Bengali Wikipedia (bn.wikipedia.org), the largest Bengali language free encyclopedia on the planet, has marked its 20th anniversary. Bengali Wikipedia, the only free online encyclopedia written in Bengali, officially started its journey on January 27, 2004.

During the early 21st century, obtaining Bengali information online was a nearly insurmountable challenge. Even though over 234+ million people spoke Bengali then, there was a notable absence of an online encyclopedia in the Bengali language. All the information related to Bengali and Bangladesh was in English. In February 2002, the development team initiated the establishment of language-code-based sub-domains to cater to various language Wikipedias. Among these sub-domains, the Bengali language sub-domain was introduced. A placeholder page automatically materialized in this sub-domain on June 1, 2002. Subsequently, on December 9, 2003, Shah Asaduzzaman, a Bangladeshi PhD student at McGill University in Canada, reached out to Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, expressing a desire for the creation of Bengali Wikipedia. In response to this request, developers crafted a test page on Wikipedia titled Home Page on December 26 of the same year.

Despite its launch in 2004, the Bengali Wikipedia faced initial challenges in technical and other dimensions. As the new Wikipedia, the primary objective was to boost the article count. However, accomplishing this task proved to be quite challenging. Because at that time, writing Bengali on the internet was not as easy as today; even there were no writing tools from Wikimedia. One of the pioneers of the Bengali Wikipedia, Ragib Hasan said:

The biggest challenge was writing something in Bengali on the internet. Bangla Unicode was not supported by most operating systems, only a few websites on the internet supported Bangla Unicode, and users had to face difficulties in configuring it. Besides, the idea of writing something with Bangla Unicode was new. Initially, the idea of a Wikipedia in Bengali was not viable.
—Ragib Hasan, Kaler Kantho, February 25, 2017

Currently, typing in Bengali on the internet is straightforward, thanks to integrating the Avro Keyboard into Bengali Wikipedia. Additionally, a selection of impressive free Bengali fonts has been included. Since then the number of articles has increased due to the convenience of writing. As a result, Bengali Wikipedia achieved the milestone of 10 thousand articles in October 2006, becoming the second South-Asian language to do so. During that period, the active user count stood at only 20-25. Between 2009 and 2010, Bengali speakers from West Bengal and other territories in India also started to contribute to Bengali Wikipedia. However, after the launch of the mobile version in 2010, the number of users increased significantly. In 2012, the Bangla Wikipedia Unconference was the first ever big-level conference-like outreach event organized by Wikimedia Bangladesh in association with Chittagong Independent University and Bangladesh Open Source Network. The Unconference aimed to raise awareness about Wikipedia, acquaint participants with the functionalities of Wikipedia editing and foster the growth of Wiki culture and consciousness. Around 300 students from schools, colleges, and universities of Chattogram participated in this event. Thus, Bengali Wikipedia continued to thrive, and by October 2013, the number of articles had surged to 25 thousand.

Bengali Wikipedia experienced its golden age in the years 2014-2015. To mark the 10th anniversary of Bangla Wikipedia, Wikimedia Bangladesh organizes year-long workshops, article contest, editathons, photography contest‎ and photowalks as well as nationwide campaigns. In 2015, as part of the legacy of the 10th-anniversary celebrations, Wikimedia Bangladesh has been hosting Wikipedia awareness programs in schools around the country. Out of the nine workshops, four were held in Chattogram, three in Dhaka, and one each in Lalmonirhat and Rajshahi. On February 26, 2015, Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, visited Bangladesh on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Bengali Wikipedia. During his keynote address, Jimmy stated that according to the article depth, Bengali Wikipedia is rated quite well. Following that, the active user count experienced growth, accompanied by an increase in the number of quality articles.

L to R: (1) Women participants at a workshop in 2015. Photo by Kanon Ahammad / CC-BY-SA-4.0. (2) Students showing a ‘W’ sign during the school program held in 2015. Photo by Motiur Rahman Oni / CC-BY-SA-4.0. (3) School program to encourage students to read Bengali Wikipedia. Photo by Motiur Rahman Oni / CC-BY-SA-4.0.

In 2015, the Good Articles Contest was initiated to promote the creation of quality articles. In this contest, approximately 600+ quality articles have been translated from English. Then, the annual article competition was organized for three consecutive years from 2017 to 2019. To sustain this momentum, Wikimedia Bangladesh has been conducting an annual article enhancement competition called the Amar Ekushey Article Competition since 2021, spanning a few months each year. Every year various editathons are organized on the occasion of various national and international days. Presently, Bengali Wikipedia organizes various article competitions and editathons throughout the year. These include Wikipedia Asian Month, Feminism and Folklore Editathon, Open Access Week Editathon etc. Cultural exchange projects have also been conducted in joint ventures with other Wikipedia communities at various times. These include the Arabic–Bengali Cultural Exchange Program and the Bengali–German Cultural Exchange Project.

In June 2017, Bengali Wikipedia reached the milestone of 50 thousand articles. Since 2018, the growth rate of articles on Bengali Wikipedia has continued to increase, as more than 16,000 articles were written in 2019 and over 21,000 articles in 2020. Where only 8.8 thousand articles were written in 2018. In December 2020, the Bengali Wikipedia achieved a significant milestone by surpassing 100,000 articles. It’s remarkable to note that while the first 50 thousand articles took thirteen years to create, the subsequent 50 thousand were achieved in just three years. The increase in growth can be credited to a combination of successful editathons and the influx of numerous prolific contributors. The majority of whom encompass students, educators, researchers, writers, journalists, and various other professionals. Wikimeetups are organized in different parts of the country almost every month to build communication and friendship between Wikipedians. These gatherings provide an open invitation for anyone interested to participate in discussions, gain insights into the intricacies of Wikipedia, and connect with the Wikipedia Community. Also, every year on International Mother Language Day, Bengali Wikipedians gather in different parts of the country under the banner “Enrich Bengali Wikipedia”.

As of January 27, 2023, Bengali Wikipedia has 146,500+ articles, including 9 Featured Articles and 179 Good Articles. There are approximately 1,200+ users actively engaged per month, overseen by a team of 13 administrators. Today’s Bengali Wikipedia is much more lively and creative than before. The enthusiasm of older users as well as several new users has made Bengali Wikipedia more informative, and their professionalism has also increased the quality of information. Bengali Wikipedia has a higher rate of new user growth than before, as well as a higher retention rate of newcomers.

Imagine, twenty years ago, when writing Bengali on the internet was a pipe dream, today Bengali has become one of the most powerful languages in the online world. The majority of these contributions are from Bengali Wikipedia and its contributors. At present, Bengali Wikipedia ranks 63rd among the 326 languages of Wikipedia in terms of number of articles. It ranks 5th in article depth among 318 active Wikipedias worldwide. In 2023, Bengali Wikipedia was read about 48.3 million times from all over the world.

Wikimedia Ukraine has been working to advance free knowledge in Ukraine for almost 15 years now. The past year continued to be among the most difficult ones in our history as Russia’s war against Ukraine goes on with the whole country undergoing almost daily attacks.

Yet, thanks to the dedication of volunteers and committed work of the whole team, we’ve managed to do a lot to advance free knowledge. To give just a few examples, Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine gathered close to 20,000 cultural heritage photos, over 100 people participated in our annual Wikiconference, and 1,500 articles about women on Wikipedia and Wikiquote were written thanks to our campaigns.

Traditionally, here’s a brief look at some highlights from our work in the past year. The programs mentioned here cover only a part of our work; we’ll publish a detailed 2023 report in February.

1. Supporting the community of volunteers during the war, and telling their stories

With the start of the full-scale war, Wikimedia Ukraine has launched a program to support the local community – providing various kinds of assistance to the volunteers affected.

One aspect of this work that’s public is highlighting stories of community members affected by the war to the Ukrainian and international community. For example, in 2023 we wrote about a university professor and a teacher who had to flee Russian occupation and interviewed Oleh Shostak, Ukrainian Wikipedia’s most prolific editor. 

• Learn more: “2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine” portal on Meta-Wiki • full list of stories published by Wikimedia Ukraine

2. Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine – almost 20,000 photos of Ukraine’s cultural heritage

Wikimedia Ukraine has been supporting Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine every year since 2012. Part of the international competition, it aims to gather a database of freely licensed photos of Ukraine’s cultural heritage monuments for Wikimedia Commons, as well as to draw attention to cultural heritage protection. 

Despite the war and subsequent security restrictions, this year the contest in October gathered almost 20,000 photos from 278 participants – a third place among 46 participating countries. Apart from main prizes, we had a range of special nominations that helped discover entire layers of cultural heritage not included in official state lists.

• Learn more: Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine English-language landing page

3. Wiki Loves Earth – supporting record results on the international level, first Ukrainian contest since the full-scale war

After a break in 2022 because of the war, in 2023 we organized the Wiki Loves Earth in Ukraine photo contest. Ukraine came third among 50 participating countries by the number of uploaded photos as 121 participants contributed over 4,600 pictures. Two Ukrainian photos made it to the top 20 international winners.

A separate international team supported by Wikimedia Ukraine organizes Wiki Loves Earth at the global stage. The project saw record results in 2023 as 50 countries and territories held their contest, bringing over 61,000 nature heritage photos from 3,300 participants.

• Learn more: Wiki Loves Earth 2023 international winners

4. “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” – our first mass open online course for educators

In 2023 we launched our first mass open online course about Wikipedia. 300 Ukrainian educators enrolled in the course in July and studied to design an integration of Wikipedia in their lessons.

The course helped increase awareness of how Wikipedia works among teachers, dispel myths, and direct them on how to use Wikimedia projects in their work. After the successful graduation of the first cohort, we are scaling the course so that significantly more educators can take it in the future.

• Learn more: Diff story about the course

5. Developing the community of educators, online and in-person

Throughout the year, we helped educators integrate Wikipedia and wikiprojects into their curricula. Part of this work is developing a community and facilitating connections and experience exchange among the educators.

In July, we held a two-day offline conference in Kyiv, attended by 35 people. Every month we organize online meetings to share experiences and learn useful skills like working with Wikidata or accessing Wikipedia offline. We also support local meetings of educators, such as presentations of the Wikipedia handbook for teachers.

• Learn more: Education newsletter story about one online event for educators

6. Wikiconference 2023 – our largest conference to date

Every year we gather the community from across Ukraine for Wikiconference. The event has been held annually since 2011, but last year it was the largest by the number of participants.

The conference consisted of four separate meetings in September and October: an online day, a two-day conference in Kyiv, a conference and wikitraining in Komarno (Lviv region), and a meetup in Kharkiv. Overall, more than 100 people joined the event.

• Learn more: Diff story about the conference

7. Wikimarathon to mark Ukranian Wikipedia’s birthday, in Ukraine and abroad

Every year we use Ukrainian Wikipedia’s birthday on January 30th as an opportunity to organize Wikimarathon, an ambitious campaign that aims to recruit as many new volunteers as possible to Wikipedia. The idea is for everyone to present Wikipedia an article to celebrate its birthday.

In 2023 Wikimarathon lasted from January 26 to February 5 and included an online campaign and 35 offline meetups. 346 participants joined and created almost 1900 new articles. Because of the full-scale Russian invasion, for the first time local events took place not only in Ukraine but also abroad: in Poland, the Netherlands, Spain, and Israel.

