Highlights

• In February, Wiki Education formally started a partnership with the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). CCCC is a professional organization of scholars and teachers of composition and rhetoric, advocating for broad and evolving definitions of literacy, rhetoric, and writing. The organization wants to encourage its membership to participate in Wiki Education’s programs to increase their members’ confidence editing Wikipedia and thereby support expert contribution to this global, public resource. CCCC will encourage its members to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool, helping students develop their media and digital literacy. CCCC will also encourage interested members to join a Wiki Scholars course, becoming Wikipedians themselves. The Wikipedia committee of the organization comprises several instructors in our Student Program, so we’re encouraged to see those champions bring Wikipedia to more instructors and students within the discipline. In addition to CCCC partnership, we also formalized a collaboration with the Society of Family Planning, an organization that will facilitate its members learning how to contribute scientific knowledge to Wikipedia through our Wiki Scientists courses.
• In February, we received a grant from the Stanton Foundation totaling $400,000. We received the first payment of this grant, totaling $233,000, as a match to the first payment for our Annual Planning Grant from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Fund Dissemination Committee, which was received in January. Also, Chief Advancement Officer TJ Bliss traveled to Savannah, GA, USA to attend a meeting hosted by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for all of its Education Program grantees. At this meeting, TJ connected with people from all over the world and had several opportunities to discuss Wiki Education’s work. Several people were interested in follow-up conversations and potential partnerships, especially related to our Scholars and Scientists program.
• On our blog this month, Wikipedia Expert Ian Ramjohn made a great case for why scientists should be writing Wikipedia. He walks through an MIT study from 2017 that concludes that Wikipedia articles influence published scientific research. When scientists don’t engage in Wikipedia editing, they are not only out-sourcing the public communication of science to Wikipedia volunteers, they are also outsourcing communication within their field. Scientists can now learn how to join the conversation that Wikipedia fosters by joining our virtual Wikipedia writing courses!

Programs

Before Wiki Education’s All Staff, the Programs team gathered for an offsite in Pacifica, California. As a group, we reached shared understanding of how our team is implementing Wiki Education’s new strategy through our programs, and reviewed all the current requirements, goals, and work that needs to be done for our existing grants. The Wikipedia Experts and Program Managers then split into sub-groups to better facilitate working together moving forward. It was a good opportunity to reconnect as a team and reach shared understanding before we go into the annual planning process for next year.

Wikipedia Student Program

Status of the Wikipedia Student Program for Spring 2019 in numbers, as of February 28:

• 333 Wiki Education-supported courses were in progress (198, or 59%, were led by returning instructors)
• 6,260 student editors were enrolled.
• 59% of students were up-to-date with their assigned training modules.
• Students edited 2231 articles, created 128 new entries, and added 945,000 words.

While most of our courses were just getting started in February, courses on the quarter system were busy moving forward with their Wikipedia assignments. This means that they were drafting their contributions and beginning to move them to the article main space.

Courses continue to roll in as spring quarter approaches, and Wikipedia Student Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal was busy making sure that all courses have a well set up course page. Helaine also spent a good deal of time working on an entirely revamped instructor survey that we’re excited to launch this term.

Student work highlights

In Rachel Van’s Early American History Graduate Seminar at Cal Poly Pomona, one student chose to write about Emma Fielding Baker, a tribal historian for the Mohegan Pequot tribe who was also posthumously awarded the title of Mohegan medicine woman. Baker was born in 1828, a time where Native Americans were expected and pressured to assimilate into white Christian culture. Children were sent to and boarded in Indian schools, where their real, tribal names and cultural identities were stripped from them and many faced verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. This would in turn threaten the tribes’ ability to pass down their culture and history, all while more and more land was taken from the tribes. Aware that there was a need to preserve tribal historical records and oral traditions, Baker stepped forward to be the “culture bearer” and also sought to protect Mohegan land and sacred sites. Aside from expanding the article, the student also approached the Mohegan tribe to gain access to photographs of Baker for the article, seeking to improve the article while also showing respect for the tribe. Accompanied here is one of these images.

Students have a lot to contribute to Wikipedia and the Brigham Young University students in professor Mac J Wilson’s Spanish American Culture and Civilization class are no exception. One student created a new article on the April 19 University Movement, a Nicaraguan student-led movement protesting the government of President Daniel Ortega, who had previously served as the President from 1979-1990, after the Nicaraguan Revolution. The students had participated in the 2018 Nicaraguan protests, where they stated that police repression during the event led to multiple deaths. Other stated causes for the movement include claims of the existence of political prisoners and the violation of human rights by the government. In response the Nicaraguan government has labeled the movement a terrorist group, accusing them of various crimes that includes torture, murder, and trafficking.

Ida Mary Roper was a trailblazing woman scientist. However, if you visited her Wikipedia page before February, you would have seen only one sentence about her life. Thanks to the work of a student editor in Christiana MacDougall’s Gender and Science course, readers can learn more about her life and accomplishments. She was born in 1865 in Great Britain—a time when women could not easily pursue scientific careers. In 1913, she became the first woman president of the Bristol Naturalists Society. She was also the first woman elected to the Council of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society! Women’s stories are often underrepresented on Wikipedia; students perform a remarkable and important service by expanding them.

Margaret Crosfield was a pioneering woman geologist who was elected to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1894 and was one of the first six women elected

Fellows of the Geological Society of London in 1919. Had you visited her Wikipedia biography before a student in Glenn Dolphin’s Introduction to Geology class edited the page, you would have learned about these kinds of achievements, but you would not have known why she merited this recognition. Thanks to a student in the class, her biography now discusses her education, her career, and her contributions to the field of geology. Similarly, if you had visited Helen M. Martin‘s biography before this term, you would have gotten a far more incomplete picture of her career and contributions to the field of geology. Other student editors in the class improved biographies of other women geologists including Sharon Mosher, Florence Bascom and Nancy Kirk, while others created biographies for Rhea Lydia Graham and Diane Loranger.

Harriet Redmond was an African American suffragette and political activist in Oregon. A student in Kristy Kelly’s Writing for the Web class expanded a fairly bare-bones biography into a far more complete article that documents her personal and family life, activism and legacy, and gives a much more substantial picture of her life and contributions.

Instructor Dr. Rebecca Barnes once again made progress towards bridging Wikipedia’s gender gap with her course Global Climate Change (read more about her efforts here). With a 10-week course that completed in February, her students created biographies of 22 women climate scientists, including atmospheric chemists, population ecologists, and glaciologists.

If you lived in St. Petersburg or Moscow, Russia between the years of 1919 and 1948, you might have heard of or even visited the Moscow State Jewish Theatre, a Yiddish theater company founded by Alexander Granowsky. Initially called the Jewish Theater Workshop and founded in 1919, early productions took place at the Maly Theater in St. Petersburg. This continued until April 1, 1920, when the Russian capital moved to Moscow, as then Soviet Minister of Enlightenment Anatoly Lunacharsky requested that the company make the move as well. Now called the Moscow State Jewish Theatre, Lunacharsky expressed optimism that the company would spread the Bolshevik message to both local and global audiences. Performances put on by the company included short sketches as well as full length productions and during the summer the company would tour the rural provinces. While the Moscow State Jewish Theatre’s plays gave off the impression that they supported the Soviet party, scholars have stated that the company hid critiques of Stalin and inserted Jewish subtext into their performances, all while facing government imposed censorship. The Moscow State Jewish Theatre continued to run until 1948, when it was closed by Soviet authorities. With a history like this, it’s no wonder that this company fascinated one of the students in Benjamin Beresford’s Stalinism – Society and Culture class at Arizona State University. Thanks to the student, the article has been greatly expanded and now features images related to the company.

Scholars & Scientists Program

We are right in the middle of our third Wiki Scholars course to improve women’s suffrage articles on Wikipedia, in collaboration with the National Archives and Records Administration. All participants have been hard at work on their first article, getting ready to choose a second to begin improving. Here is a selection of some of the great work they are doing:

• The article on Lillian Exum Clement was largely missing a major chapter in her life: she was elected to the North Carolina legislature, where she got sixteen of the seventeen bills she proposed passed. Now the article includes a section on her political career, thanks to a Wiki Scholar.
• A Wiki Scholar made significant improvements to the article about Annie Smith Peck, mountaineer, adventurer, suffragist, speaker, and author.
• Temperance and women’s rights advocate, Civil War nurse, and Methodist Episcopal Church minister Amanda Way‘s article was expanded by a Wiki Scholar who more than tripled the number of sources the entry now draws from.
• The biography of Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, Chinese advocate for women’s suffrage who was the “de-facto minister of the Chinese Baptist mission” and head of the First Chinese Baptist Church in New York’s Chinatown, doubled in size since a Wiki Scholar began developing it.
• Mary Birdsall‘s article has likewise seen a vast expansion by a Wiki Scholar, ensuring the public has a clearer picture of the journalist, suffragist, and temperance worker.
• The article about Alice Paul had a section about her work writing the Equal Rights Amendment. A Wiki Scholar added a crucial aspect of the subject: the amendment was renamed in Paul’s honor twenty years later, and its text changed. This is a great example of a significant change by adding a relatively small number of words to an existing article.

Visiting Scholars Program

This month, Wikipedians who have access to academic resources through the Visiting Scholars program contributed to several excellent articles.

Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University, added to her long list of articles she has created or substantially improved about women writers. Among them this month is Anna Fisher Beiler (1848-1904), a British-born American missionary who served as Secretary of the Bureau for the District of Alaska. Cornelia Collins Hussey (1827-1902) was a philanthropist, suffragist, and writer, as well as a member of the executive committee of the American Woman Suffrage Association. Elizabeth Lownes Rust (1835-1899) was a philanthropist, humanitarian, and missionary who first conceived the Woman’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

The idea of mineral evolution adds a long-missing historical component to mineralogy. It posits that the mineralogy on planets and moons gets more complicated due to changes in the environment, explaining how the number of mineral species in our solar system has grown from about a dozen to more than 5300. Before long-time Wikipedian and Deep Carbon Observatory Visiting Scholar Andrew Newell started it, the concept did not have a Wikipedia article. He created it in May of last year, and this month brought it all the way up to Good Article status.

The Roman poet Ennius wrote the Annales in the 2nd century BC. The epic poem was about the early history of the Roman state. It has been called a “national epic” and a “carrier of Rome’s culture,” but while it has been very influential on Latin literature, only parts of the poem survive today. Even still, Paul Thomas, Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, improved Wikipedia’s article on the subject to Good Article level.

Advancement

The Advancement Team met in person at Wiki Education headquarters in San Francisco during the first week of February. At this meeting, we recapped the recent Wiki Education Board Meeting, revisited our Team Charter, discussed our partnership strategy, kicked off our Annual Planning process, and discussed our communications strategy. Throughout the month, we were busy with fundraising, partnership development, and marketing/communications efforts, as described in the following sections.

Fundraising

In February, we received a grant from the Stanton Foundation totaling $400,000. We received the first payment of this grant, totaling $233,000, as a match to the first payment for our Annual Planning Grant from the Wikimedia Foundation’s Fund Dissemination Committee, which was received in January. We also heard from our partner at Wayne State that a concept note we had submitted together to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) related to work on Wikidata in library science education was not accepted to move forward to the full proposal stage. We continue to work with Wayne State on how to move forward with this opportunity.

Throughout the month, Customer Success Manager Samantha Weald conducted extensive research to identify new potential funders and submitted letters of intent to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation. TJ also had a conversation with one of our current funders about a grant renewal. This conversation resulted in an invitation to submit a proposal for renewal. TJ also traveled to Savannah, GA, USA to attend a meeting hosted by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for all of its Education Program grantees. At this meeting, TJ connected with people from all over the world and had several opportunities to discuss Wiki Education’s work. Several people were interested in follow-up conversations and potential partnerships, especially related to our Scholars and Scientists program.

Finally, TJ had several conversations with one of our current funders about hosting a Funder Briefing later in the spring. This briefing will focus on the role of Wikipedia in higher education, science, and media, with invitations going out to nearly 50 funders. Our current funder has agreed to host this briefing and assist with issuing invitations and providing logistical support, including venue.

Partnerships

In February, Wiki Education formally started a partnership with the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). CCCC is a professional organization of scholars and teachers of composition and rhetoric, advocating for broad and evolving definitions of literacy, rhetoric, and writing. The organization wants to encourage its membership to participate in Wiki Education’s programs to increase their members’ confidence editing Wikipedia and thereby support expert contribution to this global, public resource. CCCC will encourage its members to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool, helping students develop their media and digital literacy. CCCC will also encourage interested members to join a Wiki Scholars course, becoming Wikipedians themselves. The Wikipedia committee of the organization comprises several instructors in our Student Program, so we’re encouraged to see those champions bring Wikipedia to more instructors and students within the discipline.

This month, we formalized a collaboration with the Society of Family Planning, an organization that will facilitate its members learning how to contribute scientific knowledge to Wikipedia through our Wiki Scientists courses.

Communications

Dr. Kate Sheppard, an instructor we’ve been working with since 2017, was awarded the Faculty Experiential Learning Award at Missouri University of Science and Technology this year. Read about it in our blog post!

The Daily Record re-published a piece from 2018 by instructors Tamar Carroll and Lara Licosia about teaching with Wikipedia to counteract the gender content gap.

Also on our blog this month, Ian made a great case for why scientists should be writing Wikipedia. He walks through an MIT study from 2017 that concludes that Wikipedia articles influence published scientific research. When scientists don’t engage in Wikipedia editing, they are not only out-sourcing the public communication of science to Wikipedia volunteers, they are also outsourcing communication within their field. Scientists can now learn how to join the conversation that Wikipedia fosters by joining our virtual Wikipedia writing courses!

Blog posts:

• Professor receives teaching award for having students write Wikipedia (February 4)
• Monthly Report, December 2018 (February 7)
• A solution for historians to engage with the public (February 15)
• 5 career skills historians can achieve by writing for Wikipedia (February 20)
• What linguistics students can do to help preserve indigenous languages (February 21)
• Scientists should write Wikipedia (February 27)

External media:

• Harvard students add safety to Wikipedia, Safety.blr.com (February 6)
• Why Wikipedia often overlooks stories of women in history. Tamar Carroll and Lara Licosia. Reprint of 2018 piece, The Daily Record (February 28)
  • Why Wikipedia often overlooks stories of women in history. Tamar Carroll and Lara Licosia. Reprint of 2018 piece, Sunbury News (February 26)

Technology

In February, our main focus was on improving the efficiency of the course onboarding and approval processes and streamlining Wikipedia Expert workflows. The month started with our All Staff meeting, where Chief Technology Officer Sage Ross and Software Developer Wes Reid reviewed the main bottlenecks for both the Wikipedia Student Program and the Wiki Scholars & Scientists Program. Over the rest of the month, Sage and Wes added Dashboard improvements addressing many of the smaller issues we identified, including improvements for Wikipedia Experts to quickly respond to account creation requests from students on campuses where Wikipedia editing is blocked, an easier way to clone a course from a previous term, better emails to encourage instructors to submit their Dashboard courses courses for approval, extra information about which classes have students who haven’t yet been greeted yet by their Wikipedia Expert, and adjustments to how records of good student work get recorded in Salesforce. During the All Staff meeting, we also conducted an accessibility review of the Dashboard, identifying a number of small problems — most of which Wes has since fixed.

