Outreachy report #36: September 2022

00:00, Friday, 30 2022 September UTC

Even though this is my 36th report, it marks four years of work with Outreachy. My birthday is also in just a couple of days! The program has been growing with me as much as I’ve been growing with it. Well, such a special occasion requires a special celebration, and I want to talk about my two goals for the next year. Facilitating decision-making: Improving our relationship with data we collect and store Sage has done a phenomenal work with understanding Outreachy’s progress through queries on Django Shell, and many of those queries facilitate our day-to-day work––for instance, we’re able to assign every single Brazilian student applicant to me so other initial application reviewers don’t need to deal with academic calendars in Portuguese, or manually assign those applications to me.

Wiki Loves…. Wikidata!

09:35, Thursday, 29 2022 September UTC

This is a guest blog by Axel Petterson from Wikimedia Sweden.

Wiki Loves Monuments logo with combined with the Wikidata colours

Do you have a bunch of monuments ready to use in a “Wiki Loves” competition? Great! You have organized them in some kind of list already? Even better!

But what does it take to go from that to getting the list to be structured data that can be added to Wikidata, to make it easier to create the list on all language versions of Wikipedia, and to put all monuments on a map to make it easy for photographers to find them?
You can do this yourself, but if you’d like help the Content Partnership Hub is available for you!

We would like to give you a short walk-through of the initial steps needed for importing a data set into Wikidata.

The first important thing is to make sure that your list is up to date, so that we don’t start with old, invalid data. We also need to make sure the license is compatible with Wikidata, that the data is available under the CC-0 license or in the Public Domain, to ensure that there are no issues later on that might force us or the community to remove the data.
Another thing you want to sort out early is what to do with the former Wikipedia monument lists – mostly these are available in the form of the monuments in templated tables on the wiki. Having monument data available on both Wikidata and Wikipedia often leads to updates in one but not the other, which makes it  hard to keep track of the latest updates and correct information. It is possible to replace the static lists on Wikipedia by dynamic lists powered by Wikidata, like this one from Australia, but some Wikipedia versions do not allow such lists in the main namespace. Make sure to know what the community consensus is, or open it up for discussion before implementing new lists for the first time.

When that is out of the way the next step is to organize the list in some structured way: you can either do that yourself, or the Content Partnership team is happy to help. A spreadsheet like excel is fine, and so is JSON or some other output from a database. It is important to mention the source of the data, so that it can be added as a reference for each monument when adding the information to Wikidata.

For how much information on the monuments needs to be available, having more is usually better than less, but the minimum is:

  • Name of the monument
  • Unique identifier (often a number), preferably from the authority who defined the monument.
  • What kind of monument is it – a building, a statue, a temple?
  • Where is it located – city or other administrative unit, address, or even better: coordinates!

After the list is structured it will be matched with what is already available at Wikidata: again, you can either do this yourself, with help from the Content Partnership team, or we can do this for you. Depending on how much data is available the process may take a few hours, but it can take more time if a lot of ‘cleaning’ is needed or if there are open questions before the list can be turned into structured data. This might be the case when there already is a large number of monuments from your country available in Wikidata and we have to make sure not to create duplicates.

In this step language is an important factor: working on data that is not in an Indo-European language, especially if it uses a script other than Latin or Cyrillic, will require more assistance from you or other community members to help us match the data available and find the new information in your data set.

The sooner your lists can be made available for us, the more time there is to plan the work among other tasks, and to have time to sort out potential issues.

Even if the data is not yet perfect, you might still want to have it available on Wikidata and continue improving it directly there. For example: if you don’t have coordinates of all the monuments yet, you can invite the local Wikipedia community to fill in the gaps once the dynamic lists are up, and make the Wikidata items more usable for Wiki Loves Monuments.
The initial datasets uploaded do not have to be perfect or complete: the four bullet points mentioned above are a good way to get started.

For any questions about moving your monument data to Wikidata, please send an email to the Content Partnership Helpdesk on [email protected]. We’ll be happy to explore together what data you have and what we can do to support your team to add structured lists for Wiki Loves Monuments. Since the same process applies to other datasets, we could possibly also follow-up with nature reserves in your country for Wiki Loves Earth.

Read more about the Content Partnership Helpdesk on Wikimedia Foundation’s weblog Diff. 

scap backport Makes Deployments Easy

08:59, Thursday, 29 2022 September UTC

Mediawiki developers, have you ever thought, “I wish I could deploy my own code for Mediawiki”? Now you can! More deploys! More fun!

Next time you want to get some code deployed, why not try scap backport?

One Command To Deploy

scap backport is one command that will +2 your patch, deploy to mwdebug and wait for your approval, and finally sync to all servers. You only need to provide the change number or gerrit url of your change.

You can run scap backport on patches that have already merged, or re-run scap backport if you decided to cancel in the middle of a run. scap backport can also handle multiple patches at a time. After all the patches have been merged, they’ll be deployed all together. scap backport will confirm that your patches are deployable before merging, and double check no extra patches have sneaked into your deployment.

One Command To Revert

And if your code didn’t work out, don’t worry, there’s scap backport —revert, which will create a revert patch, send it to Gerrit, and run all steps of scap backport to revert your work. You’re offered the choice to give a reason for revert, which will show up in the commit message. Just be aware that you'll need to wait for tests to run and your code to merge before it gets synced, so in an emergency this might not be the best option.

Extra Information

You can also list available backports or reverts using the —list flag!

If you'd like some guidance on deploying backports, please sign up here to join us for backport training, which happens once a week on Thursday during the UTC late backport window!

Scap Backport In Action

Compare to Manual Steps

For comparison, the previous way to backport would require the user to enter the following commands on the deployment host:

cd /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-<version>
git status
git fetch
git log -p HEAD..@{u}
git rebase

Then, if there were changes to an extension: git submodule update [extensions|skins]/<name>
Then, log in to mwdebug and run scap pull
Then, back on the deployment host: scap sync-file php-<version>/<path to file> 'Backport: [[gerrit:<change no>|<subject> (<bug no>)]]' for each changed file

Example Usage

List backports
scap backport --list

Backport change(s)
scap backport 1234
scap backport https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/1234
scap backport 1234 5678

Merge but do not sync
scap backport --stop-before-sync 1234

List revertable changes
scap backport --revert --list

Revert change(s)
scap backport --revert 1234
scap backport --revert 1234 5678

That's all for now, and happy backporting!

Wiki Loves EuroPride Edit-a-thon

07:00, Thursday, 29 2022 September UTC

This year the capital of Serbia, Belgrade was the host of the pan-European international LGBTIQA+ event EuroPride. The event was significant because this was the first EuroPride organized beyond EEA and in Southeast Europe. In order to mark this occasion, Wikimedia Serbia organized an international edit-a-thon Wiki Loves EuroPride, during which Wikipedia volunteers in Europe and all over the world wrote and improved articles on topics of LGBTIQA+ terms, persons, organizations, festivals, books, cinematography, and all other topics that celebrate human rights and differences.

The goal of this event was to combat the prejudice and discrimination that members of the LGBTIQA+ community face daily by spreading free knowledge on Wikipedia and other Wiki projects. Wiki Loves EuroPride was supported by Wikimedia España, GLAM Macedonia, Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey, Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group, Wikimedia Community User Group Greece, and community from Serbo-Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedia. 

Organization of Wiki Loves EuroPride

The first step in the preparation of the Wiki Loves EuroPride edit-a-thon was to create a page on Meta with a table containing a list of articles showing whether they exist in various language editions of Wikipedia or not. This method is also beneficial because it allows participants to work on translating articles if sources and literature on a given item do not exist in their language.

The second step includes initiating contact with Wikimedia affiliates and communities and inviting them to join and support this event. The responses were quite good as many affiliations and User Groups wanted to support the event, at least by informing their communities about it. A lot of communities from the Balkans went one step further and decided to organize local events dedicated to LGBT+ topics, in some cases for the first time ever. This only shows that despite the fact that societies in this region are considered to be traditional and conservative, people from Balkans are more than willing to fight for human rights and diversity by spreading free knowledge about LGBT+ topics. 

Results

The edit-a-thon lasted from the 12th until the 18th of September. During this period 55 participants from 10 language versions of Wikipedia wrote 166 new articles, and 4 articles were improved. The best results were achieved on Serbian, Spanish, and Macedonian Wikipedia. Besides Wikipedia, participants were also active on Wikidata. Also, Wikimedia Commons is now enriched with 48 photos from the Pride parade and other events during EuroPride taken by Wikimedia Serbia volunteers. 

Queer History in the Digital: We are here, we are queer – where is our history?

As a part of this international edit-a-thon Wikimedia Deutschland, in collaboration with Wikimedia Serbia, organized an online panel discussion titled “Queer History in the Digital: We are here, we are queer – where is our history?

During this event, we had the opportunity to present Wiki Loves EuroPride edit-a-thon, and talk about its preparation, challenges we faced along the way, and results. The special guest at this event was ImStevan, an editor from the community on Serbian Wikipedia who is very active in the field of queer topics. He talked about his experience with writing articles on LGBT+ topics, and certain problems that arise in this realm (e.g. the fact that there is a lack of gender natural pronouns in the Serbian language, and that there is a lack of literature on queer topics written in Serbian, etc). Wikipedia editors all over Europe had a chance to discuss various topics such as gender-natural language and what are the best ways to fight for articles on queer topics to stay on Wikipedia. 

We asked ImStevan what this discussion and Wiki Loves EuroPride edit-a-thon in general represented for him

“It was a great honour for me to be invited to participate in this discussion and showcase the challenges when it comes to editing articles about queer topics on Wikipedia, and to hear about the experience of other editors. Edit-a-thon is an opportunity for us to put focus on LGBT+ topics on Wikipedia which will certainly contribute to the fight against the lack of knowledge and misinformation about our community that is circulating in the general public and on the Internet. We are the strongest when we are diverse, and because of that, it is really important to encourage others to participate in Wikimedia projects. I hope that in the future more edit-a-thons on this topic will be organized, and maybe some panel discussions during which we can address some questions from the general public about Wikipedia, and motivate more people to contribute to the mission of spreading free knowledge.“

ImStevan
Editor on Serbian Wikipedia

Thanks to international collaboration and mutual hard work and contributions, Wikipedia and other Wiki projects are enriched with important LBGT+ content which deserves to be visible, easily accessible, and well-known. 

Speaker Series: Wikidata’s 10th Birthday

21:45, Tuesday, 27 2022 September UTC

At the end of October, Wikidata, the-open-knowledge-base-that-could, turns ten! What better way to celebrate than by having a series of in-depth conversations all month long profiling Wikidata Initiatives and the impact that Wikidata has had on the world. Whether you’re a Wikidata newbie, a seasoned expert, or somewhere in between, join us as we reflect on kickstarting, growing, and sustaining Wikidata Initiatives. Just in time for Wikidata’s birthday!

