Welcome to the “Don’t Blink” series! Every month we share developments from around the world that shape people’s ability to participate in the free knowledge movement. In case you blinked this month, here are the most important public policy advocacy topics that have kept the Wikimedia Foundation busy.

To learn more about the Global Advocacy team and the work we do with the rest of the Foundation, visit our Meta-Wiki webpage, follow us on Twitter (@WikimediaPolicy), sign up to our Wikimedia public policy mailing list, or join one of our monthly conversation hours.

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Entering the New Year with More Insights

Now that the Wikimedia Foundation starts to plan for the next fiscal year, the Global Advocacy team wants to look back with you at 2022 and share how our learnings from that year are helping us organize how we’ll continue to serve Wikimedians and our audiences.

We asked our teammates to identify where we improved the most as well as what we accomplished, and both questions shared one clear answer: collaboration. We’re better at working together with our colleagues within the Foundation as well as Wikimedians. It’s cheesy, but tried and true: When we work together we can achieve great things.

Consider, for instance: joint advocacy on the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), receiving accreditation to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), supporting affiliates to achieve their goals in relation to the United Kingdom’s proposed Online Safety Bill, setting up meetings with government representatives in Chile, and co-presenting Wikimedia projects’ contributions to the world at global forums like RightsCon.

We’ve also invested time and energy in doing a better job of explaining our team’s priorities, and how they respond to those of the Foundation and movement. Our priorities are three: Protecting the Wikimedia model, protecting Wikimedia’s people, and protecting Wikimedia’s values. We’ve presented these priorities at various movement-facing calls and events, updated our Meta-Wiki page, and even added a FAQ there. Last but not least, to help illustrate the way our everyday work addresses these priorities, we’ve restructured how we share developments in this monthly recap. Let us know if you can spot the changes!

Looking forward, here are three ways in which we want to continue our work in the next fiscal year. 

1. First, we want to think and act according to a long-term strategy, so that we can pursue actions that have an extended impact, like engaging with other stakeholders thanks to our ECOSOC accreditation.
   
2. Second, we want Wikimedia projects to become a compelling reference in public discourse around internet regulation and free knowledge issues: There is much that can be learned from Wikimedians’ community-driven moderation and the Foundation’s privacy models.
   
3. Third, we want to work with affiliates to determine together which public policy activities they should lead, and which ones the Foundation should lead.

We can’t wait to continue collaborating with our colleagues and community throughout this new year!

Farewell to Kate Ruane, our Lead Public Policy Specialist for the United States

We are sad to announce Kate’s departure. She was an integral part of our team, whose impact was immediately felt. During Kate’s tenure, she helped to advance and shield the free knowledge movement by building coalitions, activating allies, submitting countless public comments on policy briefs, and helping Wikimedia influence US regulatory decisions that had an impact on foreign affairs. Kate’s extraordinary talent and dedication have landed her a role as PEN America’s inaugural Sy Syms Director, US Free Expression Programs. Although we will miss her work ethic, humor, and intimate familiarity with the workings of US policy, we can’t think of anyone better to launch the Global Advocacy team’s “Alumni Network.”

A few examples of her achievements in behalf of the free knowledge movement include:

1. Protecting access to knowledge for Russian people: Thanks to Kate’s tireless work, two governments protected access to information in Russia. On the heels of an advocacy process that Kate led, in coalition with Access Now and other advocacy leaders, both the governments of the US and the UK authorized internet companies to continue providing essential internet services to people within Russia. These decisions ensured that the Russian people, Wikipedia volunteers, and independent media—including those speaking for human rights and against the war—can contribute to and consult reliable information about the conflict in Ukraine.
   
2. Championing community-led content moderation: Kate spearheaded the Foundation’s opposition to the EARN IT Act, which could have significantly weakened protections that online intermediaries, like Wikipedia, have from liability concerning child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and also could have undermined encryption. Under her directive, the Foundation signed an open letter opposing the bill alongside a coalition of more than 60 other concerned organizations, which was published by the Center for Democracy and Technology. The open letter and our blog post on the bill were introduced into the US Congressional Record.
   
3. Representing Wikimedia’s perspectives on copyright reform: Kate dedicated considerable time and effort to representing the Wikimedia movement’s needs in the context of diverse copyright discussions. Most notably, she helped the Foundation oppose a bill called the SMART Copyright Act, which could have forced projects like Wikipedia to use certain technical tools to monitor and manage copyright infringement. Kate sent a letter with our concerns about the bill to lawmakers, and supported Fight for the Future in amplifying their petition against the Act. She also submitted comments to the US Copyright Office ahead of proceedings evaluating standard technical measures (STMs) for protecting copyrighted works online, participated in a plenary session held by the Copyright Office inquiring into what the government’s role might be in identifying STMs, and participated in a panel hosted by the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) to discuss patents in the public interest.
   
4. Expressing concern about the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA): Kate led the Foundation to sign onto a coalition letter expressing strong concerns about the JCPA, which would require large online platforms to negotiate with groups of news organizations to pay them for access to their content. Kate’s work was picked up by Wikimedia Small Projects, which invited her to an episode of the SuenaWiki podcast to discuss the challenges posed by the JCPA.
   
5. Asking the US Supreme Court to take our lawsuit against mass surveillance: Kate spearheaded the Foundation’s policy advocacy efforts to rein in mass surveillance by the US government. On the heels of the Foundation’s petition to the US Supreme Court to review our challenge to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass surveillance of Americans’ private online communications with people overseas, she led the beginning stages of our work advocating for positive changes to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and raised awareness of the issue within the Wikimedia community by presenting the case at WikiConference North America. This work builds on the Foundation’s partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Knight First Amendment Institute to argue that the government cannot use sweeping claims of “state secrets” to block court oversight of Section 702 surveillance programs.

Deepening Our Work with Affiliates

Big Fat Brussels Meeting: The eighth Big Fat Brussels Meeting was held from 2–3 December, 2022, in Brussels. The event brought together Wikimedia affiliates from across Europe to collectively decide what the public policy priorities are for the free knowledge movement in the region throughout 2023. After three years of hiatus for in-person events, reconnecting and meeting new joiners (potentially over beers or frites) was also a top priority. Over 20 Wikimedians came to Brussels, including members of the Global Advocacy team. This blog post recaps what was discussed.

Protecting the Wikimedia Model

Friend-of-the-court brief on Gonzalez v. Google: The Foundation’s ability to host Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects hangs in the balance in a case against YouTube brought to the Supreme Court: Gonzalez v. Google. We filed an amicus brief because the Supreme Court will consider Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—i.e., a key law that supports internet hosting and protects website hosts from being sued for content submitted by users—for the first time in decades. We explained that despite the tragic background of the case, siding with Gonzalez would create significant problems for the future of the internet. Read our major arguments and why ruling against Gonzalez will help to protect the ability of Wikimedia users to share free knowledge—not just in the United States, but around the world—in our blog post.

Jimmy Wales on BBC for Online Safety Bill (OSB): The founder of Wikimedia, Jimmy Wales, joined a panel on one of the UK’s most popular news shows to talk about the country’s OSB. He spoke alongside members of the House of Lords and others. The Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg program, which aired on 4 December, is available on YouTube—where it is titled Who Should Keep Us Safe Online?

Protecting Wikimedia’s Values

Human Rights Update: On 20 December, the Global Advocacy team published an update for the community on Diff. The blog post discussed the real and evolving human rights threats facing Wikimedians, actions that the Foundation has taken over the past year to implement the Human Rights Policy, what the Foundation hopes to accomplish in the coming year to continue protecting the community’s human rights, and how Wikimedians can help to do so.

________

Follow us on Twitter, visit our Meta-Wiki webpage, or join our Wikipedia policy mailing list for updates. We hope to see you there!

There was recently a request to generate a report of featured articles on Wikipedia, sorted by length, specifically the "prose size". It's pretty straightforward to get a page's length in terms of the wikitext or even the rendered HTML output, but counting just the prose is more difficult. Here's how the "Readable prose" guideline section defines it:

Readable prose is the main body of the text, excluding material such as footnotes and reference sections ("see also", "external links", bibliography, etc.), diagrams and images, tables and lists, Wikilinks and external URLs, and formatting and mark-up.

Why do Wikipedians care? Articles that are too long just won't be read by people. A little bit further down on that page, there are guidelines on page length. If it's more than 8,000 words it "may need to be divided", 9,000 words is "probably should be divided" and 15,000 words is "almost certainly should be divided"!

Featured articles are supposed to be the best articles Wikipedia has to offer, so if some of them are too long, that's a problem!

The results

The "Featured articles by size" report now updates weekly. As of the Feb. 22 update, the top five articles are:

1. Elvis Presley: 18,946 words
2. Ulysses S. Grant: 18,847 words
3. Douglas MacArthur: 18,632 words
4. Manhattan Project: 17,803 words
5. History of Poland (1945–1989): 17,843 words

On the flip side, the five shortest articles are:

1. Si Ronda: 639 words
2. William Feiner: 665 words
3. 2005 Azores subtropical storm: 668 words
4. Miss Meyers: 680 words
5. Myriostoma: 682 words

In case you didn't click yet, Si Ronda is a presumed lost 1930 silent film from the Dutch East Indies. Knowing that, it's not too surprising that the article is so short!

When I posted this on Mastodon, Andrew posted charts comparing prose size in bytes vs word count vs wikitext size, showing how much of the wikitext markup is well, markup, and not the words shown in the article.

Lookup tool

So creating the report is exactly what had been asked. But why stop there? Surely people want to be able to look up the prose size of arbitrary articles that they're working to improve. Wikipedia has a few tools to provide this information (specifically the Prosesize gadget and XTools Page History), but unfortunately both implementations suffer from bugs that I figured creating another might be useful.

Enter prosesize.toolforge.org. For any article, it'll tell you the prose size in bytes and word count. As a bonus, it highlights exactly which parts of the article are being counted and which aren't. An API is also available if you want to plug this information into something else.

How it works

We grab the annotated HTML (aka "Parsoid HTML") for each wiki page. This format is specially annotated to make it easier to parse structured information out of wiki pages. The parsoid Rust crate makes it trivial to operate on the HTML. So I published a "wikipedia_prosesize" crate that takes the HTML and calculates the statistics.

The code is pretty simple, it's less than 150 lines of Rust.

First, we remove HTML elements that shouldn't be counted. This currently is:

• inline <style> tags
• the #coordinates element
• elements with a class of *emplate (this is supposed to match a variety of templates)
• math blocks, which have typeof="mw:Extension/math"
• references numbers (specfically the [1], not the reference itself), which have typeof="mw:Extension/ref"

Then we find all nodes that are top-level text, so blockquotes don't count. In CSS terms, we use the selector section > p. For all of those we add up the length of the text content and count the number of words (by splitting on spaces).

I mentioned that the other tools have bugs, the Prosesize gadget (source) doesn't discount math blocks, inflating the size of math-related articles, while XTools (source) doesn't strip <style> tags nor math blocks. XTools also detects references with a regex, \[\d+\], which won't discount footnotes that use e.g. [a]. I'll be filing bugs against both, suggesting that they use my tool's API to keep the logic centralized in one place. I don't mean to throw shade on these implementations, but I do think it shows why having one centralized implementation would be useful.

Source code for the database report and the web tool are both available and welcome contributions. :-)

Next

I hope people find this interesting and are able to use it for some other analysises. I'd be willing to generate a dataset of prose size for every article on the English Wikipedia using a database dump if people would actually make some use of it.

This is the English rendition of the article originally written in Japanese. The original text reads 「世界各国の大学生ウィキペディアン・コミュニティ」.

This article outlines several Wikipedian communities composed of university students from various regions across the globe. Additionally, as the initiator of the “Student Wikipedian Community in Waseda University, Tokyo,” I will elaborate on the aspects that resonate with me.

My aspiration is that this article proves informative for individuals interested in the collaborative relationship between Wikipedia and academic institutions, those striving to integrate Wikipedia in educational settings, and, in particular, university student Wikipedians.

Japan

Within Japan, there exists the “Student Wikipedian Community in Waseda University, Tokyo.” The group extends beyond the confines of the university and involves online interactions with students from other institutions. The article below offers a succinct overview of the community’s historical trajectory.

The community periodically convenes with the “Toumon Wikipedian Club Tokyo,” which is their alumni association, and generates diverse articles on the Diff.

Moreover, the community organizes editathons in various GLAMs, including the Oya Soichi Library, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, and Tokyo National Museum, in partnership with Dr. Sae Kitamura, also known as [[User:さえぼー]].

Nigeria

At Kwara State University in Nigeria, the “Wikimedia Fan Club, Kwara State University” exists. The group has organized editathons such as the Wiki Loves SDGs Campus Tour and participated in various Wikimedia Project events, including the Wiki Loves Monuments 2022 in Nigeria, in collaboration with the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria. Furthermore, this student community strives to augment the quantity of Wikipedia articles in African local languages.

Additionally, Nigeria houses the “Wiki Club, Lagos State University” at Lagos State University and the “Wikimedia Fan Club, University of Ilorin” at the University of Ilorin.

