How can the Wikimedia movement not only grow the number of Wikipedia editors and sustain free knowledge on the Internet, but also increase the diversity of voices on the platform? The Wikicurious team would like to share our approach.

Over the past 18 months, Wikicurious has touched down in Dallas health accelerators, Charlotte art museums, Miami libraries, and a Sundance Film Festival pop-up — and each of these events started the same way: someone reached out ti us.

With support from Craig Newmark Philanthropies and the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikicurious travels all over the United States to introduce local communities to editing Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms.

Here’s just a few recent Wikicurious highlights:

• In Miami, participants edited bilingual articles about Caribbean and Latin music while Tito Puente Jr. spoke about preserving Latin music legacy — then closed out the afternoon with a salsa lesson.
• Over twenty editors gathered in Asheville, North Carolina for Women’s History Month and added 7,000 words about underrepresented Appalachian women to Wikipedia.
• This past March, 108 editors met up in Austin to improve articles about local history — and those edits have been viewed more than 875,000 times by people around the world.

So, what actually goes into convening a successful Wikicurious event?

Making editing Wikipedia feel fun and accessible

Wikicurious convenes in-person events tied to culturally relevant themes — art, music, local history — so that editing Wikipedia feels fun and accessible. Each meetup is anchored around a theme that a local community or group of people cares about. This theme is then woven into the Wikipedia training delivered at Wikicurious.

For example, for our recent March event in Austin, the Austin Public Library was celebrating its centennial — 100 years after it started in a small room on South Congress Avenue in 1926 — and the Austin History Center wanted to introduce its vast collection of primary sources to a wider audience.

“It just made sense for us to take our primary resources and the things that people like to use the library for and connect with and promote it more widely through Wikipedia, the people’s encyclopedia,” says Maddy Newquist, Adult Services Librarian at the Austin Public Library.

Wikicurious events are also aimed at attracting people who arrive with their own expertise and collections — and leave having added them to the public record. Austin Typewriter, Ink (ATI), a local typewriter shop and repair studio, co-presented the Austin Wikicurious meetup in March, alongside the Austin History Center.

Everett Henderson, co-founder of ATI, has spent years tracking down typewriters with documented ownership histories — machines linked to known authors, with records of the specific works written on them. Wikicurious helps unlock that “private” knowledge to become a public Wikipedia contribution.

“I’m trying to document the typewriter not just to add value to it but to actually document the stories, the words,” Everett explains. “The more documentation that’s verified and real is also true — a lot of things are hearsay, and that’s not good.”

By partnering with the Austin Public Library, Wikicurious was able to attract Austin residents who regularly visited Wikipedia but who had never even considered becoming an editor.

“I’ve been using Wikipedia basically my whole life,” says APL’s Maddy Newquist. “I was really lucky to have teachers who understood the usefulness of Wikipedia and taught us how to use it really thoughtfully.” For many attendees, the event is the first time the door swings the other way — from reader to contributor.

Local partners bring the venue, the audience, and the cultural context. Wikicurious handles event promotion and other logistics, and, most importantly, Wikipedia training — walking newcomers through the basics of editing, sourcing, and how the Wikipedia community works.

The goal isn’t just to produce edits; it’s to help each person find the overlap between what they know and what Wikipedia is missing.

“Everyone brings their own interests and niche,” says Kevin Payravi, co-founder of WikiPortraits, a popular new initiative that aims to get higher-quality photos onto the Wikimedia platform. “Editing Wikipedia is just a great opportunity for people to really dive into their interests and kind of help improve our collective knowledge.”

Since May 2025, Wikicurious has run events across Texas, North Carolina, Florida, Utah, and New York. Puerto Rico, Chicago, and Los Angeles will join the map later this year.

What you need to bring a Wikicurious event to your community

Wikicurious is always looking for new cities to host an event, and organizations we can collaborate with. If you work with a library, museum, cultural organization, or university — or if you simply know your city has stories Wikipedia is missing — get in touch.

• A venue: A library, museum, university space, or community organization with room for a group
• A local theme: A gap in Wikipedia that connects to something your community already cares about: a history, a music scene, a collection, an anniversary
• A partner organization or two: Co-presenters who bring their own audience and cultural context
• An interest in reaching new people: Wikicurious is designed for beginners, so no prior Wikipedia experience needed from attendees or hosts
• A point of contact: Wikimedia NYC handles training, editorial scaffolding, and program support

Upcoming Wikicurious events across the United States are posted on the Wikimedia NYC Events page and the Wikicurious website: https://wikicurious.org.

Reach out to Crystal Boceta at crystalboceta@wikimedianyc.org or contact Pacita Rudder at pacita@wikimedianyc.org to start the conversation.

Wikicurious is a beginner-friendly workshop and training series designed to teach people how to edit Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. Started by Wikimedia NYC and supported by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the program aims to democratize access to knowledge and combat misinformation by helping community members become active contributors to the encyclopedia.

Recently I did some work on Kenneth L. Gage. He is/was with the CDC. Given the amount of papers to his name, he has/had a distinguished career. Mr Cage has/had many co-authors. Many of them work/worked at the CDC. They are the ones who protect/protected the USA against the plague.

At Wikidata we know about Mr Gage, his papers, his expertise. We could know about his career at the CDC and the careers of his co-authors. Given that these are facts that you do not easily find anywhere else it easily gives the WMF a platform with established facts, not necessarily neutral from a political point of view but verifiably true. 

With a platform where Youtubes get connected to Wikimedia sources we could provide information that the USA press no longer offers. They are bought and verifiably no longer bring the news, all the news.

Thanks,

      GerardM

The Igala Wikimedia Community successfully participated in Wiki Loves Africa 2026 – Rites & Rituals, joining contributors across the continent in documenting and sharing Africa’s stories through freely licensed media. Through a combination of online and in-person activities, the campaign provided an opportunity for community members to learn about Wikimedia Commons, contribute media files, and showcase diverse aspects of Nigerian culture and everyday life to a global audience.

Wiki Loves Africa is an annual photography, video, and audio competition that encourages Africans to document their communities and cultures and make these resources freely available on Wikimedia Commons. For the Igala Wikimedia Community, the campaign served as a platform for preserving local knowledge, telling everyday life story of Nigerians, promoting cultural representation, and introducing new contributors to the Wikimedia movement.

Engaging New Contributors Through Training and Community Outreach

To support participation, the organizing team hosted two campaign events designed to introduce contributors to Wikimedia Commons, free licensing, media documentation techniques, and guide them through the submission process for Wiki Loves Africa 2026.

The campaign began with an online training session held on 13 March 2026 via Zoom, which attracted 19 participants. The session provided an overview of the Wiki Loves Africa campaign, guidance on creating Wikimedia Commons accounts, best practices for photography and media documentation, and practical instructions on uploading files to Commons.

This was followed by a physical training and community meetup on 14 March 2026 at Enspire Hub, Maitama, Abuja. The event brought together 20 participants for hands-on learning, discussions on open knowledge, and practical support for contributors preparing to participate in the competition. The in-person gathering also created an opportunity for participants to network, share experiences, and strengthen community ties.

The campaign attracted 20 participants overall, including 7 new contributors who joined Wikimedia projects for the first time. Through training, mentorship, and ongoing support, participants learned how to contribute high-quality media to Wikimedia Commons and make their work accessible to a global audience.

Capturing and Sharing Nigerian Stories

Participants documented a wide range of subjects that reflect the richness and diversity of daily life in Nigeria. Their efforts resulted in the upload of 237 photographs and 1 audio recording to Wikimedia Commons, contributing valuable open-access resources that can be used across Wikimedia projects and beyond.

One of the highlights of the campaign was a participant-led group photowalk organized in Yola by our community members who joined the campaign launch virtually. The photowalk provided contributors with an opportunity to document local environments, cultural expressions, and everyday experiences while applying the skills they had gained during the training sessions. The activity encouraged collaboration among participants and contributed significantly to the collection of media submitted during the campaign.

The submissions captured elements of community life, cultural practices, occupations, local environments, traditions, and everyday experiences in Nigeria. Together, these contributions help improve the visual representation of Nigerian communities on Wikimedia Commons and ensure that more authentic African stories are accessible to people around the world.

The campaign category and submitted works can be explored through the project page: https://w.wiki/QjuP

Celebrating Outstanding Contributions

At the conclusion of the campaign, the organizing team recognized outstanding contributors whose submissions demonstrated creativity, quality, and strong representation of the campaign theme.

The first prize was awarded to a contributor whose work stood out for its visual storytelling, it captures the ritual of beautifying an African woman submitted by User:Meritkosy.

The second prize recognized another exceptional contribution that effectively captured the everyday life in the market in Nigeria submitted by User:CalebTokula6.

The third prize was awarded to User:Obedmakolo whose work added unique value to the collection of media documenting ritual of making money from selling local snacks, daily life of an Hausa young girl.

These contributions demonstrate the important role community members play in preserving and sharing local knowledge through open platforms.

Building a Stronger Open Knowledge Community

Beyond the media contributions, Wiki Loves Africa 2026 served as a capacity-building initiative for the Igala Wikimedia Community. The campaign provided participants with practical skills in photography, documentation, digital literacy, and Wikimedia contribution workflows.

The involvement of 11 new editors highlights the campaign’s role in expanding participation within the Wikimedia movement and creating pathways for sustained engagement in future projects. By contributing media that represents their communities and experiences, participants became active contributors to the global effort to close knowledge and representation gaps about Africa.

Looking Ahead

The success of Wiki Loves Africa 2026 demonstrates the growing enthusiasm for open knowledge initiatives within the Igala Wikimedia Community. The campaign not only generated valuable media content but also strengthened local participation in Wikimedia projects and encouraged more people to document their communities and cultures for future generations.

As the community continues to grow, the skills, partnerships, and momentum developed during the campaign will support future efforts to preserve and share knowledge through Wikimedia platforms. The organizing team extends its appreciation to all participants, volunteers, and supporters whose contributions made the campaign a success.

