en.planet.wikimedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preparation

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

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

Priorities, part 1

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

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

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

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

I usually don’t work on translating other projects unless all of the above projects are 100% translated to Hebrew. I occasionally make an exception for OpenStreetMap or Etherpad, but only if there’s little to translate there and the untranslated MediaWiki-related projects are not very important.

Priorities, part 2

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

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

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

Getting Things Done, One by One

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

I have surprising advice.

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

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

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

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

Getting All Things Done

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

But let’s go further.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s say that you are translating to Malay. You only need to translate eight messages to go up a notch (901 – 894 + 1). Then six messages more to go up another notch (894 – 888). And so on.

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

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

Good Stuff to Do Along the Way

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

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

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

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

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

Before translating a component, review the messages that were already translated. To do this, click the “All” tab at the top of the translation area. It’s useful for learning the current terminology, and you can also improve them and make them more consistent.

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

As in Wikipedia, Be Bold.

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

Well done and congratulations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Do I Get for Doing All This Work?

The knowledge that thanks to you people who read in your language can use Wikipedia without having to learn English. Awesome, isn’t it? Some people call it “Good karma”.

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

Is There Any Other Way in Which I Can Help?

Yes!

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

“Privacy, anonymity, and perceived risk in open collaboration: a study of Tor users and Wikipedians”

This qualitative study,^[1] based on interviews with privacy-conscious Wikipedia editors and users of the Tor anonymization software, is an informative examination of the privacy issues that are particular to the work on the radically transparent online encyclopedia. It also tries (largely unsuccessfully, in this reviewer’s opinion) to make the case that Wikipedia should relax its restrictions on editing via Tor.

The three authors from Drexel University carried out in-depth, semi-structured interviews with two groups:

• 12 “Tor users who have also contributed to “online projects.” (recruited e.g. on the mailing list of the Tor project)
• 11 “Wikipedia editors who have considered their privacy while editing”, including some administrators and Wikimedia Foundation employees

In both groups, the majority (8 in each case) was male.

The goal was “to examine the threats that people perceive when contributing to open collaboration projects and how they maintain their safety and privacy”. Interview responses examined using thematic analysis, to identify the most important concepts.

As first part of their findings, the authors group the types of threats described by the participants into five areas:

• “Surveillance/Loss of privacy”, i.e. the general “fear that their online communication or activities may be accessed or logged by parties without their knowledge or consent”. This more abstract concern was more prevalent in the Tor users group than among the privacy-conscious Wikipedians interviewed for the study.
• “Loss of employment/opportunity”, such as when a potential employer decides against a particular job candidate because she derived certain kinds of negative information from his online activity, or a transphobic boss learning that a particular employee is a transgender person.
• “Safety of self/loved ones”. Some of the Wikipedians reported “threats of rape, physical assault, and death as reprisals for their contributions to the project”.
• “Harassment/Intimidation”, which was brought up far more often by the Wikipedians (8) than among the Tor users (1). In particular “Editors who took central positions like administrator or arbitration committee member found that additional authority and responsibility brought with it publicity and vulnerability”, including rape and death threats in case of a female administrator.
• “Reputation loss” in general. One participant related that often Wikipedians edits anonymously (i.e. only identified by their IP address) because “they don’t want someone to go on a vendetta against them and what’s a volunteer hobby for them suddenly turns into something that affects their professional career”.

The researchers seem to have struggled a bit to clearly delineate these five threat areas. For instance, there appears to be quite a bit of similarity between the intimidation and safety concerns, and as the authors point out themselves, “the potential for contributions to controversial topics to be misinterpreted and result in lost opportunities” – the second area – is also related to the more general concern about reputation loss. Nevertheless, for those interested in the privacy threats editors associate with the activity of contributing Wikipedia, this is a very worthwhile read. A thematically related document is the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2015 Harassment survey 2015 (Signpost summary) – unfortunately not mentioned in the paper. The WMF survey, while also not designed to be completely representative, covered some of the same ground with vastly more respondents (3,845) than the 23 interviewees in the present study.

Turning to the strategies that the interviewees employ to mitigate these perceived risks, the study identifies “two broad overlapping categories of activities: modifying participation in projects and enacting anonymity.” Modifying participation can include refraining from editing certain topics. Under “enacting anonymity”, the researchers subsume both “operational approaches that limit others’ ability to connect activities with participants real identities (e.g. maintaining multiple accounts [ also known as sockpuppets on Wikipedia])”, and technical means such as Tor (for “participating anonymously on the Internet” in general). It is in this section that the paper becomes a bit muddied about the distinction between privacy threats on the internet in general and on Wikipedia in particular. This is particularly unfortunate as it seems to have been at least partly motivated by the longstanding discussions about the restrictions on editing Wikipedia via Tor (demands from the Tor community to lift these go back at least a decade), with the authors making the case that Wikipedia is incurring a significant loss of contributions because of these restrictions. There is no doubt that the public edit histories can reveal a lot about a Wikipedian’s interests etc. (Or as this reviewer concluded in in a 2008 Wikimania talk that presented several real-life examples of conclusions that can be drawn from a Wikipedia user’s editing patterns: “Wikipedia contributors don’t just give their time to the project, but pay with their privacy, too.”) But the obfuscation of IP addresses that Tor provides is largely irrelevant for this, because editors’ IP addresses are not made public anyway, if they don’t choose to edit under an IP. In an early presentation about the study at the 2015 Chaos Communication Congress (32C3) (slide 33), the authors themselves alluded to this :

“According to Wikipedians most deanonymization is done based on contextual cues. Tor won’t help with this”

But this kind of caveat is missing from the present paper.

(Interestingly though, Wikipedians in the study reported using Tor-like tools outside of Wikipedia, to avoid “being targeted by groups with a history of harassing Wikipedians”: “when I’m reading Wikipediocracy or one of the Wikipedia criticism sites, because I know that they scoop up IP addresses, I use an IP obfuscator for that.”)

Briefly

Conferences and events

See the research events page on Meta-wiki for upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.

Other recent publications

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

• “A method for predicting Wikipedia editors’ editing interest: based on a factor graph model”^[2] From the abstract: “Recruiting or recommending appropriate potential Wikipedia editors to edit a specific Wikipedia entry (or article) can play an important role in improving the quality and credibility of Wikipedia. … this paper proposes an interest prediction factor graph (IPFG) model, which is characterized by editor’s social properties, hyperlinks between Wikipedia entries, the categories of an entry and other important features, to predict an editor’s editing interest in types of Wikipedia entries. … An experiment on a Wikipedia dataset (with different frequencies of data collection) shows that the average prediction accuracy (F1 score) of the IPFG model for data collected quarterly could be up to 0.875, which is about 0.49 higher than that of a collaborative filtering approach.”
• “Stationarity of the inter-event power-law distributions”^[3] From the abstract: “We show that even though the probability to start [Wikipedia] editing is conditioned by the circadian 24 hour cycle, the conditional probability for the time interval between successive edits at a given time of the day is independent from the latter. We confirm our findings with the activity of posting on the social network Twitter. Our result suggests there is an intrinsic humankind scheduling pattern: after overcoming the encumbrance to start an activity, there is a robust distribution of new related actions, which does not depend on the time of day.”
• “Controversy detection in Wikipedia using collective classification”^[4] From the abstract: “We hypothesize that intensities of controversy among related pages are not independent; thus, we propose a stacked model which exploits the dependencies among related pages. Our approach improves classification of controversial web pages when compared to a model that examines each page in isolation, demonstrating that controversial topics exhibit homophily.”
• “WIKIREADING: a novel large scale language understanding task over Wikipedia”^[5] From the abstract: “We present WIKIREADING, a large-scale natural language understanding task and publicly-available dataset with 18 million instances. The task is to predict textual values from the structured knowledge base Wikidata by reading the text of the corresponding Wikipedia articles. … We compare various state-of-the-art DNN [deep neural networks]-based architectures for document classification, information extraction, and question answering.”
• “A contingency view of transferring and adapting best practices within online communities”^[6] From the abstract: “Empirical research on the transfer of a quality-improvement practice between projects within Wikipedia shows that modifications are more helpful if they are introduced after the receiving project has had experience with the imported practice. Furthermore, modifications are more effective if they are introduced by members who have experience in a variety of other projects.” From the paper: “We collected the history of CotW [Collaboration of the Week] in 146 Wikiprojects and measured how different types of modifications influenced their success, in terms of the length of time the CotW continued to be used in a project, the amount of work they elicited from project members and the number of unique editors who contributed to them.”
• “Centrality and content creation in networks – the case of economic topics on German Wikipedia”^[7] From the abstract: “We analyze the role of local and global network positions for content contributions to articles belonging to the category ‘Economy’ on the German Wikipedia. Observing a sample of 7635 articles over a period of 153 weeks we measure their centrality both within this category and in the network of over one million Wikipedia articles. Our analysis reveals that an additional link from the observed category is associated with around 140 bytes of additional content and with an increase in the number of authors by 0.5. The relation of links from outside the category to content creation is much weaker. … We find non-neoclassical themes to be highly prevalent among the top articles.”
• “A platform for visually exploring the development of Wikipedia articles”^[8] From the abstract: “… associated to each [Wikipedia] article are the edit history and talk pages, which together entail its full evolution. These spaces can typically reach thousands of contributions, and it is not trivial to make sense of them by manual inspection. This issue also affects Wikipedians, especially the less experienced ones, and constitutes a barrier for new editor engagement and retention. To address these limitations, Contropedia offers its users unprecedented access to the development of an article, using wiki links as focal points.” (Also see previous coverage: “Contropedia” tool identifies controversial issues within articles”, http://www.contropedia.net/ and the following paper:)
• “Platform affordances and data practices: The value of dispute on Wikipedia”^[9] From the abstract: “… we study how the affordances of Wikipedia are deployed in the production of encyclopedic knowledge and how this can be used to study controversies. The analysis shows how Wikipedia affords unstable encyclopedic knowledge by having mechanisms in place that suggest the continuous (re)negotiation of existing knowledge. We furthermore showcase the use of our open-source software, Contropedia, which can be utilized to study knowledge production on Wikipedia.”

References

One of my little projects is OGVKit, a library for playing Ogg and WebM media on iOS, which at some point I want to integrate into the Wikipedia app to fix audio/video playback in articles. (We don’t use MP4/H.264 due to patent licensing concerns, but Apple doesn’t support these formats, so we have to jump through some hoops…)

A trick with working with digital video is that video frames are usually processed, compressed, and stored using the YUV (aka Y’CbCr) colorspace instead of the RGB used in the rest of the digital display pipeline.

This means that you can’t just take the output from a video decoder and blit it to the screen — you need to know how to dig out the pixel data and recombine it into RGB first.

Currently OGVKit draws frames using OpenGL ES, manually attaching the YUV planes as separate textures and doing conversion to RGB in a shader — I actually ported it over from ogv.js‘s WebGL drawing code. But surely a system like iOS with pervasive hardware-accelerated video playback already has some handy way to draw YUV frames?

While researching working with system-standard CMSampleBuffer objects to replace my custom OGVVideoBuffer class, I discovered that iOS 8 and later (and macOS version something) do have a such handy output path: AVSampleBufferDisplayLayer. This guy has three special tricks:

• CMSampleBuffer objects go in, pretty pictures on screen come out!
• Can manage a queue of buffers, synchronizing display times to a provided clock!
• If you pass compressed H.264 buffers, it handles decompression transparently!

I’m decompressing from a format AVFoundation doesn’t grok so the transparent decompression isn’t interesting to me, but since it claimed to accept uncompressed buffers too I figured this might simplify my display output path…

The queue system sounds like it might simplify my timing and state management, but is a bigger change to my code to make so I haven’t tried it yet. You can also tell it to display one frame at a time, which means I can use my existing timing code for now.

There are however two major caveats:

• AVSampleBufferDisplayLayer isn’t available on tvOS… so I’ll probably end up repackaging the OpenGL output path as an AVSampleBufferDisplayLayer lookalike eventually to try an Apple TV port.
• Uncompressed frames must be in a very particular format or you get no visible output and no error messages.

Specifically, it wants a CMSampleBuffer backed by a CVPixelBuffer that’s IOSurface-backed, using bi-planar YUV 4:2:0 pixel format (kCVPixelFormatType_420YpCbCr8BiPlanarVideoRange
or kCVPixelFormatType_420YpCbCr8BiPlanarFullRange). However libtheora and libvpx produce output in traditional tri-planar format, with separate Y, U and V planes. This meant I had to create buffers in appropriate format with appropriate backing memory, copy the Y plane, and then interleave the U and V planes into a single chroma muddle.

My first super-naive attempt took 10ms per 1080p frame to copy on an iPad Pro, which pretty solidly negated any benefits of using a system utility. Then I realized I had a really crappy loop around every pixel.

Using memcpy — a highly optimized system function — to copy the luma lines cut the time down to 3-4ms per frame. A little loop unrolling on the chroma interleave brought it to 2-3ms, and I was able to get it down to about 1ms per frame using a couple ARM-specific vector intrinsic functions, inspired by assembly code I found googling around for YUV layout conversions.

It turns out you can interleave 8 pixels at a time in three instructions using two vector reads and one write, and I didn’t even have to dive into actual assembly:

static inline void interleave_chroma(unsigned char *chromaCbIn, unsigned char *chromaCrIn, unsigned char *chromaOut) {
#if defined(__arm64) || defined(__arm)
    uint8x8x2_t tmp = { val: { vld1_u8(chromaCbIn), vld1_u8(chromaCrIn) } };
    vst2_u8(chromaOut, tmp);
#else
    chromaOut[0] = chromaCbIn[0];
    chromaOut[1] = chromaCrIn[0];
    chromaOut[2] = chromaCbIn[1];
    chromaOut[3] = chromaCrIn[1];
    chromaOut[4] = chromaCbIn[2];
    chromaOut[5] = chromaCrIn[2];
    chromaOut[6] = chromaCbIn[3];
    chromaOut[7] = chromaCrIn[3];
    chromaOut[8] = chromaCbIn[4];
    chromaOut[9] = chromaCrIn[4];
    chromaOut[10] = chromaCbIn[5];
    chromaOut[11] = chromaCrIn[5];
    chromaOut[12] = chromaCbIn[6];
    chromaOut[13] = chromaCrIn[6];
    chromaOut[14] = chromaCbIn[7];
    chromaOut[15] = chromaCrIn[7];
#endif
}

This might be even faster if copying is done on a “slice” basis during decoding, while the bits of the frame being copied are in cache, but I haven’t tried this yet.

With the more efficient copies, the AVSampleBufferDisplayLayer-based output doesn’t seem to use more CPU than the OpenGL version, and using CMSampleBuffers should allow me to take output from the Ogg and WebM decoders and feed it directly into an AVAssetWriter for conversion into MP4… from there it’s a hop, skip and a jump to going the other way, converting on-device MP4 videos into WebM for upload to Wikimedia Commons…

12/13/2016-12/19/2016

About us

• FYI: – Why the German team were thinking about reducing their contribution to weeklyOSM. Read here why the German team continues. (automatic translation)

Mapping

• TagaSanPedroAko asks for comments on his power pole extension proposal which will increase the detail of tagging of power poles to include design, material, function and more.
• The proposal for power switching extensions which increased the tagging detail for power switches (previously mentioned here) was adopted after a successful vote.
• Voting closed and the proposed features to map (pizza) ovens and bakehouses (communal ones often found in France) were approved. The already mentioned tagging scheme for man-made nesting sites was also approved.
• Martijn van Exel asks mappers to give ImproveOSM a(nother) try, as Telenav and INRIX have recently added almost 1 million new tiles that might contain missing streets.

Community

• OpenStreetMap US conducts a census of the US OSM members. The results up to now can be seen on a heat map.
• The videos of this year’s SotM Latam are now available. Besides many interesting Spanish and Portuguese talks there are also three in the English language.
• Michael Reichert discusses cleaning up the deprecated and unused rooms and services from OpenStreetMap Wiki’s contact channels page.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• We congratulate Frederik Ramm and Kate Chapman on their re-election to the OSMF board. If you weren’t able to vote please consider joining the OSMF now!

Events

• An international workshop on crowdsourcing in “National Mapping” will be held in Leuven, Belgium on April 3rd and 4th, 2017. The workshop is sponsored by EuroSDR, a not-for-profit organisation linking National Mapping and Cadastral Agencies (NMCAs) with research institutes and universities in Europe. Participation from the OpenStreetMap Community is greatly encouraged. Registration is free.
• You can now submit proposals for SotM Latam 2017.

Humanitarian OSM

• FT features Missing Maps and HOT and their involvement with Doctors Without Borders as part of its seasonal appeal series.
• Mapbox supports the HOT donation drive with a generous incentive: if 150 people donate within the next 12 days, Mapbox will donate US$10,000!
• HOT’s involvement and assistance with the recent earthquake in Aceh is noted by Jakarta Globe.
• Africa Times follows up FT’s coverage of Missing Maps with an article detailing their involvement in Africa, as well as MapSwipe.
• HOT hosted a workshop in Suva, Fiji that trained 25 participants on how to use tools such as the iD editor and OpenMapKit. Overall, the workshop was a success, with Mhairi O’Hara reporting that “participants were fully engaged and picked up techniques quickly.”

Programming

• Based on OsmSharp, the multi-platform opensource routing library Itinero has its own page in the OSM wiki now.
• Thomas Park releases its open source editor of vector styles for interactive maps. The MVT Styler uses the Mapbox GL Style specification.
• Paul Norman presents OSMBorder that extracts and transforms administrative boundaries. He developed it for Wikimedia, so also controversial borders in the Wikipedia maps can be displayed. He hopes for more interest in the data and asks for feedback.

Releases

Vladimir Elistratov (vvoovv) has released a new version of his OSM 3D Blender plugin . The plugin is now liable for costs, although the source code is still available.

Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist.

(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.

Did you know …

• … the app Transportr, which is open source and respects your privacy? The app continues to grow and the supported cities and countries are increasing.
• … the global light map of the University of Heidelberg? Here an example of London.
• … the German test track on a public motorway will be equipped with special traffic signs for self driving cars to measure their exact position. (automatic translation)
• … the still quite new company KreateLabs by Bradon Levalds, which produces acrylic maps from OSM data?

OSM in the media

• The Register reports about OpenStreetCam as an alternative to Google Street View.

Other “geo” things

• On December 12th the European satellite navigation system Galileo has begun operating.
• The New York Times reported on a research project, in which Italian researchers investigated the change of larger waters. The article contains some impressive animations. OSM data was also used.
• A research project by Pierre L. Ibisch at the Eberswalde College of Sustainable Development shows the connections of the road network with an unbelievable 36 million kilometers to the number of the resulting areas (600,000), which are left to nature, using a worldwide map (OSM-based) In order to develop sustainably. Conclusion: A global strategy is needed to adapt nature’s infrastructure. Read the stories in English in National Geograhic and in The Conversation.
• Eight italian schools answer to a call for proposals for “digital curriculums” from the Ministry of Education with a project that would make use of open data about school buildings and OSM to teach and improve the students digital skills. (automatic translation)
• QuickMapServices (QMS) is a geoservices catalog with public API that hosts over 200 TMS, WMS, WFS and GeoJSON services. QMS is already integrated with QGIS, NextGIS Mobile and ArcGIS. The catalog is open for participation where anyone can add a service after simple registration and easy form. After that, this service immediately becomes available in client software.
• SPON reports (automatic translation) about picture books produced more than 100 years ago that were supposed to help you navigate your car. Humorously they write about a “Predecessor to Google Street View”.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle mappeurs	10.01.2017
Nantes	Rencontres mensuelles	10.01.2017
Berlin	103. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	12.01.2017
Ulloa	1er encuentro comunidad OSMCo	13.01.2017-15.01.2017
Brussels	Brussels Meetup	16.01.2017
Essen	Stammtisch	16.01.2017
Metro Manila	【MapAm❤re】OSM Workshop Series 7/8, San Juan	16.01.2017
Osnabrück	Stammtisch / OSM Treffen	18.01.2017
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch	18.01.2017
Leoben	Stammtisch Obersteiermark	19.01.2017
Urspring	Stammtisch Ulmer Alb	19.01.2017
Tokyo	東京！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第４回 根津神社	21.01.2017

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 weeklyOSM was produced by JoshuaKGarner, Laura Barroso, Peda, Rogehm, Sadless74, Softgrow, Spec80, YoViajo, derFred, jcoupey, jinalfoflia, keithonearth, sabas88, vsandre.

By Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive, Wikimedia UK

On 8th December 2016, Wikimedia communities around the world held a multi-lingual, multi-location editathon in partnership with the BBC to raise awareness of the gender gap on Wikipedia, improve coverage of women and encourage women to edit. In the UK, events took place at BBC sites in Cardiff, Glasgow and Reading as well as the flagship event at Broadcasting House in London; while around the world, events took place in cities including Cairo, Islamabad, Jerusalem, Kathmandu, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, Sao Paulo and Washington DC. Virtual editathons were organised by Wikimedia Bangladesh, and by Wikimujeres, Wikimedia Argentina and Wikimedia México for the Spanish-language Wikipedia. Women in Red were a strategic partner for the whole project, facilitating international partnerships between the BBC and local Wikimedia communities, helping to identify content gaps and sources and working incredibly hard behind the scenes to improve new articles that were created as part of the project. The global editathon was the finale of the BBC’s 100 Women series in 2016 and attracted substantial radio, television, online and print media coverage worldwide.

The events were attended by hundreds of participants, many of them women and first-time editors, with nearly a thousand articles about women created or improved during the day itself. Impressively, Women in Red volunteers contributed over 500 new biographies to Wikipedia, with nearly 3000 articles improved as part of the campaign. Participants edited in languages including Arabic, Dari, English, Hausa, Hindi, Pashto, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese, and were encouraged to live tweet the event using the shared hashtag #100womenwiki.

The online impact of #100womenwiki was significant, however of equal importance was the media coverage generated by the partnership. The BBC has a global reach of more than 350 million people a week, so this was a unique opportunity to highlight the gender gap, to raise the profile of the global Wikimedia community, and to reach potential new editors and supporters. In the UK, I was interviewed by Radio 5Live and Radio 4’s prestigious Today programme, while my colleague Stuart Prior and I appeared on the BBC World Service’s Science in Action programme. Dr Alice White, Wikimedian-in-Residence at the Wellcome Library, was also interviewed by 5Live and Jimmy Wales came to Broadcasting House to be interviewed by BBC World News, BBC Outside Source and Facebook Live. The story was featured heavily on the BBC’s online news coverage on 8th December – with an article by Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight that you can read here – and the project was covered by the Guardian, the Independent and Metro in the UK, and other print and online media across the world.

The partnership with the BBC would not have been possible without the vision and energy of Fiona Crack, Editor and Founder of BBC 100 Women. After the events I spoke to her about what had been achieved and she reflected on how the combined reach and audience of the BBC and Wikimedia inspired and engaged people interested in women’s representation online. She commented “It was a buzzing event here in London, but the satellite events from Kathmandu to Nairobi, Istanbul to Jakarta were the magic that made 100 Women and Wikimedia’s partnership so special”

Clearly a project like #100womenwiki, focused on a single day of events, could never be a panacea for the gender gap on Wikimedia. After all, this is a complex issue reflecting systemic bias and gender inequality both online and in the wider world. With more lead-in time and resources, the partnership could have been even more successful, involving more Wikimedians and engaging and supporting more new editors. However, events and partnerships like these demonstrate that the gender gap is not an entirely intractable issue. Within the global Wikimedia community, there are a significant number of people who are motivated to create change and willing to give up their free time contributing to Wikipedia and the sister projects, organising events, training editors and activating other volunteers and contributors in order to achieve it. As the Chief Executive of Wikimedia UK, committed to building an inclusive online community and ensuring that Wikipedia reflects our diverse society and is free from bias, this is, inspiring, encouraging and humbling.

Today texvc was re-accepted for inclusion into Debian. texvc is a TeX validator and converter than can be used with the Math extension to generate PNGs of math equations. It had been removed from Jessie when MediaWiki itself was removed. However, a texvc package is still useful for those who aren't using the MediaWiki Debian package, since it requires OCaml to build from source, which can be pretty difficult.

Pending no other issues, texvc will be included in Debian Stretch. I am also working on having it included in jessie-backports for users still on Jessie.

And as always, thanks to Moritz for reviewing and sponsoring the package!

Information about marginalized and minority communities in the United States often goes unmentioned in history books and popular textbooks. Women and non-European communities in particular may be underrepresented, misrepresented, or missing altogether.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wikipedia follows the historical trend of disproportionately covering biographies of men, with only 16.78% of all biographies on Wikipedia about women. Research suggests two probable causes for this disparity: Wikipedia’s editor base is at least 80% male, so the people writing biographies may not notice the disparity; and Wikipedia is a tertiary reflection of the academy’s literature, so the gender imbalance has deeper roots in the publishing systems that preexist Wikipedia.

At the recent American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting, Dr. Carwil Bjork-James pointed to the following map as an example of how information becomes skewed in the United States. The map illustrates the southeastern United States around the year 1650.

Dr. Bjork-James presented this map to our workshop audience and said the attendees’ response resembled the one he gets from his students. Most people have not heard of the native settlements listed alongside the familiar ones: St. Augustine, Jamestown, and Fort Henry. What the known entities have in common, of course, is that they’re the colonial settlements that Americans may consider the first “cities” in the future United States. In most maps of that time period that frame our understanding of our nation’s history, the settlements of indigenous peoples are conspicuously absent.

When cartographers create a map, like the one above, they cannot include all available information but must choose items relevant to the purpose of the map. This inherently introduces bias—what do they want the audience to conclude from their depiction? What data points should the mapmaker include? Which ones should they omit?

Let’s say you wanted to create a map related to the Dakota Access Pipeline. If you wanted Americans to support the pipeline’s route through Sioux territory, you may create a map of America’s 72,000 miles of crude oil pipelines, suggesting to readers the Dakota Access Pipeline is “business as usual.” Another cartographer with a different perspective may look at this map and see a glaring omission of data: where have we already experienced pipeline accidents that have endangered the environment and people living near them? A third cartographer may then add rivers and other water sources to the map. Each addition helps readers determine whether the pipeline is a threat to the primary source of drinking water for the Sioux. Providing information on both sides of the issue better equips readers as they develop their own position.

As more mapmakers make changes they deem important, readers develop a more complete picture of the mapped data. This is the power of crowdsourcing. As we get a more complete picture, we become better-equipped to discern fact from fiction and to understand gray areas between the black and white issues often framed in mainstream news outlets.

On Wikipedia, we bring together different people—each with her or his own bias—and we build a repository of knowledge that represents the world as we understand it thus far, not unlike a map. The more diverse life experiences we have building that repository, the more complete and inclusive the information becomes for readers. This gives Wikipedia readers the agency to consider all information and form opinions based on various studies and news reports. We’ve spent 16 years working out a system to achieve consensus among editors. The system isn’t perfect, and neither are the individual editors. But together, as we diversify the editor-base and their innate biases, we create an encyclopedia that better represents the world around us.

This is why the Wiki Education Foundation’s work is so important—we consistently bring thousands of new voices to Wikipedia every semester. University instructors join our program to assign students to write Wikipedia articles. We provide the training and guidance they need as new users to write high-quality content that educates Wikipedia’s 500 million monthly readers. Students evaluate Wikipedia’s current portrayal of a topic related to their course, review the reliable research and empirical evidence available on the topic, and fill in the content gaps.

Not only that, but our students are 68% women, which in itself is a stark difference from Wikipedia’s well-documented gender gap. Students in women’s studies classrooms are challenging Wikipedia’s content every day and questioning whether it represents the experiences of all people. Then, they use their intersectional lens to write women, gender, and sexuality issues into the encyclopedia, helping readers develop a better-informed map of existing knowledge. As Dr. Lisa Anderson said to me at the National Women’s Studies Association’s conference last month: “This is the feminist work.” Feminist studies and activism center on the belief that inclusivity is empowering and serves institutions to their betterment, and that includes Wikipedia.

The students we work with are developing the media literacy skills it takes to question a 1650 map of the future United States that ignores native settlements, so we’re already doing our community a great service. Add to that the diverse perspectives and knowledge they’re making available to the world, and you have an assignment that belongs in the higher ed classroom. If you agree Wikipedia-writing assignments are a win-win pedagogical tool, here’s how you can support the work we’re doing across the United States and Canada:

• Teach with us: If you’re an instructor at a college or university in the U.S. or Canada, consider incorporating a Wikipedia-writing assignment into your class. Email us at contact@wikiedu.org.
• Spread the word: If you know someone who might be interested in teaching with Wikipedia, encourage them to email us at contact@wikiedu.org.
• Make a donation: As a nonprofit, we rely on generous contributions to scale our impact. Your gift today will help us support more students next year.

Imagine, for a moment, organizing and judging a competition with a quarter of a million contestants. To make things more interesting, you have to pick the winners without standard tools or processes. To top it off, do it year after year for the better part of a decade. New year, new people, new processes.

If it sounds hard, then consider thanking your local Wiki Loves Monuments volunteer. Thanks to the Commons community, 2016 just saw another successful iteration of the world’s largest photography competition.

If you were surprised to learn that for 6 years the largest photography competition gathered over a million submissions from over 50 countries and counting, with little to no standard process, join the club.

The lack of tooling has been a damper on organizers, as well as overall participation for the past several years. Less participation means fewer photos, and nobody wants to see less media on Wikipedia.

But how do you prescribe a standard process without recommending standard tools, and how do you build standard tools without a standard process? This year, the international team of Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) organizers set out to quash this chicken-and-egg problem, with a little help from Hatnote.

Today, we’re happy to present Montage, the web platform used to judge Wiki Loves Monuments 2016.

Overview

We started by looking at all the independent processes and tools used over the years. We wanted to make it easier than ever to organize a photography contest on Wikimedia Commons, and including communities who could not participate regularly. Before long, a new design emerged, one which would enable a standard recommended process, streamlined for future participants.

For those unfamiliar with the Wiki Loves Monuments competition, here is a handy executive summary:

1. Countries have one or more official lists of national or regional heritage sites. These lists make it onto Wikipedia with a little help from officials, volunteers, and bots.
2. Local contest coordinators self-organize on their language-specific wiki, then contact the international team to indicate their country’s participation.
3. These coordinators advertise the contest on their wiki, social media, and elsewhere.
4. Contest submissions are accepted for one month, around September, through a special Commons upload link, like this one, which places entries under a particular category, like this one.
5. When submission period ends, the 100 to 100,000 entries are judged by a jury selected by the local coordinators, consisting of experts in photography, history, anthropology, and the local wiki community.
6. After several rounds of judging on a variety of criteria, at least 10 winners are chosen from each local contest.
7. The top 10 winners from each locale, hundreds in total, advance to the international stage, where a specially selected jury judges them in several rounds.
8. The winners of the international stage are presented in a report, like this one from 2016’s contest, to much joy, fanfare, and celebration.

Submissions and prizes may vary from year to year, but the contest has always achieved its goals:

• Collecting invaluable, free-to-use heritage documentation on Wikipedia and elsewhere.
• Familiarizing a new set of creators with contributing to Wikimedia Commons.

It’s no wonder that Wiki Loves Monuments’ success has inspired many other “Wiki Loves” competitions, for all sorts of subjects, including nature, food, and folk culture.

Design

Considering the unique processes of Wiki Loves Monuments, Montage had to be designed specifically for photo contests hosted on Wikimedia Commons. As with all good software, Montage puts its users first, so let’s start by taking a look at them.

User roles

We took a hard look at the WLM process and determined that we had to build functionality for the following groups of users:

• Maintainers: The developers of Montage itself, and key organizers
• Organizers: The central WLM organization team
• Local coordinators: The teams formed around each local competition
• Jurors: A judge chosen by organizers
• The general public: In all likelihood, you, dear reader

Except for the public parts of the site, all users log in with their Wikimedia credentials.

Note that a person can take on more than one role, especially across campaigns. For instance, Leila coordinated Wiki Loves Monuments Iran, while also helping organize the international competition, and served as juror on a number of test rounds.

Each user role’s behavior in a nutshell:

• Maintainers add international organizers
• International organizers can create campaigns and add local coordinators
• Local coordinators can create rounds and add jurors for those rounds
• Jurors can view and vote on images in rounds they’ve been added to
• The general public can see our beautiful login page

So far, Montage has seen logins from over 200 users from all roles. Let’s take a peek into what their overall workflow looks like.

Workflow

The smallest WLM2016 campaign on Montage ran with 760 entries, two rounds, and five jurors. Compare that to the largest campaigns, which had tens of thousands of entries, up to six rounds, and almost 50 jurors. We’ve worked hard to design Montage for contests of any size.

Once a campaign has been created in Montage, organizers import any number of entries into a first round of voting, then run successive rounds, one at a time, to narrow down the field to just the set of winning images.

Montage supports three voting styles, providing flexibility to organizers without too much complication for jurors:

• A simple yes-no
• A five-star rating
• A first-to-last ordered ranking

A juror logging in, assigning ratings, editing ratings, and later ranking entries would see something like:

———

———

———

When a round’s voting is complete, organizers select the rating threshold to determine the set of entries advancing to the next round. Entries below the threshold are eliminated. Examples of thresholds would be:

• Yes-no: At least 2 “yes” votes
• Five-star: Average score of 3.5 stars or higher
• Ranking: Top 10

Because organizers select the threshold value from a fixed set, as seen below, Montage sidesteps complicated tiebreaking logic.

To lighten the load on individual jurors, while still ensuring each image gets a fair appraisal, Montage provides a quorum setting for yes-no and rating rounds. For example, in a rating round with quorum set to 3, each image must be rated by at least 3 randomly-selected jurors. This spreads the load for those early, large rounds.

For more in-depth detail about the research and design behind Montage’s voting system, see this post.

Technical details

Montage also packs some notable technological advantages.

First off, Montage is hosted on Wikimedia’s community server, Tool Labs. This supported environment makes collaboration easier, while also providing critical features like automatic database backups, direct access to database replicas for faster imports, and HTTPS. The price is right, too!

As mentioned earlier, Montage also uses Wikimedia’s OAuth for authentication, meaning that user accounts are autocreated on first login, as long as they’re registered on Wikipedia, Commons, or some other Wikimedia wiki. This means users don’t need to remember another password, and the Montage team doesn’t need to worry about storing sensitive user information. Votes, permissions, and other information is still treated confidentially, of course.

Montage itself is built on Python, Werkzeug, and Clastic, giving it an added measure of maintainability. It has extensive logging throughout, using Lithoxyl. On the frontend, Angular.js provides a responsive user experience with a familiar feel.

The code is free and open to contributions and issue reports on GitHub, of course.

New frontiers

Without a doubt, Montage was much more of a success than we had anticipated. In the span of just a couple months, Montage has raised the bar for software support, while lowering the barriers for future coordination.

Right now we are putting together our feature list for the next iteration of Montage. The priorities are far from final, but some directions we are investigating include:

• Adding more public-facing features to the site
• Improving internationalization and localization
• Enhancing communication between organizers and jurors
• Supporting lower bandwidth connections
• Further customization of photo viewing, including light/dark themes and zooming
• And as always, increasing performance!

The list is long, and we’re excited to tackle it for the 2017 Wiki Loves contests! We hope you’ll join us. If you’re an engineer of any sort, get in touch!

Thanks

Many people contributed to Montage directly and indirectly. To name a few:

• LilyOftheWest – Product and project manager
• Paweł Marynowski – UI designer and engineer
• Mahmoud Hashemi – Architecture and backend
• Stephen LaPorte – Backend and much more
• Jean-Frédéric – Design review
• Lodewijk – Leadership and review
• Yuvi Panda – Operations and support
• Ori Livneh – Operations and support
• Kenneth Samonte – Logo and illustration

And a huge thank you to all of the Montage users and Wiki Loves Monuments organizers and jurors. We couldn’t have done it without you!

We hope this peek behind the scenes of the contest has been enlightening. For more details and updates, feel free to watch the repo on GitHub, follow Hatnote on Twitter, and of course, watch/update/discuss via our Commons page. We look forward to hearing from you, and seeing your 2017 contest submissions!

Mahmoud Hashemi

All images and screenshots in this post are courtesy of the Montage team.

Prince. Photo by Zarateman, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Anecdotally, 2016 was a year of transition and change in much of the western world. Some events could be described as tragedy, others as cause for celebration.

Regardless of how you feel about this year, Wikipedia editors were there to help you understand what happened in 2016 and then some. Here is 2016 as seen through the most-edited articles on the English Wikipedia, both for the full year and by month.

As might be expected, politics features heavily—given the vote on ‘Brexit’, which seems likely to end in the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, and the United States’ presidential campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Four of the top five most-edited articles related to the American election.

David Bowie. Photo by Talmoryair, CC BY-SA 3.0.

A number of celebrities, politicians, and household names passed away, like David Bowie, Prince, politician Jo Cox, Cuban leader Fidel Castro, boxer Muhammad Ali, and singer Christina Grimmie. All showed up in either the full list of most-edited by year/by month breakdowns, but are dwarfed by the article on deaths in 2016. Similar to last year, it was by far the most-edited of the year.^[1]

Terror attacks struck Brussels, Belgium; Nice, France; Munich, Germany; Istanbul, Turkey; and many other locations. Violence and war in Syria continued to rage, leading Wikipedia editor Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat to ensure that the Polish Wikipedia had “a decent, up-to-date, balanced article” on the Battle of Aleppo (pl).

And the 11.5 million documents in the Panama Papers revealed global corruption on an unimagined scale.

“Wikipedia has become a place people turn to for breaking news,” Dan Gillmor, a news media expert and professor at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism, told us last year.

Wikipedia editors do not appear to be immune to that phenomenon; they consume, edit, and expand upon the information available. When these events strike close to home, one editor suggested that editing can have a cathartic effect. René Pigier helped chronicle last year’s Paris terror attacks on the French Wikipedia. “Creating and copyediting those articles helped me to heal,” he said, “by doing some rational thinking and gathering potentially interesting information.”

The Chicago Cubs celebrate after winning the World Series. Photo by Arturo Pardavila III, CC BY 2.0.

But amid the dark, there is also light. The Chicago Cubs’ victory in the World Series, their first championship in 108 years, shows up at eleventh in October. The films Deadpool, Jungle Book, Ghostbusters, and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the mobile phenomenon Pokémon Go, and the albums Views and The Life of Pablo were all released to the joy of millions. 2016 in South Korean music was updated so frequently as to be the tenth most-edited article for the year.

From sports, the Cubs had their history-breaking win, and a slew of Olympics-related articles virtually took over the month of August, including a medal table, chronological summary, and several country-based lists. Tennis’ Australian and French Opens were updated often during the months they were held, suggesting a sort of second screen effect.

And there’s always science to look to. There’s still a hypothesized ninth planet in the far outer Solar System, and the first observation of gravitational waves was announced in February.

We also found that Wikipedians’ drive to share free knowledge brought topics outside the time span of this year back to the forefront. Bailando 2015, an Argentinian dance show where dancers compete on live television, and the Beverly Gray mystery stories, published from 1934–55, were numbers ten and eleven on the year-long list (respectively).

Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. Painting by Vincent van Gogh, public domain/CC0.

Others reached back a bit farther into history. Four Wikipedia editors collaborated to rewrite the article on Vincent van Gogh, one of the most well-known painters in Western art, and brought it to ‘featured‘ status, a quality marker awarded only after an extensive peer review process by fellow Wikipedia editors.

The effort required to rewrite van Gogh’s article was “enormous,” Wikipedia editor Victoriaearle told us, due to the amount of research, reading, and writing required. This shows up in the number of edits made by the four, which put it at the twentieth-most-edited article in the entire year. But having the help of others made it easier, fellow editor Ceoil said, as working “with others is always the most satisfying way to work through an article.” On their motivation for taking on such a task, Modernist told us:

 
Another surprise contender from centuries ago were two articles related to early Irish Christianity, which took several spots on the most edited list by month. Archdeacon of Kells was the seventh-most-edited article in September, and Manchán of Mohill, a Christian saint in Ireland nearly five hundred years ago, pops up at number eight in October and November.

Read on for the lists of most edited articles, for the year and by month.

