If you’ve ever experienced the pride of seeing your name on MediaWiki's contributor list, you've been involved in our deployment process (whether you knew it or not).

The Wikimedia deployment process — 🚂🌈 The Train — pushed over 13,000 developer changes to production in 2021 . That's more than a change per hour for every single hour of the year—24 hours per day, seven days per week!

As you deploy more software to production, you may begin to wonder: is anything I've been working on going to be deployed this week? What's the status of production? Where can I find data about any of this?

🤔 Current train info

Bryan Davis (@bd808) created the versions toolforge tool in 2017. The versions tool is a dashboard showing the current status of Wikimedia's more than 900 wikis.

Other places to find info about the current deployment:

• Deployment calendar – shows upcoming deployments happening this week and next
• Current deployment task – an indispensable tool created by @Majavah that always points to this week's train

📈 Past train data

There's an aphorism in management: you can't manage what you can't measure. For years the train chugged along steadily, but it's only recently that we've begun to collect data on its chuggings.

The train stats project started in early 2021 and contains train data going back to March 2016.

Now we're able to talk about our deployments informed by the data. Release-Engineering-Team partnered with Research late last year to explore the data we have.

We're able to see metrics like Lead time and Cycle time

We measured product delivery lead time as the time it takes to go from code committed to code running in production.

– Accelerate (pg. 14, 15)

Our lead time — the time to go from commit in mainline to production — is always less than a week. In the scatter plots above, we can see some evidence of work-life balance: not many patches land two days before deployment — that's the weekend!

For the software delivery process, the most important global metric is cycle time. This is the time between deciding that a feature needs to be implemented and having that feature released to users.

– Continuous Delivery (pg 138)

Our cycle time — the time between a patch requesting code review and its deployment — varies. Some trains have massive outliers. In the chart above, for example, you can see one train that had a patch that was five years old!

It is now possible to see what we on Release Engineering had long suspected: the number of patches for each train has slowly been ticking up over time:

Also shown above: as the number of patches continues to rise, the number of comments per patch — that is, code-review comments per patch — has dropped.

The data also show that the average number of lines of code per patch is slightly going up:

🔥 Train derailment

The train-stats repo has data on blockers and delays. Most trains have a small number of blockers and deploy without fanfare. Other trains are plagued by problems that explode into an endless number of blockers — cascading into a series of psychological torments, haunting deployers like the train-equivalent of ringwraiths. Trainwraiths, let’s say.

The shape of the histogram of this data shows that blockers per train follows a power law — most trains have a few blockers:

Surprisingly, most of our blockers happen before we even start a train. Bugs from the previous week that we couldn't justify halting everything to fix, but need to be fixed before we lay down more code on top.

The data also let us correlate train characteristics with failure signals. Here we see that the number of patches (“patches”) per train (trending ↑) positively correlates with blockers, and lines of code review (“loc_per_train_bug”) per patch (trending ↓) negatively correlates with blockers — more patches and less code review are both correlated with more blockers:

Contrast this with Facebook's view of train risk. In a 2016 paper entitled "Development and Deployment at Facebook," Facebook's researchers documented how their Release Engineering team quantified deployment risk:

Inputs affecting the amount of oversight exercised over new code are the size of the change and the amount of discussion about it during code reviews; higher levels for either of these indicate higher risk.
– Development and Deployment at Facebook (emphasis added)

In other words, to Facebook, more code, and more discussion about code, means riskier code. Our preliminary data seem to only partially support this: more code is riskier, but more discussion seems to lessen our risk.

🧭 Explore on your own

This train data is open for anyone to explore. You can download the sqlite database that contains all train data from our gitlab repo, or play with it live on our datasette install.

There are a few Jupyter notebooks that explore the data:

• Miriam Redi's excellent exploration (where most of the charts in this post came from), and a presentation of her analysis.
• My ham-fisted attempts at data science

An audacious dream for the future of this data is to build a model to quantify exactly how risky a patchset is. We keep data on everything from bugs to rollbacks. Perhaps in future a model will help us roll out code faster and safer.

Thanks to @Miriam, @bd808, and @brennen for reading early drafts of this post: it'd be wronger without their input 💖.

The Community Wishlist Survey 2022 is over! We would like to thank everyone who participated in this year’s edition and express our special gratitude to those who made outstanding contributions to the survey below the results. We could not have done it without all of you!

Curious about what happens next? Learn about our prioritization process and check out the ranking of prioritized proposals for this year.

The results

Between 28 January and 11 February, contributors with a registered account could vote for the proposals submitted earlier in January. Almost 1600 users participated in the Survey. 467 proposals were submitted, including 142 archived ones, 55 larger suggestions and 270 which competed for the participants’ votes. There were 9554 support votes, including 8387 votes for the competing proposals. Congratulations to everyone involved! The results of the voting are available on Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Results.

As we wrote on the FAQ page, technical popularity (so the number of votes) is the main factor in the decision which proposals we will be working on. It is an important factor, but not the only one, though. We assessed the top 30 proposals from three perspectives: technical complexity, product and design complexity, and community impact.

This is how we came to the final sequence of projects for 2022!

Learn more about the prioritization

Technical complexity

Our engineers estimate how much effort they would need to put into granting a wish. They prioritize less complex (more workable) projects. Whenever something is not clear, they try to overestimate rather than underestimate.

• Technical dependency – we check if the work requires interactions with other Wikimedia Foundation teams. It could be that part of the work needs to be on other teams’ roadmap or that we need other teams’ input or feedback before we can complete the wish. Examples of these are schema changes, security reviews, adding a new extension, and upgrading third-party libraries.
• Technical research – we ask ourselves if we know how to approach a particular problem. Sometimes we need to evaluate and consider our options before we can start thinking about a solution. Sometimes we need to confirm that what needs to be done can be done or is within what the platform we are working on can handle.
• Technical effort – we ask ourselves how familiar we are with the underlying code and how big or complex the task can be. A high-effort score could also mean that the code we’ll be working with is old, brittle, or has some degree of technical debt that will have to be dealt with before we can start working on our actual task.

Product and design

Similarly to the assessments above, our designer estimates what effort should be made to complete a project. He prioritizes less complex (more workable) projects. Whenever something is not clear, he tries to overestimate rather than underestimate.

• Design research effort – we seek to understand the level of research needed for each proposal. In this case, the research involves understanding the problem, either at the very beginning through initial discovery work (the scope and details of the project, surveys or interviews with community members), or later in the process through community discussions and usability testing (e.g. how do users contribute with and without this new feature).
• Design research effort – we seek to understand the level of research needed for each proposal. In this case, the research involves understanding the problem, either at the very beginning through initial discovery work (the scope and details of the project, surveys or interviews with community members), or later in the process through community discussions and usability testing (e.g. how do users contribute with and without this new feature).
• Visual design effort – a significant number of proposals require changes in the user interface of Wikimedia projects. Therefore, we check to estimate the change of the user interface, how many elements need to be designed and their complexity. For instance, using existing components from our design system or creating new ones, keeping in mind how many states or warnings need to be conceived to help guide users, including newcomers.
• Workflow complexity – we ask ourselves how does this particular problem interfere with the current workflows or steps in the user experience of editors. For example, a high score here would mean that there are a lot of different scenarios or places in the user interface where contributors might interact with a new feature. It can also mean that we might have to design for different user groups, advanced and newcomers alike.

Community impact

In contrast to the two perspectives described above, this part is about equity. Practically, it’s about mitigating the majorities from being the only ones whose needs we work on.

Depending on this score, proposals with similar numbers of votes and similar degrees of complexity are more or less likely to be prioritized. If a given criterion is met, the proposal gets +1. The more intersections, the higher the score. This assessment was added by our Community Relations Specialist.

• Not only for Wikipedia – proposals related to various projects and project-neutral proposals, are ranked higher than projects dedicated only to Wikipedia. Autosave edited or new unpublished article is an example of a prioritized proposal.
• Sister projects and smaller wikis – we additionally prioritize proposals about the undersupported projects (like Wikisource or Wiktionary). We counted Wikimedia Commons as one of these. Tool that reviews new uploads for potential copyright violations is an example of a prioritized proposal.
• Critical supporting groups – we prioritize proposals dedicated to stewards, CheckUsers, admins, and similar groups serving and technically supporting the broader community. Show recent block history for IPs and ranges is an example of a prioritized proposal.
• Reading experience – we prioritize proposals improving the experience of the largest group of users – the readers. Select preview image is an example of a prioritized proposal.
• Non-textual content and structured data – we prioritize proposals related to multimedia, graphs, etc. Mass uploader is an example of a prioritized proposal.
• Urgency – we prioritize perennial bugs, recurring proposals, and changes which would make contributing significantly smoother. Fix search and replace in the Page namespace editor is an example of a prioritized proposal.
• Barrier for entry – we prioritize proposals about communication and those which would help to make the first contributions. Show editnotices on mobile is an example of a prioritized proposal.

Larger suggestions

Thank you for 55 Larger suggestions, nearly 1200 votes you cast for them, and all the comments you added! You dedicated a lot of time, and this is a huge amount of important knowledge for us.

Why did we create this category and what will we do next?

From the beginning in 2015, we have been explaining that the Community Wishlist Survey has a specific scope. Not every good proposal submitted in the first phase can become our project. We avoid committing to something we cannot do.

At the same time, it is impossible (and not fair!) to expect that submitted proposals that were great ideas but out of our scope should end up in the Archive. In past editions, we archived proposals not meeting the criteria before voting. This time, we decided to create the “Larger suggestions” category and put it next to the regular categories. We wanted to respect the effort put into submitting them, and allow you to express your interest in these projects even if we won’t be able to work on them. To avoid misconceptions, we didn’t put the larger suggestions onto the Results page.

Now, having these suggestions and votes, we will be able to understand your needs better. We will share the results with our leaders and colleagues at the Product department of the Wikimedia Foundation. We can’t promise they will work on these projects soon. They will be informed, though, and perhaps will be inspired when making their plans.

Gratitude

We would like to express our deepest gratitude to all participants. The Community Wishlist Survey is your success as well.

Some of you helped us to improve the Survey before it began. Some spent an outstanding number of hours during the Survey. They were translating the documentation and the proposals, discussing the proposals, and encouraging others to take part. Some decided to take part for the first time, and among them, there were some who affected the final results in a way no one could have expected.

We are not able to make a full list of everyone who deserves to be mentioned here. Heartfelt appreciation to everyone who helped us on social media, within their own communities, and was less likely to be noticed by us.

If you have proposals for the next Survey…

…and don’t want to forget them, add them to the sandbox. Proposals saved there do not count as submitted, but they will be in other people’s minds and will be less likely to be abandoned. 

Follow us

• You can watch the page with updates about our recent work.
• You can also watch the main Community Wishlist Survey talk page and talk pages of individual projects.
• Current status of individual wishes is available in form of a table on the main Community Wishlist Survey page.
• Once a month, we hold online meetings called Talk to Us. These meetings are open to anyone.

Thank you!

Natalia, Karolin, Dayllan, MusikAnimal, Sam, Harumi, Szymon, Nicolas, Dom, Ima, and James – Community Tech 

The latest version of Firefox - Firefox 97 - supports hyphenation of Indian languages. I had filed a bug report to include the hyphenation patterns I prepared in Firefox. That 6 year old bug report is now resolved. Hyphenation is the process inserting hyphens in between the syllables of a word so that when the text is justified, maximum space is utilized. Following languages are supported: Assamese Bengali Gujarati Hindi Kannada Malayalam Marati Odia Panjabi Tamil Telugu I had written several articles about how to do hyphenation for Indian languages in various applications.

