The Meshtastic is my solarpunk dream—a cheap, encrypted, offgrid communicator. But the project is still in the alpha stages (and it shows).

Meshtastic is a communication system. Its firmware runs on bare-bones “T-Beam” devices. T-Beams are available fully-assembled and pre-flashed for about $35.

The devices enable encrypted, text-message-style communication via an app on your smartphone. No cell service required.

I bought two Meshtastic T-Beams for a recent trip to Yellowstone National Park. The devices worked as advertised—we could share texts and locations between our Android phones even though we had no service.

What I dislike ¶

There’s no way around it: this is an alpha quality project. Right now, it’s only usable by nerds (like me 🌠). You’ll probably have a bad time if you’re not a tinkerer or a hobbyist.

• Alpha quality – The project is hard to use, even for the basics. During our trip to Yellowstone, we repeatedly lost our bluetooth connection to the devices—they kept going to sleep. And the interface is sometimes unclear—I ended up holding down buttons, waiting for something (anything) to happen.
• iOS requires Testflight – The Android mobile app worked well, but the iOS app requires Testflight to install—which seems like a pain.
• Batteries/small bombs – The T-Beams run off big honkin’ 18650 batteries—the same lithium-ion cells used in Tesla battery packs. While the batteries last all day, I had to make extra purchases. Later I realized they run fine off of USB battery packs, but I was uncertain about that when I bought it. These things added to my costs:
  • Opus BT-C3100 battery charger
  • Sanyo NCR18650GA 3500mAh 10A Battery
• PCBs are intimidating – Holding a PCB (printed circuit board) intimidates electronics neophytes. There are stickers available on the discourse that read: “Meshtastic: this is not a bomb” (for base stations in the field).
• “Meshtastic” – My brain refuses to type “meshtastic” on the first try; this may be a personal problem.

19/07/2022-25/07/2022

Mapping

• Andrea Spinelli wondered how to add a point of interest with iD at a specific coordinate. Officially, this function is not desired. Developers recommend the use of Cmd + Opt + M, or equivalent, to open the measurement panel, which shows the exact location of a selected node. In comments following the blog post, readers shared their alternative approaches.
• A bicycle route linking Stuttgart in Germany to Strasbourg in France has been created, as reported last week. Without signposts along it, a discussion has started about whether it meets OpenStreetMap’s inclusion criteria. At the moment there are opinions on multiple channels for and against, including the French mailing list > and the German forum > .
• EdoBoo reported, in their OSM Diary, that their visit to Forte di Montecchio motivated them to revise the mapping of this fortress with more detail.
• Mapping public transport seems to remain a challenge for new mappers, although the wiki contains a step-by-step tutorial.
• ngumenawesamson, from HOT, presented a detailed classification of aspects of data quality on OSM, under 10 headings. It is planned to use this classification to identify actions which can be taken, within HOT projects, to reduce some of these issues.
• Voting on Documentation of key prefixes and suffixes, to establish the convention of documenting key prefixes at pages named Key:prefix:* and key suffixes at pages named Key:*:suffix on the wiki, is open until Sunday 7 August.
• Voting on the following proposals has closed:
  • school=entrance, to deprecate the use of the tag school=entrance, was approved with 26 votes for, 3 votes against and 0 abstentions.
  • amenity=library_dropoff, for mapping a place where library patrons can return or drop-off books, other than the library itself, was approved with 12 votes for, 1 vote against and 0 abstentions.

Community

• The national mapping agency for Great Britain, the Ordnance Survey (OSGB), recently released a new map, OS Map, as a website and a mobile app. The map provides both free and subscription layers. The free layers integrate data from a range of sources: OSGB open data, OSGB closed data and OpenStreetMap via MapBox. The UK community has noticed problems with the latter layer as it includes private paths, which has resulted in irate landowners deleting perfectly valid OSM data.
• User TrickyFoxy raised the question of whether registration for OpenStreetMap by mobile users (especially with Google) is too complex and linked to different issues on GitHub, one of which has been open since 2015. As Tom Hughes pointed out at the time, any solution must enable new mappers to accept the contributor terms.

Education

• Introducing young people to responsible mapping through education and training is certainly more meaningful than hunting for nodes. Great examples are the actions of Muni Mappers from Uganda and Laura Mugeha at the Technical University, Nairobi, Kenya.

OSM research

• Roberto Pizzolotto, of the University of Calabria, published a scientific trajectory of OpenStreetMap. It showed that the main themes (a conceptual network) chiefly related to technical matters. Collaboration among scholars and institutes (the social network) was not strong, and knowledge and ideas circulated within a limited network.

Maps

• For the May Contain Hackers 2022 event in the Netherlands there is a special map based on OSM, which Evelyn also prepared for OsmAnd.

switch2OSM

• The French association Randonner Leger > , wrote > a guide about using OSMAnd for trekking purposes.

Software

• Canadian contributors reported reliability problems with OSM tile servers. The OpenStreetMap operations group is aware of latency problems for North American users as the one US rendering server, Pyrene, no longer has the capacity to keep up with demand. It is planned to add a new server soon in the east of North America.
• Benjamin Clark, from Meta, shared the 2022 development plans for MapWithAI’s RapiD editor for OpenStreetMap in a GitHub project issue. It is open to comments and feedback.
• Ilya Zverev wondered how to edit tags directly from openstreetmap.org. He built a solution which works as a browser extension available for Firefox and Chrome.

Programming

• Paul Norman took the recent outage of the standard tile layer as motivation to describe the means of monitoring system health.

Did you know …

• … there are many ways to contribute regularly to OSM?Desktop:
  • OSM Streak
  • MapRoulette
  • Pic4Review
  • Unmapped Places
  • Find Suspicious OpenStreetMap Changesets
  • OSMCha
  • NotesReview
  • Many Tasking Managers

  Smartphone:

  • StreetComplete
  • Every Door
  • Vespucci
  • OSMfocus Reborn
  • OSM Go!
  • Jungle Bus

  We are sure we have forgotten some. Please write to us and let us know, we will add them next week.

Other “geo” things

• The Tour de France Femmes bicycle race has a live map of the event which uses the Leaflet library, known for its use of OpenStreetMap as a base layer provider, among others.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
	iD for Beginner Training		2022-07-30
臺北市	COSCUP 2022 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 聯合議程軌		2022-07-30
Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires	4a reunión bimestral de OSM Latam (organiza OSM Argentina)		2022-07-30
Ernakulam	OSM Kerala Community Meetup 2022		2022-07-31
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-08-01
	MapRoulette Monthly Community Meeting		2022-08-02
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2022-08-02
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-08-03
City of Westminster	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-08-02
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #38 (Online)	✓	2022-08-02
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-08-04
Cayambe	Notathon en OpenStreetMap – resolvamos notas de Cayambé, Ecuador		2022-08-06
	OSM Africa August Mapathon: Map Rwanda		2022-08-06
新北市	OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團 #3		2022-08-07
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2022-08-10
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2022-08-09
Köln	25. Stammtisch Köln		2022-08-10
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-08-11
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-08-10
Zürich	143. OSM-Stammtisch		2022-08-11
Berlin	170. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2022-08-12
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #43		2022-08-15
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-08-17
	154. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-08-16
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-08-16
Firenze	State of the Map 2022		2022-08-19 – 2022-08-21

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, SK53, TheSwavu, derFred.

🏆 First-time achievements We hosted our first Twitter space! Last week’s theme was life before, during and after Outreachy – a chat with alums and current interns about the ways their internship experience changed their lives. Omotola invited me to join as one of the the alums and I had a fantastic experience! Here are some of the things I’ve shared: On what I’ve learned during my internship My biggest lesson was to manage expectations.

How are we doing in our strive for operational excellence? Read on to find out!

Incidents

There were 6 incidents in June this year. That's double the median of three per month, over the past two years (Incident graphs).

2022-06-01 cloudelastic
Impact: For 41 days, Cloudelastic was missing search results about files from commons.wikimedia.org.