Both the “Wikimedia Fan Club, Kwara State University” and the “Student Wikipedian Community in Waseda University, Tokyo” share a common practice of collaborating with Wikipedians outside of their respective communities. Despite the absence of a User group in Japan, the Waseda Wikipedians collaborate with Dr. Sae Kitamura and Hiroshi Kamoshida from Oya Soichi Library.

Tanzania

In Tanzania, the “Tanzanian University Students Wikimedians User Group (TUSWUG)” exists. TUSWUG is comprised of students hailing from various universities across Tanzania and organizes numerous Wikipedia events. Additionally, the group collaborates with the “Wikimedians of Arusha User Group,” “Wikimedia Community User Group Tanzania,” and “Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili.”

The history of TUSWUG is detailed on a MetaWiki page, and Magotech, the founder of TUSWUG, reports on the group’s activities on Diff, the official blog of the Wikimedia Foundation.

I was impressed by the article “A Life as a Wiki Club Leader” on Diff, as a Wikipedian who has also led a university student Wikipedian community. Magotech’s insights on maintaining the community were enlightening, and I particularly resonated with the statement “Stay up to date.” This article highlights the importance of continually expanding one’s knowledge.

Stay up to date: Keep abreast of new developments and best practices within the Wikimedia movement, and incorporate them into your club’s activities as appropriate.

Turkey

There is a recently established community at Üsküdar University in Turkey called the “Üsküdar University Wikipedia Student Club.” This community was formed during the “Wikidata Trainings For Turkish Wikimedians 2022” event held in September 2022.

Between 2017 and 2020, the Erdogan government of Turkey had imposed strict limitations on access to Wikipedia. Although these restrictions were eventually lifted in January 2020 following the decision by the Constitutional Court that deemed it unconstitutional in December 2019, the fact that the state had prohibited access to Wikipedia for several years is an issue of great gravity. Further details on the subject can be found within the English Wikipedia article titled “Turkey Wikipedia access restrictions in 2017” (as of  20:43, 6 January 2023 UTC).

Given these circumstances, the emergence of a university Wikipedian community in Turkey fills me with immense joy. As a fellow Wikipedian, I hold this community in high regard and express my heartfelt admiration for their efforts.

Further information

If you’d like to learn more about university students’ involvement with Wikipedia, educational activities using Wikipedia, and the Wikipedian community, I recommend checking out the following pages:

• Wiki Education
• This Month in Education
• Diff
• Meta-Wiki

Conclusion

From the standpoint of the founder of Student Wikipedian Community in Waseda University, Tokyo, I introduced university Wikipedian communities around the world. I focused on cooperation with people outside the community, how the community is managed, and the social background. I hope that various university Wikipedian communities will continue to be active in the future.

For over 15 years, the Wikimedia Foundation has provided public dumps of the content of all wikis. They are not only useful for archiving or offline reader projects, but can also power tools for semi-automated (or bot) editing such as AutoWikiBrowser. For example, these tools comb through the dumps to generate lists of potential spelling mistakes in articles for editors to fix. For researchers, the dumps have become an indispensable data resource (footnote: Google Scholar lists more than 16,000 papers mentioning the word “Wikipedia dumps”). Especially in the area of natural language processing, the use of Wikipedia dumps has become almost ubiquitous with the advancement of large language models such as GPT-3 (and thus by extension also the recently published ChatGPT) or BERT. Virtually all language models are trained on Wikipedia content, especially multilingual models which rely heavily on Wikipedia for many lower-resourced languages. 

Over time, the research community has developed many tools to help folks who want to use the dumps. For instance, the mwxml Python library helps researchers work with the large XML files and iterate through the articles within them. Before analyzing the content of the individual articles, researchers must usually further preprocess them, since they come in wikitext format. Wikitext is the markup language used to format the content of a Wikipedia article in order to, for example, highlight text in bold or add links. In order to parse wikitext, the community has built libraries such as mwparserfromhell, developed over 10 years and comprising almost 10,000 lines of code. This library provides an easy interface to identify different elements of an article, such as links, templates, or just the plain text. This ecosystem of tooling lowers the technical barriers to working with the dumps because users do not need to know the details of XML or wikitext.

While convenient, there are severe drawbacks to working with the XML dumps containing articles in wikitext. In fact, MediaWiki translates wikitext into HTML which is then displayed to the readers. Thus, some elements contained in the HTML version of the article are not readily available in the wikitext version; for example, due to the use of templates. This means that parsing only wikitext means that researchers might ignore important content which is displayed to readers. For example, a study by Mitrevski et al. found for English Wikipedia that from the 475M internal links in the HTML versions of the articles, only 171M (36%) were present in the wikitext version.

Therefore, it is often desirable to work with HTML versions of the articles instead of using the wikitext versions. Though, in practice this has remained largely impossible for researchers. Using the MediaWiki APIs or scraping Wikipedia directly for the HTML is computationally expensive at scale and discouraged for large projects. Only recently, the Wikimedia Enterprise HTML dumps have been introduced and made publicly available with regular monthly updates so that researchers or anyone else may use them in their work. 

However, while the data is available, it still requires lots of technical expertise by researchers, such as how different elements from wikitext get parsed into HTML elements. In order to lower the technical barriers and improve the accessibility of this incredible resource, we released the first version of mwparserfromhtml, a library that makes it easy to parse the HTML content of Wikipedia articles – inspired by the wikitext-oriented mwparserfromhell.

The tool is written in Python and available as a pip-installable package. It provides two main functionalities. First, it allows the user to access all articles in the dump files one by one in an iterative fashion. Second, it contains a parser for the individual HTML of the article. Using the Python library beautifulsoup, we can parse the content of the HTML and extract individual elements (see Figure 1 for examples):

• Wikilinks (or internal links). These are annotated with additional information about the namespace of the target link or whether it is disambiguation page, redirect, red link, or interwiki link.
• External links. We distinguish whether it is named, numbered, or autolinked.
• Categories 
• Templates
• References 
• Media. We capture the type of media (image, audio, or video) as well as the caption and alt text (if applicable).
• Plain text of the articles

We also extract some properties of the elements that end users might care about, such as whether each element was originally included in the wikitext version or was transcluded from another page.

Building the tool posed several challenges. First, it remains difficult to systematically test the output of the tool. While we can verify that we are correctly extracting the total number of links in an article, there is no “right” answer for what the plain text of an article should include. For example, should image captions or lists be included? We manually annotated a handful of example articles in English to evaluate the tool’s output, but it is almost certain that we have not captured all possible edge cases. In addition, other language versions of Wikipedia might provide other elements or patterns in the HTML than the tool currently expects. Second, while much of how an article is parsed is handled by the core of MediaWiki and well documented by the Wikimedia Foundation Content Transform Team and the editor community on English Wikipedia, article content can also be altered by wiki-specific Extensions. This includes important features such as citations, and documentation about some of these aspects can be scarce or difficult to track down. 

The current version of mwparserfromhtml constitutes a first starting point. There are still many functionalities that we would like to add in the future, such as extracting tables, splitting the plain text into sections and paragraphs, or handing in-line templates used for unit conversion (for example displaying lbs and kg). If you have suggestions for improvements or would like to contribute, please reach out to us on the repository, and file an issue or submit a merge request.

Finally, we want to acknowledge that the project was started as part of an Outreachy internship with the Wikimedia Foundation. We encourage folks to consider mentoring or applying to the Outreachy program as appropriate. 

About this post

Featured image credit: Очистка ртути перегонкой в токе газа.png in the public domain

Figure 1 image credit: Mwparserfromhtml functionality.gif by Isaac (WMF) licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license

Subject: Open letter from Wikimedia on making encyclopaedias fit for the digital age 

Dear Executive Vice-President Vestager,

We kindly request a meeting with you to talk about how to ensure that encyclopaedic knowledge can be fit for the digital age.  

Encyclopaedias are unfortunately marginalised and under-supported in today’s information society. This is particularly unfortunate, as this means their facts and reliable information often remain hidden at a time when Europe is struggling to stem the tide of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and unreliable AI models. 

Understanding and making more transparent the environment in which citizens look for and access information is a prerequisite for changing this. We support opening up “black boxes” and ensuring fair competition, something the DSA and DMA already tackle. In fact, the entirety of our content and software is freely licensed and offered for download, so that any other project can re-use them and build upon them. Our hope is that this will make encyclopaedic knowledge more reliable and more accessible.  

Another part of the challenge is, that in order to be relevant in today’s digital society, to be part of citizens’ daily lives, encyclopaedic knowledge needs to be available in certain formats and structures: Information must be linked, structured, multilingual, up to date, reusable and readable by humans and machines. The source also has to earn a strong reputation and popularity amongst users. This has been a consistent focus of our mission for over 20 years.  Now, as a result of this hard work, when one searches for “Margrethe Vestager” in Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Web.de and Qwant, Wikipedia is usually among the top search results, along with the European Commission’s own website. The Wikimedia Foundation does not have agreements with any of these, that would guarantee their favourable treatment of Wikipedia.

We at Wikimedia are dedicated to making encyclopaedic knowledge and facts part of everyone’s daily life. We believe national and specialised knowledge resources are a treasure. They should thrive. We love and rely on national and traditional encyclopaedias. 

We cite and link to them, whenever possible. We would be thrilled to work together with the European Commission and other encyclopaedias on making all reliable knowledge and cultural resources more visible and part of Europeans’ everyday experience. Making reliable public content reusable and providing public funding for traditional encyclopaedias to open up could be part of this effort.       

Yours faithfully,

Dimitar Dimitrov                                                                                             Finn Årup Nielsen

Policy Director                                                                                               Chair of the Board

Wikimedia Europe                                                                                      Wikimedia Denmark

mobile: +32497720374                                                                                 www.wikimedia.dk

Rue Belliard 12 Belliardstraat

Brussels

In 2015, Wikimedia Mexico presented the Editatona project. This initiative to reduce the gender gap in Wikimedia projects was created by Carmen Alcázar and it’s been replicated over 100 times, as of 2022, in diverse environments both locally and abroad.

Editatona is a feminist version of the edit-a-thons. In Mexico, it’s a separate space where women write about women on Wikipedia. Because of this project, they realized that another twin space was needed, to deepen the conversation about the subjects and questions that arise from the Editatonas. Furthermore, this space is needed to intensively develop skills for women who wish to access the free knowledge domain.

To do this, we colaborated with the Instituto Municipal de Mujeres Regias (Municipal Institute of Regian Women) and the LABNL, organizations from Monterrey and northern Mexico charged with the task of managing the first version of the School of Wikimedia Women, a course that consisted of six two-hour sessions per week, where subjects such as encyclopedic relevance, trusted sources, inclusive language, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, article deletion, or how to write and edit a Wikipedia article, among others, were covered. 

This course began on November 3rd and concluded on December 8th, in hybrid modality. Part of the staff of WMMX, as well as guest specialists, facilitated the themes for 20 women who attended the sessions regularly. This produced the conditions to open dialogue and debate about shared information.

As a closing activity, an in-person Editatona was hosted by the LABNL so the participants could apply what they learned at the School of Women, also to get to know one another in person, and strengthen the network of women volunteers in Mexico.

This first version was conceived as a prototype, so that we may develop a new version in 2023 with women from a different city, and make the necessary adjustments to improve on this project, in order to convince more women to approach and compromise with Wikimedia projects.

You may look at more pictures here.

February 21st holds significant importance for the over 300 million Bengali-speaking people around the world. On this day in 1952, several young people were martyred when the police opened fire during a movement to establish Bengali as one of the state languages in East Pakistan. As per the United Nations’ decision on November 17th, 1999, this day is now celebrated worldwide every year as International Mother Language Day.

Despite being the fifth-largest language in the world in terms of mother tongue, Bengali Wikipedia lags behind in terms of active users. One contributing factor to this disparity is the socio-economic context of Bangladesh and West Bengal in India, although we won’t explore this in detail in this blog post. While Bengali Wikipedia is ranked 63rd in terms of the number of articles, it’s important to note that the number of articles alone isn’t an accurate measure of a Wikimedia project’s quality. Many Wikipedia projects use bots to create articles, which isn’t the case for Bengali Wikipedia. Nevertheless, the number of articles on Bengali Wikipedia should ideally be proportionate to the native-speaking population.

Despite Bengali Wikipedia achieving the milestone of one lakh articles on December 25, 2020, the community has not focused solely on increasing the number of articles. Instead, the community has been actively working towards improving the quality of existing articles. To this end, the community has undertaken various initiatives, such as raising awareness through online and offline events, wiki-chats, and edit-a-thons focused on completing small articles instead of creating new ones. Additionally, the community has made an effort to reject 1-2 line articles in the main namespace. It’s worth noting that Bengali Wikipedia is ranked sixth in terms of article depth, which indicates that our quality initiatives have been successful to some extent.

