Hi. This is User:Eugene Ormandy from Toumon Wikipedian Club Japan. In the “Wikimedia World” series on Diff, I curate various archives of the Wikimedia movement. I hope it will encourage Wikimedians to learn more about the movement around the world, to compare the activities of other Wikimedians with their own, and to create archives of their experiences.

Strategy Discussions in the Portuguese-Speaking Community

Wikimedia is not only a medium, but also a community made up of different groups. The participants of them called Wikimedians always discuss how to govern the community and how to make it better. Let’s learn about one example reading a Diff post entitled “Top Topics for Strategy Discussions in the Portuguese-Speaking Community.”

What is the best way of governance for all the different needs regarding the many activities related with the Wikimedia environment? According to the opinions of the lusophone participants, both centralized and decentralized methods are appropriate in different contexts. For instance, server maintenance and fundraising are better taken care of by paid functionaries of Wikimedia Foundation. On the other side, other activities could be changed for a decentralized management in order to better serve each different local demand.That would, in theory, shorten communication distances, provide more value to specific local details according to each culture, language, social condition. For instance, by establishing formal partnerships with government entities to help harder to reach and less resourceful schools to obtain access to free content.

LTeles_WMF (13 February 2020) “Top Topics for Strategy Discussions in the Portuguese-Speaking Community” Diff.

Messages from the Wikimedia Foundation Executive Team

Wikimedia is made not only by volunteer Wikimedians but also by Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects such as Wikidata.

As a volunteer Wikimedian, I think it is very important for WMF executive members to share their vision or interests with volunteers and ask them to collaborate. In that respect, I am relatively satisfied with them because they sometimes write articles on Diff, a community blog hosted by WMF and we can learn about their activities and interests. Let’s examine a report entitled “Selena’s Listening Tour” written by Selena Deckelmann, the Chief Product and Technology Officer.

On a page of the first notebook I had for my onboarding, I quoted a person who said they just wanted “meaningful common goals.” This was a theme repeated over and over — a clear desire from everyone to do work together that was linked by common purpose, and with all the volunteers that have created all Wikimedia projects. I got to hear so many different voices, and I heard the details from every side — what’s working, what hasn’t been working for a long time — some of the problems we face are over ten years old. People shared what’s missing, what’s extra, who’s fighting to be heard and who’s feeling lost at sea. 

“I think there are lots of promising opportunities to incentivise people to pay off technical debt and make our existing stack more sustainable. Right now there are no incentives for engineers in this regard.”

“Are we really having impact?”

How can we unite behind meaningful common goals? And which metrics matter the most? We have so much data, but we really need lodestar (or some refer to this as north star) metrics across the whole Foundation, a system for reviewing and reflecting on what we learn from them, and then a way to connect those metrics with the day to day work everyone is doing. 

To get at that, we’re doing two main things — one is deepening our understanding of volunteer activities and the health of the volunteer communities. This will be through working closely with volunteers using existing processes and sharing what we’re learning, as well as qualitative and quantitative research workstreams, including reviewing existing research of volunteer activities and typical work profiles. The other is working to establish a set of Foundation-wide lodestar metrics. Shared metrics help everyone understand how we’re measuring success across the Foundation, and we’re sharing these publicly as part of our Annual Plan. Over time, we plan to bring our measures of success for important initiatives to communities for conversations and debate to help everyone align what success might look like. Shared metrics and data will empower us to make more effective and better decisions, along with collaboration with those who are working on changes and those who may be directly affected by them.

Selena Deckelmann (14 April 2023) “Selena’s Listening Tour” Diff.

The History of Shibuya Crossing on Wikimedia Commons

Do you know Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo? It is one of the busiest and most famous crossings around the world. You can analyze how the crossing have changed by Wikimedia Commons!

If you want more, go to [[Category:Shibuya Crossing]] on Wikimedia Commons!

In person events are a great opportunity to meet, connect and learn from one another. And they are also an amazing space to Wikicelebrate! In May, we saw our community from ESEAP host the ESEAP Conference 2024 in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia under the theme of Collaboration Beyond the Horizon. 

In line with the theme, the conference brought together nearly 150 wikimedians from 13 ESEAP countries to come together and celebrate the diversity, commitment and ambition of our movement. It was during the end of the conference, in consultation with the COT, that we celebrated the work of user B20180 (along with surprising them), a prolific administrator of Thai Wikimedia projects and a content contributor, whose work spans across Wikimedia content in Thai and beyond!

About B20180

B20180 is most active on Thai Wikipedia. This project, started in 2003 with an article containing just one word (“ดาราศาสตร์” – astronomy), has grown to 164,621 articles, and 53,995,663 monthly pageviews. Since he joined, almost 15 years ago, B20180 contributed to the growth of this project, by adding 2,905 articles. He writes about many different topics. You can stumble upon his articles, when trying to learn more about Swedish cuisine, shopping, a fighting video game from 1998,  female Estonian chess player, tourism in Uruguay or the situation of women in Ukraine. B20180’s contributions bring together both sides of a neverending dispute between cat people and dog people – he did write both about kittens and dogs! 

But for B20180 the Wikiworld doesn’t limit to Wikipedia:

While Wikipedia is the most recognized, Wikimedia hosts various unique projects. As the sole administrator for all Thai siblings projects for over a decade, I wish more people appreciated the diversity and richness of these initiatives. 

Among his many edits in siblings projects you can find B20180 adding Japanese and Ukrainian words to Thai Wiktionary, editing templates and pages in Thai Wikisource, adding quotes from sportspeople to Thai Wikiquote and working on Thai Wikibooks. He is also a contributor to Wikimedia Commons, adding photos about sport, monuments of the world, and community events. And if that wasn’t already impressive, there is also a large number of edits in Wikidata! 

From a passion for knowledge

Like many other Wikimedians B20180, is a passionate reader, who loves to read many different types of books. And among many books he loves, there are encyclopedias. He was always drawn to those sources of knowledge – even as a teenager, he often visited his local library to read the World Book Encyclopedia. So it is no surprise that, when he found Wikipedia – the global encyclopedia, covering everything from fiction, sports to academic knowledge – he instantly got interested. He tried his first edit as an anonymous typo corrector in Thai Wikipedia, and then – almost 15 years ago, he created a Wikipedia account and became a passionate editor with almost 150 000 edits across Wikimedia projects. In 2011 he became a Thai Wikipedia administrator, and in 2021 – a bureaucrat. And since bureaucrats are users who have a technical ability to extend the rights of other users (for example, making them administrators), this requires a lot of community trust. 

And a part of his work he is really dedicated to is supporting newcomers. When asked what keeps him going, he says: 

The joy of assisting new users, particularly the quick-learning younger generation, keeps me motivated. They grasp policies swiftly and are invaluable to our community’s future. 

To a passion for the community

Just a quick look at B20180’s userpage shows that the community doesn’t only show appreciation through granting him extended rights. There is also a whole collection of barnstars, special virtual badges that Wikimedians use to express gratitude and appreciation, that was awarded to him. His peers use barnstars to thank him for being a great mentor, a good admin, and a helpful Wikimedian, for participating in campaigns, adding content to different topics, and supporting others. B20180 is humbled by community appreciation: These honors inspire me to continue my dedication to the community, he says. 

The future of the community is something that occupies his mind as he adds;

One significant challenge is the relative inactivity of the Thai Wikipedia community, which has fewer than 200,000 articles as of 2024. Balancing content quantity and quality is crucial. We rely on expert advice and collective growth to overcome these hurdles.

Thank you for all that you do, B20180. Your work for Thai projects and beyond is absolutely amazing. And we are happy that the Wikicelebrate barnstar will soon join the barnstar collection already present on your userpage!

Co-authored by Ian Ramjohn

Today, the US Supreme Court unanimously rejected a challenge to the abortion pill mifepristone, ensuring continued patient access to the drug by mail. Thanks in part to the work of Wiki Scholars course editors, the Wikipedia article on mifepristone is ready to inform the coming thousands of readers looking for additional context on the drug and the SCOTUS decision.

It’s no surprise that when news breaks, people turn to Wikipedia not only to understand key topics but also to make more informed decisions. With billions of views each month, the world’s largest encyclopedia covers nearly every subject imaginable, including healthcare content used by patients, policymakers, and healthcare practitioners alike.

When Justice Matthew Kacsmaryk of the district court for the Northern District of Texas temporarily suspended the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone in April 2023, the readership of the mifepristone article skyrocketed as people sought related information.

The judge’s decision relied heavily on two studies published in the journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology, which found that the drug could harm pregnant women who took it.

Although the papers have since been retracted by the journal due to unreported conflicts of interest on the part of their primary author and methodological concerns, and the US Supreme Court rejected the case (on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue), this case illustrates how individual studies, when taken out of the context of a whole body of knowledge, can create a completely misleading impression of the state of the field.

Cherry-picked sources are often used by activists to support their specific goals, but on Wikipedia, medical content is subject to special sourcing rules that strongly recommend relying on review articles published in the past five years. A properly-referenced Wikipedia article would never rely on a pair of studies that are, at best, outliers. These rules help ensure that Wikipedia articles reflect current understandings of medical topics.

But even with the best of intentions, Wikipedia articles can be out of date, and non-specialists may not know the current state of the literature well enough to catch error misstatements (either intentional or unintentional), which is why bringing subject matter experts to Wikipedia can be incredibly impactful.

In 2019, 2020, and most recently this spring, Wiki Education partnered with the Society of Family Planning to run a series of Wiki Scholar courses where expert members of the society improved Wikipedia articles related to women’s health, including the mifepristone article. In the recent course, an editor added a section on the use of the drug to medically manage early pregnancy loss, while two members of the 2020 cohort also made several small improvements. But it was a participant in a 2019 course who made larger – and more important – changes to the article. 

This editor, who went by the username UCDEBS, separated the existing safety information in the article into a section on side effects. Crucially, for the sake of context, they were able to add information about how rarely serious complications occurred (only 0.04–0.09% of people using the drug had complications serious enough to require hospitalization) and added more information about the duration of side effects. In addition, they added important information about contraindications. 

Ideally, people would get this type of information from their healthcare provider, but when access to abortion care is severely limited, women may need access to these medications under less than ideal conditions, making the availability of high-quality information online even more important.

Since the editor’s enhancements in 2019, the mifepristone article has been viewed nearly 1.5 million times, including the spike in readership following the April 2023 ruling in Texas. 

And today, as readers explore the Wikipedia article seeking answers to questions about mifepristone, the impact of the information will soar once again.

Interested in learning how to add your own expertise to Wikipedia? Explore Wiki Education’s upcoming courses for subject-area experts.

For the sixth time, Ukraine’s local organizing team of the Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest supported a special category devoted to Jewish cultural heritage in Ukraine. The special category was held in partnership with the Ukrainian branch of Canadian NGO Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE). Let’s look at the results and winners for the 2023 contest.

As well as all other cultural sites, Jewish cultural heritage in Ukraine is in danger today. Russian military aggression not only harms people, but also destroys historical memory and monuments. In these circumstances it is even more crucial and urgent to document what is left and upload personal photo archives. 

For this special category within the contest the organisers have created and continue to maintain a list of cultural heritage monuments, which can be found here: jh.wlm.photo. Both sites that have official protection status and sites that do not have been included.  

More than 800 photos were uploaded within the special category in 2023. They depict 119 sites, including 46 that are not officially protected by the state. The photos depict Jewish heritage sites from 20 regions of Ukraine. Over 50 participants uploaded their works for the special category. Altogether as of now there are 940 sites in the “Jewish Heritage” special category, including 670 not protected by the state. 

The 2023 jury of the special category (alphabetically): 

• Serhii Khomiak (Truskavets), a photographer and editor-in-chief of the analytical platform “IQ-analytics”. He graduated from Lviv Polytechnic National University, was involved in the socio-historical photo project “Synagogues of Lviv Region” along with the project “Oi vei: UA”. His works were published online on jewishnews.com.ua, myshtetl.org and zaxid.net. Serhii is a winner of the special category “Jewish Heritage” in 2021 in Wiki Loves Monuments.
• Marla Raucher Osborn and Jay Osborn (San Francisco/Lviv) are co-founders of the volunteer NGO “Rohatyn Jewish Heritage” (RJH). Long-term participants of the Ukrainian, Polish and French parts of “Wiki Loves Monuments”, contributors to Wikipedia. Marla is a doctor of jurisprudence (Juris Doctor) with a BA in political science from UCLA. She worked at the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODŻ), Warsaw. With the support of the Fulbright program, in 2019-2020 she conducted research and created a demonstration project for Jewish heritage in western Ukraine. An ardent researcher of family history, and one of the original members of the Rohatyn District Research Group (RDRG), started in 2009 for Jewish descendants living abroad, and she also served on the boards of directors of Gesher Galicia and Remembrance and Reconciliation. She is the author of many publications on genealogy and heritage topics and gives lectures at schools, meetings and conferences in the USA, Israel and Europe, including in Rohatyn. Marla is the president of RJH. Jay holds a BS in mechanical engineering with honors from UC Irvine and has worked as a computer-aided design engineer for 30 years. Author of more than 20 American and British patents for Sun Microsystems and Apple, he worked in California, Europe and Asia. He is currently responsible for researching historical maps and creating a digital Map Room for Gesher Galicia. Jay is the head of the supervisory board of RJH. You can read more about RJH and how to help here. 
• Myroslav Pereimybida (Lviv) is an economist, German-language teacher and translator from Croatian, Polish and Macedonian. He promotes hiking and local tourism. He is a member of the foundation “Save the Church in Kuhaiv”, and a blood donor for the AFU and maternity hospitals. Myroslav has been participating in Wiki Loves Monuments for many years, has won in special categories “Ukrainian Wooden Architecture Monuments” and “Mills” and is a volunteer reviewer of the photos. He thinks that “photos of monuments for Wikipedia familiarize people with their common cultural heritage in the fastest and easiest way, and thus everything that is needed should be done to promote such a practice, regardless of the photos’ category. The more contests, the better”. 
• Alla Snurnikova (Ivano-Frankivsk/Rishon LeZion/Leipzig) is an activist, philologist-translator, marketing and business development expert and economist. She reported from Israel for hromadske.tv. She is a chartered secretary of the Ivano-Frankivsk Rotary Club of Rotary International and a volunteer at the International Human Rights Commission (IHRC). Alla is an inspirer of the Ukrainian Culture Fans’ Community in Israel and a board member of “Union of Ukrainian Women”. She popularizes Ukrainian culture (language, literature, songs, art, traditional crafts, etc) and teaches Ukrainian, Czech and other slavic languages. She is a head of the Leipzig branch of the public association de.Perspektive. 

