Last week I spoke to a few of my Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) colleagues about how we deploy code—I completely botched it. I got too complex too fast. It only hit me later—to explain deployments, I need to start with a lie.

M. Jagadesh Kumar explains:

Every day, I am faced with the dilemma of explaining some complex phenomena [...] To realize my goal, I tell "lies to students."

This idea comes from Terry Pratchett's "lies-to-children" — a false statement that leads to a more accurate explanation. Asymptotically approaching truth via approximation.

Every section of this post is a subtle lie, but approximately correct.

Release Train

The first lie I need to tell is that we deploy code once a week.

Every Thursday, Release-Engineering-Team deploys a MediaWiki release to all 978 wikis. The "release branch" is 198 different branches—one branch each for mediawiki/core, mediawiki/vendor, 188 MediaWiki extensions, and eight skins—that get bundled up via git submodule.

Progressive rollout

The next lie gets a bit closer to the truth: we don't deploy on Thursday; we deploy Tuesday through Thursday.

The cleverly named TrainBranchBot creates a weekly train branch at 2 am UTC every Tuesday.

• Tuesday
  • Deploy to Group0—132 wikis, including Test Wikipedia, mediawiki.org, and Office wiki (our internal WMF MediaWiki)
• Wednesday
  • Deploy to Group1—528 wikis, including Commons and Wikidata. Most non-Wikipedia wikis (plus Catalan Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, and Hebrew Wikipedia)
• Thursday
  • Deploy to remaining 320 wikis, including our largest wiki: English Wikipedia

Progressive rollouts give users time to spot bugs. We have an experienced user-base—as Risker attested on the Wikitech-l mailing list:

It's not always possible for even the best developer and the best testing systems to catch an issue that will be spotted by a hands-on user, several of whom are much more familiar with the purpose, expected outcomes and change impact on extensions than the people who have written them or QA'd them.

Bugs

Now I'm nearing the complete truth: we deploy every day except for Fridays.

Brace yourself: we don't write perfect software. When we find serious bugs, they block the release train — we will not progress from Group1 to Group2 (for example) until we fix the blocking issue. We fix the blocking issue by backporting a patch to the release branch. If there's a bug in this release, we patch that bug in our mainline branch, then git cherry-pick that patch onto our release branch and deploy that code.

We deploy backports three times a day during backport deployment windows.  In addition to backports, developers may opt to deploy new configuration or enable/disable features in the backport deployment windows.

Release engineers train others to deploy backports twice a week.

Emergencies

We deploy on Fridays when there are major issues. Examples of major issues are:

• Security issues
• Data loss or corruption
• Availability of service
• Preventing abuse
• Major loss of functionality/visible breakage

We avoid deploying on Fridays because we have a small team of people to respond to incidents. We want those people to be away from computers on the weekends (if they want to be), not responding to emergencies.

Non-MediaWiki code

There are 42 microservices on Kubernetes deployed via helm. And there are 64 microservices running on bare metal. The service owners deploy those microservices outside of the train process.

We coordinate deployments on our deployment calendar wiki page.

The whole truth

We progressively deploy a large bundle of MediaWiki patches (between 150 and 950) every week. There are 12 backport windows a week where developers can add new features, fix bugs, or deploy new configurations. There are microservices deployed by developers at their own pace.

Important Resources:

• Deployment calendar
• Deployment training
• Current release train status

More resources:

• Trains vs Backports
• Long-term deployment calendar
• Train blocker task
• Emergencies

Thanks to @brennen, @greg, @KSiebert, @Risker, and @VPuffetMichel for reading early drafts of this post. The feedback was very helpful. Stay tuned for "How we deploy code: Part II."

Like most people, Nick Geiser uses Wikipedia every day. As a PhD candidate in theoretical physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, Nick studies string theory and uses mathematics to solve problems in quantum gravity. Outside of research, he works with a variety of organizations to support under-represented minority groups in STEM fields.

When he first saw information about an American Physical Society (APS) Wiki Scientists course, where participants would learn to edit Wikipedia with instruction from Wiki Education, Nick was intrigued, but work and other distractions kept him from applying.

“A few months after that, I read an article about the course itself and the experiences of the Wiki Scientists who took it. I then enthusiastically signed up for the latest iteration of the course and received a scholarship from the APS to attend,” he says. “I specifically wanted to learn how to edit Wikipedia and to spend time improving the biographical pages for minority physicists.”

Nick joined other APS members in a six-week course over Zoom, led by Wiki Education’s Will Kent. As a scientific researcher, Nick says he was familiar with technical writing, but the idea of editing Wikipedia was still daunting to him.

“The weekly meetings and homework assignments were a perfect format to learn the particular skills of editing Wikipedia that I might have never learned on my own,” he says. “Frankly, Wikipedia is overwhelming, and Will broke things down so that I could learn the ropes in manageable steps.”

Following those steps led Nick to improve the biography of Argentine theoretical physicist Miguel Ángel Virasoro, whose work laid the mathematical groundwork for Nick’s field. The article was a stub, meaning it was comprised of a handful of sentences but lacked detail.

“I am also Latino, so I found Virasoro as a fitting first subject for my Wikipedia journey,” Nick explains. “Through writing this article, I learned that a prominent Argentine philosopher with the same name was the father of the physicist Virasoro, but there was no reference to this connection on English language Wikipedia! I disambiguated the two Wikipedia pages and added the fact that they were father and son. I was incredibly surprised that such an important fact was missing from the two Wikipedia pages, and I was happy to have added that particular bit of information.”

Having learned to edit Wikipedia through this course, Nick plans to keep contributing content. He loves how focused he becomes when editing Wikipedia — to the detriment of his other projects, a statement many Wikipedians all over the world can identify with. In the future, he plans to both improve biographies of under-represented physicists as well as regularly editing more technical articles he’s engaging with as part of his own research.

“Improving the open-access reservoir of knowledge on Wikipedia will now be part of my regular work as an academic,” Nick says. “I think all academics, including physicists, should learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. We all write academic papers which may be read by only a few other researchers. Wikipedia articles, however, may be read by millions of people. Just a few hours of edits can tangibly improve a primary source of information for much of the globe.”

“Moreover, STEM in particular has real problems of representation, and improving the biographical articles on Wikipedia for under-represented minority scientists can help turn the tide,” he adds. “Aspiring young scientists are influenced by scientists who look like them, and the biographies of these scientists will not write themselves.”

Image credits: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; Quant Mechanic, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

• Albania report: Diaspora Edits Wikipedia Campaign
• Argentina report: New parnership agreements and more training!
• Australia report: Preserving paralympic history
• Belgium report: Wikimedia Belgium GLAM report September 2021
• Brazil report: WikidataCon’s right around the corner: find out how to participate
• France report: Wikidata training in Musée de Grenoble
• Italy report: Call for Italian museums, archives and libraries
• Kosovo report: Diaspora Edits Wikipedia Campaign
• Netherlands report: GLAM at WikiconNL2021, ISA-campaign Tag the species Naturalis en Rijksmuseum
• Serbia report: New WiR and presentation of our activities
• Spain report: Women Gastronomes Edit-a-thon
• Sweden report: Kulturhistoria som gymnasiearbete; Uploads from museums in Göteborg; Wiki Loves Monuments; LGBTQIA+ edit-a-thon
• UK report: British Library and Khalili Collections
• USA report: New page patrol not assuming good faith towards workshop editors
• Content Partnerships Hub report: Working towards a thematic hub on content partnerships
• Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: First steps for Wikimedia Commons reconciliation service
• WMF GLAM report: Updates on grant-funded technical projects
• Calendar: October’s GLAM events

“So often, we hear that girls in science need more role models and inspiration. We’re asked, ‘Where are the women in science?’, as if we’re not already here.”

Dr. Maryam Zaringhalam and Dr. Jess Wade, Nature

500 Women Wiki Scientists is a project between Wiki Education and 500 Women Scientists to increase visibility of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine (STEMM) through Wikipedia’s vast reach. Since May 2020, we’ve partnered to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of women and other historically excluded scientists. 500 Women Scientists has given 75 members—predominantly early career scientists—the opportunity to work with Wiki Education’s Wikipedia experts to learn how to join the Wikipedia community and ensure the encyclopedia reflects the most accurate and equitable representation of STEMM.

In three Wiki Scientists courses to date (with a fourth one starting this week), scientists affiliated with 500 Women Scientists have collaborated with each other and Wiki Education’s team to add and expand STEMM biographies on Wikipedia. Over 6 weeks, they’ve learned how to use Wikimedia projects as tools in their work to preserve and share knowledge with the public. By embedding Wikipedia know-how within their institution, 500 Women Scientists has developed a network of Wikipedians to continue this important work both through their own editing and through coordinating Wikipedia-editing events.

This is the story of how this group has become an integral part of the Wikipedia movement, and how other organizations can make that happen for their faculty, staff, or members.

There are two key components to this ongoing project:

1.  we expand public knowledge of notable scientists who have been historically excluded from the narrative;

2. scientists learn how to edit Wikipedia, later applying their learning outcomes to teach others.

1) The public benefits from more inclusive information about scientists

The US Department of Education says that women earn 57.4% of bachelor’s degrees and 62.6% of master’s degrees. But only 31% of degrees and certificates in STEMM fields go to women.

This gap has an uneasy, well-known counterpart on Wikipedia. Roughly 83.7% of the volunteers writing Wikipedia are men. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Wikipedia’s biographies of women are often lacking in quality (sometimes highlighting a woman’s work through her husband’s career), and some are missing altogether, as only 19% of biographies on Wikipedia are of women. Wiki Education and 500 Women Scientists celebrate the idea that access to knowledge is a game-changer. We believe the same holds true for young future scientists. The gap in Wikipedia’s coverage of women reflects worrisome stereotypes of women in science, especially when we know that women already “do groundbreaking work and pave the way for more like them to join the ranks of the scientific workforce,” as Dr. Maryam Zaringhalam of 500 Women Scientists puts it.

That’s where the 500 Women Wiki Scientists come in. The participants in our courses have added more than 373,000 words to Wikipedia, primarily to biographies, and they’ve created 92 brand new articles. This is a feat for any group, but especially first-time editors who are new to Wikipedia’s technical and procedural nuances. They’re able to do this work because the publications about these scientists’ work already exist—notice they’ve added 1,400 references—but nobody else has taken the initiative to add it in to Wikipedia.

Participants’ hard work has reached over 7 million people curious to learn more about these scientists. Now, anyone with access to the internet can learn about Jean Langenheim, a plant ecologist and pioneer for women in the field. Perhaps they’ll read about Angela Christiano, a molecular geneticist whose research shows promise for treating hair loss, or Mercedes Concepcion, a Filipino social scientist whose outstanding work in population studies in Asia has earned her the nickname “Mother of Asian Demography.”

Thanks to the 500 Women Wiki Scientists, there are dozens of other stories like this now waiting for the world to discover them. We’re excited to continue this partnership, sharing stories that better represent the existing diversity among scientists, especially to encourage even more diversity in the coming generations. As Dr. Maryam Zaringhalam and Dr. Jess Wade have said, “If we can inspire enough editors to take to Wikipedia and fill in the gaps forged by gender bias, we will improve our scientific record, celebrate the outstanding science done by scientists from underrepresented groups and, maybe, inspire a new generation of girls in science who can find stories of girls just like them who grew up to do and discover incredible things.”

2) Wiki Scientists courses teach scientists how to edit Wikipedia, and alumni pass their new skills to other newcomers

Over 6 weeks, Wiki Education’s team of Wikipedia experts facilitates collaborative group sessions among 500 Women Scientists’ members to immerse them in Wikipedia’s technical, procedural, and cultural practices. Wiki Education helps these scholars incorporate published information about notable and underrepresented scientists from their field of study to Wikipedia.

Upon course completion, participants receive a shareable, electronic certificate issued by 500 Women Scientists and Wiki Education, designating them as 500 Women Wiki Scientists. At this stage, they have developed the technical skills and Wikipedia know-how to disseminate their knowledge to the public and facilitate Wikipedia-editing activities among their peers.

We’re proud of our Wiki Scientists course curriculum and the ability to bring “newbies” into the community in a relatively short period, and we’re especially thrilled with how much participants enjoy the whole experience. One participant said, “I was hoping to create two new Wikipedia pages – which was a huge stretch for me, since I had very limited editing experience before this program. I ended up creating three pages and participated in two additional edit-a-thons during the program. I plan on continuing to edit and make contributions. The course set me up to succeed.” When asked how they would describe the benefit of learning how to edit Wikipedia to someone else, another participant said, “Having the tools to contribute and improve one of the most visited sources of information is pretty empowering. Especially if you have a niche you’re excited to work on/learn more about. Editing Wikipedia is also a good exercise to become a better writer.”

And, of course, we love seeing that all post-course survey respondents reported satisfaction and that they would recommend this course to a colleague.

To date, we have trained 55 members of 500 Women Scientists how to edit Wikipedia, and we’re starting a new course this week, which will bring 20 new scientists into the community. The new cohort will join their peers in moderating virtual events to bring more scientists to Wikipedia. Check out their ongoing impact as they train others how to add biographies of historically excluded scientists to Wikipedia.

