13/09/2022-19/09/2022

About us

• We are always looking for people to help us improve our newsletter so it can get out faster, have more depth and coverage, and generally benefit our readers, like you! Please join our team now.

Mapping

• The French city of Rennes, announced ► that it is hosting three mapping parties, during which citizens will be helped in adding shops to OpenStreetMap.
• Pieter Vander announced that now MapComplete is able to detect tree species automatically by using PlantNet.org API, making it easier to link a tree to its correct species while mapping tree location on OpenStreetMap.
• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposal:
  • highway=scramble for indicating that a path needs use of hands to travel over.
• Voting on the following proposal has closed :
  • crossing:markings, to declare the existence and style of pedestrian crossing markings, was approved with 29 votes for, 1 vote against and 3 abstentions.
• Voting is underway for the following proposal:
  • To clarify the definition of the dimensional tags used on loading docks, until Wednesday 28 September.

Community

• OSM user Mannivu wrote > a diary entry on how to upload pictures to Wikimedia Commons, create a Wikidata element, create a Wikimedia Commons category, link a Wikidata element and a Commons category, and insert those data into OSM.
• Martijn van Exel wondered why there is no search form for OSM diaries. Commenters explained how to use your favourite search engine for that.

Events

• Katja Haferkorn announced ► that a workshop ► on the topic of OpenStreetMap indoor tagging will be held 14 to 16 October in Frankfurt am Main.
• Some statistical figures on the recent SotM in Florence for you.

Humanitarian OSM

• Adam Rousell announced that HeiGIT has activated the Disaster openrouteservice in the region of Pakistan in response to the severe monsoonal flooding the country has experienced in recent weeks. Currently, data is being updated every 10 minutes to reflect the dynamic situation and affected infrastructure.

Maps

• Martijn van Exel published an open source clone of Ilya Zverik’s vintage OSM tile server.

switch2OSM

• Deutsche Bahn is using OSM in their passenger information system. It tracks the train’s current speed, position and schedule and informs passengers of points of interest that can be found along the route. Recommended for imitation.

Open Data

• GwenCarto gave a tutorial on NoiseModelling using OSM data.
• The state of Sachen Anhalt, Germany has released ► a 20 cm resolution digital surface model as open data (via Twitter). The licence ► allows using the data to improve OSM.

Licences

• Harry Wood published an article to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Open Database License (ODbL), the licence of OpenStreetMap’s data. The ODbL was created in response to several issues regarding the unsuitability of CC BY-SA licences when applied to map data.
• Andres Gomez Casanova has published two Spanish-language videos in which he explains the incompatibility of ODbL and CC-BY:
  • The problem of attribution.
  • The use of DRM in derivative works where ODbL allows it but CC-BY does not.

  They expand ► on an article from 10 April (we reported earlier).

Software

• [1] Ilya Zverik published a tutorial for his Every Door OpenStreetMap editor (for POIs and entrances) along with the release of version 2.0 of the software. Downloads are available for Android and iOS. Release notes are on GitHub.
• Arno Wolter, one of the three founders and CEO of the Initiative for Safer Roads, talked about their new project Gefahrenstellen.de, which seeks to help parents and schoolchildren select the path to school with the least traffic and risk. The project uses HeiGIT’s openrouteservice as a routing service, which in turn uses OSM data.
• Altilunium has released Pataddress, an open-source alternative to what3words (but with four words instead) with a built-in word frequency analyser to build a custom word database in your own language.
• GraphHopper has released version 6.0 of their routing engine. This update offers faster route calculation, more flexibility, better instructions, and developer documentation.
• HeiGIT, the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology, reported that a building completeness indicator has been added to the ohsome quality analyst. This indicator uses proxy variables to predict the expected area of buildings in a given area of interest and then compares this prediction to the total area of buildings currently mapped in OSM.
• Marcel Reinmuth wrote that the Open Healthcare Access Map has now achieved global coverage. The Open Healthcare Access Map uses OpenStreetMap, HeiGIT’s openrouteservice, and WorldPop to estimate the number of people living within a certain distance of a healthcare facility. The data is also available on the Humanitarian Data Exchange.
• The RapiD development team at Meta blogged about an ‘early preview’ of RapiD 2.0 alpha, an OSM editor with access to AI-generated open data. The big change is a rewrite of the graphics engine to improve overall performance. They are asking for feedback via GitHub, Slack or Facebook.
• Felt announced that Erica Fischer, the creator of the library Tippecanoe, joined the company to continue her open-source work. Tippecanoe is a GeoJSON to vector map tiles converter, with a specific aesthetic intent to enable making a scale-independent view of the data. At any zoom level, the density and texture of the data is still visible, rather than having to manually exclude certain classes of data.

Programming

• The osm2pgsql team just announced that the source code of osm2pgsql has gone through a security audit. None of the tests revealed any severe security issues, but users should be aware that they should properly set up a secure system environment. The team have amended the manual further to explain several important security practices.

Releases

• Vespucci, ‘the editor for Android that allows any kind of editing directly on mobile devices’, released version 18.0.0. The highlights are described in a blog post.
• Marcos Dione discovered that JPEG map tile files with quality parameter set to 70–80 are 50% or less their size in PNG, suitable for low-resolution, offline, low-connectivity, or mobile map apps. He also updated his osm-tile-tools to accept JPEG tile file format.

Did you know …

• … Marcel Reinmuth presented several maps with information on abortion access in Germany that were created using HeiGIT’s openrouteservice?
• … you can find places with vegetarian (diet:vegetarian) and vegan (diet:vegan) options by using Veggiekarte?
• … that an anonymous critic collects problems with the what3words algorithm and implementation?

OSM in the media

• OpenCage is partnering with the MapScaping podcast to help promote OSM-based projects. The selected projects will receive a 30 second promotional message at the start of a podcast episode and logo inclusions on the MapScaping front page and Twitter account. Any project using OpenStreetMap is eligible (tools, technologies, services, open source, NGO, or for-profit start-up). You can apply until Saturday 15 October.

Other “geo” things

• The events associated with the funeral rites for Queen Elizabeth II would seem an unlikely reason for an item of geospatial news. However, Gizmodo reported that a number of odd errors occurred through the use of what3words to help people find the end of the queue for viewing during the lying in state.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Budapest	OSM Fonó: Short editing introduction and remote help (online, live)		2022-09-23
La Virgen	5ta reunión bimestral de OSM Latinoamérica		2022-09-24
Recife	[online] First pic4review mapathon from UMBRAOSM (BR)		2022-09-24
Cisterna d’Asti	Incontro mapper astigiani		2022-09-24
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend		2022-09-24 – 2022-09-25
Gent	OpenTechTalks: OpenStreetMap		2022-09-26
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-09-26
Arlon	Réunion des contributeurs OpenStreetMap, Arlon (Belgium)		2022-09-26
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-09-28
Derby	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup		2022-09-27
London	Geomob London		2022-09-28
Washington	OSM US Mappy Hour	✓	2022-09-29
Vern-sur-Seiche	Atelier participatif « Recensement des commerces »		2022-09-29
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-09-30
Villa de Cos	Notathon en OpenStreetMap – resolvamos notas de México		2022-10-01
	Hacktoberfest 2022		2022-10-01 – 2022-10-31
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #45		2022-10-03
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2022-10-04
London	London pub meet-up		2022-10-04
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-10-04
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #39 (Online)	✓	2022-10-04
Murray	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-10-06
Mannheim	Mapathon in der Moschee		2022-10-06
Град Крагујевац	OSM Serbia regular meetup	✓	2022-10-06
La Chapelle-des-Fougeretz	Atelier participatif « Recensement des commerces »		2022-10-07
Kaiserslautern	OSM Mapping Event Erfassung von Barrieren		2022-10-08
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第32回 Re:妙心寺		2022-10-08
Polokwane Local Municipality	OSM Africa October Mapathon	✓	2022-10-08
Polokwane Local Municipality	OSM Africa October Mapathon	✓	2022-10-08
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2022-10-12
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-10-12
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-10-11
Frankfurt am Main	Arbeitstreffen Indoor OSM 2022		2022-10-14 – 2022-10-16

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, PierZen, Strubbl, TheSwavu, andygol, derFred, erenozdemir, rtnf, tordans.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

I’ve managed to get WikiApiary to the point where there is “only” a few DB connection problems instead of a completely un-reachable website. For the past 18 hours, here is what the database connection problems look like:

I got the data from WikiApiary’s exception log. During this time, there was only one entry in the fatal log (“Allowed memory size … exhausted”). For anyone who wants to check my work (or, at least, verify that I’m not missing something) here is the one-liner I used to get this:

(grep '^Error: ' exception.log;
 grep 'Could not acquire lock' exception.log
   | cut -d ' ' -f16-
   | sed "s,.LinksUpdate:.*,,; s, *,,;"
) | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

This is around one DB problem per minute. When you consider that the site was almost completely unusable before this, I’m actually pretty pleased with these results.

To get to these results, I did a couple of things:

• Reduced the crawlers so that only two would run at a time.
• Set max_statement_time for the DB user in MariaDB.

I wrote about max_statement_time earlier, so I’ll talk a bit about what I did with the crawlers here.

First, you should know that, as one of Jamie Thinglestad’s projects a few years ago, he created the set of Python scripts that crawl the wikis and created WikiApiary to collect the information. Jamie knew WikiApiary and the scripts weren’t perfect, but it was just a fun hobby.

He could probably see the hungry looks of wiki-enthusiasts, but he had a lot of things he was working on besides wikis. He wisely decided it was time to let go.

I contacted him to transfer the domain and have mostly kept it puttering along with much more active on-wiki volunteers (shout out to Karsten, Shufflertoxin, Hoof Hearted and all the rest) until things really started getting wonky this year.

As I hinted here just a few days ago, WikiApiary is behind the times when it comes to the transition to Python 3. Python 2 has been EOL for over 2.5 years, but we still haven’t updated WikiApiary’s scripts. That really needs work. (This feels like we’re on the wrong side of the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5, guys!)

Anyway, I managed to cobble together working bots, but, for a still-not-yet-understood reason, they seem to be taking a long time to run and, while taking a long time to run, they would pummel WikiApiary with requests and cause the site to constantly produce Error 500s because of database problems.

So, instead of using cron to kick off a bot once a minute which resulted in 60 bots running at once, I pared it down to a maximum of two bots running simultaneously.

Note that I might be able to increase this, but right now there are just under 4 million jobs in the job queue because of another problem that was hidden until Shufflertoxin pointed out that pages weren’t being returned from the categorymembers API.

I’m torn between declaring job queue bankruptcy and using 10 job queue runners to eat away at the job queue. If I delete the job queue and run rebuildData.php, I might save time, and get everything back to where it should be.

Or, I could just uncover more problems.

Either way, the wiki still needs to be upgraded from the now-ancient version 1.29 that it is currently running under.

I had a lot of time to work on WikiApiary this week, but I probably won’t have as much time for the next couple of months. This work will be relegated back to the back burner for me. If anyone else wants to help out, here are the things that need to be done (I know, I should create tasks for these in phabricator):

• Update the python scripts to work with Python 3.
• Update MediaWiki on WikiApiary to the latest LTS.
• Either run out the jobqueue or declare jobqueue bankruptcy and run rebuildData.php.

When I started writing this, I thought I was going to write about my idea of moving the MediaWiki infrastructure for WikiApiary to Canasta, but, as you can see, I had a lot of other things that I needed to let you know in the meantime.

Photo credit: “Canastas en El Bajío – Ciudad de México 170924 174342 6443 RX100M5 DeppArtEf” by Lucy Nieto is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

WIKIMOVE comes back from summer break with a new episode around content and knowledge gaps in the Wikimedia projects. 

What’s in this episode?

In this episode we talk with three Wikimedians who are trailblazers for including marginalized voices into the Wikimedia projects. Lucy Crompton-Reid, Daniel Bögre Udell and Kiril Simeonowski are active in different but complementary projects that implement Recommendation 8, Topics for Impact. You can find out about new formats for creating oral citations, a toolkit in the works for surfacing marginalized knowledge and first ideas on helping to create Wikipedias with marginalized language communities. Join us for this and to find out about Wikidata’s 10th Birthday!

