26/07/2022-01/08/2022

Breaking news

• The OpenStreetMap project will turn 18 on or around Tuesday 9 August 2022. If you have a birthday event to announce or want to post photos from your celebrations you can add them to the wiki page.

Mapping campaigns

• An item, in last week’s weeklyOSM, about classifying data quality in OSM triggered a brief discussion on the HOT talking list.
• People from TomTom have put together a series of MapRoulette tasks and shared them with the Chilean, Maltese, Slovenian, and other communities. Elsewhere, TomTom’s own editing has been criticised for making incorrect edits.

Mapping

• Anne-Karoline Distel published new videos describing how to map thatched roofs and how to tag a variety of roof:material on the one building.
• Patrik_B shared his workflow and tips for validating multiple tasks at once using JOSM and a number of plugins.

Community

• The next OSM-FOSSGIS community meeting is planned > to be held on the weekend of 16 to 18 September at the Linuxhotel in Essen. Travel is at your own expense; accommodation and meals will be provided by the the FOSSGIS Association, the German local chapter of OSM.
• User AwoowoArne, from Germany, is the UN Mapper of the Month.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OWG, the operational group that manages the OSMF servers, showed the board-approved version of their 2022 (Q3–Q4) budget.
• The OSMF Board is running an ‘Ask Us Anything’ at SotM, and is looking for questions.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap US’s July newsletter has been published.
• OpenStreetMap Poland has signed > a cooperation agreement with the Internet portal gisplay.pl which will promote OSM and modern map solutions based on OSM data.

Events

• The OpenSteetMap community in Kerala held their Meetup 2022, which took place on Sunday 31 July in Kochi. Around 30 mappers across Kerala state participated. Presentations and hands-on sections on were devoted to mapping public transport and local government bodies.The meeting was reported by The Hindu, and Florian Lainez, of Jungle Bus, tweeted highlights of the day.

OSM research

• Mohammed Rizwan Khan reported on the development of a lite-mode ohsomeHeX application for smaller-screen mobile devices. Though the application will have limited functionality on smaller screens, it will still allow mobile users to get an overview of current OSM topics on the go.

switch2OSM

• Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn is cycling from Luxembourg to Saint Maxime, in Provence (over the top of Mont Ventoux!), and he used OpenStreetMap to plan his journey.
• New instructions for setting up a rendering server on Ubuntu 22.04 were published when that version of Ubuntu was released. In a diary entry, SomeoneElse explained that setting up replication with osm2pgsql or PyOsmium and monitoring with munin is much easier now, as Ubuntu provides up to date packages for osm2pgsql and osmium, so that a manual build from source is not needed any more.

Software

• ChrisPark blogged a Google Summer of Code midterm update for their goal of reintroducing transit to Valhalla, an open-source routing engine.
• The OpenStreetMap Ops Team has published post-mortem reports about two recent service outages: the longest outage in 5+ years, and a degraded standard tile layer incident.

Programming

• Roland Olbricht has released Docker containers to run the Overpass API. Instructions for installing these are available here.

Releases

• [1] Pieter Vander Vennet has added another map to the 46 themes at MapComplete, the OnWheels map. In his blog post, Pieter tells how he and four students, funded by Open Knowledge in Belgium, implemented the OnWheels project as part of their Open Summer of Code and created a special map for wheelchair users.

Did you know …

• … we left some options out in last week’s list of tools for contributing to OSM? Go Map!! is available on iPhone (thank you for the kind comments from @Notna M and @Tordans) and OsmApp for Android, iOS and Web. Felipe says on Telegram ‘On Chrome, Firefox and Safari you can download the Progressive App directly from its page’. We also recommend checking Wambacher’s SoftwareWatchlist.
• … all the best alternatives to the various Google services? This list > , by the French Clubic web magazine, contains a section about Google Maps alternatives. OpenStreetMap and its ecosystem are placed at the top of the list of alternatives.

Other “geo” things

• Plan4Better has used their Geo Open Accessibility Tool (GOAT) to see how close Munich is to being a 15-minute city.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Csömör	OSM 18th birthday hiking & survey in Csömör		2022-08-06
Cayambe	Notathon en OpenStreetMap – resolvamos notas de Cayambé, Ecuador		2022-08-06
	OSM Africa August Mapathon: Map Rwanda		2022-08-06
新北市	OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團 #3		2022-08-07
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2022-08-10
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2022-08-09
Köln	25. Stammtisch Köln		2022-08-10
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-08-11
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-08-10
Zürich	143. OSM-Stammtisch		2022-08-11
Berlin	170. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2022-08-12
Perth	Social mapping Sunday: Claisebrook to Optus Statium		2022-08-14
Windsor	StreetComplete Group Quest		2022-08-16
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-08-15
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #43		2022-08-15
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-08-17
	154. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-08-16
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-08-16
Firenze	State of the Map 2022		2022-08-19 – 2022-08-21
Firenze	FOSS4G 2022		2022-08-22 – 2022-08-28
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)		2022-08-22
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-08-23
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-08-23
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2022-08-24

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, SK53, SomeoneElse, Strubbl, TheSwavu, conradoos, derFred.

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.

Oleg Andros is a photographer, musician, environmental activist, and an active participant of the Wiki Loves Earth photo contest.

Before the war, Oleg was actively involved in nature protection. He lobbied for the creation of nature reserves in Kyiv, the preservation of Zhukiv Island, Lysa Hora and other protected areas in Ukraine. At the same time, he is fond of photography. Since 2000, he has amassed a large archive of photographs, which he periodically uploads to Commons.

In 2021, Oleg took part in the Ukrainian part of Wiki Loves Earth. His photos won all five prizes in the special nomination “Protection of nature sites”.

One of his photos also won a third place in the nomination “Human Rights and Environment” in the international Wiki Loves Earth round. It depicts a picket on November 22, 2013 against deforestation in Ukraine. The action included folk songs and a dramatic duel between a beaver and a lumberjack.

On the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion, on February 21 this year, Oleg opened his fourth solo photo exhibition “The Touch of Otherworld” at the Little Opera in Kyiv. At the same time, he got a new job – Oleg is an editor at the Kyiv Youth Library.

On February 24, Oleg woke up at six am. His mother told him that the Russians were bombing Vasylkiv airport near Kyiv. He grabbed his essentials and headed to Bila Tserkva through traffic jams.

In 2015, Oleg Andros served in the Armed Forces of Ukraine fighting Russian-backed terrorists in the eastern Donetsk region. As a military reservist, he immediately went to the military office. On the first day of the 2022 Russian invasion, he was assigned to a unit that got sent to the frontline. Oleg’s service takes place in various regions: from the Brovary district in the Kyiv region, back when Russian troops were near Kyiv, to Sumy, Kharkiv and Donetsk regions.

“During the Anti-Terrorist Operation [war in eastern Ukraine since 2014] I didn’t see much because I served in the brigade headquarters. But I compensated for it during the 2022 invasion. Now I know the sound of different artillery shells; I know what it’s like to ride a combat vehicle a few hundred kilometers away”, Oleg Andros says.

Currently, Oleg’s battalion is defending the eastern Donetsk region. In his unit, he performs the duties of the personnel officer, handling administrative work. Oleg is constantly on the front line.

During the war, Oleg continued to participate in the activities of environmental organizations. In particular, in March, he helped evacuate 62 cats from the Kyiv Zoo. There are still 45 animals left in this cat shelter, they are helped by the NGO “Nature above all”, co-founded by Oleg.

Oleg hasn’t had the time to contribute to Wikipedia during the invasion, but he found time to take some good photos. One of them was exhibited in a Kyiv library in the spring.Read more about Oleg and his views on war and philosophy in the articles he published in April and July.

The pilot year of the Wikipedia Human Rights Month challenge is over. 54 Wikipedians edited a total of 96 articles. We held 4 online and offline editathons. More than 20 non-profits supported us. Join us for an evaluation of the first edition of the #humanright2022 wikipedian challenge.

Why Human Rights Month on Wikipedia?

“When we planned the Human Rights Month project on Wikipedia at the beginning of the year, we didn’t expect that tragic events in world politics would make the promotion of human rights even more important,” says Programs for community Manager Natalia Szelachowska, who led the project.

Compared to the English Wikipedia, for example, entries on human rights are often missing or insufficient in the Czech one. That is why we have joined the international effort for better coverage of these complex topics. Because Wikipedia is where people go when they want to get a quick overview of complicated topics.

Articles like the International Institute for Human Rights, Women in Science or age segregation should undoubtedly be found on Czech Wikipedia. Unfortunately, they are not.

The difficulty of writing about these topics was also one of the reasons why we reached out to experts who have been working with these topics for a long time.

Human rights topics are quite broad, so participants in the challenge could write about anything – children’s rights, refugees, minorities, women, human rights organizations, celebrities, and more. A list of requested articles soon emerged with dozens of suggestions from the Wikipedian community.

In total, Wikipedians have created and expanded nearly 100 articles

We are very pleased that Wikipedians wrote 49 new human rights articles and edited another 47 articles during the month-long challenge.

Articles that definitely deserve attention include:

• World Humanist Day,
• Romani feminism,
• Committee for the Prevention of Torture,
• Ciocia Czesia (Czech-Polish initiative that helps Polish women undergo abortion in Czech clinics),
• Kuo Fej-siung (Chinese human rights activist),
• Lucie Hrdá (Czech attorney specializing in family law, sexualized and domestic violence and stalking) and many more.

