That was the question Tuku Tiway Sayuen asked in his Wikimania presentation about the Sakizaya community. The tribes of Hualien City warned against venturing beyond the third ridgeline in the west – it was said that dangers awaited there. However, when climbing the mountain of Wikipedia, what Sayuen and his community found were not dangers but friends and allies. They found people on the same mission of strengthening their languages, and conserving and sharing their indigenous knowledge.

Supporting those that already support

The Wikimedia projects are amazing tools for making indigenous languages and knowledge available online, for example as seen in Cambodia and in India . The tools are freely available and they are managed by a global movement passionate about sharing knowledge. Being widely used by many people already, they have many advantages. However, reaching that point where a new language version of Wikipedia becomes a useful tool for a small language, might just feel like a challenging venture into unknown territories.

The Telegram group Wikimedia Language Diversity is a great resource for support for new and semi-new Wikimedians and Wikipedians. The Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub is built on the foundation of this group. While the group have insights and knowledge, passion and dedication to the small languages and to the Wikimedia movement, the members have expressed a need for more support when supporting the new language versions. Documentation on the conversations can be found on Meta.

Movement Strategy Grant project

While the goal is clear (Making Wikimedia-projects more accessible to the new language versions), we needed to decide where and how to start. What we wanted to know was “What challenges or barriers are perceived as the most difficult by the contributors to small-language Wikipedia versions?”. To answer that question we are now interviewing contributors to 13 different language versions of Wikipedia. At Wikimania we presented our results so far. 

Technological support as the first priority- or?

One of our assumptions before the research started was that there would be technological barriers. We know that both the incubator and many small language Wikipedia versions have room for improvement, and we know that as a hub we can improve them. We are still hoping that the conversations will give us some direction to where it is a good idea to start. Interestingly enough though, from the first few interviews we have reviewed, there has not been a mention for better technology, but rather for more courses and more support in growing the local community. 

We look forward to finding out if this is the general opinion from the communities, and if we will be able to find a clear direction for technological improvements from the conversations. We will of course continue to work for improving the technology, but this is a valuable reminder of the importance of the people of Wikipedia. The Wikimedia movement has not grown because of a few great leaders, it has grown and it continues to grow because of the many good contributors.

We want to hear from you too

Several people contacted us after the Wikimania-presentation, wanting to share something or to know more about the project. We would like to give all of you the chance to share your experiences and your thoughts with us. Even though this is not a part of our planned research project, it will add perspectives to the findings and support the direction of future projects. You can share your experiences and thoughts by filling out this form.

Do you want to get involved?

We encourage everyone with an interest in language diveristy in the Wikimedia movement to get in touch with us. You can sign up on Meta, use the Movement Strategy Forum or contact members from the steering committee for more information on how to get involved. We look forward to hearing from you!

The Gurene Wikimedia Community has launched the ‘Gurene Wiki Youth Month’ in commemoration of International Youth Day.

The Gurene Wiki Youth Month will celebrate community members who are contributing to the goal of digitizing the Gurene language and culture on Wikipedia and its sister projects.

These individuals include researchers, language translators, students, community groups, lecturers, software developers, etc. The month-long activities include an editing competition, training sessions, technical support, and awards, among others.

This year’s IYD theme Intergenerational Solidarity: “Creating a World for All Ages” will provide an opportunity to explore oral tradition which is largely carried by the older generation and digitize the language on Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Watch the full launch below.

While we're waiting for the results (September 21st at the earliest), I want to thank everyone who helped with my WMF Board candidacy.

From the people who initially gave me the confidence to run, to the people who helped me get through the Affiliate round, and then the people who ran Get Out The Vote efforts for the community voting period or even just told me that they were supporting me: thank you.

A very special set of people were there every stage of the way, I can't really express in words how much I appreciate each of you. <3

Globally, voter turnout was down: only 5,955 votes this year compared to last year's 6,873. Yet, in each group of users we tracked, turnout was solidly up:

Pretty incredible. Now it's at least two more weeks of anxious waiting and hopefully some time for actual wiki editing!

“Student Wikipedian Community in Waseda Uni Tokyo” and “Toumon Wikipedian Club Japan” , the almuni association held an online meeting discussing how to use digital archives for Wikipedia. This article reports the detail of that meeting.

Various digital archives

First of all, Eugene Ormandy introduced some digital archives such as Europeana, DPLA, Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons refering to an article about digital archive (時実象一「世界のデジタルアーカイブの動向」).

Then, other members explained how they use digital archives to edit Wikipedia.

How to use digital archives (User:Takenari Higuchi)

Firstly, Takenari Higuchi explained how they uses digital archives.

They picked up a Japanese animation’s Wikipedia article [[少女☆歌劇 レヴュースタァライト (アニメ)]] which they had wrote and said that they had archived the web pages used as references in the article by Wayback Machine. They pointed out that web pages are useful reference to write articles especially about animation or manga, so you have to archive it to prevent link rot.

They also picked up a Japanese Wikipedia article [[本山原人]] which they had wrote and said that they had used some newspaper digital archives, such as  “Asahi Shimbun Cross-Search“, “MAISAKU” and “NIKKEI TELECOM” to write the article. They access those archives through the database of their university.

How to use digital archives (User:Uraniwa)

Then, Uraniwa explained how they uses digital archives.

Uraniwa said that they had took a picture of a shrine and uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons as [[File:Murahi shrine.jpg]]. And they had used the picture for Japanese Wikipedia’s article [[村檜神社]].

After Uraniwa’s edit, another Wikipedia user had added the pictures from other point of view. A participant pointed out that such an improvemet is an advantage of “wiki” system.

How to use digital archives (User:Eugene Ormandy)

Then, Eugene Ormandy explained how they uses digital archives.

Eugene Ormandy explained that they had downloaded a picture (CC BY) from Europeana and uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons as [[File:William Steinberg.jpg]] and use it for Japanese Wikipedia’s article [[ウィリアム・スタインバーグ]].

Eugene Ormandy added that the picture used in English Wikipedia’s article [[William Steinberg]] is in the licence of “fair use” , so you cannot upload it to Wikimedia Commons and use it in Japanese Wikipedia.

Eugene Ormandy also explained that they had referred to books uploaded to Internet Archive to write a Japanese Wikipedia’s article [[カール・バーグマン]]. They said that Internet Archive is a very useful tool to write about classical music conductors especially active in 19th or 20th century because that archive contains many old music magazines.

Eugene Ormandy also presented an unfortunate example. They pointed out that many pictures in DPLA are not in Creative Commons license, so they can only add URL to “External links” section of Wikipedia articles.

Q&A

After the presentations, participants asked questions, such as “Are there any useful digital archive of Japanese painting?” or “Are there any other Web-Archive system?”. In response to this, Eugene Ormandy and Uraniwa introduced some digital archives, such as colbase, archive today and WARP.

Conclusion

Through this meeting, we confirmed that Wikipedia editors can use and make digital archives. And we also confirmed that some digital archives are very useful to make Wikimedia projects better.

We will continue to hold meetings to interact and exchange Wikipedian’s experiences.

A few decades ago, exoplanets were like alien life — their existence seemed likely, but none had ever been detected. But since the first confirmed discovery in 1992, the existence of over 5,000 exoplanets has been confirmed. While direct observations of exoplanets are impossible, it’s possible to estimate their size and mass. Using the planets of our own solar system as a baseline, it is possible to deduce the likely structure of known exoplanets. Thanks to a student in Simon Klemperer’s Journey to the Center of the Earth class, Wikipedia now has an article that discusses the current state of knowledge about exoplanet interiors. Similarly, it’s possible to use the atmospheric circulations on planets in our own Solar System to try to understand those of exoplanets. A student editor in David Catling’s Planetary Atmospheres class summarized this information to create a new article about Atmospheric circulation of exoplanets.

Mars often attracts interest from student editors — after all, it’s the best-known planet after Earth, Mars exploration is a hot topic, and its the only planet known to be entirely inhabited by robots. At the same time, a lot of the gaps that exist in information about Mars require specialist technical knowledge to understand the topic, along with access to scholarly resources that are frequently behind paywalls. A student in Journey to the Center of the Earth created a new article on the magnetic field of Mars, while one student in Planetary Atmospheres created one about Mars carbon dioxide ice clouds and others expanded the water on Mars and climate of Mars articles. In these kinds of specialized topic areas, student editors have a lot to offer.

From engagement rings, to conflict diamonds, to hidden loot in heist movies, diamonds fascinate. While people are usually only familiar with inclusions in the context of gemstones, the material trapped in diamonds during their formation can provide information about conditions in the Earth’s mantle at the time when the diamonds were formed. While inclusions are mentioned in the Wikipedia articles about both the mineral diamond and diamonds as gemstones, the nature of of the inclusions, their formation, and their importance in studying the interior of the planet isn’t a good fit in either article. A student editor in the Journey to the Center of the Earth class was able to recognize this omission and fill it by creating the diamond inclusions article.

While earthquakes are difficult or impossible to predict, certain areas are subject to repeated cycles of earthquakes driven by the accumulation of stress, followed by periodic release. One student editor in the Journey to the Center of the Earth class created an article about this phenomenon, the earthquake cycle while another made major expansions to the Earth’s outer core article. Others created articles about notable academics like geologist Holly Stein and geochemist François M. M. Morel.

Wiki Education’s Student Program offers opportunities for instructors in planetary sciences — be it this planet or others out there — to fill content gaps while empowering students to make a meaningful contribution. For more information, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Thumbnail image in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

By Robin Owain, Programme Manager for Wales at Wikimedia UK

This year, in Wiki Loves Earth, editors from all over Wales went out into protected areas such as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty etc with cameras clicking in all directions! At the end of the day, for the number of images, Wales received the Silver Medal on the international podium for photographers, out of 36 nations. The judging at the international level now begins.

Last year’s 1,892 photos now look meagre compared to this year’s massive 5,041 images! The 10 best images will now go through to the final, but as far as numbers are concerned, Wales came second out of 36 nations, with Germany first, Kazakhstan third, Brazil fourth, and Russia fifth. Small is beautiful!

To many photographers, taking an aesthetically pleasing image, technically correct, and visually stunning are important. To me, as one of the editors (in my own time, of course), it’s equally important that we have lots of images which illustrate Wikipedia articles and which document all aspects of our natural environment. Quality and quantity!

