We have bengali wikisource friends requesting for web scrapping PDF files from a dspace based library.
If you are interested, reply here or mail to me on tshrinivasan@gmail.com
Thanks.
The first two weeks of GSoC were pretty different from that of Outreachy, not in terms of the amount of work and the hard work I’d put in, but in terms of the kind of work I did in these initial weeks of my journey. My project proposal was pretty much the same as what the final requirements were, and thus was approved very quickly by my mentors and thus I could start coding pretty early (happy to have reached this stage pretty quickly this time 😛).
I spent some time setting up the environment, database for the tool etc for a smooth development experience. I did lot of research about React, its efficiency and when its useful. In these two weeks, I also managed to set it up, along with Django on Toolforge. It was hell of a task to make React work with Django along with Webpack, Babel etc. Issues kept on coming and I kept resolving them! The whole Webpack world seemed pretty complicated to me, but I managed to survive 😅.
Having spent lot of time playing around with React and Webpack and setting them up to work with Django, I’ve now shifted my focus up on the MVP release of my tool. MVP of the tool will contain all the basic functionality like creating a worklist, adding articles to worklist, finding a worklist, claiming an article in a worklist etc but with minimal UI. The goal of the MVP release would be to gather initial feedback from the users about the tool and make necessary amendments in our plans for this tool. I hope I’ll be able to share the results of MVP release with you in the next chapter. Stay tuned!
This spring, Wiki Education ran a pilot program called Wikipedia Fellows to train subject-matter experts in three disciplines on how to edit Wikipedia. Over a three-month structured course that included weekly meetings, nine academics in political science, sociology, and women’s studies improved Wikipedia articles in their fields of expertise. We’re excited to declare the pilot a success, and we are actively recruiting additional cohorts as we attempt to scale the impact of the program.
How do we know the pilot program was a success? The team of Wiki Education staff who worked on the pilot — Program Manager Will Kent, Educational Partnerships Manager Jami Mathewson, Community Engagement Manager Ryan McGrady, Senior Wikipedia Content Expert Ian Ramjohn, and Wikipedia Content Expert Shalor Toncray — spent extensive time reflecting on every aspect of the pilot program. The team documented what they did and what their learnings were along the way, and since the pilot wrapped up at the end of March, they have been busy creating a full evaluation report of the program, which we’ve published on Meta-wiki, the central organizing hub for the Wikimedia movement’s documentation.
Following in the trends of other evaluation reports we’ve published, the Fellows pilot evaluation report provides an in-depth overview of what we did during the preparation phase, the selection phase, how we created the curriculum, how the meetings went, what our staff roles were, and the outcomes from the pilot. We identified our theory of change and key questions, and then reflected upon them in a conclusion. All of these are documented extensively in the report on Meta.
While Wiki Education believes in transparency, which is part of the reason we publish reports like this, we are also hopeful that this information can be useful for other Wikimedia movement partners globally who may want to pursue a similar program in the future. Trying to engage subject-matter experts to contribute their knowledge to Wikimedia projects has been an ongoing goal of many in our movement for the last 17 years. While only time will tell if we actually retain these new experts as long-term editors, the English Wikipedia and its readers have already benefited from the contributions these nine experts made during their time as Wikipedia Fellows.
To read the full evaluation report, visit Meta. We’ve also published a short blog post outlining the outcomes from the pilot, and participants in the Fellows program are blogging about their experiences on our blog.
Photo by Benh, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Dear Minister Arslan:
I am the General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, the not-for-profit organization that hosts Wikipedia, whose more than 46 million articles make it the largest, collaboratively-built online repository of free knowledge in the world. I read your recent statements on the access ban of Wikipedia in Turkey, which did not include critical information about the current situation. Unfortunately, the statements did not include any information about the many steps the Wikimedia community of volunteer editors have already taken to improve the articles that are the basis for the block. Nor do they include information about our compliance with Turkish law and many meetings with Turkish officials. To that end, I want to take this opportunity to provide crucial information concerning many and significant efforts to address the block, and to emphasize our interest in understanding how to return access to Wikipedia for people in Turkey.
Before getting into more detail, here are a few very important points.
First, the Turkish block is the most expansive government ban ever imposed on Wikipedia, and includes Wikipedias across nearly 300 languages. The court order imposing the ban is based on two articles in English Wikipedia which the court said damaged the reputation and prestige of the Republic of Turkey. While we respectfully disagreed with the court’s decision as it applied to the articles at the time the block was imposed, we also wish to point out that those articles have been changed substantially by Wikipedia volunteer editors since the block was imposed and urge you to take that into consideration.
Second, it is important to note that, unlike other top internet platforms, the Wikimedia Foundation does not own or control the content of the sites it hosts, including Wikipedia. With respect to the editing process, the Foundation cannot remove or alter content. The originating idea that has led to the unique value of Wikipedia is that it is a collaboration of hundreds of thousands of people across the globe. Together they make decisions about what information to include in Wikipedia and how that information is presented. The editing process proceeds according to policies developed and overseen by these independent volunteer editors. Wikipedia’s policies require reliable sources to verify information included in Wikipedia, and neutrality, especially when covering controversies in which there are differing views. This is an ongoing process and means that Wikipedia articles are under constant improvement. It is a process that benefits from more editors and differing perspectives, which is one of the reasons why ending the block in Turkey is so important.
This manner of creating and improving content remains to this day the most powerful and unique contribution of Wikipedia to the internet. When more people participate on Wikipedia, the more neutral, reliable, and accurate its articles become. As you may know from the BTK, the Wikimedia Foundation and independent Wikipedia volunteer editors offered to provide open, public training on Wikipedia in Turkey once the block is lifted, as we have done in other countries, with the goal of increasing the number of editors and perspectives on Wikipedia.
Third, I also want to emphasize that Wikipedia has complied with Turkish law; it has not sought to circumvent the court ruling. The Foundation, for its part, has pursued its legal remedies and will continue to do so.
Significantly, and as stated above, independent, volunteer Wikipedia editors have made extensive changes to the articles upon which the court order is based. The Wikipedia articles today are significantly different than the versions that were reviewed by the court more than one year ago when it issued its 2017 decision.
The articles have been improved, in a manner consistent with Wikipedia’s own standards: The articles now include more statements from multiple reliable sources from both within and outside Turkey, cover different sides of controversies, and use more neutral language. These changes also address major concerns expressed by the government, including that the Wikipedia articles provide comprehensive summaries that do not only reflect one point of view.
The articles are and have remained open for editing by anyone around the world in accordance with Wikipedia’s editorial policies of neutrality and reliance on reliable sources. Indeed, the only barrier to Turkish people’s ability to improve Wikipedia further is the fact that the access ban has not yet been lifted.
We respectfully request that the government join us in asking the court to lift the ban so that Wikipedia can return to serving as a valuable, free educational resource on a wide range of topics, including science, engineering, art, and culture. We would like to see the Turkish people able to contribute to the global conversation, including Turkish topics, on Wikipedia. As we have repeatedly noted, we are all made poorer for the absence of contributions by the Turkish people.
In any event, we would like to keep open communication with you so that we can discuss these matters further if that is helpful.
Eileen B. Hershenov
General Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
Last week, I had an interesting meeting with Panjabi Wikimedian community and CIS-A2K team.
Panjabi wikimedia community is small in count. But each of them are contributing with their best. Many of them doing 100-days-of-wiki, personal wiki edithathon for 100 days. Few of them do in in multiple sites and many times a year.
Their interest on contribution and passion on their language is awesome.
Interacted on wikisource, wiktionary and wikipedia. Shared many ideas to improve their workflow. They are looking for many tools to automate their tasks. Those tools will be useful for all wiki communities.
Then, had some great discussions with CIS-A2K team. We spoke about many interesting project ideas.
Listing them all the ideas here.
1. List down the Top 10 tricks/hacks/must know on any wikisource project
2. Make simple tutorials on how to start contributing to wiki, in all possible languages. Still we dont have an ebook or easy starter guide in Tamil. There may be video tutorials. curate them and show them in better way to find them easily.
3. Telegram bot to proofread wikisource contents. Get a page from wikisource. split it into lines, then words. Show a word and OCRed content in a telegrambot. User should verify or type the correct spelling in telegram itself. Submit the changes to wikisource. Thus, we can make the collaborated proofreading easily.
4. Explore how to use flickr for helping photographers to donate their photos for commons. Flickr is easy for them to upload and showcase. From there, we should move the photos to commons. Few tools are already available. Explore them and train them for photographers.
5. We should celebrate the volunteers who contribute to wiki. By events, news announcements, interviews etc. CIS may explore this.
6. Web application for OCR4WikiSource
7. Make a web application to record audio and upload to commons and add in wiktionary words. explore Lingua-Libre for web app.
8. Make a mobile application to record audio and upload to commons and add in wiktionary words.
9. CIS may ask the language based organizations to give their works/tools on public licenses.
10. A one/two day meeting/conference to connect various language technologies. Each team can demonstrate the tools they are working on. others can learn and use them for their languages. CIS may organize this soon.
11. Building spell checkers for Tamil. Learn how other other languages are doing. Odia seems to have good spell checker. Explore that.
12. For iOS, there is no commons app to upload photos. It was there sometime ago. Fix the iOS commons app and rerelease it again.
13. Build Maps with local languages with OSM.
14. One/Two day training on wiki tech. like gadgets, tools, toolserver, API, etc
15. Tweet marketing to promote the ebooks released in wikisource projects. Measure the downloads.
16. CIS may talk with amazon to release the ebooks from wikisource for free always at amazon.
17. Explore Valmigi project of malayalam, chikubuku of kannada – for their ebooks.
18. Download ebooks from dspace, bengali books – West Bengal Public Library Network – url – http://dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/jspui/
19. Explore paid works for wikisource proofreading.
20. Blog on how ta wikisource for 2000 ebooks from TN government in public domain license. Send to CIS. They may try to do the same for other languages.
21. ASI website has info about all monuments. Scrap them all and add in wiki.
22. Scrap details from tourism sites and add in wiki.
23. Kannada archeology site has tons of images but with 3 seals added in all images. scrap them, remove seal and add to commons.
24. Tool to audit wiki sites. like new users, edits, measurements, KPIs, reports etc.
25. Discuss with wiki writers and help them to automate their tasks. Build new tools to help them. train existing tools.
26. Get existing photos from many photographers. Get license doc. Add in OTRS. Have a team to upload the photos to commons.
27. Find the pages that don’t have images. Search in commons and add 1 image automatically.
28. Infobox in wiki pages may have 1 image. Check for the same page in other languages.. get the image from infobox and use it in missing pages.
29. Tito showed a broken JS script. Explore it and fix it.
30. Discuss with victor and google team to improve the OCR feature and integrating with wikisource. Explore existing tools like http://tools.wmflabs.org/ws-google-ocr/ and https://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Google_OCR
Thanks to Ravi, Tito, Tanveer, Dan, Charan Singh, Manavpreet, Rupika,Gurlaal, Stain for the interesting meeting and great ideas.
We can work on these ideas and implement them soon.
If you are interested in doing any of the ideas, reply here or mail me on tshrinivasan@gmail.com
One of my favorite programming samples is calculating a visualization of the Mandelbrot set, a famous fractal. I’ve added it to my experimental JS-like scripting engine to exercise the floating-point performance:
Using the tagged-pointer scheme in my earlier post for storage of variant local types, there was the disadvantage that double-precision floating point numbers (64 bits wide) would not fit in the 31 bits of tagged-pointer space, so they had to be “boxed” (allocated on the heap as an object). This made for runtimes on the Mandelbrot set demo approximately 200x slower than the original JS running in node. Ouch!
I decided to reimplement NaN boxing (which allows storing full 64-bit doubles or a pointer or an int32, all in a single 64-bit word), this time following the JavaScriptCore method that’s easier to unbox pointers versus the SpiderMonkey method. Now I can flip my code between NaN-boxing and heap-boxing with a compile-time #define and compare!
original js: 9 ms native w/ NaN box: 48 ms wasm with NaN box: 71 ms native w/ box doubles: 2677 ms wasm with box doubles: 1794 ms
NaN-boxing *screams* versus heap-boxing. In part it’s the indirection, but I think it’s mostly having to allocate a hojillion objects and then clean them up, as every temporary result in calculations gets turned into a live object and then garbage-collected after a while. (Note that the native build on my MacBook Pro is slower than the wasm build with heap boxing, probably due to a different allocator and 32-bit vs 64-bit pointers!)
But do we really have to do all that temporary allocation? Most math operators only return a specific type (-, *, and / always return doubles; + can return a string depending on its input). For now the JS code is hand-translated to C++ using operator overloads, so having my C++ operator overloads return doubles when possible, and accept them when possible, lets temporaries that can only be doubles skip the type-checking and boxing/unboxing overhead.
original js: 9 ms native w/ NaN box: 17 ms wasm with NaN box: 28 ms native w/ box doubles: 467 ms wasm with box doubles: 248 ms
Boxing doubles on the heap is still really slow, but a lot less slow thanks to sidestepping it on many intermediate values… And with the 64-bit NaN-boxing we’re only about 3x slower than native node when running in wasm in node, a big improvement that I’m really happy with!
This makes me feel that 64-bit NaN boxing is the way to go; it’s only slightly more complex than tagging a pointer-sized word and it makes floating point math a ton faster when it’s needed, which sometimes it just is.
Photo by Ardfern, CC BY-SA 3.0.
We at the Wikimedia Foundation are pleased that organizations across the world are currently rethinking their privacy policies. We have always strongly valued the privacy of our volunteers, readers, and donors, but this moment has given us an opportunity to look at our own privacy policy and see how it can be strengthened.
We see privacy as an important foundation for intellectual freedom, and we believe that the trust of our community is deeply linked to several practices:
We do not allow third-party tracking of visitors to our sites. We have short data retention periods (see our data retention guidelines). We proactively publish a transparency report, informing the public about requests for data about our contributors. We have a comprehensive privacy policy, developed with community input.
We are always looking for ways to improve our privacy and data security practices in partnership with our community of contributors and users.
As a result of our most recent review, we are updating our privacy policy, which now clarifies the definition of “personal information,” and has been reorganized to improve readability without changing the overall intentions previously set by the community. As promised in the policy, we are providing these minor changes with three (3) calendar days’ prior notice. These changes will go into effect on May 24, 2018. As always, we want your thoughts and feedback, and invite everyone to comment on the policy talk page over the next thirty (30) calendar days. We are also grateful to our volunteer community, who are actively working on translations of this policy.
We will continue looking for ways to improve and help make clearer to everyone our privacy practices and policy as technology and the world change rapidly around us.
Look out for more updates, both here and on the Wikimedia-l mailing list, to learn more about our approach to privacy and data security practices.
Wikimedia Foundation
I’d been waiting for the clock to hit 9:30pm, 23–4–2018 since March 27th. The heartbeat only got faster as the date came closer. But all the wait (and hard work) was worth it. I got selected in GSoC. Yay!
I’ll cherish that moment forever when I saw my name in the list of selected interns for GSoC-2018.
I’d been selected by Wikimedia to build a “worklist” tool for campaigns and in-person editing events. After the successful completion of Outreachy Round-15, this was icing on the cake! The dream of getting selected in GSoC had come true!
Being a previous intern with Wikimedia for Outreachy Round-15, I was very happy to have got another chance to work with the amazing community. My experience of working with the people at wikimedia was amazing and I’m sure this GSoC journey won’t be any different.
I’m looking forward to work with my mentors and build an amazing tool in my GSoC-2018 journey. Stay tuned for the chapters in this journey of mine!
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 22 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 23 May. It will be on all wikis from 24 May (calendar).Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 23 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.Future changes
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
08/05/2018-14/05/2018
The Munin access graph for Apache on ironbelly.openstreetmap.org shows a decline in the number of requests after the redirect on port 443 was enabled. 1 | Image: munin.openstreetmap.org
man_made=carpet_hanger was accepted.GDPR).GDPR will require changes to OpenStreetMap.org’s registration form for new mappers and requesting explicit agreement of all mappers to the new API’s and website’s terms of use. The technical implementation on how to accomplish this is being discussed on GitHub.planet.openstreetmap.org now redirects HTTP requests arriving on port 80 to port 443 (HTTPS).amenity=nursing_home and amenity=driving_school, as well as established tags like amenity=police and amenity=bus_station when tagged on surfaces.| Where | What | When | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Viersen | OSM Stammtisch Viersen | 2018-05-22 |  |
| Ulm | Mapping Stolpersteine Ulm/Neu-Ulm | 2018-05-23 | |
| Mumble Creek | OpenStreetMap Foundation public board meeting | 2018-05-24 | |
| Essen | Mappertreffen | 2018-05-24 | |
| Lübeck | Lübecker Mappertreffen | 2018-05-24 | |
| Urspring | Stammtisch Ulmer Alb | 2018-05-24 | |
| Ivrea | Incontro mensile Biellese/Canavese/Vercellese | 2018-05-26 |  |
| Bremen | Bremer Mappertreffen | 2018-05-28 | |
| Graz | Stammtisch Graz | 2018-05-28 |  |
| Dusseldorf | Stammtisch | 2018-05-30 | |
| Bordeaux | State of the Map France 2018 | 2018-06-01-2018-06-03 |  |
| Montreal | Les Mercredis cartographie | 2018-06-06 |  |
| Praha – Brno – Ostrava | Kvartální pivo | 2018-06-06 |  |
| Stuttgart | Stuttgarter Stammtisch | 2018-06-06 | |
| Bochum | Mappertreffen | 2018-06-07 | |
| Potsdam | 120. Brandenburg-Berlin Stammtisch | 2018-06-08 | |
| Tokyo | 東京！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第20回 江戸開城の地 芝 | 2018-06-09 |  |
| Rennes | Cartographie des bâtiments en 3D | 2018-06-10 | |
| Rennes | Réunion mensuelle | 2018-06-11 | |
| Milan | State of the Map 2018 (international conference) | 2018-07-28-2018-07-30 | |
| Dar es Salaam | FOSS4G & HOT Summit 2018 | 2018-08-29-2018-08-31 |  |
| Detroit | State of the Map US 2018 | 2018-10-05-2018-10-07 |  |
| Bengaluru | State of the Map Asia 2018 (effective date to confirm) | 2018-11-17-2018-11-18 |  |
Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropriate.
This weeklyOSM was produced by Nakaner, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Spanholz, YoViajo, derFred, jcoupey, jinalfoflia, k_zoar, sev_osm.
As a joke the other day I posted a code snippet on Mastodon:
for (var i = -Infinity; i < Infinity; i++) {
/* this should cover all possibilities */
}
Such an infinite loop is not possible, as adding 1 to -Infinity just gives you -Infinity again, and you never get anywhere.
But even if you started from the minimum representable individual number in a double-precision floating point you wouldn’t actually iterate anywhere because there’s not enough precision to represent the added 1.
Which got me thinking, how *would* you iterate over the entire set of floating point numbers between -Infinity to +Infinity, knowing that the intervals between the numbers are variable?
Well if you want to get everything, including non-integral values, you can iterate over the available range of exponents and fractional values, and either bit-shift them together manually (ick!) or multiply/add/pow them together in floating point land.
Something like this:
function iterate_all_floats(callback) {
// exponent is additively biased in the binary rep,
// so we go from negative to positive vals.
let min_exp = -(Math.pow(2, 10) - 2); // all binary 1s are reserved
let max_exp = Math.pow(2, 10) - 1;
let min_frac = 0;
let max_frac = Math.pow(2, 52) - 1;
let frac_divisor = Math.pow(2, 52);
let min_sub = 0;
let max_sub = Math.pow(2, 52) - 1;
let sub_divisor = Math.pow(2, 52);
callback(-Infinity);
// Start from the biggest negative numbers and go up towards -0
for (let exp = max_exp; exp >= min_exp; exp--) {
for (let frac = max_frac; frac >= min_frac; frac--) {
callback(-(1.0 + frac / frac_divisor) * Math.pow(2, exp));
}
}
// Negative subnormals and -0
for (let sub = max_sub; sub >= min_sub; sub--) {
callback(-(sub / sub_divisor) * Math.pow(2, -1022));
}
// +0 and positive subnormals
for (let sub = min_sub; sub <= max_sub; sub++) {
callback((sub / sub_divisor) * Math.pow(2, -1022));
}
// Start from just past +0 and move up to the biggest numbers
for (let exp = max_exp; exp <= max_exp; exp++) {
for (let frac = min_frac; frac <= max_frac; frac++) {
callback((1.0 + frac / frac_divisor) * Math.pow(2, exp));
}
}
callback(Infinity);
}
iterate_all_floats(function(f) {
// Convert to binary for display
let floats = new Float64Array(1);
let bytes = new Uint8Array(floats.buffer);
let str = '';
floats[0] = f;
for (let i = 3; i >= 0; i--) {
let b = bytes[i];
for (let bit = 7; bit >= 0; bit--) {
let val = (b >> bit) & 1;
str += val;
}
}
console.log(str, f);
});
Enjoy!
