A month  ago we announced the return of AfroCreatives WikiProject and its first campaign of the year: ACWP+film 2024 FESPACO Edit-a-thon. The May 18th launch is finally here! And due to high interest, we’re extending the campaign by two weeks—until June 17th—and adding an additional set of online Wikipedia training sessions on Saturday, June 1st.  Link below for the schedule.

In the lead up to the campaign we hosted a series of Wikipedia training sessions in English, French and Arabic that saw participation from stakeholders from across the film industry (creatives, professionals, scholars, film critics) and from the Wikimedia community at large. Additional sessions on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons are scheduled for May 18th.

The training sessions are designed to help campaign participants to unpack the best practices for documenting film and TV related subjects on English, French and Arabic Wikipedia, as well as Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.

Since the official announcement of the campaign, additional groups have bought into our campaign, ranging from film industry organizations, public institutions and diplomatic missions that include the likes of the Federation of Heads of Nollywood Guilds and Associations, The Tanzanian Film Board, the US embassy of Brazzaville and US consulate of Lagos, and Unesco Côte d’Ivoire, to name just a few. 

Local campaign organizers

To help drive participation and provide effective guidance to  film industry participants from across the continent, The Africa Narrative (TAN) is partnering with the following African Wikimedia communities:

1. Wikimedia Morocco
2. Wikimedia Nigeria
3. Wikimedia Community of Togo
4. Wikimédiens du Bénin User Group
5. Wikimedians of Arusha User Group
6. Wikimedia Community User Group Rwanda
7. Wikimedia Community User Group Kenya
8. Wikimedia Community User Group South Sudan
9. Wikimedia Community User Group Namibia
10. Wikimedia Community User Group Botswana
11. Wikimedians of Republic of Congo User Group
12. Wikimedia Community User Group Zambia
13. Open Foundation West Africa
14. Wikimedia Community User Group Guinée Conakry
15. Wikimédiens du Burkina Faso User Group
16. Wikimedia Côte d’Ivoire
17. Wikimedia Community User Group Sénégal
18. Wikimedians of Tchad User Group

AfroCreatives WikiProject campaign hub

While editors often know precisely what contributions they want to undertake, just as often they are looking for guidance and ideas. Here’s where our introduction of English Wikipedia AfroCreatives WikiProject, French Wikipedia AfroCreatives WikiProject and Arabic Wikipedia AfroCreatives WikiProject can play a vital role.  These pages have a variety of information, such as list of Articles to Create, Articles to Improve, Stubs to Expand, and other  resources on how to take action during the campaign and beyond. A number of the lists are searchable by country, an especially valuable filter for industry stakeholders and film enthusiasts with a keen interest in their own country. Other components like the assessment table and Most Popular African film and television articles, also serve to motivate and incentivize editors. 

Working on a WikiProject is akin to a sneak peek into the entire history of a Wikipedia project. The conventions of Wikipedia make it so that the projects are typically equipped by very sophisticated tools. One would be surprised how niche and technical are the efforts behind the characteristic Wikipedia features we often take for granted.
– Assem Khidhr

You can link to the  AfroCreatives WikiProject pages and see for yourself their usefulness. They are still works in progress and will continue to be finessed over the coming weeks.

ACWP+film 2024 FESPACO Edit-a-thon prizes

We know that participants are joining the campaign because they’re passionate about African film and improving its representation and visibility, but in the spirit of bringing some competitive fun to the campaign, we’re offering an array of prizes in the form of premium Netflix subscriptions. More than just entertainment-driven prizes in alignment with the theme of the campaign, they are an acknowledgment of best-in-class film and tv related contributions on Wikipedia as well as Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons .

For a more detailed description on the prizes and schedule of events, click here.

Join us on this exciting movement to document African film and television on Wikimedia projects!

The Wikimedians of Tabora (WOT) hosted multiple events in their local community, providing comprehensive training on Wikimedia projects. Their goal was to empower community members with the skills and knowledge necessary to become lasting contributors to the movement.

The six-month project produced promising outcomes, as evaluated below;

Gender Inclusion

The demographic breakdown of participants revealed a representation of 48% female and 52% male, as depicted in the snapshot above. While women’s involvement in Wikimedia projects typically lags behind that of men, the project witnessed a notable increase in female participation and retention as active WOT members contributing to Wikimedia projects. Although progress has been made towards gender balance, further efforts are still required.

Wikimedia Projects Awareness and Editing Skills

Over 30 enthusiastic participants engaged in a series of training sessions and workshops facilitated by the WOT. These sessions served as invaluable opportunities for individuals from diverse backgrounds to deepen their understanding and sharpen their skills in contributing to Wikimedia projects.

Upon evaluation, approximately 57% of these participants demonstrated a strong understanding and skills. Their robust understanding not only reflects their commitment to learning but also positions them as potential mentors or leaders within the community, capable of guiding and inspiring others on their journey.

Moreover, statistical data shows that 40% exhibited a moderate level of understanding and skills, indicating a solid foundation upon which they can further build and refine their contributions. Their willingness to engage and learn suggests a promising trajectory towards becoming proficient contributors, contributing valuable content and insights to Wikimedia projects.

Despite the diverse skill levels represented, only a minimal 3% of participants were identified as having the lowest level of understanding and skill. However, rather than viewing this as a setback, it presents an opportunity for targeted support and tailored interventions to uplift these individuals and ensure that no one is left behind in their quest to contribute meaningfully to Wikimedia projects

Number of Training Sessions and Workshop Attended

The figure above illustrates the level of participation, with 97% of attendees participating in more than one event, while the remaining percentage attended only one event. This trend demonstrates the enthusiasm and dedication of participants towards continuous learning and engagement with Wikimedia projects. It suggests a genuine interest in deepening their understanding and refining their skills, indicating a strong commitment to contributing meaningfully to the movement.

The high rate of return attendance also underscores the effectiveness of the training and workshop sessions organized by the Wikimedians of Tabora. It speaks to the quality of the content delivered and the value perceived by participants, encouraging them to invest their time and effort in multiple events.

Projects

Overall, WOT has actively engaged with Wikipedia and Wikidata, two prominent Wikimedia projects, providing its members with the necessary skills and resources to contribute effectively. Through their efforts, significant contributions have been made to enrich both Swahili Wikipedia and Wikidata, with over 400 articles created and edited on Swahili Wikipedia and over 200 Wikidata items added. These contributions cover a wide range of topics, from local history and culture to global issues, reflecting the diversity of interests within the Swahili-speaking community.

Moving forward, The Wikimedians of Tabora remains committed to furthering its contributions to Wikimedia projects, continuing to empower its members and amplify the voices of underrepresented communities through the dissemination of knowledge and information within the Wikimedia movement.

The Community Affairs Committee of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees invites feedback on the draft Procedure for Sibling Project Lifecycle until 23 June.

Wikimedia Sibling Projects, the content projects that make up the Wikimedia ecosystem, allow us to disseminate free knowledge in diverse formats to the world. Historically, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has approved the creation of new Sibling Projects. Once a Sibling Project has been started, the approval of new language editions or closure of inactive ones is overseen by the community-led Language Committee, with an incubation period where projects get off the ground in the Wikimedia Incubator. In contrast,  there is no standardized procedure for approving Sibling Projects. This has, at times, resulted in the approval of Sibling Projects without strategic or clear goals.

In recent years, the Wikimedia Foundation has become cautious about considering new Sibling Projects for a variety of reasons: the lack of clear strategy around approval, maintenance and closure, the lack of understanding of the impact of new Sibling Projects, and questions around their sustainability in light of the Foundation’s flattening budget. In 2021, this led the Board’s Community Affairs Committee (CAC) to add to its mandate the responsibility to “address new (…) site applications, including creating a formalized procedure, from application to approval/disapproval”.

To that end, the CAC appointed a Task Force consisting of trustees, who were later joined by advisory community members, who jointly created a draft Procedure for Sibling Project Lifecycle. The draft procedure clarifies the steps and requirements for opening and closing Wikimedia Sibling Projects. It also proposes a framework for how and when to invest in opening new Sibling Projects “to ensure that any newly approved project is set up for success and has the resources it needs to function well”.¹ We invite you to leave your feedback about the draft procedure on the project talk page until 23 June.

Shani Evenstein Sigalov, Chair of the CAC, shares:

As our Movement matures, strategic decisions become crucial to align with our limited resources and expansive goals. It’s evident that discussions about new projects require a structured process, acknowledging the need for proper evaluation of new ideas and understanding the trade-offs involved. We also need to have tough conversations about retiring projects that no longer serve the Movement’s goals, which includes defining what constitutes a justified investment and what impact looks like. These discussions are necessary for our sustainability. I look forward to your engagement in shaping our future.

Details of the proposed procedure

Establishing a clear process for the sibling projects’ lifecycle is important to make space for new innovative ideas while maintaining and continuing support for the existing Sibling Projects.

The evaluation process for a request to open a new Sibling Project will include assessing the cost of migrating existing external projects, developing or adopting new tools that may be needed, and maintaining the project over time. For example, Wikifunctions needs resources that are very different from Wikivoyage. 

