🕑 1 hour 38 minutes

Lionel Scheepmans is a co-founder of the Wikimedia Belgium chapter, an open source and open knowledge activist, and a PhD student at the University of Louvain. He is also currently running for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Lionel Scheepmans page on Meta-Wiki
• Imagine un monde ("Imagine a world") - Lionel's PhD thesis
  • PDF version
• Lionel's 2022 WMF elections candidacy page
• Rainbow Gathering Wikipedia article
• Universal basic income Wikipedia article

Wikidata’s WikiProject Video games recently passed a major milestone: 50,000 video game (Q7889) items on Wikidata. Let’s use that opportunity to draw a quick mid-year report.

Description

Let’s look at how these items are described along some basic properties − asking the Wikidata Query Service for some pretty graphs, and using my trusted inteGraality for some more advanced statistics.

Over 85% of the items have a platform (P400) statement (which does not mean that we have 85% completion on that topic, since many games are published on several platforms, and we may only have recorded one or a couple of them).

78% of the items have a publication date (P577)

67% have a genre (P136) − we have a very long tail of 600 distinct values as genres (some of which could use a clean-up, granted )

Just above 53% have a country of origin (P495)

Just under 50% of the items have a developer (P178) or a publisher (P123).

Links to Wikipedia

77% of the items are linked to an article in at least one language-version of Wikipedia − English comes first (52%), then French (30%) and then Japanese (25%).

What I also find interesting is to look at items linked to only one Wikipedia language version: some 13% only have an article in the English-language Wikipedia, almost 10% only to Japanese-language Wikipedia, then comes French-language Wikipedia with 3% of items.

External identifiers

Over at Wikidata we link to hundreds of other video game databases.

The king here is MobyGames game ID (P1933), used on over 50% of our Q7889 items. Then come the 34% of Internet Game Database game ID (P5794), 27% of GameFAQs game ID (P4769), 20% of PCGamingWiki ID (P6337), 19% of speedrun.com game ID (P6783), 17,4% of the Media Arts Database ID (P7886), 16% of Giant Bomb ID (P5247), 15,2% of OGDB game title ID (P7564), 14,8% of Igromania ID (P6827)… and a very very long tail of sometimes highly specialized databases.

(The most represented are English-language databases, but the list above includes one Japanese, German and Russian databases)

Some caveats

1/ By the time of writing this, we already reached 50,444 items. Ah well

2/ We had actually passed the milestone of “50K games” on Wikidata before. Looking strictly at instance of (P31)=video game (Q7889) items does not tell the full story, as we have a long tail of subclasses also used as P31: some refer to distinct concepts (the 850 DLCs or 587 expansion packs), while others are indeed games (192 mobile game, 120 video game remaster, 102 browser game, 100 video game remake…)
Both raise questions on our modelling − which we shall leave for another day and another post.

3/ 50,000 is definitely something to be proud of, but is still far from the almost 300,000 entries in Mobygames, the 80,000 of GiantBomb, the 63,000 of OGDB… and as such, is indeed a milestone on the road we have ahead of us.

Link collection

• Gain insights via our showcase SPARQL queries
• Explore our data with our statistics
• Learn about our data model
• Check out who’s been using our data
• Find something to start with in our suggested tasks
• Do some alignments with other databases via our 260 Mix’n’match catalogues

Other languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English,español, français, italiano, magyar, polski, português, português do Brasil, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, ,فارسی ,हिन्दी, বাংলা, ไทย, 中文, 日本語

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

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 7 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 8 June. It will be on all wikis from 9 June (calendar).
• A new str_replace_regexp() function can be used in abuse filters to replace parts of text using a regular expression. [1]

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

The Wikimedians of UAE user group is excited to announce that the 6^th edition of the WikiArabia conference will be held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates from the 28^th – 30^th October 2022.  This will be the first Wikimedia event of its kind held in the UAE and the Gulf region.

As a new addition to the Arabic Wikimedia community, the Wikimedians of UAE User Group believes in the importance of sharing opinions and experiences of those who have been active in various Arabic user groups in the region. This will lead to the strength and enrichment of the Arab Wikimedia community and provide Arabic speakers with a cohesive and unified voice within the international community.

Additionally, the WikiArabia 2022 conference will provide an important opportunity to work on policies that concern the Arab community as well as design strategies on increasing participation and creating sustainable communities of editors.

We look forward to meeting and connecting with the wider Wikimedia Arab community in person.

The Organizing Team

Ahlam Bolooki, Hani Yakan, Serine Ben Brahim, Dania Droubi, Reda Kerbouche

We are also honored to announce the names of the programming and scholarship committees who will be supporting us in organizing a successful event:

Programming Committee:

• Anass Sedarti
• Walaa Abdul Manaem
• Ala’a K Nejjar
• Reem al Kashif
• Bachounda Mohammed
• Mervat Salman

The Scholarship Committee:

• Shaima
• Yamen Bousrih
• Olla Abdalla Mahadi
• Adel Nehaoua
• NANöR
• Serine Ben Brahim

Registration is now open to register attendance and submissions starting from today until Monday, 11th of July 2022. 

To register for attendance please visit this page. For submissions please visit this link. 

For more details, please visit our meta page.

In case you have any questions regarding the conference, please do not hesitate to contact the Organising Committee members, or email us on [email protected]

Wikipedia sure is popular. The most popular articles in a given week routinely get millions of views. But with 6 million plus articles, Wikipedia has plenty of room for articles about topics which are profoundly obscure, even downright boring. I should know, I’ve written dozens of them! Some of what I consider to be my finest contributions to Wikipedia are lucky to get a couple of views per day, for example:

• The Hobby Directory
• Bank note reporter
• Minimizer

Of my creations, the least popular seems to be Sunday reading periodical, an article about a Victorian magazine genre which averages around a dozen views per month.

Are there articles with even less popular appeal than that?

Though Wikipedia page view data is publicly available (as a massive raw data dump, and through an API), there’s unfortunately no easy way to sort out the least viewed pages, short of a very slow linear search for the needle in the haystack…

A smaller haystack

As a starting point, I grabbed 2021 pageview data for a random sample of about 32,000 Wikipedia articles. Maybe the properties of the least viewed articles in the sample will lead us to some heuristics we can use to narrow our search for the least viewed articles.

Here’s what the distribution of views looks like for that sample. I’ve used a logarithmic scale, since the values are widely spread out. The median article gets a little under 1,000 views annually. The average is around 13,000, thanks to the long tail.

We have almost 100 articles in the sample whose total views in 2021 are in the single digits(!). Here’s a peek at the first few:

• Weimer Township (3 views)
• Goleh-ye Cheshmeh (4 views)
• Governor Terry (4 views)

But these are disambiguation pages – navigational aids which link to similarly named articles, but which aren’t themselves “real” articles, at least for our purposes. And in fact, all of the 50 least viewed pages in our dataset are disambiguation pages – they seem to have a notably lower floor on their pageviews than other articles.

After filtering out disambiguation pages, we’re left with a small handful of articles with single-digit annual views (ranging from 7 to 9):

• Erygia sigillata, a moth species
• Hilarigona obscurata, a fly species (apparently aptly named)
• Loxocrambus hospition, a moth
• Makhoshin, an Iranian village
• Bojerud, a surname
• Scrobipalpula crustaria, yet another moth

These obscure 2 or 3 sentence stubs average less than one view per month! That figure is so small, I suspect most or all of those might come from readers hitting the “Random article” button. This would help explain why the least viewed pages in our sample are all disambiguation pages – the “Random article” button was coded to ignore disambiguation pages starting in 2015.

There’s an effective way we can test this hypothesis. And if it’s true, it will give us an important clue for finding the least viewed article on Wikipedia.

Interlude: how the “Random article” button works

Here’s a dark secret about Wikipedia: due to some peculiarities in its implementation, the “Random article” button isn’t as random as you might think.

Whenever an article is created on Wikipedia, it’s assigned a random number between 0 and 1 (stored in the database as a field called page_random). As a toy example, suppose our encyclopedia has just 5 pages, with the following page_random values:

• List of longest fish: 0.15
• Musca depicta: 0.2
• Cow Tools: 0.35
• Fox tossing: 0.81
• List of presidents of the United States with facial hair: 0.96

When someone hits the “Random article” button, the server generates a random number between 0 and 1.

Let’s say our drunken archer’s arrow randomly lands at 0.29. The server will then search for and return the article in the database with the next-highest page_random value after 0.29. In this case, that’s Cow Tools.

As you might have surmised, this is not exactly a “fair” process. There is only a small range of values that will get us to Musca depicta: those between 0.15 and 0.2 (represented by the orange region above). It will only come up about 5% of the time, whereas Fox tossing will come up 46% of the time.

The probability of a given article being landed on is equal to the size of what I’ll call its random gap: the difference between the article’s page_random value and the next-lowest page_random value in the database. In the diagrams above, the size of each article’s colored rectangle corresponds to its random gap.

If the random article button is responsible for most of the pageviews for the project’s least popular articles, this leads to a couple testable predictions:

1. That the least viewed articles will have unusually small random gaps
2. That there is a (weak) correlation between random gap size and pageviews. This correlation should be most apparent when looking at the least viewed articles.

Are the least viewed articles in our sample “unlucky”?

Since there are around 6 million Wikipedia articles, the average random gap must be about 1/6,000,000, or 1.67e-7 in scientific notation. How big are the random gaps for the least viewed articles in our sample?

The least viewed article in the sample, Erygia sigillata, has a page_random value of 0.500764585777. The article Katherine Hanley is right on its tail with a value of 0.500764582314, which is just 0.000000003 less, or 3e-9 in scientific notation. This is 98% smaller than the average random gap. In other words, Erygia sigillatais an extremely unlucky article as far as the “Random article” button is concerned! It’s 50 times less likely to be landed on than an average article.

The random gaps for the 5 other articles in our sample with single-digit annual views are: 3e-9, 9e-9, 8e-9, 4e-9, 8e-9, 2e-8. All about an order of magnitude smaller than average. Quite a strong pattern!

Is there a correlation between random gap and views?

In the grand view of our sample of 32,000 articles, it seems like a wash:

(If anything, it might look like articles with smaller gaps get more views, but this is just an artefact of the fact that most articles have gaps which are close to the average.)

But we predicted that random gap will only have a noticeable effect on the floor of pageviews. Let’s do an extreme zoom-in on the very bottom of the plot, looking only at articles with less than 200 annual views:

An even clearer picture emerges if we limit our analysis to articles which are a priori probably uninteresting, such as short articles about moth species (sorry, entomologists). Here’s a scatterplot of random gap vs. total views in 2021 for all ~1,500 pages in Category:Phaegopterina stubs:

This must be how those scientists felt when they first saw a graph of the cosmic microwave background radiation! (To get a sense of how coherent this pattern is, here is what the same graph would look like under the null hypothesis of no association between random gap and page views. I synthesized this by randomly permuting the pageview values in the dataset.)

The least popular articles of 2021

Based on our findings above, the least viewed articles on Wikipedia are not going to be merely about topics with little popular interest – they must also be “unlucky” in the sense of having very small random gaps.

We can considerably narrow our search for the least viewed articles of 2021 by limiting our analysis to pages with small random gaps. I set a threshold of 1.7e-8, or about 1/10th of the average gap size.

Of these 600,000 least lucky articles, all received at least a few views in 2021. The booby prize for least popular article of 2021 is shared by two articles which received exactly 3 probably-human pageviews:

• Trichromia phaeocrota (random gap: 4e-9)
• Opharus corticea (random gap: 1e-9)

If you guessed that these are both moth species, you would be right.

Patterns in unpopular articles

You can check out a larger leaderboard of the 500 least viewed articles here. The list is remarkably consistent in its subject matter:

• A significant majority of them are about species or other taxons of insects (plus 17 gastropods, and one fungus).
• The next most common category is obscure geographical features, especially (for some reason) towns in Iran and Sri Lanka. My favourite of these is the deliciously laconic Kälberbuckel.
• One other recurring genre are set index articles like C24H31FO5, Dottley, Sukmanovka, and Great polemonium. (A set index article is a page which looks and functions like a disambiguation page but isn’t, because of reasons.)

There are a small number of articles not falling into the previously-mentioned categories. Some feel like living fossils from an earlier age of Wikipedia when standards of demonstrated notability were looser. It’s a little questionable whether articles like DMZ//38 or EuroNanoForum 2009 could weather a deletion discussion today.

Why so many moths?