• Learn more: Diff story about Wikimaraton 2023 results

8. Supporting and developing the local community via trainings, awards, and on-demand support

One of Wikimedia Ukraine’s goals is to help support and develop Ukraine’s Wikimedia community. For example, in 2023 we:

• held a series of online trainings on combating disinformation;
• continued to recognize the most active Wikipedia contributors with the “wiki condensed milk” program;
• supported initiatives from within the community, such as the school of patrollers.

Learn more: Diff stories about the “wiki condensed milk” program and webinars on disinformation

9. Campaigns to improve gender balance on Wikipedia and sister projects

We are consistently working to help bridge the gender gap on Ukrainian Wikipedia and sister projects. In 2023 we held three major campaigns:

• WikiGap on Ukrainian Wikipedia in March;
• #SheSaid on Ukrainian Wikiquote in October-November;
• “She Did It” marathon on Ukrainian Wikipedia in November.

As part of these projects, we organized two offline meetups in Kyiv in March and November. Yet most of the work occurred online as over 100 participants created and improved more than 1500 Wikipedia articles and Wikiquote.

• Learn more: Diff story about WikiGap 2023 in Ukraine

10. International presence, at Wikimania and elsewhere

Throughout the year we participated in international Wikimedia events to learn and share. At Wikimania in Singapore, we spoke about decolonizing knowledge and shared the experience of the “wiki condensed milk” program and Ukraine’s Cultural Diplomacy Month. We spoke about Ukrainian Wikipedia’s experience combating disinformation at the re:publica conference in Berlin. And, of course, we tried to share as much on Diff as possible – and even shared with others about how we are approaching sharing on Diff  

A version of this article was originally published on Wikimedia Ukraine’s blog in Ukrainian.

The Wiki Loves Afrodemics is an initiative of the Wiki Afrodemics Project. A collaborative effort dedicated to fostering the inclusion and enrichment of Wikimedia movements about notable African academics and scientists whether they are based within Africa or working on a global scale.

The Wiki Afrodemics project was established by Muib Shefiu and Abdo Koko when they discovered the gaps that existed in the documentation of African scholars and the urgent need to create a well-researched repository of information that highlights the achievements, innovations, and legacies of these scholars and scientists. Therefore, the duo’s collaborative efforts led to the creating of over one hundred articles about African scholars on Wikipedia.

With the spirit of openness and collaboration that the Wikimedia Foundation is well-known for, the duo established Wiki Loves Afrodemics to garner contributions from Wikimedia volunteers across the globe. With support from the Wikimedia Foundation and the invaluable contributions of the core members, Bukola James, Ayokanmi Oyeyemi, Ruby Brown, Maxwell Beganim, Lomora Ronald, Tesleemah Abdulkareem, Ojewuyi Habeeba, the first edition was launched at the end of 2023. It was aimed to train fifty participants on how to contribute to creating and editing articles related to African academics and scientists.

Achievements

Numerical Contributions

The one-month edit-a-thon garnered 78 thousand edits across different African languages on articles related to African Academics and scientists. 32 200 articles were edited in different African languages including the English Wikipedia, 1, 634 wikidata items were created and 4, 250 references were added.

Regional Contributions

One hundred eighty-one volunteers across ten African countries participated in the edit-a-thon. Fifty-eight percent which represented one hundred and six people came from Nigeria and the rest of the participants were from Cameroon, Kenya, South Africa, Togo, Malawi, Namibia, Somalia, Sudan, and Uganda. This massive participation by different African countries is a testament to the acceptability of the project in the region.

Strategies

Hybridized Trainings

The success of the project was based on the intensified training. The participants were trained both online and offline. Three online and three offline trainings were conducted to expose the online and offline participants to the skills needed to contribute to Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Edit-a-thon

The Edit-a-thon was conducted for a month, from 1st of December to 31 December 2023 across ten languages (English Wikipedia, Hausa Wikipedia, Yoruba Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, Kiswahili Wikipedia, Rwanda Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, Dagbani Wikipedia, Wikidata, Ghana Pidgin Wikipedia, Twi Wikipedia and Fante Wikipedia) including Wikidata and commons Wiki.

Central Banner

To enhance the global participation of the project, a central banner was created and approved by the central banner admin. The banner was displayed across seven Wikipedia languages from 1st Dec – December 2023.

Community

One of the problems of the campaign is the inability to retain editors. However, this campaign has foreseen this and created a community. The Whatsapp Community was used to retain the editors, and disseminate information and would also be used to kickstart a thematic organization that would see to the creation and improvement of items and articles related to African academics and scientists on the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Research on Articles to Create

Before the commencement of the project, the members identify close to 100 notable academics and scientists with a short lead Wikipedia article introduction. This gave the participants reasonable insights and motivation to create more content.

Articles to Translate

With the help of Wiki Query, the organizers also identified the articles that needed translation and compiled them on the meta page. This allowed the participants to translate thousands of articles through the meta page.

Future Plan

The futuristic aim of the Wiki Afrodemics Project is to become a thematic organization that closes the information gaps about African academics and scientists across Wikimedia Foundation Projects.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Wiki Loves Afrodemics, an integral part of the Wiki Afrodemics Project, is a commendable initiative dedicated to addressing the gaps in documenting African scholars. Through intensive training, a month-long multilingual edit-a-thon, and strategic approaches like the central banner and WhatsApp community, the project achieved remarkable milestones, making a significant impact on the representation of African academics and scientists on Wikipedia.

Nkem Osuigwe (Ph.D), Librarian and the Wikimedian of the Year Award 2022 (Newcomer Category)

When I opened an account on Wikipedia in 2019, I had no idea how things worked. I did not do any editing until 2020, when, through the African Librarians Week as part of the May 1Lib1Ref campaign, many African librarians learned how to edit Wikipedia.

I was named the Wikimedian of the Year Award (Newcomer Category) because of the work I did in bringing in and mobilising the African Library sector to be a part of the Wikimedia Movement. My organisation is African.

The Library and Information Association and Institutions (AfLIA) has gone on to run Wikipedia in the African Libraries course, which is an adaptation of the OCLC Wikipedia + Libraries: Better Together with a course on Wikidata for the visibility of knowledge resources in African libraries, archives, and museums.

In all these, I did not hear about the Movement Strategy until I met and had conversations with Yop at the Wiki Indaba Conference in Kigali (November, 2022). I read about the Strategy but did not fully understand how the implementation would happen until the Anambra Network of the Wikimedia User Group, Nigeria, ran a programme on it.

I was the moderator in the first panel discussion, with Ayokanmi Oyeyemi and Tochi Precious as the panelists. I asked questions as pertains to what the Movement Strategy is, what the 2030 Mandate means, what the recommendations are, and how the volunteers could integrate all that into their activities.

It was an illuminating experience, as that was the first time it dawned on many of us that the Strategy is the framework and the direction for moving the Wikimedia Movement forward if we are to play definite roles in achieving the overarching and ambitious goal of making Wikimedia projects the infrastructure for the free knowledge ecosystem, which everyone with the same vision can join!

The idea of leadership as a position and as a function came from Oby Ozeilo.

Isaac Olatunde, a member of the Leadership Development Working Group, took his time to explain why everyone could be a leader, notwithstanding if you have a position, a function, or an action to take within the User Group or the Movement.

He said anyone could be a leader. He spoke of those who have technical skills that may be needed as well as those who ‘direct’ activities in the User group, network, or hub. He was quite emphatic about the difference between management and leadership.

At that point, I became hooked. He spoke on the qualities of leadership and mentioned resilience, integrity, empathy, selflessness, accountability, and the ability to inspire others. The panellists were asked who needs these leadership qualities most in the User group—the officers or everyone? Isaac said anyone who wants to be a leader in his or her corner needs to bring those qualities to the table, irrespective of whether they are a manager or just a member. He went on to say that leadership becomes complex when one is a member of a group such as the Wikimedia Movement because of the diversities within the Movement. Oby also shared the same view.

That struck a chord! I chewed it over and over again. Does it mean that though I do not hold a management post or role in the User group, I can do things as a leader? Is it possible? I had major decisions to make!

My mother had most recently developed a health challenge, and I was managing it to see how she could be stabilised so that I could go to Wikimania 2023 on a full scholarship. I knew there was a long line of people waiting for the scholarship. Empathy and selflessness meant taking the painful decision to let someone else take up the scholarship as quickly as possible instead of waiting until August 12^th or 13^th before telling the Wikimedia Foundation.

I weighed it. Leadership is not a position but one’s understanding and actions that can be taken to inspire others to move towards achieving a stated goal, as Isaac said. Nigeria is the most populous black country in the world, and sometimes the inadequate infrastructure and social service safety net make us not understand and practise sharing very easily. However, sharing is ingrained in the DNA of Wikimedians, as espoused by Isaac, as it is the paramount thing that we do as we open up knowledge and engage in collaborative contributions. If hoarding is an anti-Wikimedia Movement, then.

Phew!

Tough! Tough!! Tough!!!

I wrote the letter and declined the scholarship the next day after the Movement Strategy discussion, on July 29, 2023, and asked that it be offered to someone else so that the opportunity would not be wasted, whether my mother’s health improved or not.

Phew!

Also, I remembered that I had applied for a scholarship to WikiIndaba (long before the Wikimania scholarship came!). I know that most of the volunteers in the Wikimedia Movement in Africa are young people, and they really need the scholarship to be at the WikiIndaba in Morocco. Again, I remembered empathy as one of the leadership qualities that Isaac and Oby had hammered on as an integral part of sharing. I weighed it against my financial capacity as an older professional.

I reached a decision and called Isaac as a member of WISCOM and the one whose explanations about what Recommendation 6 of the Movement Strategy really means triggered off a new insight into the Movement and how one can contribute from any corner. I asked him to kindly withdraw my application for a scholarship, as I would sponsor myself to Morocco as well as assist at least one young person from Nigeria who gets a partial scholarship for WikiIndaba.

How do I feel after the decisions were taken and communicated?

Great! I am glad that I learned about the Movement Strategy. I am happy that I can apply what I learned about leadership within the Movement. I feel good! I hope this inspires someone else within the Movement to gain more insights into the movement’s strategy and to be selfless and show empathy as a leader.

A topic of my online community course is related to newcomers: is there such a thing as a stupid question? (We discuss RTFM, FAQ slaps, and let me Google that for you.)

In my interactions with others, I try to be gentle, sharing tips on how to answer such questions, and I just added a new tool to my kit.

• In response to queries answered in the syllabus, I use the excellent screenshot and annotation utility Shottr to capture and highlight a question’s answer, while encouraging the student to use ⌘+f.

• I’m also a fan Espanso, for which I have many response macros (e.g., a course’s Zoom link).

• I added a macro encouraging the use of perplexity.ai. I like perplexity.ai because (1) it provides sources and (2) allows you to bookmark and share a thread.

    - triggers: [",ai"]
      label: "AI: ask AI"
      replace: |-
        This is a question well suited for AI: low-stakes, based
        on lots of public information, and easily verified. You
        should, of course, not pass off AI results as your own,
        but AI results can inform how you do your work.

In response to a question of how to format citations to websites without an author, I can respond, “ask AI.’

The laptop industry is a tragedy.

Meanwhile, Framework built something different—repairable, Linux-ready laptops that respect users. Framework is a rare company worth your support.¹

So, this month, I bought their 13.5″, AMD-powered laptop—the Framework 13 AMD.

But I’ve seen mixed reviews from other Linux users. I like the Framework ethos—I hope I like their laptops, too.

