Dr. Lilly Eluvathingal is an Instruction + Science Research Specialist at Occidental College. She recently completed one of our Wiki Scientist courses, in which she learned how to add content to Wikipedia pages in her area of expertise. 

As someone who grew up in the 90’s I definitely looked to Wikipedia for a quick introduction to a topic, but I never pondered where and how its content was generated. However, like most academics I had been taught not to cite it and to take everything on Wikipedia with a grain of salt. Fast forward 12 years to when I was attending the American Society for Ichthyologists and Herpetologist annual meeting and attended a symposium run by Wiki Education. The symposium inspired me to try conducting an interesting assignment that would touch on several information literacy criteria in a 100 level Biology class at Occidental college in Los Angeles.

While the assignment itself was mostly successful because the students in my class worked together to update existing (but undeveloped) Wikipedia pages of animals that excited them, I quickly realized that I lacked the expertise I wanted to support the assignment. Wiki Education does have an incredible system in place that allows an instructor who isn’t confident to work with Wikipedia editing to run Wikipedia-based assignments. The students in the class were happy about the assignment and said that it really taught them the value of taking the time to understand the premise of a website or any other online content. However, I left that class wanting to invest more time learning how to edit Wikipedia before taking a stab at assigning a Wikipedia assignment again or even recommending it to another faculty member, since I have now transitioned to a role equivalent to a Science Librarian and want to be better able to guide other instructors running Wikipedia assignments.

I had signed up to get emails from Wiki Education and the opportunity to join the Science and Society course in 2020 as a part of professional development was too good to ignore. I initially signed up thinking that I would create pages around research topics in the Biology department (I hope to get to that with the help of our student body) and then decided instead to work on developing species and genus records of herpetofauna that I had directly worked with during my graduate research instead. The reason was twofold; I knew that I had the expertise to evaluate all the material and that I could very easily reach out to experts if I got stuck anywhere. I also realized that I was sitting on a huge collection of high-quality images that would be best used if shared on the Wikimedia Commons platform rather than sitting on a personal hard drive. With that in mind I started working on one species page for Raorchestes jayarami and one genus page on Raorchestes that were stubs and needed improvement. Along the way, due to time constraints, I narrowed my focus to the genus stub and was humbled by how much more information I needed to synthesize than I had originally planned for. My research on the anurans of the genus Raorchestes had been limited to species in south India and I hadn’t parsed through material from other parts of Asia. To do justice to the page I needed to make sure it was as complete as possible. I was also surprised by the lack of reaction to updates on these pages which was well supported by discussions in the course about biases on Wikipedia and really thinking about how the idea of ‘notability’ differs vastly because of biases in historic representation.

One of the things that kept me going were our weekly Zoom meetings where all the participants discussed progress, general questions and concerns, and learnt more about the Wikipedia community. It was motivational to see all the progress that my fellow participants had made, the complex questions that they had, and to learn about wiki gnomes and other wonderful wiki beings. While I did struggle to dedicate the recommended weekly time to the course, I learnt a lot from these regular discussions with the group. The Slack channel for the course was an added plus for feedback and suggestions during other times.

After the experience of the class, I plan to continue working on species and genus pages, as well as others, time permitting. And my advice to anyone on the fence about running a Wikipedia assignment is to be brave and take the plunge. Wiki Education has wonderful staff who are driven to scaffold such endeavors and make it a fruitful foray into integrating information literacy in your classroom.

---

To teach a Wikipedia writing assignment in your own course, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

---

Join folks working in Academia, political science, public policy, and journalism as they improve Wikipedia pages related to COVID-19 by applying for our free Wiki Scientist course here.

---

Header image CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

When you read an article with the same title as this blog post, it is one among many clamoring for attention. There is so much that can be qualified as not worth your time. In this blogpost I describe my way of adding value for articles that I think are worthwhile.

What I do is look for people in the article. In this article it is a Jonathan Epstein. The first thing is to look for Jonathan in Wikidata. Disambiguation is the name of the game and, finding candidates who might be Jonathan is the first step. Jonathan proved to be Jonathan H Epstein, there was also a Jonathan H. Epstein. Because of sharing characteristics they could be merged. Vital in this are authority identifiers and links to papers that make it reasonable to assume that they are the same person. It is helpful when Jonathan is part of the disambiguation list when people look for "Jonathan Epstein" so it is added as an alias.

The next step is to enrich the data about Jonathan P.. Authorities may identify where he works and from the website of Columbia university additional information is digested into Wikidata statements, information like the alma maters. In Wikidata many authors are only known as "author name strings", meaning they are only known as text. With available tooling, papers are linked to Q88406948, the identifier for our Jonathan.

After these steps, there is a reasonable impression of the relevance of Jonathan as a scholar and this supports the likelihood that the article that cites him can be trusted. Do this for others presented as authorities in an article and by repeating the process you provide a way for Wikidata to become a source that helps identify fake news.
Thanks,
      GerardM

I never thought I could use my travel photos for an encyclopedia. Whenever I travel for a conference or vacations, I snap a picture or two from the scenery, architecture, food. To my surprise, this is something that Wikipedians also do, not for the gram, but for Wikimedia Commons, an online repository of copyright free images!

A picture is worth a thousand words. It has the power to convey meaning and sometimes trustworthiness in some Wikipedia articles. A single picture uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons repository can be viewed by thousands of people around the world. This repository, fueled by the community, is used by news, media, artists, students, teachers, and others as a common resource. Sometimes images are not available and the community, me or you could jump to fill up the gap.

During the past couple of months, with the generosity of the National Science Policy Network (NSPN), I was able to take a Wiki Scientists course focused on science and policy. My main objective for this course was to develop and improve Wikipedia pages for women in STEM. Depending on the article, this could take me a couple of hours to days. However, I also found an alternative low-effort route to still contribute to Wikipedia with the resources I already have.

As a graduate student, I have to go to seminars now and then and listen to cutting-edge research. During these, I snap a picture of the speaker and share the highlights on social media. As I wander around campus, I take pictures of buildings. During Wiki Education’s course, I learned how to leverage these pictures for the greater good.

You see, some of these speakers or buildings have missing pictures on Wikipedia and some Wikipedians cannot travel there and take a picture themselves, but in some instances, I was at the same place they wanted to go, so I could take the pictures instead. Suddenly, the world became a living scavenger hunt, one you can also be part of! Currently, the pictures I have uploaded have a total of 6,000 views, according to GLAMorgan tool (Figure 1)! To put it in perspective, my first author scientific paper has a little over 1,000 views and my most viewed Instagram has reached 800 accounts.

I might have convinced you to join the scavenger hunt club, but how do you go about and upload the pictures to Wikimedia Commons? More importantly, how do you know what is missing? Currently, for Android users, there is an app called “Wikimedia Commons” where using your location you can identify Wikipedia articles with missing pictures around you. Using this app, you can directly upload pictures taken from your phone to Wikimedia. If you are an iOS user, you can use WikiShootMe a tool and get the same information as the “Wikimedia Commons” app.

Now, you have uploaded your picture. What else can you do? You can (1) update the Wikipedia article with the newly acquired photo and or (2) Nominate your photo as a “Featured Wikipedia Picture (FP)”. I am a very competitive person so I like to do (2) whenever possible. The process to nominate your picture is very straight forward. You have to ensure that your picture follows the Featured Picture Criteria. Among these criteria, is that the picture is among the best that Wikipedia has to offer and is high resolution. If you are taking pictures from an article that has no pictures of it, then it might already be the best thing Wikipedia has to offer. Ensure that it follows the rest of the criteria and you would be ready to submit.

My most recent submission was a picture of the University of Michigan law school building. I routinely stroll by this building but recently noticed it needed a picture. Now, it has about 3,700 views. Since it met the FP criteria, I submitted it for featured picture, but did not get enough traction. But resilience is key and I look forward to submitting another picture soon!  However, this can be a bit hard during COVID-19 times so what option do you have while remaining indoors you ask?

You can search the web for pictures that are not protected by copyright. For example, I recently updated Adriana Ocampo’s page with a higher resolution picture from NASA. NASA copyright policy states that “NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted“. Moreover, you can use pictures that are in the public domain. I found the page of the chemist Elizabeth MacGregor Hardy, with a little bit of research, I found her 1938s yearbook online, now in the public domain, and uploaded her picture to the Wikipedia page, now it has a little over 60 views with less than a week.

These are some of the ways you can contribute your pictures—or the ones you find with no copyright protection—for the worldwide scavenger hunt and the greater good.  I hope you join us in the search!

---

Attabey Rodríguez Benítez is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan in the Chemical Biology program where she leverages nature’s power, enzymes, to pave new ways to make life-saving therapeutics. She is a proud first-generation student and received a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. In addition to research, she is passionate about science communication and is currently a 2020 AAAS Mass Media, Yale Ciencia Fellow, and communicate all things science in Instagram and Twitter as @ScienceBey.

By Lucy Crompton-Reid, Wikimedia UK’s Chief Executive.

I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and well during the current crisis. I think if there is a silver lining to this horrible situation it’s that I see more care and concern from friends, colleagues and strangers alike. I have only met a small number of Wikimedia UK’s donors and members in person, but I consider you all a part of our extended community. I know that many people are struggling at the moment, for different reasons, but hope that everyone feels able to cope with whatever you are facing – whether that’s isolation from friends and family, financial worry, health concerns or juggling home-schooling with working from home (speaking personally!)

Like many other charities and businesses that hold a lot of in-person meetings and events, Wikimedia UK has spent the past month ‘pivoting to online’. However, as part of what is ultimately an online movement, we were well set up to do this and have been working with a wide range of existing partners in the education and cultural sectors and beyond to support their own transitions. That’s not to say there hasn’t been a learning curve, because there certainly has been. But I’m pleased to be able to share with you some examples of online activities that the team and wider Wikimedia UK community have run over the past few weeks:

• One of our trainers in Scotland, working with our Scotland Programme Co-ordinator, ran an online hackathon for Code the City in Aberdeen over the Easter weekend. The hackathon – which was very quickly re-imagined as an online event – focused on the social and industrial history of the city and resulted in the creation of thousands of new records on Wikidata.
• Last weekend we held an online event with Banner Repeater for the Digital Archive of Artists Publishing. This is an ongoing partnership, committed to challenging the politics of traditional archives, particularly regarding inclusion and accessibility from a post-colonial, gender critical and LGBTQI perspective.
• Back in August we trained a number of archeology volunteers at the Museum of London, and last week we ran a follow up session online. Participants were very enthusiastic about the training, and see a gap in Wikipedia’s content about archeological digs that they can very usefully contribute to.  
• The National Wikimedian for Wales and Wikimedian in Residence at Menter Môn have started delivering introductory sessions to editing the Welsh Wikipedia on Twitch (the next one will be on Monday 4th May). We hope these will prove to be a useful way to continue delivering training and outreach to existing and potential contributors during the lockdown. 