  • The State of Wikidata and Cultural Heritage: 10 Years In Register here
    • Tuesday Oct 4, 2022 8am – 9am (PDT) (time zone converter)
    • We’ll learn how Wikidata is (or is not) integrated into Wikipedia, how it helps an enormous cultural institution like the Smithsonian achieve its goals, and how Kelly Doyle, Andrew Lih, and their colleagues at the Smithsonian work to keep a Wikidata Initiative going. Lane Rasberry also joins us from the University of Virginia as the Wikimedian-in-Residence at the School of Data Science!
  • What You Need to Know to Kickstart a Wikidata Initiative Register here
    • Thursday Oct 13, 2022 9am – 10am (PDT) (time zone converter)
    • We’ll hear from Wikidata’s biggest fans: librarians. Namely, Joe Cera from Berkeley Law Library, Kiley Jolicouer, a Metadata Strategies Librarian at Syracuse University Libraries, and Chris Long, the Director of the Resource Description Services Team at University of Colorado Boulder Libraries. They’ll each share how they got involved with Wikidata at their respective institutions, how Wikidata projects align with libraries’ missions, and how you can start a Wikidata Initiative at your institution, too!
  • Scaling and Sustaining a Wikidata Initiative Register here
    • Thursday Oct 20, 2022 8am – 9am (PDT) (time zone converter)
    • You’ve got a vision for a Wikidata Initiative that will amplify your work and make Wikidata more equitable and more complete. You may know how to get started, but how will you keep it going? Or foster community around this work? What does your institution need to do in order to support your Wikidata work? Join Bettina Smith from Dumbarton Oaks, Stephanie Caruso from the Art Institute of Chicago, and Anne Chen of Dura-Europos and Bard College. Let’s dive into what makes their projects successful. Their experiences may spark ideas for you as you develop your own Wikidata Initiative.
  • The Future of Data: A Community that Grows Together Stays Together Register here
    • Tuesday Oct 25, 2022 9am – 10am (PDT) (time zone converter)
    • For our final birthday celebration, we’re looking to the future. Speakers Julian Chambliss, Kate Topham, Justin Wigard, and Hilary Thorsen are out there building Wikidata community. We want to know where they envision this work going over the next few years. What kinds of insights do they want their communities to have from their Wikidata Initiatives five years from now, and how do they approach their projects to achieve this?

We hope these talks present a nice forum for connecting you not only with knowledge, but also with other attendees who can build community around an idea or project you may have. These free conversations will happen once a week over Zoom for one hour. We’ll also record and post the sessions online for you to view in the event of a scheduling conflict.

We hope you’ll be able to join us (virtually) and hear all of the insights these community members have to share about Wikidata and their projects. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Wikidata than to show what an impact its made in all of these fields. See you soon!

Reach out if you have any questions: [email protected]

Tech/News/2022/39

21:19, Tuesday, 27 2022 September UTC

Other languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English,Esperanto, Tiếng Việt, Tyap, français, ikirundi, italiano, magyar, polski, suomi, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, हिन्दी, বাংলা, ಕನ್ನಡ, 中文, 日本語, 粵語, 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

  • Parsoid clients should be updated to allow for space-separated multi-values in the rel attribute of links. Further details are in T315209.

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 September. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 September. It will be on all wikis from 29 September (calendar).
  • Visual diffs will become available to all users, except at the Wiktionaries and Wikipedias. [1]
  • Talk pages on the mobile site will change at the Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Korean, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. They should be easier to use and provide more information. [2] [3]
  • In the Module namespace, pages ending with .json will be treated as JSON, just like they already are in the User and MediaWiki namespaces. [4]

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

Episode 122: Marc Laporte

16:50, Tuesday, 27 2022 September UTC

🕑 1 hour 5 minutes

Marc Laporte is a longtime administrator of the Tiki application, the open source project also known as TikiWiki and Tiki Wiki CMS Groupware. He also runs the related WikiSuite project, and the consulting company EvoluData.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

Tech News issue #39, 2022 (September 26, 2022)

00:00, Monday, 26 2022 September UTC
previous 2022, week 39 (Monday 26 September 2022) next

Tech News: 2022-39

weeklyOSM 635

12:41, Sunday, 25 2022 September UTC

13/09/2022-19/09/2022

lead picture

How to use Every Door [1] | © Ilya Zverik | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

About us

  • We are always looking for people to help us improve our newsletter so it can get out faster, have more depth and coverage, and generally benefit our readers, like you! Please join our team now.

Mapping

  • The French city of Rennes, announced that it is hosting three mapping parties, during which citizens will be helped in adding shops to OpenStreetMap.
  • Pieter Vander announced that now MapComplete is able to detect tree species automatically by using PlantNet.org API, making it easier to link a tree to its correct species while mapping tree location on OpenStreetMap.
  • Requests have been made for comments on the following proposal:
  • Voting on the following proposal has closed :
    • crossing:markings, to declare the existence and style of pedestrian crossing markings, was approved with 29 votes for, 1 vote against and 3 abstentions.
  • Voting is underway for the following proposal:

Community

  • OSM user Mannivu wrote > a diary entry on how to upload pictures to Wikimedia Commons, create a Wikidata element, create a Wikimedia Commons category, link a Wikidata element and a Commons category, and insert those data into OSM.
  • Martijn van Exel wondered why there is no search form for OSM diaries. Commenters explained how to use your favourite search engine for that.

Events

  • Katja Haferkorn announced that a workshop on the topic of OpenStreetMap indoor tagging will be held 14 to 16 October in Frankfurt am Main.
  • Some statistical figures on the recent SotM in Florence for you.

Humanitarian OSM

  • Adam Rousell announced that HeiGIT has activated the Disaster openrouteservice in the region of Pakistan in response to the severe monsoonal flooding the country has experienced in recent weeks. Currently, data is being updated every 10 minutes to reflect the dynamic situation and affected infrastructure.

Maps

switch2OSM

  • Deutsche Bahn is using OSM in their passenger information system. It tracks the train’s current speed, position and schedule and informs passengers of points of interest that can be found along the route. Recommended for imitation.

Open Data

  • GwenCarto gave a tutorial on NoiseModelling using OSM data.
  • The state of Sachen Anhalt, Germany has released a 20 cm resolution digital surface model as open data (via Twitter). The licence allows using the data to improve OSM.

Licences

  • Harry Wood published an article to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Open Database License (ODbL), the licence of OpenStreetMap’s data. The ODbL was created in response to several issues regarding the unsuitability of CC BY-SA licences when applied to map data.
  • Andres Gomez Casanova has published two Spanish-language videos in which he explains the incompatibility of ODbL and CC-BY:
    • The problem of attribution.
    • The use of DRM in derivative works where ODbL allows it but CC-BY does not.

    They expand on an article from 10 April (we reported earlier).

Software

  • [1] Ilya Zverik published a tutorial for his Every Door OpenStreetMap editor (for POIs and entrances) along with the release of version 2.0 of the software. Downloads are available for Android and iOS. Release notes are on GitHub.
  • Arno Wolter, one of the three founders and CEO of the Initiative for Safer Roads, talked about their new project Gefahrenstellen.de, which seeks to help parents and schoolchildren select the path to school with the least traffic and risk. The project uses HeiGIT’s openrouteservice as a routing service, which in turn uses OSM data.
  • Altilunium has released Pataddress, an open-source alternative to what3words (but with four words instead) with a built-in word frequency analyser to build a custom word database in your own language.
  • GraphHopper has released version 6.0 of their routing engine. This update offers faster route calculation, more flexibility, better instructions, and developer documentation.
  • HeiGIT, the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology, reported that a building completeness indicator has been added to the ohsome quality analyst. This indicator uses proxy variables to predict the expected area of buildings in a given area of interest and then compares this prediction to the total area of buildings currently mapped in OSM.
  • Marcel Reinmuth wrote that the Open Healthcare Access Map has now achieved global coverage. The Open Healthcare Access Map uses OpenStreetMap, HeiGIT’s openrouteservice, and WorldPop to estimate the number of people living within a certain distance of a healthcare facility. The data is also available on the Humanitarian Data Exchange.
  • The RapiD development team at Meta blogged about an ‘early preview’ of RapiD 2.0 alpha, an OSM editor with access to AI-generated open data. The big change is a rewrite of the graphics engine to improve overall performance. They are asking for feedback via GitHub, Slack or Facebook.
  • Felt announced that Erica Fischer, the creator of the library Tippecanoe, joined the company to continue her open-source work. Tippecanoe is a GeoJSON to vector map tiles converter, with a specific aesthetic intent to enable making a scale-independent view of the data. At any zoom level, the density and texture of the data is still visible, rather than having to manually exclude certain classes of data.

Programming

  • The osm2pgsql team just announced that the source code of osm2pgsql has gone through a security audit. None of the tests revealed any severe security issues, but users should be aware that they should properly set up a secure system environment. The team have amended the manual further to explain several important security practices.

Releases

  • Vespucci, ‘the editor for Android that allows any kind of editing directly on mobile devices’, released version 18.0.0. The highlights are described in a blog post.
  • Marcos Dione discovered that JPEG map tile files with quality parameter set to 70–80 are 50% or less their size in PNG, suitable for low-resolution, offline, low-connectivity, or mobile map apps. He also updated his osm-tile-tools to accept JPEG tile file format.

Did you know …

  • … Marcel Reinmuth presented several maps with information on abortion access in Germany that were created using HeiGIT’s openrouteservice?
  • … you can find places with vegetarian (diet:vegetarian) and vegan (diet:vegan) options by using Veggiekarte?
  • … that an anonymous critic collects problems with the what3words algorithm and implementation?

OSM in the media

  • OpenCage is partnering with the MapScaping podcast to help promote OSM-based projects. The selected projects will receive a 30 second promotional message at the start of a podcast episode and logo inclusions on the MapScaping front page and Twitter account. Any project using OpenStreetMap is eligible (tools, technologies, services, open source, NGO, or for-profit start-up). You can apply until Saturday 15 October.

Other “geo” things

  • The events associated with the funeral rites for Queen Elizabeth II would seem an unlikely reason for an item of geospatial news. However, Gizmodo reported that a number of odd errors occurred through the use of what3words to help people find the end of the queue for viewing during the lying in state.

Upcoming Events

Where What Online When Country
Budapest OSM Fonó: Short editing introduction and remote help (online, live) osmcalpic 2022-09-23 flag
La Virgen 5ta reunión bimestral de OSM Latinoamérica osmcalpic 2022-09-24 flag
Recife [online] First pic4review mapathon from UMBRAOSM (BR) osmcalpic 2022-09-24 flag
Cisterna d’Asti Incontro mapper astigiani osmcalpic 2022-09-24 flag
Karlsruhe Karlsruhe Hack Weekend osmcalpic 2022-09-24 – 2022-09-25 flag
Gent OpenTechTalks: OpenStreetMap osmcalpic 2022-09-26 flag
OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting osmcalpic 2022-09-26
Arlon Réunion des contributeurs OpenStreetMap, Arlon (Belgium) osmcalpic 2022-09-26 flag
San Jose South Bay Map Night osmcalpic 2022-09-28 flag
Derby OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup osmcalpic 2022-09-27 flag
London Geomob London osmcalpic 2022-09-28 flag
Washington OSM US Mappy Hour osmcalpic 2022-09-29 flag
Vern-sur-Seiche Atelier participatif « Recensement des commerces » osmcalpic 2022-09-29 flag
Düsseldorf Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen osmcalpic 2022-09-30 flag
Villa de Cos Notathon en OpenStreetMap – resolvamos notas de México osmcalpic 2022-10-01 flag
Hacktoberfest 2022 osmcalpic 2022-10-01 – 2022-10-31
臺北市 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #45 osmcalpic 2022-10-03 flag
Stuttgart Stuttgarter Stammtisch osmcalpic 2022-10-04 flag
London London pub meet-up osmcalpic 2022-10-04 flag
London Missing Maps London Mapathon osmcalpic 2022-10-04 flag
Berlin OSM-Verkehrswende #39 (Online) osmcalpic 2022-10-04 flag
Murray OSM Utah Monthly Meetup osmcalpic 2022-10-06 flag
Mannheim Mapathon in der Moschee osmcalpic 2022-10-06 flag
Град Крагујевац OSM Serbia regular meetup osmcalpic 2022-10-06 flag
La Chapelle-des-Fougeretz Atelier participatif « Recensement des commerces » osmcalpic 2022-10-07 flag
Kaiserslautern OSM Mapping Event Erfassung von Barrieren osmcalpic 2022-10-08 flag
京都市 京都!街歩き!マッピングパーティ:第32回 Re:妙心寺 osmcalpic 2022-10-08 flag
Polokwane Local Municipality OSM Africa October Mapathon osmcalpic 2022-10-08 flag
Polokwane Local Municipality OSM Africa October Mapathon osmcalpic 2022-10-08 flag
Washington MappingDC Mappy Hour osmcalpic 2022-10-12 flag
San Jose South Bay Map Night osmcalpic 2022-10-12 flag
München Münchner OSM-Treffen osmcalpic 2022-10-11 flag
Frankfurt am Main Arbeitstreffen Indoor OSM 2022 osmcalpic 2022-10-14 – 2022-10-16 flag

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Lejun, PierZen, Strubbl, TheSwavu, andygol, derFred, erenozdemir, rtnf, tordans.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

WikiApiary status update

21:06, Friday, 23 2022 September UTC

I’ve managed to get WikiApiary to the point where there is “only” a few DB connection problems instead of a completely un-reachable website. For the past 18 hours, here is what the database connection problems look like:

Error count Error
5 Could not acquire lock
31 Error: 1213 Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction
994 Error: 1969 Query execution was interrupted (max_statement_time exceeded)
Database errors this morning

I got the data from WikiApiary’s exception log. During this time, there was only one entry in the fatal log (“Allowed memory size … exhausted”). For anyone who wants to check my work (or, at least, verify that I’m not missing something) here is the one-liner I used to get this:

(grep '^Error: ' exception.log;
 grep 'Could not acquire lock' exception.log
   | cut -d ' ' -f16-
   | sed "s,.LinksUpdate:.*,,; s, *,,;"
) | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

This is around one DB problem per minute. When you consider that the site was almost completely unusable before this, I’m actually pretty pleased with these results.