The Wikipedia community’s policies and practices around which articles are “notable” (worthy of an article) and which get deleted have a healthy pragmatism to them. If Wikipedia allowed articles about anything, we would see a lot more articles about obscure garage bands, businesses, and living people. The authors of these articles would not be disinterested scholars writing with the goal of expanding the largest collection of knowledge on the internet. Rather, we would get a lot of editors with conflicts of interest, using Wikipedia for publicity, profit, or to settle a score. Before the community tightened up its notability criteria, it was not so uncommon in the very early days of the project to see blatant autobiographies, advertisements, or attack pages. Here are just a few examples based on real articles from Wikipedia’s early years which have since been deleted (names and details have been altered to protect the “innocent”):

Mian Amir Rashid is the youngest elected chairman of Pakistan chapter of Mensa. He assumed the post in 2001 at the age of 23. Under his tenure Mensa has grown very rapidly and now operating in 5 cities of Pakistan including Karachi, Lahore & Capital Islamabad

Mr. Rashid is a Public Relations & Marketing consultant by profession.

Union Cab is a cab company in Saint Paul, MN. They can be reached at http://www.unioncab.biz or 555-242-2000.

–Sam

Trevor Shelby is a Canadian businessman and robotics engineer. He is the founder and CEO of Polybonk.

Mr. Shelby and Polybonk were the subject of a Human Rights Tribunal of Quebec inquiry alleging discrimination in employment practices.^[1] During the course of the inquiry, Mr. Shelby’s professional qualifications were called into question.^[2]

Shelby also created controversy in a highly publicized case of road rage. According to the police report, he menaced another driver with a tennis racquet while hurling obscenities.^[3]

The Ghosties are a small band from Melbourne. Nick sings and plays guitar, Sumeet plays bass if he hasn’t been naughty, Clark plays guitar properly and Kris makes the band seem good on the drums.

With their trademark songs Dear Robby, and Firecracker, this band are very cool, and their unmeasurable spontaneity is the stuff of legends. Learn more about The Ghosties on their website. The Forum should contain the dates and times of any upcoming gigs.

Over time, Wikipedia has developed a strong immune response against those who would try to use it for nefarious purposes, in the form of strict sourcing requirements for the sorts of topics shown above (e.g. living people, companies, bands). The existence of, say, the Union Cab company may be verifiable via primary sources, such as local business listings, but that’s not enough to secure it a place on Wikipedia. It needs significant coverage in multiple independent secondary sources. It makes sense then that we see almost no articles about these sorts of topics in the bottom 500. Any subject that meets these strict sourcing requirements is probably going to be of interest to someone beyond just those surfing the “Random article” button.

On the other hand, no-one has yet come up with a way to monetize a topic like Pseudoneuroterus mazandarani or use it to push a contentious point of view. Hence articles about species and populated places are generally not deleted, even if the topic is only weakly sourced – and most of our unpopular articles are weakly sourced, often having just a single citation to a primary source such as a database or gazetteer, or a passing mention in a single book or journal article.

Because the bar for these topics is so low, many of these articles feel a little soulless, having the appearance of being popped out via a mechanical (perhaps even fully automated) process. For example, the 12-word stub Pottallinda (5 views last year) was created on 18 January 2011 by User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao, who happens to be the most active editor in all of Wikipedia (as measured by number of edits). Within 60 seconds of creating this page, the same editor also created Polmalagama, Polommana, Polpitiya, Polwatta, and dozens of other substantially identical articles.

But hey, these hyper-obscure, tiny articles aren’t doing any harm (other than maybe disappointing the dozen people per year who land on them, rather than a more interesting fleshed-out article, when hitting the “Random article” button), and they lay a groundwork that other editors might build on in the future.

The pageview data used in this post, as well as the code used to scrape and analyse it, is available on GitHub here.

Originally published by Colin Morris at colinmorris.github.io on May 26, 2022

Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

24/05/2022-30/05/2022

Mapping campaigns

• The US OpenStreetMap chapter has launched a new Mapping for Impact campaign. In partnership with the Rising Tide Effect association, they’ll map swimming pools in New York, in order to raise awareness of swimming skills education.

Mapping

• MapComplete has created a Twitter account on the occasion of its two year anniversary. For a Mastodon account weeklyOSM recommends the use of en.osm.town.
• bxl_forever asked, on Mastodon, for a suitable tag for colourful crossings, e.g. in Brussels.
• Anne-Karoline Distel has posted a video titled ‘Mapping the history around Ballyadams Castle’.
• Push-f is waiting for your comments on his proposal to introduce the new tagging net=* to indicate whether a net (e.g. volleyball or table tennis) is available at a sports pitch.
• The voting on amenity=ticket_validator, to tag ticket validators to gain access to something like public transport or parking garages, finished with with 31 votes for, 1 vote against, and 0 abstentions.
• Voting is underway until:
  • Friday 10 June for aeroway=aircraft_crossing to mark a point where the flow of traffic is impacted by crossing aircraft.
  • Thursday 9 June for substation=* to improve tagging of power substations and transformers mixing on the same node.

Community

• Following a request, Donat Robaux vented > some anger against GéoDAE and other defibrillator databases which are either too complex to use, lack proper maintenance, or are actively guarded > .
• You can vote on the proposal to add the translate extension to the OSM Wiki now.

Imports

• User nyampire published a simple analysis > of results from a community survey about the proposed Plateau Building dataset import plan > . The import plan is acceptable for most of the Japanese community, but the article focused on the negative answers and how to address them.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The official Twitter account of the OSMF requested verified status (‘blue tick’), and was rejected. Some replies suggest that this may be because the account, managed by the Communications Working Group, is not very active.
• The Engineering Working Group (EWG) is asking for bids on projects. EWG is asking for comments on the first project until tomorrow 6 June.

Local chapter news

• The May 2022 newsletter from OSM-US is out.
• The OSMF Japan chapter has started hosting > aerial imagery published by local governments. These aerial images are under Open License or Japanese survey law. As a result OSMF Japan chapter has the appropriate waivers or permissions from governments. OSMF Japan would like to expand > coverage with local mappers.

Education

• Mark Litwintschik explained, in his tutorial ‘The Streets of Monaco’, how to extract the street network data of Monaco from OpenStreetMap, import it into PostgreSQL and render it using a tile server. The tutorial also shows you how to highlight the Formula 1 track using QGIS.

OSM research

• Geoinformatics researchers from Heidelberg are using social media and OpenStreetMap data to provide navigation services with up-to-date traffic information that allows them to determine optimal routes and calculate travel time. The project is called ‘SocialMedia2Traffic’ and will be integrated into OpenRouteService.
• Hao Li reported on a published a paper that proposes a method for detecting wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) accurately and automatically via remote sensing. By leveraging OpenStreetMap and multimodal remote sensing data this novel joint deep learning method is able to simultaneously tackle land use, land cover, and WWTP classification.

Humanitarian OSM

• [1] The UN Mappers held a week-long workshop in Nairobi on Unite Maps services and OSM. Personnel from UNSOS, the UN Peacekeeping mission operating in Somalia, learned how to contribute to open geospatial data and engage with the OSM community. OSM Kenya also participated in the workshop and provided useful inputs.
• UniqueMappersTeam, from Nigeria, is working with UNEP to facilitate a Mapathon to improve OSM data quality in Rivers State.

Maps

• Stefano Bovio used matter.js and OpenStreetMap data for an experiment where the typical ‘You are here’ point is influenced by gravity and buildings are obstacles on its path through the map.
• Tracestrack has initiated an open source project aiming to create a language vector overlay style for Openlayers. The vector layer overlays on top of a raster base map. This hybrid approach combines the power of mapnik and Openlayers, to support more sophisticated multi-language, region-specific rendering. Currently, the vector tiles are published from pnorman/openstreetmap-cartographic. Tracestrack has published an OpenLayers-Cartographic-Label-Style demo on Github.
• Christoph Hormann has written, in his blog, about ‘Tree depiction in traditional maps and plans’ and, in a second article, about ‘Trees in OpenStreetMap‘.

Software

• A Bolivian TV host said that OSM-based Trufi App is ‘an app fallen from heaven’. Congratulations @Trufi.
• A few days ago you may have noticed the performance of the OSM Wiki was unusually slow. This was due to a web scraper misdirecting itself.

Programming

• Stéphane Guillou has released his R package ‘osmexport’, which is useful for downloading, reading, preparing and visualising OpenStreetMap data from exports you would get from the OSM website’s ‘Export’ page or the other diverse download tools in the OSM ecosystem.

Releases

• The Vespucci editor has an updated privacy statement.

Did you know …

• … Mariotomo’s blog post, where he explained some of the problems faced by our readers in countries with poor and/or expensive internet connections? He has a relatively simple solution which may be of interest to others: using a bash script to pull items from the RSS feed.
• … the OpenStreetMap promotional material that can be usefully used at events?
• … Waymarked trails hiking maps? This site offers bicycle trails, mountain bike routes, inline skating, equestrian trails and winter sports trails.

Other “geo” things

• EOX IT Services GmbH has launched EOGuesser, a browser game where one has three tries to locate the daily satellite view on an OpenStreetMap based map.
• Christopher Beddow discusses, in his blog, the transition from map making to ‘world building’, and helps the reader understand how building worlds can go beyond just making a map.
• HeiGIT, the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology, is still looking for a Senior Science Manager – Innovation & Research Manager GIScience (m, f, d), 100%, permanent.
• HeiGIT is also looking for student assistants for a number of tasks related to geoinformatics and the use of OpenStreetMap data.
• Jean-Marc Liotier filmed and commented on his bicycle trip from Paris to Cannes.
• Take a look at this coloured visualisation of Dutch postal codes connected in ascending order.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Maseru	#MapLesotho Mapathon		2022-06-03 – 2022-07-03
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-06-06
Bologna	Open Data Pax: OsmAnd e passeggiata-mappatura OSM al Pratello		2022-06-06
City of Westminster	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-06-07
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-06-08
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #36 (Online)	✓	2022-06-07
Großarl	5. Virtueller OpenStreetMap Stammtisch Österreich		2022-06-08
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-06-09
Brno	Brno Missing Maps mapathon		2022-06-08
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-06-09
Nantes	State of the Map France 2022		2022-06-10 – 2022-06-12
Belém	Mapatona de Ananindeua – Meninas da Geo		2022-06-10
Brandenburg	168. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2022-06-10
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #41		2022-06-13
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2022-06-15
Berlin	Missing Maps – GRC Online Mapathon		2022-06-14
20095	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2022-06-14
Guadalajara	Curso Gratuito JOSM		2022-06-16
Arrondissement de Tours	La liberté numérique		2022-06-18
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第31回 妙法院		2022-06-18
新店區	OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團 #2 三峽-大溪踏查		2022-06-19
Arlon	EPN d’Arlon – Atelier ouvert OpenStreetMap – Initiation		2022-06-21
	152. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-06-21
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-06-22
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-06-21
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-06-21
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-06-24
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2022-06-25
	Tanzania Mapping Groups June Mapathon		2022-06-25

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, derFred, Can.

On 1 May 2022, World Press Freedom Day, the Wikimedia Foundation and Observatorio Latinoamericano de Regulación, Medios y Convergencia (OBSERVACOM) organized an open debate in Punta del Este, Uruguay. Doing so was part of our efforts to support events for digital rights activists, who advocate for policies and regulations that promote human rights on the internet. Entitled More Transparency in Content Moderation: How Do We Achieve It?, the open discussion brought together representatives of civil society and experts from the Latin American and Caribbean region to address the need for greater transparency of content moderation decisions by internet platforms. For the Wikimedia Foundation, this is a crucial issue, as transparency is a necessary tool to promote and protect the values of free knowledge and freedom of expression that guide our projects. 

The participants, who attended both in-person and online, shared ideas and visions to effectively reach such transparency, exploring the functions and region-specific characteristics of potential governance models. They discussed and agreed on the need to take a proactive approach, which included presenting proposals for democratic regulation of transparency and accountability of large commercial platforms. Regulatory pathways taken elsewhere, such as the European Union’s Digital Service Act (DSA), were cited as inspiration for the region, where legislative discussions not only have lacked open and inclusive processes of public deliberation, but also where a human rights approach to regulatory proposals has been met with hostility. Within Latin America and the Caribbean, there is a diversity of forces and interests—including political, commercial, and social interests—at play in regulatory debates.

One of the most engaging—and revealing—issues discussed was whether countries in the region have the necessary institutional framework to oversee the eventual transparency obligations of large commercial platforms. Although this topic was particularly challenging, participants offered several ideas. For example, a researcher at the Institute of Digital Development for Latin America and the Caribbean (IDD LAC) observed that a potential pathway could be one that takes advantage of existing institutions such as the ombudsperson for children, consumers or audiences, as well as data protection authorities, so that these can be tasked to carry out such oversight. OBSERVACOM also invited participants to think about adopting models similar to those implemented by national health institutes in the region, which have made the studies and analyses of their counterparts in the United States and Canada the starting points for their own—hence benefiting from the fact that the latter generally have more capacity and resources.