Most visited article? Oligarchy

That Wikipedia’s Human Rights Month was worthwhile is evidenced by the number of visitors to newly created articles, which totalled over 4,000 from the start of the challenge on 1 June to mid-July. The most read articles are currently the following:

Close behind the Oligarchy are the celebrities. The next most read articles are about celebrities, namely American transgender actress and LGBT community advocate Laverne Cox and American model, actress and LGBT+ rights activist Hunter Schafer. It is no coincidence that this year we have included under Human Rights Month an online editathon of LGBTQ rights on Wikipedia, which took place online on 22 June.

The Human Rights on Wikipedia editathon and the Romani student editathon

During June, 4 editathons took place, with a total of 36 people participating. 2 of the editathons were student editathons, which is a great demonstration that human rights issues are interesting for young people.

We were pleased with the feedback from the student participants of the Roma Rights on Wikipedia editathon, which we organised together with the Verda Foundation.Verda Foundation is interested in cooperating with us on the project in future years, which is great.

“Thanks to the Wikipedia editing course, I know that it would be useful to create more articles about Roma and that Wikipedia is lacking and I am glad that I could try how to work with Wikipedia and I will try to create something.”

student, participant of the Roma editathon

We were not alone! NGOs and Wikimedia Serbia helped

More than 20 non-profit organizations collaborated with us or helped us promote the project. Project partners include OPIM, the Association for Integration and Migration, Amnesty International, Verda Foundation and People in Need. It is great when it is the non-profits, who have a lot of information, staff and volunteers versed in human rights, who get involved in writing Wikipedia.

For us, the challenge also meant establishing cooperation with Wikimedia Serbia. We combined our online editathon with the Serbian editathon on International Refugee Day. We hope that we will be able to link our activities in the future.

See you next year!

If you’d like to get involved but missed the challenge, we have good news for you. You can participate in the Czech Human Rights Wikipedia Project all year round (for example, by writing tips for articles) and we are already planning next year’s challenge. Let’s make it international again, we would love to cooperate with other Wikimedia chapters.

In less than 6 months of its reactivation, the Fulfulde Wikipedia has gotten over five hundred articles being published. This huge success was achieved as a result of the campaigns led by Musaddam Idriss, a long-term Wikipedia editor and a founder of the Fulfulde Wikimedians User Group who is not just the first person to have organized campaigns on Fulfulde Wikipedia but also the first person to have led similar events and projects leading to recruiting over 30 active contributors who contribute content to the global online encyclopedia in Fulfulde language.

”My plan is to see that we doubles the number of contributed content we reached now or even go beyond in the next 3 months” says Musaddam Idriss

“Most of our effort as for now is centralized towards improving, referencing and categorizing the existing articles on Fulfulde Wikipedia as well as linking them to relevant Wikidata items and related files from Commons.” he added

From the mid of July 2022 to date, the Fulfulde Wikimedians have created over 70 new articles and improved over 180 existing ones.

On the 6th of August, 2022 the Tulu Wikipedia– an essential site for promoting the Tulu language and culture- will be entering its 7th year. Tulu Wikipedia has been live since 2007, and was announced by Katherine Maher, Ex-Executive Director (The Wikimedia Foundation) as India’s 23rd language Wikipedia in 2016 and has been on a meteoric rise ever since. Currently they have over 1,650 complete articles that cover over 6,000 pages.

The Tulu language is mainly spoken in parts of South-Western India (Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, Kodagu, Hassan, Chikamagalur District of Karnataka State and Kasaragod District of Kerala State) and due to a vast reliance on oral traditions, the language is endangered and efforts must be made to preserve the Tulu culture/traditions. Led by the belief that people all over the world should be able to find good quality articles in the language, the Tulu Wikimedians have been organizing various activities to ensure the culture is safeguarded and adequately represented digitally. 

HERE’S YOUR SNEAK-PEEK INTO THE ACTIVITIES OF THE TULU WIKIMEDIANS

Seeking High- Level Advice

A group has been visiting the homes and offices of language scholars, educationalists, and experts to showcase the importance of Wikipedia in the digital-era, introduce them to the work done by the Wikimedians in preserving Tulu culture and to gain perspective from the resource persons on how to get more Tulu articles added to Tulu Wikipedia. Through this initiative, an innovative project called Home to Home Wiki was launched which has seen multiple editions.

Digitizing Cultural Traditions

With the aim of showing and remembering various types of folk dances, rituals, and worship across the Tulunadu to the next generation, the Karavali Wikimedians have been regularly sharing information on Wikipedia, Wikicommons on different cultural practices including agriculture-related rituals such as Pursereg Kattuna– A religious dance during the harvest month, mainly celebrated in Belthangady region, and Kori Kambla in Tulu Nadu. The Tulu Wikipedia also includes many thematic articles on topics such as women, agriculture, cultural, medicinal plants and more.

Educating the Young: Gen-Next

The group has formed ‘Wikipedia Student Association(s)’ in various colleges of the region where teams of students have been formed with the aim of developing and collecting Tulu articles, an important feature of this association is that the students not only edit in Tulu but also in the other sister languages. In coastal Karnataka, the Tulu language is now the subject of text for primary School students who are also writing exams in the Tulu language.

During various edit-a-thons hosted by the user group several articles have been created according to the Tulu text of the Karnataka State Government, benefitting primary and high school students. 

7TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATIONS

August is very busy for The Karavali Wikimedians User Group, which is the group that hosts the Tulu language along with Kannada and Konkani who are not only hosting their anniversary celebrations but are hosting their first in-person event after years to commemorate Wikimania 2022.  

In the lead up to their anniversary, the group launched a 22-day-long article writing edit-a-thon competition that presently has added over 160 new articles in just 21 days. This is also the first time they are hosting the competition at an international level by using Fountain Tools.

On the day of their anniversary, the group is co-hosting a workshop in Mangalore, Karnataka on endangered languages ​with Coastal Wikimedia Users Group, Karnataka Arebhashe Samskriti & Sahitya Academy, and St. Aloysius Autonomous College, Mangalore.

During the workshop, the Karnataka Arebhashe Culture and Sahitya Academy will release an Arebhashe (a subdialect of Kannada) dictionary which has inputs from two members of the Karavali Wikimedians who have been supporting in the preparation of the dictionary, Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana is Editor in Chief, Bharathesha Alasandemajalu is Editor of this dictionary . The launch coupled with various workshops and talks focused on giving patronage to endangered languages and their digitization would be hosted, and attended by scholars, students and members of the user group.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Right after the anniversary, the group will get busy with the planning for Wikimania 2022 which would bring together the community for an in person meeting after two years. 

In the near future, there are plans to scientifically document the Tulu-related folk songs, folk dances, rituals, and worship of Tulu Nadu, which is a paradise of folklore. The endangered Tulu language needs its own long-term projects like cultural vocabulary and encyclopedia along with a need for textbook-related articles to help Tulu primary, high school, and postgraduate students. The Wikimedians are busy planning these next steps and would be happy for any movement-wide support in the same.

This year, the third iteration of the #WikiForHumanRights campaign has gained increased attention amongst the African community and this is evident in the number of activities and events that have been organized in the region. From Nigeria, Kenya, Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, South Sudan, Ghana just to mention a few, each of these communities is learning how to run the campaign in its own context. As an organizer from Ghana working with the Open Foundation West Africa and temporarily joining the Wikimedia Foundation as a Senior Campaign  Fellow for this year’s campaign, I was intrigued at how innovative organizers were in their participation.  While listening to organizers this year, many of them have found it an effective way to think about a new public they previously hadn’t talked to. 

When running an event for a new Campaign, like WikiForHumanRights, local organizers typically have to figure out two things: the scope of the content gap on Wikimedia Projects and how to communicate with the potential contributors for that event.  Organizers need to develop a mutual understanding with the communities they want to impact on why the newcomers should join the Wikimedia movement. Instead of doing a full-scale newcomer outreach event in Ghana, as part of this year’s WikiForHumanRights campaign, the organizers of the Wiki Green Conference focused on building relationships with other environmental activists and organizations within the country so that they can develop relationships with these networks that can be activated for future outreach activities. 

Following the conference, I had the chance to chat with the three organizers  of the campaign namely; Maxwell Beganim, Otuo Boakye Acheampong and Nana Yaw Borta to better understand why the conference was a building block in their efforts to organize the Climate and Sustainability space. I wanted to share a brief summary of the conversation I had with them, but if you want more you can listen to the full audio here on the community podcast WikiUpdate. 

Understanding ‘why sustainability?’

Organizing activities is a mix of a passion for the topic and finding the right opportunity to connect Wikimedia with other communities of practice. When I first sat down with the organizers, I wanted to learn more about their motivations. I ask them: what motivated the Wiki Green Conference?

“In 2020 soon after the pandemic hit, the UN came up with the triple planetary crisis. If you live in a country like us in the Global South, you might not actually know the theories behind climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss but you feel it in your environment every day. We see it here, for instance, I work with rural folks who are suffering because of the change in rainfall patterns the climate is hitting them big, not as a theoretical concept but as a practical concept […\ In Ghana, the current statistics of diseases as a result of air pollution is the second-most killer disease in Ghana. It means that the triple planetary crisis has real consequences on Ghana as a nation and therefore young people like us should be able to document and be able to talk about it that was my motivation.”

Otuo

“As a climate activist, and looking at the open movement, there is a nexus. The whole idea of tech and green became something that I was interested in and passionate about and so when the whole idea came with technology and green, I felt it was in line with my general objective because I have knowledge in the open space and the green space so why not merge and come up with a niche?” 

