With the upcoming Board of Trustees Election 2022, Movement Strategy and Governance Team’s facilitators talked to several Election Volunteers from different communities to hear about their experiences and motivation to join the Election Volunteer program.

This blog is a result of collaborative writing between the MSG facilitators and EV program volunteers.

Please tell us about yourself.

I am Goodness Ignatius (she/her/hers) from Nigeria. I have master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Library and Information Science. I have been a school Librarian over the years, also the founder of Digital Library Forum and Nesky Craft and Decor. On Wikimedia Foundation, I am the coordinator of the Ig Wiki librarians hub, an arm of the Igbo Wikimedians User Group; member, Ombuds Commission; member, Leadership Development Working Group, amongst others. I easily understand the use of technological tools and gadgets. I am always ready to listen, learn, unlearn and relearn. I speak, write, and read: Igbo ig-N, English en-5, Hausa ha-4 languages.

What motivated you to join the EV program? 

My motivation for joining is solely to help out and to understand more about the Wikimedia movement. I’m not really sure how I got the information, it could be from the mailing list or the content page on Meta-Wiki

What are some challenges and successes that you would like to share?

It is really an exciting experience for me because I stay informed and also pass information to my community. I really like translation interface on Meta-Wiki.

Looking ahead: What are your expectations for the upcoming 2022 BoT Elections? What would you like to do, and how would you like to be involved?

My expectations are that eligible voters can participate, communities would be informed adequately, and encourage their members to vote. I’ll like to participate in areas that help and volunteers will be will be needed.

The Gurene Wikimedia Community held a pre-Wikimania event at the Ajumako campus of the University of Education, Winneba.

The event, comprising 22 participants from the community, prepared them for Wikimania 2022 scheduled from August 11th to August 14th, 2022.

The in-person event assisted participants to register for Wikimania 2022, and the program outline helped members maximize the opportunity.

Additionally, refresher training was held to enable editors efficiently contribute to the Gurene Wikimedia incubator.

About Gurene Wikimedia Community

Gurene Wikimedia Community is an indigenous affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation and a sister community of Dagbani Wikipedia Community. The language is currently being developed in the incubator in a yet-to-be-confirmed transition period onto the main platform.

About Wikimania 2022

Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement’s annual conference celebrating all the free and open knowledge projects made possible by the volunteer community – Commons Wikimedia Commons, MediaWiki MediaWiki, Meta-Wiki Meta-Wiki, Wikibooks Wikibooks, Wikidata Wikidata, Wikinews Wikinews, Wikipedia Wikipedia, Wikiquote Wikiquote, Wikisource Wikisource, Wikispecies Wikispecies, Wikiversity Wikiversity, Wikivoyage Wikivoyage, Wiktionary Wiktionary

This year’s Wikimania will bring Wikimedians together to create, celebrate and connect, virtually and with in-person components.

It will be four days of gathering, discussions, meetups, training, and workshops. to discuss issues, report on new projects and approaches, and exchange ideas.

Wikimania: The Festival Edition!The theme for this year’s virtual Wikimania is “The Festival Edition”.

We will come together to spotlight projects and movement groups and celebrate the diversity of our vast community. Wikimania: The Festival Edition! can be summed up in three words: it will be fun, alive, and vibrant; it will be regional, shining a light on communities across the movement through the festivities; and it will welcome newcomers, creating a safe space for first-time attendees that illuminates and inspires.

Wikimedia Mexico invited women from different regions of the country for a discussion on how we inhabit the internet, about the gender gap and online violence, but above anything else, to exchange information, experiences and create networks among women for self-care and collective care.

The First #JuntasEnInternet (#TogetherOnTheInternet) Meeting took place on June 16 and 17 at the Cultural Center of Spain in Mexico (CCEMx), a cultural space in the historical downtown located in the heart of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.

Maryana Iskander, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, was  responsible for the inauguration of this event, saying a few words of welcome virtually. She was introduced by the executive director of Wikimedia Mexico Carmen Alcázar and Isabel Ruz, responsible for Support Services for diversity, inclusion, gender and human rights of CCEMx.

