By C. Estelle Smith, University of Minnesota

What does it mean to “keep community in the loop” when building algorithms for Wikipedia?

-C. Estelle Smith

Imagine you’ve just created a profile on Wikipedia and spent 27 minutes working on what you earnestly thought would be a helpful edit to your favorite article. You click that bright blue “Publish changes” button for the very first time, and you see your edit go live! Weeee! But 52 seconds later, you refresh the page and discover that your edit has been wiped off the planet. How would you feel if you knew that an algorithm had contributed to this rapid reversion of all your hard work?

For the sake of illustration, let’s say you were editing a “stub” article about a woman scientist you admire. You can’t remember where you read it, but there’s this great story about how she got interested in computing. So, you spend some time writing up the story to improve her mostly empty bio. Clearly, you’re trying to be helpful. But unfortunately, you didn’t cite your source…and boom!—your work gets blown away. Without any way to understand what happened, you now feel snubbed and unwanted. Will you ever edit again?!

Many edits (like yours) are damaging to Wikipedia, even if they were completed in good faith—e.g. missing citations [ ], bad grammars, mis-speled werds, and incorrect {syntax. And then there are plenty of edits that are malicious—e.g. the addition of offensive, racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise unacceptable content. All of these examples make it necessary for human moderators (a.k.a. “patrollers”) to review edits and revert (or fix) the bad ones. However, given the massive volume of edits to Wikipedia each day, it’s impossible for humans to review every edit, or even to identify which edits should be reviewed. 

In order to make it possible(-ish) to build and maintain Wikipedia, the community absolutely requires the help of algorithmic systems. But we need these algorithmic systems to be effective community partners (think R2-D2, cheerfully supporting the Rebel Alliance!) rather than AI overlords (think Terminator…being Terminator). How can we possibly design these systems in a way that supports all of its well-intentioned community stakeholders…including patrollers, newcomers, and everyone in between?

Our team of researchers from the University of Minnesota, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Wikimedia Foundation explored this question in our new open access research paper. We used a method called Value-Sensitive Algorithm Design which has three steps: 

(1) Understand community stakeholders’ values related to algorithms.

(2) Incorporate and balance these values across the full span of the ML development pipeline.

(3) Evaluate algorithms based not only on accuracy, but also on their acceptability and broader impacts.

We argue that if you follow these three steps, you can “keep community in the loop” as you build algorithmic systems, making you more likely to avoid catastrophic and community-damaging consequences. Our paper completes the first step of Value-Sensitive Algorithm Design with respect to a prominent machine learning system on Wikipedia called ORES (Objective Revision Evaluation Service).

ORES is a collection of machine learning algorithms which look at textual changes made by humans, and then, produce statistical guesses of how likely the edits are to be damaging. These guesses are continuously fed via API in real-time all across Wikipedia, as editors and patrollers complete their work in parallel. 

For example, one prominent place where ORES’ guesses affect user experience is in the “Recent Changes” feed, which looks like a list that shows every new edit to the encyclopedia chronologically. Patrollers often spend time looking through the Recent Changes list, using a highlighting tool built into the interface. 

If we fed an edit like yours into ORES, it might output guesses like “82% likely to be damaging” and “79% likely to be done in good faith.” The Recent Changes list could use these scores to highlight your edit in red to show that it is “moderately likely to be problematic.” Or, if the patroller wanted, it could highlight your edit in green to show that you likely meant well. 

In either case, both the underlying algorithms of ORES and the highlights they generate majorly impact: (1) how the patroller interacts with your edit, and (2) whether or not you will continue editing in the future. That’s why, in our study, we wanted to understand what values should guide our design decisions with regard to systems like ORES, and how we can balance these values to lead to the best outcomes for the whole community.

We spoke to dozens of ORES stakeholders, including editors, patrollers, tool developers, Wikimedia Foundation employees, and even researchers, in order to systematically identify which values matter to the community. The infographic above summarizes the results. 

For example, one critical value is “Human Authority.” On Wikipedia, the community believes it is vitally important to avoid giving final decision-making authority to the algorithmic system itself. In other words, please, nobody build Terminator! There should never be an algorithm that gets to call the shots and make the final decision about which edits stay, and which edits go. But we do need community partners like R2-D2 to assist with “Effort Reduction” by pointing us in the right direction.

At the same time, the example of your edit shows that along with “Effort Reduction,” we also need to build systems that foster “Positive Engagement.” In other words, ORES should reduce how much work it takes for patrollers to find bad edits, and it also needs to make sure that well-intentioned community members are having positive experiences, even when their edits aren’t up to snuff. 

So, maybe when ORES detects damaging (but good faith) edits in Recent Changes, those edits could receive special treatment. For example, rather than wiping out your red-highlighted edit without explanation, perhaps your edit could be allowed to stay online for just a few extra minutes. Recent Changes could take a hint from Snuggle and direct a patroller to first reach out to you before reverting, provide some scaffolded text like, “Hi @yourhandle! Thanks for making your first edit to Wikipedia! Unfortunately, our algorithm detected an issue… It seems like you meant well, so I wanted to see if you could fix this by adding a citation so that I don’t have to revert it?” 

(Yes, this is challenging the BOLD, Revert, Discuss (B-R-D) paradigm, and suggesting that in some cases, B-D-R may be a more appropriate way to balance community values. Please discuss!)

In the full paper, we share our journey of applying VSAD to understand the Wikipedia community’s values, along with 25 concrete recommendations for developers interested in building ML-driven systems in complex socio-technical contexts. As you navigate community-based moderation, we hope our experiences may shed light on approaches to problems you may be experiencing in your community, as well.

Thanks for reading! Please share your thoughts in the comments, or get in touch with me @fauxneme on Wikipedia.