2022-06-10 overload varnish haproxy
Impact: For 3 minutes, wiki traffic was disrupted in multiple regions for cached and logged-in responses.

2022-06-12 appserver latency
Impact: For 30 minutes, wiki backends were intermittently slow or unresponsive, affecting a portion of logged-in requests and uncached page views.

2022-06-16 MariaDB password
Impact: For 2 hours, a current production database password was publicly known. Other measures ensured that no data could be compromised (e.g. firewalls and selective IP grants).

2022-06-21 asw-a2-codfw power
Impact: For 11 minutes, one of the Codfw server racks lost network connectivity. Among the affected servers was an LVS host. Another LVS host in Codfw automatically took over its load balancing responsibility for wiki traffic. During the transition, there was a brief increase in latency for regions served by Codfw (Mexico, and parts of US/Canada).

2022-06-30 asw-a4-codfw power
Impact: For 18 minutes, servers in the A4-codfw rack lost network connectivity. Little to no external impact.

Incident follow-up

Recently completed incident follow-up:

Audit database usage of GlobalBlocking extension
Filed by Amir (@Ladsgroup) in May following an outage due to db load from GlobalBlocking. Amir reduced the extensions' DB load by 10%, through avoiding checks for edit traffic from WMCS and Toolforge. And he implemented stats for monitoring GlobalBlocking DB queries going forward.

Reduce Lilypond shellouts from VisualEditor
Filed by Reuven (@RLazarus) and Kunal (@Legoktm) after a shellbox incident. Ed (@Esanders) and Sammy (@TheresNoTime) improved the Score extension's VisualEditor plugin to increase its debounce duration.

Remember to review and schedule Incident Follow-up work in Phabricator! These are preventive measures and tech debt mitigations written down after an incident is concluded. Read more about past incidents at Incident status on Wikitech.

Trends

In June and July (which is almost over), we reported 27 new production errors and 25 production errors respectively. Of these 52 new issues, 27 were closed in weeks since then, and 25 remain unresolved and will carry over to August.

We also addressed 25 stagnant problems that we carried over from previous months, thus the workboard overall remains at exactly 299 unresolved production errors.

Take a look at the Wikimedia-production-error workboard and look for tasks that could use your help.

💡 Did you know?

To zoom in and find your team's error reports, use the appropriate "Filter" link in the sidebar of the workboard .

For the month-over-month numbers, refer to the spreadsheet data.

Thanks!

Thank you to everyone who helped by reporting, investigating, or resolving problems in Wikimedia production. Thanks!

Until next time,

– Timo Tijhof

"Mr. Vice President. No numbers, no bubbles."
— 🔴🟠🟡🟢🔵🟣

As part of the desktop improvements project we spent time investing in the core code that powers skins. With support from volunteers (the majority of this support coming from the prolific @Ammarpad), we identified code patterns and made changes to the MediaWiki-Core-Skin-Architecture to retroactively define a data layer API for generating a skin.

Once this was in place, we updated the legacy MediaWiki skins Monobook, Modern, CologneBlue to use Mustache to bring them in line with how Vector and Minerva were built.

The rationale for doing this was as follows:

1. We wanted to centralize code into core, and standardize markup, to make it easier to roll out changes to all skins. Often developers found ourselves updating every skin every time we wanted to make a small change or forced to use specific classes to markup elements (e.g. T248137, T253938).
2. We wanted to move away from server-side technologies to client-side technologies to play better to the strengths of frontend engineers and designers who worked on skins.
3. Since many of these skins do not see active development, we wanted to support them better by reducing lines of code
4. Many of the skins didn't support certain extensions because they used different code (for example certain skins didn't run hooks that were used by certain features) e.g. 6ce3ce1acb68f0a3fdf1bd8824f6d0717bffa320 T259400
5. Stop supporting features in core that were never widely adopted e.g. T97892

This process reduced 106,078 lines of code to 85,310 lines of code - a 20% decrease.
Before the change around 45% of skin code was PHP. After the change PHP only accounted for 15% of the code.

It would be great to in the future migrate Timeless too, but Timeless using the legacy skin platform does help keep us accountable for ensuring we continue to support skins built on this platform.

Methodology for result

To measure code makeup we can run github-linguist before and after the change.

Monobook

Before:

46.53%  22713      Less
36.83%  17981      PHP
16.53%  8071       JavaScript
0.10%   50         CSS
Lines of code: 48815

After change (abe94aa4082dbc4f8b9060528a1b4fea2d0af0f1)

59.28%  22831      Less
20.96%  8071       JavaScript
11.67%  4496       Mustache
7.96%   3066       PHP
0.13%   50         CSS
Lines of code: 38514

Modern

Before:

52.25%  13752      CSS
40.99%  10790      PHP
4.16%   1094       Less
2.61%   686        JavaScript
Lines of code: 26322

After change (c74d67950b6de2bafd9e3b1e05e601caaa7d9452)

68.87%  13877      CSS
18.22%  3672       Mustache
5.43%   1094       Less
4.07%   821        PHP
3.40%   686        JavaScript
Lines of code: 20150

Cologne Blue

Before:

62.00%  19183      PHP
34.82%  10773      CSS
2.22%   686        JavaScript
0.97%   299        Less
Lines of code: 30941

After change (bf06742467f6c6c2bb42367f2e073eb26ed5d495)

40.40%  10765      CSS
31.87%  8491       PHP
24.04%  6405       Mustache
2.57%   686        JavaScript
1.12%   299        Less
Lines of code: 26646

PHP

The total number of lines of PHP before the change: 47954
After the change: 12378 lines of PHP

In May 2022, hundreds of people logged into the Wikimedia Hackathon online platform to build projects, solve bugs, translate documentation, socialize, learn new skills, and more. For three days, community members led over 50 sessions, worked on over 75 Phabricator tasks, and watched one stellar live piano performance. In addition, hackers in Nigeria, Ghana, India, the U.S., Greece, and Germany came together for community-led in-person meetups to celebrate the Hackathon and teach newcomers how to contribute to Wikimedia technologies.

Now, in just two weeks, the technical community will come together again for the Wikimedia 2022 Hackathon!

How do I join the Hackathon?

To take part in the Hackathon, register for Wikimania to gain access to the platform. This information is kept private. You can also optionally list yourself publicly as a participant on the Wikimania Wiki.

When and where is the Hackathon?

The Hackathon will take place virtually in time blocks:

• 16:00 – 22:00 UTC August 12
• 12:00 – 17:00 UTC August 13
• 15:55 – 16:45 UTC August 14

The Hackathon will take place on Pheedloop, the Wikimania platform. This platform complies with WCAG 2.1 AA, and will support screen readers, font adjustments, and many other accessibility features. Video sessions will be held in Jitsi through this platform.

What will happen at the Hackathon?

A pre-hacking showcase

On the first day, there will be a pre-Hacking showcase to share project ideas and find collaborators. Anyone can present a project, and anyone can come as an observer. This informal gathering is a great way to meet new people around the world and start working together.

Hacking projects

Throughout the next two days, technical contributors around the world will come online to hack together, starting new projects, maintaining existing software, updating and translating documentation, and playing with tools. To propose a project, add a task to the Phabricator board. 

Technical and social activities

Throughout the Hackathon, take a break from hacking to learn about Wikimedia Cloud Services, attend a newcomers social, or offer a session of your own! Anyone can claim a slot on the schedule to arrange an activity for the group. 

A final showcase 

Finally, there will be a final showcase to share and celebrate the projects worked on during the Hackathon. Show off what you built to an audience of technical contributors around the world, as well as other Wikimania participants curious to learn more about the technical community.

Is the Hackathon good for newcomers?

Yes! If you’re new to the technical community, check out the resources for newcomers. Don’t miss the pre-Hacking showcase, which is a great opportunity to find people to work together with.

More information

Visit the Hackathon page on the Wikimania wiki for additional event information, a list of useful resources, and links to other exciting Wikimania activities.

See you soon!

