Simson Garfinkel conducted Wikipedia assignments in his Ethics and Data Science course at George Washington University between 2019 and 2022. He previously worked as a data scientist for the Department of Homeland Security and US Census Bureau. He is also a journalist who covers information technology, computer security, and privacy.

Teaching with Wikipedia was a transformative experience for both my students and me. I strongly recommend that faculty members consider incorporating Wiki Education into their curricula—especially faculty working in STEM fields.

For three years, I used the Wiki Education platform as one of the core elements for a course I taught as a part-time faculty member at George Washington University. Since then, I’ve discovered that few faculty members know about this incredible resource. We need to get the word out!

In my experience, Wiki Education helps students become stronger writers and better academics. It helps them to better understand the process of consuming and producing knowledge for online communities. And students get to see the immediate results of their work—substantive improvements to Wikipedia. These improvements can have a lasting impact even after the course concludes.

Teaching with Wikipedia involves much more than simply getting students to read, edit, and write Wikipedia articles. Wiki Education has developed an entire curriculum that includes training modules (with exercises and comprehension checks) that teach how to write with sources, what constitutes plagiarism, as well as the actual mechanics of editing a Wikipedia article. Wiki Education also has a dashboard that allows faculty to monitor their students’ progress through the trainings, the articles that students decide to create or edit as part of the course, the work students do in their “sandbox,” and the edits that students make to the articles on the production Wikipedia system.

All of the students in my graduate course on data science ethics were familiar with Wikipedia at the start of the semester, of course, but none of my students realized that they could actually edit Wikipedia themselves. Indeed, most of them had been told in high school and college that they should never use Wikipedia as a reference, because it wasn’t reliable. Of course, they still used Wikipedia—they just never admitted it to their teachers.

With this backstory, most of my students were genuinely surprised on the first day of class when I told them about the prominent role that Wikipedia plays in our society—and my belief that, as Wikipedia users, we have a moral obligation to correct incorrect information on the site when they see it. That’s because Wikipedia information is widely incorporated into everything from search engine results to artificial intelligence models, and it’s read by billions of people all over the world.

Quite frankly, my students were stunned that they could click the “Edit” button on a Wikipedia article, make a change, and have the result immediately reflected on Wikipedia. Many of them thought that proposed changes first had to be reviewed by a human editor. Once they understood that all changes were live, they then started to wonder why there wasn’t more vandalism. This engendered a discussion of community norms, social expectations, and both the possibility and danger of having algorithms police online spaces.

Even though I was teaching graduate students, the vast majority of them had never written for an audience other than a teacher or their friends on social media. Many were terrified by the idea that their writing would be on Wikipedia itself, viewable by anyone on the planet. Some were concerned that another Wikipedia editor might come along and criticize, correct, or simply revert what they had done. Most students were able to overcome this fear by the end of the semester. The Wiki Education dashboard made it easy to find the students who were reluctant to edit or write, which made it easy for me to provide additional support.

After students learn the basics of how Wikipedia works and how to edit articles, the Wiki Education program has students choose an article that they will either edit or write from scratch. Here again, there are tools to help students, including lists of “stub” articles in need of expansion. One of my students discovered the WikiProject Women in Red, which seeks to increase the percentage of Wikipedia biographies about women, which gave the class facts and data for discussing the presentation of women online. (As of September 2022, more than 80% of Wikipedia’s biographies are of men.) Another student made significant contributions to a page about a famous American artist. Still another had studied financial history and made significant contributions (including a graph) to better explain an important financial event.

One of the most intellectually engaging aspects of the Wikipedia assignment was what happened after students starting making edits to the article on Wikipedia, outside the safe space of their sandbox. Within days—and sometimes within hours—another Wikipedia editor would edit what my students had done! This sort of direct feedback from individuals outside the classroom was unsettling for many students at first, but it provided external validation that I could never have provided myself.

Occasionally, the edits were misinformed or even misanthropic, which also provided an important opportunity for discussion and analysis. In the intellectual world of Wikipedia, many misunderstandings can be addressed with stronger writing and better references.

Plagiarism is a growing problem in academia, and I wasn’t spared having to address the issue in the Wikipedia assignment. Wikipedia’s platform has a number of very sophisticated plagiarism detection tools. When I had students plagiarize, the student’s edits to their article were reverted and I, as the faculty member, was informed. In my experience, students were more willing to admit wrongdoing and address the underlying issue of plagiarism when the accusation came from Wikipedia than in non-Wikipedia assignments when the accusation came from me, the faculty member.

One of the problems I had with the Wikipedia assignment was conveying to students my expectations for how much work was enough. For many topics, the reason that Wikipedia articles are short or nonexistent is that there is not much in the way of authoritative, citable, secondary sources that meet Wikipedia’s citation standards. Students wanted quantifiable metrics—how many words do we need to contribute to get an A? Many students, trained their entire academic career to write papers of a specific length, were flummoxed by the open-ended nature of the Wikipedia assignment—an assignment that basically instructs students to make a significant contribution to Wikipedia.

The Wiki Education platform also includes a system to allow for peer reviews. That is, students can be assigned to review one or more articles of other students in their class. The underlying platform does a great job facilitating these reviews, and students really do benefit from having their work commented on by other students. Unfortunately, these benefits only accrue if one student actually writes their article when the article is due and the second student actually reviews it on time. Given that it is rare for 100% of the class to get their assignments in on time in part-time masters programs, I found this aspect of the Wikipedia assignment to be more hit-or-miss.

I believe that the Wikipedia assignment is particularly important for students in STEM programs because these programs frequently undervalue the importance of written communication. This is a disservice the students, as the ability to critically evaluate information and write about complex ideas for a general audience is an important professional skill for every scientist and technologist.

The assignment also transformed me and my teaching. It gave me a view into the inner world of my students through a window that would have otherwise been closed, by allowing me to see how people outside the classroom reacted to my students’ work, and to address those issues together with the students.

To learn more about incorporating an assignment like this into higher education courses, visit teach.wikiedu.org for our free assignment templates, dashboard, and support. Read additional instructor testimonials here.

🕑 1 hour 8 minutes

Eric Gardner is a senior software engineer on the Design Systems team at the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been heavily involved in the introduction of the Vue.js library into MediaWiki, and the creation of the related Codex library.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Eric Gardner WMF page
  • Eric's homepage
• WMF Design Systems Team
• Jekyll Wikipedia article
• 11ty (Eleventy) JS library
• RFC: Adopt a modern JavaScript framework for use with MediaWiki (2019)
• "Second-guessing the modern web" (Tom MacWright blog post)
• "Islands Architecture" (Jason Miller blog post)
• Astro web framework
• Wikimedia Commons Media Search 
• Codex JS library
  • Codex documentation

In December, the Supreme Court will hear “one of the most significant election law cases… well, ever,” according to the nonpartisan law and policy institute, The Brennan Center for Justice. The issue? Independent state legislature theory.

If you don’t know the in’s and out’s of the case, you’re not alone. Thousands are turning to Wikipedia to understand just what this case might mean for the future of United States elections. Before July though, people wouldn’t have found much. But thanks to Aaron Franklin, a third-year J.D. student at Stanford Law, there’s an entire Wikipedia article on the subject.

What is “independent state legislature theory” and why is it such a big deal?

Independent state legislature theory (ISL) asserts that state lawmakers should have authority to draw congressional maps and regulate federal elections without fearing the same degree of oversight or second-guessing from state supreme courts. North Carolina Republican state lawmakers in favor of adopting this theory have based their Supreme Court court filing on a disputed clause that Charles Pinckney purportedly presented in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. As NPR noted, if the Supreme Court adopts the theory, “a once-fringe legal theory could reshape federal elections.” Independent state legislature theory could overturn voting reforms and hundreds of state constitutional provisions, as well as threaten the security of registration records, disrupt mail voting processes, and impact thousands of federal election policies.

What is Wikipedia’s role in this political conversation?

Aaron created the Wikipedia article about the subject as part of Heather Joy and Katherine Ott‘s Advanced Legal Research course at Stanford Law last spring. Throughout the term, students were to create an original Wikipedia article, or edit an existing one, on a particular legal topic as part of Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program. Aaron understood that Wikipedia has strict rules about illustrating concepts in a neutral, non-political tone. And so far he had only observed passionate and contentious conversation about the subject in the news.

“One of the reasons that I was interested in writing the article was because I found it difficult to find an unbiased discussion of the theory that wasn’t interested in either advocating for or critiquing its justifications,” Aaron says. “It was especially important for me to accurately represent the textualist and originalist logic behind the independent state legislature theory in a way that adhered to Wikipedia’s neutrality principles. I hope readers will come away with a better understanding of exactly how ISL purports to interpret our constitution, which will hopefully allow them to develop their own sense of whether that interpretation is plausible or not.”

The Wikipedia assignment is unique in that it allows students to practice concise, neutral, and well-sourced writing on a world stage. In the case of this particular article, Aaron is already informing thousands of people with his coursework. The same reach can’t often be said for a research paper.

“I think writing and revising a Wikipedia article is a great assignment because it allows the general public to benefit from work you’d otherwise be producing for an audience of one or two people,” Aaron says. “And when your schoolwork is put on display for all to see, it adds an extra incentive to do well.”

As an aspiring lawyer, Aaron says he won’t often be tasked with producing this kind of unbiased writing in the future. “But I will be tasked with breaking down complex subject matter and writing coherently about it for an audience that may have had no previous exposure to the subject. Writing this article definitely helped me further develop this skill.”

By becoming an editor of Wikipedia, Aaron has joined a worldwide network of volunteers who devote their time to creating and updating the greatest repository of free knowledge of all time.

“In some ways, publishing this article and watching it being edited by others brought to mind the Ship of Theseus,” Aaron says. “Eventually, there might not be a single line in the article that was actually something I wrote, but I’ll probably still feel a sense of pride and ownership over it. People shouldn’t be worried about publishing an article for all to see and edit. Even if the article ends up looking completely different from the one that you originally published, the work that you put in to create that initial version is invaluable to those editors that come along later.”

In this tangential and neutral way, Aaron is participating in an important discussion–one that isn’t just confined to Wikipedia–that will shape democracy in the United States. As midterm election polls open, changes in governance is on the mind of every voter across the country.

“ISL has a lot of implications for state rules governing redistricting and regulating federal elections generally,” Aaron says. “While it may be unlikely that the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections will be directly affected by the rise of sympathy for ISL, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear Moore v. Harper during its 2022-2023 term. The decision in that case may make ISL the law of the land. Generally speaking, I believe it is important for citizens of a state to know who holds political power in that state and when/how that power changes hands–I believe that having this article on Wikipedia will aid precisely this kind of understanding.”

To learn more about incorporating an assignment like this into higher education courses, visit teach.wikiedu.org for our free assignment templates, dashboard, and support.

It was a dream comes true for the students and staff of the Federal University of Kashere who were sitting idle at home due to the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities industrial strike when the opportunity to become wikimedia editors presented itself. The Wikimedia Promotions in Federal University of Kashere was organised by Muib Shefiu as a one month training and awareness programme that rigorously trained participants on logical and reliable ways of contributing to the free encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, Wiki common and Wikidata.

The program campaign that started on the 24th of September 2022 and ended on the 24th October, 2022 successful created awareness for over six hundred people, it sees to the creation of account for a hundred people, it trained fifty participants and it has more than a thousand contributions across Wikimedia Foundation Projects.

The program had two sections; online and physical. The online training was facilitated by Bukola O James, Tesleemah Taye Abdulkareem and Abdulkareem, Taoheedah Kehinde. It was carried out in two days 24th and 25th September, 2022. During the training, the participants were introduced to what wikimedia projects are and the various ways in which they can contribute to the major Wikimedia projects.

On the 1st of October, 2022, the first physical training took place. The training that was facilitated by Abubakar A Gwanki , Musaddam Idriss Musa, Adamu Usman Garko and Babatunde Abdulrahman was  a hands on experience training. The participants were taken through the journey of the systematic and logical ways of contributing to the Wikimedia projects.

Consequently, three weeks closely monitored edit-a-thon was flagged off. An activity that see to the creation/ edition of close to three hundred Wikipedia articles, creation of over one hundred wikidata items and the uploading of over six hundred non copyrighted photos on Commons.

Moreover, the last physical training training took place on the 22nd of October, 2022. In this training, the participants were retrained especially on the common mistakes and errors they commited during the edit-a-thon.

Most importantly, the participants were certified and their massive positive feedbacks on different social media expressing the effectiveness of the training testify to the success of the programme. Also, it was discovered that the training was a dream comes true for the participants as many of them have been curious to know how information are being added to Wikipedia and how they can be the brain behind it.

25/10/2022-31/10/2022

Mapping campaigns

• OSM Cameroon shared their experience of a land cover mapping campaign on the Missing Maps blog.

Mapping

• dcapillae has created two infographics that describe ► how to map street parking spaces reserved for people with reduced mobility and spaces reserved for recharging electric vehicles.
• Hans Thompson reported on a dispute over new names for two mountains in Chugach State Park in Alaska.
• Jake Coppinger has mapped the controversial electronic billboards in Sydney and created a live map that uses the Overpass API to extract the data.
• The following proposals are waiting for your comments:
  • Start moving proposal announcements to the OSM Community forum.
  • Substitute passenger_information_display=* with departures_board=*.
• Rashid86 enhanced ► the OSM mapping of Ural River basin in the Zelenovsky district, West Kazakhstan, by adding relationships to existing streams.
• Grant Slater described an idea to create a map style that would highlight weaknesses in the OSM database, e.g. ‘change all highway=motorway/trunk/primary/secondary/tertiary without a surface=* tag to all display as a single simple road line type’.

