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

Recent changes

• There is a new user preference for “Always enable safe mode“. This setting will make pages load without including any on-wiki JavaScript or on-wiki stylesheet pages. It can be useful for debugging broken JavaScript gadgets. [1]
• Gadget definitions now have a new “contentModels” option. The option takes a list of page content models, like wikitext or css. Gadgets that use this option will only load on pages with the given content models.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 3 October. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 4 October. It will be on all wikis from 5 October (calendar).

Future changes

• The Vector 2022 skin will no longer use the custom styles and scripts of Vector legacy (2010). The change will be made later this year or in early 2024. See how to adjust the CSS and JS pages on your wiki. [2]

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

This post is part of a series of Safety and Advocacy posts by the Community Resilience and Sustainability team. This post was authored by staff from the Trust and Safety Disinformation team, whose training module on disinformation you can find on learn.wiki. 

Introduction and Definition

Building the largest online encyclopaedia and filling it with notable information from the world’s knowledge is a massive undertaking. For over two decades, contributors have curated content, created and shaped policies, and crafted the world’s knowledge in an accessible format for readers. 

More recently, disinformation is a growing problem around the world, and Wikimedia projects are not immune to disinformation campaigns. So what is disinformation? Why is disinformation different on Wikimedia projects? And what can Wikipedia editors do to tackle this problem?

First things first, let’s define our terms (as with many buzzwords, the term itself can be incredibly difficult to define clearly). Although many different definitions exist, the most common ones contain three key elements:  

• Disinformation contains false or misleading information. 
• Disinformation is shared with the intent to deceive. 
• Disinformation has the potential to harm readers. 

Without any of these three key elements, the information shared cannot be defined as disinformation, but it may still be a form of information disorder, such as misinformation or malinformation. Misinformation is false or misleading information, but it is shared without the intent to deceive. Malinformation may be shared out of context, but the information itself may be correct. Doxxing is a form of malinformation (which you can read more about and suggestions of how to protect yourself on Diff). 

Disinformation is different here

Disinformation as an academic discipline emerged in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 US Presidential Election. However, it is important to note that it is not a new phenomenon. Misleading information campaigns have been used as part of pandemics, wars, and elections for centuries. And where disinformation reigns, anti-disinformation work begins. This work, too, has taken place for many a year. Take, for example, the case of Thomas Browne, author of the 1646 treatise Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into very many received tenents and commonly presumed truths. Browne sought to refute some of the false and misleading claims which made their way into everyday life.

But this does not mean that all anti-disinformation work looks alike. The Wikimedia ecosystem retains a number of factors which make anti-disinformation work unique. These include:

Community – there is a vested interest in the Wikimedia movement to stop disinformation from manifesting on our projects.

Platform – rather than thousands of opinions on a single topic, Wikipedia aims to achieve community consensus based on the best verifiable sources on one page per topic.

Methods – rather than using technology, like bot accounts, disinformation spreaders are forced to engage with wiki bureaucracy in order to maintain their misleading content.

Guidelines – verifiability, neutral point of view (NPOV) and no original research.

In short, disinformation works differently in the Wikimedia ecosystem than it does elsewhere, such as on social media. As a result, our solutions to the problems that disinformation brings need to be tailored to our specific needs. So what do we do to challenge disinformation threats, and how can we do it better?

The Wikimedia Model for Challenging Disinformation

Local Administrators

The first port of call for challenging disinformation should be the administrators of your local project. They are best placed to understand the context and history of the pages under threat, and can best direct community resources to resolve content issues. 

Wiki Initiatives

There are a range of different initiatives across the movement which deal with disinformation in one way or another, including: WikiCred, a project aimed at training media professionals how to use Wikipedia; the Knowledge Integrity Risk Observatory; and various projects led by the Foundation’s Moderator Tools team. The Foundation’s Global Advocacy team is working on a map of some of these initiatives, to which you can contribute. 

Trust and Safety Disinformation Team

Should the issue include serious behavioural issues which local administrators are unable to resolve, the Wikimedia Foundation has a Trust and Safety Disinformation team. This team is available to help with a range of issues:

• In cases which involve serious threats of harm, they can be contacted via emergency@wikimedia.org;
• In cases that cannot be adjudicated by local community mechanisms, they can be reached via ca@wikimedia.org;
• The Wikimedia Foundation’s Trust and Safety Disinformation team also runs the Disinformation Response Taskforce (DRT) around elections at high risk of disinformation attacks. In cases where the community is concerned about disinformation efforts connected to prominent elections or geopolitical events, they can be contacted via drt@wikimedia.org.

Ahead of a bumper year of elections in 2024, the Trust and Safety Disinformation team has begun preparing for several Disinformation Response Taskforces (DRTs), designed to support Wikimedia communities to maintain knowledge integrity during high-risk events.

The Trust and Safety Disinformation team has also recently published a training module about anti-disinformation work, which you can find on learn.wiki. If you would like to establish your own personal toolkit for challenging disinformation in your wiki community, please check it out! 

Members of the Disinformation team will be available during the next Community Resilience and Sustainability Conversation Hour in November. Join, ask your questions, and learn more.

You should never have more than a day’s work sitting unintegrated in your local repository

– Martin Fowler, Branching Patterns

In interviews, I throw out a gimme: “Can you explain continuous integration?”

Folks tend to ignore the easy answer: Continuous integration is when folks merge code to main as soon as it’s healthy—often a couple of times a day.

Some code review systems afford continuous integration.

But GitHub doesn’t. Instead, pull requests afford integration pain.

🐘 Feature branches encourage big diffs

Code review decision fatigue is real—big changes make for slow reviews.¹

Imagine a feature branch with a three commits:

• Refactor some code
• Add a model class
• Add a database migration

Push that branch as a pull request and you get this:

But this is an anti-pattern—you’ve created a monster pull request that some poor sap has to wade through.

Compare the same local branch pushed up as a stack of three reviews:

Now, each commit gets reviewed on its own. And that makes each review small.

The small delta means less code for the reviewer to understand, making each change easier to review and faster to merge.

😖 Feature branches create integration pain

It’s common for two developers to create conflicting code changes.

Feature branches make integration painful by hiding conflicts until merge time:

Continuous integration makes it easier to catch the same situation earlier:

Now, instead of waiting until their feature is complete, developers push and resolve their conflicts along the way.

Less painful integration means you’ll do it more and move faster.

Overview

When the Movement Strategy recommendations came out, it advocated for Investing in skills and leadership development “to intentionally make our Movement more distributed and sustainable”. Our commitment to decentralisation and empowerment of volunteers is our DNA and one of the reasons for the Wikimedia Movement’s success and resilience. Yet, there still is room for improvement. To create ideas on how to empower contributors to make a difference, the Community Development team assembled a Leadership Development Working Group (LDWG) – that’s us! We came together in June 2022 as a group of globally distributed volunteers from all sorts of backgrounds within and outside the movement. 

Our mandate was to come up with strategies to foster leadership in the Wikimedia Movement. But how does one go about that? After all, to many, the idea of “leader” and “leadership” sounded like a few people deciding what their subordinates are supposed to do – the opposite of what Wikimedia is about. It was clear to us that the first thing to do was to elaborate on what shape leadership needs to take to suit our Movement. 

• We first set out to come up with a shared definition of leadership that encompasses our grassroots spirit. 
• Building on that foundation, we drafted a Leadership Development Plan tailored to the special needs of the Wikimedia Movement. 
• In the remaining time of our one-year tenure, we started implementing parts of the plan in several small- to medium-scale projects and initiatives.

Amplifying our work at Wikimania

Most of what we accomplished was to establish a vocabulary of concepts (the definition) and a directory of tools (the development plan) to make it easier for Wikimedia members to progress on their leadership journey. Consequently, our work critically depends, even more so than other projects, on Wikimedians being aware of what we did so that they can use it. Wikimania 2023 in Singapore was our time to shine – and we took full advantage of that! 

• We collaborated with Let’s Connect to co-organise and co-facilitate a series of Learning Clinics on-site. These learning clinics were non-recorded spaces for people to acquire useful leadership skills through practical workshop-style sessions. We identified the following three scenarios for these Learning Clinics:
  • Networking for introverts – how to make the most of this conference
  • Communication skills for collaborative leadership
  • How not to lose a volunteer after the first edit: volunteer retention strategies
• We hosted an interactive session to announce the formation of a Leadership Development Network and identify ways in which the Leadership Development Plan could be used by communities and individuals. It was an engaging session where we were able to recognize how diverse community needs and experiences actually are, and strengthen our resolve to work in a distributed and coordinated manner to implement the resources in the leadership development plan.  
• Finally, we co-facilitated a Connectathon with Let’s Connect. It was an open, lighthearted, and safe space for participants to share common interests, skills, get to know one another and build trust. The LDP states that effective leaders, whether they be individuals or groups, bring people together for a common mission. This is the spirit of human connection we wanted to express through this session.

What working together taught us about leadership

As many working groups before us, we faced – and eventually dealt with – the occasional lack of motivation, disagreement over the content, lengthy discussions about priorities and the choice of process to get them done. Managing issues like these is at the heart of leadership, so observing and reflecting on how we worked together had a special place in our group. We elaborated on some of these topics extensively in our Leadership Development Plan, but based on what we learned while we were writing it, we would like to share three pieces of advice that helped us a lot:

1. Be open about your abilities and needs, especially availability and energy levels. There is no point in keeping up appearances here – we are all volunteers, no one knows everything or is available 24/7. You do yourself and your team a favor when you are transparent about these things.
2. Make consent-building a habit. No matter how you choose to work on a project, in the end, all of your names will be on it. Reaching alignment on what to do and publish is often hard but you can make the process a whole lot easier when it becomes habitual. We, for instance, adopted Sociocracy-based consent-building processes after a couple of us attended a workshop on the topic.
3. Be a community – get to know your colleagues. You, as a team, will be much stronger when you can truly appreciate the personalities and stories your fellow Wikimedians have to share. There are really interesting people around here!

What’s next?

We envision a vibrant and collaborative network where individuals from across the Wikimedia community will unite to foster leadership growth. During Wikimania Singapore, we kickstarted the Leadership Development Network. This initiative aims to create a dynamic space where people can freely exchange ideas, share their challenges and showcase their leadership projects within the Wikimedia ecosystem. This network will facilitate the transition from the Leadership Development Working Group drafting concepts into a more decentralised, distributed and flexible working space that puts leadership development into practice. By nurturing this supportive environment, we hope to encourage both seasoned contributors and newbies to innovate and drive sustainable change within Wikimedia. We welcome all individuals who are interested in working on leadership development in your projects, communities and regions to join the Leadership Development Network. You can already do so now by following this link to our semi-formal telegram group. We’d love to hear from you soon!

In a world where knowledge is power, access to information should be a universal right, unhindered by gender, identity, or geography. It is with this unwavering belief in mind that we proudly unveil the logo that encapsulates the spirit of WikiWomenCamp 2023.

The logo was unveiled during the excitement of Wikimania 2023 where everyone came together to celebrate the free knowledge mission.

This symbol, meticulously crafted with the emotional intent of our collective mission, serves as a beacon of hope and unity, guiding us as we navigate the seas of diversity within the free knowledge movement. As we embark on this journey to bridge gender gaps, we invite you to join us in unlocking the true potential of a world where everyone can contribute and access the sum of human knowledge.

The Journey

The journey of ideating and creating the WikiWomenCamp 2023 logo was a thoughtful and deliberate process. The WikiWomenCamp team  worked closely with the Wikimedia Foundation Brand team and poured their hearts and minds into its creation, engaging in extensive discussions about the myriad concepts and symbols associated with women-centric movements. 

After much contemplation, we embraced a design philosophy that favored simplicity and depth. The result is the logo that now stands before you, a visual embodiment of our commitment to inclusivity and unity. 

At its core, the logo revolves around the idea of circles, inclusivity, and mandalas, representing the unbroken bonds that tie us all together. It signifies not only the strength of individual identities but also the interconnectedness that empowers us when we stand together. 

Here’s how these concepts intersect with the empowerment and identity of women:

Circles

Circles often symbolize unity and the idea of coming together. In the context of women, circles represent the power of community and support. 

Women have a long history of gathering in circles to share stories, wisdom, and experiences. These circles depict safe spaces where women can discuss topics that matter to them, offer guidance, and provide emotional support.

Circles empower women by fostering a sense of belonging and sisterhood. They encourage open dialogue, enabling women to exchange ideas, challenge norms, and collectively work towards positive change. 

Circles also showcase the idea that every voice matters, reflecting the strength that arises when women come together to inspire, uplift, and advocate for each other in a single space.

Inclusivity

Inclusivity encompasses the rich tapestry of experiences, backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives that women bring to the table. 

Women are not a monolithic group; they come from various ethnicities, races, religions, socio-economic backgrounds, sexual orientations, and abilities. Recognizing and celebrating this diversity is essential to acknowledging the complexity of women’s lives and identities.

Embracing inclusivity and diversity empowers women by acknowledging and valuing their unique journeys. It challenges stereotypes and fosters a broader understanding of the struggles and triumphs that women experience. 

