In Changes and improvements to PHPUnit testing in MediaWiki, I wrote about efforts to help speed up PHPUnit code coverage generation for local development.[0] While this improves code coverage generation time for local development, it could be better.

As the Manual:PHP unit testing/Code coverage page advises, adjusting the whitelist in the PHPUnit XML configuration can speed things up dramatically. The problem is, adjusting that file is a manual process and a little cumbersome, so I usually didn't do it. And then because code coverage generation reports were slow locally[1], I ended up not running them while working on a patch. True, you will get feedback on code coverage metrics from CI, but it would be nicer if you could quickly get this information in your local environment first.

This was the motivation to add a Composer script in MediaWiki core that will help you adjust the PHPUnit coverage whitelist quickly while you're working on a patch for an extension or skin.

You can run it with composer phpunit:coverage-edit -- extensions/$EXT_NAME, e.g. composer phpunit:coverage-edit -- extensions/GrowthExperiments.

The ComposerPhpunitXmlCoverageEdit.php script copies the phpunit.xml.dist file to phpunit.xml (not version controlled), and modifies the whitelist to add directories for that extension/skin. vendor/bin/phpunit then reads phpunit.xml instead of the phpunit.xml.dist file. Tip: Make sure "Edit configurations" in your IDE (PhpStorm in my case) is using vendor/bin/phpunit and phpunit.xml, not phpunit.xml.dist, when executing the tests.

When you want to reset your configuration, you can rm phpunit.xml and vendor/bin/phpunit will read from phpunit.xml.dist again.

Further improvements to the script could include:

• Reading the extension.json file to determine which directories to add to the whitelist, rather than using a hardcoded list (T235029)
• Allow passing arbitrary directories/filenames, e.g. for working with subsections of core or of a larger extension (T235030)
• Adding a flag for flipping the addUncoveredFilesFromWhitelist property, so that phpunit-suite-edit.py in the integration/config repo could be removed in favor of the Composer script (T235031)

Thanks to @Mainframe98 and @Krinkle for review of the patch and to @AnneT for reviewing this post. Happy hacking!

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[0] One patch changed <whitelist addUncoveredFilesFromWhitelist="true"> to false to help speed up PHPUnit code coverage generation, the second patch flipped the flag back to true in CI for generating complete coverage reports.
[1] For GrowthExperiments, generating coverage reports without a customized whitelist takes ~17 seconds. With a custom whitelist, it takes ~1 second. While 17 seconds is arguably not a lot of time, the near-instant feedback with a customized whitelist means one is less likely to face interruptions to their flow or concentration while working on a patch.

What does it mean to have scientists of diverse identities represented in the largest, most-accessed encyclopedia worldwide?

It means…

• scientists besides white men are historically recognized for their role in the advancement of STEM fields.
• correcting the stereotype of “what a scientist looks like” (did you think man with a lab coat when I said that?).
• road maps are made visible for youth who want to pursue STEM careers and yet often don’t see themselves represented in those fields.
• increasing the public’s trust in scientists (a study this year has shown that putting a face to science garners more public trust).

Visibility is a powerful tool for good. So in honor of this year’s Ada Lovelace Day, we’re recognizing the ways in which our community has helped advance the visibility of women, women of color, and people of color in STEM fields by writing them into Wikipedia.

Students doing this work

Women have made valuable contributions to science and mathematics throughout the ages, but aren’t remembered in history as often or as accurately as their male colleagues. Students in Dr. Alexandra Edwards’ course at Georgia Tech wrote them back into the telling of that history this spring.

Dr. Rebecca Barnes‘ students are also chipping away at the gender disparity on Wikipedia by creating new biographies for living women scientists. They’ve created almost 90 so far and the number continues to grow each term. In a world where so many women in STEM don’t have a Wikipedia biography until they’ve been recognized in a huge way (Dr. Donna Strickland lacked one until she won the Nobel Prize), it was thrilling to see one of Dr. Barnes’ students had already created Dr. Andrea Dutton’s biography before she was named a MacArthur “Genius” grantee.

When students write biographies for underrepresented people in STEM, they affirm that diversity and inclusion in STEM matters. They’re also exposed to a variety of career paths that they could pursue.

Scientists and professionals doing this work

Wikipedia’s systemic gender gap problem isn’t simply a matter of missing biographies of women – it also shows up in the way that women are “contextualized” by presenting them in relation to the men in their personal and professional lives. In our professional development courses for scientists, participants are well equipped to make these nuanced corrections to existing biographies. Take Dr. Laura Hoopes, for example. In one of our Wikipedia writing courses, she made sure the biography for Dr. Jennifer Doudna noted her scientific contributions (specifically her work around the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing system) without contextualizing her accomplishments in relation to men.

Another one of our Wiki Scientists improved the biography for Marie Tharp, which previously showed an image of Tharp with a male colleague who appeared to be showing her something on a map. While it appeared that the colleague was explaining something to her, in reality that map was of her own creation. The image reflected some other much needed changes in the article, primarily the fact that it focused on her career and early life, but not much about her scientific contributions. Now it’s better.

When scientists participate in our Wikipedia writing courses to create and improve these biographies, they understand how others in their field should be portrayed. Some participants have noted that participating in this work is like being a “counterbalancing force” against the inequities they face in their own career. Another noted that practicing Wikipedia’s philosophy of “being bold” and changing things that aren’t correct is great practice in fighting imposter syndrome. The act of editing Wikipedia builds confidence in one’s voice, while at the same time sets the record straight that these influential women in STEM belong in our cultural lexicon.

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To access our support for instructors teaching Wikipedia writing assignments, visit teach.wikiedu.org. To learn Wikipedia editing yourself in one of our virtual courses, visit learn.wikiedu.org.

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Header image in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s the last week to sign up for our upcoming linked data online courses! Dive into the world of Wikidata (the centralized, linked data repository for all Wikimedia projects) to better serve your community of users and your institution’s longevity.

“Contributing to Wikidata has a ripple effect. It’s a great way for institutions to contribute our resources to a wide variety of communities and meet users where they already are. It also presents opportunities to facilitate a community’s involvement in, design of, and creation of information.” – past course participant

 

Why Wikidata?

• Digital assistants Alexa and Siri rely on Wikidata to answer user questions. Read more…
• The ARL, IFLA, and the PCC have all pledged their support of improving. Find out why…
• Here’s what a typical course looks like. Read more…

Beginning and intermediate courses

If you’re new to linked data practices and want to understand how you can best incorporate them into your work, check out our online course for beginners. If you’re already familiar with linked data (or Wikidata) and want a project-based course that explores more specific querying/visualization tools and approaches, take our intermediate online course.

In each of these six week courses, participants meet online once a week for an hour to learn how to use and contribute to Wikidata. Both courses begin the week of October 21st and run through the week of December 2nd (with no session the week of November 11th). Registration closes October 14th!

 

Introduction

This past week marks the release of a little tool that I've been working on for a while. In fact, it's something I've wanted to build for more than a year. But before I tell you about the solution, I need to describe the problem that I set out to solve.

Problem

Production errors are tracked with the tag Wikimedia-production-error. As a member of the Release-Engineering-Team, I've spent a significant amount of time copying details from Kibana log entries and pasting into the Production Error Report form here in Phabricator. There are several of us who do this on a regular basis, including most of my team and several others as well. I don't know precisely how much time is spent on error reporting but at least a handful of people are going through this process several times each week.

This is what lead to the idea for rPHAT Phatality: I recognized immediately that if I could streamline the process and save even a few seconds each time, the aggregate time savings could really add up quickly.

Solution

So after considering a few ways in which the process could be automated or otherwise streamlined, I finally focused on what seemed like the most practical: build a Kibana plugin that will format the log details and send them over to Phabricator, eliminating the tedious series of copy/paste operations.

Phatality has a couple of other tricks up it's sleeve but the essence of it is just that: capture all of the pertinent details from a single log message in Kibana and send it to Phabricator all at once with the click of a button in Kibana.

Clicking the [Submit] button, as seen in the above screenshot, will take you to the phabricator Production Error form with all of the details pre-filled and ready to submit:

Conclusion

Now that Phatality is deployed to production and a few of us have had a chance to use it to submit error reports, I can say that I definitely think it was a worthwhile effort. The Kibana plugin wasn't terribly difficult to write, and thanks to @fgiunchedi's help, the deployment went fairly smoothly. Phatality definitely streamlines the reporting process, saving several clicks each time and ensuring accuracy in the details that get sent to Phabricator. In a future version of the tool I plan to add more features such as duplicate detection to help avoid duplicate submissions.

If you use Wikimedia's Kibana to report errors in Phabricator then I encourage you to look for the Phatality tab in the log details section and save some clicks!

What other repetitive tasks are ripe for automation? I'd love to hear suggestions and ideas in the comments.

We’ve just updated the Wiki Education Privacy Policy. Like the last version, this one is adapted from the freely-licensed policy of Automattic, the company that makes the open source blogging software WordPress. We’ve based it on Automattic’s policy because they have a well-earned reputation for protecting users’ rights, along with the resources to cover their legal bases.

The new policy starts from a recent edition of the Automattic policy that, unlike our previous policy from 2016, was written with the requirements of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in mind. You might also have noticed a consent banner on your first visit to the Wiki Education Dashboard within the last few weeks, highlighting how we handle private information. While we don’t store very much private information, we want to be as transparent as possible with what we do keep and why.

If you’re the type of person who finds privacy policies interesting, we’d love to get your feedback on it. Let us know what you like or don’t like about it; we’re open to making further updates in the future:

[contact-form]

Have you heard about Virginia Tucker? She was one of the first “human computers” in space engineering history. What about Katheryn Emanuel Lawson? She was one of the first female African American chemists who worked in Sandia National Laboratories. Or how about Margaret Hilda Harper? She was “one of the two physicians who described that coeliac disease in the pancreas and cystic fibrosis were ‘distinct entities’ in the 1930s.” And don’t forget Evelyn Brower Man – she was one of the leading women “in developing the first test to detect hormone levels in the thyroid gland.”

What do these women have in common (besides being impressive contributors to the history of science)? None of them had Wikipedia biographies until this summer when Dr. Alexandra Edwards’ students at Georgia Institute of Technology wrote them!

When Wikipedia serves as the first stop for most people wanting to learn more about history, current events, and people across time, making sure the site represents a wide array of topics and a diversity of individuals is huge.

“Research illustrates that a sense of belonging is critical to success. Yet our history books and ‘books’ like Wikipedia (the 5th most visited website in the world) reflect a very white, very male centric view on everything – including science and scientists,” says Dr. Rebecca Barnes of Colorado College, another instructor in our program who has conducted Wikipedia assignments around biographies of women in STEM.

The power of a Wikipedia writing assignment is that students have the opportunity to correct that gender imbalance and set the record straight. Women have made valuable contributions to science and mathematics throughout the ages, but aren’t remembered in history as often or as accurately as their male colleagues. Let’s change that.

This Ada Lovelace Day (coming up on October 8th!), take the pledge to join these instructors and incorporate a Wikipedia writing assignment into your next courses. We have all the resources, assignment templates, and support you need for you and your students to be successful. Just visit teach.wikiedu.org to gain access.

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Header image in public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

24/09/2019-30/09/2019

About us

• Erratum: AndiTabinas was not a scholar at SotM 2019 (as we reported in issue #479 last week). An extensive post/wiki page about this year’s scholarships will probably get published in the upcoming weeks and we will link to a more detailed update on scholars.
• We are always looking for people to help us improve our newsletter so it can get out faster, have more depth and coverage, and generally improve it for our readers, like you. Please join our team by contacting us now, it’s fun!
• Manfred Reiter presented a guide on how to publish OSM news via weeklyOSM during the recent SotM in Heidelberg. So if you are a mapper, data consumer or iD programmer and feel that some kind of news deserves attention, here is a copy of the slides.

Mapping

• Valor Naram proposes to deprecate the tag contact:phone= in favour of phone=. So far the proposal has received mixed feedback.
• Michal Fabík wants to know how to tag a homeless encampment/colony.
• The voting for jrose_aph’s proposal to simplify indoor routing with footway=indoor has started.

