Have you ever wished monitoring and fighting vandalism was easier from your mobile device?

For quite some time Product teams at the Wikimedia Foundation have heard requests to add more tools for protecting against vandalism on mobile devices. The majority of editors who edit on desktops use visual and source editor, edit summary, watchlists, talk pages, templates, recent changes, and may have access to various patrolling tools such as SWViewer, Twinkle, and Huggle. However, for editors who edit through their mobile devices, there has been increasing interest in anti-vandalism tools, especially on Wikipedia’s mobile apps. Starting in August 2023 as a result of the annual plan, the Android team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been working on an anti-vandalism / patrol feature in the Wikipedia Android mobile application.

Over the past six years, the Android team has been working to strengthen editing tools available to mobile users, such as image recommendations, which was a new suggested edits feature that allows users to add images to articles based on machine recommendation (it’s available now on the iOS Wikipedia app too). These features are especially important for Android because the majority of people in mobile-only markets use Android over iOS.

By introducing the Edit Patrol feature to the Wikipedia Android mobile application, the team aimed not only to address the immediate need for enhanced vandalism control for this important group, but also to improve editor workflows and content moderation across all language wikis. 

The new feature offers users with rollback rights several new capabilities within the App:

• Swipe through a feed of recent changes
• Review diffs and take action through the toolbar to Thank, Watch page, Send a talk page message to the user, or Undo or Rollback the edit
• Learn more about the editor you are reviewing, such as how long they’ve been an editor
• Create and save a personal library of user talk messages to use while patrolling

How did the Android team build this feature?  

“Improve experience of editors with extended rights” is an objective of the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2023-2024 fiscal year plan that the Android team. It aligns with requests from various language communities, especially medium size wikis, for improvements in the quality of edits made through the app.

Community members emphasized the need for moderation tools that are fair and unbiased across different language wikis, and this was a specific request from the Wishlist.

Following a structured process outlined in the Wikimedia Foundation’s Inclusive Development Playbook, we aim to improve the quality of edits made through the app. This included research, user engagement, and planning. Clear goals were set and feedback was collected to guide the process ensuring a focus on enhancing both Wikipedia’s content quality and overall user experience.

Data is key in the decision-making process 

The Android team decided to focus on specific Wikipedia languages based on user data. We found that there were twice as many users with Rollback rights on Android (371) compared to iOS (176), so we prioritized developing the feature for Android first. Then, we identified which Wikipedia languages had users with Rollback rights using the apps.

Using data shared by our analyst (T322065), we selected Indonesian, Spanish, French, Chinese, and English Wikipedia as our target languages, and made sure to meet with current patrollers before working on designing the feature. We started with Indonesian Wikipedia as our pilot and collaborated throughout the development process with the help of Bonaventura Aditya Perdana, the Indonesian Product Ambassador.

Our aim was to assist wikis that faced challenges with existing monitoring tools, which is primarily small and medium sized wikis. We are also engaging with Igbo Wikipedia to understand the experience of a smaller wikis that do not have standard patrolling policies. With the input of small and medium-sized wikis, we were able to create saved warning messages that could be use as a type of template for communities that lack them.

Incorporating feedback

After presenting at Wikimania 2023 and sharing our initial V1 of the tool, the Android team heard requests from English, Indonesian, and French Wikipedians that they would like to be able to access and insert existing user talk warning templates while using this feature and Saved Messages. In response, the team built V2 to include a significant improvement: Templates.

Editors in the app can now access existing community templates from the editing toolbar, search for existing templates, fill out template data, insert a template, and preview it before posting. Adding this functionality allows patrollers to continue using the existing warning templates they are used to from their wikis while using this tool.

One of the Android team’s goals was to ensure our patrolling solution supported all users regardless of language. We noticed that many language wikis do not have existing user talk warning templates, so we prepared a set of 10 example messages from 5 Wikipedias that have templates, which come pre-loaded into the app and can be used as a key point. We consulted with Igbo Wikipedians on how the links within the messages should be presented, when policy pages are not yet created.

In the first 15 days after release, we saw 184 unique users from our target wikis engage with the tool. 85.9% of those unique users used the tool for sending messages, highlighting that the tool is effective in motivating communication while patrolling, which editors expressed was an important action to encourage over rollbacking.

Additionally, 57.1% of users who provided feedback about the feature, expressed feeling satisfied and 42.9% expressed feeling neutral about Edit Patrol. 87.5% of users who opened the feature completed successful engagement actions as designed without encountering issues with the tool.  

What’s next?

We have heard requests to make a few elements of this feature community configurable, and we are exploring that possibility in partnership with the Growth team.The feature is now available for all Wikipedias. To access the feature, download the Android App and set your primary language.

If you have rollback rights on that language wiki, the “Edit Patrol” option will appear in the  “Edits” tab. However, if a community decides they want to make the feature available to users who do not have rollback rights but have reached a certain edit threshold, they can contact us via our support emails: [email protected]

As a global rollbacker, you will be able to perform patrols in all the languages where you hold global rollbacker rights through your mobile device.

Are you interested in more about the Mobile Apps team? Subscribe to our quarterly newsletter, try out our mobile app if you haven’t already, and join in contributing to human knowledge on the go!

Anne-Christine Hoff is an associate professor of English at Jarvis Christian University.

Back in January of this year, I took a three-week, six-hour introductory course on Wikidata through the nonprofit Wiki Education. Before the course’s start, I knew little to nothing about Wikidata, and I had several preconceived notions about the database and its uses before I began the course.

My first impression about Wikidata was that AI bots ran the system by sweeping Wikipedia pages and then used that information to create data sets under various pre-defined headings. In my conception, Wikidata’s information updated only when editors on Wikipedia changed or added pages. I thought of Wikidata as a closed system, and I thought the point of the course would be to learn how to run queries, so that we students could figure out how to access the data collected through Wikipedia. 

I remember asking my Wiki Education instructor about the role of AI in Wikidata, and he very pointedly responded that bots cannot program anything on their own. Instead, humans program Wikidata, and through this programming capability, both humans and machines can read and edit the system.

Wired writer Tom Simonite provided an example of this phenomenon in his article “Inside the Alexa Friendly World of Wikidata”:

“Some information is piped in automatically from other databases, as when biologists backed by the National Institutes of Health unleashed Wikidata bots to add details of all human and mouse genes and proteins.” 

This same article also discusses a further example, published in a paper by Amazon in 2018, of Wikidata teaching Alexa to recognize the pronunciation of song titles in different languages.

Both of these examples do a good job of illustrating another one of my misconceptions about Wikidata. As mentioned before, I thought the system was centralized and, apart from periodic updates, static. I did not conceive of the difference between data collected through documents (like Wikipedia) and a database with an open and flexible, relational communication system. 

What I discovered was vastly more interesting and complex than what I imagined. It was not a bot-driven data collecting system drawn from Wikipedia entries, but instead Wikidata was a communication system that can use multiple languages to add data. An editor in Beijing may enter information in Chinese, and that data will immediately be available in all the languages used by Wikidata. This feature allows for a self-structuring repository of data by users adding localized data from all over the world.

In 2013, Wikidata’s founder, Denny Vrandečić, wrote about the advantages that a database like Wikidata has over documents because “the information is stored centrally from where it can be accessed and reused independently and simultaneously by multiple websites without duplication.” In his article “The Rise of Wikidata,” Vrandečić made clear that Wikidata is not just a database for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. It can also be used “for many different services and applications, from reusing identifiers to facilitate data integration, providing labels for multilingual maps and services, to intelligent agents answering queries and using background knowledge” (Vrandecic, 2013, p. 90). 

This raises the question as to how Wikidata intelligently reads the information stored on its platform. My first misconception had to do with my belief that Wikidata was a flat collection of data based on Wikipedia’s entries. What I didn’t understand is that the crux of Wikidata’s intelligence comes from its ability to understand data in a relational way. As noted in “Familiar Wikidata: The Case for Building a Data Source We Can Trust,” Wikidata’s semantic structure is based on rules, also known as Wikidata ontology. According to this ontology, a person may have a relationship to a “born in” place, but a place cannot have a “born in” relationship to other entities. For example, Marie Curie can be born in Warsaw, but Warsaw cannot be born in Marie Curie. 

This knowledge-based structure is the key to understanding how Wikidata’s identifiers are used to connect to one another. In Wikidata’s logical grammar, two entities connect to one another by a relationship, also known as a “triple.”  It is this triple structure that creates the structural metadata that allows for intelligent mapping.  A fourth item, a citation, turns each triple into a “quad.” The fourth item is crucial to Wikidata’s ability to further arrange the data relationally, by making clear where the data in the triple originates, then arranging the data hierarchically based on its number of citations. 

Having access to the Wiki Education dashboard, I was able to see the edits of the other students taking the class. One student whom I’ll call Miguel was adding missing information about Uruguayan writers on Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay’s catalog. As of this writing, he has completed more than 500 edits on this and other subjects, such as the classification of the word “anathema” as a religious concept. Two Dutch archivists were adding material on Dutch puppet theater companies in Amsterdam and Dutch women in politics. An Irish student was updating information on a twelfth century Irish vellum manuscript and an English translation of the Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge by Thomas Kinsella. 

What I saw when I perused the subjects of edits was exactly what the article “Much more than a mere technology” mentions, that is, that Wikidata is capable of linking local metadata with a network of global metadata. This capability makes Wikidata an attractive option for libraries wanting to “improve the global reach and access of their unique and prominent collectors and scholars” (Tharani, 2021). 

Multiple sources contend that Wikidata is, in fact, a centralized storage database, and yet the intelligence of Wikidata makes this description ring hollow. It is not a database like the old databases for documents. Its ontological structure allows for it to understand the syntax of data and arrange that information relationally into comprehensible language. Like the example of the biologists from the National Institutes of Health who programmed bots who programmed Wikidata bots to add genetic details about humans, mice and proteins to external databases, it can also be programmed for uses on external databases. Its linking capabilities make it possible for librarians and archivists from around the world to connect their metadata to a network of global metadata. Its multilingual abilities have a similar decentralizing effect, allowing users to create structured knowledge about their own cultures, histories, and literature in their own languages. 

If you are interested in taking a Wikidata course, visit Wiki Education’s course offerings page to get started.

Explore the upcoming Wikidata Institute, Wikidata Salon, and other opportunities to engage with Wikidata at learn.wikiedu.org.

This is an English translation of my book entitled “A 70-year-old Wikipedian talks about the charm of libraries.” Chapter 1, The Road to Wikipedia. Previously, click here.

“Labyrinth” by Yaeko Nogami (Chapter 1-5)

I had only heard of Yaeko Nogami (1885-1985) through essays she wrote for magazines and newspapers, and had never read any of her novels. I was interested to read in a newspaper that Nogami visited China for the first time when she was over 70 years old and went to Yan’an, where Mao Zedong had his base of operations. My father had been to northern China during the war, but I had never heard anything about the battlefield, so I thought there might be some clues there. In 2014, I found a book titled “Critique of Yaeko Nogami: Through the Labyrinth to the Forest” (Shinchosha, 2011) and read it. 

The book told that Nogami came to Tokyo from Usuki, Oita Prefecture, and entered the Meiji Girl’s School; that her husband, Toyoichiro Nogami, was the president of Hosei University and a Noh scholar; that she went to Yan’an because it was the setting of “Labyrinth”; her relationship with Eiichi Shibusawa and his family; and so on. Nogami continued to write until the end of her life at the age of 99. 