You may have seen media coverage about Wikipedia’s essential role during the pandemic, with readership up by around 30% across all the Wikimedia projects and the articles related to Covid-19 receiving millions of views a day. But with this rise in users comes the challenge of keeping myths, misinformation and poorly-sourced content out of the large number of articles about the virus. So Wikimedia UK is working with WikiProject Medicine to mobilise experienced editors in the UK to help address these issues. We are also working with health bodies to ensure that the most accurate and up to date information about the virus, the disease and the pandemic is made available under an open licence and freely accessible on Wikipedia.

It is thanks to donations from supporters that Wikimedia UK can continue this vital work during the current lockdown. Whilst we know that our fundraising for the year is likely to be significantly affected by the pandemic and the associated economic downturn, I’m so grateful for the solid foundation of supporters who give when they can or regularly. On that note, please consider making Wikimedia UK your Amazon Smile charity. It only takes one click and can raise additional income for us with no cost to you. Thanks again for your support, and stay safe.

By Andre Klapper and Sarah R. Rodlund, Wikimedia Developer Advocacy

For a decade, the annual Google Code-In contest has provided a fun and exciting opportunity for teenagers, ages 13-17, to build their technical and coding skills and to learn important lessons in cooperation and community. This year’s contest brought 194 students together with 43 mentors and 6 organizational admins to complete 715 Google Code-In tasks on Wikimedia projects. Volunteer mentors are from Free and Open Source organizations. Students compete to complete tasks over the course of the program’s run. This year, Google Code-in ran from December 2019–January 2020.

Participation is completely online and remote. The program gives young learners an opportunity to use their technical skills, learn new ones, and interact with other young technologists from around the world. 

Mentors from the Wikimedia technical community play an essential role in the contest by proposing tasks and providing guidance to Google Code-In participants.

Small tasks, big accomplishments

In 2019, students had a variety of mentored tasks to choose from; these ranged from non-technical to technical — ensuring participants along the spectrum of skills can participate. Every contribution helps to improve Wikimedia projects, which are used by people all around the world.

Students and mentors can join anytime during the month of the contest. Tasks are created and monitored by mentors. As tasks are completed, participants can choose from new ones, which are added throughout the contest. 

There were a number of requests for graphic design work for logos and stickers for technical projects and community gatherings. Several designs were proposed for a “Personal Space Needed” sticker that attendees can wear at conferences when they need time to themselves. 

Participants also designed logos for the VideoCutTool tool and the MediaWiki FormWizard Extension.

Several tasks helped improve user experiences. One asked students to improve the user experience for folks uploading videos to Wikimedia Commons, an online repository of millions of freely usable media to which anyone can contribute. Another task was to transcribe music on Wikipedia using Lilypond. This makes it possible for users to listen to musical compositions and read scores on Wikipedia articles.

Even small contributions can make a huge difference. One popular task asked students to search for spelling and grammar errors in code. This may seem like a tiny task, but it increases the quality of the code and keeps it functional and understandable.

Check out the complete list of tasks to learn more about the technology and tasks the students contributed to.

Working together

As part of the program students not only worked on tasks, they built other valuable skills like communicating online and working together.

In the words of one of the winners, Netx, from their post contest blog, “Google Code-in is a great way to get people into open-source development, which I think is important…something which I found constantly cool was people constantly helping each-other with any issues they had. In times of such division across the world, collaboration like what I saw made me feel great.” 

Read more of the student’s Google Code-in wrap-up blog posts.

Winners

At the end of the contest, winners were announced.

This year’s Wikimedia finalists are Andrey Shcherbakov, Taavi Väänänen, Jan Rosa, Nicholas Gregory. 

This year’s Wikimedia winners are Ben Houghton and Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano 

View the full list of winners.

Congratulations to all the students who participated! 

A standing ovation for the mentors

Google Code-In and other outreach programs would not be possible without the help of mentors who share their expertise and time with students, interns, and mentees. Program mentors come from all around the movement. Some are even past program participants who have returned to the mentorship role.

Volunteer mentors share their time and expertise to help foster the next generation of technologists. 

Thank you to all the mentors! We hope you join us again next year!

About this blog post

Featured image credit: Une image floue de code, Smile_Eh, CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0)

I’m thrilled to announce that Wiki Education’s Board of Directors elected two new Board members, Meaghan Duff and Jon Cawthorne.

Dr. Meaghan Duff is the Owner & Principal of Mercy Education Partners and former Senior Vice President for Partnerships & Strategy at Faculty Guild. She is also a long-standing associate lecturer in American history at the University of Massachusetts-Boston where she has worked in an adjunct role since 2003. Dr. Duff has more than 20 years of experience with grant-funded programs, corporate development, and strategic planning. Having worked both at universities and EdTech providers, her expertise in transformative and sustainable instructional services will bring immense value to our organization.

Dr. Jon Cawthorne is Dean of the Wayne State University Library System and incoming president of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). With a Ph.D. in managerial leadership in the information professions, his published research explores intersections between libraries, leadership, organizational culture, and diversity. Dr. Cawthorne is committed to equity and inclusion at his institution and through his own hiring practices, bringing talented people from underrepresented communities into his organization. His commitment to equity and work to advance open-access scholarship and digital knowledge resources will greatly benefit our work on the Board, as it already has in his spheres within higher education.

I am excited for the contributions that both Drs. Cawthorne and Duff will make as members of the Wiki Education Board. Their respective backgrounds in research libraries and educational technology will greatly benefit the organization’s work in those spaces and help advance our efforts to ensure Wikipedia is representative, accurate, and complete.

I look forward to working alongside and learning from such passionate, thoughtful leaders. Welcome!

---

PJ Tabit is Wiki Education’s Board Chair.

As classrooms and workplaces have turned virtual over the last month plus, many are finding that video conferencing is hardly a perfect replacement for in-person interaction. Not only that, they’re also raising privacy concerns that many didn’t have to consider before. How does Zoom collect and use our personal data? What should consumers be aware of before asking their students and colleagues to use the platform, or before using it themselves?

With these questions on the tip of all of our tongues, it was a great surprise to see that engineering students at the University of Southern California completed their Wikipedia writing assignment this semester by adding new data privacy information to the article about Zoom, ensuring folks have enough information to make informed decisions when using this online platform. These engineering students were already adding succinct, well-sourced content to the Wikipedia page a month ago, even before Zoom issued a statement about their privacy policy on March 29.

One student added that in the first two months of 2020, 2.22 million new users had signed up for Zoom (more than in the entirety of 2019). With this great influx of new users comes great responsibility. And one way to keep the platform accountable to data ethics and to help inform users of where their data goes, is to make sure that information is represented on this Wikipedia page where 40,000 visitors consult it per day.

That’s right. There have been 1,285,251 page visits on Zoom’s Wikipedia page since these students added this information at the end of March.

Instructor Dr. Helen Choi had wanted the Wikipedia writing assignment to help students learn to:

• write for academic, public, and professional audiences,
• demonstrate research and documentation abilities at the upper-division level,
• revise and edit to advanced academic and professional standards,
• work collaboratively to research, write, and present information and ideas,
• and write accurate, precise technical prose.

But what could prepare an instructor or their student for this kind of impact? The result is pretty incredible.

---

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia writing assignment into a future course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for all you need to know to get started.

---

Thumbnail image in public domain.

The immune system is complex and fascinating. Cells of our immune system encounter and destroy bacteria and viruses daily, most often without our even being aware of their presence.

So begins the description for Dr. Debby Walser-Kuntz’s immunology course at Carleton College this spring. After looking into components of vertebrate immune systems and how cells produce immune responses to foreign invaders, students were ready to examine the role of the immune system in infectious disease, allergy and asthma, autoimmunity, vaccination, obesity, and immunotherapy. And as a final project, they would become public scholars as they put what they learned on Wikipedia.

Quite a few of the articles that these students created and improved in the beginning of March attracted many more pageviews than usual by the end of the month, likely due to the increase in Wikipedia’s web traffic as readers sought to understand the unfolding coronavirus pandemic. With their access to academic sources and guidance from their expert instructor, students can help play an important role in answering the public’s immediate questions.

One of Dr. Walser-Kuntz’s students is responsible for nearly all of the current content in the article about immune response. They even uploaded a diagram they created to describe an innate immune response to a bacteria invasion.

The article has received 46,650 pageviews since the student made changes. There was a dramatic upswing in readership in March, likely as regions increasingly reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic and readers sought to understand how their bodies might respond to the virus.

Another student uploaded a diagram they made to the article about immunogenicity, “the ability of a foreign substance, such as an antigen, to provoke an immune response in the body.” The diagram explains the different factors that affect immunogenicity, including glycosylation (a chemical reaction between molecules), how the antibodies are administered to the patient, and more.

The page reaches an average of 180 readers per day. Now those readers will read the content that the student added, which accounts for nearly the entire page. The student also included an abundance of new references, responding to a warning template that had been placed on the article in 2013 alerting readers that there weren’t enough references.

A Wikipedia writing assignment presents a unique opportunity to translate scientific concepts in a place where people around the world are looking for answers. Students are great performers of this work, since they remember what it was like learning about these concepts for the first time.

Adding scientific content to Wikipedia, especially when it relates to medicine and health, can be complicated. Our trainings for students aim to prepare them to follow the sourcing and quality requirements that the Wikipedia volunteer community has built. With the guidance of their instructor, students can do some amazing work that lives on well beyond the classroom.

---

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia writing assignment into a future course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for all you need to know to get started.

Kathleen Downes is a licensed social worker and a trained Wiki Scientist from our recent Wikipedia training course sponsored by the WITH Foundation.

From the time I first learned how to use the Internet in early elementary school, I have always wanted to find out as much as possible about my disability and in turn, help others gain an accurate understanding of life with a disability. Sure, times have changed a bit since my now-dinosaur Compaq desktop and I may spend a bit less time playing Lion King computer games than I did back then—but in the two decades that have elapsed since my first foray into cyberspace, it hasn’t become as easy to find balanced, accurate disability information as one would think. An even more difficult task is finding information written, or at the very least, reviewed, by disabled folks themselves.