Community

• Pierre Béland mentioned his SotM 2019 presentation, Monitoring of building outlines, on the talk-ca list. This had the effect of restarting a passionate discussion about the import of buildings data published by Statistics Canada and Microsoft. Topics included which method to follow and the implications for local communities.
• Jennings Anderson reports on SotM 2019 including his own contributions: a workshop at the HOT Summit and a presentation at the main conference. The workshop concerned extracting and analysing OSM data using Amazon Athena. Some results and materials from the workshop are included in the post. His presentation concerned the influence of paid mappers on the overall OSM community.
• Fischkopp0815 asked (automatic translation) the forum for ideas on how to motivate anonymous reporters to register with OSM.

Imports

• Pierre Béland points to examples that show the limits of Microsoft’s automated building recognition.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• SeverinGeo expressed his opinion about the checkbox that allows an OSM user to assign their contributions to the public domain (PD) when signing up to OSM. Now that he is fully aware of the pros and cons of ODbL versus PD, he would like to untick the box. This has started a long, ongoing thread indicating that the matter has been an unsolved issue for years regarding potential conflicting legal interpretations of this checkbox.
• The Local Chapters Working Group has published the minutes of its meeting on 3 September 2019.
• The Membership Working Group has updated the OSMF membership statistics.
• The minutes of the Membership Working Group meeting on 19 July 2019 have been made available.
• In the wrap-up session of State of the Map, OSM-Ireland became an official chapter of the OSMF. The agreement was signed by Dermot McCarthy for OSM-Ireland and board members of OSMF.

Events

• Adrien Pavie liked the wrapping his gift from SotM 2019 came in so much, that he framed it and hung it on the wall.
• On October 12, 2019 the mapathon Missing Maps will be held (automatic translation) for the first time in Russia. It is organised by Doctors Without Borders in conjunction with the “Greenhouse of social technologies”. Don’t forget to register (automatic translation)!
• Suchith Anand announced that videos of this year’s FOSS4G Conference in Bucharest are now available.
• Stefan Keller informed us (automatic translation) that OSM will be represented together with Wikidata in a session at this year’s Swiss open data conference DINAcon on 18 October in Bern.

Humanitarian OSM

• The Climate Centre of the Red Cross and Red Crescent reports that climate action was a central theme of the HOT summit this year.
• If you did not have the chance to attend this year’s HOT summit, you can view the recorded sessions on YouTube.
• HOT continues its microgrant programme, originally started in 2017, and announced Microgrants 2020. OSM-focused organisations in lower- or middle-income countries can apply now for grants to fund mapping-related costs.
• The Kitum project is going to construct the Citizen Digital Map (automatic translation) of the National Emergency Response Drill convened by the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management – UNGRD in Colombia.

Maps

• cq94 shares a tweet pointing to the map of Seveso sites (industrial establishments linked to handling, manufacturing, using or storing dangerous substances) with “high” risk in France. He also shares the link to the data source.
• [1] CyclOSM is a brand new bike-oriented map based on OpenStreetMap data. The goal is to provide a beautiful and practical map for cyclists, regardless of their habits or abilities. A global server is available at https:/www.cyclosm.org supported by OSM-France
• If you ever wanted to know where all the witches (well, accused witches, to be precise) lived in Scotland, here’s a map that can help you with that.

switch2OSM

• Thomas Skowron is pleased that Zeit Online uses OSM data, but criticises that he cannot find a correct attribution anywhere. The great stickers that were distributed at this year’s SotM unfortunately only work with analog maps.
• The airport finder OurAirports now uses OSM and Esri satellite images instead of Google Maps, as the developers report on Twitter.

Open Data

• OpenStreetMap Belgium blogged about the importance of street-level imagery and gives a short overview about the situation in Belgium and current trends.

Software

• Guillaume Rischard reminds us to use http instead of https for connections to JOSM as https support will probably be dropped. He points to the World Wide Web Consortium specifications for trusted connections.
• Yuichiro (User nissyyu) announced the publication of mapcompare.jp. Up to 8 maps can be displayed simultaneously for Japanese mappers. This launch was also announced by Toshikazu at the LT session of SotM 2019.

Did you know …

• … of OsmInEdit, the web editor for mapping building interiors? The developer, Adrien Pavie, presented the web editor at the SotM and asked for help with development.
• … how to set up (automatic translation) an address search by coordinates?
• … how many edits Maps.Me users have made in OSM through the built-in editor? Their blog says that it’s more than 3.1 million.

OSM in the media

• Mark Altaweel has published, on the site GIS Lounge, an article with the name: Community Involvement in OpenStreetMap.
• Ciarán Staunton, of the Irish local chapter of the OSM Foundation, passionately advocated that basic land-use data should be made available to the OpenStreetMap community. The letter was in response to an article by Sylvia Thompson, in The Irish Times, entitled “Ireland needs more detailed land-use maps“.

Other “geo” things

• Problems with automated mapping are not just for Microsoft and their AI-supported recognition of building footprints. Google seems to have issues as well.
• GIS Geography published a list of the best free GIS data sources of 2019. Of course OSM made it into the list, too.
• The speakers for URISA’s Caribbean GIS Conference 2019 have been announced.
• The winners of MonoCarto 2019 have been announced. The competition, formerly known as Monochrome Mapping Competition, recognises the best maps made using one colour and its shades.
• pocketnavigation.de tested (automatic translation) the new generation of the Spanish cycling and hiking navigation system TwoNav Trail 2. Compared to its predecessor it has more buttons, it can connect to more satellites and it is more environmentally friendly.
• If you are a fantasy author and don’t want to create your own world you can just use the Procedural Fantasy Map Generator. If you’re not, it is still an interesting gimmick that creates different layers of information that are all customisable.
• Last week we mentioned the “Royal Society for Preservation of Boring Grid Squares”. It turns out that there is a long and august history of such geographical minutiae in the UK. The first written reference we can find is a letter in volume 10 of The Angry Corrie, a hillwalking fanzine. Follow-up articles appeared in volumes 12, and 14, under the byline “White Holes”.
• Rodolfo De Guzman has published, on the news site techinasia.com, an article about how they created a model for estimating property values in Singapore that uses OpenStreetMap data as a basis.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Nantes	Village des sciences à Centrale Nantes (Fête de la science)	2019-10-04-2019-10-05
Fujisawa	湘南マッピングパーティ	2019-10-05
Kinshasa	Rencontre OSM Kinshasa	2019-10-05
Ballaghadereen	Map Ballaghadereen	2019-10-05
Nantes	Village des sciences au Dix (Fête de la science)	2019-10-06
Budapest	OSM Hungary Meetup reboot	2019-10-07
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle pour tous	2019-10-08
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2019-10-08
Salt Lake City	SLC Mappy Hour	2019-10-08
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2019-10-08
Cologne	Köln Stammtisch	2019-10-09
Arlon	Espace public numérique d’Arlon – Formation Consulter OpenStreetMap	2019-10-09
Wuppertal	OSM-Treffen Wuppertaler Stammtisch im Hutmacher 18 Uhr	2019-10-09
San José	Civic Hack & Map Night	2019-10-10
Nantes	Réunion mensuelle	2019-10-10
Bochum	Mappertreffen	2019-10-10
Berlin	136. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2019-10-11
Zurich	110. Zürcher Stammtisch	2019-10-11
Grenoble	Village des sciences sur le campus de l’UGA [1]	2019-10-11-2019-10-12
Pilsen	Missing maps Hackathon Pilsen / Hackathon s Lékaři bez hranic	2019-10-11-2019-10-13
Berlin	Berlin Hack Weekend Oktober 2019	2019-10-12-2019-10-13
Greater Manchester	Joy Diversion 8	2019-10-12
Santa Fe	State of the Map Argentina 2019	2019-10-12
Bordeaux	Réunion mensuelle	2019-10-14
Grenoble	Rencontre mensuelle	2019-10-14
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #9	2019-10-14
Cologne Bonn Airport	Bonner Stammtisch	2019-10-15
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2019-10-15
Arlon	Espace public numérique d’Arlon – Formation Contribuer à OpenStreetMap	2019-10-16
Berlin	Missing Maps Mapathon – Putting the Wolds’s Vulnerable People on the Map	2019-10-17
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend	2019-10-19-2019-10-20
Nottingham	Nottingham pub meetup	2019-10-22
Žilina	Missing Maps Mapathon Žilina #6	2019-10-22
Arlon	Espace public numérique d’Arlon – Formation Les itinéraires balisés et OpenStreetMap	2019-10-23
Lübeck	Lübecker Mappertreffen	2019-10-24
Prizren	State of the Map Southeast Europe	2019-10-25-2019-10-27
Dhaka	State of the Map Asia 2019	2019-11-01-2019-11-02
Brno	State of the Map CZ+SK 2019	2019-11-02-2019-11-03
Wellington	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2019	2019-11-12-2019-11-15
Grand-Bassam	State of the Map Africa 2019	2019-11-22-2019-11-24
Cape Town	State of the Map 2020	2020-07-03-2020-07-05

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Nakaner, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, SeverinGeo, Silka123, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, doktorpixel14, geologist, jinalfoflia, anonymus.

A text on the Internet read: "She’s Rice’s first-ever MacArthur grant winner. But her real claim to fame? Her clever medical inventions might just save your life." It is not as if I know her even though I added to her Wikidata item in the past .

I looked her up because she approves of the NEST360° organisation on Twitter. It is an organisation committed to reducing neonatal mortality in sub-Saharan hospitals by 50 percent.

Such organisations deserve a place in Wikidata, it has members I am adding. I consider it part of my "Africa project" even though it does not have a place there yet.

Yesterday I added an item for "neonatal care" and all the papers that are already included in Wikidata  about neonatal care need to be associated with the subject. Scientists like Prof Joy Lawn are to be marked for their specialty.

How is it possible that it takes a 60 year old white male from the Netherlands to add something this basic to Wikidata. We are talking about more yearly deaths than Ebola..
Thanks,
       GerardM

The face of Wikipedia’s volunteer community is often an editor—someone who maintains, edits, and writes facts in the vast online encyclopedia. But editors aren’t the only contributors to Wikipedia, WikiCommons, and the other Wikimedia projects: there are many other volunteers who contribute by organizing events and inspiring others to join our volunteer community. Their work, though not as overtly visible, is also incredibly important and vital to the growth of our movement.

Wikimedia organizers help recruit, train, support, and organize the community, and invite new contributors and allies, like librarians, educators, and activists, to fill gaps and create content in the projects. They also facilitate thousands of projects and events each year to introduce new contributors to Wikimedia, shaping the movement that supports Wikipedia and its sister projects in innumerable ways.

As the Wikimedia Foundation focuses on our movement’s strategic direction, we anticipate needing to know more about how to support and grow this community of organizers. When the strategic direction describes needing to invite allies, partners, and a more diverse set of communities into the movement, it also implies the Wikimedia movement needs more organizers to facilitate this work and organize new contributors.

During the first half of this calendar year, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Community Engagement and Product departments conducted a research project, called Movement Organizers.  We worked with the consultancy Concept Hatchery to produce design research materials like personas and research findings which will help both departments better design programs, technology and support structures for the growing community of organizers. We have now published the research, and you can find it from our portal on Meta-Wiki, in both Spanish and English.

Understanding movement organizers

The Movement Organizers research project tries to understand a globally diverse community that supports the Wikimedia movement. It was important to us that the research represent a broad range of different communities from different parts of the world, while also reflecting the unique challenges that some of our communities face. Therefore we interviewed 55 organizers, half of which were remote with members of our communities around the world, and half from deep local studies in Argentina and Ghana.

Despite organizers in Argentina, Ghana, and the rest of the world experiencing very different contextual and social conditions, many things remained consistent including the journeys organizers experience joining the community, the roles organizers play, the teams that organizers build around themselves, the tools they use, and challenges they face. This allowed us to both create design research materials that are both generically useful, but also pose questions and highlight conditions that support opportunities for organizers in different contexts.  Interviews in Ghana and Argentina also highlighted how complex social and cultural conditions create very locally specific variations on these broad trends.

