en.planet.wikimedia

Image by Bowman Gum, public domain/CC0.

At the end of the long and tiring 1948 baseball season, the Cleveland Indians found themselves in a tie with the Boston Red Sox for first place. Both teams had the same win-loss record, and in 22 games against each other, each had won 11 games.

The stage was set for the first one-game playoff in the history of the American League (AL), one of baseball’s two top leagues. It would be a simple tiebreaker. One team would win the AL pennant, advance to the World Series, and play for the overall championship. The other would go home.

The Indians were a charter member of the AL in 1901, but had seen relatively little success in many of the years since. In 1948, they were fighting to win their first pennant and championship in nearly three decades.

To face the Red Sox, the team selected rookie pitcher Gene Bearden. Bearden had won 19 games that season, including two against the Sox, but one might assume that his arm would be tired after pitching a game just two days earlier. But he didn’t play like it. Bearden pitched the entire game, allowing 3 runs on 5 hits, while his teammates knocked home 8 on 13 hits.

The Indians went on from the tiebreaker to win the 1948 World Series, the last championship they have won to date.

———

Wikipedia editor, Cleveland native, and baseball fan Wizardman, who admits to being “spoiled” by the Indians’ success when he was growing up in the 1990s, is hoping that the Indians will win another title this season, which starts on April 3. They had a great chance as recently as last year, when they “heartbreakingly” fell exactly one win short to the Chicago Cubs.

In the meantime, Wizardman is focusing on the Indians’ 1948 season and its 45 related articles on Wikipedia, many with surprisingly fascinating storylines.

“Now that I’ve delved fairly deep into it, it has shocked me just how many stories make up each individual player,” Wizardman said. “Significant events certainly weren’t limited to just Bob Feller‘s wartime service or Larry Doby breaking the American League color barrier. You’ve got a guy who was later banned from the minor leagues, a guy who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on the field, and one of the rare ballplayers who hit four homers in a game.”

And that’s not even getting into nicknames. Feller, the ace on Cleveland’s pitching staff, was known as “The Heater from Van Meter”, “Bullet Bob”, and “Rapid Robert.” Al Gettel went by “Two Gun.”  And Mike Garcia was affectionately called as “Big Bear,” giving a name to Wizardman’s ongoing mission to improve all of the articles related to the team in that year: Operation Big Bear.

The operation’s mascot is a literal bear (above) that Wizardman has named “Dwight,” a reference to The Office character and a conversation he once had. Photo by Simm, public domain/CC0.

Of all the articles he has or plans to write about the team, Wizardman says that Don Black is probably his favorite. It was the first article he worked on that related to the 1948 Indians, and the surprising details he found—a sobriety-fueled career turnaround, the cerebral hemorrhage—helped him decide to create Operation Big Bear. “Had I picked a boring ballplayer first,” he said, “who knows if I would have continued.”

Remaining interested and engaged with the content you’re writing about is important, because It can be difficult to write Wikipedia articles about this time period. The site’s content is built on the concept of verifiability, meaning that information added needs to be cited to reliable sources. “Readers must be able to check that any of the information within Wikipedia articles is not just made up,” the page says.

But many of the reliable sources from the 1940s are still copyrighted in the United States, so they are rarely available through free resources like Google Books, HaithiTrust, or the Internet Archive. That’s a major reason why, Wizardman notes, Wikipedia has a “recentist bend” that includes baseball, like the several Indians players from the 1990s with “good” articles written about them. For those in more recent times, there are more available reliable sources about their lives and career, many for free. For the opposite reason, “the same caliber of pre-Internet player is probably a stub [article],” he says.

Wizardman has found tricks to help him get around these difficulties. One major help has been access to the archives of Cleveland’s primary newspaper (the Plain Dealer) and Newspapers.com, the latter through the efforts of the Wikipedia Library. Another has been the lack of difficulty in writing what he calls “decent” baseball articles, as “the game is naturally very stat-based,” he says.

But on the other hand, “making the leap from relying on stats and telling the ballplayer’s story is much more difficult.” For example, Wizardman may have access to the Plain Dealer, but it is rare for a player to have stayed in Cleveland for his entire career. “Tackling other aspects,” he said, “such as being traded to another team where sources are harder to come by, … can be challenging.” With limitations like that, Wizardman has been forced to concede that at least 19 of his 45 planned articles will never be finished to the standards of Wikipedia’s highest “featured” quality level.

Wizardman has had help in Operation Big Bear from Zepppep, a editor who according to Wizardman “didn’t edit on Wikipedia long, but did do a few of the articles on the 1948 Indians, and helped to re-kickstart [Operation Big Bear] after I had moved on to other things.” Of special importance to Wizardman was Zepppep’s work on Bob Feller’s article, “the one player more than any I wanted to get to [featured status], both due to his significance and the shape of the article when I first read it 10 years or so ago (it was bad).”

You too can help Wizardman on his mission, lest it take until 2030 to finish. Head over to Operation Big Bear and start working on one of the red, orange, or yellow articles.

Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate
Wikimedia Foundation

• there is an API informing about authors and their books at Open Library based on the Open Library identifier.
• an app can now be build that shows this information
• this app could use identifiers of other "Sources" like Wikidata, VIAF or whatever on the assumption that Wikidata links these "Sources".
• this app could show information based on Wikidata statements in any language using Wikidata labels.
• this app may download the book (maybe not yet but certainly in the future)

• investigate the JSON and see what we already can do with it
• publish the results and iterate
• Add more identifiers of authors known to Open Library to Wikidata
• there are many OL identifiers in the Freebase information; they need to be extracted and a combined list of Wikidata identifiers and OL identifiers allows OL to curate it for redirects and we can then publish.
• Raffaele Messuti pointed to existing functionality that retrieves an author ID for Wikidata and VIAF using an ISBN number.
• Open Library knows about ISBN numbers for its books. When it runs the functionality for all the authors where it does not have a VIAF identifier it can enrich its database and share the information with Wikidata.
• Alternatively someone does this based on exposed information at Open Library.. :)
• We add a link to Open Library in the {{authority control}} in Wikipedia
• We could add information for nearby libraries like they do in Worldcat [1].
• We can measure how popular it is; how many people we refer to Open Library or to their library.

Hamble, the Humble Bundle mascot, enjoys a vintage reading experience through a monocle with a printout of Wikipedia. Photo by Whitney Stutes

There are about 5.4 million articles on the English-language Wikipedia. That can be impressive – and a little overwhelming. It’s empowering to know that at any time you can—for free!—peruse lists of songs, and delve into the list of songs about vehicle crashes, and then read about the song “30,000 Pounds of Bananas,” and the real incident it is based on, and wow that’s actually kind of tragic, and did you know bananas are actually berries, and you can make beer out of them? And… wait, it’s 3 a.m.?

Rabbit hole. Gets ya every time. That’s where inspiration struck Humble Bundle, the San Francisco-based company that lets gamers buy a bundle of games while helping their favorite charities. Humble Bundle has long been a supporter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that supports Wikipedia and its sister projects.

A few weeks ago, the folks at Humble Bundle wondered, what if – instead of endless rabbit holes – people could get a little divet of Wikipedia, or maybe a pothole of Wikipedia, or a small ditch of their very own they could fall into? What if people could pay for a download of Wikipedia in staggeringly massive DRM-free text files?

“On a laserdisc!” suggested our forward-thinking Executive Director Katherine Maher. “Or a VHS tape!” Or a papyrus scroll! Or a thing where the whole encyclopedia is spelled out with Stonehenge-like tablets!

It turns out some of that wasn’t feasible.

Print shop. Photo by Daniel Chodowiecki, public domain.

But you can—you really, truly can—buy yourself a chunk of Wikipedia via Humble Bundle. You can download it for use whenever you want to look something up. You can even buy a slender printed volume! (Printing is a way of reproducing text and images using a master form or template.)

Dog in top hat. Photo by Bonque & Kindermann photography, public domain.

Humble Bundle is producing handsome bound volumes on topics including “Encyclopedia of English Language Metaphors,” “Encyclopedia of Commonly Misspelled Words,” (see what they did there?), and “Encyclopedia of the Metal Umlaut.”

Think of the vintage experience of perusing a volume of Wikipedia through your monocle before a crackling fire. In the article on the use of the umlaut in the name of heavy metal bands you read the explanation from Spın̈al Tap’s rocker David St. Hubbins: “It’s like a pair of eyes. You’re looking at the umlaut, and it’s looking at you.” Satisfied, you lay the book upon a doily on your oaken desk and pour a glass of sherry.

From now through Monday, you can order the Wikipedia bundle from Humble currently being featured.

The Wikimedia Foundation and open-license applications

Happy April Fool’s Day! If you get volume A from Humble Bundle, you can read all about the origins of this day on your own Wikipedia. Otherwise, you can look it up with everybody else online.

This offer, however, is very real, as is our sincere appreciation for Humble Bundle. This is their great idea, and the kind of creative generosity that makes the company a real gift to gaming and the internet.

Downloading and printing Wikipedia are possible because of free and open licenses that allow for other fantastical applications. Want to see a 4.9′ wide and 43′ tall representation of the complete text and images of the Wikipedia article for Magna Carta? Check out Magna Carta (An Embroidery), a 2015 work by English installation artist Cornelia Parker. Our licenses enable “Histography,” an online visualization of world history on a sliding scale. Print Wikipedia is an art project by Michael Mandiberg. It was displayed at the at Denny Gallery in New York City, where 106 of the 7,473 volumes of English Wikipedia were printed, providing a small snapshot of what Wikipedia looked like on April 7, 2015. In addition to enabling these creative ventures, we believe free and open licenses—like the Creative Commons license utilized for Wikipedia’s content—are an important tool in making knowledge available to every human being.

About Humble Bundle

Humble Bundle sells digital content through its pay-what-you-want bundle promotions and the Humble Store. When purchasing a bundle, customers choose how much they want to pay and decide where their money goes – between the content creators, charity, and Humble Bundle. Since the company’s launch in 2010, Humble Bundle has raised more than $95 million through the support of its community for a wide range of charities, providing aid for people across the world. For more information, please visit www.humblebundle.com.

Jeff Elder, Digital Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

This post was written by Dr Pedro Telles, Senior Lecturer in Law at Swansea University and originally published on his website.

For the last couple of years with my colleague Richard Leonard-Davies I have been teaching competition law here at Swansea University and doing so in a very traditional and straightforward way: lectures focused on plenty of case law and seminars where we drilled down the details. As competition law is one of those topics that can be eminently practical, there was plenty of scope for improvement. As we run two separate Competition Law modules in different semesters (Agreements in the first, Dominance in the second) it is possible to make changes in only a part of the year.

About a year ago I found this blogpost by Chris Blattman on getting students to draft a Wikipedia article as part of their assessment. Blattman called this the creation of a public good while my preferred description is getting them to pay forward for the next lot. Immediately I thought, “hmmm let’s see the entries for competition law” and they were very underwhelming.

Fast forward a year, a few hoops and plenty of support from Wikimedia UK and we’re now in the position of starting the module with a new assessment structure that includes the (re)-drafting of a Wikipedia entry. Here’s the nitty gritty:

Assessment 1 (2,000 words)

For the first coursework you will have to choose from the topics covered this semester and check if it has a Wikipedia entry or not. Once you have selected a topic you will need to submit it for approval to either member of the teaching team. If an entry already exists you will critically analyse the entry by providing a report which encompasses the following:

–       Why you have chosen this topic

–       What is covered in the Wikipedia entry

–       What the entry does well

–       How the entry could be improved in your view (ie, caselaw, different perspectives, more recent doctrinal developments, context)

–       What aspects of the topic were not covered but should have been included

–       What sources (academic/case-law) you would use to reference the entry

We expect the piece to be factual on its description of the area of the law you decided to analyse but at the same time critical and reflective, basing yourself in good quality academic sources for the arguments you are presenting.

Assessment 2 (1,000 words)

For Coursework 2 you will be expected to put in action the comments and analysis from Coursework 1, ie you will be drafting an actual Wikipedia entry that improves on the strong points identified and addresses the weaknesses as well. This entry will be drafted on your Wikipedia dashboard (to be discussed in the Coursework Workshop in March) and will have to be submitted both on Turnitin and also uploaded to Wikipedia itself before the deadline.

Regular plagiarism rules apply, so if you pick an entry that already exists you are advised to re-write it extensively, which, to implement the changes from Coursework 1 you should be doing nonetheless. It is fundamental that you make the Turnitin submission prior to the Wikipedia one

The drafting style for this entry will be very different from the first one (or any academic coursework for that matter) as you are no longer critiquing a pre-existing text, but creating an alternative one. As such, it is expected to be descriptive and thorough, providing a lay reader with an understanding of the topic at hand. For an idea, please check Wikipedia’s Manual of Style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_better_articles

What we are hoping for with this experiment is to get students out of their comfort zone and used to think and write differently from the usual academic work. Instead of padding and adding superfluous materials, they will be expected (and marked) to a different standard.

But that is not the only thing we’re changing as the seminars will also be quite different from the past. This year we will use WhatsApp as a competition law case study.

Why WhatsApp?

Well, when considering what company/product to use as a case study there had been no investigations into WhatsApp so that made it a clear frontrunner as a potential case study. It’s a digital product/service which may or may not be tripping EU Competition Law rules with enough of a grey area to get people to think. So we will apply the law to WhatsApp and try to figure out if:

– It has a dominant position (and if so, in what market)

– It has abused its putative dominant position

– Its merger with Facebook is above board

– it’s IP policy/third-app access policy is compliant with competition law requirements

To this end, students will have to find information by themselves (incredible the amount of statistics freely available these days online…) and be prepared to work together in the seminar to prepare the skeleton arguments in favour/against any of those possibilities. The second half of the seminar will be spent with the teams arguing their position.

We’ll see how it goes and will comment on the whole experiment in four months or so. In the meanwhile, if you want to know more drop me a line in the comments.

21/03/2017-27/03/2017

Mapping

• At the FOSSGIS conference, data privacy on OSM was discussed. Frederik Ramm summarizes (automatic translation) some relevant aspects in the German forum. There was also a brief discussion on Talk-de mailing list. Personally identifiable data, such as mapping activities, is still visible to anyone.
• Voting window for the new tag amenity=courier is open until April 7th.
• Martijn van Exel is working on a monthly newsletter for MapRoulette. Take a look at the March edition.
• Following Harry Wood’s idea to upload OSM notes in MAPS.ME, Noémie Lehuby generated a file to spot bus stops with missing names around Paris.
• Telenav’s mapping team members disappoints the Canadian community by armchair mapping of turn restrictions.
• Areas tagged landuse=farm won’t be rendered (automatic translation) any longer in our standard map style. In re-tagging these legacies, the NoFarm map might be a great help.
• Martin Koppenhoefer explained where the center of Berlin is defined, after having recently looked at the history of the city center of Rome.

Community

• Harald Hartmann asks in the German forum, whether there should be more “gamification” at OSM, for example in the form of virtual awards and rewards. (automatic translation)
• [1] Carlos F. Castillo aka kaxtillo runs a scout group called ScoutMappers in Popayán, Colombia. The scouts should be enabled to know and apply useful tools in emergency cases and to share data with rescue workers. The group from Popayán will publish their experiences from the past six years on REME to share their knowledge with all the scouts around the world so that every scout can do a good deed every day.
• According to Spanish OSM, there are many mazes mapped in OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• In Belgium, there is currently an OSM local chapter in formation. The charter is still being elaborated.

Events

• The organizers of the 2018 FOSS4G Conference in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, are looking for a logo and have launched a competition.
• This year’s international State of the Map conference will take place in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Japan. This is a gentle reminder to send in your proposals for talks and/or workshops if you have not already done so. The deadline to submit your session proposal is Sunday, 2nd April.
• Vincent de Château-Thierry asks (automatic translation) for submissions to SotM France on the talk-fr mailing list. It takes place in June from 2nd to 4th at Avignon.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT is currently redeveloping the “Export Tool“ and hosted a community text chat on their Slack #export-tool channel on March 30th at 15:00 UTC.
• Kate Chapman explained the importance of OpenSource software and the need for developers for humanitarian purposes.
• Joost Schouppe is looking for validators after the successful Belgian National Mapathon. The more than 300 participants completed the last few gaps in the map of Sierra Leone, which had been mapped in several previous HOT projects. A novelty as MapSwipe was used beforehand to find those spots, so mappers could concentrate on them. They also made a dent in the monster project #1396 in Nigeria, which has been ongoing for more than a year now. Also several tasks to help MSF fight malaria.
• The flood disaster in Peru is still ongoing. (We reported last week). The tasks that need your help – mapping or validation:
  • #2719 – Chosica, Peru: Flood Prone Communities Mapathon 2017
  • #2677 – Peru Flood Support 2: Cayma
  • #2679 – Peru Flood Support 4: Huarmey
  • #2709 – Peru Flood Support 5: Cajamarquilla
• Russell Deffner has published a first task in the OSM Tasking Manager to support the elimination of malaria in Zimbabwe.

switch2OSM

• Local authorities from Digne, France, proudly announced that their new printed tourist map is based on OSM data. The design process will be presented at the SotM France in June in Avignon. (automatic translation)

Software

• The OpenStreetMap location monitoring app OsMo is now using MapZen vector tiles.
• OsmAnd+ offers a 50% discount for the app.

Programming

• Lukas Martinelli, one of the two guys behind OSM2Vectortiles is now a part of Mapbox.

Releases

Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist. Timestamp: 2017-03-27 18:15:39+02 UTC

(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.

