en.planet.wikimedia

16.06.–22.06.2015

Fundraising campaign for new server hardware

• Goal reached.
• The largest single donations apart from the premium sponsors MapBox and Mapzen are: 500 Euros (Matthias Eilers, Küstenschmiede), 500 USD (Robert Cheetham), 250 Euros (Klaus Tockloth, Freizeitkarte), 256 USD (Ian Dees), 250 USD (Nelson Minar ), Pierre Boizot (200 CHF) and 200 Euros from an unknown donor. Many Thanks to you all. Every little helped.

Mapping

• JOSM has a Mapillary-Integration now. (see this Twitter feed)
• Martin Simon asks how to map ” railway expansion devices” (a piece of equipment on railway tracks which compensates for changes in length as a result of temperature variations).
• A Mapillary-App for Firefox OS is under development. (see posting here)
• Jóhannes Birgir Jensson blogs a plea for remote mapping (via @OpenCageData).
• Students report on a mapping week in Germany during their stay in Saarburg for a Comenius school project.
• While conducting a research, a user in Belgium has changed numerous maxspeed values for roads using multiple accounts without prior communication with the community. The changes resulted in maxspeed values  which were far from reality. The Data Working Group has already taken action. In the comments, Jost Schouppe alleged that a student from Ghent did it as part of his master’s thesis.
• User sbagroy986 informs the community on his progress so far on  Moderation Queue project as a part of this year’s Google Summer of Code. He developed a “Report” button to for osm.org, used for User Diaries (spam, insults, …) and changesets. It was also created a dashboard for the administrators and moderators, a management system for the Data Working Group.
• No one is faster than OSM, right? Especially regarding Edward Snowden Square in Dresden…

Imports

• In Norway, a manual road import is planned.
• In Slovakia is planned an address import with KasporSKAdress.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The State of the Map 2016 will be held in Brussels, Belgium.

Events

• Sam Matthews talks about his views on OpenStreetMap using his experience in the US SOTM 2015.

Humanitarian OSM

• PhD student Martin Dittus examines the activity of HOT-beginners.
• Pierre Béland and Dale Kunce published their campaign speeches for the HOT-board elections.

Maps

• Incredible, how fast OpenStreetMap grows.
• [1] Cambridge University is using OSM data for their detailed interactive campus map. Some of the tags used to achieve their aims were subject to discussion and criticism by other mappers.

switch2OSM

• search.ch uses now partly OSM data.
• The German Railways Company (Deutsche Bahn) uses an OpenStreetMap map to display traffic information about the railway project VDE8 (German Unity Transport Project No. 8).

Open-Data

• The Environment Agency announces the release of their LIDAR data, covering 72% of the land in England, under the Open Government License.
• Open Data is now firmly established in the city of Zurich, Switzerland. Their stated aim is to provide all relevant information  (urban statistics, municipal data) using the best means to do it.
• The Austrian Federal Office of Metrology and Surveying has released a record of the administrative boundaries under a CC-BY-SA license incompatible with OSM. Was this deliberate? (via talk-at)

Software

• OsmAnd 2.1 is released.
• With help from Geolicious OSM routing has been made available as a new OpenRouteService plugin within Quantum GIS.
• Simon Poole announced version 0.9.6 of Vespucci, which is now available on Google Play. Before upgrading unposted changes must be uploaded as Changeset for OSM API, because the format of unposted changes, has been changed.
• GeoServer 2.7.1 was released on May 21.
• Simon blogs about the dangers of open technology when it is driven only by a single company and he mentions as an example MapBox and vector rendering.
• GeoExt reports the results of a three-days codesprint.
• Daniel Koć asks on josm-dev why editors do their own thing in the tagging templates. The responses implied that as other editors are younger than JOSM the question should be why don’t they use the JOSM infrastructure.
• Christoph writes about the necessary work when dealing with all kinds of elevation data.
• OpenLayers Release 3.6.0 is from June 07.
• SQLight Release 3.8.10.2 dates from May 20.

Did you know …

• … the Leaflet Routing Machine for easy displaying OSM-based map and routing capabilities via OSRM, GraphHopper or MapBox API?
• … the Thematic Cartography Guide is available from Axis Maps (via)

Other “geo” things

• Techcrunch.com and bizjournals.com reported that the US company MapBox could collect about 52 million US dollars from investors.
• It looks like … Audi, BMW, Mercedes are favorites to win bid for Nokia HERE maps
• As part of a project, over 500 British diary entries from the first half of the 20th century were geographically assigned and visualized on a map. Although the map resembles maps from this period, it uses data from OSM, Ordnance Survey and Natural Earth.
• The Senate of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) has set up a Priority Programme: “Volunteered Geographic Information: Interpretation, Visualization and Social Computing.”  A call for proposals runs until October 29.
• Max Roser illustrates how common projections affect the outline of a head.
• “ESA trumpeted the launch of a new earth observation satellite.” Christop Hormann reflects on the usefulness of the data and the public relations of the ESA.

Privacy is a core tenant of the Wikimedia movement. Photo by Owen Moore, freely licensed under CC BY 2.0.

We are proud to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation received perfect marks in all five categories in the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)’s Who’s Got Your Back? report.

The annual report, released on June 17, grades technology companies on how well they protect users’ rights and how transparent they are about their policies and activities. As the EFF points out, in an era in which the law is slow to keep pace with technical developments, it is the responsibility of technology companies to enact the strongest possible policies and practices to protect user rights.

This year, the Wikimedia Foundation earned five stars in all five categories:

1. follows industry-accepted best practices;
2. tells users about government data demands;
3. discloses policies on data retention;
4. discloses government content removal requests; and
5. pro-user public policy: opposes backdoors.

Noting that we have adopted all of EFF’s recommended best practices, the report praised the Wikimedia Foundation for our “strong stance regarding user rights, transparency, and privacy.”

Wikimedia’s five-star rating reflects the lengths we go to for transparency and privacy. Photo by Sylwia Bartyzel, freely licensed under CC-0 1.0.

Industry-accepted best practices: The Wikimedia Foundation occasionally receives requests from governments and organizations to release nonpublic user data or remove content from the Wikimedia projects. Compared to other technology companies, we receive relatively few requests like these, in part because we collect little nonpublic information about our users and retain that information only for a limited time. When we do receive a request, we carefully scrutinize it to ensure that it meets our requirements prior to considering release of any nonpublic user information. As we state in our law enforcement guidelines, we require a valid, enforceable warrant before releasing any content to law enforcement. We also explain in those guidelines how we respond to data demands, and publish a transparency report that documents the requests we receive and how we responded.

Government data demands: We promise to give users prompt notice of government demands for nonpublic user information. When we receive a request, we seek to notify the affected user and provide a copy of the request at least 10 calendar days before we release the information. We will contact the user provided that we have the user’s contact information, that disclosing the request will not threaten life or limb, and that we are not otherwise prohibited by law from doing so. The notified user can then attempt to quash or legally challenge the request. If we are prevented from notifying users for one of the above reasons, we will provide information about the request to affected users after the threat or legal restriction has ended. Additionally, we may, and reserve the right to, challenge a request on behalf of any affected user, whether or not the user chooses to pursue his or her own legal challenge.

Data retention policies. We publish detailed information about our data retention policies.

Content removal requests: In our transparency report, we disclose government requests to remove user content or accounts, as well as information about how often we comply.

Pro-user public policy: We oppose “backdoors” that introduce security vulnerabilities for the government’s use.

As part of our commitment to supporting the free sharing of knowledge, we strive to do our utmost to protect our users’ privacy and we are honored to be recognized as industry leaders. We invite you to learn more about our efforts to protect user privacy  and promote transparency at https://transparency.wikimedia.org/.

Geoff Brigham, Wikimedia Foundation General Counsel*

• *Our commitment to privacy is an organization-wide effort, and we thank all who are involved in upholding that commitment, including the Foundation’s Analytics, Operations, Design, Community Engagement, Communications, and Legal teams, as well as many others. Our special thanks go to Lexie Perloff-Giles for her assistance with this blog post.

Wikipedia is the encyclopedia anyone can edit, and thousands of people around the world do just that. But all too often, cultural knowledge is locked behind a language barrier. Haruki Ikeda is an example of a student working to break down that wall, and he’s opening up knowledge about a rich cultural tradition in the process.

Haruki (User:Decafespresso) is a student in Dr. Amy Hughes’ two-term theater history course at Brooklyn College. While he was interested enough to create an account on Wikipedia in 2009, he hadn’t made an edit until he started the course. Since then, he worked on two articles over two terms, contributing to the article on Noh, a traditional Japanese theater form that was rated a Good Article. Then, he began working on the article for the Broadway League.

In his first round, the Noh article, Haruki drew from Japanese sources that weren’t available in English. He was born in Tokyo, and Japanese is his first language.

“It has really helped in my coursework because I was able to use Japanese sources for the Noh article, in addition to English sources,” he said. “I think it was a very meaningful contribution that I was able to make to the Wikipedia community.”

For Noh, Haruki helped edit as the article expanded from 8 sources to 41, with at least three Japanese-only texts. The article was named a Good Article three months after Haruki helped expand it (with very few additional edits in between).

“The reviews were very constructive, and I think going beyond expectations of the class assignment really helped me in solidifying my knowledge of Noh. It is very gratifying to know that others care about what I’ve done and the subject I care about.”

His second article required a completely different approach.

“It was interesting to edit two articles,” Haruki said. “Noh is a very traditional, historic genre with many reliable sources in the form of books and journal articles, but I had to work mostly with newspaper articles for the Broadway League article.”

For that article, Haruki added over 20 sources about the Broadway League, a trade association for theater actors on Broadway. Haruki added information about strikes and the political activity of the organization dating back to the 1940s.

Haruki said he hopes to spend more time translating Japanese articles and sources for the English Wikipedia. After all, that’s in line with his long-term goals: He wants to bring more awareness of contemporary Japanese performances to the West.

“Traditional Japanese theatre forms such as Noh and Kabuki have become known in the Western world, but there are so many talented Japanese contemporary artists and plays that are completely unknown in the rest of the world. Japanese works haven’t been able to reach audiences abroad partly because of the language barrier,” he said. “I think I can change that situation with my English and knowledge of the American theatre industry.”

Haruki’s work is an example of what’s possible when a bilingual student, already fluent in English and another language, tackles a classroom assignment. Students who are still mastering a language, however, can also make meaningful contributions to Wikipedia through translation assignments. By working with articles in their target language and translating it into their native language, students can unlock knowledge from other language Wikipedias and share it with the English-speaking world. (You can read more about translation assignments here).

Thanks to Haruki Ikeda for his wonderful contributions to Wikipedia.

Photo of Haruki Ikeda By Decafespresso (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons. Mask photo, “Three pictures of the same noh ‘hawk mask’ showing how the expression changes with a tilting of the head” by Wmpearl – Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Wealthy apples in Piper Orchard, Seattle, Washington taken with a Leica CL. Photo by Dennis Bratland, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Today, June 29th, is World Camera Day 2015! To celebrate, upload or check out photos taken with different cameras on Wikimedia Commons. Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons do a great job of not only providing an article for reference and more info, but also images and examples of photos taken with different cameras.

The best part is that Wikimedia Commons photos are freely licensed under Creative Commons’ CC BY-SA (example). This means that you can freely reuse these wonderful images, taken with fantastic and high quality cameras, as long as you reshare them under a similar license and attribute the photographer.

Find out more about cameras on Wikipedia and see photos taken by specific cameras on Wikimedia Commons.