At the same time, we would like to evaluate existing Sibling Projects for success and sustainability. It would also be beneficial to have clearly defined approaches for splitting, merging, and sunsetting Projects, adopting external projects that come with their communities, and preparing Sibling Projects for merging or adoption by external organizations.²

“We have always needed a clearer process for sibling projects, which are essential to our mission. It’s great to have attention to these issues; this draft procedure is a healthy start, community input will improve it,” said Sam Klein, a contributor to many sibling projects and advisor to the Task Force.

We want your feedback

We will collect feedback on this draft procedure until June 23, 2024. We hope this feedback period will allow for rich discussions without feeling rushed. There are several ways to provide feedback:

• Review the page on Meta and leave comments on the talk page. 
• Join open calls (May 23 at 02:00 to 03:00 UTC and May 30 at 16:00 to 17:00 UTC)
• Request a conversation as a part of Talking:2024 by using the Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee/Talking: 2024#Let’s Talk|Let’s Talk feature to sign up for a time to speak with me and other trustees about this topic.

1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Proposals_for_new_projects#From_the_Board_of_Trustees ↩︎
2. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/9/11_wiki_move_proposal ↩︎

While working with MetaPost for typeface design(Nupuram, Malini), I frequently felt the need for a quick and easy way to test code snippets. This mirrors the functionality of popular online sandboxes like CodeSandbox or JSBin, which many developers are already familiar with. These platforms provide a web-based environment where you can edit code, see the output instantly, and avoid the hassle of setting up a complete application or environment. Inspired by this concept, I’ve been developing a MetaPost sandbox, and I’m excited to share it with you in this blog post.

09/05/2024-15/05/2024

Mapping

• Salim has set up a new challenge on MapRoulette called ‘Portugal – Fix Spiky Buildings’, which aims to correct inaccurately mapped buildings identified on OpenStreetMap, some of which may be correct but many of which are likely errors.
• The proposal to set the tag shop=tortilla is in the voting phase until Sunday 26 May.

Mapping campaigns

• Tushar V recounted his experience of participating in an OpenStreetMap mapping party for the first time.

Community

• [1] Benedicta Banful Ohene-Amadi has provided an update on a survey on women’s participation in OpenStreetMap, revealing different perspectives on the issue from women and men, and highlighting the importance of understanding and addressing different viewpoints in mapping activities.
• Nikita Ushakov explained ► the basics of OpenStreetMap editing using MapComplete, EveryDoor, and Vespucci.

Events

• Włodzimierz Bartczak tooted that the State of the Map Europe 2024 event programme is now available and hints that more details will be coming soon. It’s also the final call for proposals for presentations and workshops, inviting those with solutions based on OpenStreetMap data or discussions about the project’s history to participate (open until Friday 31 May).
• FOSSGIS will host the 22nd OpenStreetMap Community Meeting this October in Essen, Germany.
• State of the Map Europe 2024 is fully embracing Mastodon for communication, with a monitored account run by @etua_en and @Cristoffs. They encourage anyone with questions about the conference to tag them with @sotmeu for support.
• The call for venues to host the State of the Map 2025 is now open until Sunday 21 July.

Education

• Alexandre Marques explained ► how to create interactive online maps using uMap, an open source tool that integrates OpenStreetMap layers, allowing users to add markers, lines, and polygons, import geospatial data, manage layers, and share maps through downloadable formats or embedded iframes on websites.
• Séverin Ménard was invited to lead a workshop on river mapping in OpenStreetMap, using documentation published on the UN Maps Learning Hub. The workshop was organised by an oceanographer and president of the IVIDES, Dr Raquel Dezidério Souto, who provided ► more details in her diary. The video is available.

OSM research

• The United States Census Bureau has developed a socioeconomic profile of the commuters affected by the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, in Baltimore, based on OSM data and OSRM.

Maps

• Daniel J. H. explored in detail the evolution and mechanics of OpenStreetMap’s vector tiles, highlighting their advantages over raster maps, detailing the Mapbox vector tile specification, and discussing challenges such as data redundancy across tiles.
• Tino Dietel has created Freifunk Karte, a map that lists free wifi locations provided by the Freifunk movement.
• Kamil Monicz detailed the ongoing preparations for the first development release of their OpenStreetMap NextGen project, including improvements to the elements sidebar, a preliminary implementation of the API 0.7, and general code cleanup.
• The IVIDES has created a dynamic web map, using uMap, to support the actions being taken to combat the effects of the flooding in the state of Rio Grande do Sul that resulted in a significant humanitarian crisis. Official data on the hydrology of the affected region is available in the map documentation ►. Specifically, the polygons of flood areas were generalised from data from the National Institute for Space Research, which is also available from the ‘Flooding in Brazil’ activation on Disaster Charter. This initiative was blogged ► in Dr Raquel Dezidério Souto’s diary.

OSM in action

• Reddit user AtmosphericBeats has created a 1:1 scale map of Baltimore in Minecraft, using OpenStreetMap data to accurately represent real building heights, street networks, pavements, parks, and more. This detailed model allows users to explore Baltimore in a virtual environment that mirrors the real city.
• eMerzh tooted about an enjoyable cycling experience he had with his kids, highlighting a useful OpenStreetMap sign for cycling routes and appreciating its good attribution. Smveerman mentioned that you can order a free paper copy of this map from the Walloon government on their official site. Pieter Vander Vennet pointed out that MapComplete.org allows users to participate in creating their own maps.
• The KF Map provides a detailed digital map of Indonesia’s infrastructure, with a particular focus on Jakarta. It includes data on various property types, facilities, and key infrastructure elements such as toll roads, airports and seaports, facilitating comprehensive urban and regional planning and analysis.

Licenses

• Foxy found that the administrative boundary information in Overture Maps, which includes data from OpenStreetMap, is currently licensed under ODbL. Previously, this data was sourced from Esri and TomTom and was licensed under the CDLA Permissive 2.0 licence.

Software

• Marcus Jaschen announced ► several updates to the bikerouter.de website, an OpenStreetMap-based bicycle routing app derived from brouter-web. These updates include a migration of the web server from Nginx to Caddy, a migration of the server to an ARM64-based architecture, and a migration of the operating system to Ubuntu 24.04.
• Beakerboy has developed a 3D renderer web application allowing users to visualise an individual building object from OpenStreetMap.

Programming

• Andrii Holovin has proposed a solution to the impasse in transitioning the Switch2OSM project to a new platform. He suggested preserving the current version on Jekyll as a historical artefact and starting anew by transferring the materials to MkDocs, a step he took over a year ago.

Releases

• Garmin has released a new CycleMap and TopoActive map update, version 2024.10, for compatible wearable and handheld GPS devices. It improves navigation with updated map data while maintaining the same memory footprint. In case you didn’t know, these maps are based on OpenStreetMap data.
• Bryan Housel announced the release of Rapid v2.3 for OpenStreetMap, introducing features such as Esri Wayback imagery for historical views, map rotation, MapRoulette integration for task management, and GeoScribbles for field notes.

OSM in the media

• The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun, a local newspaper in the Hokuriku region of Japan, reported ► the completion of a highway repair project using an OpenStreetMap road route illustration. The highway had previously been damaged in 30 locations by the Noto Peninsula earthquake.

Other “geo” things

• Heise Online reported ► on several projects that aim to detect GNSS signal disruption globally: Flightradar24 GPS Jamming Map and GPSJAM.
• Researchers are developing a high-resolution, impact-based flood forecasting, and early warning system that will provide near-real-time flood forecasts with uncertainties to improve disaster preparedness and response.
• Google Maps has launched ► a live tracking feature for TransJakarta buses, much to the delight of many Jakarta citizens. Through its Google Transit Partner initiative, Google is open to collaborations with any public transportation agency that is interested in providing real-time updates to Google Maps.
• Amir Shoam, in TechSpot, explained the history of MapQuest, a web-based navigation service that was popular around 1999 and in 2010 became the first large online mapping service to embrace OSM.

Upcoming Events

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

In the first post of this series, we shared more about the Workshop that started this all: an LD42023 hour, in which Giovanna and I learned what Librarians think about Wikidata. In our last post, we shared more about what brought these librarians to enjoy and contribute to Wikidata’s linked open-data ecosystem. But many times, inspiration comes from the projects we’ve learned about. So, in this post, we talk precisely about that. Which Wikidata+Library projects were known to this community? Let us dive deep into eleven of them:

1. The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation created a collaboration to enhance the accessibility and utilization of cultural heritage artifacts. One of the components of this collaboration has been to improve data quality by implementing Structured Data on Commons. 

DPLA’s impact is tangible, with artifacts appearing in over 2,500 Wikipedia articles across 78 language versions, accumulating over 100 million views. Webinars, informational coffee chats, and live sessions offer valuable resources for those interested in delving deeper into DPLA’s Wikimedia initiatives. This work has made DPLA one of the largest institutions to upload to Wikimedia Commons and the biggest one to contribute to Structured Data on Commons. DPLA welcomes new partners and institutions as the project progresses to join this transformative endeavor. Read more here. If you want to get more involved with DPLA, there’s also a Wikimedia Working Group. Read more about it here.

