Written by Worldsgreatestmum, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.

When I first made a Wikimedia account in late 2023, I created it intending to make articles centred around Māori history. I wanted to do this for multiple reasons, firstly, it was an area in which I was comfortable researching in and creating content for, and I wanted to produce something informative and well-researched, something that I could be proud of. My second motivation was loftier and more emotional, and it is that I wanted history significant to me, my family, and my wider community, to be shared and understood. I wanted people from across the world to learn, and connect, and appreciate the history of Māori people. I wanted to do my small bit in demystifying Indigenous history. I wanted others to know what I knew. I wanted to connect.

The first article I created was for the nineteenth-century chief Tara Te Irirangi, a man based in the East Auckland region and a significant leader across the Auckland landscape during his life. I descend from Tara Te Irirangi. If I were to chart my family tree I believe he would be my great-great-great-great grandfather, with maybe a couple more greats added in. I was excited to begin researching, I wanted to create a good article that would reflect his importance to not only Māori history but New Zealand history more broadly. As I started researching, digging through government reports and transcribed oral submissions, I discovered detailed recollections of histories passed down through generations, minute details about day-to-day occurrences, personality quirks and treasured stories. The stories I found were rich and beautiful, full of strength, sorrow, and joy. As I read, I thought about the information I was reading, and how precious it was. This was not my information to share. Within Te Ao Māori (the Māori world), whakapapa (genealogy) and mātauranga (knowledge) are taonga (treasures), and considered tapu (spiritually and culturally sacred). In accordance with Māori frameworks of knowledge-sharing, each whānau (family), hapū (sub-tribe) and iwi (tribe) has the unalienable right to the protection of these taonga, and therefore this information is not required to be shared, or be open knowledge and accessible to all.

This truth around Māori taonga is in direct conflict with Wikimedia’s mission of developing educational content under a free license, to be disseminated globally and effectively. This truth also directly contradicts the traditions of anthropologists and ethnologists for centuries, where culture, particularly indigenous culture, was something to be dissected and splayed out to view, detailed and sterile. I found myself feeling complicated, frustrated, and uncomfortable. Why did Wikipedia feel entitled to this information? Why would my article be considered less worthy if I withheld these taonga? Why does Wikipedia not understand the cultural context which I am working within? On one level I knew exactly why Wikipedia did not understand my cultural context, as its origins can be traced back to middle-class white-American men of the early 2000s with a passion for technology and a bank account to support it. These origins do not diminish the value of Wikipedia, but understanding the context of its creation was an irritating necessity for me to understand my specific frustrations with it.

Wikimedia as a whole, and Wikipedia specifically, has created the perfect conditions for knowledge-hungry individuals with minimal cultural competency to insert, share, and link as they please, regardless of the desires of the people who are attached to that knowledge. Education is a right, and accessible information is a beautiful and valuable thing, but conversations must be had, and considerations must be made. When writing an article on Wikipedia, or uploading an image on Wikimedia Commons, extra care and thought must be given to not only Māori but all Indigenous items. With pure intentions harm can still be caused, please do not perpetuate the colonial brutality of ethnologists and settlers accidentally. As Wikipedia continues to grow and develop, in not only knowledge, but also inclusivity and representation, Indigenous models of knowledge holding and sharing must be more deeply considered. I hope that he devoted editors of Wikipedia can support this, and as a community and a movement, we can not only share, but treasure and protect the knowledge that is so valuable to us.

Further reading on the topic of Indigenous knowledge and data sovereignty:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_data_governance
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81tauranga_M%C4%81ori

Wikipedia promotes open access knowledge, accessibility, and unbiased information. Gone are the days of Wikipedia being misjudged for incredibility, its reputation now promotes a collaborative community-driven model that provides free knowledge to all. While Wikipedia strives to display unbiased information, bias still exists in what content is and isn’t present on the site. This is reflective of not only what information is favoured on secondary sites but the dominance of Eurocentric knowledge on Wikipedia. This manifests in editing wars where other users promptly delete ‘Aotearoa’ and replace it with just ‘New Zealand’. In order to fill the gaps and diversify the content on Wikipedia, this diversity needs to be reflected in its contributors, users, and engagement. 

Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum’s involvement with Wikimedia projects is long-running and active. Evident in the presence of myself and three other Wikipedia interns, through the Sheldon Werner Summer Studentship Programme, who carried out a 10-week placement as Auckland Museum’s Wikipedians in residence. Joining the Collections Information Access team, alongside project manager James Taylor and fellow Wikipedian in residence Marty Blayney, our current Wikimedia project aims to support the newly introduced Aotearoa New Zealand compulsory history curriculum which focuses on local histories and bigger picture thinking. Our contributions aim to provide resources for teachers and students, to be an accessible starting point to explore the scope of Tāmaki Makaurau’s diverse history. 

Part of the project’s aim was to reframe local histories and encourage people to connect with history in a more dynamic way. Early on in the project, it was identified that it was important to encourage students to develop their own research or history interests and find their own connections with the world around them, outside of an institutional context. I channelled this though first exploring my immediate surroundings in my local suburb of Onehunga. Churches that I walk past every day host points of contact for community members and are a vital part of Onehunga’s heritage. Our Lady of the Assumption Catholic Church in Onehunga is among the oldest churches in Auckland, built between 1887 and 1889. It was once the Catholic parish for early colonial settlers to the area and now hosts a multicultural parish with services in English, Samoan, Tongan, Tamil, Filipino, Rotuman, Slovakian, and Afrikaans.

After exploring my local suburb, I decided to do some research drawing from my arts background. Creating artist profiles and exhibition pages highlighted the lack of representation of New Zealand artists of migrant and Asian descent on Wikipedia. With hopes to carve a space in Wikipedia for diasporic, migrant, and minority people to legitimise the presence of diversity in Tamaki Makaurau. I created biographies for artists such as Sarah Dutt and Mandrika Singh and writer Ghazaleh Golbakhsh.

I soon found myself down a research rabbit hole of early South Asian immigration to Aotearoa. This led me to the story of Phomen Singh (ਫੁੰਮਣ ਸਿੰਘ; 1869/1870 – 27 May 1935), one of New Zealand’s first Indian settlers. Born in the Moga district of Punjab, Singh, along with his brother Bir Singh, arrived in Aotearoa around 1892. Singh found success as a hawker and travelled door to door selling Indian sweets, curries, and chutneys out of a suitcase. He later started a confectionary company, ‘Abraham, Singh and Company, Indian Lolly Manufacturers’ alongside Charlie Abraham, a Muslim man who taught him the trade. Singh’s arrival marked the start of three ripples of Punjabi migration to Aotearoa, prior to the Immigration Restriction Amendment Act of 1920 which mainly targeted Asian immigration.

Singh was not New Zealand’s first Indian migrant however the documentation of his life highlights the triumphs and struggles of many migrants who came after him. Singh encountered racism and violence such as an incident where his turban was torn off, leading him to cut his hair short and no longer wear a turban. The pain of leaving homelands and the reality of migrant assimilation mirrors similar stories of today. My positionality urged me to share these stories, and make them more accessible through Wikipedia so we can collectively celebrate these cultural connections and engage with an often overlooked part of Tāmaki Makraurau and Aotearoa’s cultural heritage.                          