Joe Valle majored in Economics during his undergraduate experience at the University of Virginia, where he graduated in 2020. One of his last classes in college focused on coding with the programming language R, which spurred his interest in data science. With the COVID-19 pandemic making the job market grim, Joe pivoted toward pursuing his master’s degree in Data Science at George Washington University. There, he enrolled in Simson Garfinkel’s Ethics for Data Science class — where he was assigned to improve a Wikipedia article.

“Considering the nature of my other graduate classes, I was a bit surprised to learn about the Wikipedia assignment upon starting my Ethics for Data Science class,” he says. “Coupled with my earlier notions on Wikipedia, I didn’t really know whether I should feel excited or not about this task, but I wanted to keep an open mind as to how it would go.”

This open mind led Joe to explore Wikipedia’s coverage of economics, where the article on the 1994 bond market crisis caught his attention. At the time, the article was only three sentences, a true “stub” article on Wikipedia. Joe set out to change that.

“Considering the level of press that many financial crises have received, especially in the stock market, I was quite surprised that the crash’s article was a stub,” he says. “This was so despite the fact that bond investors in 1994 and since have referred to it as the Great Bond Massacre, underlining just how bad it was.”

Joe learned a lot about the crash while researching it. He particularly found it intriguing to read about the crash’s causes. Along the way, he added all the information he found to Wikipedia, dramatically improving the article. Today, the 23-paragraph article cites 21 sources, thanks to Joe’s work.

And Joe put his data science experience to work as well. He says his favorite part of the assignment was the opportunity to add images he’d created to the article.

“Taking a page from my data visualization class over last spring, I decided to download some data covering the yields of US Treasury bonds over several maturities. I cleaned up the raw sets with Python and exported them to Excel. From there, I created a couple of charts on Tableau to visualize the data,” Joe says “I included two in my article to offer readers a visual perspective on the crash’s effect on bonds.”

Joe says he liked the flexibility he had in structuring the article, as well as gaining a better understanding of how Wikipedia works. He says he might edit more, but he hopes other editors add more information to the article he improved. It’s a topic he cared about — which he says is the most important thing for any writing project.

“I think the most critical element of the writing process, within and outside Wikipedia, is passion,” he says. “Without it, a writer will be left unmotivated on how he or she can expand the discussion on the topic at stake.”

Image credit: Pjn1990, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On February 7, 2022, the “University World” contest for writing and editing articles dedicated to higher education institutions started in the Russian and English versions of Wikipedia. The contest is part of a project that the Russian non-profit partnership Wikimedia RU is implementing with the support of the non-governmental development institute Innopraktika and the Presidential Grants Fund.

The contest will last until March 7, 2022. The total amount of the prize fund of the contest is 100 000 rubles (around $1,300 USD, in form of online shop certificates). Five winners will be determined in each of the two nominations.

“The main goal of the project is to provide students and specialists with comprehensive information based on verified, trustworthy sources. Wikipedia is the best resource for solving this problem, ” Alexey Ryabinin, Chairman of the organizing committee of the competition, Doctor of Economics, business Ombudsman in the field of copyright and intellectual property says.

Of course, the contest will contribute to the content of Wikipedia:

“In almost every Wikipedia article about a person, we indicate the university that he graduated from and put a link to an article about this educational institution. Unfortunately, not all universities, institutes and academies have Wikipedia articles written about them. And those articles that already exist sometimes need updating and clarification. This competition should help solve this problem.”

Stanislav Kozlovsky, Wikimedia RU Executive Director.

It is expected that the competition will allow to get a tangible social effect.

“Wikimedia RU has found new partners in the face of universities interested in the project, which allows for an additional competition within its framework”, the head of the Innopraktika Development Projects Directorate on the launch of the competition Mark Trifonov commented. — To replenish information about universities, outstanding graduates and their mentors, it is necessary to motivate the authors and editors of the encyclopedia, as well as attract new participants. Lectures and master classes on the algorithm of writing articles were held at universities, which affected their quality. The competition will sum up the work done, and we could not help but support it.”

Two language platforms of the competition correspond to its two nominations. In Russian, the contestants will be able to write or supplement articles about any universities in the world, both existing and already discontinued. Within the framework of the competition, it will be possible to write about Russian higher educational institutions in English.

The jury, consisting of three experienced Wikipedia experts, will evaluate the work of wiki marathon runners on a point system. Each contest article can receive from 1 to 3 points, depending on the degree of disclosure of the topic and the level of design.

The organizers of the contest are Wikimedia RU, the Institute of Economics and Management in Industry, and the Educom.Net Internet platform. Learn more about the contest and get involved.

I have had the pleasure of being part of the Wikibase journey one way or another since 2013 when I first joined Wikimedia Germany to work on Wikidata. That long-running relation to the project should put me in a fairly good position to give a high-level overview of the history, from both a technical and higher-level perspective. So here it goes.

For those that don’t know Wikibase is code that powers wikidata.org, and a growing number of other sites. If you want to know more read about it on Wikipedia, or the Wikibase website.

For this reason, a lot of the early timeline is quite heavy on the Wikidata side. There are certainly some key points missing, if you think they are worthy of mentioning then leave a comment or reach out!

2005

At Wikimania 2005 there was a series of talks on “Semantic web”. One of these was Wikipedia and the Semantic Web – The Missing Links, and this Wikimania lead to the creation of Semantic MediaWiki.

The WikiProject “Semantic MediaWiki” provides a common platform for discussing extensions of the MediaWiki software that allow for simple, machine-based processing of Wiki-content. This usually requires some form of “semantic annotation,” but the special Wiki environment and the multitude of envisaged applications impose a number of additional requirements.

Semantic MediaWiki at 22:29, 2 January 2006

The initial version of Semantic MediaWiki was released in late 2005 (version 0.1), with 4.0.0 being released at the start of 2022.

If you read through the Wikimania and connected resources carefully, you’ll find a reference to Wikidata already, though at this point Wikidata is only a project proposal.

Wikidata is a proposed wiki-like database for various types of content. This project as proposed here requires significant changes to the software (or possibly a completely new software) but has the potential to centrally store and manage data from all Wikimedia projects, and to radically expand the range of content that can be built using wiki principles.

Wikidata/Archive/Wikidata/historical at 19:16, 30 November 2005

And ultimately the Wikidata project lead to the creation of the Wikibase software.

2012

There was certainly some work behind the scenes between 2005 and 2012 but most of this seemingly doesn’t have a super public record. There certainly will have been work done on the project proposal, and ongoing discussions with the Wikimedia Foundation about the project.

In March 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Germany jointly announced “The Wikipedia data revolution”.

• Wikimedia Foundation: The Wikipedia data revolution
• Wikimedia Germany: Data Revolution for Wikipedia (archive.org press release)

Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement, and the Wikimedia Foundation are proud to announce Wikidata, a collaboratively edited database of the world’s knowledge and the first new Wikimedia project since 2006.

The Wikipedia data revolution (Wikimedia Foundation)

A team of 12 was hired and announced in April to work on Wikidata, with the team being complete at the end of March with the first office hour.

If you want a video introduction from 2012 take a look at this video from SMWCon Fall 2012 in a session called “Wikidata: Semantic Wikipedia”.

If you want to know the original goals of the Wikidata project, and thus the Wikibase software, take a look here. (Maybe I should write some of this up soon)…

Also in April 2012, Jeroen De Dauw created the initial content of the first Wikibase extension page on mediawiki.org. And thus Wikibase was born.

And the end of 2012 you can start to see the structure of Wikibase by looking back at this extension page and the code at the time. We have:

• client, repo, lib: The three sub extensions that have been a part of the Wikibase git repository since the eary days. One for Wikidata.org, one for Wikipedias, and one containing shared code.
• terms (labels, descriptions aliases): So that concepts can be identified in language
• sitelinks: Connections from Wikibase to other MediaWiki sites such as Wikipedia
• Namespaces for “data”, now “items”, properties, and queries.

2013

In 2013 I joined the team . And there are some things that I distinctly remember:

• There were continued disucssions around how to get started with a query service
• Multiple libraries were split out to be reusable outside of the main Wikibase codebase such as DataValues, DataTypes, DataModel (Some of these were created as MediaWiki extensions before later being turned into libraries.)
• We were still doing a phased role out of Wikidata to various Wikimedia projects (phase 1 being sitelinks)
• I personally remember working on the Wikbiase Action API soomewhat, adding item merge functioanlity.

The main hidden gem that is worth pointing out about 2013 developments is that some portion of time was spent developing WikibaseQuery, WikibaseQueryEngine and WikibaseDatabase that never saw the light of day. These were primarily built to meet the first usecase of “Query by one property and one value“.

2014

It may seem insignificant, but 2014 saw the first version of the wikiba.se website.

Wikibase is a collection of applications and libraries for creating, managing and sharing structured data. It is an open source project, and everyone is welcome to join in development.

wikiba.se in 2014

JSON dumps of Wikidata were created for the first time this year.

The various query related extensions developed were archived, as the Wikimedia Foundation had a need for both simple and complex queries for a project called WikiGrok. Work kicked off at the foundation looking into Wikibase indexing needs and goals.

2015

The news of the year was certainly that the Wikidata Query Service was launched by the Discovery team at the Wikimedia Foundation. This was the SPARQL and blazegraph implementation that we have now been using next to Wikibase for the past 7 years.

A side note here is that Titan was originally evaluated, but looks like it was ditched as it, and the team was bought by DataStax to build a new graph database (Ironically this happened with blaze graph a few years later).

The SPARQL endpoint also saw the completion of the RDF mapping for Wikibase, so now we have stable RDF output.

Generally speaking, the Wikibase extension itself looks very similar to the early years, but extensions such as WikibaseQualityConstraints were developed and deployed to Wikidata.

2016

Wikibase code docs are now built to doc.wikimedia.org (patch).

I’m sure other things happened this year, but things really start to pick up in 2017! ;)

2017

Wikibase docker images saw the light of day to try and make Wikibase easier to get started with.

I feel that this really was a springboard enabling many more folks to try out Wikibase for their own projects locally, and also to run production instances.

Code wise, the “data-access” component appeared for the first time in Wikibase.git.

2018

On 23-25 April 2018, a “Workshop on harnessing open data for Monitoring and Evaluation” is taking place in Antwerp (Q12892), focused on using Wikibase (Q16354758) instances federated with Wikidata (Q2013) in the context of research assessment (Q51844619).

Wikidata:WikiProject Wikidata for research/Meetups/2018-04-23-25-Antwerpen

This round of workshops showed a real momentum increase around interest in Wikibase. At this point, although there were technical developments ongoing on the Wikibase software, these were still all primarily driven from a Wikidata perspective.

A Wikibase of Wikibases (Wikibase registry) was created as one of the outcomes of these workshops, making use of the docker images released in the previous year.

2019

WBStack, the first Wikibase as a service, was launched.