Community

• [1] Włodzimierz Bartczak (OSM user Cristoffs), vice president of OSM Poland, is the UN Mapper of the Month for November.
• Censorship of a post and closing of a discussion about HOT on the OpenStreetMap Community was made without prior warning by a moderator who is a HOT employee and part of the Forums governance team.The post What happens if let others keep sponsoring against OpenStreetMap? discusses the 2017 HOT Google Ads that assured better positioning in Google searches. The moderator said that he saw a violation of the OSM Etiquette Guidelines.

  A participant underlined the moderator’s apparent conflict of interest. To prevent this happening again, there is an urgent need to clarify how moderators should behave in the event of a conflict of interest.

• The censoring of a post on the OpenStreetMap Community website has triggered discussion about how conflicts of interest should be handled, which brought community leaders into the discussion. One participant suggested that hiding or closing a post can be counterproductive and often a polite rebuttal will work. A second said that there was no obvious violation of the OSM Etiquette Guidelines.The HOT-affiliated moderator recognised that his handling of the previous topic was not ideal and reported that there are not enough moderators helping to review all the flags. Other reported that they are there more for technical support and didn’t sign up to be moderators. One says to hurry up with finding some good mods for the global categories whom the community can trust.
• Anne-Karoline Distel shared more archaeological discoveries in her diary and provided a short video about them.
• One of the Chinese community’s active contributors reported ► that OpenStreetMap was blocked in China by the GFW, including the API and tiles.
• Have a look at this video (voice: and , subtitles: ) about the volunteers who assisted at SotM in Florence.
• Juan Arellano (CWG translator) interviewed Andrés Gómez (OSM Colombia) about note-a-thons, group activities solving OSM map notes.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Rob Nickerson commented on why the decision to not hold a State of the Map in 2023 was wrong in his perspective.

Events

• The FOSSGIS Conference 2023 will take place in Berlin from 15 to 18 March 2023. The Call for Participation has been made ►.

OSM research

• Pietro Folco’s team published a study on data-driven micromobility (for example, bicycles or e-scooters) network planning. By tweaking the demand and crashes trade-off, this could provide urban planners with multiple short-term scenarios. A demo is available with three Italian cities.

Maps

• Tankaru has created a web page where you can easily switch between numerous map providers. Browser extensions are available, but can be difficult to use when listing too many services.
• Tracestrack has updated its Carto maps with open landcover data from the ESA WorldCover 2021 project. This results in more vivid and realistic low zoom maps.

Software

• Ilya Zverev has released version 3.0 of Every Door. Among other improvements he has improved handling and zoom.

Programming

• Sarah Heidekorn from HeiGIT reports that the OSHDB and ohsome API are now updated hourly. The OSHDB allows users to investigate the evolution of the amount of data and contributions to OSM, while the ohsome API is a generic web API for in-depth analysis of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data with a focus on its history.
• Sarah Heidekorn, from HeiGIT, presented the latest chapter in the ohsome region of the month series. This time, they’re looking at the temporal development of highways and how to add smoothness information, as well as social facilities and updates on map development for Kyiv.

Releases

• StreetComplete has released a huge update with v48.0. The major changes are an ‘Addresses Overlay’ to efficiently map addresses on-site and a ‘Shops Overlay’ to map and check what shops exist in local shopping areas. A lot of of performance improvements, bug fixes and new quests were also added.

Did you know …

• … that the official network map of Deutsche Bahn’s long distance train services was (once again) created using Microsoft PowerPoint?
• … Klas Karlsson’s was surprised by better than anticipated results using a GoPro on a stick and @OpenDroneMap?

OSM in the media

• Ki-Joune Li, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Pusan National University, South Korea, pointed ► to OSM as an important success in the fight against data hegemony.
• In the Rhön ► and Bavarian ► Forests there are ‘digital guardians’, who want to identify illegal routes online that lead through sensitive protected areas and have illegal tour tips deleted. They also help to correctly map the boundaries of protected areas and trail permissions in OSM.

Other “geo” things

• Marie Patino wrote in MapLab, a Bloomberg newsletter, about how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is being monitored by the watchful eyes of commercial satellites like no other conflict before.
• Miettinen Jesse / Blenderesse revealed the first results from a city generator that impressively creates random 3D city models.
• A French mountain biker spent ten hours literally hanging ► on for dear life from a cliff near the Cascade de l’Oule after going on a ride following Google Maps, which is a general service that is not adapted to mountain bike trails and shouldn’t be followed blindly.
• The Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology is looking for a software engineer to work in the OSM routing services field. Depending on the applicant’s experience, they will perform tasks within the field of route planning and smart mobility.
• The Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology is looking for a student assistant for communication tasks. The applicant will support the Openrouteservice team in communication with their users.
• Dave Smith has discovered a lake in Finland… that looks like Finland. Its origin and status has been revealed, as a quick search on OpenStreetMap would have done.
• The New York Department of Transportation released a list of about a hundred car-free streets (‘Trick-or-Streets’) to celebrate Halloween night. A map is available which may depict a far from good view of pedestrian considerations in neighbourhoods such as Park Slope.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Aberdeen City	Scottish Open Data Unconference		2022-11-05 – 2022-11-06
City of Subiaco	Social Mapping Sunday: Rokeby Road		2022-11-06
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 月聚會 #46		2022-11-07
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-11-07
Lajoux	Sensibilisation OpenStreetMap		2022-11-08
Lajoux	Sensibilisation OpenStreetMap (visioconférence)		2022-11-08
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-11-09
	HOT Tasking Manager Monthly Meet Up		2022-11-09
West Valley City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-11-10
Köln	OSM-Stammtisch Köln		2022-11-09
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-11-10
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-11-09
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2022-11-09
Berlin	173. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch	✓	2022-11-10
Montrouge	Réunion des contributeurs de Montrouge et du Sud de Paris		2022-11-10
Washington	Mapping USA + WikiConferenceNA	✓	2022-11-11 – 2022-11-12
City of New York	Mapping USA/Wiki Conference New York City		2022-11-12
	OSM Local Chapters & Communities Virtual Congress		2022-11-12
津山市	オープンデータソンin津山		2022-11-13
København	OSMmapperCPH		2022-11-13
	157. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-11-15
City of Edinburgh	OSM Edinburgh Social		2022-11-15
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-11-15
Roma	Incontro dei mappatori romani e laziali – novembre 2022		2022-11-16
Zürich	Missing Maps Zürich November Mapathon		2022-11-16
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe		2022-11-16
Ville de Bruxelles – Stad Brussel	FOSS4G & State of the Map Belgium		2022-11-17
Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta	OSMGeoWeek Indonesia 2022		2022-11-17
Letterkenny Municipal District	Online Map & Chat: Manor, Co Donegal, Ireland		2022-11-17
Zürich	10 Jahre SOSM mit Fondue-Abend		2022-11-17
Barcelona	Geomob Barcelona		2022-11-22
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-11-23
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-11-22
Gent	Meetup @ TomTom Gent		2022-11-23
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-11-25
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第33回 佛光寺		2022-11-27

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Elizabete, Lejun, Mannivu, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, Strubbl, TheSwavu, YoViajo, andygol, derFred, 快乐的老鼠宝宝.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

When communicating about the climate crisis to the public, it’s important to get four main messages across:

1. The climate crisis is real, immediate, and human-caused.
2. The impacts are catastrophic, especially for humanity.
3. There is urgency to act now.
4. We already have solutions that can provide for a more equitable and just future.

Each of these messages faces threats: active discrediting from players who profit from the world’s inaction and the resulting confusion and exhaustion that these actions foster. After decades of misinformation and greenwashing campaigns, it’s no wonder that individuals feel overwhelmed, powerless, and tired when faced with all that needs to be done. So what can be done to motivate the public to demand action from elected officials and leaders? And where do each of us fit into the most important mission of our lifetimes?

November 6th marks the beginning of the United Nations’ 27th Climate Change Conference (COP27), where nations will account for their progress toward the goals set out in the Paris Agreement and renew commitments to keeping warming well below 2 degrees Celsius. As the president of the UN climate summits, Sameh Shoukry, said in his recent address, this conference is a unique opportunity for the world to “come together, mend multilateralism, rebuild trust and unite at the highest political levels to address climate change.”

Each of these central goals to mitigate the climate crisis–mending multilateralism, building trust, and uniting toward action–are inherent in another entity too that we all know and love: Wikipedia. Integrating scientific information into Wikipedia about the effects of the climate crisis and the solutions for solving it is one of the most powerful ways to influence the public’s understanding of climate.

• Mending multilateralism: Averaging 18 billion page views per month, Wikipedia is the 5th most visited website in the world.
• Building trust: Wikipedia is free from advertising or the influence of private interests. Its open access origins create the possibility of democratizing knowledge, and its community has worked for more than 20 years to fight mis- and dis-information.
• Uniting towards action: Wikipedia’s content has large, measurable effects on behavior. And its readers are not just students doing homework or friends settling an argument. Research shows that Wikipedia content affects scientific literature, tourism, and even judges’ legal rulings. It seems that Wikipedia plays a big (if unacknowledged) role in keeping knowledge systems running. The same is surely true of every field of serious intellectual and political endeavor.

Long-term, targeted efforts in public awareness are critical in the fight to solve the climate crisis. And that’s where Wiki Education can help. Wiki Education has a proven track record of helping scientists communicate research to the public through Wikipedia. Although the site is familiar to millions of us on the front-end, adding new information that sticks is a whole other game. Wiki Education has more than 12 years of experience training 100,000+ students, professors, scientists, and subject matter experts how to do this work. And what makes us unique as an organization? Whatever topic we target, we can really boost.

Wikipedia is a powerful tool for public education. If you had power to wield such a tool, what would you use it for? Solving the world’s biggest problems? Yeah, us too. But even as Wikipedia is an incredible tool for climate education, with the rapid changes in our environment and the urgency to convey these new developments, the site needs help keeping climate and conservation science up-to-date and accurate. As the only organization worldwide systematically improving Wikipedia’s content at scale, this is our call to everyone across all disciplines to join us in the task.

As Shoukry writes in his COP27 address, “We as international community have agreed and recognized that the magnitude of the climate challenge requires an inclusive partnership and collaboration amongst all stakeholders to deliver the action we need now in a people-centered and an all-of-society approach that ensures that no one is left behind.”

Where better to bring the global community along in this fight than through Wikipedia? Let us show you how.

If you’re interested in improving a particular area of interest on Wikipedia related to climate change, Wiki Education has the resources and know-how you need to do it. Explore starting a Wikipedia Initiative with us. If you’re an instructor in higher education in the US or Canada, consider using our assignment templates to have students write Wikipedia articles.

Thumbnail image composit of logo by Wikimedia Foundation via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0) and image by RCraig09 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

By Timo Tijhof

Hello, HTTP/2!

In 2016, the Wikimedia Foundation deployed HTTP/2 (or “H2”) support to our CDN. At the time, we used Nginx- for TLS termination and two layers of Varnish for caching. We anticipated a possible speed-up as part of the transition, and also identified opportunities to leverage H2 in our architecture.

The HTTP/2 protocol was standardized through the IETF, with Google Chrome shipping support for the experimental SPDY protocol ahead of the standard. Brandon Black (SRE Traffic) led the deployment and had to make a choice between SPDY and H2. We launched with SPDY in 2015, as H2 support was still lacking in many browsers, and Nginx did not support having both. By May 2016, browser support had picked up and we switched to H2.

Goodbye domain sharding?

You can benefit more from HTTP/2 through domain consolidation. The following improvements were achieved by effectively undoing domain sharding:

• Faster delivery of static CSS/JS assets. We changed ResourceLoader to no longer use a dedicated cookieless domain (“bits.wikimedia.org”), and folded our asset entrypoint back into the MediaWiki platform for faster requests local to a given wiki domain name (T95448, T107430).
• Speed up mobile page loads, specifically mobile-device “m-dot” redirects. We consolidated the canonical and mobile domains behind the scenes, through DNS. This allows the browser to reuse and carry the same HTTP/2 connection over a cross-domain redirect (T124482).
• Faster Geo service and faster localized fundraising banner rendering. The Geo service was moved from geiplookup.wikimedia.org to /geoiplookup on each wiki. The service was later removed entirely, in favor of an even faster zero-roundtrip solution (0-RTT): An edge-injected cookie within the Wikimedia CDN (T100902, patch). This transfers the information directly alongside the pageview without the delay of a JavaScript payload requesting it after the fact.

Could HTTP/2 be slower than HTTP/1?

During the SPDY experiment, Peter Hedenskog noticed early on that SPDY and HTTP/2 have a very real risk of being slower than HTTP/1. We observed this through our synthetic testing infrastructure.

In HTTP/1, all resources are considered equal. When your browser navigates to an article, it creates a dedicated connection and starts downloading HTML from the server. The browser streams, parses, and renders in real-time as each chunk arrives. The browser creates additional connections to fetch stylesheets and images when it encounters references to them. For a typical article, MediaWiki’s stylesheets are notably smaller than the body content. This means, despite naturally being discovered from within (and thus after the start of) the HTML download, the CSS download generally finishes first, while chunks from the HTML continue to trickle in. This is good, because it means we can achieve the First Paint and Visually Complete milestones (above-the-fold) on page views before the HTML has fully downloaded in the background.

In HTTP/2, the browser assigns a bandwidth priority to each resource, and resources share a single connection. This is different from HTTP/1, where each resource has its own connection, with lower-level networks and routers dividing their bandwidth equally as two seemingly unrelated connections. During the time where HTML and CSS downloads overlap, HTTP/1 connections each enjoyed about half the available bandwidth. This was enough for the CSS to slip through without any apparent delay. With HTTP/2, we observed that Chrome was not getting any CSS response until after the HTML was mostly done.

This HTTP/2 feature can solve a similar issue in reverse. If a webpage suffers from large amounts of JavaScript code and below-the-fold images being downloaded during the page load, under HTTP1 those low-priority resources would compete for bandwidth and starve the critical HTML and CSS downloads. The HTTP/2 priority system allows the browser and server to agree, and give more bandwidth to the important resources first. A bug in Chrome caused CSS to effectively have a lower priority relative to HTML (chromium #586938).