There were three stages of the jury’s work: at the first stage the jury received portions of photos for the primary selection; they had to select up to 50 photos out of almost 700 to go to the next round. At the second stage the jury graded almost 100 works on a 9-point scale. At the third stage the jury scored the 23 photos that got the most points in the previous round. 

Twelve photos that show sites from seven regions of Ukraine (Khmelnytsky, Chernivtsi, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil, Cherkasy, Rivne, and Kyiv Oblasts) won based on the choice of the jury. These works are divided into three main subcategories: “Synagogues”, “Cemeteries” and “Other buildings”. These are the photos which received the most points for technical requirements and jury ratings. The best series of photos was highlighted separately. 

The best series 

The best series of photos includes three works showing the Jewish cemetery of Delatyn, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, by Taras Zolotavin. The cemetery is not protected by the state. 

The jury noted not only the composition of the individual works, but also their detailed documentation: over 100 photos of the cemetery were uploaded, which in the past was presented in the Wikimedia projects only by 3 photos of the user Trip Impressions Iryna. 

Marla and Jay commented on one photo from the series: “This image captures one of the few surviving intact Jewish cemeteries in the western part of Ukraine, aging naturally without intervention. The photo illustrates the typical density of burials that these old cemeteries had, and the unique carving style of the inscriptions and symbols (both primitive and more sophisticated). Although there is perhaps more color adjustment than is warranted, the photo nevertheless represents the vastness and rarity of this unusual historical site”.

Myroslav Pereimybida highlighted this work in the series: “[There is] nothing excessive. The dark cloudy sky and light tones of stone are contrasting while not drawing attention away from the matseva”. Serhii Khomiak noted as well: “The camera angle and combination of both artistic and documentary components are well-chosen. The gloomy sky enhances the atmosphere”.

Taras Zolotavin first participated in the competition in 2021 standing out among debutants, and in 2022 he was among the top ten most successful contestants. He is currently serving in Ukraine’s Armed Forces. Taras commented:

“[It] was one of my trips to the Carpathians. Usually I visit the mountains there, but I am interested in local history and culture as well. I saw information about the Jewish cemetery in Deliatyn somewhere on the Internet (as we learned later, it was not illustrated in Wikipedia at all, although it deserves it). [So] I decided to devote one day specifically to explore it. And it was really worth it.

I was impressed by the size of the cemetery, I had never seen so many matsevas at the same place and in such diversity of ornaments before. On the bright side, the cemetery was well-maintained, overgrown greenery had been cut down, and a fence and information board had been installed. Judging by the garbage remains, previously locals had a dump there. 

It was quite difficult to get to the Jewish cemetery’s territory. The surrounding fence protects the place nicely from vandalism and livestock grazing, but I did not find any sort of entrance. I had to ask locals, who showed me a wooden section and opened a makeshift entrance (although there were some questions too, probably not every day they come across people who rush to a cemetery with a camera).

Overall, this place is worth visiting at least once not only for local historians or Jewish history researchers, but for everyone. One can find quite sophisticated stone engravings there. There is also a great variety of stylistics and ornaments, zoological symbols, epitaphs, etc. So there is much work to do [in terms of photographing the cemetery]”. 

Best photos in the category “Synagogues”

Oleksandr Solentsov’s work of the interior of the synagogue in Sataniv won the highest scores from the jury in the category. The synagogue in Sataniv is an architectural monument of national significance. 

The jury noted the quality of the work. Serhii Khomiak emphasized: “It is a compositionally great photo with well-maintained geometry at such a wide angle of photo”. This photo received an award in the special category “Interiors” in 2023 as well. 

The second place belongs to a work depicting the Kaniv synagogue. The photo was taken by Oleksandr Malon. The early 19th century building has the status of a newly discovered architectural monument.

The Great Synagogue in Husiatyn won third place. The photo was taken by Petro Hrushko. The jury highlighted good composition and illumination of the work. The synagogue is an architectural monument of national significance and was built in the late 16-17th centuries.

Best photos in the category “Cemeteries”

The first place in the category belongs to a preserved matseva from the Jewish cemetery in Ostroh, Rivne Oblast. The photo was made by Станислава Ро (Stanyslava Ro). This cemetery is also not protected by the state. 

Marla and Jay commented: “A very crisp image of a very old and artistic headstone, truly one of the most interesting of the recovered stones in this cemetery (compare to others in the Commons category). In addition to the lacy vines in the stone frame, the hands are quite realistically depicted, showing the stone carver’s art. The photo is sharp and well-framed, with good illumination and color. A very lovely record of an important object”.

The second place went to the photo of Jewish cemetery on Vovcha Mountain. It has the status of a newly discovered historical monument and is traced back to the 19th century. It is thought that rabbi Israel Avraham Mazal, a spiritual leader, mentor of Jewish community and head of the Jewish community of Chornyi Ostriv, is buried here. The photo was taken by Valentyn Mahovkin. 

Valentyn explained his motivation: “For me it is important to preserve and carry the memory of historical monuments that are disappearing, and capture them in a photo for the next generations. [And] Jewish heritage in my historical hometown Chornyi Ostriv has recently begun to be restored, [here] it is about an old cemetery. It is literally arising from the ruins, from the ground”.

The jury gave third place in this category to Dmytro Poliukhovych and his photo of the Jewish cemetery in Horodets, Khmelnytskyi Oblast. The cemetery goes back to the 18th-20th centuries and also is not protected by the state.

Best photos in the category “Other buildings”

This category includes all the photos which the jury rated highly, but which illustrate neither synagogues nor cemeteries. 

The jury recognized Serhii Plakhotniuk’s photo of the red Jewish house in Stavyshche, Kyiv Oblast. This brick house has been preserved as traditional Jewish architecture. There was a shop on the ground floor, and a living area on the first floor. The building doesn’t have official protected status, even though its bricks date back to 1902. The local military commissariat was housed there, then the building became private property and started slowly deteriorating. 

Serhii Khomiak noted that it is “an interesting building, which prompts interest to explore and look inside it. There is a bicycle and people, so life continues”. Marla and Jay added: “From our perspective, the image is well-framed, well-illuminated, and with added elements (people and bicycle) to give scale without obscuring the object. It is also important as a time-stamp capturing the state of decay of the building, now that it no longer has the life it was built for”. 

For Serhii Plakhotniuk it is not his first contest: in 2014 his photos of a wooden windmill in the village Heisykha became the best photo of Kyiv Oblast; in 2021 he won second and third places in the special category “Video”. Serhii explained his motivation for participating in the special category “Jewish heritage”:

“I decided that there should also be artifacts of Jewish Stavisht heritage on Wikipedia.

(…) In 2017 I translated and published the book “STAVISHT: Memorial Book”, which consists of stories that were compiled by Stavisht Jews from all over the world about the town of Stavisht from Tarashchany district at the edge of the 19th and 20th centuries. I am afraid that in half a century no one will remember that Jews were the half of the Stavisht population in the beginning of 20th century. In fact, by translating the book, I brought all this back to Stavisht and multiplied the knowledge about the past of my hometown. 

[By the way] in Stavisht’s satellite village of Rozkishna there is still a Jewish cemetery; its renovation was funded in 2016 by U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, its representative professor Richard Weisberg even came to the opening of the memorial plate on the cemetery fence (his ancestors came from Stavisht)”.

Serhii shot a video about the red house as well. 

The second place in this category went to Vadym Posternak and his photo of Jewish community house in Chernivtsi. It is an architectural monument of local significance.

Serhii Khomiak commented on this work: “It is a beautiful monument and it is well presented by the author. From a technical standpoint, the branches could be dragged out of the shadows a little bit more on the right. I would love to see more such photos in the contest”. Myroslav Pereimybida noted: “There are a little too many details, but the shot is perfectly composed, the soft side light doesn’t block the excess of nude colors of the building and emphasizes the relief”. 

The jury awarded the third place in this category to the photo of the well of Baal Shem Tov in the village Trebukhivka, Khmelnytskyi Oblast, a suburb of the city Medzhybizh. The image was taken by Ihor Zapadenko. This site is not protected by the state as well.

The most active participants

The list of participants who have uploaded the most of photos for the special category in 2023 is:

• Vadym Posternak (photos of 27 objects)
• Zhanna Oleksiienko (photos of 11 objects)
• Oleksandr Malon (photos of 7 objects)
• Petro Hrushko (photos of 7 objects)
• Volodymyr Shevchuk (photos of 6 objects)
• Serhii Onkov (photos of 6 objects)
• Yevhenii Levinzon (photos of 6 objects)
• Serhii Plakhotniuk (photos of 6 objects)
• Olena Machulenko (photos of 6 objects)
• Mykhailo Titarenko (photos of 5 objects)

The winners and nominees received diplomas and souvenirs from the Ukrainian office of the Canadian NGO Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE), NGO Wikimedia Ukraine and the project “Wiki Loves Monuments”.

For reference: “Ukrainian Jewish Encounter” (UJE) is a private, multinational initiative set up in 2008 as a collaborative project of Ukrainians who represent Jewish and Christian traditions and other participants from Ukraine, Israel and other diasporas. UJE involves scholars, public leaders, artists, government and general public representatives in its activities to strengthen solidarity and mutual understanding between Ukrainians and Jews.

In the last few weeks I have stumbled on various little bits during Wikipedia edits that I thought were worthy of airing! One of them was a re-realization of the boon and the curse of iron and steel. It starts with something I heard a few years ago by economist Sashi Sivramkrishna and others who were following the trail of Buchanan Hamilton in Mysore (listen to the talk here) and they were apparently impressed by the impact of iron production particularly on the destruction of forests in southern India. And last week I found a Wikipedia entry that someone from Parangipettai had written as a draft and which had been left languishing. I went and ensured that it got moved from a draft version to a mainspace entry - it was on the Porto Novo Iron Works, one of the first large-scale iron smelting enterprises in India. The venture, started by a J.M. Heath, did not last long, one of the big factors being the lack of coal for smelting, and he had to make do with charcoal. In a few years, he ran out of charcoal, after depleting the forests of several districts nearby, and the factory had to move to the west coast near Calicut (Beypore). The first director general of forests Dietrich Brandis also noted the role of iron smelting in deforestation. 

Now to Josiah Heath, who is a real character and it is quite a surprise to see that the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography does not even have an entry for him, and there appears to be no available photograph of him (at least online). Heath sent out skins of various animals to the Zoological Society of London and there is a species of bat named after him. More interestingly it seem the fishing cat was described based on a specimen that he sent from India - which it would appear from all likelihood to have come from the Parangipettai region - more likely Pichavaram (wonder if the species still exists there). He also collected a specimen of a Eurasian Griffon Vulture from the same region. Heath apparently was impressed by traditional ukku (better known as Wootz steel) steel-making near Salem where he was initially posted and he seems to have discovered an important factor which he patented. It involved the use of carbon and manganese and he made money initially by distributing packets of his mixture - and later made the mistake of giving its composition. The steel makers of Sheffield, England quickly started using his technique and decided not to pay him any royalty - and he died in poverty. Of course today we could ask whether he actually stole the idea from traditional Indian blacksmiths and whether it could have been patented at all in the first place or of the numerous other injustices involved in all of this. 

Herr Meves

In another Wikipedia-related iron-connection, I found a little-known ornithologist who now has a Wikipedia entry (Wilhelm Meves). Meves was a German pharmacist turned ornithologist - and he decided to treat the brown feathers of lammergeiers with hydrochloric acid and tested them for iron and found that the colour was largely due to iron oxide. He found that this coating was on the outer surface and that the inside of the feathers was largely iron free. He suggested that the birds were bathing in iron-rich waters. Meves worked in Stockholm and mostly wrote in German but some of his findings made their way into the Ibis in English - thanks to John Wolley. And it seems both T.C. Jerdon and A.O. Hume were careful readers of Meves' works. Jerdon was aware of the bleating sound of snipes being produced by air-flow induced vibrations of the outermost tail feather. And Hume even repeated Meves' chemical analysis on his lammergeier specimens from Shimla and confirmed the presence of iron. Hume however noted that neither he nor any of his "intelligent native sportsmen" had ever seen a lammergeier bathe in water and suggested that the red staining may be derived from the blood of dead animals. Hume's original text (emphasis mine):

Anyway, it seems that India's large iron-deposits have a habit of lying in regions rich in biodiversity and ethnic diversity often on ancient tribal lands. It is little wonder that the steel industry barons are involved in disempowering tribal peoples or paying governments to water down environmental laws. I was truly surprised by the amount of work from around the world on related topics.

