Tech News week 03 (13 January 2025)

Tuesday, 14 January 2025 01:43 UTC

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

Weekly highlight

  • The Single User Login system is being updated over the next few months. This is the system which allows users to fill out the login form on one Wikimedia site and get logged in on all others at the same time. It needs to be updated because of the ways that browsers are increasingly restricting cross-domain cookies. To accommodate these restrictions, login and account creation pages will move to a central domain, but it will still appear to the user as if they are on the originating wiki. The updated code will be enabled this week for users on test wikis. This change is planned to roll out to all users during February and March. See the SUL3 project page for more details and a timeline.

Updates for editors

  • On wikis with PageAssessments installed, you can now filter search results to pages in a given WikiProject by using the inproject: keyword. (These wikis: Arabic Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, French Wikipedia, Hungarian Wikipedia, Nepali Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Chinese Wikipedia) [1]
  • One new wiki has been created: a Wikipedia in Tigre (w:tig:) [2]
  • Recurrent item View all 35 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, there was a bug with updating a user’s edit-count after making a rollback edit, which is now fixed. [3]

Updates for technical contributors

  • Advanced item Wikimedia REST API users, such as bot operators and tool maintainers, may be affected by ongoing upgrades. Starting the week of January 13, we will begin rerouting some page content endpoints from RESTbase to the newer MediaWiki REST API endpoints for all wiki projects. This change was previously available on testwiki and should not affect existing functionality, but active users of the impacted endpoints may raise issues directly to the MediaWiki Interfaces Team in Phabricator if they arise.
  • Toolforge tool maintainers can now share their feedback on Toolforge UI, an initiative to provide a web platform that allows creating and managing Toolforge tools through a graphic interface, in addition to existing command-line workflows. This project aims to streamline active maintainers’ tasks, as well as make registration and deployment processes more accessible for new tool creators. The initiative is still at a very early stage, and the Cloud Services team is in the process of collecting feedback from the Toolforge community to help shape the solution to their needs. Read more and share your thoughts about Toolforge UI.
  • Advanced item For tool and library developers who use the OAuth system: The identity endpoint used for OAuth 1 and OAuth 2 returned a JSON object with an integer in its sub field, which was incorrect (the field must always be a string). This has been fixed; the fix will be deployed to Wikimedia wikis on the week of January 13. [4]
  • Many wikis currently use Cite CSS to render custom footnote markers in Parsoid output. Starting January 20 these rules will be disabled, but the developers ask you to not clean up your MediaWiki:Common.css until February 20 to avoid issues during the migration. Your wikis might experience some small changes to footnote markers in Visual Editor and when using experimental Parsoid read mode, but if there are changes these are expected to bring the rendering in line with the legacy parser output. [5]

Meetings and events

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What’s new in The Wikipedia Library? (Oct-Dec 2024)

Monday, 13 January 2025 07:00 UTC

Happy New Year! As we enter 2025, here are some updates from The Wikipedia Library team from the last quarter of 2024. 

The disparity in linguistic and regional representation that we see in Wikimedia projects and the publishing world is something that affects The Wikipedia Library as well. That is something we want to address by expanding our collections to include content from more regions and languages. In the last quarter, the following publishers joined The Wikipedia Library, offering free access to their content.

  • The Hindu Group is a major Indian publishing company based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. TWL users will now have access to The Hindu Digital, The Hindu Businessline, Frontline, and SportStar from The Hindu. Collections from The Hindu will be available with a single sign-on voucher code. You can apply for access here. 
  • Les Jours is an independent and generalist online news site based in France. Les Jours specialises in long-form reporting on topics such as media moguls, feminism, pollution, discrimination, etc. You can apply for access to Les Jours here.
  • Arcanum is the largest (and growing) digital periodical database from Eastern Europe, which contains scientific and specialized journals, encyclopaedias, weekly and daily newspapers, and more. You can apply for access here.
  • East View Press publishes periodicals and books focused on international and public policy issues, particularly related to the former Soviet Union and China. Their publications cover topics like foreign policy, international security, Slavic and Sino studies, and geography, with content translated and edited to make global research accessible in English. This collection is part of the Library Bundle, meaning eligible editors can instantly access content from East View Press here.

Both Arcanum and East View Press were long standing requests from the community and we were able to meet these publishers and develop partnership conversations with them at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. If there is a resource that you would like to see in this list in the future, please suggest or upvote it.

In November, The Wikipedia Library team attended the first edition of the Dubai International Library Conference. We delivered two talks; an introduction to the Wikimedia movement and one on the shared spaces between Wikimedia and Libraries.

Our team will be attending the Wikimedia + Libraries International Convention 2025 from 15th to 17th January in Mexico City and the WikiCred Conference in San Francisco from 14th to 16th February. We look forward to seeing some of you there. 

Alice Kibombo and Vipin SJ at the Dubai International Library Conference 2024

“The fix is to complete the localization”. Not letting people do it is a bug. (Also, some non-standard observations about American health insurance.)

Sunday, 12 January 2025 20:51 UTC

It sometimes happens in people’s lives that someone tells them something that sounds true and obvious at the time. It turns out that it actually is objectively true, and it is also obvious, or at least sensible, to the person who hears it, but it’s not obvious to other people. But it was obvious to them, so they think that it is obvious to everyone else, even though it isn’t.

It happens to everyone, and we are probably all bad at consistently noticing it, remembering it, and reflecting on it.

This post is an attempt to reflect on one such occurrence in my life; there were many others.

(Comment: This whole post is just my opinion. It doesn’t represent anyone else. In particular, it doesn’t represent other translatewiki.net administrators, MediaWiki developers or localizers, Wikipedia editors, or the Wikimedia Foundation.)

There’s the translatewiki.net website, where the user interface of MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia, as well as of some other Free Software projects, is translated to many languages. This kind of translation is also called “localization”. I mentioned it several times on this blog, most importantly at Amir Aharoni’s Quasi-Pro Tips for Translating the Software That Powers Wikipedia, 2020 Edition.

Siebrand Mazeland used to be the community manager for that website. Now he’s less active there, and, although it’s a bit weird to say it, and it’s not really official, these days I kind of act like one of its community managers.

In 2010 or so, Siebrand heard something about a bug in the support of Wikipedia for a certain language. I don’t remember which language it was or what the bug was. Maybe I myself reported something in the display of Hebrew user interface strings, or maybe it was somebody else complaining about something in another language. But I do remember what happened next. Siebrand examined the bug and, with his typical candor, said: “The fix is to complete the localization”.

What he meant is that one of the causes of that bug, and perhaps the only cause, was that the volunteers who were translating the user interface into that language didn’t translate all the strings for that feature (strings are also known as “messages” in MediaWiki developers’ and localizers’ jargon). So instead of rushing to complain about a bug, they should have completed the localization first.

To generalize it, the functionality of all software depends, among many other things, on the completeness of user interface strings. They are essentially a part of the algorithm. They are more presentation than logic, but the end user doesn’t care about those minor distinctions—the end user wants to get their job done.

Those strings are usually written in one language—often English, but occasionally Japanese, Russian, French, or another one. In some software products, they may be translated into other languages. If the translation is incomplete, then the product may work incorrectly in some ways. On the simplest level, users who want to use that product in one language will see the user interface strings in another language that they possibly can’t read. However, it may go beyond that: writing systems for some languages require special fonts, applying which to letters from another writing system may cause weird appearance; strings that are supposed to be shown from left to right will be shown from right to left or vice versa; text size that is good for one language can be wrong for another; and so forth.

In many cases, simply completing the translation may quietly fix all those bugs. Now, there are reasons why the translation is incomplete: it may be hard to find people who know both English and this language well; the potential translator is a volunteer who is busy with other stuff; the language lacks necessary technical terminology to make the translations, and while this is not a blocker —new terms can be coined along the way—, this may slow things down; a potential translator has good will and wants to volunteer their time, but hasn’t had a chance to use the product and doesn’t understand the messages’ context well enough to make a translation; etc. But in theory, if there is a volunteer who has relevant knowledge and time, then completing the translation, by itself, fixes a lot of bugs.

Of course, it may also happen that the software actually has other bugs that completing the localization won’t fix, but that’s not the kind of bugs I’m talking about in this post. Or, going even further, software developers can go the extra mile and try to make their product work well even if the localization is incomplete. While this is usually commendable, it’s still better for the localizers to complete the localization. After all, it should be done anyway.

That’s one of the main things that motivate me to maintain the localization of MediaWiki and its extensions into Hebrew at 100%. From the perspective of the end users who speak Hebrew, they get a complete user experience in their language. And from my perspective, if there’s a bug in how something works in Wikipedia in Hebrew, then at least I can be sure that the reason for it is not that the translation is incomplete.

As one of the administrators of translatewiki, I try my best to make complete localization in all languages not just possible, but easy.¹ It directly flows out of Wikimedia’s famous vision statement:

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.

I love this vision, and I take the words “Every single human being” and “all knowledge” seriously; they implicitly mean “all languages”, not just for the content, but also for the user interface of the software that people use to read and write this content.

If you speak Hindi, for example, and you need to search for something in the Hindi Wikipedia, but the search form works only in English, and you don’t know English, finding what you need will be somewhere between hard and impossible, even if the content is actually written in Hindi somewhere. (Comment #1: If you think that everyone who knows Hindi and uses computers also knows English, you are wrong. Comment #2: Hindi is just one example; the same applies to all languages.)

Granted, it’s not always actually easy to complete the localization. A few paragraphs above, I gave several general examples of why it can be hard in practice. In the particular case of translatewiki.net, there are several additional, specific reasons. For example, translatewiki.net was never properly adapted to mobile screens, and it’s increasingly a big problem. There are other examples, and all of them are, in essence, bugs. I can’t promise to fix them tomorrow, but I acknowledge them, and I hope that some day we’ll find the resources to fix them.

Many years have passed since I heard Siebrand Mazeland saying that the fix is to complete the localization. Soon after I heard it, I started dedicating at least a few minutes every day to living by that principle, but only today I bothered to reflect on it and write this post. The reason I did it today is surprising: I tried to do something about my American health insurance (just a check-up, I’m well, thanks). I logged in to my dental insurance company’s website, and… OMFG:

What you can see here is that some things are in Hebrew, and some aren’t. If you don’t understand the Hebrew parts, that’s OK, because you aren’t supposed to: they are for Hebrew speakers. But you should note that some parts are in English, and they are all supposed to be in Hebrew.

For example, you can see that the exclamation point is at the wrong end of “Welcome, Amir!“. The comma is placed unusually, too. That’s because they oriented the direction of the page from right to left for Hebrew, but didn’t translate the word “Welcome” in the user interface.² If they did translate it, the bug wouldn’t be there: it would correctly appear as “ברוך בואך, Amir!“, and no fixes in the code would be necessary.

You can also see a wrong exclamation point in the end of “Thanks for being a Guardian member!“.

There are also less obvious bugs here. You can also see that in the word “WIKIMEDIA” under the “Group ID” dropdown, the letter “W” is only partly seen. That’s also a typical RTL bug: the menu may be too narrow for a long string, so the string can be visually truncated, but it should happen at the end of the string and not in the beginning. Because the software here thinks that the end is on the left, the beginning gets truncated instead. This is not exactly an issue that can be fixed just by completing the localization, but if the localization were complete, it would be easier to notice it.

There are even more issues that you don’t notice if you don’t know Hebrew. For example, there’s a button with a weird label at the top right. Most Hebrew speakers will understand that label as “a famous website”, which is probably not what it is supposed to say. It’s more likely that it’s supposed to say “published web page”, and the translator made a mistake. Completing the translation correctly would fix this mistake: a thorough translator would review their work, check all the usages of the relevant words, and likely come up with a correct translation. (And maybe the translation is not even made by a human but by machine translation software, in which case it’s the product manager’s mistake. Software should never, ever be released with user interface strings that were machine-translated and not checked by a human.)

Judging by the logo at the top, the dental insurance company used an off-the-shelf IBM product for managing clients’ info. If I ask IBM or the insurance company nicely, will they let me complete the localization of this product, fixing the existing translation mistakes, and filing the rest of the bugs in their bug tracking software, all without asking for anything in return? Maybe I’ll actually try to do it, but I strongly suspect that they will reject this proposal and think that I’m very weird. In case you wonder, I actually tried doing it with some companies, and that’s what happened most of the time.

And this attitude is a bug. It’s not a bug in code, but it is very much a problem in product management and attitude toward business.

If you want to tell me “Amir, why don’t you just switch to English and save yourself the hassle”, then I have two answers for you.

The first answer is described in detail in a blog post I wrote many years ago: The Software Localization Paradox. Briefly: Sure, I can save myself the hassle, but if I don’t notice it and speak about it, then who will?