2. Promoting Open Knowledge Practices in African Libraries through Wikidata. This was a WMF-approved grant proposal from the African Library and Information Associations and Institutions, which trained 392 librarians trained in English and French (you can check out the materials as zip files in their final report!) 

3. ELTEdata is a semantic database developed at the Department of Digital Humanities of the ELTE BTK TI. The primary purpose is to organize and publish research groups’ materials in prosopography, bibliography, and other historical subjects in a semantic data network. 

4. Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) used Wikidata to retrieve 4,300 Ukrainian URLs, which helped them in their mission to digitize and preserve Ukrainian digital cultural heritage.

5. The Wikidata:WikiProject Nuremberg Trials is a collaborative effort to create items for authors of documents (primarily written statements or affidavits) used in the Nuremberg Trials. Worth noting is the Cradle template they made to help users contribute to their project by filling up the fields.

6. The Wikidata:WikiProject Chinese Culture and Heritage is an initiative by 13 Chinese American librarians from several institutions who got together in 2020 to work on Chinese-related topics. During the last few years, this group has worked on challenges in creating Chinese-related Wikidata entries, a data model for Chinese women poets (a comprehensive list is available here), and different visualizations using the Wikidata SPARQL Query Service.

7. The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) is a Wikibase project that aims to build a Black Bibliography by reviving “the practice of descriptive bibliography for African American literary studies.” Its objectives are twofold: To fix the scarcity of Black print and bibliographies by enriching data and, more boldly, to rethink bibliographic and cataloging practices so that Black print culture is well described in its essence.

8. The WikiProject University of Washington Libraries is an initiative accomplished by catalogers from this same university. It is divided into two other projects: WikiProject PCC Wikidata Pilot/University of Washington and WikiProject University of Washington Archival Metadata. UW Libraries contributors are also involved in a third initiative, the WikiProject Personal Pronouns.

– Members of the Archival Metadata WikiProject for instance, have mapped MARC fields to Wikidata fields and even have a Github repository with them.

– The WikiProject PCC Wikidata Pilot is a project organized by the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), “an international cooperative effort aimed at expanding access to library collections by providing useful, timely, and cost-effective cataloging that meets mutually accepted standards of libraries around the world.” They are using Wikidata as an identity reconciliation service and implementing identity management principles, as Wikidata lowers “the barrier to authority creation and maintenance by PCC members.” The University of Washington is one of the contributors to the PCC Wikidata project.

One of the most interesting activities accomplished by the UW Libraries on Wikidata is the tables filled with property suggestions. These tables are essential information for those looking for guidelines on how to best model Wikidata items and for developing and establishing Wikidata best practices for library data.

Discover their tables here: Archival Collections, Faculty and Staff, Graduate Students, General References and Qualifier Information, UW Corporate Bodies, UW Buildings, Subjects, Dissertations and Theses.

On this page, the project shares workflows, pieces of training, and resources for those interested in learning more. And on this page, you can find all the items created for the Labor Archives of Washington.

9. The Digital Scriptorium project uses linked data and the Wikimedia environment to allow better access to manuscripts. DS is a consortium of North American institutions with collections of premodern manuscripts, such as the Boston Public Library, University of Pennsylvania Indic Manuscripts, and Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Library, among others.

DS uses Wikidata, Getty Vocabularies, and FAST to facilitate the access, search, and research of manuscript data across its member institutions and to “link to external authorities for richer context and deeper data exploration.” The system also offers a Query Service, the DS Wikibase SPARQL Endpoint. This service allows more comprehensive data search and discovery.

Currently, DS is working to enrich its Linked Open Data and is welcoming even more institutions to join the platform.

10. The Linked Data Research Group was established in 2018 and is a Wikibase project that uses and applies “linked data methods to investigate the data-driven semantic indexing of text and time-based media collections to facilitate the precision search for attribute-bearing collection items, item parts, and other granular components via SPARQL queries and URL-based locators.”

This work results in SPARQL queriable RDF knowledge graphs, which the Office of Information Technology (OIT) from the University of Alabama maintains on a local Wikibase.

For their explorations and investigations, they consider two “overarching empirical questions”: the scalability of the semantic indexing method and the state of queriability of semantic indexing results.

Currently, they have three ongoing projects: 1) Sports DAM Knowledge Graphs resulting from the semantic indexing of time-based media collections; 2) Philology Graphs resulting from the semantic indexing of text collections, and 3) Documentary Series Knowledge Graphs resulting from the semantic indexing of time-based documentary media collections (series).

11. As the name indicates, the WikiProject Wikidata Religion & Theology Community of Practice is an initiative to improve and represent data about religion and theology on Wikidata. It is mainly aimed at librarians and encourages collaboration in this community of practice. 

The project has developed data models, such as the “recommended properties for person” and “recommended properties for publications,” which include books, scholarly articles, and publication venues. There’s also a list of Religion-related journals needing metadata and authors needing disambiguation.

On March 20, 2023, the initiative organized an event with ATLA, a “membership association of librarians and information professionals committed to advancing the study of religion and theology.” Following the event, the project launched a demo video on manually adding an article to a Journal in Religion in Africa:

This series will comprise six Diff posts, including this introduction, each describing at length the five Jamboard frames used in this workshop. Follow them here:

1. #LD42023 I: The Future of Wikidata + Libraries (A Workshop)
2. #LD42023 II: Getting to Know Each Other, Librarians in the Wikidata World
3. #LD42023 III: The Examples, Libraries Using Wikidata (this post!)👈
4. #LD42023 IV: Wikidata Tools everyone is talking about
5. #LD42023 V: Main Challenges of Wikidata for Librarians 
6. #LD42023 VI: Imagining a Wikidata Future for Librarians, Together

The Wikimedia Movement Charter (“the Charter”) states the values, rights, relationships, and mutual responsibilities of all participants in the shared mission of this movement. The Charter applies to all individual and institutional participants, movement entities, projects, and online and offline spaces officially associated with the Wikimedia Movement. (see full draft of Movement Charter on Meta-wiki)

In Indonesia, community engagement about Movement Charter has been done three times over three years with several communities in Indonesia. The purposes of this community engagement are to introduce about Movement Charter and to provide community space and time to ask or provide feedback to Movement Charter draft. This community engagement is part of Movement Strategy initiatives, Ensure Equity in Decision-Making specifically on Movement Charter. Furthermore, this community engagement supported by Movement Charter Ambassador Program.

In this round, community engagement about Movement Charter implemented from 1 to 30 April 2024. The purpose is to discuss about One-Page Draft of Movement Charter. In Indonesia, community engagement implemented online through live conversation and WhatsApp chat with in 6 communities, Wikimedia Bandung community, Wikimedia Banjar community, Wikimedia Denpasar community, Wikimedia Manokwari community, Wikimedia Medan community, and Wikimedia Yogyakarta community. There are two ways for community to provide feedback, they may write it on google document provided and fill google form with several questions that need to be answered.

Result

Online conversations held in 5 communities with different time based on community discussion. Date of online conversation could be seen below:

• April 6, 2024: Wikimedia Banjar community (11 attendees)
• April 6, 2024: Wikimedia Medan community (5 attendees)
• April 7, 2024: Wikimedia Bandung community (13 attendees)
• April 7, 2024: Wikimedia Yogyakarta community (3 attendees)
• April 20, 2024: Wikimedia Manokwari community (10 attendees)

Online conversations held approximately one hour, starting with presentation about one-page draft of Movement Charter then continuing to discussion and questions and answers session. Number of communities members attendee these conversations is more than 40 members. Mostly, feedback obtained is in Volunteers part specifically on Wikimedia communities part. Furthermore, with these conversations, many new members involved, they become familiar with Movement Charter and how Movement Charter affect them on their contributions whether as a volunteer and community member.

The Wikimedians of the Levant user group (WM Levant) kicked off 2024 with a groundbreaking workshop – the first ever in the region for Arabic speakers! Translating and subtitling videos created by the Basque User Group into Arabic was the focus of the program.

The workshop was a successful collaboration between WM Levant and the Wikimedia Basque User Group. More than 20 videos were translated into Arabic under the guidance of WM Levant experts Mervat and Michel Bakni. This enriched Wikimedia Commons, the free online library of videos, and provided a valuable skillset to the Arabic Wikipedians.

The workshop implied an introductory session to introduce the participants to the Basque culture and the process of translating videos on the Commons. The learning experience extended beyond video translation, where the workshop introduced the participants to the Basque language and culture, and to the creative online community, creating a more enriching experience for the 12 Wikipedians who participated from the Arabic community. 

This innovative program sheds light on the power of collaboration between user groups across borders and languages. Not only did it significantly broaden the presence of Arabic content on Wikimedia Commons, but it also served as a catalyst, empowering Arabic speakers to actively engage and contribute to the continually expanding reservoir of freely accessible knowledge.