Two years later, in 2016, I applied for the Library Exhibition Forum to be held in Oita in September and picked up Nogami’s “Labyrinth” to read a novel with a connection to Oita. It is a large work of nearly 1,300 pages in two volumes in the Iwanami Bunko collection, set in Tokyo, Karuizawa, her hometown Oita, and the battlefields of China, during the 1910s. I continued reading the book throughout my trip to Oita, I visited the memorial museum that had been renovated from Nogami’s birthplace to take a closer look. I finished reading the book after I returned to Tokyo. I was impressed by the power of the writing style of Soseki Natsume‘s disciple: the conception and development of the story on a large scale, the detailed coverage of the historical background, and the accurate portrayal of the characters.

I thought that an author of Nogami’s caliber would have an article on Wikipedia, but when I looked at it, I found a detailed article but only the titles of individual works. So, I decided to put “Labyrinth,” one of her best-known works, on Wikipedia. Based on the pages of famous works by other authors, I compiled a “synopsis,” “main characters,” “publication and release chronology,” and so on. If there was something I did not understand from the materials I had on hand, I went to the local library and researched this or that. In the process of researching, I came across many things that I had not noticed when reading the novel, and I enjoyed the process.

Once the manuscript was completed, it was time to edit the draft on Wikipedia. The title of the article was initially “Labyrinth,” but there was already an article titled “Labyrinth,” which described the labyrinth itself, as well as several songs with that title. Therefore, I decided to change the title of the article to “Labyrinth (Novel by Yaeko Nogami).” Thinking that I could prepare the content of the article later, I first wrote and published a definition, a synopsis, and the main characters. To my surprise, within an hour or so, I received corrections from many Wikipedians, not about the contents, but about various formatting mistakes. I was surprised that so many people had checked my first submission as a newcomer. I then enhanced the content of the article, and other Wikipedians made corrections as well. All of the edit history remains public, so you can see who made the changes, when, and how.

I managed to make my debut, but it took me two years to start working on the next article. I was able to read the novel in depth and writing the article was a fun experience, but I must have been too enthusiastic because it took a lot of energy to get it published, and I was exhausted. I didn’t have anyone I could easily ask small questions to, and the hurdles were still high.

OFWA Wiki Tech Clubs. Image by Kaffzz  CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

In an exciting new initiative, Open Foundation West Africa (OFWA) through the African Wikimedia Technical Community (AWMT) has launched tech clubs in universities across Ghana to introduce students to the world of Wikimedia, specifically focusing on MediaWiki and tech contributions. This initiative aims to bridge the knowledge gap among tech-savvy students in Africa and provide them with opportunities to engage with and contribute to the Wikimedia ecosystem.

The underrepresentation of African tech enthusiasts in the Wikimedia space is a significant issue that needs attention and this is due to factors such as lack of awareness and outreach, lack of skill development and training, and lack of support. This is why OFWA has taken it upon itself to launch a comprehensive initiative aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of African tech enthusiasts in the Wikimedia space.

Ghana boasts of a vibrant community of computer science students, coders, programmers, and tech enthusiasts. However, many of these students are unaware of the potential contributions they can make within the Wikimedia space, particularly through MediaWiki. MediaWiki, the open-source software that powers Wikipedia and many other collaborative platforms, offers numerous opportunities for tech contributions, including coding, software development, and project management.

Joining these tech clubs offers numerous benefits for students, including:

• Hands-On Experience: Students will gain practical experience working with MediaWiki and other Wikimedia technologies.
• Skill Development: Participants will have opportunities to develop and enhance their coding, software development, and project management skills.
• Networking: Tech clubs provide a platform for students to connect with like-minded peers, industry professionals, and Wikimedia contributors.
• Contribution to Open Knowledge: Students will have the chance to contribute to the global knowledge base, making information more accessible to people worldwide.

The first milestone of this initiative was the successful launch of a tech club at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Ghana. The launch event was a resounding success, attracting a large number of enthusiastic students eager to learn about Wikimedia and MediaWiki. The club’s formation marks a significant step towards fostering a community of tech contributors who can actively engage with Wikimedia projects.

Building on the success at KNUST, OFWA plans to establish tech clubs at other universities and senior High Schools across Ghana. These clubs will serve as hubs for students to collaborate, share knowledge, and work on Wikimedia-related projects. By providing training, resources, and mentorship, OFWA aims to empower students to become active contributors to the Wikimedia community.

OFWA invites all computer science students, coders, programmers and tech enthusiasts to join this exciting initiative and be a part of the African Wikimedia Tech Community. Whether you are an experienced coder or just starting your tech journey, there is a place for you in the Wikimedia community. To get involved, students can join their university’s tech club or reach out to OFWA for more information on how to start a club on their campus.

The launch of these tech clubs marks the beginning of a transformative journey for students in Ghana. By introducing them to the Wikimedia space, OFWA is not only expanding its horizons but also contributing to the global movement of free and open knowledge. We are excited to see the innovative contributions that will emerge from these clubs and look forward to supporting the next generation of Wikimedia tech contributors.

For more information on how to get involved, please visit OFWA’s website or contact us directly at [email protected]. Let’s shape the future of open knowledge together!

Open Foundation West Africa (OFWA) is dedicated to promoting open knowledge, digital literacy, and technology innovation across West Africa. Through various initiatives and partnerships, OFWA aims to empower individuals and communities with the skills and resources needed to thrive in the digital age. The Africa Wikimedia Technical Community(AWMT) is a community under Open Foundation West Africa(OFWA) whose mission is to create an enabling ecosystem for developers who are willing to learn and build new skills in the open space through volunteering as technical contributions for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Johan Jönsson works as a manager at the Movement Communications team, supporting Product and Technology work at the Wikimedia Foundation. Among other duties, he’s part of the Future Audience initiative. He’s been part of the Wikimedia movement since he got sucked into fixing Wikipedia typos in 2004.

The future is a strange country. All roads lead there, but some are better than others.

In one of the influential classics of product strategy theory,  The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen investigated how technologies are overtaken by new ones, and how the dominant organisations struggled to retain their positions as their industries shifted to a new paradigm. Christensen, a scholar of business administration, pointed to how leading companies found it difficult to adapt to the situation even when they wanted to direct resources towards innovation in the new area. It’s difficult for a leading organisation to get truly excited about small, incremental victories when they are dwarfed by the number of people making use of the currently dominating, successful thing the organisation does. And companies have customers, who want their needs met. The pressure from the existing customer base anchors the companies in the old technology, until it’s too late, and the customers have moved on to the new solutions – developed by someone else.

The Wikimedia movement isn’t a company and Wikipedia and its sister wikis aren’t commercial products, but there are still similarities, just as there are Wikimedia-specific factors which make it difficult for the Wikimedia Foundation to try new things. There’s always the discussion about how to handle limited resources, both within the Foundation and within the broader Wikimedia movement, where evolving our platform draws on already overstretched systems, but beyond that there’s the crushing weight of how we relate to each other within the movement.

There are expectations of Wikimedia development. Wikimedia editors like to know what the Foundation is trying to achieve and be part of the development process at a reasonably early stage. It’s not that Wikimedians don’t want us to try out new things as much as the community pressures inherent in the system push development towards clearly defined projects. Editors tend to look at Wikimedia development with certain questions in mind: How can I or my home community use this to add or curate knowledge? How will it fit into the current workflows? How will it affect how readers interact with the information we supply? 

One of the ways Christensen has identified in which companies can get around the pressures and expectations of their success is by having a separate organisation to drive new, more experimental features. A group which doesn’t try to appeal to the same customers, who aren’t bound by the same logic, who can celebrate small victories. This is very far from what the Wikimedia Foundation does, but there is an initiative which is explicitly all about experimentation, and being part of it is a bit of fresh air after nine years at the Foundation.

Future Audiences is a small team, with limited resources but also with none of the expectations of finished products. Future Audiences doesn’t do products. It doesn’t have the resources to maintain something – if something turned out to be successful, and we’d want to keep it, the only product Future Audiences can deliver is the result of the experiment and a recommendation that some other part of the Wikimedia Foundation invest in it.

The main point of building a ChatGPT plugin wasn’t to get a successful plugin. It was to understand how people interact with Wikipedia and information in ChatGPT to see how it could affect the Wikimedia wikis. The point of building a Chrome extension like Citation Needed to see if people can use it to see if a statement is supported by Wikipedia isn’t to build a successful Chrome extension – if it had turned out that this is a product we want, it wouldn’t necessarily have been a browser extension at all – but to see if this is a feasible way of letting users interact with information and Wikipedia.

As of writing, the Future Audiences team is working on a new tool to help readers add facts to Wikipedia – to see if we can lower the threshold to add something by using generative AI to help find the right article to update when you see a fact somewhere and make it easier to add a reference. We’re not trying to use generative AI to create information, but to function as a bridge between the source and the wiki. It’s merely a tool for the human editor.

Yet again: The experiment aims to be quick and cheap. And so we take what shortcuts we can. Initially, it will post updates to talk pages, to suggest edits. And it won’t work – when we launch it, at least – in languages other than English. Were this a product, we couldn’t and wouldn’t build it like this. But it isn’t. We hope Wikimedians would find it useful, but more than anything, it’s a way for us to learn so we can help the rest of the Wikimedia movement understand how the technology works and could work for us.

Wikimedia technical development has historically not focused on small experiments, at testing something for a couple of months and then walking away from it, no major investments. Having a separate function, working according to a different narrative, which can test something and walk away from it? It’s a deliberate attempt to give us the tools and the understanding we need, as a movement, to meet the future. In working with the Wikimedia movement, a significant part of the challenge is to explain what we are doing – that we’re often closer to research projects than products. It’s easy to start thinking about the tools we develop as products, but that leads us down the wrong path, because if we build products we need to invest significant resources to make sure they work for everyone. And then we won’t be able to learn, to be able to add more knowledge to how the changing technical landscape might affect us and what we can do about it.

We think we can make the future better, but only if we’re part of it.

This year, 2024, marks 10 years of manhole cover photography. A fascinating journey that our Wikimedian community undertook with the mission to photograph and document manhole covers from different parts of the world. The first of these manhole covers was captured by our member Montserrat Sáez on 13 April 2014. “It is neither pretty nor ugly, it is quite ‘normal’ for its time; however, the anagram (engraved on the lid, and belonging to the National Institute of Colonisation -INC-) puzzled us, until we found out what it meant and understood the place where it is located and its history. If it hadn’t been for that, we wouldn’t have continued the task”, says Montse, together with Luis Ulzurrun.

Manhole covers are robust, designed to protect manholes, commonly found in sewer and utility networks. For our community, these manhole covers have become the focus of a passionate documentation effort that has been ongoing for a decade, recording their unique locations and characteristics. Find out more in the following Wikimedia Commons category.

A decade of discovery and documentation

Documenting a manhole cover has become an essential part of the community’s trips and outings. Over the years, some members have developed an affinity for certain covers that they consider particularly representative. Mentxu Ramilo, for example, found a 1925 manhole cover in Vitoria-Gasteiz that she found fascinating. “I let myself be infected by the Wikimedian spirit and passions, and by everything that forms part of the graphic heritage and deserves to be documented,” explains Mentxu.