Our guests are…

Kiril Simeonovski
Kiril is president of Shared Knowledge and a leading Wikimedian from the region of Central and Eastern Europe and has been actively contributing to the Wikimedia projects since 2008.

Daniel Bögre Udell
Daniel is a co-founder and the Executive Director of Wikitongues, which supports language revitalization projects on every continent.

Lucy Crompton-Reid
Lucy joined Wikimedia UK as Chief Executive in October 2015. She is on the British Library Advisory Council and sits on the board of The Audience Agency and Visible Theatre. 

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

Our next episode around peer support in our movement will be released on October 20th, stay tuned! 

It’s difficult to imagine a more efficient way to celebrate achievements.

“Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites in the world, and the go-to resource for reference and background information,” said Christian Anderson who completed our recent Wiki Scientists course sponsored by the American Physical Society. “When STEM minorities are included in Wikipedia, their visibility immediately increases. It’s difficult to imagine a more efficient way to celebrate achievements from all kinds of folks. As a physicist (one of the majors with the fewest women) at BYU (one of the least ethnically diverse schools in America), it’s easy to think only white men do what I do; Wikipedia is a powerful counter to those sorts of historically-deterministic blinders.”

Christian Anderson is a marine biologist and theoretical physicist, who also studies Finnish in his spare time. When he realized that the English Wikipedia was missing a biography of Dr. Eugenie Lisitzin, an oceanographer who was the first Finnish woman to earn a PhD in physics, he figured he was a great person to write it.

“I’ve been strongly committed to increasing minority involvement in STEM for decades. I have also taught myself a bit of wiki editing, and I thought this was a fantastic opportunity to combine both interests. I was delighted to find a physical oceanographer (my two fields) who broke so many gender barriers in her own country, and that I happened to have rudimentary abilities in the uncommon language containing most of the secondary sources about her. But what really made me feel like this was meant to be was late in the project, I stumbled upon a list of visiting scholars to my own former department (The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD), and learned that Lisitzin had spent a six month sabbatical on the same campus as me in 1959.”

There are a few reasons a biography might not exist on Wikipedia yet. The figure may not meet Wikipedia’s requirements for notability. There may not be enough secondary sources about them to cite. Or, (and what is very often the case), someone simply has not taken the time to write it.

The argument could definitely be made for Dr. Lisitzin’s deserving an article. But at first, Christian had some trouble tracking down enough online resources about her.

“I understand Wikipedia’s policy of referencing secondary sources to maintain standards of notability. Unfortunately, one side effect of this policy is that it causes Wikipedia to reflect societal bias against women and minorities in science,” said Christian. Luckily, he knew where else to look.

“I sought help from some wonderful people. Ari Miettinen at the University of Helsinki dug Dr. Lisitzin’s 1927 dissertation out of the archives and scanned the first five pages for me, so I could find out who her advisor was. I also discovered that her future boss at the Institute of Marine Science was on her committee, explaining why she shifted from particle physics to oceanography. Researchers in the Finnish Genealogy Facebook group and at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City were able to help me find the family’s immigration records from Germany (where her father was a railway engineer) to Finland, and her only obituary in a small local newspaper. Without their help, I wouldn’t have known even where she died, much less that an Act of Parliament was passed in 1961 to allow her to become the first director of a federal science ministry when the current director took a two year sabbatical.”

It’s exactly this kind of collaboration, crowd-sourcing, and passionate follow-through that makes Wikipedia work and makes it wonderful. And having the support of our Wiki Scientists course gave Christian some added skills and confidence, even though he had been editing Wikipedia since 2014.

“I had written two articles before taking this class, but learned something new every meeting, including how to customize my personal profile, all about the wiki journal, community standards in talk pages, where to get help, and so on. Will Kent was an excellent discussion leader.

“I love Wikipedia as a source, and am always delighted when I get to contribute. After the class, I went back and improved an article I created in 2016 about Ludwig Berwald, a brilliant Jewish mathematician in Vienna who submitted his last paper for publication the morning before Nazis took him to the concentration camp where he would die. That is a powerful story, and one that deserves the best writing I can bring to it.”

“Ludwig and Lisitzin show that even with the millions of articles already available, significant and inspiring stories are still waiting to be told. I’m delighted that I now have the skills and opportunity to share them via Wikipedia.”

Sign up for an open course at learn.wikiedu.org or explore sponsoring a customized course like the American Physical Society did at partner.wikiedu.org.

Thank you to all who participated in the 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election! Voting closed September 6 at 23:59. The data can be seen on the Statistics page and the two most voted candidates can be seen on the Results page. Please note these are preliminary results. The official announcement of the new trustees will happen later, once the candidates have been approved and appointed by the Board. This is planned to happen at the Board of Trustees’ December meeting.

Diversity was an important goal with these elections. Messages about the Board of Trustees election were translated into about 40 languages thanks to election volunteers and community members. Just under 6,000 (5,955) community members from 194 wiki projects voted. This makes 8.8% global participation. In 2021, 6,946 people from 216 wiki projects cast their vote. You can read a blog post about thoughts on the reduced turnout in the 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections.

As part of Wikimedia’s 2030 Movement Strategy Recommendations, there have been discussions on Initiative 25, which focuses on regional and thematic hubs. In view of this, the West African Hubs Research Team has embarked on research to understand the perceptions of the community members in the West African sub-region on the concept of regional and thematic hubs. We have therefore shared a survey with the primary goal of understanding:

1. What do African volunteers in West Africa think of hubs? 
2. What obstacles can these hubs in West Africa address?  

The survey will also help the team to understand the perspectives of communities in West Africa as well as provide a description of how a hub should be set up.

Work done so far

We have begun collecting data for our research and currently have fewer than 100 responses to our survey. This comprises 64 from the English communities and 12 from the French communities, respectively. We have also begun contacting community leads to conduct in-depth interviews.

Support

The West African Hubs Research Team is grateful to all who have already filled our survey and will entreat other Wikimedians, especially those within the West African Region, to kindly fill the survey and share it with other Wikimedians. It takes about 5 minutes to complete the survey. Below is a link to the survey. Thank you for your help

English-https://forms.gle/szX17P2xh4hQUCqb6

French- https://forms.gle/71yFezdw65ovF4RE6

Have you ever wondered how campaigns like #1lib1ref, Art+Feminism or Wiki Loves Folklore got started?

In the last few years, the Movement Strategy process has emphasized the critical importance of organizers to growing content on our platforms, and recruiting and retaining newcomers. The Wikimedia projects rely on a sustainable network of volunteers to drive continuous improvement of the knowledge we curate for the world. Organizers — be they local or international — have been leading this space and filling knowledge gaps by inviting, training, and retaining new people through a wide variety of campaigns and partnerships. 

To date, the path to organizing has been very organic, loosely supported by grant-making and the work of our affiliate network. But the Movement Strategy asks us to focus on Investing in Skills and Leadership Development and Identifying Topics for Impact. We need to get more deliberate about asking questions like:

• How are we inviting the next generation of editors and volunteers to our movement to help us address a universe of knowledge gaps?
• Are we creating clear pathways for organizers to gain all the skills or knowledge they need to champion the Wikimedia Movement well?

By mentoring and working with organizers over the last three years to understand campaigns around the world, the Campaigns Team at the Wikimedia Foundation has learned how to help organizers design campaigns that bring in the next generation of contributors. We are going to share those lessons and experiences in an Organizer Lab (beta) focused on campaigns and organizing around “Topics for Impact”. Though we hope to expand to support other topics and themes in the coming years, the first cohort will be themed around a topic of rising interest across the movement: Climate Change and Sustainability.

What is the Organizer Lab?

The Organizer Lab will be a 9-week online learning experience running from the end of October until mid December that prepares participants to design strategic calls to action around prioritized knowledge gaps, as well as more generalized Wikimedia organizing and campaign/event design skills. The Lab will also connect those skills with a particular topic area: climate and sustainability. We have learned that organizers work best together when they collaborate on one theme. 

More specifically, participating organizers will leave the course with:

• A firm understanding of a how to develop a locally-relevant topic list for a knowledge gap-focused campaign
• A process for identifying local audiences and organizations who would be good candidates for activation and recruitment
• Understanding of the menu of tactics, tools, and newcomer engagement strategies available for effective event design
• A scalable and fundable project proposal for events or projects connected to a global campaign around Earth Day (April, 2023) (building on #WikiForHumanRights) or to other regional and international campaigns.

Participants who successfully complete the program will receive a certificate of completion and gain access to a special pool of grant funds for the best designed projects from the course. Applications are open from September 22 – October 19, 2022. 

Why an organizer lab?

Campaigns like Art+Feminism and Wiki Loves Monuments help Wikimedia communities meet new contributors and run their first events — community is often formed by running events as part of international campaigns. However, there is a central challenge for new international campaigns: often only the most experienced organizers are able to form them — it requires both deep knowledge of Wikimedia communities and skills important to campaigning more generally, often learned outside the Wikimedia movement. 

Working alongside the Community Resources team (which facilitates funding to our communities), we have observed a consistent need for support designing and running campaigns. Though we have been able to mentor campaigns like Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos and WikiVibrance, one-on-one kind of support doesn’t scale: if we are to achieve Movement strategy goals, communities around the world need to be able to run campaigns that address Topics for Impact. By taking what we learned from mentoring to the WikiLearn platform, we will be able to share these insights with more of the community, and help grow a stronger peer learning network for campaign organizers.

Who can participate?

Since this is the first cohort of the course, we are seeking to create a diverse cohort that includes organizers from all parts of the Wikimedia movement, especially in the Global South.  

Good candidates for the course will have: 

• Some Wikimedia organizing experience, running events or campaigns within their own communities. 
• An interest in topics related to climate change and sustainability
• A desire to organize strategic campaigns within the movement, that fill key knowledge gaps around climate 

By the end of this program, successful participants will understand how to design topics for impact campaigns and other programs targeted at climate and sustainability and also have connections with organizers around the world.

Apply now or learn more

To apply to join the cohort, please read the instructions on Meta, where you will find: an application form, important dates, and general guidance. Also check out the campaign newsletter for wider campaign organizing news and updates.

You’re also invited to join the information session on  September 30 at 14:00 UTC where we’ll share more details and answer questions. A recording will be made available after the information session. If you have any further queries ahead of this event, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the team via campaigns@wikimedia.org.

This blog was contributed by Wiki Movimento Brasil

Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo contest organized by the Wikimedia community annually. In Brazil, the contest has been taking place since 2015 and since 2019 it has been organized by the user group Wiki Movimento Brasil. Until 2018, there were around 1,500 participating monuments in the national phase, mostly monuments protected by the Institute of National Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN). With the integration of Wikidata, the free database of the Wikimedia ecosystem, this number has since jumped to more than 15 thousand monuments in 2022, covering monuments protected by official bodies of different governmental spheres and monuments recognized by institutions or projects aimed at recording the Brazilian heritage.

The expansion of the list of participating monuments is of great importance, as it allows the registration of less touristy monuments, but also holders of local, municipal and/or state historical importance. This was the case, for example, of the Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, a public library founded in 1837 by the Portuguese community in the city of Rio de Janeiro, then capital of the Portuguese Empire. Later this library was considered the fourth most beautiful library in the world by Time Magazine.

In 2021, the winning image of the international Wiki Loves Monuments was a photograph of exactly this Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, taken by the Lithuanian photographer Donatas Dabravolskas, who in an interview with Wiki Movimento Brasil said that he became aware of the existence of the monument through social networks in 2019 and decided to visit it, took several pictures and saved them. In 2021, he found that the library was on the list of monuments participating in the national phase and decided to submit the photographs. The symmetry and air of antiquity that the library and photography presented were highlighted among the judges of the international jury, as well as the choice of point of view, which conveys the grandeur of the library.