We confirmed the hypothesis by disabling SPDY support on the Wikimedia CDN for a week (T125979). After Chrome resolved the bug, we transitioned from SPDY to HTTP/2 (T166129, T193221). This transition saw improvements both to how web browsers give signals to the server, and the way Nginx handled those signals.

As it stands today, page load time is overall faster on HTTP/2, and the CSS once again often finishes before the HTML. Thus, we achieve the same great early First Paint and Visually Complete milestones that we were used to from HTTP/1. But, we do still see edge cases where HTTP/2 is sometimes not able to re-negotiate priorities quick enough, causing CSS to needlessly be held back by HTML chunks that have already filled up the network pipes for that connection (chromium #849106, still unresolved as of this writing).

Lessons learned

These difficulties in controlling bandwidth prioritization taught us that domain consolidation isn’t a cure-all. We decided to keep operating our thumbnail service at upload.wikimedia.org through a dedicated IP and thus a dedicated connection, for now (T116132).

Browsers may reuse connections for multiple domains if an existing HTTPS connection carries a TLS certificate that includes the other domain in its SNI information, even when this connection is for a domain that corresponds to a different IP address in DNS. Under certain conditions, this can lead to a surprising HTTP 404 error (T207340, mozilla #1363451, mozilla #1222136). Emanuele Rocca from SRE Traffic Team mitigated this by implementing HTTP 421 response codes in compliance with the spec. This way, visitors affected by non-compliant browsers and middleware will automatically recover and reconnect accordingly.

Further reading

• When Network is Faster than Cache, Simon Hearne, 2020.

Update, 3 November, 2022

The Wikimedia Foundation continues to monitor and engage in this situation as necessary for the goal of protection of our communities and preservation of our projects. We are aware of the ongoing threats from the Russian government regarding both our projects and volunteers contributing to them. As of this update, none of our sites are currently blocked in Russia and threats against volunteers are being addressed and mitigated where possible. The Foundation will continue to monitor this situation and provide further updates as this crisis continues to unfold.

Original post:

The Wikimedia movement’s commitment to provide reliable, verifiable information to the world becomes even more critical in times of crisis. The ongoing invasion of Ukraine has already caused unimaginable pain and suffering and impacted millions. Yet in times of upheaval, from pandemics to political turmoil to natural disasters, Wikimedians come together in the service of our collective mission. People are coming to the Wikimedia projects to learn facts, and Wikimedians around the world are collaborating to share their knowledge.

In addition to the work being done on the Wikimedia projects to document this crisis in 100 languages, people across the movement are hard at work to support the affected communities. In the most wiki way, we are starting a page to coordinate efforts on Meta-Wiki – and your help is needed. Anyone in the movement is encouraged to list their Wikimedia activities related to this crisis or ideas they have to help, so that we can collaborate and support each other where needed.

The Wikimedia Foundation stands in solidarity with the communities–those directly affected in Ukraine and all others who work to protect access to free knowledge. We are also reviewing the potential impacts that this crisis and the corresponding threats of censorship being made by the Russian government could have on the entire movement. We remain committed to sharing information as quickly as we are able, and we look forward to hearing from others across the movement.

This week the last upload campaigns for Wiki Loves Monuments 2022 have come to a close. While we wait for the teams and their juries to decide on their national winners, lets us take a moment to share with you the final report of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion research that was conducted by researcher and DEI Consultant Mesha Murali, for our Wiki Loves Monuments photo competition.

Picture above: Capela de Nossa Senhora da Conceição do Engenho Poxim, Brazil. 10^th prize in the national contest of Brazil in Wiki Loves Monuments 2020. Photo by Paul R. Burley, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Digitally documenting and preserving cultural heritage has recently gathered momentum. This is due to ongoing natural and human induced destruction of heritage sites. In times like this, digital documentation and archiving ensures continuity of community histories. It acts as a crucial information reservoir for future restorative projects.

Digital documentation is sharing and preserving information in the form of photographs, videos or audio clips. It allows under-represented communities to share their knowledge across time and space. This also gives these communities the opportunity to tell their story through their perspective. In doing so, local communities get to reclaim their pasts from majoritarian retelling. For example, WLM Ukraine documented the removal of Lenin statues in the country. This documentation gave an opportunity to the local community to talk about their relationship with the statue. These statues were considered historically important by the Ukrainian government. However, its removal was a way for the local community to express their detachment from the statue and its related heritage.

In this light, the WLM photography competition’s aim to document and archive built cultural heritage through photographs becomes more relevant. WLM has had 12 iterations and managed to document almost 3 million photos from across the world. The competition is an extension of Wikimedia’s endeavour to promote and cultivate free knowledge systems. Here communities document and share knowledge that they deem important. WLM has constantly worked towards being inclusive of different regions and their monuments. However, the diversity, equity and inclusivity analysis (DEI) of the competition highlights the need to take this effort one step further.

It encourages us to think about the kind of photographic data collected and the process of doing so. How successful are we in documenting heritage sites of marginalised and indigenous communities? What more can we do to ensure diversity of representation? It is important to ask these questions as they help us reflect on the narratives and histories that don’t get documented.

Most monuments submitted for the WLM competition are those that are ‘aesthetically’ good looking. These are likely to be well maintained popular tourist destinations. Such selective photography results in lower representation of monuments belonging to marginalised communities. Sites belonging to these communities are less likely to be protected and are susceptible to deterioration. Documenting these monuments can help emphasise the importance of preserving these sites. This ensures that cultural heritage and histories from the margin are documented and passed on to the future generation.

Another example of DEI issue faced is that of gender specific barriers to technology and resources. As part of the DEI research national WLM organisers were interviewed. Some of them shared that the participation rate among women is lower compared to men in their region. This may be due to different country or culture specific hurdles. For example, monuments in remote areas generally go unphotographed. This is due to higher cost of travel or due to concerns of safety. The latter is a deterrent especially for female photographers.

On the other hand, certain functioning religious monuments may follow gender based segregation. This limits the female photographer’s access to certain spaces in the heritage site. Acknowledging and working on such gender related roadblocks is essential. It helps us document a diverse range of perspectives. For example, in gender segregated sites male photographers are not allowed in spaces designated for women, and vice versa. As a result they may end up photographing only those aspects of the monument which they have access to, and documenting a partial narrative of the monument. Ensuring balanced gender participation helps us overcome this hurdle. It allows us to tell a layered story of access, culture, architecture and gender norms in the space.

Hence, paying attention to what is missing in our documentation makes us aware of our various DEI needs. In turn, it will help us create a diverse, equitable and inclusive space for everyone.

A more detailed analysis of the WLM DEI structure is available here: this English report is also available in Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Brazilian-Portuguese, Chinese Mandarin, French, Hausa, Hindi, Spanish, Urdu, and isiZulu.

People give to Wikipedia for many different reasons. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, ensures that every donation we receive is invested back into serving Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects, and our free knowledge mission. 

While many visit Wikipedia on a daily basis, it’s not always obvious what it takes to make that visit possible. Here are 7 reasons to donate to the Foundation that also clarify who we are, what we do, and why your donations matter: 

1. We’re a nonprofit, and readers and donors around the world keep us independent.

Many people are surprised to learn that Wikipedia is hosted by a nonprofit organization. It is actually the only website in the top-ten most-visited global websites to be run by a nonprofit. That’s important because we are not funded by advertising, we don’t charge a subscription fee, and we don’t sell your data. The majority of our funding comes from donations ($15 is the average) from people who read Wikipedia. Many see fundraising banners on Wikipedia and give through those. This model preserves our independence by reducing the ability of any one organization or person to influence the content on Wikipedia. 

We’ve long-followed industry best practices for nonprofits and have consistently received the highest ratings by nonprofit groups like Charity Navigator for financial efficiency and transparency. We also publish annual reports about our finances and fundraising that are open for anyone to review. 

2.  Wikipedia serves millions of readers and runs at a fraction of the cost of other top websites. 

Wikipedia is viewed more than 16 billion times every month. We have the same (if not higher) levels of global traffic as many other for-profit internet companies at a fraction of the budget and staffing. 

Around 700 people work at the Wikimedia Foundation. The majority work in product and technology ensuring quick load times, secure connections, and better reading and editing experiences on our sites. They maintain the software and infrastructure on which we operate some of the world’s most multilingual sites with knowledge available in over 300 languages. While our mission and work are unique, by comparison, Google’s translation tool currently supports 133 languages; Meta has more than 70,000 employees; and Reddit has over 1,400 employees. 

3. Reader donations support the technology that makes Wikipedia possible and improvements to how people read, edit, and share knowledge on Wikipedia. 

Powering free knowledge projects requires technology to keep the sites running and relevant, dedicated support to volunteers, and policy efforts that protect users and keep knowledge free.

About 43 percent of our budget goes to direct support in maintaining Wikipedia and Wikimedia sites. This includes support of technical infrastructure that allows billions of visits to Wikipedia monthly, as well as about 160 technical Wikimedia staff who contribute to the maintenance of our systems, including site reliability engineering, software engineering, security, and other roles. 

Because Wikipedia is available in 300 languages, it needs top-notch multilingual technology to ensure readers and editors can view and contribute knowledge in their preferred language. Funding also helps with improvements to the user experience on Wikipedia and supporting the growth of global volunteer editor communities, so that when people come to Wikipedia, they find knowledge that is relevant, accurate, and useful. 

4. We’ve evolved to meet new needs in a changing technology landscape and respond to new global threats.

If you regularly visited Wikipedia in our first decade, there was a good chance you’d get an error message on Wikipedia at some point. Because of our steady investments in technology, that’s no longer the case. New investments allow Wikipedia to handle record-breaking spikes in traffic with ease, preventing any disruption to the reading or editing experience. 

We’ve also adapted to meet new challenges, including sophisticated disinformation tactics and government censorship, as well as cybersecurity attacks and laws regulating companies that host websites. New security protocols limit the potential for attackers to take advantage of our sites, while our legal staff help to protect our free knowledge mission.

More than half of our traffic now comes from mobile devices. Voice-activated devices and websites increasingly leverage Wikipedia to serve their users’ knowledge needs. We continue to evolve to meet these preferences.

5. We manage our finances responsibly and balance Wikipedia’s immediate needs with long-term sustainability. 

You probably don’t use your checking account in the same way you use a savings account. One is probably for more day-to-day expenses and the other is likely for emergencies, like if your car suddenly breaks down, or for long-term financial goals, like retirement.  

It’s similar for nonprofits. We have two accounts that act like savings accounts for us. Our reserve is like a rainy day fund for emergencies, such as an economic crisis. 

Our endowment is a long-term permanent fund. The investment income from the endowment supports the future of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. These funds are set aside for particular long-term purposes. However, we use the vast majority of the donations we receive from Wikipedia readers to support the current work we are doing that year. 

Sustaining healthy financial reserves and having a working capital policy is considered a best practice for organizations of all types. The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Directors recently defined our working capital policy that is designed to sustain our work and provide support to affiliates and volunteers in the event of unplanned expenses, emergencies, or revenue shortfalls. It also enables us to have sufficient cashflow to cover our expenses throughout the year.

6. Supporting Wikipedia means you’re helping it become more representative of all the world’s knowledge. 

The Wikimedia Foundation supports individuals and organizations around the world with funding to increase the diversity, reach, quality, and quantity of free knowledge. Compared to two years ago, we have increased direct financial support to our volunteer movement by 140 percent. Recently, we made changes to the way we allocate our revenue to be more inclusive to newer and smaller Wikimedia affiliates.

While we recognize there are still big gaps to fill, knowledge on Wikipedia has become more globally representative of the world, as have the editors that contribute to the site. This is because of steady programmatic efforts led by Wikimedia volunteers, affiliates, and others many of whom have received funding, trainings, and other support from the Foundation. 

Compared to 2019, in 2021, our community of volunteer editors had grown by 58 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa; 21 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean; and 14 percent in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. 

Why does global representation of Wikipedia volunteer editors matter? It matters because Wikipedia is a reflection of the people who contribute to it. Diverse perspectives create higher quality, more representative, and relevant knowledge for all of us.  

7. Contributions from readers keep us going.

The humans who give back to Wikipedia — whether through donations, words of support, edits, or through the many other ways people contribute  — inspire us every day. All of us here at the Wikimedia Foundation want to take this opportunity to thank them. We’d like to share some of our favorite messages from donors over the years. We hope they move you as much as they have moved us: 

“I am astonished at the capabilities of Wikipedia! As I read scientific and medical articles on one monitor, I always have Wikipedia open on the other to check the meaning and background of the increasingly obscure terminology in these areas. Wikipedia is not only the largest collaborative project in human history, it’s the best!”

Donor from the US

“Please accept my heartfelt thanks for keeping Wikipedia going, for not letting it be anyone’s personal property, for maintaining its integrity, quality, and its sanctity, for making it accessible to anyone and everyone across the geography. I understand how difficult it can be to not compromise and keep going especially in today’s profit-seeking digital world.”

Donor from India

We hope that we helped to deepen your understanding about how important reader donations are to Wikipedia. If you have any questions, please check out our FAQ. 

If you are in a position to give, you can make a donation to Wikipedia at donate.wikimedia.org.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

– Laozi

As the year draws to a close, it’s time we recap some of the impact achieved, the learnings gathered, and the progress made in the ESEAP region (East Asia, South-East Asia, and the Pacific) under the new funding strategy.

Let’s start with some ESEAP-level statistics

33 geographies are grouped under the ESEAP Region. Our movement has 13 affiliates based in the region – 5 chapters and 8 user groups- and the many volunteers who may not be affiliated are active and regularly contribute to furthering our movement’s mission. 

ESEAP as a region contributes 16.6% of the global readership traffic (12 month average), with 33 billion unique views across all projects. Its share of unique global editors is 15.4%.