For the second year running, the National Library of Wales, Menter Mon and Wikimedia UK organised the competition. Within weeks, we had new partners, including the Welsh Government, all three National Parks: Eryri (Snowdonia), Pembrokeshire and the Brecon Beacons as well as the Ramblers. Other existing partners included Natural Resources Wales and Llên Natur, the largest Welsh language nature society. 

The National Library’s Open Data Manager, Jason Evans said, “The National Library of Wales is thrilled to be able to work with Wikimedia UK to support this fantastic competition for the second year in a row. Once again the standard of photography and the number of entries has been exceptional. It is so important to capture and record the ever-changing beauty of our natural environment and to make that content freely available to all.”

WLE 2022 was a quick snapshot of the rich diversity of one small corner of our global biosphere: a record of flora, fauna and fungi, as they were in the summer of 2022. Future snapshots could be used to show the differences in the biosphere, and the impact of climate change. If Wikipedia could better illustrate this change, we could help negate the effect. So let’s get these images on Wikipedia articles, and make a difference!

The winning image in Wales is by User:Mjw999, featured above. It shows Three Cliffs Bay within the Gower Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in South Wales. Judges Iestyn Hughes and Simon Evans, both prominent local photographers, felt that the image captured the diversity of this beautiful landscape, which includes fresh water streams, a salt marsh and towering limestone cliffs.

In second place this year is User:Naff14 with a well executed shot of a Puffin on Skomer Island, collecting flowers for his nest building.

And in third place, the judges agreed on a more abstract image of a rock on Rhossili Beach on the Gower by User:Suntooth. The judges felt that the image invoked the power of the wind and sea whilst the patterns in the sand echoed the branches of trees.

Also highly commended was the following image of footprints in the sand dunes at Gronant by User:ClwydRuth. The judges were keen to include this image as a way of raising the profile of the important but little known habitats of Gronant Dunes.

The ten best images can be seen here and will now represent Wales in the international competition. Best of luck to all our photographers!

The post Wales moves up to second place in Wiki Loves Earth appeared first on WMUK.

About 30 Ghanaian hearing-impaired students from the Special Education Department at the University of Education Winneba have been trained on Wikipedia and its sister projects.

The workshop themed ‘Sign Language and Wikipedia: Wiki4SDGs Ghana Campaign’ is the first of two pieces of training aimed at empowering PWDs with open resources.

The Project Lead, Stella Agbley, expressed optimism in promoting inclusion in the Wikipedia community, hence the need to continue the training of persons with disabilities, which began in 2021.

Miss Agbley shared her thoughts on the workshop, stating, “it went well, we expected 15 people and closed with almost 30 people. I am advocating the teaching of sign language at various levels, just like we have other Ghanaian languages taught in our schools. This would go a long way in making communication easier for those with hearing impairment.”

Sign Language Interpreter, Martin Atta Nyamekye says the students applauded the team for the training and “wished programs should be organized in the school frequently.”

The team includes:

• Stella Agbley User:SAgbley has over 6 years as a Wikimedian trainer. She is a GLAM advocate and very passionate about SDGs. She would lead training and also handle event planning. (Climate & Inclusion)
• Daniel Anyorigya- User:Uprising Man is also a climate and Human rights activist, an avid Wikimedia contributor and a journalist. He will train and assist with online communication and reporting.(Human Rights)
• Lady Patience: User:Patketeku – would assist with Logistics and youth mobilisation.
• Martin Atta User:Martinattakee is a sign language interpreter who has been trained on how to edit Wikipedia and its sister projects, he will also be an advisor and sign interpreter for the inclusion section. (Inclusion)

Advisory and Tech Team

• Joy Agyepong: User:Joy Agyepong is an experienced wikimedian/ environmental advocate and long time contributor who would serve as an advisor and also a facilitator.
• Nii Commey User:Cnii an active Wikimedian and would be technical lead/research support.
• Anita Adu- Yeboah – User:Edapa Annie an avid contributor and would handle resources and community engagement

About Wiki4SDGs Ghana Campaign

This is a follow-up to events held in 2021 on topics on climate, human rights, and Inclusion. This aims at:

• With the goal of recruiting more new editors (SDG advocates in the fields mentioned)
• To also Increase skills for translating Human rights related articles into Ghanaian local languages
• Create and improve Wiki Data items on Human rights and climate topics.
• Increase skills for existing editors on Human rights, institutions, and climate topics, and healthy natural systems.
• Add or improve and create content SDGs that include; Climate, Human Rights, and Inclusion topics.
• Uploads to Wiki Commons in all areas above.

The project will increase participation during World Environment Day, Climate Change Day, SDGs Week, and International Day of Sign Languages during the entire project period.

This was written by Daniel Abugre Anyorigya, a Journalist, Wikipedian and Environmentalist. Follow him on Twitter: @danyorigya

Wikimedia Sverige is experimenting with the development of a thematic hub for content partnerships in the Wikimedia movement. One area of experimentation is: how can the Wikimedia movement better support software development of strategically important tools used in content partnerships?

Many of these tools are created and maintained by volunteer developers in the Wikimedia movement. Sometimes, these tools are not actively maintained and improved. Sometimes new developments in the Wikimedia movement create a need for new features or even entirely new tools (for instance: tools that support Structured Data on Commons, which was deployed for the first time in 2019).

A group discussion with volunteer developers at Wikimania 2022

To kick off this conversation, we held a group discussion on August 13 at Wikimania 2022. This session was open to anyone who builds and uses such tools (Wikimedia tool developers, Wikimedia affiliates and end users) to talk about a plan of action for collaborative work on sustainable partnership software in the upcoming years. The key questions for this discussion were:

1. What is important to everyone involved, and
2. What do we need to make this work?

More than 30 people participated in this session. Brainstorming was done collaboratively: participants answered various questions in a shared Etherpad document.

What did we learn from the group discussion?

Some general observations:

• Many participants agreed that we shouldn’t keep relying on Magnus Manske‘s and other volunteer developers’ free time to fix problems.
• Many people ask for good end user documentation, training and support… these are aspects that are closely related to software development, but that are covered elsewhere in the content partnerships hub: capacity building and the helpdesk.
• Everyone who contributed to the Etherpad seemed to agree that it is OK for a formal organisation (like a thematic hub) to step in and to take over tasks from volunteer developers. Preferably, this would be tasks that volunteer developers don’t like to do: project management, writing documentation, promotion of the software, and maintenance tasks that are seen as boring or cumbersome. Volunteer developers generally enjoy experimenting and innovating; they should keep that role (and be encouraged and supported in it).

Do you agree with these conclusions?

In general, we find the feedback very encouraging for further experimentation in a content partnerships hub – we feel that there is a ‘green light’ and even encouragement to take action in prioritizing and in starting to support key tools in a more long-term and sustainable way. But is this observation correct? Although this discussion at Wikimania was very lively, with more than 30 participants, we are aware that many voices were still not heard there. This post is an invitation for more input, especially in the case of disagreement or important additions. If you read the contributions to the Etherpad, and the summary above: do you agree, or disagree? We would really like to hear your feedback, which you can leave on the talk page of the on-wiki version of this blog post, or e-mail to sandra.fauconnierwikimedia.se.

Next steps?

This conversation was an early step in a longer process. In the next months, Wikimedia Sverige will initiate conversations on other topics as well: including decision-making and prioritization; financing of software development and maintenance. We are working on a longlist of tools, and are preparing a survey for end users of Wikimedia content partnerships software, to help decide which tools most urgently need support in the short and longer term. The Software page of the content partnerships hub will be updated as more of these conversations are held and as more activities develop, and we will reach out to the relevant communities accordingly. Let’s continue this journey together!

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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 6 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 7 September. It will be on all wikis from 8 September (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 6 September at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 8 September at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
• On Special pages that only have one tab, the tab-bar’s row will be hidden in the Vector-2022 skin to save space. The row will still show if Gadgets use it. Gadgets that currently append directly to the CSS id of #p-namespaces should be updated to use the mw.util.addPortletLink function instead. Gadgets that style this id should consider also targeting #p-associated-pages, the new id for this row. Examples are available. [1][2]

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

The Report on the digital commons, initiated by France during the conference “Building Europe’s Digital Sovereignty” (February 2022) was presented at the Digital Assembly co-organized in Toulouse by the French Presidency and the European Commission, on June 21-22. The report is the result of several months of reflection by 19 Member States¹, the European Commission, and a number of civil society actors interested in the digital commons. How well does the report address the future of enriching and accessing the commons in the EU?

Wikimedia France brought its own vision and solutions strenthening the development of the digital commons in Europe. We had already started discussions focused on the enrichment of Wikipedia by volunteer communities with Henri Verdier, French Ambassador for Digital Affairs, around the Wikicheese event we had organized in Brussels with the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group. It was important for the association to be able to represent the Wikimedia movement on these issues because online communtiy platforms are too often put aside by public authorities in their statements or in their debates during regulations.

The report made four key proposals:

1. The creation of a European one-stop shop to guide communities towards adequate funding and public aid;
2. The launch of a call for projects to deploy financial support to the most strategic commons;
3. The creation of a European foundation for the digital commons, with shared governance between the States, the European Commission and the digital commons communities;
4. The implementation of the “digital commons by default” principle in the development of digital tools for public administrations.

The Wikimedia movement welcomes this initiative and these proposals. The Internet can and must be a diversified space beneficial to all. Thanks to the collective intelligence, very beautiful things – such as access to information for all, access to cultural heritage – can become the experience of all Europeans. This is why it is necessary more than ever that decision-makers support the use of digital tools based on the commons including Wikipedia, Open Food Facts, Open Street Map and Framasoft. Supporting the development of a model different than that of the dominant commercial platforms is crucial as we need an alternative for both access and production of information to that based on monetising interactions between users.