Throughout these two days, roundtables were held covering topics related to technological appropriation, gender bias, violence against women and girls on the Internet, the political and legal context of digital violence in Mexico, human rights for a violence free life, violence on the internet against women journalists and human rights defenders and freedom of speech with the participation of Anasuya Sengupta, Claudia Pozo, Mariana Fosstti, Ana Laura Godínez, Diana Valero, Irene Soria, Angie Contreras, Claudia Pedraza, Lulú Barrera , Lucía Lagunes, Martha Tudón and Marcela Nochebuena.

Además, se brindaron talleres sobre justicia transformativa, biografía tecnológica y resiliencia emocional con Walys Becerril, Alex Argüelles, Grecia Macías y Luisa Ortiz.

A strong, empathic and close bond was built between all the participants and at the end of the meeting, a visit to a wrestling match, one of the most popular sporting events in Mexico, was organized in the Mexico City Arena.

As a result of this meeting, two new alliances have been formed and the participants are in constant communication for exchange of information and to continue to strengthen the collaborative networks.

#NuncaMásWikipediaSinNosotras (#NeverAgainWikipediaWithoutUs)

It’s Wikimania week for 2022 and the countdown for the event has begun! First of all – make sure you have registered and once you have done that, you will receive an email giving you your login password. You can join our platform for this year, Pheedloop, any time from now till the event ends. 

Find out more about how Pheedloop works and once you have logged in, you can update your profile and join others in the Lobby to say hi in the chat and introduce yourself in the photo booth. Once you are in Pheedloop, you can look through the session schedule and start to build your own personal calendar of sessions – creating your own unique programme! 

As a newcomer to Wikimedia and Wikimania, you probably will want to look for sessions that have the “Ideal for newcomer” tag. You also want to try and catch as many of the lightning talks as you can, as they’ll be lightweight glimpses into what our communities (and even sometimes the Foundation) does on the projects, in an easy to digest format. 

There will also be arts, culture and entertainment every day, featuring local groups and affiliates – a fun way to get to know what communities are doing across the globe. Look out for interactive sessions too, from Meditação do Riso (Laughter meditation) to walking your pet round your local area to get some fresh air, to a cookout where we can be together to make delicious food to keep us going.  The Wikimedian of the Year awards will also be announced on the last day, Sunday 14, with multiple awards being given out – a special time for the community to recognise people from across the movement. 

There will also be a Newcomers group in the networking space, where there will be Wikimedian volunteers there to say hi, answer questions and give you insights into joining the community. If you feel overwhelmed by the sheer choice of things to listen to and do – fear not! As the majority of sessions will be recorded and then posted after the event for everyone to go back and enjoy on Pheedloop, on Youtube, and after the event has ended, on Wikimedia Commons!. 

Make sure you also check out all the in person events happening – in case there is one nearby for you to join! If you have any problems or questions during the scheduled event, we have a team of people there to help out – contact the Helpdesk and also check in with the Newcomers networking group.

In an idealized vision of the world, judges in common law countries are unbiased actors who rely on expert knowledge and detailed research to craft rulings which accurately reflect both the substance of the written law, and the body of precedent that applies to their jurisdiction. A judge must be proficient at doing their research and must consult all relevant ruling. Ideals aside, judges are human, and generally have heavy caseloads. Like the rest of us, they’re likely to rely on tools to ease their way through the research process. We live in a world where everyone relies on Wikipedia, regardless of whether they admit it. And according to research recently published by Neil Thompson and colleagues, judges are just like everyone else in this regard.

Back in 2019 I wrote about a study by Neil Thompson and Douglas Hanley which suggested that Wikipedia content helped shape the scientists’ understanding of their own field of study. They showed that the language used in the technical literature in chemistry converged with the wording used in Wikipedia articles about a given topic. Through a fascinating study, they were able to demonstrate experimentally that this wasn’t coincidental — the way topics are discussed on Wikipedia influences the way they’re discussed in the literature. The fact that Wikipedia articles influence the way people understand their own fields highlights the importance of experts getting involved in the process of editing articles.