Between July 2021 and June 2022, the region received 11% of global funding (up from 7% in the previous year); this is a 135% increase from the previous year (USD 586,000 to USD 1.3 million), 94% of the total investments were directed to emerging communities. 77% (10/13) of recognized and active ESEAP affiliates have applied for and were awarded funding, with more in the pipeline in the coming months. 

The new funding strategy is an iterative process that will continue to grow and evolve with each round of applications, implementation, and reflection – we need to be agile to provide proactive support to our growing movement in ESEAP. This is our collective effort. 

So, here are 8 highlights of our movement’s remarkable achievements in the region. We need your support to take our work to the next level and want to work with you to create a welcoming and enabling environment for existing and future grantees. So, let’s continue reading!

1. Diversity in the Regional Funds Committee

We increased our committee members to 12; these members bring together a diverse, experienced, and community-focused mindset to the committee. These members are committed to the movement and have been contributing by editing, organizing, or lending other forms of support to the communities. We have people who have worked with the youth (an essential demographic of ESEAP), research, partnerships, and underrepresented groups (LGBTQI+)

Following the Wikipedia Education Program from Wikimania London in 2014, there was a u-turn on the community’s stance about students submitting their homework to Wikipedia. Pilot classes were conducted at Mahidol University and it was an opportunity to grow the volunteer base that turned out to be the backbone of Wikimedia Thailand today. 

Taweetham Limpanuparb (Taweetham), Member of ESEAP Funds Committee, Long-time volunteer from Thai Wikipedia

2. Increase in first time applications (more are welcomed!)

We saw an increase in new applicants globally, and ESEAP stood 2nd in the highest number of grants given to first-time applicants. Our new funding structure has diversified and enabled easy entry points for new grantees. Hence we saw 13 first-time applicants in the region.

To find out more about our funding process and the changes, get in touch with us (via [email protected])

3. Small and Everyday Wins pave the way for lasting impact and a growing legacy

Some of the fantastic impact in the region;

• Wikimedia Korea: Completed the first strategic planning exercise with Board members and welcomed diverse audiences into the movement with specific focus on socioeconomic, youth, gender, and neuro-diversity;
• Wikimedia Taiwan: Developed a robust open-access culture and close partnerships with Government and civil society organizations. Provided a supportive environment for indigenous local knowledge/ language Wikipedia/ communities to grow;
• Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia: Successfully opened their formal bank account to receive grant funding as an affiliate;
• Wikimedia Australia: Produced a three-year strategic and a detailed activity plan while securing multi-year funding. Australia is set to host the 2022 ESEAP conference Sydney in November, the first gathering for the region since 2019;
• Aotearoa | New Zealand User Group: Set up a working committee, completed strategic planning, successfully applied for first grant funding as a user group, and started the process to apply for non-profit status, all in 12 months;
• Wikimedia Thailand: Bringing the Thai editing community closer together, more engagements with youth led- and focused approach;
• Wikimedia Community User Group Hong Kong: Successfully applied for their first grant and built skill sets in planning, and budgeting, while being youth-led;
• Wikimedia Indonesia: Underwent a leadership renewal process, building and supporting new local Wikimedia communities, and made space for more volunteers to move from local to regional participation and representation

As our user group completes our third year of existence it’s inspiring to see the growing number of editors putting time into organizing events and projects. We’re changing from a group of individual editors into a community supporting one another with a diverse range of initiatives. The operating grant has accelerated this rate of change.

Victoria Leachman, President, Wikimedia User Group of Aotearoa New Zealand 

4. Increased focus on Partnerships through the Wikimedia Alliance Fund

Through the Wikimedia Alliance Fund, which supports mission-aligned organizations that are underrepresented in our movement, the ESEAP region welcomed 6 partners who are piloting new approaches to bring in more diverse content, contributors, and consumers of Wikimedia project content. These partners are crucial to establishing accelerated growth of the movement in ESEAP. For example, Analysis Policy Observatory (Australia); Creative Commons (Indonesia), Open Street Map (Indonesia), National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan), Open Street Map (Taiwan), Shin Leh Yuan Art Space (Taiwan)

The ESEAP region and Wikimedia Funding Programme have come a long way. While we are celebrating the success in the region, a lot of work is waiting to fill the gap in knowledge equity – including creating access to countries without representation yet.

Kartika Sari Henry (22Kartika), Member of ESEAP Funds Committee, Wikimedia Australia and long-time volunteer with Wikimedia Indonesia

5. Emergent trends in our grant applications

Program Delivery and Innovation

Globally, “youth” does not seem to be prioritized in programming. However, in the ESEAP region, youth-focused or youth-led projects are an emerging trend.

There are exciting innovations linked to culture & heritage, such as digital mapping to promote historical infrastructures and strong partnerships with Museums that develop specific projects focused on Wikimedia contributions. 

Regional Level Focus

All affiliates expressed interest and intent to contribute and participate more actively at a regional level. Some have included process indicators in their annual work plan on regional collaboration and partnerships, such as New Zealand and Australia affiliates. 

Building Movement-wide Capacity

With more flexible funding programs, we see increased demand for skills training for the community, paid staff, and Board members, from facilitation skills to cultural sensitivity training. Community members also have access to peer learning opportunities through Let’s Connect, which seeks to build an inclusive learning culture based on the notion that: we all have something of value to share – given the information to connect, the right spaces, and logistical support.

Growth and Diversification

All affiliates have identified content and representation gaps and are actively working on bridging these gaps on themes such as gender, indigenous communities/ First Nation, and youth. We see a more profound reflection and focus on equity and inclusion

Being a Wikimedia Regional Funds Committee member for ESEAP has been a fulfilling experience for me. It brought me a bigger insight on the unique needs of each applicant affiliate or alliance organization. It gives me delight in being part of the process that brings the wishes of the target community to life.

Butch Bustria (Exec8), Member of ESEAP Funds Committee, Wikimania Steering Committee and Movement Strategy Roles & Responsibilities Working Group. 

6. A Multi-lingual approach

12% of grant applications submitted were in a language other than English (i.e., Mandarin, Indonesian, Korean, and Japanese). Many required translation and interpretation support to engage and participate effectively. With the Foundation streamlining and increasing its translation and interpretation support, we will welcome applicants from more diverse geographies (in particular for rapid fund programs)

As a new member of the ESEAP funds committee, reading applications amazed me: in spite of language differences, all of us have the same problems. My aspiration is that communities will share strategies across languages. “Not just inviting partners to inform our thinking, but also letting partners lead us into areas that are outside our comfort zone.”–a key takeaway from my onboarding orientation on the topic of Review Mindset.

Yumiko Shibata (YShibata), ESEAP Funds Committee and part of wikimedia movement in Japan

7. Support beyond Funding: Let’s Connect and regional learning sessions

Building on the Let’s Connect peer learning program, Community Resources hopes to set aside spaces for reflection, connection, and collaboration at a regional level and globally across regional funds committees. In October 2022, we kicked off the inaugural ESEAP learning session, attended by close to 40 participants (the majority are existing grantees from rapid, alliances, and community fund programs). The session was rich in content on regional meta-level trends and provided participants with inputs on contributing to shared learning and localizing trends. 

8. Let’s Reconnect- The ESEAP Conference

One of the most significant milestones for our region is the focus of our communities on region-level convening, representation, and strategizing. A perfect example of this outlook is the ESEAP conference, which will be held in Sydney in November with the theme of reconnecting, something that is critical for the region as we emerge from the pandemic. The conference will be a moment for us all to regroup, reconvene and re-energize our strategy as we advance. 

The ESEAP Program officer and representatives from the ESEAP Funds Committee will join the conference in person. We are excited to continue our conversations and welcome all to reach out (via [email protected]) if you are interested in knowing more about the process and how we can support you in your planned endeavors. 

In December 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation released the first in a series of data-driven studies exploring the level of trust and understanding that people in different regions have in our projects and work, examining the views of groups underrepresented in our projects. The initial study focused on the United States. 

Today, we released data and analysis exploring community sentiments in Brazil, Nigeria, and South Africa. Alongside this data, we also launched a new data visualization tool that will allow greater visibility and increased potential for applying this research to our knowledge equity work and raising awareness amongst public audiences. 

Guided by the Wikimedia Movement’s strategic direction, the data opens opportunities for all of us to examine equity gaps in our projects through a fresh lens. It expands on the work the Wikimedia Foundation Communications Department is doing in regions to better understand perceptions of our work and the levels of trust and awareness people have in our projects. It also supports our “Open the Knowledge” initiative launched last year to unite our equity work under a common theme in order to bring more attention to these connected efforts. Through these insights, we can support avenues to close gaps in our projects across the movement, building toward the needs and preferences of the people we hope to reach with our free knowledge mission.  

In gathering this data, there have been different questions asked and different contexts examined depending on the country-focus. Demographics on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion vary significantly by country; as such, the methodology and focus was adjusted to account for these differences. While the data provides a snapshot of what diverse communities think about our projects and work, considerations of age, income, and community population size must also be examined in gleaning insights from the research. The research in South Africa, for example, must be considered against low awareness in the country of Wikipedia overall.

The data presents actionable insights for our work. Among these, the lack of representation perceived around local languages by Black South Africans is a key barrier to using Wikipedia, while being represented on Wikipedia is most important to Black and Asian women and LGBTQ+ communities. The lack of representation perceived around local languages by Black South Africans is a key barrier to using Wikipedia. Though Igbo and smaller ethnic groups in Nigeria do not feel represented on Wikipedia, their usage is still high, opening opportunities to make  them feel more represented on the site. Similarly, Black women in Brazil feel there are not enough articles that represent their race, religion and cultural background. However, they are also likely to consider using Wikipedia in the future and generally have positive views of the platform, creating an opportunity for more engagement. 

As with the previous release in the series, we met with and presented these findings to a group of Wikimedia volunteers and organizers focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Their insights continue to shape this effort, and we are deeply grateful for their role in making this work both visible and actionable. 

Any feedback or questions about this research can be submitted on the report’s talk page. Please share it with others and let us know how you are applying it to your work. We will be building further on the series, so there is more research in different markets to come. Stay tuned for more updates on Diff. 

Do you know where the Wikimedia movement is growing the fastest in the world?

Over the last three years, there has been tremendous growth of the Wikimedia movement in Africa, as seen from the increased number of User Groups, newcomers and the region’s participation in movement events and projects.

Growing knowledge equity through deeper regional learnings 

This expansion and increased activity in Africa is aligned with the two pillars of the movement’s Strategic Direction, knowledge equity and knowledge as a service. This year, as part of the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan, we introduced a focus on regional work as part of our own commitment to advancing knowledge equity and supporting movement strategy. We are all part of a global movement that spans regions, languages and communities, and this regional focus will allow the Foundation to better understand localized needs and regional trends as part of our work. 

We launched this new approach at the beginning of this fiscal year by improving our coordination on a regional level. Foundation teams working in the regions and partnering with local communities now convene more intentionally around defining the impact that is possible for us to make together in different regions of the world. Each quarter, we will meet to discuss regional and historical trends and activities by individual volunteers, Chapters, User Groups, Thematic Organizations, partners organizations in the free knowledge ecosystem. These sessions are an important check-in as part of our Annual Plan, and look at planned work by various teams at the Foundation to prioritize and align resources for focused results and more impactful partnerships. Here are our learnings for Africa.

Wikimedia in Africa

Tremendous growth in African user groups and affiliates 

Although South Africa is still the only chapter in Africa since its affiliation in 2012, the region is home to a growing number of User Groups, some of which are well structured and run akin to Chapters in other regions. Affiliates in the African region have grown from 6 Affiliates in 2014 when we hosted our first Wiki Indaba in Johannesburg South Africa to 21 affiliates.

The ease of creating a User Group compared to Chapters is what inspires most communities in Africa to opt for the former as a starting point. Some of the new User Groups in the region, which have been formally recognised recently by the Affiliations Committee include;  Dagbani Wikimedians User Group, Gungbe Wikimedians User Group, Wikimedia Community User Group Rwanda, Wikimedia User Group Kenya, Wikimedians of Lagos User Group and Tyap Wikimedians User Group. A majority of the communities in the region are focussed on projects around culture and local languages.

Support for the movement

With over a billion people and over 450+ countries, Africa represents one of the youngest regions in the world – 97% of the population is under 65 and this youth bulge is being felt in the movement. There is however room for growth in the region as Africa represents only 1% of unique active editors globally despite having 7% of global internet users. 

Fortunately, we’re already seeing some notable successes in the region. Newcomers are three times more likely to come from Africa, according to data from the  2020 Community Insights Report . Regional partnerships in Africa have focused on developing partnerships models to drive newcomer contributions by focusing on education and capacity-building campaigns. The Africa Knowledge Initiative (AKI), in partnership with the African Union (AU) is one such partnership that is aimed at increasing capacity building for communities in the region.

The Let’s Connect Peer Learning program, which creates a space for Wikimedians to share their knowledge and learn from others, has also proven to be a great avenue for horizontal learning in the movement. Africa and Asia comprised the majority of individuals who signed up for the Let’s connect programme, a great indication of the region’s commitment to not only learn but share the knowledge with peers as well.

There has also been notable increased participation in the African region in global campaigns such as the Wiki for Human Rights, which has seen remarkable growth in Africa. Approximately half of the events and participation in the #WikiForHumanRights campaign has been with communities in Africa, who are also leveraging it to collaborate closely with environmental and human rights organizations.

Over the last several years, communities in Africa have received increased funding from the Foundation. This is a result of the Wikimedia Foundation’s strategy to decentralize resources especially among underrepresented communities. 

During the 2021-2022 fiscal year, globally there was a 51% increase in funding in comparison to the previous year, going from 8.2 million in funding to 12.4 million. The Middle East and Africa (MEA) Region received a 279% increase this year – going from USD $784,951 to USD $2,189,257 in fiscal year 2021-22. General Support funds made up the biggest chunk of funding at 59% followed by Rapid Funds 30% and the Wikimedia Alliances fund at 10%. 100% of total investments in this region were to emerging communities.