The second answer is basically the same, but with more pathos. It’s a quote from Avot 1:14, one of the most famous and cited pieces of Jewish literature outside the Bible: If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for my own self, what am I? And if not now, when? I’m sure that many cultures have proverbs that express similar ideas, but this particular proverb is ours.

And if you want to tell me, “Amir, what is wrong with you? Why does it even cross your mind to want to help not one, but two ultramegarich companies for free?”, then you are quite right, idealistically. But pragmatically, it’s more complicated.

Wikimedia understands the importance of localization and lets volunteers translate everything. So do many other Free Software projects. But experience and observation taught me that for-profit corporations don’t prioritize good support for languages unless regulation forces them to do it or they have exceptionally strong reasons to think that it will be good for their income or marketing.

It did happen a few times that corporations that develop non-Free software let volunteers localize it: Facebook, WhatsApp, and Waze are somewhat famous examples; Twitter used to do it (but stopped long ago); and Microsoft occasionally lets people do such things. Also, Quora reached out to me to review the localization before they launched in Hebrew and even incorporated some of my suggestions.³

Very often, however, corporations don’t want to do this at all, and when they do it, they often don’t do it very well. But people who don’t know English want—and often need!—to use their products. And I never get tired of reminding everyone that most people don’t know English.

So for the sake of most humanity, someone has to make all software, including the non-Free products, better localized, and localizable. Of course, it’s not feasible or sustainable that I alone will do it as a volunteer, even for one language. I barely have time to do it for one language in one product (MediaWiki). But that’s why I am thinking of it: I would be not so much helping a rich corporation here as I would be helping people who don’t know English.

Something has to change in the software development world. It would, of course, be nice if all software became Freely-licensed, but if that doesn’t happen, it would be nice if non-Free software would be more open to accepting localization from volunteers. I don’t know how will this change happen, but it is necessary.

If you bothered to read until here, thank you. I wanted to finish with two things:

  1. To thank Siebrand Mazeland again for doing so much to lay the foundations of the MediaWiki localization and the translatewiki community, and for saying that the fix is to complete the localization. It may have been an off-hand remark at the time, but it turned out that there was much to elaborate on.
  2. To ask you, the reader: If you know any language other than English, please use all apps, websites, and devices in this language as much as you can, bother to report bugs in its localization to that language, and invest some time and effort into volunteering to complete the localization of this software to your language. Localizing the software that runs Wikipedia would be great. Localizing OpenStreetMap is a good idea, too, and it’s done on the same website. Other projects that are good for humanity and that accept volunteer localization are Mozilla, Signal, WordPress, and BeMyEyes. There are many others.⁴ It’s one of the best things that you can do for the people who speak your language and for humanity in general.

¹ And here’s another acknowledgement and reflection: This sentence is based on the first chapter of one of the most classic books about software development in general and about Free Software in particular: Programming Perl by Larry Wall (with Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant): “Computer languages differ not so much in what they make possible, but in what they make easy”. The same is true for software localization platforms. The sentence about the end user wanting to get their job done is inspired by that book, too.

² I don’t expect them to have my name translated. While it’s quite desirable, it’s understandably difficult, and there are almost no software products that can store people’s names in multiple languages. Facebook kind of tries, but does not totally succeed. Maybe it will work well some day.

³ Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Quora abandoned the development of the version in Hebrew and in all other non-English languages in 2022, and in 2023, they abandoned the English version, too.

⁴ But please think twice before volunteering to localize blockchain or AI projects. I heard several times about volunteers who invested their time into such things, and I was sad that they wasted their volunteering time on this pointlessness. Almost all blockchain projects are pointless. With AI projects, it’s more complicated: some of them are actually useful, but many are not. So I’m not saying “don’t do it”, but I am saying “think twice”.

A 70-year-old Wikipedian (8) Wikipedia 20th Anniversary Event

Sunday, 12 January 2025 14:00 UTC

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

Wikipedia 20 mark

Wikipedia 20th Anniversary Event (Chapter 1-8)

On Saturday, January 23, 2021, I participated in the “Wikipedia 20th Anniversary Event” via Zoom. This event celebrates the 20th anniversary of the founding of the free internet encyclopedia Wikipedia in 2001, and is organized by the Wikipedia 20 JAPAN Executive Committee, a volunteer organization. At the same time as the online Zoom, satellite venues were set up in Nagoya City, Fukui City, Kyotango City, Itami City, and Higashine City. Even though it was held during a pandemic, the event was filled with enthusiasm.

The opening talk, “Wikipedia as a Knowledge Information Infrastructure,” was given by Shusaku Higashi of Open Data Japan, a general incorporated association that makes recommendations on the use of open data. He spoke in an easy-to-understand manner about Wikipedia’s 20-year history, along with his own footsteps, and used statistical data on global trends and Japan’s characteristics. I felt like I was able to think about Wikipedia’s position in today’s society from various perspectives, and vaguely confirm my own position and coordinate axis in the vast world of the Internet. Higashi has been helping us with Wikidata, but it became clear to me that he is involved in a wide range of activities beyond Wikidata.

The next talk was “Wikipedia: 20 Years, What Happened?”, and it was about three young people who played a key role in the early days of the Japanese Wikipedia. They all had unique handle names: suisui, kzhr, and Aokomoriuta. Some of them were middle school students in the early 2000s, and it gave a vivid account of what happened in the first decade. I was once again amazed at how young people in Japan had become central players in Wikipedia in such a short time since it first started in the US, and each of their stories helped me to visualize that situation. Above all, I was impressed by the honest way each of them approached the issue, even though I had thought that all three were just IT geeks.

The third topic was “What Would Happen If Someone From a University Tried Editing Wikipedia?” by Sae Kitamura (Saebo) from Musashi University, Youju Ito from Shiseikan University, and members of the Waseda Wikipedian Circle were on stage. Listening to their talks, it became clear that there are still not many universities that actively support Wikipedia, like the university where veteran Sae Kitamura is. However, I truly hope that not only students who belong to the academic world of universities, but also faculty and staff, will gain experience editing Wikipedia. I especially hope that university librarians, who are involved in various aspects of the creation and dissemination of knowledge, will do so.

The afternoon session started with “Wikipedians Take a “Grab Books from the Shelf” in 2021″. This was a project where Wikipedians chose and introduced books from their own bookshelves. The speakers were Norimaki, Mayonaka no osanpo, and Tobosha. The first two also introduced interesting books, but the highlight was Jun Henmi‘s “Farewell Notes from a Prison Camp (収容所から来た遺書)”, recommended by Tobosha. It is a story about a farewell notes written by a person who was detained in Siberia after the war and died there, addressed to his family in Japan. It was published by Bungeishunju in 1989 and caused quite a stir.

Next, in “Choice of Outstanding Articles,” hosted by Norimaki, Swanee’s “Shimoyama Chitose Hakusai (下山千歳白菜),” Arioto’s article on Venus, and Sakaori’s article on tunnels were introduced. All of them were things I had never heard before, and they were all incredibly excellent, with a wide range of focus from the far reaches of space to deep underground, which left a lasting impression. It also made me realize that each Wikipedian’s writing style and attention to detail are not uniform, which was helpful in learning that there are other ways of doing things.

The last event was the Wikipedia Town Summit 2021. There were reports of Wikipedia Town edit-a-thons in various regions, and Masao Takaku’s precise comments gave me a more detailed understanding of the situation. Unfortunately, I ran out of time and had to leave early, but I am happy to see that Wikipedia Town’s efforts are spreading across the country. What I felt after participating in this 20th anniversary event was that there are stronger forces trying to make Wikipedia “better” than those trying to make it “worse.” I would like to continue writing articles that link this impression to reality.

20th Anniversary of Lingála Wikipedia

Sunday, 12 January 2025 12:00 UTC
Hbd lnwiki wp

As announced on Diff in July and August 2024, January 9 remains a symbolic date for the Lingála version of Wikipedia. This date marks the 20th anniversary of its creation, celebrated in person for the first time after previous online celebrations. This event aims to honor the essential contributions of the two first administrators of this language version, Moyogo and Bombo (or Eruedin), who played a crucial role in its development since its beginnings. Their work allowed Lingála Wikipedia to thrive, with its first contribution dating back to January 9, 2005, as indicated by this archive. They also initiated the first celebrations of this community, which likely took place between 2006 and 2013.

12 years later, the January 9, 2025 celebration, led by CapitainAfrika, the most recent administrator of this encyclopedia appointed by the community in 2023, and the team of the WikiLinguila Community, aims to highlight one of Congo’s national languages, which is also the mother tongue of many Congolese people. This effort underscores the importance of taking the necessary time to organize a visible and meaningful event. Currently, Lingála Wikipedia has 4,636 articles and 43 active contributors—a modest number that reflects the lack of engaged contributors. However, the community hopes for substantial improvement over the next ten years.

This celebration is also part of a ceremony for exchanging New Year’s wishes among members of the WikiLinguila Community, further strengthening community ties and commitment to promoting local languages through collaborative and educational projects.

party

Additionally, it marks the conclusion of the Wiki100Impact campaign-contest, which lasted three months, from October to December 2024. It achieved an impressive output of 1,400 articles created, 600 articles improved, and active participation from around 36 contributors across three wikis (lnwiki, kgwiki, and luawiki-incubator), this led to a rapid growth in the number of articles on these wikis within a short period. These results demonstrate exceptional mobilization and lay the groundwork for a promising future. The campaign serves as a springboard for the International Month of Contribution to Mother Tongue in February 2025.

honour

During this anniversary, the honor of cutting the cake was given to OtikolenoiL, the winner of the Wiki100Impact contest for the Lingala branch. This event will aim to bring together a larger audience, strengthen partnerships with educational and cultural institutions, and develop innovative techniques for documenting languages. By relying on inclusive and participatory approaches, such as workshops, training sessions, and strategic collaborations, the community hopes to transform these platforms into essential pillars for preserving and promoting local languages in the global digital space.

A buggy history

Sunday, 12 January 2025 11:51 UTC
—I suppose you are an entomologist?—I said with a note of interrogation.
—Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name! A society may call itself an Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad title as that to himself, in the present state of science, is a pretender, sir, a dilettante, an impostor! No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp.
The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
A collection of biographies
with surprising gaps (ex. A.D. Imms)
The history of Indian interest in insects has been approached by many writers and there are several bits and pieces available in journals and various insights distributed across books. There are numerous ways of looking at how people viewed insects over time. One of these (cover picture on right) is a collection of biographies, some of which are uncited verbatim accounts from obituaries (and not even within quotation marks). This collation is by B.R. Subba Rao who also provides a few historical threads to tie together the biographies. Keeping Indian expectations in view, both Subba Rao and the agricultural entomologist M.A. Husain play to the crowd in their early histories. Husain wrote in pre-Independence times where there was a need for Indians to assert themselves before their colonial masters. They begin with mentions of insects in ancient Indian texts and as can be expected there are mentions of honey, shellac, bees, ants, and a few nuisance insects. Husain takes the fact that the term Satpada षट्पद or six-legs existed in the 1st century Amarakosa to make the claim that Indians were far ahead of time because Latreille's Hexapoda, the supposed analogy, was proposed only in 1825. Such one-upmanship (or quests for past superiority in the face of current backwardness?) misses the fact that science is not just about terms but  also about structures and one can only assume that these authors failed to find the development of such structures in the ancient texts that they examined. Cedric Dover, with his part-Indian and British ancestry, interestingly, also notes the Sanskrit literature but declares that he is not competent enough to examine the subject carefully. The identification of species in old texts also leave one wondering about the accuracy of translations. For instance K.N. Dave translates a verse from the Atharva-veda and suggests an early date for knowledge on shellac. Dave's work has been re-examined by an entomologist, Mahdihassan. Another organism known in ancient texts as the indragopa (Indra's cowherd) supposedly appears after the rains. Some Sanskrit scholars have, remarkably enough, identified it, with a confidence that no coccidologist ever had, as the cochineal insect (the species Dactylopius coccus is South American!), while others identify it as a lac insect, a firefly(!) or as Trombidium (red velvet mites) - the last for matching blood red colour mentioned in a text attributed to Susrutha. To be fair, ambiguities in translation are not limited to those dealing with Indian writing. Dikairon (Δικαιρον), supposedly a highly-valued and potent poison from India was mentioned in the work Indika by Ctesias 398 - 397 BC. One writer said it was the droppings of a bird. Valentine Ball thought it was derived from a scarab beetle. Jeffrey Lockwood claimed that it came from the rove beetles Paederus sp. And finally a Spanish scholar states that all this was a gross misunderstanding and that Dikairon was not a poison, and - believe it or not - was a masticated mix of betel leaves, arecanut, and lime! 
 