Maxbeg

“I am also in the climate space, I deal with kids to help them create awareness of what the climate means to them, but I realize that there is that gap. Most of them are naive about what is going on[…] Just as my co-organizer said, back in the days you don’t need an alarm, a bird will do the job of waking you up but in the urban areas you don’t see it.  There was a need for us to come up with a project that can bridge that gap. When we look at the opportunities that the open movement brings, the resources and the tools that they offer — These are things we could, first of all, create awareness and then find solutions that can help mitigate because down here people are really feeling it, it has a serious impact on humans. So that was the motivation for me.

After I saw the organizers both active in the conference and talking to them afterward, it was important to help me understand their motivation for participating in the conference and understanding the tactics that was used…

Stephen

Why a conference and not an edit-a-thon?

Edit-a-thons are one of the most common activities we see in the movement. But this time these three organizers took an unusual path by organizing a conference instead. From their perspective, since most of the targeted audience were new to the Wikimedia space, they saw organizing a conference as a way to draw attention from this audience to convene and be introduced to the Wikimedia space in a way that aligns with their interests. 

Though the participants got to learn how to edit, it was more important to build a greater shared understanding with the participants: of why Wikipedia matters for the kind of work that they already do, communicating environmental crises. Here is how Max and Otuo  explained it:   

“Because there are different organizations, and they have their own understanding of it, it becomes very difficult to bring all these teams together even though there is the same objective. They may also, one way or the other, say that though we may have the objective they may not be aligned with this.”

Maxwell

So I think one of the key challenges we overcame was to articulate what we are doing very clearly… the aim is greening the tech space, so it’s like an alignment, whatever you are doing, let’s green the tech space. Irrespective of how you want to do it, or not one way or the other you use tech…  Let me give you an example, if you look at one of the partners that came on board like the Internet Society Ghana Chapter, they do not necessarily work within the climate space but understand that we can green the tech space because it’s the internet that we use, they aligned with it… I think it’s about the alignment and the objective thus one. 

Secondly, a lot of people have myths about Wikipedia and so the onus is also on us, as people who understand, to clear all these myths and doubts within this space. So people are working in the space [Green space] but they go to other places for information but if you tell them, look you can contribute or you can curate content by getting your voice heard. I think the challenge is also about capacity building because some of the organizations are not fully equipped or understand some of these issues, you need high-level skills to be able to do that. But hosting this workshop you realize that people are now interested in knowing even Wikipedia.

And Otuo described why this kind of outreach matters for the local communities in Ghana: 

“As a research scientist, this is what, most literature on climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss is in the English language. And even in the sciences, we are always saying 90% of all research is in the English language. We want local content, so how can we have something in Twi? Ga? Dagomba? The Wikimedia Foundation gives us those platforms through the languages we have in here. So when we are able to bring technical people into the movement who can also write in their local language they are able to present the picture in a wonderful and perfect way. 

For instance, I read Twi so it will be easier for me to write about Climate Change in Twi for the local people to understand than what a white man can write in English. For instance, when I start mentioning some of the terms like ‘mitigation’, ‘adaptation’, ‘climate vulnerability, and ‘risk assessment’ these things are not local terms, and the local people won’t understand. But if I say it in Twi, they will understand. And so we can leverage the Wikimedia platforms to also translate some of this information and even create articles in our local languages as experts so that people can actually appreciate the concept of the triple planetary crises. Because access to information now is a human right and so I think that we should all have access to information and that information we should have should be inclusive such that if I don’t speak English I shouldn’t be cut away from accessing information and Wikipedia gives us that platform that is why I think bringing an expert to work in this area is one of the best ways to go as a sustainable solution.

The way forward now is to get tailor-made solutions that fit a particular context and environment. We can’t just import what is being done in the US when we talk about climate change because they have a high adaptive capacity to climate change so we can’t import what is there. We need tailor-made solutions and how do we get them: use the experts here and be able to communicate it to other people out there. And so going a specific way will help us solve most of our challenges and our problems.“

Otuo

Following through? What’s next?

As movement organizers, we are all enthusiastic about reaching and bringing newcomers into the movement. However, when it comes to the retention of these newcomers, different strategies come to play.  When talking to them, Stephen described:

“We brought people from other organizations. As organizers we will also do well to participate in their activities… Because when you partake in their activity they feel you are part of them so they even give that listening ear to listen to you in the first place.. If you are part of them they already feel you are giving them a different solution. They become open to it… Secondly, we have communities here in Ghana Like OFWA, Dagbani Usergroup, and Wikimedia Ghana Usergroup. So we also try to integrate them into those user groups so that they will get that support that they will need because I believe with Wikipedia you can’t learn everything in a day. I believe the affiliates are in such positions to offer that training. Most of these groups have activities and contests that they run daily so it always keeps you busy and always wanting to do more. So it’s more about getting them engaged…”

Stephen

What Followed?

The Wiki Green Conference laid the foundation for yet another fantastic local collaboration between the Youth Climate Council Ghana and the Open Foundation West Africa: hosting a hands-on skills building workshop dubbed Climate Change edit-a-thon. The two-day hybrid workshop’s objective was to inform and equip young climate activists from the network of the Youth Climate Council Ghana on how to use Wikipedia to raise public awareness of climate change in Ghana. It was a thrill to observe how the young people responded to this appeal with such fervor and expertise.

Unlike the Wiki Green conference which focused more on knowledge sharing, the two day training was more focused on impacting practical skills. Throughout the 2 day event participants edited Wikipedia, uploaded images on Wikimedia commons and basic translation skills. We were impressed by the participants’ determination during the workshop and are confident that they became allies of the movement. 

What’s next?

I am inspired by the great work and effort these organizers put in when organizing their events. Community building can be challenging, time-consuming, and yet rewarding if the right techniques are put in place. Gathering from what these organizers have shared, Wikimedia affiliates have a major role to play in the retention of newcomers who come in through various activities that are being organized in our communities. 

As a campaign organizer in Ghana, and part of a local affiliate, I am provoked into rethinking the design of the future growth for my community. I am going back to my community more equipped with a better perspective about organizing campaigns and building communities. Being a fellow at the Wikimedia Foundation for this year’s WikiForHumanRights campaign has been truly a wonderful and insightful experience full of learning coupled with the adventure as we explored and deployed new tactics. I must commend the campaigns team for this initiative. In my next blog I will be sharing my experience and lessons learned.

The Wikimania Festival Edition takes place from 11 to 14 August, virtually and in person across the globe. If you have already registered for the virtual event – great! We can’t wait to see you there! And if you haven’t, you can register from now through the duration of the event here. 

We just announced the Wikimania 2022 Program, so take a look and find the sessions you’re most interested in! While you do, here is a quick orientation to help you start planning.

Finding your way around the Festival

The Wikimania 2022 virtual event will take place on PheedLoop. Just like an in person festival, Wikimania 2022 will have different spaces or ‘tents’ with entertainment, activities, celebrations, workshops, tutorials, and more. You can make your own schedule in PheedLoop ahead of time, moving freely between tents so that you catch everything you most want to see!

Tent 1, Tent 2 and Tent 3: 

These are the tents of programming that will be running throughout Wikimania hours. We will have keynotes, endnotes, art, entertainment & culture highlights, informational lectures, workshops, discussions and rotational regional segments to spotlight various projects. We will also feature local events, allowing groups to stream in live and show us what they’re working on.

Networking Tent

This is an open social space at Wikimania where you can get together with other Wikimedians during extended hours. If you want to host sessions outside of the formal program, you can use this space to schedule meetups in advance for up to 25 people, or host something impromptu. If you’re speaking in the program and want to continue the discussion after the session ends, you can send your audience over to the Networking Tent to keep the conversation going. 

You will also be able to search for other users with your same interests or skills you are interested in learning and meet them in the Networking Tent. And, for newcomers, we will have an informal buddy system that will connect you with experienced Wikimanians for tips and support getting oriented.

On-demand content

If you can’t get enough of the Wikimania Festival, why not stream more on-demand? Check out the on-demand programming Commons category, where Wikimedians will be contributing content for others to watch during and after the Festival.

Hackathon

The Hackathon–an event open to the general public to work together on technical projects and learn new skills–will be held in between Wikimania programming hours on Friday August 12 and Saturday August 13. It will take place on PheedLoop with video sessions held on Jitsi.

Program overview

Join us for practice sessions

Curious to see how PheedLoop works? We will be hosting both attendee and speaker practice sessions to help you learn your way around. 

Sessions will be held on Monday August 8 and Tuesday August 9 at different times to accommodate all timezones. Participation details are on the Wikimania Wiki.

See you at Wikimania: The Festival Edition!

Whether this is your first or one of many Wikimedia events you’ve attended, Wikimania: The Festival Edition! will be a welcoming place, bringing Wikimedians together to connect, enjoy and draw inspiration from all remarkable work of the Wikimedia movement. 

Still have questions? Check out our FAQ, and see you at this year’s Wikimania!

Who are we and what do we do.

University Students Wikimedians (USW) is a Wikimedia-based program focused on engaging and creating awareness among Colleges and Universities Students on the Wikimedia projects and Movement. It is a program currently (2022) being run in three regions (Morogoro, Dodoma, and Iringa regions) in Tanzania.

The program was initially started as an experiment back in 2019 in the Morogoro region and became fully operational in July 2021. The experimental period was focused on what ways students can be engaged in different Wikimedia projects through volunteering and what ways would be best to organize these communities while accommodating their life hood as students. So far the program has participated in different national and international campaigns.

