suggestions of any improvements they’d like to see.
Programming
[1] Paul Norman did an experiment with ClearTables, generating vector tiles on his own and with client-side rendering using Tangram. He also published a demo site.
A summary of Michael Zangl’s work on JOSM as a part of Google Summer of Code 2016
Hartmut Holzgraefe summarizes his latest work on improving his Maposmatic instance.
Kamalpreet Kaur Grewal from India has sent out an email to the dev mailing list about his interest in contributing to ‘Detection of Vandalism’ project.
Tom MacWright presents the work results of the iD developers, in modularizing the editor’s code. This will allow modules to be written for iD in the future.
Arnulf Christl, co-organizer of the Bonn FOSS4G, stated in an interview in Bonner-General Anzeiger the meaning of open source systems for geographical information. The basis for the data required for this is OpenStreetMap. (automatic translation)
Other “geo” things
The (independent) Google Earth blog speculates that Google is threatened by a $15 million penalty due to Indo-Bangladeshi border issues including numerous unanswered enclaves contradicting Indian legislation. These enclaves still show up on Google Maps. OSM has clarified this long ago.
‘Migrations in Motion’, an animated map, shows how different species in North America will migrate as a result of climate change.
With Uber planning to roll out self-driving cars, there is need for better maps and navigation technology to overcome dependence on communication with the rider.
The historic digital maps by Map Edinburgh’s Social History (MESH) project blends the picture of contemporary Edinburgh provided by OpenStreetMap with historical geological and cartographic data.
German radio station Deutschlandradio Kultur discussed (translation) the impact of digitalisation and cross-linkage on general mapping procedures and map usage, emphasizing the growing importance of dynamic, use-oriented mapping based on movement profiling over merely descriptive maps.
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, jinalfoflia, kreuzschnabel, mgehling, muramototomoya, seumas, wambacher.
The project aims to upload over 1300 high-quality photos and 20 videos to Commons, the Wikimedia movement’s media repository, in addition to developing more than 110 articles about the region on Wikipedia.
During each excursion, the teams will record traditional folk dress and artwork, like sculptures, artisan objects, and cultural artifacts, that uniquely represent each region. Volunteers taking part in the project will also gather bibliographic and reference material, which they will later use to write or improve related Wikipedia articles in six languages.
The Carpathian Mountains form the second-longest mountain range in Europe, spanning across southeast Poland, southwest Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Romania and Serbia. While it is an area of rich cultural diversity, its traditions and contemporary culture have never been adequately recorded on Wikipedia.
“Wikipedia entries on these forms of cultural heritage are often very basic and only written in local languages,” explains Klara Sielicka-Baryłka, European ethnography specialist at the National Museum of Ethnography. “We are holding this series of joint field trips to change that.”
On these five trips, international teams of ethnographers and Wikimedians will collect reference material (publications, which are frequently rare and difficult to acquire), visit local ethnographic museums and small regional cultural centers, and photograph and film the work of local craftsmen.
Members of the first ethno-wiki expedition team have just returned from the Beskids and Podhale—two mountain ranges that lay within Polish borders—with impressive discoveries. The team photographed some of the oldest surviving relics of original regional clothing from the collections of the Żywiec City Museum and the Tatra Museum in Zakopane, neither of which have articles on the English Wikipedia at the time of this writing; filmed the process of making kierpce shoes and folk musical instruments; recorded short interviews with contemporary craftsmen making jewelry, textiles and leather modeled on historic designs; and brought back a wide range of subject literature in the form of publications and book scans made on location.
The close collaboration between professional ethnographers and Wikipedia volunteers was key to the success of this project. “Gathering documentation of this type requires the professional expertise of museum professionals and qualified researchers. But the knowledge they collect is often locked in museum archives and university libraries,” says Tomasz Ganicz of Wikimedia Poland. “The museum contributes background knowledge, bibliographic research, field skills and local contacts, while Wikimedia volunteers contribute their knowledge about best practices, the process of editing Wikipedia, the basics of licensing, and general enthusiasm about participating in a truly unique adventure in research.”
Both sides end up acquiring new skills, as museum professionals learn more about open standards, licenses, and the inner workings of Wikimedia projects, and Wikimedia volunteers learn the basics of ethnographic field research.
“It wouldn’t have been possible to carry out this project without the museum team on board,” Marta Malina Moraczewska from Wikimedia Polska stated. “To bring valuable images of folklore to Wikimedia Commons, we need not only the knowledge about regional customs and the artwork; we also need to be able to identify the items and to get in touch with local craftspeople and artists. Maintaining and cultivating these contacts is a key aspect of an ethnographer’s work. We also rely on the museum’s help when it comes to the descriptions of all images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.”
“The team has organized a workshop to present the basics of editing Wikipedia, uploading files to Commons and understanding GLAM-WIKI for the staff of the Żywiec City Museum and local photographers, who can expand the project by releasing some of their own images under free licenses. “We received a very warm welcome, both from local communities and the museums,” says Moraczewska. “Apart from the images, we left with quite a few books on the subject and ideas on further collaboration offered by local staff. We look forward to keeping in touch!”
This is not the first partnership between Wikipedians and the National Museum of Ethnography in Warsaw. During the Ritual Year with Wikipedia project in 2015, Wikimedians and ethnographers traveled around Poland to document folklore rituals and customs. Many of these were ancient and enduring in the context of Polish history, yet almost extinct in the online realm and known only to a limited group—sometimes only a single village. The project resulted in close to 1000 images and several films uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and over 40 articles written or expanded in several languages on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is an unheralded crown jewel of the Internet. And today, it turns 15!
Founded before current titans like Facebook and YouTube (and even before predecessors like MySpace and Friendster), Wikipedia has shown remarkable staying power. It is the most extensive compendium of knowledge ever, and the most widely read. But it’s more than a big, popular encyclopedia — it’s also the biggest collaborative project in history. Every month, more than 100,000 people pitch in, contributing to its ever-evolving, ever-expanding collection of knowledge. What are the important things we, as Wikipedians, should focus on as we look to the future? Here are some ideas:
Form a strategy. The five year strategic plan 1,000 of its volunteers created in 2010 expired last year. There is currently no plan to build a new one. A strategic plan can help hundreds of thousands of individuals, as well as a growing stable of organizations, stay organized and aligned. It’s the best way to maximize our impact on the big issues. We need a new strategic plan, drawing from broad and deep input from our enormous and talented community. The items below could be part of such a strategy.