In late February, we also began preparing for our upcoming project to customize Salesforce for the Scholars & Scientists Program. Wes will take the lead on this project, which over the next several months will address many of the process bottlenecks in that program that we identified during the All Staff meeting.

Finance & Administration

The total expenses for February were $192,000, just $8K below the budgeted $199,000. As mentioned in the January reporting, the expenses relating to the Board meeting in January were budgeted in both January and February. Where we saw an overage in January, we show that the Board was under budget by ($9K), and the overall spend was right on target. General and Administrative were also on target this month. Fundraising was over by $3K, $1K in benefits catch up, and $2K in travel. Programs was over by $3K, where payroll was over by $13K (we kept staff on longer than previously budgeted and had benefits catch up), under in travel ($8K), indirect costs relating to the All Staff meeting ($6K), over in professional fees by $4K-Over $6K in professional fee relating to fees for services program, and under by ($2K) due to a refund for a cancelled conference. Technology was under by $4K, $3K in employment costs, and $1K in facility costs.

The Year-to-date expenses are $1.4M, $243K under budget of $1.64M. We expected that Fundraising would be under by $156K due to a change in plan for professional services ($149K) and deciding not to engage in a cultivation event ($10K) and is offset by the overage this month in travel (+$2K) and benefits catch up (+1K). Programs are under ($53K) due to a few changes in processes-professional services ($13K), Travel ($36K), and Printing and Reproduction ($11K), Communication ($5K) and Indirect expenses ($26K) while reporting an overage in Payroll ($34K) and furniture and equipment ($4K). General and Administrative are under ($15K) due to a reduction of payroll ($15K) and professional fees mostly relating to Audit and Tax prep ($5K) and administrative costs ($8K) while spending over budget Occupancy-combined direct and indirect (+$13K). The Board is entirely on budget. Technology is under budget by ($19K) as there was a change in plans in utilizing the budgeted professional fees ($17K) and additional rent ($6K) and instead increased Furniture and equipment ($4K).

Office of the ED

Current priorities:

• Coordinating and overseeing work on the Annual Plan & Budget for FY 2019/20

In February, we hosted our second all-staff meeting in the Presidio of San Francisco. With more than half of our staff working remotely, the February meeting provides an opportunity for reflecting on the organization’s performance during the first half of our fiscal year, for group learning exercises, for embarking on the annual planning process, and for increasing the social coherence among the diverse group of people who’re working on making our mission come true.

The all-staff meeting started with a day of individual meetings for the Advancement and the Programs team, so they could coordinate their work for the upcoming year. The second day started with a “celebrating successes” exercise, followed by a presentation about information security and a process-mapping activity aimed at identifying opportunities for smoother workflows and automation. On the third day, Beth Steinhorn, from VQ Volunteer Strategies gave a presentation about volunteer engagement strategies, followed by a discussion of the Programs and Tech team about best practices in the engagement of existing volunteers. The fourth day started with information about upcoming changes in HR and the kick-off of the annual planning process. On the last day, staff engaged in a social activity at one of San Francisco’s escape rooms.

Highlights

• Chief Programs Officer and Deputy Director LiAnna Davis attended the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin, Germany at the end of March. The gathering of representatives of Wikimedia organizations was an opportunity to give feedback on the Wikimedia strategy process to working group members. LiAnna met up with many members of the global Wikimedia community, gaining valuable insight she has brought back to our organization.
• Since January we have been running our third Wiki Scholars course to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of women’s suffrage. The courses are the result of a collaboration between Wiki Education and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in advance of their May 2019 exhibit Rightfully Hers, which celebrates the centennial of women’s right to vote in the United States. This month, the nine participating academics, librarians, and independent researchers wrapped up their contributions.
• It’s not every day that a student takes the time to officially thank their professor for a great project. But that’s what Madeleine Hardt, Dr. Jennifer Glass’ student at Georgia Institute of Technology, did after learning how to write Wikipedia articles as a class assignment. The thank you came in the form of a certificate of appreciation issued through Georgia Tech’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Read more in our blog post.

Programs

LiAnna attended the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin, Germany at the end of March. The gathering of representatives of Wikimedia organizations was an opportunity to give feedback on the Wikimedia strategy process to working group members. LiAnna met up with many members of the global Wikimedia community, gaining valuable insight she’s brought back to our organization.

On March 19, Scholars and Scientists Program Manager Ryan McGrady presented about Wiki Education’s programs at a Pratt Institute faculty event in Brooklyn. As we spread the word about Wiki Education’s new professional development offerings, we are consistently excited by the enthusiasm people have for the idea. The courses with NARA, improving women’s suffrage articles on Wikipedia, have been particularly popular.

Wikipedia Student Program

Status of the Wikipedia Student Program for Spring 2019 in numbers, as of March 31:

• 374 Wiki Education-supported courses were in progress (221, or 59%, were led by returning instructors)
• 7,169 student editors were enrolled
• 61% of students were up-to-date with their assigned training modules.
• Students edited 3,350 articles, created 203 new entries, and added a total of 1.76 million words.

As our winter quarter courses wound down and our spring quarter courses started up, the vast majority of our courses really got going with their Wikipedia assignments in March. Students finalized their topics and began drafting their work. The next few weeks will see a flurry of student activity as they begin to move their contributions into the article main space.

We were happy to welcome long time instructor in our program, Professor Cecelia Musselman of Northeastern University, to our SF office in early March as she made her annual pilgrimage to the Bay Area. We all enjoyed chatting with Cecelia and finding out what makes her courses so successful.

Finally, in March we launched a newly revamped version of our end of term instructor survey. We’re looking forward to learning what our instructors have to say about the Student Program.

Student work highlights:

Are you a fan of true crime? Do you find yourself fascinated by not only the pursuit and capture, but also the trial and legal issues that may pop up as the case runs its course through the legal system? If so, then you may find yourself intrigued by the Buried Bodies Case, an article that one of the students in Beth Williams’s Advanced Legal Research class at Stanford Law chose to expand for their assignment. The Buried Bodies Case refers to the mid-1970s criminal trial of Robert Garrow, Sr., who was charged with the murder of 18-year-old college student Philip Domblewski while he was camping in the Adirondacks with his friends. Defense attorneys Frank H. Armani and Francis Belge were chosen to represent Garrow, who confessed that he had not only murdered Domblewski but also two other women unrelated to the case and informed the attorneys where he hid the bodies. Upon locating the bodies, Armani and Belge chose to keep this information a secret despite an ongoing search for the women. When this was discovered during the Domblewski trial, Armani and Belge faced not only public criticism but also criminal and ethical proceedings. They were eventually cleared in both cases, as the People v. Belge and its appeal confirmed that their actions had protected the Fifth Amendment constitutional right concerning self-incrimination, although the judge did note that attorneys should “observe basic human standards of decency.” Although they were now cleared of wrongdoing, the aftermath took a large toll on both attorneys as Belge abandoned his profession while Armani suffered a heart attack that temporarily destroyed his practice. As the case occurred during the Watergate scandal, this contributed to the case’s attention and the American Bar Association began reconsidering attorneys’ ethical obligations. Law schools also began to reconsider how legal ethics were taught and the case is still a touchstone of legal ethics classes today.

Another student in Beth’s class chose to create an article for the U.S. Supreme Court case of Hudson v. Palmer, which started with a search of Russell Palmer’s cell at the Bland Correctional Center in Bland, Virginia, on September 16, 1981. After the search Palmer stated that officer Ted Hudson destroyed some of his personal belongings, which included legal materials and letters, as part of a targeted attempt to harass him and violate his Fourteenth Amendment due process rights. The ruling of the District Court was that “intentional destruction of a prisoner’s property is not a violation of due process, when the prisoner has an adequate remedy under state law” and that even if the search was non-routine and meant to harass Palmer, it did not have “constitutional significance” under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. An appeal filed at the Fourth Circuit affirmed the decision on due process but ruled that Palmer “had a limited privacy right which may have been violated” if the search was undertaken because of “a desire to harass or humiliate him.” This was again appealed and it went to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled that “Prison inmates have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their cells under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, and destruction of property did not constitute a Due Process violation under the Fourteenth Amendment because Virginia had adequate state law remedies.” Based on a privacy test derived from the Katz V. United States case in 1967, prisoners had no right to privacy due to the need for prison security to detect and remove drugs and contraband, maintain sanitary surroundings, as well as to ensure institutional security. They also found that Fourth Amendment protections did not cover prisoner restrictions, as “imprisonment carries with it the circumscription or loss of many significant rights”. Justice John Paul Stevens filed an opinion on behalf of four justices that disagreed with the Fourth Amendment holding, as they felt that “inmates must retain some “slight residuum of privacy” in their cells and because the Seizure Clause “protects prisoners’ possessory interests even assuming the absence of any legitimate expectation of privacy” and that safety concerns don’t eliminate all civil rights of prisoners. He further wrote that the Court’s decision “declares prisoners to be little more than chattels” and that Chief Justice Burger’s assessment that society would not recognize privacy rights for prisoners as legitimate was faulty, as this was at odds with the general agreement by the lower courts that prisoners retain some privacy rights, and that prison officials also shared a “near-universal view…that guards should neither seize nor destroy non contraband property.” Following the case many state courts that had previously not ruled that incarcerated persons had some limited amount of Fourth Amendment protection have changed their state constitutions to follow the Hudson ruling, with Vermont serving as the only exception. The case was cited in the 2012 Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders of County of Burlington, where it held that strip searches of pretrial detainees entering a general jail population do not violate the Fourth Amendment as it struck a balance between “inmate privacy and the security needs of correctional institutions,” not by holding that pretrial detainees have no Fourth Amendment privacy rights.

If you asked people to name a painter, many would name Claude Monet, a French painter well known as a founder of French Impressionist painting. A student in Inga Dorosz’s Art 200 course at Cuesta College chose to improve the collection of Monet paintings on Wikimedia Commons by uploading an image of the beautiful 1886 painting Champs de Tulipes, which is currently on display at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Depicting a beautiful, lush tulip field filled with many different colors, the flowers are overlooked by a windmill standing next to a house. A blue sky filled with fluffy clouds crowns them all. It’s a beautiful painting and a wonderful addition to Wikipedia’s article on Monet.

It’s been said that protesting is the new brunch—trendy and fashionable. But protests can be the fulcrum by which people leverage massive changes, as the students in UCLA professor Jennifer Chun’s Protest and Social Change in East Asia course demonstrated. Students contributed more than 30,000 words to Wikipedia, almost all in the form of writing about topics that hadn’t been covered on Wikipedia yet. When South Korean President Park Geun-hye was being impeached, her supporters staged the Taegukgi rallies to show their opposition to the proceedings. The number of reported attendees, however, may have been greatly exaggerated. Students created an article about the Anti-incinerator movement in China, as residents were concerned about the health effects of living next to trash incinerators. Similarly, students wrote about the 2005 Huashui protest, which was also by Chinese citizens concerned about the effects of pollution. With the Wikipedia assignment, students not only learned about the political complexities of protests and demonstrations, but they also learned how to convey them to a general audience, backing up their work with dozens of citations.

Usually, when we think about the carbon cycle, we think about the processes that happen in the atmosphere, the biosphere, and the upper layers of the Earth, but tied to that is a deep carbon cycle that involves carbon present at much deeper layers — in the Earth’s mantle and core.

A student in Simon Klemperer’s Journey to the Center of the Earth class created an article about this far less familiar carbon cycle. Another student in the class created an article about the deep water cycle, a similar portion of the water cycle. Other students in the class created articles about the mantle, including one on the lower mantle, another on the mantle oxidation state and a third about core-mantle differentiation, the processes by which the core and mantle differentiated as the Earth cooled. Another student created an article about inner core super-rotation, the theory that the inner core of the Earth rotates faster than the outer core. Other students expanded related articles about more general topics, including one who expanded the planetary core article and another who expanded the lithosphere–asthenosphere boundary, an article that was created by another student editor in 2015.

Students in Amy Carleton’s Advanced Writing in the Sciences class created a range of new articles which included fascinating areas related to biotechnology and health like tissue engineering of heart valves, extremophiles in biotechnology, Bilophila wadsworthia, Boston University CTE Center and Brain Bank and food safety in the United States.

Scholars & Scientists Program

Since January we have been running our third Wiki Scholars course to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of women’s suffrage. The courses are the result of a collaboration between Wiki Education and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in advance of their May 2019 exhibit Rightfully Hers, which celebrates the centennial of women’s right to vote in the United States. This month, the nine participating academics, librarians, and independent researchers wrapped up their contributions. Here are some of the highlights:

• A Wiki Scholar made substantial improvements to the article about the woman suffrage parade of 1913, a large march organized by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns which was the first suffragist parade in Washington, DC.
• Another scholar started an article about Carrie Langston Hughes, an African-American writer, actress, and mother of Langston Hughes.
• The article on Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was doubled in size, with more than double the number of citations. Lee was a Chinese advocate for women’s suffrage and head of the First Chinese Baptist Church in New York’s Chinatown. In particular, the Scholar built out Wikipedia’s coverage of Lee’s education, career, and suffrage-related activities.
• Mary Birdsall‘s article is now triple the size it was before a Wiki Scholar started working on it. Notably, the number of citations in the article grew from only 5 to 69!
• After the 19th Amendment passed, one of Alice Paul‘s primary activities and historical contributions was the Equal Rights Amendment. This received a single short paragraph in the article before a Wiki Scholar expanded it substantially to be one of the more well developed sections of her biography.
• A Wiki Scholar substantially expanded the article on Emma Barrett Molloy, an American journalist, lecturer, and temperance and women’s rights activist from Indiana.

We were also excited to kick off a Communicating Science on Wikipedia Wiki Scientists course with 8 scientists from both academia and industry. The participants bring a diverse range of expertise to Wikipedia, from seismology, chemistry, and astronomy to food science and STEM education. It is too soon to highlight good work, since the group has only just started editing in their sandbox, but we are excited about the fascinating subjects they plan to improve.

Visiting Scholars Program

This month, the George Mason University Visiting Scholar, Gary Greenbaum, brought the article on the Apollo 15 mission up to Featured Article status. Apollo 15 was the ninth manned mission in the United States Apollo program and the fourth to land on the Moon. The 1971 mission had a greater focus on scientific research than had previous missions, and it was the first use of the Lunar Roving Vehicle. David Scott and James Irwin spent 18.5 hours on the surface, collecting 170 pounds of material to bring back for research purposes. Another first from the mission was on the way back home, when Alfred Worden performed the first spacewalk. Although it was a great success, it was tainted by a controversy involving unauthorized postal covers. If that sounds familiar, it is because Gary brought that article up to Featured Article recently, too, and we mentioned it in a previous monthly report.

Gary had another Featured Article with the Norfolk, Virginia, Bicentennial half dollar, adding to a long list of extremely high-quality numismatics articles. The half-dollar was minted in 1937, but the year on the coin said 1936, as it was intended for that year’s 200-year anniversary of Norfolk being designated a royal borough.

Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University, added 12 more articles about women writers to her ever-growing list (more than 440!). For example, Cordelia Throop Cole (1833-1900) was a social reformer who lectured, wrote, and edited on behalf of the temperance crusade and social purity movement. Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood (1826-1903) wrote under the names M. E. W. S., M.E.W. Sherwood, and Mrs. John Sherwood. She wrote short stories, poetry, several books, and etiquette manuals. She was also a translator of poems from various European languages. Emily Lee Sherwood Ragan (1839-1916), also known as Jennie Crayon and E. L. S., was an author and journalist in Washington DC. She was a charter member of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution and involved in writing and research at the Library of Congress. She also served as press superintendent of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

Advancement

In March, the Advancement Team worked hard to identify potential new funders, had several good conversations with potential partners, traveled to several association meetings, and developed a budget and began drafting an annual plan for the next fiscal year.

Fundraising

No new grants were awarded in March, but we submitted several proposals for funding. One proposal was invited by one of our current funders to support our Communicating Science efforts. Chief Advancement Officer TJ Bliss worked with senior leadership and the Programs team to develop and submit a proposal in response to this invitation. Customer Success Manager Samantha Weald conducted desk research and identified two new potential funders with goals aligned to our purpose and strategy. Samantha worked with TJ to develop and submit Letters of Intent to each these funders. TJ also had several conversations with our current funders, including the Stanton Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Heising-Simons Foundation. During the Wikimedia Summit, LiAnna met with our program officer to discuss the status of our Annual Plan Grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. Finally, we worked with our colleagues at Wayne State University to develop plans for raising money to support an effort we are developing together around Wikidata.

Communications

It’s not every day that a student takes the time to officially thank their professor for a great project. But that’s what Madeleine Hardt, Dr. Jennifer Glass’ student at Georgia Institute of Technology, did after learning how to write Wikipedia articles as a class assignment. The thank you came in the form of a certificate of appreciation issued through Georgia Tech’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Read more in our blog post.

In their newly published research analysis of the Wikipedia assignment, Dr. Ariella Rotramel, Rebecca Parmer, and Rose Oliveira of Connecticut College conclude that the assignment works well with feminist curricula, prepares students for careers, and fosters effective collaboration among faculty. Read more here.

Chelsea Sutcliffe completed our recent professional development course in order to improve Wikipedia’s representation of women in STEM. She shared her three take-aways on our blog: The gender gap is real – bridge it. Imposter syndrome is real – be bold. If time is money – donate it. Read more here.

Emilee Helm, a student at the University of Washington, wrote about how much the Wikipedia assignment she completed in Nathan TeBlunthuis’ course affected her. “I could not have imagined I would be so satisfied with my experience. I was able to gain confidence and develop a final product that I am undoubtedly proud of.” Read more here.

Blog posts:

• Why this professor will “never go back to term papers” (March 1)
• Wikipedia is the ultimate open educational resource (March 4)
• The Wikipedia assignment: praxis as pedagogy (March 6)
• Experimenting with Wikipedia as a woman in STEM (March 6)
• Information science students participate in Wikipedia’s living archive (March 7)
• Wikipedia offers a solution for teaching critical media literacy (March 8)
• Make sure every woman in science has a Wikipedia bio (March 8)
• Monthly Report, January 2019 (March 8)
• Why Wikipedia often overlooks stories of women in history (March 11)
• Student’s perspective “completely altered” after Wikipedia assignment (March 12)
• Wiki Education publishes program evaluation update (March 12)
• Students write 50 Wikipedia biographies of women in STEM in less than a year (March 13)
• Radical African thought, revolutionary youth culture, and Wikipedia (March 14)
• Teaching students how to communicate science (March 18)
• Fulfilling your potential (March 20)
• When students become experts and experts become students (March 22)
• Telling the whole story of US women’s suffrage (March 27)

Technology

In March, the Technology department started work with Salesforce consultants Common Voyage to update our data infrastructure for our Scholars & Scientists Program and create flexible interest and application forms for the Advancement team. We also started work on a streamlined system for responding to help requests, as a replacement for the Desk.com ticketing system that will be shut down next year. This new system, which we’ve dubbed TicketDispenser, will be rolling out in April.

Following the preliminary process mapping we conducted during the February All-Staff meeting, we created a set of editable process maps for both the Scholars & Scientists Program and the Wikipedia Student Program; these provide a framework we can continue using to identify the most important technical needs for scaling our programs as they continue to evolve.

Outreachy intern Cressence wrapped up her project this month, with an updated course creation interface for both Wiki Education courses and global programs on Programs & Events Dashboard.

Finance & Administration

The total expenses for March were $172,000, just ($2K) below the budgeted $174,000. All departments were either on target, or very close to their target. Programs was over by $4K due to a known payroll overage of $7K while under ($3K) in printing costs, fundraising is under ($1K) by only using half of the travel budget for March. General & Administrative was under by ($4K) due to indirect cost reallocation. Technology was under ($1K) in rent and internet. And the board was right on target.

The year-to-date expenses are $1.56M ($246K) under budget of $1.8M. We expected that fundraising would be under by ($157K) due to a change in plan for professional services ($149K) and deciding not to engage in a cultivation event ($10K) and ($1K) in travel this month. Programs are under ($49K) due to a few changes in processes – professional services ($13K), travel ($37K), printing and software ($15K), communication ($5K), and indirect expenses ($25K) while reporting an overage of $42K in payroll and $4K in furniture and equipment. General and Administrative are under ($20K) due to a reduction of payroll ($16K) and professional fees mostly relating to audit and tax prep ($4K). The board is entirely on budget. Technology is under budget by ($20K) as there was a change in plans in utilizing the budgeted professional fees ($17K) and additional rent ($7K) and instead $4K increase in furniture and equipment.

Office of the ED

Current priorities:

• Coordinating and overseeing work on the Annual Plan & Budget for FY 2019/20
• Preparing the annual Leadership Team retreat at the Green Gulch Zen Center
• Providing support during the development of our new Wikidata training

As part of the work on next year’s Annual Plan, Executive Director Frank Schulenburg started reviewing the individual departments’ budgets. We’re currently at a point where all different parts of the new plan get pulled together so we can see the whole picture and determine whether all elements work well with each other and everything makes sense. Big picture is that we’re well on track with our annual planning process work. We expect to deliver the first draft to our board on time.

Given the strong need for high-quality training materials that empower new users to engage in Wikidata, the structured open data repository for facts, we decided to kick off work on Wikidata trainings earlier than initially planned. When you Google a topic or ask Alexa a question, the answer you get often comes from Wikidata instead of coming from Wikipedia – that’s why our strategic plan calls for expanding our programmatic offerings to Wikidata. We’re planning on accepting applications for this new and unique offering within the next few months, with the goal to start the first courses in July.

We have known for a while that the librarian community would be a great target for such a Wikidata training, given the already existing interest of librarians in everything related to “Linked Open Data” (structured data published under an open license which is being made available in a way that allows it to be interlinked and become more useful through semantic queries – think of Linked Open Data as the precondition for the internet to become a global database that is freely available to everyone). Also, with the Association of Research Libraries’ (ARL) task force on Wikimedia and Linked Open Data having asked for public comments on its white paper “Wikidata: Opportunities and Recommendations” on November 30, 2018, we could foresee that the interest in Wikidata among librarians in the United States would only increase in 2019. In this context, Wiki Education will play the important role of being the intermediary between the world of librarians and Wikidata. Our goal is to empower and encourage librarians to contribute to Wikidata so they can advance and enrich the discovery of locally curated collections on the web.

In order to prepare for a launch in July this year, we established an internal task force that will be dealing with all aspects of scoping, developing, and marketing our new Wikidata training within the next couple of months. Given that librarians have large amounts of high-quality data at their hands, we’re really looking forward to seeing numerous exciting ideas and projects coming out of this engagement that will allow the general public better access to reliable and rich information.

Visitors

Professor Cecelia Musselman of Northeastern University, a long time instructor in our program, visited our SF office in early March. We all enjoyed chatting with Cecelia and finding out what makes her courses so successful.

Wikimedia Argentina (WMAR) y la Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP) firmaron el pasado 20 de marzo un convenio de cooperación para impulsar y promover políticas transversales de difusión y producción de conocimiento abierto. Es la primera alianza de estas características que WMAR formaliza con una institución de educación superior.

“Este acuerdo facilitará en gran medida el acceso masivo al conocimiento libre, respetando la autoría de los contenidos científicos”, afirmó Anna Torres, directora ejecutiva de WMAR.

Las posibilidades que este convenio habilita son de gran alcance. La UNLP se compromete a establecer un flujo de trabajo estable para visibilizar la producción de contenido científico a través de Wikipedia.

Como contraparte, WMAR realizará capacitaciones internas, orientadas a los investigadores y equipos de comunicación, con el propósito de incorporar y mejorar el conocimiento científico. Además, WMAR acompañará y apoyará la liberación del fondo documental de la UNLP mediante la utilización de licencias libres.

Esta asociación también permitirá a WMAR reforzar la presencia de las colecciones del Museo de La Plata en proyectos de la Fundación Wikimedia. En este sentido, el museo se incorpora a un selecto grupo de instituciones, entre los que se encuentran el Museo Británico de Londres y el Museo Metropolitano de Nueva York.

Último, pero no menos importante, se institucionaliza el primer wikipedista en residencia (WIR) con base en la UNLP, cuyo trabajo se centrará en la incorporación de proyectos de la Fundación Wikimedia en los procesos universitarios.

El acuerdo fue rubricado por la presidenta de WMAR, Ivana Lysholm, y el presidente de la casa de estudios platense, Fernando Tauber. De la firma también participaron la directora ejecutiva de WMAR, Anna Torres; el secretario general de la UNLP, Patricio Lorente, y el jefe de Gabinete, Carlos Giordano.

¿Primera vez trabajando juntos?

El acuerdo suscrito entre WMAR y la UNLP no es ninguna sorpresa, ambas instituciones ya han desarrollado proyectos en clave cooperativa. Uno de tantos fue el 90° aniversario de la Radio de la Universidad de la Plata, celebrado en 2014 con un Editatón Radiofónico. Utilizando la radiodifusión y la historia del rock argentino como vectores pedagógicos, los participantes aprendieron a editar en Wikipedia.

En esta misma actividad, la radio liberó una parte importante de su archivo de audios, que data de 1924, en Wikimedia Commons. Estos incluyen ponencias académicas, entrevistas y lecturas de personalidades reconocidas a nivel nacional y mundial, como Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo, Julio Cortázar, Albert Einstein, Salvador Dalí y Eva Perón, entre muchos otros.

También fue en 2014 que se llevó a cabo una editatón por el Día del Bibliotecario. El objetivo de esta actividad fue iniciar y capacitar a los participantes en Wikipedia. Se crearon y mejoraron artículos relacionados al acervo cultural de la Biblioteca de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata y su impacto en el patrimonio local.

Otra prueba de cooperación fue la primera Wikilesa en 2016, un evento realizado en conmemoración al 40° aniversario del golpe cívico-militar que gobernó ilegítimamente la República Argentina entre 1976 y 1983. Esta editatón tuvo como eje principal la creación y enriquecimiento de artículos relacionados a los derechos humanos en Argentina.

Tomás Marchetta, Responsable de Comunicación
Wikimedia Argentina

You can read this post in English.

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)

Lately there has been a lot of hype around the typed properties that PHP 7.4 will bring. In this post I outline why typed properties are not as big of a game changer as some people seem to think and how they can lead to shitty code. I start by a short introduction to what typed properties are.

What Are Typed Properties

As of version 7.3, PHP supports types for function parameters and for function return values. Over the latest years many additions to PHP types where made, such as primitive (scalar) types like string and int (PHP 7.0), return types (PHP 7.0), nullable types (PHP 7.1) and parameter type widening (PHP 7.2). The introduction of typed properties (PHP 7.4) is thus a natural progression.

Typed properties work as follows:

class User {
    public int $id;
    public string $name;
 
    public function __construct(int $id, string $name) {
        $this->id = $id;
        $this->name = $name;
    }
}

You can do in two simple lines what takes a lot more boilerplate in PHP 7.3 or earlier. In these versions, if you want to have type safety, you need a getter and setter for each property.

    private $id;
    private $name;

    public function getId(): int {
        return $this->id;
    }
    public function setId(int $id): void {
        $this->id = $id;
    }
 
    public function getName(): string {
        return $this->name;
    }
    public function setName(string $name): void {
        $this->id = $name;
    }

Not only is it a lot more work to write all of these getters and setters, it is also easy to make mistakes when not automatically generating the code with some tool.

These advantages are what the hype is all about. People are saying it will save us from writing so much code. I think not, and I am afraid of the type of code those people will write using typed properties.

Applicability of Typed Properties

Let’s look at some of different types of classes we have in a typical well designed OO codebase.

Services are classes that allow doing something. Loggers are services, Repositories are services and LolcatPrinters are services. Services often need collaborators, which get injected via their constructor and stored in private fields. These collaborators are not visible from the outside. While services might have additional state, they normally do not have getters or setters. Typed properties thus do not save us from writing code when creating services and the added type safety they provide is negligible.

Entities (DDD term) encapsulate both data and behavior. Normally their constructors take a bunch of values, typically in the form of Value Objects. The methods on entities provide ways to manipulate these values via actions that make sense in the domain language. There might be some getters, though setters are rare. Having getters and setters for most of the values in your entities is an anti-pattern. Again typed properties do not save us from writing code in most cases.

Value Objects (DDD term) are immutable. This means you can have getters but not setters. Once again typed properties are of no real help. What would be really helpful however is a first-class Value Object construct part of the PHP language.

Typed properties are only useful when you have public mutable state with no encapsulation. (And in some cases where you assign to private fields after doing complicated things.) If you design your code well, you will have very little code that matches all of these criteria.

Going to The Dark Side

By throwing immutability and encapsulation out of the window, you can often condense code using typed properties. This standard Value Object …

class Name {
    private $firstName;
    private $lastName;
 
    public function __construct(string $firstName, string $lastName) {
        $this->firstName = $firstName;
        $this->lastName = $lastName;
    }
 
    public function getFirstName(): string {
        return $this->firstName;
    }

    public function getLastName(): string {
        return $this->lastName;
    }
}

… becomes the much shorter

class Name {
    public strimg $firstName;
    public strimg $lastName;
 
    public function __construct(string $firstName, string $lastName) {
        $this->firstName = $firstName;
        $this->lastName = $lastName;
    }
}

The same goes for Services and Entities: by giving up on encapsulation and immutability, you gain the ability to not write a few lines of simple code.

This trade-off might actually make sense if you are working on a small codebase on your own or with few people. It can also make sense if you create a throw away prototype that you then actually throw away. For codebases that are not small and are worked on by several people writing a few simple getters is a low price to pay for the advantages that encapsulation and immutability provide.

Conclusion

Typed properties marginally help with type safety and in some rare cases can help reduce boilerplate code. In most cases typed properties do not reduce the amount of code needed unless you throw the valuable properties of immutability and encapsulation out of the window. Due to the hype I expect many junior programmers to do exactly that.

