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

Recent changes

• The Persian (Farsi) Wikipedia community decided to block IP editing from October 2021 to April 2022. The Wikimedia Foundation’s Product Analytics team tracked the impact of this change. An impact report is now available.

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 16 August. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 17 August. It will be on all wikis from 18 August (calendar).
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 16 August at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 18 August at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
• The Realtime Preview will be available as a Beta Feature on wikis in Group 1. This feature was built in order to fulfill one of the Community Wishlist Survey proposals.

Future changes

• The Beta Feature for DiscussionTools will be updated throughout August. Discussions will look different. You can see some of the proposed changes. [1][2][3]

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

🕑 53 minutes

Lawrence McCray and Dave Anderson (left to right) are the founder and lead developer, respectively, of the site Protoball, a wiki about the prehistory and early history of baseball.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Protoball
• "Doubleday myth" Wikipedia article
• List of Diggers
• Enhanced search page

By @Mstyles and edited by @Cleo_Lemoisson

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

What is a pentest?

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

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

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

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

Why do we pentest? And who needs it?

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

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

How is it typically run?

A typical pentesting process has several steps:

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

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

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

What does pentesting currently look like at the Foundation?

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

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

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

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

Help us design the future of the pentesting program!

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

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

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

A group of exceptional Wikimedia community members were recognized today at the 2022 Wikimania. Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement’s annual conference celebrating free knowledge projects made possible by the volunteer community and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia projects are made possible by hundreds of thousands of volunteers from around the world. Known as Wikimedians, we are united by a shared vision of a world in which knowledge is available to everyone, everywhere. 

Each year, Wikimedians who have made outstanding contributions to this cause are recognized through the Wikimedian of the Year awards! 

This special recognition dates back to 2011. Over the years, it has highlighted the achievements of inspirational community members and welcomed Wikimedians from different backgrounds and experiences. Last year, the award was expanded to recognize even more contributors and celebrate a richer profile of our projects, volunteers, and geographies. The expansion included newcomers, long-time editors or Wikimedia Laureates, and contributors to media and technology. 

This year’s winners showcase the commitment and creativity of the Wikimedia movement: From highlighting the funny depths of Wikipedia and improving the representation of women online, to teaching people to contribute to Wikipedia in the classroom, working with Indigenous languages, and strengthening Wikimedia’s technical infrastructure.  

“The winners are a testament to the passion, curiosity, and spirit of collaboration that powers our movement,” says Jimmy Wales, the Founder of Wikipedia, who also shares the awards with the winners each year. “I’m so excited to commemorate the brilliance and commitment these individuals bring to our mission of free knowledge for all.

We are so excited to present this year’s Wikimedian of the Year awardees!

Wikimedian of the Year: Olga Paredes

Olga is an enthusiastic, inspiring leader, committed to the pursuit of open knowledge. Based in Bolivia, she’s a volunteer leader in multiple Wikimedia communities, including Wikimujeres and Wikimedistas de Bolivia, and has gone above and beyond in teaching and encouraging others to grow the Wikimedia movement and make meaningful contributions to our sum of knowledge. Olga is always highlighting the contributions of others and particularly encouraging more women to get involved with Wikimedia projects.

“The key to the success of Wikimedia projects is their ability to change and the perseverance of many Wikimedians in keeping the projects evolving and growing, locally and globally.”

Olga Paredes

Other Award Winners

Wikimedia Laureate: Andrew Lih

Andrew is an internationally-renowned Wikipedia expert, author, professor, and Wikimedia contributor. In 2003, he was the first person to teach Wikipedia at the university level, instructing his students to write and edit pages about sites in Hong Kong. That sparked his interest in looking at Wikipedia as creating “knowledge in the public interest,” and he would go on to write one of the first academic articles about Wikipedia and a book on Wikipedia history, in addition to attending every Wikimania since its founding in 2005 and becoming a key cornerstone of the community and its spirit. Now, Andrew works with museums, libraries, and other institutions on using Wikipedia to store knowledge and continues to grow the broader Wikimedia movement and our shared value of open knowledge. He is also a member of the Wikimania Steering Committee, helping the magic of the flagship event come alive year after year. 

“A long-term goal is to ensure people know about the greater Wikimedia movement and not just Wikipedia. We are not just the text on the virtual page. We are the images and multimedia that bring knowledge alive and the structured data that now lies beneath the surface that connects databases and institutions all over the world. So much of the knowledge on the Internet is held together by the free content, citations, and linked open data from the Wikimedia movement.”

Andrew Lih

Wikimedia Laureate: Deror Lin

In addition to being an inspiring editor and a prolific contributor, Deror has been instrumental in convening Wikimedia community members from around the world as a key organizer of multiple Wikimanias, famously the 2011 Wikimania in his native Israel. He has served on the program committee since and in other roles for many other Wikimedia events. He has been one of the most influential leaders in bringing Wikimedians together to celebrate the power of open knowledge. He has also written over 8,600 articles for Hebrew Wikipedia, comprising more than 2% of it!

“Deror is always cheerful and enthusiastic and wants to see results, whether it is in a program schedule or a Wikipedia article. He’s a maximalist, always wanting to see more talks, more points of view, and more participation. He is an inspiration for trying new projects, to learn from others, and to continue finding the joy in our work.” 

Phoebe Ayers (Wikimania Steering Committee co-chair, Wikimedian)

Honorable Mention: Anna Torres

Anna is the Executive Director of Wikimedia Argentina, but she goes above and beyond her job description, helping to grow the Wikimedia community across Latin America. She has mentored countless people and served as a key partner, leader, and role model for many volunteers, organizers, and projects in the region and around the world. She has helped to expand the boundaries of Wikimedia to make it more diverse, building, as she calls it, “a support network, a community that often transcends the borders of your place.” Anna has also been a leader on the 2030 Movement Strategy to envision and plan Wikmedia’s impact on the world for the next 10+ years.

“I have been almost 9 years in this movement that I describe as ‘a place where you never stop learning’. I had and have incredible mentors and my effort is also to be able to be at the same level for the new people that join the Movement.”

Anna Torres

Newcomer of the Year: Nkem Osuigwe

Dr. Nkem Osuigwe helped to start a partnership between the Wikimedia Foundation and the African Library and Information Associations & Institutions in 2020, using an existing professional network to generate over 27,000 edits since then. Her success led to the development of a Wikipedia training course for over 300 African librarians. Those trainees have gone on to make sizable contributions, join local communities, and begin new communities in countries including Zimbabwe, which previously did not have one. Nkem is a trailblazing leader, a grandmother, and a proud librarian expanding our knowledge sharing movement and introducing the power of Wikipedia to new communities across Africa and the world.

“Open knowledge is critical for development and Wikimedia projects are best suited for enabling everyone tell their own stories and increasing visibility for all forms of ‘knowing’.”

Nkem Osuigwe

Media Contributor of the Year: Annie Rauwerda

Annie had been occasionally editing and correcting typos on Wikipedia, but during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, she began posting screenshots of various quirky, funny and interesting Wikipedia pages to Instagram. By the end of the year, her Instagram account @depthsofwikipedia had over 50,000 followers – and now she has more than 1.5 million followers across Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Annie uses social media to spread the word about free, open knowledge, inspiring the next generation of community members and contributors to learn about the power … and depths of Wikipedia.

“I’m continually inspired by the fellow volunteers who have created a floating corpus of knowledge for everyone, for free. Wikipedia was lauded as the ‘last bastion of shared reality’ by The Atlantic in 2018, and for all its flaws, it’s one of the few areas of the internet where people share a common goal of advancing free knowledge.”

Annie Rauwerda

Tech Contributor of the Year: Taavi Väänänen

Based in Finland, Taavi volunteers with the Wikimedia movement as a developer and as a system administrator. He’s been a critical member of the team running Wikimedia Cloud Services, including Toolforge and Cloud VPS, key pieces of infrastructure that let community members host their Wikimedia-related bots, tools, and other software projects for free. He also helps maintain the CentralAuth MediaWiki extension, which allows users to use a single user account on all public Wikimedia sites. Taavi is dedicated to improving Wikimedia behind the scenes and making it possible for more Wikimedians to take advantage of the free ways to showcase open knowledge.

“I am a huge fan of Wikimedia’s transparency and ‘anyone can edit’ model, and being able to help even a tiny part to make the projects even better is quite rewarding to me.”

Taavi Väänänen

New honorees: Wikimedia Affiliate Spotlight

In a first-time partnership with the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee, this year’s Wikimedian of the Year celebration also spotlighted affiliates whose invaluable contributions to the movement help it grow in content and contributors.

