Wales and international photography competition #WikiLovesEarth

14:25, Tuesday, 14 2022 June UTC

Upload your photographs during June to be in with a chance of winning country and national prizes.

This year, for the second time, Wales is taking part in the international photography competition ‘Wiki Loves Earth’ organised by the Wikimedia movement. Founded 9 years ago as a focus for nature heritage, the competition aims to raise awareness of protected sites. The Welsh campaign is also organised by Wikimedia UK, the National Library of Wales and WiciMon.

Robin Owain who leads the Wikimedia UK projects across Wales said “This year, our key supporters include the Welsh Government, the Ramblers Association and all three National Parks! We are calling on people across Wales to share their photographs of nature: flora, fauna and fungi!”

This is one of the largest photography competitions in the world focusing on National Parks, Sites of Special Scientific Interest and all protected areas. Robin explained “The biodiversity and geology of Wales is unique, and this competition allows Welsh photographers to share our protected areas on a world stage. 

Other organisations who will be supporting this exciting competition include Natural Resources Wales, all three National Parks: Eryri (Snowdonia), Pembrokeshire and the Brecon Beacons, Ramblers (Cymru), and both Edward Llwyd and Llên Natur  nature societies.

Examples of past winners can be seen at http://wikilovesearth.org and last year’s Welsh winners can be found here.

Any photographs you have taken in the past can be uploaded during June, with prizes at both country and national level to the winners. Robin added “The competition is open to everyone. We play rugby and football on the world stage, therefore we ask our friends, volunteers and staff to take photographs on that international stage, and at the same time exhibit their photographs of our diverse countryside.”

Read more about Wiki Loves Earth 2022 in Wales here on Wikimedia Commons.

More on Wiki Loves Earth can be found here.

Further information & images [email protected]

About Wikimedia UK here

The post Wales and international photography competition #WikiLovesEarth appeared first on WMUK.

Tech/News/2022/24

07:00, Tuesday, 14 2022 June UTC

Other languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English,Yorùbá, español, français, italiano, magyar, polski, português, português do Brasil, suomi, svenska, čeština, Ελληνικά, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, فارسی, বাংলা, 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.

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 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 14 June at 06:00 UTC (targeted wikis). [3]
  • Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get “Add a link” (Abkhazian Wikipedia, Achinese Wikipedia, Adyghe Wikipedia, Afrikaans Wikipedia, Akan Wikipedia, Alemannisch Wikipedia, Amharic Wikipedia, Aragonese Wikipedia, Old English Wikipedia, Aramaic Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, Asturian Wikipedia, Atikamekw Wikipedia, Avaric Wikipedia, Aymara Wikipedia, Azerbaijani Wikipedia, South Azerbaijani Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [4]
  • The New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at Commons, Wikidata, and some other wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in Preferences. [5][6]

Future meetings

  • The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place today (13 June). The following meetings will take place on: 28 June, 12 July, 26 July.

Future changes

  • By the end of July, the Vector 2022 skin should be ready to become the default across all wikis. Discussions on how to adjust it to the communities’ needs will begin in the next weeks. It will always be possible to revert to the previous version on an individual basis. Learn more.

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

Wikimedia Foundation welcomes Selena Deckelmann as Chief Product and Technology Officer

18:11, Monday, 13 2022 June UTC

13 June 2022, San Francisco  — The Wikimedia Foundation today announced the appointment of Selena Deckelmann as Chief Product and Technology Officer. Selena is currently serving as Senior Vice President of Mozilla, where she was responsible for Firefox. She will officially join on August 1, 2022.

Selena will lead the product and technology teams at the Wikimedia Foundation. These teams support the technology infrastructure and innovation that powers Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, one of the most visited websites in the world with more than 16 billion pageviews per month. They also enable more than 300,000 global volunteers to edit Wikimedia projects each month. 

“Selena has a proven track record of delivering results by enabling individuals and teams to tackle unique and often complex challenges,” said Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. “She has dedicated her career to open source technologies for empowerment and inclusion.” 

At Mozilla, where she has been for nearly a decade, Selena currently leads the Firefox organization of more than 400 people responsible for all Firefox product and technology functions including desktop, mobile, web platform, and browser services. She oversaw some of the company’s most significant achievements including performance projects like Quantum Flow, architectural changes like Project Fission, key features like Enhanced Tracking Protection and Total Cookie Protection, and services such as Firefox Monitor. In her nine years at Mozilla, Selena held various other roles including Vice President for Firefox Desktop, Senior Director for Web Platform Engineering and Gecko Runtime, and Senior Manager for Gecko Security Engineering. 

Selena also brings experience from her previous roles as co-founder of Prime Radiant, a software as a service business that explored how to improve business processes at scale with checklist automation software, and as Consulting Director of Development for The Ada Initiative, an organization that was dedicated to increasing the participation of women in open source and technology communities. She was a major contributor to PostgreSQL, one of the largest free and open source databases in the world. 

“Open collaboration produces better solutions for the world, and technology is a critical enabler of making this true,” said Selena. “I look forward to contributing to Wikimedia’s inspiring free knowledge mission.”

As Chief Product and Technology Officer, Selena will work with Wikimedia Foundation staff, technical contributors, volunteer developers, researchers, and communities to support Wikimedia’s 2030 Movement Strategy to advance free and open access to knowledge. The majority of the Foundation is focused on product and technology development in service of our mission.

Wikimedia Foundation welcomes Selena Deckelmann as Chief Product and Technology Officer

17:00, Monday, 13 2022 June UTC

13 June 2022, San Francisco  — The Wikimedia Foundation today announced the appointment of Selena Deckelmann as Chief Product and Technology Officer. Selena is currently serving as Senior Vice President of Mozilla, where she was responsible for Firefox. She will officially join on August 1, 2022.

Selena will lead the product and technology teams at the Wikimedia Foundation. These teams support the technology infrastructure and innovation that powers Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, one of the most visited websites in the world with more than 16 billion pageviews per month. They also enable more than 300,000 global volunteers to edit Wikimedia projects each month. 

“Selena has a proven track record of delivering results by enabling individuals and teams to tackle unique and often complex challenges,” said Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. “She has dedicated her career to open source technologies for empowerment and inclusion.” 

At Mozilla, where she has been for nearly a decade, Selena currently leads the Firefox organization of more than 400 people responsible for all Firefox product and technology functions including desktop, mobile, web platform, and browser services. She oversaw some of the company’s most significant achievements including performance projects like Quantum Flow, architectural changes like Project Fission, key features like Enhanced Tracking Protection and Total Cookie Protection, and services such as Firefox Monitor. In her nine years at Mozilla, Selena held various other roles including Vice President for Firefox Desktop, Senior Director for Web Platform Engineering and Gecko Runtime, and Senior Manager for Gecko Security Engineering. 

Selena also brings experience from her previous roles as co-founder of Prime Radiant, a software as a service business that explored how to improve business processes at scale with checklist automation software, and as Consulting Director of Development for The Ada Initiative, an organization that was dedicated to increasing the participation of women in open source and technology communities. She was a major contributor to PostgreSQL, one of the largest free and open source databases in the world. 