After developing these shared definitions, frameworks and a number of more nuanced recommendations, we highlighted three broad principles for supporting organizers:

1. Energize the existing Wikimedia community to organize by designing catalyzing experiences that encourage people towards committed organizing.
2. Invest in building alignment with people outside the movement to increase the participation of invited Organizers.
3. Retain Organizers by increasing motivation and decreasing challenges.

We think that by designing with these core principles in mind, the movement can grow our community of organizers and strengthen the capacity of the movement to organize and support communities. As Concept Hatchery’s Ana Chang observed after doing the research: “the organizers we met have built so much community with so little resources. With a little intentional support, we can stabilize and empower them to truly develop strong local communities for Wikimedia.”

Do you want to learn more? We recommend reading the research (in English or Spanish), and joining the discussion on Wikimedia Space!

Building on a foundation of design research

The Movement Organizers research follows on what the Wikimedia Foundation learned from two previous design research projects^[1]: New Editor Experiences, focused on new editors to Wikimedia projects, and New Readers, focused on readers in markets not well supported by the Wikimedia movement. Both of these projects have informed the work of teams within the Wikimedia Foundation toward better supporting and informing new Wikipedia readers and new Wikipedia editors.

“When we talk with and learn from people in their context, in such a focused way, our work is more easily organized around the needs and motivations of those people and communities,” says Abbey Ripstra, a Lead Design Researcher at the Wikimedia Foundation. “This kind of research informs our teams and departments about what people need in order to access and contribute to free knowledge, and what we might do to better fulfill, or support those needs being fulfilled.”

Though the development of the New Readers, New Editors, and Movement Organizers research was largely unrelated, Ripstra sees an overarching pattern behind them. “We started with our biggest unknown audience (new readers), and it was a natural step to focus next on new editors. Now, we’re moving on to learning more about movement organizers, which is a smaller community that makes a huge difference in the effectiveness of the larger community.”

What can you do with the research?

The Wikimedia movement’s 2030 strategy process will soon be publishing recommendations that focus our collective effort on trying to reach our movement direction. This direction is ambitious: focused on becoming a central infrastructure for free and open knowledge. To make this audacious move, we, as a movement, need to design greater pathways and support structures for the organizers we have, and invite new organizers to strengthen our movement.

Because the research is foundational research, we expect different organizations and communities to be able to leverage or respond to it differently. For example, The Wikimedia Foundation’s Community Engagement department is pairing parts of the research with the finding from previous Community Capacity Development research, to build training and help organizers to better understand their own work in light of the larger movement. We are excited that the research also provides a common framework for Product and Community Engagement to design tools to support organizers. Additionally, we hope that groups throughout the movement will use this research to design their own support programs.

The research also prompts a number of questions about growing the movement to meet the strategic direction: by focusing on the organizers who have already joined our movement, we weren’t able to do deep research into the organizers who have not been invited to the movement, or have yet to have an opportunity to join the WIkimedia community.

If you are interested in learning more about the research, have questions, or would like help integrating the research into your own planning or design processes, please let us know on the Wikimedia Discuss Space or on Meta!

Alex Stinson, Senior Strategist, Community Programs, Community Engagement
Lauren Miranda, Project Manager, Community Engagement

[1] Design research is a practice based on observing, listening to, and learning from people in the contexts in which they live and work. Solutions to problems and addressing opportunities are more successful if they are designed around the goals and needs, challenges and accomplishments of the people being designed for.

Earlier this week Google commemorated psychiatrist and substance abuse researcher Dr Herbert Kleber with a Google Doodle by Jarrett J. Krosoczka, and provided a rather sobering example of how technology reinforces systemic bias and structural inequality, and also how we can address it. 

Kleber is certainly worth celebrating, a quick glance at his Wikipedia page shows that he revolutionised approaches to theorising, researching and treating drug addiction, by rejecting punitive and moralistic approaches and focusing on scientific research into the causes and treatments of addiction.  Kleber’s Wikipedia page also records that he co-founded the Substance Abuse Division at Columbia University, with his wife Dr Marian Fischman.  Fishman was already a respected psychologist researching narcotics and addiction when she met and married Kleber in 1987 and they founded the Substance Abuse Center five years later in 1992.  However when Google published their doodle on 1st October, to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of Kleber’s election to the National Academy of Medicine, Fischman had no Wikipedia page of her own.  Indeed she didn’t even warrant a red link. I flagged this up on twitter to the fabulous Wiki Women In Red project, which aims to address Wikipedia’s gender gap by creating new biographical articles for women, and turning red links blue, and I’m delighted to say that Fischman had her own Wikipedia entry by the end of the day.  It’s still just a stub and could do with a lot more work, but at least it’s there and it’s a starting point. 

There are many more prominent women scholars, thinkers, researchers and scientists who are all too often relegated to the role of “wife” and who lack their own Wikipedia entries. If you’d like to help write entries for some of these women, the University of Edinburgh is running a Women in Engineering Wikipedia editathon as part of its Ada Lovelace Day events on Tuesday 8th October so why not come along and help us to record the achievements of some notable women.  You can find out more information and sign up for the Ada Lovelace Day events and editathon here: https://thinking.is.ed.ac.uk/ada-lovelace-day/ 

And who knows, maybe one day Marian Fischman will be celebrated by her own Google Doodle too. 

The Wikimedia Foundation is excited to announce the appointment of Amanda Keton as General Counsel. Amanda brings more than a decade of legal, nonprofit management, and compliance experience to the role. She will join the organization on 7 October.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. Together, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects are visited by around 1.5 billion unique devices every month. The Wikimedia Foundation is driven by its vision of building a world in which every single person can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

“Advocacy is a crucial part of our work in advancing free knowledge,” said Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “Now more than ever, we must recognize the urgency in fighting for policies and protections to make knowledge more open. Amanda’s extensive experience in advocacy and public policy, and her passion for fighting for equity and social change, make her an excellent fit to lead the advocacy work for our movement.”

As General Counsel, Amanda will work closely with the executive team to develop and build the organization in service of the future of our projects. She will advise the Executive Director on legal and policy matters and serve as Secretary to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. Amanda will direct the Foundation’s defensive litigation and public policy agenda around the world, while supporting and cultivating a diverse team of experts and leaders across the Legal department.

“I’m thrilled to join the Wikimedia movement and help bolster the work of its dedicated community,” Amanda said. “Increasing access to knowledge, defending our community and users, curbing surveillance and censorship, facilitating open policy discussions, and advocating for privacy are among the defining issues of our time. Wikimedia is poised to play a leading role in shaping them in collaboration with people everywhere who are driving forward our goal of free knowledge for all.”

Prior to joining Wikimedia, Amanda was General Counsel of Tides Network, a national public foundation deploying donor-advised grants and investments to build a world of shared prosperity and social justice. While in that role, she worked with the Wikimedia Foundation to establish the Wikimedia Endowment, a source of funding to support the Wikimedia projects and mission in perpetuity. She also served as Head of Tides Foundation and People Operations as well as CEO of Tides Advocacy, the policy affiliate in the Tides family of organizations.

Before her work at Tides, Amanda worked for Ernst & Young providing nonprofit organizations with consulting, advisory, and compliance services.

Amanda serves on the Network for Good Board, which supports companies and organizations to target, retain, and engage donors through a variety of services. She previously co-chaired the Board of Directors for the San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center during a period when they tripled their affordable nonprofit rental space and co-located service providers to help the Center’s program participants thrive in San Francisco. She also formerly served on the Board of Directors for the ACLU of Northern California and Equal Rights Advocates.

Amanda completed a Master of Arts in Education while teaching middle school and wrote her thesis on why culturally and linguistically diverse students opt out of gifted and talented programs. Amanda is a member of the California State Bar and graduated with a Master of Laws in Taxation cum laude and Juris Doctor from the University of San Diego School of Law. She is based in San Diego.

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

📊 Month in numbers

• 3 documented incidents. [1]
• 42 new Wikimedia-prod-error reports. [2]
• 31 Wikimedia-prod-error reports closed. [3]
• 210 currently open Wikimedia-prod-error reports in total. [4]

The number of recorded incidents in August, at three, was below average for the year so far. However, in previous years (2017-2018), August also has 2-3 incidents. – Explore this data.

To read more about these incidents, their investigations, and pending actionables; check Incident documentation § 2019.

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*️⃣ When you have eliminated the impossible...

Reports from Logstash indicated that some user requests were aborted by a fatal PHP error from the MessageCache class. The user would be shown a generic system error page. The affected requests didn’t seem to have anything obvious in common, however. This made it difficult to diagnose.

MessageCache is responsible for fetching interface messages, such as the localised word “Edit” on the edit button. It calls a “load()” function and then tries to access the loaded information. However, sometimes the load function would claimed to have finished its work, but yet the information was not there.

When the load function initialises all the messages for a particular language, it keeps track of this, so as to not do the same a second time. From any one angle I could look at this code, no obvious mistakes stood out. A deeper investigation revealed that two unrelated changes (more than a year apart), each broke 1 assumption that was safe to break. But, put together, and this seemingly impossible problem emerges. Check out T208897#5373846 for the details of the investigation.

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📉 Outstanding reports

Take a look at the workboard and look for tasks that might need your help. The workboard lists error reports, grouped by the month 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):

• January: 1 report left (unchanged). ⚠️
• February: 2 reports left (unchanged). ⚠️
• March: 4 reports left (unchanged). ⚠️
• April: 2 reports got fixed! (8 of 14 reports left). ❇️
• May: 4 of 10 reports left (unchanged).
• June: 1 report got fixed! (8 of 11 reports left). ❇️
• July: 2 reports got fixed (17 of 18 reports left).
• August: 14 new reports remain unsolved.
• September: 11 new reports remain unsolved.

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🎉 Thanks!

Thank you to @aaron, @Catrope, @Daimona, @dbarratt, @Jdforrester-WMF, @kostajh, @pmiazga, @Tarrow, @zeljkofilipin, and everyone else who helped by reporting, investigating, or resolving problems in Wikimedia production. Thanks!

Until next time,

– Timo Tijhof

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🎭“I think you should call it Seb's because no one will come to a place called Chicken on a Stick.”

Footnotes:

[1] Incidents. – wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex?prefix=Incident…

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

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

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

Since its creation, film has long since been used to transmit stories, ideas, imagery, and feelings. An ethnologist or sociologist would also identify it as a cultural artifact, as film is ideal for both reflecting a given culture as well as impacting it. For some, film provides a rare chance to evade the censorship and control of their country, for others it is a way to make a statement on a topic near and dear to their heart. As such, it’s no surprise that Dr. Pamela Krayenbuhl’s students at the Northwestern University in Qatar chose to focus on the History of Film.

The cinema of the Middle East has no one form, structure, or style, as it encompasses films from all of the countries and cultures in the Arab world. In its inception, Arab cinema was mostly an imitation of Western cinema, however it has and continues to constantly change and evolve with the times. According to scholars such as Amal Elgamal, Egypt is especially a pioneer as it was able to create a sustained film industry at a time when other parts of the Arab world had only been able to sporadically produce feature-length films due to limited financing. Elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, film production was scarce until the late 1960s and early 1970s when filmmakers began to received funding and financial assistance from state organizations. This was during the post-independence and is when most Arab cinema took root. Most films produced at that time were funded by the state and contained a nationalistic dimension. These films helped to advance certain social causes such as independence and other social, economic, and political agendas.

Students in the class also took the time to create an article on the cinema of Qatar noting that it’s a relatively young industry that evolved as part of the country’s plans to develop different local sectors with the aim of accumulating international recognition and status. Many major steps were taken to implement a long-term plan to develop the infrastructure as well as give opportunities to local talents to have a platform that establishes their presence within the film industry with the support of the Doha Film Institute, and their various grants, workshops, and festivals.

Students and educators have a wealth of knowledge that’s surpassed only by their passion to learn and teach, two things that are incredibly well suited to the task of Wikipedia editing as an educational assignment. If you’re interested in taking part, visit teach.wikiedu.org to gain access to free tools, online trainings, and printed materials.

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Header image in public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects form the largest collaborative collection of free knowledge – written in roughly 300 languages, and built by and for the world. At the Wikimedia Foundation, the U.S.-based nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia, we strive to reflect the communities we currently work with, and those we hope to work with in the future. With this in mind, diversity and inclusion are core to our mission. In order to build a diverse and inclusive environment, we prioritize impact rather than intention, contributions rather than culture fit, and equity rather than equality.