A first Wikibase Ecosystem strategy paper was published. At a high level this said “Wikibase powers a thriving linked open data web that is the backbone of free and open knowledge”, looking at some key areas:

• Focus on enabling connections between data and people
• Partner with the main players in their field, utilize network effects and branch out
• Leverage mandates to open up data
• Maximize the competitive advantage gained via Wikidata

2020

Things start getting a little easier here, as Envel Le Hir has started collecting yearly summaries of Wikibase, such as “Wikibase Yearly Summary 2020“. I highly recommend reading these for a full overview, but I’ll extract some key points here.

• The first Product Manager for Wikibase was hired by Wikimedia Germany.
• There was the first online meeting of the Wikibase Community User Group.
• WBStack, the first Wikibase as a service, was open sourced.
• Semantic Wikibase was released, which is a connection between Semantic MediaWiki and Wikibase.
• Local Media Support for Wikibase was developed by Professional.Wiki
• WikibaseManifest was created by Wikimedia Germany

Code wise the introduction of “packages” in Wikibase.git happened!

2021

Wikibase Yearly Summary 2021 by Envel Le Hir

This year Wikibase got its own all-important Twitter account. More and more workshops and projects around Wikibase were created, including a series of working hours around WBStack. Great projects exposing user needs were created such as RaiseWikibase. Federated properties, blog posts, WikidataCon 2021 and more.

The Wikibase stakeholder group is thriving with 17 organizational members, and 26 individual members. Institutional requirements have been collected and presented, and the group even has a budget to work with, and also a Twitter account!

Most importantly the new Linked Open Data strategy was published by Wikimedia Germany. The highlight of this for Wikibase, is the clear and distinct strategy for the Wikibase Ecosystem.

• Empower knowledge curators to share their data: Increase the number and diversity of Wikibases that can eventually be connected to the LOD web.
• Ecosystem enablement: Enable an ecosystem of extensions as well as tools and custom interfaces based on WB APIs to emerge around Wikibase, extending the functionality of the software for more use cases.
• Connect data across technological & institutional barriers: Ensure Wikibases can connect more deeply with each other and Wikidata to form an LOD web

Code wise some of the libraries that were split out of Wikibase.git back in 2013 were moved back into the code base to be managed as a mono repo.

2022

Wikibase Yearly Summary 2022 by Envel Le Hir

It’s only February, and the next thing on the cards for Wikibase is the Wikibase.cloud offering by Wikimedia Deutschland to replace wbstack.com.

Lots still to happen here, as I am writing this in February :)

The post Wikibase a history appeared first on addshore.

Did you know that another generation of women will have to wait for gender parity? That is women have to wait 135.6 years to be on equal footing with men. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021 as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to be felt, closing the global gender gap has increased by a generation from 99.5 years to 135.6 years. The report estimates that it will take an average of 135.6 years for women and men to reach parity on a range of factors worldwide, instead of the 99.5 years outlined in the 2020 report. Data from 156 different countries are taken into consideration and analysed on the factors such as economic opportunity, political power, education and health. Countries are ranked according to the Global Gender Gap Index, which measures scores across these indicators on a 0 to 100 scale, and these scores are interpreted as distance to gender parity, or the percentage of the gender gap that has been closed in a country.

According to the Global Gender Gap report of the year 2021, it was seen that in most of the sectors the share of women employed is pretty less than 45% which clearly states that there is a huge need for women employment and participation in every field of work. In the year 2021-2022 it was seen that in western european countries maximum gender gap was closed which accounts to roughly 77.6% followed by North America by 76%. The massive change was seen due to literacy and acknowledging people with several campaigns such as End child marriage, Gender Equality and HeForShe campaign which was organized in America for making an impact in the lives of women and girls everywhere.

Initiatives must be taken to bridge this gap. Feminism and Folklore – a project organised on Wikipedia from 1st February 2022 till 31st March 2022 – is an international writing competition dedicated towards increasing number of articles related to folk culture and women in folklore. Folklore is a combination of two words “folk” which means “popular antiquities” or “popular literature” whereas “lore” is the knowledge and traditions of a particular group, frequently passed along by word of mouth.

As there are numerous unknown folk cultures whose information is not present on the internet even today, it is very important to preserve our traditional culture and let it not diminish as years pass away. Wikipedia has taken an initiative in the year 2019 for increasing the number of articles related to folklore and feminism by organising multilingual contests hosted. From the very first year of its start it received a positive response from various inter-lingual wikipedia communities. Participation in such contests can help in both ways, for readers- they can get every detail about the folklore as well as for contributors – while writing as they research on the topic they would get to explore more in depth knowledge related to the topic.

The idea of folklore was first born in Europe in the 19th century, initially it was only known for traditions, ancient customs and festivals. As years passed by the definition of folklore modified drastically and was defined to be the natural expression of man such as tales, sayings, dances, or art forms preserved among the people. It is now considered as a festival of togetherness which lets people escape from the burden caused to them by society. It helps validate culture, justifying its rituals and instructions to those who perform and observe them and teach people morals and values which are difficult for people to imbibe.It follows socialism which means people tend to explore and practice social skills.

Along with creating articles contributors would also be awarded with exciting rewards.The winning image prize is US$300, US$200 for second prize, and US$100 is for third prize respectively. The winner will be judged as per the highest number of articles created under the scope of the contest. The winning images ranking fourth to fourteen would receive $10 each. Read all the details about this contest from the project page on Meta-wiki. Participants can create an article on any topic across the globe as long as it falls under the theme of folk or the female and LGBTQ personalities working under the folklore professions.

How can one contribute to Feminism and Folklore 2022? 

Participation is simple, you just need to follow a certain set of rules to make your contribution count. There is no language barrier as Feminism and Folklore 2022 is organized on 27 inter-wikipedia projects. But if you are interested in organizing Feminism and Folklore in your local language, contact the international team at support@wikilovesfolklore.org for more information and personalized support in the form of video meet, live or pre recorded video sessions and proactive help for the how-to tutorials.  

If you are new to Wikipedia, the first step is to create your account from here. Next choose any topic of your interest which is related to the theme of Feminism and Folklore 2022 such as folk festivals, folk dances, folk music, folk activities, folk games, folk cuisine, folk wear, fairy tales, folk plays, folk arts, folk religion, mythology, folk artists, folk dancers, folk singers, folk musicians, folk game athletes, women in mythology, women warriors in folklore, witches and witch hunting, fairy tales and more.

Make sure that the topic of the article you have chosen is not present already. Okay as now you are set with the topic make sure the content you write in the article match with the rules such as 

1. The expanded or new article should have a minimum 3000 bytes or 300 words
2. The article should not be purely machine translated
3. The article should be expanded or created between 1 February and 31 March
4. The article should be within theme feminism or folklore, articles will be accepted if it belongs to either feminism or either folklore. 
5. No copyright issues and must have proper reference as per Wikipedia notability guidelines

Once you are ready with the article you can submit the article via the respective fountain/dashboard link of the Wikipedia project. (List of Wikipedia Project along with fountain tool links). If you face any issues or have doubts regarding the project feel free to mail the support team.

Stay tuned for more upcoming posts about Feminism and Folklore. 

Gaurav Gaikwad, Community Outreach Officer

Wiki Loves Folklore International Team

Gaurav Gaikwad is an Indian Wikimedian and also one of the active volunteer editors of Marathi Wikipedia since 2020. His main area of contribution is focused on Tech, culture, fashion and Woman empowerment which is very much relevant to open knowledge. 

Other languages: Akan, Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English, español, français, italiano, magyar, norsk bokmål, polski, português, português do Brasil, suomi, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, اردو , العربية, فارسی, ไทย, 中文, 日本語, 한국어

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• Purging a category page with fewer than 5,000 members will now recount it completely. This will allow editors to fix incorrect counts when it is wrong. [1]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 February. It will be on all wikis from 17 February (calendar).
• In the AbuseFilter extension, the rmspecials() function has been updated so that it does not remove the “space” character. Wikis are advised to wrap all the uses of rmspecials() with rmwhitespace() wherever necessary to keep filters’ behavior unchanged. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [2]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Koneal Laguidao was shocked when he enrolled in Professor Jonas Lamb’s Writing Across Contexts course in his first term at the University of Alaska Southeast — and discovered he’d be editing Wikipedia as part of the class.

“I never knew students my age were able to write for Wikipedia; let alone write for Wikipedia as a college project,” he says.

Koneal’s knowledge of Wikipedia and how to edit it quickly grew, thanks to the resources provided by Wiki Education. He chose to expand the article on Douglas Island, a tidal island that’s part of Juneau, where he grew up.

“When I first read the article, I instantly saw how underdeveloped the ‘History’ section of the article was and wanted to drastically improve it,” Koneal says. “For someone who has lived in the Juneau area for years, I knew how immersive Douglas Island’s history truly was and I wanted to display it in full form.”

Koneal was one of many students in the class that selected Wikipedia articles that had some kind of personal meaning to them. Professor Lamb says an assignment with personal meaning helped him connect better with his students.

“Through his research and writing Koneal demonstrated a strong connection to place and a new awareness of the hidden history of his home town,” Professor Lamb says. “I learned a lot from my students, about who they are and where they are coming from based on the articles they selected and the issues they hoped to tackle. Their perspectives helped me recognize just how under-represented Alaska is in Wikipedia, how important it was to have Alaska Native authors contributing to articles about their communities, their culture, their leaders.”

Koneal says the Wikipedia assignment was a great opportunity for him to learn more about a place that was meaningful to him, and he encourages other students to approach the Wikipedia assignment with an open mind, as an “opportunity to learn more about where you came from, your people, your community, or something you love to do.”

He says he prefers writing for Wikipedia to a traditional assignment because of the public nature of his work. He says he would love to keep editing Wikipedia.

“I thought that the Wikipedia assignment was a ‘breath of fresh air’, as throughout my whole educational career, I have never been able to fully emerge into the researching process and researching through my university’s library finally allowed me to do that,” he says. “My favorite part about writing for Wikipedia was knowing that my contributions were formed through the research that I did and the contributions that I published were also my work.”

And, of course, he didn’t just learn from the research he did on Douglas Island — he also learned about Wikipedia.

“While editing the article, I learned how important the editing process at Wikipedia truly was, which caused me to change my previous judgments toward the site,” Koneal says. “Throughout my education, I have been constantly told that Wikipedia was not a reliable source to use in papers or projects. But, after completing this project, I have now seen how much Wikipedia emphasizes citing sources, using credible sources, and preventing acts of plagiarism within their articles.”

Hero image of Douglas Island: Gillfoto, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

01/02/2022-07/02/2022

Mapping campaigns

• Cristoffs showed > some statistics on the progress of mapping defibrillators (AED) in Poland.

Mapping

• Marjan, from TomTom, has initiated a MapRoulette challenge to add missing roads in the Caribbean.
• Florian Lohoff is puzzled about a strange behaviour of the OSRM routing engine that he uses to monitor the road network in OSM.
• Jherome Miguel, from Alberta, Canada, proposed developing and documenting a new highway classification scheme covering trunk roads and motorways, based on one being implemented in the USA. In Quebec, thousand of kilometres to the east, mappers are satisfied with the road classification as it is. Pierre Béland, author of Highway Tag Africa, suggested documenting > the classification of the forestry roads, sometimes hundred of kilometres long, managed by the forestry industry. On unpaved roads, heavy trucks have priority over other vehicles that access things in these areas such as chalets, fishing, or hunting.
• Gruff Owen started a discussion on Talk-GB about the mapping and tagging of what he called a ‘goat track’ in OpenStreetMap, which is a potentially dangerous path, and there are concerns that this could lead inexperienced walkers into dangerous situations.
• After complaints, Vespucci is removing Bing aerial imagery for third-party builds, e.g. F-Droid.