I spoke with you all back in November about what I believe is the most pressing question facing the Wikimedia movement: how do we ensure that Wikipedia and all Wikimedia projects are multigenerational? I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to really consider that question and to respond to me directly, and now that I’ve had the chance to spend some time reflecting on your responses, I’ll share what I’ve learned.

First, there is no single reason volunteers contribute. In order to nurture multiple generations of volunteers, we need to better understand the many reasons people contribute their time to our projects. Next, we need to focus on what sets us apart: our ability to provide trustworthy content as disinformation and misinformation proliferate around the internet and on platforms competing for the attention of new generations. This includes ensuring we achieve the mission to assemble and deliver the sum of all human knowledge to the world by expanding our coverage of missing information, which can be caused by inequity, discrimination or bias. Our content needs to also serve and remain vital in a changing internet driven by artificial intelligence and rich experiences. Lastly we need to find ways to sustainably fund our movement by building a shared strategy for our products and revenue so that we can fund this work for the long term.

These ideas will be reflected in the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2024-2025 annual plan, the first portion of which I’m sharing with you today in the form of draft objectives for our product & technology work. Like with last year, our entire annual plan will be centered around the technology needs of our audiences and platforms, and we’d like your feedback to know if we’re focusing on the right problems. These objectives build off ideas we’ve been hearing from community members over the past several months through Talking:2024, on mailing lists and talk pages, and at community events about our product and technology strategy for the year ahead. You can view the full list of draft objectives on Meta-Wiki.

An “objective” is a high level direction that will shape the product and technology projects we take on for the next fiscal year. They’re intentionally broad, represent the direction of our strategy and, importantly, what challenges we’re proposing to prioritize among the many possible focus areas for the upcoming year. We’re sharing this now so community members can help shape our early-stage thinking and before budgets and measurable targets are committed for the year.

Feedback

One area in which we’d particularly like feedback is our work grouped under the name “Wiki Experiences.” “Wiki Experiences” is about how we efficiently deliver, improve, and innovate how people directly use the wikis, whether as contributors, consumers, or donors. This involves work to support our core technology and capabilities and making sure we can improve the experience of volunteer editors — in particular, editors with extended rights — through better features and tooling, translation services, and platform upgrades.

Here are some reflections from our recent planning discussions, and some questions for all of you to help us refine our ideas:

1. Volunteering on the Wikimedia projects should feel rewarding. We also think that the experience of online collaboration should be a major part of what keeps volunteers coming back. What does it take for volunteers to find editing rewarding, and to work better together to build trustworthy content?
2. The trustworthiness of our content is part of Wikimedia’s unique contribution to the world, and what keeps people coming to our platform and using our content. What can we build that will help grow trustworthy content more quickly, but still within the quality guardrails set by communities on each project?
3. To stay relevant and compete with other large online platforms, Wikimedia needs a new generation of consumers to feel connected to our content. How can we make our content easier to discover and interact with for readers and donors?
4. In an age where online abuse thrives, we need to make sure our communities, platform, and serving system are protected. We also face evolving compliance obligations, where global policymakers look to shape privacy, identity, and information sharing online. What improvements to our abuse fighting capabilities will help us address these challenges?
5. MediaWiki, the software platform and interfaces that allow Wikipedia to function, needs ongoing support for the next decade in order to provide creation, moderation, storage, discovery, and consumption of open, multilingual content at scale. What decisions and platform improvements can we make this year to ensure that MediaWiki is sustainable?

Other languages:

Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English, Ghanaian Pidgin, Tiếng Việt, español, français, norsk bokmål, polski, português, português do Brasil, suomi, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, فارسی, বাংলা, 中文, 日本語

Tech News: 2024-08

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

• If you have the “Email me when a page or a file on my watchlist is changed” option enabled, edits by bot accounts no longer trigger notification emails. Previously, only minor edits would not trigger the notification emails. [1]
• There are changes to how user and site scripts load for Vector 2022 on specific wikis. The changes impacted the following Wikis: all projects with Vector legacy as the default skin, Wikivoyage, and Wikibooks. Other wikis will be affected over the course of the next three months. Gadgets are not impacted. If you have been affected or want to minimize the impact on your project, see this ticket. Please coordinate and take action proactively.
• Newly auto-created accounts (the accounts you get when you visit a new wiki) now have the same local notification preferences as users who freshly register on that wiki. It is effected in four notification types listed in the task’s description.
• The maximum file size when using Upload Wizard is now 5 GiB. [2]

Changes later this week

•  The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 February. It will be on all wikis from 22 February (calendar). [3][4]

•  Selected tools on the grid engine have been stopped as we prepare to shut down the grid on March 14th, 2024. The tool’s code and data have not been deleted. If you are a maintainer and you want your tool re-enabled reach out to the team. Only tools that have asked for extension are still running on the grid.
• The CSS filter property can now be used in HTML style attributes in wikitext. [5]

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

The first ever WikiCamp or Summit for Wikipedia Activism in Peru was celebrated from June 9 to June 11 2023 in the Pachacámac district, south of Lima, organized by WikiAcción Perú (lit. WikiAction Peru). 

This camp was aimed at activists in ecology, gender and culture, who wished to participate or know more about the Wikimedia movement. We received 33 applications and selected twenty people to participate coming from seven Departments: Áncash, Cajamarca, Cusco, Junín, Lambayeque, Lima and Tacna.

The main goal of this summit was to hold space for sharing, learning and exchanging experiences in activism related to ecology, gender and Peruvian culture in Wikimedia platforms. At the same time, we looked forward to hosting people with common interests so that they would forge new links among them as the foundation of a larger sense of community and collective action.

The calling was focused mostly to volunteers living in Peru who had contributed on Wikimedia platforms, previous participants of WikiAcción Peru and activists in ecology, gender and culture who demonstrated interest in the Wikimedia movement. The group of twenty people selected came from a variety of professional experiences, and were—for the most part—young people who also were part of other citizen collectives and non-profit organizations..

THE PROGRAMME

This community meeting took part over three continuous days, during which we had thematic lectures, workshops, an editathon and several assorted group dynamics to share our experiences towards strengthening the work of other Peruvian activists in ecology, gender and culture through the Wikimedia projects (mostly Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons).

We want to make particular mention of three keynote speakers on transversal topics to the Wikimedia movement. These were Karina Castro, speaking about the environmental work of CooperAcción; Zoila Antonio and Emma Ramos, speaking on the work of La Antígona (lit. Antigone), an independent feminist media outlet; and Allison Peralta, speaking about the intercultural focus of the work done at the Ministry of Culture.

Also during the event, there was an editathon focused on making significant changes to 8 articles in the Spanish Wikipedia: the PIACI Act, the biography of Rosa Cerna Guardia, the Mashco piro people, the Manu National Park, the article on Tropical glaciers, the documentary Tambogrande: Mangos, Muerte, Minería (lit. Tambogrande: Mangoes, Death and Mining), the article about theParanapura river, and the biography of Teresa Gonzales de Fanning.

