18/02/2020-24/02/2020

About us

• We would like to thank everyone who sent a message on the occasion of issue 500 of weeklyOSM via blog post, e-mail, comment on the issue, Twitter or even personally. Please help to inform the community about YOUR OSM-activity by using our guest mode.

Mapping

• Joseph Eisenberg is asking for comments on his proposal of amenity=motorcycle_taxi, a specific tag for a place where motorcycle taxis wait for passengers. (Nabble)
• Victor started a discussion asking if the presence or absence of signs for surveillance cameras should be tagged camera:signed=yes/no, as some countries require a notification if a public space is being filmed. (Nabble)
• Long time OSM contributor Nick Whitlegg announced that he is shutting down his England and Wales footpath mapping site FreeMap. The site started out in the very early days of OSM (or even slightly beforehand) and the announcement caused Richard Fairhurst to point out a fascinating old blog post on his own mapping work antecedent to the creation of OpenStreetMap (geowiki.com) and other aspects of OSM prehistory.
• dktue created the page autobahnkilometer.tirol on 17 February 2020 showing highway milestones in Tyrol (Austria) on a map. On the day of publication no milestones had been mapped in OSM; now most of them have been mapped.
• Thejesh GN wrote an introduction to mapping surveillance cameras in OSM, and how to map them with OSMAnd.
• HOT has shared about its collaboration with Microsoft on the issues of creating detailed maps of Tanzania and Uganda via satellite mapping, machine learning and community mappers.
• Knotenpunktsystem (literally ‘junction point system’) have been set up in a number of European countries to help people navigate their cycling networks by numbering the junctions and providing extensive signage between them. Robert Grübler reported (automatic translation) on the work undertaken to map the knotenpunktsystem of the cycle network in Murtal, Austria.

Community

• If you know a person or a project who deserves to be awarded for their contribution to OSM you can submit a nomination for the OSM-Awards 2020. Ilya Zverev asks that nominations be made before 10 May 2020.
• Fabien Delolmo will be holding (automatic translation) a technical workshop on programming a mobile app that uses and updates OpenStreetMap data. The workshop will be held on 6 March in Grenoble, France.
• Google announced the open source projects and organisations which have been accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. OSM is amongst the 200 accepted open source projects. GSoC will accept student applications from 16 to 31 March 2020.
• SomeoneElse is experimenting with adding information to established icons. Amongst other things he explains in his blog post how an icon could be enriched with wheelmap accessibility information.
• The Tobler Society is an up-and-coming YouthMappers Chapter at the University of Chicago. They tweeted about their Mapathon, held last week. Several times a year, they host mapathons through YouthMappers’ humanitarian projects and last year students started the first chapter of YouthMappers in Chicago.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Simon Poole announced a new version of the Attribution Guideline, which incorporates feedback from the public discussion in August last year. The draft will be forwarded to the OSMF board for formal approval.

Events

• Ilya Zverev reminds us that State of the Map Baltics 2020 will take place on 6 March 2020 at the University of Latvia.
• Lars Linger invites you to another OSM Hackweekend on 28 and 29 March 2020 in Berlin. The event, which has been running for at least 7 years, will be hosted at Wikimedia’s offices and is supported by the FOSSGIS, the local chapter of the OSMF.
• Ed Freyfogle, co-founder of OpenCage, and Steven Feldman, of KnowWhere Consulting, have started a podcast series about geo-related themes.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT has tweeted that all six HOT Microgrants candidates from Sierra Leone, Iraq, South Sudan, the Philippines, Bolivia and Peru have been fully funded by the community.

Maps

• Do you like drawing on maps? Are you sick of having to do it on a paper map with a crayon like some sort of caveman? Then Gribrouillon (automatic translation) by Adrien Pavie is for you. Use it to draw on an OSM basemap and share with friends.
• Andrei Kashcha announced the update of his ‘obscure’ 2D WebGL renderer. In his tweet he shows a preview of the new 3D rendering feature.
• The BBC dedicated an article to the misuse of a map to share misleading information on the global spread of coronavirus.
• Some mappers expressed (automatic translation), in the German OSM forum, their disappointment about the poor rendering performance of OSM’s main map.

switch2OSM

• Tempus is a transport company in the Südeifel region of Germany. With the community’s help, it has entered all of its bus lines into OpenStreetMap, and built individual maps on the line pages of its website using Leaflet and Overpass.

Open Data

• OpenDataFrance has launched (automatic translation) the GeoDataMine extraction tool. It allows local authorities to quickly extract data relating to their territory from the OpenStreetMap database.

Software

• OSMCha is switching its domain to https://osmcha.org. Users will be redirected from the previous domain to the new one, but developers that use the API need to change their applications to avoid problems. See more on https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/wille/diary/392289.
• The source code for blender-osm, an add-on to render OSM data in 3D with the free and open 3D creation software Blender, is back on Github as vvoovv announced on his user diary.

Programming

• The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced the publication of reports documenting the work of the Open Routing API Pilot, including implementations developed and a prototype Routing API and Route Exchange Model to address location interoperability challenges with various tools available from many providers.
• The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is considering adopting CityJSON as an official OGC Community Standard. A new work item justification to begin the Community Standard endorsement process is available for public comment.

Releases

• The JOSM team has released stable version 20.02 (release 15915) of their OSM editor. The new version brings access to Maxar’s imagery back, add links to Geofabrik’s regional/national Taginfo instances, improves JOSM’s Autofilters and has many many more new features and improvements.

Did you know …

• … the traffic_sign tag? It allows the location and type of traffic signs to be tagged. This is especially helpful if you are unsure about how to tag the effect of the sign and helps other mappers to make corrections if necessary.

Other “geo” things

• Omar Rizwan tweets the personalised public transport map of Auckland, New Zealand which he made for his parents.
• Dāvis Viļums five years ago set out to ride every street in Central London. Dāvis explains the why and how and presents a time-lapse video of the record of all his rides as they reveal London’s street grid.
• Tom Forth (ODI Leeds) has a long twitter thread about using open data to map income disparities in the UK and France.
• Carlos Jurado Rivera was featured in an article (automatic translation) in La Voz de Almería. Carlos describes how he came to be interested in mapping the cycling infrastructure of Almería (Spain), why he chose OpenStreetMap, and his mapping style.
• Cartographers have been known to occasionally sneak a personal joke into their work. Zoey Poll reports on how even Swisstopo has played host to a small cartographical joke or two.
• Researchers from Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group have published a paper on the role of spatially structured scoring systems as a motivational element in location-based games. They found that players who are confronted with a spatially structured scoring system are more likely to have a longer playing time, walk longer distances, and be more willing to take detours than those facing a spatially random scoring system.
• The kick-off meeting for LOKI (Airborne Observation of Critical Infrastructure) was hosted by Heidelberg University on 12 February. The aim of the LOKI project is to develop a system that enables fast and reliable airborne situation assessments following an earthquake.
• The imagery provider Mapillary is now available in ArcGIS Urban, ESRI’s tool for smart city planning, providing imagery with street-level perspective.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Toulouse	Contrib’atelier OpenStreetMap	2020-02-29
Budapest	Budapest gathering	2020-03-02
London	Missing Maps London	2020-03-03
Hanover	OSM-Sprechstunde	2020-03-04
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	2020-03-04
Praha/Brno/Ostrava	Kvartální pivo	2020-03-04
Arlon	Atelier ouvert OpenStreetMap	2020-03-04
Dortmund	Mappertreffen	2020-03-06
Riga	State of the Map Baltics	2020-03-06
Amagasaki	GPSで絵を描いてみようじゃあ～りませんか	2020-03-07
Rennes	Réunion mensuelle	2020-03-09
Grenoble	Rencontre mensuelle	2020-03-09
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #14	2020-03-09
Toronto	Toronto Mappy Hour	2020-03-09
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2020-03-10
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle	2020-03-10
Zurich	115. OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-03-11
Hanover	OSM-Sprechstunde	2020-03-11
Freiburg	FOSSGIS-Konferenz	2020-03-11-2020-03-14
Nantes	Rencontre mensuelle	2020-03-12
Berlin	141. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2020-03-12
Ulmer Alb	Stammtisch Ulmer Alb	2020-03-12
Chemnitz	Chemnitzer Linux-Tage	2020-03-14-2020-03-15
Nottingham	Nottingham pub meetup	2020-03-17
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-03-17
Cologne Bonn Airport	127. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch	2020-03-17
Hanover	OSM-Sprechstunde	2020-03-18
Hanover	Stammtisch Hannover	2020-03-19
Munich	Münchner Treffen	2020-03-19
San José	Civic Hack & Map Night	2020-03-19
Valcea	EuYoutH OSM Meeting	2020-04-27-2020-05-01
Guarda	EuYoutH OSM Meeting	2020-06-24-2020-06-28
Cape Town	HOT Summit	2020-07-01-2020-07-02
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 Elizabete, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, geologist, jinalfoflia, Can.

“I was hesitant about shaking up a popular class that had worked well for years, but one statistic finally convinced me. … And this assignment quickly took on a much deeper significance than a research paper.”

Dr. Stephennie Mulder at University of Texas at Austin decided to scrap the research paper for her Fall 2018 term and have students collaborate and rewrite Wikipedia pages. “It ended up better than I could have imagined and transformed how I think about teaching,” she shared over Twitter when the course wrapped up.

She has now taught a Wikipedia writing assignment in two of her Islamic art history courses, once in Fall 2018 and again in Fall 2019. One student from last fall uploaded a photo of metalworking detail to the Wikipedia article about the history of metallurgy in Mosul. Another created a new article for an object of islamic art by translating the one on the French Wikipedia. In this most recent course, 26 students added 154 references to 9 total articles. Overall a great success for representing topics related to Islamic art history on Wikipedia.

Dr. Mulder shared her reasons for incorporating the Wikipedia writing assignment again via Twitter:

“I was hesitant about shaking up a popular class that had worked well for years,” Dr. Mulder reflected after that first term. “But one statistic finally convinced me: 90% of Wikipedia articles are written by men – and largely by men from Euro-American contexts,” she wrote, citing an article in the Guardian.

“The oft-maligned Wikipedia is now the world’s most frequently-consulted source of information and fifth-most visited website. Because anyone can be an editor, it’s on us to make it the best resource it can be. If you think Wikipedia is bad, look in the mirror. Wikipedia is us.”

“So this assignment quickly took on a much deeper significance than a research paper. It required [students] to develop many of the same research and writing skills as a research paper, but it also came to have a strong civics and social justice component, and the students responded.”

“To emphasize the collaborative, real-world applicability of the assignment, I set it up as a partnership with a museum and another Islamic art class via my brilliant colleagues Dr. Leslee Michelsen and Dr. Alex Dika Seggerman.”

“The assignment asks [students] to imagine they’re hired as consultants for a major museum to improve the public’s knowledge on Islamic art, in advance of an exhibition. Their task? To assess an article for the quality of its sources and content and then research, write, and improve it.”

“The assignment was set up on Wiki Education’s terrific website. Students had to complete a training module/week. Through this and discussion in class they learned how to determine quality of sources, the value of peer review, and improved research methods.”

Dr. Mulder also called upon materials from Art & Feminism, as well as the help of librarians at UT Austin.

“I also spent a day in the library with students, walking them through basic research methods. I thought this might be too basic but the day walking them through the physical library was inspired by a comment made by one of our brightest Honors Art History undergraduates in a meeting of the UT Provost’s Libraries Task force (on which I currently serve): ‘Many faculty and librarians don’t realize that it’s not that undergraduates don’t want to use the libraries, it’s that we are SCARED of the libraries. She explained that many students no longer receive the basic training needed to know how to use the libraries. So they don’t.”

“Just getting them physically in the library was revelatory. They were astonished at the range and quality of sources that did not turn up on a Google search. It really lit a fire under them, sparked their curiosity and made them want to dive in. This was revelatory for me too!”

“We talked about what a privilege it is to have access to depth and reliable quality of knowledge in a top research library. We talked about how access to knowledge controls the way we see the world and our place in it. Again and again, students spoke about feeling empowered.”

“Yesterday we met for an upload party. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but it turned out to be one of my favorite days as a teacher EVER. I am so proud of my students and of their hard work. I am amazed at how seriously they took the assignment and what a terrific job they did.”

“There were challenges: the sometimes-difficult collaborative aspect of a group assignment, the fact that some topics had few sources, the challenge of learning to write in a neutral, unbiased style. But they had something real on the line: an article out there in the world. And in the end, these smart students have now contributed 15 better-sourced, better-written articles to the most frequently-consulted body of knowledge in the world. And they’ve learned key research and writing skills that will be applicable in a range of fields.”

That number has now risen to 29!

“In short, this assignment did all a traditional research paper does: deepening knowledge, research, and writing skills – but it also left them feeling empowered to be active contributors: shaping global knowledge and redressing imbalances that shape the way we see the world.”

“So if you’ve ever wanted to have students do a Wikipedia article writing project, I would encourage you to jump in and follow Wikipedia’s motto: Be Bold. Your students will learn, and you will all feel like you made the world just a tiny bit better place to be.”

To incorporate a Wikipedia writing assignment into an upcoming course, visit teach.wikiedu.org for access to free resources and assignment templates.