What’s next during this holiday?

First, we extend our many Congratulations to all the members of our communities on the completion of your University Exams!

As we head for the long holiday (Approx. 4 Months) many might think we will not be running any events! But rest assured we already have plans put in place for you! Yes, we will be running events as usually no matter where you will have a chance to participate in all of the events with full support from our organizing team.

The events are live! Join us during this holiday by contacting any of our club leaders below:

However, would you like to be part of our volunteering communities? Feel free to email us via hello@uswiki.africa or call +255685261018. We do not charge anything!

Collaborators of the Africa Knowledge Initiative (AKI), the African Union (AU) and the Wikimedia Foundation, are very excited to announce that Ceslause Ogbonnaya from the Igbo Wikimedians User Group has been recruited as the Wikimedian in Residence (WiR) for the African Knowledge Initiative Project.

The Africa Knowledge Initiative aims to increase coverage of African-related topics on Wikimedia projects. AKI will leverage the immense spirit of collaboration within the African communities and create avenues for partnership with like-minded external partners that share the project’s mission.

Ceslause, who was selected following a competitive recruitment process brings a wealth of knowledge in project management, multicultural & multilingual communications, community relations  and experience from running projects across the African continent. Embedded with our implementing partner, Africa No Filter — whose mission is to ”support the development of nuanced and contemporary stories that shift stereotypical and harmful narratives within and about Africa” — Ceslause will serve as the project lead and the bridge between project stakeholders and Wikimedia communities. 

According to Ceslause,  “The contribution to the sum of free knowledge isn’t complete until every group of people is equally represented in it, irrespective of their origin or background”. 

He recounts his experience from working with Wiki Loves Africa organizers, and the expertise African photographers or creatives bring into Open knowledge. He believes the AKI is a great project that will help align more African individuals with their areas of interest and expertise within the Wiki-sphere. 

Aligning with Movement Strategy

As observed from the prioritization discussion around the Movement Strategy, the majority of Wikimedia communities in Africa prioritized Topics for Impact and Invest in Skills & Leadership Development as key focus areas. In addition, these two focus areas prioritized by the African communities are also among the top nine community-prioritized initiatives in the Movement strategy.  This makes the AKI project timely as the region begins implementation of the Movement Strategy.

Fostering collaborations to bridge content gaps, experimenting toward future movement structures

The AKI project also seeks to provide a framework to work with the African Union and other partners from the continent on key content gap areas, and to build capacity within our communities. The yearlong cycle of activities will be centered around three African Union holidays: Africa Youth Day, African Environment/Wangari Maathai Day, and Africa Day, which are relevant, annual celebrations in the region, whose themes — connected to AU’s Agenda 2063 goals — will help enhance content creation around the various topic areas. The opportunity will also allow our communities to work with the resources and networks of these partners to bridge the content gaps that exist on Wikipedia and its sister projects. 

Aligning the movement’s conversation on Topics for Impact with regional partners like the AU creates an opportunity to amplify our efforts in all the 55 member states, and positions us with civil society organizations and change makers that have an interest in those topical areas. This partnership also provides an opportunity for communities to experiment with different collaborative structures as the movement evolves towards decentralizing decision-making and new entities like regional hubs, as envisioned in the Movement Strategy.

It’s time for communities to get involved!

AKI will be rolled out in various phases, designed to include community engagement and participation. The next phase will focus on recruiting implementing partners to lead the AU holiday-themed campaign rounds.

We will soon open calls to invite Wikimedia Affiliates, aligned institutions and prospective partners who have an experience organizing within the Wikimedia movement and are interested in the aforementioned topical areas. The WIR will be tasked, among other things, with opening a call to select these three organizers (affiliates, institutions, individuals, etc.) for each of the campaign rounds.

Stay tuned for the next community conversations on 19th August (we will update with an event link soon) to discuss, share and shape the future of this monumental project for the continent. In the meantime, you can reach us via campaigns@wikimedia.org if you have any further questions about the project.

Policy is straight forward. Wikipedia is not censored:

“Wikipedia may contain content that some readers consider objectionable or offensive‍—‌even exceedingly so. Attempting to ensure that articles and images will be acceptable to all readers, or will adhere to general social or religious norms, is incompatible with the purposes of an encyclopedia.”

If we can get our hands on relevant freely licensed images of human remains, then there is a fair chance they will be used in articles.

While various groups might find this objectionable, censorship in this area would be the kind of thin end of the wedge that Wikipedians really, really don’t want to deal with.

That was simple, lets move on.

What do non-Wikipedians think? Well, a search of Google Scholar throws up nothing directly. Some have rough analogues, though.

In war photography, there is the standard argument of balancing respecting the dead with not sanitising war. Ken Jarecke famously went with: “If I don’t photograph this, people like my mom will think war is what they see on TV”. Personally, I tend to agree.

That said, most of Wikipedia’s war photos are old and black and white which provides a certain veil over events. We do have colour stuff from the current Russian invasion of Ukraine (along with prisoner of war photos but those are a separate issue). Bucha massacre is probably the most high profile example. Its also ethically probably one of the more straightforward. The images are all sourced for Ukraine. These are their dead and they have largely avoided showing faces.

Human remains in museums are an ongoing debate. Both in terms of repatriation and reburial of human remains and how to handle the stuff you are not going to rebury. Museums being museums, they have set up entire exhibitions about the subject.

Broadly, museums have been getting more restrictive about human remains in the UK. This is governed by the Human Tissue Act 2004, which has resulted in a lot of museums at least thinking about what they are doing. In this area, “Wikipedia is not censored” is probably going to be the last word. If someone is on display in a museum, Wikipedia is probably always going to be okay with a photo of them. Even if it is alarmingly racist. Certainly Wikipedia has photos of human remains in museums that are at the centre of controversy. The now removed Pitt Rivers Museum Shrunken heads and the skeleton of Charles Byrne both have photos on Wikipedia.

Museum photography has the secondary matter of getting people to take the photos in the first place (war photographs mostly come from third parties that have released them under a free license). Wikipedia may not be censored but the people taking and uploading photos can make their own decisions. While we do encourage Wikipedians to be emotionless robots, we are not entirely successful. My personal standard appears to be that I’m not ok with taking photos of non-wrapped mummies unless they are British. If you want a pic of Nesyamun you are going to have to get your own. Ditto poor Ta-Kush down in Maidstone. Lindow Man though I’m apparently fine with since he is from the British isles. Shep-en-hor I’m apparently fine with since she (or whoever is in that mummy case) is wrapped. Concerns about her presence in the museum have been raised mind.

Ultimately “Wikipedia not censored” is probably the only viable option. Options in this area vary too widely and tie into broader censorship (PETA would probably be concerned about our stuffed animal pics and we have various photos of things that religions and governments would prefer we not have photos of). The principle of least astonishment may have some relevance (It was perhaps somewhat concerning that the only image in the Whitby Museum article was a human hand) but for the most part people don’t think there are many articles out there overly gratuitous images of human remains. Readers may be shocked by some of the images in our articles on wars and massacres, but I’d argue that is more of a result of wider popular media attempts to sanitise both rather than any issue with Wikipedia’s choices.

One of the best ways to learn about Wikidata is through examples — examples of property usage, query examples, and examples of well-modeled items. When we started our Wikidata program back in 2019, there were far fewer items — and even fewer well-developed items. Even though the early examples of well-developed items are technically excellent, they are not diverse or representative of the world. In the original version of our training slides, we replicated the well-used examples from the Wikidata community. Now, we’ve updated our training slide examples and the items we use in our outreach to emphasize diversity and represent a broader community.

For this project we partnered with Lane Rasberry, Wikidatan-in-Residence at the University of Virginia (UVA), who had recently received funding from the Sloan Foundation to help bring more data about academic research software to Wikidata. Collaborating on this project will allow UVA to improve data on Scholia (a platform that displays academic profiles based on what’s in Wikidata) and it will help diversify the examples Wiki Education uses in outreach and training materials.

This project has been an excellent way of elevating some urgent and important research from individuals whose work has been underrepresented on Wikidata and beyond. This is a continuation of our commitment to equity across Wikimedia projects. We recognize that continued engagement is essential to affect community-wide changes. Our hope is these examples can lead to bigger changes and create space for more critical thought and engagement about representation on Wikidata.

We set out to identify academic research software contributors from North America who represent historically marginalized communities in this space: Native Americans, women, and people of the African diaspora. Wiki Education was ideally positioned to identify potential research software developers who fit these descriptions; through our Wikipedia Student Program and Scholars & Scientists Program, we are connected to thousands of academics across the United States and Canada. A few emails and video calls later, and we were able to develop a pool of individuals who met this specific criteria. The next step was to locate sources, publications, unique identifiers, and any other data we could use to update (or create) their items on Wikidata, enhance items related, and link their work to other entities on Wikidata.

One urgent research project happening right now came from Dr. Ben Frey, a linguistics professor who is part of the Eastern Band of Cherokees. He has been conducting research to preserve and teach the Cherokee language, which has around 2,500 speakers left at the time of publication. He has been working with large datasets of Cherokee and English sentences to improve machine learning with the Cherokee language. From there his hope is more instant translation can occur, as well as other uses. Before this work, he and the research software he’s developing didn’t have items on Wikidata. Not only does he have one now, but you can see a set of his publications here.