When diverse women come together, they contribute a wealth of perspectives, ideas, and solutions that drive progress and create a more inclusive society.

Mandalas

Mandalas are intricate, uniformed designs that often represent wholeness, balance, and unity. They are used in various cultures as a tool for meditation, self-discovery, and spiritual growth. 

Mandalas are a visual representation of the interconnectedness of all things and the journey towards inner harmony.

They can serve as a metaphor for the complexity and depth of women’s lives. Just as a mandala’s patterns interconnect to create a complete design, women’s experiences, roles, and identities intersect to shape their multifaceted lives. 

Creating or reflecting on mandalas can provide women with a means to explore their inner selves, celebrate their unique journeys, and find balance in a world full of demands and expectations.

Usability

The WikiWomen logo is a unifying symbol, bringing together all activities and initiatives for and by WikiWomen. It signifies our collective commitment to gender equity and knowledge sharing within the Wikimedia movement. 

It encourages collaboration, connects like-minded individuals, and provides a consistent identity for our efforts. 

In essence, it’s a powerful emblem that unites us in our mission to make a positive impact on the Wikimedia ecosystem. 

WikiWomen Summit Logo

Logo & Designer for the WikiWomenCamp 2023

We would also like to introduce the remarkable designer of the WikiWomenCamp, User:Kurmanbek, a creative visionary who has beautifully captured not only the vibrant festivities and colors of India but has also ingeniously incorporated this central design into the broader WikiWomen initiatives.

The logo is an extended design of the central WikiWomen logo for the upcoming WikiWomenCamp in India.

Endnote

In all, the logo embodies the spirit of our global community, which is united by its shared commitment to addressing gender gaps in the free knowledge movement. 

It started as a simple design, lines and colors coming together with purpose. But as it evolved, it took on a life of its own. It became more than just an emblem; it became a representation of a global movement—a movement of empowerment, knowledge, and equity. 

These concepts remind us that women are not only individuals with their own stories but also part of a collective journey towards empowerment, understanding, and positive change. 

No matter where you are, when you see this logo, you know you are in the company of Wiki Women—a global network of individuals who believe in the power of information, the strength of unity, and the beauty of diversity.

At WikiWomenCamp 2023, we will come together to build relationships, learn from each other, and support each other’s work.

What do Messi, the city of Gerli and the Lepidobatrachus species have in common? Wikipedia.

This story is part of a series of minimal stories created by Wikimedists, these are not large projects but rather anecdotes found in the work of editing or transiting this open movement. As a paleontologist and part of the Wikimedistas del Museo de La Plata I found in Wikipedia an ideal space to make visible the work and scientific work that paleontologists carry out daily.

Going through this profession I realized that science can use atypical resources to be visible or that in Argentina, most paleontologists are soccer fans. That football passion was further enhanced by the end of 2022 when Argentina won the Men’s Football World Cup. 

So I’m going to tell you this love story between paleontology and football.

In May 2023, two scientific articles were published creating three fossil species whose names pay homage to Emiliano Dibu Martínez, goalkeeper of the Men’s Soccer Team winner of the Qatar 2022 World Cup, to Lionel Messi, for being one of the best soccer players in the world (I would say, the best in the entire history of this honorable sport but I would need a proper reference for this statement to stand) and to Club El Porvenir, based in the city of Gerli, between the neighborhood of Lanús and Avellaneda (something administratively impossible in Argentina).

Paleontologists Guillermo Turazzini and Raúl Gómez published a work about the discovery of a fossil specimen, which they called with its generic name (pre-existing) and the addition of a specific epithet “dibumartínez”. The species, Lepidobatrachus dibumartínez, pays tribute to Dibu, for his role in winning the world championship and for bringing that joy to our country.

The species is very well preserved and, something quite unusual in this type of fossils, many of its bones are articulated (that is, in relative positions similar to those they had in life). Guillermo gave in to the  Wikimedistas del Museo de La Plata the photos of the discovery to illustrate the article and it didn’t take us long to upload those to Commons. We also added a reference in the tributes to Dibu article in Spanish-language Wikipedia.

Our peer Damián Pérez, from CENPAT, discovered and published in Ameghiniana two new species of brachiopods of the genus Discinisca. One of them, named Discinisca messi, pays tribute to Lionel Messi. We wrote an article and left a few lines in the football icon’s Wikipedia article, in the section social impact. The other species, Discinisca porvenir, is named after Club El Porvenir, of which Damián is a fan. El Porve (as the club is affectionately named by its fans) is in Primera Nacional B of Argentine soccer and is based in the City of Gerli, cut in the middle by the boundary between the districts of Lanús and Avellaneda (I found out by reading the Wikipedia article).

Since its creation, the page of the species Discinisca messi was visited 13 times more than its sister species, Discinisca porvenir. We find a similar pattern in the visits to the escuerzos: that of the Dibu has between 5 and 16 times the visits of the other escuerzos of the same genre, which are also alive, and therefore it is more expected that they will be searched in the encyclopedia (data obtained of Page Views). It is clear to us that the community reads more about paleontology if it associates these species with soccer icons. The love of soccer and paleontology come together in Argentina.

Do you want to know more about the work carried out by the Wikimedistas of the Museo de la Plata?

You can visit our social networks

Instagram

Twitter

Facebook

Meta.Wiki

Needed citations: 

Our peers works:Pérez, Damián E.; Farroni, Nicolás D.; Mosquera, Aylén Allende; Cuitiño, José I. (12 de mayo de 2023). «First Discinid Brachiopods (Brachiopoda: Lingulida) from the Cenozoic of Patagonia (Gaiman Formation, Lower Miocene, Argentina)». Ameghiniana 60 (3). doi:10.5710/AMGH.23.01.2023.3544

Turazzini, Guillermo F.; Gómez, Raúl O. (30 de mayo de 2023). «A new old Budgett frog: an articulated skeleton of an Early Pliocene Lepidobatrachus (Anura, Ceratophryidae) from western Argentina». Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology doi:10.1080/02724634.2023.2207092. 

19/09/2023-25/09/2023

Mapping

• barefootstache outlined his experience of mapping the coastal towns of Croatia.
• CharliePlett shared his experience of mapping all the landcover in Belize.
• Denrazir recounted his experience when mapping the distribution of tree species at the University of the Philippines Diliman campus.
• n8dx announced ► that the pedestrian network for the city of Paris is almost complete. In particular, it provides precise guidance for people with visual impairments. You can find ► more details in an article by SonarVision, which is developing a GPS application for adapted guidance.
• Pierre Béland has released a JOSM-style waterways mapcss to ease the process of editing waterway in JOSM.
• M!dgard has written a proposal on refining access restrictions.

Mapping campaigns

• Charmyne Mamador shared her experiences when participating in the ‘MapaTalks‘ at De La Salle University, ‘Make the Map Ausome‘ at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, and in the US-ASEAN Science, Technology, and Innovation Cooperation (US-ASEAN STIC) Conference’s Pitch Competition in Jakarta.

Community

• Ponciano da Costa de Jesus reported on the activities of the Timor Leste G-SIG during July to September 2023.
• Udayana RS and GIS blogged about their OpenStreetMap workshops held at Udayana University, Denpasar, Indonesia.
• Andrii Holovin has reworked the website Welcome Mat. It now has features like internationalisation support and dark/light modes. These features were built using Material for MkDocs. Andrii invites everyone to help and improve the resource.
• Even on GNU/Linux in Switzerland, people are making ► fun of Google’s ‘Road Mapper’ project and find it immoral that the richest corporation in the world is looking for volunteers to work for free. Instead, GNU/Linux.ch recommends getting involved with OpenStreetMap. In summary, the article has well written arguments and visual examples.

Events

• Asif Bin Alam Seum reflected on this year’s activities of YouthMappers at SUST, Bangladesh.

Education

• Just van den Broecke published documentation from the workshop ‘OpenStreetMap, smart mapping with Apps’, held in the city of Middelburg, Netherlands.

Maps

• [1] The new map style ‘Tracestrack Topo’ is now available on OpenStreetMap’s website.
• The German Federal Office of Cartography and Geodesy announced that they have updated ► the data for the TopPlusOpen presentation graphics. Further on Mastodon, the Office tooted that the map is based on official geodata and OpenStreetMap data.
• Jochen Topf has built an OpenStreetMap-based vector map tile prototype that updates every minute.
• According to netzpolitik.org, Amnesty International has criticised ► the restriction of freedom of assembly in Germany. On an OSM-based interactive ‘Protest Map‘ you can view the respective violations worldwide.

Open Data

• Yandex has released ► a Russian-language dataset of reviews of organisations that were published on Yandex Maps.

Licences

• Christoph Hormann commented on the licence issue arising from adding the new map style ‘Tracestrack Topo’ to OpenStreetMap’s website.

Software

• Junzhen published their Google Summer of Code 2023 project’s final report on incorporating a landmark-based navigation system into the Valhalla routing engine.
• Tracestrack has released the ‘OpenStreetMap Localisation Tool‘, a web application to make it easier to translate place names on OpenStreetMap.
• kadi4 announced the release of ‘OsmoTagger’, an OpenStreetMap editor for the iOS platform.

Programming

• whammo has released a VS Code extension that highlights MapCSS syntax. It will improve code readability for .mapcss and JOSM validator files, and is available directly from the VS Code Marketplace.

Releases

• Organic Maps version 2023.09.22-27-android has been released. This version comes with improvements to the voice-based navigation feature.

Did you know …

• … that you can quickly draw complex curved lines in iD by pressing the space bar and just moving the mouse? There is a FastDraw plugin for the same feature in JOSM.
• … of the public bookcases map, where you can find public bookcases that allow you to add and/or take out books for free?

OSM in the media

• Australia’s ABC News reported on the crosswalk wait timer app created by Jake Coppinger.

Other “geo” things

• GeoParquet released version 1.0.0. It is a geospatial data storage format, which is based on Apache Parquet.
• Claire Giodarno, on the Path To Citus Con podcast, interviewed Paul Ramsey and Regina Obe, who are members of the PostGIS extension development team.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend September 2023		2023-09-30 – 2023-10-01
Portland	A Synesthete’s Atlas + Some 3d Color/Light/Motion Experiments		2023-10-02
Curitiba	State of the Map Brasil 2023		2023-10-02 – 2023-10-04
Budapest	Picnic in Csörsz park to meet your local mappers		2023-10-02
Gorham	A Synesthete’s Atlas: Performing Cartography		2023-10-03
	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2023-10-03
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #52	✓	2023-10-03
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2023-10-04
	MapRVA Happy Hour		2023-10-05
Santa Maria Maior	Geomob Lisbon		2023-10-04
Bengaluru	OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party		2023-10-07
Philadelphia	Bobby Zankel’s Wonderful Sound, Upholstery & Veronica Mercedes Jurkiewicz/Carlos Santiago/Matt Engle/Eric Theise : A Benefit for Fire Museum Presents		2023-10-08
City Of Gosnells	Social mapping Sunday: Beckenham		2023-10-08
København	OSMmapperCPH		2023-10-08
Washington	A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations Between Eric Theise, Jim Ryan, and Darien Baiza / Tangent Universes		2023-10-09
Chambéry	Mapathon débutant saison 23/24 CartONG		2023-10-09
	Osm2pgsql Virtual Meetup		2023-10-10
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-10-11
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2023-10-10
Abuja	State of the Map Nigeria 2023		2023-10-11 – 2023-10-14	ng
Zürich	OSM-Stammtisch		2023-10-11
Lorain County	OpenStreetMap Midwest Meetup	✓	2023-10-12
Hannover	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2023-10-12
Berlin	OSM Hackweekend Berlin 10/2023		2023-10-14 – 2023-10-15
Henrietta Township	Journey to the Centers of Michigan		2023-10-14

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

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

Wikimedia projects are a result of successful collaboration of contributors towards shared objectives. Certainly not everything goes smoothly in this community. Because we are a large group of humans working together, sometimes challenges arise and difficult decisions must be made. Decisions are not made by one governing body, but rather by various committees focusing on certain topics, issues, or resources.

Volunteer committee members often need support to carry out their work. The support comes in a number of ways, including peer support and support from the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation recently added a Committee Support team within Community Resilience and Sustainability to support volunteer committees. A fun fact: all of the staff on that team came from the community! The Committee Support team works to ensure governance committees are able to succeed in their duties and volunteers on committees are able to grow in their commitment to the community and Wikimedia projects.

Committees can be traced back to the early formation of the Wikimedia projects. Since that time, committees have grown and expanded to support the vast community of contributors with various important roles. Who are these committees and what do they do? I asked long-time community member and now Vice President of Community Resilience and Sustainability, Maggie Dennis, to share some insights about this post’s featured committee, the Case Review Committee (CRC).

How did community committees get started?