See Also

• Missing in PHP7: Value Objects
• Introduction to Iterators and Generators in PHP
• The Fallacy of DRY
• PHP project template

The post PHP Typed Properties appeared first on Entropy Wins.

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  

16/04/2019-22/04/2019

Mapping

• Andy Mabbett looked at some high-use wikidata tags and (while also noticing some accidental mistagging) raised the question whether each branch of a company should be tagged with the wikidata= code of the parent or if -with the exception of the headquarters- brand:wikidata= or franchise:wikidata are better options to tag the belonging.
• Dave F wanted to know whether junction=yes on polygons is used somewhere. According to the answers from Mateusz and Tobias, it is used.
• Valor Naram created a proposal for tagging baby changing tables and asks for comments.
• The tagging proposal Police Facilities, which was supposed to introduce additional detail tags for police facilities, has missed the approval threshold slightly.
• Leif Rasmussen has drafted a proposal for improving road lane connectivity information as he thinks that the current model with turn:lanes= does fails to store all information for complex junctions. Simon Poole points to a similar proposal for a transit=-key from 2015 that has been abandoned.
• Joseph Eisenberg wants to map plateaus, mesas, buttes and tablelands and asks on the Tagging mailing list for a suitable tag value for it. Various options are suggested; others believe that some large imprecisely defined areas that are difficult to verify on the spot do not really fit OSM’s data model at all, but should be stored elsewhere and made accessible to map stylists.

Community

• Ilya Zverev announces the opening of nominations for the OpenStreetMap Awards 2019.
• OpenStreetMap is turning 15 this year and at the time of writing only one event has been scheduled so far. Thank you, Michael, for the reminder.
• The OSM Portugal Community has debated, through the mailing list Talk-pt, about the mapping of a new hospital on Madeira Island. If this hospital is under construction, how should it be mapped? If it is ready and closed, how should it be mapped? If it is ready, working without a license (and therefore illegal) how should it be mapped? Who should check the possible (i)legality of the operation? What should the mapper do? Map when to open without a license? Ignore until everything is licensed? These are some of the questions that have been asked by the Portuguese community. (automatic translation)
• Michael Reichert suggests (translation) an OSM-Wikicamp to discuss all the OSM-wiki related issues – and there are a lot of them. As he writes in his post, chances are that OSM’s local chapter in German, FOSSGIS e.V., funds the accommodation.
• The cleanup of our wiki gained some popularity recently. Apparently even pages which were deleted 7 years ago as been outdated still find readers today. Ilya Zverev criticised the deletion of a wikipage about the testing of the API 0.6. Unfortunately (but highly predictably) the following discussion about the wiki deletion policy derailed to a semantic dispute about the recent progress of the OSM API, the use of the word “vandalism” and the existence or non-existence of gatekeepers in OSM.
• API 0.6 turned 10 years last week: it went live on 21st of April 2009. Ilya Zverev recalls the history (automatic translation) of switching from API 0.5 and explains why he thinks we will never see a version 0.7 of the API.

Imports

• Grigory Rechistov prepared an import of forests, farmland and other types of land cover from Sweden’s Environmental Protection Agency and documented his plan in the wiki. Criticism voiced on the Imports mailing list seems to have been largely ignored.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Christoph Hormann has discovered that the board meeting on April 24 contains a non-public agenda item about GlobalLogic.
• Rory McCann asks whether GlobalLogic indirectly pleads guilty because they offered to withdraw the memberships of their employees.

Events

• Potential organisers can now apply for the State of the Map 2020. Applications close on June 15 2019.
• Christine Karch and Denis Helfer plan another OSM meeting in Strasbourg in May. The meeting, which will be scheduled every six months from now on will be held in German-French-English-Alsatian.

Maps

• Philip Pierdomenico introduced his recently created OpenStreetMap Coffee Map on Twitter.
• As Mapillary reports in its blog, the Departments of Transportation of the US states Utah, Florida, Arizona, Connecticut and Vermont have uploaded images covering 430,000 km of roads to Mapillary where they were automatically processed to detect traffic signs and other features.
• The Neue Züricher Zeitung reports (translation) about the origin and development of Wheelmap by the association Sozialhelden and introduces its founder Raúl Krauthausen.

Open Data

• Owen Boswarva tweeted that the Canadian province of New Brunswick has completed its Lidar survey under the GeoNB Open Data Licence.
• Uli Deiters announced the release of 350,000 bollard positions (from 2014) by the city of Berlin as Open Data. He shows some nice visualisations and provides the data in shapefile format on GitHub.

Programming

• yaugenka filed a feature request for iD in 2017 to “unglue” an entire landuse area from a line with a shortcut. Quincy Morgan implemented this function recently and provided a short animation how it works.
• The PgAdmin4 Geometry viewer nice feature is added to PgAdmin4 since v3.3 with an OpenStreetMap background. While testing PostGIS scripts, programmers simply switch between Data And Geometry viewers and avoid moving data to other tools to visualize.
• jguthrie100 created a pull request for the iD editor which warns if an address is used multiple times.

Releases

• MapRoulette is now at version 3.3. The latest release adds a brand new review system. You can mark each task you solve as ‘review wanted’. Mappers can volunteer to review other mappers’ solved tasks within MapRoulette. Other new features include a new Portuguese localization and opt-in email notifications.

Did you know …

• … the new quality tool “Osmoscope” by Jochen Topf? It shows superimposed nodes as well as undefined or lonely nodes and ways.
• [1] … Parking Lanes Viewer by user ascd, with which you can view and change the mapping of parking possibilities at the roadside in OSM?
• … how to tag if a shop or amenity has a seating area? There are two tags for this: indoor_seating and outdoor_seating. For the outdoor gastronomy area there is the tag leisure=outdoor_seating. In some places even the type of chairs has been mapped as outdoor_seating:comfort or the type of weather_protection and shade.

OSM in the media

• On El Pais’ article about the 2016 Spanish General Election showing voting maps. 11 of the 12 maps displayed on the article do not have the required attribution. The 2019 election was on 28th April.

Other “geo” things

• The Guardian reports about the fight of a man from Ilford, a London borough in North East London, for the postal code E19 which would indicates the belonging to London. He is concerned that than the current IG1 – IG6 is not always recognised as a London postcode and could be misread as part of Essex. His “fight” has lasted for 15 years now.
• Mapbox announced the release of its Vision SDK during the Shanghai Automotive Show. The SDK allows developers to add functions like augmented reality navigation and lane guidance, live traffic alerts and many others into own driving applications. The SDK also combines processed live data from sensors and cameras with classic map data, called AI Maps.
• Kenneth Field and Max Roberts show that schematic maps are a subject about which highly emotional debates can be carried out in public.
• A Blog Post from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reports how collection of data at the local level with gps helps monitor Malaria desease with spatial analysis of the data.
• The National Geographic reports that the ice melt in the Himalaya will threaten more people to suffer from flash floods than thought. Researchers have included OpenStreetMap data in their investigations.
• Nico Belmonte, formerly head of visualization at Uber, has joined Mapbox as General Manager in charge of maps.
• You are invited to submit workshop- and presentation proposals for the URISA 2019 Caribbean GIS Conference, which takes place 18-21 November 18-21 in Port of Spain, Trinidad.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Graz	Grazer Linuxtage 2019	2019-04-26-2019-04-27
Resistencia	Taller de edición en FLISoL2019	2019-04-27
Córdoba	Charla relámpago sobre Wikipedia y OpenStreetMap en FLISoL2019	2019-04-27
Luján	Charla Mapeo comunitario con comentarios sobre la investigación de usos del suelo en la cuenca del río Luján en FLISoL2019	2019-04-27
Rennes	Recensement des parcs et jardins	2019-04-28
Budapest	Oktogon buffet dinner & mapping	2019-04-29
Cayenne	Rencontre mensuelle	2019-04-30
Mannheim University of Music and Performing Arts	Mannheimer Mapathons	2019-05-02
Bochum	Mappertreffen	2019-05-02
Nantes	Réunion mensuelle	2019-05-02
Zittau	OSM-Stammtisch Zittau	2019-05-03
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #4	2019-05-06
Essen	Mappertreffen	2019-05-07
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2019-05-08
Salzburg	Maptime Salzburg – Mapathon	2019-05-08
Wuppertal	Wuppertaler Stammtisch im Hutmacher 18 Uhr	2019-05-08
Berlin	131. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2019-05-09
Ivrea	Incontro Mensile	2019-05-11
Kyoto	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第8回 柳谷観音	2019-05-12
Rennes	Réunion mensuelle	2019-05-13
Bordeaux	Réunion mensuelle	2019-05-13
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle pour tous	2019-05-14
Salt Lake City	SLC Mappy Hour	2019-05-14
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2019-05-14
Toulouse	Rencontre mensuelle	2019-05-15
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch	2019-05-15
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, NunoCaldeira, NunoMASAzevedo, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, SomeoneElse, SunCobalt, YoViajo, derFred, geologist.

A few weeks ago, I was honored to travel to Europe where I participated in two conferences related to the broader Wikimedia movement: The Wikimedia Summit in Berlin and the Wikimedia + Education Conference in Donostia. Wiki Education is one of the largest organizations in the Wikimedia movement in terms of both budget and number of program participants, so we had a lot to share with other organizations. But, as always, we also have a lot to learn from the experiences of others who share our mission to improve Wikimedia content globally.

This year’s Wikimedia Summit was focused exclusively on the Wikimedia movement strategy. It was an opportunity for organizations like Wiki Education to provide feedback on progress to date. Wiki Education’s work supports both knowledge equity — our work to improve content gaps related to equity is critically important, given how much emerging communities translate from the English Wikipedia — and knowledge as service, in which our work on the Program & Events Dashboard has led to it being one of the most used tools across languages and projects.

The Wikimedia Summit was also an important opportunity to meet up with various global collaborators. Like most conferences, the hallway conversations were incredibly meaningful to me, as in both pre-arranged and casual conversations with my global colleagues, I learned a lot about what’s happening in the movement, what others have learned in their programs, and thought about how we can apply learnings to our own programs. As our Chief Programs Officer, I’ve always felt this conference was particularly relevant, as it includes many people who are running programs globally, and has given me the opportunity to gather learnings from their programmatic work.

The Wikimedia + Education Conference continued this trend. The three-day conference was a great opportunity to connect with other program leaders globally who are running education programs. I learned a lot about how others have structured their programs, the challenges they’ve faced, and the ways they’ve overcame those challenges through the excellent program. And again, hallway conversations were a great way to supplement the program.

I also had the opportunity to present three sessions at the Wikimedia + Education Conference. I gave a 20-minute talk about the learnings from our Scholars & Scientists program on how to get subject matter experts to edit Wikipedia. I also led a 90-minute workshop on how to scale an education program while keeping a focus on equity — one attendee told me this was their favorite session, which meant a lot to me!

And finally, I collaborated with colleagues in Macedonia, Jordan, Indonesia, and Serbia in sharing how to use the Program & Events Dashboard for an education program in another 90-minute workshop. This session collected information on what people liked and what additional features we should develop for the Program & Events Dashboard, which I’ve passed on to Wiki Education’s technical team. The Dashboard is one of the three focus areas for the upcoming Wikimedia Hackathon in Prague, so we’re excited to see if we can get Hackathon attendees to tackle some of the items on the wish list.

All in all, I appreciated the opportunity to both share what we’ve learned with the global Wikimedia community and be inspired by others’ learnings. I look forward to continuing to participate in our global Wikimedia movement as we all pursue the vision of sharing the sum of all human knowledge.

Header: File:Bb 20190407768565 33.jpg, Maialen Andres-Foku, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The internet has a problem: across much of the world, women’s access, and participation, and representation on the internet are below that of men.*

For online communities like Wikipedia, the internet’s missing women help contribute to our gender gap—both in our content, which is biased towards male biographies, and in our contributors, which are overwhelmingly male.

Of course, the missing women aren’t the only factor in contributing towards our gender gap. As the Wikimedia Foundation’s Executive Director, Katherine Maher,  wrote last October, “Wikipedia is by design a living, breathing thing—a collection of knowledge that many sources, in aggregate, say is worth knowing. It is therefore a reflection of the world’s biases more than it is a cause of them.”

But even though some of the problem is out of our hands, this doesn’t mean we can’t do anything about it.

• • •

On International Women’s Day last month, UNESCO, the Swedish government, volunteer Wikipedia editors and Wikimedia affiliates (including Wikimedia Sweden (Sverige) teamed up with local organisations to train women how to edit Wikipedia and to write more women into history.**

In total, sixty events were hosted in thirty-five countries, ranging from France to Nigeria to Bangladesh. Over 650 people participated and added 2.6 million words to Wikipedia. As many as 90 of those took part in the WikiGap Challenge, making significant contributions to over 1,400 articles—including an article about Liette Vasseur, a Canadian scientist who studies the effect of climate change on rural communities.

• • •

You may have missed these events, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still help out. Here’s some ways to get involved:

• Write about women on Wikipedia: This can take all sorts of forms, from writing a new article from scratch, to improving an existing article, to even translating an article into your own language. That’s a lot, though, and so we’d recommend starting with reading up on of the organized Wikipedia groups that focus on women, including Women in Red (English), Les sans pagEs (French), WikiDonne (Italian), Wiki Loves Women (Africa), and HerStory (Arabic). More on how to participate is available in this blog’s interview with Women in Red members, and if you need help, reach out to @WikiWomeninRed on Twitter or <email address>.
• Write about women online: Are you a journalist or an academic who perhaps already writes too much for your job? No problem! You can still pitch in. Wikipedia relies on journalism and academic papers to cite its content—as quoted above, it’s “a collection of knowledge that many sources, in aggregate, say is worth knowing.” Here’s a list of people you might be able to write about.
• Contribute pictures of notable women. Are you friends with someone who already has a Wikipedia article? Take a good photo of them and add it to Wikimedia Commons, which holds most of the media used on Wikipedia. Here’s a tutorial!
• Join or organise an event: on this or any other topic, our Wikipedia organisations (chapters and user groups) and Wikipedia volunteers run regular events and can help set up events. If there’s none near you, you could consider setting up your own event—here’s one instruction booklet.

 
Have additional questions? We’re more than happy to help. Please reach out to Wikimedia Sweden’s Mia Jacobsson at mia.jacobsson[at]wikimedia.se.

Isla Haddow-Flood, WikiFundi
Florence Devouard, WikiFundi
Mia Jacobsson, Project Leader, Learning and Education, Wikimedia Sweden
John Cummings, Wikimedian in Residence, UNESCO

Notes

*See 2017 data from the International Telecommunications Union, which also says that the “proportion of women using the Internet is 12% lower than the proportion of men using the [i]nternet worldwide.”

**These included a plethora of organized Wikipedia groups, such as WikiGap, Les sans pagEs, Wiki Loves Women, and HerStory.

Map of 2019's Wikipedia-focused International Women’s Day events.

WikiGap 2019 in Seoul.

WikiGap 2019 in Albania.

WikiGap 2019 in Kampala, Uganda.

