The Wikimedia movement continues to expand its engagement with global institutions working in the public interest. In this spirit, I am pleased to share that I have been appointed as a Wikimedian-in-Residence (WiR) at the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs under the Wiki4Disarmament initiative. This appointment is a significant step in promoting collaboration between Wikimedia communities and the United Nations system.

A Wikimedian in Residence serves as a bridge between an institution and the Wikimedia community, helping to improve content, facilitate knowledge sharing, and promote open access practices. Through this residency, the aim is to improve the connection between the work of UNODA and Wikimedia projects, ensuring that information related to disarmament and international security is accessible, reliable, and available to a global audience.

The United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs plays an important role in supporting global peace and security by promoting nuclear non-proliferation, reducing conventional weapons, and supporting international disarmament frameworks. Through this residency, the goal is to connect this work with Wikimedia platforms, making critical knowledge on disarmament more accessible, reliable, and multilingual.

Why disarmament knowledge matters?

Disarmament refers to the reduction or elimination of weapons, especially weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear arms. It has been a foundational concern of the United Nations since its inception, as reducing arms and building trust between states are essential for long-term peace.

However, despite its importance, coverage of disarmament topics across Wikimedia projects is uneven. Many important treaties, institutions, and individuals remain underrepresented, especially in non-English languages.

Wiki4Disarmament

Wiki4Disarmament is a collaborative initiative focused on improving public understanding of disarmament, arms control, and peacebuilding. At its core, the project recognizes an important issue: while disarmament is central to international peace and security, much of the available knowledge remains fragmented or difficult to access. The initiative aims to bridge this gap through Wikimedia projects by inter alia, documenting institutions, agreements, individuals, and movements involved in disarmament and arms control efforts.

Wiki4Disarmament covers a wide thematic scope, including weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear, chemical, and biological arms, as well as conventional weapons like small arms and landmines. It also connects with broader intellectual and social dimensions of disarmament, including peace activism, antimilitarism, and emerging challenges such as cyber warfare and autonomous weapons systems. This wide scope reflects the evolving nature of global security and the need for accessible, up-to-date knowledge in these areas.

As a community initiative, Wiki4Disarmament invites participation from Wikimedians around the world. Contributors can engage by creating and improving articles, translating content into different languages, uploading media to Wikimedia Commons, and organizing events such as edit-a-thons and workshops, which are under the project’s scope. These collective efforts will improve publicly accessible knowledge, and also help build a more informed and engaged global community around issues of peace and security.

Looking ahead, this residency represents an opportunity to improve collaboration between the Wikimedia movement and the United Nations by embedding open knowledge practices within institutional frameworks. It is a step toward ensuring that critical topics like disarmament are accessible to anyone seeking to understand them.

To learn more about disarmament and get involved, explore the Wiki4Disarmament initiative on Meta-Wiki (https://w.wiki/JE7X) and visit the United Nations disarmament education platform at https://www.disarmamenteducation.org/. Contributions of all kinds, from editing and translation to research and outreach are welcome.

02/04/2026-08/04/2026

Mapping

• Comments on the following proposal have been requested:
  • Deprecate railway=narrow_gauge
• The following proposals are up for a vote:
  • man_made=cable_landing_station, to standardise the mapping of submarine cable landing station locations in OpenStreetMap. The tag is intended to more accurately help map this important infrastructure for international data connections (voting until 14 April 2026).
  • aerodrome:classification=*, to classify aerodromes more precisely according to their use and significance (e.g. international, regional, or local) (voting until 16 April 2026).

Community

• SeverinGeo, one of the French editors on weeklyOSM, has started a subjective review of weeklyOSM on Mastodon threads in French, English, and Portuguese, highlighting relevant information or extending articles with commentary.
• Pieter Vander Vennet provided an overview of the reviews made using MapComplete (2026 edition). Most reviews are located in Europe and focus on categories such as food, shops, and leisure activities.
• Engelbert Modo published , on LinkedIn, about a new initiative titled ‘CityMAPPER Externship 2026’, which aims to develop local capacity on mapping with OpenStreetMap and using open data, with initial focus on urban mapping in Cameroon. This initiative is a pilot project of the UN Mappers, a programme of the United Nations Global Service Centre, and has the sponsorship of the companies IVIDES DATA and TomTom, and the NGOs Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, GeOsm Family, and Geospatial Girls and Kids. You can read a prospectus of the UN Mappers Chapters Programme, the umbrella of the local initiatives.
• JDL09Organic, in a diary entry, presented a collection of Android apps for mobile mapping, including StreetComplete, Every Door, and MapComplete. The post provides a practical overview of their use cases and differences for efficient mapping on the go.
• juminet provided an overview of mapping photovoltaic installations in Wallonia and explains the correct usage of tags such as power=plant and power=generator. The analysis identifies several thousand mapped installations while highlighting gaps, especially in smaller setups.
• mbuege shared his experience capturing 360° imagery for Panoramax and has created a wiki page with tips on equipment and workflows. The guide is intended to be expanded and improved collaboratively by the community.
• watson reported ► on the discovery of a previously unmapped island in the Weddell Sea, which is now being discussed and mapped in OpenStreetMap. The community is debating the correct representation and positioning, as the feature is gradually added to maps and datasets.

Events

• Around 100 students at Brigham Young University took part in a mapathon to contribute OpenStreetMap data for humanitarian purposes. During the event, more than 13,000 features were mapped, mainly in regions such as South Africa and Myanmar.
• The organisers of State of the Map 2026 in Paris have opened their call for presentations, workshops, and panels, with a submission deadline of 27 April 2026. Contributions are invited across topics such as mapping, software development, community, and data analysis.
• Manuel is offering ► a workshop on the JOSM editor at the Graz Linux Days 2026 on Saturday 2 May, which will teach beginner and advanced users how to edit OpenStreetMap data. While using practical examples and exercises, the participants will learn how to work efficiently and error-free with the editor.

OSM research

• HeiGIT and the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy have investigated how OSM data quality affects routing outcomes. Thirty city-to-city routes were computed across several countries and benchmarked against Google Maps, Bing, Apple Maps, and Graphhopper using two criteria: distance and travel time.

Maps

• ^[1] L_J_R presented, via their OSM user diary, Strado, a web map that scores neighbourhoods across 50 European cities using OpenStreetMap data. Based on around 78 million POIs, it uses an H3 grid to analyse liveability and activity. There is also a city dashboard where you can browse all cities with their neighbourhood rankings.
• Frederik Ramm reported that Geofabrik now provides GeoPackage files alongside shapefiles, combining multiple layers into a single file. The datasets have also been expanded with new content such as administrative boundaries, protected areas, and additional POIs previously only available in paid datasets.
• Users can explore the application built using python-maps-vis that visualises river basins and watersheds across North and South America on an interactive map.

OSM in action

• Carlos Carrasco, the developer behind NIMBY Rails, a game with a railway design simulator that allows users to plan and build railway networks on real-world geography, has announced a shift away from the proprietary file format in favour of open standards, specifically Protomaps PMTiles and MapLibre MLT. The change is intended to make it easier for players to generate their own in-game map files.
• The OSRM project noticed that both OSRM and the OpenStreetMap project are properly credited in the Tesla Model Y owner’s manual.

Open Data

• HeiGIT introduced OpenAccessLens, a platform analysing global accessibility to healthcare and education based on OpenStreetMap and openrouteservice. The open dataset is intended to support research, humanitarian work, and policy-making.

Software

• Craig announced that Wandrer, an OpenStreetMap-data-based exploration game, now has ‘100% routing’ tools which lets you create in one go a route covering every road in an area.
• Tobias Knerr introduced, on the OSM Community forum, the OSM2World Object Viewer, a viewer that allows inspection of individual OSM objects in 3D, such as buildings, highways, waterslides, German traffic signs, and more than 200 other types of OSM objects. It fully supports Simple 3D Buildings, fetches up-to-date data on demand, and even enables local tag edits with instant visual feedback.
• The project OpenCourseMaps has introduced a web-based editor designed specifically for mapping golf courses in OpenStreetMap, thus reducing the complexity of doing this in a general purpose editor. It aims to engage golfers in detailed mapping of features such as fairways, greens, and bunkers while ensuring correct OSM tagging and geometry. The YouTube video explains how to map with the editor.
• Michael Reichert presented Wamy (an acronym for ‘Where are my ways’), a prototype of a web map which reconstructs and maps the ways deleted from OpenStreetMap in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. It displays geometries of ways removed since 12 September 2012 (when OpenStreetMap changed its licence to the Open Data Commons Open Database Licence). It is helping to reveal changes in the dataset and potential conflicts around path usage. You can read more in the ‘About’ section.

Programming

• Sander de Snaijer presented ‘Map Gesture Controls’, browser-native hand gesture controls for OpenLayers, powered by MediaPipe and without a backend. A JavaScript library enables gesture-based interactions for web maps and the project enhances map usability with more intuitive controls, especially for touch and trackpad input. The source is available from the GitHub project map-gesture-controls, under a MIT licence.
• Marcos Dione described, in his OSM user diary, a small Python 3 script that scans a local osm2pgsql database for rare and likely wrong tag values and opens the affected objects in the editor for manual review. The approach deliberately targets the long tail of uncommon errors, so corrections can be made directly and in a controlled way. The errors include typos, street names instead of type, and some others.
• Ralph Straumann described on Spatialists – geospatial news, a demo workflow by Riccardo Klinger, which converts OpenStreetMap street network data into vector tiles using GDAL/OGR and integrates them into ArcGIS Enterprise. The pipeline runs on Kubernetes in the ArcGIS Notebook Server. You can read the tutorial on LinkedIn.
• The new iD tagging schema release v6.16.0 includes 34 new icons, 4 new presets (shop=piercing, amenity=kitchen, natural=arete, advertising=sign), new matching fields in various presets, fixes of bad text, avoidance of iD issues, and more.
• Tom Hodson outlined his experience of compiling and running a local copy of the Overpass API on a Mac.

Releases

• Kevin Ratzel introduced Map2Go, a new OpenStreetMap editor for iOS, designed to simplify on-site data collection through suggestions and favourites. The app is currently in early beta and available for testing via TestFlight.
• The OSM-based web map Cartes.app is now available in English (in addition to the original French version), as announced by maelito2000 in the OSM Community forum. Further translations are planned, while current performance issues are caused by the overloaded Overpass instances.
• The DBeaver Community Release 26.0.2 has fixed the ‘access blocked’ error in Spatial Viewer when loading OpenStreetMap tiles and provided other improvements. It is now using a local web server and your firewall might ask you to accept the connection to this server. DBeaver is a free, open-source database management tool which connects to PostgreSQL/PostGIS and other geospatial (and non-geospatial) databases, including MariaDB, DuckDB, MySQL, and SQL Server.
• Zeke Farwell announced that the josm-strava-heatmap version 6 updates the extension to work with Strava’s current heatmap site and cookie requirements for imagery access. Unfortunately this means support for iD editor had to be removed, but you can use the julcnx/strava-heatmap-extension instead, which was designed to be used with iD.
• Rphyrin announced the release of Altilunium LocationPad v26.4.6, introducing several features aimed at addressing personal pain points encountered in the past. This lightweight web app has its focus on mapping, labelling, and revisiting meaningful places on an OpenStreetMap-based map. Designed for quick place logging, personal mapping, and spatial note-taking without accounts. The source is available on GitHub.
• Tracestrack has introduced Tracesmap, a new iOS app for recording and uploading GNSS traces to OpenStreetMap. The app supports multiple map styles and aims to contribute to improving OSM data quality.
• Pablo Brasero reported on the OSM Community forum (in posts [1] and [2]) about the multiple updates to the OpenStreetMap.org website made in March 2026, including UI refinements, better small-screen layouts, and upgrade of iD to version 2.39.5. They have also introduced anti-abuse measures such as Cloudflare Turnstile on sign up and laid groundwork for a future notification system.
• Zkir released version 2.0 of their UrbanEye3D, a JOSM plugin, which significantly improves 3D rendering of OSM data directly within the editor. New features include a 2D ground layer, tree visualisation, and improved background processing for large datasets.

Did you know that …

• … there is a special offer for AI companies: in exchange for a modest donation to the OpenStreetMap project, the donor company will receive a direct download link to OSM data in a machine-friendly format. For a larger donation, the OpenStreetMap Ops Team will provide the full history data via a fresh weekly torrent download, under the ODbL licence.

OSM in the media

• Arshak Ahamed wrote about how the delivery company they work for in Oman has replaced Google Maps with OSM-based services, in order to stop paying $8,000 a month.
• In a blog post, PeopleForBikes described how mapathons help update bicycle infrastructure in OpenStreetMap and improve the accuracy of their City Ratings. Around 60 participants from North America have learned how to use iD and JOSM to map bike lanes, speed limits, and key destinations.