Especially in these weird, challenging, thoroughly bizarre pandemic days, it can be difficult to feel inspired to do anything online except post pictures of our pets and play with video chat filters…so when the opportunity arose to improve Wikipedia’s disability content, I was thrilled to have a new quest. Naturally, my first thought was to contribute to an article about cerebral palsy, a topic I have had a front row seat in exploring for literally my entire life. Some would argue it would be too difficult to deliver an objective piece about an area that is so deeply personal.

On the contrary, my personal knowledge of the subject has enabled me to be aware of a wider variety of sound research sources. Furthermore, my interest in disability studies, a field many in the medical realm have never even heard of, has given me the ability to write about disability using language that doesn’t insinuate that disabled people, by default, lead terrible lives. I’ve always had something of an allergy to the phrase “suffer from” in prognosis paragraphs and it has been my pleasure to ensure that the phrase takes a literary perp walk off any of the pages I edit and into the retirement community for Things That Oh God No One Says Anymore.  It has also been crucial to me to include in my work on the spastic CP page a sentence or two suggesting that “prognosis” is not only influenced by biology, but can also be influenced by accessibility and policy.

Perhaps the most glaring thing I noticed during this project is the astounding lack of suitable images available in relation to cerebral palsy. As is the case with online images for most disability-related topics, the selection for CP is…less than awe-inspiring.

Lots of disembodied hands, downcast gazes, and people looking sad like they’ve just been told there are no puppy videos left on YouTube. On the other hand, freely licensed disability images can swing to the other extreme: shots of people in wheelchairs (usually vaguely crusty, fake- looking wheelchairs), appearing overly gleeful on a mountainside at dawn or grinning with arms outstretched on a on a miraculously accessible beach with no access mat in sight.

If anyone wants to tell me how these fantasy wheelchairs roll on the beach in Freely Licensed Photo Land, feel free to ping me.

Anyway, back to my point: the pictures representing CP for use in spaces like Wikipedia are just not great. When my instructors suggested I upload a picture of myself to compliment the article on spastic CP, I thought to myself hey, that’s a really good idea. I proceeded to add a picture of myself as a child, when I was decidedly cuter than I am in the present day. I’m feeding a deer in the picture for reasons unknown and casually feeding deer is not an activity that I, nor my CP brethren, presumably do very often. But the point is, the photo is real and shows a whole person living a life with CP. And I hope that some parent whose kid was recently diagnosed will Google spastic CP one day, find my article, and realize it’s not all doom and gloom.

If that happens, my break from posting pet photos will have been well-spent.

---

As conferences and other networking events move online, our virtual course infrastructure offers organizations a way to continue engaging their members. If you’re interested in organizing a customized virtual course, contact Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson at jami@wikiedu.org or visit partner.wikiedu.org for more information.

By Gilles Dubuc, Wikimedia Performance Team

FOSDEM is the biggest Free and Open Source software conference in the world. It takes place in Brussels every year, is free to attend, and attracts more than 8000 attendees. Aside from the main track, FOSDEM is made of developer rooms, or devrooms, self-organized conference tracks. For FOSDEM 2020, the Wikimedia Performance Team decided to organize a Web Performance devroom. We wanted to share our experience here, to give people an idea of what organizing a track at FOSDEM is like.

Why did we organize a Web Performance devroom at FOSDEM?

There are industry conferences solely focused on the topic of web performance, such as We Love Speed, perfmatters or performance.now(), in addition to tracks and talks at broader interest conferences. Having attended many of them and spoken at some of them, we noticed that some topics were underrepresented.

For instance, academic research on this subject seems to exist in an entirely different realm, with talks about web performance research only happening at academic research conferences. Another frequently missing topic in industry conferences is free software and open standards. All three of these areas provide the backbone for what makes web performance a field, but best practices talks tend to dominate conferences.

For some time our team discussed organizing our own web performance conference that would cover these underrepresented topics. However, the logistics of fully organizing a conference seemed daunting for our small team.

A FOSDEM devroom seemed like a great compromise for us. Most of the logistics of organizing a conference would be handled by FOSDEM, and it would allow us to focus on the content of our track.

Applying for a FOSDEM devroom

We set out to pitch the creation of a new devroom focused on web performance. Most existing devrooms happen every year at FOSDEM, and because there is limited space, it can be challenging for a new devroom to be selected. Applications usually open in August with an announcement on the FOSDEM website and their mailing lists. You have about one month to apply, and selected devrooms are announced about 10 days after the deadline.

We applied. We were selected and given half a day. FOSDEM happens over the course of 2 days, and different devrooms get different durations.

Selecting talks and putting together a schedule

Devrooms are free to set up their own schedule within the allocated time frame. They are truly self-organized. Our first choice was to dedicate the half-day we were given to talks only. Half a day didn’t seem like enough time to run both talks and workshops in a meaningful way.

To select our speakers and talks, we decided to have an open call for participation for people to submit talk proposals. Our Call for Proposals (CfP) announcement was then posted on the FOSDEM website and their mailing list. We also advertised it on other mediums like Twitter, where the web performance community is quite active.

Our CfP encouraged people to submit their talk proposals on the FOSDEM website directly. In hindsight, we should probably have collected talk proposals ourselves on a different platform. Pentabarf, FOSDEM’s web-based event management software, has very dated UX with many steps required to submit talk proposals. We might have received fewer submissions than we could have because of it.

The schedule to gather speakers and talks is quite tight. We were able to open our CfP in early October, and we had exactly 2 months to select the final list of speakers and talks.

We received a lot more applications than available slots, but a fair amount of applicants didn’t follow the requested topics on our CfP. In the end, making the selection was fairly straightforward. And on that part, Pentabarf made it quite simple, thanks to its built-in voting functionality.

Speaker logistics

Since FOSDEM is free to attend, FOSDEM doesn’t have money to sponsor speaker travel. This proved to be a blocker for some of our applicants, and in the end, we were able to afford sponsoring one of our speakers to come to our devroom.

This is something we will plan better next time in order to be able to help more speakers with travel costs if needed. A strategy other devrooms have used is to find local businesses in Brussels that would be interested in hiring speakers as contractors around the time of FOSDEM for in-house training and similar services. The local company would then cover the speaker’s travel cost.

There are probably other ways to fund this part of the event, but it’s critical to plan that part early, as some speakers simply cannot afford to travel to Brussels, especially those who are self-employed.

Aside from travel costs, we also had some back-and-forth with speakers that needed to adjust their talk contents to match our devroom focus. These discussions were always constructive, and we learned this way that potential speakers who might have submitted a talk proposal that looked off-topic to us sometimes had an on-topic talk up their sleeve. It was worth having that discussion rather than rejecting them directly.

Once all the final talk proposals were selected and polished and a schedule agreed upon with everyone, we submitted it all to FOSDEM, and a week later it was posted officially on their website.

Now, after that official announcement, the FOSDEM schedule for the devroom remains updatable until the event itself, which would have allowed us to substitute speakers if one had to cancel their participation, etc. Any update to the schedule, talks or speakers from our devroom admin accounts is reflected on the FOSDEM website in a matter of minutes. This sort of flexibility is very powerful and often missing at other conferences.

Announcing our lineup

It can be difficult to get visibility for your devroom on the FOSDEM website, as there are dozens of them. It can also be challenging to advertise what is essentially a mini-conference inside a bigger one with a very broad theme.

We took care to announce each speaker individually, which helped get visibility from their own networks. With our devroom being new, we were worried that it might be challenging to attract people to it, who might have their habits at FOSDEM, visiting other devrooms.

We also built a dedicated website for the devroom, as the page that was automatically generated on the FOSDEM website felt a bit generic. Our devroom website proved useful later as a more attractive place to post the recorded talks after the event.

Devroom day

And finally, the big day! Since our devroom was only half a day, there was another one in the same room before us, the DNS devroom. When we showed up during that previous one, the room was quite full, but we were still worried that it might empty completely when the first half of the day ended and our devroom started.

After picking up our highly visible devroom shirts, we discovered the well-oiled logistics when we showed up in the room during the small break. Different microphones and a video camera were all already set up and ready to go. All we had to do was have each of our speakers test that their laptop worked correctly on the A/V system, which took a few minutes.

We also saw that it was really useful to have at least 3 of us present in the room. One person to introduce the speakers and pass a microphone to members of the audience for questions and to keep speakers on time with the schedule, one person to drive the camera choices of the live video stream (basically alternating between a view of the computer screen, the speaker, or both whenever we like), and finally someone to keep people from stepping in front of the video camera or knocking it over…

At FOSDEM video staff are shared by the entire floor, which means that the video camera stands on a tripod unattended. If adjustments need to be made to the camera’s focus or framing, we send a request via instant messaging to the FOSDEM volunteer video staff, and they show up in a matter of minutes to take care of the change or issue at hand. This all works great, but our devroom turned out to be so popular that the dozens of people standing at the back would often get dangerously close to the camera. It was useful to have someone near it to remind people of its presence.

A nice addition would have been a fourth person to act as a photographer, with a proper camera and to handle live tweeting/online interactions. We took the pictures as best we could with our phones, but with no natural light in the room, the photos weren’t great. Same for online interactions, we all did our best, but we were quite distracted by our respective higher priority roles in the room. This is why we think that you need at least four people in a FOSDEM devroom to run it at the same level of quality as other comparable conferences.

Video recordings

The turnaround for the FOSDEM staff to produce the talk videos was incredible! The devroom wasn’t over yet, and we were already receiving videos to review for the first talks. FOSDEM then provides a web-based tool that allows you to pick the exact start and end point of the video, verify sound, etc. It was very efficient to use and in a matter of minutes each talk video was edited. A few hours later – the evening after the devroom – the talk videos were online already!

Some of the speakers reposted the videos on other platforms that track views, while the hosting FOSDEM provides by default (and that we use on the devroom website) doesn’t record viewership statistics. That would be a nice addition, as it would allow us to see which talks were the most popular after the fact, in order to adjust our talk selection next time.

Conclusion

Overall the experience of running our own FOSDEM devroom was everything we hoped for and more. It was superior to other conferences in many ways. The high-quality live streaming and same-day final videos were amazing. The audience in the room was bigger than some dedicated web performance conferences we’ve been to, which made our speakers very happy. We look forward to applying again next year, for a second edition of the Web Performance devroom!

About this post

Featured image credit: Courtesy Peter Hedenskog

Collaboration is a key component of human activity, in fields as diverse as scientific inquiry, news reporting, the arts, and government. When we work together effectively, we can accomplish big things. We should always seek to improve our understanding of what conditions support effective collaboration. Wikipedia, I believe, holds many of the answers — not in the content of its encyclopedic articles, but in the story of its genesis and growth.