Wikimedia France in coalition with other actors of the digital commons are waiting for real actions to be put in place following these declarations. We have, in turn, posed several proposals to that end. From the coalition’s demands, four were covered in the report: the establishment of a European funding system, the creation of a support fund for commons and open source actors, the assurance of European governance with the creation of a European foundation, and the structuring of public-digital commons partnerships by public authorities. Three were either not mentioned in the report or, in our opinion, insufficiently covered or too vague: improving the legal framework by taking the digital commons into account in regulations, structuring a European digital industry ecosystem based on open innovation and interoperability, and supporting the existing digital commons infrastructure. Therefore, the members of the coalition will continue their exchanges with the key actors of this report and will be vigilant, in the coming months, to the implementation of the proposals presented in the report. 

The digital commons are an important lever to set up a multilateral governance of our data and tools used to regain a share of strategic digital autonomy. It is therefore urgent to bring a new vision as well as a renewal of the way of thinking on all these issues, especially for a more open, innovative, sovereign and democratic Europe. We believe that Europe has, more than the capacity, the duty to shape the digital society of tomorrow by taking the right path.

¹these were: Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden

As I posted about earlier, the election for the WMF Board of Trustees is wrapping up. Today is the final day for voting, it closes at 23:59 September 6 UTC (in your local timezone).

You should:

• Read about the candidates
• Vote!
• Tell other people to vote!

Thank you to everyone who has already voted and is encouraging other Wikimedians to vote. This is an incredibly important election and every vote counts.

Earlier in the summer, way back at the end of June, I had the very great pleasure of joining Puiyin Wong on her fabulous My Liminal Podcast. We had a really engaging and wide ranging discussion covering open education, OER, digital labour, knowledge equity, Wikimedia in the classroom, and perhaps most importantly, cats!  You can listen to Puiyin’s My Liminal Podcast on anchor.fm and Spotify, and follow on twitter at @MyLiminalPod.

23/08/2022-29/08/2022

Mapping

• After comparing different 360° cameras, OSM user 2hu4u came up with a fairly low-budget option for 360° street level imagery that has led to satisfying results for mapping.
• Ilya Zverev commented on the proposal to change the OSM data model.

Community

• MarcoR is amused about a case of pareidolia in OSM, where he identified a smiling farm in Tuscany, Italy. In the comments, other references are posted, for example a memorial looking like a bear.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• To be eligible to vote at this year’s OSMF annual general meeting you must be a member or associate member for the full 90 days prior to the date on which the meeting is held, that is, from Sunday 11 September.
• Tobias Knerr reported about the Software Dispute Resolution Panel (SDRP), a mechanism for dispute resolution where developers, members of the community, or the OSMF board can take disputes to be resolved. There were no disputes taken to the panel over the past year and the OSMF Board would like to hear opinions from the community on how to evaluate the value of the SDRP.
• The OSM Foundation (OSMF) has decided to only accept new applications for OSMF membership and associate membership from people who have previously contributed to OpenStreetMap. The Foundation additionally plans to perform a survey among the OSMF membership.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap Polska has signed ► another cooperation agreement, this time with the author of the Velomapa.pl ► portal.

Education

• Craig Kochis wanted to know how vector maps work and taught himself by implementing one.
• Altilunium published a tutorial on how to self-host an OSM tile server by using JOSM, NodeJS, Maptiler Desktop and Tileserver GL. It also covers how to design your own map style by leveraging OSM tag data.
• Anne-Karoline Distel wrote a diary entry about aspects of tagging stiles before completing a video about how to map them.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT is offering data quality internships. They are full-time for 12 weeks and interns will be paid.

Maps

• [1] Cristoffs blogged about the initiative to rewrite and extend the Polish map of automated external defibrillators (AEDs). The result is available at openaedmap.org. The project is looking for support with coding as well as translations.
• OpenSnowMap reported that very high resolution relief (0.5–2 m resolution) shading is now available for Switzerland. The data are sourced from SwissTopo OpenData.
• As one can read on Twitter, OpenMapTiles is taking steps towards open governance and considering moving to a CC0 licence, in order to become the official OpenStreetMap vector tiles. Tobias Jordans created an issue on GitHub to collect information about this announcement and hopefully get an official response.

switch2OSM

• Sahil Dhiman wrote about his discovery of OSM data usage in many products during daily life and how it motivates him to contribute to the map.

Did you know …

• … LibRedirect, a web browser extension redirecting to alternative privacy friendly frontends and backends? It effectively redirects requests from the usual map providers to OpenStreetMap.
• … that requests to the OpenStreetMap tile server for tile status and tile re-rendering have not possible since July? See the discussions on Reddit and the GitHub issue.

OSM in the media

• Le Monde featured ► the local OpenStreetMap office in Mali. The group, initiated by Nathalie Sidibé, aims to contribute to the development of the territory by collecting and distributing data, starting with the capital, Bamako.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Santa Terezinha de Goiás	2° Validatona da UMBRAOSM – Brasil.		2022-09-03
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #44		2022-09-05
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2022-09-06
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-09-06
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #39 (Online)	✓	2022-09-06
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-09-08
Berlin	171. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2022-09-08
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-09-08
Morogoro	Field Mapping is the Future: A Tasking Manager Workflow for Open Data Kit (ODK)		2022-09-09
Claix	Cartopartie à Claix (Isère, France)		2022-09-10
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-09-12
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-09-14
Chippewa Township	Michigan Meetup		2022-09-15
Großarl	6. Virtueller OpenStreetMap Stammtisch Österreich		2022-09-14
Ballerup Kommune	OSM DK Konference		2022-09-17
Dublin	OpenStreetMap Ireland AGM		2022-09-17
Pacé	Atelier participatif « Recensement des commerces »		2022-09-20
	155. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-09-20
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-09-20
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-09-20
Roma	Incontro dei mappatori romani e laziali		2022-09-21
Miniac-sous-Bécherel	Atelier participatif « Recensement des commerces »		2022-09-22
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-09-22
Cisterna d’Asti	Incontro mapper astigiani		2022-09-24

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 PierZen, SK53, Strubbl, TheSwavu, adiatmad, derFred, richter_fn.
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The first implementation of the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program in Nigeria ran for a period of 3 months and was led by Bukola James, a Certified Trainer of the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program. Bukola was part of the first international cohort of Certified Trainers to receive the Wikimedia Foundation support of a grant and mentorship for the implementation. Her implementation was led in partnership with the Nigerian National Commission for UNESCO, the National Library of Nigeria (NLN), the Ministry of Education and Human Capital Development – Kwara, UNESCO Associated School Project Network (ASP-net) in Kwara, State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), and Teaching Service Commission (TESCOM) in Kwara State.

Key partnerships for the program

The partnership with the Nigerian National Commission for UNESCO led to the approval for the implementation of the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program which adopted the UNESCO Media and Information Literacy framework with the recommendation from the National Library of Nigeria.  

This approval from UNESCO provided legal backing for reaching out to participants and stakeholders in the education sector in Nigeria, specifically Kwara State for further approval for the commencement of the first implementation. This partnership also facilitated the approval and recommendation of this program in other parts of the country for newly certified trainers. As part of this partnership, the Nigerian National Commission for UNESCO recommended that the implementation consider working with 30 teachers from both public and private secondary schools in Kwara State under the UNESCO Associated School Project Network (ASP-net) during the implementation which was agreed upon.

The Ministry of Education and Human capital Development Kwara State provided the implementation team with a monitoring team and recommended 40 teachers to be part of the program.  The partnership with the Kwara State government ensured functional measurement as a means to evaluate Teacher’s performance during the implementation. The partnership with State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), and Teaching Service Commission (TESCOM) in Kwara State birthed the approval letter which served as evidence for participating Teachers.

Our program goals and impact

The program proposed creating awareness among 200 teachers but succeeded in creating awareness among 228 teachers on the effective usage of Wikipedia to enhance Media and Information Literacy skills and act as a learning tool in June 2022. We initially collected the perspectives and experiences of these teachers using a survey.

The program proposed engaging 70 teachers for the first pilot implementation. However,  75 teachers in Kwara were enrolled to be trained on how to understand, access, retrieve, create, and effectively integrate the lessons learned from this program into their classroom activities in June 2022. This was a result of the 228 applications received from all the 16 local government areas in the State.

The program originally aimed to certify 35 teachers. At the end of the implementation in July 2022, 60 of the teachers who met the program requirement received certificates of completion. These teachers are ready to implement the new classroom strategies that foster Media and Information Literacy using Wikipedia as an Open Education Resources (OERs) across 60 Schools in Kwara State.

Steps taken to grow our community

The project timeline was divided into 3 specific activities; 

1. Planning which commenced in May 2022 with various activities such as adaptation and localization of teachers guide, documentation page, call for teachers and selection of participants that met the program requirement, conducting pre-survey/need assessment for teachers, and creating communication channels via Social Media Platforms, preparation of presentation slides among others to achieve program desired goals.
2. Implementation: The program adopted a blended mode of implementation (Offline in-person training and online one-on-one support for teachers) with four (4) physical training held at the Mustapha Akanbi Library and Resource Centre, Ilorin for a period of 1 month in June. The teachers also contributed to Wikimedia projects which was tracked on the project outreach dashboard.

• The first training session introduced 63 Teachers to module 1 (Accessing Information) of the Teacher’s Guide. 

• The second training session discussed module 2 (Evaluating Information) with 72 participants in attendance.
• The third training session which was the final training session dwelled on module 3 (Creating information) with 68 teachers in attendance.
• The fourth session which was the closing and certification ceremony had over 70 participants across all the 16-Local Government Areas of Kwara State with 60 certified teachers who met the program requirements, and special recognition /awards given to the top 5 editors who contributed immensely to Wikipedia and its sister projects. 

3. Evaluation: The goal of the evaluation is to establish what changed as a result of the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program in Kwara, Nigeria, and to gain useful insights about the process that will assist in improving future interventions and sustainability. This helps to better understand whether the program improved teachers’ understanding of Wikipedia as a useful learning tool to promote relevant media and information literacy skills. The team is currently consolidating the data gathered in this stage and we will be presenting more of our learnings soon.

Learnings and recommendations from the Nigeria team

• Seek advice from experienced resource persons such as retirees from the education sector and get them involved in your implementation process: This is one of the best decisions that made RWC Kwara measure great impact. Working with experienced stakeholders as resource persons who acted as an advisory board for the project provided guidance and proper planning for the implementation.
• According to research, collaborative problem-solving produces better results as people are more likely to take calculated risks that lead to innovation. Working with a team of 6 dedicated volunteers made the implementation less stressful as there was a division of labour and grouping of teachers by the trainers so they can be attended to on time for increased job satisfaction, and to reduce workload. 