How organizations can partner with Wiki Education around a training course

Amplify reliable information to the public

Our team works personally with organizations like 500 Women Scientists to set up Wikipedia and Wikidata training courses that align with their mission and expand the public’s access to high quality knowledge. In conversations with one of 500 Women Scientists’ executive leaders, Dr. Maryam Zaringhalam, we identified what Wiki Education could help their members achieve, and we built the first course to ensure it would be an excellent learning experience for 500 Women Scientists’ participating members and would contribute to the public scholarship about women in STEMM.

Give your team the skills they need to train others

500 Women Scientists has been active for a few years in running Wikipedia edit-a-thons, events where trained Wikipedia editors guide interested newcomers through the early stages of contributing content to Wikipedia. Though they originally held events in regional “pods,” the COVID-19 pandemic shifted their events into a virtual space. These events proved engaging for members and have long had a high turn-out, but we determined that a more in-depth Wiki Scientists course would provide a deeper learning experience for anyone who prefers structured assignments and milestones as a part of their learning process. That way, 500 Women Scientists could expand their pool of members who were competent in Wikipedia editing and confident enough to train others, thus passing on their new skills to other members.

Help make open knowledge more inclusive and equitable

500 Women Scientists’ mission to make science more inclusive aligns with Wiki Education’s initiative to make Wikipedia more equitable. Not only do their members bring more inclusive content about scientists to the public through Wikipedia, but they represent a much more diverse group of editors than the existing community on English Wikipedia.

98% of the 500 Women Wiki Scientists alumni report their pronouns as “she/her” or “they/them,” which means this partnership is bringing more diverse voices to Wikipedia, as the existing editor base is 83.7% men. Additionally, we can compare the reported race and ethnicity of Wiki Education’s participants in the 500 Women Wiki Scientists courses to the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2021 Community Insights Report and see how much more racially diverse the 500 Women Wiki Scientists are compared to the existing Wikipedia community within the United States.

Join our movement!

Together, 500 Women Scientists and Wiki Education are working together to improve Wikipedia’s breadth, quality, and equity. We’re eager to continue this work, both with 500 Women Scientists and other partners. 500 Women Scientists has sponsored 75 seats since May 2020, creating a free, engaging learning opportunity for their members. This unique, fun professional development experience is fulfilling for scholars as they share knowledge with the world, and we can’t wait to bring more subject-matter experts into our community.

If you’re interested in beginning a conversation about buying out a customized course for members or staff of your organization, contact us at [email protected].

The fight over the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market has shown that European copyright rules affect the operation of Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. Global rules are equally important. Negotiations take place in Geneva, at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Wikimedia Deutschland and the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group are committed to increasing transparency around WIPO negotiations on international copyright law, and shaping WIPO-level policy outcomes, especially facing the pressure by rightsholders’ to expand the scope of copyright protections. This is the third installment of a series on Wikimedia’s involvement at WIPO (see part I and part II).

China blocked the Wikimedia Foundation’s bid for observer status at WIPO. This is the second time this has happened after the Foundation’s initial application in 2020. Wikimedia’s exclusion sets a worrying precedent and should alert European lawmakers who are concerned about the democratic governance of intergovernmental organizations.

Unsurprising yet still disappointing

China’s move during last week’s general assembly session didn’t exactly come as a surprise. It was again the only country to explicitly object to the accreditation of the Wikimedia Foundation as an official observer. Since WIPO is generally run by consensus, any one country may veto accreditation requests by NGOs. The Foundation will reapply for official observer status in 2022, but it will only be admitted by WIPO if China decides to change its mind.

Like last year, China’s statement suggested that “affiliated websites of Wikimedia contain a large amount of content and disinformation that run counter to the ‘One-China-Principle.’” It’s unclear whether this claim was made in reference to the independent, volunteer-led Wikimedia Taiwan chapter or the Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia. The government has blocked access to all language versions of Wikipedia in China for a number of years.

No consensus in sight

The United States and the group of industrialized countries at WIPO (Group B) — which also includes a number of Western European Union member states, Australia, Canada, the Holy See, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom — expressed their support for the Foundation’s application. Yet Iran, Pakistan, and Russia in their respective statements insisted on the observance of the consensus principle.

A wide range of international and non-profit organizations as well as business associations are accredited as observers by WIPO. These outside groups offer technical expertise, on-the-ground experience, and diversity of opinions to help WIPO carry out its global mandate. It’s not at all unusual for observers to have members, partners, or affiliates in Taiwan. So far, the only organization that unsuccessfully applied for observer status has been Pirate Parties International due to being a political party.

Civil society united

In a statement released on Tuesday, Amanda Keton, General Counsel of the Foundation noted that “the Wikimedia Foundation’s absence from these meetings deprives our communities of an opportunity to participate in this process.” Keton added: “We renew our call to WIPO members, including China, to approve our application. The international community must ensure meaningful civil society participation in UN fora.”

“We renew our call to WIPO members, including China, to approve our application. The international community must ensure meaningful civil society participation in UN fora.”

Amanda Keton, General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation

The French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, and Swiss Wikimedia chapters joined in on this call. In addition, Creative Commons released a statement of support and Communia sent a letter to WIPO delegates co-signed by 55 civil society organizations, asking for the Foundation’s admission as an observer organization.

The EU needs to do more to uphold democratic principles

China is already using its influence to choke NGO participation at the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). WIPO is at risk of falling prey to the same mechanism of capture and becoming an arena for battles unrelated with intellectual property. The EU has a responsibility to uphold democratic principles in global governance and particularly in the UN system. While the statements by the United States and Group B are certainly welcome, it’s clear that we need more support.

Roxanne Hughes uses Wikipedia all the time. So when Roxanne, the director of the Center for Integrating Research and Learning at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, saw a call from the American Physical Society to take one of our Wiki Scientists courses aimed at improving biographies of underrepresented physicists on Wikipedia, she signed right up.

“I realized that Wikipedia was such a valuable place to highlight biographies of STEM women who might not be known,” she says. “I work in diversity, equity, and inclusion within STEM and Wikipedia’s efforts to give voice to scientists and engineers who have been ignored is incredibly valuable.”

In the six-week class, Roxanne met with our instructor, Will Kent, and her classmates once a week via Zoom, as well as taking our online trainings outside of class. Roxanne says she enjoyed both the trainings and the synchronous instruction.

Roxanne chose to work on Dorothy Toplitzky Blum‘s Wikipedia article. Blum was an American computer scientist and cryptanalyst.

“She worked for the National Security Agency and its predecessors from 1944 until her death in 1980,” Roxanne explains. “I find the period during WWII to be such an interesting time period for women to gain opportunities in the workforce. So her story particularly intrigued me.”

In addition to improving Blum’s biography, Roxanne is also contemplating how she can engage more with Wikipedia. In her work, she runs or oversees programs for K-12 students/teachers, undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs. She says she thinks a similar course for these age groups could have a profound impact on students and postdocs. Roxanne calls it an “empowering experience” to give credit to an underrepresented scientist on such a big platform like Wikipedia. And of course, she adds, it’s not just Wikipedia’s biographies that need expanding: physics topics themselves are important too.

“When people Google physicists or physics concepts, they will most likely be taken to a Wikipedia page,” she says. “Physicists need to be part of the communication of their science, and that happens through Wikipedia.”

To take a course like the one Roxanne took, visit learn.wikiedu.org.

Image credit: NationalMagLab, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

28/09/2021-04/10/2021

Mapping campaigns

• The OrganicMaps team asked users to help fix issues with subway mapping using this validator. Brandon suggested that the makers of the recently released new app for Jungle Bus could perhaps initiate a collaboration?

Mapping

• MapSpot has created several maps detailing the progress of the river modernisation project, which replaces waterway=riverbank with natural=water and water=river.

Community

• OpenStreetMap Belgium’s Mapper of the Month for October is Donat Robaux (gendy54) from France.

Imports

• foxandpotatoes explained, in detail, how to use official sources related to Belgian cadastral boundaries to complete and/or correct OpenStreetMap data for administrative boundaries.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Roland Olbricht explained the mission and tasks of the new Engineering Working Group (EWG), of which he has become chairman.
• Here you can find all the necessary information to become a candidate for the OSMF board (election in December), or to nominate someone else.

Local chapter news

• Happy birthday OSM-FR! The French local chapter will celebrate its 10^th birthday on Monday 11 October at several locations in France.
• The University of Arizona will host the next State of the Map US on 1 to 3 April 2022. So let’s go to Tucson!
• The September issue of the monthly newsletter from the US local chapter has been published.

Events

• Topi Tjukanov has announced the categories for the 30 day map challenge to be held during November 2021. OpenStreetMap features directly as one of the data challenges.
• The call for a venue for the State of the Map 2022 (we reported earlier) has gone unanswered. Andrew Hain asked if we need to think more carefully about how we meet? Or have the explicit or implicit demands placed on venues become too onerous?

Maps

• Chetan Gowda is looking for some feedback on their printable Kannada maps.
• Marcos Dione blogged about how he manages the rendering of isolated points of interest at lower zoom levels compared with the same type of POI in dense areas.

Software

• Bryce Cogswell announced that Go Map!! v3.0 has been released for iOS. In the diary post Bryce also reminisced about how Go Map!! came to be.
• Version 4.0 of the GraphHopper routing engine has been released. ‘Spatial rules’ have been replaced and extended with custom areas. You can use custom areas to customise properties of GraphHopper’s road network in arbitrary areas. A typical use case is to amend rules on a country-by-country basis, such as default speed limits.
• NLnet is a foundation that ‘funds those with ideas to fix the internet’. A call for open funding proposals, for projects that would help with creating an ‘open, trustworthy and reliable internet for all’, may cover projects helping OpenStreetMap, and it may be a good idea to apply.

Did you know …

• … Richard Fairhurst has written Providing data to OpenStreetMap, an illustrated anglophone guide for local authorities and other data owners?
• … that Anne-Karoline Distel (OSM user b-unicycling) maintains a YouTube channel with lots of ideas and advice on OSM for history buffs?
• … you can find a list of external data that has been imported into the OSM database on the wiki?
• … that the colour scheme of the OSM Mapnik layer, now replaced by CartoCSS with a revised scheme, was investigated by researchers from Hamburg University in 2013? Richard Fairhurst, who created the original colour scheme, speculated that the effort spent on research was considerably greater than that spent on choosing the colours in the first place.

Other “geo” things

• OpenCage’s latest and very recent #geoweirdness thread is focused on Spain. The thread starts with the image of a multipolygon natural=lava that contributor sergionaranja entered into OSM on the occasion of the current eruption of the volcano Cumbre Vieja on the island of La Palma.
• Fancy a bit of aerial surveying using a drone? Be careful not to get too close to aggressive wildlife. A crocodile took out a low-flying drone in Australia, which captured its own last moment on video.
• Google has released an app, Address Maker, which is designed to encourage the use of Plus Codes as addresses in areas where there are no government assigned addresses.
• There are surviving references to the existence and geography of North America from as early as the 14^th century, thanks to an Italian monk.
• The radio signals of a large number of low-flying and GNSS-independent Internet satellites are being used by scientists to determine their location.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Nantes	À la découverte d’OpenStreetMap [Fête de la science 2021]		2021-10-09 – 2021-10-10
Zürich	OSM-Treffen Zürich		2021-10-11
Tours	OSM Tours (FR) fête les 10 ans de OSM_Fr		2021-10-11
	DRK Missing Maps Online Mapathon		2021-10-12
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2021-10-12
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2021-10-12
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2021-10-13
Mannheim	Einführung in der humanitären Kartographie		2021-10-13
	OpenStreetMap Michigan Meetup		2021-10-15
Bonn	144. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2021-10-19
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2021-10-19
Olomouc	říjnový olomoucký mapathon		2021-10-21
Hlavní město Praha	“50 years of MSF” mapathon with Missing Maps CZ community 2021 #6		2021-10-25
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	✓	2021-10-25
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2021-10-27
Bruxelles – Brussel	Virtual(?) OpenStreetMap Belgium meeting		2021-10-26
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OSM-Treffen (online)		2021-10-27
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2021-10-29
Amsterdam	OSM Nederland maandelijkse bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2021-10-30

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 Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, TheSwavu, derFred.

For the paper "Effects of large herbivores on fire regimes and wildfire mitigation" Wikidata has an item, it links to its eight authors but there are no citations. Like any quality article there are plenty of references on the website for the article but we do not know them yet in Wikidata. There is a bot that goes around and adds citations in its own sweet time but when volunteers like me take an interest, it would be great to tool up for attention for a single paper.

What it would look like is easy; it would show the papers that are known to be citations and enable a one click solution to add them as a citation. Then it would show the papers not known to Wikidata but with a DOI. They can be added one at a time. What is left is the stuff that is cited but takes more effort to annotate. 

The benefits are obvious; science connects what is said before to what is said in a paper and eventually it will be linked to those citing a paper. As more papers from more authors get this royal treatment, Scholia as a tool will become even more relevant for those who care about the references in related Wikipedia articles; its references are referenced.

It is easy to suggest that it should not be hard to implement; there is a bot and it only needs to function for only one paper in stead of serially. It then has to find its way as a tool in Scholia and that opens up a box of user interface related issues. Well worth it (I think) but it then we also need to get the message out that Scholia is very much an active as well as a passive tool.

Thanks, GerardM

Nonprofit organizations across the world are vibrant and diverse with wide ranging missions and objectives. One thing that ties them together is the goal of fundraising and awareness – something each organization approaches differently. At the Wikimedia Foundation, your generous donations help us maintain our independence, serve our diverse and global community, and––unlike many other major websites––guarantee that Wikipedia will never have to rely on advertising. In short, your donations help keep free knowledge free.