Image detail: Seated Woman with a Book, India 20th century. Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, 11.1.5

With three terms of Wikipedia writing assignment experience already under his belt, Dr. Josh DiCaglio reflects on having students understand Wikipedia’s editing culture by participating in it. He is an assistant professor in the department of English at Texas A&M University.

Although many instructors have used Wikipedia in class projects, these assignments usually focus on writing new content in a subject related to the course or remedying imbalances in editing. While these are excellent pedagogical tasks and essential for Wikipedia’s mission, my assignment focuses on the general editorial situation presented by Wikipedia. I ask students to take existing content, which is often a patch-work of years of different contributions and changes representing different interests and backgrounds, and intervene in the page in a way that will align it with Wikipedia conventions and facilitate future contributions. They are encouraged not to produce new content but to work with what is already there, with the assumption that other content-matter experts will come along (probably long after they are done with this project) to assist in working up the page. Doing so forces students to learn the elaborate conventions of Wikipedia, join and react to a live community of writers, figure out ways to facilitate an on-going writing process, and experience editing in an online setting—including using Wikipedia’s markup language. The public setting amplifies the stakes: every change is live for the whole world to see (4.12 million people viewed the pages students worked on during the 2019 project), every communication open for response, and every alteration a permanent part of the evolution of the articles they edit.

This assignment provides students with direct experience with a live and dynamic editorial situation that shares many of the attributes of editing in a technological environment—working with existing content, accommodating limits according to a prescribed genre, managing multiple writers that may or may not be present and may have contrasting uses, considering multiple audiences, accounting for past writing, and facilitating future work on a future document. One of the most valuable and elusive skills is the learning and accommodating an existing editing culture. In fact, the original assignment was inspired when some friends of mine asked me to assist in putting together a page for someone they held worthy of a Wikipedia page. To our surprise, we received quick and direct lessons in the difficulties of writing biographies of living persons, the constraints of Wikipedia’s policies (especially Neutral Point of View, Notability, and Verifiability), and the procedures that Wikipedians use to vet content. This provided a valuable lesson in learning to read an editorial culture, one that I wanted to pass along to my students.

As I developed the project, I came to see that there is a key skill needed for the continued success of Wikipedia that few beyond seasoned Wikipedia editors may be aware of: the need for advanced editorial sensibilities to perform the elaborate coordination needed to handle the diverse interests and contributions provided to Wikipedia. There are three major scenarios I try to get my students to focus on. The first are slowly developing pages that are the result of years (often well over a decade) of contributions that have been amassed without a global coherence. In these pages, decisions made a decade ago by one user might set the stage for years of edits even if they are not the most sensible organization. Often, there has been little discussion of what the page is actually for and what kind of content should be there (One of my favorite examples of this is the Concert page—what kind of information should go in a Concert Wikipedia page? What is it for?). The second are pages that have received attention from content matter experts but may not have the appropriate frame, organization, and style that fits with Wikipedia. These often have very active users who would welcome someone less knowledgeable in the topic; but this requires someone who is not afraid to work with these experts to dig into the writing and organization of the article to make it more accessible and appropriate. Sometimes these kinds of pages have controversies that could use an additional neutral voice to help figure out what might be done next and where the article could go. The third are pages that were created and vetted largely on the work of one contributor but which are not appropriately written for Wikipedia. Most common is the page that is ported from an essay into a Wikipedia page, such as this one on World War 2 US Military Sex Education or this one on Gender in Horror Films (the links are the pages before my students’ interventions). These pages usually have good content but become stalled because so much work is required to turn the content into something appropriate for Wikipedia.

Having students work with such pages provides both an incredibly useful editing scenario and a focused study of the difficulties of editing with a group over time. Many students struggle with the assignment only to return later to speak of how meaningful it was for them. Several students have mentioned referring to it in job interviews and several have remained regular Wikipedia editors since completing the assignment.

The Montague-CTE (Center for Teaching Excellence) Scholars program is an award and grant given at Texas A&M to one assistant professor from each college per year. As part of the award, they have you focus on one particular innovative teaching technique that you would like to develop. I received the award (which includes a small stipend in addition to general recognition) to work on my Wikipedia assignment that I developed for my Technical and Professional Editing course. My plan is to use this support to enlist an undergraduate in refining this course assignment, gathering examples from previous iterations of the course (this semester will be my fourth time running the assignment), and working up these materials into something that can be presented to others at professional conferences (including, potentially, the WikiConference) and through a publication for a composition journal.

To incorporate a Wikipedia writing assignment into an upcoming course, visit teach.wikiedu.org for access to free resources and assignment templates.

I’m a political junkie, perhaps in some ways more now than ever. And yet, I’m posting very little about the 2020 election on Twitter. An old friend with similar political compulsions asked how I’m doing it. The answer is ironically too long for Twitter, so here goes.

Reduced my Twitter political inputs

Step 1 was to simply reduce the amount of political stuff that I see when I go to Twitter. I see all kinds of other wonderful stuff instead! What I did:

• Unsubscribe from all ‘news’ feeds on twitter—@nytimes, @cnn, etc. I use other mechanisms (email, actually visiting a website) to get them daily at most. More generally, I aggressively turn off all news notifications on my phone. If the missiles launch and I need to hug my loved ones, someone will text me.
• Unsubscribe from people I don’t know personally. For me, that’s basically all celebrites (except Lin-Manuel) but if that sounds too aggressive, you can Marie Kondo your follows with the help of the Tokimeki Unfollow tool. Two (small) exceptions for me:
  • Have they taught me something I didn’t know, because they’re giving me diverse perspectives not in my personal network? That can be troubling/non-joyful, but still valuable.
  • Have they given me opportunities for real-world action that you can’t get in some other way? For me, this is primarily local organizations — several San Francisco bike, transit, and YIMBY activists. (I find this to almost never be the case from national media, because the opportunities for practical action are too limited.)
• Turn off pure retweets with the Turn Off Retweets tool. In my experience, pure retweets are highly likely to be more angry/emotional, and less informative. Yes, there was some FOMO here. I got over it very quickly. If it is important, I see it eventually.
• Mute (aka filter) political words aggressively. Here are Twitter’s instructions. My word list: all the primary candidate’s names; Trump; President; debate. I’m sure I’ll add more.

(optional) Replace with better news sources

I still feel the need for a lot of politics news. I subscribe to them via non-Twitter mechanisms. This is local as much as possible, or in some cases national news for very specific needs. For example, I still very much feel the need to understand global warming, so that I can target my giving in that space, so I read heated.world and the Washington Post’s Energy 202.

I use Feedbin to subscribe to newsletters (and yes, some RSS feeds still) so that they stay out of my email inbox. (Most of the same ‘aggressively unsubscribe’ applies to my email inbox too…)

(hard, but helpful) come to terms with the world as it is, and act in that framework

At some point in the past few years, I accepted that I’m going to have a baseline level of anger about the state of the world, and that I have to focus on what I can change and let go of what I can’t. (Twitter anger is the latter.) So what can I change? Where is my anger productive?

I’ve found that doing things offline—for me, mostly giving money—really helps. In particular, giving to causes that seek systemic (usually, that means political/government) change like 350.org and local activist groups, and giving a lot, and regularly. This, frankly, makes it a lot easier for me to ignore anger online — each new tweet is not likely to make me be more angry, or give more, because I’m already basically giving what I can. Being confident about that really reduced my FOMO when I started filtering aggressively.

I hear from non-parents/non-startup-founders that physical-world activism (door-knocking, phone banking, local gov meeting-attending, etc.) can be great in this way too but sadly I can’t confirm :(

(I also want to acknowledge that, in the current state of the world, ‘letting go’ gets harder the less privilege you have. I have no great response to that, except to say that I empathize and am trying to fight for you where and how I can.)

Improving my outputs

Having done all that, here’s how I try to improve the Twitter environment for others:

• If I must RT or otherwise share politics news, I only quote tweet. I try to add useful context. What can I add that others can’t? If I can’t add something, if I’m just amplifying anger, I try to shut up instead.
• If I must be angry, I’ve tried to follow a rule that I only express that offline if I am also telling other people who are angry how to constructively address the problem. I don’t just say “I’m so mad about global warming”, say “I’m mad about global warming, here’s what I’m doing to help fix it, you can too“. If I don’t have a ‘here’s what I’m doing’ to add to it … I go back to ‘figure out what I can do’.

This isn’t perfect

Twitter has made me a literally better person, because it has exposed me to viewpoints I don’t have in my daily life that have made me more empathetic to others. It has changed my politics, making me vastly more open to systemic critiques of US center-left politics. So I’m reluctant to say ‘use it less, particularly for politics’. But I feel like it’s the only way to stay sane in 2020.

This post was written by Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Edinburgh.

Kindness on the Internet has been much in the news of late and this quote from novelist Henry James stood out to me:

Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.

I have been working at the University of Edinburgh for over four years now as the Wikimedian in Residence. Four years as of January 2020 in fact, just as Wikipedia itself turned nineteen years old on January 15th 2020. In thinking about this period of my working life, I am reminded of some of the (sometimes) sceptical conversations I have had with (some) academics over the years but more often than not I recall the enthusiasm, generosity and kindness I have encountered.  And I’m reminded also of the words of Katherine Maher, Executive Director for the Wikimedia Foundation, when she said that Wikipedia, ultimately, is based on human generosity; that the act of editing Wikipedia is a generous act by volunteer editors all around the world because they are giving of their time, their expertise and their passion for a subject in order to improve the knowledge shared openly with the world through this free and open online encyclopedia. And why? Well because…

Knowledge creates understanding – understanding is sorely lacking in today’s world. – Katherine Maher.

While the residency has been something of an experiment, a proof of concept if you will for hosting a Wikimedian to support the whole university, I am more convinced than ever that there is a clear role, a structural need even, for Wikimedia in teaching and learning.

Yet while I am an employee of the University of Edinburgh, I attended the other place (University of Glasgow) for my undergraduate course and my postgraduate courses were at Glasgow Caledonian University, University of Strathclyde and Northumbria University. So four years at the University of Edinburgh and experience of five universities all told. As 74 UK universities go on strike now and a national conversation is being held about working conditions, casualised contracts and the workloads of staff at universities it does indeed give pause for thought. Time, for thought and reflection on the purpose of education… and its delivery.

Now imagine you are relaxing after work in a sauna at your local swimming pool one evening and a guy called Patrick starts chatting to you and asking what you do for a living. You tell Patrick why, I’m a Wikipedian at the University of Edinburgh. And Patrick replies… “Cool. What’s Wikipedia got to do with universities?”

Have a think for a moment… what is the link between Wikipedia and Universities? What would you say? How would you answer?

Well Patrick, it’s a fair question. Let’s see.

How about shared vision and mission statements. “The creation, curation and dissemination of knowledge” is built into the University of Edinburgh’s mission while Wikimedia’s vision is to “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.”

And as Sue Beckingham said in her Association for Learning Technology (ALT) keynote it’s about engaging with & understanding the relationship we have with the open web, how people create, curate and contest knowledge online and our relationship with the big digital intermediaries like Facebook, Google, Amazon and Wikipedia, the fifth most visited website in the world.

Then there’s the Digital Skills aspect – It is widely recognised that digital capabilities are a key component of graduate employability. So many reports make this clear. Supporting learning digital research skills, synthesising that information and communicating it in a rapidly changing digital world.

And it’s about how we support developing a more robust critical information literacy. In fact, this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the areas that working with the free and open Wikimedia projects affords. At its heart its about the fact that search is the way we live now and what’s right or wrong or missing on Wikipedia affects the whole internet. And this is how Wikipedia in teaching in learning is often framed – warning students about its use, pros and cons, often with the focus firmly on the cons, as something to be consumed at your peril. When Wikipedia in teaching and learning should really spin this on its head. It’s what you can also contribute as an institution, staff and students, and get out of the teaching & learning experience as a result.

Indeed, the ALT website defines Learning Technology as this:

We define Learning Technology as the broad range of communication, information and related technologies that can be used to support learning, teaching and assessment. Our community is made up of people who are actively involved in understanding, managing, researching, supporting or enabling learning with the use of Learning Technology. We believe that you don’t need to be called ‘Learning Technologist’ to be one.

Wikipedia is learning technology, the largest open knowledge resource in human history that is free, open and anyone can contribute to. Now aged nineteen, as of last month, Wikipedia has truly come of age and ranks among the world’s top ten sites for scholarly resource lookups and is extensively used by virtually every platform used on a daily basis, receiving over 20 billion views per month, from 1.5 billion unique devices. The only non-profit website in the top 100 websites, quite simply “Wikipedia is today the gateway through which millions of people now seek access to knowledge.”– (Cronon, 2012)

Ergo… Wikimedians are learning technologists. And a Wikimedian is just someone who has learnt how to train people how to edit, who facilitates editing events and assignments.

Ergo… Learning technologists are Wikimedians or they should be.

Because at the University of Edinburgh, we have quickly generated real examples of technology-enhanced learning activities appropriate to the curriculum and transformed our students, staff and members of the public from being passive readers and consumers to being active, engaged contributors. The result is that our community is more engaged with knowledge creation online and readers all over the world benefit from our teaching, research and collections.