Per University of Pennsylvania professor Dr. Kent Bream, “Global health is an often repeated goal for motivated individuals, modern leaders of countries, and non-governmental organizations. Despite its modernity, this goal has been elusive for more than 100 years and despite scientific advancement.” This is all too true, however over the years there have been many people who have traveled outside of their home country in order to make healthcare more accessible to people who live in areas, often rural villages, without a physician’s office or hospital nearby. Dr. Bream’s students in his Medical Missionaries to Community Partners class focused on medical missionaries, people who traveled overseas as part of their missionary work. Sometimes positive, sometimes detrimental, medical mission work has left a definitive impact that should be researched and recorded so that others may learn from their successes and failures.

Hur Libertas “H. L.” Mackenzie was a medical missionary and minister for the Presbyterian Church of England who worked in Swatlow, China, where he aided in the construction of a mission hospital and established several out-stations for patients. While these facilities were highly Evangelistic, they did bring Western medical infrastructure into areas where it may have been lacking, particularly the out-stations. He also assisted in the creation of a girls’ boarding school, theological college, and boys’ middle school, which were primarily staffed with Chinese ministers and teachers.

Lucy Bement, a nurse and medical missionary, also worked in China, specifically Shaowu, China. She was accompanied in her ventures by her sister Frances. Bement saw patients in a makeshift doctor’s office housed in their home until the Boxer’s Rebellion, when she and her sister were forced to flee until the rebellion passed. Upon returning home the sisters found that the house had been almost completely destroyed. Undeterred, the sisters worked to repair the house so they could resume seeing patients. The pair put extra emphasis on seeing women, as cultural customs strictly forbade male providers from caring for female patients. Before returning home to the United States, Bement helped build a hospital and a boarding school for girls.

Students also created a new article for the Scottish medical missionary Margaret Stephen Kennedy. Kennedy worked in India, where she initially taught Sunday School with her sister and brother-in-law. She later started a day school and also began working with a local orphanage. Between the years of 1847 and 1859 Kennedy personally taught Victoria Gouramma, who was the daughter of Chikka Virarajendra, the Raja of Coorg. She briefly returned home due to her husband catching ill, but returned to India to care for women with leprosy in Almora.

You too can have your class work with Wikipedia as one of your class assignments. If you’re interested, please visit teach.wikiedu.org to find out how you can gain access to our tools, online trainings, and printed materials.

Image: File:Shanghai mission conference members.jpg, University of Birmingham, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Uploaded by a student.

As an employee of Wiki Education for six months now, it’s impossible not to be inspired. Our participants in the Student Program have added over 47 million words to Wikipedia since our organization began. They bludgeon away at content gaps across the site like Thor’s mighty hammer itself! And our participants in our professional development courses contribute by bringing top-notch expertise to highly viewed areas of Wikipedia.

But lately, I’ve been blown away by the contributions our participants have made to increasing coverage of women on Wikipedia. I’ve facilitated one of our Women in Science courses where participants—mainly women scientists themselves—write biographies of other women scientists. I helped another group of scholars learn to edit so they could improve content related to women’s suffrage in the United States in honor of the upcoming 100th anniversary of Congress passing the Nineteenth Amendment. The program participants I’ve supported these past six months have written over 100 new biographies of women!

As a biologist by training, I began editing Wikipedia in 2017 so I could write about what I knew the most about: bats. I wrote over 40 articles on Wikipedia about bat diversity and ecology before I wrote my first biography. But now, looking at the last 12 articles I’ve written in my free time, half were biographies of women. What’s changed?

These past months, I’ve spent so much time initiating brand new members into the Wikipedia community, becoming more and more aware of systemic barriers to women participating in the community, as well as women being written about by the community. I’ve repeated the statistics on women underrepresentation so many times, it’s almost a mantra at this point: less than 18% of all biographies on Wikipedia are about women. Helping others fix these problems is worthy and meaningful, but I didn’t want to just “talk the talk.” Believing in the importance of what I was teaching necessitated action; it necessitated writing.

With women’s history month in March, I made a conscious effort to dedicate more of my outside of work time on Wikipedia to writing about notable women. The six women I’ve written about in the past six weeks included scientists, writers, and artists. They study diseases and develop potential treatments and cures. They share stories of grief and love—of gunslinging cowboys and steely-eyed sheriffs. They rally their communities against the destruction of precious environmental resources. They create art and explore what it means to be a black girl in Ithaca, New York or an Appalachian folk musician. These women, so different in their trades and professions, had a shared trait. They were notable and accomplished women, yet no one had written about their achievements.

I love the quote, “Here’s to strong women. May we know them. May we be them. May we raise them.” I say, may we do those three things, but also one more: may we write about them.

Registration for our professional development course about women’s suffrage is currently open! Check it out here and write more women into Wikipedia. As always, for those interested in teaching a Wikipedia writing assignment into their classroom, visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn about our resources.

Three years ago, we created the Wikimedia Endowment as a permanent, independent fund dedicated to ensuring the long-term sustainability of Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects.

In other words, it will help sustain Wikipedia for decades to come.

But the Endowment is not a simple undertaking. It relies on the generosity of donors who recognize that knowledge is more impactful when it is freely available and shared with the world.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that Wikimedia Endowment Advisory Board member Peter Baldwin and his wife, Lisbet Rausing, have donated an additional $3.5 million to the Endowment. The gift brings their total Endowment giving to $8.5 million, building upon the $5 million they gave in 2017.

Peter and Lisbet are co-founders of the Arcadia Fund, one of the UK’s largest philanthropic foundations, which focuses on preserving cultural heritage and the environment, and promoting open access. Besides being major philanthropists and two of our biggest funders, Peter and Lisbet are historians who’ve taught at universities and written scholarly works.

With their gifts, the Endowment has now increased to more than $35 million and have moved us that much closer to our goal of $100 million.

“We are grateful to Peter and Lisbet for their continued investment in universal access to information and free and open knowledge” said Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia. “Their generosity will enable us to ensure knowledge remains free and open for the benefit of generations to come.”

The Endowment and the Wikimedia Foundation’s knowledge projects are more important than ever to support, says Peter. “In the era of fake news and globalized data rubbish,” he says, “it is all the more important to ensure that Wikipedia remains on a steady course, supplying us with balanced, factual, accurate information.”

Our vision with the Wikimedia Foundation’s projects is simple: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.” We’re extremely thankful that Peter Baldwin and Lisbet Rausing—and other Endowment donors—are joining us on this quixotic quest.

To learn more about how you can support the Wikimedia Endowment, visit wikimediaendowment.org or email endowment@wikimedia.org.

Marc Brent, Senior Endowment Development Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

In the search for a better user experience metric, we have tried out the upcoming Element Timing for Images API in Chrome.

Background

One of the tasks we in the performance team have been struggling with is finding better metrics that can tell us more about the user experience than the technical metrics we usually get out of browsers.

We started out 2015 trying to find a way to know when images are displayed for the user. We tried out the latest patterns at that moment in T115600. We used our WebPageTest instance to record a video of the browser loading the Obama page, and followed state of the art technology at that moment using a User Timing mark to fire when the image was displayed.

The results were very disappointing. The mark was at 2.0 seconds, but as you can see in the screenshot, the image was displayed at 4.8 seconds. It was off by 2.8 seconds :( We did multiple tests and we got the same result multiple times. We tried the state-of-the-art technique people where talking about and it was clearly completely wrong. This taught us the important lesson the reliability of new RUM metrics we decide to collect need to be verified in synthetic testing using a video recording of the browser.

The next attempt to measure when images appear was when WebPageTest added support for visual element metrics (meaning analyzing a video and getting metrics for specific elements), but that only helps us with synthetic testing. We also want better metrics collected directly from our users.

Element timings

@Gilles has been working on enabling origin trials for Chrome for us to verify the effectiveness and usefulness of upcoming performance APIs. Recently we enabled the Trial for Element Timing for Images on Russian Wikipedia. The goal of this API is to report exactly what we had been looking for: when an image is actually displayed to the user.

Let's verify the accuracy of this new metric and see if it works better than old approximations marked with user timings.

Evaluating element timings

Using Browsertime we record a video of the screen and run some extra JavaScript to collect the new metric. Then we compare the metric we get from JavaScript with the one we get from the video.

The first large image in an article is named thumbnail-high, so we know which one to use. The following JavaScript snippet is what allows us to get the Element Timing metric just for that element:

(function() {
    const elements = performance.getEntriesByType('element');
    for (let element of elements) {
        if (element.name === 'thumbnail-high') {
            return element.startTime;
        }
    }
})();

This is passed to Browsertime, which runs it after the page has loaded. Visual Elements are enabled, which analyses the video and gives us a timing corresponding to when the largest image within the viewport is displayed (which for most articles, is the thumbnail-high image).

$ docker run --rm -v "$(pwd)":/browsertime sitespeedio/browsertime:4.6.0 --script thumbnail-high.js https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Древесные_стрижи -n 11 --visualElements

This was run on two different connectivity types and 11 times in a row. Then we keep the median for both metrics and we get the following:

The video recording performed by browsertime is done at 30 frames per second. Which means each frame lasts 1000/30 = 33.333ms. This indicates that the differences seen between Element Timing and the video analytics are within one frame. Element Timing might very well be the more accurate one, since it's not constrained by the video recording's 30fps cadence.

That looks really promising and very accurate, particularly compared to old workarounds. We tested a couple more URLs that you can see in T219231 and they showed the same result.

For our content, it looks like the Element Timing API finally provides a way for us to know accurately when images are really displayed to users!

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

📊 Month in numbers

• 8 documented incidents. [1]
• 31 new Wikimedia-prod-error issues reported. [2]
• 28 Wikimedia-prod-error issues closed. [3]

The number of incidents this month was slightly above average compared to earlier this year (7 in February, 4 in January), and this time last year (4 in March 2018, 7 in February 2018).

To read more about these incidents, their investigations, and conclusions, check wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation#2019-03.

There are currently 177 open Wikimedia-prod-error issues, similar to last month. [4]

💡 Ideas: To suggest an investigation to highlight in a future edition, feel free contact me by e-mail, or private message on IRC.

📉 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/

Or help someone that’s already started with their patch:
→ Open prod-error tasks with a Patch-For-Review

Breakdown of recent months (past two weeks not included):

• September: Done! The last two issues were resolved.
• October: Done! The last issue was resolved.
• November: 2 issues left (from 1.33-wmf.2). 1 issue was fixed.
• December: 4 issues left (from 1.33-wmf.9). 1 issue was fixed.
• January: 2 issues left (1.33-wmf.13 – 14). 1 issue was fixed.
• February: 5 issues (1.33-wmf.16 – 19).
• March: 10 new issues (1.33-wmf.20 – 23).

By steward and software component, for issues remaining from February and March:

• CPT / JobQueue: T218692
• CPT / MCR: T217329
• CPT / Parser: T216664
• CPT / Revision-backend: T220353, T220257
• Growth / Page deletion: T219816
• Growth / Watchlist: T220245
• Language / Translate: T217380, T219736
• Multimedia / WikibaseMediaInfo: T217285
• Operations / PHP-7.2: T221347
• Search Platform / Elastica: T219234

🎉 Thanks!

Thanks to @aaron, @Anomie, @Arlolra, @Daimona, @hashar, @Jdforrester-WMF, @kostajh, @matmarex, @MaxSem, @Niedzielski, @Nikerabbit, @Petar.petkovic, @santhosh, @ssastry, @Umherirrender, @WMDE-leszek, @zeljkofilipin, and everyone else who helped last month by reporting, investigating, or patching errors found in production!

Until next time,

– Timo Tijhof

🦅 “This isn’t flying. This is falling… with style!”

Footnotes:

[1] Incidents. – wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/Incident_documentation/201903 …

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

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

[4] Open tasks. – phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query …

Last week, I watched, completely helpless, as the spire of Notre-Dame de Paris was eaten away by a blazing fire.

I lived for seven years in France’s capital. I’ve seen Notre-Dame more times than I can count—as a backdrop to a evening stroll, a morning rendez-vous, an outing with friends. Paris, and Notre-Dame at its heart, are dear to me.

However, Notre-Dame is not the first of our world heritage places to be damaged or have been destroyed. Dharahara, Palmyra, and the Great Mosque of Aleppo all immediately come to mind. It also will not be the last.

I am lucky. Most of my cultural anchors are recorded not once, not twice, but a thousand times, because I am French. Notre-Dame was even recorded in excruciating 3D detail for a video game, of all things. And since last Monday, France is all over the news, all the news, in the whole world. Wikimedians have plenty of material to work with to record my knowledge and preserve my culture. I’ve been able to watch all of the Wikimedia sites swell with information about Notre-Dame: Wikipedia articles have been created, the Wikidata items updated, and the Commons categories grew with more and more pictures—not just of the fire, but also of information not available before.

And you, my friends in the Wikimedia community: editors, organizers and colleagues, are who makes this possible.

Yet despite all these silver linings, Notre-Dame is still very much the exception. The voices of non-Western people are still missing from much of the discourse both inside and outside of Wikimedia. We are missing so much information about the cultures and knowledge of many of the people we already work with, and even more of the cultures and knowledge of those who we still haven’t managed to get to know.

Since 2018, we have been developing the Wikimedia movement strategy, and pledged to focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out. We are actively working to make sure that anyone, anywhere, will be able one day to find their cultural anchors online, freely accessible.

So today, I want to say thank you, my Wikimedian friends, for the work you have done, the work you are doing, and most importantly, I want to thank you for the work you will be doing in the years to come, to support the recording of the world’s knowledge, in all its diversity.

Your work, while it might not be saving any building from flames, will allow more and more people to access and share a part of what makes them who they are.

Thank you.

Delphine Ménard, Program Officer, Annual Plan Grants, Community Resources
Wikimedia Foundation

Earlier this year, Wikimedia Korea was formally recognized as a new Wikimedia chapter to support greater awareness and participation of Wikipedia, the world’s free knowledge resource with more than 50 million articles edited entirely by volunteers, and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects in South Korea.

Wikimedia chapters are independent, nonprofit affiliate organizations dedicated to supporting Wikipedia and its free knowledge mission in their respective geographic regions. The new organization, with an office in Seoul, joins 37 other recognized Wikimedia chapter affiliates around the world.

Today, Korean Wikipedia is the most widely-read language Wikipedia in South Korea with nearly 500,000 articles and more than 70 million pageviews every month. Its articles are written by a community of volunteer editors, or Wikipedians, who together use reliable sources to create and improve articles about a wide variety of topics from science, to pop culture, to the arts.

In the coming year, Wikimedia Korea will be supporting greater collaboration between Wikipedia and universities and libraries, having already hosted a series of lectures and events at Eulji University, Hallym University, and Dangook University. The chapter will also continue connecting and teaching new editors how to contribute to Wikipedia through trainings, in person events, and other initiatives.

This month, the chapter is hosting an online edit-a-thon—an editing event welcoming new and experienced volunteer Wikipedia editors alike—to improve articles on Korean Wikipedia about science and technology. As part of this, the chapter will also be hosting an in-person edit-a-thon on April 27th at Jeongdok library in Seoul to improve articles on these topics. Everyone is welcome to join, and more information on how to get involved is available on the Korean Wikipedia.