Wikipedia has supported an unprecedented level of collaborative activity in its first two decades. What conditions have permitted the site to become, and remain, such an integral part of our information landscape? That is the question I explore in an essay, “Trusting Everybody to Work Together,” for a forthcoming book celebrating Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary. I review some of the early discourse that drove Wikipedia’s software design. I propose that the proper mix of eight specific, mutually supporting software capabilities has played a significant role, and I argue that closer consideration of these software capabilities should inform future software design, both in the Wikipedia world and beyond.

The Signpost just published the essay. Please take a look.

14/04/2020-20/04/2020

Actual Category

• The French service “Ça reste ouvert” has now also been launched in Finland, Ollaan auki was introduced on 17 April and it is supported by Gispo (automatic translation) and the Finnish OSM-community. (Info: OSM-user houtari)
• The app “Ca reste ouvert” now exists (automatic translation) in German and covers Germany (www.bleibtoffen.de), Switzerland (www.bleibtoffen.ch) and Austria (www.bleibtoffen.at).

Mapping

• Andrew Harvey has created a proposal for the tagging of mountain bike tracks with path=mtb with the incorporated feedback of the previous discussion and is looking for feedback.
• Voting for Joseph Eisenberg’s proposal to mark the location of a motorcycle taxi stand with amenity=motorcycle_taxi has started. In many countries, predominantly in Southeast Asia, but also elsewhere, motorcycles as taxis are very common and a major transport mode.
• Andrew Harvey informed the tagging mailing list that voting for the proposal on the key locked=* has started. The aim of the key is to store information if a feature such as a gate or barrier is usually or conditionally locked or accessible.
• Ty S brought the proposal for urgent_care=* to voting, but cancelled it later in favour of the existing tag walk-in=*.
• François Lacombe made a comprehensive description of the state of the French power network in OSM in his diary. In his round-up he includes the type and number of different features in France, the sources of data, a short description of the data and provides an outlook.
• Voting has started on the modified amenity=refugee_site proposal.
• Pixel8Earth reported on their experiments to use a GoPro camera for large scale 3D mapping, on medium.com. They include a lot of useful information such as the calibration or how odometry can help. The article ends with a promising conclusion.
• Multipolygons in OSM are a constant source of discussion topics. This time a user ‘fixed’ potential issues from the OSM-Inspector, here ‘touching inner rings’ for scrub, heath, bare_rock in surrounding woods. But the original creator did not agree with the fix and not all mappers in the discussion (automatic translation) on the German forum see touching inners as an issue.

Community

• If you missed the numbers for ‘last modifier’ in Pascal Neis’s ‘How did you contribute to OpenStreetMap?’ statistics, we’d like to share Pascal’s tweet with you which says the numbers are back.
• OpenStreetMap Ireland organised a week long, online mapping campaign on its present #osmIRL_buildings task, which started on Monday 20 April and is running until the following Monday (27 April).
• eiskalt-glasklar wrote (automatic translation) a diary post where he laid out his thoughts and wishes for a new version of public transport tagging schema.
• Geomob, ‘a series of regular events in European cities for location based service creators and enthusiasts’ held for the first time an online geomob on 7 April. Ed Freyfogle of OpenCage, together with Steven Feldman of mappery.org, summarise this attempt in a podcast. Advantages and disadvantages are discussed as well as consequences from the experiences of this first online meeting. Ian Landsman also wrote an interesting blog post about hosting online conferences.
• Maggie Cawley and Jennings Anderson presented the results of an OpenStreetMap US community survey. Besides old but apparently true stereotypes of the typical OSM mapper being a 30 to 50 year old, white man, there are some interesting new findings. For example, 44% of respondents are using OSM professionally.
• Proposals for this year’s OSM Awards can still be submitted until 10 May 2020.
• Valeriy Trubin continues his series of interviews with OSMers from Russia. He spoke with Alexey Kalinin (automatic translation), who created a paper map of southern Urals using OSM data, and Alexandr Zeynalov (automatic translation), who is the keeper of the keys to the RU-OSM servers.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Chris Beddow, from the OSM Foundation’s Microgrants Committee, is calling for applications for the recently introduced program. All OSMF members can apply for the funds. Further details can be found on a dedicated wiki page.
• Allan Mustard, from the board of the OSM Foundation, summarised his impressions of the talks he has recently held with members of OSMF’s Board of Directors and of the OSMF Advisory Board, corporate OSMF members and local chapters. He identified OSM’s core infrastructure, communication to local chapters and communities, vector tiles, frustration with the OSMF board, diversity/inclusion as well as artificial intelligence/machine learning as important topics. Interestingly none of his important topics are about mapping, which is surprising in a mapping project. This is probably due to the people he talked to. If you speak with mappers you may get completely different answers such as questions about multipolygons or an area data type, public transport mapping, a ‘gold standard’ for tagging, the non-representative proposal process for new tags, poisoned or quasi non-existent relations between regionally divided communities and probably many, many more.
• Some OSMF working groups have published new minutes of their meetings. The topics discussed in them include:
  • Local Chapters and Communities Working Group meeting of 23 March (Local Chapters Survey, comparison of national OSMF websites)
  • Microgrant Committee meeting of 17 April (submission form, next steps)
  • Diversity and Inclusion Special Committee meeting of 9 April (revision of the Diversity Statement, current work)
  • Licensing Working Group meeting of 12 March (Brexit, Attribution Guideline, Change of Licence)

Events

• Students of the University of Delaware organised a mapathon for Earth Day on 22 April 2020. The participants were asked to improve the mapping of the African country Malawi. During the event the mappers completed 1,222 buildings and 50 km of roads.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT is launching Rapid Response Microgrants: COVID-19 which aims to bolster the mapping of unmapped areas with vulnerable communities, which are at risk of being forgotten without assistance with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Maps

• Internet portal fontanka.ru has created a project to support local businesses in St. Petersburg. It is called ‘Buy from your own‘ (automatic translation). Due to the coronavirus local businesses in main cities are on the verge of shutting down. The businesses that need help are displayed on the map.
• Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group published an article about a visualisation of the completeness, in OSM, of health facilities in Sub-Saharan Africa made with its OSM History Explorer ohsomeHEX.
• Sergey Myshlyakov (an OSM user from Russia) created a map (automatic translation) of the spread of Sosnowsky’s hogweed in the Moscow region. The information was obtained by automatic analysis of satellite images.

Open Data

• The Federal State of Brandenburg, Germany, changed the General Terms and Conditions for some of its geodata, which were already provided under a free and open licence but required attribution, in a way that allows OSM (automatic translation) to use the data. The attribution note does not necessarily have to be included in the direct visual context of a product made with OSM data, usually a map, if the data from this source represents only a minor share.

Software

• [1] Egor Smirnov, from ITMO University, (automatic translation) St. Petersburg, explains in his diary why he developed (automatic translation) YourMaps, a service to export data from OSM.

Programming

• Geofabrik’s blog provides a useful article for all of those whose tile server stopped updating recently. Frederik Ramm helps identify what the issue may be, as there may be more than one, provides some background information, and outlines solutions for the issues.

Releases

• Roland Olbricht introduced the new Overpass API version 0.7.56. The first update in over a year brings new functionality such as filtering ways by the angles of their inner vertices and the possibility of restricting a recursion to only some members of a set.
• CyclOSM v0.3.5 has been released with new features such as mountain bike difficulty scales, inner tube vending machines, and railways at low zooms… A short overview can be seen in the release twitter post and the full change log here.
• The HOT NGO has released Tasking Manager version 4. All improvements are detailed in the release notes. The new version is available in the source code repository and on 6 May, the new version will be launched on the HOT Tasking Manager.

Did you know …

• … that OSM can be embedded into Drupal CMS?
• … the sites sunders.uber.space and osmcamera.dihe.de, where you can view the surveillance cameras mapped in OSM? These sites are made using the code from the project osmcamera.
• … Pascal Neis’ updated webpage resultmaps featuring all the tools he offers for OSM?

OSM in the media

• softwareengineeringdaily.com published a podcast with Saurav Mohapatra and Jacob Wasserman, from Facebook, to talk about the tools which Facebook has built to deal with OSM data.

Other “geo” things

• The esri.com Africa GeoPortal has made available analysis-ready OpenStreetMap data for all of Africa on their platform.
• Yandex took panoramas (automatic translation) of the empty streets of Moscow.
• The Gigarama project took a bird’s-eye view of the construction of an antivirus centre in New Moscow.

Upcoming Events

Many meetings are being cancelled – please check the calendar on the wiki page for updates.

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Nakaner, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, Silka123, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred.

Dr. Maryam Zaringhalam is a molecular biologist, science writer, and member of the 500 Women Scientists leadership team. Here, she invites women scientists to help achieve our goal of writing 500 biographies of women in STEM into Wikipedia.

Inspired by my brilliant friend Jess Wade, I started writing Wikipedia biographies for women scientists to tackle some pretty big-picture problems surrounding equity in science. I was tired of hearing that women aren’t interested in science or lack the aptitude to pursue careers in science. But when I turned to the pages of Wikipedia to cite examples of women doing amazing science, the encyclopedia came up short. Women’s contributions to scientific advancement have been downplayed throughout history or even erased from the story altogether. Women are covered less in the media, which leads to journalists approaching us less often for interviews. They’re denied tenure and promotion at higher rates than their male colleagues and looked over for prestigious awards, all while being subject to gender and sexual harassment.

Despite it all, women continue to do groundbreaking work and pave the way for more like them to join the ranks of the scientific workforce. I firmly believe those achievements deserve to be celebrated on the pages of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has a bold vision to offer the sum of all human knowledge. But, quite frankly, we’re nowhere near that yet—especially when women make up only 18% of the biographies and ~10% of the volunteer editors on the English Wikipedia. The beauty of Wikipedia, though, is that it is intrinsically a work in progress, always growing, expanding, and adapting. When we know better, we do better. But we can only do better together. In the case of biographies, there are a variety of barriers to their inclusion. But the biggest barrier remains the simplest one: if no one takes the time to write it, it won’t exist.

Really, Wikipedia holds up a mirror to what our society values. If there aren’t enough articles about a woman scientist to cite, her Wikipedia biography cannot be written. Dr. Donna Strickland, for example, didn’t have a Wikipedia page until she won the Nobel Prize in physics, the first woman to do so in 55 years. We don’t have to wait until a woman accomplishes this exceptional achievement to recognize her for her contributions to her field.

So yes, there is inequity in STEM. Yes, there are gaps on Wikipedia. And yes, we can do better. And… we are. Let’s change the narrative. With a click of Wikipedia’s “edit” button, we have the power to shine a spotlight on the change-makers and pioneers who have transformed science for the better.  When we are asked about gender gaps — “Where are the women in science?” — we can show them we have always been here. And we are accomplishing great things.