• Goucher, C.L. (1981). Iron is iron ’til it is rust: Trade and Ecology in the Decline of West African Iron-Smelting. The Journal of African History. 22(2):179-189. https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021853700019393 
• Siran Liu, Thilo Rehren, Dashu Qin, Jianli Chen, Wenli Zhou, Marcos Martinón-Torres, Xin Huang, Wei Qian (2019). Coal-fuelled crucible lead-silver smelting in 12th-13th century China: A technological innovation in the age of deforestation. Journal of Archaeological Science 104:75-84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2019.01.004
• The impact of ancient iron mining and smelting on the landscape balance on Elba Island, Tuscan Archipelago, Italy - Fabian Becker, Raphael A. Eser, Philipp Hoelzmann, Brigitta Schütt (2019). The environmental impact of ancient iron mining and smelting on Elba Island, Italy – A geochemical soil survey of the Magazzini site. Journal of Geochemical Exploration 205 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gexplo.2019.04.009
  
• Iles, L. (2016). The Role of Metallurgy in Transforming Global Forests.. J Archaeol Method Theory 23:1219–1241 https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10816-015-9266-7

Someday I ought to visit Parangipettai and Pichavaram!  

PS (June 2024): Apparently the idea of sustainable forestry is associated with a German term  Nachhaltigkeit - a concept introduced by a mine inspector named Hans Carl von Carlowitz who wrote a book called Sylvicultura oeconomica in 1713. It was based on fears that deforestation for agriculture would destroy the mining industry! And he was likely influenced by John Evelyn who wrote Sylva in 1662.

I want to begin with an anecdote from my experience in the vast and diverse world of open knowledge sharing. It involves an experienced Telugu Wikimedian training a newbie, over a telephonic conversation. The veteran Wikimedian, with a wealth of knowledge, attempted to guide the newcomer through the steps of creating an account and making edits on Wikipedia. However, the new user struggled to grasp the instructions. He couldn’t find the options his mentor was describing, particularly when it came to creating a new article. The senior Wikimedian had advised him to search the topic they wanted to edit and find a red link, but the newbie couldn’t find any.

The root of the issue was soon discovered. The newbie was accessing Wikipedia via his mobile device, while his mentor was working with the desktop version. This incongruity illustrated the gap between experienced users and newcomers in the Wikipedia community. This story is not unique to the Telugu community or even India but represents a global challenge, especially for the Global Majority countries.¹

As someone who has organized and supported outreach activities in India, I have seen firsthand the necessity of investment in mobile editing that can revolutionize the Wikimedia movement in India, South Asia, and other Global Majority countries. It’s not just an Indian issue, but a global one. Many countries which cannot afford laptops for the masses can provide mobile internet and mobile internet usage is growing exponentially.

The year 2016 marked a significant turning point in the Indian internet industry when “Jio” announced free internet for several months. This resulted in cheaper data charges and a surge in internet users for the next few years. Big tech companies like Google started focusing on building technology in various Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, etc. These efforts were aimed at improving the mobile experience of their apps and technology, coinciding with the global shift towards Mobile first.²

The democratization of internet access in India, fueled by affordable data plans, also significantly impacted the Wikimedia movement. There was an influx of users accessing Wikipedia, mirroring the broader pattern of increased internet usage. This development could have presented an opportunity for a growth spurt within the Wikimedia community. However, a critical factor restrained this potential growth: the nascent stages of mobile editing features on Wikipedia.

Many of the new users accessing Wikipedia were doing so on their mobile devices. Few of these users weren’t just reading articles; they were aspiring contributors with new energy and ideas. However, they often found themselves stymied by the lack of user-friendly mobile editing features. 

The difficulties faced by these mobile editors weren’t minor inconveniences. There are significant barriers that hindered their ability to contribute effectively. The mobile editing experience was far from optimal, and this led to a frustrating user experience for many. Consequently, the Wikimedia community’s growth was not as robust as it could have been, despite the surge in internet users in India.

Initiatives such as Project Tiger and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Hardware Donation Program were designed to support contributors who made significant contributions and needed laptops. These contributors either had non-functional laptops or had never owned one, often relying on mobile devices or borrowed computers from schools or colleges. While Project Tiger focused solely on South Asia and has other objectives, the Hardware Donation Program is global in scope and confines itself to the donation of depreciated but still useful hardware assets (majorly laptops) to users who need them. A report on the Hardware Donation Program from 2017-2019 showed that India had the most recipients (12), a trend that continues with many applications still coming from India. This trend highlights the necessity of improving the mobile editing experience to bridge the gap between the experiences of laptop and mobile users as much as possible.

Therefore, the situation highlighted a critical need for the Wikimedia movement to invest in improving the mobile editing experience. It’s not just about providing alternative means of access; it’s about making sure that the primary mode of access for a majority of users—mobile devices—is as user-friendly and intuitive as possible.

It is a welcoming initiative to see the Wikimedia Foundation is currently investing in improving mobile editing. While there has been significant progress, there is still much work to be done. The Global majority Wikimedia technology priorities, to which CIS-A2K made some contributions and is committed, also consider mobile editing one of the priority aspects. The document says “Considering that 70% of people from the Global Majority exclusively access the Internet using mobile devices, break down barriers that hinder access and contribution to the free knowledge ecosystem by optimizing the mobile infrastructure and prioritizing the development of the visual editor for mobile devices.”

In this context, CIS-A2K conducted a study on the mobile commons app and its contributors in India. We are working on understanding the current status of mobile editing, future opportunities and challenges, in collaboration with Gopala Krishna A, a long-time Wikimedia contributor from India. We hope to complete and publish these studies soon which we believe will help us understand the challenges and explore possibilities.

This journey towards improving mobile editing is a testament to the Wikimedia movement’s commitment to inclusivity and accessibility. It’s an ongoing journey, one that will continue to evolve as technology and user needs change. But the goal remains the same – to ensure that everyone, regardless of their device or location, can contribute to the world’s largest free knowledge platform, Wikimedia.

1. Global South represents the Global Majority; Ref: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_Majority_Wikimedia_Technology_Priorities ↩︎
2. https://www.businessinsider.in/how-the-jio-effect-brought-millions-of-indians-online-and-is-reshaping-silicon-valley-and-the-internet/articleshow/70723349.cms ↩︎

The latest WIKIMOVE podcast has just been released: check out our website or the WIKIMOVE meta page to find the transcript of the episode and continue the conversation. 

In this episode, Nikki and Eva speak with two of the initiators behind the recently published manifesto “Global Majority Wikimedia Technology Priorities”. This document addresses decision making about technology in the Wikimedia Movement –  particularly when it comes to creating technology that is designed for users of the Global Majority and in emerging communities. Guests Tanveer and Éder discuss how their work aligns with Movement Strategy and the concept of knowledge as a service.

Our guests are…

• Tanveer Hasan works for the Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. Prior to this he has worked in the Movement Strategy implementation grants team of the WMF and was part of the team that managed the development of MS
• Éder Porto is a member and the products and technology manager at the Brazilian affiliate, Wiki Movimento Brasil. He oversees their tech team and has worked on the research mentioned in this episode.

WIKIMOVE is also available on the following platforms:
Spotify | Apple Podcast | Google Podcast | Soundcloud
Deezer | JioSaavn | Podchaser | Youtube

Originally pushed on 9 April, 2024

On 1 January 2024, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake, the Noto earthquake, occurred with its epicenter off the Noto Peninsula in Honshu, Japan. The earthquake was not confined to the area off the Noto Peninsula, but shook a wide area of the ground, and the effects were widespread, with liquefaction phenomena observed. The Noto region has experienced major earthquakes in the past, especially since 2021, when earthquakes of intensity 5 or higher on the Japanese Seismic Intensity Index occurred once or twice a year. At the same time, each district in the Noto region had just begun to work diligently to recover from the previous earthquakes when an even larger earthquake struck.

I myself experienced the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011, when a junior member of the student newspaper suffered damage in Sendai (no injuries or other physical damage) and was completely unreachable for several days afterwards, and I remember hearing later that there was a long queue for public telephones. From that day onwards, the Tohoku region, which was the hardest hit in Japan, was reported on day after day and night, and at the same time the damage caused by the tsunami became clearer and clearer with each passing day. However, as I had no experience of visiting the Tohoku region, I could only discern what the landscape of Tohoku looked like before the disaster and what had happened there from maps, news reports and photos from the past.

Past photographs can be easily identified if the geographical information such as coordinates is organised, but otherwise it was very difficult for me, as I had no knowledge of the land. Google Street View had also started operating in Japan, but as it had not yet expanded to the Tohoku region, I could not see it either. Nowadays, driving window footage from the immediate aftermath of the earthquake is stored as DVDs and partly as YouTube videos at the ‘Centre for Remembering 3/11’ in the Sendai Mediatheque.

https://recorder311.smt.jp/movie/8256

This experience made me think: “If you don’t record the present, it may not be recorded in the future either”. This is the ‘now’, not just before or after the disaster. I really wanted to visit Tohoku earlier, but as a student, I was unable to do so, and it was not until 10-11 March 2012, exactly one year after the disaster, that I was actually able to visit Tohoku for the first time.

Let me return to the Noto Peninsula earthquake in the foreword. The mood in Japan, which had been in celebration mode at the beginning of the year, changed dramatically to one of coverage of the disaster, which had the same feeling as that of the Great East Japan Earthquake. The next day, 2 January, an accident occurred at Haneda Airport when a passenger aircraft collided with a Japan Coast Guard aircraft that was about to take off to assist local relief efforts.

In the midst of all this, I was beginning to think about what I could do for myself. I was thinking about why I was involved in the Wikimedia projects with connections all over the country, but I was unable to materialise the content of these projects. However, I had come to strongly feel that I did not want to have the same feelings and regrets as after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami .

I sent a message from January 7, a week after the earthquake. When I sent the message, I received an email from a representative of the Wikimedia Foundation asking about the situation of the Noto Peninsula earthquake, and I decided that I had to move in earnest. The recipients were the members of the Eizo-Workshop, which is developing a project in Ishikawa Prefecture, where the Noto Peninsula is located. The Eizo-Workshop had been involved in many projects in Noto, such as the Okunoto International Art Festival, and had connections with the local community. In addition to this, they had also helped with the collaboration between Wikimedia and the video workshop in the past and with the construction of ‘ Kagaga ‘. The details of this are to be found in a separate article.

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/08/11/launching-of-a-wikipedia-town-in-the-far-remote-settlement-of-ozuchi

Kaga City in Ishikawa Prefecture, which is the main field of the Eizo-workshop, has a district that developed from the ‘Kitamae-bune’, which sailed the Sea of Japan to transport goods and earn a living, and the same is true for the district in Noto. More so, we also had the opportunity to work together at the 8th Research Conference of the Society for Digital Archiving held in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture in November 2023, and we have a connection there.

In his own message to the recipient, he wrote. Extracted and summarised in part.

Of course, this is only if everyone settles down, but I am trying to find the right time to go to Noto to film it properly as a record. I feel that only those in Ishikawa will know when that timing will be.

To be honest, I want to document the damage. Everything should be documented, but I have not been able to materialise it yet.

I am going to Fukui at the end of March, but the person in charge lives on the sea side and he himself has not suffered any damage, but there are stories of houses collapsing around him, and to be honest, I don’t know where to base my record.

I was a student at the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake, so I remember having my juniors who were there take photos of Sendai Station and other places and archive them. I’m really worried about what I should do this time. Including the timing.

The need for archives is as important during and immediately after a disaster as it is before it occurs, and even after recovery has progressed.Sendai Mediatheque, mentioned in the section on disaster-related footage, has been recording and organising a series of events from before to after the disaster. When I heard about this from a member of the film workshop, I realised once again the importance of documenting the present. It reminded me of the term ‘archival spirit’ from a book I read on a different topic.

The spirit of continuing to collect in order to build a collection, the spirit of continuing to record daily events in a diary, the spirit of continuing to photograph landscapes around the world – all of these could be described as actions that internalise the ‘archival spirit’ of disciplining daily behaviour so that the ‘value of the data does not decrease dramatically’. Google, which continues to photograph streets around the world, could also be described as an organisation with an archival spirit.

Kitamoto, ‘Chapter 7: The Irreversibility of Disasters and the Spirit of Archives – Lessons from Digital Typhoon and Great East Japan Earthquake Digital Archives and Memory Graphs’, in Suzuki, ed. and Imamura, Supervision of Disaster Records for the Future (2019), p. 178.

At a subsequent meeting, approximate destinations and dates were discussed and it was decided that the three of us would visit Nanao City, Noto Town, Suzu City and Wajima City from Kanazawa for three days from 15 to 17 February, but the final dates would be decided in coordination with the respective destinations.

They also produced a ‘Prospectus of Interview’ for the visit. This was proposed by me as a reminder of what I used to bring with me on inspection visits when I was a student, and the paper was filled with our own thoughts and ideas.

We are engaged in grass-roots activities to archive (record and preserve the events of) the Noto Peninsula Earthquake of 2024, which occurred on 1 January 2024. In contrast to mass media reports and records made by national research committees, each citizen’s perspective captures episodes rooted in ‘the place’, ‘the time’ and ‘the culture’. We transmit these stories to the future and believe that someone who receives them will change the world for the better.

Today we are here to document the damage to the city with video and photographs. We would like to use this as a starting point for an archive to continuously document the reconstruction and transition of the city.

Eizo-workshop, Araisyohei: ‘Noto Peninsula Earthquake Archive, “To remember the first day of 2024″‘ (prospectus for the interview).

The actual report will be published again as a sequel, but while some parts of downtown Nanao have made some progress in restoration, there are still many parts of Suzu City, which covers a vast area from Nanao to the tip of the peninsula, that have not even been restored, and the visit made me realise how great the power of nature is and how helpless people are. Wajima City, Wajima Prefecture. We were also able to visit a port in Monzen-cho, Wajima City (on the western side of the peninsula), where the seabed had risen. Mr Sakāori had already uploaded a comparison image on Wikipedia using aerial photographs from the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI), but I am glad I was able to take photographs of the area as well.