Another project we decided to focus on is Openscapes, led by Julia Stewart Lowndes. Openscapes endeavors to mentor researchers about open data practices (check out some of their cool work here). In working on these items, we performed merges, created new items, and linked to their Github repositories, which were previously unlinked. In developing these related items, Wikidata users will be able to discover this work through queries or by visiting Wikidata itself.

We also spent time working on several other researchers’ Wikidata items, items representing their research, and linking out to Github repositories, ORCID scholarly communication records, and additional identifier data. Although we can’t explain all of the edits here, the general idea is the same: having research better represented on Wikidata allows for better analysis of this data, more re-use of this data, and the opportunity to discover new insights about this data.  As with all of our examples, we are hopeful that drawing more attention to this kind of research will inspire others to think of work that should belong on Wikidata, but isn’t there yet.

We believe that using a diverse set of examples will draw more attention to the systemic bias that pervades Wikidata and the Wikidata community. Elevating the profile of these accomplished researchers (and their research) is just the beginning of what we need to do. We will continue to update these items, related items, and research papers to ensure the most information possible is on Wikidata. We hope our course participants and other members of the Wikidata community will also consider improving representation across all of Wikidata.

To learn more about Wikidata, follow this link and explore our courses.

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

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

• Improved LaTeX capabilities for math rendering are now available in the wikis thanks to supporting Phantom tags. This completes part of the #59 wish of the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 2 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 3 August. It will be on all wikis from 4 August (calendar).
• The Realtime Preview will be available as a Beta Feature on wikis in Group 0. This feature was built in order to fulfill one of the Community Wishlist Survey proposals.

Future changes

• The Beta Feature for DiscussionTools will be updated throughout August. Discussions will look different. You can see some of the proposed changes.

Future meetings

• This week, three meetings about Vector (2022) with live interpretation will take place. On Tuesday, interpretation in Russian will be provided. On Thursday, meetings for Arabic and Spanish speakers will take place. See how to join.

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

🕑 1 hour 22 minutes

Jake Orlowitz is the lead of the management consulting company WikiBlueprint. Before founding WikiBlueprint, he worked at the Wikimedia Foundation, where his projects included The Wikipedia Library and The Wikipedia Adventure. He has been open about his former struggles with mental health, and Wikipedia's role in helping him overcome them. He can be reached at jorlowitzATgmailDOTcom.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Jake Orlowitz homepage
• "How Wikipedia Drove Professors Crazy, Made Me Sane, and Almost Saved the Internet" (Jake's chapter of Wikipedia@20, 2019)
• Welcome to the Circle: the Mental Health Book (Jake Orlowitz, 2019)
• The Wikipedia Library
  • Page on Wikipedia
• WikiBlueprint
• The Wikipedia Adventure
• GuidedTour MediaWiki extension
• "The Wikipedia Adventure: Field Evaluation of an Interactive Tutorial for New Users" (2017 conference paper, Jake Orlowitz et al.)

The Meshtastic is my solarpunk dream—a cheap, encrypted, offgrid communicator. But the project is still in the alpha stages (and it shows).

Meshtastic is a communication system. Its firmware runs on bare-bones “T-Beam” devices. T-Beams are available fully-assembled and pre-flashed for about $35.

The devices enable encrypted, text-message-style communication via an app on your smartphone. No cell service required.

I bought two Meshtastic T-Beams for a recent trip to Yellowstone National Park. The devices worked as advertised—we could share texts and locations between our Android phones even though we had no service.

What I dislike ¶

There’s no way around it: this is an alpha quality project. Right now, it’s only usable by nerds (like me 🌠). You’ll probably have a bad time if you’re not a tinkerer or a hobbyist.

• Alpha quality – The project is hard to use, even for the basics. During our trip to Yellowstone, we repeatedly lost our bluetooth connection to the devices—they kept going to sleep. And the interface is sometimes unclear—I ended up holding down buttons, waiting for something (anything) to happen.
• iOS requires Testflight – The Android mobile app worked well, but the iOS app requires Testflight to install—which seems like a pain.
• Batteries/small bombs – The T-Beams run off big honkin’ 18650 batteries—the same lithium-ion cells used in Tesla battery packs. While the batteries last all day, I had to make extra purchases. Later I realized they run fine off of USB battery packs, but I was uncertain about that when I bought it. These things added to my costs:
  • Opus BT-C3100 battery charger
  • Sanyo NCR18650GA 3500mAh 10A Battery
• PCBs are intimidating – Holding a PCB (printed circuit board) intimidates electronics neophytes. There are stickers available on the discourse that read: “Meshtastic: this is not a bomb” (for base stations in the field).
• “Meshtastic” – My brain refuses to type “meshtastic” on the first try; this may be a personal problem.

19/07/2022-25/07/2022

Mapping

• Andrea Spinelli wondered how to add a point of interest with iD at a specific coordinate. Officially, this function is not desired. Developers recommend the use of Cmd + Opt + M, or equivalent, to open the measurement panel, which shows the exact location of a selected node. In comments following the blog post, readers shared their alternative approaches.
• A bicycle route linking Stuttgart in Germany to Strasbourg in France has been created, as reported last week. Without signposts along it, a discussion has started about whether it meets OpenStreetMap’s inclusion criteria. At the moment there are opinions on multiple channels for and against, including the French mailing list > and the German forum > .
• EdoBoo reported, in their OSM Diary, that their visit to Forte di Montecchio motivated them to revise the mapping of this fortress with more detail.
• Mapping public transport seems to remain a challenge for new mappers, although the wiki contains a step-by-step tutorial.
• ngumenawesamson, from HOT, presented a detailed classification of aspects of data quality on OSM, under 10 headings. It is planned to use this classification to identify actions which can be taken, within HOT projects, to reduce some of these issues.
• Voting on Documentation of key prefixes and suffixes, to establish the convention of documenting key prefixes at pages named Key:prefix:* and key suffixes at pages named Key:*:suffix on the wiki, is open until Sunday 7 August.
• Voting on the following proposals has closed:
  • school=entrance, to deprecate the use of the tag school=entrance, was approved with 26 votes for, 3 votes against and 0 abstentions.
  • amenity=library_dropoff, for mapping a place where library patrons can return or drop-off books, other than the library itself, was approved with 12 votes for, 1 vote against and 0 abstentions.

Community

• The national mapping agency for Great Britain, the Ordnance Survey (OSGB), recently released a new map, OS Map, as a website and a mobile app. The map provides both free and subscription layers. The free layers integrate data from a range of sources: OSGB open data, OSGB closed data and OpenStreetMap via MapBox. The UK community has noticed problems with the latter layer as it includes private paths, which has resulted in irate landowners deleting perfectly valid OSM data.
• User TrickyFoxy raised the question of whether registration for OpenStreetMap by mobile users (especially with Google) is too complex and linked to different issues on GitHub, one of which has been open since 2015. As Tom Hughes pointed out at the time, any solution must enable new mappers to accept the contributor terms.

Education

• Introducing young people to responsible mapping through education and training is certainly more meaningful than hunting for nodes. Great examples are the actions of Muni Mappers from Uganda and Laura Mugeha at the Technical University, Nairobi, Kenya.

OSM research

• Roberto Pizzolotto, of the University of Calabria, published a scientific trajectory of OpenStreetMap. It showed that the main themes (a conceptual network) chiefly related to technical matters. Collaboration among scholars and institutes (the social network) was not strong, and knowledge and ideas circulated within a limited network.

Maps

• For the May Contain Hackers 2022 event in the Netherlands there is a special map based on OSM, which Evelyn also prepared for OsmAnd.

switch2OSM

• The French association Randonner Leger > , wrote > a guide about using OSMAnd for trekking purposes.

Software

• Canadian contributors reported reliability problems with OSM tile servers. The OpenStreetMap operations group is aware of latency problems for North American users as the one US rendering server, Pyrene, no longer has the capacity to keep up with demand. It is planned to add a new server soon in the east of North America.
• Benjamin Clark, from Meta, shared the 2022 development plans for MapWithAI’s RapiD editor for OpenStreetMap in a GitHub project issue. It is open to comments and feedback.
• Ilya Zverev wondered how to edit tags directly from openstreetmap.org. He built a solution which works as a browser extension available for Firefox and Chrome.

Programming

• Paul Norman took the recent outage of the standard tile layer as motivation to describe the means of monitoring system health.

Did you know …

• … there are many ways to contribute regularly to OSM?
  Desktop:
  • OSM Streak
  • MapRoulette
  • Pic4Review
  • Unmapped Places
  • Find Suspicious OpenStreetMap Changesets
  • OSMCha
  • NotesReview
  • Many Tasking Managers

  Smartphone:

  • StreetComplete
  • Every Door
  • Vespucci
  • OSMfocus Reborn
  • OSM Go!
  • Jungle Bus

  We are sure we have forgotten some. Please write to us and let us know, we will add them next week.

Other “geo” things

• The Tour de France Femmes bicycle race has a live map of the event which uses the Leaflet library, known for its use of OpenStreetMap as a base layer provider, among others.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
	iD for Beginner Training		2022-07-30
臺北市	COSCUP 2022 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 聯合議程軌		2022-07-30
Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires	4a reunión bimestral de OSM Latam (organiza OSM Argentina)		2022-07-30
Ernakulam	OSM Kerala Community Meetup 2022		2022-07-31
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-08-01
	MapRoulette Monthly Community Meeting		2022-08-02
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2022-08-02
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-08-03
City of Westminster	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-08-02
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #38 (Online)	✓	2022-08-02
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-08-04
Cayambe	Notathon en OpenStreetMap – resolvamos notas de Cayambé, Ecuador		2022-08-06
	OSM Africa August Mapathon: Map Rwanda		2022-08-06
新北市	OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團 #3		2022-08-07
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2022-08-10
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2022-08-09
Köln	25. Stammtisch Köln		2022-08-10
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-08-11
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-08-10
Zürich	143. OSM-Stammtisch		2022-08-11
Berlin	170. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2022-08-12
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #43		2022-08-15
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-08-17
	154. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-08-16
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-08-16
Firenze	State of the Map 2022		2022-08-19 – 2022-08-21

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, TheSwavu, derFred.

