14/06/2022-20/06/2022

Breaking news

• The next OSMF Board meeting will take place on Thursday 30 June 2022, at 13:00 UTC via the OSMF video room (which opens about 20 minutes before the meeting). The draft agenda is available on the wiki. The topics to be covered are:
  • Treasurer’s report
  • Updated membership prerequisites plan
  • Consider directing the OWG to cut access off due to attribution or other
    legal policy reasons, if flagged by the LWG
  • OSM Carto
  • OSM account creation API
  • Advisory Board – monthly update
  • Presentation by Mapbox Workers Union
  • Guest comments or questions.

Mapping

• ViriatoLusitano has updated > his very detailed and richly illustrated guide describing how to integrate data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) into OSM, with names and georeferenced boundaries of different urban agglomerations.
• Anne-Karoline Distel made a short report on her mapping trip to North Wales.
• At this year’s SotM France conference, Stéphane Péneau gave an overview of street-level imagery, from hardware choice to file management.
• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • school=entrance to deprecate the use of the tag school=entrance.
  • exit=* to deprecate entrance=exit, entrance=emergency, and entrance=entrance in favour of clearer tags.
  • Emergency access and exits to address issues with the current tagging of these items.
  • aeroway=stopway for mapping the area beyond the runway that has a full-strength pavement able to support aircraft, which can be used for deceleration in the event of a rejected take-off.
  • runway=displaced_threshold for mapping the part of a runway which can be used for take-off, but not landing.
  • school:for=* a tag for schools to indicate what kinds of facilities are available for special needs students.
  • information=qr_code for tagging a QR code that provides information about a location of interest to tourists.
• Voting on the pitch:net=* proposal, for indicating if a net is available at a sports pitch, is open until Saturday 2 July.
• Voting on the following proposals has closed:
  • aeroway=aircraft_crossing to mark a point where the flow of traffic is impacted by crossing aircraft, was approved with 14 votes for, 0 votes against and 0 abstentions.
  • substation=* to improve tagging of power substations and transformers mixing on the same node, was approved with 11 votes for, 1 vote against and 0 abstentions.

Community

• In the 133rd episode of the Geomob Podcast, Muki Haklay, Professor of Geoinformatics at UCL, an early adopter of combining geography with computer science and one of the earliest supporters of OpenStreetMap, is the guest. There is a discussion about extreme Citizen Science.
• Nathalie Sidibé > , from OSM Mali, is now involved in another community: Wikipedia! Her commitment to the Malian community, to open source data and of course to OSM has already been featured in several profiles. Now there is her full biography > and an initiative of the ‘Les sans pagEs‘ > women geographers project.

Imports

• Daniel Capilla provided > an update about the import of Iberdrola charging stations for electric vehicles in Malaga, which is now complete. The data is available under an open licence from the Municipality of Malaga (Spain). He maintains a corresponding wiki page for the documentation and coordination of open data imports.

Events

• YouthMappers UMSA, a recently opened chapter of YouthMappers in Bolivia, tweeted about their first OpenStreetMap training activity on 22 June.
• Videos of the presentations at the SofM-Fr 2022 conference are now available online. A session listing for the conference, which was held 10 to 12 June in Nantes, is available > on their website.

Education

• Anne-Karoline Distel explained in a new video how to add running trails to OpenStreetMap.
• Astrid Günther explained, in a tutorial, how she created vector tiles for a small area of Earth and hosts them herself.

OSM research

• Youjin Choe, a PhD student in Geomatics at the University of Melbourne, Australia, is looking for your advice on a potential focus group study on the design of the OSM changeset discussion interface. Her research topic is on the user conflict management process in online geospatial data communities (which has mixed components of GIS, HCI, and organisational management).

Maps

• Hub and spoke is a map that shows the 10 nearest airports to a given position.
• CipherBliss published a thematic map of places to eat based on OpenStreetMap, ‘Melting Pot‘ > .

Open Data

• [1] Osmose is now using open data to compare against OpenStreetMap data to find any missing roads or power lines in OSM. At present comparisons are made for power lines in France and highways in Spain.

Software

• The first version of ‘Organic Maps’, a free and open source mobility map app for Android and iOS, was released > last June (2021). After more than 100,000 installations and one year of intensive development work, the results and plans for the future are presented.

Programming

• The new OSM app OSM Go! is looking for translators and developers.

Releases

• Version 17.1 of the Android OSM editor Vespucci has been released.
• With version StreetComplete v45.0-alpha1 Tobias Zwick introduced the new overlays functionality.

Did you know …

• … that there are apps out there helping you find windy roads? Curvature, Calimoto and Kurviger are just some examples.
• … the MapCSS style for special highlighting of bicycle infrastructure in JOSM?
• … HistOSM.org, which renders historical features exclusively?
• … the Japanese local chapter of OSMF, OSMFJ, maintains a tile server and also offers a vector tile download service (via user smellman)? More details are on the wiki > .

OSM in the media

• OpenStreetMap featured > (see video ) ) in an overview of a wide range of modern mapping technologies in a segment on the France24 news channel. The OSM examples were: participative mapping in Africa (3m17s); and, Grab’s use of OSM in South-East Asia (4m10s), which allows them, unlike other map providers, to take into account the reality of Asia with rainy seasons and a lot of narrow roads. Other topics include Apple’s 3-D visualisation of Las Vegas, 360 degree image capture, indoor mapping and geoblocking.

Other “geo” things

• Matthew Maganga wrote, in ArchDaily, about the inequalities created through modern mapping methods and especially Google StreetView.
• Google Earth blogged about how they process Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite images daily to create a current and historical land cover data set.
• Saman Bemel Benrud, an early Mapbox employee, looked back at the 12 years he worked at the company and describes how it changed over time – leading to a failed attempt to found a union, which was part of the reason he left the company last year.
• Canada and Denmark had a decades long land dispute, called the Whisky War, over an uninhabited Arctic island between Nunavut and Greenland. Following an agreement to divide control of Hans Island / Tartupaluk / ᑕᕐᑐᐸᓗᒃ, Canada now has a land border with a second country after the United States. Note that Canada also shares a maritime border with a second European country (France) near Newfoundland (second because Greenland is a constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark).

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Arlon	EPN d’Arlon – Atelier ouvert OpenStreetMap – Contribution		2022-06-28
Hlavní město Praha	MSF Missing Maps CZ Mapathon 2022 #2	Prague, KPMG office (Florenc)		2022-06-28
City of New York	A Synesthete’s Atlas (Brooklyn, NY)		2022-06-29
Roma	Incontro dei mappatori romani e laziali		2022-06-29
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-06-30
Washington	A Synesthete’s Atlas (Washington, DC)		2022-07-01
Essen	17. OSM-FOSSGIS-Communitytreffen		2022-07-01 – 2022-07-03
	OSM Africa July Mapathon: Map Liberia		2022-07-01
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-07-04
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #42		2022-07-04
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-07-06
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-07-05
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #37 (Online)	✓	2022-07-05
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-07-07
Fremantle	Social Mapping Sunday: Fremantle		2022-07-10
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-07-12
20095	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2022-07-12
Landau an der Isar	Virtuelles Niederbayern-Treffen	✓	2022-07-12
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-07-14

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, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, SeverinGeo, Strubbl, Supaplex, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred.

Dr Sara Thomas, Scotland Programme Coordinator for Wikimedia UK

On International Women’s Day, I ran training for long-term Wikimedia UK partners Protests & Suffragettes and Women’s History Scotland. The editathon focused on Scottish Suffrage(ttes), and is just one of a series of events that they’ll be running over the next few months.  

A few days after the event, I was tagged in a brilliant Twitter thread from one participant and new Wikipedia editor Becky Male. Becky had been working on the Hunger Strike Medal article. I was really struck not only by her new-found enthusiasm for Wikipedia editing, but also by this quote: “Knowledge activism matters because, for most people, Wikipedia is their first port of call for new info. I did the Cat and Mouse Act in GCSE History. Don’t remember learning about the medal or the names of the women..” 

We often talk about Knowledge Activism in the context of fixing content gaps that pertain to voices and communities left out by structures of power and privilege, and how the gender gap manifests in different ways on-wiki. I thought that this was a great example of how the Wikimedia community’s work is helping to address those gaps, so I reached out to Becky to ask if she’d like to write a blog for us which you can read below. Thanks Becky!

By Becky Male, @beccamale

Joining Wikipedia was one of those things I’d thought about doing from time to time – I’d come across an article that was woefully short and think to myself “someone should probably do something about that”. But fear of accidentally breaking something stopped me.

But then it’s International Women’s Day, and Women’s History Scotland, Protests & Suffragettes and Wikimedia UK are organising an Editathon to get some of the information P&S has found – they’ve created fantastic educational resources on the Scottish suffrage movement – added to Wikipedia. This is the Knowledge Gap: even when things are known about women, that knowledge hasn’t made it on to Wikipedia. It’s most people’s first port of call for new information, which makes this a big problem.

So I signed up and did the intro tutorial. A misspent adolescence on LiveJournal meant the leap from basic HTML to editing in source was fairly small. And there’s something about sitting in a Zoom call of two dozen women, all a bit nervous about this process too and being told “It’s okay, you really can’t screw this up that badly” that’s genuinely reassuring – failure’s a lot less scary when you’ve got backup.

Offline, I volunteer at Glasgow Women’s Library digitising artefacts. Creating the article on the Suffragette Penny sounded like a perfect extension of that. But it was wisely suggested that I should pick an existing article for my first. The Hunger Strike Medal needed work and was similar enough to get me started.

I studied the Cat and Mouse Act for GSCE History so I already had some background knowledge of the suffragette tactic of hunger striking. I cleaned up the lead, separated the information into sections and added a few other interesting titbits – as I learned at the Editathon, Wikipedia users love trivia. But the biggest change I made was to the list of medal recipients.

The medal was the WSPU’s highest honour – not only had a woman been gaoled for her beliefs, she’d risked her life and health for the cause. The hunger strikes and subsequent force-feeding by prison authorities contributed to early deaths, caused serious illnesses, and destroyed women’s mental health. They suffered horrifically and their sacrifices deserve to be remembered.

The list is now over 90 names, each one sourced, each medal confirmed. Some I found in books, maybe just one line about them. Others I found with a Google search, the suggested images showing me new medals the deeper I went, leading me to the sites of auction houses and local museums. My favourites, though, are in newsreels from 1955, women well into their 60s still proudly wearing their medals.

There’s another 60+ hunger strikers whose medals haven’t been found yet. Some names I moved to the Talk page if the evidence doesn’t support them on the list. I can’t say for sure that this is the most comprehensive list of WSPU hunger strikers but I think it’s likely – I certainly haven’t found one anywhere else.

And I’ve still got that Suffragette Penny article to write.

The post Women’s suffrage and the Hunger Strike Medal appeared first on WMUK.

The Global Data & Insights team’s Equity Landscape metrics project completed the first pilot cohort for data use and consultation in Feb-March 2022.

The purpose of the pilot and consultation was to gather feedback and suggestions from community use case participants either reflecting on the project and metrics design, or directly piloting the dashboard design options and metrics to understand their geographic space in terms of movement engagement signals.

The Pilot

The first cohort of the pilot launched in February and had nine participants who joined under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) as one of the targeted community audiences. After an initial doodle poll to arrive at a common meeting time, two office hour slots were selected based on the time preference indicated by the participants. The virtual office hour sessions were hosted on Google Meet. The first sessions were held with two options in February, the first on a Friday from 4-5 PM UTC, with seven participants attending. The second, on a Tuesday from 5-6 PM UTC, with five participants attending.

The initial pilot session provided a basic overview of the pilot and data privacy boundaries, as well as a demonstration on how to navigate the data of the equity landscape within the dashboard testing space. The following sessions provided more demonstrations and specific walk-throughs with the data to answer key use case questions which had been selected as most relevant by the pilot cohort:

1. What countries may be underrepresented in the grants or affiliates ecosystem? 
2. How many other affiliates may be competing for resources in this same space? 
3. Which countries have a strong affiliate presence and reader base but are lacking in editorship? 
4. To what extent does a country engage in various languages and projects? 
5. Does a country have a well-balanced movement organizer ecosystem to support an international event or extensive collaborative partnership?  

All demonstrations were recorded and made available to those who could not attend the sessions live. Upon the group’s request, we continued to host optional office hours every two to three weeks for technical support and for pilot participants to share back their experiences. We also asked pilot participants to alert us to bugs in the data, and help us to understand barriers within their user experience which would be used to improve our tooling design to ensure accessibility.

The Outcome

Throughout the pilot sessions, community participants provided input and feedback via email and direct talk page comments to the ten Directed Review Questions and Design Considerations. We captured and analyzed roughly 29 points of input from the meta portal comments from 5 community commenters who were actively involved as well as participant feedback gathered during the course of our first pilot sessions with 9 community participants.

The results have been analyzed and posted on Meta-Wiki. For the most part, we must continue to pilot and consult more closely over the coming months with some of our key movement organizing and governance bodies. We must ensure further dialogue on both the metrics design, as well as connect for future sense-making around the metrics.

Challenges & Barriers

The pilot process revealed important challenges that we encountered as a team. We faced time-zone challenges as we tried to find a common time for the monthly office hours. Given the community participants were geographically dispersed spanning from Latin America to Eastern Asia, we could not find a single time that worked for all. Language barrier was another challenge. The office hour sessions were hosted in English and all communications were drafted in English, and some participants faced difficulty in understanding and interpreting the purpose of the sessions due to the technical language required to discuss the Equity Landscape. Lastly, connectivity issues also brought challenges during calls where internet bandwidth could be overwhelmed when attempting to run both the video call and the Google data studio at the same time.

What Next?