Adrián Estévez remembers with special affection a manhole cover in Gandesa, belonging to the Dirección General de Regiones Devastadas y Reparaciones (General Directorate of Devastated Regions and Reparations). When he photographed it, he could not help but think of the devastating effects of the Battle of the Ebro on the town.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tapa_de_rexistro_de_Regiones_Devastadas_en_Gandesa.jpg

Adrián takes the preparation of his photos very seriously, cleaning the lids and looking for the best position to avoid shadows or the appearance of his feet in the image. Another of his outstanding photos is a manhole cover in excellent condition near the Estrella Galicia factory in A Coruña.

Miguel Alán tells us the story of the oldest manhole cover in Valladolid, dating from 1901. On the other hand, Florencia Claes has a special predilection for an 1851 cover located in the Prado Museum.

Florencia loves to share her findings with the community and play a guessing game about the location of the covers, which provides her with additional motivation to continue documenting.

Ten years of hidden art in cities

The motivation behind photographing manhole covers may seem peculiar to some, but for a group of Wikimedians, it is a fascinating way to document and preserve unique aspects of our urban environment.

Mentxu, a graphic documentation enthusiast, explains that her interest stems from the influence of other Wikimedians. In addition, she is also dedicated to photographing shop signs, and any element that deserves to be documented captures her attention. This dedication to capturing and sharing seemingly mundane details reflects a deep respect for the graphic heritage and visual history of our cities.

Adrian adds a historical perspective to this practice. For him, manhole covers are more than just manhole covers; they are historical artefacts that tell stories. Each cover carries with it information about when it was made, for what purpose, by whom and where. This ability of manhole covers to tell stories through time makes them objects of interest and value to those seeking to better understand urban and industrial development.

Miguel Alan, on the other hand, found in manhole covers an excuse to collect photographs and join a community with similar interests. Inspired by others who photograph silos, road markers or Osborne bulls, he decided that manhole covers would be his niche. His main motivation is to complete a specific category on Wikimedia Commons: “Category:Manhole covers by year”. Despite the difficulties of travelling and finding old covers, he has dedicated himself to this mission, managing to capture many on his holidays.

Florencia, for her part, sees beauty in the diversity and design of these covers. For her, each manhole cover is an entrance to another world, with its own aesthetics and meaning, which motivates her to continue documenting them.

Throughout these ten years, our community has shown that even the most everyday items can hide fascinating stories and become cultural treasures. And best of all, this adventure is far from over!

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

Recent changes

• At the Wikimedia Foundation a new task force was formed to replace the disabled Graph with more secure, easy to use, and extensible Chart. You can subscribe to the newsletter to get notified about new project updates and other news about Chart.
• The CampaignEvents extension is now available on Meta-wiki, Igbo Wikipedia, and Swahili Wikipedia, and can be requested on your wiki. This extension helps in managing and making events more visible, giving Event organizers the ability to use tools like the Event registration tool. To learn more about the deployment status and how to request this extension for your wiki, visit the CampaignEvents page on Meta-wiki.
• Editors using the iOS Wikipedia app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Wikipedia.
• Thank you to all of the authors who have contributed to MediaWiki Core. As a result of these contributions, the percentage of authors contributing more than 5 patches has increased by 25% since last year, which helps ensure the sustainability of the platform for the Wikimedia projects.

Problems

• A problem with the color of the talkpage tabs always showing as blue, even for non-existent pages which should have been red, affecting the Vector 2022 skin, has been fixed.

Future changes

• The Trust and Safety Product team wants to introduce temporary accounts with as little disruption to tools and workflows as possible. Volunteer developers, including gadget and user-script maintainers, are kindly asked to update the code of their tools and features to handle temporary accounts. The team has created documentation explaining how to do the update. Learn more.

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Hi everyone,

The Wikimedia Movement Charter is currently undergoing a ratification process. Voting on the Charter started on June 25 and will end on July 9 at 23:59 UTC. 

If you have not voted yet, please vote now!

You can read the high-level summary of the Wikimedia Movement Charter, as well as an analysis of the Movement Charter content. This analysis highlights new proposals, changes to the current situation, and matters that remain the same in the Charter content areas.

What’s next after voting? 

After the voting ends on July 9, the scrutineers will ensure that all votes on the ballot are valid. This work will take about two weeks. Once they confirm that scrutineering is complete, they will present their confirmation to the Charter Electoral Commission, which is responsible for running the final tally and reporting the final results. The Wikimedia Movement can expect to hear the results of the voting approximately on July 24. 

All of the comments received during voting will be carefully organized by the MCDC support team and released to the wider community before Wikimania 2024.  

MCDC gatherings in June: 

• 3 June – MCDC members met with the Legal Team member of the Wikimedia Foundation to hear feedback on the Charter. 
• 6 June – MCDC’s regular meeting:  The full Committee was debriefed about the legal feedback. The Committee worked on the finalization of the Charter. 
• 13 June – MCDC’s regular meeting: The Committee worked on finalizing the supplementary documents to the Charter. 
• 27 June – MCDC’s regular meeting: The Committee discussed housekeeping items related to the voting process. The second half of the meeting was dedicated to MCDC  internal reflections on the journey.

For the Group, What do we talk about when we talk about Chagas? A strategic ally of Wiki UNLP, “talking about Chagas means much more than talking about a disease” and with that premise is that for three years we have been working together organizing editathons, workshops and talks in the framework of the World Chagas Disease Day. This year we held an editathon as part of the regional Wiki Campaign for Human Rights with the aim of improving and creating content on the issue in Wikimedia projects, from a kaleidoscopic view of Chagas disease that includes its socio-environmental dimension.

What did it leave us, What do we talk about when we talk about Chagas disease?

Chagas disease, caused by the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite, is a neglected tropical disease that affects millions of people, mainly in Latin America. However, addressing Chagas disease involves considering more than its medical aspects, giving way also to the epidemiological, sociocultural and political issues. This is why it is a kaleidoscopic view, where these elements combine dynamically and make sense in their relationship. From its biology and forms of transmission to diagnosis and treatment in the biomedical field; its prevalence, incidence and geographical distribution impacted by migration in the epidemiological field; cultural practices, stigmas, and prejudices in the sociocultural field; and the management of public policies and resources in the political field, which have a direct impact on its prevention and treatment, must be taken into account when dealing with this problem.  

Our joint work is essential to make this complexity visible through collaboration with volunteers and experts. We strive to ensure that the information available is accurate, accessible and reflects the multifaceted reality of Chagas disease. In this sense, Wikimedia projects are an impactful tool to meet these objectives.

Our joint activities

Events such as Editatón Vectores Biológicos 2022, Editemos Chagas 2023, Pensemos en Chagas 2023 and Editemos Chagas 2024 were initiatives that brought together editors, scientists, and members of the community to improve articles on the subject in Wikimedia projects, which arose from the attempt to reflect its complexity and multiple dimensions with a neutral view that escaped the prejudices we know. 

We highlight the workshop held in collaboration with the University Language Center (CUI) at the end of last year, where Chagas-related content was reviewed and the communication materials about the issue were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in Guarani, Aymara, and Quechua. These resources were adapted and translated by dedicated collaborators from the CUI, based on the work done by the “Transdisciplinary Table for Educational and Communicational Approaches to Chagas” of the National Ministry of Health. The activity resulted in an audiovisual production made within the framework of a community support project funded by our team.

This year, Edit Chagas took on a broader meaning by being part of the regional Wiki for Human Rights 2024 Campaign, which aimed to “improve information on environment, climate change, and sustainability in Wikimedia projects, as well as to highlight the role our platforms play in providing neutral, reliable, and evidence-based information for climate action.” Along with the campaign, we had the opportunity to explore an emerging dimension of the issue: the impact of socio-environmental conflicts. After two weeks of editing, we achieved very interesting results and new ideas for continuing to improve the content and raise awareness about the Chagas issue. Among the most important achievements of the event, we highlight the creation of articles for all species of triatomines (vinchucas or kissing bugs) that inhabit Argentine territory.

27/06/2024-03/07/2024

Mapping

• Marco Antonio mapped El Cardón National Park in Bolivia using official boundary data from PROMETA, an environmental conservation organization of Tarija, Bolivia.
• Roxystar is currently mapping street lamps in Munich, complete with additional details such as the lamp’s height, to simulate the light coverage by using OSMStreetLight.
• rtnf on Mastodon emphasised the importance of mapping building entrances to help people avoid getting lost, citing personal experience of having to circle a building to find the entrance. znrgl points out in the conversation that it is easy to record entrances with the Every Door at any time while traveling.
• DENelson83 has completed a project to manually map all the forested areas on Vancouver Island from aerial imagery, improving the detail and accuracy of the island’s forested regions on OpenStreetMap.
• Comments were requested on the following:
  • The proposal to deprecate crossing=zebra in favour of crossing:markings.
  • The proposal to introduce the volunteers: prefix for locations/features that have need of volunteers, including whether new volunteers are accepted, urgency of need, signup information, and benefits for volunteers.

Mapping campaigns

• The Open Mapping Hub – Asia Pacific from HOT celebrated the winners of the Climate Change Challenge, recognising the efforts to generate valuable data through OpenStreetMap in 14 Asia Pacific countries. Special thanks were given to Open Mapping Gurus from Nigeria, Peru, and Niger, and the winning teams will soon receive their prizes. Countries mapped include Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Nepal, and more.
• Pavy_555 visited JNTU Hyderabad, to promote smart mobile mapping using the Every Door app, emphasising community engagement and the importance of updating OpenStreetMap data with local amenities and micro-mapping efforts.
• IVIDES.org is promoting a campaign > for the collaborative mapping of the Brazilian coastal and marine zones. The project uses OpenStreetMap and will be carried out to evaluate aspects related to the sustainability of this strategic region. Registration is open for participation in the pilot mapping and the research coordinator presents the initiative in her diary > .

Community

• The OpenStreetMap community is invited to participate in WikiCon 2024, taking place from 4 to 6 October in Wiesbaden, Germany. Volunteers are needed to staff the OSM booth and promote the project to a wider audience. Travel and accommodation costs can be covered by FOSSGIS e.V. for participants from outside the Wiesbaden or Rhein-Main area. If you are interested, you can note this directly on the wiki page.

Events

• [1] Bristow presents a photo retrospective of the 10th SotM France conference, held in Lyon from 28 to 30 June 2024. Attendance records were broken, with over 300 people taking part. Recordings of the presentations will soon be available online on PeerTube.
• The deadline for early bird pricing for the 2024 State of the Map from 6 to 8 September has been extended till 31 July.
• The FOSS4G Perth 2024 conference, scheduled for 23 October in conjunction with the ISPRS TC IV Mid-Term Symposium, has opened its Call for Presentations, inviting the open geospatial community to share insights on tools such as QGIS, PostGIS, and OpenStreetMap.
• The State of the Map 2024 programme offers a diverse range of sessions, workshops, and lectures. The event will occur from 6-8 September, in Nairobi, Kenya, covering topics such as sustainable transport, local mapping initiatives, integration into academic curricula, and innovative data collection methods.

Education

• OpenStreetMap contributor Denis_Helfer is organising an introduction to OSM on the 15 July in Strasbourg, France. This will likely be followed by a series of workshops in autumn.

Maps

• JveuxDuSoleil is a web application that simulates urban shadows to help users find sunny terraces in cities such as Paris, Marseille, and Nantes. Users can zoom in on the map to see where terraces will be sunny at certain times. However, the project faces functionality issues as building models and their shadows are no longer generated due to maintenance issues.