Embrace our connections with age-old institutions. In many ways, Wikipedia’s goals and values overlap with what museums, universities, libraries, news organizations, non-profits, government, and other institutions have done for centuries or millennia. In our first 15 years, we shook those institutions up. In our next 15, we should help them evolve their practices to better serve an increasingly online world. We should also allow ourselves to grow and evolve with their input, as Wikipedia is not the first institution to try to change the world for the better. Wikipedia should be the nexus of how a grassroots movement can interact with structured institutions, to make the world a better place.
Broadly invite the world to engage. Although we Wikipedians say the right words consistently, we have not attracted participation at the level we should. We count our volunteer base in the tens or hundreds of thousands, while those who give money number in the millions. But money isn’t what Wikipedia needs to thrive. When we invite people to contribute, we should focus on their time and good will, not just their bank accounts.
Be better at collaboration. When people engage with Wikipedia, they should come away proud and inspired. We should strive to truly become the “encyclopedia anyone can edit.” If you look closely at the dynamics among Wikipedia editors, you’ll find great inspiration in some places — and utterly intractable, nasty debates in others. The problems have both external and internal causes: the inherent controversies in the topics we cover; nasty dynamics all over the Internet and society; and, notably, Wikipedia’s own policies and processes. We shouldn’t blame ourselves for what’s outside our control. But we should always seek ways to improve the collegiality of our policies and processes.
Instill our values in the organization that represents us. The Wikimedia Foundation does much good for Wikipedia, but in many ways it has lost track of Wikipedia’s founding principles. Its board has grown increasingly secretive; its deliberations and objectives are often opaque. But the results are sometimes shocking: in just the last month, the Wikimedia Foundation has made not one, but two shocking decisions about its own membership. It has largely forgotten that its volunteers aim to serve the world’s readers, and claims exclusive ownership of that passion in many ways. There is a glimmer of hope for one value (financial transparency), but still much work to be done regarding values like operational transparency, inclusion, good governance, and healthy communication.
Define and share our expertise. Wikipedians know a great deal about collaboration (big and small, online and offline), encyclopedia creation, copyright freedom, free content/open source values, and how to run a massive web site without a massive corporate sponsor. We should make the wisdom and knowledge we have accumulated more accessible, so it can inform other great new ideas — both within the Wikimedia movement and beyond. When somebody thinks, “who can help me think about massive collaboration?” the obvious — and fruitful — answer should be, “Wikipedians.”
The Wiki Education Foundation is a wholly independent non-profit organization. Donations off banners at the top of Wikipedia articles don’t go to us (only donations at wikiedu.org/donate do). We don’t charge our program participants for our services (although support is always appreciated!).
Instead, we rely on your enthusiasm to help us grow.
We know time is a scarce resource in academia. So we’re sharing five easy ways for busy instructors to help Wiki Ed grow, which will help us provide better tools, support, and ideas for the future.
1. Have a conversation.
One of the most powerful drivers for new courses is word of mouth recommendations from trusted colleagues. If you’ve taught with us, and you feel enthusiastic about the assignment, we’d love if you mentioned it to a colleague in your school. Talk honestly about your experiences, your challenges, and the outcomes you found most valuable. Then, follow up with an e-mail. You can link to our teaching resources, and there’s a contact form there to get if they’re interested. Of course, you can always send them an email, copied to a Wiki Ed staff member you work with or contact@wikiedu.org.
2. Post about us to an academic community.
Are you part of an academic community or mailing list? Writing up a paragraph or two about your experience (or your students’ experiences) and linking to our resources is a major boost. Let us know if you do, and we can help answer questions as they come up.
3. Write a blog post.
Do you have a blog, column, or a hankering to write for an academic association’s blog or journal? If you’re open to sharing ideas about pedagogy with others in your field, we’d love if you mentioned the benefits of the Wikipedia assignment, and the tools we offer. Let us know if you do, so we can help spread the word! We’d love to share your ideas on this blog, too. Get in touch with us: contact@wikiedu.org.
Some of you also may be teaching with Wikipedia, but haven’t connected to us. That means you’re potentially missing out on resources and tools that can improve your students’ experiences and learning outcomes. That includes free print and online teaching materials, online trainings and orientations, and a staff on hand to support the Wikipedia side of your assignment.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably already interested in what Wikipedia can do for your classroom. Maybe you’re interested, but haven’t been ready to make the leap. If that’s you, reach out! We’re still seeking instructors in higher ed in the US and Canada for fall term, and we’d be happy to start a conversation about building a course that fits your needs.
Interested in getting involved? Drop us a line: contact@wikiedu.org.
Script from the Koran adorns much of the Taj Mahal. Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, licensed CC BY 2.0
A slide flashed on the screen—the Taj Mahal. The audience was initially taken by its physical beauty. But upon closer inspection, we were told, one would find much of the text of the Koran chiseled into this wonder of the ancient world.
What a brilliant way to preserve text against the ravages of time. Carve the most important words into the stone of a marvelous structure.
Text—its physical structure, its preservation, its manipulation, interpretation and cultural transformation—was the topic of the sixth Future of Text Symposium on the Google campus in late August.
Frode Hegland introduces the Symposium. Event photos by Dan Cook, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
For the second year, Wiki Strategies founder Pete Forsyth was among the speakers, who each had 10 minutes to describe a particular personal text passion, followed by five minutes for questions and discussion. Wiki Strategies co-sponsored the symposium.
The symposium exists because Frode Hegland cares deeply about text and had been searching for a vehicle to bring together kindred spirits to probe text’s evolution. As he has said in explaining the need for such a gathering, “The written word is a fundamental unit of knowledge and as such is of universal importance.”
Hegland, a teacher, lecturer, software developer and author, hosted the first Future of Text symposium in London six years ago. He intentionally keeps the crowd small, intimate and engaged; expanding to a three-day conference in a hotel ballroom is not his idea of thought leadership.
Eileen Clegg presenting.
His co-organizer is Houria Iderkou—without whom, he says, the symposium would not be possible. Houria is an e-commerce entrepreneur who flawlessly manages the many details of hosting a symposium.
The passions unleashed and the intellectual exchanges that occurred that day in Mountain View paid tribute to text’s contributions to human culture. For one day, the written word was celebrated as the miraculous gift to mankind that it truly is. Frode admitted to being a bit discouraged at day’s end–not by the discussions that took place, but by the weight of responsibility mankind has to hand text along from generation to generation, and to use it to its full potential to support the human endeavor.