Other “geo” things

• Jet Lag: The Game is a travel competition video series by Wendover Productions channel. Every season is built around a game format that is tailored to its filming location, while taking into account regional geography and available modes of transportation. The challenges vary widely, including tasks such as claiming territories across countries or continents, circumnavigating the globe by air, playing large-scale tag, racing between a country’s northernmost and southernmost points, and staging cross-country games of hide-and-seek, among others.
• Jake Godin reported that the access to open source visuals of the current Iran conflict, which has spread to many parts of the Middle East, continues to be sporadic. In past conflicts satellite imagery has provided a vital overview of potential damage to infrastructure, but nowadays imagery from commercial providers is becoming increasingly restricted and expensive. After the war in Gaza (began in 2023), Bellingcat introduced a free tool authored by University College London lecturer and Bellingcat contributor, Ollie Ballinger, that was able to estimate the number of damaged buildings in a given area. Bellingcat is now introducing an updated version of the open source tool, the Iran Conflict Damage Proxy Map, focused on destruction in Iran and the wider Gulf region, which can be freely accessed.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
	Berlin	Wikimedia e.V. Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24,10963 Berlin	OSM Hackweekend Berlin-Brandenburg 04/2026	2026-04-11 – 2026-04-12
		Armadale Park Cafe	Social Mapping Sunday: Armadale Train Station	2026-04-12
	Milano		Editathon e mapathon alla Milano Marathon 2026	2026-04-12
	Antwerpen		Camera’s in kaart brengen	2026-04-12
	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-04-12
	Meerut	Haldiram’s, Garh Road, Meerut	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.28 (Meerut)	2026-04-12
			Missing Maps : Mapathon en ligne – CartONG [fr]	2026-04-13
	Grenoble	La Turbine	Atelier d’avril 2026 du groupe local de Grenoble	2026-04-13
	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #87	2026-04-13
	Salt Lake City	Woodbine Food Hall	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night	2026-04-14
		Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-04-14
	München	Echardinger Einkehr	Münchner OSM-Treffen	2026-04-14
	Hamburg	Online (Link s. Wiki)	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2026-04-14
		Oloron Sainte Marie	Une cartopartie dédiée à la mobilité durable dans les Montagnes Béarnaises	2026-04-15
		Oloron-Sainte-Marie – La Friche	Cartopartie à Oloron-Sainte-Marie – Projet SYSTOUR	2026-04-15
		MJC de Vienne	Rencontre des contributeurs de Vienne (38)	2026-04-15
			Online Mapathon von ÄRZTE OHNE GRENZEN	2026-04-15
	Karlsruhe	Chiang Mai	Stammtisch Karlsruhe	2026-04-15
	Freiburg im Breisgau	CCCFR, Adlerstr. 12a, Freiburg (Grethergelände)	OSM-Treffen Freiburg/Brsg.	2026-04-16
			OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting	2026-04-17
	Potsdam	Kellermann	Potsdamer Mappertreffen	2026-04-17
		Golem, Avane, Empoli	Mapping Day ad Empoli	2026-04-18
		Dijital Bilgi Derneği	OSM-TR Meet-Up – OSM League Pit-Stop	2026-04-18
	Chennai Corporation		Mapping Party @ Chennai	2026-04-19
	Liège	ULiège-RISE	Understanding the OpenStreetMap ecosystem	2026-04-20
			Missing Maps London: (Online) Mid-Month Mapathon [eng]	2026-04-21
	Lyon	Tubà	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon	2026-04-21
	Chemnitz	Kaffeesatz, Chemnitz	OSM-Stammtisch Chemnitz	2026-04-21
	Derby	The Brunswick, Railway Terrace, Derby	East Midlands pub meet-up	2026-04-21
	Bonn	Dotty’s	199. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn	2026-04-21
	City of London	The Globe pub, Moorgate	London pub meet-up	2026-04-21
		Online	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)	2026-04-21
	Richmond	Richmond, VA USA	Capital One TPM Summit Global Mapathon	2026-04-23
	Bratislava	Prírodovedecká fakulta UK Bratislava	Missing Maps mapathon Bratislava #13	2026-04-23
	Richmond	Virtual	MapRVA Virtual Map & Yap with LaToya Gray-Sparks, VA DHR	2026-04-23
	Tours	Étape 84	Rencontre locale Touraine	2026-04-23
	Catania	Verso Coffice	Modifichiamo Wiki e OSM insieme!	2026-04-23
	Rapperswil-Jona	OST RJ See-Gebäude 6, Rapperswil (SG)	18. Mapathon & Mapping Party Rapperswil 2026	2026-04-24
		Pinneberg	Hamburger Mapping-Spaziergang (in Pinneberg)	2026-04-25
	Mumbai		OSM Mumbai Mapping Party No.9 (Central Line)	2026-04-25
			B of A – EC AM’s Mapathon -Global Service Month	2026-04-27
	Brno	Kamenice 753/5, Brno, Kamenice 753/5, Brno	Dubnový Missing Maps mapathon na Ústavu botaniky a zoologie	2026-04-27
			Missing Maps : Mapathon en ligne – CartONG [fr]	2026-04-27

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, Raquel IVIDES DATA, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred, izen57, mcliquid, s8321414.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

“Can all the museums of a country fit into Wikipedia?”

We didn’t look for the answer to this question at a desk, but in the field by going from museum to museum across Northern Cyprus within a short yet intensive period of time.

As part of the Cyprus Museums: Preserving Heritage, Sharing Knowledge project, we visited a total of 25 museums across 6 different cities in 7 days. This was not just a trip, but a systematic documentation effort. We carefully explored museums in Nicosia, Kyrenia, Famagusta, İskele, Güzelyurt, and Lefke, photographing exhibition spaces, architectural details, collections, and displayed objects in a comprehensive way. The results exceeded our initial expectations. We produced more than 2,000 photographs. Beyond quantity, we also created a strong archive in terms of content quality and documentary value.

Of course, as with any fieldwork, not everything went exactly as planned. Some museums we intended to visit were inaccessible due to restoration work or temporary closures. Yet even these gaps reminded us of something important: cultural heritage is not static, it is constantly evolving.

This experience made one thing very clear:

Not all museums of a country can fit into Wikipedia alone. But they can easily fit into the Wikimedia ecosystem.

Because the issue is not just about writing articles.

Wikipedia is inherently selective. Creating an article for every museum is not always possible due to notability and sourcing requirements. Especially in regions like Northern Cyprus, where international visibility is limited, many museums are barely represented in the digital world.

This is exactly where other Wikimedia projects come into play. Wikimedia Commons preserves the photographs we take not just as images, but as documents. Each image becomes a clear and verifiable record of a museum’s existence. Wikidata transforms these records into structured knowledge. Each museum becomes a data entity connected through its location, type, and other attributes within a global knowledge network.

Together, this creates a three-layered structure:

• Wikipedia tells
• Commons shows
• Wikidata connects

When these three work together, the meaning of “fitting in” is redefined.

Our work in Northern Cyprus is not just a documentation project. It is also an effort to bring the cultural heritage of a relatively underrepresented region into the digital world.

Projects like this do not merely consume existing knowledge they produce it. They make invisible places visible. They ensure that spaces with no digital trace become part of a permanent record.

So, what is the conclusion?

Can all the museums of a country fit into Wikipedia?

No.

But when you go into the field, document, and share, all the museums of a country can find their place within Wikimedia.

And perhaps the real question was never about capacity. The real question was whether we were ready to step inside those museums, document what we see, and say:

“We are here.”

Further links

• Wikimedia Commons Category

On 2 April 2026, a drone attack struck the Al-Jabalain hospital in White Nile state, Sudan. Seven medical staff were killed. It is shocking and at the time I predicted that it would not be covered in the news. It did not. 

What to do? I read the MSF website and learned about a disease called Noma. In 2023 noma was added to the World Health Organization's list of neglected tropical diseases. I am in the process of deepening the information about Noma in Wikidata. It involves tagging papers with "noma", attributing papers to people. Finding new papers and adding them as well. For a recent "systematic scoping review" I am adding all the citations, adding many more papers relevant to the subject. It results in an informative Scholia on the subject. 

When the news is this bad, doing something positive is a way to cope.

Thanks,

       GerardM

From January to March 2026, the EduWiki Hub has continued to grow its collection of Open Educational Resources (OERs), adding materials that support educators, trainers, and learners working with Wikimedia projects.

These newly documented resources reflect key areas in today’s education landscape, from teaching with Wikipedia and strengthening information literacy to exploring the role of generative AI in learning. Each addition contributes to a broader goal: making open knowledge more accessible, practical, and impactful in educational spaces.

A snapshot of the pageview

We invite you to explore them directly on the EduWiki Hub’s Monthly OER Documentation page. The collection is continuously updated and organized to help you easily find materials that match your needs.

The page serves as a growing repository of curated OERs, categorized by skill and use, making it easier for educators and program leaders to integrate Wikimedia into their work.

We also encourage contributions. If you have created an OER or come across a valuable resource, you can share it via the talk page. Your input helps keep the collection relevant, diverse, and responsive to the evolving needs of the global education community.

The relevance of language computing is increasing day by day and it is necessary for small languages to enhance their digital presence. The Wikimedia ecosystem is playing an important role in popularization and conservation of small languages and their knowledge base. But it’s the duty of the native speakers and Wikimedia volunteers to use such ecosystems and do necessary activities to conserve their own language. WikiConference Kerala is conducted with such an aim in mind, to preserve Malayalam and make the community aware about the ways to protect our language and local knowledge using the latest technology.

Where It All Started: WikiConference Kerala 2023

The first WikiConference Kerala started in 2023, in a minimal manner, in an un-conference format at St. Thomas College, Thrissur, Kerala, India on 23 December 2023. The dates were chosen such that it aligns with Malayalam Wikipedia birthday. Around 50 people participated in the event with talks and discussions on more than 20 topics related to Malayalam Wikipedia, Opendata, Mediawiki, Malayalam computing etc.

The Saga Continues: WikiConference Kerala 2024

The success of the first WikiConference Kerala gave us confidence to organize the same event next year, in 2024. This time the WikiConference Kerala 2024 happened at College of Climate Change and Environmental Science, Kerala Agricultural University, Thrissur, , Kerala, India on 28 December 2025. This time we had participation from 100 people which shows the real enthusiasm from the community. This time we have introduced theme based talks which mainly focused on the linguistic diversity and accessibility. Experts who have worked on different and diverse languages related to Malayalam delivered talks on the conference along with Opendata, Accessibility, Mediawiki, Wikiwomen, Malayalam Computing, GLAM etc. This time we saw the filling of the gender gap with separate tracks for women contributors.

Expanding the Vision: WikiConference Kerala 2025

Now the WikiConference Kerala became a proud event for us and slowly it is becoming an integral part of the language community in Kerala. In 2025, the conference team collaborated with Kerala Institute of Local Administration, which was a big step to include a government agency who hosted Panchayathwiki to the picture. The WikiConference Kerala 2025 was conducted at Kerala Institute of Local Administration (KILA) campus, Mulagunnathukavu, Thrissur, Kerala, India on 20 December 2025.

This time, the event started with a cultural performance, Pulluvan pattu, a serpent worship art form, which mesmerised people and made them active to attend the conference. The theme of focus was “Wikipedia; Language;Technology: Future of Knowledge in the era of AI “ which made sure that small languages like Malayalam are serious about AI and its allied technologies. Former CEO of Wikimedia Foundation, Maryana Iskander gave a recorded birthday wish for Malayalam Wikipedia.

The significance of the conference was further highlighted by the announcement of the release of books by M. P. Parameshwaran, the renowned science writer and nuclear engineer, through Malayalam Wikisource and the announcement of the digitization project of books by Vaidyabhooshanam K. Raghavan Thirumulpad, a famous Ayurvedic scholar and practitioner. Following this, the conference featured a panel discussion on “Wikisource: Transform & Preserve the Knowledge”, along with tracks on Malayalam Computing: Accessibility, Wikiwomen, and Wiki Loves.

At the end there was a surprise for the audience: Tholpavakoothu which made the day enjoyable for everyone. The performance was such a wonderful display of colors and light. Apart from just a performance, the team interacted with the participants about the history of Tholpavakoothu and how it is performed.

In the media, WikiConference Kerala 2025 got greater visibility due to the release of the Wikisource project of M P Paramerswaran, which again makes sure the community is working towards open knowledge.

 It’s not easy to organize such a conference. Sahya Digital Conservation Foundation and its co-founder Manoj K took all the responsibilities and took the lead for WikiConference Kerala. Other communities collaborating in WikiConference Kerala 2025 are, Wikimedians of Kerala User Group, Zendalona, Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, OpendataKerala, Free Software Community of India, Free Software Users Group Thrissur. Awesome designs by Jameela P got WikiConference Kerala a lot of visibility from different communities of people.

More details on WikiConference Kerala 2025 can be found on Meta-wiki.

Language computation and perseverance of indigenous as well as local knowledge is not a responsibility of a particular group. At WikiConference Kerala, we strive to sustain these efforts by giving open data, FOSS, and Open Knowledge communities a platform to present their contributions and make more people aware of their work.

The author is the founder of OKA, which is the subject of this article.

Most Wikipedia editors work within a single language. Knowledge that exists in French but not in Spanish, or in German but not in Portuguese, is largely invisible — both to editors and to the hundreds of millions of readers who only access Wikipedia in those languages. Translating well-sourced articles across language editions can often have more impact than writing new content from scratch. The sourcing is already done, the structure is there, and the gaps are known. That was the idea behind OKA, the Open Knowledge Association.

Three years, 80 translators, and 10,000 published articles later, the experiment has attracted both interest and serious scrutiny. This article reflects on what we’ve learned, what we’ve had to improve, and what this experiment suggests about a broader question for the Wikimedia movement: what role should Wikipedia play in an information ecosystem increasingly shaped by AI?

How the workflow works

The workflow used by OKA translators looks like this:

• Translators freely select articles they wish to translate. Optional lists highlight articles missing an equivalent in their language (for example based on pageviews or the featured article label).
• The translator reviews the source article and decides whether it is suitable for translation.
• A draft translation is generated using automated tools.
• The translator then performs a full human review. This includes verifying facts, checking citations, and adapting wording to the target language and community norms.
• The article is published under the translator’s own Wikipedia account.
• More experienced translators help onboard newer participants and occasionally review samples of their work.

Translation on Wikipedia is rarely mechanical work. Articles often require adaptation to different citation practices, templates, and sourcing expectations across language communities. In practice, human verification is still the most time-consuming step.