To get to these results, I did a couple of things:

  • Reduced the crawlers so that only two would run at a time.
  • Set max_statement_time for the DB user in MariaDB.

I wrote about max_statement_time earlier, so I’ll talk a bit about what I did with the crawlers here.

First, you should know that, as one of Jamie Thinglestad’s projects a few years ago, he created the set of Python scripts that crawl the wikis and created WikiApiary to collect the information. Jamie knew WikiApiary and the scripts weren’t perfect, but it was just a fun hobby.

He could probably see the hungry looks of wiki-enthusiasts, but he had a lot of things he was working on besides wikis. He wisely decided it was time to let go.

I contacted him to transfer the domain and have mostly kept it puttering along with much more active on-wiki volunteers (shout out to Karsten, Shufflertoxin, Hoof Hearted and all the rest) until things really started getting wonky this year.

As I hinted here just a few days ago, WikiApiary is behind the times when it comes to the transition to Python 3. Python 2 has been EOL for over 2.5 years, but we still haven’t updated WikiApiary’s scripts. That really needs work. (This feels like we’re on the wrong side of the transition from PHP 4 to PHP 5, guys!)

Anyway, I managed to cobble together working bots, but, for a still-not-yet-understood reason, they seem to be taking a long time to run and, while taking a long time to run, they would pummel WikiApiary with requests and cause the site to constantly produce Error 500s because of database problems.

So, instead of using cron to kick off a bot once a minute which resulted in 60 bots running at once, I pared it down to a maximum of two bots running simultaneously.

Note that I might be able to increase this, but right now there are just under 4 million jobs in the job queue because of another problem that was hidden until Shufflertoxin pointed out that pages weren’t being returned from the categorymembers API.

I’m torn between declaring job queue bankruptcy and using 10 job queue runners to eat away at the job queue. If I delete the job queue and run rebuildData.php, I might save time, and get everything back to where it should be.

Or, I could just uncover more problems.

Either way, the wiki still needs to be upgraded from the now-ancient version 1.29 that it is currently running under.

I had a lot of time to work on WikiApiary this week, but I probably won’t have as much time for the next couple of months. This work will be relegated back to the back burner for me. If anyone else wants to help out, here are the things that need to be done (I know, I should create tasks for these in phabricator):

  • Update the python scripts to work with Python 3.
  • Update MediaWiki on WikiApiary to the latest LTS.
  • Either run out the jobqueue or declare jobqueue bankruptcy and run rebuildData.php.

When I started writing this, I thought I was going to write about my idea of moving the MediaWiki infrastructure for WikiApiary to Canasta, but, as you can see, I had a lot of other things that I needed to let you know in the meantime.

Photo credit: Canastas en El Bajío – Ciudad de México 170924 174342 6443 RX100M5 DeppArtEf” by Lucy Nieto is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

WIKIMOVE Podcast: Content and knowledge gaps

07:00, Friday, 23 2022 September UTC

WIKIMOVE comes back from summer break with a new episode around content and knowledge gaps in the Wikimedia projects. 

What’s in this episode?

In this episode we talk with three Wikimedians who are trailblazers for including marginalized voices into the Wikimedia projects. Lucy Crompton-Reid, Daniel Bögre Udell and Kiril Simeonowski are active in different but complementary projects that implement Recommendation 8, Topics for Impact. You can find out about new formats for creating oral citations, a toolkit in the works for surfacing marginalized knowledge and first ideas on helping to create Wikipedias with marginalized language communities. Join us for this and to find out about Wikidata’s 10th Birthday!

Our guests are…

Kiril Simeonovski
Kiril is president of Shared Knowledge and a leading Wikimedian from the region of Central and Eastern Europe and has been actively contributing to the Wikimedia projects since 2008.

Daniel Bögre Udell
Daniel is a co-founder and the Executive Director of Wikitongues, which supports language revitalization projects on every continent.

Lucy Crompton-Reid
Lucy joined Wikimedia UK as Chief Executive in October 2015. She is on the British Library Advisory Council and sits on the board of The Audience Agency and Visible Theatre. 

You can find the audio podcast on our websiteand a video version with English subtitles on Youtube. Please visit our meta page to react to the episode and subscribe to get notified of each new release. You can also follow us on Twitter to continue the conversation. 

Our next episode around peer support in our movement will be released on October 20th, stay tuned! 

Counteracting historical erasure of women in STEM

22:05, Thursday, 22 2022 September UTC

It’s difficult to imagine a more efficient way to celebrate achievements.

 

“Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites in the world, and the go-to resource for reference and background information,” said Christian Anderson who completed our recent Wiki Scientists course sponsored by the American Physical Society. “When STEM minorities are included in Wikipedia, their visibility immediately increases. It’s difficult to imagine a more efficient way to celebrate achievements from all kinds of folks. As a physicist (one of the majors with the fewest women) at BYU (one of the least ethnically diverse schools in America), it’s easy to think only white men do what I do; Wikipedia is a powerful counter to those sorts of historically-deterministic blinders.”

Christian Anderson, APS Wiki Scientist, with one of his chickens and a cross stitch

Christian Anderson is a marine biologist and theoretical physicist, who also studies Finnish in his spare time. When he realized that the English Wikipedia was missing a biography of Dr. Eugenie Lisitzin, an oceanographer who was the first Finnish woman to earn a PhD in physics, he figured he was a great person to write it.

“I’ve been strongly committed to increasing minority involvement in STEM for decades. I have also taught myself a bit of wiki editing, and I thought this was a fantastic opportunity to combine both interests. I was delighted to find a physical oceanographer (my two fields) who broke so many gender barriers in her own country, and that I happened to have rudimentary abilities in the uncommon language containing most of the secondary sources about her. But what really made me feel like this was meant to be was late in the project, I stumbled upon a list of visiting scholars to my own former department (The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD), and learned that Lisitzin had spent a six month sabbatical on the same campus as me in 1959.”

There are a few reasons a biography might not exist on Wikipedia yet. The figure may not meet Wikipedia’s requirements for notability. There may not be enough secondary sources about them to cite. Or, (and what is very often the case), someone simply has not taken the time to write it.

The argument could definitely be made for Dr. Lisitzin’s deserving an article. But at first, Christian had some trouble tracking down enough online resources about her.

“I understand Wikipedia’s policy of referencing secondary sources to maintain standards of notability. Unfortunately, one side effect of this policy is that it causes Wikipedia to reflect societal bias against women and minorities in science,” said Christian. Luckily, he knew where else to look.

“I sought help from some wonderful people. Ari Miettinen at the University of Helsinki dug Dr. Lisitzin’s 1927 dissertation out of the archives and scanned the first five pages for me, so I could find out who her advisor was. I also discovered that her future boss at the Institute of Marine Science was on her committee, explaining why she shifted from particle physics to oceanography. Researchers in the Finnish Genealogy Facebook group and at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City were able to help me find the family’s immigration records from Germany (where her father was a railway engineer) to Finland, and her only obituary in a small local newspaper. Without their help, I wouldn’t have known even where she died, much less that an Act of Parliament was passed in 1961 to allow her to become the first director of a federal science ministry when the current director took a two year sabbatical.”

It’s exactly this kind of collaboration, crowd-sourcing, and passionate follow-through that makes Wikipedia work and makes it wonderful. And having the support of our Wiki Scientists course gave Christian some added skills and confidence, even though he had been editing Wikipedia since 2014.

“I had written two articles before taking this class, but learned something new every meeting, including how to customize my personal profile, all about the wiki journal, community standards in talk pages, where to get help, and so on. Will Kent was an excellent discussion leader.

“I love Wikipedia as a source, and am always delighted when I get to contribute. After the class, I went back and improved an article I created in 2016 about Ludwig Berwald, a brilliant Jewish mathematician in Vienna who submitted his last paper for publication the morning before Nazis took him to the concentration camp where he would die. That is a powerful story, and one that deserves the best writing I can bring to it.”

“Ludwig and Lisitzin show that even with the millions of articles already available, significant and inspiring stories are still waiting to be told. I’m delighted that I now have the skills and opportunity to share them via Wikipedia.”

Sign up for an open course at learn.wikiedu.org or explore sponsoring a customized course like the American Physical Society did at partner.wikiedu.org.

Thank you to all who participated in the 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election! Voting closed September 6 at 23:59. The data can be seen on the Statistics page and the two most voted candidates can be seen on the Results page. Please note these are preliminary results. The official announcement of the new trustees will happen later, once the candidates have been approved and appointed by the Board. This is planned to happen at the Board of Trustees’ December meeting.

Diversity was an important goal with these elections. Messages about the Board of Trustees election were translated into about 40 languages thanks to election volunteers and community members. Just under 6,000 (5,955) community members from 194 wiki projects voted. This makes 8.8% global participation. In 2021, 6,946 people from 216 wiki projects cast their vote. You can read a blog post about thoughts on the reduced turnout in the 2022 Wikimedia Foundation Board elections.

A Regional or Thematic Hub? Help us decide!

19:32, Thursday, 22 2022 September UTC

As part of Wikimedia’s 2030 Movement Strategy Recommendations, there have been discussions on Initiative 25, which focuses on regional and thematic hubs. In view of this, the West African Hubs Research Team has embarked on research to understand the perceptions of the community members in the West African sub-region on the concept of regional and thematic hubs. We have therefore shared a survey with the primary goal of understanding:

  1. What do African volunteers in West Africa think of hubs? 
  2. What obstacles can these hubs in West Africa address?  

The survey will also help the team to understand the perspectives of communities in West Africa as well as provide a description of how a hub should be set up.

Work done so far

We have begun collecting data for our research and currently have fewer than 100 responses to our survey. This comprises 64 from the English communities and 12 from the French communities, respectively. We have also begun contacting community leads to conduct in-depth interviews.

Support

The West African Hubs Research Team is grateful to all who have already filled our survey and will entreat other Wikimedians, especially those within the West African Region, to kindly fill the survey and share it with other Wikimedians. It takes about 5 minutes to complete the survey. Below is a link to the survey. Thank you for your help

English-https://forms.gle/szX17P2xh4hQUCqb6

French- https://forms.gle/71yFezdw65ovF4RE6

File:OrganizerLabSept22.png

Have you ever wondered how campaigns like #1lib1ref, Art+Feminism or Wiki Loves Folklore got started?

