—I suppose you are an entomologist?—I said with a note of interrogation.

—Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name! A society may call itself an Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad title as that to himself, in the present state of science, is a pretender, sir, a dilettante, an impostor! No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp.

The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. 

A collection of biographies with surprising gaps (ex. A.D. Imms)

The history of interest in Indian insects has been approached by many writers and there are several bits and pieces available in journals and there are various insights distributed across books. There are numerous ways of looking at how people historically viewed insects. One attempt is a collection of biographies, some of which are uncited verbatim (and not even within quotation marks) accounts  from obituaries, by B.R. Subba Rao who also provides something of a historical thread connecting the biographies. Keeping Indian expectations in view, Subba Rao and M.A. Husain play to the crowd. Husain was writing in pre-Independence times where there was a genuine conflict between Indian intellectuals and their colonial masters. They begin with interpretations of mentions of insects in old Indian writings. As can be expected there are mentions of honey, shellac, bees, ants, and a few nuisance insects in old texts. Husain takes the fact that the term Satpada षट्पद or six-legs existed in the 1st century Amarakosa to suggest that Indians were far ahead of time because Latreille's Hexapoda, the supposed analogy, was proposed only in 1825. Such histories gloss over the structures on which science and one can only assume that they failed to find the development of such structures in the ancient texts that they examined. The identification of species mentioned in old texts are often based on ambiguous translations should leave one wondering what the value of claiming Indian priority in identifying a few insects is. For instance K.N. Dave translates a verse from the Atharva-veda and suggests an early date for knowledge of shellac. This interpretation looks dubious and sure enough, Dave has been critiqued by Mahdihassan.  The indragopa (Indra's cowherd) is supposedly something that appears after the rains. Sanskrit scholars have identified it variously as the cochineal insect (the species Dactylopius coccus is South American!), the lac insect, a firefly(!) and as Trombidium (red velvet mite) - the last matches the blood red colour mentioned in a text attributed to Susrutha. To be fair, ambiguities resulting from translation are not limited to those that deal with Indian writing. Dikairon (Δικαιρον), supposedly a highly-valued and potent poison from India was mentioned in the work Indika by Ctesias 398 - 397 BC. One writer said it was the droppings of a bird. Valentine Ball thought it was derived from a scarab beetle. Jeffrey Lockwood claimed that it came from the rove beetles Paederus sp. And finally a Spanish scholar states that all this was a misunderstanding and that Dikairon was not a poison, and believe it or not, was a masticated mix of betel leaves, arecanut, and lime! One gets a far more reliable idea of ancient knowledge and traditions from practitioners, forest dwellers, the traditional honey harvesting tribes, and similar people that have been gathering materials such as shellac and beeswax. Unfortunately, many of these traditions and their practitioners are threatened by modern laws, economics, and culture. These practitioners are being driven out of the forests where they live, and their knowledge was hardly ever captured in writing. The writers of the ancient Sanskrit texts were probably associated with temple-towns and other semi-urban clusters and it seems like the knowledge of forest dwellers was not considered merit-worthy.

A more meaningful overview of entomology may be gained by reading and synthesizing a large number of historical bits, of which there are a growing number. The 1973 book published by the Annual Reviews Inc. should be of some interest. I have appended a selection of sources that I have found useful in adding bits and pieces to form a historic view of entomology in India. It helps however to have a broader skeleton on which to attach these bits and minutiae. Here, there area also truly verbose and terminology-filled systems developed by historians of science (for example, see ANT). I prefer an approach that is free of a jargon overload and like to look at entomology and its growth along three lines of action - cataloguing with the main product being collection of artefacts and the assignment of names, communication and vocabulary-building are social actions involving groups of interested people who work together with the products being scholarly societies and journals, and pattern-finding where hypotheses are made, and predictions tested. I like to think that anyone learning entomology also goes through these activities, often in this sequence. With professionalization there appears to be a need for people to step faster and faster into the pattern-finding way which also means that less time is spent on the other two streams of activity. The fast stepping often is achieved by having comprehensive texts, keys, identification guides and manuals. The skills involved in the production of those works - ways to prepare specimens, observe, illustrate, or describe are often not captured by the books themselves.

Cataloguing

The cataloguing phase of knowledge gathering, especially of the (larger and more conspicuous) insect species of India grew rapidly thanks to the craze for natural history cabinets of the wealthy (made socially meritorious by the idea that appreciating the works of the Creator was as good as attending church)  in Britain and Europe and their ability to tap into networks of collectors working within the colonial enterprise. The cataloguing phase can be divided into the non-scientific cabinet-of-curiosity style especially followed before Darwin and the more scientific forms. The idea that insects could be preserved by drying and kept for reference by pinning, [See Barnard 2018] the system of binomial names, the idea of designating type specimens that could be inspected by anyone describing new species, the system of priority in assigning names were some of the innovations and cultural rules created to aid cataloguing. These rules were enforced by scholarly societies, their members (which would later lead to such things as codes of nomenclature suggested by rule makers like Strickland, now dealt with by committees that oversee the  ICZN Code) and their journals. It would be wrong to assume that the cataloguing phase is purely historic and no longer needed. It is a phase that is constantly involved in the creation of new knowledge. Labels, catalogues, and referencing whether in science or librarianship are essential for all subsequent work to be discovered and are essential to science based on building on the work of others, climbing the shoulders of giants to see further. Cataloguing was probably what the physicists derided as "stamp-collecting".

Communication and vocabulary building

The other phase involves social activities, the creation of specialist language, groups, and "culture". The methods and tools adopted by specialists also helps in producing associations and the identification of boundaries that could spawn new associations. The formation of groups of people based on interests is something that ethnographers and sociologists have examined in the context of science. Textbooks, taxonomic monographs, and major syntheses also help in building community - they make it possible for new entrants to rapidly move on to joining the earlier formed groups of experts. Whereas some of the early learned societies were spawned by people with wealth and leisure, some of the later societies have had other economic forces in their support.

Like species, interest groups too specialize and split to cover more specific niches, such as those that deal with applied areas such as agriculture, medicine, veterinary science and forensics. There can also be interest in behaviour, and evolution which, though having applications, are often do not find economic support.

Pattern finding

Eleanor Ormerod, an unexpected influence in the rise of economic entomology in India

The pattern finding phase when reached allows a field to become professional - with paid services offered by practitioners. It is the phase in which science flexes its muscle, specialists gain social status, and are able to make livelihoods out of their interest. Lefroy (1904) cites economic entomology as starting with E.C. Cotes [Cotes' career in entomology was short, after marrying the famous Canadian journalist Sara Duncan in 1889 he too moved to writing] in the Indian Museum in 1888. But he surprisingly does not mention any earlier attempts, and one finds that Edward Balfour, that encyclopaedic-surgeon of Madras collated a list of insect pests in 1887 and drew inspiration from Eleanor Ormerod who hints at the idea of getting government support, noting that it would cost very little given that she herself worked with no remuneration to provide a service for agriculture in England. Her letters were also forwarded to the Secretary of State for India and it is quite possible that Cotes' appointment was a result.

As can be imagined, economics, society, and the way science is supported - royal patronage, family, state, "free markets", crowd-sourcing, or mixes of these - impact the way an individual or a field progresses. Entomology was among the first fields of zoology that managed to gain economic value with the possibility of paid employment. David Lack, who later became an influential ornithologist, was wisely guided by his father to pursue entomology as it was the only field of zoology where jobs existed. Lack however found his apprenticeship (in Germany, 1929!) involving pinning specimens "extremely boring".

Indian reflections on the history of entomology

Kunhikannan died at the rather young age of 47

A rather interesting analysis of Indian science is made by the first native Indian entomologist to work with the official title of "entomologist" in the state of Mysore - K. Kunhikannan. Kunhikannan was deputed to pursue a Ph.D. at Stanford (for some unknown reason many of the pre-Independence Indian entomologists trained in Stanford rather than England - see postscript) through his superior Leslie Coleman. At Stanford, Kunhikannan gave a talk on Science in India. He noted in his 1923 talk :

In the field of natural sciences the Hindus did not make any progress. The classifications of animals and plants are very crude. It seems to me possible that this singular lack of interest in this branch of knowledge was due to the love of animal life. It is difficult for Westerners to realise how deep it is among Indians. The observant traveller will come across people trailing sugar as they walk along streets so that ants may have a supply, and there are priests in certain sects who veil that face while reading sacred books that they may avoid drawing in with their breath and killing any small unwary insects. [Note: Salim Ali expressed a similar view ]

He then examines science sponsored by state institutions, by universities and then by individuals. About the last he writes:

Though I deal with it last it is the first in importance. Under it has to be included all the work done by individuals who are not in Government employment or who being government servants devote their leisure hours to science. A number of missionaries come under this category. They have done considerable work mainly in the natural sciences. There are also medical men who devote their leisure hours to science. The discovery of the transmission of malaria was made not during the course of Government work. These men have not received much encouragement for research or reward for research, but they deserve the highest praise., European officials in other walks of life have made signal contributions to science. The fascinating volumes of E. H. Aitken and Douglas Dewar are the result of observations made in the field of natural history in the course of official duties. Men like these have formed themselves into an association, and a journal is published by the Bombay Natural History Association[sic], in which valuable observations are recorded from time to time. That publication has been running for over a quarter of a century, and its volumes are a mine of interesting information with regard to the natural history of India.

This then is a brief survey of the work done in India. As you will see it is very little, regard being had to the extent of the country and the size of her population. I have tried to explain why Indians' contribution is as yet so little, how education has been defective and how opportunities have been few. Men do not go after scientific research when reward is so little and facilities so few. But there are those who will say that science must be pursued for its own sake. That view is narrow and does not take into account the origin and course of scientific research. Men began to pursue science for the sake of material progress. The Arab alchemists started chemistry in the hope of discovering a method of making gold. So it has been all along and even now in the 20th century the cry is often heard that scientific research is pursued with too little regard for its immediate usefulness to man. The passion for science for its own sake has developed largely as a result of the enormous growth of each of the sciences beyond the grasp of individual minds so that a division between pure and applied science has become necessary. The charge therefore that Indians have failed to pursue science for its own sake is not justified. Science flourishes where the application of its results makes possible the advancement of the individual and the community as a whole. It requires a leisured class free from anxieties of obtaining livelihood or capable of appreciating the value of scientific work. Such a class does not exist in India. The leisured classes in India are not yet educated sufficiently to honour scientific men.

It is interesting that leisure is noted as important for scientific advance. Edward Balfour, mentioned earlier, also made a similar comment that Indians were too close to subsistence to reflect accurately on their environment!  (apparently in The Vydian and the Hakim, what do they know of medicine? (1875) which unfortunately is not available online)

Kunhikannan may be among the few Indian scientists who dabbled in cultural history, and political theorizing. He wrote two rather interesting books The West (1927) and A Civilization at Bay (1931, posthumously published) which defended Indian cultural norms while also suggesting areas for reform. While reading these works one has to remind oneself that he was working under and with Europeans and would not have been able to have many conversations on these topics with Indians. An anonymous writer who penned the memoir of his life in his posthumous work notes that he was reserved and had only a small number of people to talk to outside of his professional work.

Entomologists meeting at Pusa in 1919 Third row: C.C. Ghosh, Ram Saran, Gupta, P.V. Isaac, Y. Ramachandra Rao, Afzal Husain, Ojha, A. Haq Second row: M. Zaharuddin, C.S. Misra, D. Naoroji, Harchand Singh, G.R. Dutt, E.S. David, K. Kunhi Kannan, Ramrao S. Kasergode, J.L.Khare, Jhaveri, V.G.Deshpande, R. Madhavan Pillai, Patel, A. Mujtaba, P.C. Sen First row: Capt. Froilano de Mello, Robertson-Brown, S. Higginbotham, C.M. Inglis, C.F.C. Beeson, Gough, Bainbrigge Fletcher, Bentley, Senior-White, T.V. Rama Krishna Ayyar, C.M. Hutchinson, Andrews, H.L.Dutt

Entmologists meeting at Pusa in 1923 Fifth row (standing) Mukerjee, G.D.Ojha, Bashir, Torabaz Khan, D.P. Singh Fourth row (standing) M.O.T. Iyengar, R.N. Singh, S. Sultan Ahmad, G.D. Misra, Sharma,Ahmad Mujtaba, Mohammad Shaffi Third row (standing) Rao Sahib Y Rama Chandra Rao, D Naoroji, G.R.Dutt, Rai Bahadur C.S. Misra, SCJ Bennett (bacteriologist, Muktesar), P.V. Isaac, T.M. Timoney, Harchand Singh, S.K.Sen Second row (seated) Mr M. Afzal Husain, Major RWG Hingston, Dr C F C Beeson, T. Bainbrigge Fletcher, P.B. Richards, J.T. Edwards, Major J.A. Sinton First row (seated) Rai Sahib PN Das, B B Bose, Ram Saran, R.V. Pillai, M.B. Menon, V.R. Phadke (veterinary college, Bombay)

Note: As usual, these notes are spin-offs from researching and writing Wikipedia entries, in this case on several pioneering Indian entomologists. It is remarkable that even some people in high offices, such as P.V. Isaac, the last Imperial Entomologist, and grandfather of noted writer Arundhati Roy, is largely unknown (except as the near-fictional Pappachi in Roy's God of Small Things)