African countries also showed higher than average “pageview to active device” ratios in the Android app, relative to the rest of the world. This means that a given Android app user in Africa reads more pages than app users in the rest of the world. The highest are in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, and Nigeria.

Machine translation support was also provided for the first time in Content/Section Translation for the Luganda language. Luganda editors provided positive feedback about the quality of the translations provided by this tool. This innovation may help to grow free knowledge in new and smaller language Wikipedias across Africa. The Foundation collaborated with nine communities lacking machine translation support for their languages (Wolof, Iloko, Kongo, Lingala, Northern Sotho, Swati, Tswana, Oromo and Tigrinya). 

From 4-6 November, Wikimedians and partners across Africa will come together to celebrate these successes and share learnings at WikiIndaba, the regional conference for Africans both within Africa and across the diaspora. This conference will aim to build capacity for African Wikimedians, foster growth of the coverage and involvement of Africa in Wikimedia projects, connect African Wikimedians both within the continent and in the diaspora, and turn ideas into action in line with the 2022 conference theme; “Advancing Africa’s Agenda in the 2030 Movement Strategy”.

Help us learn

Is this missing something? Leave a comment below and tell us about the great work in the region.

The Kwara State University Wikimedia Fan Club with support from the Wikimedia Nigerian User Group.  Micro-Grant got an opportunity to participate in this year’s WikiLovesMonuments 2022 Campaign. The Wiki Loves Monuments campaign is an international photographic competition to promote historic sites around the World through Wikimedia projects (mainly Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons).

Our Goals

1. Create awareness about Wiki Loves Monuments and its activities at Kwara State University Malete.
2. Recruit and train 10 new editors through various photo expeditions, upload sessions, and edit-a-thons.
3. Engage 25 existing editors to contribute to Commons and other sister projects.
4. Add 100+ images about some selected tourist attractions in Kwara state such as Dada Pottery, Sango Crushed Rock, and Sobi Hills; and improve articles by integrating these images in their related articles or creating articles/article subsections for non-existing articles.

What We Did

On the 16th of September 2022, members of the Kwara State University Fan Club visited tourist sites of attraction in Kwara State to take images of educationally useful objects as part of the global Wiki Loves Monuments 2022. Some of the important places visited include:

1. The Sobi Hill from which the highest natural landscape of the entire city of Ilorin and its environs can be seen. 
2. Crushed Rock Sango: a man-made tourist attraction a few meters away from Sobi hill.
3. Dada pottery Ilorin, the largest concentration of potters in Kwara State. 
4. Held a series of online training to guide participants on how to contribute to WikiCommons, better understand the different types of creative commons licensing, and upload quality media files.

How We Achieved It

Participation in the training increased as a result of publicity and awareness made in various faculties within the academic community. In addition, we sent weekly updates about the campaign on the fan club WhatsApp group. Furthermore, we followed up with each participant to ensure they had created their accounts, and user pages, and join the event dashboard before the physical training session. 

Our Outcomes

• 3 events: We did a photo walk to 3 tourist sites, online training for participants to learn how to contribute to the project, and physical training to round up the campaign at the Muhammadu Buhari Library, Kwara State University Malete.
• 39 participants: we had more participants due to the publicity at various departments and on social media
• 353 images uploaded on commons: This was a result of increased participation by members of the fan club. For more information on the metrics, see the project dashboard.

Challenge

It was difficult locating the Crushed Rock in Sango as there was very little information about the rock online. Moreso, the location was not covered on google Maps or open street maps.

I’d like to officially welcome Brianda (She/They) to our staff! Brianda is joining us in the role of Wikipedia Expert, where she will support student editors while they make high-quality content contributions to Wikipedia. She will spend most of her time monitoring and tracking student contributions on-wiki, answering questions, providing feedback, and explaining Wikipedia rules and policies in concise ways to new student editors. I’m very excited to have Brianda join us and think her experience and expertise will be a valuable addition to the Student Program.

Most recently, Brianda worked for the San Diego Youth Symphony and Conservatory’s Opus Project in the role of Community Program Coordinator. In this capacity, Brianda coordinated music instruction, working closely with students, teachers, and their families. Brianda’s deep commitment to equity is evident throughout her experience in education, supporting students from historically marginalized communities in different capacities. Before Opus, Brianda worked as a Program Assistant for the Upward Bound program at CSU-Fullerton where she helped hundreds of historically underserved high school students prepare for college. Brianda has held a number of internship positions further highlighting her passion for equity driven work, including positions at The Justice for Janitors Project at UCLA, Mayme E. Clayton Library & Museum, and the Museum of Social justice.

Brianda was raised in Orange County, CA. She graduated from UCLA with a major in History and a minor in Latin American Studies. While at UCLA, Brianda actually participated in a Wikipedia assignment in a course on Labor History and recalls how impactful the experience was. She is a native Spanish speaker, and is learning French and Korean. In her free time, you can find her exploring the streets of San Diego on her 2-wheeled steed, tracking down the tastiest tacos in Tijuana, or grooving to live music somewhere in SoCal. When not out and about, Brianda enjoys keeping her plant babies alive and trying to squeak out some notes on the clarinet. She’s also content with a good book in hand, accompanied by some light mezcal sipping or a warm cup of hot chocolate.

Join me in welcoming Brianda!

The Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) is happy to announce the upcoming community wide consultation period to collect feedback on the sections of the Movement Charter. 

At the 2022 Wikimedia Summit, the MCDC presented their first drafts that covered three sections: The Preamble, Values & Principles, and Roles & Responsibilities (intentions statement). MCDC integrated the feedback and produced updated versions of these drafts. The updated versions of the Movement Charter sections will be published on Meta after translations on November 14.   

The first community-wide consultation on the Movement Charter draft content will take place from November 20 to December 18, 2022. The MCDC and representatives thereof will interact with community members via different channels to collect feedback. The consultation periods are in accordance with the existing Movement Charter timeline.   

“Ask Me Anything about Movement Charter” sessions 

Three “Ask Me Anything about Movement Charter” sessions have been scheduled to ensure that people are well informed to fully participate in the conversations and are empowered to contribute their perspective on the Movement Charter. During these sessions, people will learn more about the Movement Charter – its goal, purpose, why it matters, and how it impacts their community. MCDC members will attend these sessions, which will be organized and facilitated by the Movement Strategy and Governance (MSG) team. 

The “Ask Me Anything about Movement Charter” sessions accommodate communities from different time zones. While the presentation part of the sessions will be recorded and shared afterwards for those who were not able to attend, the conversation part of the sessions will not be recorded for privacy reasons. A report of the conversations will be shared on Meta and on Movement Strategy Forum. Below is the list of planned events: 

• Asia/Pacific: November 4, 2022 at 09:00 UTC (your local time). Interpretation is available in Chinese and Japanese.  
• Europe/MENA/Sub Saharan Africa: November 12, 2022 at 15:00 UTC (your local time). Interpretation is available in Arabic, French and Russian. 
• Latin America/North America/ Western Europe: November 12, 2022 at 15:00 UTC (your local time). Interpretation is available in Spanish and Portuguese. 

You will find the details of the onboarding sessions on the Meta page. 

How to provide feedback? 

After the “Ask Me Anything about Movement Charter” sessions, the four weeks from November 20 to December 18, 2022 will be dedicated to collecting feedback from the community. There are different ways to engage with the MCDC and share feedback on the drafts and propose amendments or changes. Interested people can participate by: 

• Attending the regional community conversation hours via Zoom. Details about the region-specific community conversation hours will be published here.   
• Sharing feedback on the Meta Talk page or on the Movement Strategy Forum. 
• Sending an email to: [email protected].

Regional facilitators of the Movement Strategy and Governance team will reach out to communities via different channels closer to the start of the feedback cycle. 

What happens after the first community wide consultation period? 

After receiving feedback through multiple platforms and planned sessions, MCDC will thoroughly review the suggestions and catalog them per relevance. The committee will then incorporate the suggestions in the drafts, keeping it supportive of overall movement entities and their growth.

Movement Charter Ambassadors Program 

What is the Movement Charter Ambassadors Program?

The Movement Charter Ambassadors Program is an opportunity to support individuals and groups in consulting their communities about the Movement Charter’s draft. The program has been designed in connection with the Movement Charter community consultation cycle. It is expected to serve as a resource and an opportunity for the communities to better engage with MCDC. 

The goal of the Movement Charter Ambassadors Program is to ensure that all voices in the Movement are heard, especially those from emerging communities. Community members are included and engaged in the Movement Charter community review process. 

Who can join the Movement Charter Ambassadors Program?

Anyone can be a Movement Charter Ambassador. Movement Charter Ambassadors are individuals or groups helping to ensure that their communities are engaged in the community review process, that their communities fully understand the Movement Charter content, and can easily provide their feedback. 

Movement Charter Ambassadors can help in various ways:

• Organizing community review conversations (online/offline) in their communities, collecting their feedback, and reporting back on Meta-Wiki.
• Translating the Movement Charter content to ensure its accessibility in their own language/s. 
• Distributing Movement Charter-related announcements in their communities.

Apply for a grant! 

Dedicated funds are available to support interested people who intend to engage their communities in Movement Charter. More details on how to apply for the grant are here.

At the Wikimedia Foundation, we feel strongly that clear, consistent, and comprehensive attribution of Wikimedia content reused outside of our projects is critical to maintaining a thriving ecosystem of free knowledge. Attribution is important to us not just for meeting licensing requirements, but for ensuring that the individuals and communities who volunteer their time to create and make free knowledge available on Wikipedia and its sister projects are properly credited. It is also important as a mechanism to raise awareness of the open knowledge movement and increase participation in that movement. But figuring out what to attribute and how can be challenging, given the varied nature of Wikimedia content (text, images, facts) and the different places that content can be reused (on mobile phones, desktop computers, and even car navigation systems). The Wikimedia Foundation’s Product Design teams do a lot of thinking and building with this goal in mind, and today we’re pleased to announce a set of best practices and practical tips for how reusers of Wikimedia content can approach attribution.  

People going online today interact with media from Wikimedia Commons, or text from Wikipedia or its sister projects in a wide variety of ways: external websites, apps, voice assistants, and more. However, it may not always be clear where this content originates or who created it, because attribution is sometimes incomplete or inconsistent. Due to user experience constraints (e.g., small screens with little real-estate available for in-depth attribution), and variation and flexibility in Creative Commons license attribution requirements (e.g., fair use exemptions), it may not always be clear that this content is created and curated by Wikimedia community volunteers, is available under a free license, and can be improved, remixed, and shared.

The new guidelines on our Brand Portal page are aimed at anyone who is new to the Wikimedia or free license ecosystem and is interested in reusing Wikimedia content in an online environment, whether that’s individuals, startups, or large-scale technology platforms. While we have based these guidelines on our own experience of remixing and sharing content in new ways, we recognize that new, creative applications of Wikimedia content arise as quickly as technology grows and evolves (which is to say, very quickly!). There are a wide variety of reasonable ways project content can be reused, and different use-cases require careful thought to the user experience and licensing terms. However, we hope that these guidelines can serve as a first step for anyone considering reusing Wikimedia content externally, and can provide more consistency to the attribution end-user experience across different devices and platforms. Reusers of other Creative Commons licensed content or those who are looking for more guidance should also be sure to check out the Creative Commons wiki for more attribution recommendations and best practices.

If you’re an individual or team interested in reusing Wikimedia content, we hope you’ll find these guidelines valuable, and if you have more questions or ideas for bringing free knowledge to online experiences in ways that aren’t covered in the guidelines, please get in touch with us! We would love to hear what you’re working on and help you ensure that our free knowledge ecosystem gets the credit it deserves.

Tim Sherratt is a historian, hacker, and Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at University of Canberra. He runs the GLAM Workbench, a collection of guides to help you explore and use data from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, and earlier this year received a grant from Wikimedia Australia to explore and create integration of Australian government agency data with Wikidata. This is part one of two articles where he discusses his recent work.

Over the last few months, with the support of Wikimedia Australia, I’ve been working on two related projects. The first aims to add information about federal government agencies from the National Archives of Australia to Wikidata. The second involves the addition of a new Wikidata section to the GLAM Workbench. This will provide examples of using and visualising the agencies data and, more generally, help introduce Australian humanities researchers to some of the possibilities of Wikidata.

One of the most exciting features of Wikidata, is its ability to connect disparate data sources. By bringing together links for the same entity in different systems, Wikidata exposes a network of relationships and contexts – only visible otherwise as a series of slices in individual data silos. Of course this isn’t new. I’m old enough to remember adding data to Freebase, and back in 2010 I got very excited about the National Library’s People Australia service (now the People & Organisations category in Trove). But with a large community of contributors, and an open, evolving data model, Wikidata overcomes many of the limitations of earlier systems and provides a platform where anyone can start connecting things up.

The National Archives of Australia (NAA) captures information about the activities of the federal government – not just the records it creates, but also the histories and functions of the agencies that implement its policies. Like Wikidata, the NAA aggregates information about individual agencies and exposes it via a permanent identifier. For example, the Attorney-General’s Department has the identifier CA 5. If you follow the link you’ll see lists of related agencies, functions, people, and records series. These rich relationships are documented using the Commonwealth Record Series System – a data model developed in the 1960s that was quite innovative in thinking of archival documentation in terms of entities and relationships.

Unfortunately, RecordSearch, the online interface to the NAA’s collection data, is isolated from other systems, and limited in its ability to query across related entities. Even sharing links is difficult – the use of browser sessions means that saved urls stop working (though I’ve created a tool to help with this). How can we make better use of this rich and important data to support new ways of seeing and understanding the workings of the Australian government over time?