🏆 First-time achievements We hosted our first Twitter space! Last week’s theme was life before, during and after Outreachy – a chat with alums and current interns about the ways their internship experience changed their lives. Omotola invited me to join as one of the the alums and I had a fantastic experience! Here are some of the things I’ve shared: On what I’ve learned during my internship My biggest lesson was to manage expectations.

How are we doing in our strive for operational excellence? Read on to find out!

Incidents

There were 6 incidents in June this year. That's double the median of three per month, over the past two years (Incident graphs).

2022-06-01 cloudelastic
Impact: For 41 days, Cloudelastic was missing search results about files from commons.wikimedia.org.

2022-06-10 overload varnish haproxy
Impact: For 3 minutes, wiki traffic was disrupted in multiple regions for cached and logged-in responses.

2022-06-12 appserver latency
Impact: For 30 minutes, wiki backends were intermittently slow or unresponsive, affecting a portion of logged-in requests and uncached page views.

2022-06-16 MariaDB password
Impact: For 2 hours, a current production database password was publicly known. Other measures ensured that no data could be compromised (e.g. firewalls and selective IP grants).

2022-06-21 asw-a2-codfw power
Impact: For 11 minutes, one of the Codfw server racks lost network connectivity. Among the affected servers was an LVS host. Another LVS host in Codfw automatically took over its load balancing responsibility for wiki traffic. During the transition, there was a brief increase in latency for regions served by Codfw (Mexico, and parts of US/Canada).

2022-06-30 asw-a4-codfw power
Impact: For 18 minutes, servers in the A4-codfw rack lost network connectivity. Little to no external impact.

Incident follow-up

Recently completed incident follow-up:

Audit database usage of GlobalBlocking extension
Filed by Amir (@Ladsgroup) in May following an outage due to db load from GlobalBlocking. Amir reduced the extensions' DB load by 10%, through avoiding checks for edit traffic from WMCS and Toolforge. And he implemented stats for monitoring GlobalBlocking DB queries going forward.

Reduce Lilypond shellouts from VisualEditor
Filed by Reuven (@RLazarus) and Kunal (@Legoktm) after a shellbox incident. Ed (@Esanders) and Sammy (@TheresNoTime) improved the Score extension's VisualEditor plugin to increase its debounce duration.

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.

Trends

In June and July (which is almost over), we reported 27 new production errors and 25 production errors respectively. Of these 52 new issues, 27 were closed in weeks since then, and 25 remain unresolved and will carry over to August.

We also addressed 25 stagnant problems that we carried over from previous months, thus the workboard overall remains at exactly 299 unresolved production errors.

Take a look at the Wikimedia-production-error workboard and look for tasks that could use your help.

💡 Did you know?

To zoom in and find your team's error reports, use the appropriate "Filter" link in the sidebar of the workboard .

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

Thanks!

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

Until next time,

– Timo Tijhof

"Mr. Vice President. No numbers, no bubbles."
— 🔴🟠🟡🟢🔵🟣

As part of the desktop improvements project we spent time investing in the core code that powers skins. With support from volunteers (the majority of this support coming from the prolific @Ammarpad), we identified code patterns and made changes to the MediaWiki-Core-Skin-Architecture to retroactively define a data layer API for generating a skin.

Once this was in place, we updated the legacy MediaWiki skins Monobook, Modern, CologneBlue to use Mustache to bring them in line with how Vector and Minerva were built.

The rationale for doing this was as follows:

1. We wanted to centralize code into core, and standardize markup, to make it easier to roll out changes to all skins. Often developers found ourselves updating every skin every time we wanted to make a small change or forced to use specific classes to markup elements (e.g. T248137, T253938).
2. We wanted to move away from server-side technologies to client-side technologies to play better to the strengths of frontend engineers and designers who worked on skins.
3. Since many of these skins do not see active development, we wanted to support them better by reducing lines of code
4. Many of the skins didn't support certain extensions because they used different code (for example certain skins didn't run hooks that were used by certain features) e.g. 6ce3ce1acb68f0a3fdf1bd8824f6d0717bffa320 T259400
5. Stop supporting features in core that were never widely adopted e.g. T97892

This process reduced 106,078 lines of code to 85,310 lines of code - a 20% decrease.
Before the change around 45% of skin code was PHP. After the change PHP only accounted for 15% of the code.

It would be great to in the future migrate Timeless too, but Timeless using the legacy skin platform does help keep us accountable for ensuring we continue to support skins built on this platform.

Methodology for result

To measure code makeup we can run github-linguist before and after the change.

Monobook

Before:

46.53%  22713      Less
36.83%  17981      PHP
16.53%  8071       JavaScript
0.10%   50         CSS
Lines of code: 48815

After change (abe94aa4082dbc4f8b9060528a1b4fea2d0af0f1)

59.28%  22831      Less
20.96%  8071       JavaScript
11.67%  4496       Mustache
7.96%   3066       PHP
0.13%   50         CSS
Lines of code: 38514

Modern

Before:

52.25%  13752      CSS
40.99%  10790      PHP
4.16%   1094       Less
2.61%   686        JavaScript
Lines of code: 26322

After change (c74d67950b6de2bafd9e3b1e05e601caaa7d9452)

68.87%  13877      CSS
18.22%  3672       Mustache
5.43%   1094       Less
4.07%   821        PHP
3.40%   686        JavaScript
Lines of code: 20150

Cologne Blue

Before:

62.00%  19183      PHP
34.82%  10773      CSS
2.22%   686        JavaScript
0.97%   299        Less
Lines of code: 30941

After change (bf06742467f6c6c2bb42367f2e073eb26ed5d495)

40.40%  10765      CSS
31.87%  8491       PHP
24.04%  6405       Mustache
2.57%   686        JavaScript
1.12%   299        Less
Lines of code: 26646

PHP

The total number of lines of PHP before the change: 47954
After the change: 12378 lines of PHP

In May 2022, hundreds of people logged into the Wikimedia Hackathon online platform to build projects, solve bugs, translate documentation, socialize, learn new skills, and more. For three days, community members led over 50 sessions, worked on over 75 Phabricator tasks, and watched one stellar live piano performance. In addition, hackers in Nigeria, Ghana, India, the U.S., Greece, and Germany came together for community-led in-person meetups to celebrate the Hackathon and teach newcomers how to contribute to Wikimedia technologies.

Now, in just two weeks, the technical community will come together again for the Wikimedia 2022 Hackathon!

How do I join the Hackathon?

To take part in the Hackathon, register for Wikimania to gain access to the platform. This information is kept private. You can also optionally list yourself publicly as a participant on the Wikimania Wiki.

When and where is the Hackathon?

The Hackathon will take place virtually in time blocks:

• 16:00 – 22:00 UTC August 12
• 12:00 – 17:00 UTC August 13
• 15:55 – 16:45 UTC August 14

The Hackathon will take place on Pheedloop, the Wikimania platform. This platform complies with WCAG 2.1 AA, and will support screen readers, font adjustments, and many other accessibility features. Video sessions will be held in Jitsi through this platform.

What will happen at the Hackathon?

A pre-hacking showcase

On the first day, there will be a pre-Hacking showcase to share project ideas and find collaborators. Anyone can present a project, and anyone can come as an observer. This informal gathering is a great way to meet new people around the world and start working together.

Hacking projects

Throughout the next two days, technical contributors around the world will come online to hack together, starting new projects, maintaining existing software, updating and translating documentation, and playing with tools. To propose a project, add a task to the Phabricator board. 

Technical and social activities

Throughout the Hackathon, take a break from hacking to learn about Wikimedia Cloud Services, attend a newcomers social, or offer a session of your own! Anyone can claim a slot on the schedule to arrange an activity for the group. 

A final showcase 

Finally, there will be a final showcase to share and celebrate the projects worked on during the Hackathon. Show off what you built to an audience of technical contributors around the world, as well as other Wikimania participants curious to learn more about the technical community.

Is the Hackathon good for newcomers?

Yes! If you’re new to the technical community, check out the resources for newcomers. Don’t miss the pre-Hacking showcase, which is a great opportunity to find people to work together with.

More information

Visit the Hackathon page on the Wikimania wiki for additional event information, a list of useful resources, and links to other exciting Wikimania activities.

See you soon!

For the past two years I’ve been working on Reddit related questions such as:

1. Do researchers’ ethical disguise of Redditors’ posts work?
2. How many Redditors use throaways or delete their posts? Why?
3. Why do Redditors participate in advice-related subreddits?

Much of this has been facilitated by Python scripts, which are in decent enough shape that I share here: https://github.com/reagle/reddit .

Questions are welcome!

Knowledge equity has been a cornerstone of our programs since our founding. Thanks to our efforts, content related to equity on Wikipedia has steadily improved over the years. By empowering students and other subject matter experts to add content to Wikipedia, we ensure the public’s most used reference is more equitable, accurate, and complete.