One of our solutions? A Wikipedia biography-writing training course with Wiki Education for 500 Women Scientists members. By joining the impressive volunteer community that makes Wikipedia what it is, we help it better reflect the population that it serves: the world.

Wikipedia benefits from the diversity of interests, expertise, and lived experiences its editors bring. Not only are we helping right the wrongs women scientists have and continue to face, but we are also sharing roadmaps that young women can look to as they begin their own journeys into STEM careers. Who we champion in science matters. Validating and supporting each other’s careers and achievements is activism. It is building community. It is inspiring new generations of discoverers. And it is advancing science.

In partnership with 500 Women Scientists, Wiki Education is running a Wikipedia writing group to invite members of 500 Women Scientists into the Wikipedia community and provide support as we build these pages together.

• Timing: May 11 – June 19 (6 weeks). Meeting time will be determined by applicant availability.
• Time commitment per week: Two 1-hour meetings per week; 2 additional hours of independent work.
• Cost: free for members of 500 Women Scientists
• Goal: Create or improve two biographies of women in STEM
• No prior experience with Wikipedia necessary

We’re a group of women scientists who believe in an equitable and just scientific community. Can we add 500 new biographies of women scientists to Wikipedia? We think so! We hope you join us. If you’re interested, please consider registering by April 30th.

---

For our other open courses, visit learn.wikiedu.org.

---

As conferences and other networking events move online, our virtual course infrastructure can offer your organization a way to continue engaging your members. If you’re interested in buying out a similar, customized virtual course, contact Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson at jami@wikiedu.org. Or visit partner.wikiedu.org for more information.

---

Hero images by b farias and Eucalyp (the Noun Project).

By Lucy Crompton-Reid, Wikimedia UK’s Chief Executive.

Wikimedia UK is delighted to announce the appointment of a new Chair of the Board of Trustees, Nick Poole. 

Nick Poole is the Chief Executive of CILIP, the UK’s library and information association. His previous roles, before joining CILIP in 2015, include CEO of Collections Trust and National Policy Adviser at the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. Nick was previously Chair of the International Council of Museums UK and of the Europeana Network. He has lectured and presented worldwide on topics relating to cultural heritage, technology and the arts, and is a visiting lecturer at several Universities.

Nick was elected to the board of Wikimedia UK in July 2015, and so already has an in depth understanding of the work of the chapter and the aims and ambitions of the Wikimedia movement. During the time that Nick has already been on the board, Wikimedia UK has benefited from his extensive knowledge of the cultural sector, his strong connections and influence with senior leaders and policy makers, and his passionate commitment to openness as an essential element of social justice. I’m extremely pleased that Nick has been appointed Chair of the Board and am looking forward to working with him more closely in this new role. 

At the same time, it’s with sadness that I have to announce Josie Fraser’s departure from the Wikimedia UK board – after nearly five years of service – due to increasing time constraints given her new role as Head of Digital Policy at National Lottery Heritage Fund. Josie became Chair of Wikimedia UK in July 2017, and has been an inspiring and supportive leader to me and to the rest of the organisation over the past few years. Josie’s deep understanding of and connections with the open sector, learning technology and Open Educational Resources has been hugely beneficial to the development of our profile and programme over the last few years and she will be hugely missed. I know Josie will also be missed by international colleagues, as she has forged strong relationships with the Chairs of other chapters and user groups across the global Wikimedia movement. 

For more information about the role of the board and details of our other serving trustees, please see Wikimedia UK board.

It’s time for another blog post in my Wikidata map series, this time comparing the item maps that were generated on the 13th May 2019 and 11th November 2019 (roughly 6 months). I’ll again be using Resemble.js to generate a difference image highlighting changed areas in pink, and breakdown the areas that have had the greatest change throughout the 6 month period. The full comparison image can be found here.

If you don’t know what Wikidata is, or what items are then give this page a read. This map shows all items that have a “coordinate location” as a light pixel on a black canvas. The more items with coordinates in a single pixel, the brighter that pixel. This map is generated using code that can be found here.

The text descriptions work from left to right, and split the world into areas that make sense to picture and describe together.

If you notice anything that I have missed then please comment or tweet me and I will update this post! If you know the individuals or projects to thank for the areas of increase then please also comment so we can give them so recognition!

Canada

Item growth has been seen all across Canada with a particular area of increase in Ontario, Quebec and Nova Scotia. What appears to be the border line between Saskatchewan, Alberta and the North West Territories can also be seen as a fairly clear line of interest, with more items existing directly south of the border.

Argentina

Although Argentina has not seen a large growth, there is a noticeable growth around Buenos Aires and what appears to be the major road network across the country.

West Europe

Baltics

Africa

It is incredibly hard to pick out some of the points of increase in the African continent, and perhaps it is time for the to integrate a rough overlay of the world as we know it onto the map for easier identification.

The area that stands out the most by eye is either in Benin or Togo. I suspect but can not confirm that it is the city of Djougou.

Asia

Generally looking at the continent of Asia there are a few major stand outs.

Pakistan is bright in pink indicating change, particularly in the southern area with a focus around Hyderabad and Karachi.

India has a very noticeable increase on the southern part of the west coast, I believe the state of Kerala. Also an area in the middle of the state of Andhra Pradesh has seen quite an increase. West Bengal and the area around Kolkata is also bright and has seen a great increase in item coverage.

Bangladesh can also be seen to have an increase in the southern area around Chattogram.

The post Wikidata Map May – November 2019 appeared first on Addshore.

Please help us with getting relevant COVID-19 information out to the general public. Wikipedia has developed into being one of the most trusted sources of information. The online encyclopedia and the volunteers that write it have played an important role in this global pandemic from day one: By providing critical information about the infectious disease, the virus that’s causing it, and the global pandemic that’s currently taking place. However, we believe some relevant aspects could be explained better and at greater length. That’s where you come in.

If the coronavirus pandemic has taught us something in recent months, it is how impactful local governments are during a crisis and how their actions (or inaction) can be a matter of life and death. That’s why I’d like to extend to you an invitation from Wiki Education to join us in improving Wikipedia pages about state and regional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Understanding the pandemic on a global level is important, but when it comes down to deciding whether or not to go to the grocery store, people need information on a more localized scale. Wikipedia may be the most neutral way people receive information about their state’s guidelines, actions local governments have taken, and data regarding documented cases of COVID-19.

That’s why we’ll be running Wikipedia training courses with all tuition fees waived to invite scholars into the Wikipedia community and provide support as you help build these important pages:

• Course dates: The weeks of May 4th – June 12th (6 weeks)
• Time commitment: 5 hours per week (includes 1 hour of virtual meeting time)
• Free of charge
• No prior experience with Wikipedia necessary

If you have a background in political science, public policy, journalism, combined with a passion for translating complex topics into understandable and easy-to-read pieces of information, please consider applying by April 30th.

The many languages missing from the internet:

An article in BBC Future about linguistic representation on the internet. 

The Kaqchikel Mayan community from Guatemala includes more than half a million speakers. Miguel Ángel Oxlaj Kumez is part of it and was one of the organisers of the first Latin American Festival of Indigenous Languages on the Internet, held in 2019.

“When I get on the internet I find more than 90% of the content in English and hence a significant percentage in Spanish and other languages,” he says. “So what I have to do is to move to another language, and that favours the displacement of my own language.”

“It discredits my own language, because – as it is not on the internet – then it is not valid, then it does not work, therefore why am I going to continue learning it? Why am I going to teach it to my children if, when I turn on the internet or television, I cannot find it there?”

Oxlaj Kumez is working with other activists to create a version of Wikipedia in Kaqchikel Mayan, as well as a translated version of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. His dream is to be able to have a “digital life in my own language, and when I decide to move to another language that it will be my decision”.

He is not the only one with that dream. In 2003, Unesco adopted a recommendation to promote the use of multilingualism online. Ever since, the organisation has been pushing for universality on the internet, with a special focus on indigenous languages.

Read the whole thing. 

WBStack has now been up and running for 6 months. During that time it has helped 70 people create 178 MediaWiki installs running Wikibase, a SPARQL query service and quickstatements, all at the click of a button, with a total of around 200,000 edits across all sites.

The most active site is currently virus-taxonomy.wiki.opencura.com which was developed during the Virtual Biohackathon on COVID-19 as a staging environment for “improving the taxonomy of viruses on Wikidata”. It currently stands at 20,000 edits, around 7000 Items.

Thanks again to Rhizome, who run their very own Wikibase, for their support paying the Google Cloud bill in the early stages of this project.

Updates

2020 has so far seen 135 commit to the currently private git repo (38 a month). Today the git repo hit 1038 commits, the first being on 29 December 2017.

For previous update posts see the 2019 October Introduction, November Review and January 2020 Infrastructure Overview.

MediaWiki & Wikibase

MediaWiki and extensions have all be updated to include the latest security fixes, this is MediaWiki 1.33.3. You can find the release notes here.

MediaWiki has had a large number of commonly used extensions enabled. These include: JsonConfig, Kartographer, Math, Score, PageImages, Scribunto, Cite, TemplateSandbox, CodeEditor, WikiEditor, SecureLinkFixer, Echo, Graph, Poem, TemplateData, AdvancedSearch, ParserFunctions, MobileFrontend, DeleteBatch, MultimediaViewer and EmbedVideo. The MinervanNeue skin was also added.

Wikibase has seen the addition of a few new datatypes that have already been on Wikidata for quite some time, these include Musical Notation and Mathematical Expression.

WikibaseLexeme is also deployed to the platform and enabled by request on some sites. If you want to try out this extension please get in touch as a feature toggle has not yet made its way into the UI.

If you want to read up move on the skins, extensions of data types then I advise that you click one of the many links above.

You’ll also notice a shameless bit of self promotion that has been added to the bottom of all sites. Hopefully we can add this to Wikibase soon (Wikibase task).

For site managers

Site managers in this context are the users that created the site on wbstack.com. Currently that is limited to 1 manager per site, but that will be changing in the future.

Many wbstack.com UI bugs have been fixed, these include confusing form input errors when creating accounts and sites. More content is now included on the main dashboard and, if you forget your password, there is now a password reset flow available from the login page.

Site managers can now set a Logo for the site that will automatically be sized and applied to MediaWiki. And to get rid of all of those pesky test sites, there is finally a delete button!

When creating a site you now also have the option to use a custom domain name.

Queryservice

The WBStack query service updater has been a terrible hack since day 1. It was a PHP script wrapping around the main Java updater, and the Java updater would be shelled out to based on events from MediaWiki. This is of course slow, and the JVM for the updater could regularly take 30 seconds to fully initiate, all to send a single update to the backend.