Despite being essentially a photographic contest to select the best images of the global historical heritage, Wiki Loves Monuments has also been used in Brazil as a tool to achieve the maximum mission of the Wikimedia movement: The building and preservation of the sum of all human knowledge. In recent years, the coverage of illustrated monuments has increased by 270%, reaching 928 illustrated monuments, with at least 600 of those illustrated in Wikimedia projects for the first time. The photographic record of a monument can act as a kind of digital preservation of the object itself, even more so when subjected to bad weather and disaster, or in light of the neglect and abandonment by the State and its institutions in the preservation of this heritage. It’s also an opportunity to diversify the Internet’s heritage records and engage new editors to the Wikimedia Movement.

It was precisely with the engagement of new editors in mind that Wiki Movimento Brasil started to develop an interactive map application for the national Wiki Loves Monuments phase. The profile of Internet users in Brazil is mainly mobile (99.4% of people that accessed the internet in 2021 used mobile devices, only 35.7% used computers) and with lower bandwidth depending on the state (with the poorest regions having lower bandwidth than the wealthiest regions). The application is available at https://wikilovesbrasil.toolforge.org.

Providing good user experience might help engage participants more and more meaningfully with the contest and the interactivity of such application has the potential of helping participants to know or to acknowledge the historic heritage near them and incentivize them to contribute with images and improve the sum of all knowledge.

What’s it like to win Wiki Loves Monuments?
Lithuanian photographer Donatas Dabravolskas, winner of the 2021 edition, shares his story.

A video interview with Donatas Dabravolskas, WLM 2021 winner: click on the image to open.

And we’re off!

Wiki Loves Monuments 2022 has started again: national teams from 40 countries around the world will be organizing the annual photo competition, which is focused on getting more photographs of built heritage monuments. After the national competitions, the organisors will submit the top 10 images from their country to the international competition for the big finale. Jurors from around the world will the decide who will be the Winner of Wiki Loves Monuments 2022.

Wiki Loves Monuments is built on three simple criteria. First, all photos are freely licensed, like all other contributions to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. By giving permission to the public to share these photos, it ensures that the results can remain widely available forever. Second, all photos must contain an identified monument, e.g., a building or art of historic significance – we want to know what heritage is on the photo so that we can actually use it. Each country maintains a list of registered historic sites that are eligible for the competition. Third, the photo must be uploaded in the month of September/October (based on the country). You are always welcome to contribute your photography to Wikimedia Commons, but photos uploaded before or after the month of September and October may not be considered for the competition. If you would like more details on Wiki Loves Monuments in your country, you can visit wikilovesmonuments.org/participate.

You can expect an international announcement on the winners in February 2023. Good luck!

While WikiApiary was offline, its stewards–the MediaWiki Stakeholders user group–got a number of complaints. For a brief time, I tried to allay the worry by putting up a reassuring bee, but then I was spending time that I didn’t think I had, so I figured it would be better to use that time to actually get the site working.

I wrote about some of that work last Friday, but I did some more tinkering and the site seems to be working better. A brief summary of what I did since then:

• Bumped PageForms to 4.9.1. I tried a newer version, but I would have to upgrade MediaWiki first and I’m not yet prepared to do that. Soon.
• Made the graphs work. This was pretty trivial. Now I just have to work on getting them populated.
• Bumped up the memory available to PHP. I was seeing a few Allowed memory size of .... bytes exhausted messages in PageForms for some pages. Doubling the memory available seems to have solved that, for now.
• Solved the DB problem? This one I doubt. But I am seeing far fewer problems at the moment. I’ve just unleashed the bees again, so I think the problem will be back.

We’ve had some people volunteer to help with the maintenance of the site, but we could probably use more. Let me know if you want to help. Especially helpful right now would be someone who is good at porting python 2 code to python 3.

Photo is a detail of one by Dmitry Grigoriev on Unsplash

The Abstract Wikipedia team has taken further steps toward representing abstract content in natural languages!

When Denny introduced the proposal for Abstract Wikipedia here on Diff, he noted the need for “functions that can translate the content of Abstract Wikipedia into the natural language text of every Wikipedia.” Those “functions” will eventually comprise a community-driven natural language generation pipeline. Research and prototyping for that NLG pipeline have now begun. In this post, we will outline how the architecture of the NLG templating system (part of the NLG pipeline) fits in with other components. We’ll also highlight open questions in the hopes of encouraging discussion and further contribution by the community.

As the AW team discussed a few weeks ago, the planned NLG realizer, also called Renderer, and a component of the NLG system, will use a template language to help write templates and then it will transform templates into natural language text. The template language will provide a high-level, readable, declarative syntax to steer text generation from the abstract content (captured with the constructors). Then, the template language parser will produce a series of function compositions, whose details are further described in Google.org Fellow Ariel Gutman and Professor Maria Keet’s template language specification. It’s important for us to begin creating some standards for these functions now in order to limit complexity and ensure interoperability, so that abstract content can indeed benefit all languages and so that the community can write Constructors and Renderers on Wikifunctions with relative ease. Some of the complexities regarding doing NLG in agglutinating African languages have been addressed by Maria Keet in a TechTalk she gave to Google fellows in a meeting they held in Zurich in August.


 

To have a better idea of how the NLG realizer’s implementation may look, Ariel Gutman has started creating a Scribunto prototype, which will inform the Wikifunctions implementation. Mahir Moshed has also created the Ninai and Udiron libraries in Python to prototype the realizer. We will share more about the prototype in a future Diff post. At the same time, Google.org Fellow Sandy Woodruff has started reflecting about a dedicated UI for the NLG system. You can learn about some of her ideas in a brainstorming session held at the aforementioned meeting.

One open question concerns the Constructors themselves. A Constructor represents a piece of abstract content. Let’s adapt an example from the template language specification:

Age(

    entity: Malala Yousafzai (Q32732)

    age_in_years: 25 

)

This is a Constructor that represents a fact true at the time of writing, namely the age of Malala Yousafzai, which would be rendered in English as “Malala Yousafzai is 25 years old.” Note that, in reality, “age_in_years” would itself likely be defined by a function call that calculates age based on birth date and the present date, but this detail is omitted here for clarity.

Many of our open questions concern how representative this example Constructor is. This example represents a single proposition and can be realized as a sentence in most (maybe all?) natural languages, but will that be true of all Constructors? What if some Constructors embed multiple propositions? Is it possible for a Constructor to correspond to an incomplete proposition? 

Another set of questions concerns how general the relationship between a Constructor and its participant entities should be. We might imagine a Constructor for the sentence, “Bi Sheng invented movable type in 1040 AD.” In order to make Constructors reusable across languages and for multiple propositions, we would want to enshrine more general scenes or frames like “Age” above or, in this case, “Invent.” What, if any, linguistic formalization should be adopted for this purpose? FrameNet is one possibility, but might another work better, or does Abstract Wikipedia demand an ad hoc solution? How do we handle information which belongs in a sentence but isn’t intrinsically part of a proposition, e.g. “in 1040 AD” from the given example, which isn’t a “core” part of the notion of inventing something the way that the inventor and invention are? Kutz Arrieta from Google has begun thinking about these questions.

Once the Constructors have done their job, the Renderers’ work begins. The working NLG proposal presumes that the lexical forms in Wikidata will be marked with grammatical features (e.g., number for nouns and verbs, gender or class for substantives, aspect and tense and mood for verbs, …). Mahir Morshed and the rest of the NLG contributors have begun work on standardizing these representations in Wikidata’s lexicographical content, but our NLG system can’t assume the data will always be present or complete. Therefore, our questions here concern how to address missing lexical data. When the system generates a sentence, can it provide multiple possibilities for words it’s uncertain about? Should it allow the user to add new terms at that time? If so, how would it guide them to contribute to Wikidata from another project’s context?

These are big questions, but hopefully the challenges they present look exciting, rather than intimidating. As always, we welcome your contributions. We hope that the breadth of experience and sheer number of languages present within the community will help us find the most equitable solutions possible.

Nigeria, with a population of more than 200 million people, is unarguably the largest nation in Africa. It was a colony of the British empire and got its independence in 1960. In 1986, it acquired the current status of 36 states + Federal Character Territory (Abuja). It’s one of the most diverse nations with over 500+ indigenous languages, representing 25% of the entire country in Africa. There are over 300 ethnic groups across the length and breadth of the land.

The New Readers program has been an essential part of growing the WMF’s understanding of the gaps we need to fill in awareness and use of the Wikimedia projects in Emerging Markets. In the WMF’s New Awareness research conducted in Nigeria in 2016, less than 77% of Nigerians are aware of Wikipedia and its sister projects. The idea behind this research gave birth to the Wikimedia Nigeria Fan Club at the University of Ibadan, the first tertiary institution in Nigeria and the premier edition of the project. Later in the year, we had another fan club at the Nigeria Institute of Journalism in Lagos. Today, there are over 6 Wikimedia Nigeria Fan Clubs in Nigeria. Other institutions are in the pipeline for the project and coordinated by the community in charge of community resources within the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria. 

The entity behind this project and many others are the Wikimedia User Group, Nigeria (WUGN), an affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation recognised by the Affiliations Committee in September 2015 to introduce Wikimedia and its sister projects to Nigeria. It was the premier Wikimedia affiliate in the country. Subsequently, there are recognitions of other language-based Wikimedia User groups like; Igbo Wikimedians User Group, Hausa WIkimedians User Group, Yoruba Wikimedians User Group, Gungbe Wikimedians User Group, Tyap Wikimedians User Group. The Wikimedia UG Nigeria started its operation in Nigeria with three members, all residing in Lagos. By 2022, the group user base is now 400+ domiciling in over 80% of states in Nigeria.

The group received Wikimedia Community Support Grant in 2022 after 6+ years of recognition to promote various missioned aligned programs in Nigeria. Its Community Support Funds is an integral part of the annual program designed by Wikimedia User Group Nigeria to support Nigerian mission-aligned organization, individual members of the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria, fan clubs, and organised groups contributing to any Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, Wikidata or Wikimedia Commons etc.– to manage projects throughout the year with a budget of $100 up to $500. The Application opens on the 1st of May 2022! The grant focuses on Campaigns, e.g. Wiki Loves, 1 Lib 1Ref, e.t.c and micro-grants. 

The grant is administered through an independent committee of community members from different walks of life in Nigeria’s three user groups. Every month, the Grant applications are submitted from the 1st-15th, while the reviewing is from the 16th -the 25th of every month. The administration of the grants started in May 2022 with only five applicants. As of September, twenty applicants applied for the scheme from all states. However, the program could only fund a maximum of five campaign grants and two community grants, as agreed in the Annual Plan Grant (APG). In the 2023 APG, the team intends to increase the support.   

Recently, the group will celebrate its 7th anniversary in September 2022. Within this short time, the group has worked with 100+ local and international partners to promote Wikipedia and its sister projects in Nigeria.

Summary

This year’s board elections ended with lower global voter participation than in 2021.

By comparing available data of the elections in 2021 and 2022, some possible explanations for this are explored.

It seems as if 2022’s smaller group of candidates, with reduced support from super big communities, had a significant impact on the global voter turnout of the board elections. Their absence is possibly responsible for a significant part of the decline.

A significant second factor was last year’s unique additional outreach in the Japanese, Catalan, and Czech communities, which did not repeat this year. 

Question

This year’s election ended with lower global voter participation than in 2021, though it still was the second-highest number of voters ever. 5957 voters cast their vote in 2022, compared with 6873 voters in 2021, a total loss of 916 votes. This is the first significant reduction since 2013. As the global electorate did not change significantly (2022: 67574, 2021: 67838), it brings up the question why that is.

Diagnosing differences

If we take a look at the election statistics of 2022 and 2021, it is striking that we do not see communities that mobilized heavily above the global standard turnout of ~10% (“champion communities”) in 2022. From former voter statistics, we learn that there were always “champion communities” having voter turnouts way above standard turnouts.

