Lessons from seven years of remote work

03:46, Wednesday, 01 2021 December UTC

The inspiration for this post is Željko Filipin’s post on the same topic.

Nobody worked remotely during the pandemic, but everybody worked from home.

During the pandemic, office workers had to adjust to working out of their homes. But remote work is different: you’re not working from home, necessarily; you’re working while seperated from a lively, in-person office. You might be in the same city as your co-workers or on the other side of the world.

When you’re physically disconnected from your colleagues, you have to build new skills and adapt your tactics. This is advice I wish I’d had seven years ago when I started working remotely.

Asynchronous communication

Office workers have the luxury of hallway conversations. In an in-person office, getting feedback takes mere minutes. But in a remote work position where you may be on the other side of the planet, communication may take overnight.

To be effective, you need to master asynchronous communication. This means:

Timezones suck

I wish this section was as simple as saying: use UTC for everything, but it’s never that easy. You should definitely give meeting times to people in UTC, but you should tie meetings to a local timezone. The alternative is that your meetings shift by an hour twice a year due to daylight savings.

This all gets more complicated the more countries you have involved.

While the United States ends daylight savings time on the first Sunday in November, many countries in Europe end daylight savings on the last Sunday in October, creating a daylight confusion time.

During daylight confusion time, meetings made by Americans may shift by an hour for Europeans and vice-versa.

I think the only thing to learn from this section is: you’ll mess it up.

Space and Nice tools

Function often follows form. Give yourself a context for capturing thoughts, and thoughts will occur that you don’t yet know you have

– David Allen, Getting Things Done

Working from the kitchen table is unsustainable for your mental health and your back. You need a space that’s primary function is your work, and that space needs to have tools that are a joy to use.

Splurge a bit on tools you’ll use every day: your chair, keyboard, monitor, headphones, webcam, and microphone. These purchases quickly fade into the background of your life. Still, if you ever have to work outside your home office again, you’ll realize how these tools enable your best work.

Buy a nice notebook, and don’t be afraid to absolutely destroy it. I prefer the Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks, but I’m currently trying out the JetPen’s Tomoe River 52 gsm Kanso Noto Notebook. Writing is thinking, and you’ll find your thinking is sharper if you start with pen-and-paper first.

“The beginning of wisdom,” according to a West African proverb, “is to get you a roof.”

– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

The most important property of your permanent workspace is that it has ample and appropriate light for video calls.

Apart from that, I prefer having a door, but then again, I have a dog and a cat, so your mileage may vary.

Outreachy report #27: November 2021

00:00, Wednesday, 01 2021 December UTC

Highlights We finished reviewing all intern selections We finished handling most invoices for this round We planned and started hosting written exercise sessions Intern selection We’ve been testing shorter periods for the intern selection for a while. It went from a month to three weeks to two weeks this round, and we learned very quickly that two weeks won’t cut it – the ideal is offering mentors and coordinators three weeks to finalize their intern selections.

Five reasons Wikipedia needs your support

18:00, Tuesday, 30 2021 November UTC

In the 20 years since Wikipedia was born, it has grown to become a valued and beloved knowledge destination for millions across the globe. Now with over 55 million articles, its growth has been fueled by a global volunteer force and donors who explore and visit the site regularly.  Supported by contributions from readers around the world, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, works to ensure the site remains accurate and ad-free, while supporting the free knowledge infrastructure that makes 18 billion monthly visits to the site possible. 

Reader support has allowed Wikipedia to celebrate 20 years as the world’s only major website run by a nonprofit organization. We continue to rely on this generosity as the need for accurate, neutral information, created in the public interest becomes ever-more acute. Here are five reasons why you should support free knowledge work: 

  1. Ensuring the long term independence of Wikipedia and other projects that keep knowledge free 

“Wikipedia is a unique entity that continues to add value in the lives of me and my loved ones. I feel that the crowd funded nature of Wikipedia’s balance substantially contributes to Wikipedia’s immaterial values. Whenever I have money and wikipedia is in need, I will contribute.”

Donor in the Netherlands

Part of the role of the Wikimedia Foundation is to ensure that the independence of Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects is never compromised. The majority of the funding for the Wikimedia Foundation comes from millions of individual donors around the world who give an average of $15 USD. This model preserves our independence by reducing the ability of any one organization or individual to influence our decisions. It also aligns directly with our values, creating accountability with our readers. You can read more about how our revenue model protects our independence in the Wikimedia Foundation’s guiding principles

Our legal and policy teams also work to uphold our independence, protecting our projects from censorship and advocating for laws that uphold free expression and open up knowledge for anyone to use. Support for this work is essential to securing everyone’s right to access, share and contribute to knowledge-building. 

  1. Keeping Wikipedia safe, secure and inclusive   

Wikimedia values — transparency, privacy, inclusion, and accessibility — are built into our technology. Just around 250 engineering and product staff at the Wikimedia Foundation work with our servers to ensure our projects are always available. That means one technical employee for every four million monthly Wikipedia readers! 

As technology platforms increasingly deal with new threats and risks from bad actors, we develop tools and features that protect editor privacy, maintain security, and respond to attacks. We also work to improve our projects, making them more accessible to people with disabilities, or those who primarily access our sites on mobile. Wikipedia projects are built with the intention to keep bandwidth costs low for readers, so that it’s easy for anyone, anywhere to enjoy their value. 

The open source software maintained by our engineers in cooperation with volunteers around the world, MediaWiki, powers our projects and supports more than 300 languages, many more than any other major online platform. This empowers our communities to make content accessible in more languages than you will find on any other top ten website, and it puts our software on the leading edge of global outreach.

  1. Supporting the global Wikimedia volunteer community to help fill knowledge gaps and improve our projects 

Supported by Foundation grants, Wikimedia volunteer and affiliate campaigns continue to make notable contributions to the free knowledge movement. 

For example, some affiliates are working to add new media files to Wikimedia Commons, the world’s largest free-to-use library of illustrations, photos, drawings, videos, and music:

  • In Europe, Wikimedia UK’s partnership with the Khalili Collections, to share more than 1,500 high-resolution images of items from across eight collections, now sees the uploaded images getting more than two million views per month. 
  • Additionally,  this year’s Wiki Loves Africa campaign resulted in over 8,319 images and 56 video files contributed by 1,149 photographers. The campaign challenges stereotypes and negative visual narratives about Africa. Since the collection began in January 2016, over 72,300 images have been loaded to the platform under a Creative Commons license and have been viewed 787 million times. 

With paywalls and price tags increasingly placed on content, the growing collection of free use files on Wikimedia Commons is becoming even more  vital to our efforts to expose people around the world to new sights, art, and cultures.

  1. Building a future for greater knowledge equity   

Our vision is to create a world in which every human can share in the sum of all knowledge. We know that we are far from achieving that goal and that large equity gaps remain in our projects. From content drives, to inclusive product design and research, there are several ways Wikimedia projects work to advance knowledge equity to ensure diverse, more equitable, accessible and inclusive initiatives. Our Wikimedia in Education initiative, for example, promotes equity in education by expanding access to linguistically and culturally relevant open educational resources, and provides opportunities for teachers and students to participate in knowledge production.  In 2020, the Foundation joined UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition, allowing us to discover new ways to support education for people and communities most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

  1. Making sure you know that we use your donations responsibly 

The Wikimedia Foundation has a two-decade-long track record of using resources efficiently, transparently, and in service of impact — which is why independent nonprofit evaluator Charity Navigator gives us its highest overall ratings for accountability and transparency. It’s also why nonprofit research organization GuideStar gives us its Platinum Seal of Transparency. We remain committed to making the best use of donor funds to support Wikipedia. 

We  invite you to support our mission. You can make a donation to Wikipedia at donate.wikimedia.org. For more information about the Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising program, please see the 2020-2021 Fundraising Report. For additional information about donating, see our list of Frequently Asked Questions. Thank you!

Joseph Wahba sitting on bench
Joseph Wahba.
Image courtesy Joseph Wahba, all rights reserved.

Joseph Wahba’s interest in health sciences was sparked in high school — but it wasn’t until he was in his third year of his Health Sciences program at McMaster University that he began to question how we know and understand topics of health. That line of inquiry was prompted by a course he took, taught by Denise Smith, called Health Information — a class that had a Wikipedia assignment.

“My eyes had been open to the crucial importance of effective dissemination of health information. We dealt with various topics in health discussed publicly, including vaccination, diseases that carry stigma, etc.,” he says. “Our final project in the course was to utilize Wikipedia as a platform to share health information that had been gathered from critically appraised academic literature on the topics we chose. Although I had brought my preconceived notions of Wikipedia to the course, I learned to truly appreciate it for what it is: accessible. It is the most accessible platform out there to share information that I have seen up to this day.”

Joseph had long known about Canada’s Food Guide; his mother, a physician, even came to his elementary school class to teach about it. Denise’s class was the first time he considered it as a topic of study, however. In Denise’s class, he learned about how the Food Guide failed to represent people of marginalized communities, including exploiting First Nations groups. As part of his deep dive into the topic, he found reference on Wikipedia to “First Nations nutrition experiments”, in which the Canadian government ran purposeful malnourishment experiments on First Nations people, including children in residential schools. Before he started working on it, the article on the First Nations nutrition experiments was what Wikipedians call a “stub” — in this case, a three-sentence article. Joseph set out to improve the information available on Wikipedia.

“I learned that I knew very little about the experiences of First Nations Peoples in this country. I could never say I truly understand having my language, way of life or cultural identity forcibly stripped in the same fashion as many First Nations Peoples have,” he says. “There are many gruesome accounts documented of the nutritional experiments between the 1940s and 1950s in Canada, led by prominent researchers in the fields of medicine and nutrition, where autonomy, consent, and care of the First Nations participants were disregarded in a blatant and quite frankly, cavalier manner.”

Joseph documented all of these in the now-expanded article on Wikipedia, which today has more than 20 paragraphs and citations to 23 sources.

“Although I dove deep into the historical context and events that had transpired during some of these experiments, what struck me more were the transcribed accounts from survivors,” he says. “A personal account that I covered in the article was that of Alvin Dixon, a former residential school survivor who was among many children subjected to a nutrition experiment conducted in Alberni Residential School, on the CBC Radio One series As It Happens. By listening to his recollection of the experience, the suffering borne by him and his fellow survivors was all but evident to me in his solemn voice.”

Denise, he says, was critical in helping him find articles, providing tips on the best literature to cite and working with archivists who helped dig up items from library catalogs to help Joseph expand the article. Another editor, User:SonOfTheHoundOfTheSea, saw Joseph’s work and started collaborating with him, adding a section on the James Bay Survey. Joseph found this interaction with another contributor a really interesting part of his project. He also enjoyed the ability to see page views of his work, to understand its impact.

Joseph hopes more faculty like Denise assign students to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment. He says learning to address feedback from the instructors as well as other contributors is a critical skill to develop. He also learned how to share complex information using simpler language, making more knowledge accessible to the general public. And, he says, it’s motivating to contribute to something bigger than yourself.

“Wikipedia projects serve a purpose outside of class: to serve the platform, and in turn, the community of people who use it for learning,” he says. “I think a major factor to whether I get excited about assignments is if I can find a purpose for putting in the effort. It feels good to serve a community with work you do as a student since it provides you with motivation to continue to learn and develop the skills necessary to improve.”

Joseph graduated this year and is working full-time at one hospital and volunteering at another, while he applies for medical school. These have kept him busy recently, but he intends to continue editing Wikipedia, likely in the health care topic area. And he particularly appreciated the opportunity Wikipedia brings to raise awareness about Indigenous health topics like the First Nations nutrition experiments.

“I believe that the First Nations and Inuit peoples have endured and still do endure injustices that render it difficult to access healthcare facilities and resources,” he says. “I also think that the First Nations nutrition experiments were only one of many instances throughout history during which Canada did not uphold the needs, beliefs and wants of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples, as a collective. I hope that more and more is done in terms of reparations as well as educating Canada’s youth about the Indigenous perspective of this country’s history.”

To learn more about teaching with Wikipedia, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Image credit: Captain108, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Tech News issue #48, 2021 (November 29, 2021)

00:00, Monday, 29 2021 November UTC
previous 2021, week 48 (Monday 29 November 2021) next

weeklyOSM 592

10:15, Sunday, 28 2021 November UTC

16/11/2021-22/11/2021

lead picture

Open Indoor Viewer OpenLevelUp [1] | © OpenLevelUp | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

About us

  • Kai Michael Poppe has extended his multi-purpose-bot to also inform the D-A-CH Telegram group when a new issue of weeklyOSM is published.
    • Kai invited other Telegram groups that are interested to make use of this service too, using a new bot.
    • We have created a spreadsheet in which we ask administrators to enter the Telegram group that they want to be served directly when a new weeklyOSM is published.

Mapping

  • Managing imagery alignment has always been a problem; bdhurkett found a solution for Burnie (Tasmania) as suburb polygons are well aligned with fences and other property boundaries. They outline how they are incrementally adjusting OSM objects to match these alignments more consistently.
  • SherbetS showed a setup for river mapping using a PlayStation controller and JOSM.
  • SK53 continued his examination of how natural=heath is used in Wales with a detailed example of a small hilltop heathland which was previously unmapped.
  • Voting is underway for the following proposals:

Community

  • Canadian cartographers discussed, on the forum, the relevance of special mapping for flood disasters and landslides in various areas of British Columbia.
  • The Local Chapters and Communities Working Group presented the ‘OpenStreetMap Welcome Tool’. The tool is designed to make it easy to welcome new mappers to your country or region.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

  • On the OSMF mailing list Heikki Vesanto suggested a ‘made with OSM logo’ along the lines of those of Natural Earth and QGIS. Note that this is subtly different from an OSM mark, an idea which was recently revived (as we reported earlier), in that it would be additional to, not a replacement for, existing attribution requirements.
  • Michal Migurski, candidate for the OSMF Board, asked on MetaFilter about ‘organisations that form in spite of their grassroots counterparts’, and asked how ‘new members’ could ‘circumvent a community organisation to form something larger and more organised’.

Events

  • Both State of the Map Africa and the HOT Summit occurred last weekend (20 and 22 November), a little too late for inclusion of highlights in this week’s weeklyOSM. One talk several people noted on Twitter, was by Alazar Tekle from AddisMap, one of the earliest OpenStreetMap startups anywhere in the world. No videos, at present, but you can view their, virtual, presentation at State of the Map 2010 on YouTube.

Education

  • Pascal Neis left a message on the changeset of a Chinese newcomer to ask why they deleted lots of data. Another user in the comments pointed out that this was OSM mapping homework assigned to students by an instructor at Central South University. Other mappers from China also showed their disappointment (zhcn) > en with these homework changesets. Should teachers be responsible for such improper behaviour of students? How should we deal with the teacher’s assignment of editing in OSM as homework?
  • Videos of presentations by Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT), given at the recent FOSS4G conference, are now available online. Subjects include: an OSM Confidence Index developed using the ohsome.org framework, and an introduction and update on MapSwipe .