One gets a far more reliable idea of ancient knowledge and traditions from practitioners, forest dwellers, the traditional honey-harvesting tribes, and similar people that have been gathering materials such as shellac and beeswax. Unfortunately, many of these traditions and their practitioners are threatened by modern laws, economics, and cultural prejudice. These practitioners are being driven out of the forests where they live, and their knowledge was hardly ever captured in writing. The writers of the ancient Sanskrit texts were probably associated with temple-towns and other semi-urban clusters and it seems like the knowledge of forest dwellers was never considered merit-worthy by the book writing class of that period.

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

Cataloguing

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

Communication and vocabulary building

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

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

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

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

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

Indian reflections on the history of entomology

Kunhikannan died at the rather young age of 47
A rather interesting analysis of Indian science is made by the first native Indian entomologist, with the official title of "entomologist" in the state of Mysore - K. Kunhikannan. Kunhikannan was deputed to pursue a Ph.D. at Stanford (for some unknown reason two pre-Independence Indian entomologists trained in Stanford rather than England - see postscript) through his superior Leslie Coleman. At Stanford, Kunhikannan gave a talk on Science in India. He noted in that 1923 talk :
In the field of natural sciences the Hindus did not make any progress. The classifications of animals and plants are very crude. It seems to me possible that this singular lack of interest in this branch of knowledge was due to the love of animal life. It is difficult for Westerners to realise how deep it is among Indians. The observant traveller will come across people trailing sugar as they walk along streets so that ants may have a supply, and there are priests in certain sects who veil that face while reading sacred books that they may avoid drawing in with their breath and killing any small unwary insects. [Note: Salim Ali expressed a similar view ]
He then examines science sponsored by state institutions, by universities and then by individuals. About the last he writes:
Though I deal with it last it is the first in importance. Under it has to be included all the work done by individuals who are not in Government employment or who being government servants devote their leisure hours to science. A number of missionaries come under this category. They have done considerable work mainly in the natural sciences. There are also medical men who devote their leisure hours to science. The discovery of the transmission of malaria was made not during the course of Government work. These men have not received much encouragement for research or reward for research, but they deserve the highest praise., European officials in other walks of life have made signal contributions to science. The fascinating volumes of E. H. Aitken and Douglas Dewar are the result of observations made in the field of natural history in the course of official duties. Men like these have formed themselves into an association, and a journal is published by the Bombay Natural History Association[sic], in which valuable observations are recorded from time to time. That publication has been running for over a quarter of a century, and its volumes are a mine of interesting information with regard to the natural history of India.
This then is a brief survey of the work done in India. As you will see it is very little, regard being had to the extent of the country and the size of her population. I have tried to explain why Indians' contribution is as yet so little, how education has been defective and how opportunities have been few. Men do not go after scientific research when reward is so little and facilities so few. But there are those who will say that science must be pursued for its own sake. That view is narrow and does not take into account the origin and course of scientific research. Men began to pursue science for the sake of material progress. The Arab alchemists started chemistry in the hope of discovering a method of making gold. So it has been all along and even now in the 20th century the cry is often heard that scientific research is pursued with too little regard for its immediate usefulness to man. The passion for science for its own sake has developed largely as a result of the enormous growth of each of the sciences beyond the grasp of individual minds so that a division between pure and applied science has become necessary. The charge therefore that Indians have failed to pursue science for its own sake is not justified. Science flourishes where the application of its results makes possible the advancement of the individual and the community as a whole. It requires a leisured class free from anxieties of obtaining livelihood or capable of appreciating the value of scientific work. Such a class does not exist in India. The leisured classes in India are not yet educated sufficiently to honour scientific men.
It is interesting that leisure is noted as important for scientific advance. Edward Balfour, also commented that Indians were "too close to subsistence to reflect accurately on their environment!"  (apparently in The Vydian and the Hakim, what do they know of medicine? (1875) which unfortunately is not available online)

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

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


Entomologists meeting at Pusa in 1923
Fifth row (standing) Mukerjee, G.D.Ojha, Bashir, Torabaz Khan, D.P. Singh
Fourth row (standing) M.O.T. Iyengar (a malariologist), R.N. Singh, S. Sultan Ahmad, G.D. Misra, Sharma, Ahmad Mujtaba, Mohammad Shaffi
Third row (standing) Rao Sahib Y Rama Chandra Rao, D Naoroji, G.R.Dutt, Rai Bahadur C.S. Misra, SCJ Bennett (bacteriologist, Muktesar), P.V. Isaac, T.M. Timoney, Harchand Singh, S.K.Sen
Second row (seated) Mr M. Afzal Husain, Major RWG Hingston, Dr C F C Beeson, T. Bainbrigge Fletcher, P.B. Richards, J.T. Edwards, Major J.A. Sinton
First row (seated) Rai Sahib PN Das (veterinary department Orissa), B B Bose, Ram Saran, R.V. Pillai, M.B. Menon, V.R. Phadke (veterinary college, Bombay)
 
Note: As usual, these notes are spin-offs from researching and writing Wikipedia entries. It is remarkable that even some people in high offices, such as P.V. Isaac, the last Imperial Entomologist, grandfather of noted writer Arundhati Roy, are largely unknown (except as the near-fictional Pappachi in Roy's God of Small Things)

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

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

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

    weeklyOSM 755

    Sunday, 12 January 2025 11:30 UTC

    02/01/2025-08/01/2025

    lead picture

    CubeTrek web app for managing and visualising GPS tracks in 3D [1] | © Cube Trek | Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

    Mapping

    • Requests for comments have been made on these proposals :
      • catenary_mast:*=* to add further specifications on catenary masts, a vertical support structure used in railway electrification systems to hold up the overhead wires (also known as catenary wires) that supply electric power to trains.
      • pratictioners=* to tag the number and field of professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, or therapists, available at facilities like clinics, legal offices, or wellness centres, aiming to enhance the mapping of professional services.
      • epigraph=* to tag inscriptions or dedications on features such as monuments, buildings, or plaques, allowing for the documentation of text content and cultural significance.
      • sensory:* to tag features providing sensory accessibility, such as tactile paving or audible signals, aimed at improving map usability for people with sensory disabilities.

    Community

    • Ciarán Staunton has analysed the current progress of the Ireland OSM community’s #osmIRL_buildings mapping project using the ohsome Dashboard.
    • A post on the OpenStreetMap Community forum discussed efforts to improve mapping in Thailand by reducing the risks of armchair mapping.
    • David Schneider has used OSM points of interest data to identify ’18-hour neighbourhoods’, lively places near rail services that attract foot traffic from around 6 am to midnight.

    OpenStreetMap Foundation

    • The OpenStreetMap Foundation is seeking applicants for the role of Core Software Development Facilitator, funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund for two years. The facilitator will coordinate the development of OSM’s core software stack, including communication with the community, maintaining a lightweight roadmap, supporting developers, and overseeing the budget. Applications, including CVs and cover letters, are open until Tuesday 21 January and the position is 100% remote.

    Events

    • The FOSSGIS conference team is pleased to announce ► that registration for FOSSGIS 2025 is now open. Volunteers are needed to help with session management and video recording, since the recordings and livestreams depend on someone operating the camera.
    • Christian Quest revealed that Panoramax will have a booth at FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, Belgium, taking place on 1 and 2 February, located on the second floor of the K2 building (K2-A-4). There will also be a presentation about Panoramax, a full FLOSS alternative for ground-level imagery sharing, on Saturday at 11:50 CET in room AW1.120. Attendees can expect some goodies at the booth.
    • Geomob Berlin will take place at 18:00 CET on Wednesday 12 February. Volunteer speakers are currently needed.
    • At the 38th Chaos Communication Congress held in Hamburg, the German OpenStreetMap community hosted ► an assembly within the ‘Bits and Bäume’ area. The team conducted workshops on iD and JOSM editors, facilitated OSM meetups, and held an ‘ask-us-anything’ session on data usage. Using FOSSGIS e.V.’s large-format printer, they created 54 custom A1 maps for participants. Additionally, stickers were distributed, and EUR 453 in donations was collected for OpenStreetMap-related activities.

    OSM research

    • Piero Campalani, Massimiliano Pittore, and Kathrin Renner have assessed the quality of the OpenStreetMap roads data in Burundi at a national level, with a view to its fitness-for-use for disaster risk mitigation purposes, which were adopted in the context of a recent multi-hazards risk assessment and mapping exercise on behalf of the International Organisation for Migration.

    Humanitarian OSM

    • Contributors can support the OSM France project for Mayotte response via the tasking manager to support the response and recovery efforts in the Island after the passage of cyclone Chido. Only intermediate and advanced OSM users can contribute in this project. The HOT Open Mapping Hub ESA is inviting contributors to map for nearby Mozambique, where mappers of all levels of experience can contribute.

    Maps

    • Andrea Abuín has updated the Map of Mithraea using OpenStreetMap and Leaflet.
    • Andy Townsend tooted that he has made another map style to explore OSMF’s experimental on-the-fly-updated vector tiles. He said he created this because he wasn’t a fan of the demo map style previously used.

    OSM in action

    • Data Guy has analysed OpenStreetMap road network data in various global cities to find the most ‘complex’. They examined road network graphs from 79 of the world’s largest cities, assessing factors such as the number of nodes, the number of edges, graph density, and average node degree.

    Open Data

    • Mapscaping is offering a global elevation data download tool that allows users to easily access free elevation datasets. The tool supports datasets including SRTM, ALOS, and Copernicus DSM, providing resolutions from 30 m to 500 m. Users can select areas via a map interface and download data in GeoTIFF or ASCII Grid format, making it suitable for geospatial analysis or GIS projects.

    Software

    • [1] CubeTrek is an open-source web app for managing and visualising GPS tracks in 3D, tailored for outdoor activities like hiking, skiing, and trail running. It offers features such as replay mode using Google Earth data, advanced statistics, calendar heatmaps, activity matching, and integration with Garmin Connect and Polar Flow. Tracks can be imported via GPX or FIT files, and the platform allows users to explore topography interactively.
    • Carlos Felipe Castillo has provided an overview of OSMnx, a Python package for downloading, analysing, and visualising geospatial data from OpenStreetMap (we reported earlier). The article demonstrated ► its capabilities, such as generating street networks, visualising edge centrality, calculating routes with travel times, and extracting features like buildings and rail networks.
    • running-routes.com is a new website that helps generate interesting running routes tailored to your location and target distance while prioritising privacy. It downloads OpenStreetMap data locally, processes it into a graph, and uses a genetic algorithm to create routes with minimal backtracking. All computations occur on your device, ensuring your location and data remain private, with no third-party APIs or external services involved.
    • Mapscaping’s OpenStreetMap Category Viewer is an interactive tool for exploring and downloading OSM data. Users can select specific categories, for example amenities, highways, or natural features, and fetch data for a defined area.
    • The WhoDidIt tool has been brought back online after being taken offline due to problems with its database. Following troubleshooting and community engagement, the tool is back, allowing OpenStreetMap contributors to view and analyse recent changesets.
    • GeoDownloader is a pay-for-use service that simplifies downloading OpenStreetMap data through a user-friendly interface, enabling users to visually select areas, filter by tags or geometry types, and export data in GeoJSON, GeoPackage, or Shapefile format. Designed for small-scale projects, the tool avoids complex Overpass queries and costly external services, hosting indexed OSM data locally. The service is free for up to 100 features and offers a low-cost option for larger datasets, with plans to expand filtering and file format support.

    Programming

    • overtureR is an R library to work with Overture Open Data. An alpha version is available on GitHub.
    • Minh Nguyễn shared new examples of topological queries using QLever, a tool enhancing spatial analysis on OpenStreetMap data. Demonstrations include retrieving all the street intersections in Chicago, calculating compactness of city boundaries in Oklahoma, and identifying the longest straight trunk road segments in California. These examples showcase QLever’s scalability, allowing analysis from urban areas to national scales, and its potential to complement Overpass API for unique queries.

    Releases

    • Jochen Topf gave an update on taginfo, introducing new features such as displaying a tag’s status from the OSM wiki on key pages, highlighting inconsistencies, and a report for ‘discardable’ tags, such as those used by editors like iD and JOSM. Additional improvements include a CSV export option for tables, enhanced tools for wiki maintainers, and an interactive keyboard shortcut guide for experienced users.

    Did you know that …

    • … that there are several browser add-ons that can enhance your OSM mapping experience?
    • … that Jason Davies, one of the contributors to the D3 graphics package, has created a webpage demonstrating several dozen map projections of the Earth with smooth transitions between each?
    • … that GPX traces uploaded to OpenStreetMap with their visibility set to private are not displayed in the Public GPS Traces layer, even if the permissions are later changed to public? Marcos Dione tooted that the current system only processes newly uploaded traces for display.
    • … that OSMyBiz is an OpenStreetMap-based platform that allows small businesses to manage and update their business information on the map? It makes it easy to edit OSM listings and provides tools to verify and promote local businesses.