There was a consensus among the participants that regulatory measures to be adopted should be applied with caution and balance, recognizing the variety of stakeholders that exist in the digital ecosystem. To provide further food for thought, representatives of Brazilian civil society presented on the lawmaking process underlying Bill 2630 on Freedom, Responsibility, and Transparency on the Internet, which includes a series of transparency obligations on advertising, operation, and content moderation of large commercial platforms. This process shows how, despite broad consensus among all stakeholders in Brazil that regulation is necessary and expected, there can be a clash of political forces and interests throughout the legislative discussion. Yet, there are high expectations that this process and proposal will establish a good transparency standard for the region. However, given the competing interests at stake, the final resolution of this process remains to be seen.

In conclusion, the participants concurred that it is fair to say that a regulation claiming to be democratic must be built by listening to and considering the different voices involved in the discussion. In addition, such regulation must aim to foster a vibrant digital citizenry and an environment in which human rights can thrive both online and offline. For that reason, we are pleased to contribute toward generating spaces for open and inclusive public deliberation about an internet that is participatory and equitable, and are ready to continue supporting and being part of that dialogue in the Latin America and the Caribbean region and elsewhere.

Release Engineering's "GitLab-a-thon" sprint for May 10th-24th (roughly) focused on the mechanics of migrating a Wikimedia service to GitLab, setting up a CI pipeline, building container images from that service, and publishing images to the Wikimedia registry. We selected the Blubber project as a good candidate for experimentation:

• Workboard: Release-Engineering-Team (GitLab-a-thon 🦊)
• T301168: Migrate Blubber project to GitLab
• T307536: Build Blubber images on GitLab

We evaluated build mechanisms including GitLab's suggested docker-in-docker, Kaniko, Podman, and BuildKit:

• T307599: Investigate alternatives to docker-in-docker for container image creation in GitLab
• T308213: Investigate Kaniko as an option to build CI images
• T307810: Investigate buildkitd instances as image builders for GitLab

We ultimately landed on BuildKit as the least constraining for future options, and the most in line with features we'd like to offer.

We explored a range of options for building and publishing, including variations on:

• Building on runners provisioned on a DigitalOcean Kubernetes cluster and importing to the production registry from some trusted location (contint, for example) by way of a shim.
• Building on trusted runners and publishing to the GitLab Container Registry, then importing to the production registry by way of a shim.
• Building on trusted runners and publishing directly from there to the prod registry, authenticated against GitLab by way of JWT.

We eventually landed on this latter, and work is well underway on implementation: T308501: Authenticate trusted runners for registry access against GitLab using temporary JSON Web Token

Other work included implementing CI for Blubber on GitLab (T307534), improvements to user-facing documentation (T307535, T307538), enforcing the allowlist for container images in GitLab CI (T291978), experimentation with the GitLab Container Registry (T307537), and extensive discussions with ServiceOps on GitLab infrastructure.

The Wikimania 2022 Core Organizing Team wants to work with you! Sign up to join us at the Wikimania Festival (August 11-14) to support in one of the following roles:

1. Trust and Safety: remind people of the Friendly Space Policy and serve as a resource for anyone needing support
2. Session Q&A Facilitators: Relay audience questions to the speakers and help speakers manage their question queue
3. Tent Managers: Help manage spaces like the Hackathon, Community Village and more
4. Help Desk: Staff the central area for attendees to go if they have any questions about programming, platform, languages and more
5. Newcomer Host: Run activities and host sessions that welcome first-time Wikimania attendees – be a buddy to a newcomer
6. Newcomer Desk: Answer any questions and provide support to first-time Wikimania attendees

We will provide training for all volunteers – no prior experience is necessary. The hours will be flexible and based on your availability, but we do prefer that volunteers support at least six hours during the event. Please note that the working language of the Wikimania organizers is English. 

Privacy statement

Don’t see the area you’d like to support in? Feel free to add it to the survey.

We look forward to celebrating with you at this year’s Wikimania Festival!

Here I share some thoughts around the history of "responsive" MediaWiki skins and how we might want to think about it for Vector.

The buzzword "responsive" is thrown around a lot in Wikimedia-land, but essentially what we are talking about is whether to include a single tag in the page. The addition of a meta tag with name viewport, will tell the page how to adapt to a mobile device.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

More information: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/html/responsive-meta-tag/

Since the viewport tag must be added, by default websites are not made mobile-friendly. Given the traditional Wikimedia skins were built before mobile sites and this tag existed, CologneBlue, Modern, Vector did not add this tag.

When viewing these skins on mobile the content will not adapt to the device and instead will appear zoomed out. One of the benefits of this is that the reader sees a design that is consistent with the design they see on desktop. The interface is familiar and easy enough to navigate as the user can pinch and zoom to parts of the UI. The downside is that reading is very difficult, and requires far more hand manipulation to move between sentences and paragraphs, and for this reason, many search engines will penalize traffic.

Enter Minerva

The Minerva skin (and MobileFrontend before it) were introduced to allow us to start adapting our content for mobile. This turned out to be a good decision as it avoided the SEO of our projects from being penalized. However, building Minerva showed that making content mobile-friendly was more than adding a meta tag. For example, many templates used HTML elements with fixed widths that were bigger than the available space. This was notably a problem with large tables. Minerva swept many of these issues under the rug with generic fixes (For example enforcing horizontal scrolling on tables). Minerva took a bottom-up approach where it added features only after they were mobile-friendly. The result of this was a minimal experience that was not popular with editors.

Timeless

Timeless was the 2nd responsive skin added to Wikimedia wikis. It was popular with editors as it took a different approach to Minerva, in that it took a top-down approach, adding features despite their shortcomings on a mobile screen. It ran into many of the same issues that Minerva had e.g. large tables and copied many of the solutions in Minerva.

MonoBook

During the building of Timeless, the Monobook skin was made responsive (T195625). Interestingly this led to a lot of backlash from users (particularly on German Wikipedia), revealing that many users did not want a skin that adapted to the screen (presumably because of the reasons I outlined earlier - while reading is harder, it's easier to get around a complex site. Because of this, a preference was added to allow editors to disable responsive mode (the viewport tag). This preference was later generalized to apply to all skins:

Responsive Vector

Around the same time, several attempts were made by volunteers to force Vector to work as a responsive skin. This was feature flagged given the backlash for MonoBook's responsive mode. The feature flag saw little development, presumably because many gadgets popped up that were providing the same service.

Vector 2022

The feature flag for responsive Vector was removed for legacy Vector in T242772 and efforts were redirected into making the new Vector responsive. Currently, the Vector skin can be resized comfortably down to 500px. It currently does not add a viewport tag, so does not adapt to a mobile screen.

However, during the building of the table of contents, many mobile users started complaining (T306910). The reason for this was that when you don't define a viewport tag the browser makes decisions for you. To avoid these kind of issues popping up it might make sense for us to define an explicit viewport to request content that appears scaled out at a width of our choosing. For example, we could explicitly set width 1200px with a zoom level of 0.25 and users would see:

If Vector was responsive, it would encourage people to think about mobile-friendly content as they edit on mobile. If editors insist on using the desktop skin on their mobile phones rather than Minerva, they have their reasons, but by not serving them a responsive skin, we are encouraging them to create content that does not work in Minerva and skins that adapt to the mobile device.

There is a little bit more work needed on our part to deal with content that cannot hit into 320px e.g. below 500px. Currently if the viewport tag is set, a horizontal scrollbar will be shown - for example the header does not adapt to that breakpoint:

Decisions to be made

1. Should we enable Vector 2022's responsive mode? The only downside of doing this is that some users may dislike it, and need to visit preferences to opt-out.
2. When a user doesn't want responsive mode, should we be more explicit about what we serve them? For example, should we tell a mobile device to render at a width of 1000px with a scale of 0.25 ( 1/4 of the normal size) ? This would avoid issues like T306910. Example code [1] demo
3. Should we apply the responsive mode to legacy Vector too? This would fix T291656 as it would mean the option applies to all skins.

[1]

<meta name="viewport" content="width=1400px, initial-scale=0.22">

The Wikimedia Foundation is proud this year to support RightsCon for the second time. This global summit, hosted by AccessNow, brings together people from around the world to discuss human rights in the digital age. This year our financial support of the conference as well as our presence at it are both unique. 

The Foundation has contributed funds to RightsCon’s accessibility initiatives and Connectivity Fund. This assistance is closely tied to our movement’s vision of a world in which all people can freely participate in the sum of all knowledge. By providing support to make the conference accessible in more languages, across more devices, and via additional internet connectivity, we help welcome the knowledge and communities that have been excluded by historical structures of power and privilege. Early numbers released by the RightsCon organizers indicate the fund is likely successful in prompting knowledge equity: out of a total of 717 individual applications, 98% came from the Global South, 54% were from women or non-binary people, and 86% featured first-time applicants. 

To make Wikimedia more visible at the event, this year our Global Advocacy and Public Policy team called upon Wikimedians from around the world to partner with us in order to submit proposals for sessions and conversations that we could host and hold together. Not only does the Wikimedia community have unique perspectives and expertise, but editors and other volunteers are also our strongest allies in advocating for laws, policies, and norms that promote and protect free knowledge and Wikimedia projects. RightsCon ’22 will feature ten sessions where Wikipedians are hosts and/or participants, five of which were co-created with our team. Members of our movement will be championing Wikimedia approaches on emerging challenges to a free and open internet, including privacy and surveillance, internet access, inclusion, and internet shutdowns and disruptions.

Below is an overview of the sessions with Wikimedia participation. Foundation staff or Wikimedia volunteers who are interested in attending RightsCon can register for free until 3 June 2022. We hope to see you there!

The five sessions that were submitted with members from the community

Fighting disinformation in Persian Wikipedia: The good, the bad, the AI

Format: Tech Demo

Presenter: Amir Sarabadani (Wikimedian)

Details: This tech demo covers two tools that members of Persian Wikipedia developed to combat government disinformation campaigns. These tools have made it possible to share and update information on Persian Wikipedia without the fear of persecution. As such, they have become crucial to foster the resilience of Persian Wikipedia and may inspire other groups to bring similar initiatives back to their communities.

Using Wikipedia to advance human rights and democracy, using constructive conflict to create quality articles 

Format: Workshop

Presenters: Luisinia Ferrante (Wikimedia Argentina), Spencer Graves (Wikimedian), Franziska Putz (Wikimedia Foundation)

Details: This workshop will demonstrate how controversy can be a productive force behind “the wisdom of crowds” that makes it possible for websites like Wikipedia to share freely accessible information online. Case studies on Spanish, Chinese, French, and English Wikipedia articles will demonstrate how their development was informed by social, economic, and political debates in each of the contexts they describe as well as by the different perspectives and approaches between volunteer editors. This session will expose participants to the experience of co-creating knowledge about human rights online.

No “right” approach, but many effective ones: Moderation approaches for online information about political processes

Format: Workshop

Presenters: Patricia Díaz-Rubio (Wikimedia Chile), Augustina Del Campo (CELE), Kate Levan (Wikimedia Foundation), Nathan Forrester (Wikimedia Foundation)

Details: This immersive workshop brings together organizations with unique, community-led moderation approaches in order to present participants with case studies on disinformation around electoral processes. Panelists will engage participants in analyzing the issues at hand, discussing challenges to moderating specific content, and will then walk the audience through the moderation process employed in their context. The goal of the session is for the audience to experience how hard the job is, as well as the variety of effective approaches there are to content moderation, debunking the idea that there is a single, perfect process for moderating online spaces. 

How lawmakers in Southeast Asia can safeguard human rights while addressing online disinformation during elections

Format: Panel

Presenters: Rachel Arinii Judhistari (Wikimedia Foundation), Kristina Gadaingan (ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights), Members of Parliament from the Philippines and Thailand

Details: This interactive panel seeks to broaden the discussion about human rights safeguards within internet regulation regimes in Southeast Asia, especially the nuances surrounding online campaigning and the rising threat of disinformation, how they influence political conversations, and also potentially undermine electoral processes. The panel will pose these questions to the members of parliaments, civil society, and platform hosts. It will allow participants to contribute to the free-flowing discussion, and to provide perspectives from their own experiences and contexts as well.