We are looking to continue with the pilot period. We continue to monitor the talk page for new pilot volunteers and we plan to present some targeted demonstration workshops in July to preview the metrics to key use cases. 

We are also exploring translation support for key documentation and working to connect with key stakeholder groups who would benefit from a guided workshop and demo session.

If you are part of a strategic Wikimedia organizing or governance group interested in attending a demonstration workshop (1) watch for announcements and/or (2) reach out on our talk page if you have a specific workshop request!

Here I share some thoughts around the history of "responsive" MediaWiki skins and how we might want to think about it for Vector.

The buzzword "responsive" is thrown around a lot in Wikimedia-land, but essentially what we are talking about is whether to include a single tag in the page. The addition of a meta tag with name viewport, will tell the page how to adapt to a mobile device.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

More information: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/html/responsive-meta-tag/

Since the viewport tag must be added, by default websites are not made mobile-friendly. Given the traditional Wikimedia skins were built before mobile sites and this tag existed, CologneBlue, Modern, Vector did not add this tag.

When viewing these skins on mobile the content will not adapt to the device and instead will appear zoomed out. One of the benefits of this is that the reader sees a design that is consistent with the design they see on desktop. The interface is familiar and easy enough to navigate as the user can pinch and zoom to parts of the UI. The downside is that reading is very difficult, and requires far more hand manipulation to move between sentences and paragraphs, and for this reason, many search engines will penalize traffic.

Enter Minerva

The Minerva skin (and MobileFrontend before it) were introduced to allow us to start adapting our content for mobile. This turned out to be a good decision as it avoided the SEO of our projects from being penalized. However, building Minerva showed that making content mobile-friendly was more than adding a meta tag. For example, many templates used HTML elements with fixed widths that were bigger than the available space. This was notably a problem with large tables. Minerva swept many of these issues under the rug with generic fixes (For example enforcing horizontal scrolling on tables). Minerva took a bottom-up approach where it added features only after they were mobile-friendly. The result of this was a minimal experience that was not popular with editors.

Timeless

Timeless was the 2nd responsive skin added to Wikimedia wikis. It was popular with editors as it took a different approach to Minerva, in that it took a top-down approach, adding features despite their shortcomings on a mobile screen. It ran into many of the same issues that Minerva had e.g. large tables and copied many of the solutions in Minerva.

MonoBook

During the building of Timeless, the Monobook skin was made responsive (T195625). Interestingly this led to a lot of backlash from users (particularly on German Wikipedia), revealing that many users did not want a skin that adapted to the screen (presumably because of the reasons I outlined earlier - while reading is harder, it's easier to get around a complex site. Because of this, a preference was added to allow editors to disable responsive mode (the viewport tag). This preference was later generalized to apply to all skins:

Responsive Vector

Around the same time, several attempts were made by volunteers to force Vector to work as a responsive skin. This was feature flagged given the backlash for MonoBook's responsive mode. The feature flag saw little development, presumably because many gadgets popped up that were providing the same service.

Vector 2022

The feature flag for responsive Vector was removed for legacy Vector in T242772 and efforts were redirected into making the new Vector responsive. Currently, the Vector skin can be resized comfortably down to 500px. It currently does not add a viewport tag, so does not adapt to a mobile screen.

However, during the building of the table of contents, many mobile users started complaining (T306910). The reason for this was that when you don't define a viewport tag the browser makes decisions for you. To avoid these kind of issues popping up it might make sense for us to define an explicit viewport to request content that appears scaled out at a width of our choosing. For example, we could explicitly set width 1200px with a zoom level of 0.25 and users would see:

If Vector was responsive, it would encourage people to think about mobile-friendly content as they edit on mobile. If editors insist on using the desktop skin on their mobile phones rather than Minerva, they have their reasons, but by not serving them a responsive skin, we are encouraging them to create content that does not work in Minerva and skins that adapt to the mobile device.

There is a little bit more work needed on our part to deal with content that cannot hit into 320px e.g. below 500px. Currently if the viewport tag is set, a horizontal scrollbar will be shown - for example the header does not adapt to that breakpoint:

Decisions to be made

1. Should we enable Vector 2022's responsive mode? The only downside of doing this is that some users may dislike it, and need to visit preferences to opt-out.
2. When a user doesn't want responsive mode, should we be more explicit about what we serve them? For example, should we tell a mobile device to render at a width of 1000px with a scale of 0.25 ( 1/4 of the normal size) ? This would avoid issues like T306910. Example code [1] demo
3. Should we apply the responsive mode to legacy Vector too? This would fix T291656 as it would mean the option applies to all skins.

[1]

<meta name="viewport" content="width=1400px, initial-scale=0.22">

On May 28, 2022, an editathon was held at OYA Soichi Library in Tokyo, Japan, which specializes in magazines. Araisyohei (a sysop of the Japanese Wikipedia) supported this event, and was in charge of recording video and photo shooting . A report in Japanese language by Natsumi Miura, a member of the staff, was published in a web-based e-mail magazine “ACADEMIC RESOURCE GUIDE” in CC-BY. Note that only the text of this article was published in the original e-mail magazine. Pictures were inserted for this article.

Publication

• Publication: ACADEMIC RESOURCE GUIDE（ARG）［ARG-905］
• Issue Date: 06/06/2022 (Weekly)
• ISSN: 1881-381X
• Language: Japanese

Contents

Wikipedia OYA was held.

Miura Natsumi (Sumida Midori Library, Certified Librarian, Japan Library Association 1154)

■ Summary

On May 28, 2022, “Wikipedia OYA,” a volunteer project, was held at Oya Soichi Library (Setagaya-ku, Tokyo), which specializes in magazines. I would like to introduce this project from the perspective of a staff member.

The aim of this project is to edit articles of Wikipedia, an Internet encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone, using magazines in OYA Soichi Library. The Wikipedians who participated in this event were: さえぼー, Swanee, 逃亡者, のりまき, and Eugene Ormandy (the planner of this project).

This event was originally scheduled to take place in April of 2021, but it was postponed due to the spread of Covid-19, and held in May of 2022. Considering the situation of the infection, we didn’t widely recruit the participants. Information of this event was also posted in SNS with the hashtag #WikipediaOYA.

■ Aim of the project

“WikipediaOYA” was planned by a group of volunteers with the aim of spreading awareness of good compatibility of Wikipedia and magazines, which strongly represent the social trends and fashions of the times, and it was also planned to promote the  utilization of Oya Soichi Library.

Because magazines contain a variety of topics scattered throughout a single volume, it is difficult to find the information you need. However, the OYA Soichi Library’s unique Oya-style index classification method makes it easy to find the information you are looking for.

We held this event to let Wikipedian editors or Wikipedia readers know the value of Oya Soichi Library, large number of magazines and convenient search system.

■ OYA Soichi Library

OYA Soichi Library, a magazine library in Japan, was established in 1971 based on the magazine collection of a critic Soichi Oya (1900-1970) who had wanted to make his collection “available for every person to use”.

Last year (2021) marked the 50th anniversary of its establishment, and it continues to collect magazines. The collection amounts to approximately 12,000 and it is used by press such as newspapers and TV stations, as well as researchers and students.

However, due to the spread of the Internet and the Covid-19 lockdowns, the number of users has decreased. In 2017, the library started the crowdfunding using READYFOR, and the monetary goal has been achieved in 3 days. Moreover, the library newly launched a paid membership system named “OYA-bunko patronage”.

■ The theme “Bread”.

“Bread” was chosen as the theme for this event to take advantage of the magazine’s characteristics. The inspiration for this theme came from a magazine pathfinder (resource list) of “Curry Bread” on the website of OYA Soichi Library.

Another reason is that the information about unique breads in Japan has not been compiled as a book and is not well organized also on Wikipedia.

■ Visiting

Firstly, Mr. Hiroshi Kamoshida, a staff of OYA Soichi Library explained to the participants how to use its original database “Web OYA-bunko”. Users can search for magazines mainly from 1988 by keywords and unique classification. I searched for “brain bread (zunou-pan)”, which is said to make you smarter. I was surprised that I can find the information which I thought is not available by using this database. You can also use this database at public libraries with which OYA Soichi Library have contracts, but the number of them is not large.

After that, Mr. Kamoshida showed us the stacks, which are usually closed to the public (magazines are took out by library staff). The stacks, divided into eight rooms, are full of magazines.

We saw many magazines, first issue of a magazine that is still published today, a magazine that has already ceased publication, and the oldest magazine in the collection, “Kaikan Zasshi (會館雑誌)” published in 1875. We can also flip through the pages of a magazine published 100 years ago. It included special features about the world100 years later.

Magazines in OYA Soichi Library were stored, searchable, findable, and accessible. In public libraries, serials such as magazines are often removed after their storage period has passed. I reaffirmed the significance of the OYA Soichi Library.

■ Research and Edit

Participants used the database and “OYA Soichi Library Index Catalog,” which is a catalog of magazines before 1987, to find the information they need. Not only Wikipedians but also staff actually used the database.

We picked up some fashion and cuisine magazines such as “Hanako”, “Tokyo Walker”, and “Dancyu”, and other magazines such as “Mainichi Graph”, “Shukan Jitsuwa”, and “Seventeen”. One participant commented that “I didn’t expect to find so many articles”.

MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) used by public libraries does not contain such detail information especially about serialized articles or columns included in feature articles.

Four articles ([[ウチキパン]] [[かにぱん]] [[なかよしパン]] [[マグノリアベーカリー]]) were written and published on the day of the project using magazines. More articles will be published.

■ After the project

I often feel that if I cannot find the information, it is the same as if it didn’t exist. On the contrary, if we can find, we can use the information. 

Soichi Oya said “Books are not for read. They are for search”. I felt that the OYA Soichi Library, which not only collects magazines but also stores them in a searchable format, has more places to be utilized, not limited to Wikipedia.

Visiting OYA Soichi library is the best way to enjoy its uniqueness, but if you can’t visit, you can use database “Web OYA-bunko”. If this database were available at other libraries like prefectural libraries, for example, I wonder how many missing information could be found. How can we support this rare specialized library which has materials that are not available anywhere else? This is one of the main reasons why I agreed with the planners and participated in the project.

We want to continue to hold Wikipedia OYA. Through this project, we would like to support the Oya Soichi Library so that it will continue to be utilized in the future. The next event has not yet been decided, but we will post information on SNS with the hashtag #WikipediaOYA. If you are interested in this event, please keep an eye on this tag. Sharing information is also welcome! Why don’t you join us in supporting the Soichi Oya Library?

Author’s profile

Natsumi Miura. After working in the magazine editorial department of a publishing company, she joined TRC Library Service Co., Ltd. in 2008 and works at Sumida Midori Library as a designated manager. She was the responsible editor for LRG No. 35, which was released last year. Outside of the library, she is active in drawing illustrations and focusing on the library’s book post. On June 18 (Sat.), she held “Wikipedia Town Sumida” with volunteers.

*This text is released under the Creative Commons License CC-BY.

Wikimedia Ukraine is collecting and telling stories of Ukrainian Wikimedia community members affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This article was first published in The Signpost. See the full collection of stories on Meta.

In 2015, Bulgarian Wikipedian Spiritia initiated the #100wikidays challenge. The rules are simple – creating at least one article on Wikipedia every single day for 100 days.

Over the next seven years, the challenge grew in popularity. Over 400 Wikipedia users joined the challenge, and over 100 people successfully finished it. The participants jokingly call themselves “victims” – creating a new article every single day is fun but difficult; you have to sacrifice other tasks or even sleep.

Seven years ago Antanana, an experienced Wikipedian and Ukrainian Wikipedia administrator, became one of #100wikidays’ first participants. In 2022, she decided to complete the challenge again.

Antanana started her 100-days marathon on January 2nd – and almost half of her #100wikidays had to be completed during Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. Still, Antanana managed to complete the challenge successfully. In an interview, she shared how she managed to do it, when creating an article was most difficult, and who was inspired by her run to complete the challenge themselves.

Why #100wikidays – and what the articles covered

The decision to start #100wikidays was a sort of New Year’s resolution for Antanana. She says she often “lacked a sense of accomplishment during the day” – the tasks she’d been working on were progressing slowly, and she wanted to see some tangible work completed every day.

She set additional restrictions for herself that are not required by the general rules of the challenge – she covered only Israel-related topics, and each article had to be linked from a different article created in this #100wikidays round.

Antanana chose Israel because she is learning Hebrew – and also because she wanted to visit the country again but hadn’t been able to for a long time because of the COVID-19 travel restrictions. Her first #100wikidays article was about Israeli singer Zohar Argov, while the last one, created on April 11th, covered composer and singer Avihu Medina, who created music for Argov.

During her #100wikidays Antanana wrote, for example, about the Montefiore Windmill, the Sasson Report, and the 1931 census of Palestine. (She also joined other challenges on Ukrainian Wikipedia during her run, and she didn’t count the articles created then as #100wikidays articles).

Antanana mostly translated articles from English and Hebrew editions of Wikipedia. She says writing articles “from scratch”, i.e. not translating from another language, is too difficult when it has to be done every day.

Overall, during her 2022 #100wikidays round Antanana added 685,744 bytes to Ukrainian Wikipedia (one Ukrainian character counts for two bytes).

Contributing every day during the war

Late on February 23rd, Antanana wrote her 53rd article for the challenge. A few hours later, Russian missiles hit her city – and many other cities across Ukraine.

In the early hours of the invasion, Antanana thought about giving up on #100wikidays – but soon decided that she would finish it anyway, and Russian aggression would not force her to abandon her plans.

However, the first days of the Russian invasion were still the most difficult. On February 24, Antanana was in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in Western Ukraine, but her mother and brother were in a village near Kyiv with Antanana’s grandfather, some 600 kilometers eastward. They had to be evacuated to Western Ukraine. Getting to that village is difficult even in peacetime, and much more so during the war.