    OSM in the media

    • An article in Le Monde has spotlighted the role of open-source software and digital commons in modern technology, mentioning OpenStreetMap as an exemplary community-driven project. The piece emphasised the critical importance of resources such as OSM for public services and sovereignty initiatives, including France’s national geographic agency using OSM for digital twins of territories.

    Other “geo” things

    • MundoGEO noted ► the publication of Proceedings of the VII Jornada de Geotecnologias do Estado do Rio de Janeiro – (JGEOTEC) 2024 (we reported earlier), which is available for free download and includes research in various areas, with emphasis on multitemporal analysis, the use of drones and other equipment to acquire high-resolution images, as well as real-time data collection.
    • The Indus River Basin is highly exposed to the impact of riverine floods. A group from HeiGIT travelled to Islamabad, Pakistan, to strengthen local capacity in disaster risk management and geospatial analysis.
    • Miguel García Álvarez announced the Cartographer’s Tale weekly newsletter, in which he will share his fondness for maps. Already available in Spanish, he will now be publishing it in English.
    • Cesium for Unreal supports importing Photorealistic 3D Tiles from the Google Maps Platform using Cesium ion. This tutorial walks you through adding these tiles to Unreal Engine projects, using the CesiumGeoreference component to accurately position scenes on a global scale.
    • Carlos Felipe Castillo revisited ► John Snow’s historic 1854 cholera outbreak analysis in London, considered the first geospatial analysis in history. Using modern tools including uMap and digitised datasets, Carlos recreates Snow’s identification of the Broad Street water pump as the outbreak’s source.
    • Since 2021 the United Nations Human Settlements Programme has been working with local leaders in the Juiz de Fora municipality (Brazil) to advance inclusive and transformative solutions to urban challenges. Using KoboToolbox, their collaborative ‘Territories of Citizenship’ project aims to leverage up-to-date and accurate data to inform policies and improve service delivery for urban communities.
    • Gregory Marler shared his excitement about seeing the next-stop display on an Xplore Dundee bus in GPS debug mode. The short video captured the screen revealing raw GPS data instead of the usual route information, offering a rare glimpse into the system’s backend operations.
    • The YouTube video The Wrong Map of Syria No One Noticed highlighted a cartographic error where multiple maps inaccurately represented the border between Syria and Jordan. The video delves into the origins of this mistake, its widespread presence in digital and physical maps, and the lack of scrutiny it received despite being publicly accessible for years.
    • Barbara Petchenik was the first woman to serve as Vice President of the International Cartographic Association (ICA). She was committed to designing maps in such a way that they could be understood by a broad target group, especially children and people without specialised knowledge. The ICA organises a competition for children and young people every two years and the theme for 2025 is ‘Maps in everyday life’.

    Upcoming Events

    Where What Online When Country
    OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting 2025-01-10
    Bangalore South OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party 2025-01-11 flag
    Model Town Tehsil 13th OSM Delhi Mapping Party 2025-01-12 flag
    København OSMmapperCPH 2025-01-12 flag
    Chambéry Mapathon en ligne saison 24/25 CartONG 2025-01-13 flag
    Richmond MapRVA Meetup with OSM US 2025-01-14 flag
    Grenoble Atelier de janvier du groupe local de Grenoble 2025-01-13 flag
    中正區 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #72 2025-01-13 flag
    München Münchner OSM-Treffen 2025-01-14 flag
    Zaragoza Asamblea extraordinaria de la Asociación OpenStreetMap España (Online) 2025-01-14 flag
    [Online] Map-py Wednesday 2025-01-15
    Karlsruhe Stammtisch Karlsruhe 2025-01-15 flag
    [Online] Map-py Wednesday 2025-01-16
    Utrecht Nieuwjaarsborrel OSGeo.nl, OSM.nl en QGIS Gebruikersvereniging Nederland 2025-01-19 flag
    Panoramax monthly international meeting 2025-01-20
    Hannover OSM-Stammtisch Hannover 2025-01-20 flag
    Missing Maps London: (Online) Mid-Month Mapathon [eng] 2025-01-21
    Lyon Réunion du groupe local de Lyon 2025-01-21 flag
    Bonn 184. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn 2025-01-21 flag
    San Jose South Bay Map Night ✓ 2025-01-22 flag
    Lüneburg Lüneburger Mappertreffen ✓ 2025-01-21 flag
    Lübeck 149. OSM-Stammtisch Lübeck und Umgebung 2025-01-23 flag
    OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting 2025-01-24
    Chambéry Mapathon en ligne saison 24/25 CartONG 2025-01-27 flag
    Stadtgebiet Bremen Bremer Mappertreffen 2025-01-27 flag

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

    Empowering Multilingual Knowledge: The Journey Behind the 1-Click-Info Extension Powered by Wikidata

    Sunday, 12 January 2025 09:00 UTC

    In a world where access to information is a fundamental right, the ability to search and explore multilingual knowledge seamlessly is an essential tool for empowerment. This vision became a reality through the 1-Click-Info browser extension, a project funded by the Arcadia grant through the Wikimedia Deutschland and fiscally sponsored by the Dagbani Wikimedians user group. Leveraging the power of Wikidata, the extension simplifies the process of searching and retrieving multilingual data, enabling communities worldwide to explore knowledge indifferent languages.


    The development of this extension by a dedicated team of volunteers led by Jaccob Kondo and his team was a journey of collaboration, resilience, and innovation. Guided by the goal of integrating the Wikidata API for an intuitive search experience, the team faced various challenges but ultimately succeeded in creating a tool that fosters inclusivity and accessibility. Through the work of highly dedicated Ghanaian Wikimedians the 1-Click-Info extension now provides a robust platform for users to effortlessly tap into the vast resources of Wikidata. This project not only showcases the power of community-driven development but also highlights the importance of volunteers collaborating with local Wikimedia groups like the Dagbani Wikimedians user group, whose support and coordination ensured that the team successfully executed the project.

    This project leverages Wikidata to provide a seamless search experience while empowering communities to access multilingual knowledge with ease. The development of the 1-Click-Info browser extension marked a significant achievement, fulfilling its primary goal of integrating the Wikidata API for user-friendly search functionality.

    Challenges

    From countless late nights of troubleshooting code to brainstorming features and seeking inspiration online, the team’s resilience eventually paid off. The integration of sitelinks, a feature advised by Lydia Pintscher, added an important layer of functionality. Despite these challenges, the collaborative spirit of the team ensured the extension’s completion.

    From Concept to Reality

    The project’s objectives spanned API documentation, UI design and integration, testing, deployment, and project management. Here’s a breakdown of how each was accomplished:

    API Documentation

    The team thoroughly examined Wikidata’s REST API and action API. It was determined that the action API, specifically the WbSearchEntitiesAction aligned with the project’s needs. This ensured seamless integration and efficient data retrieval for the extension.

    UI Design

    The UI design prioritized simplicity and accessibility. Featuring a clean, minimalistic layout, the design includes:

    • A language selection dropdown for multilingual support.
    • Intuitive icons for search functionality.
    • A clear call-to-action: “Please select a word and click on the extension.”
    • Pagination buttons for easy navigation.

    These design choices ensure an inclusive user experience while maintaining consistency across different themes, including plans for a dark mode.

    UI Integration

    The team focused on populating the UI with results from the API and enabling user interactions such as pagination and detailed views of selected items. This brought the user interface to life, making it intuitive and functional.

    Testing

    Rigorous testing was conducted to ensure the extension’s reliability. This included verifying successful API requests, handling errors, and evaluating user options. The testing phase guaranteed that the extension functioned as intended.

    Deployment

    The 1-Click-Info extension was deployed on the Mozilla Add-ons store and Google Chrome Web Store. The process involved completing detailed forms, meeting platform requirements, and submitting the extension for review. Once approved, the extension became available for public use.

    Published Outcomes

    The 1-Click-Info browser extension is now available for download and use on:

    Project Management

    Project management involved navigating personnel changes, onboarding a new team member, and coordinating tasks among the team. Regular meetings, both virtual and in-person, were essential for progress tracking. The project leader, in collaboration with the Dagbani Wikimedians user group, also managed budgets, invoices, and resource allocation to ensure the project’s smooth execution.

    Looking Ahead

    This project exemplifies the power of collaboration and innovation within the Wikimedia movement. By simplifying access to Wikidata’s vast resources, the 1-Click-Info extension empowers users to explore multilingual knowledge effortlessly. It also underscores the critical role of individual volunteers and local Wikimedia communities in driving impactful initiatives.

    In the future the team is planning an improvement of the extension such as an implementation of the REST API to retrieve concise data when switching from different languages and an implementation of lexemes in the long term.

    Exploring Wikimedia Collaboration on Language Preservation: Highlights from the 2024 Global Voices Summit in Nepal

    Sunday, 12 January 2025 07:00 UTC

    The recent Global Voices Summit 2024 in Kathmandu, Nepal, saw strong participation from the Wikimedia movement, spurring new ideas for collaboration with a like-minded community and ways to bring more diverse knowledge to Wikimedia projects. Several Wikimedians who have previously participated and collaborated with Global Voices (GV) were invited.

    During the Summit, Wikimedians participated in focus group discussions throughout a Rising Voices gathering to explore opportunities for collaboration, attended Summit preconference internal meetings (December 2–5), presented in multiple Summit public conference sessions related to linguistic diversity and open knowledge, offered demo sessions for tools like LinguaLibre, and met over food.

    Global Voices is a global and international community that publishes stories and voices of many of the world’s communities missing from mainstream media, as well as counting on a strong volunteer translation community that offers news and information in more than 30 languages. Its Rising Voices (RV) initiative has been actively facilitating the creation of a peer network of Indigenous and endangered language digital activists around the world. Many of them are also Wikimedians as well as academics, grassroots activists, artists and journalists. RV is also a Wikimedia Equity Fund grantee. Watch the grantee full video of Round 3 of the Knowledge Equity Fund.

    Watch the panel session: ‘How the Wikimedia movement is powering language reclamation-and how can you do too’.


    Originally planned to be biannual, but due to the global pandemic, this was the first summit after the last summit in Colombo in 2017. While the summit had a participation of people speaking approximately 80 languages from 50 countries, the participating Wikimedians represented 10 languages from Asia, Africa and Latin America.

    Global Voices Summit 2024 public days. https://summit2024.globalvoices.org/

    The 2024 Global Voices Summit in Nepal spotlighted groundbreaking projects from the Wikimedia movement dedicated to cultural preservation, language revitalization, and digital empowerment. The session showcased inspiring initiatives from various regions, all utilizing Wikimedia tools to safeguard linguistic and cultural heritage. This year’s participants included members of the Wikimedia community, particularly Wikimedians who are also part of the Global Voices multilingual network of writers, translators, and human rights activists. These individuals, representing Rising Voices, Lingua, Newsroom, and the Advox teams, were awarded full scholarships to attend both the internal meetings and the summit in Nepal.

    Showcase of Wikimedia community projects

    Kente Weaving in Ghana: A Story of Cultural Pride

    Ghanaian Wikimedian Zita Zage led this initiative, which documents the rich oral histories and weaving traditions of the country’s iconic Kente textile using Wikimedia Commons. Known for its vibrant colors and intricate patterns, Kente weaving is a cornerstone of Ghanaian heritage, embraced globally as a symbol of cultural pride. The project created multimedia content to showcase Ewe and Akan Kente weaving while also promoting awareness of Twi Wikipedia. Beyond preserving traditions, the initiative fosters cultural preservation and skill development.

    Explore Kente weaving resources: Category:Kente (Ewe) and Category:Kente (Bonwire)

    Ekpeye Cultural Heritage Project: Reclaiming Identity

    Nigerian Wikimedian Franca Umasoye Igwe’s Ekpeye Cultural Heritage Project uses Wikimedia Commons to digitize and share the Ekpeye people’s rich cultural identity. By recording folk songs and traditional practices, the initiative aims to create digital resources for learning and representation. The project fosters cultural awareness, strengthens identity, and ensures a digital presence for Ekpeye heritage.

    Explore Ekpeye Language and Culture Resources: Category:Ekpeye Language and Culture Resources

    Language Accelerator Project: Preserving Endangered Languages

    Tochi Precious presented the Language Accelerator Project, which focuses on preserving endangered languages like Jalkatek (a Mayan language) and Igbo through Wiktionary. With languages disappearing every two weeks, this project equips language activists with tools to document and share their languages online. Wiktionary’s collaborative, dynamic platform enables definitions, translations, and audio, offering hope for endangered languages to thrive in the digital age.