The below text is adapted from Wikipedia; it was written by various contributors and is freely licensed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 License and GFDL. Authorship information can be found in each article’s “history” tab.

Kodak Brownie

Kodak Brownie Flash III camera. Photo by NotFromUtrecht, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Brownie is the name of a long-running popular series of simple and inexpensive cameras made by Eastman Kodak. The Brownie popularized low-cost photography and introduced the concept of the snapshot. The first Brownie, introduced in February 1900, was a very basic cardboard box camera with a simple meniscus lens that took 2¼-inch square pictures on 117 rollfilm. With its simple controls and initial price of $1, it was intended to be a camera that anyone could afford and use, hence the slogan, “You push the button, we do the rest.” The camera was named after the popular cartoons created by Palmer Cox. Consumers responded, and over 150,000 Brownie cameras were shipped in the first year of production. An improved model, called No. 2 Brownie came in 1901, which produced larger photos and cost $2. It was also very popular.

Taken with a Kodak Brownie

Leica CL

Leica CL with 40mm Summicron-C. Photo by JamesPFisherIII, freely licensed under CC BY 3.0.

The Leica CL is a 35 mm compact rangefinder camera with interchangeable lenses in the Leica M-mount. It was developed in collaboration with Minolta who manufactured it. It first appeared in April 1973 and was released in the Japanese market in November 1973 as the Leitz Minolta CL. Both the Leica CL and Leitz Minolta CL were manufactured in a new Minolta factory in Portugal.

Taken with a Leica CL

Nikon D40x

Nikon D40 with Nikkor 50 f1.8 AF (whose autofocus doesn’t work with this camera). Photo by Phiarc, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The D40 is a now-discontinued Nikon F-mount entry-level digital SLR, announced November 16, 2006. Compared to its predecessor, the D50, the D40 had several features removed, a few added, and a lower price: US$499.95 ESP as of November 2009 with the 18–55 mm G-II kit lens, positioning it as an entry-level model compared to the D80. The D40x (released March 6, 2007) has a 10-megapixel maximum resolution, up from 6 megapixels of the D50.

Taken with a Nikon D40x

Sony DSLR-A700

The front of a Sony Alpha A700 DSLR. Photo by Evan-Amos, Public domain.

Sony α 700 (DSLR-A700) was the second model launched in the Sony α series of digital single-lens reflex cameras. This model appeared to reuse some technology of the former Konica Minolta Maxxum 7D. On March 8, 2007, at the PMA Trade Show, Sony announced two new α cameras, both positioned to be “above” the α100 in the Alpha line-up. One model was referred to as a “high amateur” model, with a release date of late 2007. The A700 was discontinued, and its successor, the A77 (SLT-A77), was announced on August 24, 2011, with availability from October 2011.

Taken with Sony DSLR-A700

Canon EOS-1D X

2012 Canon EOS 1D X. Photo by Morio, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Canon EOS-1D X is the professional flagship digital SLR camera body by Canon Inc. It succeeded the company’s previous flagship Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III and the Canon EOS-1D Mark IV. It was announced on 18 October 2011. It was released in March 2012 with a suggested retail price of $6,799.00 (body only) and a suggested retail price of £5,299 in the United Kingdom. The camera is supplemented by the Canon EOS-1D C, a movie-oriented camera that shares most of its still photographic features with the 1D X. The 1D C was announced in April 2012 and released in March 2013.

Taken with Canon EOS-1D X

Andrew Sherman
Digital Communications Intern
Wikimedia Foundation

How Wikipedia built governance capability; readability of plastic surgery articles

With contributions by: Piotr Konieczny, Leeza Rodriguez and Tilman Bayer

How Wikipedia built governance capability, 2001–2009

This paper^[1] looks at the topic of Wikipedia governance in the context of online social production, which is contrasted with traditional, contract-bound, hierarchical production models that characterize most organizational settings. Building on the dynamic capabilities theory, the authors introduce a new concept, “collective governance capability”, which they define as “the capability of a collective arrangement to steer a production process and an associated interaction system”. The authors ask the research question, “How does a collective governance capability to create and maintain value emerge and evolve in online social production?”

1. Quantitative analysis: The authors processed a dump of the full history of the English Wikipedia’s first nine years. For each of the 108 months from January 2001 to December 2009 and each editor, that editor’s activity was described by the following numbers: “the number of edits and pages edited, median [Levenshtein] edit distance and article length change, the number of reverted edits, and reverts done […., in] four namespaces: encyclopedia articles, article talk pages, policies and guidelines, and policies and guidelines talk pages”. A cluster analysis is then performed for each month to group editors into sets of similar editing behavior. The authors report:
   “we identify a slow initiation period followed by a period of extremely rapid growth, and, finally, levelling out and a slight decline. In the first phase, there is only a minimal differentiation of contributors into clusters. The second phase of exponential growth is characterized by increasing differentiation of contributors, while the number of clusters stabilizes in the third phase. The statistics provide only a very rough depiction of a complex system, but they certainly suggest that, whatever governance mechanisms have been in place, they have had to deal with dramatically different circumstances over the years.”
2. qualitative analysis: Building on these three phases identified via descriptive statistics, the authors construct “theoretical narrative … [using] a highly selective representation of empirical material that advances the plot of capability-building”, including discussion of the history of policies, processes and events including IAR, 3RR, FAR, bot policy, flagged revisions, the 2005 Nature study comparing Wikipedia’s quality with Britannica’s, the Seigenthaler affair the same year, etc.

The researchers note that Wikipedia governance has changed significantly over the years, becoming less open and more codified, which they seem to acknowledge as a positive change. The authors’ main conclusion stresses, first, that governance could itself be a dynamic, evolving process. Second, that new kinds of governance mechanisms make it possible to create significant value by harnessing knowledge resources that would be very difficult to seize through a market or corporate system. Third, that the lack of a contractually sanctioned governance framework means that people have to learn to deal directly with each other through peer-based interaction and informal agreements, which in turn creates opportunities for self-improvement through learning. Fourth, the authors note that the new type of governance models are constantly evolving and changing, meaning they have a very fluid structure that is difficult to describe, and may be better understood instead as changing combinations of different, semi-independent governance mechanisms that complement one another. Finally, they stress the importance of technology in making those new models of governance possible.

Readability of plastic surgery articles examined

The subject of readability of online patient materials for Plastic Surgery topics was recently assessed by teams from Beth Israel Medical Center at the Harvard Medical School. Readability scores are generally expressed as a grade level: Higher grade levels indicate that that content is more difficult to read. According to the authors, “nearly half of American adults have poor or marginal health literacy skills and the NIH (National Institute of Health) and AMA (American Medical Association) have recommended that patient information should be written at the sixth grade level”. The aim of their research was to calculate readability scores for the most popular web pages displaying procedure information and compare the results to the sixth grade reading level recommendation.

Overview

The core author group published two papers, “Online Patient Resources for Liposuction”^[2], in Annals of Plastic Surgery , and “Assessment of Online Patient Materials for Breast Reconstruction”^[3], in Journal of Surgical Research. The authors concentrated on the topics of “liposuction” and “tattoo information” in one paper, and focused solely on the topic of “breast reconstruction” in the second paper. Readability scores were accessed in both papers, but the breast reconstruction paper added an analysis of ‘complexity’ and ‘suitability’ to more comprehensively evaluate reading level.

For each procedure term topic, websites selected for analysis were based on the top 10 links resulting from the Google search query. The top 10 links were identified as the 10 most common websites for that search term.

Results and conclusions

The authors concluded that the readability of online patient information for ‘liposuction’ and ‘breast reconstruction’ is ‘too difficult’ for many patients as the readability scores of all 20 websites (10 each) far exceeds that of a 6th-grade reading level. The average score for the most popular ‘liposuction’ websites was determined equal to 13.6-grade level. As a comparison ‘tattoo information’ scored at the 7.8-grade level.

Health care information available at the most popular websites for ‘breast reconstruction’ had an average readability score of 13.4, with 100% of the top 10 websites providing content far above the recommended 6th grade reading level . Wikipedia.org readability scores aligned at the higher readability range for both terms, with scores above the 14 grade level for ‘liposuction’, and above grade 15 for ‘breast reconstruction’.

When other metrics such as ‘complexity’ and ‘suitability’ were applied to the Breast Reconstruction websites, the content appeared to be more friendly towards less educated readers. Complexity analysis using PMOSE/iKIRSCH yielded an average score of 8th–12th grade level. In a testament to how images and topography enhance user readability, the breast reconstruction paper also employed the SAM ‘suitability’ formula. This metric concluded that 50% of the websites were ‘adequate’. The SAM formula gives weight to the contribution that images, bulleted lists, subheadings, and video make to the readability of content. Wikipedia.org was found to be ‘unsuitable’ along with Komen.org, BreastReconstruction.com, WebMD.com, and MedicineNet.com.

In conjunction with the ‘readability score’, the PMOSE and SAM metric helped to achieve a more comprehensive view of a patient’s ability to read and comprehend the breast reconstruction material.

Liposuction paper methodology

After articles from the 10 websites with liposuction content were stripped of images and videos, the plain text content was analyzed using ten established readability formulas. These included Coleman–Liau, Flesch–Kincaid, Flesch reading ease, FORCAST, Fry graph, Gunning fog, New Dale–Chall, New Fog count, Raygor estimate, and SMOG. All readability formulas in this paper relied on some combination of word length, syllable count, word complexity, and sentence length. Longer word lengths and sentence lengths compute to higher reading levels. Similarly, words of three or more syllables increase the grade level readability scores. These text-based readability scores do not include the impact that images or graphics have on readers.

In an effort to compare readability scores for a procedure ‘similar’ to liposuction, the authors performed the same type of analysis on the term ‘tattoo information’. Not surprisingly, the query for ‘tattoo information’, a simpler procedure, yielded content with average readability scores of 7.8-grade level.

Based on this wide gap of 5.8 grade levels in readability scores between ‘liposuction’ and ‘tattoo’ literature, the authors pose the question , “So why is this (tattoo) information significantly easier to read than liposuction?” The authors do present good example strategies for rewriting some liposuction content at lower reading levels. However, the authors do not convincingly clarify why the two procedures should have similar low readability levels. The average education levels of the target audience for “liposuction” and “tattoo information” is not well documented in the paper, and it is questionable if they are equal.

According to ASPS statistics, 50% of liposuction patients are over 40 years old. Are 50% of the people seeking tattoos over age 40? While age does not equal reading level, it may certainly give a hint.

Furthermore, the authors downplay the complexity of the liposuction procedure in comparison to tattooing. Liposuction is an invasive procedure performed by a credentialed surgeon and anesthesiologist under IV or General Anesthesia in an accredited outpatient surgery center. The tools, equipment, and anesthetics used in the technique are not simple, common words.

Unlike surgeons, tattoos artists do not require any type of formal medical training or certification. The tattoo procedure does not involve the complexities of pre-operative clearance, fat extraction , fluid and electrolyte regulation, anesthesia administration , or vital sign monitoring. Likewise, the liposuction procedure description is destined to be longer, more technical, and likely requires higher readability levels than tattooing.

Top 10 Google links used in methodology

One consideration which is not discussed by these and other published authors evaluating online content readability, is the fact that Google uses the Dale-Chall and Flesch Kincaid readability formulas in its Penguin algorithm. However, rather than punish high (difficult) readability scores, the algorithm is thought to punish low grade level readability scores. In 2013, the UK analytics company MathSight determined^{[supp 1]} that the Penguin algorithm penalized websites with low grade level readability scores. After the MathSight finding, many SEO experts concluded that Google favors content written at a higher educational level.