About this post

Featured image credit: Le pei (pôle entrepreneuriat et innovation) est à viva tech startup connect 2016, Ecole polytechnique Université Paris-Saclay, CC BY-SA 2.0

How are we doing on that strive for operational excellence during these unprecedented times?

📊  Numbers for March and April

• 3 documented incidents. [1]
• 60 new Wikimedia-prod-error reports. [2]
• 58 Wikimedia-prod-error reports closed. [3]
• 178 currently open Wikimedia-prod-error reports in total. [4]

For more about recent incidents and pending actionables see Wikitech and Phabricator.

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📉  Outstanding reports

Take a look at the workboard and look for tasks that could use your help.

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

Breakdown of recent months:

• April 2019: Two reports closed, 2 of 14 left.
• May: (All clear!)
• June: 4 of 11 left (unchanged). ⚠️
• July: 8 of 18 left (unchanged).
• August: 2 of 14 reports left (unchanged).
• September: 7 of 12 left (unchanged).
• October: Two reports closed, 4 of 12 left.
• November: One report closed, 4 of 5 left.
• December: Two reports closed, 4 of 9 left.
• January 2020: One report closed, 5 of 7 reports left.
• February: One report closed, 6 of 7 reports left.
• March: 2 new reports survived the month of March.
• April: 13 new reports survived the month of April.

At the end of February the total of open reports over recent months was 58. Of those, 12 got closed, but with 15 new reports from March/April still open, the total is now up at 61 open reports.

The workboard overall (which includes pre-2019 tasks) has 178 tasks open. This is actually down by a bit for the first time since October with December at 196, January at 198, and February at 199, and now April at 178. This was largely due to the Release Engineering and Core Platform teams closing out forgotten reports that have since been resolved or otherwise obsoleted.

💡 Tip: Verifying existing tasks is a good way to (re)familiarise yourself with Kibana. For example: Does the error still occur in the last 30 days? Does it only happen on certain wiki? What do the URLs or stack traces have in common?

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🎉  Thanks!

Thank you to everyone who helped by reporting, investigating, or resolving problems in Wikimedia production. Thanks!

Until next time,

– Timo Tijhof

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Footnotes:
[1] Incidents. – https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation
[2] Tasks created. – https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/HjopcKClxTfw/#R
[3] Tasks closed. – https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/ts62HKYPBxod/#R
[4] Open tasks. – https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/Fw3RdXt1Sdxp/#R

Andrew Oh was drawn to the Wikipedia assignment even before taking Dr. Joan Strassmann’s class at Washington University in St Louis. “In fact, I signed up for the class because its course listing description talked about how we’ll be writing for Wikipedia,” Andrew tells us in an interview. “No other class on the listing had a description remotely similar, and I was curious as to what exactly we would be writing on. I was excited!”

Andrew chose to focus on Drosophila subobscura, a species of fruit fly whose Wikipedia page was in need of some attention.

“The class teaches us to contribute to the academic community by writing Wikipedia articles on incomplete or nonexistent entries of a specified animal group,” Andrew explains. “Out of the given list of flies to choose from, I chose Drosophila subobscura.”

Before Andrew started making edits in September 2019, there had only been a handful of changes made to the article in the last few years.

With a stub like this one, it may seem simple to know where to fill in the gaps. They’re everywhere! But, as Andrew explains, adding content to the page was not without its challenges.

“I basically had to write the entire article from scratch. Writing the article itself was hard, but spending a greater part of the semester dissecting journal articles on my fly was incredibly challenging. Some of the ones I read were from the late 19th century, and interpreting those studies was a challenge. In order to deal with this, the class was structured in a way where we are put into groups of three, where each member of the group was assigned a role — Wikipedia expert (person that would help with the ins and outs of navigating Wikipedia), writer (person that edits our manuscripts), and fact checker (person that would make sure the information we were conveying was accurate). The group-centered aspect of the class helped with my writing process, because I would always have my group members to check my work and bounce ideas off of. My group in particular was extremely helpful (thank you, Justin and Emmanuel)!”

“The reason I chose that fly was not really a compelling one — it just sounded cool. I recognized the Drosophila name from my biology classes, so I just said ‘sure’ and chose it.”

Although there may not have been a rhyme or reason to his initial choice, Andrew dove into improvements head on. So much so that the page earned an acknowledgement on Wikipedia’s main page in the “Did you know?” column on October 22, 2019.

 

Did you know … that the gut bacteria of Drosophila subobscura can influence its mating behavior?

 

Then, Andrew continued to make improvements into January, well after his course ended, until content was high quality enough for a Good Article designation — the second highest quality designation on Wikipedia.

“I started out by nominating the article for Good Article status — this gets the attention of the Wikipedia community, as the article gets listed as a ‘Good Article nominee’ and can be reviewed by a designated reviewer. After about a month from my nomination, a reviewer made contact with me, asking if I was still available to acknowledge some edits. I responded, confirming my availability. The reviewer listed all of the edits and changes I could make to help my article reach Good Article status (according to a set of community-decided guidelines). After some back and forth, making edits and receiving more feedback, I eventually put my article in ‘Good Article’ shape. The editing process took about three days of work. I was sitting in the library when I randomly got a notification saying that my article was promoted to Good Article status, and I silently celebrated. It was a good time.”

As compared to a traditional assignment, Andrew says he appreciated the new challenges of a Wikipedia writing assignment.

“I’ve taken enough classes that are structured with the traditional two midterms / one final test format, so it was great to see that change in my academic schedule. Plus, the fact that we were actively contributing to the academic community, and the work I did in this class would be used by scholars for years to come, was a really fulfilling thought that made me feel proud of my work. Although traditional assignment structures have a place in the academic pursuit of our students, it’s always nice to see learning conveyed in a different way.”

And Andrew says he’s proud of how it all turned out.

“I feel pretty good about it! It’s fun to read over the article occasionally and think about the work I put into it. I will check the ‘history’ of the article daily, and see if any new edits are made. Now that the article is Good Article status, I feel much more confident in its quality. Overall, I’m very satisfied and proud of my work.”