“To bolster the second phase of this collaboration, participants were surveyed to gather their feedback. Impressively, all respondents reported an experience that exceeded expectations, expressing a keen interest in future iterations of the workshop. However, they suggested several areas for improvement, including extending project durations, diversifying subject matter, implementing more robust progress monitoring mechanisms, and amplifying project promotion across social media and official community channels.”

What’s Next?

The WM Levant group is planning for the second phase of this fruitful collaboration, which involves adding subtitled videos to the relevant articles on Arabic Wikipedia, and translating the new videos that the Basque UG is working on. 

Movement Charter Ambassadors Program, 2024

with RamzyM and KVaidla

I guess we can sing our praises better, after, louder with more feeling, but later. The consultations, conversations and ”drop-in” sessions across time zones we dived into, all to mitigate some inaccurate information that may slip through the cracks — showed a clearer map to follow. The extent of it can actually be fun, such as the drop-in sessions, the regional online conversations, the community consultations and my homespun meetups + movement charter conversations. Most especially our meetups, yes, hands down, actually being the most fulfilling. The process brings mixed feelings to me; triumph and disaster. I read the faces and determine where conversations go as they happen. What’s in this for us? What will it be like?

Today I realize the privilege of being part of the Movement Charter Ambassadors Program. And for what it’s worth, I can’t help the fandom from the flashes of inspired thinking by people I so greatly admire. Will anyone want it any other way?

Being part of a community that was once recognized, then derecognized, and now recognized again by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) this year has been quite the journey. The road to regaining trust, rebuilding, and reawakening the Wikimedia community has been challenging yet exciting.

Taking the reins from former Wikimedia leads and steering the community to where it stands today has been a journey marked by perseverance. Rebuilding trust in the wiki ecosystem, training the community in Botswana about Wikipedia, and establishing a structure for our community were essential steps along the way.

Our journey to revive the community began in 2020 with projects funded by rapid grants. However, irregular project occurrences made it difficult to maintain community engagement. Hosting regular activities became crucial to keeping the community active. The turning point came with the introduction of annual grants in 2022/23. This steady funding allowed us to grow steadily, evidenced by the significant increase in the number of Setswana articles on Wikipedia. Where once we had around 700 articles, we now boast approximately 1300, a testament to our progress in rebuilding the Wikimedia Community user group Botswana.

Our efforts to revive the user group consisted of a range of activities, including edit-a-thons, Wikipedia sister projects training, capacity-building workshops, and panel discussions etc. Each initiative played a crucial role in rebuilding our user group and rekindling interest in Wikimedia projects among our community members.

In our relentless pursuit to revive the Wikimedia community in Botswana, collaboration has been key. We’ve been fortunate to partner with various Wikimedia user groups, including Wikimedia ZA, the Igbo User Group, and Wikimedia Zambia and more great community members from other usegroups. These collaborations have been invaluable in providing training and support for our community members across different Wikimedia projects.

Our journey has been enriched by forging meaningful partnerships with institutions in Gaborone and Palapye, such as the University of Botswana, Limkokwing University, BIUST, Francistown Library and Botho University. These institutions have not only provided us with access to resources and facilities but have also helped us to expand our reach and engage with a broader audience.

Among our collaborators, Wikimedia ZA holds a special place. Serving as both a fiscal sponsor and a community from which we receive invaluable advice and support, Wikimedia ZA has been instrumental in navigating the challenges of rebuilding our community and shaping our strategies for growth and sustainability.

However, our journey hasn’t been without its challenges. One of the biggest hurdles we faced was dispelling misconceptions about Wikipedia and convincing stakeholders to collaborate with us. We also encountered difficulties due to limited resources and internet connectivity issues. Overcoming these challenges required perseverance and a commitment to consistency.

One of the most important lessons we’ve learned is the power of persistence. By consistently reaching out to potential collaborators, engaging with the community through various channels, and actively publicizing our activities, we’ve been able to gradually build trust and garner support. This advice is especially pertinent to derecognized communities aiming to regain recognition from the Wikimedia Foundation.

To any community facing similar obstacles, we would emphasize the importance of perseverance and engagement. Keep knocking on doors, keep reaching out to stakeholders, and keep advocating for your community. With time, dedication, and a steadfast commitment to your goals, you can overcome challenges, rebuild trust, and reignite the flame of the Wikimedia movement in your community.

File:Attendants of the Setswana Wikipedia Launch.jpg

As we journey forward, our commitment to nurturing our community, fostering growth, and making meaningful contributions to the Wikimedia movement remains unwavering. Together, we’re not merely rebuilding a community; we’re crafting a legacy of empowerment and knowledge dissemination that will resonate for generations.

Africa is the birthplace of our species, and the place human civilization began, but outside of Egypt and the Nile Valley, how much do you know about ancient archaeological sites anywhere on the African continent? 

Over the past decade, Kate Grillo’s classes have worked to fix that problem, at least on Wikipedia. Initially at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse and now at the University of Florida, Dr. Grillo’s classes, supported by Wiki Education’s Student Program, have added almost 200,000 words to Wikipedia’s coverage of African archaeology. Student editors in the latest iteration of her class, Introduction to African Archaeology, created four new articles about archaeological sites – Takarkori in Libya, al-Khiday in Sudan, the Jarigole pillar site in Kenya, and Old Oyo in Nigeria. In addition to creating these new articles, the class also made improvements to another 20 articles.

Takarkori is an archaeological site in southern Libya, near the border with Algeria. Evidence of human habitation dates back over 10,000 years to a period when this area, now deep in the Sahara, was much wetter and supported lakes, wetlands, and flowing streams. 

The article provides readers with a sense of the depth of history of the site and manages to meet a reader’s need for background information without delving too deeply into tangential topics. 

A good Wikipedia article needs to strike a careful balance between providing the reader with enough information to keep reading without adding so much background that it ends up duplicating information that should be in a separate article dedicated to the topic. When writing in an underdeveloped area of Wikipedia like this one, getting that balance right can sometimes be a challenge.

Al-Khiday is a group of five sites on the western bank of the Nile in Sudan that were discovered in 2004. The best-studied of these sites, al-Khiday 2, was occupied at least four separate times between the pre-Mesolithic and the Late Meroitic (a time period that relates to the city of Meroë, the capital of the Kingdom of Kush).

This article provides a glimpse at life in the Upper Nile Valley at various points in time over the course of thousands of years. It also lifts the curtain as to how archaeologists learn about life in ancient times through clues like charring in food remains, starch grain sizes, and the imprints of bacteria on prostate stones. 

Jarigole pillar site, a communal burial site in northern Kenya, and Old Oyo in Nigeria, the capital city of the Oyo Empire which was abandoned in 1835 after Fulani attacks, round out the set of articles created by student editors in this iteration of Dr. Grillo’s class. Together, these articles help fill gaps in an area of Wikipedia where significant absences abound.

Popular – and sometimes scholarly – knowledge is shaped by the information that’s available. Wikipedia’s existence has put an incredible amount of information at the fingertips of anyone with an internet connection (and a decent command of English or one of the other major language Wikipedias). But the information on Wikipedia tends to reflect the biases in popular content. By adding specific scholarly content in an area that’s less visible in the public imagining of the ancient world, student editors like those in Dr. Grillo’s classes can help chip away at systemic issues in the representation of human knowledge. 

Just by doing a class assignment, they can start to change the world.

Interested in learning more about teaching with Wikipedia and getting started in your own class? Visit teach.wikiedu.org or reach out with questions at contact@wikiedu.org.

Hero image by Luca Galuzzi, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Nick Sheppard, Open Research Advisor at Leeds University and winner of Wikimedian of the Year Award 2023, and Martin Poulter, Wikimedian in Residence at the Khalili Collections and Wikimedian of the Year in 2016, have teamed up with to create a primer for researchers on how and why to use Wikimedia projects as platforms for their work.

The new document is one of many Open Research primers published by the UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) – a consortium that promotes best practice in research. The UKRN site hosts advice on open and reproducible research across all subjects; all freely available and openly licensed. The primer was reviewed by Daniel Mietchen (Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure, FIZ Karlsruhe) who is a contributor to multiple Wikimedia projects as well as a scientific researcher.

It may surprise people how much content on Wikipedia and its sister projects is drawn directly from scholarly publications. If you read about peat in any of eight languages, you see a global map of peat distribution from a research database at the University of Leeds. It’s one of many images that have come from open-access research. If you read about ant species, some of the text has been repurposed from research papers.

Concentrating mainly on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata, the new document describes how sharing open-access research helps to open up the process of research while reaching a public audience much larger than the typical readers of a research paper. Individual charts and diagrams can be shared on Wikimedia Commons, along with the code and data tables used to create them. Text from suitable research papers can be reused in Wikipedia articles. Large databases can build mutual links with Wikidata, using it as a hub to connect with other sources of information about a topic.

There are many reasons to make the process of research as open and transparent as possible, including rigour, reproducibility, and public trust. As part of the UKRN’s work promoting transparency, its readers now have concrete suggestions of how the Wikimedia projects help this goal.