Jim Strahorn, Pete Forsyth, and Bonnie DeVarco dig into the technicalities of text.
It is, after all, the accounting and preservation of the human experience, as well as an essential ingredient of that experience. When one considers what has been irrevocably lost of the experiences of humans who did not have a written language to pass their tales on to those who came after them, then perhaps Frode’s anxieties come sharply into focus. The responsibility is on us to preserve in text what we have learned, what we have seen and heard and touched and felt and smelled.
So perhaps we should ask: What will be our Taj Mahal?
Photo by Eugene A. Cernan/NASA, public domain/CC0.
In 1977, NASA launched two identical Golden Records into space as part of the Voyager program. Voyager 1 and 2 have by now left the Solar System and are the farthest man-made objects from Earth. If one is ever discovered, its finders will experience sounds, images, and greetings in 55 languages that give an impression of life on Earth.
40 years later, enter Wikipedia to the Moon. Wikipedia, with more than forty million articles in hundreds of languages, is the largest collection of human knowledge ever compiled. As such, it provides a vast and ever-expanding picture of life on Earth and knowledge cultures from all around the world.
That was reason enough for the Berlin-based Part-Time Scientists, who are contesting the Google Lunar X Prize, to plan to include Wikipedia on their planned rovers. They hope to reach the Moon in late 2017, where they will leave a time capsule of free knowledge preserved in space.
Earlier this year, Wikipedians from all over the world voted to send featured articles and lists from all Wikipedia language versions to the Moon—the very best Wikipedia has to offer. We are now halfway into the working phase, and there are already more than 30,000 featured articles and lists in 155 languages in Wikipedia, a far larger and more diverse cross-section of human knowledge than the Golden Record contained.
And there is still space for more.
During our working phase, which runs until October 31st, editors will have the opportunity to improve existing featured content more or to work on their favourite articles that are not yet featured, using the Moon project as a motivation to edit these articles to featured standards. As a reward, your contributions to a newly featured article or list will be immortalized on the Moon. The contents of the disc will also be made available online as a time capsule. We will thus be able to trace how our collective free knowledge expands and transforms over the years.
You can still contribute even if your language community does not yet have a featured category. Our project aims to represent the diversity of knowledge in Wikipedia and take every language on Wikipedia to the Moon. Start a discussion in your community about how to select the very best articles your language version of Wikipedia has to offer and compile these articles on an overview page. Once you have compiled such a list, you can simply provide a link in the work station table or get involved on the talk pages.
Help Wikipedia boldly go where no encyclopedia has gone before!
Wiki Loves Monuments returns to the United Kingdom in September. The competition has a heritage focus and we want your help to photograph every monument in the country. The prizes are funded by Wikimedia UK and the Open Data Institute, with £250 for best photograph and a £100 special prize for the best photo of a tax exempt heritage item.
Anyone can take part, all you need is a camera. Our interactive map lets you explore the environment around you, helping you find hidden heritage just around the corner. There are hundreds of thousands of sites which need photos!
By sharing images through Wikipedia we are creating a resource which anyone can benefit from. The photos from the competition are available under a free licence.
You can submit as many images as you want, and as long as you are the photographer and the photos are uploaded in September it doesn’t matter when they were taken.
350 people took part from the UK in 2014, submitting more than 7,000 photos. In August these images were seen by 4.3 million people on Wikipedia.
If you’re looking for inspiration use the map to see what monuments are around you. Or you can look at some of the photos from previous years.
Wikipedia is my favorite source of news. When news breaks, I trust Wikipedia to have an article contextualizing the event. Wikipedia is also my favorite way to catch up on Game of Thrones episodes I’ve missed. Wikipedia has its finger on the pulse of current events!
Sometimes I need to reference it for something more academic. I’ll need to know how grapefruit interacts with medications or why mixing bleach and ammonia doesn’t create a super cleaner. Wikipedia can tell you who died on Game of Thrones. But it also gives me insight into the world around me. The problem is that all too often, the articles on the real world just aren’t as comprehensive.
Wiki Ed is working to change that. Wiki Ed reaches higher ed classrooms from the U.S. and Canada who contribute to Wikipedia. So it makes sense that students are adding a lot of academic content. But how do we know if we are contributing “a lot of content” or “a lot of content”?
That’s what I set out to do. But it’s a tricky question for several reasons.
Defining “academic” content
Before we can figure out how much academic content students create, we need to know what makes an article “academic.”
Unfortunately, there isn’t an “academic content” label on Wikipedia. Subject area isn’t definitive either. Super Bowl 50 and Concussions in American football are both about football. Only one of them is academic.
We need to look at several features of the article, and use them all to make a best guess as to what it is.
This is where machine learning comes in. We fed a machine learning algorithm a bunch of articles that we already knew were academic. Then, we fed it a bunch of articles we knew weren’t academic. The algorithm pieced together a pretty good idea of what “academic content” was. It can figure out that Nirvana is academic, while Nirvana (Band) isn’t.
Tracking student contributions
Now that we had a way of figuring out if an article was academic, we turned to our real question. What portion of academic content are students contributing? Here’s what we learned:
This is a plot of the daily percentage of our students’ academic content creation over four terms. From just glancing at it, we can see some major work. On their best days, our student editors are producing more than 15% of all content added. But it’s easy to be good for a day. How do they perform over the long term?
We can look to our best 30-day period for some ideas. Last semester, we maxed out at 4.6% right near the end of the term, between mid-April and mid-May. Now, before you go thinking that 4.6% is small, remember: Wikipedia is a big place, with more than 5 million articles and thousands of editors. Australia is only 5% of the Earth’s land mass, and nobody considers it small!
Early risers
Wiki Ed isn’t just trying to develop existing academic content. We’re trying to create new content, and fill out content that was hardly even there to begin with. For example, stubs and start-class articles, which may run a sentence or two in length. These articles are what we consider to be early in their development. Here’s what student editors have done for those early-stage articles:
We see a similar pattern, but with more consistent daily levels of contribution. Our best 30-day period is again between mid-April and mid-May. This time, students contributed a whopping 10% of all content among these early stage articles.
This isn’t just a particularly good month. Extending our window to 90 days, we saw that our student editors still produced a staggering 7.5% of content.
This sort of content will never be the most viewed, but it may be the most consequential. It’s what makes Wikipedia such a go-to knowledge source. The same place you can find your Game of Thrones spoilers, students are using to study. People are using it to make decisions and inform their understanding of policy. Coverage of academic content has far-reaching consequences, so it had better be reliable. I’m happy to say that Wiki Ed is helping to make that happen.