At the same time, the visit also allowed us to meet key people from different parts of the country. This included community builders, cultural assets and artists, among many others, with whom we spoke. We each promised to meet again in the future and left Noto.

Sharing Wikipedia’s 20+ years of experience and lessons learned with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

The rapid development, distribution, and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) has spurred legislative and regulatory debates around the world. Many policymakers are now asking: “What should we do about AI?”

While AI has been under development for years, for most people it has suddenly become ubiquitous and unavoidable. The emergence of sophisticated chatbot applications like ChatGPT and Gemini, and subsequent releases of multimodal applications that generate text, audio, and video responses to prompts from users, have brought AI into our homes, our conversations, and our jobs.

Many governments and international organizations are seeking stakeholder feedback about how policies should be formulated in order to best serve the public interest. The Wikimedia Foundation has recently submitted comments in response to several such consultations. 

• In the United States (US), President Biden issued an Executive Order directing federal agencies to conduct analyses and engage in consultations to inform future policymaking on the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of AI.
  
  The Wikimedia Foundation provided comments in response to two of the consultations arising from the Executive Order:
  
  
  • The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) requested feedback on AI in the context of international development. You can read our comments here.
    
  • The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) requested feedback on the regulation of “dual-use AI models with widely available model weights.” Part of the NTIA’s job is to define what this phrase means—a good reminder that we are in a novel and unestablished territory. You can explore our responses here.

• Separately, the US Copyright Office launched a project to examine the intersection of AI with copyright, including a public consultation to which the Wikimedia Foundation also submitted comments. You can find our comments here.

• The United Nations has also established an AI Advisory Body, which issued an interim report addressing the global governance of AI. We provided comments to that report as well, which will inform the Advisory Body’s final report later in 2024. You can read our comments here.
  
• In a parallel process, the UN sought input on the development of a Global Digital Compact which, along with the AI Advisory Body’s report, will inform the UN’s Pact for the Future. You can explore our contribution to the Compact and statements, where we address AI and other emerging technologies, as well as our open letter.

The Foundation’s comments have fallen into two categories. Some are directly relevant to the work being done by volunteer Wikipedia editors around the world, such as on copyright and openness of foundational AI models. Others applied our values and the valuable lessons we have learned from our AI/ML work to benefit public interest projects focused on free knowledge and the online information ecosystem—i.e., decentralized community-led decision-making, privacy, stakeholder inclusion, and internet commons. We will highlight a few of these themes below.

Attribution and verifiability promote trust and sustain the online information ecosystem

In our comments to the United States Copyright Office’s notice of inquiry, we noted the critical role that attribution of sources plays in the online information ecosystem. Attribution—that is to say, citing and linking to the sources of information that support another work—is central to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Every assertion in every article must be supported by reliable, authoritative sources so that readers and volunteer editors can verify the accuracy of content. At the same time, all content is made freely available under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license, which requires anyone who reuses Wikimedia content to provide attribution. In addition to supporting the verifiability of the content, attribution also recognizes the valuable work of the volunteers who contribute to the projects. 

Our comments argue that, for the same reasons, AI systems that use Wikimedia project content should provide attribution. At a minimum, AI developers who include Wikipedia in the training data used to create large language models (LLMs) should publicly acknowledge that use and give credit to Wikipedia and the volunteer editors who made this rich source of raw materials for LLMs. We also urge AI companies—whose chatbots include Wikipedia content in their generative responses (now even more common with the deployment of retrieval augmented generation [RAG])—to provide hyperlinks to the relevant articles, both to credit the authors and to enable people who use AI systems to access information to verify the responses to their queries. Linking to Wikipedia not only helps readers learn more about their query, it also lets them know that the information came from a trusted source. Even setting aside copyright policy and licensing terms, providing attribution in generative outputs improves the quality of those responses, helps readers verify their accuracy, and supports the sustainability of sources like Wikipedia.

Context is important for AI consultations

In our comments to the USAID’s request for information, we encouraged the Agency to prioritize inclusion of all stakeholders. We urged the USAID and others to engage in focused consultations that clearly identify the form of AI in question and its relevant use cases. For example, we suggested that rather than frame a consultation around “AI and education,” interested stakeholders should be provided with more information and context, and—as an example—be consulted about  “generative AI tools for translation and summarization of text for educational purposes.” We also noted the tensions that exist between enabling local communities to develop and share data sources for AI development and the risks that Indigenous culture and knowledge will merely be extracted and exploited, perpetuating historical inequalities and underrepresentation.

In AI, both open and closed models may bring risks, but open AI models bring more benefits

In his Executive Order on AI, President Biden instructed the US Department of Commerce, working through the NTIA, to conduct a public consultation and provide a report on the risks, benefits, and regulatory approaches to “dual use foundation models for which the model weights are widely available.” As mentioned before, part of the NTIA’s request for comments sought input on what this phrase should mean, but the consultation generally implied a distinction between models that are “closed” (with limited public information about how to reproduce or modify the model) and models that are more “open” (with some or all information about the model, including training data, model weights, and source code made publicly available).

Our responses to the NTIA encouraged the agency to recommend regulatory approaches that enabled the development of open AI models. We acknowledged that the development of powerful, multipurpose AI models presents some risks and that, given the rapid pace of AI development, correctly identifying and anticipating those risks could be an additional challenge. However, we also argued that many of those risks would exist regardless of whether an AI model was more open or more closed.

Going further, we argued that making information about AI models more open and more available to the public would lead to more benefits than attempting to keep model information locked behind proprietary doors. With access to information about model weights, source code, and training data, researchers and developers can inspect, test, improve, and modify AI models. This research and development could help to identify flaws and vulnerabilities, counteract biases, and improve the performance of AI tools, as well as modifying those tools to address different needs.

Access to information about AI technologies can help level the playing field for global governance conversations

In addition to participating in consultations with US executive agencies, we provided our comments to the United Nations AI Advisory Body in response to its Interim Report on Governing AI for Humanity. We echoed several of the points we raised in our comments to the USAID, aimed at improving conditions for a more diverse set of stakeholders in conversations about AI governance. To this end, we also suggested that the UN could leverage its connections with academic institutions and researchers around the world to improve the quality and consistency of Wikipedia articles about AI, machine learning, and computer science across the world’s major languages.

We reasoned that policymakers would be better equipped to propose and discuss approaches to regulating AI if they had access to reliable and accurate information about how AI technologies work. We noted that Wikipedia already serves as one source of such information—the article about ChatGPT was one of the most visited articles in 2023 with over 52 million page views—but that more can be done to make information about other AI technologies available in more languages.

Finally, we reminded the UN AI Advisory Body of the critical roles that people play in creating and compiling sources of high quality information, like Wikipedia, and of the importance of ensuring that new technologies support people in this work. Specifically, we urged the UN and others to protect the sustainability of a free and open knowledge ecosystem by recognizing the valuable sources of knowledge that people create and to respect their contributions through clear and consistent attribution.

Empowering people online to share in the sum of all human knowledge is our primary goal

The central theme underpinning all of our positions and suggestions for the development, use, and governance of AI is simple: put people first. This theme echoed through our various comments and also in our contribution and statements to the Global Digital Compact—a process led by UN Member States that aims to establish principles and commitments that can help harness the immense potential benefits of digital technologies. We called upon the international community to consider including three of our main suggestions within the Compact in an open letter, which we co-authored with Wikimedia affiliates. The open letter asks UN Member States to ensure that AI supports and empowers, not replaces, people who work in the public interest.

Final thoughts

Every revolutionary technology comes along with waves of hype and panic, and these waves can sometimes lead to uninformed regulatory or legislative approaches. It is reassuring, however, when governments, international institutions, policymakers, and regulators attempt to gain a better understanding of the technology at hand and to engage in consultations with stakeholders about their needs, concerns, and values. We hope that our participation in these consultations will help steer agencies toward approaches that support, promote, and respect the people that generate the world’s knowledge and emerging technologies—and continue moving together toward a better, shared digital future.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows United States (US) intelligence agencies to monitor foreign communications without a warrant, raising serious privacy concerns. Despite criticism and calls for reform from civil society, the US Congress recently renewed—and expanded—this mass surveillance authority.

In the United States (US), federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies conduct electronic surveillance under the authority granted to them by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This statute allows the National Security Administration (NSA) to collect the contents of foreign electronic communications between people and entities identified as surveillance targets. In reality, this means collecting virtually all communications transmitted between US networks and those abroad. These communications are stored in a massive database that the NSA, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other agencies can query to find communications that include specific names, addresses, topics, or other information related to an investigation. US intelligence agencies have come to rely heavily on this authority, but the statute is not permanent: it expires every so often unless US Congress reauthorizes it. 

Controversies and Legal Challenges

Section 702 is also contentious because it enables secret surveillance not only of individuals located outside the US, but that of US residents as well, without due process protections like obtaining a warrant. As a result, it threatens the rights of Wikipedia readers, editors, and internet users globally. Civil society organizations who work to protect privacy and civil liberties have been calling for reforms to Section 702 since 2013, when whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the scope and scale of the NSA’s electronic surveillance operations. The Wikimedia Foundation sued the NSA in 2015, challenging its “Upstream” data surveillance and collection practices conducted under Section 702. Ultimately, the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case based on the government’s assertion of “state secrets privilege” in 2023, and hence never decided on the validity of the Foundation’s constitutional challenges.

In 2018, during a previous reauthorization period, Congress tried, but failed, to amend the statute in order to require greater transparency and accountability for the intelligence agencies who use the Section 702 database. Instead, Congress approved a “clean” reauthorization of Section 702—that is to say, with no changes—that was set to expire again at the end of 2023. In the months leading up to the 2023 expiration date, the Foundation joined a bipartisan group of civil society organizations to highlight to Congress the importance of reforming Section 702. In particular, we asked Congress to better protect the privacy of people who use the internet, to require greater transparency and accountability for the intelligence agencies, and to enable legal challenges like the one brought by the Foundation to have greater chances of success.

Recent Developments and Legislative Actions

Unfortunately, after a short-term extension of Section 702 (until 19 April, 2024) Congress once again reauthorized the statute without meaningful reforms. Instead, Congress actually broadened the purposes for which the Section 702 database can be queried: initially limited to counterrorism investigations, it now includes investigations for both counternarcotics and immigrant vetting. Congress also expanded the definition of “electronic communication service provider”—i.e., the entities that the NSA could require to assist with data collection—to include any organizations or persons with access to a communications facility.

This is a disappointing and unacceptable outcome. Not only did Congress fail to protect privacy and civil liberties, it gave the intelligence agencies even more power to secretly spy on people around the world. This time, however, Congress only reauthorized Section 702 for two years. This provides another opportunity to enact real reforms in 2026, but for that elected representatives will need to hear a loud and clear message from their constituents: Reform FISA, or let it lapse.

*          *          *

Interested in learning about other public policy issues that affect the Wikimedia projects, Wikimedians, and free and open knowledge? Subscribe to our quarterly newsletter email and stay up-to-date.

As discussed in the January 2024 post about our progress on the 2023-2024 Annual Plan goals, we have centered this year’s goals around our Product and Technology work, in service of the broader movement strategy goals to advance the 2030 Strategic Direction. Our annual plan recognizes Wikimedia’s role as a platform for people to contribute on a massive scale, and prioritizes four key goals to meaningfully evolve the work we do and meet the changing world around us. Hundreds of Wikimedians shaped this annual plan both on and off wiki.

This is the third part of a two-part update. Read part two in this post.

The four key annual plan goals

The annual plan laid out these four key goals: 

• INFRASTRUCTURE: Advance Knowledge as a Service. Improve User Experience on the wikis, especially for established editors. Strengthen metrics and reporting.
• EQUITY: Support Knowledge Equity. Strengthen Equity in Decision-Making via Movement governance and Movement Charter. Empower and engage the Movement, support regional strategies and help close knowledge gaps.
• SAFETY & INCLUSION: Protect against growing external threats. Defend our people and projects against disinformation and harmful government regulation. Work across the Movement to Provide for the Safety of Volunteers.
• EFFECTIVENESS: Strengthen our overall performance. Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt our processes for maximum impact with more limited resources.

Here’s a summary of the Foundation’s progress, broken down by these four goals.

Infrastructure

Our Infrastructure goal is about improving the user experience on the Wikimedia projects. This goal forms the largest portion of the Foundation’s budget, highlighting our focus on product and technology.

Editors with extended rights

This year we committed to delivering improvements to four workflows over the course of the year that help editors with extended rights (admins, patrollers, functionaries, and moderators of all kinds). These editors do critical work that makes our wikis function. They’re administrators, patrollers, and other kinds of functionaries. They’re on the receiving end of incoming edits and new contributions, and they can revert and block users when necessary. They help make our encyclopedia trustworthy. So far this year we’ve delivered five interventions to make their work easier and more efficient: Edit Check, PageTriage, Edit Patrol on Android, Release Rights improvements in Upload Wizard, and the Watchlist on iOS. Two more are in progress to be completed before the end of the year: Community Configuration 2.0, and Automoderator.

As part of this work to help support new volunteers becoming successful contributors and reduce moderator burdens, we have begun deploying Edit Check tools to MediaWiki’s Visual Editor. Initial testing of this feature shows that contributors are 2.2x more likely to add a citation to the site, and the revert rate of edits made decreased by 8.3%. These significant changes demonstrate how useful the feature can be for newcomers. We are continuing to test out new additions to this feature set, including how we may apply AI assistance. The tool has been deployed to 11 small wikis and enabled for new contributors by default, and we are continuing to test it on 11 other medium to large size wikis to refine how it works and identify any potential bugs in the code.

Also as part of improvements for editors with extended rights, Edit Patrol within the Wikipedia Android app is now available in Production for Spanish and French Wikipedia.