A decision was made to immediately get in the car and drive to get Antanana’s family members. The journey was ultimately successful and relatively safe, but long and difficult. They drove for three days – with short breaks for sleep, with large military vehicles on the neighboring lanes, and with long lines at gas stations.

Still, Antanana kept writing a Wikipedia article a day, even in the car (as a passenger) on the way toward Kyiv. She says it was really useful that Wikipedia’s translation tool automatically saves progress – it was helpful when connection was spotty during the drive. These several days were the most difficult in terms of keeping up with #100wikidays, but Antanana managed to do it.

A few days after returning to Ivano-Frankivsk, Antanana went to Israel – and, ironically, finished the challenge of writing articles about Israel in that very country, where she couldn’t get for a few years before.

How to find the time for an article a day

For Antanana, one new article took approximately two hours. That’s enough to translate an average article – not a long and highly detailed one, but something more than a short stub.

Of course, much depends on the topic of a specific article. For Antanana, it also depends on the language which she is translating the article from; she needs more time to translate from Hebrew than from English.

How to find two hours every day? “If you want to, you’ll find a way,” Antanana says. Writing an article on Wikipedia becomes an urgent item on the to-do list. When the task has a specific deadline, you can sacrifice other tasks which can wait for a few more days. And, of course, you can sacrifice the time you’d otherwise spend on reading news, scrolling social media feeds, and even sleeping.

One useful lifehack – plan article topics beforehand. When you’re more busy on a certain day, you can plan to create a shorter article. For Antanana, for example, the quickest to create were articles about Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories. (In theory, one can also prepare full texts of the articles beforehand. The rules of the challenge prohibit it, but they also encourage ignoring all rules)

Consequences of #100wikidays

Antanana’s example inspired a couple of Wikipedian friends to get on a new round of #100wikidays as well.

The first one who couldn’t resist was Spiritia, a Wikipedian from Bulgaria and the challenge’s founder. Many of her 100 Bulgarian-language articles were devoted to Ukraine; for example, she wrote about the theater destroyed by Russian invaders in Mariupol and about prominent Ukrainian painter Maria Prymachenko.

Then, Israeli Wikipedian Ijon joined. He was also among the first #100wikidays participants in 2015. Now, his personal challenge is “consequences of 100wikidays”. The idea is going back to the 100 articles created during the challenge and writing all the articles necessary to turn all the red links blue, i.e. creating all the missing articles linked from the 100 original articles.

Antanana says she doesn’t yet have plans to embark on #100wikidays again – but in the future she might start fixing the “consequences” of her previous two rounds.

Disclaimer: This interview was given in Antanana’s personal capacity as a volunteer editor, not as a Board member of Wikimedia Foundation

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

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

Recent changes

• The Wikipedia App for Android now has an option for editing the whole page at once, located in the overflow menu (three-dots menu ). [1]
• Some recent database changes may affect queries using the Quarry tool. Queries for site_stats at English Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata will need to be updated. Read more.
• A new user_global_editcount variable can be used in abuse filters to avoid affecting globally active users. [2]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 June. It will be on all wikis from 23 June (calendar).
• Users of non-responsive skins (e.g. MonoBook or Vector) on mobile devices may notice a slight change in the default zoom level. This is intended to optimize zooming and ensure all interface elements are present on the page (for example the table of contents on Vector 2022). In the unlikely event this causes any problems with how you use the site, we’d love to understand better, please ping Jon (WMF) to any on-wiki conversations. [3]

Future changes

• The Beta Feature for DiscussionTools will be updated throughout July. Discussions will look different. You can see some of the proposed changes.
• Parsoid’s HTML output will soon stop annotating file links with different typeof attribute values, and instead use mw:File for all types. Tool authors should adjust any code that expects: mw:Image, mw:Audio, or mw:Video. [4]

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

Learnings from the events that presented the Wikimedia to heritage professionals in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile, while testing the Add an image feature on Wikipedia

This blog post is Part II. Find here the Part I, with the GLAM & Culture team and Wikimedia Argentina’s perspectives.

Wikimedia Mexico’s perspective

By Andy Cyca

The way things were

My own history as a Wikipedian goes back more than a decade ago. The idea of contributing to a collaborative project was alluring and the markup language was way easier than keeping track of HTML tags.

As a newbie editor, it felt overwhelming having to keep track of so many things at once: when should I use italics and when should I bold text? What information goes in the citation template? What was the code for displaying an image again? Slowly but surely, I made my share of mistakes and learned bit by bit the intricacies of Wikipedia so that they became sort of a second nature.

When I joined Wikimedia Mexico back in 2013–14 we hosted monthly edit workshops for beginners. Anyone could come and learn how to contribute to Wikipedia: the space loaned laptops for basic editing and we could be there to teach in real-time, new editors could express their questions and get an answer in almost no time at all from an experienced Wikipedian. I felt a special kind of pride when I was asked to step up to the plate and be the host; it meant that I was trusted as having both technical skills and social grace to help newcomers. Many of our long-time local Wikipedians learned in those workshops.

Back then we – and most other chapters – identified that Wikipedia would grow by bringing in people with knowledge to contribute (i.e. most everyone) and have them overcome the technical barriers to bring that knowledge to Wikipedia and the world at large. Our editathons often had people exhausted by trying to learn what I learned – markup language, style – in a single afternoon. To this day, I admire all those people who taught us so much about how to teach.

As time passed, it became clear that the technical challenge of newbies on Wikipedia was actually twofold:

1. Teaching new editors – through workshops, assisted editing, and tutorials – so that they could pass over the technical barriers, and
2. Bringing down the technical barrier as much as possible so that contributing is easier, for new and seasoned editors alike.

For the most part, we could only directly address the first of those, while the second asked us to get creative – like asking editors to write in a familiar text processor – without explicitly getting a solution.

Technical breakthroughs

Fortunately, things have changed. New tools inside Wikipedia have helped enormously to assist users in getting their knowledge and expertise into the largest collaborative effort the world has ever seen.

There’s one thing that I like to emphasize when teaching new editors: just as actors say that “there are no small roles“, so it is that there are no “small edits” on Wikipedia. Some people do contribute through writing extensive articles, but that’s not the only way to contribute. Correcting typos, rewording unclear phrases, clarifying minute details and even formatting are critical tasks to make an article the best it can be.

These “small” tasks are also ideal for a new user to try out their editing powers. I’ve witnessed first-hand just how much it means to many people to see their contribution live with only a few clicks. My intuition tells me people who see how easy it is to contribute are encouraged to contribute more.

Inviting new editors

So you’ll understand my excitement when I was asked to help try out a new feature aimed at new editors: an AI-powered image suggestion tool. Images are a critical part of most articles, but finding them in Commons is sometimes tricky, not to mention the fact that it requires navigating a whole different wiki – a concept that is not always easy to convey.

This tool, as mentioned, is meant to be used first and foremost by new editors, so we were presented with a new challenge: in Mexico, we’ve worked with several museums, universities, government dependencies, and non-profits in the past, so much that many of their workers are no longer considered “new to Wikipedia”: and an otherwise great achievement to celebrate, but not a good fit for this and only this particular situation.

The solution, then, was obvious: this was an opportunity to connect with new people and new institutions. We reached out to Mexicana – an open repository of Mexican Cultural heritage – and the Secretariat of Culture (enwiki) to help us get the word out: we’ve worked with both institutions before and we knew there’s still more to do.

The response was amazing. We received over 100 sign-ups, coming from various institutions across the country:

• UNAM – The National Autonomous University of Mexico and the oldest university in the Americas;
• ENCRyM – National School of Conservation, Restoration and Museography;
• ENAH – National School of Anthropology and History;
• Public universities (University of Guadalajara, Autonomous University of Tabasco, Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, Universidad Vizcaya de las Américas);
• Public libraries (National Library of Mexico, Amado Nervo Community Public Library, Prof. Ma. Ignacia Martínez de Loza Community Library, Azcapotzalco Borough, Tulancingo Municipality).

Testing Add an image

We held the workshop on April 1, 2022, before a group of mixed ages and professions, but equally enthusiastic to try and see how images are important to Wikipedia and how they could contribute.

As with previous events, we started with a short introduction to the Wikimedia Foundation and the work of Wikimedia Mexico regarding cultural heritage and GLAM. Following that, Cora Garmanik gave us a brief and very interesting lecture on how images are connected – and should be connected – with its proper context; using examples from recent Mexican history (in 1994–95).

We took a small break and delved right down to add images using the tool. Yours truly gave a small introduction on what Add an image is, how it works and what it is supposed to replace. But as always, merely watching how something is done is merely the beginning; so we split into three groups to try the tool for ourselves.

As is natural, we all started having questions. We worked together on finding articles to improve, navigating the article itself, opening images on Commons to read metadata, adding the image, adding an image description, and saving the article.

As is natural, going through a few bumps here and there helped us learn. Asking questions of each other helped us cement knowledge, boldly editing in the knowledge that mistakes can be corrected.

Lessons learned and questions for the future

Our last activity before closing the event was to gather everyone’s thoughts and feelings, as well as a first round of feedback.

The participants were generally happy, not only to learn how the proverbial sausage is made, but also to learn just how much work happens behind Wikipedia. Seeing their own work helped us all reflect on just how much effort goes into the pages that we all read every day to check a quick fact.

Of course, this was a group of intelligent people, and they shared their observations about Add an image as a feature. Summarizing their comments:

1. Some of them felt “frustration” at having only one image suggestion per article. Of course, for many of these articles, there’s most likely another candidate image on Commons, but the tool allowed only one suggestion, and if it’s deemed not appropriate for the article the only other option is to move to a new article. Several users wished to stay on the same article to try and see if they could improve this article instead of having to return to “square one” (i.e. finding and selecting an article to improve).
2. On occasions, the suggested image was only very tangentially related to the article. For instance, it would suggest a picture of a place on an article about a person – sometimes their place of birth or final resting place.
3. When selecting a category for article suggestions, the list of articles is always in the same order. In most cases, this is not a concern, but during a collective editing event, it meant that most users selected articles near the beginning of the list and, thus, we experienced several edit conflicts, when two users tried adding to the same article at almost the same time.

Despite these concerns, participants were eager to learn more and keep editing. In general, their hopes and wishes for the future were:

1. Learning how to contribute to Commons: both as individuals and as institutions. This activity led many to re-think the importance of preserving cultural heritage through images, and many were eager to learn how to improve articles through the donation of images.
2. Learning how to improve an article’s text: the bread-and-butter of all Wikipedians. Many of the participants saw the adding of images as only the first step in improving articles. Having a positive first experience led them further down the Wikipedian pipeline
3. Staying in touch with the local chapter: Most participants didn’t know the work made in concert between Wikimedia Mexico and local institutions. They were amazed at the potential to work on improving content related to culture…
4. Potential for education: Several of the participants, we found out, are also teachers and lecturers and so they wondered if there was some way to incorporate what they had just learned into their syllabus and schools. We were glad to say that Wikimedia Mexico does have an Education program and the only reason why it wasn’t mentioned was a lack of time for this event. These users wondered if Wikipedia could somehow be integrated into their educational practice (the answer to which is obviously yes)

Wikimedia Chile’s context

By Nicole González

The geographical coordinates of Chile tend to wall its history under the limits of the desert, the mountain range, and the ocean. However, the media boom that the country has reached in this digital age and the effervescence of the active social movements that have emerged since 2019, played – also – a key role in the Chilean session of #1Pic1Article.

Thus, contrary to expectations, editors from different provinces in Chile (Santiago, Iquique, Curacaví, and Quillota) attended the session, as well as collaborators from Argentina (Buenos Aires), Colombia (Bogotá), Mexico (Mexico City and Tuxtla Gutiérrez), and Peru (Lima and San Juan de Lurigancho) also participated in this activity. This total participation, enriched by Latin American identities, covered a distance of more than 6,500 km and allowed for 60 editions on the day of the event, which continued to grow until reaching 151 editions in a total of 110 articles.

The opportunity to bring together professionals from the cultural and heritage sectors from five different countries contributed to highlighting the regional interest present for Wikipedia and registering that, those from vastly different fields of knowledge (Art, Education, Library Science, Anthropology, Museology, Cultural management, Teaching, etc.), see in the Wikimedia community an opportunity to expand their networks and to enhance their public and professional outreach. Within the universe of attendees, we are happy to say that 70% had not participated in any previous activity, and therefore, the experiences shared by Patricia Díaz Rubio (Executive Director of Wikimedia Chile) and Giovanna Fontenelle (Program Officer, GLAM and Culture, Wikimedia Foundation) were a stimulus that broadened the gaze on all the hidden and intertwined possibilities within the largest encyclopedia in the world.

The occasion led to a proposal of analyzing images as a form of a situational exercise, with a corporality and a territoriality fostered in and with the images. Thus, Cora Gamarnik (Social communicator and specialist in photojournalism) hit the nail on the head when using an image of the social protests carried out in the context of the Chilean dictatorship since 1973, contrasting their evolution in popular, editorial, and even musical culture. This allowed us to perceive how images carry a message of time, politics, use, and potential that radiates according to the context and the references that we want to give them – and also deny them.

The session continued to test the Add an image feature, where the group was able to realize how agile and simple it was to cross and see the compatibility between the textual resources (which were already available) and their connected access to Wikimedia Commons. Here, as in any learning process, with hits and misses, we saw that – sometimes – the proposed topics were not limited or delimited as we would have liked, but that some links were so expansive, that they made us doubt the true connections and notice how important the source metadata were, to specify the categories and encourage inclusion. 