Through their photographs, audio contributions, and collaborative activities, participants helped tell stories of Nigerian cultural and everyday life that might otherwise remain undocumented. Their contributions enrich Wikimedia Commons and contribute to a more diverse and representative visual record of Africa.

Starting My Journey in the Wikimedia Indonesia (WMID) Ecosystem

My internship at the Education Division of Wikimedia Indonesia (WMID) became one of the experiences that changed how I see knowledge, collaborative work, and the learning process itself. At the beginning, I came with a fairly simple understanding of Wikimedia. At the time, I understood Wikimedia mainly as something closely related to Wikipedia. Only later did I realize that Wikipedia is just one of many projects under Wikimedia, as the organization that supports and drives them.

My understanding began to grow during the orientation period for new interns, particularly through the WikiLatih Online sessions, a program that introduces how Wikipedia works while guiding participants to make their first contributions. In this session, the learning focused on editing the Indonesian-language Wikipedia, from understanding article structures and using reliable sources to practicing editing directly. From there, I began to understand the Wikimedia ecosystem more comprehensively. I learned that Wikipedia articles are written by volunteers and realized that contributing to Wikimedia projects is not limited to Wikipedia alone. There are many other projects such as Wikidata, Wikivoyage, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, and initiatives that promote knowledge in local languages, all of which open up wide opportunities for collaboration.

In this context, the Education Division plays an important role through programs such as WikiLatih, WikiLatih Mahir, and WikiCendekia, which became the main focus of my internship. Through this involvement, I had the opportunity to contribute to the development of capacity within the open knowledge community.

Understanding the Work Culture at WMID

In the early stage of my internship, I started learning how to edit articles on Indonesian Wikipedia. This experience helped me realize that editing involves more than writing. It requires finding reliable sources, understanding them properly, and presenting the information in a clear and responsible way. I found this process quite challenging, especially because it demands consistency and attention to detail. At the same time, I also began to understand the working culture at Wikimedia Indonesia. The staff works in an open and collaborative manner while still maintaining professional boundaries, even though the entire process is conducted remotely.

From Preparation to the Implementation of WikiCendekia 2026

WikiCendekia 2026 is a training program designed for administrators of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to strengthen their capacity in managing the projects while also providing a space for them to share knowledge and experiences. The program is a continuation of previous training initiatives such as WikiPelatih and earlier editions of WikiCendekia, and in 2026, it was held in Surabaya. At this stage, I began to learn more deeply about how the program was designed and implemented. At first, I imagined WikiCendekia as an ordinary technical training. However, as the process went on, I began to understand that the program has a more specific focus, particularly in strengthening the capacity of administrators across various Wiki projects such as Wikipedia, Wikisource, and other projects in local languages.

During the preparation process, I was involved in several aspects of organizing the program. At the initial stage, I helped draft the training agenda and prepare guidance documents and administrative materials, including coordinating participants’ travel arrangements. I also served as a point of contact for participants during the preparation period. As the event approached, I helped prepare technical needs and supported the sessions by facilitating parts of the program as an MC and moderator. In addition, I contributed to developing the concept for the event documentation and assisted with the publication process after the program concluded. The preparation process also allowed me to interact more closely with administrators through a series of discussions and coordination meetings. Through these interactions, I began to understand how different roles within the program are interconnected and form a structured workflow.

Through this program, I also had the opportunity to travel to Surabaya for the first time and meet the Wikimedia Indonesia team as well as several administrators whom I had previously only known through online interactions. Meeting them in person created a different experience and made the learning process feel more tangible. The supportive atmosphere from the team and the community helped me feel more confident in carrying out my role throughout the WikiCendekia program.

Documenting Local Knowledge from Manado

Beyond my main responsibilities in the Education Division, I also had the opportunity to be involved in the WikiMaknyus program initiated by the Wikimedia Jakarta Community, where I served as a local guide in Manado. WikiMaknyus is a program aimed at documenting traditional cuisines from various regions through photographing dishes and editing related information across several Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikibooks. This activity was also combined with WikiNgamprog, a program that collaborates with various local Wikimedia communities to improve content in regional languages across Wikimedia projects.

Together with the Wikimedia Jakarta team, I supported both of these activities in Manado. I also invited friends in Manado to contribute to Wiki projects by focusing on local culinary topics, tourist destinations, and vocabulary in the Manado language. The enthusiasm of the participants was clearly visible, especially during discussions about vocabulary and pronunciation from the perspective of native speakers. In addition, I also contributed to editing the Manado language Incubator project as part of an effort to encourage the use of local languages in Wikimedia projects. This experience allowed me to explore various Wikimedia projects while also documenting local knowledge in ways that felt more contextual and meaningful.

Reflecting on My Internship Experience at Wikimedia Indonesia

This internship provided me with diverse experiences, both in terms of professional work and personal learning. Throughout the process, I met people who consistently dedicate their efforts to maintaining and contributing to open knowledge. I also had the opportunity to be involved in various programs that enriched my ability to contribute, from WikiLatih to WikiMaknyus, and to get to know the volunteer community more closely, which I had previously only observed through editing activities and various online engagements. From all these experiences, I learned that open knowledge is sustained through structured processes built on collaboration, communication, and a continuous commitment to learning.

What The Keyboard?

People who regularly use two different writing systems—¹like the Cyrillic alphabet for Russian and the Latin alphabet for English—will sometimes accidentally type with the wrong one, especially on a laptop or desktop. They might type Dbrbgtlbz when they meant Википедия (“Wikipedia”), or type Цшлшзувшф (approximately “Tsshlshzuvshf”) when they meant to type Wikipedia. Obviously, this is a recoverable error like any other typo: delete the mistake, switch to the right keyboard, and try again.

Notes From the DWIM Dim Past

However, this kind of thing happens often enough on Russian and Hebrew Wikipedia that, many years ago, the users there created gadgets to ameliorate the problem; the Hebrew original was given the hackerishly humorous name DWIM, an initialism for “do what I mean”. Every time the UI would show as-you-type suggestions, the gadget would check if there were fewer than 10 suggestions (the maximum that can be shown), and if so it would map back and forth between Cyrillic and Latin (or Hebrew and Latin, depending on the wiki), get additional suggestions for the transformed query, if any, and append them to the original suggestion list.

The DWIM gadgets worked well for a long time, but eventually changes to various on-wiki UI libraries had the side effect of eliminating the Javascript hooks they needed to function, and DWIM was no more.

I’d been tracking “wrong-keyboard” queries for a long time—they can be up to 1%² of fulltext queries on Russian Wikipedia—and the Search Team had been thinking about adding “wrong-keyboard Russian” to our cross-wiki language-detection tools.³ Unfortunately, integrating wrong-keyboard detection into cross-wiki language detection requires additional data workflows that we never managed to work on.

After DWIM had been offline for a while and didn’t seem likely to come back, we decided to recreate it on the search backend for as-you-type suggestions. We also realized the same infrastructure could potentially be used for transliterated searches, too!

Transliteration / transliteratsia / Lipyantaran

For various reasons—that surely vary by language, country, device, or even by individual—a lot of people don’t (or maybe even can’t) type in their native script when searching Wikipedia in their language. There has been a long-standing task to allow searchers on Georgian Wikipedia (a.k.a. ვიკიპედია) to search by typing in Latin or Cyrillic—not in English or Russian, to be clear, but in Georgian, transliterated into the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets. I also filed a task a while back to support searching in Romanized⁴ Hindi after discovering that part of the reason that so many searches on Hindi Wikipedia (a.k.a. विकिपीडिया) get no results is that many seem to be in Hindi, but written in the Latin alphabet.

The DWIM second-try model of transforming a query and adding additional results seemed like it could be a good fit for transliteration, too. There were lots of fun languagey complications—as there always are—but overall it did indeed work a lot of the time.

So, you can now type transliteratsia in the Georgian Wikipedia search box and get a suggestion for ტრანსლიტერაცია (“transliteration”), or Lipyantaran in the Hindi Wikipedia search box and get a suggestion for लिप्यंतरण (also “transliteration”).

By the Numbers

We originally enabled DWIM-like wrong-keyboard second-try remapping⁵ for Hebrew- and Russian-language wikis, then added Latin and Cyrillic transliteration remapping for Georgian, and finally Latin transliteration remapping for Hindi.

The usage patterns for as-you-type suggestions vary by language and wiki—some ignore the suggestions and go to fulltext search results or the default page more than others and some generally like clicking on suggestions more than others.

To keep things simple we’re going to just look at two stats for second-try suggestions:

• As a percentage of all “clicks” in the search box at the top of the wiki page. These include hitting return after typing or clicking the “Search” button, clicking “Search for pages containing [your query]” after the suggestions, or clicking on a suggestion.
• As a percentage of suggestion clicks, which is limited to just the presented as-you-type suggestions, whether the normal suggestions or the second-try suggestions.

Keep in mind that not all queries get second-try suggestions. There could be too many regular suggestions to have room for second-try suggestions, or there might be no second-try suggestions for a given query. Also, very small projects are excluded from the list because of data sparsity over the sample period.

Without further ado:

For Hebrew (he) and Russian (ru), the Wikipedia and Wiktionary results are surprisingly similar. Wiktionary sees less usage, probably because there are more titles in Latin script (because there are lots of English, French, Spanish, etc., words in Russian Wiktionary) that can match a Latin query.

Georgian (ka) Wikipedia is broadly similar to Hebrew and Russian Wikipedias, too. Over 1.5% of all clicks in the top-of-page search box and more than 3% of clicks on suggestions is an awesome result.

Then there’s Hindi (hi), which was implemented and evaluated last, but which has the biggest effect! 16% of all clicks in the top-of-page search box and more than half of clicks on any suggestions are from the transliterated suggestions. I feel like this is a huge improvement for searchers while still being indicative of an underlying problem with Hindi/Devanagari input.