References

• Balfour, Edward (1887). The agricultural pests of India, and of eastern and southern Asia, vegetable and animal, injurious to man and his products. London: Bernard Quaritch.
• Ball, V. 1885. On the identification of the animals and plants of India which were known to early Greek authors. The Indian Antiquary. 14:274-287, 303-311, 334-341
• Barnard, Peter C. (2018). Bat-Fowlers, Pooters and Cyanide Jars: a Historical Overview of Insect Collecting and Preservation in MacGregor, A. (Ed.).  Naturalists in the Field . Brill.
• Dave, KN (1950) Lac and the lac insect in the Atharva veda. Int Acad Ind Cult Nagpur, 16 pp. [Dave incidentally, is also the translator and interpreter of another problematic work on ornithological knowledge in ancient Indian literature]
• Farber, P.L. (1976). The type-concept in zoology during the first half of the nineteenth century. Journal of the History of Biology 9(1):93–119.  
• Hewitt, C. Gordon (1916). A review of applied entomology in the British Empire. Annals of the Entomological Society of America. 9(1):1–33.
• Howard, L.O. (1930). A history of applied entomology (Somewhat Anecdotal). Smithsonian Institution. Publication 3065.
• Husain, Mohamad Afzal (1938). Entomology in India, past, present and future. Current Science 6(8):422-424. [This is a summary, for the full address see - Husain, M. Afzal (1939). "Entomology in India: Past, Present and Future."  Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Indian Science Congress, Calcutta, 1938. pp. 201–246]
• Lefroy, Maxwell (1904). Historical summary in Report of the Entomologist to the Government of India.
• Lienhard, S. (1978) On the meaning and use of the word indragopa. Indologica Taurinensia 6:177-188.
• Lockwood, J.A. (2012) Insects as weapons of war, terror, and torture. Annual Review of Entomology 57:205-227.
• Mahdihassan, S. (1986). Lac and its decolourization by orpiment as traced to Babylon. Indian Journal of History of Science 21(2):187-192.
• Melillo, E. D. (2013). Global Entomologies: Insects, Empires, and the “Synthetic Age” in World History. Past & Present, 223(1):233–270. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtt026
• Rao, H. Srinivasa (1957) History of our knowledge of the Indian fauna through the ages. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 54:251-280.
• Rao, B.R. Subba (1983). Systematic entomology in India - past, present and future. Current Science 52(21):997-1000.
• Romero, D.B. (2007). El díkairon en la obra Indika de Ctesias de Cnido. Propuesta de identificación. Emerita 75(2):255-272.
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2017). Malarial Subjects. Cambridge University Press. [Open-Access]
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2013). Quinine, mosquitoes and empire: reassembling malaria in British India, 1890–1910, South Asian History and Culture, 4(1):65-86. doi:10.1080/19472498.2012.750457
• Smith, Ray F.; Mittler, T.E.; Smith, Carroll N. (1973). History of Entomology. Annual Reviews Inc. ISBN 0824321017.

An index to entomologists who worked in India or described a significant number of species from India - with links to Wikipedia links (where possible - the gaps are huge)
(woefully incomplete - feel free to let me know of additional candidates)

Carl Linnaeus - Johan Christian Fabricius - Edward Donovan - John Gerard Koenig - John Obadiah Westwood - Frederick William Hope - George Alexander James Rothney - Thomas de Grey Walsingham - Henry John Elwes - Victor Motschulsky - Charles Swinhoe - John William Yerbury - Edward Yerbury Watson - Peter Cameron - Charles George Nurse - H.C. Tytler - Arthur Henry Eyre Mosse - W.H. Evans - Frederic Moore - John Henry Leech - Charles Augustus de Niceville - Thomas Nelson Annandale - R.C. Wroughton -  T.R.D. Bell - Francis Buchanan-Hamilton - James Wood-Mason - Frederic Charles Fraser  - R.W. Hingston - Auguste Forel - James Davidson - E.H. Aitken -  O.C. Ollenbach - Frank Hannyngton - Martin Ephraim Mosley - Hamilton J. Druce  - Thomas Vincent Campbell - Gilbert Edward James Nixon - Malcolm Cameron - G.F. Hampson - Martin Jacoby - W.F. Kirby - W.L. Distant -  C.T. Bingham - G.J. Arrow - Claude Morley - Malcolm Burr - Samarendra Maulik - Guy Marshall

 

Edward Percy Stebbing - T.B. Fletcher - Edward Ernest Green - E.C. Cotes - Harold Maxwell Lefroy - Frank Milburn Howlett - S.R. Christophers - Leslie C. Coleman - T.V. Ramakrishna Ayyar - Yelsetti Ramachandra Rao - Magadi Puttarudriah - Hem Singh Pruthi - Shyam Sunder Lal Pradhan - James Molesworth Gardner - Vakittur Prabhakar Rao - D.N. Raychoudhary - C.F.W. Muesenbeck  - Mithan Lal Roonwal - Ennapada S. Narayanan - M.S. Mani - T.N. Ananthakrishnan - K. Kunhikannan - Muhammad Afzal Husain

Not included by Rao -   F.H. Gravely - P.V. Isaac - M. Afzal Husain - A.D. Imms - C.F.C. Beeson

 - C. Brooke Worth - Kumar Krishna -


PS: Thanks to Prof C.A. Viraktamath, I became aware of a new book-  Gunathilagaraj, K.; Chitra, N.; Kuttalam, S.; Ramaraju, K. (2018). Dr. T.V. Ramakrishna Ayyar: The Entomologist. Coimbatore: Tamil Nadu Agricultural University. - this suggests that TVRA went to Stanford on the suggestion of Kunhikannan.

It’s been quite a long time (four and a half years in fact) since I looked at the state of the African language Wiktionaries. For those new to Wiktionary, the idea is that it will describe all words of all languages using definitions and descriptions in the particular language edition. An ambitious task!

So, how are the projects progressing?

A portion of the Octateuch in Ethiopian

African Language Wiktionaries

In short, although it’s been so long since the last update, there’s not much to show. The only project to more than double its articles in four and a half years is Tsonga, off a minute base. Malagasy has always had a huge amount of bot activity, and is still growing from a large base, and Afrikaans shows some signs of life. But overall, the state of the African language Wiktionaries can be described as dormant.

Perhaps the African language Wikipedias will fare better?

African Language Wikipedias > 1000 articles

The Zulu Wikipedia is the latest addition to the 1000 club, having reached this milestone just before Wikimania last year, and progress has been steady since then.

At first glance, Hausa looks like it’s in great shape, with an 88% increase in the number of articles. But this is misleading, as many of these are one line articles on football players, the entirety of which translates as, for example, “Kenny Allen (footballer) is an English football player.” No disrespect to Kenny Allen, but I’m not sure he and the 100s of other footballers listed there are critical components of Hausa knowledge. There’s a move to delete these articles (you can see the impressive list here while it’s up), but even if they survive, it’s not a sign of a healthy project.

Leaving aside Hausa, it’s once again Afrikaans, growing at an impressive 53% over the period, that provides an example for the rest. At current rates, it’s on track to pass Malagasy and reclaim it’s position on top in about a year or so.

Besides Afrikaans, only Shona, Swahili, Somali and Zulu show a growth rate above 10%, while quite a few sit idle.

Moving on to the South African language editions specifically:

South African Language Wikipedias

Afrikaans remains the only project that could be described as a usable Wikipedia – the other languages are still very much in the formative stages. Zulu is also showing signs of life. Besides these two, only Xhosa and Swati see growth rates above 5%. It’s sad to see the stalling of Northern Sotho, while Ndebele shows no signs of getting out of the incubator anytime soon.

2019 has been proclaimed the Year of Indigenous Languages by the UN, but so far there’s not much sign of a change in the status of the African language projects. Later today sees the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources, in collaboration with the Academy of African Languages and Science from the University of South Africa, present an interactive day workshop on contributing to Wikipedia in South African languages. It’s great to see this initiative, which arose with no help that I’m aware of from Wikimedia South Africa. I’m always hopeful with events like these. Generally very few people to stay around to edit Wikipedia, but as projects like Northern Sotho and Swahili show, one person can make a huge difference in the early stages, and it justs needs a committed editor to stick around. It’s a lonely job editing in the early stages, wondering if it’s worthwhile, no community, no idea if their work is being read. Hopefully someone will take on the challenge!

If you are looking to contribute, but don’t know where to start, please reach out to Wikimedia South Africa and we’d be happy to assist.

Related posts

• Zulu Wikipedia reaches 1000 articles
• June 2018 African language Wikipedia update, 50 000 articles for Afrikaans
• September 2017 African language Wikipedia update
• November 2016 African language Wikipedia update
• March 2016 African language Wikipedia update
• June 2015 African language Wikipedia update
• October 2014 African language Wikipedia and Wiktionary update
• June 2014 African Wikipedia and Wiktionary update
• May 2013 African language Wikipedia update
• November African language Wikipedia update: Afrikaans passes Swahili
• April 2012 African language Wikipedia update
• Northern Sotho Wikipedia now an official project, Afrikaans reaches 20 000 articles
• African language Wiktionary update
• African language Wikipedia update
• Wolof Wikipedia reaches 1000 articles
• Swahili Wikipedia now the largest African-language Wikipedia
• The state of Wikimedia projects in South African and Africa – Dec 2008
• The South African Wikimedia communities
• Venda Wikipedia Progress
• First Wikipedia Academy in Africa
• Wikipedia Week
• Afrikaans Wikipedia hits 5000 articles

Image from Wikimedia Commons

This April 2, on #AprilFactsDay, we’re reminded of the importance of trustworthy information. How can we equip the next generations of information consumers and producers with the skills they need to participate in our rapidly changing digital landscape?

Wikipedia is one of the most trusted sites among the cacophony online. That’s because it’s built on the principle of verifiability; its community-made policies take a strict stance against promotion and advertising; and the volunteers that curate its content value neutrally presented and well-referenced facts. Information that doesn’t adhere to these standards is deleted as soon as one of Wikipedia’s thousands of devoted volunteers encounters it.

But there are still gaps in information on Wikipedia, which can be harder to spot than false information. That’s where instructors and students in our Student Program are making a difference. Higher education instructors use our tools and assignment templates to teach students how to identify gaps on Wikipedia and use what they’re learning in class to correct those gaps.

That’s what Dr. Ada Palmer did with her 32 students at the University of Chicago last fall term. Students added 90,000 words of well-researched content to Wikipedia about “how new information technologies trigger innovations in censorship and information control.” *

Did you know, for example, that food producers can more easily sue their critics in certain states in the US because of food libel laws? The laws are often criticized as a restriction of first amendment rights.

And newspaper theft, a form of censorship, occurs when an individual, organization, or government removes a large portion of a publication without the consent of the publisher in order to prevent others from reading it. The Wikipedia article now highlights some notable cases, as well as the strategies that various states and cities in the US employ to counteract it.

Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post calls April 2 (also known as Fact-Checking Day) “a global counterpunch on behalf of truth.” She also writes that it’s an opportunity to get the public more involved in the processes of informational evaluation that journalists undertake daily.

In a Wikipedia writing assignment, students participate in fact-checking Wikipedia, looking for informational gaps, and correcting those gaps for the benefit of millions of readers. Wikipedia writing is fact-checking in action, with an added praxis of making the digital informational landscape better.

In the case of Dr. Palmer’s students, the assignment is also an opportunity to educate others of their rights in the face of false information and censorship.

In general, a Wikipedia writing assignment provides students with an opportunity to learn to critically evaluate information and participate in modes of knowledge creation that they typically accept passively. When Stanford Graduate School of Education found in 2016 that most students can’t tell the difference between a credible news website and a fake news site, a lot of instructors sprung into action to understand how they could help reinforce these skills in their students. Critical media literacy is an essential part of education and a skill that every instructor in higher education has the power to teach.

The ability to access trustworthy and free information equips citizens to know and protect their rights. Access, however, is just the first step. Access plust judgement – the ability to discern reliable from unreliable information – is what truly makes a digital citizen.

Read more about how our work at Wiki Education combats fake news and how you can help.

Interested in adapting a Wikipedia writing assignment to fit your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for all you need to know.

For a few weeks, a CI job had PHPUnit tests abruptly ending with:

returned non-zero exit status -11

The connoisseur [ 1 ] would have recognized that the negative exit status indicates the process exited due to a signal. On Linux, 11 is the value for the SIGSEGV signal, which is usually sent by the kernel to the process as a result of an improper machine instruction. The default behavior is to terminate the process (man 7 signal) and to generate a core dump file (I will come to that later).

But why? Some PHP code ended up triggering a code path in HHVM that would eventually try to read outside of its memory range, or some similar low level fault. The kernel knows that the process completely misbehaved and thus, well, terminates it. Problem solved, you never want your program to misbehave when the kernel is in charge.

The job had recently been switched to use a new container in order to benefit from more recent lib and to match the OS distributions used by the Wikimedia production system. My immediate recommendation was to rollback to the previous known state, but eventually I have let the task to go on and have been absorbed by other tasks (such as updating MediaWiki on the infrastructure).

Last week, the job suddenly began to fail constantly. We prevent code from being merged when a test fails, and thus the code stays in a quarantine zone (Gerrit) and cannot be shipped. A whole team could not ship code (the Language-Team ) for one of their flagship projects (ContentTranslation .) That in turn prevents end users from benefiting from new features they are eager for. The issue had to be acted on and became an unbreak now! kind of task. And I went to my journey.

returned non-zero exit status -11, that is a good enough error message. A process in a Docker container is really just an isolated process and is still managed by the host kernel. First thing I did was to look at the kernel syslog facility on our instances, which yields:

kernel: [7943146.540511] php[14610]:
  segfault at 7f1b16ffad13 ip 00007f1b64787c5e sp 00007f1b53d19d30
     error 4 in libpthread-2.24.so[7f1b64780000+18000]

php there is just HHVM invoked via a php symbolic link. The message hints at libpthread which is where the fault is. But we need a stacktrace to better determine the problem, and ideally a reproduction case.