🛠️ DIY Hardware and assembly

Framework offers two editions of its laptops:

1. Pre-built – Fully assembled, complete with a useless (to me) Windows™ install.
2. DIY – Do it yourself (DIY). Some assembly required—BYO-OS.

I opted for the DIY edition—a misnomer, given assembly took five minutes.

• CPU 8-core/16-thread 5.1Gz AMD (AMD Ryzen™ 7 7840U)
  • AMD Radeon 780M integrated GPU (works fine with amdgpu driver)
  • Ryzen AI Neural Processing Unit (NPU) (AMD released an xdna driver last week. I have yet to try it.)
• 64 GB RAM – DDR5-5600
• 2TB NVMe
• 13.5” (diagonal) matte (🥳) screen

This is a powerful machine.

🏋️ Weight

A notebook that weighs more than a kilo is simply not a good thing

– Linus Torvalds

The Framework weighs more than a kilo.

Fully assembled (stickers and all), my new laptop tips the scales at 1,323g.

It’s 100g lighter than my x220 but 100g heavier than my partner’s M2 Macbook Air.

The Framework weighs as much as the 2011 Macbook Air—a sure sign innovation has stopped in this space.

🔌 Ports/dongles

I’m torn.

I can arrange my laptop’s USB, power, and ethernet ports however I want them.

And folks in the Framework community are cooking up new ideas.

But these are dongles. Brilliant dongles, but dongles nonetheless—I have to tote them on my travels and keep track of them all.

Now, I need a little pouch for my adorable dongles.

I hate computers, but this one is pretty good.

What I like:

• Repairable – I hoard a closet of old ThinkPads because I know they’ll end up at the dump otherwise.
• Hardware camera/mic switch + RFKill – Hardware switches beat camera covers any day. And a laptop that respects its users’ privacy is lovely.
• Reference designs – While it’s not open hardware, Framework releases reference designs under a Creative Commons license.
• Matte screen – Why are shiny screens an option? Who wants that?

What I dislike:

• Keyboard – It’s mushy. Plus, the button under [/?] is [←], which is breaking my brain. I’m used to it being right CTRL (which I use as AltGr).
• Brightness – Even at 0% brightness, the screen is too bright. There’s probably something I can do here.
• HDMI requires back slots – HDMI expansion card plugged into the front left expansion slot failed. Moving to one of the back slots works.
• 3:2 aspect ratio – Why? It’s an outre choice. I’m having a bad time mirroring to 16:9 displays. Plus, horizontal screen space is great for tiling window managers.
• Trackpad – I still like buttons. The trackpad is good, but I’m a luddite—ThinkPads spoil you.
• Keyboard backlight – Speaking of ThinkPads, why have we abandoned the ThinkLight?

Each year, the Wikimedia Foundation summarizes our goals for the year in our Annual Plan. This fiscal year, which kicked off for us in July 2023, we are centering our plans around our Product and Technology work, in service of the broader movement strategy goals to become the essential infrastructure of free knowledge. Our Annual Plan recognizes Wikimedia’s role as a platform for people to contribute on a massive scale, and prioritizes four key goals to meaningfully evolve the work we do and meet the changing world around us. Hundreds of Wikimedians shaped this annual plan both on and off wiki.

How’s the year going so far?   

The four key annual plan goals

The annual plan laid out these four key goals: 

• EQUITY: Support Knowledge Equity. Strengthen Equity in Decision-Making via Movement governance and Movement Charter. Empower and engage the Movement, support regional strategies and help close knowledge gaps.
• INFRASTRUCTURE: Advance Knowledge as a Service. Improve User Experience on the wikis, especially for established editors. Strengthen metrics and reporting.
• SAFETY & INCLUSION: Protect against growing external threats. Defend our people and projects against disinformation and harmful government regulation. Work across the Movement to Provide for the Safety of Volunteers.
• EFFECTIVENESS: Strengthen our overall performance. Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt our processes for maximum impact with more limited resources.

Here’s a summary of the Foundation’s progress, broken down by these four goals.

Equity

Equity is about closing knowledge gaps and supporting and growing a global movement of contributors and content on the Wikimedia projects. This is not work the Foundation can do alone, and so we’ve been working collaboratively with volunteers on activities to reach this goal.

Wikimania Singapore was a key milestone of our knowledge equity work, and was an opportunity to invite and engage with growing communities in Asia. Hosted by volunteers from East and Southeast Asia & Pacific (ESEAP) in partnership with Foundation staff, Wikimania connected over 2800 Wikimedians virtually and in person from 142 countries- many of whom may not otherwise have had the opportunity to collaborate and learn from each other. Attendees shared their experiences in workshops, lectures, and discussions, participated in photo walks, meetups, library edit-a-thons and city tours, cheered on the Wikimedians of the Year, and celebrated a wikibirthday and wikiwedding at the closing party.  More than 90% of attendee survey respondents agreed that they were overall satisfied with the event and that it made them feel like they belonged to the Wikimedia movement. 

Another key element of knowledge equity involves taking a regional approach, which enables us to address content gaps, center perspectives that have historically been marginalized, and support local needs. We have partnered with volunteers to coordinate monthly regional calls that strengthen support and collaboration at a local level – examples include Afrika Baraza, Central and Eastern Europe Catch Up, WikiCauserie for French-speaking Wikimedians, and the South Asia community call. We also gathered learnings through funding and attending the volunteer-led regional conferences, as well as thematic conferences like EduWiki Conference, WikiWomen Summit, WikiWomen Camp and the GLAM-Wiki Conference. These calls and convenings have been an opportunity to learn more about regional trends and create opportunities for additional collaboration, such as the Africa New Editors project, which has focused on addressing blockers to participation for new editors in the region, and which aims to double the number of retained new editors in Africa over a 3 month period as compared to a control group. 

In addition, we continue to support ongoing governance conversations in the movement about the future of Wikimedia and how to ensure representative and equitable governance. We have supported the Movement Charter Drafting Committee on their work to create a charter for the movement, which you can read more about here on Diff.

Infrastructure

Our Infrastructure goal is about improving the user experience on the Wikimedia projects. The bulk of the work so far has been focused on the first of three categories, or “buckets,” called Wiki Experiences. The purpose of this bucket is to efficiently deliver, improve and innovate on wiki experiences that enable the distribution of free knowledge world-wide. We do this by building on our core technology and capabilities, ensuring we continuously improve the experience of volunteer editors, editors with extended rights, and technical contributors, and creating a great experience for our readers.

 We staged the first of four targeted interventions this year through overhauling the PageTriage software to modernize it and increase its maintainability into the future. We also introduced or improved a number of  features, including: 

• Event Discovery: a feature that helps campaign organizers increase the visibility of campaigns they do to encourage content on the Wikimedia projects, and thus contributions on high-impact topics.
• Dark Mode: a longstanding wish from the Community Wishlist that will increase accessibility for both editing and reading Wikipedia. 
• Patrolling on the Android app: an expansion of the moderator tools in the app to improve the overall quality of edits made from the app
• Better diff handling for paragraph splits: the #1 wish from the 2022 Community Wishlist survey that allows editors to more easily see when a paragraph spacing was inserted on Wikipedia.
• Watchlist on iOS: this addition to the app gives experienced editors a new way to monitor important Wikipedia articles from their phones.
• Edit Check: improvements to Visual Editor that will guide newcomers to make better edits by automatically warning newer editors when they have added information without a reference, encouraging them to add a reference and notifying them if their reference appears to come from a non-reliable source.
• A more extensive list of features developed in Q1 can be found in this update from CEO Maryana Iskander.

Under Wiki Experiences, we also ramped up our support of technical contributors, dedicating more hours to guidance and code review. For example, the MediaWiki Platform team provided code review for 200 volunteer-submitted patches in Q1. Notably, the number of contributors to MediaWiki core who have submitted more than 5 patches increased 15% when compared to Q1 last year.

Other work from Q1 includes completing research on the history of the Community Wishlist and initiating a refresh of the Community Wishlist process, and not including tasks closed as invalid, the resolution of 331 community-reported Phabricator tasks. 

Safety and Inclusion

The Foundation’s safety and inclusion work revolves around defending our people and projects against disinformation and harmful government regulation, and providing for the safety of volunteers. One big body of work was to ensure compliance with the new Digital Services Act, an act that went into effect in August that regulates internet platforms operating in the European Union. Wikipedia was designated a Very Large Online Platform under the Act, subjecting it to additional compliance obligations. We worked to engage regulators and educate them about the Wikipedia model, and also worked to meet our reporting and disclosure obligations by the deadline. We also continued critical advocacy work to raise awareness about Wikipedia as a nonprofit with a unique community-led model when compared to other large internet platforms. We spoke to policymakers and government leaders at several events including the United Nations Human Rights Council, the United Nations General Assembly, and more. 

Part of our safety and inclusion work is also about addressing the rising disinformation online and its impact on the Wikimedia projects. To support volunteers, we mapped out initiatives across the ecosystem tackling disinformation on the projects in an Anti-Disinformation Repository and we supported community measures for safety and inclusion by working with the Affiliations Committee, Case Review Committee and Ombuds Commission. 

Effectiveness

The Effectiveness goal is about improving how we as an organization operate and scale. This year, we are already on track to increase the percentage of our budget that goes to directly supporting Wikimedia’s mission. In concrete terms, this means that, through increasing our internal efficiency around administrative and fundraising costs, we will enable an additional investment of $1.8M into funding for things like grants, feature development, site infrastructure and more.

Evaluating progress

We will measure our impact on these four goals through four key metrics, which you can learn more about on Meta. This is our first time measuring these metrics around Content, Contributors, Relevance and Effectiveness, and we will share more details around the activities we’ve done and the progress we’ve seen. Our work so far  included a significant intervention to support contributors with the PageTriage tool, and resulted in progress on two of our four key metrics for the year:  our contributors metric, which we moved the needle on through the PageTriage overhaul, and our effectiveness metric, which we moved toward by improving the percentage of budget going to direct support of Wikimedia’s mission. Our remaining two metrics–content and relevance– remain at baseline. We expect to see progress on these through interventions in the coming months. We are constantly feeding our data back into the process, iterating based on what we’ve been successful at impacting and what we haven’t. We look forward to reporting on more progress throughout the rest of the year. 

A little bit before 2023 ended, I had asked a question in the Nigeria Wikimedia User Group about the public domain concept in the copyright laws of African countries. The public domain principle promotes the notion of knowledge as a public good meant for all to access and build on for a better society.

I had no idea that my dear country Nigeria, has the provision tucked in within the law but it is not mentioned as is done in the Copyright law of Ghana.

This rankled.

Knowledge as a public good

Explicit mention of the term within the copyright law will give it a name and make it more noticeable and ‘knowable’. It will also highlight the point that knowledge as a public good is enshrined within the law. Paul Samuelson’s Pure Theory of Public Expenditure (1954) postulated that public goods are necessary to keep the society functional, and progressive in an orderly manner. He also ascribed two principal characteristics to public goods.

First, there must be non-rivalry of consumption (when one person consumes the goods, it does not hinder another person from doing so and the good does not disappear because another person used it). Second, for a resource to be a public good, there must be non-excludability of consumption (it is accessible to all. No one is excluded from using it). Knowledge fulfills these criteria.

That person A has the knowledge about a concept or a process does not stop person B from gaining the same knowledge. Also, once knowledge is open and out there, no one can be excluded from acquiring it. Inequalities are created through hindering or blocking access to knowledge and this happens when the resource is seem as an exclusive good that should be available to some and not to all.