Last month, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Argentine Nation (Argentina) delivered a decision that upheld freedom of expression and protected free access to public information in a case regarding the right to be forgotten. The outcome of the case sets an important precedent for protecting access to reliable, verified information about people in the public eye—key for Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects, which rely on third party sources to verify information about living people.

The right to be forgotten is the principle that allows individuals to request that information about themselves be de-indexed from search engine results, rendering that information less prevalent online. The Wikimedia Foundation has spoken out about issues related to the right to be forgotten in the past, calling attention to the negative impact it could have in limiting access to verified, public information. When public figures can pick and choose what verified information is available about themselves online, it provides an incomplete picture to the public, and a distorted image of knowledge on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. 

In March 2022, the Wikimedia Foundation submitted an amicus brief to the case  Denegri, Natalia Ruth C/ Google Inc S/Derechos Personalísimos (CIV Docket No. 050016/2016/1). The individual who brought the case, Natalia Denegri (i.e., the plaintiff), invoked the right to be forgotten in order to delete information related to them from twenty years ago, suing Google Inc. to remove the information from search engine results. The plaintiff expressed that journalistic facts extracted from their media interviews, which link them to a well-known Argentinian criminal case from the 1990s (known as the “Cóppola Case”), are now irrelevant, unnecessary, and cause them ongoing serious damages.

In our amicus brief, the Foundation argued that the right to be forgotten was not the appropriate remedy for this circumstance and, if used, would lead to an unacceptable violation of freedom of expression and the right to information. The Supreme Court of Justice agreed that this case had great public interest and that removing the content from internet search engines would affect freedom of expression and deprive society of access to relevant information.

In this decision, the Court also found that news or information that has been part of the public debate continues to remain relevant to the public, regardless of how much time has passed. The Court went on to say that removing information solely because a period of time had passed would be “seriously endangering history as well as the exercise of social memory that is nourished by the different facts of culture, even when the past is reflected to us as unacceptable and offensive by today’s standards” (Fallos 345:516).

Finally, the Court concluded that there are no legal grounds that “demonstrate that a person who was and is a public figure has the right to limit access to truthful and public interest information” available on the internet (Fallos 345:520).

The Wikimedia Foundation celebrates that freedom of expression and access to information––crucial to the public interest and the ability of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects to thrive–– prevailed in this case.

This case is part of a global trend of right to be forgotten requests to remove verified information about public figures. Recently the Supreme Court of Chile confirmed the rejection of an appeal filed by a former television director. The former television director had sought to remove from search engines any hyperlinks to access news associated with abuse allegations in which they were involved in 2018.

Similarly, the Supreme Court of Brazil confirmed in the 2021 ruling of the “Aida Curi” case that the right to be forgotten cannot be invoked to prohibit the publication of facts that have been lawfully obtained, including historical facts related to crimes. We respect the application of the right to be forgotten, as long as this does not interfere with the right of everyone else to access public information.

We celebrate the outcome of this case, and will continue to protect and defend free access to knowledge globally.

– Ellen Magallanes, Senior Counsel, and Amalia Toledo, Lead Public Policy Specialist for Latin America & the Caribbean, 28 July 2022

Twice a year, the Wikimedia Foundation publishes a Transparency Report, in which it reports all right to be forgotten requests we receive and our responses, among other requests to remove or alter information on our projects as well as requests for user data.

Related blog posts:

• Wikipedia and the law of digital platforms in Chile – December 2021 
• Do Europeans have a right to be globally delisted? The Court of Justice of the European Union says no – September 2019
• Don’t Blink: Public Policy snapshot for March 2022

One of the challenges that are faced by Wikipedians is the availability of credible information as a source of reference. Academic writings have been deemed as one of the most appropriate references on Wikipedia.  Nevertheless, sometimes Wikipedians face difficulties to obtain references as the majority of the content is behind a paywall. 

Fortunately, through The Wikipedia Library platform, the Wikimedia Foundation has been able to collaborate with top publishers across the globe to provide previously paywalled articles for free to selected Wikipedians (an active editor who has made more than 500 edits and their account is more than 6 months old).

The Wikimedia Foundation strives to expand the collaboration not only with the publisher on the global level but also with major prestigious publishers at the regional level. In the Asian region, The Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) is considered a prominent authority in technical areas of information processing and computer science. The IPSJ has agreed to open up its valuable research publications to the Wikipedia Library. The previously paywalled articles will be beneficial to enhance and even create numerous new science and technology-related Wikipedia articles. 

IPSJ has a variety of publications covering academic research and industrial practices that comprise 3 main publication clusters: IPSJ Journal (11,000 papers – published 12 times a year), IPSJ Transactions (5,000 papers from 10 journals – irregularly published about 30 times a year), and Special Interest Group (SIG) Technical Reports (80,000 papers – published approximately 150 times a year (irregularly) from 40 academic groups).

The participation of IPSJ is truly beneficial, particularly for both Japanese and non-Japanese speaking Wikipedians who have a keen interest in creating or editing science and technology articles as IPSJ papers are available both in English and Japanese language. We anticipate that with this collaboration, the number of science and technology articles will increase. Not to mention improve the capacity of both Japanese and Non-Japanese-speaking Wikipedians to access useful and trustworthy information sources to constantly improve the Wikimedia projects.

Students at the University of New Mexico were for the first time introduced to Wikimedia projects through the WikiForHumanRights 2022 campaign to contribute content related to the environment to the global online encyclopedia

Students numbering 38, participated in a 2-day Wikipedia session dubbed, #WikiForHumanRights New Mexico and were scored extra credit as part of a Spring Semester course.

It is widely known that the State of New Mexico is fraught with several environment challenges caused by industrial pollution and other harmful pollutants. This is further heightened by the recent spate of fires which has consumed several acres of lands in what is referred to as the annual wildfire season often caused by extreme drought and climate change.

Participants contributed content (articles and images) about New Mexico portraying the beautiful forested mountains and wildlife sceneries and at the same time, the environmental challenges currently present in the state.

“Editing Wikipedia offered me insight into how the site works and refuted preconceptions about Wikipedia,” says Yamil a participant.

“I now understand what it takes to be an editor for Wikipedia. I learned how Wikipedia’s content is created and negotiated by editing and examining existing pages,” she adds.

The project was the first time majority of the students learned about Wikipedia, its related projects and the ability to contribute content to educate readers.

A Tiktok dance video in which the students celebrated their first edit raked over 2K views on social media (Facebook and Tiktok combined).

The project was led by Pamela Ofori- Boateng, a long term Wikipedia editor and a Graduate Teaching Assistant at UNM together with Jesse Asiedu Akrofi, founder of Wiki Update podcast with the support of other volunteers.

Useful resources and further information about the project

Event dashboard here

Event podcast here

For the past two years I’ve been working on Reddit related questions such as:

1. Do researchers’ ethical disguise of Redditors’ posts work?
2. How many Redditors use throaways or delete their posts? Why?
3. Why do Redditors participate in advice-related subreddits?

Much of this has been facilitated by Python scripts, which are in decent enough shape that I share here: https://github.com/reagle/reddit .

Questions are welcome!

Knowledge equity has been a cornerstone of our programs since our founding. Thanks to our efforts, content related to equity on Wikipedia has steadily improved over the years. By empowering students and other subject matter experts to add content to Wikipedia, we ensure the public’s most used reference is more equitable, accurate, and complete.

Not only have we helped diversify Wikipedia’s content, we’re also helping to ensure the group of content contributors is more diverse. Only 22% of Wikipedia editors identify as women in our region, and 89% identify as white. In contrast, 67% of Wiki Education’s program participants identify as women, 3% identify as non-binary or another gender identity, and only 55% identify as white.

We’re bringing a more diverse writing voice to Wikipedia, and we’re adding more equity-focused content. But we want to do more: That’s where the Equity Outreach Coordinator role comes in. We’re thrilled to announce Andrés Vera is fulfilling this new role.

Andrés, as the Equity Outreach Coordinator, oversees the targeted outreach for courses in equity content areas and the inclusion of diverse institutions in the Wikipedia Student Program, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). He will also work to encourage more instructors who teach courses related to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other equity-related disciplines at other institutions to teach with Wikipedia.