Not only have we helped diversify Wikipedia’s content, we’re also helping to ensure the group of content contributors is more diverse. Only 22% of Wikipedia editors identify as women in our region, and 89% identify as white. In contrast, 67% of Wiki Education’s program participants identify as women, 3% identify as non-binary or another gender identity, and only 55% identify as white.

We’re bringing a more diverse writing voice to Wikipedia, and we’re adding more equity-focused content. But we want to do more: That’s where the Equity Outreach Coordinator role comes in. We’re thrilled to announce Andrés Vera is fulfilling this new role.

Andrés, as the Equity Outreach Coordinator, oversees the targeted outreach for courses in equity content areas and the inclusion of diverse institutions in the Wikipedia Student Program, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). He will also work to encourage more instructors who teach courses related to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other equity-related disciplines at other institutions to teach with Wikipedia.

Equity has been an important strategic priority for Wiki Education for years now, and it’s integrated into everything everyone on staff does on a daily basis. In creating this Equity Outreach Coordinator role, we are creating space to ensure we are actively recruiting a diversity of courses and an even more diverse set of participants for our Wikipedia Student Program. We’re making a deliberate investment aimed at taking our Equity work to the next level.

Andrés brings a unique perspective to Wiki Education. He has worked as a music teacher, a music ensemble manager, and a freelance community development professional. He holds a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and a professional diploma in Music performance and regularly performs around the world as a concert cellist. Andres has worked with Wiki Education in a contractor role for years. He is extremely passionate about and knowledgeable of our mission, and has a contagious enthusiasm for all that he does. We’re thrilled with his work so far and look forward to seeing where he takes this position.

Please join me in welcoming Andrés in his new role!

In a 99% Invisible episode, Avery Trufelman stated that America’s 19th-century preoccupation with the self and self-help was reflected in the fact that Webster’s 1841 edition of his dictionary had 67 additional words prefixed with “self-”. I’ve yet to find this factoid repeated, to say nothing of finding evidence for the claim.

I count 116 “self-” entries in the 1828 version. In the 1841 version I count 179. That’s 63 additions. (This unfortunately required me to manually count entries as I could not find nicely formatted versions.) Back then, though, Johnson was not consistent with how he dealt with parts of speech and related words. For example, the 1828 version has “self-abusing” and “self-abuse”; the 1841 version only has the former. Similarly, the 1841 addition added “self-abasing” to 1821’s “self-abasement” and “self-abased.”

Trimming the additions down to what I thought were meaningful differences – i.e., not simple grammatical variations – I count 44 additions between the 1828 and 1841 editions.

Given that the 1828 version is reported to have 70,000 words – I did not count myself – and advertisements for the 1841 claimed “many thousand more words than that or any other English dictionary hitherto published” it probably is fair to conclude the 38% increase in “self-” words was significant.

Update 2022-07-26: Avery Trufelman referred to Cheng, who cites Zakim (2006):

… in the early 1840s. Driven by the same concerns, American physicians had a few years earlier identified a new medical condition they diagnosed as “moral insanity,” a term used of persons who failed to restrain their passions. It was a distinctly post-patriarchal disorder, born of an age “of the first person singular,” as Emerson described it. Noah Webster accordingly added sixty-seven new words to the second edition of his American Dictionary in 1841 that all began with the prefix “self.” This was convincing, if circumstantial, evidence of the transformation of Americans’ personal sovereignty… [note 50: Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language Containing the Whole Vocabulary of the First Edition … the Entire Correction and Improvements of the Second Edition … to Which Is Prefixed an Introductory Dissertation (Springfield, Mass.: George and Charles Merriam, 1849). (Zakim 2006, pp. 122-123)].

Also, see this thread on r/dictionary.

12/07/2022-18/07/2022

About us

• weeklyOSM collects relevant OSM news from all over the world and informs the community every week. We announce each new issue via Twitter, Mastodon, mailing lists, Telegram, and we also want to announce it at community.openstreetmap.org.However, some mailing lists are relatively low volume, and list admins may wish to limit how many ‘weekly’ announcement messages appear there. If that is the case, could list admins please let us know via ‘lists at weeklyosm.eu’?

Mapping campaigns

• User sahilister reported, in his blog, about his systematic mapping of schools in Chandigarh, North India.

Mapping

• LuxuryCoop presented > use cases for the place tag in Korea and suggestions for improvement.

Community

• Hayden Clarkin discovered that using overpass turbo makes it easy to analyse parking space land use, and asked how to find other cool OSM tools.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The next public OSMF board meeting on osmvideo room is scheduled for Thursday 28 July at 13:00 UTC (Time in your timezone). You can view the minutes of the last meeting on the wiki.

Maps

• European deputy Anna Deparnay-Grunenberg, made official / > the Bio.Vélo.Route., a cycle route from Stuttgart to Strasbourg celebrating the 60th anniversary of their town twinning. As shown on the website, the route made full use of OpenStreetMap data through Komoot and uMap. A route relation stub has been created and may benefit from contributions along it.
• Tracestrack has released an Osm-Carto/OpenTopoMap hybrid map style. With a demo page using Mapbox Globe, it shows the OSM-Carto style enriched with colour relief, hill shades and contour lines from OpenTopoMap. As a background layer, various existing label layers can be overlaid.

Programming

• Sarah Hoffmann described how type annotations have been added to Nominatim’s Python code in order to improve software maintainability, and also explained some lessons she learned in the process.
• korobkov outlined a five-step workflow which allows you to quickly complete a series of similar MapRoulette tasks for OpenStreetMap using the keyboard only, with little to no manual intervention, in a matter of seconds per task via browser automation plug-ins using regular expressions.
• PhysicsArmature suggested a design for a JOSM extension to map a large area of something that has distinct colour.

Did you know …

• … there is a video on working with Mapillary and RapiD?
• … all of the ways to join the OpenStreetMap Foundation?
• [1] … OSMTagChallenge > ? OSMTagChallenge (by Jean-Marie Favreau of the University of Clermont-Ferrand) is a daily tagging challenge at noon UTC to collectively find the most appropriate tags for rare objects recorded in France. The code is available on GitHub.
• … on UN Mappers’ Instagram stories you can find quick guides with helpful tips on how to map roads, buildings and waterways?

Other “geo” things

• Qiusheng Wu presented a new feature of geemap: calling 3rd-party #EarthEngine JavaScript libraries from Python, built upon the Open Earth Engine Library (OEEL) from Mathieu Gravey. For example, running the JS grid module by Gennadii Donchyts.
• OpenCage Geocoder shared their insights about commonly unknown geographical facts about France.
• Christopher Beddow wrote about the possibilities unlocked by Visual Positioning Systems (VPS), citing the developer tools and latest features from Google ARCore and Niantic Lightship on his Worldbuilder blog.
• In what is essentially an advertisement for the UK’s Ordnance Survey, the Guardian reported that three-quarters of UK adults can’t read a map and gave readers hints on how to get better at it.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
大阪市	ひがよどの街を世界にシェア #01		2022-07-23
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第32回 妙心寺		2022-07-24
Plano Piloto	State of the Map Brasil 2022 (online) – Sessão 1		2022-07-27
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-07-27
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-07-28
臺北市	COSCUP 2022 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 聯合議程軌		2022-07-30
	iD for Beginner Training		2022-07-30
Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires	4a reunión bimestral de OSM Latam (organiza OSM Argentina)		2022-07-30
Ernakulam	OSM Kerala Community Meetup 2022		2022-07-31
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-08-01
	MapRoulette Monthly Community Meeting		2022-08-02
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2022-08-02
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-08-03
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-08-02
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-08-04
	OSM Africa August Mapathon: Map Rwanda		2022-08-06
新北市	OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團 #3		2022-08-07
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2022-08-10
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2022-08-09
Köln	25. Stammtisch Köln		2022-08-10
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-08-10
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-08-11
Zürich	143. OSM-Stammtisch		2022-08-11

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, SomeoneElse, Guillaume Rischard (Stereo), TheSwavu, derFred.

Through a historic vote on 21 July 2022, the Wikimedia Foundation was granted accreditation by the United Nations Economic and Social Affairs Council (ECOSOC). The Foundation  thanks the cosponsors of the corresponding resolution that was proposed by the United States, Italy, Sweden, and Estonia earlier this week, and all the ECOSOC members who voted for it. 

ECOSOC is the UN body responsible for leading international discussions on economic and social issues and advancing the Sustainable Development Goals. The accreditation grants UN consultative status to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia and other global volunteer-run free knowledge projects. Today’s landmark vote sends a strong signal of support for NGOs that stand up for human rights and freedom of expression. The vote passed with 23 countries in favor and 7 against, with 18 countries abstaining. 

As the guarantor and supporter for the Wikimedia projects and free knowledge movement, ECOSOC observer status will enable the Wikimedia Foundation to represent the interests of contributors and readers of Wikipedia and other projects. The Wikimedia worldwide free knowledge movement is an important stakeholder in the conversation around the role of access to knowledge in advancing global sustainable development.

“We thank the United States, Italy, Sweden, and Estonia for introducing the resolution, as well as all other ECOSOC members who voted for it. This is a decisive win for the protection of global civic space and will strengthen civil society engagement within the United Nations. It will enable the Wikimedia Foundation to work directly with member states and other stakeholders to promote greater and more equitable access to free knowledge globally,” said Amanda Keton, General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. “We look forward to deepening our engagement across the UN system and advancing important elements of the Sustainable Development Goals, which are promoted by Wikimedia’s collaborative model of collecting and sharing knowledge, including inclusive, equitable access to information and educational content online.”  