“When I visited San Francisco, I spoke with the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation about the need to locally support Wikipedia editors in Korea. I was encouraged by her response, and decided to pursue the chapter recognition process to do just this,” said EunAe, the Executive Director of Wikimedia Korea. “Over the past year, we gained the recognition of Copyright Commission of Korean government and signed the agreement with the Wikimedia Foundation to become a formal chapter. I hope this agreement will further expand the free culture movement and share the sum of all knowledge of in Korea. ”

Wikipedia has long had a presence in South Korea, but this recognition marks an important milestone in the efforts of local volunteer Wikipedia editors to build and grow its impact. In 2014, a community of volunteers came together to launch the first Wikimedia affiliate in South Korea, called the Wikimedians of Korea User Group, an open membership group that supported Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects in the broader network of affiliates. After meeting a series of stringent criteria created by the broader Wikipedia volunteer community and affiliates, the former Wikimedians of Korea User Group has now been expanded and formally recognized as an independent, nonprofit chapter affiliate called Wikimedia Korea.

In the coming year, Wikimedia Korea will be supporting greater participation in national and global Wikipedia competitions such as the Wiki Loves Monument competition, documenting national monuments to share on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia sites, and the “Wikimedian of the Year” competition which awards active, engaged South Korean editors with a series of prizes for their participation on the site.

“We are thrilled to have Wikimedia Korea join the global network of Wikimedia affiliates, the first chapter affiliate to be announced in four years,” said María Sefidari Huici, Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, the governing body associated with recognizing new Wikimedia chapters. “Wikimedia Korea has had a lasting impact in building Wikipedia’s presence in South Korea—from working with educational institutions like Dangook University to supporting countless new volunteer editors in the region through trainings and events. We look forward to seeing the even greater impact this community has as a formally-recognized chapter.”

Samantha Lien, Communications Manager, Communications
Wikimedia Foundation

Read this post in Korean.

올해 초, 사단법인 한국 위키미디어 협회가 위키백과와 위키미디어 자매 프로젝트에 대한 인식을 제고하고 참여를 독려하기 위하여 새로운 위키미디어 지부(Wikimedia chapter)인 위키미디어 한국(Wikimedia Korea)으로 승인됐다. 위키백과는 자발적인 편집자가 작성한 5천만 개 이상의 문서를 보유한 세계적인 자유 지식 자료(free knowledge resources)이다.

위키미디어 지부는 독립적인 비영리 가맹 단체로서, 각자의 지리적인 지역을 기반으로 위키백과와 자유 지식을 진흥하는 것을 목적으로 한다. 이미 전세계적으로 37개의 지부가 활동하고 있으며 대한민국을 기반으로 활동하는 새로운 지부는 38번째 지부이다.

한국어 위키백과는 다양한 언어의 위키백과 중에서 대한민국에서 가장 널리 읽히는 위키백과이며, 약 50만 개의 문서를 보유하고 있고, 매달 7천만 회 이상 조회되고 있다. 한국어 위키백과의 문서는 위키백과 사용자라고 불리는 자발적인 편집자의 커뮤니티에 의하여 작성된 것이며, 이들은 과학에서 대중 문화에 이르기까지 다양한 주제의 문서를 신뢰할 수 있는 출처를 이용하여 생성, 편집한다.

올해부터 위키미디어 한국은 위키백과와 대학, 도서관과의 협업을 지원할 예정이며, 이미 을지대학교, 한림대학교, 단국대학교 등에서 강연과 행사를 개최한 바가 있다. 또한 오프라인 행사 등을 통하여  새로운 편집자에게 위키백과에 기여하는 방법을 지속적으로 교육할 예정이다.

위키미디어 한국은 4월 한 달 동안 과학과 기술에 대한 한국어 위키백과 문서를 향상시키기 위하여  초보 편집자와 숙련 편집자 모두를 대상으로 하는 편집 행사인 온라인 에디터톤(edit-a-thon)을 개최하고 있다. 이 행사의 일환으로 4월 27일에는 서울의 정독도서관에서 오프라인 에디터톤도 개최할 예정이다. 참가 자격에는 제한이 없으며, 참가에 대한 더 자세한 사항은 한국어 위키백과에서 확인할 수 있다.

“샌프란시스코에 방문했을 때, 위키미디어 재단의 사무국장과 한국에서 위키백과 편집자를 지역적으로 지원할 필요성에 대해서 논의한 적이 있습니다. 저는 그때 사무국장의 반응에 대단히 고무되었고, 지부 승인 절차를 진행하기로 결심했습니다.”라고 류철 위키미디어 한국 이사는 회상했다. 또한 그는 “지난 몇 년 동안 저희는 문화체육관광부의 법인 설립 허가를 받고 정식 위키미디어 지부가 되기 위하여 위키미디어 재단과 협약을 체결했습니다. 이 협약이 한국에서의 자유 문화 운동의 확산과 지식의 공유에 기여하기를 희망합니다”라고 말했다.

위키백과는 대한민국에서 오랫동안 접속할 수 있었지만, 대한민국에서의 지부 출범은 자발적인 위키백과 사용자의 오랜 노력에 의해 세워진 중요한 이정표이다. 2014년 위키미디어 사용자들은 한국 위키미디어 협회의 창립 총회를 개최하였고, 2015년 위키미디어 재단 가맹 위원회(Affiliations  Committee)로부터 사용자 그룹(User Group)으로 승인되었다. 이후, 한국 위키미디어 협회는 계속 확장되어 위키미디어 한국으로서 독립적인 비영리 지부로서 위키미디어 재단의 정식 승인을 받기에 이르렀다.

올해 위키미디어 한국은 위키백과와 자매 위키미디어 프로젝트에서 공유될 문화재 사진을 촬영하는 위키 러브 모뉴먼트(Wiki Loves Monuments)와 같은 대회를 개최할 예정이며, 또한 위키미디어 프로젝트에 헌신한 위키미디어 사용자에게 상금을 수여하는 “올해의 위키인” 행사를 개최할 예정이다.

마리아 세피다리 우이시(María Sefidari Huici) 위키미디어 재단 이사장은 “위키미디어 한국이 세계적 위키미디어 가맹 네트워크에 참여하게 되어 기쁩니다.”라며 “위키미디어 한국은 교육 기관과 협업하거나 초보자 교육 행사 통하여 새로운 편집자를 지원하는 등의 방식으로 위키백과를 대한민국에 홍보하면서 지속적인 효과를 창출했습니다. 저희는 위키미디어 한국이 정식으로 승인된 지부로서 더욱 큰 영향력을 발휘하기를 기대하고 있습니다.”라고 밝혔다.

위키백과는 전세계에서 곳곳에서 자발적인 편집자에 의해 작성되는 지식을 온라인에 모아놓은 곳이다. 현재 약 300개의 언어로 이용할 수 있으며, 광고 없이 무료로 고대 역사부터 과학, 예술까지 어떠한 주제에 대해서든지 각 나라의 언어로 학습할 수 있는 곳이기도 하다. 위키백과 편집자는 위키백과에 삽입된 정보를 입증하기 위하여 신뢰할 수 있는 출처를 사용하며, 독자는 사실을 확인하기 위하여 그 출처를 검토할 수 있다. 위키백과는 완전히 비영리이며 독립적인 프로젝트로서 전세계의 자원봉사자들에 의해 매일매일 관리되고 있다.

전세계적으로 위키백과는 중요한 학습 자료로 인식되고 있으나, 지식을 전세계에 공유하기 위한 플랫폼이기도 하다. 전세계의 많은 나라에서 편집되는 정보는 세계적인 지식 자료에 기여되며, 매달 억명의 독자들에 의해 열람된다. 이는 소수의 사람들만이 알 수 있었던 것을 많은 사람들이 배울 수 있도록 해준다. 위키백과에 기여가 목소리들이 많아질수록 위키백과는 더욱 중립적이고 더욱 대표성을 가지게 되고 더욱 정확해진다.

Read this post in English.

Eilene Lyon is a Colorado-based freelance writer specializing in historical non-fiction, and an avid genealogist. Eilene learned how to create and expand Wikipedia articles in our professional development course as a way to give back to society and ensure that accurate information is being presented in a well-written format. This is a republishing of her blog post about the experience, first published on March 27, 2019.

A Major Milestone

This year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. It was ratified in 1920, so we can celebrate another centennial next year. In recognition of women winning the vote, the National Archives (NARA) museum has a special exhibit opening in May.

In conjunction with that, NARA has collaborated with Wiki Education to create a special course for Wiki Scholars to improve Wikipedia’s articles on the suffrage movement and women’s history/biography in general.

Bias in Wikipedia

English Wikipedians are overwhelmingly male and represent primarily North American and European populations. Consequently, there is a lot of bias on the platform. Biographies, particularly prior to 1900, are overwhelmingly about men. Meeting the “notability” requirement can be a hurdle for female subjects, partly because the notability standard at Wikipedia is defined by, um, men. See this article in Slate.

Why don’t more women write/edit Wikipedia articles? Some answers can be found here at the Harvard Business Review. The problem is widely recognized and many people are looking for ways to combat it. A couple good articles on the subject come from the Washington Post and Smithsonian. It’s also important to get more women of color in Wikipedia, not just in the suffrage movement, but for any significant achievement.

I created my own Wikipedia account over a year ago, because I wanted to correct some errors. But I never did much, because I didn’t feel like I really understood the platform. It looks more user-friendly than it seems once you get started.

Learning to Edit/Write for Wikipedia

In December, NARA sent me an email about the Wiki Scholar online course and I jumped at the chance to learn how to be a Wikipedian while improving women’s suffrage articles. While Wiki Education’s work is usually billed as a program for students and professionals in academia, this course isn’t that restricted. You do have to apply and pay for the course (scholarships are available).

It’s been such a fantastic experience! The class is taught by two Wikipedia editors (and a guest appearance by someone from NARA). There are teaching modules to do on your own, plus once a week the entire class meets for an hour by video conference.

There is also regular communication with other students and course instructors using Slack and our Wikipedia user pages. I’ve learned new concepts from classmates and new terminology as well.

By the end of the 3-month course, the Wiki Education instructor expects each student will contribute significantly to at least two articles. First we learn to evaluate what makes a good Wikipedia article, so we can take steps to improve them. Work is usually done in a “sandbox,” a user sub-page that isn’t a live article, but is accessible to anyone. After an instructor provides feedback, the edits are copied to the actual article.

My Contributions

My first article was a biography about a 19th-century suffragist from Indiana, Mary Thistlethwaite Birdsall. Using my genealogy research skills, I was able to correct some information about Birdsall and add quite a lot more to this article. Not many people had worked on it, so I figured I wouldn’t get much resistance to my work (great for a newbie).

The second article was a much larger undertaking, which I also substantially re-wrote and expanded greatly. Beforehand, I engaged with the people who had previously worked on it. This one is about a significant historic event, the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C. It was the first major political march in our nation’s capital.

While researching this article, I came across many women who either need substantial additions/revisions to their Wikipedia articles, or new ones created. I’ll never run out of projects! In researching both articles, I learned so much about the suffrage movement that I previously knew nothing about. Like all Wikipedia articles, these two are still works in progress.

Your Turn?

Two other things I learned in this class were: 1. how important it is to use a neutral tone (in Wikipedia, not my blog!), and 2. the subtle ways that the English language and composition are used to imply that women are subordinate or inferior to men. I recommend reading this article: Writing about women to see how we can be less biased.

Do you use Wikipedia? It seems like it’s the first place I go to learn about a person, historical event, natural phenomenon, or geographic place. Many people are working to make it reliable, but it depends on editors using quality resource materials. If you feel like giving back by contributing to this online encyclopedia, I hope you will consider signing up.

Resources:

• Editing_Wikipedia_brochure_(Wiki_Education_Foundation)_(2016)
• Illustrating_Wikipedia_brochure_(Wiki_Education_Foundation)
• Citing_your_sources
• Feature image: Official Program for the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession (Wikimedia Commons)

Registration for this course is currently open! Visit our landing page to learn more.

The Popups MediaWiki extension previously used HTML UI templates inflated by the mustache.js template system. This provided good readability but added an 8.1 KiB dependency* for functionality that was only used in a few places. We replaced Mustache with ES6 syntax without changing existing device support or readability and now ship 7.8 KiB less of minified uncompressed assets to desktop views where Popups was the only consumer.

Background

Given that ES6 template literals provided similar readability** and are part of JavaScript itself, we considered this to be a favorable and sustainable alternative to Mustache templates. Additionally, although the usage of template strings require transpilation, adding support enabled other ES6 syntaxes to be used, such as let / const, arrow functions, and destructuring, all of which Extension:Popups now leverages in many areas.

We compared the sizes before and after transpiling templates and they proved favorable:

Where “index.js (gzip)” is the minified gzipped size of the resources/dist/index.js Webpack build product as reported by bundlesize, “index.js” is the minified uncompressed size of the same bundle as reported by source-map-explorer and Webpack performance hints, and the remaining columns are the sum of minified uncompressed assets for each relevant module as reported by mw.loader.inspect() with the last column being a total of these inspect() modules.

The conclusions to draw from this table are that transpiling templates does minimally increase the size of the Webpack bundle but that the overhead is less than that of the mustache.js dependency so the overall effect is a size improvement. Additionally, note that the transpiled bundle now encompasses the HTML templates which source-map-explorer reports as contributing a 2.53 KiB minified uncompressed portion of the 35.15 KiB bundle. (Previously, templates were part of ext.popups.main but only via ResourceLoader aggregation; now templates are part of index.js.) Allowing for rounding errors and inlining, this brings the approximate overhead of transpilation itself to nearly zero, 35.15 KiB - 32.88 KiB - 2.53 KiB ≈ 0, which suggests transpiling as a viable solution for improving code elsewhere that must be written in modern form without compromising on compatibility or performance.

We used the Babel transpiler with babel-preset-env to translate only the necessary JavaScript from ES6 to ES5 for grade A browsers. The overhead for this functionality may be nonzero in some cases but is expected to diminish in time and always be less than the size of the mustache.js dependency. Please note that while most ES6 syntaxes are supported, the transpiler does not provide polyfills for new APIs (e.g., Array.prototype.includes()) unless configured to do so via babel-polyfill. As polyfills add more overhead and are related but independent of syntax, API changes were not considered in this refactoring.

Manual HTML escaping of template parameters was a necessary part of this change. This functionality is built into the double-curly brace syntax of mustache.js but is now performed using mw.html.escape(). These calls are a blemish on the code but appear only in the templates themselves and would be replaced transparently in a UI library with declarative rendering (such as Preact). We also anticipate that the template literal syntax would transition neatly to such a library. We don't know that Extension:Popups will ever want to use a UI library and accept these shortcomings may always exist.