Another part of implementing a JavaScript-like engine to run inside a WebAssembly sandbox is memory management: JS requires garbage collection because objects may hold references to each other, creating cycles that simpler schemes like reference counting can’t break.
Most JS engines implement some form of mark-and-sweep garbage collection, usually enhanced with various fancy features we won’t get into here (moving/compaction, generational sweeps, etc).
The mark phase involves tracing your way through the object graph. Starting with globals and objects that are held in variables, you mark the object, setting a flag unique to that object. For any references it holds to other objects, you repeat — whenever you reach an object that’s already been marked you can skip over to the next one without re-tracing its references.
Any object that didn’t get marked is considered unreachable, and gets deleted in the sweep phase. This requires having some way to iterate through all allocated objects, which in my experimental engine I’ve temporarily implemented as a C++ std::unordered_set (a hash map with no payload) which new objects are always added to. This should eventually be replaced with a custom allocator that knows how to iterate through its own objects, or something. 
Traditional C/C++ programs store some of their local variables (those that aren’t optimized into registers) in a region of memory known as the stack: a pointer to the stack top is incremented and decremented as functions run to provide storage space, and the same stack is used to store return addresses for function calls (a cause of many security problems).
Some garbage collection systems like Boehm libgc take advantage of this, and scan the stack looking for object references to keep alive during the mark phase. Clever!
The WebAssembly environment has stricter memory safety: byte-addressable “linear memory” has a limited range and you can only access local variables in the stack frame through compile-time-addressed, pre-verified indexes. There’s no way to access a calling function’s stack frames to check what it had saved in its local variables…
When using the emscripten compiler, there is a second, more C/C++ like stack maintained inside the linear memory for variables and data structures that can’t fit in WebAssembly locals (for instance structure types larger than a single word, or anything that has its address taken and a pointer passed somewhere). Theoretically we could scan through that looking for our pointer values, but there may be false positives and that could be trouble — you wouldn’t want to accidentally try to traverse the object references inside a pointer that was actually a random integer or something!
For now I’ve implemented my own secondary stack which holds only encoded JS values, and modeled JS local variable bindings as C++ pointers to the value on the stack. When a garbage collection happens, the known globals and anything referenced on the stack are marked and traversed, so objects considered in use stay alive.
The way the stack is managed in the C++ engine code is inspired by V8’s Handle & HandleScope/EscapableHandleScope system. It requires a little bit of explicit discipline, and could probably be further improved in terms of the classes making usage correct, but seems to work correctly.
At the beginning of each function, a Scope or ScopeRetVal object is instantiated:
void someFunc() {
Scope scope;
// do stuff
}
This saves the stack position, and restores it to its original state when the function exits — so you don’t have to manually remember to pop. That’ll free up any of your locally allocated values for garbage collection.
Any given variable binding is either a ‘Binding’ (alias to Val*) to an existing, elsewhere-managed Val, or a ‘Local’ “smart pointer” object when compiles down to a pointer, but with a constructor that pushes a slot onto the stack.
Arguments can be passed as Local instances as well, constructed on the parent frame and eventually destructed with it, or if you know they’re GC-rooted already for sure you can pass a direct binding.
The big trick is return values, which I needed inspiration from V8 to figure out. If you try to return a Local, it’ll be cleaned up from your own scope before you return — and if you try to return a Val directly it won’t be GC-rooted and can disappear unexpectedly.
RetVal somefunc() {
ScopeRetVal scope;
// do stuff
return scope.escape(new String("keep it safe!"));
}
Functions return a RetVal which doesn’t push, instead of a Local which does. A variant of the Scope, here ScopeRetVal (V8 uses the awesomer name EscapableHandleScope!) first reserves space on the parent scope for that return value. When you return, you have the scope insert the return val into the saved slot, and then the destructor restores the stack to the saved spot _after_ the return value, safely still alive.
Without this trick, return values could end up de-allocated during code like:
var retval = a() + b();
translated to C++ as
Local retval;
*retval = *(a->call(Null(), {})) + *(b->call(Null(), {}));
where the return value from a() gets de-allocated during an allocation inside the call to b().
In my last post I explored NaN-boxing in JavaScript engines, showing how Firefox and Webkit manage to squish multiple types, including pointers and floating point, into a single 64-bit word.
In my WebAssembly-based JavaScript-like engine experiment I initially implemented NaN boxing similarly to how Firefox/SpiderMonkey do it. It works nicely, but has some downsides:
Inspired by the GC proposal, I’ve tried switching from the 64-bit NaN boxing to native pointer-size (32-bit for Wasm32) words with a minimal tagging system to store integers, which is equivalent to what is available there.
So what’s a pointer anyway? It’s a number that points (ha!) to a location in memory where you store stuff. This has a very important consequence:
Because stuff has to be laid out in memory in a way it can be efficiently accessed, structs and classes containing pointers are themselves always located on a pointer-size-aligned boundary. That is, if pointers are 32 bits wide (4 bytes), the structs have to be at a memory location that’s evenly divisible by 4, or it won’t be efficiently accessible.
This means that every pointer to every garbage-collected object is a number divisible by 4… which means its bottom 2 bits are always 0 in binary representation.
Thus, if your value has the bottom bit set, it’s definitely not a pointer to an object. Knowing that, we can divide the 32-bit number space into 32-bit object pointers on the one hand, and on the other hand either 1 tag bit with a 31-bit payload, or 2 tag bits with a 30-bit payload.
The Wasm GC proposal includes an “int31ref” type which can be stored in an “anyref” slot alongside other GC’d reference types, which is meant to use such a scheme.
In the Val wrapper class in my engine, I’ve adopted this system now and it’s got some trade-offs, but I kinda like it.
The tag check is now a single bit-mask against 1 rather than a giant constant like 0xffff000000000000, which feels cleaner. Integers can be promoted back to 32 bits by right-shifting one bit, while pointers can be consumed as-is once the test is confirmed (or if you know for sure they’re safe).
The biggest downside is that there’s simply not room in 31 bits for very large integers (abs value > 1 billion-ish) or for floating point numbers (64 bits, ay ay!) so they must be boxed on the heap.
“Boxing” is the fun task of taking a nice atomic value type, and wrapping it in a giant heap-allocated object. Horribly inefficient if you use lot of them!
But, it can be automatically done in the accessors, and seems to work so far.
I would prefer to avoid using boxing for floats, but there’s just no room in the int space for them unless I do something crazy like using two tag bits and then storing a 24-bit or 16-bit float when a value can be represented that way… yikes! And you’d still have to box values that are out of range or would lose precision.
For the other JS types — undefined, null, boolean, etc — I’m using boxed types as well, but using a single well-known instance value. So all “undefined” values refer to the same Box<Undefined>* and all “booleans” refer to one of two Box<bool>*s, one for true and one for false. This avoids runtime allocation for those special types, while allowing them to be treated as objects for dynamic dispatch or making the type checks cheap pointer equality comparisons for static dispatch.
While the overwhelming majority of students strive to avoid plagiarism on Wikipedia, they sometimes still miss the mark. Wikipedia’s definition of plagiarism differs in important ways from those set forth by academia, which is often the root of misunderstandings related to plagiarism. When students are caught plagiarizing, it’s often a case of close-paraphrasing. Students might not even realize that by changing a few words in a sentence, but keeping the original meaning, they’ve done something wrong. That’s why we’ve developed a plagiarism training module for students to learn about how to make meaningful contributions to Wikipedia in a way that is acceptable both to the academic and Wikipedia communities.
A student’s sandbox on Wikipedia can be a great spot to organize their notes for articles they plan to improve. However, because a sandbox is public facing just like any other page on Wikipedia, it’s subject to the same plagiarism standards as anywhere else on the site.
Make sure students understand that they need to synthesize academic research in their own words. Rather than taking rigorous notes while reading a text, students can try asking themselves summary questions after reading:
What are the biggest take-aways? What are the results?
Keeping a list of key words and phrases, rather than copying down full quotes, is also an effective way to organize main points to include in their article. Remind students that each sentence that they construct from these notes should reflect something they’ve learned in a source. And remind them to always cite a source where they can!
Plagiarism and copyright violation often overlap on Wikipedia, but they are also distinct concepts and are treated a bit differently.
Plagiarism involves passing someone else’s work off as your own. This can be their ideas, their specific wording, or the overall structure of their work. Copyright infringement is using copyright work without proper permission. Wikipedia’s primary concern is with copyright violations, since it creates legal liability for the site. But editors take plagiarism seriously as well. There are strict standards against both that other Wikipedia editors expect students to understand.
As intellectual property group Novagraaf says, you can republish Shakespeare’s works without fear of copyright infringement or plagiarism because they are old enough that they are out of copyright. If you replace Shakespeare’s name with your name, you still aren’t guilty of copyright infringement, but you are a plagiarist. On the other hand, if you reprint the Harry Potter books with JK Rowling listed as the author, you don’t have a plagiarism problem, but you would be infringing copyright.
From a student perspective, including the lyrics of a song or the text of a poem in a Wikipedia article may infringe copyright (and trigger a deletion) but won’t constitute plagiarism. Copying text from NASA’s website into a Wikipedia article won’t infringe copyright (since that text is not published under a restrictive license), but trying to pass that off as their own work for the purposes of a class assignment will be seen as plagiarism. (If you’re curious about adding open licensed text to Wikipedia, see this page on the process).
When text or images are published under a particular license, they cannot be used (or published under a different license) without the permission of the person or organization that owns the copyright. The people or organizations that are willing to give that permission are pretty few and far between because they want to protect their intellectual property, their ability to profit off of it, or both. You can read more about these different licenses here.
The intricacies of these licenses are most relevant to students when they are uploading images to Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia’s image sister-site. Students who do so should take the training module about uploading images to be prepared. When students want to publish content to Wikimedia Commons, the most important note is that they look at the license under which the content was originally published. Different licenses require different forms of attribution or restrict use in different ways. If licensing information is not available, it’s not appropriate to upload or use it, as that may violate copyright.
Wikipedia has varying means for detecting such violations. Often, these detections fall to other editors who swiftly delete inappropriate content when they see it. The Wikipedia Expert that supports your course is also an effective detector of potential copyright violations and plagiarism. When this happens, you, as the instructor, will receive a notice from the Dashboard so that the issue may be resolved. The Wiki Education team is also notified of all cases of plagiarism in the classes we support. We swiftly examine the nature of each case and reach out to the instructor to inform them of any relevant next steps.
If students do plagiarize or violate copyright, we’ll reach out to explain how the student may improve their work. There are often cases of false positives, so we’ll let you know if this is the case. We recognize that Wikipedia’s definition of plagiarism may differ from what you and your students are accustomed to, so we’ll all work together to ensure that both the instructor and students understand how to navigate cases of plagiarism on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia’s strict quality standards may present new challenges to students, but ultimately these challenges can create positive outcomes for students. One of the many student learning outcomes that a Wikipedia assignment fosters is that students must have a firm grip on course material to synthesize it concisely and in their own words. And if they are confused about anything they encounter on Wikipedia, they can always review our training materials or ask their course’s Wikipedia Expert if they have questions.
For more information about teaching with Wikipedia or to get started, visit teach.wikiedu.org or reach out to contact@wikiedu.org.
In researching code plugin sandboxing with WebAssembly, my thoughts naturally turned to how to let people actually program for that environment without forcing use of low-level C++ or such… so naturally, now I’m writing a small JavaScript-like runtime engine and compiler that targets WebAssembly.
My explorations so far are themselves written in C++, with tiny JS samples hand-translated into C++ code that calls the runtime’s classes. If I continue the project, I may switch to directly emitting Wasm source from the translator, with an eye towards future Wasm improvements like native garbage-collected reference types. (Right now I have to implement garbage collection myself, which will be the subject of another blog post!)
The first step of implementing a JavaScript engine is to implement a representation for values, which is tricky because JS values can be any of several distinct types:
Many other dynamic languages like PHP and Python similarly allow a value to hold multiple competing types like this. There are two main ways to implement a value type like this.
The first is to use a “tagged union” struct, something like this:
enum TypeTag {
TAG_UNDEFINED,
TAG_INT32,
TAG_DOUBLE,
...
TAG_OBJECT
};
struct Value {
TypeTag tag;
union {
int32_t int32_val;
double double_val;
Object* object_val;
};
};
Then add accessor/mutator functions which check the tag and perform appropriate accesses or conversions. This is simple, but has the downside of requiring 16 bytes per value (to maintain 8-byte alignment on the double-precision float or a 64-bit pointer or int64). That means most reads require two loads, writes require two stores, and you can’t pass a value in a register reliably. (WebAssembly’s local variables and function arguments are sort of like CPU registers in how they’re addressed, so would be the equivalent.)
To get around these, a common trick in high-performance dynamic language runtimes like LuaJIT and all major JavaScript engines is known as NaN boxing.
Floating point numbers are a complex beast! A 64-bit double-precision float can be broken down into several sets of bits:
If the exponent bits are all 1, then you have a special value:
The interesting part is that means you have an entire number space within the range of representable NaN values that will never be produced by legit math operations on legit numbers!
Firefox’s SpiderMonkey engine divides this up into 4 bits of tag (16 types) and 47 bits of address, which is enough for x86_64 (where bit 48 will always be 0 in user space and bits 49-64 aren’t needed … yet) but apparently causes problems on AArch64 and Sparc64. (They work around this by deliberately mapping memory in the lower 47 bits of address space with mmap.)
I’ve chosen to experiment with a similar technique, but only using 3 bits of tag (8 types) to leave a clean 48 bits of address. Though when building to WebAssembly, you only need 32 bits of address so it doesn’t make much difference.
When reading a value of as-yet-unknown type, you mask off the top X bits and compare against some constant values:
One downside is that every object dereference has to be masked from the stored value, and typical JavaScript code does a lot of objects. It’s a bit-op so it’s cheap, though… and in WebAssembly you can actually wrap the 64-bit value down to 32-bits without masking, since pointers are 32 bits.
WebKit’s JavaScriptCore uses a different technique on 64-bit native architecture.
When storing a double value, the bit pattern is treated as a uint64 and has a constant added to it to “rotate” the NaN patterns such that the top 1 bits in a range of the signaling NaNs turn into 0s.
Sounds clever!
I haven’t checked what Chrome’s V8 and Edge’s ChakraCore do, but I believe they are similar to one or the other of the above.
The downside of all this magic bit-fiddling is that you have to be careful at API boundaries between the JS world and the external world it’s connected to to canonicalize all incoming NaN values in doubles, or it would be possible to create arbitrary object pointer references from within the scripting language — a huge security hole.
So, you know, be careful with that.
The more relevant coursework is to a student’s life or career, the more they will agree that their education has been worth the cost.
Strada and Gallup released a study last month, From College to Life: Relevance and the Value of Higher Education, which seeks to understand students’ perspectives on the value of their higher education. It’s the first national study of its kind, drawing data from more than 250,000 interviews with people from more than 3,000 educational programs. Subjects, who completed at least some time in a higher education program and are now employed, were asked to respond to two main statements in Strada-Gallup’s survey:
Findings show that those who report that their coursework was relevant to their current professional lives gave a higher rating for the quality and cost-benefit of their education. These respondents also report a higher sense of overall well-being in their current lives. Although respondents varied in gender, race, economic status, age, and more, these results were consistent across the board.
Strada-Gallup suggest next steps from this data, mainly that higher education institutions should consider exploring educational practices that best support increasingly diverse populations of learners. At Wiki Education, we’ve developed an infrastructure of support and free resources for instructors to introduce a new and innovative assignment in their classroom: teach students to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of their course topics, which nicely fits into the study’s recommendations.
When students learn how to improve Wikipedia as a classroom assignment, they not only gain a deeper understanding of a resource they use all the time, but they must also delve deep into course concepts to be able to succinctly transmit them to a worldwide audience. Students are excited by the prospects that millions will have access to their work, motivating them to present high quality research and writing.
The real-world tangibility of a Wikipedia assignment is what draws so many instructors and students to it. As one instructor wrote in our Fall 2017 survey, students “interpret real world material with a purposeful approach, taking their knowledge outside the classroom, engaging in a public debate and defending their ideas in the real world, communicating complex ideas in an accessible language, and exercising meaningful and civil public debate.”
For students, a Wikipedia assignment offers skills for articulating academic topics to a lay audience. Through this articulation process, the student must understand complex course concepts in order to translate them for a public audience. A psychology instructor who also taught with Wikipedia in Fall 2017 noted that by understanding how information is created on Wikipedia, “students will understand what information their patients bring to their office, and will be able to answer questions about how well-founded those pre-conceptions are.”
For Dr. Kathleen Crowther’s course Women and Medicine, a Wikipedia assignment offered students a chance to begin to correct systemic issues within STEM fields. Her students first identified where Wikipedia lacked biography articles about notable women scientists and then wrote them themselves. As Dr. Crowther writes in a reflection about the course, “How was it, they demanded, that these women, who had achieved so much, often against serious odds, did not already have articles on Wikipedia? It was a powerful lesson on bias in history, both on Wikipedia and in historical scholarship generally. But rather than just learning about that bias, they got to do something concrete to remedy it.” (Read more about how students are closing the gender gap in STEM on Wikipedia here.)
Students thus become involved in correcting misinformation (or correcting a lack of information) by contributing well-researched content to Wikipedia. And along the way, they gain critical informational literacy skills. Students understand how Wikipedia’s information gets there and how to evaluate articles for accuracy. They become intimately familiar with Wikipedia’s high standards for what a “good quality” source is. And they rise to meet those quality standards, often with enthusiasm.
When students engage in the worldwide arena that is Wikipedia, they get a sense of involvement in larger structures of knowledge and politics that are relevant to their future lives and careers. As Rice University student Katie Webber wrote about the experience, “To have some concrete thing that I feel like I can really do right now has made me really feel more confident that I can find other ways to create change going forward. I call my senators, I vote, I donate to the ACLU, and now, I edit Wikipedia.”
Dr. Cathy Gabor, who has taught with Wikipedia in a number of her courses at the University of San Francisco, wrote about one student who helped create the Wikipedia article on the principle of Eloquentia Perfecta: “By the end of the project, Chelsey realized that both Wikipedia and the principles of Eloquentia Perfecta had become ‘integrated into her life,’ including her part-time job and her other classes. Chelsey explains the impact in this short video:”
“I really took an interest in something that I wasn’t interested in before,” Chelsey says, “which was probably the greatest outcome for me — to see that I can be interested in random things. When you take the time to put your whole self into it and really learn it, it’s cool how something can become really interesting and be integrated into your life. If I have time over the summer, I’ll try to find a new topic and research, and then incorporate my knowledge into a Wikipedia page for other people to go learn from.”
Instructors are drawn to teaching with Wikipedia because of the opportunity to foster this sort of love for learning and sharing knowledge that a student can bring forward with them into their future pursuits.
“Faculty across the disciplines could easily employ a Wikipedia editing project because Wikipedia supports entries in every field,” Dr. Gabor writes.
And as one longtime instructor said in our Fall 2017 survey, “A Wikipedia assignment fits well with John Dewey’s principles that school is not preparation for life, it is life.”
To learn how you can incorporate a Wikipedia assignment into a future course, visit teach.wikiedu.org or reach out to contact@wikiedu.org.
Photo by Abigail Ripstra/Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0.
We’re happy to announce we’ve awarded nine rapid grants to proposals dedicated to increasing awareness of Wikipedia in communities all over the world.
Rapid grants have a maximum budget of US$2,000 and are designed to offer the everyday Wiki-hero the chance to experiment with running small-scale projects to make a difference. These projects serve as a sort of incubator, where unique ideas can be tested out and eventually nurtured into larger initiatives.
Following the New Readers Inspire Campaign, each of these grants focuses on spreading awareness in locations where few internet users have heard of Wikipedia. This is crucial because data has shown that low awareness of Wikipedia is associated with low readership, and therefore fewer people supporting and advancing free knowledge initiatives. In order to make meaningful work towards our movement’s goal of knowledge equity, we first need to reach readers everywhere to ensure that we have worldwide participation in our projects.
We believe that the best way to spread awareness in diverse locations around the world is to empower Wikimedians who know their communities best. Rapid Grants offer the opportunity for the Foundation to engage with Wikimedians on the ground, and to learn more about strategies to raise awareness at the local level.
The locations represented in these projects mirror the direction of the Inspire New Readers Campaign, emphasizing regions such as South Asia and West Africa, which are crucial areas to raise awareness and bolster readership. Here are the projects we’re funding:
Wikipedia Instagram Campaign: In Nigeria, Instagram contests are a popular marketing tool used to promote everything from movies and musicians to tech companies and financial institutions. This campaign uses the approach to spread awareness for Wikipedia using hashtags like #ILoveWikipedia and #MyWikipedia to encourage users to share what they love most about Wikipedia to spread the word.