Beyond that, knowledge is critical for development and sustenance of human life at all levels. Research findings, learning and innovations drive civilization. Knowledge has become the mainstay of all sectors of human development as it is a major factor that guides decisions and builds the capacity for actions in modern times. The internet and the ever evolving digital technologies have made knowledge to become essential to life as is the air we all breathe. It therefore follows that knowledge generation, dissemination and accessibility should not only be available for individuals, organizations and communities that can afford it. As much as is feasible, knowledge should be a public good, a resource that is available for all, that bridges the existing inequalities and ensures that ‘no one is left behind’.

Copyright laws safeguard authors and other creators so that knowledge is first a private right then a public good second. However, the argument is that naming the public domain concept openly in Copyright laws will signify non-resistance to opening and sharing knowledge for common good as well as the maintenance of a proper balance between the private and public gains of knowledge. This is important because the underlying principle of open knowledge or open licensing or knowledge as a public good should not be alien concepts to copyright provisions within some countries in the continent. Stakeholders especially authors and creators should be made to feel comfortable around the idea that open knowledge is a pathway they can tow in releasing their works.

Why the public domain principle is important

Knowledge is a critical building block for creativity and development especially where there are opportunities for re-use, reinterpretation and reproduction as this engenders new ideas. The practice gives authors and creators of knowledge and art in different formats as well as their off-springs sufficient time to benefit from their intellectual property first before the resources become ‘free’ to adapt, reuse, translate without asking for permissions from the copyright holders. Open knowledge enthusiasts see the principle as a means of opening up knowledge for the greater good of the society as all knowledge is interconnected and creativity inspires more creativity. They understand the importance of embedding the public domain concept in copyright laws as this enables knowledge resources and art works in different formats to become unbound from copyright limitations after several decades, depending on the country.

Thus, this enables anyone to freely use the resources, remix, reuse, adapt, translate or remake into a new format to make them more available to others. That is why 2024 Public Domain day was somewhat loud as Mickey Mouse, along with Minnie, somewhat came into the public domain.

Why it is important for Wikimedia communities

There is need for African editors to better understand copyright policies that impact what they can and can’t do on Wiki projects as policies that guide access to knowledge are the guideposts that can prove to be challenges in opening up knowledge. For example, the public domain principle enshrined in Copyright laws can be further explored by Wiki editors in Africa to know what books and other resources will be freely available for use and reuse and when this would happen. Furthermore, the understanding about Wiki projects will grow within the African continent when there is more awareness about knowledge as a public good that all can access.

What can we do?

Wikimedia User Groups could run trainings within their different communities to assist volunteers see the larger picture of what they do within the frameworks of making knowledge a public good which can drive good governance, equity and sustainable development within and beyond their communities. This will ingrain the understanding of why opening up knowledge is important. They could also be led to see themselves as open knowledge advocates or at least enthusiasts who make knowledge openly available for humane and altruistic purposes and why being a Wikimedian means identifying with a philosophy that highlights ‘open’ as a principal pathway for societal equity among other things!

User Groups could also run targeted awareness creation and advocacy in the right places that will go beyond the present Wikimedia communities to stakeholders who should ‘recognize’ the Wikimedia movement as a voice that needs to be heard when Copyright issues are discussed in different African countries.

Also, it is important that Wikimedia volunteers in Africa understand and drive the fact that there are two sides of a coin for knowledge creation and dissemination. On one side, knowledge could be created and disseminated for pecuniary purposes with full copyright provisions in place as stipulated in the law. On the other side, knowledge could be recognized as a public resource and/or a good that can also be created and shared for altruistic purposes as upheld through the public domain principle also in the copyright laws. Ensuring that this side of the coin is robustly presented in the Copyright law within the the different countries of African continent is a task for Wiki African editors.

The Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program is coming to La Guajira Colombiana thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Colombia, the Wikimedistas Wayuu User Group, as well as the backing of the Ministry of Education. This collaboration has been leading a series of actions in the last half of 2023, to create opportunities to implement a pilot version of the program in Colombia led by Wikimedia Colombia, as a starting point for implementations in the country. This key because to implement the process from February to June 2024 we require an effective partnership of institutional efforts, people who can think as a collective, and material and structural conditions to guarantee the learning experience of 25 leading teachers. Moreover, for this program to impact the learning process of close to 1000 students.

The pilot has a particular characteristics, it is carried out with teachers who are part of the Wayúu [ˈwajuː] people historically distributed in the Guajira peninsula in northern Colombia and northwestern Venezuela. This involves the participation of teachers and students from two culturally united countries that also share the interest of strengthening media and information literacy skills through access, evaluation and editing of information. This will allow them in turn to consolidate Wikipedia in Wayuunaiki [waˈjuːnaiki], Wikipeetia, which was launched in 2023 as a tool to circulate knowledge and content for the memory and preservation of the culture. It is worth highlighting the co-creative role of a group of Wayúu teachers who, together with the Wikimedia Colombia and Wikimedia Foundation teams, are collaborating in the adaptation of the program and its open educational resources, aiming for a meaningful and relevant learning experience for the local community.

In this context, the Wayúu people rely on the jayeechi, which are songs to narrate the life of the community, daily work, grazing, abundance or scarcity, as well as love and tragedy. Thus, the jayeechi have been used for centuries as a tool for cultural reproduction and a resource for historical construction, as happened with the Iliad and the Odyssey in the European world. Therefore, keeping proportions in mind, “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom” can also support the journey of a minority community to gain digital skills to encyclopedically document content that deserves to be part of the universal heritage, not only from orality exclusively anymore but also taking advantage of Wikipedia as a digital tool for collective knowledge building.

How to be a Wikipedian is a project that launched and developed by Rotana Nawwaf Al Hasanat Within the framework of the Wikimedians of the Levant projects. The core of the project involves tteaching a group of participants how to edit and write on the Arabic Wikipedia, divided into two parts. The first part consists of face-to-face or remote sessions, while the second part involves an editing competition.

We achieved a very good result in the first version, and based on that, we arranged the second version in the end of 2023.

The second version of “How to be a Wikipedian” targeted all Arabic countries, not only Jordan as in the first version. This expansion contributed to a significantly higher level of diversity, as participants that joined from Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Morocco took part in the project.

All sessions in this version were conducted online by Rotana Nawwaf Al Hasanat, with a strong focus on editing in the Arabic Wikipedia and uploading images to Wikimedia Commons.

The total number of participants was 22 editors, and they achieved impressive results in this version: 121 new articles, 165 commons uploaded, 552K words added, and a total of 473 edits. Please check the Dashboard for full stats.

On the other hand, the total number of new active members for Wikimedians of the Levant was three.

We are looking to conduct new versions in 2024, aiming to attract more editors, members, and knowledge.

In a strategic shift aimed at fostering more direct connections, Let’s Connect Team Kwara 2.0 proudly presents the second edition of our Peer Learning Program. This time, we chose in-person interaction, acknowledging that people often benefit from shared physical spaces in the learning process. Join us for a concise journey through the practical highlights of our recent Learning Clinics and the moments that ensued.

Learning Clinic 1: Proposal Writing for Funding

Date: January 12, 2024

Miracle James, our moderation facilitator, guided a learning session from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. West Central African Time. Barakat Adegboye, the project lead, provided an introductory speech, shedding light on the Let’s Connect program and creating a conducive learning atmosphere. The presentation, led by Barakat, delved into “Proposal Writing for Funding”. It navigated through the intricacies of creating proposals, offering insights into funding dynamics. Participants actively engaged in dissecting real funded proposals, fostering a participatory learning environment.

The 60-minute presentation concluded with a Q&A session, where participants posed thoughtful questions. To wrap up the day, a 20-minute game session injected a lighthearted element into the proceedings, promoting camaraderie among participants.

Following the sessions, participants had the opportunity for a casual photo session, capturing the essence of the day. Shared laughter and experiences during this time added an extra layer to the connections formed.

Barakat Adegboye, the project lead, closed the event with a brief speech, expressing gratitude for participants’ involvement and enthusiasm. Her words aimed to encapsulate the essence of the day, leaving attendees with a sense of motivation for their ongoing learning journey.

Learning Clinic 2: Designing Learning/Retrospective Sessions

Date: 13th January 2024

Miracle James resumed moderation duties, steering participants into “Designing Learning/Retrospective Sessions” from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm West Central African Time. Blessing Linason, the trainer for the day, initiated a discussion by asking, “Why design learning/retrospective sessions?” The ensuing conversation was a brainstorming session, with participants sharing insights and experiences.

Blessing’s presentation unfolded systematically, providing insights into the magic behind designing effective learning experiences. The Q&A segment added a touch of spontaneity, with Blessing fielding questions. A 20-minute charades game followed, offering participants a chance to unwind and connect through laughter.

As the Learning Clinic concluded, Barakat Adegboye returned to deliver a closing speech. Her words focused on thanking participants for their active involvement, underlining the collaborative spirit of the day.

Let’s Connect Peer Learning Program in Kwara 2.0‘s Learning Clinics aimed at providing practical insights without embellishment. The decision to transition to physical learning clinics was grounded in our findings from the last implementation. Stay tuned for more updates from the Let’s Connect Peer Learning Program in Kwara 2.0 as we continue our journey of turning knowledge into an enriching and practical experience.

 Ridzaina (project lead): She is a Wikimedia volunteer from Nigeria who has gained extensive experience as a facilitator and editor in various Wikimedia projects. Some of these projects include Wiki loves SDGs, WikiGLAM, 1lib1ref, Wikidata for Libraries and Librarians in Nigeria, Wikidata for Novels and Novelists in Nigeria, WikiLovesLibraries, Promoting Nigerian Books and Authors, Celtic Knot Kwara, and more. She has also served as a facilitator for Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom programs in Kwara, Nigeria, for teachers and secondary school students. She led the Let’s Connect Peer Learning Program in Kwara in the late and early quaters of 2022 and 2023, respectively.

Ridzaina also served as the General Secretary of the Wikimedia Fanclub, University of Ilorin for the academic session of 21/22.

James Rhoda (project facilitator and disbursement of fund): She is an experienced Wikimedian, who has participated in various Wikimedia projects (as a facilitator as well as an editor) namely; Some of these projects include Wiki loves SDGs, WikiGLAM, 1lib1ref, Wikidata for Libraries and Librarians in Nigeria, Wikidata for Novels and Novelists in Nigeria, WikiLovesLibraries, Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom for Secondary School students, Promoting Nigerian Books and Authors, Celtic Knot Kwara, and more.

Linason Blessing (project facilitator): Blessing is an experienced Wikibrarian and has participated in various Wikimedia projects such as WikiLoveAfrica, WPWP, Wikidata (Media personalities in Nigeria), Winner of WPWP Kwara and Wikidata Media personality in Nigeria, WikiGLAM Awareness for Libraries and Librarians in Kwara, Wikidata for Libraries and Librarians in Nigeria, 1lib1ref 2022 Kwara, etc. She led the Wikipedia awareness for Library and Information Science Students in Nigeria and was a facilitator for the first Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom in Nigeria.

Mijesty (communication expert): Miracle James is an experienced Wikimedian and member of the Wikimedia user group Nigeria who has participated in several Wikipedia projects as a volunteer, she also led the Wikipedia awareness in Offa community and has facilitated several Wikimedia projects.