Community

• YouthMappers is inviting > people to a one-hour information session at 14:00 Friday 18 or 15:00 Saturday 19 February (Guatemalan time). The event is for students from Guatemala and anyone interested in starting new YouthMappers groups in Latin America.
• On Mastodon, MapAmore summed up the result of phase two of the OSMaPaaralan school mapping project in the Philippines.
• OpenStreetMap Belgium’s Mapper of the Month for February is Mustafa Kamil from Sudan.
• User contrapunctus proposed a mapping event in Delhi, and got quite a bit of interest.
• User Ziegenfritze wondered > how to best plan where to walk with his goats from Überlingen to Meißen, 583 km from Southwest to East Germany, using OpenStreetMap.

Imports

• Sofia Kozidis announced a proposed import in Bayfield County (Wisconsin, USA) of Emergency Location Markers.

Local chapter news

• The OSM-US February Newsletter has been published here.

Events

• HeiGIT, the Heidelberg Institute of Geoinformation Technology, is presenting a lecture on ‘ohsome quality analyst (OQT): assessing the quality of OpenStreetMap data’ at the FOSSGIS conference > on Wednesday 9 March from 16:30 to 16:50 CET.

Maps

• Enzet has mapped the ‘Large Millimetre Telescope’ in Mexico in great detail. He created a ‘before and after’ animation in colour and with roof slopes with his Map Machine software.
• @RandoCarto published a new hiking map. This time, you can go and hike in the volcanoes of the Puys de Dôme, France with a printed paper map made from OSM data.

Open Data

• Pascal Neis has written a blog post comparing > German Federal Government and OSM data for amenity=police and government=healthcare in Germany (the Government data was from the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy). He concluded that ‘at least in Germany’ … ‘no more data imports should take place’. Data reconciliation is, in his opinion, a promising way to improve data quality on both sides. Tobias suggested > possibilities for realising this idea.

Programming

• Nicolas Lambert has published bertin.js, an easy to use D3.js-wrapper on GitHub, that can be used to create thematic maps.
• A change to API 0.6 will be deployed in the near future. After the change the OSM API will reject relations exceeding a certain number of relation members (significantly more than used in any current relation). The reason for the change is that extremely large relations can cause problems to downstream data consumers. The largest current relation is Tongass National Forest, which is already too large to be visible on the OSM website’s ‘relation view’.

Releases

• Kontur posted a Twitter thread which featured a new version of Disaster Ninja – a tool for mapping coordination and spatial analytics. It is now possible to get OpenStreetMap analytics within administrative boundaries or freehand polygons to know where to put your mapping efforts.
• The iD editor was recently updated from 2.20.2 to 2.20.4, including various improvements such as security fixes, improvements to screen reader accessibility, enhanced preservation of the history of OSM objects, bugfixes and more. See the changelog for the full list of changes. This version of iD will be the last to support Internet Explorer 11.
• Richard has released a new version of the Potlatch 3 OSM editor, which contains several fixes. Once running it can be invoked from OSM by remote control, just like JOSM can.

Did you know …

• … the map farmshops.eu , a ‘Code for Karlsruhe’ project? You can find farm shops, markets, milk vending machines and other direct marketers between Brussels and Brno. The data comes from OSM, of course.
• … the true size of a country? After selecting a country you can move it with the mouse on a world map (Google Maps, unfortunately) in Mercator projection and it changes the displayed size according to where it is placed.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Berlin	164. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch	✓	2022-02-11
Bogotá Distrito Capital – Municipio	Mapeemos las ciclovías de Bogotá		2022-02-12
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #37		2022-02-14
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle Lyon		2022-02-15
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-02-16
	148.Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-02-15
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-02-15
Köln	Stammtisch Köln		2022-02-16
South Lakeland	OSM-UK chat		2022-02-16
	MSF online validation mapathon		2022-02-17
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-02-21
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-02-22
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-02-24
Bratislava	Missing Maps mapathon Slovakia online #6	✓	2022-02-24
Puerto López	Notathon en OpenStreetMap – resolvamos notas de Latinoamérica		2022-02-26
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	✓	2022-02-28
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-03-01
Landau an der Isar	Virtuelles Niederbayern-Treffen	✓	2022-03-01

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Nordpfeil, PierZen, RicoElectrico, Sammyhawkrad, SomeoneElse, Strubbl, TheSwavu, conradoos, derFred.

• Belgium report: Belgium report
• Brazil report: A portable museum experience to digitize and share collections online
• Colombia report: Let’s celebrate the Public domain day with Wikisource
• Estonia report: Mobile Photo Studio + New Cooperations
• Finland report: Photowalks in Helsinki, autumn 2021
• France report: Training course for Musée de l’armée staff members; Journée Wikimédia Culture et numérique 2022; Wikiway
• Indonesia report: GLAM Indonesia wrap-up; Public Domain Day 2022 in Indonesia; #1Lib1Ref
• Italy report: Collaborations and new projects in January
• Romania report: About #1lib1ref activities in Romania (and Moldova)
• Serbia report: Successful end of the Old and even more successful beginning of the New year
• Spain report: BiBat Museum and libraries
• Sweden report: Uploads of photographs taken by Swedish missionaries in China; Sörmlands museum’s first contributions
• UK report: Khalili Collections and British Library
• USA report: Report from DPLA
• AvoinGLAM report: Hello, world!
• Content Partnerships Hub report: Results and summaries; Helping with getting Pattypan back on track; Working with partners to make content available
• Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: February 22: Meetup about SDC support in OpenRefine
• WMF GLAM report: Wikimedia campaigns for librarians and museum workers; Community Wishlist Survey; and Wikimedia query services
• Calendar: February’s GLAM events

Wikimedia Colombia joins the commemoration of women in science and we want to invite you to continue working and writing so that many more of them are on Wikipedia. There are still many articles about the work of great Colombian women scientists in Wikipedia and we want to keep writing about them. Do you want to join our mission? 

Wikipedia is the 13th most visited website in the world, and unfortunately the vast majority of biographies on the platform are of men (mainly European or North American). So several organizations around the world have been promoting the increase of women scientists’ biographies on Wikipedia, and thanks to the training sponsored by 500 Women Scientists in 2021 (several of the organizers of the Editatona did it), we were inspired and wanted to contribute to this movement in Colombia.

Last year Wikimedia Colombia, Parent in Science Colombia, OWSD Colombia and the Universidad Nacional joined forces and energy in the framework of an editatona to create and improve articles by Colombian women scientists on Wikipedia. An editatona is a collective and simultaneous editing event in Wikipedia, in which people with different levels of expertise meet in person or virtually to improve or create articles, usually proposed in advance and related to a specific topic, in this case we were going to create articles about Colombian women scientists.  

We developed this editatona from the call to a group of 13 women interested in contributing to Wikipedia, they are Colombian scientists, professionals and academics. The objective of the editatona was to make Colombian women scientists visible in the largest collaborative encyclopedia in the world: Wikipedia.

Thus, for about a month we met for three consecutive Saturdays, we talked about Wikipedia as a source of information and representation, also about the gender gap, the problems of notability of Colombian women scientists, which in the case of women who do science, ends up being a double gap: for being women and for being scientists. This, according to research by the Wikimedia Community, is also replicated in the ecosystem projects. 

In the meetings we also had discussions about the pillars of the digital encyclopedia, the rules that exist to create or modify articles. The sources of information and their relevance in Wikipedia. We developed practical exercises in which we learned to use tools such as the visual editor, workshop and we had peer reviews of articles. In the last session we were joined by Carmen Alcazar, the current executive director of Wikimedia Mexico and founder of Editatona, the international initiative that seeks to bridge the gender gap in Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. 

In this editatona we created nine (9) new articles, edited 22 articles, and had a total of 310 edits. There were 13 editors, who added about 114K bytes. The articles have had 7.36 K views and added 5 images to Wikimedia Commons. The profiles created are of women scientists who have made contributions to aerospace engineering, physics, climatology, medicine, pharmacy, anthropology, archeology, chemistry, botany and legislation. The work and contributions of these women scientists are references both nationally and internationally and now we find them in Wikipedia, also as an initiative that could inspire girls and women to follow their trajectory, and have them as references and role models. 

As part of this commemoration, we would like to share the new and improved articles, so that you can read them and, of course, help us to complement them. This is the list of contributions.

Articles created

1. Martha Lucía Ospina Martínez
2. Alicia Dussan de Reichel
3. Ana María Rey
4. Ángela Maldonado
5. Adriana Navarro Suarez
6. Carla Faria
7. Lucy Gabriela Delgado Murcia 
8. Kleinsy Bonilla    
9. Alba Luz Arbelaez Alvarez 
10. Alegría Fonseca 

Improved articles

11. Diana Trujillo
12. Ángela Stella Camacho
13. Kate Marvel
14. Kizzmekia Corbett
15. Instituto Nacional de Salud (Colombia)   
16. Universidad del Tolima

Regarding our learning, we now know more about Wikipedia, we also know that it is not difficult to contribute and that we can use our work and support networks to review and continue adding knowledge to the most consulted digital encyclopedia on the Internet. We all have something to say and to contribute to Wikipedia, it can be from our professions, also from our hobbies and interests, from gaps we find in the information available on the Internet. We can also contribute to make the voices that are silenced or inaudible, or the contributions that many people make to society on a daily basis. In the end we are left with the invitation to continue learning and contributing from a more participatory position in the contents and information that circulate on the Internet.

We take advantage of this commemoration to invite you to participate in a discussion where we will talk about Colombian Women Scientists in Wikipedia. This activity will be carried out in partnership with El Espectador and we will have the participation of Lina Caballero (Biologist. Ph.D in genetics and molecular biology. Director of Welfare, National University of Colombia, La Paz. Founder of Parent in Science Colombia), Maria Monica Monsalve (Journalist of Vivir de El Espectador) and Monica Bonilla (Executive Director of Wikimedia Colombia). You can register for the event through the following form and also tell us which articles about Colombian women scientists you want to create. This way we can make sure you have a safe and enjoyable environment on the Internet to share our knowledge and strengthen the community of Wikipedians around the world.

Credits

This editatona was coordinated and led by Dr. Martha Lucia Borrás-Guevara (Goldsmiths, University of London), Dr. Lina María Caballero Villalobos (Director Bienestar Universidad Nacional sede La Paz. Founder of Parent in Science Colombia), Dr. Karina Mondragon-Shem (Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine) and Monica Bonilla-Parra (Executive Director of Wikimedia Colombia). 

Our planet continues to face an ever changing and urgent climate crises, and access to neutral, fact-based, and current information about it has never been so important than now.

Bringing our virtual Wikimedia communities together to learn and to help build a strong collaborative global network that is ready to tackle the shared challenges that are shaping our world, including the climate crisis, is so important.

In partnership with Teams for a Better Planet, the Wikimedia Foundation will present a workshop dealing with the global climate crisis – Race to Net Zero. This workshop will have interactive, team-building sessions with educational content, discussions and innovative approaches to problem-solving. The goal is to present clear, actionable information about the causes of climate change and the solutions we must rapidly scale to meet this challenge, and to host conversations to help build our community of practice. We are excited to encourage active peer-to-peer learning, reflection, and thoughtful discussions that will bring teams closer together while empowering individuals to take action.