Our Wikimedia in the Curriculum activities bring benefits to the students who learn new skills and have immediate impact in addressing both the diversity of editors and diversity of content shared online:

• Global Health MSc students add 180-200 words to Global Health related articles e.g. their edits to the page on obesity are viewed 3,000 times per day on average.
• Digital Sociology MSc students engage in workshops with how sociology is communicated and how knowledge is created and curated online each year.
• Reproductive Biology Honours – students work in groups in 2 workshops at the beginning of the semester – learning about digital research kills from our Academic Support Librarians so they can work collaboratively to research and publish a new article on a reproductive biomedical term not yet on Wikipedia. One student’s article on high-grade serous carcinoma, one of the most common forms of ovarian cancer, includes 60 references and diagrams she created, has been viewed over 88,000 times since 2016. That’s impact.
• Translation Studies MSc students gain meaningful published practice each semester by translating 1,500 words to share knowledge between two different language Wikipedias on a topic of their own choosing from the highest quality articles.
• World Christianity MSc students spend the semester undertaking a literature review assignment to make the subject much less about White Northern hemisphere perspectives; creating new articles on Asian Feminist Theology, Sub-Saharan Political Theology and more.
• Data Science for Design MSc – Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikidata, affords students the opportunity to work practically with research datasets, like the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft Database, and surface data to the Linked Open Data Cloud and explore different visualisations and the direct and indirect relationships at play in this semantic web of knowledge to help further discovery.
• This academic year we have also added three more course programmes in Korean Studies MSc, Digital Education MSc (group editing pages related to information literacy), and Global Health Challenges Postgraduate Online (group editing on short stub articles on natural disasters). Indeed we are looking increasingly at how we support online course programmes and supporting discussion, engagement and up-skilling students on these course programmes in more structured self-directed way.

We also work with student societies (Law & Technology, History, Translation, Women in STEM, Wellcomm Kings) and have held events for Ada Lovelace Day, LGBT History Month, Black History Month, Mental Health Awareness Week and celebrated Edinburgh’s Global Alumni; working with the UncoverEd project and the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission.

Students are addressing serious knowledge gaps and are intrinsically motivated to communicate their scholarship because of this. They benefit from the practice academically and enjoy doing it personally because their scholarship is published, lasting long beyond the assignment and does something for the common good for an audience of not one but millions.

Why engage at all? I think we know that representation matters. And that Gender inequality in science and technology is all too real. Gaps in our shared knowledge excludes the vitally important contributions of many within our community and role models, trail blazers are important. You can’t be what you can’t see. To date, 69% of our participating editors at the University of Edinburgh have been women. The choices being made in creating new pages and increasing the visibility of topics and the visibility of inspirational role models online can not only shape public understanding around the world for the better but can also help inform and shape our physical environments to inspire the next generation.

Wikipedia in the curriculum involves identifying reliable secondary sources we can cite (or sometimes the lack thereof); discussing whose knowledge, open access, bias, neutral point of view, writing for a lay audience and copyright. These are all absolutely appropriate for the modern graduate. The skills needed by those contributing to Wikimedia are the same digital literacy skills which a degree at University of Edinburgh is designed to develop: Those of critical reading, summarising, paraphrasing, original writing, referencing, citing, publishing, data handling, and understanding your audience.  In this era of fake news it has never been more important that our students understand how information is published, shared, and contested online. And beyond this, feel empowered that they can do something positive to share fact-checked knowledge and help build understanding.

Because It’s an emotional connection… Within, I’d say, less than 2 hours of me putting her page in place it was the top hit that came back in Google when I Googled it and I just thought that’s it, that’s impact right there!” (Hood & Littlejohn, 2018)

Things can look bleak when we think about all we see in the news and our relationship with the open web and the way in which information is shared online. It’s easy to lose faith at times. Indeed almost two years ago, Sir Tim Berners-Lee was on Channel 4 News being interviewed about the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal and he said this.

We need to rethink our attitude to the internet.

It is not enough just to keep the web open and free because we must also keep a track of what people are building on it.

Look at the systems that people are using, like the social networks and look at whether they are actually helping humanity.

Are they being constructive or are they being destructive?

And he’s later reiterated this point that he feels the open web is at something of a crossroads and could go either way.

Happily, Sir Tim had cheered up a little by May 2018 when he gave his Turing Award lecture in Amsterdam when he said,

It is amazing that humanity has managed to produce Wikipedia. Somebody recently said, “You know what? For all of the defending of the open net and the open web, it would have been worth it if we just got Wikipedia.”

It IS amazing that humanity has produced Wikipedia. And he’s right. That’s my experience of working with Wikipedia. The research, the feedback from staff and students all bear this out. People do feel they are doing something inherently good, and worthwhile in sharing verifiable open knowledge and they learn so much from engaging in this process. Becoming knowledge activists. I commend it to you as a hugely impactful form of learning technology where our staff, students, research and collections can help shape the open web for the better, building understanding to make for a kinder, better world.

Bibliography

1. Wadewitz, A. (2014). 04. Teaching with Wikipedia: the Why, What, and How. Retrieved from https://www.hastac.org/blogs/wadewitz/2014/02/21/04-teaching-wikipedia-why-what-and-how
2. Cronon, W. (2012). Scholarly Authority in a Wikified World | Perspectives on History | AHA. Retrieved from https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/february-2012/scholarly-authority-in-a-wikified-world
3. Levine, N. (2019). A Ridiculous Gender Bias On Wikipedia Is Finally Being Corrected. Retrieved from https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2019/06/234873/womens-world-cup-football-Wikipedia
4. Mathewson, J., & McGrady, R. (2018). Experts Improve Public Understanding of Sociology Through Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://www.asanet.org/news-events/footnotes/apr-may-2018/features/experts-improve-public-understanding-sociology-through-Wikipedia
5. Hood, N., & Littlejohn, A. (2018). Becoming an online editor: perceived roles and responsibilities of Wikipedia editors. Retrieved from http://www.informationr.net/ir/23-1/paper784.html
6. McAndrew, E., O’Connor, S., Thomas, S., & White, A. (2019). Women scientists being whitewashed from Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/women-scientists-being-whitewashed-from-wikipedia-ewan-mcandrew-siobhan-o-connor-dr-sara-thomas-and-dr-alice-white-1-4887048
7. McMahon, C.; Johnson, I.; and Hecht, B. (2017). The Substantial Interdependence of Wikipedia and Google: A Case Study on the Relationship Between Peer Production Communities and Information Technologies.

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).

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 Rosalie Perside, Jakob Warkotsch, and 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 WMDE 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.

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.

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

Further reading:

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

Bath Spa University in the UK had its first ever Wikipedia assignment, as part of a Digital Citizenship module for undergraduates studying Business Management Fashion. The results are mostly in user sandboxes, but some new articles have been created.

Bath Spa University, located in South West England, recently had its first, tentative, Wikipedia student assignment. The Business fashion degree has a focus on sustainable fashion, hence students had been studying the Rana Plaza collapse and its aftermath. This disaster highlighted the role of sweatshop labour in fashion supply chains and led to activism – including the #WhoMadeMyClothes hashtag. This gave a range of Wikipedia articles to which their work is relevant. The Women In Red project was also immensely useful for identifying prominent women in the fashion industry who did not have a Wikipedia article.

User:MartinPoulter gave two workshops on editing and interacting with Wikipedia. Because the Wikipedia element was introduced relatively late in the course, we decided to have the students post in user sandboxes rather than directly edit articles. Some groups collaborated on a single sandbox, and the article history was very useful in showing what each student had contributed.

As well as being marked for their individual essay submitted in the normal way, students were marked on whether they had done enough on-wiki work to make a substantial improvement to Wikipedia. It was still important that they experience feedback through the wiki platform, so in one activity they used Talk pages to write short reviews of each others’ drafts. The resulting work varies widely in quality but it has already enabled some significant improvement to English Wikipedia and at the same time it enabled students to do real collaborative writing. Martin is going through the students’ content, moving it into mainspace, in some cases combining work from multiple drafts. Some articles that have been created or improved:

• Lucinda Chambers
• Ethical Trading Initiative
• Farnaz Abdoli
• Florence Given
• Janet Walker (costumier)

On 26 February Wikimedia UK and the Disruptive Media Learning Lab are holding a one-day summit about the role of Wikimedia in education. This post was written by Martin Poulter and Caroline Kuhn; Martin will be taking part in the summit and teaching people about Wikidata. To learn more about Wikimedia UK’s activities, subscribe to our quarterly newsletter.

11/02/2020-17/02/2020

About us

• The 500th issue of the weekly newsletter has arrived! It all started with issue 1 of the weekly note on 23 July 2010 having 14 news articles.At this milestone, in our 10th year, the current editorial staff would like to thank all the readers who have supported us over the years. We thank you for your interest and the helpful feedback which has enabled the initially small editorial team to produce weekly and hopefully interesting issues. WN is now published in nine languages and enjoys steadily increasing popularity.Only through a strong community can OpenStreetMap be successful despite the commercial competition. The great recognition that the ‘open world map’ has gained in the world of open geodata is remarkable. Thanks are also due to all those who are happy to contribute to our weeklyOSM, in whatever language, and to those who have made weeklyOSM a modest contribution to strengthening the OSM community.Many thanks and enjoy reading.

Mapping

• The JOSM team announced a development version of its editor has been released that brings the Maxar imagery back. Bryan Housel tweeted that the Maxar background layers have also been restored in the iD editor. The imagery service for OSM was temporarily suspended following a sharp increase in usage caused by automated requests.
• It was recommended not to use Vespucci from Google Play but instead use the one from open source store F-Droid, as the Google Play version is lagging three months behind the current version. Fortunately, this issue has now been resolved
• The proposal to introduce the tag duty_free=*, for marking shops which offer duty-free shopping, has been approved.
• memfrob is looking for an open source 3D webmap with 3D terrain which can visualise track data and let a user fly over it.
• Mapillary released the results of their survey of delivery drivers, carried out to estimate the cost to business of broken maps. The losses due to broken maps are huge.
• Minutely Extracts is a new service by Protomaps for on-demand OSM downloads in PBF format. The data is replicated from the main OSM database once every minute, so mappers can download and make use of their edits immediately after uploading. You can find further details in bdon’s diary entry.

Community

• Martin Koppenhoefer thinks that the OSMF board has overruled the ‘on the ground rule’ and the Data Working Group decision to tag the Crimea peninsula as being part of Russia two years ago. He asks the board on OSM’s main mailing list to revisit the previous decision. As expected this started a long discussion about this case in particular but also about the tagging of disputed boundaries, the ‘on the ground rule’, the role of non-physical objects in our database and many others. (Nabble)
• Daniel Capilla points to an ongoing discussion about how explicitly abstaining from voting should be treated during the tagging proposal voting process.
• The results of the most recent board election of OSM US are in. The amendments to the articles of association (change in the terms of office of the board members) failed as they did not meet the quorum of 50% of the membership participating. The new board consists of Jubal Harpster, Daniela Waltersdorfer, Alyssa Wright, Martijn van Exel and Minh Nguyễn. Jonah Adkins and Steve Johnson were not elected.
• Shawna Bjorgan, of Arizona State University, writes about her experience interning remotely with YouthMappers and the USAID GeoCenter on the YouthMappers blog.
• OpenStreetMap US publishes a monthly newsletter with a short selection of news, events and announcements from the OpenStreetMap community in the United States. You can read the February Issue here.
• Valeriy Trubin continues his series of interviews with OSMers. He talked with Georgiy Potapov (automatic translation) about neural networks and AI and with Sergey Zaichenko (automatic translation) about the use of OSM data in big projects such as the ‘Sputnik‘ map service.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Joost Schouppe from the OSMF board announced the start of OSMF’s microgrants. However, before the first funds can be granted, the mechanism to do so, in the form of a selection committee, must be set up. If you think you can help OSM by running the program, your application is welcome until 8 March 2020.
• The minutes of the OSMF board meeting of 30 January 2020 are online. Topics included ODbL violations, dealing with new members without a history of mapping activity and the establishment of a working group on diversity.
• OSM and the OSMF favour open and self-hosted software, as documented in the FOSS policy. However, the implementation has stalled somewhat. Tobias Knerr from the OSMF board is trying to push the implementation further by looking for volunteers for a FOSS Policy Committee.