In celebration of Language Month, Wikimedia Bangladesh hosts an annual article-writing competition called Amar Ekushey Article Contest. The theme for this competition is “Let’s put the things we love, in our own language.” One notable aspect of the contest is the creation of relatively lengthy articles. In previous years, new articles were written for the competition. However, starting in 2021, the focus shifted to upgrading existing articles. Given that Bengali Wikipedia has relatively few active users, incomplete articles tend to remain unfinished or neglected. However, the competition has helped resolve this issue to some extent. Participants in the competition have been able to enhance the quality of short or substandard articles that are of significant importance.

The Amar Ekushey Article Writing Contest for 2023 began on February 1st this year. As of writing this post, around 400 users have shown interest in participating in the competition. The contest will continue until March 31st. The organizers, reviewers, and participants all have high hopes that this year’s competition will be a great success through the collective efforts of everyone involved.

If you’re interested in learning more about the contest, you can visit the contest link at https://bn.wikipedia.org/s/pfsr.

Other languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English,Tiếng Việt, français, italiano, polski, suomi, svenska, čeština, русский, српски / srpski, українська, עברית, العربية, فارسی, বাংলা, ಕನ್ನಡ, ไทย, 中文, 日本語, 粵語, ꯃꯤꯇꯩ ꯂꯣꯟ, 한국어

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

Problems

• Last week, during planned maintenance of Cloud Services, unforeseen complications forced the team to turn off all tools for 2–3 hours to prevent data corruption. Work is ongoing to prevent similar problems in the future. [1]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 21 February. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 22 February. It will be on all wikis from 23 February (calendar).
• The voting phase for the Community Wishlist Survey 2023 ends on 24 February at 18:00 UTC. The results of the survey will be announced on 28 February.

Future changes

• All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 1. This is planned for 14:00 UTC. More information will be published in Tech News and will also be posted on individual wikis in the coming weeks. [2][3][4]

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The internet is a powerful tool for the younger generation, offering a world of knowledge, communication, and entertainment at their fingertips. But with that power also comes numerous risks and challenges. That’s why the Internet Society (ISOC) Ghana Chapter and Open Foundation West Africa (OFWA) took the initiative to commemorate Internet Safe Day by hosting a workshop at Labone Senior High School, to educate students  on how to access accurate information online and stay safe while doing so.

During the workshop, over 500 students learned about the dangers of sharing personal information online, cyberbullying, and privacy concerns. But that’s not all! We also showed them how Wikipedia can be a helpful tool for accessing accurate information online. The students were amazed to learn that they could actually contribute to Wikipedia! Who knew?!

Before the workshop, we checked out the students’ Wikipedia knowledge and found out that most of them use Wikipedia, but didn’t know that just about anyone could contribute to it. Additionally, just one student identify himself as ever editing Wikipedia before and almost none of the students knew that Wikipedia has a global community of contributors across the globe. We even heard some hilarious myths about Wikipedia, like “Wikipedia information is not credible or relevant” and “Wikipedia takes its information from Google.” and I quote;

“A teacher told me that Wikipedia information is not credible or relevant” -Student 1

“Wikipedia takes it’s information from Google, It doesn’t have the information so it does the research on Google and gives it to us”- Student 2

But after the workshop, the students were enlightened and eager to join the Global Wikimedia community and learn how to write on Wikipedia. We heard comments like, “I never knew I could contribute to Wikipedia” and “How do I join the training programs to learn how to edit and contribute to Wikipedia?” “I thought Wikipedia was contributed by foreigners”. 

In short, the workshop was a huge success, inspiring the students to become responsible digital citizens and to join the Wikimedia community to learn how to edit and contribute to Wikipedia. The school plans to continue the collaboration and provide more training for the students to equip them with the skills and knowledge they need to thrive in the digital world.

Our sincere gratitude to the Internet Society Ghana Chapter President Francis Amaning Aquah and  Maxwell Beganim a Wikipedian and member of ISOC Ghana Chapter for this fruitful collaboration.

Let’s empower our youth to become responsible digital citizens!

#OFWA #ISOC #InternetSafeDay #LaboneSeniorHighSchool #OnlineSafety #EmpoweringYouth.

Gallery

Poetry slam for Wikipedia, a debate on free licenses, the opening of the Czech Wiki Photo 2022 exhibition. Such a packed programme awaited those who decided to spend the evening of 13 January 2023 in Charles University’s „Didaktikon“ space. The programme attracted over a hundred spectators and the event was definitely a success.

The programme started with a debate on free licenses

The programme started in the afternoon with a debate on free licenses, to which four experts with expertise directly or indirectly related to the issue of free licenses were invited. The debate offered a reflection on the nature of free licenses, their purpose and the legal questions they raise. The fact that the intended 90-minute debate stretched to two hours, also thanks to questions from the audience, shows that there was much to discuss.

Poetry slam for Wikipedia and education made dozens of spectators laugh

Poetry slam, a performative poetry genre, has enjoyed unprecedented popularity in the Czech Republic in recent years. Considering the fact that two employees of Wikimedia Czech republic are involved in it, and that perhaps the most famous Czech poetry slam performer Anatol Svahilec is a passionate Wikipedian, the connection was clear. After last year’s premiere, we knew that we had to repeat the poetry slam for Wikipedia, and it was not a mistake.

Potopa Basha talked about how easy it is to deviate from the original query when searching the internet. The bronze medalist of the European Poetry Slam Championship, Vašek z Aše, reflected on how to use everything he learned in primary school in everyday life. “Nothing like recaping polyethylene first thing in the morning,” he said. As the winner of the evening, the audience chose Dejv with a poetry slam in which he thinks about what would happen if Czech celebrities looked up their defining topics on Wikipedia. The one and only Anatol Svahilec hosted the whole show and the audience fell in love with his improv slam on Wikipedia.

“I don’t even remember the last time I giggled like that all evening,” Zdeněk Svatoš, a Wikipedian and a graduate of our Seniors Write Wikipedia course, told us after the event.

Czech Wiki Photo 2022 exhibition will be on display until the end of February

We are very pleased that the exhibition was opened by the Rector of Charles University Milena Králíčková, and we officially signed a memorandum on this day to confirm our broader cooperation with the University, about cooperation regarding Students write Wikipedia and more. On the occasion of the exhibition, a member of the Czech Wiki Photo jury, internationally award-winning photographer Edita Bízová, spoke. The results of Czech Wiki Photo 2022 have been officially announced and we can already look forward to the next edition of the competition for the best Czech photo uploaded on Wikimedia Commons. The exhibition will be on display till the end of February in Prague. You can also see the competition’s results online.

PHOTOS: Richard Sekerak (WMCZ), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

ChatGPT is the internet’s shiny new toy. It’s also a potential shortcut for students to quickly generate essays and other writing assignments — which has many educators rethinking their assignment designs. (For some, that means trying to AI-proof their writing assignments; for others, it may mean teaching students how to use a text-generating AI conscientiously as a writing tool.)

How does ChatGPT work?

ChatGPT is built on top of the GPT-3 language model, a machine learning model designed to predict (to simplify it slightly) the next word in a text. It does this by analyzing a very large amount of text data, and calculating probabilistic relationships between words in a sequence. It’s designed, in other words, to produce the same patterns of word use that are present in the datasets used to train the model. (In a recent, brilliant essay, science fiction writer Ted Chiang describes ChatGPT as “a blurry JPEG of the web”.)

GPT-3 is being developed by OpenAI, a for-profit company that, as of 2023, is funded primarily by Microsoft. (The name is a legacy of the company’s origin as a not-for-profit research lab, but it transitioned to become a for-profit in 2019, and GPT-3 and its other products are not open source.) According to OpenAI researchers who have published about GPT-3 and its training process, the system was trained on five main datasets:

• CommonCrawl, a publicly available, broad-ranging corpus of text scraped from the open internet, contributing about 66% of the training;
• WebText2, a more curated set of text scraped from the internet, derived from URLs that were submitted to Reddit and got at least a few upvotes and more upvotes than downvotes, contributing about 22% of the training;
• Books1 and Books2, a pair of “internet-based books corpora”, the details of which are not public, contributing about 16% of the training;
• English Wikipedia, which is much smaller than any of the other datasets, but was the highest quality dataset used in training and was weighted more heavily relative to its size, contributing about 3% of the training.

So those text datasets are what GPT-3 “knows”. ChatGPT adds several features on top of that, including a system for handling natural language as a prompt, the ability to refine output by replacing only specific parts of it, and “fine-tunings” that focus its output on chat-like responses.

The release notes for a recent update also tout “improved factuality”, but I haven’t been able to find any discussion of what that means or how the system accounts for the concept of “factuality”. The core GPT-3 system, as a language model, does not rely on structured data (like Wikdata, or the “knowledge graph” projects at Google and Amazon that incorporate Wikidata and power their virtual assistants). ChatGPT’s failure modes are often what AI researchers have termed “hallucinations”, seemingly coherent statements that, upon closer inspection, are fabrications, self-contradictions, or nonsense.

What about Wikipedia?

Using ChatGPT and similar large language models to create Wikipedia content is (as of early 2023) not prohibited on Wikipedia. Some editors have started drafting a potential guideline page that spells out some of the risks of doing so as well as advice for using them effectively. (In its current form, that proposal would also require that editors declare in their edit summaries whenever they make AI-assisted edits.) Some experienced Wikipedia editors have found ChatGPT to be a useful tool to jump-start the process of drafting a new article, especially for overcoming writer’s block. (You can read about these experiments here.) In this context, editors handle sources the old-fashioned way: combing through the text, editing it as needed, throwing out anything that can’t be verified, and adding inline citations for the things that can be verified.

ChatGPT will happily generate output in the style of a Wikipedia article, and indeed it does a pretty good job of matching the impersonal, fact-focused writing style that Wikipedians strive to enforce. It “knows” what Wikipedia articles sound like, perhaps in part because one if its training datasets is exclusively Wikipedia content. However, the relationship between text and citations — core to how Wikipedia articles are structured — is not part of the equation.

In its current iteration, ChatGPT will typically produce a bulleted list of sources at the end the Wikipedia article you ask for (if you explicitly ask for references/sources/citations). However, even more so than the article body, the source list is likely to consist of so-called hallucinations: plausible-sounding article titles, often with plausible publication dates from real publishers and even URLs, that don’t exist. When sources do exist, they don’t bear any specific relation to the rest of the output (although they might be relevant general sources about the topic that could be used to verify facts or identify hallucinations within the article).

For topics that don’t already exist on Wikipedia but that have a commercial element, ChatGPT also has a tendency towards promotional language and “weasel words”. For these topics — especially if they aren’t covered in books — GPT-3’s relevant training data is likely to include a lot of the sorts of marketing material that make up a large portion of the web these days. (Of course, the unfiltered web has a huge quantity of promotional garbage that was created by less sophisticated automation tools and/or churned out by disaffected pieceworkers.)

Copyright is another danger zone. So far, OpenAI has staked out a position that essentially says that users can do whatever they want with the output ChatGPT produces based on their prompts; they aren’t attempting to claim any copyright of their own on the output. However, ChatGPT frequently produces text that doesn’t come close to passing the plagiarism smell test, because it comes too close to the content and structure of some specific published text that was part of its training data. (Tech news site CNET was recently caught posting AI-generated content that amounted to close paraphrasing of real journalists.) The Wikipedia community takes copyright and plagiarism very seriously, but it’s hard to guess how the kinds of close paraphrasing that comes out of AI systems will affect conventional understandings of originality, copyright, and the ethics of authorship.

What about Wikipedia writing assignments?

Easy access to ChatGPT means that we’re very likely to start seeing Wikipedia content that editors in our Student Program contribute that was drafted by generative AI. (If any of it happened last term, it’s slipped under our radar so far.) Wiki Education staff are not sure what to expect, but we do want to make sure that students aren’t filling Wikipedia with ChatGPT-written nonsense or plagiarism. (That would be both harmful to Wikipedia in general, and also devastating to our relationship with the Wikipedia community and our capacity to provide free support for these Wikipedia writing assignments.)

Some educators are excited about exploring AI tools as part of the writing process, and have plans to incorporate it into their teaching. If you’re considering doing this as part of your Wikipedia assignment, we’d like to talk with you about it. (Please don’t do it without letting us know!)

Others are hoping to keep students from using ChatGPT. The typical failure modes and pitfalls of at least the current iteration of it mean the best things you can do are the same ones you’re already doing for your Wikipedia assignments:

• Use your subject-matter expertise to provide feedback — especially as students prepare their bibliographies *before* they start writing.
• Review what your students are drafting and posting to Wikipedia, and provide feedback to help them draft accurate and clearly-written text.

If you think it’s an important topic for your students, we suggest you also have a frank conversation with them about ChatGPT, how it works, and its potential for causing harm to Wikipedia. And if you do find that any of your students used ChatGPT, let us know — whether they conscientiously edited it into good, fact-checked content or not. We want to know how ChatGPT plays out in your classes.

What is the Call for Advisors about? 

The Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) is working on the sections of the Movement Charter by splitting into Drafting Groups, each focusing on specific subjects. The MCDC invites individuals with relevant expertise, particularly those who are familiar with the MCDC’s work, to support with insights based on their experience and institutional knowledge. Individuals with expertise from the broader open knowledge movement gained from outside the Wikimedia movement are also encouraged to reach out. The advisors are expected to collaborate with the Drafting Groups and Sub-committee members, who are developing specific chapters of the Charter.

You can share your willingness and availability with us through any of the identified communications channels below. Interested people once selected will join the Drafting groups and/or Sub-committees in the role of an advisor. All selected advisors, working at various stages will be non-voting members. 

Why is the MCDC announcing the Call for Advisors? 

While the MCDC members themselves come from different backgrounds and have expertise in various fields, the call for advisors is expected to connect the diverse experiences with acquired knowledge to prepare a well-informed document for advanced review by the communities. The complementary information gained through the advisors is expected to enhance the composition of the Drafting Groups.

The ways of engagement of an advisor will be designed by each Drafting Group. It may vary from meeting at regular intervals to engaging in asynchronous work contributions and may extend up to supporting the Drafting Groups with reference material. This will also depend on the field of expertise, nature, and scope of the chapter. The details will be discussed and agreed upon based on each individual’s knowledge and availability before starting the formal engagement. 

The Committee consists of the following Drafting Groups:

• Preamble 
• Values & Principles
• Roles & Responsibilities
• Global Council 
• Hubs 
• Decision-Making 

And Sub-committees: 

• Communications sub-committee
• Research sub-committee
• Ratification sub-committee.

How can you apply? 

Interested people should complete the advisory application form by indicating their area of expertise and in what way(s) they can support the Drafting Groups or the sub-committees. We expect to receive your support throughout the drafting process. For the current phase, advisors are invited to contact the MCDC by the end of May 2023. With the advancement of work, the asks around engagement for advisors joining at different intervals might vary. 

Thank you for your interest and we are looking forward to hearing from you. Please help us spread the word by forwarding this message to people interested in collaborating with the MCDC.

If you have any questions, please email: [email protected]

The Wikimedia Foundation Legal Team would like to announce that we are opening a comment period for amending the Foundation’s Terms of Use. The comment period will run from February 21 to April 24.

The Foundation last updated its Terms of Use (ToU) in June 2014. The last comprehensive review was in May 2012. In the last decade, we have witnessed a series of global legislative developments, as well as policy updates within the Wikimedia projects, which have led us to start a new round of updates. We want to ensure that the final document is high quality, meets our legal obligations, and supports the work of Wikimedia volunteer communities to the greatest extent possible, and we’d like to collaborate with you to get there. We’re sharing a brief overview of the proposed changes and opening a sixty day community comment period. 

We invite you to share your thoughts with us on Meta.

1. What are we updating now?

Legislative Reforms: As mentioned above, we have witnessed a series of legislative advancements regarding the regulations of online platforms. The European Union’s Digital Services Act, United Kingdom’s Online Safety Bill, and EU Anti-Terrorist Regulation, have established a series of compliance requirements for platforms that apply to any platform with a substantial number of users in the European Union in order to help protect the public. These requirements include rules against spreading misinformation and processes to address illegal content. Wikimedia communities already are hard at work addressing these issues every day, but it’s important that we have website terms that meet the requirements of the law. For example, under these new laws, the Foundation is mandated to introduce an updated way to receive complaints from users, including explaining options to appeal the results of a Foundation action. The proposed ToU changes align the projects with these new applicable laws. 

Policy Updates: 

CC BY-SA 4.0: The update will also upgrade the Wikimedia projects’ default license to CC BY-SA 4.0, an upgrade that has been long-requested from the community since its approval in 2016. The 4.0 version of the license significantly improves readability, offers flexibility for people remixing content in new formats, allows external CC BY-SA 4.0 text content to be added to the Wikimedia projects, and has a much better international structure with fully translated versions of the license in over forty languages. 

Proposal for better addressing undisclosed paid editing: The Foundation intends to strengthen its tools to support existing community policies against marketing companies engaged in systematic, undisclosed paid editing campaigns. The proposed changes aim to introduce new dispute resolution options to more efficiently address bad actors who disrupt the projects through undisclosed paid editing.

UCoC: To help ensure users’ safety and carry out the results of the recent UCoC vote on enforcement guidelines, the Foundation is introducing the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) as a reference within the Terms of Use. This will help to ensure that the UCoC is brought to the attention of all users and ensure consistency in Foundation policies. 

Wording updates: The updates also include a handful of semantics updates and new hyperlinks to existing policies. 

API policies: We have added a new section on API policies that references and explicitly includes use of APIs in the Terms of Use. Although the previous ToU wording implicitly included the APIs, as the use of project APIs becomes more important over time, we want to explicitly call further attention to policies around them. It’s important to note that this change is not an update in substance (the ways developers can use the API isn’t changing).

To see all the proposed changes and a more detailed explanation for why we’re doing them and how community comments can help improve the document, please see the project page on Meta-wiki.

2. What Next? Are these Proposed Changes Binding?

Unlike several other digital platforms that introduce unilateral updates to their terms, these ToU updates will happen collaboratively. We are presenting a draft of proposed changes to kick off discussions with you, which you can review on Meta. We will also be holding conversation hours to answer any questions and discuss proposed changes in more depth. Dates, times and links are available on the Meta project page.

In order to make this process as inclusive as possible for our global community, we have prepared translations of the proposed changes in nine different languages and will be working with staff members and volunteers to translate comments to the greatest extent we can. Because most of the Foundation lawyers are required to practice law in California, responses are likely to mostly occur in English and during Pacific Time Zone working hours. 

Throughout the comment period, we will be integrating your feedback and discussing revisions with you. When the comment period is complete, we will publish the finalized version of the ToU in several languages. We also plan to add further language translations in the next fiscal year. 

The Foundation legal team welcomes your feedback and invites Wikimedians across the globe to participate in the conversation to enable us to produce a comprehensive and sound update to the ToU.  

WASHINGTON, February 21, 2023 — The U.S. Supreme Court today denied the Wikimedia Foundation’s petition for review of its legal challenge to the National Security Agency’s (NSA) “Upstream” surveillance program. Under this program, the NSA systematically searches the contents of internet traffic entering and leaving the United States, including Americans’ private emails, messages, and web communications. The Supreme Court’s denial leaves in place a divided ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which dismissed Wikimedia’s case based on the government’s assertion of the “state secrets privilege.”

“The Supreme Court’s refusal to grant our petition strikes a blow against an individual’s right to privacy and freedom of expression — two cornerstones of our society and the building blocks of Wikipedia,” said James Buatti, legal director at the Wikimedia Foundation. “We will continue to champion everyone’s right to free knowledge, and urge Congress to take on the issue of mass surveillance as it evaluates whether to reauthorize Section 702 later this year.”

In its petition, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia free knowledge projects, argued that its challenge should be allowed to proceed, despite the government’s sweeping invocation of “state secrets.” This privilege allows the government to withhold information in legal proceedings if disclosure would harm national security. Wikimedia sought to move forward in the case based on the wealth of public information about the breadth and operation of Upstream surveillance, including numerous official disclosures by the government itself. 

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and the law firm Cooley LLP represented the Wikimedia Foundation in the litigation.

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

In the course of this surveillance, both U.S. residents and individuals located outside the U.S. are impacted. The NSA copies and combs through vast amounts of internet traffic, including private data showing what millions of people around the world are browsing online, from communications with friends and family to reading and editing knowledge on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. This government surveillance has had a measurable chilling effect on Wikipedia users, with research documenting a drop in traffic to Wikipedia articles on sensitive topics, following public revelations about the NSA’s mass surveillance in 2013. 

“The Supreme Court let secrecy prevail today, at immense cost to Americans’ privacy,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “We depend on the courts to hold the government to account, especially when it wields powerful new technologies to peer into our lives like never before. But the Supreme Court has again allowed the executive branch to hide abuses behind unjustifiable claims of secrecy. It is now up to Congress to insist on landmark reforms that will safeguard Americans in the face of the NSA’s mass spying programs.”

“This decision is a blow to the rule of law,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “The government has now succeeded in insulating from public judicial review one of the most sweeping surveillance programs ever enacted. If the courts are unwilling to hear Wikimedia’s challenge, then Congress must step in to protect Americans’ privacy by reining in the NSA’s mass surveillance of the internet.” 

The Wikimedia Foundation, which filed the case alongside eight other plaintiffs, sued the NSA in 2015 to protect the rights of Wikipedia readers, editors, and internet users globally. Lawyers representing the Wikimedia Foundation in the litigation include Patrick Toomey, Ashley Gorski, and Sarah Taitz for the American Civil Liberties Union; Alex Abdo and Jameel Jaffer for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University; and Ben Kleine, Aarti Reddy, and Maximilian Sladek de la Cal from the law firm Cooley LLP. Wikimedia v. NSA is a part of the ACLU’s Joan and Irwin Jacobs Supreme Court Docket.

. . .

This press release can be found online: www.aclu.org/press-releases/u-s-supreme-court-declines-to-hear-wikimedia-foundations-challenge-to-nsa-mass-surveillance 

For more information about the case:
https://knightcolumbia.org/cases/wikimedia-v-nsa 

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

. . .

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

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

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

. . .

Contacts:

Lorraine Kenny, Knight First Amendment Institute, [email protected] 

Allegra Harpootlian, American Civil Liberties Union, [email protected]

Laura Pulecio Duarte, Wikimedia Foundation, [email protected]

The State Of Open Conference brings together organisations, communities and advocates of open data, technology and knowledge. This year, Wikimedia UK was excited to attend SOOC23, where we spoke with attendees from across the sector about our particular role in the open knowledge movement. It provided us with a great opportunity to network with like-minded individuals, learn about emerging trends and technologies, and gain new insights and perspectives. 

Keynote speakers included the Labour MP and shadow science minister Chi Onwurah, Google’s vice-president of Infrastructure Eric Brewer, and Open UK CEO Amanda Brock. Representing the Wikimedia Foundation was Movement Advocacy Manager Franziska Putz, who took part in a panel discussion on the relationship between open data and diplomacy. We were also delighted to hear from Jimmy Wales, who gave a fascinating keynote lecture on Wikimedia’s role in open-knowledge sharing and the challenges that both the Wikimedia projects and open knowledge sector faces today.

A particularly enjoyable aspect of this conference was the diverse range of topics covered, including cutting-edge developments in open software and hardware, best practices for team collaboration and the ethical considerations of open technology. Attendees were able to choose from a variety of sessions, workshops, and keynote speeches, allowing them to tailor their experience to suit their particular interests.

In addition to the educational aspect, this conference was a fantastic chance to connect with others, providing a chance for Wikimedia UK representatives to meet new people and form meaningful connections with potential collaborators or volunteers. After three years of largely online working, this event provided an opportunity to learn from industry experts, connect with peers, and gain exposure to the latest technologies and trends. 

Although Wikipedia is a globally recognised and utilised resource, many attendees we spoke with were not aware of the specific work that Wikimedia UK undertakes to contribute to the open knowledge movement. Therefore, it was great to be able to speak with those unfamiliar with our organisation and to discuss our work in the fields of cultural heritage, information literacy, and open knowledge advocacy. Our efforts sparked numerous questions and discussions regarding how Wikimedia can help shape the future of open technology and how to get involved with our projects.

Whether we were talking with experienced industry professionals or students just starting out, the conference was a highly  positive and rewarding experience, and it was great to speak with others who recognized the benefits of open collaboration and knowledge sharing.  As a first-time attendee representing Wikimedia UK at a conference, I was struck by the passion for open technology felt throughout the community. The commitment to advancing and promoting this sector was evident, and the experience reinforced the critical role that Wikimedia plays in this field. I was delighted to see the overwhelmingly positive response from many of the attendees towards the important work that we do.

Thank you to everyone who supported us during SOOC23, especially our volunteers Ian Watt and Navid Nezafati!

The post Wikimedia UK at SOOCon23 appeared first on WMUK.

07/02/2023-13/02/2023

Mapping

• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • amenity=showground to describe open areas (typically grassy or gravel) which are maintained to be used for outdoor events.
  • landcover=* version 2 to formalise the usage of the key landcover=* and deprecate the tags landuse=grass and landuse=flowerbed.
• Voting is currently open until Friday 24 February for:
  • emergency=air_rescue_service, for tagging buildings and base areas of those groups that use aircraft for either aerial search and rescue or medical evacuation purposes.
  • emergency=water_rescue, for mapping the buildings and base areas, both on and off water, of those groups that are dedicated to the rescue of vessels and/or sailors in distress.
  • emergency=fire_water_inlet, for mapping an inlet to a building’s firefighting system.

Community

• Martijn van Exel has sent out the final OSM Tips email (we reported earlier). After a three month trial Martijn has decided to invest more time on MapRoulette in the future.
• MoiraPrime reflected on the current state of the map in Mississippi and concluded that the issues identified can be fixed with the help of the community. She listed a number of ways to get in touch with the Southern US community.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OSMF Engineering Working Group has decided that the call for proposals to add the ability to mute users on the openstreetmap.org website (we reported earlier) will close on Monday 13 March.