In a new study of Irish legal cases, Neil Thompson and colleagues were able to show that judges rely on Wikipedia articles to inform them about settled cases and precedents, and concluded that judges are relying on Wikipedia as a replacement for their own reading of Supreme Court rulings.

Much like in the previous study, the researchers created 154 new articles about Irish Supreme Court cases, and uploaded half of them to Wikipedia, while keeping the other half as a control set. Most of these articles were created by law students with the support and supervision of faculty (using a methodology based on Wiki Education’s Student Program). Wikipedia’s coverage of Irish Supreme Court cases was very incomplete, which meant that it was easy to create new articles about cases where none existed previously.

What happened next was probably not a huge surprise — creating a Wikipedia article about a case increased its rate of citation in rulings by almost 22%. While this showed that judges are relying on internet searches to locate relevant cases, it said little about how they are using the information on Wikipedia. But the second part of the study looked at the textual similarity between rulings and the Wikipedia articles. Here again, they found a statistically significant effect. In other words, judges (or, perhaps, their law clerks) were paraphrasing Wikipedia articles as they drafted their rulings.

The implications of this study are pretty major. While the best Wikipedia articles provide accurate, comprehensive, unbiased coverage of a topic, most fall short in one area or another. This is rarely intentional — while Wikipedia’s contributors are usually dedicated to producing high-quality articles, they’re mostly volunteers who face constraints of time, access to sources, and sometimes subject-matter expertise. But Wikipedia’s open nature also means that people with vested interests in the outcomes of a case have the ability to manipulate articles about important precedents.

To avoid these sorts of problems, Thompson and colleagues suggest ways to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles: “Policy-wise, this could be addressed by buttressing the reliability and review of Wikipedia content by including legal professionals as supervising editors to certify page quality, or by augmenting the content of authoritative but less-broad sources, and using those for the provision of legal information about particular jurisdictions.”

These are reasonable suggestions, but they’re also ones that the community has tried without much success throughout Wikipedia’s existence. It’s hard to convince experts to dedicate their limited time to reviewing Wikipedia articles. It can also be difficult for experts to work with the Wikipedia editing community, especially when outside experts don’t have a good sense of the community. (Despite the frequent assumption that Wikipedians are just random amateurs, many have advanced degrees in the subject areas where they contribute, while others have become experts while contributing over the last two decades.)

Short of convincing judges not to use Wikipedia, there are other ways to mitigate some of these problems. The more active editors there are in a subject area, the harder it is to insert bias. People pay more attention to changes to existing articles, especially if they are actively being edited. It’s much harder to insert bias into existing articles than it is to do it when you’re creating a brand new article. Programs that bring more contributors to Wikipedia — like Wiki Education’s Student Program — not only can fill content gaps in legal topic areas, they also bring more traffic and more editorial attention to these articles (and to articles that are downstream from them). After all, the articles that Thompson and colleagues used for this study were mostly created by student editors.

The other way to mitigate potential harm is to make people better consumers of information from Wikipedia. Few people who consult Wikipedia articles ever look at the history tab or the talk page, despite the fact that they can provide crucial information about the state of the article. Even fewer know about plug-ins like “Who Wrote That?“ that supply information about when individual “facts” were added (and by whom). Training judges (or the pool of legal professionals from which judges are appointed) would make them better consumers of Wikipedia. This isn’t a far-fetched idea — the model for this kind of thing exists in our Scholars & Scientists Program, where participants gain these kinds of skills (among others).

As Thompson’s research has shown, Wikipedia is influential on multiple disciplines. If you’re interested in influencing the public’s understanding of your topic area, as well as future ways of writing about your subject area, adding neutral, fact-based information to Wikipedia is the way to go. Instructors who are interested in teaching with Wikipedia, visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information on Wiki Education’s support for assignments. Knowledge or disciplinary organizations, empower your staff or members to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of your topic by hosting a Wikipedia editing course.