Maggie Dennis: When humans first gathered in groups beyond families, they realized that they could work better if they created clusters, and, lo, the first committees were born. From time beyond memory, we have come together in committees to get things done, creating first oral and then written bylaws, taking minutes, making charters. The Wikimedia Movement, too, embraced this universal human trend, with individual communities creating committees and working groups around many facets of the wikiverse. The Meta-wiki page on committees was launched in 2004 with nomination for leadership of a variety of committees to do Wikimedia work, ranging from finances to technical matters. It was totally A Thing. In time, that almost jovial but simultaneously sincere desire to organize and lead specialist groups to get work done evolved into fully formed committees. And in 2020, the Trust and Safety Case Review Committee emerged among them.

What is the history of the CRC in particular?

The Trust and Safety Case Review Committee (CRC) was forged from multiple streams, including conversations of Movement Strategy, but the final instigation was a call by the Foundation’s Board of Trustees. The Statement on Healthy Community Culture, Inclusivity, and Safe Spaces called for the Foundation to establish such a review committee. “Work with community functionaries to create and refine a retroactive review process for cases brought by involved parties, excluding those cases which pose legal or other severe risks,” said the Board, footnoting that “To clarify: it means that review happens post-action, and not as a precondition to taking action.” Mindful that the ongoing conversations around the Universal Code of Conduct and its subsequent Enforcement Guidelines might come up with a different practice, staff consulted with functionaries and launched the CRC as an interim approach at first. The committee was fully operational by October 2020.

What is the role of the CRC in the movement?

MD: The role of the CRC is to work in close collaboration with designated Wikimedia Foundation staff to review appeals by users directly involved in cases closed by the Foundation under its office action policy for harassment. As noted above, the CRC does not evaluate cases which the Foundation’s attorneys deem ineligible because they are legally mandatory or because they constitute strong danger to the physical safety of community members. 

A key component of the success of the movement is our movement-wide commitment to self-governance. In almost all cases, local user communities are best positioned to regulate content and regulate user behavior. This system has served the movement quite well for decades, including in the development of local policies, albeit within the framework of certain global policies, such as the Terms of Use and now the Universal Code of Conduct. As the movement has grown and globalized, the Foundation continues to work to recognize this essential and values-aligned respect for autonomy while also ensuring we meet our responsibilities as an online host. 

In practice, this means that we have evolved a policy of leaving most cases of inter-user conflict to local communities and global functionaries, like the stewards, to handle, becoming involved either on request of administrators or functionaries or when local communities lack policies and processes to handle problems. Because there is typically a certain amount of “gray area” in determining when local policies and processes are not sufficient, and because sometimes inter-user behavioral conflicts are not clear-cut, we value the availability of a body of experienced volunteers who can, on request, review these cases to ensure that Trust and Safety is working within its mandate–to protect community members from overly intrusive, overly strict, or overly lax enforcement of conduct standards by the Foundation. 

In any case brought before the committee, the CRC is asked to evaluate four things, that: a) The cases were appropriately handled by the Foundation rather than deferred to local community processes, b) The Trust and Safety team assembled sufficient evidence to assess the allegations within the parameters of respecting the safety of any confidential information, c) The Trust and Safety team correctly determined according to evidence assembled if the conduct described in the report does or does not qualify as a violation of relevant policy, and d) Sanctions issued by Trust and Safety (or choice to issue no sanction) are appropriate to the circumstances of the case.

If they disagree with any of these four statements, they may either immediately overturn a Trust and Safety decision or, in some cases, recommend to the Foundation’s General Counsel that they be overturned. (They do not, for instance, have the right to immediately issue a Foundation ban if the Trust and Safety team did not, and they cannot reverse a ban without review if that ban was assessed as necessary for the safety of other users. Such cases require final legal approval.)

Why is the CRC anonymous?

MD: After consultations with functionaries and legal review, the decision was made when the CRC was created that its members need to be anonymous during their service and for a certain term thereafter. However, there are a few staff and volunteers who know who they are. While even Trust and Safety staff do not know who participates on the CRC, the Ombuds Commission has agreed to review the final list and verify the generalized information about the group which is released on Meta-wiki. The CRC is anonymous for the members’ safety. Community governance carries with it several risks, including a risk of retaliation by people disappointed with case review outcomes (even from those who are simply informed that their case is not eligible for review, for instance, because it is criminal in nature) and a risk of pressure to expose private information, even through hostile external organizations or governments. Committee members are permitted to disclose their own involvement if and when they feel safe after they depart the committee but not to disclose who participated with them.

Why should community members be interested in what the CRC does?

MD: The CRC has not often been called into service, although individuals are informed of their right to appeal to the group when the Foundation communicates about sanctions. In fact, they’re such a quiet committee that we’ve shifted their reporting to quarterly. Historically, the bulk of appeals that are sent to them are not the kind of “borderline” or “grey area” cases they were created to review, but rather those which our lawyers have determined are essential to uphold the Foundation’s responsibility as a service provider. Nevertheless, their existence offers an important outlet for those who worry the Foundation has overstepped in their case or has acted with inadequate evidence. They also stand to support those who think the Foundation did not take serious enough action. (The bulk of Trust and Safety cases lead to no sanction, and this can obviously feel very unfair to those who request the Foundation to act.) We know that those who appeal aren’t likely to be satisfied by anything short of getting the outcome they want–and that will not always happen. However, we think it’s important to do everything we can to ensure that the system is fair, and these checks and balances help achieve that.

You can find reports from the Case Review Committee on Meta-wiki. Are you interested in joining the CRC? Read more about what some of the CRC members had to say about their work on the committee. Their answers might inspire you to join.

One member of the CRC says:

My sense of justice and knowledge of Wikimedia guidelines motivated me to participate in the Case Review Committee. Being part of the CRC allows me to learn more about the movement, the relationships between the different parts of the movement, and the user experience. I see my work as finding ways for valuable contributors to continue their work building the Wikimedia projects.

Another member says:

At first I hesitated about joining the Case Review Committee. I worried about dealing with the Wikimedia Foundation bans because of the lack of transparency in a movement which values open discourse, transparency and community autonomy. The CRC actually started because of the most controversial Foundation ban.

I felt joining the CRC would mean I was aligning myself with the parts of Foundation bans which the community did not like. Maggie Dennis emailed me and changed my mind. She was right. We do need people who can disagree and discuss with civility. I participate on this committee to make sure people are being treated appropriately and bans are not overstepping where the community could handle the situations. Now that I am on this committee, I would like to see the CRC review additional Trust and Safety cases, particularly where the Foundation rejects cases. 

In this weekly series, I quote some impressive Diff posts which were recently published.

WikiWomenCamp 2023

Gender equality in Wikimedia Movement is crucial. One of the activities to achieve the goal is WikiWomenCamp. WWC2023 and Shreya Dwivedi introduce it in a post titled “Unveiling the Wiki Women Camp and its Cohorts for Strategic Advancement and Capacity Development.”

The WikiWomenCamp 2023 (WWC 2023) is a highly anticipated event that celebrates and empowers women contributors within the Wikimedia Movement. After a gap of six years, the WWC returns, and this time, WWC 2023 is happening in India – a country known for its rich cultural diversity and immense potential in fostering gender equality. 

As WWC 2023 expands its reach globally, hosting this event in India signifies its commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion on a global scale. 

Considering the changed scenario and strategic advancement, the camp is designed with a renewed vigor and focus, under the theme “Map Up, Rise Up.” Acknowledging the need for a more targeted approach, WWC 2023 has organized its program under two cohorts:

1. Strategic Cohort: This cohort is dedicated to analyzing the current status of women within the Wikimedia Movement and devising comprehensive plans to foster their growth. Discussions on gender disparities, strategic initiatives, and long-term goals will be the focus.
2. Capacity Cohort: The capacity cohort will equip participants with the skills and knowledge to translate the strategies formulated by the strategic cohort into action. With a two-year plan in place, this cohort will work diligently to carry forward the initiatives and effect positive change.

WWC2023 and Shreya Dwivedi (14 September 2023) “Unveiling the Wiki Women Camp and its Cohorts for Strategic Advancement and Capacity Development” Diff.

Wikimedians’ storytellings

In a post titled “Bringing WikiForHumanRights into focus: Climate storytelling from around the Wikimedia Movement,” Euphemia Uwandu introduces various storytellings of Wikimedians.

Wikimedia communities often deploy a variety of communication tactics to share their participation in movement campaigns. In 2023, during the WikiForHumanRights Campaign, we witnessed new and inspiring communication strategies used by organizers in the movement.

The 2023 Senior Content Campaign Organizing Fellow, Euphemia Uwanduaccompanied by Wikimedia communities, adopted a regular weekly storytelling practice on LinkedIn.

……Beyond this, some communities leveraged radio shows for elevating the campaign work. For example, the WAFTAI community in Cameroon engaged in a talk show on Nkwalla radio and the Algeria community on the Mostaganem radio. 

Inspired by these innovative storytelling practices and campaign activities, Romeo Lomara, a 2022 Organizer Lab participant initiated the WikiForHumanRights 2023 Podcast to feature stories of implementing communities. 

Eugine Masiku, the communications officer at Open Foundation West Africa and podcast participant, shared their strategy and motivation in organizing a local campaign photowalk in the Walewale community in Ghana.

Euphemia Uwandu (13 September 2023) “Bringing WikiForHumanRights into focus: Climate storytelling from around the Wikimedia Movement” Diff.

The value of Movement Strategy

Did you know there is a strategy of Wikimedia Movement? Nada kareem22 explains the value of Movement Strategy in a post titled “Your first interactive session: How to overcome the challenges.”

I observed that our Arabic-speaking community is reluctant to engage in conversations, discussions, and activities related to movement strategy. To enhance their involvement, I applied for a MS grant to launch and activate Movement Strategy’s Arabic educational material and deliver the material in interactive sessions. 

The movement strategy 2030 has been a dream and a challenge. The movement community had set 10 recommendations, 10 principles, 8 prioritized clusters, and a very ambitious 47 initiatives (currently) to achieve. To push these initiatives forward into action, we need to work together and merge our skills, diversities, and previous experiences and knowledge.

The highlight of the movement strategy is inclusivity and specificity. All members and affiliates are invited to participate. You can take one initiative and push it a step forward.

The movement strategy 2030 has been a dream and a challenge. The movement community had set 10 recommendations, 10 principles, 8 prioritized clusters, and a very ambitious 47 initiatives (currently) to achieve. To push these initiatives forward into action, we need to work together and merge our skills, diversities, and previous experiences and knowledge.

The highlight of the movement strategy is inclusivity and specificity. All members and affiliates are invited to participate. You can take one initiative and push it a step forward.

Nada kareem22 (11 September 2023) “Your first interactive session: How to overcome the challenges” Diff.

Adding information based on their experiences

In a post titled “SAAB Veterans Shared Their Knowledge at Metadata Workshop,” you can learn about a unique event which Wikimedia Sweden held. It gathered people with connections to SAAB’s aircraft manufacturing and asked them to add information to images on Wikimedia Commons.

The photos uploaded often have minimal information, or metadata, associated with them. Typically, they only have a title and a year, information obtained from the labels on the physical folders in the photo archive. We wanted to gather people with strong connections to SAAB, those who have worked or currently work there, to provide insights into what the images depicted. This way, we could add structured data to Commons through Wikidata tags and captions and descriptions directly in Wikimedia Commons.

The highlight of the event was that a man featured in one of the photographs was present! He could provide many details about what he was doing when the photo was taken and why. Other participants added information about both that image and others. They shared details about the locations, aircraft models, equipment, purposes, which photos depicted actual activities, and which ones were staged.

Josefine Hellroth Larsson WMSE (11 September 2023) “SAAB Veterans Shared Their Knowledge at Metadata Workshop” Diff.

Acknowledgement

First of all, I appreciate my friend Caner (User:Kurmanbek), who created a fantastic logo for Diffquote. I’m really happy to collaborate with such a talented designer and Wikimedian under the Wikimedia Japan-Türkiye Friendship project. Of course, I also appreciate all the contributors, organizers, and readers of Diff. It’s a great pleasure for me to know Wikimedia Movement around the world through Diff.

This month, I want to talk about one of the things that brings me the most joy in my line of work: replacing a proprietary tool with a free and open source one. In January of this year, I toyed with the idea of semi-automating some repetitive tasks by introducing scripts that could write, for example, letters of participation. I talked about it on my report. I created that prototype using a tool called Rocket Typist.

As Wikipedia turned 15 years old in 2016, Wikimedia’s leadership looked at our vision – Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge – and acknowledged that this vision cannot be accomplished in any of our lifetimes. It is a vision with an infinite time horizon, and it was in this spirit that the Wikimedia Endowment was born. 

The first gift to the Wikimedia Endowment was a generous bequest from a longtime Wikimedia donor, Jim Pacha, who had passed away in 2014 but left direction that his legacy gift go into an endowment fund to support the Wikimedia projects, if one ever was established. In the years since, over 2,000 other donors have similarly been inspired to make planned gifts to the Wikimedia Endowment. 

This journey of support has led to today’s important announcement that the endowment has moved into its own independent 501c3 charity in order to better support the Wikimedia projects for the long-term.  The mission and the leadership of the endowment stay the same; we just have a new permanent home. Endowments everywhere – whether at hospitals, museums, or other entities – are a way to ensure impact beyond the immediate moment. 