Events

• About a year ago, Martin Raifer started working as the maintainer of the iD editor for the OSMF (we reported earlier). He has blogged a short recap and outlook of what’s lying ahead according to him. He wants to host regular online community sessions to chat about the iD editor. The first of these chats will take place on 20 February at 4 pm UTC with the topic ‘the state of the tagging presets – recent changes and development tips’.
• Ilya Zverev announced that SOTM Baltics 2023 will be held in Riga on 18 and 19 May, where OSM-Baltic will join with the BalticGIT organisation team, the same arrangement as three years ago. This will give everyone interested in open data and open tools an opportunity to gather together to present their work, meet other mappers and developers, and spend two days in a beautiful city on a super wide river.

Education

• While training in French for beginners has already started (‘OpenStreetMap and Humanitarian Mapping’, which we reported in #651 and #655), the UN Mappers announced that this free training will also be provided Portuguese starting Wednesday 22 March. All interested Portuguese speakers are invited to register.
• Christian Hollinger encouraged beginners to get a handle on QGIS, for everything from basic data to elevation data and inserting photos. There is a lot for newcomers.

Humanitarian OSM

• Heather Leson, Dinar Adiatma, and Can Unen shared links to help new and experienced mappers get started with HOT mapping in Turkey.
• pedrito1414 addressed the question ‘is what I am doing really helping anybody in a disaster situation?’ with some statistics. The answer is yes.

Maps

• Alan McConchie interviewed Tanya Ruka, a Māori indigenous multimedia artist and designer who is the new Executive Director of Native Land Digital, an organisation with the mission ‘to map Indigenous lands in a way that changes, challenges, and improves the way people see history and the present day’.

Software

• MapTiler now has an Ocean map style available on MapTiler Cloud. The 15 arc-second elevation dataset provided by GEBCO was processed into an optimised Ocean tile set.

Other “geo” things

• In the latest edition of OpenCage’s #geoweirdness, even a Brazil specialist is sure to find some more interesting facts.
• The MapScaping Podcast recently discussed how AI can be used to generate artificial satellite imagery using generative adversarial networks (GANs). They tweeted four lookalikes – are you able to tell which is fake?
• Five days after the Turkey–Syria earthquakes, researchers have produced a map of the ground movement along the East Anatolian Fault. They did this by using before and after data from the EU’s Copernicus Sentinel-1A satellite, which carries a synthetic-aperture radar instrument that is able to routinely sense changes in elevation of the Earth’s surface. Neither of the two most serious earthquakes here were limited to a single epicentre; the first was a 300 km long rupture in one fault and the second a 140 km long one in another.
• Matthew Beedham drew an analogy between Overture Maps Foundation’s aim to develop standards for interoperability and shipping containers.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Budapest	Hiking by the pipeline towards Százhalombatta		2023-02-18
Nairobi	Mapping for Türkiye and Syria		2023-02-18	ke
Bologna	Wikigita alla Certosa di Bologna		2023-02-18
Toulouse	Réunion du groupe local de Toulouse		2023-02-18
	iD monthly meetup		2023-02-20
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2023-02-21
Lyon	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon		2023-02-21
	160. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2023-02-21
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2023-02-21
	HeiGIT Sketch Map Tool Launch		2023-02-22
Berlin	Missing Maps – DRK & MSF Online Mapathon		2023-02-22
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2023-02-22
Wien	67. Wiener Stammtisch		2023-02-22
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2023-02-23
Lajoux	OpenStreetMap : la cartographie collaborative pour tous		2023-02-24
Lajoux	OpenStreetMap : la cartographie collaborative pour tous		2023-02-25
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend February 2023		2023-02-25 – 2023-02-26
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2023-02-25
	Junta bimestral OSM-LatAm		2023-02-25
	Understanding the Basics of OpenStreetMap		2023-02-25 – 2023-02-26
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	✓	2023-02-27
Swarzędz	Workshops for new users – improve the space around you virtually		2023-02-28
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-03-01
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2023-03-01
England	OSM UK Chat	✓	2023-03-02
Budapest	Hiking by the pipeline between Barosstelep and Albertfalva		2023-03-04
泉大津市	マッピングパーティーin泉大津		2023-03-04
荒尾市	地域の「今」を記録して残そう！ みんなで作る！ みんなが使える無料のマップ ～変わりゆく荒尾～		2023-03-05
	MapRoulette Monthly Community Meeting		2023-03-07
	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2023-03-07
Stainach-Pürgg	8. Virtueller OpenStreetMap Stammtisch Österreich		2023-03-08
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2023-03-09
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2023-03-09
Winterthur	OSM-Stammtisch @Init7		2023-03-10

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 MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, SK53, SeverinGeo, SomeoneElse, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

For public policy students, writing for Wikipedia is a way of participating in conversations important to our democracy. Students embody a new and important role: conveyors of fact and truth. They must ask themselves, What information are people looking for? What sources are most trustworthy? What is the right tone? 

Aaron Franklin, a third-year at Stanford Law, created the Wikipedia article about Independent state legislature theory just months before the Supreme Court would consider the once fringe legal theory in one of the most significant election law cases ever. Thousands would likely visit Wikipedia once the case hit the news cycle, so he wanted to strike the right tone.

“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,” Aaron shared. “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.”

Through Wikipedia assignments, students can funnel academic research from behind paywalls out into the general public, letting readers make up their own minds about topics important to our democracy. 70,500 readers have now visited the article about ISL that Aaron created and that number continues to rise.

Political scientist and policy expert, Erzsebet Fazekas, led a Wikipedia assignment last Spring at the University of Albany. The course page invites students to practice the role they may embody in a future career in policy: explaining complex topics in a clear and fair way.

“Working in international development or in other internationally focused careers means working in a community of practice where members have unequal access to knowledge,” Dr. Fazekas writes to students. “Your job will entail strategically and effectively synthesizing and communicating knowledge to people in an accessible, balanced and inclusive way to fill knowledge gaps. This assignment will prepare you to do that.”

Students chose to update Wikipedia articles about the public management of humanitarian disasters, comparing public management tools across countries to address policy issues like refugee settlement and the COVID-19 pandemic. One student edited the article about procurement, or the purchasing of goods and services through a competitive bidding process. Thanks to them, the article now has a detailed section about “public procurement,” or how governments purchase goods and services for taxpayers. These additions explain the power of public procurement to cultivate economic growth, but also the associated challenges. It’s difficult to measure effectiveness, and there’s a risk that bribery will influence how procurements are distributed. 220,000 readers have visited the page since the student added this information.

Another student in the course chose to edit the article about public policy. It now states that drawing upon data science when making public policy decisions improves public services and mitigates errors and fraud. 163,000 readers have visited the page since the student made this addition last year.

Another student worked on the humanitarian crisis article, adding an entire section on how the United Nations and non-governmental organizations work together to manage them. The student wrote about the elements needed for successful management, including efficient coordination and communication between actors, working at both international and local levels, and centering the needs of those most at risk. This particular article has reached 18,550 readers since last year.

Wikipedia assignments are an effective way to channel academic research into highly relevant Wikipedia articles. As classrooms became remote at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Helen Choi’s engineering students made sure the article about Zoom video technology told students of their data privacy rights–informing more than 1.2 million readers that month and inspiring additional Wikipedians to expand the privacy section further. A business law student from Babson College expanded the COVID-19 section of the eviction in the United States section, updating with the changes to eviction law during the pandemic. Wikipedia editing is a way of putting timely, factual information into the hands of the public right as they’re looking for that information.

With the publication of Neil Thompson’s latest Wikipedia-related research, Trial by Internet, we understand Wikipedia’s importance not only to the public sphere but to the legal system broadly. Experimenters examined the invisible flows of information from Wikipedia to the Irish legal system, posting a set of 77 new Wikipedia articles about cases decided by the Supreme Court of Ireland. They analyzed subsequent decisions out of Ireland’s lower courts, finding that the cases with Wikipedia articles were 21% more likely to be cited as precedents and that lower court decisions drew on the Wikipedia articles in framing these precedents and their meaning. It seems that Wikipedia plays a big (if unacknowledged) role in keeping this knowledge system running–not just informing the public, but also the lawmakers.

As Amanda Levendowski, a law professor at Georgetown University, said, “It’s hard to imagine a more powerful way to further the public’s understanding of law and justice than by empowering law students to improve Wikipedia articles about those laws.” Wiki Education will help you guide your students to do so.

Learn more about incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course of any discipline at teach.wikiedu.org.

For two years in 2020 and 2021, I shared Wikipedia’s worldwide browser statistics on Mastodon under #browserstats. They looked a little something like this:

Wikipedia.org and sister projects, browserstats for May 2021:

• 49%: Chrome + Chrome Mobile
• 24.7%: Safari + Mobile Safari
• 5.2%: Firefox + Firefox Mobile
• 2.8%: Edge
• 2.5%: Samsung Internet
• […]

100% = 16.4 billion page views (not including bots)

As the data includes the browser’s major version, I wondered whether I could use this to follow the adoption rate through each browser’s release cycle. The short answer is… Yes! Here is what I found as of May 2021:

• Firefox: 1 week (peaks ~87% every 4 weeks).
• Edge: 1 week (peaks ~97%, every 6 weeks).
• Chrome: 2 weeks (peaks ~91%, every 6 weeks).
• Safari: 1-2 months (peaks ~86%, yearly).
• Chrome Mobile: 2 weeks (peaks ~80%, every 6 weeks).
• Mobile Safari: 4 months (peaks ~92%, yearly).

For each browser family I identified the typical adoption “peak”, which is the highest percentage of clients having the same major version of that browser during the last six months. I then measured the time it takes for a given version to reach that peak. To discount noise (such as from early betas and fake user agents) I count from 2% to 90% relative to the browser’s own adoption peak.

Firefox (desktop)

Release cadence: every 4 weeks.
Adoption peak: ~ 87%.
Adoption time: ~ 1 week.

from 1.7% to 78% (2-90% of peak):

• v85: 26 Jan – 3 Feb.
• v86: 23 Feb – 2 Mar.
• v87: 23 Mar – 31 Mar.

Microsoft Edge

Release cadence: every 6 weeks.
Adoption peak: ~ 97%.
Adoption time: ~ 1 week.

from 1.9% to 87% (2-90% of peak):

• v87: 19 Nov – 29 Nov.
• v88: 21 Jan – 30 Jan.
• v89: 4 Mar – 12 Mar.

As of August 2020, Edge aligns its schedule to Chromium releases.

Chrome (desktop)

Release cadence: every 6 weeks.
Adoption peak: ~ 91%.
Adoption time: ~ 2 weeks.

from 1.8% to 82% (2-90% of peak):

• v86: 7 Oct – 18 Oct.
• v87: (had a bumpy ride).
• v88: 20 Jan – Feb 6.
• v89: 3 Mar – 19 Mar.

Safari (desktop)

Release cadence: every 12 months.
Adoption peak: ~ 86%.
Adoption time: 1-2 months.

from 1.7% to 77% (2-90% of peak):

• v13: 14 Sep 2019 – 17 Nov 2019.
• v14: 16 Sep 2020 – 25 Dec 2020.

Chrome Mobile

Release cadence: every 6 weeks.
Adoption peak: ~ 80%.
Adoption time: ~ 2 weeks.

from 1.6% to 72% (2-90% of peak):

• v86: 7 Oct – 24 Oct.
• v88: 20 Jan – Feb 3.
• v89: 3 Mar – 19 Mar.

Mobile Safari (iOS)

Release cadence: every 12 months.
Adoption peak: ~ 92%.
Adoption time: ~ 4 months.

from 1.8% to 82% (2-90% of peak):

• iOS 13: 9 Sep 2019 – 12 Feb 2020.
• iOS 14: 16 Sep 2020 – 31 Dec 2020.

See also

You can interact with the adoption graphs on the Navigation Timing by browser dashboard in our public Grafana instance.^[1]

Explore the general browser usage and pageview data for yourself, visually:

• by browser family,
• by operating system, and
• overall Wikipedia pageview counts.

Or, access the open data in its pure form:

• OS/browser dataset,
• Pageview API.

This post appeared on timotijhof.net. Reply via email.

Since I last wrote about editing Wikimedia projects, quite a bit has changed — I’m not entirely sure if writing in detail about what happened is a good idea, nor am I sure why I’m even writing this at all, but I suppose we’ll just see how this post goes… but first, a crash-course in some relevant user groups, policies, and procedures of the world of Wikimedia. If you’re already familiar with the checkuser user group, requests for adminship and related policies, you may wish to skip the explainer.

User groups

Up until fairly recently, I was a checkuser and oversighter on the English Wikipedia, and a steward globally.

These user groups grant permissions such as:

• Viewing recent IP addresses a given user has logged in/edited from
• Viewing user-agent information for a given user’s actions
• Hiding revision content/log content from the public and administrators

As such, these user groups are considered highly sensitive positions of trust, only granted after considerable deliberation either by direct community election (i.e. the steward elections) or by a mixture of community consultation and internal deliberation by committee (CUOS call for applications).