Fun Languagey Complications

Hebrew and Russian

The Hebrew DWIM gadget—which I think is the original, at least on-wiki—had a nice character-by-character map that swapped ש and a, נ and b, ב and c, etc. Hebrew doesn’t have an upper/lowercase distinction, so when DWIM was adapted to Russian, they normalized the case before doing their mapping.

Well, that works most of the time, but because Russian has so many more letters in its alphabet, some of them map to punctuation on the US QWERTY keyboard. And while as-you-type search suggestions will mostly⁶ ignore case, as with щ/Щ or o/O, it does not “uppercase” ; (semicolon) to : (colon) so ж and Ж (the same keys on the Russian keyboard) behaved differently from each other. When I noticed this, the Russian Wikipedia gadget did get updated to handle upper- and lowercase better.

When I started working on the search-internal DWIM mappings, I realized that this particular complication was even more complicated. Russian keyboard ю maps to QWERTY keyboard . (period), but Russian . maps to QWERTY / (slash) and Russian / maps to QWERTY | (pipe). There are a few other such chains. Fortunately, the way the mapping was set up ignored this ambiguity in favor of mapping toward Cyrillic, which was the more common case. A fun side effect is that the all-punctuation string :','[' on the US QWERTY keyboard maps to Жэбэхэ on the Russian keyboard.

I discovered that Hebrew had similar problems—like Hebrew ת mapping to QWERTY , (comma), Hebrew , mapping to QWERTY ' (apostrophe), and Hebrew ' mapping to QWERTY w.

My solution to this problem has been to break the query into words and if there is any Hebrew or Russian present, map from that script to Latin, but map from Latin to the “host” script of the wiki by default.

Phew, not too hard! And the ticket for Georgian transliteration promised that it would be “fairly easy”.⁷

Georgian

There are several ways to Romanize Georgian. Some are official. Some are academic. Some are even unambiguous and lossless. But none of those are popular. Instead, we have the dreaded “unofficial system” that’s ambiguous and inconsistent, but easy to type and probably not particularly difficult if you actually speak Georgian.

A big problem with transliteration can occur when the language/script you are coming from has more sounds/letters than the language/script you are going to.⁸ For example, Georgian has the letter თ, which sounds like /tʰ/, and ტ, which sounds like /tʼ/. English doesn’t make the distinction between those two sounds!

Fortunately, unofficial transliterations of Georgian do sometimes use uppercase and lowercase letters differently—like using t for ტ and T for თ—or use digraphs and trigraphs (ts, dz, sh, ch, tch). Of course, sometimes the uppercase Latin characters in a query on Georgian Wikipedia are there because the query is properly capitalized English, adding to the confusion.

So, if we are careful about case,⁹ we can map the trigraphs and digraphs, then map the distinct upper- and lowercase letters, then lowercase everything and map the leftovers, then hope we get a match. Hey, that actually works pretty well!

Whew! Now what about Georgian transliterated into Cyrillic? [….twenty minutes later….] Oh how I long for the days of the unofficial system!

I could only find one list of systematic mapping from Georgian to Russian Cyrillic, on Russian Wikipedia, from an academic paper from 1972! It’s clearly designed to turn Georgian names into something a Russian speaker can pronounce reasonably well, not to losslessly preserve the original Georgian spelling or pronunciation.

I checked to see if there were any Cyrillic queries on Georgian Wikipedia. There aren’t a lot, but there are some. Some are clearly Russian and some are obviously names, but it was clear that making a decent effort and handling Cyrillicized¹⁰ input would probably help someone.

I ended up ignoring case, handling a few digraphs, and leaning heavily on context clues to choose between ambiguous options.

And by context clues, I mean something like: if you were untransliterating a phrase back into English and you had a letter that could be either an f or a v, you’d be smart to choose f if the next letter was l, because fl is fairly common and vl is very rare. You would get “Flad the Impaler” and “Flassic Pickles” wrong, but you’d get most things right. At the beginning or end of the word, between certain letters, before or after other letters—all can help you pick. Fortunately, only т vs თ & ტ and п vs პ & ფ needed that level of careful disambiguation. The results are nowhere near 100% accurate, but they are so much better than nothing.

Hindi

The challenges that Hindi offers are similar to those of Georgian, but dialed up to eleven. Like Georgian, Hindi has a lot more sounds than the Latin alphabet has letters. There are also a number of potentially lossless academic and official transliteration systems for Devanagari, though they have even more orthographic variety than Georgian transliteration systems. Here’s a semi-random sample of transliterations for single characters, most of which no one is ever going to just type into a search bar: ī   R^i   .ll   r̥̄   lṛī   ṉ   ṁ   ḥ   m̐.

The “unofficial system”—shudder!—use for Romanization is even more difficult for Hindi, possibly in part because so many Hindi speakers also speak and write English, and sometimes freely mix the two. Rather than stick to a single Romanization scheme, some Hindi speakers seem to use their greater familiarity with English to transliterate in ways that follow awful English spelling conventions. And if an English word has been borrowed into Hindi it might be Romanized phonetically or just written in English. (As a native English speaker, I was usually able to get a good sense of the Hindi pronunciation from the transliterations—so the system works fine for humans. It’s just hard on computers.)

There are machine learning models designed to handle transliterated Hindi, and some LLMs can probably do a good job, but those are too computationally expensive for as-you-type suggestions, where we need to generate a suggestion on every keystroke. So, I set out to make something much more lightweight.

Despite my goal of a lightweight system, the idea of context-dependent disambiguation of a couple of characters—as used for Cyrillicized Georgian above—exploded into a full-on set of rewrite rules for Romanized Hindi.

Fortunately, I was able to find an open-source, human-generated Romanized Hindi transliteration data set, which made it much easier to evaluate my rewrite rules as I was working on them. Looking at the data also verified the complexity and ambiguity. The mappings are many-to-many, meaning that not only are there often multiple ways to Romanize a given Hindi word, some Romanizations can map to multiple Hindi words. So without an understanding of context, it might be impossible to accurately transliterate Romanized Hindi back to Devanagari.

There are two saving graces with Hindi. First, statistics. While there are sometimes multiple Hindi words that a given transliteration could map to, one is often statistically much more likely than the other. Second, the multiple words are at least somewhat similar. It’s not like the equivalent of Fred and Maynard having the same transliteration; more like Fred and fried. This is where the ability of as-you-type suggestions to handle typos comes in. fried smit is close enough to Fred Smith to match as a suggestion.

I also ended up taking a moderate number of the most frequent transliterated words in my sample of Hindi queries, about 1400 of them, and just hard-coding their most likely Hindi equivalents. This also insulated common words from tweaks to the rewrite rules that might improve a lot of individual words, but get worse on a few really common words. It might also be faster to just look up really common words instead of running them through all the rewrite rules.

As I said before, the results are nowhere near 100% accurate, but they are so much better than nothing.

Future Fulltext Directions

So far, we have replicated (and hopefully somewhat improved) the original DWIM wrong-keyboard functionality for Hebrew and Russian, and expanded the scope to more complex mappings for transliteration in Georgian and Hindi.

However, like the original DWIM gadget, we’re currently still limited to as-you-type suggestions. Submitting a wrong-keyboard query to the fulltext search will typically get few if any results because the query often looks like gibberish. Submitting a transliterated query to the fulltext search is more likely to match something, since the mapping is phonetic, but it’s not a good way to search.

One direction for expanding second-try searching is to consider showing “did you mean” suggestions for fulltext queries. It’s not just a matter of turning it on, though—as always, there are complications.

Because as-you-type suggestions are limited to matching titles, those suggestions can handle one or two typos per query, which can compensate for minor errors in the DWIM or transliteration mapping. Plus, the searcher never sees the exact remapped query used to generate the suggestions; as long as the suggestions are good, it doesn’t matter. And if the remapped query is a complete disaster,¹¹ it generates no suggestions, and the searcher doesn’t see anything amiss.

For “did you mean” suggestions, showing suggestions with ridiculous typos would only further damage their spotty reputation. We also can’t currently filter “did you mean” suggestions that get zero results. I really don’t want to show a typo-riddled suggestion that gets no results! Part of the problem, though, is that we have to search for the remapped suggestion (or at least get the number of results from the search index) to see if it is plausible, and that can be expensive. There is also the issue of prioritizing the sources of possible “did you mean” suggestions—we currently get suggestions from an internal feature of our underlying search engine, from an internal dataset of queries that look like typo corrections, and now plausibly from second-try remapping. We would need to investigate to decide whether a hard-coded prioritization is sufficient, and which order is best—which may vary across languages!—or come up with a very efficient way to rank individual options. That’s not insurmountable, but it isn’t trivial either.

Whether second-try “did you mean” suggestions are useful will probably vary by language and maybe by wiki, since the accuracy and ambiguity of the mappings varies so much between transliteration and wrong-keyboard mappings, and possibly even more so between languages.

More Languages—Help Us Help You!

Another direction for expanding the usefulness of second-try searching is to apply it to other scripts (for transliteration mappings) or keyboards (for wrong-keyboard mappings), which could allow for immediate improvements to as-you-type suggestions on-wiki, and possible future expansion into “did you mean” suggestions.

If you know of a language community that could use this kind of support, let me know in any of the usual ways, or open a Phab ticket and tag Discovery-Search.

And if you love nerding out about this kind of thing, you can check out the Second-Try Searching section of my Notes page, which has recent links to a lot more details on second-try searching, DWIM for Russian and Hebrew, and transliteration for Georgian and Hindi.

__________

¹ Despite it often being treated as a dead giveaway that AI wrote something, human typography nerds—like me!—can overuse em dashes, too! (Here’s a wiki mailing list message from me from 2015 with about 20 artisanal em dashes in it—I typed every one by hand—to prove I’ve pretty much always been this way.) I’m not gonna let AI take credit for my writing—or steal the joy of em dashes from me!

