Over the years, Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) has constantly worked towards documenting and disseminating diverse cultural places and histories through photographs. Annually hosted by over 50 countries across the world, the competition aims to encourage participation in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, while fostering an important need for digital documentation of built heritage sites in different parts of the world.

With the growing success and country participation in the competition each year, the WLM team identified a number of challenges in the WLM concept and has undertaken a Diversity,  Equity and Inclusivity (DEI) research to re-evaluate the same. Often, we hear or read about DEI in the context of gender equality or equitable hiring practices in a workplace. Then, what does it mean to assess a photo competition such as WLM from a DEI lens?

While it is important that we have geographical diversity (having countries from different parts of the world participate), it is equally important to take into consideration diverse representation from local communities, social groups and cultural contexts. However, varied socio-political and economic situations within each country may present a unique set of roadblocks in accessing resources necessary to host such a photo competition. On the other hand, a disconnect between local community understandings of what a monument is and the ‘official’ understanding of a monument might lead to a sense of alienation and exclusion within the competition which hinders diverse participation.

With the above understanding in mind the DEI research was conducted to identify country specific gaps and find sustainable solutions for the same. As part of the research process WLM national organisers and stakeholders were interviewed and based on this, we describe a set of preliminary issues below.

Access to Resources:

Conversations with national organisers revealed that participants from some countries struggle with accessing affordable internet or digital cameras which limits the regional scope of participation in the country and documentation of monuments and local built heritage. Organisers in these countries have tried to reduce this gap by hosting upload sessions using portable internet routers at multiple locations and through curated photowalks. However, reaching participants in peripheral towns and documenting monuments in non-urban locations still remains a challenge.

Heritage Lists, Definition and Rules:

Many shared their struggle in accessing lists from government agencies and cultural organisations as they are either outdated, incomplete or not digitised.

Accessing the heritage lists and sites becomes more difficult in certain areas, such as Ukraine, where the physical lists and the monuments are at risk of being destroyed due to the ongoing war and military occupation which causes fear in participants to photograph the monuments.

When freely available, the lists are sometimes not inclusive of monuments representative of minority or marginalised communities. As cultural contexts change across countries, so does the understanding of what is considered as cultural heritage and what is a monument. This is necessary to bear in mind especially while creating an inclusive space where everyone feels welcome irrespective of their differences. During the interviews with organisers some of them shared how the term monument when translated to their cultural context takes on a different meaning and does not fully capture the essence of heritage spaces in their country. According to them, it tends to highlight the colonial understanding of monuments while classifying indigenous monuments as a separate category which comes across as exclusionary.

Outreach and Communication:

Every year we have countries joining Wiki Loves Monuments and enthusiastically taking up the opportunity to host the competition in their respective countries. However, in regions where there are no strong Wikimedia affiliate or thematic groups organisers find it difficult to plan and structure the competition’s outreach and communications.

The presence of Wikimedia affiliates generally makes it easier for volunteer organisers to seek help in navigating the Wikimedia domain and getting familiar with the structure of the competition. These groups also play an important role in minimising the language barrier and making communication easier for local organisers.

Freedom of Panorama/ restriction to photography:

Often national organisers run into issues that are beyond their control. One of these is a legal restriction on freedom of panorama, when the architects’ copyright prohibits publishing photos of a young-ish building in the public space. In countries without freedom of panorama provision, participants can not freely take and upload photos of many more recent heritage sites, such as post-colonial heritage. This not only restricts documentation but also  leads to lack of motivation to host the competition and affects participation rate in certain regions of the country.

The above are a few of the problem areas that came to light during the Wiki Loves Monuments Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity research, so far. The WLM team is currently working on facilitating collaborations and partnerships between local cultural institutions and WLM national organisers. We intend to have the pilot network in place before the next iteration of Wiki Loves Monuments and put available resources to test in making the competition more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

The research is still underway and we would love to hear from you and understand your experience of participating in and organising the competition in your country, from a diversity, equity and inclusivity perspective. You can write to Mesha Murali to know more about the ongoing research and share your experience. You can also have a look at the detailed midterm report on the Commons Page.

17/05/2022-23/05/2022

Breaking news

• EOX IT Services has published the 2021 update of their cloudless images version of the ESA’s Sentinel-2 Earth observation satellites programme (10 m resolution) data last week. These images are particularly useful for observing changes in land cover. The EOX cloudless Sentinel-2 images (2018 to 2021) are available in JOSM and need to be activated from the Imagery → Imagery preferences menu and can be used to update OpenStreetMap.For more details about developments from this project, see the EOX blogpost.

Mapping campaigns

• Dcapillae presented > , in his diary, a map of the rubbish and recycling bins in the municipality of Málaga, now present in OSM thanks to a recent import.
• Martijn van Exel wrote, in his blog, about Microsoft’s machine-generated dataset of building footprints for the United States, created some years ago, and the benefits and problems related to making use of it.

Mapping

• bgo_eiu gave their thoughts on mapping bus stops shared between overlapping operators’ networks, resulting in multiple signs and references.
• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • isced:2011:level=* a second version of a key for tagging the 2011 International Standard Classification of Education scale.
  • place=* tagging for Japan.
• Voting on the US county, city and local highway networks tagging proposal is open until Wednesday 8 June.

Community

• Martijn van Exel is asking for ideas, on Twitter, to make OSM more helpful for people and is getting a lot of feedback.
• Late last month, the Africa GeoConvo Podcast sat down with Tommy Charles, of OSM Sierra Leone, to talk about how YouthMappers is encouraging the next generation of mappers.
• The OpenStreetMap Taiwan Community (OSMTW) is pleased to announce that it has secured an alliance grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, which has been used to purchase two Insta360 One X2 cameras with accessories, and to support related workshops scheduled from March 2022 until February 2023. OSMTW is dedicated to organising at least six street-view expeditions and six edit workshops.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap US Trails Working Group members are thoroughly tagging trails in three different areas of Washington State. The richer tagging in these areas will allow navigational app developers to test out improved map rendering showing different types of trails and paths.

Education

• [1] OpenSchoolMaps.ch has created > this particularly descriptive guide for students and other interested parties on how to map the environment themselves.

Humanitarian OSM

• Paul Uithol, Jessica Pechmann, Ivan Gayton and Shazmane Mandjee Rehamtula shared HOT and the wider humanitarian community thinking about ethical and practical considerations of mapping in conflict areas.

Maps

• OSM Live Changes is a fully turnable globe displaying changesets as red dots.
• Robhubi described > how he optimises the map layout for city trips.

Programming

• OpenSnowMap has moved its API from Osmosis to Osm2pgsql, resulting in a major performance improvement in the request response delay.
• Christoph Hormann shared an update on his insights and reflections about the OpenStreetMap Carto Project.

Releases

• OsmAnd 4.2 has been released for iOS. It comes with a new map style, improved track management, categorised public transport routes, and displays running routes (OSM tags route=fitness_trail and route=running).

Did you know …

• the Latest Changes tool? It displays the most recent changes in your region, allowing better data reviews.
• … StreetFerret? It encourages you to explore your city through running. It uses OpenStreetMap data to analyse how many streets of your city you have completed.

Other “geo” things

• Microsoft has released a new update of Planetary Computer with many new datasets, API enhancements, and updates to libraries.
• Approximator explained > how to create a time-lapse video using Mapillary photos.
• Florian Lohoff showed how he attached a camera to an electric scooter to record street-level imagery for Mapillary.
• In the age of the Internet and GPS, Jean-Louis Rheault, a cartographer-illustrator in Montréal, continues to practise > the same way he has for the past 40 years with cartography as an art form. Cartography-illustration dates back to antiquity and continues to this day with illustrations on maps based on the same idea: ‘to orient and make people want to visit a place by highlighting its attractions’.
• Two young ladies, from Bulgaria, followed > their navigation app on an electric kick scooter trip and ended up on an Autobahn near Munich.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2022-05-28
Santiago	3a reunión bimestral de OSM Latam		2022-05-28
佐賀市	みんなで街なかのデジタル地図をつくろう！		2022-05-28
	Unique Mappers May Mapathon : Let’s Map Aguata LGA for Social Good		2022-05-28
Kasaragod	MapYourPlace		2022-05-28 – 2022-05-31
Town of Victoria Park	Social Mapping Sunday: East Vic Park		2022-05-29
Bari	OpenStreetMap in Puglia		2022-06-01
Anderlecht	Notes Mapathon & Meetup		2022-06-01
	OSM Africa June Mapathon: Map Lesotho		2022-06-03
Maseru	#MapLesotho Mapathon		2022-06-03 – 2022-07-03	ls
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-06-06
City of Westminster	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-06-07
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-06-08
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #36 (Online)	✓	2022-06-07
Brno	Brno Missing Maps mapathon		2022-06-08
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-06-09
Großarl	5. Virtueller OpenStreetMap Stammtisch Österreich		2022-06-08
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-06-09
Nantes	State of the Map France 2022		2022-06-10 – 2022-06-12
Belém	Mapatona de Ananindeua – Meninas da Geo		2022-06-10
Brandenburg	168. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2022-06-10
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #41		2022-06-13
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2022-06-15

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 Climate_Ben, Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Strubbl, TheSwavu, cafeconleche, derFred.

Pedagogic videos, in Basque language

Ikusgela is a project specialized in pedagogical videos. Its aim is to increase the presence of the Basque language on the web and to complete the scope of Basque Wikipedia. With a fresh tone that appeals to both students and those interested in the topics being worked on, it will use a language and resources adapted to the new narratives. All the videos, moreover, have been completed with free content, mostly from Wikimedia Commons, and the material created will also be free, as a sign of a way of acting in the network.

It has a website, but the essence of the project is not the container, but the content itself. Therefore, more important than the web is the Wikipedia and the Youtube channel, as well as finding innovative ways to disseminate and promote this content on social networks (via Twitter, Mastodon, Telegram, Instagram…). Ikusgela also wants to act as a bridge: it wants to bring those who only use Basque in the formal sphere to see Basque content in the informal sphere as well.

The project is coordinated by the Basque Wikimedians User Group, financially sponsored by the Basque Government and Hiru Damatxo puts the audiovisual branch. The project started in 2019, with a project presented to the UEU-EWKE Digital Humanities research grant, sponsored by the Basque Wikimedians User Group and the Basque Summer University. After the research, the project got the possibility to realize a prototype inside a multimedia research institution. After that, the Department of Culture and Language Policy of the Basque Government supported the initiative and Ikusgela was born.

Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir

The philosophers Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir could be, for the first time, an exam topic at the University Access Evaluation, and with two videos about these two authors Ikusgela has begun its journey with the aim of alleviating a lack that was sensed when working on school content. The two videos are already at Commons, in the relevants articles in Wikipedia, in the social networks of Ikusgela and in the portal http://www.ikusgela.eus.

Members of the Agora Philosophy Teachers Association and the Joxe Azurmendi Chair of the Basque Country University have worked as academic advisors for the creation of these first two videos; in addition, a student and a professor have worked on the article about Hannah Arendt inside the Basque Wikimedia Education Program. In the audiovisual field, the production company Hiru Damatxo has been dedicated to the creation of videos. The voice of this videos is provided by the actor Klara Badiola.

All-in in September

After the summer Ikusgela will start its full activity, in mid-September the first series will be presented. Sometimes animation techniques will be used, sometimes a presenter will guide the content. The idea is to make explanatory educational videos on different fields of knowledge, free and in Basque.

In the middle of a global pandemic, the public turned to Wikipedia for information about vaccines. Pageviews on articles related to vaccines spiked as people sought neutral, fact-based information from a source they trusted — Wikipedia — amidst a sea of disinformation on social media.

One such article that saw massive pageviews is the one on attenuated vaccines. But if you had looked at the page in October 2020, you wouldn’t have found much — mostly text in bullet points, and a warning banner at the top, alerting readers that the article needed additional citations. Today, the article is extensive, with sections on development, administration, mechanism, safety, history, advantages and disadvantages, and an extensive list of attenuated vaccines. The article cites 64 sources, peer-reviewed publications that meet Wikipedia’s strict standards for medical content.

The improvements to the article are all thanks to a group of students in Denise Smith’s public health class at McMaster University. Abdullah AlShenaiber is one of the students who dramatically improved the article.

“It was heartbreaking to learn about the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy and disinformation online. As a group, we sought to address the issue as we understood how crucial it is to disseminate credible health information that is accessible in both delivery and language. We found the mechanism of attenuated vaccines particularly interesting and were especially attracted to the topic because of its current relevance. There has been some talk in the media of live-attenuated COVID-19 vaccines in-development,” Abdullah says. “While there is widespread use of attenuated vaccines (e.g., in measles, mumps, rubella, polio) many readers may be unaware of what an attenuated vaccine is and how it works. The Wikipedia article for attenuated vaccines was very limited in scale; it lacked high quality references, a detailed lead section, and information on subtopics typically provided in other articles such as its mechanism and safety. This makes it difficult for a person reading the article to fully understand the topic due to insufficient resources. Hence, our group decided to focus on the attenuated vaccine article in hopes of improving its quality and its gaps in scientific information.”

Abdullah tackled the lead section, expanded the development section, and wrote an entirely new section on safety. His classmates, Emma and Tal, added additional content to the article.

“We found the safety section to be the most challenging to address considering how prevalent vaccine hesitancy is. It was particularly difficult to balance presenting objective information while mitigating safety concerns or potential avenues for misinformation regarding vaccines,” Abdullah explains. “We worked as a group through this section with the instructor’s advice and had several revisions by all members to ensure the language and information used is appropriate and not misleading. For example, in the beginning of the safety section, we ascertain the safety and efficacy of attenuated vaccines while making it clear that there are extremely rare occasions of severe adverse effects. We cited secondary and tertiary sources (e.g., governments sites, WHO, systematic reviews, and academic textbooks) to ensure that readers can refer to reliable and informative references. We attempted to use objective language and were clear that there is a small degree of stability and safety concerns, such as in its administration to pregnant mothers or to severely immunocompromised individuals. We hope that the section makes it clear that vaccines are very safe, while not misleading the lay reader or contributing to vaccine hesitancy or concern.”

Abdullah and his classmates learned how to contribute thanks to Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program, which provided training on how to edit Wikipedia, including information on specific sourcing requirements for medical articles like the attenuated vaccine article the group was working on.

“Compared to a traditional assignment, our Wikipedia assignment felt unconventional and insightful,” Abdullah says. “It was very involved, collaborative, and required on-going reflection between yourself and other editors. As a Wikipedia editor, you have a duty to provide credible health information, collaborate with colleagues, and learn from your peers. I believe collaboration is a fundamental pillar in editing articles. Having lovely classmates and editors provide suggestions, diverse perspectives, and constructive discussion was extremely valuable in my learning and development in appraising scientific research and navigating the editing platform. It was truly a unique opportunity to disseminate information to the public. It felt like we were serving our community and left a lasting impact in improving health information online.”

Abdullah found his favorite part of the assignment was how collaborative it was and seeing its impact with his peers. He checked the Wiki Education Dashboard and watched the pageviews climb, as more and more people read his work. He tried to engage other Wikipedians to discuss their work on the article’s Talk page, and was excited when others made minor edits to his contributions. Since Abdullah and his classmates started improving the article, it’s received more than 130,000 pageviews.

“After editing the attenuated vaccine article with my group, I felt extremely proud and pleased of our contributions, especially considering how important it is to disseminate reliable information regarding vaccines,” Abdullah says. “I began to appreciate my role as a student in consuming health information, fostering collaboration and community, and applying my learning to communicate relevant health information to the public.”

Abdullah recently graduated from McMaster University’s Bachelor of Health Sciences program and is continuing his studies at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine in the fall. The Wikipedia assignment helped him develop skills in critically appraising sources of health information that he hopes to apply in his career, looking for key factors like the author, methodology, references, conflicts of interest, validity of interpretation, and risk of biases, he says. He learned to look beyond the stigma Wikipedia has to understand the value of providing accessible health information on an open platform.

“The experience allowed me to appreciate Wikipedia’s central role as an accessible health resource,” he says. “After getting acclimated with the editing process, working on an article with peers, and reading research surrounding the platform, I learned that Wikipedia can act as a reliable health resource for the lay reader when used appropriately; this includes taking into account quality ratings, evaluating the article’s writing, and referring to other credible sources to supplement our knowledge.”

And he wants to keep sharing his knowledge on Wikipedia — both in health information and in topics he cares about beyond medicine.

“With the skills I’ve learned, I believe I have a responsibility to become an active producer of health information,” he says. “I learned valuable skills in evaluating and editing Wikipedia that I would love to keep applying in the future.”

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your class? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information.

Image credit: Cpl. Jackeline Perez Rivera, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Other languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English, español, français, italiano, magyar, polski, português, português do Brasil, suomi, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, فارسی, 中文, 日本語, ꯃꯤꯇꯩ ꯂꯣꯟ, 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

• Administrators using the mobile web interface can now access Special:Block directly from user pages. [1]
• The www.wiktionary.org portal page now uses an automated update system. Other project portals will be updated over the next few months. [2]

Problems

• The Growth team maintains a mentorship program for newcomers. Previously, newcomers weren’t able to opt out from the program. Starting May 19, 2022, newcomers are able to fully opt out from Growth mentorship, in case they do not wish to have any mentor at all. [3]
• Some editors cannot access the content translation tool if they load it by clicking from the contributions menu. This problem is being worked on. It should still work properly if accessed directly via Special:ContentTranslation. [4]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 24 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 25 May. It will be on all wikis from 26 May (calendar).

Future changes

• Gadget and user scripts developers are invited to give feedback on a proposed technical policy aiming to improve support from MediaWiki developers. [5]

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

🕑 1 hour 11 minutes

Matthew Westerby is the Robert H. Smith Postdoctoral Research Associate for Digital Projects at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, a national art museum of the United States. He has been heavily involved in the creation of the wiki History of Early American Landscape Design.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• History of Early American Landscape Design
• National Gallery of Art Wikipedia article
• Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
• Keywords in American Landscape Design by Therese O'Malley
• HEALD Image Collection page
• HEALD People category
• National Gallery of Art GitHub repository
  • StickyTOC MediaWiki extension
  • Dates page package
  • Geolocation page package
• HEALD Fence page
• HEALD sample RDF export

Diego Whittembury Escobar hadn’t ever considered writing for Wikipedia before. He had always assumed that it was too complex, or that he wasn’t qualified. But that all changed for Diego when he signed up for a course on Primate Behaviour, Ecology and Conservation taught by Sarah Turner at Concordia University.

“I discovered that I am able to, and that it can even be very fulfilling,” Diego explains.

Diego significantly expanded the article on Azaras’s capuchin. He chose the species because its habitat is primarily in Brazil, relatively close to Diego’s home country of Venezuela. Diego says writing on a primate that’s local to his home continent felt more personal than writing about one from another part of the world.

Using Wiki Education’s training modules, Diego learned how to expand the article.

“I learned the dedication that it takes to create such a good information platform such as Wikipedia,” Diego explains. “I also learned that even though anyone can write anything in any article, it takes strict sourcing and a certain style of writing to properly contribute to Wikipedia.”

These learnings were valuable to Diego, and he’s encouraged his professor to keep teaching with Wikipedia in that course through Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program.

“It was a very unique assignment that taught me many things about the selected species, and about how to do research and write about it,” Diego says. “It also showed me that this platform that we all enjoy all the time (Wikipedia) is only possible with the efforts of people like us, which is very motivating.”

Diego says his favorite part was Googling the Azaras’s capuchin and seeing his work appear as the top result. Armed with the knowledge from editing Wikipedia for this course, he intends to keep improving other species articles.

“I would like if more people could see how fulfilling it is to contribute to a platform that benefits everyone,” he says.

Image credit: Alexandre Pereira, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We first shared why a sound logo is needed for Wikimedia content to be correctly identified on audio platforms. We then shared how the creation of this sound logo would build upon existing practices in the movement with an array of exciting new parameters when it comes to sound logo creation and audio production. Now, the sound logo contest organizing team is excited to share a proposal for the global contest to create the sound of Wikimedia … and we’d love to hear from you. 

Let us know your thoughts on the project’s talk page and join an upcoming conversation on Friday May 27 @13:00 UTC (on Zoom with live interpretation) and Tuesday May 31 @15:00 UTC (on Jitsi). During these conversations, we will discuss the project, unpack sound logos, and introduce some basic audio mixing. We hope you like this contest proposal and help us make it louder. The conversation remains open until June 10. 