Full year

1. Deaths in 2016 (18230 edits)
2. Donald Trump (8933)
3. List of Hillary Clinton presidential campaign endorsements (6527)
4. United States presidential election, 2016 (6162
5. Republican Party presidential primaries, 2016 (5715)
6. 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting (5540)
7. Bailando 2015 (5342)
8. Donald Trump presidential campaign endorsements, 2016   (5328)
9. 2016 in sports (5277)
10. 2016 in South Korean music  (5074)
11. Beverly Gray (4957)
12. Statewide opinion polling for the United States presidential election (4743)
13. Panama Papers (4659)
14. 2016 in Philippine television (4600)
15. 2016 Pacific typhoon season (4244)
16. 2016 Atlantic hurricane season (3874)
17. Democratic Party presidential primaries, 2016 (3736)
18. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (3593)
19. The Life of Pablo (3574)
20. Vincent van Gogh (3551)

January

1. Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge (2158)
2. Deaths in 2016 (2014)
3. Planet Nine (1319)
4. 2016 Australian Open (1225)
5. Jascha Spivakovsky (1175)
6. David Bowie (1163)

February

1. The Life of Pablo (1520)
2. Deaths in 2016 (1470)
3. Republican Party presidential primaries, 2016 (1149)
4. 2016 Pakistan Super League (1101)
5. American Idol (season 15) (1050)
6. Deadpool (film) (919)

March

1. Deaths in 2016 (2107)
2. 2016 Brussels bombings (1896)
3. Republican Party presidential primaries, 2016 (1638)
4. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (1446)
5. Flydubai Flight 981 (1316)
6. The Voice (U.S. season 10) (1304)

April

1. Panama Papers (3425)
2. Beverly Gray (1630)
3. Deaths in 2016 (1607)
4. WrestleMania 32 (1539)
5. Bailando 2015 (1412)
6. 2016 World Snooker Championship (1347)

May

1. EgyptAir Flight 804 (1626)
2. Bailando 2015 (1507)
3. Deaths in 2016 (1411)
4. 2016 French Open (1082)
5. Captain America: Civil War (1077)
6. Republican Party presidential primaries, 2016 (1023)

June

1. 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting (4430)
2. Bailando 2015 (1597)
3. Deaths in 2016 (1525)
4. United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, 2016 (1506)
5. Cary Grant (1460)
6. Muhammad Ali (1322)

July

1. 2016 Nice attack (2764)
2. 2016 Turkish coup d’état attempt (1937)
3. 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers (1756)
4. Deaths in 2016 (1747)
5. 2016 Munich shooting (1720)
6. Pokémon Go (1428)

Helen Glover, British Olympian and gold medal winner, seen here in 2012. Photo by Thomaswwp, CC BY-SA 3.0.

August

1. Great Britain at the 2016 Summer Olympics (1578)
2. 2016 Summer Olympics medal table (1500)
3. United States at the 2016 Summer Olympics (1444)
4. Chronological summary of the 2016 Summer Olympics (1434)
5. Deaths in 2016 (1398)
6. Vincent van Gogh (1095)

September

1. Deaths in 2016 (1377)
2. Great Britain at the 2016 Summer Paralympics (1293)
3. 2016 New York and New Jersey bombings (1123)
4. List of Hillary Clinton presidential campaign endorsements, 2016 (1014)
5. RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars (season 2) (929)
6. 2016 Pacific typhoon season (923)

October

1. Newspaper endorsements in the United States presidential election, 2016 (1525)
2. Donald Trump sexual misconduct allegations (1493)
3. Hurricane Matthew (1424)
4. Deaths in 2016 (1424)
5. Statewide opinion polling for the United States presidential election, 2016 (1371)
6. 2016 Atlantic hurricane season (1158)

November

1. Protests against Donald Trump (1832)
2. United States presidential election, 2016 (1749)
3. Donald Trump (1475)
4. Survivor Series (2016) (1446)
5. Deaths in 2016 (1420)
6. El Coyote (character) (1240)

December (complete through the fifteenth)

1. Bigg Boss 10 (830)
2. Fake news website (747)
3. Deaths in 2016 (727)
4. Aleppo offensive (November–December 2016) (678)
5. 2016 United States election interference by Russia (641)
6. 2016 Oakland warehouse fire (638)

Footnotes

[1] Wikipedians chronicle and sort these deaths by month, so starting in 2017 the page will redirect to a list of lists of deaths.

Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate
Samantha Lien, Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

Our thanks go to the Wikimedia Foundation’s Aaron Halfaker for obtaining and tabulating the numbers. You can find more data like this on Meta.

Photo by Manfred Werner/Tsui, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Wikispeech, a so called speech synthesis, aims to make all the information available on Wikipedia accessible for anyone that faces reading difficulties, whether that is due to vision impairment, dyslexia, they never had an opportunity to learn literacy, or any other number of reasons.

Everyone should be able to take advantage of the information on Wikipedia. Only offering written text is really limiting for millions of people and this project we hope will be part of the solution to realize the grand vision of providing free knowledge for all people of the world.

The development of a text-to-speech MediaWiki extension was carefully investigated and planed during a pilot study in Autumn 2015. Development requirements and existing solutions that could be integrated were identified at this stage.

Just like everything else that the Wikimedia movement creates, the entire software will be freely licensed alongside the speech data and documentation. As such, people will be able to use Wikispeech on other wikis run by other organizations. Moreover, different parts of the synthesizer can also easily be reused by other text-to-speech projects, so that even more people with limited reading abilities will have an easier life.

The hope is that Wikispeech will be used in many different services, and that the communities improving the software and lexicon will be very diverse.

Wikispeech logo. Photo by ElioQoshi, public domain/CC0.

Many of those most in need of information do not have easy access to a personal computer, have limited knowledge of how computers and smartphones work, and/or lack access to the high quality commercial tools that are available. To reach these people the aim is a MediaWiki extension. Even though an extension is much more difficult to develop than an independent external tool we hope that it will be easier to find for Wikipedia’s users and there will be no need to download any software as it is an Internet-based solution. Another benefit is that a MediaWiki extensions should be simpler to include in other extensions and tools developed by other teams, such as reading aloud of subtitles in videos shown on Wikipedia, in Kiwix (the offline Wikipedia), and elsewhere.

At the end of the project, our goal is to have Wikispeech available in Swedish and English, along with a working prototype in Arabic, to show that it works in a right-to-left language. Long-term, we hope that Wikispeech will be available in all languages.

It will be possible through crowdsourcing to improve Wikispeech. You may, for example, help develop the pronunciation dictionary used by the program to make it sound more correct (the pronunciation of each word is described by the International Phonetic Alphabet). In this way, the speech synthesizer is constantly improved and annoying errors can be corrected by the user. The project team is not aware of any similar solutions and believe that this might actually be a world’s first. Wikispeech will also use a very flexible structure, where different parts of the synthesizer (dictionaries, voice, etc.) easily can be connected. The goal is that a newly developed solution that has been missing simply can be plugged into the framework.

We want the value of Wikipedia to increase among the people who have the least resources and are most vulnerable. A speech synthesis has a very great value in many of the world’s poorer countries where the education level is low. For commercial entities, these are not markets that are a priority, and here Wikispeech can help to fill the gaps.

The Swedish Post and Telecom Agency is financing the work that Wikimedia Sweden (the project owner) and the project partners Södermalms Talteknologiservice AB (STTS) and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) are doing in the project. In total, the project has a budget of around US$300,000. Furthermore, a number of other organizations and research teams have offered to support the project in other ways, including reporting in more than sixty news articles worldwide.

To make things as transparent as possible and make it easier for volunteers to help out, show their support, or raise a note of caution, all of the planned development have been added to Phabricator. We invite you to get involved, and please endorse the project!

John Andersson, Wikimedia Sverige

Photo by Boris Petković,CC BY-SA 4.0.

Last month, the international winners of Wiki Loves Earth were announced, and Čedomir Žarković from Serbia took first place with his photo of the Stopića limestone cave.

The announcement made Žarković into a viral TV and social media star for a short time, and we hope that the resulting media coverage of him and his photo will encourage future participation in similar free knowledge sharing events.

People in Serbia have seen this success as a matter of national pride. Over 46,000 people viewed our blog post announcing the results, and 30,000 saw the post on our Facebook page, all in addition to thousands of visits and shares other news websites received.

The attention was contagious as it traveled from social media to classical media channels. Wiki Loves Earth was the topic on fourteen TV shows, three radio interviews, five papers and magazines (including covers and front pages), in addition to sixty-five posts on blogs and news websites.

The awards ceremony was held at the National Tourism Organisation of Serbia, covered by several news agencies. Žarković was awarded a plaque and a voucher to attend Wikimania, the annual conference of the Wikimedia movement. Filip Maljković, the president of Wikimedia Serbia, handed out the prizes and took the opportunity to acknowledge the efforts of all participants in promoting the value of free knowledge and the natural heritage of our country.

Local cultural organizations didn’t miss the opportunity to lionize Žarković. The Institute for Nature Conservation of Serbia awarded the winner with the monograph Protected Cultural Heritage of Serbia, in addition to a stay at Tara National Park to give him inspiration for other work to promote the nature of Serbia. Moreover, the National Tourism Organization will invite Žarković to participate in the organization’s winter campaign and have him travel through Serbia.

Finally, Žarković’s winning photo was displayed on eight billboards across Serbia in the following month, thanks to the donations from Alma Quattro and Babbler Media Group.

Photo by Filip Maljković,CC BY-SA 4.0.

We believe that the media coverage of the winning photo was a great tool to promote Wiki Loves Earth in Serbia, as well as promoting the culture of free knowledge in our country.

Ivana Guslarevic, Communications Manager
Wikimedia Serbia

In Brief

Wiki Women Prize in the Arab World announces the winners: Wiki Women Prize is a monetary prize on the Arabic Wikipedia to encourage female participation and writing about women on Wikipedia. The fourth round of the competition was held between September 1 and November 30, 2016 and the results were announced yesterday. Congratulations to the winners.

Polish Wikipedia Community gets ready for their winter meeting: Wikimedia Poland, the independent chapter that supports the Wikimedia movement in the country, has opened registrations for their winter meeting. The meeting will be held between January 27 and 29, 2017 and registration is now open. More information about the meeting is available on Wikimedia Poland website.

Archives Challenge winner is announced: Wikipedian Gikü was the highest contributor during the Archives Challenge on Wikimedia Commons. Both Gikü and his bot (robot software) have added descriptions to thousands of photos and documents on Wikimedia Commons in addition to categorizing and using photos on Wikipedia. You can see more about the contest in our previous digest about it.

Affiliations Committee calls for new members: The Wikimedia Affiliations Committee (AffCom), the committee responsible for guiding volunteers in establishing Wikimedia chapters, thematic organizations, and user groups—is looking for new members. All applications will be posted on Meta, and all members of the community are invited to provide comments and feedback about each candidate. Applications will be accepted until the end of December. More information about the role and selection criteria is available on Meta.

Wikipedia as a platform for impactful learning: Education and Information Technologies, a scientific journal by Springer Nature, shared an article by Wikipedian Shani Evenstein. Evenstein’s article discusses using Wikipedia as a teaching tool in a new course model in higher education. The article is available on Springer Nature’s website.

WikiCup to begin: The WikiCup, an annual friendly competition designed to spur content creation on the English Wikipedia, will be offering monetary prizes this year for the first time. It is entering its tenth iteration. You can sign up to participate over on their page.

Voting for Military History WikiProject prizes under way: The English Wikipedia’s Military History WikiProject is voting on the recipients for their two year-end annual prizes: the “military historian of the year” and the “military history newcomer of the year.”

New This Month in GLAM: The newest monthly edition of This Month in GLAM has been published, covering developments in the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) for the month of November.

Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

Local history on Wikipedia is full of ripe opportunities. The site is global in reach, but among its 5 million articles are many that cover the small, but significant, cities and towns that shape our history. Even if those towns don’t actually exist.

Take, for example, the town of Baring Cross, Arkansas. You won’t find it on any (contemporary) map, because the town merged into Little Rock after just a 10-year run. Student editors from Dr. Kristin Dutcher’s Community History course at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock added information about the life of that town’s first of just two mayors.

Students tackled plenty of history about the existing city of Little Rock, too, drawing on local historical writings and trade journals that often aren’t available to many Wikipedians. The students created an article on Verna Cook Garvan, one of the first women CEOs in the United States, and expanded Adolphine Fletcher Terry, an anti-lynching advocate.

Having access to the local archives of a university or college library is a privileged position for students. Drawing on those materials to create Wikipedia articles is a great public service. It gives local readers a better understanding of their own history, and it can provide other historians with information that may otherwise be inaccessible. It’s just one of the ways that students open access to knowledge when they write for Wikipedia. More than that, students also have a sense of contribution, and a deeper respect for the communities they’re serving.

If you’re interested in participating in a similar initiative, we’d love to hear from you. We can provide free tools to help you and your students get started on Wikipedia. This includes online trainings and free printed materials for your course. We’ll also help you design a course page to help track student work, laying out a scaffolding built from hundreds of class hours’ worth of experience.

Interested? Get in touch with us by email: contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo: Crop of Foggy Hills in Arkansas by Ryan Wick, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. 

Hello,

Continuing the topic of the new template editor from previous weeks, let me introduce the new detailed and illustrated help page for the template editor. It includes useful information for articles translators and for template maintainers. We would really appreciate it if you could bring this to the attention of the template maintainers in your wiki, and also if you could translate it into your language.

Other than that, translating into Bengali was broken this week because of a subtle problem with handling of a Bengali Unicode character in the title of the special page. We apologize for the inconvenience. (bug report)

Unless something surprising happens, this is the last CX update for post for 2016. Happy new year—exciting changes are planned for 2017!

“Stand with Standing Rock” protest in San Francisco. Photo by Pax Ahimsa Gethen, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Dakota Access Pipeline has been the subject of fierce and continued protests in the United States during the past few months. The controversy, which started garnering significant media attention last September, has pitted business against environmental and cultural concerns.

Announced in June 2014, the pipeline is intended to be a 1,172 mile-long (1,886 km) underground oil pipeline project; it is designed to carry 470,000 barrels of crude oil from North Dakota to Illinois every day.

Many people, including Native American tribes in North Dakota, have opposed the project from the beginning. The pipeline’s proposed Missouri River crossing is believed, by opponents, to endanger the tribe’s main source of water. The transport of oil in the United States and Canada has come under much scrutiny in recent years after several pipeline spills and oil train derailments, like the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster.

Moreover, the Sioux Nations believe that the pipeline threatens their sacred burial grounds. Twenty-six archaeological sites are located in the area, Standing Rock’s Historic Preservation Officer LaDonna Brave Bull Allard has said. “It is a historic trading ground, a place held sacred not only by the Sioux Nations, but also the Arikara, the Mandan, and the Northern Cheyenne.”

In early 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux established a camp for cultural preservation and resistance to the pipeline. Thousands of opponents to the project gathered in the camp throughout the summer to protest the project, and by September the protest was attracting major media attention. Artists, activists, and many public figures showed up at the protests, and videos of conflicts between protesters and law enforcement have frequently gone viral, including episodes where water cannons were used on protesters in freezing weather.

Builders, however, claim that the project will not have any environmental impact on water, supported by a report from the US Army Corps of Engineers. The report confirmed that the pipeline will run 90 feet (27.4m) below the riverbed. Automatic shut-off valves on both sides of the river will add more protection to the river that already hosts several other fuel lines.

Growing media attention on the story prompted internet searches, some of which came to Wikipedia. Pageviews to the article on the pipeline spiked from 2,920 in September to 354,928 views in November—an almost 12,000% increase in pageviews. Pageviews to the protests article are examined more in depth by Wikipedian Pete Forsyth’s video on YouTube.

These people coming to learn more about it read an article crafted by volunteer Wikipedia editors. Whether supporters or opponents or just interested, Wikipedians have strived to provide neutral and factual coverage of the story, providing more information than people “would have learned elsewhere, like in single stories in the press,” Wikipedia editor SashiRolls told us. SashiRolls was inspired to contribute over 150 edits to the articles on the pipeline and pipeline protests after seeing some of this media coverage—after watching a TV news segment about it, he found out that “there have been good editors working on [the pipeline’s Wikipedia article] from more sides of the debate.”

“As Wikipedians, and especially in an era of fake news sites, we have a duty to Identify Reliable Sources,” one Wikipedian wrote on the talk page, linking to Wikipedia’s policy on determining what references are and are not suitable in article citations.

That policy is usually coupled with another on verifiability, which enshrines the idea that nearly all information added to Wikipedia needs to be supported with a citation to a reliable source.

SashiRolls was able to keep up with the developing story by “reading through” the verifiable information added to the two pages. Moreover, the page also helped him learn “about the Wikipedia project itself and how to edit relatively harmoniously on a charged subject.” There has been a significant amount of discussion on the article, with the article talk page and archives having over one hundred thousand bytes of discussion.

Earlier this month, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it will look into an alternate route for the project and reassess the environmental impact of the pipeline on the area. Protesters in the Standing Rock camp celebrated the news but have continued to protest, as they question how and when this conflict will come to an end.

Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

12/06/2016-12/12/2016

About us

• Dear reader, you might noticed that this issue was published very late. WeeklyOSM is normally published after being proofread twice. This issue had been proofread only once. If you are not satisfied with the English texts, grammar, wording, or anything else, please feel to join us and help us to publish the next issue. The next issue will only be published if it gets proofread twice. Get in touch with us or ping us on twitter.

Mapping

• On Osmtalk there is a discussion about the tag in highway=living_street Africa.
• Andy Mabbett suggests a few ideas for quarterly projects on the Talk-GB mailing list. The polls on proposals amenity=baking_oven and oven=* are open until December 20th.
• Alejandro Suárez wonders about the different definitions of the tag amenity=bar in the Mediterranean and the rest of the world, which probably comes from another semantic information of “bar” in Spanish and he would like to harmonise this in the wiki.
• LeTopographeFou establishes, that the original intended tagshop=estate_agent is ignored, and the tag office=estate_agent is used instead.
• User daniel-j-h writes a diary about the anomalies that the OSRM users report and the impact of oneway=reversible tag on the routing engine. He also introduces the oneway=alternating tag and it’s usage in OpenStreetMap.
• Manoharuss publishes his MAPS.ME edits analyses for November.

Community

• As part of the OSM women’s initiative against the gender gap in the past OSM latam there is a new group now on telegram. If you are a woman and interested, join!
• Who says that people don’t comment to changeset discussions on very old changesets?
• @mapeadora writes about the construction of OSM woman group on Latin America, and how to make a community.
• OSM is proposed as a method and database for the inventory of trees in Colombia in the urban areas of the nation.
• Presentation on the OGP by @mapanauta on how open data/open mapping can make a difference for social impact & humanitarian purposes. OGP is overseen at the international level by a Steering Committee composed of representatives of governments and civil society organizations in equal numbers. It brings together governments and civil society organizations as true partners at both the national and international level.
• On December 9th, the Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski visited the Mapbox team, in Ayacucho, Peru, where he learned about the company and worked on his first OpenStreetMap edit, contributing to the largest open geographic database in the world. Alex Barth asks if the president is the first head of state on OSM?

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OSM Foundation chairperson’s report for the 2016 Annual General Meeting has been published.
• The OSM Foundation Treasurer’s Report for the 2016 Annual General Meeting has been published. The meeting occurred last Saturday, December 10th.

Events

• The SoTM 2017 will take place in Aizuwakamatsu, Japan from 18th to 20th of August.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT explained details and procedures of their “Microgrant Program” for 2017. The sum donated so far, however, is limited.
• DutchNews.nl writes about the dedication of Paul Uithol from HOT and a team of volunteers who have been using online maps to help rebuild devastated communities since Hurricane Matthew swept through Haiti last month.

Maps

• OpenInfraMap, a project by Russ Garrett, has been updated with new layers.

Open Data

• Christoph Hormann publishes his reduced waterbody data (we reported earlier) on openstreetmapdata.
• OpenAddresses has passed the 300 million address milestone.

Licences

• User PlaneMad thinks that MapMyIndia, a commercial aggregator, is using OSM data and shows an example of an area he personally mapped.

Software

• Dave F. writes to the talk mailing list expressing his unhappiness about automatically generated notes from Maps.me.

Programming

• Chris Hill wrote a Leaflet plugin that adds a hash to the URL, denoting which baselayer and overlays are currently selected.

Releases

Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist.

(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.

Did you know …

• …the first node translated into the language Atikamekw?
• … the service MapContrib of Guillaume AMAT? User escada presented it on the basis of a map with dog parks a few months ago.

OSM in the media

• The newspaper La Croix published (automatic translation) an article about a contributor, Fabrice Ramamonjy who improves the data of Antananarivo with his community of students. Their university supports (automatic translation) the initiative. 