OSM research

  • Alexander Zipf’s group has received funding to start a new project related to climate change actions – ‘GeCO – Generating high-resolution CO2 maps by Machine Learning-based geodata fusion and atmospheric transport modelling’.

Maps

  • Here are some selected OpenStreetMap-based maps from the penultimate week of the #30DayMapChallenge, which we have been following all month:

Software

  • The website Visionscarto announced (fr) > en the launch of three tools built with OpenStreetMap and uMap to identify available agricultural lands and their uses by the association ‘Terre de liens’.
  • Hauke Stieler created a web application called OSM Open to find POIs that are open at a selected point in time. The data can also be filtered by tags and the source code is available on GitHub. He has chosen to hide the OpenStreetMap attribution by default.

Did you know …

  • … the existence of the xmas:feature key? While scarcely used (about 2000 items) and mainly in Germany, this ‘in use’ tag was introduced in 2009 and grows each year by a few hundred or so. Its use has been debated and a merging proposal with the temporary: namespace was made, but the proposal has been inactive since 2016.
  • [1] … the Open Indoor Viewer called ‘OpenLevelUp‘?
  • … there is a list of new keys recently created in OSM? Most of them involve typos or ignorance of established tagging principles. Comes with direct links to correct them.
  • OSM Streak, the gamified web application that encourages you to do small tasks in OpenStreetMap every day? There is also a Telegram account named @osm_streak_bot, which you can configure to remind you of your daily task.

OSM in the media

  • The government of France has unveiled (fr) > en its action plan for open source software and digital commons which, as its name suggests, aims to strengthen the use of open source and encourage the opening up of public data. A specific objective is to reference open source software and digital commons such as OpenStreetMap, a free and collaborative digital tool from which other tools such as transport.data.gouv.fr (fr) > en are derived.

Other “geo” things

  • Archival geodata are now available (pl) > en as WMS layers from the Polish national geoportal.
  • The general secretariat of the German Red Cross (GRC), based in Berlin, is looking (de) for a ‘Manager Geoinformatics’. The position is responsible for the implementation of the project ‘Development of geoinformatics for the international humanitarian aid activities of the GRC – Strengthening the cooperation with the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology’. The person chosen will also help develop programmes and basic approaches for the use and support of OpenStreetMap.
  • Reibert wrote (ru) > de about the official state register [uk] > de of permits to harvest timber in Ukraine.
  • SkyNews reported that Mapbox’s route to a stock market listing, through a Softbank SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company), has run out of steam.

Upcoming Events

Where What Online When Country
UCB Brasil + CicloMapa: curso de mapeamento osmcalpic 2021-11-16 – 2021-11-26
UN Map Marathon osmcalpic 2021-11-22 – 2021-11-26
[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting osmcalpic 2021-11-26
Brno November Brno Missing Maps mapathon at Department of Geography osmcalpic 2021-11-26 flag
HOTOSM Training Webinar Series: Beginner JOSM osmcalpic 2021-11-27
Amsterdam OSM Nederland maandelijkse bijeenkomst (online) osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
長岡京市 京都!街歩き!マッピングパーティ:第27回 元伊勢三社 osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
Bogotá Distrito Capital – Departamento Resolvamos notas de Colombia creadas en OpenStreetMap osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
泉大津市 オープンデータソン泉大津:町歩きとOpenStreetMap、Localwiki、ウィキペディアの編集 osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
Biella Incontro mensile degli OSMers BI-VC-CVL osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
津山のWEB地図作り~OSMのはじめ方~ osmcalpic 2021-11-28
Chamwino How FAO uses different apps to measure Land Degradation osmcalpic 2021-11-29 flag
OSM Uganda Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-11-29
Salt Lake City OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night osmcalpic 2021-12-02 flag
Paris Live Youtube Tropicamap osmcalpic 2021-12-01 flag
Missing Maps Artsen Zonder Grenzen Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-12-02
Bochum OSM-Treffen Bochum (Dezember) osmcalpic 2021-12-02 flag
MapRoulette Community Meeting osmcalpic 2021-12-07
San Jose South Bay Map Night osmcalpic 2021-12-08 flag
London Missing Maps London Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-12-07 flag
Berlin OSM-Verkehrswende #30 (Online) osmcalpic 2021-12-07 flag
Landau an der Isar Virtuelles Niederbayern-Treffen osmcalpic 2021-12-07 flag
Stuttgart Stuttgarter Stammtisch (Online) osmcalpic 2021-12-07 flag
CASA talk: Ramya Ragupathy, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team osmcalpic 2021-12-08
London London pub meet-up osmcalpic 2021-12-08 flag
Chippewa Township Michigan Meetup osmcalpic 2021-12-09 flag
Großarl 3. Virtueller OpenStreetMap Stammtisch Österreich osmcalpic 2021-12-09 flag
Berlin 162. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch osmcalpic 2021-12-10 flag
[Online] 15th Annual General Meeting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation osmcalpic 2021-12-11
Grenoble OSM Grenoble Atelier OpenStreetMap osmcalpic 2021-12-13 flag
臺北市 OSM x Wikidata Taipei #35 osmcalpic 2021-12-13 flag
Toronto OpenStreetMap Enthusiasts Meeting osmcalpic 2021-12-14
Washington MappingDC Mappy Hour osmcalpic 2021-12-15 flag
Derby East Midlands OSM Pub Meet-up : Derby osmcalpic 2021-12-14 flag
Helechosa de los Montes Reunión mensual de la comunidad española osmcalpic 2021-12-14 flag

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 Lejun, Nordpfeil, PierZen, RCarlow, SK53, Strubbl, TheSwavu, YoViajo, conradoos, derFred.

Train the Trainer 2022 – call for participants

12:42, Thursday, 25 2021 November UTC

Would you like to receive training on how to deliver Wikipedia editing events? Wikimedia UK are now inviting expressions of interest in our next round of Train the Trainer, due to take place in early 2022. We are delighted to say that we’ll once again be partnering with Trainer Bhav Patel.    

Volunteer trainers play a key role in the delivery of Wikimedia UK programmes, helping us to achieve our strategic objectives by delivering Wikimedia project training to new and existing editors across the country.  Demand for training often outstrips staff capacity to fulfill, and we’re conscious that our existing networks do not always allow us to reach all the communities with whom we’d like to work.  

In the past, we’ve offered our main Train the Trainer programme as a 3-4 day in-person training course, and it has often focussed on training design and pedagogy. This time however, we’re taking a slightly different approach, which we hope will offer more flexibility to our volunteer trainers, and which we have developed in response to feedback from the community, and from partner organisations.  

The aim of this round of training will be to equip Volunteer Trainers with the skills, experience and resources to deliver a standard ‘Introduction to Wikipedia’, such that would take place at a standard online editathon or wiki workshop  Drawing on the experience of a number of trainers and staff, we have developed a set of training slides and exercises which can be delivered without the requirement for the Volunteer Trainer to do their own course design.  In time, and should they so desire, members of this cohort could be supported to deliver training in-person, and with their own design.  

Expressions of interest are welcomed from all, however given the current demographic mix of our training network, we are particularly interested in hearing from women, members of the LGBT+ community, and non-white people.

Dr Sara Thomas and Bhav Patel outline the content of the Train the Trainer course.

Course content and key dates

The course would be organised as follows, all sessions would be held online over Zoom:

  • Briefing: Thursday 27th January, 6-7pm. Introduction session.
  • Experience: Saturday 29th January, 1-5pm. Trainees would attend an Editathon / Wiki Workshop as participant observers.
  • Debrief: Sunday 30th January, 1-5pm. Trainees would discuss and debrief the Saturday session, exploring how and why the training was put together.
  • Practice: February. Trainees will run their own online Editathons / Wiki Workshops in pairs or groups of three. These sessions will be organised by Wikimedia UK, probably with partner organisations who will be aware that they are helping new trainers. We are also open to trainees setting up their own practice sessions, if they know a group with whom they’d like to work.

What we would expect from you if you decide to join 

  • Full attendance at the training course as outlined above.
  • To lead training for a minimum of 2-3 events per year. This would be a mixture of third party events which our Programmes Team would field to you, and those you would organise yourself. Please note that we do receive requests for training to be delivered within office hours.  
  • To be responsive to communication from Wikimedia UK staff and Event Organisers, including in advance of the event, and to complete basic reporting, including returning sign up sheets, afterwards.
  • Familiarity with, or desire to increase your knowledge of the Wikimedia Projects, particularly Wikipedia. Pre-course support can be provided if you feel that you would benefit from this in order to fully participate in the training.
  • To represent Wikimedia UK well during the time in which you are volunteering.
  • To adhere to our Safe Spaces policy, and the Code of Conduct. 

What you can expect from us

  • Full training and support to become a trainer for editathons and similar events.
  • Access to materials for participants.
  • Ongoing support from the Programmes Team.
  • Job references upon request (paper / email / LinkedIn as required).
  • Reasonable volunteer expenses where appropriate.

How to apply

Please fill in the Google Form here. Applications will close on the 9th December, and all successful applicants will be notified by 14th December.

Further background information

Volunteer Trainer is one of two main volunteer roles available at Wikimedia UK, the other being Board Member. In 2020, in light of the demand for online training, we ran an Online Training for Online Trainers course for our existing trainer network, and our last in-person training for new trainers took place in November 2019

The Wikimedia UK Volunteer Trainer Role description.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Security team is an often invisible force that works tirelessly to protect the information and software of Wikipedia and our other projects. The internet has changed a lot since Wikipedia was created in 2001, and that change has brought with it myriad new security challenges.

From our vast army of diverse volunteer editors who create and maintain the online encyclopedia and its companion projects, to the millions of people around the world who use them every day, our security experts protect our community’s privacy and ensure safe and secure access to invaluable educational resources, acting in real time to confront cyber attacks.

John Bennett, The Wikimedia Foundation.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Security team is committed to fostering a culture of security. This includes growing security functions to keep up with ever-evolving threats to the health of Wikipedia and the free knowledge movement at large.

It also includes equipping those who are closest to the challenges with appropriate knowledge and tools so they can make good security and privacy decisions for themselves.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Director of Security John Bennett recently shared in the following Q&A how the Foundation is getting ahead of changing security vulnerabilities, as well as positioning itself at the cutting edge of championing privacy and security on our collaborative platforms.

Q: Why is the work of the Security team so important right now?

The world has come to rely on Wikipedia’s knowledge. We are also living through a moment in history where we are seeing the greatest number of threats to free and open-source knowledge. As we have seen over the past few years, disinformation and bad actors online can pose huge threats to democracy and public health. Wikipedia volunteers work in real time to fact check and ensure the public has safe, reliable access to critical information.

Wikipedia’s continued success as a top-10 site with hundreds of millions of readers means that it will continue to be a target for vandals and hackers. We have to constantly evolve our security efforts to meet new challenges and the growing sophistication of hacking and malicious behavior.

“We are living through a moment in history where we are seeing the greatest number of threats to free and open-source knowledge.”

Security and privacy are key elements in our work to be champions of free knowledge. Though fundamental, this behind-the-scenes work often goes unnoticed. You don’t recognize how important security systems are until they are broken. Investing in a culture of security now will allow Wikipedia to protect its record of the sum of human knowledge for generations to come.

Q: Craig Newmark Philanthropies recently invested $2.5 million in the Foundation’s security operations. What does this investment mean for your work?

This generous new funding is allowing Wikipedia and the Foundation to evolve with the times and get ahead of ongoing threats from hackers and malicious internet users. Over the next two years, we are boosting our security capabilities to an even more thorough level than where we’ve been before.

To take a step back, this investment from Craig is going to our Security team, which has the mission to serve and guide the Foundation and Wikimedia community by providing security services to inform risk and to cultivate a culture of security.

This donation is actually Craig’s second in support of our work. In 2019, Craig funded efforts to vigorously monitor and thwart risks to Wikimedia’s projects. That first investment allowed us to grow and mature a host of security capabilities and services. These include application security, risk management, incident response, and more. While threats to our operations happen nearly every day, we work proactively to prevent cyber attacks by following best practices, leveraging open source software to aid our security efforts, and by performing security reviews.

But to keep up with changing security threats, we need to do much more, and that’s what this new funding will help us to do — take our security to the next level. We’re very grateful to Craig for facilitating that. As the founder of craigslist, he has been a long-time supporter of the free knowledge movement and the work we do at Wikipedia, or as he calls it, “the place where facts go to live.”

Q: What are the Security team’s priorities for the near future?

We have developed a comprehensive three-year security strategy with three areas of focus:

First, cyber risk. Security risk is a tool that we use to assess potential loss and potential opportunity. It’s a framework for us to evaluate our priorities. We need to create a common language and understanding of risk within the Foundation and our communities. To that end, we will be rolling out a series of “roll your own” risk assessments for our staff and communities to learn about security and privacy best practices and equip them to make the best, informed decisions for themselves.

“Understanding and having an appreciation for security and privacy is in everyone’s best interest.”

Second, security architecture. Through this pillar of work, we will deploy robust security services and capabilities for the Foundation and our community projects, including Wikipedia. There are two projects I am particularly excited about. The first is a new internal differential privacyservice for those seeking to safely use and release data. This will enable our staff, volunteers, researchers, and others to consume and share data in a safe and privacy-respecting way. The second project is an effort to move application security practices and tooling closer to those people who are creating code, which will enhance our current security practice and add velocity.

Third, capabilities management. Our main goal with this area of our work is to get better at what we do. It is essentially an ongoing internal audit of our security work, with the ultimate goal of improving security efficacy and creating solutions for Foundation staff and community members. We will evaluate the effectiveness of all of our security and privacy services, as well as establish standards and practices to modify or end services if needed.

Q: What does a secure culture at Wikimedia look like, and how can other online platforms follow the Wikimedia Foundation’s lead?

Understanding and having an appreciation for security and privacy is in everyone’s best interest. What I mean is that by creating an understanding of risks, threats, and vulnerabilities, we are teaching others how to appreciate and how to apply an appropriate lens to various security and privacy situations.

In a large online community like ours, we want people to be comfortable with their security and privacy practices and in asking questions. In the spirit of Wikimedia, our team conducts this work with a human-first approach. We know we are going to have vulnerabilities and threats to our platforms and technology stack — that’s inevitable; but one of our greatest strengths to mitigate these challenges is our community. Empowering them and others to help understand and promote security and privacy is key to creating the culture of security we are seeking.

Q: Any closing thoughts?

Wikipedia at its core is a bold idea that anyone can access and contribute to the world’s knowledge. Our platforms were built on the notion that security and privacy sustain freedom of expression. Security doesn’t mean policing the community of volunteer contributors that make Wikipedia work, but rather empowering all of our users and staff with security practices and resources that will protect and expand our reach. By making Wikipedia sustainable and safe from cyberthreats, we are setting an example for other online platforms that a culture of security can and should be a collaborative effort.