Other “geo” things

• Web developer and artist Hans Hack created a map of London and Berlin with collapsed buildings to compare it to the situation in Aleppo.
• At the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, researchers have pieced together a 17th-century Dutch map that has spent part of its life up a chimney, and part under the floorboards at a Scottish castle.
• London scientists found (automatic translation) that using navigation aids has a deep effect on brain’s activity.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Mazzano Romano	Workshop 2	31/03/2017
Kyoto	【西国街道#02】山崎蒸溜所と桜マッピングパーティ	01/04/2017
Rome	Walk4Art	01/04/2017
Rostock	Rostocker Treffen	04/04/2017
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	05/04/2017
Helsinki	Monthly Missing Maps mapathon at Finnish Red Cross HQ	06/04/2017
Dresden	Stammtisch	06/04/2017
Zaragoza	Mapeado Colaborativo	07/04/2017
Mazzano Romano	Workshop 3	07/04/2017
Fribourg	SOSM Annual General Meeting and mapping party	08/04/2017
Popayán	#MappingPartyTulcan (Scout Mappers)	08/04/2017
Rennes	Atelier de découverte	09/04/2017
Rennes	Réunion mensuelle	10/04/2017
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle libre	11/04/2017
Nantes	Rencontres mensuelles	11/04/2017
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	11/04/2017
Essen	Stammtisch	13/04/2017
Manila	MapAm❤re #PhotoMapping San Juan, San Juan	13/04/2017-16/04/2017
Berlin	106. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	14/04/2017
Tokyo	東京！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第７回 小石川後楽園	15/04/2017
Avignon	State of the Map France 2017	02/06/2017-04/06/2017
Kampala	State of the Map Africa 2017	08/07/2017-10/07/2017
Curitiba	FOSS4G+SOTM Brasil 2017	27/07/2017-29/07/2017
Aizu-wakamatsu Shi	State of the Map 2017	18/08/2017-20/08/2017
Boulder	State Of The Map U.S. 2017	19/10/2017-22/10/2017
Buenos Aires	FOSS4G+SOTM Argentina 2017	23/10/2017-28/10/2017
Lima	State of the Map – LatAm 2017	29/11/2017-02/12/2017

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 appropriate.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Hakuch, Nakaner, Peda, Polyglot, Rogehm, Spec80, SrrReal, YoViajo, derFred, jcoupey, jinalfoflia, kreuzschnabel, vsandre.

Our Wikipedia Content Experts are experienced Wikipedians who play a vital role in the Classroom Program, providing support to students as they contribute to Wikipedia for the first time. I’m pleased to announce that Shalor Toncray has joined Wiki Ed on a short-term contract to provide extra support to students as Content Expert in the spring 2017 term.

Shalor is a long-time Wikipedian who has edited as User:Tokyogirl79 since 2006, and became an administrator in 2013. Her experience with Wikipedia led her to an interest in digital archiving, working with the Library of Virginia, and also to earn a Master of Library and Information Science from Drexel University. A recent profile on the Wikimedia Blog highlighted the work she’s done the improve Wikipedia’s coverage of important but overlooked historical figures.

Before diving into archiving and library science, Shalor attended Virginia Commonwealth University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in religious studies. When she’s not working, Shalor likes to read, watch movies, play video games (especially tactical RPGs), and, of course, edit Wikipedia.

Photo by Subhashish Panigrahi, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Odia Wikisource turned two in October 2016. Started in 2014, the project has over 500 volumes of text including more than 200 books from different genres and publication eras. There are about 5-10 active contributors to this project who are geographically dispersed. To celebrate the anniversary, the Odia Wikisource community is starting a batch of activities to help grow it.

On January 29, a day-long event was organized in the Indian city of Bhubaneswar, the capital of the state of Odisha, where a majority of Odia-language speakers live. The event aimed to provide training for those who wanted to learn more about Wikisource, assess the work done so far, and develop strategies for the future.

Forty Wikimedians from different backgrounds participated in this event, including six active contributors on the project: Pankajmala Sarangi, Subas Chandra Rout, Radha Dwibedi, Sangram Keshari Senapati, Prateek Pattanaik, Chinmayee Mishra, and Aliva Sahoo along with Mrutyunjaya Kar, the project administrator.

The event marked the beginning of several new community-led projects: Pothi, a project to digitize old and rare public domain Odia books; an initiative at the Utkal University library to digitize public domain books; another project that aims at digitizing palm leaf manuscripts that are hundreds of years old at a temple in Bargarh; in addition to an open-source project to record pronunciation of words for Wiktionary.

Several small workshops were organized to cover topics like low-cost setup for large-scale digitization of books, communications management for small or large events, uploading scanned works on Commons, dealing with OTRS-related issues, OCRing scanned pages, using images on Wikisource, general guidelines for proofreading, and tips for promoting digitized works on social media and other platforms.

“Books like Odishara Itihasa, Ama Debadebi, Manabasa Laxmipurana, and Sabitri Osa haven’t been available on the internet,” says Wikisourcer Sangram Keshari Senapati, “even though many search for them. That makes me proud to contribute to their digitization.

Pothi: a project to collect, archive and digitize old rare Odia books

“Odia Wikisource is run by Wikimedia volunteers,” explains Mrutyunjaya Kar, an administrator of the project. “This project is a storehouse of out-of-copyright books. In addition old books, we try to reach out to well-known authors and publishers with the aim of including some of their books in this free library. This way, the new generation won’t become oblivious to the invaluable pieces of Odia literature available in this digital age.” Prateek Pattanaik, a 12th grade student in Delhi Public School Damanjodi, has started a project called “Pothi” at his school. Participants will collect out-of-copyright and rare books and make them available in digital form on Wikisource. Many of his fellow students registered to participate.

Palm leaf manuscripts

Shree Dadhibaman Temple, a 400-year-old temple in Bargarh, a city in the Indian state of Odisha, has an archive of over 250 ancient Odia manuscripts that date back to the sixteenth century. These palm leaf manuscripts include Mahabharata, Ramayana, Skanda Purana, and the history of the temple, all in Odia.

Many of the manuscripts from the collection are at risk of erosion. The temple administration and trust have preserved the manuscripts with available preservation techniques. The preservation started a couple of years back when the student volunteers of different colleges of Bhatli, a nearby town, helped the temple administration identify manuscripts in dire need of preservation.

The Odia Wikimedia community is planning to collaborate with the temple administration to organize a three-day-long digitization camp for the students of two colleges in Bhatli. Participating students will be informed about Wikisource and the digitization process and some of the temple manuscripts will be digitized during this camp. After scanning the manuscripts, the Odia Wikimedia community will help the students upload, digitize and proofread the manuscripts on Odia Wikisource.

Digitizing books in the Utkal University library

Utkal University is one of the oldest universities in Odisha and the 17th oldest university in India. The central library of Utkal University, named after its first Vice Chancellor, Professor Prana Krushna Parija, hosts many old rare books and manuscripts. The library was set up in 1946 in Cuttack, and was then transferred to the Utkal University campus in Bhubaneswar in 1962. Odia Wikimedians are working closely with the university to set up a structure where the Wikimedians in Bhubaneswar (WikiTungi participants) will be involved in the scanning process. This collaboration with the university will enable the Wikimedians to use the public domain books for Wikisource where the university will host the e-books on their website.

Kathabhidhana

Kathabhidhana is a community-led project to record the pronunciation of words and upload them under open licenses to be used on projects like Wiktionary. The project is led by Odia Wikimedian Subhashish Panigrahi, drawing its inspiration largely from open-source software created by Wikimedian Shrinivasan T. The source code of the software used for Kathabhidhana is written in Python and over 1,200 audio recordings have been conducted so far using the tool.

Odia Wikimedian Prateek Pattanaik is developing workflow software using a proprietary iOS-based app that can record about 5 words per minute using an iPad or iPhone to facilitate contribution to the project. More than 1,000 recordings have been added to Odia Wiktionary so far. Odia Wiktionary, which usually lacks notable contributions, has undergone some great activity by Shitikantha Dash, a sysop of the project. The project hosts over 100,000 words, mostly from Bhashakosha, a public domain lexicon digitized by nonprofit Srujanika.

Subhashish Panigrahi
Bikash Ojha
Prateek Pattanaik
Sailesh Patnaik
Chinmayee Mishra
Odia Wikimedians

In brief

Deadline for Wikimania submissions extended: Submissions for Wikimania, the annual conference of the Wikimania movement which will be held this year in Montreal, Canada, has been extended. Proposals for presentations, (lectures, workshops, roundtables and tutorials) will be accepted until 10 April, 2017 while the proposals for lightning talks, posters and birds of a feather will be accepted until May 15, 2017. More information and submitting applications on Wikimania 2017 wiki.

Wikimedia Tunisia holds their first annual meetup: Wikimedia Tunisia user group has held a meetup for the user group members. Participants were informed about event planning, grantmaking, Wikimedia affiliations, and the next strategy for the user group. More information about the meetup can be found on Meta, and photos from the event can be found on Commons.

Fourth edition of WikiMed courses wraps up at Tel Aviv University: The Wikipedia Education Program course that started in 2013 at Tel Aviv University, has celebrated its fourth edition last January. The course has presented over 200 new articles to the Hebrew Wikipedia so far. Shani Evenstein, the Wikipedia Education Program leader in Israel wrote a post on This Month In Education newsletter about the organizer motivations and the program objectives.

Wikimedia Germany publishes 2016 impact report: Wikimedia Germany (Deutschland), the independent chapter supporting the Wikimedia movement in Germany has published their impact report for 2016. The report drops shade on the learnings and experiences from the last year with special coverage to the projects supported by the chapter. More information on Wikimedia-l.

New filters for edit review beta filter release: This week, the New filters for edit review beta option will be released on the Portuguese and Polish Wikipedias, and also on Mediawiki. The beta option adds an improved filtering interface and powerful filtering and other tools to the “recent changes” and “recent changes linked” pages. More information on Wikimedia-l.

Amical Wikimedia share their partner survey results: Amical Wikimedia, the independent thematic organization that supports Wikimedia in the Catalan-speaking region, has shared the results of a survey they conducted on over 100 of their partners to see what they think of their work with the Wikimedia movement. The survey result report is available on the Amical Wikimedia website.

Compiled and edited by Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

I really like Magnus Manske’s WikiShootMe tool. It visualises Wikidata items, Commons photos and Wikipedia articles on an OpenStreetMap. Wikidata items are shown as red if they have no photo and green if they do have one. For the past few months, I’ve been spending my lunch hours walking around the area near the Wikimedia UK offices, trying to turn red data points into green ones.

The biggest concentration of data items near our office was in Bunhill Fields, a famous cemetery just outside the old city walls of London. It opened in the 17th century, and had over 100,000 people buried there before it closed in the middle of the 19th century. Because of its location, it became a home for many nonconformist Christians, especially Methodists, as it is just over the road from the the Methodist Chapel of John Wesley. Daniel Defoe, William Blake and John Bunyan are buried there, along with Wesley’s mother Susanna.

Bunhill fields is a beautiful place to walk through, and now, thanks to the linked data I’ve attached to the Wikidata items for the listed graves in the cemetery, you can view images of all of the graves to identify which one is which as you walk around the site. I’ve also created a hyperlapse video showing a walk around the cemetery which is CC licensed.

Most of the gravesites are enclosed, but I could take photos of many of the graves from the paths, and on some days, groups of volunteer gardeners manage the enclosures, and are happy to let you enter to take photos. The park attendant was also very helpful, and let me look at his book showing the locations of graves whose inscriptions had become illegible, which helped to identify many of them.

Eventually, I ticked all the graves off the list, and I have to say that it was quite fun and satisfying. I’ve always felt that there is an underlying element of gamification within the Wikimedia projects. People take pride in having lots of edits or uploads, completing tasks and being the person who started particular articles. If these elements could be made more satisfying within the overall user experience of editing Wikimedia projects, it could encourage many more editors to participate.

In May, there are two hackathons taking place for developers working on Wikimedia projects in Prague and Vienna, and there will be a particular focus on the Wikimedia Commons Uploader, an android app that will make uploading easier. Currently, the web browser is a pain to use, and you can only upload 50 photos at a time. With millions of people in the developing world becoming connected to the internet through their mobiles, we need to improve the user experience for the projects, especially on mobile phones.

Imagine a Pokemon style application which took you on a walking tour of you nearby location, pointing out historical heritage and showing you the geolocated data that exists and encouraging you to fill in the gaps, taking photos or adding descriptions or other fields. Rewarding the editors with points for valuable edits and uploads could make the whole experience much more enjoyable and encourage people to edit who would never normally consider it.

We have a long way to go in developing our open source community, but there are exciting possibilities ahead as our movement evolves to meet new challenges and fix old problems.

____________________________________________________________________________

If you’re interested to get involved and learn more about Wikidata and how it works, you can sign up here to attend our Wikidata hackathon on Saturday April 8 at the Wikimedia UK offices near Old Street.

The new adventure I was mentioning few days ago is the Design Research Lab, a joint initiative of University of Trento, Confindustria, Art Institute Artigianelli and Bruno Kessler Foundation.

We are currently recruiting and now there are 3 open positions as research fellow in the Design Research Lab. The duration of the contract is for 12 months. The gross amount is 19.668 euros.
All the details are in the call.
The broad goals of the Design Research Lab (and the tasks of the research fellows) are to effectively promote in public and private organizations the culture of services and their design as levers of product creation and central factors of local development.

The deadline for applying is 12 April 2017 (hurry up!)
Feel free to ask me any question. We might end up working together ;)

Photo by Zachary McCune, CC BY-SA 4.0.

For nearly 16 years, Wikipedians have been presenting the facts. Now, we are proud to release our ninth annual report, which focuses on that important work.

As a way into our communities and our work, we offer 10 facts. They are introductions to stories about Wikimedians who document climate change, increase the number of women’s biographies, offer language and learning to refugees, or add new languages to Wikipedia.

We care about facts. Contributors work hard to systematically source and review them. Readers return to our projects to find and share them. Donors stand up to support and expand access to them. At the Wikimedia Foundation, it’s our job to backup the people who backup the facts.

Fact: Wikipedia is updated nearly 350 times a minute.

Those updates are offered by thousands of volunteers writing in over 280 languages. This year, 70,000 volunteers added 5 million articles to Wikipedia, and more than 1 billion devices visited our sites—every month—to read them. We measure our impact based on the communities of knowledge we support, and the ways the world uses Wikimedia’s free knowledge projects to learn.

Fact: Most Wikipedia articles are in a language other than English.

Indeed, we have encyclopedias active in 23 languages in India alone. The vitality of these communities is supported by volunteers, Foundation staff, developers, donors, and advocates for free knowledge everywhere. An estimated 239 million people used the internet for the first time in 2016, and we intend to meet their needs by asking how they learn and what they need.

There is always more to do. Just 17% of English Wikipedia biographies are about women. We think that number should be much higher. So we are supporting and celebrating Wikimedians who want to change the ratio.

Fact: Half of refugees are school-aged.

That means more than 10 million would-be students are away from their homes, families, and places of learning. We believe that learning is a lifelong pursuit, so we look for ways to bring our free knowledge across boundaries. This year, German Wikimedians collaborated to translate phrasebooks for refugees so that newcomers to European countries could ask for the help they need.

About the theme

We chose the theme “facts matter” in early October 2016 as a way to remind the world how Wikipedia works and why our movement matters. By that time, the state of fact-based information had become a highly-discussed topic internationally. We received questions from the media about how and why Wikipedia was able to avoid the fake news phenomenon, while many other companies had become amplifiers. We heard from donors about the importance of Wikipedia in a world where verifiable information is not promised. We saw, as always, an unwavering commitment from volunteer community members to presenting and verifying the facts.

When we launched the site, we received feedback from many voices in our community. There were thoughts and concerns, change requests and ideas to improve the report. It was a complex and detailed conversation and we updated the report in places to reflect this feedback

Facts are vital. Facts help us understand our world. Our contributors take pride in systematically sourcing and evaluating facts so that the world of knowledge grows, and curious readers can find original sources.

We are proud to support them.

Zack McCune, Global Audience Manager
Heather Walls, Interim Chief of Communications
Wikimedia Foundation

Environmental history is one of the most rapidly growing academic fields. The number of history departments employing an environmental historian has grown from just 4.3% in 1975 to 45% in 2015. The field focuses on the ways humans have shaped and have been shaped by their environment. With recent events like those in Standing Rock and Flint, and the trend among local government planners to replace “climate change” with “resilience” in policy documents, this relationship between humans and our environment is as important as ever to study and understand.

But it’s not just important for academics to study and understand these issues. It’s also imperative that the general public become aware and informed as well. That’s why Wiki Ed is so excited to be attending this year’s American Society of Environmental History conference. The theme for this year, “Winds of Change: Global Connections across Space, Time, and Nature”, emphasizes points that Wikipedians, and we here at Wiki Ed, know well: that knowledge and understanding can change and transform, and that when it does, it’s important to adapt and to click that “edit” button.

During the conference I’ll be in the exhibit hall talking to interested university instructors about the many opportunities that a Wikipedia assignment can bring to their classrooms. From research engagement to critical thinking, to science communication and other skills, we think that what students learn while working to improve Wikipedia is crucial to their ability to become informed citizens. If you’re in Chicago next week attending the ASEH conference, I hope you’ll come by the booth. And if you or any other instructors you know are interested in learning more about Wikipedia assignments, visit teach.wikiedu.org or reach out at samantha@wikiedu.org – I’d love to chat!

Exhibit Hall Hours

• Wednesday, March 29: 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm (Opening Reception)
• Thursday, March 30: 8:00 am – 5:00 pm
• Friday, March 31: 8:00 am – 12:00 noon
• Saturday, April 1: 8:00 am – 2:00 pm

Photo by Elsie Wright, public domain in the United States.

One hundred years ago, two young cousins took a camera down to a stream in northern England and came back with a controversy that lingered almost magically in the air for decades. Five photographs taken by the girls appeared to show them engaging with fairies, the mythical small, graceful female creatures with wings.

This might seem like a prank that—no matter how well-executed—would be only briefly considered before being decisively and permanently dismissed. Not in this case. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the most popular authors of his (or any other) time due to his detective Sherlock Holmes, wrote about the fairies: “The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life.”  Experts examined the photos and toured the site. (One clairvoyant who visited the scene “saw them [fairies] everywhere”.) The world, it seemed, wanted to know more.

Photo by Elsie Wright, public domain in the United States.

Media including the British Broadcasting Corp. interviewed the photographer cousins, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Eighty years after the girls’ photo shoot, two movies were made about the events, and they were not cheap productions: one featured Harvey Keitel and Peter O’Toole, and another Ben Kingsley.