For more on Kevin’s work on the impact student editing has on Wikipedia, see here. Questions? Send us an e-mail: contact@wikiedu.org.
Wikipedia has about 4,668 articles it considers to be “highest quality.” Of these, only 12 relate to languages or linguistics. That means that many linguists, theorists, and theories aren’t well-documented on Wikipedia, and may even be missing completely. Likewise, many dialects and languages have articles that could be improved.
That’s part of what drove Wiki Ed’s partnership with the Linguistics Society of America. By connecting linguistics students to Wikipedia, students are critically engaging with information about languages, dialects, and linguistics. They can read through the information on Wikipedia, critically assess it, and then set out to improve its content. They develop greater confidence in their own understanding while improving a reference resource used by millions of people.
The guide was written with input from Gretchen McCulloch and Wikipedia editors User:Cnilep, User:Uanfala, and our own Wikipedia Content Expert in Humanities, Adam Hyland. It takes student editors through the process of writing or improving Wikipedia articles, with templates for structuring articles on languages, dialects, and linguistic concepts.
It also steers students through tricky subjects such as identifying reliable sources in linguistics, or structuring a language InfoBox.
You can browse through the guide yourself as a .PDF file. Instructors participating in our Classroom Program can also receive free printed copies for their students.
This guide joins a suite of online training materials we’re making available to students as part of our Year of Science. We’re still accepting new classes for the fall term! Let us know if you’d like to bring an exciting service learning and public communications element to your linguistics assignments by reaching out to contact@wikiedu.org.
As a passionate teacher with a great interest in free culture and open source, Habib M’henni found out about Wikipedia soon after it began, and he used the site for many years as most readers do—to get information. His job inspired him to learn and teach others, and Wikipedia provided him the perfect outlet for this endeavor.
M’henni is a civil engineering university professor from Sayada, a city in the Monastir governorate in Tunisia. He has contributed to both the Arabic and French Wikipedias, especially on topics in the French Wikipedia’s Wikiproject Tunisia, and has uploaded a large number of quality media files to Wikimedia Commons, the Wikimedia movement’s free image repository. He’s edited Wikimedia projects over 26,000 times, and has co-organized several events to encourage others to join the editing community. But these accomplishments were the result of a coincidence.
“I was searching for my town [Sayada] on Wikipedia back in 2010,” M’henni recalls, “when I found an article about it on the French Wikipedia. The article was in poor condition. I thought I could expand the article, upload better photographs for it, and translate its content for the Arabic Wikipedia. It was then that I officially became a Wikipedian.”
M’henni’s contributions to Commons include over 3,000 photos to Wikimedia Commons, 20 of which are featured, quality and valued images (quality designations that are widely considered to be the finest work on the project), and re-illustrations of many diagrams and logos. They are a particular point of pride for him.
“Whenever I upload photos to Wikimedia Commons,” M’henni notes, “they get reused by many people on Wikimedia projects, other websites on the internet, and even offline, with credit to me. For example, if you take a walk in Tunis, you’ll see the Tunis coat of arms that I have re-illustrated on most of the banners made by the municipality. They use my work because it has been redeveloped and the vector format allows them to print large, high-quality prints.”
Offline, his educational spirit could not let the the opportunity to help recruit and support newbies pass by.
“Starting in 2011, we’ve held workshops on a regular basis to help new Wikipedians,” says M’henni. “My work has helped me start a Wikipedia Education Program course at my school, and together with the Wikipedia community in Tunisia, we have coordinated contests like Wiki Loves Monuments.”
Many Wikipedians, even some outside Tunisia, wanted to unite the efforts in Tunisia by developing a body that supports and promotes Wikimedia projects.
M’henni and Yamen Bousrih, a fellow Wikipedian from Tunisia, were among the first to take tangible steps toward starting the Wikimedia TN user group, which was recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2014 as the first Wikimedia user group in Africa and the Arab World.
The user group quickly produced several fruitful events and initiatives. One of the first and most prominent examples was WikiArabia 2015, the first regional meeting for Wikipedians from the Arab World. Despite many obstacles, the team thrilled many with their efforts.
“The team worked several hours a day despite their work, family and personal obligations. Seeing everyone satisfied was reward enough for the team,” notes M’henni.
Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern Wikimedia Foundation
Highlights of recently deployed Content Translation changes:
One of the most common complaints about the Content Translation editing interface was that it’s too easy to remove a paragraph and there is no way to undo it. The button that removes the paragraph was in the “Automatic translation” card, which confused many translators. To address this, this card was completely redesigned, to make editing and configuring machine translation easier. (task description)
For several days links to foreign languages were inserted instead of internal links. This was fixed. (bug report)
ISBN links were frequently added with <nowiki> tags. This is now fixed. (bug report)
Some users couldn’t save translations and saw as “Internal database error”. This was fixed. (bug report)
Many fixes were made for common citation templates in Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Welsh and other languages (see T142753 for an example of such a fix). This is a step towards generally more robust support for template adaptation (in progress), which will give translators and wiki editing communities more flexibility, ease and control of the translated content.
Wiki Education Foundation Research Fellow, Dr. Zachary McDowell.
A goal of higher education is to ensure that students learn information that enriches their lives and their careers. As an instructor in higher education, I want to make sure we’re developing the critical skills that ensure future success.
Students must master a new set of skills to prepare them for the world beyond their classroom. These skills will improve their careers, their lives, and even future scholarship. Digital/information literacy, critical research, teamwork and group communication, technology, and writing are the most cited examples.
I’ve seen firsthand that assigning Wikipedia articles rather than a “traditional” writing assignment goes much further toward developing these skills. Many other instructors have corroborated with anecdotes of their own. But there hasn’t been much empirical research examining the impact of the assignment. This is what I hope to change.
Evaluating Student Learning Outcomes
This semester, we’re conducting a study to understand the skillsets developed through Wikipedia assignments. Over 5,000 students this semester are using Wikipedia instead of traditional assignments, and they’ll all be invited to take part in this research.
This research will assess these students’ information literacy and research skills, alongside surveys of attitudes toward the assignment and toward Wikipedia. That way, we’ll be able to see how students think about their learning, as well as their competency in those areas. In addition, students will be asked to reflect on their own learning in regards to a variety of skills that myself and other instructors have identified over the years through our own use of Wikipedia in the classroom.