In the last few years, the Movement Strategy process has emphasized the critical importance of organizers to growing content on our platforms, and recruiting and retaining newcomers. The Wikimedia projects rely on a sustainable network of volunteers to drive continuous improvement of the knowledge we curate for the world. Organizers — be they local or international — have been leading this space and filling knowledge gaps by inviting, training, and retaining new people through a wide variety of campaigns and partnerships. 

To date, the path to organizing has been very organic, loosely supported by grant-making and the work of our affiliate network. But the Movement Strategy asks us to focus on Investing in Skills and Leadership Development and Identifying Topics for Impact. We need to get more deliberate about asking questions like:

  • How are we inviting the next generation of editors and volunteers to our movement to help us address a universe of knowledge gaps?
  • Are we creating clear pathways for organizers to gain all the skills or knowledge they need to champion the Wikimedia Movement well?

By mentoring and working with organizers over the last three years to understand campaigns around the world, the Campaigns Team at the Wikimedia Foundation has learned how to help organizers design campaigns that bring in the next generation of contributors. We are going to share those lessons and experiences in an Organizer Lab (beta) focused on campaigns and organizing around “Topics for Impact”. Though we hope to expand to support other topics and themes in the coming years, the first cohort will be themed around a topic of rising interest across the movement: Climate Change and Sustainability.

File:WikiForHumanRights 2021 in Nigeria 01.jpg
Promotional material from #WikiForHumanRights 2021 in Nigeria.
James Moore200, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

What is the Organizer Lab?

The Organizer Lab will be a 9-week online learning experience running from the end of October until mid December that prepares participants to design strategic calls to action around prioritized knowledge gaps, as well as more generalized Wikimedia organizing and campaign/event design skills. The Lab will also connect those skills with a particular topic area: climate and sustainability. We have learned that organizers work best together when they collaborate on one theme. 

More specifically, participating organizers will leave the course with:

  • A firm understanding of a how to develop a locally-relevant topic list for a knowledge gap-focused campaign
  • A process for identifying local audiences and organizations who would be good candidates for activation and recruitment
  • Understanding of the menu of tactics, tools, and newcomer engagement strategies available for effective event design
  • A scalable and fundable project proposal for events or projects connected to a global campaign around Earth Day (April, 2023) (building on #WikiForHumanRights) or to other regional and international campaigns.

Participants who successfully complete the program will receive a certificate of completion and gain access to a special pool of grant funds for the best designed projects from the course. Applications are open from September 22 – October 19, 2022

Promotional material from #WikiForHumanRights 2022 in Colombia, source Twitter.

Why an organizer lab?

Campaigns like Art+Feminism and Wiki Loves Monuments help Wikimedia communities meet new contributors and run their first events — community is often formed by running events as part of international campaigns. However, there is a central challenge for new international campaigns: often only the most experienced organizers are able to form them — it requires both deep knowledge of Wikimedia communities and skills important to campaigning more generally, often learned outside the Wikimedia movement. 

Working alongside the Community Resources team (which facilitates funding to our communities), we have observed a consistent need for support designing and running campaigns. Though we have been able to mentor campaigns like Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos and WikiVibrance, one-on-one kind of support doesn’t scale: if we are to achieve Movement strategy goals, communities around the world need to be able to run campaigns that address Topics for Impact. By taking what we learned from mentoring to the WikiLearn platform, we will be able to share these insights with more of the community, and help grow a stronger peer learning network for campaign organizers.

Who can participate?

Since this is the first cohort of the course, we are seeking to create a diverse cohort that includes organizers from all parts of the Wikimedia movement, especially in the Global South.  

Good candidates for the course will have: 

  • Some Wikimedia organizing experience, running events or campaigns within their own communities. 
  • An interest in topics related to climate change and sustainability
  • A desire to organize strategic campaigns within the movement, that fill key knowledge gaps around climate 

By the end of this program, successful participants will understand how to design topics for impact campaigns and other programs targeted at climate and sustainability and also have connections with organizers around the world.

Apply now or learn more

To apply to join the cohort, please read the instructions on Meta, where you will find: an application form, important dates, and general guidance. Also check out the campaign newsletter for wider campaign organizing news and updates.

You’re also invited to join the information session on  September 30 at 14:00 UTC where we’ll share more details and answer questions. A recording will be made available after the information session. If you have any further queries ahead of this event, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the team via [email protected].

This blog was contributed by Wiki Movimento Brasil

Wiki Loves Monuments is an international photo contest organized by the Wikimedia community annually. In Brazil, the contest has been taking place since 2015 and since 2019 it has been organized by the user group Wiki Movimento Brasil. Until 2018, there were around 1,500 participating monuments in the national phase, mostly monuments protected by the Institute of National Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN). With the integration of Wikidata, the free database of the Wikimedia ecosystem, this number has since jumped to more than 15 thousand monuments in 2022, covering monuments protected by official bodies of different governmental spheres and monuments recognized by institutions or projects aimed at recording the Brazilian heritage.

The expansion of the list of participating monuments is of great importance, as it allows the registration of less touristy monuments, but also holders of local, municipal and/or state historical importance. This was the case, for example, of the Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, a public library founded in 1837 by the Portuguese community in the city of Rio de Janeiro, then capital of the Portuguese Empire. Later this library was considered the fourth most beautiful library in the world by Time Magazine.

In 2021, the winning image of the international Wiki Loves Monuments was a photograph of exactly this Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, taken by the Lithuanian photographer Donatas Dabravolskas, who in an interview with Wiki Movimento Brasil said that he became aware of the existence of the monument through social networks in 2019 and decided to visit it, took several pictures and saved them. In 2021, he found that the library was on the list of monuments participating in the national phase and decided to submit the photographs. The symmetry and air of antiquity that the library and photography presented were highlighted among the judges of the international jury, as well as the choice of point of view, which conveys the grandeur of the library.

Despite being essentially a photographic contest to select the best images of the global historical heritage, Wiki Loves Monuments has also been used in Brazil as a tool to achieve the maximum mission of the Wikimedia movement: The building and preservation of the sum of all human knowledge. In recent years, the coverage of illustrated monuments has increased by 270%, reaching 928 illustrated monuments, with at least 600 of those illustrated in Wikimedia projects for the first time. The photographic record of a monument can act as a kind of digital preservation of the object itself, even more so when subjected to bad weather and disaster, or in light of the neglect and abandonment by the State and its institutions in the preservation of this heritage. It’s also an opportunity to diversify the Internet’s heritage records and engage new editors to the Wikimedia Movement.

It was precisely with the engagement of new editors in mind that Wiki Movimento Brasil started to develop an interactive map application for the national Wiki Loves Monuments phase. The profile of Internet users in Brazil is mainly mobile (99.4% of people that accessed the internet in 2021 used mobile devices, only 35.7% used computers) and with lower bandwidth depending on the state (with the poorest regions having lower bandwidth than the wealthiest regions). The application is available at https://wikilovesbrasil.toolforge.org.

Providing good user experience might help engage participants more and more meaningfully with the contest and the interactivity of such application has the potential of helping participants to know or to acknowledge the historic heritage near them and incentivize them to contribute with images and improve the sum of all knowledge.

What’s it like to win Wiki Loves Monuments?
Lithuanian photographer Donatas Dabravolskas, winner of the 2021 edition, shares his story.

Video interview with the winner (in Brazilian-Portuguese)

A video interview with Donatas Dabravolskas, WLM 2021 winner: click on the image to open.

Wiki Loves Monuments in 2022

09:41, Thursday, 22 2022 September UTC

And we’re off!

Wiki Loves Monuments 2022 has started again: national teams from 40 countries around the world will be organizing the annual photo competition, which is focused on getting more photographs of built heritage monuments. After the national competitions, the organisors will submit the top 10 images from their country to the international competition for the big finale. Jurors from around the world will the decide who will be the Winner of Wiki Loves Monuments 2022.

Wiki Loves Monuments is built on three simple criteria. First, all photos are freely licensed, like all other contributions to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. By giving permission to the public to share these photos, it ensures that the results can remain widely available forever. Second, all photos must contain an identified monument, e.g., a building or art of historic significance – we want to know what heritage is on the photo so that we can actually use it. Each country maintains a list of registered historic sites that are eligible for the competition. Third, the photo must be uploaded in the month of September/October (based on the country). You are always welcome to contribute your photography to Wikimedia Commons, but photos uploaded before or after the month of September and October may not be considered for the competition. If you would like more details on Wiki Loves Monuments in your country, you can visit wikilovesmonuments.org/participate.

You can expect an international announcement on the winners in February 2023. Good luck!

More WikiApiary progress

02:13, Wednesday, 21 2022 September UTC

While WikiApiary was offline, its stewards–the MediaWiki Stakeholders user group–got a number of complaints. For a brief time, I tried to allay the worry by putting up a reassuring bee, but then I was spending time that I didn’t think I had, so I figured it would be better to use that time to actually get the site working.

I wrote about some of that work last Friday, but I did some more tinkering and the site seems to be working better. A brief summary of what I did since then:

  • Bumped PageForms to 4.9.1. I tried a newer version, but I would have to upgrade MediaWiki first and I’m not yet prepared to do that. Soon.
  • Made the graphs work. This was pretty trivial. Now I just have to work on getting them populated.
  • Bumped up the memory available to PHP. I was seeing a few Allowed memory size of .... bytes exhausted messages in PageForms for some pages. Doubling the memory available seems to have solved that, for now.
  • Solved the DB problem? This one I doubt. But I am seeing far fewer problems at the moment. I’ve just unleashed the bees again, so I think the problem will be back.

We’ve had some people volunteer to help with the maintenance of the site, but we could probably use more. Let me know if you want to help. Especially helpful right now would be someone who is good at porting python 2 code to python 3.

Photo is a detail of one by Dmitry Grigoriev on Unsplash

The State of Abstract Wikipedia Natural Language Generation

00:16, Wednesday, 21 2022 September UTC

The Abstract Wikipedia team has taken further steps toward representing abstract content in natural languages!

When Denny introduced the proposal for Abstract Wikipedia here on Diff, he noted the need for “functions that can translate the content of Abstract Wikipedia into the natural language text of every Wikipedia.” Those “functions” will eventually comprise a community-driven natural language generation pipeline. Research and prototyping for that NLG pipeline have now begun. In this post, we will outline how the architecture of the NLG templating system (part of the NLG pipeline) fits in with other components. We’ll also highlight open questions in the hopes of encouraging discussion and further contribution by the community.

As the AW team discussed a few weeks ago, the planned NLG realizer, also called Renderer, and a component of the NLG system, will use a template language to help write templates and then it will transform templates into natural language text. The template language will provide a high-level, readable, declarative syntax to steer text generation from the abstract content (captured with the constructors). Then, the template language parser will produce a series of function compositions, whose details are further described in Google.org Fellow Ariel Gutman and Professor Maria Keet’s template language specification. It’s important for us to begin creating some standards for these functions now in order to limit complexity and ensure interoperability, so that abstract content can indeed benefit all languages and so that the community can write Constructors and Renderers on Wikifunctions with relative ease. Some of the complexities regarding doing NLG in agglutinating African languages have been addressed by Maria Keet in a TechTalk she gave to Google fellows in a meeting they held in Zurich in August.


 

To have a better idea of how the NLG realizer’s implementation may look, Ariel Gutman has started creating a Scribunto prototype, which will inform the Wikifunctions implementation. Mahir Moshed has also created the Ninai and Udiron libraries in Python to prototype the realizer. We will share more about the prototype in a future Diff post. At the same time, Google.org Fellow Sandy Woodruff has started reflecting about a dedicated UI for the NLG system. You can learn about some of her ideas in a brainstorming session held at the aforementioned meeting.

One open question concerns the Constructors themselves. A Constructor represents a piece of abstract content. Let’s adapt an example from the template language specification:

Age(

    entity: Malala Yousafzai (Q32732)

    age_in_years: 25 

)

This is a Constructor that represents a fact true at the time of writing, namely the age of Malala Yousafzai, which would be rendered in English as “Malala Yousafzai is 25 years old.” Note that, in reality, “age_in_years” would itself likely be defined by a function call that calculates age based on birth date and the present date, but this detail is omitted here for clarity.