To help us understand our progress, we’re releasing our 2019 U.S. staff diversity data, as well as information about the gender diversity of professionals we work with outside of the United States. When we shared the Foundation’s workforce diversity data in August 2018 for the first time, we set a goal to focus our programs and initiatives on three values: consistency, transparency, and objectivity. We sought to do this in all parts of the employee lifecycle, including recruitment, onboarding, development, compensation, and promotions. We considered these three values to be a guiding light for the last fiscal year, which ran from July 2018 to June 2019.

With this annual report, our goal is to be transparent in our hiring and staffing efforts, objective in reflecting on our current and future initiatives, and consistent in our communication to our staff and broader community of people we work with about our efforts in diversity and inclusion.

Diversity data for U.S. staff^[1]

The Wikimedia Foundation has grown significantly in the last fiscal year. In analyzing the data from fiscal year 2018–19 and comparing it to the data from the previous fiscal year, it’s clear that we are making strides in our hiring practices, but it’s also clear that we have more work to do.

Over the course of the 2018–19 fiscal year, 53% of new hires in the U.S. were women and 30% of new hires were Black/African-American, Hispanic/Latino, Asian, or Native American. Overall, our representation of women in the U.S. increased from 45% to 47%. Moreover, 41% of new hires in the U.S. for technical roles within the Foundation were women, 18% of which were women of color. We continue to have a higher representation of women than men in management and leadership roles, which is unique in comparison with other major technology organizations but is fairly consistent with nonprofit organizations.

While these numbers are representative of consistent progress, we also take note of the work that is ahead of us. The latest data shows that overall only 13% of Foundation employees in the United States are Asian, 8% are Hispanic/Latino, 7% are Black/African-American, 0.4% are Native American/Alaskan Natives, and 5% are multi-racial. Overall, these numbers show an increase in people of color based in the United States as compared to last year’s diversity report, but we still have significant room to improve.

 

 

 

Diversity data for global Wikimedia professionals

While the Wikimedia Foundation is headquartered in the U.S., our mission is global. As we continue to expand the number of people we work with based outside of the U.S., it is important that we continue to measure our progress in diversity in Wikimedia professionals globally.

The graph below covers our last four fiscal years, and illustrates a steady increase in the representation of women worldwide. These advancing numbers are an encouraging sign of progress, but there is still much work to be done in bringing more women into the organization and supporting their advancement. We’re unable to share global race and ethnicity information as collecting such information is not permitted in many countries.

Advancing an inclusive culture

Within the Foundation, we value seeking out the voices that are not currently represented, inviting differing perspectives, and celebrating what makes each of us unique. We’ve undertaken several efforts to advance a culture of inclusion and understand how we can continue to improve:

• During the 2018–19 fiscal year, we achieved a key goal of revitalizing our employee resource groups (ERGs), with five active groups and counting. These spaces provide employees with leadership opportunities, time to connect with their peers, and a space to build community, both internally and externally. In the coming year, we will be sharing guidelines on how to create ERGs that we hope will inspire staff to create even more spaces for community and connection.
• We also kicked off our internal Diversity & Inclusion Speaker Series. This program holds space for our staff to connect with experts and collaborators in various areas of diversity and inclusion work, whether it be in the workplace, academia, or through lived experience. The program has become a space for honest and raw conversations about social justice, equity, and belonging and we look forward to continuing with more opportunities for learning and connection.
• Finally, we began working with Paradigm, a diversity and inclusion strategy firm. They conducted a full assessment of our employee lifecycle by analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data, facilitating focus groups, evaluating our policies, and collaborating with us to create recommendations that will work for our environment. We are confident that their recommendations will enhance our culture of inclusion and enable us to more effectively embed diversity and inclusion throughout our processes and policies.

 

The strategy as we move forward

The Wikimedia Foundation has grown in recent years in order to better support the growing free knowledge movement. In alignment with the direction of the Foundation and a strategy that looks forward to the year 2030, our focus internally is with service and equity. To carry this out, our diversity and inclusion strategy over the coming months includes: the implementation of the recommendations from Paradigm, the creation of new partnerships with organizations that uphold models of equitable service to support shared learning, the continuation of our Diversity & Inclusion Speaker Series, and bringing on a Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Director. More broadly, we will be focusing on what equity and service means to us as an organization and how these themes can serve as a framework for our culture, including how we recruit new talent and make decisions across the organization.

While we still have work to do, our hope is that this report serves as an indication of where we are and where we’re going on this journey. When we began reporting our diversity and inclusion data last year, we recognized that this was just the beginning. We are always learning new terms, developing new techniques, and finding better ways to make our staff feel celebrated. Change doesn’t occur overnight, but we are dedicated to co-creating a thriving movement that incorporates diversity of thought, respect for all, and a framework where service, equity and liberation take the front seat.

Aubrey Williams, Diversity and Inclusion Program Associate, Talent and Culture
Wikimedia Foundation

Footnote

[1] The diversity data for U.S. Foundation staff is from June 2019 and based on similar data that would be reported in the United States EEO-1 report and includes job category, gender, and race/ethnicity. When evaluating gender in this survey, the data is binary and does not accurately account for individuals who identify along a non-binary spectrum. The EEO-1 survey requires we provide information about Foundation employees based in the United States in each calendar year and does not reflect those we work with through third parties, whether based in the United States or in other countries. Categories are provided by the government, and self-reported by employees. It is important to note that United States law differs from that of many other countries in terms of personal information that must be reported, based in large part on the culture and history behind the laws that require seeking such information about U.S. employees. In contrast to the United States, many other countries prohibit obtaining or reporting information about race/ethnicity. We believe, however, that the United States data is still useful in helping us assess progress relating to overall organizational diversity.

When you watch a game, you want to know the score. When you have a favourite author, you want to know all his/her publications and when you hear about a place you want to know where it is. Easy.

Such data may be included in a repository like Wikidata and, in essence the data is still simple. You still want to know the score, the publications or the location, the question is how do you get the data in a format that makes sense.

People are really good at understanding data when it is in an agreeable format.. These are three format for the same data; a scientist in Wikidata. This is how Wikidata presents its data and imho the data is really hard to understand. This is the same data in Reasonator, it is a general purpose tool that shows data and its relations. It can be used for all kinds of data, it is my goto tool to get to grips with data related to one item. Finally Scholia presents data formatted in a way that makes sense for this scientist.

Given how awful the default presentation of Wikidata is, it is obvious why everyone teaching the use of Wikidata focuses on querying the data and therefore people seek/work on the results provided in what is their default tool. I typically focus on particular subjects, today it was Dr Shima Taheri, I added a reference, some publications and genders for her co-authors. To do this I am triggered by the presentation of the data in the tools I use.

The holy grail for Wikidata is the use of its data in Wikipedia info boxes. However, people are taught to query data and that approach does not align well with the data items you find in info boxes. So when the purpose of Wikidata is in Wikipedia info boxes, presentation needs to become a priority.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Highlights

• Our longest-running Scholars & Scientists partnership has been with the National Archives and Records Administration. We just wrapped up the last two of the six  Scholars & Scientists courses we offered with NARA’s partnership. 
• We created seven training modules that explore different aspects of Wikidata, including Evaluating Data on Wikidata, Adding to Wikidata, and how to Query Wikidata.
• We confirmed an upcoming collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Several UMass Lowell faculty will join a Wiki Scholars course this fall to add and expand biographies of women to Wikipedia. After this 10-week intensive training about how Wikipedia works, participating faculty will design Wikipedia assignments for their students, joining Wiki Education’s Student Program in the following semesters.

Programs

Academics, other subject-matter experts, academic associations, universities, and Wikimedians from multiple parts of the world understand the value of bringing the most knowledgeable people to these public goods. That was one of the lessons Scholars & Scientists Program Manager Ryan McGrady learned when presenting about the program at Wikimania in Stockholm this month. Wikidata Program Manager Will Kent also presented — virtually — at Wikimania about how our program has engaged librarians to edit Wikidata. Outside of Ryan’s own session, he attended several other sessions focused on engaging experts. How to do so is a question Wikipedia has wrestled with since its inception in 2001, and we continue to believe the Scholars & Scientists model is a fantastic model to achieve that goal, demonstrated by some of the article improvements detailed below.

Ryan also joined program leaders globally who use the Program & Events Dashboard, an open version of our Dashboard software for others in the Wikimedia movement. The group presented about how they use the Dashboard and what features it offers program leaders.

Wikipedia Student Program

Status of the Wikipedia Student Program for Fall 2019 in numbers, as of August 31:

• 297 Wiki Education-supported courses were in progress (172, or 58%, were led by returning instructors)
• 2,624 student editors were enrolled
• 68% of students were up-to-date with their assigned training modules.
• Students edited 44 articles, created 1 new entry, and added 24,300 words and 350 references.

The Fall 2019 term has begun for the majority of our courses, and students are beginning to learn that they’ll be doing something a bit different this fall. Despite the fact that Wikipedia is an integral part of the student experience today, few have ever contributed to the site or even realized they could do so. As the next few months unfold, they’ll realize that not only can they contribute, but that they can make a meaningful and lasting contribution.

As Wikipedia Student Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal was busy preparing for the Fall term, Wikipedia Experts were closing out our Summer courses. Though the summer is relatively quiet for us, around 700 students from 43 courses contributed 520,000 words to Wikipedia. While a fraction of what takes place during the Fall and Spring terms, we’re nonetheless extremely proud of this cohort of students and instructors.

Courses are continuing to roll in at a steady pace for Fall 2019, and we’re excited to see the great work that this group of students will do.

Student work highlights:

If you’ve spent time around the deli department at your local grocery store, you have likely seen pancetta for sale. A salumi made of pork belly meat that is salt cured, pancetta can be served as a cold cut or served as part of a dish. The production process takes a relatively long time, as the meat must brine for 10–14 days in a low temperature and high humidity environment and after further preparation, undergoes enzymatic reactions facilitated by exposure to a warm environment of 22-24℃ for 24 to 36 hours. It is simultaneously exposed to cold smokes for desirable colors and flavors and to prevent moulding. In the final portion of the process the smoked pork is held at 12-14℃ and 72-75% relative humidity for 3–4 weeks for drying. The resulting pancetta retains approximately 70% of its original weight. This August a University of British Columbia student in Judy Chan’s Exploring Our Food added more than 13,000 characters to the article, adding content on this food item that wasn’t there before, creating a more thorough article for readers.

Swimming through the water, what could it be? Is it a bass? An alligator? No, it’s a gar, an ancient holosteian order of ray-finned fish! A common addition to state aquariums and Animal Crossing games, there are seven different species of gar in two genera. The largest of these species is the alligator gar, so named because it was often mistaken as an alligator by locals. Adults can measure up to 10 feet long and weigh more than 300 pounds. Sadly, overfishing has made the gar extinct in some states. If you’re in Florida, you may mistake two different species of gar for one another; the spotted and Florida gar have a similar appearance. Other gar include the shortnose and longnose gar, which differ in more ways than nose length! They differ in not only their lifespans for male and female gars, but also length. Like its nose, the shortnose gar is far smaller than the longnose, which can reach up to 6 feet and 8 inches in length. Thanks to a student in Nicole Rosevear’s writing class at Clackamas Community College, the gar article now has this valuable information in it.

Continuing on the trend of expanded articles, the article on the Bodo cranium was expanded by several UC Berkeley students in Marianne Brasil and Catherine Taylor’s Human Biological Variation class this August. Discovered in the 70s, the Bodo cranium is a fossil of an extinct type of hominin species and was discovered along with Acheulean tools and animal fossils. Only a few of the tools were discovered near the skeleton, which was found in pieces during several surveys conducted by the Rift Valley Research Mission. The cranium has cuts that show the earliest evidence of removal of flesh immediately after the death of an individual using a stone tool and are believed to have been purposely done for either cannibalism purposes or polishing mortuary practices. Some researchers have also speculated that the de-fleshing was done in order to remove the mandible. The odd shape of the cranium has led to debates over its taxonomy and its exact location in the human evolutionary tree is still uncertain despite appearing to represent a lineage between Homo erectus and anatomically modern humans.