*As reported by mw.loader.inspect() on March 22nd, 2018.
**The Mustache version of previews:

<div class="mwe-popups" role="tooltip" aria-hidden>
  <div class="mwe-popups-container">
    {{#hasThumbnail}}
    <a href="{{url}}" class="mwe-popups-discreet"></a>
    {{/hasThumbnail}}
    <a dir="{{languageDirection}}" lang="{{languageCode}}" class="mwe-popups-extract" href="{{url}}"></a>
    <footer>
      <a class="mwe-popups-settings-icon mw-ui-icon mw-ui-icon-element mw-ui-icon-popups-settings"></a>
    </footer>
  </div>
</div>

The ES6 version of the same template explicates dependencies but must manually escape them. The HTML snippet is quite similar but a call trim() is made so that parsing the result only creates a single text Node.

/**
 * @param {ext.popups.PreviewModel} model
 * @param {boolean} hasThumbnail
 * @return {string} HTML string.
 */
export function renderPagePreview(
        { url, languageCode, languageDirection }, hasThumbnail
) {
        return `
                <div class='mwe-popups' role='tooltip' aria-hidden>
                        <div class='mwe-popups-container'>
                                ${hasThumbnail ? `<a href='${url}' class='mwe-popups-discreet'></a>` : ''}
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1. Build your students’ intellectual confidence.

When students can distill course topics into the essential information, translate that for a general audience, and then post that information in a public place – that feels good. Instructors who use our tools to assign students to create or expand Wikipedia articles often tell us about the confidence and empowerment that their students find in the exercise. Students get to be the expert. And sometimes they are the best ones to translate complex academic topics for a general audience because they remember what it was like to learn it for the first time.

2. Equip students with tools to understand and participate in their digital landscape.

We hear from students all the time that their teachers tell them never to touch Wikipedia. We also hear from students that they use it anyway and their teachers know they do. So we ask instructors, instead of turning them away from the site, why not give them skills to critically evaluate what they read there?

When students write for Wikipedia, they must first understand where there are knowledge gaps. Emilee Helm, a student whose instructor we supported at the University of Washington, says writing for Wikipedia really made an impact on her. “This new understanding of what goes on behind the scenes of each article has completely altered my perspective of what Wikipedia’s mission is. Furthermore, I have been equipped with the proper tools to help,” she writes.

3. Give students the chance to do something that matters.

Since Dr. Rebecca Barnes adopted the assignment last fall, her students at Colorado College have written more than 50 Wikipedia biographies for women in STEM who didn’t previously have one. Not only are these students correcting Wikipedia’s notorious gender gap, they also get to see what career paths could be possible for their own futures.

The autonomy of a Wikipedia writing assignment also lets students write about topics they care deeply about. Lalo Mendez, for example, expanded the article about 2001 California Assembly Bill 540 to inform other DREAMers of their rights. “The opportunity to help expand an article and body of knowledge to help educate others was both exciting and a challenge,” he shared with us. “As an undocumented student who has learned to be resourceful, I know that having updated information on such an article would help another student or ally learn about the requirements to ensure college access for DREAMers.”

4. Prepare students for their future careers in a way that they enjoy.

Students find education to be worth the cost when coursework is relevant to their lives, says a Strada and Gallup survey published in 2018. What could be more relevant than writing for the fifth most popular website in the world? Students understand the real world implications of their work and are more motivated knowing that millions have access to it. As Thais Morata and Erin Haynes’s student gushed, the brand new Wikipedia article she created had already been viewed by 246 visitors even before she presented about her work in class at the end of the term.

Some students have told us that more universities should teach assignments like this. Others have even continued to write for Wikipedia as a hobby. And one student from York University won a faculty writing prize for the Wikipedia article he created.

5. Hundreds of instructors already love this.

Dr. Anthony Denzer taught with Wikipedia for the first time last fall and is hooked. As he writes in a recent guest post, this is how he sells the assignment to his students:

• Your efforts will have a real audience. Lots of people will benefit by reading your work, not just me.
• Wikipedia is an amazing, good thing, but it needs to be improved.
• You’ll develop or sharpen a number of important skills: research, critical thinking, writing, information literacy, collaboration.

Term after term, the vast majority of instructors that we support (over 90%) indicate that they will run another Wikipedia assignment with many of those making it a mainstay of their pedagogical repertoire. Some instructors, like Dr. Jennifer Glass, have received glowing appreciation from their students for doing something new and innovative in the classroom. And others, like Dr. Kathleen Sheppard, have even won awards from their institution!

We provide the tools and support, you provide the subject matter expertise. Let’s make a difference for both student learning and public knowledge.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia writing assignment into a future course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for information about our free tools.

This month a Recurser I know, Pepijn de Vos, observed a concentration of high-quality open source software in the developer tools category, to the exclusion of other categories. With a few exceptions.

I understood where he's coming from, though my assessment differs. I started reflecting on those exceptions. Do they "prove the rule" in the colloquial sense that "every rule has exceptions," or do they "prove the rule" in the older sense, in that they give us an opportunity to test the rule? A few years ago I learned about this technique called "appreciative inquiry" which says: look at the unusual examples of things that are working well, and try to figure out how they've gotten where they are, so we can try to replicate it. So I think it's worth thinking a bit more about those exceptional FLOSS projects that aren't developer tools and that are pretty high-quality, in user experience design and robust functionality. And it's worth discussing problems and approaches in product management and user experience design in open source, and pointing to people already working on it.

FLOSS with good design and robust functionality: My list would include Firefox, Chromium, NetHack, Android, Audacity, Inkscape, VLC, the Archive Of Our Own, Written? Kitten!, Signal, Zulip, Thunderbird, and many of the built-in applications on the Linux desktop. I don't have much experience with Blender or Krita, but I believe they belong here too. (Another category worth thinking about: FLOSS software that has no commercial competitor, or whose commercial competitors are much worse, because for-profit companies would be far warier of liability or other legal issues surrounding the project. Examples: youtube-dl, Firefox Send, VLC again, and probably some security/privacy stuff I don't know much about.)

And as I start thinking about what helped these projects get where they are, I reach for the archetypes at play. I'll ask James and Karl to check my homework, but as I understand it:

Mass Market: NetHack, VLC, Firefox, Audacity, Inkscape, Thunderbird, youtube-dl
Controlled Ecosystem: Zulip, Archive Of Our Own
Business-to-business open source: Android, Chromium
Rocket Ship To Mars: Signal
Bathwater? Wide Open? Trusted Vendor? not sure: Written? Kitten!

The only "Wide Open" example that easily comes to mind for me is robotfindskitten, a game which -- like Written? Kitten! -- does one reasonably simple thing and does it well. Leonard reflected on reasons for its success at Roguelike Celebration 2017 (video). But I'd be open to correction, especially by people who are familiar with NetHack, VLC, Audacity, Inkscape, or youtube-dl development processes.

Design: Part of de Vos's point is about cost and quality in general. But I believe part of what he's getting at is design. Which FLOSS outside of developer tooling has good design?

In my own history as an open source contributor and leader, I've worked some on developer tools like PyPI and a linter for OpenNews, but quite a lot more on tools for other audiences, like MediaWiki, HTTPS Everywhere, Mailman, Zulip, bits of GNOME, AltLaw, and the WisCon app. The first open source project I ever contributed to, twelve years ago, was Miro, a video player and podcatcher. And these projects had all sorts of governance/funding structures: completely volunteer-run with and without any formal home, nonprofit with and without grants, academic, for-profit within consultancies and product companies.

So I know some of the dynamics that affect user experience in FLOSS for general audiences (often negatively), and discussed some of them in my code4lib keynote "User Experience is a Social Justice Issue" a few years ago. I'm certainly not alone; Simply Secure, Open Source Design, Cris Beasley, The Land, Clar, and Risker are just a few of the thinkers and practitioners who have shared useful thoughts on these problems.

In 2014, I wrote a few things about this issue, mostly in public, like the code4lib keynote and this April Fool's joke:

It turns out you can go into your init.cfg file and change the usability flag from 0 to 1, and that improves user experience tremendously. I wonder why distributions ship it turned off by default?

I wanted to quickly summarize some thoughts and expand on the conversation you and I had several days ago, on reasons Wikimedia community members have a tough time with even opt-in or opt-out design changes like the image filter or VisualEditor or Media Viewer.

• ideology of a free market of ideas -- the cure for bad speech is more speech, if you can't take the heat then you should not be here, aversion to American prudishness etc., etc. (more relevant for image filter)
  • relatedly "if you can't deal with the way things are then you are too stupid to be here" (more applicable to design simplifications like Media Viewer and VisualEditor)
• people are bad at seeing that the situation that has incrementally changed around them is now a bad one (frog in pot of boiling water); see checkbox proliferation and baroque wikitext/template metastasis
• most non-designers are bad at design thinking (at assessing a design, imagining it as a changeable prototype, thinking beyond their initial personal and aesthetic reaction, sussing out workflows and needs and assessing whether a proposed design would suit them, thinking from other people's points of view, thinking from the POV of a newcomer, etc.)
  • relatedly, we do not share a design vocabulary of concepts, nor principles that we aim to uphold or judge our work against (in contrast see our vocabulary of concepts and principles for Wikipedia content, e.g. NPOV, deletionism/inclusionism)
    • so people can only speak from their own personal aesthetics and initial reactions, which are often negative because in general people are averse to surprise novelty in environments they consider home, and the discourse can't rise beyond "I don't like it, therefore it sucks"
• past history of difficult conversations, sometimes badly managed (e.g. image filter) and too-early rollout of buggy feature as a default (e.g. VisualEditor), causes once-burned-twice-shy wariness about new WMF features
  • Wikimedians' core ethos: "It's a wiki" (if you see a problem, e.g. an error in a Wikipedia article, try to fix it); everyone is responsible for maintaining and improving the project, preventing harm
    • ergo people who feel responsible for the quality of the project are like William F. Buckley's "National Review" in terms of their conservatism, standing athwart history yelling "stop"

I haven't answered some questions: what are the common patterns in our success stories (governance, funding, community size, maintainership history, etc.)? How do we address or prevent problems like the ones I mentioned seeing within Wikimedia? But it's great to see progress on those questions from organizations like Wikimedia and Simply Secure and Open Tech Strategies (disclosure: I often do work with the latter), and I do see hope for plausible ways forward.

What might the future of the Wikimedia movement look like? At the Wikimedia Summit, held in Berlin, Germany, from 29–31 March, around 210 participants from across the globe gathered to find answers to this question.

Over three energetic days, representatives from Wikimedia affiliates, the Wikimedia Foundation, and three Wikimedia committees came together with members of nine movement strategy working groups to discuss how to build the future of the Wikimedia movement and ensure access to more knowledge for more people. Via interactive sessions, open space forums, and conversation circles, participants analyzed research the working groups had produced and key questions they have formulated. Each program element was designed to help find answers to these questions, engage the affiliates in this work, and provide a platform for creating our future together.

“We’re here to work collaboratively on our future”

With a fresh name for 2019, the Wikimedia Summit—formerly the “Wikimedia Conference”—is the annual meeting of Wikimedia affiliates, the Wikimedia Foundation, and three Wikimedia committees, and is hosted and organized by Wikimedia Germany (Deutschland; WMDE). The change of name went hand in hand with a refining of the event’s objectives: to discuss strategy and governance of the Wikimedia movement. This year’s event put the spotlight on the movement strategy, which brings together members from all parts of our community to determine where we as a movement want to go and how we get there.

The Wikimedia Summit got underway with opening speeches that brought the bigger picture into view right from the outset. Michelle Müntefering, the German Minister of State at the Federal Foreign Office, acknowledged the work of Wikimedians in proliferating knowledge and spoke of the importance of reflecting different, diverse perspectives in this “new, democratic global library.” Katherine Maher, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Executive Director, got straight to the point, stating “we’re here to work collaboratively on our future” before Kaarel Vaidla, the movement strategy process architect, and Nicole Ebber, the movement strategy program manager, took the floor to outline how.

Finding the best way to move forward together

As a key gathering for Wikimedia affiliates, the Wikimedia Summit provided working groups a dedicated space to engage with some of their main stakeholders. Its strategy-focused objective saw discussions center on how to advance in our strategic direction and become the essential support system for the whole free knowledge movement. On a concrete level,  this was the first opportunity for the working groups to speak directly to affiliates and start developing answers together to sets of guiding questions that the groups have formulated, each relating to a specific thematic area within the movement. Among the key insights that came out of the Summit are that there is a need to turn existing frustration into positive energy; ensure that people are at the core of what we do; and create partnerships and share resources effectively and meaningfully. Some working groups divided into sub-groups to enable them to better interact with the affiliates, and with other working groups.

Day one allowed working groups time to work together while the affiliate representatives were guided through how to use these questions to kickstart conversations about our future as well as ask their questions about the role they can play. The day was capped off by thematic meetups and dinner at WMDE’s offices.

Day two’s program focused on developing content and enriching it with the perspectives and input from Wikimedia affiliates. In a relaxed, open format, affiliates were able to visit each group at designated  areas in the venue, discuss the scoping documents and questions, and enhance conversations by providing useful local or thematic insight into the group’s work. The Wikimedia Board of Trustees rounded off the day’s program with their reflections on the path toward our future before the evening festivities got underway at nearby hotspot Villa Neukölln.

After two days of discussions, ideas generation, and exchange, the third and final day of the event focused on how to build on these conversations and develop next steps. Working groups took the input they received on day two and used this to start crafting a plan for action for developing recommendations for structural change within the Wikimedia movement. The event concluded with speeches and insights from Emna Mizouni (Wikimedian from Tunisia), Sunil Abraham (The Centre for Internet and Society), and Ryan Merkley (Creative Commons), who acknowledged the hard work it has taken to get to this point and offered words of encouragement to take us forward. Emna called upon participants take the insights from the Wikimedia Summit and apply them within their context: “We’re the privileged people [who get] to go back to our countries and local communities to deliver what we have been through during these three days.”  Ryan spoke to the ambitious nature of collaboratively designing our movement’s future, saying “It’s a rare opportunity that a group this large gets to do strategy… The reason we do it is because it’s better. It takes longer, it’s frustrating, but it’s also more inclusive and we get better ideas.” You can add your voice and your ideas for change. Conversations are currently happening online where you can can share your insights and solutions that will make the Wikimedia movement future ready. Join in on the Meta-Wiki page, on several language wikis, and also via an upcoming survey.

More interaction, more strategy—and more sweets!

The program was designed to be adaptive, and this flexibility enabled all nine groups to connect with the Wikimedia affiliates in numerous ways. It also allowed facilitators to tailor their approach as engagement levels peaked and dropped and frustrations were surfaced. With each shift, facilitators adjusted the design to make sure the program responded to participant needs in real time. Crucially, affiliates had the opportunity to speak to working groups in person about the strategy for our future and develop a picture of how the organized part can contribute. Many commented that this is a necessary process and that being at the Summit had strengthened their own ideas about the future of the movement and motivated people to take these back to their own community.

As the central event to discuss strategy, the Wikimedia Summit provided the perfect forum to collaborate on our future, and the refined focus led to targeted, effective conversations. Fostering interaction lay at the heart of the Summit (aside from the opening and closing, there were no lectures, a first for this event), and this helped create meaningful exchanges between participants. Feedback from the attendees was positive, with people emphasizing the need for the movement to meet and network in person. Beyond the program and format, elements such as the friendly space policy were particularly well received as was the international sweets table (which is exactly as good as it sounds).  Thank you to all who attended! We’re already looking forward to the 2020 Wikimedia Summit.