Finally this has been totally rewritten in Java, so you should see less delays to your query service. Though currently specific to WBStack, this multi site updater should make its way into the main Wikidata query git repo for use by others if needed. You can find the current Gerrit patch here.

The query service itself has also seen an expansion to the whitelisted SPARQL endpoints. You can see the full list here.

Under the hood

If you want to know more about how all of the moving parts tie together take a look at my 2019 infrastructure post.

Backups always existed of all sites, however these were taken by hand, now automatic snapshots of all sites are taken every single night!

The main platform is powered by Laravel, and was recently updated from version 5.8 to 6.18. The main wbstack.com UI is written in VueJS using Vuetify which has been updated from version 1.5 to 2.2, which has lead to some UI improvements and layout changes. Other backend services such as Redis, MariaDB, Nginx, and Cert-Manager have also been kept up to date with security fixes and new releases.

The whole platform is powered using Docker images on Kubernetes running in the Google Cloud. One part of deploying to the site involves building docker images. The build pipeline now makes use of Kaniko build caching which dramatically speeds up the time to live for needed changes. The “wikibase-docker” images are not used on WBStack, and the images that are used are not really fit for use outside of the infrastructure. However learnings will continue to filter into “wikibase-docker”.

The future

The future is bright, and although WBStack is still very much in an alpha state the platform has proved itself to be scalable, managale, maintainable and of use to people.

In the last month I presented the idea of WBStack at a remote version of EMWcon (Enterprise MediaWiki con). One of the quotes from the slide deck is:

WMDE work around “Wikibase as a Service” is planned in this area during the second half of 2020.

EMWCon 2020 slides

If you are interested in this effort then please contact the Product manager for Wikibase, Samantha Alipio.

Planned changes

One of the biggest changes which should happen in the next 3 months will be the upgrade from MediaWiki 1.33 to 1.35. This will bring a variety of features including some new special pages, a new REST API and a PHP based Parsoid service. The PHP based parsoid service should allow VisualEditor to more easily be deployed on WBStack (something I have been waiting for).

As well as VisualEditor I am keen to try and deploy some sort of collaborative editor for wiki pages. This could be the VisualEditor “CollabPad”, or some other, possibly new extension.

Login is not currently where I want it to be. MediaWiki “user identity” extensions don’t currently offer the level of flexibility that I would like. This being custom usernames, but easy registration and login making use of common authentication methods such as Google, Twitter or others.

I want to push more settings into the site manager view such site language, site name and default skin selection, and also open up the ability to have a site managed by multiple people. Sites should also be more discoverable on the wbstack website itself.

A documentation hub of some description is also long overdue. This could be added to the main wbstack site, or created as a wiki itself, possibly sitting at wiki.wbstack.com. Dog food is good for you after all!

The post WBStack 2020 Update 1 appeared first on Addshore.

07/04/2020-13/04/2020

Mapping

• Gareth L announced the mapping of general practice doctors (GP) and other health sites as the UK’s project for Q2 2020, for which a OSM wiki page has been created.
• Chris Beddow, of Mapillary, shared a webinar on YouTube on how to add hospital data to the map to help curb the spread of COVID-19.

Community

• Bleibtoffen is a version of Ça reste ouvert for Germany, Switzerland and Austria. It launched on 12 April and is supported by FOSSGIS and Swiss OSM.
• Mapillary’s Edoardo Neerhut blogged about the importance of maps for capacity planning in the fight against COVID-19. He detailed the benefits of having better maps and pointed to MapRoulette tasks for adding data to hospitals in the US.
• There is some controversy (automatic translation) about the appropriateness of including non-open data from dokomaps in the Ça reste ouvert app, which we reported about last week.
• Russian user Artem Svetlov used QGIS 3 and OSM data to generate (automatic translation) about 40 diagrams of Russian railway lines for articles in Wikipedia (automatic translation).
• Issue # 6 of the US OSM newsletter is now online.

Imports

• Rafael Avila Coya posted the plan of UN Mappers to import 108,000 km of waterways in Somalia from the UN Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS) data, on the OSM Import mailing list.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• If all goes well, you can start applying for an OSMF Microgrant from 20 April 2020. The Microgrants Committee is working hard to make this possible. Joost Schouppe’s diary post already points the way to what kind of proposals the OSMF is looking for (hint: yours!). The page will be updated with all relevant information, in particular a link to the submission form and an extensive blog post.
• Lately there has been some criticism of OSM tile server performance. In a blog post, the Operations Working Group thanked the five recent donors of nodes for OSM’s tile cache CDN. We would also like to join the Operations Working Group and thank all the sponsors as outlined in the blog post about tile caches.

Humanitarian OSM

• Missing Maps reported about its activities in Canada, where it partners with the Canadian Red Cross Society. The blog post explains why such activities are needed in a developed country like Canada, with the incomplete map data in remote areas causing safety issues for the local population, often Indigenous communities.
• FOSM (Fundación OpenStreetMap Colombia) reported (automatic translation) that, thanks to the volunteers who participated, a consolidated map of the indigenous reservation of Guambia has been created. This mapping will assist in responding to the emergency of the Misak indigenous community in the reservation, located in the municipality of Silvia, Cauca, Colombia. Mainly derived from Task 158, where 3,755 buildings and 73 km of rivers and streams were added. The information captured by drones in the area is currently being processed to generate a new task for the area. The map and vector information has already been delivered to the authorities of the Indigenous Council of the Guambia Resguardo.

Maps

• Alexander Avtanski visualised the GPS tracks he collected during hiking, biking, kayaking and driving over the past 12 years in a YouTube video.
• [1] clementroux introduces a new service that visualises public transport data from OSM. The service, named JustGo, also provides downloads of public transport data.
• The map of security cameras installed by the Moscow (Russia) City Hall uses OSM as a background. The installation addresses are marked with dots on the map, and there may be even more cameras.

Open Data

• David Morais Ferreira (osm user dmlu) shows how to build shaded relief maps, using Luxembourg open data as an example.

Licences

• MapBox highlighted the creativity of many local projects helping in the COVID-19 response using MapBox products. Nuno Caldeira is watching to ensure the recognition of the OpenStreetMap community role in all these efforts.

Software

• An article on Medium explains how Google’s OR-Tools can be used to solve vehicle routing problems. Other tools directly based on OpenStreetMap are also mentioned, both for routing and optimisation.
• Hannah Judge, from Mapbox, likes that Sheet Mapper, a tool that creates live maps including an OSM attribution with POI data from a spreadsheet, is included on Mapbox’s new Impact Tools page.
• Mapzen, a start-up which failed early in 2018, created a lot of useful software in the OSM sphere. The Mapzen open-source, MIT licensed, mapping platform has moved to the Urban Computing Foundation (UCF), founded by the Linux Foundation as an umbrella for the mobility sector, which wants to restart the project.

Releases

• Joseph Eisenberg blogged about the improvements made in OpenStreetMap Carto release v5.1.0. As usual, it will take some days until you can see the changes in the default map on the OSM website.

Did you know …

• … how to quickly and easily set up your own tile server?
• …the OSM Ireland Tasking Manager, which was set up to complete all of Ireland’s buildings in OSM as part of the #osmIRL_buildings campaign.

Other “geo” things

• Guillaume Rischard tweets that the dismantled fortress under Luxembourg City can still be detected when using newly released LiDAR open data.
• Map enthusiasts are tweeting images of maps (and map-related objects) which they have at home. The hashtag is #mapsathome.
• Another battle in the ongoing dispute as to the world’s steepest street was resolved in favour of New Zealand, according to The Guardian. We’ve reported on earlier episodes.

Upcoming Events

Many meetings are being cancelled – please check the calendar on the wiki page for updates.

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 NunoMASAzevedo, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Silka123, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred.

On twitter a reference was made to an article in the Sunday Times. The article is about the response of the UK government to the COVID-19 pandemic. It mentions many people and mentions their roles.

It is up to you to have your own opinion, but most if not all people are known in Wikidata, some have a Wikipedia article and all of them are in the spotlight. So when you get an edited sound bite, when you want to know if someone is "for real", it helps when you can turn to Wikimedia and find what there is to know.

This sound bite about "herd immunity" is too short to be properly understood. The argument made is that herd immunity is all that we have now that the genie is out of the bottle and, who can argue with that? Read the article as well.. After some tinkering, the Scholia for Prof Edmunds shows some 235 papers, many co-authors and still, even more co-authors are missing. The subjects he covered are extensive.. check out that Scholia. Prof Edmunds takes/tool part in UK government deliberations; it is mentioned in that Sunday Times article. He is asked to explain epidemiology to the public.

Wikimedia interconnection for me is to enrich our existing knowledge in cases like this. Tweeting about it, blogging about it may lead to even more and better information like a Wikipedia article. What we as Wikimedians do does not happen in a vacuum, connecting to what happens and who the players are help us and our readers understand who they are in  these early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thanks,
      GerardM

We are running a survey to find out how MediaWiki can be improved for the typical user.

Are you using MediaWiki? Or have you looked into using it? We'd love to hear what your experience was like. Letting us know your thoughts only takes a few minutes.

We are doing this survey since we think the needs of the typical user are not that well understood. Most feedback on the MediaWiki software comes from highly technical users or from those involved with Wikimedia. If you fall into one of these categories, this survey is not for you, though please do share it with more typical users.

Please do not fill out the survey if you are a MediaWiki developer, MediaWiki consultant, Wikimedia employee or if your primary MediaWiki usage is on Wikimedia projects.

Are you currently using MediaWiki? Then go to the MediaWiki User Survey.

Are you considering using MediaWiki or did you investigate MediaWiki in the past? Then fill out the MediaWiki survey for non-users.

Share the surveys

Upvote the Reddit post

Have you looked into MediaWiki before? But are not using it (yet)? What where your impressions? What did you like? What did you hate? Did you choose an alternative? Our survey only takes a few minutes.https://t.co/6bp0Yw6RCK#RemoteTools #RemoteWork #HomeOffice #wiki #remote

— Professional.Wiki (@ProWikiExperts) April 20, 2020

Are you using #MediaWiki at your company or organization? Let us know how we can make the software stack even better! Or rant about how bad it is for usecase xyz, we love negative feedback!https://t.co/jWe3bZauBV#wiki #UserExperience #RemoteTools #KnowledgeManagement

— Professional.Wiki (@ProWikiExperts) April 20, 2020

We are running a survey for #MediaWiki users and one for people not using MediaWiki but have looked into it. Take a few minutes to share your thoughts and help make the software even better!https://t.co/gFb50uFWzJ#OpenSource #wiki #KnowledgeManagement #RemoteTools

— Professional.Wiki (@ProWikiExperts) April 20, 2020

By Jonathan Morgan and Isaac Johnson, Wikimedia Research

Some Wikipedia articles are born popular, some achieve popularity, and some have popularity thrust upon them. But it can be hard to anticipate when or why a particular Wikipedia article will become popular, especially when that popularity is driven by viral content posted on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit. 