“Open collaboration produces better solutions for the world, and technology is a critical enabler of making this true,” said Selena. “I look forward to contributing to Wikimedia’s inspiring free knowledge mission.”

As Chief Product and Technology Officer, Selena will work with Wikimedia Foundation staff, technical contributors, volunteer developers, researchers, and communities to support Wikimedia’s 2030 Movement Strategy to advance free and open access to knowledge. The majority of the Foundation is focused on product and technology development in service of our mission.

How students are using Wikipedia as a tool toward decolonial-Indigenization

16:28, Monday, 13 2022 June UTC

Wikipedia is not just a place where the world goes for quick and reliable information. It’s a place where stories can be reframed, where the record can be corrected, where longstanding inequities can be addressed. This is exactly what Professor Nicole Lugosi-Schimpf’s students at the University of Alberta attempted to do in her Fall 2020 course on Colonialism and the Criminal Justice System in Canada. Content related to Indigenous communities is woefully underdeveloped on Wikipedia, and Professor Lugosi-Schimpf’s students tackled this glaring content gap through the lens of criminal justice.

We wrote about Professor Lugosi-Schimpf’s class last year, highlighting some of the important contributions her students made. With the field being wide open, her students tackled everything from specific court cases involving Indigenous populations to the very broad subject of Indigenous Peoples and the Canadian Criminal Justice System itself. As the student who wrote this article noted, “The most difficult part of selecting a topic was that every relevant topic I considered writing about would have first required educating the reader on the broader context of the Indigenous experience in Canada. This is because there was no relevant or accurate article to backlink to. This was the basis for the decision to write on the broad topic of ‘Indigenous Peoples and the Canadian Criminal Justice System’.”

In her recent paper, Theorizing and implementing meaningful Indigenization: Wikipedia as an opportunity for course-based digital advocacy, Professor Lugosi-Schimpf and two of her students provide a systematic overview of how the Wikipedia assignment can be a critical tool in the process of decolonial-Indigenization. As they note, “To realize decolonial-Indigenization aims, instructors must acknowledge that it is not theoretically or pedagogically possible to understand and teach about Indigenous oppression without attention to how colonialism and systemic racism are intertwined.” In other words, it’s not enough to provide content where none exists, but to carefully curate that content in such a way that accurately represents the experience of Indigenous populations. All too often these communities are presented as victims and this idea is perpetuated in all aspects of society from the media to institutions of higher education. But as the article notes, “Wikipedia, if properly curated, can play an important role in decolonial-Indigenization projects.”

Who edits Wikipedia matters. As Lugosi-Schimpf and her co-authors so eloquently write, “A result of unrepresentative authorship is unrepresentative content.” This is especially true on Wikipedia where the majority of editors identify as white, male, and from Western countries. Wiki Education has long striven to not only diversify Wikipedia’s content, but to diversify its editor base as well. Diversity of content and authorship are two sides of the same coin. Though all Wikipedia articles are supposed to be neutrally written and entirely fact-based, the author ultimately decides which facts to include and which to leave out. Wikipedia can provide a diverse array of communities with an opportunity to shape their own narrative within Wikipedia’s guidelines designed to uphold accuracy and reliability. As Lugosi-Schimpf notes in the article, “Editing Wikipedia was an impetus for students to contemplate what narratives and histories are told, how they are told, and by whom. … Actively engaging the politics of citation affords students an invaluable opportunity to push back against disciplinary canons often found on syllabi to bring scholarship from the margins to the forefront.”

Peoples from historically marginalized communities have largely been left out of the story because they have rarely been given the chance to write their own narratives. If they are injected into mainstream history, it’s often as victims without agency or depth. Wikipedia offers such people a unique space to present history in and on their own terms. As Professor Lugosi-Schimpf notes, “From the course evaluations, it was clear the Wikipedia experience was rewarding for all of the students, and it was especially meaningful for the students that identify as BIPOC and/or sexual and gender minorities whose voices and perspectives are often missing from mainstream media.” And as one of Lugosi-Schimpf’s students confirmed, “As a Black bi-racial woman, I have embodied experiences with misrepresentation and stereotyping that stems from structures of white supremacy and systemic racism. The opportunity to create Wikipedia content that dispelled taken for granted assumptions for another equity seeking group, from within a supported environment, was both empowering and inspiring.”

Wikipedia is in many ways a reflection of the systemic biases present throughout society. Its reliance strictly on written sources means that many peoples and cultures are left out because they have been left out of the written record. It’s often argued that Wikipedia isn’t a place for activism. Its requirements around neutrality dictate that no single point of view should dominate an article. Its notability policies have often been criticized for excluding those who have been left out of the written record — namely historically marginalized communities. In spite of its limitations, Lugosi-Schimpf and her co-authors argue that Wikipedia is in fact a place where longstanding institutional biases can be overturned: “Despite its constraints, we assert that Wikipedia can still be leveraged as a site of digital advocacy to foster positive change. For example, once a reader has more facts and sees an assemblage of colonial projects, it is difficult to refute the damage done by settler-colonialism. Even a balanced viewpoint can cause readers to question their taken-for-granted assumptions. Striving for neutrality, while contentious, opens Wikipedia up to be an ideal place to rewrite history, because history as previously written has not been neutral.”

When students contribute to Wikipedia, it can be easy to get caught up in the technicalities of the project and the demands of the term. At its core though, students are engaging in the politics of knowledge production. They are the ones deciding which facts to include and which to leave out, and it’s our hope that the work they produce makes Wikipedia a more equitable place.

Interested in teaching with Wikipedia? Visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information.

Image: ibourgeault_tasse, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Don’t Blink: Public Policy Snapshot for May 2022

15:54, Monday, 13 2022 June UTC

Welcome to the “Don’t Blink” series! Every month we compile developments from around the world that shape people’s ability to participate in the free knowledge movement. In case you blinked this month, here are the most important topics that have kept the Wikimedia Foundation’s Global Advocacy and Public Policy team busy in May.

To learn more about our team and the work we do, join our first-ever monthly conversation hour, follow us on Twitter (@WikimediaPolicy), sign up to our Wikimedia public policy mailing list, or visit our Meta-Wiki page.

Latin America and the Caribbean

  • World Press Freedom Day event in Uruguay: On 1 May, the Wikimedia Foundation sponsored and co-hosted an event to mark World Press Freedom Day with the Observatorio Latinoamericano de Regulación, Medios y Convergencia (OBSERVACOM). The session, titled More Transparency in Content Moderation: How Do We Achieve It?, explored transparency and accountability around online platforms’ content moderation practices. Amalia Toledo (Lead Public Policy Specialist for Latin America & the Caribbean) and Ricky Gaines (Senior Human Rights Advocacy Manager) participated in the event, which aimed to enhance debate around these issues in Latin America, so that civil society groups and their allies can better anticipate and respond to legislative proposals in the region that would threaten online communities and human rights on the internet. You can read our full recap of the event.