  Effective teamwork makes the project work!

• Ensure the training space is set a day before the training and all equipment such as projector, and sound systems are in place. Prepare training resources and share them with participants via mail or WhatsApp before each training session. 

• Divide the teachers into different groups and assign a facilitator to each group using different communication channels, e.g., WhatsApp for instant feedback, Facebook, text messaging, or telephone calls. 

• Ensure participants create Wikipedia accounts before the implementation to keep IP blocks to a minimum. 
• Recommend at least 5 training sessions so teachers can get more hands-on experience during implementation.

• Encourage feedback and recognition of outstanding participants using incentives such as gift vouchers.
• Generate weekly reports of activities carried out by team members to keep track of implementation progress.

Challenges faced during implementation of the RWC Kwara, Nigeria

Despite the project’s success, the following challenges were faced during its implementation. 

1. Inadequate ICT Skills: Some of the teachers selected to represent their schools do not have adequate ICT skills and could only use their mobile phones for basic functions, which slowed their comprehension of some basic things on Wikipedia.  E.g., changing their mobile phones to desktop mode, inability to distinguish between a search engine and a browser, and unfamiliarity with the Wikipedia user interface.
2. IP address block: This was the most difficult challenge encountered during the third week of the program implementation, as it prevented most teachers from actively participating in the physical training session on creating information in module 3. Hence the need to devise other alternatives which made the session very difficult and stressful. The teachers became hesitant and almost changed their perception of Wikipedia as a friendly space for new editors causing a delay in their assignment submission, and postponement of the closing/certification ceremony.
3. Absence of Teachers at the physical meeting: Some of the ‌teachers who could not attend the third physical training found it extremely difficult to adapt and complete the lesson plan on their own, so we had to organise individual Zoom calls and provide one-on-one support for them to go over the lesson plan several times.

Our next steps

The Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program Nigeria having exposed Teachers to the UNESCO Media and Information Literacy framework has also proven that Wikipedia truly belongs in education. Our team believes that Wikipedia has a lot of potential to promote new learning methodologies for students, enhance teaching pedagogies, facilitate high-quality learning and teaching efficiency, prioritize the use of Open Education Resources, bridge the media and Information literacy gap in Nigeria, and strengthens the critical thinking abilities of students. 

To have a functional measurement of the impact of the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program Kwara on Teachers, we have adopted a follow-up initiative to the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program but this time for students in secondary schools in Kwara State. The goal of this initiative is to assist the teachers who completed the program in implementing the lessons learned and using the knowledge gained to support their students. This way, our team will be able to evaluate the impact of this training on their classroom activities.  More about this project will be discussed in our next publication!

About the Project Implementation Team

Bukola James (Project Lead): She is a graduate of Library and Information Science from Kwara State University Malete, a former virtual intern for the IFLA-BSLISE working group, and a member of the Creative common GLAM Resource group. She is the first certified trainer of the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program in Nigeria. Outside of the open community, she is an advocate of SDGs 4, 8 & 12.

Linason Blessing Chematoan (Co-Trainers): She is a student of Kwara State University from the department of Library and Information Science, a Wikimedian, and a volunteer for the Women’s Technology Empowerment Centre. She is passionate about making free knowledge accessible and dispensable to people in her community and globally.

Rhoda James (Co-Trainers): She is a student at the University of Ilorin, studying Business Education. She is a Wikimedian and Graphic Designer for the Wikimedia Nigeria User Group and a co-trainer at the First Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom, Kwara Nigeria. She has also organised, facilitated, and participated in various Wikimedia projects.

Ajeigbe, Rukayat Bolaji (Volunteer): Wikimedian, Content creator, and project lead for Female Youth Initiative. She’s passionate about research and self-development.

Barakat Adegboye (Volunteer): She is a Business Education student at the University of Ilorin. A Wikimedian, and facilitator of the recently concluded Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom Program in Kwara State. She is also a self-taught phone photographer and artist who loves to bring out the beauty in anything ordinary.

Pst. J. K. Alabi, (Resource Person): A Retired Civil Servant, Guidance-Counsellor, and Educationist. He is the  CEO of Toptal Global Educational Consult, Ilorin. 

Mrs. Olani Olabimpe, (Resource Person): Head of Branch National Library of Nigeria Kwara State.

Mrs. Juliet Emielu (Resource Person):  Author and School Principal, Government Secondary School Adeta Ilorin.

Reading Wikipedia in the classroom program, Kwara Nigeria Social media handles

• Twitter
• Instagram
• Facebook

A few months back, Wikimedia Sverige announced the Helpdesk to “provide hands-on support to affiliates and volunteers who are trying to form content partnerships, especially for local communities in the underserved and underrepresented parts of the world.”

Now, we are taking the Helpdesk to the next step. The full Expert Committee, which will guide the work of the Helpdesk, has been established. The Expert Committee consists of content partnerships experts from around the globe. You can now meet the Committee members on the new Helpdesk portal for the Content Partnerships hub! 

The next thing that the Helpdesk needs, are your requests for help!

Request help from the Helpdesk!

Submitting a request for help from the Helpdesk is easy. Explain your project in an email and send it to [email protected]. Or ask for an individual meeting, if you prefer a call.

If you want help to make an upload of content to the Wikimedia platforms, we will ask you a few questions:

• Does the project contribute to filling knowledge gaps?
• Will you learn new skills through the project?
• Will it show the content partner the benefits of working with Wikimedia?

But you can also request help on other parts of the journey, such as help with policy-making and advocacy.

If the Helpdesk team does not have the answers to your questions, we will help guide you to the people in the movement that does.

Be part of a working group! 

Have you worked with partners to share their content to the Wikimedia platforms? Would you be willing to share your experience and help others? Perhaps you are interested in reusing the content? Translate pages, or start sub-projects? Your help is needed, both as volunteers and affiliates.

We are working to launch working groups to the Helpdesk. These working groups will be created according to the needs and the wishes of the movement, but might involve areas such as technical support and advocacy.

Reach out to [email protected] if you want to take part in a working group.

Help translate the pages! 

We also need help with translation of the pages on the Helpdesk portal.

If you want to know more about how to get involved, read here!

Previous updates: 2018, 2021

Kiwix is an offline content reader, best known for distributing copies of Wikipedia. I have been maintaining it in Debian since 2017.

This year most of the work has been keeping all the packages up to date in anticipation of next year's Debian 12 Bookworm release, including several transitions for new libzim and libkiwix versions.

• libzim: 6.3.0 → 8.0.0
• zim-tools: 2.1.0 → 3.1.1
• python-libzim: 0.0.3 → 1.1.1 (with a cherry-picked patch)
• libkiwix: 9.4.1 → 11.0.0 (with DFSG issues fixed!)
• kiwix-tools: 3.1.2 → 3.3.0
• kiwix (desktop): 2.0.5 → 2.2.2

The Debian Package Tracker makes it really easy to keep an eye on all Kiwix-related packages.

All of the "user-facing" packages (zim-tools, kiwix-tools, kiwix) now have very basic autopkgtests that can provide a bit of confidence that the package isn't totally broken. I recommend reading the "FAQ for package maintainers" to learn about all the benefits you get from having autopkgtests.

Finally, back in March I wrote a blog post, How to mirror the Russian Wikipedia with Debian and Kiwix, which got significant readership (compared to most posts on this blog), including being quoted by LWN!

We are always looking for more contributors, please reach out if you're interested. The Kiwix team is one of my favorite groups of people to work with and they love Debian too.

Hello there! Welcome to the University Students Wikimedians communities’ monthly learning series. This series will contain a total of two seasons and each season will contain 6 episodes. The main of this series is to share our experience in establishing, running, and maintaining wiki clubs and communities as a community-based in Tanzania for the years 2022-2023 projects which are currently running.

In this particular episode, we will be focusing on the programs that run from July to August (One month) where we had three regions participating (i.e. Morogoro, Dodoma, and Iringa regions).

Planning and Structuring

As well-known planning and structuring are the basics and the key to a successful project. The University Students Wikimedians Core Organizing Team (USW C.O.T) had the mandate to support the communities in the whole process so everything was put in place before the beginning of the project where we had a training for trainers’ session which included the C.O.T and the club leaders in the late June 2022 at Udzungwa in Morogoro region.

The main aim of the training for trainers was to equip all leaders with the skills needed to run the clubs and different departments during the whole period of the project.

However, in this particular episode, all the events were online!

Kickoff

After a long wait from the communities’ members, we were able to kick off the project in mid-July 15^th 2022 where we had all three regions participating in the programs. All the clubs had a chance to choose their preferred edit-a-thon theme after which the clubs’ leader had to prepare the list of articles that were to be worked on.

Monitoring and Maintaining

With the help from the Clubs’ Coordinator, Miss Wahida we were able to monitor the progress of each club using the outreach dashboard for metrics, online sessions, one on one calls, and in-person meetups with some of the members just to make sure everything is running as planned before the programs end date.

Challenges

As well-known challenges are part of any given project and for us, we did also face challenges during the running of our project as stated below:

Online Events

Due to the closure of Colleges and Universities in Tanzania, we were unable to run in-person events and thus we were forced to move online. This was a challenge due to other editors not being able to utilize the technology efficiently mostly for the newbies and hence we had to use a lot of time providing training.

Skills

A big challenge was for the newbies who were new to computer use. Basic computer skills were to be taught before they could join in contributing to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. However, we are grateful we were able to achieve a great outcome through the program.

Inactive members

We faced a challenge where we had many inactive members in the community. Many of the inactive participants were due to the interference between their timetable and the programs’ timetable. Also, we have students who were at their field practical training so lacking enough time to participate in the edit-a-thon. We are still looking for a way forward on this issue.

Privacy, Safety, and Friendly space

As a community, we are always committed to the provision of privacy, safety, and friendly space to all the community and non-community members. During this episode, no act violated any of these. We are happy and will always make sure that we maintain this act during and after the project.

Outcomes

For this particular episode, we were contributing to the Swahili Wikipedia, and below are the statistics and outcome data for this program.