Why did the Cottingley Fairies photos—which were actually of cardboard cutouts—impress so mightily? The relatively recent novelty of photography fueled curiosity, according to the Wikipedia article about the photos. Doyle consulted experts at Kodak, which helped to popularize photography when it introduced the Brownie box camera in 1900. The photos were enhanced and transported around the United Kingdom by their admirers on lecture tours. “Spirit photography” was becoming a fad, and Doyle posed for a double-exposure photo with a supposed ghost in 1922. (Doyle’s friend and later foe, Harry Houdini, mocked the fad and created a photo of himself with the supposed ghost of Abraham Lincoln as part of his debunking of spiritualism.)

Photo by Elsie Wright, public domain in the United States.

In 1983, 66 years after their prank went viral, Elsie and Frances admitted they copied illustrations of dancing girls from a  children’s book and drew wings on them. They posed with the cardboard cutouts, producing the fairy effect.

But even then Frances insisted that one of the photos—which shows only misty images of the fairy figures without the girls—was real. “It was a wet Saturday afternoon and we were just mooching about with our cameras and Elsie had nothing prepared. I saw these fairies building up in the grasses and just aimed the camera and took a photograph.”

Elsie at times said the fairy figures were figments of her imagination that was able to photograph. The photographers themselves had a hard time letting go of the fairies, despite some discomfort that came with their faked photos fame.

In 1985 Elsie said that she and Frances were too embarrassed to admit the truth after fooling Doyle. “Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle—well, we could only keep quiet.” In the same interview Frances said: “I never even thought of it as being a fraud—it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in—they wanted to be taken in.”

Jeff Elder, Digital Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

Very interesting conversation with Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb. I share some insights I got by watching the 2013 video.

• First insight: they were 3 founders in California with a stagnating company (Airbnb), they could have kept staying in their office trying to improve the site, write more software code and instead what did they do? Realising that apartments in New York all had horrible photos, they took a flight (from California to New York!), rented a camera, knock on doors of Airbnb users in New York, took better photos of their apartments and replace them on the site. As Joe says in the interview, “for the first year, we sat behind our computer screens trying to code our way through problems”, instead going to meet their users is one of the pillars of design thinking, its very human-centred focus. Just after this intervention, revenues which were stagnating at 200 dollars per week went up to 400 dollars per week. Near the end, Joe says “if you ever want to understand your product, go stay in the home of your customer” (well, this applies only to Airbnb … and maybe also to Couchsurfing ;)
• Actually the previous suggestion was given to Airbnb founder by Paul Graham (of Ycombinator, I loved his “hackers and painters” essay!) which suggested it’s okay to do things that don’t scale. What is the meaning? I think it’s again about being very human-centred, going out of the building, develop empathy with specific persons and really understand him/her. So that you can make improvements that really satisfy real needs (of at least one real person!). Scaling to millions of persons will come later, if needed.
• Another suggestion by Paul Graham was go meet the people which again is the very human-centred side of design thinking. The interviewer asks “what if your company is not for < go out and meet people?> and Joe replies “well, be pirate”, a sort of “do it anyway” but then I asked my self how do you get it accepted? This reminded me of the pragmatic book Undercover User Experience Design.
• And what can the employee bring back from this “go out and meet people” to the company? Joe replies “visible, tactical, tangible insight that came from somebody is consuming your product or your service”
• Joe suggests to become the patient (of your service/product). For example, every new employee at Airbnb, during the first week, makes a trip (using Airbnb of course), document it and share insights with his/her new department. Wow!
• Joe also cites the stars vs heart icons story: when you start as new employee at Airbnb, you ship (a new small feature, something) on day one, so that new employees can experience shipping on day one. A newly hired designer was given the task of looking at the star functionality (an icon you click in order to save a listing you find interesting). After few hours he or she comes back with something like “I think the stars are the kinds of things you see in utility-driven experiences. Instead Airbnb is so aspirational. Why don’t we tap into that? I’m going to change that to a heart.” And Joe “Wow, okay. It’s interesting” and they just shipped the new feature, to the entire userbase (not a/b testing or just shipping it to 10% of the users)! They also added some code in it in order to track it and see how behavior change. And the next day they checked the data and the engagement with the icon increased by over 30%, that simple change from a star to a heart increased engagement by over 30%! In short, let people be pirates, ship stuff and try new things.

Photo by Zack McCune, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Alangi Derick comes from Buea, Cameroon. He joined the Wikimedia movement to develop his skills in coding, and was quickly hooked by the movement’s values and its community culture, eventually becoming a staunch advocate for it in his university.

As a computer science student at the time, he joined the movement a year and a half ago, and his work booked him a place at the 2016 Google Summer of Code as one of the Wikimedia Foundation’s students. Derick passed the program, helped mentor teenage participants in Google Code-in for two consecutive years, and has helped fix bugs in the MediaWiki software. He is now trying to pass this experience onto other potential contributors in his country.

In 2015, Derick was looking for an extracurricular activity where he could practice and boost his coding skills. That’s when he learned about the Wikimedia Foundation projects and their participation in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), an annual project where students spend the summer working on a free open-source project of their choice mentored by one of the participating organizations.

“I felt like I was lagging behind and wanted to explore a little bit by working on a project that will be used by millions of people,” Derick said. “With this idea in mind, I searched for open source organizations with active projects and a strong community that would be willing to help me out if I faced problems. I found that the Wikimedia Foundation and its MediaWiki project perfectly matched my skill set, so I decided to join them.”

Every year, students who wish to join GSoC can apply to participating organizations proposing a new project idea or claiming one of their ready-to-pick-up tasks. When their project is approved, they spend a whole month learning about and integrating into the community they will be working with. Starting in June, students start working on their coding projects and are mentored by the participating organization and its community.

To prepare for the GSoC, Derick talked to Wikimedia developers on their IRC channel, where they directed him to areas of need that he could work on. In a few months, Derick was able to create over 25 patches (codes that fix bugs in software) on the MediaWiki code base and its extensions.

Derick has been one of the six students to complete the program in his GSoC round and was the first African GSoC student for Wikimedia.

In addition to GSoC, and even prior to joining it, Derick was a mentor to Google Code-In Wikimedia participants in 2015 and 2016. Participants in Google Code-In are pre-university students aged 13 to 17, who are introduced to the world of free and open-source coding as they practice on very small coding tasks. Like in the GSoC, participants in the Google Code-in are mentored by the participating community members.

“I wanted to share what I learned,” Derick explained. “I found myself trying to build a Wikimedia community in Cameroon, but there was an active group supporting the activities there already. The group helps both writers and developers.”

Last January, Derick attended WikiIndaba, the regional conference of Wikipedians from the African region. The conference was another opportunity to share his thoughts on “contributing to open-source communities,” learning about “capacity building, Wikimedia grants, improving Wikipedia’s content,” and many other topics.

For the future, Derick is planning to expand his efforts to support the Wikimedia movement and its community in his country.

“Wikimedia’s goal is to make knowledge free to everyone, and this is what I want to do in my community,” he said. “I’m trying to get the knowledge to people free of charge, and this allowed me to work on software that proliferates free content.”

Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

• English Wikipedia - All articles about someone who is known as an author of any kind gets the template.
• Wikidata - For all the items for someone who is known as an author of any kind we seek the VIAF identifier.
• OCLC - All the libraries in the world will be updated with a link to Wikidata within a month. This will make it easy for a librarian to find Wikipedia articles in any language.
• Open Archive - It has a project called "Open Library" and it has freely licensed e-books. Wikidata includes Open Library identifiers. OCLC and OL have links combined with Wikidata identifiers. As these numbers include, people in libraries or from Wikipedia could find authors with free books.
• other Wikipedias - they could include VIAF and OL identifiers as well. Open Library has books in languages other than English..

Musical event at Dar Lasram, Medina of Tunis. Photo by TAKOUTI, CC BY-SA 4.0.

MedinaPedia is a project in Tunisia that aims at documenting the monuments of Tunis’ ancient city center on Wikipedia. Their passion for that historical part of their country encouraged the participants to add over 400 articles to Wikipedia in five languages over the past three years. The organizing group is currently planning to extend their efforts to include other cities and towns in Tunisia.

The idea of MedinaPedia started at Carthagina, a local movement concerned with preserving the heritage of Tunisia, in 2014. Three Wikimedians (Émna Mizouni, Yamen Bousrih and Brahim Bouganmi) had a vision and took the lead on making it a reality. In 2015, Carthagina partnered with The Association of Preservation of the Medina of Tunis (ASM Tunis) to start the project.

At that time, MedinaPedia planned to document 150 selected historical monuments in the Medina of Tunis, the city’s ancient core, for people to have easy access to information about them. The Medina of Tunis is a particularly apt place to start; Wikipedia states that “it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979 … [containing] some 700 monuments, including palaces, mosques, mausoleums, madrasas and fountains dating from the Almohad and the Hafsid periods.”

The first part of the MedinaPedia project was to write articles about these monuments on Wikipedia. The second, called QRpedia, was to attach QR codes to the monuments so that tourists and locals could easily access the articles.

The project was kicked off in September 2015 with a group of motivated volunteers who had been selected through an open application process. They were students from different fields, young doctors and engineers who all had one thing in common: curiosity and passion for the Medina.

We met on the first Sunday of every month in Dar Lasram, the office of our partner: ASM Tunis. We would discuss what we had achieved in the previous month, write some more articles, and make plans for the following month.

Throughout the year, we had a lot of help from our partners in Wikimedia Tunisia Yassine, Mounir, and Wael, who guided us through the process of writing, editing, and publishing the articles on Wikipedia. Jamel Ben Saidane (Wild Tunis) helped us with anything related to the Medina.

The first workshops were very interesting for us. We left each one having learned something new about the Medina and the world of Wikimedia. However, as time went on, knowledge and discovery were not the only things we looked forward to from our workshops. We wanted to see each other. The strictly professional environment turned into a monthly reunion of friends.

Brahim, the project coordinator and one of the authors of this post, kept track of what we achieved at the end of every set of workshops. On the one hand, he was aware of the large amount of articles we would write, translate, or edit within a certain timeframe. On the other hand, he (like every member of the team) was so busy planning meetings, writing more articles, and setting the next steps that none of us realized the amount of work we had done until the first part of the project came to end.

Our goal at the beginning was to cover about 150 monuments. We thought it was a long shot but we were hopeful nonetheless. Now, as the project is coming to an end, we are proud to say that our team has written over 400 articles in 5 languages. According to the team members, Yamen Bousrih and Sami Mlouhi who counted the results, we have uploaded over 5000 pictures so far on Wikimedia Commons. More than half of the articles that were created in French about Tunisia in 2016 were written by MedinaPedia members. Moreover, we are going to attach the first set of QRpedia codes by the end of April.

Even though we have not reached the end of the MedinaPedia Tunis project, we have already started expanding to other cities and towns. By the end of February we held the first workshop of MedinaPedia BeniKhalled, in partnership with ASM Beni Khalled, and now we are getting ready to start MedinaPedia Sfax. This is just the beginning as we are planning to cover other places across the country.

We hope that what used to be a small project in the beginning will inspire people to start a series of successful global projects.

Youssef Ben Haj Yahia, member
Brahim Bouganmi, coordinator
MedinaPedia project of Wikimedia Tunisie user group

———

Three years of weekly editathons

Photo by Hannibal, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In 2014, a small group of Swedish Wikipedians started holding weekly editathons in Gothenburg, Sweden. There are many other Wikimedia meetups and regular editathons around the world, but this group has been at it each week for over three years.

Litteraturhuset (The House of Literature) in Gothenburg, is where the Wikipedians gather every week for a simple but fun program: Participants meet, edit Wikipedia articles, and have some coffee.

We have met nearly 150 times, edited several hundred articles about female authors and literary figures, and improved the quality of 20 of these articles, two of which became featured articles, the highest quality level determined by the Wikipedia community. The editathons attracted great female participation, which inspired male Wikipedians to edit female profiles on Wikipedia.

Some of the participants shared their thoughts about this experience:

• “Thanks to the editathons, I’ve become bolder in writing long entries and creating my first article! It was a good opportunity for me to keep editing Wikipedia along with other nice and interesting people.”
• “I always had a good time when I was there. Everyone is helpful and pleasant. I’ve learned so much more than before attending the weekly editathons.”
• “I came into contact with the Wikimedia group during the Gothenburg Book Fair in 2016. I got help writing an article about my father, Viktor Tesser (an artist). Since then, I’ve written about a science fiction trilogy, expanded the definition section of the article about families, and now I’m writing an article about a female scientist who’s researching girls with autism. We talked about symbols, female warriors, the early photographs, manga artists, ghost nets, famous female TV personalities, manors in the Bohuslän area, and much more.”

Different media outlets featured the project and the small group behind it, which encouraged other Wikipedians to host a similar activity. Over the past three years, a few other regular editathons have cropped up in Stockholm, Jönköping, and another one has recently started in Gothenburg.

We are not done yet

In 2016, two organizers of the weekly editathons hosted a Wikipedia camp. Inspired by the Armenian Wikicamps, the Swedish camp helped increase female participation on the Swedish Wikipedia as the newcomers were all women. They were invited by Wikimedia Sweden (Sverige) to attend a free week at a folk high school. The new participants continued editing for long time after the event.

The impact of our 2016 camp encouraged us to host a new one in 2017. Applications for the new camp are now open. More information about the camp is available on the Swedish Wikipedia and photos from the camp can be found on Commons.

In the meantime, the weekly editathons are being held on a regular weekly basis and new people join this effort every time. One of our participants comments on this saying:

“For me, the editathons are now a weekly habit, with nice people, interesting discoveries and much to learn. What started with the goal of “20 recommended articles” has grown to much more. We meet new faces nearly every week. We had annual meetings with the Swedish Wikimedia chapter and celebrated Wikipedia’s 15th anniversary, organized the Gothenburg Book Fair and wikicamps, made plans for International Women’s Day, and some attendees joined us from Svenshögen (quite far for weekly trips) as well as British Columbia. Our group doesn’t consist of females only and we don’t only write about women, but a clear focus has its own value. Our Tuesdays at Litteraturhuset are probably like Wikipedia—not perfect, but fantastic.”

Photos from the weekly editathons are available on Wikimedia Commons.

Lennart Guldbrandsson, Swedish Wikipedian

In brief

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Ghana user group.

Art + feminism workshop in Ghana: Last weekend, Wikimedia Ghana user group hosted an Art + feminism workshop in Accra Ghana where the participants edited African women profiles on Wikipedia. Photos from the event on their Facebook page.

2016 picture of the year competition is now open: Hundreds of images that have been rated Featured Pictures by the international Wikimedia Commons community will run for 2016’s picture of the year competition. Two rounds of voting will be held: In the first round, users can vote for as many images as they want. The first round category winners and the top ten overall will then make it to the final. In the final round, each voter needs to pick one image only. The image with highest votes becomes the picture of the year. More about the competition and voting are on Wikimedia Commons.

Workshop on fake news and new journalism by Amical Wikimedia: Amical Wikimedia, the independent thematic organization supporting Wikimedia in the Catalan-speaking countries, is holding a workshop on new journalism. The workshop will be held between 15 and 30 May 2017, where the journalist participants will be informed about the human rights related to access to information, how to maintain and encourage critical thinking, and more. The workshop will be organized in collaboration with Faber, the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities residency of Catalonia in Olot. More information and how to apply on Faber’s website.

Hindi Wikipedia presentation at Rashtriya Sangoshthi: The Bhabha Atomic Research Center, Mumbai (BARC) and the directorate of culture and archaeology in the governorate of Chhattisgarh, India organized a presentation at the Rashtriya Sangoshthi (national event) to share their editing experience with the event attendees.

WikiJournal user group getting ready for piloting a new platform: WikiJournal is an idea for an open peer-reviewed academic journal where the participants can publish research, peer-reviewed Wikipedia articles (such as the featured articles), etc with the main author’s name. The organizers are now getting ready for their website pilot. More about WikiJournal on Wikimedia-l.

The Netherlands and the world exchange platform kicks off: Wikimedia Netherlands, the independent chapter supporting Wikimedia in the Netherlands, has launched this platform to encourage global use of Dutch collections on non-European cultural heritage. The platform will particularly encourage sharing collections from countries with historical ties with the Netherlands including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Brazil, Ghana, Suriname, South Africa, and others. More about the new website on Wikimedia-l.

Bay Area WikiSalon meets next week: San Francisco Bay Area’s WikiSalon will be held on Wednesday 29 March at 6 PM local time. The meetup will be held at Noisebridge makerspace/hackerspace followed by guided tours of Noisebridge. More about the event on Wikipedia.

Conflict of interest confusion on the English Wikipedia: A request for comment on the future of the conflict of interest policy and investigations related to it is ongoing on the English Wikipedia after an attempted close, which would have established “a task force of trusted editors to act as referees in matters related to conflict of interest and outing,” was reversed.

Compiled and edited by Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia genealogy project now has a mailing list.

Photo by ArielGlenn, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The 2017 Wikimedia Developer Summit took place on January 9–11 at the Golden Gate Club in San Francisco, California. Coordinated with support from the organization team, around 179 participants from 30 countries participated in the summit, out of which 29% were from outside of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The summit provides a platform to developers both volunteer contributors and staff members to meet and have conversations around projects and technologies supporting the Wikimedia movement. Developers come together to gather feedback on current approaches from the technical community and have an in-depth discussion on problems that are technically challenging, and identifying practical solutions for them. The overall goal of this meetup was to push the evolution of technologies that falls under the umbrella of Wikimedia, thereby addressing the high-level needs of the movement.

The program consisted of two days of pre-scheduled and unconference sessions, and an unscheduled day for people to self-organize and get stuff done for their projects. At this year’s event, some of the topics focused on were planning for the Community Wishlist 2016 top results, brainstorming ideas to managing our technical debt and growing our developer community. The highlight was the keynote from Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the wiki, titled: “Has our success made it hard to see your own contribution?”

Photo by Ckoerner, CC BY-SA 4.0.

There was a Questions & Answers (Q&A) session about Wikimedia Foundation’s Technology and Product department, with Victoria Coleman (Chief Technology Officer) and Wes Moran (now-former Vice President of Product). For the Q&A, 40 questions were collected before the event that got a total of 1840 votes. In parallel to the pre-scheduled sessions, there were unconference tracks for which participants were invited to submit topics on the fly on a physical wall using sticky-notes.