In 2021 we saw the following bigger communities having turnouts of 15% and more:

2022 is pretty different from that. There were barely any champion communities, and those there are had lower turnouts: 

This is confirmed by checking medians. If we select the Top 30 communities by eligible voters (comprising 84% of the electorate), sort them by their turnouts, and calculate the average of the groups with the highest, medium, and lowest turnouts this is what we can find:

It is clear that neither the groups with the lowest nor the medium average turnout shows significant changes but the group with the highest turnout does with a loss of 34.7%.

How significant is this?

As shown above, the effect is real, but does it actually affect the change significantly?

To find out, we took the above TOP 30 communities (again: they make up 84% of the electorate) and sorted them by the change in their number of voters in 2021. 

Twelve of the 30 communities experienced losses bigger than twenty voters. For these 12 communities we can see the following:

As mentioned, there was an increase in voter numbers in 6 communities. In three of them only it is significant, these are: 

Remember: the total decrease from 2021 was 917 votes. The above communities’ losses alone make up 870 voters lost and only 194 votes gained in reverse.

Reasons

Most intriguing is the question of the reason for these losses. Just to make it clear: while up to this point all insights are based on data, this is going to be, to some extent, educated guessing.

Last year five of the eight champion communities had a candidate running: ES, IT, PT, RU, FR. All these communities are part of the TOP 10 communities by eligible voters (not counting EN). Their voter decrease makes up for 399 voters lost. 

Usually, in the following elections, the new candidates’ communities compensate for losses in former champion communities. 

With only 6 candidates (2021: 19) that effect was significantly smaller though. With two of them originating from EN, and only one of them from the above-mentioned TOP 10 (Polish), the new candidates communities couldn’t make up for these losses. The gains from the Hebrew and the English communities sum up to 150 voters only.

This insight is strengthened by looking at the results from Indian communities that had four candidates running in 2021 and none this year. Turnouts dropped in 2022 in the Indian language communities, respectively. Due to the number of Indian language versions we took a pass on their quantification, spot checks seem to confirm this effect though.

Other reasons for voter losses were more specific to the respective communities: 

• Outreach: Last year’s hype in the Catalan community, run by a volunteer, did not repeat. (-80 votes)
• Outreach: The Japanese community had some (very basic) outreach by a community member last year, which was missing this year. (-77 votes)
• Outreach: In the Czech community, the chapter was not promoting and supporting the elections as last year (-52 votes)
• Politics: The Ukrainian community lost 89 voters, obviously a consequence of the ongoing war.
• Electorate: The German community had a smaller electorate (-175), and the almost same turnout (2022: 10.9% 2021: 11.3%) led to -41 voters.

The increase of the Mandarin Wikipedia’s turnout is probably a result of localized outreach by the Movement Strategy and Governance team not present in 2021. This led to an addition of 44 voters. 

There are yet no valid explanations available for the losses in the Farsi (-33) and Polish (-99) communities.

Outreach factors, responsible for the losses of 3 of 12 and the gain in 1 of 3 communities, sum up to 209 losses and 44 gains. Again, the gains do not make up for the losses, leading to 165 voters less than last year. Last year’s outreach in the respective communities was driven by local volunteers and affiliates, who did not repeat their engagement this year. 

Possibly last year’s unusual volunteer and affiliate engagement was driven by the euphoria of finally having an election again after four years and slowed down by its repetition just a year later (not to mention other votes like the MCDC and the UCoC Enforcement Guidelines in between). WMF staff outreach was not available to compensate for these losses.

Conclusions

The Wikimedia movement over the years has gotten used to a continuously growing number of voters in board elections. The above data indicates, that various factors cause participation in elections and are influential to the global turnout. Some powerful factors seemingly are the composition of the candidates’ group and localized outreach to communities.

The decreased impact of candidates hailing from big (and due to their size mostly western) communities, might be perceived as less of a loss, but a correction of former imbalances though. A bigger number of candidates though, resulting in a resurrection of the champion community phenomena, will help to raise local and to some extent global turnouts again.

A strong point to learn from the above numbers is the significance of community outreach. Regardless of it being executed by dedicated volunteers, affiliates, or Wikimedia Foundation staff, it seemingly helps to raise general awareness of elections within communities formerly underrepresented and thus equalizing voter turnouts globally.

(All data from the WMF Board Elections statistics)

This year’s Wikimania: The Festival Edition brought together Wikimedians from various language communities both virtually and in-person. We, the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC), organized two sessions, titled: “Meet the members that are drafting the Wikimedia Movement Charter”. If you missed them, here is a quick catch up!

First, as a committee, we would like to express our gratitude to the participants who were able to join and brought their insightful questions and feedback. Your input helps us in the work of drafting the charter of the Wikimedia Movement. 

The MCDC members presented an introductory video to answer some of the basic questions about the Movement Charter. The introduction video shows the committee members, putting faces to our names, and connecting the languages and the projects that the committee members are part of.

Please watch the video here with transcripts available in Arabic, Brazilian-Portuguese, Russian, English, French and Spanish.

To watch this video on Youtube with the auto-translate option, see below

Committee member Manavpreet presented the current status of the Committee, and the slides are available for your view here.  

The sessions were not recorded to allow participants to freely share their input and discuss with the Committee. If you are interested in the questions and discussion during the sessions, you can read the full documentation on Meta.
The two sessions accommodated about 100 participants.

Stay tuned for more updates about the work of the Committee. You are invited to subscribe to the MCDC newsletter to receive monthly updates and announcements on your personal Talk page. 

06/09/2022-12/09/2022

Breaking news

• The next monthly video-meeting of the OSMF board will take place on Thursday 22 September 2022, at 13:00 UTC. The preliminary agenda is on the OSMF Board wiki and this is also where the draft minutes will be added.

Mapping campaigns

• Sven Geggus created a website that shows ‘campsites with others inside’ and, as we reported earlier, has asked the community for help to clean up this specific type of erroneous tagging.

Community

• Ruben Martin, from the Forums governance team, announced that the old forum.osm.org will be retired and migrated to the new forums on Friday 30 September as part of the OSMF modernisation efforts. Communities are asked to migrate and request a space in the new forums (community.openstreetmap.org) as soon as possible.

Events

• The Call for Presentations for Pista ng Mapa 2022 and State of the Map Asia 2022 Conferences is now open.

Education

• Anne-Karoline Distel explained how to map horse hitching locations on OpenStreetMap. Horse hitching facilities are common in historic places, especially in the stables of European castles.

Maps

• [1] Marcel Reinmuth announced an update to the Open Healthcare Access Map. Released last year, the map based on OpenStreetMap healthcare facilities and access times from OpenRouteService, now has global coverage of healthcare access.
• This constantly updated map shows the current deployment of military units in the war in Ukraine, the location of incidents, and which areas are controlled by the respective warring parties. The map is based on OSM.It should be remembered that maps always have a political dimension. weeklyOSM cannot and does not want to judge the facts presented or whether it is propaganda or the glorification of war.

Licences

• Ilya Zverev wrote an article to commemorate the day the OpenStreetMap data licence changed to ODbL. He has also created a website where, for a while, you can see what OSM looked like in 2012, before the licence change.

Software

• An easter egg can be found on the ideditor.org website : an information file named IDEDITOR.NFO, with a 1 April 1994 timestamp and a Chmod 4162 permission, referencing the Warez subculture.

Programming

• Jochen Topf announced the start of a project that will add cartographic generalisation capabilities to osm2pgsql. The project is funded for six months through a research grant from the Prototype Fund and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. There is a GitHub issue that goes into details of what is planned.
• Zhengyi Cao, a Google Summer of Code 2022 participant, published a final report on their ‘JOSM plug-in for public transportation route visualisation’.

Releases

• The BBBike extract service now supports OrganicMaps for Android and iOS.

Other “geo” things

• Researchers, from Bavaria and Austria, have developed ► a ‘cardio-mapped’ hiking trails information system to prevent overexertion while hiking. Hikers can determine their individual heart fitness during a short test hike on-site and then find hikes in the area that match their ability.
• Vincent Privat discovered a place in Kourou, French Guiana, where a gun shop can be found opposite a bank.
• Jon Keegan wrote an article about ‘Highway Photolog’, an ancient version of street-level imagery, conducted by highway departments in the US as early as 1961.
• Gary Dagorn, from Le Monde, documented ► the current floods in Pakistan. More than 1300 deaths have been reported in this disaster, where 10% of the land area was flooded according to satellite imagery. Multiple image comparisons are provided in the article, in addition to an overview map of the country. A HOTOSM task has been created for volunteers and is still ongoing.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Град Кикинда	OpenStreetMap x Pionir #1		2022-09-17
Ballerup Kommune	OSM DK Konference		2022-09-17
Dublin	OpenStreetMap Ireland AGM		2022-09-17
Brno	Zářijový brněnský Missing Maps mapathon na konferenci OpenAlt 2022		2022-09-17
Peyruis	Cartopartie à Peyruis		2022-09-17
Nantes	À la découverte d’OpenStreetMap la carte numérique collaborative libre		2022-09-17
臺北市	第四次 OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團工作坊		2022-09-18
Grenoble	Réunion mensuelle du groupe local OSM Grenoble		2022-09-19
Budapest	OSM Fonó: Short editing introduction and remote help (online, live)		2022-09-19
Pacé	Atelier participatif « Recensement des commerces »		2022-09-20
Zürich	OSM-Stammtisch		2022-09-20
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle Lyon		2022-09-20
	155. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-09-20
City of Edinburgh	OSM Edinburgh Social		2022-09-20
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-09-20
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-09-20
Aachen	Aachener Stammtisch 2.0		2022-09-21
Roma	Incontro dei mappatori romani e laziali		2022-09-21
Miniac-sous-Bécherel	Atelier participatif « Recensement des commerces »		2022-09-22
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-09-22
La Virgen	5ta reunión bimestral de OSM Latinoamérica		2022-09-24
Cisterna d’Asti	Incontro mapper astigiani		2022-09-24
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend		2022-09-24 – 2022-09-25
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-09-26
Gent	OpenTechTalks: OpenStreetMap		2022-09-26
Arlon	Réunion des contributeurs OpenStreetMap, Arlon (Belgium)		2022-09-26
Derby	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup		2022-09-27
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-09-28
London	Geomob London		2022-09-28
Vern-sur-Seiche	Atelier participatif « Recensement des commerces »		2022-09-29
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-09-30
Bengaluru	Hacktoberfest 2022	✓	2022-09-30 – 2022-10-31
Villa de Cos	Notathon en OpenStreetMap – resolvamos notas de México		2022-10-01
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #45		2022-10-03
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-10-04
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2022-10-04
Murray	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-10-06
Град Крагујевац	OSM Serbia regular meetup	✓	2022-10-06
La Chapelle-des-Fougeretz	Atelier participatif « Recensement des commerces »		2022-10-07
Kaiserslautern	OSM Mapping Event Erfassung von Barrieren		2022-10-08
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第32回 Re:妙心寺		2022-10-08

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Lejun, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, SeverinGeo, Strubbl, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

In April, I reached 500 edits on English-language Wikipedia!! In my excitement, I published a Twitter thread which got popular; this is the blog post version.

Last October, I attended a Wikipedia editing party themed around homelessness. I’d edited a couple of incorrect details before on Wikipedia, but never anything major. At this event, I realized that by contributing to Wikipedia, I could contribute to how history is written. I was immediately addicted. It was so exciting to be able to contribute and so awesome to be able to see my edits live on Wikipedia.

One month in, someone noticed my edits. I had changed a sentence about the emptying of mental institutions “precipitating” homelessness in the United States, to say that actually, decreasing government subsidies caused an increase in homelessness. The other editor said that my sources were too biased. That’s fair: I dove into this topic and found that my original edit was incorrect. But the other editor also tried to delete my user page, claiming that I was using it for self-promotion, which was totally uncalled for. Luckily that was quickly declined by someone monitoring the deletion queue. I tried to make my edit again, by citing the government budget directly showing decreased subsidies, but this wasn’t OK because it was a primary source (and in reality, the government spent more than it budgeted) and original research. So I gave up on editing about Homelessness for the time being. Eventually I did more research and figured out the truth: The government had actually kept the dollar amount of subsidies the same, and homelessness increased because more people were in need. The article remained incomplete in its explanation, but I was too anxious to try to engage with the article again. At the same time, I saw a post encouraging Wikipedia editing about Effective Altruism, so I decided to practice my editing on something more low stakes.