Asia

  • C20 global civil society forum: Rachel Arinii Judhistari (Lead Public Policy Specialist for Asia) represented the Foundation at the C20, the global civil society forum that runs parallel to the Group of 20 (G20) forum. As we wrote previously, the process convened civil society organizations from around the world to discuss issues related to digital transformation and inequities, among other topics. The Foundation is participating in the Working Group on Digitalization, Education, and Global Citizenship, and is contributing to a civil society policy brief that will shape G20 summit outcome documents on issues relating to free knowledge and internet regulation. 
  • Read our deep dive on the Australian Basic Online Safety Expectations (BOSE): Earlier this year, we published a blog post on the common pitfalls of online safety regulations. Aspects of these bills may threaten open knowledge communities and individuals’ fundamental and human rights to privacy, freedom of expression, and access to knowledge. We have now published a deep dive on the Australian government’s approach to online safety. The BOSE contain overly prescriptive content identification, removal, and enforcement expectations, as well as threats to encryption and privacy practices that could disproportionately expose historically underserved groups to online harm. 
  • Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting on human rights: On 18 May, Rachel Arinii Judhistari represented the Foundation at a meeting with the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) Representative from Thailand. The topics discussed included online disinformation, harmful business models of social media platforms, and others. The Thai Representative will aim to organize a regional dialogue on digital rights this year, and we are looking forward to contributing the perspective of the open knowledge movement.

United States

  • Texas social media law: The US Supreme Court has blocked, at least for now, a Texas state law that would harm the free exchange of knowledge around the world, and threaten the legal protections that enable the community editing model of Wikimedia projects. We signed onto an amicus brief in the case a week prior to this decision, which was made on 31 May. Our brief asked the US Supreme Court to stop the law from going into effect and presented the harmful impacts of this law to free speech online. We signed the brief alongside allies at the Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others.
  • Declaration for the Future of the Internet: Since our last update for April, more than 60 countries issued a Declaration for the Future of the Internet. We strongly support the principles in the declaration, which advance free expression and the exchange of free knowledge, and have explained that we intend to hold signatories to their commitments to support a free, open, interoperable, and accessible Internet.
  • Comments to US Copyright Office’s public inquiry: We filed comments to the United States (US) Copyright Office in its inquiry into standard technical measures (STMs) under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). STMs are technical tools meant to assist in identifying copyrighted works on online platforms. In our comments, we explained why STMs must be open source, that costs to free expression and privacy must be considered when identifying STMs, and our concerns that forcing platforms to use inappropriate STMs could interfere with the exchange of free knowledge and, specifically, with Wikimedia projects’ effective copyright enforcement system.

Additional Developments

  • United Kingdom (UK) government to protect internet access in Russia: The UK government has made a major decision to protect access to the free and open internet within Russia. On 30 May, the UK government exempted transactions that enable civilian telecommunications and news media services from sanctions against Russia. The decision comes off the heels of an open letter that we signed alongside allies like AccessNow, Article 19, Open Rights Group, among others, urging the UK government to protect access to the global, open internet for the Russian people. This access is essential as it enables consulting reliable information and prevents further isolation of those who speak for human rights and against war within the country. Our request to the UK government mirrors a similar initiative that we pursued in the context of US sanctions: in response to our advocacy efforts, President Biden authorized US internet companies to continue providing essential internet services within Russia. Kate Ruane (Lead Policy Specialist for US), led both of these efforts.
  • World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO): On 9 May, six Wikimedia chapters—France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Sweden and Switzerland—were rejected from gaining accreditation to the WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), the body responsible for shaping the future of global copyright policy. China was the only country to oppose the accreditation of the Wikimedia chapters, inaccurately claiming that chapters were complicit in spreading disinformation. China has also objected to the application of the Wikimedia Foundation for observer status twice, first in 2020 and again in 2021. 

Announcements from our Team

  • Launch of monthly conversation hours: In June, our team is launching our monthly conversation hours. We want to create a dedicated space to engage directly with Wikimedia volunteers, affiliates, and Foundation staff. This forum offers you an opportunity to ask questions about our work, to share information about your own projects and initiatives, and to connect and learn from each other. Come and talk with us! All details, links, and dates are on our Meta page.
  • Human Rights Policy community conversations and survey: Our team has finished the first phase of Community Conversations on the Foundation’s Human Rights Policy. These events provided spaces for volunteers, Foundation staff, and contractors to ask questions about the policy, to share their own experiences, and to offer ideas and recommendations for its implementation. If you were unable to participate or wanted to share more about your experiences, please consider filling out our anonymous survey. This survey is currently being translated into multiple languages, but is already available in English. It will be conducted via a third-party service, LimeSurvey, which may subject it to additional terms. For more information on privacy and data-handling, see the survey’s privacy statement. The survey will remain open through 30 June 2022.

This Month in GLAM: May 2022

14:34, Monday, 13 2022 June UTC

Wikimedia Foundation Appeals Russian Court Decision on Removal of Wikipedia Information Related to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

10:57, Monday, 13 2022 June UTC

On 6 June 2022, the Wikimedia Foundation filed an appeal to challenge a Moscow Court’s decision that the Foundation committed an administrative offense by failing to remove “prohibited” information on Wikipedia, largely related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In its appeal, the Wikimedia Foundation argues that information on Wikipedia should be protected by freedom of expression and does not constitute disinformation, as found by the Court. The information at issue is fact-based and verified by volunteers who continuously edit and improve articles on the site; its removal would therefore constitute a violation of people’s rights to free expression and access to knowledge.

The court fined the Foundation a total of 5 million rubles (the equivalent of approximately $65,000 USD) for refusing to remove information from Russian Wikipedia articles: Russian Invasions of Ukraine (2022), Black powder, Battle for Kyiv, War Crimes during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Shelling of Hospital in Mariupol, Bombing of the Mariupol Theater, Massacre in Bucha. The appeal comes on the heels of a growing number of requests by the Russian government to censor fact-based knowledge on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects amidst the government’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. 

According to the lower Court’s decision, the information on Wikipedia is considered disinformation, which poses risk of mass public disorder in Russia. Further, the Court declared that the Wikimedia Foundation is operating inside Russian territory, and would therefore be required to comply with Russian law. 

“This decision implies that well-sourced, verified knowledge on Wikipedia that is inconsistent with Russian government accounts constitutes disinformation,” said Stephen LaPorte, Associate General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. “The government is targeting information that is vital to people’s lives in a time of crisis. We urge the court to reconsider in favor of everyone’s rights to knowledge access and free expression.”  

This action is part of a growing trend of companies and websites being asked to set up legal entities in the country, thereby placing users, staff, and equipment under the authority of the Russian government, and making it easier to request content removal from their platforms. 

 In addition to arguing that the Russian government’s request to remove information from Wikimedia projects constitutes a violation of human rights, the Wikimedia Foundation appeal contends that Russia does not have jurisdiction over the Wikimedia Foundation. Describing Wikipedia as operating inside of Russian territory mischaracterizes the global nature of its model. Wikipedia is a global resource available in over 300 languages. All of its language editions, including Russian Wikipedia, are available to anyone in any country around the world. 