We had a workshop on «How to host Wikimedia activities», participants learned the basic notions on how to design cultural projects, the principles of the Wikimedia movement and an overview of the funding programs given by the Wikimedia Foundation. 

During the Strategic Planning workshop, people worked on generating ideas surrounding the existing ecology, gender, and Peruvian culture gaps in the Wikimedia projects, and there were 68 main subjects identified. Moreover, more ideas and testimonies were gathered throughout the event in order to improve the strategic planning of WikiAcción Peru.

The diversity of participants’ professional paths, interests and their openness to dialogue allowed everyone to share in a rich, deep discussion, able to hold many different perspectives: the perspectives of their respective regions, local problems on government and legislation, citizen incidence to obtain and use data, and approaches by artist-activists.

All of these activities allowed us to better know the profiles of the participants, as well as their needs as activists. At the end of the event, we identified a few common themes and motivations to contribute to the Wikimedia projects:

• Being a Wikipedian means encouraging free knowledge and setting in action strategies to strengthen local communities,
• To safeguard knowledge through credible sources, aiming for neutrality, using simple, understandable language.
• Rethinking knowledge and exploring ways of recovering ancestral knowledge to be uploaded and shared on Wikipedia, while acknowledging authorship.
• To acknowledge the need of high-quality photographs to improve contributions.

METHODOLOGY

We had support from an facilitation team external to WikiAcción, who were also in charge of documenting and reporting the event. Our methodology focused on mixing moments of formation, dialogue, editing, group dynamics, as well as the inclusion of Andean and Amazonian traditions such as an Opening offering, using illustrations of Guamán Poma de Ayala, the coca leaf and pututu [playing]. 

In the Final Report you can find detailed chronicles of every activity we had, comments from participants, links to key documents and other related content.

LEARNINGS FROM THIS FIRST SUMMIT

1. Inclusion and democratization of knowledge: this WikiCamp emphasizes the importance of being inclusive and national in future callings, allowing for people from different regions and diverse experiences take part in creating knowledge in Wikipedia. This focus may inspire other communities to open their doors to a wider range of collaborators, as well as working for the democratization of information.
2. Awareness on access gaps: It is essential to recognize several gaps: of information access, of connectivity, of mobile devices in certain regions. Bearing this in mind means we need to learn to not presume good access to technology and information across the country, and highlights the importance of spreading this knowledge and activism to rural, impoverished areas where these gaps are greater. 
3. Focusing on community collaboration: The group of activists at this WikiCamp acknowledges the need to collaborate and share knowledge in benefit of the community as a whole. This may inspire other Wikipedians to work together to improve the quality and relevance of new and existing contents in Wikipedia.
4. Interconnectedness of subjects: We reached a common understanding of the ways in which ecology, gender and culture are connected between them, as well as the importance of treating their issues in an integrated manner in Wikipedia. This may help promote a more complete, more accurate narrative in all articles related to these subjects, as well as raising awareness on these interactions.
5. Skill development: The development of courses, workshops, and practical activities such as photo-walks and editathons, must always be focused on developing skills in editing, writing, photography and other key aspects of contribution to Wikipedia.
6. These learnings may serve as guide for other activist communities who wish to improve and strengthen their participation in Wikipedia and face critical subjects such as ecology, gender and culture in a Peruvian context and beyond. Interest in these axes of action is demonstrably there, which further encourages us to continue working in our commitment to improve Wikipedia and democratize access to knowledge in Peru.

These learnings may serve as guide for other activist communities who wish to improve and strengthen their participation in Wikipedia and face critical subjects such as ecology, gender and culture in a Peruvian context and beyond. Interest in these axes of action is demonstrably there, which further encourages us to continue working in our commitment to improve Wikipedia and democratize access to knowledge in Peru.

IMAGE GALLERY

Learning is a journey. Currently, Wikipedia is a great resource to support you in your learning journey. In this exploration, I illustrated how Wikipedia could support people through more parts of this journey.

The ideas presented in the video below were discussed and prototyped in unconference sessions at two consecutive recent events in Nairobi and San Francisco (and some airports in between).

Some key ideas illustrated in the video are detailed below:

• Responding to different learning needs. Different people at different moments may follow a different learning process. From looking for a specific answer on Wikipedia, to getting immersed into the story from beginning to end (possibly with some rabbit holes in between).
• Smaller and richer knowledge units. We can think of a Wikipedia article as an assembly of smaller information pieces that can be accessed and manipulated both as a whole or independently. This notion provides flexibility to support new possibilities. A visual overview can be provided with key information about the topic in a way that individuals and communities can customize it. For example, an individual can include an interactive map as they explore multiple articles on animals to understand their habitat. This can be useful for that user or proposed to be part of the default view of the article.
• Explore and collect. Keeping all the great things people learned from Wikipedia at hand can be quite powerful to build a “second brain”. Not only to find them again, but also to keep track of updates, and contextualize them. Putting information in context helps to build an understanding. The elevation of Nairobi is just a number, comparing it to other cities of Kenya or your own city helps you to get a better idea.
• Remix and share with traceability. Relevant pieces of knowledge can be reassembled by people for different purposes: a slide deck for school, a video for social media, an interactive graph to be embedded on a news site. This helps Wikipedia knowledge to reach where people are. More importantly, contents can be connected with the original pieces of information. In this way, people can verify where the information comes from, and check any updates or inconsistencies in the future.
• Support active readers. Providing ways for readers to participate more blurs the lines between readers and editors. Active readers can participate in collecting the information they are interested in, following the updates on such information, and providing useful signals. Some example signals: indicate that they learned something new to surface a particularly relevant piece of information, flag content that lacks references (“citation needed”) to signal it may not be trustworthy, or propose possible changes as a lower bar into editing. This can be useful to distribute a bit of the load from editors to the larger reader group, as well as making readers more aware and familiar with participation to encourage them to try more active editing too.

The way the ideas are presented in the video is one possible way to execute the ideas for illustration purposes. With a quick prototype that skips over many details. This is not part of any ongoing project. The intention is to inspire others.

Leveraging the Wikidata knowledge graph with LangChain

With the growing popularity of large-language models (LLMs), researchers and hobbyists have been quick to tap into the power of Wikimedia projects using a new tool: generative artificial intelligence. In 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation launched the Wikipedia ChatGPT plugin, which lets ChatGPT use Wikipedia as a reference library to help answer questions. But until recently, no similar project has made use of Wikidata, whose wealth of structured information should be, if anything, easier for machines to process.

Now it’s Wikidata’s turn to be served by a new generative-AI platform: the recently launched LangChain offers support for interfacing Wikidata with LLMs. LangChain is an open-source framework for constructing applications that draw on LLM backends, allowing developers to hook LLMs of all kinds, including open-source models, into various tools, including Wikidata. Once integrated, these models gain the ability to retrieve data or even take actions.

With this new support, users can ask ChatGPT a question and have it reference data from the Wikidata knowledge graph before responding. For example, ChatGPT was given access to the new Wikidata tool, then given the following prompt:

Using just information found in Wikidata, answer this question: the author of the book I Am a Strange Loop attended two universities. Which is the older one?