Thus, what I am really looking for is the core dump file I alluded to earlier. The file is generated by the kernel and contains an image of the process memory at the time of the failure. Given the full copy of the program instructions, the instructions it was running at that time, and all the memory segments, a debugger can reconstruct a human readable state of the failure. That is a backtrace, and is what we rely on to find faulty code and fix bugs.

The core file is not generated. Or the error message would state it had coredumped, i.e. the kernel generated the core dump file. Our default configuration is to not generate any core file, but usually one can adjust it from the shell with ulimit -c XXX where XXX is the maximum size a core file can occupy (in kilobytes, in order to prevent filling the disk). Docker being just a fancy way to start a process, it has a setting to adjust the limit. The docker run inline help states:

--ulimit ulimit Ulimit options (default [])

It is as far as useful as possible, eventually the option to set is: --ulimit core=2147483648 or up to 2 gigabytes. I have updated the CI jobs and instructed them to capture a file named core, the default file name. After a few runs, although I could confirm failures, no files got captured. Why not?

Our machines do not use core as the default filename. It can be found in the kernel configuration:

name=/proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern
/var/tmp/core/core.%h.%e.%p.%t

I thus went on the hosts looking for such files. There were none.

Or maybe I mean None or NaN.

Nada, rien.

The void.

The result is obvious, try to reproduce it! I ran a Docker container doing a basic while loop, from the host I have sent the SIGSEGV signal to the process. The host still had no core file. But surprise it was in the container. Although the kernel is handling it from the host, it is not namespace-aware when it comes time to resolve the path. My quest will soon end, I have simply mounted a host directory to the containers at the expected place:

mkdir /tmp/coredumps
docker run --volume /tmp/coredumps:/var/tmp/core ....

After a few builds, I had harvested enough core files. The investigation is then very straightforward:

$ gdb /usr/bin/hhvm /coredump/core.606eb29eab46.php.2353.1552570410
Core was generated by `php tests/phpunit/phpunit.php --debug-tests --testsuite extensions --exclude-gr'.
Program terminated with signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
#0  0x00007f557214ac5e in __pthread_create_2_1 (newthread=newthread@entry=0x7f55614b9e18, attr=attr@entry=0x7f5552aa62f8, 
    start_routine=start_routine@entry=0x7f556f461c20 <timer_sigev_thread>, arg=<optimized out>) at pthread_create.c:813
813    pthread_create.c: No such file or directory.
[Current thread is 1 (Thread 0x7f55614be3c0 (LWP 2354))]

(gdb) bt
#0  0x00007f557214ac5e in __pthread_create_2_1 (newthread=newthread@entry=0x7f55614b9e18, attr=attr@entry=0x7f5552aa62f8, 
    start_routine=start_routine@entry=0x7f556f461c20 <timer_sigev_thread>, arg=<optimized out>) at pthread_create.c:813
#1  0x00007f556f461bb2 in timer_helper_thread (arg=<optimized out>) at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/timer_routines.c:120
#2  0x00007f557214a494 in start_thread (arg=0x7f55614be3c0) at pthread_create.c:456
#3  0x00007f556aeebacf in __libc_ifunc_impl_list (name=<optimized out>, array=0x7f55614be3c0, max=<optimized out>)
    at ../sysdeps/x86_64/multiarch/ifunc-impl-list.c:387
#4  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()

Which @Anomie kindly pointed out is an issue solved in libc6. Once the container has been rebuilt to apply the package update, the fault disappears.

One can now expect new changes to appear to ContentTranslation.

[ 1 ] ''connoisseur'', from obsolete French, means "to know" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/connoisseur . I guess the English language forgot to apply update on due time and can not make any such change for fear of breaking back compatibility or locution habits.

The task has all the technical details and log leading to solving the issue: T216689: Merge blocker: quibble-vendor-mysql-hhvm-docker in gate fails for most merges (exit status -11)

(Some light copyedits to above -- Brennen Bearnes)

Today we're publishing our first report of the performance experienced by visitors of Wikimedia websites, focused on the Autonomous Systems visitors are connecting from.

This report will be updated monthly, with historical data made available. The goal is to watch the evolution of these metrics over time, allowing us to identify improvements and potential pain points.

In order to make a fair assessment of the autonomous systems' performance, real user metrics collected from web browsers are normalised, in order to avoid differences such as average device power for a given network's users potentially skewing the results. For example, an ISP with more expensive data plans might have users with more expensive, better performing devices on average. This is way we compare data points only for similar effective device CPU power between providers. We also separate the mobile and desktop experiences, because they serve different content, with a notable difference in the median page weight, which directly impacts performance metrics. We wouldn't want the mobile/desktop mix of a given provider to influence the results.

If you look at the report, you might wonder why some autonomous systems' underlying mobile networks show up under "desktop" and some wired internet providers appear under "mobile". The explanation is that the internet providers either sell home internet devices that are effectively mobile network modems, resulting in people using their desktop computers (and as a result, the desktop websites) over a mobile network. Or the providers have mobile device users automatically connect to the same provider's WiFi routers when users are in reach of one.

One caveat about this report is that in countries that are physically large, like the United States, the country-wide aggregation in no way reflects important regional differences there might be for a given network. The main reason why we can't look at smaller regions is that we have simply no way of knowing where mobile users are connecting from, short of collecting geolocation data. Since we care deeply about our user's privacy and their experience, it doesn't feel appropriate at this time to ask users for their precise location in order to generate this type of finer-grained data. Such a scheme would also suffer from self-selection bias. There's already a lot of work to be done with the data aggregated at the national level!

We hope that this public report will help network operators understand their customers' real performance characteristics when it comes to browsing one of the web's largest websites. We are welcoming of peering requests networks might want to propose, should they seek to improve their connectivity to our datacenters.

Dr. Irene Chen gave her chemistry students a unique opportunity to practice science communication. She incorporated a Wikipedia writing assignment into her course at UC Santa Barbara this last fall. The course discussed major breakthroughs in nucleic acids research – information that students then channeled into relevant Wikipedia articles where details were missing. Eight students added a total of 13,600 words to Wikipedia this way, a process requiring that they synthesize research in the most concise, essentialized way possible.

3,600 of those words were channeled into Wikipedia’s article about systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment, a chemical process also known as in vitro selection. Before the student began improving the article, it was almost entirely made up of an introduction and no other informational sections. That was even noted on the article’s Talk page, where volunteers discuss their desired changes. Dr. Chen’s student responded directly to the issue by adding sections about the details of the procedure. Those new sections include information about how chemists generate a single stranded oligonucleotide library and then how that library is incubated to allow binding with the oligonucleotide-target. The student also added information about tracking the progress of the resulting reaction.

Another student expanded Wikipedia’s article about minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC), which before was also just an introduction and few references. 1,200 words later, the article boasts an additional 10 sources, as well as background information about the history and clinical usage of the MIC concept. As the article states, MIC “is the lowest concentration of a chemical, usually a drug, which prevents visible growth of bacterium,” a definition supported by a review paper published in 2005 about the treatment of bacterial infectious diseases. The article has been viewed almost 13,000 times since the student made changes – many more than would a typical term paper!

Students tend to invest more in their work when they realize it can be accessed by millions. They understand the responsibility to represent information accurately and take their new-found role of ‘knowledge creator’ seriously. They’re a great group to do this work well, especially in the sciences. Students can translate complex course topics for a general audience who might be learning about the topic for the first time because they remember what that was like. They do a great service to the world by sharing expertise they have access to (both through their professor and their library resources) with Wikipedia’s worldwide readership. That matters, and they understand that.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia writing assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for all you need to know to get started. Or hear from instructors who have done this here.

19/03/2019-25/03/2019

Mapping

• mapmeld made an interesting analysis of language clusters by using Unicode code points. They also detected outliers and odd forms of vandalism.
• The vote on the proposal “Fashion accessory shop” has begun and runs until 8th April 2019.
• The vote on “Substations functions” ended. The proposal did not achieve the necessary majority.

Community

• alexkemp describes how he resolves problems encountered with OSMTracker 0.7 when pictures aren’t georeferenced. He shows how he restores the missing data.
• SK53 wanted to identify areas of social housing in England. He shows in his blog how he was able to create suitable useful polygons from an open data list of individual properties with PostGIS clustering. He suggests that such approaches may have broader applicability to OSM data.
• Ilya Zverev recently started working for the taxi company Juno. He describes how GPX tracks from the Juno app are being aggregated and how they can be used to keep OpenStreetMap up-to-date with very fresh data. This data is a lot easier to work with than the GPX tracks stored by OSM, which may cover multiple changes in the road network. He also presented on this subject at FOSDEM in Brussels, and his talk was recorded.

Events

• FOSS4G Argentina, a conference with workshops and presentations, takes place from 9th – 12th of April 2019 in Buenos Aires. Registration is open and it includes a workshop on how to use JOSM for editing by (@Hernan)
• The Linuxwochen 2019 tour through Austria will be in Vienna from May 2 – 4. The article contains some links to video recordings of earlier Linux weeks. (automatic translation)
• Entur and Ruter are hosting an OpenTripPlanner Summit in Oslo on 3rd April. The proceedings will be live-streamed.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT has created a new development community for the Tasking Manager with further partnerships with Microsoft and Bing Maps. Over the next few months, work will begin on the design for integrating machine-learning and improving workflow performance of the Tasking Manager. Additionally open building datasets for Uganda and Tanzania will be created.
• In order to be able to help people in crisis areas quickly, NGO helpers depend on high-quality maps. For many areas, these maps must first be produced. In doing so, Doctors Without Borders is supported by modern technology and by thousands of volunteers. On Tuesday 2nd of April 2019 from 19:00 – 22:00 interested people will meet for a Missing Maps Mapathon in Berlin.

Maps

• PrivateMajory tweets a 3-D effect map made using QGIS and then enhanced in Blender.
• DJI appears to be using (in certain countries) OSM data in their Fly Safe GEO ZONE Map
  (several examples). A tweet and emails have been sent to DJI requesting correct attribution, but sadly there was no reply from DJI.
• The OpenStreetMap.be website now has a brand-new “How To” page with some tutorials and example code to demonstrate on how to use OSM and OSMBE base layer.
• The first version of the Baby Map was published. It represents the tags that are relevant for parents of small children. However, the data in OSM is still a bit thin.

Programming

• The German forum discusses (automatic translation) the categorisation of notes on osm.org. The forest of “Notes” markers is often dense and a categorisation by urgency or keywords could have a positive effect on the processing of the messages. User miche101 arranges notes on a map assigning different symbols to the markers based on keywords.
• The GISience News Blog of the University of Heidelberg previews a new way to query spatial links in the OpenStreetMap history database OSHDB.

Did you know …

• … the 2 Minute introduction videos to help beginners get started with OpenStreetMap and mapping for HOT-projects? Vitor George reminds us of the possibility to add subtitles to these YouTube videos.
• … how to tag an area that is covered by trees, but neither tagged as landuse=forest nor natural=wood such as for example a cemetery? These can be tagged using landcover = trees along with their default landuse tags.
• … the smartphone app ViewRanger ?

OSM in the media

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) recognised OpenStreetMap with the 2018 Free Software Award for Projects of Social Benefit and Deborah Nicholson with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Kate Chapman received the award from Richard M. Stallman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and gave a speech on behalf of OSM/OSMF community.
• The Open Mapping Group at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, hosted an indoor mapping party in the face of frosty weather.