For each session, there were 1 or 2 note-takers(s) collaboratively taking notes, moving them onto a Wiki page, and copying the action items into the Wikimedia’s Phabricator later. Some selected sessions were streamed live for remote participants who also joined the discussion via IRC. The full program schedule was updated all throughout the event by organizers, participants, and session hosts!

On the third day of the summit, which had a pretty flexible agenda, participants got some stuff done: programming, project-planning, and meetings! This day was utilized for making concrete plans on the topics that emerged from the day 1 and 2 of the summit. Folks spent the day writing code with people who they normally communicate with online, getting their code reviewed by peers present in the room, and submitting patches for ideas that were brought up in their session. There was a project showcase at the end, in which some participants demoed the projects they built and shared the action items for which they took responsibility. Ward Cunningham exhibited a plugin that he developed for tabular data and presented it being fetched on the federated wiki. The full showcase is available on Commons.

Photo by Ckoerner, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Besides three full days of productive discussions with actionable items on various topics, one immediate outcome from an unconference session lead by Gergő Tisza, was the announcement of the Developer Wishlist Survey at the summit. The Developer Wishlist is an effort to seek input from developers for developers, to create a high-profile list of desired improvements for MediaWiki platform, Wikimedia server infrastructure, contribution process, documentation, etc. The survey was concluded in February with 76 proposals that received a total of 952 votes from 144 editors. The proposals that received most votes are are now ready to be promoted to our volunteer developers, teams within the foundation, and through our various outreach and hackathon events.

The exploration has begun for investigating potential directions for addressing questions that were brought up in the Q&A session with Victoria and Wes. Hopefully, there will be more tangible updates to share from this discussion in a few months from now. A feedback survey was conducted for both in-person and remote participants, results of which are summarized on Mediawiki.org. One of the participants said “Keep doing this, if you can, for it opens up possibilities that would not otherwise be open.”

It is a great boost for the developer community that events like these provide a space for long-term contributors to meet with each other and reflect on their collaborations.

Srishti Sethi, Developer Advocate, Technical Collaboration team
Wikimedia Foundation

Our next developer event is the Wikimedia Hackathon, held from May 19–21, 2017, in Austria. If you’re interested in attending, please register on Mediawiki.org.

14/03/2017-20/03/2017

Mapping

• The Costa Rican community photomapped the trails in the natural forest reserve of Bosque del Niño in Poás volcano.
• The Mexican OSM community proposes the use of the hashtag #CallesVioletas to visualize and map the public spaces. This is done by using an inclusive methodology that empowers citizens by generating participatory data from georeferenced photos.
• User kreuzschnabel asks (automatic translation) in the German user forum how to tag scenery frames.
• Christoph Hormann cleans up defective multi-polygons and data garbage in the Antarctica region. He wonders why there are so many nodes created with the iD editor.
• In his draft proposal, user dieterdreist suggests that the key emergency be supplemented by the collection of “dry riser inlet”.
• Ever wondered why OSM hasn’t adopted a review procedure yet? Read the discussion on responding to vandalism thread in the Talk mailing list. Proponents and opponents share their thoughts.
• The proposal for drying rooms for sports equipment is under way and Thilo Haug asks for comments.
• Yuri Astrakhan suggests some features for editors to improve the usage of tags.
• Tod Fitch thinks that the direction=* tag is used for too many unrelated conventions. The mailing list Tagging discussed some of them.
• Charlie Loyd from Mapbox, writes a blog about the high-resolution images that are made available in India and can be used for mapping.

Community

• User mueschel has published the visualisation service OSM Destination Signs, for relations of type destination_sign. See also the discussion (automatic translation) at the German forum.
• Phase 2 of the School of Free Geomatics has just been launched at Benin with a lot of reuse of the OpenStreetMap data.

Imports

• An import of trees in the West Midlands of England that has mostly ignored the import guidelines has sparked some difficult discussions – some highly respected members of the GB community spoke up against it.
• There was a discussion about Facebook’s proposed import (based on automatically recognising streets) on the “import” mailing list. It also continues to be discussed on the Thai forum.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The minutes of the board meeting held on 21 February 2017 were published in the wiki of the Foundation. There was a discussion about the transparency of the Data Working Group among other working groups, the necessary profit from SotM and furthermore, the status of the Corporate Membership was presented.

Events

• Simon Poole invites to the Annual General Meeting of the Swiss OpenStreetMap Association followed by a Mapping Party. This takes place on Saturday, April 8th at the University of Fribourg.
• The enrollments for SotM France from 2nd to 4th June in Avignon are open.

Humanitarian OSM

• On the HOT mailing list, Johnattan Rupire asks for help in dealing with the flood disaster in Peru which caused many casualties. This wiki page was created for more information.Here the recent tasks to work on:
  • #2701 – Peru Flood Support 5: Pampa Pacta, Punta Hermosa
  • #2677 – Peru Flood Support 2: Cayma
  • #2679 – Peru Flood Support 4: Huarmey
• Johnattan Rupire (@johnarupire) publishes an article in his blog about the importance of open data and participatory collaboration to save lives in time of emergencies and disasters.
• Jochen Topf asks on the HOT mailing list for support in the repair of defective multi-polygons. Background and tools can be found in his website. The current status can be seen here.
• Violaine from CartONG requests participation in a survey.
• In Belgium you are invited to the second National Mapathon next Saturday, 25th of March, which will be organised at 8 different university campuses simultaneously. “More than 200 mappers will be trained by OpenStreetMap Belgium volunteers to work on MSF/Missing Maps tasks”, says Joost Schouppe.
• Pjstewart1984 describes in his blog, how the results from MapSwipe can be used in OSM Tasking Manager.
• HOT is hiring a part-time developer for the OpenAerialMap project.

Maps

• [1] The “Neue Westfälische” presents a new city map of Bielefeld. This map is based on OSM, cadastral and other sources. It is to be further expanded.
• Frikart.no offers Garmin Maps with different Norwegian map styles.

Open Data

• Christian Quest reported that the RTE (the French electricity network operator) published all network data (overground 45 kV to 400 kV, Underground, etc.) and declared it as open data.

Licences

• Update: There is now an official common statement by The OpenStreetMap Foundation and Creative Commons for the compatibility of the CC-BY 4.0 with OSM. If you want to use sources that are under the CC-BY 4.0, you must obtain a waiver from the data provider as to 1) DRM restrictions and 2) format of attribution. Here’s a link to a template waiver form, as well as a link to template waiver forms for CC BY 2.0 and 3.0 data sources.

Programming

• Ilya Zverev proposed a pull request that allows OSM users to communicate their email address to external programs via OSM verification.
• Michael Spreng tests a new routing frontend at the swiss server. He asks for feedback.
• Frederik Ramm suggests in the Geofabrik blog, what to do if osm2pgsql crashed on your servers due to the huge collective relation uploaded in Brazil a few days ago. (Reported in our last issue)
• Mapbox checks the instructions of the navigation software OSRM. They use a tool that translates ASCII art of an intersection to a valid OpenStreetMap extract, then pushes the data for that scenario through the entire engine to make sure it behaves correctly.
• Rob H. Warren is looking for volunteers regularly fetching planet dumps of OpenHistoricalMap as a backup.
• Naoliv will distribute gifts to anyone who writes a notification tool, that will notify when there is a change in street name in a particular area.

Releases

Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist.

(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.

Did you know …

• … the possibility to access the David Rumsey Map Collection via Luna Browser with more than 75,000 historical maps?
• … Map Compare?
• … Maps on the Web?
• … the Android app StreetComplete? It allows you to easily find and add missing data in your environment.

Other “geo” things

• A collection of community created maps of India sourced from different government websites is freely available to all Indians.
• Boston schools ditch Mercator-based maps for Gall-Peters. (via TeachOSM). The world maps of Arno Peters provide a true to the surface projection and the distortions of the Mercator projection are avoided.
• An article about Arun Ganesh’s involvement in Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Passau	FOSSGIS 2017	22/03/2017-25/03/2017
Zaragoza	Mapping Party #Zaccesibilidad (Mapeado Colaborativo)	24/03/2017
Louvain-la-Neuve	Bar meeting	24/03/2017
Vancouver	Vancouver mappy hour	24/03/2017
Mazzano Romano	Workshop 1	24/03/2017
Ayacucho	Workshop of Mapbox Studio	25/03/2017
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen	27/03/2017
Graz	Stammtisch Graz	27/03/2017
Viersen	OSM Stammtisch Viersen	28/03/2017
Montpellier	Rencontre mensuelle	29/03/2017
Mazzano Romano	Workshop 2	31/03/2017
Kyoto	【西国街道#02】山崎蒸溜所と桜マッピングパーティ	01/04/2017
Rome	Walk4Art	01/04/2017
Rostock	Rostocker Treffen	04/04/2017
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	05/04/2017
Helsinki	Monthly Missing Maps mapathon at Finnish Red Cross HQ	06/04/2017
Dresden	Stammtisch	06/04/2017
Zaragoza	Mapeado Colaborativo	07/04/2017
Mazzano Romano	Workshop 3	07/04/2017
Fribourg	SOSM Annual General Meeting and mapping party	08/04/2017
Rennes	Atelier de découverte	09/04/2017
Avignon	State of the Map France 2017	02/06/2017-04/06/2017
Kampala	State of the Map Africa 2017	08/07/2017-10/07/2017
Curitiba	FOSS4G+SOTM Brasil 2017	27/07/2017-29/07/2017
Aizu-wakamatsu Shi	State of the Map 2017	18/08/2017-20/08/2017
Boulder	State Of The Map U.S. 2017	19/10/2017-22/10/2017
Buenos Aires	FOSS4G+SOTM Argentina 2017	23/10/2017-28/10/2017
Lima	State of the Map – LatAm 2017	29/11/2017-02/12/2017

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 appropriate.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Nakaner, Peda, Polyglot, Rogehm, SeleneYang, SomeoneElse, Spec80, SrrReal, TheFive, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia, keithonearth, kreuzschnabel, vsandre, wambacher.

Video by Victor Grigas, CC BY-SA 3.0. You can also view it on Vimeo or Youtube.

Last January, Iraqi Wikimedians held a Wikipedia meetup in Baghdad where they helped attendees understand how Wikipedia works and taught them basic editing skills. “Iraqis’ participation on Wikipedia is limited,” said Mahmoud Alrawi, one of the workshop organizers. Consequently, “there is a lack of coverage about Iraqi topics on Wikipedia.”

Alrawi and his fellows in the Iraqi Wikimedians user group wanted to share their experience on Wikipedia with new users. They used their Facebook page to invite interested followers to join the workshop. Many people from Baghdad and other places in Iraq registered to attend the workshop, but the number of interested users greatly exceeded the number of spots available in the workshop. Participants included educators, students, senior citizens, and others from different backgrounds.

“Our priority in the near future will be to follow up with those newbies who need attention,” Alrawi explained. “For example, the concept of notability was not very clear to everyone. We had to address this first. After that, we may want to hold similar workshops in other cities and towns in Iraq, so that attendees don’t need to travel far to learn about Wikipedia.”

You can get in contact with them on the Iraqi Wikimedians meta page.

Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

When students bring a critical eye to Wikipedia, comparing its available content to their course readings, academic studies, and personal experiences, they’re often surprised at what information is missing. During their assignment to research a topic and write about it on Wikipedia, they remedy that information disparity.

In Annette Nierobisz’s course on Women, Crime, and Criminal Justice at Carleton College in spring 2016, students identified missing information about criminology and the justice system, then created articles on those overlooked topics. For example, students started the article about reproductive health care for incarcerated women in the U.S.. As more women are incarcerated in the United States, prisons must develop systems to care for pregnant women and their babies. But most prisons lack the proper resources to make this necessary shift. If Americans don’t know about issues like this plaguing incarcerated women, they are less likely to prioritize criminal justice reform as a political platform. By contributing information about the subject to Wikipedia, students brought Americans a step closer to understanding the research behind the issues.

Similarly, students adding accurate, accessible, and comprehensible legal information to Wikipedia are empowering citizens to understand the legal rights that impact their everyday lives. After all, most people don’t have access to law books, and, even if they do, they lack the legal prowess and education to understand the details. Most Americans do, however, have access to Wikipedia, which can summarize case law relevant to their communities. This is the power of a public resource like Wikipedia and why we need more criminology students to make sure as many communities as possible are represented.

This week, I’m at the Academy of Criminal Justice Science‘s annual meeting in Kansas City, MO. ACJS promotes criminal justice research and education, and the attendees are the ideal collaborators to bring their expertise and students to Wikipedia. If you are attending the conference, stop by the Wiki Education booth in the exhibit hall to find out how criminology and law students are working to inform citizens about their rights and laws.

Exhibit hall hours

• Wednesday, March 22, 2017, 9:00am–5:00pm
• Thursday, March 23, 2017, 9:00am–5:00pm
• Friday, March 24, 2017, 9:00am–2:00pm

If you’re interested in joining our program, email us at contact@wikiedu.org.

Photo by LoggaWiggler, public domain/CC0.

Suppose there is an alternate reality in which you own an apartment building and your biggest worries are the security of your apartments and the well-being of goldfish, respectively.

In this reality, that of apartment building ownership without profit motive, there exists a startup, “GLDFSH,®” that allows tenants to summon others to feed their goldfish. Sometimes folks will set up a trust with GLDFSH to take care of their goldfish after they pass away.

As you care about security (even more than goldfish), if a tenant no longer inhabits one of your apartments, you change the locks as a matter of course—regardless of circumstance. There have been times (dark times) when a goldfish being cared for in trust has missed a meal because you didn’t get GLDFSH an updated copy of a key in a timely manner.

So what if you made a special GLDFSH-only key that opened all the apartments where there were goldfish?  You could keep that key under the watchful eye of a security minion 24/7/365.  That minion wouldn’t allow anyone to use the key, but would allow anyone with an active and valid GLDFSH employee ID (very secure) to enter an goldfish-containing apartment by using that single special key.

———

Keyholder, a newly open-sourced project from the Wikimedia Foundation, is a bit like that ever-watchful security minion. For us, it allows authorized developers to access remote servers using an ssh key, to which it is the only user that has access. More specifically, Keyholder is an ssh-agent proxy that allows a group of trusted users to share an SSH identity without exposing the contents of that identity’s private key.

We have been using Keyholder for several years, and we’re now releasing it as a standalone project.

Wikimedia and SSH

Secure Shell (SSH) is a cryptographic network protocol and client-server architecture that is used to provide a secure communication tunnel over an insecure network. The SSH protocol is defined across a series of requests for comments, an Internet standards-setting publication, and its OpenSSH implementation is broadly used wherever you find Linux on a server.

Over here at Wikimedia, we use SSH everywhere! If you interact with a shell account, chances are you authenticate yourself (and the server to which you’re connecting) via SSH.

SSH is also the tool we turn to for deployments of MediaWiki and other software. Our deployment software, stripped to its nuts and bolts, sends a command over SSH to all of our application servers to tell them that new code is available and that they should fetch it.

Secure secure shell

SSH is not a perfect technology; there are various means by which malicious actors may exploit SSH, and we do our best to mitigate the ability of those malicious actors to do harm to our infrastructure.

For instance, there are several ways in which SSH may authenticate a client – passwords and public keys being the most common. Using password-based authentication is insecure for all the normal reasons that passwords may be compromised – everything from using easy-to-guess passwords to rubber-hose cryptanalysis.

Alternatively, public key cryptography is a technology that is indistinguishable from magic (a.k.a, “math”) that enables a server to authenticate you by validating that you have some secret (a private key) based on a public piece of information (a public key).

Public key cryptography is awesome; however, there are ways in which you can be bad at public key authentication.

Photo by bastique, CC BY-SA 2.0.

ssh-agent forwarding considered harmful™

ssh-agent is a program that allows a user to hold unencrypted private keys in memory for use in public key authentication. ssh-agent is neat – it means you only need to enter the password for your private keys once per login session. ssh-agent is also a way you can be bad at public key authentication.

A common use of the ssh-agent is to “forward” your agent to a remote machine (using the -A flag in the OpenSSH client). After you’ve forwarded your ssh-agent, you can use the socket that that agent creates to access any of your many (now unencrypted) keys, and login to any other machines for which you may have keys in your ssh-agent. So, too, potentially, can all the other folks that have root access to the machine to which you’ve forwarded your ssh-agent.

While some folks may pick-and-choose keys to keep in one of many ssh-agents, it’s entirely possible to keep your Wikimedia production SSH key in the same ssh-agent that you forward to your second-cousin’s friend-of-a-friend’s shared-hosting provider. For this reason, forwarding your ssh-agent is Considered Harmful™.

And even though we know no one would ever be reckless enough to try to forward SSH keys, we discourage bad practice by not allowing anyone to forward their ssh-agent to production.

Deployment hosts considered useful™

Keeping track of the two deployed versions of MediaWiki, the nearly 2000 files in the MediaWiki configuration repository, and the correct version of the other 169 extensions we branch every week is a heavy burden.

To lighten the load on our deployers, we use a handful of deployment hosts from which we are able to easily script deployments.

This means you can login to a deployment host, pull in the latest updates, and get new code running on the Wikimedia sites in under a minute (if you’re a quick-draw with git).

A perfect storm

So let’s review.

1. Publickey SSH authentication is magic, let’s use that!
2. To keep access to our production machines secure and to encourage best practice, we won’t allow anyone to forward their ssh-agent to production.
3. For ease of use, we’ll deploy from a special host in production.
4. We’ll use SSH to deploy from our special deployment host.

But how do we grant deployers SSH access from the deployment host without using passwords, without allowing agent forwarding, without having to manage SSH keys for every. single. deployer, and without creating the administrative mess of every deployer sharing a single deployment key?

With Keyholder, of course!

Several years ago there were some folks around here who pondered this exact problem and came up with a pretty novel solution that we’ve finally made into a standalone project!

Keyholder began life as a gleam in the eye of principal operations engineer Faidon Liambotis, who conceived of its core requirements and gave a basic operational sketch. From there, Ori Livneh did the hard work of reading the source and RFCs that make ssh-agent work and turned that into the initial version of Keyholder. Tyler Cipriani added support for multiple keys and separate user groups. Riccardo Coccioli added support for OpenSSH SHA256 fingerprints. And, finally, Mukunda Modell liberated Keyholder from the depths of our Puppet repository where it was previously languishing in obscurity.