Using Wikidata, ChatGPT performed a lookup of I Am a Strange Loop, its author and his alma maters and provided this answer:

The author of the book I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter, attended both Stanford University and the University of Oregon. Stanford University was founded in 1885, while the University of Oregon was founded in 1876. Therefore, the University of Oregon is the older of the two universities.

Data-driven results like this one contrast sharply with much of the LLM output seen in popular culture and media in recent months, which often contains “hallucinations”: responses that read as plausible but don’t line up with real-world facts or the user’s own input, and in some cases not even with assertions made within the same response. Results also tend to vary over time, even when the facts in question haven’t changed a bit. 

If a user asks ChatGPT the aforementioned question without giving it access to Wikidata, it often provides an answer that is not only wrong but somewhat disorienting: “Stanford University… was founded in 1885, while the University of Oregon was founded later, in 1876.” On the other hand, if ChatGPT has access to the aforementioned English Wikipedia tool, it gives no answer at all, owing to the fact that the relevant information doesn’t happen to appear in the first few paragraphs of the Wikipedia articles.

LangChain’s integration with Wikidata’s stockpile of thousands of properties and millions of items relies on the recently released Wikidata REST API, which smooths the way for applications to obtain information from Wikidata.

Support for Wikidata in LangChain is in its infancy, and there’s plenty of room and opportunity to obtain even more value from the platform using artificial intelligence. Eventually we may live in a world where an LLM can answer incredibly complicated questions by running SPARQL queries against Wikidata and interpreting the results.

We want to use this post to talk about Comunicar Diversidad (Communicating Diversity), a Wikimedia Argentina project looking to connect the worlds of Journalism and the Wikimedia movement. While it might sound like a simple goal, once the project started taking form we had to face and reflect on a few situations that we’d like to share from Wikimedia Argentina.

In 2023 we celebrated the second edition of Comunicar Diversidad, and the third one is coming up, working along with Periodicas Santa Fe and La Nota Tucumán (local media outlets in Argentina). This is in essence, a workshop aimed at journalists and small media outlets, in which we share tools to improve the usage of Wikimedia platforms in their journalistic practice. What we set as our goal was to forge links between collaborative projects.It is in that sense that, besides teaching how to use Wiki tools for journalists, we also discussed with assistant on how their journalistic products can aid in improving contents across Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, particularly when it comes to gender-, sexuality- and geographical gaps in the Wikimedia universe and the internet at large.

In 2023 we hosted 35 people in this workshop. At the end of it, participants can apply for funding on particular projects. This year, we selected 4 projects to fund: Historical Reparations for Argentinian transvestite-trans people, by Pilar Cabrera;, Pride dances huaynos and carnavalitos, by Gastón Wahnish and Anuka Fuks (LatFem), Adapted sports: revelation of Argentinian athletes’ profiles, by Melisa Gabbanelli; and LGBTT+ Icons in Argentina, by Valeria Tellechea and Sofía Espul (Furias magazine). These projects had 4 analogues who donated over 30 high-quality images of underrepresented Argentinian communities to Wikimedia Commons.

We focused on the LGBT+ community from a historical and geographical perspective. We also worked alongside leading Argentinian athletes with disabilities. Last but not least, these projects produced over 15 journalistic articles and interviews so that the memories of these communities would be preserved, both in the past—through the recovery of figures and processes—as well as to the future, building what we like to call the “archive of the future”.

Third  Plurinational Pride March at Cafayate. Author: Dafna Marina Alfie. CC-BY-SA. Available on Wikimedia Commons.

Archives of the Future to democratize information access

With Comunicar Diversidad, we wanted to start building an “archive of the Future” of the underrepresented communities of our country. This idea, borrowed from Periódicas—a collective of feminist journalists—is our way of rethinking how we build knowledge. At Periódicas, they suggest traditional journalism to dispense with the “what is news” logic and use their time to build profiles and articles on relevant people and significant events for the underrepresented communities, to begin the narratives of that which we will see in the future as an archive. To us, this proposal seems helpful when creating strategies to reduce gender-, sexuality- and geographical gaps in Wikimedia.

Marlene Wayar. Author: Valeria Tellechea. CC-BY-SA. Available on Wikimedia Commons.

While we’re still learning how to build Archives of the Future, we’re also recovering those memories and stories that hadn’t been properly told before. It’s all about bringing attention to the silences surrounding underrepresented communities and building alliances to recover those stories. These are only a few of the results created while working with journalists and small media outlets in 2023:

• El orgullo de ser indígena y LGBT+ (The Pride of being Indigenous and LGBT+): chronicles the Third Plurinational Pride March of Valles Calchaquíes, Salta, Argentina. Written by Anuka Fuks, Gastón Wahnish, and Milagro Mariona for LatFem.
• Reparación travesti trans en Argentina: logros y testimonios de sobrevivientes (Transvestite-Trans Reparation in Argentina: accomplishments and testimony of survivors): chronicles the struggles when trying to create an Economic Reparation Act for trans- and transvestite people who lived through the last military dictatorship in Argentina, as well as the first years of democracy. Written by Pilar Cabrera for Agencia Presentes.
• Seguir siendo una en muchas (Continuing to be one in many): Interview with and profile of Mónica Santino, leading football player in Argentina. Written by Nadia Beherens for Revista Furias.

Comunicar Diversidad will come back in April 2024 and it’s aimed at journalists and small media outlets in Argentina. If you’re interested in participating, please write an email to comunidad@wikimedia.org.ar

08/02/2024-14/02/2024

Breaking news

• The OpenStreetMap Engineering Working Group announced that 2024 will be the year of the OpenStreetMap vector map and that Paul Norman has been hired to work on the project. Vector tiles represent a significant advancement from the traditional raster tiles (static images). It will be possible to offer multilingual maps, interactive points of interest, more accessible maps for vision-impaired users, thematic styles, and better integration with other datasets.

Mapping

• Valerie Norton wondered how to map a mountain whose peak has a different name than the mountain itself. There are various solutions in use today and she described and justified the use of several of them.

Mapping campaigns

• OpenStreetMap Bengaluru, India will be hosting a mapping party event on Saturday 24 February.

Community

• Anne-Karoline Distel shared her experiences of mapping while on holiday in Malta.
• The question we asked last week as to whether this node was the one with the most tags, prompted Minh Nguyễn to provide an instructive reply. He showed how the SPARQL engine QLever, written by Hannah Bast and others and hosted by the University of Freiburg, can be used to easily determine the top ten most heavily tagged nodes in OSM.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Arnalie Vicario reviewed the accomplishments of her tenure as a board member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation in 2023 and also outlined her future plans for 2024.

Education

• Raquel Dezidério Souto has created a workflow for beginner mappers to map POI data in OSM and display the results dynamically using uMap.
• To find out more about the interest in possible training from the UN Mappers Validation Group and about the validation practices of the global OSM community in general, the UN Maps crowdsourcing team conducted a survey (we reported earlier). The first results have been presented graphically.
• UMBRAOSM reported that there will be a free 60 hour mapping and geoprocessing online course using QGIS , as an extension project of the Geography Course at UNESPAR (State University of Paraná).