Supporting Wikimedia events

Wikimedia events are held around the world, organized by dozens of different communities and groups in order to bring together new contributors and experienced editors to add content and technical contributions to the Wikimedia projects. Our latest Event Registration tool allows organizers to create and manage their events on the wikis, and allows participants to sign up and receive updates. In the inaugural quarter, it was used to create 224 events with collectively 3,232 participants. Next, the Campaigns product and the Community Growth teams are collaborating to integrate grants information into the Events Registration tool. We expect 300-400 additional events per year will utilize this feature and facilitate faster and more efficient reporting of event outcomes.

Responding to other community needs

In addition to implementing improvements to our Community Wishlist process, we also deployed a number of features requested by the community:

• Edit Recovery has been deployed on all wikis. This community requested feature allows for saving wikitext and other edit form information while typing, and restoring it after the browser has been accidentally closed, or a power or network outage or browser crash has happened.
• QR share, which allows users to generate a 1-click QR code for any wiki page, has been deployed on all wikis.
• Multiblocks schema changes, allowing for layered blocking of malicious users, have been successfully deployed to production wikis, and rollout to all projects is planned for the upcoming week. 
• CodeMirror 6, which aims to make it easier for contributors to edit wikitext, is in beta testing.
• AutoSuggestSiteLink is a MediaWiki gadget that suggests Wikidata items for possible linking with a Wikimedia site page.
• The Who Wrote That Extension is back up and running on the Google Chrome Store.

Improvements to the MediaWiki and Wikimedia wikis infrastructure

Overall, we deployed over 35 new features or improvements to the MediaWiki and Wikimedia wikis infrastructure, including:

• MediaWiki 1.42.0-wmf.16 deployed, including 316 Patches in 71 repos by 75 authors.
• MediaWiki 1.42.0-wmf.23 deployed; 414 Patches in 101 repos by 85 authors.
• Temporary accounts can now be hidden, to avoid accidental IP address leaks.
• A new CAPTCHA system has been successfully deployed to production after a combined effort from SRE, security team and volunteers. Not only is the new CAPTCHA more secure, but early signs are showing it is more accessible to non-Latin text based speaking users due to clearer legibility.
• A native editor is in production in the Wikipedia iOS app, accumulating data for reporting. 
• trace.wikimedia.org is up and running. Now, we’re not only able to enjoy the traces, but we can also access them at an optimal speed.
• Translation page filter for Special:PrefixIndex has been deployed to all wikis using the Translate extension. 
• Foundation staff helped organize and participated in the 2024 Bellagio AI Symposium. The group published a draft of potential research areas.
• A new type is now available for use by the Wikifunctions Community: Natural numbers! 
• We have significantly reduced the time it takes for regular maintenance of DNS hosts, down from 30-45 minutes of on-hands maintenance to a single command by moving to a dynamic confd based management of state from the earlier Puppet defined state. This will reduce toil for the Traffic team and in general make our infrastructure more resilient, allowing us to depool DNS hosts in a few seconds versus the above time frame.
• SecurityPatchBot checks security patches nightly then pings the patch author in Phabricator as soon as a patch is out-of-date—which means fewer manual steps for Security and Release Engineering and less train delay.
• We landed a big milestone for how Types can use Functions to check inputs as you enter them. You can try it out on Wikifunctions Beta to see multiplication work for Roman numerals, for example.
• We ran a successful Datacenter Switchover, moving all wikis from our primary data center (in this instance, Texas) to the secondary data center (in this instance, Virginia).
• The config store configuration now features 5 data sets that are being processed on the production cluster into temporary tables, parallel to the current production output. On the k8s deployment side, a new, simplified service runner implementation has been done, enabling the subsequent deployment of the service.
• The first version of Night Mode is now deployed to production.  Night mode is available to logged-in users on French, Spanish, Farsi, Polish, Serbian, Turkish, and Vietnamese Wikipedias. 
• Rewrite of LoadMonitor (T314020) has been merged and will be deployed soon. This made protection against certain types of outages much stronger. 
• We have integrated MADLAD-400, the new translation model from Google Research, into the MinT test instance.
• We have enabled Content and Section Translation for 28 Wikipedias, with MinT support on 22 of them using the new MADLAD-400 model from Google Research.
• We launched the 2024 Community Insights survey, covering 29 languages with questions on our Movement’s demographics, motivations, and health. 
• We replaced an expensive feature of Flagged Revisions (which contributed to an outage earlier this year) with a simpler functionality that’s mostly transparent to the users, while removing tens of gigabytes from every database host on average (and massive amount of read and writes removed from these databases).
• 109 different staff across the Foundation worked to resolve 454 community reported phabricator tasks.

• 3256 tools were migrated as part of the Toolforge’s migration off of the Grid Engine.

Equity

To further our equity goal, we have been working closely with Affiliates to form strategic partnerships to close content gaps. We also amplified and supported community gender gap campaigns in biographies and women’s health during Women’s History Month. This included running the Wikipedia Needs More Women campaign (14.5M Unique people reached) and  coordinating the global landing page and calendar for Celebrate Women campaign. We also supported the rollout of  ¡Alto! Mujeres haciendo historia campaign in Latin America (344 new standard quality biographies on es- and ptwiki were created). Finally, we also supported Wikimedia Indonesia’s women’s health campaign.

To identify improvements to the onboarding of new languages, we also conducted a series of community conversations on the state of the Incubator and shared data on Incubator graduation and editing trends, as well as the state of languages across Wikimedia projects.

Work was also done to build the capacity of Affiliates to implement global programs locally. For example, Wikimedia Colombia & the Ministry of Education launched Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom in Waayuunaiki community; and wrapped a 6 month Wiki Loves Manuscripts Learning Partners cohort – 21 participants from 15 languages in 6 regions, with 11 communities intending to pursue manuscript digitization projects next year.

To improve connections within the movement, we celebrated 10 Wikimedians from 7 language communities through WikiCelebrate. We also facilitated the first-ever Arabic Let’s Connect session and continued to co-create new spaces for the community to connect. We also provided communications and event programming support to regional (ESEAP, WikiArabia, Francophone WikiConf, WikiIndaba) and thematic (Global Advocacy) conferences. 

Safety and Inclusion

The Foundation’s safety and inclusion work revolves around defending our people and projects against disinformation and harmful government regulation, and providing for the safety of volunteers. As the political and human rights landscape continues to rapidly evolve in the world around us, the work of our Legal, Trust & Safety, and Human Rights teams has evolved to keep pace.

As Wikipedia is increasingly regarded as a reliable source of knowledge, we are seeing two large trends. Politicians have a greater stake in what appears on Wikipedia and take actions to influence on-wiki content, directly or indirectly. Additionally, some politicians and governments who do not like what appears on Wikipedia are making deliberate efforts to discredit our people and projects through disinfo campaigns in mainstream and social media.

Our Disinformation working group will continue to work with wiki communities and contributors to counter any disinformation efforts on our projects, and protect the contributors targeted by efforts to discredit them or their work. 

We have continued to engage with regulators to educate them on our model. In February, we responded to a consultation on illegal harms by Ofcom, the regulator of the UK Online Safety Act, pushing back against proposals that would undermine effective volunteer community self-governance. In March, we attended a roundtable with the Group Director of Online Safety. And speaking of safety, following the publication of our first child rights impact assessment, the Foundation launched a new child safety policy to better protect our younger users.

Part of our work includes providing support for community self-governance; in addition to seating the new members of Affiliations Committee, Ombuds Commission, and Case Review Committee, we supported a Community vote on the final Charter of the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) in January, which was approved with a strong mandate (75%) in February.  

Effectiveness

The Effectiveness goal is about improving how we as an organization operate and scale. This year, we are already on track to increase the percentage of our budget that goes to directly supporting Wikimedia’s mission. In concrete terms, this means that, through increasing our internal efficiency around administrative and fundraising costs, we will enable an additional investment of $1.8M into funding for things like grants, feature development, site infrastructure and more.

Our financial modeling still indicates that, for a range of reasons, fundraising online and through banners will not continue to grow at the same rate as in past years. We have several long-term initiatives underway to help mitigate this risk and diversify our revenue streams, including Wikimedia Enterprise, the Wikimedia Endowment, growing major gifts and testing new revenue streams.  

Evaluating progress

We will continue to measure our impact on these four goals through four key metrics, which you can learn more about and read the most recent published results on Meta-Wiki. We are constantly feeding our data back into the process, iterating based on what we have been successful at impacting and what we have not been as successful at impacting. We look forward to reporting on more progress throughout the rest of the year.

As discussed in the January 2024 post about our progress on the 2023-2024 Annual Plan goals, we have centered this year’s goals around our Product and Technology work, in service of the broader movement strategy goals to advance equity as part of the 2030 Strategic Direction. Our annual plan recognizes Wikimedia’s role as a platform for people to contribute on a massive scale, and prioritizes four key goals to meaningfully evolve the work we do and meet the changing world around us. Hundreds of Wikimedians shaped this annual plan both on and off wiki.

Let us check in on how things have progressed since our last update.

The four key annual plan goals

The annual plan laid out these four key goals: 

• INFRASTRUCTURE: Advance Knowledge as a Service. Improve User Experience on the wikis, especially for established editors. Strengthen metrics and reporting.
• EQUITY: Support Knowledge Equity. Strengthen Equity in Decision-Making via Movement governance and Movement Charter. Empower and engage the Movement, support regional strategies and help close knowledge gaps.
• SAFETY & INCLUSION: Protect against growing external threats. Defend our people and projects against disinformation and harmful government regulation. Work across the Movement to Provide for the Safety of Volunteers.
• EFFECTIVENESS: Strengthen our overall performance. Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt our processes for maximum impact with more limited resources.

Here’s a summary of the Foundation’s progress, broken down by these four goals.

Infrastructure

Our Infrastructure goal is about improving the user experience on the Wikimedia projects. This goal forms the largest portion of the Foundation’s budget, highlighting our focus on product and technology. The bulk of the work so far has been focused on the first of three categories, or “buckets,” called Wiki Experiences. The purpose of this bucket is to efficiently deliver, improve and innovate on wiki experiences that enable the distribution of free knowledge world-wide. We do this by building on our core technology and capabilities, ensuring we continuously improve the experience of volunteer editors, editors with extended rights, and technical contributors, and creating a great experience for our readers.

Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world; and regularly recognized as one of the fastest sites. This is because of our investment in infrastructure around the world to meet the demands from readers and contributors. We know that for knowledge to be useful, it must be easily and rapidly accessible from anywhere, at anytime. As the demand for our content and complexity of that content increases, so too does the demand on our server infrastructure. In addition to the ongoing work to improve our existing data centers around the world, we have recently deployed a new set of servers to a data center in South America. The availability of this new data center will improve speeds and overall efficiency for contributors and readers from South America.

In an age of generative AI services like ChatGPT, the Foundation has introduced new experiments to help us learn more about generative AI is impacting how people seek out knowledge content. To help us further our understanding, we launched in August 2023 a ChapGPT plugin experiment. The plugin was built as a way for ChatGPT users to query Wikipedia explicitly and directly. The experiment concluded in January 2024, and showed that chatbots are not supplanting Wikipedia as a source for knowledge. There is increased trust in the content provided when the information is coming from Wikipedia. We are taking these learnings and beginning work on a new browser extension, which will utilize generative AI and Wikimedia content, to allow readers to use Wikipedia to verify the accuracy of information they read across the internet. This new browser extension will help readers find additional information and reliable sources from Wikipedia about content they discover on other websites. 

Recently, we expanded our work to enable a new Wikimedia community for building an open library of functions, Wikifunctions, that is capable of creating new forms of knowledge across Wikimedia sites. Officially launched in August 2023, Wikifunctions is a Wikimedia project to collaboratively create and maintain a library of code functions to support the Wikimedia projects and beyond, in the world’s natural and programming languages. A “function” is a sequence of programming instructions that makes a calculation based on data you provide. Functions can answer questions, such as how many days have passed between two dates, or the distance between two cities. You can find out more on the main Abstract Wikipedia project page on Meta-Wiki.

Our Product and Technology teams also worked to continue to lower the barriers to entry for new code contributors, and have already seen a 20% increase over last fiscal year in the number of volunteer code contributors who submit more than five patches. The teams also made progress on a number of requests for new or improved features, including:

• Temporary Accounts for Unregistered Editors: Previously known as the IP Masking project, this effort will provide greater anonymity to volunteers making contributions without a registered account.
• Discussion Tools: A set of features that improve the usability and effectiveness of the talk pages used to facilitate discussions and decision making on all of the Wikimedia projects.
• Automoderator: Allows volunteer content moderators to configure automated prevention or reversion of bad edits based on scoring from a machine learning model.
• Community Configuration: Provides local on-wiki configuration tools for leaders of individual wikis to customize their wiki’s usage of tools developed by the Foundation’s Growth team. This is designed to help wikis reach and welcome more new contributors with tools such as the newcomer tasks feature.
• Accessibility for reading: Prototyping of a new feature which allows individual readers to select font-related settings – such as size and spacing – which best accommodate their reading needs or preferences.
• Virtual domains: This improvement to our databases setup allows for multiple wikis to have easier access to data shared between many wikis – such as account information.

Equity

Equity is about closing knowledge gaps and supporting and growing a global movement of contributors and content on the Wikimedia projects. 

To further our engagement with the numerous Wikimedia communities around the world, we launched Talking: 2024: conversations to share, listen, and learn with intention as we continue to plan our future. So far, Wikimedia Foundation Trustees, executives, and staff have hosted 130 conversations on-wiki, with individuals, and in small groups. Highlights included the need to continue focusing the Foundation on supporting product/technology needs, ‘Human-led, tech-enabled’ means that the humans still lead, can our financial model provide more certainty, and also force difficult trade-offs and that movement roles need more clarity. You can still take part in Talking: 2024 through the project’s Meta-Wiki page.