Preparing students for their future is a top priority in higher education today. This study will help us better understand the role that a Wikipedia-based assignment plays in developing those skills.
What we’ll do
This research is a hybrid approach to research, combining assessments, focus groups, and surveys to better understand these skills and how they’re developed.
Participating students will take pre- and post- course assessments evaluating information literacy skills (linking to the American College and Research Libraries Information Literacy Framework), along with some demographic questions. The pre- and post- assessments also include questions about neutral writing, an important aspect of Wikipedia.
The focus groups and qualitative surveys offer another way to examine the assignment results. They’ll help us contextualize student learning outcomes by measuring their attitudes and opinions. These assessments ask students to reflect on their skills development, offering valuable insight into how and what students learn with Wikipedia-based assignments.
Finally, the instructor survey will further contextualize student assessments and responses by asking about instructor motivations and perceived classroom behavior.
At the end of this study, in keeping with the Wiki Education Foundation’s interest in open knowledge, the data will be anonymized and shared under an open access framework. Additionally, in this spirit of openness I have consulted with a diverse group of interdisciplinary researchers and instructors who have graciously assisted in the design of these tools. I hope this interdisciplinary approach towards research design will encourage and allow a variety of researchers to better assess the learning outcomes of Wikipedia-based assignments.
We’d love your help.
If you’re teaching with Wikipedia, participating in this research will strengthen our ample collection of anecdotal evidence with the support of empirical evidence about Wikipedia’s impact on student learning and development.
We believe this research will have lasting effects on the understanding of student learning and skills development. We all hope you’ll take part, and we encourage your students to do so, too (although participation must remain voluntary and cannot be part of their grade). We’re looking forward to seeing this data feed into a range of future research and collaborations.
The largest editing event by now to Finnish Wikipedia was organized in International Women´s Day in March 8, 2016 in Helsinki Finland under title “One hundred women into Wikipedia”. Photo:: Teemu Perhiö / CC BY SA 4.0
In 29th August 2016, an article titled Praksiteleen Hermes (Hermes and the Infant Dionysus) was written into Finnish Wikipedia. It was the 400 000th article in this net published encyclopedia.
Among different language Wikipedia, the Finnish Wikipedia ranks in 22nd position based both in the number of articles and the numbers of its active editors (more than five edits a month). If put into perspective of less than six million speakers, Finnish Wikipedia is one of the forefront language editions of Wikipedia.
More than half of the page visitors in Finnish Wikipedia have been mobile users since autumn 2015. This is probably a consequence of long mobile user history and large spread of mobile device in Finland.
This years´ Wikipedia 15th anniversary follows the 15th birthday of Finnish Wikipedia in February 2017. Next year Finland will celebrate her 100th year of independence. The community of Finnish Wikipedia will celebrate this by translating one hundred most central articles concerning Finland into other languages. In 2017, an international translation competition will be launched, where we expect participants from tens of different language Wikipedia.
The contents of Finnish Wikipedia have also been developed in collaboration with cultural and memory organizations. More than hundred people participated in a Wikipedia editing event in March International Womens´ Day in Helsinki, creating articles of women. Editing events if Finland have been organized in many parts of the country, in Pori, Oulu and Rovaniemi.
Wikimedia Suomi, a chapter of Wikimedia Foundation, is an association that backs up the volunteer driven net publication and their sister forums. The non-profit association that is funded by the Foundation, organizes, coordinates and promotes various Wikimedia related events. Among them is a study of Wikipedia, where experience, motives, styles and groups of Wikipedia readers and editors are researched.
In the New York headquarters of the United Nations, a teak statue of a young woman hangs on the glowing wood wall of the sprawling Trusteeship Council chamber. The female figure in the Henrik Starcke sculpture reaches up, hopefully toward a flying bird.
Volunteer editors in this room reached out hopefully to the world on August 12, striving for a better place for women on Wikipedia, and in history. Dozens of editors gathered to create and improve Wikipedia articles about women at the United Nations—and at sites around the world.
Only 16.3 percent of the 1,383,736 biographies on the English Wikipedia were about women (as of 7 August 2015). The percentage of Wikipedia editors who are women is about the same. The August 12 event sought to bring both figures up.
“Today, in this room, change starts with you,” Katherine Maher, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, told new editors gathered in the capital of global cooperation.
The United Nations #HERstory project and editathon was organized by the Wikipedia community, supported by United Nations Women and joined by UN Secretary-General’s Envoy on Youth.
Fifty-six hundred miles away, Salma Nabil, 16, published her first Wikipedia article at a Cairo #HERstory editathon. “I attended without having a clue about what should I do or how to write on Wikipedia,” she said. “I can’t wait to write more.”
Other editors at the Cairo event posed for photos holding up laptop screens showing their new articles. A sight-impaired volunteer Wikipedian edited with the help of headphones and a microphone. Participants wrote the names of the women they wrote about on a large poster stretched across a wall: Emily Sartain, Nayera Mohamed, Lady MacBeth, Latifa al-Zayyat.
And another name, mentioned often as a great woman of the day who deserved credit: “A very special thanks to the hero of the day, May Hachem, who mentored us in writing our articles,” said Mahmoud Mansi, a Egyptian volunteer. Hachem, a WikiProject Women founder and Wikipedia Education Program leader in Egypt, ran the Cairo editathon and was the catalyst of #HERstory: she was invited by United Nations Women to run an editathon in Cairo, and later helped to expand that idea into editathons around the world.
Hachem said she was surprised by the number of women’s biographies that have never been written. With college professors and teenagers working together at her Cairo event, she said it was inspiring “to narrow the gender gap. I think this is just the beginning of many other campaigns.”
Nourhan Adel and other participants exulted in their experience, announcing it in a 21st century way. “I decided to change my job on Facebook to a researcher/editor at Wikipedia,” Nourhan said. “I am very proud of my experience with HerStory.”
The global campaign took place in different cities on the same day, and it inspired other communities to join online in the weeks prior to August 12. Mirroring the events in New York and Cairo, editathons also took place in Chennai and in Hyderabad, India.
Through a partnership with the Red Elephant Foundation, 250 people signed up to participate in Chennai, and were summoned on different days in batches of 17 due to lack of space. “I think it was absolutely vital for us to participate because it matters so much to us to put women back into the conversation and the rhetoric”, said Kirthi Jayakumar, a local organizer who noted that the campaign was very well received in India, and many of the women participants are still engaged in editing Wikipedia.