Some inspiration for you

Think of HBO, TED or Netflix. Think back to Intel and Windows. Sound logos are all around us and virtual voice assistants are ever more ubiquitous.  Now think of our vibrant wikiverse. How can you capture the sound of question and answer, knowledge growing, or trusted information in 1 to 4 second? We have already started a collection of sounds and tools to get you creating. Please help to expand it. 

A unique contest with lots to explore

Creating the sound of Wikimedia is no easy task, neither is evaluating a sound logo contest. You can’t place a series of sound logos next to each other and choose the one that you like the best in one attempt. It’s  also easy to develop listener fatigue when hearing one sound logo after another. This is going to be a collaborative, global effort with a lot of room for learning and hopefully a contribution of vibrant sound bites to Wikimedia Commons. There are many ways to contribute – from growing the existing collection of sounds and creating your own unique sound logo for Wikimedia to participating in the screening team or the selection committee. Learn more about getting involved. 

Some criteria and specifics 

For the contest, we are encouraging 1 submission per person with up to 3 sound logos, each between 1 and 4 seconds long. Your submission should contain only original sounds or CC0 / public domain samples. The ideal sound logo should feel human, inspired, smart, and warm.  You can learn more about the submission criteria, creative prompts, selection criteria, and the next steps on the contest proposal page. 

"Alright folks. It is showcase time. Show here the cool hacks you did in last 2 or days in wikimedia hackathon".Lucas announced this in IRC and telegram channels. It was Sunday night 8.30 PM IST. I was returning to chennai, in a bus.Joined the JitSi meet to see what the world has done recently. "Good … Continue reading Few notes on Wikimedia hackathon 2022 at Villupuram – VGLUG

10/05/2022-16/05/2022

Breaking news

• The next OSMF board meeting will be on this Monday 23 May 2022, at 13:00 UTC. Information about the video conference and the agenda (including moderation of the talk@ & osmf-talk@ lists and SOTM 2022) are available here.The agenda for the meeting is:
  • Treasurer’s report
  • Decision on the acceptance of the statutes of the Fundraising Committee
  • Test of the change in moderation of the talk@ and osmf-talk@ lists
  • State of the Map 2022 – Board preparations
  • Advisory Board – monthly update
  • Monthly presentation – OSM Austria
  • Comments or questions from guests.

Mapping campaigns

• ’12 Months of OpenStreetMap’, a OpenStreetMap US initiative, is inviting mappers to participate in the May 2022 theme of sustainable transportation – for example, bus stops, bike boxes, parking and rental stations for bicycles and scooters.

Mapping

• danielmescheder published the first article in a series of five discussing the features distinguishing maps from general data processing challenges. The first feature is titled ‘Relations’.
• OpenStreetMap Belgium and Flanders’ official tourism administration and provincial tourism organisations launched a collaborative project called Pin je punt > aiming to spotlight points of interest for tourists. Pieter Vander Vennet, from OSM Belgium, and Jos Pyck, the project manager for Pin je Punt at Visit Flanders, reflected on the overall project.
• In a first post, SLMapper wrote about the challenges of aerial mapping of forests, especially on lands used for wood production.
• In ruriyuri’s diary > , she said that she was recently trying to add some tags in Taipei to record etymological information on OSM elements and gave a sample changeset with corresponding OverpassQL code. She also said that she was puzzled because she could not find Wikidata entries for commonly used Taiwan road names such as the Four Cardinal Principles and Eight Virtues (信義/忠孝/仁愛/和平).

Community

• On Thursday 21 April, Sawan Shariar contributed the 120,000,000^th OpenStreetMap changeset, in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
• Amanda McCann told us what she did in OSM in April 2022.
• Allison P wrote a diary entry about the relationship between privacy and mapping. While aiming to be detailed, OpenStreetMap has been and will continue to confront people having opposing opinions about data on privacy grounds.
• BudgieInWA reported their reflections after hosting the third ‘Social Mapping Sunday’ in Perth, Australia.
• Cristoffs, from the Polish OSM community, asked OSMF board members and working group members about the state of democracy in the creation of the basic map style, and for suggestions on how it could evolve.
• User Natfoot, from Washington State, described in his blog his various activities in and with OSM.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap US announced the creation of the TeachOSM Steering Committee, whose activities will be aimed at promoting the classroom use of OSM.

Events

• Join Wikimedia’s annual hackathon (20 to 22 May) which this year has a map-focused track hosted by the Wikimaps User Group, which aims to advocate for more geospatial capabilities on the Wikimedia platforms (Wikipedia, Wikidata, etc.) as well as improved integration with OpenStreetMap.
  • Wikimaps track and map-related tasks
  • Wikimedia hackathon main page.

Education

• A landscape design media channel has re-posted, to Zhihu Video, its instructional video about how to use OSM data to create a district analysis map.

OSM research

• Anaïs Ladoy PhD, from the EPFL’s Laboratoire de systèmes d’information géographique, explained > how she favoured open-source alternatives to closed solutions during her thesis, including using OpenStreetMap as an address database.
• Aliaksandr described the development of an AI assistant for the mapping of yurts in Ulaanbaatar. The whole process took 77 hours whereas the estimated time without assistance would’ve been closer to 625 hours.

Maps

• Mieux se Déplacer à Bicyclette published > information about this year’s la Convergence Francilienne, an event where cyclists from all the Ile-de-France region group together and cycle to a meeting point. The numerous starting points are colour coded into six branches and can be browsed under uMap.

Software

• Cempatin, an OSM-based micro-blogging platform, has been released in Indonesia.
• The OSMViews website provides world-wide ranking of geographic locations based on OpenStreetMap tile logs (source: https://planet.openstreetmap.org/tile_logs/). It can be used for many purposes where ranking or prioritisation could improve functionality, such as label placement or monitoring. It is updated weekly and aggregated over the last 52 weeks to smooth out seasonal effects (for any location on Earth, up to ~150m/z18 resolution).
• Haukauntrie / wielandb has made a video about StreetComplete, which has been transcribed. A script was used to fetch the number of quests resolved for 5284 users between October 2021 and March 2022, revealing around 100 power users accounting for 30% of contributions.

Programming

• Anton Khorev, developer of osm-note-viewer, explained the implementation of Leaflet’s pop-ups in his app whilst also accounting for any required map scrolling movements.
• The French national railway company is developping > a mobile app designed to help guide travellers through stations. To do so, they use a picture database linked to OpenStreetMap data.

Releases

• Ilya Zverik released a new mobile OSM editor Every Door, which is available for Android and iOS.

Did you know …

• … MapCarta? A simple browser map viewer aggregating data from OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, GeoNames, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Wikivoyage and OpenRouteService.

OSM in the media

• Randall Munroe (XKCD) thinks ‘OpenStreetMap was always pretty good, but is now “really” good’. Check out the alt-text on his recent cartoon ‘Maps’.

Other “geo” things

• Francois Valentin tweeted a series of interesting figures overlaying old historic maps on modern political maps. On HackerNews, more examples were discussed.
• Andrew Hart, from DentReality, posted a video showcasing the indoor navigation technology they built in a store, with map and augmented reality integration.
• Vox reported on their investigation into a puzzle from a year old Reddit post, about circles visible in the Sahara (location in OpenStreetMap and in Google Maps). The conclusion is that they are remnants from a seismic survey by a French oil company back in the 1950s.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Montmorillon	Printemps des Cartes		2022-05-19 – 2022-05-22
	Mapathon: United Nations for Libya		2022-05-20 – 2022-05-22
Kaskazini B	Tanzania Mapping Groups May Mapathon	✓	2022-05-21
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第30回 相国寺		2022-05-22
臺北市	OpenStreetMap街景踏查團工作坊2		2022-05-22
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-05-23
	Deutsches Rotes Kreuz – Mozambique Red Cross Online Beginner Mapathon		2022-05-23
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-05-23
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	✓	2022-05-23
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-05-25
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-05-24
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-05-25
Decatur County	OpenStreetMap US Mappy Hour	✓	2022-05-26
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2022-05-28
Santiago	3a reunión bimestral de OSM Latam		2022-05-28
	Unique Mappers May Mapathon : Let’s Map Aguata LGA for Social Good		2022-05-28
Town of Victoria Park	Social Mapping Sunday: East Vic Park		2022-05-29
Bari	OpenStreetMap in Puglia		2022-06-01
Anderlecht	Notes Mapathon & Meetup		2022-06-01
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-06-08
City of Westminster	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-06-07
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-06-09
Großarl	5. Virtueller OpenStreetMap Stammtisch Österreich		2022-06-08
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-06-09
Nantes	State of the Map France 2022		2022-06-10 – 2022-06-12
Brandenburg	168. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2022-06-10

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 Elizabete, Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, Strubbl, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, 快乐的老鼠宝宝.

It’s Hackathon day 2, and I’ve nearly wrapped up my first draft of a pretty hacky system for editing documentation pages in ToolDocs. It’s fun learning the GitLab API, although that’s also making me question a bunch of assumptions I made about this project in the beginning! It’s seeming more like it’d be better to just build the whole thing as effectively a custom UI to GitLab. But we’ll see…

The Connected Heritage team is offering more public, free events and webinars in 2022 as the project progresses. If you work or volunteer for a heritage or cultural organisation, please do come along. 

Webinars

If you want to learn more about the Connected Heritage project, or find out why editing Wikimedia projects is a great way to enhance digital skills while at the same time improving the long term preservation and findability of your collections – come along to a webinar. 

• Wednesday 15th June
• Friday 12th August
• Thursday 13th October

About the webinars

In the one-hour webinar Leah Emary and Dr. Lucy Hinnie will introduce the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, and outline the benefits of engaging with these sites. The talk will last for about 45 minutes, with 15 minutes for questions and discussion with the audience.

Wikipedia is read 22 billion times a month, making it one of the most visited websites in the world. It is a crucial way to share knowledge. Wikimedia UK is a registered charity and has received funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to help heritage and cultural organisations develop skills, tools and communities of practice for the sustainable digital preservation of heritage. 

If you work or volunteer for a heritage or cultural organisation, please do come along. 