Russian-language Wikipedia is a crucial second draft of history, written by and for Russian speakers around the world who volunteer their time to make reliable, fact-checked information available to all. Blocking access to Wikipedia in Russia would deny more than 145 million people access to this vital information resource. Further, the articles flagged for removal uphold Wikipedia’s standards of neutrality, verifiability, and reliable secondary sources to ensure articles are based in fact. They are well-sourced, including citations to a variety of established news sources. The articles continue to be improved by Wikipedia volunteer editors from all over the world with more sources and up-to-date information.

The Wikimedia Foundation remains committed to defending the right of everyone to freely access and share knowledge. We have not complied with any orders from the Russian government to date, and will continue to stand by our mission to deliver free knowledge to the world. 

The Russian government will have an opportunity to make a filing in response to our appeal in the coming weeks. 

For more information, please see our previous statements on 1 March 2022 and 3 March 2022.

Tech News issue #24, 2022 (June 13, 2022)

00:00, Monday, 13 2022 June UTC
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Tech News: 2022-24

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

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 14 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 15 June. It will be on all wikis from 16 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 14 June at 06:00 UTC (targeted wikis). [3]
  • Starting on Wednesday, a new set of Wikipedias will get "Add a link" (Abkhazian Wikipedia, Achinese Wikipedia, Adyghe Wikipedia, Afrikaans Wikipedia, Akan Wikipedia, Alemannisch Wikipedia, Amharic Wikipedia, Aragonese Wikipedia, Old English Wikipedia, Aramaic Wikipedia, Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia, Asturian Wikipedia, Atikamekw Wikipedia, Avaric Wikipedia, Aymara Wikipedia, Azerbaijani Wikipedia, South Azerbaijani Wikipedia). This is part of the progressive deployment of this tool to more Wikipedias. The communities can configure how this feature works locally. [4]
  • The New Topic Tool will be deployed for all editors at Commons, Wikidata, and some other wikis soon. You will be able to opt out from within the tool and in Preferences. [5][6]

Future meetings

  • The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place today (13 June). The following meetings will take place on: 28 June, 12 July, 26 July.

Future changes

  • By the end of July, the Vector 2022 skin should be ready to become the default across all wikis. Discussions on how to adjust it to the communities' needs will begin in the next weeks. It will always be possible to revert to the previous version on an individual basis. Learn more.

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

weeklyOSM 620

10:04, Sunday, 12 2022 June UTC

31/05/2022-06/06/2022

lead picture

OSMCha with a new feature funded by Wikimedia Italy [1] © OSMCha | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Mapping campaigns

  • It is with great sadness that we learnt of the sudden death of Innocent Dibloni Soungalo, an OSM contributor from Burkina Faso. A geographer by training and a geomatician by profession, a former volunteer of the Francophonie in Senegal, Innocent had worked hard to strengthen OpenStreetMap in West Africa since his debut in 2015. From Cotonou to Dakar, via Ouagadougou, Bamako, Lomé or Bouaké, many people have benefited from his teachings and will mourn him. In his memory, the African OSM community has decided to map Gaoua, his home town.
  • Christoffs reported that OSM Poland (OSMP) has recently established contacts with the blind community in Poland. This has identified their special needs and the potential for OSM support. The next step is to encourage contributors to pay special attention when mapping to tags that support the mobility of blind people.

Mapping

  • French news agency Agence France Presse reported (fr) > en about the colossal work of a volunteer team in Ukraine that is scanning buildings deemed of interest at a 5 mm resolution, both for historical and future rebuilding purposes. Similar methods had been used for the Notre-Dame de Paris’ cathedral in France, before the 2019 fire.
  • Franjo Lukezic wrote a guide to making before-and-after GIFs for visualising OpenStreetMap editing sessions.
  • The vote on the improved tagging of neighbourhood places (place=*) in Japan is open until Thursday 16 June.

Community

  • French mapper Djiril shared (fr) their main takeaways after 1 month into OpenStreetMap. Future updates will be on Github (fr) > en.
  • François Lacombe posted (fr) > en a call, on LinkedIn, asking for data about communications and power poles in France. Following a partnership between OpenStreetMap France and Enedis, the main French electric power distribution company, more than one million of the estimated total of 24 million poles have been mapped.
  • The UN Mapper of the month for June is Yacouba Diarra, from Mali, a member of YouthMappers UnivSegou.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

  • The OSMF Board intends to change the requirements to become a normal foundation member to include that people must have edited on a minimum of 15 days first, and first registered as a mapper at least 3 months ago. The announcement triggered a lengthy discussion on osmf-talk which is still ongoing. Mikel Maron has summarised what is proposed here.
  • Cristoffs wrote an open letter to the OSMF board, as a diary entry (following on from this issue), which attracted considerable comment, including from the EWG, who commented here, and indirectly from the repository author, here. The key request was that the style ought to reflect community requests for the display of new tags regardless of cartographic issues, and that the OSMF board (who currently don’t directly mandate what that style shows) should make that happen, due to the special status that the ‘standard’ style has (rendered by OSM itself, cached by Fastly, etc.). Topics covered also included the behaviour of style authors (and how issues there should be reported).
  • The OSMF Engineering Working Group has commissioned Jochen Topf to write a report outlining the problems with the current OSM data model, their impact on OSM systems, and possible improvements. Steve Coast, founder of OSM, responded by saying that there is nothing to fix. If the discussion on Y Combinator is any guide, this is not a truth universally acknowledged.

Events

  • The State of the Map Working Group is happy to announce that tickets and the programme are now accessible through the SotM 2022 website.

OSM research

  • You can now find out about the four accepted student projects for the Google Summer of Code 2022.

Humanitarian OSM

  • The HOT unSummit is offering travel funding for active HOT and humanitarian open mapping / open data contributors and community members to attend two of the conferences that they are supporting; FOSS4G and SOTM.

Maps

  • The AdV working group Smart Mapping has developed a bilingual map ((uk)/(de)), as an aid for refugees and as an experiment for future applications. More can be found about AdV projects at basemap.de (de) > en and AdV Smart Mapping.
  • Andy Townsend (SomeoneElse) wrote a diary entry describing the recent style changes visible on the map here including the use of colours to differentiate tourist and mainline railway stations, locked gates, and better roadside cycleway and footpath name handling. Mostly these are done using lua tag transforms to keep the styling code simple.

switch2OSM

  • Big Tech’s maps have led ride-sharing giant Grab astray. Grab is now building its own maps based on OSM and says it has become the largest contributor to OpenStreetMap in Southeast Asia.

Open Data

  • Cristiano Giovando wrote about the current state of affairs with OpenAerialMap version 2.

Software

  • OSMCha now allows users to search changesets that affect a certain OSM tag. For example: you can find changesets that created, modified or deleted restaurants. For more details, see the Development Seed blog post.
  • OsmAnd invites you to celebrate 12 years with OsmAnd! You can share a photo with your trip story on Instagram with the hashtag #12YearsOsmAnd; OsmAnd will choose the best and award a prize.
  • Sammyhawkrad built a simple tool to help OpenStreetMap contributors see statistics of their most common editing issues as flagged by Osmose.