As a first step, I’ve started adding NAA identifiers and basic agency information to Wikidata. As of today, there are 1,482 Australian government agencies with NAA identifiers in Wikidata. You can view a list by running this query using the Wikidata Query Service. As well as the identifiers, I’ve been adding start and end dates from RecordSearch, and making sure the Wikidata items are instances of either ‘Australian government body’ or ‘department of the Australian government’ (for Departments of State). This means you can easily construct a query that shows all government departments from 1901 with their life dates. The agencies added so far include all departments and most of those with the status of ‘Head Office’ in RecordSearch. This label is a bit misleading it includes bodies such as Royal Commissions and courts, as well as a host of others boards, bureaus, councils, and committees.

Data wrangling

Getting data out of RecordSearch is not straightforward, but over the years I’ve developed a set of tools to help. The RecordSearch Data Scraper is a Python package that turns RecordSearch queries into machine-readable data. You can try it out in the RecordSearch section of the GLAM Workbench. There’s no simple way of searching for all agencies, so I looped through a range of numbers from 1 to 10000, and searched for agencies matching ‘CA 1’, ‘CA 2’, ‘CA 3’ etc. I ended up with a dataset containing the details of 8,558 agencies. To process the data I used a variety of tools – Python and Jupyter notebooks to filter and reorganise the NAA data, OpenRefine to look for matches with existing Wikidata entities and build an upload schema, and QuickStatements to modify or create Wikidata items.

Before adding the NAA identifiers to Wikidata, I needed to create a property to attach them to. This involved developing a property proposal for an NAA Entity ID and seeking feedback from other Wikidata users. Once there was agreement that the proposal was worthwhile, it was created. Wikidata properties are themselves entities within Wikidata and include definitions, constraints, and examples.

I used existing properties like `inception’ and ‘dissolved, abolished or demolished date’ for the start and end dates, but finding the best way of describing relationships between agencies was a bit more challenging. When a government decides to shake up the names and responsibilities of government departments, the lines of succession are rarely clear cut. A department’s functions might be split between two new departments, or merged back into an existing department. There are properties for ‘replaces’ and ‘replaced by’, but I couldn’t find a good way of expressing the partial transfer of responsibilities. Property values can be qualified, so it might be possible to indicate where ‘replaced by’ applies to specific government functions. However, while RecordSearch documents functions and applies them to agencies, their use in describing relationships between agencies is inconsistent. Another complication is that both ‘replaces’ and ‘replaced by’ expect there to be inverse relationships – if Department A replaces Department B, then Department B is replaced by Department A. But this doesn’t quite work if Department B hands some of its functions to Department A, but continues to exist – has it actually been replaced? Ah, the fun of data modelling!

To avoid over-complicating things I decided to focus on instances where the transfer of responsibilities involved the end of one department and the start of another. If responsibilities were split or merged, I added multiple ‘replaced’ or ‘replaced by’ values, with the thought that I might improve these further in the future by adding qualifiers. This means that some connections will be missing, but at least provides a clear set of relationships to build on.

Once I’d added each department’s predecessors and successors, I started to explore ways of visualising the connections. While the Wikidata Query Service includes a number of useful visualisation tools, I wanted a bit more control over the output, and to build some examples I could extend further within the GLAM Workbench.

My first attempts at creating a network graph of agencies showed a number of isolated nodes, with few or no connections. This seemed odd. Looking back at RecordSearch I realised there were some problems with the data. For example, the Department of Aboriginal Affairs is described in RecordSearch as a ‘Head Office’ rather than a ‘Department of State’. As a result, I’d overlooked it in my first upload of departments. As it was missing from the graph, departments connected to it became isolated from the broader network. There are some other issues with the RecordSearch data that I’m still working through. Visualisation is always a great way of finding problems with your data!

The completed network graph shows how the number and arrangement of departments has changed over time. It’s structured hierarchically with the earliest agencies at the top, and is grouped by decade. The size of a node indicates how long an agency was in existence, while the colour shows the decade in which it was created.

Little change is evident in the early decades, though the impact of World War II and its aftermath can be clearly seen. The pace of change quickens dramatically in the 1970s. Since then, agencies have changed names and functions frequently. You can explore an interactive version of this visualisation in the GLAM Workbench. You can also play around with the code that built in this Jupyter notebook. I’ve also created a little tool to build a network graph around a single agency that you can run live using Binder – just select an agency from the dropdown list. For an overview of departments and their lifespans, you can create a Gannt-style chart using this notebook.

What’s next?

While the agencies data is fascinating in itself, what interests me most about this sort of work is how we can extend, enrich, and enhance the interfaces provided by GLAM organisations. With the NAA identifiers in Wikidata, and properties and relationships aligned, we can explore the NAA’s holdings in new ways. We can construct complex queries that traverse relationships and filter outputs that are impossible within RecordSearch itself. We can start to ask different types of questions.

Working with the NAA data has got me thinking about other ways of using Wikidata in research around GLAM collections. I’ve added a Wikidata section to the GLAM Workbench and will be adding a variety of tools, notebooks, and examples shortly, but I’ll save those details for a follow-up post!

You can keep up to date with Tim Sherratt and his work on his website and Twitter. Part two of this article will be posted later in November.

Originally posted by Tim Sherratt to Wikimedia Australia on 31 October 2022.

It took me two years as a manager to reach the “leadership is lonely” phase.

– Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle

When you jump from tech lead to manager: things change.

Your deep understanding of the system evaporates and becomes shallow. You’ll stop writing all the critical code. Your focus will shift.

But for me the weirdest change was everyone treating me like a manager all the time.

Other languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English,Esperanto, français, ikirundi, italiano, magyar, polski, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, فارسی, 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

• When using keyboard navigation on a Kartographer map, the focus will become more visible. [1]
• In Special:RecentChanges, you can now hide the log entries for new user creations with the filter for “New users”. [2]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 1 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 2 November. It will be on all wikis from 3 November (calendar).
• The maps dialog in VisualEditor now has some help texts. [3]
• It is now possible to select the language of a Kartographer map in VisualEditor via a dropdown menu. [4]
• It is now possible to add a caption to a Kartographer map in VisualEditor. [5]
• It is now possible to hide the frame of a Kartographer map in VisualEditor. [6]

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

We received an outstanding amount of initial applications this round: 4,426 of them, in fact! This October, we focused our efforts on reviewing every single application and supporting applicants, mentors, and coordinators throughout the contribution period. Two things delayed the announcement of approved initial applications: A thousand more applications than expected; Delays in setting up initial application reviewers papers (contracts and other essential documentation). As the initial application format we launched in 2018 matures, I worry about how initial application review will scale up in the next 2-3 years.

18/10/2022-24/10/2022

About us

• This week we mark 4 consecutive years of semanárioOSM, the Portuguese language weeklyOSM!Every week the editors Nuno MAS Azevedo and Elizabete Oliveira translate the several articles proposed in several languages by the OSM users worldwide and prepare the Portuguese version for publication.Do you also want to contribute with articles to weeklyOSM? We recommend you to read this tutorial.

  We need articles about the activities of the Portuguese-speaking OSM community. Here is a challenge!

Mapping

• A request for comments has been made for archaeological_site=*, to replace the site_type=* key for tagging the type of archaeological site.
• Voting is underway for the following proposals:
  • castle_type=citadel, a tag for historic fortifications inside cities that served as defensive cores. Voting open until Tuesday 1 November.
  • pedagogy=*, to denote the educational theory of an element, especially schools or kindergartens, until Thursday 3 November.
  • amenity=mailroom, a tag to identify the location of shared mail rooms, receiving packages or letters, at a university, an apartment building complex, or in an office building complex, until Friday 11 November.
• Voting on the following proposals has closed :
  • settlement_type=crannog, for mapping prehistoric settlements that are artificial islands constructed in lakes or sea inlets, was not successful with 6 votes for, 5 votes against and 2 abstentions.
  • to deprecate passenger_information_display and promote departures_board instead, was not successful with 3 votes for, 4 votes against and 2 abstentions.
  • replace the tagging mail list with the OSM Community forum for the purposes of announcing proposal requests for comments and voting, was not successful with 49 votes for, 27 votes against and 4 abstentions.
  • payment:coins|notes:denominations=*, to record information about which denominations of coins or banknotes are accepted at a feature, was approved with 21 votes for, 4 votes against and 2 abstentions.
  • amenity=training_centre, to unify the tagging of facilities that provide various additional or special training, other than universities, colleges, and schools for children, was not successful with 10 votes for, 14 votes against and 3 abstentions.

Community

• Igor Eliezer ► has been appointed ► an honorary citizen of the city of Laranjal Paulista, Brazil (approximately 25,000 inhabitants) for his work on OSM. Apart from his remarkable mapping activities, Igor has also created ► an ‘atlas’ worth seeing.
• Pierre Parmentier published an interview with Jonathan Czalaj, OpenStreetMap Belgium’s October 2022 Mapper of the Month.
• Martin has written two extensions for OSM Wiki (OSM account login and vote GUI) and is waiting for your feedback. There also a demo wiki.
• The winners of OpenCage’s OpenStreetMap MapScaping Promotion Project have been announced. The winners were OSM Before-After Maps, MapComplete, The Global Healthsites Mapping Project, and weeklyOSM.
• OpenStreetMap Belgium have published their 2021 annual report.
• Andrew Wiseman, the community lead for Apple’s OSM team, is moving to a different team at Apple and Teddy Ahlvin (LessThan3Nodes) will be taking over Andrew’s role as community lead. More information about Apple projects can be found here. Andrew will continue to participate in OSM as a local community member.
• The results of the Indoor-OSM meeting held on 15 and16 October, at the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy in Frankfurt am Main, organised ► by FOSSGIS e. V., are documented on the wiki. The next meeting has been announced for November.

Events

• Arnalie Vicario announced that the Local Chapters and Communities Congress 2022, a virtual event where members of various OSM communities come together to share stories and learn from each other, will be held online on Saturday 12 November (12:00 UTC to 15:00 UTC).

Maps

• [1] Brian Sperlongano has published his ‘OpenStreetMap Americana Style’, a vector-tile map for roads in North America and for some other countries. It also displays custom route shields for routes in all US states and territories.
• The French government recently released ► data on the socioeconomic status of students at schools and colleges across metropolitan France. When visualised on a browsable map the data shows some discrepancies across the country.
• The Lost Rainforests of Britain Project has published an interactive map to highlight areas in the UK with a climate suitable for temperate rainforest, where reforestation efforts could be focused. It uses OSM as a basemap.

Software

• The French initiative to build a geolocated street level image sharing service has voted to name the project Panoramax, which is both a wordplay on panorama, maximum and Panoramix, the original name of Getafix from the Asterix series. One can follow the project’s development on this forum .
• Following the release of an unofficial JOSM paid version on the Microsoft Store a week ago (we reported earlier), Vincent Privat has made an official and free version of JOSM that can be downloaded from the Microsoft Store.
• Board members from the MapLibre community have reached out to Maputnik proposing a collaboration as a consequence of Mapbox’s GL JS closed-source update.
• MapTiler Desktop is now MapTiler Engine! It comes with lots of improvements and is available for download. MapTiler renamed MapTiler Desktop to MapTiler Engine to ‘better reflect how the software drives the process of turning your spatial data into web maps’.
• Pl@ntNet has released GeoPl@ntNet in beta. This application uses AI-GeoSpecies to estimate which plants may grow in any given area by aggregating data from multiple sources including OpenStreetMap.

Programming

• Maël is developing ► a tool built on OpenStreetMap data to estimate the cyclability of cities, effectively creating a ranking between them. A live demo is available ► where you can click on any city for detailed results. As noted in a Twitter thread ►, the method is significantly sensitive to the number of cities being considered (four by default).
• Seth Fitzsimmons published a tutorial on how to query OpenStreetMap data by using Amazon Athena, a serverless interactive query service.

Releases

• Hauke Stieler (hauke-stieler) has released version 1.5.0 of the Android app GeoNotes. This update includes several bug fixes and some new features. New is the categorisation of notes, filtering notes, and also translation into German, Hungarian and Italian.
• Walter Nordmann (Wambacher) has just released new versions of his Emergency Map and Healthcare Map. They have been changed using osm2pgsql with the Flex format, which has resulted in a considerable performance gain in updating. Menu navigation is available in , and .
• Stephan Bösch-Plepelits has released an update to OpenStreetBrowser, with new quality control categories.
• Vespucci version 18.0.3 has been released. This release contains a ‘custom style file importing’ bug fix in Android 12 and higher.

Did you know …

• … that you can keep track of current and previous OpenStreetMap tagging proposals by using osm-proposals?

Other “geo” things

• OpenCage has unrolled its latest Twitter thread in their ‘geographical oddities’ series (#geoweirdness). This time it’s about the last remnants of the British Empire, the Overseas Territories of the United Kingdom.
• Natacha Bouchart, mayor of Calais in France, asked for a car stopped on a pedestrian crossing to be ticketed, based on Google StreetView, thinking it was live.
• Chris Arvin is making a map of San Francisco store cats, including their names and friendliness.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
	Hacktoberfest 2022		2022-10-01 – 2022-10-31
	United Nations – OSS4SDG: Smart Sustainable Cities Hackathon		2022-10-03 – 2022-10-31
Windsor	OSM Windsor-Essex Monthly Meet Up		2022-10-28
City of New York	New York City Meetup		2022-10-29
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2022-10-29
Puerto López	Mapeemos vías faltantes de Colombia		2022-10-29
新北市	Wikidata Birthday Taiwan Streetview caputure		2022-10-29
City of Westminster	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-11-01
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #41 (Online)	✓	2022-11-01
Wirral	OSM UK Chat	✓	2022-11-01
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2022-11-02
Aberdeen City	Scottish Open Data Unconference		2022-11-05 – 2022-11-06
City of Subiaco	Social Mapping Sunday: Rokeby Road		2022-11-06
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 月聚會 #46		2022-11-07
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-11-07
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-11-09
	HOT Tasking Manager Monthly Meet Up		2022-11-09
Murray	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-11-10
Köln	OSM-Stammtisch Köln		2022-11-09
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-11-09
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-11-10
Berlin	173. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch	✓	2022-11-10
Washington	Mapping USA + WikiConferenceNA	✓	2022-11-11 – 2022-11-12
	OSM Local Chapters & Communities Virtual Congress		2022-11-12
København	OSMmapperCPH		2022-11-13
	157. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-11-15
City of Edinburgh	OSM Edinburgh Social		2022-11-15
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-11-15
Roma	Incontro dei mappatori romani e laziali – novembre 2022		2022-11-16
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe		2022-11-16
Ville de Bruxelles – Stad Brussel	FOSS4G & State of the Map Belgium		2022-11-17
Zürich	10 Jahre SOSM mit Fondue-Abend		2022-11-17

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, YoViajo, darkonus, derFred, miurahr, rtnf, 快乐的老鼠宝宝.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Wiki Education is hosting webinars all of October to celebrate Wikidata’s 10th birthday. Below is a summary of our third event. Watch the webinar in full on Youtube. And access the recordings or recaps of other events here.