Also, language emerged as a difficulty, because, although we were working with Spanish, proposals from other languages appeared, such as German and Arabic, which made our choices difficult. Finally, already recognizing the desire to make available more new images and imaginaries for the entire population, we would have liked to have a range of possibilities, as well as a carousel of images where we could compare, cut, highlight, or indicate the explicit reference of why such image was necessary for such an article.

Without a doubt, having had the opportunity to hold the last workshop, in the last country of the southern cone, favored the accumulation of experiences and the desire to continue building visual culture. The subsequent contacts and connections that were generated with different people and institutions that wished to maintain a close relationship between the Wikimedia community, Education, and Digital Culture are proof of this.

Find here the Part I, with the GLAM & Culture team and Wikimedia Argentina’s perspectives.

Learnings from the events that presented the Wikimedia to heritage professionals in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile, while testing the Add an image feature on Wikipedia

This blog post is Part I of II. Find here the Part II, with Wikimedia Mexico and Wikimedia Chile’s perspectives.

Introduction

Por Giovanna Fontenelle

As part of the 2021-2022 fiscal year, the Newcomer experience pilot, a project developed by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Growth team, started to plan the Add an image (Anãdir una imagen in Spanish) feature. This beta component would be added to a few Wikipedia languages as a way to help new users engage more with the platform through small and easy tasks.

Specifically, this feature would make it easier to add images and captions to articles, based on topics, such as Art, Architecture, History, Chemistry, Technology, and so on, as well as regions (Africa, Central America, North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania).

But before adding this feature, the team needed to test it. That’s where the GLAM & Culture team entered the project. For us, the Add an image feature was an opportunity to not only engage new users with the visual culture of Wikimedia, but also to help improve the connection on Wikipedia between images from Wikimedia Commons and structured data from Wikidata, and consequently, enhance the appeal and readability of Wikipedia articles in Spanish. 

The team was especially interested in this initiative because, since its creation, it has been engaging in conversations about visual culture and the Wikimedia projects. Recently, the team even organized the Image Description Week and two Annual Planning Conversations with Maryana Iskander about Wikimedia Commons.

The Add an image would also be an opportunity to engage with heritage professionals, particularly museum workers, especially as we believed this group was uniquely qualified to judge the selection and captioning of images on Wikipedia, since they usually work closely with visual culture. 

So, in the first half of 2022, both the GLAM & Culture and Growth teams decided to organize a series of workshops together with Wikimedia Argentina, Wikimedia Mexico, and Wikimedia Chile. In a nutshell, the objectives of these events were two:

• Test the Add an image feature developed for the Newcomer experience pilot;
• Further develop the GLAM-Wiki community in Spanish-speaking Latin America by engaging heritage professionals.

To accommodate the needs of the organizing affiliates, we requested the Newcomer team to add extra filters with articles about each of the countries (Argentina, Mexico, and Chile), in addition to activating the possibility of combining topics (e.g., GLAM Argentina + art.

The experiment yielded four events between March and April 2022:

• March 7th – Test event organized by Wikimedia Argentina with ADiMRA;
• March 18th – Main event organized by Wikimedia Argentina with many heritage professionals;
• April 1st – Event organized by Wikimedia Mexico with many heritage professionals;
• April 20th – Event organized by Wikimedia Chile with many heritage professionals.

After the start of the initiative, we also noticed similarities this feature could have with the #1Lib1Ref campaign, but with images instead of references and museum professionals instead of librarians. That’s why, together with WMAR, WMMX, and WMCL, we decided to name this set of events #1Pic1Article.

Below, you will find the stories of the three affiliates and the learnings from the point of view of each local organizer:

Wikimedia Argentina’s approach

By Angie Cervellera

When the Wikimedia Foundation, through the GLAM team and the Growth team, contacted us to carry out #1Pic1Article in the Latin American region, the first thing I thought was: “What a great opportunity to connect those from cultural fields with Wikimedia projects!” It was a dynamic tool, with a friendly interface for people who are not strictly from the Wikimedia universe and that would surely allow a greater real connection with participants from museums.

This was an issue that was of particular interest to me, due to my museums related professional and academic background. Before working at Wikimedia Argentina, my relationship with people and heritage came through the role of facilitator in areas such as educational action and cultural mediation, that is, maintaining close contact with different audiences of museums and cultural centers, so that by activating their own prior knowledge and common senses they could achieve learning experiences around pieces of heritage.

Upon discovering the Wikimedia universe, I saw myself in some ways limited in this connection with people in a physical, face-to-face, and tangible way. But on the other hand, I discovered an enormous potential linked to the collaborative building of knowledge, a fundamental pillar that is shared with educational practices in museums: understanding that there is not a single point of view on a certain subject but that there are multiple meanings, which build narratives. Narratives that are not neutral but that take on certain ideas and values.

Latin America is a symbolically complex territory, with truly diverse representations, in many cases built by the outlook of others. It was not enough to just connect images to Wikipedia articles if we could not learn to discern, if these images represented ideas “of others”, and if we could not debate whether the images continued to endorse hegemonic stories. In other words, we had to address the debate of denaturalizing our gaze and learn to contextualize visual stories.

Cora Garmanik, a photojournalism researcher in Argentina, was fundamental in this process and I think it was a great and successful experience to have her share her expertise in these meetings. Those who work in museums are connected to visual culture and it’s easy for them to generate adequate, accessible, and understandable descriptions because they do it on a daily basis. However, as they are immersed in a place with a heavy cultural and symbolic heritage it was important that they would be able to critically address the circulation of images both within their institutions and outside of them, in this case, in the digital ecosystem. And #1Pic1Article, through the Add an image function, turned into a great opportunity to explore this aspect and put it into practice.

As in any activity where technology challenges us, we humans are the ones who have the last word in applying our criteria and our abilities to choose one thing over something else. As cultural workers – whether in museums, libraries, archives, universities, or civil organizations – the roles of research, communication, and dissemination are essential so that images do not circulate without their proper contexts and truly become allies of knowledge.

In this way, an initiative that combined a thoughtful and attentive look at the use of images and a dynamic tool to connect said images with articles, attracted interest in the Argentine cultural community, with more than 150 persons interested in participating in these meetings. We had the support of the Asociación de Directores de Museos de la República Argentina (ADiMRA) (Association of Museum Directors of the Republic of Argentina) and the área de Formación y Redes de la Dirección Nacional de Museos (Training and Networks area of the National Directorate of Museums), which promoted the participation of people from museums throughout the country, thus turning the event into a national one.

The production of the events at the regional level was led by Wikimedia Argentina together with the Wikimedia Foundation. During December, January, and February, preliminary preparations were carried out, such as contacting and confirming Cora Garmanik as a guest specialist, conducting a series of tests of the Add an Image tool together with the Growth team, which included the search for a selection of articles considered to be of real relevance to local contexts – e.g., working on articles not only about Argentina but also where Argentina is named.

We also worked on the design of a general document that could explain the relevance of this meeting for Latin American cultural references and we began conversations with the chapters of Chile and Mexico to include them in the proposal. We defined dates and hired two people to follow through on the implementation of the project. With Andy and Nicole, we began to think about the dynamics of the event, the order and duration of the presentations, and how participatory it was going to be. We agreed at all times that the important thing was to get people interested in Wikimedia projects and that to accomplish this, we had to address their perspectives, and not ours. Also, speaking in technical terms or talking about topics that were not representative of the cultural community would not get our participants involved.

The events in Argentina were the first in the region – followed by Mexico and Chile, respectively – and it was possible to test different ways of approaching the participants, where some of these approaches were more motivating than others. The splitting up into Zoom groups to use the tool simultaneously allowed for a fluid exchange between different interested parties and the organizers for we made ourselves available to assist in the process of adding images to Wikipedia. Sometimes, even encouraging the participants to choose images, even though they were not familiar with the subject, valuing the role of previous research, at the very least, reading the descriptions and categories of the original images in Wikimedia Commons, in order to be able to decide their relevance in the suggested articles. I think this empowered many people who felt they “didn’t know” or “couldn’t,” discovering an easy-to-use tool with which to apply their criteria, driven by the theoretical content shared by Cora.

Along the same lines, once the moment of working in small groups was over, a general exchange was encouraged where one person from each group told what theirs and their colleagues’ experience had been in the use of the Add an image feature. In the second event in Argentina, for example, I was with 5 other people from the field of museums, one of whom was excited to share his screen to show us how his process was getting along. In his case, an image of a Bayeux tapestry was being suggested in connection with an article on a plowing technique, which at first aroused doubts in everyone. Then, by researching the image and reading its description in English, we could see that in its fabric there was a scene represented where that specific plowing technique was used. In this way, this participant associated the image to the article and wrote a description using both the information that was already on Commons – translating it into Spanish – and the information from the article, thus generating a description that contextualized the image.

As for the exchanges after the work in small groups, very interesting comments emerged regarding the variety and quantity of topics that exist and of which not all of us have specific knowledge about, but to which, nevertheless, we can contribute with small bits of data that connect with other pieces of information. One of the participants even referred to this tool as “a ball of wool” from which it is possible to continue pulling to obtain a thread, and that thread intersects with other threads, generating a network of knowledge and learning. Furthermore, the issue of collaboration and of being seen as agents of change, of multiplication of knowledge, came up. The idea of ​​reflecting on the use of images, of how representative they are of the topics to be discussed, and, if representative, of being very precise with their description based on the context, was also highlighted. The idea is not to overwhelm with too much information, but simply provide “small bits of data that will later form the network”, in the words of one of the participants.

The most gratifying part of the meetings was this final exchange, where the knowledge of each participant connected with that of others, revealing a motivation to improve the encyclopedia and an interest in the existing possibilities in terms of the circulation of images. But above all, reflecting an empowerment in the role of collaboratively building a visual culture that is more representative of the South, that is removed from cultural stereotypes that are foreign to the region and that can reflect narratives more in line with Latin American contexts.

I think our mission was accomplished. If there are people who feel motivated to improve Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, or any other project in order to better reflect their local history and culture, then we are on our way to promoting a more sustainable and open movement.

Find here the Part II, with Wikimedia Mexico and Wikimedia Chile’s perspectives.

🕑 30 minutes

It's another BTB Digest episode! Mike Cariaso explains why you should use SQLite, Tyler Cipriani talks about teaching deployment to volunteers, Dror Snir-Haim compares translation options, Alex Hollender defends sticky headers, Kunal Mehta criticizes Bitcoin miners, and more!

June 21, 2022, San Francisco, CA, USA ― Wikimedia Enterprise, a first-of-its-kind commercial product designed for companies that reuse and source Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects at a high volume, today announced its first customers: multinational technology company Google and nonprofit digital library Internet Archive.  Wikimedia Enterprise was recently launched by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, as an opt-in product. Starting today, it also offers a free trial account to new users who can self sign-up to better assess their needs with the product.

As Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects continue to grow, knowledge from Wikimedia sites is increasingly being used to power other websites and products. Wikimedia Enterprise was designed to make it easier for these entities to package and share Wikimedia content at scale in ways that best suit their needs: from an educational company looking to integrate a wide variety of verified facts into their online curricula, to an artificial intelligence startup that needs access to a vast set of accurate data in order to train their systems. Wikimedia Enterprise provides a feed of real-time content updates on Wikimedia projects, guaranteed uptime, and other system requirements that extend beyond what is freely available in publicly-available APIs and data dumps. 

“Wikimedia Enterprise is designed to meet a variety of content reuse and sourcing needs, and our first two customers are a key example of this. Google and Internet Archive leverage Wikimedia content in very distinct ways, whether it’s to help power a portion of knowledge panel results or preserve citations on Wikipedia,” said Lane Becker, Senior Director of Earned Revenue at the Wikimedia Foundation. “We’re thrilled to be working with them both as our longtime partners, and their insights have been critical to build a compelling product that will be useful for many different kinds of organizations.” 

Organizations and companies of any size can access Wikimedia Enterprise offerings with dedicated customer-support and Service Level Agreements, at a variable price based on their volume of use. Interested companies can now sign up on the website for a free trial account which offers 10,000 on-demand requests and unlimited access to a 30-day Snapshot. 

Google and the Wikimedia Foundation have worked together on a number of projects and initiatives to enhance knowledge distribution to the world. Content from Wikimedia projects helps power some of Google’s features, including being one of several data sources that show up in its knowledge panels. Wikimedia Enterprise will help make the content sourcing process more efficient. Tim Palmer, Managing Director, Search Partnerships at Google said, “Wikipedia is a unique and valuable resource, created freely for the world by its dedicated volunteer community. We have long supported the Wikimedia Foundation in pursuit of our shared goals of expanding knowledge and information access for people everywhere. We look forward to deepening our partnership with Wikimedia Enterprise, further investing in the long-term sustainability of the foundation and the knowledge ecosystem it continues to build.”

Internet Archive is a long-standing partner to the Wikimedia Foundation and the broader free knowledge movement. Their product, the Wayback Machine, has been used to fix more than 9 million broken links on Wikipedia. Wikimedia Enterprise is provided free of cost to the nonprofit to further support their mission to digitize knowledge sources. Mark Graham, Director of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shared, “The Wikimedia Foundation and the Internet Archive are long-term partners in the mission to provide universal and free access to knowledge. By drawing from a real time feed of newly-added links and references in Wikipedia sites – in all its languages, we can now archive more of the Web more quickly and reliably.”

Wikimedia Enterprise is an opt-in, commercial product. Within a year of its commercial launch, it is covering its current operating costs and with a growing list of users exploring the product. All Wikimedia projects, including the suite of publicly-available datasets, tools, and APIs the Wikimedia Foundation offers will continue to be available for free use to all users. 