The event details are as follows:

The Race to Net Zero
Join a special event hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation
Thursday, 24 February 2022 at 1500 UTC
Participate live via Zoom

Please join us for this special workshop – there is a maximum of 25 people that can join, and the session will last for approximately 2 hours; sign up on Meta-wiki. This workshop will not be recorded and sign-up is on a first come, first served basis. After completion of the workshop, there will be a certificate of participation available.

About The Race to Net Zero workshop

Science-based targets, carbon neutrality, net zero emissions – these terms show up on a daily basis in headlines, press releases, corporate climate goals and everyday conversation. But what do these terms actually mean for companies, governments and individuals? Are we on track to hit our climate goals? In this session, we learn all about setting strong climate commitments and give you the tools to understand the ambition of the public pledges that companies and governments are making and evaluate their progress toward realizing these goals.

In the Race to Net Zero workshop, you’ll come away with:

• Understanding of key language and terms
• Actionable schema for reducing and eliminating CO2 across sectors and scales
• Understanding of carbon footprinting, including Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions
• Framework for carbon reduction measurement and accountability
• Enhanced headline interpretation skills

About Teams for a Better Planet

Through hands-on learning modules focused on climate awareness, education, and solutions design, Teams for a Better Planet provides the necessary tools your community needs to connect with purpose, empower each other, and take meaningful climate action in your personal life and professional capacity. Teams for a Better Planet is co-founded and led by Frances Sawyer and Katie Barrett. 

The consultation period for the Wikimedia Movement Data Equity Landscape project has begun with the hope to examine data to answer questions about who is in our movement, what voices may be missing across known pathways for engaging with the Wikimedia community, and where.

The Global Data & Insights team invites you to (1) review the high-level or detailed project documentation available and (2) input your perspective in response to:

• Directed Review Questions This first set of five general questions focuses on the data domains of interests, potential input measures, data sources, and use cases for the measurement overall data framework.
• Design Considerations This second set of design questions which may or may not be relevant for your inputting depending on your background skills, interests, and experiences. For these prompts, we encourage you to pick and choose where you feel comfortable inputting.

Please sign-up for the pilot here if you haven’t already and help push the movement forward! 

A term is not a word […] a term is a word used unambiguously

Mortimer J Adler, How to Read a Book

I identify with a seeming minority who believe words have meaning. And I have problems with the software industry term blameless postmortem.

Software engineers love to scrutinize terms. Variable names are (rightfully, I believe) an endless topic of debate. There’s even an aphorism explaining this aspect of software: the two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation and naming things (and off-by-one errors 😂).

The problem is that terms help us model reality. As the saying goes: all models are wrong, some are useful. And if a term leads you to an incorrect model, it ceases to be useful. The term blameless postmortem carries some baggage that puts it at odds with its goals as a term.

(/^ヮ^)/*:・ﾟ✧ dict disquisition
1 definition found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Disquisition \Dis`qui*si"tion\, n. [L. disquisitio, fr.
     disquirere to inquire diligently, investigate; dis- +
     quaerere to seek. See {Quest}.]
     A formal or systematic inquiry into, or discussion of, any
     subject; a full examination or investigation of a matter,
     with the arguments and facts bearing upon it; elaborate
     essay; dissertation.
     [1913 Webster]
  
           For accurate research or grave disquisition he was not
           well qualified.                          --Macaulay.
     [1913 Webster]

Last October 2021, the Education team at the Wikimedia Foundation welcomed the first cohort of wikimedians to the Training of Trainers (ToT) for “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom”. In December, 22 participants successfully completed the ToT and they are ready to support more teachers in their countries to use Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool. In this article, learn more about “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom”, what the ToT program entails, and how you can be part of the second cohort!

What is “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom”?

In 2020, along with Wikimedia affiliates in Bolivia, Morocco and the Philippines, the Education team at the Wikimedia Foundation piloted the “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” program with the participation of hundreds of secondary school teachers in these three countries. “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” is an 8-week online professional development opportunity for secondary school teachers to learn how to approach Wikipedia as a pedagogical tool. The curriculum is designed in alignment with UNESCO’s Media and Information Literacy framework and it allows teachers to understand how to use Wikipedia to access, evaluate and create information and how it can help further develop important 21st century skills in their students. After the positive impact of this pilot the user groups in Bolivia and Morocco successfully applied to project grants and they are leading new implementations of Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom this year – thus strengthening the impact of their work in their local education sector.

What is the Training of Trainers for “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” program?

As the next stage for “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom”, in October 2021 the Education team invited wikimedians and educators interested in implementing this program to join the first Training of Trainers (ToT) experience. Through the ToT model, we seek to support new implementations of the program around the world led by motivated and prepared Wikimedians and educators. 

The ToT is a 9-week online learning experience with a global cohort of peers interested in education, Wikipedia, teacher development, and 21st century skills. At the end of the ToT, the participants are equipped to lead a local implementation of the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom in their countries. The participants who successfully complete the program receive a certificate of accomplishment, an open badge, and the opportunity to access financial support for their local implementations. As certified trainers, they are able implement the program to foster a better understanding of Wikipedia in their local education sector, empowering educators to critically approach Wikipedia instead of keeping it out of their classrooms altogether.

What do participants learn in this Training of Trainers program?

In the 9 weeks of the ToT program, participants work through a curriculum designed to prepare them to implement the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program in a way that is aligned and pertinent to their local education context. The ToT is hosted in the WikiLearn platform (an instance of Open edX) where participants have access to educational resources and communication spaces, this is complemented by 3 synchronous training sessions and optional weekly office hours for open conversations and support.

The program consists of three core modules:

• Module 1 – Learn: Participants are able to express the value of the Reading Wikipedia in the classroom curriculum to a variety of audiences, and they are able to identify areas for localization that ensure the program is in line with pertinent educational policies, practices, and the lived realities of teachers and students.
• Module 2 – Teach: Participants are able to design and facilitate an engaging program, whether online, offline, or blended, that is focused on the learner’s context.
• Module 3 – Plan: Participants are able to create an implementation plan that includes needs assessment, outreach and partnership, budget, and monitoring & evaluation strategies.

Each module contains formative assignments, exercises and discussion prompts that allow participants to socialize their learning and finish the ToT with a robust program implementation plan.

Who participated in the first cohort of the Training of Trainers program?

In 2021, we received the applications of 126 interested wikimedians from all over the world and after a hard evaluation period, we invited 26 participants to join this first cohort. At the end of the program, 22 participants successfully completed all the requirements and are now certified trainers of the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program. These new trainers come from 18 countries including El Salvador, Yemen, Nigeria, New Zealand, and Ukraine, to name a few. You can see a list of the newly certified trainers on this link. Moreover, this multicultural cohort strengthened bonds of cooperation, promoted knowledge sharing, and took advantage of the course forums and synchronous conversations to promote a positive and supportive learning environment.

Join the next cohort and become a certified trainer!

The applications to join the second cohort of the ToT are open! Find all the information on Meta-Wiki and submit your application before February 20, 2022. Apply if you’re interested in becoming a certified trainer and bringing the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program to your country. This second cohort will take place from March-May 2022 and participants who successfully complete the ToT will gain access to the same opportunities: certifications, funding for implementation, multicultural professional cohort.Join our upcoming information session this Friday, February 11 at 13:00 UTC and share any questions or doubts you may have about the application process. Find all the info to join on Meta-Wiki or watch the recording afterwards.

Carmen Fernández Fisac had long wanted to start contributing content to Wikipedia.

“It’s a resource I’ve used countless times and I was excited to give back by adding content that could help others as well, but I always felt like I lacked the tools to do it properly,” she says. “What if instead of helping I ended up making it worse?”

Enter Wiki Education’s Wiki Scientist training course, hosted by the National Science Policy Network (NSPN). A Ph.D. student, Carmen studies biomedical engineering and neuroscience. She’s researching how the brain balances sensory information and intention during voluntary movement, using brain-computer interfaces.

“I am also at my core a science communicator: as fulfilling as conducting research is, nothing makes me as happy as writing about science for different audiences and teaching students what I know,” she says. “This course was the push I needed, not just because it made navigating the editing process easier, but because it was a confirmation that Wikipedia wanted people like me to contribute. The course offering through NSPN was an explicit invitation for scholars to dive in and have a tangible impact on knowledge accessibility, and I was thrilled for the possibility.”

Carmen says the NSPN Wiki Scientists course gave her the skills to navigate Wikipedia’s rules and guidelines in a way that wasn’t overwhelming. She also learned about the community of Wikipedia editors, something she’d never before considered.

“The thing that completely blew me away was the powerful sense of community among Wikipedians,” she says. “I knew the premise of Wikipedia and had heard the classic ‘it works, despite all odds’, but I had never really dived deep into discussions in Talk pages or the internal initiatives bringing editors together to push through more meaningful improvements. I don’t think I understood the extent of it until the course dropped me right in the middle of it and encouraged me to engage in those conversations. Watching people collaborate selflessly like that was inspiring and heartwarming, and it only made me want to do more in Wikipedia.”

Carmen tackled Wikipedia’s article on neurotechnology, which averages thousands of page views each month.

“Like with other transformative technologies, I think it is incredibly important to stay ahead of scientific advances in neurotechnology and consider their potential ethical and social repercussions, not only for policy makers but also for those conducting the research,” she says. “Because it is something that has been present in science fiction for a long time, I especially wanted to work on the definition and the ethical considerations of neurotechnology to help separate the fantasy elements from the reality so that the concerns that do exist can be identified and put in context. A lot of the work I did ended up focusing on restructuring content in addition to writing to make sure sections were balanced and written in a neutral tone.”

Although the course wrapped up, Carmen has continued editing the article, making gradual improvement. She’s excited to keep editing Wikipedia — both the English and Spanish language versions.

“I have noticed that many science-related Wikipedia articles are less detailed in Spanish than they are in English, possibly due to the majority of international research being published in English,” she says. “As a bilingual speaker with a scientific background, I feel this is somewhere I can make impactful contributions to make Spanish articles more complete. I think multilingual science communication is absolutely critical if we want to reach local communities everywhere, and I am excited to help reduce language barriers if I can by making more information available in Spanish.”

Carmen hopes more experts like her are able to contribute — in any language. And she sees courses like the Wiki Education one she took that brings experts to Wikipedia as being key for the future.

“You don’t have to be an expert to add accurate information, but the unique value that an expert brings to an initiative like Wikipedia, I think, is not given by the wealth of detail they could go into on a certain subject — which would likely overwhelm the non-expert reader — but rather by their insight into the building blocks of the subject, allowing them to identify which are the critical details that need to be included to capture the essence of a concept and making a complex field of study penetrable to its outsiders,” she says.

She found the immediate impact personally rewarding as well.

“It’s so rare in life to be able to identify an issue that you would like to correct for those coming after you and in the same second be able to fix it, then and there,” Carmen says. “Getting a closer look at Wikipedia and the community behind it has restored a bit of my faith in humanity. Sometimes the world seems a little bleak, but I see Wikipedia continuing to work despite all odds and I think ‘you know, we might just make it as a species’.”

Interested in hosting a course like the NSPN course Carmen took? Visit partner.wikiedu.org.