OSM in action

• The ‘Los Pueblos más Bonitos de España’ website offers a guide to the most beautiful villages in Spain, with resources such as an OpenStreetMap-based village map application for geolocalised travel and a guidebook for sale to help organise trips to these charming places.
• The GLOBE programme’s data visualisation tool allows users to explore environmental data collected around the world, filtering by protocol, date range, and geographical location, with options to download and analyse specific datasets for educational and scientific purposes.
• The Toll/ST Ceritapeta tool allows users to visualise and measure driving distances from various toll gates and train station in Jakarta, Indonesia on an OpenStreetMap background. This tool is utilized to aid decision-making when choosing a residential complex in the suburbs of the Jakarta Metropolitan Area, as driving distances to the nearest transportation infrastructures serve as a good indicator of connectivity.
• The Naturkalender ZAMG map allows users to explore various natural observations, such as plant and animal phenology data. It provides detailed visualisations of seasonal changes and species distribution, supporting citizen science, and ecological research.
• The Mosquito Alert map displays real-time reports of mosquito sightings and breeding sites submitted by users on an OSM background, contributing to public health research and control efforts. The interactive map allows users to explore mosquito data geographically, helping to track the spread and presence of different mosquito species.
• Norbert Tretkowski navigated > around Norway using Organic Maps on a Google Pixel 3, detailing the app’s performance and challenges with features such as tunnel navigation, estimated arrival times, and ferry integration.
• velowire.com displays the routes of the most important cycle races on OpenStreetMap maps and offers them for download.
• NNG and Dacia have partnered to offer Dacia drivers OSM based navigation maps, providing a community-driven, frequently updated, and feature-rich map solution to enhance the driving experience.

Open Data

• The Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) has made OSM land use data available on HeiData, providing TIFF tiles for EU countries and the UK. This data is derived from Sentinel-2 imagery and OpenStreetMap, which is classified into categories such as agricultural areas and urban regions using a deep learning model. The datasets can be used by urban planners, environmental researchers, and others for various applications.

Software

• Badge(r)s is a location-based GPS game where players collect virtual items, quadrants, and regions, acting as both creators and collectors. Badges, the primary virtual items, appear on the map at specific coordinates or in players’ collections.
• The June 2024 MapLibre newsletter announced two minor releases of MapLibre GL JS, progress on a Vulkan backend for MapLibre Native, and the release of Martin Tile Server v0.14. It welcomed new sponsors and highlights upcoming events including FOSS4G EU and State of the Map Europe.
• Amanda details improvements and ongoing issues with WaterwayMap.org, including a new flow direction grouping feature, bugs in river bifurcation calculations, and gaps caused by geojson-to-vector tile conversion, and invites feedback and discussion from the community.

Programming

• emersonveenstra introduced the ‘Rapid Power User Extension’, a new Chrome/Firefox extension that integrates with OpenStreetMap to redirect edit buttons to Rapid and add Strava heatmap support as overlay imagery. The extension is in early development, and users are encouraged to report issues and suggestions on GitHub.
• Mark Stosberg explored the optimisation of Minneapolis’ low-stress bicycle network connectivity using spatial analysis for generating isochrones to measure bicycle travel distances within the network. He described his process using QGIS, JOSM, and Valhalla to create a customised routing network and generate multiple isochrones. The aim is to prioritise segments for improvement based on their impact on overall connectivity.
• The new osmapiR package is now published at CRAN, the official repository for R packages. After almost one year of development and polishing, the package implements all API calls and includes a complete documentation with examples for all functions. With this publication and existing packages osmdata (implementing overpass calls) and osmextract (work with .pbf files), R is now a first class language to work with OpenStreetMap.

Did you know …

• … the map 1NITE TENT, where private individuals offer overnight accommodation with a tent on their property? This is particularly useful in countries where wild camping is prohibited.
• … about the different tools to convert opening hours into OSM syntax, display them, and fix any errors?

Other “geo” things

• Robin Wilson has created a demo app for searching an aerial image using text queries like “tennis courts” or “swimming pool”. Under the hood, it extracts embedding vectors from the SkyCLIP AI model for small chips of the image and compares them using vector similarity metrics.
• Cameroon and Nigeria have agreed to resolve their long-standing border dispute through joint on-the-ground verification and demarcation, with the aim of completing the process by the end of 2025 without recourse to the courts. The agreement, facilitated by the Cameroon-Nigeria Mixed Commission, focuses on areas such as Rumsiki, Tourou, and Koche, and addresses the challenges posed by Boko Haram terrorism in the region.
• tlohde discussed the concept and application of average colors in digital maps, highlighting how averaging colors can simplify images while maintaining their recognisable features.
• Grant Slater shared that he has updated the ZA-aerial with all the latest 25 cm resolution aerial photos, related to the national coverage of South Africa, provided by the South African National Geo-spatial Information (NGI). The full announcement can be found in the mailing list of the OSGeo Africa.
• The initial release of the Panoramax Android app, announced at the State of the Map France 2024, offers an alpha/beta version available for download as an APK, and will be published on the Play Store and F-Droid. The app allows users to contribute geolocated photos to the Panoramax database, a free alternative to Google Street View for OpenStreetMap.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Tartu linn	FOSS4G Europe 2024		2024-06-30 – 2024-07-07
中正區	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #66		2024-07-08
Lyon	Pique-nique OpenStreetMap		2024-07-09
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2024-07-09
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-07-10
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2024-07-11
Bochum	Bochumer OSM Treffen		2024-07-10
Lorain County	OpenStreetMap Midwest Meetup	✓	2024-07-11
Amsterdam	Maptime Amsterdam: Summertime Meetup		2024-07-11
Berlin	DRK Online Road Mapathon		2024-07-11
Wildau	193. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2024-07-11
Zürich	165. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich		2024-07-11
Portsmouth	Introduction to OpenStreetMap at Port City Makerspace		2024-07-13 – 2024-07-14
København	OSMmapperCPH		2024-07-14
Strasbourg	découverte d’OpenStreetMap		2024-07-15
Richmond	MapRVA – Bike Lane Surveying & Mapping Meetup		2024-07-16
England	OSM UK Online Chat		2024-07-15
	Missing Maps London: (Online) Mid-Month Mapathon		2024-07-16
Bonn	177. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn		2024-07-16
Hannover	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2024-07-17
Łódź	State of the Map Europe 2024		2024-07-18 – 2024-07-21
Zürich	Missing Maps Zürich Mapathon		2024-07-18
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2024-07-19
Cocody	OSM Africa July Mapathon – Map Ivory Cost		2024-07-20
Stadtgebiet Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen		2024-07-22

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 Raquel Dezidério Souto, SeverinGeo, Strubbl, barefootstache, derFred, euroPathfinder, mcliquid, muramototomoya, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Wikibase, the powerful open-source software behind Wikipedia, offers robust features for structured data management. But is it the right choice for your project? Let's explore when Wikibase shines and when you might want to consider alternatives.

We also have a comparison between Wikibase and Semantic MediaWiki.

Summary: this article shares the experience and learnings of migrating away from Kubernetes PodSecurityPolicy into Kyverno in the Wikimedia Toolforge platform.

Wikimedia Toolforge is a Platform-as-a-Service, built with Kubernetes, and maintained by the Wikimedia Cloud Services team (WMCS). It is completely free and open, and we welcome anyone to use it to build and host tools (bots, webservices, scheduled jobs, etc) in support of Wikimedia projects. 

We provide a set of platform-specific services, command line interfaces, and shortcuts to help in the task of setting up webservices, jobs, and stuff like building container images, or using databases. Using these interfaces makes the underlying Kubernetes system pretty much invisible to users. We also allow direct access to the Kubernetes API, and some advanced users do directly interact with it.

Each account has a Kubernetes namespace where they can freely deploy their workloads. We have a number of controls in place to ensure performance, stability, and fairness of the system, including quotas, RBAC permissions, and up until recently PodSecurityPolicies (PSP). At the time of this writing, we had around 3.500 Toolforge tool accounts in the system.
We early adopted PSP in 2019 as a way to make sure Pods had the correct runtime configuration. We needed Pods to stay within the safe boundaries of a set of pre-defined parameters. Back when we adopted PSP there was already the option to use 3rd party agents, like  OpenPolicyAgent Gatekeeper, but we decided not to invest in them, and went with a native, built-in mechanism instead.

In 2021 it was announced that the PSP mechanism would be deprecated, and removed in Kubernetes 1.25. Even though we had been warned years in advance, we did not prioritize the migration of PSP until we were in Kubernetes 1.24, and blocked, unable to upgrade forward without taking actions.

The WMCS team explored different alternatives for this migration, but eventually we decided to go with Kyverno as a replacement for PSP. And so with that decision it began the journey described in this blog post.

First, we needed a source code refactor for one of the key components of our Toolforge Kubernetes: maintain-kubeusers. This custom piece of software that we built in-house, contains the logic to fetch accounts from LDAP and do the necessary instrumentation on Kubernetes to accommodate each one: create namespace, RBAC, quota, a kubeconfig file, etc. With the refactor, we introduced a proper reconciliation loop, in a way that the software would have a notion of what needs to be done for each account, what would be missing, what to delete, upgrade, and so on. This would allow us to easily deploy new resources for each account, or iterate on their definitions. 

The initial version of the refactor had a number of problems, though. For one, the new version of maintain-kubeusers was doing more filesystem interaction than the previous version, resulting in a slow reconciliation loop over all the accounts. We used NFS as the underlying storage system for Toolforge, and it could be very slow because of reasons beyond this blog post. This was corrected in the next few days after the initial refactor rollout. A side note with an implementation detail: we stored a configmap on each account namespace with the state of each resource. Storing more state on this configmap was our solution to avoid additional NFS latency.

I initially estimated this refactor would take me a week to complete, but unfortunately it took me around three weeks instead. Previous to the refactor, there were several manual steps and cleanups required to be done when updating the definition of a resource. The process is now automated, more robust, performant, efficient and clean. So in my opinion it was worth it, even if it took more time than expected.

Then, we worked on the Kyverno policies themselves. Because we had a very particular PSP setting, in order to ease the transition, we tried to replicate their semantics on a 1:1 basis as much as possible. This involved things like transparent mutation of Pod resources, then validation. Additionally, we had one different PSP definition for each account, so we decided to create one different Kyverno namespaced policy resource for each account namespace — remember, we had 3.5k accounts.

We created a Kyverno policy template that we would then render and inject for each account.

For developing and testing all this, maintain-kubeusers and the Kyverno bits, we had a project called lima-kilo, which was a local Kubernetes setup replicating production Toolforge. This was used by each engineer in their laptop as a common development environment.

We had planned the migration from PSP to Kyverno policies in stages, like this:

1. update our internal template generators to make Pod security settings explicit
2. introduce Kyverno policies in Audit mode
3. see how the cluster would behave with them, and if we had any offending resources reported by the new policies, and correct them
4. modify Kyverno policies and set them in Enforce mode
5. drop PSP

In stage 1, we updated things like the toolforge-jobs-framework and tools-webservice.

In stage 2, when we deployed the 3.5k Kyverno policy resources, our production cluster died almost immediately. Surprise. All the monitoring went red, the Kubernetes apiserver became irresponsibe, and we were unable to perform any administrative actions in the Kubernetes control plane, or even the underlying virtual machines. All Toolforge users were impacted. This was a full scale outage that required the energy of the whole WMCS team to recover from. We temporarily disabled Kyverno until we could learn what had occurred.