We are grateful to be funded primarily by readers around the world who give an average of €10, responding to appeals in banners and email. Reader donations are the best and most important support that the Wikimedia Foundation receives, because they are a reflection of the value that people feel Wikipedia brings to their lives. These donations have allowed the Foundation to provide the infrastructure, world-class technical engineering, and community support that a top ten global website requires.

Every donation we receive is effectively and transparently spent to support our mission. It is important to know that donations do not fund the editing of Wikipedia by Foundation staff. The Foundation does not write, edit, or determine what content is included on Wikipedia or how that content is maintained––editorial policy is determined by Wikipedia’s global community of volunteer editors who strive to deliver neutral and reliable information and prevent and revert inaccurate information on the site. 

Here are just some of the ways we do use donations to sustain Wikipedia and free knowledge:

Providing international technology infrastructure

Our dedicated engineering staff work to ensure you can securely and quickly access Wikipedia on your preferred device no matter where you are in the world. Donations also ensure people around the world can access Wikipedia in their preferred language. While most major websites support an average of 50–100 languages, Wikipedia supports over 300 and counting.

Supporting community-led projects to increase access to trusted information

We support numerous initiatives and projects, including various volunteer-led events and workshops that enrich content on Wikimedia sites and invite new editors to join. We collaborate with Wikipedia volunteers around the globe to support their ideas and help them bring more free knowledge to the world. Every year, about 10% of our budget is specifically dedicated to supporting community projects that enrich, grow, and improve knowledge on Wikipedia.

Defending and protecting free access to information globally

Our legal team works to protect free knowledge, working to prevent censorship, advocating for free licenses and the reform of copyright laws, as well as defending our volunteers from the threat of reprisal. In addition, while Wikipedia remains an example of the good the internet can provide, governments are looking for new models to curb the influence of larger tech companies. Tech companies that operate in the for-profit area have significant financial resources to respond, but we need the help of our supporters to protect our movement’s efforts from these and other looming challenges. 

Empowering French communities

The Wikimedia Foundation supports and promotes the direct impact our free knowledge projects have on French communities. The French language edition of Wikipedia receives nearly one billion pageviews each month, with half of those views coming from France. Wikimedia Commons, our free media repository, has hundreds of thousands of photos and videos sharing the sites and sounds of France with people around the world – including nearly 20,000 files showcasing the Eiffel Tower. Finally, the Foundation provides support to Wikimedia France, the independent movement affiliate working on the ground in France everyday.

We see the impact of these efforts in the messages we receive from French donors:

“Thank you for your kind return email. I am a grandmother over 70 who loves Wikipedia, it helps me a lot when I want or need to know something important to me.”

“Your work is masterful, universal. A huge thank you for allowing us, indeed, without effort, to access your encyclopedia on a daily basis or nearly. Your appeal for financial support is also useful so as to remind us that we are all members of a common world, a common history.”

“I use Wikipedia almost daily. I have the chance to have free access to the French and English pages, which multiplies the field of possibilities. Wikipedia is a gold mine, long live free knowledge! Thank you for what you do for the good of humanity.”

It takes a village to successfully operate a global free knowledge platform, and your donations help by sustaining Wikipedia and our numerous other open source projects. We hope to keep Wikipedia primarily funded by our readers long into the future. Please consider making a donation to Wikipedia to ensure it continues to thrive and remain independent for years to come.

8 October 2021, San Francisco, California — The Wikimedia Foundation today announced the appointment of two new Vice Presidents: Anusha Alikhan as Vice President of Communications, and Margeigh Novotny as Vice President of Product Design. The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. With this news, both Anusha and Margeigh build on their established tenure at the Foundation and step into expanded leadership roles supporting the broader free knowledge movement.

“I’m thrilled by this opportunity to recognize the deep bench of leaders we’re developing at the Wikimedia Foundation,” said Robyn Arville, Wikimedia Foundation Chief of Talent and Culture. “Anusha and Margeigh both excel at articulating long-term strategy for their respective functions. They are creative thinkers who have the experience and the operational skills to work across rapidly expanding teams and broaden the ways in which Communications and Product support our global movement.” 

Anusha Alikhan brings more than 14 years of communications experience spanning the areas of human rights, technology, international development, journalism and media innovation. She started her career as an employment and human rights lawyer in Toronto, Canada. She expanded her focus on advocacy by building a career around social good with communications leadership roles at the UN, the National Parkinson Foundation, and Knight Foundation. Technology has been core to her focus in communications; at the UN her work centered on promoting technology solutions to advance global peacekeeping, and at Knight Foundation she led strategies that emphasized the power of technology to inform and engage.

In her two years at the Foundation, Anusha has led an expanding team and strengthened Wikimedia’s strategic communications focus. Her emphasis on targeted-campaign building has increased the Foundation’s media impact, particularly around key initiatives including Wikipedia’s 20th birthday, the Foundation’s partnership with the World Health Organization and our approach to misinformation. She also stewarded the restructuring of the Foundation’s digital strategy to expand its visibility, increase brand alignment, and attract new and global audiences. Her focus on diversity, equity and inclusion has advanced new approaches to engagement and outreach, combining storytelling with data-driven insights.  

As the new VP of Communications, Anusha will oversee communications activities across media, brand, marketing, movement and internal communications functions, with the goal of educating and engaging global audiences on Wikimedia work. She will move forward the department’s strategy to expand communications within regional markets, advancing the Foundation’s equity, advocacy and growth goals, and creating campaigns that meet people where they are. 

“Communications has a vital role to play as the Wikimedia Foundation seeks to grow and support a diverse, global movement, while pushing the understanding of what it takes to keep knowledge free,” said Anusha. “Wikimedia is a technology and social good organization working to advance a movement that is human at its core; our stories and unique perspective have the power to connect and influence. I could not be more excited to collaborate with a talented group of staff to continue and expand this work.” 

Anusha has a master’s degree in journalism from New York University, a law degree from Queen’s University in Ontario and an honors bachelor of arts from the University of Toronto. She is also a Board member at the Communications Network, First Draft News, and Awesome Foundation Miami, and a member of the Communications Network working group for diversity, equity and inclusion.

Margeigh joined the Wikimedia Foundation in 2018, building on an expansive career as a product strategist, designer and inventor. An architect by training, she has led the development of many first of category consumer technology products, including  the design of polite intelligent systems that are able to build trust through transparency with the users they serve. She is also the first inventor on several patents related to user-centered machine learning, video content delivery and other hardware-software interfaces.

During her tenure at the Foundation, Margeigh has led the Product Design and Design Strategy teams, with an emphasis on modernizing the reading experience across Wikimedia products, and streamlining the editing experience to make it more accessible for newcomers. She has expanded design research capabilities to make it possible to reach users in emerging contexts, and to engage with them in their preferred language. Margeigh has also co-led the development of Wikimedia’s Product Platform Strategy and been an active contributor to the broader Movement Strategy effort, working closely with Wikimedia volunteer communities on recommendations for the future of the Wikimedia movement.  

In her new role as the VP of Product Design, Margeigh will focus on making inclusive product development methodologies a best practice at the Wikimedia Foundation. She will expand the department’s capability to design with, not for – prioritizing products and features which will empower emerging communities to scale. She will ensure that human-centered design continues to influence organizational practice at the Foundation, and will continue to support design thinking in the free knowledge movement.

“I joined the Foundation because I believe the Wikimedia projects are critical cultural infrastructure,” said Margeigh. “I want to help ensure the resilience and relevance of the projects in these times of global uncertainty and change. I’m honored and grateful to work with such a talented and mission driven team on products that truly welcome all people to participate in the sum of all knowledge.”

Margeign has a Bachelor’s of Architecture, Philosophy minor, from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. She did her masters’ studies in architecture, anthropology and continental philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and University of California, Berkeley. She is a registered Architect in the state of California.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

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

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

This weekend is WikiConference North America, a virtual gathering of Wikimedians who will share our experiences. Wiki Education board, staff, and program participants are featured prominently in the schedule.

Board member Carwil Bjork-James is a plenary speaker. We also extend our thanks to our board members Richard Knipel and Bob Cummings, both of whom have helped to plan the conference.

Sessions Wiki Education’s staff are running include:

• Chief Programs Officer LiAnna Davis is collaborating with the Smithsonian’s Kelly Doyle for a session on How the Smithsonian and Wiki Education are adding biographies of American women
• Chief Technology Officer Sage Ross and LiAnna are teaming up to show off the Programs & Events Dashboard – Tips & Tricks for Event Organizers
• Director of Partnerships Jami Mathewson, Senior Program Manager, Wikipedia Student Program Helaine Blumenthal, and Wikidata Program Manager Will Kent are leading a presentation, Survey Says: What Wiki Education’s program participants say about joining the Wikipedia and Wikidata communities
• Will is also explaining, How do you even teach Wikidata?
• Jami, Senior Wikipedia Expert Ian Ramjohn, and Will are also running a session, Engaging subject-matter experts during a national emergency: Wiki Education and COVID-19

Program participants are also well represented in these sessions, all involving instructors who teach in our Wikipedia Student Program:

• Expert fact-checkers rely on Wikipedia. You and your students should too!
• News On Wiki, Phase 2 complete; Future steps with ASU journalism school
• 2Rāth: To Digitally Preserve Arab Literary Heritage
• Current developments in Wikipedia-integrated academic journals
• Information Has Value: Engaging Students as Wikipedia Editors
• Wikipedia as Information Literacy Vector: Authority and Undergraduate Students
• Engaging the University Community with Wikipedia Curating and Creation
• When Students contribute to Wikipedia: A Local Initiative with Global Reach
• Teaching Engineering Writing and Ethics with the Wikipedia Writing Assignment
• Decolonizing Wikipedia
• Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality

We’re looking forward to the conference; we hope to see you there!

Image credits: Geraldshields11, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons; KevinPayravi and Outstandy (source work), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Lorraine Hariton, President & CEO of Catalyst, has volunteered to help Wiki Education in a new capacity as a member of our Advisory Board. Lorraine previously served on Wiki Education’s Board of Directors, and is greatly valued for her fundraising expertise and knowledge in STEM.

She advocated for Wiki Education’s successful Year of Science in 2016, which helped young scientists learn about science communication, while improving Wikipedia’s science coverage for millions of readers worldwide. In 2016, more than 6,200 students contributed nearly 5 million words to science articles seen more than 262 million times.

As the leader of Catalyst, Lorraine is dedicated to accelerating positive change for women. Her extensive career includes senior-level positions in Silicon Valley, as well as leadership roles across the private, nonprofit, and government sectors. She served as CEO of two Silicon Valley start-ups and held senior executive roles at IBM and other public companies.

In 2009, she was appointed by President Obama to be Special Representative for Commercial and Business Affairs at the US Department of State. Most recently, Lorraine was Senior Vice President for Global Partnerships at the New York Academy of Sciences. She was instrumental in creating the Global STEM Alliance and its 1000 Girls, 1000 Futures program, a global mentoring initiative to help girls pursue careers in STEM.

Wiki Education is focused on promoting two initiatives in our Wikipedia Student Program: Communicating Science and Knowledge Equity. I’m excited to work with Lorraine to broaden Wikipedia’s content of women and other historically marginalized groups in the STEM fields and beyond.

“I look forward to continuing to help Wiki Education achieve its vision of representing the sum of all human knowledge in this new advisory capacity,” Lorraine says. “Women, people of color, and those of different sexualities deserve to be recognized for their accomplishments on Wikipedia. I’m happy to spread the word of Wiki Education’s equity work in making that possible.”

I want to offer a very big ‘Thank You’ to everyone who took the time to respond to the first-ever Programs & Events Dashboard user survey. It had 73 responses from a diverse cross-section of Wikimedia program leaders — roughly mirroring the usage patterns of the Dashboard, with less than half from English Wikipedia. In preparing the survey, I wanted to cover a wide variety of possible focus areas for Dashboard development and to get a sense for what users’ top priorities for improvement are. The results are helping me form a clear picture of what to work on — the start of a Programs & Events Dashboard roadmap that I’ll be publishing soon.

Top priorities

The most popular priority matches a request I’ve heard frequently in the last year: program leaders want “easier ways to manage overlapping campaigns and sets of events”. Especially for Wikimedia affiliates that run large numbers of programs, using the Dashboard’s campaigns feature doesn’t provide an easy way to group related sets of events while also getting accurate aggregate statistics for all their events (or all their events over a certain time period). Organizers are looking for something like a “campaign of campaigns” that they can use to get an overall picture of their programs. I’m not sure exactly how this will look, but this is something I’m going to work on. I’m planning to follow up with survey respondents to learn more about the specific use cases and what new features would meet their needs. Relatedly, Wiki Education is exploring the possibility of offering “Dashboards-as-a-service” to other organizations in the Wikimedia community; having a dedicated, branded website for all an organization’s programs (as Wiki Education has with dashboard.wikiedu.org) could be a simpler and more satisfying solution to the problem.