After this webinar, participants will understand more about open knowledge; know how to follow up if they would like to continue with the project; and have resources and materials to make a case for participation to organisation leaders.

To sign up for a Zoom webinar, please select from the following dates, and register via Eventbrite. You need only attend one webinar. Sessions are free, open and no prior Wiki experience is required.

Wikithons

If you’re already convinced and are ready to start editing, come to an Edit-a-thon.

• Friday 27th May
• Thursday 21st July
• Friday 30th September

About the wikithons:

Our Potluck Wikithons are designed to offer a taster of what a Wikithon would offer for a partner organisation. Participants are encouraged to bring along material that they would like to work with, and we will train them in how to edit Wikipedia and add material to Wikimedia Commons. They are a lot of fun, and a great way to see what it is that we offer.

The post Learn more and get trained with Connected Heritage in 2022 appeared first on WMUK.

I’ve been wondering for a while how it’d be setting up a package on Packagist from Wikimedia’s GitLab… turns out it’s incredibly simple, and we now have wikimedia/toolforge-skeleton added and working! There’s still more to be done on it, but hopefully it’ll make it super quick to bootstrap the development of new PHP tools.

If you read Wikipedia’s article on an alcázar, a type of Islamic castle or palace in the Iberian peninsula, you’ll get a detailed description of the history of alcázars and a description of their common features. That’s all thanks to two University of San Diego students, who recently improved the article as part of a class assignment in Kate Dimitrova’s The Year 1500 – A Global History of Art and Architecture course.

“I think we both saw how much potential the article had since it lacked organization and overall didn’t do justice to the complexity of alcázars as a topic,” says Kaitlin Falk, one of the students who improved the article. “In that way, it really introduced a challenge to us as students to help refine the article.”

Kaitlin and her classmate, Zoe Kobs, started by creating a list of what was missing from the article. They each worked on different sections, collaborating together to significantly expand the article. In doing so, they drew knowledge from training materials provided by Wiki Education’s Dashboard in how to edit Wikipedia.

“All of the Wiki Education training modules provided me with the tools to contribute to the site,” Zoe says. “I had to alter the way I research to pull facts from multiple sources to create a neutral, reliable, statement. By the end of the project, I became confident in both my ability to research and participate in Wikipedia.”

Both Kaitlin and Zoe expressed initial surprise that they were being assigned to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment. Neither knew Wikipedia could be edited by students. Now, both are converts to the idea.

“My perspective on Wikipedia has changed through this process,” Zoe says. “Wikipedia has always been something I have used for learning something new, but once I was in school there was a negative connotation with using it for research. Until now, I hadn’t realized the value Wikipedia has. The site is actively serving information to millions of people every second by thousands of passionate, hard-working, editors. I am happy to be a part of that.”

Kaitlin agrees.

“I actually think I would prefer to do a Wikipedia assignment over a general academic paper,” she says. “Editing a Wikipedia article feels more important and exciting since your work will be made public and you’re adding to an academic dialogue. You’re not only learning, you’re also educating whoever will read your edits. On the other hand, a paper is only seen by your professor. “

Both expressed willingness to continue editing after the conclusion of their class. As Zoe notes, even small changes helped her feel connected to the world.

“The fact that my work will be revised and transformed by other Wikipedians benefitted me in my research process. When writing formal papers, I always get stuck in making sure I cover everything extensively. In Wikipedia, I know my research will be continued by other editors so I can take the time to convey the right information,” Zoe says. “Working on Wikipedia is very rewarding. The project gave me the ability to make an impact on my education. Not only am I fulfilling my class material, but also am sharing what I have learned with millions of others!”

Interested in learning more about teaching with Wikipedia? Visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Image credit: Rafa Esteve, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We are excited to be dropping the second episode of WIKIMOVE, the new podcast on everything Wikimedia Movement Strategy.

What’s in this episode?

Wiki Movimento Brasil surveyed the Portuguese speaking communities about some of the big juicy concepts in the MS20230 recommendations – equity in decision making, leadership development and diversity. By doing that, they reached many community members not previously engaged. In this pod they talk about the insights, opportunities and challenges that emerged. These Wikimedians are showing the way of how we can make the strategy come to life at community level, and jointly figure out what our next steps are locally and regionally. We also talk about money, building communities and the Movement Charter Drafting Committee….

Our guests are…

Érica Azzellini, Community Manager at Wiki Movimento Brasil 

Érica is in charge of community support, partnerships and strategy development at Wiki Movimento Brasil. She is also a member of the movement charter drafting committee. 

Lucas Piantá, Wiki Movimento Brazil’s Strategy Working Group 

Works as researcher on the movement strategy implementation in the lusophone community. He serves on a number of committees including the Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Committee.

You can find the audio podcast on our websiteand a video version with english and portuguese subtitles on Youtube. Please visit our meta page to react to the episode and subscribe to get notified of each new release. You can also follow us on Twitter to continue the conversation. 

The topic and guests for our next episode will be announced soon, stay tuned!

Best, 

Nicole, Nikki & Eva 

Other languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English, español, français, italiano, magyar, polski, português, português do Brasil, suomi, svenska, čeština, українська, עברית, العربية, 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.

Changes later this week

• Some wikis can soon use the add a link feature. This will start on Wednesday. The wikis are Catalan Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Simple English Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia. This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [1]
• The Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 will take place online on May 20–22. It will be in English. There are also local hackathon meetups in Germany, Ghana, Greece, India, Nigeria and the United States. Technically interested Wikimedians can work on software projects and learn new skills. You can also host a session or post a project you want to work on.
• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 17 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 18 May. It will be on all wikis from 19 May (calendar).

Future changes

• You can soon edit translatable pages in the visual editor. Translatable pages exist on for examples Meta and Commons. [2]

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

This post is also available in English.
Puede encontrar la versión de este artículo en español aquí.

Este mês, a Fundação Wikimedia — a organização sem fins lucrativos que torna o conhecimento livre e acessível a todas as pessoas ao redor do mundo — começa uma série de campanhas de financiamento na Wikipédia na Índia, América Latina e África do Sul. Mensagens de financiamento aparecerão em artigos da Wikipédia para leitores nestas regiões, pedindo a eles que considerem contribuir com uma doação.

Você pode ver essas mensagens e se perguntar por que estamos promovendo essas campanhas e como as doações para a Wikipédia são usadas.

A Wikipédia é o único grande site do mundo administrado por uma organização sem fins lucrativos: a Fundação Wikimedia. Nossa missão beneficente garante que todas as pessoas possam acessar e compartilhar conhecimento de graça. A Wikipédia não é um website comercial guiado por lucro ou por incentivos publicitários. Em vez disso, ela é apoiada por doações de leitores como você.

Doações para a Wikipédia ajudam a Fundação Wikimedia a garantir que projetos de conhecimento livre cresçam e sobrevivam. Conquanto muitas pessoas conheçam a Wikipédia porque a usam regularmente para encontrar respostas para tópicos dos divertidos aos sérios, poucas contemplam a grande infraestrutura necessária para manter um site que recebe 18 bilhões de visitas por mês. Doações de leitores garantem a independência a longo prazo que a Wikipédia tem de anúncios e interesses corporativos; mantêm-na segura de maus elementos; protegem-na de interferência e censura; e ajudam a Fundação a apoiar a comunidade Wikimedia voluntária global que cria e mantém a Wikipédia e projetos de conhecimento livre; entre muitas outras coisas.

Além disso, sabemos que os leitores e contribuidores da Wikipédia na Índia, América Latina e África do Sul são uma parte integral do ecossistema global da Wikimedia. Essas campanhas de financiamento visam garantir que essas pessoas possam continuar a acessar e contribuir com a Wikipédia pelos anos que virão. 

• Índia. No mês passado, leitores da Índia visitaram a Wikipédia mais de 767 milhões de vezes, o quinto maior número de visualizações de qualquer país. A Índia também tem o terceiro maior número de editores voluntários ativos (5 mil por mês).
  Ao longo dos últimos anos, muitos projetos foram financiados pela Fundação Wikimedia para ajudar as comunidades indianas a sobreviver e crescer. Elas incluem o Wiki Loves Butterfly, um projeto para aumentar a quantidade de materiais de licença livre sobre espécies de borboletas disponíveis no leste e nordeste da Índia, bem como desenvolver a qualidade e quantidade de artigos da Wikipédia sobre borboletas nesta região.
  Além disso, desde 2012, nós financiamos o CIS-A2K (Centre for Internet and Society – Access to Knowledge; “Centro de Internet e Sociedade – Acesso ao Conhecimento” em tradução livre), uma campanha para catalizar o crescimento do movimento do conhecimento aberto na Ásia do Sul e em línguas índicas.

• América Latina. Mensagens de financiamento para a Wikipédia aparecerão em vários países latinoamericanos: Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colômbia, México, Peru e Uruguai. Juntos, leitores nestes países visitam a Wikipédia mais de 772 milhões de vezes por mês — usando a enciclopédia online para aprender tanto sobre tópicos sérios quanto sobre os peculiares.
  Com a ajuda da Fundação Wikimedia, a comunidade voluntária latinoamericana liderou alguns projetos incríveis: indo da expansão do movimento Wikimedia no Peru com foco na ecologia, cultura e gênero ao Wiki meets Sustainable Fashion, um esforço para expandir a cobertura da Wikipédia em espanhol de moda sustentável e para preencher a lacuna de gênero criando artigos para as maiores líderes no ramo.
  Adicionalmente, uma colaboração com o Banco Interamericano de Desenvolvimento e a Wikimedia Argentina, apoiada pela Fundação, está ajudando jovens da América Latina e no Caribe a fortalecerem sua alfabetização digital e suas habilidades do século XXI.

• África do Sul. Pessoas na África do Sul visitam a Wikipédia cerca de 68 milhões de vezes por mês, mais do que qualquer outro país na África. Muito graças aos esforços da Wikimedia África do Sul, um capítulo reconhecido do movimento Wikimedia, nove das 11 línguas oficiais da África do Sul estão representadas na Wikipédia. No ano passado, a Wikimedia África do Sul colaborou com a Fundação e a comunidade criativa local na campanha #WikipediaByUs, que celebra o poder do conhecimento e o direito de todas as pessoas acessarem, criarem e compartilharem conhecimento.

