09/05/2023-15/05/2023

Breaking news

• The next OSMF Board meeting is on Thursday 25 at 13:00 UTC. The meeting will be held in the ‘Boardroom’ Big Blue Button video conference room. The Strategic Plan will be discussed. You can connect 20 minutes before the meeting.

Mapping

• [1] Martijn van Exel analysed the density of pedestrian infrastructure in the Boston and Dallas areas using visualisations of OpenStreetMap data.
• Steffen Voß explained ► how to use OSM tags (to model real-world attributes of buildings etc.) to set visual effects in streets.gl, a 3D-based map application.
• Piet Brömmel has integrated website contribution statistics based on the first year of contribution into his OpenStreetMap Statistics. He noted that in 2022, just under 50% of all edits were made using accounts that submitted their first changeset between 2018 and 2022.
• Wilmer Osario, from Venezuela, wrote ► a forum post detailing how to add place nodes to farms, based on aerial photography, some local knowledge, and reason.

Community

• BudgieInWA wrote about how they and like-minded people mapped Hyde Park, in Northbridge, Perth, Australia, in detail and met new friends at the same time.
• Julien Minet compared ► the number of mapped addresses in OpenStreetMap with the number of addresses in the ICAR register for Wallonia, one of the three Belgian states.
• Rupert Allan (who some UK OSMers may remember from a project in South Wales) blogged about his invitation to consult on a new OSM project on mapping ancient wetlands in Jordan with a community of different ethnic groups.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Steve Coast has suggested an alternative to the OSMF’s 2023 strategic plan. You can either discuss via the osmf-talk mailing list, on the community forum, or of course on twitter.
• At the start of the year, the OSMF Board put together their thoughts on what they saw ahead. Four months later, there is a lot to reflect on and assess – each board member presents their thoughts.

Events

• The OpenStreetMap Philippines Community will host the MAPAtalks Volume 1 workshop on 27 May 2023.
• You have less than a week and a half left to submit your application to host #StateoftheMap2024.
• The State of the Map Europe 2023 organising team is looking for helping hands. At present help with finding sponsors and establishing the programme committee are the most important. But help is welcome for other tasks too. If you haven’t done so already, mark your calendar for 10 to 12 November. Subscribe for updates at stateofthemap.eu.
• The preliminary agenda for the French SotM 2023 conference is now available .

Maps

• Andy Townsend has added OSM UK’s existing cadastral parcels layer to his map.atownsend.org.uk map.

Programming

• Four OpenStreetMap-themed projects have been selected for the 2023 Google Summer of Code.
• Ash Kyd explained how he used vector map technology to create a map of bike lanes in Brisbane, Australia.
• Andrii Holovin, a member of the Ukrainian OpenStreetMap community, proposed some exciting ideas for OSM 2.0. His suggestions include utilising Git as a version control system, storing objects in the YAML format, and introducing various additional features to enhance the functionality of the API.

Releases

• Peter explained the use of the ‘route hint’ and ‘custom model’ features of the GraphHopper application.
• The May 2023 version of Organic Maps has been released.

OSM in the media

• The online magazine BASIC thinking tested ► the bicycle navigation offered by OsmAnd.
• GadgeteerZA reviewed Magic Earth for car navigation on Android Auto.

Other “geo” things

• The geoEpi group attended the CGA 2023 ‘From Geospatial Research to Health Solutions’ at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Along with others Sven Lautenbach, from HeiGIT, and PhD student Steffen Knoblauch, from GIScience, provided a general introduction into the field of GIS health applications.
• Ireland’s Environmentalists tweeted about EPAIreland’s Pollution Impact Potential (PIP) maps, which show the coverage of phosphorus pollution in Ireland due to high livestock activity and poorly draining soil. Excessive phosphorus pollution can result in excessive plant growth, algal blooms, and a reduction in the amount of oxygen in the water, which is not good for the aquatic species that live there.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Washington	OSM US Mappy Hour	✓	2023-05-18
	UN Mappers – OSM and humanitarian mapping training – session #3		2023-05-18
Toulouse	Réunion du groupe local de Toulouse		2023-05-20
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	✓	2023-05-22
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-05-24
Bayonne	Cartopartie à Bayonne – 25 mai 2023		2023-05-25
	UN Mappers – OSM and humanitarian mapping training – session #4		2023-05-25
左營區	2023年5月 OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團		2023-05-27
Singapore	OG Training by HOTOSM AP-Hub	OSM ON THE GO: OSM MOBILE APPLICATIONS		2023-05-27
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2023-05-31
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2023-05-31
Bologna	Alluvione dell’Emilia-Romagna: editathon e mapping party al Salaborsa Lab		2023-06-03

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Elizabete, MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, SomeoneElse, Strubbl, TheSwavu, andygol, darkonus, derFred, rtnf, s8321414, 冰觞沐雨.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

For nearly two decades, the Wikimedia Foundation has supported free access to the sum of all knowledge.

This ambitious goal would not be possible without the Wikimedia community—thousands of volunteer editors, admins, and functionaries of the Wikimedia projects who not only contribute content, but monitor for harmful material, stop the spread of misinformation, and create policies that determine what content belongs on the projects.

Since the projects are open, collaborative and driven by volunteer efforts, those volunteer editors are best able to respond to requests to change, update, or delete content from our projects. These requests come from governments and private parties, and sometimes also include attempts to obtain nonpublic user information. The Foundation evaluates all requests with an eye towards protecting privacy and freedom of expression. We support the Wikimedia communities’ prerogative to determine what educational content belongs on the projects.

Twice a year, we publish a transparency report outlining the number of requests we received, their types, countries of origin, and other information. The report also features an FAQ and stories about interesting and unusual cases.

Here are a few highlights from the report:

Content alteration and takedown requests. From July to December of 2022, we received 282 requests to alter or remove project content. 13 of these requests were Right to Erasure-based requests related to user accounts. When we receive such a request, we provide the user information on the community-driven vanishing process.

Copyright takedown requests. The Wikimedia communities work diligently to ensure that copyrighted material is not uploaded to the projects without an appropriate free license or exception, such as fair use. Most Wikimedia project content is therefore freely licensed or in the public domain. When we occasionally receive Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices asking us to remove allegedly infringing material, we conduct thorough investigations to make sure the claims are valid. From July to December of 2022, we received 26 DMCA requests, and granted only one. This low number is due to the hard work of community volunteers who ensure that content on the projects is properly licensed.

Requests for user data. The Wikimedia Foundation only grants requests for user data that comply with our requests for user information procedures and guidelines (which includes a provision for emergency conditions). Moreover, the Foundation collects very little nonpublic user information as part of our commitment to user privacy. Any information we do collect is retained for a short amount of time. Of the 29 user data requests we received, zero resulted in disclosure of nonpublic user information.

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The Wikimedia Foundation’s biannual transparency report reaffirms our organization’s commitment to transparency, privacy, and freedom of expression. It also reflects the diligent work of the Wikimedia community members who shape the projects. We invite you to learn more about requests we received in the past six months in our comprehensive transparency report. For information about past reports, please see our previous blog posts.

Ellen Magallanes, Senior Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation

The transparency report would not be possible without the contributions of Raji Gururaj, Julianne Alberto, Jim Buatti, Leighanna Mixter, and Aeryn Palmer.

This year’s (W)zlot – Spring Wikimedian Meet-up, the annual gathering of Wikipedia editors from all over Poland, was full of many interesting and thought-provoking lectures, panels and meetings. One of them, organized by Wikimedia Polska, was the session titled Youth and Wikimedia – why don’t young people get involved in co-creating our projects? led by Polish Wikipedia’s youngest administrator Kacper Szymański [16-year-old] and youth activist and researcher Zuza Karcz [21-year-old]. Kacper and Zuza faced Wikipedians with rich editing experience and spoke boldly about what discourages young people from getting involved in Wikimedia projects. Here’s their diagnose.

1. Wikipedia doesn’t have a good reputation. As Zuza pointed out, there is still a strong belief that Wikipedia is a rather mediocre source of knowledge. School and university teachers often forbid their students to go to Wikipedia – they don’t consider it a reliable source of information. Wikimedia Polska is fighting this conviction through the activities of its education team, but, unfortunately, there’s still much to do to change people’s awareness in this dimension. Another stereotype, according to Kacper, concerns people who edit Wikipedia. They are seen as nerds with their noses in books (nothing wrong with that, the author of this article is a bookworm herself). Yet, the wiki community is much more diverse and it would be worthwhile to communicate this to the world and change the image of “The Wikipedian.” This leads us to another conclusion Kacper and Zuza proposed.

2. Wikipedia is faceless. Our young experts say their peers assimilate information differently than older generations. Because they grew up in the era of social media they prefer a story told by a real person to dry facts. However, is this possible with Wikipedia? It turns out that yes, as exemplified by the encyclopedia Britannica’s account on TikTok which has more than 3 million followers. Young people are not only looking for knowledge on the Internet, but also for entertainment. Providing them with these both at the same time is like killing two birds with one stone (except that these birds are piñatas full of candy). This brings us to the next question. Do they think that getting involved in Wikimedia projects, not as readers but as editors, is a trick or treat? The next point answers this question.

3. Editing Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects doesn’t give any benefits. Or so it seems. According to Zuza and Kacper, currently, young people often decide on a specific volunteering activity by looking at the profit a given organization offers. For pupils, extra points at school count, university students can settle student internships through volunteering, and for those who are already working, what matters is that they can record such activity on Linkedin or mention it in their resumes. Yet, as our research team reminds us, it’s not only about such benefits, but also about values. Young people are motivated by a sense of agency. They like to feel that what they do contributes to building a better world for everyone. And you know what? That is what Wikipedia is all about. Its very mission is included in the catchphrase: “Imagine a world where every person on the planet has access to the sum of human knowledge…” – implicitly be the one who makes it happen! We just need to admit it. Thus, what is missing is a proper narrative necessary to involve new young members so they can become a part of this unique community. Let’s tell them they matter, let’s show them how much we can achieve by working together.

We are happy to share our experiences with you. If you want to talk don’t hesitate to contact me directly: malgorzata.gramatnikowska@wikimedia.pl.

 

Hardly a "woman in red", Dr De Vos has many accomplishments chronicled in these Wikipedia articles. She presents herself with her colleagues on Facebook and, the graph of her co-authors should paint a similar picture, initially it did not. At first there were only a few publications to her name, they have been expanded to 26 at present. It introduced many co-authors and there are now some 112 co-authors missing.

Behind the Screen in MENA is part of a wider series celebrating tireless Wikimedians who make free knowledge possible. It brings ‘to the screen’ stories from MENA so that we can know, honor, and learn from the people that work for a free ecosystem. The series aims to take forward the Wikimedia Foundation’s Annual Plan for 2022-23, and the movement’s strategic goal of Knowledge Equity. The annual plan talks about Advancing Knowledge Equity through a Stronger Regional Focus and this series celebrates regional impact in particular. 

Behind the Screen, the MENA edition features voices from within this vibrant community, we spoke to the bold women behind the screens who shared their origin editing stories and their hopes for the future of the region. I had the pleasure of meeting them at WikiArabia which took place in Dubai, in October 2022.

They will share with us, what it is to be a Wikimedian, and their achievements, and tell us about the role of the Wikimedia Foundation in supporting their volunteer journey.

Moving from a local to a global level has significantly affected my personality, seeing that my work, which was started in Morocco, has spread to places like Afghanistan, Yemen, and Tanzania, gave me a sense of local fulfillment. This inspires me, and appreciative of Wikimedia

Nassima Chahboun, Wiki World Heritage User Group

The foundation’s role is influential. Especially in recent years. The foundation started to focus on regional levels, underrepresented communities, and low-voiced communities. This approach affects my community directly because we are still a developing and nascent community that needs direction and leadership

Mervat Salman, Wikimedians of the Levant User Group

My son told me about Wikipedia, so I created an account and started to learn gradually until it became part of my daily life. Volunteering with the Wikimedia Foundation has given me the opportunity to befriend new people from all over the world

Luma Salman, Iraqi Wikimedians User Group 

Watch the full video here to see MENA– Behind The Screen!

We can’t save the planet without uplifting the voices of its people, especially those most often unheard.”