The creation of Wikimedia Enterprise arose, in part, from the recent Movement Strategy – the global, collaborative strategy process to direct Wikipedia’s future by the year 2030 devised side-by-side with movement volunteers. By making Wikimedia content easier to discover, find, and share, the product speaks to the two key pillars of the 2030 strategy recommendations: advancing knowledge equity and knowledge as a service. 

Interested companies are encouraged to visit the Wikimedia Enterprise website for more information on the product offering and features, as well as to sign up for their free account. 

About the Wikimedia Foundation 

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

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

For more information on Wikimedia Enterprise:

• Website
• Product specific explainers
• Logos (SVG & PNG)
• Homepage on wiki

The Internet Archive discovers in real-time when WordPress blogs publish a new post, and when Wikipedia articles reference new sources. How does that work?

Wikipedia

Wikipedia, and its sister projects such as Wiktionary and Wikidata, run on the MediaWiki open-source software. One of its core features is “Recent changes”. This enables the Wikipedia community to monitor site activity in real-time. We use it to facilitate anti-spam, counter-vandalism, machine learning, and many more quality and research efforts.

MediaWiki’s built-in REST API exposes this data in machine-readable form to query (or poll). For wikipedia.org, we have an additional RCFeed plugin that broadcasts events to the stream.wikimedia.org service (docs).

The service implements the HTTP Server-Sent Events protocol (SSE). Most programming languages have an SSE client via a popular package. Most exciting to me, though, is the original SSE client: the EventSource API — built straight into the browser.¹ This makes cool demos possible, getting started with only the following JavaScript:

new EventSource('https://stream.wikimedia.org/…');

And from the command-line, with cURL:

$ curl 'https://stream.wikimedia.org/v2/stream/recentchange'

event: message
id: …
data: {"$schema":…,"meta":…,"type":"edit","title":…}

…

WordPress

WordPress played a major role in the rise of the blogosphere. In particular, ping servers (and pingbacks²), helped the early blogging community with discovery. The idea: your website notifies a ping server over a standardized protocol. The ping server in turn notifies feed reader services (Feedbin, Feedly), aggregators (FeedBurner), podcast directories, search engines, and more.³

Ping servers today implement the weblogsCom interface (specification), introduced in 2001 and based on the XML-RPC protocol.⁴ The default ping server in WordPress is Automattic’s Ping-O-Matic, which in turn powers the WordPress.com Firehose.

This firehose is a Jabber/XMPP server at xmpp.wordpress.com:8008. It provides events about blog posts published in real-time, from any WordPress site. Both WordPress.com and self-hosted ones.⁵ The firehose is also available in as HTTP stream.

$ curl -vi xmpp.wordpress.com:8008/posts.org.json # self-hosted
{ "published":"2022-06-05T21:26:09Z",
  "verb":"post",
  "generator":{…},
  "actor":{…},
  "target":{"objectType":"blog",…,},
  "object":{"objectType":"article",…}
}
{ … }

$ curl -vi xmpp.wordpress.com:8008/posts.json # WordPress.com
{ … }

Internet Archive

It might be surprising, but the Internet Archive does not try to index the entire Internet. This in contrast to commercial search engines.

The Internet Archive consists of bulk datasets from curated sources (“collections”). Collections are often donated by other organizations, and go beyond capturing web pages. They can also include books, music,⁶, and software.⁷ Any captured web pages are additionally surfaced via the Wayback Machine interface.

Perhaps you’ve used the “Save Page Now” feature, where you can manually submit URLs to capture. While also represented by a collection, these actually go to the Wayback Machine first, and appear in bulk as part of the collection later.

The Common Crawl and Wide Crawl collections represent traditional crawlers. These starts with a seed list, and go breadth-first to every site it finds (within a certain global and per-site depth limit). Such crawl can take months to complete, and captures a portion of the web from a particular period in time — regardless of whether a page was indexed before. Other collection are more narrow in focus, e.g. regularly crawl a news site and capture any articles not previously indexed.

Wikipedia collection

One such collection is Wikipedia Outlinks.⁸ This collection is fed several times a day with bulk crawls of new URLs. The URLs are extracted from recently edited or created Wikipedia articles, as discovered via the events from stream.wikimedia.org (Source code: crawling-for-nomore404).

Last month, I edited the VodafoneZiggo article on Wikipedia. My edit added several new citations. The articles I cited were from several years ago, and most already made their way into the Wayback Machine by other means. Among my citations was a 2010 article from an Irish news site (rtl.ie). I searched for it on archive.org and no snapshots existed of that URL.

A day later I searched again, and there it was!

I should note that, while the snapshot was uploaded a day later, the crawling occurred in real-time. I published my edit to Wikipedia on May 30th, at 21:03:30 UTC. The snapshot of the referenced source article, was captured at 21:03:55 UTC. A mere 25 seconds later!

In addition to archiving citations for future use, Wikipedia also integrates with the Internet Archive in the present. The so-called InternetArchiveBot (source code) continously crawls Wikipedia, looking for “dead” links. When it finds one, it searches the Wayback Machine for a matching snapshot, preferring one taken on or near the date that the citation was originally added to Wikipedia. This is important for online citations, as web pages may change over time.

The bot then edits Wikipedia (example) to rescue the citation by filling in the archive link.

WordPress collection

The NO404-WP collection on archive.org works in a similar fashion. It is fed by a crawler that uses the WordPress Firehose (source code). The firehose, as described above, is pinged by individual WordPress sites after publishing a new post.

For example, this blog post by Chris. According to the post metadata, it was published at 12:00:42 UTC. And by 12:01:55, one minute later, it was captured.⁹

In addition to preserving blog posts, the NO404-WP collection goes a step further and also captures any new material your post links to. (Akin to Wikipedia citations!) For example, this css-tricks.com post links to file on GitHub inside the TT1 Blocks project. This deep link was not captured before and is unlikely to be picked up by regular crawling due to depth limits. It got captured and uploaded to the NO404-WP collection a few days later.

Further reading

• The Internet Archive Turns 20: Behind The Scenes, Forbes (Kalev Leetaru), 2016.
• Fixing Broken Links on the Internet, blog.archive.org (Alexis Rossi), 2013.
• ‘Save Page Now’ is New and Improved, blog.archive.org (Mark Graham), 2019.
• Early Macintosh Emulation Comes to the Archive, blog.archive.org (Jason Scott), 2017.
• 2,500 More MS-DOS Games at the Archive, blog.archive.org, 2019.

Footnotes:

07/06/2022-13/06/2022

Mapping

• Data curator arredond explained how working on map layers for the Felt company was an opportunity to find and correct tagging errors.
• In the fourth part of a series about the specific challenges of working with map data, Daniel Mescheder wrote about the importance of tracking changes.
• MarcoR noted that there are templates (KeyDescription and ValueDescription) in the OSM wiki that are used by taginfo to display some useful information to the user. Since the same information is included in the data element associated with the feature page, some wiki users in good faith truncate these templates to their minimum (e.g. ‘{{KeyDescription}}’), preventing taginfo from retrieving the data.
• willkmis shared a personal view on urban road classification from a North American perspective.
• The proposal for county, city and local highway networks in the United States was approved with 17 votes for, 0 votes against and 2 abstentions.

Community

• Amanda McCann wrote about the new moderator team and etiquette guidelines for the talk and osmf-talk mail lists.
• Amanda’s work report for May 2022 is available online.
• The OpenStreetMap Taiwan Community (OSMTW) gathered for its second workshop. Whether participating on-site or online, the participants worked very hard to map on OpenStreetMap or uploaded related images to Wikimedia Commons. Even during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Taiwan, there were two geographic teachers who attended the workshop to learn more about OpenStreetMap, and how to use OpenStreetMap in the curriculum. OpenStreetMap Taiwan will use the resource supported by the alliance grant from the Wikimedia Foundation 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.
• Zhengyi Cao and Chris Park briefly reported on their projects in this year’s GSoC.
• Ed Freyfogle talked to Ilya Zverev about mapping in general and about Ilya’s new OSM editor Every Door, in Geomob Podcast #132.
• OSM Belgium has chosen Nicxon Piaso, from Papua New Guinea, as Mapper of the Month and introduced him in an interview.
• Pieter Vander Vennet wrote about educational facilities, the current way of tagging them, and examined how to converge towards unified tagging of schools. Previous discussions on the subject and the difficulty in unifying even a simple country are reported by other contributors.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Paul Norman pointed out the North American capacity issues with pyrene, the only US render server. It looks like Amazon may help with the server problem.
• Simon Poole shared his insights about the limits and possibilities of reaching a EU-wide General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR)-compatible OSM world.

Local chapter news

• There are still places available > at the OSM-FOSSGIS community meeting on the weekend of 1 to 3 July at the Linuxhotel in Essen. Travel is at your own expense; accommodation and meals will be provided by the the FOSSGIS Association, the German regional representation of OSM.

Education

• Anne-Karoline Distel shared a new video on the topic ‘Adding roads to hiking route relations’.
• Daniel Capilla presented > a brief exposition of the possibilities offered by the OpenStreetMap data mining tool for those who wish to collaborate in the task of field verification of recycling containers in the municipality of Malaga, based on the key check_date and using the overpass turbo query wizard.

OSM research

• Veniamin Veselovsky, Dipto Sarkar, Jennings Anderson and Robert Soden published a scientific paper about the development of an automated technique for identifying corporate mapping in OpenStreetMap.

Maps

• Christoph Hormann published the third and fourth parts of a series about the depiction of trees in maps.
• Holocrypto provides OSM Planet, Europe and Netherlands vectorial MBTiles for personal or educational use. The MBtiles packages are updated regularly.
• Neue Züricher Zeitung is publishing an OSM-based daily updated interactive map of developments in the Ukraine war.

Software

• Grab launched GrabMaps, which aims to tap into the US$1 billion map and location-based services market in Southeast Asia. Grab still uses OpenStreetMap as its map base.

Did you know …

• … flipcoords, OpenCage’s new tool for reformatting coordinates to and from lat/lng to lng/lat or into named parameters?

Other “geo” things

• [1] You might think the whole world knows about OpenStreetMap, and then you read this light-bulb moment (aha moment) from Chaz Hutton on Twitter. ‘Shout out to Ed Freyfogle for getting me onto it’, Chaz comments on his new insight.
• Without words
• The European Space Agency has released > a three dimensional map of the Milky Way, including nearly two billion stars. It took ten years for the Gaia satellite, 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth, to collect the data and the mission will continue until 2025.
• About a hundred people were rescued > during a school trip this week in Kleinwalsertal, Austria. The teachers were apparently misguided by false information on the internet, leading the group onto the Heuberggrat path without warning them about its sheer difficulty.
• As TechCrunch reported, Russian tech giant Yandex has removed national borders from its map apps.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Arrondissement de Tours	La liberté numérique		2022-06-18
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第31回 妙法院		2022-06-18
新店區	OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團 #2 三峽-大溪踏查		2022-06-19
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-06-20
Arlon	EPN d’Arlon – Atelier ouvert OpenStreetMap – Initiation		2022-06-21
Kaiserslautern	Erfassung von Barrieren in Kaiserslautern		2022-06-21
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle Lyon		2022-06-21
	152. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-06-21
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-06-22
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-06-21
	TeachOSM Map-Along		2022-06-22
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-06-21
Manila	Making OSM a Safer Space for LGBTQIA+ Mapper – An Intro to SOGIESC (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression, and Sex Characteristics) and How to be a better Ally?	✓	2022-06-22
Washington	OpenStreetMap US Mappy Hour	✓	2022-06-23
Roma Capitale	Incontro dei mappatori romani e laziali		2022-06-22
Kaiserslautern	Erfassung von Barrieren in Kaiserslautern		2022-06-23
Oriental Mindoro	Open Mapping Hub Asia Pacific’s Map and Chat Hour (PRIDE Celebration)	✓	2022-06-24
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-06-24
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2022-06-25
	Tanzania Mapping Groups June Mapathon		2022-06-25
Arlon	EPN d’Arlon – Atelier ouvert OpenStreetMap – Contribution		2022-06-28
Hlavní město Praha	MSF Missing Maps CZ Mapathon 2022 #2	Prague, KPMG office (Florenc)		2022-06-28
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-06-30
Essen	17. OSM-FOSSGIS-Communitytreffen		2022-07-01 – 2022-07-03
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-07-06
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-07-05
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-07-07

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, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Sammyhawkrad, Strubbl, TheSwavu, derFred.

Maria Murad decided to take Heather Sharkey’s course at the University of Pennsylvania because it involved learning how to write a Wikipedia article.

“I was already working for my school newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, and I wanted to explore more avenues that allowed me to create short form, accessible content on important topics,” Maria explains. “I find that academic articles can be pretty inaccessible for most. Wikipedia or news articles are more accessible to the masses. I know when I want to learn more about something, the first thing I do is search it on Wikipedia. This course felt like an opportunity to have a meaningful impact on a platform that virtually everyone uses to learn about new topics.”

The assignment provided a meaningful impact for Wikipedia’s readers — but also to Maria herself. Dr. Sharkey had provided a list of women connected to the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (better known as the Penn Museum) as potential subjects for their Wikipedia assignment. One name on the list was Florence Shotridge, or Kaatxwaaxsnéi, a Native Alaskan Tlingit ethnographer, museum educator, and weaver who worked at the Penn Museum for several years. There was little to no information online about her. Intrigued, Maria set out to research her.

“I took a lot of trips to the Museum Archives and learned that she was one of the first American Indians  to lead an anthropological expedition (alongside her husband), an excellent Chilkat weaver, and a museum educator guide to schoolchildren who would visit the museum,” Maria says. “Her husband, Louis Shotridge, already had a Wikipedia article and there was a lot of information about him at the Museum, but it seemed like Florence’s legacy was mostly invisible.”