“We are setting an example for other online platforms that a culture of security can and should be a collaborative effort.”

I am super grateful to be part of this work and for the amazing group of people I get to collaborate with on a daily basis. Maryum Styles, Hal Triedman, James Fishback, Samuel Guebo, Sam Reed, Scott Bassett, Manfredi Martorana, David Sharpe, and Jennifer Cross make up a small but super powerful team. I am a huge believer in this team and what it can do and can’t wait to see what’s next!

Indigenous knowledge on Wikipedia and Wikidata

18:07, Tuesday, 23 2021 November UTC

In a presentation at WikidataCon, Érica Azzellini said something that got me thinking: “A mountain could also be an instance of a divine being”.

I was born in a town built on the slopes of a single hill standing beside the sea on the west coast of Trinidad. Though it rises less than 200 m above its surroundings, the hill is the only high point between a flat plain to the east, and the Gulf of Paria to the west. The hill is also Nabarima, the Guardian of the Waters, and the residence of one of the four Kanobos of the Warao, who are an indigenous people of the area. Knowing this, I headed to Wikidata to try to incorporate Érica’s suggestion.

And I ran into problems immediately. In Wikidata, information is modeled as part of a “triple”, where the thing being modeled (the particular hill that my home town is built on) is associated with a property that takes a specific value. In this case, the property I was interested in is called “instance of”, and it’s straightforward enough to assign that property the value “hill”: San Fernando Hill is an instance of a hill. But it’s also the residence of a Kanobo.

So what, precisely, is a Kanobo? A divine spirit, of a sort. A grandfather spirit. There’s a part of my brain that handles unstructured, nonlinear information effectively. But that doesn’t help much when you’re trying to add values to Wikidata.

And how do I model “residence of” a divine being? For guidance, I looked at Mount Olympus, the home of the Greek gods. I tried Valhalla. I even checked out the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City. None of these left me the wiser. To model the hill properly I suspect I would have to model it as an instance of a “residence of a Kanobo”, but first I would need to create an item for “residence of a Kanobo”. And to do that, I’d need to create an item for Kanobo. It’s difficult, I’m out of my depth, so I end up going with “instance of” a religious site. Whose religion? Neither Wikidata nor Wikipedia will tell you. And even if you found your way to the Warao people article on Wikipedia, you’d learn that they are an indigenous group in Venezuela, with little hint of their presence in Trinidad. Archaeologists like Arie Boomert believe that the Warao were the original inhabitants of Trinidad, but the borders drawn by the Spanish and the British left the Warao cut off, foreigners in what is by right their homeland.

Across Wikipedia, the connection between indigenous people and their lands is cut off. While land acknowledgements have become common, especially in academic settings, there’s a large gap between knowing whose land you’re on and understanding how those people relate to this land. If we’re lucky, a Wikipedia article will tell us the indigenous name of a particular geological feature, but it’s extremely rare for the article to document more than that.

The Denali article documents seven indigenous names for the mountain and group them into two categories of meaning — “the tall one” and “big mountain” — but says nothing about how indigenous Alaskans see or relate to the mountain. It’s in the category “sacred mountains”, but the article fails to explain why. Visit the Wikidata item for Denali and you’ll find nothing about sacredness or spiritual meanings.

Wikipedia and Wikidata aren’t notably bad in this regard, but I believe they should be better. Much better. It’s a problem that’s systemic — it’s hard to add content to Wikidata when the statements don’t exist to build the relationships. And it’s harder to add the statements to Wikidata when the relevant articles don’t exist on Wikipedia. But in the end, it’s hard to write about Kanobos when you don’t actually understand what they are.

Non-indigenous contributors can — and should — work to improve the coverage of Indigenous content across Wikimedia projects, but unless the movement includes more Indigenous people writing about their own communities, we will always fall short. That challenge is exacerbated by the fact that Indigenous communities aren’t interchangeable, just as manitō isn’t interchangeable with Kanobo.

Native American Heritage Month is a good time to reflect on our movement’s shortfalls in this regard. How do we work in partnership with Indigenous communities to tell their own stories? And how do we convey an invitation honestly, knowing that our sourcing policies that exclude so much knowledge?

But while we grapple with ideas, we also need action. Do you, or your colleague teach at Tribal Colleges in the US? Put them in touch with our Wikipedia Student Program. Do you know someone who can sponsor a Wiki Scholars course or a Wikidata course with a focus on Indigenous communities? Please get in touch.

Image credit: Denali National Park and Preserve, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Three months of Connected Heritage

12:10, Monday, 22 2021 November UTC

By Dr Lucy Hinnie, Digital Skills Wikimedian at Wikimedia UK.

As we begin to look towards 2022, and move towards the end of 2021, we thought it was a good time to reflect on the first three months of the Connected Heritage project at Wikimedia UK.

The projects so far

In August, Leah and I began our posts as Digital Skills Wikimedians. Our first task was to familiarise ourselves with the cultural heritage landscape in England and Wales, and to identify potential participants for our first series of introductory webinars. Many emails, tweets and messages were sent out into the world, and we were lucky to have a great response to our offering.

September was the month of webinar creation: we worked hard to design an hour of content that was welcoming, informative and engaging, and offered an overview of the project and our vision. We rehearsed with some willing Wikimedia UK colleagues and developed the presentation into something we are very proud of!

The webinars started in earnest in October. We were blown away by the enthusiasm from participants, and the wide variety of groups and organisations represented. We ran four webinars, and engaged with new faces from all over the cultural heritage sector.

November has been busy thus far: we ran an additional webinar for evening participants, and our first Wikithon for potential partners who had attended a webinar and were interested in the next step. We are in the preliminary stages of our first partnerships, and broadening our understanding of what our audience is looking for. The Wikithon in particular was a great success, with over 10 new editors trained and engaging with Wikimedia through Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

What next?

We have another webinar running before the year concludes: if you’re thinking ahead to 2022, and wishing you’d attended one earlier, now is the time! The session will run from 2pm on Thursday 2nd December and we’d love to see you there. We’ve had great feedback from participants saying they are feeling more confident, more engaged and positive about Wikimedia and open knowledge.

Thinking further ahead?

If you’re feeling the end of year burnout already, and would rather look towards 2022, we’re one step ahead: we’ve set up four introductory webinars and a Wikithon! Start your 2022 with some Connected Heritage, we’ve got webinar sessions running on 18th January, 2nd February, 17th February and 4th March, and an International Women’s Day Potluck Wikithon on Friday 11th March. You can sign up now via Eventbrite.

I’d like to partner with you – how do I do this?

In short, let’s talk. We have a meeting calendar set up here, and you can book in for a slot to chat with us about your questions regarding your organisational needs and aims. Or you can email us at [email protected]. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

Tech News issue #47, 2021 (November 22, 2021)

00:00, Monday, 22 2021 November UTC
previous 2021, week 47 (Monday 22 November 2021) next

weeklyOSM 591

10:44, Sunday, 21 2021 November UTC

09/11/2021-15/11/2021

lead picture

Prof. Leonardo Gutierrez & students of the Colegio Salesiano in Duitama, Columbia [1] | © Colegio Salesiano, Duitama

About us

Mapping campaigns

Mapping

  • LySioS compared (fr) > en before and after mapping of a park, which was recommended to him for children’s activities.
  • SK53 looked at some worldwide solar data (we reported last week) and compared it with OSM data for China.
  • Polish mappers discussed (pl) > en , on the forum, whether any special mapping is required for areas currently under emergency regulations on the border with Belarus.
  • Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
    • snow_chains to map where and when you need to use snow chains on your vehicle.
    • defensive_work=* to tag defensive structures in historic/pre-modern fortifications.
    • network:type=basic_network to distinguish nameless connections in the cycle/hiking route network from named routes and numbered node networks.
  • The outlet=* proposal for tagging culvert or pipeline outlets with more details, was approved with 20 votes for, 0 votes against and 0 abstentions.

Community

  • [1] Over more than 10 years, successive cohorts of students of the Colegio Salesiano in Duitama, Columbia under the guidance of Professor Leonardo Gutierrez have been continually mapping, refining, and expanding the public transport data available to the people of Duitama via the BusBoy app. Professor Leonardo Gutierrez is a long-time OSM contributor. In late 2014, he organised a live teaching session with his students and Humanitarian OSM contributors.
  • Jaime Crespo provided (es) > en
    short notes from an informal online meeting of members of the Spanish community which have been added (es) > en to the wiki.
  • Charlie Plett reports on his effort to map all Primary and Secondary schools in the Corozal District, Belize.
  • Cyberjuan presents a thematic summary of what was discussed at the event Building Local Community in OSM: Tips, Tricks and Challenges, organised by the HOT Community Working Group on November 8th.
  • Jennings Anderson revisited an old graphic exploring OpenStreetMap contributor life spans. The original work, published in 2018 (as we reported), used data up to 2014. The updated graphs cover the period to 2021.
  • On Wednesday 1 December at 20:30 (UTC+1), Adrien, Donat and Florian will have their first Live mapping session (fr) on their new YouTube channel Tropicamap. Live mapping sessions will take place on the first Wednesday of each month and aim to reach a younger public. This first mapping session will be aimed at the French toy shop cooperative JouéClub.
  • PlayzinhoAgro took (pt) > en his second anniversary as an OSM contributor as an opportunity to report on his OSM activities over the past year.

Education

  • During the UN Map Marathon 2021, which will take place from 22 to 26 November, UN Mappers are offering two online training sessions:
    • ‘Running with JOSM’, on Monday 22, aimed at those who want to approach the use of JOSM for the first time;
    • ‘From marathon to maps: how to use OSM data’, on Friday 26, focused on the use of OSM data with QGIS.

    The sessions will be held in English, French and Portuguese. Once registered, it will be possible to participate in the mapping competition. The best mapper of the map marathon will be announced on Friday.

OSM research

  • Annett Bartsch was interviewed by Doug Johnson, from ArsTechnica, about the study she and her team published criticising the poor quality of mapping data above the Arctic Circle. The study claims to depict a more accurate representation of the local human footprint and its long-term impact.

Maps

  • The #30DayMapChallenge, which we covered last week, and the week before, continues. Once again we have selected some of the maps using OpenStreetMap data:
    • Day 10: Raster – Not surprisingly, given that OSM is a vector dataset, entries were somewhat scarce. A 3-D jigsaw puzzle by D&G Placenames stood out.
    • Day 11: 3D – gonsta’s tactile map of Cherkasy (Ukraine).
    • Day 12: Population – OSM data were used to show where people live in the French commune of Orsay (Come_M_S).
    • Day 13: Natural Earth data – Federica Gaspari managed to include some OSM data as well as those of Natural Earth.
    • Day 14: New tool – Prettymaps (by Marcelo Prateles, reported earlier) was a popular choice for a new mapping tool (Bill Morris, Heikki Vesanto, University of Pretoria Youthmappers). Clare Powells’s 3-D visualisation of buildings of Dubai using Cesium also demonstrated OSM data nicely.
    • Day 15: Without using a computer – needless to say this was one challenge where OSM was not a lot of help, but Justin Roberts worked out a way, mapping a GPS trace of a route for later incorporation in OSM.
  • Did you know it was possible to find all the maps published during the 30DayMapChallenge by searching on Twitter ‘30DayMapChallenge Day‘ followed by the day number?
  • Cartographer John Nelson, of ESRI, provided some general advice as to when to add a north arrow to a map.

Open Data

  • skunk has written (de) > en a small tool that helps to match open government datasets with Wikimedia (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata) and OpenStreetMap.

Software

  • Rohner Solutions has (de) > en put up a doner kebab search tool using OSM data, but it requires you to enter or select a place name or to share your location to get a result.

Did you know …

  • …that JOSM is used by less than 10% of the contributors, but since 2010 has provided the majority of the total of OSM edits? UN Mappers opened a poll, during GISDay, to explore the reasons and to propose free training sessions on this powerful editor. You can still participate this Sunday!
  • … that you can deactivate all quests at once in the task selection settings of StreetComplete? Then you can activate the questions that interest you – for example, questions about incomplete addresses.
  • … the European OpenGHGMap, by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and collaborators, show a city-level carbon dioxide emissions inventory for Europe?
  • … the tool showing the content of relations with type=destination_sign, direction_* tags on guideposts, as well as destination tags on highways and guideposts?

OSM in the media

Other “geo” things

  • Google’s flood forecasting system is now live in all of India and Bangladesh, and they are working to expand to countries in South Asia and South America.
  • grin described the setup they have been using to collect real-time kinematic positioning data (we reported earlier).
  • Our favorite #30DayMapChallenge: the Mapping Cube video from ArtisansCartographes. Have fun practising your mapping cubic dexterity.

Upcoming Events

Where What Online When Country
Черкаси Open Mapathon: Digital Cherkasy osmcalpic 2021-10-24 – 2021-11-20 ua
Pista ng Mapa 2021 osmcalpic 2021-11-13 – 2021-11-20
UCB Brasil + CicloMapa: curso de mapeamento osmcalpic 2021-11-16 – 2021-11-26
MSF Geo Week Global Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-11-19
State of the Map Africa 2021 osmcalpic 2021-11-19 – 2021-11-21
Maptime Baltimore Mappy Hour osmcalpic 2021-11-20
Lyon EPN des Rancy : Technique de cartographie et d’édition osmcalpic 2021-11-20 flag
Bogotá Distrito Capital – Municipio Resolvamos notas de Colombia creadas en OpenStreetMap osmcalpic 2021-11-20 flag
New York New York City Meetup osmcalpic 2021-11-21 flag
UN Map Marathon osmcalpic 2021-11-22 – 2021-11-26
HOT Summit 2021 osmcalpic 2021-11-22
Bremen Bremer Mappertreffen (Online) osmcalpic 2021-11-22 flag
San Jose South Bay Map Night osmcalpic 2021-11-24 flag
Derby East Midlands OSM Pub Meet-up : Derby osmcalpic 2021-11-23 flag
Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy : Rencontre osmcalpic 2021-11-24 flag
Düsseldorf Düsseldorfer OSM-Treffen (online) osmcalpic 2021-11-24 flag
[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting osmcalpic 2021-11-26
Brno November Brno Missing Maps mapathon at Department of Geography osmcalpic 2021-11-26 flag
Bogotá Distrito Capital – Municipio Resolvamos notas de Colombia creadas en OpenStreetMap osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
泉大津市 オープンデータソン泉大津:町歩きとOpenStreetMap、Localwiki、ウィキペディアの編集 osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
長岡京市 京都!街歩き!マッピングパーティ:第27回 元伊勢三社 osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
HOTOSM Training Webinar Series: Beginner JOSM osmcalpic 2021-11-27
Amsterdam OSM Nederland maandelijkse bijeenkomst (online) osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
Biella Incontro mensile degli OSMers BI-VC-CVL osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
津山のWEB地図作り~OSMのはじめ方~ osmcalpic 2021-11-28
Chamwino How FAO uses different apps to measure Land Degradation osmcalpic 2021-11-29 flag
OSM Uganda Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-11-29
Salt Lake City OpenStreetMap Utah Map Night osmcalpic 2021-12-02 flag
Paris Live Youtube Tropicamap osmcalpic 2021-12-01 – 2021-12-03 flag
Missing Maps Artsen Zonder Grenzen Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-12-02
Bochum OSM-Treffen Bochum (Dezember) osmcalpic 2021-12-02 flag
MapRoulette Community Meeting osmcalpic 2021-12-07
San Jose South Bay Map Night osmcalpic 2021-12-08 flag
London Missing Maps London Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-12-07 flag
Landau an der Isar Virtuelles Niederbayern-Treffen osmcalpic 2021-12-07 flag
Stuttgart Stuttgarter Stammtisch (Online) osmcalpic 2021-12-07 flag
CASA talk: Ramya Ragupathy, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team osmcalpic 2021-12-08
Chippewa Township Michigan Meetup osmcalpic 2021-12-09 flag
Großarl 3. Virtueller OpenStreetMap Stammtisch Österreich osmcalpic 2021-12-09 flag
Gaishorn am See Dritter Österreichische Online OSM-Stammtisch osmcalpic 2021-12-09 flag

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 Lejun, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, SeverinGeo, Strubbl, Ted Johnson, TheSwavu, derFred, tordans.