OKA compensates translators with hourly pay, rather than per article. There are no quotas and no bonuses tied to volume. The intention is to support careful work rather than rewarding speed.

Translators participate as independent editors. OKA provides guidance and funding, but editorial decisions remain theirs. Participants disclose their paid status on their user pages in accordance with Wikimedia’s paid editing policies.

Early in the project we mostly relied on traditional machine translation tools. When newer language models became available, we found that newer technology often produced clearer first drafts and handled complex sentence structures better. The result was a shift in where translators spent their time. Instead of rewriting awkward machine output, they could focus more on verification: checking claims against sources, ensuring citations were correct, and adapting the article to local context.

What we found

In late 2025, we conducted a structured evaluation of AI-assisted translation across 119 articles and 10 language pairs, supported by Wikimedia CH. The study analyzed 1,068 hours of translation work and tracked the corrections made between AI drafts and the final published articles.

• 27% of AI-generated text was modified before publication.
• 74% of corrections addressed AI-introduced issues.
• 26% corrected weaknesses already present in the source article.
• 5–6% of errors altered the meaning of the original text

The numbers probably won’t surprise anyone, but they’re worth stating plainly: you cannot publish this output unreviewed. At the same time, the translation process often improves the original. Translators regularly identify unclear wording, outdated phrasing, or ambiguous citations while working through the text. In that sense, translation can also function as a form of maintenance for the encyclopedia.

This analysis also showed substantial variation between models, which informed subsequent adjustments to the tools which OKA advised translators to use.

On quality, scrutiny, and what we changed

Any organized editing effort at scale attracts attention. The community discussion that preceded a recent article in 404 Media was at times more heated than productive. But the discussion highlighted several real issues: specific articles with fabricated citations, formatting breakages, and instances where translators clearly hadn’t read their own output. Those findings convinced me to invest more in verification, even where it reduces efficiency or translator autonomy.

The most serious case involved a translator who went beyond straightforward translation and added content not present in the source – including a citation that pointed to a source page that had nothing to do with the subject. This wasn’t a mistranslation. It was an editorial decision that went wrong, and the AI draft made it easier for a bad decision to slip through unnoticed. The risk, I came to understand, isn’t primarily in translation itself. It’s in the moments where translators act as editors: adding content, filling gaps, inferring.

Even rare mistakes matter for an encyclopedia that relies on trust.

To be clear about proportion: well under 1% of the 10,000 articles we have published were ever flagged for issues of the kind described above – and in most of those cases, the problems affected only a small portion of the article itself. If the quality problems were systematic, we would have seen deletions at scale or waves of editor suspensions. Neither happened. The community discussion identified real issues that needed addressing, but it was a discussion about raising standards, not evidence of a project producing broadly unreliable content. It’s important to say that plainly, not to deflect criticism, but because the proportion matters when evaluating whether AI-assisted translation can work at all.

What struck me about the discussion – despite its heat – is that Wikipedia’s governance functioned. Editors identified problems, discussed them publicly, and implemented restrictions through a transparent process. I would prefer the community were more open to AI-assisted experimentation rather than defaulting toward restriction; the process was messy and at times hostile. But it produced a real outcome through a legitimate mechanism, and that is more than exists anywhere when AI systems consume this same content without any community having a say.

Following that discussion, several changes were introduced:

• Stricter sourcing guidance. Translators are now instructed not to translate any sentence unless its claims can be clearly supported by inline sources that they have manually checked. No expansions, no inferences from unlisted sources. Earlier guidance allowed more discretion.
• Comparison checks. We are testing prompts where a second language model compares the source and translated text to highlight possible discrepancies. AI checking AI is obviously not reliable in isolation — this is a complement to manual review, not a substitute for it.
• Exploring peer review. We are studying whether peer review among translators before publication could help detect issues earlier.
• Alignment with the community’s “four strikes” rule. The recent community discussion introduced restrictions for OKA editors producing repeated problematic translations. We welcome this clarification, which formalizes quality expectations that already existed within OKA.

These measures complement the existing requirement that translators manually review every sentence. No single safeguard is perfect. The goal is to layer multiple checks.

Incentives and participation

Some editors have raised concerns about incentive distortion. Funding can change behavior.

For that reason, compensation was designed to be hourly rather than per article. There are no quantity targets. Monitoring output is mainly used to detect anomalies, not to reward productivity.

Interestingly, unusually high output has sometimes served as an early signal that closer review was needed. That reinforced the importance of tracking quality indicators rather than celebrating volume.

Another recurring question concerns where translators come from.

Roughly half of the articles produced so far have been published in the Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedias, where large communities still face significant coverage gaps in foundational topics. Many of our translators are multilingual editors who move fluidly between language communities – a translator based in Latin America might translate a French article into English. The fact that OKA funding goes further in some regions than others is simply part of the model: the same budget supports more contributors, which means more coverage. It is better to acknowledge that openly.

Many translators participate part-time alongside other activities. Some combine translation work with university studies. Others do it as a complement to other professional work that may pay better but is less personally engaging. The flexible structure allows contributors to participate at different stages of their careers.

Participation can also create pathways into the broader Wikimedia movement. Translators are encouraged to engage with local Wikimedia communities, and in some cases OKA provides financial support to help participants attend regional Wikimedia events.

In several cases, translators have later moved on to better-paid professional opportunities after gaining experience with translation, sourcing, and collaborative editing through the program. We see that as a positive outcome and encourage it.

In other words, the program is not simply producing translated articles. It can also function as an entry point for new contributors to learn Wikipedia’s editorial practices and become involved in the wider Wikimedia ecosystem.

Wikipedia’s role in the AI knowledge ecosystem: a forced choice we should refuse

The roundtable report published last year by Wikimedia CH and Open Future – a discussion in which I participated in alongside around twenty Wikimedians, AI researchers, and data governance experts – framed a question I keep returning to: should Wikipedia try to remain a destination for human readers, or adapt to becoming ground truth for AI systems?

The trend is already visible. Wikipedia has seen an 8% decrease in human traffic alongside 50% growth in overall traffic attributed to bots. AI tools increasingly access Wikipedia in real time as a live reference rather than directing users to visit it. The concern isn’t hypothetical. Wikipedia could become what the roundtable called “highly used but politically weak infrastructure” – indispensable to AI systems but invisible to human users, underfunded, and increasingly unable to defend the public interest.

I don’t think this should be a forced choice. Wikipedia cannot prevent AI systems from using its content, nor should it try: that reuse is a feature, not a bug, of the open license. But Wikipedia’s value to those AI systems depends entirely on the content remaining human-curated, sourced, and verifiable. If the human editorial community degrades because editors stop coming, because the site feels irrelevant, or because there is no strong base of content to improve on, Wikipedia loses its value in both directions simultaneously. You cannot have the ground truth layer without the living community that produces and maintains it.

This is also why I think the translated articles OKA produces matter beyond their direct value to readers. A well-translated, well-sourced article in Spanish or Portuguese is a foundation. It attracts human editors who can improve, correct, or extend it. These editors might not have started from scratch but will engage seriously with something that already exists. The maintenance work of fixing citations, updating outdated content, and improving structure is genuinely valuable and often unpopular among volunteer editors. Paid programs can help absorb some of that load, not as a replacement for volunteer editing, but as infrastructure that makes volunteer editing more productive.

What follows, I think, is that Wikimedia communities need to engage actively with how AI tools are used within Wikipedia instead of either avoiding them entirely or watching external systems deploy them without accountability. The roundtable noted that Wikipedia was itself a force of disruptive innovation when it emerged. Unlike institutions that had to navigate the shift from analogue to digital, the Wikimedia movement has never faced a moment where its fundamental ways of working were seriously challenged. That history may make it harder to recognize the urgency now.

Since this article was written, English Wikipedia has introduced near-complete bans on LLM-generated content (excluding translations) — a development that makes the question in this piece more urgent, not less. The bans reflect genuine frustration from volunteer editors overwhelmed by AI-related cleanup work, and that frustration is legitimate. But a blanket restriction also forecloses the kind of careful, disclosed, community-governed experimentation this article describes. Whether that tradeoff was the right one is a question the Wikimedia movement will be living with for some time.

Tools can sharpen a first draft; they can’t decide what belongs in an encyclopedia. OKA is one small experiment in using these tools under community governance, with transparency about what works and what doesn’t. Some approaches have worked; others haven’t. What I’ve become convinced of is that these experiments must happen openly and remain subject to community oversight not because that is comfortable, but because that is what keeps Wikipedia’s value intact on both sides of the equation.

Feedback and contact
Wikipedia volunteers who have questions about OKA translations or edits, concerns about specific articles or editors, or general feedback about the program are welcome to reach out. You can contact us at info@oka.wiki, leave a message on the OKA page on Meta-Wiki, or reach me directly on my talk page.

Note: Parts of this article were drafted with assistance from a large language model. All substantive content, analysis, and conclusions were written and reviewed by the author.

A quiet revolution took center stage this March at Que Pasa, Barlin St., Naga City, the Philippines.

As the nation celebrated National Women’s Month, the Philippine Wikimedia Community User Group successfully launched the inaugural WikiWomen Filipinas Summit 2026, a landmark event dedicated to one of the internet’s most pressing challenges: the gender gap in digital knowledge.

The summit served as a collaborative sanctuary for women, gender minorities, and allies. It wasn’t just a simple meeting; it was a strategic masterclass designed to ensure that the achievements of Filipinas are no longer “missing links” on the world’s largest encyclopedia.

Leadership in Action

The summit opened with an inspiring address from Jamin Phoebe Sabaybay, Acting Naga City Youth Mayor. Reflecting on her own trajectory, the youth leader emphasized the power of mentorship.

Working alongside former Vice President Leni Robredo, the current City Mayor, seasoned mentors, and local leaders has been instrumental in evolving her leadership journey. In her message, she echoed the summit’s core theme of bridging the gap between generations of changemakers.

“In our city, we take pride in being the cradle of good governance in the entire country; this means offering yourself as a city youth official is no easy task. The very essence of the CYO program, when it was created back in 1989, was to give the young people of Naga firsthand experience in governance. However, nearly four decades later, we have matured from just learning to actually making a community impact,” she said.

The Architects of Representation

Three passionate Wikimedians took the floor to showcase the community’s localized campaigns, turning global missions into regional triumphs:

• Maffeth Opiana-Sto. Tomas introduced the #SheSaid initiative, celebrating women’s words.
• Sheena Bagacina detailed the WikiWomen Filipinas and WikiGap campaigns, focusing on increasing Wikipedia articles about notable Filipinas.
• Irvin Sto. Tomas connected gender with heritage, presenting the Feminism+Folklore and Wiki Loves Folklore campaigns.

Quantifying Impact: The #SheSaid Movement

The summit celebrated the extraordinary success of the SheSaid 2025-2026 campaign in the Philippines. This initiative has seen a massive surge in contributions, immortalizing the words of Filipina icons:

Massive Contribution Volume: Top contributors like Rockbfr (323 points), Derk29 (297 points), and Dos Padayon (198 points) have added hundreds of quotes for Filipinas, ranging from Nobel laureate Maria Ressa to Olympic gold medalist Hidilyn Diaz.

100Quotes, 100Days Milestone: Leading the charge in consistency, Maffeth.opiana reached Day 112 of her challenge, while Filipinayzd and Sheena Aloner followed closely with 108 and 91 days respectively. Over-all, 479 new Wikiquote articles have been created by 46 participants.

WikiGap: Closing the Digital Divide

A cornerstone of the summit was the launch of the Wiki Gap Campaign Philippines 2026, which runs from March 8 to May 8, 2026. This three-month initiative focuses on building a more gender-equal internet through:

Targeted Content Creation: Motivating participants to increase representation by editing and translating articles about women across English, Tagalog, Cebuano, and Central Bikol Wikipedias.

Broad Inclusivity: The campaign actively welcomes participants from all backgrounds, regardless of occupation or affiliation, to foster a truly diverse editing community.

Sustained Momentum: Following a highly successful 2025 campaign that saw 492 new articles and 567 improvements, the 2026 edition aims to set even higher benchmarks for digital advocacy.

Bridging Culture and Gender: Feminism and Folklore

The summit also highlighted the Feminism and Folklore 2026 campaign, focusing on the intersection of heritage and gender:

Visual Documentation: Over 1,000 high-quality photographs from 23 participants have been submitted to Wiki Loves Folklore in the Philippines, capturing rituals and crafts often preserved by women.

Diverse Storytelling: Using the Campwiz tool, participants are ensuring women’s roles as custodians of oral traditions are documented in local languages. Currently, there are 127 articles meeting the minimum 4,000 bytes or 400 words requirement added by 35 contributors.

A New Guard of Female Leadership

The summit also marked a pivotal organizational milestone. During the Annual General Meeting, a new 5-member board was elected for the 2026–2027 term: Sheena Bagacina, Bernadette Roco, Leah Sumalinog, Marife Altabano, and Maffeth Opiana-Sto. Tomas. Naga City Councilor David Casper Nathan Sergio formalized their Transition.

Legacy and the Road Ahead

From educators to youth leaders, the attendees left Naga City with a roadmap for sustained engagement. As part of its broader strategy within the ESEAP region, the PhilWiki Community is committed to ensuring the future of digital knowledge in the Philippines is truly equitable.

In her closing words, Jamin Phoebe said, “I believe women are better leaders. It is already proven. So my fellow ladies, keep on taking up space, the world needs more of us. Cheers, and Happy Women’s Month!”