    Wikisource Loves Manuscripts: Unlocking Global Knowledge

    Satdeep Gill’s “Wikisource Loves Manuscripts” (WiLMa) project has digitized over 28,000 pages of Indonesian manuscripts, collaborating with Wikimedia Indonesia and research institutes. These efforts not only preserve cultural texts but also train AI models for handwritten text recognition in Balinese and Javanese scripts. Through global partnerships, WiLMa is expanding to underrepresented languages, blending traditional knowledge with cutting-edge technology.

    Explore the Wiki Loves Manuscripts resources: Wikisource Loves Manuscripts/Report and The British Library Loves Manuscripts on Wikisource

    Ghana NLP Khaya AI Using Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons: Digitizing Dagbani 

    Sadik Shahadu, the co-founder and executive director for the Dagbani Wikimedians User Ghana, presented on how their NLP Khaya AI is using Wikimedia Commons to bridge the digital divide by creating online text and audio data for Dagbani. Partnering with Ghana NLP, the initiative by the Dagbani Wikimedia community integrates Dagbani into machine learning and language AI application tools such as the Khaya app, which uses large language models for text translation and automatic speech recognition (ASR). The Spell4Wiki application enabled volunteers to record and upload audio data directly to Wikimedia Commons, laying the foundation for Dagbani language integration for global language translation tools, machine learning and AI applications. 

    Explore Ghana NLP Khaya AI resources: Category:Files uploaded by spell4wiki in dag, Khaya AI App and Breaking the low-resource barrier for Dagbani ASR: From data collection to ASR modeling

    These inspiring projects illustrate how the Wikimedia movement empowers communities to reclaim their languages and heritage by:

    • Documenting local traditions on Wikimedia Commons.
    • Creating and editing entries in Wiktionary or Wikisource.
    • Advocating for cultural preservation through Wikimedia’s platforms.

    The launch of the Rana Tharu Wikimedia Community

    The Global Voices Summit 2024 provided attendees with valuable insights into Wikimedia and its movement, offering a platform for learning how to utilize Wikimedia projects to promote and preserve their languages. On December 21, Sadik Shahadu from the Wikimedia Diversity Hub hosted a virtual session focused on supporting the Rana Tharu language within Wikimedia projects. This followed a meeting with Rana Tharu language speakers during the summit in Nepal. The session served as an introductory guide to editing the Rana Tharu Wikipedia incubator, a project initiated by Sadik. Participants were also encouraged to begin translating the main page and key messages on MediaWiki via translatewiki.net.

    Learn more about the summit here.

    Meet The Africa Wiki Women Mentors: Redefining Women’s Leadership in Africa

    Saturday, 11 January 2025 14:00 UTC

    The Africa Wiki Women (AWW) is redefining the narrative of African women’s leadership within the Wikimedia community through the African Wiki Women Leadership and Mentorship Fellowship (LMF) Program, which is designed to empower women across Africa with the skills, mentorship, and opportunities needed to step confidently into leadership roles within the ecosystem.

    The program currently features 8 women (AWW fellows) championing the Africa Wiki Women’s mission across Africa. The fellows work collaboratively with the AWW core teams to implement various projects, actively participate in workshops, mentorship sessions, and immersive hands-on activities, whilst making meaningful contributions to Wikimedia projects.

    At the core of the program are mentors whose expertise and experience are instrumental in shaping the fellows’ journey. Through close collaboration with mentors, fellows will be equipped to lead and thrive within the Wikimedia ecosystem and beyond.

    Key Responsibilities of Mentors:

    1. Provide Guidance and Feedback: Offer support and constructive feedback to help fellows navigate their leadership journey.

    2. One-on-One Mentoring Sessions: Conduct regular sessions to address challenges, and track progress.

    3. Share Leadership Insights: Provide practical knowledge and best practices to inspire and inform fellows.

    3. Support Goal Achievement: Assist Fellows in setting and achieving leadership goals.

    Individuals serving as mentors in the program are well rounded leaders, carefully selected for their leadership experience, commitment to gender equity, and deep understanding of the Wikimedia ecosystem.

    Meet Our Mentors :

    Ruby D-Brown
    Bukky658
    Pellagia Njau
    Oby Ezeilo

    With the expertise and experience of the mentors, fellows will be empowered with the right tools to lead meaningful change and contribute significantly to the ecosystem.

    This Month in GLAM: December 2024

    Saturday, 11 January 2025 13:02 UTC

    Ghanaian Wikimedians Contribute to Black Lunch Table Project of Artists with Colour

    Saturday, 11 January 2025 11:00 UTC

    In an inspiring initiative to amplify the representation of Black artists and artists of color on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia ecosystems, the Black Lunch Table Regional Proxy program successfully organized two dynamic workshops and contests in collaboration with some local language Wikimedia communities. These events showcased the power of collective knowledge-sharing and spearheaded by the Black Lunch Table regional proxies Hamidu Rukaya (User:Ruky Wunpini) and Mohammed Kamal-Deen Fuseini (User:Dnshitobu).

    “Artist Wey Get Colour Too Dey” with Ghanaian Pidgin Wikimedians Community

    On November 14, 2024, Hamidu Rukaya teamed up with the Ghanaian Pidgin Wikimedians Community to host an online workshop dubbed “Artist Wey Get Colour Too Dey“. This session introduced participants to Wikipedia editing, with a focus on documenting and celebrating Black artists and creatives of color. The workshop attracted a diverse group of contributors eager to make a difference.

    Following the workshop, the team launched a month-long contest from November 14 to December 14, 2024. Participants competed to create or improve Wikipedia articles about notable Black artists. The contest concluded with the recognition of exceptional contributors, celebrating their commitment to enhancing representation on the world’s largest online encyclopedia. 

    Winners:

    • Top Contributor: User: DaSupremo
    • Second Top Contributor: User: Tenacious Ntaawa
    • Third Top Contributor: User: Yaw tuba
    • Top Female Contributor: User: Tenacious Ntaawa
    Ghanaian Pidgin BLT top female contributor
    Ghanaian Pidgin BLT 3rd top contributor
    Ghanaian Pidgin BLT top contributor
    Ghanaian Pidgin BLT 2nd top contributor

    “Baŋsim bɛla Nuchee Ni” with Dagbani Wikimedians User Group

    Meanwhile, Mohammed Kamal-Deen Fuseini partnered with the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group to host a parallel online workshop on November 15, 2024, under the title “Baŋsim bɛla Nuchee Ni” curled from the Dagbani language, which translates to “There is absolute knowledge in the wrist of man.” This event emphasized the importance of documenting local artists in indigenous languages, bridging the gap between digital knowledge and cultural heritage.

    The workshop paved the way for a contest that ran from November 15 to December 15, 2024. Similar to its counterpart, this contest sought to engage editors in building a richer repository of information about Black and local artists, fostering cultural pride and digital activism.

    Winners:

    These events celebrated artists of color and also showcased the power of Wikimedia’s diverse communities in advancing representation and inclusivity. The Ghanaian Pidgin Wikimedians Community and Dagbani Wikimedians User Group worked tirelessly to inspire new contributors through training and mentorship throughout the contests. These efforts ensured that participants felt equipped to contribute meaningful content to Wikipedia.

    Wikimedia Iraq: 2024 in Numbers

    Saturday, 11 January 2025 08:00 UTC

    The year 2024 was a pivotal and challenging one for Wikimedia Iraq as we started on revitalizing the user group after years of low activity. With the dedication of our experienced members and support from the Wikimedia Foundation, we implemented a solid plan starting on July 1st, achieving remarkable success. Here, we are proud to share some of the key highlights from the past six months.

    We achieved remarkable impact through our efforts, particularly the Wikimedia Iraq Contest and our support for members participating in various Wikipedia competitions. Between July 1 and December 31, 2024, we contributed by16% of new articles created on Arabic Wikipedia.

    This accomplishment includes over 2,000 new articles, more than 39,000 edits, and an impressive addition of 21 million bytes of content.

    Our members’ impact extended beyond Wikipedia, reaching Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons through our initiatives to document notable Iraqi figures on Wikidata and the “Wiki Loves Iraq” campaign on Commons.

    Together, we added over 10,000 new statements on Wikidata and contributed more than 2,000 new images to Commons. These efforts not only enriched these platforms but also improved the visual content of existing articles on Wikipedia, bringing fresh perspectives to knowledge representation.

    These achievements would not have been possible without our focus on bringing fresh energy and engaging youth and newcomers in our movement and user group.

    Through a series of diverse workshops, we successfully increased overall participation by 200%, With increasment of youth by 60% and women by 50%.

    This was no small feat, but by deeply understanding our community’s needs and implementing clear, adaptive strategies, we turned this challenge into a milestone of growth and inclusivity.

    Creating a new, inspiring identity for the user group has been transformative, energizing both longtime members and newcomers. This renewed sense of purpose and connection to our movement’s mission has significantly enhanced engagement, driving greater impact in our activities and advancing our goals.

    Read more here -> Wikimedia Iraq: How We Built Our New Visual Identity

    We take immense pride in our members who made a significant difference in 2024. Notably, most of them were newcomers who joined our user group within the last 4-5 months, showing the incredible potential of fresh talent and enthusiasm in our community.

    Finally, we wish everyone a fantastic year ahead. As for us, we remain committed to contributing to our user group, supporting newcomers, and ensuring its sustainability. We also aim to enhance our country’s presence more on the internet while actively supporting national digital transformation efforts.

    Readability Enhancement and Diversity Improvement on Arabic Wikipedia and Wikiquote

    Saturday, 11 January 2025 07:00 UTC

    As Wikimedia continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, with tens of new articles being added every month, the need for sustained maintenance and quality assurance has become more pressing than ever. Recognizing this, we initiated the Readability Development: Wikipedia and Wikiquote as Models project to address both the maintenance of existing content and the enhancement of underrepresented areas in Wikimedia projects.

    Our project comprised two distinct competitions:

    Wikipedia Readability Enhancement Competition (Aug 03, 2024 – 31 Aug, 2024)

    Readability Contest Logo, This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

    To celebrate Arabic Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary, we launched a unique content maintenance competition. Unlike traditional contests, this initiative focused on improving and maintaining existing articles, targeting specific categories that required attention, such as orphaned articles, those lacking infoboxes, or needing citations.

    We began with a preparatory phase, crafting a detailed plan that defined competition rules, participant criteria, lists of eligible articles, and help page. During the four-week execution phase, contributions were tracked using hashtags and categories, followed by an evaluation period. To promote the competition, we utilized Wikipedia’s Village Pump, central banner, and social media channels. The initiative successfully attracted a diverse group of participants, including newcomers, who developed essential editorial skills and deepened their understanding of Wikipedia’s broader mission. 

    The competition drew approximately 1400 maintained articles and significant participation by introducing new approaches and dividing suggested articles into interest-based groups.

    This structure opened doors for further unconventional contests.

    #SheSaid Wikiquote Campaign for the Maghreb Region (06 Sep, 2024 – 18 Oct, 2024)

    Logo of the campaign “SheSaid” in the Maghreb region, This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

    In collaboration with the global #SheSaid campaign, we organized a competition to revive Arabic Wikiquote, focusing on bridging both gender and geographic content gaps.

    The campaign successfully increased contributions to Arabic Wikiquote and highlighted the potential for similar projects in underdeveloped Wikimedia platforms.

    Key Learnings and Recommendations

    1. Defining article categories early on ensured smoother execution and encouraged participants to engage based on their interests.
    2. Removing eligibility restrictions allowed newcomers to join, leading to significant skill-building.
    3. Integrating Arabic Wikiquote with the #SheSaid campaign showcased how broader initiatives can address gaps across Wikimedia projects.
    4. Engaging experienced editors and administrators for support during peak periods was instrumental in managing the high volume of contributions effectively.

    By documenting lessons learned and sharing them on platforms like Diff, we hope to inspire similar projects and foster a culture of continuous improvement in the Wikimedia movement.

    HBCU students bring AI leader to Wikipedia

    Friday, 10 January 2025 17:00 UTC

    Anna Makanju is shaping the future of artificial intelligence. As a global policy leader, advocate for AI regulation, and the vice president of global affairs at OpenAI, there’s no doubt that Makanju is leaving her mark on the field, but like so many other diverse figures in technology, her story was missing from Wikipedia – that is, until just a few months ago, when two students at North Carolina Central University decided to remedy this gap.

    “As someone deeply invested in the evolution of AI in education and training, I was thrilled to learn about Anna Makanju, an African woman shaping the AI industry,” explained educational technology student Lauren Love. “Since minorities are often underrepresented in computer science and artificial intelligence, our objective for creating this article was to highlight her impactful contributions and inspire awareness of her influence on the AI tools many use today.”

    Lauren Love
    Lauren Love. Image courtesy Lauren Love, all rights reserved.

    With a shared interest in adding representation to Wikipedia, information science student Katrina Powell teamed up with classmate Love to bring Makanju’s article to the encyclopedia.