Maria made it more visible by creating her biography on Wikipedia. But the assignment inspired Maria further: She also made Florence Shotridge the focus of her senior thesis, including creating a short documentary film about her life.

“I think one of the best skills I gained from writing for Wikipedia was the ability to succinctly synthesize various sources,” Maria says. “Since little was written about most of these women before, I had to combine primary research I discovered in the Museum archives with object histories in the Museum with brief mentions in academic articles. I had to marry a variety of sources together in a clear and accessible way in order to publish it on Wikipedia. I think this is a very important skill to have in academic writing.”

It’s a skill Maria is now putting to use. A Kentucky native, she graduated from Penn in 2021. Now, she’s studying Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology in a master’s program at the University of Oxford. While Oxford is keeping her busy, she hopes to get back to editing Wikipedia soon, especially creating new articles about women.

“Though supplementing details and information on extant articles was a worthwhile and rewarding task, it felt very special to contribute something new to the platform that would lead to so many more people learning about important women in Penn’s history that would have never known about them before,” says Maria.

To learn more about the Wikipedia Student Program, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Image credit: Bain News Service, publisher, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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

Incidents

By golly, we've had quite the month! 10 documented incidents, which is more than three times the two-year median of 3. The last time we experienced ten or more incidents in one month, was June 2019 when we had eleven (Incident graphs, Excellence monthly of June 2019).

I'd like to draw your attention to something positive. As you read the below, take note of incidents that did not impact public services, and did not have lasting impact or data loss. For example, the Apache incident benefited from PyBal's automatic health-based depooling. The deployment server incident recovered without loss thanks to Bacula. The Etcd incident impact was limited by serving stale data. And, the Hadoop incident recovered by resuming from Kafka right where it left off.

2022-05-01 etcd
Impact: For 2 hours, Conftool could not sync Etcd data between our core data centers. Puppet and some other internal services were unavailable or out of sync. The issue was isolated, with no impact on public services.

2022-05-02 deployment server
Impact: For 4 hours, we could not update or deploy MediaWiki and other services, due to corruption on the active deployment server. No impact on public services.

2022-05-05 site outage
Impact: For 20 minutes, all wikis were unreachable for logged-in users and non-cached pages. This was due to a GlobalBlocks schema change causing significant slowdown in a frequent database query.

2022-05-09 Codfw confctl
Impact: For 5 minutes, all web traffic routed to Codfw received error responses. This affected central USA and South America (local time after midnight). The cause was human error and lack of CLI parameter validation.

2022-05-09 exim-bdat-errors
Impact: During five days, about 14,000 incoming emails from Gmail users to wikimedia.org were rejected and returned to sender.

2022-05-21 varnish cache busting
Impact: For 2 minutes, all wikis and services behind our CDN were unavailable to all users.

2022-05-24 failed Apache restart
Impact: For 35 minutes, numerous internal services that use Apache on the backend were down. This included Kibana (logstash) and Matomo (piwik). For 20 of those minutes, there was also reduced MediaWiki server capacity, but no measurable end-user impact for wiki traffic.

2022-05-25 de.wikipedia.org
Impact: For 6 minutes, a portion of logged-in users and non-cached pages experienced a slower response or an error. This was due to increased load on one of the databases.

2022-05-26 m1 database hardware
Impact: For 12 minutes, internal services hosted on the m1 database (e.g. Etherpad) were unavailable or at reduced capacity.

2022-05-31 Analytics Hadoop failure
Impact: For 1 hour, all HDFS writes and reads were failing. After recovery, ingestion from Kafka resumed and caught up. No data loss or other lasting impact on the Data Lake.

Incident follow-up

Recently completed incident follow-up:

Invalid confctl selector should either error out or select nothing
Filed by Amir (@Ladsgroup) after the confctl incident this past month. Giuseppe (@Joe) implemented CLI parameter validation to prevent human error from causing a similar outage in the future.

Backup opensearch dashboards data
Filed back in 2019 by Filippo (@fgiunchedi). The OpenSearch homepage dashboard (at logstash.wikimedia.org) was accidentally deleted last month. Bryan (@bd808) tracked down its content and re-created it. Cole (@colewhite) and Jaime (@jcrespo) worked out a strategy and set up automated backups going forward.

Remember to review and schedule Incident Follow-up work in Phabricator! These are preventive measures and tech debt mitigations written down after an incident is concluded. Read more about past incidents at Incident status on Wikitech.

💡Did you know?: The form on the Incident status page now includes a date, to more easily create backdated reports.

Trends

In May we discovered 28 new production errors, of which 20 remain unresolved and have come with us to June.

Last month the workboard totalled 292 tasks still open from prior months. Since the last edition, we completed 11 tasks from previous months, gained 11 additional errors from May (some of May was counted in last month), and have 7 fresh errors in the current month of June. As of today, the workboard houses 299 open production error tasks (spreadsheet, phab report).

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

Thanks!

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

Until next time,

– Timo Tijhof

Wikimedia has many entrance points for developers and technical contributors. Our technical community includes people with a wide range of skills, experience, and interests—from students learning to build their first app, to professional software engineers with deep knowledge of MediaWiki. Many developers use APIs to access free knowledge content, and many volunteers contribute their technical skills to Wikimedia open source projects.

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation Developer Advocacy team is launching a new, centralized entry point for finding technical documentation and community resources: the Wikimedia Developer Portal. Just like the community itself, our technical documentation takes many forms and resides in many different places. From mediawiki.org to GitHub to Wikitech, the key information developers need may exist in wiki pages, code repositories, websites, and more. This complex landscape can make it hard to find the information you need. The goal of the the Developer Portal project was to make it easier for developers and technical contributors to:

• Find the information they need to achieve a certain task.
• Discover available tools and technologies.
• Learn how to get started in Wikimedia technical areas.

Understanding audiences and their documentation needs

Part of the complexity of Wikimedia technical documentation comes from the multiple audiences it serves. The new Developer Portal seeks to support the following types of users:

Content reusers

Developers who want to use Wikimedia content in their projects.

Data consumers and researchers

Data scientists, machine learning engineers, and researchers who want to use Wikimedia data in their projects.

Tool developers

Wikimedians who have created or contributed to Wikimedia tools.

New tool developers

Wikimedians who are interested in learning to create, contribute to, and use Wikimedia tools, usually to solve a problem they face in maintaining their local wiki.

Open source contributors

Developers who want to use their skills to contribute to Wikimedia technical projects.

Learners

Students who are learning programming and are interested in Wikimedia technical projects.

Each of these audiences has different (but often overlapping) goals, motivations, and tasks to complete. They have different information needs and may rely on different types of documentation. How can we help all these types of users find what they need without risking information overload?

To begin, we talked with stakeholders, gathered community feedback, and reviewed previous research about developer documentation hubs. We then completed multiple rounds of user research to identify the major user journeys for each audience. A user journey captures the steps to complete a specific task. For example, the user journey below illustrates the steps a new developer might take to start contributing code to a Wikimedia open source project:

Applying user journeys to guide our content strategy enabled us to identify the key docs necessary for each step in the journey. Key docs might be landing pages for a major technical area, tutorials for a given topic, or overviews that explain essential concepts. 

Improving technical docs and processes

This project involved an entirely new user research process for our team. We worked with the Wikimedia Foundation Design Strategy team to design a research study and recruit a diverse group of users to test the final version of the site. We learned a lot from this process! Here are some key takeaways:

• User types overlap more than we expected.
• People have very different navigation behaviors: some use menus heavily, others use page content, and sometimes that behavior changes based on context. Offering multiple paths to information is important.
• Users appreciate the option to view content in languages other than English, but most developers say they would still use the site in English because that’s the language of most technical content. 

Helping users discover key technical docs is only part of the solution; the information in those docs must also be reliable, updated, and user-friendly.  To ensure that the Developer Portal links to high-quality documentation, we developed a documentation review process.  It currently includes checklists to standardize documentation reviews and make it simpler for anyone to help improve documentation. We’ve used this process to review and improve over 20 key docs so far, and we’re continuing to streamline and scale the process. While work in this area continues, today’s launch of the Developer Portal is an exciting step towards better empowering developers to share in the sum of all knowledge.

Learn more

• Check out the new Developer Portal to learn something new or find ways to contribute.  
• Learn more about how we designed and built the portal: visit the companion post on the TechBlog.

Image credits: Mam’Gobozi Design Factory (MDF), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The technical community now has a new tool to discover information. The Developer Portal is a centralized entry point to help you:

• Find the key documentation you need for common developer tasks.
• Discover available tools and technologies.
• Learn how to get started in Wikimedia technical areas.

For a general overview of this project, see the companion post on Diff; the following post focuses on details of the Developer Portal relevant to technical audiences.

Design principles

At its core, the Developer Portal is an index of categorized links to key sources of technical information. These sources are hosted primarily on wikis—the portal contains no actual documentation. 

Technical writers, developer advocates, software engineers, and designers worked together to create the Developer Portal, with lots of input and feedback from the community. We did user research, analyzed documents, created a content strategy, and implemented the portal as a static site. 

In designing the Developer Portal, we followed these principles:

• Progressive disclosure: Avoid information overload by limiting the amount of content on each page. Provide only relevant, contextualized information at each step.
• Well-lit paths: Focus on the most important and reliable resources. Do not attempt to index documentation for all Wikimedia technologies. Prioritize content that lowers barriers to entry.
• Inclusivity: Support the widest set of developers (See the Diff blog post for details.) This includes providing translations, and making the portal accessible and usable on low-speed internet connections.

Paths to explore

Browse tutorials

Tutorials are crucial to help developers get started with Wikimedia technology, but it can be hard to find tutorials when they live on different wikis.  The Developer Portal makes it easier to browse available tutorials:

• Get started building tools and bots that interact with Wikimedia projects 
• Learn to use Wikimedia APIs to access wiki content or data

Explore by programming language

In feedback sessions and user testing, developers often express a desire to browse documentation and projects by programming language. The Developer Portal provides several paths to do that:

• Developers looking to contribute to Wikimedia open source projects can browse projects by programming language. The featured projects are a subset of projects that are written in popular programming languages, actively maintained, and have clear contributing guidelines.
• Developers who want to browse client libraries by programming language or explore the codebase by language can use the portal to quickly navigate to key wiki pages and repositories.

Find community and educational resources

It can be hard to keep up with all the events, news, and opportunities in the technical community! The Developer Portal brings together some essential resources to help people stay connected:

• Events listings for different technical audiences
• Learning and mentorship opportunities
• Updates and news about technical topics

Technical architecture

The navigation-focused design of the portal made its implementation different from a standard, content-focused website. We wanted to use a static site generator to simplify the process of constructing and rendering the portal, but we didn’t want to create many pages with paragraphs of written content. Instead, a single page on the portal displays a collection of links to wiki pages or other key technical resources. We wanted to maintain only a single description of each key technical resource, and be able to easily combine or transclude those units to create modular collections of links.

The Developer Portal site is generated by MkDocs using the Material for MkDocs theme. We built custom plugins to integrate with translatewiki.net and to render markdown pages based on categorized sets of links, which are described in YAML files.  For more implementation details, see the Developer Portal docs on mediawiki.org.

Ongoing and future work

So far, the portal is 100% translated into French, Macedonian, and Turkish. If you can help add translations in more languages, visit the project’s page on translatewiki.net!

In the future, we plan to do more user testing in languages other than English, and we’d also like to test with users of assistive technology.

A major part of this project includes reviewing and updating the key documents linked from the Developer Portal.  We’re continuing that work into the coming year, and also investigating how to improve and scale the process.  Helping the technical community find documentation is just the first step—the larger goal is to empower everyone to contribute to and benefit from high-quality, reliable information about Wikimedia technical projects.

Learn more

• For a more general overview of this project, see the companion post on Diff.
• To propose or contribute code, content, or translations for the Developer Portal, see the docs on mediawiki.org.
• The source code is available on Gerrit.

Upload your photographs during June to be in with a chance of winning country and national prizes.

This year, for the second time, Wales is taking part in the international photography competition ‘Wiki Loves Earth’ organised by the Wikimedia movement. Founded 9 years ago as a focus for nature heritage, the competition aims to raise awareness of protected sites. The Welsh campaign is also organised by Wikimedia UK, the National Library of Wales and WiciMon.

Robin Owain who leads the Wikimedia UK projects across Wales said “This year, our key supporters include the Welsh Government, the Ramblers Association and all three National Parks! We are calling on people across Wales to share their photographs of nature: flora, fauna and fungi!”

This is one of the largest photography competitions in the world focusing on National Parks, Sites of Special Scientific Interest and all protected areas. Robin explained “The biodiversity and geology of Wales is unique, and this competition allows Welsh photographers to share our protected areas on a world stage. 

Other organisations who will be supporting this exciting competition include Natural Resources Wales, all three National Parks: Eryri (Snowdonia), Pembrokeshire and the Brecon Beacons, Ramblers (Cymru), and both Edward Llwyd and Llên Natur  nature societies.

Examples of past winners can be seen at http://wikilovesearth.org and last year’s Welsh winners can be found here.

Any photographs you have taken in the past can be uploaded during June, with prizes at both country and national level to the winners. Robin added “The competition is open to everyone. We play rugby and football on the world stage, therefore we ask our friends, volunteers and staff to take photographs on that international stage, and at the same time exhibit their photographs of our diverse countryside.”

Read more about Wiki Loves Earth 2022 in Wales here on Wikimedia Commons.

More on Wiki Loves Earth can be found here.

Further information & images press@wikimedia.org.uk

About Wikimedia UK here

The post Wales and international photography competition #WikiLovesEarth appeared first on WMUK.