Thumbnail image by Blogtrepreneur, (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to the “Don’t Blink” series! Every month we share developments from around the world that shape people’s ability to participate in the free knowledge movement. In case you blinked this month, here are the most important topics that have kept the Wikimedia Foundation’s Global Advocacy team busy.

To learn more about our team and the work we do, join one of our monthly conversation hours, follow us on Twitter (@WikimediaPolicy), sign up to our Wikimedia public policy mailing list, or visit our Meta-Wiki page.

Wikimedia Foundation Celebrates Two Major Milestones

July was a historic month for the Foundation on two fronts: externally at the United Nations Economic and Social Affairs Council, and internally via the publication of the Foundation’s first Human Rights Impact Assessment. These developments are decisive steps that advance the strength of the free knowledge movement as well as our movement’s ability to protect and promote access to knowledge and human rights in relation to the Wikimedia ecosystem around the world. 

In this edition we dedicate special space to these landmark events and break down the most essential information for you.

1) Wikimedia Foundation Gains Consultative Status at United Nations

The Wikimedia Foundation was granted accreditation as an observer by the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) on 21 July 2022. We have spelled out the what and why below. 

• What is ECOSOC observer status? ECOSOC is the United Nations (UN) body responsible for leading international discussions on economic and social issues. ECOSOC also works alongside other UN bodies to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Observer status at the Council enables non-governmental organizations like the Wikimedia Foundation to enrich and shape ECOSOC efforts by sharing their expert advice and expressing their concerns and views in discussions, to do so at the subsidiary bodies of ECOSOC and to be allowed  participation at special events.
  
• Why does it matter for Wikimedians and the free knowledge movement? The fact that 23 countries voted in support of the Foundation signals strong support for organizations and movements like ours, which stand up for human rights and freedom of expression. For the Wikimedia Foundation, accreditation amounts to an opportunity to represent the interests of the free knowledge movement in global conversations around the role of access to knowledge in advancing sustainable development. As a formal player in UN processes, the Foundation can work directly with member states and other stakeholders to promote greater and more equitable access to free knowledge. Part of this involves showcasing Wikimedia’s collaborative model of creating and sharing knowledge. 

2) Wikimedia Foundation Publishes Human Rights Impact Assessment

The Foundation published its first human rights impact assessment (HRIA) on 11 July 2022. The report evaluates human rights risks that may be related to Wikimedia projects, platforms, or activities. The findings help everyone in the Wikimedia movement better identify, understand, and address those risks. Full details about how the report came to be and what it means for the movement are available in a Diff blog post.

• What is the human rights impact assessment? An HRIA helps to identify and consider potential responses to human rights risks. This specific report was commissioned to understand human rights risks related to Wikimedia projects, platforms, and activities. It helps us identify opportunities to address and mitigate those risks, essentially making our knowledge ecosystem safer and more equitable.
  
• Why was the report produced? The report was produced because hosting a platform for curating, sharing, and contributing knowledge, even with the intention of promoting access to educational content, can also impact fundamental rights centred around free expression, privacy, and equity. The report examines how these activities impact fundamental human rights, and also provides recommendations to help the Foundation and movement volunteers address and mitigate any risks to the continued advancement of human rights and access to free knowledge.
  
• How will the report help the Wikimedia movement safeguard human rights? The report helps us identify what and where risks are associated with Wikimedia projects. Five key risk areas were highlighted. It also provides recommendations on how these can be addressed. Some recommendations were very high-level, like adopting a Human Rights Policy. Others required additional time and resources, like recruiting staff with expertise in human rights. Others again were more tactical. We have already acted upon some of these recommendations, but to address others we will need your feedback. 
  
• What does this have to do with me? The publication of this HRIA is also meant to start a conversation on these challenges and solutions within our movement. This is a long-term effort, not a quick fix. Let us know your thoughts at Wikimania (virtual session), the HRIA talk page, or the Movement Strategy Forum.