Irvin P. Sto. Tomas (User:Filipinayzd) is the Project Director and Founding Chair of the PhilWiki Community. He is also part of the Wikisource Loves Manuscripts Learning Partners Network and Bikol Wikipedia Community. He currently serves as Board Secretary of the Commons Photographers User Group, Regional Ambassador for the ESEAP Region of the Wiki Loves Folklore International, Southeast & East Asia Representative of the Wikipedia Asian Month User Group, and Community Connector of the ESEAP Wikimedia Hub.

On 6th April 2026, the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group (DWUG) successfully organized a hands-on training session on Wikimedia Commons at the user group office in Tamale. The training brought together community volunteers with the aim of equipping them with essential skills to contribute effectively to Wikimedia platforms, particularly Wikimedia Commons.

The program commenced with an opening prayer led by a volunteer, followed by a brief introduction of participants and facilitators. In his opening remarks, Musah Fuseini welcomed participants and emphasized the importance of contributing local content to global knowledge platforms, especially through images and multimedia.

A comprehensive session on Wikimedia Commons was delivered by Alhaj Darajaati, who introduced participants to the platform, its purpose, and its role in supporting Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. He highlighted the importance of uploading freely licensed media that reflects local culture, history, and everyday life.

This was followed by a practical demonstration by Achiri Bitamsili on how to upload images to Wikimedia Commons. Participants were guided step-by-step through the upload process, including selecting appropriate files, adding accurate descriptions, categorizing content, and applying correct licenses.

Another session, facilitated by Alhaji Darajat, focused on how to upload videos to Wikimedia Commons. Participants learned the technical requirements and best practices for contributing video content.

A key highlight of the training was the hands-on session, where volunteers actively practiced what they had learned. During this session, facilitators moved around to assist participants individually. Many volunteers were supported in creating their Wikipedia usernames, ensuring they could fully participate in Wikimedia projects. Participants also successfully uploaded their first images to Wikimedia Commons under guidance.

The session concluded with an interactive Q&A segment where participants asked questions and received clarifications on various aspects of Wikimedia Commons and contributions. Closing remarks were delivered by team members, who encouraged participants to continue contributing beyond the training.

Overall, the training was impactful, as it not only introduced new volunteers to Wikimedia Commons but also empowered them with practical skills to begin contributing immediately. The Dagbani Wikimedians User Group remains committed to building the capacity of community members and promoting the documentation of local knowledge through Wikimedia platforms.

WikiConference India 2026 word text by Gnoeee CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

Last month, we shared the first major milestone for WikiConference India (WCI) 2026:the opening of scholarship applications under the spirit of Namukku Othukoodam, meaning “Let us come together.” The response so far reflects the energy and commitment of the Wikimedia communities across South Asia, especially in India. While that invitation focused on “who” should be there, today we are excited to share the “why”.

As we prepare to meet in Kochi this September, we are centring our conversations, workshops, and collaborations around a shared, forward-looking vision. We are excited to introduce the theme that will guide WikiConference India 2026:

Theme: “Reimagining the Knowledge Commons”

Sub-title: Community leadership for the future of Wikimedia

Why this theme?

The digital landscape is shifting rapidly- from the rise of new AI technologies to changing patterns in how people seek and trust information. The knowledge commons we have built over the last two decades now exists within a more complex and evolving ecosystem.

To ensure that knowledge remains open, inclusive, safe, and accessible, we cannot simply maintain what exists: we must actively shape what comes next. This theme aligns closely with broader Wikimedia movement priorities, as highlighted in the Wikimedia Foundation’s global trends. In a time of declining trust in online information and the rapid rise of AI-generated content, strengthening community-led, human-created knowledge becomes more critical than ever.

This theme works because it is:

• Future-oriented: It acknowledges that the movement must evolve to stay relevant.
• Grounded in community agency: It places the power of this evolution in the hands of contributors, editors, and organizers who lead our projects every day.
• A call for new models: It encourages us to think beyond traditional editing and explore new ways of participation and knowledge creation that reflect the diversity of India and South Asia.

“The idea of ‘reimagining’ invites us to pause and reflect on how we build and share knowledge today. It’s also a call to actively shape what the Wikimedia movement can become tomorrow- together, as communities.”
— Core Organising Team, WikiConference India 2026

Connecting the Dots

In our first blog, we spoke about the importance of bringing together diverse voices from across Indic-language projects. Strengthening collaboration across these communities is essential as we navigate the future.

Reimagining the knowledge commons is not only about tools or platforms- it is also about leadership. It is about ensuring that regional languages, local knowledge systems, and underrepresented histories remain at the heart of the global movement.

The Wikimedia movement has always been rooted in a shared knowledge commons- built by communities, for communities. As the ecosystem evolves, so do the questions we must ask:

• How do we sustain and grow participatory knowledge models in a changing technological landscape?
• What new forms of collaboration and contribution can create meaningful impact?
• How can communities continue to lead and shape the future of open knowledge?

“Reimagining the Knowledge Commons” invites us to reflect on these questions together, while staying grounded in what makes Wikimedia unique: community agency.

“WikiConference India has always been about people- the communities who build and sustain the knowledge commons. The future of Wikimedia will be shaped by community leadership that is inclusive, adaptive, and bold in reimagining how knowledge is created and shared.” — Manavpreet Kaur, Core Organising Team WikiConference India 2016

What to expect

Over the coming months, the program will be shaped around this theme. You can expect sessions that challenge current workflows, highlight community-led innovations, and explore pathways for the future of the Wikimedia movement in India.

We envision WikiConference India 2026 as more than a conference- it is a space to collectively imagine and design the future of one of the internet’s most important shared resources.

Join the Conversation

If you haven’t already, make sure to:

• Apply for a Scholarship: The deadline is April 15, 2026.
• Stay Tuned: We will soon be opening the call for program submissions, where you can propose sessions that align with our new theme.

Let’s come together in Kochi to reimagine what we can build together.

I was busy minding my life and our non-government organization, growing Shared Knowledge Asia Pacific ( SKAP) in Northern Luzon island of the Philippines and to be honest, our team has a lot to do. Building strategic alliances was a huge, doing due diligence, looking for places to put Wikiprint (Wikipedia footprint) in towns and communities that have barely any or no Wikipedia projects and build communities too.

Then I read somewhere and heard from other Wikimedians that the second largest Wikipedia which happens to be in the Philippines, in one of the largest provinces, rich in culture and heritage, will be deleted because 99% of the articles were created by a bot. Most importantly, according to the conversation, there is no human heartbeat as the former editors from a decade back or more were no longer active and were not replaced by younger ones.

The Cebuano Wikipedia failed to create a community pipeline to sustain its growth and existence.

Without human editors, Cebuano Wikipedia became a ghost town

So the second largest Wikipedia, next to English Wikipedia, with over 6 Million articles had become a ghost town.

It feels terrible for the Philippines and some Filipino Wikimedians to even think of deleting those bot creations. If only there is a community that will continue on, the talks of deletion may be stalled, perhaps. Crossing fingers.

The SKAP Officers met and explored the probability of establishing a WikiClub in Cebu. Just a small one, 5 people at first, at least, hopefully. And we gambled.

It is not easy to build. We do not speak the Cebuano language and it was clearly the greatest barrier in community growth. But the Cebuanos are kind and generous for assistance, speaking patiently with us as we try to meet in the middle. I met Aileen, Charmaine and Bim. We learned Cebuano words fast and steady and we try to blend English or try to speak in Ceblish ( mix of Cebuano ang English language) to cope up and be understood.

And then we launched

Launching a community is not easy especially in a ghost town. Resurrecting a dormant community is harder than building a new one from scratch. Sometimes people will be nice and they come to your event. Most frequently, they don’t show up thinking they have nothing to gain form aliens like us. Cebuanos have a very strong community spirit though, and they are proud of their culture and heritage.

Giving up is not an option, even if it is difficult to navigate the terrain

It is very easy to pack up and leave. When people are not interested in your cause, you get hurt and the first thing that comes to mind is not fight, but flight. When we invited a thousand people, successively, only 250 will respect and atted. Only one in four. Its not that bad if 25% is the batting average but.. we wanted more. There was a time we said, okay let’s pack our bags and leave Cebu. Let the Movement decide its fate. Whether they delete all of it or not, so be it. However, I still gave it one last chance.

In the darkest of nights, a silver lining appears. We met partner schools who are interested in language preservation, tourism promotion, AI literacy, narrative strategy, and Cebuano studies. We met with government officers and collaborated with them. We asked what they need and if the WikiClub can help with content, as long as it is within the boundaries of Wikimedia policies, we proceed. WikiClub Cebu has attracted like minded organizations and offered help, offered a free venue like the Cebu City Public Library which is open 24/7. Universities and public high schools send their students to join WikiClub Cebu events and edit-a thons, controlled numbers but significant.

Gradually, people start to attend, participate, edit, upload and celebrate with the community.

Time to celebrate

During Wikipedia’s 25th Birthday, WikiClub Cebu collaborated with SKAP to celebrate its milestone. Our partner Library provided a place for us to edit, do a mini Wikiexpedition, bond with other Wikimedians and share a birthday cake.

Barely after a year, and almost deciding to pack up and leave, the Cebuano Wikipedia is no longer a ghost town. It has silently developed a heart beat, mostly from Cebuano women who believe in the cause, the outreach and advocacy of open knowledge and the commons. A sprouting community is a good gift for Wikipedia @25. WikiClub Cebu has been the model for Mindanao cities to establish their own WikiClubs too. It inspired three (3) WikiClubs across Mindanao, such as WikiClub Zamboanga, WikiClub Davao and WikiClub Iligan to organize their own too.

From ‘Ghost town’ to Growth Engine

WikiClub Cebu tries to overcome its challenges and pave the way for other WikiClubs to start their own. And that is a truly positive impact. Aside from the humble numbers of Cebu, its outcome could not happen without the trust of its strategic institutional partners, Wikimedia Foundation included.

With 9 strategic partners on board, the Cebuano language is officially entering a new era of open knowledge. We are not just surviving; we are leading the Cebuano language into a new era of open knowledge while slowly inspiring other local communities to start and grow their own. We are starting to be Visayas and Mindanao region’s growth engine. Our numbers may be small and conservative, but we recognize each member’s effort. We will just continue to tread on and spread the knowledge and grow our projects across the two main islands of the Philippine archipelago.

This article is co-written with LadyPinayForever and Bim24.

🕑 52 minutes

Wandji Collins is a software engineer and engineering manager at Tech Chantier, as well as a volunteer MediaWiki developer.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Tech Chantier
• Between the Brackets Episode 36: Derick Alangi
• Wiki Mentor Africa
• Lexicographical data on Wikidata
• Page Forms MediaWiki extension

• From the team: GLAM in Equinox
• Albania report: Wikigap 2026 in Tirana, Albania
• Aruba report: Celebrating 20 Years of Papiamentu/o Wikipedia
• Bolivia report: The Family Treasures Project Returns, with New GLAM Partners
• Brazil report: Wiki Loves Folklore Brazil defines six categories to represent Brazilian culture on Commons
• Colombia report: Architecture in the public domain in libraries in Nariño/Arquitectura en dominio público en bibliotecas nariñenses
• Czech Republic report: Main Wikimedian in Residence report for 2025 is here
• Germany report: Art History Loves Wiki 2026 – digital/local. collection loves wiki
• India report: Collaboration resumes with the British Library for Bangla Wikisource
• Italy report: 2026 winners projects
• New Zealand report: New Zealand Bioeconomy Science Institute Wikimedian in Residence update, a letter published in Nature & Architecture + Women NZ
• North Macedonia report: Wikimedia MKD’s GLAM Highlights: Botany and Beyond
• Portugal report: March in Portugal
• Serbia report: March in Wikimedia Serbia
• Sweden report: Looking for similar images
• Switzerland report: GLAM Wiki Group, Donna, CoCreation PTT-Archive
• UK report: CILIP MDG 2026 Conference, Library meetups and the World’s Enamels
• Ukraine report: Spring 2026 news from Ukraine – Wiki Loves Folklore & more #1Lib1Ref
• USA report: MoMA’s International Traveling Exhibitions and Wikidata on the LD4 Arts Affinity Group April Community Call
• Biodiversity Heritage Library report: Updates on work by BHL-Wiki Working Group members
• AvoinGLAM report: Oulu Löyly
• Memory of the World report: Indigenous languages on the Main Page
• Calendar: April’s GLAM events

By Kaelynn Ross, student at the University of Alaska Anchorage

Trying to figure out a direction for my Wikipedia assignment last term proved to be tricky. I hadn’t spent much time on Wikipedia previously, and all of the things I was interested in also seemed to be loved by many other editors, so finding additional sources to bring to those articles would be difficult. But when I followed my professor’s advice to find a female artist who didn’t have much information on Wikipedia, I landed on Ellen Thesleff, a Finnish expressionist painter.  And while it was a challenge to navigate the language barrier in most of the available sources about her, I learned some really interesting ideas through my research, like the median of modernism that Ellen practiced, and how important the experience of travel was for her artistic perspective.

I also learned a great deal about Wikipedia itself. At its core, it’s a place for people to share verifiable information about things they love. Wikipedia has tons of information on almost anything popular, but it also gives someone the opportunity to use their unique expertise to bring an unknown topic to light when the world isn’t yet aware of it. When using Wikipedia, I learned how to find articles that used high-quality sources, and then use those sources to find other research avenues. I found that looking for information about a young, unknown woman artist like Ellen can be difficult — it is hard to find any scientific articles, books, or even websites about her. This made me dig deeper than just a simple Google search of her name. I looked for the people who found Ellen interesting and used what they shared about her to further my research,  guiding me to books by Finnish artists or to articles from their country that could be translated. 

When I discovered it, Ellen’s Wikipedia article had only four references, which provided vague information about who Ellen was and what her life was like. When searching for my own references, I was blessed enough to find two books and a lengthy article on Ellen’s artwork and life. It was wonderful to add these sources into the Wikipedia article, contributing more information about Ellen’s life. 