    “Lauren and I chose Anna Makanju because first and foremost, she’s a woman leader and second, we believe it’s crucial to increase representation of women in STEM fields on Wikipedia,” said Powell. “As a woman of color in STEM, we were particularly drawn to Anna’s story – her experiences navigating a male-dominated field and her commitment to ethical AI resonated with us. We hope that by sharing her story, we can contribute to a more inclusive and equitable online encyclopedia.”

    The student pair, who worked closely to divide the workload and find high-quality sources for the new article, underscored the challenges posed by Wikipedia’s notability threshold for publishing new biographies. 

    “I enjoyed delving into research to uncover Makanju’s diverse experiences and contributions,” said Love. “Refining the article to align with Wikipedia’s standards was also a rewarding challenge that pushed me to improve my writing. Ensuring alignment with their guidelines was definitely the toughest part.”

    For both Love and Powell, the Wikipedia assignment offered the opportunity to give readers insight into the ongoing work to address ethical implications of emerging technologies, including Makanju’s efforts in shaping AI regulations to maximize societal benefit while minimizing risk. Powell, interested in pursuing a career in AI governance like Makanju’s, stressed the power of Wikipedia in raising awareness of underrepresented yet notable individuals.

    “Before the assignment, I had no clue who Anna Makanju was, I had never even heard her name before,” explained Powell. “It was great learning about her background and the work she is doing in the tech field. I was deeply inspired.”

    Katrina Powell
    Katrina Powell. Image courtesy Katrina Powell, all rights reserved.

    Similarly inspired by Makanju’s journey and professional impact, Love also appreciated the opportunity to sharpen her skills for a future career in learning and development and instructional design.

    “Unlike traditional research or discussion boards that may lack engagement, this project allowed me to explore a topic of personal interest while refining critical skills such as creativity, collaboration, and effective communication,” said Love. “[It] enhanced my research and written communication skills, particularly in presenting diverse perspectives with neutrality.”

    Powell’s and Love’s work on Wikipedia is part of a larger Wiki Education initiative sponsored by the Broadcom Foundation, which supports the creation of new biographies of diverse people in STEM on Wikipedia.

    “It is critical for young women and people of color to see themselves as powerful AI leaders like Anna Makanju. The future of AI is here, and they can shape it to reflect their unique knowledge and achievements,” noted Paula Golden, President of Broadcom Foundation.

    While their coursework on Wikipedia is now complete, both Love and Powell expressed plans to continue editing and improving the online encyclopedia into the future, finding the experience both fun and rewarding.

    “It was a proud moment once the article was published,” said Powell. “It felt great to be part of history!”

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

    Wikipedia:Administrators' newsletter/2025/2

    Friday, 10 January 2025 15:21 UTC

    News and updates for administrators from the past month (January 2025).

    Administrator changes

    added
    readded Arcticocean
    removed

    CheckUser changes

    removed ·

    Oversighter changes

    removed

    Guideline and policy news

    Technical news

    Arbitration

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    Google Web Vitals, 75th percentile and why every milliseconds count on Wikipedia

    Friday, 10 January 2025 14:58 UTC

    In late 2023, an article claimed that Wikipedia is one of the fastest websites in the USA. Flattering, right? I've been measuring web performance for over a decade, I couldn't help but wonder: How did they measure that? How do you know that Wikipedia is one of the fastest websites? The article does not say anything on how they did measure it.

    I went to the Web Performance Slack channel (yes, there's a dedicated place where web performance geeks hang out). I asked the question:

    “Has anyone seen the data or the actual “study” done by DigitalSilk about the fastest loading US websites? https://www.technewsworld.com/story/craigslist-wikipedia-zillow-top-list-of-fastest-us-websites-178713.html - I can only find references to it and a screenshot, nothing else?”

    Not providing references? That's not Wikipedia! We're all about citations and verifiable sources. No one on the Slack channel knew anything about how the test was run. But then, one of the channel members took action: Stoyan Stefanov emailed the journalist and actually got an answer!

    Methodology
    The most visited websites based on web traffic were ran through Google's PageSpeed Insights tool, to find out how long it takes for each site to load in full on average“

    So, while it's flattering to see Wikipedia crowned as one of the fastest websites based on Google's PageSpeed Insights tool, I couldn't help but feel a tricked. They seemed to rely on the onload metric. That's a metric that, in the web performance world was regarded as old and not correlating to user experience since 2013.

    Understanding the limitations using the onload metric, let’s shift our focus to modern metrics that better reflect real-world user experiences: Google Web Vitals

    Google Web Vitals

    Google Web Vitals is Google's initiative to focus on the metrics that matter to users and also affects Googles core ranking system. Unlike the old-school onload time, Google Web Vitals better measure aspects of real world user experience.

    The core metrics at the moment are three metrics:

    • Large Contentful Paint (LCP) - when in time is the largest element painted on the users screen. For Wikipedia that is very often a paragraph, but sometimes its an image element or a heading.
    • Interaction To Next Paint (INP) - measure the responsiveness of page, meaning that a page responds quickly to user interactions. For Wikipedia the responsiveness can be slow depending on the amount of JavaScript we ship, event listeners or click events.
    • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - measure the visual stability of the page. That means it measures if content is moved around. In the Wikipedia case this means when campaigns runs and we move the content of Wikipedia.

    Google also have two other web vitals, two metrics that are important for the user experience but not listed as core:

    • Time To First Byte (TTFB) - measure the time between the request for a resource and when the first byte of a response begins to arrive. For Wikipedia TTFB depends on where the users are in the world and how far it is to the closest data center.
    • First Contentful Paint (FCP) - measure the time from when the user first navigated to the page to when any part of the page's text/images painted on the screen. For Wikipedia this is often text.

    Google pay special attention to the 75th percentile of those metrics. It was chosen because "First, the percentile should ensure that a majority of visits to a page or site experienced the target level of performance. Second, the value at the chosen percentile shouldn't be overly impacted by outliers.". But what does the 75 percentile mean for us at Wikipedia?

    The 75th percentile at Wikipedia

    Now let’s put the 75th percentile into perspective by applying it to Wikipedia’s vast global audience.

    Imagine that there were 100 people visiting Wikipedia. Each person got a different user experience because of their device, the internet connection and how we build Wikipedia. For some users the experience will be really fast, for some it will be slower.

    The 75th percentile focus on the worst experience of the best 75%. If you take all 100 users and then sort the experience from fastest to slowest, the 75th experience is where you draw the line. This means that 75% of the users had a better or equal experience and 25% had a worse one. So, how many users are in that 25% for us? We measure unique devices and not users so lets use that.

    Well, for Wikipedia, those 100 users are actually 1,5 billion unique devices per month and 24 billion page views.

    That means if we look at the 75 percentile and we see that a metric move we know that at least 6 billion page views per month ( 24 billion × 0.25) is affected. And 375 million unique devices (1.5 billion × 0.25).

    That is many devices. Suppose we have a regression of just 100 milliseconds in the 75th percentile. That is at least 375 million devices are experiencing this delay. Collectively, those users are waiting an extra 434 days. Yes, over a year of extra wait time for the users with the worst experience because of a (tiny) 100 ms change.

    Is the English Wikipedia the fastest website in the USA according to Google Web Vitals?

    With the metrics Google collects from different web sites, you can compare different sites with each other! The metrics are available per domain (not user country), so we can not compare if the English Wikipedia is one of the fastest web sites in the USA, but we can compare the English Wikipedia against other web entities with users all around the world.

    However before we do that, I want to point out that "Is the English Wikipedia fastest website in USA according to Google Web Vitals?" is a very exclusionary question to ask since:

    • The English Wikipedia is used in more places than the USA
    • There are many Wikipedias for other languages out there and we should not only focus on the English Wikipedia. We need to make sure that everyone independent of language has the same user experience.

    Looking just at "Are we fast in the USA" we leave out a big part of the world. So today we gonna look at the English Wikipedia compared to other web sites and then also look at Wikipedias all around the world to see what kind of user experience all users have.

    But first let's talk about how Google also categorises these experiences as good, needs improvement, or poor by setting specific limits for each metric. With Googles definitions we can see how many of our users have different kinds of experiences. In the data I will show, green means good, needs improvement yellow and red means bad/poor experience.

    We collect all data that is available through the Chrome User Experience API and you can see that in our Chrome User Experience dashboard. There's a lot of metrics, so I will focus on just the Largest Contentful Paint today.

    First let's look at the actual 75 percentile Largest Contentful Paint. We compare against a couple of other web sites. Lower numbers are better. Green is good. We will start to look at the numbers for mobile.

    Mobile

    Screenshot 2024-12-06 at 05.30.50.png (500×922 px, 76 KB)

    This graph highlights that Wikipedia's mobile LCP performance is nearly as fast as Google's, which is quite remarkable!

    We can also look at how many of our users have a slow/bad experience.

    Screenshot 2024-12-06 at 05.30.35.png (500×910 px, 72 KB)

    Wow we can see that we have less users in percentage with a bad experience than the rest of the sites. However the graph shows a small percentage of mobile users experiencing suboptimal LCP. For a website of Wikipedia's scale, this small percentage translates into millions of users, we need to be even better!

    I wonder if it's the same for desktop users? Lets look at the 75 percentile again.

    Desktop

    Screenshot 2024-12-06 at 05.30.20.png (504×920 px, 74 KB)

    Again we can see that Wikipedia is almost the fastest, outperforming many major websites! We seem to be fast on both mobile and desktop.

    Screenshot 2024-12-06 at 05.30.07.png (498×914 px, 73 KB)

    Yes we are really fast! Can we open the champagne and celebrate?

    Are we the fastest site known to human kind?

    Well I would take it a little easy here before we start to brag. Do you remember how we calculated how many users are left out when we use the 75 percentile? I would be careful with a web site with so many users. I would say that: "The English Wikipedia is really fast compared to other web pages looking at the Largest Contentful Paint at the 75% percentile for Chrome users that Google collects metrics from".

    Another way of looking at the data we get from Google is to see how many users have a bad experience using Wikipedia. By taking the ones that need improvement and poor experience, we can see how many users in percentage we need to move to having a good experience.

    First let's look at Largest Contentful Paint again for desktop users. This time we look at the number of users in percentage that have a non good experience per wiki.

    Screenshot 2024-12-20 at 13.34.43.png (1×3 px, 382 KB)

    And then we look at the same for mobile.

    Screenshot 2024-12-20 at 13.35.57.png (1×3 px, 402 KB)

    We can see that on desktop and mobile we have Wikipedias where we as developers have work to do to give more users a good experience.

    As a last example I want to share the interaction to next paint data for mobile. This is interesting because here JavaScript comes into play and there are many things we can do on our side to give the user a better experience.

    Screenshot 2024-12-20 at 13.37.08.png (1×3 px, 406 KB)

    We see that for almost every Wikipedia, 5% of the users have a not so good user experience.

    Summary

    Wikipedia's performance story is one of scale and precision. By focusing on Google Web Vitals, we've seen how milliseconds of delay can impact millions of users. Metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) can provide valuable insights into real-world user experiences, guiding us to optimize for both mobile and desktop users.

    With billions of page views monthly, even the smallest regressions in performance ripple across the globe. Yet, Wikipedia stands as a benchmark of speed in the US, rivaling even the likes of Google. This achievement underscores the importance of continuous monitoring, fine-tuning, and maintaining a user-first perspective in web development.

    As we celebrate, we also need to acknowledge the challenges. Moving the needle for those users with "non-good" experiences remains our mission. By using data and ongoing analysis, we can ensure that Wikipedia stays fast, accessible, and enjoyable for everyone, everywhere.

    Wikipedia:Administrators' newsletter/2023/11

    Wednesday, 8 January 2025 17:29 UTC

    News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2023).

    Administrator changes

    added 0xDeadbeef
    readded Tamzin
    removed Dennis Brown
    renamed Howcheng → Holly Cheng

    Interface administrator changes

    added Pppery
    removed ·

    Technical news

    Arbitration

    • Eligible editors are invited to self-nominate themselves from 12 November 2023 until 21 November 2023 to stand in the 2023 Arbitration Committee elections.
    • Xaosflux, RoySmith and Cyberpower678 have been appointed to the Electoral Commission for the 2023 Arbitration Committee Elections. BusterD is the reserve commissioner.
    • Following a motion, the contentious topic designation of Prem Rawat has been struck. Actions previously taken using this contentious topic designation are still in force.
    • Following several motions, multiple topic areas are no longer designated as a contentious topic. These contentious topic designations were from the Editor conduct in e-cigs articles, Liancourt Rocks, Longevity, Medicine, September 11 conspiracy theories, and Shakespeare authorship question cases.
    • Following a motion, remedies 3.1 (All related articles under 1RR whenever the dispute over naming is concerned), 6 (Stalemate resolution) and 30 (Administrative supervision) of the Macedonia 2 case have been rescinded.
    • Following a motion, remedy 6 (One-revert rule) of the The Troubles case has been amended.
    • An arbitration case named Industrial agriculture has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case close 8 November.