In light of this, and regarding the typical methodology of obtaining the data set from Google’s top 10 links, one must question if Google would ever rank a medical content website with a grade 6 readability score higher than a website with a grade 13 readability score. Perhaps even more importantly, most website publishers want what Google wants. Competition is fierce for a spot in the top 10 links. Therefore, as long as online content publishers believe that Google favors well written, well researched, sophisticated content, it might be a tough sell to persuade medical content publishers to oversimplify their content to a sixth grade reading level.

Briefly

Fukushima discussions in the English and Japanese Wikipedias

Similar to several other pieces of research, this paper^[4] looks at social production of knowledge in the context of a single, controversial Wikipedia topic, this time, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The authors compare the discussions in the English and Japanese Wikipedias, noting that (as we would expect) the English one attracts more global audience. Both communities were primarily focused on writing an encyclopedic article, though, contrary to the authors’ expectation, it was the English Wikipedia editors who were more likely to raise topics not directly related to the creation of the article. Overall, the paper is primarily descriptive, and does not provide much discussion to enhance existing social theories.

Other recent publications

A list of other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue – contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.

• “Wikipedia and medicine: quantifying readership, editors, and the significance of natural language”^[5]
• “One-shot Wikipedia: An edit-sprint toward information literacy”^[6] From the abstract: “In this case study, a Wikipedia-editing activity was incorporated into two-hour one-shot instruction sessions. … While a great deal of attention has been paid to teaching with multi-week Wikipedia assignments and coursework, evidence from this project suggests that Wikipedia-related activities can be used effectively within much narrower time constraints.”
• “Unsupervised biographical event extraction using Wikipedia traffic”^[7] From the introduction: “We hypothesise that when a notable event happens to a person, traffic to their Wikipedia page peaks abruptly, and an edit is made to their page describing the event. To explore this hypothesis, a simple outlier-based method is applied to extract peaks (short periods of sudden activity) from Wikipedia page traffic data, which are used to locate page edits which align to sentences contributing to the notability of the page subject.”
• “The Internet School of Medicine: use of electronic resources by medical trainees and the reliability of those resources”^[8] (blog summary: [1])
• “Wikipedia knowledge community modeling”^[9] (book chapter / reference work entry)
• “Domain-specific semantic relatedness from Wikipedia structure: a case study in biomedical text”^[10] (book chapter)
• “Wikipedia – challenges and new horizons in enhancing medical education”^[11]
• “Coverage of European parties in European language Wikipedia editions”^[12]
• “Context-aware detection of sneaky vandalism on Wikipedia across multiple languages”^[13]
• “Google and Wikipedia in the professional translation process: a qualitative work”^[14] (related paper by the same author)

• “Coordination and efficiency in decentralized collaboration”^[15] (conference paper submitted to ICWSM 2015). From the abstract: “we consider the trade-offs inherent in coordination in [decentralized on-line collaboration environments], balancing the benefits to collaboration with the cost in effort that could be spent in other ways. We consider two diverse domains that each contain a wide range of collaborations taking place simultaneously – Wikipedia and GitHub – allowing us to study how coordination varies across different projects. We analyze trade-offs in coordination along two main dimensions, finding similar effects in both our domains of study: first we show that, in aggregate, high-status projects on these sites manage the coordination trade-off at a different level than typical projects; and second, we show that projects use a different balance of coordination when they are “crowded”, with relatively small size but many participants.”

References

Supplementary references and notes:

When you consider the size of the camps where Syrian refugees are kept, the people lose their face, are no longer seen as individuals. But exactly because of the size, there must be professors, engineers, soccer stars and actors among them. Seen in that light Mr كيفين بيكن is not that far away from any of them.

I am sure that for all them it is a "significant event" to be in such a camp. Would it make a difference when we knew for many refugees how "near" they are to Mr Bacon? Would it convince you that these people need food, drink, shelter and schooling for their children?
Thanks,
       GerardM

Tahir Mahmood spent much of his childhood in Saudi Arabia, but is now the most prolific editor on the Urdu Wikipedia. Photo by Tahir Mahmood, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

“I am trying to help the Urdu Wikipedia reach the community-set goal of 100,000 articles. In the process, I crossed the 100,000 edits milestone. This makes me happy.”

This statement highlights the intensely-spirited approach of Tahir Mahmood Qureshi, who has become the first Urdu Wikipedian to surpass 100,000 edits. Though originally from Pakistan, Tahir spent most of his childhood in Saudi Arabia, and attended university in Cyprus. His background means he is familiar and comfortable speaking English, Arabic, and Greek. When it came to Wikipedia, though, Tahir chose to contribute mainly in Urdu.

As one of his colleagues on the Urdu Wikipedia, I congratulated him on his remarkable feat. I then took the opportunity to ask some questions to the man behind the username.

I was surprised to learn that he works in a well-respected Saudi Arabian company, and is in charge of networking and operations. Yet Tahir still finds the time to edit the Urdu Wikipedia with great enthusiasm and dedication.

He credits his achievement to his family support, as well as the general atmosphere of the Urdu Wikipedia. The community is friendly and free from conflict. He started editing on the English Wikipedia as early as 2009, but switched to the Urdu-language Wikipedia in 2012 when he discovered the project in his native language. Adding knowledge in Urdu, that was freely usable by others, was a thrilling and satisfying experience.

Soon, Tahir became a prolific contributor. He was eventually granted administrator and bureaucrat rights by the community, allowing him to perform more technical maintenance tasks. Tahir has an excellent track record of sustaining Urdu content and supporting users, enthusiastically helping to improve templates and categories, guiding new users, fixing missing links, and engaging in other admin tasks – on top of creating and editing new content for the project.

But Tahir’s strongest attributes are his vision and his team spirit. He points out that Urdu Wikipedia is currently ranked 61st in terms of article numbers, bettering its status from 90th last year, as a result of collective effort. It boasts the 14th-highest “article depth” of all Wikipedia projects. The community, however, is far from complacent. Rather, they are working on ways to add even more content, and to improve the encyclopedia’s quality.

“I personally compare the Urdu Wikipedia with the Arabic, Persian and Hindi Wikipedias,” he says. “I believe that we still have a long way to go.”

Tahir spoke about his efforts in reaching the community-set goal of 100,000 articles on the Urdu Wikipedia. As result of his untiring involvement in the process, Tahir surpassed 100,000 edits, becoming the first Urdu Wikipedian to do so.

As something of a team leader, Tahir notes he is just one of many contributors to the Urdu Wikipedia helping to reach this lofty goal. He speaks particularly highly of Mohammed Shoaib’s technical expertise, Obaid Raza’s linguistic knowledge, and Ameen Akbar’s great all-round ability. Tahir also mentioned thirteen other very active Wikipedians, including many with good knowledge of other languages, as being excellent colleagues to work alongside.

Tahir recalled his participation in the Urdu Wikipedia community group call reported on Wikimedia blog last year. He also spoke of the success of Wikipedia meetup events in Karachi, Pakistan, some years ago, and suggests that planning similar meetups in the near future could help to enlist new editors for the Urdu Wikipedia.

Urdu is under no threat of extinction, as it is the national language of Pakistan, and there are good number of Urdu publications in the subcontinent. Tahir is, however, disappointed that the use of Urdu, especially on digital and social media, is poor. “Many well-known media outlets make basic mistakes in spelling and grammar,” he says.

Tahir believes these mistakes are coming from the new generation of “Roman Urdu” users, who write traditional Urdu using the Latin alphabet to get around the relative lack of support for Urdu characters. He urges these Urdu speakers to instead acquaint themselves with Urdu keyboard, and to write in traditional Urdu script. He sees Urdu Wikipedia as the most appropriate platform on which to learn and use these skills.

Syed MuzammiluddinIndian Wikimedian

The Wikipedia Library aims to connect writers with high-quality sources. Photo by JHistory, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Earlier this month, we were happy to launch a new French-language branch of the Wikipedia Library with donations from three new publishers of French and English sources.

The Wikipedia Library aims to connect experienced Wikipedia editors with the quality sources and references that they need to author more content and spread the sum of human knowledge. One strategy for this access is our publisher donation program, which offer free subscriptions to contributors who meet a modest selection criteria. To learn more about the Wikipedia Library, check out our earlier blog posts about it or a 2014 Signpost feature.

As part of the new French-language Wikipedia Library branch, 3 new donor partners join the ranks of dozens of already established partnerships. The new French-language partnerships include:

• Cairn.info is a site for the publication and dissemination of humanities and social science journals from several publishers. This project offers publications on several subjects: law, economics, geography, history, literature and linguistics, philosophy, psychology, education science, information science, political science, sociology and society and sport. The Wikipedia Library has 100 free accounts for CAIRN.info, French and English.
• Érudit is a non-profit organization in Quebec whose primary mission is the dissemination and promotion of results of scholarly research in the humanities and social sciences. The platform also includes some journals in the hard sciences and the environment. The Wikipedia Library offers 50 free accounts.
• L’Harmattan is a French publishing house founded in 1975. It has 27,000 titles in the social sciences and humanities, rare or out of print books, videos and magazines that are available online via the digital platform. The Wikipedia Library has 100 free accounts for L’Harmattan, in French only.

Through its partnerships, the Wikipedia Library aims that experienced contributors may have access to high-caliber sources to reference and increase the quality of Wikipedia articles. For our partners, the benefits are numerous: due to the high traffic and visibility of Wikipedia, readers learn where to find the best databases and collections.

It is very exciting to see the international team of the Wikipedia Library expand to create partnerships with other providers of newspapers, journals and databases, and in more languages. Our full list of partner journals is located on the English Wikipedia, and editors are invited to list the paywalled resources they need access to on our Meta requests page. We will do our best to make inroads with them.

Additionally, we would like to widen this scope and encourage more Wikimedia communities to consider launching Wikipedia Library branches in their own language. These programs operate as local-language research hubs through various strategies and best practices identified in other language communities. For more information about setting up new branches, check out our new Branch Guide. If you would like to support established Wikipedia Library branches, let us know!

Benoit Rochon and Sylvain Machefert, coordinators of the francophone branch of TWL for WikiFranca.

Awards are funny. They are presented with a lot of fanfare. They show the relevance of a subject; the reason why the award is presented and the person who the person is presented to. However, it takes effort and money to maintain an award and often the needed stamina simply disappears.

The J.B. Broekszprize was awarded by the VARA at least until 1996. The award was given to people and organisations who "humanised society". It is obvious that this effort was recognised at the time and, to understand the relevance of people and organisations it is great to know about awards like this.

At Wikidata we can and do recognise awards. People are added just because they received an award. Sometimes, it seems obvious that a person like Rob Hof is the 1995 winner of the award. But it needed some research to make sure that he was. Not even the Beeld en Geluid Wiki knew about Mr Hof..

Awards point to the legacy of people and organisations. They add relevance to both and they help in understanding an era that has come and gone.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Wikimedia developers from around the world met last month in Lyon, France, for the Wikimedia Hackathon 2015. To meet a few of them, watch this short video.

On May 23, public transportation workers were on strike in Lyon, France. But it would have taken a lot more to discourage our coders from around the world, gathered here to develop tools for the Wikimedia projects! They were invited by Wikimédia France for our annual Wikimedia Hackathon, which took place at Écully, a small town just outside of Lyon.