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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

• All wikis can now use Kartographer maps. Kartographer maps now also work on pages with pending changes. [1][2]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 June (calendar).
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 14 June at 06:00 UTC (targeted wikis). [3]
• Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get “Add a link” (Abkhazian Wikipedia, Achinese Wikipedia, Adyghe Wikipedia, Afrikaans Wikipedia, Akan Wikipedia, Alemannisch Wikipedia, Amharic Wikipedia, Aragonese Wikipedia, Old English Wikipedia, Aramaic Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, Asturian Wikipedia, Atikamekw Wikipedia, Avaric Wikipedia, Aymara Wikipedia, Azerbaijani Wikipedia, South Azerbaijani Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [4]
• The New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at Commons, Wikidata, and some other wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in Preferences. [5][6]

Future meetings

• The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place today (13 June). The following meetings will take place on: 28 June, 12 July, 26 July.

Future changes

• By the end of July, the Vector 2022 skin should be ready to become the default across all wikis. Discussions on how to adjust it to the communities’ needs will begin in the next weeks. It will always be possible to revert to the previous version on an individual basis. Learn more.

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

By Slavina Stefanova, Wikimedia Cloud Services

The mwsql library is the latest addition to MediaWiki-utilities, a collection of lightweight Python tools for extracting and processing MediaWiki data. It provides a simple interface for downloading, inspecting, and transforming SQL dump files into other more user-friendly formats such as Pandas dataframes or CSV. mwsql is available through PyPI and can be installed using pip.

Why mwsql?

Data from Wikimedia projects is open-source licensed and publicly available in a variety of formats, such as:

• Data dumps in SQL, XML, and HTML format
• Database replicas thorough Toolforge, PAWS, or Quarry
• API endpoints

While utilities for working with most of these data sources have existed for quite some time, for example mwapi and mwxml, no such tool existed for SQL dumps. Because of this gap, developing mwsql was proposed as a joint Outreachy project between the Research and Technical Engagement teams during the May-August round of 2021.

SQL dumps

Before diving into exploring the different features of mwsql, let’s take a look at what a raw SQL dump file looks like.

The dump contains information related to the database table structure, as well as the actual table contents (records) in the form of a list of SQL statements. There is also some additional metadata. Database dumps are most often used for backing up a database so that its contents can be restored in the event of data loss. They are not designed to be worked with ‘as is’, e.g., parsed, filtered or searched. However, having the ability to access data directly from the dumps allows offline processing and lowers the barrier for users with only basic Python knowledge, such as data scientists, researchers, or journalists because the only prerequisite is basic Python knowledge.

mwsql features

mwsql main features are:

• easily downloading SQL dump files
• parsing the database table into a Dump object
• allowing fast exploration of the table’s metadata and contents
• transforming the SQL dump into other more convenient data structures and file formats

Use mwsql with a wiki data dump

The rest of this tutorial demonstrates each of these features through a concrete example hosted on GitHub. You can clone the Jupyter notebook to go through the example of downloading dump files, parsing the SQL dump file, exploring the data, and writing to CSV.

You’re welcome to clone, fork, or adapt the Jupyter notebook containing the source code for this tutorial to meet your needs.

Future of mwsql

As many of the dump files are huge (>10GB), having to download them before being able to process their contents can be time-consuming. This is less of a problem in a WMF-hosted environment, such as PAWS, where the dumps are available through a public directory. Having the opportunity to inspect a file before committing to download all of it, as well as being able to process it as it is downloading (streaming), would be a huge performance improvement for users working in non-WMF environments.

mwsql project info

The project repository is hosted on GitHub. Anyone is welcome to submit a patch, file a bug report, request new features, and help improve the existing documentation. Have you used mwsql to do something interesting with Wikimedia data? Leave a post on this Talk page, and together we can think of a way to showcase your work.

Further reading

This tutorial explains how you can use mwsql along with other tools from the Mediawiki-utilities suite and Pandas to explore how mobile editing has evolved over time.

13 June 2022, San Francisco  — The Wikimedia Foundation today announced the appointment of Selena Deckelmann as Chief Product and Technology Officer. Selena is currently serving as Senior Vice President of Mozilla, where she was responsible for Firefox. She will officially join on August 1, 2022.

Selena will lead the product and technology teams at the Wikimedia Foundation. These teams support the technology infrastructure and innovation that powers Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, one of the most visited websites in the world with more than 16 billion pageviews per month. They also enable more than 300,000 global volunteers to edit Wikimedia projects each month. 

“Selena has a proven track record of delivering results by enabling individuals and teams to tackle unique and often complex challenges,” said Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. “She has dedicated her career to open source technologies for empowerment and inclusion.” 

At Mozilla, where she has been for nearly a decade, Selena currently leads the Firefox organization of more than 400 people responsible for all Firefox product and technology functions including desktop, mobile, web platform, and browser services. She oversaw some of the company’s most significant achievements including performance projects like Quantum Flow, architectural changes like Project Fission, key features like Enhanced Tracking Protection and Total Cookie Protection, and services such as Firefox Monitor. In her nine years at Mozilla, Selena held various other roles including Vice President for Firefox Desktop, Senior Director for Web Platform Engineering and Gecko Runtime, and Senior Manager for Gecko Security Engineering. 

Selena also brings experience from her previous roles as co-founder of Prime Radiant, a software as a service business that explored how to improve business processes at scale with checklist automation software, and as Consulting Director of Development for The Ada Initiative, an organization that was dedicated to increasing the participation of women in open source and technology communities. She was a major contributor to PostgreSQL, one of the largest free and open source databases in the world. 

“Open collaboration produces better solutions for the world, and technology is a critical enabler of making this true,” said Selena. “I look forward to contributing to Wikimedia’s inspiring free knowledge mission.”

As Chief Product and Technology Officer, Selena will work with Wikimedia Foundation staff, technical contributors, volunteer developers, researchers, and communities to support Wikimedia’s 2030 Movement Strategy to advance free and open access to knowledge. The majority of the Foundation is focused on product and technology development in service of our mission.

13 June 2022, San Francisco  — The Wikimedia Foundation today announced the appointment of Selena Deckelmann as Chief Product and Technology Officer. Selena is currently serving as Senior Vice President of Mozilla, where she was responsible for Firefox. She will officially join on August 1, 2022.

Selena will lead the product and technology teams at the Wikimedia Foundation. These teams support the technology infrastructure and innovation that powers Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, one of the most visited websites in the world with more than 16 billion pageviews per month. They also enable more than 300,000 global volunteers to edit Wikimedia projects each month. 

“Selena has a proven track record of delivering results by enabling individuals and teams to tackle unique and often complex challenges,” said Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. “She has dedicated her career to open source technologies for empowerment and inclusion.” 

At Mozilla, where she has been for nearly a decade, Selena currently leads the Firefox organization of more than 400 people responsible for all Firefox product and technology functions including desktop, mobile, web platform, and browser services. She oversaw some of the company’s most significant achievements including performance projects like Quantum Flow, architectural changes like Project Fission, key features like Enhanced Tracking Protection and Total Cookie Protection, and services such as Firefox Monitor. In her nine years at Mozilla, Selena held various other roles including Vice President for Firefox Desktop, Senior Director for Web Platform Engineering and Gecko Runtime, and Senior Manager for Gecko Security Engineering. 

Selena also brings experience from her previous roles as co-founder of Prime Radiant, a software as a service business that explored how to improve business processes at scale with checklist automation software, and as Consulting Director of Development for The Ada Initiative, an organization that was dedicated to increasing the participation of women in open source and technology communities. She was a major contributor to PostgreSQL, one of the largest free and open source databases in the world. 

“Open collaboration produces better solutions for the world, and technology is a critical enabler of making this true,” said Selena. “I look forward to contributing to Wikimedia’s inspiring free knowledge mission.”

As Chief Product and Technology Officer, Selena will work with Wikimedia Foundation staff, technical contributors, volunteer developers, researchers, and communities to support Wikimedia’s 2030 Movement Strategy to advance free and open access to knowledge. The majority of the Foundation is focused on product and technology development in service of our mission.

• Albania report: Summer of Wikivoyage 2022
• Argentina report: Face-to-face and virtual events on May
• Australia report: Over 1000 references added in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand for #1Lib1Ref
• Belgium report: New Wikidata Property
• Brazil report: Wiki Loves Espírito Santo is a success
• Estonia report: From university to library
• Finland report: Photowalks in Southern Finland, spring 2022
• France report: International Museum Day 2022
• India report: Digitization of Tibetan Buddhist canons, The International Museum Day 2022 Wikidata Competition
• Italy report: May in and for museums
• Kosovo report: Cooperation with the National Gallery of Kosova and Summer of Wikivoyage 2022
• Malaysia report: WikiGap Malaysia 2022 @ Kuala Lumpur Library
• New Zealand report: Pacific Arts Aotearoa Wikiproject, Auckland Museum’s Exploratory Study and Report back on #1Lib1Ref
• Poland report: Wikipedian in residence in the National Museum in Cracow; Training at the Wawel Royal Castle National Art Collection; How can we make GLAM’s digital resources more reusable in education?; The International Museum Day 2022 Wikidata Competition
• Serbia report: New GLAM brochure and Wikilive 2022
• Sweden report: Rembrandt and others – drawings from the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm; Stockholm Museum of Women’s History; The map book of Heinrich Thome; Sörmland Museum; Wikidata competition – International Museum Day 2022
• Switzerland report: Diversity in GLAM Program
• UK report: Khalili Collections
• Uruguay report: Wikimedistas de Uruguay report: 1bib1ref, Museum of Natural History, and more!
• USA report: Hackathons and Edit-a-thons
• Content Partnerships Hub report: International Energy Agency share their knowledge and graphics on Wikipedia
• Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: Uploading files to Wikimedia Commons with OpenRefine: looking for test uploads!
• WMF GLAM report: Results from 1Lib1Ref May 2022
• Calendar: June’s GLAM events

On 6 June 2022, the Wikimedia Foundation filed an appeal to challenge a Moscow Court’s decision that the Foundation committed an administrative offense by failing to remove “prohibited” information on Wikipedia, largely related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In its appeal, the Wikimedia Foundation argues that information on Wikipedia should be protected by freedom of expression and does not constitute disinformation, as found by the Court. The information at issue is fact-based and verified by volunteers who continuously edit and improve articles on the site; its removal would therefore constitute a violation of people’s rights to free expression and access to knowledge.

The court fined the Foundation a total of 5 million rubles (the equivalent of approximately $65,000 USD) for refusing to remove information from Russian Wikipedia articles: Russian Invasions of Ukraine (2022), Black powder, Battle for Kyiv, War Crimes during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Shelling of Hospital in Mariupol, Bombing of the Mariupol Theater, Massacre in Bucha. The appeal comes on the heels of a growing number of requests by the Russian government to censor fact-based knowledge on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects amidst the government’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. 

According to the lower Court’s decision, the information on Wikipedia is considered disinformation, which poses risk of mass public disorder in Russia. Further, the Court declared that the Wikimedia Foundation is operating inside Russian territory, and would therefore be required to comply with Russian law. 

“This decision implies that well-sourced, verified knowledge on Wikipedia that is inconsistent with Russian government accounts constitutes disinformation,” said Stephen LaPorte, Associate General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. “The government is targeting information that is vital to people’s lives in a time of crisis. We urge the court to reconsider in favor of everyone’s rights to knowledge access and free expression.”  

This action is part of a growing trend of companies and websites being asked to set up legal entities in the country, thereby placing users, staff, and equipment under the authority of the Russian government, and making it easier to request content removal from their platforms. 

 In addition to arguing that the Russian government’s request to remove information from Wikimedia projects constitutes a violation of human rights, the Wikimedia Foundation appeal contends that Russia does not have jurisdiction over the Wikimedia Foundation. Describing Wikipedia as operating inside of Russian territory mischaracterizes the global nature of its model. Wikipedia is a global resource available in over 300 languages. All of its language editions, including Russian Wikipedia, are available to anyone in any country around the world. 

Russian-language Wikipedia is a crucial second draft of history, written by and for Russian speakers around the world who volunteer their time to make reliable, fact-checked information available to all. Blocking access to Wikipedia in Russia would deny more than 145 million people access to this vital information resource. Further, the articles flagged for removal uphold Wikipedia’s standards of neutrality, verifiability, and reliable secondary sources to ensure articles are based in fact. They are well-sourced, including citations to a variety of established news sources. The articles continue to be improved by Wikipedia volunteer editors from all over the world with more sources and up-to-date information.

The Wikimedia Foundation remains committed to defending the right of everyone to freely access and share knowledge. We have not complied with any orders from the Russian government to date, and will continue to stand by our mission to deliver free knowledge to the world. 

The Russian government will have an opportunity to make a filing in response to our appeal in the coming weeks. 

For more information, please see our previous statements on 1 March 2022 and 3 March 2022.

31/05/2022-06/06/2022

Mapping campaigns

• It is with great sadness that we learnt of the sudden death of Innocent Dibloni Soungalo, an OSM contributor from Burkina Faso. A geographer by training and a geomatician by profession, a former volunteer of the Francophonie in Senegal, Innocent had worked hard to strengthen OpenStreetMap in West Africa since his debut in 2015. From Cotonou to Dakar, via Ouagadougou, Bamako, Lomé or Bouaké, many people have benefited from his teachings and will mourn him. In his memory, the African OSM community has decided to map Gaoua, his home town.
• Christoffs reported that OSM Poland (OSMP) has recently established contacts with the blind community in Poland. This has identified their special needs and the potential for OSM support. The next step is to encourage contributors to pay special attention when mapping to tags that support the mobility of blind people.