Leah Thomas

Identifying Climate Change as one of the most pressing issues of our time is crucial for ensuring climate sustainability. The WikiClimate Campus Tour Nigeria is co-led by three passionate organizers; Bukky658, Omorodion1, and Tesleemah, who completed the Wikimedia Foundation`s Organizer Lab Course that spanned for 3-months. The “WikiClimate Campus Tour Nigeria” received funding from the Wikimedia Foundation to offer a unique opportunity to youths, especially Undergraduate Students in Nigeria, to influence their climate literacy which will ultimately help build a sustainable environment in Nigeria and beyond.

Increasing Climate Literacy:

The WikiClimateCampusTourNigeria is expected to run from May to September 2023, engaging 300 participants from six targeted institutions: University of Ilorin, Kwara State University, Federal University of Kashere, University of Port Harcourt, University of Benin, and University of Ibadan. The Tour will begin with a roundtable discussion involving climate experts and activists to discuss the Triple planetary crisis and possible solutions. The participants are expected to undergo a series of training, including physical and online sessions and weekly follow-ups. These activities are aimed at enhancing their understanding of climate change and its impacts, and empowering the participants to become climate change champions.

Driving Collaborative Contributions:

Through Edit-a-thons, Data-a-thons, and Write-a-thons, the project will encourage active participation from the participants. By leveraging the vast resources of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to generate valuable contributions and innovative solutions that will address climate change collaboratively leaving a lasting impact that will improve the quality of climate information from Nigeria for a healthy and greener environment.

Building Partnerships:

Recognizing the significance of collaboration, the project has reached out to Fan Club Leaders in the selected institutions, the Ministry of Environments, influential stakeholders, and organizations dedicated to climate action. Notably, the involvement of Climate Organizations such as Agbelere Foundation, TruORGANIC, Lekan Bakare Foundation, and Environment Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, strengthens the initiative’s impact and outreach. Discussions have taken place to define roles and responsibilities, ensuring a coordinated effort towards achieving our goals.

Creating Online Visibility:

A dedicated Twitter page has been established for the program to maximise reach and engagement. This space will provide participants with the latest developments, inspiring stories, and opportunities to get involved.

Long-Term Impact:

Our ultimate vision is to witness the successful implementation of this project, leading to improved climate literacy among Nigerian youths. By amplifying visibility on Wikipedia, we aim to create a lasting impact on climate change education and awareness. Through the WikiClimate Campus Tour Nigeria, we strive to empower a generation of informed individuals who are ready to tackle climate challenges head-on.

Conclusion:

Join the WikiClimate Campus Tour Nigeria and contribute to climate literacy for increased access to information about climate-related articles in Nigeria, while driving innovative solutions. To learn more about this exciting project and take the first step towards making a difference. Register now and let your voice be heard. Together, we can create a greener, more resilient world.

A version of this article was first published in the CEE Newsletter

Since 2018 Ukrainian Wikipedia has been among the most active participant communities of WikiGap, the global initiative designed to improve representation of women on Wikipedia and bridge the gender gap. Over the past five years, around 350 people joined the challenge by creating and improving close to 4,000 articles about women in the Ukrainian language.

In 2023, Wikimedia Ukraine organized the challenge on Ukrainian Wikipedia once again, with the help of our long-term partners – Swedish Embassy in Ukraine, National Democratic Institute, and UNFPA Ukraine.

The online campaign ran for close to three weeks in March. We invited everyone to join and create or improve an article about a notable woman. As an incentive to join – apart from contributing to the mission of bridging the gender gap on Wikipedia – we’re sending souvenirs for everyone who created / improved at least two articles within the campaign.

As a result, 90 Wikipedians joined the challenge in 2023; collectively they created 704 new articles about women and improved 38 existing ones. (80 participants are eligible to receive souvenirs for their participation, having worked on at least two articles).

We’re especially pleased to see that three articles received the “good article” status. One of them is about prominent Ukrainian biologist Valentyna Radzymovska, who was erased from the Soviet history books but is remembered in independent Ukraine. “I participate in WikiGap regularly because I believe that the low representation of women in Wikipedia and in the media space is a problem that needs attention. The topics of women in science, women’s education of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and women’s organizations are especially close to me”, says user Brunei, the article’s lead author and a biologist himself.

Within WikiGap 2023 we supported two offline events. The main one took place in Kyiv, where 17 people came on a Saturday to work collectively on contributing to Wikipedia around WikiGap topics. Besides, Wikimedia Ukraine’s volunteer Daryna (user Rina.sl) held a training session for Ukrainians abroad in Gdańsk, Poland, gathering 6 people.

A few insights from organizing the campaign this year and before:

• Promotion on social media is useful for building broader awareness but not so effective for attracting actual participants. The most effective communications tools for bringing new people are the CentralNotice banner and communication with participants of previous similar campaigns via MassMessage.
• People are hungry for in-person communication after three years of the pandemic and the war, so it was quite beneficial to meet offline – both to work on WikiGap articles directly but also as a tool for community building. Unfortunately, because of the war, the scale of offline events this year was much smaller than it used to be before 2020.
• It’s highly useful for us to have long-term partners. While we at Wikimedia Ukraine do most of the legwork in terms of organizing the campaign on Wikipedia and promoting it among community members, the partners are quite helpful in spreading broader public awareness about the cause, as well as by providing material help (such as funding for offline events).

Learn more:

• Landing page for WikiGap 2023 on Ukrainian Wikipedia
• WikiGap 2021 in Ukraine: Results and insights from organizers on Diff

Are you tired of seeing African narratives misrepresented or underrepresented on global digital knowledge networks? Do you want to be part of the solution and make a meaningful contribution to bridging the content gap? Then join us for the Africa Day Campaign 2023 from  May- June Themed ‘The African Continental Free Trade’ inline with the Africa Union (AU) Theme of the Year 2023!

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement, which was launched in 2019, presents a unique opportunity for Africa to boost intra-regional trade, create jobs, and drive economic growth. However, its implementation faces various challenges, including inadequate infrastructure, non-tariff barriers, and low levels of industrialization. The 2023 Africa Union-them ‘Africa Continental Free Trade’ seeks to generate greater political commitment in the trade as a developmental Agenda for Africa.

By documenting Africa’s stories during the Africa Day Campaign, we can shed light on these challenges which then increases the visibility of this knowledge and encourages stakeholders to work together toward addressing them. We can also highlight the benefits of free trade, such as increased access to markets, enhanced competitiveness, and the creation of new opportunities for entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Additionally, by promoting the achievements of African entrepreneurs and innovators on the web, we can inspire the next generation of business leaders and innovators to seize the opportunities presented by the AfCFTA. By creating more inclusive and representative digital knowledge networks, we can ensure that young Africans have access to accurate and diverse information about the benefits of free trade and how they can participate in it.

Who can join?

We can’t do it alone. We need your help to create and improve content about Africa in relation to the campaign theme on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms. Whether you’re an affiliate, usergroup, organization, Institution, student, professional, campaign organizer, or just someone passionate about African knowledge and narratives, you can make a difference. Here are a few ways you can participate:

• Join the one-month intensive continent-wide Africa Day Writing contest from May 20th May to 20th June 20223 to create, improve or translate existing articles around the topic. Register and also sign up for the contest by signing on to the Africa Day Writing Contest Campaign Dashboard. Visit the campaign meta page Learn more about how to participate in the contest. 
• Organize an event eg; edit-a-thon, translate-a-thon, or local writing contest, in your community. If you are organizing an event please create your dashboard on the event on the Africa Day Program dashboard and add your event to the event table on the meta page.

By participating in the Africa Wiki Challenge, you’ll not only contribute to bridging the content gap but also be part of a community that values African knowledge and narratives. 

Join the Launch Event

Register to join the Africa Day Campaign Launch Event on Thursday, May 18th 16:00 UTC to hear from Amazing speakers who will share insight around the topic and learn more about the campaign. There will be live interpreters for French, Swahili and Arabic

What?

The Africa Day campaign is one of the initiatives of the Africa Knowledge Initiative (AKI) project, an initiative birthed out of a partnership between the Wikimedia Foundation, the African Union, and Africa No Filter. Open Foundation is honored to be the Implementing partner for the Africa Day Campaign for 2023. Read more about the AKI here.

Join us in the Africa Wiki Challenge and help bridge the content gap, one story at a time!

Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn for more updates, or Join the AWC Telegram channel for more engagements.

These students made Wikipedia’s information about fertility care and family planning more inclusive of the LGBTQ community. Their work continues to be read 1,500 views every day, well beyond the conclusion of their course. What other assignment can say the same?

Dr. Cynthia Gabriel’s course about LGBTQ Reproductive Health invites students at the University of Michigan to explore the biological, social, cultural, and legal experiences of LGBTQ+ family-making. Aurora Rynda and Airy Garcia both found themselves in the course last fall as they pursued degrees in biology with focuses on gender, health, and society.

Aurora and Airy worked in a group with six other students to improve Wikipedia’s article about in vitro fertilization (IVF). The article was already fairly comprehensive, but given the lens of their course, some gaps stood out to the students right away.

Noticing gaps in Wikipedia through a course lens

“The main gaps our group noticed in the IVF article were the overall lack of gender inclusive language and representation of the LGBTQ+ community,” Airy explained.

“The way the article only uses infertility as a reason to undergo IVF or other assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) came as a shock to me,” Aurora added.

“We were not too surprised that these gaps existed given the general lack of awareness about LGBTQ+ reproductive health and the fact that the media tends to overrepresent cis and heteronormative individuals as the recipients of IVF,” said Airy.

“While editing this article we wanted to create a more inclusive page where individuals can acquire up to date and informative knowledge,” noted Aurora.

So the students got to work.

Taking initiative to correct self-identified gaps

After learning how to edit through Wiki Education’s resources, the group went about making changes. First, they added gender inclusive language throughout the article to better represent all parents. They showed the different forms that fertility care may take for same-sex couples and transgender parents. And they wrote of the unique challenges facing transgender expectant parents as they navigate insurance coverage. The students also changed the article’s main image (the one that appears on Google search results) to be more inclusive, having found a scientific image in the public domain to replace it with.

“Given the fact that we were taking a class on LGBTQ+ reproductive health at the time, we wanted to increase awareness of LGBTQ+ individuals accessing assisted reproductive technologies, especially IVF,” Airy continued. “This included changing gendered language to be more inclusive, adding information from emerging research, and dispelling commonly held misconceptions about LGBTQ+ reproductive health.”

“The main point I wanted readers to take away from the article was the future for assisted reproductive technologies and how ART is used not just for infertility, but it’s widely used for same-sex parents and other LGBTQ partners to create a family,” said Aurora. “It is so important to provide information regarding assisted reproductive technologies because we’re in a society where heterosexual reproduction is the large majority and there is a lack of representation for the LGBTQ community. I find it very frustrating when the LGBTQ community in particular gets marginalized and excluded from the reproductive conversation and the technologies aren’t as accessible. I believe that anyone who wants to have children should be able to, regardless of their identity.”

Because of the public-facing nature of the assignment, students feel a responsibility to get it right, no matter the topic. They also tend to feel empowered by the act of correcting information that will be consulted by so many. The IVF article gets 1,500 views every day. Since December when the students stopped editing, 233K readers have viewed their contributions. That’s an incredible impact.

Depending on how the instructor structures the assignment, students often have autonomy over what topic they’ll improve on Wikipedia. This allows them to bring their interests, career aspirations, and identity to their work, as well as connect it to their other studies.

“As a woman of color, I understand what it feels like to feel under and misrepresented, especially in the health field and in research,” Airy shared. “Since I personally do not identify with the LGBTQ+ community, I wanted to ensure that my contributions to the IVF page were as accurate as possible and worked to uplift instead of exclude or misinform.”

Learning research skills along the way

Information on Wikipedia related to health is subject to additional checks and balances when it comes to sourcing. Aurora, Airy, and their group were especially intentional about the research that they cited, making sure it was peer-reviewed and up-to-date.

“Writing for Wikipedia showed me how important it is to be an expert in the topic you are writing about. You have to not only source all your edits, but you also need to comb through the article and find what parts of the article you find incorrect and need to be changed,” Aurora said. “It also taught me the importance of looking at the sources and not believing everything you read. When you question information you read, you enable yourself to learn more about the topic. I’ve learned to question literature and research on my own before agreeing with the opinions of others. I will take this into my field of study by educating others on the inclusivity of ART and the high demand to discover new technologies.”