A traditional group photo. Photo by Pierre Selim, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

But why a hackathon … and why in Lyon?

The Wikimedia Hackathon is an annual gathering of coders from across the Wikimedia movement. Many of the tools you use every day on Wikipedia and other projects are developed during hackathons like this one.

This year’s event was held in Valpré, a major conference and training center near Lyon, in France’s second-largest metropolitan area. Lodging and work rooms were in the same location, and participants had access to a wide range of services to make their stay more comfortable: a daycare, a restaurant, a large playing field—and five meeting rooms available to developers night and day.

The 2015 Wikimedia Hackathon was a real success, with over 200 participants from 20 different countries! This year’s programs were carefully designed to welcome new contributors: 66 new participants joined us in the convention center’s crowded amphitheater, for the hackathon’s opening session, on May 23, 2015 at 9am.

We had a full house at the opening ceremony. Photo by Jean-Philippe Kmiec, CC-BY-SA 4.0

How does it work?

For three days, developers worked on software and tools related to Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, MediaWiki and many other projects. In total, 62 meetings and workshops took place during the event. Participants had the choice of working in one of five meeting rooms, so they could code around the clock to develop better software.

We also organized a number of public lectures, to encourage interactions with newcomers, and to introduce them to the Wikimedia movement, to Wikimédia France and other wiki projects. It was a great opportunity to spotlight our local group in Lyon and discuss their many initiatives in the region.

A project showcase

No fewer than 33 projects were presented at the closing ceremony on Monday, May 25 at 4pm. We saw cool new features, like Wikipedia on Apple Watch, and an ultra minimalist version of the free encyclopedia: La découvrir! More technological projects were also shown, such as a tool which generates complex search queries using sentences written in natural language.

A media event

The Wikimedia Hackathon was covered by a dozen regional and national publications, and it was a great opportunity to spread the word about our association and the Wikimedia projects.

Thanks to all our attendees, and see you at next year’s Hackathon in Jerusalem!

Jean-Philippe KmiecManager of Communications and EventsWikimédia France

Infographic by Jean-Philippe Kmiec, CC-BY-SA 4.0

From the editors: This story was originally published in French on the Wikimédia France blog and on Planet Wikimedia. It was translated into English by Fabrice Florin.

Mrs Clinton has been the recipient of many awards. The current count at Wikidata is at 23 and, it is quite an impressive list.

There is one funny bit in there, you have to know Dutch to spot this loonie. Mrs Clinton has been awarded several honorary doctorates. The screen shot shows nicely that there are two items for the same thing. You may see one for the University of St Andrews and one for Yale University.

Obviously the two could be merged. One reason why I won't is because Reasonator does not show redirects nicely and I do not want to lose all that information.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Welcome to our first installment of ‘Wikipedia Picks’, a new content experiment for the Wikimedia blog. This proposed weekly feature would invite one Wikipedia community member to curate a list of five articles, images, or other content that they find interesting or important — in collaboration with our blog editors.

This week’s guest host is Gary Greenbaum (Wehwalt), who has written or collaborated on 127 featured articles on the English Wikipedia—more than anyone else on the site. Over the past ten years, he has made nearly 100,000 edits. He has written about everything from politics (American, British, Canadian, and Australian), architecture, numismatics, law, musicals, royalty, sports, and a train crash. Offline, Greenbaum works as a lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia, and is George Mason University’s Wikipedia affiliate for 2014–2015. For this week’s Wikipedia Picks, he selected five featured articles, three of which he personally worked on; the comments below are his.

Lost at sea

The SS Arctic was an early Titanic-like disaster. Painting by James E. Buttersworth, Public domain.

I was quite interested in the Girl Pat article about a 1935 trawler, successfully brought to “Featured Article Candidate” (FAC) status by my colleague Brianboulton. Its unauthorized transatlantic voyage in 1936 was a rather strange incident which got much public attention at the time, and is almost completely forgotten today. Britain watched with fascination as this small ship was searched for, amid all sorts of rumors, and eventually found off the north coast of South America. If anything, it’s a reminder that the past was not a sepia photograph, that the people of the past were just as likely as us to focus on unusual things. The only difference being that things didn’t move with the speed of the Internet in the 1930s.

The SS Arctic disaster article, brought to “Featured Article” (FA) status by Brianboulton, was another notorious incident where a passenger ship sank during a trip across the Atlantic; all of the women and children and most of the crew died. Put in today’s context, it was like the Titanic disaster, but worse. Enough said. I think Brian took some quiet glee in asking me to review it, since he knows that I sometimes go on passenger ships, when I can put time and money together. The obvious thing to say is that this could not happen in the age of the ever-vigilant cell phone camera, but then, the captain of the Costa Concordia seemed to get quite a head start on his passengers …

A politician

Joseph B. Foraker. Photo, Public domain.

Fierce-looking fellow, isn’t he? And quite the speaker, in a time when politics, not baseball, was the national sport. Joseph B. Foraker is one of those figures who was talked about for president for a while at the turn of the 20th century, but never quite made it. He was governor of (and senator from) Ohio, a Republican — and a lawyer who took money from corporations, while he was in the Senate, which at the time was legal. But he also had a regard for human equality that caused him to sacrifice his career over the Brownsville affair, in which President Theodore Roosevelt unjustly fired a group of African American soldiers. It shows that nothing is quite black or white in a time of political polarization.

A horse trainer and … newspaper publisher

Al-Marah horses from Tankersley’s ranch were used in her son’s Arabian Nights dinner show. Photo by Rob Bixby, freely licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Another article that I found interesting was about Ruth ‘Bazy’ Tankersley, an American breeder of Arabian horses and a newspaper publisher; it was successfully brought to “Featured Article Candidate” status by my colleague Montanabw. Tankersley’s involvement with Arabian horses is well known; her political history, and her involvement in political controversies of the 1950s less so. I was able to help out by getting old committee hearings transcripts, through Congressional ProQuest, a database to which I have access through being George Mason University’s Wikipedia affiliate. It will be difficult to do without these resources when my term expires at the end of August; they have proven useful to me and to other editors who aren’t students or academics. While the Wikimedia Foundation and volunteer coordinators have done good work in establishing these positions, there needs to be more of them. Sometimes the hardest thing about contributing content is getting access to the sources to begin with.

A pioneer … and writer

Ezra Meeker. Photo, Public domain.

Another gentleman with spectacular facial hair! Ezra Meeker was, for about 20 years—his last twenty—a very well-known figure in the U.S., from about 1906 to 1928. He went west by wagon trail in his 20s, in 1852. He lived quite a life: a settler of the west, he made a fortune growing and selling hops for brewing, lost it all, and went to the Klondike as a gold miner. When that didn’t pan out, he reinvented himself as a sort of professional living history pioneer, promoting the Oregon Trail and was quite successful at it. He did this into his late 90s. If not for an inconvenient illness at age 97, he’d probably still be doing it today.

Legally sanctioned … trial by battle

Legal trials by battle were once much more common. Artwork by Jörg Breu d. Jüngere and Paulus Hector Mair, public domain.

Let me impose once more with an article on which I did much work. Ashford v Thornton was a case that I looked up in the library, like many law students. It’s probably easier to find it now. Ashford was the last ruling to uphold a right to trial by battle. That this could survive until 1818, at least in theory, seems hard to believe. And yet it did, and it was only abolished when the antiquated procedures surrounding it began to be invoked too often. Behind this case is a very human story that disrupted many lives. I don’t write much about law—it’s too much like work—but I enjoyed this one.

Gary Greenbaum (Wehwalt)
English Wikipedia editor

This story is part of an ongoing content experiment to produce more interesting stories for you, the reader of the Wikimedia blog. Please leave comments below on how we can improve this proposed feature.

Mohomodou Houssouba has strong ties to his native Mali and its languages and culture. Photo by Mohomodou Houssouba, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Mohomodou Houssouba is intimately tied to his home country of Mali and the Songhay languages spoken by around six percent of his country’s population, spread over a vast area in the central and northern regions of the country. He has spent the last two years working on a plan to build a Songhay Wikipedia that may help bring free knowledge to the people of west Africa.

Houssouba was born and raised in Gao, a city in the northeastern region of Mali on the Niger River. Historically, Gao was the capital of the Songhay Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the language—Songhay and its various idioms—has become a lingua franca in the northern part of the country, especially along the Niger River. It remains an important cross-border vehicular language, spoken in five countries (Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger), with enclaves in Sudan and sizable diasporas across west Africa.

Houssouba studied English at the national teacher-training college in Mali’s capital, Bamako, and wrote his Bachelor’s thesis on traditional Songhay poetic expression. “I started writing French or English, and tried to write in Songhay, but mostly in poetry,” he says. “I think that is how my interest in the language grew up. My interest in creating other things in the language, like translating software into the language, that came twenty years later.”

Indeed, he played a key role in localizing Mozilla‘s Firefox 4 browser for use in the language. He is also a co-founder of Songhay.org, an online resource providing information on the Songhay language and culture. He is now a literary scholar at the Univeristy of Basel in Switzerland.

Much of Houssouba’s interest in history and language stems from his father. Though his father could not read, he possessed an incredible memory for events and stories in his past, including his experience of French colonial rule.

“He came of age during the colonial period, where people lived under French colonization with all kinds of restrictions. There was a labor regime in which he had to participate when he was very young,” Houssouba says. “I recorded a lot of him telling different stories of the genealogy of my family, or the village, or the whole region going back hundreds of miles. When you try to transcribe it, it is really linear, really something you just have to write down.”

Houssouba’s father was a historian—a “local, traditional historian”—whose stories, passed down the family line, served as a public record of life in Gao. He was also highly skilled in the Songhay tongue. “He was really a master of that language,” Houssouba says. “I always got fascinated by how many nuances [there] are in this seemingly simple [language]. Seemingly short words are fairly simple to write and pronounce, but one word can have so many interpretations and so many connotations.”

On Wikipedia, Houssouba’s goals involve moving on with a Songhay-language version of Wikipedia. He began work on translating the MediaWiki interface into Songhay in 2011, but says he only found time to devote to the project at the end of 2013. Now, the translation is complete.

“The second phase is to collect articles and publish them,” he explains. “A mid- to long-term [goal] is to have a Songhay Wikipedia domain, where we could have hundreds, thousands of articles that people publish [in the Songhay language] on Wikipedia.”

He envisions the project as providing cultural information in Songhay relating to the culture and history of the region. Houssouba does, however, concede that it is difficult to define Songhay as a language in its own right, since many of its dialects are so wildly varied. “It is sometimes put in one category of languages, other times taken as an isolated [language],” he says.

While Mali has introduced Songhay in schools in the Gao region, there are a lack of well-trained teachers and adequate teaching material in the language. “This is an important aspect,” he explains, “since the Internet is not readily available in that part of the world. The encyclopedia idea is to have a platform in which a lot of knowledge—traditional and modern—can be collected and translated into Songhay. This can be made available online, but also accessible offline for those who do not have access to the Internet, which is mostly the case for those parts of Mali.

“For us, it is very important to have the production of knowledge by people who speak the language. Articles and text that have been well translated, and those that have been produced directly in the language. These are the two aspects that we hope are complementing each other,” he adds.

“To have a Wikipedia in Songhay, with Songhay content, that could be made available offline… that would be major for us.”