During the endowment’s start-up phase from 2016 to 2023, nearly 3 million generous donors contributed founding gifts at all levels to help seed the fund. In this seed phase, the endowment was housed at the Tides Foundation, which helps launch nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. This allowed us to focus on fundraising and keep our costs low as we got the endowment off the ground.

With the Wikimedia Endowment now entering a new phase of its maturity, the Wikimedia Endowment Board has authorized a new multi-year fundraising campaign that will allow the endowment to return even greater support for Wikimedia projects for years to come. 

How the Wikimedia Endowment works 

The Wikimedia Endowment is our promise to the future of the Wikimedia projects. It’s our commitment that Wikipedia will be there for generations to come. It does this by pooling donations into a permanent fund that generates earnings – a portion of which are then disbursed to support Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, in accordance with the Wikimedia Endowment spending policy. 

Each year, the Board of Directors of the Wikimedia Endowment decides on a spending rate of between 2.5 and 4 percent of the market rate of the endowment’s investment portfolio.  This policy is designed to preserve the endowment’s principal while also providing funds to cover the operational expenses of the endowment and to make grants to critical projects that will help ensure a future of innovation for the Wikimedia projects.

Last year, we conducted interviews with people who donated to the Wikimedia Endowment and asked them what the endowment should support in the near future, in line with its purpose to support the sustainability of Wikimedia projects. The theme that emerged from these conversations was a focus on funding technical innovation, so that the Wikimedia projects stay relevant in a time of rapid technological change. You can find a list of initiatives that the Wikimedia Endowment supported last fiscal year here. This work is led by the Endowment Board’s Grantmaking and Community Committee (comprised of longtime Wikimedia community members Phoebe Ayers and Patricio Lorente).

They are joined on the Wikimedia Endowment Board by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and experts in finance, philanthropy, education, and business. The Endowment Board includes some of the Wikimedia movement’s largest donors who have been supporting the Wikimedia Foundation for over a decade.  Board members must also be active fundraisers for the endowment; they have helped to host fundraising events to help grow the fund. In order to minimize costs, the endowment is supported by staff from the Wikimedia Foundation who spend a portion of their time to support the endowment (the endowment then reimburses the Wikimedia Foundation for these costs). 

Why donors choose to donate to the Wikimedia Endowment

While gifts to the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual fund are spent on immediate needs in the current fiscal year, gifts to the Wikimedia Endowment are never spent. Rather, they are invested alongside other endowment gifts so that they can generate returns year after year.  Over the long term, every gift to the endowment will ultimately return more funds to the Wikimedia projects than if the donor had made a single gift to the annual fund.  Conversely, many people prefer to donate to the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual fund so that their donation can have the largest impact that year.  We are proud to offer our donors the opportunity to contribute to the annual fund or to the endowment depending on their preference – or both if they are so inspired. You can find more information about the Wikimedia Endowment at www.wikimediaendowment.org. 

Donate to the Wikimedia Endowment here.

Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Fund here.

Code for Africa (CfA) continues its dedicated mission to empower the Wikimedian-in-Residence (WiR) community through its bi-weekly webinar series. The fourth webinar held on 18 August 2023 had 24 African Wikimedians from Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda. The webinar was led by Precious Obiorah, co-founder of Wiki fact-checkers, and adeptly facilitated by Bukola James, CfA’s WiR community coordinator, to shine a spotlight on the indispensable “Citation Hunt tool.”

Why Citations Matter on Wikipedia

In the academic and digital world, citations are the bedrock of credibility. This is especially crucial in regions like Africa, where scepticism regarding the reliability of Wikipedia still lingers within academic and professional circles. The Citation Hunt tool emerges as a saviour, identifying articles lacking proper citations and providing a straightforward pathway to rectify these shortcomings.

The essence of citations on Wikipedia can be distilled into two key facets:

1. Enhancing Credibility: Each claim on Wikipedia requires verification, and reliable citations serve this purpose, lending authenticity to the content.
2. Building Trust: For readers and contributors, seeing a well-cited article bolsters trust in the information presented, especially in areas or topics that may be controversial or unfamiliar

Deep Dive: Features of Citation Hunt

The Citation Hunt tool offers a range of innovative features tailored to simplify the process of identifying and adding citations on Wikipedia with the following features:

1. Customise: The ‘Customise’ feature provides users with the flexibility to tweak and adjust the interface based on their personal preferences. This adaptability ensures a user-centric experience, allowing editors to tailor their citation-hunting journey to their specific needs.
2. Leadership Board: Transforming the editing experience into a competitive yet collaborative endeavour, the ‘Leadership Board’ showcases top contributors in terms of citations added. This gamified feature motivates users to contribute more actively, while also acknowledging and celebrating the efforts of the top citation hunters.
3. Dark/White Theme: Recognising that users have diverse reading preferences, this feature offers the flexibility to toggle between a dark and white theme. Whether editing at night or during the day, users can choose a theme that is easy on the eyes, promoting longer, more comfortable editing sessions.
4. Select Your Preferred Language: Catering to Wikipedia’s global community, this feature empowers users by allowing them to work in their preferred language. Given the multilingual nature of Wikipedia’s readers and editors, this feature ensures that language isn’t a barrier to contributing quality citations.

Benefits of Creating an Article List on Citation Hunt

Citation Hunt offers a host of advantages that enrich the editing experience:

• Thematic editing: Citation Hunt allows users to curate and edit articles around a specific theme or topic, ensuring consistency and depth in their contributions.
• Collaborative editing: The unique sharing feature means that multiple editors can collaborate on the same list of articles, turning the editing process into a group activity that’s both fun and productive.
• Dynamic updates: The lists on Citation Hunt are regularly updated, ensuring that users always have access to the most recent articles in need of citations.
• Citation Hunt’s Multilingual Prowess: A notable highlight of the tool is its multilingual support, catering to Wikipedia’s global audience. However, challenges related to the absence of some African local languages were identified, signalling opportunities for future improvements in this area.

Practical Demonstrations and Attendee Engagement

During the insightful session led by Precious Obiorah, attendees were guided through a series of hands-on demonstrations to grasp the utility of Citation Hunt, ensuring that they left the webinar equipped with practical knowledge. 

Two major practical applications were explored:

Practical Application I: Searching for Wikipedia articles on Citation Hunt

Steps:

1. Navigate to the Citation Hunt tool.
2. Utilise the search box to find specific Wikipedia articles in need of citations, e.g., “Geography of Africa”.
3. Once the article is identified, clicking on it will display the exact text that requires citation.
4. To address the citation issue, click on “I’ve got this”. This will redirect you to the Wikipedia page, pinpointing the exact location of the text in question. For instance, in the article ‘Geography of Africa’, there might be specific sections with texts that are citation-deficient.

Practical Application II: Creating a Custom Wikipedia Article List using Citation Hunt

Steps:

• Go to the ‘Customise’ section within Citation Hunt.
• Select the option ‘Search for an article in Citation Hunt’. A search box will then materialise.
• Within this search box, input the desired article name.
• The resultant list will display the searched article. Click on it to make a selection.
• Repeat the search for other articles as desired, creating a curated list.
• Any unwanted articles can be easily removed by using the ‘Delete’ icon.
• Once the list is finalised, click on ‘Submit’.
• There’s also a ‘Click to preview’ option to oversee the articles that have been selected.
• This custom article list can then be shared among other editors to collectively address the citation needs, fostering a sense of community and collaboration.

Additional Resources

In addition to the hands-on experience, attendees were encouraged to read additional resources on Wikipedia that offer in-depth insights into the concepts of Reliable Sources and Verifiability which are instrumental in helping editors gain a comprehensive understanding of Wikipedia’s standards and guidelines, to further enhance the quality of their contributions. 

Key Takeaways

Several key takeaways emerged from the informative webinar:

• Citation Hunt’s Potency: The Trainer underscored how this tool expedites the location of citation-deficient Wikipedia articles, making the editing journey smoother and more efficient.
• User-centricity: The tool’s intuitive design, from search refinement features to the choice of themes, stood out as a testament to its commitment to providing an exceptional user experience.
• Collaboration: The Trainer shed light on how the tool fosters collaborative editing, enabling users to share lists of articles with their peers and transforming the editing process into a collective endeavour, promoting knowledge sharing and growth within the WiR community. 

Feedback and Reflections 

As the session wrapped up, the floor was opened to questions, and participants eagerly shared their thoughts:

“I learnt quite a great deal today”

…Iwuala Lucy

“It was a really wonderful session today. Kudos to the organisers”…

…Sayvhior

“Toute mes félicitations pour la présentation” …

Harouna 674

“I had a good knowledge about citation hunt”…

Chidex02 

“I got new knowledge and skills”

…Opusmo

“The tutor did great”

…Ofonwilliam 

As the CfA WiR initiative continues, tools like Citation Hunt will play a pivotal role in ensuring the reliability and trustworthiness of Wikipedia’s content.

Excited to join our next event or missed this session? Kindly visit our community programmes page watch the session recordings and test your knowledge on our academy Africa. Ensure you are registered for the upcoming CfA WiR Bi-weekly webinar and immerse in our vibrant community. To stay abreast of our initiatives, complete this form, and let’s shape the future together!

In August, over 30 Israeli wikimedians gathered for a very special learning and connection experience. This time, our destination was Abu Gosh, a village steeped in history, located in the heart of Israel. This expedition provided an incredible opportunity to explore fascinating sites, meet inspiring people, and strengthen our bonds as Wikimedia community members.

The “Thousand Words” Initiative

The journey to Abu Gosh was not just an ordinary excursion; it was part of the “Thousand Words” Initiative. This initiative serves as the epicenter for organizing trips across Israel, tailored to meet the photography needs of Wikipedia. The primary goal? To populate Wikipedia with high-quality, free-to-use images.

Wikipedia articles may be meticulously written, filled with essential and captivating information. However, the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words holds true. An image accompanying an article allows readers to better grasp the subject matter and be captivated not only by the written content but also by what meets the eye. The vision of the “Thousand Words” Initiative is to address the need for more freely usable images. It calls upon Wikipedia contributors to embark on journeys, explore, and capture images.

Deror Lin and the Project’s Continuity

It is impossible to discuss the “Thousand Words” initiative without mentioning the pivotal role played by Wikimedia Israel board member, Deror Lin, a dedicated editor who conceived, initiated, and led the project over the years. Deror Lin left an impressive legacy, having contributed to over 8,700 articles and more than 37,000 images on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. His commitment to expanding human knowledge and sharing valuable images will remain unforgettable. With his recent passing, we welcome Yoav Dotan, who asked to take on the responsibility of continuing the project  in order to preserve and continue the project that was so important to Deror. The Abu Gosh expedition marked the beginning of this new phase under Yoav Dotan’s leadership.

Exploring Abu Gosh

The journey was expertly guided by Sharon Reguev, who boasts a wealth of experience in her field. Sharon had served as the head of the Department of Religions at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs for many years. Her deep knowledge and insights into the subject matter were invaluable, enriching the experience for all participants.

Our first stop was the well-preserved Crusader church, where we had the privilege of meeting Abu Gosh’s head of council, Salim Jaber. Mr. Jaber warmly welcomed us and shared insights into the village’s history, including its harmonious relations with the local Jewish community. His account offered a glimpse into the region’s multicultural coexistence, setting the stage for our immersive experience.

Next on our itinerary was a meeting with Brother Olivier, a Benedictine monk from the Olivetan Order. Brother Olivier shared his fascinating life story and provided us with a deeper understanding of the monastic order to which he belongs, known as “St. Joseph of Revelation” His words resonated with our group, fostering a sense of connection and shared humanity.

Our journey continued to the Church of Our Lady of the Ark of the Covenant, where we learned about the significance of this holy site. We explored the history of the religious order that maintains it, delving into the spiritual and historical importance of the location.

The third and final site we visited was Saxum, a visitor center run by the Catholic “Opus Dei” order. There, we had the opportunity to gain further insights into the region’s religious diversity and its role in promoting interfaith understanding.

Our excursion concluded with a delightful meal at “Abu Sa’id” restaurant, where we shared stories and reflections on our day’s discoveries. This culinary experience provided the perfect ending to a day filled with cultural enrichment and meaningful encounters.

Participants shared heartfelt testimonials about the experience. Wikipedian “Ovedc” expressed delight in the journey, emphasizing the richness of interactions and learnings. User “Elians” praised Yoav Dotan’s organization of the trip and underscored the importance of the photos taken during the expedition.

The “Thousand Words” initiative continues to create opportunities for Wikipedia contributors and enthusiasts to deepen their understanding of Israel’s history and culture. Through these immersive journeys, participants not only capture valuable images for Wikimedia projects but also cultivate a broader perspective on the communities that shape our diverse nation. Each trip is a testament to the power of collaboration and shared exploration, fostering connections among Wikipedians that extend beyond the digital realm.