I am oppressed – slam poetry from a Wikipedia sockpuppet

22:43, Saturday, 20 2021 November UTC

I am oppressed
I am oppressed

The mistake was that I was ignorant of your rules,
no more!
and the gentleman from Pakistan,
who was literally from Pakistan!
framed me

The mistake was that I was ignorant!
of your rules, no more,
and the gentleman from Pakistan, who was literally from Pakistan,
framed me?

But I reject this!
cruel
and
unjustified
punishment

I want to talk to a wise person!
you have to
be a judge to be anything but what is happening to me
is a huge injustice


tl;dr – a blocked sockpuppet was complaining on their talk page, and it made for some awesome slam poetry.

Image



idea by Tamzin, formatting by TheresNoTime

The post I am oppressed – slam poetry from a Wikipedia sockpuppet appeared first on TheresNoTime.

2021 Arbitration Committee Elections

17:40, Saturday, 20 2021 November UTC

It’s that time of the year again where we subject those brave few to the criticisms of the community at large, and select those we wish to represent us on the English Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee.

What even is an Arbitration Committee?

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve.

Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee

For those of you not familiar with the legalese of Wikipedia, the role of the arbitration committee (ArbCom) can be summed up as the the final word in the enforcement of policy (i.e. editor conduct) and the last line of appeal.

And y’all elect them?

Members of the committee are elected yearly, and either serve one year (50% support) or two year (60% support) terms (for reasons explained here).

Our elections work by appointing candidates in “decreasing order of their percentage of support, as calculated by support/(support + oppose), until all seats are filled or no more candidates meet the required support percentage.” [1] This year, we have eleven candidates for eight vacant seats.

The lucky 11

Opabinia regalis (t · c)

Cabayi (t · c)

Donald Albury (t · c)

Enterprisey (t · c)

Izno (t · c)

Beeblebrox (t · c)

Wugapodes (t · c)

Worm That Turned (t · c)

Thryduulf (t · c)

Banedon (t · c)

Guerillero (t · c)

So who are you voting for?

Eh, I’m not sure yet really – I was going to do a voters guide (User:TheresNoTime/ACE2021) but frankly that’s a lot of poring over things. I’ll likely make my mind up much nearer the time, after reading through the answers to the questions.

ArbCom needs both new members and institutional memory, ideally a majority of those who have never served on the committee before lest it get stuck in “the old ways of doing things”.

The post 2021 Arbitration Committee Elections appeared first on TheresNoTime.

Using Wikidata to promote epistemic equity

16:57, Friday, 19 2021 November UTC
Thami Jothilingam
Thami Jothilingam
Image by Jordan Kawai, all rights reserved.

As a cataloguer for the University of Toronto Scarborough Library, Thami Jothilingam sees infinite possibilities for Wikidata. That’s why she signed up to take Wiki Education’s Wikidata Institute course.

“Metadata is foundational to knowledge creation, as it forms the building blocks of knowledge infrastructure,” Thami says. “Historically, the form and process of this knowledge creation was performed primarily by the socially privileged groups in a society, which has resulted in epistemic bias in library discovery and access. Wikidata is the largest global free and open knowledge base that enables and democratises the creation of knowledge infrastructure, access, and discovery.”

Thami says she was also drawn to the course on a more personal level, too.

“As someone who is both BIPOC and queer and thus belongs to multiple marginalised communities, it is important for me to learn the skills to identify the absences/silences/erasures in knowledge creation/infrastructure and to also actively find tools to fill those gaps with a vision to contribute to epistemic equity and inclusivity,” she says. “I think Wikidata is one of those powerful tools, and I wanted to learn more about it.”

The course gave her those skills. Meeting twice a week for three weeks over Zoom, the Wikidata Institute provided practical knowledge about Wikidata and a community of other scholars studying alongside her. She says the combinations of practical, hands-on exercises, coupled with the engaging and thought provoking discussions in class, made this a perfect introduction to Wikidata for her.

“I am a cataloguer and a community archivist, and learning and exploring the endless possibilities of Wikidata and open linked data helped me to rethink the metadata creation process,” Thami says. “I strive to be mindful and conscious of the archival praxis with which I engage and what informs that praxis — what we archive, how we archive, and how we share/disseminate it. I believe in open knowledge and open access, and Wikidata helps to realise that vision both individually and collectively. Wikidata also helped me to rethink the entire process — how knowledge is organised and classified, how the ontologies are being made, how to democratise that process, how to make that knowledge creation process open and perform it collaboratively, how to navigate and find tools to address coloniality of knowledge, how can we develop and ensure a praxis with epistemic equity and inclusivity.”

As part of the course, Thami created several new Wikidata items, including one for I. Pathmanabhan Iyer, a collector, publisher, and community archivist from Sri Lanka. His 80th birthday was during the course, so Thami felt inspired to create his item in remembrance of his birthday. She also created other new items related to the Upcountry Tamil community in Sri Lanka.

“Sri Lanka’s Malaiyaka Tamilar, or Upcountry Tamils, are the descendants of nineteenth-century Indian labourers who were brought to work on the country’s British-owned tea, coffee, and rubber plantations. This community has suffered political disenfranchisement and discrimination, while adequate healthcare, education, and economic opportunity remain inaccessible to this day. I have been working closely with some grassroots organisations from the community for over a decade now, and it is important to rethink and see past the colonial and postcolonial traces, and to decolonise the power structures that were built through words and languages,” Thami says. “By creating more data, linked data, particularly metadata in multiple languages related to social and cultural histories of marginalised communities, we can develop ethical, equitable, and inclusive models for ontology development, data creation, access, and discovery.”

Thami’s engagement with Wikidata didn’t end with the conclusion of the Wikidata Institute course. She’s now working with a faculty member to develop a digital history project assignment that involves creating metadata from an archival collection. Students will work in groups to create metadata, and Thami will help move that information to Wikidata. Thami also collaborated with UTSC Library’s Digital Scholarship Unit to contribute about 800 entries to Wikidata from the S. J. V. Chelvanayakam Fonds.  

“I like when you create new items and find other items/instances to be linked, and it’s very thrilling when everything comes together, linked, and you can follow the links as if you’re following a narrative, a data narrative in this context,” she says. “Wikidata is the largest free and open knowledge base in the world, and anyone from any field of study/work can contribute and engage with it to develop it even further.”

Image credit: Loozrboy from Toronto, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Talking strategy with Wikimedia UK’s community

12:40, Friday, 19 2021 November UTC

Last week I had the pleasure of facilitating an online meeting for members of our community to help shape the future direction of Wikimedia UK. This was attended by a broad cross section of our community including staff, trustees, partners, editors and donors. I was particularly pleased to see a number of former staff and trustees of the charity, all of whom are still closely involved in the movement. 

Aim of the session

Wikimedia UK works on a three year strategic planning cycle, and we are now developing our new strategy for 2022 to 2025. I gave a brief overview of the process that the organisation is currently engaged in and what’s happened so far. Our schedule is aligned with our application deadline for funding from the Wikimedia Foundation, for which we’ll be applying for multi-year funding for the first time.

Introductions

As part of the introductions, everyone shared their aspirations for the meeting, with key themes being to make connections, understand Wikimedia UK’s priorities and engage with the wider community. The meeting was also another opportunity (following our AGM in July) to introduce our new Chair of Trustees, Monisha Shah. Monisha shared a little of her own background, and why access to knowledge is so important to her. She explained that she has a portfolio career focused on board roles within the arts, culture and media sectors, following high level roles at the BBC. Monisha emphasised her interest in hearing from the community. She noted that she is not active on social media but that volunteers were welcome to contact her via LinkedIn or the Wikimedia UK team. 

Blue Sky Thinking

After this introduction, we split into three breakout groups to finish the statement “wouldn’t it be fantastic if…” for what we’d like Wikimedia UK to achieve in the next three years. This generated lots of great ideas and objectives which coalesced into some key themes, as follows:

EQUITY

A high proportion of responses to the prompt question above were focused on equitable participation and representation. This ranged from diversifying the UK’s editors, administrators and membership, through to working with small language Wikipedias, delivering diaspora outreach, and supporting initiatives to repatriate knowledge as a form of decolonisation.  

CLIMATE

There were several responses focused on the climate crisis, with an aspiration for us to be able to offer wide-ranging and trusted information about the climate crisis across multiple languages. There was a question over whether Wikimedia UK should be applying pressure on the government regarding the crisis. On a practical level, it was felt that in the first instance Wikimedia UK needs to identify what we can do to support editors documenting and sharing information about climate change (including those involved with WikiProject Climate Change)

OPEN KNOWLEDGE

Many responses to the prompt statement “wouldn’t it be fantastic if” involved the opening up of knowledge and information. Under this general umbrella was an aspiration that all publicly funded institutions should commit to ethical open access as their default position; and that we are able to address copyright law to ensure that publicly funded research has to be made available under an open licence. Other responses included more partnerships with heritage organisations, local history initiatives and archives; more Wikimedians in Residence; and more work with diverse communities and collections. A number of responses were specifically about images – such as every notable structure in the UK having a photo and Wikidata item, and working with external partners to ensure an image for every UK article. 

EDUCATION

It’s clear that the Wikimedia UK community remains deeply concerned about misinformation and disinformation. There is a strong commitment to helping young people understand how knowledge is created and shared, and develop information literacy skills. There is also a clear ambition to have an impact on the school curriculum – particularly in England (following our success in Wales) – and to have more residencies in Universities. 

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AND AWARENESS

A number of responses were focused on the public’s understanding of Wikimedia. In particular, it was felt that there needs to be more understanding that Wikipedia is a tertiary source that can be edited by anyone, and greater awareness and use of the sister projects, such as Wikisource. It was noted that Wikimedia UK should have sufficient technical development capacity to be actively contributing to MediaWiki development for Wikimedia’s sister projects. The perennial issue of the distinction between Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation was also raised.

COMMUNITY/MOVEMENT

Two out of the three breakout groups identified an objective to diversify Wikimedia UK’s funding base so as to be less reliant on our core grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. It was also suggested that the role of affiliates will be under more scrutiny with the creation of the Movement Charter and Global Council; and that within that context, Wikimedia UK needs to be clear about its purpose and relevance. Other comments were more focused on community engagement, with a number of responses around a theme of developing closer relationships between the affiliate and online communities, and enabling people who engage with our programmes to become more involved with the work of the organisation, contributing to the movement in broader ways.

Emerging Strategic Themes

After this very productive session, I introduced participants to the key themes which have emerged from the board and staff away days held earlier in the autumn. Once these are finalised, they will form the basis of our programme development and delivery over the next three years:

  • Knowledge Equity
  • Information Literacy
  • Climate Crisis

A number of other areas have been identified, which we believe are essential to delivering an effective programme. These are still in draft form, but include community, advocacy, communications, equity, diversity and inclusion, and organisational resilience and sustainability.

It was encouraging to see the extent of the overlap between the themes that emerged from the board and staff away days, and the priorities identified through this community session. 

Engaging Volunteers

At this point I handed over to Daria Cybulska, Wikimedia UK’s Director of Programmes and Evaluation, to lead the final session of the meeting. This was focused explicitly on community, and asked participants to respond to the following questions, in a plenary discussion:

  1. As a community member, where do you see an opportunity to get involved in the emerging strategy, and what would you need from WMUK to support that?
  2. How could the Wikimedia UK community deliver the ideas generated so far?

These prompted a wide range of responses, contributions and further questions. I’ve summarised the key discussion areas below, all of which have given the team food for thought in terms of volunteer engagement and support:

  • Do we have communities of interest or communities of place? Do volunteers see themselves as aligned with a particular project – e.g. English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons – or the chapter? And does this matter?
  • People’s journey into Wikipedia is often through competitions such as Wiki Loves Monuments. How can we use this knowledge to galvanise more participation? Other entry points are vandalism and correcting typos. How can we use this knowledge to support editor recruitment? There’s something important about small, accessible tasks as a way to start. It could be correcting typos, or adding categories and references to articles.
  • This led to an interesting discussion about the use of the word ‘editathon’ which might suggest something that’s a slog, requiring stamina and discipline. Should we change the language to focus more on words like workshops, training, introductory sessions etc. It was noted that increasingly, work lists for online editing events have tasks across a broad range of activities, reflecting different levels of digital confidence and time constraints.

Wrapping up and next steps

I wrapped up the session by explaining that I would be sharing the draft strategic framework for 2022 – 2025 later this month (November) and welcome feedback on it. Please watch this space for that! And thanks again to everyone who attended. It was wonderful to see people (even if it was over Zoom) and to hear from our community about what’s important to them in the creation of Wikimedia UK’s next three year strategy. 

A roadmap for Programs & Events Dashboard

19:48, Wednesday, 17 2021 November UTC

Programs & Events Dashboard now has a public roadmap. Based largely on the results of the recent 2021 Programs & Events Dashboard user survey, this roadmap sketches out the current plans for improvements to Programs & Events Dashboard.

The roadmap will evolve over time, and you can use it to keep track of what features we’re currently working on and plan to work on next. For anything we’re actively working on, it will also link to the main Issue thread for that feature, which is a good place to ask questions and provide feedback. (The Dashboard’s Meta talk page is also always a welcome place for questions and suggestions.)

I’m looking forward to getting started on the first couple projects on the roadmap: around January, I’ll be doing user research to develop a clearer idea of what a ‘campaign of campaigns’ feature will look like, and I also hope to mentor an Outreachy intern to work on enhancing the way the Dashboard presents statistics for Wikidata-focused programs.