Joe Sutherland, Wikimedia Foundation Communications Intern
Victor Grigas, Wikimedia Foundation Storyteller

I recommend that anybody new to Wikipedia editing starts, if possible, with one of the smaller Wikipedias. It’s far more fun, contributions will probably be openly welcomed, and there’s less likelihood of experiencing some sort of bureaucratic nightmare. An example fresh in my mind is the OpenCart article, which doesn’t exist. Anyone attempting to create it will be faced with this page, and need to persuade the administrator who locked it (due to previous abuse) that they should be permitted to do so, and who therefore holds veto power over its creation. A bridge too far for most new editors!

While the English Wikipedia makes the news due to the declining number of editors, and has a particularly bad reputation (as can be seen in the mailing lists) amongst African editors who’ve had experience with some of its trigger-happy bureaucrats, how are the African language Wikipedias themselves faring?

African Language Wikipedias

Language	11/2/2011	13/4/2012	9/5/2013	17/6/2014	29/10/2014	26/6/2015
Malagasy	3,806	36,767	45,361	47,144	47,061	79,329
Afrikaans	17,002	22,115	26,752	31,756	33,392	35,856
Yoruba	12,174	29,894	30,585	30,910	30,989	31,068
Swahili	21,244	23,481	25,265	26,349	27,021	29,127
Egyptian Arabic		8,433	10,379	12,440	12,934	14,192
Amharic	6,738	11,572	12,360	15,968	16,229	12,950
Somali	1,639	2,354	2,757	3,646	3,680	3,446
Shona			1,421	2,077	2,091	2,321
Kabyle			1,503	1,876	1,967	2,296
Lingala	1,394	1,816	2,025	2,077	2,087	2,062
Kinyarwanda		1,501	1,817	1,832	1,834	1,780
Hausa	–	–	–	–	1,386	1,345
Wolof	1,116	1,814	1,161	1,201	1,148	1,023
Igbo	–	–	–	–	1,017	1,019
Northern Sotho	557	566	685	691	966	1,000

Malagasy has shot up, but it’s always been an outlier – a language for which, due to its unusual characteristics, there’s always been a great deal of outside interest. Afrikaans continues to grow steadily, albeit at a slightly slower pace than before. Swahili, in 4th place, is growing at a faster pace than Yoruba in 3rd. Yoruba had a huge burst from 2011-2012, but has only been slowly growing since then.

Egyptian Arabic is also growing steadily, but after that there are some interesting figures. Amharic has lost over three thousand articles. Articles being deleted is not uncommon. Spam gets removed, articles get merged and so on. Losing so many articles simply means the growth before was mostly made up of these kinds of articles, and that there’s little growth outside of that.

With the exception of Kabyle, most of the languages that follow share a similar fate, or are static. Wolof has even fallen to lower than its 2011 level. The one noteworthy milestone is that Northern Sotho has (just) joined the 1000 club.

So, barring Malagasy, while the only fireworks amongst the top African language Wikipedias are of the going out kind, and there are no trigger-happy bureaucrats to blame this time, are things in the far south looking any better? What about the South African language Wikipedias specifically?

South African Language Wikipedias

Language	19/11/2011	13/4/2012	9/5/2013	17/6/2014	29/10/2014	26/6/2015
Afrikaans	20,042	22,115	26,754	31,756	33,392	35,856
Northern Sotho	557	566	685	691	966	1,000
Zulu	256	483	579	630	686	683
Tswana	240	490	495	510	513	503
Swati	359	361	364	400	408	410
Xhosa	125	136	148	333	380	356
Tsonga	192	193	240	303	309	266
Sotho	132	145	188	197	202	223
Venda	193	190	204	209	208	151

So while Afrikaans continues steadily, Northern Sotho makes it to 1000 articles (albeit with the energy of an athlete somewhere near the back of the pack crawling over the finish line at the end of the Comrades marathon) and Sotho has managed to haul itself off the bottom, all the other languages are static or have shrunk.

The Xhosa deletion log, for example, gives an idea of the kind of articles being deleted, while the latest article to be created at the time of writing, Star Wars, is just blank, and probably also not long for this world.

Northern Sotho is an interesting case, as for a long time it sat in the Incubator, but the experience seems to have helped, as in spite of having less native speakers than both Xhosa and Zulu, it sits well above them in articles created.

Hopefully there’ll be some fireworks to report in the next update!

Related articles

• October 2014 African language Wikipedia and Wiktionary update
• June 2014 African Wikipedia and Wiktionary update
• May 2013 African language Wikipedia update
• November African language Wikipedia update: Afrikaans passes Swahili
• April 2012 African language Wikipedia update
• Northern Sotho Wikipedia now an official project, Afrikaans reaches 20 000 articles
• African language Wiktionary update
• African language Wikipedia update
• Wolof Wikipedia reaches 1000 articles
• Swahili Wikipedia now the largest African-language Wikipedia
• The state of Wikimedia projects in South African and Africa – Dec 2008
• The South African Wikimedia communities
• Venda Wikipedia Progress
• First Wikipedia Academy in Africa
• Wikipedia Week
• Afrikaans Wikipedia hits 5000 articles

Image from Wikimedia Commons

When asked who he is, Jeevan Jose responds—in his typically unassuming way— “not a notable person.” Yet his story of evolution from a long-term Wikipedia reader to an active contributor remains an inspiring example for many of his fellow volunteers.

Born to a family of traditional farmers in the small village of Kadavoor, Kerala, Jeevan—or Jee for short—is an entrepreneur, a volunteer photographer, and a Flickr user-turned-Wikimedian. Jee has observed a wide variety of plants and animals from a young age; Kadavoor is located on the border of Western Ghats, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the eight “hottest hotspots” of biological diversity in the world. His passion for the local flora and fauna shows through his many excellent contributions.

When Jee purchased his first hybrid camera in 2009, he started photographing Kerala’s varied plants and bugs, publishing his work at Flickr. Recalling that period, he says that he found Wikipedia to be a useful resource to improve his knowledge on the subjects he photographed. When a Wikimedia Commons volunteer asked Jee to share his pictures under a free license so that they could be uploaded to Commons, Jee did not hesitate. “I believed it to be a small expression of gratitude on my side given that I had used Wikipedia a lot,” he remembers.

Jee’s beginnings with Wikimedia did not go very smoothly. “Even though I started uploading images to Commons, I didn’t understand it much,” he admits. After another of his pictures had been successfully nominated for quality image status by someone else, however, Jee was hooked. “I started nominating my pictures for quality image and featured picture status myself, and soon became addicted to it,” he adds with laughter.

In just over five years of documenting the biodiversity of Kerala, Jee has uploaded over 1,100 pictures to Wikimedia Commons; almost 150 are now classified as being of quality image standard, with close to 40 of them being awarded featured picture status by the Commons community. In addition to submitting pictures, Jee has been spending his time helping other Commons contributors at the help desk, the Village Pump, and as a member of the volunteer response team, OTRS. When asked about his motivation to contribute, Jee says simply: “I like the idea of collecting and preserving knowledge and making it freely available to anyone who needs it.”

As I query him about his plans for the future, Jee makes sure to mention his crowdfunding campaign that was funded earlier this year. In about a month, the campaign raised $3,150 that will allow Jee to upgrade his photo equipment and take more high quality pictures of Kerala’s plants and animals. “I’m very happy to see the success of the campaign and I’m eager to get back in the field,” he says. “I wish everyone could get such support; it would guarantee an abundant flow of free knowledge.”

Answering my question about his views on the future of the Wikimedia movement, Jee says: “I hope Wikimedia will remain the main source of free knowledge.” In a true Wikimedian spirit, he quickly describes areas worth improving. “But to be able to do that, it must be more democratic and willing to change or update its technical side according to people’s needs. It would be nice if we could identify potential contributors and help them by making available the required infrastructure; a good camera or a computer for a youngster from the third world could do wonders.”

Tomasz W. Kozlowski 
Wikimedia community volunteer

Mrs Clinton will obviously be a topic of many conversations. It is probably the best annotated USA presidential candidate on Wikidata. It is best looking at it from a Reasonator perspective because there is so much that you would drown in all of it on Wikidata itself.

When you look at the screenprint, you see a lot of text that was generated based on the currently available data. When you look at it, you may find that she received a Grammy award as well. I am certain that even though the information is extended, it is not complete. There are even technical issues to be found that need to be sorted in Wikidata itself.

When you complete all the data and all the interconnections to Mrs Clinton, one thing is sure. Many more people will be that much closer to Kevin Bacon. It would be interesting to learn how Mrs Clinton compares to the other candidates. Who will bring more people closer to Mr Bacon?
Thanks,
       GerardM

Amnesty is one of the organisations I consider essential in this world. It is known for its work on human rights and it will tell any country where it fails in its commitments or in its actions. It is a participatory organisation and it is up to anyone to choose their levels of commitment.

Organisations are awarded for their work and I have added several of them spurred on by a friend who added the Dr J.P van Praag award to Amnesty. Typically I only add awards to people. It is easier and there are fewer false positives.

Reading the Dutch article, the question arose if Amnesty was indeed the beneficiary of this award. The text says in Dutch.. "Amnesty International (afdeling Nederland) voor haar werk voor gewetensgevangenen.". It says that it is the Dutch chapter who was awarded the award.

Given that other Amnesty chapters have items in Wikidata, it was easy to add one for the Dutch chapter and make it the recipient for the award. It follows that people tagged as member of Amnesty are actually member of the local chapter ... :)

NB I would not be surprised when more awards have been given to Amnesty, much of this may be found in articles in languages I do not read.
Thanks,
      GerardM

February’s Train the Trainer program—which aims to increase the number of new editors and ‘ambassadors’ for the movement at large—proved a rewarding experience for attendees. Photo by U.B. Pavanaja, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

It is heartening to report that many Wikimedia projects in Indian languages have sustained, and even experienced an upward trend in, editor engagement. However, in terms of content creation, the majority of these projects are still facing grave challenges that put their very existence at risk.

Pageview statistics for Indian-language Wikipedias are pleasantly surprising. Almost all exceed one million unique views every month—but despite these positive readership figures, very few of these readers become actively involved in the project’s communities. There is almost no increase in the number of active and very active editors on a month-to-month basis.

These statistics are alarming. They suggest a very real possibility of volunteer burnout, a dearth of second-generation editors who might continue established work, and, perhaps most importantly, the projects losing their reputation as frequently-updated and reliable encyclopedias.

The most realistic way of dealing with this problem is to bring in new volunteers who will be guided by more experienced users. They would, eventually, fill the shoes of senior Wikimedians and continue to fight for free and open knowledge.

The Centre for Internet and Society – Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K)—a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development—realised as part of its needs-assessment program that although outreach activities are being conducted to attract more volunteers to Wikipedia, they had not been as successful as expected.

To address this problem, CIS-A2K came up with the ‘Train the Trainer’ program (TTT). The program is designed to teach volunteers essential skills and abilities to, in turn, train the general public on all things Wikipedia.

These volunteers, or “trainers,” develop key competencies that will allow them to conduct a successful outreach workshop, such as public speaking, presentation skills, peer-to-peer learning, effective communication, reporting, and followup strategies.

To take part in the TTT program, it is imperative that participants be active Wikipedians. CIS-A2K is angling TTT as both a skill-building initiative amongst Indian-language Wikimedians, as well as a platform where Indian-language Wikipedians can meet and greet each other in-person. This allows participants to interact with Wikimedians from many different communities, to understand their nature of engagement, and share the challenges they have faced and overcome.

The contextual learning and exchange of ideas at these events, similar to editathons, are very special. They help participants feel like they are a part of both their linguistic community and a greater Indian-language community, opening up new opportunities of collaboration, project development, and friendship.