We have also been working to support regional strategies and increase our ability to connect directly with volunteers from different backgrounds, cultures, and languages. We have partnered with movement affiliates to co-create shared discussion spaces such as WikiCauserie, Afrika Baraza, CEE Catch Up, and more.

Let’s take a closer look at one of these discussion spaces. In early 2023, the Afrika Baraza was established as a forum for African Wikimedians to gather and discuss the challenges and problems faced by the Wikimedia Communities in Africa. Each quarter, Wikimedians from around Africa join Wikimedia Foundation staff to brainstorm and plan solutions to problems facing the region or improvements to existing efforts, such as the Wiki Indaba Conference. This forum has played a crucial role in the development of the Africa Agenda. The Africa Agenda aims to unite the goals that the continent wishes to address, offering a systematic approach to dealing with the issues closing the participation gap in the Sub Saharan Africa region.

The Foundation is also working to close thematic content gaps in too often overlooked topics. Our Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards helped raise awareness of the need for reliable sources in Africa, and recognized six journalists in the region for their outstanding while prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion in their reporting. The most recent WikiWomen Camp developed a declaration seeking to close the gender gap in project leadership roles, community resourcing, and movement policies. With support from UNESCO and the British Library, Wikisource Loves Manuscripts was able to digitize 28,000 new pages of potential sources on hard to find topics.

Safety and Inclusion

The Foundation’s safety and inclusion work revolves around defending our people and projects against disinformation and harmful government regulation, and providing for the safety of volunteers. As the political and human rights landscape continues to rapidly evolve in the world around us, the work of our Legal, Trust & Safety, and Human Rights teams has evolved to keep pace.

In December, we filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting challenges to social media laws in Texas and Florida, and informing the Court about how those laws threaten community-governed free and open knowledge projects like Wikipedia. We also engaged the UK regulator Ofcom to influence enforcement of the Online Safety Act and educate European regulators about the Wikimedia model.

With a number of high-profile national elections taking place in numerous countries, multiple teams across the organization have been organizing and preparing our efforts to combat disinformation. To help inform a wider audience on the potential harm and lessons to take from disinformation, our Trust & Safety team launched a Disinformation 101 course on learn.wiki.

Our communities are an integral part of our efforts in addressing potential safety concerns and increasing inclusion of new and larger audiences. In October, staff supported the publishing of the report on the Foundation’s Affiliates Strategy, which will help guide both staff and volunteer groups in how we collaborate on our work together. The Committee Support team ran successful appointment processes for a diverse slate of candidates to the community-based Affiliations Committee, Ombuds Commission, and Case Review Committee.

Effectiveness

The Effectiveness goal is about improving how we as an organization operate and scale. This year, we are already on track to increase the percentage of our budget that goes to directly supporting Wikimedia’s mission. In concrete terms, this means that, through increasing our internal efficiency around administrative and fundraising costs, we will enable an additional investment of $1.8M into funding for things like grants, feature development, site infrastructure and more.

Effectiveness in communication is also important for an organization serving communities which collectively speak hundreds of languages. Increasingly over the past few years, we have been working to develop a new system for providing translations of core Foundation documentation and communications available in more languages. Within just the previous fiscal year, more than 650 requests for translations were processed within the Foundation using this evolving system. Over the past couple of years, the number of languages supported by the initiative has increased from its inaugural six languages in written translations, to thirty-four languages in written translations and nine languages in verbal interpreting. As an added benefit, the translations are provided by known members of the Wikimedia community – whose experience and knowledge of the movement provides much higher quality translations.

Evaluating progress

We will continue to measure our impact on these four goals through four key metrics, which you can learn more about and read the most recent published results on Meta-Wiki. We are constantly feeding our data back into the process, iterating based on what we’ve been successful at impacting and what we haven’t. We look forward to reporting on more progress throughout the rest of the year. 

Jun 10, 10:29 UTC
Resolved - This incident has been resolved.

Jun 10, 10:13 UTC
Monitoring - A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.

Jun 10, 10:10 UTC
Identified - We are aware of issues with saving edits to some wikis, and we are working on a fix.

• Albania report: Summer of Wikivoyage Edit-a-thon in Kruja; Traditional Albanian food photography competition
• Brazil report: Open licensing guide from Midiateca Capixaba; Activities in Rio de Janeiro; First batch from LabDOC; New batch from NeuroMat; Hercule Florence photowalk
• Czech Republic report: International discussion on the role of media and new GLAM partnership on the horizon
• India report: Digitization concludes for Behar Herald and a digitization workshop held for libraries in Maharashtra
• Italy report: Edit-a-thons
• Kosovo report: Summer of Wikivoyage Edit-a-thon in Kruja & Traditional Albanian food photography competition
• Netherlands report: WikiconNL 2024
• New Zealand report: Women in Architecture Edit-a-thon, Wikidata Te Papa research expeditions project and 1Lib1Ref
• Poland report: What’s up in GLAM-Wiki in Poland in May
• Portugal report: The Search for the Lost Manuscripts
• Switzerland report: Swiss GLAM Programme
• UK report: Our first Igbo language article
• Ukraine report: Article campaigns for Ukrainian librarians, partnership with a national library
• USA report: WikiPortraits & Edit-a-thons
• Biodiversity Heritage Library report: BHL-Wiki Working Group May monthly highlights
• GLAM Wiki Meta pages revamp: GLAM Wiki Meta pages kicking off the Working Group
• WMF GLAM report: Introducing Alice Kibombo, a new dataset, and more
• Calendar: June’s GLAM events

• Albania report: International Roma Day Editathon in Albania and Kosovo, 2024
• Australia report: New images from Central Australia on Wikimedia Commons, Library Science WikiProject students edit Wikipedia & 1Lib1Ref in Australia and New Zealand
• Brazil report: Wiki Library Month
• Czech Republic report: 2023 became a promissing year for wiki-residents and partnerships in CR
• Kosovo report: International Roma Day Editathon in Albania and Kosovo, 2024
• Netherlands report: Informal GLAM hack session
• New Zealand report: Te Papa research expeditions and the Wikipedian at Large
• North Macedonia report: Climate Changes and GLAM
• Poland report: What’s up in GLAM-Wiki in Poland in April
• Spain report: SMALL GLAM SLAM
• Sweden report: 100 000 bildminnen; Metabase
• Switzerland report: Swiss GLAM Programme
• UK report: Heaven on Earth at last?
• USA report: WCNA open for submissions, GLAM CSI at the Hackathon, and Meetups
• Biodiversity Heritage Library report: BHL-Wiki Working Group April monthly highlights
• AvoinGLAM report: AI Sauna quick reflection
• Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: OpenRefine online courses in more languages, and certified trainers
• WMF GLAM report: OpenRefine course in three more languages and International Museum Day challenges
• Calendar: May’s GLAM events

30/05/2024-05/06/2024

Mapping

• [1] Jérôme Limozin, a Singapore-based OpenStreetMap mapper, has managed to cycle through 99% of all the roads in Singapore by using the Wandrer exploration game.
• Ilya Zverev announced that as of 1 June, his Level0 editor and other services, such as the OSM Imagery Browser and the Offset Database frontend, will be temporarily non-functional. Ilya explains that, due to the development of Every Door, he was not able to migrate the services to a new server in time for the transition to OAuth 2. The disruption is expected to last for one month, barring any urgent commitments.

Mapping campaigns

• IrdiIs has decided to push Albanian’s rural mapping forward by randomly choosing 100 villages to map in the upcoming 100 days!
• OpenStreetMap India reported that the Sahakarnagar Mapping Party event, held on Saturday 1 June by the OpenStreetMap Bengaluru community, successfully mapped over 250 features, primarily consisting of benches, gazebos, and street lamps around Sahakarnagar Park.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• You can help the OSM CWG collect images for the OSM’s 20th birthday party by sending them your favourite photos or images of OpenStreetMap from the past 20 years.

Local chapter news

• FOSSGIS eV has issued ► an official statement regarding the Mobility Data Act drafted by the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport. They argue that the bill could adversely affect the OpenStreetMap project within the European Union. FOSSGIS eV suggests several revisions, including exemptions for the OSM project from the immediate data update requirement and the obligation to address user-reported data errors.

Events

• Gislars announced that the OpenStreetMap Berlin Hack Weekend will be held 2 and 3 November at Wikimedia Deutschland, Berlin.
• The Swiss OpenStreetMap Association is holding ► a free webinar ‘OpenStreetMap für den Tourismus’ for tourism professionals and developers. Participants will learn how to effectively use Points of Interest to improve tourism services. The webinar will take place on 19 and 25 June via BigBlueButton, therefore there is no need to register.

Education

• Raquel Dezidério Souto (IVIDES) has published ► a guide about mapping waterways in JOSM, using the FastDraw plugin. This is part of the mapping project of the Taquari-Antas River Basin, one of the main areas affected by the ongoing disaster in the state of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). The campaign’s wiki page includes this and other projects, which may have collaboration opportunities for the global community of OpenStreetMap mappers.

OSM research

• Benjamin Herfort et al. have published a research paper titled ‘Data Quality of OpenStreetMap for Industrial Sites in the Arctic’.
• HeiGIT tooted that its Openrouteservice is now being used in the EU-Project Grid Cell Database, a project aiming to create reachability analyses for healthcare, educational, and other facilities from all across Germany.

Maps

• Candid Dauth decided to invest in a bigger server to revive the OpenPublicTransportMap and make it available as an additional map style of FacilMap. At the same time, he is looking for financial support for his service.

OSM in action

• Rihard Olups tooted an interactive map showing the locations of EU election polling stations in Latvia.
• User_5359 has developed an OpenStreetMap-based interactive map to show the location of historical objects managed by the Silesian Cultural Institute Foundation (Stiftung Kulturwerk Schlesien). This collection includes postcards, autographs, stamps, historical maps, historical securities, artists’ works, battle plans, vedute, and various other items.

Software

• Michael Mann has developed OSM_LeaderBoard, a dash-based leaderboard of OpenStreetMap contributors based on the number of nodes they have contributed for a given bounding box and time period.

Programming

• Volker Krause reported on some recent updates made to the KDE Itinerary application, a digital travel assistant.
• Kamil Monicz has published his ninth blog about the development of OpenStreetMap NextGen, his personal alternative to the OpenStreetMap code base, reporting several updates such as support for a MacOS development environment, an update to the changeset history interface, and a new GPS trace animation feature.
• PeachyOne shared an Overpass query for finding stress accent mistakes in Greek speaking regions that need correcting.
• Andy Townsend explained how to set up a tile server using Shortbread, Tilemaker, and VersaTiles.

Releases

• Tobias Zwick has released StreetComplete version 58.0, featuring various new quests and numerous enhancements.

Did you know …

• … that bxl-forever is putting together a guidebook for newbie OpenStreetMap contributors?
• … that you can monitor the current state of road conditions in France using the Inforoute France platform?
• … Map UI Patterns? It is a detailed overview and description of the UI elements and patterns used in programmes and websites with maps. The author of the website gives tips and shows examples of how the correct use of these elements can increase the user friendliness and user experience of digital maps and avoid common errors.
• …that you can simulate the movement of shadows cast by buildings, mountains, and trees using the Shade Map app?

OSM in the media

• ZDNET published ► a series of articles covering the topics of open data and open source. They specifically highlighted the SotM-FR, which is being held on the last three days of June in Lyon, and the growth of the Panoramax project, which is being built by a partnership between the IGN and OSM France.
• Ouest France has analysed ► the road names in France that commemorate the Normandy landings by using OpenStreetMap database. They identified 90 roads directly associated with D-Day, with the majority concentrated in Normandy.
• Sanyo News reported ► that Rei Frontier has analysed the travel behaviour patterns of SilentLog app users. This anonymised travel data was directly compared with POI data from OpenStreetMap to examine the types of places users visited.

Other “geo” things

• Mierune, a Japanese GIS company, is offering ► regular QGIS training for beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels from June to August. Each unit of the course costs ¥27,500.
• Freethink and the Skoll Foundation have released a documentary video explaining how OpenStreetMap and HOT, through their software and regional hubs, can support communities around the world to respond to challenges such as humanitarian disasters, climate change, and urban problems.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
København	OSMmapperCPH		2024-06-09
London Borough of Hackney	London Ruby User Group talk on OSM		2024-06-10
Grenoble	Atelier du groupe local OpenStreetMap		2024-06-10
Zug	164. OSM-Stammtisch ausnahmsweise in Zug		2024-06-11
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-06-12
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2024-06-13
Lorain County	OpenStreetMap Midwest Meetup	✓	2024-06-13
Bruxelles – Brussel	OSM Belgium meetup in Brussels		2024-06-13
Bochum	Bochumer OSM Treffen		2024-06-13
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2024-06-13
Berlin	192. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2024-06-14
Defence Colony Tehsil	9th OSM Delhi (Indoor) Mapping Party – Session 1		2024-06-15
Kalkaji Tehsil	9th OSM Delhi (Indoor) Mapping Party – Session 2		2024-06-16
Hannover	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2024-06-16
England	OSM UK Online Chat		2024-06-17
Lyon	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon		2024-06-18
Bonn	176. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn (Juni 2024: 20 Jahre OSM – 15 Jahre Stammtisch Bonn)		2024-06-18
City of Edinburgh	OSM Edinburgh pub meetup		2024-06-18
Utrecht	OSGeo.nl Open Zomerpodium – OSGeo.nl Open Summer Stage		2024-06-19
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe		2024-06-19
Stainach-Pürgg	13. Österreichischer OSM-Stammtisch (online)		2024-06-19
	OSM-Deutschland Vernetzungstreffen		2024-06-20
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2024-06-21

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, Raquel Dezidério Souto, SeverinGeo, Strubbl, TheSwavu, adiatmad, barefootstache, derFred, euroPathfinder, mcliquid, miurahr, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

For more than a decade, Wiki Education has bridged the realms of education and Wikipedia, supporting academics and students in U.S. and Canadian accredited institutions as they improve the world’s go-to source of information. But what does this approach to enriching Wikipedia look like worldwide?