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To learn more about Wiki Education’s free resources and support for this assignment, visit teach.wikiedu.org. Also check out Dr. Strassmann reflections on the assignment here or another of her student’s experience with the Good Article process here.

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Header image by Martin Cooper, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Thumbnail image by Andrewoh29, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Packages for the MediaWiki 1.31 LTS release are now available for the new Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" release in my PPA. Please let me know if you run into any errors or issues.

In the future these packages will be upgraded to the MediaWiki 1.35 LTS release, whenever that's ready. It's currently delayed because of the pandemic, but I expect that it'll be ready for the next Debian release.

This is a republishing of a WITH Foundation blog from May 7, 2020.

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As many of you know, the WITH Foundation and our grantees are working toward inclusive and transformative healthcare. A facet of this work involves making information about disability and healthcare accessible for people who are looking for it. which is why we’re sponsoring this opportunity for experts to learn how to add information to the site through Wiki Education’s Wiki Scientists courses. We’d like to invite you to consider joining the second cohort of WITH Wiki Scientists. Apply now for a seat in the June-August course!

Why Wikipedia?

Wikipedia as an avenue for fortifying public information with the most evidence-based, current research out there. Wikipedia is also a place to translate research into accessible language for a general, non-academic audience. Information can be empowering and reduce stigma. This Wiki Scientists course is a chance to invite more people into the Wiki community for disability advocacy and to give back to the information resource we all know and use.

A Wikipedia training course for experts

In February of this year, we supported the first cohort of Wiki Scientists to embark on this WITH-sponsored mission. The group included healthcare professionals and advocates,; behavioral therapists, nonprofit leaders, researchers, and academics; and disability activists. We were thrilled that people were drawn to the course across such a diverse range of fields, united by their passion for information access and health advocacy. The overwhelming interest in our first cohort just helped drive home that Wikipedia is a great way to bring these experts together for a common purpose.

The cohort of 17 wrapped up their course last week and added more than 11,000 words to Wikipedia pages related to disability, disability healthcare, and activism. These pages have already been viewed 130,000 times since the group began making improvements. Here are some highlights:

Kathleen Downes, a licensed social worker and one of our WITH Wiki Scientists, was less than impressed with the depiction of spastic cerebral palsy on Wikipedia. She uploaded a photo of herself as a child to the page and made numerous improvements to the content. “A difficult task is finding information written by disabled folks themselves,” Kathleen wrote in a blog about her course experience. “I hope that a parent whose kid was recently diagnosed will Google spastic cerebral palsy one day, find my page, and realize it’s not all doom and gloom.”

Another great example of how powerful the course can be for increasing access to well-researched information can be seen in the improvements made to Wikipedia’s page about muteness. Another Wiki Scientist added brand new sections that hadn’t existed on the page before, including more information about organic causes, psychological causes, developmental and neurological causes, and treatment. They also doubled the references cited throughout the page. Click here to see the “before” and here to see the page’s current state with the improvements.

And the page on the Civil Rights Act of 1968 didn’t cover how the Fair Housing Act applies to people with disabilities before a Wiki Scientist added a sub-section devoted to the subject. This page alone has received 26,000 pageviews since February.

How to apply

Wiki Education and the WITH Foundation believe that involving experts in adding content to Wikipedia can have a lasting impact. We encourage disability healthcare scholars, disability healthcare practitioners, and/or disability studies scholars to apply. Scholars and practitioners with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply!  Want to be a part of the movement? Join the next course!

• Course dates: June 15 – September 4 (12 weeks). Meeting time will be determined via the registration form based on registrants’ shared availability.
• Time commitment per week: 1 hour virtual, collaborative meeting; 2 additional hours of independent work
• Cost: The full cost of enrollment in this course is covered by the WITH Foundation.
• Goal: to improve healthcare and disability-related pages on Wikipedia, the most utilized healthcare resource in the world.
• Apply here by May 29th, 2020. Applicants will be notified of acceptance status by June 8th,

Read more about the course by visiting wikiedu.org/WITH

28/04/2020-04/05/2020

Mapping

• muramoto tweeted about a list of Mapillary related tools he has made available.
• Richard Fairhurst points to a curious reason for sticking with volunteer on-the-ground mapping. A local mapper added a highway=track to OSM, which Richard assumes to be correct. An Amazon Logistic mapper changed it to a service road and a Mapbox remote mapper raised a note complaining that a driver could not use this way.
• Joseph Eisenberg plans to drop the tag healthcare=pharmacy in favour of the 2006 approved and widely used amenity=pharmacy. According to the proposal, healthcare=pharmacy was unilaterally implemented as a preset in one editor two years ago.
• Valor Naram wants to replace the prefix contact:*= on all occurrences of contact keys such as phone=, email= and others. His last try failed five months ago with a high turnout of 45 in favour and 61 votes against. Hence the new venture wasn’t appreciated by the readers of the tagging mailing list.
• Martin Koppenhoefer started a proposal for ele:regional= and asks for comments. The new key should provide a space for elevation based on a ‘regionally common reference system’.
• DeBigC summarised his experience of the Irish #StayHomeAndMapIRL mapping sprint, which was held after everyone in Ireland was instructed to stay home.
• Chris Beddow, a Mapillary solutions engineer, hosted a webinar on how to improve the map in the fight against COVID-19.
• The voting for traffic_signals=crossing_only for traffic lights which control a pedestrian crossing, as opposed to an intersection, has started. It seems that the Request for Comment period was not used to discuss the proposal properly, but the discussions have started now, in the voting section and on the German forum (automatic translation).
• The latest Mapillary for JOSM release brings new features for the JOSM plugin: more flexible filters, enhanced changeset tagging, support for organisations, and more. In a blogpost Chris Beddow, from Mapillary, provides some background information.