TTT intends to train Indian-language Wikimedians into effective ambassadors of the movement—keen and able to spread the goals and mission of the open knowledge movement. The program also strives to combine best practices from all over the world, taking cues from various chapters, user groups, and thematic organisations. It builds bridges between communities in terms of communication, encouraging partnerships and collaborations that can result in long term rewards.

Tanveer HasanProgramme OfficerCIS-A2K

While I do occasionally write Wikimedia tools “to order”, I wrote quite a few of them because I required (or just enjoyed) the functionality myself. One thing I like to do is adding images to Wikidata, using WD-FIST. Recently, I started to focus on a specific list, people with awards (of any kind). People with awards are, in general, more likely to have an image; also, it can be satisfying to see a “job list” shrink over time. So for this one, I logged some data points:

Over the last 2-3 weeks, even my sporadic use of the tool has reduced the list by 1/4 (note the plateau when Labs was offline!). Some thoughts along the way:

• The list of item candidates is re-calculated on every page load, and is not stable. As awards are more likely to be added to than removed from items, the total list of people with awards is likely to be longer today than it was at the beginning of this exercise.
• I cannot take credit for all of this reduction; images that were added to Wikidata independently, but to items on this list by chance, likewise reduce the number of items on the list.
• Not all of the items I “dealt with” now have an image; many had their candidate images suppressed thanks to a recently implemented function, where all the Wikipedia candidate images for a person are not depicting the person, but either a navbox icon, or something associated with the person (a sculpture made by the person, a house the person lived in, etc.)
• Many items were “dealt with” by setting a “grave image”. These seem to be surprisingly (to me at least) popular on Wikipedia, especially for people from the former Soviet Union, for some reason.
• I skipped many items where either the item label or the image name are in non-Latin characters. Oddly enough, I can match images to items quite well if both are in the same (non-Latin) script, by visual comparison
• I also skipped many items where a candidate item has multiple people. I tried my hand on generating cropped images for specific people with the excellent CropTool, but that remains quite slow compared to the usual WD-FIST actions. Maybe if I can find a way to pre-fill the CropTool values (e.g. “create new image with this name”).
• Based on a gut feeling, the “low-hanging fruit” will probably run out at ~10-15K items.
• A sore point for me are statues of people; sometimes, I use close-ups of statues as an image of the person, when no proper image is available. I’m not sure if that is the right thing to do; it often seems to cover the likeness of the person (at least, better than “no image”), but somehow it feels like cheating…
• There should be a “pictures of people” project somewhere, making prioritized lists of people to get an image for, then systematically “hunt them down” (e.g. ask these people or their heirs for free images, check other free image sources in print and online, group them by “likely event” where they could show up in the future, etc.).
• I could really use some help for the “Cyrillic people”, towards the end of the list.

In a previous post I wrote that I wanted to have all the awards of the Optical Society in Wikidata. I now admit that I failed.

The Optical Society has many awards and only some of them are known to Wikidata at this point. The funny part is that Wikidata knows about one more award than English Wikipedia does. It is an award conferred both by the Optical Society and the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.

I did add most of the people who received an award but given that so many did not have an article it was not of interest to me to add all the missing ones. Maybe it is of interest to the Optical Society to complete information about itself and its awards..
Thanks,
     GerardM

When you, like me, had never heard of biophotonics, you would never have heard about the Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award. As it is an award by the Optical Society and I wanted its list of awards to be complete I added yet another award.

The subject must be rather new because there is no image on the biophotonics article. The award linked to Mr Feld so there is room for improvement on English Wikipedia.

What I have done is add all the current winners of the award on Wikidata and Mr Tromberg, the winner for 2015. was the only one with an article. Yes, the award is still missing on the article.

NB As I complete more awards, the results of the Kevin Bacon challenge will change. It is fun.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The New York Times featured an article titled: "Can Wikipedia Survive?" by Andrew Lih. It is a good article in that it describes the current state of Wikipedia. It raises several important points and the main one is that because of smartphones and tablets many people do not contribute as much as they used to.

Articles like that describe the status quo. The issues that seem important based on the old understanding of what Wikipedia is about. The older understanding was: "To share the sum of all knowledge" the current situation is that there are 280+ Wikipedias and each is on its own to do its own thing using the MediaWiki software. There are other projects that contribute to the old motto but they were outside of the scope of the article.

When you reflect on the original objective, all Wikipedias fail. Every Wikipedia has its own content and is distinct in what it has to say. Consequently they do not share the sum of all knowledge; they are not even aware of the knowledge that is available elsewhere.

When you analyse Wikipedia, it has several components; there are accumulations of text and there are accumulations of data. There have been experiments that show clearly that it is not always necessary for a person to write the text. The experience from several Wikipedias is that bot generated content leads to more readers and more editors. This is quite counter intuitive but hey, why dispute the facts? If there is one draw back, it is with updating said texts when need be.

We know that once enough data is available for a subject information may be gleaned from raw data. Wikidata provides raw data and Reasonator among others transforms it into information. This may finally be accepted when the overly long awaited Wikidata Query engine will become available.

What this may do is several things.

• people will want to add items and statements to Wikidata
• results will pop up everywhere once the facts are in
• more software will be written to produce texts based on Wikidata data
• articles generated in this way may be cached without saving the text
• generated articles will change once more facts are known

When students edit Wikipedia, their approach can be as diverse as their topics. How do you organize a specific article? How do you find the best sources related to your field?

To help students answer these questions, Wiki Ed has published subject-specific advice for students editing Wikipedia articles in a variety of academic fields. Now, we’ve added two more brochures to help edit articles on women’s studies topics and ecology.

For women’s studies, we explore editing Wikipedia articles related specifically to women and gender. Ecology focuses on writing articles about biomes, and other aspects of natural habitats.

They join a suite of subject-specific brochures for classrooms, which already includes advice on editing medicine, psychology, and sociology topics. We have seen that tying specific advice to students in their area of expertise helps them make even stronger contributions to Wikipedia.

We’ve also recently expanded our Case Studies brochure with four new pages. The new content includes ideas for using Wikipedia in translation assignments, museums and archives work, and understanding knowledge production. We’ve also made smaller revisions and improvements to other print materials in our catalog to keep them accurate and up to date.

These brochures are available online as printable .pdfs, or as print copies for classrooms who teach Wikipedia assignments through the Wiki Education Foundation.

 

Sharp-eyed followers of our website may have noticed a new job on our careers page today for the Director of Programs, a title I’ve held since August. So what does it mean that we’re hiring for what seems to be my job?

It means we’re splitting my job into two director-level positions. As Wiki Ed grows, so do our responsibilities, and we’ve reached a point where it’s too large a job for one person. So while I’ll continue to oversee communications, technology, and Wikipedia content support as the Director of Program Support, Wiki Ed is hiring a new Director of Programs.

That position will oversee our core programmatic work: the Classroom Program, Community Engagement, and Educational Partnerships. In the Classroom Program, university instructors assign their students to contribute content to Wikipedia as part of a class activity. Our community engagement work supports Wikipedia editors by providing access to helpful university resources. Our educational partnerships work establishes relationships with associations, universities, and other organizations that bring in new program participants.

We’re looking for a Director of Programs who can innovate and shepherd the scaling of these programs, while maintaining their excellent quality.

And, of course, I’ll be working closely with the new Director of Programs, as my team provides support for these roles. I will oversee our communications work, such as developing new support materials for program participants; our digital infrastructure work, including technical product development; and our Wikipedia content support, including help and feedback for all program participants. I look forward to collaborating with the new Director of Programs as we work to scale Wiki Ed’s impact.

If you’re interested in the Director of Programs position or know someone who is, please see the job description, and reach out to m/Oppenheim (the firm who is helping us recruit for this position) for more details.

The annual Wikimania conference will be coming to Mexico City on July 15-19, gathering volunteers and digital rights leaders to discuss access to knowledge, participation in the Wikimedia projects, and the role of Wikipedia in education. Photo by Ralf Roletschek, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Wikimania 2015, the annual conference celebrating Wikipedia and its sister projects, will take place in Mexico City from July 15-19. Digital rights leaders and hundreds of volunteer editors will come together at the Hilton Mexico City Reforma to discuss issues at the heart of the Wikimedia movement, including the state of free knowledge, the role of Wikipedia in education, international privacy issues, and using technology to grow participation.

Wikimania focuses on the Wikimedia vision: to make the sum of all knowledge available to everyone on the planet. Unfortunately, access to knowledge around the world is not equal. In some places, people do not have Internet access or cannot afford access. In Mexico, for example, only 40% of the population have access to the Internet. In other areas of the globe, access to knowledge is censored or constrained. These issues, which directly impact our ability to fulfill the Wikimedia mission, will be at the center of conversations at the conference.

This year’s conference—which is co-organized by the local Wikimedia affiliate, Wikimedia Mexico, and the Wikimedia Foundation—will feature a special focus on efforts from Latin America, Spain, and Portugal to improve access to knowledge and increase the amount of quality content on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

“People across Mexico read 44 million Wikipedia articles every month. While we have made great strides in making knowledge available, we have a long way to go to achieve our mission,” says Iván Martinez, president and founder of Wikimedia Mexico. “Wikimedia communities in Latin America and other countries are increasingly finding solutions for growing quality information on Wikimedia projects, including through partnerships with educational, government, cultural, and civil associations. Wikimania is a chance for us to share these kinds of experiences with each other to make Wikipedia and its sister projects stronger.”

This year’s speakers and workshops include:

• “Bringing Free Education to the World” by Luis von Ahn, Guatemalan entrepreneur and academic, founder of reCAPTCHA, and co-founder and CEO of Duolingo
• “Wikipedia and the collective construction of knowledge” by César Rendueles, Spanish sociologist, researcher, and social critic
• “Wikipedia Five Pillars Panel” featuring members of digital humanities organization Red de Humanidades Digitales (RedHD)
• A panel on “Latin America Internet Freedom,” featuring
  • Carlos Brito of Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (R3DMX; Digital Rights Defense Network)
  • Darío Ramírez of Article 19 Mexico
  • Katitza Rodríguez of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
  • Renata Ávila, Guatemalan human rights and intellectual property lawyer with Web we want and country lead for Creative Commons Guatemala
  • Paz Peña, Chilean researcher and promoter of digital rights in Latin America with Derechos Digitales
  • Yana Welinder, senior legal counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation
• A lecture from Carlos A. Scolari, renowned digital media researcher from Argentina who studies new ways of communication that originated from the rise of the Internet
• Annual “State of the Wiki” address from Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia
• Opening Plenary by Lila Tretikov, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation

With more than 35 million articles in 288 languages, Wikipedia is the largest shared knowledge resource in human history. Nearly half a billion people turn to Wikipedia every month for everything from preserving cultural heritage, to improving cancer detection, to researching homework. This remarkable scope and scale was recognized this month by the prestigious Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation, awarded by the Princess of Asturias Foundation in Spain. The jury recognized Wikipedia as an “important example of international, democratic, open and participatory cooperation—to which thousands of people of all nationalities contribute selflessly.”

“Wikimedians collaborate digitally with each other from far corners of our planet all of the time,” says executive director Lila Tretikov. “Once a year we have a chance to gather in person and we are so excited to meet this year in Mexico City, and share our passion, knowledge, and experiences.”

The Wikimania conference has been organized globally for the last 10 years, to make it easier for anyone to access, share and contribute to free knowledge.