In Hyderabad, the editathon took place in partnership with Sayfty. “Who better to write about change in young women’s development but young women themselves?”, asked Sammy Sahni, another local organizer. In this smaller gathering, participants contributed information on sports women from Hyderabad like Sania Mirza, PV Sindhu, and also created a page on woman biker Sana Iqbal who rode her bike across India to create awareness about “Suicide and depression among our youth”.
On the same day, other editathons were hosted in Monterrey and Mexico City, Mexico. Similarly, workshops were held in the weeks prior to August 12 for about 20 people in Buenos Aires, with a specific focus on how to create content with a gender perspective. As a result, new articles were created on notable Argentine women like Yolanda Ortiz, Victoria Galardi and Romina Paula, as well as notable women from other countries, and women-related topics, coming out to 14 articles total.
The Spanish Wikipedia community also joined forces through an online editathon organized by the Wikimujeres User Group. In the span of 15 days, 36 participants from Spain, Argentina and Mexico got online to work on 84 different articles. While the focus was strongly set on women’s biographies, this editathon also worked on articles about women organizations, like Girls in Tech and Laboratoria, and women-related topics. You can see a full accounting of these events has been published.
The global effort shared this inspiration in many locations, where women were written into Wikipedia by volunteers with a sense of purpose, and joy.
Maria Cruz, Program Associate, Learning and Evaluation Jeff Elder, Digital Communications Manager Wikimedia Foundation
Special thanks go to Heba Katoon, Sammy Shani, Kirthi Jayakumar, Anna Torres, Carmen Alcázar, Emad Karim, María Sefidari, May Hachem, and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, for their testimonies and documentation of the events. They represent, respectively, UN Women in Cairo, Sayfty, the Red Elephant Foundation, Wikimedia Mexico, Wikimedia Argentina, and UN Women initiative; Sefidari, Hachem, and Stephenson-Goodknight participated as volunteers.
This post has been updated to include information on a Spanish-language editathon.
The Tech News weekly summaries help you monitor recent software changes likely to impact you and your fellow Wikimedians. Subscribe, contribute and give feedback.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Wikimedia mobile sites now don't load images if the user doesn't see them. This is to save mobile data and make the pages load faster. [1]
When you edit a table with the visual editor, pressing Tab in the last cell of a row will take you to the first cell in the next row. Pressing Shift and Tab in the first cell of a row will take you to the last cell in the previous row. [2]
Changes this week
The name of the "Save page" button will change. The button will say "Publish page" when you create a new page. It will say "Publish changes" when you change an existing page. [3][4]
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 August. It will be on all wikis from 1 September (calendar).
Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 30 August at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
#Marketing is something the #Wikimedia Foundation does not do. It does not mean that concepts like KPI are foreign to the WMF. Take this list from the English article "La Galería de las Mujeres de Costa Rica" the women listed are "women who have broken gender stereotypes and advanced human rights principals".
A lot of effort goes into fighting for a diverse Wikipedia where both women are given proper attention. If I were a marketing man, I would say that lists like this provide pointers to people who want to help. I would be happy with a list that shows all the current people with an article and I would be ecstatic when I had a list that would show all the missing articles that would auto update.
The funny thing is that technically it is not that hard to produce. It is not even that hard to include the technology into MediaWiki but it takes a marketing man to drive the point home that you have to engage people and that it shows the quality of a Wikipedia project when we know where we are lacking and where we should concentrate. Thanks, GerardM
Rear side of Taj mahal - The winning photogrpah of WLM 2012
One does not need to be quizzed on this, Wikipedia is unarguably the World’s Biggest Encyclopaedia both in terms of information and readership, its merits and endeavour remain unmatched. Similarly, India is also the world’s largest democracy promoting free speech, expression and voice. India’s rapid economic progression from curbing poverty to advancing towards digital literacy via technological advancements remain unparalleled. Recognising the potential amongst the two, when Wikipedia and the people of India come together something big is bound to happen, categorising, ‘bigger than the biggest’. Wikipedia’s parent organisation Wikimedia Foundation runs an annual international photographic competition, ‘Wiki Loves Monuments’ where participants upload pictures of Indian monuments its architectural heritage , ancient heritage and much more clubbed under India’s unique monumental diversity. Wikimedia India, the affiliate of Wikimedia Foundation will be hosting this program in India between (September 1st – September 30th), when you surf Wikipedia to gain information about something in September, you will find a Wiki Loves Monument in India banner at the top.
The basic concept is that people are invited to upload images of monumental objects under a free license for usage on Wikipedia. The participants images are subsequently uploaded on Wikipedia pages which not only gives their photography a global recognition but also at times convince them to contribute content on Wikipedia. That’s not all ! The journey is much longer, Wikipedia has a long list of sister projects such as Wikivoyage, Wikiversity, Wikinews etc. The pictures are subsequently used on these sisters projects as well. Next time there is some development in Ellora Caves, you may be reading about it on Wikinews with your photography attested to it. You may infact be planning to visit Ellora Caves for a vacation, your search results may be directing you to Wikivoyage, you may find your picture out there !
Home to several ancient cultures that date back to time immemorial, it should come as no surprise that India happens to be one of the biggest challenges in capturing as many historically significant sites as possible. India has a nice bend of monumental history stretching from ancient civilisations like Dholavira in Gujarat to Rakhigarhi in Haryana or Ropar in Punjab to Alamgirpur in Uttar Pradesh.
Photograph of the 9 stupas at Thiksey (Leh District)
With the help of the Archeological Survey of India lists who captures all of them, Wiki Loves Monuments team would concentrate their efforts on shrines of national and international importance.The 2011 version of WLM was accredited with a Guinness World Record for the World’s largest photo contest with 168,208 images being submitted during the contest, 2012 made way for bigger records with more than 350,000 photographs of historic monuments being uploaded by more than 15,000 participants. The 2016 contest plans to carry many more records with it, all five continents would go ahead in making this contest a success.
The year 2016 has already brought success to India. In June, this summer, Wiki Loves Earth a photography competition to record India’s flora and fauna recorded an unprecedented 32,000+ images from more than 6,000 contributors across India. Stretching from Ladhak in Kashmir, Jim Corbett in Uttrakhand, Western Ghats in Maharashtra to the backwaters of Kerala. Everything was captured !
Wiki Loves Monument is another such attempt, to capture India’s heritage digitally. This time, even bigger !