² Discovering that around 1% of Russian Wikipedia fulltext queries appear to be gibberish but actually aren’t was quite surprising! In search, a 1% improvement is often a pretty big deal. For reasonably well-supported languages, it can be hard to make really big improvements to more than 1% of queries if you have a decent stemmer (for inflected languages) and tokenizer (for spaceless languages like Chinese and Thai). Woe unto the heavily inflected spaceless languages.

³ For example, if you search on English Wikipedia for labdarúgó-világbajnokság, mistrovství světa ve fotbale, or 國際足協世界盃 (“football world cup”) they will be recognized as Hungarian, Czech, or Chinese and cross-language results from Hungarian, Czech, or Chinese Wikipedia will be shown. Interestingly, I couldn’t use Wereldkampioenschap voetbal, ワールドカップ, Copa do Mundo, Världsmästerskapet i fotboll, 월드컵, Dünya Kupası, or Giải vô địch bóng đá thế giới as examples because there is so much on English Wikipedia either about the World Cup or in those languages that those queries got too many results to be eligible for cross-wiki results.

⁴ It’s kind of goofy that English often uses the word “Romanization” for transliterating into the Latin Alphabet, but it’s far from the goofiest thing about English. (“However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell every [English] phoneme, and most letters also represent multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context.” And how!)

⁵ People often talk about how German compounds can be so ridiculously long, but really they aren’t that different from long English noun phrases. German just writes them without spaces. I’m not sure which is better. It’s probably easier to parse the elements in English because the words are broken up, but scoping might be easier in German because pieces that strongly go together are attached to each other. It’s a Kopfzerbrechen to be sure.

⁶ There is some exact match logic in there that will re-rank precise matches higher, so that typing Cinemas in the search box on English Wikipedia gives the top suggestion Movie theater (with redirect from Cinemas), but searching for CinemaS (or wild case CiNeMaS or anything that is not an exact match) will give the top suggestion CinemaScope.

⁷ It was not easy. It was not peasy. It was not lemon squeezy. Yet, I didn’t know how easy I had it!

⁸ To be fair, the Latin alphabet doesn’t really have enough letters for all the sounds of English, which is a big contributing factor as to why English spelling is so goofy.

⁹ That is, if we assume sh is being used as a digraph, we would expect it to be uppercased as Sh or SH, but not sH. Things like sH happen more often than I expected—not a lot, but more than I expected—because words sometimes get run together. We can’t catch every corner case, but it’s fun to try.

¹⁰ Cyrillicized is a fun word. Cyrillicization is even better.

¹¹ In fact, this effective filtering of very poor queries is part of how second-try as-you-type suggestions are able to function. For reasons of speed, we have to issue the original query and the remapped query at the same time. So if you search for Википедия (“Wikipedia”) on Russian Wikipedia, there’s a simultaneous second-try search for Dbrbgtlbz, which doesn’t match any titles, so no additional suggestions are generated. By the way, if you do a fulltext search for Dbrbgtlbz on Russian Wikipedia, there currently are two results, both about other software that helps correct wrong-keyboard mistakes and use Википедия/Dbrbgtlbz as an example.

Wikipedia thrives on the contributions of heroic volunteers. Our editors, fact-checkers, and writers keep the world’s largest encyclopedia accurate and up-to-date. But there’s a rampant problem: fewer people are signing up to help the quest of sharing knowledge. Account registrations have been declining for years, with a 6.7% drop over the past year alone (April, month to month). So yes, it is created by heroes who found their path to create an account.

This isn’t just a numbers issue; it’s a threat to the health of Wikipedia’s contributor community, in every language. Each of them are concerned: when fewer people register, fewer stick around to edit, maintain and curate the encyclopedia, and the cycle of decline continues, even worse.

The Wikimedia Foundation works with communities on solutions to change this trend. Meanwhile, we are also exploring the many small blockers that prevent users from succeeding. The Growth team looks for small but impactful changes that could help potential newcomers to join the quest, no matter if they are readers or future editors.

Most new readers and potential editors come to Wikipedia on their phones, but the mobile account creation experience is below industry standards, where signing up is made easy and clear. The option to create an account is hard to find. It is buried under menus or hidden behind confusing prompts. When (lucky) users do find the registration form, it’s cluttered, outdated, and difficult to navigate, especially on small screens. It is the residence of all sorts of warnings, complex instructions, and, paradoxically, too much greetings! 

Many users encounter friction before they even complete registration. Fortunately, many of these barriers can be addressed through straightforward usability improvements.

The Growth team has identified several areas for improvement and has begun testing potential solutions. These experiments focus first on mobile experiences, with successful changes potentially expanding to desktop as well.

The well-hidden account creation process

On mobile, the “Create Account” option is hidden or confusing. Can you find it? There is no sign of it. Enmarking the path is a good way to take the first step, so we added a prominent user icon to the mobile header, so users can find it with a single tap. 

The overwhelming registration form

The current registration form can feel overwhelming, especially on mobile devices where the keyboard reduces the visible screen space even further. The form includes redundant branding, lengthy help text, confusing warning messages, and dense instructions that make the process frustrating and difficult to complete.

 
The updated design aims to create a cleaner and more intuitive experience. By simplifying the layout, improving visual hierarchy, and reducing unnecessary text, the form becomes easier to understand and navigate.

Early testing suggests that even small changes, such as clearer instructions, improved spacing, and real-time feedback, can significantly reduce friction and make registration feel more approachable.

As part of this work, the account creation form is also being updated to use Codex, Wikimedia’s design system.

Pick a username… but not this one.

What makes unique humans enter Wikipedia is their unique username. Yes, it is possible to edit with no account, but the benefits of having an account should be highlighted (more on this later).

Finding the right username is an overwhelming task. It must suit you, but also follow some rules. 

We introduce a real-time username validation to provide immediate feedback: is the username taken? It is better to check at this step, instead of after you clicked on “create account”! 

The team is also testing a shorter and more accessible explanation of the username policy. Instead of directing newcomers to a long and complex policy page, the new approach provides concise guidance directly within the signup experience.

Additional improvements include standard usability features such as a “reveal password” option, helping users avoid mistakes while entering passwords on mobile devices.

Oops, I’m logged-out!

Now that you have an account, you are free to log in and out when you want. As it happened to many editors (including several Growth team members), editing without being logged-in assigns you a temp account. Then your edits can’t be re-attached to your main account.

The current logged-out warning message does little to encourage users to sign in: it is just a reminder for users who signed-out! In some cases, it even prioritizes editing without an account before explaining the benefits of logging in.

The redesigned experience better highlights the value of having an account, including saving edits, building a reputation, accessing mentorship, and using personalized features. The login option is also surfaced more prominently for returning contributors, while anonymous editing remains available for those who prefer it.

Is it working? Our A/B test is conclusive: 27% of users created an account, while 16% shifted from a temporary account to a permanent one. Soon, we will deploy the new interface to all wikis.

Future explorations?

The Growth team wants to pursue the work on other improvements. Your ideas are more than welcomed! 

One area of exploration is reducing the complexity of the registration process itself, particularly around username and password creation. Breaking the process into smaller, more manageable steps could help reduce abandonment.

We’d like to encourage temporary users to create full accounts at key moments, like after they make their first edit. Our initial explorations highlight what they gain: a permanent identity, access to more tools and services (like reading lists, suggested edits or a mentor), and a stronger connection to the community. Or, for what matters to most of them: getting credit for future edits, building a reputation as an editor or tracking their edit history. 

Many readers are also unaware of the features available to registered users. Future work may explore surfacing tools such as Reading Lists to logged-out readers while showing how creating an account unlocks a more personalized and connected experience.

A better account creation journey will not solve contributor decline on its own. But reducing friction, improving clarity, and making participation feel more welcoming can help more curious readers take the first step toward becoming contributors. Maybe we should start with another stop users face: suggesting usernames? 

And curious minds are one click away from learning more about this project and sharing their ideas and feedback. 

Wiki Education is pleased to welcome a new staff member to our team, Derek Bigelow! 

As our new Programs Operations Specialist, Derek will manage the systems, data, and communications infrastructure at the heart of our programs. From guiding participants through their first engagement with Wiki Education to maintaining the data integrity that informs our decision-making, this role shapes the experience of our participants at every turn.

Derek brings a wide array of email, marketing, and operations experience to Wiki Education, including work across the tech, travel, and nonprofit sectors. Most recently he led merchandising strategy and operational efficiency as a program manager at Chewy and previously served as the Email and Digital Marketing Specialist at Cascade PBS.

Derek earned his Bachelor’s degree in Business Management and Marketing from Daemen University and is looking to further his education with a degree in Nonprofit Leadership in the coming years.

Derek has called Seattle home since 2005 where he enjoys exploring the city and natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, playing sports with friends, attending concerts, and tinkering with his list of ever-growing hobbies.

May has been packed with activity at Wikimedia Ghana User Group (WMGH), from our English Wikipedia 101 Workshops in different parts of Ghana, to the start of Saturday editing sessions in Accra and the launch of the Wiki Loves Places campaign. There are also some exciting opportunities for the community and organisers!

Read on for the highlights!

The Ghana Edits Wikipedia Roadshow Went to 4 Regions in May!

This May, the Roadshow bus made stops in 4 regions in Ghana including Bolgatanga, Cape Coast, Kumasi and Accra, introducing participants to the basics of Wikipedia editing and ways to improve content about Ghana online.

Participants also explored the different ways to contribute, learned where their impact was most felt and published their first edits!

A big Wiki love to all who made it possible to host workshops simultaneously across regions. Your support continues to help us strengthen editing capacity equitably across Ghana.

Saturday Editing Sessions for the Community & New Editors Commence

Weekly Saturday editing sessions are now underway at the Work from Home Workspace in Accra.

The pilot session took place on 23 May 2026 and will run through to June. Participants with no prior editing experience were trained while existing editors in the community connected in person after months of online editathons.