Other “geo” things

• An impressive interactive map visualizes the population density of English cities. John Elledge shows some examples on CityMetric.
• The detailed replica of the world famous “Lascaux” cave, a Unesco World Heritage Site, was opened by French President Hollande, is now open to visitors.
• The change of name from Open Street View to OpenStreetCam is complemented by the new version.
• Sightline reports on structural changes in the use of living space in Seattle.
• Ivory Coast adds the 3-word global addressing system offered by the British startup What3Words to their own insufficient system of postal addresses. What3Words assigns an arbitrary three-word-code to any 3×3-metres square of the Earth surface. Critics consider it a bad idea to make a postal system dependent on a commercial company’s licensing system.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Berlin	DB Open Data Hackathon	12/16/2016-12/17/2016
Washington_DC	Mapping Anacostia	12/17/2016
Tokyo	東京！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第３回 小石川植物園	12/17/2016
Essen	Stammtisch	12/18/2016
Kyoto	【晴明神社】マッピング＆ステップアップ勉強会	12/18/2016
Alpi Apuane	2016 Mapping party Rifugio Nello Conti	12/17/2016-12/18/2016	Toscana
Tampere	OSM kahvit	12/19/2016
Manila	【MapAm❤re】OSM Workshop Series 5/8, San Juan	12/19/2016
Taipei	Taipei Meetup, Mozilla Community Space	12/19/2016
Graz	Stammtisch	12/19/2016
Cologne/Bonn	Bonner Stammtisch	12/20/2016
Lüneburg	Mappertreffen Lüneburg	12/20/2016
Valencia	Missing Maps Valencia 1	12/20/2016
Lyon	Missing Maps Lyon	12/20/2016
Moscow	Schemotechnika 07	12/21/2016
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch	12/21/2016
Lübeck	Lübecker Mappertreffen	12/22/2016
Dusseldorf	Stammtisch	12/30/2016

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Hakuch, Laura Barroso, Peda, Rogehm, Spec80, TheFive, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia.

The Kiwix/Offline medical project will improve software that enables access to Wikipedia health content in areas with limited internet access. Photo of 2015 Kiwix offline Wikipedian training camp in Cambodia, by Tapei Medical University FL Young International Service, CC BY-SA 4.0.

We are excited to announce the successful grantees from the second round of the Wikimedia Foundation’s new Project Grants program.

Project Grants support individuals, groups and organizations to implement new experiments and proven ideas, whether focused on building a new tool or gadget, organizing a better process on your wiki, researching an important issue, coordinating an editathon series or providing other support for community-building.

When we initially announced the Project Grants program earlier this year, we piloted a quarterly schedule for proposal submissions. After two rounds of piloting, we have realized we aren’t sufficiently staffed to support 4 rounds per year. As a result, our existing grantees have not gotten the level of support that we want to offer to maintain the integrity of our programs. Our goal is to not just to offer funds, but to facilitate the growth and success of grantees and their projects. Consequently, we are scaling back to make sure we offer quality support all the way through the life of our grants.

In 2017, we will run two—rather than—four open calls. We have revised the 2017 schedule accordingly, with details about the next round posted on the Project Grants Start page. The Foundation will continue to fund smaller project grants (under $2,000) on a rolling basis through the Rapid Grants program. Assessment of the design of all our new grants programs will be ongoing as we seek to meet the needs of the community and align with Foundation’s resources and capacity. We will be doing a community survey in early 2017 to understand how the changes have impacted our grantees.

Project Grants are reviewed by a volunteer committee currently made up of 17 Wikimedians who come from over 13 different wikis and collectively speak over 15 languages. Outside of our Project Grant committee work, members edit, review, and translate content; help govern local chapters; write software; organize off-wiki events; facilitate workshops; work as sysops and bureaucrats; verify copyright and licensing permissions; draft and discuss project policies; and recruit and welcome new users to Wikimedia projects. Many members also serve as advisors to new grantees, helping to answer questions, connect them to relevant resources, and comment on monthly and midpoint reports.

In this latest round, a total of 21 eligible proposals were submitted for the committee’s review. The committee recommended that twelve projects be funded to receive $194,490, divided into three themes: software, offline outreach, and online organizing.  Here is what we are funding:

Software: four projects funded

• Kiwix/Offline medical: Wikimed is a medical encyclopedia app that runs on the offline platform Kiwix. It serves as a powerful resource for its users, who are predominantly based in areas of the Global South with limited connectivity. This project will update the existing Kiwix code to improve access and content quality, benefitting both Wikimed and other Wikimedia projects supported by Kiwix.

• Video templates: Video is used by Wikimedians for many reasons, like sharing on social media, providing trainings, reporting on successes and more. This project will produce templates to enable volunteers to more easily develop professional-level videos compatible with our visual identity guidelines. The templates will be developed for open source software.

• GLAMpipe: GLAMpipe is an open source web application that allows GLAM institutions to upload and process more complex data sets.  Initially developed in 2016 with support from the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, the grant will fund the next phase of improvements, focused on adoption by key GLAM-Wiki contributors, and extension of the tool to bring data to Wikidata.

• Fountain: Running wiki contests involves extensive preparation for organizers and volunteers, from devising requirements and guidelines, to scoring edits and determining winning participants. Fountain is a tool that creates and organizes online contests, and includes the ability to review edited quality articles. It has already been used on Russian Wikipedia, and was used by organizers of Asian Wikipedia Month in November 2016!  This grant will expand the tool for multiple-language and multi-project environments.

Offline outreach: seven projects funded

Offline Wikipedia outreach in Mongolia will integrate offline English and Mongolian Wikipedias into classroom curriculum. Photo by One Laptop per Child, CC BY-SA 2.0.

• Offline Wikipedia outreach in Mongolia: Progress Gateway, an NGO that specializes in building better education in Mongolia, will lead a pilot project that will integrate offline Wikipedia into classroom curriculum in both urban and rural areas. With support from the Ministry of Education, the project aims to build skills in utilizing English Wikipedia, and provide an introduction to editing in Mongolian Wikipedia.

• Let’s fill the gender gap through community building: This project seeks to build on the success of the Let’s fill the gender gap workshops for another year.  Focused on building motivation among new female volunteers in the Geneva region, regular meetings will be hosted to build personal relationships among participants and a sense of belonging to the Wikimedia community as a whole.

• Joburgpedia 2016: Wikimedia South Africa, in partnership with South African History Archives, will be engaging participants in edit-a-thons and in a digitization initiative as part of Johannesburg-based Joburgpedia.  Notably, this project will include documentation of the work of photojournalist and activist Gille De Vlieg, who photographed life in South Africa’s townships and shanty towns during the Apartheid era.

Music in Canada @ 150 will fill in content gaps related to Canadian music—particularly its folk music. Photo by Nash Gordon, CC BY-SA 4.0.

• Music in Canada @ 150: A Wikipedia and Wikidata Project
  This project aims to fill a gap in content about Canadian music. Through a collaboration between music communities, librarians and music archivists across the country, a series of offline events will strategically encourage new contributions to both Wikipedia and Wikidata.

• Bashkortostan User Group Event Planning for Q1 2017: Through this multi-part project, Bashkortostan Wikimedians will run contests, conduct trainings and offer social meet-up opportunities to build the volunteer community contributing to Bashkir language Wikimedia projects.

• Initialization project for Iraq Wikimedians User Group: The Iraqi User Group will run a multi-part project focused on:  building the user group, conducting trainings and editathons, hosting photo trips, coordinating Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments campaigns and launching their first version of the Wikipedia Education Program.

• Wikimedia Belgium Public facing activities 2017: Two years after its founding, Wikimedia Belgium seeks to further build its capacity by developing GLAM partnerships, establishing education programs and expanding its volunteer community through offline events.

Online outreach: one project funded

Siko Bouterse and Anasuya Sengupta, founders of Whose Knowledge?, will lead a project to engage marginalized communities in representing their knowledge on the internet. Photo by FloNight, CC BY-SA 3.0.

• Whose Knowledge?: This project seeks to build a base for a global campaign to create, collect and curate knowledge from and with marginalised communities. The grantees will pilot their model with two communities: the Dalit community in India and its diaspora in the US, and women’s human rights defenders in the global South.

Analysis of trends

When we created Project Grants, we sought to make room for both innovative projects that experiment with new ideas, and iterative projects that replicate on known ideas that work.  In this second round of grants, we received a sampling of both kinds of grants.

Among projects focused on innovation, we saw a strong interest this round in supporting users with little or no internet connectivity, with several proposals seeking to improve access to Wikimedia projects through Kiwix, an app that provides offline access to Wikimedia projects.  Within the Foundation, recent research conducted by the New Readers team has sparked fresh discussions about how we can better serve internet users in countries with developing internet access.  Three projects we’ve funded this round will help us probe this question. Kiwix/Offline medical will apply a technical solution, seeking to make it easier to download and regularly update Kiwix-based apps, and building more capacity to display high quality images.  Offline Wikipedia outreach in Mongolia will apply an offline solution, aiming to build curricular infrastructure that would allow offline Wikipedia to be seamlessly integrated into the public education system in Mongolia.  Lastly, though not specifically focused on offline readers, Whose Knowledge? has a complementary goal: it seeks to build a toolkit to engage marginalized communities in a process to identify and fill gaps about their knowledge on our projects.  As additional communities come online, this resource will be one aid to facilitate contributions of missing content most relevant to new readers.

Among projects focused on iteration, we received robust engagement plans from four different Wikimedia movement affiliates.  Wikimedia Belgium, Wikimedia South Africa, the Iraq User Group and the Bashkortostan User Group will all be funded to conduct offline activities including: edit-a-thons, trainings, social meetups, GLAM activities, education programs and campaigns.  We are glad to be able to support the development of movement leaders who are building strong volunteer communities around the world.

We received many compelling proposals this year that the committee decided not to fund. We encourage applicants who were not successful in this round of funding to refine and resubmit their proposals in upcoming rounds or to pilot a smaller project in Rapid Grants. Return proposals that have been revised in response to community and committee feedback are warmly welcomed. The open call for Project Grants 2017 round one will launch on February 13, 2017, with applications due March 14, 2017.

Directly prior to the Project Grants open call, an Inspire Campaign will be launched in January to invite community ideas on engaging and developing partnerships with outside knowledge networks—such as experts, libraries, and cultural institutions—to improve the quality of content in our projects.  These ideas may be developed into Rapid or Project grants in cases where funding is needed.

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

Marti Johnson, Program Officer
Alex Wang, Program Officer
Wikimedia Foundation

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12/06/2016-12/12/2016

私たちについて

• 2016/9/8に欧州司法裁判所は、商用ウェブサイトがリンクを貼る場合、リンク先が著作権を侵害していないことを確認する必要があるとの判断を下しました。WeeklyOSMはリンク集であり、本規定の下では活動に支障があります。特にドイツ語チームは記事のほとんどを集めており、リスクが高いのです。すべてのリンクをチェックしても安全は担保できませんし、これ以上作業を増やすことはできません。ドイツでは、第三者が業務停止通知を送ることが可能であり、それを専門にする法律事務所も非常に多く存在しているため、法の安全側で動くことが重要です。通知書が送られてきた場合、罰金を支払うか裁判に訴えることになるのです。

  欧州司法裁判所によるプレスリリースはこちら

マッピング

• Andy Mabbett 氏は英国のメーリングリストの中で四半期プロジェクトの候補をいくつか提案しています。
• amenity=baking_oven と oven=* への投票は12月20日までです。
• OSM-talk メーリングリストでアフリカでの highway=living_street についての議論が行われています。
• amenity=barの定義が地中海地域とその他で異なっていることに関して、Alejandro Suárez氏が疑問を呈しています。スペイン語の”bar”の意味に引きずられているものと思われますが、地域によらず定義を統一するほうがよいのではないかとSuárez氏は考えています。
• shop=estate_agentの代わりにoffice=estate_agentを使うほうがよいのではないかとLeTopographeFou氏が提案しています。
• OSRMでルート検索すると、oneway=reversableタグがついた道は検索対象から除外されるため、異常な大回りの道を提示されることがあります。そのため、通行方向が信号機などで頻繁に変わる道についてはoneway=alternatingを使うことが提案されました。daniel-j-h氏がこれらのタグの使い方について解説記事を書きました。
• Manoharuss 氏が11月に MAPS.ME で編集された内容の分析結果を公開しています。

コミュニティ

• 南アメリカOSMにおけるジェンダーギャップに対応するため、OSM女性イニシアチブがtelegramにグループを立ち上げました。興味がある方はぜひ参加してください。
• 古い変更セットであっても「議論」に対する応答があります。
• mapeadora氏が南アメリカにおけるOSM女性グループの立ち上げとコミュニティ形成について記事を書きました。
• コロンビアの都市部にある国有樹木の管理をするデータベースとして OSM を使うことが提案されています。
• OpenStreetMap Advent Calendar 2016 が折り返し地点を過ぎました。お気に入りの記事は見つけられたでしょうか。引き続きエントリーを受け付けています。
• 12/9にペルー大統領Pedro Pablo Kuczynski氏がMapbox社を訪問し、OSMデータを編集しました。もしかしたらOSMを編集した最初の国家元首かもしれませんね。
• nyampire 氏が人口の少ない自治体の地図を作るプロジェクト「God is in the detail」をスタートさせました。

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• 2016年度 OSMF 年次総会の議長報告が公開されました。
• OSMF の会計担当による 2016年度 OSMF 年次総会の報告が公開されました。OSMF 総会は12月10日土曜日に開催されました。

イベント

• State of the Map 2017 は2017年8月18日から20日の日程で開催されます。開催地は日本の会津若松です!

OSM人道支援

• HOT が2017年の資金調達について詳細に説明をしています。ただ、現在までに集まった寄付金はまだ目標金額を大きく下回っています。
• DutchNews.nl紙が、HOT社のPaul Uithol氏へのインタビュー記事を掲載しました。ハリケーンマシューの被害を受けた地域で、オンラインマップを利用したコミュニティ再生に関して解説しています。

地図

• [1] Russ Garrett 氏の OpenInfraMap が更新されました。

オープンデータ

• OpenStreetMapData のサイトで Christoph Hormann 氏が低いズームレベルで表示される水域のデータ(以前お伝えしたものです)を公開しました。
• OpenAddresses に登録されている住所データが3億件を超えました。

ライセンス

• PlaneMad 氏は MapMyIndia が配信している地図に OSM のデータが使われているのではないかと考え、自身がマッピングしたエリアを例として紹介しています。

ソフトウェア

• Maps.meアプリ経由の書き込みで、店舗閉店情報が何度も地図メモとして書き込まれてしまう問題にDave F.氏がいらいらしています。

プログラミング

• Chris Hill 氏が URL にハッシュを表示する Leaflet プラグインを作りました。現在表示されているレイヤーのズームレベルや緯度、経度が URL に表示されます。

リリース

Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist.

(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.

ご存知でしたか？

• アティカメク語の名称がついた最初のノードです。
• Guillaume AMAT によって運営される主題図作成サービス MapContrib、escada 氏が数か月前にこのサービスでドッグランの地図を作ったと紹介していました。

メディア掲載

• La Croix紙が、マダガスカルの大学生Fabrice Ramamonjy氏が学生コミュニティと協力して生活圏のOSMデータを整備した活動について記事を掲載しました。本活動は大学の支援を受けています。

その他の “ジオ” な事柄

• 英国の人口密度を可視化した見事な地図です。Web サイト CityMetric の中で John Elledge 氏がいくつかの例を紹介しています。
• ユネスコの世界遺産に登録されている「ラスコー洞窟」の精巧なレプリカがフランスのオラルド大統領によって公開されました。現在一般客も見学可能です。
• ケータイ Watch がゼンリンデータコムの提供する「ゲームマップ SDK」について報じています。AR、VRサービスがあり、Unity からの利用もできるようです。
• Android アプリ OpenStreetView もバージョンアップによって OpenStreetCamへ名前をが変更されます。
• Sightline 研究所はシアトルで建物の種類が変化してきていることについてリポートしています。
• コートジボワールが住所表記システムにWhat3Wordsを導入するとのことです。What3Wordsは英国スタートアップ企業が開発したシステムで、世界中を3m x 3mの大きさに区切り、3つの単語の組み合わせによって任意の場所を指定できるようになっています。ただし、特定企業の独自システムに住所表記を委ねるのは危ういとの批判もあります。

まもなく開催

場所	名称	開催日	国
ベルリン	DB Open Data Hackathon	12/16/2016-12/17/2016
Washington_DC	Mapping Anacostia	12/17/2016
東京	東京！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第３回 小石川植物園	12/17/2016
エッセン	Stammtisch	12/18/2016
京都市	【晴明神社】マッピング＆ステップアップ勉強会	12/18/2016
Alpi Apuane	2016 Mapping party Rifugio Nello Conti	12/17/2016-12/18/2016	Toscana
タンペレ	OSM kahvit	12/19/2016
マニラ	【MapAm❤re】OSM Workshop Series 5/8, San Juan	12/19/2016
台北市	Taipei Meetup, Mozilla Community Space	12/19/2016
グラーツ	Stammtisch	12/19/2016
ケルン・ボン空港	Bonner Stammtisch	12/20/2016
リューネブルク	Mappertreffen Lüneburg	12/20/2016
バレンシア	Missing Maps Valencia 1	12/20/2016
リヨン	Missing Maps Lyon	12/20/2016
モスクワ	Schemotechnika 07	12/21/2016
カールスルーエ	Stammtisch	12/21/2016
リューベック	Lübecker Mappertreffen	12/22/2016
デュッセルドルフ	Stammtisch	12/30/2016

‘

Note: ここであなたのイベントを見たい場合は、カレンダーにそれを 入れてください。そこにあるデータのみが、週刊 OSM に表示されます。 カレンダー 内で都市や国に言及するのを忘れないでください。

This weeklyOSM was produced by Hakuch, Laura Barroso, Peda, Rogehm, TheFive, derFred, k_zoar, muramototomoya.

In the last few years many editathons have been held in Wales encouraging people to write articles on women. Many new Women editors have been trained at the History Department at Swansea University since their first editathon in May 2014 and others at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth and at Machynlleth and Ruthin.

The efforts to improve and increase articles on women on Welsh Wikipedia has been steered by Wikimedia UK Wales Manager Robin Owain and a strong and committed Welsh Wikipedia community. The Welsh Wikipedia currently has nearly 90,000 articles and is ranked 60th largest out of a total of 284 language Wikipedias all over the world, punching well above its weight.

In June 2016 the proportion of biographical articles about women on Wiki Cymru was 32%. Yesterday saw that balance turned on its head for the first time on any Wikipedia with more than 10,000 articles. There are now 9,312 biographies on women and 8,123 of men on Welsh Wikipedia, and we hope that the success of achieving a more gender balanced site encourages more women to become editors.

Wikimedia UK is helping to build an inclusive online community and ensure that the Wikimedia projects reflect our diverse society and are free from bias. Wales Manager Robin Owain says that, “The number of biographies is now balanced, which is a big achievement for a small Wikipedia, but we now need to look at other factors such as increasing the content of articles from being male orientated, to being more balanced and gender neutral.”

Source:

The calculation of the gender of all biographies is made through a Wikidata Query on this page.

We are proud to announce the 15 winning photographs of Wiki Loves Monuments 2016. More than 10,700 photographers participated this year, submitting over 275,000 photographs of historic buildings, monuments, and cultural heritage sites to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, and other free knowledge projects. Thanks to them, more heritage sites from a diverse selection of countries can be explored through Wikipedia.

In this year’s contest 42 national competitions organized their own national jury process, and submitted their 392 nominees to this international finale – if you want to explore more beautiful heritage from around the world after this blogpost, you can take a look here.

We hope that this will be an encouragement for you to share your photos through Wikimedia Commons as well. You can do that by participating in one of the photo challenges (keep an eye on this blog and @wikimonuments on Twitter), or just by uploading your photos directly. You can start today.