Other “geo” things

• The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) published a report on reliefweb.int about the use of disruptive technologies in disaster management. The digital technologies that are supported by many volunteers around the world in the crowdsourcing projects such as OSM are highlighted in particular.
• Nazi spies, untroubled by the Soviet authorities, made a complete map of Moscow during the late 1930s.
• Yahoo Japan news reported that Google Maps data of Japan has deteriorated. Users assume that the data source has switched, because the copyright attribution of Zenrin has disappeared.
• Grab Malaysia and The Department of Geoinformation, of the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, organise mentoring training for mappers valled Grab Geo*Star in order increase the interest of students in the areas of mapping and OpenStreetMap.
• Mapbox reports that it enhanced its living map platform with proprietary data from Zenrin, a Japanese map publisher. It is not clear as to whether enhanced was used synonymously for “replaced OSM”.
• It’s not just OSM that suffers from the occasional broken polygon. Simon Poole spotted woods near Zurich which have disappeared on Here and Bing maps.
• The book Time for mapping: Cartographic temporalities deals with the entry of the temporal into maps in the digital age and contemporary mapping practices.
• The children’s book Lindsey, the GIS Specialist introduces the basics of GIS. This is one of a small series published by the US-based surveying firm Bolton & Menk, based on the job roles of their own employees.
• A Guardian quiz shows population density maps of various cities. Can you identify them? Or do you have to guess?.
• Esri announces on their ArcGIS blog that the new March version (previously beta) of the OpenStreetMap Vector Basemap is now freely available in ArcGIS.
• On the south coast of Norway the first underwater restaurant in Europe opened (automatic translation). Potential visitors have to wait half a year to get a reservation due to it being booked out. It is still only mapped as a construction site in OSM.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Sydney	Sydney OSM get together	2019-03-30
UCL Louvain-la-Neuve	National Mapathon	2019-03-30
ULIEGE Liège	National Mapathon	2019-03-30
Bochum	Mappt die Innenstadt – Mappingtag für Einsteiger*innen und Fortgeschrittene	2019-03-31
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	2019-04-03
Bochum	Mappertreffen	2019-04-04
Nantes	Réunion mensuelle	2019-04-04
Dresden	Stammtisch Dresden	2019-04-04
Heidelberg	DisasterMappers Night of Geography	2019-04-05
Cayenne	Rencontre mensuelle	2019-04-05
La Riche	La Riche (37)#Ateliers d’initiation à OpenStreetMap	2019-04-06
Kyoto	お花見！オープンデータソン in 京都	2019-04-07
Rennes	Réunion mensuelle	2019-04-08
Bordeaux	Réunion mensuelle	2019-04-08
Essen	Mappertreffen	2019-04-08
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #3	2019-04-08
Toronto	Toronto Mappy Hour	2019-04-08
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle pour tous	2019-04-09
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2019-04-09
Salt Lake City	SLC Mappy Hour	2019-04-09
Viersen	OSM Stammtisch Viersen	2019-04-09
Cologne	Köln Stammtisch	2019-04-10
Buenos Aires	Taller Introducción a JOSM en FOSS4G-AR 2019	2019-04-10
Leoben	Stammtisch Obersteiermark	2019-04-11
Zurich	OSM Stammtisch Zurich	2019-04-11
Berlin	130. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2019-04-12
Salt Lake City	University of Utah Campus Mapping Party	2019-04-13
Biella	Incontro mensile	2019-04-13
Salt Lake City	SLC Map Night	2019-04-16
Cologne Bonn Airport	Bonner Stammtisch	2019-04-16
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2019-04-16
Reutti	Stammtisch Ulmer Alb	2019-04-16
Toulouse	Rencontre mensuelle	2019-04-17
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch	2019-04-17
Montpellier	State of the Map France 2019	2019-06-14-2019-06-16
Angra do Heroísmo	Erasmus+ EuYoutH_OSM Meeting	2019-06-24-2019-06-29
Minneapolis	State of the Map US 2019	2019-09-06-2019-09-08
Edinburgh	FOSS4GUK 2019	2019-09-18-2019-09-21
Heidelberg	Erasmus+ EuYoutH_OSM Meeting	2019-09-18-2019-09-23
Heidelberg	HOT Summit 2019	2019-09-19-2019-09-20
Heidelberg	State of the Map 2019 (international conference)	2019-09-21-2019-09-23
Grand-Bassam	State of the Map Africa 2019	2019-11-22-2019-11-24

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 PierZen, Polyglot, Rainero, Rogehm, SK53, SunCobalt, TheFive, TheSwavu, YoViajo, adrianxoc, derFred, jinalfoflia, k_zoar, muramototomoya.

In February 2018, a user reported that some topics created by users on Flow discussion boards were not appearing in the Recent Changes feeds, including EventStreams and the IRC-RC feed. Various automated patrol systems rely on EventStreams, so the bug meant a number of edits bypassed those systems on Flow-enabled wikis.

When approaching a bug like this, there are typically three things I do:

1. Determine the steps to reproduce the bug. That was already done by the task author (thank you @Rxy!) and then confirmed by other contributors to the task (h/t @Krinkle, @Etonkovidova)
2. Attempt to reproduce the issue locally and set breakpoints in code to understand why the problem occurs
3. Check the production logs to look for any messages related to the bug report

Unfortunately the problem was not reproducible in the MediaWiki Vagrant development environment. Nor were there any relevant messages in the logs. Since reproducing the issue locally wasn't possible, we merged some diagnostic code but still had nothing. Early on, @SBisson suggested a hypothesis about the code path involved in emitting the event:

if ( user is trusted ) 
  return true
else
  let's load the revision from replica, return true based on the the status of the revision
  oh it doesn't exist (yet), return false

But we could not reproduce this, nor could we identify exactly where this might occur since the code paths for this functionality had many points where execution could stop silently.

Enter X-Wikimedia-Debug

One of the useful tools in our stack is the X-Wikimedia-Debug header. I knew about this header (and its browser extensions) from verifying changes that were being SWAT'ed into production but I had not thought to use it for tracking down a production bug.

I was using the browser extension with the "Log" checkbox ticked (and still not finding anything useful in Logstash to help isolate this bug) when I realized that I could also profile the problematic request. When you check the box to profile a request, XHProf will profile the code that's executed and make the result available for viewing via XHGui.

Typically you do this to understand performance bottlenecks in your code, as get a complete list of all functions executed during the request, along with the time and memory usage associated with each function.

I followed the steps to reproduce and then switched on the "Profile" option before posting a new topic on an empty Flow board. Now, I had a profiled request which provided me with information on all the methods called, including which method called another (click on a method call to see its parent and children method calls). From here I could follow the path traversed by Flow's event emitting code, and see exactly where the code execution halted.

Reproducing the bug locally

With this knowledge, I went back to my local environment, this time using MediaWiki-Docker-Dev, which has database replication set up as part of its stack (MediaWiki Vagrant does not). I set some breakpoints in the code I suspected was causing the problem, and then found that in RevisionActionPermissions.php#isBoardAllowed(), we had this code:

$allowed = $this->user->isAllowedAny( ...(array)$permissions );
if ( $allowed ) {
    return true;
}
return !$workflow->isDeleted();

For a new topic on a blank flow board, $permissions is deletedtext, which would return true for privileged users. But for unprivileged users, Flow would check !$workflow->isDeleted();, and this evaluated as false because the code was querying the database replica, and the title did not exist there yet.

The submitted solution was to patch isDeleted() to query the master DB when in the context of a POST request, since we know the title would exist in the master DB. With this patch in place, events were once again emitted properly and the bug was fixed.

Conclusion

A few of my conclusions from this experience:

• If you're having difficulty tracking down the code path, consider using the profiler in the X-Wikimedia-Debug browser extension
• Diagnostic code is helpful (even if it didn't pinpoint the problem here) and debug level logging should be considered instead of silent returns
• Having database replication in your local development environment can help catch issues while developing and when attempting to reproduce a production issue. One can use the MediaWiki-Docker-Dev environment for this, and see also how to adjust its database replication lag.

Kosta Harlan
Senior Software Engineer
Growth Team

Learn more about the X-Wikimedia-Debug header and browser extension on Wikitech.

The working group to consider future CI tooling for Wikimedia has finished and produced a report. The report is at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/CI_Futures_WG/Report and the short summary is that the release engineering team should do prototype implementations of Argo, GitLab CI/CD, and Zuul v3.

How do we get Wikipedia to every corner of the world?

How can we share the joy of free knowledge with people who have never heard of our website?

In 2018, we asked Wikipedia’s volunteer editing communities all over the world to think creatively about expanding the reach of the free online encyclopedia.

Through a crowdsourcing campaign called “Inspire New Readers”, we collected 362 ideas from more than 500 participants. From these, the Wikimedia Foundation funded eight projects through our rapid grants program.

Half of the proposals that we received focused on using social media and videos to generate additional reach, while the other half were for offline promotion. This campaign gave us many insights on what works well for projects that focus on raising awareness and we have now launched a new rapid grant type. We hope that community organizers continue to work on bringing Wikipedia to everyone.

Lessons from the Inspire New Readers campaign

Of the eight projects funded, four focused on online promotion, and four focused on offline promotion.

One example of online promotion is the video created by the Punjabi Wikimedians community. In it, a group of animals go to Lahore with their teacher, learning facts from Wikipedia along the way. The video went viral: it was seen by almost half a million people. The impact on Punjabi Wikipedia’s main page also exceeded expectations, with page views increasing by 357% during the campaign.

An example of an offline campaign to raise awareness of Wikimedia projects is one carried out by Maithili Wikipedia community: “The Wikipedia Rickshaw”, which had the goal of engaging new readers in Rajbiraj, a province in Nepal. For this campaign, the local community ran rickshaw announcements about Maithili Wikipedia in the city, held offline meetups, and hired billboards at various locations throughout the city. During the campaign, there was a 25% increase in siteviews for this language version Wikipedia.

These eight projects are a good example of why it is important to reach potential new readers in their language, and where they are: traffic can be easily impacted in smaller language version Wikimedia projects. You can read more about all projects funded in the campaign report.

What other lessons stem from these awareness projects? What about the performance of videos, versus slide shows, versus images in social media campaigns? To dive deeper on the impact social media campaigns can have, we focused on two other marketing initiatives led by communities in Asia: Bengali Wikisource, and Tamil Wikipedia. The Bengali Wikisource community created 2 videos and 1 image with text, which were then a/b tested. After testing them, the videos proved to have better results, increasing traffic to the site by 86% during the campaign. The Tamil Wikipedia community created a slideshow on Facebook, using good quality images from Wikimedia Commons. They tested Facebook banners against the slideshows and learned that the slideshows worked better. Through this optimization, they were able to increase traffic to the site by 22% during the campaign.

You can read more about these two initiatives, including lessons learned on audience segmentation through geography and language, in the community marketing experiments impact report.

New guidelines for projects that focus on raising awareness of Wikimedia projects

These marketing initiatives are important to the growth of Wikipedia and other wiki projects: awareness is the first step in building new users, support, and ultimately participation in Wikimedia projects. We know that low awareness of Wikipedia is associated with low usage, and without usage people will never become contributors or advocates for free knowledge.

It is now easier to apply for grants for projects that focus on raising awareness of Wikimedia projects. With the insights from the two impact reports, we have created two sets of guidelines that focus on projects to raise awareness: one for general promotion campaigns, and one for video campaigns. This documentation is part of the rapid grants program, which now offers an extension of $1,000 over the limit of this grant program (a total of $3,000 USD) for video creation. In these guidelines, you will find details of what the grant will pay for, typical outcomes, things you’ll need, and a list of example projects for guidance.

We hope that these new guidelines inspire community organizers to continue working to make Wikipedia visible in every corner of the world.

María Cruz, Communication & Outreach Project Manager, Community Relations, Community Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation

Writing blog is neither my job nor something that I enjoy, I am thus late in the Quibble updates. The last one Blog Post: Quibble in summer has been written in September 2018 and I forgot to publish it until now. You might want to read it first to get a glance about some nice changes that got implemented last summer.

I guess personal changes that happened in October and the traditional norther hemisphere winter hibernation kind of explain the delay (see note [ 1 ]). Now that spring is finally there ({{NPOV}}), it is time for another update.

Quibble went from 0.0.26 to 0.0.30 which I have cut just before starting this post. I wanted to highlight a few changes from an overall small change log:

• Use stronger password in Quibble related browser tests - T204569
• Parallelize ext/skin linter
• Parallelize mediawiki/core linter
• PHPUnit generates Junit results - T207841
• readme: how to reproduce a CI build - T200991
• doc: quibble-stretch no more has php
• mediawiki.d: Avoid vars that look like core or wmf names
• Drop /p from Gerrit clone URL - T218844
• Support to clone repositories in parallel - T211701
• Properly abort when git submodule processing fails - T198980
• mediawiki.d: Improve docs about dev settings and combine env sections
• mediawiki.d: Merge into one file

Parallelism [ 2 ]

The first inception of Quibble did not have much thoughts put into it with regard to speed. The main goal at the time was simply to gather all the complicated logic from CI shell scripts, Jenkins jobs shell snippets, python or javascript scripts all in one single command. That in turn made it easier to reproduce a build but with a serious limitation: commands are just run serially which is far from being optimum.

Quibble would now run the lint commands in parallel for both extensions/skins and mediawiki/core. Internally, it forks run composer test and npm test in parallel, that slightly speed up the time to get linting commands to complete.

Another annoyance is when testing multiple repositories together, preparing the git repositories could takes several minutes. An example is for an extension depending on several other extensions or the gated wmf-quibble-* jobs which run tests for several Wikimedia deployed extensions. Even when using a local cache of git repositories (--git-cache) the serially run git commands take a while. Quibble 0.0.30 learned --git-parallel to run the git commands in parallel. An example speed up using git cache, several repositories and a DSL connection:

The option defaults to 1 which retain the exact same behavior / code path as before. I invite you to try --git-parallel=8 for example and draw your own conclusion. Wikimedia CI will be updated once Quibble 0.0.30 is deployed.

Parallelism added by myself, @hashar, and got partly tracked in T211701.

Documentation

Some part of the documentation referred to a Wikimedia CI containers that were no more suitable for running tests due to refactoring. The documentation as thus been updated to use the proper containers: docker-registry.wikimedia.org/releng/quibble-stretch-php72 or docker-registry.wikimedia.org/releng/quibble-stretch-hhvm. -- @hashar

In August, Wikidata developers used Quibble to reproduce a test failure and they did the extra step to capture their session and document how to reproduce it. Thank you @Pablo-WMDE for leading this and @Tarrow, @Addshore, @Michael, @Ladsgroup for the reviews - T200991.

You can read the documentation online at:

• https://doc.wikimedia.org/quibble/#reproducing-a-ci-build

Note: as of this writing, the CI git servers are NOT publicly reachable (git://contint1001.wikimedia.org and git://contint2001.wikimedia.org).

Submodule failures

Some extensions or skins might have submodules, however we never caught errors when they failed to process and kept continuing. That later causes tests to fail in non obvious way and caused several people to loose time recently. T198980

The reason is Quibble simply borrowed a legacy shell script to handle submodules and that script has been broken since its first introduction in 2014. It relied on the find command which still exit 0 even with -exec /bin/false. The reason is that although /bin/false exit code is 1, that simply causes find to consider the -exec predicate to be false, find thus abort processing further predicates but that is not an error.