Find it on Wikipedia!!!: This project uses a popular local radio station to broadcast a contest for listeners to look up information on Wikipedia to win prizes, including gadgets like smartphones which can then be used to access Wikipedia.
Wikipedia Street Take-Over: Wikipedia Street Take-Over interviews everyday Nigerians on the streets of Abuja, spreading awareness for Wikipedia and includes questions and answers in brief clips shared on social media.
Wiki Awareness Campaign: This project aims to bring experienced Wikimedians into the classrooms of secondary schools for girls in India, holding workshops and lectures on how young women can use Wikipedia as a tool in their academic journeys.
Promotion of Punjabi Wikipedia on Social Media: Many Punjabi speakers are aware of English Wikipedia, but don’t realize the wealth of articles that already exist in their native language. Videos showcasing some of Punjabi Wikipedia’s best resources will be shared on social media, targeting Punjabi speakers in India as well as abroad.
Awareness Video for Bengali Wikisource: This project targets avid bookworms in Bengali-speaking regions of India, where few are aware of Wikisource’s huge collection of copyright-free Bengali literature. Local Wikisource experts will collaborate on a video to promote this great resource and inspire new users on social media channels.
Promotion of Maithili Wikipedia: Maithili is a language primarily spoken in Nepal, with a significant presence in Northern India. One Wikimedian proposes to promote Maithili Wikipedia through the use of physical notices posted in popular public spaces, particularly near academic centers. Interested passers-by will be invited to meetups hosted by local Wikimedians.
One Computer, one Wikipedia: Kiwix is a popular app used to access Wikipedia offline, which can be a powerful tool for readers in countries with little access to the internet. This project aims to install Kiwix software on devices used by Computer Science students in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Using Kiwix, students will have offline access to Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and other sister projects, as well as an introduction from organizers about the Wikimedia movement.
While these inspiring projects have been approved for funding, many still rely on support from volunteers. If you’ve been inspired, we encourage you to get involved with these and many more projects on IdeaLab. For funded grants that still need assistance, you can find a full list here, under “Funded Proposals 2017-2018.” From there, you can check out each project’s page which gives an overview of resources or support still needed, and how to get in contact with the creator.
IdeaLab also offers a list of projects that need volunteers for particular roles, like developers or organizers. You can offer your skills and expertise with these projects, or add your name and skillset for future idea creators to get in touch with you.
You can learn more about this Inspire Campaign, and view previous campaigns on the Inspire page on Meta. You’ll also find two workshops we hosted during the campaign, which discuss the importance of awareness for Wikipedia in different regions of the world, and offer advice on how to plan your own pilot to tackle this issue. We’re looking forward to seeing more great ideas turn into projects which make a difference in Wikimedia communities around the world, and we encourage you to tune in with us on another round of inspiration.
Noa Morales, Communications intern, Community Engagement
This reflection on teaching with Wikipedia in the classroom as a feminist praxis is co-written by Dr. Ariella Rotramel and Wiki Education’s Cassidy Villeneuve. Dr. Rotramel is the Vandana Shiva Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Connecticut College. She has reflected on her experience in our Classroom Program before, found here.
Feminist pedagogy continues to ask that we take up the call to challenge students “to be an active participant, not a passive consumer” in their education (hooks 1994, 14). As Adrienne Rich argued in her foundational essay “Claiming an Education,” it is critical that students engage in a “struggle for real education” (Rich 1980, 235). Working with Wikipedia in the classroom offers an opportunity for students to make their education their own.
When students create or add to Wikipedia articles, they make and share content that is popular and freely accessible. Instead of accepting the common idea that Wikipedia is to be avoided in educational contexts, students learn to evaluate resources for accuracy and missing content. This shift requires that they think about their own usage of online content and learn about the ways Wikipedia works and does not work as a platform for feminist knowledge sharing.
As students delve into topics of their choice for the project, they learn how to convince other Wikipedia editors that their topics are noteworthy. They also encounter Wikipedians who are excited about their work and provide support. Students of differing gender identities, races, and sexualities thus hold positions of power in mechanisms of knowledge dissemination that have historically excluded them. They learn how to work through problems rather than shutting down. As students become knowledge creators, they gain a sense of the dynamics that feminist scholars, writers, and artists face as they choose to put their work into the world; they learn to accept imperfection or criticism along with the recognition that sharing their work is worth the risk. The opportunity to be subject-matter experts, putting forth knowledge on a forum to which millions have access, is a strong motivator. Students recognize the tangible impact of their work and feel a responsibility to ensure its quality for a worldwide audience.
In Rotramel’s feminist theory classes, working with Wikipedia is a means of doing feminist praxis (the dynamic relationship between theory and practice). When students evaluate Wikipedia for where it can be improved, they must first understand how gaps in knowledge occur. How is knowledge traditionally produced? What perspectives are privileged in the process? Whose histories are told, and by whom? Those whose histories have been historically marginalized in academia face the same underrepresentation on the world’s most popular online encyclopedia. Rather than just talking about feminist theories about knowledge, students think through the assumptions of Wikipedia – particularly the site’s principles that editors must write with a neutral point of view and authority. Moreover, Wikipedia’s coverage of topics relies heavily on the interests of its volunteer base, 80% of whom identify as men and are subject of a disproportionate amount of its content (Mako Hill, 2013; Reagle, 2011). Many articles about notable women, people of color, and queer folks are under-developed or simply do not exist.
With the knowledge of these challenges, students create new articles or add to existing material to address content gaps they have identified. For example, Rotramel’s course evaluated the article for the anthology This Bridge Called My Back. The article did not detail the anthology’s contributors, a glaring erasure of many contributors of color. By editing the article in class, we addressed this problem. Students created entries that highlight the work of women of color and women with disabilities, as well as added content that addresses racial and class privilege in existing entries. When students learn to edit Wikipedia in the classroom, they not only understand how to evaluate the site for gaps in knowledge, they take an active role in righting those wrongs. If you are interested in teaching with Wikipedia, visit teach.wikiedu.org for access to free resources to help you do it.
Bibliography
To read more about Dr. Rotramel’s Fall 2017 course in which she taught with Wikipedia, see our feature here.
I have been working on the project with more or less focus on it since 2015. Maybe the easiest way to follow the project is by taking a look at a few epic tasks:
T182421: Q3 Selenium framework improvements will come to an end in a few days, so last week a few of us had a meeting to discuss the project.
Conclusions:
What could have gone better:
Things to do:
Meeting notes are available at 20180320 Selenium Retrospective.
Image by Paul Friel - Meerkat II, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24567063
Dr. Bradley Zopf is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Carthage College. He recently participated as a Wikipedia Fellows in our pilot program as a member of the American Sociological Association. In this reflective piece, he discusses three things he’s taken away from the experience.
As an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Wikipedia has usually been near the top of my least favorite websites students cite. I have held a genuine hesitancy, if not outright rejection, of Wikipedia as a reliable source of information. My skepticism extended to my own use of this online database, often reluctantly and begrudgingly using Wikipedia simply because it was easy and often the first website that comes up in a Google search. When I first became aware that the American Sociological Association was collaborating with Wiki Education for a pilot program to engage academics in editing Wikipedia, I instinctively dismissed the opportunity. However, my curiosity soon got the better of me as I explored the purpose and scope of the Wikipedia Fellows Program. Now, having participated in this program, I am happy to say that my views on the use and value of Wikipedia have changed dramatically.
By learning the rules and regulations concerning Wikipedia contributions and engaging with fellow Wikipedians, I learned a lot more about how Wikipedia articles are created, edited, and maintained. I have come to appreciate the breadth, and even the depth, of what Wikipedia can provide to both students and scholars alike. I would like to explain just a few lessons I have learned after participating in the Wikipedia Fellows Pilot project as a member of the American Sociological Association.
The first lesson I learned from this experience is that Wikipedia articles are very much a collaborative effort and that fellow Wikipedians truly care about making articles as well researched and well-written as possible. I participated in the Wikipedia Fellows program primarily because I wanted to contribute to more complete and accurate knowledge about the Arab and Muslim American populations in the United States. During the early phases, I often confirmed my initial apprehension about Wikipedia, which was that not all Wikipedia articles are good. I often found articles on Arab and Middle Eastern Americans to be incomplete. However, I generally did not find these articles to be inaccurate or to misrepresent Arab, Middle Eastern, and/or Muslim Americans. Perhaps this should not have been a surprise given the stringent guidelines around vandalism on Wikipedia, but my naiveté notwithstanding; I set out to contribute to various pages on the Arab and Muslim American experience. I initially edited several pages on Arab American immigration and Definitions of Whiteness. While editing these articles I realized just how much information is well cited in the Wikipedia article and the ease to which I could investigate source material linked throughout the page. Additionally, I found that being a part of a community of Wikipedians contributed to the overall improvement of the articles as several Wikipedians copyedited my own contributions making the overall article much clearer. Even with relatively little direct communication with others, I found myself a member of a community of writers, scholars, and contributors whose goals aligned with my own, namely, to provide accurate and reliable information about Arab and Muslim Americans.
The second lesson I learned by participating in the Wikipedia Fellows Program was that Wikipedia provides a fertile ground for student involvement. I am looking forward to assigning semester-long group projects requiring students to engage with both material on Wikipedia and the broader Wikipedia community of editors. Rather than having students avoid Wikipedia, I want students to contribute as editors. If anything, involving students with Wikipedia can encourage them to “Be Bold” in their own writing and thinking. I envision students gaining skills in editing others’ work, evaluating sources, and developing new writing styles as potential learning outcomes for Wikipedia-based projects. Such skills are highly transferrable and students can point to Wikipedia contributions as real-world experience.
Finally, and perhaps most rewardingly, I learned that Wikipedia can be a good place for scholars to engage with their own research and that of others. While Wikipedia articles are not about original research or scholarship, I was surprised by the skills and knowledge I gained by participating in this Wikipedia Fellows program. Not only did I find myself endlessly following linked articles across the vast number of articles on Wikipedia, but I also dug deeper into the references and resources related to my own research. In order to feel confident in contributing to Wikipedia, I forced myself to re-engage with books and articles I haven’t read in a while and even found others that I was not aware had been published. Taking my work on Wikipedia seriously meant that I had to find sources—especially page numbers—for often very specific details that I wanted to add to an article. Going through the process of re-reading and combing through some of those references I know quite well, as well as finding more recent scholarship on the subjects, gave fresh light on my own research—something I certainly did not expect.
My experience as a Wikipedia Fellow has taught me to embrace Wikipedia for a variety of reasons. I want to encourage other scholar-teachers to consider taking part in Wikipedia projects around their areas of expertise whenever possible. The skills I gained by going through this program have changed my views of Wikipedia for the better. I no longer scoff when students use Wikipedia, nor do I include it on my do-not-cite list. Rather, I plan to encourage students to explore Wikipedia as starting place for exploration of their chosen research topics; to continue editing and contributing to Wikipedia as a matter of scholarly activity; and to occasionally use Wikipedia as a place to practice my writing and editing skills.
To see the Wikipedia articles this Fellows cohort improved, click here. To learn more about how you can get involved as a Wikipedia Fellow, click here.
Darius Kazemi is an internet artist who makes bots—bots that mix headlines together and bots that make absurd flow charts and bots that buy him random items from Amazon each month. He also relies heavily on Wikipedia for both inspiration and material. His Wikipedia-related bots include the Bracket Meme Bot, which makes “arbitrary brackets, sourced from Wikipedia” and the Empire Plots bot, which comes up with “weird but plausible soap opera-type plots for the TV show Empire.”
I wanted to learn more about how Kazemi uses Wikipedia in his work. Our conversation is below.
———
What was your first project that used Wikipedia?
Oh gosh. Good question. I think it was probably Content, Forever—this was an extension of a failed National Novel Generation Month prototype. The idea is that it generates a semi-coherent “thinkpiece” type article simply by falling down a Wikipedia hole! I wrote a little post on how it works that might be of interest to your readers. It uses the parse action to get JSON formatted content, then parses the HTML clientside using JavaScript and jQuery.
———
In the write-up for the Empire Plots bot, you explained how you employed DBPedia. While DBPedia is structured content extracted from infoboxes on Wikipedia, there’s also a structured info database called Wikidata (run by our sister organization Wikimedia Deutschland). In some cases the infoboxes on Wikipedia are actually generated from the associated structured content on Wikidata and it too can be queried with SPARQL, the querying language you used with DBPedia, to return some pretty interesting datasets. Do you think there’s potential for Wikidata as a source of content in addition to DBPedia for bot makers?
Wikidata can absolutely be used in addition to DBPedia! Wikidata is always going to be more up-to-date than DBPedia, but main issue is whether Wikidata has the data you want. For example, for that bot I used the “dbt:subject” relation to determine if an entry belongs to the set of “African_American_actresses”, which doesn’t exist on Wikidata. I suppose that could be worked around with a JOIN operation of some kind, though!
Mikhail’s note: The following query,which can be used on Wikidata Query Service, finds African American actresses on Wikidata.
SELECT ?person ?personLabel WHERE {
?person wdt:P31 wd:Q5. # instance of: human
?person wdt:P21 wd:Q6581072. # gender/sex: female
?person (wdt:P106/wdt:P279*) wd:Q33999. # occupation: all subclasses of actor (incl. film, voice, and television)
?person wdt:P172 wd:Q49085. # ethnic group: African Americans
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language “[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en”. }
}
———
What is your general process when building a bot after you have the initial idea?
I try to start making the bot as soon as I have the idea, and the first thing I do is a manual, non-computational prototype. So if I have an idea for an algorithm, I will write down the algorithm and then attempt to follow it manually a few times to see if the results are good. So for @BracketMemeBot, I poked around Wikipedia’s Categories to get a sense of what my algorithm might look like, then manually created a few brackets to see the result. This is the research portion of the process, and it’s helpful because I can determine very quickly without writing any code whether or not a bot will be any good. I abandon a lot of projects at this point in the process because the output isn’t what I want, but also no code was written so it’s no big deal.
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Has there been a time when you wanted to make something that relied on Wikipedia but it wasn’t possible using the MediaWiki API nor DBPedia? What were the limitations you ran into and what would be some features you wish the MW API endpoint had?
It’s tough to say because I almost always set out to do a certain thing, immediately discover it’s not possible, and then redesign the bot within the parameters of what is possible. Just like in my Empire Plots Bot, I had to figure out a way around the fact that there is no “dead African American actors” category on Wikipedia. But I have always been able to find a workaround on MediaWiki or DBPedia — although often, as is the case with Content, Forever, I need to add HTML parsing/scraping to the mix.
Probably the most specific road block I ran into was with Bracket Meme Bot. It would certainly be nice to be able to get a random Category, or to be able to at least get a count of the total number of Categories available and then be able to index to an arbitrary number in that range.
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The size of English Wikipedia makes it a great source of content for bot makers but Wikipedia is also available in almost 300 other languages (with some articles being available in multiple languages), DBPedia is available in 125 languages, and Wikidata is language-agnostic (users can add labels & descriptions in their language). In the global bot-making community, have you seen your colleagues build bots in other languages besides English that utilized the multilingual aspect of those projects?
Yes, there have been translations of some of my bots. @TwoHeadlines has a Spanish version called @DosTitulos! Now that you mention it, I could probably easily translate Content, Forever by changing the language namespace on the API…
Mikhail Popov, Data Analyst, Reading Product
Wikimedia Foundation
by Gerard Meijssen (noreply@blogger.com) at May 14, 2018 05:36 AM
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 15 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 16 May. It will be on all wikis from 17 May (calendar).Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 16 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.Future changes
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
01/05/2018-07/05/2018
The City of Newcastle, UK – OSM data as art 1 | © ItoWorld © map data OpenStreetMap contributors
spacing=* receives both positive and negative comments on the tagging mailing list.Google Street View for validation. An issue has been raised with the DWG as this seems contrary to existing policies.Google Summer of Code 2018.
vector tiles might be implemented.| Where | What | When | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rennes | Réunion mensuelle | 2018-05-14 | |
| Budapest | OSM meetup – Urban Mobility(EN) | 2018-05-14 |  |
| Nantes | Réunion mensuelle | 2018-05-15 | |
| Lüneburg | Lüneburger Mappertreffen | 2018-05-15 | |
| Cologne Bonn Airport | Bonner Stammtisch | 2018-05-15 | |
| Lyon | Rencontre mensuelle pour tous | 2018-05-15 | |
| Disneyland Paris Marne/Chessy Railway Station | FOSS4G-fr 2018 | 2018-05-15-2018-05-17 | |
| Karlsruhe | Stammtisch | 2018-05-16 | |
| São Paulo | Painel OpenStreetMap no MundoGEO Connect | 2018-05-16 |  |
| Mumble Creek | OpenStreetMap Foundation public board meeting | 2018-05-17 | |
| Vienna | 60. Wiener Stammtisch | 2018-05-17 | |
| Davao City | Free & Open Mapping Workshop at Ateneo de Davao University | 2018-05-18 |  |
| El Salvador | Palestra na Campus Party Bahia | 2018-05-18 | |
| Greater Manchester | OSM UK Annual General Meeting 2018 | 2018-05-19 |  |
| Greater Manchester | OSM UK and OpenData Manchester joint meetup/workshops/mapping | 2018-05-19 | |
| Essen | Mappertreffen | 2018-05-24 | |
| Lübeck | Lübecker Mappertreffen | 2018-05-24 | |
| Urspring | Stammtisch Ulmer Alb | 2018-05-24 | |
| Bremen | Bremer Mappertreffen | 2018-05-28 | |
| Graz | Stammtisch Graz | 2018-05-28 | |
| Dusseldorf | Stammtisch | 2018-05-30 | |
| Bordeaux | State of the Map France 2018 | 2018-06-01-2018-06-03 | |
| Milan | State of the Map 2018 (international conference) | 2018-07-28-2018-07-30 | |
| Dar es Salaam | FOSS4G & HOT Summit 2018 | 2018-08-29-2018-08-31 | |
| Detroit | State of the Map US 2018 | 2018-10-05-2018-10-07 | |
| Bengaluru | State of the Map Asia 2018 (effective date to confirm) | 2018-11-17-2018-11-18 | |
Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropriate.
This weeklyOSM was produced by Anne Ghisla, Nakaner, PierZen, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Spanholz, YoViajo, derFred, doktorpixel14, jinalfoflia, keithonearth.
by Gerard Meijssen (noreply@blogger.com) at May 12, 2018 05:12 AM
Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, User:Rosiestep on Wikipedia, is a prolific editor who improves the encyclopedia in a number of ways. One of these ways is by uploading photos of pre-20th century women writers to Wikimedia Commons, which she then uses to illustrate biography articles that she’s written about them. Thanks to access to academic databases provided by Northeastern University, Rosie is putting faces to women’s history on the fifth most-accessed site in the world. Watch our short video for more:
For more about Rosie’s impact, read our feature we published in March here. Also, follow along with her progress on the Dashboard.
Our very first Wikipedia Fellows cohort has finished! For the first three months of 2018, we piloted a new program in which nine academic experts completed rigorous training and contributed to more than sixty articles on Wikipedia. We are proud of their work and are excited to have new Wikipedians out in the world! From Race to Masculinity to Margaret Atwood, you can see their contributions here.
Many of Wikipedia’s readers look to information on the site to make political, behavioral, and even medical decisions in their life. The goal of the Wikipedia Fellows program is to have subject-matter experts improve the public’s access to reliable knowledge, especially in these highly-trafficked topic areas. Engaging professors and graduate students with expertise in these areas, who would have access to high-quality resources, seemed like a compelling approach to bridging academia and Wikipedia. We partnered with three academic associations – the National Women’s Studies Organization (NWSA), the American Sociological Association (ASA), and the Midwestern Political Science Association (MPSA) to help us identify participants for this program. The Fellows we selected from these associations excelled in our program.
With one Good Article (GA) nomination and one Did You Know (DYK) nomination, these Fellows went from being new to Wikipedia to confidently contributing new sections to articles, improving existing articles for clarity, and creating new articles entirely from scratch. They surpassed our projections of words added, page views, and number of articles edited. The Fellows reported in their exit survey that they found this program useful for anyone interested in explaining Wikipedia to students and colleagues, ensuring the public has access to accurate information, and addressing systematic bias.