Equity has been an important strategic priority for Wiki Education for years now, and it’s integrated into everything everyone on staff does on a daily basis. In creating this Equity Outreach Coordinator role, we are creating space to ensure we are actively recruiting a diversity of courses and an even more diverse set of participants for our Wikipedia Student Program. We’re making a deliberate investment aimed at taking our Equity work to the next level.

Andrés brings a unique perspective to Wiki Education. He has worked as a music teacher, a music ensemble manager, and a freelance community development professional. He holds a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and a professional diploma in Music performance and regularly performs around the world as a concert cellist. Andres has worked with Wiki Education in a contractor role for years. He is extremely passionate about and knowledgeable of our mission, and has a contagious enthusiasm for all that he does. We’re thrilled with his work so far and look forward to seeing where he takes this position.

Please join me in welcoming Andrés in his new role!

After many years of work, I’m delighted that all Wikimedia wikis now have their media player provided by Video.js.

The work to replace the older Kaltura media player started during the Wikimedia Hackathon 2015, and has finally reached this milestone after seven years. The Kaltura player has served us well for many years, and it was a great innovation they donated to the movement back in 2010, but unfortunately had been largely unmaintained since. It was time for us to move on. There are more things I still want to do, so we can make watching video files and listening to audio files even better for our readers around the world. Today is a great opportunity to take stock.

There are many benefits Wikimedia readers and editors get from us moving to an industry-standard player. Most directly and significantly, a fifth of our readers’ page views – hundreds of millions of users – who are on the iOS platform can now watch videos on our websites for the very first time.

By simply being an industry standard, Video.js gives us other benefits too. It is based on the HTML5 video standard, which was decided on years after the old Kaltura player had shipped. It is modern code which is maintained, with bugs getting found and fixed by the wider Internet community. It’s using the W3C standard for subtitles, which enables other integrations in the future. And it’s lighter-weight in terms of bytes shipped to users, which is important in helping us save costs for the many readers who pay for network by the transfer.

The benefits are not limited to Wikimedia saving work by using existing open-source code created by other people. Now that we’ve got a more modern codebase, we can also much more easily and more rapidly make future changes. As well as making life better for Wikimedia wikis and our readers, we hope that this will let us propose improvements upstream where Wikimedia’s special interest in language support can be a benefit for the whole of the Web.

In terms of modernising our code, dropping the Kaltura player means we’re dropping tens of thousands of lines of old code and configuration, shrinking the page payload for every page with a video on it by 6.47 KiB, and for all pages (even those without videos on) by 635 bytes, collectively around a TiB of bandwidth saved by our readers every two days.

Although we’ve now switched, I’m sure there will be things you spot about the new video player. Perhaps there’s an edge case we’ve not seen yet, a bug when used a certain way, a missing tool we’ve previously said was too hard, or a feature for videos or audio files that you think would be brilliant. We have some thoughts of our own, but we’re building this for our readers and editors, so what you think matters hugely to us. Whether you think we’ve heard it before or not, we’d really love for your feedback now on what we can do better. You can file tasks in Phabricator or add comments on the talk page of the project on mediawiki.org.

Finally, I’d like to thank those who helped get this change out to our readers. To the tens of thousands of community members who tried it as a beta, the hundreds who commented and filed bugs, my partner in development Brion Vibber right back from the Hackathon, many people who’ve tested, reviewed, improved, and merged patches, James Forrester and Amir Sarabadani, for getting it over the line — my thanks. Let’s hope the next big idea we have at a Hackathon ships slightly quicker!

Happy editing, TheDJ

On June 22, 2022, “Student Wikipedian Community in Waseda Uni Tokyo” held an online meeting, in which we discussed how to write Wikipedia articles about literary works

Lakka26, a member of our group asked how they can write an Wikipedia article about their favorite literary work “Hikarigoke (ひかりごけ)”. Then, Takenari Higuchi and Eugene Ormandy replied to it. This article reports the detail of that meeting and what we learned.

Plot summary

Firstly, we read [[Wikipedia:あらすじの書き方]], Japanese Wikipedia’s guideline about writing plot summaries, and checked the rules, for example “Use present tense” or “Don’t use exaggerated rhetoric”. There were some comments from participants such as “It is the first time for me to think about what a plot summary is” or “That guideline is also an interesting essay”.

Then, Lakka26 expressed a concern that “If I make a plot summary using an original text as a source, would it be original research which Wikipedia prohibit?”. Takenari Higuchi and Eugene Ormandy agreed with it and said “how you pick up the sentence from an original text reflects your originality”. They recommended Lakka26 to refer to a plot summary written in reliable and independent sources.

Evaluation

Next, we discussed how to write “Evaluation” section.

Lakka26 had collected some reviews for “Hikarigoke (ひかりごけ)”, but they wondered how to organize it.

Firstly, Takenari Higuchi replied to it. They introduced a Japanese Wikipedia article [[サンルームにて]] which is the article they had wrote and had been selected as a “Good Article“, and suggested dividing “Evaluation” section into sub sections such as “Response (反響)” or “Influence (影響)” like that.

In contrast, Eugene Ormandy suggested classifying reviews based on who had written it. They introduced a Japanese Wikipedia article [[アルトゥル・ニキシュ]] which is a “Good Article” they had wrote. In this article, “Evaluation” section is divided into 4 sub sections, “Evaluation by composer”, “Evaluation by conductor”, “Evaluation by instrument players” and “Evaluation by critics”. Each sub section contains various reviews.

Useful references

Lakka26 pointed out that magazine articles are more useful references than books such as author’s biography to write Wikipedia articles about literary works, especially unfamous works.

In response to this, Eugene Ormandy, who writes Japanese cafe articles such as [[名曲喫茶クラシック]] using magazines said that “Web OYA-bunko”, a database of Japanese magazine library “Oya Soichi Library” is very useful to search magazine articles.

What we learned

Through this meeting, we learned that there are various ways to write an article and discussion help us create ideas. In this meeting, we could share each opinion and technique.

After this meeting, Lakka26 edited [[Hikarigoke (ひかりごけ)]] and added many topics. We are very happy that we can encourage Wikipedian’s growth. We will continue to hold meetings or editathons to support Wikipedians and make Wikipedia better.

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

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

• The www.wikibooks.org and www.wikiquote.org portal pages now use an automated update system. Other project portals will be updated over the next few months. [1]

Problems

• Last week, some wikis were in read-only mode for a few minutes because of an emergency switch of their main database (targeted wikis). [2]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 26 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 27 July. It will be on all wikis from 28 July (calendar).
• The external link icon will change slightly in the skins Vector legacy and Vector 2022. The new icon uses simpler shapes to be more recognizable on low-fidelity screens. [3]
• Administrators will now see buttons on user pages for “Change block” and “Unblock user” instead of just “Block user” if the user is already blocked. [4]

Future meetings

• The next open meeting with the Web team about Vector (2022) will take place tomorrow (26 July).

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

Each year, the Wikimedia Foundation shares an annual plan of its priorities and activities for the fiscal year, which runs from July 2022 to June 2023. The Foundation’s current Annual Plan is now anchored in the two strategic pillars of our movement strategy:  “knowledge equity” and “knowledge as a service.” The movement strategy is an ambitious vision to 2030 that Wikimedia’s global community created together several years ago. 

This is part of our new approach to planning, introduced by our new CEO Maryana Iskander, as she joined in January 2022. Maryana’s top priority was evolving the way that we approached planning as a Foundation. The goals identified in this plan are directly informed by hundreds of conversations that Maryana had with volunteers and staff around the world as part of her listening tour. We built on these conversations by asking what the world needs from us now? We also identified key trends from the rise of government regulation to the increased threats of misinformation and disinformation to the changing nature of search on the internet. 