New Articles Created: 414

The number of editors: 78

Articles Views (as of 26/08/2022 13:31 EAT): 5,458

Dashboard links:

https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/USW/Uoi_Club_July_2022/home

https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/USW/Moro_Swahili_Month/home

https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/USW/USW_CHSS/home

https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/UDOM/USW_CIVE_Club_July_Program/home

You join us in our upcoming events by emailing us via: [email protected] or WhatsApp +255685261018.

Incase you missed our last post see it bellow:

As we head for the long holiday: what’s next for the University Students Wikimedians Communities in Tanzania?

In celebration of Pride Month, Wiki Education recruited participants, particularly faculty or graduate students in the LGBTQ+ community, for another Wiki Scholars course focused on expanding Wikipedia’s coverage of notable LGBTQ+ people.

We regularly run Wiki Scholars courses throughout the year, but the way this course came to be was especially important to us. “We are so grateful to the estate of B.B. Clark for generously supporting this Wiki Scholars course,” said Andrés Vera, Wiki Education’s Equity Outreach Coordinator, who made this connection. “Mr. Clark was a victim of the AIDS pandemic and vowed that none of his anti-gay family would receive a portion of his estate. While so many people try to erase the stories of LGBTQ+ people, in the after life, Mr. Clark is helping us preserve LGBTQ history.”

You can see one example of improving the historical record in the article about AIDS activist Reggie Williams. It is now a substantial Wikipedia biography, thanks to Wiki Scholar Dan Royles. Before the course, Reggie’s biography did mention his activism work. But after the course, the biography tells a much deeper story of his life-mission making AIDS education and services more culturally relevant for gay and bisexual men of color. You can now read about Reggie’s impact at both a local and national level. He became an adviser to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and the San Francisco Department of Public Health, submitted a proposal to the Centers for Disease Control’s national AIDS education program, and was instrumental in starting multiple organizations for on-the-ground AIDS education in San Francisco.

In addition to Reggie William’s biography, Ruth Bleier now has a more detailed one. Wiki Scholar Jenny Lenkowski worked on it, enhancing sections about the neurophysiologist’s activism work during the era of McCarthyism. Ruth was an early explorer of how gender bias affected her field and she advocated for change. In addition to following her own personal mission to better represent a diversity of scientists on Wikipedia, Jenny — as an Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Goucher College who teaches with Wikipedia — has new perspective to take back to her Wikipedia assignments.

“This course was a great way for me, as an instructor who has assigned Wiki Education projects in my classes, to more intentionally contribute to Wikipedia in a meaningful way myself,” Jenny told us. “I try to emphasize to my students the benefits of us contributing to Wikipedia to increase the diversity of Wikipedians and to also consider profiling scientists from underrepresented groups for their project, so this was a great opportunity for me to explore and contribute to biographies of scientists in the LGBTQ+ community. It took me quite a while to finally decide what page I would be working on, something I see some students struggle with as well. I also benefited from weekly discussions of how projects were going, something I’ll be more intentional about doing next time I assign a similar project.”

One more example comes from Wiki Scholar Sara Moore, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Salem State University, who greatly expanded Rachel Levine’s biography page. Rachel Levine made history as the first openly transgender government official to hold an office requiring a Senate confirmation, serving as assistant secretary of health since 2021. Sara added a section to Levine’s biography about her commitment to solving US health disparities, especially as they relate to LGBTQ+ youth.

“You feel empowered when you learn how to contribute meaningfully to a body of knowledge that so many people draw on,” Sara told us. “It’s also important to bolster the stories and experiences of underrepresented groups of people and their histories.” Although there is a lot more work to do regarding the preservation of LGBTQ history, we’re pleased courses like this can have such an impact on Wikipedia.

If you’d like to peruse more great work that came out of our first iteration of this course, follow this link.

Thumbnail image shows Rachel Levine and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre holding a Pride flag in 2022. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

For a few weeks, a CI job had PHPUnit tests abruptly ending with:

returned non-zero exit status -11

The connoisseur [ 1 ] would have recognized that the negative exit status indicates the process exited due to a signal. On Linux, 11 is the value for the SIGSEGV signal, which is usually sent by the kernel to the process as a result of an improper machine instruction. The default behavior is to terminate the process (man 7 signal) and to generate a core dump file (I will come to that later).

But why? Some PHP code ended up triggering a code path in HHVM that would eventually try to read outside of its memory range, or some similar low level fault. The kernel knows that the process completely misbehaved and thus, well, terminates it. Problem solved, you never want your program to misbehave when the kernel is in charge.

The job had recently been switched to use a new container in order to benefit from more recent lib and to match the OS distributions used by the Wikimedia production system. My immediate recommendation was to rollback to the previous known state, but eventually I have let the task to go on and have been absorbed by other tasks (such as updating MediaWiki on the infrastructure).

Last week, the job suddenly began to fail constantly. We prevent code from being merged when a test fails, and thus the code stays in a quarantine zone (Gerrit) and cannot be shipped. A whole team could not ship code (the Language-Team ) for one of their flagship projects (ContentTranslation .) That in turn prevents end users from benefiting from new features they are eager for. The issue had to be acted on and became an unbreak now! kind of task. And I went to my journey.

returned non-zero exit status -11, that is a good enough error message. A process in a Docker container is really just an isolated process and is still managed by the host kernel. First thing I did was to look at the kernel syslog facility on our instances, which yields:

kernel: [7943146.540511] php[14610]:
  segfault at 7f1b16ffad13 ip 00007f1b64787c5e sp 00007f1b53d19d30
     error 4 in libpthread-2.24.so[7f1b64780000+18000]

php there is just HHVM invoked via a php symbolic link. The message hints at libpthread which is where the fault is. But we need a stacktrace to better determine the problem, and ideally a reproduction case.

Thus, what I am really looking for is the core dump file I alluded to earlier. The file is generated by the kernel and contains an image of the process memory at the time of the failure. Given the full copy of the program instructions, the instructions it was running at that time, and all the memory segments, a debugger can reconstruct a human readable state of the failure. That is a backtrace, and is what we rely on to find faulty code and fix bugs.

The core file is not generated. Or the error message would state it had coredumped, i.e. the kernel generated the core dump file. Our default configuration is to not generate any core file, but usually one can adjust it from the shell with ulimit -c XXX where XXX is the maximum size a core file can occupy (in kilobytes, in order to prevent filling the disk). Docker being just a fancy way to start a process, it has a setting to adjust the limit. The docker run inline help states:

--ulimit ulimit Ulimit options (default [])

It is as far as useful as possible, eventually the option to set is: --ulimit core=2147483648 or up to 2 gigabytes. I have updated the CI jobs and instructed them to capture a file named core, the default file name. After a few runs, although I could confirm failures, no files got captured. Why not?

Our machines do not use core as the default filename. It can be found in the kernel configuration:

name=/proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern
/var/tmp/core/core.%h.%e.%p.%t

I thus went on the hosts looking for such files. There were none.

Or maybe I mean None or NaN.

Nada, rien.

The void.

The result is obvious, try to reproduce it! I ran a Docker container doing a basic while loop, from the host I have sent the SIGSEGV signal to the process. The host still had no core file. But surprise it was in the container. Although the kernel is handling it from the host, it is not namespace-aware when it comes time to resolve the path. My quest will soon end, I have simply mounted a host directory to the containers at the expected place:

mkdir /tmp/coredumps
docker run --volume /tmp/coredumps:/var/tmp/core ....

After a few builds, I had harvested enough core files. The investigation is then very straightforward:

$ gdb /usr/bin/hhvm /coredump/core.606eb29eab46.php.2353.1552570410
Core was generated by `php tests/phpunit/phpunit.php --debug-tests --testsuite extensions --exclude-gr'.
Program terminated with signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
#0  0x00007f557214ac5e in __pthread_create_2_1 (newthread=newthread@entry=0x7f55614b9e18, attr=attr@entry=0x7f5552aa62f8, 
    start_routine=start_routine@entry=0x7f556f461c20 <timer_sigev_thread>, arg=<optimized out>) at pthread_create.c:813
813    pthread_create.c: No such file or directory.
[Current thread is 1 (Thread 0x7f55614be3c0 (LWP 2354))]

(gdb) bt
#0  0x00007f557214ac5e in __pthread_create_2_1 (newthread=newthread@entry=0x7f55614b9e18, attr=attr@entry=0x7f5552aa62f8, 
    start_routine=start_routine@entry=0x7f556f461c20 <timer_sigev_thread>, arg=<optimized out>) at pthread_create.c:813
#1  0x00007f556f461bb2 in timer_helper_thread (arg=<optimized out>) at ../sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/timer_routines.c:120
#2  0x00007f557214a494 in start_thread (arg=0x7f55614be3c0) at pthread_create.c:456
#3  0x00007f556aeebacf in __libc_ifunc_impl_list (name=<optimized out>, array=0x7f55614be3c0, max=<optimized out>)
    at ../sysdeps/x86_64/multiarch/ifunc-impl-list.c:387
#4  0x0000000000000000 in ?? ()

Which @Anomie kindly pointed out is an issue solved in libc6. Once the container has been rebuilt to apply the package update, the fault disappears.

One can now expect new changes to appear to ContentTranslation.

[ 1 ] ''connoisseur'', from obsolete French, means "to know" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/connoisseur . I guess the English language forgot to apply update on due time and can not make any such change for fear of breaking back compatibility or locution habits.

The task has all the technical details and log leading to solving the issue: T216689: Merge blocker: quibble-vendor-mysql-hhvm-docker in gate fails for most merges (exit status -11)

(Some light copyedits to above -- Brennen Bearnes)

By Daria Cybulska, Director of Programmes and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK

My adventure with the Wikimedia movement started in 2012, 10 years ago. Ten years is a long time, and when I joined as a staff member at Wikimedia UK, freshly established as a charity, there were already plenty of established community members around me. I remember coming to the global Wikimania conference in 2012, where in the opening session the audience of over a thousand people were asked to stand up, and then sit down in sequence depending on how long they’ve been in the movement – starting from the newcomers. As I sat through the countdown, embarrassed by my short tenure, I got the message that what’s valued in the movement is your length of service, and a direct connection to the key moments in its history. 