Policies

The use of both checkuser and oversight is governed in a number of different policies; often defined as local policy, global policy and legal policy.
An example of this is the checkuser user group, which has an English Wikipedia local policy, a global policy and is subject to the global Wikimedia privacy policy via the access to nonpublic personal data policy (which in turn references the confidentiality agreement for nonpublic information).

In addition to these policies, as an English Wikipedia administrator (and at the time, checkuser and oversighter) I was expected to abide by the local administrator policy in the actions I mention later.

To save you reading and digesting all of those policies and trying to figure out how they apply below, I’ll summarise the relevant parts here. Of course, my own bias will be evident in how I read and summarise these policies, and I provide a link to each, so you can read them verbatim.

Administrator policy

Involved admins (link)

In general, editors should not act as administrators in disputes in which they have been involved. This is because involved administrators may be, or appear to be, incapable of making objective decisions in disputes to which they have been a party or about which they have strong feelings. Involvement is construed broadly by the community to include current or past conflicts with an editor (or editors), and disputes on topics, regardless of the nature, age, or outcome of the dispute.

[…]

In straightforward cases (e.g., blatant vandalism), the community has historically endorsed the obvious action of any administrator – even if involved – on the basis that any reasonable administrator would have probably come to the same conclusion.
Although there are exceptions to the prohibition on involved editors taking administrative action, it is still the best practice, in cases where an administrator may be seen to be involved, to pass the matter to another administrator via the relevant noticeboards.

From WP:INVOLVED (local policy)

This policy is well-defined, and the excerpts above explain the crux of the expectations placed upon me while performing administrative tasks — do not take admin action against someone you have previously been in dispute with, nor when the situation in which you are acting is one which triggers strong feelings.

I also note the “any other reasonable administrator” exemption, something I later come to rely on in defending my actions.

Wheel warring (link)

With very few exceptions, once an administrative action has been reverted, it should not be restored without consensus.

From WP:WW (local policy)

There’s not much which can be summarised further than the above, so I’ll give a relevant example:

• Administrator A blocks User B from editing
• Administrator C unblocks User B

Administrator D is now unable to re-block User B without first gaining community consensus (or, the explicit permission of Administrator C).

Checkuser policy

Grounds for performing a check (link)

The tool is to be used to fight vandalism, spamming, to check for sockpuppet abuse, and to limit disruption of the project. It must be used only to prevent damage to any of the Wikimedia projects.

The tool should not be used for political control, to apply pressure on editors, or as a threat against another editor in a content dispute. There must be a valid reason to use the CheckUser tools to investigate a user.

From Checkuser policy#Use of the tool (global policy)

The English Wikipedia’s checkuser policy expands on the above global one, but for this post only the grounds for performing a check is relevant. In summary, the primary purpose of checkuser is the prevention of sockpuppetry and the abuse sockpuppets often cause — no explicit list of grounds for checking are provided, as “checkusers asked to run a check must have clear evidence that a check is appropriate and necessary. The onus is on an individual checkuser to explain, if challenged, why a check was run“.

Fishing (link)

“Fishing” is to check an account where there is no credible evidence to suspect sockpuppetry. Checks are inappropriate unless there is evidence suggesting abusive sockpuppetry. For example, it is not fishing to check an account where the alleged sockmaster is unknown, but there is reasonable suspicion of sockpuppetry, and a suspected sockpuppet’s operator is sometimes unknown until a CheckUser investigation is concluded. Checks with a negative result do not mean the check was initially invalid.

From Wikipedia:Checkuser#Fishing (local policy)

As mentioned above, checkusers must have clear evidence that a check is both appropriate and necessary. Checks performed without clear evidence are considered “fishing expeditions” — i.e. a check performed to “see what you catch“.

Procedures

Requests for adminship (link)

Requests for adminship, often just referred to as “RfA”, is a process in which editors wishing to become administrators are subjected to a week of comment and voting — our candidate advice pages are appropriately pessimistic:

Some editors have left Wikipedia as a consequence of an RfA that has gone poorly.

From Wikipedia:Guide to requests for adminship

It’s suffice to say that RfA is probably the most stressful week an English Wikipedia editor will experience on the site.

In recent years, it has become very rare to see self-nominations, and it is expected that a prospective candidate will secure one or two co-nominators who will write a nomination statement and support the editor during the week.

Request for arbitration (link)

The arbitration process exists to impose binding solutions to Wikipedia conduct disputes that neither community discussion nor administrators have successfully resolved.

From Wikipedia:Arbitration

A request for arbitration is the last step of dispute resolution for conduct disputes on Wikipedia. The Arbitration Committee considers requests to open new cases and review previous decisions.

From Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration

When a dispute on the English Wikipedia requires the assistance of the arbitration committee to resolve, a request for arbitration is created, often by the aggrieved editor. This case request is then reviewed by ArbCom, accepted (or declined) and case proceedings commence.

On a personal note, the request for arbitration process is incredibly complex, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed even just as an onlooker.

Foreword

Before I begin, I’m going to make explicitly clear that this post:

• is not an attempt at rehashing the dispute in question.
• is not designed to plead innocence or shift blame.
• contains my own opinions and recollections of the events leading up to the loss of my oversight and checkuser permissions.
• may, where absolutely necessary, contain direct quotes from emails I sent, but never quotes from other editor’s replies.

In addition to the above, I have, where possible;

• attempted to remain neutral when explaining and summarising Wikimedia policy and procedure, and instead made it clear when making opinionated comments in respect to policy.
• refrained from linking to user pages of other editors.

For context, it may be useful to note:

• I have publicly disclosed a significant mental health condition (the same which I have posted about here previously) on my user page, in an effort to reduce the stigma editors face.
• In my disclosure, I note that “I consider myself as accountable as any other administrator/checkuser/oversighter, and explicitly waive any “potential leeway” an investigating body may wish to apply”.
• I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, though of course I don’t represent the Foundation. These opinions are my own.

Lastly, I need to stress that although some readers may feel strongly enough to contact those involved, I must insist that you do not.

Background to the RfA

At the start of October 2022, after a few weeks of private discussion via email, I co-nominated an editor named Isabelle Belato for adminship.

Part of my nomination statement, a feeling which I still hold today, read;

I’m thrilled to be co-nominating an editor who exemplifies what being here is all about — Isabelle has proven their competence both in policy and in the curation of content.

Normally the contents of a candidate’s user page is not germane to any discussion of them (except, of course, where that content is problematic) — a cursory review of Isabelle’s user page, a step I believe a lot of nominators will do, didn’t reveal anything remotely concerning nor indicative of likely controversy.

The RfA went live on the evening of the 7th, and immediately attracted stalwart support from the community. Isabelle appeared to remain a little nervous via email (a feeling that every RfA candidate can understand and share in!), but it was my hope that the overwhelming support at least mitigated that slightly. The days passed, and I reflected on my own RfA experience from seven years prior — a familiar pit in my stomach returned.

A single oppose

Often on Wikipedia, a series of events can be traced to a singular, definitive cause — in this case, the casting of a single oppose vote on Isabelle’s RfA by an administrator named Athaenara.

Oppose. I think the domination of Wikipedia’s woman niche, for lack of a better term, by males masquerading as females as opposed to welcoming actual, genuine, real women who were born and have always been female, is highly toxic. Go ahead, “cancel” me, I don’t care.

From Special:Diff/1115345450

This vote was made at 01:44 AM on the 11th, so I was probably asleep.

The community reaction to such a vitriolic statement was thankfully swift — another admin blocked Athaenara at 02:21 AM, and a request for arbitration for the removal of Athaenara’s admin permissions was made not long after.

I saw the comment at around 09:00AM, emailed Isabelle, and then left Athaenara the following talk page message:

I recognise your username Athaenara, but I do not recognise your words. To hold such a belief is one thing, but to say it so plain when it did not need to be said… I’m disappointed. I’m hurt for my candidate to whom we’d already explained RfA can be a nasty experience, but we never expected comments like this. I’m hurt for those who read your remarks and have internalised them. I’m hurting for you, who must have such hatred in your own heart to feel and believe such things, where people are merely trying to live their lives. Simply — how dare you?

From Special:Diff/1115401703

At this point, I apparently should have swallowed my pain and stepped away. This direct attack on someone already going through one of the most stressful weeks of their time on Wikipedia, for just being who they are…

I could not stand back. The LGBTQ+ community has had to fight, must continue to fight, and needs to send the message that this is unacceptable on every level in situations like this.

I was angry, and I remain angry that this happened.

Athaenara unblocked

The next day (12th October 2022), a very inactive administrator unblocked Athaenara. About an hour later I realised this, and contacted the unblocking administrator (both on their talk page, and privately via email), as well as opening a thread on the Administrators’ noticeboard for incidents:

Although the original block stood, both for the reason given in the block log and by consensus at the above thread, Lourdes has decided to unblock Athaenara without discussion, nor even an explanatory comment. Given how much of a controversial topic this block and the events leading to it are, this absolutely should have called for discussion with the blocking administrator (Floquenbeam) first, as clearly stated in Wikipedia:Administrators#Reversing another administrator’s action. As to not wheel war, I am seeking consensus to reinstate the block.

From Special:Diff/1115606391

Disputed actions

I need to be careful when discussing the events which transpired next, as a key element of the Wikimedia privacy policy (and by extension, the checkuser policies) is the prevention of the disclosure of private data — I therefore must rely on the information made available at the resultant arbitration case.

Use of checkuser

After the surprise unblock of Athaenara, I suspected collusion or compromise of the unblocking admin and Athaenara — multiple editors had already made clear their suspicions of compromise, and now with this unexpected behaviour I was beginning to worry that multiple admin account compromises had taken place for the purpose of causing disruption.

Due to these concerns, I performed a checkuser on both Athaenara and the unblocking admin (Lourdes) — it was my opinion that these checks were within policy^{1, 2}, as the check was made to “[investigate, prevent, or respond to] disruption (or potential disruption) of any Wikimedia project“.

At the time, I did not consider that this check would be considered involved.

Use of admin tools

After letting the “Athaenara unblocked by Lourdes” ANI thread sit for around half an hour (during which editors noted their support for the reinstatement of the block), I reblocked Athaenara.

At the time, I considered the ramifications of being potentially involved (a point I personally reconciled² as a reblock in case where any reasonable administrator³ would do the same) and wheel-warring (I depended on emergent consensus at the ANI thread — that is to say, consensus which was evident⁴ from a few experienced editors giving their opinions).

An Arbitration case opens

On the evening of the 12th, I received a talk page message from an arbitrator requesting that I “contact the arbitration committee at my earliest convenience” — this message is universally recognised on Wikipedia as something serious (in fact, Athaenara had received the exact same sort of message).

I emailed the committee less than a minute later, and awaited a response. Roughly a quarter-hour later, I received an explanation that the arbitration committee considered the checks I ran on Athaenara and Lourdes to be inappropriate, both per checkuser policy and involvement policy, and that they would like me to explain my actions.

My response, in which I attempted to neutrally explain the thought processes which led to making the checks, and where I explicitly made the statement that I “agree[d] in this case I should not have checked Lourdes, and by extension Athaenara.” was sent to ArbCom about an hour later — it took a significant amount of time to find supporting documentation/diffs and ensure my reply was not emotionally compromised.

I then heard nothing for six absolutely nerve-racking hours, during which everything from the public humiliation of having permissions revoked for cause, to my job being impacted, ran repeatedly through my head. I followed up to confirm the email had been received — it had, though no one had thought to let me know.

It is disheartening to know that the events which followed from this point on are the more likely contributors to the loss of my permissions — I was, at this point, unable to regulate my emotions. I rapidly changed my position⁵ between resigning my permissions, wanting a private case and wanting a public case.

I finally decided on a public case⁵, one of the first for misuse of checkuser permissions, and thus Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Reversal and reinstatement of Athaenara’s block began.

The entire case, I felt nothing but anger, betrayal, hurt, and disappointment towards a system which was meant to protect editors. Why was I likely to “come off worse” than the editor who posted those vitriolic comments? What ulterior motives were at play from those who were baying for my blood? Why was the standard of involved, and its explicit exception, not fairly applied to me? On reflection, I was psychotic and did not remove myself from the situation as I normally would — admittedly, this was a situation where it was made clear that I could not remove myself easily.

Aftermath

The ArbCom case resolved in the removal of my checkuser and oversight permissions, and my admonishment. I resigned my admin permissions on the English Wikipedia, logged out, and didn’t look back for quite a while⁶.

I received significant (and valid) votes for removal at this year’s reconfirmations, and as such decided to resign as a steward.

As it stands, I’m no longer able to do any of the things I’ve enjoyed doing (protecting editors from abuse and harassment, investigating large-scale disruption etc.) on Wikimedia projects for the ~7 years I’ve held advanced permissions.

It seems unlikely I’ll stick around as a volunteer in the long run, and honestly it’s taken a toll on how much I enjoy my job working for the Foundation.