The Foundation’s 2023 Annual Plan is centered around four main goals:

1. Advance Knowledge Equity by bringing a stronger regional focus to the work of the Foundation and our mission of free knowledge.
2. Deepen our commitment to Knowledge as a Service by strengthening how we prioritize and allocate product and technology support to 740+ Wikimedia projects, starting with Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.
3. Strengthen movement governance and health by supporting key movement priorities like the Movement Charter, the Universal Code of Conduct, and implementation of key recommendations of the movement strategy.
4. Improve the Foundation’s performance and effectiveness by improving our translation/interpretation support, lifting up more meaningful metrics to assess our impact, and designing shared services to support a truly global working environment

The process of identifying these goals also included a month of feedback and ‘two-way planning’ with Foundation staff and volunteers. There were over 12,000 pageviews of the draft plan on Meta-wiki (4x increase from last year) with 30+ contributors engaging on the talk page from across 8 wikis, including Arabic, Swedish, German Wikipedias, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. Over 750 community members from all regions of the world were reached through conversations that included multilingual support in 15 languages. These conversations were an opportunity to shift planning from a one-way information sharing exercise led by the Foundation, to a more collaborative two-way planning exercise. 

You can find an appendix of the feedback we received in the final plan. This document is a starting point for what will be a highly iterative process of doing and learning in the months ahead.  We will continue to host community conversations on- and off-wiki to share progress and invite further feedback. 

We invite your reflections and questions at any time on Meta.

Wikimedians across the East, Southeast Asia, and Pacific (ESEAP) region will gather in Sydney, Australia in November, following the lifting of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Covid Travel Policy. 

As one of the most underrepresented and diverse regions within the Wikimedia community, ESEAP Conference 2022: Reconnect is a critical opportunity for community and affiliate representatives to come together, share ideas and explore new ways to overcome the many challenges contributors and organizers are facing.

As only the second in-person regional event, ESEAP Conference 2022 will see the continuation of the many conversations that began in Bali in May 2018 that brought together participants from Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Timor Leste, and Vietnam.

Hosted by Wikimedia Australia, ESEAP Conference 2022 will take place from Friday 18 November until 20 November at the University of Technology, Sydney and will feature strategic discussions, particularly in regards to regional Hub development as well as partnership, leadership and skills development aimed at building networks that can support a greater diversity of participants enabling future growth.

Scholarships are supporting travel costs for two members of each affiliate or community from the ESEAP region, also extending invitations to the core organising team for Wikimania 2023 which will be hosted in the ESEAP region.

Wikimedians, representatives from the galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector or anyone with a passion for community development and sharing free knowledge from the Pacific region, or those countries without an official chapter or user group are particularly encouraged to get in touch.

The call for program submissions will also open on 8 August 2022, closing on 23 September 2022. Session proposals can be submitted as lectures, panels, workshops, lightning talks and roundtables, as well as posters which can be publicly displayed in the venue during the course of the conference.

Sessions will be streamed online for remote access also.

For inquiries, please contact: [email protected] 

Over the years, the internet has experienced a shift in the way content is presented and consumed. Also, the preference for the content format has tilted to 91% of the population choosing visual and interactive content to a traditional text-based format which has caused approximately 65% of people, both young and old, to identify as visual learners. Within Wikimedia projects, photos, audio, and videos improve readers’ experience with Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. Furthermore, the 2030 movement strategy discussions emphasised “the equitable distribution of knowledge sharing opportunities across Wikimedia Communities across the world”, which inspired the exploration of Wikistories. 

Wikistories is a story creation and consumption tool in our projects for editors and readers who want to engage with visual and reliable knowledge in a quick way using mobile devices. This tool is now available in the Indonesian language Wikipedia. In the coming days, Wikimedia Foundation’s Inuka team is collaborating with Wikimedia Indonesia to run a campaign, more like a workshop and a contest where the tool is introduced to newcomers and contributors in different Wikimedia Indonesian communities, and they use it to add visual content. At the same time, the Inuka team learns from their experiences to better observe and evaluate the utilization of the capabilities of the tool, for improvements and further enhancements.  

Design exploration and research

The early exploration concept of  Wikistories was based on the following assumption: 

Suppose a simple, straightforward way is provided for mobile device contributors to create content. This can result in an increase in the diversity of content added, especially for smaller or emerging communities of contributors, whose languages and topics of socio-cultural interest have remained vastly underrepresented on the Wikimedia platform.

 The conclusion was  to develop a product that will: 

• Grow visual content and lead to more contributor & reader engagement with encyclopedic content in emerging digital communities
• Help underserved users to create, curate, contribute and engage with knowledge through visually-driven experiences.

With the above goals in mind, the Wikimedia Foundation commenced Wikistories as an experimental project  in July 2021. For the pilot version of the project, the objective is to  work with a Wikimedia community that has experience curating image-related projects, a high mobile contribution in an underserved market, and is well organized and willing to collaborate with the WMF Inuka team. Hence, our collaboration with the Wikimedia Indonesian community, from the concept development, the prototype testing, and the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) development to the community-based pilot testing that is ongoing in the Wikimedia Indonesia community, has been valuable for the evolution of the idea. We are also collaborating with three GLAM institutions in Indonesia for another round of campaigns in the coming months.

After early exploration of the Wikistories design concept, and several consultations sessions with individuals  and the Wikimedia Indonesian community, the team developed clickable prototypes. Using the prototypes, the team conducted qualitative user research in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and with members within the Wikimedia Indonesian community. The research in the African countries focused on potential Wikistories contributors that are content creators and consumers in different spheres, not necessarily in the Wikimedia Movement. The study in Indonesia focused on participants that are content creators in Indonesian Wikipedia, Commons and other Wikimedia projects. 

The prototypes tested distinct user behaviours in: 

• Using Wikipedia articles to create a story.
• Getting images from Wikimedia Commons to create a story.
• Creating a story using an automated creation flow.
• Combining information from a Wikipedia article and Commons to create a story

The feedback and learnings from design research sessions validated the creation and consumption experience of Wikistories. These helped determine the scope of the minimal viable product for Wikistories, broadly classified into – story creation, discovery and consumption workflows.

From Beta sites to Going Live

The Wikistories team iterated learnings from the research and consultation sessions into the development of the tool as per the scope of this first version.  and simultaneously conducted extensive tests on Wikimedia Beta Cluster. 

During this period the team continued to engage with Wikimedia Indonesia, GLAM partners, and other individuals to create awareness, and prepare for the planned deployment and pilot testing campaign activities.  The team also demonstrated Wikistories at WikiNuSantara 2022 – an event organised by Wikimedia Indonesia in Padang, and received encouraging feedback.. 

Finally on June 30th, 2022, the very first version of Wikistories with minimal features focused on story creation, discovery and story consumption, was deployed in Bahasa Indonesian Wikipedia, and the pilot testing campaign in Wikimedia Indonesia has commenced. Also, our GLAM partners in Indonesia are set to participate in a Professional Development Event organised to showcase the capabilities of Wikistories for GLAM institutions. 

With the above activities and others lined up, the Inuka  team will monitor and evaluate the outcomes of this version of Wikistories in line with our goals, improve it, and engage with other Wikimedia communities that want to incorporate this content format in their different projects. 

To know more about the Wikistories tool, please see the FAQ page and provide feedback about this tool here. 

In a 99% Invisible episode, Avery Trufelman stated that America’s 19th-century preoccupation with the self and self-help was reflected in the fact that Webster’s 1841 edition of his dictionary had 67 additional words prefixed with “self-”. I’ve yet to find this factoid repeated, to say nothing of finding evidence for the claim.

I count 116 “self-” entries in the 1828 version. In the 1841 version I count 179. That’s 63 additions. (This unfortunately required me to manually count entries as I could not find nicely formatted versions.) Back then, though, Johnson was not consistent with how he dealt with parts of speech and related words. For example, the 1828 version has “self-abusing” and “self-abuse”; the 1841 version only has the former. Similarly, the 1841 addition added “self-abasing” to 1821’s “self-abasement” and “self-abased.”

Trimming the additions down to what I thought were meaningful differences – i.e., not simple grammatical variations – I count 44 additions between the 1828 and 1841 editions.