Plus, it’s rewarding to write for a resource we all use. “This was my first time making significant changes to a Wikipedia page,” said Airy. “It felt nice to be able to expand representation on such an important topic!”

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free assignment templates and resources that Wiki Education offers to instructors in the United States and Canada.

The Celtic Knot Conference Kwara local meetup 2023, supported by Wikimedia United Kingdom, brought together Wikimedians in Kwara State and its environs to promote and preserve minority and marginalized languages on Wikimedia projects. The meetup focused on eliminating language barriers and increasing the visibility of indigenous knowledge on Wikipedia and its sister’s project. Let’s take a closer look at the goals, activities, and outcomes of this exciting event.

Goals

The meetup had several key goals in mind to empower participants and promote Nigerian culture and languages. These goals included:

1. Recruitment and publicity about Nigerian local Languages and culture; Creating awareness about Nigerian languages and local culture by recruiting 10 new editors and 35 existing editors using different promotional materials whilst making 500+ edits on both Wikipedia, Wikicommons, and Wikidata.
2. Wikipedia: Teaching participants how to access and create a Wikipedia account, introducing them to project tools on Wikipedia, and conducting practical hands-on sessions on translating English Wikipedia articles into the Yoruba Language. Additionally, discussions were held to address the specific challenges faced by language communities, focusing on improving articles related to Nigerian cultures, tribes, local foods, and traditional wear.
3. Wikidata: Introducing participants to Wikidata and its project tools, conducting practical sessions on translating Wikidata Lexemes to the Yoruba Language, and emphasizing the importance of translating labels on Wikidata. The participants were encouraged to create items about Nigerian culture, tribes, local foods, and traditions.
4. WikiCommons: Encouraging participants to contribute by uploading pictures of traditional Nigerian food and adding them to Wikipedia articles. Additionally, they were taught how to add images to Wikidata items, further enriching the cultural representation of Wikimedia projects.

Activities:

The meetup encompassed both online and physical training sessions to cater to a wider audience and facilitate hands-on learning. Here’s a breakdown of the activities that took place:

1. Online Training: On February 4th, 2023, an online onboarding and training session was conducted. During this session, participants learned how to create their Wikipedia accounts, add Wiki links and citations to articles, and translate Wikipedia articles to their local language. The session was recorded for future reference.
2. Physical Training: On February 9th, 2023, the physical training took place at the Ghalib Chambers Law Library in Kwara State. Participants received training on creating Wikidata items, translating them into their local languages, and gaining a deeper understanding of the Wikimedia ecosystem. Photos taken during the physical event captured the enthusiasm and engagement of the attendees.

How It Was Achieved:

To ensure maximum participation and engagement, the organizers implemented several strategies:

1. Clear Guidance: A list of articles and items was provided to the participants, enabling them to easily identify areas where their contributions were needed. Additionally, one-on-one training sessions were conducted to provide individualized guidance and support.
2. Publicity and Awareness: The event was promoted through e-posters and various Wikimedia communities, generating interest and attracting a larger number of participants. Social media platforms played a crucial role in spreading the word and creating awareness.
3. Ongoing Communication: Weekly updates about the campaign were shared with the participants through a dedicated WhatsApp group. This regular communication kept the participants informed and motivated throughout the preparation phase.
4. Personalized Support: Each participant was followed up with individually to ensure they had created their accounts, set up their user pages, and joined the event dashboard before the physical training session. This personalized support helped participants overcome any technical or logistical hurdles they might have encountered.

Outcomes:

The Celtic Knot Conference Kwara Local Meetup 2023 resulted in significant outcomes that exceeded our expectations.

• We organized two highly successful events, comprising an online event and a physical gathering held at Ghalib House in Ilorin, Kwara State. The dual-format approach allowed us to reach a wider audience and accommodate the diverse preferences of participants.
• One of the most notable achievements of the meetup was the impressive turnout of 45 participants. The increased participation can be attributed to the extensive publicity efforts carried out across various departments and on social media platforms. By leveraging these channels, we effectively spread the word about the event, capturing the interest and enthusiasm of individuals passionate about indigenous languages and cultural preservation.
• During the Celtic Knot Conference Kwara Local Meetup 2023, the participants made a substantial impact by contributing over 500 edits on both Wikipedia and Wikidata. These edits encompassed the translation of articles and items, allowing for the dissemination of knowledge in local languages. This remarkable achievement is a testament to the dedication and hard work of the participants in bridging language barriers and elevating the visibility of minority and marginalized languages on the Wikimedia projects.

For more detailed information and a comprehensive overview of the participants’ contributions, we encourage you to explore the outreach dashboard. It provides a detailed breakdown of the edits made, highlighting the transformative impact of the meetup in advancing the cause of language diversity and indigenous knowledge preservation.

The outcomes achieved through the Celtic Knot Conference Kwara Local Meetup 2023 demonstrate the profound impact that focused initiatives can have on promoting cultural heritage and inclusivity. By engaging a diverse group of participants and empowering them with the necessary skills and tools, we were able to foster a collaborative environment that celebrated Nigerian languages and traditions. The meetup served as a catalyst for change, inspiring the creation of culturally relevant content and enriching the representation of indigenous knowledge online.

…drum roll please! As members of the Leadership Development Working Group (LDWG), we are excited to share the Leadership Development Plan (LDP) and invite your feedback. After several months of research, deliberation, and writing, we have written the Leadership Development Plan, a practical resource for emerging and existing leaders across the Wikimedia movement who want to develop themselves and others. For an overview of the Leadership Development Plan, read the summary and share your feedback by Sunday, May 28, 2023.

How Far We’ve Come

What is the LDWG, you might ask? LDWG is a global and diverse community working group that convened for a 1-year term (2022-2023) to steward the definition and direction of the Movement’s leadership development. Our work is a response to Movement Strategy’s “Invest in Skills and Leadership Development” recommendation. When we first convened in June of 2022, we aligned on a shared vision:

“As a result of LDWG’s work, movement members across the Wikimediaverse have an understanding of leadership and how to nurture it in themselves, in others, and in their communities.”

A group of 15 volunteers from various regions, identities, and movement experiences, we are joined by the belief that developing the leadership of community members can lead to the decentralization of power and diverse inclusion. Through our work, we want to make the movement a place where new, small, disadvantaged (emerging) groups and individuals who want to join and grow feel empowered to do so. Effective leadership has the potential to bring people together for a common mission, help people feel safe and a sense of belonging, and support those around them. 

Over the past year, we focused on three goals to further this vision: 

1. Draft a shared definition of leadership

2. Draft a leadership development plan 

3. Guide the implementation of the leadership development plan 

In September 2022, we published a definition of leadership that we hope brings clarity and alignment to the way leadership is understood in the Wikimedia movement. In short, leadership is “the ability to guide, inspire, build autonomy, encourage and motivate a group of people towards a shared goal or common vision.” It involves the embodiment of internal qualities such as courage, resilience, focus, and accountability; and outward actions such as trust-building, setting a shared vision, and guiding collaborative decision-making. After publishing the definition, we hosted a community feedback period where community members asked important questions and helped refine the definition. A majority of the responses were in support of the definition and as a result, we forged ahead to the next goal!

Check out our journey in more detail!

Present Day

Building on the leadership definition, we united our collective experiences to draft the Leadership Development Plan. To reach this point, we conducted research to better understand community sentiments about leadership development and worked in subgroups to draft the Plan. There was a lot of writing, that is certain! Throughout the process, our aim was to draft something useful and relevant. What we ultimately wrote is a practical resource, in a “how-to guide” style, that inspires, validates, and encourages community members across the movement to grow as leaders and support others in their development. While it is not a “plan” on the surface, it does lay out a framework to view leadership and leadership development. Section 1: Understanding Leadership Roles and Skills presents a way to understand and discuss leadership skills and roles across Wikimedia contexts. Section 2: Navigating Leadership Situations focuses on five encounters that leaders face, inviting leaders to notice and, where needed, improve their current handling of those situations. It’s not a comprehensive list but rather a starting point from which to expand. Lastly, Section 3: Creating a Leadership Development Initiative offers a step-by-step process for creating an initiative supporting leadership development, may that be an online course, video series, or any other learning initiative. By providing a systematic process and tools, we hope that more mentors, trainers, organizers, and leaders feel able to support leadership development in their communities. The summary shares an overview of what you will find in the detailed Leadership Development Plan. 

What’s Next?

This is where your help is needed! To improve the first draft of the Leadership Development Plan, we are requesting your feedback. Give feedback through the survey, talk page, MS Forum, or email at leadershipworkinggroup@wikimedia.org by Sunday, May 28, 2023.

Once your feedback is incorporated into the resource, we will publish a revised version and share next steps. In the future, we intend for this resource to be more accessible and want to support community members in using and implementing it in their contexts. 

We look forward to hearing from you!

– Leadership Development Working Group

March of 2023 was distinguished across all Wikipedias for hosting Ukraine’s Cultural Diplomacy Month: an annual campaign that sets a goal of creating better coverage of Ukrainian culture and people across all projects, organized by Wikimedia Ukraine and the Ukrainian Institute. This way apart from sharing interesting cultural phenomena, high-quality information can be ensured for the readers. This year Ukraine’s Cultural Diplomacy Month reached exceptional results, which I would like to present to you in this post.

154 participants took on the challenge, 60% of which were new to the challenge, and wrote 1401 new articles along with 85 improved ones. This year we broke the record for the number of language editions of Wikipedia taking part in the contest at 64. While numerical results are always interesting to analyze, I want also to share some particular stories and achievements.

Contributions by participants span across all types of arts and culture. Articles on staples of Ukrainian literature have appeared as, for example, “Maria” now has a page in Gujarati, “Forest Song” in German, “Cathedral” in Belarussian, “City” in Arabic, and “Eneida” in Welsh. The most celebrated writers gained recognition as articles about Lina Kostenko and Vasyl Stus were written in Hungarian, Marko Vovchok in Basque, Taras Shevchenko in Inari Sámi, Mychailo Draj-Chmara in Spanish, and Lesya Ukrainka in Volapük.

“I dedicated years of my life outside of Wikipedia to promotion of Ukrainian culture in Russia by way of translating and publishing Ukrainian poetry. My efforts and efforts of my friends and colleagues in Russia failed, we were unable to bring Ukrainian culture to the wider audience more interested in shauvinistic propaganda of Russian fascist government. Still in my exile I feel obliged to keep informing Russian readership about achievements of Ukrainian culture as far as I believe that one would never shoot at the culture one has respect to.”

participant Андрей Романенко

Ukrainian visual artists now also have better exposure on the pages of Wikipedia providing articles written about Ivan Marchuk in Japanese, Mykhailo Boychuk in Romanian and Kotava, Kateryna Bilokur in Georgian, Zofia Albinowska-Minkiewiczowa in Azerbaijani as well as about paintings “A Victim of Fanaticism” in Portuguese and “Kateryna” in Esperanto.

“I joined your Campaign to honor my late mother. She was in Europe in mid ‘60s, and cherished the children’s book based on Ukrainian fable of a mitten hosting forest animals“

participant Omotecho from Japan, joined the project for the third time

Reflecting on the deep musical culture of Ukraine, articles appeared about the following songs: “A Duckling Swims in the Tisza” in English, “What a Moonlit Night” in Bulgarian, and “Prayer for Ukraine” in Chinese. Composers Mykola Lysenko and Vasyl Verkhovynets obtained articles in Romanian and Tamil respectively.

“Through my participation in the contest, I sought to address this issue and contribute to the dissemination of accurate and comprehensive information about Ukraine. By creating articles about Ukraine’s culture and history, I hoped to provide Azerbaijani speakers with a deeper understanding and appreciation of Ukraine’s rich heritage and unique contributions to world culture.”

participant Solavirum

Ukrainian theater also got more exposure as articles about the play “Natalka Poltavka” were written in French and Esperanto, the opera “Moses” in German, Theatre of Coryphaei in Bulgarian, Les Kurbas Theatre in Italian and Maria Zankovetska in Belarussian.

“I wanted to help Ukraine somehow. One of the ways, I figured, was by raising awareness about the depth of Ukrainian culture. This time, I focused specifically on translating articles about places of interest in Ukraine, such as museums, theaters, and opera houses. I hope the information would drive more people to visit Ukraine after the war, bringing in some tourist revenue”

participant Nyagoslav Zhekov from Malaysia.