Menstruation is a natural part of life where individual experiences the regular discharge of blood and mucosal tissue (known as menses) from the inner lining of the uterus through the vagina. The first period, or menarche, typically occurs between 12 and 15 years of age but can occur in females as young as 8 years old. There are many cultural, societal, and religious traditions and taboos, as some religions believe menstruating women to be impure and the discussion of menstruation is seen as a taboo subject in some countries. This can make it difficult for them to receive a thorough and proper education, particularly if they come from a disadvantaged group and/or a lower or middle income country that also lacks easy access to resources such as birth control and menstrual products. Due to the aforementioned taboos and traditions it’s hard for some to discuss the topic of menstruation but not so for UCSF students in Dorie Apollonio’s Foundations II class, as they were more than ready to tackle this topic on Wikipedia.

During this summer several students in multiple different courses chose to create new articles. One of these students was in Emily Ginier’s Improving Medical Communication Through Wikipedia class at the University of Michigan Medical School, who chose to create an article on Muscle Tension Dysphonia (MTD). This term describes a dysphonia caused by increased muscle tension of the muscles surrounding the voice box: the laryngeal and paralaryngeal muscles and is a unifying diagnosis for a previously poorly categorized disease process. This voice disorder typically occurs during middle age and its symptoms present as vocal changes such as a hoarse or breathy voice. Wikipedia’s readers now have more detailed information about the disorder.

Scholars & Scientists Program

This was a busy month for Wiki Scholars and Wiki Scientists contributing to public knowledge on Wikipedia and Wikidata. We wrapped up five courses altogether, with some excellent results.

Wikidata

August was a busy month for our new Wikidata program. Our two Wikidata courses that began in July wrapped up. In six short weeks, 23 participants made a big impact on Wikidata, editing more than 2,500 items. Coming from libraries, museum libraries, Wikimedia, and a research company, these participants brought a wide range of skills, needs, and questions to these courses. Each course was six weeks long, meeting an hour a week. One course was designed for participants who may be new to linked data while the other was more project-based, designed for participants with some familiarity with linked data.

We created seven training modules that explore different aspects of Wikidata, including Evaluating Data on Wikidata, Adding to Wikidata, and how to Query Wikidata. Our once a week meetings created an opportunity or participants to ask questions, clarify concepts, and test tools and processes. Each week built off the previous week to ensure that participants would be able to learn Wikidata policy and best editing practices before beginning to edit Wikidata. We did not assume any prior experience with Wikimedia projects so we were sure to spend time contextualizing the Wikidata community, explaining how to best work with others on this project.

Items like Archives de l’État de Neuchâtel (Q2860433) and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee (Q50745528) demonstrate the grasp participants have on a wide range of properties and their usage on Wikidata. Having experts apply their skills to modeling these items will make them appear more accurately in queries. Improving the data quality of items on Wikidata will allow future editors to use the well-modeled items as templates and will allow for better representation on Wikidata.

Some quantitative conclusions demonstrate that there was significant enthusiasm around editing Wikidata. These 23 participants created 228 items, edited more than 2,500 items, and made more than 9,200 individual edits. You can follow this link to see more detailed statistics about these two courses. These results far exceed the requirement of editing five to seven items per person. We are also pleased to share that every single course participant edited Wikidata. Qualitatively, we had an approved property proposal for the Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America, P7128, an interesting discussion on post-conviction relief on Project Chat, as well as some newly-created queries (this one for labels exist in one language but not another). This level of engagement reflected well on the course participants but also underscored our thoughts that interest in Wikidata is at a tipping point and this is an exciting time to bring in new editors. Lastly, at least seven of the twenty-three participants have edited Wikidata since the end of the courses.

As we transition from summer to fall, we are excited to be offering more Wikidata courses starting in September and October.

Wikipedia

Our longest-running Scholars & Scientists partnership has been with the National Archives and Records Administration. We first teamed up with them last fall to train academics, archivists, librarians, and independent researchers to improve Wikipedia articles about women’s suffrage in the United States. NARA was planning an exhibit, Rightfully Hers, which celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. They knew that when members of the public would visit the exhibit, anyone who wanted to learn more would likely turn to Wikipedia, so they understood the value of a focused program to target those articles. We began with a plan to run four courses. Interest was great enough and the impact high enough that we would up running six, the last two of which wrapped up this month. Here are just a few of the highlights from among the entries Scholars developed this month:

• Nora Houston (1883-1942), painter, women’s right advocate, and suffragist from Virginia.

• Maud E. Craig Sampson Williams (1880-1958) was an African-American suffragist, teacher, civil rights leader and community activist in El Paso.
• A new section on Texas in the article on women’s suffrage in states of the United States as well as a major expansion of the article about the Texas Equal Suffrage Association.
• A new article about women’s suffrage in California.
• Adolphine Fletcher Terry (1882-1976), political and social activist in Arkansas named as one of the state’s 15 most significant figures in its history by the Arkansas Historical Association.
• Major improvements to the article on Juno Frankie Pierce (1864-1954), African-American educator and suffragist who opened the Tennessee Vocational School for Colored Girls in 1923.
• Dorothy Dix (1861-1951), journalist and columnist who was the country’s highest paid and most widely read female journalist when she died.

• Annie Heloise Abel (1873-1947), historian and suffragist who was among the earliest professional historians to study Native Americans.
• Orra Henderson Moore Gray Langhorne (1841-1904), writer, reformer, and suffragist in Virginia.
• Mary Johnston (1870-1936), novelist and suffragist from Virginia who was a popular author, including novels that served as the basis for three silent films.
• Grace Wilbur Trout (1864-1955), suffragist who was president of two prominent Illinois suffrage organizations.

Another article created by a NARA Wiki Scholar was featured in the Did You Know section of Wikipedia’s Main Page this month with the following hook: “[Did You Know] … that when Virginia suffragist Anna Whitehead Bodeker was not allowed to cast a ballot in the 1871 municipal election in Richmond, she put a note in the ballot box claiming her right to vote?”

We also finished our first course with the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries. Participants made improvements to a wide range of topics, including Florence Knoll, classical reception studies, Black Girl Magic, Maxine Greene, Great Lakes Theater, Vivian Yeiser Laramore, and Milicent Patrick.

One of the two courses we are running in connection with the Society of Family Planning finished this month, with some excellent improvements to Wikipedia. The second course still has a few weeks left, but has been active in making contributions to articles related to abortion and contraception. Here are some of the highlights:

• A Scholar expanded the article on unintended pregnancy, refining the definition of the term, improving statistical information, improving referencing, and adding content about factors associated with unintended pregnancy, among other improvements.
• Another Scholar expanded osmotic dilator, including taking two pictures and uploading them, as the article previously lacked any illustrations.
• The article on reproductive coercion is now greatly improved after Scholar rewrote the lead and other parts of the article, adding for example information on prevalence.
• Multiple Scholars worked to improve or add several sections of the article on dilation and evacuation.
• A Scholar improved the doula article, writing more than half of the current high-impact entry that gets nearly a thousand pageviews every day. Whereas it previously only referenced doulas regarding childbirth, the new summary paragraphs reflect that doulas are involved in other processes, however, including miscarriage, abortion, and end-of-life care.
• The article for vaginal bleeding also saw impressive growth, with a Scholar adding more than 2,500 words. They are now also responsible for half of this article, which is considered “top importance” in Wikipedia articles related to women’s health. The section on vaginal bleeding in premenopausal women is dramatically expanded, with detailed and specific information conditions that can cause vaginal bleeding.

 

Visiting Scholars Program

The Long Island Tercentenary half dollar was a commemorative coin struck in 1936 celebrating the 300th anniversary of the first European settlement on Long Island. Unfortunately, the coins were not struck until months after the tercentenary celebrations. This month George Mason University Visiting Scholar Gary Greenbaum successfully brought the article up to Featured Article, a designation reserved for only the best articles on Wikipedia by quality.

Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University, continued adding biographies of women to Wikipedia, including:

• Margaret Hunt Brisbane (1858-1925) was a poet from Mississippi who wrote for national magazines and New Orleans newspapers.
• Another poet, Adelaide George Bennett (1848-1911) of New England, is known for her poems describing Native American life and the Red Pipestone Quarry.

Advancement

Partnerships

In August, we confirmed an upcoming collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Several UMass Lowell faculty will join a Wiki Scholars course this fall to add and expand biographies of women to Wikipedia. After this 10-week intensive training about how Wikipedia works, participating faculty will design Wikipedia assignments for their students, joining Wiki Education’s Student Program in the following semesters. We’re excited to work with departments at UMass Lowell on the three major components: 1) faculty learning how to edit Wikipedia together; 2) student participation in Wikipedia; and 3) expanding public knowledge of notable women.

We spent the month recruiting participants for a Wiki Scientists course in collaboration with the New York Academy of Sciences. Most accepted applicants are early career scientists and graduate students looking to add Wikipedia-editing to their science communication toolkit.

Finally, we worked with the National Science Policy Network (NSPN) to recruit outstanding early career scientists eager to edit Wikipedia’s science policy articles. NSPN sponsored 15 seats for their members, and we received applications from more than 30 graduate students and faculty. We are excited about early scientists’ enthusiasm to join the Wikipedia community and rebuild the public’s trust in science.

Fundraising

In August, we received our second grant payment of $166,667 from the Wikimedia Foundation. We also received a matching payment of $166,667 from the Stanton Foundation, in addition to $726 in individual contributions. These grants and donations support our Student Program and are so critical to our success. We are extremely grateful for the support we receive from these excellent partners and from other supporters in the community.

We had several conversations with potential funders in August, including a visit to our office from the President of the WITH Foundation, Ryan Easterly. Mr. Easterly and Chief Programs Officer LiAnna Davis discussed our programs in detail, as part of the WITH Foundation’s proposal review process. We expect to hear in late September whether we will be awarded a $40K grant from the WITH Foundation to improve information on Wikipedia related to healthcare and disability issues.

Chief Advancement Officer TJ Bliss and Chief Technology Officer Sage Ross had productive conversations with a Program Officer at the Michelson 20MM Foundation and resulting in an invitation to submit a full proposal to the SPARK Grant competition. This $25K proposal, if funded, will support improvements to our Dashboard.

TJ had a good conversation with our Program Officer at the Moore Foundation and provided a report on the success of our Communicating Science efforts over the past year. He specifically requested renewal of our current grant before the end of 2019. The outlook for this renewal is positive. TJ also spoke with a hedge fund manager who is interested in funding work related to K-12 education. He developed and submitted a concept note to this potential funder, as well as to a contact at Red Hat, describing our proposed efforts to develop a professional development offering for teachers focused on using Wikipedia to teach information literacy to K-12 students.

In addition to these conversations, TJ traveled to Stockholm, Sweden to attend the 2019 Wikimania Conference. He presented about Wiki Education’s extensive partnership work as an example to other organizations and had conversations with funders and other leaders in the Wiki movement. While in Sweden, TJ finalized negotiations with the Smithsonian Institute to collaborate on a project to improve the representation of women in science on Wikipedia.

Communications

Student Program

August was a busy month for our blog!

Quite a few students who have completed Wikipedia assignments shared their experiences. Sienna Stevens wrote, “I cannot stress enough how much I learned from this project. I truly believe it gave me a chance to push myself, my writing, and my research skills.” Hilary Wilson told us that the assignment inspired confidence and motivation. And Philip Marr shared why he thinks the Wikipedia stigma is undeserved.

Past and current instructors in our Student Program also lended their voices to our blog this month. Dr. Kathleen Sheppard took us through her biggest take-aways from last term. Janice Airhart speaks to how effective a Wikipedia assignment was for her freshman composition students. And Dr. Carolyn Cunningham shared what it was like for her media students to join the “Wikipedia ecosystem.”

It’s invaluable to hear from instructors and students, and it’s encouraging that they gain such personal (and professional) fulfillment from making Wikipedia a better resource for everyone. We’re proud to support them and be part of the effort!