Wikimedia Affiliate Spotlight – Partnerships: Art+Feminism

Art+Feminism is a nonprofit that builds a community of activists committed to closing information gaps related to gender, feminism, and the arts, beginning with Wikipedia. Since 2014, over 20,000 people at more than 1,500 events around the world have participated in Art+Feminism’s edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of more than 100,000 articles on Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Wikimedia Affiliate Spotlight  – Governance: Wikimedia UK

Wikimedia UK, the UK-based affiliate for the global Wikimedia movement, has centred knowledge equity, not just in programming and content, but in their own leadership. They recently diversified their staff and board of directors, showing the Wikimedia global movement that leadership should be as representative as our readers and community members.

02/08/2022-08/08/2022

Mapping

• Anne-Karoline Distel shared, in a diary entry, her efforts on nano-mapping the roofs of thatched buildings. Furthermore Anne-Karoline’s new video about creating ( voice / subtitles) a thatch map on uMap is now available, which completes the videos we reported last week.
• coolmule0 described how Microsoft’s recently released ‘Worldwide building footprints derived from satellite imagery’ can be filtered and used in JOSM.
• The proposal on cycleway=expressway, to map a cycleway with high design speed, limited access, no or very few at-grade crossings, and right of way, is waiting for your comments.
• Mateusz Konieczny published the results of StreetComplete user experience tests.
• Troy Hartwig blogged about the variety of difficulty rating systems and published an attempt to harmonise difficulty scales for trails (hiking and MTB).

Community

• Last Sunday, 7 August, we celebrated 18 years of OpenStreetMap! The OSMF invites you to share your birthday event, your birthday cake, or anything else related to the 18 years of OSM.
• The OSM Africa community organised an online monthly mapathon in honour of OSM’s 18th birthday, mapping Rwanda.
• The virtual meeting of the Latin American OSM community, organised ► by the OSM community in Argentina, took place on 30 July. The next meeting will take place in September and will possibly be organised by the OSM community in Panama.
• OpenStreetMap Belgium presented their August Mapper of the Month, Domenico Calvagna from Italy.

Maps

• Neil Southall showed his animation of lidar data that he combined with OSM to create a colour 3D representation of Copenhagen, Denmark.
• Topi Tjukanov has created ‘Notable people’, a map based on data from both OpenStreetMap and based on research by a team led by Morgane Laouenan. The map aims to show the most notable people from anywhere on Earth.

Software

• Jean Marco Rojas Umana, a computer engineering student at the Technological Institute of Costa Rica (Public University), is working on proposing and developing an improvement to the OSMTracker. Now he needs your help by answering seven questions (most of them YES or NO) to validate the necessity to implement functionality to upload tracked traces to a shared folder.
• Mikael Codes showed in a video, how you can make use of Prettymapp, by Christoph Rieke, to make amazing maps. Prettymapp is software based on prettymaps (we reported earlier), which has fewer configuration options, thus is much faster and has a web interface.
• The new 2022.07.27 update of Organic Maps was released for iOS and Android. Shop types were added, API support is improved for Android, and it is now possible to remove cuisines in the editor. As usual, maps and translations have been updated, and several routing fixes are in place.
• Eugene and Tatiana, from OsmAnd, explained in detail how to use and manage the route layer in OsmAnd.

Programming

• GitHub user Discostu36 is currently gathering feedback for a ‘photo uploader for Wikimedia Commons’ which directly links newly surveyed images to an OSM POI after uploading it to Wikimedia Commons. The project aims to ease the contribution of new images to already existing OSM objects. It is currently still in a pre-development stage, but you can find it on GitHub and provide feedback or track progress.

Releases

• [1] Paul Norman informed us that v5.6.0 of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on the OSM website) has been released. A GitHub issue offers arguments as to why large water polygons labels are rendered at high zoom levels only.
• Sarah Hoffmann (lonvia) proudly announced the release of Nominatim 4.1.0. Also check out the new Nominatim Cookbook.

Did you know …

• … John Wiseman (@lemonodor) has a map showing likely GPS interference, based on aircraft reports of their navigation system accuracy? For details have a look at the FAQ.
• … chronotrains-eu can show how far you can travel by train in five hours? Benjamin Td was inspired by the direkt.bahn.guru map.
• … the OSM Node Density map? You can either view the density for a specific year between 2014 and 2022 or display the difference between two consecutive years.
• … wheelmap, the OSM-based map by Sozialhelden e. V.? Apps to join in are available for Android and iOS.

Other “geo” things

• The GIScience Research Group, at Heidelberg University, is inviting applications for postdoctoral positions within the Heidelberg Mannheim Health and Life Science Alliance ‘Innovation Campus’ working on a inter-institutional project. The postdoctoral research at Heidelberg University will generate new geographical and environmental information through the combination and fusion of various geodata sources using state of the art machine learning methods.
• Our market companion has got ► some new bicycle functions.
• City Monitor discussed ‘how Google Maps is ruining your neighbourhood’ by encouraging rat running.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Berlin	170. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2022-08-12
Manila	#OSM18 meet-up in Manila		2022-08-13
Perth	Social mapping Sunday: Claisebrook to Optus Statium		2022-08-14
Windsor	StreetComplete Group Quest		2022-08-16
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-08-15
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #43		2022-08-15
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-08-17
	154. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-08-16
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-08-16
Firenze	State of the Map 2022		2022-08-19 – 2022-08-21
Lancaster	OSMUK AGM	✓	2022-08-20
Firenze	FOSS4G 2022		2022-08-22 – 2022-08-28
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)		2022-08-22
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-08-23
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-08-23
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2022-08-24
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-08-25
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-08-31
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-08-31

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 Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, Strubbl, TheSwavu, derFred.

With the upcoming Board of Trustees Election 2022, Movement Strategy and Governance Team’s facilitators talked to several Election Volunteers from different communities to hear about their experiences and motivation to join the Election Volunteer program.

This blog is a result of collaborative writing between the MSG facilitators and EV program volunteers.

Please tell us about yourself.

I am Goodness Ignatius (she/her/hers) from Nigeria. I have master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Library and Information Science. I have been a school Librarian over the years, also the founder of Digital Library Forum and Nesky Craft and Decor. On Wikimedia Foundation, I am the coordinator of the Ig Wiki librarians hub, an arm of the Igbo Wikimedians User Group; member, Ombuds Commission; member, Leadership Development Working Group, amongst others. I easily understand the use of technological tools and gadgets. I am always ready to listen, learn, unlearn and relearn. I speak, write, and read: Igbo ig-N, English en-5, Hausa ha-4 languages.

What motivated you to join the EV program? 

My motivation for joining is solely to help out and to understand more about the Wikimedia movement. I’m not really sure how I got the information, it could be from the mailing list or the content page on Meta-Wiki

What are some challenges and successes that you would like to share?

It is really an exciting experience for me because I stay informed and also pass information to my community. I really like translation interface on Meta-Wiki.

Looking ahead: What are your expectations for the upcoming 2022 BoT Elections? What would you like to do, and how would you like to be involved?

My expectations are that eligible voters can participate, communities would be informed adequately, and encourage their members to vote. I’ll like to participate in areas that help and volunteers will be will be needed.

The Gurene Wikimedia Community held a pre-Wikimania event at the Ajumako campus of the University of Education, Winneba.

The event, comprising 22 participants from the community, prepared them for Wikimania 2022 scheduled from August 11th to August 14th, 2022.

The in-person event assisted participants to register for Wikimania 2022, and the program outline helped members maximize the opportunity.

Additionally, refresher training was held to enable editors efficiently contribute to the Gurene Wikimedia incubator.

About Gurene Wikimedia Community

Gurene Wikimedia Community is an indigenous affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation and a sister community of Dagbani Wikipedia Community. The language is currently being developed in the incubator in a yet-to-be-confirmed transition period onto the main platform.

About Wikimania 2022

Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement’s annual conference celebrating all the free and open knowledge projects made possible by the volunteer community – Commons Wikimedia Commons, MediaWiki MediaWiki, Meta-Wiki Meta-Wiki, Wikibooks Wikibooks, Wikidata Wikidata, Wikinews Wikinews, Wikipedia Wikipedia, Wikiquote Wikiquote, Wikisource Wikisource, Wikispecies Wikispecies, Wikiversity Wikiversity, Wikivoyage Wikivoyage, Wiktionary Wiktionary

This year’s Wikimania will bring Wikimedians together to create, celebrate and connect, virtually and with in-person components.

It will be four days of gathering, discussions, meetups, training, and workshops. to discuss issues, report on new projects and approaches, and exchange ideas.

Wikimania: The Festival Edition!The theme for this year’s virtual Wikimania is “The Festival Edition”.

We will come together to spotlight projects and movement groups and celebrate the diversity of our vast community. Wikimania: The Festival Edition! can be summed up in three words: it will be fun, alive, and vibrant; it will be regional, shining a light on communities across the movement through the festivities; and it will welcome newcomers, creating a safe space for first-time attendees that illuminates and inspires.