“I think this will prompt researchers in many fields to consider how their work can be visible on the most popular reference websites,” says Poulter. “And maybe give helpful next steps to those who have thought about it but are still apprehensive.” Neil Jacobs from UKRN said “We hope that this primer will encourage more researchers to work with Wikimedia in conducting research that is rigorous and transparent. It sits alongside others on data sharing, open software / code, community engagement in research, open hardware and many more.”

Wikimedia projects are community-driven and mainly work “bottom-up” with individual scholars and experts. There is also a place for working “top-down”: shaping the advice that respected organisations give to their communities. This work with UKRN is one example of work that Wikimedia UK and its community are doing with organisations in the scientific, scholarly, cultural, and volunteering sectors.

Find the primer on UKRN.

The post New guidance for researchers on Wikimedia and open research appeared first on WMUK.

Discover the improvements to MediaWiki hosting over the last two years.

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Jessica Hernandez challenges the norms of traditional Western scholarship in her work as an environmental scientist, author, and activist. Hernandez, who is Maya Ch’orti and Binnizá-Zapotec, brings her lived experience as an Indigenous scholar into her research, building a bridge between activism and academia.

Like many notable women of color in STEM, Hernandez’s work was missing on Wikipedia – until just two months ago, when four undergraduates living across the country from Hernandez came together to add her story.

“Jessica Hernandez is an Indigenous scientist who gets very little exposure and advocates for communities and groups that are also underrepresented,” said Dayanara Mendez, a first-year English student at Lone Star College-Kingwood, a community college in Houston, Texas. “To get the chance to write an article about a woman of color in STEM, especially since I’m Hispanic and I always love the chance to learn more about other Latinos, made this a great opportunity.”

Classmates Natalie Ramirez, Alexandria Ravina, and McKenna Sealy joined Mendez to create the new Wikipedia article for Hernandez, working collaboratively to outline sections, find high quality sources for citations, and review each other’s research and writing. For Sealy, the Wikipedia assignment was a chance to share an inspiring and important perspective.

“Jessica Hernandez has a lot to offer our world from her Indigenous perspective and research as an environmental scientist, activist, author, and researcher,” said Sealy. “She’s learned a lot through her family heritage about the environment, and that, combined with her formal education, can be very powerful in helping us to better understand the world around us and how to take care of it.”

Sealy noted the power of Wikipedia in shaping awareness and understanding of notable figures like Hernandez, emphasizing its accessibility.

“Because of Wikipedia, no one needs a database that costs money to learn more about people making a great impact on the world,” Sealy explained. “The assignment helped me realize that we can all contribute to big and important things even if we feel small and don’t think we can have an impact.”

At first, Mendez dreaded the research for the project, but once she began, quickly changed her mind.

“When I actually started, I found that it was pretty fun,” Mendez shared. “It was kind of challenging and I’m grateful for it because it was something new. It helped kill the boredom that I normally get from writing the same kind of essay consistently.” 

While she was a little nervous for the Wikipedia page to go live for the world’s eyes, Mendez received positive feedback from friends and would look forward to another Wikipedia assignment in the future.

Sealy agreed, noting the feeling of accomplishment when they finalized and published the article.

“This was a great assignment compared to a traditional assignment because rather than turning in a paper no one will ever see again, I’m actually making a difference and my work will be seen,” said Sealy.

Guided by course instructor Dr. Brian Shmaefsky, the group’s Wikipedia assignment is part of a larger Wiki Education initiative sponsored by the Broadcom Foundation, which encourages the creation of new biographies of diverse people in STEM on Wikipedia.

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

Explore other related stories:

• Adding Claibourne Smith’s Wikipedia article: “like it was a piece of art that I kept looking at”
• Telling the story of an African American chemist
• Clovis students add biographies of diverse people in STEM

 

As an organisation deeply committed to the principles of open knowledge and free information, Wikimedia UK has always sought innovative ways to engage with our community and promote our cause. Today, we’re thrilled to announce a new chapter in our outreach efforts: the launch of our new animations, designed to illuminate our work and bring about a greater understanding of our mission.

Since November 2023, we have been collaborating with a fantastic animation studio called Ritzy Animation who have helped us to bring our ideas to life, using images from Wiki Commons, which they’ve beautifully animated. 

There are four animations in total, providing an overview of us as an organisation and our three strategic themes. We have also created Welsh language versions, to support our projects and programmes across Wales.

Why animation?

In a world inundated with information, we recognise the importance of finding creative ways to communicate our message effectively. As a result, we have identified a need for a more dynamic and accessible approach to engage with diverse audiences. Animation offers a unique medium to communicate new, and at times complex, concepts into digestible and visually appealing narratives, making our work more relatable and engaging to everyone.

What do our animations cover?

Our animations cover both Wikimedia UK’s mission and objectives, offering insights into the wide-ranging impact of our work. From highlighting the significance and impact of open knowledge, to showcasing our three strategic themes of knowledge equity, information literacy and climate & environment, each episode offers a glimpse into our work and our mission.

Through captivating storytelling, and vibrant visuals, our aim is to demystify the concept of open knowledge and inspire viewers to become active participants in the creation and dissemination of knowledge through Wikimedia- these animations serve as an invitation to join us on our mission to empower individuals and communities through knowledge sharing.

What we hope to achieve

At Wikimedia UK, our ultimate goal is to help build a world where every person has access to the sum of all human knowledge. With these animations, we hope to reach new audiences, ignite curiosity, and spark meaningful conversations about the importance of open knowledge in today’s society. 

By showcasing the breadth and depth of our work, we aim to raise awareness about the Wikimedia movement and the vital role it plays in promoting access to knowledge for all. We also hope to inspire individuals to actively contribute to Wikimedia projects, whether through editing articles, participating in community discussions, or supporting our initiatives in other ways.

Join us on our animated journey!

We hope that these animations help to convey to you what working with Wikimedia can do for you, your organisation or your community. Whether you’re a seasoned editor or someone new to our movement, there’s a place for you in the world of Wikimedia. Together, let’s harness the power of open knowledge to build a brighter, more informed future for generations to come.

The post Bringing our mission to life through animation appeared first on WMUK.

This year's Wikimedia Hackathon was held in early May in Tallinn, Estonia. Like last year, it was a great opportunity to both see people I work with regularly, including people in my own team that I had not seen in person before, and to work with and help people that I have had very limited interactions with before. Image by Olari Pilnik is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. I presented a session about Puppet (slides), the configuration management tool used on Wikimedia infrastructure (and some other projects I've been involved on) which I think went quite well.

Wikimedia Europe has signed an open letter, penned by the Wikimedia Foundaiton, that calls on UN Member States to protect Wikipedia and other public interest projects in the forthcoming Global Digital Compact.

The Global Digital Compact initiative is a unique and pivotal opportunity to shape our digital world in a manner that advances the public interest and supports sustainable development for everyone, everywhere. 

UN Member States have the chance to embrace a positive vision for the internet’s future that supports and empowers diverse communities everywhere to build and operate free and open knowledge projects. The Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, provide the world with the largest free and open, multilingual, intercultural, universally accessible repository of educational materials ever created. The volunteer-run Wikimedia projects have formed a community-led ecosystem that champions information integrity. They serve as digital public infrastructure for openly licensed, neutral, encyclopedic content in over 300 languages.

Wikipedia’s experience of over two decades has taught us that the internet needs to be open, global, interoperable, and inclusive in order to serve all of humanity. To that end, three essential commitments should be included in the text of the Global Digital Compact:

1. Protect and empower communities to govern online public interest projects.  Free knowledge projects such as Wikipedia should not be rare. UN Member States should—through regulation, public policy, funding, and other resources—support a world where diverse online communities can build and govern their own public interest projects, designing them to be equitable and contributing to a healthier online information ecosystem. 
2. Promote and protect digital public goods by supporting a robust digital commons from which everyone, everywhere can benefit. Digital public goods such as Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects aim to make multilingual and intercultural information freely accessible to everyone. A thriving public domain that enables the sharing of free and openly licensed content for everyone to use and reuse is key to advancing many Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
3. Build and deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to support and empower, not replace, people who create content and make decisions in the public interest. AI and machine learning tools should support, and not replace, the work of humans. They should be designed and deployed in a manner consistent with international human rights standards, ensuring clear and consistent attribution. Such tools should also ensure participation and control by affected communities through transparent, accountable, and open processes.

02/05/2024-08/05/2024

Mapping campaigns

• contrapunctus has suggested hosting a mapping party to coincide with DebConf24, which will be held from 28 July to 4 August at Pukyong National University, Busan, South Korea. Hwang Dongha said that attracting the local OSM community, Debian user groups, and Ubuntu user groups to the mapping party would be an easy way to get people together, and would also create an opportunity to promote OSM in South Korea.