In general, instructors are increasingly drawn to the ways the Wikipedia assignment challenges students, hones 21st century skills, and inspires passion. And there are quite a few peer-reviewed journal articles that confirm the value of the assignment. We published a blog this month about how academia is changing its mind about Wikipedia, which was widely circulated in our community.

Scholars & Scientists

Participants in our Scholars & Scientists courses also took to our blog to highlight their experience becoming Wikipedians. Valerie Catrow wrote about imposter syndrome: “the parts of my life that made me feel not qualified to participate are exactly what make me a good fit for this huge public service project.” And we featured the work of Colleen Denny, MD, an OB/GYN and Wiki Education-trained Wiki Scientist who improved the accuracy of an article about a medical procedure she performs on a weekly basis, one which receives 500 page views every day.

Blog posts:

• Engaging students with Wikipedia (August 1)
• Creative thinking education for early career scientists (August 5)
• Looking ahead: our plan for 2019-2020 (August 6)
• Early career scientists advancing the role of science in policy making (August 6)
• Why a Wikipedia assignment: a student’s perspective (August 9)
• An emerging movement of health professional students contributing to Wikipedia (August 12)
• Monthly Report, June 2019 (August 12)
• Ask Alice? Not about medical content! (August 13)
• Academia is changing its mind about Wikipedia (August 13)
• Data for all: share your collection (August 14)
• The ancient Middle East and the ethics of archaeology (August 16)
• Wikipedia assignments are perfect for my Freshman Composition students (August 19)
• The Dashboard now counts references (August 19)
• Expanding the reach of your library collections through Wikidata (August 20)
• GLAM professionals excited about the possibilities of Wikidata (August 22)
• Me, a Wikipedian? (August 23)
• When social media savvy students write for Wikipedia (August 23)
• Life on Mars? Planetology students inform us on Wikipedia! (August 26)
• Building student confidence and sharing knowledge outside the academic silo (August 27)
• Why this student says Wikipedia’s stigma is undeserved (August 29)

External media:

• An engaging way of teaching science communication through Wikipedia. Cassidy Villeneuve. Genes to Genomes: a blog from the Genetics Society of America. (August 9)
• Join Wiki Education’s Student Program to Share Deep Carbon Science with the Public. Deep Carbon Observatory. (August 28)

Technology

In August we wrapped up our three summer internship projects, shipping some very exciting new features along with the beta launch of an experimental Android app for the Dashboard. The headline feature for Khyati Soneji’s project is that “The Dashboard now counts references!“, and in August Khyati also added integration with the powerful category-based PetScan tool so that contributions can be tracked within just the specified content area — useful for thematic edit-a-thons and content drives, especially. Amit Joki completed his project to improve multi-wiki support, adding a stretch goal that has been a frequent request from edit-a-thon organizers: you can now exclude specific articles from tracking, so that if a stray unrelated edit ends up alongside the articles you care about — a bit of idle vandalism reversion, perhaps — it’s easy to clean up the stats. Ujjwal Agrawal’s Android app is up and running, and we’re gathering feedback from the beta release before distributing it more widely.

We also deployed a batch of improvements to how and where the Dashboard points students to complete Wikipedia exercises and draft their articles. New templates provide dedicated sandbox pages and a preloaded outline for the “evaluate an article” exercise and for building a bibliography, and students working in groups will all be directed to the same shared sandbox page to draft their article together. Meanwhile, design and development work picked up for bigger changes to the student user experience, which we’re aiming to complete and release just before the Spring 2020 classes begin.

Finance & Administration

Overall expenses in August were $177K, ($8K) less than the budgeted plan of $185K. Programs were under by ($10K) due to a wage correction ($3K) and Indirect Expense allocation ($7K). General and Administration were under by ($4K) due to a combination of items including an increase in travel +$3K, under in Meetings ($3K), Professional Services ($4K), and an uptick in Shared expenses +$8K. Fundraising was over +$1K relating to Travel for a conference. And Governance was under by ($1K) relating to payroll adjustments.

The Year-to-date expenses are $341K ($33K) under budget of $374K. Fundraising, is right on target. The Board is under by ($1K) relating to a payroll adjustment. General and Administration is under by ($4K) due to Operational Expenses($8K), Payroll Adjustments ($2K) with an uptick in shared expenses +$14K. Programs are under by ($28K) due to Travel ($9K), Communications ($4K) and Payroll Adjustment ($1K).

Office of the ED

• Current priorities:
  • Improving the coordination of work between the Advancement and the Programs department
  • Mapping of Wiki Education’s services
  • Financial reporting and projections

August is traditionally the month of Wikimania, the annual Wikimedia conference. This year, the event was held in Stockholm, Sweden, and Frank attended the conference together with Ryan and TJ. The conference was centered around the theme “Stronger Together: Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals” and attracted about 900 attendees from all parts of the Wikimedia universe. Among the 200 different presentations, workshops, and panel discussions were 5 organized by Wiki Education staff. TJ participated in a panel that discussed the question “Why should we care about UNESCO’s SDGs and how can this framework help Wikimedians transform Education?” and presented about the topic “Lessons learned from five years of partner building at Wiki Education”. Ryan held a presentation about Wiki Education’s new Scholars & Scientists Program. Will joined a panel discussion about “Integrating Wikidata into Education” remotely. Upon invitation by the track’s organizers, Frank gave the keynote of this year’s quality track, titled “How to measure a giant squid and other thoughts about Wikipedia’s quality”. However, one of the most important aspects of Wikimania is the interaction with other Wikimedians and all three staff members had many opportunities to do so.

A few days after Wikimania, Frank participated in the quarterly meeting of the board’s finance and audit committees. Frank and Jordan (SFBay Financials) provided the attending board members with a year-end report for fiscal year 2018–19 and also walked the board through some new accounting rules for non-profits. With Wiki Education’s audit being scheduled earlier this year, Jordan provided the committee members with an update on the timeline and next steps.

In order to further improve the coordination of work between the Advancement and the Programs department, Frank, LiAnna, and TJ formed the new “Services Steering Group”. This new group will meet every other week and discuss everything related to the different services our organization offers (e.g. services for academics, services for students, etc.) One of the first exercises the group engaged in was a mapping exercise intended to provide better clarity on which services Wiki Education will offer to its different target audiences over the course of the next two years. As next steps the steering group will work on prioritizing the development of new services and create a “services roadmap” in order to create better alignment among staff.

Also in August, Frank met with Tilman Bayer (former Senior Analyst) and Katy Love (former Director of Community Resources) who recently left the Wikimedia Foundation, in order to catch up and to explore potential opportunities for future collaboration.

Visitors

• Katy Love, former Director of Community Resources at the Wikimedia Foundation
• Ryan Easterly, WITH Foundation
• Naniette Coleman, University of California, Berkeley and students

In August, Naniette Coleman, Doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley, made what has now turned into her annual pilgrimage to Wiki Education’s office. Naniette has been working with students to improve Wikipedia since 2016, and we’re always delighted to hear about what her students are up to. This summer, two of her students highlighted their work on translating Wikipedia articles and the challenges therein and their attempts to build a database of scholarship related to issues surrounding privacy.

* * *

This week saw the conclusion of a project that I've been shepherding on and off since September of last year. The goal was for the initialisation of our asynchronous JavaScript pipeline (at the time, 36 kilobytes in size) to fit within a budget of 28 KB – the size of two 14 KB bursts of Internet packets.

In total, the year-long effort is saving 4.3 Terabytes a day of data bandwidth for our users' page views.

The above graph shows the transfer size over time. Sizes are after compression (i.e. the net bandwidth cost as perceived from a browser).

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How we did it

The startup manifest is a difficult payload to optimise. The vast majority of its code isn't functional logic that can be optimised by traditional means. Rather, it is almost entirely made of pure data. The data is auto-generated by ResourceLoader and represents the registry of module bundles. (ResourceLoader is the delivery system Wikipedia uses for its JavaScript, CSS, interface text.)

This registry contains the metadata for all front-end features deployed on Wikipedia. It enumerates their name, currently deployed version, and their dependency relationships to other such bundles of loadable code.

I started by identifying code that was never used in practice (T202154). This included picking up unfinished or forgotten software deprecations, and removing unused compatibility code for browsers that no longer passed our Grade A feature-test. I also wrote a document about Page load performance. This document serves as reference material, enabling developers to understand the impact of various types of changes on one or more stages of the page load process.

Fewer modules

Next was collaborating with the engineering teams here at Wikimedia Foundation and at Wikimedia Deutschland, to identify features that were using more modules than is necessary. For example, by bundling together parts of the same feature that are generally always downloaded together. Thus leading to fewer entry points to have metadata for in the ResourceLoader registry.

Some highlights:

• WMF Editing team: The WikiEditor extension now has 11 fewer modules. Another 31 modules were removed in UploadWizard. Thanks Ed Sanders, Bartosz Dziewoński, and James Forrester.
• WMF Language team: Combined 24 modules of the ContentTranslation software. Thanks Santhosh Thottingal.
• WMF Reading Web: Combined 25 modules in MobileFrontend. Thanks Stephen Niedzielski, and Jon Robson.
• WMDE Community Wishlist Team: Removed 20 modules from the RevisionSlider and TwoColConflict features. Thanks Amir Sarabadani.

Last but not least, there was the Wikidata client for Wikipedia. This was an epic journey of its own (T203696). This feature started out with a whopping 248 distinct modules registered on Wikipedia page views. The magnificent efforts of Amir removed over 200 modules, bringing it down to 42 today.

The bar chart above shows small improvements throughout the year, all moving us closer to the goal. Two major drops stand out in particular. One is around two-thirds of the way, in the first week of August. This is when the aforementioned Wikidata improvement was deployed. The second drop is toward the end of the chart and happened this week – more about that below.

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Less metadata

This week's improvement was achieved by two holistic changes that organised the data in a smarter way overall.

First – The EventLogging extension previously shipped its schema metadata as part the startup manifest. Roan Kattouw (Growth Team) refactored this mechanism to instead bundle the schema metadata together with the JavaScript code of the EventLogging client. This means the startup footprint of EventLogging was reduced by over 90%. That's 2KB less metadata in the critical path! It also means that going forward, the startup cost for EventLogging no longer grows with each new event instrumentation. This clever bundling is powered by ResourceLoader's new Package files feature. This feature was expedited in February 2019 in part because of its potential to reduce the number of modules in our registry. Package Files make it super easy to combine generated data with JavaScript code in a single module bundle.

Second – We shrunk the average size for each entry in the registry overall (T229245). The startup manifest contains two pieces of data for each module: Its name, and its version ID. This version ID previously required 7 bytes of data. After thinking through the Birthday mathematics problem in context of ResourceLoader, we decided that the probability spectrum for our version IDs can be safely reduced from 78 billion down to "only" 60 million. For more details see the code comments, but in summary it means we're saving 2 bytes for each of the 1100 modules still in the registry. Thus reducing the payload by another 2-3 KB.

Below is a close-up for the last few days (this is from synthetic monitoring, plotting the raw/uncompressed size):

The change was detected in ResourceLoader's synthetic monitoring. The above is captured from the Startup manifest size dashboard on our public Grafana instance, showing a 2.8KB decrease in the uncompressed data stream.

With this week's deployment, we've completed the goal of shrinking the startup manifest to under 28 KB. This cross-departmental and cross-organisational project reduced the startup manifest by 9 KB overall (net bandwidth, after compression); From 36.2 kilobytes one year ago, down to 27.2 KB today.

We have around 363,000 page views a minute in total on Wikipedia and sister projects. That's 21.8M an hour, or 523 million every day (User pageview stats). This week's deployment saves around 1.4 Terabytes a day. In total, the year-long effort is saving 4.3 Terabytes a day of bandwidth on our users' page views.

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What's next

It's great to celebrate that Wikipedia's startup payload now neatly fits into the target budget of 28 KB – chosen as the lowest multiple of 14KB we can fit within subsequent bursts of Internet packets to a web browser.

The challenge going forward will be to keep us there. Over the past year I've kept a very close eye (spreadsheet) on the startup manifest — to verify our progress, and to identify potential regressions. I've since automated this laborious process through a public Grafana dashboard.