Right now, I think what Wikipedia needs is more people improving existing articles, which is currently harder to do than making new articles. First, Wikipedia isn’t built for collaboration. It’s easy to clobber over someone else’s edits if you are editing at the same time. Second, it’s also difficult to improve a page if someone has been working on it who cares about it, who disagrees with you on what an improved page looks like. I’ve been having this issue with the Effective Altruism article. At one point I got so frustrated, I asked the other person to leave. This was an overreaction, but I think that complaining did help. I think we have been able to figure out how to co-exist even though we still disagree. Turns out, the way to fix disagreements on Wikipedia is rules and bureaucracy! For the Effective Altruism article, I nominated it for a Good Article Review, and I’ve been able to make improvements to the article based on reviewer feedback.

Getting to 500 edits is special for two reasons: First, it gives me “extended confirmed” status, which lets you edit some articles that are extra-protected due to disputes (like about the Israel/Palestine conflict). I don’t plan on doing any of that. More importantly, it gives me access to the Wikipedia Library! This is a treasure trove of journal, news article, and book access. I used to buy used books on Ebay when that was the only way to read it, but some of my books are in digital format on the Wikipedia library.

In summary, I can’t say I recommend editing Wikipedia as a hobby. Maybe you would like it if you’re the kind of person that is into research and writing, and likes the idea of your work getting a lot of views. But if you do get into it, I recommend finding a friend who’s a more experienced editor to help advise you, and back you up if some other editor is trying to unfairly push you around. Also, it turns out that maintaining a community like Wikipedia is a huge labor of love, from the person who ran the Wikipedia editing party (who I’m now friends with in real life!) to the stranger who kindly reversed the deletion of my account. It’s wild that the world’s best encyclopedia is run by an army of unpaid volunteers. I’m grateful!

I hope that my honest take on my experience helps others. Being able to contribute to the world’s most highly utilized encyclopedia is as frustrating as it is exhilarating.

– Ruth Wong

From the Wikimedia Foundation’s Growth team…

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Growth team currently works on improving newcomers’ first steps on Wikipedia. The features they develop are immediately available when you create a new account.

The key Growth feature is the “Homepage”. That personal page serves as a basecamp for your first steps. To access the Homepage, simply create an account on that Wikipedia. If you already have one, log-in and type”Special:Homepage” in the search bar.

When you visit the Homepage, you get some suggested easy tasks to work on, based on your preferred topics. When you select one of these tasks to work on, you are guided on how to work on the task and on how to edit. We observed that newcomers use these features successfully, and continue editing more than the ones who didn’t get access to Growth features.

At several Wikipedias, some experienced users volunteer to support newcomers when they first edit the encyclopedia. They are known as mentors. At these Wikipedias, each newcomer gets one mentor, whose name is displayed on their Homepage. Newcomers can contact their mentor anytime, for advice on editing. Sometimes, the first edit made by a newcomer is to ask a question to their mentor.

At the moment, the English Wikipedia is testing the mentorship process. 10% of accounts get a mentor, but this number will increase as more experienced mentors join!

For more information, please visit https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth. You can also contact us at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Growth. You can also search for Growth posts on Diff, at https://diff.wikimedia.org/?s=growth.

– Benoît Evellin, User:Trizek (WMF)

—I suppose you are an entomologist?—I said with a note of interrogation.

—Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name! A society may call itself an Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad title as that to himself, in the present state of science, is a pretender, sir, a dilettante, an impostor! No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp.

The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. 

A collection of biographies with surprising gaps (ex. A.D. Imms)

The history of Indian interest in insects has been approached by many writers and there are several bits and pieces available in journals and various insights distributed across books. There are numerous ways of looking at how people viewed insects over time. One of these is a collection of biographies, some of which are uncited verbatim accounts from obituaries (and not even within quotation marks). This collation by B.R. Subba Rao who also provides a few historical threads to tie together the biographies. Keeping Indian expectations in view, both Subba Rao and the agricultural entomologist M.A. Husain play to the crowd in their early histories. Husain wrote in pre-Independence times where there was a need for Indians to assert themselves before their colonial masters. They begin with mentions of insects in ancient Indian texts and as can be expected there are mentions of honey, shellac, bees, ants, and a few nuisance insects. Husain takes the fact that the term Satpada षट्पद or six-legs existed in the 1st century Amarakosa to make the claim that Indians were far ahead of time because Latreille's Hexapoda, the supposed analogy, was proposed only in 1825. Such one-upmanship (or quests for past superiority in the face of current backwardness?) misses the fact that science is not just about terms but  also about structures and one can only assume that these authors failed to find the development of such structures in the ancient texts that they examined. Cedric Dover, with his part-Indian and British ancestry, interestingly, also notes the Sanskrit literature but declares that he is not competent enough to examine the subject carefully. The identification of species in old texts also leave one wondering about the accuracy of translations. For instance K.N. Dave translates a verse from the Atharva-veda and suggests an early date for knowledge on shellac. Dave's work has been re-examined by an entomologist, Mahdihassan. Another organism known in ancient texts as the indragopa (Indra's cowherd) supposedly appears after the rains. Some Sanskrit scholars have, remarkably enough, identified it, with a confidence that no coccidologist ever had, as the cochineal insect (the species Dactylopius coccus is South American!), while others identify it as a lac insect, a firefly(!) or as Trombidium (red velvet mites) - the last for matching blood red colour mentioned in a text attributed to Susrutha. To be fair, ambiguities in translation are not limited to those dealing with Indian writing. Dikairon (Δικαιρον), supposedly a highly-valued and potent poison from India was mentioned in the work Indika by Ctesias 398 - 397 BC. One writer said it was the droppings of a bird. Valentine Ball thought it was derived from a scarab beetle. Jeffrey Lockwood claimed that it came from the rove beetles Paederus sp. And finally a Spanish scholar states that all this was a gross misunderstanding and that Dikairon was not a poison, and - believe it or not - was a masticated mix of betel leaves, arecanut, and lime! 

 

One gets a far more reliable idea of ancient knowledge and traditions from practitioners, forest dwellers, the traditional honey-harvesting tribes, and similar people that have been gathering materials such as shellac and beeswax. Unfortunately, many of these traditions and their practitioners are threatened by modern laws, economics, and cultural prejudice. These practitioners are being driven out of the forests where they live, and their knowledge was hardly ever captured in writing. The writers of the ancient Sanskrit texts were probably associated with temple-towns and other semi-urban clusters and it seems like the knowledge of forest dwellers was never considered merit-worthy by the book writing class of that period.

A more meaningful overview of entomology may be gained by reading and synthesizing a large number of historical bits, and there are a growing number of such pieces. A 1973 book published by the Annual Reviews Inc. should be of some interest. I have appended a selection of sources that are useful in piecing together a historic view of entomology in India. It helps however to have a broad skeleton on which to attach these bits and minutiae. Here, there are truly verbose and terminology-filled systems developed by historians of science (for example, see ANT). I prefer an approach that is free of a jargon overload or the need to cite French intellectuals. The growth of entomology can be examined along three lines - cataloguing - the collection of artefacts and the assignment of names, communication and vocabulary-building - social actions involving the formation of groups of interested people who work together building common structure with the aid of fixing records in journals often managed beyond individual lifetimes by scholarly societies, and pattern-finding a stage when hypotheses are made, and predictions tested. I like to think that anyone learning entomology also goes through these activities, often in this sequence. Professionalization makes it easier for people to get to the later stages. This process is aided by having comprehensive texts, keys, identification guides and manuals, systems of collections and curators. The skills involved in the production - ways to prepare specimens, observe, illustrate, or describe are often not captured by the books themselves and that is where institutions play (or ought to play) an important role.

Cataloguing

The cataloguing phase of knowledge gathering, especially of the (larger and more conspicuous) insect species of India grew rapidly thanks to the craze for natural history cabinets of the wealthy (made socially meritorious by the idea that appreciating the works of the Creator was as good as attending church)  in Britain and Europe and their ability to tap into networks of collectors working within the colonial enterprise. The cataloguing phase can be divided into the non-scientific cabinet-of-curiosity style especially followed before Darwin and the more scientific forms. The idea that insects could be preserved by drying and kept for reference by pinning, [See Barnard 2018] the system of binomial names, the idea of designating type specimens that could be inspected by anyone describing new species, the system of priority in assigning names were some of the innovations and cultural rules created to aid cataloguing. These rules were enforced by scholarly societies, their members (which would later lead to such things as codes of nomenclature suggested by rule makers like Strickland, now dealt with by committees that oversee the  ICZN Code) and their journals. It would be wrong to assume that the cataloguing phase is purely historic and no longer needed. It is a phase that is constantly involved in the creation of new knowledge. Labels, catalogues, and referencing whether in science or librarianship are essential for all subsequent work to be discovered and are essential to science based on building on the work of others, climbing the shoulders of giants to see further. Cataloguing was probably what the physicists derided as "stamp-collecting".

Communication and vocabulary building

The other phase involves social activities, the creation of specialist language, groups, and "culture". The methods and tools adopted by specialists also helps in producing associations and the identification of boundaries that could spawn new associations. The formation of groups of people based on interests is something that ethnographers and sociologists have examined in the context of science. Textbooks, taxonomic monographs, and major syntheses also help in building community - they make it possible for new entrants to rapidly move on to joining the earlier formed groups of experts. Whereas some of the early learned societies were spawned by people with wealth and leisure, some of the later societies have had other economic forces in their support.

Like species, interest groups too specialize and split to cover more specific niches, such as those that deal with applied areas such as agriculture, medicine, veterinary science and forensics. There can also be interest in behaviour, and evolution which, though having applications, are often do not find economic support.

Pattern finding

Eleanor Ormerod, an unexpected influence in the rise of economic entomology in India

The pattern finding phase when reached allows a field to become professional - with paid services offered by practitioners. It is the phase in which science flexes its muscle, specialists gain social status, and are able to make livelihoods out of their interest. Lefroy (1904) cites economic entomology in India as beginning with E.C. Cotes [Cotes' career in entomology was cut short by his marriage to the famous Canadian journalist Sara Duncan in 1889 and he shifted to writing] in the Indian Museum in 1888. But he surprisingly does not mention any earlier attempts, and one finds that Edward Balfour, that encyclopaedic-surgeon of Madras collated a list of insect pests in 1887 and drew inspiration from Eleanor Ormerod who hints at the idea of getting government support, noting that it would cost very little given that she herself worked with no remuneration to provide a service for agriculture in England. Her letters were also forwarded to the Secretary of State for India and it is quite possible that Cotes' appointment was a direct result.

As can be imagined, economics, society, and the way science is supported - royal patronage, family, state, "free markets", crowd-sourcing, or mixes of these - impact the way an individual or a field progresses. Entomology was among the first fields of zoology that managed to gain economic value with the possibility of paid employment. David Lack, who later became an influential ornithologist, was wisely guided by his father to pursue entomology as it was the only field of zoology with jobs. Lack however found his apprenticeship (in Germany, 1929!) involving pinning specimens "extremely boring".