Various articles connected to Ukrainian cinema appeared starting from such classics as “Earth” in Hungarian and “The Stone Cross” in Punjabi to modern “Homeward” in Odia and “The Earth Is Blue as an Orange” in Latvian.

The organizing team is grateful for every and each contribution during the contest, no matter how small or large. We hope that, despite all obstacles, we will keep to our mission of sharing knowledge with the whole world! I want to end this post by citing one of the articles, written during the contest in Estonian: Slava Ukrajini!

 A recent Wikipedia Research article aims to prove that the English Wikipedia deletion process is not biased. For some that is a loaded question because it  centers on the question if Wikipedia is equitable.

As so often the article is all about English Wikipedia and it has its own bias. English Wikipedia does not serve half the public of the Wikimedia Foundation and much of the other half does not read English. The gender balance in English Wikipedia is however improving; the percentage of articles about women is slowly but surely increasing.

At issue in the article is whether the English Wikipedia deletion policies effectively harm gender and race biases. Obviously there are more biases; you may be male and white but when you are not from an Anglo-american background chances for Wikipedia recognition are slim. When you care to research this, check out Wikidata, it includes a super set of what Wikipedia includes and it is biased in this way as well.

When a Wikipedia article about a scientist is deleted, it does not follow that its Wikidata item is deleted and given enough identifiers, it is likely that its related subset increases over time tilting the "notability" balance. Even so, many important scientists are "scientists in red", an example is Prof Emily Fairfax her prominence is for instance in her explaining and demonstrating that beavers feature prominently in the fight against forest fires. 

When English Wikipedia defends its own policies, it follows that they rely on the base assumptions in those policies. When those assumption are questioned, their arguments are lost. Given that English Wikipedia represents a subset of "the sum of all knowledge" that is included in Wikidata, it follows that much of Wikipedia can be understood from such a perspective. 

Wikidata has no "red links"; when a relation exists for an recipient of an award, there must be an item for both the award and the recipient. Wikipedia has one link in black to the "SIRS Lifetime Achievement Award". while Wikidata has a link to all recipients. They are linked to identified publications and other awards and consequently the Scholia for the award is really informative. 

Based on information like this improved information is available that must wait for a Wikipedia volunteer. English Wikipedia is a victim of its success, it cannot fully maintain its information. The same can be said for Wikidata. It is however a superset and it does not necessarily require a mastery of English.

With new technologies becoming more relevant, there is an avenue to improve the quality of any Wikipedia, inform people based on the data in Wikidata and improve on the quality of the information that we provide. 

Thanks,

     GerardM

02/05/2023-08/05/2023

Mapping

• Following a workshop held by UN Mappers, a group of students from the Erasmus Mundus Masters program in Geospatial Technologies at the University of Jaume I, in Castellón de la Plana Spain, analysed campus safety and identified potential vulnerabilities by mapping street lights in OSM.
• PhysicsArmature has some tips for mapping rivers: staying simple.
• Valerie Norton has written an article discussing various tags related to hitching posts and resting places for trail riding. She explored the uses and popularity of tags such as amenity=hitching_post, tourism=trail_riding_rest, amenity=animal_hitch, and amenity=horse_parking. The author contemplates the advantages of different tags and their hierarchical nature, highlighting the need for clearer guidelines, and additional tags in order to enhance mapping accuracy.

Mapping campaigns

• Marjan Van de Kauter, from TomTom’s OSM team, has announced their plans to conduct edits in Luxembourg based on feedback received for their upcoming new TomTom map, ensuring that the edits add value to OpenStreetMap and do not conflict with recent community updates. The team will focus on editing highways, addresses, POIs, land use, buildings, and water initially, expanding to other features in the future. They will use the hashtags #tomtom and #tt_mapfeedback to provide updates on their progress and welcome feedback from the OSM community during this activity.

Community

• In connection with the survey on communication in the OSM community (we reported earlier), Imre Samu clarifies the cultural differences in communication in different countries. He quotes from his sources and backs up his statements with three links that everyone who enters the international arena should read.
• mapmeld blogged about the border of Belgium’s Baarle-Hertog and the Dutch Baarle-Nassau, which overlap in one town riddled with border crossings and enclaves. He included pictures of the weirdest places, including borders intersecting buildings.
• Sango Bishiri Narcisse, based in Chad, is the UN Mapper of the Month for May.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The Board of the OpenStreetMap Foundation has invited its members and the OSM community to participate in revising its Strategic Plan. The plan will be discussed in four phases over the next two months, starting with a focus on ‘Cluster B: Community Development for OSM’.Feedback is requested on missing elements, plan inconsistencies, urgent stratagems, and which ones are important for the success and growth of OpenStreetMap. Comments can be shared on the OSM Community forum or mailing list and private feedback can be sent to the strategy team or individual board members.
• The OSMF Board has written draft Fundraising Guidelines and is seeking feedback from the community about them. You can provide any feedback on the OSM Community forum, in the blog comments, or directly to the Board.

Education

• Denrazir Atara, from HOT Open Mapping Hub Asia-Pacific, is hosting an online training session on Sunday 14 May for beginners and experienced mappers on how to use uMap.

OSM research

• Ulrich et al. have assessed the potential of OSM to quantify land use and land cover change related carbon fluxes to the atmosphere for a regional case study, in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg, in their new paper.

Maps

• [1] Streets GL is an impressive real-time 3D map renderer designed to showcase OpenStreetMap data with stunning visual effects. This TypeScript project utilises WebGL2 and a render graph implementation to generate dynamic geometry, allowing for the visualisation of complex building shapes, roads, trees, and more.
• karlos on Mastodon pointed out that while weeklyOSM provides a comprehensive list of events, it lacks a corresponding map to visualise their locations. He shared a test map featuring pins with some event information. The Calendar Widget from Jonathan Beliën shows how it could look.

Open Data

• Jeff Underwood tweeted about recent enhancements to building height data in downtown Phoenix, comparing the information available in OpenStreetMap and Overture. He acknowledged the positive development and noted that Overture’s coverage extends beyond downtown, encompassing the entire region.

Software

• Bellingcat’s latest geolocation tool, based on OpenStreetMap data, simplifies the process of identifying the location of images for investigative purposes. By selecting key features from an image, such as landmarks or structures, users can narrow down their search within a specified region of interest. The tool provides a list of potential matches on a map, enabling users to pinpoint the exact location for further investigation. With this tool, geolocating images has become more accessible for open-source researchers and investigators.
• Wille Marcel, in a recent presentation during the OpenStreetMap US Mappy Hour, showcased OSMCha, a powerful tool for OpenStreetMap data analysis and quality control. The tutorial dives into the various functionalities starting at the 5:14 mark, providing a valuable resource for OSM enthusiasts.

Releases

• Magic Lane has unveiled a new Android version of its Magic Earth navigation app, offering users privacy, offline capabilities, and advanced driver assistance features.

Did you know …

• … about Open Etymology Map? It is a web application for displaying historical information about people whose names have been used as street or place names. This application uses information from the wikidata:* tag in OSM.
• … using Ctrl+F5 instead of F5 to refresh a webpage? Ziltoidium pointed out that after an edit, if you press F5 the map is reloaded, but the images continue to come from the cache. He recommends Ctrl+F5 instead and says that changes to the map are visible after 1 to 2 minutes.

OSM in the media

• Researchers from the Simon Fraser University have developed Canada’s first national open-source dataset of cycling infrastructure, aimed at promoting active transportation options, and assisting decisionmakers. The dataset, derived from OpenStreetMap, provides consistent information on bicycle infrastructure, allowing for better planning decisions.
• In an interview with the Lower Saxony Tourism Network Marie Witte, from Mittelweser-Touristik (MWT), reported ► on the useful cooperation with OSM mappers to optimise cycling and hiking tours using digital maps. In order to implement this cooperation, the MWT, together with Tof99 and OSM_RogerWilco, have set up a working group in which mappers and tourism experts exchange information. The cooperation has allowed MWT ► to improve its suggestions and to ensure the data quality of the routes with the help of the OSM mappers.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2023-05-11
Chippewa Township	OpenStreetMap Michigan Meetup	✓	2023-05-11
	“Open- und OpenStreetMap-Daten in Blaulichtorganisationen” (Schweiz)		2023-05-11
Berlin	179. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2023-05-11
Zürich	OSM-Stammtisch		2023-05-11
Zaragoza	esLibre 2023		2023-05-12 – 2023-05-13
Briançon	Parlons d’OpenStreetMap		2023-05-12
Verona	MERGE-it		2023-05-12 – 2023-05-13
Gap	Parlons d’OpenStreetMap		2023-05-12
Sülysáp	Mapping around Sülysáp before, after and during breaks of qbParty (demoscene)		2023-05-13 – 2023-05-14
Gap	Cartopartie Durance à vélo dans le pays Gapençais !		2023-05-13
City Of Vincent	Social Mapping Saturday: Hyde Park		2023-05-13
Nanterre	Paris Hack Weekend		2023-05-13 – 2023-05-14
Puerto López	Notas OSM: Discutamos hashtags para incluir en las notas de OpenStreetMap		2023-05-13
Singapore	OG Training by HOTOSM Ap-Hub	CREATING ONLINE MAPS USING UMAP		2023-05-13
København	OSMmapperCPH		2023-05-14
Grenoble	Contribuez à OpenStreetMap avec votre smartphone		2023-05-15
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 月聚會 #52		2023-05-15
Lyon	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon		2023-05-16
Bonn	163. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2023-05-16
City of Edinburgh	OSM Edinburgh Social		2023-05-16
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2023-05-16
	Formação UN Mappers: OpenStreetMap e o mapeamento humanitário – sessão 9		2023-05-17
Zürich	Missing Maps Zürich Mapathon		2023-05-17
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe		2023-05-17
Washington	OSM US Mappy Hour	✓	2023-05-18
Rīga	State of the Map Baltics 2023		2023-05-17 – 2023-05-18
Toulouse	Réunion du groupe local de Toulouse		2023-05-20
Singapore	OG Training by HOTOSM AP-Hub	CREATING ONLINE MAPS USING USHAHIDI		2023-05-20
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	✓	2023-05-22
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-05-24
Bayonne	Cartopartie à Bayonne – 25 mai 2023		2023-05-25
Singapore	OG Training by HOTOSM AP-Hub	OSM ON THE GO: OSM MOBILE APPLICATIONS		2023-05-27

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

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

By Daria Cybulska, Director of Programmes and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK

Democracies rely on informed citizens to function effectively. Over recent years, new digital technologies have fundamentally altered the creation and consumption of media content, and introduced new challenges to democratic participation. The increased volume of news, the politicisation of social media, misinformation, disinformation, and the distracting of the public through fake news, along with the rise of polarised and radicalised groups whose own ideology is reinforced by ‘filter bubbles’, all combine to create untrustworthiness, bias and misrepresentation. These issues undermine democracy and its reliance on well-informed citizens. 

Information literacy has the power to counter this. At its heart, information literacy empowers citizens to access, create, consume and critically evaluate information. It builds understanding of the ethical and political issues associated with the use of information, including privacy, data protection, freedom of information, open access/open data and intellectual property. 

In my role as the Director of Programmes at Wikimedia UK, I’ve long believed that our workshops and training sessions make a difference in empowering people – by building their information literacy skills, providing an opportunity to collaborate, and capturing their heritage. In 2021, together with Agnes Bruszik, a research colleague, we delivered a project to critically investigate how engaging with Wikimedia projects contributes to the strengthening of civil society and democratic processes in the UK.

Our main inquiry was to understand how improving information literacy skills contributes to Wikimedia UK’s vision of a more tolerant, informed and democratic society. Does our work increase participants’ information literacy, and does this in turn lead to a more engaged civil society? We reviewed the current understanding and frameworks in the intersection of literacies, civic engagement and democratic participation, to see how information literacy has been found to support civic engagement. We then explored how Wikimedia UK’s work contributes to civic disposition skills. 

Our research concludes that Wikimedia’s activities can increase citizen engagement in democratic processes through our work in information literacy by 1) Providing open and free access to accurate information, 2) Improving information literacy skills of individuals, 3) Encouraging volunteering, and 4) Providing accessible collaborative infrastructure. 