Given that the 1828 version is reported to have 70,000 words – I did not count myself – and advertisements for the 1841 claimed “many thousand more words than that or any other English dictionary hitherto published” it probably is fair to conclude the 38% increase in “self-” words was significant.

Update 2022-07-26: Avery Trufelman referred to Cheng, who cites Zakim (2006):

… in the early 1840s. Driven by the same concerns, American physicians had a few years earlier identified a new medical condition they diagnosed as “moral insanity,” a term used of persons who failed to restrain their passions. It was a distinctly post-patriarchal disorder, born of an age “of the first person singular,” as Emerson described it. Noah Webster accordingly added sixty-seven new words to the second edition of his American Dictionary in 1841 that all began with the prefix “self.” This was convincing, if circumstantial, evidence of the transformation of Americans’ personal sovereignty… [note 50: Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language Containing the Whole Vocabulary of the First Edition … the Entire Correction and Improvements of the Second Edition … to Which Is Prefixed an Introductory Dissertation (Springfield, Mass.: George and Charles Merriam, 1849). (Zakim 2006, pp. 122-123)].

Also, see this thread on r/dictionary.

12/07/2022-18/07/2022

About us

• weeklyOSM collects relevant OSM news from all over the world and informs the community every week. We announce each new issue via Twitter, Mastodon, mailing lists, Telegram, and we also want to announce it at community.openstreetmap.org.However, some mailing lists are relatively low volume, and list admins may wish to limit how many ‘weekly’ announcement messages appear there. If that is the case, could list admins please let us know via ‘lists at weeklyosm.eu’?

Mapping campaigns

• User sahilister reported, in his blog, about his systematic mapping of schools in Chandigarh, North India.

Mapping

• LuxuryCoop presented > use cases for the place tag in Korea and suggestions for improvement.

Community

• Hayden Clarkin discovered that using overpass turbo makes it easy to analyse parking space land use, and asked how to find other cool OSM tools.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The next public OSMF board meeting on osmvideo room is scheduled for Thursday 28 July at 13:00 UTC (Time in your timezone). You can view the minutes of the last meeting on the wiki.

Maps

• European deputy Anna Deparnay-Grunenberg, made official / > the Bio.Vélo.Route., a cycle route from Stuttgart to Strasbourg celebrating the 60th anniversary of their town twinning. As shown on the website, the route made full use of OpenStreetMap data through Komoot and uMap. A route relation stub has been created and may benefit from contributions along it.
• Tracestrack has released an Osm-Carto/OpenTopoMap hybrid map style. With a demo page using Mapbox Globe, it shows the OSM-Carto style enriched with colour relief, hill shades and contour lines from OpenTopoMap. As a background layer, various existing label layers can be overlaid.

Programming

• Sarah Hoffmann described how type annotations have been added to Nominatim’s Python code in order to improve software maintainability, and also explained some lessons she learned in the process.
• korobkov outlined a five-step workflow which allows you to quickly complete a series of similar MapRoulette tasks for OpenStreetMap using the keyboard only, with little to no manual intervention, in a matter of seconds per task via browser automation plug-ins using regular expressions.
• PhysicsArmature suggested a design for a JOSM extension to map a large area of something that has distinct colour.

Did you know …

• … there is a video on working with Mapillary and RapiD?
• … all of the ways to join the OpenStreetMap Foundation?
• [1] … OSMTagChallenge > ? OSMTagChallenge (by Jean-Marie Favreau of the University of Clermont-Ferrand) is a daily tagging challenge at noon UTC to collectively find the most appropriate tags for rare objects recorded in France. The code is available on GitHub.
• … on UN Mappers’ Instagram stories you can find quick guides with helpful tips on how to map roads, buildings and waterways?

Other “geo” things

• Qiusheng Wu presented a new feature of geemap: calling 3rd-party #EarthEngine JavaScript libraries from Python, built upon the Open Earth Engine Library (OEEL) from Mathieu Gravey. For example, running the JS grid module by Gennadii Donchyts.
• OpenCage Geocoder shared their insights about commonly unknown geographical facts about France.
• Christopher Beddow wrote about the possibilities unlocked by Visual Positioning Systems (VPS), citing the developer tools and latest features from Google ARCore and Niantic Lightship on his Worldbuilder blog.
• In what is essentially an advertisement for the UK’s Ordnance Survey, the Guardian reported that three-quarters of UK adults can’t read a map and gave readers hints on how to get better at it.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
大阪市	ひがよどの街を世界にシェア #01		2022-07-23
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第32回 妙心寺		2022-07-24
Plano Piloto	State of the Map Brasil 2022 (online) – Sessão 1		2022-07-27
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-07-27
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-07-28
臺北市	COSCUP 2022 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 聯合議程軌		2022-07-30
	iD for Beginner Training		2022-07-30
Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires	4a reunión bimestral de OSM Latam (organiza OSM Argentina)		2022-07-30
Ernakulam	OSM Kerala Community Meetup 2022		2022-07-31
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-08-01
	MapRoulette Monthly Community Meeting		2022-08-02
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2022-08-02
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-08-03
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-08-02
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-08-04
	OSM Africa August Mapathon: Map Rwanda		2022-08-06
新北市	OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團 #3		2022-08-07
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2022-08-10
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2022-08-09
Köln	25. Stammtisch Köln		2022-08-10
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-08-10
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-08-11
Zürich	143. OSM-Stammtisch		2022-08-11

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, SomeoneElse, Guillaume Rischard (Stereo), TheSwavu, derFred.

Through a historic vote on 21 July 2022, the Wikimedia Foundation was granted accreditation by the United Nations Economic and Social Affairs Council (ECOSOC). The Foundation  thanks the cosponsors of the corresponding resolution that was proposed by the United States, Italy, Sweden, and Estonia earlier this week, and all the ECOSOC members who voted for it. 

ECOSOC is the UN body responsible for leading international discussions on economic and social issues and advancing the Sustainable Development Goals. The accreditation grants UN consultative status to the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia and other global volunteer-run free knowledge projects. Today’s landmark vote sends a strong signal of support for NGOs that stand up for human rights and freedom of expression. The vote passed with 23 countries in favor and 7 against, with 18 countries abstaining. 

As the guarantor and supporter for the Wikimedia projects and free knowledge movement, ECOSOC observer status will enable the Wikimedia Foundation to represent the interests of contributors and readers of Wikipedia and other projects. The Wikimedia worldwide free knowledge movement is an important stakeholder in the conversation around the role of access to knowledge in advancing global sustainable development.

“We thank the United States, Italy, Sweden, and Estonia for introducing the resolution, as well as all other ECOSOC members who voted for it. This is a decisive win for the protection of global civic space and will strengthen civil society engagement within the United Nations. It will enable the Wikimedia Foundation to work directly with member states and other stakeholders to promote greater and more equitable access to free knowledge globally,” said Amanda Keton, General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. “We look forward to deepening our engagement across the UN system and advancing important elements of the Sustainable Development Goals, which are promoted by Wikimedia’s collaborative model of collecting and sharing knowledge, including inclusive, equitable access to information and educational content online.”  

The Wikimedia Foundation congratulates Inimõiguste Instituut (Estonia), Syrian American Medical Society (US), National Human Rights Civic Association “Belarusian Helsinki Committee” (Belarus), Non C’è Pace Senza Giustizia (Italy), and Diakonia (Sweden), which were also granted consultative status at ECOSOC today.

It’s nearly an year since the Wikimedia Foundation, through the Community Resources Team rolled out a new community funding strategy, which has been aimed at decentralizing decision-making, working with regional committees, and reaching underrepresented communities. 

As promised, the process continues to be iterative as we remain eager to learn and engage with communities to identify what’s working and what needs to change. 

The introduction of the regional committees has been one of the most notable changes and what better way to reflect on the impact of the revised funding strategy in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region, one year later, than through the eyes of the regional committee.

Below are some of the reflections shared by a section of the 12-member MEA regional Funds Committee.