OSM research

• The Instituto Virtual para o Desenvolvimento Sustentável is developing ► a collaborative mapping platform to help reduce the effect of disasters in the Municipality of Maricá (Brazil). The research is explained in Raquel Dezidério Souto’s diary entry.

Programming

• The OpenStreetMap Operations team announced that OAuth 1.0a and HTTP basic authentication support for the OpenStreetMap website and API will be retired on Saturday 1 June. Users of these services are required to migrate to OAuth 2.0.

Releases

• [1] MapComplete has released a thematic ski map that features a 3D visualisation of terrain contours. Thibault Molleman’s comment explains how to get the 3D view.
• Osm2pgsql version 1.11.0 has been released.

Did you know …

• … that you can explore visualisations of changes made to OpenStreetMap during the past 30 days?
• … OpenStreetMap has implemented a rate limiting policy to address the issue of vandalism?
• … these independent, non-commercial ‘wiki maps‘ ►, based on OSM, that Aliya Kutueva lists in her blog post?
  • nearbywiki
  • wiki-atlas
  • wikimap.wiki
  • geopedia

Other “geo” things

• The Federal Office of Topography of Switzerland (Swisstopo) has recently updated its freely available app. Since the update, the app now has a base map. This base map is a continuously scalable map display, optimised for readability and smartphone use, with lots of information and real-time data from various sources (including OSM). The Swisstopo app has maps for Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
• Alan McConchie tooted a linguistic map of North American English dialects.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
	OSMF Membership Drive – 2nd Volunteers Meetup		2024-02-17
Chanakya Puri Tehsil	5th OSM Delhi Mapping Party		2024-02-18
Hlavní město Praha	Missing Maps mapathon at MSF Prague office		2024-02-19
Görlitz	1. Stammtisch Görlitz		2024-02-19
Lyon	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon		2024-02-20
Bonn	172. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn		2024-02-20
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-02-21
City of Edinburgh	OSM Edinburgh pub meetup		2024-02-20
	[Online] Map-py Wednesday		2024-02-21
Berlin	Geomob Berlin		2024-02-21
Windsor	OSM WINDSOR-ESSEX: MAP NIGHT		2024-02-22
	MapComplete Community Call 2024-01		2024-02-23
Localidad Teusaquillo	OpenBeer Bogotá 2024		2024-02-24
Bengaluru	OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party		2024-02-24
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend February 2024		2024-02-24 – 2024-02-25
Saint-Étienne	Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire		2024-02-27
	iD Community Chat		2024-02-28
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)		2024-02-28
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2024-02-29
Žilina	Missing Maps Mapathon Žilina #12		2024-02-29
Localidad Teusaquillo	OpenDataDay Bogotá 2024 – Capturando datos de arbolado urbano		2024-03-02

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

Anthony G. Kafatos is a co-author on many papers that are part of the "Seven Countries Study". When you want to know about the many papers he was involved in, it helps when they are all linked. The papers known at Wikidata are linked to his item. When papers are still known as a string, an "author name string", they are hard to spot AND they may be spelled differently AND even be in a different script.

Anthony was also spelled as Antony.. Both work in the same department at the same University making it safe to consider them the same. Someone has to decide, this time it was me. That is not great because what do I know. One alternative is that nothing gets decided but it is much better when scientists themselves are involved.

Data is an ecosystem. Best is when any and all scientists have one ORCiD identifier and authorise the institutions they trust to update their profile with their latest and greatest work. This has profound implications. This data will now be available for many applications including Wikidata. It will become easier to understand what the neutral point of view on a subject is.

This is the Scholia for Mr Kafatos. At this time there are 18 links to papers on the "Seven Nations Study", four more than for Mr Ancel Keys the architect of the study. 

Thanks, GerardM

The lumberjacks in Karelia Finland got all the physical activity you can expect for lumberjacks, they looked the part and they died in droves before their fifties. This was as well known in the world of health scientists as well as the fact that in Japan people had the least problems with heart failure. Epidemiologists started one of the most famous studies, the "Seven Countries Study" to learn about these phenomenon. The Karelians ate a lot of meat and butter, this caused arthrosclerosis and it was identified as the cause of all these early demises. 

The Finish government wanted this to change, the lumberjacks loved their meat but their wives loved their hubbies more and they started them on a different diet. The government did a double blind research project and the fine Karelian gentlemen started to outperform their fellow Fins... As a consequence the Finnish government promoted healthy food to all Fins.

In Wikidata we have MANY scientific publications with "Seven Countries Study" in the name of the publications. With more than 100 such publications tagged, many authors, publications and subjects have become apparent. This can be seen in the Scholia for the Seven Countries Study. Statistically it is likely that when another 100 publications are added, the patterns found may slightly differ. Additional authors may be represented but the relative weight of existing authors is likely to remain the same. 

Ancel Keys is the architect of the Seven Countries Study, he authored both papers and books with many publications and publishers and he collaborated with many of the most prominent scientists in his time. The results of all these published studies are profound and not only for the Karelian lumberjacks. Not everybody is happy with the results. Influencers have us believe that Mr Keys misrepresented the facts of the study. However, when you look at the co-author graph, Mr Keys is not really central to all the collaborations. It is also obvious that there were many different publishers involved. 

The meat of the matter is obvious. Don't be a Karelian of centuries past, be smart, be there for your nearest and dearest and understand that a traditional Japanese diet or the Mediterranean diet gives you more mileage. The Seven Countries Study had a run for over fifty years, it knows about what people ate and the mortality that is the consequence of their diet. You can ignore this at your own peril :)

Thanks, GerardM

In the “Wikimedia World” series, I curate various archives of the Wikimedia Movement. I hope it will encourage Wikimedians to know more about the movement around the world, to compare other Wikimedians’ activities to their own, and to create archives of their experiences.

Africa Day Campaign 2023

Africa Day Campaign 2023 is an online campaign which aims to improve the representation of Africa on Wikimedia projects. Under the theme “Africa Continental Free Trade,” African Wikimedians hosted various events.

For example, teachers in Abuja, Nigeria held an in-person editathon on 2nd June 2023 where they translated various Wikipedia articles and improved Wikidata items. The outcomes are beautifully listed up on MetaWiki [[Africa Day 2023: Teachers celebrating Africa]]. This activity was also introduced on Education News on Metawiki.

The Africa Day Campaign also covered other Wikimedia projects; Wikimedians in Kenya implemented a Wikiquote-focused campaign. Let’s take a look at MetaWiki [[Wikimedia Community User Group Kenya/Project/ African Day Campaign in Kenya 2023]] which introduces the voices of the participants.

I was honoured to be one of the facilitators of the Africa Day Campaign,Wikiquotes. I have improved on both my leeadership and editing skills.We had successful trainings and edit-a-thons which were educative and insightful thanks toour project manager Ms Carol Mwaura. I am super excited to continue editing and creating more articles on Wikiquotes. Ann Wavinya

MetaWiki [[Wikimedia Community User Group Kenya/Project/ African Day Campaign in Kenya 2023]] 13:05, 4 August 2023‎ (UTC)

Some organizations produced very detailed reports. For instance, Wikimedians in Rwanda collected the results of their project on outreach dashboard and created a financial report on MetaWiki [[Africa Day Campaign 2023 in Rwanda]]. Those reports will become good guides for Wikimedians who want to hold similar Wikimedia events.