🕑 1 hour 23 minutes

Tricia Burmeister is a senior technical writer at the Wikimedia Foundation, and part of the (relatively new) WMF Technical Documentation Team.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Wikimedia Technical Documentation Team
• Wikitech wiki main page restructuring diff
  • Phabricator ticket that relates to this change
• MediaWiki Product Insights page
• Toolhub
• MintyDocs MediaWiki extension
• Documentation > Toolkit
• Documentation > Patterns > Landing page
• Huggle documentation page
• Wikifunctions site

12/09/2023-18/09/2023

Mapping

• Citrula wrote about how to use OSMCha’s RSS feed and filter features to review changesets for which a review has been requested.
• Anne-Karoline Distel is seeking comments on a proposal to add vandalised to lifecycle prefixes.

Community

• OpenStreetMap mapper Jasper wanted an OSM shirt and there wasn’t one. So he made one and is offering it on Etsy, in case you are interested.
• nabilersyad blogged about his aims to map every street in Kuala Lumpur CBD and to add satellite visible data in all of the Kuala Selangor District.
• There are 30 videos from the SotM US 2023 on YouTube.
• Antti blogged about how to use OsmAnd for driving the TET (Trans Euro Trail), an 80,000 km GPX route, from the edge of Africa to the Arctic Circle, created by the TET adventure motorcycle community.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The current status of the OSMF fundraising campaign can be viewed online. The comments made by donors are interesting.
• You are welcome to join the next monthly video-meeting of the OSMF Board that will take place on Thursday 28 September at 15:00 UTC. The video room opens 20 minutes before the meeting starts. The preliminary agenda is on the wiki and this is also where the draft minutes will be added.
• The OpenStreetMap Foundation reported the addition of a new render server in the US. It will be used for rendering and updating the default map style.

Humanitarian OSM

• [1] Pete Masters (pedrito1414), Head of the Community staff at HOT, provided an update on the disaster response activations for Morocco and Libya, providing statistics and other information about this response.
• ABDURAHMAN AL FURJANI from OSM Libya, supported by UN Mappers and HOT, has launched a disaster response activation, following the devastating floods in Darnah, Libya. There are mapping tasks ready for contribution on the HOT Tasking Manager and pre- and post-event imagery available on OpenAerialMap, provided by Maxar.

Maps

• Imzadi1979 announced that the community responsible for the English Wikipedia’s North American road articles has created a fork of Wikipedia that features vector maps based on OpenStreetMap Americana (example).
• The Berlin Refreshment Map shows cool, windy and shady areas in the city. The map was created in a collaboration between the Open Data Informationsstelle Berlin and CityLab Berlin.
• Geofabrik have released a boundary fix for their OpenStreetMap data snapshot of the Alps region.
• jonnymccullagh blogged about setting up a map server displaying [ga] place names in the Irish language (Gaeilge).

Open Data

• Qiusheng Wu’s interactive web app for visualising Maxar’s open data has been improved. By just clicking on the map, you may now select images interactively.

Software

• jarmokivekas released, on GitHub, an overview tool that he developed for tracking Tasking Manager activity by campaign, project, country, or organisation. This is a preliminary version. It is not yet clear how easy it will be working with this API (no dropdown list for selection) compared to working directly in the Tasking Manager explore function.
• Answerquest listed the steps to convert boundary shapefiles, using Mapshaper and QGIS, in order to use them in OpenStreetMap.
• Allan Mustard has figured out how to get mkgmap to produce fully customised, routable Garmin-compatible IMG files for his nüvi GPS navigator. He posted a tutorial so you can also produce custom IMG files to your own specifications.
• After more than 9 years of work, a group of students from the Salesian College of Duitama (Colombia) has launched ► a mobile application called ‘BusBoy App’, already available on the Google Play Store and soon on the Apple App Store. The creators are seeking ► to expand the use of the application, so that more users of urban transport will know the names of the routes, places of travel, points of interest, transport companies, and schedules.
• MapComplete has changed its internet domain from mapcomplete.osm.be to mapcomplete.org after a short survey on the Mastodon server en.osm.town.
• Geopaparazzi has released ‘Smart Mobile App for Surveyor Happiness’ (SMASH), a mobile application for taking notes on mapping survey activities. The app can be downloaded via F-droid and Google Play Store.
• Sam Woodcock gave a high level overview of the Field Mapping Tasking Manager (FMTM), which is software for coordinating field mapping efforts.
• vorpalblade reported that JOSM’s MapWithAI plug-in now supports PMTiles and Mapbox Vector Tiles as data sources and showed how to use it. PMTiles is a web-first tile storage format, which allows the provider to have a single file containing all the tiles they want to share.

Programming

• An Australian family refused to sell their farmland, even though the entire neighbourhood was being converted into a new housing estate. The location of the property was unclear. This challenge was taken up by Dean Marchiori to locate, as he describes, Sydney’s strangest property using osrm and the Overpass API. There is a nice ‘movie’ at the end of the article.
• Sam Woodcock gave an overview of the different vector tile file formats available and described their differences.

Did you know …

• … that you can explore places on OpenStreetMap using the OpenStreetBrowser app?
• … that you can participate in an OSMFight?

Other “geo” things

• Felix von Leitner ►, a German IT security expert, comments on current affairs in their blog ►. Our market ‘competitor’ is looking ► for ‘volunteers’ to record streets for them. Felix asked ironically, ‘Are you also considering volunteering for the fourth richest company in the world? I hope not. But if you are, it would be better to volunteer for OpenStreetMap’.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Rouen	Rencontre Groupe local Rouen		2023-09-22
Saint-Barthélemy-de-Séchilienne	Mapping Party in Saint-Barthélemy-de-Séchilienne 38220 France		2023-09-23
Localidad Teusaquillo	Bici Ruta Geek en Bogotá		2023-09-24
Град Кикинда	OpenStreetMap x Pionir #2		2023-09-24
Maricá	Mapathon – Maricá City		2023-09-24 – 2023-09-30
Chambéry	Mapathon débutant saison 23/24 CartONG		2023-09-25
Gent	OpenStreetMap meetup		2023-09-26
Delft	IHE Delft / HOTOSM – IHEUrgentAction Mapathon for Morocco and Libya		2023-09-26
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-09-27
Berlin	Missing Maps Mapathon Berlin		2023-09-27
City of Westminster	London pub meet-up		2023-09-27
Aachen	4. Treffen Aachener Stammtisch 2.0		2023-09-28
Lübeck	135. OSM-Stammtisch für Lübeck und Umgebung		2023-09-28
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2023-09-29
Curitiba	Pré-Conferência – State of the Map Brasil 2023		2023-09-30
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend September 2023		2023-09-30 – 2023-10-01
Portland	A Synesthete’s Atlas + Some 3d Color/Light/Motion Experiments		2023-10-02
Curitiba	State of the Map Brasil 2023		2023-10-02 – 2023-10-04
	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2023-10-03
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2023-10-04

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

Sep 20, 14:22 UTC
Completed - Editing is back to normal. We will continue monitoring the systems. Read-only time was 2min 21.68s (14:00:32 - 14:02:54).

Sep 20, 14:00 UTC
In progress - Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.

Sep 20, 13:28 UTC
Scheduled - The SRE team will run a planned data center switchover, moving all wikis from our data center in Virginia to the data center in Texas. This is an important periodic test of our tools and procedures, to ensure the wikis will continue to be available even in the event of major technical issues.
The switchover process requires a brief read-only period for all Foundation-hosted wikis, which will start at 14:00 UTC on Wednesday September 20, and will last for a few minutes while we execute the migration as efficiently as possible. All our public and private wikis will be continuously available for reading as usual, but no one will be able to save edits during the process.

It is now over two years ago Albin Larsson and I started the Govdirectory. Not soon thereafter, we got the honor to present it in a Code for all lightning talk. Today, we were honored again and got to do a follow-up lightning talk.

In this talk (slides), we mention some statistics.

One aspect that I love about this project is that it is not static, but is building all the time. So since we recorded the video, we have already grown substantially.

As you can see, the coverage is just over 10% of the countries in the world, and of the countries we have, only one is complete and a handful more have great coverage. If you want to help with the data, head over to the project page on Wikidata. If you have want to help improve the website, head over to the repository on GitHub. And, of course, you are also welcome to just explore what is on the website at govdirectory.org.

UNITED KINGDOM, 19 SEPTEMBER 2023 — The Wikimedia Foundation — the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects — is calling on the UK government and independent regulator to ensure the implementation of the Online Safety Bill does not harm Wikipedia, and other projects that the public relies on to create and access free, reliable knowledge. The Bill today completed all parliamentary stages and will soon become the United Kingdom’s latest addition to a growing body of internet regulation.

In the years since the Bill was first introduced, the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia UK — the national charity for open knowledge, bringing together practical and policy expertise about Wikimedia and other Wikimedia projects — have strongly warned of the tremendous threat the Bill posed to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Wikipedia is available in more than 300 languages; its 61 million articles are created by a global community of volunteer editors, who determine the online encyclopedia’s editorial policies and guidelines that ensure content is neutral and based on reliable, published sources. The Bill also poses risks to other public interest projects such as open science initiatives, crowdsourced UK heritage repositories, and online archives. 

Unfortunately, although these concerns were elevated in numerous forums — including meetings with the government, Parliamentary debates, prominent media outlets, and an open letter — Wikipedia and its sister projects, as well as other public interest projects, were not exempted from the Online Safety Bill. 

“It is simply inconceivable to imagine the UK without access to Wikipedia, the world’s largest online knowledge repository. The Online Safety Bill’s passage may be the end of a chapter, but we are determined that it will not be the end of our story in the UK,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, Vice President of Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation. “The Bill includes requirements that invalidate Wikipedia’s volunteer-led model of creating and moderating content, threatening the encyclopedia’s ability to function in the UK.

We will continue to voice our concerns to the UK government and engage the independent regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), to ensure that the law’s implementation acknowledges Wikipedia’s value and safeguards its unique collaborative model. We are firm in our commitment to protect the best of the internet for future generations.”

In recent months, the Foundation has publicly highlighted how the Bill directly interferes with Wikipedia’s community content moderation model, which allows volunteer editors to share verified, well-sourced information on the encyclopedia. The Bill does not distinguish between public interest sites that rely on community decision-making and large for-profit technology companies, which the Bill was originally designed to address, that have employees who moderate content. It also imposes age verification, which is incompatible with the website’s commitment to user privacy and freedom of speech.

“At a time when powerful forces are seeking to erase and manipulate the world’s knowledge around many topics, the UK government’s failure to exempt Wikipedia from the Online Safety Bill is harmful to the global community of Wikipedia volunteers and readers, as well as to the Foundation’s work to support them,” said MacKinnon. 

Wikipedia is an essential tool for sharing and consuming knowledge. In August 2023, while the Bill was in its final stages in Parliament, people in the UK viewed English Wikipedia more than 836 million times. Wikipedia is also used to preserve and promote cultural heritage in the UK, including Indigenous and minority languages such as Welsh. The Welsh language version of Wikipedia is the single most popular Welsh language website in the world, with over 7.5 million views every month, and is an official component of the curriculum in Wales.

As the Bill now heads to Royal Assent, we remain deeply concerned about its impact on the future of Wikipedia in the UK. We hope the UK Government and Ofcom will protect the best parts of the internet — public interest projects like Wikipedia that uplift civil society and promote access to knowledge online.

For more information on the Wikimedia Foundation’s position on the Online Safety Bill, read our blog posts from Sept. 2023, June 2023, May 2023,  Nov. 2022, and March 2022.   

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and 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. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

For media inquiries, please contact press@wikimedia.org.

###

The post Wikimedia Foundation calls for protection and fair treatment of Wikipedia as UK Online Safety Bill becomes law appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.

I wrote about the exploration on Natural language querying for wikipedia in previous three blog posts. In Part 1, I was suggesting that building such a collection of question and answers can help natural language answering. One missing piece was actually suggesting an answer for a new question that is not part of QA set for article. In Part 2, I tried using distilbert-base-cased-distilled-squad with ONNX optimization to answer the questions.

By Rupal Karia, Outreach and Community Coordinator at Wikimedia UK

I am really excited to join Wikimedia UK and am looking forward to making a meaningful impact on Wikimedia’s engagement and support of volunteers as well as increasing participation across under-represented communities within the WMUK movement. 

I have spent the last 15 years working in the charity sector, managing teams of volunteers and supporting grassroots organisations and charities with implementing best practices within their volunteer teams. My last roles were with the Volunteer Centres in Camden and Hackney supporting grassroots organisations with their volunteer management including support with increasing diversity and representation within their volunteer teams.  

I am passionate about community engagement and eliminating barriers to participation of groups that have previously been marginalised. I am keen to explore ways we can include and collaborate with these communities, to have a voice within Wikimedia and its projects.

If you have any ideas or would like to talk to me more about this please do say hello, I’d love to hear from you rupal.karia@wikimedia.org.uk 

The post Wikimedia UK welcomes Rupal Karia as Outreach and Community Coordinator appeared first on WMUK.