The second most popular priority — “better scoping of which edits are part of my event, and which edits are not” — represents a mix of problems. Many program leaders want to track edits — and statistics — for pages that are not in mainspace. For programs where most of the expected activity is happening in sandboxes or Draft space, the Dashboard just doesn’t offer much utility right now. Being able to explicitly choose which namespaces to count is a straightforward feature to describe — although implementing it won’t be trivial. For other program leaders, the problem of “better scoping” is about defining a topic area or set of articles to track. The Dashboard has some flexible features around scoping — you can track a large set of articles by category, talk page template, or by putting together a PetScan query or PagePile — but these scoping features aren’t intuitive or discoverable enough. I plan to work on both aspects — providing more namespace flexibility, and improving the user interface to make it easier set up a program that tracks a specific set of articles.

After that, the next two top priorites were a bit of a surprise to me: more detailed Wikipedia statistics, and more detailed Wikidata statistics. For Wikipedia statistics, this partly overlaps with the need to track specific namespaces, but I need to talk with users to learn more about what kinds of additional statistics they have in mind. For Wikidata statistics, the Dashboard has some tools for analyzing Wikidata edits to count the number of claims added, claims changed, descriptions added, and so on. These features aren’t readily available on Programs & Events Dashboard yet, but I knew that users running Wikidata projects wanted them; what surprised me is just how many survey respondents consider Wikidata statistics a high priority. Wiki Education’s Wikidata Program Manager, Will Kent, and I are hoping to mentor an Outreachy intern in December (and possibly another intern in mid-2022) to make advanced Wikidata stats available.

Other areas for future work

Some of the other more popular priorities will be part of the roadmap, but we probably won’t tackle them in 2021-2022:

• Alerts for on-wiki problems. These are already present for English Wikipedia, but they don’t function yet for most other languages, and they aren’t discoverable enough.
• Enabling more language-specific features. Related to the alerts for on-wiki problems, some other features — like Authorship Highlighting — are limited to one or a few languages. We’ll continue rolling out support as we can; in most cases, this will depend on adding support for additional languages on the ORES and WikiWho services.
• Better support for education programs. I’m not sure exactly what features are the most important right now for education programs, but there are key features that Wiki Education uses on dashboard.wikiedu.org — like the assignment wizard for creating a course timeline based on a series of choices from the instructor — that would be useful for education program organizers. The challenge here will be to ensure that each program can create their own blueprints for what a standard course timeline looks like.
• More training module translations. This one is ready for anyone to add translations. The Programs & Events Dashboard training modules all have source pages on Meta; some are already set up for translations, and others will need to be marked for translation first. (If you are interested in translating existing modules, or adding new ones, let me know, and I can guide you through the process.)
• Creating accounts for new users. This is a feature that is already available, allowing users to request their desired username, and allowing organizers to review the requests and create all the requested accounts with a single click (which automatically adds them as participants). However, the account request feature must be enabled for each program and may not be discoverable enough.
• Support for judging editing competitions. A substantial number of program organizers have used the Dashboard to support editing competitions, but so far there are no dedicated features for judging competitions or tracking the particular metrics that a given competition is focused on. We may try to improve support for competitions at some point, but it will be a big project.
• Adding video tutorials & Improving written documentation. While these were the least popular priorities from the survey, they were still ranked highly by quite a few respondents (with more people interested in video tutorials than written documentation). Video tutorials — focused on how to set up a particular type of program on the Dashboard and make the most of the available features — may be a good way for organizers to discover existing features. Working on video tutorials (and perhaps written documentation as well) could make a good internship project.

Common pain points

Many users have run into problems with the Dashboard. The most common one — statistics not getting updated quickly enough — was a major issue in late 2020 and early 2021 (and was closely connected to the problem of downtime). The Dashboard’s infrastructure was stretched too thin, and was being overwhelmed by a few long-running programs tracking extremely active editors, and the system’s single server on Wikimedia Cloud just couldn’t keep up. Since then, we’ve made major strides — both in making the Dashboard’s statistics update process more efficient and adding more server capacity. (Dashboard programs get sorted in different update queues based on how resource-intensive they are. Currently, about 4/5ths of the ~550 active programs are in the fast queue, getting updates approximately every 20 minutes. Most of the rest are in the middle queue, with updates every hour or so. The 10 most resource-intensive programs — typically long-running ones that track hundreds of thousands of edits — are in the slow queue, getting updates every 3 hours.)

The other most common problems cluster on tracking the relevant edits (and only the relevant edits), and on creating accounts and joining events. We have some clear areas to work on for both adding tracking options that don’t exist right now and for making the existing options more user friendly. For creating accounts and joining programs, I think the core features work smoothly, but it’s not a simple enough user experience to enable and use those features.

What do Wikimedians use the Dashboard for, and what problems do they face?

For this survey, we worked with the Wikimedia Foundation’s new Campaigns team to add some questions focused on what people use the Dashboard for, and what the biggest challenges are for program organizing in general.

The survey responses highlight the variety of ways program organizers use the Dashboard. A large portion of respondents (77%) have used it to organize edit-a-thons, and many use it for editing contests (48%), education programs (41%), and a wide mix of other things like workshops, hackathons, WikiProjects, or tracking the activity of a group of interns or affiliate staff members.

The target audience for programs is quite wide:

The most common “other” target audience is educators.

Here’s what survey respondents see as the biggest challenges with organizing editing events and programs:

That’s a big list of challenges — some are core challenges of the whole Wikimedia movement, in fact — but I’m excited to do what I can to tackle them. I’m hopeful that between Wiki Education’s work on the Dashboard and the new tools the WMF Campaigns team will be building, we can make a lot of progress in the coming year and beyond.

Image credit: Dmitry Barsky, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Shortly before the summer recess, MEPs at the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee concocted close to 1200 amendments to the Digital Markets Act, a proposal construing the category of a gatekeeper and a set of obligations for internet services that qualify as one. Let’s take a look at what the Shadow Rapporteurs, the most important people in the process, proposed and how Rapporteur Andreas Schwab tackled their proposals to date if it comes to expanding users’ choice and autonomy over their data through the DMA.

Who’s talking?

As customary in committee work, each political group designated a representative to debate the DMA report. With Adreas Schwab (EPP, DE) at the helm, the Shadow Rapporteurs are: Evelyne Gebhardt (S&D, DE); Andrus Ansip (RE, EE); Virginie Joron (ID, FR), Martin Schirdewan (GUE, DE), Marcel Kolaja  (Greens, CZ), and Adam Bielan (ECR, PL). Each of them, either individually or with colleagues, filed amendments to the DMA.

Contributions span from reinforcing the autonomy of users, through supporting businesses making use of platforms’ intermediation, to supporting platforms themselves. There is no surprise in the fact that the more left of the political spectrum we look, the more important users’ rights are. Having said that, almost each Rapporteur has an interesting proposal on how to make our life on the platforms easier.

Who is in the scope?

With the exception of ECR’s Adam Bielan, all Shadows want to expand the scope of services that could become gatekeepers. Voice assistants, for which the market is highly concentrated, are on everyone’s list, except Kolaja’s. The Green’s Shadow wants to add connected TV and embedded digital services in vehicles, which include those enabling access to audio-visual content. MEPs Gebhardt and Schirdewan expand on the audio-visual, adding services providing audio and video on demand and streaming services respectively.

Web browsers are another popular addition (Gebhardt, Ansip, Kolaja, Schirdewan), along with cloud services (Gebhardt, Ansip, Kolaja). These are also ideas that seem to respond to MEPs’ special interests, such as mobile payment services (Gebhardt), so called number-independent interpersonal communication services that include messaging apps (Ansip). Kolaja adds collaborative economy services to the mix.

It seems that the Shadows would like to see the scope of the regulation expand to an array of services and applications that either already reach the required thresholds or have a potential to do so. Rapporteur Schwab, however, included only virtual (voice) assistants in his draft compromise (as seen on September 28).

“Without portability users cannot exercise any sort of ownership of the data. If interoperability is expanded, they will not be able to meaningfully benefit from it.”

How to become a gatekeeper?

Generally the Shadows don’t seem to be satisfied with the thresholds that the Commission had proposed in its initial draft. MEP Gebhardt takes the whole idea even further: a service becomes a gatekeeper if it meets one of the specified thresholds (two for MEP Schirdewan to qualify), without the need to designate it so by the European Commission. She also proposes to lower the annual EEA turnover threshold from 6,5 to 5 billion euro, an idea seconded by MEP Kolaja. They would also see the threshold of monthly active end users lowered to 23 and 30 million, respectively.  

Two MEPs would rather see the thresholds raised. Adam Bielan would set the bar at 8 billion of annual EEA turnover with the equivalent market value erased from the list. This turnover increase is supported by Rapporteur Schwab in his compromise, who would prefer the equivalent fair market value to be raised to 80 billion over 2 financial years.

A couple of Shadows offer additional criteria that the EC should consider when designing a gatekeeper: MEP Ansip suggests including a degree of multi-homing among business users and active end users into the assessment. MEP Kolaja proposes taking into account any intended concentration notified to the EC.

Users’ data across services

The DMA tackles excessive aggregation of information on end users across various services of a gatekeeper, a business move that sets the platforms at a competitive advantage over other businesses that cannot infer business decisions from such a wide sweep of data. It is of course also good for end users that their activity across multiple services wouldn’t be aggregated to modify their future online behaviour. 

In that case both the Greens and GUE want to curb the aggregation, with Marcel Kolaja suggesting that such a combination cannot be done even if the user has been presented with such a choice and gave consent. GUE’s Schirdewan wants to permit it provided that it does not subvert or impair consumers’ autonomy, decision-making, or choice. 

Contrary to the Greens and siding with GUE, Rapporteur Schwab proposes that combining the data should be possible if the end user has been presented with the specific choice in an explicit and clear manner. Alternatively the gatekeeper can fall back on GDPR provisions on consent, but combining the data cannot be justified by general rules such as legitimate interest or performance of a contract. 

“There is a risk that users may be scared into not acting on the new functionalities because of the alarmist messages or user experience design making them cumbersome or hardly accessible.”

Bundled subscriptions

Another ongoing issue is that a decision to use one of the services is often connected to involuntary subscription to a bunch of others offered by the same platform (remember how one day users of Google products found themselves subscribed to its bizarre social network, Google+?). There is also an issue of conditioning access to a service with a use of another service by that same company, for example bundling a Youtube account with a Google account. The DMA proposal would forbid such bundles and conditioning of access. 

MEPs Gebhardt and Kolaja think the bundling should no longer be possible across any services by one platform, and not only those that meet the high threshold of 45 million monthly active users. MEP Gebhard makes it clear that it shouldn’t be introduced through a backdoor of product design either. Rapporteur Schwab sides with her on both in his proposed compromise. 

Removal of preinstalled apps

Many of us get a new device and discover that it comes with multiple preinstalled apps that not only take up drive space but also cannot be uninstalled. The good news is that the DMA draft mandates that all preinstalled apps can be uninstalled by the end user unless they are necessary for the operating system to properly function. 

Shadow Rapporteurs at IMCO like this provision and provide suggestions on how to make it stronger. MEPs form the groups on the left posit that this provision is sufficiently self-explanatory to be moved into the core set of obligations of gatekeepers (article 5) from article 6 containing those obligations that need to be further specified by delegated acts. Rapporteur Schwab sides with that idea in his draft compromise. MEP Ansip clarifies that removal of apps should also result in removal of accompanying collected and stored data, which is a good idea and it should be taken up as well. 

Interoperability

Interoperability that enables users to connect through various messaging apps, social media platforms or providers of access to platforms (for example ensuring greater privacy and protection from surveillance) would be a great win reshaping the way online ecosystem works. 

The MEPs on the left joined by MEP Ansip believe that interoperability should be accessible to end users and not only businesses, bringing in a hope that enough pressure could be created to include this in the final IMCO report. So far, however, the Rapporteur sticks to his guns and (as laid out in his draft report) does not want to expand interoperability requirements to end users.

MEP Bielan is of a similar opinion. He wants to strengthen platforms by specifying that interoperability is only required as long as it does not present a disproportionate technical obstacle nor impedes legitimate product development, the quality of the product, etc. These discretionary clauses would give platforms an easy workaround out of providing real interoperability to businesses.

Portability of data

Portability of data is another major benefit for end users and DMA provides that gatekeeper services should enable it. Without it and without access in real time, users cannot exercise any sort of ownership of the data, and should the interoperability be expanded, they would not be able to meaningfully benefit from it without being able to get their data for a transfer. 

MEP Gebhardt would like to see this provision strengthened by clarifying that gatekeepers must implement appropriate technical and organisational measures for ensuring effective portability of data. MEPs Kolaja and Schwab have a different take. They seek to strengthen portability by ensuring that the provision includes personal data generated through end user’s activity on the platform. MEP Bielan is an outlier here as much as in the case of interoperability, as he doesn’t believe that continuous, real-time access is necessary to ensure that portability works for end users.

Anti-circumvention

If there is anything we learned living our online life intermediated by platforms is that they are experts in nudging or scaring us into making choices that serve them and not necessarily us. For example, switching off access to certain functions of an app, be it location for photos or access to the address book for a game, results in a warning that the app won’t function properly even though it is clear that the switched off functions aren’t essential to its functioning. There is a risk then that with all possible gains from DMA, users may be scared into not acting on them because of the alarmist messages or user experience design making these new functionalities cumbersome or hardly accessible. 