Wikimedia Mexico invited women from different regions of the country for a discussion on how we inhabit the internet, about the gender gap and online violence, but above anything else, to exchange information, experiences and create networks among women for self-care and collective care.

The First #JuntasEnInternet (#TogetherOnTheInternet) Meeting took place on June 16 and 17 at the Cultural Center of Spain in Mexico (CCEMx), a cultural space in the historical downtown located in the heart of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.

Maryana Iskander, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, was  responsible for the inauguration of this event, saying a few words of welcome virtually. She was introduced by the executive director of Wikimedia Mexico Carmen Alcázar and Isabel Ruz, responsible for Support Services for diversity, inclusion, gender and human rights of CCEMx.

Throughout these two days, roundtables were held covering topics related to technological appropriation, gender bias, violence against women and girls on the Internet, the political and legal context of digital violence in Mexico, human rights for a violence free life, violence on the internet against women journalists and human rights defenders and freedom of speech with the participation of Anasuya Sengupta, Claudia Pozo, Mariana Fosstti, Ana Laura Godínez, Diana Valero, Irene Soria, Angie Contreras, Claudia Pedraza, Lulú Barrera , Lucía Lagunes, Martha Tudón and Marcela Nochebuena.

Además, se brindaron talleres sobre justicia transformativa, biografía tecnológica y resiliencia emocional con Walys Becerril, Alex Argüelles, Grecia Macías y Luisa Ortiz.

A strong, empathic and close bond was built between all the participants and at the end of the meeting, a visit to a wrestling match, one of the most popular sporting events in Mexico, was organized in the Mexico City Arena.

As a result of this meeting, two new alliances have been formed and the participants are in constant communication for exchange of information and to continue to strengthen the collaborative networks.

#NuncaMásWikipediaSinNosotras (#NeverAgainWikipediaWithoutUs)

It’s Wikimania week for 2022 and the countdown for the event has begun! First of all – make sure you have registered and once you have done that, you will receive an email giving you your login password. You can join our platform for this year, Pheedloop, any time from now till the event ends. 

Find out more about how Pheedloop works and once you have logged in, you can update your profile and join others in the Lobby to say hi in the chat and introduce yourself in the photo booth. Once you are in Pheedloop, you can look through the session schedule and start to build your own personal calendar of sessions – creating your own unique programme! 

As a newcomer to Wikimedia and Wikimania, you probably will want to look for sessions that have the “Ideal for newcomer” tag. You also want to try and catch as many of the lightning talks as you can, as they’ll be lightweight glimpses into what our communities (and even sometimes the Foundation) does on the projects, in an easy to digest format. 

There will also be arts, culture and entertainment every day, featuring local groups and affiliates – a fun way to get to know what communities are doing across the globe. Look out for interactive sessions too, from Meditação do Riso (Laughter meditation) to walking your pet round your local area to get some fresh air, to a cookout where we can be together to make delicious food to keep us going.  The Wikimedian of the Year awards will also be announced on the last day, Sunday 14, with multiple awards being given out – a special time for the community to recognise people from across the movement. 

There will also be a Newcomers group in the networking space, where there will be Wikimedian volunteers there to say hi, answer questions and give you insights into joining the community. If you feel overwhelmed by the sheer choice of things to listen to and do – fear not! As the majority of sessions will be recorded and then posted after the event for everyone to go back and enjoy on Pheedloop, on Youtube, and after the event has ended, on Wikimedia Commons!. 

Make sure you also check out all the in person events happening – in case there is one nearby for you to join! If you have any problems or questions during the scheduled event, we have a team of people there to help out – contact the Helpdesk and also check in with the Newcomers networking group.

In an idealized vision of the world, judges in common law countries are unbiased actors who rely on expert knowledge and detailed research to craft rulings which accurately reflect both the substance of the written law, and the body of precedent that applies to their jurisdiction. A judge must be proficient at doing their research and must consult all relevant ruling. Ideals aside, judges are human, and generally have heavy caseloads. Like the rest of us, they’re likely to rely on tools to ease their way through the research process. We live in a world where everyone relies on Wikipedia, regardless of whether they admit it. And according to research recently published by Neil Thompson and colleagues, judges are just like everyone else in this regard.

Back in 2019 I wrote about a study by Neil Thompson and Douglas Hanley which suggested that Wikipedia content helped shape the scientists’ understanding of their own field of study. They showed that the language used in the technical literature in chemistry converged with the wording used in Wikipedia articles about a given topic. Through a fascinating study, they were able to demonstrate experimentally that this wasn’t coincidental — the way topics are discussed on Wikipedia influences the way they’re discussed in the literature. The fact that Wikipedia articles influence the way people understand their own fields highlights the importance of experts getting involved in the process of editing articles.

In a new study of Irish legal cases, Neil Thompson and colleagues were able to show that judges rely on Wikipedia articles to inform them about settled cases and precedents, and concluded that judges are relying on Wikipedia as a replacement for their own reading of Supreme Court rulings.

Much like in the previous study, the researchers created 154 new articles about Irish Supreme Court cases, and uploaded half of them to Wikipedia, while keeping the other half as a control set. Most of these articles were created by law students with the support and supervision of faculty (using a methodology based on Wiki Education’s Student Program). Wikipedia’s coverage of Irish Supreme Court cases was very incomplete, which meant that it was easy to create new articles about cases where none existed previously.

What happened next was probably not a huge surprise — creating a Wikipedia article about a case increased its rate of citation in rulings by almost 22%. While this showed that judges are relying on internet searches to locate relevant cases, it said little about how they are using the information on Wikipedia. But the second part of the study looked at the textual similarity between rulings and the Wikipedia articles. Here again, they found a statistically significant effect. In other words, judges (or, perhaps, their law clerks) were paraphrasing Wikipedia articles as they drafted their rulings.

The implications of this study are pretty major. While the best Wikipedia articles provide accurate, comprehensive, unbiased coverage of a topic, most fall short in one area or another. This is rarely intentional — while Wikipedia’s contributors are usually dedicated to producing high-quality articles, they’re mostly volunteers who face constraints of time, access to sources, and sometimes subject-matter expertise. But Wikipedia’s open nature also means that people with vested interests in the outcomes of a case have the ability to manipulate articles about important precedents.

To avoid these sorts of problems, Thompson and colleagues suggest ways to improve the quality of Wikipedia articles: “Policy-wise, this could be addressed by buttressing the reliability and review of Wikipedia content by including legal professionals as supervising editors to certify page quality, or by augmenting the content of authoritative but less-broad sources, and using those for the provision of legal information about particular jurisdictions.”

These are reasonable suggestions, but they’re also ones that the community has tried without much success throughout Wikipedia’s existence. It’s hard to convince experts to dedicate their limited time to reviewing Wikipedia articles. It can also be difficult for experts to work with the Wikipedia editing community, especially when outside experts don’t have a good sense of the community. (Despite the frequent assumption that Wikipedians are just random amateurs, many have advanced degrees in the subject areas where they contribute, while others have become experts while contributing over the last two decades.)

Short of convincing judges not to use Wikipedia, there are other ways to mitigate some of these problems. The more active editors there are in a subject area, the harder it is to insert bias. People pay more attention to changes to existing articles, especially if they are actively being edited. It’s much harder to insert bias into existing articles than it is to do it when you’re creating a brand new article. Programs that bring more contributors to Wikipedia — like Wiki Education’s Student Program — not only can fill content gaps in legal topic areas, they also bring more traffic and more editorial attention to these articles (and to articles that are downstream from them). After all, the articles that Thompson and colleagues used for this study were mostly created by student editors.

The other way to mitigate potential harm is to make people better consumers of information from Wikipedia. Few people who consult Wikipedia articles ever look at the history tab or the talk page, despite the fact that they can provide crucial information about the state of the article. Even fewer know about plug-ins like “Who Wrote That?“ that supply information about when individual “facts” were added (and by whom). Training judges (or the pool of legal professionals from which judges are appointed) would make them better consumers of Wikipedia. This isn’t a far-fetched idea — the model for this kind of thing exists in our Scholars & Scientists Program, where participants gain these kinds of skills (among others).

As Thompson’s research has shown, Wikipedia is influential on multiple disciplines. If you’re interested in influencing the public’s understanding of your topic area, as well as future ways of writing about your subject area, adding neutral, fact-based information to Wikipedia is the way to go. Instructors who are interested in teaching with Wikipedia, visit teach.wikiedu.org for more information on Wiki Education’s support for assignments. Knowledge or disciplinary organizations, empower your staff or members to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of your topic by hosting a Wikipedia editing course.

Thumbnail image by Blogtrepreneur, (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

10 August, 2022 – Every year, hundreds of Wikimedians – the volunteers who make Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects possible – come together to celebrate free knowledge at the annual Wikimania global conference. Now in its 17th edition, the conference looks different this year than it has in the past. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to shape global convenings, Wikimania 2022 is, for the first time, a hybrid event with opportunities for participants to come together virtually and in person through more than 40 events around the world.