Contributing to this Wikipedia article taught me to critically analyze articles and use the references within related articles to uncover more information about a topic. This assignment was more than typical research; it required real curiosity and exploration to bring attention to someone underrepresented. My experience showed me how Wikipedia helps illuminate less recognized artists, encouraging diverse artistic appreciation and moving beyond traditional standards. 

By contributing to the Wikipedia article about Ellen Thesleff, I have played a small part in bringing women in art more into the light. Women artists on Wikipedia are some of the least-known people on the platform, and adding more information to Ellen’s article helps encourage readers to look at artists like Ellen.

My Wikipedia assignment also gave me time to better understand the online encyclopedia and give it the appreciation it deserves. Wikipedia is a place to give people the opportunity to share their interests with the world through careful research and neutral, fact-based writing. This assignment also pushed me to look beyond conventional research paths – rather than always heading straight to Google Scholar, I can also follow the context and related sources of my topic, helping me uncover high-quality sources that meaningfully support my work.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course or know an instructor who may be interested? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.

Charity board meetings are full of legalese that sounds important but mostly isn't. Here's what you're actually being asked, and why you should probably apply to be a trustee.

26/03/2026-01/04/2026

About us

• We made a mistake last week regarding the proposed safari service road tag. The proposed service=safari tag is to be used in combination with a highway=service tag.

Mapping

• Comments are requested on this proposal:
  • highway=service + service=safari to map dedicated service roads in safari parks.
• The following proposals are up for a vote:
  • man_made=cable_landing_station, to standardise the mapping of submarine cable landing station locations in OpenStreetMap. The tag is intended to help map this important infrastructure for international data connections more accurately (voting until 14 April 2026).
  • aerodrome:classification=*, to classify aerodromes more precisely according to their use and significance (e.g. international, regional or local) (voting until 16 April 2026).

Mapping campaigns

• The new UK Quarterly Project for Q2 2026 focuses on mapping and improving address data in OpenStreetMap. The Wiki page provides ideas, datasets, tools, and resources to support contributors.

Community

• Raquel Dezidério Souto published in her OSM user diary about a new partnership between the Virtual Institute for Sustainable Development – IVIDES.org®, the IVIDES DATA® IT consulting, and the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP, São Paulo, Brazil), which aims to develop a collaborative micromapping effort with OpenStreetMap and uMap, envolving three communities that were severely affected by the major disaster that occurred in 2023, on the Southern Coast of São Paulo.
• assanges has analysed Taiwan’s OpenStreetMap phone‑number data, highlighting inconsistent separators, missing or malformed country codes, and proposed normalising all numbers to the E.123 format for consistency reasons.
• Anne-Karoline Distel explained how they started mapping ‘hogbacks’, medieval grave markers from the 10th to 12th century, in OpenStreetMap using the tag historic=hogback. These rare objects, mainly found in northern England, are intended to be more easily identifiable through dedicated tagging.
• ^[1] Koreller shared a diary post highlighting some of the lesser-known features and keyboard shortcuts in JOSM, including parallel drawing, precise angle construction, and transferring object history. The collection demonstrates how plugins and shortcuts can enable more efficient and accurate mapping workflows.
• Marcus Jaschen, developer of bikerouter.de, talked about the development and functionalities of his BRouter-based route planner in the bike podcast Antritt.
• Christian Quest presented a proof of concept that uses Geocalib to automatically correct tilted 360° images, such as those captured by helmet-mounted cameras, and apply corrections to entire sequences. The bot has already processed tens of thousands of images, applying heuristics to propagate corrections from individual fixes to larger image sets.
• rphyrin reported on his experience of attending the OpenStreetMap Local Chapters and Communities Congress 2026, providing a resume of the questions and answers (Q&A) posed by the organisers during the meeting.
• Christoph Hormann has extended his Musaicum project, which uses high-resolution satellite data to create detailed mosaics, to include Greenland.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Minh Nguyễn informed mappers that the operations team has installed the DiscussionTools extension. This extension adds a number of little features to make discussions on the wiki talk pages more intuitive. The extension has releases for both the version of MediaWiki used by the OSMF, and for the latest version of MediaWiki.

Local chapter news

• The OpenStreetMap US has launched a story map competition – the State of the Map US Narrative Map Competition, inviting the global community to create map-based storytelling projects. Participants are encouraged to submit narrative-driven maps, with selected entries showcased at the State of the Map US 2026.
• The Associació Catalana de l’OpenStreetMap has applied to become an official Local Chapter of the OSM Foundation and has opened a public discussion on the OSM Community forum. Due to overlapping areas of interest, feedback is especially requested from existing Local Chapters in Spain, France, and Italy.

Events

• The organisers of the Graz Linux Days 2026 have published their full programme, featuring talks and workshops on open source and free software. The event takes place in Graz (Austria) on 10 and 11 April and will include several sessions related to OpenStreetMap and geodata.
• The University of Zaragoza is hosting a humanitarian mapathon on Tuesday 7 April in collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières, OpenStreetMap Spain, and local mapping groups. The event will take place both in person and online as part of the regular ‘MappyHour’ sessions.
• The programme for the State of the Map US 2026 has been published. The event will be held in Madison, Wisconsin from 11 to 13 June. There is a great line-up this year with 80+ presentations covering a breadth of topics from motivating mappers, to open POI’s, to safeguarding America’s open infrastructure data, and much more.

OSM research

• A Scientific Reports study explored integrating OpenStreetMap with satellite and environmental data in a unified deep learning framework for urban analysis. OSM serves as a key geospatial layer supporting tasks such as land-use mapping, building extraction, and traffic modelling.
• HeiGIT reported that they conducted a controlled experiment to measure how humans modify AI-generated road geometries at the atomic level by using both independent and cross redundancy mapping.

Maps

• The platform Blitzortung provides an interactive map showing lightning strikes worldwide in near real time. The data comes from a non-commercial global network of around 1,800 volunteer-operated detection stations and is visualised on maps including OpenStreetMap-based layers.
• The Climate Action Navigator and Heal apps, maintained by HeiGIT, help cities assess how well urban environments support walking under hot conditions and other evaluations related to the climate change and extreme weather conditions.
• The platform Electricity Maps provides an interactive map displaying the current electricity mix, carbon intensity, and energy flows for countries in near real time. It allows users to explore where electricity comes from and how emissions and renewable shares evolve throughout the day.

OSM in action

• Steven Reid has programmed an interactive 3D visualisation of the earth directly in the browser. Users can explore global geodata and switch between different visualisations, using OpenStreetMap as one of the data sources.

Open Data

• The Instituto Geográfico Nacional – IGN (Spain) has released ► two PMTiles files for mobile app, which are available for download and using under the licence CC-BY 4.0.
• Quincy Morgan posted on LinkedIn that Pinhead, a collection of .SVG map icons, is available freely on Wikimedia and can be used in projects documented on Wikipedia or Wikidata. Pinhead is also now available in the QGIS map icons collection.

Software

• Evan Applegate posted about the experience of generating web maps with OpenFreeMap, after following a tutorial on PMTiles, created by Ben Welsh, a data journalist and editor based in New York.
• Alexandre Cavaleri’s pull request has been merged, meaning a long-distance inline skating profile will be available in brouter-web with the upcoming version 1.7.9. The profile is specifically tuned to strongly prefer smooth asphalt and avoid unpaved surfaces, based on real-world long-distance skating data.
• EoGIS, a web mapping platform maintained by Vatalysteau SAS, is now fully operational and Yann Justeau wrote ► about the micromapping, its challenges and opportunities, and some difficulties related to cartographic activities developed by small public administrations.
• Crosstalk Solutions has unveiled Project Nomad, a system designed, amongst other things, for offline navigation based on OpenStreetMap data. The project combines local routing and mapping components to enable navigation without an internet connection, for example in remote areas or emergency situations.
• François Lacombe presented the Gespot , a Web map which is aimed at mapping light poles and electric infrastructure, at Rencontres OpenStreetMap and territoires, held in Brest on 24 March. This initiative has a partnership with OSM-Fr and the source code is available on GitHub.
• While experimenting with ways to speed up Layercake builds (a collection of thematic OpenStreetMap data extracts in cloud-native formats) Jake Low has developed a DuckDB extension for reading OpenStreetMap .PBF files.

Programming

• Astrid Emde reported that the Community Sprint at FOSSGIS 2026 resulted in multiple contributions to open-source projects, including a pull request for Mapbender and work on the QGIS Qt6 update. The sprint also provided newcomers with an opportunity to ask questions and actively participate in development.
• Ivovic’s BetterBike-Turns aims to improve turn instructions in bicycle routing and make them more intuitive. It uses OpenStreetMap data to generate more realistic and cyclist-friendly navigation guidance.

Releases

• Marcus Jaschen has released version 2026.7 of Bikerouter, introducing a completely rebuilt elevation profile chart. The new implementation adds multiple features and improves the visibility of highlighted route segments in analysis mode.
• The CoMaps team released version 2026.03.23-5, including updated OpenStreetMap data along with improvements to speed limit handling, road shields, and multilingual display. The update also enhanced navigation and UI on Android and iOS and added new map features.
• Alexis Lecanu (aka ravenfeld) has released version 1.20.1 of the Baba app, mainly featuring bug fixes, including improvements to photo display and GeoVisio link parsing. This update also included numerous dependency upgrades such as MapLibre, Kotlin, and various Android components.

Did you know that …

• … the OpenStreetMap Foundation names its servers after dragons? It is inspired by the phrase ‘here be dragons’, a medieval practice of putting illustrations of dragons on uncharted areas of maps where potential dangers were thought to exist.

OSM in the media

• CHIP reported ► on the Ping Pong Map based on OpenStreetMap and other data.
• Hasi Jain discussed the power of big tech in the 21st century, related to the cartography of regions of the globe and its impact on the citizenship.
• In its latest episode , the French podcast Projets Libres gave the floor to two representatives of the French Fédération des Pros d’OSM (FPOSM). The guests, Florian Lainez (CEO of junglebus) and Marina Petkova (co-owner of dynartio), presented the actions, values and members of this association of OpenStreetMap professionals as well as the dynamics surrounding OSM.

Other “geo” things

• Heise reports that Android is introducing a 24-hour delay as a security requirement for sideloaded apps. The delay will not apply again after switching devices. This may affect OSM-related apps, which are often distributed outside official app stores such as via GitHub or F-Droid.
• The Bibliothèque Nationale de France has just opened ► the exhibition ‘Imaginary Maps: Inventing Worlds’, with more than 200 historical maps and works drawn from mythical, literary, television, and video game universes on display throughout the exhibition, ranging from medieval parchments to maps of Middle-earth, from Thomas More’s Utopia to the realms of Final Fantasy. It is an invitation to journey to the boundaries of reality and fiction, which implicitly questions how we interpret, understand, and shape our own world. The catalogue has been published ►. The Dossier de presse is also available freely.
• Thomas Weibel has developed Isoswiss, a pixel-art styled isometric map of Switzerland.
• Several media outlets have reported on North Oaks (Minnesota), a US city absent from Google Street View since 2008, after authorities threatened legal action over street-level imagery captured on private roads. The unique situation stems from all streets being privately owned; a filmmaker recently attempted to map the area using a drone, sparking debate about privacy and the limits of digital mapping (we reported earlier).
• Big Think explored star forts, which were developed from the 15th century onwards in response to cannon warfare. They were designed with geometric bastions to eliminate defensive blind spots. This design dominated European military architecture for centuries and can still be seen in the layout of many cities today, although it later became obsolete due to advances in weapon technology.
• In a NASA article the SWOT satellite is shown to be able to derive detailed maps of the seafloor from measurements of ocean surface height. Subtle variations in sea surface elevation caused by gravity differences above underwater features allow scientists to detect previously unknown structures such as seamounts and abyssal hills.
• The Los Angeles Times reported that an El Segundo resident was arrested after installing unauthorised stop signs at a neighbourhood intersection. He took this step after months of unsuccessful attempts to get city officials to address his safety concerns, claiming the intersection had become dangerous for children and that he had witnessed several near-collisions involving them. This situation raises questions about OpenStreetMap’s ‘map what’s on the ground’ principle, as signs physically present may not always be officially authorised.
• Quarticle outlined the transition from traditional GIS systems to modern real-time routing platforms. The article explains how contemporary architectures combine dynamic data, APIs, and scalable infrastructure to support applications such as navigation and logistics.
• Yandex described how its new storage and indexing methods for map tiles enables handling up to 80,000 requests per second from a single server. This approach simplifies infrastructure by avoiding backend rendering and leverages object storage, such as S3, to deliver multiple map variants at scale.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India – Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-04-04
	Tucson	Wave Archive	A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations between Eric Theise, Jeffrey Gordon Evans, Hannah Joyce, and Steev Hise	2026-04-04
	Lucknow	Café Coffee Day, Hazratganj	OSM Lucknow Mapping Party No.3	2026-04-05
	Zaragoza	Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Unizar) & online	Mapatón humanitario	2026-04-07
	Salzburg	Bewohnerservice Elisabeth-Vorstadt	OSM-Treffpunkt	2026-04-07
	Richmond	Shockoe Hill Cemetery	Shockoe Hill Cemetery mapping with MapRVA	2026-04-07
	Dublin	Online	Easter 2026 Map n Chat	2026-04-07
			Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng]	2026-04-07
			iD Community Chat	2026-04-08
	Essen	Verkehrs- und Umweltzentrum	Essen OSM-Treffen	2026-04-08
	Oslo	Royal Gastropub	OSM-Vår-pils	2026-04-09
	Albuquerque	Guild Cinema	A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations between Eric Theise, Kenneth Cornell, and Clifford Grindstaff	2026-04-09
	Berlin	Restaurant Split	214. OSM-Stammtisch Berlin-Brandenburg	2026-04-10
	Zürich	Bitwäscherei Zürich	186. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich	2026-04-10
	Paris	MSF France (Paris 19e), France	MSF-CARTONG: Nuit de la Géographie	2026-04-10
	Berlin	Wikimedia e.V. Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24,10963 Berlin	OSM Hackweekend Berlin-Brandenburg 04/2026	2026-04-11 – 2026-04-12
	Braunschweig	Stratum 0	Braunschweiger Mappertreffen im Stratum 0 Hackerspace	2026-04-11
		Armadale Park Cafe	Social Mapping Sunday: Armadale Train Station	2026-04-12
	Milano		Editathon e mapathon alla Milano Marathon 2026	2026-04-12
	Antwerpen		Camera’s in kaart brengen	2026-04-12
	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-04-12
	Meerut	Haldiram’s, Garh Road, Meerut	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.28 (Meerut)	2026-04-12
			Missing Maps : Mapathon en ligne – CartONG [fr]	2026-04-13
	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #87	2026-04-13
	München	Echardinger Einkehr	Münchner OSM-Treffen	2026-04-14
		Oloron-Sainte-Marie – La Friche	Cartopartie à Oloron-Sainte-Marie – Projet SYSTOUR	2026-04-15
		Oloron Sainte Marie	Une cartopartie dédiée à la mobilité durable dans les Montagnes Béarnaises	2026-04-15
		MJC de Vienne	Rencontre des contributeurs de Vienne (38)	2026-04-15
	Karlsruhe	Chiang Mai	Stammtisch Karlsruhe	2026-04-15
			Online Mapathon von ÄRZTE OHNE GRENZEN	2026-04-15
	Freiburg im Breisgau	CCCFR, Adlerstr. 12a, Freiburg (Grethergelände)	OSM-Treffen Freiburg/Brsg.	2026-04-16
		Golem, Avane, Empoli	Mapping Day ad Empoli	2026-04-18
		Dijital Bilgi Derneği	OSM-TR Meet-Up – OSM League Pit-Stop	2026-04-18
	Chennai Corporation		Mapping Party @ Chennai	2026-04-19