I’m afraid this post has no “grand realisation of an opportunity for growth”, nor any sort of positive lesson or moral — this whole situation is one I regret, and worst of all, it was pointless. The same outcome (transphobic editor gets banned) would have occurred without me taking any actions.

All I’ve accomplished is ensuring that the next time a transgender editor feels unsafe on the English Wikipedia, I’m not going to be in a position to help.

Footnotes

1. — A later Ombuds Commission investigation found this action to be against policy.

2. — The ArbCom case into my actions found this action to be against policy.

3. — The Involved Admins section of the English Wikipedia administrator policy contains the exception “the community has historically endorsed the obvious action of any administrator – even if involved – on the basis that any reasonable administrator would have probably come to the same conclusion“.

4. — This was later disputed.

5. — I was probably manic/delusional at this point.

6. — I have since returned to the English Wikipedia as an admin, though admittedly at a very low activity level.

The post Updates, Involvement, and Psychosis appeared first on TheresNoTime.

Maintain your brand identity by using your own email address for wiki emails.

By default all ProWiki emails are sent from our pro.wiki domain:

Sending emails using a domain you own makes it clearer to your users who is communicating with them.

New Email Settings

You can configure your custom email on the Dashboard tab of the admin panel.

By default it will be set to use pro.wiki:

This can be changed to use your own settings:

For more details, see How to Configure Custom Email.

🕑 1 hour 17 minutes

Anton Krom is a longtime MediaWiki administrator and consultant.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• WikiTeq
• Wikiask
• Canasta
• Anton on Upwork

Women are often the de facto leaders in community change, social movements, and political groundswells. So why are only 19% of Wikipedia biographies about them? That’s what Natchee Barnd set out to correct in our recent Women in Red Wiki Scholars course. In the virtual course, a group of experts spanning many disciplines gathered together to write biographies for women related to their careers and research interests.

“As a scholar of Ethnic Studies, I am always eager to learn more about people who engage in different and creative forms of activism or organizing,” Dr. Barnd says. “I only write in Wikipedia in order to create new content that focuses on communities of color, Indigenous peoples, and topics related to social justice.”

After learning Wikipedia basics in our course, Dr. Barnd created a biography for María Urquides, who is often referred to as the “Mother of Bilingual Education” in the United States. Dr. Barnd hopes that readers of the biography reflect on how long communities and schools have been fighting to implement bilingual education, as well as to notice how much resistance persists.

“María Urquides got involved in bilingual education at a rather late age, after a long career in education. So, she provides an amazing role model for community engagement and grassroots efforts toward inclusion education,” Dr. Barnd shares. “Since my children are currently in a dual immersion program, I would also hope readers consider, or reconsider, the various and wonderful models for learning and student growth.”

María was featured in the “Did You Know?” section on Wikipedia’s mainpage on November 24th, so her story has already reached thousands of readers. When biographies of notable women exist, readers can look to them for inspiration and to learn about their important contributions to history. But if no one takes the time to write these articles, they won’t exist.

“The people working with and within Wikipedia have enormous potential to make interventions against systemic bias. The first step, of course is becoming aware of this reality of bias within Wikipedia and within our larger societies. The next step is to understand it better, and to take action.”

Since taking this Wikipedia training course with us, Dr. Barnd has implemented a Wikipedia writing assignment into his course at Oregon State University. He is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies and Native American Studies there. Students in the course wrote new Wikipedia articles and edited existing ones related to Native American activists. More than 20,000 Wikipedia readers have already been reading about the Liliʻuokalani Trust in a brand new article, Patricia Whitefoot‘s dramatically expanded biography, and new biographies about Mary Cornelius Winder, and Ramona Lubo, and more.

It’s not typical that instructors learn how to edit Wikipedia themselves before conducting a Wikipedia assignment. Wiki Education’s assignment templates and trainings offer them everything they need to cultivate a successful experience both on Wikipedia and in the classroom. And many of the instructors we support tell us they were delighted to learn about the platform alongside their students. But Dr. Barnd went a little more in depth with our Women in Red Wiki Scholars course. And he had a positive experience learning the in’s and out’s of Wikipedia alongside peers.

“As a professor, I am particularly involved with using the platform to help students become more media literate, as well as to help them understand how platforms like Wikipedia can be a force for good, or a tool for inequity. I want them to choose, and to do something about it. If we choose to do nothing, our inaction will not free of us responsibility. It simply sweeps us along the with the current.”

Learn more about incorporating an assignment like this into your course at teach.wikiedu.org. OR, if you’re curious about learning some Wikipedia editing skills yourself, check out our open courses at learn.wikiedu.org.

By Leah Emary, Wikimedian in Residence at the Mixed Museum and Connected Heritage Project Lead at Wikimedia UK

As a part of the Connected Heritage project at Wikimedia UK, I have been embedded at the Mixed Museum one day a week as a Wikimedian in Residence since September. The Mixed Museum is directed by Chamion Caballero and is a digital museum and archive that contributes to widening knowledge about Black and ethnic minority British history. This blog posting reports on three aspects of the residency:

1. Sharing Mixed Museum’s scholarship and research on Wikipedia
2. Creating a Volunteering Programme
3. The Brown Babies Images

The mini-Residency was initially scheduled to run from September-December 2022 but it’s been so fruitful and interesting for both the Mixed Museum and for Wikimedia UK that we decided to extend it into the first few months of 2023.

Mixed Museum Residency First Steps

The Mixed Museum’s Director Chamion has long been a supporter of Wikipedia and Wiki editing, having written a piece in 2018 about how important it is for academics to write about their work on Wikipedia and not lock academic research behind paywalls. Yet she had never had the time or opportunity to edit or write articles herself. So the Residency gave us the chance to set aside time for bespoke one on one training for her. 

Bite-sized Training Sessions

We decided to break a typical Introduction to Wikipedia training into smaller, weekly sessions rather than the usual 3-4 hour block of time. The first week, Chamion and I met on Zoom and she created an account and a user page. The second week, she created her Wikipedia sandbox and began to play with headings, inserted citations, an image, and an infobox. 

In the third session, she made her first edit to live Wikipedia and we both cheered very loudly! As a sociologist who has relied heavily on UK census data in the past, she was keen to update some misinformation and lack of nuance on the Wikipedia page on Mixed as an ethnicity category in the UK. So her first edit was to change the page summary and to add a key reference. She plans to continue work on this page. 

In our fourth training session, we returned to talking more about what does and does not belong on Wikipedia and some of the guiding principles such as notability, reliable sources, conflict of interest and systemic bias. A theme throughout each of our training sessions has been a wider consideration of how Chamion can continue to thread wiki work into the Museum’s existing workflow, and to fill content gaps on Wikipedia using the Museum’s exhibitions and scholarships. 

Telling the Brown Babies story on Wikipedia

Chamion then spent some time drafting a few paragraphs in her sandbox about the UK’s brown babies, the name given to the children of white British women and African American soldiers born during and after World War 2. The Mixed Museum hosted a successful Brown Babies exhibit which opened in 2020 and the families of these children are keen to to tell their stories more widely and especially to share some beautiful family photographs of the children, some of whom lived at a children’s home in Surrey called Holnicote House. 

There is no Wikipedia page dedicated to Holnicote House, but there is a page for Holnicote Estate, which includes a subsection on Holnicote House. So instead of creating a new page, we decided to embed the history of Holnicote House and the brown babies story onto the Holnicote Estate page. Look what a difference her edits have made: 

Before   

Before there was one sentence about the use of Holnicote House as a children’s home which was buried in the history of the house and outbuildings.

After 

She created a new heading for a history of Holnicote House in the 20th century and added three paragraphs of text about who these children were and how they came to live there. She uploaded an image of the children to Wikipedia (the challenges we faced in our efforts to upload images of the brown babies to Wikimedia Commons will be the subject of another blog posting). I think the addition of the image is a particularly powerful aspect of bringing this history to life. 

Though Chamion’s journey as an editor is just beginning, the impact of her work is shown in the Residency’s dashboard statistics. 12,5000 views of the 5 articles and 1 Commons upload she has worked on!

Creating a Wikimedia volunteering package for The Mixed Museum

One issue for small heritage organisations is that, though there may be many people interested in volunteering for the organisation, the administrative capacity to train and manage volunteers just isn’t there. This is a problem that Chamion faces. We thought that we could perhaps create a digital volunteering programme for The Mixed Museum based on editing Wikimedia Projects in The Mixed Museum’s areas of expertise: the history of racial mixing in Britain. 

This project is particularly exciting in the heritage space because it’s entirely digital: digital museum, digital platform and digital volunteers.

Training the volunteers

To begin with, we envisioned three types of volunteer: 

1. One with confident digital and academic skills who would be keen to learn how to edit Wikipedia
2. One with confident digital skills who might like create digital content for Wikimedia Commons 
3. One who might be a keen researcher, writer, creator or storyteller but who might not yet have the digital confidence to edit Wikimedia projects.

Each volunteer would require a training program which they could complete remotely and on their own time and, when they were ready, a set of tasks which they could begin work on independently. 

To begin, we recorded Chamion’s Zoom-based wiki training sessions and edited those down so that the volunteer training videos would feature Chamion’s voice and be tailored to the digital museum’s context. 

These videos will be embedded into three different Mixed Museum Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons volunteer training programmes, though they are hosted on Wikimedia Commons and YouTube. The training programmes are currently structured as three different Google Slides presentations which volunteers can click through as a self-study study tutorial. 

Managing the volunteers’ work 

A final piece of the puzzle is how to manage the volunteer programme. As the sole full time paid member of staff, Chamion does not have the time to oversee volunteer training and work in real time. So we came up with the idea of managing the training and work with the help of  two Trello boards. One Trello board is to manage the volunteers’ time and work. The second is to keep track of work which needs doing. 

In the first board, each volunteer has a section with their name on it. They can be assigned a training programme and can give updates on their progress or ask any questions on their training there. Once they have completed their training, they can either choose or be assigned a Wikimedia task. 

The second Trello board holds a pool of Wikimedia tasks. In a Wikipedia editathon context, this would be known as a ‘work list’ and would usually be a list of tasks that need doing, the Wikipedia page which needs editing, a list of relevant sources to use and any advanced tutorials a new editor might need to support them. A part of the edithon would involve an editor claiming a task with their initials and going off to work on it. In the Trello board, each card contains these bits of information and the cards are categorised by which type of volunteer they might best suit: 

1. A text-based Wikipedia task (such as adding references to Steve Stacey’s biography page
2. A digital content creation task on Wikimedia Commons, such as uploading 19th century images of mixed race people in Ireland
3. An off-wiki task for someone, such as identifying what’s missing on Wikipedia pages.

Volunteers can either go in and select a task that appeals to them and drag it over to their Trello workspace, or Chamion can select one for them and assign it to them. 

Volunteers can update on their progress and ask questions on tasks within Trello. Any unfinished tasks can be returned to the pool and any finished tasks can be marked as complete and archived, thus providing a record of what has been achieved.

Would you like to be a Wiki volunteer at the Mixed Museum?

We aim to prototype and test the volunteering programme with willing participants in 2023. New to wiki work and interested in helping us prototype the training? Please be in touch.

Is copyright resulting in systemic exclusion?

The Mixed Museum used a series of images to illustrate the Brown Babies exhibition which included the story of children who lived at Holnicote House in the 1940s. From the outset, Chamion was very keen to upload these Holnicote House images to Wikimedia Commons and embed them on relevant Wikipedia pages. 

As we planned the uploads, it became clear that we did not have enough information about the provenance of the images (or where they came from) to allow them to be openly licensed and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Though there may be acceptable levels of risk that a heritage organisation might be willing to take in terms of uploading images which are likely in the public domain because of copyright elapsing or the copyright owner being untraceable, Wikimedia Commons applies a cautionary principle, and won’t accept images unless their status as copyright-free or freely licensed can be firmly established. 

After many weeks of emailing, phone calls and expert copyright advice from three sources, we were able to document a chain of donation and speak with the donor of the image. This donor’s late husband appeared in the photographs when he was a child. This donor is, like Chamion, very keen that the images be shared on Wikimedia Commons. The donor also considers this a family photograph, and her daughter’s inheritance. Yet we cannot establish whether the photos were taken by the Holnicote House employees in the course of their employment (and would therefore be the property of the employer) or if the photographers were not employed by Holnicote House (and therefore copyright would be owned by the photographer or their heir). Either way, because this information cannot be firmly established, these photographs are not able to be uploaded to Commons under existing rules.  

I raised the issue at the Village Pump on Commons, because it seems to me and Chamion that the unintended consequence of this strict application to UK copyright law results in systemic bias against children who grew up in care. And mixed race and Black children in Britain are disproportionately overrepresented in the care system so this issue will impact the family photographs of mixed race and Black people more than others. Please contribute to the discussion on the Village Pump if you’re keen to move this along!

What next? 