Events

• The FOSSGIS Conference 2020 and OSM Saturday will take place in Freiburg im Breisgau from 11 to 14 March. Nakaner wants (automatic translation) people to know that participation on OSM Saturday 2020 (14 March) is free of charge and independent of the FOSSGIS conference.
• Manfred Stock reminds us that the deadline for the call for participation and the call for abstracts of the academic track at State of the Map 2020 in Cape Town is looming.
• OSGeo Oceania, in lieu of purchasing carbon credits for its recent conference has decided to fund the planting of 250 yellow box trees in the Churchill National Park in Lysterfield, Victoria, Australia. The tree planting will take place on 15 August 2020 and people who would like to participate should register with ParkConnect.
• On 14 March 2020 the GIS meeting will be held in Saint Petersburg (Russia) as part of the spbgeotex project. The meeting will be dedicated to that famous software package – QGIS.
• 50 students, with their teachers, from five European countries will work together in Râmnicu Vâlcea, Romania at the end of April to do pre-disaster mapping and learn to use several QA tools.
• Pista ng Mapa, a festival that aims to promote the use of free and open geodata and software, will take place from 27 to 29 May 2020 in the Philippines.
• The SOTM Baltics 2020 is scheduled for 6 March 2020 in Riga. The conference should be of interest for non-Baltic mappers as well, as all talks will be in English.
• Open Belgium 2020 will bring together over 50 national and international speakers to provide information about Open Knowledge and Open Data. osm.be can be of help if you’d like to attend but can not afford the ticket for the event on 6 March 2020 in Hasselt, Belgium.
• OpenStreetMap Belgium will be hosting a meet up with Allan Mustard, chair of the OSMF board of directors, at the Cafe De Markten in Brussels on 23 March. RSVP via Meetup.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT has launched an export tool, which aims to ease the delivery of OSM data to humanitarian organisations via the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX).
• In cooperation with the United Nations and the Ugandan government HOT has created the Risk Atlas of Arua showing existing hazards, exposure, and vulnerabilities.
• During the UN World Urban Forum 10, held in Abu Dhabi between 8 and 13 February, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team had a training event titled ‘Map Your City: A Tale of Three Countries’, where project managers from Indonesia, Turkey and Uganda demonstrated OSM data tools and described how open data is used in different humanitarian contexts. You can access the slides of the event here.

Education

• The German tutorial ‘Getting Started with OpenStreetMap’ by Volker Gringmuth, aka kreuzschnabel, offers a really good introduction to the OSM universe, and not only for beginners. Volker continues to update his tutorial and the pdf may be interesting for translators.
• Ryan Lambert started a webinar series of six videos on how to work with PostGIS and OSM. The first four videos are online; the others will follow shortly.

Maps

• Do you remember Geopedia, the digital travel guide? Developed by Michael Schön, this application (also available as a smartphone app) shows Wikipedia articles with a geolocation overlaid on OpenStreetMap (or Google Maps if that’s what you’re into).
• Mapbox visualises the course of the outbreak of the new coronavirus on a real-time map with a lot of additional information.
• Art group ‘Neploho’ (Russian for ‘not bad’) created an online map of popular places for first dates in Moscow.
• An investment map is available on the website of the Administration of Chernogorsk (a city in Russia). OSM is used as a basemap.

Open Data

• A reminder that you are invited to Open Data Day, 7 March. For the tenth time, groups from around the world will hold local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities.

Licences

• The website ‘All houses of Russia’ has allowed the use its photos for editing data in OpenStreetMap.

Software

• The base version of the blender-osm plugin for Blender 3D can now be downloaded for free.
• Generation Street, a game based on OSM data, is now available for free on Steam (with a limited selection of territories, the entire planet is available in DLC). According (automatic translation) to its developer, Roman Shuvalov, its source code will be opened in the foreseeable future.

Programming

• mmd has announced the new CGImap version 0.8.0 in his OSM user diary. Thanks to the new changeset endpoints, the OSM API 0.6 is now covered to the extent that running most parts of an OSM editing session is now possible using only CGImap.
• Rostislav Netek et al. compare in their paper ‘Performance Testing on Vector vs. Raster Map Tiles-Comparative Study on Load Metrics’ the relative performance in delivering maps over HTTP between raster and vector tiles.

Releases

• The OSM Software Watchlist by Walter, aka wambacher, will continue to be maintained and it remains the reference in terms of highlighting release changes of OSM-related software. Walter, a long time member of the Wochennotiz/weeklyOSM team, will not be able to maintain the Boundaries-map in the future.
• OsmAnd’s iOS version is catching up with the Android one. The team has released version 3.12 which comes with an improved route details screen.
• The webmap framework OpenLayers has reached version 6.2.0. The new version improves mousewheel zooming, optimises text rendering, introduces the ‘displacement’ option for a more flexible positioning of point symbolisers, and many, many, more improvements.

Did you know …

• … how to map highways covered by a building? The wiki article Key:covered explains how to map highways covered by buildings in situations where using layer=-1, denoting the highway is underground, is not applicable.
• … that there is a list of OSM-related Twitter accounts?
• … about the websites ‘Tram systems of Russia’ and ‘Bus lanes of Russia’?
• … that the iD editor now has its own blog? This blog covers feature releases, community news, and development insights from iD’s maintainers and contributors.
• … that windy.com has animations of the weather forecasts produced by various models superimposed on an OpenStreetMap-based map?

OSM in the media

• El Territorio, a local Argentinian newspaper, informs us (automatic translation) that all rivers and streams in the Misiones province, Argentina, can be found in OpenStreetMap. They can also be seen in a hydrology map prepared with uMap by user Carlos Brys. Most of the toponyms were collected by geographer Miguel Stefañuk, who travelled the mostly jungle covered province for many years, checking the names of streams with rural and native dwellers.

Other “geo” things

• BBC Radio’s ‘Inside Science’ visits Britain’s Ordnance Survey, and some of the methods that they’re using will sound fairly familiar to contributors to OpenStreetMap.
• The Ramblers are running their ‘Don’t Lose Your Way’ project to identify potential lost rights of way by searching old OS maps for paths, which are marked historically as footpaths or bridleroads, which are now missing on the current OS map. Time is running short, from 1 January 2026 it will no longer be possible to add paths to the definitive map (the national record of public paths) and access to missing paths will be lost forever.
• Jack Dangermond, founder and president of ESRI in California, details in a Geospatial World article titled ‘GIS as an intelligent nervous system for the planet’ the importance of GIS and geodata from the perspective of one of the market leaders.
• Google solves the problem of disputed borders by showing whatever the user wants to see. Greg Bensinger’s article in the Washington Post describes how the Silicon Valley firm’s decision-making on maps is often shrouded in secrecy, even to some of those who work to shape its digital atlases every day.
• Paul Kang is a Nashville (USA) resident with a passion for adding civil rights related sites to Google Maps. Molly McHugh-Johnson’s article describes how Paul’s hobby started and grew. If only we could somehow encourage him to also add them to OSM. Then not only would his work not ‘be going anywhere’, it would also be freely available for everyone to use.
• Dan Stowell and Jack Kelly explained the value of mapping the location of solar photovoltaic panels. They highlight the recent work done by OSM mappers to add over 120,000 installations to the map.
• Christine Ro discussed some of the unintended consequences of using remote sensing in human right campaigns. She gives as an example the 2007 project ‘Eyes on Darfur’, where the villages in Sudan that were being remotely monitored to discourage human rights violations ended up being more likely to experience violence.
• SevenCs has released a new version of its electronic nautical chart display software. The new version allows users to combine SevenCs’ visuals with third-party geographic data sources such as those provided by OpenStreetMap.
• DC Rainmaker reviewed the Suunto 7 with Wear OS, a smart watch that features an OSM-based map.
• Feedspot has a list of 75 of the most popular blogs and websites about GIS (Geographic Information Systems) for 2020.
• New locations are available (automatic translation) on Yandex.Panoramas. Earlier Yandex gave permission (automatic translation) to use its panoramas for editing OSM data.
• appleinsider.com features a comparison of Apple Maps and Google Maps in a comprehensive article. Unfortunately the article does not include any pointers to other options.
• The GEO-3 payload of the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay System (EGNOS), hosted aboard the EUTELSAT 5 West B satellite, has successfully entered into service. The payload is part of the program to update Europe’s satellite-based augmentation system.
• And finally a time lapse of our future: A journey to the end of time …

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Turin	FOSS4G-it/OSMit 2020	2020-02-18-2020-02-22
Hanover	OSM-Sprechstunde	2020-02-19
Ulmer Alb	Stammtisch Ulmer Alb	2020-02-20
Rennes	Atelier découverte	2020-02-23
Takasago	Takasago Open Datathon	2020-02-24
Singen	Stammtisch Bodensee	2020-02-26
Hanover	OSM-Sprechstunde	2020-02-26
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-02-26
Lübeck	Lübecker Mappertreffen	2020-02-27
Brno	Únorový brněnský Missing maps mapathon na Geografickém ústavu	2020-02-27
Toulouse	Contrib’atelier OpenStreetMap	2020-02-29
Budapest	Budapest gathering	2020-03-02
London	Missing Maps London	2020-03-03
Hanover	OSM-Sprechstunde	2020-03-04
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	2020-03-04
Praha/Brno/Ostrava	Kvartální pivo	2020-03-04
Dortmund	Mappertreffen	2020-03-06
Riga	State of the Map Baltics	2020-03-06
Amagasaki	GPSで絵を描いてみようじゃあ～りませんか	2020-03-07
Rennes	Réunion mensuelle	2020-03-09
Grenoble	Rencontre mensuelle	2020-03-09
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #14	2020-03-09
Toronto	Toronto Mappy Hour	2020-03-09
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2020-03-10
Zurich	115. OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-03-11
Hanover	OSM-Sprechstunde	2020-03-11
Freiburg	FOSSGIS-Konferenz	2020-03-11-2020-03-14
Chemnitz	Chemnitzer Linux-Tage	2020-03-14-2020-03-15
Valcea	EuYoutH OSM Meeting	2020-04-27-2020-05-01
Guarda	EuYoutH OSM Meeting	2020-06-24-2020-06-28
Cape Town	HOT Summit	2020-07-01-2020-07-02
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 Elizabete, Nakaner, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Silka123, Softgrow, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, geologist, jinalfoflia.

One of my longstanding pet peeves is that skin development for MediaWiki is so hard. I propose a radical change to how skins are installed and ask for feedback.

Having watched teenagers use Myspace.com and then tumblr.com and watching Wikimedians build all sorts of things using wikitext templating it's clear that skinning anything should be possible with a mixture of basic knowledge of web technology (HTML,CSS maybe JSON) and/or cargo cult programming. The MediaWiki skin ecosystem is pretty sparse and when skins are created they don't tend to be published for wider consumption or are lost in github repos that are never linked to. Some never even get built. After almost 10 years in this movement it's easy to see why.

At a recent offsite I got all my team to stand up in a room and asked them to sit down if they felt comfortable with HTML. A few sat down and I told them unfortunately they couldn't build a skin. When I asked them if they felt comfortable editing CSS, a few more sat down and I told them the same thing. Eventually everyone sat down. What was interesting was who sat down and when. The designers sat down at the mention of PHP (while comfortable with CSS and JS) as did many frontend engineers. Meanwhile backend engineers sat down at the mention of PHP.

Our skin code is pretty complicated. We currently encourage skin development by guiding users to the ExampleSkin. This extension is pretty scary to many developers not already in our ecosystem and many designers who are in it. There is an extreme amount of PHP and knowledge of folder structure and MediaWiki-concepts such as ResourceLoader is needed before someone can even start.

Currently to create a skin at minimum you must

• Download and setup MediaWiki
• Learn git and clone the ExampleSkin repo
• Understand ResourceLoader
• Understand our i18n system
• Understand how skin.json works
• Edit PHP to generate HTML
• Edit CSS

To encourage a healthy skin system we need to lower many of the barriers to implementing a skin. It should be as simple as:

• Clone a repo
• Edit some CSS and HTML
• Run some npm commands

During the implementation of MobileFrontend and MinervaNeue many changes were made to the skin system to help build the new skin whilst maintain the old skin. It also intentionally made some breaking changes from traditional skin - for example no longer were languages or categories part of the HTML of an article. JavaScript and CSS shipped by all skins was turned off in preference for its own versions. In my opinion this was the skin's right. A good skinning system allows you to create radically different skins and innovate. If our skin system was healthy we'd likely have skins of all sorts of shapes and sizes. A good skin system also makes maintenance easier. Right now because of class inheritance, it's very difficult to make changes to our existing skins or our core skin PHP without worrying about breaking something elsewhere. Similar changes and challenges happened with Timeless that I'm sure Isarra can attest to!

Exploring different approaches

I've been lamenting this situation for some time. A while back I created an extension called SimpleSkins that reduced the Minerva skin to 2 files with some ambitious and breaking changes to the PHP skin code that I dreamed of one day upstreaming.

At a recent hackathon, with this idea still in mind, I took a slightly different approach. Instead of trying to make a skin a folder of several files I thought - what if the skin folder was an output of a build step? Similar to the SimpleSkin approach I again focused on a folder of frontend friendly technologies and reduced Vector to 3 files - Mustache (template), JS (with require support), LESS(css) however the generation of skin.json, PHP was left to a build script. Remarkably this worked and was relatively straightforward. One interesting insight I had this time however was that no skin developer should require a MediaWiki install to build the skin - with templates a lot of data can be stubbed or come from an API endpoint. Not having to install a MediaWiki install is a big deal!

With a good architecture a lot of our skin system can be abstracted away. A skin without qqq codes is still useful provided en.json has been generated. ResourceLoader module config is much easier to auto-generate now we have packageFiles provided we enforce a common entry point e.g. index.js and index.css/less. The PHP skin class should and can do more. Instead of having skins that extend SkinTemplate e.g. SkinVector we should have a skin rendering class that renders folders that contain skin meta data....

How we do it.