The logic has been ported to pure python and now properly abort when git submodule fails. That also drop the requirement to have the find command available which might help on Windows. -- @hashar

Miscellaneous tweaks

The configuration injected by Quibble in LocalSettings.php is now a single file when it previously was made of several small PHP files glued together by shelling out to php. The inline comments have been improved. -- @Krinkle

MediaWiki installer uses a slightly stronger password (testwikijenkinspass) to accommodate for a security hardening in MediaWiki core itself. -- @Reedy T204569

The Gerrit URL to clone the canonical git repository from has been updated to catch up with a change in Gerrit. Updated r/p to simply /r. -- @Legoktm T218844

PHPUnit generates JUnit test results in the log directory, intended to be captured and interpreted by CI. -- @hashar T207841

footnotes

[ 1 ] Seasons are location based and a cultural agreement, they are quite interesting in their own. They are reversed in the Norther and Southern hemisphere, do not exist at the equator while in India they define six seasons. Thus when I refer to a winter hibernation, it really just reflect my own biased point of view.

[ 2 ] Parallelism is fun, I can never manage to write that word without mixing up the number of r or l for some reason. As a sideway note, my favorite sport to watch is parallel bars (enwiki).

The contrast provided by Niethammer who looked at the birds on one side while ignoring inhumanity on the other provided novelist Arno Surminski with a title for his 2008 novel - Die Vogelwelt von Auschwitz - ie. the birdlife of Auschwitz.

G. Niethammer

Niethammer studied birds around Auschwitz and also shot ducks in numbers for himself and to supply the commandant of the camp Rudolf Höss (if the name does not mean anything please do go to the linked article / or search for the name online).  Upon the death of Niethammer, an obituary (open access PDF here) was published in the Ibis of 1975 - a tribute with little mention of the war years or the fact that he rose to the rank of Obersturmführer. The Bonn museum journal had a special tribute issue noting the works and influence of Niethammer. Among the many tributes is one by Hans Kumerloeve (starts here online). A subspecies of the common jay was named as Garrulus glandarius hansguentheri by Hungarian ornithologist Andreas Keve in 1967 after the first names of Kumerloeve and Niethammer. Fortunately for the poor jay, this name is a junior synonym of  G. g. anatoliae described by Seebohm in 1883.

Meanwhile inside Auschwitz, the Polish artist Wladyslaw Siwek was making sketches of everyday life  in the camp. After the war he became a zoological artist of repute. Unfortunately there is very little that is readily accessible to English readers on the internet (beyond the Wikipedia entry).

Siwek, artist who documented life at Auschwitz before working as a wildlife artist.

 

Hans Kumerloeve

• Erwin Stresemann (1889 - 1972)
• Friedrich Tischler (1881 - 1945)
• Lew Osipowitsch Belopolskij (1907 - 1990)
• Jurij Andrejewitsch Isakow (1912 - 1988)
• Veleslav Wahl (1922 -1950)
• Wladyslaw Rydzewski (1911 - 1980)
• Andrzej Dunajewski (1908 -1944)
• Günther Niethammer (1908 - 1974)
• Hans Kummerlöwe alias Kumerloeve (1903 -1995)
• Wladyslaw Siwek (1907 -1983)
• Wlodzimierz Graf Dzieduszycki (1885 - 1971)
• Ferdinand Pax (1885 -1964)
• Kazimierz Szarski (1904 -1960)
• Werner Klemm (1909 -1990)
• Boris Karlowitsch Stegmann (1898 -1975)
• Nikolaj Alexejewitsch Gladkow (1905 - 1975)
• Hong-Gu Won (1888 -1970) - he came to learn of his son lost during partition via a Daurian starling that happened to be ringed by his son.
• Pyong-Oh Won (born 1926) son of previous
• Jean Delacour (1890 -1985)
• Kazimierz von Granöw Wodzicki (1900 - 1987)
• Nikolaj Wladimirowitsch Timofejew-Ressowski (1900 -1981)
• Hans Stubbe (1902 -1989)
• Konrad Lorenz (1903 -1989)
• Jan Sokolowski (1899 -1982)
• Roman Wojtusiak (1906 -1987)
• Bernhard Grzimek (1909 -1987)
• Hans Christian Johansen (1897 -1973)
• Wasilij Nikolajewitsch Skalon (1903 - 1976)
• Wolfgang Makatsch (1906 -1983)
• Tso-hsin Cheng (1906 -1998)
• Nikolaj Boew (1922 -1985)
• Hans Schildmacher (1907 -1976)
• Oleg Ismailowitsch Semenow-Tjan-Schanskij (1906 -1990)
• Alexander Bogdanowitsch Kistiakowskij (1904 - 1983)
• Heinrich Dathe (1910 -1991)
• Erich Rutschke (1926 -1999)
• Georgij Petrowitsch Dementjew (1898 - 1969)
• Alexander Nikolajewitsch Formosow (1899 - 1973)
• Pierre Pfeffer (1927 - 2016)
• Micha Jankowski (1842 - 1912)
• Alexander Michailowitsch Jankowski (1876 -1944)
• Jurij Michailowitsch Jankowski (1879 - 1956)
• Walerij Jurewitsch Jankowski (1911 -)
• Charles Vaurie (1906 -1975)
• Walter Beick (1883 - 1933)
• Richard Meinertzhagen (1878 -1967)
• Wilfried Przygodda (1916 -1991)
• Salim Ali (1896 -1987)
• Boris Michailowitsch Pawlow (1933 - 1994) 

SS-Sturmbannführer Schäfer at the head of the table in Lhasa

Issues arising from race and perceptions are of course not restricted to this period or region, one of the less glorious stories of the Smithsonian Institution concerns the honorary curator Robert Wilson Shufeldt (1850 – 1934) who in the infamous Audubon affair made his personal troubles with his second wife, a grand-daughter of Audubon, into one of race. He also wrote such books as America's Greatest Problem: The Negro (1915) in which we learn of the ideas of other scientists of the period like Edward Drinker Cope! Like many other obituaries, Shufeldt's is a classic whitewash.  

Even as recently as 2015, the University of Salzburg withdrew an honorary doctorate that they had given to the Nobel prize winning Konrad Lorenz for his support of the political setup and racial beliefs. It should not be that hard for scientists to figure out whether they are on the wrong side of history even if they are funded by the state. Perhaps salaried scientists in India would do well to look at the legal contracts they sign with their employers, especially the state, more carefully. The current rules make government employees less free than ordinary citizens but will the educated speak out or do they prefer shackling themselves. 

Postscripts:

• Mixing natural history with war sometimes led to tragedy for the participants as well. In the case of Dr Manfred Oberdörffer who used his cover as an expert on leprosy to visit the borders of Afghanistan with entomologist Fred Hermann Brandt (1908–1994), an exchange of gunfire with British forces killed him although Brandt lived on to tell the tale.

• To the above list one should add -  Jean-Marie Derscheid.
• Another story to read - about biology and the Nazi era is about the SS Sammelkommando - see Heinz Brücher

• Apparently Himmler's entanglement with ornithology also led him to dream up "Storchbein Propaganda" - a plan to send pamphlets to the Boers in South Africa via migrating storks! The German ornithologist Ernst Schüz quietly (and safely) pointed out the inefficiency of it purely on the statistics of recoveries!

• July 2018 - an English translation of Nowak's book is now available.
• See also Walther Arndt

From time immemorial, human beings have obsessed over knowledge. It’s one of our most precious resources, and our most jealously guarded. We’ve accumulated it gathering in circles under trees and squeaky chairs in sloped lecture halls, distributed it in etchings on stone tablets and inky letters on paper pages, even sought to hide it by blindfolding interlopers and erecting paywalls out of code.

Today, the gates that keep knowledge in the hands of the few are coming down. As a global society, we are more literate, cooperative, and connected than ever before. By reading this right now, you are doing more than your early ancestors could have fathomed.

How has that access to knowledge shaped your life?

Who would you be without what you know?

Is the right to seek knowledge freely currently protected where you live?

What might a future with complete access to the sum of the world’s knowledge look like?

What forms of knowledge are most important to you—and does your society recognize and value them?

After all, knowledge isn’t just a set of random facts (“Hey Alexa, what’s the population of Budapest?”), nor is it only the theorems you memorized in school or the coding languages you use at work. It’s family recipes and whisper networks, the ways you tie your shoes and the muscles you recognize by name. It’s contested, nuanced, often inextricable from power and control. It affects the decisions we make, our health and happiness, even how we relate to each other.

With your help, the Wikimedia Foundation wants to illustrate the expansive role of knowledge in human life. Send us your creative submissions on the theme of what open access to knowledge means to you. We’re accepting work in five categories: short films, visual art (including illustrations, photography, 3D renderings, etc.), poetry, short fiction, and creative essays. The deadline to submit is 11:59pm on 30 April 2019.

In June, we’ll showcase the top entries under a Creative Commons license in our Heart of Knowledge digital anthology zine, share selected works through the Wikimedia Foundation’s YouTube channel and blog, and host an awards ceremony at the Wikimedia Foundation headquarters in San Francisco, California. The top submission in each category, as determined by our panel of judges, will also win a prize worth up to $350.

Rules here.

Submit here.*

Adora Svitak, Communications Fellow
Wikimedia Foundation

*Please contact asvitak@wikimedia.org if you need an alternative method of submission.

We’re excited to announce that we’re becoming a member of the W3C, the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web.

Founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1994, W3C works with hundreds of organizations to ensure that the web’s basic building blocks—like HTML or CSS—remain consistent across browsers, platforms, and more. You can learn more about what W3C does over on Wikipedia.

Joining the W3C fits right into our 2030 strategy, which calls on the Wikimedia movement to “become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and [ensure that] anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us.”

The underlying technologies and standards of the web are a core part of the infrastructure that can facilitate knowledge equity, and so to achieve our vision, we need to participate and collaborate in designing the future of the web.

As part of working groups, we will be collaborating directly with other major stakeholders on the web. Through attending meetings, providing feedback, helping with the drafting of standards, and performing some of the technical work necessary to put standards together (as well as participating in the decision-making process of their design), we’re going to contribute to shaping a future of the web that helps everyone create and share free knowledge.

“We are pleased to welcome the Wikimedia Foundation among our membership,” says Alan Bird, W3C’s Global Business Development Leader. “With their 2030 strategy and interests in so many of the areas we advance on the web, we anticipate that the Wikimedia Foundation’s participation will be key in building the services and structures that enable web users.”

And we too are looking forward to collaborating with them.

Gilles Dubuc, Senior Software Engineer (Contractor), Performance, Technology
Wikimedia Foundation

Note: this post has been published on 03/28 but has been originally written in September 2018 after Quibble 0.0.26 and never got published.

The last update about Quibble is from June 1st (Blog Post: Quibble in May), this is about updating on progress made over the summer.

Since the last update, Quibble version went from 0.0.17 to 0.0.26:

For --commands one pass them as shell snippets such as: --commands 'echo starting' 'phpunit' 'echo done'. A future version of Quibble would make it only accept a single argument though it can be repeated. Or in other terms, in the future one would have to use: --command 'echo starting' --command 'phpunit' --command 'echo done'.

The MediaWiki PHPUnit test suite to use is determined based on ZUUL_PROJECT. --phpunit-testsuite lets one explicitly set it, a use case is to run extensions tests for a change made to mediawiki/core and ensure it does not break extensions (ZUUL_PROJECT=mediawiki/core quibble --phpunit-testsuite=extensions mediawiki/extensions/BoilerPlate). On Wikimedia CI they are the wmf-quibble-* jobs.

You can get great speed up by using a tmpfs for the database. Create a tmpfs and then pass --db-dir to make use of it. With a Docker container one would do: docker run --tmpfs /workspace/db:size=320M quibble:latest --db-dir=/workspace/db.

In the future, I would like Quibble to be faster, it runs the commands in a serialized way and would be made faster by parallelizing at least some of the test commands (edit: done in 0.0.29).

Changelog for 0.0.17 to 0.0.26

• T196013 MediaWiki configuration injected by Quibble is now prepended at start of LocalSettings.php, that makes the configuration snippets available to wfLoadExtension() / wfLoadSkin().
• T197687 - Fix Chrome autoplay policy which prevented Qunit tests to run for Wikispeech https://goo.gl/xX8pDD
• T198171 - In Chrome do not rate limit history.pushState(), prevents some Qunit tests from passing since they overflow the limit.
• T195918
  • Enhance inline help for --run and --skip by grouping group them in a stages argument group.
  • New --skip=all to skip all tests
• T195084 T195918 - Support running any command inside the Quibble environment by using --commands (see below). They are run with a web server exposed (T203178).
• T22471 T196347 - rebuildLocalisationCache after update.php, fix locking issues when doing the first page request, multiple requests were racing over generating the localization cache.
• T200017 - Allow overriding the PHPUnit testsuite to run.
• Do not spawn a WebServer when running PHPUnit tests, its is only needed for Qunit and Selenium tests.
• Add a link to https://doc.wikimedia.org/quibble/ in the README.rst.
• T192132 - Quibble is now licensed under Apache 2.0
• T202710 - Xvfb no more listens on an unix socket.
• T200991 - Passing --dump-db-postrun will dump the content of the database to the log directory (--log-dir). Thanks @Pablo-WMDE
• Add support for Zuul cloner --branch and --project-branch, used to test MediaWiki-extensions-DonationInterface master branch against MediaWiki release branches.
• The environment variable TMPDIR set by Quibble is no more hardcoded to /tmp, it now follows the logic of Python tempfile.gettempdir().
• When running under Docker, default the log directory to be under the workspace instead of /log.
• Allow specifying database data directory with --db-dir (default is the temporary directory based on environment variable).