🕑 1 hour 13 minutes

Alan Ang and Kris Litson (pictured, left to right) are both employees at Wikimedia Deutschland, the German Wikimedia chapter: Alan is a partner manager for Wikidata, while Kris is head of software communications. The two are both involved in evangelism for both Wikidata and its backend software, Wikibase.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Wikidata
• Wikibase
• "Linked open data" on Wikipedia
• Wikidata REST API
• Wikibase Cloud
• Wikimedia Deutschland data partnerships (includes contact email address)
  • List of some current partners
• Wikidata entries tagged as "big city"
• Wikidata Mismatch Finder

On January 27, 2004, a humble IP address marked the commencement of an extraordinary journey – the birth of Bengali Wikipedia – by creating the main page. The inaugural article in বাংলা ভাষা was created on May 24, 2004.

As it celebrates its 20th birthday, we delve into the evolution of this digital encyclopedia, witnessing the growth of knowledge, culture, and community.

As of January 26, 2024, Bangla Wikipedia editors have written 146,392 articles and contributed a staggering 71,69,000+ edits. The project even holds the 5th position in article depth among 318 active Wikipedia’s worldwide.

At the heart of Bangla, Wikipedia is a vibrant community. With 1,154 active volunteers and 13 administrators, this collective of passionate contributors has woven a tapestry of knowledge, including 17,716 files and images.

The journey wasn’t without challenges, from content disputes to technical glitches. Yet, the Bangla Wikipedia community has remained resilient through adversities, contributing to the platform’s growth and maturity.

Wikimedia Bangladesh and the West Bengal Wikipedia Community play pivotal roles in managing offline activities in Bangladesh and India, respectively. Their collaborative efforts amplify the impact of Bangla Wikipedia, fostering a sense of community across borders.

On this special day, the Bangla Wikipedia community marks the occasion with flair. From changing the site logo to an offline meet-up with cake-cutting ceremonies, the celebration reflects the collective joy of achieving two decades of knowledge-sharing.

As Bangla Wikipedia steps into the future, the path ahead is filled with possibilities! With 20 years of legacy, it envisions continued growth, increased collaboration, and an ever-expanding treasure trove of knowledge for generations to come.

Dr Martin Poulter has been the Wikimedian in Residence at the Khalili Foundation since 2019. Our partnership with the Khalili Foundation has facilitated an incredible wealth of cultural information and research being added to the wiki projects, with a particular focus on non-western art. In this blog, we take a look at the achievements made over the last year of the residency.

In 2022, Martin and Waqās Ahmed researched the extent to which the western art canon was represented on the wiki projects in comparison to the art of other cultures. Unsurprisingly, western art has much higher representation. But with the help of the Khalili Foundation’s images and expertise, as well as native language speakers from the wider Wikimedia community, this residency is filling the gap.

The residency has previously shared over 1500 from all eight Khalili Collections. These are used in 90 different Wikimedia platforms (up from 81 last year). Articles referencing these items and information from the Collection saw a rush of translations from English into other languages, enriching other language Wikipedias with this wealth of cultural heritage. This made it a record year for image views at 78.5 million views of Khalili images across all Wikimedia platforms.

In 2023 the emphasis of the residency shifted from sharing images and creating articles, to running events. Two editathons were hosted by Wellcome Collection and Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford. The Wikimedians of Islamic Civilization User Group hosted two online sessions about using Khalili Collections’ Islamic art in Arabic Wikipedia. Waqās made a presentation to Art UK using this project as a case study of successful sharing of cultural heritage on Wikimedia.

Milestones

• Fifteen new articles in English, Indonesian, Urdu, Malay and Spanish, bringing the total of new Wikipedia articles created to fifty.
• The Musa va ‘Uj article passed Good Article* review, becoming the eighth Good Article from this project.
• The project received an honourable mention in Wikimedia UK’s Partnership of the Year awards, both to the Khalili Collections for sharing images and Dr Glaire Anderson of the University of Edinburgh for using them in her teaching.
• Two images won Featured Picture* awards: one on English Wikipedia and another on Arabic Wikipedia.

• Two Featured Article* awards: Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam in English Wikipedia and Urdu Wikipedia, getting 52,771 page views over the course of the year
• Three articles featured in Wikipedia’s Did You Know? section: Musa va ‘Uj, Falnama, and Gulshan-i ‘Ishq.
• Substantial rewrites of the articles Cultural diversity, World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development, Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, and Falnama. Wikipedia’s articles about cultural diversity were a bit overloaded with legal detail and are now more accessible. These articles are collectively getting more than 10,000 views per month.
• 58,849 page views of English Wikipedia articles relating to the Khalili Collections.

Looking ahead

As the residency continues, Martin hopes to share more articles about art works and about topics that link multiple works (such as exhibitions). The residency also aims to promote cultural diversity more generally, by encouraging the community to improve Wikipedia articles about artists and masterpieces from all the world’s cultures.

For more information on our cultural partnerships, you can visit this page. We also have a Get Involved page which lists some of the ways you can explore exciting partnerships such as this one.

The post Khalili Foundation: Year in Review appeared first on WMUK.

Hidden away in the little Himalayan town of Mukteshwar is a fascinating bit of science history. Cattle and livestock really mattered a lot in the pre-engine past, especially for transport and power,  on farms and in cities but also and especially for people in power. Hyder Ali and Tipu were famed and feared for their ability to move their guns rapidly, most famously, making use of bullocks, of the Amrut Mahal and Hallikar breeds. The subsequent British conquerors saw the value and maintained large numbers of them, at the Commissariat farm in Hunsur for instance.

The Commissariat Farm, Hunsur Photo by Wiele & Klein, from: The Queen's Empire. A pictorial and descriptive record. Volume 2. Cassell and Co. London (1899). [p. 261] The original photo caption given below, while being racy, was most definitely inaccurate, these were not maintained for beef : BEEF   FOR   THE   BRITISH   ARMY. It is said that the Turkish soldier will live and fight upon a handful of dates and a cup of water, the Greek upon a few olives and a pound of bread—an excellent thing for the commissariats of the two armies concerned, no doubt! But though Turk and Greek will be satisfied with this Spartan fare, the British soldier will not—not if he can help it, that is to say. Sometimes he cannot help it, and then it is only just to him to admit that he bears himself at a pinch as a soldier should, and is satisfied with what he can get. But what the British soldier wants is beef, and plenty of it : and he is a wise and provident commander who will contrive that his men shall get what they want. Here we see that the Indian Government has realised this truth. The picture represents the great Commissariat Farm at Hunsur in Mysore, where the shapely long-horned bullocks are kept for the use of the army.

Report of the cattle plague commission led by J.H.B. Hallen (1871)

Imagine the situation when cattle die off in their millions - the estimated deaths of cows and buffaloes in 1870 was 1 million. Around 1871, it rang alarm bells high enough to have a committee examining the situation. Britain had had a major "cattle plague" outbreak in 1865 and so the matter was not unknown to the public. The generic term for the mass deaths was "murrain", a rather old-fashioned word that refers to an epidemic disease in sheep and cattle derived from the French word morine, or "pestilence," with roots in Latin mori "to die." A commission headed by Staff Veterinary Surgeon J.H.B. Hallen went across what would best be called the "cow belt" of India and noted among other things that the cattle in the hills were doing better and that rivers helped isolate the disease. Remarkably there were two little-known Indians members - Mirza Mahomed Ali Jan (a deputy collector) and Hem Chunder Kerr (a magistrate and collector). The report includes 6 maps with spots where the outbreaks occurred in each year from 1860 to 1866 and the spatial approach to epidemiology is dominant. This is perhaps unsurprising given that the work of John Snow would have been fresh in medical minds. One point in the report that caught my eye was "Increasing civilization, which means in India clearing of jungle, making of roads, extended agriculture, more communication with other parts, buying and selling, &c, provides greater facilities for the spread of contagious diseases of stock." The committee identified the largest number of deaths to be caused by rinderpest. Rinderpest has a very long history and the its attacks in Europe are quite well documented. There had been two veterinary congresses in Europe that looked at rinderpest. One of the early researchers was John Burdon Sanderson (a maternal grand-uncle of J.B.S. Haldane) who noted that the blood of infected cattle was capable of infecting others even before the source individual showed any symptoms of the disease. He also examined the relationship to smallpox and cowpox through cross-vaccination and examination for resistance. C.A. Spinage in his brilliant book (but with a European focus) on The Cattle Plague - A History (2003) notes that rinderpest belongs to the Paramyxoviruses, a morbillivirus which probably existed in Pleistocene Bovids and perhaps the first relative that jumped to humans was measles, and was associated with the domestication of cattle. The English believed that the origin of rinderpest lay in Russia. The Russians believed it came from the Mongols.

Gods slaandehand over Nederland, door de pest-siekte onder het rund vee [God's lashing hand over the Netherlands, due to the plague disease among cattle] Woodcut by Jan Smits (1745) - cattle epidemics evoked theological explanations

The British government made a grant of £5,000 in 1865 for research into rinderpest which was apparently the biggest ever investment in medical research upto that point of time. This was also a period when there was epidemic cholera epidemic, mainly affecting the working class, and it was noted that hardly any money was spent on it. (Spinage:328) The result of the rewards was that a very wide variety of cures were proffered and Spinage provides an amusing overview. One cure claim came from a Mr. M. Worms of Ceylon and involved garlic, onion, and asafoetida. Worms was somehow related to Baron Rothschild and the cure was apparently tested on some of Rothschild's cattle with some surprising recoveries. Inoculation as in small pox treatments were tried by many and they often resulted in infection and death of the animals.

As for the India scene, it appears that the British government did not do much based on the Hallen committee report. There were attempts to regulate the movement of cattle but it seems that the idea that it could be prevented through inoculation or vaccination had to wait. In the 1865 outbreak in Britain, one of the control measures was the killing and destruction of infected cattle at the point of import. This finally brought an end to outbreaks in 1867. Several physicians in India tried experiments in inoculation. In India natural immunity was noted and animals that overcame the disease were valued by their owners. In India natural immunity was noted and animals that overcame the disease were valued by their owners. In 1890 Robert Koch was called into service in the Cape region on the suggestion of Dr J. Beck. In 1897 Koch announced that bile from infected animals could induce resistance on inoculation. Koch was then sent on to India to examine the plague leaving behind a William Kolle to continue experiments in a disused mine building at Kimberley belonging to the De Beers. Around the same time experiments were conducted by Herbert Watkins-Pitchford and Arnold Theiler who found that serum from cattle that recovered worked as an effective inoculation. They however failed to publish and received little credit. Koch, a German, beating the English researchers was a cause of hurt pride.