The pace and scale of social media mean that any internet content—from the perennially-popular cute cat video genre to topical trends like the latest in DIY face mask couture—can go from obscurity to ubiquity in a matter of hours. Sudden reader traffic spikes due to viral content can have major consequences for the encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Traffic spikes that pull from multiple sources—search engines, Wikipedia’s internal search, and links from other Wikipedia articles—generally signal that an article’s newfound popularity is related to major global events. 

A sudden increase in attention to a previously sleepy Wikipedia article coming from a single social media platform is harder to predict and interpret. 

Most of the time, these social media traffic spikes are harmless. They can even be beneficial, as when they draw the attention of subject matter experts outside the community to previously unidentified errors or content gaps. They can also lead to increases in vandalism to the target article—or to good-faith but nonetheless damaging edits by first-time editors who aren’t familiar with how Wikipedia works yet. A surprise traffic spike may even indicate a coordinated attempt by a group of social media users to surreptitiously insert disinformation into a Wikipedia article. A traffic spike could also indicate that the social media platforms themselves are linking to Wikipedia to debunk disinformation or fact-check controversial content that users are posting on their sites.

In mid-March, the Wikimedia Research team launched a pilot project that gives editors the timely information they need to monitor these social media traffic spikes. The social media traffic report is an experimental initiative intended to help us understand whether editors with more visibility into reader behavior are better at maintaining article quality. Editors in the pilot project will help the Research Team identify examples of potential disinformation campaigns and aid in ongoing efforts to build tools to model, monitor, and respond to disinformation on Wikipedia.

Historically, social media traffic spikes have been largely invisible to Wikipedia editors when and even after they occur. This is because the pageview data that the Wikimedia Foundation makes public and that powers our pageview API, as well as tools like TopViews and WikiStats, does not include information about where the source of traffic comes from.  This is a measure that Wikimedia takes to preserve user privacy. 

For this project, we worked with the Foundation’s Privacy, Legal, and Analytics Engineering teams to determine whether we could release platform-specific pageview data for the articles that were receiving the most traffic from that platform on a given day. We determined that as long as the report only shares traffic from articles that received at least 500 views from a single platform on a single day, this data could be safely released without endangering the privacy of individual Wikipedia users. 

The report also includes other public data about each of the articles that we think will be useful like the previous day’s views from that platform (to identify spikes vs. persistently popular articles), the total pageviews for the article on that day (to check whether a spike is platform-specific, or part of a broader trend), and the number of Wikipedia editors who have watchlisted the article—so that patrollers can focus their attention on the articles that are least likely to be under active monitoring already.

This project was initiated based on the output of a disinformation discussion at Wikimania 2019 and the findings of a recent research project aimed at identifying vulnerabilities created by technological limitations of current patroller workflows.

The social media traffic report is updated daily at around 14:00 UTC with the previous day’s traffic. We plan to maintain the report through the end of May 2020. If we receive positive feedback about the report, we’ll consider working with our partner teams at Wikimedia to make this data available on a long term basis. We’re also considering making social media traffic data available for more platforms on more Wikipedia languages. Our goal is to make it possible for community researchers and developers to use this new data source to build analysis and monitoring tools to help editors ensure that Wikipedia remains the most accurate, up-to-date, and reliable source for information on the internet—whether that information is being used to debunk Flat Earth conspiracy theorists (currently trending on YouTube), inform political discussions (Three-Fifth’s Compromise, currently trending on Twitter), or something completely different (Triskaidekaphobia aka “fear of the number 13”, currently trending—where else?—on Reddit). 

We are looking for ways to improve the social media traffic report, and we want your help! If you use the report, please provide feedback on the project talkpage on Meta. If you note any suspicious edits when using the report to monitor trending articles, you can report these using the anonymous Google Form linked at the top of the social media traffic report page.

About this post

Featured image credit: Nested hyperboloids, David Eppstein, CC BY-SA 3.0 and GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2 or higher

In 2019 Wikimedia UK, Archaeology Scotland and The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland recruited a graduate intern through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities Internship programme. These funded placements give PhD researchers the opportunity to spend up to three months with a partner organisation; improving their research skills and giving them an opportunity to work on a project which makes a real difference to an organisation.

The successful applicant was Roberta Leotta, and we planned that she would help to design and deliver a project which looked at the content gap around images of Scottish Archaeology, using Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata. 

As a remote internship, with occasional visits to the Archaeology Scotland offices, our first step was to give Roberta some introductory training on the Wikimedia projects – and using some of the materials I put together for the new Scottish trainer cohort, let her explore the projects. Here are her reflections on the first part of her internship. – Dr Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordinator, Wikimedia UK.

---

It is very common for a PhD student in Classics to be associated with the image of a bookworm: a person who spends all their time in the library surrounded by books and papyruses and who is usually very unfamiliar with technology and digital resources. For sure, some academic environments such as Classics tend to be less innovative and more traditional than others, however this image is increasingly becoming less realistic. In fact, even though we study the literature and culture of the past, we need and want to engage with the world where we live – a world which is highly digitised. Moreover, the special circumstances we are experiencing these days are showing how technology is crucial in all sectors, including Humanities. Unfortunately, despite some recent improvements, the opportunities to increase our digital skills whilst at university are not massive. For this reason, when I saw the possibility to partake in an internship with Wikimedia UK and Archaeology Scotland, I decided to apply. It seemed to me a good chance to learn something about a widespread digital resource that the academic world needs to deal in.

And indeed, my expectations were fulfilled from the beginning. In four training hours about Wikimedia, and in particular on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, I started to notice that something I took for granted was, instead, the result of a very well organised structure. The structure of Wikimedia is made by people who work according to the same principles, such as, in primis, to guarantee a free access to the sum of human knowledge.

At the beginning, my first challenges were to become familiar with the new language and acquire new processes, rules and attitudes. In this regard it was interesting for me to understand the rules to follow in order to create an article suitable for Wikipedia. Differing from what I was used to, an article needs to show the state of knowledge on a specific topic and it needs not to show the writer’s critical perspective. In fact Wikimedia’s aim is not to give the final interpretation on a particular topic, but to offer the starting points for research on that topic. In other words, Wikimedia offers material which can inform us about the world, but also that can improve our critical skills about what we know about the world.

Moreover, an article has to be notable and well-referenced, and writing about underrepresented subjects such as women is encouraged. In this regard, I found that there are some parallels between the accuracy and subjects’ preferences required both in Wikimedia and in the academic world. The concept of notability, instead, can be more challenging and relative, but still can encourage us to differentiate personal interests in knowledge from those that would benefit humanity’s interests as a whole.

I appreciate these principles, but what I appreciate mostly is how Wikimedia guarantees that those principles are followed. This leads me to talk about my last point, for now, which I found very provocative about Wikimedia, namely the community’s system. So far, the feelings I got by observing Wikimedia from this closer point of view is that providing knowledge to other people is not a matter of individual effort, but a matter of a communal effort and that the collaborative attitude rather than competitiveness is the key to make it possible.

I wish not only the academic environment, but also other environments dealing with culture, could take on board the same spirit and attitude to spreading knowledge and understanding of the world.

---

Roberta’s project has continued to develop over the months. The COVID-19 situation has – obviously – changed the project somewhat, and we’ll be reflecting on that in a later blog. If you’d like to help us support more interns like Roberta, please consider donating to Wikimedia UK.

Words fail to capture the significance of the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic: the suffering of the disease’s victims, the pain of their loved ones, and the frustrations of those otherwise affected are, together, greater than any crisis our generation has experienced. In the first few days, comparisons to 9/11 and the Great Recession were commonplace. They have failed to capture the mood, so references to World War II, the Great Depression, and of course the 1918 influenza pandemic have seeped into news and commentary. 

It’s impossible to know how the present catastrophe will reshape the world in the future, but Wikipedia is already documenting, essentially in real-time, how COVID-19 is changing the world day by day. To understand Wikipedia’s coronavirus coverage, you have to start with WikiProject COVID-19. 

The WikiProject

For those not already familiar, WikiProjects are collaborative efforts organized by editors who want to work on similar topics. Wikipedia has almost 900 active WikiProjects, from A Cappella to Zanzibar City. Among them, there already existed WikiProjects whose subject matter is closely related to the coronavirus—specifically Disaster management, Medicine, and Viruses—but WikiProject COVID-19 is barely a month old as of this writing. 

In that time, nearly 1900 articles have been created or adopted by the project, out of more than 6,000 articles mentioning COVID-19 on Wikipedia.^[1]and growing by about 1,000 articles per week, according to my unscientific spot checks  Launched by a single user on March 15, today it has more than 130 official contributors. And this is not to say there are only 130 editors working on pandemic articles, only that 130 have taken the time out from editing to sign their names up and, in some cases, help to coordinate efforts. Someone even came up with a logo (at right). A separate project from WMF Labs has sought to identify all pandemic-related editing, which at last check counted 527,000 edits by nearly 40,000 separate editors.

WikiProject COVID-19 also maintains a list of more than 600 articles it considers especially important and whose quality they are working hardest to improve. Some of these articles are exceptional in a conventional way, such as 2020 coronavirus pandemic in Germany^[2]the Germans are just good at Wikipedia in general while others are more unusual: here is a rare article, about the Chinese doctor Ai Fen, where the encyclopedia entry is in English but nearly all of the sources are in Chinese.

Wikipedia editors’ contributions to our understanding of the coronavirus is important work^[3]not like doctors and nurses, sure, but crucial nonetheless and unmatched on the internet. Nothing like Wikipedia existed for most of the world events described in the first paragraph, and even in 2008 Wikipedia wasn’t quite what it is now. This post is no comprehensive survey of these editors’ work, only a report back from a few days of reading and clicking to learn about aspects of the pandemic I knew nothing, little, or not enough about.^[4]Lately, it feels almost like my early days of discovering Wikipedia: opening tab after tab after tab in my browser, losing hours to it, engaging in a very mid-2000s activity once nicely captured in a memorable XKCD comic.