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the enactment of the 19th amendment, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is opening a museum exhibit called Rightfully Hers: American Women and the Vote. It will highlight both the told and untold history of women’s suffrage in America. Consider that even before the amendment’s passage, some women could vote for certain state and national offices depending on where they lived. And still other women (often women of color) could not vote even after it was ratified. The history of a nationwide policy change extends well beyond the letter of the law. Shifts must happen culturally and locally, too. Our course is working to capture and share those rich and complex stories.

NARA is collaborating with Wiki Education to make sure Wikipedia best represents the full history of women’s suffrage. Through our virtual course, historians, librarians, and citizen archivists have gathered together to learn the Wikipedia editing skills required to present these stories to the public where they’re looking for it.

Suffragist history often focuses on the well-known white players: Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Fuller. It’s important to highlight the full story and the activists working consciously towards universal suffrage. That’s exactly what Wiki Scholars in our course did when they improved the Wikipedia biography of activist Ida B. Wells.

Wells laid the groundwork for creating change and fostering attitudes of acceptance leading up to the amendment. She founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913. The group helped young black women, who were excluded from mainstream suffrage debates, engage politically in and for their communities. The club also played a role in electing city and state officials of color. The two Wiki Scholars worked together across their respective disciplines of expertise to make sure Wells is well-represented on Wikipedia. Now, her article boasts many new sections and sources, providing a more complete picture of her life, legacy, and impact within the suffrage movement.

Another Wiki Scholar in our NARA course expanded Wikipedia’s coverage of Native American civil rights, which remained restricted even after the passage of the 19th amendment.

Wiki Scholars also created previously non-existent Wikipedia biographies for lesser-known suffragists who made big impacts. Helen Hoy Greely, for example, was an accomplished activist whose career spanned over five decades. Etta Haynie Maddox fought for women to be able to take the bar exam and practice law in the state of Maryland; she was the first woman in Maryland to practice law. And Mary McHenry Keith was a lawyer and social justice advocate, whose life and career also weren’t represented on Wikipedia before the course.

Another Wiki Scholar poured their energy into a brand new article about the Prison Special, a train tour around the United States which drew attention to the stories of women who had been arrested, detained, or incarcerated as a result of participating in protests that promoted suffrage. The article was featured on Wikipedia’s main page on January 20th, and received 4,000 page views that day alone.

The collaborative experience of our course fosters personal and professional skills identified by the American Historical Association that historians with PhDs said they wished they had learned in grad school. Read all about how our NARA course will help you hone your abilities to collaborate, communicate your field to the public, improve your intellectual self-confidence, and more.

Interested in taking our course? Visit our landing page and sign up to receive updates about start dates. We’ll have another course this spring! To read about the personal experience of one Wiki Scholar, click here.

Header: File:Mary Garrity – Ida B. Wells-Barnett – Google Art Project – restoration crop.jpg, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Today, the European Parliament voted 348–274 to pass a new copyright directive that includes problematic rules that will harm free knowledge. They did so after years of discussions, revisions, and more recently street protests. We believe that this is a disappointing outcome, the impacts of which will certainly be felt for years to come.

As Articles 15 and 17 (formerly 11 and 13) of the directive will take effect across the European Union (EU), we expect to see direct repercussions on all online activities. Article 15 will require certain news websites to purchase licenses for the content they display. As a result, many websites that helped people find and make sense of the news may choose not to offer this type of service, making it harder to find high-quality news items from trusted sources online. Article 17 will introduce a new liability regime across the EU, under which websites can be sued for copyright violations by their users. This will incentivize websites to filter all uploads and keep only “safe” copyrighted content on their sites, eroding essential exceptions and limitations to copyright by making platforms the judges of what is and isn’t infringement.

Still, there are elements to celebrate in the new directive. A new safeguard for the public domain will ensure that faithful reproductions of public domain works remain uncopyrighted, even as they are digitized. Museums, archives, and libraries will now be able to provide digital access to out-of-commerce works that have not yet fallen into the public domain. Research organizations and cultural heritage institutions will be able to engage in text and data mining on works they have lawful access to.

While we are disappointed, the fight is not over. The impact of the copyright directive will be determined by how lawmakers in each country choose to implement it. As the copyright directive is implemented into national law over the next two years, it presents an opportunity for Europeans to proactively engage with policymakers and ensure national copyright protects internet freedom and empowers everyone to participate in knowledge. Many countries will be opening up their copyright law for amendments for the first time in years. Now is the time to advocate for the good and try to mitigate the harmful parts of the new EU Copyright Directive, and Wikimedia is committed to this task.

Although Articles 15 and 17 remain in the directive, Wikimedians are already working to ensure that they are implemented safely and interpreted in the best possible light in national law, while also pushing for safeguards that benefit the public like freedom of panorama or user-generated content exceptions.

It is disappointing that, in the end, the majority of members of the European Parliament chose not to listen to the millions of voices in Europe concerned about the direction this directive has taken. We look forward to making sure that national lawmakers in the EU member states will understand how their actions in future national legislation will affect internet freedom. Stay tuned to our blog and our public policy portal for future updates and ways you can help.

Jan Gerlach, Senior Public Policy Manager, Legal
Allison Davenport, Technology Law and Policy Fellow, Legal
Wikimedia Foundation

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence? Read on to find out!

• Month in numbers.
• Current problems.
• Highlighted stories.

📊 Month in numbers

• 7 documented incidents. [1]
• 30 new Wikimedia-prod-error tasks created. [2] (17 new in Jan, and 18 in Dec.)
• 27 Wikimedia-prod-error tasks closed. [3] (16 closed in Jan, and 20 in Dec.)

There are in total 177 open Wikimedia-prod-error tasks today. (188 in Feb, 172 in Jan, and 165 in Dec.)

📉 Current problems

There’s been an increase in how many application errors are reported each week. And, we’ve also managed to mostly keep up with those each week, so that’s great!

But, it does appear that most weeks we accumulated one or two unresolved errors, which is starting to add up. I believe this is mainly because they were reported a day after the branch went out. That is, if the same issues had been reported 24 hours earlier in a given week, then they might’ve blocked the train as a regression.

→ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikimedia-production-error/

Below is breakdown of unresolved prod errors since last quarter. (I’ve omitted the last three weeks.)

By month:

• February: 5 reports (1.33-wmf.16, 1.33-wmf.17, 1.33-wmf.18).
• January: 3 reports (1.33-wmf.13, 1.33-wmf.14).
• December 2018: 5 reports (1.33-wmf.9).
• November 2018: 3 reports (1.33-wmf.2).
• October 2018: 1 report (1.32-wmf.26).
• September 2018: 2 reports (1.32-wmf.20).

By steward and software component:

• Core Platform:
  • Parser: T216664.
  • Revision backend: T214035, T212428.
• Fundraising-Tech:
  • CentralNotice: T209741.
• Growth:
  • Echo: T217079.
  • Flow: T212742, T204793.
  • Page deletion: T203913.
• Multimedia:
  • MediaWiki uploading: T208539.
• Performance:
  • Lib-rdmbs: T212284.
• Wikidata:
  • Wikibase: T217329, T215380, T213483.
  • WikibaseLexeme: T207479, T200906.
  • WikibaseQualityConstraints: T212282.
• (Nobody - pending code ownership process):
  • ImageMap extension: T217087.
  • Nuke extension: T212690.

*️⃣ Fixed exposed fatal error on Special:Contributions

Previously, a link to Special:Contributions could pass invalid options to a part of MediaWiki that doesn’t allow invalid options. Why would anything allow invalid options? Let’s find out.

Think about software as an onion. Software tends to have an outer layer where everything is allowed. If this layer finds illegal user input, it has to respond somehow. For example, by informing the user. In this outer layer, illegal input is not a problem in the software. It is a normal thing to see as we interact with the user. This outer layer responds directly to a user, is translated, and can do things like “view recent changes”, “view user contributions” or “rename a page”.

Internally, such action is divided into many smaller tasks (or functions). For example, a function might be “get talk namespace for given subject namespace”. This would answer “Talk:” to “(Article)”, and “Wikipedia_talk:” to “Wikipedia:”. When searching for edits on My Contributions with “Associated namespaces” ticked, this function is used. It is also used by Move Page if renaming a page together with its talk page. And it’s used on Recent Changes and View History, for all those little “talk” links next to each page title and username.

If one of your edits is for a page that has no discussion namespace, what should MediaWiki do? Show no edits? Skip that edit and tell the user “1 edit was hidden”? Show normally, but without a talk link? That decision is made by the outer layer for a feature, when it catches the internal exception. Alternatively, it can sometimes avoid an exception by asking a different question first – a question that cannot fail. Such as “Does namespace X have a talk space?”, instead of “What is the talk space for X?”.

When a program doesn’t catch or avoid an exception, a fatal error occurs. Thanks to @D3r1ck01 for fixing this fatal error. – T150324

💡 ProTip: If your Jenkins build is failing and you suspect it’s unrelated to the project itself, be sure to report it to Phabricator under “Shared Build Failure”.

🎉 Thanks!

Thank you to everyone who has helped by reporting, investigating, or resolving problems in Wikimedia production. Including: @aaron, @Addshore, @alaa_wmde, @Amorymeltzer, @Anomie @D3r1ck01 @Daimona @daniel @hashar @hoo, @jcrespo, @KaMan, @Mainframe98, @Marostegui, @matej_suchanek, @Ottomata, @Pchelolo, @Reedy, @revi, @Smalyshev, @Tarrow, @Tgr, @thcipriani, @Umherirrender, and @Volker_E.

Thanks!

Until next time,

– Timo Tijhof

Footnotes:

[1] Incidents. — wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:AllPages…

[2] Tasks created. — phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query…

[3] Tasks closed. — phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query…

🍏 He got me invested in some kind of.. fruit company.

Wikimedia Commons, the repository for educational media content that hosts most of the images used on Wikipedia, has announced its photo of the year.*

Nearly 3,500 people chose between 57 images in the final round of the competition. Jason Weingart’s Evolution—a composite timelapse showing the development and frightening expansion of a tornado—took the top prize.

Coming in second was David Gubler’s photo of a lonely bucket train in Chile, and in third was Daniela Rapava’s remarkable shot of a soap bubble being overcome by ice.

I got in touch with all three winners to learn more about the winning photographs.

• • •

Weingart created the picture of the year (above) from eight images he took while stormchasing in Dodge City, Kansas, United States, in May 2016. Of those, seven show the tornado itself, while the one on the far left demonstrates the storm’s structure.

Weingart, who lives near Austin, Texas, then used Photoshop to blend them together for the final presentation. “I wanted to be the first person to use timelapse photography to document tornadogenesis,” he says.

The high quality of the individual shots stemmed from Weingart’s choice to rig his camera to take one photograph for every second of video, which meant that he wasn’t stuck trying to cull individual frames from all his footage. (That video is available on YouTube.)

Weingart originally designed and uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons for the Wiki Science Competition, a contest designed to encourage the upload of scientific educational media for use on Wikipedia and elsewhere. “My intention was to inspire people to learn more about the weather,” he says.

Amusingly, however, far more people probably saw this shot after it was uploaded to Reddit and Facebook with the caption “[a] mass of tornadoes.” He has no idea who did this, and if we’re honest, it doesn’t seem likely that he ever will. However, it went so viral afterwards that it has its own dedicated page on Snopes, the famed fact-checking website. Their verdict was that the photo had been miscaptioned.

So what is Weingart’s takeaway from all this? “A great lesson for people … is to fact-check things before you click share.”

More of Weingart’s work can be found on his website.

• • •

Second place: An empty ore train passes in front of Chile's San Pedro volcano. Photo by David Gubler/Kabelleger, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Second place went to David Gubler’s lonely ore train, a freight movement that winds its way through Chile’s remote Atacama Desert once or at most twice per day and terminates at the Bolivian border. Finding the train was the easy part, as it runs at the same time every day. Actually getting this photo was a bit harder, as even though the train doesn’t move particularly quickly, he and a friend would drive to a good photography location, grab the shot, jump back in the car, leapfrog ahead of the train, and rinse and repeat.

Gubler thinks that his photo stood out to voters in the picture of the year competition because it “the combination of the colorful locomotives, red desert, snow-capped peak and blue sky is very appealing,” he says, and “the exotic scenery itself may have sparked interest, as I guess many voters are not very familiar with the Atacama Desert.”

You can find more of Gubler’s work over on Wikimedia Commons.

• • •

Third place: A soap bubble slowly frosts over in freezing cold weather. Photo by Daniela Rapava, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Finally, Daniela Rapava took third place in the picture of the year competition. A native of Slovakia, one of Rapava’s favorite subjects to photograph are frozen bubbles like this. She’s been doing it since 2014, and they remind her of the planets people are able to glimpse from Observatory Rimavska Sobota, where she took this particular shot.

The bubble is made from water, detergent, and sugar, making it just robust enough to remain intact even while outdoors. It took about seven minutes to frost over in the below-freezing weather that day.

Rapava’s other work is available on her website.

Ed Erhart, Senior Editorial Associate, Communications
Wikimedia Foundation

*Photos of the year are selected from the preceding calendar year’s worth of new “featured” pictures, a marker of high quality that is awarded after a community vetting process. You can see all of the previous pictures of the year, going back to 2006, on Wikimedia Commons.