#WikiforHumanRights: Creating and editing human rights content on Wikipedia

Format: Workshop

Presenters: Faisal Da Supremo (Wikimedia Ghana),  Kolawole Oyewole (Wiki Fan Club, and Lagos State University), Iván Martínez (Wikimedia México), Luisina Ferrante (Wikimedia Argentina), Alex Stinson (Wikimedia Foundation)

Details: This workshop will introduce participants to the basic skills needed to create and edit human rights content on Wikipedia. Experienced Wikipedians will teach basic editing skills, share best practices around citing reputable sources, and answer participants’ questions during this interactive session. Participants are encouraged to identify articles on human rights concepts or content that are lacking or need to be bolstered in their linguistic communities before the session. The session will provide open editing time for participants to create or edit content on their selected topics with the assistance of experienced Wikipedians. It will conclude with a review of best practices, an update on the #WikiForHumanRights campaign, and a question and answer period.

In addition, Wikimedians will be hosting and participating in a series of other sessions

When you can’t see your city (online): Why you don’t want a country without Freedom of Panorama (FOP)

Format: Lightning Talk

Presenters: Ramzy Muliawan (Wikimedia Indonesia)

Details: This lightning talk examines the freedom of panorama (FOP), and how the absence of this limitation on copyright threatens the implementation of Wikimedia’s 2030 strategy to “provide for safety and inclusion,” especially in countries where Wikimedia communities are emerging. The talk will review the existing freedom of panorama regulations (or lack thereof) in Indonesia, and propose to Wikimedia organizations and communities in Indonesia, as well as other emerging Wikimedia communities and like-minded partners, how to best navigate the muddy waters of the clash between the underdeveloped policy landscape and the ever-changing nature of online efforts to preserve and free knowledge.

The danger of neglecting “non-lucrative” languages

Format: Lightning Talk

Presenters: Anass Sedrati (Wikimedia Morocco)

Details: Having access to information in your mother tongue is a basic human right. Wikimedia projects may be doing well compared to other actors, but how can they be improved as well? Although languages in the digital world are not represented equally, Wikimedia projects have helped to represent more languages online, since the only prerequisites to have a Wikipedia in a particular language is an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) code and an active community. Yet even on Wikipedia projects this process is imperfect. This lightning talk explores the fraught manner in which languages are represented online, and puts forward the argument that more individuals need to be involved in enriching Wikimedia content, and in diversifying the languages that are represented on other platforms.

Regulation for the few or many?

Format: Panel

Presenters: Caroline Greer (TikTok), Konstantinos Komaitis (The New York Times), Rebecca MacKinnon (Wikimedia Foundation), Jillian York (EFF), Eliška Pírková (AccessNow)

Details: This panel will discuss the risks associated with policymakers and legislators around the world crafting legislation with a small subset of large companies in mind. The panelists will discuss the theme using the latest policy development initiatives and practical examples. What is the impact on the broader tech ecosystem of one-size-fits-all laws? How can we ensure equitable policymaking that works for users as well? The session seeks to make recommendations on how the risks can be minimized, and how we can evolve to a more sophisticated model of tech policy- and lawmaking.

Building a digital rights initiative in the Caribbean 

Format: Social Hour

Presenters: Wikimedians of the Caribbean User Group, JAAKLAC initiative, AfroCrowd, Access Now

Details: Social hours are an informal space where participants with common interests can connect and expand a network or coalition. There is no participation limit, so come along!

Empowering Community Content Moderation

Format: Panel

Presenters: Jessica Ashooh (Reddit), Rose Coogan (Github), Allison Davenport (Wikimedia Foundation), Guillaume Rischard (OpenStreetMap Foundation)

Details: The panel will feature policy leadership from a variety of platforms with community content moderation, who will discuss best practices for fostering effective, scalable, and rights-based community content moderation online. Along with touching on the advantages of community moderation, the panel will also discuss challenges with the model, and how policies for digital communication can leave room for individuals to participate in effective self-regulation, collaboration, and good faith moderation of online content.

* Please note that session dates and times might be subject to change. For up-to-date information on these, please check the RightsCon schedule.

Got your attention with that provocative title? Good.

No, I absolutely don’t want Wikipedia to be less Free in terms of copyright and licenses and all that. I wrote the Wikipedia:The Free Encyclopedia essay on the English Wikipedia, and I still totally support it.

With that out of the way, there’s another aspect of “Free” in the Wikipedia world, which is not frequently discussed, and I’ve just realized that it’s kind of important.

What is the most translated book in the world? The Bible, of course. Why is it the most translated book? Because there are people who are emotionally attached to it, who want to spread it around the planet, and who are willing to donate money to organizations who translate and distribute it, and these organizations are actually good at what they do.

It’s not so important that it’s the Bible that happens to be the most translated book. If it wasn’t the Bible, it would be something else: some other religious book, or The Declaration of Human Rights, or The Communist Manifesto, or Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or Twelfth Night, or The Little Prince. I mean, what is the Bible? It’s a book; it has a beginning and an end. Sure, different Christian confessions can argue about the Apocrypha, the sequence of the books, the inclusion of some verses, the translation of some theologically significant words, and so on, but this is also completely unimportant for our issue; most of the Bible is the same in all confessions.

Now, because I love translation, I quite often read about organizations who engage in translating the Bible: Wycliffe, SIL, JW, Latter-Day Saints, etc. Wycliffe, for example, can publish an image like this one:

They can speak about “a full Bible” and to give a count of how many languages have one, because they know what the Bible is.

It’s not about religion. You could just as well make such a report about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or about Things Fall Apart. And you don’t even have to make such a report about these famous, iconic books: I’m sure that in the marketing department of every Hollywood studio there are people who make dozens of reports like this about translating movies every year. Like books, movies have a beginning and an end. So it’s really not about the Bible; the Bible just happens to be one book that attracts exceptional fame and emotion, so it’s useful as an example.

But could you make such a report about Wikipedia? Not quite.

That’s because we don’t really know what Wikipedia is. Unlike a book, it doesn’t have a clear beginning and an end. In languages that have an active Wikipedia editing community, it is changing so frequently, and so differently from other languages, that we can’t define what is “a Wikipedia” in a way that “translating Wikipedia” would mean “writing all the same things, just in another language”. You could perhaps say this about a single Wikipedia article, and you’d have challenges even with that, but you can’t say it about a whole Wikipedia.

We can make technical statements: “There is a Wikipedia in English; There is a Wikipedia in Japanese; There is a Wikipedia in Zulu; There is a Wikipedia in Hungarian”. For each of these languages, there is a *.wikipedia.org domain, and it leads to a website that has the same name and the same puzzle globe logo, and runs on more or less the same software platform. There is some overlap in the articles that each of these sites has, but defining this overlap is too elusive.

Having a domain does not necessarily mean that there is a full-fledged Wikipedia in a language. A Wikipedia needs articles and readers. For example: Intuitively, we can say that while the Zulu Wikipedia is not worthless, it is not nearly as useful to Zulu speakers as the Hungarian Wikipedia is to Hungarian speakers, even though both languages have a comparable number of speakers. The one in Zulu has much fewer articles and readers than the one in Hungarian.

So does it mean that to be useful, the Zulu Wikipedia has to translate all the articles from the Hungarian Wikipedia, or the English one? No. I have proof, which is also based on my intuition and not on data, but I doubt that anyone will reject it, even though it’s somewhat paradoxical. I’d argue that the Hungarian Wikipedia is more or less as useful for Hungarian speakers as the English Wikipedia, even though it has much fewer articles. Within the country of Hungary, the Hungarian Wikipedia gets more than twice the pageviews than the English Wikipedia does. This probably means that the Hungarian Wikipedia editors are quite good at guessing what things do other Hungarian speakers want to read about, and in writing articles about them, so Hungarian speakers are usually able to find lots of things they need there without having to search for it in another language (or giving up because they don’t know any other language). Unfortunately, the Zulu Wikipedia is not there yet. I know a few Zulu Wikipedians and they are wonderful, but it will take some time and effort to make the Zulu Wikipedia into an online encyclopedia that is as useful and robust as the one in Hungarian, or Hebrew, or English.

But still, even though it’s based on some data, all of that is mostly intuition. It all sounds correct, but we have no precisely defined way to measure it comprehensively. We can precisely answer the question “how many languages have the Bible” or “how many languages have Winnie-the-Pooh” because we know what these books are, but we cannot precisely and usefully answer the question “how many languages have a Wikipedia”, because we don’t know what “a Wikipedia” is.

We can know this about a certain small part of Wikipedia: the localization of its software platform, MediaWiki. The list of strings to translate is well-defined. It often changes, because the software is being actively developed, but on any given day you can easily get a report that says: “Language X has Y% of the software needed to run Wikipedia”. That’s because the software is largely the same in all the languages (with some caveats); in other words, it has a beginning and an end.

OK, but the software is not that useful without the content. So why don’t we similarly define what articles must exist in a Wikipedia to determine that it is a Wikipedia, and that it’s actually useful?

Well, because of that other subtle freedom: The community of Wikipedia writers in every language is free to decide which articles they want to write, and what is encyclopedically notable or non-notable for them. This freedom is generally a Good Thing: People who live in different countries and speak different languages have different needs and interests, and no one in their right mind should want to enforce a list of what Wikipedia articles must exist on people from another culture.

But what if we could suggest such a list? In a way, we already do: There’s the somewhat-famous List of articles every Wikipedia should have. That list has a bunch of problems, however.

It is manually curated by… some people, with whose Wikipedia usernames I’m not familiar. I have nothing against them; the work they do may be very good, but I don’t feel like they are widely recognized as an authority. I might be wrong.

In addition, how is this list used structurally? What can you do with it, other than just read it? There are some bots and Wikidata queries that measure how well does the Wikipedia in every language cover the topics on that list. For example, there’s an automatic report of which articles from this list are missing in each language. While these tools may be convenient for experienced Wikipedians, I doubt that they are good at encouraging masses of potential editors to improve the content coverage in their language. (Again, do correct me if I’m wrong.)

Finally, it is just one such list. While the articles on it may indeed be important for all of humanity, people who speak different languages will need additional articles about things that interest them. Of course, this list doesn’t try to enforce its own exclusivity, and people are free to create additional custom lists that match their cultural and regional needs… but that brings us back to the problem: Sure, freedom to make your own lists is good and essential, but if people in every language have to reinvent the wheel and do it manually, it’s difficult and inefficient. And if it’s not done systematically and uniformly for all languages, you can only use intuition and not precise measurement to decide whether a language really has a Wikipedia or not.

And that, I’d say, is too much freedom. Wikipedia should be a bit less free in this regard. I’ll repeat: No, not to force people to write about things that other people in another country decided that they must write, but to have a global way to decide on a task list, of what should be done and what was done already. A nudge.

Do I have anything to suggest as a fix to this problem? Not much, except identifying it: We cannot usefully define a Wikipedia, and we can only know it when we see it.

Still, what I can think about is a two-part approach. The first part is formulating a global community policy to determine at which point does a Wikipedia become really useful. Don’t call it “rules”; call it “recommended guidelines for measurable sustainable growth”. Sounds bureaucratic in the style of U.N. and E.U., but read it carefully—I actually mean it. If done well, it might work. By “work”, I mean “get Wikipedia in all languages to grow and become more useful for people who speak these languages”.

It would include things such as:

1. A global list of articles that every language should have, with globally important topics. Notice: should, not must! The “List of articles every Wikipedia should have” can probably be a starting point, but the discussion about forming and updating it should probably be wider, more structured, and endorsed by some recognized community body, such as the Board or the Language committee.
2. A local list of articles that a language should have. The list itself will be different in each language, but the method to build it will be the same, so that languages can be compared.
3. The expected length of each article and some heuristic quality markers: section headings, references, links, etc.
4. An expected number of how many people write these articles, proportinally to the number of people who speak the language.
5. An expected number of how many people read these articles, proportinally to the number of people who speak the language (this can be measured by counting pageviews in regions where each language is spoken).
6. A method to update these lists and the policy itself.

And the second part is building structured, integrated technical tools that help implement that policy:

1. Entering the lists into a structured database (that is, not a free-form wiki page).
2. Tracking the progress of the Wikipedia in each language from being just a domain with some test articles fresh out of the Incubator to being a full-fledged Wikipedia that people regularly edit, read, and rely on. “Tracking” means auto-generated tables, charts, and progress bars.
3. Nudging people to come in and contribute to achieving that goal for their language by writing or translating articles, improving (“wikifying”) existing articles, and so on.

Why would people want to coöperate with these rules and use them? Maybe they won’t, and that’s OK. But from my years of talking to people from all over the world who want to create a Wikipedia in their language, or who want to develop the one that they have, I repeatedly heard that what they want is a Wikipedia, mostly like the one in big languages such as English, French, Indonesian, or Russian, but in their language. It’s unreasonably difficult to do it without first defining what a Wikipedia is, and doing it in a way that relies on definitions and guidelines and not only on intuition and freedom.