Community

• OSM Ireland summarised the outcome of its recent #StayHomeAndMapIRL mapathon. 91 mappers added 39,208 buildings. There are still tasks to work on.
• The OSMF board member Rory McCann recaps his OSM activity in a blog post on OSM.org. The summary covers his board activities as well as his work for the Communication Working Group, hacking, mapping and socialising and a mystic puzzle titled ‘For later’.
• The minutes from the OpenStreetMap U.S. meetings on 3 February and 27 March are now available online.
• Maria Popova was looking (automatic translation) for a solution to map Sosnovsky’s Hogweed, an invasive plant species that causes burns when skin is exposed to sunlight after touching it. An even bigger problem is that without intervention, it continues spreading. On Yandex maps she was able to mark it as points, but her organisation ‘Antiboroshevik’ really needed the ability to draw polygons. She was pointed to uMap and the contributors of patches of Hogweed were pleasantly surprised by the amount of detail on the background map. We also previously reported on a Sosnovsky’s Hogweed map based on remote sensing.
• Valeriy Trubin continues his series of interviews with people in OSM. This time he spoke with one of those who use OSM in their eco-projects – Nikolai Petrov (automatic translation), the founder of the service OpenRecycleMap.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The minutes of the meeting of the OSMF Microgrant Committee of 30 April 2020 have been made available.

Humanitarian OSM

• In their Missing Maps blog post, Jennifer Duong, David Luswata, and Tino Toupane describe mapping activities, both armchair and on-site, in Guinea.
• HOT mapped, with the support of the Response Innovation Lab in Uganda, all shops for energy-saving solutions in the refugee settlement of Bidibidi, in order to better understand the existing market, and to promote the improvement of the refugee population’s access to high-quality energy-saving products.
• In a blog entry HOT reported how the organisation has adapted to the current events caused by COVID-19.

Education

• Eduard Kazakov held an educational webinar about coordinate systems in GIS and their use in QGIS.

Maps

• [1] UtaArts created paper cut art using the OSM map and released the video of the creation process. In the Twitter timeline, you can view various artworks of cutout maps.

switch2OSM

• A new guide has been added to Switch2OSM covering setting up a tile server using Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa).

Licences

• Christoph Hormann has written a blog post about OpenStreetMap’s attribution. The text is also available on the wiki.

Software

• SharedStreets released Mashnet, a programming library for merging overlapping street networks without breaking existing important connections.
• Heidelberg University’s GIScience Research Group announced a feature upgrade to its maps client on maps.openrouteservice.org. The service now suggests alternative routes, can help with round trips and allows skip-segments parameters to be sent to the API by adding manual waypoints to ‘force openrouteservice to traverse areas of missing data or “unpassable” terrain’.
• westnordost has made a new version of his Android mapping tool StreetComplete available. According to the release notes on Github he has reworked the UI, added a profile screen and made some other fixes and enhancements.
• As we have noted before, OSM user Vascom has started assembling new maps for Maps.Me. Not so long ago he added (automatic translation) new countries: Czech Republic and Poland.

Programming

• The ten year old Stamen toner map style was ported as a vector style to MapTiler Cloud (Mapbox GL).
• Jochen Topf is working on cleaning up the code in Osm2pgsql. This software is used to import OSM data into a PostgreSQL database. Over time it has became bloated which makes it difficult to add new features. This is very important work and he is glad he found Andy Allan, of Thunderforest, and Frederik Ramm, of Geofabrik, prepared to help fund it.

Releases

• Quincy Morgan announced the upgrade of the OSM editor iD to version v2.17.3. In a post to the openstreetmap-website mailing list he details the changes in the new version. The most important change is the new function to allow flagging places which are open during coronavirus lockdowns, along with special opening hours.

Did you know …

• … there is a website (automatic translation) where you can download the latest OSM maps for CIS countries and all regions of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in PBF format? In addition, there are boundary polygons available and scripts that can be used to create such downloads.
• … about OpenDroneMap, an open source program that you can use to assemble orthophotomaps? Drone owners do not shoot orthophotomaps very often as the software for their assembly is quite expensive. This app is designed to change this situation. By the way, orthophotoplans themselves can be stored on the OpenAerialMap server, from which you can access them for mapping in OSM.
• … it is possible to show photos in a very nice way over an OSM background using Leaflet Javascript Library? Wjst will fix the lack of proper attribution as soon as possible.
• … about the Mapathoner, a plugin for JOSM, that allows you to draw objects quickly and easily?
• … about the nakarte.me website, where you can easily compare various online maps? You can also use it to plan and analyse tourist routes. Not so long ago, its developer posted (automatic translation) detailed documentation. Unfortunately, the website fails to provide an attribution or copyright notice for any of the provided maps.

Other “geo” things

• Massimo points to an animated gif from Jakub Nowosad which shows the distortion of the Mercator projection by zooming the objects from Mercator to the their true size.
• Another sidewalk (pavement) width map, this time of London. The researchers from the _Streets group at the Bartlett (UCL) used detailed Ordnance Survey data to map streets where the width of the sidewalks in total is greater than 6 m wide, defined as being suitable for social distancing.
• Daniel Sokolov explains (automatic translation) on heise.de how the USA initially used the positioning service GPS as a military tool and deliberately deteriorated its accuracy for civilian users over the years.
• The World Economic Forum presented five ways in which swarm intelligence can prevent the spread of the coronavirus in developing countries.
• The Washington Post uses dynamic maps to show how an interstate highway in the western United States cuts through wildlife migration routes that have existed for thousands of years. Due to climate change, more and more animals in the Rocky Mountains are migrating, making the road a hotspot for wildlife accidents.
• Reuters reported: Intel in talks to buy Israel’s Moovit public transit app for $1 billion. The issue is discussed on Hacker News as well. Note that their corporate edits haven’t always fitted in with the way we do things in OSM.