Keyholder makes it possible for deployers to share a key without complicated administrative overhead. When a user needs to use SSH to connect to an application server from our deployment host they point ssh-agent requests to a UNIX domain socket created by Keyholder. If a user’s group membership allows them to use a particular key protected by Keyholder, then Keyholder will sign an application server’s authentication request, otherwise authentication will fail and they will not be able to login to the remote machine.

The actual SSH private keys are encrypted on disk and only readable by root users. When a user’s shell account is removed from the deployment host there is no need to rotate the SSH public/private keypair because the user has never had direct access to it, rather they’ve simply been using the mystical magic of Keyholder.

The magic of Keyholder is in its ability to proxy the ssh-agent socket as a privileged user. Keyholder creates a UNIX domain socket that is a readable and writable by anyone with shell access; however, Keyholder will only respond to requests to list identities and sign requests – users cannot add new keys or accidentally remove keys from the agent. Keyholder will only sign requests after verifying that the requesting user is authorized to make a signing request using a particular key.

We’ve been using Keyholder for several years at this point, and it’s a solution that works well for us. Still, it’s not a perfect approach. The increase in security comes at a price of increased complexity both for users and administrators. When the need to add new keys arises, the means by which those keys are generated and stored can be opaque for end-users. Further, utilizing and troubleshooting Keyholder as an end-user is not obvious. Many of our uses of Keyholder are scripted, so that Keyholder’s use on our servers is largely (hopefully) transparent. On the administrative side, storing separate keys and passwords for every group using Keyholder has its own difficulties.  Also, the need to add keys to the ssh-agent being proxied by keyholder means that the servers on which Keyholder are running require some kind of manual intervention on reboot to ensure that Keyholder is, in fact, holding all the necessary keys.

Despite the added complexity, we’ve found that Keyholder is a very useful tool. We’re excited to unlock its potential on the world! We hope that it will be useful to other organizations faced with similar challenges, of managing many servers that a large number of users are accessing via ssh. It’s a small step towards improving the security of our shared online infrastructure.

Tyler Cipriani, Software Engineer, Release Engineering
Mukunda Modell, Software Engineer, Release Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation

Highlights

• Local and remote staff connected for an all-staff meeting in San Francisco’s Presidio. Staff shared Year of Science reflections, celebrated last year’s successes, and kicked off the annual planning process for the next fiscal year.
• Wiki Ed staff attended the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston. Director of Programs LiAnna Davis and Wikipedia Content Expert for the Sciences Ian Ramjohn discussed using Wikipedia as a platform for science communication with attendees in the exhibit hall and in a workshop with the Simons Foundation’s Greg Boustead and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Dario Taraborelli.
• NPR and Pacific Standard ran major news pieces about how assigning students to edit Wikipedia through Wiki Ed’s program provides much-needed media literacy skills for students.
• We announced a new Wikipedia Visiting Scholar, User:Czar, partnered with Smithsonian Libraries and the National Museum of African Art. Czar has already produced a number of high-quality articles about African art and artists.

Programs

Educational Partnerships

At this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Boston played host to thousands of scientists, policy makers, and journalists. In a workshop at AAAS entitled “Mind the Gaps: Wikipedia as a Tool to Connect Scientists and the Public”, Greg Boustead of the Simons Foundation pointed out that the coverage of women scientists on Wikipedia is less complete than that of their male colleagues (and what coverage does exist tends to speak less about the significance of their contributions to science). When scientists assign their students to create biographies of women scientists, they aren’t engaging in activism; they’re merely working to ensure that the facts that are out there “speaking for themselves” are representative of reality. In the same workshop, LiAnna discussed the role that students can play in translating scientific knowledge into something that’s more understandable to general audiences.

LiAnna and Ian also joined attendees in the AAAS exhibit hall, where conversations about using Wikipedia’s platform to communicate science were lively. Mark Sarvary and Kelee Pacion also presented about their experience in our program in their class at Cornell.

As of February 28, we have brought 143 new courses into the Classroom Program for the spring 2017 term — 53 more than this time last year. The numbers prove our efforts to raise awareness about teaching with Wikipedia have been working, and we have been spent the month helping new instructors prepare their Wikipedia assignments.

Classroom Program

Status of the Classroom Program for Spring 2017 in numbers, as of February 28:

• 270 Wiki Ed-supported courses were in progress (126, or 47%, were led by returning instructors)
• 4,882 student editors were enrolled
• 58% were up-to-date with the student training
• Students edited 2,630 articles, created 93 new entries, and added 554,000 words.

As we approach the middle of the term, students are beginning to delve deeply into their Wikipedia assignments. They’re choosing articles to improve, drafting bibliographies, and making those first edits to Wikipedia’s main article space. We’re closing out February with 270 courses in progress, already just shy of the 276 we supported throughout all of last term. We expect to exceed our Fall 2016 record shortly, a feat we’re very proud of.

As more students engage in Wikipedia-based assignments, they have the chance to participate in the production of public knowledge, and in doing so become more adept consumers of knowledge as well. They take on the great responsibility that comes with contributing to Wikipedia, and have the chance to produce work with a lasting impact. At the same time, Wikipedia gets better coverage of topics ranging from immunology to Hawaiian linguistics, and from chemical engineering to Renaissance art.

In February, we again hosted Wiki Ed Office Hours. During this program, instructors were able to drop in and speak with members of the Wiki Ed staff about their Wikipedia assignments as well as learn what others are doing in the classroom. We’ll continue running this program throughout the term. This month, we also sent out the inaugural edition of the Wiki Ed Newsletter to both current and past program participants. Wiki Ed is engaged in a variety of programs, and we want to make sure that our instructors know about the many ways they can engage with us outside of the classroom. As the program continues to grow, we see the newsletter as a way to stay in touch with our instructors, even when they’re not teaching with Wikipedia, and to expand their involvement in the project of connecting Wikipedia and academia.

At the end of the month, Classroom Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal and Educational Partnerships Manager Jami Mathewson visited Dr. Amin Azzam’s class at the University of California, San Francisco. As Amin puts it, his group of fourth year medical students are uniquely positioned to contribute to Wikipedia. Their knowledge is robust, and they are still able to communicate their medical knowledge to a non-expert audience. As Helaine conveyed to the students, hundreds of millions of people go to Wikipedia on a monthly basis for medical information, so their contributions could potentially save lives. We’ve been working with Amin since Fall 2014, and we look forward to a continued partnership as we attempt to improve medical content on Wikipedia.

Student work highlights:

A zeotropic mixture is a mixture of components which have different boiling points. Separating these compounds through distillation is an important industrial application, and understanding the nature of these mixtures and their components is crucial for the design of the distillation columns used in the separation process. Before students in Elizabeth Nance’s Communication in Chemical Engineering class started working on it, Wikipedia’s zeotropic mixture article was short, saying little about the nature of zeotropic mixtures and almost nothing about their separation by distillation. A student in the class expanded the article substantially, adding not only sections on these topics but also ones on the use of zeotropic mixtures as refrigerants and cleaning solvents.

Another student in the class has been working on the capillary pressure article, which was surprisingly short before they started editing it. In addition to fleshing out the theory and equations of capillary pressure, the student also added applications both in the petrochemical industry and in natural processes, such as the formation of needle ice. Other students expanded a range of articles including those on inviscid flow, eddies, and the enthalpy of mixing. One student created a new article on minor losses in pipe flow.

Various insects have symbiotic relationships with fungi; many wood-boring insects, for example, depend on fungi to break down wood into something the insects can digest. Some of these carry their symbionts with them in a specialized structure called a mycangium. A student in Emily Sessa’s Principles of Systematic Biology class expanded the short article to add details about mycangia in a host of beetles and a group of wasps. They also added information about some of the types of fungi that insects carry in their mycangia.

Bats are the only mammals capable of true flight. Another student in the class created a stand-alone article on bat flight. The article discusses topics including the evolutionary origins of flight, and the relationship between wing morphology and the ecology of various species. Other students created articles about Euwallacea fornicatus, an ambrosia beetle that carries fungal spores with it in its mycangium, while others created articles about Amoebidium and Paramoebidium, a pair of genera of unicellular organisms formerly known as protists.

To many people, nanotechnology is something just this side of science fiction, dealing, as it does, with objects between 1 and 100 nanometers in size (or as little as a billionth of a meter). Students in Katherine Mirica’s Functional Nanomaterials class have been expanding articles in this area. One student expanded the nanofiber article, adding information about the history of nanofibers (they were first produced over 400 years ago), modern means of manufacture, and a range of applications including tissue engineering, drug delivery, cancer diagnosis, batteries, sensors, and air filtration. Nanobatteries are batteries made with of nanoscale particles. The existing Wikipedia article on this topic was expanded substantially by a student in the class, adding information about the advantages and disadvantages of nanotechnology in batteries as well as current and past research on the topic. Other students in the class created an article about the photolabile protecting group and made major additions to the articles on supramolecular polymers, molecular solids and 2D materials.

Community Engagement

Community Engagement Manager Ryan McGrady spent February working with several new and prospective Visiting Scholars and sponsoring institutions. Ryan worked with our partners at the Association for Women in Mathematics to review Visiting Scholars applicants who responded to our January call for applications. The response to the call was very strong, and as a result we are looking forward to working with two AWM Visiting Scholars, starting in March.

February also saw the announcement of a new Visiting Scholar with Smithsonian Libraries. User:Czar is a long-time Wikipedian with more than 70,000 contributions since 2005 and an impressive number of high-quality articles. One of the reasons we like the Wikipedia Visiting Scholars program so much is its ability to focus on a particular subject area on Wikipedia that needs improvement by forming a relationship between a Wikipedian and institution with shared interests. This is an excellent example of such a collaboration. Czar will be working with the Smithsonian Libraries and the National Museum of African Art to concentrate on African art and artists.

There are several examples of high-quality work from current Visiting Scholars this month:

University of Pittsburgh Visiting Scholar Barbara Page worked to bring the article about the Whiskey Rebellion, a tax protest in the United States beginning in 1791, up to Good Article status. It was also featured in the Did You Know section of Wikipedia’s Main Page with the fact “[Did you know] that only two men who participated in the Whiskey Rebellion were convicted of treason, but were later pardoned by President George Washington?” Barbara’s work on women’s health topics was also recognized in the Spring 2017 issue of Pitt Med magazine.

Another Did You Know this month came from Jackie Koerner, Visiting Scholar at San Francisco State University, who created an article about the Superfest International Disability Film Festival. Did you know “that the Superfest International Disability Film Festival is the longest-running disability film festival in the world?”

George Mason University Visiting Scholar Gary Greenbaum added another excellent Featured Article to his impressive list of work with the Coinage Act of 1965, which was promoted this month.

Finally, Czar, our newest Visiting Scholar, has already been very active in developing high-quality content. He worked to improve articles on Angolan photographer Edson Chagas and the National Museum of African Art, both of which reached B-class quality, and both of which are currently moving through the Good Article Nominations process.

Program Support

Communications

Working with media firm PR & Company, LiAnna did interviews with reporters from NPR and Pacific Standard, resulting in two major news pieces about how assigning students to edit Wikipedia through Wiki Ed’s program provides much-needed media literacy skills for students. The reporters also spoke to participating instructors in our program. The resulting press (especially the NPR article) was widely shared and resulted in several new instructors reaching out about potentially joining our program.

Helaine and Ryan put together the first edition of the Wiki Ed newsletter, sent to past and current program participants. The newsletter is a way to keep in touch with instructors, share news about the Dashboard, highlight student work or other successes, and communicate opportunities to connect with Wiki Ed or to get more involved in the community of people who understand that Wikipedia belongs in education. We look forward to sending out newsletters on a monthly basis moving forward.

Blog posts:

• Opening a can of bookworms (February 14)
• Join us at AAAS! (February 16)
• Students Illustrate and Explain Wikipedia’s Microbiology Articles (February 22)
• Monthly Report for January 2017 (February 23)
• Students, Sources, and Sentinels at AAAS (February 27)
• Introducing the Smithsonian Libraries Wikipedia Visiting Scholar (February 28)

External media:

• Wiki Woman, Christine Schauer and Sharon Blake, Pitt Med (Spring 2017)
• Students Bolster Wikipedia’s Pet Nutrition Content with Science, Stephanie Craig, University of Guelph (February 1, 2017)
• Students bolster Wikipedia pet nutrition content, Feedstuffs (February 3, 2017)
• How Wikipedia Is Cultivating an Army of Fact-Checkers to Battle Fake News, Jared Keller, Pacific Standard (February 13, 2017)
• What Students Can Learn By Writing For Wikipedia, Anya Kamenetz, NPR (February 22, 2017)
• What Students Can Learn By Writing For Wikipedia, Anya Kamenetz, WAMC (February 22, 2017)

Digital Infrastructure

In February, Product Manager Sage Ross kicked off an experimental grant-funded project with Agile Ventures, a nonprofit software development education community that focuses on building web applications for other nonprofits. With funding from a Wikimedia Foundation Rapid Grant, Sage is working with an Agile Ventures project manager to guide more new code contributors to the Dashboard development project and help them get started. The project will last for two months, with the goal of determining the potential for systematically working with the Agile Ventures community as a way to continue developing the Dashboard.

Intern Sejal Khatri continued her work on user profile pages, rolling out several major updates that bring better cumulative statistics along with customizable bios to the user profile pages. See Sage’s profile, for example. Sejal also added a new visualization to course pages: an edit size graph that shows the magnitude of each edit to an article. To see it in action, visit the Articles tab of a course, zoom in on one of the edited articles, and click ‘Article Development’.

We began beta testing a real-time chat feature on the Dashboard with a handful of classes. The feature will allow students and instructors to easily discuss their projects and ask or answer questions, and will be rolled out more widely once we fix the usability problems uncovered with the first few classes. As part of the preparation for this beta test, Sage also created a framework for enabling and disabling features on a course-by-course basis. This will make it easier to gradually roll out and test new features in the future, and may also be useful for A/B testing alternative features and conducting similar research.

Behind the scenes, we took the first steps connecting the Dashboard with Salesforce. This effort is aimed at streamlining the way Wiki Ed staff uses and updates course data, automating some of the necessary but tedious data curation tasks that help us track and analyze our programs and outreach efforts. Staff can now easily open a Salesforce record from the Dashboard, and up-to-date course data is automatically pushed to Salesforce on a regular basis.

User interface design work kicked off on the upcoming authorship highlighting feature in late February, which we hope to launch sometime in March. This is the first stage of a design sprint with Iván Cruz, the design lead during the Dashboard’s initial development. This design sprint is aimed at refining and polishing many of the features that have been developed in-house in the last year without a dedicated designer involved.

Research and Academic Engagement

During February, Research Fellow Zach McDowell and Research Assistant Mahala Stewart continued analyzing the research data. We have compiled numerous findings from the data, allowing us to connect with multiple researchers and potential conferences for dissemination purposes. In particular, there was significant evidence to support the case that students and instructors find Wikipedia-based assignments more valuable than traditional assignments for learning about writing for a general audience, learning about the reliability of online sources, and for learning digital literacy. Zach is in the midst of assembling a preliminary report to be released soon.

Zach has been collaborating with instructors Alexandria Lockett, Cecelia Musselman, Katherine Freedman, and Matthew Vetter on four different writing projects using Wiki Ed’s student learning outcomes data in various ways. Topics include digital literacy, skills transfer, writing contexts and attitudes, and digital citizenship. Zach is also working with another instructor, Joseph Reagle, to submit a proposal to the New Media Consortium summer conference.

Finance & Administration / Fundraising

Finance & Administration

Remote staff traveled to San Francisco to join local staff in a four-day All Staff meeting. We celebrated successes of the last four years, reviewed the learnings and accomplishments from the Year of Science initiative, and kicked off the annual planning process for next fiscal year. On the final day, staff visited The Crucible, an arts education center in Oakland, where they created clay sculptures.

For the month of February, expenses were $154,332 versus the approved budget of $181,390. The majority of the $27k variance continues to be due to staffing vacancies ($20k); as well as the timing of travel ($7k) expenses.

Our year-to-date expenses of $1,210,393 was also less than our budgeted expenditures of $1,588,364 by $378k. Like the monthly variance, the year-to-date variance was also impacted by staffing vacancies ($136k). In addition, there were timing and savings of expenditures within professional services ($76k); travel ($85k); marketing and cultivation events ($22k); board and all staff meeting ($44k); and printing ($17k) expenses.

Fundraising

In February, Tom Porter accepted a job offer from the Pacific Forest Trust and left Wiki Education. Tom has done a tremendous job, securing multiple grants for Wiki Ed and setting our organization’s fundraising efforts onto a good path for the future. We wish him well for the future.

Office of the ED

• Current priorities:

• Finding a replacement for Tom Porter
• Securing funding
• Developing the next annual plan

• In February, Frank started the process of re-filling the open development position. After the job description got posted, Frank reviewed applications and conducted a couple of first interviews with the most promising candidates.
• Frank also prepared an outline for a major programmatic campaign to start in the second half of calendar year 2017 and connected with a number of new prospects (both foundations and individuals) to investigate their level of interest in providing funding.
• Frank started preparing for the second round of the direct mail campaign (targeting high net-worth individuals) that Wiki Ed had started in late 2016.
• Also in February, Frank started work on streamlining the process for organizing Wiki Ed’s in-person board meetings.
• Frank had an initial meeting with board member Ted Yang for preparing the next iteration of Wiki Ed’s strategic planning process that’s expected to start in the second half of 2017.

Visitors and guests

• None

I was recently interviewed by Luciana Lima for an story about FOMO in Brazil's Você S/A ("Tudo ao mesmo tempo agora," March 2017). The story is print only, and in Portuguese, so I asked to include the original interview here; we are discussing my article "Following the Joneses: FOMO and Conspicuous Sociality."

In your article you say that the FOMO is a new word for an old concept and that the media has an important role in the construction of this terminology. Why does it happen?

"Social comparison" is a core feature of human behavior: we look to others to discern how we are doing and what we should do. Popular media changed the scope of our social comparison from our neighborhood to images on pages and screens. It's hard to compare yourself to the polished images seen in ads and among celebrities. Social media amplifies this.