Releases

  • Eugene Kizevich outlined what’s new in version 4.2 of OsmAnd for Android. Besides an adaptation of the map style, new quick actions and recording widgets, the ‘OSM Mapper assistant’ option was split into separate options: fixme tags,note tags, icons at low zooms, and waterway tunnels.

OSM in the media

  • French dataviz company WeDoData tweeted (fr) > en about the Arte series Europe, a disrupted continent (fr) episode on people-driven solutions to European transportation issues. They explain how they used OpenStreetMap to fetch the bicycle network at a continental scale and computed its evolution since 2014.

Other “geo” things

  • Jules Grandin has made (fr) > en a series of maps comparing humans and different livestock populations in French departments using data (fr) > en from the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (Insee).

Upcoming Events

Where What Online When Country
Nantes State of the Map France 2022 osmcalpic 2022-06-10 – 2022-06-12 flag
Zürich 141. OSM-Stammtisch/Mappingparty osmcalpic 2022-06-11 flag
臺北市 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #41 osmcalpic 2022-06-13 flag
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京都市 京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第31回 妙法院 osmcalpic 2022-06-18 flag
新店區 OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團 #2 三峽-大溪踏查 osmcalpic 2022-06-19 flag
OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting osmcalpic 2022-06-20
Arlon EPN d’Arlon – Atelier ouvert OpenStreetMap – Initiation osmcalpic 2022-06-21 flag
San Jose South Bay Map Night osmcalpic ✓ 2022-06-22 flag
152. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn osmcalpic 2022-06-21
City of Nottingham OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online) osmcalpic ✓ 2022-06-21 flag
TeachOSM Map-Along osmcalpic 2022-06-22
Lüneburg Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online) osmcalpic 2022-06-21 flag
Washington OpenStreetMap US Mappy Hour osmcalpic ✓ 2022-06-23 flag
Düsseldorf Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen osmcalpic ✓ 2022-06-24 flag
IJmuiden OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online) osmcalpic ✓ 2022-06-25 flag
Tanzania Mapping Groups June Mapathon osmcalpic 2022-06-25
Arlon EPN d’Arlon – Atelier ouvert OpenStreetMap – Contribution osmcalpic 2022-06-28 flag
[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting osmcalpic 2022-06-30
Essen 17. OSM-FOSSGIS-Communitytreffen osmcalpic 2022-07-01 – 2022-07-03 flag

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Sammyhawkrad, SomeoneElse, Strubbl, TheSwavu, derFred, erenozdemir.

Shocking tales from ornithology

02:45, Saturday, 11 2022 June UTC
Manipulative people have always made use of the dynamics of ingroups and outgroups to create diversions from bigger issues. The situation is made worse when misguided philosophies are peddled by governments that put economics ahead of ecology. The pursuit of easily gamed targets such as GDP is preferrable to ecological amelioration since money is a man-made and controllable entity. Nationalism, pride, other forms of chauvinism, the creation of enemies and the magnification of war threats are all effective tools in the arsenal of Machiavelli for use in misdirecting the masses when things go wrong. One might imagine that the educated, especially scientists, would be smart enough not to fall into these traps, but cases from history dampen hopes for such optimism.

There is a very interesting book in German by Eugeniusz Nowak called "Wissenschaftler in turbulenten Zeiten" (or scientists in turbulent times) that deals with the lives of ornithologists, conservationists and other naturalists during the Second World War. Preceded by a series of recollections published in various journals, the book was published in 2010 but I became aware of it only recently while translating some biographies into the English Wikipedia. I have not yet actually seen the book (it has about five pages on Salim Ali as well) and have had to go by secondary quotations in other content. Nowak was a student of Erwin Stresemann (with whom the first chapter deals with) and he writes about several European (but mostly German, Polish and Russian) ornithologists and their lives during the turbulent 1930s and 40s. Although Europe is pretty far from India, there are ripples that reached afar. Incidentally, Nowak's ornithological research includes studies on the expansion in range of the collared dove (Streptopelia decaocto) which the Germans called the Türkentaube, literally the "Turkish dove", a name with a baggage of cultural prejudices.

Nowak's first paper of "recollections" notes that: [he] presents the facts not as accusations or indictments, but rather as a stimulus to the younger generation of scientists to consider the issues, in particular to think “What would I have done if I had lived there or at that time?” - a thought to keep as you read on.

A shocker from this period is a paper by Dr Günther Niethammer on the birds of Auschwitz (Birkenau). This paper (read it online here) was published when Niethammer was posted to the security at the main gate of the concentration camp. You might be forgiven if you thought he was just a victim of the war. Niethammer was a proud nationalist and volunteered to join the Nazi forces in 1937 leaving his position as a curator at the Museum Koenig at Bonn.
The contrast provided by Niethammer who looked at the birds on one side
while ignoring inhumanity on the other provided
novelist Arno Surminski with a title for his 2008 novel -
Die Vogelwelt von Auschwitz - ie. the birdlife of Auschwitz.

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

Meanwhile inside Auschwitz, the Polish artist Wladyslaw Siwek was making sketches of everyday life  in the camp. After the war he became a zoological artist of repute. Unfortunately there is very little that is readily accessible to English readers on the internet (beyond the Wikipedia entry).
Siwek, artist who documented life at Auschwitz
before working as a wildlife artist.
 
Hans Kumerloeve
Now for Niethammer's friend Dr Kumerloeve who also worked in the Museum Koenig at Bonn. His name was originally spelt Kummerlöwe and was, like Niethammer, a doctoral student of Johannes Meisenheimer. Kummerloeve and Niethammer made journeys on a small motorcyle to study the birds of Turkey. Kummerlöwe's political activities started earlier than Niethammer, joining the NSDAP (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei = The National Socialist German Workers' Party)  in 1925 and starting the first student union of the party in 1933. Kummerlöwe soon became a member of the Ahnenerbe, a think tank meant to provide "scientific" support to the party-ideas on race and history. In 1939 he wrote an anthropological study on "Polish prisoners of war". At the museum in Dresden that he headed, he thought up ideas to promote politics and he published his ideas in 1939 and 1940. After the war, it is thought that he went to all the European libraries that held copies of this journal (Anyone interested in hunting it should look for copies of Abhandlungen und Berichte aus den Staatlichen Museen für Tierkunde und Völkerkunde in Dresden 20:1-15.) and purged them of the article which would incriminate him. According to Nowak, he even managed to get his hands (and scissors) on copies of the journal held in Moscow and Leningrad!  

The Dresden museum was also home to the German ornithologist Adolf Bernhard Meyer (1840–1911). In 1858, he translated the works of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace into German and introduced evolutionary theory to a whole generation of German scientists. Among Meyer's amazing works is a series of avian osteological works which uses photography and depicts birds in nearly-life-like positions (wonder how it was done!) - a less artistic precursor to Katrina van Grouw's 2012 book The Unfeathered Bird. Meyer's skeleton images can be found here. In 1904 Meyer was eased out of the Dresden museum because of rising anti-semitism. Meyer does not find a place in Nowak's book.
 