Registration for Wikimania 2015 is now open here.

Juliet Barbara, Senior Communication Manager, Wikimedia Foundation
Samantha Lien, Communications Intern, Wikimedia Foundation
Joe Sutherland, Communications Intern, Wikimedia Foundation

09.06.-15.06.2015

Fundraising campaign for new server hardware

• Have you already donated? For over a week, the fundraising campaign of the OpenStreetMap Foundation for new server hardware running. At present, only four-fifths of the required sum of £56,000 (about €78,100 or $89.000 US) has been achieved. The largest single donations so far have come from Mapbox and Mapzen, who have both donated $20,000 each (about £12,900 or €17,800). Every little bit helps.

Mapping

• Joost Schouppe reports about power editing with Level0 editor and Overpass turbo.
• Frederik Ramm launched an escalating discussion on the pros and cons of armchair mapping, particularly in connection with HOT / Missing Maps.
• Richard Welty suggests the tag README=* should be used to display a warning if an object carries this tag. README=* should contain a warning if the aerial photos are outdated locally (eg new buildings, demolished buildings).

Community

• Frederik Ramm asks who else has received “research project” mail about a “VGI in land administration” project.
• Pascal Neis’ side of changeset discussions can now filter by country (see his tweet).

Imports

• According to Pavel Kwiecien, the import of Czech land use information has been completed. (see this OSM diary entry by xkomczax )
• Robert Buchholz asks on the import list whether his use agreement for the OpenStreetMap community is sufficient. He would like to import 3D data (minimum building heights) of the city of Berlin.

Events

• User “maning” reports on a mapping party held in Iloilo City in May.
• The Call for Papers for WhereCamp in November 2015 in Berlin runs until September 26.
• See all future events in the OSM Event Calendar.

Humanitarian OSM

• Milo van der Linden has set up a meetbot in HOT-IRC that logs the chat at meetings.

Maps

• Richard Fairhurst’s bicycle router on cycle.travel is now also available for the USA. Due to the poor data situation rural roads with a highway=residential tag and a tiger:reviewed=no tag (i.e. not reviewed by a human after the TIGER import) are avoided during routing.

Software

• Simon announced the first release candidate of Vespucci 0.9.6 (Android OSM editor). It is also available via the beta program on Google Store.
• In the last issue (#255) it was suggested that an Apple Watch at SotM-US in New York was the first to run an OSM map.  However, Maps.me was faster!  (via @ШТОСМ)
• QField (a QGIS-compatible GIS for Android) is now available as a beta version in the Google Play Store.
• On GitHub, there is an R interface for Leaflet, which allows an easy integration and use of maps with Leaflet in the programming language R.
• Milo Yip has published a lecture on RapidJSON, a particularly fast JSON parser.(via @kkaefer)
• Mapnik’s project website has been updated.
• tassia presents a draft GUI for OpenAerialMap plugins for QGIS.

Did you know…

• … there’s a sandbox that you can use for testing and playing around with the raw data from OSM? Here you can can create and delete things and try something and do all you want, without breaking anything.

Other “geo” things

• Apple is driving around places for Apple Maps in the US, the UK and Ireland. A list of cities can be found on an Apple web site.
• AOL’s subsidiary company Mapquest’s tiles will be rendered in the future at Mapbox, instead of doing it themselves. In addition, revisions to the products are planned (via TechCrunch, also owned by AOL). Mapbox welcomes Mapquest on Twitter.
• Fred Johansen has created a website to visualise “history with automated event maps”. It seems that the base map is one from a market companion.
• At Geohipster.com, there’s an interview with Eric Gundersen (CEO Mapbox) and Alex Barth (head of Mapbox Data Team).

I stopped registering the dead of 2015. I am happy with the result so far. People still die in 2015 and the number of people who are still waiting to be killed of has not increased that much.

The stress I felt to work on Wikidata is gone. I do more work in the house and when I work on Wikidata it is on things I actually enjoy.

Thanks to everyone who now registers the deaths of 2015 you make me feel happy.
Thanks,
     GerardM

The IEEE or the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is an organisation that confers many different awards. One of them is the IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award. 

Adding the known Wikipedia articles is easy, they have their Wikidata item, it is just a matter of linking the two. Making a complete list is not as easy. According to the article, the data from 1986 to 2001 is missing and, only one of the winners after 2001 is linked to an article.

Mr Hiroshi Iwai is the winner for 2015 and, to make sure that he is on the list, I searched for him. Before I added him to Wikidata, I disambiguated another using Google translate to learn the date of death of one of the Mr Iwai's

The missing data is available; it is on the official website in a PDF. It is easy to make a list of all the people who have been awarded this prize. 
Thanks,
       GerardM

I have long held that the Wikimedia Foundation’s flawed approach to software development and deployment, culminating in the sudden release of the draconian “superprotect” software feature last year, would be the central issue in this year’s election for three of the organization’s 10 Trustees. As I reported earlier, all three incumbent candidates were in fact voted out, which I interpret as a sign that the international community of Wikipedia volunteers will not tolerate such a ham-handed approach to governance.

Today, Andrew Lih published an op-ed piece in the New York Times: Can Wikipedia Survive? Lih, a longtime Wikipedian and author of The Wikipedia Revolution, highlighted superprotect as a significant issue in the election, and stated:

The real challenges for Wikipedia are to resolve the governance disputes — the tensions among foundation employees, longtime editors trying to protect their prerogatives, and new volunteers trying to break in — and to design a mobile-oriented editing environment.

The nature of the election Q-and-A pages (in which 20 candidates addressed 39 questions) makes it rather impenetrable for those wishing to evaluate the themes. A few people have contended that superprotect was not such a significant issue in the election; but along with myself and Andrew Lih, a number of respected colleagues have agreed that it is, in both public and private venues.

In order to better inform that question, I am presenting below the answers all candidates gave to the question about superprotect. (The question and all answers are available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.) I have highlighted the answers of the three successful candidates in green, and the answers of the three unsuccessful incumbents in red. I have also included my own answer at the bottom (I had answered during my brief candidacy, which I withdrew before voting began). Readers may also be interested in my analysis of all candidates, in which I focused on this question more than the others. See the question and answers below the fold:

Use of Superprotect and respect for community consensus

Please explain whether you believe it was the right thing to do for the WMF to disregard community consensus on the English and German Wikipedias regarding MediaViewer, and to forcibly prevent the German Wikipedia community from disabling MediaViewer by implementing Superprotect. If you are a current Board member, then please explain how your actions on the Board in supporting WMF’s decision were consistent with your duties to support and represent the community. –Pine✉22:30, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Peter Gallert (Pgallert)

The Board is of course not micromanaging WMF’s daily affairs. I very much assume that the Board discussed these matters after the horse had already bolted. That said, it is never the right thing to do for the WMF to ignore community consensus. Such actions are at the core of the rift between WMF, communities, and Chapters that I alluded to in my candidate statement. I am concerned that an action like the creation of the superprotect right seems to have happened ad hoc, without seeking much input from either the community or the Board. I am further concerned that none of the responsible WMF employees had an inkling about what damage the creation of such user right and its immediate application on a contested page would do to the relationship of the Foundation and the editing communities. Whatever the merits of MediaViewer and other recent software development projects, if WMF cannot convince the community of their usefulness it needs to engage in more dialogue rather than forcing them down the volunteers’ throats. I believe the Board should have made a clear statement in this regard.

@Pgallert: Can you answer @Pine‘s question specifically by providing an unambiguous answer rather than dealing in generalities, ie. state whether you believe it was the right thing to do for the WMF to disregard community consensus on the English and German Wikipedias regarding MediaViewer, and to forcibly prevent the German Wikipedia community from disabling MediaViewer by implementing Superprotect? As a follow-up to your answer, the Board – on which @Raystormand @Phoebe were sat at the time – published a pretty clear statement supporting that decision, so perhaps knowing this could help. odder (talk) 15:35, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Sorry to have disappointed you with my answer, I believed it was sufficiently clear. Here it is: I do not believe community consensus should have been disregarded in this or any other manner. The German wp community should not have been prevented from disabling MediaViewer. The block of Eric Möller was entirely justified. Superprotect should not have been created in this context, and not have been used for this purpose. And I would not have endorsed the Board statement.

Do you really belive, Superprotect was one of WMF’s daily affairs? Really? Such a slap in the face of the Volunteers by those who live from the Volunteers work?Marcus Cyron (talk) 17:08, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

No, Marcus Cyron. What I wanted to say–apologies if I didn’t say it clear enough—is this: Sometimes a small technical workaround is applied to solve an issue. The Board should never be involved in that, those are the daily affairs. In this case, the “workaround” could easily have been foreseen to be the shit that is about to hit the fan. It should not have been done that way, with or without Board involvement. That the Board ex post facto approved of it is all the worse and one of the reasons you find my nomination statement here. –Pgallert (talk) 22:15, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Add-on: Two sitting community-elected Board members don’t see much wrong with superprotect and the resulting Board statement. I do. –Pgallert (talk) 22:30, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

After six years of work, a residency in the Canadian Rockies, endless debugging, and more than a little help from my friends, I have made Print Wikipedia: a new artwork in which custom software transforms the entirety of the English-language Wikipedia into 7,473 volumes and uploads them for print-on-demand. I’m excited to be launching this project in a solo exhibition, From Aaaaa! to ZZZap!, at Denny Gallery in the Lower East Side of New York City, on view now through July 2nd.

The two-week exhibition at Denny Gallery is structured around the upload process of Print Wikipedia to Lulu.com and the display of a selection of volumes from the project. The upload process will take between eleven and fourteen days, starting at ! and ending at ℧. During this time, the upload process will be open for all to see around the clock—at least during the first weekend, as the gallery will remain open through the night in recognition that the computer itself works continuously. There will be two channels for watching this process: a projection of Lulu.com in a web browser that is automated by the software, and a computer monitor with the command line updates showing the dialogue between the code and the site. If you aren’t able to visit the gallery in person, you can follow the process on Twitter; we will post to the @PrintWikipedia Twitter account after it finishes each volume.

Individual volumes and the entirety of Print Wikipedia, Wikipedia Table of Contents, and Wikipedia Contributor Appendix will be available for sale. All of the volumes will be available on Lulu.com as they are uploaded, so by the end of the upload/exhibition all of the volumes will be available on for individual purchase. Each of the 7,473 volumes is made up of 700 pages, for a total of 5,244,11 pages. The Wikipedia Table of Contents is comprised of 63,372 pages in 91 volumes. The Wikipedia Contributor Appendix contains all 7,488,091 contributors to the English-language Wikipedia (nearly 7.5 Million).

It is important to note that I have not printed out all of the books for this exhibition, nor do I personally have any intention of doing so—unless someone paid the $500,000 to fabricate a full set. There are 106 volumes in the exhibition, which are really helpful for visualizing the scope of the work. It isn’t necessary to print them all out: our imaginations can complete what’s missing.

Wikipedia has been printed. Photo by Victor Grigas, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Books are microcosms of the world. To make an intervention into an encyclopedia is to intervene in the ordering systems of the world. If books are a reduced version of the universe, this is the most expanded version we as humans have ever seen. For better or for worse, it reflects ourselves and our societies, with 7,473 volumes about life, the universe, and everything. An entry for an film or music album will pop up every few pages, and the entry for humanism will be located in a volume that begins with “Hulk (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)” and ends with “Humanitarianism in Africa” and the names of battles will fill the 28 volumes with entries that start with “BAT.” It’s big data that’s small enough that we can understand it, but big enough that no human will know all of it. It is small enough that I can process it on a desktop computer, though big enough that each round of calculations, such as unpacking the database into a MySQL database, takes up to two weeks to complete, and the whole build cycle takes over a month. As we become increasingly dependent on information what does this relative accessibility of its vastness mean.