Community

• In response to the recent OSM vandalism controversy, caused by some players of Niantic’s Pokemon GO, Ilya Zverev has written a short essay ► titled ‘Не вина Niantic‘ (It’s not Niantic’s fault), justifying Niantic’s move to join Overture Maps rather than the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
• Jiří Eischmann, a Red Hat desktop engineering manager among other things, made the following recommendation on Mastodon: ‘If you’re exploring OpenStreetMap like me and [you find] openstreetmap.org is too heavy for you, try OSMapp…’, a statement that triggered a few comments.
• … elsewhere, Jiří Eischmann also commented on OsmAnd and mapycz. David Heidelberg, a Czech Linux developer, suspects that Jiří has fallen in love with OSM.
• Julien Coupey shared his favorite OSM note of the moment (or possibly the year) : ‘Note 4097195 : The former sex shop has become a “evangelical protestant church”. I’m announcing I’m not touching that’.
• Maurizio Napolitano presented a webinar entitled ‘OpenStreetMap: A collaborative Ecosystem Serving Society and Business’. The webinar discussed the role of OSM in enhancing innovation in the public and private sectors.
• Kamil Monicz has published his OpenStreetMap NextGen Development Diary #5.5. At the end of May, OpenStreetMap-NG will include the necessary functionality to run on a testing server, as well as to invite new contributors into the project.
• The UN Mapper of the month for May is Modo Levo Engelbert Steve, a geomatics student from Cameroon.
• Brian Sperlongano has conducted a statistical analysis of the distribution of the populations of places in OpenStreetMap.

Events

• Pieter Vander Vennet announced that he will be holding an OpenStreetMap workshop for beginners in Ghent, Belgium on Thursday 16 May.

Education

• As a special guest, Dr Raquel Dezidério Souto gave a workshop on the creation of web maps with uMap and OSM data for a class at the Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. This was part of the PACES course coordinated by Professor Michael McCall. She described ► her expeience in her diary and shared the link to the recorded video for those who want to create a map like this.
• The Trufi Association drew attention to its free ‘Public Transport‘ online courses.

OSM research

• A study published in Geo-spatial Information Science analysed how the provision of OpenAerialMap images is associated with changes in the underlying editing patterns of OSM features.

Maps

• [1] MapAmore reviewed ‘Sustainable Map‘, an OpenStreetMap-based web map that focuses on environmental sustainability themes.

OSM in action

• Tykayn used MarineTraffic, a website displaying global marine traffic using OpenStreetMap data, to ponder how many people are currently at sea.

Open Data

• As part of their migration process to Overture Maps, Meta has decided to discontinue the Daylight Map Distribution, a dataset derived from OpenStreetMap data, first released in March 2020. The last release is scheduled for November 2024.
• Shizuoka Prefecture is known as an innovative region of Japan. In an article on the prefecture’s website they explained ► the ‘VIRTUAL SHIZUOKA concept’ (an open point cloud database available under CC BY 4.0). This enables Shizuoka Prefecture to be captured and experienced virtually.

Software

• Ilya Zverev has released Every Door version 5.0. Now, you can try the freehand line drawing mode to sketch streams, culverts, walls, fences, cycleways, power lines, footways, paths, roads, and tracks by using the fourth mode for notes.
• TrickyFoxy has developed ► a Tampermonkey script to add some functionality to the OpenStreetMap website.
• Jeyseni recommended ► using OsmAnd as it is reliable enough to be used as an offline map application in Japan.

OSM in the media

• Jomo noted that Germany’s most prominent TV news show, the Tagesschau (Review of the Day), is using OpenStreetMap and Maptiler to render maps in their brand design.
• Tama Plaza News, a local news site covering the suburbs of Tokyo, Japan, recommended ► OpenStreetMap as a site for looking up street names.

Other “geo” things

• Grant Slater is annoyed with Wikipedia, which rejected his attempt at creating a new article for a large dam, as it was not deemed notable enough.
• OpenCage explained the annotation feature in its geocoding API. This feature serves to provide various additional information about a location.
• OpenCage shared a news story about the local residents protesting as a result of the policy of the North Yorkshire council that is forcibly removing apostrophes from the local addressing system, allegedly due to the computer security risk they may pose.
• Rakushouke, a keen Pokémon GO trainer, embarked on a short trip to Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest freshwater lake, located near Kyoto. With the help of OpenStreetMap, they successfully tracked down Wiglett (ウミディグダ/Umidigda in Japanese) and documented their findings in a photo blog ►.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Localidad Chapinero	GeoBeer Mayo 2024		2024-05-11
	SotM Asia 2024 monthly meeting		2024-05-11
	Webinaire sur la campagne d’adhésion à OSMF		2024-05-11
Mainz	OpenStreetMap-Stammtisch Mainz		2024-05-11
Bengaluru	OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party		2024-05-12
København	OSMmapperCPH		2024-05-12
Zürich	163. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich		2024-05-13
Grenoble	Réunion groupe local Grenoble : Panoramax – L’alternative libre pour photo-cartographier les territoires		2024-05-13
Grenoble	Atelier du groupe local OpenStreetMap		2024-05-13
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-05-15
	UN Mappers training – Validating OSM data – session #9		2024-05-15
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe		2024-05-15
Zagreb	State of the Map Croatia 2024		2024-05-16 – 2024-05-17
	[Online] Map-py Wednesday		2024-05-16
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2024-05-17
Hannover	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2024-05-16
Gent	OpenStreetMap workshop for beginners		2024-05-16
Durham	Mapping around University of New Hampshire		2024-05-19
England	OSM UK Online Chat		2024-05-20
Lyon	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon		2024-05-21
Bonn	175. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn		2024-05-21
	UN Mappers training – Validating OSM data – session #10		2024-05-22
	iD Community Chat		2024-05-22
Zürich	Missing Maps Zürich Mai Mapathon		2024-05-22
Rio de Janeiro	Oficina de mapeamento de feições importantes na redução de riscos de desastres (RRD) – YouthMappers UFRJ		2024-05-24
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2024-05-24

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

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

• Albania report: International Roma Day Editathon in Albania and Kosovo, 2024
• Australia report: New images from Central Australia on Wikimedia Commons, Library Science WikiProject students edit Wikipedia & 1Lib1Ref in Australia and New Zealand
• Brazil report: Wiki Library Month
• Czech Republic report: 2023 became a promissing year for wiki-residents and partnerships in CR
• Kosovo report: International Roma Day Editathon in Albania and Kosovo, 2024
• Netherlands report: Informal GLAM hack session
• New Zealand report: Te Papa research expeditions and the Wikipedian at Large
• North Macedonia report: Climate Changes and GLAM
• Poland report: What’s up in GLAM-Wiki in Poland in April
• Spain report: SMALL GLAM SLAM
• Sweden report: 100 000 bildminnen; Metabase
• Switzerland report:
• UK report: Swiss GLAM Programme
• USA report: Heaven on Earth at last?
• Biodiversity Heritage Library report: BHL-Wiki Working Group April monthly highlights
• AvoinGLAM report: AI Sauna quick reflection
• Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: OpenRefine online courses in more languages, and certified trainers
• WMF GLAM report: OpenRefine course in three more languages and International Museum Day challenges
• Calendar: May’s GLAM events

Take a guess – what content gap in the Wikipedia articles on Lysol, the Great Depression in the United States, and the Black Panther Party is now filled, thanks to the work of Utah State University student editors? The answer might surprise you! You can now learn about the role of contraception in each subject’s histories.

These student editors may have channeled their research on birth control into unexpected areas of Wikipedia, but they weren’t the only students in Chris Babits’ History of Sexuality class who focused on adding information related to contraception to the online encyclopedia. Classmates also enhanced related pages including the Cornstock laws and Family planning in the United States. And until one Utah student jumped in, the Views on birth control in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints page was missing arguably the most relevant view: the church’s current stance on contraception. 

Just as real-world events can lead to spikes in readership of related Wikipedia articles, student editors can be motivated to work on topics that experience a peaked level of public interest, wanting to add information to the in-demand area of knowledge.

Babits’ students’ decision to explore the topic of contraception may have been influenced by the real-world interest in the information following a milestone decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 24, 2022 the Supreme Court officially ruled to reverse Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists. The decision undoubtedly drew attention to Wikipedia’s abortion article, which noted a significant jump in page views the following day, as well as to Wikipedia’s article on birth control, which nearly quadrupled in daily readership by June 25. 

So it should come as no surprise that Babits’ class, who’s collective edits on Wikipedia articles have been viewed nearly one million times, isn’t the only recent class in our Wikipedia Student Program to address knowledge gaps related to contraception. 

In fall 2023, three of Caroline Smith’s students at The George Washington University collaborated to create a new article on emergency contraceptives on college campuses, exploring the history, accessibility, and legislation of access at colleges and universities across the country. Their article explores the first time morning-after pills were sold in vending machines on a college campus at The Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, the spread of the concept to other institutions, and the related legislation.

This spring term, four of Smith’s students also worked together to create another new Wikipedia article to share the history of Julie, a healthcare company that markets a non-prescription emergency contraceptive pill. Julie launched their product in September 2022 in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade with a mission of removing stigmas around emergency contraception and increasing access for marginalized communities.