Programs & Events Dashboard is used for more than 2,000 programs and events each year, with more than 600 active ongoing events at a time. Supporting the needs of program organizers across the Wikimedia movement through supporting and improving the Dashboard is one of Wiki Education’s key priorities. If you have ideas about the future of the Dashboard and how it can better serve Wikimedians around the world, we’d love to hear from you. (And if you’re a Rails or React developer or UX designer interested in helping out as an open source contributor, we’d also love to hear from you!)

Many thanks to P-8 Digital Skills Project “Strengthening Digital Skills in Teaching”, ETH Zürich and ZHAW for inviting me to speak at their OER Conference 21. Slides and transcript of my talk, which highlights the work of Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, GeoScience Outreach students and Open Content Curation Interns, are available here.

Before we get started I just want to quickly recap what we mean when we talk about open education and OER.

The principles of open education were outlined in the 2008 Cape Town Declaration, one of the first initiatives to lay the foundations of the “emerging open education movement”. The Declaration advocates that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, and redistribute educational resources without constraint, in order to nourish the kind of participatory culture of learning, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need.  The Cape Town Declaration is still an influential document that was updated on its 10th anniversary as Capetown +10, and I can highly recommend having a look at this if you want a broad overview of the principles of open education.

There are numerous definitions and interpretations of Open Education, some of which you can explore here.

One description of the open education movement that I particularly like is from the not for profit organization  OER Commons…

“The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the human right to access high-quality education. The Open Education Movement is not just about cost savings and easy access to openly licensed content; it’s about participation and co-creation.”

Though Open Education can encompass many different things, open educational resources, or OER, are central to any understanding of this domain.

UNESCO define open educational resources as

“teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions.”

And you’ll see that this definition encompasses a very wide class of resources, pretty much anything that can be used in the context of teaching and learning, as long as it is in the public domain or has been released under an open licence.

This definition is taken from the UNESCO Recommendation on OER, which aims to facilitate international cooperation to support the creation, use and adaptation of inclusive and quality OER.  The Recommendation states that

“in building inclusive Knowledge Societies, Open Educational Resources (OER) can support quality education that is equitable, inclusive, open and participatory as well as enhancing academic freedom and professional autonomy of teachers by widening the scope of materials available for teaching and learning.”

Central to the Recommendation, is the acknowledgement of the role that OER can play in achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and particularly Sustainable Development Goal 4: to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. 

OER at the University of Edinburgh

Here at the University of Edinburgh, we believe that open education and the creation of open knowledge and open educational resources, are fully in keeping with our institutional vision, purpose and values, to discover knowledge and make the world a better place, while ensuring that our teaching and research is diverse, inclusive, accessible to all and relevant to society.  The University’s vision for OER is very much the brain child of Dr Melissa Highton, Assistant Principal Online Learning and Director of Learning and Teaching Web Services. Our student union were also instrumental in encouraging the University to support OER, and we continue to see student engagement and co-creation as being fundamental aspects of open education. This commitment to OER is more important now than ever, at a time of crisis and social change, when we are emerging from a global pandemic that has disrupted education for millions, and we’re embracing new models and approaches to teaching and learning.  

OER Policy

In order to support open education and the creation and use of OER, the University has an Open Educational Resources Policy, which was first approved by our Education Committee in 2016 and reviewed and updated earlier this year.  Our new policy has adopted the UNESCO definition of OER, and the update also brings the policy in line with our Lecture Recording and Virtual Classroom Policies. The policy itself has been shared under open licence and is available to download along with several of our other teaching and learning policies.

As one of the few universities in the UK with a formal OER policy, this new policy strengthens Edinburgh’s position as a leader in open education and reiterates our commitment to openness and achieving the aims of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which the University is committed to through the SDG Accord. 

It’s important to be aware that our OER Policy is informative and permissive. It doesn’t tell colleagues what they must do, instead its aim is to encourage staff and students to engage with open education and to make informed decisions about using, creating and publishing OERs to enhance the quality of the student experience, expand provision of learning opportunities, and enrich our shared knowledge commons. Investing in OER and open licensing also helps to improve the sustainability and longevity of our educational resources, while encouraging colleagues to reuse and repurpose existing open materials expands the pool of teaching and learning resources and helps to diversify the curriculum. 

OER Service

In order to support our OER Policy we have a central OER Service, based in Information Services Group, that provides staff and students with advice and guidance on creating and using OER and engaging with open education. The service runs a programme of digital skills workshops and events focused on copyright literacy, open licencing, OER and playful engagement.  We offer support directly to Schools and Colleges, work closely with the University’s Wikimedian in Residence, and employ student interns in a range of different roles, including Open Content Curation interns.  The OER Service also places openness at the centre of the university’s strategic learning technology initiatives including lecture recording, academic blogging, VLE foundations, MOOCs and distance learning at scale, in order to build sustainability and minimise the risk of copyright debt.

And we also manage Open.Ed a one stop shop that provides access to open educational resources produced by staff and students across the university. We don’t have is a single central OER Repository as we know from experience that they are often unsustainable, and it can be difficult to encourage engagement.  Instead, our policy recommends that OERs are shared in an appropriate repository or public-access website in order to maximise their discovery and use by others. The OER Service provides access to many channels for this purpose on both University and commercial services, and we aggregate a show case of Edinburgh’s OERs on the Open.Ed website.

We don’t have is a formal peer review system for open educational resources.  The review process that different materials will undergo will depend on the nature of the resources themselves. So for example we trust our academic staff to maintain the quality of their own teaching materials. Resources created for MOOCs in collaboration with our Online Course Production Service, will be reviewed by teams of academic experts. OERs created by students in the course of curriculum assignments will be formally assessed by their tutors and peers.  And if these resources are shared in public repositories such as our GeoScience Outreach OERs, which I’ll come on to say more about later, they may also undergo a second review process by our Open Content Curation Interns to ensure all third-party content is copyright cleared and no rights are being breached.  While open content shared on Wikipedia is open to review by hundreds Wiki admins, thousands of fellow editors, and millions of Wikipedia users.

OER in the Curriculum

As a result of this strategic commitment to OER, we have a wide range of open education practices going on across the University, but what I want to focus on today are some examples of integrating open education into the curriculum, through co-creation and OER assignments.

 Engaging with OER creation through curriculum assignments can help to develop a wide range of core disciplinary competencies and transferable attributes including digital and information literacy skills, writing as public outreach, collaborative working, information synthesis, copyright literacy, critical thinking, source evaluation and data science.

Wikimedia in the Curriculum

One way that colleagues and students have been engaging with open education is by contributing to Wikipedia, the world’s biggest open educational resource and the gateway through which millions of people seek access to knowledge.  The information on Wikipedia reaches far beyond the encyclopaedia itself, by populating other media and influencing Google search returns. Information that is right or wrong or missing on Wikipedia affects the whole internet and the information we consume. Sharing knowledge openly, globally and transparently has never been more important in building understanding, whether about the Covid pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, or other critical issues. And the need for a neutral platform where you can gain access to knowledge online for free has never been more vital in this era of hybrid teaching, remote working, and home schooling.

Working together with the University’s Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, a number of colleagues from schools and colleges across the University have integrated Wikipedia and Wikidata editing assignments into their courses.  Editing Wikipedia provides valuable opportunities for students to develop their digital research and communication skills, and enables them to contribute to the creation and dissemination of open knowledge. Writing articles that will be publicly accessible and live on after the end of their assignment has proved to be highly motivating for students, and provides an incentive for them to think more deeply about their research. It encourages them to ensure they are synthesising all the reliable information available, and to think about how they can communicate their scholarship to a general audience. Students can see that their contribution will benefit the huge audience that consults Wikipedia, plugging gaps in coverage, and bringing to light hidden histories, significant figures, and important concepts and ideas. This makes for a valuable and inspiring teaching and learning experience, that enhances the digital literacy, research and communication skills of both staff and students.

Here’s Dr Glaire Andersen, from Edinburgh College of Art, talking about a Wikipedia assignment that focused on improving articles on Islamic art, science and the occult.

“In a year that brought pervasive systemic injustices into stark relief, our experiment in applying our knowledge outside the classroom gave us a sense that we were creating something positive, something that mattered.

As one student commented, “Really love the Wikipedia project. It feels like my knowledge is actually making a difference in the wider world, if in a small way.”  

Other examples include Global Health Challenges Postgraduate students who collaborate to evaluate short stub Wikipedia articles related to natural or manmade disasters, such as the 2020 Assam floods, and research the topic to improve each article’s coverage.

History students came together to re-examine the legacy of Scotland’s involvement in the TransAtlantic Slave Trade and look at the sources being used in evaluating the contributions of key figures like Henry Dundas but also balancing this against and presenting a more positive view of Black History by creating new pages such as Jesse Ewing Glasgow.

And Reproductive Biology Honours students work in groups to publish new articles on reproductive biomedical terms. Being able to write with a lay audience in mind has been shown to be incredibly useful in science communication and other subjects like the study of law.

And I want to pause for a moment here to let one of our former Reproductive Biology students to speak for herself. This is Senior Honours student Aine Kavanagh talking to our Wikimedian Ewan about her experience of writing a Wikipeda article as part of a classroom assignment in Reproductive Biology in 2016.

And the article that Aine wrote on high-grade serous carcinoma, one of the most common and deadly forms of ovarian cancer, which includes 60 references, and diagrams created by Aine herself, has now been viewed over 130,000 times. It’s hard to imagine another piece of undergraduate coursework having this kind of global impact.

Last year, in collaboration with Wikimedia UK, the UK chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, our Wikimedian co-authored the first ever booklet dedicated to UK case studies of Wikimedia in Education which you can download under open licence here.   Also many of the resources Ewan has created during his residency, including editing guides and inspiring student testimonies, are freely and openly available and you can explore them here.

Open Education and Co-creation – GeoScience Outreach

Another important benefit of open education is that it helps to facilitate the co-creation of knowledge and understanding.  Co-creation can be described as student led collaborative initiatives, often developed in partnership with teachers or other bodies outwith the institution, that lead to the development of shared outputs.  A key feature of co-creation is that is must be based on equal partnerships between teachers and students and “relationships that foster respect, reciprocity, and shared responsibility.”

One successful example of open education and co-creation in the curriculum is the Geosciences Outreach Course.  This optional project-based course for final year Honours and taught Masters students, has been running for a number of years and attracts students from a range of degree programmes including Geology, Ecological and Environmental Sciences, Geophysics, Geography, Archaeology and Physics.   Over the course of two semesters, students design and undertake an outreach project that communicates some element of their field.  Students have an opportunity to work with a wide range of clients including schools, museums, outdoor centres, science centres, and community groups, to design and deliver resources for STEM engagement. These resources can include classroom teaching materials, websites, community events, presentations, and materials for museums and visitor centres. Students may work on project ideas suggested by the client, but they are also encouraged to develop their own ideas. Project work is led independently by the student and supervised and mentored by the course team and the client.

 This approach delivers significant benefits not just to students and staff, but also to the clients and the University.  Students have the opportunity to work in new and challenging environments, acquiring a range of transferable skills that enhance their employability.  Staff and postgraduate tutors benefit from disseminating and communicating their work to wider audiences, adding value to their teaching and funded research programmes, supporting knowledge exchange and wider dissemination of scientific research.  The client gains a product that can be reused and redeveloped, and knowledge and understanding of a wide range of scientific topics is disseminated to learners, schools and the general public. The University benefits by embedding community engagement in the curriculum, promoting collaboration and interdisciplinarity, and forging relationships with clients.

The Geosciences Outreach course has proved to be hugely popular with both students and clients.  The course has received widespread recognition and a significant number of schools and other universities are exploring how they might adopt the model.

A key element of the Course is to develop resources with a legacy that can be reused by other communities and organisations. Open Content Curation student Interns employed by the University’s OER Service repurpose these materials to create open educational resources which are then shared online through Open.Ed and TES where they can be found and reused by other school teachers and learners.  These OERs, co-created by our students, have been downloaded over 69,000 times.

Here’s Physics graduate and one of this year’s Open Content Curation Interns, Amy Cook, talking about her experience of creating open education resources as part of the Geoscience Outreach course.

 

We’re hugely proud of the high-quality open education resources created and shared by our GeoScience students and Open Content Curation Interns, so we were delighted when this collection won the Open Curation Award as part of this year’s OEGlobal Awards for Excellence.

Conclusion

These are just some examples of the way that open education and OER have been integrated into the curriculum here at the University of Edinburgh, and I hope they demonstrate how valuable co-creating open knowledge and open educational resources through curriculum assignments can be to develop essential digital skills, core competencies and transferable attributes.  There are many more examples I could share including academic blogging assignments, open resource lists, student created open journals, open textbooks, and playful approaches to developing information and copyright literacy skills.  Hopefully this will provide you with some inspiration to start thinking about how you can integrate engagement with OER in your own courses, curricula and professional practice. 

The missing bedrock of Wikipedia’s geology coverage

16:56, Tuesday, 16 2021 November UTC

The Catoctin Formation is a geological formation that extends from Virgina, through Maryland, to Pennsylvania. This ancient rock formation, which dates to the Precambrian, is mostly buried deeply under more recent geological deposits, but is exposed in part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And until a student in Sarah Carmichael’s Petrology and Petrography expanded it this Spring, Wikipedia’s article about the Catoctin Formation was only two sentences long. Now, thanks to this student editor, Wikipedia has a readable, informative, and well-illustrated article that’s almost 2,000 words long.

Despite having almost 6.4 million articles, there are still plenty of topics that are missing from Wikipedia. But it still surprises me when an entire class finds a lane as empty as this one did. In addition to working on two stubs, students in the class created 15 new articles.

The Roosevelt Gabbros is an intrusive igneous rock formation in southwestern Oklahoma. A gabbro is a magnesium and iron-rich rock formed by the cooling of magma. The Roosevelt Gabbros are named after the town of Roosevelt in Kiowa County, Oklahoma, and are one of the geologic formations that make up the Wichita Mountains. Other new articles created by the class include Red Hill Syenite, an igneous rock complex in central New Hampshire, the Ashe Metamorphic Suite in Ashe County, North Carolina and the Central Montana Alkalic Province, a geological province occupying much of the middle third of the state of Montana.

Content related to geology and mineralogy on Wikipedia is underdeveloped. From individual minerals to a 600,000 km2 geological basin, student editors in past classes have been able to create new articles about broad, substantive topics. And where articles exist, a lot of them are stubs.

Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program offers instructors in geology and mineralogy — and other subjects — the opportunity to fill these content gaps by empowering students to contribute content as a class assignment. For more information, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

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

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, applauds European policymakers’ efforts to make content moderation more accountable and transparent. However, some of the DSA’s current provisions and proposed amendments also include requirements that could put Wikipedia’s collaborative and not-for-profit model at risk. 

Wikipedia’s system of open collaboration has enabled knowledge-sharing on a global scale for more than 20 years. It is one of the most beloved websites in the world, as well as one of the most trusted sources for up-to-date knowledge about COVID-19. All of this is only made possible by laws that protect its volunteer-led model. But now, that people-powered model is getting caught in the cross-fires of the DSA proposals.