Forgetting about existing technology choices and working with what we've got, I'd propose automating most of the skin registration process - to the point that PHP is irrelevant and JS and JSON files are optional.

I strongly believe the following is possible:

• An online skin builder that saves and exports skin folders to download folder or github similar to jsfiddle
• A valid skin is a folder with at minimum 2 files - index.mustache and index.(css/less)
• You should be able to copy and paste an existing skin and get a new skin without any modification except the folder name.

To achieve such a goal we would need a SkinRenderer class that locates a skin directory and renders the template inside it (Mustache is currently the template language we support in core). SkinRenderer when passed the skin key skinnew for example would find the folder skinnew in the skins folder and the files index.less, index.js and skin.mustache. It would pass skin.mustache data (which is subject to deprecation policy and well documented and it would register a ResourceLoader module using index.less and index.js and packageFiles. qqq.json and en.json if needed could live in the i18n folder as they currently do but their absence would not cause any problems.

A developer would fork a new version of the ExampleSkin which provides the basic file components, run npm install and then npm start. This would pull our core frontend technologies - mustache and LESS from npm and then pass the skin through a tool such as parceljs that allows live updating, the workflow of which is demonstrated in this video. However unlike in my hack experiment, installing the skin would be as simple as copying that folder into mediawiki's skin folder rather than running a build step :)

What do I do next?

Am I alone in thinking it should be possible to build skins without PHP? Do you have different opinions on what the skin system should be? Do you have concerns about how such a system would scale or whether such a system would get adoption? What do you think of my skin builder tool and should I work on it more? If so I'd love to hear more from you. Any feedback you can provide would be helpful to decide whether I should prepare and push and RFC.

Thank you for your time!

A few days ago, during a period of severe flooding across many parts of England and Wales, caused by storms Ciara and Dennis, one of my friends shared this Financial Times story, UK makes last minute bid for EU flood funds, on Facebook:

Obviously, it was a timely item, and relevant to many of those affected. and clearly related to recent Brexit developments.

Or was it?

A mutual friend soon responded:

As you can see, they pointed out that the story was actually four years old.

Facebook could prevent well-intentioned posts of such stale news from misleading people, and subtly discourage people from repeating them, by including the original publication date in their preview, something like this:

There are a number of ways they could obtain the publication date, such as from the shared page’s meta headers, and if no date is available they could even warn “no date specified, please check source”.

Of course, this won’t stop bad actors from publishing stories on web pages with deliberately misleading metadata, nor the inept from accidentally doing so, but Facebook are reportedly downgrading unreliable sources anyway, so that’s just another factor to add to their criteria.

And it’s not just Facebook, but Twitter and other social media services, that could do this.

The post How Proactively Publishing Publication Dates Could Help Facebook Fight Fake News appeared first on Andy Mabbett, aka pigsonthewing.

What software do you need to manage data/knowledge in your wiki? Historically this was Semantic MediaWiki. Is that still the case, and how do the alternatives stack up?

Jewish women are underrepresented on the reference site — but not if this class has anything to write about it

Wikipedia is the most popular reference site on the internet, with nearly 20,000 articles added every month. Yet an estimated 85% of its editors are male — a problem of gender imbalance the site’s founder, Jimmy Wales, has said he isn’t sure how to fix — and a mere 17% of its biographies are about women.

“Instead of being the egalitarian ‘sum of all human knowledge,’” as a 2015 New Statesman article by Jenny Kleeman put it, “the English version of Wikipedia is mostly the sum of male knowledge.”

That’s what makes the work of one Rice University course, Sex and Gender in Jewish Culture, so vital.

Each student became an “expert” in one small topic area of women’s studies — Jewish women, in particular — over the course of the semester, then presented a published Wikipedia article on that topic to their fellow students on the last day of class.

“I wanted to structure all the assignments for this particular class around the idea of writing as activism, and the Wikipedia project fit perfectly into that principle,” said Melissa Weininger, the Anna Smith Fine Senior Lecturer in Jewish Studies and associate director of the Program in Jewish Studies.

She introduced the assignment for the first time last semester, in collaboration with Wiki Education, which connects higher education to Wikipedia in an effort to make its information more representative, accurate and complete.

Writing Wikipedia entries about Jewish women or topics pertinent to them was only one of Weininger’s many course assignments. The class also penned op-eds, watched Israeli and American movies depicting Jewish women and read short stories.

But it was the Wikipedia project that resonated most with the students.

“There’s an obvious lack of representation of Jewish women in history, and it’s even more obvious on Wikipedia,” said Lovett College junior Julia Fisher, an art history major who took the course last semester in part to explore her own Jewish heritage. But what she came away with was a whole new understanding of who writes our shared history and why.

Fisher was surprised to find that very little had been written about Israeli poet Yona Wallach; what was on the stub Wikipedia article had been plagiarized, Fisher discovered. Yet Fisher found multiple books and articles in Rice’s Fondren Library that discussed Wallach’s life.

“I didn’t understand how all of this information hadn’t been synthesized into a Wikipedia article before,” she said. “That really surprised me, because it’s all readily available. Why hadn’t anyone thought to put it all together yet?”

In a world with so much information at our fingertips, in fact, one of the most difficult things to impart to students is how to differentiate reliable and unreliable sources.

“In the last few years, I have been rethinking many of my class assignments, trying to teach writing and argumentation skills through projects that have more value to students and to the world than standard academic research papers,” Weininger said.

Sarah Silberman, a Wiess College senior who was also attracted to the course as a means of exploring her own family history, was shocked to find that prominent Jewish historian Paula Hyman had a short, “not very good” article on Wikipedia.

“She essentially founded the modern study of Jewish women’s history,” Silberman said.

Accustomed to writing long-form research papers as a history major, Silberman appreciated the Wikipedia project as an opportunity to write in a completely different format as well as a chance to have her research published in a public venue for a change.

“I think Dr. Weininger set up the course in a really good way that made it both nontraditional but still very effective,” Silberman said.

The residual effects of the course are just as important: With more women editors now trained on how to research, cite and write Wikipedia articles — and with an increased awareness of the ongoing gender imbalance issue — Weininger hopes her students will continue their contributions in the future.

“I am really proud of the work my students produced through this project,” Weininger said. “They dedicated themselves to it wholeheartedly and it was clear at the end that they had both learned a lot and enjoyed the process, as well as the outcome.”

For Fisher, who still checks in on her Wikipedia entry like a proud parent, it was a project she’ll never forget.

“It was easily the coolest part of the class because it actually felt like we were making a real, tangible impact,” Fisher said. “It wasn’t just like we were writing a paper and then it disappears forever. This is permanent.”

Katharine Shilcutt is a media relations specialist in Rice University’s Office of Public Affairs.

Interested in adapting a Wikipedia writing assignment for your own course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for access to our free assignment templates and tools.

This blog was originally published February 10, 2020 by Rice Unversity’s Office of Public Affairs. It has been republished here with permission from the author.

The Cloud Services team is in the process of updating and standardizing the use of DNS names throughout Cloud VPS projects and infrastructure, including the Toolforge project. A lot of this has to do with reducing our reliance on the badly-overloaded term 'Labs' in favor of the 'Cloud' naming scheme. The whole story can be found on this Wikitech proposal page. These changes will be trickling out over the coming weeks or months, but one change you might notice already.

New private domain for VPS instances

For several years virtual machines have been created with two internal DNS entries: <hostname>.eqiad.wmflabs and <hostname>.<project>.eqiad.wmflabs. As of today, hosts can also be found in a third place: <hostname>.<project>.eqiad1.wikimedia.cloud. There's no current timeline to phase out the old names, but the new names are now the preferred/official internal names. Reverse DNS lookups on a instance's IP address will return the new name, and many other internal cloud services (for example Puppet) will start using the new names for newly-created VMs.

Eventually the non-standard .wmflabs top level domain will be phased out, so you should start retraining your fingers and updating your .ssh/config today.

If you visit the Students tab of your course page, you may notice that it looks a bit different. As the first phase of our Spring 2020 push to improve the instructor user experience, we’ve rolled out a new version of the Students list that lets you view details about the Article Assignments for any student.

This new view builds on the improvements to the student user experience that we launched before the start of the term, and includes links to the key sandbox pages where students will complete the different phases of their assignment — preparing their bibliography, drafting their articles, reviewing the drafts of their peers, and editing live Wikipedia articles. We’ve built this interface in particular around the task of evaluating student work, and we’ll continue to iterate on it over the next several months to make it easier for instructors to efficiently view and grade their students’ work for each milestone in the Wikipedia assignment.

We’re eager to get your feedback! If you have ideas for what else could be changed to make the grading process easier, leave a comment on our blog or send an email.

The next phase of this project is to sit down with instructors and see how they make use of the Dashboard for reviewing and grading their students’ Wikipedia work. If you can spare an hour to meet with the Wiki Education technology team to test out these features, discuss your grading process, and help us plan further improvements, please let us know!

In an effort to create a repeatable, streamlined process for consumption of security services the Security Team has been working on changes and improvements to our workflows. Much of this effort is an attempt to consolidate work intake for our team in order to more effectively communicate status, priority and scheduling. This is step 1 and we expect future changes as our tooling, capabilities and processes mature.

How to collaborate with the Security Team

The Security Team works in an iterative manner to build new and mature existing security services as we face new threats and identify new risks. For a list of currently deployed services available in this iteration please review our services page.

The initial point of contact for the majority of our services is now a consistent Request For Services [2] (RFS) form [3].

The two workflow exceptions to RFS are the Privacy Engineering [4] service and Security Readiness Review [5] process which already had established methods that are working well.

If the RFS forms are confusing or don't lead you to answers you need try security-help@wikimedia.org to get assistance with finding the right service, process, or person

security@wikimedia.org will continue to be our primarily external reporting channel

Coming changes in Phabricator

We will be disabling the workboard on the Privacy [6] project. This workboard is not actively or consistently cultivated and often confuses those who interact with it. Privacy is a legitimate tag to be used in many cases, but the resourced privacy contingent within WMF will be using the Privacy engineering [7] component.

We will be disabling the workboard for the Security [8] project. Like the Privacy project this workboard is not actively or consistently cultivated and is confusing. Tasks which are actively resourced should have an associated group [9] tag such as Security Team [10].

The Security project will be broken up into subprojects with meaningful names that indicate user relation to the Security landscape. This is in service to Security no longer serving double duty as an ACL and a group project. This closes long standing debt and mirrors work done in T90491 for Operations to improve transparency. This means an ACL*Security-Issues project will be created and Security will still be available to link cross cutting issues, but will also allow equal footing for membership for all Phabricator users.

Other Changes

A quick callout to the consistency [11] and Gerrit sections of our team handbook [12]. As a team we have agreed that all changesets we interact on need a linked task with the Security-Team tag.

security@ will soon be managed as a Google group collaborative inbox [13] as outlined in T243446, This will allow for an improved workflow and consistency in interactions with inquiries.

Thanks
John

[1] Security Services
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Security_Team/Services
[2] RFS docs
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security/SOP/Requests_For_Service
[3] RFS form
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/form/72/
[4] Privacy Engineering form
https://form.asana.com/?hash=554c8a8dbf8e96b2612c15eba479287f9ecce3cbaa09e235243e691339ac8fa4&id=1143023741172306
[5] Readiness Review SOP
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Security/SOP/Security_Readiness_Reviews
[6] Phab Privacy tag
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/privacy/
[7] Privacy Engineering Project
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/4425/
[8] Security Tag
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/security/
[9] Phab Project types
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Project_management#Types_of_Projects
[10] Security Team tag
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/security-team/
[11] Security Team Handbook
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Security_Team/Handbook#Consistency
[12] Secteam handbook-gerrit
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Security_Team/Handbook#Gerrit
[13] Google collab inbox
https://support.google.com/a/answer/167430?hl=en

Khyati Soneji has been improving the Wiki Education Dashboard for nearly a year now. She joined our open tech project as an Outreachy Intern in 2019 and is now mentoring another intern for a new project. Recently she attended the SWASTHA meetup in Mumbai along with our 2019 Google Summer of Code intern Amit Joki, who has been helping improve the Dashboard for almost two years. The experience further inspired their passion for the open knowledge project we all know and love.

“SWASTHA is a new initiative to tackle the lack of authentic healthcare related articles in the regional languages of India,” Amit explained. “It stands for Special Wikipedia Awareness Scheme for The Healthcare Affiliates. Incidentally, the acronym also means ‘health’ in Hindi.”

The initiative was started by Abhishek Suryawanshi, who believes in the importance of accessible knowledge, especially when it comes to healthcare. “The project focuses on delivering high quality and verified health related articles which are region and language based, so people can read the articles in their native language,” Khyati explained.

“Because there are lots of Indians who don’t speak English,” Amit added, “it’s difficult for them to access free knowledge regarding healthcare because articles online in their regional languages are nearly non-existent.” This problem of access is one that folks in the SWASTHA initiative hope to tackle.

Khyati and Amit have both worked in a tech-capacity behind the scenes of Wikipedia-related projects, but they hadn’t had experience with volunteer editor communities before.

“The meetup was an informal, friendly meeting which introduced us to various Indian Wikipedia communities of editors,” Khyati shared. “I personally was not at all aware of the various native language editors communities.”