Image credit: Illustrated by Jasmina El Bouamraoui and Karabo Poppy Moletsane, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

“A people without knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

Marcus Garvey

Pictures have power: did you know that people are more likely to remember pictures than words? But that’s assuming you even have the chance to see the pictures.

Over one million biographies on Wikipedia do not have images—and because search engines tend to drive more traffic to Wikipedia articles with images than those without, we know that these biographies are more likely to be left unread, their stories untold and faces unseen.

Without images, we are missing out on an additional point of entry for visual learners and opportunities to expand understanding of the information Wikipedia is presenting.

Enter Wiki Unseen, a Wikimedia Foundation project in partnership with AfroCROWD.org, local artists, and Behance, the world’s largest creative network for showcasing and discovering creative work. Together, we will be expanding the visual representation of Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) in Wikimedia projects. This work will advance knowledge equity, and we’re hoping to see its model replicated across our shared movement. By commissioning these works and releasing them under a Creative Commons Attribute Sharealike license, they will be freely usable on Wikipedia… or anywhere else in the world.

Launching on 9 February, the first iteration of the project features a collaboration with artists from Africa, North America, and the Caribbean. The Wikimedia Foundation and AfroCROWD worked together to select 20 Wikipedia articles of historical figures from the African Diaspora without visual representation from a list of the top 2000 regularly visited BIPOC biographies. Foundation staff then worked with Behance to compile a list of artists who hailed from the same regions as the historical figures. We selected three artists, who then each chose to illustrate 2 out of the 20 biographies.

“The lack of visibility and understanding of these histories within the wider media ecosystem constrains how BIPOC communities are portrayed in the news, education, pop culture, the arts, and more. This contributes to discriminatory bias and stereotyping in media, business, and other sectors of daily life, and perpetuates those histories’ continued exclusion from the collective memory.”

Sherry Antoine, the Executive Director of AfroCROWD.org.

The commissioned artists include ballpoint pen artist Enam Bosokah from Ghana, Esther Griffith from Trinidad and Tobago, and multidisciplinary artist Bukhtawar Malik from the United States. Among the first articles that will feature new illustrations are Ghanaian biochemist and educator Marian Ewurama Addy, documentary filmmaker William Greaves, Senegalese computer scientist Rose Dieng-Kuntz, American poet and playwright May Miller, Jamaican astronomy and astrophysics professor Mercedes Richards, and Dominican Asquith Xavier, who fought racial segregation in England to become the first Black train guard at Euston railway station. These portraits will be uploaded to Commons and shared throughout the month with the aim of adding them to the articles on Wikipedia.

You can access a social media toolkit to share Wiki Unseen with your network; it will be updated as new materials become available to post.

“Wiki Unseen aims to make Black histories and those of people underrepresented on Wikipedia more visible. Closing knowledge equity gaps — including visual ones — is key to ensuring Wikimedia projects are accessible to everyone and represent the breadth of global cultures, experiences, and languages. We know that our work is incomplete until the full diversity of our world’s histories is seen.“

Anusha Alikhan, Vice President of Communications at the Wikimedia Foundation

By commissioning original artwork and making it freely available, Wiki Unseen is helping people everywhere visualise what these historical figures — who have remained unseen within the open knowledge ecosystem for far too long — looked like.  Wiki Unseen facilitates the illustration of notable figures to combine knowledge and creativity, while providing up-and-coming artists who hail from the same regions as those figures an opportunity to share their talent with the world in a unique way. Art inspires, drives change, and encourages people to share their vision, which leads to increased awareness of this pressing problem.  

There is more than one way to tackle a problem as complex as systemic underrepresentation and make lasting change. Other possible approaches to this problem include procuring pictures and releasing them under a CC0 license. While this is sometimes possible, successful procurement can require significant or recurring licensing fees, ongoing negotiations or requesting the public release of photography from family collections. Wiki Unseen’s approach is designed to complement the procurement of CC0 photography and invite underrepresented artists to join the Wikimedia movement to close visual knowledge gaps by contributing something that doesn’t limit how they want to tell their story. Ensuring diverse identities feel represented the way they want to be and empowered to access and contribute to free knowledge is key to increasing equity and inclusivity on and off Wikimedia projects. 

Art has an integral role in world history and has remained at the centre of how we create, shape and derive meaning. By taking an artistic approach to representation, Wiki Unseen is highlighting the critical role visual illustrators play in documenting history and hopes to influence equity and inclusivity on the walls of galleries, in libraries, archives and museum collections and ultimately in research, academia and media around the world. This resource, created by Whose Knowledge, should serve as a helpful guide for drawing Unseen figures for Wikipedia.

To kick off Black History Month, the Wikimedia Foundation, the global nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, announced the launch of Wiki Unseen, a collaboration with artists aimed at expanding the visual representation of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in Wikimedia projects and advancing knowledge equity.

Launched today, the first iteration of the project, a collaboration with artists from Africa, North America, and the Caribbean, will help to address the visual and written underrepresentation of several Black historical figures on Wikipedia and in media repository Wikimedia Commons. In addition to global artists, the Foundation is collaborating with AfroCROWD.org, a Wikipedia-volunteer led initiative to create and improve information about Black culture and history on Wikipedia, as well as Bēhance, a social media platform that showcases creative work on the initiative. 

Research shows that Wikipedia articles featuring illustrations increase audience engagement and views, creating an additional point of entry for visual learners and expanding understanding of the information presented. With this in mind, the Wikimedia Foundation and AfroCROWD.org worked together to select 20 Wikipedia articles of BIPOC historical figures without visual representation, further collaborating with Bēhance to source a list of artists from the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean to create portraits of each. This year, the artists will create portraits for six of 20 total historical figures. 

The commissioned artists include Enam Bosokah from Ghana, Esther Griffith from Trinidad, and Bukhtawar Malik from the United States. Among the first articles that will feature new illustrations are: Marian Ewurama Addy, William Greaves, Rose Dieng-Kuntz, May Miller, Mercedes Richards, and Asquith Xavier. These portraits will be published throughout the month of February; they include personalities whose images are not freely licensed and therefore unable to be added to Wikipedia articles.  

“Wiki Unseen aims to make Black histories and those of people underrepresented on Wikipedia more visible,” said Anusha Alikhan, Vice President of Communications at the Wikimedia Foundation. “Closing knowledge equity gaps — including visual ones — is key to ensuring Wikimedia projects are accessible to everyone and represent the breadth of global cultures, experiences, and languages. We know that our work is incomplete until the full diversity of our world’s histories is seen.”

When BIPOC histories are told, too often they lack visual representation. Of the 30+ articles in the African Royalty category on English Wikipedia, for example, only three pages picture their subjects. Visual aids and illustrations help people understand and retain information; their absence reinforces and perpetuates biases. 

“The lack of visibility and understanding of these histories within the wider media ecosystem constrains how BIPOC communities are portrayed in news, education, pop culture, the arts, and more. This contributes to discriminatory bias and stereotyping in media, business, and other sectors of daily life, and perpetuates those histories’ continued exclusion from the collective memory,” said Sherry Antoine, the Executive Director of AfroCROWD.org.

Wikipedia is powered by a global community of volunteer contributors working to advance Wikimedia projects in support of a vision to ensure that people everywhere can share in the sum of all human knowledge. A central pillar of the Wikimedia Movement’s 2030 strategy is to break down the social, political, and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge, focused on communities left out by structures of power and privilege. 

Wiki Unseen builds on the previous efforts of Wikimedia volunteers including Les sans pagEs, a French Wikipedia initiative, and the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign by Whose Knowledge?, which ran similar projects to bridge gender gaps.

For more information about the Wikimedia Foundation and Wiki Unseen, visit unseen.wikimedia.org.

To learn more about how the Wikimedia Foundation and movement are working towards knowledge equity, visit wikimediafoundation.org/opentheknowledge.

About the Wikimedia Foundation: The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive. 

The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive donations from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

About AfroCROWD.org: Afro Free Culture Crowdsourcing Wikimedia (AfroCROWD) is an initiative which seeks to increase awareness and the number of people of African descent who actively partake in the Wikimedia and free knowledge, culture and software movements. AfroCROWD has sensitized thousands in its target audience about free culture crowdsourcing and the need to close the multicultural and gender gaps in Wikipedia. AfroCROWD has also held monthly multilingual editathons in partnership with cultural institutions, galleries, libraries, archives, museums (GLAM), colleges, universities and many others including institutions at the United Nations and grassroots organizations.

About Behance: Behance is the world’s largest creative network for showcasing and discovering creative work.

Media Contact:
Tommy Lee; tommy.lee@berlinrosen.com 
Amy Lebowitz; amy.lebowitz@berlinrosen.com

We quietly rolled out a change to Wiki Education Dashboard’s Authorship Highlighting feature last week: it now gets its data from a new server on Wikimedia Cloud, the Wikimedia community’s cloud computing system. This shouldn’t be any different — except that according to our tests, the authorship data should load substantially faster.

The Authorship Highlighting feature, which can show which parts of a live Wikipedia article were contributed by the students in one of our Wikipedia Student Program courses or participants in our Scholars & Scientists courses, is built on top of a system called WikiWho, which was designed to analyze the entire history of Wikipedia articles and determine which edit and which editor originally added each word in a given article. The WikiWho system was initially created by a team of researchers led Fabian Flöck, based on an algorithm developed by Flöck and Maribel Acosta and hosted by the GESIS research institute. Last year, Flöck announced that he would be leaving GESIS and the data service would be shut down sometime in 2022. So I teamed up with Wikimedia Foundation software engineer (and sometime Dashboard contributor) MusikAnimal to get a replacement server ready to provide uninterrupted WikiWho data service.

Over the last few months, MusikAnimal and I worked through the process of learning about the WikiWho API’s Python codebase, provisioning and configuring a fresh server, and importing and processing the entire history of the five language versions of Wikipedia that WikiWho supports so far. We also coordinated with the WikiWho team to release the server software under an open source license and establish a new code repository for it that we can maintain. For now, this means the Dashboard’s Authorship Highlighting, along with the Wikimedia Community Tech team’s “Who Wrote That” tool, will continue working after the GESIS server shuts down. With the potential to add more storage space on Wikimedia Cloud, we’re also hopeful that we can expand support for these tools to more languages — which will be especially relevant for Programs & Events Dashboard users. (To date, only editors working on English, German, Spanish, Turkish, and Basque Wikipedias have been able to use the Authorship Highlighting feature. If you’d like us to prioritize support for your language, the best place to do so is on Wikimedia’s Phabricator bug tracker.)

I want to say thanks to Fabian, Maribel, Kenan Erdogan, Roberto Ulloa, Olga Zagovora, and everyone else who has been part of the WikiWho project.

In a previous blog post, I mentioned that Wikidata could help us “Find manuscripts that are in some way related to Shah Jahan (commissioned by him, owned by him, depicting him, about him),” and that its answers would be more complete as more collections shared their catalogue data. This is a follow-up with examples, going beyond manuscripts to other kind of object. As I work on enriching Wikidata’s representation of the Khalili Collections, I’m finding more and more connections to other collections around the world. This process makes those connections visible and suggests educational visualisations we can create.

It’s easy for Wikidata to generate lists of objects with a connection to a specific person. Here is the example for Shah Jahan, the 17th century Mughal emperor, which right now lists 29 objects commissioned by, formerly owned by, or depicting him. I wanted to make this kind of exploration more visually interesting, so I built on an idea written up in another previous blog post; using Wikidata’s graph tool.