Indian reflections on the history of entomology

Kunhikannan died at the rather young age of 47

A rather interesting analysis of Indian science is made by the first native Indian entomologist, with the official title of "entomologist" in the state of Mysore - K. Kunhikannan. Kunhikannan was deputed to pursue a Ph.D. at Stanford (for some unknown reason two pre-Independence Indian entomologists trained in Stanford rather than England - see postscript) through his superior Leslie Coleman. At Stanford, Kunhikannan gave a talk on Science in India. He noted in that 1923 talk :

In the field of natural sciences the Hindus did not make any progress. The classifications of animals and plants are very crude. It seems to me possible that this singular lack of interest in this branch of knowledge was due to the love of animal life. It is difficult for Westerners to realise how deep it is among Indians. The observant traveller will come across people trailing sugar as they walk along streets so that ants may have a supply, and there are priests in certain sects who veil that face while reading sacred books that they may avoid drawing in with their breath and killing any small unwary insects. [Note: Salim Ali expressed a similar view ]

He then examines science sponsored by state institutions, by universities and then by individuals. About the last he writes:

Though I deal with it last it is the first in importance. Under it has to be included all the work done by individuals who are not in Government employment or who being government servants devote their leisure hours to science. A number of missionaries come under this category. They have done considerable work mainly in the natural sciences. There are also medical men who devote their leisure hours to science. The discovery of the transmission of malaria was made not during the course of Government work. These men have not received much encouragement for research or reward for research, but they deserve the highest praise., European officials in other walks of life have made signal contributions to science. The fascinating volumes of E. H. Aitken and Douglas Dewar are the result of observations made in the field of natural history in the course of official duties. Men like these have formed themselves into an association, and a journal is published by the Bombay Natural History Association[sic], in which valuable observations are recorded from time to time. That publication has been running for over a quarter of a century, and its volumes are a mine of interesting information with regard to the natural history of India.

This then is a brief survey of the work done in India. As you will see it is very little, regard being had to the extent of the country and the size of her population. I have tried to explain why Indians' contribution is as yet so little, how education has been defective and how opportunities have been few. Men do not go after scientific research when reward is so little and facilities so few. But there are those who will say that science must be pursued for its own sake. That view is narrow and does not take into account the origin and course of scientific research. Men began to pursue science for the sake of material progress. The Arab alchemists started chemistry in the hope of discovering a method of making gold. So it has been all along and even now in the 20th century the cry is often heard that scientific research is pursued with too little regard for its immediate usefulness to man. The passion for science for its own sake has developed largely as a result of the enormous growth of each of the sciences beyond the grasp of individual minds so that a division between pure and applied science has become necessary. The charge therefore that Indians have failed to pursue science for its own sake is not justified. Science flourishes where the application of its results makes possible the advancement of the individual and the community as a whole. It requires a leisured class free from anxieties of obtaining livelihood or capable of appreciating the value of scientific work. Such a class does not exist in India. The leisured classes in India are not yet educated sufficiently to honour scientific men.

It is interesting that leisure is noted as important for scientific advance. Edward Balfour, also commented that Indians were "too close to subsistence to reflect accurately on their environment!"  (apparently in The Vydian and the Hakim, what do they know of medicine? (1875) which unfortunately is not available online)

Kunhikannan may be among the few Indian scientists who dabbled in cultural history, and political theorizing. He wrote two rather interesting books The West (1927) and A Civilization at Bay (1931, posthumously published) which defended Indian cultural norms while also suggesting areas for reform. While reading these works one has to remind oneself that he was working under Europeans and may not have been able to discuss such topics with many Indians. An anonymous writer who penned a  prefatory memoir of his life in his posthumously published book notes that he was reserved and had only a small number of people to talk to outside of his professional work. Kunhikannan came from the Thiyya community which initially preferred English rule to that of natives but changed their mind in later times. Kunhikannan's beliefs also appear to follow the same trend.

Entomologists meeting at Pusa in 1919 Third row: C.C. Ghosh (assistant entomologist), Ram Saran ("field man"), Gupta, P.V. Isaac, Y. Ramachandra Rao, Afzal Husain, Ojha, A. Haq Second row: M. Zaharuddin, C.S. Misra, D. Naoroji, Harchand Singh, G.R. Dutt (Personal Assistant to the Imperial Entomologist), E.S. David (Entomological Assistant, United Provinces), K. Kunhi Kannan, Ramrao S. Kasergode (Assistant Professor of Entomology, Poona), J.L.Khare (lecturer in entomology, Nagpur), T.N. Jhaveri (assistant entomologist, Bombay), V.G.Deshpande, R. Madhavan Pillai (Entomological Assistant, Travancore), Patel, Ahmad Mujtaba (head fieldman), P.C. Sen First row: Capt. Froilano de Mello, W Robertson-Brown (agricultural officer, NWFP), S. Higginbotham, C.M. Inglis, C.F.C. Beeson, Dr Lewis Henry Gough (entomologist in Egypt), Bainbrigge Fletcher, Bentley, Senior-White, T.V. Rama Krishna Ayyar, C.M. Hutchinson, Andrews, H.L.Dutt

Entomologists meeting at Pusa in 1923 Fifth row (standing) Mukerjee, G.D.Ojha, Bashir, Torabaz Khan, D.P. Singh Fourth row (standing) M.O.T. Iyengar (a malariologist), R.N. Singh, S. Sultan Ahmad, G.D. Misra, Sharma, Ahmad Mujtaba, Mohammad Shaffi Third row (standing) Rao Sahib Y Rama Chandra Rao, D Naoroji, G.R.Dutt, Rai Bahadur C.S. Misra, SCJ Bennett (bacteriologist, Muktesar), P.V. Isaac, T.M. Timoney, Harchand Singh, S.K.Sen Second row (seated) Mr M. Afzal Husain, Major RWG Hingston, Dr C F C Beeson, T. Bainbrigge Fletcher, P.B. Richards, J.T. Edwards, Major J.A. Sinton First row (seated) Rai Sahib PN Das, B B Bose, Ram Saran, R.V. Pillai, M.B. Menon, V.R. Phadke (veterinary college, Bombay)

Note: As usual, these notes are spin-offs from researching and writing Wikipedia entries. It is remarkable that even some people in high offices, such as P.V. Isaac, the last Imperial Entomologist, and grandfather of noted writer Arundhati Roy, are largely unknown (except as the near-fictional Pappachi in Roy's God of Small Things)

Further reading

• Balfour, Edward (1887). The agricultural pests of India, and of eastern and southern Asia, vegetable and animal, injurious to man and his products. London: Bernard Quaritch.
• Ball, V. 1885. On the identification of the animals and plants of India which were known to early Greek authors. The Indian Antiquary. 14:274-287, 303-311, 334-341
• Barnard, Peter C. (2018). Bat-Fowlers, Pooters and Cyanide Jars: a Historical Overview of Insect Collecting and Preservation in MacGregor, A. (Ed.).  Naturalists in the Field . Brill.
• Dave, K.N. (1950) Lac and the lac insect in the Atharva veda. Int Acad Ind Cult Nagpur, 16 pp. [Dave incidentally, is also the translator and interpreter of another problematic work on ornithological knowledge in ancient Indian literature] 
• Dover, Cedric (1922) Entomology in India. The Calcutta Review 3(2):336-349. [Dover makes a plea for greater funding for entomology: Like Magda, Queen of Sheba, whose devotion to Learning made her set out for Jerusalem, the capital of the kingdom of Solomon, they have entered the domain of Science not with the object of any financial benefit to themselves but for their love of Knowledge. They have worked in the interests of Science alone, yet certain branches of their work has saved India millions of rupees, while other, have added large sums to her coffers. Is it not then up to the Government to improve the status of entomology in this country and to make it a more lucrative profession?  ]
  
• Essig, E.O. (1931) A history of entomology. New York: The Macmillan Company.
• Farber, P.L. (1976). The type-concept in zoology during the first half of the nineteenth century. Journal of the History of Biology 9(1):93–119.  
• Hewitt, C. Gordon (1916). A review of applied entomology in the British Empire. Annals of the Entomological Society of America. 9(1):1–33.
• Howard, L.O. (1930). A history of applied entomology (Somewhat Anecdotal). Smithsonian Institution. Publication 3065.
• Husain, Mohamad Afzal (1938). Entomology in India, past, present and future. Current Science 6(8):422-424. [This is a summary, for the full address see - Husain, M. Afzal (1939). "Entomology in India: Past, Present and Future."  Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Indian Science Congress, Calcutta, 1938. pp. 201–246]
• Lefroy, Maxwell (1904). Historical summary in Report of the Entomologist to the Government of India.
• Lienhard, S. (1978) On the meaning and use of the word indragopa. Indologica Taurinensia 6:177-188.
• Lockwood, J.A. (2012) Insects as weapons of war, terror, and torture. Annual Review of Entomology 57:205-227.
• Mahdihassan, S. (1986). Lac and its decolourization by orpiment as traced to Babylon. Indian Journal of History of Science 21(2):187-192.
• Melillo, E. D. (2013). Global Entomologies: Insects, Empires, and the “Synthetic Age” in World History. Past & Present, 223(1):233–270. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtt026
• Moses, S.T. (1925). Insect pests and some south Indian beliefs. Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society. 26(1):15-19.
  
• Rao, H. Srinivasa (1957) History of our knowledge of the Indian fauna through the ages. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 54:251-280.
• Rao, B.R. Subba (1983). Systematic entomology in India - past, present and future. Current Science 52(21):997-1000.
• Romero, D.B. (2007). El díkairon en la obra Indika de Ctesias de Cnido. Propuesta de identificación. Emerita 75(2):255-272.
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2017). Malarial Subjects. Cambridge University Press. [Open-Access]
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2013). Quinine, mosquitoes and empire: reassembling malaria in British India, 1890–1910, South Asian History and Culture, 4(1):65-86. doi:10.1080/19472498.2012.750457
• Service, M. W. (1978). Review Article1: A Short History of Early Medical Entomology. Journal of Medical Entomology, 14(6):603–626. doi:10.1093/jmedent/14.6.603 
• Smith, Ray F.; Mittler, T.E.; Smith, Carroll N. (1973). History of Entomology. Annual Reviews Inc. ISBN 0824321017.
• Sorensen, Conner (1988). The Rise of Government Sponsored Applied Entomology, 1840-1870. Agricultural History 62(2):98-115. 
• Sutter, P. S. (2007). Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Isis, 98(4):724–754.

An index to entomologists who worked in India or described a significant number of species from India - with links to Wikipedia (where possible - the gap in coverage of entomologists in general is large)
(woefully incomplete - feel free to let me know of additional candidates)

Carl Linnaeus - Johan Christian Fabricius - Edward Donovan - John Gerard Koenig - John Obadiah Westwood - Frederick William Hope - George Alexander James Rothney - Thomas de Grey Walsingham - Henry John Elwes - Victor Motschulsky - Charles Swinhoe - John William Yerbury - Edward Yerbury Watson - Peter Cameron - Charles George Nurse - H.C. Tytler - Arthur Henry Eyre Mosse - W.H. Evans - Frederic Moore - John Henry Leech - Charles Augustus de Niceville - Thomas Nelson Annandale - R.C. Wroughton -  T.R.D. Bell - Francis Buchanan-Hamilton - James Wood-Mason - Frederic Charles Fraser  - R.W. Hingston - Auguste Forel - James Davidson - E.H. Aitken -  O.C. Ollenbach - Frank Hannyngton - Martin Ephraim Mosley - Hamilton J. Druce  - Thomas Vincent Campbell - Gilbert Edward James Nixon - Malcolm Cameron - G.F. Hampson - Martin Jacoby - W.F. Kirby - W.L. Distant -  C.T. Bingham - G.J. Arrow - Claude Morley - Malcolm Burr - Samarendra Maulik - Guy Marshall

 

Edward Percy Stebbing - T.B. Fletcher - Edward Ernest Green - E.C. Cotes - Harold Maxwell Lefroy - Frank Milburn Howlett - S.R. Christophers - Leslie C. Coleman - T.V. Ramakrishna Ayyar - Yelsetti Ramachandra Rao - Magadi Puttarudriah - Hem Singh Pruthi - Shyam Sunder Lal Pradhan - James Molesworth Gardner - Vakittur Prabhakar Rao - D.N. Raychoudhary - C.F.W. Muesebeck  - Mithan Lal Roonwal - Ennapadam Sundara Narayanan - M.S. Mani - T.N. Ananthakrishnan - Muhammad Afzal Husain

Not included by Rao -   F.H. Gravely - P.V. Isaac - M. Afzal Husain - A.D. Imms - C.F.C. Beeson

 - C. Brooke Worth - Kumar Krishna - M.O.T. Iyengar - K. Kunhikannan - Cedric Dover

PS: Thanks to Prof C.A. Viraktamath, I became aware of a new book-  Gunathilagaraj, K.; Chitra, N.; Kuttalam, S.; Ramaraju, K. (2018). Dr. T.V. Ramakrishna Ayyar: The Entomologist. Coimbatore: Tamil Nadu Agricultural University. - this suggests that TVRA went to Stanford at the suggestion of Kunhikannan.