The obvious and usual answer to these types of issues is to avoid images from the 20th century or ones where the creator is unknown, ‘complicated’ or ‘problematic’. From a wiki perspective, we often will turn to the low hanging fruit such as 19th century or earlier images or contemporary ones created expressly for Wikimedia Commons. By ignoring ‘complicated’ images such as the ones of the Brown Babies, however, we are systematically excluding important histories. 

In addition, one needs to be very careful particularly about framing mixed race families as ‘problematic’ or ‘complicated’ or ‘not respectable’. This carries racist overtones and there is a legacy of discrimination based on these very categories in England and elsewhere. At Wikimedia UK, we focus “on knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. We break down the barriers that prevent people and organisations from accessing and contributing to open knowledge, and support the development of people-centred and technical solutions to help eradicate inequality and bias on the Wikimedia projects.” -Wikimedia UK Strategic Framework 2022-2025. This example of the Brown Babies images gives us a chance to dive deeper, to reflect, and to move the dial where systemic exclusion on Wikimedia platforms exists, rather than to avoid these in favour of images or subjects which might be more straightforward. 

Open licensing is a lot of work

That said, the amount of work, expertise, and time involved in this process is prohibitive for many heritage and cultural organisations. We were able to achieve this at The Mixed Museum because of the time dedicated through the Wikimedian in Residence programme and because Chamion was motivated to understand open licensing in the interest of pursuing National Lottery Heritage funding.

The work of establishing ownership, understanding copyright alongside open licensing, the rules of Wikimedia Commons and discussing how it applied in this case took several months. We involved an experienced Wikimedian, a former Wikimedia Commons Bureaucrat and two experts in copyright in the GLAM sector. Not to mention Chamion herself, me, the donor, and my fellow Digital Skills Wikimedian Lucy Hinnie. We also drew on the expertise of the Wikimedia UK community and at the Village Pump on Commons. 

Even after all this work, we’re still undecided about whether we can openly license the Holnicote House images for Wikimedia Commons.

If we consider other cultural and heritage organisations who do not have these resources and knowledge to call upon, for example, a small community archives group, it seems clear that they would not be able to engage with Wikimedia Commons. A group or an individual that is sourcing, digitising and preserving family photographs and would potentially like to license these openly would have a lot of work to do to answer these questions. Even with grant funding, people are just too overstretched with the work of the actual project to engage much with the licensing and copyright issues. As Chamion and I remarked frequently to each other, anyone who wasn’t us would have given up long before we did! 

Interested in hosting a Wikimedian in Residence?

If you are involved with a heritage or cultural organisation in the United Kingdom and you think a Wikimedian in Residence might be good for your organisation, please talk to us about it. You can book a half hour meeting with the Connected Heritage team via Calendly or drop us an email. 

The post The Mixed Museum: an overview of the residency appeared first on WMUK.

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31/01/2023-06/02/2023

Mapping

• Pieter Vander Vennet expressed his concerns about the MapBuilder program that allows Bing users to indirectly edit OSM.
• António Madeira presented ► a proposal to the OSM Portugal Telegram community to standardise the mapping of school estates in Portugal. The proposal will be discussed over the next two weeks in the Telegram Channel of the OSM Portugal community and then a vote will follow. All help, critiques, and suggestions are welcome.
• GHOSTsama2503 proposed ► an approach for the uniform tagging of educational institutions in Cuba.

Community

• Charmyne Mamador shared her experiences of participating at the Pista ng Mapa 2022 Conference. She is project lead at Ausome Maps, a ‘She Leads and She Inspires’ grant-funded project, and co-founder of GeoLadies PH.
• Valerie Norton encouraged readers of her hiking blog, Moments in Dirt and Ink, to fix map errors in OpenStreetMap and provided detailed advice on how to edit the map.
• Jemimah Mukisa, a scholarship recipient, shared her experiences of the State of the Map Tanzania 2023 Conference.
• OpenStreetMap Belgium’s mapper of the month is Erik (Eebie).
• Pascal Neis tweeted that he has added some new features to the OSM Notes Overview, including a map view of the latest created notes.
• The UN Mapper of the Month is Sajeevini Sivajothy, from Sri Lanka.

Events

• mstock gave an interesting insight into the software and services behind the State of the Map conferences, from planning through to realisation.
• Trufi recorded a recent webinar ‘A Sustainable Approach to Transport Data Collection’ organised by the World Resources Institute along with partners from the Digital Transport for Africa consortium.

Education

• Tailored specifically for the French-speaking community, 328 participants from 32 countries have attended the first training session organised by UN Mappers. Every Thursday for 9 weeks, they will be meeting to learn more about #UNMaps and #OSM.

OSM research

• The LocationIQ Blog shared their answer to the question ‘Why Open Source Is Best for Your Business: The OpenStreetMap vs Google Debate’.

Humanitarian OSM

• [1] Mapping in the Turkey/Syria earthquake region is urgently needed.Via the tasking manager you can get an overview of the tasks with high urgency and start mapping immediately.

  New tasks are being added hourly and their progress is also documented on the wiki page.

  You can also search for MapRoulette challenges. Examples include: Afsin – Damaged Buildings, Islahiye – Damaged Buildings and Building Damage – Nurdagi.

  Said Turksever tweeted that Maxar has published satellite images taken after the earthquake in southern Turkey, which are being processed for post-disaster mapping.

  You can watch the daily work of the mapping community by using Pascal Neis’ OSMstats.

• Pete Masters and Rubén Martín have published their HOT Community Weeknotes: 5 / 2023. They report on what is happening and coming up in the world of HOT mapping. Feedback is welcomed on whether the newsletter is useful or what could be improved!

Maps

• dktue has made an experimental map that you can enter an airport’s ICAO code into (e.g. EDDH) and be presented with a vector map based on data retrieved via the Overpass API.
• Luke Seelenbinder has built a full-screen, nothing-but-the-map view for Stadia Maps.

Software

• Starting with StreetComplete version 51.0, the functionality for measuring things via camera has been outsourced to a new stand-alone app StreetMeasure. The source code for the app is available on GitHub, although some of the required libraries are not free.

Programming

• Sarah Hoffmann reported on an initial experiment with using Nominatim and SQLite. This is part of the work being done to make Nominatim work better with with less powerful hardware.
• tomczk shared a demonstration web app that analyses OSM changeset data. He asked for ideas on extending the types of statistics produced.
• Igor Suhorukov showed ► how to use his project, Openstreetmap_h3, to fit the whole world into a regular laptop and do analytics using PostgreSQL and OpenStreetMap.

Did you know …

• … the !bang shortcuts in DuckDuckGo? Open DuckDuckGo and try !osm.
• … that in Makiivka, Ukraine (the neighbouring city of Donetsk) there are 157 streets with the same names in the city; 65 that are repeated three times; 12 four times; eight streets are repeated five times; Zhovtneva Street six times (yes, Soviet fetish); Stepova Street eight times, five times in the same area… and for more see on Twitter

Other “geo” things

• The Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology is seeking ► a deep-learning engineer. The scope of duties includes deep feature extraction using multimodal data, such as satellite imagery and OSM data.
• Stamen cartographers Alan McConchie and Stephanie May were asked to summarise their thoughts on the new cartographic landscape, and explain what the phrase ‘full stack cartography’ means to them.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Curitiba	[Online] Mapatona de Emergência – Apoio à resposta aos terremotos com epicêntro na Turquia	✓	2023-02-09 – 2023-02-10
Cuauhtémoc	Mapatón OSM en apoyo a Turquía y Siria		2023-02-10
Ways	HOT-AP & Missing Maps – Disaster Mapping Mapathon (Asia-Pacific Time)	✓	2023-02-10
	Mapathon in support of Türkiye		2023-02-10
Walhain	HOT-AP & Missing Maps – Disaster Mapping Mapathon (Europe Time)	✓	2023-02-10
Berlin	176. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2023-02-10
	Turkey Earthquake Response Mapathon		2023-02-10
	Mapathon a supporto del terremoto in Turchia e Siria		2023-02-10
Budapest	Hiking by the pipeline from Barosstelep to the shooting range		2023-02-11
Tiranë	OSM Brunch		2023-02-11
Localidad Barrios Unidos	Mapatón LATAM para Turquía y Siria		2023-02-11
左京区	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第36回 金地院		2023-02-12
København	OSMmapperCPH		2023-02-12
	Turkey Earthquake Response Mapathon		2023-02-12
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 月聚會 #49		2023-02-13
	MapRoulette Monthly Community Meeting		2023-02-14
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-02-15
Zürich	Missing Maps Zürich Mapathon		2023-02-15
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe		2023-02-15
Olomouc	Únorový olomoucký mapathon		2023-02-16
Budapest	Hiking by the pipeline towards Százhalombatta		2023-02-18
Bologna	Wikigita alla Certosa di Bologna		2023-02-18
Toulouse	Réunion du groupe local de Toulouse		2023-02-18
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2023-02-21
Lyon	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon		2023-02-21
	160. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2023-02-21
Berlin	Missing Maps – DRK & MSF Online Mapathon		2023-02-22
Lajoux	OpenStreetMap : la cartographie collaborative pour tous		2023-02-24
Lajoux	OpenStreetMap : la cartographie collaborative pour tous		2023-02-25
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend February 2023		2023-02-25 – 2023-02-26
	Junta bimestral OSM-LatAm		2023-02-25
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	✓	2023-02-27
Swarzędz	Workshops for new users – improve the space around you virtually		2023-02-28
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-03-01
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2023-03-01

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 MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, SK53, Strubbl, TheSwavu, TrickyFoxy, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

We organised the most recent iteration of our Train the Trainer (TtT) course in 2022 in the first week of December.

TtT trains volunteers who are keen to deliver Wikipedia editing events. Volunteer trainers are at the heart of delivering Wikimedia UK programmes. They act as community leaders and extend our work to underrepresented communities. They train new and existing editors. We currently have 45 trainers in 33 different locations across the country.

This term 15 trainers attended our course. The training equipped candidate trainers with the skills, experience and resources to deliver a standard Introduction to Wikipedia workshop. The second part of the training focused on Developing Community Partnerships. This session brought together candidate and accredited trainers and served as an opportunity to network as well as learning about how to establish connections with different communities and institutions.

Objectives

“I want to feel ready and confident to run a successful edit-a-thon.”

Candidate trainers expressed their objectives for attending the TtT as:

• Improve confidence in delivering training
• Learn how to support new editors from non-academic backgrounds
• Explore how to handle difficult questions
• Structure engaging and interesting sessions
• Approach institutions and communities
• Contribute to controversial subjects on Wikipedia
• Organise translation events

Commitments

“I will revisit the role-play scenarios to inform the outreach to museums that I’m going to do.”

Following the training, our trainers committed themselves to:

• Get in touch with their networks to scope out editing events
• Translate materials to their native languages
• Identify who to contact
• Study the TtT checklists and template emails in organising future events
• Follow up with existing contacts 
• Think about how to engage better with participants after events
• Set up and promote volunteering projects
• Share learnings with colleagues
• Find framework/funding for Wikimedian residencies
• Follow more people on social media, and actually take up space

Feedback

“Really enjoyed the training, learnt a lot and look forward to putting it into practice.”

We are glad to see that our trainers had an overall good experience. We received 9 responses (60%) to our questionnaire that requested feedback for the pre-training information, training sessions, communication, training venue, catering, and online experience. All participants rated their experience 4 and above out of 5.

Introduction to Wikipedia

Developing Community Partnerships

We noted the following constructive feedback with appreciation:

• Shadowing the lead trainers to see how to set up the dashboard, the worklist, etc.
• Shorter day for especially online participants
• More time for interactive exercises such as role-playing
• Providing more context about the training content
• Interaction between the in-person and remote participants

We will strive to improve future sessions with these in mind. We will particularly pay attention to develop opportunities for bringing together in-person and remote participants, thus creating a truly hybrid experience for all.

The post Train the Trainer Dec2022 Feedback appeared first on WMUK.

• Albania report: Wikipedia Birthday in Tirana, Albania
• Belgium report: DESINGEL arts centre and Wikimedia platforms
• Brazil report: Open Midiateca: Licensing and analysis of collections of Midiateca Capixaba
• Colombia report: Let’s celebrate public domain day 2023
• Finland report: Photo walks for Wiki Loves Monuments and rephotography
• Indonesia report: Public Domain Day in Indonesia; #1Lib1Ref Campaign and Workshop
• Italy report: Wikimedia Italy’s calls for free knowledge
• Netherlands report: Opening old books at Maastricht University
• Poland report: GLAM stepping into 2023; New “did you know” articles on the collection of Wawel Royal Castle
• Spain report: #1Lib1Ref
• Sweden report: Tekniska museet makes 3000 polar images available on Commons
• Switzerland report: Swiss GLAM Programme
• UK report: National Trust and cultural diversity
• USA report: Effie Kapsalis remembered; Mathematicians + Wikipedia; Wikipedia Day 2023; San Diego meetup
• Content Partnerships Hub report: Report of survey about Wikimedia content partnerships tools
• Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: View it! Editing Functionality: Final Update!
• Calendar: February’s GLAM events