“Information literacy is one of the most important skills of the future. Without understanding how, by who and in which ways knowledge and information is created and distributed, one cannot potentially evaluate the value and credibility of that information. The formulation of opinions, values, principles, or academic and historical referencing must be based upon reliable sources and credible interpretation and presentation of facts and data. Without citizens’ awareness of information manipulation, democratic participation is thus flawed. The Wikimedia movement is in a unique position to educate and encourage individuals to become more information literate, while . also promoting democratic practices such as participatory decision-making, provisioning open access to platforms and information for even the most marginalised minority groups. These practices, in turn, create the know-how for more civic engagement in general.” – Agnes Bruszik

Crucially, freedom of expression and access to reliable information through Wikimedia projects increase intercultural dialogue and decrease the social isolation of minority groups. Wikipedia serves as a platform that can assist displaced or minoritised communities to express and maintain cultural identity.Our experience shows that groups organised around a shared interest, value or cause, and equipped with digital, information and collaboration skills, are more likely to engage in civic participation in public matters relevant for them. Moreover, learning about the culture of democratic participation and processes of engagement empowers individuals, equipping them with transferable skills.

“The rise of populism has been linked to a decline in interest in public affairs and we thought that, being less politically and socially active, people may be less capable of interpreting political phenomena and understanding the complexity of the management of public affairs.” – Science Direct

We are faced with a global trend towards a shrinking civil society space. There are fewer spaces where citizens can develop and practise key civic skills such as collaboration, self-representation, and working within a context of diversity and difference of opinion. This is much needed in any context, including the UK. Civic skills are broad in character and can be developed in a variety of contexts – including opportunities online. Wikipedia has the benefit of being a well known online space, meaning it has the recognition within a big audience that could then be engaged in civic activities. We can engage with people where they already are rather than needing to bring them to a new, unknown space. 

Many participants of Wikimedia UK activities (e.g. editing events) started out as individual editors, who then decided to bring wiki projects into their communities. In a recent survey of our community leaders, we asked if individuals’ participation in Wikimedia UK activities, such as running wiki events, encouraged them to take part in other non-wiki activities? (eg. community organising, campaigning, other kinds of volunteering, etc). One volunteer reports:

“Yes. In speaking to a volunteer for our charity, I became aware of the [community heritage project centring on a particular 19th century industrial action]. I created the Wikipedia page for […], a leading figure in the strike whose mentions elsewhere assured her notability, and through this spoke to the originators of [community heritage project]. I am now actively involved with the group, including as part of their education and community engagement sub-group. It’s likely that Wikipedia work will feature in this at some stage, as they were overjoyed with the […] page and very much convinced of the usefulness of more (and more accurate) Wikipedia representation.”- Community Leader response in a 2021-22 Wikimedia UK volunteer survey.

Working on Wikimedia UK projects can facilitate this spirit of working towards a common good (free knowledge for all), cooperation with others, activism, which in the long run encourages an empowered civil society. This we believe can go a long way towards realising Wikimedia UK’s vision of a more informed, democratic and equitable society.

Explore the report

• Full report
• Summary of the report 
• Diagram – Mapping the role of Wikimedia in Civic Part
• Wikimania 2022 presentation of the findings
• Strengthening Civil Society: Wikimedia and Democracy – online session with an overview of the research and a curated Q&A into how engagement online can strengthen civic engagement offline.

The post From editing articles to civic power – Wikimedia and Democracy appeared first on WMUK.

On TheoryOfReddit Brian Keegan has posted an open letter regarding Reddit’s tightening of their API access, especially the cutting off of Pushshift’s access.

Pushshift is/was a third-party repository of Reddit data – used by researchers and mods – that had difficulty keeping up with deletion requests, among other things. It was also used by those wanting to find deleted messages.

This issue – that Pushshift violated Reddit’s user’s privacy expectations by retaining data, requiring an additional opt-out step, and then failing to act quickly – is one of the purported reasons for its removal from the Reddit API.

For the past few years, I’ve been seeking to understand three questions relevant to this issue, especially for advice subreddits:

1. How many users actually delete their posts?
2. How long does it take for them to do so?
3. Do users actually worry about their deleted messages surviving?

I answer all these questions in a draft (under review). For example, Table 1 shows levels of removal and deletion across varied subreddits.

Feedback on the draft is welcome. Of course, without Pushshift I can no longer extend the data itself.

---

Table 1 shows that removal and deletion are common, especially on the advice subreddits. The popular advise subreddits have significantly more deletions (48%) than other sensitive subreddits (32.4%), which have significantly more deletions than tech-related subreddits (20.2%). Moderation has increased over the years, with r/AmItheAsshole going from 14% to 47% to 78%!

Table 1: Percent of submissions deleted and [removed].

subreddit	2018-Mar+	2020-Mar+	2022-Mar+
tech subreddits			20.0% [38.1%]
sensitive subreddits			32.4% [16.2%]
Advice	51.6% [09.7%]	53.0% [12.3%]	47.4% [42.8%]
AmItheAsshole	45.8% [13.9%]	48.9% [47.1%]	43.1% [78.4%]
relationship_advice	55.9% [09.5%]	58.9% [09.8%]	53.7% [48.0%]

The popular technology-related subreddits consisted of: Android, apple, audiophile, buildapc, DataHoarder, electronics, gadgets, hardware, ipad, linux, mac, sysadmin, techsupport, web, windows. The sensitive subreddits were those studied by Gaur et al. (2019kaa): Anxiety, BPD, BipolarReddit, BipolarSOs, StopSelfHarm, SuicideWatch, addiction, aspergers, autism, bipolar, depression, opiates, schizophrenia, selfharm; cripplingalcoholism is not included because it was made private earlier in 2022.

• Albania report: International Roma Day Edit-a-thon in Albania, 2023
• Brazil report: “Every Book its Public” Campaign and Strategic Committee on Libraries
• Czech Republic report: What’s new at GLAM in the Czech Republic
• Indonesia report: GLAM Mini Grants; Structured Data Marathon VIII; Wikisource Online Workshop
• Italy report: Bridges between Wikimedia and culture
• New Zealand report: BHL Whitepaper and outreach for Citizen Science Month and WeDigBio, Auckland Museum suburbs project update, New Zealand Women in Architecture Wikidata Project
• Poland report: Another meeting of EU GLAM Coordinators; Guided tours for Wikipedians in museums in Krakow; Presentation on Art in Wikipedia; Online training on the basics of copyright law; Polish monuments among the top winners of WLM
• Sweden report: ISOF workshop; More articles from students; SAAB veterans shared their knowledge during metadata edit-a-thon; ArkDes edit-a-thons
• UK report: Democratising knowledge and cultural diversity
• USA report: Into the Wikiverse; Earth Day 2023 Bushwick
• Content Partnerships Hub report: Wikipedia day pitches by FAO and IEA
• Wiki Loves Living Heritage report: Activities are starting!
• WMF GLAM report: Biodiversity Heritage Library whitepaper and the #1Lib1Ref campaign
• Calendar: May’s GLAM events

By Leah Emary, Wikimedian in Residence at The Mixed Museum and Connected Heritage Project Lead

Introduction and Overview

The Wikimedian in Residence partnership continued at the Mixed Museum from January to March 2023, building on the initial stage of the residency that began in September. This blog posting describes the initiatives focussed on during this time and next steps that both the Mixed Museum and Wikimedia UK might like to take to build on the residency. The End of Residency Report can be found here.

January to March 2023

Sustainable digital volunteer programme for the Mixed Museum

As described in the first report from the residency, editing Wikimedia projects is an ideal basis for a digital volunteering programme for the Museum. However, after the scope and scale of recruiting for and managing a volunteer programme became clear, it seemed desirable to fund a volunteer coordinator for the Museum who could deliver this with expertise and focus, rather than making it part of Chamion’s work. 

I outlined what would be required to create a sustainable virtual volunteering programme for the Mixed Museum, with the hopes that this could be used for a future funding bid. You can read the proposal here: Sustainable digital volunteer programme for the Mixed Museum. 

We had initially planned to create a bespoke, self-study training programme for volunteers based on a set of Google slides and embedded videos taken from Zoom-based training. Because the editing interface of Wikipedia changed quite dramatically in January 2023, the training videos and screenshots were quickly out of date and less suitable for self study, which altered our plans.

Rather than re-record, we took time to consider the implications of future changes to the interfaces making self study videos obsolete, and the considerable investment they take to remain up to date and useful. As the museum doesn’t have anyone to do that ongoing maintenance work, the bespoke training programme would quickly go out of date. We decided to rely on three existing resources for online training (Training Library [Programs & Events Dashboard], The Wikipedia Adventure, and The Introduction to Wikipedia) for a more sustainable future. For more information on which training we decided on and how to contextualise it, see the Sustainable digital volunteer programme for the Mixed Museum document.

Heritage Dot 2.0 Roundtable

In March 2023, Chamion participated in a roundtable discussion moderated by the Connected Heritage team and two other Connected Heritage partners, Dr Jane Secker and Dr Victoria Araj, as part of the Heritage Dot 2.0 conference hosted by the University of Lincoln. 

The discussion touched on how engagement with Wiki-based projects enabled these three cultural heritage organisations to improve the accessibility of their collections, while simultaneously empowering volunteers and members through embedded digital upskilling. The Mixed Museum’s Wikipedia edits were discussed as an example of ways that open knowledge can place overlooked cultural histories into the dominant narrative. Chamion also described the legacy the Residency will have on the Museum’s future projects. 

We were honoured to hear Josie Fraser from the National Lottery Heritage Fund mention the roundtable as a highlight of the conference during her closing remarks. 

Queen Mary University London Microinterns 2023

Two student interns, Leyi and Shannon, joined the Mixed Museum for four weeks in March 2023. The internship followed a similar model to one we ran last year. More about the micro-internship format is in this blog posting March is Wiki micro-internship month at The Mixed Museum and Manar al-Athar.

This year, the interns worked from a Trello board of Wiki tasks. Both Leyi and Shannon focussed on the military history of African American soldiers based in the United Kingdom during and after World War 2. While Shannon focussed on adding personal accounts to articles which read like lists of list of dates, Leyi was interested in adding social history to articles on military bases in England. Leyi experienced some pushback from other editors which she describes in her blog-based reflection [link here]  and was resilient in the face of it. The interns had interesting conversations with Chamion around who feels ownership over different parts of history and how our work editing Wikipedia can have an impact on what is  generally accepted as ‘important’. 

What Chamion and I discovered, having run this internship twice now is that, though the platform is the same and the work is similar each year, Wikipedia editing is like a mirror in that each person sees something different reflected back at them in the process. See the Internship Dashboard for 2023.

Museum Ethnographers Group Conference 2023

The work we did at the Residency around copyright and Wikimedia Commons (highlighted here) was the subject of a paper delivered to the Museum Ethnographers Conference in Cambridge in April 2023. Slides for Museum Ethnographers Group Conference presentation.

In the presentation, the example of the Brown Babies images sits alongside work done by Martin Poulter at the Khalli Collections and Lucy Moore’s recuperative work to enhance the representation of museums in Oceania on Wikimedia projects. The three projects engage in a conversation about what it is to edit Wiki in today’s context and how we can work together to best surmount these and create a more equitable digital space for open knowledge.

Looking at visitor numbers to The Mixed Museum 

Chamion has long been interested in what the Museum’s Google analytics tell her about the numbers of visitors clicking through from Wikipedia links to The Mixed Museum. These so-called referral links make up a small but significant portion of the Museum’s audience. In the period before the Connected Heritage partnership, the Museum had very little traffic from Wiki sources. In fact, it was listed seventh of the referral channels, with 25 visitors coming directly from Wiki links. The top referral site then was a National Archives blog post, with 117 visitors. Since March 2022, National Archives referral rate has stayed relatively steady while the Wiki channel link has seen a percentage increase of 1584!

What is also interesting is that those who reach the Museum via Wiki sources are spending an average of 3.44 minutes on the site, compared to before the Connected Heritage partnership when they visited for an average of 1.27 minutes. Clearly, through more sustained and targeted editing, we have not only attracted more Wiki users to The Mixed Museum, but increased the engagement of these visitors with the exhibitions.

We can also see all the pages which reference the Mixed Museum by using the MassViews Analysis tool. 