Here are some objects connected to the Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid I. Click on the image to enlarge it.

The interactive version of the above graph lets you drag nodes and double-click on them to get more information. It will also update over time as more collection data are added to Wikidata.

In the graph above, the same image is used to represent “Abdülmecid I” and “Sultan Abdülmecid I”. This is potentially confusing, but they are not the same thing. The “Abdülmecid I” in the centre is the man, and “Sultan Abdülmecid I” is a painting that depicts him. An image of the painting is used to represent the man because that is the best visual representation Wikidata/Wikimedia have for him.

My query asks for objects in collections with a connection to the individual, then gets the collections those objects are in, then gets the type of object. By substituting one identifier in the query, we ask the same question about a different person: here, Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent:

Here’s the link to the stretchy interactive version. Seven different collections, in multiple countries, are represented here, and this is part of the excitement of exploring art on Wikidata: These graphs aren’t an ideal interface for the general public, but they expose connections that we would never find by browsing a single collection, or even a national aggregator.

Can we do better than link seven collections? The graph for Timur, founder of the Timurid Empire, links nine different collections and includes a letter he wrote alongside art works depicting him:

Here’s the link to the stretchy interactive version.

When more objects and collections turn up, the graph gets crowded and difficult to read, so I deactivate the code that shows the “instance of” properties. Here’s the graph for the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb:

Here’s the link to the interactive query.

Previously in my career I’ve added catalogue data from the Bodleian Library and the Ashmolean Museum to Wikidata and more currently I’m building a data set of works from the Khalili Collections and know people doing the same for other institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so it’s satisfying to see all this work coming together.

Let’s finally see the rather crowded graph for my initial suggestion, Shah Jahan, presently with 29 objects in ten collections:

This is the link to the stretchy interactive version. Note that some art works appear on these graphs as a thumbnail image (e.g. the Khalili Astrolabe at the top of the image) and some appear just as a name (e.g. the Ashmolean Museum’s objects). Images appear in Wikidata queries if they are available on Wikimedia Commons; one of many benefits of bulk-uploading images to that platform is to improve this kind of visualisation.

All these graphs are almost certainly incomplete in their coverage, and can be improved as more institutions openly share their catalogue data.

Historical people and modern collections: a Wikidata exploration was originally published in Wiki Playtime on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

25/01/2022-31/01/2022

About us

• Pete Masters, Head of the Community Team at HOT, promoted weeklyOSM on Twitter and colleagues from OpenStreetMap Spain joined in. Actions recommended for imitation

Mapping campaigns

• In response to the recent enormous explosion at Apiatse near Bogoso, which leveled the entire town, OSM Ghana has created a project on the HOT Tasking Manager to help map the area.
• Cristoffs wrote > about the project to systematically record all defibrillators (emergency=defibrillator) in Poland. The findings have also been used to expand the Polish Wiki page > .

Mapping

• Christoffs recommended > , in his blog post, ‘JOSM settings useful for editing data in Poland’.
• On the German forum there is a discussion > about a massive retagging of churches. The goal of the retagging was to ‘adapt’ OSM to a flight simulator. Streckenkundler did the revert > of the rule breaking automatic/mechanical edits. Frederik Ramm clarified > the OSM position on the flight simulator users’ forum.
• Starting out to systematic map solar modules, SK53 ended up with outdoor automatic rotary milking parlours.
• Alexander Marx described > how he started contributing to OpenStreetMap with StreetComplete.
• ‘Are maps only made by tough men in wooden ships or can you do it too?’ is > the provocative question of TauvicR, who also wants to encourage you > , to contribute by mapping your surroundings in a spirit of neighbourhood help.
• TauvicR writes > about his neighbourhood outreach activities and the need for passable sidewalks from fit to handicapped pedestrians to wheelchair users. His question at the end is ‘Does OpenStreetMap see a role in providing information about well-maintained footpaths?’
• YouthCheese explained how he started mapping because there were too many white spots on the map in his area of interest in Australia.
• Ilya Zverev analysed > micromapping, in particular examples by Alex Seidel (Supaplex030), and concludes that ‘Supaplex030’s work shows that well-placed tags replace micromapping and complex geometries’.
• miroslavuzice87 compared the before and after micromapping of Uzice, a medieval town in Serbia, and reflected on the pros and cons of micromapping.
• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • boundary=forest a tagging scheme for forest boundaries. This is a follow up to an earlier proposal.
  • isced:2011:programme=* to update isced:level tagging to the 2011 version of the International Standard Classification of Education.
  • water_crossing_level:foot=* for mapping the typical difficulty of a river crossing.
  • office=diplomatic to harmonise the use of name=* and official_name=* on the facilities of diplomatic missions.

Community

• [1] OSM Fukushima members have released a video introducing weeklyOSM 597. They also evaluated the newly proposed cartography of the official Japanese national map.
• Episode 113 of the Geomob podcast is an interview with Dustin Carlino about OSM-based transport planning service A/B Street.
• Mateusz Konieczny opened a discussion in his OSM diary by affirming that having deprecated or duplicate tagging schemes in use is not a critical issue to OpenStreetMap.
• Sunil Bhattarai, from Tribhuvan University, talked about his experience with the Youthmappers mapping project in Chepang, Nepal.
• Sam Wilson reported about the first OpenStreetMap meetup in Claremont, Perth, Western Australia.
• Florian Lohoff refers to the contribution of Littlebtc, who points out that due to the lack of current aerial images for the validation of new roads in Taiwan, there is a certain risk in relying exclusively on OpenStreetMap data for navigation purposes. Florian, on the other hand, recommends actively using OSM routing in order to find and correct routing errors more quickly.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• At the 27 January OSMF Board meeting, Seth Cochran and Dolly Andriatsiferana presented Operation Fistula in Madagascar. Dolly showed > the well illustrated tutorial with gif animations of building tracing and tracing/classification of roads in the African context.

Events

• Martijn van Exel showed in a tweet the mapping progress in Tucson, Arizona, the venue for this year’s SotM US. Minh Nguyen, in his comments on our coverage of the event in Issue 601, explained that SotM US recommends that all participants be vaccinated against COVID-19 or provide a negative test result. However, the University of Arizona (the owner of the venue) is prohibited by law from requiring vaccination as a condition of entry.

Education

• The fifth part of Anne-Karoline Distel’s ‘Derrynaflan Trail’ video series is an introduction to 3D mapping, the sixth video explains how to 3D map, and the seventh shows the results.

Maps

• The city of Magdeburg > now offers a map based on OpenStreetMap to display public recycling bins. Unfortunately, the recycling bins are only an overlay and not sourced from OpenStreetMap.

Open Data

• Christian Quest tweeted that orthophotos of five departments in France have been updated on wms.openstreetmap.fr > .
• OpenStreetMap user raibach wrote > about the Geoportal Hesse > , which has provided a lot of open data since 2019. Be aware that the available data is not licensed to be directly imported into OpenStreetMap.

Software

• qeef has published a web page where you can check if your new GeoJSON file intersects with any area already published on the HOT Tasking Manager. A similar service is also available for Divide and map. Now.

Did you know …

• … Pascal Neis’ statistics page for OpenStreetMap notes?
• … the wiki page with an overview of all the possibilities for creating high resolution paper maps?
• … how to become a UN Mapper?

OSM in the media

• Cory Doctorow’s latest book Attack Surface contains a reference to OpenStreetMap.

Other “geo” things

• Xirong7 visually compared the size of south-east Asia with some states.
• L.A. Dork tweeted about ‘One of the oddest maps of the Valley’, the ‘Hand that feeds Los Angeles’.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Lyon	EPN des Rancy : Technique de cartographie et d’édition		2022-02-05
	OSM Africa February Mapathon: Map Zimbabwe		2022-02-05
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2022-02-09
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2022-02-08
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen	✓	2022-02-09
Michigan	Michigan Meetup	✓	2022-02-10
	OSM Utah monthly meetup		2022-02-10
Bochum	OSM-Treffen Bochum (Februar) ONLINE		2022-02-10
Berlin	164. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch	✓	2022-02-11
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #37		2022-02-14
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle Lyon		2022-02-15
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-02-16
	148.Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-02-15
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-02-15
Köln	Stammtisch Köln		2022-02-16
	MSF online validation mapathon		2022-02-17
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-02-22
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-02-24

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by Nordpfeil, PierZen, Sammyhawkrad, Strubbl, TheSwavu, derFred.

Trudi Jacobson is Distinguished Librarian Emerita at the University at Albany, SUNY.

The just-published book Metaliteracy in a Connected World: Developing Learners as Producers (ALA Neal Schuman, 2022) makes strong connections between metaliteracy, open pedagogy, and examples of open pedagogy, with student editing of Wikipedia an exemplar. I co-authored the book with Thomas P. Mackey, Professor of Arts and Media at SUNY Empire State College.

The conception of learners as producers strongly aligns with the goals of the Wiki Education program. By editing Wikipedia articles, students have the opportunity to move from their traditional role as information consumers to an active and engaged learning model involving  informed contributions to the global Wikipedia community.

Jako Olivier, UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning and Open Educational Resources and Professor of Multimodal Learning at North-West University in South Africa, writes in his foreword, “The focus on metaliterate producers in the classroom prompts associations with constructivist ideals where learners actively construct meaning and knowledge in the learning process. In an age where digital content is central as learning resources, the need for metaliteracy is becoming increasingly relevant” (p.xi). Metaliteracy, like editing on Wikipedia, also highlights the need for responsible and ethical participation in today’s interconnected environment.

Metaliteracy originally developed in the age of participatory online culture to go beyond the primarily skills-based approaches to teaching and learning in social information environments. Metaliteracy provides an overarching conception of literacy that emphasizes domains of learning, learner roles and characteristics, and goals and learning objectives that express a more engaged and ethical involvement with online and in-person communities. The idea of metaliterate learner as producer is a core pillar of metaliteracy, as explored in the first chapter in the book, which sets the scene for the following chapters by giving readers a rich understanding of the framework, firmly situating it within learning theory and pedagogical models. The second chapter focuses on how multimodal learning can engage students in their roles as producers.

Chapter three delves into open pedagogy and how metaliteracy can provide crucial scaffolding for the new, exciting, and sometimes anxiety-inducing scenario where students are asked to move beyond more traditional learning situations. It first introduces core concepts related to open education, looks at open pedagogy from students’ perspectives, and then moves on to the impact of open education on teaching and learning. In this chapter, the authors show how ”metaliteracy provides a comprehensive scaffolding and framework for the learning, and indeed the teaching, that takes place in open pedagogical environments” (p. 85).

Following this exploration of the connections between open pedagogy and metaliteracy, chapter four examines three courses that advance the goal of learners as producers. The first case study involves a course that is built around the Wiki Education program. It weaves together Wikipedia editing, metaliteracy, and several frames from the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. Wiki Education instructors may find metaliteracy’s scaffolding to be of particular interest, as it can be used regardless of course topic or student level. In this chapter, telling quotes from students provide a view into how they feel about this linkage.

The metaliteracy website provides a host of open learning resources for a wide range of educational settings, as well as other information about the metaliteracy framework.

Inspired to teach with Wikipedia by the book’s case study? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information on Wiki Education’s support.