Today, after asking for help with DB tuning on WikiApiary, Bernhard Krabina gave me some settings that had been used on a wiki with what looked like a ton of memory.

I didn’t realize this at first, of course. No, I just put the settings into mysqld.cnf.

That worked for a few minutes, but then the site died again. I ended up with OOM messages in the /var/log/syslog:

systemd[1]: mariadb.service: A process of this unit has been killed by the OOM killer.

Once I did more careful checking, I saw that they were allocating 20G of RAM for some settings. I don’t have that, so, of course the OOM killer struck.

I did some research to find more reasonable settings and made some changes. So far, so good.

In case it helps someone else, here are the settings I ended up with on a system with about 6GB of RAM:

# https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/innodb_buffer_pool_size/
# Default Value: 134217728 (128M)
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 512M
# https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/max_heap_table_size/
# Default Value: 16777216 (16M)
max_heap_table_size=128M
# https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/tmp_table_size/
# Default Value: 16777216 (16M)
tmp_table_size = 128M
# https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/read_buffer_size/
# Default Value: 131072 (128k)
read_buffer_size=10M
# https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/join_buffer_size/
# Default Value: 262144 (256k)
join_buffer_size=1M
# https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/key_buffer_size/
# Default Value: 134217728 (128M)
key_buffer_size = 256M
# https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/sort_buffer_size/
# Default Value: 2097152 (2M)
sort_buffer_size = 10M

Later update: ok, that worked for a bit, but I still ended up with some long running DB queries that flooded the server and the bot’s aren’t even crawling yet. Fine. I’ve taken a sledgehammer to the connection time allowed by setting MAX_STATEMENT_TIME to 30 for the DB user that php is using.

Image credit: Retired electrician, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Today, I was trying to remove hard-coded paths from some JS code.

In my particular case, I started with a stem that looked like this:

/img_auth.php/c/c9/Logo.png

But MediaWiki provides different ways to configure it to serve images.

The hard-coded url wouldn’t work in a wiki that had $wgHashedUploadDirectory set to false. And it wouldn’t work in a wiki where img_auth.php wasn’t being used.

I wanted to be able to provide the client-side with a URL that would display the image in the file Logo.png no matter how the wiki was configured.

I thought someone else might have a clue, so I asked in the MediaWiki Extensions room on Matrix. Marijn told me about the little known Special:Filepath (or Special:Redirect/file) special page that would do this.

After a little testing, it worked. A bit of JQuery and MW.js and I have the following that provides the client with the appropriate url path regardless of the wiki’s configuration:

var url=mw.util.getUrl("Special:Redirect/file/Logo.png");
$("#image-here").append("<img src='" + url + "' />");

Image credit: Tomas Castelazo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“This was my first time editing and creating in Wikipedia,” Diana Castaneda told Wiki Education. Diana recently graduated from Arizona State University (ASU) with a BS in sociology. At first, she was a little nervous about the unfamiliar digital aspect of an assignment where students write for Wikipedia.

“Because I am not savvy with computers, I worried that I would have trouble interacting with creators of already existing Wikipedia pages.”

But as she began, Diana was excited to explore a new type of research and not just write another 1,000 word essay. The assignment was part of Dr. Tracy Perkins’ Food and Justice course at ASU, which looks at US food history, politics, and activism, with a particular focus on social inequality, social justice, and race and racism.

“The assignment gives us an opportunity to discuss the social construction and politics of knowledge,” said Dr. Perkins. “Wikipedia contributors skew heavily white and male, and this impacts the kinds of content available on the site (articles on military history and video games are apparently particularly well-developed). This leaves a number of topics wide open for student contribution.”

The Wikipedia assignment inspires students to synthesize a variety of sources in their own words and translate complex academic topics for a general reader. This not only strengthens students’ writing skills, but benefits Wikipedia’s readership.

Students added course-related content that didn’t exist before on Wikipedia: more detailed historical background about the US Department of Agriculture, information on healthcare access for United Farm Workers, and what the agriculture programs were like at Japanese internment camps. Diana in particular created a brand new article on Wikipedia about Garcia v. Vilsack, an impactful court case brought by Hispanic farmers against the USDA. In total, pages that students worked on have received 464,000 pageviews since the course wrapped in Spring 2022.

“If the goal is to explain a topic, event, or concept, I would prefer to do a Wikipedia assignment,” Diana shared. “What I enjoyed most was having the ability to activate the creative part of my brain in terms of choosing the vernacular and format of my Wikipedia article. Because it reaches such a wide audience, a Wikipedia article should be easy to read and understand. In my opinion, this might be easier to comprehend and then share that information to someone else as opposed to reading a complex academic paper that leaves you confused at the end.”

Diana says that the assignment inspired a new sense of pride in her work and has helped prepare her for her next chapter: pursuing a certificate of completion in paralegal studies at Phoenix College.

“While it was one of the most tedious aspects of the assignment, editing and reediting is a skill that I am currently using as I start the next part of my academic journey. In all honesty, I have never been satisfied by any of my academic work and this assignment forced me to read and reread and then repeat that same process with editing. Therefore, I am able to understand and appreciate how much time and effort I actually put into my academic work.”

Before the assignment, aimlessly browsing Wikipedia pages seemed almost second nature to Diana. Now, understanding the site’s reach and knowing how to edit, she takes a new lens to what she reads there–activating the critical thinking skills that a Wikipedia assignment helps strengthen.

“I did make an edit after the assignment ended. On my hometown Wikipedia page I added in some information about the indigenous people who were living on the land prior to its naming. It is important to acknowledge and share that information for students and those who are curious to learn about the rich history of the area.”

“This experience helped shed the stereotype that Wikipedia is a free-for-all in terms of content. The validity of the content posted can be traced at the bottom of the page and in a time where misinformation is as accessible as Wikipedia, this is incredibly important.”

Wiki Education has free assignment templates, tools, and support for the Wikipedia assignment. Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more.

A new Wikimedia Residency is starting this month, in mini format. One of our Connected Heritage Digital Skills Wikimedians, Leah Emary, will work with The Mixed Museum for one day a week between September and December 2022. The residency has a few goals:

1. To work with Director Chamion Caballero and others affiliated with the museum to incorporate material from their collections into the Wikimedia Projects.
2. To understand existing practices at the museum and incorporate Wikipedia editing, Wikimedia Commons uploads, and Wikidata where possible.
3. To identify gaps on Wikipedia around the history of racial mixing in Britain and use the museum’s scholarship, research and expertise to fill them. 
4. To train and upskill museum staff, volunteers, interns and freelancers in how to edit Wikimedia projects.

This partnership is especially exciting for Wikimedia UK, because it addresses an important and under-represented topic on the Wikimedia projects.

The Mixed Museum, with only one full-time staff member, relies heavily on partnerships to conduct its exciting and innovative work. In addition to co-curating exhibitions with academics and artists, the museum currently hosts a folk musician as the organisation’s first Artist in Residence. Director Chamion Caballero says that partnership work is critical to small organisations like The Mixed Museum, not only for producing new and creative content, but also for building robust support networks that help increase capacity to connect, learn, share and grow. She notes that for the museum, ‘our partnerships have helped all involved to reach wider audiences, as well as access ideas, skills and funding that would be much more difficult to achieve alone.’

The residency builds upon the work of two interns earlier this year, who improved Wikipedia articles based on research for the Mixed Race Irish Families in Britain, 1700-2000 exhibition. You can find out more about that project here. 

Host a resident

Are you interested in hosting a mini-residency at your heritage or cultural organisation? Come see what Connected Heritage is all about at our free, hour long webinar on Thursday 13th October at 12:30pm.

Book a 121

If you know you’re a good fit and would like to talk about hosting an editathon or undertaking a Wiki project at your organisation, book a half hour online meeting with the team.

Get stuck in

If you would like to try your hand at editing, we would welcome you to our potluck wikithon on 30th September 2022 at 10am.

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The post A new mini Wikimedian in Residence at The Mixed Museum appeared first on WMUK.

🕑 1 hour 9 minutes

It's another BTB Digest! Clips from five recent episodes. Matthew Westerby explains the challenges of storing dates, Lionel Scheepmans extols Wikiversity, Adam Baso and Julia Kieserman ponder the future of Wikipedia in a mechanized world, Brian Wolff shares his thoughts on Asana, and Jake Orlowitz recounts the highs and (somewhat) lows of working on The Wikipedia Adventure.

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
(This is a 74% decrease in lines of code)

• Albania report: Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos Campaign in Albania and Kosovo in 2022
• Australia report: Introducing Wikidata to the City of Sydney
• Brazil report: In-person and online activities hosted by Brazil during Wikimania 2022
• Estonia report: Summer in WMEE – from collecting professors´ portraits to new potential co-operations
• Germany report: Coins and paintings by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
• Indonesia report: 4 Islands Outreach; Digital Clippings; Balinese Wikisource Competition
• Italy report: Italian institutions ever closer to Wiki Loves Monuments
• Kosovo report: Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos Campaign and Wikivoyage
• Netherlands report: West Africa in the Van der Kraaij Photo Collection 1972-1987
• New Zealand report: A Wikipedian at Large
• Poland report: The summary of GLAM editing contest and the end of residency at the National Museum in Cracow; Cooperation with Wawel Royal Castle; Hack(art)hon for Zachęta
• Portugal report: Linking Portuguese culture to Wikidata
• Serbia report: Contemporary Art Edit-a-thon and Wikipedian in residence at the Historical Archive of Negotin
• Sweden report: 100 000 Bildminnen; Uniforms, images from New Sweden, colonial officers, the map book of Fryderyk Getkant, and more!; Swedish general election 2022
• UK report: Culturally diversifying Wikipedia
• Uruguay report: Wikimuseos & editing clubs in Uruguay
• USA report: Wikimania, Meetups and More
• AvoinGLAM report: Crisis & GLAM
• Content Partnerships Hub report: Tools; Helpdesk; IGO/INGO
• Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: New tool in development utilizing Structured Data
• WMF GLAM report: Capacity building for Bophana Center
• Calendar: September’s GLAM events

 Recently, on Wikipedia, there was an open letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, asking them to improve the New Page Patrol feature.

This started the usual debate between, WMF should do something vs It is open source, {{sofixit}} (i.e. Send a patch). There's valid points on both sides of that debate, which I don't really want to get into.

However, it occurred to me - the people on the {{sofixit}} side always suggest that people should learn how to program (an unreasonable ask), figure out how to fix something, and do it themselves. On the other hand, in a corporate environment, stuff is never done solely by developers. You usually have either a product manager or a program manager organizing the work.

Instead of saying to users - learn PHP and submit a patch, why don't we say: Be the PM for the things you want done, so a programmer can easily just do them without getting bogged down with organizational questions?

At first glance this may sound crazy - after all, ordinary users have no authority. Being a PM is hard enough when people are paid to listen to you, how could it possibly work if nobody has to listen to you. And I agree - not everything a PM does is applicable here, but i think some things are.