With English Wikipedia being established in 2001, I now have roughly the same tenure in the movement as the longest standing stalwarts at that point of Wikimania 2012. Somehow I don’t feel like one of the movement’s wise old women, despite living through some of its rather interesting moments. I also note, gladly, the movement’s tentative shift towards celebrating its newcomers. 

At a recent Wikimania the countdown went from the longest standing to the newest participants, with the newbies getting an ovation when they are the last people standing. 

When I joined Wikimedia, not long after completing a philosophy degree, I thought of Wikipedia as an experiment in epistemology of testimony, in how you decide to believe the information shared by someone else. Turns out things are much more complicated than that single angle, especially because the Wikipedia project doesn’t happen by itself – it’s made by people and their interactions, and that’s complicated. 

Since my early days I’ve been exposed to a number of beliefs about Wikipedia and its movement which I approached with suspicion. As a way of reflecting on my ten years with Wikimedia, I’m sharing five of my enduring hesitations, meaning approaches I came across that I’m suspicious of and try to mitigate (I could go for a commemorative ten hesitations but even I would find that a bit demotivating!).

Build it and they’ll come

This is a common adage in the techno-social projects and movements, where you believe that when you set up a tool, a space (in terms of tech and logistics), people will appear and engage with it. I’ve had conversations with potential partner institutions believing that if they set up their own wiki, it will work just as wonderfully as Wikipedia itself, with volunteer contributors appearing out of nowhere. This might work sometimes but usually doesn’t, and it’s true even within Wikipedia across its many internal projects – the magic of Wikipedia isn’t uniformly distributed. Providing community support and facilitation is non negotiable, so is designing inviting ways of getting into the project, especially if we want to ensure inclusion. I captured some of these thoughts within a collaborative book project I supported, Collective Wisdom.

Move fast and break things

Another common tech phrase speaks to the spirit of fast iteration, putting out minimum viable products and getting them critiqued in order to improve quickly. I have fully embraced sharing my thinking and documents early and can’t quite imagine working on something without colleagues’ eyeballs on it. But moving fast and breaking things feels quite individualistic and doesn’t give justice to the communities that may be using or relying on whatever is being broken (even if to improve it). 

I’m also forever astounded by how many things in the movement have been quick temporary decisions that somehow solidified into permanent solutions (not dissimilar to when you move to a new house and a temporary DIY solution you did in week 1 is somehow still there 10 years down the line). The added complication is that people come and go, and at one point nobody remembers why something is done the way it is, and who to ask about changing it. 

Rely on hive mind

Because of this distributed knowledge in a distributed system, we often don’t know who has the information we require. It can be useful to crowdsource answers to a problem at hand; however, it relies on people having the time to engage. Wikimedia movement hasn’t really cracked knowledge management (has anybody?) but more effort put into documentation and making knowledge accessible would be a good thing. 

Revere open knowledge

Of course I think open knowledge is a good thing and a force for good. Wikipedia has been called the last best place on the internet, and as much as I’m not into exceptionalism, perhaps there’s something to it. Often the partnerships I set up with external organisations are motivated by the inherent belief that working on open knowledge simply contributes to some greater good. However, I believe that it’s useful to be self critical about openness. This thinking has developed somewhat in recent years, with examination of ‘ethics of open’, or reflections on how the nature of the open movement is excluding some people. 

Together with these tensions and criticisms there is no shortage of ideas within the movement of how to change things. Hopefully I’m wrong, but sometimes I do think that master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house – or at least that it’s pretty hard. It does seem difficult to change the Wikimedia movement, which I’ve experienced acutely while working on the implementation of the global 2030 Wikimedia vision of knowledge equity. Generalising, it’s hard for newcomers and their fresh ideas to get heard and accepted, while the thinking of the longstanding members is constrained by operating within existing movement structures and approaches (even if they’ve been DIYed!). On top of that, the movement is so beautifully amorphous that even if there are good ideas of what to change, it’s hard to know how to implement – and we’ve even tried complexity theory which is supposed to be good for such settings.  

Taking the long view, however, things have changed somewhat. During that first Wikimania I attended in 2012, the organisers ran out of conference t-shirts for women – they didn’t expect quite so many of them to turn up. These days we speak of barriers to participation, ensuring friendly spaces, and try to think about how participating in Wikimedia may benefit people, rather than the project itself. I hope that with ten years of experience on my back I can continue to support and amplify these good ideas. 

The post Taking the long view – my 10 years at Wikimedia UK appeared first on WMUK.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

–Stafford Beer, What is Cybernetics

Yet another Software as a Service (SaaS) is hawking my own data back to me.

The nutrition tracker MyFitnessPal announced it’ll now cost $80/yr to scan barcodes—a service powered by a database crowdsourced from its dumb users (like me!).

But it’s ok—this is yet another software as a service (SaaS) company fulfilling its ultimate purpose: selling out its users.

The purpose of a system is what it does ¶

So what does a SaaS company do? The typical lifecycle seems to be:

• Build a software product
• Attract new users and collect their data
• Sell the software to BigCompany™
• Destroy the product
• Sellout users
• Repeat.

Management cyberneticist and author Stafford Beer coined the phrase, “The purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID) to describe a system that may be at odds with its stated purpose.

A SaaS company is a system built to extract and sell user data.

This is as natural as a lion taking down an antelope: no malice, just the way things are. And there is a lot of value created along the way:

• Users get to use a product while it exists
• Employees of the SaaS get paid and gain experience

But that’s the deal: the only things that outlive the SaaS are the wealth created from the sale of user data and the user data itself.

✨ Team highlights We wrapped up our May 2022 cohort, Omotola’s first cohort! The most notable feat of this cohort was expanding our social media presence and interacting more with interns, mentors and coordinators. Our Twitter spaces helped us communicate with a wider audience. Our response times decreased, we processed interns' feedback faster, and we took care of communication issues between mentors and interns before they became bigger problems. 💪 Getting better at it!

Other languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English,Tyap, español, français, italiano, polski, português do Brasil, suomi, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, فارسی, 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 Realtime Preview is available as a Beta Feature on wikis in Group 2. This feature was built in order to fulfill one of the Community Wishlist Survey proposals. Please note that when this Beta feature is enabled, it may cause conflicts with some wiki-specific Gadgets.

Problems

• In recent months, there have been inaccurate numbers shown for various Special:Statistics at Commons, Wikidata, and English Wikipedia. This has now been fixed. [1]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 31 August. It will be on all wikis from 1 September (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 30 August at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 1 September at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).

Future changes

• The Wikimedia Foundation wants to improve how Wikimedia communities report harmful incidents by building the Private Incident Reporting System (PIRS) to make it easy and safe for users to make reports. You can leave comments on the talk page, by answering the questions provided. If you have ever faced a harmful situation that you wanted to report/reported, join a PIRS interview to share your experience. To sign up please email Madalina Ana.

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

🕑 1 hour 9 minutes

Cindy Cicalese is a principal engineer for the Platform Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as the general chair for the upcoming Semantic MediaWiki Conference, to be held October 26-28 in Breda, the Netherlands. She was the first-ever guest on this program, and now she's back for an all-new conversation.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• SMWCon Fall 2022
• Wikimedia Foundation Platform Engineering Team
• PluggableAuth extension
• "Adding Multiple Identity Providers to PluggableAuth" initiative
• MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group
• WMF Inclusive Product Development initiative
• MediaWiki Cli (command-line interface)
• Keycloak Wikipedia article
• Network MediaWiki extension

Analysis

In this installment of series of longer features on our blog we analyse the scope of the AI Act as proposed by the European Commission and assess it adequacy in the context of impact of AI in practice.

AI is going to shape the Internet more and more and through it access to information and production of knowledge. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata are supported by machine learning tools and their role will grow in the following years. We are following the proposal for the Artificial Intelligence Act that, as the first global attempt to legally regulate AI, will have consequences for our projects, our communities and users around the world. What are we really talking about when we speak of AI? And how much of it do we need to regulate?

The devil is in the definition

It is indispensable to define the scope of any matter to be regulated, and in the case of AI that task is no less difficult than for “terrorist content” for example. There are different approaches as to what AI is taken in various debates, from scientific ones to popular public perceptions. When hearing “AI”, some people think of sophisticated algorithms – sometimes inside an android – undertaking complex, conceptual and abstract tasks or even featuring a form of self-consciousness. Some include in the definition algorithms that modify their operations based on comparisons between and against large amounts of data for example, without any abstract extrapolation.

The definition proposed by the European Commission in the AI Act lists software developed with specifically named techniques; among them machine learning approaches including deep learning, logic- and knowledge-based approaches, as well as statistical approaches including Bayesian estimation, search and optimization methods. The list is quite broad and it clearly encompasses a range of technologies used today by companies, internet platforms and public institutions alike.

That is a sensible approach, because with the emergence of all sorts of algorithm-assisted decision-making processes that the EU citizens come in touch with every day, there is a need to better understand how well these algorithms perform and to regulate some of their uses. 

AI and the production of free knowledge

Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons rely on several algorithms, or bots, in both detection and prevention of vandalism and as editing help. These tools are developed by the community and they undergo joint scrutiny before being massively deployed. The community of a given language version of Wikipedia votes if the tool is needed and helpful, and it is checked for bugs and problems. Sometimes a bot is deployed by the Wikimedia Foundation, which then runs another check before taking it on. There is an unconditional requirement for all the bots and the training data to be open source. Any person with enough skills to evaluate or improve the code can do so.

What AI are we regulating?

Various Wikimedia projects employ techniques classifying them as AI in the understanding described above: ClueBot NG uses Machine Learning Basics, Bayesian Classifiers, Artificial Neural Network, Threshold Calculation and Post-Processing Filters; ORES, the vandalism detection and removal tool, is based on machine learning. Wikidata, created and developed in Europe, is a knowledge base and Wikibase is software for running knowledge bases, both falling under logic and knowledge-based AI. Does that mean that the new law would regulate how these projects function?

The main idea behind the AI Act is not to go after all the technologies capable of generating content, predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing the environments they interact with; but to regulate their use. Since the performance of a given algorithm depends on humans. And more specifically, on to what end they want to use it and what data they provide so that it produces the desired output. Focus on the use makes a lot of sense as well.