But now it is time to celebrate the 15 winning photos of the international finale! Please enjoy. A jury report with all the top-58 images is also available, with more detail to why the images won. Below is a full list of the 15 winners, enjoy:

First place. The entrance hall and the windy staircases of the district court of Berlin, Germany, are experienced by thousands of people every year. Ansgar Koreng, a lawyer deeply familiar with this monument, got permission to take a photo and share a glimpse of inside this building.  (Ansgar Koreng, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Second place. The interior of the Royal Albert Hall, United Kingdom, was missing a good quality photo on Wikipedia. Colin decided to change this during an Open House London annual weekend event, when taking photos of the hall was allowed.  (Colin, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Third place. Richard, an amateur photographer, went back to the same spot where he started his photographic hobby to get this shot of Perch Rock Lighthouse, United Kingdom. (Richard J Smith, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Fourth place. The hills of Emilia-Romagna in Italy are the home of the Castle of Torrechiara, seen here at sunset. (Lara Zanarini, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Fifth place. The two mythical giant demons Thotsakan (left) and Sahatsadecha (right) guard the Buddhist Wat Arun temple in Thailand. The photographer journeyed to the temple waited for hours to take this shot of the temple at twilight after a journey via the Chaopraya River. (Janepop Atirattanachai, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sixth place. The blooming flower of the Pakistan Monument is seen here during the blue hour. The photographer traveled from Lahore to Islamabad to share this view of Pakistan’s symbol of unity with the world. (Muhammad Ashar, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Seventh place. “At the right place, at the right moment” and many years of experience culminated in this illuminated Planalto Palace at sunset, where the photographer was able to capture the contrast between Brazil’s presidential palace and its surroundings. (Gastão Guedes, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Eighth place. The octagonal three-tiered shrine of Bibi Jawindi, located in the historical city of Uch, Pakistan, was built in 1493 for the great-granddaughter of a Sufi saint. (User:Usamashahid433, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ninth place. Fog, golden leaves, and the winter atmosphere engulf the fourteenth century Saint Lawrence church in Zliechov, Slovakia. (User:Volodka22, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Tenth place. Two friends traveled 500 kilometers to capture the elements of romance, decaying glory, and another set of travelers in Darawar Fort, Pakistan. (Tahsin Shah, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Eleventh place. A beautiful day in September at Crystal Mill just before sunset. The Mill is an old power generation plant that supplied hydroelectricity to the mining town of Crystal, Colorado in the United States. The road to Crystal Mill is a tricky one to drive; the photographer had to negotiate a narrow road with steep drop-offs to capture this shot. (Joe Sparks, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Twelfth place. Gravensteen castle in the center of Ghent, Belgium, has been a witness to history since the Middle Ages. The photographer waited for days for this moment, as it depended on sunset rays that would give the building a warm glow. (David Horvath, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Thirteenth place. Čachtice Castle, Čachtice, Slovakia, was captured by a twenty-three-year-old photographer who hikes the mountains of Slovakia and spends nights under the sky to explore nature and monuments in his country. He took this photo while on his way to meet an old classmate. (Vladimír Ruček, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Fourteenth place. The so-called “Devil’s Bridge” in Gablenz, Germany, was captured by the photographer while on a family trip to rediscover his family’s roots. (Albrecht Landgraf, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Fifteenth place. The photographer, a long-time Wikimedian, was traveling in Panama on a rainy day with dim lighting conditions. He decided to take a shot of the Panama Canal Railway, an instrumental component in constructing the canal. (Ivo Kruusamägi, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Did you enjoy these images? Continue browsing the winners of all the national competitions on Wikimedia Commons!

A lawyer carefully studied the arches and staircases of the Berlin district courthouse as he came and went for work, “not always liking the place.” One afternoon the crowds disappeared, the light from the towering windows softened, and Ansgar Koreng captured its elaborate elegance for first place in the contest.

Colin, from Britain, waited for Open House London to take a photo of Royal Albert Hall. He hauled a tripod to the central box of the grand tier, and set to work, hoping the light wouldn’t change as he pieced together a high-resolution composite image, giving music lovers a glowing view of the legendary venue. The photo took second place.

Tahsin Shah, a Pakistani police chief, drove 500 kilometers pursuing the “romance and decaying glory” of the ninth century Derawar Fort. He captured a camel caravan strung along its bastions, a scene that could have taken place 1,000 years ago, for tenth place.

Beginning photographer Vladimír Ruček likes to hike the mountains of his homeland, Slovakia, sleeping in “a million-star hotel,” alone under the night sky. He photographed the old stone Čachtice Castle greeting the morning sun and took thirteenth place.

———

Welcome to the largest photo competition in the world – by the world and for the world. Wiki Loves Monuments drew 277,365 entries from 10,748 participants this year, the largest pool of submissions of any photo competition. Volunteers go through all of those, first on the national level, then for the global finals. Above are some of the stories behind the top 15 photos—winnowed all the way down from the more than a quarter-million—and announced today.

Lawyer Ansgar Koreng placed first, winning a €1000 prize, Colin’s Royal Albert Hall photo placed second, Pakistani police chief Tahsin Shah placed tenth, and Slovakian hiker Vladimír Ruček placed thirteenth.

Like Wikipedia, Wiki Loves Monuments is a sprawling enterprise filled with fascinating diversity. Winners represent the world’s best photos of the cultural heritage in 42 nations. Museums and observatories, old mills and modern architecture. If Wikipedia is the story of the world, Wiki Loves Monuments could well be its most beautiful slide show.

The contest, started in 2010, judges photos submitted via Wikimedia Commons, the 36 million-file free media repository for the Wikimedia movement. The photos help illustrate articles about countries’ national monuments on Wikipedia, and are freely licensed for everyone to appreciate. In fact, one of the main criteria for judging is “Usefulness of the image on Wikipedia.”

Wiki Loves Monuments also introduces some contributors to the collaborative Wikimedia culture. This year around 8,500 people used a new Wikimedia account to submit photos to the competition, something that generally correlates to having never before contributed to Wikimedia projects.

Every nation has its own 10 winners who compete at the global level. One German photographer, the Wikimedia Commons user Tilman2007, submitted 16,507 photos this year, and has submitted 46,352 to Wiki Loves Monuments since 2011 and 102,875 to Wikimedia Commons in total with the help of uploading tools. Another participant, Francesca, submitted one-half of a photo, and was a finalist in Italy. Francesca submitted a glowing photo of the Church of Santa Maria De’ Armeni in Matera, which she took with a collaborator, her boyfriend. She only submits photos taken with her boyfriend; it is entirely a labor of love.

One thing is true about all of them, and all contributors to Wikimedia projects. As the photographers capture national treasures, they invest something of themselves.

Albrecht Landgraf of Germany took a roadtrip with his family in Saxony where one side of his family is from. “All our relatives in this area passed away years ago, and the remaining family is spread out all over Germany.” They drove back in through family history to a park in Gablenz. “That’s when we found this little gem,” he said, “in a small village.”

His fourteenth place photo is an emerald, a quiet photograph of a serene lake garlanded with lush greenery with the arc of a bridge perfectly meeting its reflection in the water.  His family may have long since left Saxony, but Albrecht returned to rediscover his roots—and left the region a gift.

For more information on the winning photos and the 2016 competition, go to www.wikilovesmonuments.org.

The other ten images follow—the first, second, tenth, and fourteenth places are above.

———

Third place. Richard, an amateur photographer, went back to the same spot where he started his photographic hobby to get this shot of Perch Rock Lighthouse, United Kingdom. (Richard J Smith)

Fourth place. The hills of Emilia-Romagna in Italy are the home of the Castle of Torrechiara, seen here at sunset. (Lara Zanarini)

Fifth place. The two mythical giant demons Thotsakan (left) and Sahatsadecha (right) guard the Buddhist Wat Arun temple in Thailand. The photographer journeyed to the temple  waited for hours to take this shot of the temple at twilight after a journey via the Chaopraya River. (Janepop Atirattanachai)

Sixth place. The blooming flower of the Pakistan Monument is seen here during the blue hour. The photographer traveled from Lahore to Islamabad to share this view of Pakistan’s symbol of unity with the world. (Muhammad Ashar)

Seventh place. “At the right place, at the right moment” and many years of experience culminated in this illuminated Planalto Palace at sunset, where the photographer was able to capture the contrast between Brazil’s presidential palace and its surroundings. (Gastão Guedes)

Eighth place. The octagonal three-tiered shrine of Bibi Jawindi, located in the historical city of Uch, Pakistan, was built in 1493 for the great-granddaughter of a Sufi saint. (User:Usamashahid433)

Ninth place. Fog, golden leaves, and the winter atmosphere engulf the fourteenth century Saint Lawrence church in Zliechov, Slovakia. (User:Volodka22)

Eleventh place. A beautiful day in September at Crystal Mill just before sunset. The Mill is an old power generation plant that supplied hydroelectricity to the mining town of Crystal, Colorado in the United States. The road to Crystal Mill is a tricky one to drive; the photographer had to negotiate a narrow road with steep drop-offs to capture this shot. (Joe Sparks)

Twelth place. Gravensteen castle in the center of Ghent, Belgium, has been a witness to history since the Middle Ages. The photographer waited for days for this moment, as it depended on sunset rays that would give the building a warm glow. (David Horvath)

Fifteenth place. The photographer, a long-time Wikimedian, was traveling in Panama on a rainy day with dim lighting conditions. They decided to take a shot of the Panama Canal Railway, an instrumental component in constructing the canal. (Ivo Kruusamägi)

———

Jeff Elder, Digital Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

With one exception, all photos used in this post are freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The first place image is CC BY 3.0 DE.

Whether via social media, email, or text messaging, we increasingly communicate online. Sites like Facebook and Twitter let us keep up with friends and family, but they also give our words the potential to reach a very large audience.

This explosion in online communication can be a powerful force for unification, but it can also have divisive effects. The ability to communicate, whether online or offline, is a skill to be honed and mastered. In text-only communications, it’s easy for tone to be misconstrued, and well-meaning interactions can quickly escalate into fruitless, even abusive encounters. It’s no surprise then that communication skills are at the top of the requirements in so many job listings. But where can people learn the skills necessary to communicate effectively and civilly in an online environment?

That’s where the Wiki Education Foundation can step in.

Through our Classroom Program, more than 10,000 college and university students contributed to Wikipedia as part of their coursework this year. Instead of the traditional term paper, students either add to or create new Wikipedia articles on subjects relevant to their course.

How does contributing to Wikipedia help students develop critical online communication skills? Wikipedia is an online community of volunteers (Wikipedians), who have developed a code of conduct to govern communications on the site. Online collaboration is at the core of Wikipedia, and when students engage with this community, they must learn and adhere to Wikipedia etiquette (Wikiquette).

Every Wikipedia article has a Talk page, and it’s here where students begin to hone their online communication skills. Click on the Talk page of any article, and you may find a glimpse into the inner workings of the Wikipedia community, and how they communicate.

When students begin to interact with other Wikipedians as they participate in Wiki Ed’s program, they have to consider a host of factors.

• Tone: Wikipedia dictates that its users maintain a polite and respectful tone. Even if a student disagrees with another editor, she must continue to engage with that individual in a civil manner via textual conversation, regardless of whether or not this behavior is reciprocated. For many of our students, this is the first time they’ve had to learn how to engage in civil online discussions with ramifications for their academic careers, and in doing so, gain the ability to diffuse tone-based conflicts in other social media environments.
• Good Faith: Wikipedia asks all users to “assume good faith” on the part of other editors. When Wikipedians assume that other users are well-intentioned, conflicts are often avoided or more easily diffused. As a result, our students can approach online interactions with a collaborative spirit. Even if they disagree with the individual on the other end of the keyboard or mobile device, they will come to the conversation with productivity and resolution as the end goal.
• Responsiveness and responsibility: When students contribute to Wikipedia, they commit to engaging in discourse with the community. They are expected to respond to questions and feedback by other editors, and to do so in a timely and respectful manner. Our students learn to be accountable for their work. Whether in a Slack conversation with a future coworker or a text message with a friend, they know it is their responsibility to equally participate in an online discussion.
• Conflict resolution: Disagreements arise on Wikipedia, but they are resolved through discussion and consensus rather than name calling and attacks. Wikipedia has a strict policy against edit warring — the practice by which disagreeing editors delete and reinsert contributions over and over again. If a student finds that her work has been deleted, she has to seek out why this is the case. She must contact the editor who reverted the work and attempt to understand how she can work with this editor to improve or revise her contribution. Our students know that results arise not from closing doors, but by keeping the lines of communication open. They know that conflict should not represent the end of the discussion but rather the beginning.
• Neutral Point of View: When contributing to Wikipedia, students must strive toward a “neutral point of view” (NPOV) — they must consider all valid sides of a topic, regardless of their own feelings on the matter. While NPOV doesn’t strictly govern interactions among editors, it compels them to consider that every issue has multiple points of view. When students master NPOV, they understand that most subjects are complex, and that while they may not agree with one point of view or another, on Wikipedia they are obliged to consider it as long as it’s based in reliable sources. After our students have completed a Wikipedia assignment, they are able to quickly discern whether the author of the news article their friend posted has supplied a balanced summary and whether the sources they have used are reliable.

Whether our students bring the communication skills they learn from contributing to Wikipedia to their first job, a friendly encounter on Facebook, or a tense online debate, they will know how to convey their thoughts in an effective and respectful manner. They will understand that online communities don’t just exist to air grievances, but that they are places to resolve differences productively. they will know how to navigate an often divisive landscape with ease, but more importantly, to turn division into dialogue.

Since our program began in 2010, we’ve helped more than 28,000 students develop these online communications skills. With your help, we can provide these skills to even more students:

• Teach with us: If you’re a professor at a college or university in the U.S. or Canada, consider incorporating a Wikipedia-based assignment into your class.
• Spread the word: If you know anyone who might be interested in teaching with Wikipedia, please encourage them to contact us contact@wikiedu.org.
• Make a donation: As a nonprofit, we rely on generous contributions to make us scale our impact. Your gift today will help us support more students next year.

December 14, 2016

Semantic MediaWiki 2.4.4 (SMW 2.4.4) has been released today as a new version of Semantic MediaWiki.

This new version is a minor release and provides bugfixes for MySQL 5.7 issues of the current 2.4 branch of Semantic MediaWiki. Please refer to the help page on installing Semantic MediaWiki to get detailed instructions on how to install or upgrade.

November 28, 2016

Semantic MediaWiki 2.4.3 (SMW 2.4.3) has been released today as a new version of Semantic MediaWiki.

This new version is a minor release and provides bugfixes for the current 2.4 branch of Semantic MediaWiki. Please refer to the help page on installing Semantic MediaWiki to get detailed instructions on how to install or upgrade.

November 28, 2016

Semantic MediaWiki 2.4.3 (SMW 2.4.3) has been released today as a new version of Semantic MediaWiki.

This new version is a minor release and provides bugfixes for the current 2.4 branch of Semantic MediaWiki. Please refer to the help page on installing Semantic MediaWiki to get detailed instructions on how to install or upgrade.

December 14, 2016

Semantic MediaWiki 2.4.4 (SMW 2.4.4) has been released today as a new version of Semantic MediaWiki.

This new version is a minor release and provides bugfixes for MySQL 5.7 issues of the current 2.4 branch of Semantic MediaWiki. Please refer to the help page on installing Semantic MediaWiki to get detailed instructions on how to install or upgrade.

Have you thought about adopting a Wikipedia-based assignment, but are struggling with how exactly to incorporate it into your class? Have you ever wondered what other instructors teaching with Wikipedia are doing in their courses? Is this the first time you’ve heard of Wikipedia assignments, and you’d like to know more?

In October, we had the pleasure of welcoming Megan Osterbur and Naniette Coleman to Wiki Ed’s San Francisco office to record an episode of Xavier University’s Teaching, Learning and Everything Else podcast. Megan contributes to the podcast as Assistant Professor of Political Science at Xavier, and Naniette has twice taught in our Classroom Program as an instructor in the University of Massachusetts, Lowell’s Department of Sociology. Their conversation with Wiki Ed’s Classroom Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal and Research Fellow Zach McDowell on the subject of how to incorporate a Wikipedia-based assignment into a college or university-level course is now available in two segments on the podcast’s website:

• Part I
• Part II

Highlights from the interview:

• How Wikipedia assignments can be well-suited for online courses. Naniette draws from her experience integrating Wikipedia into her Sociology of Mass media class.
• Experiences of instructors teaching with Wikipedia for the first time. Megan and Naniette reflect on their experiences, and compare with Zach’s, a long-time instructor in the Classroom Program.
• Benefits of teaching with Wikipedia for both students and instructors.
• Challenges of adopting a Wikipedia-based assignment, and the best practices to navigate them.
• Zach’s ongoing research on student learning outcomes.
• How Wiki Ed supports faculty and students contributing to Wikipedia as part of their coursework.

Many thanks again to Professor Osterbur for inviting Wiki Ed to participate in this program.

If you’d like to learn more about teaching with Wikipedia, please send us an email – contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo: Naniette Coleman and Megan Osterbur at the Wiki Education Foundation office. By LiAnna Davis, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Photo by Zuraj studio, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The third annual Wiki Loves Africa is running between December 2016 and the end of January 2017. The media sharing contest aims to increase both the quality and quantity of freely-licensed media files about Africa.

The idea started in 2014, mainly as a photography contest with a different theme every year. In 2014, 873 amateur and professional photographers took 6,116 photos of African cuisine as part of the competition, while the 2015 edition saw the participation of 722 people who shared 7,500 photos about African cultural fashion and adornment.

All 13,624 photographs are now stored on Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository that illustrates Wikipedia and other free-knowledge websites.

This year, the contest is changing its direction with a motion theme: music and dance. “Over the last two years, the contest has been very photographically biased,” says Florence Devouard, A French Wikipedian and one of the main organisers of Wiki Loves Africa. She continues:

“Dance and music are not only very visual, but also perfect for video and sound. This year, we are expecting more videos and sound files to be submitted, and we hope to be able to create a Wiki Loves Africa Playlist.”

Though the competition is open for participation from all over the world, local Wikipedian teams in several African countries are running to personally support the participants. Examples of activities include photowalks and editing workshops on how to upload and use the files.

“Over the three years, thirteen communities have taken part as focus countries,” says Isla Haddow-Flood, a Wikipedian from Zimbabwe and one of the main organisers of Wiki Loves Africa. “Of these, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Tunisia and Uganda have taken part in all three. This is a great achievement on their part, to be motivated enough to carry on and support the project locally.”

Haddow-Flood and Devouard had first thought about Wiki Loves Africa in 2013 when they shared the concern about the lack of Africa-related content on Wikipedia and the aspiration to do something about it.

“There are, on average, 100 times more geotagged articles on Wikipedia related to France than to the entirety of Africa,” Devouard notes, to which Haddow-Flood adds:

“This has to change, and with technology, it can. There are lots of examples of systemic knowledge bias on Wikipedia, but essentially it comes down to the fact that nothing will change until people from across Africa contribute to Wikipedia.”

In brief

Wikipedia content is ready to go to the Moon: Wikipedia to the Moon is an effort to compile material from Wikipedia about life on Earth, its cultures and knowledge to be sent to the Moon in the form of a time capsule. Over 31,000 featured articles and lists from Wikipedia in 176 languages have been selected by the Wikipedia community for this mission. Last week, a special ceramic disc carrying this content was delivered to the PT Scientists team in Berlin. The team will launch their spacecraft ALINA taking the Wikipedia content to space by the end of 2017.

Wikimania Scholarship Committee is open for volunteers: The Wikimania scholarship program is a special travel funding program to support the participation in the annual conference of the Wikimedia movement. The scholarship committee is a diverse group of volunteers who help promote the program and review/select applicants. More information about the Committee member duties, eligibility to join, the deadline for application and more on Wikimedia-l.

Prolific Wikipedian Coyau dies at 38: Coyau made over 1.5 million edits to different Wikimedia projects. He joined the movement in 2005 when he started his activity with editing the French Wikipedia. He followed that by great efforts on Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, and other projects. The Wikimedia community members are expressing their sorrow on Wikimedia-l and on his talk page.

Applications to join the Ombuds Commission are being accepted: The Ombudsman commission works on Wikimedia projects to investigate complaints about violations of the privacy policy, especially in use of CheckUser and Oversight tools, and to mediate between the complaining party and the individual whose work is being investigated. More information about the role and how to apply can be found on Wikimedia-l.

Washington, D.C. hosts two editing workshops: Wikipedians in D.C. held two editathons (editing workshops) last week. The first was at the BBC headquarter on December 8, where the participants there in addition to others in different places around the world improved women profiles on Wikipedia. The second editathon was on December 9 at the US Holocaust Memorial and Museum where experienced Wikipedians and newcomers edited about the holocaust history and relevant material.

Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

What’s in a name? When it comes to minerals, a name can tell you quite a bit.

Students from North Dakota State University’s Mineralogy course created 16 new articles about minerals. All of them have surprisingly human names, because they’re named after famous geologists.

Students tackled George-ericksenite, now a 3,000-word article about a yellow mineral named after USGS geologist George E. Ericksen. Bobdownsite was named after University of Arizona professor Robert Terrace Downs. Similarly, Waterhouseite was named for Australian geologist Frederick George Waterhouse, and Charlesite was named for a Harvard minerologist, Dr. Charles Palache. Meanwhile, Khmaralite, found in Antarctica, was named for Ivan Fedorovich Khmara, a tractor driver killed in Antarctica.

While these minerals have human names, the course created two articles, Allendeite and Hexamolybdenum, with extraterrestrial origins. These minerals were first discovered in the Allende meteorite that hit Earth in 1969.

Thanks for these students for work that expands Wikipedia’s content about mineralogy!

Photo: Hello my name is by Eviatar Bach – Own work, Public Domain. 

You’ll notice this site is default SSL now. Here’s how I did it.

I was most pleased the day I had a direct lesson that “nostalgia” is another word for “brain rot.”

I remember using a Mac LC 475 all the time in 1995 and 1996, working on a student newspaper. I remembered it as having been just a startling joy to use; haunting in its ease of use.

Then I used Windows 95 with Office 97 for much of 1997.

Then in early 1998 I got in front of an LC 475 again. Holy crap, what is this clunky piece of shit.

Remember: human memory is provably awful, and history is therefore bunk. And you can’t go back again because you’re a different person now.