This incident happened despite having tested before in lima-kilo and in another pre-production cluster we had, called Toolsbeta. But we had not tested that many policy resources. Clearly, this was something scale-related. After the incident, I went on and created 3.5k Kyverno policy resources on lima-kilo, and indeed I was able to reproduce the outage. We took a number of measures, corrected a few errors in our infrastructure,  reached out to the Kyverno upstream developers, asking for advice, and at the end we did the following to accommodate the setup to our needs.:

• corrected the external HAproxy kubernetes apiserver health checks, from checking just for open TCP ports, to actually checking the /healthz HTTP endpoint, which more accurately reflected the health of each k8s apiserver.
• having a more realistic development environment. In lima-kilo, we created a couple of helper scripts to create/delete 4000 policy resources, each on a different namespace.
• greatly over-provisioned memory in the Kubernetes control plane servers. This is, bigger memory in the base virtual machine hosting the control plane. Scaling the memory headroom of the apiserver would prevent it from running out of memory, and therefore crashing the whole system. We went from 8GB RAM per virtual machine to 32GB.  In our cluster, a single apiserver pod could eat 7GB of memory on a normal day, so having 8GB on the base virtual machine was clearly not enough. I also sent a patch proposal to Kyverno upstream documentation suggesting they clarify the additional memory pressure on the apiserver.
• corrected resource requests and limits of Kyverno, to more accurately describe our actual usage.
• increased the number of replicas of the Kyverno admission controller to 7, so admission requests could be handled more timely by Kyverno.

I have to admit, I was briefly tempted to drop Kyverno, and even stop pursuing using an external policy agent entirely, and write our own custom admission controller out of concerns over performance of this architecture. However, after applying all the measures listed above, the system became very stable, so we decided to move forward. The second attempt at deploying it all went through just fine. No outage this time 🙂

When we were in stage 4 we detected another bug. We had been following the Kubernetes upstream documentation for setting securityContext to the right values. In particular, we were enforcing the procMount to be set to the default value, which per the docs it was ‘DefaultProcMount’. However, that string is the name of the internal variable in the source code, whereas the actual default value is the string ‘Default’. This caused pods to be rightfully rejected by Kyverno while we figured the problem. We sent a patch upstream to fix this problem.

We finally had everything in place, reached stage 5, and we were able to disable PSP. We unloaded the PSP controller from the kubernetes apiserver, and deleted every individual PSP definition. Everything was very smooth in this last step of the migration.

This whole PSP project, including the maintain-kubeusers refactor, the outage, and all the different migration stages took roughly three months to complete.

For me there are a number of valuable reasons to learn from this project. For one, the scale is something to consider, and test, when evaluating a new architecture or software component. Not doing so can lead to service outages, or unexpectedly poor performances. This is in the first chapter of the SRE handbook, but we got a reminder the hard way 🙂

The four essays touch on foundational questions but also some very real problems that need to be looked at within the Wikimedia community if it comes to knowledge equity. One key aspect of this inward gaze is a deep reflection how to start this work with the communities that are silent (or silenced) at the centre – not just by them or for them.

Read the publication here

Knowledge equity is both an attractive and elusive concept. In our society, governed by meritocracy, knowledge is deemed of value, though with rates varying significantly: be it university education or street smarts. Knowledge is a non-exclusive resource; learning does not take it away from our peers or teachers. Often to the contrary, an act of learning can educate all involved.

Equity is surely a worthwhile endeavor in liberal democracy as it resonates with capital, investment, powerful people taking decisions with profit as their objective. Material profit can be an exclusive resource, often unevenly distributed. In a liberal economy it is considered a good thing, motivating its participants towards development and growth.

But what comes out of putting the two together: something that is intangible and something that is measurable, into one asset?

“Knowledge equity is based on a transformation. It is more than accepting others to the table – it is deciding that the table itself needs to be changed to accommodate all the people that should be sitting at it”

Wikimedia Movement, a nebula of volunteers, organisations, cultures, and languages that support and maintain Wikipedia, put knowledge equity on its banner. It is one of the values underpinning its 2030 Movement Strategy. Wikipedia defines knowledge equity as a concept referring to social change concerning both expanding what is valued as knowledge and seeking to include communities that may have been excluded from knowledge production and sharing through imbalanced structures of power and privilege. So, in fact knowledge equity is based on a transformation. It is more than simply accepting others to the table – it is deciding that the table itself needs to be changed to accommodate all the people that should be sitting at it. Maybe the people who didn’t mind the table as it always was, will now have less room. But thanks to the change, everyone will not only fit but also be comfortable participating. There will be no business as usual.

Flipping a table like that is not a change that many boardrooms with people in power would approve of. Not coincidentally do we engage with this metaphor: both knowledge and access are power. If we achieve equity in the boardroom for just one meeting but the next day all chairs are occupied as usual, we have failed. If we only half-open our Wikimedia projects, performatively include diversity in our documents, put beautiful values in our preambles, but do not dare to imagine what this power sharing should look like today and every day, we have failed. We have failed not only those who are silent at the table or very far away from it. We fail on the path to our vision of a world where every human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

“Knowledge equity is, like any worthwhile value, a path to walk on, not merely a destination”

So how do we get to that task? Bringing more knowledge equity has conceptual, strategic, practical, and regulatory aspects, and more. Strategizing, conceptualising, planning, and finally doing – have no end: knowledge equity is, like any worthwhile value, a path to walk on, not merely a destination. This collection of four essays is a sample of this approach as seen by the four authors.

The essays touch on the foundational concepts of Wikipedia, such as objectivity of the editors and neutrality of the content. But neutrality and objectivity source from connectedness and joint human experience, argues Marie-Luise Guhl. Marie is rereading female philosophers and demonstrating that Hannah Arendt was, in fact, a Wikipedian at heart. Nikki Zeuner investigates the effort of collective work and refracts it through the geographical, economic, and racial lenses to point out when and how a fun spare-time activity of adding to the sum of human knowledge becomes free labour. Naphsica Papanicolaou tells a story of her volunteering in a refugee camp in Greece and reflects on the role that the Wikimedia Movement can play – in both on-the-ground activities supporting refugees in their journey from despair to a new life, and as an agent of systemic change in policies that is necessary to alleviate the migrant crises. Systemic change is also at the core of my proposal to the readers. In exploring European policymaking of the internet that so often prompts regulatory changes in other parts of the globe, I propose ways in which we can influence European policies to be less colour-blind and more responsive to the intersectional nature of problems that they are trying to solve.

This collection’s all-over-the-placeness in terms of topics and levels of reflection is, to us, the feature of our project. It is an invitation for our colleagues, friends, and allies to “start where you are, use what you have, do what you can” in imagining a more equitable world, enriched by various protocols and facets of knowledge. We are offering snapshots on what transforming the Wikimedia ecosystem into an equitable space could entail. Our hope is that these thoughts and proposals will be taken on and critiqued, nuanced, made better, and supplemented. This attempt should not be misinterpreted, though, as a self-serving exercise by four white women from Europe – we never intended for that. We simply start where we are, and use our platform, access, and resources to be of service to those who need to take a seat at the table.

Read “Paths to Knowledge Equity” here

Here is a report by Kumiko, a member of “edit Tango“.

(漱石の猫, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, ウィキメディア・コモンズ経由で)

30 June 2024. A rainy Sunday. The monthly meeting of “edit Tango” is in progress. The venue is Hikari Museum of Art in Kyotango City. We work on our own topics, discuss and help each other.

Sachiko, a member of Hikari Museum of Art, is working on a new article about a local picture book author Roto Tsuda. Canta is working on a new article Toteiran and more.

Tomorrow, 1 July, is the official opening day of the beaches in summer season. Light purple Toteiran wil be blooming very soon along the beaches.

（KENPEI, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, ウィキメディア・コモンズ経由で）

June was busy and fun! Just check all the things that happened.

Vodcast

WikiAfrica Hour had the theme: #36: Does the Wikimedia movement contribute to the SDGs? and I was a guest representing the user group. It went well in my opinion and I think it might be an inspiring episode for people who see it.

User group meeting

We had a good and productive meeting, and another member of the user group organized it. That was a lovely feeling. Minutes are published.

Affiliate health

The Affiliations Committee published new criteria for judging the health of the affiliates, and based on that I made a table to see how well Wikimedians for Sustainable Development meet them. The table makes it clear that we have some room for improvement, and makes it very actionable what we need to do.

Goals and strategy

One very concrete thing we are missing are measurable goals. So I started a page for us to collect them. When doing that, I thought it would be necessary to connect them to the movement strategy, and set up a strategy page for the user group to do that connection. Of course, both of these are just empty placeholders for now, but at least we have some concrete things for the agenda for our upcoming meetings.

Voting on the Movement Charter

The user group may vote on the adoption of the Movement Charter, so I started a page for our vote and got nominated as the person to submit it on the behalf of the user group.

Newsletter

I sent another monthly newsletter, and this one was full of stuff, both from the user group and from around the movement.

This is the first half of my sixth monthly report of my New Year’s resolutions.

Enhance the security of your wiki with Two-Factor Authentication (2FA).

We take security seriously at ProWiki. That's why we're excited to announce the release of Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) for your wiki. 2FA adds an extra layer of security to your account by requiring a second form of verification in addition to your password. This feature helps protect your account from unauthorized access, even if your password is compromised.

2FA is available for all users on ProWiki. To enable 2FA, go to your user preferences and click the "Manage" button next to "Two-Factor Authentication". You can then set up 2FA with an authenticator app like Google Authenticator or Authy by scanning the QR code or entering the secret key.

Administrators can mandate 2FA for users with elevated permissions or for all users via the MediaWiki admin panel.

20/06/2024-26/06/2024

Mapping

• Derick Rethans (@[email protected]) published the ‘Überterracer’ (uberterrace), a JOSM plugin, which allows you to draw a rectangle, and then quickly convert it to a row of terraced houses and at the same time add numbers to the generated buildings. He wrote about it back in 2015 in his blog and the code is available under the GNU General Public License.
• Trufi Association challenges you to find a 14-year-old with a bigger OpenStreetMap public transport footprint than Esneider Castro, their Volunteer of the Month.
• Hungerburg is asking for comments to deprecate the use of waterway=pressurised for anything that is not artificially built for hydropower uses.
• The proposal to introduce the prefix ordering: for order-only telephone numbers or SMS-only telephone numbers and its associated tags to improve the specificity of contact information will be open for voting from 8 July to 22 July.
• The vote to mark cycleway=opposite tags as deprecated has been concluded with 67 votes in favour, 0 against, and 0 abstentions.

Community

• Ashim Paudel shared his experiences as an Open Mapping Guru Validation member. He lists his newly gained insights from the programme and highlights the collaborative OSM community.
• Teachers at the GAL School in Cusco, Peru, are using open mapping tools to document and preserve the Andean tradition like ‘linderaje’ by merging technology with ancestral practices to enhance education and community identity through the Open Mapping for All programme.
• Teckids e.V., a non-profit organisation that aims to improve children’s digital literacy, does not recommend the use of OpenStreetMap for its community. As there is a terms of use clause that prohibits the use of OpenStreetMap services for children under 13 years old. They are currently planning to approach the OpenStreetMap Foundation in a coordinated effort to bring about change.
• Tobias Jordans reported that the talks from the OpenStreetMap State of the Map US 2024 are now on YouTube.
• Softgrow reported that they discovered a 9 year old way in OSM called ‘Scammell Lane’, but found no evidence for its name at the location. So they contacted the local council, City of Charles Sturt, and asked to erect signs – which they have.
• Valerie Norton blogged thoughts about proposing toilets:disposal=vault and explains its difference to toilets:disposal=pitlatrine.
• Volker Krause announced that the KDE Akademy 2024 will take place in a venue that has available OSM indoor mapping, thereby expanding the capabilities of the KDE conference companion app: Kongress.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation announced how to become a candidate for the 2024 election, with self-nominations opening on 28 July and closing on 13 August. Candidates must have been members of the OSM Foundation for at least 180 days prior to the election and have to meet other eligibility requirements. The election will fill four board seats in October.