The sessions also give newer editors a chance to practice editing and build confidence. We look forward to welcoming more new editors and seeing more members of the community join us in upcoming sessions.

English Wikipedia 101 with Newcomer Growth Features  

On 30 May 2026, WMGH hosted an exploratory English Wikipedia 101 workshop at the Work From Home (Workspace) in Accra!  

Participants learned to edit independently with Wikipedia’s Newcomer Growth Features and shared feedback about their experience. They also explored Wikipedia reading through the mobile app, and signed up for the Global Reading Challenge.

The session offered valuable insights into the newcomer experience with the tools while equipping participants with knowledge of key editing guidelines and the skills to continue contributing to free knowledge online.

Wiki Loves Places in Ghana – 2026

Wiki Loves Places aims to document places in Ghana on Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and OpenStreetMap, using photos with location information on them. The campaign launched on 28 May 2026, will run through June, and is open to everyone!

Contributors can photograph schools, hospitals, roads, markets, and many more. Top contributors will receive rewards!

Learn more and participate: w.wiki/NfY4

Opportunities for the WMGH Community this May

Through the Shared Community Resources Program, WMGH is supporting members of the community as well as organisers in Accra, Ghana to host events in June. The program supports mission-aligned communities in Ghana by sharing resources which they may lack funding for.

Free refreshments and Lunch for Your Wikimedia Event
Up to three organisers will receive event space, refreshments and lunch to host Wiki-related events. If you have an event you want to host, we’d love to hear from you! To apply, email: team[@]wmgh.org.

Looking Ahead

We are excited about the new additions to our community and we encourage members of the regional nodes they belong to, and the larger community, to support and mentor them as they contribute to closing knowledge gaps and improving content about Ghana.

As always, we thank our contributors for every edit and effort that helps expand the sum of all free knowledge.

Warmly,
Wikimedia Ghana User Group

The Release-Engineering-Team of the Wikimedia Foundation just deployed an upgrade of Wikimedia Phabricator.

If you use a web browser more than 11 years old: Please upgrade. Visiting Phabricator now requires Chrome 36, Edge 14, Safari 12, Firefox 39, Opera 23 or newer, in order to have the webfont rendered.

Some of the bug fixes and improvements:

• Projects UX:
  • Render project tags of archived milestones in Disabled style
  • Set parent project color for milestones in autocompletion fields
• Project workboards:
  • Milestone creation: Propose importing previous milestone's columns (by Valerio)
  • Scroll only long left sidebar instead of page (by A smart kitten)
  • Hide the arrow on collapsible column headers on Safari browser (by A smart kitten)
  • Do not create a second default workboard column on an existing disabled board
• Conduit API:
  • Many improved, clearer error messages for invalid input
  • Docs: List the available Supported Values for more select field options of Edit endpoints
  • Settings: Add a Copy button to Personal API Token dialog
  • Settings: Allow setting a custom name for Conduit Tokens
  • maniphest.search: Support outputting subtasks (dependsOn)
  • maniphest.search: Support outputting parent tasks (dependedOnBy)
  • project.search: Support outputting alternative project hashtags
• Dark Mode: Should be finally pretty usable under "Personal Settings > Display Preferences > Accessibility"
• Files:
  • Increase maximum Image File Transform pixel dimensions
  • Always show 'Authored By' (by Valerio)
  • Disable numerous interactions for temporary files
  • Fix wrong image file dimensions in "Default Alt Text"
• Diffusion repository browsing: Display associated project tags on repository main page
• UX:
  • Prevent accidental closure of some form popups (by Valerio)
  • Object selection dialog: Fix word-break on long titles
• Global Feed: Show Additional Details link in Feed (by avivey)
• Phame blogs: Add text/html self link in Phame atom feed
• Passphrase: Allow filtering credentials by author (by Valerio)
• Search:
  • Fix missing user results in "open items" search results
  • UX: Display Query Errors also below the Search form area
• Account Registration UX: Provide specific details why a username is invalid (by Pppery)
• Pholio Mocks:
  • Fix altered breadcrumb and header on validation error (by Valerio)
  • Do not allow to unset the image title (by Valerio)
• For Admins only:
  • Policies: Introduce Named Reusable Policies (by avivey)
  • Use Security Session instead of MFA Token for comment removal
  • Allow filtering Bulk Job Query results by status
  • Require Multi-Factor Auth to Disable/Enable apps (by Valerio)
  • Allow user account creators to send Email Invitations (by Valerio)
  • All Settings page: Grey out settings of disabled applications
• For folks who enjoy code interaction: "Personal Settings > Developer Settings" offers a "Developer Tools" mode
• Translations: Numerous internationalization support improvements (by Pppery)
• many other small fixes and future PHP compatibility improvements
• numerous small accessibility, performance, CSS fixes/improvements

Downstream deployment task: T410849: Update to Phorge/Arcanist upstream 2026-06-01

Upstream changelogs:

• https://we.phorge.it/source/phorge/history/master/
• https://we.phorge.it/source/arcanist/history/master/

If you have comments or questions about Phab, please bring them up on the Phabricator Talk page!

Korean Wikimedians attended the ESEAP Conference 2026, held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, from May 15 to 17, 2026. Held at the conference was successfully hosted under the main theme of “New Era of ESEAP: Pioneer the Future Together!”. Among the participants included two neurodiverse individuals (Real_riism and Shula) from South Korea. Here, we take a look at the conference through the eyes of these neurodiverse participants.

Discovering diversity through a variety of sessions and refreshments

The conference was held in three locations: the main room and two smaller rooms. It was great that attendees could choose a room based on their interests to attend lectures or participate in workshops. Just when I started to feel my energy levels dropping during the conference, there were morning and afternoon tea breaks, so I was able to enjoy snacks and drinks throughout the event. Even if you aren’t neurodivergent, everyone would welcome and appreciate such well-provided snacks and meals. While there were certainly many familiar foods, upon closer inspection, there were many dishes I was trying for the first time in Kaohsiung, which made it feel fresh and exciting. I was particularly impressed by a drink similar to Korean sikhye, but made with mung beans instead of rice grains.

Doing phototaking volunteer work.

All participants selected as scholarship recipients for the conference were required to perform volunteer work, and our neurodiverse participants were assigned the role of photographers. This volunteer work required a DSLR or mirrorless camera; while Real_rism, who has been using a camera for three years, was able to take photos easily, However Shula had no prior experience operating a mirrorless camera. Before leaving for the conference, with Real_rism’s help, we took the time to learn everything from basic camera operations to the three elements of photography. The world of photography we first encountered was surprisingly wonderful. We practiced portrait photography by taking portraits of each other, just as we would at the conference. 

While volunteering as a photographer, I was asked to take photos of the lightning talks. When Real_rism had to leave early due to health reasons, Shula stepped in and took photos diligently.

Of course, I couldn’t take photos of every participant or every talk. I wasn’t allowed to take photos or record participants wearing red lanyards or during talks marked “No Recording,” which made the time I spent with them feel even more precious.

Meet fellow neurodivergent from ESEAP region.

With the help of other Korean participant’s support, Real_rism was able to exchange business cards and chat with other neurodiverse individuals. In particular, Professor Kitamura Sae, who specializes in Japan’s samurai era, showed great interest in the neurodiversity project and expressed a desire to establish a user group for neurodiverse individuals in Japan. Later, Professor Sae took the stage during the neurodiversity project presentation and asked about the purpose of the Infinity Edit-a-thon.

Give a presentation regarding neurodiversity

Above all, what made me most proud as a person with a neurological diversity was that Real_rism gave a presentation at the conference venue on the third day. The topic was: “Recording Neurodiversity: Beyond the boundaries of Wikimedia and Neurodivergent communities”.

Neurodiversity is a perspective that views neurological differences as part of human diversity, but it is also closely linked to identity, culture, community, and social movements. Neurodiversity prompts society to rethink how it understands difference and diversity, without denying the existence of disabilities.

According to the presentation, neurodiverse individuals in Korea have been unilaterally defined and documented by other groups, such as researchers, doctors, the media, and institutions. However, the neurodiversity project introduced here has consistently created opportunities for neurodiverse individuals themselves to document their own language, experiences, and history. Currently, this project is carrying out various activities, including Autism Pride Day, edit-a-thons, photo walks, lectures, and pamphlets. These activities share the common goal of enabling neurodiverse individuals to participate socially, intellectually, and culturally.

Listening to the presentations together allowed us to reflect once again on the significance of these activities, and it was a truly meaningful experience. Even though Real_rism spoke with a trembling voice due to nerves, they managed to keep the presentation exactly within the allotted 15 minutes, which really showed how much effort they had put in.

A Conference That Ended on a High Note

Here are some reflections from participants with neurodiversity:

Shula: As a person with a neurodiverse condition, I was worried about catching an early morning flight the day after the conference ended, but the organizers arranged a taxi to Kaohsiung Airport, so I was able to return home without any issues. It was a wonderful experience where all my colleagues from Wikimedia Korea who traveled with me checked in on each other’s well-being and actively participated throughout the conference.

Real_rism: After a heartfelt farewell, I checked out at 4 a.m. to catch my early morning flight the next day and hurriedly hopped into a taxi. The moment I arrived at the airport and passed through immigration, I could feel the beautiful sunlight spreading across the duty-free area. Seeing that light, I truly felt that coming to the conference had been the right decision, and it felt as though all the fatigue I’d been carrying had vanished.

Before joining the Africa Wiki Women On-Wiki Skills Mentorship Program, I had little knowledge about Wikimedia platforms and how they function. I was curious to learn new digital skills and explore opportunities that could help me grow personally and professionally. Joining the program became a turning point for me, as it exposed me to a world of knowledge sharing, collaboration, and online contribution.