Taking place from 11-14 August, this year’s conference is co-organized by Wikimedia volunteers and the Wikimedia Foundation, the global nonprofit that supports Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects.

The conference program includes over 120 sessions on a wide range of global topics, including the annual Wikimedian of the Year awards, presented by Wikipedia Founder, Jimmy Wales. The awards highlight volunteers who have gone above and beyond in their contributions to Wikimedia projects and the wider free knowledge movement.

The conference was designed with global inclusion at the forefront, including a time-zone friendly program, simultaneous live translation of sessions into 13 languages, and thousands of attendees expected to join from around the world, with a majority expected to be  newcomers to Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects.

“This year’s Wikimania will be a celebration of the depth and diversity of our global communities,” said Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. “Wikimedia projects offer access to reliable information across more languages than any other platform or movement in the world. Wikimania is an opportunity to recognize this work and to continue building – not only imagining – a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.”

The theme of this year’s conference is the “festival edition.” After more than two years of isolation and uncertainty amidst the global pandemic, this year’s Wikimania is meant to spark levity, fun, and joy. The theme encourages Wikimedians to foster closer connections with one another and celebrate what the free knowledge movement can achieve next.

“I went to my first Wikimania in 2005, and back then it was one of the first times that we met the people behind Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects,” said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. “As I look at this year’s Wikimania, I’m amazed at how far we’ve come. What was once a meeting of a few hundred people is now a meeting of thousands. Wikipedia is shaping the way information is shared online in ways that I could have never expected in those early days. This year’s festival is a testament to the work and the generosity of volunteers from around the world and their commitment to free knowledge.”

Alongside the virtual program, there will be over 40 in-person events taking place all over the world, organized by local Wikimedia affiliate groups. These events include watch parties of the virtual conference, meetups, a Wiki World’s Fair, hackathons, edit-a-thons, and cultural celebrations.

Venus Lui, Wikipedia volunteer and a member of the 2022 Wikimania Core Organizing Team said, “I look forward to four days that strengthen and celebrate our growing scope of content and community of volunteer editors. It will also be an opportunity to dig into the many projects the community is working on to make free knowledge more accessible and available than ever before – including the latest ways that we are evolving our technology and our programs to bridge knowledge gaps.”

Wikimania 2022 highlights:

• The Wikimedian of the Year awards, led by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. The award recognizes exceptional volunteers in the movement across seven categories.
• A panel session discussing examples of knowledge as a service and knowledge equity, the two pillars of the strategic direction to guide the future of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. Panelists include:
  • Maryana Iskander, CEO, Wikimedia Foundation (moderator)
  • Guillaume Paumier, Principal Program Manager, Wikimedia Foundation (moderator)
  • Dr. Nkem E. Osuigwe, Director of Human Capacity Development and Training for the African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA)
  • Olga Paredes, a Wikimedian in Bolivia working toward knowledge equity
  • Lydia Pintscher, Product Manager, Wikidata
• Sessions evaluating the impact of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects on the wider world, including in relation to human rights, climate issues, and the ongoing invasion of Ukraine. 

• Discussions centered on knowledge gaps in Wikimedia projects, led by volunteer groups like Wiki Vibrance, Women in Red, and Arabic Wikimedia communities.
• Sneak-peeks and new technology improvements like the forthcoming changes to the desktop version of Wikipedia, improvements to Wikipedia’s mobile interfaces, and Wikifunctions, the newest Wikimedia project.
• Evaluations and lessons learned from collaborations between Wikimedians and cultural institutions like the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative and the African Libraries Week, produced with the African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA).
• Cultural and entertainment activities, including a session with Annie Rauwerda who runs the Depths of Wikipedia social media accounts, musical and dance performances, cultural festivals, and more.

Interested participants are welcome to review the full conference program and register for Wikimania.

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

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

Wikimedia Foundation Celebrates Two Major Milestones

July was a historic month for the Foundation on two fronts: externally at the United Nations Economic and Social Affairs Council, and internally via the publication of the Foundation’s first Human Rights Impact Assessment. These developments are decisive steps that advance the strength of the free knowledge movement as well as our movement’s ability to protect and promote access to knowledge and human rights in relation to the Wikimedia ecosystem around the world. 

In this edition we dedicate special space to these landmark events and break down the most essential information for you.

1) Wikimedia Foundation Gains Consultative Status at United Nations

The Wikimedia Foundation was granted accreditation as an observer by the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) on 21 July 2022. We have spelled out the what and why below. 

• What is ECOSOC observer status? ECOSOC is the United Nations (UN) body responsible for leading international discussions on economic and social issues. ECOSOC also works alongside other UN bodies to advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Observer status at the Council enables non-governmental organizations like the Wikimedia Foundation to enrich and shape ECOSOC efforts by sharing their expert advice and expressing their concerns and views in discussions, to do so at the subsidiary bodies of ECOSOC and to be allowed  participation at special events.
  
• Why does it matter for Wikimedians and the free knowledge movement? The fact that 23 countries voted in support of the Foundation signals strong support for organizations and movements like ours, which stand up for human rights and freedom of expression. For the Wikimedia Foundation, accreditation amounts to an opportunity to represent the interests of the free knowledge movement in global conversations around the role of access to knowledge in advancing sustainable development. As a formal player in UN processes, the Foundation can work directly with member states and other stakeholders to promote greater and more equitable access to free knowledge. Part of this involves showcasing Wikimedia’s collaborative model of creating and sharing knowledge. 

2) Wikimedia Foundation Publishes Human Rights Impact Assessment

The Foundation published its first human rights impact assessment (HRIA) on 11 July 2022. The report evaluates human rights risks that may be related to Wikimedia projects, platforms, or activities. The findings help everyone in the Wikimedia movement better identify, understand, and address those risks. Full details about how the report came to be and what it means for the movement are available in a Diff blog post.

• What is the human rights impact assessment? An HRIA helps to identify and consider potential responses to human rights risks. This specific report was commissioned to understand human rights risks related to Wikimedia projects, platforms, and activities. It helps us identify opportunities to address and mitigate those risks, essentially making our knowledge ecosystem safer and more equitable.
  
• Why was the report produced? The report was produced because hosting a platform for curating, sharing, and contributing knowledge, even with the intention of promoting access to educational content, can also impact fundamental rights centred around free expression, privacy, and equity. The report examines how these activities impact fundamental human rights, and also provides recommendations to help the Foundation and movement volunteers address and mitigate any risks to the continued advancement of human rights and access to free knowledge.
  
• How will the report help the Wikimedia movement safeguard human rights? The report helps us identify what and where risks are associated with Wikimedia projects. Five key risk areas were highlighted. It also provides recommendations on how these can be addressed. Some recommendations were very high-level, like adopting a Human Rights Policy. Others required additional time and resources, like recruiting staff with expertise in human rights. Others again were more tactical. We have already acted upon some of these recommendations, but to address others we will need your feedback. 
  
• What does this have to do with me? The publication of this HRIA is also meant to start a conversation on these challenges and solutions within our movement. This is a long-term effort, not a quick fix. Let us know your thoughts at Wikimania (virtual session), the HRIA talk page, or the Movement Strategy Forum.

Latin America and the Caribbean

• Argentina’s Supreme Court protects Freedom of Expression: The Supreme Court of Justice of Argentina delivered a decision last month that upheld freedom of expression and protected free access to public information in a case regarding the right to be forgotten. Our analysis is now available. We explain how the decision sets an important precedent for protecting access to reliable, verified information about people that is of public interest. The Foundation cautions against the potential negative impact that removing content online can have on access to relevant and reliable information. We argued as much in an amicus brief that we submitted to the case in March 2022. Details about how we protect freedom of expression and access to information are available in our biannual Transparency Report, which documents right to be forgotten requests we receive, and our responses to those and other requests to remove or alter information on our projects.
  
• WikiCon Brasil: The Brazilian Wikimedia community hosted its first conference, WikiCon Brasil, on 23-24 July. The conference focused on the circulation of false information, and how volunteers from the Wikimedia movement fight against it. Amalia Toledo, Lead Public Policy Specialist for Latin America & the Caribbean, led an informal conversation with community members about the Global Advocacy team’s priorities and the political and regulatory environments in Brazil. In these images you can see that we exist IRL too.

North America

• US Copyright Office plenary: The Foundation participated in a plenary session held by the US Copyright Office inquiring into what the government’s role might be in identifying standard technical measures (STMs). Kate Ruane, Lead Public Policy Specialist for the US, represented the Foundation’s perspective of skepticism of the government’s role in identifying or mandating the use of STMs. We voiced support for a process where stakeholders could discuss appropriate technical measures without the threat of regulation.