Summary

• Install debugging packages: apt-get -y install php7.4-common-dbgsym php7.4-cli-dbgsym
• curl -o ~/php-gdbinit https://raw.githubusercontent.com/php/php-src/php-7.4.30/.gdbinit
• gdb <your php command>
• Enter run then once the command has failed: bt and zbacktrace

The Beta-Cluster-Infrastructure is a farm of wikis we use for experimentation and integration testing. It is updated continuously: new code is every ten minutes and the databases every hour by running MediaWiki maintenance/update.php. The scheduling and running are driven by Jenkins jobs which statuses can be seen on the Beta view:

On top of that, Jenkins will emit notification messages to IRC as long as one of the update job fails. One of them started failing on July 25th and this is how I was seeing it the alarm (times are for France, UTC+2):

(wmf-insecte is the Jenkins bot, insecte is french for bug (animals), and the wmf- prefix identifies it as a Wikimedia Foundation robot).

Clicking on the link gives the output of the update script which eventually fails with:

+ /usr/local/bin/mwscript update.php --wiki=wikifunctionswiki --quick --skip-config-validation
20:31:09 ...wikilambda_zlanguages table already exists.
20:31:09 ...have wlzl_label_primary field in wikilambda_zobject_labels table.
20:31:09 ...have wlzl_return_type field in wikilambda_zobject_labels table.
20:31:09 /usr/local/bin/mwscript: line 27:  1822 Segmentation fault      sudo -u "$MEDIAWIKI_WEB_USER" $PHP "$MEDIAWIKI_DEPLOYMENT_DIR_DIR_USE/multiversion/MWScript.php" "$@"

The important bit is Segmentation fault which indicates the program (php) had a fatal fault and it got rightfully killed by the Linux Kernel. Looking at the instance Linux Kernel messages via dmesg -T:

[Mon Jul 24 23:33:55 2023] php[28392]: segfault at 7ffe374f5db8 ip 00007f8dc59fc807 sp 00007ffe374f5da0 error 6 in libpcre2-8.so.0.7.1[7f8dc59b9000+5d000]
[Mon Jul 24 23:33:55 2023] Code: ff ff 31 ed e9 74 fb ff ff 66 2e 0f 1f 84 00 00 00 00 00 41 57 41 56 41 55 41 54 55 48 89 d5 53 44 89 c3 48 81 ec 98 52 00 00 <48> 89 7c 24 18 4c 8b a4 24 d0 52 00 00 48 89 74 24 10 48 89 4c 24
[Mon Jul 24 23:33:55 2023] Core dump to |/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-coredump 28392 33 33 11 1690242166 0 php pipe failed

With those data, I had enough to the most urgent step: file a task (T342769) which can be used as an audit trail and reference for the future. It is the single most important step I am doing whenever I am debugging an issue, since if I have to stop due to time constraint or lack of technical abilities, others can step in and continue. It also provides an historical record that can be looked up in the future, and indeed this specific problem already got investigated and fully documented a couple years ago. Having a task is the most important thing one must do whenever debugging, it is invaluable. For PHP segmentation fault, we even have a dedicated project php-segfault

With the task filed, I have continued the investigation. The previous successful build had:

19:30:18 ...have wlzl_label_primary field in wikilambda_zobject_labels table.
19:30:18 ...have wlzl_return_type field in wikilambda_zobject_labels table.
19:30:18        ❌ Unable to make a page for Z7138: The provided content's label clashes with Object 'Z10138' for the label in 'Z1002'.
19:30:18        ❌ Unable to make a page for Z7139: The provided content's label clashes with Object 'Z10139' for the label in 'Z1002'.
19:30:18        ❌ Unable to make a page for Z7140: The provided content's label clashes with Object 'Z10140' for the label in 'Z1002'.
19:30:18 ...site_stats is populated...done.

The successful build started at 19:20 UTC and the failing one finished at 20:30 UTC which gives us a short time window to investigate. Since the failure seems to happen after updating the WikiLambda MediaWiki extension, I went to inspect the few commits that got merged at that time. I took advantage of Gerrit adding review actions as git notes, notably the exact time a change got submitted and subsequently merged. The process:

Clone the suspect repository:

git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/extensions/WikiLambda
cd WikiLambda

Fetch the Gerrit review notes:

git fetch origin refs/notes/review:refs/notes/review

The review notes can be shown below the commit by passing --notes=review to git log or git show, an example for the current HEAD of the repository:

$ git show -q --notes=review
commit c7f8071647a1aeb2cef6b9310ccbf3a87af2755b (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
Author: Genoveva Galarza <ggalarzaheredero@wikimedia.org>
Date:   Thu Jul 27 00:34:03 2023 +0200

    Initialize blank function when redirecting to FunctionEditor from DefaultView
    
    Bug: T342802
    Change-Id: I09d3400db21983ac3176a0bc325dcfe2ddf23238

Notes (review):
    Verified+1: SonarQube Bot <kharlan+sonarqubebot@wikimedia.org>
    Verified+2: jenkins-bot
    Code-Review+2: Jforrester <jforrester@wikimedia.org>
    Submitted-by: jenkins-bot
    Submitted-at: Wed, 26 Jul 2023 22:47:59 +0000
    Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda/+/942026
    Project: mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda
    Branch: refs/heads/master

Which shows this change has been approved by Jforrester and entered the repository on Wed, 26 Jul 2023 22:47:59 UTC. Then to find the commits in that range, I ask git log to list:

• anything that has a commit date for the day (it is not necessarily correct but in this case it is a good enough approximation)
• from oldest to newest
• sorted by topology order (aka in the order the commit entered the repository rather than based on the commit date)
• show the review notes to get the Submitted-at field

I can then scroll to the commits having a Submitted-at in the time window of 19:20 UTC - 20:30 UTC. I have amended the below output to remove most of the review notes except for the first commit:

$ git log --oneline --since=2023/07/25 --reverse --notes=review --no-merges --topo-order
<scroll>
653ea81a Handle oldid url param to view a particular revision
Notes (review):
    Verified+1: SonarQube Bot <kharlan+sonarqubebot@wikimedia.org>
    Verified+2: jenkins-bot
    Code-Review+2: Jforrester <jforrester@wikimedia.org>
    Submitted-by: jenkins-bot
    Submitted-at: Tue, 25 Jul 2023 19:26:53 +0000
    Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda/+/941482
    Project: mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda
    Branch: refs/heads/master

fe4b0446 AUTHORS: Update for July 2023
Notes (review):
    Submitted-at: Tue, 25 Jul 2023 19:49:43 +0000
    Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda/+/941507

73fcb4a4 Update function-schemata sub-module to HEAD (1c01f22)
Notes (review):
    Submitted-at: Tue, 25 Jul 2023 19:59:23 +0000
    Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda/+/941384

598f5fcc PageRenderingHandler: Don't make 'read' selected if we're on the edit tab
Notes (review):
    Submitted-at: Tue, 25 Jul 2023 20:16:05 +0000
    Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda/+/941456

Or in a Phabricator task and human friendly way:

• 19:26 Handle oldid url param to view a particular revision
• 19:43 AUTHORS: Update for July 2023
• 19:59 Update function-schemata sub-module to HEAD (1c01f22) for T335583
• 20:16 PageRenderingHandler: Don't make 'read' selected if we're on the edit tab

The Update function-schemata sub-module to HEAD (1c01f22) has a short log of changes it introduces:

• New changes:
• abc4aa6 definitions: Add Z1908/bug-bugi and Z1909/bug-lant ZNaturalLanguages
• 0f1941e definitions: Add Z1910/piu ZNaturalLanguage
• 1c01f22 definitions: Re-label all objects to drop the 'Z' per Amin

Since the update script fail on WikiLambda I have reached out to its developers so they can investigate their code and maybe find what can trigger the issue.

On the PHP side we need a trace. That can be done by configuring the Linux Kernel to take a dump of the program before terminating it and having it stored on disk, it did not quite work due to a configuration issue on the machine and in the first attempt we forgot to run the command by asking bash to allow the dump generation (ulimit -c unlimited). From a past debugging session, I went to run the command directly under the GNU debugger: gdb.

There are a few preliminary step to debug the PHP program, at first one needs to install the debug symbols which lets the debugger map the binary entries to lines of the original source code. Since error mentions libpcre2 I also installed its debugging symbols:

$ sudo apt-get -y install php7.4-common-dbgsym php7.4-cli-dbgsym libpcre2-dbg

I then used gdb to start a debugging session:

sudo  -s -u www-data gdb --args /usr/bin/php /srv/mediawiki-staging/multiversion/MWScript.php update.php --wiki=wikifunctionswiki --quick --skip-config-validation
gdb>

Then ask gdb to start the program by entering in the input prompt: run ⏎. After several minutes, it caught the segmentation fault:

gdb> run
<output>
<output freeze for several minutes while update.php is doing something>

Thread 1 "php" received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x00007ffff789e807 in pcre2_match_8 (code=0x555555ce1fb0, 
    subject=subject@entry=0x7fffcb410a98 "Z1002", length=length@entry=5, 
    start_offset=start_offset@entry=0, options=0, 
    match_data=match_data@entry=0x555555b023e0, mcontext=0x555555ad5870)
    at src/pcre2_match.c:6001
6001    src/pcre2_match.c: No such file or directory.

I could not find a debugging symbol package containing src/pcre2_match.c but that was not needed afterall.

To retrieve the stacktrace enter to the gdb prompt bt ⏎:

gdb> bt
#0  0x00007ffff789e807 in pcre2_match_8 (code=0x555555ce1fb0, 
    subject=subject@entry=0x7fffcb410a98 "Z1002", length=length@entry=5, 
    start_offset=start_offset@entry=0, options=0, 
    match_data=match_data@entry=0x555555b023e0, mcontext=0x555555ad5870)
    at src/pcre2_match.c:6001
#1  0x00005555556a3b24 in php_pcre_match_impl (pce=0x7fffe83685a0, 
    subject_str=0x7fffcb410a80, return_value=0x7fffcb44b220, subpats=0x0, global=0, 
    use_flags=<optimized out>, flags=0, start_offset=0) at ./ext/pcre/php_pcre.c:1300
#2  0x00005555556a493b in php_do_pcre_match (execute_data=0x7fffcb44b710, 
    return_value=0x7fffcb44b220, global=0) at ./ext/pcre/php_pcre.c:1149
#3  0x00007ffff216a3cb in tideways_xhprof_execute_internal ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#4  0x000055555587ddee in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1732
#5  execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53539
#6  0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#7  0x000055555587de4b in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1714
#8  execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53539
#9  0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#10 0x000055555587de4b in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1714
#11 execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53539
#12 0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#13 0x000055555587de4b in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1714
#14 execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53539
#15 0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#16 0x000055555587c63c in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_UNUSED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1602
#17 execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53535
#18 0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#19 0x000055555587de4b in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1714
#20 execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53539
#21 0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#22 0x000055555587de4b in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1714
#23 execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53539
#24 0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#25 0x000055555587de4b in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
 at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.Quit
CONTINUING

Which is not that helpful. Thankfully the PHP project provides a set of macro for gdb which lets one map the low level C code to the PHP code that was expected. It is provided in their source repository /.gdbinit and one should use the version from the PHP branch being debugged, since we use php 7.4 I went to use the version from the latest 7.4 series (7.4.30 at the time of this writing): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/php/php-src/php-7.4.30/.gdbinit

Download the file to your home directory (ex: /home/hashar/gdbinit) and ask gdb to import it with, for example, source /home/hashar/gdbinit ⏎:

(gdb) source /home/hashar/gdbinit

This provides a few new commands to show PHP Zend values and to generate a very helpfull stacktrace (zbacktrace):

(gdb) zbacktrace
[0x7fffcb44b710] preg_match("\7^Z[1-9]\d*$\7u", "Z1002") [internal function]
[0x7fffcb44aba0] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateString(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb44ac10], array(7)[0x7fffcb44ac20], object[0x7fffcb44ac30], object[0x7fffcb44ac40], object[0x7fffcb44ac50]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:1219 
[0x7fffcb44a760] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateProperties(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb44a7d0], array(7)[0x7fffcb44a7e0], object[0x7fffcb44a7f0], object[0x7fffcb44a800], object[0x7fffcb44a810], NULL) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:943 
[0x7fffcb44a4c0] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateKeywords(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb44a530], array(7)[0x7fffcb44a540], object[0x7fffcb44a550], object[0x7fffcb44a560], object[0x7fffcb44a570]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:519 
[0x7fffcb44a310] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateSchema(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb44a380], array(7)[0x7fffcb44a390], object[0x7fffcb44a3a0], object[0x7fffcb44a3b0], object[0x7fffcb44a3c0]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:332 
[0x7fffcb449350] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateConditionals(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb4493c0], array(7)[0x7fffcb4493d0], object[0x7fffcb4493e0], object[0x7fffcb4493f0], object[0x7fffcb449400]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:703 
[0x7fffcb4490b0] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateKeywords(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb449120], array(7)[0x7fffcb449130], object[0x7fffcb449140], object[0x7fffcb449150], object[0x7fffcb449160]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:523 
[0x7fffcb448f00] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateSchema(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb448f70], array(7)[0x7fffcb448f80], object[0x7fffcb448f90], object[0x7fffcb448fa0], object[0x7fffcb448fb0]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:332 
<loop>

The stacktrace shows the code entered an infinite loop while validating a Json schema up to a point it is being stopped.