    Miscellaneous

    Archives
    2017: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2018: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2019: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2020: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2021: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2022: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2023: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2024: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2025: 01


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    Wikipedia:Administrators' newsletter/2024/4

    Wednesday, 8 January 2025 17:28 UTC

    News and updates for administrators from the past month (March 2024).

    Administrator changes

    removed ·

    Guideline and policy news

    Technical news

    • The Toolforge Grid Engine services have been shut down after the final migration process from Grid Engine to Kubernetes. (T313405)

    Arbitration

    Miscellaneous

    • Editors are invited to sign up for The Core Contest, an initiative running from April 15 to May 31, which aims to improve vital and other core articles on Wikipedia.
    Archives
    2017: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2018: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2019: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2020: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2021: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2022: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2023: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2024: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2025: 01


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    Wikipedia:Administrators' newsletter/2024/7

    Wednesday, 8 January 2025 17:28 UTC

    News and updates for administrators from the past month (June 2024).

    Administrator changes

    added ·
    removed

    Technical news

    • Local administrators can now add new links to the bottom of the site Tools menu without using JavaScript. Documentation is available on MediaWiki. (T6086)

    Miscellaneous

    Archives
    2017: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2018: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2019: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2020: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2021: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2022: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2023: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2024: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2025: 01


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    Wikipedia:Administrators' newsletter/2024/10

    Wednesday, 8 January 2025 17:28 UTC

    News and updates for administrators from the past month (September 2024).

    Administrator changes

    added ·
    removed

    CheckUser changes

    readded
    removed

    Guideline and policy news

    Arbitration

    Miscellaneous

    Archives
    2017: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2018: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2019: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2020: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2021: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2022: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2023: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2024: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2025: 01


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    Wikipedia:Administrators' newsletter/2024/11

    Wednesday, 8 January 2025 17:27 UTC

    News and updates for administrators from the past month (October 2024).

    Administrator changes

    readded ·
    removed

    CheckUser changes

    removed Maxim

    Oversighter changes

    removed Maxim

    Guideline and policy news

    Technical news

    • Mass deletions done with the Nuke tool now have the 'Nuke' tag. This change will make reviewing and analyzing deletions performed with the tool easier. T366068

    Arbitration

    Miscellaneous

    Archives
    2017: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2018: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2019: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2020: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2021: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2022: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2023: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2024: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2025: 01


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    Wikipedia:Administrators' newsletter/2024/12

    Wednesday, 8 January 2025 17:27 UTC

    News and updates for administrators from the past month (November 2024).

    Administrator changes

    added ·
    readded
    removed

    Interface administrator changes

    added
    readded Pppery

    CheckUser changes

    readded

    Guideline and policy news

    Technical news

    Arbitration

    Archives
    2017: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2018: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2019: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2020: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2021: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2022: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2023: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2024: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2025: 01


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    APNIC Foundation

    Wednesday, 8 January 2025 12:00 UTC


    An update on the Ian Peter Digitisation Project
    .

    The Ian Peter Archive Project[edit | edit source]

    In 2024, Wikimedia Australia sought to recruit two new short-term staff members to support and deliver the digital preservation of the Ian Peter Archive in a collaborative effort funded by the APNIC Foundation.

    The aim of the project is to preserve and make accessible historical documents that highlight the development and impact of the Internet in Australia. The records contained in the Ian Peter Archive provide invaluable insights into the technological advancements, policy development, and collaborative efforts that have shaped Australia's internet infrastructure and governance.

    Latest News[edit | edit source]

    In late 2024, we welcomed Caddie Brain back to the Wikimedia Australia team to manage the project, as well as Cameron Deegan in the role of Digital Project Officer.

    In 2025, the project team will be on the ground in Brisbane at the archive to assess the collection and begin the digitisation process.

    The APNIC Foundation[edit | edit source]

    APNIC Foundation’s mission is to increase investment in Internet development in the Asia Pacific region. Projects and activities implemented or funded by the Foundation are designed and managed by APNIC, in collaboration with funding partners, like Wikimedia Australia, interested in Internet development in the Asia Pacific.

    Related Links[edit | edit source]

    Revisiting cyberfeminism

    Tuesday, 7 January 2025 13:22 UTC

    By Athina Petsou, volunteer and student

    The “Revisiting Cyberfeminism” event took place in Berlin from December 7th to 8th, 2024, with a follow-up session on 14th December. Organised by Wiki Riot Squad, Who writes his_tory?, and Athina Petsou, in cooperation with bildwechsel/GuterGrund GmbH and Khoj Studios, the event was financially supported by Wikimedia Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The primary goal was to revisit and update Wikipedia articles related to cyberfeminism, ensuring that the content reflects diverse experiences.

    The concept of cyberfeminism, which emerged in the early 1990s, has been a critical framework for understanding and challenging the power structures embedded in technology and online platforms through a feminist perspective. This movement focuses on how biased technology can challenge or reinforce gender norms, questioning who controls information, who gets to participate, and how gender influences and is influenced by these dynamics. The December events were in Berlin and online, aiming to refresh and expand the discourse around cyberfeminism through collaborative efforts on Wikipedia. Among others we created and translated articles in English, German, French and Spanish Wikipedia, about Frauen+technik, Old Boys Network, etc.

    Photograph of the in-person editathon in Berlin showing a group of people sat around a table with laptops
    Meeting avec l’équipe en présentiel et online 1 by Yasminkaa CCO

    I loved the fact that the event brought together different participants: artists, historical figures who were part of the Cyberfeminist movement in the 90s, wikipedians, students, researchers and theoretics. The Berlin event took place in an artist atelier and included a series of workshops, readings, and collaborative editing sessions. It was lovely to hear stories and have a look in the archival material of the different groups (-Innen, frauen·und·technik, Old Boys Network).

    More importantly for me, the event was structured as a hybrid gathering, with participants joining both on-site in Berlin and online from various locations, including a parallel workshop hosted by Khoj Studios in New Delhi, following the tradition of the cyberfeminism movement itself.  

    Cyberfeminism has historically been underrepresented in online spaces, and this event aimed to address that gap by bringing together diverse voices and perspectives. We also read poems from the archives and from contemporary poets working on cyberfeminist topics. The collaborative nature of the event allowed participants to learn from each other, share their expertise, stories and new ideas and create a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of cyberfeminism. Also, the intergenerational nature of the event is a good heritage on the online and in flesh feminist discourses.  The “Revisiting Cyberfeminism” event was more than just an edit-a-thon; it was a collaborative effort to engage in knowledge production that challenges the systemic biases inherent in online platforms and technological products. By updating and expanding articles on cyberfeminism, participants contributed to a more inclusive and accurate representation of feminist work in the technological landscape. Also, it was a chance to reflect on our own lives and work, discuss and connect. Hopefully, meeting you all again soon and on our new projects.

    The post Revisiting cyberfeminism appeared first on WMUK.

    Announcing 2025 Partner Projects

    Tuesday, 7 January 2025 12:00 UTC


    Organisations awarded Wikimedia Australia Partner Project funding for 2024-2025
    .

    In August 2024, we invited Australian organisations and individuals to apply for partner project funding and were greatly impressed by the proposals of all the applicants. After creating a shortlist and conducting interviews with the project leaders, we are pleased to announce that 2SER FM, the State Library Victoria and the South Australian Museum have been awarded Wikimedia Australia Partner Project funding for 2024-2025.

    2SER FM[edit | edit source]

    2SER FM is a community radio station based in Sydney, Australia, known for its engagement with local communities and support of projects related to media and broadcasting. Led by Dr. Liz Giuffre, a Senior Lecturer and Research Coordinator at the School of Communication, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS Sydney, the 2SER FM project seeks to increase the visibility of women in journalism by enriching Wikipedia with accurate and comprehensive information. Read more about the project.

    South Australian Museum[edit | edit source]

    The South Australian Museum partner project, led by Museum digital transformation leader Adam Moriarty, aims to enhance the visibility of the Museum's research and collections on Wikipedia and related platforms. The focus of the project will be on local scientific research and South Australia’s rich cultural history. In addition to creating a roadmap that can be utilised by other GLAM ( Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) institutions, the Museum will collaborate with a Wikimedian in Residence to support staff training and community engagement. Read more about the project.

    State Library Victoria[edit | edit source]

    The Radical Acts project aims to address gender bias in Wikipedia and the State Library Victoria (SLV) records by improving the representation of Australian feminist activists and movements. Drawing from SLV’s extensive collection of Australian feminism and Women’s Liberation materials, the project will work with a Wikimedian-in-residence to enhance Wikipedia biographies and library metadata. Toni Burton, Library Collection Curation and Engagement Manager, will be leading this project. Read more about the project.

    Wikipedia:Administrators' newsletter/2025/1

    Sunday, 5 January 2025 15:36 UTC

    News and updates for administrators from the past month (December 2024).

    Guideline and policy news

    Technical news

    • The Nuke feature also now provides links to the userpage of the user whose pages were deleted, and to the pages which were not selected for deletion, after page deletions are queued. This enables easier follow-up admin-actions.

    Arbitration

    Miscellaneous

    Archives
    2017: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2018: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2019: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2020: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2021: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2022: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2023: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2024: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
    2025: 01


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    weeklyOSM 754

    Sunday, 5 January 2025 11:22 UTC

    26/12/2024-01/01/2025

    lead picture

    GNU/Linux.ch dedicates an article to BRouter-Web [1] | © GNU/Linux.ch || Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors

    About us

    • weeklyOSM has been advertised irregularly on Bluesky since issue 692, October 2023. As of issue 753, we will regularly announce the publication of a new issue there.

    Mapping

    • Anne-Karoline Distel continued to remotely map Indianola, Iowa (we reported earlier).
    • Noha307’s mapping of footpaths around Albuquerque International Sunport, New Mexico, USA, marked the final 2024 changeset in the OSM database (December 31, 2024, 23:59:55 +0000). Shortly afterwards, TrickyFoxy became the first mapper to contribute to the OSM database in 2025, with the mapping of buildings in Volgograd Oblast, Russia (January 1, 2025, 00:00:00 +0000). You can view all the mappers who contributed during the historic database year transition here.
    • M!dgard shared their project of mapping the WWI Western Front demarcation stones, known as ‘demarcatiepalen’ in Dutch and ‘bornes Vauthier’ in French. After identifying and adding all 19 Belgian stones to OpenStreetMap, they cross-referenced the data with the Flemish heritage agency’s database. In France, only 22 of 77 stones have been mapped and M!dgard plans to collaborate with a French heritage organisation to complete the task using their detailed list and photo album of the remaining stones.
    • SK53 compiled, classified, and analysed the nearly 860 keys used to describe amenity=pub objects in Great Britain.

    Community

    • Ilya Zverev highlighted the disparity between donations from Meta, Microsoft, TomTom, and Amazon to OpenStreetMap and their $3 million annual Overture Maps membership fees, contrasting this with significant contributions from non-profits like the German Sovereign Tech Fund. Zverev praised the OSMF for using some donations to create jobs, while Simon Poole added that Overture’s fees exclude additional staffing costs and critiqued Prototype Fund grants for focusing on lower-priority activities. Poole argued that addressing structural issues, such as competition from the Linux Foundation, should be prioritised over software development.
    • Jiří Eischmann emphasised the function of #LocusMap that he really likes: ‘you can take a photo of a map, calibrate it with the standard map and then display it as an overlay’.
    • Gregory Marler reflected on November’s #30DayMapChallenge in their OSM diary, highlighting standout artistic contributions that leveraged OpenStreetMap data. Gregory announced that they have a YouTube video series discussing their top picks, with new parts releasing every other day.
    • Jiri Vlasak reflected on the fifth year of their ‘Divide and Map. Now.’ (DAMN) project, a tool for dividing large mapping areas into smaller segments for collaboration. In 2024, challenges included performance issues with over 300,000 segments, which were resolved through pagination and size limits, and confusing JavaScript clients, which are planned for improvement in 2025. The project transitioned to OAuth 2.0 and added a ‘divide to squares’ feature compatible with MapSwipe. They aim to make JavaScript clients more user-friendly and to achieve self-hosting in 2025.
    • Yasunori Kirimoto published a summary of the MapLibre User Group Japan Activities in 2024.

    Events

    • In these OSM user diaries you can read about people’s experiences of the State of the Map LatAm 2024: tatipara ►, kauevestena ►, and crestrepo ►.

    OSM research

    • The paper ‘Mapping Public Urban Green Spaces Based on OpenStreetMap and Sentinel-2 Imagery Using Belief Functions’, published in 2021, by Ludwig and others, showed the use of OpenStreetMap data to reduce uncertainties in the classification of green areas in Sentinel-2 imagery.