Niethammer stands behind Salim Ali, 1967.
International Ornithological Congress, 1967


Nowak's book includes entries on the following scientists: (I keep this here partly for my reference as I intend to improve Wikipedia entries on several of them as and when time and resources permit. Would be amazing if others could pitch in!).
In the first of his "recollection papers" (his 1998 article) Nowak writes about the reason for writing them - noticing that the obituary for Prof. Ernst Schäfer  was a whitewash that carefully avoided any mention of his wartime activities. And this brings us to India. In a recent article in Indian Birds, Sylke Frahnert and coauthors have written about the bird collections from Sikkim in the Berlin natural history museum. In their article there is a brief statement that "The  collection  in  Berlin  has  remained  almost  unknown due  to  the  political  circumstances  of  the  expedition". This might be a bit cryptic for many but the best read on the topic is Himmler's Crusade: The true story of the 1939 Nazi expedition into Tibet (2009) by Christopher Hale. Hale writes: 
He [Himmler] revered the ancient cultures of India and the East, or at least his own weird vision of them.
These were not private enthusiasms, and they were certainly not harmless. Cranky pseudoscience nourished Himmler’s own murderous convictions about race and inspired ways of convincing others...
Himmler regarded himself not as the fantasist he was but as a patron of science. He believed that most conventional wisdom was bogus and that his power gave him a unique opportunity to promulgate new thinking. He founded the Ahnenerbe specifically to advance the study of the Aryan (or Nordic or Indo-German) race and its origins
From there, Hale goes on to examine the motivations of Schäfer and his team. He looks at how much of the science was politically driven. Swastika signs dominate some of the photos from the expedition - as if it provided for a natural tie with Buddhism in Tibet. It seems that Himmler gave Schäfer the opportunity to rise within the political hierarchy. The team that went to Sikkim included Bruno Beger. Beger was a physical anthropologist but with less than innocent motivations although that would be much harder to ascribe to the team's other pursuits like botany and ornithology. One of the results from the expedition was a film made by the entomologist of the group, Ernst Krause - Geheimnis Tibet - or secret Tibet - a copy of this 1 hour and 40 minute film is on YouTube. At around 26 minutes, you can see Bruno Beger creating face casts - first as a negative in Plaster of Paris from which a positive copy was made using resin. Hale talks about how one of the Tibetans put into a cast with just straws to breathe from went into an epileptic seizure from the claustrophobia and fear induced. The real horror however is revealed when Hale quotes a May 1943 letter from an SS officer to Beger - ‘What exactly is happening with the Jewish heads? They are lying around and taking up valuable space . . . In my opinion, the most reasonable course of action is to send them to Strasbourg . . .’ Apparently Beger had to select some prisoners from Auschwitz who appeared to have Asiatic features. Hale shows that Beger knew the fate of his selection - they were gassed for research conducted by Beger and August Hirt.
SS-Sturmbannführer Schäfer at the head of the table in Lhasa

In all, Hale makes a clear case that the Schäfer mission had quite a bit of political activity underneath. We find that Sven Hedin (Schäfer was a big fan of him in his youth. Hedin was a Nazi sympathizer who funded and supported the mission) was in contact with fellow Nazi supporter Erica Schneider-Filchner and her father Wilhelm Filchner in India, both of whom were interned later at Satara, while Bruno Beger made contact with Subhash Chandra Bose more than once. [Two of the pictures from the Bundesarchiv show a certain Bhattacharya - who appears to be a chemist working on snake venom at the Calcutta snake park - one wonders if he is Abhinash Bhattacharya.]

My review of Nowak's book must be uniquely flawed as  I have never managed to access it beyond some online snippets and English reviews.  The war had impacts on the entire region and Nowak's coverage is limited and there were many other interesting characters including the Russian ornithologist Malchevsky  who survived German bullets thanks to a fat bird observation notebook in his pocket! In the 1950's Trofim Lysenko, the crank scientist who controlled science in the USSR sought Malchevsky's help in proving his own pet theories - one of which was the ideas that cuckoos were the result of feeding hairy caterpillars to young warblers!

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

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

Postscripts:
  • Mixing natural history with war sometimes led to tragedy for the participants as well. In the case of Dr Manfred Oberdörffer who used his cover as an expert on leprosy to visit the borders of Afghanistan with entomologist Fred Hermann Brandt (1908–1994), an exchange of gunfire with British forces killed him although Brandt lived on to tell the tale.
  • Apparently Himmler's entanglement with ornithology also led him to dream up "Storchbein Propaganda" - a plan to send pamphlets to the Boers in South Africa via migrating storks! The German ornithologist Ernst Schüz quietly (and safely) pointed out the inefficiency of it purely on the statistics of recoveries!

The tragedy of Mariupol, as seen by a Wikipedia volunteer from Ukraine

20:05, Thursday, 09 2022 June UTC

Wikimedia Ukraine is collecting and telling stories of Ukrainian Wikimedia community members affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This article was first published in The Signpost. See the full collection of stories on Meta.

The Russian siege of Mariupol, a major city in southeastern Ukraine, has become one of the most profound tragedies of the 21st century.

Authorities estimate that over 20,000 civilians have died since early March, as a result of shelling, and the effects of the siege like lack of food and water. The vast majority of Mariupol’s buildings have been destroyed or severely damaged by indiscriminate shelling.

Oleksandr, known on Wikipedia as Wanderer777, was born in Mariupol and spent much of his life in the city. He eventually managed to escape from the city and is safe now, but before that he had witnessed the siege and its effects first-hand.

Mariupol after Russian shelling, photo taken by Oleksandr (credits: Wanderer 777, CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Oleksandr graduated from the Pryazovskyi State Technical University in Mariupol, specializing in the automatization of metallurgical processes and computer-integrated technologies.

On Wikipedia, he’s been most active in the Russian-language edition; over the past 15 years, he had the opportunity to be an administrator, a bureaucrat, a member of the Arbitration Committee, and a mediator on the topic of Ukraine. Oleksandr has also contributed to Ukrainian Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and other wiki projects.

When Russia openly invaded Ukraine on February 24th, Oleksandr and his family contemplated leaving Mariupol but decided to stay, hoping that the war would not reach them quickly. The predictions proved too optimistic – Russian forces advanced rapidly in the east of Ukraine, and soon Mariupol was encircled. On the third day of the invasion, leaving was already impossible, Oleksandr recalls.

Oleksandr’s family moved to a safer western part of the city. Within a few days, the occupiers destroyed practically all civilian infrastructure. Supermarkets, electrical transformer substations, water supply pumping stations were shattered, and so were fire stations and funeral homes.

Oleksandr and other people in his building moved to the basement and lived there for a few weeks. He remembers constant shelling – a picture of a Russian tank approaching the neighborhood and indiscriminately shooting at residential buildings was not uncommon. Oleksandr’s house was hit and damaged but not destroyed – unlike most of the buildings around it, which collapsed completely.

Mariupol’s drama theater destroyed by Russian bombing (credits: Donetsk Regional Military Civil Administration, CC BY-SA 4.0)

As soon as possible in mid-March, Oleksandr and his family managed to sneak from the city to a nearby village. This wasn’t the end of their ordeal, though – they spent another month looking for ways to escape from occupied territory. Finally, they managed to leave by car in the second half of April, reaching the Ukrainian-controlled city of Zaporizhzhia.