The Fellows cohort and Wiki Education staff met once a week over Zoom, a video conferencing software, and explored different aspects of contributing to Wikipedia – policies, tools, verifiability, content gaps, sources, etc. To complement meetings, we used Slack, an instant message platform, to answer questions in real-time, troubleshoot issues, and allow for another channel of communication. To track Fellows’ efforts, we used the Dashboard, which is a platform we use in our Classroom Program and with Visiting Scholars. We track individual contributions, word count, articles, as well as several other data points through the Dashboard. Although multiple platforms bring their own sets of complications to any program, the Fellows appreciated how quickly they were able to build community virtually.
Since the Fellows were new to Wikipedia, we needed to introduce, unpack, and demonstrate the content contribution process clearly and quickly. We addressed the learning curve at the beginning of the pilot by assigning training modules through the Dashboard. We spent the early sessions discussing the trainings and how Wikipedia pages work as well as the various tools users can use to contribute to articles.
The pilot cohort of Wikipedia Fellows required a three month commitment to spend three hours per week working on Wikipedia. As they selected articles, we shifted away from policy discussions to teaching steps to start their first drafts. These later sessions yielded in-depth conversations about Talk Pages, controversial topics, and collaborating with the Wikipedia community.
We believe this program meets a need that our other programs do not: contributing subject-matter expertise, from the experts themselves and at a large scale. In addition to being a bridge between Wikipedia and academia, the pilot could also serve as a connector between our Visiting Scholars and Classroom Program. This summer, we will train several new experts beginning in June, July, August, and September. We are excited to experiment with the pilot’s successes and challenges by trying out new curricula, varied program durations, thematic cohorts, and accepting applicants from additional partners. We hope that by expanding the program we will be able to have a sustained and substantial impact on the content that Wikipedia’s readers use every day to make informed decisions.
Regarding the program’s impact, one participant said “I feel that the program helps me to be a better citizen.” This could have never happened without support from our association partners. We want to thank NWSA, MPSA, and ASA for supporting us as they encouraged their members to participate in this program. Another participant said “now, more than ever, partnerships like this are vital.” These sentiments demonstrate there is great deal of interest in improving and contributing to Wikipedia among academics. We also want to thank all of the Fellows for their amazing work and for participating. They are publishing blog posts about their experience, so please check back frequently to hear about what they learned. Each Fellow had a unique experience in this program, but there was one thing they all unanimously believed: all nine fellows strongly agreed that they want to continue to edit Wikipedia.
For more information about Wikipedia Fellows and how to get involved, visit our informational page. For more information about this cohort, click here. Also check out Fellows’ blog posts by ASA member Dr. Sine Anahita, ASA member Dr. Michael Ramirez, and MPSA member Dr. Royal G. Cravens, III.
Award ceremony for the WikiChallenge Ecoles d’Afrique in Mali, March 2018. Photo by Anthere/Florence Devouard, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Senior Program Manager Anne Gomez leads the New Readers initiative, where she works on ways to better understand barriers that prevent people around the world from accessing information online. One of her areas of interest is offline access, as she works with the New Readers team to improve the way people who have limited or infrequent access to the Internet can access free and open knowledge.
Over the coming months, Anne will be interviewing people who work to remove access barriers for people across the world. In this installment, she interviews Florence Devouard, who has been a Wikimedian since the early days. Her work in the Wikimedia movement has ranged from content creation, to being a member of the Wikimedia Foundation board, to her more recent focus on supporting the growth of African language projects. In this interview, Anne and Florence discuss WikiFundi, an offline editing tool for remote schools.
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First, can you tell us about your work in Africa with Wikimedia? What got you started? What have been your proudest accomplishments?
I guess my first interest related to African participation can be traced back to the first Wikimania conference held in Frankfurt in 2005! I gave an overview of the digital divide in African countries and provided an estimate of Wikimedia projects’ visibility in Africa, as well as African editor participation and impact. Back then, I already wanted to increase awareness, foster higher contribution rate and build African-language projects.
In the past 5 years, I have really been able to really make a difference through the setting up several projects with different focuses: increasing visual content with the Wiki Loves Africa photo content, providing offline solutions with WikiFundi, increasing participation in GLAM-related projects and conducting outreach with Wiki Loves Women, teaching digital skills acquisition with WikiSchools Africa, and doing some applied research with African primary schools curriculum and motivational factors. All those projects belong to the larger WikiAfrica movement. My pride lies in the current growth of the African Wikimedia community, as I know I played a part in it.
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What is WikiFundi? How does it work?
WikiFundi is a software application that provides the same experience as editing Wikipedia, whilst not connected to the Internet. It can be run using a local server, such as a Raspberry PI, and is made available via a local wifi hotspot. WikiFundi develops the ability for a group of people within the same physical space to collaborate with each other on writing articles or learning how to work with Wikipedia’s editing interface when internet access and electricity outages fail or are not available at all.
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How did you decide to take on this software/hardware project in addition to your other efforts? How were you connected with Orange?
Back in 2013, Isla Haddow-Flood and I ran the Kumusha Takes Wiki project, in Ivory Coast with Samuel and in Uganda with Erina. We realized one of the challenges in running this outreach project was the difficulty of planning and running an edit-a-thon or a training session in a context when Internet is unreliable, sometimes plain missing, or too expensive. Some time later, I discussed the issue with Luc Héripret from the Fondation Orange, and it turned out that they were working on the Digital Schools program (which currently reach 130,000 children in schools and 250,000 people in rural villages). The Fondation Orange was providing tablets, servers, and educational resources (which naturally included Kiwix content) to schools with no internet access at all. We clearly shared an interest here and I decided to come up with a proposal to them.
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What is your vision for WikiFundi?
In my vision, anyone should be able to participate in building the sum of human knowledge, regardless of language, physical location, nationality, age, and connectivity status.
Whilst we are very inclusive in some aspects (such as language diversity), we are not so inclusive when it comes to physical location and connectivity status, with some people been largely excluded from participating because they are in non or poorly connected locations. Could we do more to facilitate participation from people living in prisons? In refugee camps? In rural isolated areas? In slums? Most of our offline solutions currently aim at giving access to the resources, not allowing people to participate in creating them.
I only took a little piece of the big puzzle: Wikipedia as a project, English and French as languages, Africa as a physical location. But, I’d love to see a larger solution or set of solutions emerge to extend the range of those human beings that can actually actively participate to build the sum of human knowledge.
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How do you see digital literacy and education as part of your vision? Are they relevant factors?
I believe they are relevant factors; which is the reason the dissemination of the WikiFundi tool is in schools was a priority. An important point to mention is that my primary focus with the WikiFundi tool is not content production.
The focus is 1) getting prospective contributors acquainted with the Wikiplatform as well as to allow training in regions or places or situations with access issues as well as 2) building soft skills (ICT literacy, collaboration, critical thinking…). WikiSkills, which I co-wrote, promotes innovative pedagogical approaches that foster creativity, competitiveness, employability and entrepreneurial spirit, equity, social cohesion and active citizenship.
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What happened in the first year? What did you learn? What lessons can you share with other people who might want to do similar projects?
We released the first version of WikiFundi in January 2017. It was made available in different contexts during the year.
The software was distributed with a raspberry PI along with various resources, as a kit, to a dozen groups of Wikimedians across Africa, to support them in their outreach work. Anyone can download the software from that page.
The software was also distributed in many African schools, in particular as part of the Digital Schools Program of the Foundation Orange; it was simply added to the educational resources and software that the Foundation already provides to their schools network. To foster use of WikiFundi, we organised a writing contest involving 30 primary schools in Mali, Madagascar, Tunisia and Guinea, in collaboration with Foundation Orange and local Wikimedians. Given the age of the kids, the content produced was hosted on Vikidia. I (manually) collected absolutely delightful texts, as well as photos, drawings and videos from the kids of those schools. It may appear anecdotal… but two years in the past, the kids of those schools had never held a tablet, never seen a computer, knew nothing about Wikipedia. And now they produce articles. That’s SO cool.
Main lesson: for offline contexts—a reliable partner with local presence is a must-have.
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What’s next for WikiFundi? What are you most excited about?
We are working on the next version with the technical support of Kiwix, hopefully to be released next summer. If you have software developing skills and want to help, contact us!
This release will be mostly bug fixing and improvements to make it more user-friendly. During WikiIndaba, Zack McCune (from the Wikimedia Foundation) also helped me in shooting introductory videos with the help of Afek and Sami from Tunisia, Georges from Cameroon and Erina from Uganda.
The most exciting element is that there are discussions ongoing to create a synchronization system. At the moment, WikiFundi is completely offline, which is not an issue as long as it is only used for training and local writing activities, but becomes a problem when the authors want their articles published online. Finalized articles have to be retrieved manually by local facilitators to be imported on Wikipedia or Vikidia, which is obviously not very practical. This synchronicity issue that I currently face in the school of the island of Antsoheribory (Madagascar) is also somewhat also faced in the ISS in low Earth orbit.
Image by Joo, CC BY-SA 4.0.
…which brings up a thought: could we manage to synchronize “offline” wiki platforms with an intermediary server, so that the content produced by kids in primary schools of Antsoheribory and hosted on the WikiFundi could be collected automatically and becomes accessible to the inhabitants of the ISS? Antsoheribory seen from ISS?
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How else can the Wikimedia Foundation help?
There is a big need for offline solutions. The Wikimedia Foundation is already helping financially in supporting this second version of WikiFundi. It is also very helpful with communication, spreading the word and facilitating networking between the different actors of offline solutions. It can further help in facilitating the “Antsoheribory seen from ISS” project (aka Async Wikis) come true.
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Who do you rely on to learn more about offline educational resources? What resources (conferences, people, spaces) exist for people who want to know more?
There is a low-traffic mailing list dedicated to offline solutions in a Wikimedia context. Anyone interested can join and speak up. You may also contact us at the Wiki In Africa association, on Twitter @wikiafrica, or on Facebook.
Interview by Anne Gomez, Senior Program Manager, Program Management
Wikimedia Foundation
Dr. Sine Anahita is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She participated in our recent Wikipedia Fellows pilot program as a member of the American Sociological Association. In this post, she reflects on what she has taken away from the experience.
You know how some persons are cat people, and some persons are dog people? Well, I am a people person and I work as a sociologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The state of Alaska has always had a cyclical boom and bust economy. The state’s fortune rises when the price of Alaska oil rises, and tanks when prices decline. Unfortunately, when the state’s budget suffers, so does the University’s budget. Over the past three years, the University’s budget woes pushed the other sociologists in my department out. Now I am the last PhD sociologist in Interior Alaska, and I am surrounded by empty faculty offices. The nearest sociologist is 353 miles away, in Anchorage. By Fall 2017, a deep sense of intellectual loneliness had settled on me—a people person—and I hungered for scholarly interaction.
But then I received two emails: one from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) and the other from the American Sociological Association (ASA). The emails announced that Wiki Education was planning a pilot program for Wikipedia Fellows to learn how to become a Wikipedia editor, and they invited applications from sociologists and women’s studies scholars. Although in the past I scorned Wikipedia, even to the point of prohibiting my students from using it as a source, the proposed cohort model appealed to me. The idea of engaging on a weekly basis with other sociologists and women’s studies scholars was exciting, so I eagerly applied.
The program not only exceeded my expectations, it exceeded even my wildest hopes. The weekly web conferences and online discussions with the other Wikipedia Fellows and the fabulous Wiki Education staff helped to ease the intellectual loneliness. But what I did not expect was the interaction with anonymous strangers on the Wikipedia articles themselves. Sometimes my edits went unnoticed, or at least unremarked. But I also made some edits that generated passionate discussion on the article talk pages. People were reading my work and were arguing with me! Other people persons! I discovered that much of my enjoyment of working on Wikipedia emerged from those creative conflicts with other editors.
I also rediscovered my passion for my discipline of sociology, the passion that I discovered as an undergraduate taking my first sociology class. Wikipedia seeks secondary sources, and there I was surrounded by sociology texts. Re-reading those to find a citation that would be useful in my argument with another editor rekindled that old passion. I remembered what drew me to the discipline in the first place. I had also inherited an office full of books left by the faculty who had departed; there are probably three or four hundred that I do not know that I own. I found myself writing a rather arcane article only because I happened to glance at one of the book shelves and discovered a set of books specific to the topic. Until the Wikipedia Fellows Pilot, I did not even know those books existed, much less that they were on my shelf. So not only did the Wikipedia Fellows Pilot ease my intellectual loneliness by immersing me with other scholars in our cohort and with other editors on Wikipedia, the project also reconnected me with the former owners of the books in my office, and with the scholars who wrote the books.
Wikipedia now feels like a community of scholars to me. I may no longer have colleagues who are physically located nearby, but I am a member of a vast network of people who appreciate interactive learning, collaboration, and scholarly discussions. And I just discovered that Wikipedia lacks an article on a topic near and dear to my sociological heart. Back to editing!
To see the Wikipedia articles this Fellows cohort improved, click here. To learn more about how you can get involved as a Wikipedia Fellow, click here.
Jane Lee, a student in Dr. Joan Strassmann’s Behavioral Ecology course at Washington University in St. Louis, vastly improved a Wikipedia article about the Small heath butterfly species last fall. She added 4,723 words and went into depth about the butterfly’s taxonomy, life cycle, habitat, and behavior. And her work has been viewed more than 1,000 times by curious Wikipedia readers since then.
If one were to look at the article’s edit history, they’d see that Jane came back to edit in February, well after her course had ended. That’s because the article had been nominated for Wikipedia’s Good Article status and required her participation in a rigorous review process.
“After the initial Good Article nomination, I frequently checked back to see if a member of the Wikipedia community began to review the article,” Jane told Wiki Education in an interview.
“During this review process, I worked with a reviewer and carefully addressed their thorough feedback. And my articles were officially promoted to Good Article standing once the reviewer was satisfied the improvements we made.”
So what was this assignment that compelled Jane to re-engage with her work months after it was due?
Dr. Strassmann guided her students in learning how to edit Wikipedia using Wiki Education’s online tools, print resources, and staff support. (She walks us through the positive experience here). Her students consistently produce admirable work that is so recognized by the Wikipedia community. This Fall 2017 term’s class alone received seven more Good Article designations, in addition to the Small heath article. Thanks to these biology students, Wikipedia articles about the Codling moth, Gynaephora groenlandica, Parnassius smintheus, Polygonia c-album, Choristoneura fumiferana, Cabbage looper, and Eldana are all deemed Good Article quality.
Jane says that writing about the small heath was no simple task. The topic required some real digging and perseverance.
“One challenge I encountered was finding a sufficient amount of information about my butterfly to compile. My butterfly, the small heath, was often associated with different species or covered tangentially, which made it difficult to find direct, concrete information at times. Because of this, I skimmed as many scientific articles as possible and compiled any relevant but reliable information I could find.”
This deep dive into research was challenging, but ultimately Jane says she came out with a clear sense of the new skills she had developed through the process. “In the end, I felt that I improved at applying knowledge from my other classes and at better understanding scientific articles while reading at a brisk pace.”
With Dr. Strassmann’s guidance and the structure the assignment provided, Jane felt prepared to engage with the Wikipedia community about her research. “It was intimidating to learn about the Wikipedia community dynamic and to work with the many experts involved in the process. However, my professor provided us with a comprehensive, structured timeline for us to follow, which helped us pace ourselves.”
Learning to apply course concepts in a public arena like Wikipedia takes a different set of skills than a traditional term paper assignment. Students develop confidence to speak authoritatively about a topic they’re learning about. And they often feel a deeper sense of motivation in their work and a sense of pride that it can be accessed by millions.
The assignment changed Jane’s perspective about Wikipedia. “At first, I was confused that we would be working on Wikipedia articles in a college course, especially after having many teachers and professors emphasize its unreliability, but I was intrigued by how unique this assignment was compared to standard exams and papers.”
Jane’s sentiment echoes something we hear a lot from students. They’ve been told that Wikipedia is unreliable and not to use it, but not how to evaluate it for accuracy on their own. As Dr. Zach McDowell said comically about the value of a Wikipedia assignment, “The problem with telling students that they’re not supposed to use Wikipedia, but at the same time knowing they are, is abstinence-only Wikipedia education.”
A Wikipedia assignment offers an opportunity for students to learn the ins and outs of a resource they use all the time. They gain valuable media literacy skills to take with them in academia and beyond.
“This assignment was very non-traditional, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the work,” Jane says. “It definitely required a lot of research, writing, revising, and time, but I appreciated applying the concepts from class to developing this article about my butterfly. I actually found it very gratifying to watch my article grow and contribute to such an enormous, volunteer-run database.”
“I was proud of the final version of the article I submitted at the end of the course, but I knew that there was still room for improvement. After working with another Wikipedia editor through the review process, I am very happy with the final version of the article because of my reviewer’s thoughtful and comprehensive critiques.”
This peer review process is an essential aspect of Wikipedia’s crowd-sourced model. The collaboration creates a sense of responsibility and accountability for students, motivating them to produce quality work and respond to feedback.
“In the beginning, the sheer number of underdeveloped Lepidoptera articles seemed daunting,” Jane tells us. “But by the end of the class, it was encouraging to see the cumulative effort of my classmates.”
To learn more about Wiki Education’s free resources and support for this assignment, visit teach.wikiedu.org or reach out to contact@wikiedu.org. Also check out Dr. Strassmann reflections on the success of this Fall 2017 course here.
Wikipedia used to have a warning about articles of a certain size. If I recall correctly, it was 64KB. As far as I understand, the reason for this was more engineering-oriented than user-experience-oriented: Loading a larger page was slower, because networks were slower, or at least so some people thought.
Wikipedia no longer has this warning. It’s not unusual to have a page of 250KB or more. I don’t participate in discussions about performance, but the discussions that I do see are about the time that it takes to parse the templates server-side, to load JavaScript modules, and to render the CSS; they are not so much about the kilobyte size of the pages themselves.
I suspect, however, that there is a problem with page length. Not one of performance engineering, but of user experience. Do people actually read whole encyclopedic articles in Wikipedia? In case you haven’t guessed it already, my hypothesis is that most people don’t.
This is my hypothesis because of the famous debunking of a designer myth: people usually don’t read texts.
It should be clarified right away that the notion that people don’t read whole Wikipedia article is not, by itself, a problem. It may be a bit sad for people who invest hours (or years!) in writing the brilliant prose of each excellent article, but the point of Wikipedia is not supposed to be getting millions of people to read very long articles. Rather, it’s making information that they need accessible, and making it as easy as possible for everybody to edit this information.
Do long articles make finding information easy? Probably not. Experienced Wikipedia editors are familiar with article structure, with tricks like Find in Page, and so on, but a lot of readers are not.
So here’s my call: Let’s bring back article length warning in some form. The importance of a topic doesn’t necessarily justify having a very long article about it. The purpose is not to have a long page, but to make information easy to find. If splitting an article to several pages makes the information easier to find, then the readers will of course be happy, and the editors who invest their effort in writing a lot about a topic should be happy, too, because their writing is more likely to be actually read.
by Gerard Meijssen (noreply@blogger.com) at May 10, 2018 10:49 AM
In this blog post I share the Guidelines for New Software Projects that we use at Wikimedia Deutschland.
I wrote down these guidelines recently after a third-party that was contracted by Wikimedia Deutschland delivered software that was problematic in several ways. The department contracting this third-party was not the software development department, as since we did not have written down guidelines anywhere, both this department and the third-party lacked information they needed to do a good job. The guidelines are a short-and-to-the-point 2 page document that can be shared third parties and serves as a starting point when making choices for internal projects.
If you do not have such guidelines at your organization, you can copy these, though you will of course need to update the “Widespread Knowledge at Our Department” section. If you have suggestions for improvements or interesting differences in your own guidelines, leave a comment!
These guidelines are for non-trivial software that will need to be maintained or developed further. They do not apply to throw-away scripts (if indeed they will be thrown away) or trivial code such as a website with a few static web pages. If on the other hand the software needs to be maintained, then these guidelines are relevant to the degree that the software is complex and hard to replace.
The stack includes programming language, frameworks, libraries, databases and tools that are otherwise required to run or develop the software.
We want
Therefore
We want
Therefore
I’ve been thinking about ways to run user-supplied untrusted code in the browser, with an eye towards things like interactive demo programs in Wikipedia articles and user interface & editor extensions. Just running JavaScript provided by the user is wildly unsafe — it can dig into your web page’s UI and submit server requests on your user’s behalf without permission, for instance — and sandboxing things into iframes can be a bit funky and hard to fully lock down.
Current web browsers have another language they can run, though, which is WebAssembly — and WebAssembly makes much stricter sandboxing guarantees:
This means there’s no way an arbitrary wasm binary can access your document.cookies or submit a form, unless you pass in a function that allows that.
This also means that unless you provide an API to the wasm code, it can’t actually do anything other than calculate numbers. It also means that whatever API you do provide becomes a security boundary — you must make sure that you don’t introduce a function that can be exploited contrary to the security guarantees you want to make!