12/03/2019-18/03/2019

[Actual Category]

• Michael Reichert suggests turning off OSM services or adding banners to protest against the EU plan to implement the new, controversial, Copyright Directive. However, the question remains as to why the protest against EU politics is more important than existing or proposed restrictions of freedom elsewhere.

About us

• The transfer of weeklyOSM to the FOSSGIS server and the subsequent necessary maintenance work has been completed. Users might have noticed some minor interruptions in service last weekend whilst this was taking place. We would like to thank Peter Barth and Andreas Hubel for the transfer. We especially want to thank Anthony Bennett aka @internetgeog of www.internetgeography.net for many years of administration of the site, which he has maintained exemplarily since 2014.

Mapping

• Jan S proposes better differentiation between various kinds of police facilities. Jan has drafted a proposal and is seeking comments.
• Members of the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano) created a deforestation mapping wiki page to improve the understanding and mapping of land coverage to make analysis and visualisation of environmental issues such as deforestation easier.
• Paul Allen asks whether superroutes are good, bad or ugly. In his post on the tagging mailing list he mentions some pros and cons of the controversial construct. During the discussion it was also asked whether relations of type=route containing child relations should be preferred over superrelations.
• Antoine Riche pointed to undiscussed wiki changes about cycleway tagging which resulted in a long discussion about how to deal with oneway restrictions.
• German mappers are voting on the deprecation of relations of type associatedStreet in Germany.

Community

• Following Alan McConchie’s blog post “It’s about time OpenStreetMap showed native lands on the map” last year and the approval of boundary=aboriginal_lands for official reservations for aboriginal, indigenous or native peoples, he has published another post titled “Aboriginal areas are finally on the map!” as OSM’s major map style Carto is now displaying such areas.
• Nick Doiron reported his findings after exploring local language hotspots in OSM data with a focus on letters falling into the unicode block system. Besides expectable clusters he also found outliers and some oddities which can be viewed on an overview map.
• The OpenCage Geocoder blog published an interview with Laura Mugeha about her motivation to contribute to OSM, how OSM in Kenya works and where she sees OSM in 10 years’ time.
• We recently reported about OsmAnd’s new feature to offer navigation for public transport. OsmAnd has now published a blog post with guidelines on how to map public transport routes.
• The Swiss local chapter SOSM supports the Alliance for a Fair Copyright in Switzerland .

Imports

• An import of bus stops in Norway is planned as announced on the import mailing list.
• Rory McCann announced the plan to import information and care points for women and LGTBI collectives in Catalunya, Spain.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The minutes of the OSMF Licence Working Group meeting of 14 February have been published.
• The OSM Operations Team announced on Twitter that one of OSM’s tile caches received a Denial of Service attack by someone using Amazon servers and an Load Impact User-Agent.

Events

• The FOSS4G North America, an open geospatial technology and business conference, will take place from 15 to 18 April 2019 in San Diego, USA. The program is available on the conference’s homepage.
• The next mapathon of MAMAPA will take place on 28 March at the Abendakademie in Mannheim. Beyond the humanitarian objective of the Mapathon, MAMAPA promotes the integration of new immigrants in Germany, in which locals and migrants map in tandem. Through the joint work prejudices and stereotypical thinking are reduced and mutual trust is strengthened.
• The 7th (seventh!) annual conference organised by OpenStreetMap France will take place from 14 to 16 June in Montpellier (34), on the campus of the Paul Valéry University. Proposals for presentations in 5′, 25′, 55′ or even 2-hour workshops will be accepted until 15 April.

Humanitarian OSM

• Russell Deffner calls for help with mapping flooded areas in Mozambique and Zimbabwe exacerbated by Cyclone Idai. More information about current tasks and how you can help can be found on the corresponding wiki page.
• Nina Strochlic covers in National Geographic how the Bidibidi refugee camp in North Uganda is transforming into a permanent city. She points out how humanitarian mapping, HOT in particular, has helped in documenting the transformation and provided valuable data for planning and managing the quickly evolving area.
• A story on MapGive, an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Humanitarian Information Unit, details how updated aerial imagery has helped crowdsourced humanitarian mapping. MapGive helped mapping efforts of Missing Maps in Uganda and Bangladesh by providing support with current imagery. The blog post shows differences in aerial imagery over the years and a before and after comparison of OSM data around refugee camps in Northern Uganda.

Open Data

• The regional conference and conference on Latin American Open Data Abrelatam19 will be held at Quito from 28 to 30 August 2019.

Software

• TriMet in 2009 launched the open source trip planner “OpenTripPlanner” that combines public transport transit with walking and biking. The tool, which can use public transport data in General Transit Feed Specification “GTFS” format and is based on OSM data, gained some popularity within the OSM community. The company announced a new version of its tool that can also incorporate data from Uber, SHARE NOW (formerly car2go) and BIKETOWN and uses real-time locations of vehicles and bikes to calculate routes. A beta version with data for Portland, OR, USA is available.
• The Android app OSMTracker, which is popular with OSM mappers, no longer shows maps as a background to tracks. OSMTracker uses the generic user-agent from the osmdroid library which was recently blocked by the OSM Operations Team. The tile usage policy requires application-specific user agents.
• Fabian Kowatsch, of HeiGIT, announced that the HeiGIT Big Spatial Data team published a public world-wide instance of the ohsome OSM History Analysis Platform including an API, an updated dashboard and the beta prototype map interface ohsomeHEX (OSM History Explorer). All this allows you to analyse the evolution of any OSM tag for arbitrary regions and time periods in a simple way. Several examples are given in earlier blogs which now can be adapted for arbitrary regions around the world. Ideas for further enhancements are most welcome.

Releases

• Version 5 of Openrouteservice was published. The service, developed by The Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology, bears the name of the Jupiter moon Io.

Did you know …

• … the OSM Software Watchlist (release status) by Wambacher? It has been extended to cover another 15 OSM applications.
• … the tagging of a centre turn lane? This is described using the tags lanes:both_ways= 1 and turn:both_ways = left.

Other “geo” things

• Dr. Michele M Tobias asked #gischat on Twitter “Can you tell your GIS/mapping career story in one tweet?” Read the nice stories and please tell your OSM story as well.
• As Marius Watz has tweeted, the Norwegian municipality Trysil decided not to name streets but numbered thousands of cabin buildings instead. The website nrk.no reported that the step caused chaos for tourists, desperate cottage owners and emergency services.
• Bryan Housel asks for help to “link branded businesses in OpenStreetMap to wikidata”.
• The Guardian reports on desire lines: “illicit trails that defy the urban planners”. (Note: there is a small amount of data in OSM identifying such paths, see 1 and 2).
• In an article on Medium, Caitlin Dewey covers the story of the Fruit Belt neighbourhood in Buffalo, New York which had been replaced on Google Maps by something called “Medical Park”. The article follows the residents and their investigation into how Google may have acquired inaccurate neighbourhood data from Pitney Bowes and how that came to be. She also points out how little control the community had over the mislabelling. In comparison, the neighbourhood had only been added to OSM a few days ago with plenty of room for map improvements in the area.
• Jorge Andres, a volunteer cartographer for MapAction, discusses, on their corporate blog, how to most effectively represent topographical relief when mapping volcanic hazards. He suggests that 3D visualisations are more effective, and in 2D contour lines tend to obscure significant details.
• Tom Lee, Mapbox’s lead on policy, testified before the US Senate Judiciary Committee regarding privacy law reform.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Greater Vancouver area	Metrotown mappy Hour	2019-03-22
Tokyo	ミャンマーに絵本と地図を届けよう～ミャンマーに届ける翻訳絵本作り＆自由な世界地図作り～	2019-03-23
Cork	Mapping Party @ UCC	2019-03-23
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen	2019-03-25
Joué-lès-Tours	Rencontre Mensuelle	2019-03-25
Graz	Stammtisch Graz	2019-03-25
Portmarnock	Erasmus+ EuYoutH_OSM Meeting	2019-03-25-2019-03-29
Zurich	Missing Maps Mapathon Zurich	2019-03-27
Montpellier	Réunion mensuelle	2019-03-27
Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB)	National Mapathon	2019-03-27
UCL Louvain-la-Neuve	National Mapathon	2019-03-27
KUL Leuven	National Mapathon	2019-03-27
UMONS Mons	National Mapathon	2019-03-27
Montrouge	rencontre locale des contributeurs de Montrouge et alentours	2019-03-27
Lübeck	Lübecker Mappertreffen	2019-03-28
VUB Brussel	National Mapathon	2019-03-28
Mannheim	Mannheimer Mapathons	2019-03-28
ULIEGE Liège	National Mapathon	2019-03-28
UNAMUR Namur	National Mapathon	2019-03-28
UGENT Gent	National Mapathon	2019-03-28
Düsseldorf	Stammtisch	2019-03-29
UCL Louvain-la-Neuve	National Mapathon	2019-03-30
ULIEGE Liège	National Mapathon	2019-03-30
Bochum	Mappt die Innenstadt – Mappingtag für Einsteiger*innen und Fortgeschrittene	2019-03-31
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	2019-04-03
Bochum	Mappertreffen	2019-04-04
Nantes	Réunion mensuelle	2019-04-04
Dresden	Stammtisch Dresden	2019-04-04
La Riche	La Riche (37)#Ateliers d’initiation à OpenStreetMap	2019-04-06
Kyoto	お花見！オープンデータソン in 京都	2019-04-07
Rennes	Réunion mensuelle	2019-04-08
Bordeaux	Réunion mensuelle	2019-04-08
Essen	Mappertreffen	2019-04-08
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #3	2019-04-08
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle pour tous	2019-04-09
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2019-04-09
Salt Lake City	SLC Mappy Hour	2019-04-09
Viersen	OSM Stammtisch Viersen	2019-04-09
Cologne	Köln Stammtisch	2019-04-10
Montpellier	State of the Map France 2019	2019-06-14-2019-06-16
Angra do Heroísmo	Erasmus+ EuYoutH_OSM Meeting	2019-06-24-2019-06-29
Minneapolis	State of the Map US 2019	2019-09-06-2019-09-08
Edinburgh	FOSS4GUK 2019	2019-09-18-2019-09-21
Heidelberg	Erasmus+ EuYoutH_OSM Meeting	2019-09-18-2019-09-23
Heidelberg	HOT Summit 2019	2019-09-19-2019-09-20
Heidelberg	State of the Map 2019 (international conference)	2019-09-21-2019-09-23
Grand-Bassam	State of the Map Africa 2019	2019-11-22-2019-11-24

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, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Softgrow, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, kartonage, muramototomoya.

Now that Wiki Education is regularly supporting around 400 Wikipedia assignments each term, it would be easy for us to simply leave well enough alone. Term after term, the vast majority of instructors (over 90%) indicate that they will run another Wikipedia assignment with many of those making it a mainstay of their pedagogical repertoire. A 90% satisfaction rate is difficult to argue with, and as the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Fixing it, however, is what we do, broken or not.

Each term, we gain new insights into how to improve our Wikipedia Student Program for instructors, students, and Wikipedia. Fall 2018 was no exception, and while it may seem a distant memory at this point, we’re still unpacking what we learned from yet another successful term.

The numbers

It’s a testament to the success of the Wikipedia assignment and of the Wikipedia Student Program that the following numbers are business as usual here at Wiki Education. Nevertheless, we’re incredibly proud of our Fall 2018 students and grateful to their instructors who shepherded them through the often challenging process of contributing to Wikipedia.

In Fall 2018, 7,884 students from 384 courses across the U.S. and Canada collectively added 6.19 million words to Wikipedia. They contributed to 7070 articles and created 812 entirely new entries that were viewed 276 million times in the term alone. That’s about 2,000 5-7 page term papers that would have been read once by one person and long since forgotten. Instead, millions of people can now read about topics ranging from aboriginal whaling to Z-DNA.

From student to expert

The Wikipedia assignment brings together several critical learning objectives that make it a uniquely valuable experience for students. As one student noted, “There is a lot that goes into writing and editing for Wikipedia and it is pretty intense. It took students in the class a few weeks to write one paragraph each because of all of the rules and regulations that need to be followed. It took me a while to even figure out how to write my first sentence because I was worried about close paraphrasing.”

When contributing to Wikipedia as a course assignment, students are not only accountable to their instructor, but to the whole world. “The concept of editing on Wikipedia,” wrote one student, “is similar to preparing a presentation on a topic of interest, which would then be given to the class; Wikipedia, though, is essentially a presentation for the entire world. Anyone, anywhere, for any reason, might read my article. As a complete biology nerd who loves to teach others, I found this to be immensely exciting.”

Students do not only feel accountable to the public at large, but to their fellow editors – either other students in their class or members of the greater Wikipedia editing community. They learn that knowledge is constructed through collaboration and revision. According to one student, “I learned a lot about scientific research, [and] the peer review process… Most other projects don’t have this type of review process, nor do they have the same, practical final result that can actually be used and built upon by others.” In contributing to Wikipedia, students expand their circle of peers to include the whole of the Wikipedia editing community, and as a result, students have the chance to feel like real experts in a field. As one student put it, “Granting students the opportunity to not only learn something new but double and triple check information already presented to the internet world, could be incredibly beneficial and does not take someone with multiple degrees or expertise but rather someone who is willing to learn and put in the effort.”