Prohibited uses of AI – half a step forward

The European Commission outlined 3 basic approaches to regulating AI. First one relates to the prohibited applications of AI. Globally we have enough evidence that the algorithmic black box can be employed to evaluate people’s behaviour, modify it, or refuse certain services or privileges.

The EC wants to prohibit social scoring by public authorities that use algorithmic determination of people’s trustworthiness based on behaviour or personal characteristics, whether known or predicted. But social scoring would not be forbidden in all cases – only if the result leads to bad treatment in social contexts that are unrelated to those where the data has been gathered. So, for example, algorithmic evaluation of somebody’s financial accounts to determine eligibility for a public welfare programme could be allowed; applying AI to social media posts to determine if that person’s way of life suggests that they earn more than they actually declare, perhaps not.

Another prohibition concerns introducing to the market and using AI that subliminally or unconsciously manipulates a person and leads to distorting their behaviour in a way that brings harm to themselves or to others. This could be read as a prohibition of pedalling highly divisive content on social media that incites hatred or violent behaviour. It is necessary to curb the algorithms deployed for manipulation to bring in profits to the platforms and their clients. But such harm needs to be proven in a specific case of a social network’s AI modifying the behaviour of a person (or a group of people). Considering that these technologies are protected by trade secrets, it may be a long and uphill court battle. In other words, forbidding a use of technology may not be sufficient to meet the objective.

AI knows your face

Finally the EC wants to prohibit the use of real-time remote biometric identification to enforce the law in publicly accessible spaces. There are, however, exceptions. It would be allowed when strictly necessary to look for a victim of a crime, of a perpetrator of a serious offence, or to prevent a specific, substantial and imminent threat. It means that, firstly, a slight delay in live footage makes it not real-time even if that is only a few seconds, and it will be allowed. Secondly, systems capable of performing live checks in those exceptional situations will be massively installed, because one can never determine when and where such a need will arise. Biometric identification in public spaces should be forbidden as it is not possible to know who has access to troves of data on innocent passers-by, in real time or not, and how that information is used under the overarching pretext of national security.

“We do not collect personal data and protect anonymity by default, but cross-referencing large datasets may reveal identities of people. Wikipedians produce information about politically and culturally sensitive topics and we wouldn’t want such activity to be weaponised against them.”

Since the AI that we develop at Wikimedia is not used for any of these purposes, we are not directly affected by the prohibitions. We support the idea to prohibit certain uses, however, especially where the activity of our editors and contributors could be mined to infer information about groups or individuals. We do not collect personal data and protect anonymity by default, but cross-referencing large datasets may reveal identities of people even if the information accessible in one source is scarce. Since Wikipedians produce information about politically and culturally sensitive topics, we wouldn’t want such activity to be weaponised against them in any circumstances, with the use of AI or otherwise.

Curbing high risk of AI

The EC lays out in their draft what we know already – that some uses of AI, however helpful, need to be especially scrutinised. The EC wants that high-risk uses be accompanied with a risk management system and data governance practices. Both are important, as the performance of AI depends not only on what it is used for (and if with the purpose it was made for) but also what data is used to train it and further, what data is processed and how it contributes to algorithmic bias. 

Technical documentation and record-keeping would have to be developed. Users of the AI – for example public authorities buying these technologies as well as companies – will need to be able to understand how to use the chosen AI to get expected results and what are its limitations and potential for automation bias (when an algorithm relies on its own input to produce further input the built in bias grows with each iteration). What is very important, the European Commission wants high-risk AI to be effectively overseen by humans throughout its life cycle.  

AI and the bureaucratic machine

These are some of the requirements, but their effectiveness depends largely on which uses of AI they will concern specifically. The EC lists high-risk AI uses in an annex to the Regulation, which would make it easier to revise and amend than if they are named in the law itself – for better, and for worse.

The high-risk uses are divided into a few categories, including biometric identification and categorisation, that is, the instances thereof that are not prohibited. These would be either not real-time or when carried out by private entities (think a smart doorbell with a camera). The latter would not be prohibited under the AI ACT as proposed by the EC; but could be undermined from the point of General Data Protection Regulation, for example.

Somewhat logically, high-risk AI would be one used in management and operation of critical infrastructure. Another example is education and vocational training. It includes both determining if a person is eligible and knowledgeable to access a given level of education, which includes exams and other types of assessments. High-risk category is also stretched to AI in employment.

Learning from past mistakes (not)

It makes sense that uses of AI in access to services such as welfare benefits or public assistance, as well as essential private services such as access to loans through establishing a credit score is deemed high risk. However, let’s consider the huge scandal in the Netherlands related to the AI-driven public childcare benefits system that, not being properly designed and controlled for years, pushed tens of thousands of families into tax debts. It would seem appropriate to at least impose a moratorium on uses of such AI tools in public welfare until it is clear that they can be designed to adequately serve such a purpose, considering the dangers their malfunctioning proved to pose.

There are also instances of AI applications that are considered high-risk by the EC but that should be banned. These include use of AI in law enforcement and criminal justice systems. There have been many instances of misuse of AI by police and there are records of disproportionate targeting of minorities and marginalised groups. Law enforcement tools tend to be shrouded in secrecy so the scrutiny, even if mandatory by AI Act, can be hindered by the use of public security arguments that override many laws. There is also no clear evidence of the possibility to ensure fair trial and access to effective remedy if AI is used in researching and interpreting facts in judicial proceedings.

These arguments can be extended to applications of AI in migration, asylum and border control. Seeking asylum is regulated by international law, violations of border crossing rules can result in imprisonment. The right to liberty and to seek protection from life-threatening circumstances should be reliably safeguarded and that includes ensuring that they are not dependent on technology that can easily be shielded from public or expert scrutiny. Even as, or especially when, migration to the EU may keep surging.

It is evident that the technologies developed in the Wikimedia community have no application in high-risk areas. Our interest in that category stems from the fact that with further changes of the annex, the approach to what is and isn’t high-risk AI could change. Especially as the growing need to enable access to verifiable information may bring more innovation in AI-assisted fact checking. Also, with the commitment to human rights in the Wikimedia movement, we think it is important to strike the right balance between what is high risk, and therefore still allowed under special conditions, and what shouldn’t be allowed to protect fundamental rights.

General purpose AI

So what about other situations in which AI is applied? The EC envisions that some practices should be more transparent when AI is used for any general purpose. Importantly, that would include the need to inform a person that they interact with a form of AI whenever it is not obvious, be it a bot answering questions in an online shop or a job application process. The same concerns emotion recognition and biometric categorisation, except when it is used by the law enforcement in detection, prevention and investigation of crimes.

Interestingly the obligation to reveal will also include deep fakes – manipulations of images, video or audio that can be mistaken for a true activity of a real person or a true event. It is important for our projects, as deep fakes pose a threat to appropriate referencing of information on Wikipedia or as content making its way to Wikimedia commons, for example.

Of course, malicious actors will not care if that requirement is followed; so we will see if that obligation can be at all enforceable. Also, if a piece of content is considered as exercising freedom of expression or of the arts it won’t have to be revealed as a deep fake, which builds on the necessity for protection of the two. The same would apply to detection, prevention and investigation of crimes, although here it is difficult to discern how deep fakes can assist prevention and why the manipulation cannot be revealed in that case.

“The policy makers want to take a bet that prescribing transparency of complex systems is enough to manage the risks these systems pose for human rights and human lives. By that, they are effectively legalised.”

Legalising the regulated

With rapid developments in technology coupled with its fast absorption we stand at many crossroads at once. On one hand, there is a need to make sense of the avalanche of information that falls on us in every activity, in every sector, when debating any systemic issue. On the other hand, there is little conversation about whether mass collection and processing of information isn’t hugely contributing to the problems that we are trying to solve by sorting it out. On one hand, we have a promise of state of the art technology that will help judges be more just, police more swift, and beneficiaries of public services better served. On the other hand, we still need policies and political processes that will set publicly accepted objectives and not hide behind the obscurity of algorithms that no one feels accountable for. On one hand, we see the need of channelling vast sums of money to private companies making the big promise of AI-assisted wellbeing, on the other hand we still struggle to ensure  that our institutions have the capacity and support necessary to navigate through this new data-powered reality. 

 The AI Act is like a foot in the door in opening up these problems. It offers guidance as to what is possible, what should be deployed more carefully, and what shouldn’t be done at all. In doing so it does two things that are not future-proof. First, it ignores existing evidence of uses of AI, such as predictive policing, assisting justice, or in public aid, that proves exacerbation of existing inequalities and stripping people of possibility to argue their own case. After all, it is hard to argue with a proprietary algorithm, which can only be understood as much as its maker is willing to reveal. 

Second, with high-risk AI the policy makers want to take a bet that prescribing transparency of complex systems that can only be understood by specialists is enough to manage the risks these systems pose for human rights and human lives. By that, they are effectively legalised. We can only hope that the industry that will emerge around ensuring compliance with requirements for high-risk AI will do its job properly. 

It may be that, standing at the crossroads, this is as much as can be done to ensure some scrutiny over AI. From that standpoint regulating the use and not necessarily the technology itself, emphasis on transparency and providing a list of prohibited practices are sensible choices. Here’s hoping that during the legislative process at least that last category can be improved. 

My personality revolves around Wikimedia, much to the irritation of those who are unlucky enough to know me — having gone from a long-term volunteer to a paid member of staff is awesome and literally my dream job.

But that’s not really right, is it?

I’ve not gone from being a volunteer to being a member of staff — I’m still every bit the volunteer I was… The only thing which has really changed is that I am paid to develop features and tools which were voted for in the Community Wishlist Survey.

I expected stepping into this dual-role to come with some community oddities, but so far this has been limited to being a tiny bit more careful with what I say, and to whom I say it. I do try to weigh this against being “true to myself” as a very open person, and as a Wikimedian.

Prior to working for the Foundation, I tried to be transparent with how I operated, and this is something I’ve continued in my new role (and have encouraged my team to begin to embrace too!). Even in “behind the scenes” roles like software development, we’re well positioned to catalyse discussions and represent the community, and as Wikimedians we should do that where possible.

I think there’s more to write here, but I’m trying to get something down…

The post Volunteer first appeared first on TheresNoTime.