One of the central components of the American Physical Society (APS)’s mission is to share physics knowledge — and, since 2020, one way the association has done this is through partnering with Wiki Education to host a series of Wiki Scientists courses. In these courses, Wiki Education staff teach APS members — physicists — how to contribute to Wikipedia. Some courses have focused on improving Wikipedia’s coverage of physics topics, while others have focused on biographies of historically excluded physicists.

“In the APS Wiki Scientist courses, our members build their science communication and public engagement skills. They work on articles of notable women and historically marginalized groups in physics, increasing the visibility of these physicists. This helps expand the public perception of ‘who is a physicist’ and can promote broader participation in the discipline. They also contribute to articles on various physics topics, using their expertise to add information and supporting references. Articles with clear, accessible content help physics learners and can generate excitement for physics topics,” says Allie Lau, Public Engagement Programs Manager at APS. “Taken together, the contributions of APS members help develop Wikipedia content that accurately reflects the makeup of the physics community and the work of physicists.”

In the five courses to date, 84 APS members have added more than 109,000 words of content to 311 articles on Wikipedia. The physicists’ work has already been read more than 13 million times. For example, the nitrogen-vacancy center article edited by a participant in one of the courses has been read more than 58,000 times. From a biographies course, the new article on Qatari physicist Ilham Al-Qaradawi has been viewed more than 10,000 times. These examples showcase why these Wiki Scientist courses are helping advance APS’s mission. Participants report the courses are meaningful — and numbered among them is even a Nobel laureate!

In addition to supporting our overall partnership, Allie signed up to participate in the most recent Wikipedia course focused on improving biographies of underrepresented physicists. Since she has a background in physics education, Allie chose to expand the article on Lillian C. McDermott, a pioneer in the field.

“The course taught me the core pillars of Wikipedia editing and I learned about the neutral tone of voice to use in articles. I also learned about the guidelines for notability and verifiability,” Allie says. “Wiki Education provides our members with access to high quality training from expert Wikipedians who are also excellent teachers.”

Allie says she’d never used Wikipedia’s talk pages before taking the course. Understanding those helped Allie see the community of volunteer contributors who work tirelessly to keep Wikipedia the reliable source it is. Thanks to the course, Allie now feels comfortable participating in APS edit-a-thons and other Wikipedia events.

Overall, Allie says she enjoyed the course — and so did the members she took it with. APS routinely gets positive feedback from members who participate in the course, which leads them to keep partnering with Wiki Education to offer more courses. Up next is a Wikidata course, focused on improving the coverage of physics on the open linked data counterpart to Wikipedia.

Allie sees these Wiki Scientist courses, especially those focused on improving biographies of underrepresented physicists, to be an important part of APS’s strategy.

“A core part of the APS’s vision is to foster equity and inclusion in physics, and increase diversity in all its dimensions. When we improve the diversity of physicist biographies on Wikipedia, we are amplifying the voices and increasing the visibility of physicists from groups historically marginalized in the discipline,” Allie says. “This is important not only because it recognizes their contributions to the field, but also because it helps shift and expand the perception of who can be a physicist.”

She encourages APS’s peer academic associations who are also interested in improving representation in their discipline to consider partnering with Wiki Education to host courses.

“If other associations have the goals of fostering equity, inclusion, and diversity in their field, as well as increasing access to their discipline’s knowledge, Wikipedia is a great avenue to explore,” Allie says. “It is one of the most popular websites in the world and it is easy to contribute to.”

Interested in learning more about a Wikipedia or Wikidata course? Visit learn.wikiedu.org.

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

By Esma Gjertsen, Volunteer Coordinator at Wikimedia UK

I am very excited to join the Wikimedia community as a Volunteer Coordinator and look forward to contributing to volunteer engagement and diversity across the community.

I moved to the UK from Turkey where I worked as a freelance translator and civil servant for more than a decade. I studied translation for my undergraduate degree and continued my formal education with masters degrees in human rights and social policy.

I am driven by social justice and equal opportunities. I have been volunteering in the education, environment and family non-profits for almost twenty years, most recently in a UK based charity as a volunteer coordinator. I’m very happy about the career change I’m going through and joining the third sector as a professional to make a meaningful impact with my experience and skills. I am hoping to advance Wikimedia UK’s efforts to reach out and bring in more people from underrepresented communities and support them to share their knowledge and expertise through open and free platforms.

I am currently familiarising myself with our work (reading lots of articles and documents and talking to colleagues) – and am very eager to join in the mission.

I’m very open to new ideas and brainstorming – just reach out and say hello at [email protected].

The post Our new Volunteer Coordinator on engaging with the community appeared first on WMUK.

... Mr. Hume who lives in a most picturesque situation high up on Jakko, the house being about 7800 feet above the level of the sea. From my bedroom window I had a fine view of the snowy range. ... at last I stood in the celebrated museum and gazed at the dozens upon dozens of tin cases which filled the room ... quite three times as large as our meeting-room at the Zoological Society, and, of course, much more lofty. Throughout this large room went three rows of table-cases with glass tops, in which were arranged a series of the birds of India sufficient for the identification of each species, while underneath these table-cases were enormous cabinets made of tin, with trays inside, containing series of the birds represented in the table-cases above. All the specimens were carefully done up in brown-paper cases, each labelled outside with full particulars of the specimen within. Fancy the labour this represents with 60,000 specimens! The tin cabinets were all of materials of the best quality, specially ordered from England, and put together by the best Calcutta workmen. At each end of the room were racks reaching up to the ceiling, and containing immense tin cases full of birds. As one of these racks had to be taken down during the repairs of the north end of the museum, the entire space between the table-cases was taken up by the tin cases formerly housed in it, so that there was literally no space to walk between the rows. On the western side of the museum was the library, reached by a descent of three stops—a cheerful room, furnished with large tables, and containing, besides the egg-cabinets, a well-chosen set of working volumes. ... In a few minutes an immense series of specimens could be spread out on the tables, while all the books were at hand for immediate reference. ... we went below into the basement, which consisted of eight great rooms, six of them full, from floor to ceilings of cases of birds, while at the back of the house two large verandahs were piled high with cases full of large birds, such as Pelicans, Cranes, Vultures, &c.

I was certainly not hoping to find Hume's home as described but the situation turned out to be a lot worse. The first thing I did was to contact Professor Sriram Mehrotra, a senior historian who has published on the origins of the Indian National Congress. Prof. Mehrotra explained that Rothney Castle had long been altered with only the front facade retained along with the wood-framed conservatories. He said I could go and ask the caretaker for permission to see the grounds. He was sorry that he could not accompany me as it was physically demanding and he said that "the place moved him to tears." Professor Mehrotra also told me about how he had decided to live in Shimla simply because of his interest in Hume! I left him and walked to Christ Church and took the left branch going up to Jakhoo with some hopes. I met the caretaker of Rothney Castle in the garden where she was walking her dogs on a flat lawn, probably the same garden at the end of which there once had been a star-shaped flower bed, scene of the infamous brooch incident with Madame Blavatsky (see the theosophy section in Hume's biography on Wikipedia). It was a bit of a disappointment however as the caretaker informed me that I could not see the grounds unless the owner who lived in Delhi permitted it. Rothney Castle has changed hands so many times that it probably has nothing to match with what Bowdler-Sharpe saw and the grounds may very soon be entirely unrecognizable but for the name plaque at the entrance. Another patch of land in front of Rothney Castle was being prepared for what might become a multi-storeyed building. A botanist friend had shown me a 19th century painting of Shimla made by Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming. In her painting, the only building visible on Jakko Hill behind Christ Church is Rothney Castle. The vegetation on Shimla has definitely become denser with trees blocking the views.

 

Clearly Shimla empowered Hume, provided a stimulating environment which included several local collaborators. Who were his local collaborators in Shimla? I have only recently discovered (and notes with references are now added to the Wikipedia entry for R. C. Tytler) that Robert (of Tytler's warbler fame - although named by W E Brooks) and Harriet Tytler (of Mt. Harriet fame) had established a kind of natural history museum at Bonnie Moon in Shimla with  Lord Mayo's support. The museum closed down after Robert's death in 1872, and it is said that Harriet offered the bird specimens to the government. It would appear that at least some part of this collection went to Hume. It is said that the collection was packed away in boxes around 1873. The collection later came into possession of Mr B. Bevan-Petman who apparently passed it on to the Lahore Central Museum in 1917.

Hume's idea of mapping rainfall to examine patterns of avian distribution

It was under Lord Mayo that Hume rose in the government hierarchy. Hume was not averse to utilizing his power as Secretary of State to further his interests in birds. He organized the Lakshadweep survey with the assistance of the navy ostensibly to examine sites for a lighthouse. He made use of government machinery in the fisheries department (Francis Day) to help his Sind survey. He used the newly formed meteorological division of his own agricultural department to generate rainfall maps for use in Stray Feathers. He was probably the first to note the connection between rainfall and bird distributions, something that only Sharpe saw any special merit in. Perhaps placing specimens on those large tables described by Sharpe allowed Hume to see geographic trends.

Hume was also able to appreciate geology (in his youth he had studied with Mantell ), earth history and avian evolution. Hume had several geologists contributing to ornithology including Stoliczka and Ball. One wonders if he took an interest in paleontology given his proximity to the Shiwalik ranges. Hume invited Richard Lydekker to publish a major note on avian osteology for the benefit of amateur ornithologists. Hume also had enough time to speculate on matters of avian biology. A couple of years ago I came across this bit that Hume wrote in the first of his Nests and Eggs volumes (published post-ornith-humously in 1889):

Nests and Eggs of Indian birds. Vol 1. p. 199

 

I wrote immediately to Tim Birkhead, the expert on evolutionary aspects of bird reproduction and someone with an excellent view of ornithological history (his Ten Thousand Birds is a must read for anyone interested in the subject) and he agreed that Hume had been an early and insightful observer to have suggested female sperm storage.

Shimla life was clearly a lot of hob-nobbing and people like Lord Mayo were spending huge amounts of time and money just hosting parties. Turns out that Lord Mayo even went to Paris to recruit a chef and brought in an Italian,  Federico Peliti. (His great-grandson has a nice website!) Unlike Hume, Peliti rose in fame after Lord Mayo's death by setting up a cafe which became the heart of Shimla's social life and gossip. Lady Lytton (Lord Lytton was the one who demoted Hume!) recorded that Simla folk "...foregathered four days a week for prayer meetings, and the rest of the time was spent in writing poisonous official notes about each other." Another observer recorded that "in Simla you could not hear your own voice for  the grinding of axes. But in 1884 the grinders were few. In the course of my service I saw much of Simla society,  and I think it would compare most favourably with any other town of English-speaking people of the same size. It was bright and gay. We all lived, so to speak, in glass houses. The little bungalows perched on the mountainside wherever there was a ledge, with their winding paths under the pine trees, leading to our only road, the Mall." (Lawrence, Sir Walter Roper (1928) The India We Served.)

A view from Peliti's (1922).

Peliti's other contribution was in photography and it seems like he worked with Felice Beato who also influenced Harriet Tytler and her photography. I asked a couple of Shimla folks about the historic location of Peliti's cafe and they said it had become the Grand Hotel (now a government guest house). I subsequently found that Peliti did indeed start Peliti's Grand Hotel, which was destroyed in a fire in 1922, but the centre of Shimla's social life, his cafe, was actually next to the Combermere Bridge (it ran over a water storage tank and is today the location of the lift that runs between the Mall and the Cart Road). A photograph taken from "Peliti's" clearly lends support for this location as do descriptions in Thacker's New Guide to Simla (1925). A poem celebrating Peliti's was published in Punch magazine in 1919. Rudyard Kipling was a fan of Peliti's but Hume was no fan of Kipling (Kipling seems to have held a spiteful view of liberals - "Pagett MP" has been identified by some as being based on W.S.Caine, a friend of Hume; Hume for his part had a lifelong disdain for journalists. Kipling's boss, E.K. Robinson started the British Naturalists' Association while E.K.R.'s brother Philip probably influenced Eha.

While Hume most likely stayed well away from Peliti's, we see that a kind of naturalists social network existed within the government. About Lord Mayo we read: 

Lord Mayo and the Natural History of India - His Excellency Lord Mayo, the Viceroy of India, has been making a very valuable collection of natural historical objects, illustrative of the fauna, ornithology, &c., of the Indian Empire. Some portion of these valuable acquisitions, principally birds and some insects, have been brought to England, and are now at 49 Wigmore Street, London, whence they will shortly be removed. - Pertshire Advertiser, 29 December 1870.

Another news report states:

The Early of Mayo's collection of Indian birds, &c.