Many of our open questions concern how representative this example Constructor is. This example represents a single proposition and can be realized as a sentence in most (maybe all?) natural languages, but will that be true of all Constructors? What if some Constructors embed multiple propositions? Is it possible for a Constructor to correspond to an incomplete proposition? 

Another set of questions concerns how general the relationship between a Constructor and its participant entities should be. We might imagine a Constructor for the sentence, “Bi Sheng invented movable type in 1040 AD.” In order to make Constructors reusable across languages and for multiple propositions, we would want to enshrine more general scenes or frames like “Age” above or, in this case, “Invent.” What, if any, linguistic formalization should be adopted for this purpose? FrameNet is one possibility, but might another work better, or does Abstract Wikipedia demand an ad hoc solution? How do we handle information which belongs in a sentence but isn’t intrinsically part of a proposition, e.g. “in 1040 AD” from the given example, which isn’t a “core” part of the notion of inventing something the way that the inventor and invention are? Kutz Arrieta from Google has begun thinking about these questions.

Once the Constructors have done their job, the Renderers’ work begins. The working NLG proposal presumes that the lexical forms in Wikidata will be marked with grammatical features (e.g., number for nouns and verbs, gender or class for substantives, aspect and tense and mood for verbs, …). Mahir Morshed and the rest of the NLG contributors have begun work on standardizing these representations in Wikidata’s lexicographical content, but our NLG system can’t assume the data will always be present or complete. Therefore, our questions here concern how to address missing lexical data. When the system generates a sentence, can it provide multiple possibilities for words it’s uncertain about? Should it allow the user to add new terms at that time? If so, how would it guide them to contribute to Wikidata from another project’s context?

These are big questions, but hopefully the challenges they present look exciting, rather than intimidating. As always, we welcome your contributions. We hope that the breadth of experience and sheer number of languages present within the community will help us find the most equitable solutions possible.

Nigeria, with a population of more than 200 million people, is unarguably the largest nation in Africa. It was a colony of the British empire and got its independence in 1960. In 1986, it acquired the current status of 36 states + Federal Character Territory (Abuja). It’s one of the most diverse nations with over 500+ indigenous languages, representing 25% of the entire country in Africa. There are over 300 ethnic groups across the length and breadth of the land.

The New Readers program has been an essential part of growing the WMF’s understanding of the gaps we need to fill in awareness and use of the Wikimedia projects in Emerging Markets. In the WMF’s New Awareness research conducted in Nigeria in 2016, less than 77% of Nigerians are aware of Wikipedia and its sister projects. The idea behind this research gave birth to the Wikimedia Nigeria Fan Club at the University of Ibadan, the first tertiary institution in Nigeria and the premier edition of the project. Later in the year, we had another fan club at the Nigeria Institute of Journalism in Lagos. Today, there are over 6 Wikimedia Nigeria Fan Clubs in Nigeria. Other institutions are in the pipeline for the project and coordinated by the community in charge of community resources within the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria. 

The entity behind this project and many others are the Wikimedia User Group, Nigeria (WUGN), an affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation recognised by the Affiliations Committee in September 2015 to introduce Wikimedia and its sister projects to Nigeria. It was the premier Wikimedia affiliate in the country. Subsequently, there are recognitions of other language-based Wikimedia User groups like; Igbo Wikimedians User Group, Hausa WIkimedians User Group, Yoruba Wikimedians User Group, Gungbe Wikimedians User Group, Tyap Wikimedians User Group. The Wikimedia UG Nigeria started its operation in Nigeria with three members, all residing in Lagos. By 2022, the group user base is now 400+ domiciling in over 80% of states in Nigeria.

The group received Wikimedia Community Support Grant in 2022 after 6+ years of recognition to promote various missioned aligned programs in Nigeria. Its Community Support Funds is an integral part of the annual program designed by Wikimedia User Group Nigeria to support Nigerian mission-aligned organization, individual members of the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria, fan clubs, and organised groups contributing to any Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, Wikidata or Wikimedia Commons etc.– to manage projects throughout the year with a budget of $100 up to $500. The Application opens on the 1st of May 2022! The grant focuses on Campaigns, e.g. Wiki Loves, 1 Lib 1Ref, e.t.c and micro-grants. 

The grant is administered through an independent committee of community members from different walks of life in Nigeria’s three user groups. Every month, the Grant applications are submitted from the 1st-15th, while the reviewing is from the 16th -the 25th of every month. The administration of the grants started in May 2022 with only five applicants. As of September, twenty applicants applied for the scheme from all states. However, the program could only fund a maximum of five campaign grants and two community grants, as agreed in the Annual Plan Grant (APG). In the 2023 APG, the team intends to increase the support.   

Recently, the group will celebrate its 7th anniversary in September 2022. Within this short time, the group has worked with 100+ local and international partners to promote Wikipedia and its sister projects in Nigeria.

Summary

This year’s board elections ended with lower global voter participation than in 2021.

By comparing available data of the elections in 2021 and 2022, some possible explanations for this are explored.

It seems as if 2022’s smaller group of candidates, with reduced support from super big communities, had a significant impact on the global voter turnout of the board elections. Their absence is possibly responsible for a significant part of the decline.

A significant second factor was last year’s unique additional outreach in the Japanese, Catalan, and Czech communities, which did not repeat this year. 

Question

This year’s election ended with lower global voter participation than in 2021, though it still was the second-highest number of voters ever. 5957 voters cast their vote in 2022, compared with 6873 voters in 2021, a total loss of 916 votes. This is the first significant reduction since 2013. As the global electorate did not change significantly (2022: 67574, 2021: 67838), it brings up the question why that is.

Diagnosing differences

If we take a look at the election statistics of 2022 and 2021, it is striking that we do not see communities that mobilized heavily above the global standard turnout of ~10% (“champion communities”) in 2022. From former voter statistics, we learn that there were always “champion communities” having voter turnouts way above standard turnouts.

In 2021 we saw the following bigger communities having turnouts of 15% and more:

Wiki Eligible Voters Turnout
ca.wikipedia.org 344 125 36.337%
uk.wikipedia.org 682 153 22.434%
pl.wikipedia.org 1251 280 22.382%
ar.wikipedia.org 464 95 20.474%
cs.wikipedia.org 558 108 19.355%
tr.wikipedia.org 441 73 16.553%
it.wikipedia.org 2113 324 15.334%

2022 is pretty different from that. There were barely any champion communities, and those there are had lower turnouts: 

Wiki Eligible Voters Turnout
ar.wikipedia.org 446 91 20.404%
pl.wikipedia.org 1175 181 15.404%

This is confirmed by checking medians. If we select the Top 30 communities by eligible voters (comprising 84% of the electorate), sort them by their turnouts, and calculate the average of the groups with the highest, medium, and lowest turnouts this is what we can find:

Group 2022 2021 Diff
Highest turnout median 12.60% 19.30% -6.70%
Medium turnout median 8.20% 7.95% 0.25%
Lowest turnout median 5.40% 5.87% -0.47%

It is clear that neither the groups with the lowest nor the medium average turnout shows significant changes but the group with the highest turnout does with a loss of 34.7%.

How significant is this?

As shown above, the effect is real, but does it actually affect the change significantly?

To find out, we took the above TOP 30 communities (again: they make up 84% of the electorate) and sorted them by the change in their number of voters in 2021. 

Twelve of the 30 communities experienced losses bigger than twenty voters. For these 12 communities we can see the following:

Wiki Voters 2022 Turnout 2022 Voters 2021 Turnout 2021 Voter Diff
es.wikipedia.org 237 8.40% 349 12.57% -112
it.wikipedia.org 215 10.32% 324 15.33% -109
ru.wikipedia.org 199 6.75% 306 10.39% -107
pl.wikipedia.org 181 15.40% 280 22.38% -99
uk.wikipedia.org 64 10.16% 153 22.43% -89
ca.wikipedia.org 45 13.64% 125 36.34% -80
ja.wikipedia.org 98 2.71% 175 5.25% -77
cs.wikipedia.org 56 10.09% 108 19.36% -52
de.wikipedia.org 604 10.93% 645 11.32% -41
fr.wikipedia.org 466 11.91% 502 12.81% -36
pt.wikipedia.org 80 7.03% 115 10.24% -35
fa.wikipedia.org 52 7.35% 85 11.79% -33

As mentioned, there was an increase in voter numbers in 6 communities. In three of them only it is significant, these are: 

Wiki Voters 2022 Turnout 2022 Voters 2021 Turnout 2021 Voter Diff
he.wikipedia.org 94 11.55% 62 7.62% 32
zh.wikipedia.org 153 6.44% 109 4.88% 44
en.wikipedia.org 1963 8.24% 1845 7.95% 118

Remember: the total decrease from 2021 was 917 votes. The above communities’ losses alone make up 870 voters lost and only 194 votes gained in reverse.

Reasons

Most intriguing is the question of the reason for these losses. Just to make it clear: while up to this point all insights are based on data, this is going to be, to some extent, educated guessing.

Last year five of the eight champion communities had a candidate running: ES, IT, PT, RU, FR. All these communities are part of the TOP 10 communities by eligible voters (not counting EN). Their voter decrease makes up for 399 voters lost. 

Usually, in the following elections, the new candidates’ communities compensate for losses in former champion communities. 

With only 6 candidates (2021: 19) that effect was significantly smaller though. With two of them originating from EN, and only one of them from the above-mentioned TOP 10 (Polish), the new candidates communities couldn’t make up for these losses. The gains from the Hebrew and the English communities sum up to 150 voters only.

This insight is strengthened by looking at the results from Indian communities that had four candidates running in 2021 and none this year. Turnouts dropped in 2022 in the Indian language communities, respectively. Due to the number of Indian language versions we took a pass on their quantification, spot checks seem to confirm this effect though.

Other reasons for voter losses were more specific to the respective communities: 

  • Outreach: Last year’s hype in the Catalan community, run by a volunteer, did not repeat. (-80 votes)
  • Outreach: The Japanese community had some (very basic) outreach by a community member last year, which was missing this year. (-77 votes)
  • Outreach: In the Czech community, the chapter was not promoting and supporting the elections as last year (-52 votes)
  • Politics: The Ukrainian community lost 89 voters, obviously a consequence of the ongoing war.
  • Electorate: The German community had a smaller electorate (-175), and the almost same turnout (2022: 10.9% 2021: 11.3%) led to -41 voters.

The increase of the Mandarin Wikipedia’s turnout is probably a result of localized outreach by the Movement Strategy and Governance team not present in 2021. This led to an addition of 44 voters. 

There are yet no valid explanations available for the losses in the Farsi (-33) and Polish (-99) communities.

Outreach factors, responsible for the losses of 3 of 12 and the gain in 1 of 3 communities, sum up to 209 losses and 44 gains. Again, the gains do not make up for the losses, leading to 165 voters less than last year. Last year’s outreach in the respective communities was driven by local volunteers and affiliates, who did not repeat their engagement this year. 

Possibly last year’s unusual volunteer and affiliate engagement was driven by the euphoria of finally having an election again after four years and slowed down by its repetition just a year later (not to mention other votes like the MCDC and the UCoC Enforcement Guidelines in between). WMF staff outreach was not available to compensate for these losses.

Conclusions

The Wikimedia movement over the years has gotten used to a continuously growing number of voters in board elections. The above data indicates, that various factors cause participation in elections and are influential to the global turnout. Some powerful factors seemingly are the composition of the candidates’ group and localized outreach to communities.

The decreased impact of candidates hailing from big (and due to their size mostly western) communities, might be perceived as less of a loss, but a correction of former imbalances though. A bigger number of candidates though, resulting in a resurrection of the champion community phenomena, will help to raise local and to some extent global turnouts again.