So far, we’ve covered the state of Wikidata and cultural heritage 10 years in and what you need to know to kickstart a Wikidata Initiative of your own. Last week, Will Kent brought additional experts together to reflect on scaling and sustaining Wikidata work within cultural institutions. Dr. Anne Chen, an art historian and archaeologist, joined us from the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive. Ian Gill is a Collections Information Systems Specialist at SFMOMA. Dr. Stephanie Caruso is a Giorgi Family Foundation Curatorial Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Byzantine Art/Archaeology at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, where she worked with Bettina Smith, the current Manager of Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives. All four speakers completed a course through our Wikidata Institute at some point in the last three years, and we’ve loved watching their Wikidata Initiatives grow.

What does Wikidata allow that makes it unique from other platforms? 

For Anne, Wikidata provides an opportunity to collaborate across continents and languages in a way she and her archaeological colleagues have never been able to do. She can draw together disparate artifacts and rebuild archaeological contexts virtually. And because Wikidata’s interface is set up for translation into many different languages, Anne and her team can invite their global colleagues to interact with their records, some of whom will have access to these records in their native language for the very first time. “Because of the democratic nature of Wikidata, we can pull additional people from all over the world into the conversation about linked open data at a relatively early stage.”

For Bettina, Wikidata is the place where Dunbarton Oaks’ collections can compare and contrast similar collections around the world. “That kind of aggregated search has been tantalizingly promised by linked open data for so many years,” said Bettina. “Wikidata is the first real manifestation of it.”

New research is possible from there, which is what Stephanie is particularly excited about. “With Wikidata you can work with much broader data in one consolidated place,” she said. “The questions you can ask of the material wouldn’t be possible if you had to go to each archive. That would be way too much work and too slow going.” When she and Bettina began cataloging collections of Syrian origin, they noticed that item names varied across different languages. Traditional repositories might ask to privilege one language over another. Not Wikidata. “Having a QID that is translatable between all these issues makes it possible to get a fuller depth of research.” And to that, Anne added: For how many generations have researchers been reinventing the same research? If someone can point to a Q number and no one has to do that work again, imagine! It’s easier to build on each other’s research if we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

At SFMOMA, Ian populates Wikidata records based on their permanent collection as part of the Artist Identities Project. Wikidata helps him represent artist information more ethically, generating metrics about who his institution exhibits and acquires each year, potentially informing the institutions’ future decisions. “A lot of museums are trying to do this work, and Wikidata is the central repository for it,” Ian said.

And it’s not just museums who are interested in improving linked open data. “I noticed there were Wikidata users that were enhancing our records, saying ‘oh this exhibition actually went to this other venue too.’ I could then add that information to our records. It’s cool to interact with others with the same goals.” It goes both ways. When institutions make improvements to Wikidata, that information has the potential to start a ripple effect. And in return, the institution benefits from access to a more complete repository. “The idea that content generated by amazing editors within the Wikidata community could be reabsorbed into a collection database and used for collection ends in the future is really exciting,” Anne added.

Editing Wikidata is also personally satisfying. Seeing your work out there with immediate effects is metadata’s version of instant gratification! “And it challenges the paradigm that your work has to go through and be checked by traditional levels of authority,” Will chimed in. “I forget sometimes that doing something for the first time, having attained this new skill, is something tangible, compelling, and addictive,” Anne added. “It’s a rush!” Bettina added with a smile.

How did they convince others at their institution to support them?

Most of us are new to editing, and even as we learn, Wikidata evolves. So how do you convey the opportunities it presents to your institution if it’s not a static platform and the possibilities are limitless? For Anne, learning enough of the basics to convey the value of a larger project was huge. “As an art historian and archaeologist, I went into the linked open data sphere feeling uncomfortable in my technical knowledge,” she said. “So I had to start at the beginning and develop content in Wikidata that I could use to demonstrate the promise. Ultimately the thing that got traction was not just talking about abstract ideas, but pointing to a case study. From there, I can talk about all the things I haven’t done yet and how this could be better if we all contributed to it and if we had buy-in from the institution to go full scale.” And once she and her team had a case study, they were able to apply for larger scale funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities–which they received!

Although Wikidata is a strategic fit for cultural institutions, many are hesitant about participating in an open platform where anyone can change anything. Stephanie had some ideas for calming nerves: “I tell them, ‘You already did a good job creating a stable URL for each object in the collection. If someone clicks on it through Wikidata, they will go to your website. There’s a unique property for a Met ID, something that links back to the Met’s site and the owners’ explanation of the object. That can reassure people that regardless of what’s happening on Wikidata, you’re not changing the authority of the institution.”

Presenting a “handbrake option” can also be reassuring. “Anything on Wikidata that is erroneous or disputed can be reverted,” Anne shared. “I’ve also found it useful to talk about the history of the edits that have been made to a particular object on Wikidata. Thinking from an archival perspective, the idea that there’s a record that there was a dispute about an object is an important facet for the next generation and for thinking about how we can more responsibly engage with multiple perspectives with the content we’re managing.” “It’s also worth making the point that if you don’t do it, someone else could,” Bettina added. “And they might not do it the way you would do it.”

What are the key elements for sustaining a project?

According to our speakers, the main elements for success are some combination of the following: Passion. Supervisor support for your time. Other colleagues’ help. Funding opportunities are also nice. And above all else, expertise and continual learning.

“The Wikidata Institute is probably the best possible resource,” Bettina shared. “There’s also things like LD4, the Wikidata interest group that meets every other week. And I’m a member of ARLIS, the Art Library Society of North America, and they have a Wikidata interest group that meets once a month. Those are useful ways to find out about tools and things that I would not otherwise have known about.” “Going through lists of tools that people have developed is also cool. That’s how I found QuickStatements!” Ian added. “I’ll also put in a plug for discussion pages and the Wikidata telegram channel,” Anne said. “As a new user I was a little intimidated about revealing my ignorance on certain issues or how to do certain things. But at Will’s encouragement, and as part of the course, we got to realize that everyone is learning something and the community is helping each other grow.”

How do they see Wikidata influencing their field in the next 5 or 10 years? 

Anne sees promise in the multilingual collaborative nature of Wikidata and the effect that it could have for equity in her field at large. “I’m doing work that deals with cultural heritage material from Syria and I would love to partner with other institutions and offer Wikidata trainings. The payoff of that could be huge. For a project like mine, we could get more diverse perspectives looking at the content that we’re creating.”

Ian pointed out that there’s a lot more internal work to be done within cultural institutions to make things public. “I expect wider adoption of Wikidata in five years for sure. In terms of the Artist Identities Project, a lot of other museums are working on that and it has come up in meetings where people say, ‘What if there were a central repository we could pull from?’ And I get to say, ‘That exists! It’s Wikidata!’”

“Innately as a librarian, archivist, and reformed cataloguer, Wikidata just makes sense,” Bettina added. “I didn’t know it existed before two years ago and now I’m presenting on it! I’m seeing that rapid increase in interest in a lot of my library colleagues and other institutions and I think it’s just gonna grow exponentially from here. If there are any cataloguers in the audience, you can do it—I promise!”

Check out Ian’s project here, Bettina and Stephanie’s here, and Anne’s here and here. 

If you’re the kind of learner who seeks community and guidance on your journey, the Wikidata Institute has three upcoming training courses starting in November, January, and March.

“Wikipedia is my go-to first source for information presented logically and accessibly,” said Liz Shesko, an Associate Professor of history at Oakland University. But before last term, she didn’t think of it as a teaching tool. Using Wiki Education’s assignment templates and Dashboard, Liz had students write Wikipedia content that related to the history of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile from independence until the end of the Cold War. Students added information about the construction of the Central Argentine Railway, the dark activities of the Navy Petty-Officers School under military dictatorship, feminism among working class women in Argentina, the history of LGBT rights in Brazil in the 20th century, and more.

In reflections at the end of the term, students noted that the nontraditional assignment had them think outside of the box and beyond the classroom. “The accessibility of Wikipedia was a large part of why I am so glad to have done this project,” said one student. “I really appreciated having done something tangible and somewhat permanent that contributes in a positive way. Most projects I have done in other classes have existed almost in a vacuum, in that once it’s been written and graded, no one ever looks at it again. While the page I worked on may not be one of the most frequently visited ones, I was still able to contribute to the overall knowledge within Wikipedia.”

“After completing the project, I felt proud of myself knowing my work will be seen by others besides my professor,” said another student. “It is rewarding to know that my contribution to Wikipedia will benefit others rather than just my grade in the class. Doing the Wikipedia assignment also is a humbling experience that truly allowed me to value my education even further. I have honestly taken for granted the resources that I have had access to as a college student. It was fulfilling to know that thanks to my work I have allowed others to learn free of cost from resources that they would not have access to otherwise.”

Given the reach that their work will have, students also felt an increased sense of responsibility to get it right. “Working on Wikipedia made me think, almost a little existentially, how my own information and research can affect what is known about a topic,” wrote one student, who expanded the biography for Argentine feminist Juana Paula Manso. “My role in the online information landscape on this particular Wikipedia article was about giving the world a little more knowledge about an important figure that, so far as Wikipedia was concerned, was not well known because of how little was written on her existing page.”

Before the student worked on the biography, it was just three sentences long and received a steady stream of readers. Now, the article has 7xs the amount of citations it had before thanks to this student, the majority of which cite journal articles behind paywalls. The article still gets the same amount of traffic, but now readers have a much fuller picture of Juana’s life. The student has effectively freed that information for all readers in the future. “It’s a little scary, thinking on it now, that since my contribution is the majority—if not all—of what is on that page, if someone were to take my information and skew it, or misread it, I would be responsible if I accidentally used a bad source,” the student added.

While thinking critically about what sources are “reliable”, students also gained skills to synthesize information in their own words, retaining more course content in the process.

“Wikipedia is extremely touchy about sourcing: you can’t quote or paraphrase, and of course outright plagiarism is not allowed,” wrote another student. “But being forced to put everything I learned in my own words was a new experience for me, since I have been so used, in my other classes, to being allowed to quote amply so long as I was able to analyze the information in my own words after. Now, after having to source this way in Wikipedia, I’ve found that I have steered clear of sources that I didn’t understand enough to put in my own words; I have become less reliant on making other authors’ quotes do my writing for me and I have found it easier to make sure my quotes are supporting my own words on a topic.”

As for how students thought this assignment compared to the more traditional term paper, another student said: “I believe I learned about as much as I would have from doing a paper instead of a Wikipedia article, but I think I learned it very differently than I would have: I’ve honestly found that I can still remember, very clearly, the information I put on my article because I had to write everything in my own words—I can’t say I’ve ever remembered this much information from a typical term paper before, so in that way I think this project was extremely beneficial to the way I learned more about Latin America.”

To incorporate an assignment like this into your next course, visit teach.wikiedu.org for our free assignment templates, dashboard, and support.

Thumbnail image is Navy Mechanics School Ave. de Libertador by David, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

🕑 1 hour 24 minutes

William Beutler is the founder and president of the creative agency Beutler Ink, which, among other services, assists clients with their presence on Wikipedia and Wikidata. Previously, he ran the longtime blog The Wikipedian, and he has co-hosted several film podcasts.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Beutler Ink
• William Beutler's personal Wikipedia account
• William's paid editing Wikipedia account
• Enter the Void podcast
  • Primer episode
  • Upstream Color episode
• The Wikipedian blog
  • "Year in Review" category
  • "Montgomerology" category
• "Wikipedia has Cancer" (essay by Guy Macon)
• Wikipedia and the Communications Professional: A primer
• "comprised of" (essay by Giraffedata)

By @Mstyles and edited by @Cleo_Lemoisson

"Over the last quarters, the Application Security team has developed several services geared towards increasing the security of the code written at the Foundation. Most notably, we created an automated security pipeline and continued our security reviews as part of the readiness steps for production deployment. But, as this review process is more focused on new code that is about to be deployed, we needed a way to audit pieces of code that were already in production. This is where our pentesting program comes in!"

What is a pentest?

Penetration testing is a type of audit run on larger code bases by specialized external contractors. Combining internal reviews and external pentesting efforts allows for a thorough analysis of the code. While internal reviews have a deeper understanding of the context, external audits adopt a bigger picture approach which uncovers problems that could have otherwise been missed.

Pentests are usually run according to a black, white or gray box approach:

• Black box penetration testing is done without any special permissions and is an attempt to gain access to systems similar to how external attackers would.
• White box penetration testing is done with access to account logins and sometimes source code information
• Gray box penetration testing combines aspects of black and white box testing. The pentesters have access to privileged accounts and do source code reviews, but also try a black box approach of gaining access to the system.

The gray box approach is the one the Security Team usually selects for WMF pentesting cycles.