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, SK53, Silka123, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, keithonearth.

Introduction by Sara Thomas, Wikimedia UK’s Scotland Programme Coordinator.

Over Easter weekend I attended a virtual hackathon, hosted by Code The City. It was originally supposed to be held in person in their space in Aberdeen, but what with lockdown and all, to Zoom we went.  

The hackathon was concerned with a number of areas of history, heritage and data in Aberdeen, such as a project looking at Aberdeen Harbour Board Arrivals supported by Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives; another looking at scraping data from the Aberdeen Built Ships site with a view to uploading to Wikidata; and the project that myself and Ian worked on, looking at Aberdeen Provosts and Lord Provosts, and getting those into Wikidata using Quickstatements.

Lockdown has meant an explosion in the frequency of online meetings, and I’m not alone in having found those increasingly tiring, due to a combination of the demands of the format, and the ongoing lockdown situation magnifying those demands. I expected to be exhausted by the end of the weekend, but came away energised, and keen to do more data work. (At the end of the first day I sat for a few more hours and finished the first tranche of data prep… I really wasn’t expecting to want to do that.)

I wanted to repost Ian’s blog here for a couple of reasons. It takes a very helpful step-by-step approach to Wikidata, which I think blog readers may find valuable, and I was struck by how well this kind of event worked when shifted to an online-only format. As the Wikimedia UK programmes team in particular is doing more of this kind of work, it’s given me a great deal of inspiration.

Aberdeen Provosts

A version of this blog was first published 6th May on Code The City, written by Ian Watt.

In the run up to Code The City 19 we had several suggestions of potential projects that we could work on over the weekend. One was that we add all of the Provosts of Aberdeen to Wikidata. This appealed to me so I volunteered to work on it in a team with Wikimedia UK’s Scotland Programme Coordinator, Dr Sara Thomas, with whom I have worked on other projects.

In preparation for CTC19 I’d been reading up on the history of the City’s provosts and discovered that up to 1863 the official title was Provost, and from that point it was Lord Provost. I’d made changes to the Wikipedia page to reflect that, and I’d added an extra item to Wikidata so that we could create statements that properly reflected which position the people held.

Sara and I began by agreeing an approach and sharing resources. We made full use of Google Docs and Google Sheets.

We had two main sources of information on Provosts:

• Memorials of the Aldermen, Provosts, and Lord Provosts of Aberdeen, 1272-1895 by Munro 1897, out of copyright, scanned and made available openly, and
• Wikipedia, which I suspect draws on the former although there are date discrepancies.

Running the project

I started by setting up a Google Sheet to pull data from Wikipedia as a first attempt to import a list to work with. The importHTML function in Google Sheets is a useful way to retrieve data in list or table format.

I entered the formula in the top left cell (A1):

=importhtml(“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_provosts_of_Aberdeen”, “list”, 27)

and repeating the formula for all the lists – one per century. This populated our sheet with the numerous lists of provosts.

That state didn’t last very long. The query is dynamic. The structure of the Wikipedia page was being adapted, it appeared, with extra lists – so groups of former provosts kept disappearing from our sheet.

I decided to create a list manually – copying the HTML of the Wikipedia page and running some regex find and replace commands in a text editor to leave only the text we needed, which I then pasted into sheets.

Once we had that in the Google Sheet we got to work with some formulae to clean and arrange the data. Our entries were in the form “(1410–1411) Robert Davidson” so we had to

• split names from dates,
• split the start dates from end dates, and
• split names into family names and given names.

Having got that working (albeit with a few odd results to manually fix) Sara identified a Chrome plugin called “Wikipedia and WikiData tools” which proved really useful. For example we could query the term in a cell e.g. “Hadden” and get back the QID of the first instance of that. And we could point another query at the QID and ask what it was an instance of. If it was Family Name, or Given Name we could use those codes and only manually look up the others. That saved quite a bit of time.

Our aim in all of this was to prepare a bulk upload to Wikidata with as little manual entry as possible. To do that Sara had identified Quickstatements, which is a bulk upload tool for Wikidata, which allows you to make large numbers of edits through a relatively simple interface.

Sara created a model for what each item in Quickstatements should contain:

There are a few quirks – for example, how you format a date – but once you’ve got the basics down it’s an incredibly powerful tool. The help page is really very useful.

Where dates were concerned, I created a formula to look up the date in another cell then surround it with the formatting needed:

=”+”&Sheet1!J99&”-00-00T00:00:00Z/9″

Which gave +1515-00-00T00:00:00Z/9 as the output.

You can also bulk-create items, which is what we did here. We found that it worked best in Firefox, after a few stumbles.

Data harvesting

As mentioned above, we used a printed source, from which we harvested the data about the individual Provosts.  It’s easy to get very detailed very quickly, but we decided on a basic upload for:

• Name
• First name
• Last name
• Position held (qualified by the dates)
• Date of birth, and death (where available).

Some of our provosts held the position three or four times, often with breaks between. We attempted to work out a way to add the same role held twice with different date qualifiers, but ultimately this had to be done manually.

The first upload

We made a few test batches – five or six entries to see how the process worked.

When that worked we created larger batches. We concluded the weekend with all of the Provosts and Lord Provosts being added to Wikidata which was very satisfying. We also had a list of further tasks to carry out to enhance the data. These included:

• Add multiple terms of office – now complete,
• Add statements for Replaces (P1365) and Replaced By (P1366) – partly done,
• Add honorific titles, partly done
• Add images of signatures (partly done) and portraits (completed) from the reference book,
• Add biographical details from the book – hardly started,
• Source images for WIkiCommons from the collection portraits at AAGM – request sent,
• Add places of burial, identifiers from Find A Grave, photographs of gravestones,
• Add streets named after provosts and link them.

You can see the results in this WikiData query: https://w.wiki/PsF

This was a very interesting project to work on – and there is still more to do to improve the data, which you can help with.