Mapping

• French news agency Agence France Presse reported > about the colossal work of a volunteer team in Ukraine that is scanning buildings deemed of interest at a 5 mm resolution, both for historical and future rebuilding purposes. Similar methods had been used for the Notre-Dame de Paris’ cathedral in France, before the 2019 fire.
• Franjo Lukezic wrote a guide to making before-and-after GIFs for visualising OpenStreetMap editing sessions.
• The vote on the improved tagging of neighbourhood places (place=*) in Japan is open until Thursday 16 June.

Community

• French mapper Djiril shared their main takeaways after 1 month into OpenStreetMap. Future updates will be on Github > .
• François Lacombe posted > a call, on LinkedIn, asking for data about communications and power poles in France. Following a partnership between OpenStreetMap France and Enedis, the main French electric power distribution company, more than one million of the estimated total of 24 million poles have been mapped.
• The UN Mapper of the month for June is Yacouba Diarra, from Mali, a member of YouthMappers UnivSegou.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OSMF Board intends to change the requirements to become a normal foundation member to include that people must have edited on a minimum of 15 days first, and first registered as a mapper at least 3 months ago. The announcement triggered a lengthy discussion on osmf-talk which is still ongoing. Mikel Maron has summarised what is proposed here.
• Cristoffs wrote an open letter to the OSMF board, as a diary entry (following on from this issue), which attracted considerable comment, including from the EWG, who commented here, and indirectly from the repository author, here. The key request was that the style ought to reflect community requests for the display of new tags regardless of cartographic issues, and that the OSMF board (who currently don’t directly mandate what that style shows) should make that happen, due to the special status that the ‘standard’ style has (rendered by OSM itself, cached by Fastly, etc.). Topics covered also included the behaviour of style authors (and how issues there should be reported).
• The OSMF Engineering Working Group has commissioned Jochen Topf to write a report outlining the problems with the current OSM data model, their impact on OSM systems, and possible improvements. Steve Coast, founder of OSM, responded by saying that there is nothing to fix. If the discussion on Y Combinator is any guide, this is not a truth universally acknowledged.

Events

• The State of the Map Working Group is happy to announce that tickets and the programme are now accessible through the SotM 2022 website.

OSM research

• You can now find out about the four accepted student projects for the Google Summer of Code 2022.

Humanitarian OSM

• The HOT unSummit is offering travel funding for active HOT and humanitarian open mapping / open data contributors and community members to attend two of the conferences that they are supporting; FOSS4G and SOTM.

Maps

• The AdV working group Smart Mapping has developed a bilingual map (/), as an aid for refugees and as an experiment for future applications. More can be found about AdV projects at basemap.de > and AdV Smart Mapping.
• Andy Townsend (SomeoneElse) wrote a diary entry describing the recent style changes visible on the map here including the use of colours to differentiate tourist and mainline railway stations, locked gates, and better roadside cycleway and footpath name handling. Mostly these are done using lua tag transforms to keep the styling code simple.

switch2OSM

• Big Tech’s maps have led ride-sharing giant Grab astray. Grab is now building its own maps based on OSM and says it has become the largest contributor to OpenStreetMap in Southeast Asia.

Open Data

• Cristiano Giovando wrote about the current state of affairs with OpenAerialMap version 2.

Software

• OSMCha now allows users to search changesets that affect a certain OSM tag. For example: you can find changesets that created, modified or deleted restaurants. For more details, see the Development Seed blog post.
• OsmAnd invites you to celebrate 12 years with OsmAnd! You can share a photo with your trip story on Instagram with the hashtag #12YearsOsmAnd; OsmAnd will choose the best and award a prize.
• Sammyhawkrad built a simple tool to help OpenStreetMap contributors see statistics of their most common editing issues as flagged by Osmose.

Releases

• Eugene Kizevich outlined what’s new in version 4.2 of OsmAnd for Android. Besides an adaptation of the map style, new quick actions and recording widgets, the ‘OSM Mapper assistant’ option was split into separate options: fixme tags,note tags, icons at low zooms, and waterway tunnels.

OSM in the media

• French dataviz company WeDoData tweeted > about the Arte series Europe, a disrupted continent episode on people-driven solutions to European transportation issues. They explain how they used OpenStreetMap to fetch the bicycle network at a continental scale and computed its evolution since 2014.

Other “geo” things

• Jules Grandin has made > a series of maps comparing humans and different livestock populations in French departments using data > from the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (Insee).

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Nantes	State of the Map France 2022		2022-06-10 – 2022-06-12
Zürich	141. OSM-Stammtisch/Mappingparty		2022-06-11
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #41		2022-06-13
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2022-06-15
20095	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2022-06-14
Berlin	Missing Maps – GRC Online Mapathon		2022-06-14
Guadalajara	Curso Gratuito JOSM		2022-06-16
Arrondissement de Tours	La liberté numérique		2022-06-18
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第31回 妙法院		2022-06-18
新店區	OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團 #2 三峽-大溪踏查		2022-06-19
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-06-20
Arlon	EPN d’Arlon – Atelier ouvert OpenStreetMap – Initiation		2022-06-21
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-06-22
	152. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-06-21
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-06-21
	TeachOSM Map-Along		2022-06-22
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-06-21
Washington	OpenStreetMap US Mappy Hour	✓	2022-06-23
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-06-24
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2022-06-25
	Tanzania Mapping Groups June Mapathon		2022-06-25
Arlon	EPN d’Arlon – Atelier ouvert OpenStreetMap – Contribution		2022-06-28
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-06-30
Essen	17. OSM-FOSSGIS-Communitytreffen		2022-07-01 – 2022-07-03

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, Sammyhawkrad, SomeoneElse, Strubbl, TheSwavu, derFred, erenozdemir.

The contrast provided by Niethammer who looked at the birds on one side while ignoring inhumanity on the other provided novelist Arno Surminski with a title for his 2008 novel - Die Vogelwelt von Auschwitz - ie. the birdlife of Auschwitz.

G. Niethammer

Niethammer studied birds around Auschwitz and also shot ducks in numbers for himself and to supply the commandant of the camp Rudolf Höss (if the name does not mean anything please do go to the linked article / or search for the name online).  Upon the death of Niethammer, an obituary (open access PDF here) was published in the Ibis of 1975 - a tribute with little mention of the war years or the fact that he rose to the rank of Obersturmführer. The Bonn museum journal had a special tribute issue noting the works and influence of Niethammer. Among the many tributes is one by Hans Kumerloeve (starts here online). A subspecies of the common jay was named as Garrulus glandarius hansguentheri by Hungarian ornithologist Andreas Keve in 1967 after the first names of Kumerloeve and Niethammer. Fortunately for the poor jay, this name is a junior synonym of  G. g. anatoliae described by Seebohm in 1883.

Meanwhile inside Auschwitz, the Polish artist Wladyslaw Siwek was making sketches of everyday life  in the camp. After the war he became a zoological artist of repute. Unfortunately there is very little that is readily accessible to English readers on the internet (beyond the Wikipedia entry).

Siwek, artist who documented life at Auschwitz before working as a wildlife artist.

 

Hans Kumerloeve

Niethammer stands behind Salim Ali, 1967. International Ornithological Congress, 1967

• Erwin Stresemann (1889 - 1972)
• Friedrich Tischler (1881 - 1945)
• Lew Osipowitsch Belopolskij (1907 - 1990)
• Jurij Andrejewitsch Isakow (1912 - 1988)
• Veleslav Wahl (1922 -1950)
• Wladyslaw Rydzewski (1911 - 1980)
• Andrzej Dunajewski (1908 -1944)
• Günther Niethammer (1908 - 1974)
• Hans Kummerlöwe alias Kumerloeve (1903 -1995)
• Wladyslaw Siwek (1907 -1983)
• Wlodzimierz Graf Dzieduszycki (1885 - 1971)
• Ferdinand Pax (1885 -1964)
• Kazimierz Szarski (1904 -1960)
• Werner Klemm (1909 -1990)
• Boris Karlowitsch Stegmann (1898 -1975)
• Nikolaj Alexejewitsch Gladkow (1905 - 1975)
• Hong-Gu Won (1888 -1970) - came to learn of his son lost during partition via a Daurian starling that happened to be ringed by his son!
• Pyong-Oh Won (born 1926) son of previous
• Jean Delacour (1890 -1985)
• Kazimierz von Granöw Wodzicki (1900 - 1987)
• Nikolaj Wladimirowitsch Timofejew-Ressowski (1900 -1981)
• Hans Stubbe (1902 -1989)
• Konrad Lorenz (1903 -1989)
• Jan Sokolowski (1899 -1982)
• Roman Wojtusiak (1906 -1987)
• Bernhard Grzimek (1909 -1987)
• Hans Christian Johansen (1897 -1973)
• Wasilij Nikolajewitsch Skalon (1903 - 1976)
• Wolfgang Makatsch (1906 -1983)
• Tso-hsin Cheng (1906 -1998)
• Nikolaj Boew (1922 -1985)
• Hans Schildmacher (1907 -1976)
• Oleg Ismailowitsch Semenow-Tjan-Schanskij (1906 -1990)
• Alexander Bogdanowitsch Kistiakowskij (1904 - 1983)
• Heinrich Dathe (1910 -1991)
• Erich Rutschke (1926 -1999)
• Georgij Petrowitsch Dementjew (1898 - 1969)
• Alexander Nikolajewitsch Formosow (1899 - 1973)
• Pierre Pfeffer (1927 - 2016)
• Micha Jankowski (1842 - 1912)
• Alexander Michailowitsch Jankowski (1876 -1944)
• Jurij Michailowitsch Jankowski (1879 - 1956)
• Walerij Jurewitsch Jankowski (1911 -)
• Charles Vaurie (1906 -1975)
• Walter Beick (1883 - 1933)
• Richard Meinertzhagen (1878 -1967)
• Wilfried Przygodda (1916 -1991)
• Salim Ali (1896 -1987)
• Boris Michailowitsch Pavlov (1933 - 1994) 

SS-Sturmbannführer Schäfer at the head of the table in Lhasa

Issues arising from race and perceptions are of course not restricted to this period or region, one of the less glorious stories of the Smithsonian Institution concerns the honorary curator Robert Wilson Shufeldt (1850 – 1934), who, in the infamous Audubon affair, made his personal troubles with his second wife, a grand-daughter of Audubon, into one of race. He also wrote such books as America's Greatest Problem: The Negro (1915) in which we learn of the ideas of other scientists of the period like Edward Drinker Cope! Like many other obituaries, Shufeldt's is a classic whitewash.  

Even as recently as 2015, the University of Salzburg withdrew an honorary doctorate that they had given to the Nobel prize winning Konrad Lorenz for his support of the political setup and racial beliefs. It should not be that hard for scientists to figure out whether they are on the wrong side of history even if they are funded by the state. Perhaps salaried scientists in India would do well to look at the legal contracts they sign with their employers, especially the state, more carefully. The current rules make government employees less free than ordinary citizens but will the educated speak out or do they prefer shackling themselves. 

Postscripts:

• Mixing natural history with war sometimes led to tragedy for the participants as well. In the case of Dr Manfred Oberdörffer who used his cover as an expert on leprosy to visit the borders of Afghanistan with entomologist Fred Hermann Brandt (1908–1994), an exchange of gunfire with British forces killed him although Brandt lived on to tell the tale.

• To the above list one should add -  Jean-Marie Derscheid.
• Another story to read - about biology and the Nazi era is about the SS Sammelkommando - see Heinz Brücher

• Apparently Himmler's entanglement with ornithology also led him to dream up "Storchbein Propaganda" - a plan to send pamphlets to the Boers in South Africa via migrating storks! The German ornithologist Ernst Schüz quietly (and safely) pointed out the inefficiency of it purely on the statistics of recoveries!

• July 2018 - an English translation of Nowak's book is now available.
• See also Walther Arndt  

Sofía Flores Fuentes is a science communicator. She’s been a university professor, a civil servant, and an independent public engagement person. Currently, she’s working as a communicator at the Physics Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her most recent medium of science communication? Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia is a great platform, if not the best platform, to freely communicate science and information based on evidence,” Sofía says. “It reaches any corner of the world (that has internet access) so anyone can exploit the information located here. I think as science communicators we have the responsibility of knowing how to use Wikipedia.”

Sofía learned to edit Wikipedia through a recent Wiki Scientists course run by Wiki Education and sponsored by the American Physical Society (APS). A colleague had recommended the course, and she knew it was the help she needed to jumpstart her work on Wikipedia. The course focused on improving biographies of underrepresented physicists on Wikipedia, a cause near and dear to Sofía’s heart.

While the course was taught in English and focused on the English Wikipedia, Sofía took the opportunity to use her bilingualism to improve Spanish Wikipedia articles too. She expanded the article on María Ester Brandan and created the article on Myriam Mondragón Ceballos.

“The Wiki Scientists course gave me the tools to write an article. Even though the Spanish version changes a bit, I had the chance to go into the platform, learn the process and how it works in general terms,” Sofía says. “However, the most important thing I got from the course was the confidence to do it. Wikipedia seemed like a dark universe to me, that couldn’t be penetrated that easily. After this course I now feel like it is a fascinating world created and nourished by a vibrant community, and all the respect and values involved.”

Sofía found the differences in processes between the Spanish and English Wikipedia interesting, as well as the differences in discussions. She’s inspired to keep editing articles about Mexican physicists, especially women. And she hopes to have events at her institution to support others to edit as well.

“I am a science communicator who loves writing articles. But I also stand for the access to information, so I try to dedicate my professional work so people can have the possibility of learning and being informed. I also think that humanity can do great things that can benefit other people, so I believe Wikipedia is a great effort for humans to reach this goal,” Sofía says. “I’m just grateful for APS giving me the opportunity to learn. I think that a lot of people like me can make the most from your work so we can also help others.”