Why do we pentest? And who needs it?

You might have heard of the critical issue was found in log4j in February 2022 - this was a pretty big one! This is the exact kind of thing pentesting is designed to avoid. By hiring external auditors, we want to try and avoid such vulnerabilities to ever live in our code and become public. As no review method is foolproof, we feel like having both internal and external reviews strengthen our chances to produce the most secure code possible.

The security team is looking for software running in WMF production and that would have a high impact on users if it were to become compromised. Past areas that have been tested include Mobile, Fundraising and Cloud VPS. We’ve also done assessments for third party software used at the foundation such as Mailman 3, Apereo CAS and the trusted runners in Gitlab. If you feel like you are working with software that could fit in those criteria, please reach out to us!

How is it typically run?

A typical pentesting process has several steps:

• Scoping: this step is usually done prior to the start of the engagement. Some vendors have a scoping worksheet that has all of the documentation links and a short description of what’s being tested and any goals the testing engagement might have.
• Kick-off meeting: a pentesting engagement starts with a kickoff meeting gathering the testers and the development team. During this meeting, the auditors will ask for clarifications about the source code, context and expected workflow of the application.
• Audit: the pentesting team performs their tests. This step can last between two and three weeks depending on the scope of the audit.
• Debrief meeting: the pentesting team issues a report containing a list of issues ranked with severity. This report is presented to the development team
• Mitigation strategy: this is where the development team assesses the uncovered vulnerability and decides on the best remediation strategy. Ideally, at the minimum any critical or high severity issues would be addressed as soon as possible. Lower priority vulnerability can either be fixed at a later date or accepted as a known risk and entered in the risk registry.

It is worthwhile to note that WMF context and open-source philosophy differs from most vendors’ appreciation of risks. Therefore, some uncovered problems are in fact voluntary features of our way of working. Such differences include what information is made public and what is accessible on the public internet .

Different firms have different processes, but as a part of changing how we approach pentesting, we want to develop a standard approach regardless of what vendor is performing the assessment.

What does pentesting currently look like at the Foundation?

The program is still very much taking shape! Since 2018, we have performed 30 audits including from Mobile to Fundraising. Mediawiki extensions have a clear pipeline defined for application security reviews via the deployment checklist.

Past pentesting engagements have exposed different issues ranging from critical that were fixed immediately to best practices that certain projects were not adhering to.

Some audits also confirm that our code is secure! Recently, an assessment performed on Wikimeda Cloud Virtual Private Services ended up with the testers being unable to access other projects or the underlying hardware during their several weeks of testing. This means that any poor choices made by individual contributors to cloud projects, such as out of date packages or improperly stored credentials cannot impact other cloud projects or take down the underlying hardware.

Of course, doing pentesting at WMF is not without challenge. Communication has been one of them, since different teams use different communication formats. Some critical infrastructure, such as Central Auth, have no official WMF team and only a few community maintainers. This, combined with very little on wiki documentation, makes it difficult for testers to understand the system. Moreover, managing the remediation projects that are not supported is challenging because those phabricator tickets will add to the thousands of open or stalled ones.

Help us design the future of the pentesting program!

While successful, this pilot phase highlighted the need to develop a set of criteria to identify good “candidates” for pentesting engagements. As we want this process to be as collaborative as possible, we’d like to hold a meeting with people from various tech departments to discuss areas we might have overlooked in the past pentesting projects.

As we move forward with that, we want to create a similar pipeline and route to pentesting various areas of Mediawiki and other WMF projects.

For future pentesting assessments, we are looking for software that we’re using that might have never been reviewed or code that’s been in production a long time, but wasn’t reviewed recently or ever by the security team. As a part of a new pentesting process, we’ll start a list of previous engagements and when they were performed. There is a lot of code written by WMF employees and the technical community, and only so much pentesting budget. We’re focused on code that is in production and if attackers gained access, many users would be impacted.

By Taavi Väänänen

I’ve been working for a while to make it possible to use Terraform to manage Wikimedia Cloud VPS, and I’m finally happy to announce that for the most part, it’s now possible.

Terraform is a popular open-source Infrastructure as Code tool that lets you manage your infrastructure configuration (such as Cloud VPS instances) with a special coding language/framework. You can then manage and review that code with familiar tools, such as Git.

If you just want to get started with Terraform on your own project, read the Terraform on Cloud VPS docs. Otherwise keep reading to learn about the technical challenges of adapting Cloud VPS to support Terraform.

Opening the OpenStack APIs

The core Cloud VPS platform is powered by OpenStack, an open-source cloud computing platform. OpenStack consists of various separate services, some of which are used in our deployment. These services already expose HTTP APIs, and for example the web-based dashboard (Horizon) uses it internally. However, until now these APIs had always been fire-walled off from the public internet, and only some specific accounts were allowed to log in from the internal Cloud VPS network without the 2-factor authentication code that we require from all users by default.

Since Cloud VPS uses Wikimedia developer accounts, the passwords used to log in to the dashboard can also be used to log in to other critical tools. For this reason, we don’t want to encourage our users to store these passwords as plain text on their computers. Thankfully, OpenStack’s Identity service, Keystone, contains a solution that works for this use case: Application Credentials. These are essentially API keys that are tied to a specific user and a specific project. As a part of this project, we’ve enabled the use of Application Credentials in our configuration and wrote documentation on how to use them properly.

The second major change needed in our setup was to open up the firewall rules that previously restricted API access to Wikimedia networks. It’s now possible to reach the APIs from anywhere from the internet. As a part of this, we’ve also updated our load balancer configuration to make it easier to limit or block misbehaving clients.

Integrating custom services with OpenStack authentication

Not everything on Cloud VPS uses upstream OpenStack projects. Some components, most notably the current web proxy service and the Puppet integration (internally called the Puppet ENC API), are powered by custom code that’s mostly been written using Python and the Flask framework. Historically they didn’t have any proper access control, and instead we simply had configured our firewalls to block access to the APIs from everything except the Cloud VPS control plane servers.

Since this model doesn’t let external users use the APIs directly, we had to come up with a new model. I ended up updating both of the affected services to use the Keystone API. After those changes, we’ve made the web proxy API publicly available like the vanilla OpenStack services, but the Puppet API is still private until it’s fixed to work properly with external consumers.

Writing a custom Terraform provider

Just having the web proxy API accessible on the internet doesn’t mean that you can directly use it with Terraform. Instead, you need something called a “Terraform provider”. Providers are programs that interact with Terraform and the external service (the Cloud VPS web proxy API in this case). There’s an existing provider for OpenStack, which works great for anything that uses the vanilla OpenStack APIs, but I ended up having to write a custom provider to work with our custom features. Since Terraform and providers are written in Go, I also ended up writing a Go library to work with the web proxy API. Support for the Puppet ENC API is planned once it’s been updated to support external clients.

Since the official Terraform module registry (where Terraform downloads the modules your code uses) is heavily built around GitHub, a proprietary platform, I ended up deploying a self-hosted registry on terraform.wmcloud.org to host the new provider. The registry is based on the rekisteri project by Hugo Martins and has been lightly customised to work for this use case.

What’s next

It’s now possible to do most things via Terraform that you can do via horizon.wikimedia.org. However, there are still a few major exceptions:

• You can’t manage the Puppet ENC data, as mentioned above.
• You can’t manage project membership due to some upstream limitations.

It would be nice to get those fixed. In addition, I’m planning on working to make the entire system more streamlined with the Puppet setup we use to provision instances. Most WMCS managed projects use a standalone Puppetmaster to manage secrets. There are a few manual steps when provisioning or decommissioning instances to sign and revoke the TLS certificates Puppet uses internally, and I want to eventually make Terraform do that for you.

If this sounds interesting: get involved! The entire stack is licensed under free licenses and welcomes new contributors, and in my experience it’s a great way to experiment with technology that otherwise might be hard to play with.

About this post

Featured image credit: File:Shovel_Ready_Project_(7231596148).jpg by Alex Proimos, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Wikimedia Enterprise is a new (now 1-year-old) service and offered by the Wikimedia Foundation, via Wikimedia, LLC.

This is a wholly-owned LLC that provides opt-in services for third-party content reuse, delivered via API services.

In essence, this means that Wikimedia Enterprise is an optional product that third parties can choose to use that repackages data from within Wikimedia projects in a more useful, more reliable, and stable format presenting them primarily via data downloads and APIs, with profits going into the Wikimedia Foundation.

Want to find out more? Read the FAQ.

The project and APIs are well documented, and access can be requested for free, but I wanted to spend a little bit of time hands-on with the APIs to get a full understanding of what is offered, the formats, and how it differs from things I know are exposed elsewhere in Wikimedia projects.

Account Creation

Wikimedia Enterprise accounts are separate from any other Wikimedia related accounts, so you’ll need a new one.

In order to get an account you need to fill out a pretty straightforward form (username, password, email, and accept terms). You then need to verify your email address. Tada, you are in!

Right away you are directed to the authentication docs and a CURL based example for getting started.

Authentication

Following the CURL based example, authentication is easy…

curl -L https://auth.enterprise.wikimedia.com/v1/login -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"username": "addshore","password":"XXX"}' { "id_token": "XXX", "access_token": "XXX", "refresh_token": "XXX", "expires_in": 86400 }

Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

You can then use the access_token in future API calls (also shown in the curl based example). Such as:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer ACCESS_TOKEN" -L https://api.enterprise.wikimedia.com/v1/projects

Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

You can read more in the authentication docs.

On-Demand API

These APIs allow you to get live information from Wikimedia projects.

The first API is Available projects.

The response of this API is a list of objects, each of which includes some additional metadata about the site.

The example below is snipped for your convenience.

[ { "name": "Wikipedia", "identifier": "brwiki", "url": "https://br.wikipedia.org", "in_language": { "name": "Breton", "identifier": "br" } }, { "name": "Wikeriadur", "identifier": "brwiktionary", "url": "https://br.wiktionary.org", "in_language": { "name": "Breton", "identifier": "br" } }, ... ]

Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)

The identifiers of these sites can then ben used with the second On-Demand API, Article lookup.

A site identifier and article name can be used to look up current information about that article.

The response of this API includes HTML and wikitext of the current revision, as well as extra metadata all collected into a single response.

Extra metadata includes:

• Page information: Title, identifier, URL, namespace, project, language, redirects to the page
• Revision information: ID, date, comment, tags, editor, templates used, categories used
• Content: HTML, Wikitext, Licence
• Wikidata information: ID, URI, additional entities used (and which aspects)

The example below is snipped for your convenience.

{ "name": "Douglas Adams", "identifier": 8091, "date_modified": "2022-10-15T21:28:17Z", "version": { "identifier": 1116296313, "comment": "/* Writing */ {{snf|Roberts|2015|pp=129–130}}: correcting year", "tags": [ "wikieditor" ], "editor": { "identifier": 11630810, "name": "Peaceray" } }, "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams", "namespace": { "name": "Article", "identifier": 0 }, "in_language": { "name": "English", "identifier": "en" }, "main_entity": { "identifier": "Q42", "url": "http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q42" }, "additional_entities": [ { "identifier": "Q42", "url": "http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q42", "aspects": [ "C", "D.en", "O", "S", "T" ] }, { "identifier": "Q5", "url": "http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5", "aspects": [ "O" ] }, { "identifier": "Q8935487", "url": "http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q8935487", "aspects": [ "S" ] } ], "categories": [ { "name": "Category:1952 births", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1952_births" }, ... ], "templates": [ { "name": "Template:Authority control", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Authority_control" }, ... ], "redirects": [ { "name": "Douglas Noël Adams", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Noël_Adams" }, ... ], "is_part_of": { "name": "Wikipedia", "identifier": "enwiki" }, "article_body": { "html": "HTML", "wikitext": "WIKITEXT" }, "license": [ { "name": "Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported", "identifier": "CC-BY-SA-3.0", "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/" } ] }

Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)

Snapshot API

Similar to the On-Demand API there are a few endpoints for listing the snapshots that could be available.

Available Projects and Available Namespaces for example will provide simple lists of project or namespace identifiers that can be used in further requests.

Snapshot Bundle Info provides information about a specific snapshot bundle of a project and namespace combination.

The example below is snipped for your convenience for frwiki namespace 0.

{ "name": "Wikipédia", "identifier": "frwiki", "url": "https://fr.wikipedia.org", "version": "2d8754c299670b10664e1f57db8e180d", "date_modified": "2022-10-01T05:59:45.170639212Z", "size": { "value": 34602.86, "unit_text": "MB" } }

Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)

Available Snapshots provides a list of all of this snapshot information across a given namespace on all projects.

You can’t actually download any of these snapshots with the initial account access. You need to contact the enterprise team to get further than this and see what is within the snapshots.

Real Time & Batch APIs

These APIs come with the same disclaimer as the snapshot APIs

For access to Realtime APIs, contact us.

The APIs here would be:

• Project Updates (Batch)
• Available Projects (Batch)
• Project Bundle Info (Batch)
• Available Namespaces (Batch)
• Available Projects (Batch)
• Article Updates (Streaming)
• Article Visibility Changes (Streaming)

Similar to above APIs, I imagine access to the higher level meta data / utility APIs would likely be included already, just downloads of batches or files would not.

Further Access

So there is no free out-of-the-box access to all of the APIs and resources provided by Wikimedia Enterprise.

Taking a few steps back I also spotted this on the dashboard once logging in.

Looking for Daily Snapshots or additional On-demand requests? Let us know what you need; we are happy to help customize your account for you.

Review our Pricing and Services, and our pricing calculator for an estimate, and then:

Wikimedia Enterprise Dashboard

This probably makes sense considering the data transfer costs that could be involved in the Snapshot API or Realtime API.

The Internet Archive already has access to these APIs in some way for free, as was announced earlier this year and hopefully, these more streamlined APIs can also be useful to other organizations.

The post Wikimedia Enterprise: A first look appeared first on addshore.