There are also a couple things that wasm by itself doesn’t solve:
But wait — you can run a wasm binary in a Web Worker thread. And you can terminate Web Worker threads from the main thread! Depending on your API, if asynchronous messaging around the calls is workable this might be a good way to avoid hanging the main thread in the face of a misbehaving plugin.
So what’s the downside? Well, a few things to consider:
Something to consider for later. 
As we approach the end of the academic year, I enjoy reflecting back to celebrate our achievements. When I step back, I see how much we’ve accomplished through our dedicated staff members, passionate program participants, and committed partners. My real passion project on Wikipedia is to improve its equity—in both content and contributors—and I’m consistently blown away by the energy we expend in our community to expand the voices represented in this precious source of information for the world.
One of the major ways Wiki Education is dedicated to expanding Wikipedia’s equity is through our partnership with the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). Through the NWSA partnership, nearly 5,000 student editors have added 3.5 million words about women’s studies to Wikipedia, reaching 346 million readers. The partnership enables us to work closely with a fiercely smart group of people whose lives are devoted to making academia and knowledge more equitable. They work tirelessly to ensure all traditionally underrepresented communities—women of color, LGBTQ people, the impoverished, the homeless, indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, children, victims of police brutality—are represented fairly in our understanding of how the world works. If Wikipedia wants to be the sum of all human knowledge, it must adopt these lenses and represent different people’s experiences in the world. That’s why so many members of NWSA work with Wiki Education to learn how they can bring their context to the encyclopedia that reaches 500 million readers each month.
Here are some of the ways we’ve worked to bring more women’s studies scholars to Wikipedia this year:
In November 2017, Wiki Education attended the National Women’s Studies Association’s annual meeting in Baltimore. The 40th anniversary meeting also marked the 40th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist organization from the 1970s that developed a statement highlighting what would eventually come to be known as intersectionality. Renowned political activist Angela Davis gave the keynote speech alongside Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. Their discourse allowed the opportunity to show how black women historically have been leaders in the fight for justice and parity. Decades of hard work to shift the feminist canon toward fighting for all people have begun seeping into the mainstream understanding of feminism, as more laypeople than ever discuss intersectionality in their everyday lives.
During the conference, I had the pleasure of speaking with women’s studies scholars and instructors who seek to bring intersectionality to the masses, enabling citizens to acknowledge narratives beyond their own. Today, Wikipedia is one of the most efficient ways to ensure this research reaches beyond the university campus.
In Wiki Education’s Classroom Program, students channel their research and writing into expanding Wikipedia articles related to their coursework. Thus, students make academic literature accessible to those of us who cannot access university libraries and databases. Over the past year, 1,500 women’s studies students have completed our program to learn how to edit Wikipedia. In the process, they made incredible information available at the world’s fingertips.
In Dr. Jo Ann Griffin’s Fall 2017 course at the University of Louisville, two students expanded the feminization of poverty article. They added information about human trafficking, single mother households, cultural influences on Muslim women’s employment status, welfare reform in the United States, and the wage gap between women and men in the Dominican Republic. In a world with growing poverty rates, it’s imperative that we enhance our understanding of economic disparity, perhaps finding more empathy for our fellow humans. Thanks to these two student editors, Wikipedia readers now have a more complete picture of struggles facing impoverished women.
In Dr. Margaret Lowry’s Spring 2018 course at Texas Christian University, one student significantly improved the article about gender equality in Rwanda. Rwanda is ranked 5th in the world for gender equality, as women have a high rate of labor participation, a smaller wage gap than most countries, paid maternity leave, and a high rate of women in government. This statistic perhaps surprises readers because the country ranks in the 48 least developed nations. As the student in Dr. Lowry’s class makes clear to the world, if a nation truly prioritizes gender equality, they can enact laws and policies to improve women’s quality of life. Gender equality does not have to take a back seat to other efforts working toward economic growth; rather, it is a core part of the solution. This article can increase the visibility of Rwanda’s successes, perhaps even inspiring other nations to follow suit.
In March 2018, I joined women’s studies department chairs in Denver to speak about the successes of our initiative and how we can make Wikimedia projects even more representative of women and women’s history. The meeting offered the opportunity to present to more than 50 women’s studies department chairs and ask them to join the Classroom Program and bring the initiative to their campuses. Wiki Education appreciated the opportunity to meet with more women’s studies instructors and scholars, including several of our current program participants. We also presented to attendees about our newest program, Wikipedia Fellows, as NWSA was one of the first partners to participate.
In short, Wikipedia Fellows join our team virtually over the course of a few months to learn how to edit Wikipedia. We provide training and insight into how Wikipedia works and how it differs from traditional academic publications, and the content experts identify articles they can improve. Then, they work to make them more representative of the underlying scholarship. During the Denver meeting, NWSA Wikipedia Fellow Dr. Jenn Brandt shared her experience in the Wikipedia Fellows pilot cohort. Dr. Brandt is teaching in the Classroom Program for the first time this term, so she also reflected on the value of asking students to learn how to contribute to Wikipedia while she was in the process of doing so herself.
Dr. Brandt selected the women’s studies article and decided to make it better align with experts’ understanding of the field. When she showed other department chairs the lead paragraph of the article (the part that comes up in a Google search!) before and after she worked on it, they couldn’t believe how inaccurate the definition had been. Brandt expanded the history of the discipline, explained different feminist theories and research methods, and made sure she included all prominent references in the field. This article is much of the world’s entryway into women’s studies, and an expert’s touch really went a long way in making it a valuable reference and summary of the discipline.
If you’re interested in improving Wikipedia’s equity, consider joining the Classroom Program to teach with Wikipedia or applying to be a Wikipedia Fellow. Email us at contact@wikiedu.org, or visit teach.wikiedu.org. We’re thrilled about the work we’ve been able to do alongside the National Women’s Studies Association, and we look forward to our continued partnership.
“Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge” is a new book published by the American Library Association that highlights the myriad connections between Wikimedia projects and libraries. Edited by OCLC Research’s Merrilee Proffitt, the book contains 15 chapters highlighting ways librarians and Wikimedia projects have been intertwined since Wikipedia’s founding in 2001.
I was honored to contribute a chapter to the book highlighting the work Wiki Education and the broader Wikipedia Education Program has done to connect academia and Wikipedia. Several other Wiki Education friends and collaborators offer their insight throughout the book, making it an interesting read for any university librarian looking to get more involved in Wikipedia, Wikidata, or Wikimedia Commons — or just interested in how programs work in the Wikipedia space.
Andrew Lih’s chapter on the history of collaborations between “GLAM institutions” — Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums — and the Wikimedia projects offers a helpful overview for both newcomers and experienced Wikimedians alike. Lih explains the mutual interests of both Wikimedians and GLAM institutions, and highlights several collaborations, including an explanation of the Wikipedia in Residence model adopted by several institutions.
A chapter written by Alex Stinson and Jason Evans is filled with case studies and tips for collaborations. With practical insight and broad overviews of a number of ways Wikimedians and librarians can collaborate — including references to both Wiki Education’s Classroom Program and Visiting Scholars Program — the chapter is a must-read for any librarian looking to survey the options of where to get started with Wikipedia.
West Virginia University Wikipedian in Residence Kelly Doyle authors a great chapter on the equity gaps related to gender in Wikipedia, and how she’s worked over the last two years to help close those through on-campus support from the library at WVU. She talks about her work to train librarians on campus to edit Wikipedia as well as projects to engage students in service learning through editing Wikipedia, always with a focus on closing the gender equity gaps on Wikipedia.
Lily Todorinova and Yu-Hung Lin offer a chapter that showcases a study Rutgers University’s library did to measure students’ use of Wikipedia as well as their work with the Visiting Scholars Program. Students, they found, generally view Wikipedia as a “reliable gateway to information”, and that a rubric would be helpful for students to assess the source material in Wikipedia. They also felt encouraged to continue collaborating with Wikipedia based on their experiences in the Visiting Scholars program.
Sara Snyder’s chapter offers a good how-to for edit-a-thons, a collaborative editing event that many university librarians are eager to host at their institution. While Wiki Education does not support these events, this chapter provides great guidelines for those interested.
Mairelys Lemus-Rojas and Lydia Pintscher’s chapter on Wikidata offers an overview of the newest Wikimedia project, and one that has the potential to be of great interest to many university librarians. Wiki Education is in the planning stages for a pilot program next year to work with Wikidata, and this chapter offers many helpful insights into the open structured data repository.
In a chapter on semantic web identity, Kenning Arlitsch and Justin Shanks write about how they engaged with Wikipedia and Wikidata to improve the availability of information about the Montana State University Library and two other campus groups. This chapter will be of interest to librarians interested in their institution’s own web presence.
Finally, Merrilee Proffitt’s chapter offers an inspirational closing statement on why all librarians should become Wikimedians, and how welcoming and collaborative the broader community of people are who help facilitate the relationships between Wikipedia and libraries. As someone who’s been involved in the Wikimedia movement since 2010, I can attest to Merrilee’s encouragement to join us: This particular intersection of groups offers fruitful collaborations for both libraries and Wikimedians. And my thanks to Merrilee for including my chapter about Wiki Education’s work in the book!
The book is available from the ALA store. Encourage your university library to add it to their collection today.
Mockup by Nirzar Pangarkar/Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0. Article text from Andromedia Galaxy and Spiral galaxy, CC BY-SA 3.0. Left image, CC BY 3.0. Right image, CC BY 2.0.
A few weeks ago, we deployed the page previews feature to English Wikipedia. This deployment marked the completion of one of the largest changes we’ve made to the desktop version of Wikipedia in years. Since then, we’ve received a number of questions about our process, motivations, and documentation. Given that much of our work is already online, we thought it’d be nice to share a bit more.
As tech lead Jon Robson wrote in his blog post, page previews took us a pretty long time to complete. This long timeline was in part due to technical complexity as well as to our best attempts at rigour in terms of instrumentation, testing, and having thorough conversations with our communities on what they wanted the feature to be like in the long term. Here’s a list of the documentation we’ve gathered along the way:
The main MediaWiki page for the project contains an overview of the project and functionality, links to research and requirements, an overview of the history of the feature, and deployment plans.
Product requirements and detailed descriptions of workflows and functionality: Before we deployed to any wikis, we refactored our code. As this marked somewhat of a fresh start, we made sure to collect all requirements for the feature ahead of time. We incorporated feedback from our communities to include all requested updates.
Initial blog post on launching this as a beta feature: The story of page previews goes far back. The feature was initially presented to logged-in users as a beta feature, then called “hovercards,” back in 2014. Since then, it has changed in appearance and functionality significantly.
How we designed page previews for Wikipedia and what could be done with them in the future: Even though page previews may seem simple at first glance, many complexities lie beneath the surface. This blog post goes into detail on why this is the case, which issues particular to Wikipedia we had to consider in terms of designing the feature, and how these considerations translated into the final design
Design improvements since the first iteration of the feature: This is a list of design updates we made since the initial iteration of page previews in beta.
Records of architectural decisions: Here, you can see why we build page previews the way we did, and track the architectural decisions we made along the way.
API Specification: In the beginning, previews were in plaintext. Our communities were rightly interested in presenting page previews in html to allow for rendering content true to its original form. This makes sense – we didn’t want strange bugs and missing formulas to detract from the benefits of page previews. However, we did not want to process all of this HTML within the Page Previews client. The less work the client has to do to display a preview, the better. Thus, we built a new API that could generate summaries for page previews as well as for other similar features in the future.
Code details: For the engineers among you, this page contains details on the code for page previews and instructions on how to set the feature up for other wikis.
“Beacons”: This blog post highlights the process of identifying and replicating one of the most confusing bugs we’ve come across so far. During our first round of A/B testing, we ran into a very strange bug within our instrumentation. We were seeing duplicate events logged for every link hover and it tooks us a lot of effort to get to the core of the issue — a bug in the Firefox browser. We worked with the Mozilla team to resolve this issue and were able to continue measuring the performance of the feature bug-free.
Page previews front-end tooling: This series of blog posts explains the different technical decisions and choices in technology and tooling for the front-end part of the extension. The posts provide reasoning, explanations, pros and cons, and our conclusions.
mustache.js replaced with JavaScript template literals in Extension:Popups: The Popups MediaWiki extension previously used HTML UI templates inflated by the mustache.js template system. This post provides the reasoning behind replacing Mustache with ES6 syntax without changing existing device support or readability.
2017-18 A/B Tests: Page Previews are designed to reduce the cost of exploring a link, as well as to promote learning, by allowing readers to gain context on the article they are reading or to quickly check the definition of an unfamiliar event, idea, object, or term without navigating away from their original topic. To gauge the success of the feature, we wanted to test these assumptions by performing an A/B test on the English and German wikipedias. This page includes details of our methodology, the hypotheses we decided to test, and our results.
Hovercards Usability Research: In addition to quantitative testing, we also wanted to test qualitatively to gain insight into user opinions on page previews. We looked into opinion based questions as well as overall usability – Do people like the feature? Do they know how to turn it on/off? Do they find it annoying? How do they feel about the presence and size of images? Etc, etc.
2016 A/B Test Results: Our first A/B test, while providing us valuable insight into the feature was most valuable as a means of improving before a larger scale test. Here, we gauged the performance of the feature on Hungarian, Italian, and Russian Wikipedias. During the process of collecting and analysing our data we also ran into a number of bugs and issues within our instrumentation that allowed us to refine and improve, making sure all subsequent tests were issue-free.
Greek and Catalan usability test: Back in 2015, we performed the first investigation into the performance of the feature. We ran a survey on beta users on Greek and Catalan Wikipedias. A number of issues and bugs were reported and user satisfaction was recorded using a survey. Users had generally favorable feedback, with the majority of users finding hovercards useful, easy to use, and enjoyable to use.
Olga Vasileva, Product Manager, Reading Product
Wikimedia Foundation
If you have a really old MacBook Pro that can’t do AppleTV mirroring, and you have an AppleTV on your network, turn this checkbox *off* to keep the status bar icon from appearing and immediately disappearing every once in a while.
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
—Juliet, Act II, Scene II of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, more or less
I really like names. There’s so much variation in the way people use their own names—formally and informally, at home, work, or online. And there’s even more variation in names across cultures. In this blog post I’m going to touch on some of my favorite kinds of name variation and how such variation can make it bafflingly hard to search for people “by name”, on Wikipedia or elsewhere.
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Let us consider a hypothetical American male named “Robert John Smith, Jr.” Our hypothetical pal might go or have gone by any of the following given names at some point in his life: Bobby, Bob, Robbie, Rob, Robert, Robin, or even Bert. Unless, of course, as a “Jr.” he decided to go by his middle name because his father was already “Rob”—in which case he might go by any of John, Johnny, or Jack.
Depending on which given name he uses, and the formality of the context, he might write out his “full” name—or have it written out for him—as any of the following:
… and many others.
Mr. Smith might also go by “Junior”, especially with his family, since he is a “Jr.”, or his friends may have nicknamed him “Smitty”, after his last name. Or maybe like a certain Mr. Lund he’s 6’5” (1.95 m) and 270 pounds (120 kg), so his friends ironically nicknamed him “Tiny”.
A lot of this variation is understandable: nicknames tend to be shortened, and in English -y or -ie is a common diminutive suffix. But have you ever wondered how Bob came from Robert, Bill from William, or Peggy from Margaret? Rhyming nicknames have been popular in English-speaking countries at various times (see Bob for more details)—so normal shortened forms of some names picked up rhyming variants, and some of those have more-or-less permanently embedded themselves in the culture. So rhyming Rob to Bob, Will to Bill, and Meg to Peg, plus a diminutive -y or -ie, can explain a lot.
Our fictitious friend might even end up affecting his father’s name! Dad might add a “Sr.” to his name to distinguish him from his son, or go by “Big Rob”, especially within the family. “Rob Junior” might tire of “Jr.” and try to class things up a bit by changing his suffix from “Jr.” to “II”.
If there were ever to be a Robert John Smith, III, the little guy might pick up the nickname “Trey”, which is one that I’m personally fond of, and not just for its interesting etymology. It’s also worth noting that—since naming patterns and customs evolve over time—while many Treys are secretly Somebody S. Something, III, Trey can also be a shortened nickname for Tremaine, and has sometimes been used as a regular given name.
And, of course, once little Bobby gets his law degree, medical degree, and doctorate, he might add one or more of “Esq.”, “Esqr.”, “MD”, “M.D.”, “PhD” or “Ph.D.” to the end of his name, or “Dr.” to the front.
Let us now consider Dr. Smith’s sister, who is also Dr. Smith, M.D., Ph.D., Esq.—though she might also go by Miss Smith or Ms. Smith—whose full name is “Caitlin Roberta Smith”. She will of course be used to people badly misspelling her first name. The English Wikipedia disambiguation page lists Caitlin, Caitlín, Caitlyn, Catelyn, Catelynn, Kaitlyn, Kaitlin, Katelyn, Katelynn, and Katlyn—though many more are attested, including KVIIIlyn—I’ll wait while you figure that one out. Of course, to avoid all the fuss, Cait/Kate/Cate might decide to just go by a nickname based on her middle name, say, Bobbie.
Some women—and some men—decide to change their names when they get married, which creates another unpredictable—but in this case very official—variant of their names.
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Why it stinks for search: In a search context, all of this variation can become quite bewildering. Computational approaches to resolving names are called entity linking (and that’s after you’ve figured out what’s actually a name—which is named-entity recognition). Using patterns for initials, titles, and suffixes, dictionaries of nicknames, and sometimes context can help, but it’s very easy to miss unusual variants or get false positives.
Alas, nothing other than real-world knowledge will help with people who have changed their names or are known primarily by an uncomputable nickname like Tiny or Squeak. Among the more practical solutions—if there are tireless hordes of dedicated WikiGnomes out there doing the work—are disambiguation pages and redirects! High-quality redirects in particular can be very useful in search because they get treated much like an alternate title for the page. Thanks, WikiGnomes!
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To shift gears a bit, I want to tell you about one of my all-time favorite things related to searching for names—it has to do with the transliteration of Russian names!
First, a few preliminaries… In case you’ve never noticed, the sound represented by English “ch” is really just a “sh” following a “t”. Yep, “tsh” is the same as “ch”. (Some additional semi-mind-blowing facts: many English speakers pronounce word-initial “tr“ as “chr”, because of an epenthetic “sh” that pops up between the “t” and the “r”, so many people say “tree” as “chree”—and “Trey” as “Chray”. Also, similarly to t + sh = ch, d + zh = j. Really.)
Also, since the sounds represented by English “sh” and “ch” are not as common across languages as, say, p, b, t, d, k, and g, they have much less consistent spelling in the Latin alphabet. For example, in French, English “sh” is spelled “ch”, and “ch” is spelled “tch”. German has “sch” and “tsch”. Polish uses “z” a bit like English uses “h”, and so has “sz” and “cz”. Several Slavic languages have nice special-purpose letters: “š” and “č”.
Back to Russian and Russian names… The Cyrillic character Щ/щ is called shcha in English, and in some languages it is pronounced more-or-less like English “shch”. In Russian, it no longer has that sound—though it still does in Ukrainian and Rusyn—but following older tradition, Russian names with Щ are transliterated as “shch” in English.
For example, there is a Russian composer named Родион Щедрин, whose name is transliterated into English as “Rodion Shchedrin”. His first name is fairly consistently spelled “Rodion”, but his last name is all over the place when transliterated into the Latin alphabet through other languages, each trying to capture “shch” in their own way. In Czech it’s efficiently rendered as Ščedrin, while German has the much, much longer Schtschedrin, French Chtchedrine, and Polish Szczedrin. Other variants include Catalan Sxedrín, Danish Sjtjedrin, Hungarian Scsedrin, Dutch Sjtsjedrin, Romanian Șcedrin, and Finnish Štšedrin.
Now you can figure out why the composer Tchaikovsky’s name is spelled with an apparent silent T. In Russian it starts with the letter Ч, which in many languages sounds like English “ch” and is generally romanized as such. In this case the name came into the Latin alphabet through French as “tch”, and that spelling became standardized in English, too.
This kind of transliteration-based variation isn’t limited to Russian or Cyrillic, of course.
For decades, there was a mixture of confusion and a running gag over the many ways to spell Libyan leader Gaddafi/Khadafy/Qadhafi’s name. In addition to inconsistent romanization, Arabic script doesn’t normally spell out all the vowels, and the pronunciation of the unwritten vowels varies by dialect, giving many layers of inconsistency. Thus, native speakers of different varieties of Arabic could pronounce a name with significant differences, and then transliterate their pronunciations according to different transliteration schemes, made even more divergent in languages with different spellings of the same sounds (like “sh” and “ch” above).