Image credits: Jfhughesus, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Illustrated by Jasmina El Bouamraoui and Karabo Poppy Moletsane, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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

Incidents

There were no incidents this January. Pfew! Remember to review and schedule Incident Follow-up work in Phabricator. These are preventive measures and tech debt mitigations written down after an incident is concluded. Read about past incidents at Incident status on Wikitech.

Trends

During 2021, I compared us to the median of 4 incidents per month, as measured over the two years prior (2019-2020).

I'm glad to announce our median has lowered to 3 per month over the past two years (2020-2021). For more plots and numbers about our incident documentation, refer to Incident stats.

Since the previous edition, we resolved 17 tasks from previous months. In January, there were 45 new error reports of which 28 have been resolved within the same month, the remaining 17 have carried over to February.

With precisely 17 tasks both closed and added, the workboard remains at the exact total of 298 open tasks, for the third month in a row. That's quite the coincidence.

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

View Workboard

For the month-over-month numbers, refer to the spreadsheet data.

Thanks!

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

Until next time,

– Timo Tijhof

🎸 Doc Brown:

It could mean that that point in time contains some cosmic significance.., as if it were the temporal junction point of the entire space-time continuum… Or it could just be an amazing coincidence.

Today, the European Commission has leaked its proposal for a “Data Act”, a piece of legislation that is supposed to include a revision of the Database Directive and the sui generis right for the creators of databases (SGR) it establishes. 

What’s changing? Not much!

It won’t take a long read to understand what the Commission is planning to do with the sui generis right: not much! While fluffy language is included that explains how European courts have been working for over two decades to “sharpen” the definitions and our understanding of when this right applies and what it covers, the actual proposed change is a baby step. The European Commission merely suggests excluding machine generated data from the application of the SGR. 

This is the core issue with the EU here. The European Commission is afraid to call a spade a spade. It must be apparent to the people working on this that the SGR is an obstacle to data sharing and innovation. Further, there is no known proof that this right has brought any added investment to database creation in the EU since its creation. Knowing this, the Commission takes the right step to limit its application so it doesn’t stop Europe in the field of machine generated data. But why do we stop here?

A little history

The Database Directive came into force in 1998 and the SGR is implemented in all EU Member States. Outside the EU, similar protection exists in the United Kingdom and the Russian Federation. In all other countries, such as the USA and Australia, there is no separate database maker’s right and databases can be protected if they fall under copyright law.  

In 2015, the European Commission carried out a first evaluation of the Directive in which it stated:

In 2021, the European Commission launched a public consultation on the Data Act with a section on the sui generis right. The responses show that stakeholders largely don’t understand and don’t apply it. 

A cascade of legal disputes over what this right does and where it applies has wasted stakeholders and investors years in front of European courts and we are still far from having a clear understanding of where and for how long this right applies. It could be eternal, it could cover entries. This scares people and organisations away from using otherwise available databases.  

Why do we particularly care?

Wikimedia works on several projects that offer free knowledge to anyone, anywhere. One such project is Wikidata, a free knowledge base with currently 96,795,835 data items that anyone can edit and humans and machines can read. Wikidata is used by Wikipedia, by scientists, journalists, by larger companies such as Lufthansa and Air France, by smaller competitors like DuckDuckGo (to offer info boxes) and by start-ups. But Wikidata can only include data that is free. Our main issue with the sui generis right is that in many cases we don’t know whether a database is or isn’t protected by it, so we pass on it. 

a simple solution is at hand

There is, of course, a very simple solution here. A solution that was recently applied to the Text and Data Mining exception in the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive. Databases (Article 4) should only be protected under the SGR if their creator has expressly stated so, for example through machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online. This would allow anyone who wants to apply the SGR to their databases, but it wouldn’t stop re-use of data in all the other cases.

Muitas pessoas no Twitter e no Mastodon me pediram para que eu registrasse as minhas impressões e experiência de uso com o Moonlander Mark I. Algumas delas até me pediram para que eu gravasse vídeos usando o teclado para entender como ele é operado – e eu farei isso em breve, na marca de 4 semanas de uso. Hoje, quero me dedicar a reportar as minhas primeiras duas semanas com um equipamento tão excêntrico (e aproveitar a oportunidade para explicar de forma mais acessível alguns conceitos relacionados ao mundo dos teclados como um todo).

It’s that time of the year! After the 2018, 2019 and 2020 recaps, let’s cover what happened in 2021 with the project that has been much out of my focus this year (but still in my heart), Wikidata’s WikiProject Video games. If you are not familiar with that endeavor, I will refer you to the mushroom-rambling blog-post I wrote in September 2019.

Overview

As of January 29th 2021, there are 45.3K video game (Q7889) items on Wikidata − a 7,8% growth (3,3K items) over the year.

As always, let’s have a look on how well these items are described: 6,4K have no platform (P400), 10.5K no publication date (P577), 12.3K no genre (P136) − somewhat worse numbers than last year: again the overall proportion of well-described items went down, as we added more items.

Regarding external identifiers: only 800 items do not have any (1.8%). Like last year, this is still slightly misleading, as this figure includes items with vglist video game ID (P8351), which is itself based on Wikidata. Excluding vglist, we arrive at 1.2K items (2.6%). Down from 12.5% a year ago, 22% the year before and 40% the year before that − we are still on a good trend

…or so I thought: by improving the query to only count properties related to video games (Q28147643), the number goes up to 6557 items. After a couple of spot checks, my guess was that the main contributor to this discrepancy was Freebase ID (P646) (and a quick query does seem to indicate this accounts for over 4.3K items). So I guess we are back at 15%

Externals identifiers

We have now reached 274 video-game related external identifiers (compared to 240 external last year). Again, the additions cover various languages: Japanese (Japan PlayStation Software Database ID (P9636) or Famitsu game ID (P10144)), Czech (Databáze her ID (P10096)), Italian (everyeye.it ID (P10248)), Spanish (AbandonSocios ID (P9987)), French (IndieMag game ID (P9870) or Gameblog.fr game ID (P9702)), German (WiiG game ID (P9806) or Adventure Corner video game ID (P9747)) and quite a few in Russian (StopGame ID (P10030), Games@Mail.ru ID (P9697) etc.) taken from the Russian-language-Wikipedia list of videogame-related reliable sources − an amazing (and ongoing) work from Russian-language editors!

In terms of specialization, most of this year’s databases are fairly generic ones, besides the occasional platform specialization (Nintendo64EVER ID (P10137) & N64-Database ID (P10169) for the Nintendo 64) ; IndieMag game ID (P9870) focuses on indie games and Adventure Corner video game ID (P9747) on adventures games. I’m however pretty pleased with the inclusion of Games und Erinnerungskultur Datenbank ID (P9709), I believe the first and only scholarly database of video games we have so far.

Most of the identifiers are about games ; but we also got a new identifier for genres (Glitchwave genre ID (P10049), courtesy of Wikiproject Music “herder of genres” [[User:Solidest]]) and for series (Igromania series ID (P9835) − together with some nice OpenRefine batches by [[User:Kirilloparma]]).

Mix’n’match catalogues, which we use to align the external database with Wikidata, went from 209 to 235. Among these are the platforms and genres from the late AllGame (Q18984) database, continuing my interest in defunct databases.

Some other things in no particular order

• In August, [[User:Poslovitch]] massively imported DLCs of RailWorks (Q2068279) − by far now the game with the most expansions documented on Wikidata
• Some crowdfunding related SPARQL queries were added to our showcase page, courtesy of the same Poslovitch.
• The Among Us (Q96417649) item keeps growing and growing − where will it stop?

Data modeling

I don’t believe our data model evolved at all this year − no new properties, and no new documented modeling. The only instance I can think of was the failed proposal for an “alternative title” property, which more or less consecrated the use of multiple title (P1476) (with relevant qualifiers) statements.

EDIT: meanwhile, Kirilloparma reminded me of announced at (P9731), which as a qualifier to announcement date (P6949) specifies at which important event a game or hardware was announced. And here is a little query to sort events by number of video games announced.

The road ahead

Dare I say it? We still did not make progress on whether we want to implement a more sophisticated data model for work/releases. Perhaps that will not happen after all, and we will stick to a single, Work-level data model (which is after all what made sense to start with for Wikipedia articles). However, I do think we must eventually expand our grammar and vocabulary to model things like art styles, perspective/viewpoint, pacing, narrative style or gameplay features. Maybe one day

Besides that, and while I try to keep my ambitions contained − there is one area I would like to facilitate: while the project is active with several contributors, it often feels that each one of us works in isolation on their own topics. I miss the days of collaboration of the month/quarter on French Wikipedia, perhaps I will try to facilitate a focused effort − can be on a genre, or a platform, or anything really: just something to make greater strides and see more visible results. Let’s see!

The time is approaching for the end of life of the WBStack alpha platform (don’t worry, it’s still some months away, and there is a migration path to a new platform etc :)).

In this post you’ll find an update on the current state of WBStack, another introduction to Wikibase.Cloud, some rough dates and connections to other communications. If you don’t know what WBStack is then you can start with this introduction.

Wikibase.Cloud

Following the pre launch announcement of Wikibase.Cloud at WikidataCon 2021, the WMDE team has been working on getting the new platform set up and ready to replace wbstack.com. This includes updates to components such as MediaWiki, Wikibase, reworking components, modifying code bases to be more easily maintained by a team, and generally getting to grips with the platform.

This new platform uses the same codebases, and architecture as wbstack.com does currently, but it is maintained by a team at Wikimedia Deutschland, rather than me, an individual.

You can read more on the launch from the WMDE perspective in the mailing list post that will be sent at the same time as this blog post.

Initially, Wikibase.cloud will launch as a closed beta for WBStack users who registered before February 2nd, 2022 with a waiting list for later expansion. To join the waiting list, please fill out this form https://lime.wikimedia.de/index.php/717538. Please note that the waitlist will be considered after WBStack migration has completed.

For current users of WBStack, you do not need to join this waitlist. You will receive an email with details on how you can opt-in to a migration to wikibase.cloud in March.

wikibase-cloud mailing list February 2022

As migration time approaches, I will be reaching out to the current users of WBStack about the options and approach to migration. And if you are a current user, it’s worth reading the rest of this post.

WBStack closing its doors

As talked about multiple times over the years, the goal of wbstack.com was always to prove the concept of Wikibase as a service as a direction to follow. Most recently in a post at the end of 2021 I said that wbstack.com would likely be reaching its end of life in 2022, and it is now clear that will be the case.

The ideal situation is that wikibase.cloud is ready to receive the first migration wikis by the end of the first quarter, and in the second quarter wbstack.com would no longer be needed (June ish).

Prior to wbstack.com being turned off users will be offered a couple of options when it comes to their wikis

1. Migrate to wikibase.cloud (a fairly hands off process, handeled by me & WMDE)
2. Get a dump of your wiki, so that you can run it elsewhere
3. Delete your wiki if it was just used for testing etc, and the content is not really of value

If you have any concerns please do reach out!

I’m excited, and I hope you are too!

Migration changes

A few things have changed behind the scenes as eluded to in previous sections:

• WMDE will become the data controller and processor for the platform (from a GDPR perspective)
• The service will be hosted within the EU, (wbstack.com is currently in the US)
• MediaWiki and Wikibase will be updated from 1.35 to a version between 1.36 and 1.37
• Communication should start happening via WMDE for Wikibase.cloud related requests, comments and questions

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