MEP Kolaja proposes that article 11 include a ban on circumvention by product design, structure, function or manner of operation capable of influencing user choice and autonomy. MEP Schirdewan is of a similar view and adds through a change in article 5.1.e that gatekeepers should not use “non-technical tactics” to restrict end users to switch between and subscribe to different apps. MEP Gebhardt has similar suggestions. Sadly, the Rapporteur doesn’t see the need for strengthening these provisions.

Who has the right to be heard?

The DMA proposal provides that gatekeepers have the right to be heard on preliminary findings as well as the measures the EC intends to take in a number of cases, including whenever the European Commission deals with assessing the compliance efforts, granting suspensions of gatekeeper status or obligations, decisions on exemptions for public interest, market investigations for designation of gatekeepers and systematic non-compliance, imposing interim measures, accepting gatekeepers’ commitments, making decisions related to non-compliance, and imposing fines and payment conditions. 

These decisions and processes could benefit enormously from the input of concerned third parties: other businesses, users and their organisations, researchers of the platform ecosystem or experts. Some MEPs agree that the right to be heard should be expanded. MEPs Gebhardt wants to simply include all third parties with legitimate interest. MEP Kolaja adds that if legal and natural persons show sufficient interest, their applications should be granted. MEP Schirdewan follows a slightly different approach focusing on adding third parties affected by the conduct of the gatekeeper concerned. Unfortunately, the Rapporteur hasn’t picked up any of these suggestions so far.

“If we want the internet to work for the users and not just for the platforms, interoperability for end users should be on Rapporteur Schwab’s shortlist.”

Unfinished work

Looking at just a handful of nearly 1 200 amendments it seems that the Shadows themselves provide many good ideas to make sure that the DMA brings concrete solutions to end users. Sadly, Rapporteur Schwab seems to mostly stick to his vision presented in his draft report. Fortunately there is still time for the Shadows to pressure him into greater inclusion of clarifications on obligations and especially expanding the scope of interoperability to end users. 

Regarding the latter, he may face pressure not only from the left side of the political spectrum but also from the liberals. Looking at his work in detailing and strengthening the obligations regarding combining data, unbundling subscriptions, providing the uninstalling options and data portability, it is puzzling why interoperability for end users is not on MEP Schwab’s shortlist. And it should be, if we want the internet to work for the users and not just for the platforms.

I have been doing a variety of history reading of late, but have not had time to properly synthesize them. They keep coming up in conversation, though, so I wanted to write down some bullet points I could refer to. I hope they are interesting and/or provocative in a good way to someone.

Resemblance to the history of open source was rarely why I read these books. (In fact at least one was read deliberately to get away from open source thinking.) And yet the parallels — around power, mindshare, “territory”, autonomy, empowerment, innovation—keep coming back to me. I leave conclusions, for the most part, for now, to the reader.

Final disclaimer: in the interest of finally publishing a damn thing (I read Ober years ago!), this post will necessarily condense and butcher thousands of pages of scholarship. Please read with that in mind — errors and oversights are almost certainly mine and not the fault of the original authors.

The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, Hendrik Spruyt

This book attempts to understand how Europe got from feudalism to the modern nation-state. It’s explicitly an argument against a view of history where nation-states were inevitable, instead trying to show that there were other possible paths during the late Middle Ages. (The book is very Euro-centric without acknowledging that, which is a shame since I think the book would be well-complemented by an analysis of how European nation-states interacted in colonial settings with non-nation-states, about which more later.)

The core argument goes something like this:

• what is feudalism anyway? at some level, it means “no entity has a monopoly on power in a territory”, because feudal lords, the church, tribal-like kinship relationships, etc., all overlap and interact in complicated ways.
• you get out of feudalism, and into nation-states by:
• punctuated-equilibrium-style evolution: a major shock to existing system (in Spruyt’s analysis, massive economic growth starting in c. 1000) which creates new power centers (bourgeoisie and new cities), which destabilizes feudalism and …
• creates a diverse set of post-feudal options: wealthy, powerful city-states in Italy; leagues of cities in Germany; something like the modern nation-state in France. (It is this diversity which Spruyt says a lot of historians ignore, and certainly which American high-school history completely ignores.) But…
• that situation (with a lot of different, competing options) is unstable even if each individual solution makes sense for that place/time (i.e., “city-states were stable in/good for Italy” and “city-states were not stable in/fit for Europe” can both be very true), so then…
• competition and conscious self-selection leaves you with modern nation-states on top, for a variety of reasons, including simply that nation states prefer negotiating with other nation-states; i.e., hard for France to make treaties with a loose coalition (league) of cities, so it partners with (and therefore empowers) other units like it.

I would love to see a similar analysis for the history of various corporate forms or industries. I’ve seen it suggested, for example, that the combination of the telegraph and the railroad made multi-jurisdiction limited-liability corporations the dominant form in the US, but there was nearly simultaneously a huge explosion in experimentation around cooperatives—should we complicate the “telegraphs → big companies” narrative in the same way Spruyt is attempting to complicate it here for the transition from feudal society to nation-states?

The mapping to open source is probably pretty obvious: internet-enabled development (and then internet-enabled distribution) delivered a shock to the existing software business ecosystem; for a time we had a flourishing of institutional/organizational forms. There is certainly a narrative (perhaps correct? perhaps not?) that we are settling into a new equilibrium with a smaller number of forms. What might this history tell us about where we’re going (and what questions we should ask about the narrative of where we’re going?)

Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, Pekka Hämäläinen

US history books rarely show Native American tribes as entities with agency—the world acts on them, but not vice-versa. This book aims to be an antidote to that, showing over a course of roughly 200 years how the Lakota acted, learned, and changed in response to the world around them (including, but definitely not limited to, the US).

I definitely did not read this with the intent of “oh, this will make me think about open source”; I figured it was about as far away as I could get, and yet as I read I couldn’t help but think about parallels.

I think it’s important to be clear: by drawing parallels here I definitely don’t want to suggest that changes in open source are in any way morally/ethically comparable to genocide; if (free?)/open source culture vanished altogether tomorrow that would be a genuine tragedy, but an extremely minor tragedy compared to the very deliberate genocide that occurred occurred in North America.

But it’s hard not to see parallels in the gradual encirclement and disruption of one culture by another very different culture. Some other thoughts:

• In one of the many ways in which the book thoughtfully gives the Lakota agency, the author writes of that “[t]hey had welcomed America’s merchandize but not its paternal embrace; they had accepted the Americans as traders and potential allies, but not as their sovereigns. They had, in other words, refused to be ‘discovered’ by [Lewis and Clark]”.
• Just like in Spruyt’s Sovereign State, much is made of the simply different notions of “territory” between the nation-state and its competitors; in this case, between the Lakota whose governing style the book describes as “ranging widely but ruling lightly… a malleable, forever transmuting regime”, with little attention to borders or even ultimately to control, and the Americans who “were content with a cartographic proof of.. sovereignty”, needing (and imputing power to) lines on a map.
• Technology is a small but significant undercurrent in the book: first guns, then horses, then ultimately the railroad. The first of these two were enthusiastically adopted by the Lakota, and indeed powered much of their imperial expansion in the 1800s. But they could not adopt the railroad in the same way. Nor was writing, though he does say that “[a] key element of Lakotas’ diplomatic prowess was the fact that they had so many literate allies who interpreted and explained [American] documents for them.”
• “Contemporary Americans saw the Powder River country as an Indigenous retreat, an insular world intentionally cut off from the rapidly expanding American empire of cities, railroads, settlers, farms, ranches, and capitalism—a perception that has dominated outsider views of the Lakotas ever since. In reality, the Powder River country under the Lakota rule was a safe and dynamic cosmopolitan world of its own where transnational commercial circuits converged, where Indians enjoyed many comforts and advantages of the industrial age, and where new ideas about being in the world were constantly debated. Lakotas knew full well that they lived in a transitional period of innovation, quickening change, and questioning of old conventions. But contrary to the tired old stereotype of obstinate, tradition-bound Indians, they embraced this radical regeneration of their world.”

Additional selected Kindle highlights from my read are here.

Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens, Josiah Ober

Ober is a data-driven classicist, focused on Athens and how it fit into the broader milieu of classical Greece. In my distant recollection, this book (or perhaps often just my takeaway from it) argues that:

• Since you have literally a thousand Greek city states, you’re running a real experiment you can draw real conclusions from. And Athens, in a real material sense (backed by a variety of interesting data sets) “won” this experiment. (This has some parallels to Spruyt, arguing that in essence there was a flourishing of alternatives and then a winnowing.)
• This greatness was in large part predicated on Athen’s ability as a democracy (relative to its neighbors, at any rate) to create and synthesize effective knowledge. In other words, it was better at being a government specifically because it was a democracy, using “local”/small-group/individual knowledge to make itself more effective.
• Athens then ultimately failed (after nearly 200 years) in part because neighboring oligarchic governments took its good ideas, and re-implemented them. (This issue is also explored in Ober’s Rise and Fall of Classical Greece.)

I do wish I still had my original notes from reading this a decade or so ago; both it and Rise and Fall are deep and rich books that stirred my political theory bones in a great way.

5 October 2021, San Francisco, CA, USA — China today blocked the Wikimedia Foundation’s bid for observer status at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) for the second time after the Foundation’s initial application in 2020. 

WIPO is the United Nations (UN) organization that develops international treaties on copyright, patents, trademarks and related issues. China was again the only country to object to the accreditation of the Wikimedia Foundation as an official observer. The Foundation will reapply for official observer status in 2022, but it will only be admitted by WIPO if China decides to lift its blockade.

WIPO’s work, which shapes international rules that affect the sharing of free knowledge, impacts Wikipedia’s ability to provide hundreds of millions of people with information in their own languages. “The Wikimedia Foundation’s absence from these meetings deprives our communities of an opportunity to participate in this process,” says Amanda Keton, General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation. 

As in 2020, China’s statement falsely suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation was spreading disinformation via the independent, volunteer-led Wikimedia Taiwan chapter. The United States and the group of industrialized countries at WIPO — which also includes many European Union member states, Australia, Canada, the Holy See, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom — expressed their support for the Foundation’s application. Since WIPO is generally run by consensus, any one country may veto accreditation requests by non-governmental organizations. 

A wide range of international and non-profit organizations as well as private companies are official observers of WIPO proceedings and debates. These outside groups offer technical expertise, on-the-ground experience, and diversity of opinions to help WIPO carry out its global mandate. Many of these organizations have members, partners, or affiliates in Taiwan. 

“The Wikimedia Foundation operates Wikipedia, one of the most popular sources of information for people around the world. The Foundation’s exclusion sets a worrying precedent for other organizations – nonprofits and for-profits – that are committed to promoting access to information, culture, and education,” adds Keton. “We renew our call to WIPO members, including China, to approve our application. The international community must ensure meaningful civil society participation in UN fora.”

The Wikimedia Foundation provides the essential infrastructure for free knowledge and advocates for a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

October marks the start of Black History Month, in the UK and Ireland. At the Wikimedia Foundation, this month is an exciting opportunity to honor the lived experiences, stories, and contributions of Black people, Africans, and Africans in the diaspora around the world. 

We are also digging deeper into the meaning of representation — exploring the challenges, the opportunities, and the incredible work already underway to ensure our movement reflects the full, rich diversity of all humanity, not just this month, but all year long. 

The challenges in representation in our movement are real.

When it comes to contributors on Wikimedia projects, the majority (61%) are based in Europe and Northern America.

Only 1.6% of contributors are based in Africa, although people in Africa comprise 17% of the world’s population. In the US specifically, fewer than 1% of Wikipedia’s editors base identify as Black or African American.

When it comes to content, there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than most countries in Africa. Africa has almost twice the population of Europe, and yet only 15 percent the number of articles.

We also know that women, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, as well as LGBTQ+ people often face increased scrutiny, pressure, or outright harassment on our projects — a disheartening reality we aim to address with a new Universal Code of Conduct.

The Wikimedia Foundation recently launched the Open the Knowledge initiative to raise awareness of the biases, under-representation, and inequities in our movement that continue to close Wikimedia projects to much of the world’s people and knowledge. We are inviting all who support our mission and participate in our movement to help open the knowledge — making it more diverse, more equitable, accessible and inclusive.

It’s with these data and challenges in mind that we ask ourselves: 

What does it really mean to be represented on Wikimedia projects (such as Wikipedia), and within the movement of volunteers who create it?

Is it reaching a certain percentage point, creating more Wikipedia articles, increasing the number of contributors? Or is it more than numbers on a screen?

We believe it is more, so much more. 

Representation is a construct, one that has layers — one that exists not just in data points but in how people feel. That means real representation comes from a range of approaches on Wikimedia projects: From having articles in your language, seeing images of people who are part of your history, attending events where you feel welcomed, and more.

There are several There are several community-led initiatives already making important progress toward knowledge equity — a pillar of our movement strategy that calls us to make Wikimedia projects more welcoming and representative of communities that have been overlooked and oppressed by systems of power and privilege.

Groups such as Black Lunch Table, AfroCrowd, and WhoseKnowledge? focus on adding knowledge about Black history and people of African descent to our projects. The AfroCine project, Africa Wiki Challenge, and Wiki Loves Africa photography campaign aim to increase information on our projects from African countries. These groups are just some of many working to improve diversity and participation across the Wikimedia ecosystem.

Drawing inspiration from these initiatives, and in an effort to elevate them and different views on representation, each week this month, we will highlight a project that works to improve the representation of Black people, Africans, and Africans in the diaspora in our movement.