By filling in missing information for topics of public interest and need, student editors like Babits’ and Smiths’ can make tremendous impact through the Wikipedia assignment. Interested in learning more and getting started in your own class? Visit teach.wikiedu.org or reach out with questions at contact@wikiedu.org.

The Wikimedia Endowment is delighted to welcome Mayree Clark as a new member of its Endowment Board. Mayree, a finance expert, will bring her extensive governance expertise to the Wikimedia Endowment, a nonprofit charitable organization providing a permanent safekeeping fund to support the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity.

Mayree Clark is a former director of the Stanford University Endowment. She brings a diverse background in investment banking, equity research, and investment management to the Wikimedia Endowment Board. Mayree spent over 20 years at Morgan Stanley, where she held various leadership roles, including deputy to the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of finance company MSCI. After leaving Morgan Stanley, Mayree joined the investment management industry and later founded Eachwin Capital, an investment management firm. She has served on the boards of Ally Financial, Taubman, and Deutsche Bank AG, contributing her expertise in risk management, governance, and corporate turnaround. Mayree is also involved in multiple philanthropic organizations and holds degrees from the University of Southern California and the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. She has been a dedicated donor to the Wikimedia Foundation since 2007.

“Mayree’s dedication to the Wikimedia Endowment is palpable. She enriches our Board, as her financial expertise guides us forward, enhancing our collective mission of knowledge building, equity, and dissemination,” said President of the Wikimedia Endowment, Lisa Seitz-Gruwell.

With Mayree’s addition, the Endowment Board now has eleven members who all serve as volunteers; Board members are appointed for three years and may serve up to three terms.

Mayree’s appointment follows the recent release of the Wikimedia Foundation’s digital-first, interactive Annual Report and Endowment Report, spotlighting Wikimedia’s achievements and the vital role of donors. Emphasizing the theme “Knowledge is Human,” the reports honor the diverse individuals, including volunteers, staff, and donors, who contribute to the mission of making free, reliable knowledge accessible to everyone, everywhere.

“I am thrilled with the opportunity to play an active part in supporting this precious community and all that it brings to the world,” said Mayree Clark.

About the Wikimedia Endowment

Launched in 2016, the Wikimedia Endowment is a nonprofit charitable organization providing a permanent safekeeping fund to support the operations and activities of the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. It aims to create a solid financial foundation for the future of the Wikimedia projects. As of December 31st, 2023, the Wikimedia Endowment was valued at $130 million USD. Endowment Board members are selected based on active involvement in philanthropic endeavors, prior nonprofit board experience, fundraising and investment expertise, and a strong commitment to the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission. They serve as volunteers. The Wikimedia Endowment is a U.S.-based 501(c)3 charity (Tax ID: 87-3024488).

The post The Wikimedia Endowment welcomes Mayree Clark as its newest Board member  appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.

 Back in January, I discovered a stored XSS vulnerability in core MediaWiki (T355538; CVE-2024-34507). Essentially by setting a specific edit summary when editing a page, you could run javascript (And take over the account of anyone viewing the edit summary, for example on the history page or recentchanges)

MediaWiki core is generally pretty good when it comes to security. There are many sketchy extensions, and sometimes there are issues where an admin might be able to run javascript, but by and large unauthenticated XSS vulns are fairly rare. I think the last one was CVE-2021-44858 from back in 2021. The next one before that was CVE-2017-8815 in 2017, which only applied to wikis configured to have a site language of certain languages (e.g. Serbian and Chinese). At least, those were the ones I found when looking through the list. Hopefully I didn't miss any. In any case, finding XSS triggerable by an unprivleged attacker in MediaWiki core is pretty hard.

So what is the bug? The proof of concept looks like this - Create an edit with the following edit summary:

[[Special:RecentChanges#%1b0000000|link1]] [[PageThatExists#/autofocus/onfocus=alert("xss\n"+document.domain)//|link2]]

This feels a bit random at first glance. How does it work?

The edit summary parser

Whenever you edit a page on MediaWiki, there is a box for your edit summary. This is essentially MediaWiki's version of a commit message.

Very little formatting is allowed in this summary. A major exception is links. You can link to other pages by enclosing the link in [[ and ]].

So this explains a little bit about the proof-of-concept - it involves 2 links. But why 2? It doesn't work with just 1. What is with the weird link targets? They are clearly abnormal, but they also don't look like typical XSS. There are no < or >, there aren't even any unclosed quotes.

Lets take a deeper look at how MediaWiki applies formatting to these edit summaries. The code where all this happens is includes/CommentFormatter/CommentParser.php.

The first thing we might notice is the following line in CommentParser::preprocessInternal: "// \x1b needs to be stripped because it is used for link markers"

In the proof of concept, the first part is [[Special:RecentChanges#%1b0000000|link1]], where %1b appears. This is a good hint that it has something to do with link markers, whatever those are.

Link markers

But what are link markers?

When MediaWiki makes a link, it needs to know whether the page being linked to exists or not, since missing pages use a red colour. The most natural way of doing this is, when encountering a link, to check in the DB whether or not the page exists.

However, there is a problem. When rendering a long page with a lot of links, we have to do a lot of DB lookups. The lookups are simple, but still on a separate (albeit nearby server). Each page to lookup involves a local network request to fetch the page status. While that is happening, MW just sits and waits. This is all very fast, but even still it adds up a little bit if you have say 500 links on a page.

The solution to this problem was to batch the queries. Instead of immediately looking up the page, MW would put a small link marker in the page at that point and carry on. Once it is finished, it would look up all the links all at once, and then do another pass to replace all the link markers.

So this is what a link marker is, just a little marker to tell MW to come back to this spot later after it figured out if all the links exist. The format of this marker is \x1B<number> (So \x1B0000000 for the first one, \x1B0000001 for the second, and so on). \x1B is the ASCII escape character.

Back to the PoC

This explains the first part of the proof of concept: [[Special:RecentChanges#%1b0000000|link1]] - the link target is a link marker. The code has a line:

                                // Fix up urlencoded title texts (copied from Parser::replaceInternalLinks)
                                if ( strpos( $match[1], '%' ) !== false ) {
                                        $match[1] = strtr(
                                                rawurldecode( $match[1] ),
                                                [ '<' => '&lt;', '>' => '&gt;' ]
                                        );
                                }

Which normalizes titles using percent encoding to use the real characters. Thus the %1B gets replaced with an actual 0x1B byte sequence. The code did try and strip 0x1B characters earlier, but at that point, it was still just %1b and did not match the check.

We now have a link with a link marker inside of it. An important note here is that Special:RecentChanges is not a normal page. It is a special page. MediaWiki knows it exists without having to consult the database, so it does not get the link marker treatment. This is important because we cannot use it as a fake link marker if it gets replaced by a real link marker.

At this stage after inserting link markers, the proof of concept becomes the following string:

<a href="/w/index.php/Special:RecentChanges#\x1B000000" title="Special:RecentChanges">link1</a> \x1B0000000

The second link

The \x1B0000000 is a stand in for [[PageThatExists#/autofocus/onfocus=alert("xss\n"+document.domain)//|link2]].

The replacement at the end is a normal replacement, and everything is fine. However there are now two replacements - there is also the replacement inside the link: href="/w/index.php/Special:RecentChanges#\x1B000000"

This is the fake link marker that we contrived to get inserted. Unlike the normal link markers, this is inside an attribute. The replacement text assumes it is being inserted as normal HTML, not as an attribute. Since it is a full link that also has quotes inside it, the two layers of quotes will interfere with each other.

Once the replacements happen we get the following mangled HTML for our proof of concept:

<a href="/w/index.php/Special:RecentChanges#<a href="/w/index.php/Test#/autofocus/onfocus=alert(&quot;xss\n&quot;+document.domain)//" title="Test">link2</a>" title="Special:RecentChanges">link1</a> <a href="/w/index.php/Test#/autofocus/onfocus=alert(&quot;xss\n&quot;+document.domain)//" title="Test">link2</a>

This obviously looks wrong, but its a bit unclear how browsers interpret it. A little known fact about HTML - /'s can separate attributes so long as no equal signs have been encountered yet. After the browser hits the second " mark, it thinks the href attribute is closed and that the remaing is some additional attributes. The browser essentially parses the above html as if it was:

<a href="/w/index.php/Special:RecentChanges#<a href=" w="" index.php="" Test#="" autofocus onfocus="alert(&quot;xss\n&quot;+document.domain)//&quot;" title="Test">link2</a>" title="Special:RecentChanges"&gt;link1</a> <a href="/w/index.php/Test#/autofocus/onfocus=alert(&quot;xss\n&quot;+document.domain)//" title="Test">link2</a>

In other words, an <a> tag, that has an attribute named autofocus and an onfocus event handler. On page load, the link is automatically focused, which triggers the javascript in the onfocus attribute to run, allowing the attacker to do what they want.

Take aways

I think the major take aways is that running Regexes over partially parsed HTML is always scary. We've had similar issues in the past, for example T110143.