11/29/2016-12/05/2016

Mapping

• BushmanK tries to enhance the definition of the tags man_made=mast and man_made=tower.
• The voting for nesting_site has started on Dec 5th and will be open until the 19th.
• Markus Schnalke wants to know how to deal with worthwhile suggestions made on a proposal after voting has started.
• Marc Zoutendijk created an Overpass query to show all fixme tags on a map. A comment from Andy points to his tool to generate GPX files of fixmes (and notes) to go out and visit them.

Community

• Sarah Hoffmann is the new mapper of the month.
• Mapanauta writes an interesting diary entry about the results and new initiatives that were discussed during the GeoChicas/ Geoladies event that happened during the SotM LatAm.
• Peter Bremer writes, in his blog, that Mapillary released new raster tiles showing all traces and photo locations, for use as a layer in map applications that don’t support vector tiles (such as OsmAnd). OsmAnd users would find the step-by-step instructions, to add the tileset to OsmAnd, interesting.
• Mappa Mercia has won a prize for its traffic heatmap at the Birmingham Highways Data Challenge. Congratulations!
• Matt Amos asks on GitHub whether OSM should run a Mattermost server as an alternative communication mechanism to Slack (used by OSMers in the US) and IRC.
• The Russian blog SHTOSM reported (automatic translation) about Malenki and the great services he did for OSM and the OSM community.

Imports

• Christoph Hormann writes an insightful post on the imports list, prompted by the San Francisco building heights import. Among other things, he says “The main aim when planning and performing an import (…) needs to be to allow you and your fellow importers to responsibly and productively participate in the community process of open map production” and “It is completely fine to articulate diverging experiences and opinions but in return you also need to respect the views of others”.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OSMF warmly thanks all the donors. A special thank you goes to Mapbox.
• The wrong list of members was used while sending out the ballots for the OSMF election. The decision was to reissue the ballots and extend the voting period until 16:00 UTC Wednesday, 14 December 2016.
• Due to the OSMF elections, Christoph explains how Single Transferable Vote (STV) voting works.
• OpenStreetMap US will have board elections soon. The manifestos of all candidates can be found on the wiki.

Events

• A group at the San Jorge University of Zaragoza organized a mapathon (automatic translation).
• Up to the 16th of December, you can apply for the first State of the Map Africa. Until now there’s been one application from Uganda.

Humanitarian OSM

• Blake Girardot calls to participate in the planning, commenting and development of OSM Tasking Manager 3.0.
• HOT launched a fund-raising campaign to support local mappers from vulnerable places with micro-grants.
• Severin Menard criticizes HOT’s transparency and questions the donation campaign’s purpose. Tyler Radford tries to clarify and promises an enlightening blog post.

Maps

• Paul Norman announced major changes to OpenStreetMap-Carto, which hopefully will soon lead to a database reimport. As a result, the new tags could easily be transferred to the main map.
• OSMLanduse.org is live – depicting landuses/landcovers according to OSM data by contrasting colours and providing a pie chart of the composition.
• A tutorial explains how to add labels on a map using mapzen.js and Tangram.

Open Data

• A talk^fr on free digital cartography and sustainable development has been held by members of several OSM communities from West Africa, at the world summit on Open Government Partnership.

Software

• Chris Hill writes in his blog post about how to replace OpenLayers and use Leaflet.
• Some Brazilian mappers made a pull request to the Maps.Me application in July, which got accepted now. The pull request adds the translation to Brazilian Portuguese and fixes some errors in the current European Portuguese translation. Problems in the translation are making users to insert data tagged wrongly on OpenStreetMap.
• Akbar Gumbira shares the work he did in GSOC around the problem of resource sharing in QGIS.

Programming

• Marc Tobias points out osm4scala, a library for Scala that can read PBF files.

Releases

Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist.

(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.

Did you know …

• … the OpenGridMap of the Technical University of Munich? The TUM reported on this important international tool for energy transition in Germany and other countries.
• … there’s a way to discover suspicious changesets?

OSM in the media

• The Washington Post shows six different maps which show the anatomy of America’s vast infrastructure. The maps are created by using data from OpenStreetMap and various government sources. The president-elect is likely to suffer some nerves with the necessary investment of half a trillion dollars to maintain and expand this infrastructure.

Other “geo” things

• The New York Times reports about the friendly settling of a land dispute between Belgium and the Netherlands.
• We featured the Dymaxion projection, the projection of Autagraph, and the Pseudo-Autagraph-projection by Marcin Ciura. Now Jos Dirksen presents an animated projection. Vox published a video that explains the problem of the projection of a three-dimensional image (globe) into a plane (map) very vividly.
• Srinivas Kodali from Hyderabad writes about Hyderabad GHMC wants to have so called smart addressing through a PPP model and he is seriously concerned about the state of all geo databases with closed numbering systems. Here is the tender document (PDF).
• Qivalon, a startup company from Saarbrücken, Germany, has developed Tankplaner an app for Android und iOS. This app gives an optimal fuel recommendation on the route to be driven. Martin Dirich says to weeklyOSM: “The route calculation is done on the server side with specially prepared OSM data, even if we take the standard components of the respective platform for the visualization.”
• George Joseph maps U.S. pipeline accidents of the last 30 years in an animated map.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
München	Stammtisch München	12/08/2016
Heidelberg	Earthquake management in Kyrgyzstan	12/08/2016
Paris	Mapathon Paris with HOT, OSM France and CartONG	12/08/2016
Urspring	Stammtisch Ulmer Alb	12/08/2016
Berlin	102. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	12/09/2016
Pergine Valsugana	Mappatura sentieri del Lagorai Cima Asta	12/09/2016	Trentino
Hanoi	Mapathon	12/10/2016
Passau	Mappertreffen	12/12/2016
Metro Manila	【MapAm❤re】OSM Workshop Series 4/8, San Juan	12/12/2016
Grenoble	Rencontre groupe local	12/12/2016
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle mappeurs	12/13/2016
Nottingham	Nottingham	12/13/2016
Landshut	Landshut Stammtisch	12/13/2016
Zurich	Stammtisch Zürich	12/13/2016
Berlin	DB Open Data Hackathon	12/16/2016-12/17/2016
Tokyo	東京！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第３回 小石川植物園	12/17/2016
Essen	Stammtisch	12/18/2016
Kyoto	【晴明神社】マッピング＆ステップアップ勉強会	12/18/2016
Alpi Apuane	2016 Mapping party Rifugio Nello Conti	12/17/2016-12/18/2016	Toscana
Metro Manila	【MapAm❤re】OSM Workshop Series 5/8, San Juan	12/19/2016
Taipei	Taipei Meetup, Mozilla Community Space	12/19/2016
Graz	Stammtisch	12/19/2016
Bonn	Bonner Stammtisch	12/20/2016
Lüneburg	Mappertreffen Lüneburg	12/20/2016
Valencia	Missing Maps Valencia 1	12/20/2016
Moscow	Schemotechnika 07	12/21/2016
Lübeck	Lübecker Mappertreffen	12/22/2016

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Hakuch, Peda, Peuc, Rogehm, SomeoneElse, Spec80, SrrReal, YoViajo, derFred, jcoupey, jinalfoflia, kreuzschnabel.

The famous Sassi di Matera in Italy; the steeple at the top belongs to the Matera Cathedral. Photo by Crispino87, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of the photographers in the world’s largest photo competition submitted 16,507 photos this year. Another photographer submitted half of one photo: She took and submitted it with her boyfriend. The subjects include an artistic capture of the Taj Mahal which, according to its caption “seems to wake up, out of the mist.” But also a little white gazebo on a family estate in Russia, humbly popping up out of greenery.

Wiki Loves Monuments drew 277,365 entries from 10,748 participants this year, the largest pool of submissions of any photo competition. Volunteers go through all of those, first on the national level, then for the global finals. The top 15 photos—winnowed all the way down from the more than a quarter-million—will be announced next week.

Like Wikipedia, Wiki Loves Monuments is a sprawling enterprise filled with fascinating diversity. Winners represent the world’s best photos of the cultural heritage in 42 nations. Museums and observatories, old mills and modern architecture. If Wikipedia is the story of the world, Wiki Loves Monuments could well be its most beautiful slide show.

Shah Mosque in Iran. Regarded as one of the masterpieces of Iranian architecture, it was completed in 1629. Photo by Forough Abadian, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The contest, started in 2010, judges photos submitted via Wikimedia Commons, the 36 million-file media repository for the Wikimedia movement. The photos illustrate articles about countries’ national monuments on Wikipedia, and are freely licensed for everyone to appreciate. In fact, one of the main criteria for judging is “Usefulness of the image on Wikipedia.”

Last year’s top winner was of a pristine orange and white lighthouse towering above an expanse of flat green German fields. It earned photographer Marco Leiter a voucher worth $1000.

The United States has the most entrants this year, with 11,277. Antarctica has 13. Every nation has its own 10 winners who compete at the global level. As the photographers capture natural treasures, they invest something of themselves.

The photographer Tilman2007 of Germany, who submitted 16,507 photos this year, has submitted 46,352 to Wiki Loves Monuments since 2011 and 102,875 to Wikimedia Commons in total with the help of uploading programs. Francesca, the Italian entrant, submitted a glowing photo of the Church of Santa Maria De’ Armeniis in Matera, which she focused on with a collaborator. She only takes photos with her boyfriend; it is entirely a labor of love. (Wiki Loves Monuments entrants sometimes prefer to use their Wikimedia user names for reasons of privacy and personal preference.)

Gastão Guedes has been photographing his native Brazil for more than 40 years. When he was 8, his family gave him his first camera: a Kodak Pocket Instamatic 200. With it he shot pictures of his cousins, of family trips and school trips. Now he is a professional photographer who is a finalist in Brazil’s Wiki Loves Monuments judging this year. “I am proud of my country for its architectural heritage and for its nature. I want to keep photographing even after my retirement,” he says.

Forough Abadian took one of Iran’s top photos for this year’s contest back in 2007. On a family trip she wandered the Shah Mosque in Isfahan, camera in hand, a 16-year-old seeking a new view of an 11th century mosque. “I played around with the light and took many photos,” she says. Suddenly, she saw it: The arch of a Persian door, intricately blossomed with orange flowers, in stark light and shadows. Click.

Popov Castle in Ukraine. Built by the grandson of an Imperial Russian general, it was ruined in the Second World War and restored in the 1990s. Photo by Nataliya Shestakova, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nataliya Shestakova, a finalist in the Ukraine Wiki Loves Earth contest, travels the backroads of her country, capturing the historic hidden treasures of small towns. In the past three years she has captured 2740 different Ukrainian monuments. “I just can’t imagine myself enjoying lying on the beach,” she says. In fact, she has hitched a ride in a dump truck, ridden in a Jeep through a former battlefield, and tromped into farmhouses to get a shot through a family’s window.

She sees the contest as an invitation “to travel, visit, see more in Ukraine, to be interested and learn about, to communicate and distribute new knowledge and impressions of the country.”

The winners in the world’s largest photo contest will be announced next week; Wiki Loves Monuments’ international jury will announce the top 15 photos out of 277,494 entries from 42 countries. For more information, go to www.wikilovesmonuments.org.

Jeff Elder, Digital Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

Photo by Acroterion, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Yesterday, the next hearing in Wikimedia Foundation v. National Security Agency took place before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. We filed this lawsuit in March 2015, to protect the free expression and privacy rights of Wikimedia users. The lawsuit challenges the government’s “Upstream” mass surveillance practices, which capture communications as they cross the internet backbone. This lawsuit is one of several steps we have taken to protect the privacy of Wikimedia users, including instituting HTTPS access across all the projects.

In October 2015, the lawsuit was dismissed on procedural grounds at the district court level following a hearing before Judge T.S. Ellis, III, who found that Wikimedia and our eight co-plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the claims. We appealed this ruling to the Fourth Circuit, and yesterday’s arguments centered around the standing issue.

At yesterday’s hearing, Fourth Circuit Judges Albert Diaz and Diana Gibbon Motz, and Senior Judge Andre M. Davis, asked pointed questions to both parties. The plaintiffs, including the Wikimedia Foundation, were ably represented by Patrick Toomey of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Among other things, Mr. Toomey argued that the district court had misunderstood several important technical aspects of Upstream surveillance and, as a result, had underestimated the scope and scale of the United States government’s searches of private internet communications. The government’s attorney, in turn, argued that the plaintiffs did not have standing because many of the details about Upstream surveillance remain classified and secret.

At times, the three-Judge panel seemed skeptical of the government’s arguments. At the beginning of the hearing, Senior Judge Davis asked if the government had really argued in its legal briefs that a non-human robot could sift through people’s private communications without constituting a search under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits most searches and seizures conducted without a warrant. The panel also asked about the kind of additional evidence and discovery the plaintiffs would want if the district court’s dismissal was potentially reversed and remanded for further proceedings.

The next step is to await a ruling from the panel, which could potentially take several months.

In the days leading up to the hearing, our attorneys at the ACLU published a new comic to help explain how Upstream surveillance functions and why it should matter to internet users. They also have posted their own blog about the hearing. For further information on Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA, you can consult our landing page about the suit, as well as the ACLU’s case page for court documents and more detail.

As soon as the opinion is handed down, we will provide another update. We will continue advocating for the privacy and expression rights of the Wikimedia communities, which enable users to freely create and share knowledge.

Jim Buatti, Legal Fellow
Aeryn Palmer, Legal Counsel

Special thanks to all who have supported us in this litigation, including the ACLU’s Patrick Toomey, Alex Abdo, and Ashley Gorski; and Aarti Reddy, Patrick Gunn, and Ben Kleine of our pro bono counsel Cooley, LLP; and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Michelle Paulson and Zhou Zhou.

Last week we reported here about the deployment of the new Content Translation template editor. Yesterday we also published an expanded post about the new template editor it in the official Wikimedia blog.

This week brings a couple of bug fixes in the template editor and other issues:

• The template editor for inline templates, such as IPA or unit conversion, was expanding to fill the whole screen. It now has a reasonable size that doesn’t cover the whole page. (bug report)
• Some pages couldn’t be published and showed a “docserver-http” error. This is now fixed. If your article was stuck and you couldn’t publish it, refresh the translation interface and publish it again, and it should work. If you still have issues with publishing, please report them to the CX feedback page. (bug report)

This is an opportunity to remind you that the user interface of Content Translation itself needs to be translated, especially now that the new template editor has several new important messages. Please check the statistics for your language at translatewiki.net, and bring it to 100%. Thanks!

Photo by Lane Hartwell/Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Over the past couple of years the Wikimedia Foundation has taken a focused look at community health—particularly in regards to harassment. The Foundation’s Board has been monitoring and discussing this issue over the past year with great interest. We have prepared a statement, copied below, offering our thoughts on this topic, and providing a clear mandate for the Foundation’s leadership to fully engage on this issue.

Since the Foundation was established, we have been invested in building a positive community culture. As part of these efforts, we have monitored the projects for instances of harassment, escalating our capacity to respond in recent years. Thanks to the work of the Foundation’s Support and Safety Team, we now have data in the form of the 2015 Harassment Survey about the nature of the issue. This has enabled us to identify key areas of concern, and step up our response appropriately. This research shows that harassment has a negative impact on participation in our projects. This has implications for our ability to collect, share, and disseminate free knowledge in support of the Wikimedia vision. Our statement speaks to the Board’s duty to help the Foundation fulfill its mission.

The Board is committed to making our communities safer and will not accept harassment and toxic behavior on Wikimedia projects. We believe this matter deserves the Foundation’s attention and resources, and have confirmed this responsibility at our latest Board meeting on November 13. The questions that lay before us all now are how to best address this threat, rather than if we should attempt to do so.

The Board especially appreciates and applauds the work being done to address this important issue by many community leaders across the movement and teams within the Foundation. We look forward to seeing this cooperative work not only continue, but expand. Finally, we encourage everyone who is interested in helping the Foundation address this threat to our vision and mission to engage in the upcoming discussions around this issue.

On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees,

Christophe Henner, Board Chair
María Sefidari, Board Vice Chair

Full statement

At our Board meeting on November 13, and in Board meetings in September and June, we spent considerable time discussing the issues of harassment and hostility on the internet generally, and more specifically on the Wikimedia projects.

This is an important issue. Approximately 40% of internet users, and 70% of women internet users, have personally experienced harassment. Of people who have reported experiencing harassment on Wikimedia projects, more than 50% reported decreasing their participation in our community. Based on this and other research, we conclude that harassment and toxic behavior on the Wikimedia projects negatively impacts the ability of the Wikimedia projects to collect, share, and disseminate free knowledge. This behavior is contrary to our vision and mission.

Our communities deserve safe spaces in which they can contribute productively and debate constructively. It is our belief that the Wikimedia Foundation should be proactively engaged in eliminating harassment, promoting inclusivity, ensuring a healthier culture of discourse, and improving the safety of Wikimedia spaces. We request management to dedicate appropriate resources to this end.

We urge every member of the Wikimedia communities to collaborate in a way that models the Wikimedia values of openness and diversity, step forward to do their part to stop hostile and toxic behavior, support people who have been targeted by such behavior, and help set clear expectations for all contributors.

• Some of the names of kings seem to be incorrect, certainly inconsistent.
• The names of these kings can be added in the original language
• Dates may be added to the period these kings were king
• The data can be used in one of the other Wikipedias that are relevant in India.

Australian Paralympian Bridie Kean. Photo by Sport the Library via the Australian Paralympic Committee, CC BY-SA 3.0.

A recurrent problem with sports on the web is that the webpages tend to have short lives. Profiles of player and athletes are inevitably replaced with ones of the current rosters, and accounts of bygone competitions and events get deleted. The HOPAU Project—established by the Australian Paralympic Committee (APC) as a way of connecting the Australian Paralympic movement with its heritage—was aware of the ephemeral nature of web pages, and sought a more lasting digital presence.

So in 2011, the HOPAU Project turned to Wikipedia.

Stephanie Schweitzer. Photo by Sport the Library via the Australian Paralympic Committee, CC BY-SA 3.0.

A meeting was set up with John Vandenberg, the then-president of Wikimedia Australia, and a workshop was run in Brisbane. Wikimedia Australia would work with the HOPAU Project as a GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) initiative.

I was one of the Wikipedians invited to attend the workshop. I have a PhD in military history, and was active in the Military History Project, but had no experience writing about Paralympic sports. At the time, I had no idea that it would occupy much of my spare time in the next four years.

Subsequent workshops were held in Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and finally, in November 2016, in Perth. The one in Adelaide in August 2016 was particularly memorable for the recovery of film footage of early Paralympic games, which was digitised and uploaded. The original footage was deposited in the National Film and Sound Archive.

At this point, there wasn’t much about the Paralympics on Wikipedia. In the lead up to the 2012 Games in London, the Wikipedia HOPAU Project created 288 articles on the English Wikipedia for the event, which received 1.9 million page views during the games. This far exceeded the number of page views of the web pages of the APC, or the ABC, the official broadcaster.

An important component of these pages is images from the APC’s collection of still photographs, transparencies and negatives. The APC agreed to release photographs of no commercial value under Creative Commons licences. By November 2016, some 2,700 had been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

I was fortunate enough to be selected as one of the two Wikipedians in attendance at the London Games with journalist credentials, allowing me to view every event, taking advantage of the media transport system and the internal games web pages.

Adam Kellerman. Photo by Sport the Library via the Australian Paralympic Committee, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Between the London and Rio Games, funding dried up, with the APC suffering severe cutbacks from the government, and Wikimedia Australia was de-funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. Fortunately, additional funding was provided by the National Research Council. The HOPAU Project continued. I travelled to the United States in 2012 to interview our Winter Paralympians, and followed our women wheelchair basketball players to Bangkok in 2013 for the Asia-Oceania Zone championships, Toronto in 2014 for the World Championship, and Beijing in 2015 for the Women’s U25 World Championship.

In addition to working with our Australian Paralympians, I took the opportunity to produce articles on wheelchair basketball players from other countries. I started with the Germans, getting people from WikiProject Germany to translate my articles into German for me. I also produced articles on the Canadian and British players.

In the run up to the Rio Games in 2016, we didn’t have a full-time Wikipedian in residence, so we needed to distribute the workload as much as possible. Sports and journalism students from the University of Canberra were detailed to write articles on the athletes as part of their courses, and 67 articles were created between April and September 2016. With the expulsion of Russia, several athletes were selected at the last possible minute.

Articles created as part of HOPAU Project received 1.6 million page views during the games, less than London, but still outstripping traffic on the APC and official broadcaster pages. Once again, the most popular were the articles on classification.

The author with Liesl Tesch. Photo by Sport the Library via the Australian Paralympic Committee, CC BY-SA 3.0.