The current DSA framework is designed to address the operating models of major tech platforms. But a variety of websites, Wikipedia included, don’t work in the same way that for-profit tech platforms do. Applying a one-size-fits all solution to the complex problem of illegal content online could stifle a diverse, thriving, and noncommercial ecosystem of online communities and platforms. 

We are calling on European lawmakers to take a more nuanced approach to internet regulation. There is more to the internet than Big Tech platforms run by multinational corporations. We ask lawmakers to protect and support nonprofit, community-governed, public interest projects like Wikipedia as the DSA proceeds through the European Parliament and Council.

We are ready to work with lawmakers to amend the DSA package so that it empowers and protects the ability of all Europeans to collaborate in the public interest. 

Protect Wikipedia, protect the people’s internet. 

Here are four things policymakers should know before finalizing the DSA legislation: 

  1. The DSA needs to address the algorithmic systems and business models that drive the harms caused by illegal content. 

DSA provisions remain overly-focused on removing content through prescriptive content removal processes. The reality is that removing all illegal content from the internet as soon as it appears is as daunting as any effort to prevent and eliminate all crime in the physical world. Given that the European Union is committed to protecting human rights online and offline, lawmakers should focus on the primary cause of widespread harm online: systems that amplify and spread illegal content. 

A safer internet is only possible if DSA provisions address the targeted advertising business model that drives the spread of illegal content. As the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen emphasized in her recent testimony in Brussels, the algorithms driving profits for ad-placements are also at the root of the problem that the DSA is seeking to address. New regulation should focus on these mechanisms that maximize the reach and impact of illegal content. 

But lawmakers should not be overly focused on Facebook and similar platforms. As a non-profit website, Wikipedia is available for free to everyone, without ads, and without tracking reader behavior. Our volunteer-led, collaborative model of content production and governance helps ensure that content on Wikipedia is neutral and reliable. Thousands of editors deliberate, debate, and work together to decide what information gets included and how it is presented. This works very differently than the centralized systems that lean on algorithms to both share information in a way that maximizes engagement, and to moderate potentially illegal or harmful content.  

In Wikipedia’s 20 years, our global community of volunteers has proven that empowering users to share and debate facts is a powerful means to combat the use of the internet by hoaxers, foreign influence operators, and extremists. It is imperative that new legislation like the DSA fosters space for a variety of web platforms, commercial and noncommercial, to thrive.

“Wikipedia has shown that it is possible to create healthy online environments that are resilient against disinformation and manipulation. Through nuance and context, Wikipedia offers a model that works well to address the intricacies required in content moderation. Yes, there might be disagreement amongst volunteers on how to present a topic, but that discussion yields better, more neutral, and reliable articles. This process is what has enabled it to be one of the most successful content moderation models in this day and age.”

Brit Stakston, media strategist and Board member of Wikimedia Sverige
  1. Terms of service should be transparent and equitable, but regulators should not be overly-prescriptive in determining how they are created and enforced. 

The draft DSA’s Article 12 currently states that an online provider has to disclose its terms of service—its rules and tools for content moderation— and that they must be enforced “in a diligent, objective, and proportionate manner.” We agree that terms of service should be as transparent and equitable as possible. However, the words “objective” and “proportionate” leave room for an open, vague interpretation. We sympathize with the intent, which is to make companies’ content moderation processes less arbitrary and opaque. But forcing platforms to be “objective” about terms of service violations would have unintended consequences. Such language could potentially lead to enforcement that would make it impossible for community-governed platforms like Wikipedia to use volunteer-driven, collaborative processes to create new rules and enforce existing ones that take context and origin of all content appropriately into account. 

The policies for content and conduct on Wikipedia are developed and enforced by the people contributing to Wikipedia themselves. This model allows people who know about a topic to determine what content should exist on the site and how that content should be maintained, based on established neutrality and reliable sourcing rules. This model, while imperfect, keeps Wikipedia neutral and reliable. As more people engage in the editorial process of debating, fact-checking, and adding information, Wikipedia articles tend to become more neutral. What’s more, volunteers’ deliberation, decisions, and enforcement actions are publicly documented on the website.  

This approach to content creation and governance is a far-cry from the top-down power structure of the commercial platforms that DSA provisions target. The DSA should protect and promote spaces on the web that allow for open collaboration instead of forcing Wikipedia to conform to a top-down model.  

  1. The process for identifying and removing “illegal content” must include user communities.

Article 14 states that online platforms will be responsible for removing any illegal content that might be uploaded by users, once the platforms have been notified of that illegal content. It also states that platforms will be responsible for creating mechanisms that make it possible for users to alert platform providers of illegal content. These provisions tend to only speak to one type of platform: those with centralized content moderation systems, where users have limited ability to participate in decisions over content, and moderation instead tends to fall on a singular body run by the platform. It is unclear how platforms that fall outside this archetype will be affected by the final versions of these provisions. 

The Wikipedia model empowers the volunteers who edit Wikipedia to remove content according to a mutually-agreed upon set of shared standards. Thus while the Wikimedia Foundation handles some requests to evaluate illegal content, the vast majority of content that does not meet Wikipedia’s standards is handled by volunteers before a complaint is even made to the Foundation. One size simply does not fit all in this case.

We fear that by placing legal responsibility for enforcement solely on service providers and requiring them to uphold strict standards for content removal, the law disincentivizes systems which rely on community moderators and deliberative processes. In fact, these processes have been shown to work well to identify and quickly remove bad content. The result would be an online world in which service providers, not people, control what information is available online. We are concerned that this provision will do the exact opposite of what the DSA intends by giving more power to platforms, and less to people who use them. 

  1. People cannot be replaced with algorithms when it comes to moderating content. 

The best parts of the internet are powered by people, not in spite of them. Article 12 and 14 would require platform operators to seize control of all decisions about content moderation, which would in turn incentivize or even require the use of automatic content detection systems. While such systems can support community-led content moderation by flagging content for review, they cannot replace humans. If anything, research has uncovered systemic biases and high error-rates that are all-too-frequently associated with the use of automated tools. Such algorithms can thus further compound the harm posed by amplification. Automated tools are limited in their ability to identify fringe content that may be extreme but still has public interest value. One example of such content are videos documenting human rights abuses, which have been demonstrated to be swiftly removed.  These examples only underscore the need to prioritize human context over speed.

Therefore, European lawmakers should avoid over-reliance on the kind of algorithms used by commercial platforms to moderate content. If the DSA forces or incentivizes platforms to deploy algorithms to make judgements about the value or infringing nature of content, we all – as digital citizenry – miss out on the opportunity to shape our digital future together. 

On Wikipedia, machine learning tools are used as an aid, not a replacement for human-led content moderation. These tools operate transparently on Wikipedia, and volunteers have the final say in what actions machine learning tools might suggest. As we have seen, putting more decision-making power into the hands of Wikipedia readers and editors makes the site more robust and reliable. 

“It is impossible to trust a ‘perfect algorithm’ to moderate content online. There will always be errors, by malicious intent or otherwise. Wikipedia is successful because it does not follow a predefined model; rather, it relies on the discussions and consensus of humans instead of algorithms.”

Maurizio Codogno, longtime Italian Wikipedia volunteer 

We urge policymakers to think about how new rules can help reshape our digital spaces so that collaborative platforms like ours are no longer the exception. Regulation should empower people to take control of their digital public spaces, instead of confining them to act as passive receivers of content moderation practices. We need policy and legal frameworks that enable and empower citizens to shape the internet’s future, rather than forcing platforms to exclude them further. 

Our public interest community is here to engage with lawmakers to help design regulations that empower citizens to improve our online spaces together. 

“Humanity’s knowledge is, more often than not, still inaccessible to many: whether it’s stored in private archives, hidden in little-known databases, or lost in the memories of our elders. Wikipedia aims to improve the dissemination of knowledge by digitizing our heritage and sharing it freely for everyone online. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent infodemic only further remind us of the importance of spreading free knowledge.”

Pierre-Yves Beaudouin, President, Wikimedia France

How to get in touch with Wikimedia’s policy experts 

  • For media inquiries to discuss Wikimedia’s position on the DSA, please contact [email protected] 
  • For MEPs and their staff, please contact Jan Gerlach, Public Policy Director, [email protected]

Tech News issue #46, 2021 (November 15, 2021)

00:00, Monday, 15 2021 November UTC
previous 2021, week 46 (Monday 15 November 2021) next

weeklyOSM 590

11:30, Sunday, 14 2021 November UTC

02/11/2021-08/11/2021

lead picture

30DayMapChallenge Day 5 – Buildings in Santa Cruz, Bolivia by Eric Armijo [1] © rcrmj | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Mapping

Community

  • Public Lab Mongolia have started a blog series. First up: ‘Creating An Open-Source Database To Improve Access To Health Services Amid COVID-19 Pandemic In Mongolia’.
  • OpenStreetMap Belgium’s Mapper of the Month for November is Dasrakel from Belgium.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

  • Michael Collinson, acting as facilitator, has published the official set of questions and instructions for board candidates. Candidates are asked to send answers and manifestos by 24:00 UTC, Sunday 14 November.
  • Amanda McCann informed the Osmf-talk mail list that the microgrants programme has been shelved while the Board works out the budgeting.
  • Amanda McCann shared, in her diary, what she did in OpenStreetMap during October.
  • This year’s OSMF Annual General Meeting has a special resolution to change the OSMF’s Articles of Association to count time as associate member for board candidacy requirements.
  • Instructions on voting at this year’s OSMF Annual General Meeting have been published.

OSM research

  • A dissertation by Filip Krumpe was published (de) > en at the University of Stuttgart that deals with the labelling of interactive maps. OSM data are used as the geodata basis. The thesis can be downloaded (en) as a pdf (file size: 29.1 MB).
  • Lukas Kruitwagen and colleagues at Oxford University published (paywall) a large worldwide dataset of predicted locations of solar power plants. The lead author has also written an accessible account. The work involved using machine learning based on a training dataset from solar farms mapped on OpenStreetMap around 2017. Satellite imagery from both SPOT and Sentinel-2 were used for both the initial training and creation of the predicted data.

Humanitarian OSM

  • The annual HOT Summit will be held on Monday 22 November as a virtual event, with the theme: ‘The Evolution of Local Humanitarian Open Mapping Ecosystems: Understanding Community, Collaboration, and Contribution’. Registration closes on Friday 19 November.

Maps

  • [1] Participants in the ’30 Day Map Challenge’ on Twitter continued to make maps using OpenStreetMap data:
    • Day 3: Polygons. Angela Teyvi showed how how much detail exists for some buildings in Accra, Ghana.
    • Day 4: Hexagons. Hexbinning of bus stops in Accra also by Angela Teyvi. SIG UCA found some actual hexagons to map – lecture theatres in San Salvador, El Salvador.
    • Day 5: Buildings in Santa Cruz, Bolivien by Eric Armijo.
    • Day 6: Red. Polluted lakes in Finland by Sini Pöytäniemi.
    • Day 7: Green. Shammilah showed isochrons of walking time to heatlh care facilites in Kisoro District, Uganda.
    • Day 8: Blue. Common choices were watery themes and places with blue in the name. Jaroslav_sm combined the two for lakes named ‘Blue Lake’ in Ukranian.
    • Day 9: Monochrome. Heikki produced an intriguing identification quiz on Irish towns and cities, based on buildings alone (cleverly leveraging and publicising the project to map them across Ireland).
  • Day 5 was a little special as OpenStreetMap was the theme. Many mappers chose to explore specific classes of objects: Sber offices in Moscow (Дмитрий); restaurants in Merced (Derek Sollberger); 7-11 convenience stores in Hong Kong (Brandon Qilin).Xavier Olive did something a little different and explored the history of Zurich Airport on OSM.

Software

  • Mythic Beats hosting company donated two virtual servers to Organic Maps to help them distribute maps for offline usage on mobile devices. They point out that the apparently low value of their donation (in comparison to some other cloud service providers) is in part due to them not having to fund their own space programme.
  • TrackExplorer is software that allows you to upload a GPX file and visualise the trip in 3D. O J’s diary post gives some examples and notes that the base data is OSM, so the more accurate the data, the better the 3D environment displayed.

Programming

  • Komadinovic Vanja gave a whirlwind introduction to using OSM’s OAuth 2 authentication service.
  • Martin Raifer (user tyr_asd), the new iD developer contracted by OSMF, introduced himself.

Releases

  • Sarah Hoffmann presented version 4.0.0 of Nominatim, now available with a more flexible approach to handling how places can be searched.

Did you know …

  • Open Etymology Map? It allows you to view and edit links to the Wikidata elements of people after whom a street is named.
  • … the polygon extractor of OSM France? This tool allows you to download OSM relations as GeoJSON, image and other formats based on the relations’ ID.

OSM in the media

  • The Economist covered (may be paywalled) the work of Kruitwagen and colleagues (reported above), including the role of OpenStreetMap data.

Other “geo” things

  • David Costa tweeted a link to a zoomable version of ‘Les grandes routes vélocipédiques de France’, an 1897 cycle touring map of France.
  • Niantic announced that the AR game ‘Harry Potter: Wizards Unite’ will cease to operate on 31 January 2022. The in-game map and data used to calculate monsters’ types and appearance rates are from OpenStreetMap.
  • User-contributed content added to Google Street View is causing players of GeoGuessr to get angry. As Andrew Deck explained players of GeoGuessr, an online game where you guess your randomly selected location based on street views, are unhappy with the grainy, blurry, or otherwise poor-quality uploads that slow them down.
  • grin wrote about his experiences with his real-time kinematic (RTK) configuration in search of the most accurate position (precise to within a few centimetres).
  • ARTE has a series ((fr) with (en) subtitles) of videos on ‘Mapping the World’. The series presents the complex world of geopolitics broken down into ten minute, bite-sized chunks. Allegedly ‘you’ll never sound uninformed at the dinner table ever again’.