An article in The Straight Dope on the variation of “Gaddafi” appeared as early as 1986, and as late as 2009, ABC News listed 112 variations (see the relevant footnote on the Wikipedia article). For (a peculiar kind of) fun, I worked up a regular expression that matches them all: ([KG]h?|Qu?)[aue]([dtz][h']?)+[aā]f+[iīy]. A regex to match all variants of his given name is left as an exercise for the reader.
Of course, the only inarguably correct spellings of Muammar and Rodion’s surnames are… القذافي and Щедрин, respectively!
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Why it stinks for search: Again, disambiguation pages and redirects are a practical and accurate approach in various Wikipedias, though the level of effort required to create and maintain them—have you thanked a WikiGnome today?—is untenable for many search scenarios. Phonetic algorithms can help, but they invariably suffer from false positives, false negatives, or significant complexity—or all three at once! There are sometimes useful trade-offs to be made, like limiting the kind of names the phonetic matching has to accommodate, but a general solution is very difficult.
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Surnames as family names are a relatively recent invention in many cultures. From the English Wikipedia article on surnames:
Many cultures have used and continue to use additional descriptive terms in identifying individuals. These terms may indicate personal attributes, location of origin, occupation, parentage, patronage, adoption, or clan affiliation. These descriptors often developed into fixed clan identifications that in turn became family names as we know them today.
Some English occupational names include Baker, Carpenter, Farmer, Miller, Potter, Weaver, and Smith. (Blacksmiths were very important in many cultures, and as a result, the words for smith or blacksmith in many languages have become surnames: Demirci, Fabbro, Haddad, Herrera, Kajiya, Kalējs, Kalvaitis, Kovács, Kovář, Lefèvre, Lohar, McGowan, Nallbani, Schmitt, Seppä, Sideras, Smed, Zargar and many others.)
Patronymics—a name based on the name of a male ancestor—are another source of surnames (that can become family names). Patronymics include Arabic Ibn- and Bin-, Aramaic Bar-, Celtic Mc- and Fitz-, Hebrew Ben-, Persian -pur, and Scandinavian -sen, and others. Matronymics are rarer, but also occur. Patronymics are good candidates to fossilize into family surnames. Many English surnames that follow the pattern of “male name + -son or -s” come originally from English or Welsh patronymics: Johnson, Robertson, Williams, Adams, Edwards, and Jones.
Some cultures don’t have surnames, or use surnames in a different way from most Western European names. Javanese people in Indonesia sometimes have only one name, or mononym. Other variations, including multiple names without a family name, also occur—see the Wikipedia page for examples. Icelandic names typically use a patronymic (or matronymic) as a surname instead of a family name, using the parent’s name, plus -son or -dóttir. Most people know that many East Asian names are ordered with family name first, then given name—though this is also the traditional order in Hungary, too. When transliterated into languages that use the traditional Western name order, East Asian names are sometimes re-ordered, sometimes not—leading to confusion.
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Why it stinks for search: For the purposes of search, mononyms, patronymics, and name element re-ordering often don’t matter much, unless you are dealing with highly structured data. If you know what elements to search for, you should be able to find them as a simple bag of words—that is, not paying attention to the order the words are in. Other naming traditions can lead to more confusion, though.
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Traditional Spanish names include two surnames, with the first coming from the father (and before that, the father’s father), and the second coming from the mother (and before that, the mother’s father). The first surname is in some sense the “main” surname, in that José Antonio Gómez Iglesias would be referred to as Señor Gómez or José Gómez, rather than as Señor Iglesias or José Iglesias, as those unfamiliar with the system might suppose. Ongoing cultural shifts have resulted in more flexibility in naming in Spain, and the system has further evolved in Latin America and the U.S., where some Hispanic people have adopted the single family name model. Searching for the wrong shortened version of a name—e.g., José Iglesias based on the full name José Antonio Gómez Iglesias—is a good way to not find what you are looking for.
Traditional Arabic names contain many interesting parts, including a variable number of patronymics and possibly a paedonymic (a name based on the name of a child), religious elements, and elements indicating place of origin, tribal affiliation, or ancestry—all depending on context and level of formality. Improperly trying to fit elements of the name into a Western name schema can lead, as with Hispanic names, to considering the wrong name elements as the ones primarily used to refer to someone. To further complicate matters, some of the elements—particularly patronymics (bin Laden) and elements based on ancestry (Al Saud)—have become surnames.
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Why it stinks for search: Once again, WikiGnomes often save our collective bacon in these situations with redirects and disambiguation pages that help you figure out what you are looking for or help the search engine find it for you.
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Here are some random additional name-related fun facts that didn’t make it into the discussion above:
There is a lot more to names—see “Further reading” below—but we’ve covered the general classes of problems we are likely to encounter when searching for people by name: unexpected variation in the preferred form of a name, unpredictable nicknames, cross-cultural confusion, transliteration trouble, spelling struggles, and overall orthographic anarchy. Many of these concerns also apply when searching for places and other proper nouns besides people. All this variation in names sometimes stinks!—but the Search Platform team is always working to improve search for Wikipedia and its sister wiki projects.
Trey Jones, Senior Software Engineer, Search Platform
Wikimedia Foundation
First-place winner. Photo by Yann Macherez, CC BY-SA 4.0.
First place in the global jury prize went to Cape Town-based freelance photographer Yann Macherez. Macherez decided to spend an afternoon with his camera and seaweed farmers in Jambiani, a village on the southeast coast of Zanzibar. He wanted to learn about the trade that creates a living for hundreds of the village women: “the way they were farming it, what they did with their crop, and why they called it a ‘gift of the ocean’”:
Before farming seaweed was an option, many women in rural coastal communities were completely dependent on their husbands for their livelihoods. Today seaweed farming employs 25,000 people, mostly rural women, while upwards of 150,000 people benefit indirectly from the seaweed industry. Women found emancipation and an access to freedom because of this ‘gift’.
He submitted several photos to the contest, including the image above.
Second-place winner. Photo by Marco Gualazzini, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Second place went to Italian photographer Marco Gualazzini, who became interested in photographing the continent to change Western attitudes about it: “most people in the west are not fully aware or even interested in learning about what happens in this beautiful continent,” he says.
Gualazzini’s photograph of a Somalian man carrying a dead hammerhead shark through the streets of Mogadishu struck a chord with this year’s contest jury members, but stories like this are far from new for him. “Telling the story of Somalia’s rebirth” is a story Gualazzini has committed to more than anything he’s covered in Africa over nearly a decade of photographing the continent, he says.
I’m working on a collection of stories that illustrate the heroic, solidarity-fuelled actions that take place here every day. These pictures I took, including the award-winning one of the man who carries the shark, seek to shed light upon these little examples of resilience and piece them together.
Third-place winner. Photo by Hassanelsayadd, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Third place went to Cairo-based lawyer Hassan Elsayed, who told me that he takes every opportunity he can to get outside and take photos. Here, he was in Dahshur, Giza, with his camera up at the perfect time to capture a brief moment of affection between a young shepherd and his sheep.
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These three winning images were only a small part of the latest Wiki Loves Africa photography and media competition, which showcases the continent’s rich diversity across a variety of themes.
All of the photos are uploaded under free licenses, meaning that you can use them free of charge with few stipulations.*
An annual competition held since 2014, Wiki Loves Africa founders and organizers Isla Haddow Flood and Florence Devouard say that a total of 40,000 photos have been uploaded in the contest’s history. That includes over 18,000 files in this year alone, donated to Wikimedia Commons by nearly 2,500 people.
(Wikimedia Commons is the photo repository of the Wikimedia movement. It holds most of the photos used on the hundreds of various language Wikipedia.)
Wiki Loves Africa’s theme changes each year, and this most recent one was focused on “people at work.” Participants were asked to upload their photos in October and November 2017, and local teams in participating countries were on hand to introduce the site to local photographers. An international jury selected the winning three images, seen above.
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This year saw the introduction of a new category to the competition: photo essays, a collection of photos or a video to document an endangered work practice or women at work. Eric Atie, from Nigeria, and User:Rachelclarareed, from Tanzania, caught those two prizes (respectively). The stories behind those are located in two separate blog posts: “Zanzibar seaweeds in Tanzania” and “The making of thatch“.
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A separate organizer’s prize went to User:Bentaylor13413 for his videos of glassmaking, which you can see below:
Video by Bentaylor13413, CC BY-SA 4.0. Due to browser limitations, the video will not play on Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, or Safari. Please try Mozilla Firefox instead, or watch it directly on Wikimedia Commons.
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Video by Bentaylor13413, CC BY-SA 4.0. This video is subject to the same browser restrictions; if you encounter an error, please try Mozilla Firefox or watch it directly on Wikimedia Commons.
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For more information on the winning photos, media files, and the competition, go to www.wikilovesafrica.net.
Samir Elsharbaty, Writer, Communications
Wikimedia Foundation
Editor’s note: Wiki Loves Africa was funded in part by a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation.
*License terms can vary depending on the image; a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license, for instance, would require you to credit the photographer and re-share the photo, even with modifications, only under a similar license. Please check each individual file page for the exact requirements.
Zanzibar’s seaweed growers face a changing climate. Here, a farmer tends to her farm in Paje, on the southeast coast of the island.
Mwanaisha Makame and Mashavu Rum, who have been farming seaweed on beautiful Zanzibar island for 20 years, wade through the low tide to their farm.
The seaweed grows underwater for 45 days. When it reaches one kilogram, the women pick it and dry it, then pack it in bags to be exported to countries like China, Korea and Vietnam. There, it’s used in medicines and shampoos.
The farmers have a lot of problems due to climate change. Two decades ago, 450 seaweed farmers roamed Paje. Now, only about 150 farmers remain.
Mwanaisha holds up a healthy clump of seaweed. Then she holds up seaweed the farmers won’t be able to use. A hard white substance grows on it – ice-ice disease, caused by higher ocean temperatures and intense sunlight.
The seaweed farmers learned how to make soap from their seaweed at the Zanzibar Seaweed Center, a business that started as an NGO in 2009. At their homes, they mix water, ground seaweed powder, coconut oil, caustic soda and essential oils in a large plastic tub.
Later in the week, the seaweed farmers will sell their finished soaps in Zanzibar town or to regular local customers. As seaweed levels decline, they have found a way to increase the value of their work.
The finished product – a bar of seaweed soap.
———
All of the images in this post by Wikimedia Commons user Rachelclarareed are freely licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0. In short, this means that you can use any of the images in this post for any reason, so long as you attribute the photographer and share any remixes under the same license. The text in this post was written by Rachelclarareed and originally posted on Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
For the other awarded photo essay, see “The making of thatch.” For more information about the contest, see the main announcement.
The creativity that comes with mud housing in rural areas is majorly in the art of it’s roofing, of crafting thatch. With the continuous movement of development reaching far into these area, newer ways of doing things have been discovered, faster, reliable, more durable ways. Houses are now being raised with modern materials, and even the ones standing still in traditional clay and thatch are being refurbished with the fashionable cement blocks/metal roofing sheets. This progression has no doubt brought about a decline to the practice of traditional crafts such as thatching.
Mr. Bassey Ekpenyong, an indegene of Ito community in Cross-River state, Nigeria, calls me his friend in that manner that, as a stranger serving in his community under the National Youth Service Corp, makes me feel safe. He invites me to his shop at evening hours, and as he offers me roasted nuts, he makes a new promise to take me on his bike to the beach when the rains have stopped and the roads are accessible again.
It is on my return to Ito after a couple of weeks away that I first see him sitted in the shade outside of his shop, palm leaves littered all over. He sees the excitement register on my face a top the moving bike and signals that I return, as if to say “I have been waiting for you”. And truly, he has.
He is making a new roof for his shop, he tells me. He wants me to make pictures. There are palm leaves all over, some tied up in a bunch, some lying underneath the sun, others thatched already and staked up in a pile. On his hands are two long,thinly carved sticks that would function as the skeletal frame for a pair of thatch.
He begins a new pair and laughs as he talk; a satisfaction that comes with the knowledge that he is creating for me yet another experience to take home when service is over. He makes a joke of it.
He folds a leaf in half neatly across both sticks. He does same for another leaf, lapping it with the previous, and then, with another thiny stick which he breaks afterwards, pins the the leaves in place, firm.
The process continues until the length of the sticks are fully covered in green palm leaves. He completes a pair of thatch in what takes minutes and begins another.
Mr. Bassey is a converser. He talks about the need for this change, a practice he does every five years as this is the durability period for the thatch. “Nfok nkaya” He says in Efik pointing to his shop behind, mud house with mat(thatch). He points to other houses around, including the ones made of clay but with metal roofing sheets and calls them “Ikanga” zinc dey up.
On other days, Mr Bassey is joined by his friends. They sit for long hours underneath the tree on their return from their various farms. They chat as they thatch, switching on occasion from Efik to English.
They craft at the same pace, with the same measure of skill, but what intrigues me the most is their fellowship in that shared space, a communion of banter and silence. How this silence descends on them as they craft only for it to be broken yet again with a thought, a story, a sigh – childhood friends who had all grown up in this same space and carried within themselves different experiences as they each sorted life out; some leaving only to return yet again.
Childhood friends thatching through time, memories into their palms, pinning them into that place of recollection, of regret, of conquests. Pinning them with the same laughter and voices that survived time.
When asked how and when they had learnt thatching, the story is the same for everyone. They throw back to a time when they were just kids, when Ito was only made of the traditional mud houses.
As kids, they had been taken along with other kids by The Contractor, an older member of the community who dealt in a sales of thatch, to the beach. There, they had, each person assigned to a bunch of palm leaves, made dozens of thatch. This contractor, in return had provide their meal for the day and bought them treats. He had, later, on completion of their work, also paid for their services to their mothers; money meant for their upkeep.
“We just sabi” Mr. Bassey tells me, explaining to me how he couldn’t really pinpoint exactly how he had learnt. How, before then, in a society where almost everything used where hand-crafted, most of these skills children grew into, got used to just by seeing it being done on a daily basis, just by being a part of the home/society.
“Those wen no sabi wen we go beach go just sidon look those wen sabi, or, watch contractor do am and dem go sabi.
To Mr. Bassey this is more. It carries sentiments enough for him to brag about the metal roofing sheets he’s kept lying waste in his house for years, enough sentiments for him to, in a time when the few thatched houses left are been broken down and then raised up in modern fashion, sit outside of his shop underneath the tree every five years, matting green leaves into thatch.
His shop, once his home, carries for him memories of events: of childhood adventures; of leaving and returning; of his late wife, of loss. Memories that make him. And thatching, this craft, this practice of maintenance is, in a fast paced world, for him the very means through which he holds time in his hands. The very means to which he laps these memories into a place of remembrance. The very means in which he shelters them.
———
All of the images in this post by Wikimedia Commons user Eric Atie are freely licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0. In short, this means that you can use any of the images in this post for any reason, so long as you attribute the photographer and share any remixes under the same license. The text in this post was written by Eric Atie and originally posted on Wikimedia Commons under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
For the other awarded photo essay, see “Zanzibar seaweeds in Tanzania.” For more information about the contest, see the main announcement.
Gary Greenbaum, also known as User:Wehwalt on Wikipedia, is a Visiting Scholar at George Mason University. Through the Visiting Scholars program, Gary gets access to George Mason University’s academic sources and databases, expanding the reach of those collections and improving his own abilities to create and maintain Wikipedia articles. Here, Gary shares an example of how George Mason collections have been useful to him.
About two years ago, I set about writing a new article for Wikipedia, on a topic that had long interested me. The topic was “Mr. Dooley”. If you have not heard of Mr. Dooley, you are not alone, but a hundred years or so ago, you would have been the exception.
Mr. Dooley, or Martin J. Dooley, was a fictional Irish immigrant bartender created in the 1890s by journalist Finley Peter Dunne, whose columns would be set in Dooley’s bar. Having a fictional surrogate speak for you in a newspaper column isn’t something that’s done a lot today, but Dunne would write of Mr. Dooley giving a monologue on local or national affairs. Dooley is depicted as speaking with an Irish brogue, an accent suggested through the spelling of words in his monologues, in which he would speak of local or national affairs, often making a progressive point.
Initially the Dooley columns dealt with local issues in Dunne’s hometown of Chicago, but after Dunne and his creation became famous, they mostly dealt with national or world affairs, with Dunne skewering such figures as Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, Admiral George Dewey, and John D. Rockefeller. Though Dooley is almost forgotten today, for a decade or so, what “Mr. Dooley says” was the topic of everyday conversation.
I became acquainted with Dooley through reprints of some of the most humorous pieces, and through satires of the style, printed in my books of legal humor. I did not have much in my personal library that could be of help, one introduction in a recent edition of some of the Dooley columns. When I started work, a useful source was the American National Biography article on Dunne. I would not ordinarily have access to the ANB, but it is one of the databases I can use as George Mason University’s Wikipedia Visiting Scholar. JSTOR, that compendium of academic articles, was also useful; Dooley may be nearly forgotten, but he remains well studied.
Both Dooley and Dunne have been the subject of a number of books over the years, available to me through George Mason’s library. I read though what I had, and I began to write. One of the difficulties I had was Dunne’s transcription of Dooley’s brogue, which made the columns more and more difficult for Dunne to write, and which has made it more difficult for modern readers to appreciate the Dooley columns. I decided on using “proper English” in the quotes found in the article, with the original found in the footnotes.
I’m generally pleased with the article that resulted. It’s a topic that should have a well-done article, for the Dooley articles were influential in their day, read by presidents and ordinary citizens alike. Phrases invented by Dunne for Dooley, such as “the Supreme Court follows the election returns” and “Politics ain’t bean bag” (that is, it’s played for real) still have relevance today, as does the fact that Dunne came from a minority group without great influence, the Irish, many of whom had only recently immigrated, with Dooley himself an immigrant.
Without the Wikipedia Library’s programs to empower our editors, Dooley might have gone long without a useful article for those wishing to read about him. I am grateful that these resources gave me a chance to tell others about him. While there is no Dooley in some rundown Chicago bar to give us humorous perspective on the political issues of today, the fact that someone could make light of the politics of the day, make a serious point, and do it while attracting an audience from across the political spectrum, has lessons for us today.
For more about Gary’s work, read our roundup here or view his Dashboard page. For more information about Visiting Scholars, see our informational page.
Initially I started creating a general post about PHP Generators, a feature introduced in PHP 5.5. However since I keep failing to come up with good examples for some cool ways to use Generators, I decided to do this mini post focusing on one such cool usage.
PHPUnit data providers
A commonly used PHPUnit feature is data providers. In a data provider you specify a list of argument lists, and the test methods that use the data provider get called once for each argument list.
Often data providers are created with an array variable in which the argument lists get stuffed. Example (including poor naming):
.jpg)
/**
* @dataProvider provideUserInfo
*/
function testSomeStuff( string $userName, int $userAge ) {}
function provideUserInfo() {
$return = [];
$return[] = [ 'Such Name', 42 ];
$return[] = [ 'Very Name', 23 ];
$return['Named parameter set'] = [ 'So Name', 1337 ];
return $return;
}
The not so nice thing here is that you have a variable (explicit state) and you modify it (mutable state). A more functional approach is to just return an array that holds the argument lists directly. However if your argument list creation is more complex than in this example, requiring state, this might not work. And when such state is required, you end up with more complexity and a higher chance that the $return variable will bite you.
Using yield
What you might not have realized is that data providers do not need to return an array. They need to return an iterable, so they can also return an Iterator, and by extension, a Generator. This means you can write the above data provider as follows:
function provideUserInfo() {
yield [ 'Such Name', 42 ];
yield [ 'Very Name', 23 ];
yield 'Named parameter set' => [ 'So Name', 1337 ];
}
No explicit state to be seen!
Update: my Introduction to Iterators and Generators in PHP is now live
I have a silly dream of seeing graphical Linux/FOSS programs running portably on any browser-based system outside of app store constraints. Two of my weekend side projects are working in this direction: an x86 emulator core to load and run ELF binaries, and better emscripten cross-compilation support for the GTK+ stack.
Emulation ideas
An x86 emulator written in WebAssembly could run pre-built Linux binaries, meaning in theory you could make an automated packager for anything in a popular software repository.
But even if all the hard work of making a process-level emulator work, and hooking up the Linux-level libraries to emulated devices for i/o and rendering, there are some big performance implications, and you’re probably also bundling lots of library code you don’t need at runtime.
Instruction decoding and dispatch will be slow, much slower than native. And it looks pretty complex to do JIT-ing of traces. While I think it could be made to work in principle, I don’t think it’ll ever give a satisfactory user experience.
Cross-compilation
Since we’ve got the source of Linux/FOSS programs by definition, cross-compiling them directly to WebAssembly will give far better performance!
In theory even something from the GNOME stack would work, given an emscripten-specific gdk backend rendering to a WebGL canvas just like games use SDL2 or similar to wrap i/o.
But long before we can get to that, there are low-level library dependencies.