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Ian Watt is one of our newer Wikimedia UK trainers, with a particular interest in open data and Wikidata. Amongst other things he’s worked on Wikidata-ifying Open Plaques in Aberdeen, and producing some great blogs which have explained the process clearly. For anyone (myself included) whose introduction to the Wikimedia projects was through text and open culture rather than open data, these have been tremendously helpful.

By Gilles Dubuc, Wikimedia Performance

Background

As a dedicated performance team, we’ve reported the long-term evolution of Wikipedia’s web performance for years. Most years we’ve managed to achieve very significant year-over-year improvements on key performance metrics. However, knowing that internet users constantly upgrade their devices, that browsers get performance improvements of their own, and that the speed of the internet itself keeps improving as a whole, we started to wonder how much of these yearly improvements were our own doing, and how much was due to the web’s environment getting better on its own.

To answer the question of how fast internet speeds are improving for our audience, we gather data exposed by the Network Information API, which provides information about the effective connection experienced recently by visitors.

To figure out if browser updates bring performance improvements or regressions to our visitors, we look at the User Agent string and compare the performance metrics of consecutive versions of a given browser as new ones are being rolled out.

We are also curious about how fast the device is. On Android, most devices expose a reasonably unique name in their User Agent string, which lets a website figure out the make and model of the device. This can be cross-referenced to a database of technical specifications, or even benchmark scores by phone reviewers, to estimate how powerful a device is. 

However, this strategy only works for Android — as Apple doesn’t let the browser know which generation of iOS device it’s dealing with. This technique also falls short when it comes to variations in device performance between different identical models. Different people use their devices differently, and some devices can be considerably slowed down by apps running in the background or when their free storage runs low. More importantly, most mobile devices have a CPU/GPU throttling mechanism that slows down the device on purpose when the battery is low. As a result, an average mobile device can easily start performing like a low-end one when it’s close to running out of battery. In that case, the technical specifications and ideal battery conditions benchmark scores matter little in practice. There is currently no API telling the browser that the device is throttled by a battery-saving mode, which means that we can’t know that directly.

Microbenchmark

Lacking any existing ready-made API to gather information about how powerful a device is (and by that we really mean the combination of device, operating system and browser), we set out to design a novel technique to estimate this information.

Like any other performance measurement, we strive to have as little impact on the performance itself when we make measurements and collect data. Web performance monitoring can’t fully avoid the observer effect, but we can try to minimize it. As a matter of principle, we only measure the performance of a sample of visitors, typically 1 in every 1000 pageviews.

We decided to create a microbenchmark measuring the processing speed of the client at a given time, shortly after the page has loaded. In order to avoid interfering with the execution of the main thread on the current page, we used a Web Worker, which runs on a separate thread. We also manually tuned it to run in a short amount of time (less than 500ms for most clients), in order to minimize the amount of wasted processing.

To verify that it worked, we looked at the scores on a variety of real-world devices. We were able to verify that scores stay within a small range on a given device over time, that the score worsens on low battery mode, and that differences between two different devices of the same make and model can be important.

Findings

We have been collecting these microbenchmark scores for over a year now, which lets us see the long-term evolution of our audience as a whole. This is the information we were looking for, to get an idea of how fast the device/operating system/browser environment improves on its own.

Between April 2019 and April 2020 the median processing speed of our visitors improved by 19% as a whole. That’s a huge difference! While device processing speed isn’t the only possible bottleneck for the effective web performance experienced by users, such a large change should influence global performance metrics. As a result, it’s fair to say that if your performance metrics stayed stable during that year, it’s likely that your performance actually regressed. Your website’s performance regression was compensated by the environmental improvement of internet users’ device/OS/browser stacks as a whole. Likewise, even if you saw some performance gains in your real user monitoring, they might not have been as large as they could have been.

When I shared this preliminary result on Twitter, Alex Russell rightfully asked if this was an evenly distributed improvement or if high-end device upgrades pulled the overall scores forward while the situation might have been more slow-moving or stagnant for low-end devices? Looking at the evolution of microbenchmark scores distribution over time, it appears that it’s really the whole range of devices becoming faster over time:

We can clearly see the global shift towards faster clients, for slow and fast ones alike.

Conclusion

Our microbenchmark technique seems like the best thing we can do currently to measure the performance of the device/os/browser stacks of our visitors. However, it suffers from being a bit naive; it only measures a short amount of time that could be unusually busy or quiet; it wastes some processing cycles and a little battery for sampled visitors. Ideally, we would want to replace this technique with a more passive collecting method, similar to the NetworkInformation API, where the browser would measure its own recent processing speed based on work it would do anyway. The big challenge to create something like this is to standardize it, as different browsers have different execution models. If such work happened it could yield interesting benefits for adaptive experiences, where a website could detect that the device is (possibly temporarily) underpowered and would adapt the user experience accordingly. This is the kind of feature web developers have already built to adapt to network conditions.

We hope that this work will inspire others to study their own audience more, and don’t take their long-term performance improvements for granted. There is a lot of work to be done to be able to fully remove the environmental factors from real user monitoring data and to understand the website’s share of responsibility in performance changes.

About this post

Featured image credit: Die vierspurige A 5 südlich von Frankfurt am Main in Hessen mit dem Flughafen Frankfurt am Horizont, Norbert Nagel, CC BY-SA 3.0

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.

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

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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.

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Header image CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

By Srishti Sethi, Wikimedia Developer Advocacy and Pavithra Eswaramoorthy, Wikimedia Volunteer

In 2016, a mentor working with Google Summer of Code (GSoC) suggested using a new group chat system for mentoring Wikimedia Outreach programs. The rationale behind that proposal was that Internet Chat Relay (IRC), a chat program that has long been used by members of the Wikimedia movement for communication and socializing, wasn’t sufficient to help mentors and interns stay connected during these programs.