Latin America and the Caribbean

• Argentina’s Supreme Court protects Freedom of Expression: The Supreme Court of Justice of Argentina delivered a decision last month that upheld freedom of expression and protected free access to public information in a case regarding the right to be forgotten. Our analysis is now available. We explain how the decision sets an important precedent for protecting access to reliable, verified information about people that is of public interest. The Foundation cautions against the potential negative impact that removing content online can have on access to relevant and reliable information. We argued as much in an amicus brief that we submitted to the case in March 2022. Details about how we protect freedom of expression and access to information are available in our biannual Transparency Report, which documents right to be forgotten requests we receive, and our responses to those and other requests to remove or alter information on our projects.
  
• WikiCon Brasil: The Brazilian Wikimedia community hosted its first conference, WikiCon Brasil, on 23-24 July. The conference focused on the circulation of false information, and how volunteers from the Wikimedia movement fight against it. Amalia Toledo, Lead Public Policy Specialist for Latin America & the Caribbean, led an informal conversation with community members about the Global Advocacy team’s priorities and the political and regulatory environments in Brazil. In these images you can see that we exist IRL too.

North America

• US Copyright Office plenary: The Foundation participated in a plenary session held by the US Copyright Office inquiring into what the government’s role might be in identifying standard technical measures (STMs). Kate Ruane, Lead Public Policy Specialist for the US, represented the Foundation’s perspective of skepticism of the government’s role in identifying or mandating the use of STMs. We voiced support for a process where stakeholders could discuss appropriate technical measures without the threat of regulation.

Announcements from our Team

• Help us combat disinformation: We are launching a public mapping project to counter disinformation. We need your help. Our goal is to compile all the initiatives and tools that have been developed at the local level across Wikipedia projects so that we can share them with the entire movement and support each other better. If you are aware of any initiative, tool, training, or other form of community engagement around misinformation, disinformation, or information integrity, please let us know. Send an e-mail with the subject “disinformation mapping” to Costanza Sciubba Caniglia (csciubbacaniglia@wikimedia.org), our Anti-Disinformation Strategy Lead, and copy Ziski Putz (fputz@wikimedia.org).
  
• Join us at Wikimania: We’re hosting a session at Wikimania! Join us on Sunday, 14 August at 17:45 UTC for a workshop focused on human rights. Participants will help us brainstorm solutions to address specific human rights challenges facing Wikimedia projects and platforms, including issues like harmful content, harassment, government surveillance and censorship, and challenges to knowledge equity. Our goal is to crowdsource ideas on how the movement can better mitigate these challenges and, in turn, protect Wikimedians’ human rights. We hope you join and share your thoughts with us.

Follow us on Twitter, check our Meta-Wiki, or join our mailing list for updates. We hope to see you there.

The diversity of the community as well as inviting new editors from various backgrounds became a prime mover to focus on topics related to the subject of human rights. Both Serbian and Czech chapters have that issue as a strategic priority and decided to work on its coverage together.

Human rights month on Wikipedia

In the Czech Republic, the idea of better coverage of topics related to human rights came into action as a Wikiproject and one-month-long editing contest “Human rights month on Wikipedia” with the highlight event – Human rights edit-a-thon, which was held on the 20th of June 2022 in the heart of Prague. 

During the contest 54 Wikipedians edited or created 96 new articles. You can find the results here. The edit-a-thon was organized in the hybrid form, 11 local organizations active in the field of human rights joined the activity – among others Amnesty International, OPIM, SIMI, or People in Need. 

World Refugee Day Edit-a-thon

On the occasion of World Refugee Day, the Wikimedia Czech Republic joined the international edit-a-thon organized by Wikimedia Serbia. Wikipedia volunteers around Europe who participated in this campaign wrote and improved articles on topics related to the refugee crisis, human rights of refugees, movies, and books about the experience of refugees, etc. Those topics are essential not only because of the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe but because refugees face discrimination, xenophobia, and various forms of violence daily along their way and we wanted to raise awareness about those issues. The edit-a-thon was supported by GLAM Macedonia, Shared Knowledge, Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey, Wikimedians of Republic of Srpska, and Wikimedia Community User Group Greece. 