Oleksandr says it’s a miracle he managed to leave Mariupol. People leaving later, especially military-age men, were either not allowed to leave or placed in filtration camps, effectively being jailed for an indefinite period without trial.

He helped his family move abroad and remains in Dnipro, a city in eastern Ukraine that’s controlled by the Ukrainian government and is relatively safe as compared to beleaguered Donbas.

Oleksandr says we’ll never know the full extent of the devastation in Mariupol. As he describes on his user page in Russian Wikipedia, “many people died, truly many … People were dying from missiles and shells. In houses and on the streets, in yards and shelters. When they were trying to get at least some food from destroyed shops, when they were cooking food in bonfires, when they were looking for a place that still had mobile connection. People were dying when buildings collapsed from air bombs and in basements from smoke caused by fires. People were dying from the lack of insulin, antibiotics and medications for heart diseases. People were dying from hunger and thirst.”

Now, what once was a major industrial center with over 400,000 residents is in ruins – and fully occupied by Russia. Active fighting has stopped, but the humanitarian disaster is not over – the city’s infrastructure was destroyed, and the occupying authorities aren’t likely to rebuild it soon.

For another account of the Mariupol tragedy, check the diary of doctor Oleh Zyma – also a Wikipedia editor – published by “Bird in Flight”.

Virtual Pride panel: Exploring experiences of LGBTQIA+ Wikimedians

18:30, Thursday, 09 2022 June UTC

On 15 June at 17:00 hrs UTC, join a Pride month panel on improving LGBTQIA+ representation within the Wikimedia movement and projects. You can watch live on YouTube.

Throughout the Wikimedia movement and its projects, many identities and backgrounds are represented and celebrated. Unfortunately, within general online spaces, there are still a lot of challenges for Queer individuals and groups that steers them away from joining communities due to their identities. 

This Pride month, on 15 June, LGBTQIA+ folks from across the Wikimedia movement will share their experiences from within the movement and talk about the achievements and challenges they continue to face in online spaces. What are some of these challenges? There is still a clear lack of representation of the LGBTQIA+ community, as well as a big gender gap in the Wikimedia projects. There’s also a lack of representation in terms of the people who build our communities: only 1% of all editors identify as trans, and less than 1% of Wikipedia biographies cover trans or nonbinary people. 

According to the open data project Humaniki, the majority of content about people on all Wikimedia projects is about men. For example, as of May 2022, only 18.38% of content in all Wikimedia projects, including biographies on Wikipedia, are about women.

Also, much of the content about LGBTQIA+ projects, activists and history, suffers from damaging edits. According to research conducted by the Foundation, 8.8% of some 500 edits made to Marsha P. Johnson’s biography were . 

This panel will be hosted by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team, and will shed light on perspectives experienced by folks in different areas of the movement, all with different tenures. 

The panelists are:

  • Andrea Denisse. Based in Mexico, Denisse is a Site Reliability Engineer with the Wikimedia Foundation, working on the Observability project.
  • Vic Sfriso. Sfriso is Cooperation and Inclusion Program Assistant with  Wikimedia Argentina.
  • Rae Adimer, User:Vermont. Adimer is a new Movement Communications Associate with the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as a Wikimedia Steward and Admin/CU on Meta-Wiki and the Simple English Wikipedia. They are also part of the Universal Code of Conduct Revisions Committee and the Leadership Development Working Group.
  • Marinus Uys. Based in South Africa, Uys is a Lead Learning and Development Specialist with  the Wikimedia Foundation. He is also a Wikipedia editor and volunteer in LGBTQIA+ organizations within South Africa. 

You can join the event on 15 June at 17:00 hrs UTC. Watch live on YouTube.

Adding women physicists to the Spanish Wikipedia

16:03, Wednesday, 08 2022 June UTC
Sofia presents in front of a flip chart
Sofía Flores Fuentes.
Image courtesy Sofía Flores Fuentes, all rights reserved.

Sofía Flores Fuentes is a science communicator. She’s been a university professor, a civil servant, and an independent public engagement person. Currently, she’s working as a communicator at the Physics Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her most recent medium of science communication? Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia is a great platform, if not the best platform, to freely communicate science and information based on evidence,” Sofía says. “It reaches any corner of the world (that has internet access) so anyone can exploit the information located here. I think as science communicators we have the responsibility of knowing how to use Wikipedia.”

Sofía learned to edit Wikipedia through a recent Wiki Scientists course run by Wiki Education and sponsored by the American Physical Society (APS). A colleague had recommended the course, and she knew it was the help she needed to jumpstart her work on Wikipedia. The course focused on improving biographies of underrepresented physicists on Wikipedia, a cause near and dear to Sofía’s heart.

While the course was taught in English and focused on the English Wikipedia, Sofía took the opportunity to use her bilingualism to improve Spanish Wikipedia articles too. She expanded the article on María Ester Brandan and created the article on Myriam Mondragón Ceballos.

“The Wiki Scientists course gave me the tools to write an article. Even though the Spanish version changes a bit, I had the chance to go into the platform, learn the process and how it works in general terms,” Sofía says. “However, the most important thing I got from the course was the confidence to do it. Wikipedia seemed like a dark universe to me, that couldn’t be penetrated that easily. After this course I now feel like it is a fascinating world created and nourished by a vibrant community, and all the respect and values involved.”

Sofía found the differences in processes between the Spanish and English Wikipedia interesting, as well as the differences in discussions. She’s inspired to keep editing articles about Mexican physicists, especially women. And she hopes to have events at her institution to support others to edit as well.

“I am a science communicator who loves writing articles. But I also stand for the access to information, so I try to dedicate my professional work so people can have the possibility of learning and being informed. I also think that humanity can do great things that can benefit other people, so I believe Wikipedia is a great effort for humans to reach this goal,” Sofía says. “I’m just grateful for APS giving me the opportunity to learn. I think that a lot of people like me can make the most from your work so we can also help others.”

Episode 114: Lionel Scheepmans

16:59, Tuesday, 07 2022 June UTC

🕑 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:

50,000 video games on Wikidata

16:26, Tuesday, 07 2022 June UTC

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).

Video games per platform

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

Video games per year of first publication

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 🙂 )

Video games per genre

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

Video games per country of origin

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%).

Count of video games linked to each Wikipedia language version

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.

Count of video games linked to only one Wikipedia language version

External identifiers

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

Count of video games per identifier

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

Tech/News/2022/22

14:39, Tuesday, 07 2022 June UTC

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.

Announcing WikiArabia 2022 Conference in Dubai, UAE

16:21, Monday, 06 2022 June UTC

The Wikimedians of UAE user group is excited to announce that the 6th edition of the WikiArabia conference will be held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates from the 28th – 30th 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:

The Scholarship Committee:

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]

In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia

07:00, Monday, 06 2022 June UTC

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:

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:

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):

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:

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

ASCII archer by jah/SSt via asciiart.eu.

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.