Next steps

Though Leah’s Residency is coming to an end, the relationship between the Museum and Wikimedia UK will go on. Chamion will be contributing her insight and knowledge to a new research project dedicated to understanding the barriers that small and medium sized heritage organisations face when contributing to open knowledge. We hope to run the microinternships again in March 2024 and ideas for pursuing the digital volunteering programme are in the works. 

Interested in hosting a Wikimedian in Residence?

If you are involved with a heritage or cultural organisation in the United Kingdom and you think a Wikimedian in Residence might be good for your organisation, please talk to us about it. You can book a half hour meeting with the Connected Heritage team via Calendly or drop us an email.

The post Celebrating The Mixed Museum residency as it comes to an end appeared first on WMUK.

Learn why we transitioned the MediaWiki platform to serve traffic from multiple data centers, and the challenges we faced along the way.

Wikimedia Foundation provides access to information for people around the globe. When you visit Wikipedia, your browser sends a web request to our servers and receives a response. Our servers are located in multiple geographically separate datacenters. This gives us the ability to quickly respond to you from the closest possible location.

You can find out which data center is handling your requests by using the Network tab in your browser’s developer tools (e.g. right-click -> Inspect element -> Network). Refresh the page and click the top row in the table. In the “x-cache” response header, the first digit corresponds to a data center in the above map.

In the example above, we can tell from the 4 in “cp4043”, that San Francisco was chosen as my nearest caching data center. The cache did not contain a suitable response, so the 2 in “mw2393” indicates that Dallas was chosen as the application data center. These are the ones where we run the MediaWiki platform on hundreds of bare metal Apache servers. The backend response from there is then proxied via San Francisco back to me.

Why multiple data centers?

Our in-house Content Delivery Network (CDN) is deployed in multiple geographic locations. This lowers response time by reducing the distance that data must travel, through (inter)national cables and other networking infrastructure from your ISP and Internet backbones. Each caching data center that makes up our CDN, contains cache servers that remember previous responses to speed up delivery. Requests that have no matching cache entry yet, must be forwarded to a backend server in the application data center.

If these backend servers are also deployed in multiple geographies, we lower the latency for requests that are missing from the cache, or that are uncachable. Operating multiple application data centers also reduces organizational risk from catastrophic damage or connectivity loss to a single data center. To achieve this redundancy, each application data center must contain all hardware, databases, and services required to handle the full worldwide volume of our backend traffic.

Multi-region evolution of our CDN

Wikimedia started running its first datacenter in 2004, in St Petersburg, Florida. This contained all our web servers, databases, and cache servers. We designed MediaWiki, the web application that powers Wikipedia, to support cache proxies that can handle our scale of Internet traffic. This involves including Cache-Control headers, sending HTTP PURGE requests when pages are edited, and intentional limitations to ensure content renders the same for different people. We originally deployed Squid as the cache proxy software, and later replaced it with Varnish and Apache Traffic Server.

In 2005, with only minimal code changes, we deployed cache proxies in Amsterdam, Seoul, and Paris. More recently, we’ve added caching clusters in San Francisco, Singapore, and Marseille. Each significantly reduces latency from Europe and Asia.

Adding cache servers increased the overhead of cache invalidation, as the backend would send an explicit PURGE request to each cache server. After ten years of growth both in Wikipedia’s edit rate and the number of servers, we adopted a more scalable solution in 2013 in the form of a one-to-many broadcast. This eventually reaches all caching servers, through a single asynchronous message (based on UDP multicast). This was later replaced with a Kafka-based system in 2020.

The traffic we receive from logged-in users is only a fraction of that of logged-out users, while also being difficult to cache. We forward such requests uncached to the backend application servers. When you browse Wikipedia on your device, the page can vary based on your name, interface preferences, and account permissions. Notice the elements highlighted in the example above. This kind of variation gets in the way of whole-page HTTP caching by URL.

Our highest-traffic endpoints are designed to be cacheable even for logged-in users. This includes our CSS/JavaScript delivery system (ResourceLoader), and our image thumbnails. The performance of these endpoints is essential to the critical path of page views.

Multi-region for application servers

Wikimedia Foundation began operating a secondary data center in 2014, as contingency to facilitate a quick and full recovery within minutes in the event of a disaster. We excercise full switchovers annually, and we use it throughout the year to ease maintenance through partial switchover of individual backend services.

Actively serving traffic from both data centers would add advantages over a cold-standby system:

• Requests are forwarded to closer servers, which reduces latency. 
• Traffic load is spread across more hardware, instead of half sitting idle. 
• No need to “warm up” caches in a standby data center prior to switching traffic from one data center to another.
• With multiple data centers in active use, there is institutional incentive to make sure each one can correctly serve live traffic. This avoids creation of services that are configured once, but not reproducible elsewhere.

We drafted several ideas into a proposal in 2015, to support multiple application data centers. Many components of the MediaWiki platform assumed operating from one backend data center. Such as assuming that a primary database is always reachable for querying, or that deleting a key from “the” Memcache cluster suffices to invalidate a cache. We needed to adopt new paradigms and patterns, deploy new infrastructure, and update existing components to accommodate these. Our seven-year journey ended in 2022, when we finally enabled concurrent use of multiple data centers!

The biggest changes that made this transition possible are outlined below.

HTTP verb traffic routing

MediaWiki was designed from the ground up to make liberal use of relational databases (e.g. MySQL). During most HTTP requests, the backend application makes several dozen round trips to its databases. This is acceptable when those databases are physically close to the web servers (<0.2ms ping time). But, this would accumulate significant delays if they are in different regions (e.g. 35ms ping time).

MediaWiki is also designed to strictly separate primary (writable) from replica (read-only) databases. This is essential at our scale. We have a CDN and hundreds of web servers behind it. As traffic grows, we can add more web servers and replica database servers as-needed. But, this requires that page views don’t put load on the primary database server — of which there can be only one! Therefore we optimize page views to rely only on queries to replica databases. This generally respects the “method” section of RFC 9110, which states that requests that modify information (such as edits) use HTTP POST requests, whereas read actions (like page views) only involve HTTP GET (or HTTP HEAD) requests.

The above pattern gave rise to the key idea that there could be a “primary” application datacenter for “write” requests, and “secondary” data centers for “read” requests. The primary databases reside in the primary datacenter, while we have MySQL replicas in both data centers. When the CDN has to forward a request to an application server, it chooses the primary datacenter for “write” requests (HTTP POST) and the closest datacenter for “read” requests (e.g. HTTP GET).

We cleaned up and migrated components of MediaWiki to fit this pattern. For pragmatic reasons, we did make a short list of exceptions. We allow certain GET requests to always route to the primary data center. The exceptions require HTTP GET for technical reasons, and change data at the same low frequency as POST requests. The final routing logic is implemented in Lua on our Apache Traffic Server proxies.

Media storage

Our first file storage and thumbnailing infrastructure relied on NFS. NetApp hardware provided mirroring to standby data centers.

By 2012, this required increasingly expensive hardware and proved difficult to maintain. We migrated media storage to Swift, a distributed file store.

As MediaWiki assumed direct file access, Aaron Schulz and Tim Starling introduced the FileBackend interface to abstract this. Each application data center has its own Swift cluster. MediaWiki tries writes to both clusters, and the “swiftrepl” background service manages consistency. When our CDN finds thumbnails absent from its cache, it forwards requests to the nearest Swift cluster.

Job queue

MediaWiki features a job queue system since 2009, for performing background tasks. We took our Redis-based job queue service, and migrated to Kafka in 2017. With Kafka, we support bidirectional and asynchronous replication. This allows MediaWiki to quickly and safely queue jobs locally within the secondary data center. Jobs are then relayed to and executed in the primary data center, near the primary databases.

The bidirectional queue helps support legacy features that discover data updates during a pageview or other HTTP GET request. Changing each of these features was not feasible in a reasonable time span. Instead, we designed the system to ensure queueing operations are equally fast and local to each data center.

In-memory object cache

MediaWiki uses Memcached as an LRU key-value store to cache frequently accessed objects. Though not as efficient as whole-page HTTP caching, this very granular cache is suitable for dynamic content.

Some MediaWiki extensions assumed that Memcached had strong consistency guarantees, or that a cache could be invalidated by setting new values at relevant keys when the underlying data changes. Although these assumptions were never valid, they worked well enough in a single data center.

We introduced WANObjectCache as a simple yet robust interface in MediaWiki. It takes care of dealing with multiple independent data centers. The system is backed by mcrouter, a Memcached proxy written by Facebook. WANObjectCache provides two basic functions: getWithSet and delete. It uses cache-aside in the local data center, and broadcasts invalidation to all data centers. We’ve migrated virtually all Memcached interactions in MediaWiki to WANObjectCache.

Parser cache

Most of a Wikipedia page is the HTML rendering of the editable content. This HTML is the result of parsing wikitext markup and expanding template macros. MediaWiki stores this in the ParserCache to improve scalability and performance. Originally, Wikipedia used its main Memcached cluster for this. In 2011, we added MySQL as the lower tier key-value store. This improved resiliency from power outages and simplified Memcached maintenance. ParserCache databases use circular replication between data centers.

Ephemeral object stash

The MainStash interface provides MediaWiki extensions on the platform with a general key-value store. Unlike Memcached, this is is a persistent store (disk-backed, to survive restarts) and replicates its values between data centers. Until now, in our single data center setup, we used Redis as our MainStash backend.

In 2022 we moved this data to MySQL, and replicate it between data centers using circular replication. Our access layer (SqlBagOStuff) adheres to a Last-Write-Wins consistency model.

Login sessions were similarly migrated away from Redis, to a new session store based on Cassandra. It has native support for multi-region clustering and tunable consistency models.

Reaping the rewards

Most multi-DC work took the form of incremental improvements and infrastructure cleanup, spread over several years. While we did find latency redunction on some of the individual changes, we mainly looked out for improvements in availability and reliability.

The final switch to “turn on” concurrent traffic to both application data centers was the HTTP verb routing. We deployed it in two stages. The first stage applied the routing logic to 2% of web traffic, to reduce risk. After monitoring and functional testing, we moved to the second stage: route 100% of traffic.

We reduced latency of “read” requests by ~15ms for users west of our data center in Carrollton (Texas, USA). For example, logged-in users within East Asia. Previously, we forwarded their CDN cache-misses to our primary data center in Ashburn (Virginia, USA). Now, we could respond from our closer, secondary, datacenter in Carrollton. This improvement is visible in the 75th percentile TTFB (Time to First Byte) graph below. The time is in seconds. Note the dip after 03:36 UTC, when we deployed the HTTP verb routing logic.

Further reading

• Wikimedia Foundation selects CyrusOne in Dallas as new data center, Mark Bergsma, 2014.
• Wikimedia’s first failover test, Mark Bergsma, 2016.
• The new data center in Singapore, Brandon Black, 2018.
• Hello, WANObjectCache, Aaron Schulz, 2019.
• One step closer to Multi-DC, Aaron Schulz, 2022.
• Documentation: WANObjectCache architecture
• Documentation: Multi-DC planning and history

About this post

Featured image credit: Wikimedia servers by Victor Grigas, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.

25/04/2023-01/05/2023

Mapping

• [1] The proposal about arrangement of power lines is now requesting comments (RFC). It aims to describe how line bundles are arranged around their supports or way points. They can be arranged horizontally, vertically or even as a delta shape.
• The parking_space=collection proposal is in RFC. The tag will describe parking spaces designated for customer collection or pick-up.
• The kerb:approach_aid=yes/no proposal is open for voting until Monday 15 May.
• Peter Elderson blogged about how to map a turbo roundabout using JOSM. A turbo roundabout allows drivers to select their direction before entering, which is then enforced through the roundabout.
• SK53 investigated if leisure=pitch with sport=tennis is being used only for single tennis courts. He ran a query which pulled tags, the geometry and the area of each pitch, in square metres, to check – the answer was no. Only about a quarter of tennis ‘pitches’ represent a single court, with at least as many objects representing two courts and a similar number more than two courts. A tiny proportion has tags indicating how many courts are represented by each area.
• The Duitama Mapping Stars from Salesian College in Duitama, Columbia, aged 13 to 16, have mapped sustainable transportation in their home town and beyond, in cities such as Bogota, Zitácuaro, Oururo, and Nairobi.