You also state that FOMO and FOBO are opposing forces that can drive the person into a state called FODA. Could you explain a little more about what this third stage would be?

Patrick McGinnis coined all these terms in 2004 in response to the intense social and professional networking scene at Harvard Business School. Whereas FOMO ("Fear of Missing Out") leads to anxiety about missing something, FOBO ("Fear of Better Options") is the fear of committing to something in case something better came along. McGinnis lamented that all of this ultimately leads to FODA ("Fear of Doing Anything").

You claim that people mistakenly associate FOMO exclusively with social networks. Could we say that there is a human predisposition to blame technology for their bad behavior?

Social comparison is innate to being human; media and technology can lead to distortions, but FOMO is a very human phenomenon.

You also affirm that in the contemporary eye wanting what we see and being seen has fused. Would that not be pure vanity? And are they not two things that have always completed each other?

I believe the term FOMO conflates two distinct feelings: missed experiences (fear of missing out) and belonging (fear of being left out): to want what we see and to be seen have fused. Lone envy and social exclusion are both facilitated by ubiquitous screens.

Don't you believe that having more access to the other's daily life (trips, parties, restaurants, relationships) intensifies the envy we already felt? And that maybe this was a new modality, different from the one our parents could feel, for example?

I think the feeling is the same, media simply changes its circumstances, like its intensity and how often it occurs.

Is FOMO also just related to envy? Or is there a correlation with low self-esteem, for example?

You are right, social comparison, the behavior that drives envy, is also a factor in self-esteem.

Finally you say that the FOMO is related to a fear of "disappearing" and that it should be understood as a continuation of centenary issues. What would this "disappear" be and what are the issues that are closely related to it?

Here I was speaking about the term "FOMO" itself. Fear and envy have always been around; but, in the past two centuries, things like the telegraph and television led to people to speak about the malady of neurasthenia and the anxiety of "keeping up with the Joneses." So I wonder how long "FOMO" will stick around, or will it one day disappear and be replaced by a new term or expression?

International Fact Checking Day is April 2, 2017 — and we at Wiki Education have joined the initiative! We encourage you to participate by helping check facts on Wikipedia.

Participating is easy:

1. Log in to your Wikipedia account.

2. Go to the Citation Hunt tool. This will give you a sentence from a Wikipedia article with the dreaded “Citation Needed” tag.

3. Do some research to determine if the sentence in question is accurate according to sources.

4. If it is not accurate, click the “Edit” button on the section, delete the fact in question, and put in your edit summary, “Remove uncited claim I cannot find literature to support #FactCheckIt” — or edit the sentence to be true, and then follow step #5.

5. If it is accurate, find a source that meets Wikipedia’s Reliable Sources guidelines. Click the “edit” button on the section where the fact is listed, then click “Cite” and follow the directions to cite a source. Save the page. When you’re prompted to add an edit summary, say “Added citation #FactCheckIt”.

Adding the #FactCheckIt hashtag will enable us to track the impact of this initiative — so be sure to include it!

Feel free to repeat the steps to add more citations to facts. While we encourage you to participate specifically on April 2, facts can be updated any time, so don’t feel restricted to just participating then.

For more events related to International Fact Checking Day, visit http://factcheckingday.com/.

Photo by Alchemist-hp, Free Art License 1.3.

In the eighth grade, I was introduced to the new subject of chemistry. Most my classmates found it incredibly difficult, while I found it easy. My problem was that the next step up were university textbooks, which I couldn’t handle at the moment.

Instead, I gradually turned to Wikipedia to obtain the knowledge I wanted. Eventually, I realized that I could write Wikipedia articles, to give back to the site I’d taken so much from. I’d still be learning, but I’d also be helping anyone in a similar position to where I was.

I chose to take a narrow scope to my contributing: the elements of the periodic table. These form a set of articles that can be reasonably taken on—not finished by just one person, of course, but some tangible progress could be made by one.

And, of course, elements are the building blocks that, when combined, constitute the full diversity of chemistry. That made the choice clear.

Photo by Alchemist-hp, Free Art License 1.3.

I’m from Russia, so I first tried to break into the Russian Wikipedia, but I found it difficult to collaborate with the editors there. So I instead decided to move to the English Wikipedia, as I’d been wanting to improve my English anyway. Moreover, the English site had an entire “wikiproject” dedicated just to the elements.

I chose fluorine as my first article-project because I thought it would be the easiest one. It only assumes only one oxidation state in its compounds, was not a major influence on history or industry (like, say, iron or oxygen), and was in pretty bad condition.

I finished the article in January 2011, and nominated it for “featured article” (FA)—a quality marker reserved for Wikipedia’s best work—status in April. As it turned out, I was wrong about how easy it would be, as the nomination failed. Still, it wasn’t all bad: the article had gained some support, and I gained a lot of knowledge about how to write Wikipedia articles. A lot of that came from TCO.

TCO was a great editor to get in contact with. I can’t thank him enough for giving so much of his time. He certainly delayed my attempts to get the article featured, but he also offered a lot—and that turned out to be a far better thing. Part of what he had for me was a new understanding of the importance of things and how I needed to do work beyond was needed for that “featured” status. This would allow to have the star and enjoy the great article I’ve produced. That’s not to say I didn’t want to write great articles, but there were moments when you think, “aah, it’ll pass the FA review anyway, they won’t notice.”

Nowadays, I’ve become my own measure of quality. It was that that mattered most, not the stars. This didn’t happen too quickly. I nominated fluorine for featured article again, albeit somewhat prematurely, in September. More and more work was being put into it, and I was becoming more and more disillusioned with it, so I’ve decided to diversify my work.

Photo by Tmv23 and Dblay, CC BY-SA 3.0.

I produced a number of GAs, two of which became so complete by the time I submitted them that I decided keep going and aim for FA as well. I had dove into the interesting topics of heavy and superheavy elements, producing a good, detailed, and Soviet-styled (as I based it on a Soviet book) article on astatine, plus a nice short beautiful article on ununseptium (now tennessine), which only lacked one thing—prose quality. Had it not been for this, we would’ve gotten it on the first try; but it had, and we didn’t.

But soon enough I entered university in 2013 and immediately lost most of my free time. This made rewriting Wikipedia articles rather difficult. Eventually, with lots of work put into them, all three articles ended up as FAs in late 2014 and 2015. But this happened only after TCO’s influence hit me one more time.

Back in 2011, TCO wrote a report titled “Improving Wikipedia’s Important Articles,” which advocated for focusing Wikipedia’s editors on vital topics, ones read by the most people. While panned by other editors at the time, I discovered it in 2014 and believe that it’s an absolutely great masterpiece. When writing ununseptium back in 2011–12, I tried to write it in a way that was fascinating but accessible. This challenge helped hook me into editing Wikipedia. You need to be immerse yourself in the topic, but you also need to make sure you’re delivering the information you’ve learned in a way that others can understand. Reading TCO’s report helped galvanize just how important this is.

Sadly, TCO left Wikipedia a few months before fluorine got its featured article star. The article would’ve gotten the star far earlier if it wasn’t for him, but it wouldn’t be as good, either. Besides, this taught me about writing articles in general and changed my perception of the topics I write about.

Photo by Alchemist-hp and Richard Bartz, CC BY-SA 3.0.

I was mostly inactive in 2015–16, though able to help with a few other projects like thorium, with User:Double sharp. In 2016, I decided to go for an important article once again. Wikipedia’s readers have been the top priority for a long time for me now, and after all I’ve been through, it didn’t only matter how I serve the information on the topic I’ve chosen, but also how I choose the topic.

So, I started work on lead, a good choice indeed. Never would I think an element could be so interesting in human life and so important in history. I’ve absolutely enjoyed that and want to go on. After it’s done, it will be aluminium, iron, and—if I ever to get to it—gold.

I may even go further after that, picking an even more important article, not even necessarily about chemistry. I’m currently considering rewriting the article on the continent of Europe, but it’s still so far away I can’t tell if this will ever happen.

But I definitely want it to.

Mikhail Boldyrev (User:R8R Gtrs), Wikipedian

Last week, I had the privilege of traveling to São Paulo, Brazil, giving two presentations at the University of São Paulo (USP), meeting with the Grupo de Usuários Wikimedia no Brasil (Wikimedia Brasil User Group), and attending a neuroscience and mathematics edit-a-thon for the Portuguese Wikipedia.

The group in Brazil is already having an incredible impact on Wikipedia. In particular, a group of Wikimedians based at USP’s Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics (RIDC NeuroMat), led by Professor João Alexandre Peschanski, has dramatically improved information available on the Portuguese Wikipedia on topics in neuroscience and mathematics. With a grant funded by São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), they’re working hard to bring more science information to the Portuguese Wikipedia. For example, check out the Portuguese Wikipedia article on the mathematical term average, which includes extensive written content added through their work — as well as animated illustrations of concepts and a sound file of the article read aloud, to make it easier for people with vision impairments who speak Portuguese to understand mathematical formulas. João, Celio Costa Filho, David Alves, and the rest of the team at NeuroMat have long been engaged in our work as well, translating many Wiki Ed blog posts for their blog.

Thanks to travel funding from FAPESP, I was able to come give two talks about connecting Wikipedia and academia at USP. The first was an informal talk to students, professors, Wikipedians, and other people interested in what we at Wiki Education are doing to connect Wikipedia and academia. We spent some time talking about how our program works, the importance of media literacy skills in the digital age, and more. I encouraged attendees to get involved in the Wikimedia movement, whether through editing articles, adding photos to Commons, translating articles, or playing the WikiData game. The result of this first meeting is that one of the two journalists who attended the talk has already published an interview with me in Carta Educação, and a Brazilian Wikipedian in the room was inspired to create the article on media literacy on the Portuguese Wikipedia.

For the second talk, representatives from the Research, Information, and Dissemination Centers of FAPESP attended to hear more specifically about Wiki Ed’s Year of Science initiative. Many attendees were not very familiar with the inner workings of Wikipedia, so it was an excellent opportunity to explain more about how Wikipedia works, the community involved in it, why it’s something worth contributing to, why Wiki Ed’s participating professors see Wikipedia assignments as key for teaching media literacy and science communication, and what we did during the Year of Science. In particular, I encouraged the group to work toward engaging with Wikipedia in hopes of seeing a Year of Science in Brazil in the coming years.

I was incredibly inspired by the enthusiasm and energy of the Wikimedians in Brazil, and I am confident that good things will continue to come from this group in the future! Many thanks to João and the rest of the team for inviting and welcoming me to Brazil!

Image: Wiki Edu presentation and the 3rd Neurociência e Matemática edit-a-thon (08), by RIDC NeuroMat, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Photo by Mikey Tnasuttimonkol, CC BY-SA 4.0.

We are happy to announce EventStreams, a new public service that exposes live streams of Wikimedia events.  And we don’t mean the next big calendar event like the Winter Olympics or Wikimania.  Here, an ‘event’ is defined to be a small piece of data usually representing a state change. An edit of a Wikipedia page that adds some new information is an ‘event’, and could be described like the following:

{
'event-type': 'edit',
'page': 'Special Olympics',
'project': 'English Wikipedia',
'time': '2017-03-07 09:31',
'user': 'TheBestEditor'
}

This means: “a user named ‘TheBestEditor’ added some content to the English Wikipedia’s Special Olympics page on March 7, 2017 at 9:31am”.

While composing this blog post, we sought visualizations that use EventStreams, and found some awesome examples.

Open now in Los Angeles, DataWaltz is a physical installation that “creates a spatial feedback system for engaging with Wikipedia live updates, allowing visitors to follow and produce content from their interactions with the gallery’s physical environment.” You can see a photo of it at the top, and a 360 video of it over on Vimeo.

Sacha Saint-Leger sent us this display of real-time edits on a rotating globe, showing off where they are made.

Ethan Jewett created a really nice continuously updating chart of edit statistics.

A little background—why EventStreams?

EventStreams is not the first service from Wikimedia to expose RecentChange events as a stream. irc.wikimedia.org and RCStream have existed for years.  These all serve the same data: RecentChange events.  So why add a third stream service?

Both irc.wikimedia.org and RCStream suffer from similar design flaws.  Neither service can be restarted without interrupting client subscriptions.  This makes it difficult to build comprehensive tools that might not want to miss an event, and hard for WMF engineers to maintain. They are not easy to use, as services require several programming setup steps just to start subscribing to the stream.  Perhaps more importantly, these services are RecentChanges specific, meaning that they are not able to serve different types of events. EventStreams addresses all of these issues.

EventStreams is built on the w3c standard Server Sent Events (SSE).  SSE is simply a streaming HTTP connection with event data in a particular text format.  Client libraries, usually called EventSource, assist with building responsive tools, but because SSE is really just HTTP, you can use any HTTP client (even curl!) to consume it.

The SSE standard defines a Last-Event-ID HTTP header, which allows clients to tell servers about the last event that they’ve consumed.  EventStreams uses this header to begin streaming to a client from a point in the past.  If EventSource clients are disconnected from servers (due to network issues or EventStreams service restarts), they will send this header to the server and automatically reconnect and begin from where they left off.

EventStreams can be used to expose any useful streams of events, not just RecentChanges.  If there’s a stream you’d like to have, we want to know about it.  For example, soon ORES revision score events may be exposed in their own stream.  The service API docs have an up to date list of the (currently limited) available stream endpoints.

We’d like all RecentChange stream clients to switch to EventStreams, but we recognize that there are valuable bots out there running on irc.wikimedia.org that we might not be able to find the maintainers of.  We commit to supporting irc.wikimedia.org for the foreseeable future.

However, we believe the list of (really important) RCStream clients is small enough that we can convince or help folks switch to EventStreams.  We’ve chosen an official RCStream decommission date of July 7 this year.  If you run an RCStream client and are reading this and want help migrating, please reach out to us!

Quickstart

EventStreams is really easy to use, as shown by this quickstart example in JavaScript.  Navigate to http://wikimedia.org in your browser and open the development console (for Google Chrome: More Tools > Developer Tools, and click ‘console’ on the bottom screen, which should open on the browser below the page you are visiting). Then paste the following:

// This is the EventStreams RecentChange stream endpoint
var url = 'https://stream.wikimedia.org/v2/stream/recentchange';

// Use EventSource (available in most browsers, or as an
// npm module: https://www.npmjs.com/package/eventsource)
// to subscribe to the stream.
var recentChangeStream = new EventSource(url);

// Print each event to the console
recentChangeStream.onmessage = function(message) {

//Parse the message.data string as JSON.
var event = JSON.parse(message.data);
console.log(event);

};

You should see RecentChange events fly by in your console.

That’s it!   The EventStreams documentation has in depth information and usage examples in other languages.

If you build something, please tell us, or add yourself to the Powered By EventStreams wiki page.  There are already some amazing uses there!

Andrew Otto, Senior Operations Engineer, Analytics
Wikimedia Foundation

What is Creative Commons? Video by Victor Grigas, CC BY-SA 3.0. You can also view it on Vimeo or Youtube.

One of the simplest requirements for using freely-licensed photos from Wikimedia Commons is to give credit to whoever created the material. But even this is not easy for users to comply with if they aren’t familiar with Creative Commons licenses and the right wording for license labels.

As opposed to those under copyright, freely-licensed photos on Wikimedia Commons are available to the world. Anyone can use them, for free, in printed material, blogs, social media channels, etc., without getting permission from the photographer—but with some stipulations, including attribution.

Wikimedia Germany (Deutschland), the independent chapter that supports Wikimedia in Germany, wants to show you how easy it is to re-use these freely licensed works. We have created a web tool to simplify these stipulations—and it’s as simple as copy and paste.

This license notice should include the author’s name and the license type. Creative Commons licenses have clear legal requirements, but they’re not always easy to interpret when the photos are being reused. Attribution requirements for the license notices can be hidden in “legalese,” which can be a challenge for the layman to decipher even with the best of intentions. Moreover, missing information can have serious legal repercussions! Even accidental non-compliance with license requirements can lead to copyright infringement.

An easy way to follow the rules with a ready-to-copy license label

The attribution generator is a new tool by Wikimedia Germany. The tool automatically compiles the license information. The user just needs to answer a few simple questions: Do you want to use the image digitally or in print materials? Have you modified the photo? Is it going to be used alone or with multiple images? The correct license notice is then generated after the user answers these questions.

Video by Benjamin Wüst/Wikimedia Germany (Deutschland), CC BY-SA 4.0. 

This short video, available in German (with English subtitles on Commons), shows how easy it is to create the license notice for an image with the Attribution Generator. In addition, Dr. Till Jaeger, a specialist attorney in copyright and media law, briefly explains the benefits of Creative Commons licenses. Dr. Jaeger collaborated with Wikimedia Germany in developing the Attribution Generator.

At the time of this writing, the Attribution Generator is only available in German and English. To get the word out about the Attribution Generator internationally, we need your help! Our goal for the tool is to make it available in as many languages as possible so that everyone can easily use freely-licensed images. Help us translate the Attribution Generator into your language. You can find details on how it works on Wikimedia Commons. You can also contact us via email.

Katja Ullrich, Project Manager for the Attribution Generator
Wikimedia Germany (Deutschland)

In photos

Photo by Sailesh Patnaik, CC BY-SA 4.0.

A Wikidatathon was organised during the 7th WikiTungi Puri meetup. The goal of the Wikidatathon was to translate labels and descriptions of the articles created so far on Women’s History Month Editathon on Odia Wikipedia. Eight Wikimedians joined the event, where they translated nearly 220 labels and descriptions.

Photo by Fjmustak, CC BY-SA 4.0.

On March 10, 2017, Zwolle, Netherland hosted an introductory workshop to Wikipedia. The Workshop was attended by a group of fourteen Syrian refugees and migrants to the Netherlands. The workshop was held in Arabic.

Photo by Francesca Lissoni, CC BY-SA 4.0.

This month, Wikimedia Italy organized six Art+Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thons in Milan, Florence, Rome, Battipaglia, Venice and Potenza. More than 100 participants attended the events and more than 80 articles on female artists and their productions were created or improved.