Events

• The OpenStreetMap Poland Association is pleased to invite all members of the OSM community to the State of the Map Europe 2024 conference, to be held in Łódź, Poland, from 18–21 July 2024. In addition to many interesting presentations and talks, it will be an opportunity to meet, discuss, and exchange experiences.
• OpenStreetMap foundation board member Sarah Hoffmann recently joined the 3rd annual UNMaps conference in Valencia, Spain, to present the OpenStreetMap project and participate in a panel discussion about crowd-sourced geodata.

Education

• IVIDES.org has signed a cooperation agreement with the Universidade Católica de Moçambique. As an initial activity, the institute held a workshop on collaborative mapping with OpenStreetMap for a group of young students who are taking the Master’s course in Geographic Information Systems. Raquel Dezidério Souto recorded this moment in her diary . The files are available in Portuguese.

OSM research

• Gustavo22soares, a member of a study group at the University of Brasília (UnB), is conducting a survey on the usability of OSM.org. There are two options for the questionnaire: MS Forms or Cryptpad. If you have any questions, you can refer to the post on the forum.

OSM in action

• [1] City Bus Manager has announced its full release on Steam, showcasing features where players build and manage their bus company using real world map data from OpenStreetMap, creating routes, and managing all aspects of their bus empire.
• Jakob Miksch reported on Mastodon that he is travelling to FOSS4G Europe and noticed the use of FOSS4G based software on the bus, specifically a Leaflet map using OpenStreetMap data.
• Sargassum Monitoring is a citizen science initiative that began in Mexico and monitors the occurrence of Sargassum sp. (species of brown algae) around the world and displays the photographs on an interactive map with uMap.

Software

• The new Mapillary iOS app, called ‘Mapillary 2.0’, features a complete redesign for improved usability, including a new home page, action cards for upload status, faster uploads and map filtering using OpenStreetMap data, making it easier for users to capture, and manage street-level imagery.
• Ilya Zverev announced that Level0 is now HTTPS-enabled with OAuth2 support and it’s running on a new fast server, thanks to the support of OpenCage. Other services, such as the image offset database, will also be migrated.
• NorthCrab’s #12 describes the near completion of new search functionality, the addition of four new contributors, and improvements like GPS trace visualisations and fixing the white grid lines bug.
• Development Seed celebrates a decade of OSMCha, highlighting its role in ensuring the quality of OpenStreetMap edits. The tool has evolved to integrate more tightly with mapping and validation processes, using AI/ML to improve detection of map vandalism and errors. Future plans include improving user interfaces, increasing community engagement, and expanding automated validation capabilities to maintain the high data standards of OpenStreetMap.

Programming

• Mohit Sindhwani explains how to use CSS filters to style OpenLayers maps, demonstrating techniques for creating different map views. These filters, including greyscale, brightness, and hue-rotate, can be applied to OpenStreetMap data to enhance visual presentations without requiring advanced design skills.
• Urban building and POI data from the Overture Maps Foundation can be downloaded using the overturemaps-py tool.

Releases

• OsmAPP has released version 1.4.0 which adds iD Tagging scheme for displaying
  properties, search by overpass, 3D terrain view, overlays support and more.
• Organic Maps has released a major June update that includes new OpenStreetMap data, street name announcements, iCloud syncing for iOS and GPX export for bookmarks and tracks, as well as various fixes and improvements across all platforms.
• TrickyFoxy has updated the “better-osm-org” user script, including features like QuickLook for changesets, hotkeys for navigation, filtering changesets, mass actions, and highlighting moderators and banned users.

Did you know …

• … that the Civis is a platform that records citizen science projects, based on eu-citizen.science, and that makes them available on an interactive map with OpenStreetMap?

Other “geo” things

• The popular speed camera app Blitzer.de has received a major update, adding a navigation feature provided by NUNAV that focuses on avoiding traffic jams using real-time data and OpenStreetMap, making it a potential alternative to Google Maps.
• PeopleForBikes’ 2024 City Ratings report highlights improvements in bicycle infrastructure in over 2,300 US cities, with improved OpenStreetMap data contributing significantly to better network connectivity and safety.
• OpenCage announces the start of a two-part series on Caribbean #geoweirdness, sharing unique and interesting geographical facts about the region.
• PLACE, a nonprofit organization founded by Peter Rabley, collects and publishes high-resolution aerial and street imagery to create detailed maps, particularly for developing countries.
• The E400 VTOL drone combines vertical take-off and fixed-wing performance with military-grade durability and a hefty price tag, making it a high-flying surveyor’s dream and a budget-conscious OpenStreetMap mapper’s nightmare.
• The interactive New York Times article of 3 June 2024 details the widespread destruction in Ukraine caused by the ongoing conflict, showing before-and-after satellite images, personal stories of affected residents and an analysis of the humanitarian impact.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2024-06-27
Lübeck	143. OSM-Stammtisch Lübeck und Umgebung		2024-06-27
	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)		2024-06-27
Lyon	SotM-FR 2024 – Lyon		2024-06-28 – 2024-06-30
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)		2024-06-28
The Municipal District of Portlaoise	Portlaoise Mapping Initiative		2024-06-29
中央区	マッピングパーティ in 北海道神宮		2024-06-30
Tartu linn	FOSS4G Europe 2024		2024-06-30 – 2024-07-07
Richmond	MapRVA Meetup		2024-07-02
	MapRoulette Community Meeting		2024-07-02
	Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon		2024-07-02
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #60	✓	2024-07-02
Potsdam	Radnetz Brandenburg Mapping Abend #7	✓	2024-07-03
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2024-07-03
Dresden	Dresden – OSM Stammtisch		2024-07-04
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2024-07-05
中正區	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #66		2024-07-08
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-07-10
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2024-07-09
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2024-07-11
Lorain County	OpenStreetMap Midwest Meetup	✓	2024-07-11
Bochum	Bochumer OSM Treffen		2024-07-10
Amsterdam	Maptime Amsterdam: Summertime Meetup		2024-07-11
Wildau	193. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2024-07-11
København	OSMmapperCPH		2024-07-14
England	OSM UK Online Chat		2024-07-15

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, TheFive, barefootstache, derFred, freyfogle, mcliquid, rtnf, tordans.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Today we present our chat with the Trier Center for Digital Humanities, University of Trier, about their MiMoText project: an innovative initiative in the study of literary history. Focusing on the French Enlightenment novel, MiMoText (“mining and modeling text“) leverages advanced text-mining techniques to extract and model information from an array of sources, including 18th-century texts and contemporary research literature. MiMoText then uses Wikibase to integrate this varied data into a cohesive, multilingual knowledge base that’s linked to external resources such as Wikidata. In this interview, the team members share with us how MiMoText puts Wikibase to use enhancing data accessibility and interoperability (including performing federated queries across multiple databases) and discuss broader implications for the digital humanities.

Please provide us an overview of the MiMoText project and its objectives.

MiMoText is a research project in computational literary studies involving new ways to model and analyze literary history — specifically the French Enlightenment novel. It’s based on the idea of extracting relevant statements from a wide range of sources (such as bibliographic resources, primary texts from the 18th century, and current research literature) in order to build a shared knowledge network for literary history.

“MiMoText” is short for “mining and modeling text”; we use information-extraction and text-mining methods on our data to extract a large quantity of statements about authors and literary works. By modeling the data in the Linked Open Data paradigm, we link this heterogeneous information to form a common knowledge base, interconnected both internally and with external knowledge resources, particularly Wikidata.

Overview of the project structure with four research areas:
mining, modeling, legal aspects and infrastructure

How did you decide to use Wikibase for the MiMoTextBase? 

At the start of the project, we compared several tools for creating knowledge graphs, using open science principles in creating both the data provision and the infrastructure for the project. 

• First of all, we felt it was important to use free, open-source software that is user-friendly and has a committed community.
• We also found the ability to handle multilingual data persuasive; we wanted to integrate data from French novels as well as German scholarly literature and to make the data available in English. 
• Wikidata’s flexible data model seemed very useful for us in our attempt to reference complementary information gained from different source types and also to represent contradictory statements at the same time. We found quite convincing the complex but differentiated system provided for referencing and qualifying statements: “claims”. 
• Furthermore, the structure of the knowledge network in the Linked Open Data paradigm is closely linked to the query options. The SPARQL endpoint (the interface to the Wikibase Query Service) is very useful and offers some great possibilities such as the ability to store example queries, various query templates, etc. 
• Above all, however, we were excited about the built-in data visualization possibilities. The project would not have had the resources to develop such analysis and exploration options. 

We see the MiMoTextBase as part of the Wikibase ecosystem, which is constantly growing.  There were two very pleasing developments that we couldn’t have fully anticipated at the beginning of the project. In addition to the ability to link Wikibase instances, another important dimension is the current development of the tool suite: for example, we used OpenRefine for reconciliation, mapping text strings from our sources (e.g., places in novels) to Wikidata items.

A view of the MiMoTextBase within the Wikimedia Linked Open Data web.
Credit original visualization: Manuel Merz.

How does Wikibase enhance the interoperability of data in MiMoTextBase? What’s the role and significance of Wikibase features around multilingual labeling in your knowledge base? 

As outlined before, various methods in MiMoText combine and generate different statements from completely different types of sources. In total, the MiMoTextBase contains around 330,000 statements and is the place where everything gets integrated while remaining fully retraceable. All statements are referenced and linked to sources, specific data sets and methods. If you’re interested in how we generated statements about the themes, locations and styles of 18th century novels based on topic modeling, named entity recognition and stylometry (methods frequently used in the field of digital humanities), you can delve into the associated GitHub repositories.

Multilingual vocabularies were very important for the project’s aforementioned multilingual dimension, particularly for linking sources from different languages. These vocabularies are also part of our MiMoTextBase; if you find that interesting, you can access further information in the associated repository.

In MiMoTextBase you’ve enabled federated queries between your knowledge base and Wikidata. Could you explain what these are, and how you’re facilitating these queries?

We began with federation starting from our MiMoTextBase in the direction of Wikidata. The fundamental advantage of federation is that you don’t have to store data redundantly in several places but can make queries across several databases. These are called federated queries. To enable them, we matched the identifiers of our MiMoTextBase with Wikidata’s corresponding identifiers, such as “people” or “places”. In this way, by matching their names you can query authors’ birth dates, which we don’t store locally in the MiMoTextBase but which are available in Wikidata.

Federation between MiMoTextBase and Wikidata

We also matched the spatial identifiers, which means we can survey the locations of the novels, opening up the possibility of querying geocoordinates from Wikidata (example query). Furthermore, we can combine very different individual queries. For example, we can query which locations in novels are frequently linked to certain topics, such as travel.

An example of a federated query:
narrative locations of French novels 1751–1800 by theme

In addition to allowing MiMoText users to employ information from the huge Wikidata knowledge graph using federated queries, we’ve also recently enabled querying in the other direction. We imported into Wikidata a portion of our data that’s relevant to the public and linked it to our MiMoTextBase by means of the MiMoText ID, an external identifier that we proposed to Wikidata. Users seeking detailed information about Enlightenment novels can query it via the Wikidata Query Service as demonstrated in this example query. For deeper insight into the process as well as some more federated queries, take a look at our documentation. The following visualization gives a rough idea of the links between the two knowledge graphs.