Mapping campaigns

• AE35 reported ► that the Danish MapRoulette Cemetery Challenge started on Monday 26 March. The task is to map all footpaths and steps in 2440 Danish cemeteries. On 2 May, 50% of the task had already been completed. Nineteen volunteers have so far added about 17,000 new footpaths/steps and 511 flagpoles. The goal is to complete the project before Christmas.

Community

• Andres Gomez Casanova wrote ► another entry in his diary on websites that are easy to use from mobile devices to improve OSM data, extending his first overview of mobile apps (we reported earlier).
• ivanbranco blogged an amazing list of his favourite OSM-related tools/websites/apps with brief descriptions of each. Matt Whilden added three more interesting tools in his comment.

Events

• Maria Pilar Pearl Mateo has published ► a long article in the Heraldo about mapathons organised by the University of Zaragoza and the Collaborative Mapping / Geoinquietos Zaragoza group. She covered mapathons in Malawi, Nigeria, and Tanzania and explained why these activities are necessary.
• The programme for the State of the Map US 2023 is now available online.

OSM research

• Filip Biljecki et al. published research on the quality of building attributes in OpenStreetMap.
• Courtney Williamson has invited the readers of weeklyOSM to take a survey (via LimeSurvey or Google Survey) about how the OSM community uses forums, mailing lists, social media and other channels to communicate. The results of the survey will be presented at the State of the Map US on Friday 9 June. The survey is being conducted in a private capacity and is not a project of the OSMF Communication Working Group.

Software

• Dustin Carlino has published a tool called Route Snapper, which allows you to mark an area by marking the surrounding roads.
• User YPGGUUY has written ( and ) a simple Python script to check the quality of a bus network; the code is hosted on GitFront.

Programming

• Lejun showed ► how to create an R script to analyse the distributions of polygon areas in OpenStreetMap. The work was prompted by SK53’s diary entry described above.

Releases

• Version 0.7.60 of the Overpass API is out and a blog post presents the enhancements. This version addresses primarily those people that maintain an instance of the database on magnetic hard drives. The data format on the backend has been changed so that updates now run four times faster.

Did you know …

• … the wiki page Good practice? It is guide for mappers on ways to be more helpful.
• … there is a FOSS fork of signal messenger for Android, that uses OpenStreetMap for maps?

Other “geo” things

• Giorgio Comai published an article on Medium, describing the process to create Mapping Diversity. It combines data from OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, and open government data to map and show statistics about the gender of people who have a street named after them.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-04-30 – 2023-06-30
	SotM Asia 2023 Meeting Kickoff		2023-05-06
Localidad La Candelaria	Ponencia: OpenStreetMap, datos de vida		2023-05-06
Localidad La Candelaria	Taller: Introducción a OpenStreetMap como parte del Flisol		2023-05-06 – 2023-05-07
London	OSMLondon pub meet-up		2023-05-09
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-05-10
	Formação UN Mappers: OpenStreetMap e o mapeamento humanitário – sessão 8		2023-05-10
	Mitgestaltung der OpenStreetMap Konferenz zur FOSSGIS		2023-05-10
Hannover	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2023-05-10
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2023-05-10
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2023-05-11
	“Open- und OpenStreetMap-Daten in Blaulichtorganisationen” (Schweiz)		2023-05-11
Zürich	OSM-Stammtisch		2023-05-11
Berlin	179. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2023-05-11
Zaragoza	esLibre 2023		2023-05-12 – 2023-05-13
Briançon	Parlons d’OpenStreetMap		2023-05-12
Verona	MERGE-it		2023-05-12 – 2023-05-13
Gap	Parlons d’OpenStreetMap		2023-05-12
Sülysáp	Mapping around Sülysáp before, after and during breaks of qbParty (demoscene)		2023-05-13 – 2023-05-14
Gap	Cartopartie Durance à vélo dans le pays Gapençais !		2023-05-13
Nanterre	Paris Hack Weekend		2023-05-13 – 2023-05-14
Puerto López	Notas OSM: Discutamos hashtags para incluir en las notas de OpenStreetMap		2023-05-13
København	OSMmapperCPH		2023-05-14
Grenoble	Contribuez à OpenStreetMap avec votre smartphone		2023-05-15
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 月聚會 #52		2023-05-15
Bonn	163. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2023-05-16
City of Edinburgh	OSM Edinburgh Social		2023-05-16
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2023-05-16
	Formação UN Mappers: OpenStreetMap e o mapeamento humanitário – sessão 9		2023-05-17
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe		2023-05-17
Rīga	State of the Map Baltics 2023		2023-05-17 – 2023-05-18
Toulouse	Réunion du groupe local de Toulouse		2023-05-20

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

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

All I need in this life of sin is my AlphaSmart 3000.

– Drew Millard

When I decided to develop a daily writing habit, I bought a toy keyboard.

It did not go well.

To begin with, I knew I wanted two things:

1. To avoid my computer – The urge to check email, sleep-destroying blue light, the siren song of Reddit: all reasons to avoid computers when possible.
2. To type instead of write – I can tap out my thoughts on a keyboard much faster than I can scribble them in a notebook.

Enter the AlphaSmart3000—a pleasingly luddite word processor from the early aughts.

Everyone from writers at the New Yorker to the hardware tinkerers at Hackaday gushed praise for the AlphaSmart.

So, when I found one for ~$30 on eBay, I snatched it up.

I thought I was going to love it. But I’ve never used it like I’d dreamed.

🌈✨The Dream✨🌈

Everything I like about this device harkens back to the bygone era when manufacturers designed new tech to last, not become e-waste.

Replaceable batteries with a long battery life

The AlphaSmart3000 boasts 700 hours of battery life on three AAs.

Replacable batteries in 2023: 🤯

Instead of AAs, my AlphaSmart3000 came with a rechargeable NiMH battery pack. But I’ve never had to recharge it. The little battery bar insists it’s fully charged, even after nearly a year of typing on it (albeit intermittently).

Future-proof upload interface

The Alphasmart3000 can double as a keyboard—you can plug it in (via USB-A) and type on it.

This is also how it transfers files—it types them out on your computer.

It’s slow, but I’m impressed with the elegance of the solution. The AlphaSmart will continue to work as long as there are USB keyboards.

🤬The reality

It’s a feature; not a bug

Almost everything I could complain about is arguably a feature.

No virtual writing assistant prodding you about adverb use. No way to sync to the cloud. No ChatGPT.

Even the four-line screen is a feature—it keeps you focused on the few sentences you’re currently wrestling with.

But I have some legitimate gripes.

The keyboard is terrible

Despite appearances, the keyboard is a trying experience. The feeling of little rubber domes popping down, stuck keys: it’s brutal.

LazyDog—a tilde.club member and AlphaSmart enthusiast—created a mechanical keyboard mod kit for the AlphaSmart3000. But I’m hesitant to put in that kind of time.

I miss Vim 😩

The shortcuts and macros for the AlphaSmart would be familiar to anyone who remembers Microsoft Word. But, as a Vim user, my brain is totally broken.

I’ll be the first one to admit: this one is petty.

😭Why I never use it

Whenever I fantasize about how to improve this device, I realize I’m building an eink laptop.

When I’m writing: I want to use Vim. I want to render Markdown and see how it looks in a browser. I want to look up bookmarked references.

I thought I wanted distraction-free writing, but what I actually want is for computers to be better.

In 2012, I was among the first in line to buy a Raspberry Pi. In 2016, I shelled out for the PocketC.H.I.P. And now I’m gearing up for my MNT Pocket Reform. It’d be easy to say: I’m a sucker for open hardware (and that’s true). But I’d also say: I hate the existing hardware hegemony.

I’m ready for what’s next: where is my eink laptop already?

By Richard Nevell, Programme Manager for Wikimedia UK

VocalEyes plays a vital role in making arts and heritage accessible for blind and visually impaired, D/deaf, hard of hearing, and neurodivergent visitors. They do this in a range of ways, including training and collaborating directly with arts and heritage organisations. They also conduct research on how various sectors are making their venues accessible.

In 2022, VocalEyes undertook ‘Heritage Access 2022’ – a survey of what information museums and heritage organisations share about accessibility on their websites. Before you visit a place, it is important to know if there are facilities such as accessible toilets, or braille displays. More than 60 volunteers were involved in collecting information about 2,258 sites across the UK. You can explore the results on the VocalEyes website.

VocalEyes invited Wikimedia UK to participate in the project, specifically to help share the data. Both organisations felt that this could be a valuable addition to Wikidata, the open source database attached to Wikipedia which helps keep its content updated. It was not only an opportunity to share accessibility information, but also to explore how Wikidata and the Wikimedia projects present this information.

Sharing the data

Putting accessibility information on Wikidata has a few benefits. Firstly, it presents the information in structured, machine-readable form so that search engines can pick it up. Secondly, once this information is in Wikidata, it can be circulated around its sister projects. For example, we are discussing with the Welsh Wicipedia whether they can adapt their infoboxes that appear in Wikipedia articles to include information about accessibility. And thirdly, because Wikidata has other information you can run custom queries to explore the data further.

Our first step was to work out what information to share. Because the VocalEyes dataset was based on information from organisations’ websites it is possible that the sites may be out-of-date or not include accessibility information. We decided to include positive information, e.g. this place has blue badge parking. This meant we were sharing positive characteristics and didn’t penalise organisations who may have had accessible facilities but didn’t advertise it.

We also needed to work out what information Wikdiata could handle. VocalEyes collected lots of information relating to things such as noisy environments, lighting levels, audio guides, and floor surfaces. Some of the difficulties here are that if you are sharing information about some of these things that will vary around a site. Parts of a site may be wheelchair accessible, but not all of it. While you can add qualifiers to information in Wikidata to add nuance, when that information is reshared outside of Wikimedia sites the nuance is often stripped away. So we needed to make sure we presented straightforward information so that if it was reused it is less likely to be misrepresented.

Ultimately, we decided to share information relating to:

• Blue badge parking on-site
• The presence of accessible toilets
• The presence of Changing Places toilets

Once we had worked out what to share, then we needed to map the information onto Wikidata.

Important progress, with more to learn

As we began matching the museums and heritage sites in the VocalEyes dataset to Wikidata, it became clear that some places didn’t have an entry yet. Of the 2,258 sites, 107 didn’t have an entry in Wikidata, and more didn’t have Wikipedia pages. For these new entries, we were able to add locations and website links – useful for anyone who may want to write a Wikipedia article and is looking for somewhere to start.

What stood out most is how little information Wikidata, and by extension Wikipedia, has about accessibility. For museums and heritage sites in the UK we were essentially starting with a blank slate.

In Wikidata there was no entry about accessible/blue badge holder parking or Changing Places toilets. While there was an entry about accessible toilets, only three places in the UK had information about these facilities (two train stations and a hospital). By adding this information we have established a framework for future information sharing. The links below allow you to explore the data on a map:

• Map of sites with accessible toilets
• Map of sites with accessible/blue badge parking
• Map of sites with Changing Places toilets

While Changing Places and Blue Badge schemes are UK specific, it is worth noting that an accessible toilet is a broader idea and that the lack of information is not UK specific. The map of places with accessible toilets is now mostly about the UK, because of the data from VocalEyes.

It is also an opportunity to reflect on what other information Wikidata could host relating to accessibility. While there is some provision for information about physical accessibility, especially relating to wheelchair accessibility, there doesn’t seem to be an infrastructure for expressing what is available to support people who are neurodiverse. This approach can be used for other places, such as public transport, libraries, and hospitals. 

We are grateful to VocalEyes for involving Wikimedia UK in this work, and we strongly support the sharing of this information. We hope that this can lead to more people sharing information around accessibility.

The post VocalEyes and Wikidata: Making accessibility information easily available appeared first on WMUK.

Professor Yajun Mo’s course at Boston College delves into the changes in Chinese women’s lives through a period of profound change on the Chinese mainland: from the mid-19th century to the present. Yik Tung Tsui, a junior from Hong Kong majoring in history and mathematics, was one student in the course last year. He was shocked to learn that he and his peers would be writing Wikipedia articles as an assignment. Knowing his writing would be accessible to anyone on the internet made him nervous, but it was also a strong motivator.

“I feel that I have a responsibility to try my best to produce a comprehensible and precise piece of information about my topic so that I would not mislead anyone into receiving false information,” Yik Tung shares.

He chose to improve the article about mainland China’s one-child policy.