I attended the 2016 Rio Games as an accredited journalist for Wikimedia Australia, and based myself at the main venue at Barra de Tijuca. The work day was long, with sports morning, noon, and night. I would update the Australia at the 2016 Summer Paralympics article at lunch time. During the games, this was one of the most edited articles on Wikipedia. Indeed, the articles on several countries at the games made the most edited articles list, topped by Great Britain. Where we differed was in being more organised.

As the on-site Wikipedian, I could chase up information. If we were unsure who was in a photograph, I could go over to the Paralympic village and ask. If we needed a photograph of a particular sport, event or athlete, I could get one. During August, September and October, I ran up 4,300 edits, took 700 photographs, and created 269 articles, running 22 of them on the front page in the Did You Know? section.

The Rio 2016 site is scheduled to disappear in March 2017, when the legal entity dissolves. Moving information to Wikipedia not only preserves the record, in many cases it also triggers the archiving of the original pages.

By November 2016, the HOPAU Project had created over 1,000 articles on Wikipedia—a lasting legacy.

Ross Mallett, Wikimedia Australia

Alex, photo courtesy of the Alex Foundation.

Alex was a parrot with extraordinary abilities. His mental performance and communication skills changed how scientists and the public look at animal intelligence.

For three decades beginning in the late 1970s, Alex was the center of increasing media attention. Nature documentaries featured him answering questions, distinguishing between different colors and shapes, doing simple math, and verbally expressing emotions of love, anger, and boredom. His lifetime trainer, Dr. Irene Pepperberg, reported that his intelligence “is comparable to that of a five-year-old human while his emotional maturity is that of a two-year-old.”

Pepperberg is an animal psychologist who spent thirty years conducting an experiment on Alex. She bought the one-year-old African grey parrot from a pet store in 1977 “with the intent to study his cognitive and communicative abilities,” as she told the Wikimedia blog. She picked his name as an acronym for ‘avian language experiment’.

Some parrots can mimic human speech, but Alex’s use of language was an unusual case, as his Wikipedia page describes it:

Pepperberg with Alex, photo courtesy of the Alex Foundation.

Pepperberg used a specially designed training technique based on a rival model. In this approach, one of the researcher’s assistants acted as a rival student for Alex. When the rival student answered a question correctly about an object, they received that object as a reward, which encouraged Alex to accomplish a similar achievement to get the reward.

“It is the only way that they can make the direct connection between the object and the label that they have used,” Pepperberg explains. “The reason other training techniques failed is because the trainers did use food rewards, and because the subjects got the same food reward no matter what they said, they never learned to understand the meanings of their labels.”

Sometimes, Alex even assumed the assistant role with other parrots getting the same training in the lab. When the other parrots made mistakes in their training in front of him, he would correct them.

He was able to articulate his emotions without being trained. When he made a mistake, he would say “I’m sorry”, and when learning bored him, he would say, “Wanna go back.” Sometimes, if they insisted on keeping him, he would play a trick to flee the class:

“He may have been bored,” says Pepperberg. “But what he did was to figure out how to manipulate me into asking the question he wished to answer (showing an important level of awareness).”

Training Alex was not an easy process. Pepperberg spent years looking for grants to fund her research. Most of her grant requests were rejected as none of the grantmakers believed in the feasibility of working on communication with animals. And there were disbelievers. Some in the scientific community were skeptical of Pepperberg’s findings, pointing to Alex’s communications as operant conditioning, or rewarded behavior. But his intelligence was well-documented. Alex was the main subject of Pepperberg’s work. She wrote a few books about her experiment and recorded her findings in dozens of papers in peer-reviewed journals.

On September 6, 2007, Alex died at the age of 31, half the average lifespan of African grey parrots. Although he knew 100 words, the last words spoken by perhaps the most intelligent bird ever studied were predictable. He gave his customary farewell to Pepperberg as she left him each night:

“You be good. See you tomorrow. I love you.”

You can read more about Alex in Wikipedia’s article about him.

Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

“Wait, what?” is a recurring series on the Wikimedia blog, bringing you some of the weirdest and unique topics that have been covered by Wikipedia’s editors. If you would like to write one, please contact blogteam@wikimedia.org.

This post has been updated with additional information from Dr. Irene Pepperberg.

We know that shaking up your curriculum can be pretty daunting. So we wanted to demystify some of what happens when you start a conversation with us about teaching with Wikipedia.

To answer a very common question first: Yes, all of the following is provided for free. We don’t even have services you could pay for, but we always appreciate donations.

And that’s the last thing you’ll hear about cost.

Wiki Ed: First contact

First, we’ll send an e-mail along, asking some basic questions about your course. What are your goals? What outcomes are you looking for? What angle of the Wikipedia assignment are you most interested in?

That conversation will help both of us better understand how Wikipedia fits into your needs and goals. We’ll find something that’s a good fit for you and your students, but also a good fit for Wikipedia.

Once that happens, you’ll want to check out teach.wikiedu.org. That’s a step-by-step guide to building a course page, which opens up the world of our resources, student metrics, training modules for you and your students, and access to our printed support materials. You’ll take a short (hour-long) orientation to Wikipedia, and be presented with a few more ideas about how to build a successful course.

You’ll be asked a few questions by our software to help you decide your needs, and then, you’ll be given a timeline. Consider it a weekly scaffold-building exercise. You can adjust that timeline to suit your specific needs, but as is, you’ll have an excellent outline, readymade, based on thousands of hours of previous courses and expertise.

Need help finding articles in your field that need improvement? We offer a very short (10-minute) orientation that will help you find good candidates. Our staff is on hand to help, too.

Once class starts

Once your students come to class, you’ll send them a link to our course Dashboard. There, they can enroll, see the timeline you’ve built, and have access to the online trainings. You’ll be able to see where your students are in their training, and track their activity on Wikipedia.

Every week, that timeline will update with new milestones for your students, links to relevant trainings and readings in the print materials we provide.

If you or your students have questions, there’s a dedicated Wiki Ed staff member assigned to your class. Press the “Get Help” button, and we’ll come by to offer guidance or advice.

Once class ends

For this one, you don’t have to take our word for it. Here’s some of the feedback we’ve heard from students and instructors at the end of their term.

“The clear advantage of having students write Wikipedia articles instead of a conventional term paper is motivation, pure and simple,” Dr. Alex Sessions told us, after teaching with Wikipedia at Caltech. “They see this as contributing something useful to society … maybe even something their fellow classmates will use some day. [They] work harder and with more enthusiasm than they normally would.”

“I feel a great sense of success in knowing that I am now a contributing editor to one of the largest sources of information online,” said Kathryn Cawley, a student editor at the University of New England.

Kenzy Peach worked on an article about a play for a class at Emerson.

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

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

Here’s a comment from an anonymous student feedback form:

“The most fun part about this project is how it forced me to study more and read more science articles.”

And finally, one more instructor shared this comment through an anonymous feedback form:

“My students did not understand the gravity of the project in terms of reach and accessibility until they moved their pages out of the sandboxes. One student asked me how to find her page, and I said “Google it!” Just then, a bunch of students Googled their pages and the classroom exploded in hoots and hollers and excitement. […] I love this assignment. It gives my students a voice in a tangible and immediate way.”

You can read many more reflections the Wikipedia teaching assignment from participating instructors here.

Get started!

Now that you know what to expect, we hope you’ll be excited to get started on an assignment with us right away. Reach out to us at contact@wikiedu.org. We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

I’m excited about the kickoff next week of a 3-month project to improve the Wiki Ed Dashboard’s user profile pages. I’ll be mentoring Sejal Khatri, a senior computer engineering student at Savitribai Phule Pune University, for an Outreachy internship, in collaboration with design researcher Jonathan Morgan of Wikimedia Foundation.

Sejal has already created the initial version of the Dashboard’s user profiles feature, which displays all the courses a user has participated in. During the internship, she’ll be adding features that highlight each user’s cumulative impact. For instructors, we’re imagining this as a sort of portfolio for your Wikipedia projects, enabling you to easily show colleagues and administrators what you’ve done. Sejal will also be exploring ways to visualize those course statistics.

Outreachy is a free and open source software internship program run by the Software Freedom Conservancy that is aimed at improving diversity in the free software community.

In MediaWiki 1.28, MaxSem improved diff limits in the pure PHP diff implementation that ships with MediaWiki core. However Wikimedia and other larger wikis use a PHP extension called wikidiff2, for better performance and additional support for Japanese, Chinese, and Thai.

wikidiff2 1.4.1 is now available in Debian unstable and will ship in stretch, and should soon be available in jessie-backports and my PPA for Ubuntu Trusty and Xenial users. This is the first major update of the package in two years. And installation in MediaWiki 1.27+ is now even more straightforward, as long as the module is installed, it will automatically be used, no global configuration required.

Additionally, releases of wikidiff2 will now be hosted and signed on releases.wikimedia.org.

Photo by Dương Trần Quốc, public domain/CC0.

For more information on the content translation tool, please see Mediawiki.org, the Signpost, and this very blog (1, 2).

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Content translation tool is getting a major new feature: completely re-written support for templates. It was in design, testing and development since June 2016, and the first version of this feature was released on December 1st to Wikipedia in all languages.

The goal of the new feature is to make it easy to translate the templates across languages. We want to give more control to all the people who use the content translation feature directly or are affected by it: translators, other editors of articles that were created as translations, and template maintainers.

How did templates work until now?

Templates are used heavily in all Wikimedia projects. When Content Translation’s development started in 2014, the developers gave it very basic template support. Templates that used a whole paragraph, such as infoboxes and long quotations, were usually skipped completely. Shorter templates inside paragraphs, such as references, unit conversions, quotes in other languages, “citation needed”, etc., were adapted to a corresponding template in the target language when possible, or substituted with wiki syntax.

While this was useful for the creation of more than 100,000 new articles, this was far from perfect. It could get confusing when infoboxes and whole paragraphs of quotations were not shown during the translation, and they had to be inserted manually after creating the first version of the translated article. References were also adapted incorrectly on some occasions, and inserted a lot of hard-to-maintain wiki syntax.

So in the mid 2016 we started a process to overhaul content translation’s template editing functionality.

How was this feature designed?

The design of this feature follows the same principles of content translation to provide a fluent experience. Template translation happens in context: an editing mode shows the template information right in the article. Information is provided side-by-side to facilitate transferring information from the source template into the translation. When possible, corresponding parameters are shown next to each other and translation aids are provided in order to save translators time and let them focus on creating quality content. You can check more details about the designs of template translation and related aspects.

We conducted initial research to learn more about the needs of translators regarding template support, and to evaluate the interaction concept proposed. The results of the research showed that the lack of template support was commonly perceived as a missing aspect, and the approach proposed seemed promising. We plan to keep learning from users by observing how the system works in future rounds of research, and the input provided by their use of the vast diversity of templates existing in all supported languages.

How it works now

No templates are silently ignored now, so infoboxes and all other templates are shown in the source article column during the translation. When clicking on a template, a card on the sidebar will let the translator choose what to do with the template. It’s possible to skip it entirely (“Skip template”) or to insert the wiki syntax of the template as it appears in the original language (“Keep original template”). If an equivalent template is available in the target language, it will be possible to insert it, and edit the parameters one by one (“Use equivalent template”).

If the equivalent templates have the same parameter names, their values will be copied automatically. The template editor also uses TemplateData, a MediaWiki extension that provides a convenient way to store and retrieve information about wikitext templates and their parameters for easier editing, which is already used by the Visual editor. If the parameter names are different, but the template in the target language has TemplateData defined with names of parameters and aliases that are the same as the parameter names in the source language, they can also be adapted automatically.

How can you improve templates in your wiki

Wikis have people who develop and maintain the templates in them. This is also an opportunity for all wikis—large, medium, and small—to take a look at their templates and improve them. Here are several things that can be done:

• Add TemplateData to templates that don’t have it yet. This will allow content translation and Visual Editor to show template insertion and editing forms where all the parameters are displayed conveniently.
• Consider adding aliases for template parameter names that correspond to parameters in wikis in other languages from which articles are frequently translated into your language. You can see from which languages articles are translated most often into yours by going to the pageSpecial:CXStats in your wiki.
• Consider making the types of parameter more similar across languages. For example, in some languages images are provided as complete file links and others have separate parameters for file name, size and caption. Making the parameter structure similar to the structure in the language from which articles are often translated will make the work considerably more efficient for translators and article maintainers.

Your feedback and future development

As noted earlier, this is only the first release of this feature. Templates on Wikimedia projects are very diverse, and while the developers tested the new template editor with many templates in many languages, it is impossible for us to test it with all the different templates—there are just too many of them. Because of this, it may be impossible to adapt some templates at first. As always, we’d love to hear from you about templates that can’t be adapted, and about other bugs. We nevertheless believe that this feature is already an improvement over the way that templates were handled till today, and we are continuing the development to make template translation easier and more efficient based on your input.

You can read more about the design and the development of this feature, as well as details for its future improvements in Phabricator. You can also let us know your feedback on the project talk page and also join us during our upcoming office hour next week on 7th December 2016, at 1300 UTC on #wikimedia-office (IRC Channel on Freenode) or participate in the online broadcast.

Amir Aharoni, Language team (Editing), Wikimedia Foundation

You can learn more about the new template editor in a screencast on Commons.

Fidel Castro, 1978. Photo by Marcelo Montecino, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Fidel Castro was the leader of Cuba for nearly fifty years. In that time, he lived through eleven US presidents and stayed in power for longer than nearly all of his contemporaries.

Although Castro gave up formal power in 2006, he still commanded much attention. Over the last year, 3.1 million pageviews have been recorded on Castro’s Wikipedia article, and over four million more have come in the days since his death.

One of the principal editors behind Castro’s Wikipedia article is Midnightblueowl, who has also written about the early life of Fidel Castro and his role in the Cuban Revolution in addition to other notable political luminaries like Muammar Gaddafi, Vladimir Lenin, Nelson Mandela, and Karl Marx.

“I have long had an interest in political biography, and in particular with the lives and careers of radicals, revolutionaries, and extremists, whatever their ideological standpoint,” they told us. “There is something about people who want radical change, and who succeed in bringing it about, which intrigues me.”

Alberto Korda‘s full roll of film shot at a March 5, 1960 memorial service, after a freighter exploded in Havana Harbor. Photos by Alberto Korda, public domain/CC0.

This interest is time-consuming, to say the least. Anyone adding material to Wikipedia needs to support that information with a citation—not unlike what you would find in an academic paper—if its verifiability is not assured. In turn, these citations must refer to reliable sources: third-party sources known for corroborating and confirming the stories they publish. The use of sources without such a reputation is heavily discouraged, and original research of any kind is barred.

This means that rewriting the articles about globally known figures like Castro or Marx figures requires negotiating a series of hurdles:

• First, finding, reading, and—if it’s not in a library—purchasing sourcing material. “It has taken several years of work, and many hundreds of hours of reading and writing, to get these articles up to good and (in some cases) featured article status,” Midnightblueowl said, referring to standard markers of quality on the English Wikipedia. “I wouldn’t call this a chore, as I enjoy reading and learning about the subjects which interest me, but it can be a bit of a challenge, particularly as I have to juggle my Wikipedia editing with multiple ‘real-life’ obligations.”

• Second, Midnightblueowl is a Western European writing about people who came from very different cultural contexts from their own or that of many of Wikipedia’s English-language readership: “It is sometimes necessary to provide greater explanations of various cultural or political idiosyncrasies,” they said. As an example, Midnightblueowl gave Nelson Mandela’s Xhosa family background, which “was not only totally alien to my own experiences as a Western European but would also be radically different to that which most [English language] readers would be familiar with, and thus required a bit of extra explanation.”

• Third, editors can occasionally come into conflict. Among positive and helpful editors, Midnightblueowl noted that there are some editors who are more devoted to pushing personal views and feelings than to the ideal of a neutral article, as Wikipedia policy requires. Dealing with them can be a frustrating process, as Wikipedia runs on a consensus model to come to decisions. “We are losing too many good editors because we are too tolerant of the bad,” they opined.

Photo by jim, CC BY 2.0.

Looking more broadly at the impact of Castro’s life on the world we all live in today, he is certainly viewed through many different lenses, depending on your worldview. The Wikipedia article about Castro notes that he is “controversial”: he has recieved much acclaim for being what supporters would call “a champion of socialism,” but opponents might call him “dictator” who “oversaw human-rights abuses … and the impoverishment of the country’s economy.”

Midnightblueowl suspects that Castro’s significance in world history will lay in the symbolism he cultivated before his death. “At the end of the day,” Midnightblueowl says, “he was the political leader of a largely impoverished Caribbean island, not of a major global superpower.” They continued:

That symbolism is visible in the extensive imagery on Castro held by Wikimedia Commons, a freely licensed collection of images used in Wikimedia projects around the globe. Here’s a selection of them.

Mural in Belfast, Ireland. Photo by Ardfern, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Fidel Castro and Camilo Cienfuegos, 1959. Photo by Luis Korda, public domain/CC0.

Castro (far left) marching with Che Guevara (center), 1960. Photo via Museo Che Guevara, public domain/CC0.

Castro with Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, 1961. Photo, public domain/CC0.

Photo via the office of the President of Mexico, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Castro’s signature, public domain/CC0.

Castro, 2003. Photo by Agência Brasil, CC BY 3.0 BR.

Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate
Wikimedia Foundation

Both Domain Driven Design and architectures such as the Clean Architecture and Hexagonal are often talked about. It’s hard to go to a conference on software development and not run into one of these topics. However it can be challenging to find good real-world examples. In this blog post I’ll introduce you to an application following the Clean Architecture and incorporating a lot of DDD patterns. The focus is on the key concepts of the Clean Architecture, and the most important lessons we learned implementing it.

The application

The real-world application we’ll be looking at is the Wikimedia Deutschland fundraising software. It is a PHP application written in 2016, replacing an older legacy system. While the application is written in PHP, the patterns followed are by and large language agnostic, and are thus relevant for anyone writing object orientated software.

I’ve outlined what the application is and why we replaced the legacy system in a blog post titled Rewriting the Wikimedia Deutschland fundraising. I recommend you have a look at least at its “The application” section, as it will give you a rough idea of the domain we’re dealing with.

A family of architectures

Architectures such as Hexagonal and the Clean Architecture are very similar. At their core, they are about separation of concerns. They decouple from mechanisms such as persistence and used frameworks and instead focus on the domain and high level policies. A nice short read on this topic is Unclebob’s blog post on the Clean Architecture. Another recommended post is Hexagonal != Layers, which explains that how just creating a bunch of layers is missing the point.

The Clean Architecture

The arrows crossing the circle boundaries represent the allowed direction of dependencies. At the core is the domain. “Entities” here means Entities such as in Domain Driven Design, not to be confused by ORM entities. The domain is surrounded by a layer containing use cases (sometimes called interactors) that form an API that the outside world, such as a controller, can use to interact with the domain. The use cases themselves only bind to the domain and certain cross cutting concerns such as logging, and are devoid of binding to the web, the database and the framework.

class CancelDonationUseCase {
    private /* DonationRepository */ $repository;
    private /* Mailer */ $mailer;

    public function cancelDonation( CancelDonationRequest $r ): CancelDonationResponse {
        $this->validateRequest( $r );

        $donation = $this->repository->getDonationById( $r->getDonationId() );
        $donation->cancel();
        $this->repository->storeDonation( $donation );

        $this->sendConfirmationEmail( $donation );

        return new CancelDonationResponse( /* ... */ );
    }
}

In this example you can see how the UC for canceling a donation gets a request object, does some stuff, and then returns a response object. Both the request and response objects are specific to this UC and lack both domain and presentation mechanism binding. The stuff that is actually done is mainly interaction with the domain through Entities, Aggregates and Repositories.

$app->post(
    '/cancel-donation',
    public function( Request $httpRequest ) use ( $factory ) {
        $requestModel = new CancelDonationRequest(
            $httpRequest->request->get( 'donation_id' ),
            $httpRequest->request->get( 'update_token' )
        );

        $useCase = $factory->newCancelDonationUseCase();
        $responseModel = $useCase->cancelDonation( $requestModel );

        $presenter = $factory->newNukeLaunchingResultPresenter();
        return new Response( $presenter->present( $responseModel ) );
    }
);

This is a typical way of invoking a UC. The framework we’re using is Silex, which calls the function we provided when the route matches. Inside this function we construct our framework agnostic request model and invoke the UC with it. Then we hand over the response model to a presenter to create the appropriate HTML or other such format. This is all the framework bound code we have for canceling donations. Even the presenter does not bind to the framework, though it does depend on Twig.