Other African Wikimedians and organizations also participated in the campaign. Details can be seen on MetaWiki [[Category:Africa Day Campaign 2023]].

Student Wikimedian Clubs in Turkey

As of January 2024, there are four student Wikimedian clubs in Turkey; Üsküdar University Wikipedia Student Club, Istanbul Bilgi University Wikipedia Student Club, METU Northern Cyprus Campus Wikipedia Society, and Istanbul Medipol University Wikipedia Student Club.

The students have done various works. For example, from October 20 to 23, they got together at The Turkic Wikimedians Conference 2023 and shared their experiences.

Turkic Wikimedians are Growing Their Magic Superpowers

Another example is the CEE Youth Group Prague Meeting 2023. At that meeting, Caner (User:Kurmanbek), a member of Istanbul Bilgi University Wikipedia Student Club shared the activities with the young Wikimedians from CEE region (CEE means Central and Eastern Europe). Caner reported the session on Diff.

At a dinner where all the participants met after the play, I told the people around me about our activities such as the student clubs project in Türkiye and listened to them about the activities in their own countries. I also stated that we could collaborate between communities on student clubs and youth projects.

Kurmanbek (29 November 2023) “My CEE Youth Group Prague Meeting 2023 notes” Diff.

My CEE Youth Group Prague Meeting 2023 notes

They also interact with Wikimedians who live far away from Turkey. Istanbul Bilgi University Wikipedia Student Club became a sister club with Student Wikipedian Community in Waseda University Tokyo under the Wikimedia Japan-Türkiye Friendship project and held a Japan-themed editathon in Istanbul!

Japan-themed edit-a-thon was held in Türkiye, hosted by BİLGİ Wikipedia Student Club

Information about the clubs is summarized on MetaWiki [[Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey/Student Clubs]].

Wikipedia Kites in Bangladesh

14th January is a traditional day for people in Dhaka, Bangladesh to fly kites (Shakrain festival) . The 2011 report of Wikimedia Bangladesh tells us that Wikimedians in Dhaka enjoyed to fly Wikipedia-kites!

More photos can be seen on Wikimedia Commons [[Category:Kite flying for Wikipedia]].

Have you ever wondered about the legal rules for hosting a website like Wikipedia? Did you know just before 2020, governments all over the world started updating the rules for hosting websites? If you’d like to learn more about what’s been happening with the legal rules around the world for keeping a large website up and running, I’ve released an essay on the topic: A changing legal world for free knowledge.

Website hosting is important for the Wikimedia movement because we’re a movement centered around an online project: Wikipedia. With millions of articles all written by volunteers, Wikipedia is as complex as it is unique. Hosting provides the baseline for this work because the website doesn’t function without the technology backend to handle all the billions of visitors. In many ways, hosting a website is somewhere in between curating one of the world’s largest libraries and running a restaurant so large that you can’t see everyone in it. This library-restaurant is full of stuff and people talking, and your job is to make sure the space is nice and organized for everyone. You must make sure things aren’t filed in the wrong places, and that nobody is so mad that they’re flinging the chairs around and making it impossible for everyone else to work and enjoy their time there. If that was not already a lot, the rules are shifting.

More and more of the world has shifted to having a life online, and there have been new and different problems that have led governments to changing the rules. For years, hosting a website for users was relatively passive as long as you handled copyright and very rare criminal issues appropriately. However, that has really started to change. Today, more and more countries around the world are asserting laws which apply broadly to websites accessible in that country, and the rules have expanded to include not only copyright but privacy and data protection for both the subjects being discussed online and the technology that makes the systems function. Moreover, many countries (both democratic and authoritarian) have increasingly been expanding efforts to censor online content in the name of public order. 

The essay covers three areas in detail. The first is how more countries are deciding their laws apply to different websites and actually exerting their power to do so. The second is about some of the new areas of law affecting what content can be hosted on a website. And the last is about the more proactive legal work that now goes into technology and product design to comply with the myriad of new laws in place.

I hope you find this an interesting read and that it’s helpful for understanding the work that goes into keeping a website like Wikipedia online. If you’d like to learn more about the laws affecting the projects, our wikilegal space on Meta-wiki includes a number of different posts and short research articles over the last decade about specific areas of law that can be useful for online communities.

Charles Darwin coined the term “warm little pond” to describe the potential origin of life. But the idea lacked a Wikipedia article until Ula Jones created it this fall as part of a class assignment to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of the origin of life.

Ula is a first-year graduate student in earth and space sciences and astrobiology at the University of Washington. Her astrobiology professor, David Catling, assigned Ula and her classmates to edit Wikipedia as part of the class through Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program this fall.

“I wanted to write about the warm little pond (WLP) hypothesis for this project both because geologic settings for the origin of life are relevant to my scientific background and research, and I was interested in the opportunity to synthesize the interdisciplinary links between chemistry, geology, and biology that underlie the topic,” Ula says.

Ula admits she was intimidated by the idea of writing for Wikipedia at first. But once she dove into the project, she got more excited.

“I eventually came to particularly like the idea of making my own work publicly available, as well as being able to read other students’ work and learn about those subjects,” she says. “Scientific literacy and communication are important to me. Since most people get their information online today, I was happy to have an opportunity to help expand access to discussions of recent research in a place where a lot of people might come across it.”

Ula says in choosing her topic, she engaged with both modern research that was directly relevant to class readings and sources that revealed historical context. Her research led her to learn more about Charles Darwin, Alexander Oparin, and John Haldane’s works, lives, and beliefs.

“This was pretty neat, because historical background seems to often be brushed over when learning and communicating science. However, in this case it was necessary to present the whole context of the WLP hypothesis,” she explains.

While Ula has written many papers before, one thing she found particularly meaningful from learning to write for Wikipedia was the emphasis on citations.

“My favorite part about writing for Wikipedia was probably learning and applying good citation practices and reference management. While I had some knowledge about this already, the specific examples of best practices and ways to avoid unintentional plagiarism in the training were particularly useful,” she says of the online modules provided by Wiki Education. “It’s also pretty cool and unique to be able to share some of my classwork with friends and family just by sending them the link or telling them the phrase to look up.”

She found the experience valuable both for her current role as a student as well as her future career path. Science communication skills are core to any modern scientist, and this assignment helped her generate those.

“I would like to work as a professor someday, which involves educating students and typically public talks or outreach as well to some degree. In both cases it is important to be able to express and present scientific information in an accessible way. Because of this, the opportunity to practice scientific communication by writing for Wikipedia was valuable,” Ula says. “The assignment was both a great way of furthering my own understanding of what we covered in class, as well as expanding access to information about an important topic in origin of life research. I would be happy to contribute more to Wikipedia in future classes.”

Wiki Education’s support for instructors who want to with Wikipedia — including the trainings Ula highlights — are available at teach.wikiedu.org. Our support for STEM classes like Ula’s is available thanks to the Guru Krupa Foundation.