Amidst the cares of empire, the Earl of Mayo, the present ruler of India, has found time to form a valuable collection of objects illustrative of the natural history of the East, and especially of India. Some of these were brought over by the Countess when she visited England a short time since, and entrusted to the hands of Mr Edwin Ward, F.Z.S., for setting and arrangement, under the particular direction of the Countess herself. This portion, which consists chiefly of birds and insects, was to be seen yesterday at 49, Wigmore street, and, with the other objects accumulated in Mr Ward's establishment, presented a very striking picture. There are two library screens formed from the plumage of the grand argus pheasant- the head forward, the wing feathers extended in circular shape, those of the tail rising high above the rest. The peculiarities of the plumage have been extremely well preserved. These, though surrounded by other birds of more brilliant covering, preserved in screen pattern also, are most noticeable, and have been much admired. There are likewise two drawing-room screens of smaller Indian birds (thrush size) and insects. They are contained in glass cases, with frames of imitation bamboo, gilt. These birds are of varied and bright colours, and some of them are very rare. The Countess, who returned to India last month, will no doubt, add to the collection when she next comes back to England, as both the Earl and herself appear to take a great interest in Illustrating the fauna and ornithology of India. The most noticeable object, however, in Mr. Ward's establishment is the representation of a fight between two tigers of great size. The gloss, grace, and spirit of the animals are very well preserved. The group is intended as a present to the Prince of Wales. It does not belong to the Mayo Collection. - The Northern Standard, January 7, 1871

And Hume's subsequent superior was Lord Northbrook about whom we read:

University and City Intelligence. - Lord Northbrook has presented to the University a valuable collection of skins of the game birds of India collected for him by Mr. A.O.Hume, C.B., a distinguished Indian ornithologist. Lord Northbrook, in a letter to Dr. Acland, assures him that the collection is very perfect, if not unique. A Decree was passed accepting the offer, and requesting the Vice-Chancellor to convey the thanks of the University to the donor. - Oxford Journal, 10 February 1877

Papilio mayo

Clearly Lord Mayo and his influence on naturalists in India is not sufficiently well understood. Perhaps that would explain the beautiful butterfly named after him shortly after his murder. It appears that Hume did not have this kind of hobby association with Lord Lytton, little wonder perhaps that he fared so badly!

Despite Hume's sharpness on many matters there were bits that come across as odd. In one article on the flight of birds he observes the soaring of crows and vultures behind his house as he sits in the morning looking towards Mahassu. He points out that these soaring birds would appear early on warm days and late on cold days but he misses the role of thermals and mixes physics with metaphysics, going for a kind of Grand Unification Theory:

And then claims that crows, like saints, sages and yogis are capable of "aethrobacy".

This naturally became a target of ridicule. We have already seen the comments of E.H. Hankin on this. Hankin wrote that if levitation was achieved by "living an absolutely pure life and intense religious concentration" the hill crow must be indulging in "irreligious sentiments when trying to descend to earth without  the help of gravity." Hankin despite his studies does not give enough credit for the forces of lift produced by thermals and his own observations were critiqued by Gilbert Walker, the brilliant mathematican who applied his mind to large scale weather patterns apart from conducting some amazing research on the dynamics of boomerangs. His boomerang research had begun even in his undergraduate years and had earned him the nickname of Boomerang Walker. On my visit to Shimla, I went for a long walk down the quiet road winding through dense woodland and beside streams to Annandale (now apparently called Anna-Dale), the only large flat ground in Shimla where Sir Gilbert Walker conducted his weekend research on boomerangs. Walker's boomerang research mentions a collaboration with Oscar Eckenstein and there are some strange threads connecting Eckenstein, his collaborator Aleister Crowley and Hume's daughter Maria Jane Burnley who would later join the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. But that is just speculation!

1872 Map showing Rothney Castle

The steep road just below Rothney Castle

Excavation for new constructions just below and across the road from Rothney Castle

The embankment collapsing below the guard hut

The lower entrance, concrete constructions replace the old building

The guard hut and home are probably the only heritage structures left

Dr Roy Vickery displaying some of Hume's herbarium specimens

Specially designed cases for storing the herbarium sheets.

The entrance to the South London Botanical Institute

A herbarium sheet from the Hume collection

Hume's bookplate with personal motto - Industria et Perseverentia

An ornate clock which apparently adorned Rothney Castle

A special cover released by Shimla postal circle in 2012

• Collar, N. J.; Prys-Jones, R. P. (2012). Pioneers of Asian ornithology. Allan Octavian Hume. BirdingASIA. 17: 17–43.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Octavian_Hume

The Bombay Gazette, 3 June 1887 page 4

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, español, français, italiano, magyar, polski, português, português do Brasil, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, فارسی, বাংলা, 中文, 日本語

Recent changes

•  In the AbuseFilter extension, an ip_in_ranges() function has been introduced to check if an IP is in any of the ranges. Wikis are advised to combine multiple ip_in_range() expressions joined by | into a single expression for better performance. You can use the search function on Special:AbuseFilter to locate its usage. [1]
• The IP Info feature which helps abuse fighters access information about IPs, has been deployed to all wikis as a beta feature. This comes after weeks of beta testing on test.wikipedia.org.

Changes later this week

•  The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 31 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 June. It will be on all wikis from 2 June (calendar).
•  Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 31 May at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
• The New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at most wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in Preferences. [2][3]
•  The list=usercontribs API will support fetching contributions from an IP range soon. API users can set the uciprange parameter to get contributions from any IP range within the limit. [4]
• A new parser function will be introduced: {{=}}. It will replace existing templates named “=”. It will insert an equal sign. This can be used to escape the equal sign in the parameter values of templates. [5]

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

This year, for the first time ever, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Global Advocacy and Public Policy team sponsored the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF). The forum is hosted by the Paradigm Initiative, and aims to bring together digital rights activists and scholars from across Africa to work towards a digitally inclusive and rights respecting future for the continent.

Supporting DRIF is part of our team’s support for events for digital rights activists, who advocate for policy frameworks and regulations that promote human rights on the internet. It is also a way to promote knowledge equity and expand participation in knowledge creation and sharing in the region. Through our sponsorship of DRIF, the Foundation covered internet access costs for a number of registered attendees participating in online events, ensuring that there could be greater access to and participation in the Forum among African civil society groups and individuals. DRIF is a mixture of both in-person and online events and sessions that run from mid-April to mid-May 2022. 

We connected with one of the DRIF organizers, Thobekile Matimbe from Paradigm Initiative, to learn more about what impact the event has made for digital rights discussions, coalition engagements, and advocacy work across the continent.

Q: Can you please tell us who you are, and what you do at the Paradigm Initiative? 

My name is Thobekile Matimbe. I am a Community Manager at Paradigm Initiative (PIN). I have worked at PIN for almost 2 years now, and coordinate the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF) as well as manage our coalition engagements and advocacy work.

Q: What is your most recent experience with Wikimedia?

Our collaboration with Wikimedia in hosting DRIF22, which has been extraordinary as it enabled over 350 additional attendees to join the Forum with the necessary data support (editor’s note: this support focused on data packages for connectivity) that the Foundation provided. 

Q: What is your event’s focus?

The 9th edition of DRIF focused on digital inclusion and digital rights under the theme, “Towards a digitally inclusive and rights-respecting Africa.” The online event held from 12–14 April had over 500 attendees who engaged with diverse topics such as women’s rights online, digital inclusion for persons with disabilities, and online media freedoms, to name a few. DRIF was also held in person in 17 African countries.

Q: What outcomes in terms of digital policy or partnerships do you hope will be sparked as a result of this conference?

We hope that the African states can craft better policies and laws, which promote digital inclusion and review the current normative standards to ensure compliance with international standards. In addition, one of the key outcomes of hosting DRIF is to provide an important strategy for engaging all relevant stakeholders, including the private sector, in shaping internet freedom in Africa. As PIN, we hope attendees continue to raise awareness of the issues discussed in their respective countries, and will build on the networks that are forged during the Forum.

Q: What similarities and/or differences do you see between last year’s and this year’s conference?

Last year we were not able to offer data support to attendees. In total, DRIF21 reached 445 attendees. This year, through the Wikimedia support, we were able to involve more people and the bar was raised! Over 500 attendees joined DRIF22, of which 372 benefited from Wikimedia’s data support. 

Q: How do you see Wikimedia fitting into the conversations and topics that were aired at the conference this year and, more broadly, in the digital rights space across Africa?

Wikimedia has a part to play in raising awareness on digital rights issues and supporting activities that promote digital inclusion in Africa. More support is welcome in the future to ensure that platforms like DRIF reach an even wider audience, not only at virtual sessions, but also at in-person convenings in different countries. One of the topics discussed this year had to do with how African languages can have a meaningful space on the internet. Looking at Wikipedia, this is an area of ongoing development and engagement where it is possible to ensure African languages are given more visibility online. 

Q: What other Paradigm Initiative projects are keeping you busy in your digital rights work?

We have our Digital Rights Media Fellowship programs planned for the year. Through these fellowships we hope to reach the media to enhance their awareness and reporting of digital rights issues. We recently had the launch of our annual report on the state of digital rights and inclusion in Africa, “Londa,” which covers 22 African countries (a title of Zulu origin calling for action to protect or defend). The launch took place at our DRIF22 closing Media Parley on 20 May 2022 in Nairobi, Kenya. We are also looking forward to releasing a short film, which will capture the key findings of the report. 

Apart from this, we are conducting advocacy initiatives in Africa, engaging at the national level with governments and the private sector on the findings of our annual report, and also making representations to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights at relevant ordinary sessions, among other projects. 

If you are interested in learning more about these and similar events, follow the Global Advocacy and Public Policy team on Twitter to stay up-to-date on public policy issues that affect free knowledge.

Over the years, Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) has constantly worked towards documenting and disseminating diverse cultural places and histories through photographs. Annually hosted by over 50 countries across the world, the competition aims to encourage participation in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, while fostering an important need for digital documentation of built heritage sites in different parts of the world.

With the growing success and country participation in the competition each year, the WLM team identified a number of challenges in the WLM concept and has undertaken a Diversity,  Equity and Inclusivity (DEI) research to re-evaluate the same. Often, we hear or read about DEI in the context of gender equality or equitable hiring practices in a workplace. Then, what does it mean to assess a photo competition such as WLM from a DEI lens?

While it is important that we have geographical diversity (having countries from different parts of the world participate), it is equally important to take into consideration diverse representation from local communities, social groups and cultural contexts. However, varied socio-political and economic situations within each country may present a unique set of roadblocks in accessing resources necessary to host such a photo competition. On the other hand, a disconnect between local community understandings of what a monument is and the ‘official’ understanding of a monument might lead to a sense of alienation and exclusion within the competition which hinders diverse participation.

With the above understanding in mind the DEI research was conducted to identify country specific gaps and find sustainable solutions for the same. As part of the research process WLM national organisers and stakeholders were interviewed and based on this, we describe a set of preliminary issues below.

Access to Resources:

Conversations with national organisers revealed that participants from some countries struggle with accessing affordable internet or digital cameras which limits the regional scope of participation in the country and documentation of monuments and local built heritage. Organisers in these countries have tried to reduce this gap by hosting upload sessions using portable internet routers at multiple locations and through curated photowalks. However, reaching participants in peripheral towns and documenting monuments in non-urban locations still remains a challenge.

Heritage Lists, Definition and Rules:

Many shared their struggle in accessing lists from government agencies and cultural organisations as they are either outdated, incomplete or not digitised.

Accessing the heritage lists and sites becomes more difficult in certain areas, such as Ukraine, where the physical lists and the monuments are at risk of being destroyed due to the ongoing war and military occupation which causes fear in participants to photograph the monuments.

When freely available, the lists are sometimes not inclusive of monuments representative of minority or marginalised communities. As cultural contexts change across countries, so does the understanding of what is considered as cultural heritage and what is a monument. This is necessary to bear in mind especially while creating an inclusive space where everyone feels welcome irrespective of their differences. During the interviews with organisers some of them shared how the term monument when translated to their cultural context takes on a different meaning and does not fully capture the essence of heritage spaces in their country. According to them, it tends to highlight the colonial understanding of monuments while classifying indigenous monuments as a separate category which comes across as exclusionary.

Outreach and Communication:

Every year we have countries joining Wiki Loves Monuments and enthusiastically taking up the opportunity to host the competition in their respective countries. However, in regions where there are no strong Wikimedia affiliate or thematic groups organisers find it difficult to plan and structure the competition’s outreach and communications.

The presence of Wikimedia affiliates generally makes it easier for volunteer organisers to seek help in navigating the Wikimedia domain and getting familiar with the structure of the competition. These groups also play an important role in minimising the language barrier and making communication easier for local organisers.