Overview of links between MiMoTextBase and Wikidata

Could you describe the process of setting up your own SPARQL endpoint and its significance for your project?

The SPARQL endpoint is crucial. On the one hand, there is a SPARQL endpoint API suitable for advanced users who want to further process the data or the query results. On the other hand, we have the Wikibase Query Service interface which, as previously mentioned, offers numerous options and formats for exporting, analyzing and visualizing queries and their results. We find these options very useful, even for less experienced users, in exploring the data and recognizing patterns that confirm or contradict certain assumptions; the options also open up completely new perspectives. It’s vital to allocate enough time and human resources for the setup and operation of a Wikibase instance. For projects that have few resources available, a workable alternative might be the Wikibase cloud service. 

Were there challenges you encountered while working with Wikibase in the MiMoText project, and how did you address them?

We encountered a couple of challenges working with Wikibase. The various programming languages, frameworks and technical platforms and systems used in the Wikibase ecosystem entailed extra effort in customizing Wikibase with its various extensions. The documentation of the extensions and configuration options could have been more detailed in some cases. It does help that there is a lively community.

Two points may also be interesting for other projects. From today’s perspective, we would recommend installation using the Docker containers [known as Wikibase Suite]. Although some options are lacking, there is a great deal of simplification and a lot of built-in extensions. In addition, we spent a relatively large amount of time adapting our customized PyWikiBot;  from today’s perspective, we can say that QuickStatements, which we recommend, would have been sufficient for the vast majority of our import scenarios.

What practices do you employ to ensure the sustainability of your Wikibase infrastructure?

The project ran from 2019 to 2023 at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities (TCDH), located at the University of Trier. We are one of the oldest digital humanities centers in Germany and can guarantee the sustainable availability of the MiMoTextBase in the coming years. We also regard sharing a relevant selection of our data in Wikidata as an important step towards sustainability. Furthermore, although the MiMoTextBase was the first, it will certainly not be the last Wikibase created at the Trier Center for Digital Humanities. The MiMoText project modeled the quite specific domain of the French Enlightenment novel; now we are transferring this approach to the broader domain of the humanities. Our project LODinG (Linked Open Data in the Humanities, running from 2024 to 2028) collects, analyzes and models data in the Linked Open Data paradigm across several sub-projects on very different subject areas, such as lexicographic data on historical pandemics, wine labels, and medical-botanical knowledge from the early modern period.

In your view, what role could Wikibase play in the broader landscape of digital humanities research? How might projects in the field benefit from the Linked Open Data web?

There are several advantages to Wikibase and to the Linked Open Data web as a whole. We see a kind of bridging function in the fact that Linked Open Data can be generated and analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative methods. This bridging is particularly important for the digital humanities; we still see a lot of untapped potential in this field. Wikibase’s interface (as well as the tool suite with OpenRefine, for example, and tools such as QuickStatements) supports qualitative work with smaller data sets as well as quantitative work with larger data sets and many things in between.

Being able to work collaboratively is of course another great advantage. Wikidata’s status as the largest Wikibase instance makes it a kind of hub for linking humanities data across project boundaries. The more projects in this ecosystem that share the same infrastructure, the denser and more significant the whole knowledge graph becomes. Of course, federated queries are possible across different types of infrastructures (via RDF and SPARQL as W3C standards), but they’re made easier by a common basic data model since it is shared via Wikibase. Ideally, researchers could use data from very different projects via federation if they were linked together.

Of course, there are also many challenges. For example, the matching process is quite time-consuming, and federated queries require precise knowledge of the various databases’ data models to be queried. In order to overcome the hurdle of needing to know SPARQL, it was important for us to share our knowledge in various workshops. In addition, we created a comprehensive online tutorial that introduces the SPARQL query language with many illustrative examples from our Wikibase instance.

Thank you for your time and for the fascinating insights into your Wikibase project!

In this interview we heard from:

• Maria Hinzmann, MiMoText team coordinator (research area: modeling), Trier Center for Digital Humanities
• Matthias Bremm, MiMoText team member (research area: infrastructure), Trier Center for Digital Humanities
• Tinghui Duan, MiMoText team member (research area: mining, scholarly literature), Trier Center for Digital Humanities
• Anne Klee, MiMoText team member (various research areas), Trier Center for Digital Humanities
• Johanna Konstanciak, MiMoText team member (various research areas), Trier Center for Digital Humanities
• Julia Röttgermann, MiMoText team member (research areas: mining, novels), Trier Center for Digital Humanities
• Christof Schöch, MiMoText project lead and co-director of Trier Center for Digital Humanities
• Joëlle Weis, head of the research area Digital Literary and Cultural Studies, Trier Center for Digital Humanities

—I suppose you are an entomologist?—I said with a note of interrogation.

—Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name! A society may call itself an Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad title as that to himself, in the present state of science, is a pretender, sir, a dilettante, an impostor! No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp.

The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. 

A collection of biographies with surprising gaps (ex. A.D. Imms)

The history of Indian interest in insects has been approached by many writers and there are several bits and pieces available in journals and various insights distributed across books. There are numerous ways of looking at how people viewed insects over time. One of these (cover picture on right) is a collection of biographies, some of which are uncited verbatim accounts from obituaries (and not even within quotation marks). This collation is by B.R. Subba Rao who also provides a few historical threads to tie together the biographies. Keeping Indian expectations in view, both Subba Rao and the agricultural entomologist M.A. Husain play to the crowd in their early histories. Husain wrote in pre-Independence times where there was a need for Indians to assert themselves before their colonial masters. They begin with mentions of insects in ancient Indian texts and as can be expected there are mentions of honey, shellac, bees, ants, and a few nuisance insects. Husain takes the fact that the term Satpada षट्पद or six-legs existed in the 1st century Amarakosa to make the claim that Indians were far ahead of time because Latreille's Hexapoda, the supposed analogy, was proposed only in 1825. Such one-upmanship (or quests for past superiority in the face of current backwardness?) misses the fact that science is not just about terms but  also about structures and one can only assume that these authors failed to find the development of such structures in the ancient texts that they examined. Cedric Dover, with his part-Indian and British ancestry, interestingly, also notes the Sanskrit literature but declares that he is not competent enough to examine the subject carefully. The identification of species in old texts also leave one wondering about the accuracy of translations. For instance K.N. Dave translates a verse from the Atharva-veda and suggests an early date for knowledge on shellac. Dave's work has been re-examined by an entomologist, Mahdihassan. Another organism known in ancient texts as the indragopa (Indra's cowherd) supposedly appears after the rains. Some Sanskrit scholars have, remarkably enough, identified it, with a confidence that no coccidologist ever had, as the cochineal insect (the species Dactylopius coccus is South American!), while others identify it as a lac insect, a firefly(!) or as Trombidium (red velvet mites) - the last for matching blood red colour mentioned in a text attributed to Susrutha. To be fair, ambiguities in translation are not limited to those dealing with Indian writing. Dikairon (Δικαιρον), supposedly a highly-valued and potent poison from India was mentioned in the work Indika by Ctesias 398 - 397 BC. One writer said it was the droppings of a bird. Valentine Ball thought it was derived from a scarab beetle. Jeffrey Lockwood claimed that it came from the rove beetles Paederus sp. And finally a Spanish scholar states that all this was a gross misunderstanding and that Dikairon was not a poison, and - believe it or not - was a masticated mix of betel leaves, arecanut, and lime! 

 

One gets a far more reliable idea of ancient knowledge and traditions from practitioners, forest dwellers, the traditional honey-harvesting tribes, and similar people that have been gathering materials such as shellac and beeswax. Unfortunately, many of these traditions and their practitioners are threatened by modern laws, economics, and cultural prejudice. These practitioners are being driven out of the forests where they live, and their knowledge was hardly ever captured in writing. The writers of the ancient Sanskrit texts were probably associated with temple-towns and other semi-urban clusters and it seems like the knowledge of forest dwellers was never considered merit-worthy by the book writing class of that period.

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

Cataloguing

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

Communication and vocabulary building

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

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

Pattern finding

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

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

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

Indian reflections on the history of entomology

Kunhikannan died at the rather young age of 47

A rather interesting analysis of Indian science is made by the first native Indian entomologist, with the official title of "entomologist" in the state of Mysore - K. Kunhikannan. Kunhikannan was deputed to pursue a Ph.D. at Stanford (for some unknown reason two pre-Independence Indian entomologists trained in Stanford rather than England - see postscript) through his superior Leslie Coleman. At Stanford, Kunhikannan gave a talk on Science in India. He noted in that 1923 talk :

In the field of natural sciences the Hindus did not make any progress. The classifications of animals and plants are very crude. It seems to me possible that this singular lack of interest in this branch of knowledge was due to the love of animal life. It is difficult for Westerners to realise how deep it is among Indians. The observant traveller will come across people trailing sugar as they walk along streets so that ants may have a supply, and there are priests in certain sects who veil that face while reading sacred books that they may avoid drawing in with their breath and killing any small unwary insects. [Note: Salim Ali expressed a similar view ]

He then examines science sponsored by state institutions, by universities and then by individuals. About the last he writes:

Though I deal with it last it is the first in importance. Under it has to be included all the work done by individuals who are not in Government employment or who being government servants devote their leisure hours to science. A number of missionaries come under this category. They have done considerable work mainly in the natural sciences. There are also medical men who devote their leisure hours to science. The discovery of the transmission of malaria was made not during the course of Government work. These men have not received much encouragement for research or reward for research, but they deserve the highest praise., European officials in other walks of life have made signal contributions to science. The fascinating volumes of E. H. Aitken and Douglas Dewar are the result of observations made in the field of natural history in the course of official duties. Men like these have formed themselves into an association, and a journal is published by the Bombay Natural History Association[sic], in which valuable observations are recorded from time to time. That publication has been running for over a quarter of a century, and its volumes are a mine of interesting information with regard to the natural history of India.

This then is a brief survey of the work done in India. As you will see it is very little, regard being had to the extent of the country and the size of her population. I have tried to explain why Indians' contribution is as yet so little, how education has been defective and how opportunities have been few. Men do not go after scientific research when reward is so little and facilities so few. But there are those who will say that science must be pursued for its own sake. That view is narrow and does not take into account the origin and course of scientific research. Men began to pursue science for the sake of material progress. The Arab alchemists started chemistry in the hope of discovering a method of making gold. So it has been all along and even now in the 20th century the cry is often heard that scientific research is pursued with too little regard for its immediate usefulness to man. The passion for science for its own sake has developed largely as a result of the enormous growth of each of the sciences beyond the grasp of individual minds so that a division between pure and applied science has become necessary. The charge therefore that Indians have failed to pursue science for its own sake is not justified. Science flourishes where the application of its results makes possible the advancement of the individual and the community as a whole. It requires a leisured class free from anxieties of obtaining livelihood or capable of appreciating the value of scientific work. Such a class does not exist in India. The leisured classes in India are not yet educated sufficiently to honour scientific men.