“It was a great way to know the people behind the articles,” Amit agreed. “The passion they have is what defines Wikipedia as a movement. They put the face to the movement and that’s always an excellent way to get more people into the fold.”

Both Amit and Khyati were impressed by how many years of experience were represented among these Wikipedians. “Some of their experience was far greater than our ages and that was humbling and overwhelming, in a good sense,” said Amit. Khyati added that “some people have made their family also contribute to Wikipedia and have become a Wikipedian family! It was great to see their passion and enthusiasm to help their people to get free knowledge in their native language.”

Over two days, the 20 or so participants divided themselves into groups and discussed problems faced in their communities that the SWASTHA initiative could help address. Khyati and Amit shared how the Dashboard could be used as part of those solutions. The first step, the group decided, was to translate the 10 health focused Wikipedia articles chosen as part of the initiative into everyone’s native languages.

“As a Dashboard team, we came up with an idea that there should be one instructor and everyone would be assigned a task to translate the articles in their native language,” said Khyati. “And we can easily check the number of contributors, check their progress and how many health articles are available in each language, and a general idea that writing health articles (in any language) should be made part of the curriculum of some top-notch Medical College so that professors can assign articles to students and professors would then verify those articles and we can get authenticated medical articles, which can later be divided into different languages.”

“We had a quick analysis about the challenges we may face,” Amit also explained. “Those included problems ranging from having hardly any canonical source of authentic terminology of the diseases in the regional languages, to finding a way to validate the articles. Because it’s healthcare we are talking about, it becomes our responsibility that what gets published is thoroughly vetted by experts before it ends up in the public domain. After the challenges were discussed, we framed a tentative timeline stretching across a period of 3 months after which we would return to quantify the work that has been done and to further discuss how we should take this forward.”

All in all, Khyati and Amit agreed that the meetup was inspiring and energizing.

“It was such a nice experience seeing the energy and eagerness of people to help others get free access to knowledge,” said Khyati. “I feel lucky to have become part of such a community and am very thankful that I was invited to such a wonderful event. I am hopeful that we will be able to accomplish the task and help people. I’m glad to help in this great initiative by bringing new members into the group and also by contributing.”

“Overall, the whole experience was amazing,” Amit echoed. “I got to board an aeroplane for the first time in my life, thanks to Wikimedia and Wiki Education. The people I met were the nicest set of people I could have met and this only further strengthens my belief that Wikipedia stands for all the good that can be found on the Internet – openness, inclusiveness, accessibility, and caring about knowledge.”

To learn more about the SWASTHA initiative, click here. To read more about our tech mentoring program, check out this blog post.

mwparserfromhell is now fully on wheels. Well...not those wheels - Python wheels!

If you're not familiar with it, mwparserfromhell is a powerful parser for MediaWiki's wikitext syntax with an API that's really convenient for bots to use. It is primarily developed and maintained by Earwig, who originally wrote it for their bot.

Nearly 7 years ago, I implemented opt-in support for using mwparserfromhell in Pywikibot, which is arguably the most used MediaWiki bot framework. About a year later, Merlijn van Deen added it as a formal dependency, so that most Pywikibot users would be installing it...which inadvertently was the start of some of our problems.

mwparserfromhell is written in pure Python with an optional C speedup, and to build that C extension, you need to have the appropriate compiler tools and development headers installed. On most Linux systems that's pretty straightforward, but not exactly for Windows users (especially not for non-technical users, which many Pywikibot users are).

This brings us to Python wheels, which allow for easily distributing built C code without requiring users to have all of the build tools installed. Starting with v0.4.1 (July 2015), Windows users could download wheels from PyPI so they didn't have to compile it themselves. This resolved most of the complaints (along with John Vandenberg's patch to gracefully fallback to the pure Python implementation if building the C extension fails).

In November 2016, I filed a bug asking for Linux wheels, mostly because it would be faster. I thought it would be just as straightforward as Windows, until I looked into it and found PEP 513, which specified that basically, the wheels needed to be built on CentOS 5 to be portable enough to most Linux systems.

With the new Github actions, it's actually pretty straightforward to build these manylinux1 wheels - so a week ago I put together a pull request that did just that. On every push it will build the manylinux1 wheels (to test that we didn't break the manylinux1 compatibility) and then on tag pushes, it will upload those wheels to PyPI for everyone to use.

Yesterday I did the same for macOS because it was so straightforward. Yay.

So, starting with the 0.6.0 release (no date set yet), mwparserfromhell will have pre-built wheels for Windows, macOS and Linux users, giving everyone faster install times. And, nearly everyone will now be able to use the faster C parser without needing to make any changes to their setup.

04/02/2020-10/02/2020

Mapping

• Jinal Foflia shared a MapRoulette task to add street names in the regions around Jakarta, as well as a task to add missing sidewalks in Singapore to make the Singapore map more pedestrian-friendly.
• Mateusz Konieczny suggested using amenity=faculty as he thinks that university faculties often deserve to be mapped separately. Comments in the discussion raise various issues with the naming of constituent parts of universities. (Nabble)
• The European Water Project continues its efforts to improve the tagging schema for drinking-water related tagging. Stuart from the project started the voting on the proposal for drinking_water:refill=<yes/no> and drinking_water:refill_scheme=<scheme-name/multiple>.
• Joseph Eisenberg suggested improving the tagging system for micromapping as he thinks that the current tags aren’t quite right for this purpose. (Nabble)
• The voting for amenity=give_box, an amenity where you can share various types of items freely, has ended with an unclear result as it seems it is ambiguous how ‘abstain’ should be counted.
• Ilya Zverev reports (automatic translation) a large amount of editorial work (reverts including deletion of old object versions) has started in Russia. About 600 organised unknowns (probably Rostelecom) have taken data from unauthorised sources. Presumably, in preparation for this year’s census, buildings and addresses were cribbed from unauthorised sources in an organised way.

Community

• The first meeting of the Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee was held on 12 February. Mikel Maron posted some rough notes on what came out of the meeting.
• Heather Leson reported on her time spent at FOSDEM 2020, particularly the community and legal sessions. She was pleased to see that Ilya Zverev’s talk on reverse geocoding is available online, as his talk was to a full room.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OSMF invited people to join the OpenStreetMap diversity mailing list. They also asked for help in translating their blog posts to languages other than English.

Events

• Nick Whitelegg brought to the notice of the talk mailing list readers the Panorama Mapping Party with TrekView, a not-for-profit organisation which aims to capture panoramas. The event will take place on 2 May 2020 at the English village Ashurst, in Hampshire.
• Stefan Keller from the HSR University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil invites (automatic translation) you to the 12th Mapathon and Mapping Party to be held on 24 April 2020 in Rapperswil, Switzerland. The invitation is also extended to English-speaking mappers and beginners.
• FOSS4G-IT 2020, an event dedicated to Free and Open Source Geographic Data and Software, will take place from 18 to 22 February 2020 at the Politecnico di Torino / Turin, Italy.

Humanitarian OSM

• Warin has the impression that HOT is using the undocumented tag damage= and contacted the HOT mailing list with his observation.
• EurekAlert, a non-profit news-release distribution platform, features an article about the three finalists of ‘Creating Hope in Conflict’, a challenge supported by the US Agency for International Development, the UK Department for International Development, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands. The goal is to help the vulnerable and hardest-to-reach people affected by humanitarian crises.
• The website thenextweb.com reported about the efforts of scientists to develop an AI-based tool that can help find safe routes after a disaster strikes, enabling families to find each other.

Education

• Jez Nicholson made “OSMUK-in-a-box”, his own toolchain for querying OSM data for the UK from a database, available at GitHub.

Maps

• Andrei Kashcha’s ridgeline map, which we have recently written about, now allows you to set bounds for the map.
• Hans van der Kwast gave a tutorial on how to resolve hydrological discrepancies in DEMs by using ‘stream burning’. The tutorial uses QGIS combined with stream network data from OSM and SRTM data downloaded from the USGS Earth Explorer.
• Russ Garret, the creator and maintainer of OpenInfraMap, announced on Twitter that OpenInfraMap now links power infrastructure to Wikipedia and uses images from Wikidata where available. Links have also been added to the UK’s Renewable Energy Planning Database.
• Plamen Pasliev made a prototype available which scrapes listings from one of the largest German real estate portals. It uses Google services to geolocate the listings and nearby amenities and provides results on an OSM-based map.

Programming

• Chris Beddow, from Mapillary, blogged about the possibilities of working with Mapillary data in Jupyter Notebooks.The hands-on guide explains how to access the Mapillary APIs and work with images, image sequences, and (if you’ve paid the subscription for map data) with features such as traffic signs, crosswalks, utility poles and pavement markings.

Did you know …

• …. the OpenStreetMap mapping activity layer from Kontur, which shows how actively every place in the world is mapped and which mapper is most active there?
• … that OpenMapTiles supports more than 50 languages? The names are taken from OpenStreetMap and enhanced by adding data from Wikidata.
• … that OSM is used on the website coronavirus.app, which shows where the corona virus has been found.

Other “geo” things

• Several media outlets such as the Indian Hindustan Times and the German Der Spiegel (automatic translation) featured the 15th birthday of Google Maps in articles describing the service and its history. Jen Fitzpatrick, Senior Vice President at Google Maps, also recaps the development from Google’s perspective in her blog.
• A map of South-east England with places names spelt phonetically in Polish was recently tweeted. It is presumed that the map was created to assist the many Polish pilots in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.
• Morgan Herlocker, of SharedStreets, and formerly of Mapbox, uses the example of the recent artistic exploitation of Google’s real-time traffic algorithm (as we reported), to explain some of the issues involved in turning traffic sensor data into something usable by road users.
• A detailed Twitter thread on cycleway provision in the British city of Leicester, provides a good introduction to a lot of detailed terminology which might be of interest to dedicated micro-mappers.
• A new minimum distance of 1.5 m will soon apply in Germany when overtaking cyclists. This distance calculator can be used to estimate how close an overtaking vehicle was in a bicycle camera shot.
• To some graffiti is a cultural asset and an important aspect of a city’s aesthetics; to others it’s vandalism. A team from Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group have developed a deep learning approach to detect building facades with graffiti artwork based on the automatic interpretation of images from Google Street View.
• Barrington-Leigh and Millard-Ball’s paper on urban sprawl (which we covered earlier) received more coverage, this time in an article on CityLab. The article points to the authors’ sprawl map and provides us with the fact that there are 10,845,867 dead ends mapped in OSM.
• bikeradar reviewed the OS Trail 2 Bike GPS and found it a frustratingly flawed device that doesn’t merit its £400 price tag and provides little incentive for choosing it over a Garmin. Of particular interest was the finding that: ‘[d]evices that use OpenStreetMap provide much greater detail and include details such as mountain bike tracks. OS map data doesn’t have this level of granular information, rendering it fairly incompatible with your average trail centre rider.’

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend February 2020	2020-02-15-2020-02-16
Mainz	Mainzer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-02-17
Viersen	OSM Stammtisch Viersen	2020-02-18
Derby	Derby pub meetup	2020-02-18
Cologne Bonn Airport	126. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch	2020-02-18
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-02-18
Turin	FOSS4G-it/OSMit 2020	2020-02-18-2020-02-22
Ulmer Alb	Stammtisch Ulmer Alb	2020-02-20
Rennes	Atelier découverte	2020-02-23
Takasago	Takasago Open Datathon	2020-02-24
Singen	Stammtisch Bodensee	2020-02-26
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-02-26
Lübeck	Lübecker Mappertreffen	2020-02-27
Brno	Únorový brněnský Missing maps mapathon na Geografickém ústavu	2020-02-27
Toulouse	Contrib’atelier OpenStreetMap	2020-02-29
Budapest	Budapest gathering	2020-03-02
London	Missing Maps London	2020-03-03
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch	2020-03-04
Praha/Brno/Ostrava	Kvartální pivo	2020-03-04
Dortmund	Mappertreffen	2020-03-06
Riga	State of the Map Baltics	2020-03-06
Amagasaki	GPSで絵を描いてみようじゃあ～りませんか	2020-03-07
Freiburg	FOSSGIS-Konferenz	2020-03-11-2020-03-14
Chemnitz	Chemnitzer Linux-Tage	2020-03-14-2020-03-15
Valcea	EuYoutH OSM Meeting	2020-04-27-2020-05-01
Guarda	EuYoutH OSM Meeting	2020-06-24-2020-06-28
Cape Town	HOT Summit	2020-07-01-2020-07-02
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 Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred.

• This is about a Wiki in contrast to the Nupedia approach. 
• Wikipedia’s founding goal is to make knowledge freely available online in as many languages as possible.
• There is a difference between opinions and facts

As a museum-goer, do you ever think about how art museums keep track of their collections? What do they know about the artists that made the art? What do they know about their collection as a whole? How can a museum answer questions about the gender breakdown of the artists in the collections? How can they track popularity of paintings, equity of artists represented, and other details about their thousands of items? One answer to this is Wikidata!

When museums contribute to one of the world’s largest linked data repositories, we can all learn more about their collection. Linked data allows for powerful queries to reveal insights about artist gender breakdown, materials used, exhibition information, and provenance of works. By having this data on hand, museums can provide a fuller picture of their works and strive for better representation within their collection.