In brief

Arabic book about Wikipedia: Wikipedian Abbad Diraneyya has published a new book about Wikipedia. This book discusses how Wikipedia works, how to edit on the website, and the author’s personal experience with it. It took Diraneyya over three years to compile the the book. However, the book is free to download and is available under CC BY-SA 3.0, the same free license used for Wikipedia’s content.

WikiLesa encourages Argentinian students to edit about human rights: Over the past two years, Wikimedia Argentina held four editing events for the project WikiLesa. The project aims at improving Wikipedia’s content on human rights violations during the (1976–1983) military dictatorship. Wikimedia Argentina worked in partnership with a local media agency specialized in human rights where they worked together on training students, educators and researchers on Wikipedia editing. 54 Wikipedia articles have been improved while 21 new ones were created as part of this project. More about the project on the This Month in Education newsletter.
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DARM challenge helps with nearly 2,200 photo uploads on Wikimedia Commons: Between 25 December 2016 and 25 January 2017, the Wikipedian in Residence at DARM (National Archive of the Republic of Macedonia), in collaboration with the State Archive, helped coordinate the DARM challenge. As part of this challenge, 2,190 files were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by sixteen Wikipedians. The photos have been used on nearly 1,400 pages on Wikipedia in 33 different languages. More about the project on Wikimedia’s GLAM newsletter.

Wikipedia Education Program kicks off in Finland: The Finnish Wikipedia community and Wikimedia Finland (Suomi), the local chapter, are getting ready to support the first regular Wikipedia courses in their country. The courses will be hosted by the University of Helsinki and the University of Jyväskylä starting in the next academic year. More about the courses in the This Month in Education newsletter.

Embassy of Sweden in New Delhi hosts a ‘women in science’ editathon: On 4 March, the Embassy of Sweden in New Delhi hosted an editathon on Indian women in science. Participants were a mix of new and experienced Wikipedia editors who worked on creating and improving relevant articles to commemorate the women’s history month on Wikipedia.

New hardware donation program: Asaf Bartov has announced that the Wikimedia Foundation will begin donating fully-functional but depreciated laptops to community members who apply for them. The pilot year for the program begins with twenty laptops, subject to several conditions; you can apply for one over on Meta. Similarly, a community-driven equipment exchange program has been started for Wikimania 2017. If you are looking for or have equipment that could be donated, navigate to the official wiki for more.

———

Compiled and edited by Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

Patricia Brooks is a Professor at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York and Doctoral Faculty at The Graduate Center, CUNY where she serves as the Deputy Executive Officer of the PhD program in Psychology. Christina Shane-Simpson is a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. Elizabeth Che is a doctoral student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. In this blog, they describe their efforts to engage undergraduates taking an Introductory Psychology course at City University of New York—arguably the most diverse public university in the world—as editors of new Wikipedia biographies on women in psychology as part of the broader PSYCH+Feminism initiative.

Last year, as part of the Wiki Education Foundation’s Year of Science, we launched the WikiProject PSYCH+Feminism to bring attention to more than 400 prominent women who were recipients of the most prestigious awards in Psychological Science, yet lacked commensurate recognition on Wikipedia. PSYCH+Feminism dovetails with the efforts of the Wikipedia Gender Gap Task Force, which was designed to confront systematic bias in Wikipedia content while also encouraging women, in particular, to become involved as editors on Wikipedia.

Introductory Psychology is a popular social science course taken primarily for general education credit by students in their first year of college. The relatively high potential for students with diverse interests and majors to enroll in this course also provides a prime opportunity for instructors to engage students through novel and exciting teaching and learning activities, particularly those that help students to connect their in-class content knowledge with a larger population of psychology learners. We used Wikipedia editing as a novel approach to help our students connect with the psychology material and build skills that would serve them well in other, non-psychology majors (e.g., communication, collaboration skills).

Although Wikipedia editing has great potential to foster students’ research, writing, and information literacy skills, our students were initially daunted by the prospect of contributing original content on a public site. They expressed concerns about their skills, as illustrated by the following quotes:

“I do not want to put up false or wrong information. I’m a bit nervous since I want to make sure that the information that I put up is valid.”

“I am afraid of making grammatical errors while editing because English is my second language.”

“I feel a bit nervous because I have never done anything like that before. I also feel confused because I do not know what it is I am doing.”

They also voiced concerns about Wikipedia’s reputation by writing:

“When I think about editing of Wikipedia I think about false information. Therefore, I don’t want to edit something if others would think it false anyway.”

“I was always told to stay away from Wikipedia. Anytime that I would get a school assignment my teachers/professors would be super strict about the use of Wikipedia. I feel like it is not that reliable. I’m not that excited about using it only because I was taught that way since I first even heard of it.”

In the face of student anxiety and ambivalence, we sought to support students as they developed their self-efficacy in public editing.  By scaffolding the assignment, we found ways to make Wikipedia editing accessible to students with no prior knowledge of the subjects they were assigned to write about. We started by creating a short list of 36 women from the PSYCH+Feminism project whose research was cited in the required Introductory Psychology textbook, and who lacked biographies on Wikipedia. We developed a preliminary set of source materials for each of these “women in red” by locating faculty websites, representative publications accessed via Google Scholar, and references in the textbook.  We then created a template for new biographies, which we loaded into each student’s sandbox. The required use of the template ensured that student work would comply with Wikipedia guidelines for biography articles and it facilitated student editing by allowing them to insert content without having to tinker with complicated HTML syntax.

The students’ first assignment was to register their Wikipedia accounts on the Dashboard website and complete the basic training modules provided by the Wiki Education Foundation.  We then asked them to select a topic from the short list, and use the source materials provided to fill in the template. We encouraged students to work together with a partner, but also allowed them to work on their own if they preferred.  After an initial round of editing, we provided extensive feedback using talk pages, email, and course announcements, and devoted class time to help students find reputable source materials through the library, use the citation tool to link source materials to Wikipedia content, and create hyperlinks to connect information across Wikipedia pages. Building on the first two assignments, students were instructed in the third assignment to continue editing in their sandboxes, expanding content and citing their sources. Following another round of feedback, students were shown how to upload their new biographies into the public domain.

Despite student concerns that they were unprepared to edit Wikipedia, 34 students (83% of the class) contributed content to 21 new biographies over an 8-week period. (Two additional students attempted to edit but did not upload their work.) The majority of the student editors found ways to connect the assignment with other aspects of the course and 40% indicated plans to continue editing Wikipedia in the future. They described new appreciation of Wikipedia by writing:

“I now believe Wikipedia is a credible source. There is a lot of work and research involved in creating an article.”

“I value it more since I had to contribute to an article being built.”

“I used to believe anybody could write anything they wanted. I now know everything gets verified.”

Given students’ lack of expertise, we were not surprised that several of the new articles were flagged as needing further attention from the Wikipedia community. We encouraged students to view their work as part of an effort-in-progress, and not be discouraged if their work was flagged. Students took this advice to heart, stating:

“It was fun and made me feel like I was smart enough to get my article launched, even if it was flagged.”

Another student wrote, “I check my article frequently to see what edits have been made. I am sure I will stumble on an article to which I can contribute in the future.”

Wikipedia editing provides a context for students to learn by teaching—sharing what they are researching and disseminating it in accessible language. The experience can be empowering for students, but it requires them to overcome initial barriers including prejudiced views about Wikipedia content. Students require a lot of help; they tend to procrastinate when anxious about assignments, which makes it imperative to guide them through the editing process, by devoting class time for research, providing feedback, and pushing them to make edits and ultimately upload their work.  For students to see their work published was exceptionally rewarding. In the words of the students:

“It was fun to become an editor and learn it is something I can do.”

“After fooling with it and learning about how it is monitored, I totally love it.”

We hope that our experience encourages you to consider Wikipedia editing as a tool that can help your students develop their research, writing, and information literacy skills.  For additional tips, check out our article in the APS Observer where we provide links to helpful Wiki Education Foundation resources and other suggestions for implementing Wikipedia editing in introductory-level courses.

Video by Victor Grigas, CC BY-SA 3.0. You can also view it on Vimeo or Youtube, or without burned-in English subtitles on Commons.

During a workshop for a Wikipedia Education Program course at her Cairo university in spring 2013, May Hachem created her account on Wikipedia and quickly made her first edit, creating an Arabic Wikipedia article about Princess Alice of Battenberg (en).

Before that day, there was no article on the Arabic-language encyclopedia about Alice, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria and mother-in-law of Elizabeth II, the current queen of the United Kingdom. Hachem quickly became hooked on writing about women like Alice. “I felt that women should be remembered in history,” she said. “I will never be quite as proud of something as my writing about women.”

Since then, May has made efforts to document the lives of women on Wikipedia by creating 450 articles and made over 10,000 edits on Wikipedia, many about women—and she has devoted an even larger part of her time to encourage others to do the same.

Photo by Ruby Mizrahi/Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Although it is uncommon for students to continue editing after completing a Wikipedia-centered education course, the education program was just a starting point in Hachem’s journey advocating for something she believes in. It was “the message behind Wikipedia,” she explains. “Knowledge should be free and everyone has the right to get the knowledge they need.”

Her success and productivity in that course, along with her eagerness to help others, drove her to enroll as a Campus Ambassador, a volunteer role that was designed to mentor fellow student editors.

“I worked with a group of 100 students, including Turkish and English department students,” Hachem recalls, and it was more successful than they realized at the time: “When we worked on the WikiWomen contest, the Turkish department students translated all the articles about women on the Turkish Wikipedia. So when we ran the contest again, we couldn’t find any articles left.”

The WikiWomen contest is a writing competition on the Arabic Wikipedia that started in late 2014. Hachem led the competition which helped the students achieve the highest contributions in the Arab World education program since its inception, during the summer 2014 term. As a program leader, Hachem helped the program get adopted by Alexandria University and Al Azhar University, both located in Egypt.

And national borders have not stopped her. May can be found at many Wikipedia editing events across the Middle East, raising awareness about gender diversity on the internet, and has established successful partnerships between the Wikipedia community and international organizations, including UN Women.

On International Youth Day in 2016, Hachem was one of the organizers of an international edit-a-thon (editing workshop) that took place in different locations around the world, including the United Nations’ headquarters in New York City, American University in Cairo, and several other venues. May also led events during the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence campaign to promote the importance of writing about women.

Hachem is looking forward to doing more on Wikipedia, even though her time has diminished since graduating from university. “I think it’s kind of an addiction … really, I can’t define it. I’ve thought about that a lot—what makes me keep doing this?”

But she had answered that question earlier in the interview: “It is my passion.”

Interview by Ruby Mizrahi, Interviewer
Profile by Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

07/03/2017-13/03/2017

Mapping

• User BushmanK writes about the quality of foreign names submitted under the name:<language_code>=* tag. An in-depth analysis is presented and suggestions on how to mitigate the issue.
• The Costa Rican community organises a tour (Feb & March event) to map national parks and volcanoes. This month’s destination was Bosque del Niño.
• Jochen Topf reports that the multi-polygon fixing effort is going well and provides an issue thread to track the evolution.
• A discussion started on the French mailing list about tagging standards for river fishing categories. Concerns were raised about such information only being relevant with regard to local nomenclatures.
• User Muzirian proposes the tag amenity=courier to map courier services. However, it received some criticism.
• The Tagging mailing list is looking for a neutral name for “Segways and the like”.
• On the Tagging mailing list, Warin asks for ideas to map Drying_room or Drying_area.
• Dave Swarthout is looking for a tag for cannabis processing plants.
• Yuri Astrakhan published a proposal to distinguish between “There is a Wikipedia page about this object” vs “This object is mentioned in a Wikipedia page”. His suggestion was seen rather critically on the OSM Wiki.
• Joshua Houston suggests on the Talk-US mailing list to replace the tag man_made to human_made, as a step to make OSM more inclusive. The OSM Latam community had a similar discussion on this issue.
• Martijn van Exel posts the latest news from MapRoulette.

Community

• After Senegal, Burkina Faso and Benin, it is the turn of Togo to start its phase 01 of the project School of Free Geomatics.
• For some time now, there have been rumours that Niantic is using OpenStreetMap data to influence Pokemon Go. There’s more discussion about it here, and a recent OSM diary entry has linked to an article amusingly titled ‘How To Create Your Own Nest In Pokemon GO With A Free Tool Called “Open Street Map”’ (and as you’d expect, every other post there, reads like Buzzfeed Bingo too). But this could mean that there are a few people trying to game OpenStreetMap to make things appear in Pokemon Go. Here are a few things that you can do about such vandalism.
• Sven Geggus tweets that the German tile server operated by FOSSGIS e.V. is now HTTPS capable.

Events

• The Swiss OpenStreetMap Association’s Annual General Meeting will take place in Fribourg, Switzerland on April 8th. A mapping party will follow.
• Gregory calls again to submit lectures for the State of the Map in Japan, since not enough papers have been submitted so far. Rob also refers to the deadlines for proposals and the scholarship program.

Humanitarian OSM

• Marek Kleciak reports in the German forum that new satellite images from Nepal are available. They allow to map previously untapped areas.
• The HOT Team Indonesia organized a mapping event called WomenMap. They introduced women to ICT and digital mapping skills. It was pioneered by HOT as it moves towards promoting inclusion for vulnerable, disenfranchised groups (women, persons with disabilities, youth and marginalized communities) and thus help to narrow the digital divide. The initiative is supported by the Australian Government, Disaster Management Innovation and UN Women.

Maps

• Walter aka wambacher presents the completely revised version of the Emergency Map.
• Mapzen now offers a map style for cycling. European readers have to answer the question themselves if this map design can compete with the long-standing experience and work of all those cycling mappers/developers in Europe.

switch2OSM

• When you do a geo search on the meta search engine Startpage, you will directly see an OpenStreetMap map in the results.

Open Data

• Mapbox published new satellite imagery for Vancouver and Toronto.
• The summary of an interview with Antonio F. Rodríguez Pascual provides 10 good reasons why the public administration (in Spain) should release data under an open license. (automatic translation)

Software

• Andrés summarizes all important sources for learning about and using the Overpass API.
• The motorcycle route planner “Kurviger”, which prefers beautiful winding routes with elevation changes, is now available worldwide.
• Harry Wood created a tool to convert OpenStreetMap notes into KML and to use them in MAPS.ME.
• On talk-fr, Florian Lainez announces the launch of Bus Contributor, a new Android app to ease public transport related contributions in OSM. Provided by Jawg Maps, the app is based on OSM Contributor.

Programming

• A “monster relation” of an undiscussed import in Brazil with more than 32,767 members was too big for osm2pgsql, which probably caused problems on many servers.
• In the second part of his blog series, Roland explained how to deal with numbers in the Overpass API.

Releases

Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist.

(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.

Did you know …

• … Multimapas by Javier Jiménez Shaw to compare a variety of different map layers? Javier’s service also supports WMS layers and allows you to add your own layers.

Other “geo” things

• Mongabay Wildtech reported on a new mapping platform for environmental protection.
• The French magazine ‘Sciences et Avenir’ reports on PaleobioDB, a database inventorying fossils found by hundreds of paleontologists. The corresponding interactive map is based on OSM.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Mazzano Romano	Presentazione di OSM al MAVNA	17/03/2017
Tokyo	東京！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第６回 愛宕神社	18/03/2017
Bonn	Bonner Stammtisch	21/03/2017
Scotland	Edinburgh	21/03/2017
Lüneburg	Mappertreffen Lüneburg	21/03/2017
Nottingham	Nottingham Pub Meetup	21/03/2017
Passau	FOSSGIS 2017	22/03/2017-25/03/2017
Lübeck	Lübecker Mappertreffen	23/03/2017
Urspring	Stammtisch Ulmer Alb	23/03/2017
Zaragoza	Mapeado Colaborativo	23/03/2017
Zaragoza	Mapping Party #Zaccesibilidad (Mapeado Colaborativo)	24/03/2017
Louvain-la-Neuve	Bar meeting	24/03/2017
Vancouver	Vancouver mappy hour	24/03/2017
Mazzano Romano	Workshop 1	24/03/2017
Ayacucho	Workshop of Mapbox Studio	25/03/2017
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen	27/03/2017
Mazzano Romano	Workshop 2	31/03/2017
Kyoto	【西国街道#02】山崎蒸溜所と桜マッピングパーティ	01/04/2017
Avignon	State of the Map France 2017	02/06/2017-04/06/2017
Kampala	State of the Map Africa 2017	08/07/2017-10/07/2017
Curitiba	FOSS4G+SOTM Brasil 2017	27/07/2017-29/07/2017
Aizu-wakamatsu Shi	State of the Map 2017	18/08/2017-20/08/2017
Boulder	State Of The Map U.S. 2017	19/10/2017-22/10/2017
Buenos Aires	FOSS4G+SOTM Argentina 2017	23/10/2017-28/10/2017
Lima	State of the Map – LatAm 2017	29/11/2017-02/12/2017

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 appropriate.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Nakaner, Peda, Polyglot, Rogehm, SeleneYang, Spec80, SrrReal, TheFive, YoViajo, derFred, freeExec, jcoupey, jinalfoflia, keithonearth, taranarmo, wambacher.

My old 5DIII is now in the hands of Wikimedia UK meaning that they now have a full frame camera. While its a decent camera there are some catches. It has been through about 42K shutter actuations or a bit under a third of its expected life. It has had zero maintenance during that period (no sensor cleaning for example) and not exactly spent its time indoors as a safe studio camera. Its been as far north as Dunnet Head, as far south as Sandown, as far west as Delabole, and as far east as Norwich.

Attitude range is rather more limited. While it has been at sea level I’m not sure its been much above the summit of Arthur’s seat.

That said with the low light performance you can only get from full frame, good autofocus and 22.3 mega-pixels it still have as a lot of use left in it. The real limit it is going to hit is lenses with WMUK currently only having 2 lens that work with it both at 50mm. While there are “50mm only” adherents it is rather photography’s equivalent of iron-man mode.

Photo by Jon Rawlinson, CC BY 2.0.

Update, 5:42pm PST: This afternoon, Judge Derrick K. Watson granted the requested temporary restraining order, preventing nationwide enforcement of the executive order in question. We are happy with the outcome of this hearing, and look forward to future proceedings in which the court may more closely examine the executive order.