If I’m going to buy a cheap Chinese product, why not get it for a fraction of Amazon’s cost? That’s the thought motivating my shopping at Temu, a Chinese-backed competitor to Amazon.

For example, this dog jacket costs $25.99 on Amazon but $9.89 on Temu. It can be challenging to find the corresponding items across the websites, but it is possible – reverse image searching can be helpful.

Why would I want to see Amazon’s reviews for a product I found on Temu? I’m even more suspicious of Temu’s reviews than Amazon’s. Consider the dog jacket, which I found on Temu with 126 reviews and 4.8 stars. On Amazon, the jacket has 9 reviews with 4.9 stars. On Amazon, more reviews typically increase my confidence in their average, as does varied prose, pictures, reviewers’ history, and verified purchases. (Though none of this guarantees a review is genuine.) This diversity of signaling is not present on Temu, which often has 10-to-100 times more reviews than Amazon, almost all of which are five-star one-liners.

In fact, the five-star glut on Temu made me wonder if it was even possible to leave a negative review. (On Amazon, I’ve had merchants challenge and remove my reviews under bogus rationalizations.) I recently left two negative reviews of products on Temu and was curious to see if they showed up; they just did.

I gave two stars to this bathroom mat. Of the 329 textual reviews I can see (though there are supposed to be 58,356 item reviews), that’s a first. Aside from a few 4 stars, all the reviewers gave the product five stars. That’s hard to believe. Similarly, for these ear muffs, I can see 190 of the textual reviews (out of the 349 item reviews), the vast majority of which are 5 stars. There are some critical reviews, but they are only viewable at the bottom of a near-infinite scroll. I can’t figure out how the reviews are ordered, but it is not by date and positive reviews are obviously favored.

My conclusion, therefore, is that Temu will accept a critical review. But the reviews are worthless. By commission or omission, the platform is overrun with useless 5-star reviews.

Other languages:

Bahasa Indonesia, Cebuano, Deutsch, English, Ghanaian Pidgin, Nederlands, Tiếng Việt, español, français, italiano, norsk bokmål, polski, português, português do Brasil, suomi, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, فارسی, বাংলা, 中文

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

• The WDQS Graph Split experiment is working and loaded onto 3 test servers. The team in charge is testing the split’s impact and requires feedback from WDQS users through the UI or programmatically in different channels. [1][2][3] Users’ feedback will validate the impact of various use cases and workflows around the Wikidata Query service. [4][5]

Problems

• There was a bug that affected the appearance of visited links when using mobile device to access wiki sites. It made the links appear black; this issue is fixed.

Changes later this week

•  The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 13 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 14 February. It will be on all wikis from 15 February (calendar). [6][7]
•  As work continues on the grid engine deprecation,[8] tools on the grid engine will be stopped starting on February 14th, 2024. If you have tools actively migrating you can ask for an extension so they are not stopped. [9]

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

Dear community, we have prepared some exciting news for you!
The Wiki Loves Earth 2024 is on its way!

What is this contest about?

Wiki Loves Earth is an annual international photographic competition. Participants take pictures of local natural heritage in their countries and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. For all participating countries, there are separate competitions organized by local teams.
For more information, follow our page!

When? 

This year, WLE also will take place between the 1st of May and the 31st of July. We have a flexible approach regarding local dates, and local organizers decide when exactly to hold their contest within the international timeframe.

How can you join the contest this year as an organizer?

For that, you need:

• Team of volunteers with clear roles and timelines;
• Defining eligible natural sites (must be officially protected);
• Preparing a landing page for the local contest;
• Promotion for the contest in social networks;
• Jury to evaluate the photos (select top-15 local winners for an international contest);
• Awards for your winners.

Find out more about the process in our detailed guidelines for the local teams.

And if you want to upload your photos and become a participant, check out all the details in the rules.

This year, we also continue to raise awareness about environmental problems so that we will launch our special nomination “Human Rights and Environment” for the 4th time.

And one more new special nomination, which can represent natural heritage in a wider way!
Stay tuned for the announcements soon!

Follow our channels for local organizers to receive the most important information:

• Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/wlecommunity/
• Telegram chat: https://t.me/+jtPfBWQVCGkzMmIy
• A mailing list for local organizers: wikilovesearth@lists.wikimedia.org

Also, subscribe on our social media channels to be first updated about the main news:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wikilovesearth/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/interwle
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/WikiLovesEarth
• Website: https://wikilovesearth.org/

If you have any questions, please contact the international team at wle-team@wikimedia.org.ua

Stay tuned for the Wiki Loves Earth 2024, and don’t hesitate to participate!

*Find translations here*

🕑 1 hour 9 minutes

Guillaume Coulombe is the head of Procédurable, a process consulting company with a focus on open source software and open data, and an even more specific focus on MediaWiki.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Procédurable
• Arbre-Évolution Coop
• "Understanding wiki collaboration in Quebec healthcare organizations" (2012 paper by Régis Barondeau)
• Wiki maraîcher
  • "Autoconstruction" (DIY) portal
• Fab Labs Québec
• Le violon de Jos
  • Collection of songs

The University of Exeter’s GLAM-E Lab and Wikimedia UK are pleased to announce the continuation of our partnership into 2024. Following on from the success of the Connected Heritage project (2021–23) and the Wikimedian Residency at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), we’re looking forward to another year of enriching the Wikimedia projects with knowledge and images from cultural collections.

Dr Lucy Hinnie, who has been the Wikimedian in Residence at RAMM, will take on the role of Digital Research Fellow, expanding her support to organisations in the South West to develop local open access activities, networks and programming. Together with the GLAM-E Lab, Wikimedia UK will support smaller organisations to publish their out-of-copyright collections to Wikimedia Commons. Data aggregators using Wikimedia’s open API will identify and ingest these newly openly-licensed collections.

In 2023, Lucy worked with the GLAM-E Lab and RAMM in the development of digital volunteer training and in-person Wiki events. You can read more about this residency and the GLAM-E Lab in this post, and see some of the images that were made available through the residency on Wikimedia Commons. This follow-on work at GLAM-E has two clear objectives. First, working with smaller organisations to get their CC0 publications on Wikimedia Commons which will improve their online visibility and contribute to the growing public domain materials made available for reuse. And second, the project will produce toolkits and guidance on: copyright clearance, rights and metadata management, and Wikimedia uploads, so as to empower other small organisations in their own open access practice. Wikimedia provides a great platform for this kind of knowledge activism, and working together with GLAM-E will allow impactful and distinctive change in the GLAM sector, particularly by improving the representation of smaller organisations in open GLAM. 

Prior to her work on the Connected Heritage project, Lucy worked as Wikimedian in Residence at the British Library (2021–23) and Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Saskatchewan (2019–21). She is also a current fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Lucy is delighted to be part of the GLAM-E Lab team, and to support the work of Dr Andrea Wallace and Dr Francesca Farmer. Lucy holds a PhD in Medieval Literature alongside a developed expertise in digital editing, open scholarship and decolonisation praxis. 

Dr Wallace said of the partnership “We are so excited for this next phase of our partnership which will improve access to the rich cultural heritage and knowledge held by smaller organisations in the Devon South West area.” 