It is interesting that leisure is noted as important for scientific advance. Edward Balfour, also commented that Indians were "too close to subsistence to reflect accurately on their environment!"  (apparently in The Vydian and the Hakim, what do they know of medicine? (1875) which unfortunately is not available online)

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

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

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

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

Further reading

• Balfour, Edward (1887). The agricultural pests of India, and of eastern and southern Asia, vegetable and animal, injurious to man and his products. London: Bernard Quaritch.
• Ball, V. 1885. On the identification of the animals and plants of India which were known to early Greek authors. The Indian Antiquary. 14:274-287, 303-311, 334-341
• Barnard, Peter C. (2018). Bat-Fowlers, Pooters and Cyanide Jars: a Historical Overview of Insect Collecting and Preservation in MacGregor, A. (Ed.).  Naturalists in the Field . Brill.
• Clark, J.F.M. (2001). Bugs in the System: Insects, Agricultural Science, and Professional Aspirations in Britain, 1890-1920.  Agricultural History 75(1):83-114.
• Dave, K.N. (1950) Lac and the lac insect in the Atharva veda. Int Acad Ind Cult Nagpur, 16 pp. [Dave incidentally, is also the translator and interpreter of another problematic work on ornithological knowledge in ancient Indian literature] 
• Dover, Cedric (1922) Entomology in India. The Calcutta Review 3(2):336-349. [Dover makes a plea for greater funding for entomology: Like Magda, Queen of Sheba, whose devotion to Learning made her set out for Jerusalem, the capital of the kingdom of Solomon, they have entered the domain of Science not with the object of any financial benefit to themselves but for their love of Knowledge. They have worked in the interests of Science alone, yet certain branches of their work has saved India millions of rupees, while other, have added large sums to her coffers. Is it not then up to the Government to improve the status of entomology in this country and to make it a more lucrative profession?  ]
  
• Essig, E.O. (1931) A history of entomology. New York: The Macmillan Company.
• Farber, P.L. (1976). The type-concept in zoology during the first half of the nineteenth century. Journal of the History of Biology 9(1):93–119.  
• Hewitt, C. Gordon (1916). A review of applied entomology in the British Empire. Annals of the Entomological Society of America. 9(1):1–33.
• Howard, L.O. (1930). A history of applied entomology (Somewhat Anecdotal). Smithsonian Institution. Publication 3065.
• Husain, Mohamad Afzal (1938). Entomology in India, past, present and future. Current Science 6(8):422-424. [This is a summary, for the full address see - Husain, M. Afzal (1939). "Entomology in India: Past, Present and Future."  Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Indian Science Congress, Calcutta, 1938. pp. 201–246]
• Lefroy, Maxwell (1904). Historical summary in Report of the Entomologist to the Government of India.
• Lienhard, S. (1978) On the meaning and use of the word indragopa. Indologica Taurinensia 6:177-188.
• Lockwood, J.A. (2012) Insects as weapons ofwar, terror, and torture. Annual Review of Entomology 57:205-227.
• Mahdihassan, S. (1986). Lac and its decolourization by orpiment as traced to Babylon. Indian Journal of History of Science 21(2):187-192.
• Melillo, E. D. (2013). Global Entomologies: Insects, Empires, and the “Synthetic Age” in World History. Past & Present, 223(1):233–270. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtt026
• Moses, S.T. (1925). Insect pests and some south Indian beliefs. Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society. 26(1):15-19.
  
• Rao, H. Srinivasa (1957) History of our knowledge of the Indian fauna through the ages. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 54:251-280.
• Rao, B.R. Subba (1983). Systematic entomology in India - past, present and future. Current Science 52(21):997-1000.
• Romero, D.B. (2007). El díkairon en la obra Indika de Ctesias de Cnido. Propuesta de identificación. Emerita 75(2):255-272.
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2017). Malarial Subjects. Cambridge University Press. [Open-Access]
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2013). Quinine, mosquitoes and empire: reassembling malaria in British India, 1890–1910, South Asian History and Culture, 4(1):65-86. doi:10.1080/19472498.2012.750457
• Service, M. W. (1978). Review Article1: A Short History of Early Medical Entomology. Journal of Medical Entomology, 14(6):603–626. doi:10.1093/jmedent/14.6.603 
• Smith, Ray F.; Mittler, T.E.; Smith, Carroll N. (1973). History of Entomology. Annual Reviews Inc. ISBN 0824321017.
• Sorensen, Conner (1988). The Rise of Government Sponsored Applied Entomology, 1840-1870. Agricultural History 62(2):98-115. 
• Sutter, P. S. (2007). Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Isis, 98(4):724–754.

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

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

 

Edward Percy Stebbing - T.B. Fletcher - Edward Ernest Green - E.C. Cotes - Harold Maxwell Lefroy - Frank Milburn Howlett - S.R. Christophers - Leslie C. Coleman - T.V. Ramakrishna Ayyar - Yelsetti Ramachandra Rao - Magadi Puttarudriah - Hem Singh Pruthi - Shyam Sunder Lal Pradhan - James Molesworth Gardner - Vakittur Prabhakar Rao - D.N. Raychoudhary - C.F.W. Muesebeck  - Mithan Lal Roonwal - Ennapadam Sundara Narayanan - M.S. Mani - T.N. Ananthakrishnan - Muhammad Afzal Husain

Not included by Rao -   F.H. Gravely - P.V. Isaac - M. Afzal Husain - A.D. Imms - C.F.C. Beeson

 - C. Brooke Worth - Kumar Krishna - M.O.T. Iyengar - K. Kunhikannan - Cedric Dover

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

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26 June 2024 —In the last week, there has been media coverage regarding a decision by Wikipedia’s volunteer community on the reliability of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as an encyclopedic source in specific subject areas. In an effort to correct inaccuracies in some of this coverage and promote better understanding of how Wikipedia works, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that hosts Wikipedia, has issued the following statement. 

Several media reports have incorrectly implied that the ADL is no longer considered a reliable source on Wikipedia. The ADL remains a generally reliable source on Wikipedia, outside of the topic of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Wikipedia’s volunteer-led processes seek to ensure that neutral, reliable information is available for all. The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that supports Wikipedia’s global communities: it does not write, edit, or determine what content is included on Wikipedia or how that content is maintained. As such, the Foundation was not involved in the volunteer-community decision about the ADL. This independent relationship is crucial to ensuring Wikipedia remains neutral and free from institutional bias. The Foundation has not, and does not, intervene in decisions made by the community about the classification of a source. 

On 6 April 2024, Wikipedia volunteers began open discussions about the Anti-Defamation League as a source for information on Wikipedia. Over a two month period, more than 120 Wikipedia volunteers participated across three separate discussions. Such discussions are a routine process conducted by Wikipedia’s volunteers to determine if a source is reliable under the encyclopedia’s guidelines for use generally or in a given topic area. Volunteer discussions are grounded in the wider media and research ecosystem to assess a particular source; that means fact-based reporting from secondary sources is used to evaluate reliability, rather than opinion-based debates. 

Volunteers have closed the current discussions that started in April. They have thoughtfully laid out the reason for the three decisions, and have indicated, as always, that consensus can change with new facts and information. 

As stated above, the result of these community processes was that the ADL remains a reliable source on Wikipedia, outside of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Volunteers arrived at a consensus that the ADL can generally be cited on the topic of antisemitism, with some exceptions. As of this writing, for example, the Wikipedia article on Antisemitism includes citations to the ADL. It was also decided that the ADL’s hate symbols database can be cited, with some considerations.

Consistent with their principles of transparency, Wikipedia volunteers’ thousands of words and range of perspectives are visible for anyone interested to view, and their decision clearly summarizes the considerations that went into the process. This review was conducted through Wikipedia’s ‘Requests for comment‘ process, one of several processes through which content policy decisions are made through public community discussions to reach consensus. ‘Requests for comment’ are fully transparent and open to the public to view.  They are based on the quality and logical soundness of the participants’ comments, regardless of their background or identity.

Volunteers also follow well-established guidelines that ensure sources, and their coverage of specific topic areas, are regularly evaluated and continue to meet the site’s requirements to be considered a reliable source on Wikipedia. Reliable sources are those publications that have a reputation for fact checking and accuracy, among other criteria. Hundreds of sources are listed on the list of perennial sources, and thousands more have been discussed on the reliable sources noticeboard without being listed. If consensus changes in the future, the decisions are updated to reflect those changes.

This entire process of content moderation by Wikipedia volunteers is open, transparent, and publicly available on an article’s history and talk pages. Anyone can join Wikipedia as a volunteer. 

For more information on how Wikipedia works, you can watch the following videos:

• How does Wikipedia work?
• Can you trust what’s on Wikipedia?
• How does Wikipedia protect readers’ privacy?
• What does the Wikimedia Foundation do?

See this FAQ to learn more about volunteer processes on reliable sources:

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and 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. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

The post Wikimedia Foundation statement on volunteer processes on reliable sources appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.

Sophia Janssens was shocked when she first discovered how little information the Black women in American law Wikipedia article provided to its readers. As a Black woman and future law student, she was instantly drawn to improving the article, knowing that its content barely scratched the surface of the topic.

Confident that there must be more sources about Black women lawyers in the United States, the Brown University rising sophomore set out to include new stories in the article to combat the possibility of misinformation – when an incomplete narrative leads readers to fill in the missing pieces with their own assumptions and preconceived biases. 

“Narratives about social movements in history tend to center either male leaders or white women leaders,” said Janssens, who plans to double major in Environmental Studies and International and Public Affairs. “They are framed in a way that makes it seem like Black women did not play a role.”

Janssens significantly expanded the article by adding over 2,000 words and 18 references, providing readers a more comprehensive understanding of the role of Black women in U.S. legal history.

Her enhancements included the development of two robust new sections on history of the topic in the 1940s to early 1960s and the late 1960s to 1970s, as well as new content for the article’s existing sections. Most notably, Janssens expanded the sections covering the 1870s to 1930s and scholarship on Black women in the legal profession, transforming them from brief mentions into much more informative summaries. 

“I wanted to emphasize the strength and resilience of Black women lawyers throughout history,” explained Janssens. “They faced many obstacles to gain a seat at the table, so I wanted to make sure their work was visible and that their contributions did not go unnoticed.”

While unsure of exactly what type of lawyer she’d like to be one day, Janssens underscored the strong connection between her future legal career goals and the competencies gained during her Wikipedia assignment, including the writing and digital literacy skills needed to edit the online encyclopedia.

“Writing a Wikipedia article requires you to be very judicious about what information to include,” Janssens noted. “I wanted my writing to be well-formed but also accessible to anyone who might come across the article on Wikipedia. Identifying the most important information and conveying it in a clear manner will be helpful for me in a future career in law.”

Overall, Janssens found editing Wikipedia to be user-friendly, noting the pleasure of creating citations.

“I think editing Wikipedia was quite fun!” she reflected. “The ability to easily create citations was very helpful throughout the writing process. I love how they automatically generate in the ‘References’ section at the bottom of the article!”

This spring, Janssens and her classmates added nearly 33,000 words and over 300 references to Wikipedia articles as part of historian Mack Scott’s course “This is America”, which focused on people and events often marginalized or forgotten in American history. During the weeks of the course alone, their collective work on Wikipedia was viewed 237,000 times. 

“I felt a level of pressure working on this assignment that I don’t feel with traditional assignments,” said Janssens. “I felt like I had to make it really good so that it would be perceived well by readers and other Wikipedia users.”

Janssens hopes others will also feel compelled to enhance content on Wikipedia, including the article she herself improved.

“I think it would be cool if other people contributed to the article, as well!” said Janssens. “I like that Wikipedia is collaborative in that way.”

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free assignment templates, resources, and guidance that Wiki Education offers to instructors in the United States and Canada.