“One child policy in China was especially intriguing to me because the policy did not take effect in Hong Kong, but it left a footprint on the families of many of my peers and friends from mainland China,” Yik Tung says. “They had experienced the effect of the policy, and most of them are the only child in the family. Therefore, one-child policy is a very unfamiliar topic to me that drives my curiosity, and I wish to contribute to the English readers by incorporating information I extracted from some resources and materials that are in Chinese.”

Yik Tung made several improvements, including contextualizing the policy against the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, the international political landscape, newly developing social science fields within China at the time, the role of natural scientists in making policy decisions, and government restrictions on pursuing population-related scientific research. He also added information about the public’s response to the policies.

“I wish to add some more complexity to the reasoning behind the implementation of the one-child policy. The economic necessity to decrease new births in China was the most cited reason that people relied upon to justify the policy. But different perspectives also argue against this reason, and some scholars outside China offered their different views towards the policy. I hoped to include these realizations in the Wikipedia article. Evidence exists from arguments in support of and contrary to the necessity to limit childbirth. Therefore, I want to highlight the fact that the one-child policy is never a simple topic that can be accounted for by the very few words and information on Wikipedia. I hope my edits in the article will help readers to further understand the topic, and other knowledgeable people could also step in to improve the article as well.”

The beauty of writing for Wikipedia is that it allows for the very interdisciplinary approach Yik Tung took in representing one topic. Students can take the project in many directions, learning to look for gaps in the existing information about the topic and seek answers in peer-reviewed sources to fill them. As a multilingual student, Yik Tung brought the invaluable ability to draw from an even greater diversity of sources.

“Since I can also read Chinese, I have the chance to read the Chinese version of the one-child policy Wikipedia article. The article appears in much less in length, shows a different piece of information, and cites different sources. One example is that the Chinese version of the article was able to track the Chinese top leader’s decisions regarding the one-child policy during the period as such information was more approachable to Chinese scholars and sources. Such drastic differences between the information from different versions of the article remind me of the importance of perspectives. In this case, language is the main driver of the difference in perspectives.”

Yik Tung was able to help build the bridge between these different language versions, providing value on both sides. And he gained some important skills through the process.

“This Wikipedia assignment helped me to write articles in an informative and concise style. In my other academic works such as history essays, I always have an impulse to use flowery language, which sometimes sacrifices my ability to articulate my statement as I spent more time using complex words and phrases. I realize that precision in formulating and conveying ideas is more important. The writing process also forces me to constantly check my citations and avoid plagiarism. With numerous pieces of information at hand, it is very easy to plagiarize someone else’s work without knowing so. As a result, I spent more time making sure that I am citing and giving credit to others appropriately. Despite the huge amount of time I spent on this, I believe it is meaningful in the way that I now have a good habit of checking for plagiarism.”

Since he improved content, the article has been read more than 466K times by Wikipedia readers. And there was a noticeable upturn in readership this January when China announced its first population decline since the 1960s. Inadvertently, Yik Tung took part in this conversation by providing well-sourced context on one of the most trusted sources of online information out there.

Inviting students to write for Wikipedia as an assignment can provide great value to both the site and the classroom. Students make the assignment their own, finding inspiration in their topic and contributing to the encyclopedia in ways that draw upon their identities, areas of study, and personal interests. To learn more about incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course of any discipline, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Africawide – The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, is today launching the inaugural Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards. Coinciding with the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day, this year’s awards celebrate the contributions of journalists in Africa who prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion in their reporting.

The awards recognise the essential role journalists play in creating well-researched articles that volunteer editors use as source materials to develop content on Wikipedia. Journalism that highlights diverse experiences helps to grow the knowledge base on one of the world’s most visited websites, so that it is more reflective of the topics, events and people that influence the understanding of culture and history through the ages. 

This year’s awards will invite submissions for articles written by African journalists that help to close knowledge gaps on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. Only 2.5% of geotagged content on Wikipedia covers Africa. In addition, only 15% of articles on Wikipedia are about Africa. This issue reflects knowledge gaps in the wider media ecosystem; new information can only be added to Wikipedia by volunteer editors if it is supported by a citation from a published, reliable source.

“Journalists play a vital role in increasing equity on Wikipedia, ensuring that the world’s knowledge is not limited to the perspectives and experiences of a select few. Through Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards we want to celebrate these efforts, shining a light on reporting that helps to close knowledge gaps and uncovers more of Africa’s rich history and culture,” said Anusha Alikhan, Wikimedia Foundation Vice President of Communications. 

The awards capture the spirit of World Press Freedom Day, which highlights the importance of a free press as essential to amplifying diverse voices and experiences. It also aligns with one of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 goals, which seeks to increase local content in all print and electronic media to 60 percent. 

African journalists, living on the continent, are invited to self-nominate their stories for the Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards between May 3 – June 30, 2023 at wikimediafoundation.org/journalism-awards, under the following categories: 

• Arts, Culture, Heritage, and Sports
• Health, Climate Change, and Environment
• Women and Youth
• Digital and Human Rights

Articles must have been published online and in English between January 1, 2022 and June 23, 2023. For more information about the nomination criteria and awards process, please visit the website. 

Award recipients will be announced by the Wikimedia Foundation at the Africa Regional Community Conference, WikiIndaba, in November 2023. The first-place award recipient will receive USD 2,000, as well as an opportunity to attend WikiIndaba 2023 in Morocco, where they can share more about their work, and accept a trophy, and certificate of recognition. The second-place award recipient will receive USD 1,500 and a certificate of recognition. Four other outstanding nominees will receive special mentions. All awardees and their work will also be celebrated on the Wikimedia Foundation’s website and social media channels.

Ends…//

For media enquiries please contact:
Gugu Mthimkhulu
gugu@africacommunicationsgroup.com. (27) 78 117 3940

About the Wikimedia Foundation

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

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

About Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the world’s free knowledge resource. It is a collaborative creation that has been added to and edited by millions of people from around the globe since it was created in 2001: everyone can edit it, at any time. Wikipedia is offered in more than 300 languages containing a total of more than 55 million articles. It is the largest, collaborative collection of free knowledge in human history, and today its content is contributed and edited by a community of more than 280,000 volunteer editors each month.

The post Wikimedia Foundation launches Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards on World Press Freedom Day appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.

✨ This month's highlights My partner (soon-to-be spouse) and I received our business/tourism visitor visas! They’re valid for 10 years. I traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina to attend CZI’s Accelerating Open Science in Latin America meeting. We finished reviewing final applications and intern selections. This month’s report will focus mainly on the trip to Buenos Aires, as it was the most significant event of the month.

18/04/2023-24/04/2023

Mapping

• SherbetS documented the HIFLD dataset with a walkthrough on how to adjust this kind of file to match OSM tagging guidelines. HIFLD is a large corpus of public domain licensed geospatial information about infrastructure around the United States. Matt Whilden used this and the JOSM Conflation plugin to detect unmapped items.
• [1] Matt Whilden showed how to add 1500 addresses to OSM in 10 minutes using the JOSM Conflation plugin.
• Anton Khorev was happily surprised to find out that iD also worked on his mobile phone. In order to optimise the experience, he advises directly opening the respective frame (https://www.openstreetmap.org/id instead of the usual https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit?editor=id) which spares you losing space to the navigation bar.
• User publicerination wrote about replacing quantity=* tags on pitches in the San Francisco Bay area.
• The ‘Markers subject refinement’ proposal is open for comments. It proposes the introduction of a subset of marker=* with subject=* to allow a clearer indication of what a utility marker is referring to.
• The ‘Public Transport: Auditory Information’ proposal is open for voting until Tuesday 2 May. The proposal aims to establish multiple tags to gather different types of auditory information that may be provided at a public transport stop and/or platform.

Community

• Anne-Karoline Distel wrote about how the OpenStreetMap community actively responded to the idea of mapping milk churn stands (we reported earlier). In particular, the number of these objects mapped in Finland significantly increased after the collaboration of users houtari and Jyrki Kokko – Finnish milk churn stands are very much a thing [fi]►. Discussion is ongoing about creating a dedicated preset for the iD editor, to make it easier for beginners to map milk churn stands.
• In episode 177 of the Geomob Podcast we hear from the maker of ‘The Melbourne Map’. Steven Feldman interviewed self-proclaimed ‘accidental map maker’ Melinda Clarke.
• Growebis is looking for help in mapping buildings in Montreal.

Maps

• Knooppuntnet is an OSM-based website that documents the node networks that are common in the Netherlands and Belgium (routes for walking, cycling, horse riding and more). Check out the homepage or have a look at the demo.

Open Data

• OpenStreetMap US shared its insights on the way ahead to benefit from Public Domain and OSM data, taking into account the different licences that apply to them.

Software

• Starting with version 3.7, GDAL’s OpenStreetMap XML and PBF formats driver has a new setting to format ‘all_tags’ and ‘other_tags’ as JSON instead of hstore. In particular, users of ogr2ogr that redistribute OpenStreetMap can enable the feature, so that the recipients of the data do not need to depend on PostgreSQL or GDAL to parse the column.
• Stefan Keller [recommended>>>, a kind of ‘Street View’ for cyclists! It is open source and uses OSM data.

Programming

• Recently darkonus decided to experiment with GPT-4, a state-of-the-art language model by OpenAI, to see if it is possible to come up with a fresh approach to visualising the history of OSM data. They shared their initial attempts, examples of the traditional OSM Deep History table, and the new visualisation created with GPT-4’s assistance.
• taginfo is a long-standing OSM project that analyses OpenStreetMap tags. The developer Jochen Topf has modernised the website’s JavaScript and CSS to improve its performance and compatibility with modern web technologies. While the site’s appearance and functionality remain largely unchanged, the update paves the way for better support on smaller screens, such as mobile phones. Despite some minor issues introduced during the update, Jochen is satisfied with the current state of the website and plans to focus on content improvements in future iterations.

Did you know …

• … Notes Map ? It tries to guess what an OSM map note is about by using keywords and hashtags. To load notes, zoom in, click on Notes dazu Laden.
• … the OSM Wikidata matcher, which was recently presented by developer Edward Betts at the FOSS-North 2023 conference?
• … there is a modified version of StreetComplete called SCEE? It is aimed at experienced OSM contributors who desire advanced editing capabilities in StreetComplete and is available on F-Droid.

Other “geo” things

• Swisstopo announced ► that they will be producing a series of SoundCloud podcasts ( only). The first episode covers the development of the cartography of glaciers, lakes, and other water and wetland features. The second episode deals with the stages of the digitalisation of the main topographic maps series.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Brest	#Rendez-vousInfini – Cartes personnalisés		2023-04-28
Érd	Érdi Piknik 2023		2023-04-28 – 2023-04-30
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)		2023-04-29
Localidad Teusaquillo	Junta Bimensual OSM LATAM – Abril	April		2023-04-29
	Weekly Mapathon Contest 2023		2023-04-29
	MapRoulette Monthly Community Meeting		2023-05-02
	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2023-05-02
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #47		2023-05-02
	Formação UN Mappers: OpenStreetMap e o mapeamento humanitário – sessão 7		2023-05-03
Roma	Incontro dei mappatori romani e laziali		2023-05-03
	SotM Asia 2023 Meeting Kickoff		2023-05-06
Localidad La Candelaria	Taller: Introducción a OpenStreetMap como parte del Flisol		2023-05-06
Localidad La Candelaria	Ponencia: OpenStreetMap, datos de vida		2023-05-06
London	OSMLondon pub meet-up		2023-05-09
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-05-10
	Formação UN Mappers: OpenStreetMap e o mapeamento humanitário – sessão 8		2023-05-10
Hannover	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2023-05-10
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2023-05-11
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2023-05-10
	“Open- und OpenStreetMap-Daten in Blaulichtorganisationen” (Schweiz)		2023-05-11
Zürich	OSM-Stammtisch		2023-05-11
Verona	MERGE-it		2023-05-12 – 2023-05-13
Sülysáp	Mapping around Sülysáp before, after and during breaks of qbParty (demoscene)		2023-05-13 – 2023-05-14
Nanterre	Paris Hack Weekend		2023-05-13 – 2023-05-14
Puerto López	Notas OSM: Discutamos hashtags para incluir en las notas de OpenStreetMap		2023-05-13

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 LuxuryCoop, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SomeoneElse, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, darkonus, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.