A strong point to learn from the above numbers is the significance of community outreach. Regardless of it being executed by dedicated volunteers, affiliates, or Wikimedia Foundation staff, it seemingly helps to raise general awareness of elections within communities formerly underrepresented and thus equalizing voter turnouts globally.

(All data from the WMF Board Elections statistics)

Tech News issue #38, 2022 (September 19, 2022)

00:00, Monday, 19 2022 September UTC
previous 2022, week 38 (Monday 19 September 2022) next

Tech News: 2022-38

weeklyOSM 634

19:02, Sunday, 18 2022 September UTC

06/09/2022-12/09/2022

lead picture

Travel time to healthcare facilities [1] Leaflet | © HeiGIT | © OpenRouteService | © WorldPop | © geoboundaries | map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

Breaking news

Mapping campaigns

  • Sven Geggus created a website that shows ‘campsites with others inside’ and, as we reported earlier, has asked the community for help to clean up this specific type of erroneous tagging.

Community

Events

  • The Call for Presentations for Pista ng Mapa 2022 and State of the Map Asia 2022 Conferences is now open.

Education

  • Anne-Karoline Distel explained how to map horse hitching locations on OpenStreetMap. Horse hitching facilities are common in historic places, especially in the stables of European castles.

Maps

  • [1] Marcel Reinmuth announced an update to the Open Healthcare Access Map. Released last year, the map based on OpenStreetMap healthcare facilities and access times from OpenRouteService, now has global coverage of healthcare access.
  • This constantly updated map shows the current deployment of military units in the war in Ukraine, the location of incidents, and which areas are controlled by the respective warring parties. The map is based on OSM.It should be remembered that maps always have a political dimension. weeklyOSM cannot and does not want to judge the facts presented or whether it is propaganda or the glorification of war.

Licences

  • Ilya Zverev wrote an article to commemorate the day the OpenStreetMap data licence changed to ODbL. He has also created a website where, for a while, you can see what OSM looked like in 2012, before the licence change.

Software

Programming

  • Jochen Topf announced the start of a project that will add cartographic generalisation capabilities to osm2pgsql. The project is funded for six months through a research grant from the Prototype Fund and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. There is a GitHub issue that goes into details of what is planned.
  • Zhengyi Cao, a Google Summer of Code 2022 participant, published a final report on their ‘JOSM plug-in for public transportation route visualisation’.

Releases

  • The BBBike extract service now supports OrganicMaps for Android and iOS.

Other “geo” things

  • Researchers, from Bavaria and Austria, have developed a ‘cardio-mapped’ hiking trails information system to prevent overexertion while hiking. Hikers can determine their individual heart fitness during a short test hike on-site and then find hikes in the area that match their ability.
  • Vincent Privat discovered a place in Kourou, French Guiana, where a gun shop can be found opposite a bank.
  • Jon Keegan wrote an article about ‘Highway Photolog’, an ancient version of street-level imagery, conducted by highway departments in the US as early as 1961.
  • Gary Dagorn, from Le Monde, documented the current floods in Pakistan. More than 1300 deaths have been reported in this disaster, where 10% of the land area was flooded according to satellite imagery. Multiple image comparisons are provided in the article, in addition to an overview map of the country. A HOTOSM task has been created for volunteers and is still ongoing.

Upcoming Events

Where What Online When Country
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Gent OpenTechTalks: OpenStreetMap osmcalpic 2022-09-26 flag
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Note:
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This weeklyOSM was produced by Lejun, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, SeverinGeo, Strubbl, TheSwavu, YoViajo, derFred, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

A buggy history

04:03, Friday, 16 2022 September UTC
—I suppose you are an entomologist?—I said with a note of interrogation.
—Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name! A society may call itself an Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad title as that to himself, in the present state of science, is a pretender, sir, a dilettante, an impostor! No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp.
The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. 
A collection of biographies
with surprising gaps (ex. A.D. Imms)
The history of Indian interest in insects has been approached by many writers and there are several bits and pieces available in journals and various insights distributed across books. There are numerous ways of looking at how people viewed insects over time. One of these is a collection of biographies, some of which are uncited verbatim accounts from obituaries (and not even within quotation marks). This collation by B.R. Subba Rao who also provides a few historical threads to tie together the biographies. Keeping Indian expectations in view, both Subba Rao and the agricultural entomologist M.A. Husain play to the crowd in their early histories. Husain wrote in pre-Independence times where there was a need for Indians to assert themselves before their colonial masters. They begin with mentions of insects in ancient Indian texts and as can be expected there are mentions of honey, shellac, bees, ants, and a few nuisance insects. Husain takes the fact that the term Satpada षट्पद or six-legs existed in the 1st century Amarakosa to make the claim that Indians were far ahead of time because Latreille's Hexapoda, the supposed analogy, was proposed only in 1825. Such one-upmanship (or quests for past superiority in the face of current backwardness?) misses the fact that science is not just about terms but  also about structures and one can only assume that these authors failed to find the development of such structures in the ancient texts that they examined. Cedric Dover, with his part-Indian and British ancestry, interestingly, also notes the Sanskrit literature but declares that he is not competent enough to examine the subject carefully. The identification of species in old texts also leave one wondering about the accuracy of translations. For instance K.N. Dave translates a verse from the Atharva-veda and suggests an early date for knowledge on shellac. Dave's work has been re-examined by an entomologist, Mahdihassan. Another organism known in ancient texts as the indragopa (Indra's cowherd) supposedly appears after the rains. Some Sanskrit scholars have, remarkably enough, identified it, with a confidence that no coccidologist ever had, as the cochineal insect (the species Dactylopius coccus is South American!), while others identify it as a lac insect, a firefly(!) or as Trombidium (red velvet mites) - the last for matching blood red colour mentioned in a text attributed to Susrutha. To be fair, ambiguities in translation are not limited to those dealing with Indian writing. Dikairon (Δικαιρον), supposedly a highly-valued and potent poison from India was mentioned in the work Indika by Ctesias 398 - 397 BC. One writer said it was the droppings of a bird. Valentine Ball thought it was derived from a scarab beetle. Jeffrey Lockwood claimed that it came from the rove beetles Paederus sp. And finally a Spanish scholar states that all this was a gross misunderstanding and that Dikairon was not a poison, and - believe it or not - was a masticated mix of betel leaves, arecanut, and lime! 
 
One gets a far more reliable idea of ancient knowledge and traditions from practitioners, forest dwellers, the traditional honey-harvesting tribes, and similar people that have been gathering materials such as shellac and beeswax. Unfortunately, many of these traditions and their practitioners are threatened by modern laws, economics, and cultural prejudice. These practitioners are being driven out of the forests where they live, and their knowledge was hardly ever captured in writing. The writers of the ancient Sanskrit texts were probably associated with temple-towns and other semi-urban clusters and it seems like the knowledge of forest dwellers was never considered merit-worthy by the book writing class of that period.

A more meaningful overview of entomology may be gained by reading and synthesizing a large number of historical bits, and there are a growing number of such pieces. A 1973 book published by the Annual Reviews Inc. should be of some interest. I have appended a selection of sources that are useful in piecing together a historic view of entomology in India. It helps however to have a broad skeleton on which to attach these bits and minutiae. Here, there are truly verbose and terminology-filled systems developed by historians of science (for example, see ANT). I prefer an approach that is free of a jargon overload or the need to cite French intellectuals. The growth of entomology can be examined along three lines - cataloguing - the collection of artefacts and the assignment of names, communication and vocabulary-building - social actions involving the formation of groups of interested people who work together building common structure with the aid of fixing records in journals often managed beyond individual lifetimes by scholarly societies, and pattern-finding a stage when hypotheses are made, and predictions tested. I like to think that anyone learning entomology also goes through these activities, often in this sequence. Professionalization makes it easier for people to get to the later stages. This process is aided by having comprehensive texts, keys, identification guides and manuals, systems of collections and curators. The skills involved in the production - ways to prepare specimens, observe, illustrate, or describe are often not captured by the books themselves and that is where institutions play (or ought to play) an important role.

Cataloguing

The cataloguing phase of knowledge gathering, especially of the (larger and more conspicuous) insect species of India grew rapidly thanks to the craze for natural history cabinets of the wealthy (made socially meritorious by the idea that appreciating the works of the Creator was as good as attending church)  in Britain and Europe and their ability to tap into networks of collectors working within the colonial enterprise. The cataloguing phase can be divided into the non-scientific cabinet-of-curiosity style especially followed before Darwin and the more scientific forms. The idea that insects could be preserved by drying and kept for reference by pinning, [See Barnard 2018] the system of binomial names, the idea of designating type specimens that could be inspected by anyone describing new species, the system of priority in assigning names were some of the innovations and cultural rules created to aid cataloguing. These rules were enforced by scholarly societies, their members (which would later lead to such things as codes of nomenclature suggested by rule makers like Strickland, now dealt with by committees that oversee the  ICZN Code) and their journals. It would be wrong to assume that the cataloguing phase is purely historic and no longer needed. It is a phase that is constantly involved in the creation of new knowledge. Labels, catalogues, and referencing whether in science or librarianship are essential for all subsequent work to be discovered and are essential to science based on building on the work of others, climbing the shoulders of giants to see further. Cataloguing was probably what the physicists derided as "stamp-collecting".

Communication and vocabulary building

The other phase involves social activities, the creation of specialist language, groups, and "culture". The methods and tools adopted by specialists also helps in producing associations and the identification of boundaries that could spawn new associations. The formation of groups of people based on interests is something that ethnographers and sociologists have examined in the context of science. Textbooks, taxonomic monographs, and major syntheses also help in building community - they make it possible for new entrants to rapidly move on to joining the earlier formed groups of experts. Whereas some of the early learned societies were spawned by people with wealth and leisure, some of the later societies have had other economic forces in their support.

Like species, interest groups too specialize and split to cover more specific niches, such as those that deal with applied areas such as agriculture, medicine, veterinary science and forensics. There can also be interest in behaviour, and evolution which, though having applications, are often do not find economic support.

Pattern finding
Eleanor Ormerod, an unexpected influence
in the rise of economic entomology in India

The pattern finding phase when reached allows a field to become professional - with paid services offered by practitioners. It is the phase in which science flexes its muscle, specialists gain social status, and are able to make livelihoods out of their interest. Lefroy (1904) cites economic entomology in India as beginning with E.C. Cotes [Cotes' career in entomology was cut short by his marriage to the famous Canadian journalist Sara Duncan in 1889 and he shifted to writing] in the Indian Museum in 1888. But he surprisingly does not mention any earlier attempts, and one finds that Edward Balfour, that encyclopaedic-surgeon of Madras collated a list of insect pests in 1887 and drew inspiration from Eleanor Ormerod who hints at the idea of getting government support, noting that it would cost very little given that she herself worked with no remuneration to provide a service for agriculture in England. Her letters were also forwarded to the Secretary of State for India and it is quite possible that Cotes' appointment was a direct result.

As can be imagined, economics, society, and the way science is supported - royal patronage, family, state, "free markets", crowd-sourcing, or mixes of these - impact the way an individual or a field progresses. Entomology was among the first fields of zoology that managed to gain economic value with the possibility of paid employment. David Lack, who later became an influential ornithologist, was wisely guided by his father to pursue entomology as it was the only field of zoology with jobs. Lack however found his apprenticeship (in Germany, 1929!) involving pinning specimens "extremely boring".