Last month’s Speaker Series program, “Wikipedia and Education, globally”, explored this very question as our international panelists and attendees came together to examine the vast network of organizations and individual volunteers actively working at the intersection of Wikipedia and education. 

Moderated by Wiki Education’s LiAnna Davis, the discussion featured program leaders from Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil, and Serbia, who shared histories of engaging students and instructors of all education levels with Wikipedia and offered insights on initiatives within their respective countries.

Wikimedia Serbia, one of the first groups in the Wikimedia movement to officially launch a Wikipedia and education program, collaborates with primary, secondary, and tertiary institutions to integrate Wikipedia into their curricula and enhance content on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikibooks.

The perception of Wikipedia among educators in Serbia has evolved over time, noted panelist Nebojša Ratković of Wikimedia Serbia.

“In earlier stages, Wikipedia was often viewed with skepticism by educators in Serbia,” said Ratković. “Over time, as Wikipedia’s quality control mechanisms improved and efforts were made to enhance the accuracy and reliability of its content, educators in Serbia began to recognize the value of Wikipedia as a learning tool.”

Recognizing the shared experiences between the panelists, EduWiki Nigeria’s Bukola James echoed Ratković’s reflection on the evolution of educator perspectives surrounding Wikipedia. 

“Once [educators] get more familiar with how Wikipedia works, they begin to really appreciate it, in fact, they preach the gospel of using Wikipedia in the classroom to their colleagues,” said James. “Introducing Wikipedia to them isn’t really about them using [the site], but also about exposing them to different kinds of open education resources that could help support their teaching and student learning in their classrooms.”

Wikimedia Argentina also has a longstanding history of supporting educators, having trained thousands of teachers and university instructors in pedagogical approaches to incorporating Wikipedia into their classrooms.

“Our turning point was during the pandemic,” explained panelist Luisina Ferrante of Wikimedia Argentina. “We were able to strengthen our networks with teachers and educational institutions, collaborate with public programs launched by the government in the context of the emergency, ally with public universities, and were more present than ever in designing open tools and resources.”

As the conversation turned to the future plans for each program, the four panelists considered the ever-changing political, educational, and technological landscapes in their respective countries.  Each speaker underscored the importance of continuing to serve as the connection between education and Wikipedia, noting the invaluable social impact of high-quality, open-access information.

“When knowledge is limited to the walls of institutions, it fails to meet its objectives of contributing towards social improvement,” said Alexander Hilsenbeck Filho of Wiki Movimento Brasil. “It is important to disseminate knowledge and make it accessible to society so that it can be put to good use.”

Interested in hearing more from our panelists and other scholars featured in previous webinars? Catch up on our Speaker Series programs on YouTube, including “Wikipedia and Education, globally.” 

Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, training, and support that Wiki Education offers to instructors in U.S. and Canadian accredited higher education institutions.

Wikidata’s WikiProject Video games has just passed a major milestone: 100,000 video game (Q7889) items on Wikidata. Like we did for the 50K milestone exactly two years ago, let’s use that opportunity to draw a quick mid-year report (and with the very same format, for both ease of comparison and ease of writing :-þ).

Description

Let’s look at how these items are described along some basic properties − asking the Wikidata Query Service for some pretty graphs, and using my trusted inteGraality for some more advanced statistics.

Over 89% of the items have a platform (P400) statement (which does not mean that we have 89% completion on that topic, since many games are published on several platforms, and we may only have recorded one or a couple of them).

85% of the items have a publication date (P577)

37% have a genre (P136) − we have a very long tail of 730 distinct values as genres, which we still should clean-up (minus indie game (Q2762504), which we recently moved to has characteristic (P1552)).

Almost 33% have a country of origin (P495)

About 34% of the items have a developer (P178) and 37% a publisher (P123).

Links to Wikipedia

42% of the items are linked to an article in at least one language-version of Wikipedia − English comes first (27%), then French (15%), Ladin (14%) and Japanese (13%).

What I also find interesting is to look at items linked to only one Wikipedia language version: some 5K (5%) only have an article in the English-language or Japanese-language Wikipedia, then comes French-language and Ladin-language Wikipedias with 1K (1%) of items.

External identifiers

Over at Wikidata we link to hundreds of other video game databases.

On top is still Internet Game Database game ID (P5794), used on 74% of items. Lutris game ID (P7597) follows with 60% (makes sense, as the Lutris database is seeded with IGDB). Steam application ID (P1733) completes the podium with 56%. The new entrant SteamGridDB ID (P12561) snatches the fourth place in barely 3 months, with 56%. RAWG game ID (P9968) and MobyGames game ID (P11688) stand at 51%. PCGamingWiki ID (P6337) is at 38%. Both Giant Bomb ID (P5247) and HowLongToBeat ID (P2816) at 33%. OGDB game title ID (P7564) and GameFAQs game ID (P4769) at 15%, speedrun.com game ID (P6783) and Mod DB game ID (P6774) at 13%. StopGame ID (P10030) and myabandonware.com game ID (P12652) at 11%… and a very very long tail of over 360, sometimes highly specialized, databases.

(The most represented are English-language databases, but the list above includes one database in German and two in Russian).

Some caveats

1/ By the time of writing this, we already reached 102,577 items.

2/ Last time, I had cautioned that looking strictly at instance of (P31)=video game (Q7889) items does not tell the full story, as we have a long tail of subclasses also used as P31: some refer to distinct concepts (the 956 DLCs or 3242 expansion packs), while others are indeed games. I’m happy that we have successfully culled out the hundreds of instances of video game remaster and video game remake (moved to based on (P144)) ; as well as free and open-source video game (moved to has characteristic (P1552)). Still some work to do to refine our P31s, but going in the right direction.

3/ With 100,000 items, we are going somewhere (surpassing the 85,000 of GiantBomb or the 63,000 of OGDB, for example). But this is still under the 153,000 games in Metacritic, far from the 278,000 entries in Mobygames or the 281,000 entries in IGDB (and dwarfed by the 868K entries in RAWG).

4/ The astute reader may have noticed that some data points went down compared to two years ago: a developer (P178), publisher (P123) or country of origin (P495) on a third of items (down from half), and a genre (P136) from two-thirds to a mere one-third. So while we should celebrate this significant milestone in breadth of coverage, we should keep in mind the depth of coverage on the road ahead of us.

Link collection

• Gain insights via our showcase SPARQL queries
• Explore our data with our statistics
• Learn about our data model
• Check out who’s been using our data
• Find something to start with in our suggested tasks
• Do some alignments with other databases via our 275 Mix’n’match catalogues

This is a guest blog by Yamen Bousrih from the Wiki World Heritage UG

During the latest edition of Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), the Wiki World Heritage User Group (WWH) had the pleasure of collaborating with the WLM international organizing team to offer a special prize for the best photo featuring a UNESCO World Heritage-listed monument. This partnership underscores the importance of documenting these invaluable monuments, which belong to all of humanity, as well as the significance of collaboration within the Wiki movement.

The synergy between WWH and WLM exemplifies the power of working together to achieve shared goals. By combining our efforts, we can enhance the documentation and appreciation of world heritage monuments around the globe.

WWH special prize in WLM 2023

For this inaugural collaboration, after submitting several photos to the international jury and the WWH community, we are thrilled to announce that the winning photo for this special prize is of the magnificent City Hall of Antwerp, Belgium. This stunning image captures the grandeur and historical significance of the City Hall, an iconic landmark recognized by UNESCO for its outstanding universal value.

The City Hall of Antwerp, a masterpiece of Renaissance architecture, stands as a testament to the city’s rich history and cultural heritage. Completed in 1565, this architectural gem has been a central figure in Antwerp’s political and social life for centuries. It is listed as one of the Belfries of Belgium and France, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, highlighting its importance and the need to preserve it for future generations.

The Belfries of Belgium and France are a group of 56 historical buildings designated by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites. These civic belfries, which house bells for ringing as part of a building, symbolize the emergence of civic independence from feudal and religious influences in the former County of Flanders and neighboring areas.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the organizing team of WLM and offer our congratulations to the winner. This collaboration has been a wonderful journey, and we look forward to many more initiatives that celebrate and preserve our shared heritage.

From scientist and reference librarian to curriculum mapper and professor, Heather McEwen, MLIS, MS has worn many scholarly hats – and she’s more than earned her newest title of Wikipedian, enhancing articles that have since been viewed more than 800K times! 

Having attended four Wiki Scientists courses over the past year, three of which were sponsored by the WITH Foundation, McEwen remains dedicated to enhancing healthcare and disability information on Wikipedia, underscoring the crucial role Wikipedia plays in increasing equity in public health.

“Quality information is important to patients and families,” said McEwen. “Wikipedia articles are a resource patients can discuss with their health care team to improve patient outcomes.”

Noting the initial challenge of selecting an article to enhance, McEwen focused her search on finding articles missing citations or large sections of critical information. 

Ultimately, she discovered Wikipedia articles at the intersection of the course themes and her own personal interests, adding content and citations to articles including De Barsy syndrome, jellyfish dermatitis, evidence-based medicine, tetracycline, congenital rubella syndrome, Alagille syndrome, and Reye syndrome.

McEwen, who particularly enjoyed the creative process of adding content and the chance to expand her biomedical knowledge, was surprised to discover a broad network of scholars actively contributing to Wikipedia.

“I was not aware of the complexity of the behind-the-scenes at Wikipedia,” McEwen explained. “I have also been impressed with the effort to involve scientists and students in improving Wikipedia articles.”

As associate professor of both Family and Community Medicine and Pharmacy Practice at Northeast Ohio Medical University, McEwen co-leads and teaches in the evidence-based medicine thread for first year and second-year medical students. She also serves as the Curriculum Mapper for the university. McEwen credits the WITH Wiki Scientists courses with keeping her on task and on track toward her goals of improving articles amidst her extensive professional responsibilities.  

“I think [editing] is a great way for scientists, health care professionals, librarians, and students to ensure quality information is available to anyone able to access Wikipedia,” said McEwen. “Your work can be seen by a larger population than traditional academic publishing.”

To connect with McEwen on Wikipedia, find her editing under the username EBMLibrarian.

Interested in learning how to add your own expertise to Wikipedia? Explore Wiki Education’s upcoming courses for subject-area experts.

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Your wiki administrators can change the homepage via our MediaWiki admin panel.

After changing your homepage it will be available at a new URL, such as https://example.com/wiki/Professional_Wiki and your homepage title will be changed.

For more details, see How to Change your MediaWiki Homepage.

Get Started Customizing Your Wiki

Homepage customization is one of the many usability features included in ProWiki. Create your wiki today.

23/05/2024-29/05/2024

Mapping

• Pete Masters explained how the use of 3D meshes created from drone imagery has significantly improved the accuracy of mapping in the informal settlements of Sierra Leone, allowing the complex structures to be better visualised and understood from different angles.
• Pedro Tharg has proposed ► a method for mapping Brazilian vegetation in OpenStreetMap by aligning IBGE ecological system classifications with existing OSM tags, and provided detailed guidelines for tagging different vegetation types based on their elevation and ecological characteristics.

Mapping campaigns

• Brazil Singh described the OpenStreetMap Bangladesh community’s mega mapathon held in Dhaka on 24 May, featuring workshops, quizzes, and mapping activities, with notable participation from the Rajshahi University and speeches from OSMBD President Sawan Shariar and Vice President Yeamun Hasan Soumik. Brazil further highlighted the success of the event and future activities leading up to the State of the Map Bangladesh in September.

Community

• Rémi Labarthe is relaunching the EcceCarto2 survey as part of his internship at Teritorio to re-evaluate ► the typology of French-speaking OSM contributors and their commitment values, by inviting the community to participate and share the survey. The survey is only available in French.
• Raelene Page Dugger discussed the multifaceted value of maps in navigation, planning, public health, communication, and education, emphasising their essential role in everyday tasks and critical situations, while highlighting the serious consequences of the lack of accurate maps in developing regions and praising initiatives such as HOT for promoting accessible geographic data.
• rtnf has reviewed the cuisine tag, explaining how it is used to describe the type of food served at places such as restaurants, fast food outlets, and cafes, detailing various ethnic origins, specific food types, and other features of the food or its style, along with guidelines for combining multiple cuisine types.

Events

• Tunda announced ► that a workshop will be held on Saturday 8 June at the Villa Kuriosum in Berlin, where participants could learn how to map trees using OpenStreetMap. The workshop is aimed at beginners and is part of the ‘Long Day of Urban Nature’ event.

Education

• The IVIDES has held ► a workshop on mapping important features for disaster risk reduction in OpenStreetMap. Dr Raquel Souto commented ► on this workshop in her diary, saying that she developed a series of uMaps to support humanitarian actions in response to the recent floods in Brazil. The video is available to everyone and the collaborative mapping campaign for supporting humanitarian actions in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, continues to be documented on the OSM Wiki ► , with everyone from around the world gently invited to help to map for this activation.

OSM research

• Martin Böckling, Heiko Paulheim, and Sarah Detzler’s paper presented a framework for transforming OpenStreetMap data into a planetary-scale spatio-temporal knowledge graph using the H3 grid system, highlighting the advantages of a graph-based representation for geospatial data and comparing it to other spatial knowledge graphs.