Check back every week for a new video and profile that celebrates Wikimedia movement initiatives strengthening representation and participation in Wikimedia projects — getting us closer and closer to making knowledge equity a reality. 

Week 1: Nigerian Language Oral History Documentation Project

Did you know that more than 6,000 languages are spoken in the world, and over 500 are spoken in Nigeria? This is approximately 8.3% of the total languages spoken worldwide. However, many of these smaller, Indigenous languages face extinction, as they have little documentation, and are not written down or taught in schools.

Enter the Nigerian Language Oral History Documentation Project: an initiative by the Wikimedia Nigeria Foundation Inc., supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, that is working to enrich Wikimedia projects with freely licensed audiovisual files documenting spoken languages and dialects in Nigeria.

Olaniyan Olushola, president of Wikimedia User Group Nigeria, says of the project’s importance:

“I perceive representation on Wikimedia projects as one of the ways of protecting the diversities of Africa and its people, the richness in our culture and traditions, and providing a level playing ground to accommodate our views on relevant discussions in and about the movement. … I am excited that this project will preserve at least over 50 languages that are bound to face extinction.”

So far, the project has produced and documented 52 audiovisuals, which have been used on over 150 related Wikipedia articles in over 20 languages. 

Week 2: Stay tuned! 

Week 3: Stay tuned!

Week 4: Stay tuned!

Kiley Jolicoeur is a graduate student at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies currently doing an internship with the Syracuse University Libraries’ (SUL) Digital Library Program (DLP), where she evaluates possible linked data solutions to implement for the digital collections metadata. A major highlight in her everyday life with the DLP is the application of Wikidata to clean and disambiguate names that appear in the digital collections metadata, especially those that may not appear in other authority files. She recently participated in our Wikidata Institute, a course where we help participants further explore and establish a foundation with Wikidata as a linked data solution.

Much of Jolicoeur’s work during the Wikidata course was in relation to her library’s digital collections metadata. With every item she encounters, she aggregates information from multiple sources and adds a few statements with references. Before diving into the course, Jolicoeur struggled which avenues to take within Wikidata. However, Wiki Education course instructor Will Kent’s guidance throughout the course immensely helped her make edits with ease.

“Having Will introduce concepts and walk us through different methods, operations, and tools really made the learning curve much less steep. I was able to start making edits after the first week and, as we progressed, really developed a feel for the Wikidata community and how the project is evolving, as well as ideas for how SUL might be able to employ Wikidata,” Jolicoeur says.

Jolicoeur attests to Wikidata’s service in catalyzing the impact of the collection with linked data. She urges librarians, students, and her colleagues to learn the benefits of linked data.

“Wikidata really has so much to offer. It’s a great way for librarians and other information professionals to learn about linked data in a live environment, it helps to disseminate information, including by exposing information that might otherwise be siloed in local collections, and it can be a very useful tool to teach students and colleagues about data,” Jolicoeur says.

Another major factor that helped Jolicoeur navigate through Wikidata smoothly was the active community who were in similar situations.

“I’ve discovered that there are great features in place that allow the community to help each other out in situations like this. The talk feature, history logs, and pages that allow for communal evaluation of requests, like notability deletions, are so helpful,” Jolicoeur says.

In Jolicoeur’s future, because of the handful of skills the Wikidata course provided her, she is able to open many doors of opportunity to apply her knowledge. 

“Wikidata is relevant to me in a lot of ways. It’s a great way to see and use linked data in action, and it’s really given me an opportunity to take classroom understanding and develop skills that build upon that. Linked data is such an important undertaking for GLAM institutions and I’m excited to be able to take the knowledge that I’ve gained here to benefit SUL as part of my internship, as well as contribute it to my future employers after I graduate,” Jolicoeur says.

To take a course similar to the one Kiley took, please visit wikiedu.org/wikidata.

Image credit: rachaelvoorhees, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The contrast provided by Niethammer who looked at the birds on one side while ignoring inhumanity on the other provided novelist Arno Surminski with a title for his 2008 novel - Die Vogelwelt von Auschwitz - ie. the birdlife of Auschwitz.

G. Niethammer

Niethammer studied birds around Auschwitz and also shot ducks in numbers for himself and to supply the commandant of the camp Rudolf Höss (if the name does not mean anything please do go to the linked article / or search for the name online).  Upon the death of Niethammer, an obituary (open access PDF here) was published in the Ibis of 1975 - a tribute with little mention of the war years or the fact that he rose to the rank of Obersturmführer. The Bonn museum journal had a special tribute issue noting the works and influence of Niethammer. Among the many tributes is one by Hans Kumerloeve (starts here online). A subspecies of the common jay was named as Garrulus glandarius hansguentheri by Hungarian ornithologist Andreas Keve in 1967 after the first names of Kumerloeve and Niethammer. Fortunately for the poor jay, this name is a junior synonym of  G. g. anatoliae described by Seebohm in 1883.

Meanwhile inside Auschwitz, the Polish artist Wladyslaw Siwek was making sketches of everyday life  in the camp. After the war he became a zoological artist of repute. Unfortunately there is very little that is readily accessible to English readers on the internet (beyond the Wikipedia entry).

Siwek, artist who documented life at Auschwitz before working as a wildlife artist.

 

Hans Kumerloeve

Niethammer stands behind Salim Ali, 1967. International Ornithological Congress, 1967

• Erwin Stresemann (1889 - 1972)
• Friedrich Tischler (1881 - 1945)
• Lew Osipowitsch Belopolskij (1907 - 1990)
• Jurij Andrejewitsch Isakow (1912 - 1988)
• Veleslav Wahl (1922 -1950)
• Wladyslaw Rydzewski (1911 - 1980)
• Andrzej Dunajewski (1908 -1944)
• Günther Niethammer (1908 - 1974)
• Hans Kummerlöwe alias Kumerloeve (1903 -1995)
• Wladyslaw Siwek (1907 -1983)
• Wlodzimierz Graf Dzieduszycki (1885 - 1971)
• Ferdinand Pax (1885 -1964)
• Kazimierz Szarski (1904 -1960)
• Werner Klemm (1909 -1990)
• Boris Karlowitsch Stegmann (1898 -1975)
• Nikolaj Alexejewitsch Gladkow (1905 - 1975)
• Hong-Gu Won (1888 -1970) - came to learn of his son lost during partition via a Daurian starling that happened to be ringed by his son!
• Pyong-Oh Won (born 1926) son of previous
• Jean Delacour (1890 -1985)
• Kazimierz von Granöw Wodzicki (1900 - 1987)
• Nikolaj Wladimirowitsch Timofejew-Ressowski (1900 -1981)
• Hans Stubbe (1902 -1989)
• Konrad Lorenz (1903 -1989)
• Jan Sokolowski (1899 -1982)
• Roman Wojtusiak (1906 -1987)
• Bernhard Grzimek (1909 -1987)
• Hans Christian Johansen (1897 -1973)
• Wasilij Nikolajewitsch Skalon (1903 - 1976)
• Wolfgang Makatsch (1906 -1983)
• Tso-hsin Cheng (1906 -1998)
• Nikolaj Boew (1922 -1985)
• Hans Schildmacher (1907 -1976)
• Oleg Ismailowitsch Semenow-Tjan-Schanskij (1906 -1990)
• Alexander Bogdanowitsch Kistiakowskij (1904 - 1983)
• Heinrich Dathe (1910 -1991)
• Erich Rutschke (1926 -1999)
• Georgij Petrowitsch Dementjew (1898 - 1969)
• Alexander Nikolajewitsch Formosow (1899 - 1973)
• Pierre Pfeffer (1927 - 2016)
• Micha Jankowski (1842 - 1912)
• Alexander Michailowitsch Jankowski (1876 -1944)
• Jurij Michailowitsch Jankowski (1879 - 1956)
• Walerij Jurewitsch Jankowski (1911 -)
• Charles Vaurie (1906 -1975)
• Walter Beick (1883 - 1933)
• Richard Meinertzhagen (1878 -1967)
• Wilfried Przygodda (1916 -1991)
• Salim Ali (1896 -1987)
• Boris Michailowitsch Pavlov (1933 - 1994) 

SS-Sturmbannführer Schäfer at the head of the table in Lhasa

Issues arising from race and perceptions are of course not restricted to this period or region, one of the less glorious stories of the Smithsonian Institution concerns the honorary curator Robert Wilson Shufeldt (1850 – 1934), who, in the infamous Audubon affair, made his personal troubles with his second wife, a grand-daughter of Audubon, into one of race. He also wrote such books as America's Greatest Problem: The Negro (1915) in which we learn of the ideas of other scientists of the period like Edward Drinker Cope! Like many other obituaries, Shufeldt's is a classic whitewash.  

Even as recently as 2015, the University of Salzburg withdrew an honorary doctorate that they had given to the Nobel prize winning Konrad Lorenz for his support of the political setup and racial beliefs. It should not be that hard for scientists to figure out whether they are on the wrong side of history even if they are funded by the state. Perhaps salaried scientists in India would do well to look at the legal contracts they sign with their employers, especially the state, more carefully. The current rules make government employees less free than ordinary citizens but will the educated speak out or do they prefer shackling themselves. 

Postscripts:

• Mixing natural history with war sometimes led to tragedy for the participants as well. In the case of Dr Manfred Oberdörffer who used his cover as an expert on leprosy to visit the borders of Afghanistan with entomologist Fred Hermann Brandt (1908–1994), an exchange of gunfire with British forces killed him although Brandt lived on to tell the tale.

• To the above list one should add -  Jean-Marie Derscheid.
• Another story to read - about biology and the Nazi era is about the SS Sammelkommando - see Heinz Brücher

• Apparently Himmler's entanglement with ornithology also led him to dream up "Storchbein Propaganda" - a plan to send pamphlets to the Boers in South Africa via migrating storks! The German ornithologist Ernst Schüz quietly (and safely) pointed out the inefficiency of it purely on the statistics of recoveries!

• July 2018 - an English translation of Nowak's book is now available.
• See also Walther Arndt  

Highlights We processed final feedback for all interns We onboarded new communities We started discussions on hiring one more organizer We held a post-mortem about internship exntensions Our applicant reviewers reviewed the whole queue just in time! 🎉 It’s official: I’ve been working with Outreachy for three whole years! 🎈 I can’t stress enough how fun it’s been to work on the program that welcomed me as an intern (and kickstarted my career in tech) four years ago.

21/09/2021-27/09/2021

Mapping

• jgruca shared details on the design choices underpinning the new way rendering of golf courses in the latest Carto release.
• qeef wants to inspire us by mapping highway radars and mirrors using the Damn-Project.
• The German OSM chapter FOSSGIS received > a complaint from the local authorities about the mapping of Mandichosee, a popular reservoir near Augsburg. A large increase in people intruding into an area dedicated for the protection of breeding birds has occurred. This is partly due to features on OSM, and the way they are displayed in the Komoot application.
• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • boundary=border_zone for tagging areas near borders that have special restrictions on movement.
  • man_made=borehole to map a narrow shaft bored in the ground for purposes not covered by the existing tags man_made=petroleum_well or man_made=water_well, or the proposed man_made=injection_well.
  • man_made=injection_well to tag a narrow shaft bored in the ground for the purposes of forcing in a fluid.
• Voting is underway for the following proposals:
  • currency:crypto:*=yes,no, to extend the currency key to support cryptocurrencies (till Friday 22 October).
  • foraging=* to indicate whether or not foraging for plants/fruit/fungi etc. is permissible for a given location or plant (till Wednesday 20 October).
  • natural=fumarole to map an opening in our planet’s crust, which emits steam and gases (till Tuesday 12 October).
  • landuse:secondary=* for mapping multiple land uses in a single area (till Tuesday 12 October).

Community

• The new Korean OpenStreetMap Community presented their website, their own tile server, and a Taginfo instance, summarising the Korean regional OpenStreetMap database, running on the osm.kr > server (including publicity for weeklyOSM).
• ztzthu defended himself, in his diary, against what he considers to be unobjective and insulting accusations against China and Chinese mappers, and refuses to accept that an accusation of vandalism is not directed sweepingly against China as a country and sweepingly against ‘the Chinese mappers’.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OSM Tech team announced that new server infrastructure has been installed in Dublin, Ireland.

Events

• OSM France are co-ordinating activities to celebrate their tenth anniversary.

Education

• Gregory Marler has created a video tutorial in which he explains how to add churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and other places of worship to OpenStreetMap. He is using Field Papers and the iD Editor.

Maps

• Several professional geologists and vulcanologists have commented on Twitter about the speed of mapping during the current volcanic eruption on La Palma.

Software

• Trufi has developed and launched a ‘one click, all modes’ journey planner app — car, carpool, taxi, bus, train, bike share, cargo bike, personal bike, and more — for Herrenberg, Germany. Based on Trufi Core system, new features developed for Herrenberg will be ported to apps used in developing countries.

Programming

• OSMF Board Member Mikel Maron proposed, via a GitHub pull request, that long-time iD maintainer Bryan Housel be removed from the list of interim maintainers.