This fact is not lost on instructors as well. “Students never understand the value of this until the end of the semester,” remarked one instructor. “They feel empowered. Wikipedia has allowed my students to disseminate research. This part of the research process has never been accessible to students until now.”

In fact, the term “power” showed up multiple times on our survey of Fall 2018 instructors. In contributing to Wikipedia, students realize that they are in a position of power in having relatively unfettered access to information largely off limits to the greater population. They also learn that in sharing the information to which they have privileged access, they can ultimately empower others. As one linguistics instructor noted, “As a social science, linguistics faces a complex struggle to simultaneously achieve academic rigor and empower the people and groups that provide the data for the science. Some in our field have started to recognize the value of a platform like Wikipedia to be a standard way to communicate the basics of what we know about the world’s language diversity to the general public… Thus, in a very tangible way, this assignment allows for knowledge sequestered in our facilities to make it out into the world at unprecedented levels, all while enabling our undergrad students to be the drivers of this process.”

From instructor to student

Students are not the only ones who learn from and feel empowered by the Wikipedia assignment. “I enjoyed the chance to act as the person advising them and not the person judging them,” commented one instructor. “It empowered me as an instructor and I think it may have empowered them as students to.” In fact, several of our instructors remarked on how the Wikipedia assignment shifted power dynamics in their classes.

As one instructor wrote, “It allowed me to show the students that even my own work and writing on Wikipedia was under scrutiny and edited by others. It allowed me to express how academic writing works and is a collaborative process.” Another remarked that the Wikipedia assignment “made me more aware of my own biases and forced me to communicate much more clearly.” By contributing to Wikipedia, students develop an “authoritative” voice, blurring the line between expert and non-expert and between instructor and student.

Other instructors noted that the Wikipedia assignment moved the focus away from grades. In the words of one instructor, “It was great for forcing the students to think about their audience. Since that audience was more than just the person in control of their grades, it allowed me as the instructor to focus on advising them about quality, not just what they needed to do to get the grade they wanted.” Yet another instructor remarked that, “I found the students are more engaged in the Wikipedia project than other traditional projects because they know all their works will be criticized by experts or editors and will be read/utilized by anyone in the world. Instead of just finishing an assignment in the class, some students really spend time to edit the pages and thinking to contribute their knowledge to the world. I think this is a good thing for the students to realize that they are part of this world’s educational program, not just simply aiming at getting a good grade for the class.”

Often instructors are learning how to contribute to Wikipedia right alongside their students. While experts in their own particular fields, most of our instructors come to Wikipedia as total novices much like their students. It’s a learning process for all involved. One instructor put it best when they wrote, “It helped me to become more confident in my ability to figure out issues on the fly. It also helped me surrender some control over every single aspect of a project and give more agency to students, even by allowing them to make mistakes.” Now with our professional development courses, instructors can take an even deeper dive into editing Wikipedia themselves if they so choose.

Beyond the classroom

Contributing to Wikipedia is a transformative experience for students and instructors alike. While most college assignments begin and end with the term, the Wikipedia assignment lives on not only in the content on Wikipedia, but in the pride students take in their work. Knowing that anyone in the world might read your contribution is incredibly satisfying, but being able to show that work to your inner circle is even more rewarding. “My family was really excited when I showed them my edits,” reported one student. “There was a very proud mom who didn’t exactly understand the content but appreciated the fact that my work is available for anyone to see who is willing to inquire.”

The Wikipedia assignment can often take on a very personal meaning for some. It can provide students with the chance to write about the topics they care about most, whether it be their identity, regional issues, or hobbies. Capturing this sentiment, one of our students reported the following anecdote, “when I told my dad about this assignment he showed interest and asked me questions about the process and the inside work in Wikipedia. I realized during our conversation that I had learned so much about Wikipedia and I could certainly defend its integrity. At the end of our conversation my dad smiled and proudly said “¿Así que ahora todo el mundo puede ver lo que escribiste?” (So now everyone can see what you wrote?) Contributing to Wikipedia has been extremely rewarding, especially knowing that my small contribution may help shape the way people look at Latin America.”

For most students and instructors, the Wikipedia assignment is a significant departure from any other assignment. It forces students to rethink how they interact with a site that they have likely been visiting for years and to reformulate how they think about information production, distribution, and consumption. It’s by no means easy and can even be daunting. As one student wrote, “Thank you for challenging our class to go outside our comfort zones with the Wikipedia project!” And thank you to our students and faculty who partner with us each term to make knowledge more accurate, accessible, and available.

Interested in teaching with Wikipedia? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for all you need to incorporate an assignment like this into your own course.

How’d we do in our strive for operational excellence last month? Read on to find out!

• Month in numbers.
• Lightning round.
• Current problems.

📊 Month in numbers

• 4 documented incidents. [1]
• 20 Wikimedia-prod-error tasks closed. [2]
• 18 Wikimedia-prod-error tasks created. [3]
• 172 currently open Wikimedia-prod-error tasks (as of 16 January 2019).

Terminology:

• An Exception (or fatal) prevents a user action. For example, a page would display “Exception: Unable to render page”, instead the article content.
• An Error (or non-fatal, warning) can produce pages that are technically unaware of a problem, but may show corrupt, incorrect, or incomplete information. For example — a user may receive a notification that says “You have (null) new messages”.

For December, I haven’t prepared any stories or taken interviews. Instead, I’ve got a lightning round of errors in various areas that were found and fixed this past month.

⚡️ Contributions view fixed

MarcoAurelio reported that Special:Contributions failed to load for certain user names on meta.wikimedia.org (PHP Fatal error, due to a faulty database record). Brad Jorsch investigated and found a relation to database maintenance from March 2018. He corrected the faulty records, which resolved the problem. Thanks! — T210985

⚡️ Undefined talk space now defined

The newly created Cantonese Wiktionary (yue.wiktionary.org) was encountering errors from the Siteinfo API. We found this was due to invalid site configuration. Urbanecm patched the issue, and also created a new unit test for wmf-config that will prevent this issue from happening on other wikis in the future. Thanks! — T211529

⚡️ The undefined error status... error

After deploying the 1.33.0-wmf.8 train to all wikis, we found a regression in the HTTP library for MediaWiki. When MediaWiki requested an HTTP resource from another service, and this resource was unavailable, then MediaWiki failed to correctly determine the HTTP status code of that error. Which then caused another error! This happened, for example, when Special:Collection was unable to reach the PediaPress.com backend in some cases. Patched by Bill Pirkle. Thanks! — T212005

⚡️ Fatal error: Call to undefined function in Kartographer API

When the 1.33.0-wmf-9 train reached the canary phase on Tue 18 December (aka, group0 [1]), Željko spotted a new fatal error in the logs. The fatal originated in the Kartographer extension and would have affected various users of the MediaWiki API. Patched the same day by Michael Holloway, reviewed by James Forrester, and deployed by Željko. Thanks! — T212218

📉 Current problems

Take a look at the workboard and look for tasks that might need your help. The workboard lists known issues, grouped by the week in which they were first observed.

→ https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikimedia-production-error

November's theme will continue for now, as I imagine lots of you were on vacation during that time! I’d like to draw attention to a subset of PHP fatal errors. Specifically, those that are publicly exposed (e.g. don’t need elevated user rights) and emit an HTTP 500 error code.

1. Wikibase: Clicking “undo” for certain revisions fatals with a PatcherException. — T97146
2. Flow: Unable to view certain talk pages due to workflow InvalidDataException. — T70526
3. Translate: Certain Special:Translate urls fatal. — T204833
4. MediaWiki (Special-pages): SpecialDoubleRedirects unavailable on tt.wikipedia.org. — T204800
5. MediaWiki (Parser): Parse API exposes fatal content model error. — T206253
6. CentralNotice: Certain SpecialCentralNoticeBanners urls fatal. — T149240
7. PageViewInfo: Certain “mostviewed” API queries fail. — T208691

Public user requests resulting in fatals can (and have) caused alerts to fire that notify SRE of wikis potentially being less available or down.

💡 ProTip:

Use “Report Error” on https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/wikimedia-production-error/ to create a task with a helpful template. This template is also available as “Report Application Error”, from the “Create Task” dropdown menu, on any task creation form.

🎉 Thanks!

Thank you to everyone who has helped by reporting, investigating, or resolving problems in Wikimedia production. Including @MarcoAurelio, @Anomie, @Urbanecm, @BPirkle, @zeljkofilipin, @Mholloway, @Esanders, @Jdforrester-WMF, and @hashar.

Until next time,

— Timo Tijhof

Footnotes:

[1] Incidents. — wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:AllPages...

[2] Tasks closed. — phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query...

[3] Tasks opened. — phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query...

[4] What is group0? — wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments/One_week#Three_groups

In the decade since Bob Cummings asked Are We Ready to Use Wikipedia to Teach Writing?, the answer for hundreds of instructors has been a resounding “yes!” It’s easy to make a convincing case for using a Wikipedia assignment in the classroom. Writing a Wikipedia article teaches students valuable skills while offering an authentic experience. But a combination of theory, individual student experiences, and studies that focus on single classes can only go so far to establish the benefits of the assignment. To draw broader conclusions about the benefits of a Wikipedia writing assignment, you need to look across classes, across instructors, and look at what a whole range of students experienced.

In the Fall of 2016, Wiki Education partnered with Zachary McDowell to remedy this deficiency in the study of the benefits of Wikipedia assignments for students. From a pool of 6,000 college students participating in Wiki Education supported classes, a total of 1,627 students and 97 instructors completed surveys and a subset of them were involved in 13 follow–up focus groups. Preliminary results were published in June 2017, and were discussed in a previous blog post. Now Matthew Vetter, Zachary McDowell, and Mahala Stewart have published an article on this study in the journal Computers and Composition: From Opportunities to Outcomes: The Wikipedia–Based writing Assignment.

Overall, students and instructors found the experience to be positive; none of them found the Wikipedia assignment to be less valuable at teaching the skills they were surveyed about. Most found the assignment to be more valuable, especially in areas like developing digital literacy, learning about the reliability of online sources and learning to write clearly. There were differences between groups: medical students found the assignment to be better at developing critical thinking skills than did social science students, while both medical students and students in introductory writing classes found the assignment to be more valuable in terms of teaching peer review skills than did students in the arts and humanities. While most of these experiences were common across categories like gender, social class and race, there were some differences. Women were less likely to edit in areas of Wikipedia outside of the assignment, while Asian/Pacific Islander students were more likely than white students to find the assignment helpful for learning how to write a literature review.

Research like this helps to establish the value of a Wikipedia–based writing assignment as a tool for student learning. Theory, models, anecdotes and case studies are all valuable tools for establishing what should work, but in the end, models are only meaningful when the survive confrontation with data. It’s nice to see that ours does.

Interested in teaching with Wikipedia? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for all you need to get started.

Update, 25 March: The Italian, Galician, Asturian, and Catalan Wikipedias have blacked themselves out today to protest the EU Copyright Directive. Other language versions of Wikipedia have chosen to show site banners above their content. Wikipedia’s volunteer editing communities make decisions like this independently. More on that, and our unaltered original post, is below.

• • •

Volunteer editor communities in four language Wikipedias—German, Czech, Danish, and Slovak—have decided to black out the sites on 21 March in opposition to the current version of the proposed EU Copyright Directive.

Those language editions of Wikipedia will redirect all visitors to a banner about the directive, blocking access to content on Wikipedia for 24 hours. A final vote on the directive is expected on 26 March.

These independent language communities decided to black out in the same way most decisions are made on Wikipedia—through discussion and consensus, something summarized in a statement from the German Wikipedia volunteer community: “Each of these independent Wikipedia communities has been engaging in public online discussions as to their course of action, and voting on whether and how to protest. They have done this according to their own rules of governance.”

• • •

This is not the first time volunteer editors have decided to take a stand on policy issues that may impact Wikipedia and the broader free and open internet.* However, it is something that happens rarely and with clear intention, and for good reason: Wikipedia’s volunteer communities recognize the importance that any one Wikipedia plays in the world, and its authority as a collection of knowledge, relies upon the neutrality of its content. And as we said in another community-led civic engagement seven years ago, “Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, [but] its existence is not.”

The Wikimedia Foundation supports decisions from our community about how they choose to include the Wikimedia projects in policy issues that directly impact our mission and values. We also recognize that our community is often in the best position to understand the local policy context and make decisions about how the site gets involved.  The Wikimedia Foundation’s role is to respect each community’s decision and work to ensure that their action is supported.

This community governance is a part of what makes Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects so robust and so unique. These sites are not just about millions of people compiling information, but about providing knowledge equity: ensuring that people everywhere have a say in contributing knowledge and how that knowledge is used.

That’s why the Wikimedia Foundation’s role in these black outs is supportive, focused on ensuring that each community’s decisions are heard, respected, and not disrupted.

Sherwin Siy, Senior Public Policy Manager
Jan Gerlach, Senior Public Policy Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

*In 2011 and 2012, the Italian, English, and Russian Wikipedias went dark in opposition to proposed laws in Italy, the United States, and Russia (respectively).

• • •

The Wikimedia Foundation’s position on the EU Copyright Directive, separate from the opinions of the communities who edit Wikimedia sites, is clear: it would be a net loss for free knowledge in the world. To learn more and find out how to get involved, visit fixcopyright.wikimedia.org.

Our paper “A Walk on the Child Side: Investigating Parents’ and
Children’s Experience and Perspective on Mobile
Technology for Outdoor Child Independent Mobility” was accepted at CHI 2019 and also got a Honourable Mention. Wow!

You can read the paper and download the pdf at the paper page. Enjoy!