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, Raquel IVIDES DATA, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred, izen57, mcliquid.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Fast forward to 2026, this charity is probably the best known charity in the Netherlands, it supports disadvantaged children and this year it focuses on loneliness. Loneliness is closely linked to suicide. The numbers for suicide are not pretty; suicide is rising year over year. There is less funding for care so what to do?

The charity commissioned research on how to prevent loneliness. It is truly scientific, done by a reputable organisation, reputable scientists, and as can be expected with plenty of citations. The paper is in Dutch but hey, is Google not your friend?

For this Dutch paper there is a Scholia. Effectively it provides an interactive view, when citations are added, the view will change because of an added cited work, a cited author. When papers are attributed to an author and multiple works happen to be cited, the Scholia evolves and the author is credited for all the papers cited. 

For an NGO this is quite powerful because papers like these underpin the value of their work. It  provides a strong argument to support its work and contribute as a donor or volunteer.

Thanks,

         GerardM

I’m autistic.

Don’t panic.

If you’ve known me for some time, I’m exactly the same person I’ve always been. There’s a wide consensus that people are born this way and remain this way for life. The only difference is that now you and I know that my kind of personality was described by some doctors in some books, and they gave it a name.

I was formally diagnosed by a doctor of psychology in January 2026, which is also the month I turned forty-six. For a bunch of reasons that are too long for this post, I’ve suspected that this is the name for what I am since at least 2015. I became almost sure about it in the middle of 2025, which is when I also decided to get a formal diagnosis. Some friends to whom I spoke about this ask me what led to this, and I’ll write about it separately someday.

Some people who know me may be very surprised to read that I’m autistic. Others will be surprised that it took me so long to figure it out. I understand both. When I read old posts in this blog, for example, I see how many of them are very typical autistic things to write, and I just wasn’t aware of it. Maybe I’ll make a list of those posts someday.

Humanity comprehends autism better these days than it did forty years ago. But not all people comprehend it well yet. I barely comprehend it well myself, as I’m only in the beginning of the journey to really grasp it. It’s quite possible that I’m writing some nonsense in this post! If you think that I’m wrong about something, do feel free to send me a correction as a comment or a private email.

Autistic people who are more similar to me are often told that they “don’t look autistic”. I don’t like hearing it, and the same is probably true for most of us, but I do understand why people think like that. Autism looks very different in different people. Some autistic people aren’t able to speak, and some do; some aren’t able to have families or jobs, and some are. And so on. That’s why it’s called a “spectrum” these days.

So what does it even mean? Autism is complex to describe. Compare it to left-handedness, for example: a consistent preference for using the left hand for writing and other fine motor tasks. That’s it, one short sentence. Autism is described as a much longer list of traits, and, very importantly, they must come as a bundle.

Described narrowly, and closely following the definition in the DSM, the guidebook that psychologists in the United States use to classify conditions, my kind of autism basically means the following seven things:

One: I have various difficulties with talking to people. They are not always huge, and perhaps if you talk to me, you won’t even notice them. Or perhaps you will. If you don’t notice them, please trust me that I do feel them constantly. Lots of people throughout my life, including people who love me, pointed out the unusual nature of my communication style to me, sometimes more kindly and constructively, and sometimes less so.

I often have great difficulty starting a conversation, especially when there are many people around. Or even when there’s just one person, but I’m not sure about something. And when I do speak, I sometimes say things that people get offended by, even though I absolutely didn’t mean to offend or patronize—I just meant to be direct or precise, which is supposed to be a good thing, but in that context, someone decided that it’s bad and misunderstood me. I completely fail to understand small talk in all languages (although perhaps it’s more related to item 2 or 3 in the list).

You may think that it’s just “shyness” or “awkwardness”, and in simple human language it’s kind of correct, but “autism” is more scientifically defined, and here’s the really important part: since it comes with a bunch of other traits, which are described later in this list, and which aren’t obviously related to “shyness”, it is, well, not just “shyness”. (Also, someone once described me as having “the opposite of stage fright”, and in some contexts this is a very good description, so I’m not always “shy”.)

Two: I have various difficulties understanding nonverbal communication. I usually understand spoken and written language well, often too well: I understand what people say literally, and I don’t easily “read between the lines”, whether written or spoken. It also repeatedly frustrates me that people read too much between the lines of what I said, which results in their “hearing” things I didn’t actually say or mean. I intensely crave harmony and coherence between what is said or written and what the reality is.

I’m also often bad at understanding facial expressions, hand gestures, and other elements of body language. It’s not like I don’t understand them at all, but throughout my life, people told me countless times that they tried to hint something to me, and I didn’t understand what they thought I should have. I also have trouble making gestures or facial expressions myself: people very often say that I have a weird smile or that they think that my face is angry, even though I’m totally not angry at that moment.

Related to this is also the fact that I cannot maintain eye contact for more than a split second with anyone except exactly three people: my spouse and two children. (Difficulty with eye contact is probably one of the best known autistic traits, but in the DSM, it’s a part of this wider trait.)

Three: I don’t entirely understand relationships, both professional and personal. Even with people I love the most. I have some friends, but not a lot. It’s not even necessarily bad, but it’s definitely noticeable. And if I wanted to make more friends, I wouldn’t totally know how; it happens according to some magic that I don’t get. It’s kind of easier for me to make friends based on shared interests (more on that later), and while having shared interests is probably helpful at making friends for all people, it’s much more acute for me. When I do get closer to a person, it’s hard for me to understand if they are a friend or just a good acquaintance with whom I have a shared interest. I also get fatigued after meeting with many people, for example, at family gatherings, or work and school events—not because I don’t like those people, but because being next to people, even people I love, quickly tires me.

Four: I often make all kinds of seemingly meaningless repetitive movements or sounds, and over the years people have told me many times that they are unusual or even disturbing. A few examples of repetitive things that I do are shaking my fingers and hands, especially the middle and ring fingers on the right hand; drumming with my teeth (if only I could record the amazing jazz, funk, and classic rock beats I make there!); twisting my facial hair; repeating weird words, usually when no one is listening; fidgeting with coins, guitar picks, nail clippers, or other small things. (If people tell me that those things are disturbing, I do my best to stop myself when I’m next to them. Autism is not a good excuse to disturb people if the autistic person can reasonably avoid it. But note that the word “reasonably” does a lot of work here: I can usually do it, and if I can’t, then I can usually just walk away. But some autistic people cannot, so please treat them with understanding, patience, and kindness.)

Five: I really love routines and certain ways of doing things, and I really hate being forced to change them without an exceptionally convincing reason. Example 1: I go to the same supermarket most of the time, and my shopping list is organized not just by the things I want to buy, but also by the sequence in which I’ll find them on my way from the entrance, through the aisles, and to the cashier, and I get horribly annoyed when a product I often buy is moved to another shelf. Example 2: I do most of the kitchen work at home, and I have a very specific way of organizing everything in the drawers, cupboards, and the dishwasher, and if something is not in its right place, I’ll get either horribly confused and dysfunctional, or very upset and possibly screaming (which is not good, but it may happen, and I cannot quite control it). Example 3: I hate moving to a new house or even moving furniture within the house. Those are just three examples out of dozens.

Six: I am very interested in certain things. Like, very. Some of those things are nearly lifelong, most notably languages, music, and public transit. Some are coming and going, like dog breeds (early 1990s), the history of Russian nationalism (from 1999 until 2004 or so, and occasionally coming back), Pink Floyd discography (coming and going every year or two), history of Scientology (coming and going from 1997 until 2014 or so), Free Software (since 1998), the Perl programming language (from 1999 until 2012 or so), editing Wikipedia and related projects (since 2004), Belarus (since 2006, and still intensifying), Catalonia (since 2007), and various other things.

(Comment 1: To avoid any misunderstandings, it doesn’t mean that I am, or ever was, a Russian nationalist or a Scientologist. Comment 2: I don’t really know why some things become a special interest and others don’t. As far as I know, no one does. I think it’s one of the most interesting questions about autism.)

Seven: I experience sensory perception of some things that is different from the way most other people experience them. There are sounds that I hear well even though people next to me hear them very faintly or not at all. Sometimes those sounds greatly disturb me, even though they don’t disturb anyone around nearly as much. For example, the noise of aluminum snack packages and plastic bags makes me either unable to do anything or very irritated. And lately, as my son got into solving Rubik’s cubes, the sound of those things has been the absolute bane of my existence. Those things, which to most people are not much more than easy-to-ignore rustling or whirring, make my ears feel they are being jackhammered. Headphones sometimes help with this a bit, but not always.

Another related issue is that lightbulbs above a certain brightness (above 3000 K and 1000 lm) make me nearly blind and cause me great discomfort, even though others find them pretty usual or even convenient. Strobe lights at concerts are a disaster, too: I love concerts, and most concert lighting is fine, but strobe lights make me unable to look at the stage. And the smell of some home or office cleaning supplies completely overwhelms my senses to the point that I can’t function very much, even though other people in the same place barely notice it.

I also easily notice wrong spelling, punctuation, or fonts in texts—I wrote about an example of this here a few weeks ago. This may sound unrelated to other things in this list item, but my psychologist told me that it is related, so I guess it is.

And that’s the end of the list.

See how I said that I’m describing it “narrowly”, and I still had to write a list of seven items, with many sentences in each of them? That’s what makes autism complex, and it’s just the tip of this iceberg. The list above goes according to the seven basic autism diagnostic criteria in the DSM, which is the mainstream scientific, academic, professional definition. Those seven criteria appear on the first page of the Autism Spectrum Disorder description in the DSM; there are ten more pages of details, a lot of which are very interesting, and to a lot of which I conform, too, but this post is already getting too long.

But I really should also mention that in addition to the formal academic definition, there’s also the autistic culture, or, more widely, the neurodivergent community culture. It has loosely defined its own informal, but pretty well-pronounced traits, such as wearing (or not wearing) certain clothes, eating (or not eating) certain foods, having certain relationship practices, etc. It also has its own jargon words, such as “catastrophizing”, “delayed processing”, “double empathy”, “monotropism”, “shutdown”, “spiky profile”, “stimming”, and many more. I can’t find any of these terms in the DSM (although maybe I didn’t search well), but they are making their way into academic articles on the topic, and some of them may become completely mainstream and scientific someday. (Here’s one glossary of this jargon, here’s another. I love glossaries! Maybe I’ll compile one myself.)

This culture has developed in the last few decades, as the autistic community came together online and in real life and started figuring out things about itself that mainstream scientists and therapists were too slow to get. While it definitely doesn’t mean that the informal autistic community is right about everything or that its members agree about everything, I do get the impression that even though most people in it are not professional psychologists or neurologists, it is remarkably robust at understanding itself. Discovering this online community in 2025 was one of the most empowering things that ever happened to me; I feel like I absolutely belong there.

Autism explains a lot about me.

My love for editing Wikipedia, for example: a broken link, a poorly organized category of articles, an incorrect reference, a typo, a missing article about a topic I am familiar with—I’ve always known that I have a heightened sensitivity to those things, and I just couldn’t give it a name. When I saw that wikis let me easily correct them, I started doing it, and couldn’t stop. I’m certainly not saying that one has to be autistic to edit Wikipedia, but I’ve heard lots and lots of people saying over the years that there is a disproportionate number of autistic people among Wikipedia editors, and many of them possibly aren’t aware of their autism, just like I wasn’t aware of mine. (A lot of these claims are hypothetical or anecdotal, but I could find two data-driven surveys that substantiate this: Dutch Wikipedia editors survey 2018 and German Wikipedia editors survey 2025; if you know about more research on this, please do tell me.)