The Wikimedia Foundation congratulates Inimõiguste Instituut (Estonia), Syrian American Medical Society (US), National Human Rights Civic Association “Belarusian Helsinki Committee” (Belarus), Non C’è Pace Senza Giustizia (Italy), and Diakonia (Sweden), which were also granted consultative status at ECOSOC today.

We live in a time of ‘knowledge revolution.’ The instant availability of information on digital devices has deeply impacted the way humans learn about the world around them. With facts and truth under attack, Wiki Education’s work in providing the public with trustworthy and accurate information through Wikipedia and Wikidata is crucial for an informed citizenry.

Wiki Education is currently the only organization worldwide that is able to improve the public’s understanding of key issues in a targeted way at scale. And if you’re reading this blog, it’s likely you’re an essential part of that mission. Thank you for joining us in playing an active part in the knowledge revolution. We’re very happy about the enormous impact our organization has had these past two pandemic years despite the challenging conditions under which we’ve been operating. Our continued success has been made possible by our generous funders, the excellent work of our board, Wiki Education’s healthy relationship with the community of Wikimedia volunteers, the tremendous dedication of our staff, and the thousands of students, instructors, and subject-matter experts enrolled in our programs.

We’re excited about the time ahead of us, as outlined in our new Annual Plan. We’ll continue to foster a greater diversity of knowledge and editors on Wikipedia & Wikidata; scale the impact of our programs; and invent tech solutions that support these missions. Here are our areas of focus for the upcoming fiscal year:

Knowledge Equity

Not only do our programs make a significant difference in students having a deeper learning experience and diversifying Wikipedia’s editor base in the United States and Canada, our program participants will continue to add high-quality content about Knowledge Equity-related topics to Wikipedia. But we want to do more: That’s where the Equity Outreach Coordinator role comes in. We’re thrilled to welcome Andrés Vera into this position, which oversees the targeted outreach for courses in equity content areas and the inclusion of diverse institutions in the Wikipedia Student Program, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), and institutions with large minority enrollments. Equity is an important strategic priority for the entire organization, and it’s integrated into everything everyone on staff does on a daily basis. By creating the new role of Equity Outreach Coordinator, we’re making a deliberate investment aimed at taking our Equity work to the next level.

Communicating Science

Beginning with the “Wikipedia Year of Science” initiative in 2016, we have strengthened Wikipedia’s critical role as a vehicle for science communication. Students in our Wikipedia Student Program translate their knowledge in a way that is understandable for an average reader. Their hard work has greatly enhanced the depth and breadth of freely accessible information about scientific topics on the web. And since launching our Scholars & Scientists Program in 2018, we now also empower subject-matter experts to share their specialist knowledge with others through Wikipedia or Wikidata.

Technical Infrastructure

We continue to empower thousands of Wikimedia organizers in different countries around the globe who run their own Wikipedia or Wikidata-related programs. In order to even better serve these volunteers, we regularly improve the stability and scalability of our Programs & Events Dashboard. Last year we added new, much-desired features like the ability to track and visualize the improvements people make to Wikidata. This year, our technology department plans to create a tool that will make the enormous impact of our programmatic work even more visible and easy to grasp. We’re kicking off a project to visualize the impact that Wiki Education program participants have made on specific topic areas on Wikipedia. Our participants, funders, community members, and staff are eager to understand our big-picture impact of our work together. 

Thank you for joining us and for following along. Onward!

To read our Annual Plan in depth, please visit wikiedu.org/annual-plan.

By: @mmartorana and @sbassett

Some history

For about a decade now, the combination of gerrit, zuul and jenkins have been used as the primary means of code review and continuous integration for most Wikimedia codebases. While these systems have been used successfully and are customized to support various workflows and developer needs, they have not helped facilitate the development of a robust application security pipeline within CI. While efforts have been made within the security space - with phan and the phan-taint-check plugin, libraryupgrader, and an occasional custom eslint rule - Wikimedia codebases have not taken full advantage of the current suite of open-source application security tooling that drives modern security automation. Given the aforementioned deficits and the announcement of Wikimedia migrating to Gitlab as a git front-end and CI/CD system, the Wikimedia Security-Team decided to explore what a modern application security pipeline within Gitlab could look like.

Our development path and roadmap

When the Gitlab migration was announced, the Wikimedia Security-Team saw great potential in the development of a robust application security pipeline to further improve application security testing and to make a concerted effort to shift left (wikipedia, snyk, Accelerate). Gitlab and its modern CI/CD functionality was a great candidate to help us explore the architecture and implementation of an application security pipeline for Wikimedia codebases, as it satisfied a number of desired outcomes including user-friendliness, convenience and impact.

Over the past couple of quarters, members of the Wikimedia Security-Team have created a number of security includes which employ Gitlab’s intuitive CI/CD functionality, particularly their means of including various yaml configuration files as components within different CI/CD stages. We initially focused this work upon several common languages used within Wikimedia projects: PHP, JavaScript, Python and Golang. Though it should be noted that the Gitlab security includes project is open to all contributors and, given Gitlab’s flexibility and simplicity, will hopefully encourage both improving existing include files while also driving support for the creation of new include files to support additional languages.

A basic example

During the aforementioned development cycle, the Wikimedia Security-Team compiled some basic mediawiki.org documentation to help developers get started with the configuration of their Gitlab repositories to run various security-related tests during CI. One specific example we explored was that of the function-schemata codebase, as used for the Abstract Wikipedia project. We migrated a test version of the repository over to Gitlab and set up a simple, security-focused .gitlab-ci.yml. This obviously would not be a complete .gitlab-ci.yml file for most codebases, but let’s focus upon the security-relevant pieces for now. First we see several environment variables defined under the variables yaml key. These serve to configure various docker images, tool cli options, etc. and are documented within the application security pipeline documentation. Then we see a list of included CI files, referenced via raw file URLs and indicating a specific tagged release. These correspond to specific tools to run during the default test phase of a repository’s CI pipeline. We can see that npm audit, npm outdated, semgrep (with certain javascript-specific rules sets) and osv’s scanner cli will all be run. In addition to these included files, we are also including Gitlab’s built-in SAST functionality (currently blocked on T312961) which, while limited in certain ways, can provide for additional security analysis. We can then see some sample pipeline output which displays the output of the tools which were run and indicates passing and failing tests.

Some opinionated decisions and current caveats would include:

1. Only being able to run the tools within the security include files under Gitlab’s test CI stage.
2. Having the security include files run for every branch which triggers the default CI pipeline (we’d definitely like to support custom branch and tag configurations at some point)
3. Only utilizing OSI- and free-culture-compliant tools and databases (likely perceived as a positive for many)
4. Presenting all results publicly as is the default configuration for repositories and pipelines within Wikimedia’s installation of Gitlab, as it currently is within gerrit and jenkins and a value of most FOSS projects.

It should be noted for the last two issues that some discussion did occur within various Phabricator tasks (T304737, T301018) and the current state of the CI includes was determined to be the best path forward at this time.

The future we would like to embrace

The Wikimedia Security-Team is obviously very enthusiastic about our work thus far in developing an application security pipeline for Wikimedia codebases migrating to Gitlab. In the coming development cycles, we plan to address bugs, evaluate and improve current CI include offerings as well as develop (and strongly encourage others to develop) new and useful CI includes. Finally - we welcome any and all constructive feedback on how to best improve upon this initial offering of security-focused CI includes.

References

• Primary project tracking bug: T289290: Design and Build Application Security Pipeline Components for Gitlab

“Most stories about LGBTQ+ pioneers are white, cisgender men with access to certain forms of economic and cultural capital,” Dr. Christina Carney says in this summer’s issue of the Black EOE Journal. “Unfortunately, queer folx such as Marsha P. Johnson and William Dorsey Swann are often elided in the LGBTQ+ archives.”

William Dorsey Swann, the first recorded drag performer in the U.S, was one of numerous Wikipedia articles improved by Dr. Carney’s class at the University of Missouri in Columbia. She was featured in the Black EOE Journal for her work in teaching with Wikipedia. The Black EOE Journal is a leading African-American business publication, and they featured Dr. Carney’s work as part of a feature on “The Importance of Telling LGBTQ+ Stories”.

Dr. Carney has been teaching with Wikipedia for several years. In the interview, she highlights the outcomes of her most recent spring 2022 course: students added one new article, edited 22 articles, added more than 18,000 words and 195 references — all while accumulating more than 1.25 million page views. Another of her students created the new article on Rogers v. American Airlines.

“Rogers v. American Airlines was a 1981 legal case decided by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York involving plaintiff Renee Rogers, a Black woman who brought charges against her employer, American Airlines, for both sex and race discrimination after she was dissuaded from wearing her hair in cornrows due to the airline’s employee grooming policy,” Dr. Carney explained in the piece. “The students not only cited sources detailing the politics of Black hair, but also how Black women are unfairly burdened with the responsibility of looking and dressing appropriately for the ‘Black race.’”

Dr. Carney credits Wiki Education for our support of her class, as well as the librarian from her campus who helped students find appropriate references for their articles.

“My biggest takeaway is the realization that high-impact research and knowledge can be accessible to a wider community — and not just limited to the ‘Ivory Tower,’” she says in the piece. “This is intersectionality in practice! Students are creating access for those who might not otherwise have the resources to find reliable information. Student creators become the conduits for linking reliably sourced material to a global audience for free.”

Read the full article here.

To participate in the Wikipedia Student Program, visit teach.wikiedu.org.