Skills

During the mentorship program, I gained valuable skills in using different Wikimedia platforms such as Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. I learned how to edit and improve articles, upload media files properly, and contribute meaningful information online. The program also improved my research, communication, and digital literacy skills. Through assignments and practical sessions, I became more confident in navigating online tools and contributing responsibly to open knowledge.

Growth

The mentorship program contributed greatly to my personal and academic growth. At first, I found some tasks challenging because everything was new to me, but with consistency, guidance from mentors, and continuous practice, I improved over time. The experience taught me patience, teamwork, and the importance of continuous learning. I also became more confident in sharing ideas and participating in collaborative activities with others.

Impact

The Wikimedia Mentorship Program has had a positive impact on my life. It opened my mind to the importance of free knowledge and how individuals can contribute to educating people around the world. The skills and experience I gained have inspired me to continue contributing to Wikimedia projects and to share what I have learned with others in my community. This program has not only empowered me digitally but has also motivated me to keep learning, growing, and making meaningful impact

Conclusion

Overall, my experience in the Africa Wiki Women On-Wiki Skills Mentorship Program was insightful, educational, and inspiring. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from experienced mentors and connect with other learners. The journey has equipped me with valuable skills, increased my confidence, and encouraged me to contribute positively to the digital world.

Through my experience, I hope others will understand that learning new skills and contributing to open knowledge is possible for anyone who is willing to learn and grow. I encourage others to take advantage of opportunities like this mentorship program, remain curious, and never be afraid to step outside their comfort zone. With dedication, consistency, and the right guidance, anyone can develop valuable skills, make meaningful contributions, and create a positive impact in their community and beyond.

Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on May 8. Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta.

Highlights

• Community Wishlist discussion: Product & Technology introduced changes meant to increase the number and complexity of wishes fulfilled, including the disbanding of the Community Tech team. They are engaging in discussions about a proposed direction for the wishlist from community members. Includes ways to structure annual voting, better tracking of wishes, removing focus areas, and staffing updates.
• Digital Public Goods: The Wikimedia Foundation has become a member of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA).
• Better bot detection: A trial of hCaptcha on several Wikipedias, including English, French, and Japanese, showed it can effectively detect and deter bad-faith automated activity, on its own and by giving checkusers and stewards signals to look into. Based on these results, hCaptcha will be rolled out across all wikis. See the project page for technical information about the implementation and privacy protections.

Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure

See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

• A better way to give credit: The Wikimedia Attribution Framework and API makes it simple for developers to fairly credit volunteer contribution. When anyone encounters Wikimedia content, we want them to know that it comes from our projects, and they are invited to participate.
• Baby Globe joins the Reading Challenge: The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps released the 25-day reading challenge, to drive readers engagement through reading milestones. To track their reading streak during the challenge, users can add a widget featuring Baby Globe to their home screen.
• Account security: The Foundation is technically enforcing that all privileges that enable users to take security- or privacy-sensitive actions can only be held by users who have enabled two-factor authentication. Logging in with passkeys is quicker than logging in without two-factor authentication. In addition, logged-in users can see a banner encouraging them to confirm their email address. These changes secure individual accounts as well as communities and the wikis.
• Incident reporting form: The Foundation began a trial on English Wikipedia of the incident reporting form. 60% of unblocked logged-in users see a new Report button, allowing them to report conduct issues.
• Encouraging account creation: Following a successful account creation experiment, an improved logged-out edit warning message will be deployed to all Wikimedia wikis this week. The change will only affect logged-out users on mobile web who open an editing session.
• Wikimedia Android App: The Wikipedia Android App is at the Phase 1 of redesigning its Home Feed. The new feed includes two tabs: Community, featuring refreshed Explore content, and For You, with personalized reading recommendations based on reader interests and activity. The For You feed refreshes daily with updated suggestions.
• Better discovery of images: The Image Browsing beta feature was rolled out for all Wikipedias on mobile following two successful experiments. The beta feature will include a carousel of all an article’s images at the top of the article, with controls for editors to exclude images from the article’s carousel or to exclude an article from the feature entirely.
• Reading Lists feature: The Foundation is conducting an experiment to show the reading lists feature, which is still in development, to logged-out mobile readers to test whether it encourages account creation at a higher rate compared to the watchstar button. The experiment was launched on May 18 on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu wikis, and will run for a month.

• Testing Suggestion Mode: Suggestion Mode was released as an A/B test for newcomer editors on the mobile website at ~15 Wikipedias. The experiment will measure its impact on the proportion of newcomer mobile web edit sessions that result in constructive (un-reverted) article edits. It will also evaluate the feature’s impact on editor retention and monitor changes in revert and block rates.
• Wikifunctions now supports Wikidata references: References in Wikidata statements are now available on Wikifunctions, and you now can use external links in Wikifunctions-generated citations. This allows the use of more than 1.3 billion references available in Wikidata and adding them as citations to individual statements in Abstract Wikipedia.
• Pilot wikis adopting Abstract Wikipedia: The Abstract Wikipedia team has identified five potential pilot wikis to assess their interest in adopting abstract articles on their wikis. The pilots are Malayalam, Bengali, Dagbani, Arabic, and Indonesian Wikipedia. If your community is interested in becoming a pilot, let us know on Meta.
• Latest experiments: An upcoming experiment is testing whether we can serve readers better when a footnote click in read mode shows the full bibliographic information rather than flying them to the reference list. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
• Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 20, 21, 22, 23 include an experiment to test a new Share Card feature that allows readers to create visually engaging cards from Wikipedia articles and share them online See also the 92 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.

Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support

See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events

• Tech blog moved to Diff: The migration of the Techblog to Diff is now complete: 138 posts going back over a decade have been successfully migrated. Diff is now happy to welcome technology-focused blog posts with renewed vigor.
• What’s new in the Wikipedia Library: Access to the American Psychological Association was renewed and collections from the Harvard Business Review and Swiss Media Database (Swissdox) are now available to editors who are eligible for The Wikipedia Library.
• New course on WikiLearn: A free self-paced online course, designed for researchers who want to make their field more visible on Wikipedia, was launched on WikiLearn. Share “Wikipedia for Researchers” if you work with early-career researchers, teach in an academic institution, or support open knowledge communities.
• Wiki Mentor Africa: The first edition of Wiki Mentor Africa – Women Tech Summit brought together over 315 registered participants across Africa to learn, explore, and grow in tech together.
• Let’s Connect Learning Clinic: If you missed it, you can now watch the recording of the Let’s Connect Learning Clinic “How to support up-and-coming groups in the movement as a long-time Wikimedian” with Wikimedistas El Salvador.
• Community Conferences: Registration for WikiConference North America and Queering Wiki Conference is now opened. Call for Speakers for the Queering Wiki is also opened until June 30.

Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness

See also: Progress on the annual plan

• Sharing the Form 990s: The Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Endowment published their Form 990s, covering the fiscal year that ran from July 2024 to June 2025. The Form 990 is an annual form required of all nonprofit organizations in the United States. You can read the highlights on Form 990 for the Foundation and Form 990 for the Endowment on Meta-Wiki.
• Wikimedia Enterprise: Wikimedia Enterprise’s free API accounts gets a substantial upgrade across the Snapshot and On-demand APIs, including free access to Structured Contents Snapshots.
• Structured Contents: How Databricks Parsed Wikipedia to Markdown with Python.

Board and Board committee updates

See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter

• Board selection process: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is reviewing and improving how it selects new members. The goal is to ensure that there is the right mix of expertise and community representation on the board. Join the conversation on 16 June at 17:00 UTC, and share your ideas on the talk page.

Other Movement curated newsletters & news

See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters

If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation’s work, contact us!

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The Dagbani Wikimedians User Group organized a practical Wikipedia training session for members of the BACE Wiki Hub on 6 June 2026. The training formed part of ongoing efforts to equip new and existing contributors with the skills needed to effectively contribute to Wikimedia projects and support the growth of free knowledge.

The session began with a recap of the previous training. Participants reflected on lessons learned from earlier sessions and discussed how they had applied those skills in their editing activities. The recap also provided an opportunity for the facilitator Alhaj Darajaati to address questions and clarify concepts that participants found challenging. This helped create a smooth transition into the day’s training topics.

One of the highlights of the training was the creation of ten new Wikipedia accounts for participants who were joining the Wikimedia movement for the first time. The newly registered editors consisted of five females and five males, demonstrating a balanced representation of participants. The addition of these new contributors marks an important step in expanding the editing community and encouraging more people to contribute to open knowledge platforms.

The training focused on several key aspects of Wikipedia editing. Participants were introduced to the process of adding sections to Wikipedia articles to improve article organization and readability. They also learned how to create interlinks between articles, an important feature that helps readers navigate related content across Wikipedia.

Another topic covered during the session was the addition of databoxes, commonly known as infoboxes. The facilitator explained the role of infoboxes in presenting key information in a structured format and demonstrated how editors can add and manage them within articles.

Participants were also trained on how to add references to Wikipedia articles. Emphasis was placed on the importance of verifiable and reliable sources in maintaining the credibility of information on the platform. The facilitator guided participants through the process of inserting citations and ensuring that information added to articles could be traced to trustworthy sources.

The training further explored the process of adding images to Wikipedia articles. Participants learned how images can enhance the quality and visual appeal of articles while also supporting readers’ understanding of the content. The session included guidance on selecting appropriate images and correctly placing them within articles.

To reinforce the concepts taught during the presentations, the training concluded with a hands-on editing session. Participants were given the opportunity to practice the skills they had learned by making edits, adding references, inserting images, creating sections, and linking articles. Core team members from the User Group provided one-on-one support and feedback throughout the exercise, ensuring that participants gained practical experience.

The training reflects the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group’s commitment to building the capacity of emerging editors and strengthening community participation in Wikimedia projects. Through regular training and mentorship, the group continues to create opportunities for individuals to acquire digital knowledge-sharing skills and contribute meaningful content to Wikimedia platforms. The engagement with BACE Wiki Hub members represents another important step toward growing a vibrant community of editors dedicated to preserving and sharing knowledge.