Indian reflections on the history of entomology

Kunhikannan died at the rather young age of 47
A rather interesting analysis of Indian science is made by the first native Indian entomologist, with the official title of "entomologist" in the state of Mysore - K. Kunhikannan. Kunhikannan was deputed to pursue a Ph.D. at Stanford (for some unknown reason two pre-Independence Indian entomologists trained in Stanford rather than England - see postscript) through his superior Leslie Coleman. At Stanford, Kunhikannan gave a talk on Science in India. He noted in that 1923 talk :
In the field of natural sciences the Hindus did not make any progress. The classifications of animals and plants are very crude. It seems to me possible that this singular lack of interest in this branch of knowledge was due to the love of animal life. It is difficult for Westerners to realise how deep it is among Indians. The observant traveller will come across people trailing sugar as they walk along streets so that ants may have a supply, and there are priests in certain sects who veil that face while reading sacred books that they may avoid drawing in with their breath and killing any small unwary insects. [Note: Salim Ali expressed a similar view ]
He then examines science sponsored by state institutions, by universities and then by individuals. About the last he writes:
Though I deal with it last it is the first in importance. Under it has to be included all the work done by individuals who are not in Government employment or who being government servants devote their leisure hours to science. A number of missionaries come under this category. They have done considerable work mainly in the natural sciences. There are also medical men who devote their leisure hours to science. The discovery of the transmission of malaria was made not during the course of Government work. These men have not received much encouragement for research or reward for research, but they deserve the highest praise., European officials in other walks of life have made signal contributions to science. The fascinating volumes of E. H. Aitken and Douglas Dewar are the result of observations made in the field of natural history in the course of official duties. Men like these have formed themselves into an association, and a journal is published by the Bombay Natural History Association[sic], in which valuable observations are recorded from time to time. That publication has been running for over a quarter of a century, and its volumes are a mine of interesting information with regard to the natural history of India.
This then is a brief survey of the work done in India. As you will see it is very little, regard being had to the extent of the country and the size of her population. I have tried to explain why Indians' contribution is as yet so little, how education has been defective and how opportunities have been few. Men do not go after scientific research when reward is so little and facilities so few. But there are those who will say that science must be pursued for its own sake. That view is narrow and does not take into account the origin and course of scientific research. Men began to pursue science for the sake of material progress. The Arab alchemists started chemistry in the hope of discovering a method of making gold. So it has been all along and even now in the 20th century the cry is often heard that scientific research is pursued with too little regard for its immediate usefulness to man. The passion for science for its own sake has developed largely as a result of the enormous growth of each of the sciences beyond the grasp of individual minds so that a division between pure and applied science has become necessary. The charge therefore that Indians have failed to pursue science for its own sake is not justified. Science flourishes where the application of its results makes possible the advancement of the individual and the community as a whole. It requires a leisured class free from anxieties of obtaining livelihood or capable of appreciating the value of scientific work. Such a class does not exist in India. The leisured classes in India are not yet educated sufficiently to honour scientific men.
It is interesting that leisure is noted as important for scientific advance. Edward Balfour, also commented that Indians were "too close to subsistence to reflect accurately on their environment!"  (apparently in The Vydian and the Hakim, what do they know of medicine? (1875) which unfortunately is not available online)

Kunhikannan may be among the few Indian scientists who dabbled in cultural history, and political theorizing. He wrote two rather interesting books The West (1927) and A Civilization at Bay (1931, posthumously published) which defended Indian cultural norms while also suggesting areas for reform. While reading these works one has to remind oneself that he was working under Europeans and may not have been able to discuss such topics with many Indians. An anonymous writer who penned a  prefatory memoir of his life in his posthumously published book notes that he was reserved and had only a small number of people to talk to outside of his professional work. Kunhikannan came from the Thiyya community which initially preferred English rule to that of natives but changed their mind in later times. Kunhikannan's beliefs also appear to follow the same trend.

Entomologists meeting at Pusa in 1919
Third row: C.C. Ghosh (assistant entomologist), Ram Saran ("field man"), Gupta, P.V. Isaac, Y. Ramachandra Rao, Afzal Husain, Ojha, A. Haq
Second row: M. Zaharuddin, C.S. Misra, D. Naoroji, Harchand Singh, G.R. Dutt (Personal Assistant to the Imperial Entomologist), E.S. David (Entomological Assistant, United Provinces), K. Kunhi Kannan, Ramrao S. Kasergode (Assistant Professor of Entomology, Poona), J.L.Khare (lecturer in entomology, Nagpur), T.N. Jhaveri (assistant entomologist, Bombay), V.G.Deshpande, R. Madhavan Pillai (Entomological Assistant, Travancore), Patel, Ahmad Mujtaba (head fieldman), P.C. Sen
First row: Capt. Froilano de Mello, W Robertson-Brown (agricultural officer, NWFP), S. Higginbotham, C.M. Inglis, C.F.C. Beeson, Dr Lewis Henry Gough (entomologist in Egypt), Bainbrigge Fletcher, Bentley, Senior-White, T.V. Rama Krishna Ayyar, C.M. Hutchinson, Andrews, H.L.Dutt


Entomologists meeting at Pusa in 1923
Fifth row (standing) Mukerjee, G.D.Ojha, Bashir, Torabaz Khan, D.P. Singh
Fourth row (standing) M.O.T. Iyengar (a malariologist), R.N. Singh, S. Sultan Ahmad, G.D. Misra, Sharma, Ahmad Mujtaba, Mohammad Shaffi
Third row (standing) Rao Sahib Y Rama Chandra Rao, D Naoroji, G.R.Dutt, Rai Bahadur C.S. Misra, SCJ Bennett (bacteriologist, Muktesar), P.V. Isaac, T.M. Timoney, Harchand Singh, S.K.Sen
Second row (seated) Mr M. Afzal Husain, Major RWG Hingston, Dr C F C Beeson, T. Bainbrigge Fletcher, P.B. Richards, J.T. Edwards, Major J.A. Sinton
First row (seated) Rai Sahib PN Das, B B Bose, Ram Saran, R.V. Pillai, M.B. Menon, V.R. Phadke (veterinary college, Bombay)
 

Note: As usual, these notes are spin-offs from researching and writing Wikipedia entries. It is remarkable that even some people in high offices, such as P.V. Isaac, the last Imperial Entomologist, and grandfather of noted writer Arundhati Roy, are largely unknown (except as the near-fictional Pappachi in Roy's God of Small Things)

Further reading
An index to entomologists who worked in India or described a significant number of species from India - with links to Wikipedia (where possible - the gap in coverage of entomologists in general is large)
(woefully incomplete - feel free to let me know of additional candidates)

Carl Linnaeus - Johan Christian Fabricius - Edward Donovan - John Gerard Koenig - John Obadiah Westwood - Frederick William Hope - George Alexander James Rothney - Thomas de Grey Walsingham - Henry John Elwes - Victor Motschulsky - Charles Swinhoe - John William Yerbury - Edward Yerbury Watson - Peter Cameron - Charles George Nurse - H.C. Tytler - Arthur Henry Eyre Mosse - W.H. Evans - Frederic Moore - John Henry Leech - Charles Augustus de Niceville - Thomas Nelson Annandale - R.C. WroughtonT.R.D. Bell - Francis Buchanan-Hamilton - James Wood-Mason - Frederic Charles Fraser  - R.W. Hingston - Auguste Forel - James Davidson - E.H. AitkenO.C. Ollenbach - Frank Hannyngton - Martin Ephraim Mosley - Hamilton J. Druce  - Thomas Vincent Campbell - Gilbert Edward James Nixon - Malcolm Cameron - G.F. Hampson - Martin Jacoby - W.F. Kirby - W.L. DistantC.T. Bingham - G.J. Arrow - Claude Morley - Malcolm Burr - Samarendra Maulik - Guy Marshall
 
 - C. Brooke Worth - Kumar Krishna - M.O.T. Iyengar - K. Kunhikannan - Cedric Dover

PS: Thanks to Prof C.A. Viraktamath, I became aware of a new book-  Gunathilagaraj, K.; Chitra, N.; Kuttalam, S.; Ramaraju, K. (2018). Dr. T.V. Ramakrishna Ayyar: The Entomologist. Coimbatore: Tamil Nadu Agricultural University. - this suggests that TVRA went to Stanford at the suggestion of Kunhikannan.

    First pass at WikiApiary DB tuning

    03:11, Friday, 16 2022 September UTC

    Today, after asking for help with DB tuning on WikiApiary, Bernhard Krabina gave me some settings that had been used on a wiki with what looked like a ton of memory.

    I didn’t realize this at first, of course. No, I just put the settings into mysqld.cnf.

    That worked for a few minutes, but then the site died again. I ended up with OOM messages in the /var/log/syslog:

    systemd[1]: mariadb.service: A process of this unit has been killed by the OOM killer.

    Once I did more careful checking, I saw that they were allocating 20G of RAM for some settings. I don’t have that, so, of course the OOM killer struck.

    I did some research to find more reasonable settings and made some changes. So far, so good.

    In case it helps someone else, here are the settings I ended up with on a system with about 6GB of RAM:

    # https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/innodb_buffer_pool_size/
    # Default Value: 134217728 (128M)
    innodb_buffer_pool_size = 512M
    # https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/max_heap_table_size/
    # Default Value: 16777216 (16M)
    max_heap_table_size=128M
    # https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/tmp_table_size/
    # Default Value: 16777216 (16M)
    tmp_table_size = 128M
    # https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/read_buffer_size/
    # Default Value: 131072 (128k)
    read_buffer_size=10M
    # https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/join_buffer_size/
    # Default Value: 262144 (256k)
    join_buffer_size=1M
    # https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/key_buffer_size/
    # Default Value: 134217728 (128M)
    key_buffer_size = 256M
    # https://mariadb.com/docs/reference/mdb/system-variables/sort_buffer_size/
    # Default Value: 2097152 (2M)
    sort_buffer_size = 10M
    

    Later update: ok, that worked for a bit, but I still ended up with some long running DB queries that flooded the server and the bot’s aren’t even crawling yet. Fine. I’ve taken a sledgehammer to the connection time allowed by setting MAX_STATEMENT_TIME to 30 for the DB user that php is using.

    Image credit: Retired electrician, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

    Today, I was trying to remove hard-coded paths from some JS code.

    In my particular case, I started with a stem that looked like this:

    /img_auth.php/c/c9/Logo.png

    But MediaWiki provides different ways to configure it to serve images.

    The hard-coded url wouldn’t work in a wiki that had $wgHashedUploadDirectory set to false. And it wouldn’t work in a wiki where img_auth.php wasn’t being used.

    I wanted to be able to provide the client-side with a URL that would display the image in the file Logo.png no matter how the wiki was configured.

    I thought someone else might have a clue, so I asked in the MediaWiki Extensions room on Matrix. Marijn told me about the little known Special:Filepath (or Special:Redirect/file) special page that would do this.

    After a little testing, it worked. A bit of JQuery and MW.js and I have the following that provides the client with the appropriate url path regardless of the wiki’s configuration:

    var url=mw.util.getUrl("Special:Redirect/file/Logo.png");
    $("#image-here").append("<img src='" + url + "' />");

    Image credit: Tomas Castelazo, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

    Diana Castaneda, rights reserved.

    “This was my first time editing and creating in Wikipedia,” Diana Castaneda told Wiki Education. Diana recently graduated from Arizona State University (ASU) with a BS in sociology. At first, she was a little nervous about the unfamiliar digital aspect of an assignment where students write for Wikipedia.

    “Because I am not savvy with computers, I worried that I would have trouble interacting with creators of already existing Wikipedia pages.”

    But as she began, Diana was excited to explore a new type of research and not just write another 1,000 word essay. The assignment was part of Dr. Tracy Perkins’ Food and Justice course at ASU, which looks at US food history, politics, and activism, with a particular focus on social inequality, social justice, and race and racism.

    “The assignment gives us an opportunity to discuss the social construction and politics of knowledge,” said Dr. Perkins. “Wikipedia contributors skew heavily white and male, and this impacts the kinds of content available on the site (articles on military history and video games are apparently particularly well-developed). This leaves a number of topics wide open for student contribution.”

    The Wikipedia assignment inspires students to synthesize a variety of sources in their own words and translate complex academic topics for a general reader. This not only strengthens students’ writing skills, but benefits Wikipedia’s readership.