A Wikipédia e os projetos Wikimedia pertencem a todos—eles são construídos para e por você. De leitores a editores, nós todos temos uma participação na preservação e contação de histórias da nossa história, nossa cultura e as pessoas interessantes e notáveis que moldaram nosso mundo. Reconhecemos que nem todos têm a capacidade ou os meios para doar. Para quem não pode nos ajudar financeiramente, tudo que pedimos é que você siga nos buscando como o maior recurso de conhecimento livre do mundo.

Para quem pode nos apoiar, suas doações ajudarão a continuar a fortalecer e sustentar os sistemas que tornam a Wikipédia possível, e garantir que o movimento do conhecimento livre possa crescer e sobreviver. Nossa missão é garantir que o conhecimento livre fique disponível para o mundo, para todas as pessoas, em todos os lugares.

Podemos estabelecer este compromisso graças à tremenda generosidade de doadores passados e presentes, e o trabalho incrível das comunidades Wikimedia voluntárias globais—mas nosso trabalho não está feito. Tem muito mais conhecimento no mundo, e tantas mais pessoas para atingir. Se você se sente conectado a esta missão, por favor visite donate.wikimedia.org para fazer sua contribuição hoje. Se você tiver perguntas adicionais, visite nossa FAQ.

Como Diretora Sênior de Financiamento Online na Fundação Wikimedia, Pats Pena lidera a estratégia e execução da experiência de doações digitais da Wikimedia.

Puede encontrar la versión de este artículo en español aquí.
Você pode ler a versão em português deste artigo aqui.

This month, the Wikimedia Foundation — the global nonprofit that makes knowledge free and accessible to everyone around the world — kicks off a series of fundraising campaigns on Wikipedia in India, Latin America, and South Africa. Fundraising messages will appear on Wikipedia articles for readers in these regions, asking them to consider contributing with a donation.

You may see these messages and wonder why we are running these fundraising campaigns and how donations to Wikipedia are used.

Wikipedia is the world’s only major website run by a nonprofit organization: the Wikimedia Foundation. Our charitable mission ensures everyone can access and share knowledge for free. Wikipedia is not a commercial website driven by profit or advertising incentives. Instead, it is supported by donations from readers like you.

Donations to Wikipedia help support the Wikimedia Foundation in ensuring free knowledge projects grow and thrive. While many know Wikipedia because they regularly use it to find answers to topics from the fun to the serious, few contemplate the large infrastructure required to sustain a website that gets 18 billion visits a month. Reader donations strengthen Wikipedia’s long-term independence from ads and corporate interests; keep it secure and safe from bad actors; protect it from interference and censorship; and help the Foundation support the global Wikimedia volunteer community who create and maintain Wikipedia and free knowledge projects; among many other things.

Further, we know that Wikipedia readers and contributors in India, Latin America, and South Africa are an integral part of the global Wikimedia ecosystem. These fundraising campaigns aim to ensure they can continue to access and contribute to Wikipedia for years to come. 

• India. Last month, readers in India visited Wikipedia more than 767 million times, the fifth highest number of views from any country. India also has the third-highest number of active volunteer editors (5,000 each month).
  Over the last several years, many projects were funded by the Wikimedia Foundation to help the Indian communities thrive and grow. These include Wiki Loves Butterfly, a project to increase the amount of free license materials regarding available butterfly species of eastern and north-eastern part of India, as well as developing the quality and quantity of Wikipedia articles on butterflies in this region.
  Additionally, since 2012, we have funded CIS-A2K (Centre for Internet and Society – Access to Knowledge), a campaign to catalyze the growth of open knowledge movement in South Asia and in Indic languages.

• Latin America. Fundraising messages for Wikipedia will run in several Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. Combined, readers in these countries visit Wikipedia over 772 million times each month — using the online encyclopedia to learn about serious and quirky topics alike.
  With support from the Wikimedia Foundation, the Latin American volunteer community has led some incredible projects: ranging from expanding the Wikimedia movement in Peru with a focus on ecology, culture and gender, to Wiki meets Sustainable Fashion, an effort to both expand Wikipedia’s Spanish language coverage of sustainable fashion and to close Wikipedia’s gender gap by creating articles for the foremost female leaders in the field. 
  Additionally, a collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank and Wikimedia Argentina, supported by the Foundation, is helping young people in Latin America and the Caribbean strengthen their digital literacy and 21st century skills.

• South Africa. People in South Africa visit Wikipedia about 68 million times each month, the most of any country in Africa. With many thanks to the efforts of Wikimedia South Africa, a recognized chapter of the Wikimedia movement, nine of South Africa’s 11 official languages are represented on Wikipedia. Last year, Wikimedia South Africa collaborated with the Foundation and the local creative community on the campaign #WikipediaByUs, which celebrates the power of knowledge and everyone’s right to access, create, and share knowledge.

Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects belong to everyone—they are built for and by you. From readers to editors, we all have a stake in preserving and telling the stories of our history, our culture, and the intriguing and notable people who have shaped our world. We recognize that not everyone has the ability or means to donate. For those unable to support financially, all that we ask is that you continue to seek us out as the world’s largest free knowledge resource.

For those who can support us, your donations will help continue to strengthen and sustain the systems that make Wikipedia possible, and ensure the free knowledge movement can grow and thrive. Our mission is to make sure free knowledge is available to the world, for everyone, everywhere.

We are able to make this commitment thanks to the tremendous generosity of past and present donors, and the incredible work of the global Wikimedia volunteer communities—but our work is not done. There is so much more knowledge in the world, and so many more people to reach. If you feel connected to this mission, please visit donate.wikimedia.org to make a contribution today. If you have additional questions, please visit our FAQ.

As Sr. Director of Online Fundraising at the Wikimedia Foundation, Pats Pena leads the strategy and execution for Wikimedia’s digital donation experience.

Many international organisations have made commitments to improve transparency and civil society participation. The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) apparently continues to see things differently. On Monday, six Wikimedia chapters were denied observer status at the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights.

No surprises

The decision did not come as a complete surprise. China had already vetoed the Wikimedia Foundation’s accreditation in 2020 and 2021. Now the People’s Republic also opposed recognition of the independent Wikimedia chapters from France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Sweden, and Switzerland. Since WIPO generally operates by consensus, China’s vote against was enough to block the applications.

The Wikimedia movement, which is the movement behind Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia platforms, is an important global actor for the dissemination of knowledge to mankind. Wikipedia, to give one example, hosts one of the largest collections of knowledge in human history. Knowledge that is freely accessible for us all.

This work is heavily affected by global conversations around copyright and related rights. Copyright law has a significant impact on the ability of hundreds of thousands of Wikimedia volunteers to do their work and contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. 

For this reason, the six Wikimedia affiliates had applied to become observers at the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights of the WIPO, one of the most important global forums for copyright rulemaking.

The Wikimedia movement is asking to participate in these negotiations. Wikimedia is uniquely positioned to contribute to discussions which are aimed at modernizing copyright to a digital, globally connected era.

unfounded claims about disinformation

Unfortunately, China has chosen to politicise WIPO, claiming that Wikimedia chapters are complicit in spreading disinformation.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the globe draw on independent sources to provide verifiable, reliable information. In fact, the entire Wikipedia model constitutes a bulwark against faulty information. Wikimedia chapters support the communities, but would never influence the content of Wikimedia projects.

The impact of the decision is that one of the most important enablers of access to knowledge are excluded from taking part in conversations around the regimes that make this enabling possible. It also sets a dangerous precedent, in which countries may prevent any stakeholder that they disagree with from becoming an observer to WIPO. 

It also means that this important forum for technical conversations is being politicised by an authoritarian regime. There are fewer and fewer spaces in the international system where dialogue is possible. If democratic countries do not oppose the exclusion of civil society, this will have a significant impact for work at the UN.

Wikimedia urges European governments, and representatives of the EU institutions, to speak out. This pattern must be reversed. A number of Wikimedia chapters have also applied for observer status to the WIPO General Assembly. European countries need to take a stand. Otherwise, we might see a new dangerous trend for the involvement of civil society in global conversations, in more areas than only copyright.

Justus Dreyling

Advisor International Regulation, Wikimedia Deutschland

Eric Luth

Project Manager for Advocacy and Involvement, Wikimedia Sverige 

Naphsica Papanicolaou

Public Affairs manager, Wikimedia France

Iolanda Pensa 

Chair, Wikimedia Italia

Jenny Ebermann

Executive Director, Wikimedia CH

(Read this message in other languages on Meta-wiki: ‎Deutsch • español • français • Русский • 中文 • हिन्दी  • Bahasa Indonesia •日本語 • 한국어 • Português • hrvatski • српски / srpski)

We are excited to announce the members of the Leadership Development Working Group. After receiving more than 60 applications, a panel of community members (4) and Wikimedia Foundation staff (2) conducted an anonymous review. Fifteen members were selected for the working group. 

Diversity and representation were important considerations. We are happy to share that the group has representatives from all 8 regions [1] (two from each region, except US + Canada have one). The group size has expanded from 12 to 15 members to increase diversity. Together, the group members speak at least 17 languages. Members hold different roles in the movement, including: a meta-organizer, a community-elected Steward, a past Affiliate executive director, and a jack-of-all-trades volunteer. The members range in their years in the movement, from newer community members to community members with more than 15 years of experience. Regarding gender, we have 7 women, 6 men, 1 non-binary and gender-fluid person, and 1 preferred not to identify their gender. 

A big welcome to the members of the Leadership Development Working Group! The members of the group will have a 1-year term and begin meeting at the end of May 2022. The group will be supported by a facilitator, Jyotsna Sara George, who will work closely with the group to support their collaboration and process. We look forward to sharing more information once the group begins their work together!

Without further ado, let us introduce you to the members of the Leadership Development Working Group: 

• Vermont

Hello! I go by Vermont on Wikimedia projects. I’m a Wikimedia Steward, admin and CheckUser on Meta-Wiki and the Simple English Wikipedia, and a Merchandise Giveaways coordinator. I’ve joined this group in the interest of supporting community and leadership development from a practical standpoint, and promoting editor retention and development in line with current movement priorities and Wikimedia’s mission.