Did you know …

• … how many people currently produce the corresponding language version of weeklyOSM week after week? The languages in alphabetical order:
  

  Language	CZ	DE	EN	ES	FR	IT	JA	KO	PL	PT-BR	PT-PT	TR	ZH
  Editors	1	6	7	3	4	5	2	1	3	1	2	10	2

• … that colonial cartographers hid the profile of an elephant in contour lines of a map created during a 1923 survey of Ghana (known then as the Gold Coast)?
• … StreetComplete, the Android app for your craftmapper activities? The list of all possible tasks can be found in the OSM wiki.
• … about osm.wikidata.link, a website that allows users to easily add Wikidata tags to elements in OpenStreetMap?

Other “geo” things

• The Mapbox Workers Union Twitter account has complained about apparent retaliation by Mapbox of the union organisers, following the loss of the union recognition vote (as we reported earlier).
• A troll has mapped > a trollface by posting spam reports of bad smells emanating from a landfill in Kasubia (the area around Gdansk). The ‘Smell Map’ has been online for 8 years as a community initiative.
• xkcd came up with another geographical cartoon. The OSM reddit had a small discussion about it.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
	OSM Africa Monthly Mapathon: Map Malawi		2021-09-04 – 2021-10-04
	FOSS4G 2021 Buenos Aires – Online Edition		2021-09-27 – 2021-10-02
	HOTOSM Training Webinar Series: Advanced iD		2021-10-02
京田辺市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第26回 Re:一休寺		2021-10-02
	OSM Africa Monthly Mapathon: Map Uganda		2021-10-02
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2021-10-04
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #33		2021-10-04
Greater London	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2021-10-05
Landau an der Isar	Virtuelles Niederbayern-Treffen	✓	2021-10-05
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch (Online)		2021-10-05
Greater London	London pub meet-up		2021-10-06 – 2021-10-07
Hlavní město Praha	Online validation mapathon	✓	2021-10-07
Nordrhein-Westfalen	OSM-Treffen Bochum (Oktober)		2021-10-07
	UN Mappers: MaPathon – le Università a servizio della cooperazione internazionale		2021-10-08
Berlin	160. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch	✓	2021-10-08
Henrietta Township	Journey to the Centers of Michigan		2021-10-09
Zürich	OSM-Treffen Zürich		2021-10-11
	DRK Missing Maps Online Mapathon		2021-10-12
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2021-10-12
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2021-10-13
Mannheim	Einführung in der humanitären Kartographie		2021-10-13
	OpenStreetMap Michigan Meetup		2021-10-15
Bonn	144. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2021-10-19
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2021-10-19

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 Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, TheSwavu, YoViajo, conradoos, derFred.

George Heard is a professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of North Carolina Asheville.

Here is an excerpt from an email a student sent me at the end of my course this semester.

“Wikipedia is way cooler than I thought, and to have been able to contribute to a chemical article and publish it this semester was definitely a game-changer (just googled my article wondering if it was all real and yes, our work is definitely on the web!)”.

This struck a chord with me – I have taught this student in several classes over their academic career, and they have submitted a number of assignments to me – homework assignments, exams, lab reports, and while they all have a meaning, ultimately they have been private and transient. Do the work, hand it in, receive a grade, hopefully learn something, move on to the next assignment.  In this final semester before they graduated and set out to make their mark on the world, they have had an opportunity to contribute to global information in a meaningful way, and it has stuck.

Incorporating a Wiki Education assignment into my class gave all my students an opportunity to produce a piece of work that is not only permanent, but accessible.  Not only that, but the better the quality of the edits, the longer they are likely to persist – I have just completed the fourth year in which I have incorporated Wiki Education assignments in my class, and one student from my first class is still in touch with me and points out that their Wikipedia edits are still there from changes made in 2018.

There have been challenges, and sharing these challenges with students in an open fashion has deepened the experience.  An experienced Wikipedia editor leaving messages on my talk page and on the pages of my students’ work sparked conversation about the concept of Wikipedia as a community and a global resource, and the passion that some users had for Wikipedia.

I first became familiar with Wiki Education from a booth at the American Chemical Society National Conference in 2017. At the time, I had been charged with creating a research capstone course for Chemistry majors who were pursuing a B.A. degree and so were not engaged in laboratory-based research.  My colleagues were interested in students having a literature intensive course with a measurable outcome, along the lines of a literature-based thesis.  After some discussion with Wiki Education staff, I added a Wikipedia assignment to the first iteration of CHEM 409, Chemistry Literature Research Seminar.  The 12-week Wiki Education timeline aligned well with the learning objectives of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UNC Asheville.

• Describe and analyze the chemical and physical structure and reactivity of matter, the mathematical models describing matter, and the methods of characterizing and measuring properties of matter
• Demonstrate problem-solving and self-directed learning skills by evaluating a research topic in chemistry, completing an extensive search of related, published literature, and completing a high-quality multi-semester research project that results in a written and an oral report summarizing the project

The Wiki Education assignment provided a structure and opportunities for multiple levels of reflection along the way to creating content for Wikipedia pages relating to the chemical and physical structure and reactivity of matter, and each student could learn self-directed learning skills in selecting appropriate sources, drafting content, responding to peer review and ultimately publishing and reacting to public feedback in a global forum.

The majority of student feedback on Wiki Education has been positive. Students complete my course with a new understanding and appreciation of Wikipedia and most importantly, a feeling that their time in class has not been wasted. The level of support I get from the Wiki Education staff and other Wikipedians, as well as the comprehensive website and documentation prepared by Wiki Education, makes it easy to get started and importantly to monitor my students progress in the assignment.

Image credit: Michael Tracey, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons; George Heard, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Tyler Cipriani, Engineering Manager, Release Engineering, The Wikimedia Foundation

Last week I spoke to a few of my Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) colleagues about how we deploy code—I completely botched it. I got too complex too fast. It only hit me later—to explain deployments, I need to start with a lie.

M. Jagadesh Kumar explains:

“Every day, I am faced with the dilemma of explaining some complex phenomena […] To realize my goal, I tell ‘lies to students.'”

This idea comes from Terry Pratchett’s “lies-to-children” — a false statement that leads to a more accurate explanation. Asymptotically approaching truth via approximation.

Every section of this post is a subtle lie but approximately correct.

Release Train

The first lie I need to tell is that we deploy code once a week.

Every Thursday, Wikimedia Release Engineering Team deploys a MediaWiki release to all 978 wikis. The “release branch” is 198 different branches—one branch each for mediawiki/core, mediawiki/vendor, 188 MediaWiki extensions, and eight skins—that get bundled up via git submodule.

Progressive rollout

The next lie gets a bit closer to the truth: we don’t deploy on Thursday; we deploy Tuesday through Thursday.

The cleverly named TrainBranchBot creates a weekly train branch at 2 am UTC every Tuesday.

• Tuesday
  • Deploy to Group0—132 wikis, including Test Wikipedia, mediawiki.org, and Office wiki (our internal WMF MediaWiki)
• Wednesday
  • Deploy to Group1—528 wikis, including Commons and Wikidata. Most non-Wikipedia wikis (plus Catalan Wikipedia and Hebrew Wikipedia)
• Thursday
  • Deploy to remaining 320 wikis, including our largest wiki: English Wikipedia

Progressive rollouts give users time to spot bugs. We have an experienced user-base—as Risker attested on the Wikitech-l mailing list:

“It’s not always possible for even the best developer and the best testing systems to catch an issue that will be spotted by a hands-on user, several of whom are much more familiar with the purpose, expected outcomes and change impact on extensions than the people who have written them or QA’d them.”

Bugs

Now I’m nearing the complete truth: we deploy every day except for Fridays.

Brace yourself: we don’t write perfect software. When we find serious bugs, they block the release train — we will not progress from Group1 to Group2 (for example) until we fix the blocking issue. We fix the blocking issue by backporting a patch to the release branch. If there’s a bug in this release, we patch that bug in our mainline branch, then git cherry-pick that patch onto our release branch and deploy that code.

We deploy backports three times a day during backport deployment windows.  In addition to backports, developers may opt to deploy new configurations or enable/disable features in the backport deployment windows

Release engineers train others to deploy backports twice a week.

Emergencies

We deploy on Fridays when there are major issues. Examples of major issues are:

• Security issues
• Data loss or corruption
• Availability of service
• Preventing abuse
• Major loss of functionality/visible breakage

We avoid deploying on Fridays because we have a small team of people to respond to incidents. We want those people to be away from computers on the weekends (if they want to be), not responding to emergencies.

Non-MediaWiki code

There are 42 microservices on Kubernetes deployed via helm. And there are 64 microservices running on bare metal. The service owners deploy those microservices outside of the train process.

We coordinate deployments on our deployment calendar wiki page.

The whole truth

We progressively deploy a large bundle of MediaWiki patches (between 150 and 950) every week. There are 12 backport windows a week where developers can add new features, fix bugs, or deploy new configurations. There are microservices deployed by developers at their own pace.

Important Resources:

• Deployment calendar
• Deployment training
• Current release train status

More resources:

• Trains vs Backports
• Long-term deployment calendar
• Train blocker task
• Emergencies

Thanks to @brennen, @greg, @KSiebert, @Risker, and @VPuffetMichel for reading early drafts of this post. The feedback was very helpful. Stay tuned for “How we deploy code: Part II.”

About this post

This post originally appeared in the Phame blog, “Doing the Needful,” on 27 Sept 2021

Featured image credit: File:Union Pacific 844, Painted Rocks, NV, 2009 (crop).jpg, 04_15_09_162xp_-_Flickr_-_drewj1946.jpg: Drew Jacksich, derivative work: Bruce1ee, CC BY-SA 2.0

September 28 2021, Johannesburg, South Africa – Today, on the International Day for Universal Access to Information, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia, is launching a campaign in collaboration with the South African creative community to showcase the power of knowledge and everyone’s right to access, create and share it. Over the next four weeks, the Foundation will release online multimedia content built by South African writers, filmmakers, fashion designers, artists and thought leaders, highlighting a variety of topics from popular culture to social politics to the evolution of African cinema. The public can follow the campaign online using #WikipediaByUs.

The campaign will invite these content creators to explore Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia, as a place to freely share knowledge, and introduce them to its model of open collaboration, which allows anyone, anywhere to add well-sourced, neutral content to the site. Content creators will use their creativity to contribute to the knowledge ecosystem, emphasizing that information can be conveyed in many ways, from writing and pictures to sound and music. Aligned with Wikimedia’s  goal to break down the social, political and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge, the campaign also aims to draw attention to the South African stories, contexts, history and experiences missing from Wikipedia.

Khanyi Mpumlwana, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Creative Director said, “Access to knowledge and information in South Africa has too often been limited by class barriers and divided along racial lines. Wikipedia opens an opportunity for anyone, anywhere to share and access knowledge. Through this campaign, we want to show all content creators across the country that knowledge can take various forms and that we can all play a part in its creation.”

The Foundation is collaborating with the Bubblegum Club, a cultural intelligence agency to showcase writers, filmmakers, thought leaders and other influencers in South Africa as experts and knowledge producers in a variety of subject areas. Two directors, Zandi Tisani and Monde Gumede, will create captivating short films, with Zandi telling a story of African film history   and Monde drawing attention to current challenges in knowledge dissemination, including the spread of misinformation. Other key influencers include Ridhwaan Suliman, a mathematician and Twitter influencer, who will illustrate the importance of storytelling through data, and Khensani Mohlatlole, a writer and video essayist focused on fashion and design and its historical impact, who will share a vlog underlying the importance of uncovering unique, untold stories.

As one of the world’s top ten most visited websites, Wikipedia is a source of knowledge for billions of people across the world. Wikipedia is written by more than 280,000 global volunteer contributors, but currently only 1.5% of these editors are based in Africa, and an even smaller percentage are South African. As a result, Wikipedia articles are missing perspectives from Africa; history written about South Africa and other countries is being documented by people in other regions of the world, making them less representative and leaving large content gaps. 

Anusha Alikhan, Senior Director of Communications at the Wikimedia Foundation said: “When more people from diverse backgrounds collaborate on Wikipedia, they move us closer to achieving our vision of ensuring our projects reflect the diversity of knowledge from people, cultures and languages around the world. South Africans have a role to play in shaping this global resource, telling their own histories, and creating content about South Africa by South Africans.” 

South Africa has a history of societal inequality, which has created barriers to accessing knowledge. Initial data from research conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation illustrated that 91% of South Africans believe that knowledge is synonymous with freedom, whilst 94.5% of them believe that knowledge is truly power. 

Currently, 9 of South Africa’s 11 official languages are represented on Wikipedia, largely due to the efforts of non-profit organization Wikimedia South Africa, a recognized chapter of the Wikimedia movement.  The top four most visited language Wikipedias monthly in the country are English (81 million pageviews), Afrikaans (3 million pageviews), IsiZulu (95,000 pageviews), and IsiXhosa (49,000 pageviews), as of last month. The Wikimedia South Africa chapter has built a movement of knowledge champions who support the building of free knowledge by contributing and editing content on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. 

Drawing from the South African context, the Wikimedia campaign aims to show South Africans an avenue to address inequities in accessing and sharing knowledge. It invites them to join the free knowledge movement and contribute to building the cultural and linguistic representation of South Africa on Wikipedia. 