The Brown Institution was destroyed in 1944 by German bombing

Interesting to see how much national pride was involved in all this. The French had established an Imperial Bacteriological Institute at Constantinople with Louis Pasteur as their leading light. This was mostly headed by Pasteur Institute Alumni. Maurice Nicolle and Adil-Bey were involved in rinderpest research. They demonstrated that the causal agent was small enough to pass through bacterial filters. In India, Alfred Lingard was chosen in 1890 to examine the problems of livestock diseases and to find solutions. Lingard had gained his research experience at the Brown Animal Sanatory Institution - whose workers included John Burdon Sanderson. About six years earlier, Robert Koch, a German, had caused more embarrassment to the British establishment by identifying the cholera causing bacteria in Calcutta. Koch had however not demonstrated that his bacteria isolate could cause disease in uninfected animals - thereby failing one of the required tests for causality that now goes by the name of Koch's postulates. There were several critiques by British researchers who had been working for a while on cholera in India - these included David Douglas Cunningham (who was also a keen naturalist and wrote a couple of general natural history books as well) and T.R. Lewis (who had spent some time with German researchers).  The British government (the bureaucrats were especially worried about quarantine measures for cholera and had a preference for old-fashioned miasma theories of disease) felt the need for a committee to examine the conflict between the English and German claims - and they presumably chose someone with a knowledge of German for it -  Emanuel Edward Klein assisted by Heneage Gibbes. Klein was also from the Brown Animal Sanatory Institution and had worked with Burdon Sanderson. Now Klein, the Brown Institution, Burdon Sanderson and many of the British physiologists had come under the attack of the anti-vivisection movement. During the court proceedings that examined claims of cruelty to animals by the anti-vivisectionists, Klein, an east European (of Jewish descent) with his poor knowledge of English had made rather shocking statements that served as fodder for some science fiction written in that period with evil characters bearing a close resemblance to Klein! Even Lingard had been accused of cruelty, feeding chickens with the lungs of tuberculosis patients, to examine if the disease could be transmitted. E.H. Hankin, the man behind the Ganges bacteriophages had also been associated with the vivisection-researchers and the British Indian press had even called him a vivisector who had escaped to India.

Lingard initially worked in Pune but he found the climate unsatisfactory for working on anti-rinderpest sera. In 1893 he moved the laboratory in the then remote mountain town of Mukteshwar (or Muktesar as the British records have it) and his first lab burnt down in a fire. In 1897 Lingard invited Koch and others to visit and Koch's bile method was demonstrated. The institution, then given the grand name of Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory was rebuilt and it continues to exist as a unit of the Indian Veterinary Research Institute. Lingard was able to produce rinderpest serum in this facility - producing 468,853 doses between 1900 and 1905 and the mortality of inoculated cattle was as low as 0.43%. The institute grew to produce 1,388,560 doses by 1914-15. Remarkably, several countries joined hands in 1921 to attack rinderpest and other livestock diseases and it is claimed that rinderpest is now the second virus (after smallpox) to have been eradicated. The Muktesar institution and its surroundings were also greatly modified with dense plantations of deodar and other conifers. Today this quiet little village centered around a temple to Shiva is visited by waves of tourists and all along the route one can see the horrifying effects of land being converted for housing and apartments.

The Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory c. 1912 (rebuilt after the fire)

In 2019, the commemorative column can be seen.

Upper corridor

A large autoclave made by Manlove & Alliott, Nottingham.

Stone marker

A cold storage room built into the hillside

Koch in 1897 at Muktesar Seated: Lingard, Koch, Pfeiffer, Gaffky

The habitat c. 1910. One of the parasitologists, a Dr Bhalerao, described parasites from king cobras shot in the area.

The crags behind the Mukteshwar institute, Chauli-ki-Jhali, a hole in a jutting sheet of rock (behind and not visible) is a local tourist attraction.

Here then are portraits of three scientists who were tainted in the vivisection debate in Britain, but who were able to work in India without much trouble.

E.H. Hankin

Alfred Lingard

Emanuel Edward Klein

The cattle plague period coincides nicely with some of the largest reported numbers of Greater Adjutant storks and perhaps also a period when vultures prospered, feeding on the dead cattle. We have already seen that Hankin was quite interested in vultures. Cunningham notes the decline in adjutants in his Some Indian Friends and Acquaintances (1903). The anti-vivisection movement, like other minority British movements such as the vegetarian movement, found friends among many educated Indians, and we know of the participation of such people as Dr Pranjivan Mehta in it thanks to the work of the late Dr. S. R. Mehrotra. There was also an anti-vaccination movement, and we know it caused (and continues to cause) enough conflict in the case of humans but there appears to be little literature related to opposition to their use on livestock in India.

Further reading

• All the linked Wikipedia entries.
• A history of the anti-vivisection movement - the Brown Dog Riots 
• Besant, Annie (1882) Vivisection.
• Blevins, S. M., & Bronze, M. S. (2010). Robert Koch and the “golden age” of bacteriology. International Journal of Infectious Diseases, 14(9), e744–e751. doi:10.1016/j.ijid.2009.12.003
• Chakrabarti, Pratik (2001). Beasts of Burden: Animals and Laboratory Research in Colonial India. History of Science 48 (2):125-151. doi:10.1177/007327531004800201
• Cunningham, D.D. (1907). Plagues and Pleasures of Life in Bengal.
• Holmes, J.D.E. (1913) A description of the Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory, Muktesar : its work and products. Calcutta: Government Press.
• Plowright, W. (1968). Rinderpest Virus. Virology Monographs, 25–110. doi:10.1007/978-3-662-39771-8_2
• Richards, S. (1986). Drawing the life-blood of physiology: Vivisection and the Physiologists’ dilemma, 1870–1900. Annals of Science, 43(1), 27–56. doi:10.1080/00033798600200111  
• Spinage, C.A. (2003). Cattle Plague. A History. New York: Springer.  

Thanks are due to Dr Muthuchelvan and his colleague for an impromptu guided tour of IVRI, Mukteshwar.

Postscripts:
The Imperial Bacteriologist - Alfred Lingard in this case in 1906 - was apparently made "Conservator" for the "Muktesar Reserve Forest" and the 10 members of the "Muktesar Shikar Club" were given exemption from fees to shoot carnivores on their land in 1928. See National Archives of India document.
Klein, Gibbes and D.D. Cunningham were also joined by H.V. Carter (who contributed illustrations to Gray's Anatomy - more here).

28-1-2024: The Hebbal Serum Institute (another institution built during Leslie Coleman's tenure) was established in Bangalore around 1927 and produced two million doses of serum from 1927 to 1939.

18/01/2024-24/01/2024

Mapping

• Anne-Karoline Distel has researched that historic=pinfold and historic=pound are describing the same thing in different dialects. She thinks that pinfold should be deprecated.
• The proposal emergency=disaster_response was approved with 45 votes for, 1 vote against, and 2 abstentions.

Community

• GOwin explained the various software and hardware equipment needed to organise a mapping party for same-day imagery collection and mapathons.
• rtnf, the driving force behind the Indonesian edition of weeklyOSM, explained the terms in Xvtn’s OSM iceberg graphic (we reported earlier) for newcomers and commented on the issues from his point of view.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The State of the Map Organising Committee is providing a Travel Grant Programme (TGP) to facilitate accessibility and diversity at the global SotM 2024 Conference, which will happen in Nairobi, Kenya on 6 to 8 September. The TGP ranges from EUR 40 to 1200; the Online Attendance Support Grant, for those with limited internet connectivity, is up to EUR 40. In a comment, SeverinGeo pointed out that the amount allocated for people living in Africa will probably not even cover travel costs, and therefore active but not wealthy OSM contributors are unlikely to take part in the SotM.
• The OpenStreetMap Foundation congratulated Tom Hughes for being recognised as one of the top open source contributors in the OpenUK New Year’s Honours List (we reported earlier).

Events

• Geoffrey Kateregga presented the results of a survey of OSM community leaders across Africa in his OpenStreetMap diary. This overview of the OpenStreetMap landscape in Africa was also outlined during the State of the Map Africa 2023 conference.
• The website for the State of the Map 2024, to be held in Nairobi, Kenya, is now online.

Maps

• Hiroshi Miura reported that K Sakanoshita, together with the OpenStreetMap community in Osaka, Japan have created a public information board based on OpenStreetMap data. The board is located next to Showa Public Bath, near Awaji Station. This neighbourhood map was created using the ‘Town Walk Map Maker‘ web application.
• Rawmaps displays more than 20 different data categories including countries, EEZs, populations, coats of arms, population, and economic data. Planets, stars, and the moon are additional items you can view.

OSM in action

• The Anime Site Mapping Project is a geolocation project aiming to identify the real-life settings used in anime films and television series. The identified locations are displayed on a uMap map based on OpenStreetMap data.

Software

• The free Windows Video GPS Viewer application allows you to view videos captured by your dashcam, action cam, or drone with embedded geolocation information on an OSM map.
• The Open Reviews website is offering a grant and calling for developers to integrate Mangrove Reviews with OsmAnd or other apps as a plugin.
• Yuri Astrakhan has fixed Sophox so that it once again returns in full up-to-date OSM data for the first time since June 2021. See what it can do with these example queries.

Did you know …

• … that the All The Places project is trying to web scrape the POI data from major websites that have ‘store location’ pages?
• … that Free Map Tools offers various map-based measurement tools?
• … Prettymapp? Ideal, if you want to quickly create a personal Christmas gift using OpenStreetMap data. Instead of using it online, you can also easily install it on your computer.
• … the public transport navigation app, KTrip?
• … that a ‘mute user‘ feature has been added to OpenStreetMap?
• … there are several OpenStreetMap-themed add-ons for the Mozilla Firefox browser?

Other “geo” things

• Paris’ public transport authority has asked the makers of navigation apps to limit route suggestions for travellers while the city is hosting the Olympic Games.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2024-01-25
Gütersloh	OSM Ostwestfalen Lippe		2024-01-25
Wien	70. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch		2024-01-25
Lübeck	138. OSM-Stammtisch für Lübeck und Umgebung		2024-01-25
	MapComplete Community Call 2024-01		2024-01-26
	Compleanno OpenStreetMap Italia 2024		2024-01-26
Localidad Santa Fé	Mapeemos los restaurantes de la calle Bonita y la Macarena		2024-01-27
Chanakya Puri Tehsil	4th OSM Delhi Mapping Party		2024-01-28
Cayenne	Rencontre mensuelle Guyane		2024-01-29 – 2024-01-30
Saint-Étienne	Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire		2024-01-30
Salt Lake City	Salt Lake City Monthly Map Night		2024-02-01
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)		2024-01-31
Amsterdam	End of Winter Mapping Party		2024-02-01
Dresden	OSM-Stammtisch Dresden		2024-02-01
	OSM-Deutschland Vernetzungstreffen		2024-02-02
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #61		2024-02-05
	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2024-02-06
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-02-07
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2024-02-07
Barcelona	Geomob Barcelona		2024-02-07
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2024-02-07
Berlin	Missing Maps – DRK & MSF Online Mapathon	✓	2024-02-07
Bochum	OSM-Stammtisch Bochum		2024-02-08

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by LuxuryCoop, MatthiasMatthias, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SeverinGeo, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, derFred, isoipsa, mcliquid, miurahr, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Mahmoud “Mody” Hassan is a freshman at Rutgers University Newark. It was his first term of college, and he had just started at Rutgers after being born and raised in Egypt. So there were a lot of changes in his life when he showed up to Dr. Laura Porterfield’s class on “Education and Social Change in the Black Diaspora” and learned he’d be writing a Wikipedia article as a class assignment. Dr. Porterfield was participating in a project run by Wiki Education and funded by the Broadcom Foundation to increase the number of biographies on Wikipedia of diverse people in STEM.

“The concept of making a page on Wikipedia sounded too crazy and made me consider dropping the class,” Mody admits. “But I never did.”

Despite that initial nervousness, Mody dug in on the assignment. He chose to write about Claibourne Smith, an African American chemist who helped advance Delaware State University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU).

“After reading about him and how much information about him was nowhere to be found, I decided that he should get a page on Wikipedia,” he says.

Mody tackled two different areas of learning: (1) learning about Claibourne Smith and his achievements, and (2) learning how to edit Wikipedia. While he didn’t enjoy the technical difficulties of creating the page, he loved publishing the final article.