... Mr. Hume who lives in a most picturesque situation high up on Jakko, the house being about 7800 feet above the level of the sea. From my bedroom window I had a fine view of the snowy range. ... at last I stood in the celebrated museum and gazed at the dozens upon dozens of tin cases which filled the room ... quite three times as large as our meeting-room at the Zoological Society, and, of course, much more lofty. Throughout this large room went three rows of table-cases with glass tops, in which were arranged a series of the birds of India sufficient for the identification of each species, while underneath these table-cases were enormous cabinets made of tin, with trays inside, containing series of the birds represented in the table-cases above. All the specimens were carefully done up in brown-paper cases, each labelled outside with full particulars of the specimen within. Fancy the labour this represents with 60,000 specimens! The tin cabinets were all of materials of the best quality, specially ordered from England, and put together by the best Calcutta workmen. At each end of the room were racks reaching up to the ceiling, and containing immense tin cases full of birds. As one of these racks had to be taken down during the repairs of the north end of the museum, the entire space between the table-cases was taken up by the tin cases formerly housed in it, so that there was literally no space to walk between the rows. On the western side of the museum was the library, reached by a descent of three stops—a cheerful room, furnished with large tables, and containing, besides the egg-cabinets, a well-chosen set of working volumes. ... In a few minutes an immense series of specimens could be spread out on the tables, while all the books were at hand for immediate reference. ... we went below into the basement, which consisted of eight great rooms, six of them full, from floor to ceilings of cases of birds, while at the back of the house two large verandahs were piled high with cases full of large birds, such as Pelicans, Cranes, Vultures, &c.

I was certainly not hoping to find Hume's home as described but the situation turned out to be a lot worse. The first thing I did was to contact Professor Sriram Mehrotra, a senior historian who has published on the origins of the Indian National Congress. Prof. Mehrotra explained that Rothney Castle had long been altered with only the front facade retained along with the wood-framed conservatories. He said I could go and ask the caretaker for permission to see the grounds. He was sorry that he could not accompany me as it was physically demanding and he said that "the place moved him to tears." Professor Mehrotra also told me about how he had decided to live in Shimla simply because of his interest in Hume! I left him and walked to Christ Church and took the left branch going up to Jakhoo with some hopes. I met the caretaker of Rothney Castle in the garden where she was walking her dogs on a flat lawn, probably the same garden at the end of which there once had been a star-shaped flower bed, scene of the infamous brooch incident with Madame Blavatsky (see the theosophy section in Hume's biography on Wikipedia). It was a bit of a disappointment however as the caretaker informed me that I could not see the grounds unless the owner who lived in Delhi permitted it. Rothney Castle has changed hands so many times that it probably has nothing to match with what Bowdler-Sharpe saw and the grounds may very soon be entirely unrecognizable but for the name plaque at the entrance. Another patch of land in front of Rothney Castle was being prepared for what might become a multi-storeyed building. A botanist friend had shown me a 19th century painting of Shimla made by Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming. In her painting, the only building visible on Jakko Hill behind Christ Church is Rothney Castle. The vegetation on Shimla has definitely become denser with trees blocking the views.

 

Clearly Shimla empowered Hume, provided a stimulating environment which included several local collaborators. Who were his local collaborators in Shimla? I have only recently discovered (and notes with references are now added to the Wikipedia entry for R. C. Tytler) that Robert (of Tytler's warbler fame - although named by W E Brooks) and Harriet Tytler (of Mt. Harriet fame) had established a kind of natural history museum at Bonnie Moon in Shimla with  Lord Mayo's support. The museum closed down after Robert's death in 1872, and it is said that Harriet offered the bird specimens to the government. It would appear that at least some part of this collection went to Hume. It is said that the collection was packed away in boxes around 1873. The collection later came into possession of Mr B. Bevan-Petman who apparently passed it on to the Lahore Central Museum in 1917.

Hume's idea of mapping rainfall to examine patterns of avian distribution

It was under Lord Mayo that Hume rose in the government hierarchy. Hume was not averse to utilizing his power as Secretary of State to further his interests in birds. He organized the Lakshadweep survey with the assistance of the navy ostensibly to examine sites for a lighthouse. He made use of government machinery in the fisheries department (Francis Day) to help his Sind survey. He used the newly formed meteorological division of his own agricultural department to generate rainfall maps for use in Stray Feathers. He was probably the first to note the connection between rainfall and bird distributions, something that only Sharpe saw any special merit in. Perhaps placing specimens on those large tables described by Sharpe allowed Hume to see geographic trends.

Hume was also able to appreciate geology (in his youth he had studied with Mantell ), earth history and avian evolution. Hume had several geologists contributing to ornithology including Stoliczka and Ball. One wonders if he took an interest in paleontology given his proximity to the Shiwalik ranges. Hume invited Richard Lydekker to publish a major note on avian osteology for the benefit of amateur ornithologists. Hume also had enough time to speculate on matters of avian biology. A couple of years ago I came across this bit that Hume wrote in the first of his Nests and Eggs volumes (published post-ornith-humously in 1889):

Nests and Eggs of Indian birds. Vol 1. p. 199

 

I wrote immediately to Tim Birkhead, the expert on evolutionary aspects of bird reproduction and someone with an excellent view of ornithological history (his Ten Thousand Birds is a must read for anyone interested in the subject) and he agreed that Hume had been an early and insightful observer to have suggested female sperm storage.

Shimla life was clearly a lot of hob-nobbing and people like Lord Mayo were spending huge amounts of time and money just hosting parties. Turns out that Lord Mayo even went to Paris to recruit a chef and brought in an Italian,  Federico Peliti. (His great-grandson has a nice website!) Unlike Hume, Peliti rose in fame after Lord Mayo's death by setting up a cafe which became the heart of Shimla's social life and gossip. Lady Lytton (Lord Lytton was the one who demoted Hume!) recorded that Simla folk "...foregathered four days a week for prayer meetings, and the rest of the time was spent in writing poisonous official notes about each other." Another observer recorded that "in Simla you could not hear your own voice for  the grinding of axes. But in 1884 the grinders were few. In the course of my service I saw much of Simla society,  and I think it would compare most favourably with any other town of English-speaking people of the same size. It was bright and gay. We all lived, so to speak, in glass houses. The little bungalows perched on the mountainside wherever there was a ledge, with their winding paths under the pine trees, leading to our only road, the Mall." (Lawrence, Sir Walter Roper (1928) The India We Served.)

A view from Peliti's (1922).

Peliti's other contribution was in photography and it seems like he worked with Felice Beato who also influenced Harriet Tytler and her photography. I asked a couple of Shimla folks about the historic location of Peliti's cafe and they said it had become the Grand Hotel (now a government guest house). I subsequently found that Peliti did indeed start Peliti's Grand Hotel, which was destroyed in a fire in 1922, but the centre of Shimla's social life, his cafe, was actually next to the Combermere Bridge (it ran over a water storage tank and is today the location of the lift that runs between the Mall and the Cart Road). A photograph taken from "Peliti's" clearly lends support for this location as do descriptions in Thacker's New Guide to Simla (1925). A poem celebrating Peliti's was published in Punch magazine in 1919. Rudyard Kipling was a fan of Peliti's but Hume was no fan of Kipling (Kipling seems to have held a spiteful view of liberals - "Pagett MP" has been identified by some as being based on W.S.Caine, a friend of Hume; Hume for his part had a lifelong disdain for journalists. Kipling's boss, E.K. Robinson started the British Naturalists' Association while E.K.R.'s brother Philip probably influenced Eha.

While Hume most likely stayed well away from Peliti's, we see that a kind of naturalists social network existed within the government. About Lord Mayo we read: 

Lord Mayo and the Natural History of India - His Excellency Lord Mayo, the Viceroy of India, has been making a very valuable collection of natural historical objects, illustrative of the fauna, ornithology, &c., of the Indian Empire. Some portion of these valuable acquisitions, principally birds and some insects, have been brought to England, and are now at 49 Wigmore Street, London, whence they will shortly be removed. - Pertshire Advertiser, 29 December 1870.

Another news report states:

The Early of Mayo's collection of Indian birds, &c.

Amidst the cares of empire, the Earl of Mayo, the present ruler of India, has found time to form a valuable collection of objects illustrative of the natural history of the East, and especially of India. Some of these were brought over by the Countess when she visited England a short time since, and entrusted to the hands of Mr Edwin Ward, F.Z.S., for setting and arrangement, under the particular direction of the Countess herself. This portion, which consists chiefly of birds and insects, was to be seen yesterday at 49, Wigmore street, and, with the other objects accumulated in Mr Ward's establishment, presented a very striking picture. There are two library screens formed from the plumage of the grand argus pheasant- the head forward, the wing feathers extended in circular shape, those of the tail rising high above the rest. The peculiarities of the plumage have been extremely well preserved. These, though surrounded by other birds of more brilliant covering, preserved in screen pattern also, are most noticeable, and have been much admired. There are likewise two drawing-room screens of smaller Indian birds (thrush size) and insects. They are contained in glass cases, with frames of imitation bamboo, gilt. These birds are of varied and bright colours, and some of them are very rare. The Countess, who returned to India last month, will no doubt, add to the collection when she next comes back to England, as both the Earl and herself appear to take a great interest in Illustrating the fauna and ornithology of India. The most noticeable object, however, in Mr. Ward's establishment is the representation of a fight between two tigers of great size. The gloss, grace, and spirit of the animals are very well preserved. The group is intended as a present to the Prince of Wales. It does not belong to the Mayo Collection. - The Northern Standard, January 7, 1871

And Hume's subsequent superior was Lord Northbrook about whom we read:

University and City Intelligence. - Lord Northbrook has presented to the University a valuable collection of skins of the game birds of India collected for him by Mr. A.O.Hume, C.B., a distinguished Indian ornithologist. Lord Northbrook, in a letter to Dr. Acland, assures him that the collection is very perfect, if not unique. A Decree was passed accepting the offer, and requesting the Vice-Chancellor to convey the thanks of the University to the donor. - Oxford Journal, 10 February 1877

Papilio mayo

Clearly Lord Mayo and his influence on naturalists in India is not sufficiently well understood. Perhaps that would explain the beautiful butterfly named after him shortly after his murder. It appears that Hume did not have this kind of hobby association with Lord Lytton, little wonder perhaps that he fared so badly!