Diversity and collaboration

“Sitting in the regional committee you get to see the true value in the learning sessions, which illustrate the diversity of our communities,”

User:Azogbonon, Benin Wikipedian and Member of regional committee

A new way of working has now emerged with the regional committee members feeling autonomous, empowered and satisfied with their role and how they managed to work with the different teams. Says User:NANöR, a member of the Arabic User Group, grants committee, and Wikimania 2022 COT.

“I can speak so much more about the impact of having worked in this process. I like the strategies used to connect the communities together and I liked the deliberation sessions we did together. These sessions help us think globally on what we need and what our movement should focus on.” 

So what has changed?  

Increased movement funding

We now have various categories of funds that include the Alliance and Research Funds and the creation of Regional Funds Committees. We for instance increased the funding caps for the Rapid Fund program from the previous  $2000 to $5,000 to support implementation of projects with larger scopes or long term planning needs. Additionally, we reviewed the criteria of accessing grants towards embracing more trust and recognizing that each community context called for different resource needs. 

This revised approach has seen more funds distributed to communities and individuals keen on developing and growing communities.

For the MEA regional funding committee, funds were distributed in line with the initial goal of more equitable distribution. This year there was increased funding to the Middle East and Africa regions through the Wikimedia Community Fund [Rapid Funds and General Support Funds] from $784,000 in the previous fiscal year to $1,949,000. The increase in funding can be attributed to the grantee partners seeking to develop and strengthen organizational and operational capacities, innovate and experiment new programs and scale existing ones to support their communities. Organized groups and communities accessed general support funds , amongst them new grantees receiving general support funds such as Wikimedians of United Arab Emirates User Group, Wikimedia Community User Group Rwanda, Wikimedia Morocco User Group, Yoruba Wikimedians User Group, Wikimedians of Cameroon User Group, Wikimedia Community User Group Nigeria, Wikimedia Community User Group Guinea Conakry.

Among the communities funded include those seeking to activate communities in countries in the Middle East and in Africa and also in regions where there are opportunities to create awareness of Wikimedia projects. These include; Oman, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Mozambique, Namibia, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Sudan, Togo and Zimbabwe.

In the two rounds of funding 23 grantee partners received general support funds, 17 of them receiving long term funding for the first time to support their work with communities. 

Regional Committees

The creation of Regional Funds Committees, who are involved in the process of making decisions about funding as well as provide guidance to applicants has decentralized decision-making regarding funding in the movement and helped introduce contextualized perspectives.

We acknowledge that each region is unique and the journey to reach and serve underrepresented communities – who now have a new found proximity and people with more regional context and there is a continuous process of learning and iteration aligned with the principles of the movement strategy. 

Lets Connect – Peer Learning

The need for capacity building as captured in the Movement Strategy Recommendations continue to be a priority especially among emerging and underrepresented communities. We have also early this year  introduced  a Peer learning network , Let’s Connect  Peer Learning aimed at sharing knowledge and skills.

“The feedback I heard from some people is that they were not aware or didn’t know how to secure grants… some felt the information provided was complicated and they didn’t know how to navigate it and they also felt that grants were always given to the same regular people, and no room for newbies so it was not worth it” There was a need to review the programs so that newcomers found the funding programs easier to navigate and accessible,”

User:Joy Agyepong, Ghananian Wikipedian, and Member of grants committee and Affiliations Committee

We continue to create spaces for reflection and learning to support continuous strengthening of the funding programs in the region. 

“Adaptation is key and through learning we find different ways of doing things in a simpler mannery” 

User:NANöR

Revised Funding Cycle/ Application Template

According to Joy, the “updated funding program pages platform is very easy to navigate and the categorisation of funds makes it also easy for people to know what category they are eligible for; and also the opportunity for office hours is also brilliant idea since you’re able to give and receive great feedback or ask for information that will guide the application process” 

Challenges/Concerns

We recognize the progress made and acknowledge that more needs to be done as we continue to implement our goal of having a more equitable distribution of resources to support advancing the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation.

We live in a time of ‘knowledge revolution.’ The instant availability of information on digital devices has deeply impacted the way humans learn about the world around them. With facts and truth under attack, Wiki Education’s work in providing the public with trustworthy and accurate information through Wikipedia and Wikidata is crucial for an informed citizenry.

Wiki Education is currently the only organization worldwide that is able to improve the public’s understanding of key issues in a targeted way at scale. And if you’re reading this blog, it’s likely you’re an essential part of that mission. Thank you for joining us in playing an active part in the knowledge revolution. We’re very happy about the enormous impact our organization has had these past two pandemic years despite the challenging conditions under which we’ve been operating. Our continued success has been made possible by our generous funders, the excellent work of our board, Wiki Education’s healthy relationship with the community of Wikimedia volunteers, the tremendous dedication of our staff, and the thousands of students, instructors, and subject-matter experts enrolled in our programs.

We’re excited about the time ahead of us, as outlined in our new Annual Plan. We’ll continue to foster a greater diversity of knowledge and editors on Wikipedia & Wikidata; scale the impact of our programs; and invent tech solutions that support these missions. Here are our areas of focus for the upcoming fiscal year:

Knowledge Equity

Not only do our programs make a significant difference in students having a deeper learning experience and diversifying Wikipedia’s editor base in the United States and Canada, our program participants will continue to add high-quality content about Knowledge Equity-related topics to Wikipedia. But we want to do more: That’s where the Equity Outreach Coordinator role comes in. We’re thrilled to welcome Andrés Vera into this position, which oversees the targeted outreach for courses in equity content areas and the inclusion of diverse institutions in the Wikipedia Student Program, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), and institutions with large minority enrollments. Equity is an important strategic priority for the entire organization, and it’s integrated into everything everyone on staff does on a daily basis. By creating the new role of Equity Outreach Coordinator, we’re making a deliberate investment aimed at taking our Equity work to the next level.

Communicating Science

Beginning with the “Wikipedia Year of Science” initiative in 2016, we have strengthened Wikipedia’s critical role as a vehicle for science communication. Students in our Wikipedia Student Program translate their knowledge in a way that is understandable for an average reader. Their hard work has greatly enhanced the depth and breadth of freely accessible information about scientific topics on the web. And since launching our Scholars & Scientists Program in 2018, we now also empower subject-matter experts to share their specialist knowledge with others through Wikipedia or Wikidata.

Technical Infrastructure

We continue to empower thousands of Wikimedia organizers in different countries around the globe who run their own Wikipedia or Wikidata-related programs. In order to even better serve these volunteers, we regularly improve the stability and scalability of our Programs & Events Dashboard. Last year we added new, much-desired features like the ability to track and visualize the improvements people make to Wikidata. This year, our technology department plans to create a tool that will make the enormous impact of our programmatic work even more visible and easy to grasp. We’re kicking off a project to visualize the impact that Wiki Education program participants have made on specific topic areas on Wikipedia. Our participants, funders, community members, and staff are eager to understand our big-picture impact of our work together. 

Thank you for joining us and for following along. Onward!

To read our Annual Plan in depth, please visit wikiedu.org/annual-plan.

By: @mmartorana and @sbassett

Some history

For about a decade now, the combination of gerrit, zuul and jenkins have been used as the primary means of code review and continuous integration for most Wikimedia codebases. While these systems have been used successfully and are customized to support various workflows and developer needs, they have not helped facilitate the development of a robust application security pipeline within CI. While efforts have been made within the security space - with phan and the phan-taint-check plugin, libraryupgrader, and an occasional custom eslint rule - Wikimedia codebases have not taken full advantage of the current suite of open-source application security tooling that drives modern security automation. Given the aforementioned deficits and the announcement of Wikimedia migrating to Gitlab as a git front-end and CI/CD system, the Wikimedia Security-Team decided to explore what a modern application security pipeline within Gitlab could look like.

Our development path and roadmap

When the Gitlab migration was announced, the Wikimedia Security-Team saw great potential in the development of a robust application security pipeline to further improve application security testing and to make a concerted effort to shift left (wikipedia, snyk, Accelerate). Gitlab and its modern CI/CD functionality was a great candidate to help us explore the architecture and implementation of an application security pipeline for Wikimedia codebases, as it satisfied a number of desired outcomes including user-friendliness, convenience and impact.