ASCII arrow: own work.

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.)

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:

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

Tech News issue #23, 2022 (June 6, 2022)

00:00, Monday, 06 2022 June UTC
Tech Forum
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MediaWiki
The Tech News weekly summaries help you monitor recent software changes likely to impact you and your fellow Wikimedians. Subscribe, contribute and give feedback.

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Tech News: 2022-23

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.

weeklyOSM 619

09:57, Sunday, 05 2022 June UTC

24/05/2022-30/05/2022

lead picture

UN Mappers workshop in Kenya [1] UN Mappers | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

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 (fr) > en some anger against GéoDAE and other defibrillator databases which are either too complex to use, lack proper maintenance, or are actively guarded (fr) > en.
  • You can vote on the proposal to add the translate extension to the OSM Wiki now.

Imports

  • User nyampire published a simple analysis (ja) > en of results from a community survey about the proposed Plateau Building dataset import plan (ja) > en. 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 (ja) > en 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 (ja) > en 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

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

Latin America debates ideas to democratically regulate transparency of digital platforms

12:00, Saturday, 04 2022 June UTC
2022 World Press Freedom Day open debate in Punta del Este, Uruguay
2022 World Press Freedom Day open debate in Punta del Este, Uruguay. Image by Nicolás Neves, CC0, via OBSERVACOM

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.

GitLab-a-thon!

18:39, Friday, 03 2022 June UTC

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:

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

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.

Should Vector be responsive?

15:30, Thursday, 02 2022 June UTC

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:

Screen Shot 2022-05-09 at 2.47.31 PM.png (786×1 px, 182 KB)

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:

Screenshot_20220509-151012_Chrome.jpg (2×1 px, 651 KB)

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:

Screenshot_20220509-152651_Chrome.jpg (2×1 px, 571 KB)

Screenshot_20220509-152646_Chrome.jpg (2×1 px, 579 KB)

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">

What is Wikipedia? And in Which Way Should It Be Less Free?

19:46, Wednesday, 01 2022 June UTC

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:

1 in 5 people are still waiting for the Bible in their own language. 7,378 languages are spoken in the world. 717 languages have a full Bible. *September 2021 statistics. Wycliffe Bible Translators. wycliffe.org.uk

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.

A screenshot of a table with columns: Language, Messages, Untranslated, Completion, Reviewed. Sorted by "Untranslated", with the languages that have 0 untranslated at the top. The languages are Arabic, Belarusian, German, Persian, etc. The full table in text form is available at the "report" hyperlink from the previous paragraph.
A screenshot of a part of the report. Good work, translators to Arabic, Belarusian, German, Persian, French, Macedonian, Norwegian Bokmål, Dutch, Russian, and Turkish! (Also Hebrew, but a lot of that is done by yours-truly, so it’s weird to praise myself.)

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.

Why the American Physical Society partners with Wiki Education

16:12, Wednesday, 01 2022 June UTC
Headshot of Allie Lau wearing a hat
Allie Lau

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

Our new Volunteer Coordinator on engaging with the community

10:05, Wednesday, 01 2022 June UTC

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.

Tracing some ornithological roots

03:32, Wednesday, 01 2022 June UTC
The years 1883-1885 were tumultuous in the history of zoology in India. A group called the Simla Naturalists' Society was formed in the summer of 1885. The founding President of the Simla group was, oddly enough, Courtenay Ilbert - who some might remember for the Ilbert Bill which allowed Indian magistrates to make judgements on British subjects. Another member of this Simla group was Henry Collett who wrote a Flora of the Simla region (Flora Simlensis). This Society vanished without much of a trace. A slightly more stable organization was begun in 1883, the Bombay Natural History Society. The creation of these organizations was probably precipitated by the emergence of a gaping hole. A vacuum was created with the end of an India-wide correspondence network of naturalists that was fostered by a one-man-force - that of A. O. Hume. The ornithological chapter of Hume's life begins and ends in Shimla. Hume's serious ornithology began around 1870 and he gave it all up in 1883, after the loss of years of carefully prepared manuscripts for a magnum opus on Indian ornithology, damage to his specimen collections and a sudden immersion into Theosophy which also led him to abjure the killing of animals, taking to vegetarianism and subsequently to take up the cause of Indian nationalism. The founders of the BNHS included Eha (E. H. Aitken was also a Hume/Stray Feathers correspondent), J.C. Anderson (who was a Simla naturalist) and Phipson (who was from a wine merchant family with a strong presence in Simla). One of the two Indian founding members, Dr Atmaram Pandurang, was the father-in-law of Hume's correspondent Harold Littledale, a college principal at Baroda.

Shimla then was where Hume rose in his career (as Secretary of State, before falling) allowing him to work on his hobby project of Indian ornithology by bringing together a large specimen collection and conducting the publication of Stray Feathers. Through readings, I had a constructed a fairytale picture of the surroundings that he lived in. Richard Bowdler Sharpe, a curator at the British Museum who came to Shimla in 1885 wrote (his description  is well worth reading in full):
... 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.
 
So there ended my hopes of adding good views (free-licensed images are still misunderstood in India) of Rothney Castle to the Wikipedia article on Hume. I did however get a couple of photographs from the roadside. In 2014, I managed to visit the South London Botanical Institute which was the last of Hume's enterprises. This visit enabled the addition a few pictures of his herbarium collections as well as an illustration of his bookplate which carries his personal motto.

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


I got back from Annandale and then walked down to Phagli on the southern slope of Shimla to see the place where my paternal grandfather once lived. It is not a coincidence that Shimla and my name are derived from the local deity Shyamaladevi (a version of Kali).


The South London Botanical Institute

After returning to England, Hume took an interest in botany. He made herbarium collections and in 1910 he established the South London Botanical Institute and left money in his will for its upkeep. The SLBI is housed in a quiet residential area. Here are some pictures I took in 2014, most can be found on Wikipedia.


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

Further reading
 Postscript

 An antique book shop had a set of Hume's Nests and Eggs (Second edition) and it bore the signature of "R.W.D. Morgan" - it appears that there was a BNHS member of that name from Calcutta c. 1933. It is unclear if it is the same person as Rhodes Morgan, who was a Hume correspondent and forest officer in Wynaad/Malabar who helped William Ruxton Davison.
Update:  Henry Noltie of RBGE pointed out to me privately that this is cannot be the forester Rhodes Morgan who died in 1919! - September, 2016.

Incidentally, the Simla naturalists' Society must have had its home in Chapslee Estate, which was where Ilbert lived and I had the privilege of having a look at the interiors of one of this last remaining heritage mansion in Shimla. The society evidently had numerous lulls and starts with the movements of interested members.
 
The Bombay Gazette, 3 June 1887 page 4


Wiki Loves Monuments in Focus: Challenges of Hosting Diverse, Equitable and Inclusive Photo Competitions

11:54, Monday, 30 2022 May UTC

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.

Tech News issue #22, 2022 (May 30, 2022)

00:00, Monday, 30 2022 May UTC
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Tech News: 2022-22

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

Recent changes

  • Advanced item 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]
  • Advanced item 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]

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