If you’d like to get in touch with Lucy, you can reach her at lucy.hinnie@wikimedia.org.uk. You can also check out the GLAM-E tools via the GLAM-E website.

The post GLAM-E Lab x Wikimedia UK: follow-on partnership appeared first on WMUK.

01/02/2024-07/02/2024

Mapping

• Inspired by Koreller’s edits to Pyongyang and the recently updated imagery provided by both Mapillary and Esri, CactiStaccingCrane has embarked on mapping the urban areas of Hanoi.
• L’imaginaire reached one million map change edits and pondered some philosophical questions about OpenStreetMap itself.
• Requests for comments have been made for these proposals:
  • hairdresser=barber to introduce hairdresser=barber as a sub-key of the shop=hairdresser tag, for indicating a type of hairdresser that traditionally specialises in cutting masculine styles and providing other male grooming services such as beard trimming.
  • highway_construction:*=* for tagging the type of highway construction.
• Voting for the community_adopted=* proposal, a tagging scheme for mapping the voluntary cleaning or minor maintenance of community facilities, is open until Monday 19 February.

Community

• Arnalie Vicario shared her experience of attending OpenStreetMap Philippines’ 2024 Year-Starter mapping party #OSMPHarin2024.
• Cyberjuan blogged his ideas on topics which to map to help mitigate climate change: trees, water sources, solid waste, noise pollution, gardens, and coastlines.
• Inspired by the SmallTownUSA Mastodon bot, Kai Poppe has started a thorough analysis of places in Europe that may require further mapping, complementing Pascal Neis’ unmapped places. He blogged about his analysis and included some interesting statistics. Kai has already created some MapRoulette challenges.
• The Austrian OpenStreetMap community in Vienna held its 70th gathering event on Thursday 25 January.
• Xvtn called for experienced mappers to mentor newbies who asked for help and showed how to find them.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation Board has decided to set a maximum budget deficit limit for 2024 of £85,820. This has resulted in a reduced budget allocation for every working group this year.
• The OpenStreetMap Operation Working Group has submitted its 2024 budget request to the OpenStreetMap Foundation Board.
• OpenStreetMap has been officially registered with the Digital Public Goods Alliance, a multi-stakeholder United Nations-endorsed initiative. The official recognition of OpenStreetMap as a public good gives it additional legitimacy.

Local chapter news

• Arnalie Vicario welcomed OpenStreetMap Belgium as the newest OpenStreetMap Foundation Local Chapter.
• Jochen Topf has published ► the minutes from the meeting of the OpenStreetMap Germany community discussion that was held online on Friday 2 February.

Events

• Hans Hack tooted the registration link for Maptime Berlin, which will be held on Thursday 29 February at CityLAB Berlin.
• OpenStreetMap Colombia, in collaboration with FLISoL Colombia, will host ► ‘Open Beer Bogotá 2024’, a community gathering for the open technology enthusiasts of Bogotá, on Friday 23 February.
• OpenStreetMap US has released video recordings of the talks delivered at the State of The Map US 2023.
• The OpenStreetMap Local Chapters and Community Congress 2024 will be held online on Saturday 2 March, at 13:00 UTC.

Education

• The UN Maps Crowdsourcing team is thinking about organising an online training session on OSM data validation, aimed at experienced OSM mappers, using the training materials recently published on the UN Maps Learning Hub. It would aim to strengthen both the global OSM community and the group of validators among UN mappers. To learn more about the interest in potentially training and joining a UN Mappers Validation Group, and more broadly about the validation practices of the global OSM community, the UN Maps crowdsourcing team has designed a survey, which should take about 5 to 10 minutes to complete. The survey will remain active until Thursday 15 February, and the results will be published on the UN Mappers blog.

Maps

• OpenStreetMap France showcased Carte de France du train vélo, a webmap that combines open data from SNCF (French national railway company) and OpenStreetMap data to show bicycle travel times from SNCF railway stations.
• Adam Steer has created an illustrative bike journey map using Strava, OpenStreetMap, and QGIS.
• Researchers from the University of Minnesota and the University of Southern California have used OpenStreetMap data to automatically generate synthetic maps in a historical style, which allowed them to improve text recognition on real old maps using modern machine learning models.

OSM in action

• MapAmore showcased the Quezon City monthly air quality maps. The maps use a Stamen Design background layer that utilises OpenStreetMap data.
• Hans van der Kwast has made a video tutorial on how to do flood analysis by combining building footprint data from OpenStreetMap with DTM and DSM elevation data.

Open Data

• Friederike von Franqué wrote ► a column discussing the importance of free licences for geodata.

Software

• Alex Chiu has created ‘Musical OSM‘, a web application that features audiovisual visualisations of the latest OpenStreetMap edits. For every OSM edit made, a random musical note is played.

Releases

• Daniel announced the release of Maplibre GL JS version 4.0.0.

Did you know …

• … this could be the node with the most tags in OSM? The tagging models the entirety of the lighthouse’s light characteristics. But for something that appears this interesting on OpenSeaMap, real-life is a bit of a let down.For those who are curious about what the complex notation in OpenSeaMap means, Oc(2)G.8s for example represents an occulting green light, where a pair of brief dark intervals repeats every eight seconds.

Other “geo” things

• DevSeed’s Data and Annotation Team is separating to become an independent company owned by the employees called GeoCompas based in Ayacucho, Peru. They will continue working with OpenStreetMap data and providing high-quality geospatial data and training datasets for machine learning.
• @larstransportworld tooted the 2024 edition of their map of Germany’s long-distance railways. Compared to DB’s official ICE and IC network map, this map focuses more on systematic connections and their frequencies for better understanding, rather than just showing every line.
• William Gallagher, of AppleInsider, reported on several accidents that have occurred in Scotland due to outdated data in Apple Maps.
• Dzima Buko et al. have released a book titled Kut, which is a collection of photographs of the wildlife of Belarus. They explained in detail the creative process behind the map illustrations in the book.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Berlin	188. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2024-02-09
København	OSMmapperCPH		2024-02-11
Budapest	2024 februári OSM meetup – urbanisztika az Urbanumban		2024-02-12
Grenoble	Mapathon Missing Maps à Grenoble		2024-02-12
Hannover	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2024-02-13
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2024-02-15
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2024-02-14
Lorain County	OpenStreetMap Midwest Meetup	✓	2024-02-15
Rostock	Rostocker Treffen		2024-02-14
	Map-py Wednesday		2024-02-15
Bochum	OSM-Stammtisch Bochum		2024-02-15
Görlitz	1. Stammtisch Görlitz		2024-02-19
Lyon	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon		2024-02-20
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-02-21
Bonn	172. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn		2024-02-20
City of Edinburgh	OSM Edinburgh pub meetup		2024-02-20
	[Online] Map-py Wednesday		2024-02-21
Windsor	OSM WINDSOR-ESSEX: MAP NIGHT		2024-02-22
Berlin	Geomob Berlin		2024-02-21
	MapComplete Community Call 2024-01		2024-02-23
Localidad Teusaquillo	OpenBeer Bogotá 2024		2024-02-24
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend February 2024		2024-02-24 – 2024-02-25

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