“So this assignment took longer than the other assignments, but the most important and different thing is that this article was going to go online for people to read and consume knowledge from, and it was my responsibility that those people weren’t misled by what I wrote,” Mody says. “The feeling of having the assignment done and having it published online for everyone to see was such a flex, and I loved that part.”

He hopes more faculty participate; if they’re going to ask students to write the equivalent of an article anyway, why not publish it on Wikipedia so everyone can benefit? And the experience has taught him useful skills about editing Wikipedia. While he’s busy with schoolwork during the term, he’s already planning to create more articles on the Arabic Wikipedia this summer.

“Making a page about Smith meant a lot to me because I felt like it was a piece of art that I kept looking at,” Mody says.

Wiki Education has exciting news to ring in the New Year! We are thrilled to announce a three-year partnership with the Mellon Foundation’s Higher Learning program that will elevate the knowledge of 16,000 higher education students studying the humanities to represent more complete and accurate narratives of the human experience on Wikipedia. Beginning this year, this partnership will amplify our Wikipedia Student Program’s Knowledge Equity initiative that brings to light stories and perspectives that are often missing, misrepresented, or have little information written about them. This project will be the biggest social-justice campaign for the humanities in Wikipedia’s history.

“Our world is full of rich human stories and horizon-expanding knowledge that should be accessible to all, but that have been left out, suppressed, or otherwise hidden from public view,” says Maria Sachiko Cecire, Program Officer in Higher Learning at the Mellon Foundation. “We are delighted to partner with Wiki Education in this ambitious social justice campaign to bring more information about the full range of human creation and expression to the largest and most consulted reference work on the planet. We are especially thrilled that the significant research and writing skills of humanities faculty and students at colleges and universities across the country will power this essential work.”

We define knowledge equity content as that which pertains to the narratives of women and other non-male gender identities, those with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and others whose perspectives have been historically marginalized by dominant groups. Indeed, the dominant group of Wikipedia contributors are currently well-educated white men from North America and Europe. Featured Articles on Wikipedia’s landing page are largely authored by this group and often lacking a social justice lens. 

Wikipedia editors, including new ones, tend to stick with the way things have always been written if not guided to where the gaps exist. Wiki Education’s resources and support will empower students to add content about knowledge equity, while still adhering to Wikipedia’s rigorous rules on sourcing, writing style, and layout. 

Students will specifically focus on re-shaping the landscape of humanities articles pertaining to academic disciplines such as anthropology; archaeology; arts; classics; cultural studies; disability studies; ethics; gender and sexuality studies; history (including history of science); jurisprudence; languages and literature; music; philosophy; racial and ethnic studies; religion; sociology, as well as interdisciplinary topics related to an equitable human experience, like environmental justice.

By the end of 2026, we expect more than 200 million people will have viewed these articles and increased their understanding of communities, cultures, histories, and notable figures that have not received enough media attention elsewhere.

“I’m excited about our partnership with the Mellon Foundation,” says Frank Schulenburg, Executive Director of Wiki Education. “This initiative will significantly impact the students involved and the countless Wikipedia users who will gain free access to representative and trustworthy information. Our Knowledge Equity initiative is a key aspect of our mission, and I’m especially pleased that we’re starting a large campaign to enhance content in the Humanities.”

This project will catalyze our ongoing Knowledge Equity campaign by significantly growing participation among new humanities faculty and supporting Wikipedia use in their courses. Wiki Education will activate its existing network of academic associations and partners and identify new opportunities to collaborate. Our work will be guided by a newly established Humanities and Social Justice Advisory Committee, composed of seven exemplary humanities scholars who have taught with Wikipedia through our Wikipedia Student Program with a knowledge equity lens. Our program team will onboard and support 800 humanities courses that add over 11 million words, powerfully diversifying who and what you see on Wikipedia. 

Contact Kathleen Crowley, Director of Donor Relations, at [email protected] if you’re interested in growing this impact. 

About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org

About Wiki Education
Wiki Education is a small, high-impact nonprofit organization systematically building and expanding the content on the English Wikipedia. Our goal is to represent the sum of all human knowledge by making Wikipedia more accurate, representative, and complete through our Wikipedia Student Program and Scholars & Scientists Program. These programs have trained students in higher education classrooms across the United States and Canada and subject matter experts from around the world how to add their knowledge to the most referenced online encyclopedia. We bring 19% of all new contributors to Wikipedia, who have written over hundred thousand articles viewed hundreds of millions of times.

Mellon Foundation logo used courtesy of Mellon Foundation, all rights reserved.

[This started out as a response for [[Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Evaluation of Vector 2022]] but turned out to be expansive and too-broad-scope for there. It's intended for those familiar with the basics of en.wiki and WMF. ]

The introduction of Vector 2022 skin into en.wiki was a disaster by pretty much any metric.

Huge amounts of heat but very little light was generated on public-facing wikis (mainly en.wiki) and tools (mainly phabricator) and reading between the lines the process was very unpleasant for WMF staffers and the en.wiki admins. The end result was that a new skin containing modest improvements (mainly maintenance fixes) was adopted at the cost of huge ill-will.

1. It wasn’t about the technical content of the change. The changes were technically boring, competently implemented and worked reliably in the overwhelming proportion of situations for the overwhelming proportion of editors.
2. It wasn’t about the intention of the WMF staffers directly involved in the process. All the WMF staffers appeared to behave professionally and appropriately.
3. It wasn’t about the intention of the en.wiki admins. All the en.wiki admins appeared to behave appropriately.
4. It may have been partly about the huge pool of en.wiki editors who are deeply invested in the project, each of whom with their own point of view, set of priorities and fields of expertise. This, however, is a fundamental strength of the project (both Wikipedia as a whole and en.wiki specifically).

Systematic issues

Causes

1. The boundary between the volunteer-run and professionally-staffed portions of en.wiki is brittle, current processes and arrangements ensure that making technical changes to en.wiki is an all-or-nothing big-bang operation which is very costly to all concerned.
2. Technical changes to the en.wiki platform are seen by en.wiki editors as coming from “elsewhere” and being done to them, setting up an in-group and an out-group, with the WMF consistently being the out-group.
3. en.wiki continues to allow pile-ons.

Concrete ideas for WMF

1. Consider recasting wiki infrastructure updates to make WMF tech teams arbiters of technical quality rather than sources of disruption. This might be by funding (and providing infrastructure for) commercial or academic teams to build, debug, test and evaluate skins (and similar) which are then promoted to wikis by WMF based on quality.
2. Consider sponsoring academic research and a theme or track at a usability conference or journal on wikipedia usability (reading and editing; across language and culture textual practices; design for avoiding pile-ons; etc).
3. Consider sponsoring science communication in fields relevant to the wikipedia project: web UI; information systems; multilingual web usability; readability; etc.; etc. By promoting awareness of the academic consensuses in these fields there is hope that we steer discussion along evidence-based lines rather than “I don’t like X, don’t do it”
4. Consider sponsoring the creation and maintenance of wikibooks on each of the technologies wikipedia relies on, prioritising those usable by non-privileged wikimedians within the project (javascript, css, SQL, etc). Boosting access to such resources and aligning the versions and examples with the broader project would promote these skills across the project and enable motivated volunteers to engage with these technologies much more easily.
5. Consider using the volunteers who were actively involved in discussions related to one update as candidates for notification / testing of related updates. My participation in discussions related to Vector 2010 apparently didn’t qualify me for notification about Vector 2022; it should probably have. 12 years may seem like a long time to the WMF, but non-trivial numbers of active en.wiki users have been editing since before WMF was founded, embodying significant institutional knowledge. [Service awards can be used to find veteran editors.]
6. Consider processes to rollout changes to only portions of a wiki at once for testing purposes.
7. Consider moving to rolling updates of significant features as is common in SaaS. A new mainline skin appearing every January on all wikis, being made the default in May and marked as deprecated 48 months later. A new alternative skin appearing alongside it, with more innovative changes and more radical changes to the visual aesthetic might be deprecated earlier, with successful features appearing in a future mainline.
8. Consider publishing explicit design criteria for future wikimedia skins (and similar) built / commissioned by the WMF. 
9. Consider ‘introspection into the wikimedia system’ to be a design criteria for future wikimedia skins built / commissioned by the WMF. ‘Introspection into the wikimedia system’ in this context means enabling and encouraging users to reflect on the wikimedia install before them and might include: consistent visual differentiation between UI elements created by wikimedia core functionality, installed gadgets and /wiki/User:<user>/common.js; links from preference options to the respective tags in phabricator; etc.
10. Consider publishing formal technical evaluations of skins, to provide evidence and motivate change and progress. If editors can see that one skin fails on 25% of browsers used globally and one fails on 1% of browsers used globally, that's hard evidence the the second fulfills the WMF's mission better than the other. 

Concrete ideas for en.wiki

1. Consider better ways of handling contentious issues which don’t result in pile-ons and bordering-on-unclosable RFCs.
2. Consider a policy requiring complaints of specific technical issues in WMF infrastructure (broadly construed, but including skins) to be required to include a link to a relevant phabricator ticket (or a statement of why one can’t be created) if instructions for doing so are already on the page. Driving people who complain about WMF tech stuff to phabricator to create a bug report should be obvious, but it is apparently not.

This fall, students in Melanie Sanwo’s Honors English class at Clovis Community College came together with a common mission: Add biographies of diverse people in STEM to Wikipedia. The 12 students split in four groups to add four new biographies to Wikipedia: Steve Ramirez, Joseph Monroe, Juan G. Santiago, and James M. Jay.

For the Clovis students, it was an opportunity to see themselves in the people they were writing about. Designated as a Hispanic-Serving Institution, Clovis is located in Fresno, California.

“By adding a biography of a diverse person, I felt like I was bringing their story out in the world. Not many would know about this individual but because we started his article, it would allow others to learn about him,” says Kaitlyn Chhay, a first-year student at Clovis who is planning to major in biology. “My favorite part about writing for Wikipedia is knowing that in some way I am kind of leaving an impact on this website. Now forever on, I will know that I was one person of a group who started his article and brought his name out into the light.”

Benson Karki, a computer science major, echoed Kaitlyn’s sentiments.

“Adding a biography of diverse individuals in STEM to Wikipedia is significant to me because it serves as an inspiration for individuals from similar backgrounds,” he says. “Highlighting the accomplishments of someone like Juan G. Santiago, whose work was not widely showcased on the internet, is essential in demonstrating the possibilities within STEM fields to a broader audience.”

Bringing diverse people’s accomplishments to light is the goal of the project the students participated in, funded by the Broadcom Foundation. By adding diverse biographies to Wikipedia, the project seeks to help students see themselves in the heroes and heroines of science.

“As a person of color coming from Lebanese immigrant parents, adding a biography of a person also of color in STEM means for me that I can make it,” Danny Aoun says. “Having a role model who has pursued their dreams as a person of color and has a commonality with me in neuroscience motivates me to strive in whatever I am currently doing because my end goal will be to make as big of an impact on this world that Steve Ramirez has.”

Danny says he plans to transfer to a four-year college after finishing his first two years at Clovis. He hopes to major in psychology or psychological and brain sciences, and dreams of completing a doctoral degree. So creating the biography of a neuroscientist was particularly meaningful to him.