Let’s start with glib, which implements a bunch of runtime functions and the GObject type system, used throughout the stack.
Glib needs libffi, a library for calling functions with at-runtime call signatures and creating closure functions which enclose a state variable around a callback.
In other words, libffi needs to do things that you cannot do in standard C, because it needs system-specific information about how function arguments and return values are transferred (part of the ABI, application binary interface). And to top it off, in many cases (emscripten included) you still can’t do it in C, because asm.js and WebAssembly provide no way to make a call with an arbitrary argument list. So, like a new binary platform, libffi must be ported…
It seems to be doable by bumping up to JavaScript, where you can construct an array of mixed-type arguments and use Function.prototype.apply to call the target function. Using an EM_ASM_ block in my shiny new wasm32/ffi.c I was able to write a JavaScript implementation of the guts of ffi_call which works for int, float, and double parameters (still have to implement 64-bit ints and structs).
The second part of libffi is the closure creation API, which I think requires creating a closure function in the JavaScript side, inserting it into the module’s function tables, and then returning the appropriate index as its address. This should be doable, but I haven’t started yet.
Emscripten function pointers
There are two output targets for the emscripten compiler: asm.js JavaScript and WebAssembly. They have similar capabilities and the wrapper JS is much the same in both, but there are some differences in implementation and internals as well as the code format.
One is in function tables for indirect calls. In both cases, the low-level asm.js/WASM code can’t store the actual pointer address of a function, so they use an index into a table of functions. Any function whose address is taken at compile time is added to the table, and its index used as the address. Then, when an indirect call through a “function pointer” is made, the pointer is used as the index into the function table, and an actual function call is made on it. Voila!
In asm.js, there are lots of Weird Things done about type consistency to make the JavaScript compilers fast. One is that the JS compiler gets confused if you have an array of functions that _contain different signatures_, making indirect calls run through slower paths in final compiled code. So for each distinct function signature (“returns void” or “returns int, called with float32” etc) there was a separate array. This also means that function pointers have meaning only with their exact function signature — if you take a pointer to a function with a parameter and call it without one, it could end up calling an entirely different function at runtime because that index has a different meaning in that signature!
In WebAssembly, this is handled differently. Signatures are encoded at the call site in the call_indirect opcode, so no type inference needs to be done.
But.
At least currently, the asm.js-style table separation is still being used, with the multiple tables encoded into the single WebAssembly table with a compile-time-known constant offset.
In both cases, the JS side can do indirect calls by calculating the signature string (“vf” for “void return, float32 arg” etc) and calling the appropriate “dynCall_vf” etc method, passing first the pointer and then the rest of the argument list. On asm.js this will look up in the tables directly; on WASM it’ll apply the index.
(etc)
It’s possible that emscripten will change the WASM mode to use a single array without the constant offset indirection. This will simplify lookups, and I think make it easier to add more functions at runtime.
Because you see, if you want to add a callback at runtime, like libffi’s closure API wants to, then you need to add another entry to that table. And in asm.js the table sizes are fixed for asm.js validation rules, and in WASM current mode the sub-tables are definitely fixed at compile time, since those constant offsets are used throughout.
So currently there’s an option you can use at build time to reserve room for runtime function pointers, I think I’ll have to use it, but that only reserves *fixed space* of a given number of pointers.
Next
Coming up next time: int64 and struct in the emscripten ABI, and does the closure API work as expected?
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Problems
The abuse filters had a problem with blocks where you had changed how long they last. It used the default length everywhere. This was in late April. Abuse filter users should make sure the right block length is used and change them if needed. This is only for filters where how long blocks last had been changed. [2]Changes later this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 8 May. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 9 May. It will be on all wikis from 10 May (calendar).Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 8 May at 18:30 (UTC). See how to join. You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 9 May at 15:00 (UTC). See how to join.Future changes
All wikis with fewer than 100 high-priority linter errors in the main namespace will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. It will happen on 16 May. Other wikis will switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed on all wikis before July 2018. [4][5]Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
I have been selected for GSoC 2018! I couldn’t be happier. This time also I am gonna be working with Wikimedia.
After completing Outreachy 15, I was looking for more work to keep myself busy. Then, my friend Aman Jain suggested me to participate in GSoC. I got to know that Wikimedia is also participating this year. Choosing a project was a bit of a challenge for me since all of them looked so interesting. There were so many new things to learn. I took a lot of time to decide which project I am gonna be participating in.
Completing the first microtask was challenging since this project is a first for me. Anyhow, I completed the first microtask in the middle of my exams and endless hackathons ;). I started working on the proposal pretty late but the experience of Outreachy was really helpful. I was already familiar with phabricator, Gerrit etc. I had to finish my proposal and get the opinion of mentors too.
After submitting the proposal to the GSoC site, I brushed up my python skills which have gone pretty rusty. On 23rd April, I was anxiously waiting for the results. I was elated to see my name on the GSoC site(top of the world feeling :D).
There are many people in Wikimedia cloud team who have offered to help me. Never felt more welcomed :D. The whole journey of getting selected in GSoC was not possible without my two most amazing mentors Bryan Davis and Andrew Bogott. Initially, I was a bit sceptical about participating but Srishti Sethi encouraged me a lot. Thanks to all of these wonderful people.
Looking forward to a thrilling summer of code.
24/04/2018-30/04/2018
How to generate 1D maps from OSM data: example linear maps of public transport stops 1 | © SK53
man_made=carpet_hanger until May 10th.man_made=observatory or ... antenna, further examples are leisure=outdoor_seating or ...beach_resort.| Where | What | When | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| N’Djamena | Mapathon: Bol in Lake Chad | 2018-05-05 |  |
| Dortmund | Mappertreffen | 2018-05-06 | |
| Heidelberg | Semester Start Mapathon with Kathmandu Living Labs | 2018-05-07 | |
| Arlon | Réunion au Pays d’Arlon | 2018-05-08 |  |
| Munich | Münchner Stammtisch | 2018-05-09 | |
| deutscher Mumble-Server | öffentliche Vorstandssitzung FOSSGIS e.V. | 2018-05-09 | |
| El Salvador | Encontro de Dados Abertos | 2018-05-09 | |
| Berlin | 119. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch | 2018-05-10 | |
| Shiki | 東京！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第19回 出張編 小江戸と浅草の中継点「志木」 | 2018-05-12 | |
| Kyoto | 幕末京都マッピングパーティ#04：薩摩藩士と寺田屋騒動 | 2018-05-12 | |
| Davao City | Free & Open Mapping Workshop at Ateneo de Davao University | 2018-05-12 | |
| Rennes | Réunion mensuelle | 2018-05-14 | |
| Nantes | Réunion mensuelle | 2018-05-15 | |
| Lüneburg | Lüneburger Mappertreffen | 2018-05-15 | |
| Cologne Bonn Airport | Bonner Stammtisch | 2018-05-15 | |
| Lyon | Rencontre mensuelle pour tous | 2018-05-15 | |
| Disneyland Paris Marne/Chessy Railway Station | FOSS4G-fr 2018 | 2018-05-15-2018-05-17 | |
| Karlsruhe | Stammtisch | 2018-05-16 | |
| São Paulo | Painel OpenStreetMap no MundoGEO Connect | 2018-05-16 | |
| Mumble Creek | OpenStreetMap Foundation public board meeting | 2018-05-17 | |
| Greater Manchester | OSM UK Annual General Meeting 2018 | 2018-05-19 | |
| Greater Manchester | OSM UK and OpenData Manchester joint meetup/workshops/mapping | 2018-05-19 | |
| Essen | Mappertreffen | 2018-05-24 | |
| Lübeck | Lübecker Mappertreffen | 2018-05-24 | |
| Bordeaux | State of the Map France 2018 | 2018-06-01-2018-06-03 | |
| Milan | State of the Map 2018 (international conference) | 2018-07-28-2018-07-30 | |
| Dar es Salaam | FOSS4G & HOT Summit 2018 | 2018-08-29-2018-08-31 | |
| Bengaluru | State of the Map Asia 2018 (effective date to confirm) | 2018-11-17-2018-11-18 | |
Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropriate.
This weeklyOSM was produced by Anne Ghisla, Nakaner, Polyglot, Rogehm, SK53, Spanholz, Spec80, YoViajo, derFred, jinalfoflia.
Running all tests for MediaWiki and matching what CI/Jenkins is running has been a constant challenge for everyone, myself included. Today I am introducing Quibble, a python script that clone MediaWiki, set it up and run test commands.
It is a follow up to the Vienna Hackathon in 2017. We had a lot of discussion to make the CI jobs reproducible on a local machine and to unify the logic at a single place. Today, I have added a few jobs to
mediawiki/core.
An immediate advantage is that they run in Docker containers and will start running as soon as an execution slot is available. That will be faster than the old jobs (suffixed with -jessie) that had to wait for a
virtual machine to be made available.
A second advantage, is one can exactly reproduce the build on a local computer and even hack code for a fix up.
The setup guide is available from the source repository (integration/quibble.git):
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/plugins/gitiles/integration/quibble/
The minimal example would be:
git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/p/integration/quibble
cd quibble
python3 -m pip install -e .
quibbleA few more details are available in this post on the QA list:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/qa/2018-April/002699.html
Please give it a try and send issues, support requests to Phabricator Quibble project.
It will eventually used for all MediaWiki extensions and skins as well.
by hashar (Antoine "hashar" Musso (WMF)) at May 05, 2018 04:15 AM
by Gerard Meijssen (noreply@blogger.com) at May 04, 2018 11:10 AM
The author and a host of other Wikipedia editors wrote the article on Malouma, a Mauritanian singer, songwriter, and politician. Photo by Marc Ball, CC BY 2.0.
When I was growing up, I never really identified with my history classes. They focused on the “great men” who in theory shaped that history: “great men”: politicians, military heroes, church leaders, and the famous. In these narratives, women were usually mentioned only in the context of their relationship with a more famous man, usually their husband.
I was fascinated by the history that lurked behind—of people who actually built society and sustained each other while great men were trying to build power and create influence. I could see the differences between what textbooks presented as history and real life, as my everyday life, was full of women and men of varying colors, ethnicities, beliefs, and sexual orientations. It was only when I got to university that studying the hidden history was ever an option.
At this time, women’s studies had just been launched as a degree path in US universities, something that both intrigued and appalled me—appalled that we knew so little about women’s participation in historical events, and intrigued by the irony that a group of mostly male professors were teaching us about women who were important for other women’s development. I realized that the people I was studying were being pushed into the “great women” mold and recognized that there was a fundamental difference in what and how I wanted to learn and what teachers wanted to teach.
I wanted to learn about how women participated in the events and developments of the world. Instead, I was being taught about women’s sphere as if it was a separate entity, concerned about and involved in different things than men were. I wanted to learn about the builders of society, the ones who sustained other people, created systems for them to overcome the adversities of life, not the leaders or figureheads, but the teachers, the farmers, the artists, the scientists. The hierarchical measure of contributions, where some are less than others, isn’t interesting to me. I see history more as a circular playing field where many contributed to make the whole. It is far more engaging to see how all the pieces fit into shaping an event than giving one person all the credit.
I discovered Angie Debo, Audre Lorde, Anaïs Nin, and Doris Stevens, among others, and fortunately had professors who might not be ready to teach about these women given the era, but were willing to let me do independent studies on them. In a contemporary studies course, I questioned why women were left out of the stories—how can one teach about the civil rights movement and only refer to Rosa Parks or the Women’s Political Council in tangential asides, as if their actions had been minor? I realized that the only way stories would be told in a different way was if I researched them myself to find the stories behind the official rhetoric. I took courses in research techniques and fell in love with archives, spending hours and hours combing through old documents and newspapers.
Fast forward several years. Textbooks hadn’t changed much, though there was an incremental change in the diversity represented. History books still focused on great men and minimized everyone else’s contributions to our collective history. It took the rise of the internet to finally change who told our history and how it was portrayed.
First and foremost, it made my own research objectives and the exchange of information far easier. Second, I saw the potential for other narratives to reach a wider audience, giving a more balanced perspective on how society developed, how different people contributed, and how we have always been and always will be a jagged mosaic, rather than a monochromatic line drawing.
In mid-2014, I started editing Wikipedia as an unregistered editor. My first edits were to pages dealing with Native American and LGBT history. In November, I created an account and wrote my first article on Tillie Hardwick. Little by little, I added more indigenous women, Latinas, and Caribbean women. I tend to focus on minority women, non-English speaking women, and women whose impact crosses geographic barriers. Finding a group of mentors, which included the editors Dr. Blofeld, Montanabw, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, Ian Pigott, and others, was pivotal—editing Wikipedia is difficult. It is technology-driven and the opposite of academic writing. Slowly, I found my legs and with my mentors became one of the founding members of the WikiProject Women in Red in 2015. Our project works to add women’s stories back into the history of world events.
While we focus on biographies of notable women, a critical part is adding links of those women to the world in which they participated. For example, during an event to create Wikipedia articles on women in the food and drink industry, Sue Barnum and I worked on an anchor article about the history of women in brewing. It allowed us to use it as an article to link to articles of notable women working in the field, as well as to add links to the general article on brewing, which at the time had no information about women’s influence on brewing in emerging nations and prior to European and American industrialization.
I learn as much from writing women’s biographies as I impart from telling their stories. For example, in the pre-internet world, the international links between people and the organizations in which they participated were much stronger than you might imagine. The analytical part of researching the interconnections, and reward of working with editors who want to improve articles, is a motivating factor to me—as is the hope that the women in generations who follow will grow up knowing that women have always been actively involved in the world around them and were not passively allowing the world to go by.
SusunW, Wikipedia editor
I’m back from Wikimedia Conference 2018 in Berlin, where I had the privilege of spending time with some of the most inspiring and lovely people I know: leaders of the global Wikimedia movement. These are people from all across the world who are working together on the Wikimedia mission, and joining them in person is a powerful reminder of how lucky I am to have fallen in with this crowd.
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One of the developments I’m most excited about is Structured Data on Commons. This project will bring first-class metadata support to the image and media files on Wikimedia Commons, including translatable captions and Wikidata integration so that we can tag an image with exactly the things it depicts. This opens up the possibility to do curation and annotation independently of the MediaWiki user interface — such as via the Dashboard, in the same context where we can currently view the media contributions from a group of new users. (In fact, Outreachy intern Urvashi Verma will be laying the groundwork for that kind of curation activity in the Dashboard this summer.) More broadly, it could enable a wide range of “microcontributions” that work well for mobile-only internet users, who so far have been limited in what they can practically contribute to Wikimedia projects.
My main role at the conference centered on our Dashboard software — in particular, the present and future of the global Programs & Events Dashboard that we maintain for use by the global Wikimedia community. It was extremely gratifying to meet so many people who have already been using it — “this has made my work so much easier” is a remark I heard more than a few times — and the questions and concerns I discussed with these folks reinforced my ideas of what the most imporant priorities for further Programs & Events Dashboard development ought to be. I’m also excited to work with Wikimedia Foundation Community Programs team to provide better support for users who have questions or run into problems going forward.
And the personal highlight of the trip? I got to meet recent Outreachy intern Candela! Candela is a developer based in Berlin who is currently working on building diversitytickets.org, and she came by the conference meet some of the folks who’ve been using the Dashboard.
Photo by Sailesh Patnaik, CC BY-SA 4.0.
I recently traveled to Nepal, India and Taiwan to meet with local Wikimedians and pilot a new approach to help program leaders in each country establish, improve and grow their educational programs.
In-context help provides program leaders with the opportunity to get support and feedback that is grounded in the needs of the local Wikimedia community, and the local educational landscape. During the site visits, I supported the local Wikimedia community to advocate to institutional partners, listen to the needs of educators, and plan for high quality education programs.
We know that students learn valuable skills when they contribute to Wikimedia projects. On the education team, we want to empower our program leaders to be able to work with educators. But every location around the globe has different challenges and may require slightly different methods of execution.
At Deerwalk Sifal School, a primary school in Kathmandu, Nepali Wikimedians facilitated an elective course that taught students how to edit Wikipedia. The enthusiasm of the students led the teachers to ask to be trained themselves with one teacher noting, “It wasn’t a viable solution to just train the students. So, we asked to be trained so we could continue the class.” Together with local program leader Saroj Dhakal, I visited 5 institutions, all of which expressed great enthusiasm towards the idea of using Wikimedia projects to support student learning.
The time spent with the local Wikimedia community was also incredibly valuable. During a program planning workshop where we looked at local problems and turned them into project objectives, the Nepali Wikimedians discovered that the potential impact of their activities would be greater than words or bytes added on projects. Especially when thinking about gender equality, they expressed that they thought teaching students about anti-harassment and safe space policies would have a ripple effect in the society with students spreading the idea to their friends and families.
From the group discussions in all three site visit locations, we learned that teachers and Wikimedians really understand how using Wikimedia projects in the classroom gives students skills that they need to be successful in the world. Overall, educators saw the value of Wikimedia projects as contributing to a shift in pedagogy from teacher-centred to student-centered learning by getting students to critically engage with the information they consume.
You can learn more about the experience on the online report.
This pilot trip is shaping the way in which the education program team is offering support for communities all over the world. We now ask ourselves: How can support for education program leaders all over the world be more equitable and transparent?
We are trying to find ways of giving in-context help on a regular basis. In the coming months, we will be piloting an incubation project, where communities can apply for in-context support. If you are interested in this project and would like to get notifications and news, please sign up on Outreach wiki.
Nichole Saad, Program Manager, Community Programs
Wikimedia Foundation
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by Shyamal L. (noreply@blogger.com) at May 03, 2018 08:29 AM
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec | |
| List of birds of India | 7401 | 6193 | 5616 | 7090 | 8768 | 11788 | 11238 | 10102 | 24240 | 10419 | 16052 | 13782 |
| List of birds of Bangalore | 652 | 619 | 947 | 549 | 674 | 543 | 683 | 757 | 574 | 478 | 820 | 568 |
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| Heinroth's 1911 description |
Merkwürdig ist das laute Pfeifen, das Dendrocygna javanica im Fluge hervorbringt. Es wird verursacht durch einen eigenartigen Vorsprung an der Innenfahne der äußersten Handschwinge, die auf der nebenstehenden Abbildung in natürlicher Größe wiedergegeben ist. Den anderen Arten fehlt diese absonderliche Federbildung, und sie fliegen auch anscheinend ohne ein besonders bemerkenswertes Geräusch; bei ihnen werden aber dafür, wenn sie die Flügel öffnen, weil hin auffallende Farben bemerkbar. (Siehe unter "Bedeutung des Flügelspiegels" S. 696.)This translates as
The strange thing is the loud whistle that Dendrocygna javanica produces in flight. It is caused by a curious projection on the inner vane of the outermost primary feather, which is reproduced on the adjacent image in actual size. The other species lack this bizarre feather structure, and they seem to fly without any particularly remarkable sound, but when they open their wings, they have striking colors. (See "Understanding the wing mirror": page 696)And page 696 has this:
Von den mir naher bekannten Dendrocygna-Arten hat autumnalis und discolor einen breiten, weißen, arborea einen deutlich silbergrauen Spiegel, bei arcuata, fulva und eytoni sieht man im Fluge eine leuchtende, durch die Seitenfedern und Oberschwanzdecken erzeugte, um das hintere Körperende gehende Binde, viduata hat den abstechend weißen Kopf, und bei D. javanica, die keinerlei helle Farben hat, ist an die Stelle des optischen ein akustisches Lockmittel getreten: an der Innenfahne der äußersten handschwinge findet sich bei dieser Art ein ganz merkwürdiger, zungenartiger Fortsatz (s. Abbildung S. 673), der beim Flügelschlage ein Pfeifen hervorruft. Es wäre mir sehr erwünscht, wenn andere Beobachter diese von mir aufgestellten Behauptungen bei den übrigen Anseriformes, die meinen Studien bisher nicht zugänglich waren, nachprüften !Which translates to:
From the Dendrocygna species that I know of - autumnalis and discolor have a wide white band, arborea a silvery gray colour, and in arcuata, fulva and eytoni in flight bright colors, produced by the side feathers and upper tail-coverts; viduata has a contrasting white head, and in D. javanica, which has no bright colors, the role of the visual effect is replaced by an acoustic modification:- the inner vane of the outermost primary has a very strange, tongue-like extension (see Figure p. 673), which causes the wing to produce a whistle. It would be very desirable if other observers can confirm my idea with other Anseriformes, that I have not had access to in my studies !
by Shyamal L. (noreply@blogger.com) at May 03, 2018 03:18 AM
The names of the mother and father are confirmed elsewhere as well. But it is odd that no further information is found on his father in the ODNB. Does anyone know further details and sources?He was born in Delhi, India, the third child and eldest son of Major-General Sir William and Lady Elizabeth B. Davies née Field. His father later became Governor of Delhi and was awarded the Order of the Star of India, while his mother was said to be an expert on Indian snakes.
by Shyamal L. (noreply@blogger.com) at May 03, 2018 03:08 AM
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| Looking towards the western horizon - a matrix of tropical montane forest and grassland |
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| The road between Belur and Hassan. Well marked and bordered. Accidental or by design? |
by Shyamal L. (noreply@blogger.com) at May 03, 2018 02:59 AM
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| Smith's idea of the elephant as emphasised by him. |
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| The actual Stela in question |
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| Somnathpur carvings. The figures to the left and right hold the puported cobs in their left hands. (Photo: G41rn8) |
by Shyamal L. (noreply@blogger.com) at May 03, 2018 02:30 AM
"David Lack was the clear leader (30 votes), followed by Ernst Mayr (23), Niko Tinbergen (21), Robert MacArthur (11), Peter Grant (11), Nick Davies (11), Erwin Stresemann (11), Charles Sibley (11), Konrad Lorenz (9), and Donald Farner (8)."