Announcements from our Team

• Help us combat disinformation: We are launching a public mapping project to counter disinformation. We need your help. Our goal is to compile all the initiatives and tools that have been developed at the local level across Wikipedia projects so that we can share them with the entire movement and support each other better. If you are aware of any initiative, tool, training, or other form of community engagement around misinformation, disinformation, or information integrity, please let us know. Send an e-mail with the subject “disinformation mapping” to Costanza Sciubba Caniglia (csciubbacaniglia@wikimedia.org), our Anti-Disinformation Strategy Lead, and copy Ziski Putz (fputz@wikimedia.org).
  
• Join us at Wikimania: We’re hosting a session at Wikimania! Join us on Sunday, 14 August at 17:45 UTC for a workshop focused on human rights. Participants will help us brainstorm solutions to address specific human rights challenges facing Wikimedia projects and platforms, including issues like harmful content, harassment, government surveillance and censorship, and challenges to knowledge equity. Our goal is to crowdsource ideas on how the movement can better mitigate these challenges and, in turn, protect Wikimedians’ human rights. We hope you join and share your thoughts with us.

Follow us on Twitter, check our Meta-Wiki, or join our mailing list for updates. We hope to see you there.

The diversity of the community as well as inviting new editors from various backgrounds became a prime mover to focus on topics related to the subject of human rights. Both Serbian and Czech chapters have that issue as a strategic priority and decided to work on its coverage together.

Human rights month on Wikipedia

In the Czech Republic, the idea of better coverage of topics related to human rights came into action as a Wikiproject and one-month-long editing contest “Human rights month on Wikipedia” with the highlight event – Human rights edit-a-thon, which was held on the 20th of June 2022 in the heart of Prague. 

During the contest 54 Wikipedians edited or created 96 new articles. You can find the results here. The edit-a-thon was organized in the hybrid form, 11 local organizations active in the field of human rights joined the activity – among others Amnesty International, OPIM, SIMI, or People in Need. 

World Refugee Day Edit-a-thon

On the occasion of World Refugee Day, the Wikimedia Czech Republic joined the international edit-a-thon organized by Wikimedia Serbia. Wikipedia volunteers around Europe who participated in this campaign wrote and improved articles on topics related to the refugee crisis, human rights of refugees, movies, and books about the experience of refugees, etc. Those topics are essential not only because of the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe but because refugees face discrimination, xenophobia, and various forms of violence daily along their way and we wanted to raise awareness about those issues. The edit-a-thon was supported by GLAM Macedonia, Shared Knowledge, Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey, Wikimedians of Republic of Srpska, and Wikimedia Community User Group Greece. 

International Refugee Day Edit-a-thon started on the 20th of June when World Refugee Day is celebrated, and it lasted until the 26th of June. During this campaign, 44  editors wrote 146 and improved 7 articles. The best results were made on Serbian and Macedonian Wikipedia. You can find more information about the results here. On the occasion of these noteworthy results, we asked Žana Gnjatović, the editor of Serbian Wikipedia who made significant contributions to this event, what the International Refugee Day Edit-a-thon represented for her:

By participating in the World Refugee Day edit-a-thon, my goal was to showcase books and publications that are dedicated to this topic. My primary goal was to bring attention to the books that can be helpful to refugees, people who are there to support and aid them, and the general public. The refugee crisis has been occurring for several years now, and it seems that it will not end anytime soon. For starters, something that we as individuals can do about this matter is to find relevant information and try to learn more about and understand all of the daily challenges and difficulties that refugees face. Writing articles about the book dedicated to refugees and refugee crisis is my contribution to this task.

Žana Gnjatović

Wikimedia Serbia and the Wikimedia Czech Republic also collaborated on the organization of a meet-up call for all the chapters and Wikimedia user groups that supported and participated in the International Refugee Day Edit-a-thon. This call presented an opportunity to Wikimedians around Europe not only to get to know each other but also to share their experience and plans for the future. 

Other languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English,español, français, italiano, polski, português do Brasil, suomi, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, فارسی, বাংলা, 中文, 日本語

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

Recent changes

• GUS2Wiki copies the information from Special:GadgetUsage to an on-wiki page so you can review its history. If your project isn’t already listed on the Wikidata entry for Project:GUS2Wiki you can either run GUS2Wiki yourself or make a request to receive updates. [1]

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 9 August at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 11 August at 7:00 UTC (targeted wikis).

Future meetings

• The Wikimania Hackathon will take place online from August 12–14. Don’t miss the pre-hacking showcase to learn about projects and find collaborators. Anyone can propose a project or host a session. Newcomers are welcome!

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

The East African Regional and Thematic Hub (EARTH) is a proposed hub that seeks to bring together communities in East Africa to work towards a common agenda in the pursuit of championing free knowledge in line with the implementation of initiative 25 of Wikimedia 2030 Strategy: Regional and thematic hubs.

EARTH is currently in the research and planning phase. The core organizing team received funding from the movement strategy team to facilitate the process.

The proposed hub will target 11 communities: in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Congo, Burundi, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia, Zambia, and Botswana

The extensive research seeks to identify both opportunities and the existing challenges facing East African communities and establish whether EARTH Hub is something of interest to these communities as well as find out how this hub will be a solution to the existing EA communities’ problems in the pursuit of free knowledge. We will also explore similar hub-like structures within our regions and learn more about their operations and governance models and consider what might be worth adopting.

Scope

• To ensure that the existing and future communities have the capacity and resources to make and implement meaningful decisions for Wikimedia 2030, and the Movement Strategy.
• Make new connections and structures that will strengthen the identified communities to fulfill the Strategic Direction.
• To empower groups of affiliates to collaborate on capacity building, knowledge transfer, coordination, and participation in the Wikimedia Movement discussions and activities.

Community participation is Key

The project will define the scope and role of a hub in our region through community outreach to gather input around what a regional hub means for the target communities; what tangible steps are needed in creating a hub; identify thematic areas of mutual interest; and identify solutions to solve coordination or representation decisions, inclusivity, and also provide a systematic way of Knowledge and skills sharing.

An external consultant will be recruited by the steering team to facilitate the research process, and a call for the target communities to participate will be published soon.

The end result will include an evaluation on the gaps and needs, plus recommendations for a pilot implementation.

Background

East African Countries enjoy historical political and economic relations that are enshrined in the East Africa Community economic bloc (EAC) and the East African Regional and Thematic Hub (EARTH) seeks to leverage on this goodwill.

Earth is looking into building on a journey that started gaining momentum in 2019 when 8 communities in the East Africa region and others drawn from nearby countries that are not within the EAC like Ethiopia, convened in Uganda for the East Africa Strategy Summit.

Learn more and see how to get involved on the EARTH Meta page

• Argentina report: Provinces: our main characters
• Brazil report: Brazil holds its National Wiki Conference, and many GLAM partners join
• Colombia report: A very busy July for Colombian libraries / Un Julio bastante movido para las bibliotecas colombianas
• France report: Wikimedian in residence in Clermont-Ferrand
• New Zealand report: News from Auckland Museum, the West Coast, and New Zealand’s thesis repositories
• Poland report: Edit-a-thon in the National Museum in Cracow, GLAM editing contest on the collection of artworks
• Portugal report: Portugal’s first GLAM-Wiki open access museum project is launched!!
• Serbia report: Presentation of GLAM activities at Edu Wiki Camp
• UK report: Khalili Collections
• USA report: GLAM for the Masses
• AvoinGLAM report: Wikimania
• Content Partnerships Hub report: Wikimania activities
• WMF GLAM report: What next for 1Lib1Ref?
• Calendar: August’s GLAM events

26/07/2022-01/08/2022

Breaking news

• The OpenStreetMap project will turn 18 on or around Tuesday 9 August 2022. If you have a birthday event to announce or want to post photos from your celebrations you can add them to the wiki page.

Mapping campaigns

• An item, in last week’s weeklyOSM, about classifying data quality in OSM triggered a brief discussion on the HOT talking list.
• People from TomTom have put together a series of MapRoulette tasks and shared them with the Chilean, Maltese, Slovenian, and other communities. Elsewhere, TomTom’s own editing has been criticised for making incorrect edits.

Mapping

• Anne-Karoline Distel published new videos describing how to map thatched roofs and how to tag a variety of roof:material on the one building.
• Patrik_B shared his workflow and tips for validating multiple tasks at once using JOSM and a number of plugins.

Community

• The next OSM-FOSSGIS community meeting is planned > to be held on the weekend of 16 to 18 September at the Linuxhotel in Essen. Travel is at your own expense; accommodation and meals will be provided by the the FOSSGIS Association, the German local chapter of OSM.
• User AwoowoArne, from Germany, is the UN Mapper of the Month.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OWG, the operational group that manages the OSMF servers, showed the board-approved version of their 2022 (Q3–Q4) budget.
• The OSMF Board is running an ‘Ask Us Anything’ at SotM, and is looking for questions.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap US’s July newsletter has been published.
• OpenStreetMap Poland has signed > a cooperation agreement with the Internet portal gisplay.pl which will promote OSM and modern map solutions based on OSM data.