On March 14, 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation joined more than 50 other organizations, including Electronic Arts, Pinterest, and Zendesk, to file an amicus brief in State of Hawaii v. Trump. The brief supports the issuance of a temporary restraining order against a new executive order issued in the United States that imposes restrictions on travel and immigration based on national origin. The brief demonstrates that these restrictions will cause serious harm to the Wikimedia Foundation and signatories’ operations, and explains how the order itself violates fundamental essential constitutional protections.

The Wikimedia vision is a world in which everyone can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. In support of this vision, the Wikimedia Foundation is an inherently global organization. When our ability to collaborate across the world is hindered, our work toward that vision suffers. After an earlier executive order placing restrictions on travel was issued in January of this year, the Wikimedia Foundation joined an amicus filed in State of Washington, et. al. v. Trump. Following the issuance of this latest executive order, that case was dismissed. However, it remains clear that any effort to stifle international travel and collaboration will seriously impact the operations of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects are the work of thousands of volunteers who collaborate across cultures, languages, countries, beliefs, and experiences to share free knowledge with the world. Together, they have created the world’s free knowledge resource—available in nearly 300 languages spanning all corners of the globe. Reflecting both this breadth of content, and the global nature of our mission, the Wikimedia Foundation has employees and contractors from all over the globe, and we collaborate with community members, chapters, and affiliate groups in nearly every time zone. Restrictions on international travel will greatly hinder our ability to work together in furtherance of making free knowledge available to everyone, everywhere.

For more information about the importance of travel and collaboration to the Wikimedia Foundation’s operations, please see our February 5, 2017 blog post about the amicus we joined in Washington. Additionally, the January 30 statement by our Executive Director Katherine Maher discusses the Foundation’s philosophy of making free knowledge available across all borders.

The latest restrictions presented in the U.S. executive order are antithetical to the spirit of open collaboration that has allowed the internet and the Wikimedia projects in particular to flourish. We urge the court to grant the restraining order, and provide protection until the order’s legal and constitutional infirmities can be fully examined.

The list of signatories, as of publishing time, follows.

1. Airbnb, Inc.
2. AltSchool, PBC
3. Ampush LLC
4. Appboy
5. Appnexus, Inc.
6. Azavea
7. CareZone, Inc.
8. Chegg, Inc.
9. Cloudera
10. Color Genomics, Inc.
11. Copia Institute
12. DoorDash
13. Dropbox, Inc.
14. Electronic Arts
15. EquityZen Inc.
16. Evernote Corporation
17. Flipboard
18. General Assembly Space, Inc.
19. Glassdoor, Inc.
20. Greenhouse Software, Inc.
21. IDEO
22. Imgur, Inc.
23. Indiegogo, Inc.
24. Kargo Global, Inc.
25. Kickstarter, PBC
26. Light
27. Linden Research, Inc. d/b/a Linden Lab
28. Lithium Technologies, Inc.
29. Lyft
30. Lytro, Inc.
31. Mapbox, Inc.
32. Marin Software Incorporated
33. Meetup, Inc.
34. Memebox Corporation
35. MongoDB, Inc.
36. NetApp, Inc.
37. Patreon, Inc.
38. Pinterest, Inc.
39. Postmates Inc.
40. Quora, Inc.
41. RealNetworks, Inc.
42. RetailMeNot, Inc.
43. Rocket Lawyer Incorporated
44. Shutterstock, Inc.
45. Square, Inc.
46. Strava, Inc.
47. SugarCRM
48. Sunrun, Inc.
49. TripAdvisor, Inc.
50. Turo, Inc.
51. Twilio Inc.
52. Udacity, Inc.
53. Upwork
54. Warby Parker
55. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
56. Work & Co
57. Y Combinator Management, LLC
58. Zendesk, Inc.

Michelle Paulson, Interim General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation

Special thanks to the law firm Paul, Weiss for drafting the brief, to the other signatories of the brief for their collaboration and support in this matter, and to the Wikimedia Foundation Communications, Legal, Talent and Culture, and Travel teams for their work since the initial order was first issued.

This post has been corrected to note that State of Washington v. Trump has been dismissed.

Photo by Ken Hammond/USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, public domain/CC0.

Wikipedia is based on the belief that every person, everywhere should be able to freely share in the sum of all knowledge. This vision only works when when every single person feels welcome to participate and collaborate openly, regardless of background or identity. At the Wikimedia Foundation, we believe this commitment to inclusion applies to our staff as it does to Wikimedia communities. Today, I’m proud to share that we’re affirming this commitment by making some important updates to our non-discrimination policy.

Our updates go beyond protecting all the classes that the law requires. Our updated non-discrimination policy includes new explicit protections and expanded definitions related to gender identity and expression, disability, citizenship, and ancestry. This updated policy codifies practices and values already in place at the Foundation, and builds on recent efforts to support inclusivity and equitable opportunity within our organization, including expanding our parental leave policies, standing in support of our global staff, and appointing Talent & Culture leaders with strong track-records in supporting people rather than process.

Our previous non-discrimination policy had not been updated since 2006. While it was progressive at the time, we know time keeps moving forward. As you might imagine, in nearly eleven years, not only has the law of equal opportunity changed, but our understanding of how to best manifest equitable opportunity has evolved as well. We believe that this recent update better reflects our commitment to non-discrimination—and to realizing the diversity of talent, identity, and experience necessary to support one of the world’s most beloved and popular websites.

The first additions regard gender identity and gender expression. Our updates here reflect the Foundation’s belief that regardless of how someone identifies or expresses their gender, they bring value and perspective to our work. With this and all the updates, the Foundation affirms its belief that a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives is critical to effectively serving the Wikimedia movement worldwide.

The new policy includes explicit protection in a number of other areas, including veteran, military, marital, and childbearing status. We also added an expanded definition of protected disability to explicitly include mental as well as physical disability. The Wikimedia movement and the Wikimedia Foundation welcomes contributors of all of these statuses and backgrounds.

Finally, the policy adds explicit protections for citizenship and ancestry, confirming the Foundation’s belief that each person should be considered as an individual, regardless of the nation or culture from which they hail. The Foundation seeks to find the most passionate, dedicated, and talented employees who are committed to its mission to help make the world’s knowledge freely available to all, and celebrates the rich tapestry of language, culture, and identity that inform these efforts.

In addition to the updates to this important policy, our Talent & Culture department is supporting new employee resource groups, as well as an organization-wide discussion group on diversity and inclusion. Some of the employee resource groups being developed include ones for parents, LGBTQ+, immigrants, and women.

These groups have already been involved with the updates to our non-discrimination policy and other recent efforts. They are also looking at actions for the future, such as bringing in outside speakers to discuss topics like the gender gap, the transgender gap, and anti-harassment efforts; coordinating our efforts at events like San Francisco Pride and diversity work fairs; and reviewing our recruitment materials to better reflect our diverse workplace.

The Wikimedia Foundation will continue to develop our internal programs and policies to help nurture an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace that allows us to recruit the best talent possible to serve the Wikimedia movement.

Katherine Maher, Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation

Special thanks to Angel Lewis, Joady Lohr, Patrick Earley, Jacob Rogers, Michelle Paulson, Gregory Varnum, and Juliet Barbara for their contributions to this update.

March 14, 2017

Semantic MediaWiki 2.5 (SMW 2.5.0), the next feature version after 2.4 has now been released.

This new version brings many enhancements and new features such as full-text search support for datatype "Text", query result caching for better performance and the options to record and reference provenance data, to use property chains and language filters in print requests, to define preferred property labels as well as to integrate edit protection with annotations. Moreover the links in values feature for datatype "Text" was improved a lot and the fixed properties support was repaired which is now no longer experimental. Not to forget special page "SMWAdmin" was renamed to "SemanticMediaWiki" extended and overhauled. See also the version release page for information on further improvements and new features. Additionally this version fixes a lot of bugs and brings stability and performance improvements. Automated software testing was again further expanded to assure software stability. Please see the page Installation for details on how to install and upgrade.

March 14, 2017

Semantic MediaWiki 2.5 (SMW 2.5.0), the next feature version after 2.4 has now been released.

This new version brings many enhancements and new features such as full-text search support for datatype "Text", query result caching for better performance and the options to record and reference provenance data, to use property chains and language filters in print requests, to define preferred property labels as well as to integrate edit protection with annotations. Moreover the links in values feature for datatype "Text" was improved a lot and the fixed properties support was repaired which is now no longer experimental. Not to forget special page "SMWAdmin" was renamed to "SemanticMediaWiki" extended and overhauled. See also the version release page for information on further improvements and new features. Additionally this version fixes a lot of bugs and brings stability and performance improvements. Automated software testing was again further expanded to assure software stability. Please see the page Installation for details on how to install and upgrade.

“The Gleaners,” by Jean-François Millet, public domain/CC0.

On a daily basis, millions of terms are entered into the Wikipedia search engine. What comes back when people search for those terms is largely due to the work of the Discovery team, which aims to “make the wealth of knowledge and content in the Wikimedia projects easily discoverable.”

The Discovery team is responsible for ensuring that visitors searching for terms in different languages wind up on the correct results page, and for continually improving the ways in which search results are displayed.

Dan Garry leads the Backend Search team which maintains and enhances search features and APIs and improves search result relevance for Wikimedia wikis. He and his team have a public dashboard where they can monitor and analyze the impact of their efforts. Yet, they do much of their work without knowing who is searching for what—Wikipedia collects very little information about users, and doesn’t connect search data to other data like page views or browsing habits.

Dan and I talked about how the search team improves search without knowing this information, and how different groups of people on Wikipedia use search differently. An edited version of our conversation is below.

———

Mel: You mentioned in an earlier conversation we had that power editors use Wikipedia’s search in a completely different way than readers. What are some of the ways that power editors use search?

Dan: Power users use search as a workflow management tool. For example—they might see a typo that annoys them or a word in an article that is misused a lot, or be looking for old bits of code that need to be changed, and then search for that to see if corrections can be made. In that case, unlike your average user, they’re actually hoping for zero results from their query, because it means the typo isn’t present anywhere.

Another way that power users might use search is to look for their usernames because they might want to find places where they’ve been mentioned in discussion—and they want to “sort pages by recency” so that they can see the most recent times they’ve been mentioned.

That represents a divergence from someone who simply wants to find an article. Our power users aren’t always trying to find an article—they’re trying to find pages that meet certain criteria so they can perform an action on those pages. They’re interested in the whole results set, rather than 1-2 results.

———

Mel: It sounds like power editors don’t always want or need relevancy. (Although I’m sure sometimes they do.)

Dan: That’s right. It’s something we’d like to study more in-depth. We prioritize relevancy for readers but editors and even some kinds of readers might need something completely different.

Dan Garry. Photo by Myleen Hollero/Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0.

———

Mel: There are a lot of ways to search Wikipedia. Off the top of my head, I can think of searching through search engines, through wikipedia.org, through an individual article page, and then on the mobile apps. Do you notices differences between all of these different pathways into the site?

Dan: Occasionally we do. I used to be a product manager for mobile and I was focusing a lot on search. I was interested in search as an entry point for the mobile app.

But we found that a lot of people were having trouble with things like finding the search tool. We had made an assumption that keeping a search query in the search bar would be useful for the end user, but people thought that was the title of the page, and they were really confused.

When we realized that this could be an issue, we did a lot of qualitative user studies with people, and asked staff who weren’t on the product team what they thought. It was helpful to get perspectives of this feature on the app outside of the dev team, from actual users.

We decided to change the way that search appeared in the app once a page loaded. When people navigated to that page, we deleted their search phrase from the search box which helped people know where to look to start searching again.

We’ve also thought quite a bit about images and their relationship to search. We thought about adding images in search results, and we found that adding images to the search results changed user behavior quite a bit. Instead of clicking on the first link, which may or may not have been the most relevant result, they would almost always prefer articles with pictures, even if the articles were further down the search results page. We asked why, and people said that they felt that the result was more comprehensive or complete.

It’s funny how changing something small can immediately have a huge effect. When we made the picture change, we also saw a small drop in people clicking through to the articles. This alarmed us because we thought we were enhancing things for the end user, and we were worried that by adding the pictures, that we may have inadvertently caused them to not get the information they needed. But we did some digging, and found it was the opposite:  for some queries, the answer to the search query was given in the search results so they didn’t need to go to the article. We were meeting their user needs earlier in the search process which was fantastic.

You really need both quantitative and qualitative data to truly understand all the ways users use your product. Having either only one or the other can paint an unclear picture.

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Mel: What kinds of things do you think about when thinking about relevancy?

Dan: This is a tricky topic. The fundamental approach assumes that you can break down relevance into an equation that aggregates different factors, and then produces results that are “the most relevant.” That’s clearly not always going to be the case. If I search for ‘Kennedy,’ I could be looking for the airport, or the President, or I might be looking for John Jr. or Ted. There is no single correct “most relevant result” for that query.

There’s a multitude of different factors—we used to use something called tf-idf to figure out what to surface in what order. tf-idf stands for ‘term frequency—inverse document frequency’, which combines measures of how much words are mentioned in one article with how much they’re mentioned in the whole site.

So if I were to search for “Sochi Olympics”. The word “Sochi” is relatively rare, but the word “Olympics” is much more commons, it knows that “Sochi” part of the query is probably the more important one, and that’s how it finds the 2014 Winter Olympics article as opposed to other articles about the Olympics.

Melody Kramer. Photo by Zachary McCune/Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Mel: It sounds like that would be challenging for words that have multiple meanings.

Dan: That’s true and something we think about a lot. If you go to Wikidata, and you search for life on the search page, you get search results like: Life Sciences, the Encyclopedia of Life, IUBMB Life, Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, the phrase slice of life, the video game Half-Life… but you don’t get the item on the concept of something being living.

And that’s because of the term frequency and inverse document frequency. A lot of the pages I just mentioned a lot of them have the term life in them. And, by coincidence, the item about life itself doesn’t actually have the word life in it very often. Which means the actual result for life is far down, because it doesn’t seem as important as the others, even though it is!

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Mel: I imagine there must be ways to mitigate that.

Dan: We’ve switched to an algorithm Okapi BM25 instead of tf-idf – it’s a newer algorithm. (BM stands for Best Match.) Basically, what BM25 says is that there isn’t a huge difference between a term being mentioned 1000000 times and a term being mentioned 10000 times.  Using the new algorithm and switching to a more precise way of storing data about articles helped with the Kennedy problem a lot, because it’s paying less attention to how frequently the word Kennedy appears in other pages since it’s used a lot in this page. Before John Fitzgerald Kennedy was on the second page of result, and now he’s about 7th or 8th in terms of results.

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Mel: Does the site use BM25 everywhere?

Dan: We use BM25 on every Wikipedia that is not in Chinese, Thai, Japanese and other languages where words in a sentence don’t have spaces in between them. We tested BM25 and it caused a massive drop in the zero results rate on the spaceless languages due to a bug in the way words are broken up, or tokenized. We learned the algorithm wasn’t working on those languages, and we deployed it everywhere else. We’re hopeful that we can fix that problem for spaceless languages in the future.

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Mel: What has been the most unexpected thing you’ve learned through search?

Dan: There is a surprising long tail when it comes to the frequency of searches.

One of the first things we were asked by our community members is “Why don’t you make a list of the most popular queries that give zero search results so editors can make redirects or find articles that need to be written?”

The data is not that useful, as it turns out. In our analysis of the problem, some of the most popular zero result searches were “{searchTerms}” and “search_suggest_query” which we think are bugs in certain browsers or automated search systems.

We also found that a lot of people were searching for DOIs, which are digital object identifiers used by academic researchers. Most of the searches for those got zero results. We had to ask ourselves “What are people doing?” And we found there was a tool that let researchers put a DOI into it to see whether their paper was cited in Wikipedia. Of course, most papers that people are searching for aren’t in Wikipedia, so it’s actually correct to give them zero results!

When I started in search, we believed that users should never get zero results when searching. But it turns out that a lot of people were searching for things we don’t have and it’s correct to give them zero results.

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Mel: I know that Wikipedia has a very strict privacy policy and tracks hardly anything. What do we collect?

Dan: We do track some info. We have event logging that says ‘This user with this IP clicked on the 4th result, it took us this long to give them results’, and so on. But, it’s Wikimedia’s policy to delete all personally identifying information after 90 days. That is a very intentional thing we decided to protect user privacy.

If you don’t want information about users to be revealed, the only thing you can do is to not record it. If we get subpoenas, we are legally required to comply with. But if we don’t have that information, we obviously can’t give it out! So it’s the safest way to keep users’ privacy protected. We can figure out some things by language, but not geography.

But it’s tricky sometimes. A good example of that within the Latin alphabet is the search term “paris”. What language is that in? Is it English? French? If I search for “cologne”, it’s a city in Germany but also a perfume in English. And that’s an example of relevance. Is a user who searches for “cologne” searching for a fragrance or a city? These things make delivering good search results really hard, but we keep on trying, and keep making them a little better every day.

Melody Kramer, Senior Audience Development Manager, Communications
Dan Garry, Lead Product Manager, Discovery Product and Analysis
Wikimedia Foundation

I have been looking into a JavaScript library called vue.js lately. It is similar to React, but not encumbered by licensing issues (that might prevent its use on WMF servers in the future), faster (or so they claim), but most of all, it can work without interference on the server side; all I need for my purposes is including the vue.js file into HTML.

So why would you care? Well, as usual, I learn new technology by working it into an actual project (rather than just vigorously nodding over a manual). This time, I decided to rewrite the slightly dusty interface of Mix’n’match using vue.js. This new version went “live” a few minutes ago, and I am surprised myself at how much more responsive it has become. This might be best exemplified by the single entry view (example), which (for unmatched entries) will search Wikidata, the respective language Wikipedia, and the Mix’n’match database for the entry title. It also searches Wikidata via SPARQL to check if the ID for the respective property is already in use. This all happens nicely modular, so I can re-use lots of code for different modules.

Most of the functions in the previous version have been implemented in the new one. Redirect code is in place, so if you have bookmarked a page on Mix’n’match, you should end up in the right place. One new function is the ability to sort and group the catalogs (almost 400 now!) on the main page (example).

As usual, feel free to browse the code (vue.js-based HTML and JavaScript, respectively). Issues (for the new interface, or Mix’n’match in general) go here.