Upcoming Events

Where What Online When Country
Черкаси Open Mapathon: Digital Cherkasy osmcalpic 2021-10-24 – 2021-11-20 ua
Crowd2Map Tanzania GeoWeek FGM Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-11-15
UP Tacloban YouthMappers: MAPA-Bulig, Guiding the Youth to Community Mapping osmcalpic 2021-11-15
Bologna Geomatics at DICAM Geo Week Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-11-15 flag
Grenoble OSM Grenoble Atelier OpenStreetMap osmcalpic 2021-11-15 flag
OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting osmcalpic 2021-11-15
Missing Maps PDX GIS Day Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-11-16
UCB Brasil + CicloMapa: curso de mapeamento osmcalpic 2021-11-16 – 2021-11-26
Lyon Lyon : Réunion osmcalpic 2021-11-16 flag
Bonn 145. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn osmcalpic 2021-11-16 flag
Berlin OSM-Verkehrswende #29 (Online) osmcalpic 2021-11-16 flag
Lüneburg Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online) osmcalpic 2021-11-16 flag
Missing Maps Arcadis GIS Day Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-11-17
Fort Collins CSU Geospatial Centroid GIS Day Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-11-18 flag
Missing Maps WMU GIS Day Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-11-17
Köln OSM-Stammtisch Köln osmcalpic 2021-11-17 flag
Zürich Missing Maps Zürich November Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-11-17 flag
Chambéry Missing Maps CartONG Tour de France des Mapathons – Chambéry osmcalpic 2021-11-18 flag
MSF Geo Week Global Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-11-19
State of the Map Africa 2021 osmcalpic 2021-11-19 – 2021-11-21
Maptime Baltimore Mappy Hour osmcalpic 2021-11-20
Lyon EPN des Rancy : Technique de cartographie et d’édition osmcalpic 2021-11-20 flag
Bogotá Distrito Capital – Departamento Resolvamos notas de Colombia creadas en OpenStreetMap osmcalpic 2021-11-20 flag
HOT Summit 2021 osmcalpic 2021-11-22
Bremen Bremer Mappertreffen (Online) osmcalpic 2021-11-22 flag
San Jose South Bay Map Night osmcalpic 2021-11-24 flag
Derby East Midlands OSM Pub Meet-up : Derby osmcalpic 2021-11-23 flag
Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy : Rencontre osmcalpic 2021-11-24 flag
Düsseldorf Düsseldorfer OSM-Treffen (online) osmcalpic 2021-11-24 flag
[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting osmcalpic 2021-11-26
Brno November Brno Missing Maps mapathon at Department of Geography osmcalpic 2021-11-26 flag
長岡京市 京都!街歩き!マッピングパーティ:第27回 元伊勢三社 osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
Bogotá Distrito Capital – Departamento Resolvamos notas de Colombia creadas en OpenStreetMap osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
泉大津市 オープンデータソン泉大津:町歩きとOpenStreetMap、Localwiki、ウィキペディアの編集 osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
Amsterdam OSM Nederland maandelijkse bijeenkomst (online) osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
HOTOSM Training Webinar Series: Beginner JOSM osmcalpic 2021-11-27
Biella Incontro mensile degli OSMers BI-VC-CVL osmcalpic 2021-11-27 flag
Chamwino How FAO uses different apps to measure Land Degradation osmcalpic 2021-11-29 flag
OSM Uganda Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-11-29
Missing Maps Artsen Zonder Grenzen Mapathon osmcalpic 2021-12-02
Bochum OSM-Treffen Bochum (Dezember) osmcalpic 2021-12-02 flag

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, Strubbl, TheSwavu, cafeconleche, derFred.

Improving Wikipedia’s coverage of the climate crisis

18:45, Friday, 12 2021 November UTC

As the COP26 summit comes to a close, many people are reflecting on what we can do to help solve the climate crisis. For some student editors in Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program, they already have: they’ve helped shape the world’s understanding of climate change and its impacts by sharing scientific information on Wikipedia. While some of the classes working on the topic have focussed specifically on climate change, others have been introductory-level composition classes.

Graduate students in Gunnar Schade’s Texas A&M climate change class took on a host of important topics. The student who re-wrote the Climate change in Texas article was able to flesh it out into an excellent article which addresses both the challenges Texas faces and some of the mitigation approaches. Another, who worked on the Media coverage of climate change article, was able to add information about coverage of recent events like the Trump Administration and the Australian wildfires.

Other students chose to focus on the science of climate change and its impacts. The history of climate change science helps to contextualize what has been done, and can help readers understand the long history of climate science. Greenhouse and icehouse Earth are the two states that the Earth’s climate has fluctuated between. Understanding these two states is important for forecasting future climates, now clearer on Wikipedia thanks to that student editor’s work. The Global temperature recordPolar amplification, and Tropical cyclones and climate change articles highlight the more obvious impacts of climate change; all were improved by student editors. The Climate change and ecosystems article looks at the impact of climate change on the natural systems human life depends on.

Effects of climate change on humans and the related Effects on climate change on human health are helping to connect the impacts of climate change to readers. Finally, the Climate change art looks at climate change in another way, delving into some of the ways we react as humans.

Erin Larson’s Climate Change class at Alaska Pacific University worked on articles related to mechanisms like CO2 fertilization effect, the Methane chimney effect, and the Tree credits article. A Fordham University student in Paul Bartlett’s Environmental Economics class Climate engineering.

Yale University students in Helene Landemore’s Democracy, Science, and Climate Justice class focused on a different set of articles. One student expanded the Public opinion on climate change, adding information about public perceptions of climate change in India to the article. Other students expanded the Carbon tax and Climate change policy in the United States articles.

Matthew Bergman’s Introduction to Policy Analysis class at the University of California at San Diego made important additions to the Economics of climate change mitigation and Climate change policy in California articles adding information about a series of bills passed in the state. Other students contributed to the Greenhouse gas emissions by the United States, the United States withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and the San Diego Climate Action Plan.

Students from the University of California at Merced in Michelle Tonconis’ Extinction Events and Stewardship class also worked on the Effects of climate change on humans article; as humans, this topic is close to home for all of us.

While classes like these, which had a science or policy related to climate change are likely to contribute a lot to the topic, it’s an issue that almost everyone is aware of, and many classes with a more general focus were also able to make good contributions.

A University of Massachusetts Boston student in Brittany Peterson’s Composition 102 class, for example, was able to improve the Climate change in the United States article, while a College of DuPage student editor in Timothy Henningsen’s Research, Writing, and the Production of Knowledge class was able to improve the Effects of climate change article.

One of the participants in Joseph A. Ross’s Freshman Seminar at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro worked on the Individual action on climate change article.

All told, students from a wide range of backgrounds chose to work on articles related to climate change, demonstrating the fact that especially for younger people, climate change has a huge impacts on their lives and their futures. By improving the information available to the public, student editors can help people understand the topic, and cut through a lot of the misinformation that continues to persist in the space.

If you’re a university instructor wondering what you can do about the climate crisis, join these instructors! Ask your students to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of climate change topics. Visit teach.wikiedu.org to get started.

Image credit: Insure Our Future, PDM-owner, via Wikimedia Commons

Dr Nowak has a Wikipedia article in several languages. Her notability is obvious because wolves is a very hot topic in many European countries. When people have opinions about wolves, it is obvious that in a European context you cannot dismiss the research of Dr Nowak over the years. 

When the notability and the quality of a Wikipedia article is assessed, it is obvious that an encyclopedic article is not best served with a list of papers Dr Nowak contributed to; the Scholia template provides more in depth information. However, Scholia only functions when the papers are known and attributed.

In Wikidata, there were two items that needed to be merged. Three papers were linked, an additional nine could be attributed. Additional identifiers were added, of particular significance is Google Scholar as it knows many if not most of the papers of a scientist. 

Adding missing papers is easy; you search with a DOI for the paper and when Wikidata does not know it, it is suggested to add it using the quickstatements tool. The best bit is that when CrosRef knows the ORCiD identifier for an author, it will either identify the author or will add the ORCiD identifier as a qualifier. 

Adding the Scholia template to any Wikipedia article about published scholars makes sense; the data is a "work in progress". It changes as more papers and co-authors become known. It is also an invitation to our communities and scientists to improve both the Wikipedia article and the data represented in the Scholias for any scientist.

Thanks, GerardM 

SMW at ENDORSE conference

09:41, Thursday, 11 2021 November UTC

March 16, 2021

Semantic MediaWiki will be presented at the European Data Conference on Reference Data and Semantics (ENDORSE).

On March 18, 2021 (day 3), between 16:55 and 17:25, Bernhard Krabina will present "Linked Open Data with SMW". For the program, see this webpage for the detailed program of the conference.

This Month in GLAM: October 2021

06:21, Thursday, 11 2021 November UTC

How we learned to stop worrying and loved the (event) flow

14:21, Wednesday, 10 2021 November UTC

By Zbyszko Papierski, Senior Software Engineer

How hard can that be?

Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is probably the most common way to access Wikidata—well, data. It’s basically an open SPARQL endpoint, so it allows everybody (and I do mean everybody) to ask for any data contained within this vast graph of knowledge. You want to know about all the famous cats? Check. List of all Pokemon? Here’s your very own Pokedex! Why not go a bit meta and find a list of scientific papers on Wikidata? We got that too! 

Unfortunately, hosting an open query engine comes with a bunch of limitations and provisions.

Issues Challenges

For some this may sound obvious: Wikidata is not Wikidata Query Service (and vice versa). Whether you belong to that enlightened group or not, there still may be some subtle distinctions here that aren’t immediately evident.

Wikidata itself is a service built on Wikibase. You can access any entity and see triples that comprise it. For every page like this one, you can find a page like this. They contain (mostly) the same information, but one is designed to be readable by humans, the other by applications and services (and tech-savvy humans). The latter represents the data as provided and used by WDQS —but it’s not what you’ll actually get from WDQS.

To be able to serve SPARQL queries, we first need to feed Blazegraph, WDQS’s backend RDF engine, WDQS—  for our current situation, the backend RDF engine, Blazegraph—the data it needs. We use TTL (also called Turtle, because why not?) format, but we do not feed the data directly from Wikidata (or its Wikibase). The process, which we call munging, isn’t exactly complicated; at a glance, it sorts out the data, strips the types (not required for SPARQL), and validates the input. 

Once prepared, the data is indexed in Blazegraph, which mostly involves heavy denormalization into specific data structures (I won’t go into detail here). 

That’s it! Easy, right? Not when you’re at 11B triples, dozens of instances of Blazegraph, and a constant flow of changes —all while users are banging on your service— it isn’t.

Resolving our differences

Feeding the data into Blazegraph sounds simple enough until you learn that Blazegraph doesn’t represent the data like Wikidata does. It doesn’t contain entities; it contains triples. When an entity gets edited, it may gain some triples, and it can lose some triples. In the end, we cannot simply feed Blazegraph new triples. We need to remove stale ones as well. So how can we do that?

The answer is really easy: just check with Blazegraph to see which triples it has or not, feed in the new ones, delete the old ones and call it a day. Problem solved!

The funny thing about problems with easy solutions is that, at scale, they often don’t have easy solutions—think eating a hamburger vs eating ten. Feeding Blazegraph isn’t exactly like eating hamburgers. While you can always get nine more people into a diner (depending on your COVID-19 lockdown situation) to help with those, Blazegraph doesn’t allow more than one thread to update its indices. Additionally, parts of the process are read/write exclusive, meaning that writes interfere with reads and vice versa. 

With changes constantly flowing in and Blazegraph getting slower due to the sheer size of the data and users querying the service, WDQS inevitably started to lag behind.

Keeping up with the Entities

As I mentioned in the beginning, WDQS is a very popular way of accessing Wikidata. So much so that having it lag behind Wikidata was a huge user experience issue. We had to implement some way of fixing that.

There are two things you can do if you want to synchronize two data streams, or in our case, changes made to Wikidata and data indexed in WDQS. You can speed up the slower one (WDQS) or slow down the faster one (Wikidata). While the second option sounds less than optimal, it’s also much faster to implement and takes into account multiple sources of lag – so that was the mechanism that ended up being implemented.

Most services out there implement some kind of a throttling mechanism—basically a way to make sure that the traffic doesn’t overwhelm the service. It’s no different with Wikidata. Apart from your usual query traffic throttling, it also implements a throttle on writes. Maxlag is the name of the parameter that drives that throttle. This is the maximal value of update lag between Wikidata and services that serve its data. WDQS is the biggest contributor to that lag.

Old Updater, in Torment (colorized, 2021)

To put it bluntly, WDQS slows down how fast a bot or a user can edit Wikidata. Obviously, we mostly think about bots here—not only do they account for most of Wikidata’s traffic, but their rate of changes is also vastly larger than what humans generate. WDQS was already slowing down Wikidata’s growth and we didn’t want that.

Harder, better, faster, stronger

The current WDQS update process has its own issues, too. The main one is that it isn’t really scalable. On top of that, it is known to occasionally lose updates, mostly due to the eventual consistency of downstream data sources. We could spend time to better account for them and work on making the update process scalable, but it wouldn’t really make sense. We would still need to deal with the fact that Blazegraph doesn’t like us using it to resolve entity differences. Including all of that in an effort to improve the existing updater sounded like a full-on rewrite. We decided to do an actual full-on rewrite.

Obviously, replicating the current design of the updater made no sense —even if we worked on making it more scalable — because the design itself had fatal flows. We still hoped that we could find some low-hanging (or about 2.5 meter / 8.2 feet hanging) fruit – by making the update process work more closely with blazegraph and thus fixing some of the most pressing issues. We soon realized that tying WDQS closer to Blazegraph is the opposite of what we should be doing. It was clear that we might be moving away from that technology at some point. 

Deciding to base the architecture around event streaming was a next logical step. Incoming changes are already available as streams; you can read more about them here. Not any old event processing would do, though. We wanted the new updater to actually be aware of the state of entities so it would actually know which triples to remove and which to add.

That’s how the idea of using Flink was born.

About this post

Featured image credit: File:Pika – Ladakh – 2017-08-06, Tiziana Bardelli, CC BY-SA 4.0

This is part one of a three-part series. Read part two here. Read part three here.

The trouble with triples

14:20, Wednesday, 10 2021 November UTC

By David Causse, Senior Software Engineer

What is the difference?

Like plants, Wikidata entities can be small, with just a stem and a leaf, or large, with many branches and dense foliage. To know how a plant evolves as it grows you need to capture its states while it changes; for plants, a solution is offered through time-lapse photography. To track the changes made to an entity in Wikidata to the triplestore, a similar approach is used: take a snapshot of the entity after every edit and send it as a whole to the triplestore.

Potentilla reptans (Q130224) (credit: Flora Londonis, commons link)

But as the entity grows the size of the data required to be sent to the triplestore grows as well. This is inefficient as individual changes made to Wikidata entities are small. Generally, only one leaf is added, removed, or changed in a single edit. The new WDQS Streaming Updater makes it possible to identify what has changed on the entity after an edit and only ship this information to the triplestore.

A Patch for RDF

Spotting differences between two snapshots can be challenging. Fortunately, the semantics of an RDF document can be expressed using the set theory, and its relative complement operation could not find a better use case. 

We, the Search Platform Team, thought that it would be trivial to capture the difference between two versions of the same entity. We evaluated some previous attempts at defining a patching technique (TurtlePatch and RDF-patch) for RDF stores and whether they would meet our requirements:

  1. No need to fetch prior information and to converse with the RDF store before applying the mutations (this would be a major impediment to increasing throughput)
  2. Only send the actual triples that are added or removed instead of sending the whole entity graph

Unfortunately, none of the techniques we evaluated could meet our requirements when it comes to RDF blank nodes. In the context of the Wikibase RDF model, blank nodes are used to denote the concept of SomeValue (mistakenly referred to as an unknown value in the UI). In the RDF specification, blank nodes are locally scoped to the file or RDF store where they are used, and so do not have persistent or portable identifiers. Because blank nodes are thus not referenceable, the triples using them cannot be deleted explicitly.