Events

• The OpenSteetMap community in Kerala held their Meetup 2022, which took place on Sunday 31 July in Kochi. Around 30 mappers across Kerala state participated. Presentations and hands-on sections on were devoted to mapping public transport and local government bodies.The meeting was reported by The Hindu, and Florian Lainez, of Jungle Bus, tweeted highlights of the day.

OSM research

• Mohammed Rizwan Khan reported on the development of a lite-mode ohsomeHeX application for smaller-screen mobile devices. Though the application will have limited functionality on smaller screens, it will still allow mobile users to get an overview of current OSM topics on the go.

switch2OSM

• Luxembourg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn is cycling from Luxembourg to Saint Maxime, in Provence (over the top of Mont Ventoux!), and he used OpenStreetMap to plan his journey.
• New instructions for setting up a rendering server on Ubuntu 22.04 were published when that version of Ubuntu was released. In a diary entry, SomeoneElse explained that setting up replication with osm2pgsql or PyOsmium and monitoring with munin is much easier now, as Ubuntu provides up to date packages for osm2pgsql and osmium, so that a manual build from source is not needed any more.

Software

• ChrisPark blogged a Google Summer of Code midterm update for their goal of reintroducing transit to Valhalla, an open-source routing engine.
• The OpenStreetMap Ops Team has published post-mortem reports about two recent service outages: the longest outage in 5+ years, and a degraded standard tile layer incident.

Programming

• Roland Olbricht has released Docker containers to run the Overpass API. Instructions for installing these are available here.

Releases

• [1] Pieter Vander Vennet has added another map to the 46 themes at MapComplete, the OnWheels map. In his blog post, Pieter tells how he and four students, funded by Open Knowledge in Belgium, implemented the OnWheels project as part of their Open Summer of Code and created a special map for wheelchair users.

Did you know …

• … we left some options out in last week’s list of tools for contributing to OSM? Go Map!! is available on iPhone (thank you for the kind comments from @Notna M and @Tordans) and OsmApp for Android, iOS and Web. Felipe says on Telegram ‘On Chrome, Firefox and Safari you can download the Progressive App directly from its page’. We also recommend checking Wambacher’s SoftwareWatchlist.
• … all the best alternatives to the various Google services? This list > , by the French Clubic web magazine, contains a section about Google Maps alternatives. OpenStreetMap and its ecosystem are placed at the top of the list of alternatives.

Other “geo” things

• Plan4Better has used their Geo Open Accessibility Tool (GOAT) to see how close Munich is to being a 15-minute city.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Csömör	OSM 18th birthday hiking & survey in Csömör		2022-08-06
Cayambe	Notathon en OpenStreetMap – resolvamos notas de Cayambé, Ecuador		2022-08-06
	OSM Africa August Mapathon: Map Rwanda		2022-08-06
新北市	OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團 #3		2022-08-07
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2022-08-10
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2022-08-09
Köln	25. Stammtisch Köln		2022-08-10
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-08-11
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-08-10
Zürich	143. OSM-Stammtisch		2022-08-11
Berlin	170. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2022-08-12
Perth	Social mapping Sunday: Claisebrook to Optus Statium		2022-08-14
Windsor	StreetComplete Group Quest		2022-08-16
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-08-15
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #43		2022-08-15
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-08-17
	154. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-08-16
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-08-16
Firenze	State of the Map 2022		2022-08-19 – 2022-08-21
Firenze	FOSS4G 2022		2022-08-22 – 2022-08-28
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)		2022-08-22
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-08-23
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-08-23
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2022-08-24

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, SK53, SomeoneElse, Strubbl, TheSwavu, conradoos, derFred.

One of the best ways to learn about Wikidata is through examples — examples of property usage, query examples, and examples of well-modeled items. When we started our Wikidata program back in 2019, there were far fewer items — and even fewer well-developed items. Even though the early examples of well-developed items are technically excellent, they are not diverse or representative of the world. In the original version of our training slides, we replicated the well-used examples from the Wikidata community. Now, we’ve updated our training slide examples and the items we use in our outreach to emphasize diversity and represent a broader community.

For this project we partnered with Lane Rasberry, Wikidatan-in-Residence at the University of Virginia (UVA), who had recently received funding from the Sloan Foundation to help bring more data about academic research software to Wikidata. Collaborating on this project will allow UVA to improve data on Scholia (a platform that displays academic profiles based on what’s in Wikidata) and it will help diversify the examples Wiki Education uses in outreach and training materials.

This project has been an excellent way of elevating some urgent and important research from individuals whose work has been underrepresented on Wikidata and beyond. This is a continuation of our commitment to equity across Wikimedia projects. We recognize that continued engagement is essential to affect community-wide changes. Our hope is these examples can lead to bigger changes and create space for more critical thought and engagement about representation on Wikidata.

We set out to identify academic research software contributors from North America who represent historically marginalized communities in this space: Native Americans, women, and people of the African diaspora. Wiki Education was ideally positioned to identify potential research software developers who fit these descriptions; through our Wikipedia Student Program and Scholars & Scientists Program, we are connected to thousands of academics across the United States and Canada. A few emails and video calls later, and we were able to develop a pool of individuals who met this specific criteria. The next step was to locate sources, publications, unique identifiers, and any other data we could use to update (or create) their items on Wikidata, enhance items related, and link their work to other entities on Wikidata.

One urgent research project happening right now came from Dr. Ben Frey, a linguistics professor who is part of the Eastern Band of Cherokees. He has been conducting research to preserve and teach the Cherokee language, which has around 2,500 speakers left at the time of publication. He has been working with large datasets of Cherokee and English sentences to improve machine learning with the Cherokee language. From there his hope is more instant translation can occur, as well as other uses. Before this work, he and the research software he’s developing didn’t have items on Wikidata. Not only does he have one now, but you can see a set of his publications here.

Another project we decided to focus on is Openscapes, led by Julia Stewart Lowndes. Openscapes endeavors to mentor researchers about open data practices (check out some of their cool work here). In working on these items, we performed merges, created new items, and linked to their Github repositories, which were previously unlinked. In developing these related items, Wikidata users will be able to discover this work through queries or by visiting Wikidata itself.

We also spent time working on several other researchers’ Wikidata items, items representing their research, and linking out to Github repositories, ORCID scholarly communication records, and additional identifier data. Although we can’t explain all of the edits here, the general idea is the same: having research better represented on Wikidata allows for better analysis of this data, more re-use of this data, and the opportunity to discover new insights about this data.  As with all of our examples, we are hopeful that drawing more attention to this kind of research will inspire others to think of work that should belong on Wikidata, but isn’t there yet.

We believe that using a diverse set of examples will draw more attention to the systemic bias that pervades Wikidata and the Wikidata community. Elevating the profile of these accomplished researchers (and their research) is just the beginning of what we need to do. We will continue to update these items, related items, and research papers to ensure the most information possible is on Wikidata. We hope our course participants and other members of the Wikidata community will also consider improving representation across all of Wikidata.

To learn more about Wikidata, follow this link and explore our courses.

🕑 1 hour 22 minutes

Jake Orlowitz is the lead of the management consulting company WikiBlueprint. Before founding WikiBlueprint, he worked at the Wikimedia Foundation, where his projects included The Wikipedia Library and The Wikipedia Adventure. He has been open about his former struggles with mental health, and Wikipedia's role in helping him overcome them. He can be reached at jorlowitzATgmailDOTcom.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Jake Orlowitz homepage
• "How Wikipedia Drove Professors Crazy, Made Me Sane, and Almost Saved the Internet" (Jake's chapter of Wikipedia@20, 2019)
• Welcome to the Circle: the Mental Health Book (Jake Orlowitz, 2019)
• The Wikipedia Library
  • Page on Wikipedia
• WikiBlueprint
• The Wikipedia Adventure
• GuidedTour MediaWiki extension
• "The Wikipedia Adventure: Field Evaluation of an Interactive Tutorial for New Users" (2017 conference paper, Jake Orlowitz et al.)

The Meshtastic is my solarpunk dream—a cheap, encrypted, offgrid communicator. But the project is still in the alpha stages (and it shows).

Meshtastic is a communication system. Its firmware runs on bare-bones “T-Beam” devices. T-Beams are available fully-assembled and pre-flashed for about $35.

The devices enable encrypted, text-message-style communication via an app on your smartphone. No cell service required.

I bought two Meshtastic T-Beams for a recent trip to Yellowstone National Park. The devices worked as advertised—we could share texts and locations between our Android phones even though we had no service.