16/08/2022-22/08/2022

Mapping campaigns

• The Swiss project of the month (PotM CH) for August 2022 is mapping benches on OpenStreetMap. A dashboard shows (//) map edits related to this PotM CH made since the beginning of August. A change simply counts as adding or changing any element with the tag amenity=bench, for instance adding other tags such as colour. The data is updated hourly.
• New mapping projects, curated by UN Mappers, are available in Somalia. Topics include mapping roads, villages and barriers; all in support of the UNSOS mission.

Community

• Christoph Hormann feels that the OSMF is moving strongly towards an increasing dominance of technical interests and viewpoints, over the social and economic context of OpenStreetMap. He thinks the current situation is seriously out of balance and that this is increasingly affecting the OSM community’s ability to handle the various challenges it faces.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Jochen Topf has published the results of his study into the problems with the current OSM data model, possible improvements, and their impact on OSM’s systems (we reported earlier).

Events

• [1] Carlo Prevosti shared this SotM2022 Group Photo.
• As with every OSM event, the State of the Map could not have taken place without a small group of dedicated volunteers. Many thanks to them!
• Poster presentations from the State of the Map 2022 have been uploaded.
• Future cartographers also didn’t want to miss this year’s conference. Students from the joint Cartography M.Sc., run by universities from Munich, Vienna, Dresden and Twente, had a great time this year at #SotM2022 in Italy.
• Thierry Jean reports ► on the participation of six members (actually, at least nine) of the Brazilian OSM community at the OSM World Event in Italy.
• Oscar Zorrilla tweeted about the OSM Spain community present at State of the Map 2022, in Florence, Italy.

Maps

• Ellen Poe shared the project Headway, which aims to be a self-hostable maps stack powered by OpenStreetMap. A demo is available at maps.earth.
• Koen Rijnsent has created a clickable map showing a series of murals in Utrecht, NL.

Software

• Sarah Heidekorn presented the 14th entry to the ‘How to become ohsome?‘ series, discussing the convenient and intuitive ohsome dashboard. Boasting more of a user interface than other tools, the ohsome dashboard allows users to select features of interest using a map. A recent update with advanced filter settings now also provides more complex filters.
• Ilya Zverev released version 1.0 of the Every Door app.

Programming

• Paul Jeffrey reported an issue about the OSMAnd app presumably ‘leaking data about users’ travel history’ through a unique identifier. While true, it’s been explained that this randomly generated UUID is used solely to maintain fair usage of the servers’ resources when downloading maps and seemed to be already covered in the privacy policy.
• Sarah Hoffmann announced the release of 1.7.0 of osm2pgsql, a tool to import OSM data into a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database.
• Stamen blogged about Chartographer, which generates visualisations of a supplied Mapbox GL stylesheet to better understand how its layers are rendered per zoom level. Chartographer has special views for areas, lines, icons and labels. It is especially helpful when generating a basemap style for vector tiles.
• Leo van der Meulen used data from the Dutch Bureau for Statistics to visualise the variation in sun hours across the Netherlands, which indicates the expected efficiency of solar panels.

Releases

• The new release of the Open Camping Map integrates user reviews from Mangrove.
• Geospatial analytics provider Kontur added the new OpenStreetMap Road Completeness layer to their free emergency mapping dashboard, Disaster Ninja. It helps to check if all roads are mapped in OpenStreetMap by showing the ratio of OSM road length to Facebook AI-detected road segments, find exactly where the gaps are, and go to the iD editor to fix them.
• The August maintenance release of Vespucci (17.1.6) and the first beta release of 18.0 are available from Google Play, F-Droid, or their GitHub repository now.

Did you know …

• … Table2map, which can put addresses in table format onto an OSM map?
• … OpenStreetMap live edit, where you can watch added changes to OSM?
• … OSM Landuse Landcover? It is a WebGIS application to explore the OpenStreetMap database specifically in terms of landuse and landcover information. Landuse tags were predicted where absent. This was first applied to Germany in 2017 and since 2020, with improved methods, for all EU countries.
• … the SaveEcoBot Map of Ukraine and adjacent areas showing air quality, gamma radiation, and fires?

OSM in the media

• The Italian newspaper La Nazione featured ► an article about State of the Map 2022.
• Daniel Kulesz noticed that modern cars are equipped with headunits that support Android Auto or Apple CarPlay. With the recently added support for Android Auto in OsmAnd, an established open source offline maps and navigation app, his hope for a privacy-friendly solution was re-awakened. Hence, he investigated whether it was practical and possible to use this combination in a data-literate way. He stumbled over several caveats and irritating privacy-invasive issues but also found a semi-satisfactory workaround for the time being.

Other “geo” things

• Clara Aberneithie, writing in The New Statesman, asked if the logic behind routing algorithms, and their preferences for certain spatial resources in urban environments, has broader societal implications for poor people.
• The Spanish Geographical Society published ► an article on the avant-garde activities of the cartographers of the Society of Jesus up until the 18th century.
• Brandon Liu explained some of the improvements being proposed for v3 of PMTiles, a single-file archive format for tiled data. A great deal of storage space can be saved by using the Hilbert curve and run-length encoding.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Firenze	FOSS4G 2022		2022-08-22 – 2022-08-28
Puerto López	Hablemos de OpenStreetMap-OSM		2022-08-27 – 2022-08-28
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-08-29
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-08-31
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-08-31
Santa Terezinha de Goiás	2° Validatona da UMBRAOSM – Brasil.		2022-09-03
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #44		2022-09-05
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2022-09-06
London	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-09-06
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #39 (Online)	✓	2022-09-06
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-09-08
Berlin	171. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2022-09-08
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-09-08
Morogoro	Field Mapping is the Future: A Tasking Manager Workflow for Open Data Kit (ODK)		2022-09-09
Claix	Cartopartie à Claix (Isère, France)		2022-09-10
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-09-14
Großarl	6. Virtueller OpenStreetMap Stammtisch Österreich		2022-09-14
Chippewa Township	Michigan Meetup		2022-09-15

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Lejun, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Robot8A, SK53, Sammyhawkrad, SeverinGeo, Strubbl, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, mavimsii.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court today to review a challenge to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass surveillance of Americans’ private emails, internet messages, and web communications with people overseas, also known as its “Upstream” surveillance program. In its petition, Wikimedia asks the Court to reject the government’s sweeping claims of “state secrets” and allow the case to proceed, arguing that the wealth of public disclosures about Upstream surveillance means the program can and should be subject to constitutional review in the courts. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and the law firm Cooley LLP represent the Wikimedia Foundation in the litigation.

“When people’s privacy is at risk, free knowledge is at risk,” said James Buatti, Senior Legal Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. “The NSA’s mass surveillance is a threat to the fundamental rights to privacy and free expression for the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who rely on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects for reliable information.” 

Upstream surveillance is conducted under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which permits the government to intercept Americans’ international communications without a warrant so long as it is targeting individuals located outside the U.S. for foreign intelligence purposes. Section 702 will expire in 2023 unless it is reauthorized by Congress.

In the course of this surveillance, the NSA copies and combs through vast amounts of internet traffic, including private data showing what millions of people around the world are reading or writing online—whether they are accessing knowledge on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, browsing the web, or communicating with family and friends. This government surveillance has had a measurable chilling effect on Wikipedia users, with research documenting a drop in traffic to Wikipedia articles on privacy-sensitive topics following public revelations about the NSA’s mass surveillance in 2013. 

“It is past time for the Supreme Court to rein in the government’s sweeping use of secrecy to evade accountability in the courts. Upstream surveillance is no secret, and the government’s own public disclosures are the proof,” said Patrick Toomey, Deputy Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “Every day, the NSA is siphoning Americans’ communications off the internet backbone and into its surveillance systems, violating privacy and chilling free expression. The courts can and should decide whether this warrantless digital dragnet complies with the Constitution.”

In September 2021, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that even though the Wikimedia Foundation provided public evidence that its communications with Wikipedia users around the world are subject to Upstream surveillance, the government’s assertion of the “state secrets privilege” required dismissal of the entire case. The privilege allows the government to withhold information in legal proceedings if disclosure of that information would threaten national security. The government claimed it might have sensitive information that would—at least in theory—establish a defense to the lawsuit. Over the dissent of Judge Motz, a majority of the court held that this possibility was enough to end the litigation.

Wikimedia’s petition argues that the Fourth Circuit was wrong to dismiss the lawsuit on the basis of the state secrets privilege and that the court should have, instead, excluded any secret evidence, but allowed the case to proceed.

“For years, the NSA has vacuumed up Americans’ international communications under Upstream surveillance, and to date, not a single challenge to that surveillance has been allowed to go forward,” said Alex Abdo, Litigation Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “The Supreme Court should make clear that NSA surveillance is not beyond the reach of our public courts.”

The Wikimedia Foundation, which filed the case alongside eight other plaintiffs, sued the NSA in 2015 to protect the rights of Wikipedia readers, editors, and internet users globally. The Supreme Court may consider the petition as early as October 2022.

Lawyers representing the Wikimedia Foundation in the litigation include Patrick Toomey, Ashley Gorski, and Sarah Taitz for the American Civil Liberties Union, Alex Abdo and Jameel Jaffer for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and Ben Kleine, Aarti Reddy, and Maximilian Sladek de la Cal from the law firm Cooley LLP.

Read today’s petition here: https://knightcolumbia.org/documents/q8iqf1p7ez

For more information about the case:

• https://knightcolumbia.org/cases/wikimedia-v-nsa 
• https://www.aclu.org/cases/wikimedia-v-nsa-challenge-upstream-surveillance-under-fisa-amendments-act

Press contacts:

• Lorraine Kenny, Knight First Amendment Institute, [email protected]; 
• Allegra Harpootlian, American Civil Liberties Union, [email protected]
• Laura Pulecio Duarte, Wikimedia Foundation, [email protected]

About the ACLU
For more than 100 years, the ACLU has worked in courts, legislatures, and communities to protect the constitutional rights of all people. With a nationwide network of offices and millions of members and supporters, the ACLU takes on the toughest civil liberties fights in pursuit of liberty and justice for all. https://www.aclu.org

About the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University
The Knight First Amendment Institute defends the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age through strategic litigation, research, and public education. It promotes a system of free expression that is open and inclusive, that broadens and elevates public discourse, and that fosters creativity, accountability, and effective self-government. www.knightcolumbia.org 

About the Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.