• Flavia Doria (XenoF) 

Hi, I’m Flavia Doria (she/her), I’m Brazilian, living in Portugal since 2016, and I’ve been involved with the Wikimedia Movement since early 2020. I’m currently working as Ambassador of the Portuguese-speaking community for the Wikimedia Foundation. As a volunteer I’m part of the Wikipedia group Wiki Editoras Lx, the first and perhaps only Lusophone group composed only by women and non-binary people who edit within the gender theme. In my group I work in several fronts such as training new users, organizing events and promoting debate within the community. From the beginning, I quickly became more involved in issues related to decision-making within the Movement and the importance of including marginalized groups from our community in these debates and how this inclusion is key to keeping Wikimedia projects relevant to society.

I am also a communicologist and journalist, I have a special interest in the social and political aspect of the Information and Communications Technology debate, and have recently published an academic paper on gender and Wikipedia and hope to do so more often.

Now as a member of the Leadership Development Working Group, I hope that we can collectively learn how to use our resources to promote more autonomy for our communities, especially those who fall outside of our standard average user profile. I am excited to meet more people interested in this debate and I look forward to working with all of you!

• Francesc Fort (TaronjaSatsuma) 

I’m Francesc, a Catalan-language editor from València. I’ve been a very active editor for a 

long time, but I haven’t been that much involved with international communities until 2019.  

I’m very excited on discovering and learning new things about Wikipedia.

• Isaac Olatunde (T Cells) 

I am a food safety specialist and a volunteer contributor to Wikipedia for more than 8 years, building capacity for new editors, nurturing, and helping new editors to grow in  Nigeria. 

I co-founded the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria, (now a charitable organization in Nigeria) to support volunteers and continue to provide both technical and administrative support for the volunteers. 

During the peak of the COVID-19, Isaac led an initiative in partnership with the Moleskine Foundation to create Wikipedia articles relating to COVID-19 in local languages and produced a video in Yorùbà language to educate the people with little or no education on how to avoid being infected with COVID-19 and to highlight how Wikipedia is helping to fight the pandemic. The video featured notable film actors in Nigeria. 

I was nominated as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2020.

Having realized that millions of articles on Wikipedia are lacking photos to illustrate them, I launched an international campaign called “Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos Campaign” in 2020 to engage volunteers during the COVID-19 pandemic by encouraging Wikipedia editors across the world to add images from Wikimedia Commons to Wikipedia articles.

In 2021, I co-lead an initiative to document and preserve Nigerian languages that are not written or thought in Schools. More than 50 audiovisuals were created in the first stage. 

I am a sysop on the Yoruba Wikipedia, a member of the Wiki Indaba Steering Committee (WISCOM), and a former member of the Individual Engagement Grant Committee and Project Grant Committee. 

I am from an underrepresented community and one of the questions that often come to my mind is “why are Africans not always included in leadership roles within the movement?” WMF does a better job of including Africans but it’s often very difficult. Perhaps we usually do not make input on policy discussions or participle in related discussions. Africans are part of the movement, we should strive to participate in decision-making discussions as much as possible. The Wikimedia movement is growing at a very fast rate and leadership development is pivotal to our mission. This is my intrinsic motivation for joining the leadership working group.

• Goodness Ignatius (Olugold)

My name is Goodness Ignatius (she/her) from Nigeria and my username across all wikis is Olugold. I’m a member of the Igbo Wikimedians User Group (IWUG). I am glad to be a part of this group and I’m here to collaborate with other team members to support the group’s mission.

• Iván Martínez (ProtoplasmaKid) 

I’m Ivan (User:ProtoplasmaKid), from Mexico, Wikimedian more than a decade ago and Spanish Wikipedia editor since 2006 and admin since 2016. Former 2021 BoT candidate. Human Rights Defender and Activist. I would love to be able to contribute to a better movement with shared knowledge in order to enrich what we collectively know about leadership. 

• Rocío Consales (La_Mantis)

I am Rocío Consales and I have been participating in different instances of the Wikimedia movement for more than 17 years. I was director, vice president and president of the board of Wikimedia Chile.

I joined the working group to contribute from my experience with the various lessons I have learned over the years.

I have a degree in Philosophy from the University of Chile and a Master’s Degree in Publishing (Publisher) from the Pompeu Fabra University from 2020 to 2021. I am a publisher, specialized in small format books. I currently live in Luxembourg.

• Donia Domiaty (دنيا) 

“Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality.” Warren Bennis. In any community, if we are ambitious to develop it, I think the first step is to build leaders! 

This is Donia Domiaty. an Egyptian medical student. I joined Arabic Wikipedia for the first time in February 2019. By the end of 2019, I had created more than 100 articles; more of them were in medicine. I participated in the virtual Wikimania 2021 by 2 sessions; one of them was a solo session. I am a member of many user groups, a winner of many competitions, and an organizer of many edit-a-thons and photo competitions whether local in Egypt or throughout the whole Arabic community.

Despite being a 21-year-old medical student, I have 3-year-experience of leading groups, inside and outside wikiprojects.

For what is inside wiki projects, I founded and managed Wikipedian Editor Project, a project that reaches all Arab countries through online workshops and edit-a-thons to encourage more volunteers to participate and edit on Arabic Wikipedia and learn more about sister projects, during the previous 2 years, I led my project and tried to make some participants leaders for initiatives and events related to the project. On the other side, in many communities other than the Wikimedia community, I was nominated to be head of HR in many projects inside or outside my university. Being an HR manager for a long time made me deal with many leaders in many fields, which helped me improve my leadership and negotiation skills this is what inspired me that Leadership is an acquired skill and anyone can acquire it by working on themselves.  

A leader has good communication skills, inspiration, creativity, decision-making skills, and many other skills. And we need Leader characters in all Wikimedia communities.

• Nada Alfarra (Nada kareem22) 

I am Nada Alfarra, I am an intern doctor from Palestine. I am a member of Wikimedia Levant. Being a member of such active group enhances my eagerness to upgrade my leadership skills and experience. I have organized workshops to document Levantine authors’ works on Arabic Wikipedia and co-organized an online Interwiki Women Collaboration 2020 workshop. I have also guided few newcomers in Wikimedia Levant to members to use Photoshop for editing photos and uploading to Wikimedia Commons. This is the outcome of my experience as an online project coordinator for a project to enrich the digital Arabic content for children with 100 stories translated from English to Arabic. I am a long-life learner and I believe that Leadership Development Working Group will guide my journey to influence people to be more proactive, cooperative and decision makers and this group will connect me with mutual minds where I can learn better and have our collective endeavors be more effective.

• Gnangarra

Wikimedian since 2006, creator of Commons Quality Images and what has been adopted as basic image requirements. Admin on Commons, retired in good standing as an admin on en.Wikipedia after 13 years service. Two years as President of Wikimedia Australia, and 4 as Vice President. Various terms on VRT, part of the development of ESEAP and COT for the cancelled 2020 Wikimania, then on the COT for Wikimania 2021 created the scholarship process for that. Lead the development of Nyungar Wikipedia, ran multiple workshops given many talks including to on National Radio and Television shows. My goal now is to pass on my knowledge, encourage new leaders to step up and take the movement into the future.

• Imelda Brazal (brazal.dang) 

Hi! I am Imelda, a volunteer Wikimedian from the Philippines. I joined this group to be able to share my experiences, both as an organizer and editor of different Wikiprojects, in developing a shared understanding of what leadership is and how we can leverage this shared definition to improve editing and organizing experience of every volunteer around the Movement, especially of those communities around the East and Southeast Asian countries.

• Jan Lukas Hobrock (Jan Lukas Hobrock) 

Hi everyone, my name’s Jan! I live in Germany, where I currently study Biochemistry. I have been a soft skills trainer for a couple of student NGOs for a little over a year; right now, I’m aiming at professionalising this hobby of mine and get some of my ideas implemented. So when I read about the Leadership Development working group, I immediately applied as I see huge potential in leadership training for the movement. I’m excited to start developing thoughts about the way the we might provide capacity building.

• Dmitry Erokhin (Erokhin) 

Erokhin has been a member of the Wikimedia Movement for over 12 years. He was a member of Wikimedia Russia for 5 years. As one of the members of Wikimedia RU, I have organized and conducted several wiki expeditions and wiki tours in Russia and other countries. I have interacted with different bodies of state power, local government, commercial and non-commercial organizations, and private persons to transfer their resources to free licenses, and increase their integration into Wikipedia. First and foremost, I work on Wikimedia projects in Russian, and in languages of the peoples of Russia and the former Soviet Union. There is a desire and time to develop the Wikimedia movement in North Asia and Central Asia, and the rest will follow. I am motivated by the opportunity to improve and develop my skills and competencies for better participation in the Wikimedia Movement, to be more useful and more effective to the community and the Wikimedia Foundation.

• Nitesh Gill (Nitesh Gill) 

​​I am Nitesh and my user name is Nitesh Gill. I belong to Punjab, India. I am pursuing my PhD in Punjabi Literature. I am active editor of Punjabi Wikipedia since 2015. I am a contact person of Punjabi Wikimedians User Group and admin on Punjabi Wikipedia. I have participated and conducted many activities. I am also leading and coordinating a few projects in volunteer capacity. Nowadays, I am trying to focus that others who are long time Wikimedians come forward and take a lead on their own. The same thing I am doing in my community. When I came to know about this working group I read about it and I want to be becoming a part of it. The group has potential to encourage people to take initiative for their own communities or people. I believe I will be play a good part in this group.

• M. Rafiul Bahar Rafi (Mrb Rafi) 

From the experience of several years of fieldwork in the Wikimedia Movement in South Asia, I can feel the urge to unify the process of creating and nurturing leadership in the movement. This is very much needed to secure the sustainability of the movement; especially for the underrepresented communities, this can be a game-changer. The process of leadership development may vary due to the social and geographical context of any target Wikimedia community, I’m very much interested to learn about different Wikimedia communities from all over the world and working with them closely to identify the scopes and processes to develop leadership there and for the same reason, I considered joining the Leadership Development Working Group.

[1] The 8 regions are: Middle East and North Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa; East, Southeast Asia, and Pacific (ESEAP); South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC); Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Central Asia; Northern and Western Europe; United States and Canada; Latin America (LATAM) and the Caribbean

But try to understand
Try to understand
Try try try to understand
Git’s a magic command.

– Heart  💕

Once upon a time, I believed git was storing diffs somewhere. But then I learned I was wrong.