“My favorite part about writing for Wikipedia was learning what this underrepresented STEM researcher has done for modern neuroscience,” he says. “Neuroscience is such a fascinating field, so I enjoyed learning about the research he has done and what it means for the future.”

Juliet Herzog, another Clovis student, is also planning to transfer to a four-year school, and is majoring in biology.

“It was interesting to research and write about someone influential in STEM because of my interest in science,” she says. “Writing this article felt rewarding. As my group did research for the microbiologist we were creating an article for, James M. Jay, it seemed like he was influential in his field. From our research, he seemed dedicated to microbiology, and this was reflected in the awards honored to him. For this reason, I am glad he has a Wikipedia article that others can continue to make contributions to and others can read.”

Of course, not only did students learn about the people whose accomplishments they were featuring on Wikipedia — they also learned about Wikipedia itself.

“One crucial aspect I’d like to emphasize is how meticulously Wikipedia articles are crafted. They are credible, unbiased, and extensively backed by citations, challenging the misconception that they are not reliable sources; a significant lesson I learned through this assignment,” Benson says.

And it’s not just learning about Wikipedia; students gained core research and writing skills as well.

“One thing I really appreciate about this project was the skills developed from writing this type of article; for example, research and writing objectively,” Juliet says. “I thought it was an interesting project because of how different it was from past writing assignments. I am mostly familiar with writing argumentative essays or thematic essays, so this writing was very different for me. Furthermore, this project not only helps students, but also Wikipedia as this project raises awareness among students of writing for this website.”

Danny agrees. While he loved sharing Steve Ramirez’s contributions to neuroscience research, he also enjoyed gaining skills along the way.

“My second favorite part about writing about Wikipedia was learning information literacy. I did not only realize how to be literate at gathering information but how important it is in our day and age where seeking accurate information is a necessity,” he says. “I grew passionate for this project through the information I was learning, and this ties back to what Wikipedia is, a worldwide, free encyclopedia. Being able to provide more information to the public on what I may be researching in the future and supporting Wikipedia’s journey to make a more equitable encyclopedia has been a great honor.”

Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn how to incorporate a Wikipedia assignment into your own course.

Header image of students in the class courtesy Melanie Sanwo, all rights reserved.

09/01/2024-17/01/2024

Mapping

• Requests for comments have been made on these proposals:
  • hitchhiking=true to add a tagging system for hitchhiking spots, aiming to identify common and successful hitchhiking locations.
  • toilets:menstrual_products for adding information about whether a toilet has menstrual products available or not.

Community

• [1] Xvtn has created an OpenStreetMap-themed iceberg chart meme.
• Anne-Karoline Distel described how she searched for and mapped village pounds in Ireland and Great Britain.
• Franjo Lukežić explained how to set up a drawing tablet to improve the FastDraw experience in JOSM. There is also a hint (towards the end) on how to reduce the amount of clicks when drawing a neighbouring area.
• King edgar blogged about his experience at the State of the Map Africa 2023 conference in Yaoundé, Cameroon. The event was focused on ‘Open Mapping as a Support Tool for Local Development in Africa’.
• Makilagi Ed shared their experience of mapping with OpenStreetMap for the first time, detailing how taking a journey through familiar and new areas, marking waypoints and creating routes, has deepened their understanding of the art of mapping.
• unsungNovelty published a post about three places on OpenStreetMap that he has mapped and remembered the most. He noted the beauty of Valparaiso in Tamil Nadu, told how he had to correct his mistakes in Pettineo, Italy and shared how he refined the contours of Dirks Lake in Arkansas, USA.
• Tom Hughes, maintainer of the OpenStreetMap website, made it to the OpenUK New Year’s Honours list, which recognises the UK’s top open source influencers.
• The OpenStreetMap France community is debating the future of their social media presence, particularly on Twitter and Mastodon, with discussions focusing on whether to continue using Twitter, fully migrate to Mastodon, or adopt a hybrid approach for broader outreach and engagement.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The next OSMF Board meeting will be held via the Video room on Thursday 25 January, 13:30 UTC.
• Komoot is now an official Gold Corporate Member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation.
• Mateusz Konieczny, OpenStreetMap Foundation Board member, shared the procedure for reporting those OSM tile server users who do not provide proper attribution.

Local chapter news

• Amanda McCann triggered a discussion by reporting that Slack, a proprietary chat service used by the OSM US and others, is moving to an ‘ephemeral’ 90 day history of discussions unless using thee paid service. Alternatives to this service are being discussed.
• The next FOSSGIS OSM Community Meeting will be held ► in Essen, Germany in May 2024.
• OpenStreetMap US hosted a virtual conference event titled ‘Mapping USA 2024’, which ran on 19 and 20 January.
• OpenStreetMap US is selling various OpenStreetMap-themed merchandise.

Events

• The call for the SotM 2024 travel grant programme is now open. Apply before the end of January if you need financial support to join the State of the Map 2024 in Nairobi.
• An event to be held at the EPN – Médiathèque Louis Aragon in Martigues on Friday 22 March will offer ► an introduction to OpenStreetMap and how to contribute, as part of a series of collaborative workshops organised by the city’s public digital space to explore digital tools and practices suitable for different skill levels.
• KDE España released a recording of the talk titled ‘Geographic Open Data with OpenStreetMap’ via YouTube. You can also watch this video on the PeerTube instance maintained by the KDE community.
• HeiGIT reported that their ‘Waterproofing Data’ project, a mapping project to improve disaster mitigation process in the flood-prone areas of Brazil, has won the ESRC Celebrating Impact Prize 2023 in the ‘Outstanding Societal Impact’ category.
• Participants in the OpenStreetMap@Asia channel in Telegram held their second monthly workshop, tentatively called ‘Map-py Wednesday’, with the goal of encouraging regional mappers to get to know each other better, share about local happenings, and learn from each other, through snappy map-py (lightning) talks. Map-py Wednesday is held online on the third Wednesday of the month, at 08:30 UTC.

Education

• The UN Maps Learning Hub has launched its OSM Advanced courses, starting with a course on validating data in OSM. It offers an initial guide to learning validation techniques and tools such as the OSM Tasking Manager validation steps, JOSM tools and plugins, Overpass, Osmose, Whodidit, OSMCha, then a guide to learning how to interact with OSM contributors, and finally a guide that proposes a specific validation workflow for different map features (places, land use, road network, hydrography, bridges, fords and culverts) with a long-term perspective. Feedback is welcome!

OSM research

• A new building classification model using OpenStreetMap building data aims to estimate the earthquake risks to the built environment, enhancing the accuracy of damage assessment and aiding in disaster management.
• HeiGIT and Amsterdam University Medical Centres have conducted a study to analyse the relationship between the food-related retailers location data on OpenStreetMap and its influence on the health of people living in an area.

Maps

• Christoph Hormann released some additional layers for Musaicum EU-plus, a 10 m resolution satellite image mosaic of Europe.
• Paul Norman analysed the load and performance of the minutely map tile updates on OpenStreetMap. With an update capacity of 4800 tiles per second, the OSM server is expected to handle 95% of map tile update requests in less than 60 seconds.
• Russ Garrett tooted a map of the world’s electricity networks made using data from OpenStreetMap.

OSM in action

• Geocaching noted their OpenStreetMap-based Trails map as a replacement of Google Maps for their premium members. They highlight that the maps are made by locals, that they have more details and are offline available.
• Jake Coppinger released his ‘Australian Cycleway Stats’, a web dashboard that displays statistics on cycleways in Australia based on data from OpenStreetMap.

Open Data

• Sven Geggus has updated the list of trekking locations in Germany on the OpenStreetMap wiki ►. Some areas on this list still need more details.

Software

• Daniel Schep announced that he has made a new version of Overpass Ultra that makes it easier to customise map styles and feature popups.
• bs2000 has created ► an OpenStreetMap-based journey planner application. This application is able to process the GPX route of the planned journey, then it will find nearby travel-related POI locations (such as toilets, lodging, refuelling stations and others) along the route.
• Pieter Vander Vennet blogged about all the achievements of MapComplete in 2023. It is an impressive list!
• Vespucci tooted that support for OAuth2 is available in version 20, which is planned to enter the first beta stage at the end of March 2024.

Programming

• Mark Litwintschik has written about how to work with openly published flight tracking data collected by a network of volunteers contributing to a common aircraft tracking feed.
• Lucas Longour created some userscripts to display Panoramax links on OpenStreetMap and overpass turbo.
• rtnf has shared Javascript code to integrate OpenStreetMap data with Wikidata.

Releases

• GeoDesk for Python 0.1.4 has been released. Highlights include large-area spatial queries now being 4 to 30 times faster (find all 60+ million mapped buildings in the US in under a second), and area calculations for features near the poles are now significantly more accurate.
• Version 2.2.0 of Transportr has been released, with the main change being the switch to MapLibre, making it available on F-Droid again.
• Tilemaker version 3.0.0 has been released. It can convert OSM data in osm-pbf format into Mapbox Vector Tile format (.mbtiles).

Did you know …

• … there is an OpenStreetMap Notes HeatMap?
• … about the OpenCage Geothreads geography trivia collection?
• … that you can create OpenStreetMap-based map posters using the Map Poster Creator app?
• … that the URL osm.org redirects to OpenStreetMap?
• … about the Mastodon OpenStreetMap Diaries Bot account?
• … that the OpenStreetMap Foundation supports, but does not control, the OpenStreetMap project?
• … how to synchronise ► GPX track data from OsmAnd to a PC?

OSM in the media

• Mortiz Poldrack, from Tarnkappe.info, reported ► on the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s move to enforce the rules regarding OSM’s data attribution requirements.

Other “geo” things

• Using LiDAR technology, a team of archaeologists have discovered a cluster of ancient city traces in the Amazon rainforest region of Ecuador.
• Using training data from Google Street View, a team of students from Stanford University have built an AI system to automatically detect where photos were taken. In a ‘Geoguessr’ geolocation competition, this AI system successfully defeated a human geolocation expert in multiple rounds.
• Mapbox released MapGPT, a location-aware AI assistant.
• NASA has launched TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of POllution), a satellite-based air quality monitoring system. This satellite can provide hourly reports on atmospheric pollutants in the North American region.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Gent	OpenStreetMap meetup & MapComplete workshop at TomTom		2024-01-18
Washington	Mapping USA	✓	2024-01-19 – 2024-01-20
Bengaluru	OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party		2024-01-20
City of Fremantle	Social Mapping Saturday: Fremantle 2024		2024-01-20
Hai Buluk	OSM Africa Monthly Mapathon: Map South Sudan	✓	2024-01-20	ss
Windsor	OSM Windsor-Essex Meetup		2024-01-23
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen		2024-01-22
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-01-24
	iD Community Chat		2024-01-24
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2024-01-24
London Borough of Islington	Geomob London		2024-01-24
Richmond	MapRVA Happy Hour		2024-01-25
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2024-01-25
Lübeck	138. OSM-Stammtisch für Lübeck und Umgebung		2024-01-25
Wien	70. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch		2024-01-25
	MapComplete Community Call 2024-01		2024-01-26
Terni	Compleanno OpenStreetMap Italia 2024		2024-01-26
Localidad Teusaquillo	Mapeemos los restaurantes de la calle Bonita y la Macarena		2024-01-27
Saint-Étienne	Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire		2024-01-30
Salt Lake City	Salt Lake City Monthly Map Night		2024-02-01
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)		2024-01-31
Amsterdam	End of Winter Mapping Party		2024-02-01

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, derFred, mcliquid, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.