Some things a volunteer person could potentially do:

• Make sure that bugs are clearly described with requirements, so a developer could just do them instead of trying to figure out what the users need
• Make sure tasks are broken down into appropriate sized tickets
• Make a plan of what they wish would happen. A volunteer can't force people to follow their plan, but if you have a plan people may just follow it. Too often all that is present is a big list of bugs of varying priority which is hard for a developer to figure out what is important and what isn't
• • For example, what i mean is breaking things into a few milestones, and having each milestone contain a small number (3-5) tickets around a similar theme. This could then be used in order to promote the project to volunteer developers, using language like "Help us achieve milestone 2" and track progress. Perhaps even gamifying things.
    
  • No plan survives contact with the enemy of course, and the point isn't to stick to any plan religiously. The point is to have a short list of what the most pressing things to work on right now are. Half the battle is figuring out what to work on and what to work on first.
• Coordinate with other groups as needed. Sometimes work might depend on other work other people have planned to do. Or perhaps the current work is dependent on someone else's requirements (e.g. new extensions require security review). Potentially a volunteer PM could help coordinate this or help ensure that everyone is on the same page about expectations and requirements.
• [not sure about this one] Help find constructive code reviewers. In MediaWiki development, code much be reviewed by another developer to be merged in. Finding knowledgeable people can often be difficult and a lot of effort. Sometimes this comes down to personal relationships and politely nagging people until someone bites. For many developers this is a frustrating part of the software development process. Its not clear how productive a non-developer would be here, as you may need to understand the code to know who to talk to. Nonetheless, potentially this is something a non-programmer volunteer can help with.

To use the new page patrol feature as an example - Users have a list of 56 feature requests. There's not really any indication of which ones are more important then others. A useful starting point would be to select the 3 most important. There are plenty of volunteer developers in the MediaWiki ecosystem that might work on them. The less time they have to spend figuring out what is wanted, the more likely they might fix one of the things. There are no guarantees of course, but it is a thing that someone who is not a programmer could do to move things forward.

 To be clear, being a good PM is a skill - all of this is hard and takes practice to be good at. People who have not done it before won't be good at it to begin with. But I think it is something we should talk about more, instead of the usual refrain of fix it yourself or be happy with what you got.

p.s. None of this should be taken as saying that WMF shouldn't fix anything and it should only be up to the communities, simply that there are things non-programmers could do to {{sofixit}} if they were so inclined.

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

Incidents

7 documented incidents in July, and 4 in August (Incident graphs). Read more about past incidents at Incident status on Wikitech.

2022-07-03 shellbox
Impact: For 16 minutes, edits and previews for pages with Score musical notes were slow or unavailable.

2022-07-10 thumbor
Impact: For several days, Thumbor p75 service response times gradually regressed by several seconds.

2022-07-11 FrontendUnavailable cache text
Impact: For 5 minutes, the MediaWiki API cluster in eqiad responded with higher latencies or errors.

2022-07-11 Shellbox and parsoid saturation
Impact: For 13 minutes, the mobileapps service was serving HTTP 503 errors to clients.

2022-07-12 codfw A5 power cycle
Impact: No observed public-facing impact. Internal clean up took some work, e.g. for Ganeti VMs.

2022-07-13 eqsin bandwidth
Impact: For 20 minutes, there was a small increase in error responses for thumbnails served from the Eqsin data center (Singapore).

2022-07-20 eqiad network
Impact: For 10-15 minutes, a portion of wiki traffic from Eqiad-served regions was lost (about 1M uncached requests). For ~30 minutes, Phabricator was unable to access its database.

2022-08-10 cassandra disk space
Impact: During planned downtime, other hosts ran out of space due to accumulating logs. No external impact.

2022-08-10 confd all hosts
Impact: No external impact.

2022-08-16 Beta Cluster 502
Impact: For 7 hours, all Beta Cluster sites were unavailable.

2022-08-16 x2 database replication
Impact: For 36 minutes, errors were noticeable for some editors. Saving edits was unaffected.

Incident follow-up

Recently completed incident follow-up:

Replace certificate on elastic09 in Beta Cluster
Brian (@bking, WMF Search) noticed during an incident review that an internal server used an expired cert and renewed it in accordance with a documented process.

Localisation cache must be purged after train deploy
@Tchanders (WMF AHT) filed this in 2020 after a recurring issue with stale interface labels. Work led by Ahmon (@dancy, WMF RelEng).

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.

Highlight from the "Oldest incident follow-up" query:

• T83729 Fix monitoring of poolcounter service.

Trends

The month of July saw 22 new production errors of which 9 are still open today. In August we encountered 29 new production errors of which 10 remain open today and have carried over to September.

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

30/08/2022-05/09/2022

About us

• We are pleased to be able to offer two more languages from issue #632 onwards: Bahasa Indonesia and Russian. weeklyOSM now informs local OSM communities about the happenings in the OSM world in a total of 15 languages.

Mapping

• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • pedagogy=* to denote the educational theory (or pedagogy) of an element, especially schools or kindergartens.
  • man_made=graduation_tower for mapping the structures used in the production of salt which remove water from a saline solution by evaporation, increasing its concentration of mineral salts.
• Voting is underway for the following proposals:
  • to deprecate departures_board=realtime and promote instead passenger_information_display=yes, until Friday 16 September.
  • crossing:markings=*, for mapping the existence and style of pedestrian crossing markings, until Saturday 17 September.
• CasGroenigen created the 10 billionth node (10,000,000,000) in OSM on 4 September. The node is part of a house in the city of Fort Collins, Colorado, United States. Interestingly, this node caused problems with some of the Geofabrik’s free shapefiles. This is because the Geofabrik .dbf file limits the ID length to 10 digits, while this node has an ID length of 11 digits.
• An IDN Times journalist has produced a podcast about OSM mapping for Situ/lake conservation in Jabodetabekpunjur, Indonesia.
• rtnf published his opinion regarding localised styles and vector tiles.
• Jochen Topf presented his proposal for changes to the OSM data model at the State of the Map 2022. If you would like to participate in the discussion of the new OSM data model, you can do so in the GitHub discussion forum.
• Christoph Hormann explained his thoughts on the planned changes to OpenStreetMap’s data model.
• After a long discussion that has stalled several times since 2009, Belarusian OpenStreetMap contributors have again proposed ► using Belarusian as the official language of the Belarusian OSM, replacing Russian. A mass editing bot has been set up to perform this migration. They are currently waiting for community member voting results before running the bot.
• Amanda McCann has created a data visualisation of the growth of the building tag in Ireland from 2007 to the present.

Community

• Following a debate regarding the definition of service=driveway, as we reported earlier, an OSM user has proposed a new alternative tagging scheme: driveway2 for better routing. Others have proposed instead a mass deletion of the service=driveaway2 tag in OSM.
• Two personalities who have helped shape the OpenStreetMap ecosystem, while working for business partners in recent years, each share some personal thoughts: Randy Meech and Mikel Maron.
• The Geomob London Meetup will take place on Wednesday 28 September at the Ordnance Survey Geovation Hub. As usual, the meeting will feature several talks about innovations in the geospatial field. If you are planning to attend this event, please complete the registration form. Those unable to attend the conference can receive a summary of the conference by joining the Geomob mailing list.
• Bartosz Racławski ► , from Poland, is the UN Mapper of the Month for September.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The development team of osm2pgsql, a command line tool for converting OSM data into the PostgreSQL/PostGIS format, received a test server grant from FOSSGIS e.V., the German local chapter of the OSMF.
• The OpenStreetMap tile server address has changed to https://tile.openstreetmap.org. The new tile server supports HTTP/2 + HTTP/3 and has a higher cache hit ratio than the previous tile server. Applications still using the old OSM tile server url ((a|b|c).tile.openstreetmap.org / (a|b|c|).tile.osm.org) should switch to the new format immediately, as the old urls may be deactivated at any time.
• FOSSGIS and the German OpenStreetMap community were invited ► by the German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to participate in the Citizens’ Festival at Bellevue Palace. This event was held to honour citizens who actively participate in various voluntary activities.

Local chapter news

• The August newsletter of OpenStreetMap US has been published.

Events

• Some OpenStreetMap users have shared their personal experiences of the SotM 2022, held in Florence, Italy.

Education

• Anne-Karoline Distel explained how to map blacksmith workshops on OpenStreetMap. In the video she explained that there are many forges in Ireland that now have the status of historic buildings. In the old days, there were forges along main roads in Ireland that were used to repair broken horseshoes.

switch2OSM

• The French government provides information on the net about fuel prices at petrol stations in France. It uses OSM for this and even uses the © reference correctly. Recommended for imitation.
• In his latest video, Luke Smith, a well-known privacy advocate, gave his opinion about smartphones vs privacy. At the end of the video (16:00 min), he said that ‘the only Google software that is better than the free and open source variety is Google Maps’, as opposed to OpenStreetMap which he deemed to be lacking in its search features.
• IT security blogger SwiftOnSecurity recommended checking OpenStreetMap data if deliveries or people have trouble finding your home. The reason is that OSM powers many routing engines.

Software

• The August release of Organic Maps is available for iOS and Android. Routing performance was improved for long routes and total ascent and descent is now displayed for the route. New icons were added for different sport POIs. Information about OpenStreetMap as a map source was added to the splash screen.
• BRouter was featured on the HackerNews front page.
• As a work in progress, jmsbert listed the JOSM plugins that they consider useful.
• woheller69 has published LavSeeker on F-Droid. The application lists the toilets nearest to you that are mapped in OpenStreetMap.
• Samuel Manu, perhaps better known in OSM as sammyhawkrad, tweeted about new updates to the OsmoseStats tool he built. You can now see the number of OSM issues per country/region and also view the list of individual issues with hyperlinks on the charts.
• Altilunium has released OSM Pantau, an OpenStreetMap recent change monitoring system. See the live demo here, click the blue button to refresh. Find out how it works here.

Other “geo” things

• The French government is using ► satellite data to locate illegal swimming pools.
• Achim Sawall reported how he was misled by Google Maps on a bike tour from Berlin to Lübbenau.
• Chloé Woitier, from LeFigaro newspaper, reported ► on the launch by Google of its fuel-saving itinerary function, based on automatic learning from data including those collected by the map application itself.
• The Wall Street Journal has published a video explaining the technology used by Google Maps.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-09-12
Ville de Bruxelles – Stad Brussel	Afterwork meetup OSM + OSgeo		2022-09-13
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2022-09-13
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-09-14
Kortrijk	DigiPinguïns: OpenStreetMap		2022-09-13
Großarl	6. Virtueller OpenStreetMap Stammtisch Österreich		2022-09-14
Chippewa Township	Michigan Meetup		2022-09-15
Bologna	Wikiaperitivo del buon rientro a Bologna (per OSMer e wikimediani)		2022-09-15
Град Кикинда	OpenStreetMap x Pionir #1		2022-09-17
Ballerup Kommune	OSM DK Konference		2022-09-17
Dublin	OpenStreetMap Ireland AGM		2022-09-17
Peyruis	Cartopartie à Peyruis		2022-09-17
臺北市	第四次 OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團工作坊		2022-09-18
Pacé	Atelier participatif « Recensement des commerces »		2022-09-20
Zürich	OSM-Stammtisch		2022-09-20
	155. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-09-20
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-09-20
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-09-20
Roma	Incontro dei mappatori romani e laziali		2022-09-21
Miniac-sous-Bécherel	Atelier participatif « Recensement des commerces »		2022-09-22
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-09-22
La Virgen	5ta reunión bimestral de OSM Latinoamérica		2022-09-24
Cisterna d’Asti	Incontro mapper astigiani		2022-09-24
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend		2022-09-24 – 2022-09-25
Gent	OpenTechTalks: OpenStreetMap		2022-09-26
Arlon	Réunion des contributeurs OpenStreetMap, Arlon (Belgium)		2022-09-26
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-09-28
Derby	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup		2022-09-27
London	Geomob London		2022-09-28
Vern-sur-Seiche	Atelier participatif « Recensement des commerces »		2022-09-29
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-09-30
Bengaluru	Hacktoberfest 2022	✓	2022-09-30 – 2022-10-31
Villa de Cos	Notathon en OpenStreetMap – resolvamos notas de México		2022-10-01

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, SK53, Strubbl, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.