Two members of the Experience Design department from the Art Institute of Chicago—Josh Andrews, Website Product Manager, and Illya Moskvin, Web Developer—attended my Wikidata courses. In these courses we cover a broad curriculum tailored to linked data beginners and those familiar with linked data concepts. These two in particular had specific goals in mind regarding the Art Institute’s collection data. We were able to dive into conversations about representing artists, their works, and so much more data that could be associated with them.

In December 2019, I was able to visit the Experience Design department in person. We had the opportunity to discuss ways to stay engaged on Wikidata and advocate for broader adoption within the institution. We also started to answer the question “what can an art museum learn from Wikidata?” We uncovered a few definite use cases for Wikidata including the following:

• Collections have incomplete data about their works. Other institutions or editors could help fill in those gaps on Wikidata.
• Having a persistent URL on Wikidata increases the visibility of items thanks to Google’s (and other search engine’s) emphasis of Wikimedia URLs in search results.
• Using authority control makes an institution a more definitive source about collection data (if the museum knows the most about a particular work, they would likely have the most detailed data – sharing that on Wikidata would further cement that authority).
• Institutions gain additional discoverability/linking through identifiers across other databases (Getty, other museums).
• By having collection data structured across several institutions, the ability to query across collections becomes possible.
• Queries can answer any number of questions posed by patrons, artists, publishers, researchers, board members, or colleagues from other institutions.

Some museums and other institutions have found ways to fund a Wikimedian-in-Residence, which is a way to ensure collection data is well represented on Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects (like Wikipedia). This can be a dedicated position whose responsibilities are established by the organization with the aim of sharing institutional data on Wikimedia projects. We realize that not every organization can support a position like this, but there are other options as well. Making an argument on a departmental-level or even an institutional level for the usefulness of engaging on Wikidata may open staff time to work on these kinds of projects.

It is always exciting to meet course participants in person and see the impact a course like this can have. It is especially exciting to meet them when there is so much enthusiasm, curiosity, and dedication to improving access around knowledge about a collection. Keep an eye on the Art Institute and its collection as more of it continues to appear on Wikidata.

Registration for our upcoming Wikidata courses is open! New to linked data? Join the open data movement in our beginner’s course. Have more experience with linked data or Wikidata? Sign up for our intermediate course that focuses on possible applications. Or visit data.wikiedu.org for more information.

Want to hear from participants about what courses are like and how they’re using their new skills? Check out these testimonials.

I’m pleased to announce that Paul Carroll has joined the Wiki Education team as Director, Institutional Funding. In his new role, he works most closely with me in establishing new funding opportunities and maintaining relationships with our institutional funders. Paul also collaborates with Wiki Education’s program staff to ensure that current and future programs are sufficiently resourced.

Having spent his professional career at the nexus of philanthropy, government, and nonprofits, Paul is a great fit for establishing and cultivating Wiki Education’s relationships with institutional donors; managing day-to-day fundraising activities; and ensuring that all of us here at Wiki Education deliver on our giving agreements. For much of the past twenty years, Paul has worked as a grantmaker with the Ploughshares Fund, a public foundation that addresses international security. Paul served as the program director with responsibilities for a roughly $6 million annual grantmaking budget. He has also served on the steering committee of the Peace and Security Funders Group (PSFG), an international network of foundations and individual donors interested in a broad range of peace, human security, and development issues. Paul has lived on both sides of the fundraising/grantmaking table – experience that adds to his understanding of and appreciation for the craft of development, communications, and partnership-building.

A self-described policy wonk, dad, husband, avid cyclist, community organizer, concerned citizen, and team player – Paul has been to North Korea twice, earned a pilot’s license in high school, and completed two cross country bike trips. Paul is very much looking forward to helping us here at Wiki Education to increase our impact and reach. We’re excited to have him on the team. Welcome, Paul!

By Katie Crampton, Wikimedia UK Communications & Governance Assistant

We kicked off February in collaboration with University of York with another editathon to help close the gender gap on Wikipedia. Focused on Yorkshire women in STEM, the editathon aimed to highlight the diverse set of role models women have in the field. And with women’s uptake in careers in STEM at a dismal 22% in the UK, the importance of championing these voices is more important than ever.

With businesses in STEM building much of the world we interact with on a daily basis, the lack of women represented in these industries has long been a concern for those aiming to change its landscape. Without a solid foundation of biographies for women to take inspiration from, Wikipedia is one of the many areas that has fallen short in this regard, with only 18% of its biographies on women. Wikimedia UK and the global movement have been tackling the issue for a number of years, and we were delighted to partner with the University of York for this latest event.

The editathon aimed to expand digital editing skills through creating and editing Wikipedia pages. The first step was drawing together a list of entries to be added to or created, so a University wide call went out for names of notable Yorkshire Women in STEM. These included the likes of amateur field botanist Catherine Muriel ‘Kit’ Rob, whose story was included by the Borthwick Institute for Archives in a long list of other lost voices vital in a time when women had only just started entering STEM.

Dr Helen Niblock, Research Development Manager in Physical Science at the University of York, thanked Namrata Ganneri “for organising the editathon, it really brought people together for positive change. Thanks to Nigel [Wikimedia Trainer] for talking us through Wikipedia editing, it’s not as scary or complicated as I thought! I’ve now got the knowledge and confidence to go away and add more women scientists to Wikipedia.”

Some of the articles that were improved included Hilary Lappin Scott’s page, which now comprehensively outlines Scott’s career in microbiology with her “field of research in microbial biofilms. In 2009 Hilary was elected as the second female President of the Society for General Microbiology (SGM) in 70 years and served in this role until 2012. In September 2019 she was elected as President of the Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS), being the first President from the UK.”

Other articles improved included Edith Pechey’s page, and the York physicist Professor Sarah Thomposon, with some work started on Professor Jane Hill’s page. With participants expressing interest in creating pages that there wasn’t time for in the event, like one for Catherine Muriel Kit Rob, a famous Yorkshire amateur botanists, we hope the skills built in the editathon will go on to have a lasting impact.

If you’d like to know more about our events, you can visit our events page, or for more activities around the gender gap on Wikipedia and its sister projects, have a look through this blog tag.

The Wikidata courses that wrapped up in December made for our largest group of new Wikidata trainees so far. After six quick weeks, we covered a lot of ground — from property proposals to taxonomic grouping of Wikidata’s Q-items (What does this mean? Take a look at this tool to see how groups of people, concepts, and things are organized — this example uses all occupations that fall under “artist”).

These courses had a healthy mix of participants with linked data experience and some without as much. Nevertheless, conversations gravitated toward some of the most specific details of Wikidata — property usage, data consistency, how to learn about using tools, and specific query requests. Catering to the diverse needs of libraries, museums, and the other nonprofits represented in the bunch presented a fun challenge for our discussions. Our training staff tried to balance examples that satisfied a large number of workflows and scenarios. By the end of the course we had covered a lot of ground including identifiers, propose properties, interacting with other Wikidata editors, and pulling specific data sets from Wikidata through queries.

So what did these two courses accomplish?

• This round of our beginner course had 18 editors who made a total of 579 revisions to Wikidata. Specifically, they created 282 claims, changed 159, and removed 40. They created 15 new items and added 14 labels. They also updated 44 descriptions of items and edited 22 aliases. They edited 101 total items. (Click here to see the stats on their Dashboard). This kind of interaction with Wikidata indicates how committed these participants were to lending their expertise to contributing as much as they could. We’re pleased that this course had an emphasis on court cases – see, for example, the new item for Simmons VS South Carolina. As with Wikipedia there are several content gaps within Wikidata and law-related items are one of them. We’re always thrilled when our course participants can work to address those gaps.
• This round of our intermediate course included eleven editors, who made a total of 834 revisions, totaling 484 new claims, 160 updated claims, and 27 claims removed from Wikidata items. (Click here to see the stats on their Dashboard). They created ten new items and updated 69 labels. They edited twelve descriptions and added 17 aliases. They edited a total of 178 distinct items. As an intermediate course, several of these course participants had some ideas for projects that would involve integrating Wikidata into their workflows at their respective institutions, which has made for some excellent and inspiring conversation. These data roundtripping conversations revolved around these project ideas, answering questions about Wikidata specifics. We’re pleased to add that every participant in this group was able to contribute to Wikidata.

As we transition from one year to another, we’re excited for what comes next with Wikidata and our program. At this time last year, our training courses and resources were just a glimmer in our organizational eye. Now here we are, five courses in, and participants have edited or added almost 8,000 statements to Wikidata. We’re proud of this and eager for what comes next.

Registration for our upcoming Wikidata courses is open! New to linked data? Join the open data movement in our beginner’s course. Have more experience with linked data or Wikidata? Sign up for our intermediate course that focuses on possible applications. Or visit data.wikiedu.org for more information.

Want to hear from participants about what courses are like and how they’re using their new skills? Check out these testimonials.

Thumbnail image includes graphic by Creative Stall, PK via Noun Project.

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

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

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

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

The history of Indian interest in insects has been approached by many writers and there are several bits and pieces available in journals and various insights distributed across books. There are numerous ways of looking at how people viewed insects over time. One of these is a collection of biographies, some of which includes uncited verbatim (and not even within quotation marks) accounts  from obituaries. This collation by B.R. Subba Rao who also provides a few historical supporting material to thread together the biographies. Keeping Indian expectations in view, bot Subba Rao and the agricultural entomologist M.A. Husain play to the crowd in their versions. Husain wrote in pre-Independence times where there was a need for Indians to assert themselves in their conflict with colonial masters. They begin with mentions of insects in ancient Indian texts and as can be expected there are mentions of honey, shellac, bees, ants, and a few nuisance insects. Husain takes the fact that the term Satpada षट्पद or six-legs existed in the 1st century Amarakosa to make the claim that Indians were far ahead of time because Latreille's Hexapoda, the supposed analogy, was proposed only in 1825. Such one-up-manship misses the fact that science is not just about terms but  also about structures and one can only assume that they failed to find the development of such structured ideas in the ancient texts that they examined. The identification of species in old texts also leave one wondering about the accuracy of translations. For instance K.N. Dave translates a verse from the Atharva-veda and suggests an early date for knowledge of shellac. This interpretation looks dubious and sure enough, Dave has been critiqued by an entomologist, Mahdihassan. One organism named in the texts as the indragopa (Indra's cowherd) is supposedly something that appears after the rains. Sanskrit scholars have remarkably enough, identified it with a confidence that no coccidologist ever had as the cochineal insect (the species Dactylopius coccus is South American!), while still others identify it as a lac insect, a firefly(!) and as Trombidium (red velvet mites) - the last matches the blood red colour mentioned in a text attributed to Susrutha. To be fair, ambiguities resulting from translation are not limited to those that deal with Indian writing. Dikairon (Δικαιρον), supposedly a highly-valued and potent poison from India was mentioned in the work Indika by Ctesias 398 - 397 BC. One writer said it was the droppings of a bird. Valentine Ball thought it was derived from a scarab beetle. Jeffrey Lockwood claimed that it came from the rove beetles Paederus sp. And finally a Spanish scholar states that all this was a misunderstanding and that Dikairon was not a poison, and believe it or not - was a masticated mix of betel leaves, arecanut, and lime! One gets a far more reliable idea of ancient knowledge and traditions from practitioners, forest dwellers, the traditional honey-harvesting tribes, and similar people that have been gathering materials such as shellac and beeswax. Unfortunately, many of these traditions and their practitioners are threatened by modern laws, economics, and cultural prejudice. These practitioners are being driven out of the forests where they live, and their knowledge was hardly ever captured in writing. The writers of the ancient Sanskrit texts were probably associated with temple-towns and other semi-urban clusters and it seems like the knowledge of forest dwellers was never considered merit-worthy.