Maps

• Lokjo.com offers a global map service that allows users to find and save their favourite locations by bookmarking or adding links to their home screens, with updates in multiple languages. ollibaba has tooted a detailed review of this.

OSM in action

• The co2.click map shows air quality data from public co2.click sensors on an OSM basemap. If you have a Wi-Fi enabled air quality monitor, you can add your sensor to the map and share the air quality of your area or region.
• Russian companies are continuing to experiment with using OpenStreetMap data in services (we reported earlier). It was noted in the chat of the Russian-speaking community that the online classifieds platform Avito is testing the use of OpenStreetMap data when displaying real estate listings to show what infrastructure is available nearby.

Software

• Since Saturday 1 June the OpenStreetMap API now requires apps to use OAuth 2.0 to authenticate. HTTP Basic Authentication and OAuth 1.0a are no longer supported. More information can be found on the wiki.
• HeiGIT demonstrated the new live mode of ohsomeNowStats in a short video.
• Dominik Neumann highlighted some of the new features of the ohsome Quality API, including comparative analysis with external datasets, an intuitive interface for seamless data quality assessment, flexible region selection, comprehensive results display, and real-time sharing, all based on open source technology to enhance OpenStreetMap data analysis.
• Alex Cojocaru’s pull request for BRouter-Web used the updated geodata exchange library to improve the calculation of gradients by eliminating the 200 m segmentation, improving the accuracy and readability of elevation profiles.

Programming

• Kamil Monicz, aka Zaczero, described his project to autonomously map zebra crossings in Poland using machine learning models, combining YOLO for detection and a CNN for classification, with the objective to ultimately improve pedestrian safety by enhancing OpenStreetMap data (we reported earlier).
• The ServerlessMaps GitHub repository provides instructions for building and hosting high-performance serverless maps on AWS, with detailed steps for setting up the project locally, building basemaps, deploying serverless infrastructure, uploading maps, and sample websites.
• Mattia Pezzotti, a Google Summer of Code 2024 participant, presented their project for integrating Panoramax imagery into the iD editor. The project aims to enhance map exploration by incorporating 360-degree imagery, providing users with valuable visual context and improving map visualisation and community engagement.
• Stefan Bohacek described the process of creating an interactive map of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, highlighting the use of different data sources, mapping tools, and technical steps involved in the project.

Releases

• The Every Door 5.1 release introduced several new features and enhancements, including a recently walked path display, GeoScribbles drawing lock, QR code scanner for website fields, address retention suggestions, node movement for relationship members, a demolition marker button, and various bug fixes. Due to the Flutter upgrade support is now only available for Android 5.0 and up.

Did you know …

• [1] … that the OpenStreetMap Community in Fukushima, Japan, hosts a weekly online discussion to discuss recently published weeklyOSM articles?
• … Complete-Tes-Commerces ► is a site that focuses on French businesses already present in OSM and helps contributors retrieve and fill in missing SIRET and address tags? This tool allows you to track shops in a city and will also highlight when an establishment has been marked as closed in the Base Sirene ►.
• … Mark Stosberg released open-source software in 2021 that is designed to calculate the walk potential of cities? It works by evaluating how many amenities are within a 10-minute walk, with the aim of helping city planners prioritise infrastructure improvements such as adding sidewalks.

OSM in the media

• Shunnosuke Shimizu, an active contributor to the Code for Japan and HOT Japan, has led a volunteer group of around 2000 people to preserve ► a map of the Noto Peninsula before the earthquake that occurred in the area in January 2024. In addition, they also mapped the reconstruction that has taken place in the area since the disaster. Shimizu, a qualified art restorer, stated that the act of recording the original state of the area is inspired by the European philosophy of art restoration. This philosophy aims to preserve the current state of artworks and transmit them to future generations.

Other “geo” things

• Kyle Corry’s Trail Sense is an open-source Android app that helps in wilderness trekking and survival situations by using the phone’s sensors for features such as navigation, weather forecasting, and backtracking, all designed for offline use.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Saarbrücken	Stammtisch OSM Saarland gemeinsam mit OpenSaar e. V.		2024-05-31
	SotM Asia 2024 – Announcement of Venue		2024-05-31
Yelahanka taluku	OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party		2024-06-01
City of Vincent	Social Mapping Sunday: Hyde Park II		2024-06-02
Richmond	MapRVA Meetup		2024-06-04
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #65		2024-06-03
City of Westminster	London pub meet-up		2024-06-04
	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2024-06-04
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #59	✓	2024-06-04
Berlin	Geomob Berlin		2024-06-05
Brno	Kvartální OSM pivo		2024-06-05
	OSM Indoor Meetup		2024-06-05
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2024-06-05
Dresden	OSM-Stammtisch Dresden		2024-06-06
Rio de Janeiro	Oficina de mapeamento de árvores e cobertura vegetal no OpenStreetMap – YouthMappers UFRJ		2024-06-07
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2024-06-07
København	OSMmapperCPH		2024-06-09
Zug	164. OSM-Stammtisch ausnahmsweise in Zug		2024-06-11
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-06-12
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2024-06-13
Lorain County	OpenStreetMap Midwest Meetup	✓	2024-06-13
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2024-06-13
Berlin	192. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2024-06-14
Hannover	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2024-06-16

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by PierZen, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, derFred, mcliquid, miurahr, rtnf, s8321414.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

I am one of the people who implemented the language selector on Wikipedia, one of the World Wide Web’s most multilingual sites. Because of that, and because I’ve loved languages since I was five, I’m generally obsessed with language selection interfaces everywhere: websites, apps, self-service kiosks, airplane entertainment systems, cars, smart headphones, and so on.

So I was obviously thrilled to see a language selector as a minor plot device in the movie Atlas starring Jennifer Lopez. Most movie critics were quick to pan it, but I’m occasionally curious about “so bad it’s good” movies and like many other people these days, I’m curious about the portrayal of artificial “intelligence” in art, so I bothered to watch it. It is indeed not too brilliant: J.Lo’s acting is pretty OK, and the story has some sensible ideas about AI, but it also has ideas that are very silly and self-contradicting, as well as too much CGI, too many references to the Terminator, Alien, and Blade Runner franchises, and a generally lazily-written script. Though it’s mildly entertaining, you probably have better ways to spend two hours.

However, if I don’t write something about the language selector there, who will? So let’s go:

This selector appears at about 33 minutes into the movie.

A few general comments first.

Representing languages using flags is common in language selection interfaces, but it’s a very bad practice. This interface has many examples of why it’s bad, which I’ll discuss in detail.

If my calculations are correct, the movie mostly takes place in the year 2071. The language selector is designed to look like something from that year, but it actually looks a lot like a language selector from a contemporary video game, for example Brawl Stars:

(I’m not much of a gamer, but I’ve got a feeling that there are games whose language selectors are even more similar to the one in Atlas. If you have an example, let me know.)

Some of the languages in the Atlas selector are unusual and don’t quite exist as separately-named languages today. Are the producers suggesting that they’ll exist as independent software user interface languages in 2071? Are those inside jokes by people in the production crew? Are those just goofs? I don’t know, but I’ll try to add a few guesses along the way. Please remember that those are just guesses.

I am failing to find logic in the order of the languages. It’s not alphabetical by the original language name, not by the English language name, not by ISO language code. Maybe it’s just random. Maybe it’s based on some currently-existing software. I just don’t know.

And of course, it’s generally weird that any software in 2071 needs a manual language selector, especially in the context shown in the film—setting up a piece of electronic equipment after turning it on for the first time. Already today, automatic language detection works fairly well in both text and audio, so by 2071, manual selection should be completely unnecessary. Perhaps the producers wanted to poke fun at modern software instead of showing how it will actually look like in 2071.

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Now, let’s finally take a look at the languages themselves, going by columns from left to right.

Right at the top, we have something quite odd. The label says “Hejazi”. It’s written in broken Arabic because the designers, as it very often happens, didn’t bother to ask native speakers to proofread. The letters appear disconnected and are written from left to right, and not from right to left. The flag is a bit similar to the Palestinian, Jordanian, and Sudanese flags, but with a different order of colors. According to Wikipedia, it was indeed used by the Kingdom of Hejaz, a short-lived country that existed for a few years after the First World War, and eventually merged with Saudi Arabia. Hejaz is a geographical region in the West of the Arabian Peninsula, and a particular variety of Arabic is spoken there, but to the best of my knowledge, the people who speak it mostly write in standard Arabic, which is treated separately here (more on that later).

Next we have German and Spanish, about which there isn’t much to add except that those languages are represented by the flags of Germany and Spain, even though both languages are spoken in multiple countries.

Chinese is also mostly uneventful—it uses the PRC flag and is just labeled “Chinese”, without “traditional” and “simplified” in parentheses.

Portuguese is represented by the flag of Brazil, even though it’s also spoken in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, and several other countries.

Then we have Turkish, Tagalog, and Ukrainian, about which there’s not much to say, except that Ukrainian is present here, but Russian isn’t! Does it mean anything? No idea.

Not much to say about Czech and Italian.

English is represented by the United States flag and not by England, U.K., or India (which, depending on how you count, may be the nation with the largest number of English speakers). I don’t understand why is Spanish represented by a European country, while English and Portuguese are represented by American countries.

Not much to say about Korean, Swedish, and Japanese, but there’s a comment about Swedish later.

Finnish is labeled “Suomalainen”. This word describes a Finnish person, and is also used as the adjective “Finnish” for describing some things, but not the Finnish language.

Then we have “Arabic”. Like Hejazi, it’s written from left to right and in disconnected letters. The flag is fuzzy, but it’s probably the UAE one. Arabic is spoken in many countries, and over the years, I’ve seen lots of flags representing the Arabic language: Saudi Arabia’s Shahada flag, Palestinian, Jordanian, or UAE flags, the Arabic letter Ayin, etc.

“Bajan” is the Barbadian creole. Today it is spoken by many people, but not written much. Was there someone Barbadian in the filming crew? Does anyone suggest that it will be a big established language used in software user interfaces in 2071 or is it just a joke? (I didn’t know that “Bajan” is a word for describing the Barbadian culture before watching the film, and it’s probably the most useful thing I learned from it.)

Hausa is represented by the flag of Nigeria. This language is also spoken in Niger and in some other countries. It’s one of the world’s biggest languages, and it’s particularly important in all of Western Africa. Nigeria is a heavily multilingual country, and Hausa is just one of its four big languages, the other three being Yoruba, Igbo, and Fula. So it’s not a very good idea to use the Nigerian flag for this.

Catalan is represented by the Catalan independence activists’ flag, with the blue chevron and the star, known as Estelada. The official flag of the autonomous community of Catalonia is just the yellow one with the four red stripes, and it will probably remain its flag if it ever becomes independent. Are they hinting that Catalonia will achieve independence by 2071? Paying tribute to the fact that Catalan is heavily present in many websites and apps? Or just being ignorant?

“Kryuol” is the Jamaican English-based creole. I didn’t know that “Kryuol” is one of its names, but it looks like it appears on some websites, such as this, so it’s probably not a mistake. Like Barbadian, it’s not written much these days, but maybe it will be written more in the future.

“Sranan” is the language of Suriname, a creole based mostly on English and Dutch. There is a Wikipedia in it, but I haven’t seen it written elsewhere.

Next comes one of the oddest entries: “Åland”. Today, it is a name of an island, which is a Swedish-speaking self-administering territory of Finland. About thirty thousand people live there. There is an Åland Swedish dialect, and I cannot say how different it is from standard Swedish, which appears in this selector separately. Will it develop to an independent language by 2071? Maybe, but it’s still odd to see it in the list. Maybe Åland and Suriname will be revealed as the world centers of AI innovation in the sequel? (Netflix, if you’re producing a sequel and use this idea, consider giving me a lifetime ad-free subscription or something.)

And the last one is Azerbaijani. It’s written strangely. Like the names of other languages, its name is written in all-caps: “AZƎRBAYCANLI”. The third letter is Ǝ, which is the capital counterpart of ǝ. It is incorrect, because the name of this language must be written with the letter Ə, which is the capital counterpart of… ə! The small letters look the same, but the capital letters are different. It’s one of most confusing things in the extended Latin alphabet, and the production designers fell for this trap. Also, the name of the language is usually written with the suffix -CA and not the suffix -LI. As it is with the name of the Finnnish language in the same screen, this word is more appropriate for an Azerbaijani person than for the Azerbaijani language.

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So there. Some of the issues are usual and common today: broken Arabic, and wrong character for Azerbaijani.

The most surprising thing is probably the dialects or creoles that are minor or barely existing today: Åland, Hejazi, Bajan, Sranan, Kryuol. Not something that is seen often. Since some of them are Caribbean, perhaps it’s Lopez’s tribute to her Puerto Rican background? But then why aren’t Haitian Creole and Papiamento there, considering that they are much more prominent? I have no answer.

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If you see a language selector in any other movies or in any other interesting place, please let me know!

Podcast episode

Surprisingly, the tables were turned when after an interview at the Wikimedia summit in April, Eva Martin offered to interview me. I agreed, and here is the episode where I elaborate on the experience of the summit with the perspective of being there as a representative for the Wikimedians for Sustainable Development. While it is a bit specific for the summit, it still is a good introduction to the user group.

User group meeting

I announced a user group meeting, but it was not many attendees. I still took some notes and published the minutes.

On a more positive note, another user group member offered to help announce the meetings and already scheduled one for 16 June after a bit of coaching. This is precisely what I hoped for, and with just three or four more members taking on small tasks like this, it will turn into a lively group quickly.

Newsletter

There were also plenty of cool things happening in the community, and the newsletter for May was fun to write.

Grant

Last month, I reported I submitted a grant for starting a secretariat. Unfortunately, it was declined.

This is the first half of my fifth monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.