It’s challenging to wield git’s clunky interface when you have a broken mental model of its internals. Learning more about what’s happening inside git transformed me into a more effective git user.

In this post, I’ll attempt to explain all the deep details of git diff to my past self.

$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/bar/.git/
$ echo "Hi, I'm blob" > foo
$ git add foo
$ tree .git/objects/
.git/objects/
└── 26
  └── 45aab142ef6b135a700d037e75cd9f1f1c94dc

$ git commit -m 'Initial Commit'
[main (root-commit) 0644991] Initial Commit
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
create mode 100644 foo
$ tree .git/objects/
.git/objects/
├── 06
│   └── 449913ac0e43b73bfbd3141f5643a4db6d47f8
├── 26
│   └── 45aab142ef6b135a700d037e75cd9f1f1c94dc
└── 41
  └── 81320a57137264d436b2ef861c31f430256bf4

$ git cat-file -p 06449913ac0e43b73bfbd3141f5643a4db6d47f8
tree 4181320a57137264d436b2ef861c31f430256bf4
author Tyler Cipriani <tcipriani@wikimedia.org> 1652310544 -0600
committer Tyler Cipriani <tcipriani@wikimedia.org> 1652310544 -0600

Initial Commit

$ git cat-file -p 4181320a57137264d436b2ef861c31f430256bf4
100644 blob 2645aab142ef6b135a700d037e75cd9f1f1c94dc    foo

📈 Git’s dependency graph ¶

So if we graphed the state of dependencies in our object database, we’d get something like this:

The commit incorporates our tree, which includes our blob—everything depends on our blob!

So if we change even a single bit inside a single file: git will notice—everything is entirely traceable from the commit down to the bit level. We get this for free by hashing objects and including those hashes in other objects.

This is the whole concept of a Merkle Directed Acyclic Graph (Merkle DAG)!

🍔 So, where’s the diff? ¶

When we type git diff, git presents us a diff. We know there are blobs and trees and commits—so where’s the diff!?

Git doesn’t store diffs anywhere at all! It derives diffs from what’s stored in the object database.

$ echo "I'm ALSO blob" > baz
$ git add baz
$ git commit -m 'Add baz'
$ tree .git/objects/
.git/objects/
├── 06
│   └── 449913ac0e43b73bfbd3141f5643a4db6d47f8
├── 26
│   └── 45aab142ef6b135a700d037e75cd9f1f1c94dc
├── 41
│   └── 81320a57137264d436b2ef861c31f430256bf4
├── 95
│   └── 42599fac463c434456c0a16b13e346787f25da
├── 9b
│   └── 2716e4540c11e8d590e906dd8fa5a75904810a
└── e6
   └── 5a7344c46cebe61d052de6e30d33636e1cd0b4

We made a new commit, and now we have three new objects. We added a new file (blob), which made our directory different (tree), and we committed it (commit).

Our graph now looks like this:

You might be surprised by a few things in the graph:

• Our new commit stores its parent commit as metadata
• Our new tree points to our old blob, and our NEW blob

So now what happens when we try git diff:

$ git diff 064499..e65a73
diff --git a/baz b/baz
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..9b2716e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/baz
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+I'm ALSO blob

Git compares the two commits, finds their trees, sees a new blob in the second commit, and shows you the diff of /dev/null and baz.

No diffs. Just Merkle DAGs. And now you know.

---

Thanks to Joe Swanson for providing excellent early feedback on this post. And thanks to Kostah Harlan for reading an early draft of this post and making it less terrible. <3

03/05/2022-09/05/2022

Mapping

• Pete Masters pointed out that Becky Candy’s feedback to mappers (we reported earlier) has been translated to Japanese and Spanish .
• Ikuzo is a POI oriented ‘map editor made specially for travel photographers, influencers and other content creators’ for categorising, filtering, sharing POIs and adding pictures to them. It is powered by OpenStreetMap. Unfortunately POIs are opened in Google Maps.
• The MapComplete theme for trees got an update to easily add wikidata for species to trees.
• User Frank, aka Dooley, has > taken the page OSMsuspects permanently offline. The page cannot be operated by other sites because of missing sources. User mmd suggested replacing > parts of it with the help of overpass queries.
• A request for comments on a proposal for a consistent tagging scheme for highway networks belonging to sub-state administrative divisions of the USA has been made.
• Voting on the amenity=ticket_validator proposal, for tagging ticket validators, which are often required to gain access to an area or service like public transport or parking garages, is open until Tuesday 24 May.

Community

• The UN mapper of the month is Abdurahman Al Furjani, from OSM Libya.
• OpenStreetMap Belgium’s Mapper of the Month for May is Gpoilvet.
• Anne-Karoline Distel’s archaeological discovery that we reported last week has been picked up in the Irish media. ‘A lovely find’, says the National Monuments Service.
• The SotM 2022 Scientific Committee informed us that the deadline of the call for abstracts for the Academic Track has been extended to 22 May 2022.
• AngocA reported > on an introductory session about the OSM wiki that he gave on Saturday 23 April, and provided the video recording of the session, a PDF , along with the slides and a quiz to test your knowledge.
• The French association ‘Observatoire international pour la réinstallation des cabines téléphoniques‘ > (literally ‘International observatory for phone booth reinstallation’) has built > its first booth in Grenoble, France, and aims for a first objective of 22. This is an opportunity for the French mapping community to rediscover the amenity=telephone tag.
• Luisrobledomx1 invites > you to join the 3rd Latin America bi-monthly meeting, organised by OSM Chile, which will be held on Saturday 28 May and will be virtual.
• Université de Strasbourg (France) is using an online map based on OpenStreetMap to give directions on the university campus.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap Belgium wrote a diary post about their open street-level imagery project. They are buying 360° cameras and lending them to volunteers to generate more and better street-level imagery as open data. They hope to not just collect data, but to also inspire others to start contributing. The project page is available in English, French and Dutch

Events

• State of the Map France 2022 released > its planning for the event taking place 10 to 12 June in Nantes.
• Enjoy excerpts from a 45 minute improvisation between Eric Theise, manipulating digital maps, and Helena Espvall, performing on cello with electronics.
• The list of publications from the last SotM US is getting longer. New videos on the OpenStreetMap US YouTube channel include:
  • Martijn van Exel talking about MapRoulette
  • Philipp Kandal and Alex Ilisei explaining that Grab uses OSM and how they generate images for Kartaview (formerly OpenStreetCam and OpenStreetView) to contribute to OSM.
  • Steve Coast explaining the MapMetrics tool that TomTom introduced in 2021. He also demonstrated how to work with it. Furthermore he gave an outlook on ‘automatic road alignment’.

Education

• Christian Quest has published > a tutorial for French mappers interested in contributing streets to OpenStreetMap through comparison with the Institut National de l’information Géographique et Forestière (National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information) open database BDTopo.
• barefootstache shared a video showing advanced JOSM techniques to map buildings.

OSM research

• The International Journal of Geoinformation has gathered together 15 research papers for a special issue named ‘OpenStreetMap as a multi-disciplinary nexus: Perspectives, Practices and Procedures’.

Maps

• [1] Joseph Jean François, Count of Ferraris, created the ‘Carte-de-Cabinet’ of the Austrian Netherlands in his own style between 1771 and 1778. Manuel Claeys Bouuaert recreated Ferraris’ style in QGIS for use with OpenStreetMap data. In his blog post, Manuel described in detail how he proceeded and shows many beautiful examples. Using sliders you can compare the OSM ‘FerrarGis 2021’ and Ferraris 1777.

Software

• Organic Maps have released the April update for Android and iOS, which has improvements in support of Wikipedia articles, Euskara (Basque) translations, speed and battery optimisation. As usual, maps are updated, and routing and translations are improved.
• Anton Khorev wrote a diary entry about loose link detection in note-viewer, which will replace a plaintext URL with a dotted hyperlink. For now, it only handles openstreetmap.org and StreetComplete’s image hosting URLs, but other sites may be added in the future.
• garmin.openstreetmap.nl has not been fully functional for some time, so now an automatic redirection to an alternative service of bbbike.org is now in place.
• ‘On The Go Map’ is a route planner for running, walking, biking, or driving, where you can plot your route points, see the elevation, and share the map – powered by OpenStreetMap.
• Balluchon > is a tool aiming to ease contributing to OpenStreetMap, putting a focus on pedestrian data. As of now, it allows adding and modifying entrances along buildings. A live demo is available here .
• Patrick Gendre created OpenMobilityIndicators, using open data to draw a map of sustainable mobility indicators.
• Vespucci is planning to remove support for Android 4.0.1 to 4.0.4 (released in 2011) devices in version 18 (fall 2022). People still using such devices, with a private instance of the OpenStreetMap API, are asked to contact the Vespucci team.
• xrisnik shared a JOSM preset for adding addresses to houses.

Programming

• Hans Hack tweeted about his beta release of ‘a geoprocessing tool to handle GeoJSON files fast and simple’. It allows the processing of GeoJSON files in an if-this-then-that manner. For example ‘Remove this:<Berlin.geojson> from that:<Germany.geojson>’. There are ‘sentences’ that find shared geometries (areas), dissolve areas in other areas and repair GeoJSON files.
• Jean-Marie Favreau has released > the source code for OSM Tag Challenge. Each day, the Twitter bot posts pictures of a place from a Flickr album without context and challenges us to ‘reflect on OpenStreetMap’s ontology’.

Releases

• OsmAnd has released a new version of their website.

Did you know …

• … Acastus-Photon, an address and POI lookup application for Android based on OpenStreetMap data? Available through F-Droid, the app is said to be more reliable than other POI lookup solutions thanks to using Photon, developed by the Komoot team, as its default backend.
• … how to create a layer highlighting a custom POI type in OsmAnd?
• … Volodymyr Agafonkin, creator of Leaflet, has explained the most important steps for rendering map tiles in a tutorial? This tutorial and much more (including a ‘sourdough calculator‘) can be found on his ‘Notebooks’ page.

OSM in the media

• Amy Flaming, from The Guardian, reported on secondary school teacher Michael Shanks, who has had the satisfaction of having drawn GPS lines over all 6,000 streets of his city Glasgow, and other people equally motivated to reach their own target of travelling every street in their city.