Since the triplestore we use does not allow tracking the identity of the blank nodes, we decided to experiment with skolemization, the approach suggested by RDF 1.1, and the patching techniques we evaluated. Unfortunately, there was no reasonable way to do this without introducing a breaking change, so we attempted to ease the transition by introducing the wikibase:isSomeValue() custom function. We also provided a test service at https://query-preview.wikidata.org for users and bot owners to anticipate any potential problems for their use cases.

The joy of the playground

Conceptually, what we had to build seemed relatively simple—an updater that would consume a stream of changes made to the entities, fetch the RDF of each entity and generate a diff from the previously seen version, and apply it to the triplestore. 

However, complications arose as we got into the details, and this led us to evaluate Flink, a stateful streaming processor, to do the job.

A novice Flink developer discovering all the cool stuff that Flink can do (Curriculum Vitae, Marble Run by Alex Schmid, photo credit Gwen and James Anderson, commons link)

Building diffs requires reconstructing the revision history of a Wikidata entity, and the Mediawiki event bus can assist us with several topics:

  • Revision create
  • Page delete/suppress
  • Page undeletes

Because events may not be well ordered in their individual topics, and also because we read from multiple Kafka topics with varying throughputs, we cannot simply process them as we read them. Instead, we have to reorder them so that the events can be processed in the same order seen in the revision history.

Flink provides a handy time window operator for this; we decided to use tumbling windows for their simplicity and for their ability to route late events to a side output.

With events properly ordered we can then determine what operation we want to perform:

  • Fully import an entity
  • Find the diff between the new revision of an entity and the previously seen revision
  • Delete the entity

These operations require keeping the state of what was previously seen and knowing that we can also detect some discrepancies. For instance:

  • Trying to delete an entity that was never seen before
  • Trying to diff with a revision older than the previously seen one
  • Plus everything else that we can detect from the state we store and the data available in the events

Similar to what we do for late events, we capture such discrepancies in a side-output for later analysis and reconciliation.

Generally speaking, writing a Flink application is quite straightforward once you fully understand its core concept of watermarks

The reality of the crowd

When building a Flink application you will rapidly learn that you cannot claim victory without running a backfill test. Simply put, backfilling means reading historical events stored in the input queues. What we learned here is that Flink is optimized for throughput and will consume events as fast as it can, putting all the components of the pipeline under maximum load.

This is part two of a three-part series on the Wikimedia Data Query Services (WDQS) updater.
Queue at the entrance of the Louvre museum (photo credit: Anton Lefterov, commons link)

If the components are not fast enough to handle the throughput, Flink can apply back-pressure to instruct the source components to slow down. Back-pressure is not something you want to see in normal conditions (real-time speed), but it is a necessary evil when backfilling—especially when the Kafka throughput is high compared to what your pipeline can handle. It allows Flink to keep events outside of the pipeline when they don’t have a chance of getting processed in a reasonable amount of time.

It is a bit like deciding to start waiting on a 200-meters line at the entrance of the Louvre a few dozen minutes before they close the doors. You may be a bit disappointed to realize that you waited for nothing and will have to come back the next day.

This is basically what happened during the first backfill test we did. By using windows to re-order the events, we stopped the propagation of the back-pressure. Events are added to the window state, and this is very cheap compared to the rest of the pipeline. Unfortunately, these windows have to be fired at some point. Since we have to deal with idled sources, the watermark may jump ahead in time very quickly causing too many timers to be fired at the same time and moving millions of events to the next part of the pipeline, which is the slowest.

This caused a vicious cycle: when all the timers were applied in one go, they blocked the checkpoint barriers for too long, causing the pipeline to fail. With the timers being held in the saved checkpoints, there was no way to recover from them; it was too late.

The solution was to reconnect the flow between operators (removing the need to buffer and create timers) so that the back-pressure could be propagated to the source. The idea was simply to partially re-order the events. Since most events (95%) are well ordered and deletions are relatively rare, we could advance most of the events without buffering them. Unfortunately, for this, we had to give up some nice high-level features like windows and write our own process function. We would like to thank Ververica for their help on this project by providing training and support.

So… what is the difference?

Dealing with small RDF patches provides several advantages. The size of the payload sent to the triplestore is a lot smaller than with a full reconciliation technique—which sends the whole entity graph. It also allows you to batch more edits together. Our testing shows that between 5% and 20% of the triples can be compressed, thanks to batching.

Like a wine press, batching patches together allows us to keep only what matters (A wine press exhibited at the Börzsöny museum in Szob Hungary, photo credit Jan Pešula, commons link)

Detecting some discrepancies and inconsistencies becomes possible, too. When applying the RDF patch, the triplestore is able to tell us how many mutations were actually performed compared to how many were expected.

Performance-wise we saw a noticeable increase in throughput (up to nine times faster in the best case scenario) with an average of 3600 edits per minute, while our initial goal was only 1000 edits.

Other metrics on the Blazegraph servers saw favorable shifts as well:

  • Read operations decreased from around 1000 operations per second to 60, since they were no longer required
  • Load decreased from 1.2 to 0.4 on average, since there is a lot less data to process during updates

Working with smaller patches gives us more flexibility in tuning the throughput. In the current system, the payload sent to the triplestore can be very large, and we had to limit the number of entities updated in a single batch because of that. Did you know that you can list the longest pages of a wiki using Special:LongPages? Can you guess the size of the longest item on Wikidata? Now that we have smaller payloads (ten times smaller on average), we can trade latency for throughput or vice versa by batching more or fewer patches together depending on our needs.

So… yes it makes a big difference!

The good news is that we finally had a fully functioning stream of RDF changes that could be applied to the triplestore much faster than the current system; the bad news is that it was far from being done, as we still had to find a home for Flink in our infrastructure.

About this post

Featured image credit: File:Three leaves (293686026).jpg, Caitriana Nicholson, CC BY-SA 2.0

This post is part two in a three-part series. Read part one here. Read part three here.

By Maryum Styles, Software Engineer III, Search Platform, Wikimedia Foundation

We created a Streaming Updater for Wikidata Query Service (WDQS), and it runs on Flink—Awesome, right? The new Streaming Updater will help keep WDQS up and running as Wikidata continues to add information daily. Developing a plan for a new updater was exciting, and deploying the new updater had a lot of lessons learned about Flink in production environments.

Going from Beta to Production

The Streaming Updater was running on YARN in the analytics cluster for the beta users, and we needed to get it to production, aka Kubernetes (K8s). Our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team joked that we were deploying a job runner (Flink) on a job runner (Kubernetes).

We thought we could easily deploy a nice Flink application cluster on Kubernetes! No problem, right?—Just bundle that Streaming Updater jar in the existing base Flink image. That’s what the cool kids do.

Haha nope. We had to rebuild the wheel.

Since the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) K8s cluster only allows base images from the small selection of internal base images, and they don’t allow plain Dockerfiles, we used an internal tool called Blubber. Dockerfiles can vary wildly from developer to developer and in order to have standards around layered filesystems, caching, directory context, obscure config format, and inheritance, not to mention testing, Blubber is used to avoid common pitfalls. Blubber is a fun templating tool that takes your YAML file and turns it into a WMF-approved Dockerfile. Then there’s a WMF pipeline that takes your nice Dockerfile, creates your image, and loads it into the WMF docker registry, which is all pretty nice.

Great! It took some time adjusting the official Flink base image to our needs, but we had an image that we could put in a Helm chart. Now, we were good to go!

Again, not at all. 

WMF Helm charts follow certain standards, and there’s a lot of boilerplate bits that are intended to be helpful for people. But for an app that is running another app, they’re not that helpful. The charts were tweaked, merging the best of the Flink K8s docs with the WMF Helm chart standards. 

But we still weren’t quite ready.

Flink does stateful computation—and needs somewhere to store said state. Flink doesn’t need to store a ton of data like how a database does, but it does need to store checkpoints that ensure that the data computation happening is secure and consistent. We decided to go with OpenStack Swift since it was already supported by the Foundation. That required adding an authorization for Swift to the Flink filesystem plugin. Failed events and other types of events that didn’t work out can’t be stored in Swift, so those needed to go to Kafka. That happens via the WMF event platform.

And then there’s the whole running in production thing. How would we stop a Flink job when we wanted to update the Streaming Updater job? Could we stop it and have a savepoint? Could we resume from a savepoint? There’s not much we could find online about managing stopping and restarting jobs from savepoints outside of, “make your Flink cluster highly available.” 

“Highly available” for Flink does not mean 24/7 uptime. It means that if the job manager is stopped in any way, the job can resume from the last savepoint. That’s great, but that still didn’t answer the question of what would happen if we chose to stop the job (to upgrade, etc). 

This is where the Flink session mode comes into play. When you deploy Flink as a session cluster, you decouple the jar from the Flink application. Then you can stop the Flink job with a savepoint without having to take down the whole application cluster.

Just when you thought there were no more blockers: Surprise! 

Everything in the WMF Kubernetes cluster has to be deployed in both of our data centers. But Flink isn’t designed for multi-region. Honestly, the whole discussion about working with multiple data centers and how a Kubernetes-powered Flink application might work in that environment deserves a separate blog post on its own, so I’ll spare the details here. In the end, we decided on a solution that puts a separate Streaming Updater in each data center – thanks, to which we didn’t need to worry about pushing the data across the world. It also made more sense to us, because our Kafka instances are mostly separated that way as well (with the help of the Mirror Maker, a part of Kafka that can synchronize topic data between data centers).

Adventures in Production

Deploying the Streaming Updater, while by far the most complicated part of the process, wasn’t all that we needed to do. At the time, WDQS used the old update process and the service itself was serving live traffic.

The initial plan we came up with was relatively easy:

1. Depool (remove from the load balancer) a single data center.

2. Disable the old updater.

3. Reload the data on all hosts.

4. Enable the new Streaming Updater.

5. Pool that data center back.

6. Repeat for the other data center (simplifying step three by copying the data from the already migrated data center).

Unfortunately, it turned out there was a flaw in this plan. So far, we assumed that a single data center could handle all the traffic. It turned out that that isn’t always the case and turning off a data center in a way that it cannot be immediately plugged back in could result in a catastrophic, long-term WDQS failure.

In light of that, we decided to change the approach and plug out one host at a time to transfer the data from another, already migrated host. It meant some inconsistencies along the way —the old updater was known to lose updates and the new one fared much better, but that sounded better than potential (and probable) service-wide downtime. 

In the end, we were, again, surprised by the performance of the new solution. While we had some initial delays to the migration process, once started, it actually went much faster than we expected. The post-import catch-up took 24 hours compared to the two weeks usually required by the old system. Then the rest of the process to replicate the Blazegraph data across the server fleet was done in four workdays, about half the time we assumed it would take!

Work that started more than a year and a half before (with the research phase starting way before that), was finally done.

It’s somewhat hard to celebrate remotely, but due to an amazing feat of logistics, all around the world (Thanks, Janet! 🙏 ), we got cupcakes 🙂

Cupcakes By Cbogsin – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

(Not) out of the woods

The Streaming Updater is meant to be a more stable, scalable, and consistent solution to our update process. It’s now been deployed for more than two weeks and it’s clear that it already fulfilled at least part of that promise. 

We decided that with the current setup, our Service Level Objective (SLO) for WDQS is to have an edit latency under 10 minutes at least 99% of the time. The graph below shows the fulfillment of that objective, calculated over a day for a period of 90 days. The vertical blue line denotes the last instance’s deployment of the new Streaming Updater on 18 Oct 2021 – note that the instability after that is caused by the one-day calculation period.

It’s clear that the stability is better, at least so far. It’s not perfect yet, because our backend, Blazegraph, still has its issues and affects the latency in general, but the Streaming Updater is doing its job. 

What would we do differently?

Looking back, we should have started with a Flink session cluster and not worried so much about bundling the Streaming Updater jar. That takes away a lot of network dependencies and other ephemera. We were so focused on the Streaming Updater application that we allowed that to drive all of our decisions. Of course, there are needs that are new updater-specific that do matter, but just getting Flink working first would have made some things more apparent.

It felt easier to have a barebones version of Flink that was used for Beta testing running with YARN. It takes one line to spin up a Flink cluster, but that cluster in no way is ready for a production environment. Focusing on having a production suitable Flink cluster earlier would have been better since we had to end up changing our application architecture to accommodate different production requirements, like multi-datacenter and using Swift.

Everything else that came up didn’t really feel like something we could have known about before. If you’re thinking of getting Flink deployed in your production environment, I would see if it’s possible to have a separate K8s cluster for it. Of course, all of our applications are namespaced, but Flink as an application has different security concerns than the average application.

Flink is complex and so is Kubernetes, so putting them together is not the simplest process, along with the other moving parts of storage and multiple datacenters. Figuring out the Flink job lifecycle and maintenance has been tricky, especially for a long-running job, but overall better than having an update script that leaves stale data in the Wikidata Query Service.

Deploying a stateful application can be tricky, but the benefits of Flink and being able to scale the update process is worth it. With Flink, WDQS will be able to receive updates as they happen which means less load on Blazegraph since updates are incremental versus handling a bunch of changes at once from a dump. The knowledge gained from using Flink with Kubernetes will be helpful to the Foundation, since other teams have been following this process carefully and hope to utilize Flink for their own solutions.

About this post

Featured image credit: File:Elakala Waterfalls Swirling Pool Mossy Rocks.jpg, Forest Wander, CC BY-SA 2.0

This is part three of a three-series. Read part one here. Read part two here.

The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts

19:55, Tuesday, 09 2021 November UTC

Should online communities require people to create accounts before participating?

This question has been a source of disagreement among people who start or manage online communities for decades. Requiring accounts makes some sense since users contributing without accounts are a common source of vandalism, harassment, and low quality content. In theory, creating an account can deter these kinds of attacks while still making it pretty quick and easy for newcomers to join. Also, an account requirement seems unlikely to affect contributors who already have accounts and are typically the source of most valuable contributions. Creating accounts might even help community members build deeper relationships and commitments to the group in ways that lead them to stick around longer and contribute more.

In a new paper published in Communication Research, I worked with Aaron Shaw provide an answer. We analyze data from “natural experiments” that occurred when 136 wikis on Fandom.com started requiring user accounts. Although we find strong evidence that the account requirements deterred low quality contributions, this came at a substantial (and usually hidden) cost: a much larger decrease in high quality contributions. Surprisingly, the cost includes “lost” contributions from community members who had accounts already, but whose activity appears to have been catalyzed by the (often low quality) contributions from those without accounts.


A version of this post was first posted on the Community Data Science blog.

The full citation for the paper is: Hill, Benjamin Mako, and Aaron Shaw. 2020. “The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Peer Production.” Communication Research, 48 (6): 771–95. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650220910345.

If you do not have access to the paywalled journal, please check out this pre-print or get in touch with us. We have also released replication materials for the paper, including all the data and code used to conduct the analysis and compile the paper itself.