Anna Rees, Project Assistant, International Relations
Wikimedia Germany (Deutschland)

You can find more info about the Wikimedia Summit on Meta and also read more about this year’s event in the Summit report.

We are very pleased to announce the recent appointment of three new trustees to Wikimedia UK’s board. Sangeet Bhullar, Jane Carlin and Marnie Woodward bring a range of skills and experience to the board including financial management, strategic partnerships and digital literacy.

Sangeet Bhullar joined the Wikimedia UK board in January 2019. She is the Founder and Director of WISE KIDS, which focuses on New Media Literacy Education, Digital Citizenship, Online Safety and Digital Well-being. In the last 17 years, Sangeet has worked with thousands of young people, parents and professionals in the UK, Singapore and Malaysia, addressing these themes. She is passionate about amplifying young people’s voices and about rights and agency in addressing risk, harm, opportunity and well-being online. Sangeet is based in Wales and is a member of a number of Welsh government and non-government committees. She will sit on Wikimedia UK’s Partnerships Advisory Board, helping to shape the chapter’s education programme.

Jane Carlin has been a trustee of Wikimedia UK since September 2018. She has served in a wide range of senior finance roles within the publishing and wider media sector, including educational publishing, and brings strong finance and compliance skills to the board. Jane is a chartered management accountant and is Chair of Wikimedia UK’s Audit and Risk Committee.

Marnie Woodward also joined the board in September 2018. She is a chartered management accountant, and has been involved in the charity sector as a finance director for several decades, having worked with the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Mental Health Foundation, the Musicians Benevolent Fund and RPS Rainer among others. Previously she was a trustee and the chair of the Finance and Administration Committee of the Church Urban fund. She brings knowledge and experience of financial and organisational issues across a range of charitable enterprises. Marnie sits on the Audit and Risk Committee and is Treasurer for Wikimedia UK.

We are delighted to have attracted trustees of this calibre to the Wikimedia UK board, with such an impressive range of skills, knowledge and experience, and are looking forward to the new insights they can offer the charity over the next few years. There will be a number of additional board vacancies at Wikimedia UK this year, and we encourage members of our community to consider whether they could play a role within the governance of the organisation.

Wikimedia UK has started running events to encourage long-time Wikipedia editors and those interested in becoming technically proficient at more complex tasks to gain skills that will allow them to improve Wikimedia projects.

In November we ran our first event on how to write a Featured Article. On May 7th, we will be running our second SkillShare event, focusing on how to use AutoWikiBrowser. AWB is “a browser that follows a user-generated list of pages to modify, presenting changes to implement within each of those pages, then progressing to the next page in the list once the changes are confirmed or skipped by the user.” It is intended to help editors make tedious and repetitive edits quickly and easily.

To use the software, you have to apply for permission on wiki, at this page. You need at least 250 non-automated edits in mainspace to get permission. I definitely recommend that if you want to come to our skillshare event that you do this in advance. You can then download the software here. Then follow the instructions on getting started.

There’s lots of other sources available online to understand how to use AWB like the video below.

So what can you do? You can auto tag templates, fix common typos, find and replace particular words, or import custom fixes. Once you’ve specified what you want to change, AWB will browse a set of selected pages, or a set of randomly generated ones, and then suggest changes based on your parameters. You can then review the suggested changes and decide to implement them or not.

You might want to check out the User Manual for AWB to get a better understanding about how to use it, but if you are a Wikipedia editor with a reasonable amount of experience who wants to better understand tools like AWB, you should consider coming to our next SkillShare, on Tuesday May 7. It takes place at the Wikimedia UK office in London, near London Bridge, Southwark and Blackfriars stations. Please sign up on the Eventbrite page to let us know you’re coming!

Five years ago, Manavpreet Kaur administered several tests for entry-level forensics diploma students at Punjabi University, located in Patiala, Punjab, India.

From her vantage point, Kaur—who had recently completed a Ph.D. in forensic science—quickly realized that not all of the students were comfortable with the course being taught exclusively in English. She searched for Punjabi-language documentation to help them but was frustrated to find that very little was available.

That’s when Satdeep Gill, a fellow student in another class, introduced her to the Punjabi-language Wikipedia.

Although the encyclopedia contained only a few thousand articles, Kaur recognized that the site had much potential for making knowledge about forensic science available, being much faster and cheaper to distribute than a traditional book.

Over the next year, Kaur wrote more than one hundred articles about the subject, including a span where she created one per day for a hundred days—known as completing “100wikidays.” (Her favorite is one you might expect: the entry about forensic science.) She also did a second 100wikidays to create biographies of notable women, thereby writing them into Punjabi’s popular history.

In 2016, however, Kaur decided that she wanted her work to have a greater impact, one that reached beyond her field. “By working on one specific subject, I was catering to the needs of very few people,” she tells me. “Some individuals are better editors and some are better facilitators. I am the latter. … I realized that I could contribute more effectively and productively in planning and organizing initiatives like education programs, trainings, and Wikipedia awareness campaigns.”

Kaur started with her own classroom of master’s students, a role she had taken on after beginning post-doctoral studies in facial expression analysis. Five of them started editing Wikipedia with help from Kaur, and two of them later completed their own 100wikidays. (In fact, one did two 100wikidays, and another is working towards their second as of this moment.)

This quickly snowballed, to put it mildly. Since then, Kaur helped organize nine different Wikimedia-focused events and contributed towards another seven. Given the Wikimedia movement’s persistent gender gap and the sheer number of languages in India—the country has 23 official languages, and hundreds more are spoken—Kaur has kept a special eye on putting women into leadership roles and ensuring that Indic events cut across language barriers.

Some of these events have emphasized the needs of Punjabi Wikipedia readers, which differ from those reading other, larger, Wikipedias. “We have found that the people who read the Punjabi Wikipedia are either interested in the literature [in the language] or seeking information … because of language constraints,” she tells me.

That knowledge factored into the creation of Wiki Women for Women Wellbeing, or WWWW2018, which brought together women leaders from across India to create and promote Wikipedia content about women’s health. This was a big project—the scale “forced us to build a support network,” she says—but what they took away from it was that it needed to be even bigger.

And that’s why March of this year was a very, very busy month for Kaur. First, she facilitated a joint UNESCO-Wikipedia gender bridging workshop where over the course of five hours, Indian women wrote historical women into Wikipedia. 41 articles were created and another 62 were edited, including a number of scientists, media personalities, and artists.

Second, she was the primary organizer of a women-focused “Train the Trainer” event held in New Delhi last month, where over a dozen women learned about communication tactics, partnerships, grant reporting, and more.

“So many amazing and enlightened people are working together selflessly to build Wikipedia,” she says. “It is an amazing place to be. I’ve met so many people from incredibly diverse backgrounds. The acknowledgments, trust, and faith given to and invested in me have helped shape who I am today and are the major driving force that keeps me going.”

Interview by Ed Erhart, Senior Editorial Associate, Communications
Wikimedia Foundation

To learn more about Manavpreet, visit her Wikimedia user page.

By Richard Nevell, Wikimedia UK Project Coordinator

Shortly before 7pm on April 15 in Paris a devastating fire broke out in one of France’s most iconic buildings. The fire was extinguished after more than 12 hours, and while the stone walls still stood and movable artwork had been removed, the spire and roof had collapsed, causing extensive damage.

As a medievalist and someone who studies destruction I watched with grim interest, as did much of the world. The cathedral is a masterpiece of medieval art and architecture and welcomed 13 million visitors in 2018.

Within minutes of the first news reports, Wikipedia was being updated. At 7:19pm a short note was added to the article on Notre-Dame de Paris to say that it was on fire, and thirteen minutes later a separate page had been created to document the incident. Soon that page was available in more than 40 languages. At 8:21pm, Wikipedia’s Twitter account asked people to help document the event by taking photographs as it happened.

Lots of social media users commented that Wikipedia was quick to note that the building was on fire.

Wikipedia people are way too quick #NotreDame pic.twitter.com/LnD7yTJEkF

— Ryan (@_R13JM) April 15, 2019

On 15 and 16 April, 1.2 million people read the page about the fire, and 16 million read the pages about the cathedral across all language versions. They came to Wikipedia to find out what was going on, and what had been lost.

Elite medieval architecture was designed to convey power and inspire awe; in cathedrals it was also intended to demonstrate piety and create something eternal. Cathedrals contain effigies, burials, and monuments to people who have long since passed but who wanted their memory to live on. Over Notre-Dame’s 850-year history it survived wars and revolution and became a symbol of French identity.

The fire has also caused some reflection about the loss of heritage sites elsewhere. For some people, it has brought back memories of fires at York Minster in 1984 and Windsor Castle in 1992. Further afield, the number of people reading the English Wikipedia’s list of destroyed heritage increased 27,000%, and there were more changes to that page in one day than in the past six months put together. This wasn’t just the work of one person either, it was more than 30 people (most of whom hadn’t edited the article before) who wanted to help. The page was of course updated to include Notre-Dame, but it was far more wide ranging. Historic events were documented from a dozen countries including Argentina, Ireland, and Turkey. If there was any doubt this interest in the loss of cultural heritage was triggered by the events unfolding at Notre-Dame de Paris, there was a common theme of destruction by fire in the updated coverage on the page. The entries are a mix of accidental and deliberate loss, and each tells a story which impacts a community. With the events in Paris, that community is international in scale.

The buildings around us are impermanent, and even thick stone walls which have stood for centuries can come under threat without prior notice. In these situations, Wikipedia acts as a form of public documentation. While the news records events as they unfold and the human impact, Wikipedia is there to provide the long view, with a detailed history of the cathedral and more than 7,000 media files with which to explore its fabric.

Wikipedia itself is impermanent, though its contributors try to create something which will endure the test of time. In other parts of the world projects such as New Palmyra aim to catalogue endangered heritage, creating digital models. There is no way to recover what has been lost, and physical recreations must be handled sensitively, but it does at least help document what has been lost.

If you have taken pics or video of the fire at Notre Dame de Paris, please upload them to @WikiCommons: https://t.co/wiXL223FUZ for use on Wikipedia & under #OpenLicence #NotreDame

— Andy Mabbett (@pigsonthewing) April 15, 2019

If you have images of the Notre-Dame, or any other heritage sites, please do consider uploading them to Wikimedia Commons. From there they can potentially reach an audience of millions and the whole world can benefit.

When members of the public read of a new astronomical discovery, learn about a unique endangered animal, fact-check claims about climate change, or educate themselves about an illness, Wikipedia is often their first stop. The encyclopedia that anyone can edit provides a wealth of information on a wide range of topic areas, but also presents many opportunities for improvement. Wikipedia articles are best in subject areas that align with the interests of its volunteer user base. When a lot of people are not just interested in something, but have relevant knowledge and access to sources, the result is a high-quality article. Some scientific and technical topics, however, have few people editing them and can be difficult for someone without specialized training. Among Featured Articles, the highest quality assessment a Wikipedia article can receive, there are clear clusters of coordinated interest around topics related to history and popular culture. There are far fewer Featured Articles on medicine or astronomy than there are on military history or sports, for example.

For years, when Wiki Education staff have attended science-related conferences, we’ve heard from scientists that they’ve noticed errors, omissions, misconceptions, and overly technical writing on this or that article in their field, but didn’t know how to fix it themselves. It’s easy to make an edit on Wikipedia, but it can be challenging to learn how to contribute content meaningfully. That’s why we run virtual professional development courses to train subject matter experts to be “Wiki Scientists”. In this 12-week course, Wiki Education staff help scientists learn how Wikipedia works and how to improve public knowledge in their fields.

I’m excited to announce the participants of our newest Communicating Science course, with 8 scientists coming from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines.

• Alexandra M. Courtis is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, working in materials science, physical chemistry, and nanoscience. Through this course, she will focus on improving Wikipedia’s coverage of women in STEM as well as topics concerning nanoscience and optics.
• Meg Eastwood is an Assistant Professor and Science and Engineering Reference Librarian at the University of Denver Libraries. She has a BA in Biology from Grinnell College and an MS in Information Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. In the years between those degrees, Meg worked as a field assistant for ecological studies and as a lab prep/RA for the Shoals Marine Lab on Appledore Island, ME. In this Wiki Education course, Meg hopes to learn more about the inner workings of Wikipedia so that she can contribute articles and host edit-a-thons that highlight women in STEM, citizen science projects, and more.
• Eric Grunwald is a lecturer and group coordinator in the English Language Studies group at MIT, where he teaches writing, speaking, and listening to second-language undergraduates and graduate students. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Grunwald, intending to be an engineer or a physicist, took two years of STEM subjects and worked on a project for the NASA Space Shuttle before switching to the humanities (history). His teaching interests include the writing process, creative writing (he holds an MFA in fiction), composition, and the Web 2.0, and he has been using Wikipedia in his graduate STEM writing classes for three years, allowing students to practice their academic writing with an authentic audience and fill in content gaps in the online encyclopedia. An active writer himself, Grunwald has published fiction, book reviews, and translations in journals and newspapers nationwide and is currently focusing on poetry and a play.
• Wasiu Lawal holds a PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences from the University of Texas at Arlington. He is an advocate for the advancement of underrepresented minorities in the sciences. He is an active volunteer with the American Chemical Society where he serves as a member of its Committee on Minority Affairs. Wasiu’s overall mission is to improve the public’s perception of science through effective science communication.
• Maame Ekua Manful is an entrepreneur and a Food Science Graduate Student at ISA Lille, France with specialization in Food Quality Management Systems. She is passionate about using storytelling to make science simplified and attractive to the younger generations, as well as bridging the science community with the global community through knowledge sharing in the food science space. Maame seeks to achieve this as she engages Wiki Education’s course by sharing and improving articles related to food science.
• Tyler Newton is a PhD Candidate in Earth Sciences at University of Oregon. His research focuses on understanding the mechanics and properties of Earth’s crust using computational and observational seismology. Tyler is passionate about communicating earthquake science to the public and increasing the accuracy of Wikipedia.
• Roopesh Ojha is an astronomer working for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. He is active in outreach because he thinks it is important for everyone to know about both basic and cutting-edge science so they can make informed decisions as the citizens of a democracy. He looks forward to learning the mechanics and ethos of Wikipedia so he can contribute his mite to this invaluable public resource.
• Sarah Peers is current Deputy President of the International Network of Women Engineers & Scientists and a very longstanding champion of diversity in STEM. She is based near Hadrian’s Wall in the United Kingdom, and holds several degrees in mathematics and an engineering PhD. Her day-job involves advising on STEM education that fit-for-industry and supporting innovation in technology and engineering sectors. As an avid Wikipedia user, Sarah hopes through this Wikipedia course to ensure better visibility of the issues of gender and wider diversity in STEM and in industry.

Our Communicating Science on Wikipedia course will run through May. Stay tuned for updates about the great work these experts contribute to Wikipedia.

For more information about our course offerings and to sign up for updates about our next Wiki Scientists course, visit learn.wikiedu.org.