In January 2003 Apple announced Safari, their new web browser for Mac. [1] The Safari team had just spent 2002 building Safari atop KHTML and KJS, [2][3] the KDE layout and javascript engines developed for Konqueror. The Safari team kept the codebase somewhat modular. This allowed Apple-branding and other propietary features to stay separate whilst also having a sustainable open-source project (WebKit) that is standalone and compilable into a fully functional GUI application. The Mac OS version of WebKit is composed of WebCore and JavaScriptCore – the frameworks that encapsulate the OSX ports of KHTML and KJS respectively. (Apple developed the JavaScriptCore library previously for use in Sherlock. [3])
Chromium
In 2008 Google introduced Chrome and started the open-source project Chromium. Chromium was composed of WebKit's WebCore and the V8 javascript engine (instead of JavaScriptCore). Google later forked WebCore into Blink in 2013, thus abandoning any upstream connection with WebKit.
While Chromium is a single code-base with bindings for multiple platforms, WebKit is not. Instead, WebKit is based around the concept of ports.
These ports are manually kept in sync. Some maintained by third parties (e.g. not by "webkit.org"). Some ports are better than others. "WebKit", as such, is closer to an abstract API than an actual framework.
WebKit
A few popular ports:
Safari for Mac
Mobile Safari for iOS
Safari for Windows (abandoned)
QtWebKit (by Nokia; due to it being implemented atop Qt, it works on Mac/Linux/Windows)
Android browser (abandoned, uses Chromium now)
Chromium (abandoned, uses Blink now)
WebKitGTK+
WebKit itself doesn't do much when it comes to network, GPU, javascript, text rendering. Those are not "WebKit". Each port binds those to something present in the OS – or another application layer. E.g. QtWebKit defers to Qt, which in turn binds to the platform.
PhantomJS
PhantomJS is a headless browser using the QtWebKit engine at its core.
The current release cycle of PhantomJS (1.9.x) is based on Qt 4.8.5, which bundles QtWebKit 2.2.4, which was branched off of upstream WebKit in May 2011. Due to the many layers in between, it will take a long time for PhantomJS to get anywhere near the feature-set of current Safari 8. PhantomJS by design is nothing like Safari but, if anything, it is probably like an alpha version (branched from svn trunk) of Safari 4. Which is why, contrary to Safari 5, PhantomJS has only partial support for ES5.
Chromium has its abstraction layer at a higher level (platform independent). When run headless, it is exactly like an actual instance of Chrome on the same platform. When used in a virtual machine on a remote server, one doesn't even need to be "headless". We can use regular Chromium (under Xvfb). In theory the visual rendering through Xvfb and VM hypervisor could be different, however.
People often ask, what are the criteria upon which the images in Wiki Loves Monuments are judged. While every national competition can have its own specific criteria, the criteria for the international finale have remained almost unchanged over the past years. So if you want your picture to be really successful internationally, it would be good to keep them in mind.
But first, let me take a minute to quickly explain how Wiki Loves Monuments works. Each national competition has its own judging process, and is permitted to nominate 10 pictures for the international finale. These pictures (somewhere between 200 and 500 in total, depending on the number of participating countries) will be judged in a few rounds by the international jury. Their criteria are therefore usually considered as a basis for the national juries. They are broadly formulated, so some explanation might be helpful. In future blogposts, we will ask some former jury members to go a bit more into detail.
The three main criteria are:
Technical quality: The first criterium is all about the quality of the picture itself. What is the sharpness and resolution of the picture, how do you make use of the light in the situation, did you have to go through particular trouble to make this picture as it is? Is the perspective not distorted, is the view realistic, etc. A good rule of thumb is that a winning picture should usually fulfill the Wikimedia Commons technical criteria for ‘featured picture’ status – which you can read more about here.
Originality: Of course also the original setting is considered. If your setting already exists thousands of times around the web, it is probably not the most original way of photographing the monument. After all this is a competition, and jury members are looking for that little “extra” that your image may contain.
Usefulness of the image on Wikipedia: One of the main goals of this competition, is to collect good photographs of the monuments to be used on Wikipedia. How well does your image keep that in mind? Does it represent the monument well, so that it can be used in an encyclopedic context? Is it not misrepresenting the monument, or are there very distracting details?
Almost no image will be perfect on all three criteria – and that is fine. A certain balance is what we’re looking for. Hopefully this gives a bit of guidance towards the best way of getting one of your pictures scoring really well in the upcoming Wiki Loves Monuments competition!
We’re looking forward to the competition to start in a few days, and to all the beautiful submissions that we hpe to receive. Please be bold and submit many pictures – not every single picture has to be a winner. In the olympic spirit: participating is more important than winning.
(photo: First place winner of 2015, the Westerheversand Lighthouse in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany by Marco Leiter. License: CC BY-SA)
When reporting on OpenStreetView last week we made a mistake. Thank you Jochen for pointing it out.
Mapping
Voting on the proposed taghealthcare=midwife started on August 22nd and closes on September 5th.
More on the ‘MAPS.ME’ – a new application version is rolled out by them which includes an extra “name:<language>” key (also a Github isssue is filed on the same).
Joost Schouppe reported about ‘open’ road data in Flanders (Belgium) and how it can be used in OpenStreetMap.
Mapbox mapping employees have lately been looking at possibly “suspicious” change sets. User manoharuss asks in his blog about how long it is suggested to wait for an answer in the changeset discussions. His colleague nammala listed questionable changesets in his user’s blog on OpenStreetMap.
Christian Quest wrote a bash script that allows him to copy and georeference a Linux-mounted iPhone’s Mapillary images via exif data to use them directly in JOSM before uploading.
Community
Escada interviews Jorieke Vyncke from Belgium, as this month’s “Mapper of the Month”.
“OpenStreetMap at the Crossroads” is the subject of Laura O’Gradys message on the Canadian OSM talk mailing list describing how communication stopped between her a “local craft mapper” and a “robot Mapper”. Laura refers in her e-mail explicitly to the blog post OpenStreetMap at the Crossroads from Jonathan Crowe who qualifies and discusses the statements of Migurski.
Imports
This Minneapolis Maptime announcement caused a certain amount of amusement in some quarters (” … techniques bringing in large open source datasets to Open Street Map … No previous Open Street Map experience is necessary”). However Minneapolis did get 3 new local users last week, and a few more further afield.
The OSM versus TIGER Battle Grid has been resurrected, now with Stamen tiles in the background. The Battle Grid points out areas where recent USA Census TIGER data is different from OSM data. This usually means OSM data needs to be updated (but sometimes it means TIGER is worse than OSM). If you have not tried it, go to http://184.73.220.107/battlegrid and solve a few squares.