    Maps

    • Benjamin Tran Dinh and Sarah Mamy have developed Chronotrains, an interactive rail map of Europe that shows how far you can travel by train within 8 hours.
    • Klas Karlsson explained how to add and style OpenStreetMap Vector Tiles with QGIS.

    OSM in action

    • Hackaday showcased Arnis, an open-source project by Louis Erbkamm that transforms OpenStreetMap data into detailed Minecraft maps. Written in Rust, the tool allows users to import geographic areas into Minecraft by specifying coordinates, enabling immersive exploration of real-world locations. Although computationally intensive, Arnis is functional and the project welcomes community contributions to enhance its features.
    • The Bandung city government has developed an OpenStreetMap-based interactive map that provides public access to traffic camera feeds across the city of Bandung, Indonesia.
    • SPOT is an AI-driven tool designed to simplify the critical task of geolocating images, videos, or eyewitness reports. A beta release is publicly available, as is a tutorial.

    Open Data

    • Ronan Ysebaert, Marianne Guérois, and Louis Laurian published an open data archive using a 1 km grid at an EU scale. It shows the accessibility indicators of services related to cities and towns. It follows a reproducible, transparent, and updatable framework and uses only OSRM data, based on OpenStreetMap.
    • Martina Oefelein tooted that the Munich Transport Corporation (MVG) has published anonymised usage data for their MVG-Rad bike-sharing service for download. She analysed the data using statistics and maps, and has shared her findings and code in a GitHub repository.

    Software

    • [1] GNU/Linux.ch introduced ► the BRouter as a versatile route planning tool based on OpenStreetMap, suitable for various transport modes including walking, cycling, and driving. With features such as route customisation, elevation profiles, no-go zones, and export options, it offers flexibility and functionality for users on desktops or mobile devices.
    • Victor and Eugene shared OsmAnd’s 2025 New Year Resolutions, showcasing several new planned features to be implemented this year. They also recounted several of the 2024 resolutions that were successfully fulfilled last year.
    • Dirk Stöcker has issued a challenge to the JOSM community to improve the completeness of translations in the programme, as only 7 out of the 41 supported languages exceed 99% coverage for the core interface. Important languages like French still lag behind, prompting the call to action for 2025 to become the ‘Year of the JOSM I18n Contest’. Contributions can be coordinated via the Translations page, where a statistics table highlights the current progress.
    • Sesivany has evaluated ► the various OSM-based map applications for mobile phones: Mapy.cz, OsmAnd, LocusMap, Organic Maps, and Freemap.sk.

    Programming

    • Ilya Zverev has invited Every Door users to brainstorm potential software architecture alternatives for extending the app with external modules, extensions, plugins, or whatever.
    • Pavel has described how to analyse OpenStreetMap changesets with DuckDB and dbt, focusing on converting large XML datasets into the efficient Parquet format for streamlined workflows and storage in S3 for dashboards. They demonstrated solutions to challenges such as de-duplication, resource management and metadata integration, using GIS tools, automation via GNU Make and Parallel, and lightweight pipelines for flexible analysis and visualisation.
    • The experimental tool Godview integrates ► OpenStreetMap data with a Large Language Model to offer a chat-based map service. Created by Reddit user Ranoutofusernames, during the holidays, to address limitations in Google Maps, it allows users to combine natural language prompts such as ‘cheap hotels, petrol stations, and hiking parking lots between Hamburg and Berlin’ for multi-faceted map results. Currently it is limited to iOS and capped at five search results. Godview’s ability to integrate multiple queries and navigate seamlessly to results, highlights its potential as a robust alternative to Google Maps.
    • hlfan has developed ► a solution for programmatically identifying and fixing gaps in route relations within OpenStreetMap data.

    Releases

    • Alexis Lecanu announced that Baba, a new Panoramax client for Android, can be downloaded from Google Play, and since it is the first version, he is asking people to report on GitLab any problems they encounter.
    • Yohan Boniface has noted in uMap’s December change log fixes for some minor bugs and improvements to the functionality of this useful web map creator.
    • OsmAnd has released version 4.9 for iOS, featuring enhanced multi-layer GPX track support, customisable audio alerts for navigation, and improved map rendering. Additionally, this version introduces an updated interface for trip planning and new tools for offline editing, offering a more streamlined and versatile user experience.
    • Benjamin (aka piratenpanda) tooted about the improvements to veggiekarte, which has resulted in better cluster loading times.

    Did you know that …

    • … the Participatory Mapping Observatory, one of the initiatives coordinated by IVIDES.org, has published a book on techniques and cases of success in participatory mapping and social cartography, in Brazilian Portuguese and with a free download > ? The Institute plans to release a book in 2025 with case studies on collaborative mapping, most of them using OpenStreetMap.
    • … Alexay Noskov and collaborators have published a collection of datasets for the WeGovNow project? They contains data provided by stakeholders, OpenStreetMap data, under the OSM data licence (ODbL), and data generated by the IGIS.TK applications. You can read more about the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and its collaborative network.
    • … OpenFreeMap lets you display custom maps on your website and apps for free? It provides several vector tilesets, including liberty, positron and Brighton.
    • … the OSM planet file is currently about 2006 GB in uncompressed XML format and about 146 GB when compressed with bzip2?
    • … OsmAnd offers hourly offline map updates for free to OpenStreetMap contributors? Tungmar recalled being surprised years ago when he had access without a subscription, only to realise recently that it stopped because he was no longer logged in.

    Other “geo” things

    • A gold robbery suspect in Banyumas, Indonesia, admitted during police interrogation that they had relied ► on Google Maps to identify potential targets. Specifically, they searched for local gold stores that lacked security grilles on their shopfronts.
    • Christopher May highlighted the AuthaGraph projection, an approximately equal-area projection created by Japanese architect Hajime Narukawa. The projection achieves its accuracy by dividing the globe into 96 triangles, mapping them onto a tetrahedron, and then unfolding it into a rectangle. This method minimises the distortions common in traditional Mercator and Dymaxion projections, offering a more accurate representation of Earth’s geography, particularly at the high latitudes.
    • In the final #geomobpod of the year, the podcast’s hosts, Ed, Steven, and Alastair, got together to reflect on 2024.
    • Malay Haldar and the Airbnb engineering team have explored how to optimise map search rankings differently from traditional list-based rankings. Maps require unique strategies due to uniform user attention across scattered pins, rather than a top-down decay in lists. Innovations included limiting map pins to maximise discoverability, introducing tiered attention with ‘mini-pins’ for less prominent listings, and recentering maps to prioritise high-probability bookings near the centre.
    • A Deutschlandfunk report discussed ► recent discoveries revealing that the Amazon basin, long thought to be an untouched wilderness, once hosted advanced urban centres. Using technologies including LiDAR, researchers have uncovered evidence of sophisticated ‘garden cities’, challenging old assumptions, and supporting indigenous legends of thriving civilisations in the Amazon.
    • A research group from the University of Ghent, Belgium, published a study in 2020 in which they were able to prove that there is no ‘Mercator effect’. You can take the test as well. This quiz was found via Paulina Rowinska’s MapMatics, How we navigate the world through numbers, recommended by the editorial team!

    Upcoming Events

    Where What Online When Country
    Montrouge Réunion des contributeurs de Montrouge et du Sud de Paris 2025-01-02 flag
    OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting 2025-01-03
    Moers Community-Hackday vom 3. – 5. Januar 2024 im JuNo, Moers Repelen 2025-01-03 – 2025-01-05 flag
    Model Town Tehsil 13th OSM Delhi Mapping Party (Online) ✓ 2025-01-05 flag
    Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng] 2025-01-07
    San Jose South Bay Map Night ✓ 2025-01-08 flag
    Stuttgart Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen 2025-01-08 flag
    iD Community Chat 2025-01-08
    Salt Lake City OSM Utah Monthly Map Night 2025-01-09 flag
    Lorain County OpenStreetMap Midwest Meetup ✓ 2025-01-09 flag
    Bangalore South OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party 2025-01-11 flag
    Model Town Tehsil 13th OSM Delhi Mapping Party 2025-01-12 flag
    København OSMmapperCPH 2025-01-12 flag
    Richmond MapRVA Meetup with OSM US 2025-01-14 flag
    Chambéry Mapathon en ligne saison 24/25 CartONG 2025-01-13 flag
    中正區 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #72 2025-01-13 flag
    München Münchner OSM-Treffen 2025-01-14 flag
    Asamblea General Extraordinaria Enero 2025 Asociación OSM España (Online) 2025-01-14
    [Online] Map-py Wednesday 2025-01-15
    [Online] Map-py Wednesday 2025-01-16
    Utrecht Nieuwjaarsborrel OSGeo.nl, OSM.nl en QGIS Gebruikersvereniging Nederland 2025-01-19 flag
    Panoramax monthly international meeting 2025-01-20
    Hannover OSM-Stammtisch Hannover 2025-01-20 flag

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

    The Atlas Language Selector

    Saturday, 4 January 2025 02:07 UTC

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

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

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

    A screenshot from Netflix. A futuristic interface for selecting languages: three columns of buttons with names of languages and flags. At the top, a closed caption: “Francais [speaks French]”. The other details are described in the rest of the post.

    This selector appears at about 33 minutes into the movie.

    A few general comments first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Not much to say about Czech and Italian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Catalan is represented by the Catalan independence activists’ flag, with the blue chevron and the star, known as Estelada. The official flag of the autonomous community of Catalonia is yellow with the four red stripes and without the chevron and the star, and it will probably remain its flag if it ever becomes independent. Are they hinting that Catalonia will achieve independence by 2071? Paying tribute to the fact that Catalan is heavily present in many websites and apps? Or just being sloppy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      History student transforms Wikipedia article on immigrant detention center

      Friday, 3 January 2025 17:00 UTC

      Before her US Immigration History course last term, Phoebe England had never heard of the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, an immigrant detention center located more than 2,000 miles away from her home in Utah. But after learning about the center in class, England knew she wanted to help others understand its significance, too.

      One Wikipedia assignment, more than 3,500 words, and 36 new references later, and the Irwin County Detention Center Wikipedia article has been completely transformed – thanks to England’s efforts to provide readers with a more comprehensive overview of its history, which includes allegations of non-consensual surgeries performed on female detainees. 

      As the article outlines, more than 40 women detainees and a nurse at the facility came forward in 2020 alleging that unnecessary medical procedures, including hysterectomies, were conducted on women without their consent. But concerns for the health and wellbeing of detainees were raised long before the highly-publicized allegations in 2020, explained England.

      “News articles sensationalized this dehumanizing experience of immigrant women,” said England. “However, what was missed in the hype of it all, whether you believed the women’s experiences to be true, is that the treatment of immigrants had been poor long before that at the detention center and that any abuse no matter how big or small should be addressed regardless of whether it makes a good headline or not.”

      Phoebe England
      Phoebe England. Image courtesy Phoebe England, rights reserved.

      Before England’s edits, the article contained one short paragraph that focused on the 2020 allegations. Now, the article provides readers with several new sections, including other allegations made before 2020, a more detailed summary of the 2020 allegations, the legal aftermath of the 2020 allegations, and the 2022 report outlining the United States Senate’s investigation of the center. 

      “When I talked to people about my topic, many disregarded the story and said that events like these surely could not be happening in our current time,” said England. “I wanted people to know that immigrant detainees have been poorly treated and continue to be treated that way, and that this is not an isolated event.”

      England emphasized that while she personally believes the women’s allegations, she wants readers to be able to make their own determinations based on the facts. 

      Reflecting on the impact of her edits, England underscored the crucial role of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors in making information accessible to everyone.

      “In this day and age, people are all about instant gratification,” noted England. “They want quick information that is easily accessible, and Wikipedia can easily make that knowledge accessible and reliable. It’s just down to Wikipedia editors to make sure that there are articles written about these topics and that they are written/sourced well.” 

      England, who considered her assignment to improve Wikipedia a win-win for everyone, enjoyed the opportunity to develop her research and writing skills in a new way.

      “While I do love writing historical analyses, it was super fun to do something different,” said England.  “I put in a lot of work and effort to make sure that this article was as unbiased as possible. It is also kind of cool to say you have something published on Wikipedia  – I sent the link to all of my family.” 

      As an aspiring history professor, England recognized the value of bringing research to the public in an accessible way.

      “While writing scholarly articles is important, I think it is extremely important to be able to synthesize that information for the general public in a more informal manner,” explained England. “That way your information can be used for good rather than just sitting and collecting dust. I would totally be willing to assign my future students a Wikipedia writing assignment!” 

      England’s editing efforts are part of our three-year initiative to improve humanities and social justice content on Wikipedia – the largest campaign of its kind in history. Read more.

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