International Refugee Day Edit-a-thon started on the 20th of June when World Refugee Day is celebrated, and it lasted until the 26th of June. During this campaign, 44  editors wrote 146 and improved 7 articles. The best results were made on Serbian and Macedonian Wikipedia. You can find more information about the results here. On the occasion of these noteworthy results, we asked Žana Gnjatović, the editor of Serbian Wikipedia who made significant contributions to this event, what the International Refugee Day Edit-a-thon represented for her:

By participating in the World Refugee Day edit-a-thon, my goal was to showcase books and publications that are dedicated to this topic. My primary goal was to bring attention to the books that can be helpful to refugees, people who are there to support and aid them, and the general public. The refugee crisis has been occurring for several years now, and it seems that it will not end anytime soon. For starters, something that we as individuals can do about this matter is to find relevant information and try to learn more about and understand all of the daily challenges and difficulties that refugees face. Writing articles about the book dedicated to refugees and refugee crisis is my contribution to this task.

Žana Gnjatović

Wikimedia Serbia and the Wikimedia Czech Republic also collaborated on the organization of a meet-up call for all the chapters and Wikimedia user groups that supported and participated in the International Refugee Day Edit-a-thon. This call presented an opportunity to Wikimedians around Europe not only to get to know each other but also to share their experience and plans for the future. 

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

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

• GUS2Wiki copies the information from Special:GadgetUsage to an on-wiki page so you can review its history. If your project isn’t already listed on the Wikidata entry for Project:GUS2Wiki you can either run GUS2Wiki yourself or make a request to receive updates. [1]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 9 August at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 11 August at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).

Future meetings

• The Wikimania Hackathon will take place online from August 12–14. Don’t miss the pre-hacking showcase to learn about projects and find collaborators. Anyone can propose a project or host a session. Newcomers are welcome!

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

The East African Regional and Thematic Hub (EARTH) is a proposed hub that seeks to bring together communities in East Africa to work towards a common agenda in the pursuit of championing free knowledge in line with the implementation of initiative 25 of Wikimedia 2030 Strategy: Regional and thematic hubs.

EARTH is currently in the research and planning phase. The core organizing team received funding from the movement strategy team to facilitate the process.

The proposed hub will target 11 communities: in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia, Zambia, and Botswana

The extensive research seeks to identify both opportunities and the existing challenges facing East African communities and establish whether EARTH Hub is something of interest to these communities as well as find out how this hub will be a solution to the existing EA communities’ problems in the pursuit of free knowledge. We will also explore similar hub-like structures within our regions and learn more about their operations and governance models and consider what might be worth adopting.

Scope

• To ensure that the existing and future communities have the capacity and resources to make and implement meaningful decisions for Wikimedia 2030, and the Movement Strategy.
• Make new connections and structures that will strengthen the identified communities to fulfill the Strategic Direction.
• To empower groups of affiliates to collaborate on capacity building, knowledge transfer, coordination, and participation in the Wikimedia Movement discussions and activities.

Community participation is Key

The project will define the scope and role of a hub in our region through community outreach to gather input around what a regional hub means for the target communities; what tangible steps are needed in creating a hub; identify thematic areas of mutual interest; and identify solutions to solve coordination or representation decisions, inclusivity, and also provide a systematic way of Knowledge and skills sharing.

An external consultant will be recruited by the steering team to facilitate the research process, and a call for the target communities to participate will be published soon.

The end result will include an evaluation on the gaps and needs, plus recommendations for a pilot implementation.

Background

East African Countries enjoy historical political and economic relations that are enshrined in the East Africa Community economic bloc (EAC) and the East African Regional and Thematic Hub (EARTH) seeks to leverage on this goodwill.