Other “geo” things

• Taylor Brooker has made an unusual and beautiful hand crafted map as a wedding present.
• HouseFresh gathered up Google search data from 2021 and created a map of the world’s houseplants based on each country’s most popular species.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle Lyon		2022-05-17
	151. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-05-17
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-05-17
Zürich	Missing Maps Zürich Mapathon		2022-05-18
Montmorillon	Printemps des Cartes		2022-05-19 – 2022-05-22
Olomouc	květnový olomoucký mapathon		2022-05-19
Kaskazini B	Tanzania Mapping Groups May Mapathon	✓	2022-05-21
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第30回 相国寺		2022-05-22
臺北市	OpenStreetMap街景踏查團工作坊2		2022-05-22
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-05-23
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-05-23
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	✓	2022-05-23
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-05-25
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-05-24
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-05-25
Santiago	3a reunión bimestral de OSM Latam		2022-05-28
Town of Victoria Park	Social Mapping Sunday: East Vic Park		2022-05-29
Bruxelles – Brussel	Virtual OpenStreetMap Belgium meeting	✓	2022-05-31

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 Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, SomeoneElse, Strubbl, TheSwavu, cafeconleche, derFred, fazlerabbi37, tordans.

An experienced graphic designer will tell you that good graphic logos are supposed to be simple and so easy to recall that a child can draw them from memory… which means the Wikipedia logo probably wouldn’t be one of them! The puzzle globe logo is however a befitting representation of Wikipedia – it’s busy and complicated. It’s more like an emblem or a coat of arms that proudly shows the history and complexity of the thing it represents. It’s a permanently unfinished work-in-progress that came to be via a logo contest decided by public vote. 

After gauging community interest, we are happy to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation will be hosting a global contest to create a sound logo for Wikimedia projects.

Voting for logos is common practice in the Wikimedia movement. As we prepare to launch a new type of logo contest, this blog post takes a look at some of the logo contests that have happened over the course of the past twenty years, as new projects and initiatives across  the movement have come to exist. The contests have not been entirely uniform. Some Wikimedia logo contests have one round of voting, some have an elimination round, some have score voting or ranked-choice voting. Some have prizes (which range from t-shirts to a few hundred euros or dollars). Some set aside time for the refinement of the logo. Most voting is open for a week or two. 

Some logos are temporary celebrations of particular achievements. These contests are usually shorter in time than other logo contests and go through only one round of voting before being adopted. For example, the Polish Wikipedia held a contest to mark the million articles milestone or the Ukrainian Wikipedia marked its 18th anniversary. 

The 2003 ‘International Logo Contest’ gave us the predecessors to the current Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Wikimedia Foundation and MediaWiki logos. The top prize was 100 euros and a t-shirt back then. This was an era when Wikipedia was not a household name and all of Wikipedia was receiving around 250,000 pageviews a day (in 2022 Wikimedia sites receive about 700,000,000 page views a day). The puzzle globe logo won the top prize and the 2nd and 3rd place logos later became used for the Wikimedia, Wikimedia Foundation and MediaWiki logos. Notably, the red, green and blue colors of the early Wikimedia logo became applied to many subsequent logos and logo proposals thereafter. 

Many more logo contests came about. In 2004, a need for a media repository for all Wikimedia projects arose and an informal poll was held to vote for a logo for Wikimedia Commons. The poll lasted for two weeks. By 2008, after a clear consensus, it was decided to have a vote to adopt the Wikimedia community logo as the new Metawiki logo, which had been using the Wikimedia movement logo. By 2011, the new Wiki Loves Monuments photo competition held a vote for a new logo, and kept submissions open for a month. Only one week-long round of voting was held. In 2012, the Wikidata logo contest was announced via a blog post, and asked submissions to be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and tagged into a category to be considered submissions. Then a committee reviewed all the submissions and made a shortlist of finalists which went to public vote.

Wikivoyage was born as an open-source fork of content from a non-Wikimedia site and for Wikimedia servers to host it, it needed a new logo. The community held a contest in 2013 and a logo was adopted, but was later met with a legal challenge for bearing too much resemblance to the World Trade Organization logo. From this came the (sort of) standard ‘logo selection procedure’ we have today: A need for a logo arises, the contest forms with a submission period, an elimination round, a finalist review, and a final vote. The uploader must have created all the work themself and the finalist review exists so that research can be done to see if there are any legal or other issues with the logo finalists. 

The ‘Proposal for changing logo of MediaWiki, 2020’ was held to address design issues with the old 2003 MediaWiki logo. The original MediaWiki logo was a bitmap picture so it didn’t work for large sizes, the wide range of colors made it difficult to print, the high details made it unusable in small sizes and it was difficult to modify for things like temporary celebrations. Proposals and discussions for the new logo lasted for six weeks, the first round of voting lasted for a month, then two weeks of legal clearance, then a month-long second round of voting for variants on the top proposals, followed by another month of legal clearance.

The 2021 Wikifunctions logo contest involved two months of discussions, followed by five weeks to submit designs, a few days to narrow the vote candidates, then two weeks for voting. What followed was seven months to refine and finalize the logo because there was a high probability of lawsuits for logos that use the lambda symbol.

For the 2022 Wikimedia Sound Logo contest, we have to consider interesting new aspects like:

• How do we consider vocalizations?  
• What technical requirements (bit depth, sampling rate, et cetera) should be made?
• Human hearing is roughly 20 – 20,000 Hertz. Are there accessibility considerations to be made?
• How will we overcome listener fatigue when evaluating a large number of submissions?
• Most sound logos are only a few seconds long. We are proposing submissions between 1 and 4 seconds. What do you think?
• How will we screen for copyright infringement?
• How do we find a large enough group of people with knowledge of audio editing and mixing to submit to the contest?

We encourage you to help us develop this contest on Meta-wiki. Phase 2 of this project is focused on community outreach and discussions with the purpose of co-creating a contest that we can all be excited about. These community conversations are currently planned for May 23 to June 10. More information to come soon. Sign up on the page to stay informed.  

The Wikimedia Hackathon is happening next weekend, and the Wikimedia tech community is excited to share some details about all the activities that will be taking place – and how you can get involved either in-person or online.

Building on experience from last year’s virtual hackathon, this year’s Wikimedia Hackathon will take a new approach: it will happen both online and in-person on May 20-22, 2022. 

Collaboration is a key aspect of our community. The Wikimedia Hackathon is a great opportunity to meet others and work together on technical projects during a fun three-day event. The main Hackathon events will happen in an online game-style space, while local meetups organized by community members happen around the world. These two formats will have a diverse set of activities that everyone is welcome to join – no matter the technical background they have!

We’re expecting to have participants from many different places, so the schedule is planned to allow people in multiple time zones to participate comfortably. There will be core hours several times a day when most events will occur, and online social and hacking spaces open 24 hours a day throughout the three days.

Participating in a Hackathon doesn’t necessarily mean coding! Of course you’ll find sessions about technical topics, but you can also find sessions about culture, diversity, and some activities that can help you get skills to inspire and motivate your team. The Wikimedia Hackathon seeks to welcome a larger audience, beyond just developers. 

If you would like to join the Hackathon, take a look at the different options that are available and find the ones that interest you the most:

• Host a session. You can check out our schedule page and pick an open slot in the category that best fits your topic, you just need to add yourself there!
• Contribute to or create a project. If you want to get involved in the hacking activities, check the Phabricator board and add a task. 
• Attend in-person meet ups. Find out if there is a meeting near you here.
• If you want to explore other options, there are a lot of tasks you can contribute to! You can help out welcoming newcomers, contributing to translations or you can even just explore the virtual game space and meet new people. Check the list of activities we have for you.

Please feel free to reach out to anyone on the Wikimedia Hackathon team if you need any support or have any questions. Make sure to bring your best ideas to the table and be ready to work along with developers, designers, translators and other tech Wikimedians in a fun and collaborative environment!

A new version of Gayathri typeface is available now. Version 1.20 comes with a few bugfixes and glyph additions. New version is available at SMC website for preview and download. Changes Fix the size issue of fullstop and comma Add 0D7B+0D4D+0D31 based ന്റ Improve kerning for latin Add 22 latin glyphs Fix spacing issues for quote signs Flatten the nested components Update build dependencies and CI The latest version is not yet available at Google fonts.

In Central America there is a gap in the creation of knowledge and information on the Internet. In Wikipedia, biographies from the region represent only 1.8 percent and in the case of El Salvador only represent 0.14 percent.

In order to promote the generation of knowledge from and about El Salvador and Central America, a group of volunteers have joined together to develop educational programs that involve Wikipedia and its sister projects as the main protagonists of change in digital education.

Thus, on May 20, 2021 Wikimedia El Salvador was launched, formed as a group of Wikipedians that aims to raise awareness in the country about the use of Wikimedia Foundation projects.

The Wikipedistas seek to collaborate with communities and organizations in the development of education based on free knowledge and universal access to information through a free and open internet in which all people have the right to search, create, share culture and knowledge.

In addition, several events are planned to eradicate the stigmas and myths that exist around the use of Wikipedia and to show the power of the rest of the spaces that Wikimedia has as a foundation.

Since the launch of the initiative, events have been held to promote the collection of knowledge about El Salvador on different topics such as historical memory, gender, sports and culture. This through workshops, talks and collaborations with different organizations such as the Olympic Committee of El Salvador, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences and the Cultural Center of Spain in El Salvador.

In 2021, in the framework of the Bicentennial of Central America, a Wikipedia workshop was held in which the Central American Bicentennial entry was created together with researchers from the region.

The Wikipedians have also participated in the Art+Feminist initiative since before the launch of Wikimedia El Salvador.

This year they have held events for Women’s Month, such as talks, Wikipedia workshops with a gender focus, editatonas, as well as participating in the Latin American regional campaign “¡Alto! Mujeres Trabajando” (¡Stop! Women Working).

The Wikipedistas plan to become an official user group this year, in addition to continuing with events, workshops and actions that allow the creation and improvement of entries on women, environment, culture and history in Wikipedia.

“Now and in the future we will continue to work to contribute to open knowledge through the Foundation’s projects,” they say.

Learn more about Wikimedia El Salvador, here our networks:

Our Facebook account

Our Instagram account

Twitter account

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

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

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

How we did it

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

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

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

Fewer modules

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

Some highlights:

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

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

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

Less metadata

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's next

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

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

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

– Timo Tijhof

Further reading:

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