Freedom of Panorama/ restriction to photography:

Often national organisers run into issues that are beyond their control. One of these is a legal restriction on freedom of panorama, when the architects’ copyright prohibits publishing photos of a young-ish building in the public space. In countries without freedom of panorama provision, participants can not freely take and upload photos of many more recent heritage sites, such as post-colonial heritage. This not only restricts documentation but also  leads to lack of motivation to host the competition and affects participation rate in certain regions of the country.

The above are a few of the problem areas that came to light during the Wiki Loves Monuments Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity research, so far. The WLM team is currently working on facilitating collaborations and partnerships between local cultural institutions and WLM national organisers. We intend to have the pilot network in place before the next iteration of Wiki Loves Monuments and put available resources to test in making the competition more diverse, equitable and inclusive.

The research is still underway and we would love to hear from you and understand your experience of participating in and organising the competition in your country, from a diversity, equity and inclusivity perspective. You can write to Mesha Murali to know more about the ongoing research and share your experience. You can also have a look at the detailed midterm report on the Commons Page.

17/05/2022-23/05/2022

Breaking news

• EOX IT Services has published the 2021 update of their cloudless images version of the ESA’s Sentinel-2 Earth observation satellites programme (10 m resolution) data last week. These images are particularly useful for observing changes in land cover. The EOX cloudless Sentinel-2 images (2018 to 2021) are available in JOSM and need to be activated from the Imagery → Imagery preferences menu and can be used to update OpenStreetMap.For more details about developments from this project, see the EOX blogpost.

Mapping campaigns

• Dcapillae presented > , in his diary, a map of the rubbish and recycling bins in the municipality of Málaga, now present in OSM thanks to a recent import.
• Martijn van Exel wrote, in his blog, about Microsoft’s machine-generated dataset of building footprints for the United States, created some years ago, and the benefits and problems related to making use of it.

Mapping

• bgo_eiu gave their thoughts on mapping bus stops shared between overlapping operators’ networks, resulting in multiple signs and references.
• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • isced:2011:level=* a second version of a key for tagging the 2011 International Standard Classification of Education scale.
  • place=* tagging for Japan.
• Voting on the US county, city and local highway networks tagging proposal is open until Wednesday 8 June.

Community

• Martijn van Exel is asking for ideas, on Twitter, to make OSM more helpful for people and is getting a lot of feedback.
• Late last month, the Africa GeoConvo Podcast sat down with Tommy Charles, of OSM Sierra Leone, to talk about how YouthMappers is encouraging the next generation of mappers.
• The OpenStreetMap Taiwan Community (OSMTW) is pleased to announce that it has secured an alliance grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, which has been used to purchase two Insta360 One X2 cameras with accessories, and to support related workshops scheduled from March 2022 until February 2023. OSMTW is dedicated to organising at least six street-view expeditions and six edit workshops.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap US Trails Working Group members are thoroughly tagging trails in three different areas of Washington State. The richer tagging in these areas will allow navigational app developers to test out improved map rendering showing different types of trails and paths.

Education

• [1] OpenSchoolMaps.ch has created > this particularly descriptive guide for students and other interested parties on how to map the environment themselves.

Humanitarian OSM

• Paul Uithol, Jessica Pechmann, Ivan Gayton and Shazmane Mandjee Rehamtula shared HOT and the wider humanitarian community thinking about ethical and practical considerations of mapping in conflict areas.

Maps

• OSM Live Changes is a fully turnable globe displaying changesets as red dots.
• Robhubi described > how he optimises the map layout for city trips.

Programming

• OpenSnowMap has moved its API from Osmosis to Osm2pgsql, resulting in a major performance improvement in the request response delay.
• Christoph Hormann shared an update on his insights and reflections about the OpenStreetMap Carto Project.

Releases

• OsmAnd 4.2 has been released for iOS. It comes with a new map style, improved track management, categorised public transport routes, and displays running routes (OSM tags route=fitness_trail and route=running).

Did you know …

• the Latest Changes tool? It displays the most recent changes in your region, allowing better data reviews.
• … StreetFerret? It encourages you to explore your city through running. It uses OpenStreetMap data to analyse how many streets of your city you have completed.

Other “geo” things

• Microsoft has released a new update of Planetary Computer with many new datasets, API enhancements, and updates to libraries.
• Approximator explained > how to create a time-lapse video using Mapillary photos.
• Florian Lohoff showed how he attached a camera to an electric scooter to record street-level imagery for Mapillary.
• In the age of the Internet and GPS, Jean-Louis Rheault, a cartographer-illustrator in Montréal, continues to practise > the same way he has for the past 40 years with cartography as an art form. Cartography-illustration dates back to antiquity and continues to this day with illustrations on maps based on the same idea: ‘to orient and make people want to visit a place by highlighting its attractions’.
• Two young ladies, from Bulgaria, followed > their navigation app on an electric kick scooter trip and ended up on an Autobahn near Munich.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2022-05-28
Santiago	3a reunión bimestral de OSM Latam		2022-05-28
佐賀市	みんなで街なかのデジタル地図をつくろう！		2022-05-28
	Unique Mappers May Mapathon : Let’s Map Aguata LGA for Social Good		2022-05-28
Kasaragod	MapYourPlace		2022-05-28 – 2022-05-31
Town of Victoria Park	Social Mapping Sunday: East Vic Park		2022-05-29
Bari	OpenStreetMap in Puglia		2022-06-01
Anderlecht	Notes Mapathon & Meetup		2022-06-01
	OSM Africa June Mapathon: Map Lesotho		2022-06-03
Maseru	#MapLesotho Mapathon		2022-06-03 – 2022-07-03	ls
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-06-06
City of Westminster	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-06-07
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-06-08
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #36 (Online)	✓	2022-06-07
Brno	Brno Missing Maps mapathon		2022-06-08
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-06-09
Großarl	5. Virtueller OpenStreetMap Stammtisch Österreich		2022-06-08
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-06-09
Nantes	State of the Map France 2022		2022-06-10 – 2022-06-12
Belém	Mapatona de Ananindeua – Meninas da Geo		2022-06-10
Brandenburg	168. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2022-06-10
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #41		2022-06-13
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2022-06-15

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 Climate_Ben, Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Strubbl, TheSwavu, cafeconleche, derFred.

Pedagogic videos, in Basque language

Ikusgela is a project specialized in pedagogical videos. Its aim is to increase the presence of the Basque language on the web and to complete the scope of Basque Wikipedia. With a fresh tone that appeals to both students and those interested in the topics being worked on, it will use a language and resources adapted to the new narratives. All the videos, moreover, have been completed with free content, mostly from Wikimedia Commons, and the material created will also be free, as a sign of a way of acting in the network.

It has a website, but the essence of the project is not the container, but the content itself. Therefore, more important than the web is the Wikipedia and the Youtube channel, as well as finding innovative ways to disseminate and promote this content on social networks (via Twitter, Mastodon, Telegram, Instagram…). Ikusgela also wants to act as a bridge: it wants to bring those who only use Basque in the formal sphere to see Basque content in the informal sphere as well.

The project is coordinated by the Basque Wikimedians User Group, financially sponsored by the Basque Government and Hiru Damatxo puts the audiovisual branch. The project started in 2019, with a project presented to the UEU-EWKE Digital Humanities research grant, sponsored by the Basque Wikimedians User Group and the Basque Summer University. After the research, the project got the possibility to realize a prototype inside a multimedia research institution. After that, the Department of Culture and Language Policy of the Basque Government supported the initiative and Ikusgela was born.

Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir

The philosophers Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir could be, for the first time, an exam topic at the University Access Evaluation, and with two videos about these two authors Ikusgela has begun its journey with the aim of alleviating a lack that was sensed when working on school content. The two videos are already at Commons, in the relevants articles in Wikipedia, in the social networks of Ikusgela and in the portal http://www.ikusgela.eus.

Members of the Agora Philosophy Teachers Association and the Joxe Azurmendi Chair of the Basque Country University have worked as academic advisors for the creation of these first two videos; in addition, a student and a professor have worked on the article about Hannah Arendt inside the Basque Wikimedia Education Program. In the audiovisual field, the production company Hiru Damatxo has been dedicated to the creation of videos. The voice of this videos is provided by the actor Klara Badiola.

All-in in September

After the summer Ikusgela will start its full activity, in mid-September the first series will be presented. Sometimes animation techniques will be used, sometimes a presenter will guide the content. The idea is to make explanatory educational videos on different fields of knowledge, free and in Basque.

In the middle of a global pandemic, the public turned to Wikipedia for information about vaccines. Pageviews on articles related to vaccines spiked as people sought neutral, fact-based information from a source they trusted — Wikipedia — amidst a sea of disinformation on social media.

One such article that saw massive pageviews is the one on attenuated vaccines. But if you had looked at the page in October 2020, you wouldn’t have found much — mostly text in bullet points, and a warning banner at the top, alerting readers that the article needed additional citations. Today, the article is extensive, with sections on development, administration, mechanism, safety, history, advantages and disadvantages, and an extensive list of attenuated vaccines. The article cites 64 sources, peer-reviewed publications that meet Wikipedia’s strict standards for medical content.

The improvements to the article are all thanks to a group of students in Denise Smith’s public health class at McMaster University. Abdullah AlShenaiber is one of the students who dramatically improved the article.

“It was heartbreaking to learn about the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy and disinformation online. As a group, we sought to address the issue as we understood how crucial it is to disseminate credible health information that is accessible in both delivery and language. We found the mechanism of attenuated vaccines particularly interesting and were especially attracted to the topic because of its current relevance. There has been some talk in the media of live-attenuated COVID-19 vaccines in-development,” Abdullah says. “While there is widespread use of attenuated vaccines (e.g., in measles, mumps, rubella, polio) many readers may be unaware of what an attenuated vaccine is and how it works. The Wikipedia article for attenuated vaccines was very limited in scale; it lacked high quality references, a detailed lead section, and information on subtopics typically provided in other articles such as its mechanism and safety. This makes it difficult for a person reading the article to fully understand the topic due to insufficient resources. Hence, our group decided to focus on the attenuated vaccine article in hopes of improving its quality and its gaps in scientific information.”

Abdullah tackled the lead section, expanded the development section, and wrote an entirely new section on safety. His classmates, Emma and Tal, added additional content to the article.

“We found the safety section to be the most challenging to address considering how prevalent vaccine hesitancy is. It was particularly difficult to balance presenting objective information while mitigating safety concerns or potential avenues for misinformation regarding vaccines,” Abdullah explains. “We worked as a group through this section with the instructor’s advice and had several revisions by all members to ensure the language and information used is appropriate and not misleading. For example, in the beginning of the safety section, we ascertain the safety and efficacy of attenuated vaccines while making it clear that there are extremely rare occasions of severe adverse effects. We cited secondary and tertiary sources (e.g., governments sites, WHO, systematic reviews, and academic textbooks) to ensure that readers can refer to reliable and informative references. We attempted to use objective language and were clear that there is a small degree of stability and safety concerns, such as in its administration to pregnant mothers or to severely immunocompromised individuals. We hope that the section makes it clear that vaccines are very safe, while not misleading the lay reader or contributing to vaccine hesitancy or concern.”

Abdullah and his classmates learned how to contribute thanks to Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program, which provided training on how to edit Wikipedia, including information on specific sourcing requirements for medical articles like the attenuated vaccine article the group was working on.

“Compared to a traditional assignment, our Wikipedia assignment felt unconventional and insightful,” Abdullah says. “It was very involved, collaborative, and required on-going reflection between yourself and other editors. As a Wikipedia editor, you have a duty to provide credible health information, collaborate with colleagues, and learn from your peers. I believe collaboration is a fundamental pillar in editing articles. Having lovely classmates and editors provide suggestions, diverse perspectives, and constructive discussion was extremely valuable in my learning and development in appraising scientific research and navigating the editing platform. It was truly a unique opportunity to disseminate information to the public. It felt like we were serving our community and left a lasting impact in improving health information online.”

Abdullah found his favorite part of the assignment was how collaborative it was and seeing its impact with his peers. He checked the Wiki Education Dashboard and watched the pageviews climb, as more and more people read his work. He tried to engage other Wikipedians to discuss their work on the article’s Talk page, and was excited when others made minor edits to his contributions. Since Abdullah and his classmates started improving the article, it’s received more than 130,000 pageviews.

“After editing the attenuated vaccine article with my group, I felt extremely proud and pleased of our contributions, especially considering how important it is to disseminate reliable information regarding vaccines,” Abdullah says. “I began to appreciate my role as a student in consuming health information, fostering collaboration and community, and applying my learning to communicate relevant health information to the public.”