The arguments can be further inspected by using printz and giving it as argument an object reference. For the line:

For [0x7fffcb44aba0] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateString(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb44ac10], array(7)[0x7fffcb44ac20], object[0x7fffcb44ac30], object[0x7fffcb44ac40], object[0x7fffcb44ac50]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:1219

(gdb) printzv 0x7fffcb44ac10
[0x7fffcb44ac10] (refcount=2) array:     Hash(0)[0x5555559d7f00]: {
}

(gdb) printzv 0x7fffcb44ac20
[0x7fffcb44ac20] (refcount=21) array:     Packed(7)[0x7fffcb486118]: {
      [0] 0 => [0x7fffcb445748] (refcount=17) string: Z2K2
      [1] 1 => [0x7fffcb445768] (refcount=18) string: Z4K2
      [2] 2 => [0x7fffcb445788] long: 1
      [3] 3 => [0x7fffcb4457a8] (refcount=15) string: Z3K3
      [4] 4 => [0x7fffcb4457c8] (refcount=10) string: Z12K1
      [5] 5 => [0x7fffcb4457e8] long: 1
      [6] 6 => [0x7fffcb445808] (refcount=6) string: Z11K1
}

(gdb) printzv 0x7fffcb44ac30
[0x7fffcb44ac30] (refcount=22) object(Opis\JsonSchema\Schema) #485450 {
id => [0x7fffcb40f508] (refcount=3) string: /Z6#
draft => [0x7fffcb40f518] (refcount=1) string: 07
internal => [0x7fffcb40f528] (refcount=1) reference: [0x7fffcb6704e8] (refcount=1) array:     Hash(1)[0x7fffcb4110e0]: {
      [0] "/Z6#" => [0x7fffcb71d280] (refcount=1) object(stdClass) #480576
}

(gdb) printzv 0x7fffcb44ac40
[0x7fffcb44ac40] (refcount=5) object(stdClass) #483827
Properties     Hash(1)[0x7fffcb6aa2a0]: {
      [0] "pattern" => [0x7fffcb67e3c0] (refcount=1) string: ^Z[1-9]\d*$
}

(gdb) printzv 0x7fffcb44ac50
[0x7fffcb44ac50] (refcount=5) object(Opis\JsonSchema\ValidationResult) #486348 {
maxErrors => [0x7fffcb4393e8] long: 1
errors => [0x7fffcb4393f8] (refcount=2) array:     Hash(0)[0x5555559d7f00]: {
}

Extracting the parameters was enough for WikiLambda developers to find the immediate root cause, they have removed some definitions which triggered the infinite loop and manually ran a script to reload the data in the Database. Eventually the Jenkins job managed to update the wiki database:

16:30:26 <wmf-insecte> Project beta-update-databases-eqiad build #69029: FIXED in 10 min: https://integration.wikimedia.org/ci/job/beta-update-databases-eqiad/69029/

One problem solved!

References:

• T342769: Beta update.php fails due to PHP segfault in libpcre2-8.so.0.7.1
• A similar debugging session I had to do for update.php back in 2021 {T296539#7531235}
• 2006 notes by @tstarling from whom I have learned about gdb and the PHP gdb config: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/GDB_with_PHP

05/09/2023-11/09/2023

Mapping

• Black Diamond shared his experience of using USGS 3D Elevation data, which is available as a background layer in iD and JOSM for most US territories, to more easily map geographic features.

Community

• Deus Figendi called on friends and acquaintances to motivate them to map their houses in OpenStreetMap in detail. He described ► for beginners how to do this and hopes to attract new mappers.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Courtney Williamson has released an update on the OpenStreetMap fundraising programme. As of 8 September 2023, €50,450.85 had been raised from 1425 donors. These funds will go towards data centre infrastructure maintenance and site reliability engineering.
• Courtney wrote about the new guidelines for companies who use OpenStreetMap data in their products and services. All corporate members will now have a seat on the OSMF advisory committee and the fee for an annual membership has increased by 50% for the top tiers.

Events

• [1] Aman Bagrecha shared his experience of participating in a community mapping activity organised by OSM Bengaluru, India, on 9 September 2023.
• The schedule for the State Of The Map 2023 Brazil (2 to 4 October in Curitiba) has been published.

Humanitarian OSM

• OSM Morocco and HOT’s Open Mapping Hub – West and Northern Africa have collaboratively launched the Morocco Earthquake activation of HOT in response to the disaster. They are asking for help from mappers (and validators) to fill out OpenStreetMap data in the affected areas and support the response. Mapping tasks are available at tasks.hotosm.org

switch2OSM

• StralsundTourismus.app ►, the new tourist website for Stralsund, Germany, is using OpenStreetMap for its map displays.

Open Data

• Miroff has published ► software for converting the State Catalogue of Geographical Names of Russia into a GeoJSON format that is supported by JOSM. The latest version of the dataset contains 730,738 names of rivers, lakes, mountains, hamlets, and other place names.In response to this, freeExec has made an updated list of the top 20 longest currently unnamed rivers and river basins that can be named from the catalogue, while rtnf has made a simple guide on how to use this tool.
• Junior Flores, from DevSeed, has created ► an interactive 3D visualisation tool using OSM data showing the mobile signal coverage at educational institutions in Ayacucho, Peru, and the location of the antennas of different telecommunication companies. It shows that of the 1,960 educational institutions in Ayacucho, 670 have no mobile coverage at all, and only 122 enjoy high signal quality.
• Daniel O’Donohue, from the Mapscaping Podcast team, interviewed Jennings Anderson, a researcher at Meta, about Meta’s Daylight Map Distribution and the Overture Maps Foundation.
• Raquel Dezidério Souto, from OSMBrasil, reported ► that Fidelis Assis has, among other things ►, captured the data of the 2022 Brazilian Census.

Software

• HeiGIT reported that their openrouteservice (ORS) for Disaster Management is expanding its coverage to include Africa, Central and South America, and South-East Asia. Using OSM data, ORS for Disaster Management updates frequently to ensure first responders are able to circumnavigate critical infrastructure that is blocked or damaged.

Programming

• osm2pgsql announced the concept of Themepark. It can be used to create a configuration file by reusing existing building blocks.
• Alexandre Donciu-Julin described how he used OpenStreetMap and Python to create a map showing his runs.

Releases

• HeiGIT reported that the ohsome dashboard has now been integrated with taginfo.
• HeiGIT reported that version 1.0 of their ohsome quality API and ohsome dashboard is now online. The new version includes an overhauled currentness indicator and the integration of the ohsome quality API into the ohsome dashboard. The tool allows easy access to aggregated statistics on the evolution of OSM elements since 2020.

Did you know …

• … GeoVisio, also known as Panoramax, is a Street View gallery server software that is libre and open source and that you can host on your own server?
• … that machine learning is being used to create 3D digital models of past neighbourhoods? These provide valuable tools for studying economic losses incurred from demolishing historic areas.
• … MapTiler labs offers a variety of proofs-of-concept showcasing OpenStreetMap data, including an elevation profile calculator, a digital elevation model, a bathymetric map, a map of the Roman Empire, a wind simulator, and sea routes?
• … Pieter Fiers has released an app named OSMfocus Reborn? It is an Android app, based on OSMFocus, to help view the details of object tags on OpenStreetMap.

Other “geo” things

• Justin O’Beirne reviewed Google Maps’ new map style.
• The Royal Navy is testing a quantum navigation system. It wants to use it to determine the exact position of a ship worldwide without relying on GPS.
• literan collects funny images from various street-views in their Telegram channel .
• Alexey Radchenko has analysed public and open data from users of Yandex’s geo-services about road accidents in Moscow and found that only 2% of road accidents reported by users were officially registered.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
London Borough of Camden	Mobile mapping training session and workshop		2023-09-19
Lyon	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon		2023-09-19
	167. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2023-09-19
City of Edinburgh	OSM Edinburgh Social		2023-09-19
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2023-09-19
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2023-09-20
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)		2023-09-20
The Municipal District of Kilkenny City	Kilkenny History Mappers MeetUp		2023-09-21
Saint-Barthélemy-de-Séchilienne	Mapping Party in Saint-Barthélemy-de-Séchilienne 38220 France		2023-09-23
Град Кикинда	OpenStreetMap x Pionir #2		2023-09-23 – 2023-09-24
Localidad Teusaquillo	Bici Ruta Geek en Bogotá		2023-09-24
Maricá	Mapathon – Maricá City		2023-09-24 – 2023-09-30
Chambéry	Mapathon débutant saison 23/24 CartONG		2023-09-25
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-09-27
Berlin	Missing Maps Mapathon Berlin		2023-09-27
City of Westminster	London pub meet-up		2023-09-27
Aachen	4. Treffen Aachener Stammtisch 2.0		2023-09-28
Lübeck	135. OSM-Stammtisch für Lübeck und Umgebung		2023-09-28
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2023-09-29
Curitiba	Pré-Conferência – State of the Map Brasil 2023		2023-09-30
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend September 2023		2023-09-30 – 2023-10-01

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

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

Atlassian has partnered with Wiki Education to support the creation of more biographies for women in STEM and help close the site’s gender content gap. Only 19% of Wikipedia’s biographies on English Wikipedia are about women. Systemic issues continue to prevent women in STEM from receiving due recognition for their significant contributions to their fields and beyond. Not only does this mean we’re not hearing and learning from a huge cohort of the STEM community, it also means aspiring women in STEM cannot be what they cannot see. 

Wiki Education is helping close the gap across disciplines. For example, in 2012, geneticist Jennifer Doudna helped make one of the most remarkable breakthroughs in biology — the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing system, which changed editing genomes from science fiction to science. While Doudna’s Wikipedia biography looked substantial, a lot of her research was missing or contextualized in relation to her male colleagues. In 2018, one of our Wiki Scientists transformed the page so that it emphasized Doudna’s scientific achievements.

Then, on October 7, 2020, Jennifer Doudna was awarded the Nobel Prize for her work on CRISPR. Thanks to the Wiki Scientist’s work, her biography on Wikipedia explains the revolutionary potential of CRISPR and Doudna’s role in this research. Had she not added this content, millions of readers who came to Doudna’s Wikipedia biography to learn why she was awarded the Nobel Prize might have left with more questions than answers. This work reminds the public of women’s scientific contributions, inspiring new generations to pursue careers in science.

As a leading provider of team collaboration and productivity software, Atlassian believes in collaborating with like-minded organizations to tackle the inequities in STEM. So for their first cohort of Wiki Scientists, they invited their employees, members of 500 Women Scientists, and other experts to work together in our virtual Wikipedia training courses. 

The results speak for themselves. In the 4 months since the course wrapped up, the work participants added to Wikipedia (more than 17K words!) has already reached 170K readers. As Atlassian’s Event Content Operations Manager, Lauryn Yacubich thought the experience would be a great way to expand her skill set while contributing to the common good. She chose to write a biography for Eve Lipchik, an Austrian-American psychologist.

“I always had an interest in psychology and relationship therapy and when I googled her name, I thought she did some significant research that certainly changes the way therapists approach their patients now,” Lauryn reflected. “So I was surprised the biography did not exist. You don’t usually think about Wikipedia lacking in that department but I was glad I was able to contribute something. I wanted to make sure I got her background and her approach to research correct.”

Lauryn said the experience definitely invigorated new aspects of her work. Not only did it give her a chance to expand her copywriting skills, it was also a nice reminder of what drew her to Atlassian’s mission in the first place. 

“In regards to STEM, I never really considered it a part of my job, but I quickly realized that I am part of a much larger movement and the sooner I see my impact, the better I am able to contribute to the industry more.”

She’s also newly inspired to get back into some personal writing and blogging. “I feel refreshed and I also now know where I could potentially put my interest in psychology energy into – updating Wikipedia articles.”

Editing Wikipedia is a powerful, high-impact way to amplify public knowledge, but the barriers to entry into the Wikipedia ecosystem deter many. With hands-on support from Wiki Education’s Wikipedia experts, plus learning together in a cohort, these Atlassian Wiki Scientists were able to reach 170K readers so far with their work. This exposure for women in STEM who didn’t have a Wikipedia biography before could benefit their careers and the field in general.

A Wikipedia biography recognizes a scientist’s contributions in real time. It surfaces her expertise to journalists and panel organizers, humanizes her beyond her CV or university profile, and shows young people interested in STEM what career paths are possible for them. It also does the important work of boosting a scientist’s credibility, changing stereotypes about who gets to be a scientist, and fostering trust in scientific research. 

Together, we can increase public awareness of women in STEM while bringing more diverse voices to the writing of our living history. 

Interested in joining this initiative or starting one of your own? Send an email to partner@wikiedu.org. We’d love to help more companies achieve their missions of elevating women in STEM and other fields through this important work.