Earth is looking into building on a journey that started gaining momentum in 2019 when 8 communities in the East Africa region and others drawn from nearby countries that are not within the EAC like Ethiopia, convened in Uganda for the East Africa Strategy Summit.

Learn more and see how to get involved on the EARTH Meta page

This year’s Wikimania is taking place both virtually and in person, with nearly 50 events happening across the globe! The in-person events are being organized by affiliates and other movement groups and will bring Wikimedians together to celebrate with pizza parties, picnics, watchathons and more!

You’ll also be able to see some of the in-person events being tied into the main virtual program–on the 12th we have Wikimedia Mexico and a reprise of the mariachi band from 2021! And on the 14th, the final day we have a previous host location, Esino Lario, make an appearance virtually, all the way from Italy. 

Africa was home to many newcomers for the 2021 event and this year has 20 events taking place across the continent. Latin America has a spread of events from Mexico all the way down to Santiago, Chile. India has four events taking place across the country! 

If you are interested in joining any of these events, you can find out more about the hosts, dates, times and how to register on the Wikimedia Wiki page. If you are a host or going along to attend, we’d love to see and hear how things go! You can send info, photos and videos to wikimania@wikimedia.org and share on social channels by tagging us (@wikimania.conference on Facebook/Instagram and @wikimania on Twitter) or using the official hasthtag #Wikimania2022. 

Highlights from the regions

Latin America and the Caribbean

There are eight events in seven countries across the Latin American and Caribbean region.
Wikimedia México will host a viewing party August 12,13 and 14 in Cuernavaca. They will have activities with the community such as a barbecue and karaoke night. There is going to be a second event in Veracruz on August 12 with a series of talks on Wikipedia and the Education program. 

Wikimedia Venezuela and Wikimedia Small Projects are planning a conference for Wikimedians and people who want to know more about this community. More information here.

Wikimedia Colombia is also planning a Wikidia, an event for volunteers of the Colombian chapter. Wiki Ocupa Santa Leopoldina is the event from Wiki Movimento Brasil and will include a day and night time photo walk, collaborative mapping, an edith-a-ton and digitization of Museu do Colono collections. Wikimedia Argentina is organizing a two days event in Santa Fe and will include a community meeting with people around the country and a safari tour in the ecological reserve. Meetups are also happening before and during the event in Chile and Haiti.

Middle East and North Africa

There will be two events in the Middle East & North Africa region. Wikimedia Tunisia is organizing a community meet up and a watch party in Monastir. They will also be changing the board committee of the user group and this will be part of the event. The Sudan group is also planning a meet up. 

Africa

There are several Wikimania in-person events that include watch parties, workshops and training that will be taking place across East, West and South Africa. The following are some of the communities organizing:

Wikimedia South Africa – Two Wikimania Meet-Ups; in Capetown and Johannesburg. In Capetown the in-person events will run for three days (12-14 August) while the Joburg meet up will only run for one day (13th August).

Wikimedia User Group Nigeria, Igbo Wikimedians User Group, Yoruba Wikimedians User Group are also planning a joint Wikimania in person 4 day regional event in Lagos, Nigeria,  that will feature discussions, meetups, training, and workshops

Europe and North America

There are nine events taking place in Europe, with previous host cities such as London, Stockholm and Esino Lario holding in person meet ups. North America sees New York host The Wiki World’s Fair event, to be held all-day on Saturday August 13, 2022 at the Queens Museum.

Asia 

East Asia is home to events taking place in communities such as Japan, Thailand and the Philippines. South Asia will see 5 events being organized in the region covering 4 language communities, 2 countries and a developer community.

Wikimania 2022, Bangladesh Edition is a regional daylong conference arranged by Wikimedia Bangladesh on the occasion of Wikimania 2022 on the 12th of August, 2022. In this conference, the social and technological side will be presented and discussed, focussing on the projects under Wikimedia like Wikipedia, other wikis, open knowledge etc.