We still have many more opportunities on that dashboard to improve bundling of our features, and (for Performance Team) to make it even easier to implement such bundling. I hope these on-going improvements will come in handy whilst we work on finding room in our performance budget for upcoming features.

– Timo Tijhof

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Further reading:

• Metrics & Perf reports, on performance.wikimedia.org
• ResourceLoader Architecture, on mediawiki.org.
• The 14KB Initial Window, by Tyler Cipriani

On Wednesday, the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grants were announced for 2019. The Wikipedian part of my brain, the part that I can’t turn off anymore, immediately wanted to update the Wikipedia article for the Fellowship with the most recent awardees, linking to the biographies that already existed and highlighting which still needed to be created. I already planned on reaching out to the Women in Red community for help writing about any women who didn’t have biographies yet, as women are severely underrepresented on English Wikipedia.

In linking to articles that already existed, the name Andrea Dutton caught my eye. As she’s a paleoclimatologist studying the effects of climate warming on ancient sea levels. I was thrilled to see she was being recognized for her important work through this grant. So many women scientists don’t have a Wikipedia biography, and won’t have a biography until they’ve been recognized in a big way (like Dr. Donna Strickland). But sometimes, it’s just that no one has taken the time to write it yet. It’s a problem that’s often indicative of larger structural disparities facing women in STEM (i.e. that their accomplishments aren’t covered in the media to the extent as their male peers). In the face of Wikipedia’s gender gap, there’s so much work to be done!

But in Dr. Dutton‘s case, that work was already done. There was her Wikipedia biography already well-developed! I just had a feeling about the author based on how much work Wiki Education does supporting the creation of biographies of women scientists, so I decided to click through the edit history and see who wrote the biography and when. As it turned out, it was created by one of Dr. Rebecca Barnes’ students at Colorado College who I helped support this spring in our Student Program. That student wrote the biography from scratch as an assignment just months ago. I thought the name sounded familiar!

Dr. Barnes has been guiding her students at Colorado College in Wikipedia writing assignments since Fall 2018. Each term, a new batch of students writes biographies for women in STEM. So far, they’ve written more than 70 into existence.

The existence of Dr. Dutton’s Wikipedia biography (and the biographies of women scientists in general) is not only important for recognizing her contributions to her field. The act of recognizing also has an effect on the students who are participating in that visibility work. And having them write Wikipedia biographies for women in STEM not only demonstrates to them that diversity and inclusion belongs in STEM, it asserts that to the world. It’s important for women in science to be visible to future generations, inspiring women to pursue scientific careers and providing possible roadmaps for doing so.

So go on over to Wikipedia to read all about Dr. Dutton’s fascinating work. You’ll see that the page has been updated to include her latest achievement. You can thank Dr. Barnes’ student for that. Even though their course ended in May, they came back to make the change! And as for the five women who won the MacArthur Fellowship but didn’t have a biography yet? All five are written now.

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Further reading: Thanks to these Washington University students, the winners of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine were already represented on Wikipedia when they won.

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Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia writing assignment into a future course? We provide support and free resources to instructors teaching all disciplines! Visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information.

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Header image by John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0 via MacArthur Foundation.

When you gather a group of about 800 people to celebrate open knowledge, you can’t help but feel the excitement and hope in the room. Wiki Education staff were thrilled to join the Wikimedia community in Stockholm, Sweden for Wikimania 2019. We’ve accomplished a lot together as a community and it was a great to celebrate together.

“Meeting fellow Wikimedians and experiencing their eagerness to improve Wikipedia and its sister projects keeps inspiring me at each Wikimania I participate in,” said our Executive Director, Frank Schulenburg, about attending.

TJ Bliss, our Chief Advancement Officer, also attended for his first time. “I wasn’t quite sure what to expect,” he shared. “But what I experienced was fantastic. I found people engaged in trying to make the world a better place through knowledge. I found people wanting to share their good ideas and deeply interested in the good ideas other people were sharing. I made new friends and expanded my network.”

Talking about engaging experts on Wikipedia

Ryan McGrady, our Scholars & Scientists Program Manager, also attended the event. He and TJ both noted how energizing it was to talk to others about training experts in Wikipedia editing through our Scholars & Scientists Program. “There was a lot of enthusiasm about our courses, and in particular for getting experts to edit Wikipedia,” Ryan shared.

Meeting Olle Terenius was also a particular highlight of the week. “Olle is a faculty member at Uppsalla University who encourages all Ph.D. students to contribute to Wikipedia,” TJ explained. “He’s basically a one-man Wiki Education in Sweden, supporting hundreds of students and the instructors who teach them as they edit Wikipedia articles. He is also working to encourage the swedish research agencies to include requirements on grant proposals that will create powerful incentives for scholars and scientists to contribute to Wikipedia as part of their public outreach efforts.”

The Dashboard in action

“Seeing the nearly ubiquitous use of the P&E Dashboard in other peoples’ presentations was also a really meaningful experience,” said TJ. “The Dashboard is by far the most used tool in the Wikimedia community to show impact of projects. And to see how others are utilizing it to bring more accurate knowledge to the masses is really inspiring.” During the event, the Dashboard was named one of the Coolest Tools of 2019, which meant a lot to the Wiki Education staff present, as well as our tech team who works hard to improve the tool every day.

Sweden!

Our staff also enjoyed how well the conference organizers integrated local Swedish culture into the entire conference. Whether it was going on Commons photography walks (Frank and Ryan both got a Featured Picture out of it!) or socializing with other Wikipedians over surströmming, the venue provided a great opportunity to talk about shared values with new and old friends from all around the world.

 

Stronger together

“One of the things I enjoy most about Wikimania is remembering that people all over understand what we’re trying to do and believe in the value of Wikipedia in education,” Ryan noted.

We really are, as Wikimania’s theme this year celebrated, stronger together. Thanks everyone for a great event!

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Header image by LEP Hamburg, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Here at Wiki Education, we’ve had the great honor and privilege of working with thousands of instructors since 2010, and we’ve had the great fortune to form deep and lasting relationships with many of our program participants. In July, we lost one of our most committed instructors, Professor James Council of North Dakota State University. Our sadness is immense, but we are also incredibly grateful that many of us had the opportunity to work with Jim and experience his kindness, integrity, and enthusiasm.

Jim began working with us in 2014, and never stopped, except when illness forced him to take leave. And once he was well enough to resume teaching, he came back to the Wikipedia assignment. (A fact met with joy and relief from all of us). In that time, he ran nine Wikipedia assignments, guided over 350 students in how to contribute to Wikipedia, and produced over 150,000 words of new content. While these numbers are a testament to Jim’s commitment to improving psychological content on Wikipedia, they tell just a small part of the story. Jim urged his students to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of women psychologists to ensure that women in the field of psychology had equal coverage to their male counterparts. Jim’s dedication to his students showed in the level of involvement in their assignments. He worked closely with them on Wikipedia, giving them multiple rounds of feedback that helped them build solid contributions.

To say that Jim was a pleasure to work with is a gross understatement. As Wikipedia Expert, Ian Ramjohn, noted, “Jim’s kindness in asking for help and gratitude in receiving it meant that even if he asked me to review 15 group assignments at the busiest time of the semester, it didn’t feel like a burden. Working with Jim felt like a productive collaboration with a friend.”

In March 2015, Jim Council and Ann Burnett hosted Wiki Education’s Jami Mathewson at North Dakota State University, in hopes that he could invite other colleagues into this special community of ours. Here are some words from Jami about her visit:

“To convey Jim’s actions would be to tell you my experience in beautiful Fargo. He picked me up from the airport after a late late delay, insisted on staying up with me to take me to his favorite bar for a local beer, and thoroughly walked me through my agenda for the next few days. He gave me a ton of work to do (in a good way!), put people in chairs for me to present at 6 different workshops/luncheons/panels (in two days!), and told me jovial stories of every person we met along the way. Jim introduced me to the Provost and various deans and genuinely believed I was worthy of their attention. He treated me to a lovely dinner in town, welcomed my local friend to the table, and cajoled his charming wife into sharing funny stories with me. He grabbed his car from the parking lot to pick me up because I hadn’t gotten a memo about the blustery spring winds and was wearing a breezy skirt. He gave me an entire hour to speak to nearly 200 people who clearly all admired him enough to respond to his email inviting them to a random talk on a Wednesday. He insisted on taking a bunch of pictures of me speaking, as a family member might do with pride. I simply can’t convey enough how one man could leave such a touching impression on me in 48 hours.”

Jim was truly beloved by the Wiki Education team. We will all miss Jim for what he brought to this program and to our lives.

Assigning Wikipedia as a classroom assignment is a difficult proposition. The idea of integrating the encyclopedia into a curriculum has been stigmatized for many years, and it can be complicated to ensure that students’ work fits into Wikipedia’s extensive policies and guidelines.

Over the last decade, however, a brave cadre of professors and teachers have been out to change that. And earlier this year, one of those educators contacted Wikimedia Israel (WMIL), an independent affiliate, with the idea of bringing a Wikipedia assignment in their course.

The educator was Dr. Daniela Shabar-Shapira, from the Tel-Aviv University School of Social Work, and the course was Women and Gender in Social Work—a Feminist Perspective. The topic matter of the course gave us some pause, as established Wikipedia editors can view such courses as being agenda-driven, thereby violating Wikipedia’s founding principle of neutral point of view.

Never one to shy away from a challenge, WMIL’s academic coordinator met with Dr. Shabar-Shapira and Moran Abouloff-Pick, her teaching assistant, to learn more about the course’s characteristics and explore how a Wikipedia assignment could be integrated. The course they are teaching is part of a retraining program for a master’s degree in social work. Students in this program come from different academic backgrounds—mostly social studies or behavioral studies—and hold at least a bachelor’s degree. The three-year program also includes guided training in the field, i.e., the students work at an organization and learn the practical aspects of the trade.

This specific course focuses on the principles of treatment and intervention from a feminist perspective. It covers, among other things, topics related to the history and different waves of the feminist movement and theory, development and crystallization of feminine identity, psychological theories of women and gender, intersection of marginal positions, and more. The Wikipedia assignment was to write about a topic covered in the course and relating to their practical field work.

WMIL’s academic coordinator met with the students and gave an introduction to Wikipedia and its writing guidelines. One point of emphasis was that content about feminism need not appear under a heading of a “feminist perspective.” It suffices that those undercovered topics, aspects, or studies be added with reliable sources and described using neutral language.

To ensure that the topics written as assignments are suitable for Wikipedia, students had to submit their suggested topic and a list of sources (references) to WMIL’s academic coordinator. The coordinator reviewed the notability of the suggested topics and the reliability of the sources. In some cases the suggested topic was risky as an article on its own.

For example, the topic “insidious trauma” is a well-known term coined by psychologist Maria Root. However, as there is no article about this topic in any other Wikipedia, the recommendation was to write about the topic within the scope of an article about Maria Root (which did not exist in Hebrew).

In other cases, WMIL’s coordinator identified existing articles which the suggested topics could expand on, or made recommendations on specific areas of focus. For example, a student planning to write about “homelessness among LGBT youth in Israel” eventually expanded the article about homelessness, adding information about homelessness among youth, in general, and also among LGBT youth.

The students’ work was checked for its content by the course instructors, and following their approval, it was uploaded as a draft (known as a “sandbox” in Wikipedia’s parlance). The academic coordinator then reviewed the drafts and corrected any content or style issues.

• • •

This pilot project, though small in scale, was a resounding success. All eight articles or expansions were accepted without discussion. In total, 138,000 bytes were added. The instructors and the students reported enormous satisfaction from making their work accessible through Wikipedia, thereby making important information that was lacking, freely available to the public. Moreover, they viewed the assignment as a particularly fitting task that, like the profession they are learning, combines the academic with the practical.