    Students added course-related content that didn’t exist before on Wikipedia: more detailed historical background about the US Department of Agriculture, information on healthcare access for United Farm Workers, and what the agriculture programs were like at Japanese internment camps. Diana in particular created a brand new article on Wikipedia about Garcia v. Vilsack, an impactful court case brought by Hispanic farmers against the USDA. In total, pages that students worked on have received 464,000 pageviews since the course wrapped in Spring 2022.

    “If the goal is to explain a topic, event, or concept, I would prefer to do a Wikipedia assignment,” Diana shared. “What I enjoyed most was having the ability to activate the creative part of my brain in terms of choosing the vernacular and format of my Wikipedia article. Because it reaches such a wide audience, a Wikipedia article should be easy to read and understand. In my opinion, this might be easier to comprehend and then share that information to someone else as opposed to reading a complex academic paper that leaves you confused at the end.”

    Diana says that the assignment inspired a new sense of pride in her work and has helped prepare her for her next chapter: pursuing a certificate of completion in paralegal studies at Phoenix College.

    “While it was one of the most tedious aspects of the assignment, editing and reediting is a skill that I am currently using as I start the next part of my academic journey. In all honesty, I have never been satisfied by any of my academic work and this assignment forced me to read and reread and then repeat that same process with editing. Therefore, I am able to understand and appreciate how much time and effort I actually put into my academic work.”

    Before the assignment, aimlessly browsing Wikipedia pages seemed almost second nature to Diana. Now, understanding the site’s reach and knowing how to edit, she takes a new lens to what she reads there–activating the critical thinking skills that a Wikipedia assignment helps strengthen.

    “I did make an edit after the assignment ended. On my hometown Wikipedia page I added in some information about the indigenous people who were living on the land prior to its naming. It is important to acknowledge and share that information for students and those who are curious to learn about the rich history of the area.”

    “This experience helped shed the stereotype that Wikipedia is a free-for-all in terms of content. The validity of the content posted can be traced at the bottom of the page and in a time where misinformation is as accessible as Wikipedia, this is incredibly important.”

    Wiki Education has free assignment templates, tools, and support for the Wikipedia assignment. Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more.

    A new mini Wikimedian in Residence at The Mixed Museum

    14:59, Wednesday, 14 2022 September UTC

    A new Wikimedia Residency is starting this month, in mini format. One of our Connected Heritage Digital Skills Wikimedians, Leah Emary, will work with The Mixed Museum for one day a week between September and December 2022. The residency has a few goals:

    1. To work with Director Chamion Caballero and others affiliated with the museum to incorporate material from their collections into the Wikimedia Projects.
    2. To understand existing practices at the museum and incorporate Wikipedia editing, Wikimedia Commons uploads, and Wikidata where possible.
    3. To identify gaps on Wikipedia around the history of racial mixing in Britain and use the museum’s scholarship, research and expertise to fill them. 
    4. To train and upskill museum staff, volunteers, interns and freelancers in how to edit Wikimedia projects.

    This partnership is especially exciting for Wikimedia UK, because it addresses an important and under-represented topic on the Wikimedia projects.

    The Mixed Museum, with only one full-time staff member, relies heavily on partnerships to conduct its exciting and innovative work. In addition to co-curating exhibitions with academics and artists, the museum currently hosts a folk musician as the organisation’s first Artist in Residence. Director Chamion Caballero says that partnership work is critical to small organisations like The Mixed Museum, not only for producing new and creative content, but also for building robust support networks that help increase capacity to connect, learn, share and grow. She notes that for the museum, ‘our partnerships have helped all involved to reach wider audiences, as well as access ideas, skills and funding that would be much more difficult to achieve alone.’

    The residency builds upon the work of two interns earlier this year, who improved Wikipedia articles based on research for the Mixed Race Irish Families in Britain, 1700-2000 exhibition. You can find out more about that project here

    Host a resident

    Are you interested in hosting a mini-residency at your heritage or cultural organisation? Come see what Connected Heritage is all about at our free, hour long webinar on Thursday 13th October at 12:30pm.

    Book a 121

    If you know you’re a good fit and would like to talk about hosting an editathon or undertaking a Wiki project at your organisation, book a half hour online meeting with the team.

    Get stuck in

    If you would like to try your hand at editing, we would welcome you to our potluck wikithon on 30th September 2022 at 10am.

    Stay in touch

    Follow us on Twitter:

    @wikimediauk

    @wiki_hinnie

    @LeahEmary

    Sign up to our mailing list

    The post A new mini Wikimedian in Residence at The Mixed Museum appeared first on WMUK.

    Episode 121: BTB Digest 19

    15:55, Tuesday, 13 2022 September UTC

    🕑 26 minutes

    It's another BTB Digest! Clips from five recent episodes. Matthew Westerby explains the challenges of storing dates, Lionel Scheepmans extols Wikiversity, Adam Baso and Julia Kieserman ponder the future of Wikipedia in a mechanized world, Brian Wolff shares his thoughts on Asana, and Jake Orlowitz recounts the highs and (somewhat) lows of working on The Wikipedia Adventure.

    이 포스트는 다음의 언어로도 읽을 수 있습니다: : اَلْعَرَبِيَّةُ, 中文, Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English, Español, Français, हिंदी, Русский, Português, & 한국어.

    2022년 9월 13일 — 위키백과와 위키미디어 프로젝트를 지원하는 비영리 단체인 위키미디어 재단은 위키백과와 위키미디어 프로젝트의 사운드 로고를 찾기 위한 “모든 사람의 지식의 소리” 공모전을 개최합니다. 현재 접수를 받고 있으며, 10월 10일까지 soundlogo.wikimedia.org를 통해 제출하실 수 있습니다. 

    사운드 로고, 사운드 트레이드마크라고도 하는 짧은 소리 컬렉션을 활용하여 시청각 및 오디오 전용 설정에서 브랜드를 나타냅니다. 사운드 로고는 전 세계적으로 오디오 기술의 부상과 함께 인기를 얻었습니다. 음성 비서 사용자의 규모는 2015년에 5억4410만명에서, 2021년 26억명으로 증가하고 있습니다.  

    위키미디어 프로젝트는 음성 지원 장치에 대한 다른 웹사이트 및 일반 지식 쿼리에 점점 더 많은 힘을 실어주고 있습니다. 사운드 로고는 청취자가 온라인 어디에서나 위키백과 혹은 위키미디어 사이트의 지식에 액세스할 때 이를 알 수 있도록 도와줍니다.

    위키미디어의 브랜드 디렉터 Zack McCune는 “사람들이 새로운 방식으로 위키미디어 프로젝트의 지식을 접할 때 위키미디어 브랜드는 새로운 형식으로 존재해야 합니다,”라고 말했습니다. “사운드 로고 공모전은 “자유 지식”을 상징하는 소리가 무엇인지 질문합니다. 우리는 위키미디어 프로젝트 및 운동의 집단지성으로 만들어가는 지혜를 반영하면서 그 질문에 답하는 것을 목표로 하는 콘테스트를 만들었습니다.” 

    이 공모전은 위키미디어 재단이 위키백과 및 위키미디어 프로젝트를 작성하고 편집하는 자원봉사자인 위키미디어 운동과 긴밀히 협의하여 설계했습니다. 이 컨텍스트는 위키백과의 로고인 퍼즐 글로브의 초기 버전을 만든 2003년 콘테스트를 포함하여 자원 봉사자가 운영한 이전 로고 콘테스트를 모델로 합니다. 전 세계의 참여를 유도함으로써 이 공모전은 위키미디어 프로젝트와 자유 지식 운동의 개방적이고 협력적인 정신을 반영하는 것을 목표로 합니다.

    공모전 제출작은 위키미디어 운동의 기여자 7명과 MassiveMusic 사운드 전문가와 음악가 5명으로 구성된 선택 위원회가 검토할 것입니다. 위원회는 자신의 전문성을 결합하여 제출물을 쉽게 불러올 수 있고 오디오 설정에서 채택하고 위키미디어 운동의 가치를 반영할 수 있는 10개의 소리로 좁힐 것입니다. 이 10개의 사운드는 11월 29일부터 최종 우승 사운드를 선택하기 위한 투표를 위해 공개됩니다.

    최종 우승자는 2023년에 발표될 예정이며, 미화 $2,500달러의 상금과 함께 MassiveMusic의 도움으로 사운드 로고를 다시 녹음하기 위해 녹음 스튜디오로 여행 비용을 지원받습니다. 또한 최종 10명의 후보자에게는 소정의 한정판 기념품을 드릴 예정입니다.

    위키 러브 모뉴먼트 공모전의 기확자이면서, 이번 공모전의 선택 위원회의 구성원인 Lodewijk Gelauff는 “사운드 로고 공모전은 우리 운동에서 글로벌 사진 공모전과 시각적 로고 콘테스트를 조직하는 전통을 기반으로 하며 위키미디어 브랜딩을 사운드의 새로운 풍경으로 가져온다. 위키미디어 운동의 사운드 로고는 오래 전에 만들었어야 했습니다. 우리는 마침내 우리 운동과 함께 자신의 지식을 소리에 대한 전문 지식과 결합하여 우리를 나타내고 여러 플랫폼에서 위키미디어 지식을 연결하는 소리 로고를 정의하게 된 것을 기쁘게 생각한다”고 말했습니다.

    모든 사람들의 지식의 소리 공모전은 위키미디어 2030의 전략 권고안(보다 구체적으로 자유 지식 혁신에 대한 권장 사항입니다)을 따릅니다.

    MassiveMusic의 이사이자 연구 전략가인 Aifric Lennon은  “이 진정으로 독특하고 미래 지향적인 프로젝트에서 위키미디어 자원봉사자 및 재단과 긴밀히 협력하게 되어 기쁩니다. 소셜 미디어, 스마트 스피커, 비디오 스트리밍 플랫폼, 팟캐스트, 앱과 같이 오디오 우선 터치포인트가 진화하는 세상에서 우리의 공통 목표는 현재와 미래에 위키미디어 콘텐츠가 사운드를 통해 표현되도록 하는 것입니다.” 이라고 말했습니다.  “음악은 국경을 넘어 공동체를 결속시키는 특별한 힘을 가지고 있습니다. 우리는 전 세계에서 제출된 사운드 로고를 검토하고 자유 지식을 널리 공유하는 위키미디어 운동이 가치를 나타내는 통일된 소리를 찾도록 도울 수 있기를 기대합니다.” 

    언론 연락처

    [email protected] 

    위키미디어 재단에 대하여

    위키미디어 재단은 위키백과와 다른 위키미디어 자유 지식 프로젝트를 운영하는 비영리 조직입니다. 저희의 비전은 지구상의 모든 사람들이 모든 지식을 자유롭게 공유할 수 있는 세상을 만들어 나가는 것입니다. 우리는 모든 사람이 우리가 공유하는 지식에 기여할 수 있는 잠재력이 있으며 모든 사람이 해당 지식에 자유롭게 접근할 수 있어야 한다고 믿습니다.우리는 위키백과와 위키미디어 프로젝트를 호스트하고, 위키미디어 콘텐츠를 읽고, 기여하고, 공유하기 위한 소프트웨어 경험을 구축하고, 위키미디어를 가능하게 하는 자원 봉사 커뮤니티와 파트너를 지원하고, 위키미디어와 무료 지식이 번성할 수 있도록 하는 정책을 옹호합니다. 위키미디어 재단(Wikimedia Foundation)은 미국 캘리포니아 샌프란시스코에 사무실이 있는 미국 501(c)(3) 면세 기관입니다.

    모든 사람들의 지식의 소리 공모전에 대해서 soundlogo.wikimedia.org 를 방문해 더 자세히 알아보실 수 있습니다.

    사운드 로고 관련 자주 묻는 질문 (FAQ)