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

Cataloguing

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

Communication and vocabulary building

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

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

Pattern finding

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

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

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

Indian reflections on the history of entomology

Kunhikannan died at the rather young age of 47

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entomologists meeting at Pusa in 1919 Third row: C.C. Ghosh (assistant entomologist), Ram Saran ("field man"), Gupta, P.V. Isaac, Y. Ramachandra Rao, Afzal Husain, Ojha, A. Haq Second row: M. Zaharuddin, C.S. Misra, D. Naoroji, Harchand Singh, G.R. Dutt (Personal Assistant to the Imperial Entomologist), E.S. David (Entomological Assistant, United Provinces), K. Kunhi Kannan, Ramrao S. Kasergode (Assistant Professor of Entomology, Poona), J.L.Khare (lecturer in entomology, Nagpur), T.N. Jhaveri (assistant entomologist, Bombay), V.G.Deshpande, R. Madhavan Pillai (Entomological Assistant, Travancore), Patel, Ahmad Mujtaba (head fieldman), P.C. Sen First row: Capt. Froilano de Mello, W Robertson-Brown (agricultural officer, NWFP), S. Higginbotham, C.M. Inglis, C.F.C. Beeson, Dr Lewis Henry Gough (entomologist in Egypt), Bainbrigge Fletcher, Bentley, Senior-White, T.V. Rama Krishna Ayyar, C.M. Hutchinson, Andrews, H.L.Dutt

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

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


References

• Balfour, Edward (1887). The agricultural pests of India, and of eastern and southern Asia, vegetable and animal, injurious to man and his products. London: Bernard Quaritch.
• Ball, V. 1885. On the identification of the animals and plants of India which were known to early Greek authors. The Indian Antiquary. 14:274-287, 303-311, 334-341
• Barnard, Peter C. (2018). Bat-Fowlers, Pooters and Cyanide Jars: a Historical Overview of Insect Collecting and Preservation in MacGregor, A. (Ed.).  Naturalists in the Field . Brill.
• Dave, KN (1950) Lac and the lac insect in the Atharva veda. Int Acad Ind Cult Nagpur, 16 pp. [Dave incidentally, is also the translator and interpreter of another problematic work on ornithological knowledge in ancient Indian literature] 
• Essig, E.O. (1931) A history of entomology. New York: The Macmillan Company.
• Farber, P.L. (1976). The type-concept in zoology during the first half of the nineteenth century. Journal of the History of Biology 9(1):93–119.  
• Hewitt, C. Gordon (1916). A review of applied entomology in the British Empire. Annals of the Entomological Society of America. 9(1):1–33.
• Howard, L.O. (1930). A history of applied entomology (Somewhat Anecdotal). Smithsonian Institution. Publication 3065.
• Husain, Mohamad Afzal (1938). Entomology in India, past, present and future. Current Science 6(8):422-424. [This is a summary, for the full address see - Husain, M. Afzal (1939). "Entomology in India: Past, Present and Future."  Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Indian Science Congress, Calcutta, 1938. pp. 201–246]
• Lefroy, Maxwell (1904). Historical summary in Report of the Entomologist to the Government of India.
• Lienhard, S. (1978) On the meaning and use of the word indragopa. Indologica Taurinensia 6:177-188.
• Lockwood, J.A. (2012) Insects as weapons of war, terror, and torture. Annual Review of Entomology 57:205-227.
• Mahdihassan, S. (1986). Lac and its decolourization by orpiment as traced to Babylon. Indian Journal of History of Science 21(2):187-192.
• Melillo, E. D. (2013). Global Entomologies: Insects, Empires, and the “Synthetic Age” in World History. Past & Present, 223(1):233–270. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtt026
• Rao, H. Srinivasa (1957) History of our knowledge of the Indian fauna through the ages. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 54:251-280.
• Rao, B.R. Subba (1983). Systematic entomology in India - past, present and future. Current Science 52(21):997-1000.
• Romero, D.B. (2007). El díkairon en la obra Indika de Ctesias de Cnido. Propuesta de identificación. Emerita 75(2):255-272.
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2017). Malarial Subjects. Cambridge University Press. [Open-Access]
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2013). Quinine, mosquitoes and empire: reassembling malaria in British India, 1890–1910, South Asian History and Culture, 4(1):65-86. doi:10.1080/19472498.2012.750457
• Service, M. W. (1978). Review Article1: A Short History of Early Medical Entomology. Journal of Medical Entomology, 14(6):603–626. doi:10.1093/jmedent/14.6.603 
• Smith, Ray F.; Mittler, T.E.; Smith, Carroll N. (1973). History of Entomology. Annual Reviews Inc. ISBN 0824321017.

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

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

 

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

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

 - C. Brooke Worth - Kumar Krishna - M.O.T. Iyengar - K. Kunhikannan


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

Flickr is a wonderful, cheap (or free!) way to store and serve images online. When you’ve used a Flickr account for several years, it becomes a rich repository of historic media — a veritable treasure chest.

I’ve been trying to help a client (who shall remain nameless, to spare their blushes — and to preserve my relationship with them) to recover access to their old corporate Flickr account.

It’s clearly branded as such, both in the name and logo, and is obviously so from the content.

It seems the staff member who set it up, and has long since left, did not register it with their corporate email address, but a personal one.

We’ve emailed them at a publicly-available address, to ask for their assistance, but they haven’t responded — I don’t know whether they left the organisation willingly, nor under what circumstances.

Flickr support say we can only recover it if we can tell them information only the account holder would know, such as:

• Describe the contents of any private photos in the account.
• Provide the names of any of the non-public albums in the account.
• Provide the name any Private Groups the account is in.
• List any third-party apps that have been authorized on the account (uploaders, social apps, etc).
• If you used the FlickrMail system, please describe some of the conversations that you have had in there.
• If you can recall back to when you had a paid account, please tell me the exact date and amount for some of the charges that you’ve gotten from us.

Of course, we can’t do that.

It looks like my client will never get back access to their account, and any non-public media locked in it. Fortunately, there is nothing there that is publicly viewable and embarrassing, though some of it is dated.

The best Flickr will offer, in the circumstances, is to make the whole account private.

A salutary lesson to the rest of you, to check who has “ownership” of not just organisations’ Flickr, but social media, cloud storage and similar accounts.

And do the same for all your domain names, too — in a past job, I found one that had been registered to a staff member’s spouse!

The post Who Has the Keys to Your Online Treasure Chests? appeared first on Andy Mabbett, aka pigsonthewing.

28/01/2020-03/02/2020

Mapping

• The team behing the Osmose quality assurance tool announced that an in-line help panel with a description of potential errors is now available. The additions also feature a guide on how to fix them, and other useful information.
• Marc summarised the current tagging situation of camping sites following the approval of tourism=camp_pitch. However, rather than improving the data, he felt that the situation had worsened.
• OpenStreetMap passed the milestone of its 80 millionth changeset on 23 January.
• Don’t know what to map? You could help to make the map of Estonia better. A simple tool from user SviMik will help you to do this.
• Andrew Wiseman, of Apple, has put together a MapRoulette challenge with the idea of adding missing roads associated with Pascal Neis’s unmapped places in various countries. The Unmapped Places Leaderboard may be interesting for internal challenges with students
• Hauke Stieler started the voting on his proposal of duty_free=*, a tag that should indicate whether a shop offers duty-free shopping.

Community

• In a tweet the Osmose team pointed to GitHub, where the source code and now the documentation is maintained. The developer also welcomes help with translation.
• The Russian OSM community has checked that all Russian border crossings are in order. MapRoulette was used as a tool for tasks.
• Rory McCann, newly elected member of the OSMF board, listed his contributions made in January 2020 to the various areas of OSM, such as mapping, coding and the OSMF board, in a blog post.
• Valeriy Trubin continues his series of interviews with OSMers. He spoke with Yevgeniy Usvitskiy (automatic translation) about humanitarian mapping and HOT and with Vladimir Marshinin (mavl) (automatic translation) about the data working group (DWG) and data licences.
• User Vascom has started (automatic translation) to assemble weekly maps for Maps.Me. So far, he has covered all regions of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

Imports

• In early January 2020 the Russian OSM-community completed (automatic translation) the import of data on Russian theatres, which started in 2017. Now OSM is richer by 693 theatres.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Christoph Hormann explained his concerns about how the OSMF Board risks codifying the English language and Anglo-American cultural mores as predominant within the OSM community. A long discussion, mainly with members of the board, follows.
• OpenStreetMap Česká republika z.s.(an organisation supporting OSM in Czechia), has applied to become a Local Chapter of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Joost Schouppe, member of the OSMF board, is asking the community for their opinions on the application.

Events

• Ilya Zverev gave a talk at the recent FOSDEM about reverse geocoding. He outlined the basics, presented a few unexpected challenges that a geocoder developer might face when working with OpenStreetMap data, and invited people to help improve the reverse geocoder he created.
• Peter Rushforth, from the Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation, announced plans to hold a workshop about maps together with the World Wide Web Consortium and the Open Geospatial Consortium and invited interested parties from OSM to participate.

Humanitarian OSM

• Missing Maps describes their activities during an anti-malaria campaign in Burundi in an article on their homepage. The country’s health authorities asked Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders for help. Missing Maps traced nearly 90 000 buildings in the region of Ruyigi, as large parts had not been mapped before. The article explains how the mapping activities helped and also the role OsmAnd and KoboToolbox played during the indoor residual spraying campaign.
• ManonVi elaborated on a proposal for the tag place=refugee_site. He describes why this tag is necessary. The request for comments started on 1 February 2020.

Maps

• Mapillary started the CompleteTheMap challenge for the northern hemisphere to improve its imagery. The top 3 contributors in terms of number of unique kilometres between 14 February and 15 March 2020 will be awarded with prizes.
• Alexander Chertov created a map of speed limit cameras installed on Russian roads. He took data about cameras from the highway police website and used OSM as a basemap.
• Anton Rapesco created a map of all the lights of Moscow. To do this he used open data from the Moscow open data portal.

switch2OSM

• Golden Cheetah, a tool for analysing data from power meters (mostly for bicycle computers), switched to OSM from Google. The new 3.5 release uses OSM data.

Licences

• User unen wrote in his OSM user diary entry that the Turkish parliament voted in favour of the proposed amendment to the National Geographic Information Systems Law. It requires official approval for a lot of mapping activities in Turkey and seems to forbid OSM.

Programming

• OsmApiClient is a C# package to handle the communication between your .Net project and the OSM API. See the GitHub project, or nuget package.
• User Artem Svetlov wrote (automatic translation) a script that could be used to generate beautiful maps of urban electric transport routes in any city. That’s why he called on everyone to help tidy up this data in OSM. The script is available on GitHub.

Releases

• MapTiler announced MapTiler.jp as a service in Japan, in cooperation with local map provider MIERUNE. It provides maps using data from OSM and the Japanese government.
• The map style of OSM’s main map has been updated to v4.25.0. Joseph Eisenberg detailed the changes in the current OpenStreetMap Carto release in his user diary.
• JOSM published stable release #15806; they note that ‘with 58 enhancements and 26 bugfixes, this is one of the biggest monthly releases ever made’.
• The new release of OpenMapTiles comes with rendering support for disputed borders, roads under construction and the Kurdish and Amharic languages.

Did you know …

• [1] … the SolidaryCityMap by openDEM, which shows places where you can participate in city life without papers and money? In the forum openDEM explains which OSM tags and other data sources the SolidaryCityMap evaluates and asks for further ideas.
• … about the “Atlas of risks and threats” of the Russian emergencies Ministry? OSM is used as a basemap.
• … about a site that collects sounds of various environments from all over the world? It also uses OSM as a basemap.
• … about the Oontz website, whose owner recorded the sounds of Sergiev Posad (a city in Russia) and placed them on a map based on OSM.
• … about the Russian app HandyPet (automatic translation), with which you can try to find a lost pet? The smartphone app uses OSM as a basemap. Unfortunately, the required attribution is not specified properly.

Other “geo” things

• Simon Weckert shows you how to easily create a traffic jam on Google Maps. Also reported by Slashgear.
• GISGeography has a list of its ‘Top 25 satellite maps’ and provides some information for each of them. The term ‘satellite map’ is used very broadly and includes not only a range of classic satellite maps such as Google, Bing, Landsat and others, but also the JavaScript library Leaflet and images produced by the NASA weather satellites NOAA and GEOS.
• Apple has given its maps of the United States more detail, including buildings. The buildings shown in the linked article do not appear in OSM.
• Yandex has made (automatic translation) a map on which you can see a day in the life of the Moscow ground transport system over about a minute.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	When	Country
Dortmund	Mappertreffen	2020-02-07
Rennes	Réunion mensuelle	2020-02-10
Grenoble	Rencontre mensuelle	2020-02-10
Taipei	OSM x Wikidata #13	2020-02-10
Toronto	Toronto Mappy Hour	2020-02-10
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle pour tous	2020-02-11
London	Move 2020 (featuring OSMUK)	2020-02-11-2020-02-12
Zurich	114. OSM Meetup Zurich	2020-02-11
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2020-02-11
Munich	Münchner Stammtisch	2020-02-12
Wuppertal	OSM-Treffen Wuppertaler Stammtisch im Hutmacher 18 Uhr	2020-02-12
Nantes	Rencontre mensuelle	2020-02-13
Berlin	140. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch	2020-02-14
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	2020-02-18
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend February 2020	2020-02-15-2020-02-16
Mainz	Mainzer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-02-17
Viersen	OSM Stammtisch Viersen	2020-02-18
Turin	FOSS4G-it/OSMit 2020	2020-02-18-2020-02-22
Derby	Derby pub meetup	2020-02-18
Cologne Bonn Airport	126. Bonner OSM-Stammtisch	2020-02-18
Ulmer Alb	Stammtisch Ulmer Alb	2020-02-20
Rennes	Atelier découverte	2020-02-23
Takasago	Takasago Open Datathon	2020-02-24
Singen	Stammtisch Bodensee	2020-02-26
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Stammtisch	2020-02-26
Lübeck	Lübecker Mappertreffen	2020-02-27
Riga	State of the Map Baltics	2020-03-06
Freiburg	FOSSGIS-Konferenz	2020-03-11-2020-03-14
Chemnitz	Chemnitzer Linux-Tage	2020-03-14-2020-03-15
Valcea	EuYoutH OSM Meeting	2020-04-27-2020-05-01
Guarda	EuYoutH OSM Meeting	2020-06-24-2020-06-28
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 Elizabete, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Silka123, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, geologist.