When you collaborate on a three-month-long project, you need to be able to have focused, structured, and productive conversations, and maintain a sense of belongingness in a virtual room with fellow collaborators. Most importantly, you do not want to miss out on a single notification. 

IRC lacked some of these requirements, and most of the clients that were available back then didn’t work well on mobile. GSoC administrators were inclined to adopt an Open Source tool. They did a bit of research about Open Source collaboration tools and compared two possible alternatives that seemed promising: Zulip and Mattermost. They ultimately decided on Zulip.

Zulip was emerging as a fast-growing Open Source tool, and its tech-stack was compatible with Wikimedia’s. Zulip’s powerful chat application provides robust features such as threaded group conversations, support on multiple platforms, private and group chats, email and desktop notifications, embedding an inline image, video in messages, etc. Read more about Zulip here.

How we use Zulip to stay connected with folks before, during, and after outreach programs

Zulip is the go-to platform for discussions related to Wikimedia’s outreach programs, namely, Google Summer of Code, Outreachy, and Google Season of Docs. In the aforementioned programs, Zulip enables organizers to provide support and guidance to participants in each of the three phases of these programs: the application phase, the internship phase, and the post-internship phase. 

At the beginning of an outreach program’s lifecycle, organizers start by creating a new Zulip “stream” and pin it to the top of all streams. Streams in Zulip are like channels in Slack or IRC. 

Next, the organizers create a “topic” named “Welcome!” in this stream for all general-purpose communications. Topics in Zulip help users engage in sub-conversations. For instance, under the “Welcome!” topic, participants introduce themselves by sharing a little bit about their backgrounds, skillsets, and the projects they are interested in applying to. Participants are encouraged to freely ask almost anything on Zulip. As most of them are new contributors to Free and Open Source projects, it has become a friendly place for them to ask advanced or easy questions related to the application process, contribution guidelines, fixing bugs on a project without hesitation. The program administrators answer queries the students may have and share updates and reminders throughout the program season.

Some mentors prefer to use Zulip to have asynchronous communication with their applicants. During the application phase, organizers create a new topic for each promoted project that applicants have shown interest in. After the project reaches the internship phase, organizers create private group chats between accepted candidates and mentors. This helps keep project-specific discussions contained throughout. 

Zulip’s email notifications allow organizers to effortlessly reach former participants to inform them about ongoing activities in the Wikimedia movement. In this way, Zulip helps manage communication from a single platform and stay connected with participants before, during, and after an outreach program. 

Overall, Zulip is joyfully received and widely used by our outreach program participants and new contributors, especially for “getting-started” guidance needed to contribute to Wikimedia’s technical projects. It is always a pleasure watching them help and support each other; this is precisely the kind of learning environment that we hoped a mentoring tool could foster. 

Some cool statistics

Since its adoption in 2017, Zulip has been used to run 12 outreach program rounds and has had 1800+ sign-ups. In the graph below, you can see that the messages sent to users increased significantly every year —particularly in January, when the application period for Google Summer of Code (a program that draws many university students every year) opens, and students start landing in Zulip looking for projects to work on.

The road ahead

The road ahead for Wikimedia’s Zulip looks super promising! 

Many new contributors who join Zulip ask the same types of questions about “getting started” resources. To make it easier for both applicants and organization administrators and to reduce duplication of effort, there is a consensus to automate this process.

As a next step, the plan is to help develop a bot for Zulip through Google Summer of Code 2020 that sends a welcome message to applicants, replies to commonly asked questions with links to relevant resources, and directs applicants to appropriate venues (streams & topics), etc. A Zulip integration with IRC is also in the works. This will help connect the community of new contributors on Zulip with the broader Wikimedia community who are primarily active on IRC. 

Zulip is a great venue for our new contributors

If the programs you support are similar in nature to Wikimedia’s outreach programs, you might consider using Zulip to help build a thriving online community.

Here’s what some users of Zulip from within the Wikimedia community have to say about the tool:

“Right now, Zulip is my favorite Open Source tool for collaborating on outreach projects. Zulip makes it possible to communicate easily in real-time and also asynchronously, which is very useful when working with individuals from around the world. At Wikimedia, we do our work in the open. Zulip makes it possible to have our conversations in the open so others can see what we have discussed. This helps us keep a historical record of our work and gives us an opportunity to model good communication practices to others.” ~ Sarah R. Rodlund (Technical Writer, Wikimedia Foundation)

“Zulip is a very nice tool for collaboration. I used it for the first time during my Outreachy internship with Wikimedia, and it was easy for me to navigate around even when using it for the first time. I also love the fact that you can easily catch up on messages you’ve missed and the segregation of topics makes it easier to manage and navigate.” ~ Zainab Abubakar (Intern, Outreachy Round 19)

Wikimedia’s Zulip chat is full of love and appreciation by the community members, in the form of hearts, flowers, likes, and other fun emoji reactions. It is lovely to see a growing community that we are a part of! 

Help support our friends at Zulip by contributing code or if you are interested in learning more about Wikimedia’s outreach programs, join the Zulip chat: https://wikimedia.zulipchat.com/.

About this post

Featured image credit: Fall photo of world’s oldest organism, a grove of Populus tremuloides (Quaking Aspen) sharing one root system, from Fish Lake National Forest website, J Zapell, the image is in the Public Domain.

21/04/2020-27/04/2020

Mapping

• alexkemp blogged about his work in OSM on complex multi-site schools, specifically on the Heath Mount School in Hertford, England. In his blog he details the steps he made with JOSM to deal with the complex mapping task.
• CupIvan, an OSM user from Russia, has created a validator that shows post offices on a map. The orange colour indicates that the data in OSM is wrong or incomplete and the blue colour indicates that everything is OK. He invites (automatic translation) everyone to join his little mapathon and sort out all of the post offices in Russia.
• Andreea Banciu, from Telenav, has announced a project to improve navigation in Frankfurt and Rüsselsheim on the local OSM mailing list. The project targets street tagging, turn restrictions and the geometry of ways. She asked the OSM community for information about other local OSM communication channels and local data sources.