Wikimania Madurai 2022 is a local meetup of Tamil Wikimedians on behalf of Global Wikimania conference 2022, on the14th of August, 2022 in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. The meetup will have lightning talks, project introductions, opening ceremonies and honorable mentions for some special guests. The event will also be connected with Wikimania’s virtual program.

Wikimania Mangalore 2022 is the local meet up of the Karavali Wikimedians being hosted in Mangalore, Karnataka. They are hosting a Wikimania 2022 local meetup in Mangalore on August 13 for Karavali Wikimedians to gather in-person to meet each other and participate in both online and offline activities. The full day event will include opening ceremonies, group connect activities, special talks and a discussion on the future of the group and their activities. 

Indic MediaWiki Developers User Group is organizing a 3-day Hackathon in Bangalore, Karnataka from the 12th to 14th of August, 2022. This meet-up is composed of two tracks running parallely for the whole meet-up. One track is dedicated to hackathons while the other track is for attending and engaging with online Wikimania events. The hackathon is a participant-led track and participants will choose and work on the project of their interest from the set of pre-listed tasks. They will join in the Wikimania festival celebrations during the 3-day event and the participants would be encouraged to join the different discussions to learn, contribute and share their experiences during Wikimania 2022. They also encourage newcomers to join the event and learn about the Wikimania, and the Wikimedia moment and help them in making connections with fellow developers from across the globe.

Odia Wikimedians User Group is organizing a 2-days conference in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha on the 13th and 14th of August, 2022, inviting all members of the user group to meet, exchange and learn. The conference would also focus on increasing the skills needed for existing editors. 

In the past years, the threat posed by disinformation—that is to say, the intentional spread of misleading information—has become particularly intense worldwide. Wikipedia volunteers and communities work tirelessly everyday to establish reliable information as well as find and correct false information on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. 

Many in the Wikimedia movement have been addressing this growing challenge by developing new tools to address it and also by sharing knowledge across the volunteer community. However, not all communities and volunteers are aware of or have access to these efforts, and many are struggling to confront disinformation risks in a highly complex environment. 

The Global Advocacy team, in collaboration with many others at the Foundation, wants to help. For this reason, we are launching a public mapping project to collect all initiatives and tools that have been developed at the local level across Wikimedia projects, and make them easily accessible and available to the movement at large.

Crowdsourcing this information will allow us to support our community better, thereby improving Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects’ protection against disinformation. We need your help to do so.

If you are aware of an initiative, tool, training, or other form of community engagement around misinformation, disinformation, or information integrity, please let us know. Here is how to do so:

1. Send an email with the subject “disinformation mapping” to Costanza Sciubba Caniglia (csciubbacaniglia@wikimedia.org), our Anti-Disinformation Strategy Lead, and CC Ziski Putz (fputz@wikimedia.org), our Movement Advocacy Manager. Let us know the time zone in which you are based.
   
2. Wait for a follow-up reply from either Ziski or Costanza.
   
3. Schedule a time to meet with them!

We are very excited to hear about your projects, and to discuss and decide together how we can better support and highlight them. Collectively, as a movement, we can learn from each other and ensure that our platforms remain sources of free and reliable information! 

• Argentina report: Provinces: our main characters
• Brazil report: Brazil holds its National Wiki Conference, and many GLAM partners join
• Colombia report: A very busy July for Colombian libraries / Un Julio bastante movido para las bibliotecas colombianas
• France report: Wikimedian in residence in Clermont-Ferrand
• New Zealand report: News from Auckland Museum, the West Coast, and New Zealand’s thesis repositories
• Poland report: Edit-a-thon in the National Museum in Cracow, GLAM editing contest on the collection of artworks
• Portugal report: Portugal’s first GLAM-Wiki open access museum project is launched!!
• Serbia report: Presentation of GLAM activities at Edu Wiki Camp
• UK report: Khalili Collections
• USA report: GLAM for the Masses
• AvoinGLAM report: Wikimania
• Content Partnerships Hub report: Wikimania activities
• WMF GLAM report: What next for 1Lib1Ref?
• Calendar: August’s GLAM events

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.

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.

🕑 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.