Despite Hume's sharpness on many matters there were bits that come across as odd. In one article on the flight of birds he observes the soaring of crows and vultures behind his house as he sits in the morning looking towards Mahassu. He points out that these soaring birds would appear early on warm days and late on cold days but he misses the role of thermals and mixes physics with metaphysics, going for a kind of Grand Unification Theory:

And then claims that crows, like saints, sages and yogis are capable of "aethrobacy".

This naturally became a target of ridicule. We have already seen the comments of E.H. Hankin on this. Hankin wrote that if levitation was achieved by "living an absolutely pure life and intense religious concentration" the hill crow must be indulging in "irreligious sentiments when trying to descend to earth without  the help of gravity." Hankin despite his studies does not give enough credit for the forces of lift produced by thermals and his own observations were critiqued by Gilbert Walker, the brilliant mathematican who applied his mind to large scale weather patterns apart from conducting some amazing research on the dynamics of boomerangs. His boomerang research had begun even in his undergraduate years and had earned him the nickname of Boomerang Walker. On my visit to Shimla, I went for a long walk down the quiet road winding through dense woodland and beside streams to Annandale (now apparently called Anna-Dale), the only large flat ground in Shimla where Sir Gilbert Walker conducted his weekend research on boomerangs. Walker's boomerang research mentions a collaboration with Oscar Eckenstein and there are some strange threads connecting Eckenstein, his collaborator Aleister Crowley and Hume's daughter Maria Jane Burnley who would later join the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. But that is just speculation!

1872 Map showing Rothney Castle

The steep road just below Rothney Castle

Excavation for new constructions just below and across the road from Rothney Castle

The embankment collapsing below the guard hut

The lower entrance, concrete constructions replace the old building

The guard hut and home are probably the only heritage structures left

Dr Roy Vickery displaying some of Hume's herbarium specimens

Specially designed cases for storing the herbarium sheets.

The entrance to the South London Botanical Institute

A herbarium sheet from the Hume collection

Hume's bookplate with personal motto - Industria et Perseverentia

An ornate clock which apparently adorned Rothney Castle

A special cover released by Shimla postal circle in 2012

• Collar, N. J.; Prys-Jones, R. P. (2012). Pioneers of Asian ornithology. Allan Octavian Hume. BirdingASIA. 17: 17–43.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Octavian_Hume

The Bombay Gazette, 3 June 1887 page 4

The Bombay Natural History Society offers an interesting case in the history of amateur science in India and there are many little stories hidden away that have not quite been written about, possibly due to the lack of publicly accessible archival material. Interestingly two of the founders of the BNHS were Indians and hardly anything has been written about them in the pages of the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society where even lesser known British members have obituaries. I suspect that this lack of obituaries can be traced to the political and social turmoil of the period. Even a major two-part history of the BNHS by Salim Ali in 1978 makes no mention of the Indians founders. Both the founders were doctors with an interest in medical botany and were connected to other naturalists not just because of their interest in plants but also perhaps through their involvement in social reform. The only colleague who could have written their obituaries was the BNHS member Dr Kanhoba Ranchoddas Kirtikar who probably did not because of his conservative-views and a consequent fall-out with the reformists. This is merely my suspicion and it arises from reading between the lines while editing the  relevant entries on the English Wikipedia. There are some rather interesting connections.

Sakharam Arjun

Dr Sakharam Arjun (Raut) (1839-16 April 1885) - This medical doctor with an interest in botanical remedies was for sometime a teacher of botany at the Grant Medical College - but his name perhaps became more well known after a historic court case dealing with child marriage and women's rights, that of Dadaji vs. Rukhmabai. Rukhmabai had been married off at the age of 11 and stayed with her mother and step-father Sakharam Arjun. When she reached puberty, she was asked by Dadaji to join him. Rukhmabai refused and Sakharam Arjun supported her. It led to a series of court cases, the first of which was in Rukhmabai's favour. This rankled the Hindu conservatives who believed that this was a display of the moral superiority of the English. The judge had in reality found fault with English law and had commented on the patriarchal and unfair system of marriage that had already been questioned back in England. A subsequent appeal was ruled in favour of Dadaji and Rukhmabai was ordered to go to his home or face six months in prison. Rukhmabai was in the meantime writing a series of articles in the Times of India under the pen-name of A Hindoo Lady (wish there was a nice online Indian newspapers archive) and she declared that she would rather take the maximal prison penalty. This led to further worries - with Queen Victoria and the Viceroy jumping into the fray. Max Müller commented on the case, while Behramji Malabari and Allan Octavian Hume (now retired from ornithology; there may be another connection as Sakharam Arjun seems to have been a member of the Theosophical Society, founded by Hume and others before he quit it) debated various aspects. Somewhat surprisingly Hume tended to being less radical about reforms than Malabari.

Dr Rukhmabai

Dr Edith Pechey

Dr Sakharam Arjun did not live to see the judgement, and he probably died early thanks to the stress it created. His step-daughter Rukhmabai became one of the earliest Indian women doctors and was supported in her cause by Dr Edith Pechey, another pioneering English woman doctor, who was a BNHS member went on to marry H.M. Phipson. Phipson of course was a more famous founder of the BNHS. Rukhmabai's counsel included the lawyer J.D.Inverarity who was a big-game hunter and BNHS member. To add to the mess of BNHS members in court, there was (later Lt.-Col.) Kanhoba Ranchoddas Kirtikar (1850-9 May 1917), a student of Sakharam Arjun and like him interested in medicinal plants. Kirtikar however became a hostile witness in the Rukhmabai case, and supported Dadaji. Rukhmabai, in her writings as a Hindoo Lady, indicated her interest in studying medicine. Dr Pechey and others set up a fund for supporting her medical education in London. The whole case caused a tremendous upheaval in India with a division across multiple axes -  nationalists, reformists, conservatives, liberals, feminists, Indians, Europeans - everyone seems to have got into the debate. The conservative Indians believed that Rukhmabai's defiance of Hindu customs was the obvious result of a western influence.

J.D.Inverarity, Barrister and Vice President of BNHS (1897-1923) Counsel for Rukhmabai.

It is somewhat odd that the BNHS journal carries no obituary whatsoever to this Indian founding member. I suspect that the only one who may have been asked to write an obituary would have been Kirtikar and he may have refused to write given his stance in court. Another of Sakharam Arjun's students was a Gujarati botanist named Jayakrishna Indraji who perhaps wrote India's first non-English botanical treatise (at least the first that seems to have been based on modern scientific tradition). Indraji seems to be rather sadly largely forgotten except in some pockets of Kutch, in Bhuj. I recently discovered that the organization GUIDE in Bhuj have tried to bring back Indraji into modern attention.

Atmaram Pandurang

The other Indian founder of the BNHS was Dr Atmaram Pandurang Tarkhadkar (1823-1898)- This medical doctor was a founder of the Prarthana Samaj in 1867 in Bombay. He and his theistic reform movement were deeply involved in the Age of Consent debates raised by the Rukhmabai case. An obituary termed him as a "mild Hindu" (this is essentially code at that point to indicate that he was not a "sanatanist"). His organization seems to have taken Max Muller's suggestion that the ills of society could not be cured by laws but by education and social reform. If Sakharam Arjun is not known enough, even lesser is known of Atmaram Pandurang (at least online!) but one can find another natural history connection here - his youngest daughter - Annapurna "Anna" Turkhud tutored Rabindranath Tagore in English and the latter was smitten. Tagore wrote several poems to her where she is referred to as "Nalini". Anna however married Harold Littledale (3 October 1853-11 May 1930), professor of history and English literature, later principal of the Baroda College (Moreshwar Atmaram Turkhud, Anna's older brother, was a vice-principal at Rajkumar College Baroda - another early natural history hub), and if you remember an earlier post where his name occurs - Littledale was the only person from the educational circle to contribute to Allan Octavian Hume's notes on birds! Littledale also documented bird trapping techniques in Gujarat. Sadly, Anna did not live very long and died in her thirties in Edinburgh somewhere around 1891.

It would appear that many others in the legal profession were associated with natural history - we have already seen the case of Courtenay Ilbert, who founded the Simla Natural History Society in 1885. Ilbert lived at Chapslee House in Simla - now still a carefully maintained heritage home (that I had the fortune of visiting recently) owned by the kin of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Ilbert was involved with the eponymous Ilbert Bill which allowed Indian judges to pass resolutions on cases involving Europeans - a step forward in equality that also led to rancour. Other law professionals in the BNHS - included Sir Norman A. Macleod and  S. M. Robinson. Justice Herbert Mills Birdwood was a keen botanist. L.H. Bayley was also a BNHS member.

Times of India 7 May 1885. p. 5.

Times of India, 9 July 1885

The Bombay Gazette, 7 November 1884. Note that Kirtikar is present at the early meetings alongside Sakharam Arjun.

Postscript: 18 March 2022 - came across Hugh Fletcher Palin (16 February 1858, Poona - 8 February 1909, Lahore) who wrote a Birds of Cutch (1878). Palin's father Lt-Gen Charles Thomas Palin (6 February 1823- 14 March 1892) also wrote on the birds and plants of Kutch for the Bombay Gazetteer (volume 5, 1880). A sister of Hugh, Ethel Frances, married the son of Herbert Mills Birdwood. A brother of Hugh, Colonel Gilbert Walter Palin (29 September 1862 - 31 December 1946) married Florence, daughter of Charles Swinhoe.