What I dislike ¶

There’s no way around it: this is an alpha quality project. Right now, it’s only usable by nerds (like me 🌠). You’ll probably have a bad time if you’re not a tinkerer or a hobbyist.

• Alpha quality – The project is hard to use, even for the basics. During our trip to Yellowstone, we repeatedly lost our bluetooth connection to the devices—they kept going to sleep. And the interface is sometimes unclear—I ended up holding down buttons, waiting for something (anything) to happen.
• iOS requires Testflight – The Android mobile app worked well, but the iOS app requires Testflight to install—which seems like a pain.
• Batteries/small bombs – The T-Beams run off big honkin’ 18650 batteries—the same lithium-ion cells used in Tesla battery packs. While the batteries last all day, I had to make extra purchases. Later I realized they run fine off of USB battery packs, but I was uncertain about that when I bought it. These things added to my costs:
  • Opus BT-C3100 battery charger
  • Sanyo NCR18650GA 3500mAh 10A Battery
• PCBs are intimidating – Holding a PCB (printed circuit board) intimidates electronics neophytes. There are stickers available on the discourse that read: “Meshtastic: this is not a bomb” (for base stations in the field).
• “Meshtastic” – My brain refuses to type “meshtastic” on the first try; this may be a personal problem.

19/07/2022-25/07/2022

Mapping

• Andrea Spinelli wondered how to add a point of interest with iD at a specific coordinate. Officially, this function is not desired. Developers recommend the use of Cmd + Opt + M, or equivalent, to open the measurement panel, which shows the exact location of a selected node. In comments following the blog post, readers shared their alternative approaches.
• A bicycle route linking Stuttgart in Germany to Strasbourg in France has been created, as reported last week. Without signposts along it, a discussion has started about whether it meets OpenStreetMap’s inclusion criteria. At the moment there are opinions on multiple channels for and against, including the French mailing list > and the German forum > .
• EdoBoo reported, in their OSM Diary, that their visit to Forte di Montecchio motivated them to revise the mapping of this fortress with more detail.
• Mapping public transport seems to remain a challenge for new mappers, although the wiki contains a step-by-step tutorial.
• ngumenawesamson, from HOT, presented a detailed classification of aspects of data quality on OSM, under 10 headings. It is planned to use this classification to identify actions which can be taken, within HOT projects, to reduce some of these issues.
• Voting on Documentation of key prefixes and suffixes, to establish the convention of documenting key prefixes at pages named Key:prefix:* and key suffixes at pages named Key:*:suffix on the wiki, is open until Sunday 7 August.
• Voting on the following proposals has closed:
  • school=entrance, to deprecate the use of the tag school=entrance, was approved with 26 votes for, 3 votes against and 0 abstentions.
  • amenity=library_dropoff, for mapping a place where library patrons can return or drop-off books, other than the library itself, was approved with 12 votes for, 1 vote against and 0 abstentions.

Community

• The national mapping agency for Great Britain, the Ordnance Survey (OSGB), recently released a new map, OS Map, as a website and a mobile app. The map provides both free and subscription layers. The free layers integrate data from a range of sources: OSGB open data, OSGB closed data and OpenStreetMap via MapBox. The UK community has noticed problems with the latter layer as it includes private paths, which has resulted in irate landowners deleting perfectly valid OSM data.
• User TrickyFoxy raised the question of whether registration for OpenStreetMap by mobile users (especially with Google) is too complex and linked to different issues on GitHub, one of which has been open since 2015. As Tom Hughes pointed out at the time, any solution must enable new mappers to accept the contributor terms.

Education

• Introducing young people to responsible mapping through education and training is certainly more meaningful than hunting for nodes. Great examples are the actions of Muni Mappers from Uganda and Laura Mugeha at the Technical University, Nairobi, Kenya.

OSM research

• Roberto Pizzolotto, of the University of Calabria, published a scientific trajectory of OpenStreetMap. It showed that the main themes (a conceptual network) chiefly related to technical matters. Collaboration among scholars and institutes (the social network) was not strong, and knowledge and ideas circulated within a limited network.

Maps

• For the May Contain Hackers 2022 event in the Netherlands there is a special map based on OSM, which Evelyn also prepared for OsmAnd.

switch2OSM

• The French association Randonner Leger > , wrote > a guide about using OSMAnd for trekking purposes.

Software

• Canadian contributors reported reliability problems with OSM tile servers. The OpenStreetMap operations group is aware of latency problems for North American users as the one US rendering server, Pyrene, no longer has the capacity to keep up with demand. It is planned to add a new server soon in the east of North America.
• Benjamin Clark, from Meta, shared the 2022 development plans for MapWithAI’s RapiD editor for OpenStreetMap in a GitHub project issue. It is open to comments and feedback.
• Ilya Zverev wondered how to edit tags directly from openstreetmap.org. He built a solution which works as a browser extension available for Firefox and Chrome.

Programming

• Paul Norman took the recent outage of the standard tile layer as motivation to describe the means of monitoring system health.

Did you know …

• … there are many ways to contribute regularly to OSM?
  Desktop:
  • OSM Streak
  • MapRoulette
  • Pic4Review
  • Unmapped Places
  • Find Suspicious OpenStreetMap Changesets
  • OSMCha
  • NotesReview
  • Many Tasking Managers

  Smartphone:

  • StreetComplete
  • Every Door
  • Vespucci
  • OSMfocus Reborn
  • OSM Go!
  • Jungle Bus

  We are sure we have forgotten some. Please write to us and let us know, we will add them next week.

Other “geo” things

• The Tour de France Femmes bicycle race has a live map of the event which uses the Leaflet library, known for its use of OpenStreetMap as a base layer provider, among others.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
	iD for Beginner Training		2022-07-30
臺北市	COSCUP 2022 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 聯合議程軌		2022-07-30
Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires	4a reunión bimestral de OSM Latam (organiza OSM Argentina)		2022-07-30
Ernakulam	OSM Kerala Community Meetup 2022		2022-07-31
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-08-01
	MapRoulette Monthly Community Meeting		2022-08-02
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2022-08-02
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-08-03
City of Westminster	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-08-02
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #38 (Online)	✓	2022-08-02
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-08-04
Cayambe	Notathon en OpenStreetMap – resolvamos notas de Cayambé, Ecuador		2022-08-06
	OSM Africa August Mapathon: Map Rwanda		2022-08-06
新北市	OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團 #3		2022-08-07
Washington	MappingDC Mappy Hour		2022-08-10
Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2022-08-09
Köln	25. Stammtisch Köln		2022-08-10
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-08-11
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-08-10
Zürich	143. OSM-Stammtisch		2022-08-11
Berlin	170. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2022-08-12
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #43		2022-08-15
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-08-17
	154. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-08-16
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-08-16
Firenze	State of the Map 2022		2022-08-19 – 2022-08-21

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SK53, TheSwavu, derFred.

🏆 First-time achievements We hosted our first Twitter space! Last week’s theme was life before, during and after Outreachy – a chat with alums and current interns about the ways their internship experience changed their lives. Omotola invited me to join as one of the the alums and I had a fantastic experience! Here are some of the things I’ve shared: On what I’ve learned during my internship My biggest lesson was to manage expectations.

How are we doing in our strive for operational excellence? Read on to find out!

Incidents

There were 6 incidents in June this year. That's double the median of three per month, over the past two years (Incident graphs).

2022-06-01 cloudelastic
Impact: For 41 days, Cloudelastic was missing search results about files from commons.wikimedia.org.

2022-06-10 overload varnish haproxy
Impact: For 3 minutes, wiki traffic was disrupted in multiple regions for cached and logged-in responses.

2022-06-12 appserver latency
Impact: For 30 minutes, wiki backends were intermittently slow or unresponsive, affecting a portion of logged-in requests and uncached page views.

2022-06-16 MariaDB password
Impact: For 2 hours, a current production database password was publicly known. Other measures ensured that no data could be compromised (e.g. firewalls and selective IP grants).

2022-06-21 asw-a2-codfw power
Impact: For 11 minutes, one of the Codfw server racks lost network connectivity. Among the affected servers was an LVS host. Another LVS host in Codfw automatically took over its load balancing responsibility for wiki traffic. During the transition, there was a brief increase in latency for regions served by Codfw (Mexico, and parts of US/Canada).

2022-06-30 asw-a4-codfw power
Impact: For 18 minutes, servers in the A4-codfw rack lost network connectivity. Little to no external impact.

Incident follow-up

Recently completed incident follow-up:

Audit database usage of GlobalBlocking extension
Filed by Amir (@Ladsgroup) in May following an outage due to db load from GlobalBlocking. Amir reduced the extensions' DB load by 10%, through avoiding checks for edit traffic from WMCS and Toolforge. And he implemented stats for monitoring GlobalBlocking DB queries going forward.