How the Information is Organized

Most readers arrive at Wikipedia via web search, but those visiting the Main page over the past month have found a coronavirus-specific information box toward the top-right corner of the page.^[5]A development this blog advocated for just before it became reality, ICYMI. This box is obviously a good place to start exploring Wikipedia’s coverage of the pandemic and related topics. By definition it is the highest-level summary of how Wikipedians think about organizing this information. But as we shall see, it doesn’t even begin to hint at the true scope of the topic.

There are nine total links here, which is arguably a lot, but it is well-organized. The bigger typeface on “Coronavirus pandemic” draws the eye to what is not just the box’s name but also a link to the primary article about the phenomenon, 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic. The next two links, “Disease” and “Virus” go to Coronavirus disease 2019 and Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, respectively, wisely sparing the reader from guessing about how these relate to each other. The rest of the links describe the pandemic from different angles, and we’ll examine them more later. But first, I’m interested in capturing some numbers about each of the three main articles. 

The Pandemic, The Disease, and the Virus

Here is a rudimentary side-by-side comparison of the three articles about (in order, left to right) the Pandemic, the Disease, and the Virus. The following is information pulled from WikiWatch, a tool that I built, and from Wikipedia itself:^[6]Accurate as of April 13, when this data was collected

Even without charts, the pattern is clear: all the figures, from word count to images to edits to pageviews, are very large for the primary article about the pandemic, and commensurately less for each supporting article on more specialized subjects. Considering how Wikipedia’s content guidelines advise editors to consider giving subjects their “due weight”, the editors involved are doing pretty well on this account, whether by design or accident. It’s rather elegant, actually. 

As for the content, I won’t pretend to have read all 22,000 words, but in sampling a few sections of each, I feel confident saying they represent some of Wikipedia’s best work. The pandemic is clearly a topic of grave concern, with copious available sources to draw upon, and there is sufficient interest from editors and readers alike to ensure the articles are constantly updated as information changes. This is the kind of thing Wikipedia does exceptionally well during extreme weather events, such as hurricanes,^[7]hat tip: WikiProject Tropical cyclones only this time the whole world is in one.

There is some repetition in photos, but if you have a good photo depicting a nasopharyngeal swab, you don’t really need another. And while we might think everyone has seen a “flatten the curve” illustration or animation by now, it doesn’t hurt to use in more than one article, just in case. Interestingly, a number of these images are drawn from the CDC which, along with the WHO, has released all of its coronavirus-related content as public domain.^[8]To learn more about the coronavirus illustration oft-used in Wikipedia’s pandemic coverage, see this New York Times article. 

Speaking of flatter curves, there is another trend to be found in the traffic. First, here’s a chart from the WMF Labs pageviews analysis tool covering the last 30 days, also covering the Pandemic, the Disease, and Virus, in that order:

This gives you a good comparison of traffic on these articles over the last month, but the pandemic article receives so much more attention compared to the others that we can’t really see what’s happening with them. Via the WikiWatch dashboard, here are the same three articles, each according to its own x-axis:

• 

• 

• 

This isn’t altogether surprising: the internet-surfing public’s greatest interest in these topics occured in the first two weeks, when the stay-at-home orders were as novel as the coronavirus. Now, at least half the public’s demonstrated curiosity has been sated. I also wonder if it might not suggest something about the urgency with which the public is responding, which is to say, less over time. If you feel like social distancing practices at your local supermarket are already diminishing, these charts might help explain why.

The Timeline and the Territory

Now let’s have a look at some of these other pages: the “Timeline” link goes to Timeline of the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic, which is surprisingly short. But this is only because it is a repository of links to the timeline by month, which explains the “April” link next to it, and which naturally takes one to Timeline of the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic in April 2020. This article is enormous—and we’re only halfway through the month! It’s a mind-bogglingly extensive list of events from all over the world, for each day this month. It’s already about 16,000 words, or 22,000 words if you count the references at the end.

And here one also starts to confront the limitations of what Wikipedia can offer the reader. Often as not, Wikipedia does not make for a riveting reading experience. Its content is constrained by requirements of sourcing, content, and tone appropriate to an encyclopedia. This is overwhelmingly a good thing: it is this quality control that gives Wikipedia its uniquely authoritative fixedness, although it comes at a price: the context you wish could be found between the facts. But this is not Wikipedia’s job. When the newspaper features and book-length investigations are finally published, months and years from now, then Wikipedia will have the sources it needs to tell a more compelling story.

Next there is “By location” which goes to 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic by country and territory. Less an article than a list of lists, it organizes the globe first by continent, with links to dedicated pages for each. It even discusses territories with no identified cases, such as 2020 coronavirus pandemic in Antarctica, which won’t take you very long. And some of these regions surely lying about it—see 2020 coronavirus pandemic in North Korea. Name a country, dependency or principality, and Wikipedia will tell you how it has been affected by the coronavirus. 

Naturally, there is an article for each of the 50 U.S. states, five territories, and one district, not to mention the parent article 2020 coronavirus pandemic in the United States. A summary of just these U.S.-centric articles would be a fascinating blog post, which I will not attempt here, except to observe that they vary widely in quality. This is not just because some are short. After all, there isn’t nearly as much to say about the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in Wyoming as compared to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in Florida. But the Florida article is likely too short, whereas the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in California is so long as to be unreadable at times. Skim the subsection called “March 18–19” and tell me it’s worth anyone’s time to read or write. In an archive, of course. In an encyclopedia article, not so much.

Some of this tedium would be better replaced by charts. And indeed, many country and state articles include variations on a really excellent chart, meaning visually appealing and easy to interpret, that you can see below depicting cases in Sweden.^[9]and accessible on a Wikipedia template page here 

Then there is another table which is far too tall to show in full, but starts like this:

This is the big picture of what you really want to know: how many cumulative cases, deaths, and recoveries by country. In fact, if you search Google for coronavirus cases right now, this Wikipedia page—not a government or professional organization—is where Google’s knowledge panel is pulling data from. Look for the easy-to-miss “Wikipedia” link at the bottom of this screen grab:

That link goes directly to Template:2019–20 coronavirus pandemic data. Not an article, but a template—the raw back end of Wikipedia that most readers never see. Because of the link from Google, this template is currently receiving nearly 200,000 pageviews a day, putting it in the top 1,000 pages across all of Wikipedia. A template!

The Rest of the Story

Finally, there are links for “Impact”, “Deaths”, and “Portal”. We’ll take these in reverse order: Portal:Coronavirus disease 2019 is like the front page of Wikipedia but focused entirely on the coronavirus (less the pandemic, for some reason). It’s a perfectly good starting point if you’d like some help in finding your way around; it presents partial lead sections of the “Disease” and “Virus” articles, and links to some other important pages, such as COVID-19 vaccine^[10]hypothetical, just to be clear and COVID-19 drug development.^[11]not just the hoped-for vaccine, but treatments as well Again, a great place to start, especially if you like curation, but its purpose is diminished because it is not actually the starting point. Compared to the millions received by the first three links, this page gets only a little over 2,500 pageviews daily. 

List of deaths due to coronavirus disease 2019, by contrast, is getting around 35,000 views daily. This article is self-explanatory, and is also a specialized version of Wikipedia’s perennially popular “Recent deaths” article.^[12]see: Deaths in 2020 The coronavirus deaths article lists more than 200 individuals, each the subject of Wikipedia articles before or, in some cases, after they died. Previously, there was a separate list article about prominent individuals who had been infected, and then recovered, from the coronavirus. It was deleted in late March, largely for being potentially impossibly long, and also problematic for privacy reasons.

“Impacts” takes one to Socio-economic impact of the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic another very long article with numerous links to articles organized principally by industry and then by region. There are dozens of them, and they too could be the topic of substantial study. Alas, considering the length of this article already, I will leave this for you to explore on your own. Know this: if it exists in the world, you can bet the coronavirus has had an impact upon it, and Wikipedia editors have organized the available news coverage and government statistics to explain it.

While you’re stuck at home over the next few weeks or months, you could do a lot worse than spending your time reading it all. And then, when you’re done, you might as well start again at the beginning, because WikiProject COVID-19 will have revised each article dozens or hundreds of times to keep up with the evolving situation. 

Odds & Ends

I can’t resist leaving you with a couple of unusual or unexpected things I found out that didn’t fit into the post above:

• Speaking of the 1918 flu pandemic, the current article is called Spanish flu. Nowadays we know that it did not begin in Spain but likely it was in the U.S., and especially after the “Chinese Virus” controversy, many of us are more sensitive to these kinds of historical injustices. In March, there was a fierce debate about whether the article should be renamed. Ultimately the move to rename it failed, following Wikipedia’s sometimes controversial policy about using commonly recognizable names. 
• 
  
• What was the first news article to mention Wikipedia and the coronavirus? It appears to be “On Wikipedia, a fight is raging over coronavirus disinformation” by Omer Benjakob in Wired on February 9.
• 
  
• According to Wikipedia’s official statistics, pageviews are up 7% over the past month, and editing activity is up 9%. But if you look at past months, there’s nothing statistically significant about these upward ticks. For some reason, various months in 2019 and even earlier were on par or higher than these figures. Then again, we are talking matters of millions and billions, and one has to assume the law of large numbers applies.
• 
  
• This being Wikipedia, where anyone can edit as they wish until enough other editors become fed up with you, Wikipedia already had a list of “generally sanctioned” editors and pages. Not too many editors, fortunately, but if you’re looking for a list of coronavirus-related articles that have been more controversial than others, here you go.
• 
  
• Finally, WikiProject COVID-19 also maintains a list of its most popular pages, sorted by traffic. A couple of entries near the top of the almost 800 caught my attention:

Unlike traditional writing assignments where a student’s work is ephemeral, the Wikipedia writing assignment allows for student work to persist on in the public reach. Student work can later become highly relevant and important in response to current events. Last spring, a University of Maryland student in Dr. L. Jen Shaffer’s Researching Environment and Culture class created a Wikipedia article about wildlife smuggling and zoonoses to explore the role that wildlife trafficking has in zoonotic diseases. With the emergence of a global coronavirus pandemic, likely linked to a wildlife host, this student’s work has seen a surge of interest.

Before the pandemic, the article was viewed by a couple dozen of readers each day. In the month since the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic on March 11, the page was viewed by an average of 330 readers every day, with a total of 9,869 views! The article includes the important section “Exotic trade and disease outbreaks”, which is particularly important to readers right now.

With education disrupted around the world, learners are increasingly turning to Wikipedia to fill their knowledge needs. On average, over 280,000,000 readers have turned to English Wikipedia each day in the month after a global pandemic was declared. Student work can fill that critical need to provide free information accessible to a general audience.

---

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia writing assignment into a future course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for all you need to know to get started.