The same goes for my enormous love for languages and letters and texts and books—I learned to read early (thanks, mom!), and reading and writing were a fantastic way to learn and communicate at my own pace, without having to synchronize with people who keep talking and saying unexpected things. Books—and later, websites—have always been wonderful for me because I can reread them if I didn’t understand something, and they won’t get tired of my clarification questions.

Language in general fascinates me because it is the infrastructure of people’s communication, and I love how it is completely arbitrary, yet systematic; studying Linguistics in the university explained it all so well to me. Different linguists have different reasons for going into this field, but for me, an easy explanation is that trying to understand something about this infrastructure is my overcompensation for having frequent misunderstandings with so many people. And foreign languages are wonderful, too, because I’ve always felt different from most people, and foreign languages are one of the most notable and beautiful ways in which people are different and diverse. Each foreign language is a puzzle that can be solved with some effort, and solving this puzzle is endlessly rewarding. Put those things together, and bam, I became the specialist on languages in Wikipedia.

Same for music. Music is a sensory delight, and I now understand that I probably experience it far more intensely than other people do. When it has any kind of rhythm, it stimulates my body. When it has no clear rhythm, it stimulates my thinking (my favorite example of such piece of music is Piece for Jetsun Dolma by Thurston Moore, but there are many others). That’s why, for example, I love going to concerts, but I usually (albeit not always) prefer to do it alone: I’m there for the music itself, not for socializing. And that’s why music in general, and specific artists in particular (not only Sonic Youth and Pink Floyd, far from it) become my special interests and I easily learn their discographies, including full track lists, by heart. Is it any wonder that the first articles I edited in Wikipedia—in English, in Hebrew, and in Catalan—were about musicians?

Same for public transportation systems. Those are systems, they are largely predictable, they aren’t chaotic like cars, their maps and schedules can be learned by heart. When I was eight or so in the late 1980s, I learned the map of the Moscow Metro with around 120 stations by heart. It wasn’t even intentional—I just wasn’t able not to learn it after taking the metro frequently and looking at this map. I could also take long bus rides in Moscow with my eyes closed and say exactly where the bus is at any time because I feel all the turns and stops. Like, I actually did it several times for fun, and my parents and friends were weirded out.

And the smell of subways! It’s more or less the same in the whole world. Some people don’t enjoy it, and I can understand why, but to me, it’s wonderful. When I moved to Israel, which didn’t have a working subway at all in 1991, I missed it, but when the Carmelit, the subway in Haifa, was reopened, I entered it and felt that wonderful aroma again. I’ve always known that it was not nostalgia for Moscow—it was the aroma of a system that I can appreciate. (Theoretically, I could put this special interest together with Wikipedia, too, but I don’t actually do it much. I only contribute a little to writing about subways and other public transit systems on Wikipedia. The people who do it are absolute heroes. I can’t tell for sure, of course, but it is quite possible that, um, some of them are autistic.)

Ironically, my great and prolonged interest in Wikipedia is perhaps a thing that delayed my realization that I’m likely neurodivergent. Being in the Wikipedia community and interacting with quite a lot of people who openly call themselves neurodivergent made me repeatedly wonder: “What’s special about them? Their description of how they experience the world is very similar to how I experience the world, and I’m not neurodivergent.” That was a mistake: I experience the world like that, and my neurodivergent friends experience the world like that, but most other people don’t. Which means that I am neurodivergent. I fully realized it only in 2025.

And one more thing. As I was reading the seventeen-page report that the psychologist gave me in the end of the diagnostic process, I found the part called “Behavioral Observations” particularly fun to read. It described how I behaved during the evaluation process in the psychologist’s office and how I filled the online forms for it. Among other things, it said:

He used the word “curious” many times throughout the evaluation.

This is a very good description of me, because I love being curious! I love discovering things, being asked an interesting or relevant question, and enthusiastically and explicitly acknowledging that something is, as a matter of fact, curious. At least to me. Some people would also describe this as a “verbal stim” in the autistic community jargon, and it’s perhaps appropriate. However, verbal stims are sometimes meaningless. While I do say meaningless words sometimes, when I say that something is curious, I mean it. And that’s also the most central thing that Wikipedia is about: truly endless curiosity, wanting to learn things, adding pieces to the perpetually incomplete puzzle, and sincerely wanting to help other people to learn those things more easily and freely.

Am I going to write a lot about autism here now? At the moment, I don’t plan to start writing explicitly about autism a lot. I mostly plan to keep writing nerdy things about Wikipedia and languages and maybe music and maybe random things from my life. In a way, this blog has been mostly about autism all along, just without calling it by this name, because I didn’t know it myself. But go figure, now that I know that it’s an important part of my personality and identity, perhaps I’ll start writing specifically about it.

Am I happy that I got the diagnosis? Yes, I am. Perhaps someday humanity’s attitude to this will completely change, and the diagnosis will have a different name, or become completely unnecessary. But with the way we work now, I’m happy to understand my personality better and have a name for it.

How is this understanding going to change my life? I don’t know! At the moment, I just hope that the few more decades that I probably have in this universe will be easier to navigate now that I know all this stuff. And maybe it won’t be much easier, and that’s OK, too; I’ve learned something, and if you’ve read at least some of this post, you’ve learned something, too. If it makes you behave more kindly to autistic people or to learn something interesting about yourself, that’s already a good thing.

(I was also diagnosed with ADHD, but I don’t yet have an idea of how to write a blog post about it. Trust me, however, that it’s very meaningful, too.)

As the Swahili Wikipedia (SWWP) successfully navigates the post-100,000 article era, it is imperative to shift our focus from mere article count to the core metrics of velocity and strategic consistency. The journey beyond the milestone is not a passive coasting period but a critical phase demanding rigorous analysis of our community’s momentum and the allocation of our strategic resources.

The foundational pillars of the national community remain robust and active, a testament to sustained local engagement. Key groups such as Wikimedians of Arusha, the Kilimanjaro Wiki Community, Wikimedia Community TZ, and the Tanzanian University Students Wikimedians continue to support encyclopedic growth and outreach initiatives. However, the data reveals a divergence in momentum, with one project experiencing a strategic paradigm shift driven by the Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili User Group (JWK). This group has strategically shifted its focus, moving from the traditional, cyclical growth of the encyclopedia to a high-speed revitalization of a different, yet equally vital, linguistic resource: the Swahili Wiktionary.

1. The Swahili Wikipedia (SWWP): The Post-Milestone Plateau

The achievement of 100,000 articles on June 23, 2025, was a monumental success. Yet, in the subsequent months, the Swahili Wikipedia’s growth has settled into a phase of distinct fluctuation, often referred to as the “Post-Milestone Plateau.” While new article count milestones continue to be surpassed, the crucial “Articles Per Day” (APD) metric indicates a clear cooling of momentum when compared to the intense collaborative efforts that characterized the period leading up to the 100K target.

SWWP Growth Velocity (June 2025 – March 2026)

Observation and Analysis: For a significant portion of late 2025, the daily creation rate frequently struggled to surpass the 20 articles per day threshold. While data from early 2026 indicates a slight improvement and bursts of higher activity, the overall pace remains inconsistent. This fluctuation suggests a need for targeted initiatives to re-energize the contribution base and diversify article creation methodologies beyond the large-scale creation efforts that typified the pre-milestone push. Sustained, consistent organic growth must now become the central focus to ensure the encyclopedia continues to expand in both quantity and quality

2. The Swahili Wiktionary (SWWKT): The “Jenga” Acceleration

In stark contrast to the steady, slower pace of the encyclopedia, the Swahili Wiktionary (SWWT) has become the epicenter of the most dramatic and effective growth in the Swahili Wikimedia movement’s recent history. The Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili User Group identified the Swahili Wiktionary as a crucial, yet dormant, project and initiated a comprehensive, high-velocity intervention. This effort has successfully transformed SWWT into the fastest-growing Swahili linguistic database in the history of the Wikimedia language projects.

The Strategic Gap: Data-Driven Success

View the statistics page: https://sw.wiktionary.org/wiki/Maalum:Takwimu

The data clearly illustrates the difference in strategic focus and resultant growth rates. While the Wikipedia’s average growth rate has hovered in the lower double digits (APD), the Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili initiative on Wiktionary has been able to sustain a massive average of 250 entries per day.

This concerted, methodical campaign has achieved exponential scaling: in a remarkable period of just seven months, the project has grown from approximately 15,000 entries to over 73,000. This phenomenal success is the result of a dedicated, focused strategy that leveraged both community effort and advanced content generation methods, proving that exponential growth is achievable with a singular, committed vision

3. Future Plans: The July 2026 Indigenous Pilot

The successful revitalization of the Swahili Wiktionary has established a new model for project growth. As the movement drives toward its ambitious June 30, 2026 goal of 100,000 Wiktionary entries, attention is already shifting to the next frontier of linguistic preservation: the indigenous languages of Tanzania. Starting in July 2026, Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili will spearhead a pivotal Pilot Project focusing on four specific indigenous languages selected from Tanzania’s rich linguistic tapestry of over 120+ ethnic dialects.

This phase represents a profound transition—from strengthening a national lexicography (Swahili) to initiating genuine, grassroots linguistic preservation efforts. The pilot project aims to establish a replicable and scalable model by focusing on three primary objectives:

• Documentation and Digitization: To systematically document and digitize the vocabularies of endangered tribal languages, ensuring their long-term digital survival.
• Multi-Dialectal Bridging: To create a robust, searchable, and multi-dialectal framework within the Swahili Wiktionary structure, effectively creating a linguistic bridge that connects the national language to its many source dialects.
• Scalable Model Establishment: To establish a proven, scalable methodology for indigenous language documentation that can be replicated and deployed across other African nations facing similar challenges of linguistic heritage erosion.

Conclusion
While reaching milestones like 108,000 Wikipedia articles provides a sense of collective accomplishment, the definitive narrative of the 2025-2026 period is the dramatic acceleration of the Swahili Wiktionary. This achievement, decisively led by Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili, serves as a powerful case study demonstrating that dedicated, focused effort can yield exponential growth and strategic impact within the Wikimedia ecosystem. The community has not only revived a critical project but has also refined its methodology. Come July, this proven, high-velocity strategy will be applied to the very roots of Tanzanian heritage, initiating a new era of indigenous language preservation.

Each term, hundreds of postsecondary faculty across the U.S. and Canada launch Wikipedia assignments with a free suite of materials and support from our team at Wiki Education. While some are newcomers trying the assignment for the first time, other faculty return to the assignment year after year as an established cornerstone of their syllabus. And when a professor brings the project back, each new group of students can pick up where the last left off — and the impact of that work can compound significantly.

Undoubtedly, this is the case for University of California Berkeley professor Juana María Rodríguez, who has assigned the project to 159 students throughout seven courses, empowering them to make an incredible collective contribution to Wikipedia’s coverage of LGBTQ+ history.

The big numbers:

• 332,000 words added
• 3,580 references added
• 588 articles edited
• 63 articles created

And probably the most staggering impact number from Dr. Rodríguez’s Wikipedia assignments over the years? Her students’ contributions have received more than 96,600,000 pageviews. 

Their work hasn’t gone unnoticed — several media outlets have covered Dr. Rodríguez’s coursework on Wikipedia in recent months. In addition to the big impact numbers, they’ve spotlighted her reflections on the assignment, including the learning outcomes she notes as her students work to contribute well-sourced, fact-based knowledge to the encyclopedia.

For Rodríguez, the assignment offers the opportunity to spark critical reflection about knowledge production, sharpen her students’ skills in research and writing, and significantly broaden the reach of their coursework.

“I want my students to think of themselves as not just consumers of knowledge, but as being able to produce knowledge as well,” Rodríguez has explained, underscoring her motivation to return to the Wikipedia assignment term after term.

Rodríguez’s series of Wikipedia assignments are a powerful reminder of the cumulative impact instructors can make on public knowledge — and on the generations of students they empower to contribute to it. 

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course or know an instructor who may be interested? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.

Apr 2, 14:27 UTC
Resolved - This incident has been resolved.