OpenStreetMap Foundation
Following some issues with its current bank, OSMF is on the look out for an alternate bank which will provide the board more flexibility in terms of multiple currencies and international access. Frederik Ramm asks for advice.
Events
The State of the Map will host a social event for the participants of the conference on September 24th.
On Friday, 26 August 2016 an interesting Mapathon will take place in Colombia from 08:00 AM to 12:15 PM. Targets among others are highway=tertiary. This Mapathon is aimed at a group of Spanish speaking students which are part of YouthMappers, students from Universities in Colombia and the general Colombian OSM community. There are awards up for grabs (including field trips and tablets) in multiple categories.
Maps
[1] Lukas Martinelli published osm-activity, a global heat map of OpenStreetMap where one can see the number of changes made to OSM in each tile dating back to 2008. The sources are available on Github. Lukas Martinelli says: “When you click on a region a timeline is displayed and you can see imports and long-term trends.”
Paul Norman asks how “handling the need to do both cartographic and technical review”.
switch2OSM
ImmobilienScout24 a German property website shows data from Wheelmap showing wheelchair suitability of nearby POI. Data are provided by Sozialhelden and thus from OSM. However, the base map is still the one from a competing map provider.
Licences
Due to the confusion about Mapbox vector styles, Simon Poole asked Mapbox about 2 weeks ago to clarify their licences.
Software
Mapbox has now acquired Human, a company which developed an app focusing on activity tracking.
The latest version (6.3.2) of Maps.me offers several improvements, such as considering gradients in bicycle routing, and a clearer map layout.
The OsmAnd developers work on a new rendering engine with multi-threading.
Programming
Mapz provides two job vacancies for “people with a penchant for OpenStreetMap”.
Frederik Ramm proposed in a pull request on GitHub to reduce the maximum size of change sets from 50,000 to 10,000 objects. He received only affirmative responses.
… the users blocked from editing OSM are listed with details of duration and reason?
Other “geo” things
The Toronto Public Library exhibits visually stunning maps from the 15th through the 19th centuries.
The International Business Times explains once again, why Google Maps doesn’t display reliable geospatial information in Chinese territory.
Why Apple Maps was a disaster for Apple? Because the map in Cupertino was “pretty darn good”, not the case for other locations. This incident led to a big change for the company.
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, SomeoneElse, SrrReal, TheFive, derFred, jinalfoflia, kreuzschnabel, mgehling, seumas, wambacher.
I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready.
To punctuate his “won’t be big and professional” warning, he added that “It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.”
Linus’ work leapt to the forefront of kernel development, following what has become accepted wisdom in software engineering: “do the simplest thing that could possibly work“. The Linux kernel combined with the GNU operating system to become the most ubiquitous free operating system. Linux represents a triumph of incremental progress: start with something small, and use the power of the Internet as a tool for global collaboration to continually make it better.
Photo by Jim Nieland/US Forest Service, public domain/CC0,
Everyone who starts an article on Wikipedia knows this feeling. An editor sees something that doesn’t have an article, but should. Some editors are meticulous, and want to start with something “big and professional”. Many editors start small, like the first Mount St. Helens article, but sooner or later, the article will become something big and professional—like the current Mount St. Helens article. As anyone who has started a substandard article will tell you (/me sheepishly raises his hand), it’s both thrilling and educational when someone else fixes the article you started. And even cites sources!
From nearly the beginning, [Linux] was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet. Quality was maintained not by rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from hundreds of users within days, creating a sort of rapid Darwinian selection on the mutations introduced by developers. To the amazement of almost everyone, this worked quite well.
This insight applies to creations besides software. Before Raymond published his 1997 essay, Ward Cunningham applied this idea in another domain: building websites. In 1995, he started the first wiki: WikiWikiWeb. The wiki mimicked and accelerated the incremental progress development model, and applied not to the software, but the words on the site. All content on the site was instantly editable by any reader, and to this day, the WelcomeVisitors page says: “All Wiki content is WorkInProgress.”
This philosophy carried over to the world’s most famous wiki: Wikipedia. In a 2011 interview, Cunningham was asked about making mistakes online. He pointed out that even an incomplete or poorly-worded answer can be the basis of a better answer. He added: “This idea that every thought is kind of a seed and it just grows and grows and grows [has] been used very effectively on Wikipedia.”
One thing that Torvalds quickly came to understand: licensing matters. The very first versions of Linux were free (gratis) but not free (libre). Torvalds quickly reversed course with Linux, recognizing a need for code reuse. Code that was free of charge (or “free as in beer”) was one thing, but hackers needed to modify and build onto code for incremental progress. As Torvalds pointed out in a 1997 interview with Hiroo Yamagata:
I changed the copyright to the GPL within roughly half a year: it quickly became evident that my original copyright was so restrictive that it prohibited some entirely valid uses (disk copying services etc – this was before CD-ROM’s became really popular). And while I was nervous about the GPL at first, I also wanted to show my appreciation to the gcc C compiler that Linux depended on, which was obviously GPL’d.
Making Linux GPL’d was definitely the best thing I ever did.
The GPL was a pretty good thing for Wikimedia, too. MediaWiki, the wiki engine that powers the main Wikimedia sites, is licensed under the GNU General Public License and software code written by the Wikimedia Foundation is under a free software license. And today all content on Wikimedia projects is under a similar copyleft framework: Creative Commons Sharealike 3.0 Unported.
After Torvalds made his original announcement, he received the response from Jyrki Kuoppala “Nobody will believe you about non-portability ;-)” to which Torvalds replied:
Simply, I’d say that porting is impossible.
Thank you, Linus, for giving the world the opportunity to prove you wrong!
Rob Lanphier, Director of Architecture Wikimedia Foundation
after publishing issue 319 why MAPS.ME was marked as non-free software. MAPS.ME is not free software because it 
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![Alte Sennalpe Batzen, Vorarlberg, Austria. Photo: Böhringer [CC BY-SA]](http://web.archive.org./web/20160915184224im_/https://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Alte_Batzenalpe_2014_Interior_06-300x200.jpg)
![Tajmahal, Agra, India. Photo: Narender9 [CC BY-SA]](http://web.archive.org./web/20160915184224im_/https://www.wikilovesmonuments.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/1200px-Rear_side_of_Tajmahal-300x200.jpg)
Part of a technology demonstration of Paul Norman’s Vector Tiles – with client-side rendering 
If you have not tried it, go to 
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