Abdullah recently graduated from McMaster University’s Bachelor of Health Sciences program and is continuing his studies at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine in the fall. The Wikipedia assignment helped him develop skills in critically appraising sources of health information that he hopes to apply in his career, looking for key factors like the author, methodology, references, conflicts of interest, validity of interpretation, and risk of biases, he says. He learned to look beyond the stigma Wikipedia has to understand the value of providing accessible health information on an open platform.

“The experience allowed me to appreciate Wikipedia’s central role as an accessible health resource,” he says. “After getting acclimated with the editing process, working on an article with peers, and reading research surrounding the platform, I learned that Wikipedia can act as a reliable health resource for the lay reader when used appropriately; this includes taking into account quality ratings, evaluating the article’s writing, and referring to other credible sources to supplement our knowledge.”

And he wants to keep sharing his knowledge on Wikipedia — both in health information and in topics he cares about beyond medicine.

“With the skills I’ve learned, I believe I have a responsibility to become an active producer of health information,” he says. “I learned valuable skills in evaluating and editing Wikipedia that I would love to keep applying in the future.”

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your class? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information.

Image credit: Cpl. Jackeline Perez Rivera, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

🕑 1 hour 11 minutes

Matthew Westerby is the Robert H. Smith Postdoctoral Research Associate for Digital Projects at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, a national art museum of the United States. He has been heavily involved in the creation of the wiki History of Early American Landscape Design.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• History of Early American Landscape Design
• National Gallery of Art Wikipedia article
• Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
• Keywords in American Landscape Design by Therese O'Malley
• HEALD Image Collection page
• HEALD People category
• National Gallery of Art GitHub repository
  • StickyTOC MediaWiki extension
  • Dates page package
  • Geolocation page package
• HEALD Fence page
• HEALD sample RDF export

Diego Whittembury Escobar hadn’t ever considered writing for Wikipedia before. He had always assumed that it was too complex, or that he wasn’t qualified. But that all changed for Diego when he signed up for a course on Primate Behaviour, Ecology and Conservation taught by Sarah Turner at Concordia University.

“I discovered that I am able to, and that it can even be very fulfilling,” Diego explains.

Diego significantly expanded the article on Azaras’s capuchin. He chose the species because its habitat is primarily in Brazil, relatively close to Diego’s home country of Venezuela. Diego says writing on a primate that’s local to his home continent felt more personal than writing about one from another part of the world.

Using Wiki Education’s training modules, Diego learned how to expand the article.

“I learned the dedication that it takes to create such a good information platform such as Wikipedia,” Diego explains. “I also learned that even though anyone can write anything in any article, it takes strict sourcing and a certain style of writing to properly contribute to Wikipedia.”

These learnings were valuable to Diego, and he’s encouraged his professor to keep teaching with Wikipedia in that course through Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program.

“It was a very unique assignment that taught me many things about the selected species, and about how to do research and write about it,” Diego says. “It also showed me that this platform that we all enjoy all the time (Wikipedia) is only possible with the efforts of people like us, which is very motivating.”

Diego says his favorite part was Googling the Azaras’s capuchin and seeing his work appear as the top result. Armed with the knowledge from editing Wikipedia for this course, he intends to keep improving other species articles.

“I would like if more people could see how fulfilling it is to contribute to a platform that benefits everyone,” he says.

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

"Alright folks. It is showcase time. Show here the cool hacks you did in last 2 or days in wikimedia hackathon".Lucas announced this in IRC and telegram channels. It was Sunday night 8.30 PM IST. I was returning to chennai, in a bus.Joined the JitSi meet to see what the world has done recently. "Good … Continue reading Few notes on Wikimedia hackathon 2022 at Villupuram – VGLUG

10/05/2022-16/05/2022

Breaking news

• The next OSMF board meeting will be on this Monday 23 May 2022, at 13:00 UTC. Information about the video conference and the agenda (including moderation of the talk@ & osmf-talk@ lists and SOTM 2022) are available here.The agenda for the meeting is:
  • Treasurer’s report
  • Decision on the acceptance of the statutes of the Fundraising Committee
  • Test of the change in moderation of the talk@ and osmf-talk@ lists
  • State of the Map 2022 – Board preparations
  • Advisory Board – monthly update
  • Monthly presentation – OSM Austria
  • Comments or questions from guests.

Mapping campaigns

• ’12 Months of OpenStreetMap’, a OpenStreetMap US initiative, is inviting mappers to participate in the May 2022 theme of sustainable transportation – for example, bus stops, bike boxes, parking and rental stations for bicycles and scooters.

Mapping

• danielmescheder published the first article in a series of five discussing the features distinguishing maps from general data processing challenges. The first feature is titled ‘Relations’.
• OpenStreetMap Belgium and Flanders’ official tourism administration and provincial tourism organisations launched a collaborative project called Pin je punt > aiming to spotlight points of interest for tourists. Pieter Vander Vennet, from OSM Belgium, and Jos Pyck, the project manager for Pin je Punt at Visit Flanders, reflected on the overall project.
• In a first post, SLMapper wrote about the challenges of aerial mapping of forests, especially on lands used for wood production.
• In ruriyuri’s diary > , she said that she was recently trying to add some tags in Taipei to record etymological information on OSM elements and gave a sample changeset with corresponding OverpassQL code. She also said that she was puzzled because she could not find Wikidata entries for commonly used Taiwan road names such as the Four Cardinal Principles and Eight Virtues (信義/忠孝/仁愛/和平).

Community

• On Thursday 21 April, Sawan Shariar contributed the 120,000,000^th OpenStreetMap changeset, in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
• Amanda McCann told us what she did in OSM in April 2022.
• Allison P wrote a diary entry about the relationship between privacy and mapping. While aiming to be detailed, OpenStreetMap has been and will continue to confront people having opposing opinions about data on privacy grounds.
• BudgieInWA reported their reflections after hosting the third ‘Social Mapping Sunday’ in Perth, Australia.
• Cristoffs, from the Polish OSM community, asked OSMF board members and working group members about the state of democracy in the creation of the basic map style, and for suggestions on how it could evolve.
• User Natfoot, from Washington State, described in his blog his various activities in and with OSM.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap US announced the creation of the TeachOSM Steering Committee, whose activities will be aimed at promoting the classroom use of OSM.

Events

• Join Wikimedia’s annual hackathon (20 to 22 May) which this year has a map-focused track hosted by the Wikimaps User Group, which aims to advocate for more geospatial capabilities on the Wikimedia platforms (Wikipedia, Wikidata, etc.) as well as improved integration with OpenStreetMap.
  • Wikimaps track and map-related tasks
  • Wikimedia hackathon main page.

Education

• A landscape design media channel has re-posted, to Zhihu Video, its instructional video about how to use OSM data to create a district analysis map.

OSM research

• Anaïs Ladoy PhD, from the EPFL’s Laboratoire de systèmes d’information géographique, explained > how she favoured open-source alternatives to closed solutions during her thesis, including using OpenStreetMap as an address database.
• Aliaksandr described the development of an AI assistant for the mapping of yurts in Ulaanbaatar. The whole process took 77 hours whereas the estimated time without assistance would’ve been closer to 625 hours.

Maps

• Mieux se Déplacer à Bicyclette published > information about this year’s la Convergence Francilienne, an event where cyclists from all the Ile-de-France region group together and cycle to a meeting point. The numerous starting points are colour coded into six branches and can be browsed under uMap.

Software

• Cempatin, an OSM-based micro-blogging platform, has been released in Indonesia.
• The OSMViews website provides world-wide ranking of geographic locations based on OpenStreetMap tile logs (source: https://planet.openstreetmap.org/tile_logs/). It can be used for many purposes where ranking or prioritisation could improve functionality, such as label placement or monitoring. It is updated weekly and aggregated over the last 52 weeks to smooth out seasonal effects (for any location on Earth, up to ~150m/z18 resolution).
• Haukauntrie / wielandb has made a video about StreetComplete, which has been transcribed. A script was used to fetch the number of quests resolved for 5284 users between October 2021 and March 2022, revealing around 100 power users accounting for 30% of contributions.

Programming

• Anton Khorev, developer of osm-note-viewer, explained the implementation of Leaflet’s pop-ups in his app whilst also accounting for any required map scrolling movements.
• The French national railway company is developping > a mobile app designed to help guide travellers through stations. To do so, they use a picture database linked to OpenStreetMap data.

Releases

• Ilya Zverik released a new mobile OSM editor Every Door, which is available for Android and iOS.

Did you know …

• … MapCarta? A simple browser map viewer aggregating data from OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, GeoNames, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Wikivoyage and OpenRouteService.

OSM in the media

• Randall Munroe (XKCD) thinks ‘OpenStreetMap was always pretty good, but is now “really” good’. Check out the alt-text on his recent cartoon ‘Maps’.

Other “geo” things

• Francois Valentin tweeted a series of interesting figures overlaying old historic maps on modern political maps. On HackerNews, more examples were discussed.
• Andrew Hart, from DentReality, posted a video showcasing the indoor navigation technology they built in a store, with map and augmented reality integration.
• Vox reported on their investigation into a puzzle from a year old Reddit post, about circles visible in the Sahara (location in OpenStreetMap and in Google Maps). The conclusion is that they are remnants from a seismic survey by a French oil company back in the 1950s.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Montmorillon	Printemps des Cartes		2022-05-19 – 2022-05-22
	Mapathon: United Nations for Libya		2022-05-20 – 2022-05-22
Kaskazini B	Tanzania Mapping Groups May Mapathon	✓	2022-05-21
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第30回 相国寺		2022-05-22
臺北市	OpenStreetMap街景踏查團工作坊2		2022-05-22
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-05-23
	Deutsches Rotes Kreuz – Mozambique Red Cross Online Beginner Mapathon		2022-05-23
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-05-23
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	✓	2022-05-23
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-05-25
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-05-24
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-05-25
Decatur County	OpenStreetMap US Mappy Hour	✓	2022-05-26
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2022-05-28
Santiago	3a reunión bimestral de OSM Latam		2022-05-28
	Unique Mappers May Mapathon : Let’s Map Aguata LGA for Social Good		2022-05-28
Town of Victoria Park	Social Mapping Sunday: East Vic Park		2022-05-29
Bari	OpenStreetMap in Puglia		2022-06-01
Anderlecht	Notes Mapathon & Meetup		2022-06-01
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-06-08
City of Westminster	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-06-07
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-06-09
Großarl	5. Virtueller OpenStreetMap Stammtisch Österreich		2022-06-08
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-06-09
Nantes	State of the Map France 2022		2022-06-10 – 2022-06-12
Brandenburg	168. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2022-06-10

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 Elizabete, Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, Strubbl, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, 快乐的老鼠宝宝.

It’s Hackathon day 2, and I’ve nearly wrapped up my first draft of a pretty hacky system for editing documentation pages in ToolDocs. It’s fun learning the GitLab API, although that’s also making me question a bunch of assumptions I made about this project in the beginning! It’s seeming more like it’d be better to just build the whole thing as effectively a custom UI to GitLab. But we’ll see…

The Connected Heritage team is offering more public, free events and webinars in 2022 as the project progresses. If you work or volunteer for a heritage or cultural organisation, please do come along. 

Webinars

If you want to learn more about the Connected Heritage project, or find out why editing Wikimedia projects is a great way to enhance digital skills while at the same time improving the long term preservation and findability of your collections – come along to a webinar. 

• Wednesday 15th June
• Friday 12th August
• Thursday 13th October

About the webinars

In the one-hour webinar Leah Emary and Dr. Lucy Hinnie will introduce the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, and outline the benefits of engaging with these sites. The talk will last for about 45 minutes, with 15 minutes for questions and discussion with the audience.

Wikipedia is read 22 billion times a month, making it one of the most visited websites in the world. It is a crucial way to share knowledge. Wikimedia UK is a registered charity and has received funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to help heritage and cultural organisations develop skills, tools and communities of practice for the sustainable digital preservation of heritage. 

If you work or volunteer for a heritage or cultural organisation, please do come along. 

After this webinar, participants will understand more about open knowledge; know how to follow up if they would like to continue with the project; and have resources and materials to make a case for participation to organisation leaders.

To sign up for a Zoom webinar, please select from the following dates, and register via Eventbrite. You need only attend one webinar. Sessions are free, open and no prior Wiki experience is required.

Wikithons

If you’re already convinced and are ready to start editing, come to an Edit-a-thon.

• Friday 27th May
• Thursday 21st July
• Friday 30th September

About the wikithons:

Our Potluck Wikithons are designed to offer a taster of what a Wikithon would offer for a partner organisation. Participants are encouraged to bring along material that they would like to work with, and we will train them in how to edit Wikipedia and add material to Wikimedia Commons. They are a lot of fun, and a great way to see what it is that we offer.

The post Learn more and get trained with Connected Heritage in 2022 appeared first on WMUK.