If you are familiar with Silex, you might already have noticed that we’re constructing our UC different than you might expect. We decided to go with our own top level factory, rather than using the dependency injection mechanism provided by Silex: Pimple. Our factory internally actually uses Pimple, though this is not visible from the outside. With this approach we gain a nicer access to service construction, since we can have a getLogger() method with LoggerInterface return type hint, rather than accessing $app['logger'] or some such, which forces us to bind to a string and leaves us without type hint.

This use case based approach makes it very easy to see what our system is capable off at a glance.

And it makes it very easy to find where certain behavior is located, or to figure out where new behavior should be put.

All code in our src/ directory is framework independent, and all code binding to specific persistence mechanisms resides in src/DataAccess. The only framework bound code we have are our very slim “route handlers” (kinda like controllers), the web entry point and the Silex bootstrap.

For more information on The Clean Architecture I can recommend Robert C Martins NDC 2013 talk. If you watch it, you will hopefully notice how we slightly deviated from the UseCase structure like he presented it. This is due to PHP being an interpreted language, and thus does not need certain interfaces that are beneficial in compiled languages.

Lesson learned: bounded contexts

By and large we started with the donation related use cases and then moved on to the membership application related ones. At some point, we had a Donation entity/aggregate in our domain, and a bunch of value objects that it contained.

class Donation {
    private /* int|null */            $id
    private /* PersonalInfo|null */   $personalInfo
    /* ... */
}

class PersonalInfo {
    private /* PersonName */          $name
    private /* PhysicalAddress */     $address
    private /* string */              $emailAddress
}

As you can see, one of those value objects is PersonalInfo. Then we needed to add an entity for membership applications. Like donations, membership applications require a name, a physical address and an email address. Hence it was tempting to reuse our existing PersonalInfo class.

class MembershipApplication {
    private /* int|null */            $id
    private /* PersonalInfo|null */   $personalInfo
    /* ... */
}

Luckily a complication made us realize that going down this path was not a good idea. This complication was that membership applications also have a phone number and an optional date of birth. We could have forced code sharing by doing something hacky like adding new optional fields to PersonalInfo, or by creating a MorePersonalInfo derivative.

Approaches such as these, while resulting in some code sharing, also result in creating binding between Donation and MembershipApplication. That’s not good, as those two entities don’t have anything to do with each other. Sharing what happens to be the same at present is simply not a good idea. Just imagine that we did not have the phone number and date of birth in our first version, and then needed to add them. We’d either end up with one of those hacky solutions, or need to refactor code that has nothing to do (apart from the bad coupling) with what we want to modify.

What we did is renaming PersonalInfo to Donor and introduce a new Applicant class.

class Donor {
    private /* PersonName */          $name
    private /* PhysicalAddress */     $address
    private /* string */              $emailAddress
}

class Applicant {
    private /* PersonName */          $name
    private /* PhysicalAddress */     $address
    private /* EmailAddress */        $email
    private /* PhoneNumber */         $phone
    private /* DateTime|null */       $dateOfBirth
}

These names are better since they are about the domain (see ubiquitous language) rather than some technical terms we needed to come up with.

Amongst other things, this rename made us realize that we where missing some explicit boundaries in our application. The donation related code and the membership application related code where mostly independent from each other, and we agreed this was a good thing. To make it more clear that this is the case and highlight violations of that rule, we decided to reorganize our code to follow the strategic DDD pattern of Bounded Contexts.

This mainly consisted out of reorganizing our directory and namespace structure, and a few instances of splitting some code that should not have been bound together.

Based on this we created a new diagram to reflect the high level structure of our application. This diagram, and a version with just one context, are available for use under CC-0.

Lesson learned: validation

A big question we had near the start of our project was where to put validation code. Do we put it in the UCs, or in the controller-like code that calls the UCs?

One of the first UCs we added was the one for adding donations. This one has a request model that contains a lot of information, including the donor’s name, their email, their address, the payment method, payment amount, payment interval, etc. In our domain we had several value objects for representing parts of donations, such as the donor or the payment information.

class Donation {
    private /* int|null */            $id
    private /* Donor|null */          $donor
    private /* DonationPayment */     $payment
    /* ... */
}

class Donor {
    private /* PersonName */          $name
    private /* PhysicalAddress */     $address
    private /* string */              $emailAddress
}

Since we did not want to have one object with two dozen fields, and did not want to duplicate code, we used the value objects from our domain in the request model.

class AddDonationRequest {
    private /* Donor|null */          $donor
    private /* DonationPayment */     $payment
    /* ... */
}

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have realized that this approach violates one of the earlier outlined rules: nothing outside the UC layer is supposed to access anything from the domain. If value objects from the domain are exposed to whatever constructs the request model, i.e. a controller, this rule is violated. Loose from the this abstract objection, we got into real trouble by doing this.

Since we started doing validation in our UCs, this usage of objects from the domain in the request necessarily forced those objects to allow invalid values. For instance, if we’re validating the validity of an email address in the UC (or a service used by the UC), then the request model cannot use an EmailAddress which does sanity checks in its constructor.

We thus refactored our code to avoid using any of our domain objects in the request models (and response models), so that those objects could contain basic safeguards.

We made a similar change by altering which objects get validated. At the start of our project we created a number of validators that worked on objects from the domain. For instance a DonationValidator working with the Donation Entity. This DonationValidator would then be used by the AddDonationUseCase. This is not a good idea, since the validation that needs to happen depends on the context. In the AddDonationUseCase certain restrictions apply that don’t always hold for donations. Hence having a general looking DonationValidator is misleading. What we ended up doing instead is having validation code specific to the UCs, be it as part of the UC, or when too complex, a separate validation service in the same namespace. In both cases the validation code would work on the request model, i.e. AddDonationRequest, and not bind to the domain.

After learning these two lessons, we had a nice approach for policy-based validation. That’s not all validation that needs to be done though. For instance, if you get a number via a web request, the framework will typically give it to you as a string, which might thus not be an actual number. As the request model is supposed to be presentation mechanism agnostic, certain validation, conversion and error handling needs to happen before constructing the request model and invoking the UC. This means that often you will have validation in two places: policy based validation in the UC, and presentation specific validation in your controllers or equivalent code. If you have a string to integer conversion, number parsing or something internationalization specific, in your UC, you almost certainly messed up.

Closing notes

You can find the Wikimedia Deutschland fundraising application on GitHub and see it running in production. Unfortunately the code of the old application is not available for comparison, as it is not public. If you have questions, you can leave a comment, or contact me. If you find an issue or want to contribute, you can create a pull request.

As a team we learned a lot during this project, and we set a number of firsts at Wikimedia Deutschland, or the wider Wikimedia movement for that matter. The new codebase is the cleanest non-trivial application we have, or that I know of in PHP world. It is fully tested, contains less than 5% framework bound code, has strong strategic separation between both contexts and layers, has roughly 5% data access specific code and has tests that can be run without any real setup. (I might write another blog post on how we designed our tests and testing environment.)

Many thanks for my colleagues Kai Nissen and Gabriel Birke for being pretty awesome during our rewrite project.

1. Previous research, studied how long it took for a subject to appear in English Wikipedia after it was first mentioned in the news / social media. The new question would be: how long does it take for the same subject to appear in any Wikipedia and, how long does it take and to what extend does it happen for those articles to get corresponding articles in other Wikipedias and how long does it take for the English Wikipedia to take notice?
2. In the search engine for Wikidata we use the description to help differentiate between homonyms. There are two approaches to a description; many existing descriptions are not helpful and hardly any items have texts exist in all of the 280 languages. There are however automatically generated descriptions. The question is: what do people like more, the automated descriptions or the existing questions? Is there a real difference for people who use Wikidata in English as well?
3. Many people know their languages, this is obviously true for readers of Wikipedia. For the regulars there is a “Babel” template that allows them to indicate what languages they know. For the others for some purposes geo-location is used to make a guess. Do people find it useful to have it indicated that articles exist in the languages they know in search requests? Does it make a difference that a quality indicator is set for those other texts on the same subject?
4. Many people make spelling errors when they search for a subject or when they create a wiki link to another subject. Google famously suggests what people may be looking for. We can expand the search and include items from Wikidata (40% increase in reach) but we can also use Google or any other search engine to help people get to the sum of all knowledge. We can ask people to answer some questions after they are done. Are people willing to do this and how does it expand our range of subjects that we know about. Are people willing to curate this information so that we can expand Wikidata and at least recognise the subjects we have no articles about?
5. When we show the traffic for the articles people edited on in the last month, we gain an insight in what people actually read. We also congratulate people on the work they did and show appreciation. Does this kind of stimulus stimulate more articles? How do you stimulate for subjects that people hardly read (eg Indian nobility).. Do you compare with existing articles in the same category?
6. There have been several Wikipedias that include bot generated texts. It is a famously divisive issue in the Wikipedia community. There has been no research done on this. With Wikidata there is an alternative way to exploit the underlying data. When the data is included in Wikidata, it is possible to generate text on the fly. This data may be cached for performance issues but there are two main advantages; both the script and the data can be updated. The question is: does it serve a purpose for our readers? Will editors update the data or the script to improve results or will they use the text as a template for new articles? Will it take the heat of the argument of generated texts? How will it affect projects that were not part of the existing controversy and does it work for them?
7. Wikidata does not allow for the dating of its labels. It follows that it is not easily understood what the relation is between Jakarta and Batavia. How are such issues generally stored as data and what alternatives exist for Wikidata. How does it improve the usefulness of Wikidata as a general topic resource?
8. Wikidata now includes data from sources like Swiss-Prot. What are the benefits to both parties? Does it make for people editing this data at Wikidata and what is the quality of such edits? Does it get noticed by Swiss Prot and is there a cooperation happening? How is this organised and to what extend does “the community” interfere with the notions of academia? Do such communications exist or are these groups doing “their own thing”?
9. What is the effect on the ultra small Wikipedias when generated texts are available based on available labels.. Does it mean more interest in creating the templates for articles and work on labelling? What does it mean when such generated articles are available to search engines?
10. At this time many articles in the English Wikipedia are written by students, university students. The result is positive on many levels but the question is, is what they write understood by Wikipedia readers? When students write their articles, it is mostly based on literature. It is well known that the bias in scientific papers is huge. Negative results are not published and many results from studies are ignored. The question would be: is sufficient weight given to debunking studies or are they put aside with an argument of a “neutral point of view”. This would make sense when students are graded on what they write given accepted fact on the university.

Photo, public domain/CC0.

What would you do if you had over 6,500 public domain and freely-licensed photos? For Bulgarian Wikipedians, the answer was: the Archives Challenge.

The Archives Challenge is a competition to maximize the use of digital copies of 6,500 photos and documents from the Bulgarian Archives State Agency (BASA) which are now available on Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, thanks to the efforts of many volunteer editors.

From November 15 to December 15, 2016, participants of the challenge are working on categorizing the photos, adding descriptions, translating the descriptions, and adding the photos to relevant Wikipedia pages, in addition to several other creative jobs to make the most out of the available photos.

The photos used in this competition are the product of five years of collaboration between Wikimedians of Bulgaria and BASA. The latter decided to release a large part of the archives collections to the public and the Wikipedia community took action on this.

“The work with BASA is very exciting,” says Spasimir Pilev, one of the main organizers of the competition. “We visit the archives almost every week — we scan the documents and request new ones. Afterwards, we upload them to Wikimedia Commons where the work begins.”

Although it started in Bulgaria, people from around the world are helping out, which helps in providing better file descriptions. For example, “we have 30 images from Saratoga in California,” Pilev explains. “We know where the photos are from, but not what exactly is featured in each photo. We can’t recognise the buildings, streets, etc.”

Of the ones that are recognized, some have been used to compare how the places looked like in the past versus now.

Last year saw the first edition of the Archives Challenge, when Wikipedians added descriptions to 3,200 photos, 600 photos were used on Wikipedia, 94 new articles were created, and 69 pairs of photos made it to the Then & Now gallery.

So far, this year is proving far more productive, as the number of photos in use on Wikipedia increased. The Wikipedia pages containing photos from the Archive Challenge have also been visited over 3,000,000 times in November 2016 alone.

“Such priceless resources [should] be used to the fullest. Many of the pictures were taken outside of Bulgaria’s borders. When these images are available to a larger circle of people, they can be localized and used much better,” Pilev elaborates.

In brief

Photo by Neboysha87, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Wiki4MediaFreedom edit-a-thon concludes: On November 21, sixteen people from six countries gathered in Belgrade, Serbia for the Wiki4MediaFreedom edit-a-thon (editing workshop). Conceptualized by Wikimedia Serbia and Italy, independent affiliates that work to advance the Wikimedia movement, and Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa, the event brought journalists, media freedom activists, experts, and the Wikipedia community together—”three groups that share the battle for freedom of information along with the need for quality information and a richer and plural information ecosystem,” Rossella Vignola told us. Tangibly, they together created eleven new articles and improved four more, and the group hopes that the connections made will bear additional fruit in the future. More information is available on Meta and on balcanicaucaso.org.

Wikimedia community in Estonia receives prestigious prize: The European Science photo competition organized by Wikimedia Estonia won the second prize for the “Popularization of Science and Technology Using Audiovisual and Electronic Media” by the Estonian Research Council. Wikipedian Ivo Kruusamägi was the main organizer of the competition and one of the driving forces behind its success. He received the prize on November 23.

WikiPack Africa provides resources for Wikipedians: WikiPack Africa is an action pack to help the Wikipedia communities and individuals in African countries. The initiative provides material and equipment to help event organizers with their work. More information on the project and how to apply for WikiPack Africa is available on on Meta.

Contemporary Chinese art edit-a-thon in New York: The Wikipedia community in New York City held an edit-a-thon that will focus on modern and contemporary artists from Chinese speaking countries. The event coincides with the conclusion of Wikipedia Asian Month, where Wikipedians from around the world work on improving Wikipedia’s content about Asia.

GA Cup analyzed: The Signpost has published an in-depth research piece on the GA Cup, a competition on the English Wikipedia that encourages editors to review candidates for “good article” status—a marker of quality. You can learn more over at the Signpost.

Annual adminstrator elections on the Indonesian Wikipedia: The Indonesian Wikipedia community is holding their annual administrator election in December. On the Indonesian Wikipedia, there is an annual call for requests for adminship, where candidates nominate themselves and answer any community questions before the community votes on their requests.

English Wikipedia’s Military History Project award nominations now open: The annual Military historian of the year and Military history newcomer of the year awards are now open for nominations.

Milestones articles and entries: Michenerit, a rare mineral, was the subject of article number two million on the German Wikipedia. The site is the fourth language Wikipedia to reach this milestone after the English, Swedish, and Cebuano Wikipedias. Meanwhile, the English Wiktionary crossed the five million entries rubicon with ათარიღებს‎, a Georgian word meaning “to date (to determine the age of something).” They hit four million in May 2015. Congratulations to both communities!

Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

Topics in the news and pop culture are usually overrepresented in the list of the top 25 most read articles on Wikipedia each week. I use Wikipedia to learn about those subjects, too. But for me, the brilliance of Wikipedia isn’t in its ability to provide information about the latest box office smash or a biography of the president-elect of the United States. Wikipedia is incredible because its vision is to encapsulate the sum of all human knowledge — from the popular to the obscure.

After all, you never know when you might want to learn about peer pressure. Or environmental issues in Kuwait. Or the effects of overtime. Or how we’re more likely to share personal information than we used to be. And Wikipedia is there to help you out.

Or is it?

If you’d tried to find information on Wikipedia on those topics a couple of months ago, you’d have been sorely disappointed. The last three didn’t exist, and the first was littered with warning banners about the validity of the content. While Wikipedia has a lot of great content, it also has a lot of bad content or even no content at all for some important topics.

Why is that? It’s because Wikipedia content is all written by volunteers — “Wikipedians”. And volunteers naturally write about topics they’re interested in — and what they have access to sources for. So when you read an article about Game of Thrones or Star Trek, the quality is probably quite good because many people are interested and sources about them are easy to find. On the other hand, an article about a medical condition or sociological theory might not be — or it might not exist at all.

That’s where the Wiki Education Foundation comes in. We’re not Wikipedia and don’t get money from the banners you see on Wikipedia; we’re an independent nonprofit that’s reliant on donations from people like you. We have a simple mission: bridge the gap between Wikipedia and academia, with the goal of harnessing the power of higher education to improve Wikipedia for readers like you.

We do this in two ways: we support college and university students to write Wikipedia articles as a class assignment (what we refer to as our “Classroom Program”), and we provide university logins to existing Wikipedia authors to give them access to critical sources (in our “Visiting Scholars Program”).

In the Classroom Program, higher education instructors replace a traditional research paper (one which might just be thrown away at the end of the term) with an assignment to write a Wikipedia article on course-related topics. This program is wildly successful, and it works: Wiki Ed staff provide the support for how to edit Wikipedia, and the content students add dramatically improves Wikipedia. In the busiest part of the spring term, we were adding 10% of all the previously under-developed academic content to Wikipedia. We’re supporting even more students this fall term, and the work so far speaks for itself:

• The peer pressure article was overhauled and improved by a Carnegie Mellon student in Robert Kraut’s communications class.
• The environmental issues in Kuwait article I mentioned earlier was started by a UC Berkeley student in Tiffany Page’s environment and development class.
• The effects of overtime article was started by a Northeastern University student in Amy Carleton’s business writing class. Another student in the class wrote the article on the gender identity term femme.
• What personal information we share online is the focus of the article on the social data revolution, dramatically improved by a UMass Lowell student in Naniette Coleman’s sociology course.

These are all important subjects that people seek information on. Prior to this term, they wouldn’t have been able to learn about these topics from Wikipedia, but thanks to Wiki Ed’s work, these underdeveloped topics now have quality Wikipedia articles. And those are just examples from this term. Since the program began in 2010, students have added more than 25 million words of content to Wikipedia. That’s enough content to fill 57% of the last print edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, or more than 44 copies of War and Peace. But our work with students isn’t the only way we tackle content gaps on Wikipedia.

In the Visiting Scholars program, we pair an existing Wikipedian with a university. Because so much content is in books and journal articles that are behind paywalls, it can be challenging for Wikipedians to get access to the sources they need to improve an article. Take the article on neonatal infections, for example. Wikipedian Barbara Page started the article a year ago, after getting access to sources through the University of Pittsburgh as their Visiting Scholar. It’s not the only health article Barbara has improved; since joining Wiki Ed’s program, she’s added important, well-sourced medical information to articles on rape, breastfeeding, and STIs. Since Wikipedia is the leading source for health information on the web — it gets more traffic on medical articles than sites for the NIH, WebMD, Mayo Clinic, NHO, or WHO — these improvements are crucial for giving the public accurate, well-sourced information.

Wiki Ed plays a crucial role in the Wikipedia ecosystem, filling in content gaps in those educational areas that Wikipedians don’t have access to sources to work with, or which are vitally important but less popular. Please support our work. If you’re an instructor, teach with us. If you can, include us in your year-end giving. The work we’re doing to provide neutral, fact-based, educational information is more important than ever.

When higher ed students write papers for a chemistry class, they’re typically writing for an audience of one: their instructor. If students put any thought into communicating science, it gets lost in the fact that they’ll be communicating science with the exact same person they learned it from.

But what happens when you’re one of the students in Dr. Freda Kleiman’s course at Hunter College? Those students had a rare opportunity to communicate science with more than one reader. By writing for Wikipedia instead, their articles have been seen by 1.1 million readers. Suddenly, students get some skin in the game: they want to make sure they’re writing something that people can understand.

Even just putting students into that position is a win for developing science communications skills. They start thinking about their audience. Wikipedia’s rules for citations rely on a critical assessment of information sources. It also requires students to carefully integrate information from many sources into their own words.

Writing about chemistry for Wikipedia helps student editors explore the context of a topic they otherwise might ignore. Articles from the class include Phosphorylation, which is when phosphourous groups bond to a molecule — a process that turns enzymes on or off. There’s a thorough overview including the history of the concept and a description of its function. It’s written in a way that an audience reading texts where they’d encounter the term can come to Wikipedia and quickly understand the article. The same is true for other articles, such as Ion chromatography or Alkaline phosphatase.

This isn’t a science communications course per se, and these articles aren’t expected to be accessible to a layman. But by positioning these articles to be understood exactly by the people who’d be most likely to encounter them, students begin to think about how to best express their knowledge across contexts.

For Wiki Ed’s Year of Science initiative, we’re helping students think about how they structure and share knowledge with the world through Wikipedia. Participants in our Classroom Program have access to training materials for students that help them get started on Wikipedia, including a specific guidebook for editing chemistry articles. If you’re interested in providing a unique science communication experience to your students, we’d love to hear from you. Together, we can inspire students and expand the world’s access to knowledge about chemistry. Reach us at contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo: Chemistry by Faris Algosaibi, CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.