Apr 2, 11:17 UTC
Investigating - We are currently investigating an issue which is causing a number of edits to Wiki's to fail. Investigation continuing and updates to follow.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Cataloguing

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

Communication and vocabulary building

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

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

Pattern finding

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

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

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

Indian reflections on the history of entomology

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

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

Kunhikannan died at the rather young age of 47

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading

• Balfour, Edward (1887). The agricultural pests of India, and of eastern and southern Asia, vegetable and animal, injurious to man and his products. London: Bernard Quaritch.
• Ball, V. 1885. On the identification of the animals and plants of India which were known to early Greek authors. The Indian Antiquary. 14:274-287, 303-311, 334-341
• Barnard, Peter C. (2018). Bat-Fowlers, Pooters and Cyanide Jars: a Historical Overview of Insect Collecting and Preservation in MacGregor, A. (Ed.).  Naturalists in the Field . Brill.
• Clark, J.F.M. (2001). Bugs in the System: Insects, Agricultural Science, and Professional Aspirations in Britain, 1890-1920.  Agricultural History 75(1):83-114.
• Dave, K.N. (1950) Lac and the lac insect in the Atharva veda. Int Acad Ind Cult Nagpur, 16 pp. [Dave incidentally, is also the translator and interpreter of another problematic work on ornithological knowledge in ancient Indian literature] 
• Dover, Cedric (1922) Entomology in India. The Calcutta Review 3(2):336-349. [Dover makes a plea for greater funding for entomology: Like Magda, Queen of Sheba, whose devotion to Learning made her set out for Jerusalem, the capital of the kingdom of Solomon, they have entered the domain of Science not with the object of any financial benefit to themselves but for their love of Knowledge. They have worked in the interests of Science alone, yet certain branches of their work has saved India millions of rupees, while other, have added large sums to her coffers. Is it not then up to the Government to improve the status of entomology in this country and to make it a more lucrative profession?  ]
• Elias, Scott A. (2014) A Brief History of the Changing Occupations and Demographics of Coleopterists from the 18th Through the 20th Century. Journal of the History of Biology 47(2):213-242. [A nice examination of livelihoods]
• Essig, E.O. (1931) A history of entomology. New York: The Macmillan Company.
• Farber, P.L. (1976). The type-concept in zoology during the first half of the nineteenth century. Journal of the History of Biology 9(1):93–119.  
• Hewitt, C. Gordon (1916). A review of applied entomology in the British Empire. Annals of the Entomological Society of America. 9(1):1–33.
• Howard, L.O. (1930). A history of applied entomology (Somewhat Anecdotal). Smithsonian Institution. Publication 3065.
• Husain, Mohamad Afzal (1938). Entomology in India, past, present and future. Current Science 6(8):422-424. [This is a summary, for the full address see - Husain, M. Afzal (1939). "Entomology in India: Past, Present and Future."  Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Indian Science Congress, Calcutta, 1938. pp. 201–246]
• Lefroy, Maxwell (1904). Historical summary in Report of the Entomologist to the Government of India.
• Lienhard, S. (1978) On the meaning and use of the word indragopa. Indologica Taurinensia 6:177-188.
• Lockwood, J.A. (2012) Insects as weapons ofwar, terror, and torture. Annual Review of Entomology 57:205-227.
• Mahdihassan, S. (1986). Lac and its decolourization by orpiment as traced to Babylon. Indian Journal of History of Science 21(2):187-192.
• Melillo, E. D. (2013). Global Entomologies: Insects, Empires, and the “Synthetic Age” in World History. Past & Present, 223(1):233–270. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtt026
• Moses, S.T. (1925). Insect pests and some south Indian beliefs. Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society. 26(1):15-19.
  
• Rao, H. Srinivasa (1957) History of our knowledge of the Indian fauna through the ages. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 54:251-280.
• Rao, B.R. Subba (1983). Systematic entomology in India - past, present and future. Current Science 52(21):997-1000.
• Romero, D.B. (2007). El díkairon en la obra Indika de Ctesias de Cnido. Propuesta de identificación. Emerita 75(2):255-272.
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2017). Malarial Subjects. Cambridge University Press. [Open-Access]
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2013). Quinine, mosquitoes and empire: reassembling malaria in British India, 1890–1910, South Asian History and Culture, 4(1):65-86. doi:10.1080/19472498.2012.750457
• Service, M. W. (1978). Review Article: A Short History of Early Medical Entomology. Journal of Medical Entomology, 14(6):603–626. doi:10.1093/jmedent/14.6.603 
• Smith, Ray F.; Mittler, T.E.; Smith, Carroll N. (1973). History of Entomology. Annual Reviews Inc. ISBN 0824321017.
• Sorensen, Conner (1988). The Rise of Government Sponsored Applied Entomology, 1840-1870. Agricultural History 62(2):98-115. [Very interesting comments on the religiosity/rationality of entomologists]
• Sutter, P. S. (2007). Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Isis, 98(4):724–754.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

A few days ago I was listening to some of the talks at MUDCon (The MediaWiki conference aimed at non-Wikimedia uses of MediaWiki).

During James Hare's talk about a project to keep track of various Miraheze wikis using Wikibase (The software behind Wikidata), he briefly mentioned that WikiApiary has been down forever, and that maybe a Wikibase approach would be better instead of the previous Semanitc MediaWiki approach (Semantic MediaWiki is an extension to MediaWiki that allowing annotating links with the "relationship" the link represents and querying those relationshops).

This reminded me that WikiApiary existed, and i thought i would try to give it a kick. For those who don't know, WikiApiary is/was a site that tracked what public mediawiki isntances were out there and what extensions they had installed.

I had already gotten server access years ago (People wanted me to help but i never really did). The status of the site was sort of up but extremely flakey and timing out all the time.

Web server concurrency

If you've been paying attention to web hosting at all in the last while, you know that AI scrapper bots are the bane of everyone's existence.

Initially I assumed that was what was happening here. I may have been partially wrong on that, but i think it was a contributing factor.

One of the most common performance problems with MediaWiki is people setting up apache to use the default max 150 threads. If a large spike in traffic comes in, all the threads fight over resources and everything becomes really slow, causing even more threads to pile up, slowing everything down to a halt. Even worse if you don't have enough memory and have swap enabled, you end up with swap death (This server did not have swap enabled, but i mention it because its such a common failure case). Its often better to try and process a few requests at the time and make the other requests wait their turn than to try and do too much all at once and accomplish nothing.

 To address this, I installed varnish. Varnish is a great piece of software that lets you cache recently used pages, reducing server load significantly in general. It can also help by deduplicating requests to a certain extent, if two people request the same page at the same time, it will just send one request to the backend so the backend doesn't get overloaded processing the same page twice for two separate people

It can also set a maximum number of requests in flight to the backend. This can make sure that the backend doesn't get too overloaded.

One of the less used features of varnish is the ability to set up multiple backends. I like to use this to setup different backends for different classes of requests. For WikiApiary I setup four - likely bots, non-normal article views (e.g. diffs, history, special), normal article views, logged in users & images. For each of these I had different back-ends with a different number of max requests at one time. For bots, i set it to at most one. Mostly in case of false positives. My bot metric is just using an old version of chrome. Comparatively, normal page was given 15 and non-normal pages 3. Thus bots should not be able to take down the site, at worse they could just take down requests in the same class as them. I gave effectively no limit (actually 60) for logged in users and requests to static resources like images that are super cheap to serve.

As a special case, I outright blocked facebook's AI scrapper as it was being super aggressive. I also blocked logged out access to Special:Browse. I hate outright blocking things for logged out users; how can lurkers become contributors if you block them from everything? However, Special:Browse was using OFFSET based paging and was super expensive to render while at the same time being linked everywhere and a very common spider target.

This is what I ended up with for the varnish config:

  backend default {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "8088";
    .max_connections = 60;
    # Unfortunately the version of varnish i have is too old for .wait_limit
    # and .wait_timeout. However if you're doing something like this with small max connections, you definitely want a wait queue to even out spikes.
#    .wait_limit = 10;
#    .wait_timeout = 10s;
}

backend page {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "8088";
    .max_connections = 15;
#    .wait_timeout = 30s;
#    .wait_limit = 60;
    .first_byte_timeout = 200s;
    .between_bytes_timeout = 300s;
}

backend bot {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "8088";
    .max_connections = 1;
    .first_byte_timeout = 200s;
    .between_bytes_timeout = 300s;
}

backend special {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "8088";
    .max_connections = 3;
 #   .wait_timeout = 60s;
 #   .wait_limit = 15;
    .first_byte_timeout = 120s;
    .between_bytes_timeout = 200s;
}
# access control list for "purge": open to only localhost and other local nodes
acl purge {
    "127.0.0.1";
}

# vcl_recv is called whenever a request is received 
sub vcl_recv {
        # Serve objects up to 2 minutes past their expiry if the backend
        # is slow to respond.
        set req.grace = 500s;

        set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = req.http.X-Forwarded-For + ", " + client.ip;

        set req.backend_hint= default;

        # This uses the ACL action called "purge". Basically if a request to
        # PURGE the cache comes from anywhere other than localhost, ignore it.
        if (req.method == "PURGE") {
            if (!client.ip ~ purge) {
                return (synth(405, "Not allowed."));
            } else {
                return (purge);
            }
        }

        # Was crawling very fast.
        if ( req.http.User-Agent ~ "^meta-externalagent" ) {
                return (synth( 403, "No crawling please" ) );
        }
        
        # Pass requests from logged-in users directly.
        # Only detect cookies with "session" and "Token" in file name, otherwise nothing get cached.
        if (req.http.Authorization || req.http.Cookie ~ "([sS]ession|Token)=") {
            return (pass);
        } /* Not cacheable by default */

        if ( req.url ~ "^/w/index.php\?(.*&t|t)itle=Property:.*&limit=\d*&offset=\d\d\d\d" ) {
                return (synth( 403, "Log in to view more" ));
        }

        # rate limit < chrome 136. MSIE. Opera. (Note samsung browser is chrome 136)
        # Also applebot, only rate limiting instead of blocking because it is well behaved.
        if (req.http.User-Agent ~ "(Chrome/[0-9][0-9]\.|Chrome/1[012][0-9]|Chrome/13[0-5]|Opera|MSIE|Applebot)" && req.url ~ "^/(wiki/|w/index.php|w/api.php)" ) {
                set req.backend_hint = bot;
        } elsif (req.method == "GET" && 
                ( req.url ~ "^/w/index.php" || req.url ~ "^/wiki/Special:" || req.url ~ "/wiki/.*\?" || req.url ~ "^/w/api.php" ) &&
                !( req.url ~ "(Special:CreateAccount|Special:UserLogin|Special:RecentChanges|Special:Random)" )
        ) {
                set req.backend_hint= special;
        } elsif ( req.method == "GET" && req.url ~ "^/wiki/" ) {
                set req.backend_hint= page;
        } elsif( req.method == "POST" && req.url ~ "(^/w/api.php|Special(:|%3A)Browse)" ) {
                set req.backend_hint= special;
        }

        if ( req.method != "GET" ) {
                return (pass);
        }

        # normalize Accept-Encoding to reduce vary
        if (req.http.Accept-Encoding) {
          if (req.http.User-Agent ~ "MSIE 6") {
            unset req.http.Accept-Encoding;
          } elsif (req.http.Accept-Encoding ~ "gzip") {
            set req.http.Accept-Encoding = "gzip";
          } elsif (req.http.Accept-Encoding ~ "deflate") {
            set req.http.Accept-Encoding = "deflate";
          } else {
            unset req.http.Accept-Encoding;
          }
        }
 
        return (hash);
}

sub vcl_pipe {
        # Note that only the first request to the backend will have
        # X-Forwarded-For set.  If you use X-Forwarded-For and want to
        # have it set for all requests, make sure to have:
        # set req.http.connection = "close";
 
        # This is otherwise not necessary if you do not do any request rewriting.
 
        set req.http.connection = "close";
}

# Called if the cache has a copy of the page.
sub vcl_hit {
        if (!obj.ttl > 0s) {
            return (pass);
        }
}

# Called after a document has been successfully retrieved from the backend.
sub vcl_backend_response {
        # Don't cache 50x responses
        if (beresp.status == 500 || beresp.status == 502 || beresp.status == 503 || beresp.status == 504) {
            set beresp.uncacheable = true;
            return (deliver);
        }   
        if (beresp.http.Set-Cookie) {
          set beresp.uncacheable = true;
          return (deliver);
        }

        if (!beresp.ttl > 0s) {
          set beresp.uncacheable = true;
          return (deliver);
        }
 
 
        if (beresp.http.Authorization && !beresp.http.Cache-Control ~ "public") {
          set beresp.uncacheable = true;
          return (deliver);
        }

        set beresp.grace = 2h;
        return (deliver);
}

  

Request Limits

However, I still saw lots of slow requests piling up. Sometimes DB queries seemed to take longer than the request stayed open, which was very pointless as the user had gone away by the time it was done.

Ideally the user would not be able to trigger super slow requests, however in a system like SemanticMediaWiki where the user is allowed to make arbitrary queries (and quite frankly a questionably optimized DB schema) its going to happen.

So the important thing is to make sure if a query that can't be answered in a reasonable amount of time happens, that we stop processing it instead of just wasting resources on it. This is extra important as slow requests can have a cascade effect; the first request is slow taking up a lot of resources making other requests at the same time slow down. Throughput falls and suddenly more requests come in also slowed by the general business of the system. Basically a traffic jam happens.

To deal with this I did two things:

• Install php-excimer package and set $wgRequestTimeLimit to 300. This allows MediaWiki to gracefully set a time limit for itself. Unlike php's execution_time, the php-excimer extension allows handling the timeout gracefully and also applies the timeout to wall clock time instead of cpu time (Important because in an overload, the CPU might be split amongst many php processes so only a little cpu time might have passed)
• Set mariaDB's max_statement_time config to 200 seconds. This is the max amount of time a query can take before it is killed. This ensures that a run away query is time limited. You have to be careful though since this config is global, you'll want to disable it before running any sort of DB maintenance.

This helped a bit to prevent things from piling up. However queries were still slow and when i looked at iotop & top it seemed like mariadb was using excessive CPU & Disk I/O but almost no memory.

Almost no memory? That doesn't seem right for a database. I'd missed the obvious thing: innodb_buffer_pool_size was set to only 128 MB! This is one of the most important settings for MariaDB/MySQL performance. It effectively determines how much RAM the DB users (while one time of ram anyways, kind of the important one). The server had 23GB of ram and the DB was limited to 128MB. No wonder queries were slow. Traditional advice is for a dedicated server this value should be 80% of the server's RAM. We have to subtract from that for the RAM MediaWiki needs as both were on the same server, but nonetheless this needed to be way higher. I upped it to 11GB and query speed increased by orders of magnitude almost instantly.

I also noticed that the temporary table in memory size was really small. This doesn't matter much for vanilla mediawiki, but for extensions like SemanticMediaWiki that do a lot of user defined queries that sort through many results this is really important, so I bumped max_heap_table_size, tmp_table_size and tmp_memory_table_size to 800MB.

The Database