Over the past couple of quarters, members of the Wikimedia Security-Team have created a number of security includes which employ Gitlab’s intuitive CI/CD functionality, particularly their means of including various yaml configuration files as components within different CI/CD stages. We initially focused this work upon several common languages used within Wikimedia projects: PHP, JavaScript, Python and Golang. Though it should be noted that the Gitlab security includes project is open to all contributors and, given Gitlab’s flexibility and simplicity, will hopefully encourage both improving existing include files while also driving support for the creation of new include files to support additional languages.

A basic example

During the aforementioned development cycle, the Wikimedia Security-Team compiled some basic mediawiki.org documentation to help developers get started with the configuration of their Gitlab repositories to run various security-related tests during CI. One specific example we explored was that of the function-schemata codebase, as used for the Abstract Wikipedia project. We migrated a test version of the repository over to Gitlab and set up a simple, security-focused .gitlab-ci.yml. This obviously would not be a complete .gitlab-ci.yml file for most codebases, but let’s focus upon the security-relevant pieces for now. First we see several environment variables defined under the variables yaml key. These serve to configure various docker images, tool cli options, etc. and are documented within the application security pipeline documentation. Then we see a list of included CI files, referenced via raw file URLs and indicating a specific tagged release. These correspond to specific tools to run during the default test phase of a repository’s CI pipeline. We can see that npm audit, npm outdated, semgrep (with certain javascript-specific rules sets) and osv’s scanner cli will all be run. In addition to these included files, we are also including Gitlab’s built-in SAST functionality (currently blocked on T312961) which, while limited in certain ways, can provide for additional security analysis. We can then see some sample pipeline output which displays the output of the tools which were run and indicates passing and failing tests.

Some opinionated decisions and current caveats would include:

1. Only being able to run the tools within the security include files under Gitlab’s test CI stage.
2. Having the security include files run for every branch which triggers the default CI pipeline (we’d definitely like to support custom branch and tag configurations at some point)
3. Only utilizing OSI- and free-culture-compliant tools and databases (likely perceived as a positive for many)
4. Presenting all results publicly as is the default configuration for repositories and pipelines within Wikimedia’s installation of Gitlab, as it currently is within gerrit and jenkins and a value of most FOSS projects.

It should be noted for the last two issues that some discussion did occur within various Phabricator tasks (T304737, T301018) and the current state of the CI includes was determined to be the best path forward at this time.

The future we would like to embrace

The Wikimedia Security-Team is obviously very enthusiastic about our work thus far in developing an application security pipeline for Wikimedia codebases migrating to Gitlab. In the coming development cycles, we plan to address bugs, evaluate and improve current CI include offerings as well as develop (and strongly encourage others to develop) new and useful CI includes. Finally - we welcome any and all constructive feedback on how to best improve upon this initial offering of security-focused CI includes.

References

• Primary project tracking bug: T289290: Design and Build Application Security Pipeline Components for Gitlab

“Most stories about LGBTQ+ pioneers are white, cisgender men with access to certain forms of economic and cultural capital,” Dr. Christina Carney says in this summer’s issue of the Black EOE Journal. “Unfortunately, queer folx such as Marsha P. Johnson and William Dorsey Swann are often elided in the LGBTQ+ archives.”

William Dorsey Swann, the first recorded drag performer in the U.S, was one of numerous Wikipedia articles improved by Dr. Carney’s class at the University of Missouri in Columbia. She was featured in the Black EOE Journal for her work in teaching with Wikipedia. The Black EOE Journal is a leading African-American business publication, and they featured Dr. Carney’s work as part of a feature on “The Importance of Telling LGBTQ+ Stories”.

Dr. Carney has been teaching with Wikipedia for several years. In the interview, she highlights the outcomes of her most recent spring 2022 course: students added one new article, edited 22 articles, added more than 18,000 words and 195 references — all while accumulating more than 1.25 million page views. Another of her students created the new article on Rogers v. American Airlines.

“Rogers v. American Airlines was a 1981 legal case decided by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York involving plaintiff Renee Rogers, a Black woman who brought charges against her employer, American Airlines, for both sex and race discrimination after she was dissuaded from wearing her hair in cornrows due to the airline’s employee grooming policy,” Dr. Carney explained in the piece. “The students not only cited sources detailing the politics of Black hair, but also how Black women are unfairly burdened with the responsibility of looking and dressing appropriately for the ‘Black race.’”

Dr. Carney credits Wiki Education for our support of her class, as well as the librarian from her campus who helped students find appropriate references for their articles.

“My biggest takeaway is the realization that high-impact research and knowledge can be accessible to a wider community — and not just limited to the ‘Ivory Tower,’” she says in the piece. “This is intersectionality in practice! Students are creating access for those who might not otherwise have the resources to find reliable information. Student creators become the conduits for linking reliably sourced material to a global audience for free.”

Read the full article here.

To participate in the Wikipedia Student Program, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

 This week I was interviewed by Yaron Karon for the second time for his MediaWiki podcast Between the Brackets.

Yaron has been doing this podcast for several years now, and I love how he highlights the different voices of all the different groups that use, interact and develop MediaWiki. He's had some fascinating people on his podcast over the years, and I highly reccomend giving it a listen.

Anyhow, it's an honour to be on the program again for episode 117. I was previously on the program 4 years ago for episode 5

The Wikimedia Foundation welcomes yesterday’s decision of the United States, Italy, Sweden, and Estonia to introduce, with broad cross-regional support from other member states, a resolution asking the UN’s Economic and Social Affairs Council (ECOSOC) to grant accreditation to the Wikimedia Foundation and five other NGOs: Inimõiguste Instituut (Estonia), Syrian American Medical Society (US), National Human Rights Civic Association “Belarusian Helsinki Committee” (Belarus), Non C’è Pace Senza Giustizia (Italy), and Diakonia (Sweden).

As the guarantor and supporter for the Wikimedia projects and free knowledge movement, ECOSOC observer status would enable the Wikimedia Foundation to represent the interests of contributors and readers of Wikipedia and other projects. The Wikimedia worldwide free knowledge movement is an important stakeholder in the conversation around the role of access to knowledge in advancing global sustainable development.

For more than a decade, ECOSOC’s NGO Committee has blocked the accreditation of well-qualified NGOs that stand up for human rights and freedom of expression such as the Wikimedia Foundation. During the NGO Committee’s most recent session, on 7 June 2022, it approved a “no action” motion to prevent applications from the Wikimedia Foundation and other NGOs from being brought up for a vote.

The ultimate decision on whether to accredit an NGO rests with the full membership of ECOSOC. 

“Wikipedia is a vital tool for promoting education, ensuring access to verifiable and reliable information, and advancing goals such as global health access in underserved regions of the globe,” said Amanda Keton, General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. “We urge ECOSOC members to support this resolution when it comes up for consideration on 21 July 2022.”

The Wikimedia Foundation is the US-based global nonprofit that aims to make knowledge freely accessible to everyone around the world. The organization hosts Wikipedia and a collection of other Wikimedia projects, and offers access to over 585 million articles with peer-reviewed information written in 300 languages, all for free and without ads. In May 2022 alone, Wikimedia websites received over 22 billion unique page views globally.

The Wikimedia Foundation ensures that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia websites are fast, reliable, and available to all. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects are created and supported by an unprecedented global network of affiliate groups and organizations and tens of thousands of volunteers. Together these groups comprise the “Wikimedia movement.”

Wikipedia provides information that enables students to learn the essential 21st century skills needed to advance their professional careers and enrich their personal lives. Hundreds of thousands of students and educators rely on it every day. Wikipedia has also been widely recognized as a reliable source for medical information during the COVID-19 pandemic, as Wikipedia editors have helped stem the flow of misinformation around the globe, including in a collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO).

The Wikimedia Foundation remains deeply committed to the promotion of greater and more equitable access to information and educational content online in support of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and looks forward to deepening our engagement with the United Nations system as an ECOSOC-accredited NGO.