Community

• There are many communication channels for OSM enthusiasts. A reader informed us that the ‘OSM World’ discord channel just exceeded 1000 participants. If you are interested in joining, our reader provided an invite link.
• Rohubi analyses (automatic translation) in his user blog the differences between elevation profiles that different providers have determined from OSM route relations, but partly different elevation datasets. It is particularly noticeable that the profiles of Waymarked Trails are clearly smoothed, which is due to the use of the ASTER elevation data model, Version 2.
• ZKir published a video review of the Street Complete mobile app, which is used to edit OSM from a smartphone.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The agenda, the action items for the board members and parts of the minutes of the OSMF board meeting on 21 and 22 March 2020 have been made available. The minutes of the conversation with the sysadmins are also an interesting read.
• Meeting minutes of the OSMF working groups are available:
  • Operations Working Group on 10 April
  • Engineering Working Group on 16 April
• SunCobalt showed that the OSM project is accumulating more and more guidelines, terms of use and other regulations, the length of which are no longer reasonable for a reader.

Events

• The annual meeting of the in Austrian OSM association will take place (automatic translation) on 7 May 2020 online using Jitsi. Non-members are welcome to join the event.

Maps

• News from “Ca reste ouvert”, they now:
  • appear in 15 languages among others Catalán and Galego
  • offer a list view and allows the selection of subcategories;
  • have an app available for Android and iOS with English, French and German instructions, otherwise all 15 languages are supported;
  • and enable adding data about the availability of masks and hand sanitiser in pharmacies and other shops, however this data is not imported into OSM, because it is expected to change regularly; this feature is useful for countries where masks are obligatory..
• Eric Gundersen (CEO of Mapbox) published, on Medium, an article ‘Alternate care sites to expand bed capacity in Los Angeles mapped by UrbanFootprint’ talking about some maps created by UrbanFootprint to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Dhelfer announced on the Alsatian local list and twitter the availability of an OSM tile server with Alsatian rendering of names (name:gsw).
• The Austrian user gsa has created (automatic translation) a map, which displays pharmacies and whether and how often the website uses terms such as homoeopathy, Schuessler salts or Bach flowers (see Wikipedia), i.e. the German words Homöopathie, Schüsslersalze, Bachblüten, which he calls collectively ‘esoteric’.

switch2OSM

• The Ukrainian Minister of Interior Affairs Arsen Avakov published (automatic translation) a map of flights around fires in the Chernobyl nuclear power station exclusion zone. The map is based on OSM.
• Facebook has created a map of COVID-19 distribution in the US. OSM is used as a basemap.
• SpeedTest, an internet speed measurement service, has created a map of 5G network implementation around the world. OSM is used as a basemap.

Programming

• Ivan Begtin has developed a tool for processing data using the undatum command line. This tool allows you to convert, split, calculate frequency, statistics and check data in CSV, JSON and BSON files.
• Rory McCann blogged about software he has created to make heatmaps based on OSM data. In his post he demonstrates the functionality by making maps based on the sport=* tag.

Releases

• There is a fresh release of Maputnik 1.7.0. You can read about new features in the blog article.

Did you know …

• … the Procedural City Generator, which creates fictitious cities in the American grid-based style.
• …about MapCraft? MapCraft is a tool to use at mapping parties, or any other time you need to collaborate with others in OpenStreetMap.
• … UN Mappers? It is a newly created but growing community of mappers that contributes to the United Nations’ peace-building and humanitarian efforts (we reported) by editing OSM features in developing countries with the goal of producing better data and maps for daily UN operational activities. A large number of mapping projects are available on the Tasking Manager under ‘UN Mappers’.

OSM in the media

• Kylie Foy, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. reported on efforts to use an airborne Lidar platform, paired with artificial intelligence algorithms, for identifying the status of roads after a disaster to allow routing around impassable roads. The identified road network with recognised anomalies is merged with OpenStreetMap to create a useable network for route planning.

Other “geo” things

• Sidewalk (or pavement) infrastructure has a significant effect on how easy social distancing might be for users. Two initiatives this week map sidewalk widths in New York City and Paris. In many areas of both cities sidewalks are often too narrow for pedestrians to pass whilst allowing for the desired physical separation (1.5-2 metres or 6 feet). Historically, mapping widths of sidewalks has been a minority sport on OSM. Now is the time to collect this information.
• The cartographer Daniel Huffman blogged about his just finished project An Atlas of North American Rivers, an interestingly styled atlas of the major rivers in the United States, Mexico and Canada.
• Citylab asked people to draw maps of the worlds they can access under lockdown. They drew tight floor plans, ‘sanity’ walks, and the people they miss seeing.
• Roger Kain published, on Talking Humanities, an article ‘How we make maps and why’ talking about the history of cartography. He refers to the page History of Cartography Project where you can find links to books, from ‘Cartography in the Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval’ to ‘Cartography in the Twentieth Century’.
• [1] ‘The end is near’ is an often (mis)used phrase. This time Tobias Kauer used the term to label his map which visualises the final syllables of German town and village names. The source code is available on GitHub.
• On 20 April 2020 online protests (automatic translation) took place in a number of Russian cities. The citizens expressed their dissatisfaction with the government’s policies by leaving messages with their demands in the Yandex.Navigator app. Messages were concentrated on the squares near the buildings where authorities are located.

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 Elizabete, Nakaner, NunoMASAzevedo, Rogehm, SK53, Silka123, SunCobalt, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred.

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!

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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!

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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Apply for a seat in the upcoming cohort of WITH Wiki Scientists here! The full cost of enrollment in this course is covered by the WITH Foundation.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.