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| Title page of Volume 7 part 2 of Handbuch der Zoologie (1934) |
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| Stresemann (left) in Finland during the Ornithological Congress of 1958. Photo from the Alexander Wetmore album courtesy of Smithsonian Instituion / Biodiversity Heritage Library. |
Einleitung [Introduction]
Definition
Erforschungsgeschichte [Research history]
Haut und Hautgebilde [Epidermis]
Haut: Cutis - Epidermis - Schnabel [beak] - Stirnplatten - Nagel [nails]: Zehennägel- Fingernägel - Sporen - Federn [feathers] - Konturfedern [contour feathers] - Augenwimpern [eyelash], Tastfedern - Pelzdunen - Puderfedern - Pinselfedern - Fadenfedern - Afterschaft - Nestdunen - Stellung der Federn [position of feathers] - Anordnung der Federn [arrangement of feathers] - Schwingfedern [flight feathers] - Deckfedern [coverts] - Diastataxie [diastaxy] - Afterflügel - Oberarmdecken [upper wing coverts] - Steuerfedern [control feathers] - Mauser [moult] - Schnelligkeid des Federwachstums [rate of feather growth?] - Mauserperioden [moult period]- Umfang der Mauser - Doppelte und dreifache Mauser [double and triple moult] - Reihenfolge des Federwechsels [sequence and - Abhängigkeit der Mauser von äusseren und inneren Einflüssen - Schuppen [scales]: Deck-, Lauf-schuppen - Fersenschuppen - Hautdruesen - Färbung von Haut und Hautgebilden [colours of skins and skin formation]: Melanine und Lipochrome - Bildungsort der Lipochrome - Periodischer Faerbungswechsel [periodic colour change] - Federzeichnung - Farbenindruck - Schillerfarben - Farbaberrationen [aberrant colours] - Komplizierte Mutationen
Skelett [Skeleton]
Schädel [skull] - Ersatzknochen - Deckknochen - Bewegungen im Schädel - Unterkiefer - Zweiter Schlundbogen - Driter Schlundbogen - Pneumatizität der Schädelknochen - Wirbelsäule - Rippen - Brustbein - Schultergürtel - Vordere Extremetität - Pneumatizität des Rumpf [pneumatization of the hull] - und Extremitätenskeletts - Ossifikation der Markknochen [Ossification of the medullary bone]
Muskelsystem [Muscular system]
Viszeralmuskulatur - Somatische Muskulatur - Augenmuskulatur [eye muscles] - Parietale Muskeln - Glatte Federnmuskeln [smooth feather muscle] - Hautmuskeln [skin muscles] - Rote und weisse Muskulatur - Muskelkerne
Nervensystem [Nervous system]
Rückenmark [spinal cord] - Spinalnerven - Gehirn - Gehirnnerven III-XII - Kleinhirn - Mittelhirn - Zwischenhirn - Vorderhirn - Autonomes Nervensystem - Paraganglien - Parasympathisches System
Sinnesorgane [Sense organs]
Hautsinnesorgane - Geschmacksorgan - Geruchsorgan - Hörorgan - Labyrinth - Scheckenteil - Vestibularteil - Bogengangteil - Mittelohr - Paratympanisches Organ - Äußerer Gehörgang - Auge - Retina - körper - Akkomodation - Cornea - Sclera - Bulbus - Augenmuskeln - Lidapparat - Assoziation beiderAugen - Augendrüsen
Verdauungssystem [Digestive system]
Mund-Rachenhöhle - Zunge - Histologie der Mund-Rachenhöhle - Drüsen - Faerung der Mundhöhle Oesophagus - Magen - Druesenmagen - Muskelmagen - Innervierung des Magens - Darm - Duodenalschleife - Ileum - Diverticulum caecum vitelli - Blinddärme - Enddarm - Struktur der Darmwand - Kloake - Bursa Fabricii - Innervierung des Darmes - Verdauung - Leber - Pankreas
Klementaschenderivate und Thyreoidea [Respiratory system]
Atmungsorgane
Atemweg - Pharyngo-nasale Luftsäcke - Kehlspalt - Stutzgerüst des Kehlkopfes - Trachea - Freie Bronchien - Syrinx - Syrinxmuskeln - Innvervierung der Syrinx - Sexualdimorphismus im Syrinxbau - Lunge - Pulmonale Luftsäcke - Histologie der Luftsäcke - Bronchialbaum - Physiologie der Atmung - Funktionen der Luftsäcke - Thoraxbewegungen - Kammerung der Leibeshöhle
Zirkulationsorgane [Blood circulation]
Herz - Wärmeschutz -Schutz gegen Ueberhitzung - Körpertemperatur - Arterien: Schicksal der Aortenbögen -Arterien der vorderen Extremität - Arterien der hinteren Extremität - Intersegmentale Arterien - Arterien des Darmkanales - Arterien der Nieren und Keimdrüsen - Venen: Embryonale Entwicklung - Gebiet der Vena cardinalis posterior - Gebiet der Vena cava posterior - Gebiet der Vena hypogastrica - Nierenpfortaderkreislauf - Gebiet der Venae portae - Gebiet der Vena cardinalis anterior - Gebiet der Vena jugularis - Gebiet der Vena vertebralis communis und Vena subclavia - Blutzellen: Leukozyten und Erythrozyten -Thrombozyten - Lymphgefäßsystem — Milz
Urogenitalsystem [Urinogenital system]
Harnapparat — Harn — Nebenniere — Geschlechtsapparat. Entwicklung: Urgeschlechtszellen - Entwicklung der Keimdrüsen — Entwicklung des Müllerschen Ganges - Zustand beim Männchen: Hoden — Reste der Urniere beim Männchen - Nebenhoden - Samenleiter - Übertragung des Sperma - Phalloides Organ - Zustand beim Weibchen: Schwund des rechten Ovars und rechten Ovidukts - Geschlechtsumwandlung - Ovar — Reste von Urniere und Wolffschem Gang beim Weibchen — Ovidukt
Keimzellen [Germ cells]
Ei. Eierstockei — Dotterbildung - Große Wachstumsperiode des Eies - Bilateraler Bau der Oozyte und des Follikels - Follikelsprung - Hau des Reifeies - Sekundäre Eihüllen - Kalkschalc - Färbung der Schale - Schalendicke - Eiform - Legeakt- Eiweiß - Verhältnis des Dottergewichts zum Eiweißgewicht - Zusammensetzung des Eiweißes - Eigröße - Spermium.
Embryonale Entwickelung [Embryo development]
Befruchtung - Furchung - Gastrulation - Primitivstrelfen -Kopffortsatz - Mesoderm -Orientierung der Embryonalanlage - Drehung auf die linke Seite -Eihäute-Dottersack- Resorption des Dotters - Gefäße des Dottersackes - Amnion -Serosa -Allantois - Gefäße der Allantois - Eiweißsack - Bau der Eiweißsackwandung - Resorption des Eiweißes - Verbindungen der Allantois gefäße - Stellung des Embryo im letzten Drittel der Bebrütung - Schlüpfakt -Abbau lies Schalenkalkes - Aufnahme des Dottersackes in die Bauchhöhle-Stellung des Eies während der Bebrütung-Physiologie der Hmbryonalentwickeluug - Ent-Wickelungsdauer -Brutdauer.
Postembryonale Entwickelung [Post-embryonic development]
Nestflüchter und Nesthocker - Dottervorrat - Gewichtszunahme - Nahrungsmenge - Erste Befiederung - Nestlingsdunen - Färbung des Dunenkleides- Tragdauer des Jugendkleides - Eigenschaften der ersten Plugfedern - Färbungs entwickelung - Nestlingszeit - Proportionsverschiebungen - Nahrungsaufnahme der Jungen - Leitmale
Geschlechtsdimorphismus [sexual dimorphism]
Geschlechtschromosomen - Zahlenverhältnis der Geschlechter - Gynandromorphe - Sexualhormone -Geschlechtsunterschiede in der Färbung - Größenverschiedenheit der Geschlechter - Geschlechtsunterschlede im Skelettbau - Geschlechtsunterschiede und Werbung - Unterschiede im Stimmapparat - Periodischer Wechsel des Geschlechts-dimorphismus- Geschlechtsunterschiede im Mauserverlauf - Geschlechtsdimorphismus und Brutpflege - Übertragung männlicher Eigenschaften auf das Weibchen - Rassenunterschiede im geschlechtlichen Färbungsabstand - Mutative Vergrößerung des Geschlechtsdimorphismus
Fortpflanzung [Reproduction]
Werbung. Erreichung der Geschlechtsreife - Fortpflantungsperiode - Zusammenhalt der Geschlechter- Verlobung- Balz - Psychische Selektion- Begattung -Nest. Ort der Eiablage - Nestbautrieb- Nestform- Standort des Nestes- Baukunst als ererbte Anlage - Baustoffe - Verarbeitung der Baustoffe - Dauer des Nestbaues - Aushöhlen von Holz und Erdreich - Benutzung von Ameisen- und Termitenbauten [use of termites and termite nests] - Fehlen des Nestbautriebes - Wiederbenutzung des alten Nestes — Bautätigkeit nach Brutbeginn - Organveranderungen zur Nestbau-Zelt — Ei: Eiabläge und Klima - Eierzahl [number of eggs] — Beziehungen zwischen Eigewicht und Zahl der Eier [Relations between egg weight and number of eggs] — Nachlegen - Nachgelege — Brut [brood] — Polyandrie — Legeabstand - Bebrütung - Schutzfärbung der Eier - Anteil der Geschlechter am Brutgeschäft — Bebruting durch beide Gatten - Ablösung beim Brüten — Verständigungsmittel der Gatten - Triebhandlungen im Dienste der Brutsicherung — Bebrütung durch nur einen Partner - Brutflecke - Kompensation mangelnder Brutflecke — Bebrütung über die normale Brutdauer hinaus - Schlüpfakt — Jungenpflege — Verhalten der Nesthocker - Verhalten der Nestflüchter - Zusammenhalt der Familien — Geselliges Brüten - Polygynie — Ehelosigkeit — Geselliges Leben der Pinguine — Erbrütung der Eier durch Bodenwarme - Brutparasitismus — bei Cuculiden — Färbunganpassung der Kuckuckseier — Größenanpassung der Kuckuckseier — bei Icteriden - bei Ploceiden — bei Indicatoriden — bei Heteronetta — Rasche Embryonalentwickelung der Brutschmarotzer — Schädigung der Wirtsvögel.
Lebensdauer [life spans]
Tag- und Nachtvögel [day and night birds]
Ernährung [nutrition]
Nahrung — Nahrungswahl — Nahrungsaufnahme — Erweiterung von Spalträumen — Bogenförmige Schnäbel — Zusammenspiel von Schnabel und Zunge — Mundwerkzeuge der Nektarsauger — Saugakt — Ornithophile Blüten — Zungen-apparat der Spechte — Nahrung der Spechte — Mundwerkzeuge der körnerfressenden Passeres — Mundwerkzeuge der Papageien — Jagd auf fliegende Beutetiere — Nahrungsaufnahme bei den Raubvögeln— Scharren — Nahrungsaufnahme aus dem Wasser — Vorrat-Sammeln — Zerkleinerung der Nahrung durch Zerrupfen oder Zerschlagen — Prüfung der Nahrung mit dem Geschmackssinn — Tastsinn im Bereich der Mundwerkzeuge — Bildung des Werkzeuges nach dem Bedürfnis — Ausnutzung der Nahrung. Zellulosereiche Nahrung — Darmbakterien — Fleischnahrung — Gallen-farbstoffe - Resorption und Anbau pflanzlicher Farbstoffe — Endozoische Samen-verbreltung durch Vögel
Stoffwechsel und Energiewechsel [Metabolism and energy metabolism]
Chemie des Eies — Zusammensetzung des Dotters — Zusammensetzung des Eierklars — Zusammensetzung von Schalenhaut und Kalkschale — Stoffwechsel des Embryo— Stoffwechsel des Erwachsenen. Erhaltung des ernährungsphysiologischen Gleichgewichts — Mineralstoffwechsel — Eiweißabbau und Harn — Grundumsatz und Leistungszuwachs — Periodisches Schwanken des Fettansatzes — Stoffwechsel im Hunger — Hungerresistenz und Körpergröße — Wasserhaushalt.
Bewegung [Movement]
Bewegungen der Wirbelsäule — Brustwirbelsäule — Halswirbelsäule — Schwanzwirbelsfiule — Bewegungen der hinteren Extremität — Schlafstellung - Ortsbewegung: Laufen und Hüpfen — Gang — Ortsbewegung der Schwimmvögel auf festem Boden — Klettern — Bewegungsform und Bauplan — Längenverhältnis der Zehenglieder — Längenverhältnis von Lauf und Unterschenkel — Bewegungen der vorderen Extremitat — Flügelskelett — Schultergürtel — Schultergelenk — Ellenbogengelenk — Handgelenk — Gelenke zwischen Mittelhand und Fingern — Flügelmuskeln — Muskeln zur Bewegung des — Muskeln zur Bewegung des Vorderarms — Muskeln zur Bewegung der Mittelhand und der Finger — a) Ursprung am Oberarm — b) Ursprung am Vorderarm — c) Ursprung am Metacarpus — Flügelfläche — Propatagium und Metapatagium — Schwungfedern — Bau der Schwungfedern — Spannung der Schwungfedern — Wirkung des Luftdruckes an den Federstrahlen — Erteilung des Vortriebes — Flug: Ruderflug — a) große Vögel — b) kleine Vögel — Flügeltypen — Hubflügel — Schnellflügel — Schwebeflügel — Zahl der Flügelschläge — Zusatzbelastung — Hüpfender Flug — Schwebeflug der Kleinvögel — Gleitflug — Schwirrflug — Rütteln — Flugleistung — Flugarbeit — Ausnutzung der Windkräfte — Statischer Segelflug — Dynamischer Segelflug — Änderung der Höhe — Änderung der Richtung — Abflug — Landüng — Aufgaben des Schwanzes — Verlust des Flugvermögens — Schwimmen — Tauchen — Fußtaucher — a) Kormorane — b) Podiceps, Colymbus, Tauchenten — Flügeltaucher — Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Tauch- und Flugvermögen — Tauchleistungen
Tonerzeugung [Sound generation]
Syrinx und Trachea als Zungenpfeife — Akustik der Zungenpfeifen — Akustik der immwerkzeuge der Vögel — Wirkung der Stimm-Muskeln — Paarige und unpaarige Stimmapparate — Veränderung des von den schwingenden Membranen erzeugten Tones — Resonanzapparate — Biologische Bedeutung der Stimmlaute — Instrumentalmusik
Geographische Verbreitung [Geographical distribution]
Alter des Vogelstammes, der Arten und Rassen — Arten-Zahl — Ausbreitungsschranken
— Verbreitungsmittel — Räumliche Sonderung der Populationen als Vorbedingung der
Artenvermehrung — Artvermehrung als Folge ökologischer Umstellung — Diskontinuierliche Verbreitung als Ergebnis erdgeschichtlichen Geschehens — Regionale Verbreitung der Vögel
Wanderungen [Migration]
Ökologische Ursachen der Wanderungen — Winteraufenthalt — Dauer des Aufenthaltes im Überwinterungsgebiet — Ökologische Ansprüche an das Winterquartier — Traditionelles Festhalten am Winterquartier — Beziehungen zwischen Urheimat und Winterquartier — Überwandern südlicher Populationen durch nördliche — Unbeständige Lage der Winterquartiere — Winteraufenthalt der Albatrosse — Räumliche Ausdehnung des Überwinterungsgebietes — Wanderwege — Ökologisch begründete Umwege — Schleifenförmiger Zugweg — Historisch begründete Umwege — Verlassen der traditionellen Zugbahnen — Breite der Zuggebiete — Leistungen: Beispiele für lange Wanderwege — Beispiele für lange Flugstrecken — Häufigkeit und Dauer der Rasten — Vergleich der täglichen Flugleistungen während der Brutzeit und der Zugzeit — Energiequellen — Orientierung — Optische Orientierung — Flug in großen Höhen — Richtungssinn — Richtungsgefühl und Richtungstrieb — Andressiertes Richtungsgefühl — Artgedächtnis — Steigerung der Orientierungsfähigkeit durch Selektion — Verdriftung — Aufsuchen neuer Brutgebiete — Veranlassung zum Aufbruch — terscheidung zwischen Wettervögeln und Instinktvögeln — Verkettung von Zugtrieb und r;pflanzungszyklus — Zusammenhänge zwischen Zugtrieb und endokrinem System — Beeinflussung des Zuges durch meteorologische Faktoren — Windrichtung — Beziehungen zwischen Zugzeiten und Dauer des Fortpflanzungszyklus — Beziehungen zwischen Zugzeiten und Länge des Wanderweges — Veranlassung zur Einstellung der Wanderung — Trennung nach Alter und Geschlecht — a) im Herbst — b) im Frühjahr —Geselliges Wandern —Zug und Mauser — Stammesgeschichtliches Alter der Zugvögel
Parasiten [Parasites]
Vermes: Trematoden — Cestoden — Nematoden — Acanthocephalen — Pentastomiden — Arthropoden: Acari — Flöhe — Wanzen — Fliegen — Mallophagen
Stammesgeschichte [Evolutionary history]
Stresemann's work is also well illustrated and it makes use of graphs to show how conclusions were arrived at. For instance there is a graph that shows the numbers of male and female larks collected at Danish lighthouses which points to protandry in Spring migration. It clearly was a truly illuminating and broad overview of ornithology in the 1930s and one that was widely appreciated. It is unclear if Salim Ali went through the contents of this work. The only major biography of Stresemann is by Jürgen Haffer, Erich Rutschke and Klaus Wunderlich - all three of whom are no more. Their biography includes several interesting sections but the ones that stand out are by Haffer and include scientometric approaches to examining the life and work of Stresemann. Unfortunately most of the book is in German and there is only a short summary in English. Haffer provides a chronological view of Stresemann's research focus over time using a graphical timeline.  |
| A chronology of Stresemann's research focus from Haffer et al., 2000. |
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| Haffer's phylogeny of avian taxonmy |
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| Photo: Z thomas (Creative Commons) |
33 Pali Hill, BandraAs can be seen from the graph of Haffer, Stresemann really moved into the study of moult towards the 1960s and until the end of his life. He was greatly aided in his research on moult by his (second) wife Vesta, an ornithologist in her own right about whom rather little has been written. Salim Ali notes in his autobiography that Stresemann was his guru and that he routinely wrote enquiries to which detailed replies would be sent without fail but in a difficult cursive handwriting. Perhaps someone can find the archives of Ali's letters and see what is to be learnt there. Ali notes that Stresemann was warm and welcoming in his letters even before he met him, a reason for Ali to choose Berlin over the British Museum. He also wondered how Stresemann managed to keep up with his correspondence given the number of people who wrote to him.
Bombay-50
29 April 1966
Dear Stresemann,
Many thanks for the prompt reply to my query about age, moult, and leg colour in Philomachus. This clarifies the position nicely.
I feel guilty and unhappy not to make fuller use of the exceptional opportunities one gets for studying moults etc. when handling such large numbers of birds for ringing. But unless we can have a much larger team of helpers in our migration study camps than circumstances permit - including some devoted entirely to moult study - this is very difficult. We have to collect arthropod parasites and blood samples from the birds for virus studies, and the various operations connecting with ringing - measuring, weighing, etc - use up all the time and facilities available. How, and for how long, to detain the birds during and after all these operations without harming them, when several hundred birds have to be dealt with under more or less alfresco conditions is another problem. All the same it seems a great pity that such wonderful opportunities cannot be more fully utilized!
With warmest regards, Yours ever
Salim
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| The entrance to Waldfriedhof Dahlem (4 April 2017) |
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