By Dr Lucy Hinnie, Resident at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Connected Heritage Project Lead

Since early 2023 I have been working with the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) and GLAM-E Lab in Exeter as their Wikimedian in Residence. These so-called ‘mini’ residencies are a key part of the Connected Heritage project: you can read all about Leah Emary’s experience as Wikimedian in Residence at the Mixed Museum here.

About RAMM and GLAM-E

The RAMM is the largest museum and art gallery in Exeter. It was founded in 1868 and holds over one million items. It was Museum of the Year in 2012. I have been working with Research Assistant Dr Francesca Farmer: Francesca is based within the GLAM-E Lab, part of The Centre for Science, Culture and the Law (SCuLE) at the University of Exeter. We have received support and guidance from Dr Andrea Wallace, Co-Director of the GLAM-E Lab. GLAM-E is ‘a joint initiative between the Centre for Science, Culture and the Law at the University of Exeter and the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law to work with smaller and less well-resourced UK and US cultural institutions and community organizations to build open access capacity and expertise’.

So what have we been doing? Our aim at the outset was for the Residency to scale up current open knowledge practice at RAMM. Dr Richard Nevell, Project Manager, had worked with Dr Wallace previously on the Cast In Stone project, and it was from this collaboration that ideas grew.

Supporting Image Uploads

As part of the Lab’s ongoing work with postgraduate students, earlier this year we supported the upload of a selection of images from the University of Exeter Special Collections. 

They are images from Christopher Saxton‘s 16th century atlas of England and Wales, and are of incredible quality. If you enjoy cartography and/or having a peek at old names for places, these will definitely be of interest to you. You can see the full selection here. If you live in England, you may even be able to spot where you live now.

By integrating these images more widely across Wiki platforms, we have been able to drive more traffic towards Special Collections, and increase viewer numbers.

Upskilling Volunteers

From April 2023, we worked with a group of digital volunteers at the Museum, providing a three-week introductory course to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Volunteers ranged from school leavers to those of retirement age, and had a vast array of experience and interests. Over the course of three weeks, we covered the basics of editing, common questions about Wiki and cultural heritage, and how to plan and formulate impactful edits. This course culminated in an online editing event in May 2023.

We were so taken with the material that we uncovered during this editing session, particularly the work of local historians on Devon Women in Public and Professional Life, 1900–1950: Votes, Voices and Vocations (available via Open Access here) that we have arranged another, larger-scale event in September: Devon in Red!

Devon in Red

Devon in Red is a public facing Wikithon in which authors of Devon Women in Public and Professional Life, 1900–1950: Votes, Voices and Vocations will speak to local volunteers and interested members of the public about their experience of researching this book, with an aim of adding even more information about these exceptional women to Wiki. Many of the women featured in this book do not have their own Wiki pages, and provide fascinating insight into Exeter’s history. 

If you are local to Exeter, you can register for the event here. Please note that some small bursaries are available to enable attendance for those who would otherwise be unable to attend. Please contact us at connectedheritage@wikimedia.org.uk for further information.

Establishing a Legacy

As we move towards the end of the project and the residency, I am working closely with RAMM to develop and circulate materials for volunteers and staff in the future to take charge of their own Wiki training, and to embed digital practice in the Museum going forward. Working with RAMM on this project has been a great pleasure and I am confident that exciting things are on the horizon for both RAMM and GLAM-E in terms of Wiki activity and collection access.

The post Residency at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum appeared first on WMUK.

Sep 14, 12:34 UTC
Resolved - This incident has been resolved.

Sep 14, 12:26 UTC
Monitoring - A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.

Sep 14, 12:17 UTC
Update - We are continuing to investigate this issue.

Sep 14, 12:12 UTC
Investigating - We are currently investigating an issue that is preventing articles to load on the mobile apps.

🕑 21 minutes

Clips from five recent episodes! Danielle Batson thinks about the future of genealogy, Ike Hecht considers the effect of AI on software, Tom Harriman describes the contents of Nuclepedia, Rita Ho praises the Content Translation tool, Allan Lim talks about becoming an amateur archaelogist, and more!

Experts are becoming Wikipedia editors in efforts to put the latest climate research in front of public audiences.

When it comes to experts’ understanding of climate science and the public’s understanding, there are some well-documented differences. American Physical Society members have been closing the gaps with impactful work on Wikipedia. With 18 billion page views per month, Wikipedia content has a proven track record for affecting collective behavior across a wide range of sectors. 

Since 2019, the American Physical Society (APS) has empowered 110 members—from a high school student to a Nobel Prize laureate—to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of physics and physicists. These scientists practice their science communication on a worldwide stage, write biographies of historically excluded physicists, leverage Wikidata—the open data repository behind Wikipedia—and are now correcting content gaps related to climate mitigation.

Dr. Allie Lau, the APS Public Engagement Sr. Programs Manager, has been instrumental in advancing the work.

“APS was excited about a Wikipedia training course focused on energy and climate science as this is an area of importance to the Society and its members,” Dr. Lau shared. 

The virtual courses, seven of them so far including the latest climate-focused iteration, present an opportunity for APS members to connect across disciplines and countries like never before. 

“APS recognizes the serious consequences of climate change and urges physicists to contribute to interdisciplinary climate research collaborations and efforts to design solutions to mitigate the human impact on climate,” Dr. Lau added. “The Society is committed to actions that will reduce greenhouse gas concentration and advocates for research and development of carbon-neutral and carbon-free energy technologies.”

Facilitating this chance for physicists to contribute accurate energy research to the public dialogue has been meaningful for the Society. As their Chief External Affairs Officer, Francis Slakey explains, “The Wiki Scientists course is a great tool for achieving our mission of diffusing the knowledge of physics for the benefit of humanity and amplifying the voice for science.” 

Correcting well-documented knowledge gaps

By adding up-to-date climate research to Wikipedia, APS Wiki Scientists supported by Wiki Education are helping correct the following gaps in public understanding: 

People misunderstand climate science and mitigation. 

The public often cites recycling and limiting trash pollution as the actions they think are most impactful for addressing climate change, whereas climate scientists focus on reducing carbon dioxide emissions on a much larger scale and across all sectors of society. 

Advances in renewable energy production, like solar* and wind, are some such mitigation strategies that physicists improved on Wikipedia as Wiki Scientists. Morgaine Mandigo-Stoba, one of these physicists, expanded the Wikipedia page about thin-film solar cells, which covers a variety of established and developing thin-film photovoltaic technologies for an audience of 5,000 readers every month. She wrote about what these types of solar cells are made out of; how they work; how they’re produced and the costs of production; their advantages over first-generation silicon solar cells (including being cheaper and safer to produce); recent advancements in how efficient they are for electricity production; their durability and lifetime; how widely used they are in new utility development; and their potential role in meeting international renewable energy goals. She even included a diagram of her own design to illustrate a solar cell I-V curve. 

“Adding good data visualizations was really important to me in terms of making this page accessible to a wide audience,” Mandigo-Stoba shared. “Of course, I hope that this exposure can lead to people making more informed energy choices. One thing we talked about in the course is that people can feel a lot of anxiety around taking action against climate change and one way to alleviate that is to simply expose them to possible solutions. I hope that this page can help alleviate some of that worry that people have about finding the ‘perfect’ energy solution and help them feel empowered to explore new green energy technology.”

Another physicist improved the Wikipedia page on wind power, adding the physics at work in the power transfer from wind into energy. This page receives even more readers per month: close to 30,000! 

As Mandigo-Stoba explains, the exercise of writing a Wikipedia page is one of science translation. “Taking a topic that at its core is very technical and making it useful and interesting to a broad audience like this is a really fun challenge,” she shared.

People don’t connect the effects of climate change to their daily lives.

Many researchers have long assumed that the public doesn’t feel the urgency around mitigating climate change that scientists do. But according to new research, 61% of Americans say global climate change is affecting their local community and 70% are alarmed, concerned, or cautious. However, many still struggle to explain the connection between their lived experiences and the science behind global warming. Fewer understand how they can help. 

That’s why adding regional-specific climate information to Wikipedia pages like climate change in Illinois, as one Wiki Scientist did, is so impactful. This page now explains that, because of climate change, Illinois is likely to experience more frequent flooding, harmful algae blooms on Lake Michigan, and higher temperatures that may harm humans and agriculture. The page also illustrates local mitigation efforts, including strategies to reduce the effects of heat islands, as well as information about the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act–a job retraining program for workers impacted by the transition to renewables.

“When I came across this page for the first time, it was in bad shape,” says APS member Maggie Geppert who tackled the updates. “It was a series of long quotes from a single source from 2016, which is not appropriate for a Wikipedia page. I originally thought about simply going back to the original source and rephrasing the quotes. In that sense, my original goal was to make the page better by just bringing it to some baseline standards. However, a topic like climate change really does need current information, and a single seven-year-old article as a source is not nearly enough. I decided to update the information and expand it from projected effects to current actions people in Illinois are taking to mitigate climate change. People need to know that there is political will in the United States to fight climate change. This is not an impossible task. It’s really, really big and really, really hard, but there are people who are willing to take action now. I chose to edit the Climate Change in Illinois page because it’s about where I live. My students will be able to read it and relate to the places and climate conditions it describes.”

Contributing up-to-date information on this topic in particular counteracts much of the popular mis-narratives circulating about climate science. Wikipedia is nicknamed the “last best place on the internet”, after all.

“When it comes to climate change, there is a lot of misinformation on social media,” Geppert added. “Wikipedia stands as a beacon of truth in an area riddled with lies and misrepresentations.”

People struggle to see where they might pursue climate-related work or they may even distrust scientists.

A Wikipedia biography recognizes a scientist’s contributions in real time. It surfaces her expertise to journalists and panel organizers, humanizes her beyond her CV or university profile, and shows young people interested in STEM what career paths are possible for them. It also does the important work of boosting a scientist’s credibility, changing stereotypes about who gets to be a scientist, and fostering trust in scientific research. This visibility is especially important for climate scientists, who–like other scientists in politicized fields–often encounter pushback in the public sector about how they know what they know.

Wiki Scientists in our courses are putting faces to climate work by writing biographies of scientists. The biographies for Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine Hayhoe are much more comprehensive now. And Kate Marvel even has a new photo! Thousands of Wikipedia readers are being exposed to the scientific contributions of these scientists and others like them, every day.

Wiki Education kicked off our 8th APS Wiki Scientists course last week, and participating members will celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month by adding or expanding Wikipedia biographies of Hispanic and Latinx physicists. We’re thrilled at the commitment APS has made toward their mission of providing a welcome and supportive professional home for an active, engaged, and diverse membership, and we look forward to the ongoing work from their dedicated members.

The work lives on.

These are just some of the many examples of helping close the gap between expert and public understanding of climate science.

“Once you get over the fear of editing something which potentially will be read by many people, editing Wikipedia is not that difficult,” one APS Wiki Scientist shared. “Improvements can be made at all levels, from fixing grammar/readability to adding new content. And the benefit is that you are making real contributions to pages that are read by many, helping them make informed perspectives.”

For Geppert, the Wiki Scientists experience was also a new way to interact with her APS membership. “This class was an opportunity for me to mix with physicists in all different places around the world at many different stages in their career,” she added. “It was a lot of fun.”

—

* Links will direct you to Wiki Education’s Dashboard tool, which highlights the parts of Wikipedia articles that scientists in our program are responsible for writing. You also have the option in that window to navigate to the actual Wikipedia article, where you will see the same content. This tool is available to all of Wiki Education’s partners.

Wiki Education is looking to expand its impact on the public’s access to high-quality climate science. If you’re interested in getting involved, visit partner.wikiedu.org to start building your own Wikipedia Initiative with our support.

• Albania report: Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos in Albania and Kosovo
• Argentina report: Highlights on Wikimania 2023
• Armenia report: Wikimedia Armenia GLAM projects in August
• Belgium report: Activities in Belgium September-December 2023
• Brazil report: 4 new GLAM-Wiki partnerships and uploads from several institutions
• Canada report: Wiki-Wednesdays: Digital Literacy for GLAM workers
• Italy report: Summer does not stop the wiki collaborations
• Kosovo report: The Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos in Albania and Kosovo; Wiki Loves Earth in Albania and Kosovo
• New Zealand report: Public sculpture photo trail: documenting Auckland sculptures in Wikidata; Aotearoa’s Wikimedia Laureate
• Poland report: Presentation for school librarians at Wikiteka, Ongoing projects
• Serbia report: A month in the shine of Wikidata and new cooperation
• Sweden report: Showcasing collaboration with the Nordic Museum at Wikimania 2023; Working with Swedish folk high schools
• Switzerland report: Swiss GLAM Programm
• UK report: Islamic art exhibitions and heritage innovation
• USA report: Great North American Wiknic
• AvoinGLAM report: Wikidocumentaries to import images from the web to Structured Data on Commons – a Google Summer of Code project
• Content Partnerships Hub report: Hub updates at Wikimania 2023; Supporting Wiki Loves Monuments teams
• Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: Open call: OpenRefine-Wikimedia train-the-trainer course, November 2023-April 2024
• Wiki Loves Living Heritage report: Looking back, looking ahead
• WREN at Wikimania report: Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network at Wikimania Singapore
• Calendar: September’s GLAM events