WMIL’s conclusion from this pilot is that it is possible to write about sensitive or potentially controversial issues in the framework of an academic Wikipedia assignment, providing that the process is structured, guided and supervised well. More specific insights are:

• Instructors and students must be acquainted with Wikipedia’s neutral point of view and reliable sources policies.
• The topics for the assignment must be curated by an experienced Wikimedia editor
• Having at least one teaching assistant, depending on the size of the course, is crucial for the coordination and supervision of the assignment. Given the workload of most university lecturers, it is unlikely that a university lecturer would be able to give students the required support to complete such a task.
• It is imperative to create clear instructions and guidelines for the students. These describe the assignment and what is expected of them, provide clarity about the process milestones, and lay down the deadlines for each phase.
• To minimize conflicts with other Wikipedia editors, it is advisable that students do not edit directly in the article space, but rather in the sandbox. Moving the content to the article space should only be done after it has been reviewed by a Wikimedia editor.

 
Dr. Keren Shatzman, Senior Coordinator, Academia & Projects
Wikimedia Israel

What I hate with a vengeange is make work. DBpedia as a project retrieves information from all the Wikipedias, wrangles it into shape and publishes it. In one scenario they have unanimous support from one or more Wikipedias agreeing on the same fact and, they all may have their own references.

We should import such agreeable data without further ado. An additional manual step to import to Wikidata is not smart because manual operations introduce new errors. Arguably when there is no unanimous support manual intervention may improve the quality but given the quantity of the data involved, it means that a lot of data will not become available. THAT in and of itself has a negative impact on the quality of available data as well.

So what to do.. Harvest all the data that is of an acceptable quality, that is the data DBpedia accepts for its own purposes. Enable an interface where people verify the data where their project is challenged.

When we truly aim to engage people, we enable them to target the data they want to work on. I will happily work on scientists but do not expect me to work on "sucker stars". More than likely there will be people who care about soccer stars but not about "crazy professors".
Thanks,
      GerardM

So you’ve spent the last three years of your life studying a type of gene, cell, or species, (maybe a bat), and you’re wondering… “How can I share what I know with more people?” The answer: contribute to Wikipedia’s coverage of your specialty and help thousands of people around the world better understand biology and biological processes.

Living Knowledge is our latest professional development course for scientists. These synchronous online sessions present an opportunity to improve a diverse set of skills for a variety of professional priorities and goals:

Engage in impactful science communication

Are you and your organization committed to reaching the public with your science? Do you have grant requirements that demand effective public engagement? Are you just passionate to share your knowledge in a space where the public goes to learn? We’ll help you identify topics on Wikipedia aligned with your expertise that will reach a wide audience. Wikipedia not only shapes the public’s understanding of science – a 2018 study out of MIT found that it also affects future scientific research.

Learn a new way of writing

Making the most frequently accessed source of information in the world better is fulfilling. It’s also an interesting challenge. The rules on Wikipedia aren’t intuitive or welcoming for new “editors”. We’ll help you navigate the complex, community-led policies that regulate Wikipedia’s content and its own “eco-system”. This sort of writing can be a great exercise in creativity and for curing writer’s block.

Look at your research in new light

Need dedicated time to brush up on the latest research in your field? Incorporating that knowledge into relevant Wikipedia articles affords you the chance to read and reflect, while also bringing that information to the public.

Connect with other scientists

Are you looking for a networking opportunity? Our weekly synchronous meetings allow you to meet with other scientists across institutions and disciplines.

Try something new

“Wiki Scientists” are asked to broaden their mind, to step outside the traditional modes of academic writing, and to make connections across disciplines. Take an active role in how the world understands science and take those skills with you throughout your career. Register today!

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Early bird enrollment ends October 31st. To see our other training course offerings, visit learn.wikiedu.org.

Much like Asgard, Wikipedia is not a place but a people. Specifically, an extensive community of volunteers from around the world who donate their time each day to building, curating, and watching over the largest collection of knowledge ever assembled.

Unlike Asgard, the people who contribute to Wikipedia often only rarely meet outside of the internet, and so we here at the Wikimedia Foundation set out in 2013 to make it easier for users to “thank” each other for taking actions on the site.

Fast forward six years, and the feature is still live on all Wikimedia projects; two clicks are all that is required to thank a user for making any particular change. Assuming that you’ve created and logged into a Wikimedia account, you can see the “thanks” option on the “history” tab accessible from any Wikimedia page.

• • •

Earlier this year, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Research team, in collaboration with researchers from Gunn High School and the University of Toronto, set out to determine how effective the thanks feature has been.

We posed a variety of questions as part of this study:

• How often is the thanks feature used in Wikimedia projects?
• Are there projects in which the thanks feature is used more often?
• Are there specific groups of editors who use the thanks feature more (or less) than others?
• What is the impact of thanking an editor’s revision?

 
Here’s what we learned:

• In the largest languages, thanks are typically sent upwards (from less experienced to more experienced editors). However,  the most experienced editors send/receive thanks less frequently relative to their total edit count as compared to all other editor groups.
• Some projects break from trends of “thanks” usage seen in the other studied languages. Thanks on the Norwegian Wikipedia, for instance, are typically sent downwards, not upwards. Additionally, a greater percentage of editors on that Wikipedia have interacted with the thanks feature than the overall average of 5%.
• A controlled test indicates that receiving a single thank can increase a person’s edit count by a factor of >1.5 over the next day. This increased editing effect fades within the next month, but it is still strong for the next week following a thank.

 
Finally, here’s some possible directions for future studies:

• Expanding this study to include smaller languages and further examining how “thanks” usage differs across projects.
• Examining whether the impact of receiving thanks is cumulative. It appears that receiving a thank has a strong short-term effect. Does receiving multiple thanks have a longer term effect?
• Advocating increased usage of the Thanks feature! If it can increase engagement and foster positive interaction between editors, it should be taken full advantage of!

 
Swati Goel, Gunn High School
Ashton Anderson, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Leila Zia, Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation

If you’d like to learn more, all of this study’s code, raw and intermediate data, and analysis is available. You can also read the paper published in WikiWorkshop 2019: In Companion Proceedings of The Web Conference 2019 (WWW ’19).

Last week, we completed a piece of long-neglected work relating to Puppet, the tool that manages the configuration of every virtual machine in our cloud. Historically, each VM has received its configuration from a physical, production server (the 'puppetmaster'). This meant that there was a constant chatter of traffic back and forth between each VM and unrelated networks and hardware sitting in Wikimedia production. Now, the puppetmasters are located on VMs, so all of that chatter is internal to Cloud Services.

Generally, we like to think of the cloud as an isolated sandbox, a safe place for volunteering and experimentation. Any tight links between the cloud and production require extra vigilance; as we sever those links we can worry a bit less about issues (security and otherwise) bleeding back and forth between the cloud and the public wikis.

A notable thing about this move is that nearly all the work was done by a technical volunteer, @Krenair. Krenair updated the code that runs the in-cloud puppetmasters, built out the server cluster, and designed the migration flow that transferred control over from the old controllers. It was his hard work (done on top of his unrelated day job) that moved this task from long-neglected to a box with a check mark.

Quite a few Cloud Services projects are partially (or, in some cases, completely) maintained and managed by technical volunteers. Not only does this allow us to run infrastructure well beyond the capacity of our small team, it's also a clear success in the mission of the Technical Engagement team (of which Cloud Services is a part). We work to build technical capacity in the community, and when volunteers start doing our job for us, we know we've succeeded. Almost all levels of access are available to trusted volunteers, and getting permission to hack on the WMCS infrastructure is not as hard as you might think. Come and join us![4]

The people at DBpedia are data wranglers. What they do is make the most of the data provided to them by the Wikipedias, Wikidata and a generous sprinkling of other sources. They are data wranglers because they take what is given to them and make the data shine.

Obviously, it takes skill and resources to get the best result and obviously, some of the data gathered does not pass the smell test. The process the data wranglers use includes a verification stage as described in this paper. They have two choices for when data that should be the same is not; they either have a preference or they go with the consensus ie the result that shows most often.

For data wranglers this is a proper choice.. There is an other option for another day, these discrepancies are left for the cleaners.

With the process well described, the data openly advertised as available, the cleaners will come. First people akin to the wranglers, they have the skills to build the queries, the tools to slice and dice the data. When these tools are discovered, particularly by those who care about specific subsets, they will dive in and change things where applicable. They will seek the references, make the judgments necessary to improve what is there.

The DBpedia data wranglers are part of the Wikimedia movement and do more than build something on top of what the Wikis produced; DBpedia and the Wikimedia projects work together improving our movement's qualities. With the processing data generally available this will become even more effective.
Thanks,
        GerardM

Today, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has issued a landmark privacy ruling regarding Europeans’ right to request search engines delist search results about themselves. We are excited that the court has considered the effect of such delistings on other fundamental rights like freedom of expression in its decision, but concerned about the increasing reliance of both companies and now courts on geographical barriers to limit access to information on the internet. Before we address the court’s decision, however, let’s start with some background.

Over the past decade, the protection of privacy online has been a focus of European regulators, and Europe has seen a number of laws passed in an effort to protect citizens’ privacy. Often, these laws will lay out a principle or right, but the exact contours of that right end up being determined later by courts. The CJEU has just issued one such clarifying decision about a process called “delisting” or “de-referencing.” Delisting, sometimes referred to as the “right to be forgotten,” is a process through which a person can request that information about themselves be removed from search engine results returned for that person’s name. But how far does this right to delist extend?

This is the exact question tackled by the CJEU in Google v. CNIL. After delisting was recognized as a right in Europe, Google put in place processes for European citizens to request certain information about them that was available online be delisted. Through this process, Google would ensure that these results were delisted in its European domains such as Google.fr or Google.de, but did not apply the delisting outside of Europe. This meant that if you were searching from the United States, using Google.com, these results would still be available.

However, in 2015, the French data protection authority (“CNIL”) informed Google that delisting requests must be honored worldwide, not just in the European Union. When Google proposed an alternative solution, the CNIL appealed to France’s highest court, where the Wikimedia Foundation intervened to offer our perspective on delisting and access to knowledge. The court sent questions regarding the scope of delisting to the CJEU, and the Wikimedia Foundation again submitted observations on the matter. Now, almost a year after the arguments before the CJEU, the court has found that search engines are not required under EU law to carry out delisting requests across all versions of the search engine, only those which correspond with EU Member states. While not closing off the possibility of global delistings in certain circumstances, the court has essentially approved Google’s current processes for delisting, which uses a process called “geoblocking” to identify where a user is searching from based on their IP address.

We applaud this recognition that delisting should not extend beyond EU borders to the rest of the globe. In the Wikimedia Foundation’s brief to the court, we expressed our concern that the practice of delisting search results could harm both free expression and access to knowledge online. We are happy to see this argument acknowledged in the CJEU’s decision, which says, “The processing of personal data should be designed to serve mankind. The right to the protection of personal data is not an absolute right; it must be considered in relation to its function in society and be balanced against other fundamental rights, in accordance with the principle of proportionality.”

Despite this, there are still some troubling aspects of this decision. Primarily, we remain concerned about the inequality in access to knowledge that results from any form of delisting orders. Wikipedia is founded on a premise of providing access to knowledge for all and Wikipedias are differentiated by language, not geography. What the CJEU’s decision means is that if someone requests the delisting of an article on Spanish Wikipedia, users in Mexico will still see this page in their search results, but users in Spain will not. Because these delisting decisions are often targeted toward only a small portion of the information contained on a page, this means that entire communities will lose the ability to easily search for information solely because of where they are located.

This highlights a larger trend of internet fragmentation, a growing concern for the interconnected global community that is the Wikimedia movement. As individual countries demonstrate an increased desire to regulate the internet, often in contradictory ways, this can lead to the internet looking very different depending on where you are located.  Although the Wikimedia communities generally strive to be respectful of national laws, this will become increasingly difficult to navigate as countries place more granular requirements on online content. Volunteers come to Wikipedia to share their knowledge and learn from others, no matter where they are located.

Geoblocking, as envisioned here, is far superior to global delisting, which would essentially make it impossible to find certain information through a search engine. However, the type of geographical fragmentation it envisions will present challenges for movements that cross borders.

In the end, the internet is a global resource that connects people across the world every day to share their perspectives, creations, and knowledge. Let’s try to keep it that way.

Allison Davenport, Technology Law and Policy Fellow, Legal
Wikimedia Foundation

Our thanks go to Claire Rameix-Séguin and SCP Baraduc-Duhamel- Rameix for their representation of the Wikimedia Foundation in this matter.