Some of the creative collaborators participating in the campaign include: 

• Monde Gumede – filmmaker who will create a short film about how misinformation fuels panic and social divide in a South African social and digital context
• Zayaan Khan – multidisciplinary ecological thought leader who will provide a socio political perspective on how we navigate natural environments    
• Kabelo Kungwane – storyteller behind The Sartists who will develop a knowledge sharing series around culture and fashion in the country 
• Amogelang Maledu – art practitioner, interested in popular culture, who will share a video essay reflecting her work on sound cultures in Southern Africa and their influences
• Khensani Mohlatlole – writer and video essayist who will unpack themes in South African popular culture
• Ridhwaan Suliman – mathematician and Twitter influencer who will illustrate the importance of accurate information, and how information is distributed in a pandemic
• Zandi Tisani – filmmaker who will create a short film about the history of African film, and how we have come to consume or create content 

To learn more about Wikimedia Foundation’s efforts to increase knowledge equity in its projects, explore our Open the Knowledge initiative.

To learn how to get involved in the Wikimedia South Africa chapter, visit here.

Follow the campaign online using #WikipediaByUs. 

About the Wikimedia Foundation

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

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

27 September 2021, San Francisco, California — The Wikimedia Foundation today announced that Rebecca MacKinnon has joined the Foundation as its first Vice President for Global Advocacy. Rebecca is an experienced advocate for privacy rights and media freedom who has had a long-career in journalism, academia and public policy.

“Rebecca joins our team at a time when it is increasingly urgent to establish and defend access to open knowledge,” said Amanda Keton, General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. “She brings a breadth of experience across digital advocacy issues that will enable the Wikimedia Foundation to influence key regulatory initiatives in support of our mission. Her work will allow us to grow public awareness and engagement on policy issues to protect the future of the open internet.”

As the VP for Global Advocacy, Rebecca will provide strategic leadership and direction to the Wikimedia Foundation’s growing public policy team, and continue Wikimedia’s efforts to establish and defend a legal and regulatory landscape essential to the future of free knowledge globally. She is extremely familiar with the work of the Wikimedia movement, having previously been an active member of the Advisory Board to the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees between 2007-2012. Now, as part of the Foundation she will guide the public policy team on efforts to support the global movement of Wikimedia volunteers by promoting free expression and addressing national and regulatory threats that prevent access to knowledge.

“I share this movement’s steadfast commitment to knowledge as a human right,” said Rebecca MacKinnon. “I have built my career around advocating for people’s digital rights and defending against legal and technological threats that undermine democracy. Wikimedia plays a unique role in the international information landscape, and I am excited for the opportunity to serve the global movement by strengthening our advocacy efforts to enable all people to participate in the sum of all knowledge.”

Rebecca was most recently the founding director of Ranking Digital Rights (RDR), a program at New America that works to promote freedom of expression and privacy on the internet through the creation of global standards and incentives for technology companies to respect and protect users’ rights. Prior to launching RDR, in 2012 Rebecca published Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, one of the first books to publicly discuss the contemporary rise of “networked authoritarianism” and its threat to human rights and democracy.  Her book was the product of nearly a decade working as a researcher, educator, and advocate raising awareness about freedom of expression and privacy online. 

In 2004 as a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center she co-founded, with Ethan Zuckerman, the international citizen media network Global Voices, which like Wikipedia is shaped by a global community of volunteer contributors.  She has held board member roles at organizations including the Global Network Initiative and the Committee to Protect Journalists, and serves on the Advisory Network for the Freedom Online Coalition.

Rebecca began her career as a journalist in East Asia, culminating as CNN’s bureau chief in Tokyo as well as Beijing, where she was directly exposed to many of the realities of internet censorship and surveillance, as well as threats to a free press. She is a fluent Mandarin speaker, and a former Fulbright scholar in Taiwan. Rebecca received her Bachelor’s degree with honors in Government at Harvard University, where she was also the Editor-in-Chief of Harvard International Review. She joins the Wikimedia Foundation today.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

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

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

There’s a lot to Wikidata. The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is one of the most effective and efficient ways to help you make sense of all that data on Wikidata. This post will explore how you can use different kinds queries to get the most out of your Wikidata experience. Each different kind of query will include example queries that demonstrate everything you can get out of Wikidata. You’ll also be able to modify and save them yourself to better understand how they work.

Let’s start with the most important takeaway right now: querying is how a lot of people read and use Wikidata. Although it’s important to comprehend what’s happening on the item-level on Wikidata, most community members are concerned with the relationship among all of these items (nearly 100 million as of September 2021). If you’re new to querying, that’s great! You can think of querying as defining a set of things you’re interested in on Wikidata and learning more about those things. You don’t have to worry about concerning yourself with everything that’s on Wikidata — just the things and relationships you’re interested in.

Queries can serve many purposes and express many, detailed aspects of Wikidata. The following list will provide you with some different “styles” of queries written for specific, applied purposes.

Queries can tell you…

• Facts: Queries can answer questions. For example which cities have mayors who identify as female? This is another way of showing the relationship between items. You can think of this query as a group of city items relate to human items (who are female). What links these two sets together is the “head of government” property. City, Head of Government, Mayor. The query zips through Wikidata and serves up an answer for you. This is a common kind of query.
• Visualization: Queries can visualize a lot of data for you. The Wikidata Query Service has several visualization options built into it — maps, images, graphs — to help readers process and interpret big sets of data. This query builds off the previous query, but this time it pulls in images and geographic coordinates to enable a map visualization option. This is another compelling use of a Wikidata query.
• Existence: Queries can tell you if Wikidata has an item you’re interested in — or not. New items are created every day on Wikidata, but there are plenty of gaps. Queries can tell us what’s there vs what isn’t. You can also think of it as a detail about something, for example: does Wikidata have the date that architect Jeanne Gang was a MacArthur fellow?
• Maintenance: Queries can help define metrics, track progress, and evaluate item completeness. If you’re working on a project you can have a query that focuses on a set of statements. The WikiProject Sum of All Paintings gathers paintings and data about them on Wikidata. To track progress, this project use a query (coupled with a tool called Listeria) to see which paintings are missing creator statements. Follow this link to see that list. If you scroll down a little, you’ll be able to see the link back to the query. Or you can click here to view it. Revisiting this query over time will reveal changes the community makes to items. Sets of queries can support projects to illustrate progress, gaps, and connectedness over time.
• Wikipedia article data: Queries can tell you all about Wikipedia articles. Every Wikipedia article has a corresponding Wikidata item that describes the article as linked data. So queries can answer questions like what percentage of biographies on Wikipedia are about women? Or more specific, how many female geneticist have Wikipedia articles? Wikidata can help us understand crucial metrics from other Wikimedia projects. These data points can help better develop Wikipedia in an equitable way, as well as keep track of systemic biases that exist in all of the projects — including Wikidata itself.
• Enrichment: Queries can grab that little slice of Wikidata that may improve your local collection. Is your collection missing specific pieces of data? Maybe birthdates and birth places for some artists? Don’t forget that you can download any set of query results! Build a query, scope it to a set of artists, ask for birthdates and birth places, and take whatever you want. After you run the query, just click the “Download” button on the right side of the screen and select from the file format options that best suit you. (Don’t forget that you can download *all* of Wikidata too…queries are probably the better way to do this since all of Wikidata is BIG).
• Language analysis: Queries can render results in many different languages. Similar to above — what if you want to translate names and descriptions of things in your collection to another language. That could make your collection more accessible to whole new communities. You can query Wikidata for language labels and descriptions in over 300 languages. These queries can reveal where there’s more translation work to do. Any way you look at it, the more translation that happens on Wikidata, the more accessible its knowledge becomes.
• Wikidata data model use: Queries will allow you to see how the community describes specific things on Wikidata. These standard descriptions of things on Wikidata are called data models. They emerge organically and the community defines them. Queries can help reveal where there are consistencies (or inconsistencies). For example, cities are a diverse set of things, but there are some common ways of describing them. This query shows the most commonly used properties for describing cities from 100,000 different examples. This kind of data will tell us how the community is most commonly describing something vague, like cities. Better data models = more accurate descriptions = more consistent data.
• Research: Queries can answer (and inspire) research questions. One benefit of Wikidata’s immense size is the ability to query across all of Wikipedia — and beyond! Some of these questions may not have been answerable previously. Relationships between things may be known already or they could be a new discovery for most of the population. There is a tool called Scholia that acts as a platform for revealing these research insights. You can search for authors, articles, or topics and it will produce a series of associated queries to tell you more about whatever you have searched for. Take a look at the queries about Wikidata itself.
• Hierarchies: Queries can reveal hierarchies and taxonomy on Wikidata. Wikidata is chaotic, it’s true, but there is a hierarchy to it. Using the P279 (Subclass of) property, paired with an item in question, like cities again, you can learn where that thing “lives” in this hierarchy and make better edits.
• Keeping count: Queries can count. Counting items in Wikidata is simple enough, but this act can reveal some very important things about Wikidata and everything it represents. There is a feature of properties on Wikidata called “property constraints” — these constraints guide and recommend Wikidata community members to add the appropriate kind of data. This query shows which properties have the most constraints, which may indicate complexity and specificity when adding data. From there, more community members can add more data more accurately. Who knew querying could reveal so much!?
• Reveal the inner workings of the universe*: Okay, I exaggerated…but you can turn queries on Wikidata itself to learn about its inner workings. Wikidata describes properties the same way it describes items. This means you can write queries that can tell you all about how properties relate to each other. This can reveal not only the internal structure of Wikidata itself, but also how we describe relationships in a linked data environment. You can also search for inverse properties, usage examples, related properties, as well as a set of property constraints we can see — all thanks to queries.

I think you’ll agree, queries can tell us a lot more than just facts. Yes, they can answer questions, but queries can make Wikidata a much more useful, urgent, and accessible resource for everyone.

Interested in learning more about querying Wikidata? Take one of our Wikidata Institute courses: wikiedu.org/wikidata.

There is an idea to use a  “section recommendation” feature to help editors write articles by suggesting possible sections to be added. But it is possible that its recommendations inadvertently increase gender bias. Here’s how we could deal with it.

A Section Recommender for Wikipedia

An experimental development, the section recommendation feature’s main goal is to make it easier for newcomers to start and expand Wikipedia articles. It is a machine learning tool that analyses existing Wikipedia articles and pulls out statistical data, like what type of “sections” or “subheadings” exist in articles about living people, battles or cities. It then uses these statistical records to recommend to the user categories they might want to add to the article they are editing. So if you are editing an article about a town, it might suggest section titles such as “Government and law”, “Demographics” or “Twin towns – sister cities”, all three very common sections in city articles on Wikipedia. 

Reinforcing gender bias

One major issue in the process is that when it comes to Wikipedia biographies, men are more likely to have sections such as “Career” and “Awards and honors”, while women are more likely to have sections such as “Personal life” and “Family”. This is an existing social, systemic bias on Wikipedia that is perpetuated. Part of it is a spillover from traditional sources – historical documents, books and journals that are predominantly about men. 

The section recommender feature is likely to quickly “learn” this and will start, while helping editors improve article quality in many cases, increasing the systemic bias in which men and women are portrayed on Wikipedia. 

Could algorithmically-generated section recommendations inadvertently increase gender bias in biographies of women? (risk scenario A: Reinforcing existing bias.) Text from the English Wikipedia article about “Alice Frey”, CC BY-SA 3.0. Image by unknown, used in the article under fair use. Mockup by Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Identifying risk, then addressing it

Once the developers and users recognise this, there are usually simple technical fixes. In this case it would be to set up the system to not distinguish between biographies about women and men, for instance. It would then suggest sections, such as “Career” and “Family” to all biographies. 

In order to recognise such biases in advance, we need to work on risk scenarios – short hypothetical situations about AI-powered products and their results in a specific environment. Then we need to change the process of developing AI-powered products, and then the design of the products themselves. It is important to not only change the product, but also the actual development process, in order to avoid similar gaps in the future. 

Openness, because no developer can think of all risks

Much of the public debate on ethical AI has revolved around generalprinciples like fairness, transparency and accountability. Articulating the principles that underlie ethical AI is an important step. But technology companies also need practical guidance on how to apply those principles when they develop products based on AI, so that they can identify major risks and make informed decisions.

One thing that makes it so hard to recognise biases and unintended negative consequences is that they are part of our culture, of how we grew up and how we talk and think. We don’t see them until someone points it out to us. It would be foolish to assume that even the most experienced and well-meaning developers and providers can catch most of them. 

In our mind, communities, especially marginalised ones, know better than regulators and developers what content and consequences of a tool or resource are truly harmful to them. This is why we must make sure our systems are as open and transparent as possible. We must give every individual and every community a chance to see how ML/AI algorithms work and even a way to toy with them. And then when they signal to us that something is not right, we should have solid review and redesign systems in place. And while it is hard to imagine that a private company could ever be as open and transparent as a non-for-profit such as Wikimedia, we could and should very well demand this from the government and public services.

Recommended reading

• Designing ethically with AI: How Wikimedia can harness machine learning in a responsible and human-centered way
• Ethical and human centered AI

A miniseries on machine learning tools

Machine Learning and AI technologies have the potential to benefit free knowledge and improve access to trustworthy information. But they also come with significant risks. Wikimedia is building tools and services around these technologies with the main goal of helping volunteer editors in their work on free knowledge projects. But we strive to be as human centered and open as possible in this process. This is a miniseries of blog posts that will present tools that Wikimedia concepts, develops and uses, the unexpected and sometimes undesired results and how we try to mitigate them. Today, we present ORES, a service meant to recognise vandalism.