Reduce Lilypond shellouts from VisualEditor
Filed by Reuven (@RLazarus) and Kunal (@Legoktm) after a shellbox incident. Ed (@Esanders) and Sammy (@TheresNoTime) improved the Score extension's VisualEditor plugin to increase its debounce duration.

Remember to review and schedule Incident Follow-up work in Phabricator! These are preventive measures and tech debt mitigations written down after an incident is concluded. Read more about past incidents at Incident status on Wikitech.

Trends

In June and July (which is almost over), we reported 27 new production errors and 25 production errors respectively. Of these 52 new issues, 27 were closed in weeks since then, and 25 remain unresolved and will carry over to August.

We also addressed 25 stagnant problems that we carried over from previous months, thus the workboard overall remains at exactly 299 unresolved production errors.

Take a look at the Wikimedia-production-error workboard and look for tasks that could use your help.

💡 Did you know?

To zoom in and find your team's error reports, use the appropriate "Filter" link in the sidebar of the workboard .

For the month-over-month numbers, refer to the spreadsheet data.

Thanks!

Thank you to everyone who helped by reporting, investigating, or resolving problems in Wikimedia production. Thanks!

Until next time,

– Timo Tijhof

"Mr. Vice President. No numbers, no bubbles."
— 🔴🟠🟡🟢🔵🟣

As part of the desktop improvements project we spent time investing in the core code that powers skins. With support from volunteers (the majority of this support coming from the prolific @Ammarpad), we identified code patterns and made changes to the MediaWiki-Core-Skin-Architecture to retroactively define a data layer API for generating a skin.

Once this was in place, we updated the legacy MediaWiki skins Monobook, Modern, CologneBlue to use Mustache to bring them in line with how Vector and Minerva were built.

The rationale for doing this was as follows:

1. We wanted to centralize code into core, and standardize markup, to make it easier to roll out changes to all skins. Often developers found ourselves updating every skin every time we wanted to make a small change or forced to use specific classes to markup elements (e.g. T248137, T253938).
2. We wanted to move away from server-side technologies to client-side technologies to play better to the strengths of frontend engineers and designers who worked on skins.
3. Since many of these skins do not see active development, we wanted to support them better by reducing lines of code
4. Many of the skins didn't support certain extensions because they used different code (for example certain skins didn't run hooks that were used by certain features) e.g. 6ce3ce1acb68f0a3fdf1bd8824f6d0717bffa320 T259400
5. Stop supporting features in core that were never widely adopted e.g. T97892

This process reduced 106,078 lines of code to 85,310 lines of code - a 20% decrease.
Before the change around 45% of skin code was PHP. After the change PHP only accounted for 15% of the code.

It would be great to in the future migrate Timeless too, but Timeless using the legacy skin platform does help keep us accountable for ensuring we continue to support skins built on this platform.

Methodology for result

To measure code makeup we can run github-linguist before and after the change.

Monobook

Before:

46.53%  22713      Less
36.83%  17981      PHP
16.53%  8071       JavaScript
0.10%   50         CSS
Lines of code: 48815

After change (abe94aa4082dbc4f8b9060528a1b4fea2d0af0f1)

59.28%  22831      Less
20.96%  8071       JavaScript
11.67%  4496       Mustache
7.96%   3066       PHP
0.13%   50         CSS
Lines of code: 38514

Modern

Before:

52.25%  13752      CSS
40.99%  10790      PHP
4.16%   1094       Less
2.61%   686        JavaScript
Lines of code: 26322

After change (c74d67950b6de2bafd9e3b1e05e601caaa7d9452)

68.87%  13877      CSS
18.22%  3672       Mustache
5.43%   1094       Less
4.07%   821        PHP
3.40%   686        JavaScript
Lines of code: 20150

Cologne Blue

Before:

62.00%  19183      PHP
34.82%  10773      CSS
2.22%   686        JavaScript
0.97%   299        Less
Lines of code: 30941

After change (bf06742467f6c6c2bb42367f2e073eb26ed5d495)

40.40%  10765      CSS
31.87%  8491       PHP
24.04%  6405       Mustache
2.57%   686        JavaScript
1.12%   299        Less
Lines of code: 26646

PHP

The total number of lines of PHP before the change: 47954
After the change: 12378 lines of PHP

In May 2022, hundreds of people logged into the Wikimedia Hackathon online platform to build projects, solve bugs, translate documentation, socialize, learn new skills, and more. For three days, community members led over 50 sessions, worked on over 75 Phabricator tasks, and watched one stellar live piano performance. In addition, hackers in Nigeria, Ghana, India, the U.S., Greece, and Germany came together for community-led in-person meetups to celebrate the Hackathon and teach newcomers how to contribute to Wikimedia technologies.

Now, in just two weeks, the technical community will come together again for the Wikimedia 2022 Hackathon!

How do I join the Hackathon?

To take part in the Hackathon, register for Wikimania to gain access to the platform. This information is kept private. You can also optionally list yourself publicly as a participant on the Wikimania Wiki.

When and where is the Hackathon?

The Hackathon will take place virtually in time blocks:

• 16:00 – 22:00 UTC August 12
• 12:00 – 17:00 UTC August 13
• 15:55 – 16:45 UTC August 14

The Hackathon will take place on Pheedloop, the Wikimania platform. This platform complies with WCAG 2.1 AA, and will support screen readers, font adjustments, and many other accessibility features. Video sessions will be held in Jitsi through this platform.

What will happen at the Hackathon?

A pre-hacking showcase

On the first day, there will be a pre-Hacking showcase to share project ideas and find collaborators. Anyone can present a project, and anyone can come as an observer. This informal gathering is a great way to meet new people around the world and start working together.

Hacking projects

Throughout the next two days, technical contributors around the world will come online to hack together, starting new projects, maintaining existing software, updating and translating documentation, and playing with tools. To propose a project, add a task to the Phabricator board. 

Technical and social activities

Throughout the Hackathon, take a break from hacking to learn about Wikimedia Cloud Services, attend a newcomers social, or offer a session of your own! Anyone can claim a slot on the schedule to arrange an activity for the group. 

A final showcase 

Finally, there will be a final showcase to share and celebrate the projects worked on during the Hackathon. Show off what you built to an audience of technical contributors around the world, as well as other Wikimania participants curious to learn more about the technical community.

Is the Hackathon good for newcomers?

Yes! If you’re new to the technical community, check out the resources for newcomers. Don’t miss the pre-Hacking showcase, which is a great opportunity to find people to work together with.

More information

Visit the Hackathon page on the Wikimania wiki for additional event information, a list of useful resources, and links to other exciting Wikimania activities.

See you soon!

For the past two years I’ve been working on Reddit related questions such as:

1. Do researchers’ ethical disguise of Redditors’ posts work?
2. How many Redditors use throaways or delete their posts? Why?
3. Why do Redditors participate in advice-related subreddits?

Much of this has been facilitated by Python scripts, which are in decent enough shape that I share here: https://github.com/reagle/reddit .

Questions are welcome!

Knowledge equity has been a cornerstone of our programs since our founding. Thanks to our efforts, content related to equity on Wikipedia has steadily improved over the years. By empowering students and other subject matter experts to add content to Wikipedia, we ensure the public’s most used reference is more equitable, accurate, and complete.

Not only have we helped diversify Wikipedia’s content, we’re also helping to ensure the group of content contributors is more diverse. Only 22% of Wikipedia editors identify as women in our region, and 89% identify as white. In contrast, 67% of Wiki Education’s program participants identify as women, 3% identify as non-binary or another gender identity, and only 55% identify as white.

We’re bringing a more diverse writing voice to Wikipedia, and we’re adding more equity-focused content. But we want to do more: That’s where the Equity Outreach Coordinator role comes in. We’re thrilled to announce Andrés Vera is fulfilling this new role.

Andrés, as the Equity Outreach Coordinator, oversees the targeted outreach for courses in equity content areas and the inclusion of diverse institutions in the Wikipedia Student Program, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), and Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs). He will also work to encourage more instructors who teach courses related to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other equity-related disciplines at other institutions to teach with Wikipedia.

Equity has been an important strategic priority for Wiki Education for years now, and it’s integrated into everything everyone on staff does on a daily basis. In creating this Equity Outreach Coordinator role, we are creating space to ensure we are actively recruiting a diversity of courses and an even more diverse set of participants for our Wikipedia Student Program. We’re making a deliberate investment aimed at taking our Equity work to the next level.

Andrés brings a unique perspective to Wiki Education. He has worked as a music teacher, a music ensemble manager, and a freelance community development professional. He holds a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and a professional diploma in Music performance and regularly performs around the world as a concert cellist. Andres has worked with Wiki Education in a contractor role for years. He is extremely passionate about and knowledgeable of our mission, and has a contagious enthusiasm for all that he does. We’re thrilled with his work so far and look forward to seeing where he takes this position.

Please join me in welcoming Andrés in his new role!