The general pattern we've used to fix this and similar issues, is make sure the replacement token has special characters that would be mangled if it appeared in an unexpected context. Concretely, we added " and ' to the token, which would get escaped if placed in an attribute, and thus no longer matching and no longer being replaced.

More generally though, I think this is a good example of why even a minimal CSP policy would be helpful.

CSP is a complex standard, that can do a lot of things and has a lot of pieces. One of the things it can do, is disable "unsafe-inline" javascript. This means javascript from attributes (like onfocus) and javascript URLs. Usually this also includes inline <script> tags without a nonce, but that part is optional. A key point here, is this also generally means you cannot execute javascript via .innerHTML anymore, which is a fairly common vector for XSS via javascript.

Normally disabling unsafe-inline would be part of a broader effort to secure javascript, however its possible to take things a step at a time. This vulnerability would have been stopped just by disabling event attributes. A surprising portion of MediaWiki & extension XSS vulns [Excluding boring - an admin can change something in an unsafe way issues] involve just html attributes (or javascript: urls), which is a web feature that nobody really needs for legit reasons and is generally considered bad practise in normal usage. Even the most minimal CSP policy might really help MediaWiki's overall security posture against XSS vulns.

For more info about the vulnerability, please see the original report at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T355538.

In the last few weeks I have stumbled on various little bits during Wikipedia edits that I thought were worthy of airing! One of them was a re-realization of the boon and the curse of iron and steel. It starts with something I heard a few years ago by economist Sashi Sivramkrishna and others who were following the trail of Buchanan Hamilton in Mysore (listen to the talk here) and they were apparently impressed by the impact of iron production particularly on the destruction of forests in southern India. And last week I found a Wikipedia entry that someone from Parangipettai had written as a draft and which had been left languishing. I went and ensured that it got moved from a draft version to a mainspace entry - it was on the Porto Novo Iron Works, one of the first large-scale iron smelting enterprises in India. The venture, started by a J.M. Heath, did not last long, one of the big factors being the lack of coal for smelting, and he had to make do with charcoal. In a few years, he ran out of charcoal, after depleting the forests of several districts nearby, and the factory had to move to the west coast near Calicut (Beypore). The first director general of forests Dietrich Brandis also noted the role of iron smelting in deforestation. 

Now to Josiah Heath, who is a real character and it is quite a surprise to see that the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography does not even have an entry for him, and there appears to be no available photograph of him (at least online). Heath sent out skins of various animals to the Zoological Society of London and there is a species of bat named after him. More interestingly it seem the fishing cat was described based on a specimen that he sent from India - which it would appear from all likelihood to have come from the Parangipettai region - more likely Pichavaram (wonder if the species still exists there). He also collected a specimen of a Eurasian Griffon Vulture from the same region. Heath apparently was impressed by traditional ukku (better known as Wootz steel) steel-making near Salem where he was initially posted and he seems to have discovered an important factor which he patented. It involved the use of carbon and manganese and he made money initially by distributing packets of his mixture - and later made the mistake of giving its composition. The steel makers of Sheffield, England quickly started using his technique and decided not to pay him any royalty - and he died in poverty. Of course today we could ask whether he actually stole the idea from traditional Indian blacksmiths and whether it could have been patented at all in the first place or of the numerous other injustices involved in all of this. 

Herr Meves

In another Wikipedia-related iron-connection, I found a little-known ornithologist who now has a Wikipedia entry (Wilhelm Meves). Meves was a German pharmacist turned ornithologist - and he decided to treat the brown feathers of lammergeiers with hydrochloric acid and tested them for iron and found that the colour was largely due to iron oxide. He found that this coating was on the outer surface and that the inside of the feathers was largely iron free. He suggested that the birds were bathing in iron-rich waters. Meves worked in Stockholm and mostly wrote in German but some of his findings made their way into the Ibis in English - thanks to John Wolley. And it seems both T.C. Jerdon and A.O. Hume were careful readers of Meves' works. Jerdon was aware of the bleating sound of snipes being produced by air-flow induced vibrations of the outermost tail feather. And Hume even repeated Meves' chemical analysis on his lammergeier specimens from Shimla and confirmed the presence of iron. Hume however noted that neither he nor any of his "intelligent native sportsmen" had ever seen a lammergeier bathe in water and suggested that the red staining may be derived from the blood of dead animals. Hume's original text (emphasis mine):

Anyway, it seems that India's large iron-deposits have a habit of lying in regions rich in biodiversity and ethnic diversity often on ancient tribal lands. It is little wonder that the steel industry barons are involved in disempowering tribal peoples or paying governments to water down environmental laws. I was truly surprised by the amount of work from around the world on related topics.

• Goucher, C.L. (1981). Iron is iron ’til it is rust: Trade and Ecology in the Decline of West African Iron-Smelting. The Journal of African History. 22(2):179-189. https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019393 
• Siran Liu, Thilo Rehren, Dashu Qin, Jianli Chen, Wenli Zhou, Marcos Martinón-Torres, Xin Huang, Wei Qian (2019). Coal-fuelled crucible lead-silver smelting in 12th-13th century China: A technological innovation in the age of deforestation. Journal of Archaeological Science 104:75-84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2019.01.004
• The impact of ancient iron mining and smelting on the landscape balance on Elba Island, Tuscan Archipelago, Italy - Fabian Becker, Raphael A. Eser, Philipp Hoelzmann, Brigitta Schütt (2019). The environmental impact of ancient iron mining and smelting on Elba Island, Italy – A geochemical soil survey of the Magazzini site. Journal of Geochemical Exploration 205 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gexplo.2019.04.009
  
• Iles, L. (2016). The Role of Metallurgy in Transforming Global Forests.. J Archaeol Method Theory 23:1219–1241 https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9266-7

Someday I ought to visit Parangipettai and Pichavaram! 

I recently learned about a new book titled “Tamil Computing” by Dr. R. Ponnusamy. It sparked my own long-held desire to write a book on Malayalam Computing, which friends have encouraged me to publish. I am still not convinced that a “printed book” is a good idea to present this topic yet. Not to mention the amount of time it require for such initiatives. So, I was intrigued by this book promptly purchased a copy from amazon.

🕑 1 hour 3 minutes

Viktor Schelling is the Senior Principal MediaWiki Developer at Pegasystems.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Pegasystems Wikipedia article
• Wikibase Solutions
• FlexForm MediaWiki extension
• Open CSP

By Lucy Moore, Archeologist, Curator and Wikimedian

“Mmmm! Inhale that fresh vintage aroma!” is a sign that welcomes buyers and browsers to the vintage shop Blue Rinse in Leeds. It struck a chord with me, as I’ve been thinking a lot lately about smell and culture, in particular how data about smell can be represented in a database like Wikidata.

This train of thought started early in 2024, at an event in York that is part of a research project at the university called ‘Bespoke, Open, Collaborative Approaches to Heritage Documentation’. It brought together heritage workers and researchers to think creatively about documentation in that sector. During the day I was chatting with people about how recording sensory information, like the smell of an object, could, and perhaps should, be part of museum records. Like a good Wikimedian, I turned to Wikidata to see how it recorded examples of ‘things smelling like other things’, and to my surprise a property for ‘smells of’ was absent. 

Why was I surprised you might be thinking? Why would most people want to record how objects might smell or taste? We’re not (usually) licking things when we visit museums. I have definitely heard people talk about a ‘museum smell’. When I worked as a museum curator, I also used smells in a few exhibitions to bring topics more to life for visitors.

What captures my imagination, especially when you think about smell, is that as a sense it is both intensely personal, and also something shared. I began to think about all the cultures represented in museum collections, but also across the Wikimedia movement and started to imagine what potential there might be to represent this way of understanding the world on Wikidata.

So what smells connect what objects? How can we ‘follow our noses’ to find common scents in cultural data? Once the topic was raised lots of people in our Wikimedia family had suggestions. From the sculpture 5318008 by artist Tasha Marks (it smells of human breast milk!), to Agatha Christie-inspired ways to detect poison through scent, new smell-horizons opened with each conversation. The natural world is full of nose-surprises too. Did you know that a binturong smells of popcorn? Or that jasmine tea smells of otter poo (or is it the other way around)?

Whilst pondering these relationships and questions, I saw that  XLab– The Cultural Heritage Informatics Collaboratory at Carleton University in Ottawa was due to run a conference on futures in heritage informatics along with a ‘book sprint’ on the topic. This looked like a great opportunity to talk to others thinking creatively about data. With funding from Wikimedia UK partly covering my costs, I was able to travel to Canada and take part in the workshops, discussions and book revision in person. Being able to participate in events like these is really important for researchers. At Carleton I spoke with lots of people working at their digital humanities centre, the XLab, and attended a celebration of their public history graduates’ work too. It exposed me to new ideas, and has helped me to shape how I’m thinking about smell and data. I’m now revising the chapter I have written for the book, and am looking forward to sharing wider ideas about linked open sensory data elsewhere. I’m also collecting “things that smell like other things” so drop a message on my talk page!

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