Print Wikipedia is a both a utilitarian visualization of the largest accumulation of human knowledge and a poetic gesture towards the futility of the scale of big data. Built on what is likely the largest appropriation ever made, it is also a work of found poetry that draws attention to the sheer size of the encyclopedia’s content and the impossibility of rendering Wikipedia as a material object in fixed form: once a volume is printed, it is already out of date.

My practice as an artist is focused around online interventions, working inside of existing technical or logical systems and turning them inside out. I make poetic yet functional meditations that provoke an examination of art in a non-art space and a deeper consideration of the Internet as a tool for radically re-defining communication systems. For example, I sold all of my possessions online in the year-long performance and e-commerce website Shop Mandiberg (2001), and made perfect copies of copies on AfterSherrieLevine.com (2001), complete with certificates of authenticity to be signed by the user themselves. I made the first works to use the web browser plug-in as a platform for creating artworks: The Real Costs (2007), a browser plug-in that inserts carbon footprints into airplane travel websites, and Oil Standard (2006), a browser plug-in that converts all prices on any web page in their equivalent value in barrels of oil.

Mandiberg (left) with assistant Jonathan Kiritharan. Photo by Tilman Bayer, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

I began editing Wikipedia a couple years before I first started working on this project in 2009, though it is not my only engagement with Wikipedia. I’m a professor of digital media at the City University of New York, and I teach with Wikipedia in my classes. I have written about this process, my teaching has been covered on the Wikipedia Blog, and one of my assignments was included in a series of Case Studies on teaching with Wikipedia put together by the Wikimedia Foundation, a function now done by the Wiki Education Foundation. I am co-founder of the Art+Feminism, a campaign to increase female identified editorship on Wikipedia and improve the site’s articles on women and the arts.

Wikipedia matters to me because it is a collaboratively produced repository of human knowledge made through unalienated labor and kept in a digital commons. Most people are acting in good faith, and amazingly those who aren’t can’t seem to bring the whole thing down.

Wikipedia contributor appendix, volume 1. Photo by Victor Grigas, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

This was not a solitary endeavor. I was grateful to work with several programmers and designers, including Denis Lunev, Jonathan Kiritharan, Kenny Lozowski, Patrick Davison, and Colin Elliot. I was also supported by a great group of people at Lulu.com who went above and beyond to support this wild and quite unwieldy project.

If you’re in New York, I hope can come see the show. The show will remain open 24 hours a day through 6pm, Sunday June 21st. We will be hosting a special New York City Wikipedians on Sunday June 21st at 1PM. For those of you far away, you can follow the upload process at PrintWikipedia.com and on Twitter.

Michael Mandiberg, artist, Associate Professor, City University of New York

The Saviour’s Transfiguration Cathedral, Dnipropetrovsk. Photo by Ryzhkov Sergey, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Preparing for Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), the Wikimedia community’s worldwide photo contest, requires creating lists of cultural, historical, architectural and archaeological heritage monuments. These are typically based on official records. In Ukraine, only some of the official lists were available free online; most were not.

To make the WLM list, Wikimedia Ukraine—the local Wikimedia affiliate in the country—had to send requests to the relevant government agencies. According to the Ukrainian law on Access to Public Information (“Law on Access”), these agencies had to respond within five working days.

This step proved more difficult than expected. We received answers ranging from redirects to other agencies, claims that the information wasn’t held, or that “the staff member responsible for this was fired recently and took everything with them.” One of the regional authorities, Pokrovske Raion State Administration in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, proved especially troublesome. Our first request to Pokrovske Raion was sent on August 27, 2013, and their answer came three days later: while they noted that there were 227 archaeological and historical monuments in the territory, they refused to make the list public as it was classified for the staff’s use only.

This contradicted the Law on Access, which clearly prescribed the types of information that could be withheld from public access, like internal official correspondence, information collected for defence, and other similar documents.

Wikimedia Ukraine’s second request was made a year later. It resulted in the same denial, with the government citing a local Act drafted in 2011. The chapter’s third request asked for the text of this Act, and it appeared that information on cultural and historical monuments fell into the category of classified information.

Such a response, Wikimedia Ukraine argued, was contrary to nationwide law. With help from the Media Law Institute and its Fund for Defending the Right to Access Information, the chapter’s executive director Nataliia Tymkiv filed a lawsuit against the Pokrovske Raion State Administration.

The first meeting was held on December 14, 2014, and the province’s legal defense team backed down. They said that the 2011 law was incorrectly applied, and were ready to provide the lists to the chapter. This result, while fulfilling our immediate goal, would have kept other similar documents inaccessible, so we pressed on with our lawsuit.

On February 9, the judge made their decision, satisfying all positions of our claim: The court recognized the refusal as illegal, ordered Pokrovske Raion State Administration to satisfy the information request, and declared that the provision in the 2011 Act, which ultimately kept the list of cultural and historical monuments from public view, was illegal.

The court also stressed that the only type of information in the field of cultural heritage that may be restricted is that of protected archaeological territory, according to the aforementioned Law on Cultural Heritage Protection. Pokrovske Raion did not contain any such territories.

On May 6, the court decision was executed and Wikimedia Ukraine finally received the lists, along with lists of architectural heritage monuments of which we had not previously been aware.

The received lists of historical, architectural and archaeological heritage monuments have already been added to the contest lists in the Ukrainian Wikipedia.

“While this case may sound ridiculous for those from countries with developed democracies, in Ukraine we have to struggle for different kinds of important information. State bodies hide it from the citizens. We fortunately managed to get victories through courts, even though sometimes we have to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights,” explains Taras Shevchenko, director of the Media Law Institute NGO.

Tymkiv, the executive director of Wikimedia Ukraine, says: “A lot of time and efforts are put into the lists of monuments. Our Ministry of Culture does not have all the information, so we have to contact all of the individual state administrations (including oblast [province], raion [district], and city level) to request it. That takes time, and one needs patience to [do this] again and again. Ukraine has around 150,000 cultural monuments. We have more than 71,000 in our lists—less than half the total number—and it has taken us three years to get that many. It requires dedication, so I want to thank everybody working on this project.”

“I believe there are other teams fighting against all the odds and winning, to share, to have it for everybody to use and reuse. This kind of work requires dedication, sleepless nights, and requires you to be in love with what you do and what for.”

We are hopeful that these lists will help in obtaining many more photos of Pokrovske Raion during Wiki Loves Monuments this September; it is currently rather poorly represented on Wikimedia sites.

Vira Motorko, volunteer, Wikimedia Ukraine chapter
Maksym Dvorovyi, lawyer, Media Law Institute

I’ve been cleaning up some of my old test code for running Ogg media on iOS, adding WebM support and turning it into OGVKit, a (soon-to-be) reusable library that we can use to finally add video and audio playback to our Wikipedia iPhone app.

Of course decoding VP8 or Theora video on the CPU is going to be more expensive in terms of energy usage than decoding H.264 in dedicated silicon… but how much more?

The iOS 9 beta SDK supports enhanced energy monitoring in Xcode 7 beta… let’s try it out! The diagnostic detail screen looks like so:

Whoa! That’s a little overwhelming. What’s actually going on here?

First, what’s going on here

I’ve got my OGVKit demo app playing this video “Curiosity’s Seven Minutes of Terror” found on Wikimedia Commons, on two devices running iOS 9 beta: an iPod Touch (the lowest-end currently sold iDevice) and an iPad Air (one generation behind the highest-end currently sold iDevice).

The iPod Touch is playing a modest 360p WebM transcode, while the iPad Air is playing a higher-resolution 720p WebM transcode with its beefier 64-bit CPU:

First look: the cost of networking

At first, the energy usage looks pretty high:

This however is because in addition to media playback we’re buffering umpty-ump megabytes over HTTPS over wifi — as fast as a 150 Mbps cable connection will allow.

Once the download completes, the CPU usage from SSL decoding goes down, the wifi reduces its power consumption, and our energy usage relatively flattens.

Now what’s the spot-meter look like?

Pretty cool, right!?

See approximate reported energy usage levels for all transcode formats (Ogg Theora and WebM at various resolutions) if you like! Ogg Theora is a little faster to decode but WebM looks significantly better at the bitrates we use.

Ok but how’s that compare to native H.264 playback?

Good question. I’m about to try it and find out.

….

Ok here’s what we got:

The native AVPlayer downloads smaller chunks more slowly, but similarly shows higher CPU and energy usage during download. Once playing only, reported CPU usage dives to a percent or two and the reported energy impact is “Zero”.

Now, I’m not sure I believe “Zero”…

I suppose I’ll have to rig up some kind of ‘run until the battery dies’ test to compare how reasonable this looks for non-trivial playback times… but the ‘Low’ reportage for WebM at reasonable resolutions makes me happier than ‘Very High’ would have!

This post was originally written by Katherine Maher for the Wikimedia Foundation’s blog and can be found here.

The Princess of Asturias Foundation has announced that it is awarding Wikipedia the 2015 Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation. The Awards recognize exemplary cultural, scientific and social achievements.

“On behalf of our global community of Wikimedians, we are deeply honored to accept this prestigious award,” said Jan-Bart de Vreede, Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees. “The Princess of Asturias Awards recognize achievements and organizations that celebrate and advance our shared human heritage. As a collective project of shared human knowledge, we are honored Wikipedia has been recognized today.”

Presented in eight different categories ranging from Arts to International Cooperation, the Awards are considered to be amongst the most prestigious honours in the world, especially in the Spanish-speaking world.

“Wikipedia is an incredible project that has been created by millions of people from around the world. We are honored to be recognized in the category of international cooperation, which is at the heart of our mission,” said Lila Tretikov, executive director at the Wikimedia Foundation. “This award honors those volunteers—the editors, photographers, writers, and developers—who make Wikipedia possible.”

Wikipedia is read by nearly half a billion people every month, making it one of the most popular knowledge resources in the world. From its humble beginnings nearly fifteen years ago, it now offers more than 35 million articles in 288 languages—including a number of indigenous languages—all written by volunteers from around the globe.

According to the jury Wikipedia is an “important example of international, democratic, open and participatory cooperation—to which thousands of people of all nationalities contribute selflessly—that has managed to make universal knowledge available to everyone along similar lines to those achieved by the encyclopedic spirit of the 18th century.”

“Cooperation is what Wikipedia is all about, and it is a tremendous honor to be recognized by the Princess of Asturias Awards,” said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. “I hope this inspires more people to become involved in the mission to share in the sum of all knowledge with the world.”

Previous recipients of the Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation include the Fulbright Program, the International Red Cross, the World Health Organization, Al Gore, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and others. A full list can be found on Wikipedia.

The awards ceremony will take place in Oviedo, Spain, on the 23rd of October, under the presidency of H.M. King Felipe VI of Spain. The prize consists of €50,000 and a sculpture by Joan Miró.

02.06.–08.06.2015

About us

• New in our team for the Spanish version: Laura from Cuba and Luis from Ecuador. Bogus joined the team for the English language.

State of the Map US

• Videos of the presentations on the US SotM can be found on YouTube and are linked from the “program” page.
• RobJN reported about the US-SotM.
• At SotM US a selfie was taken from space. (terrestrial photo of the action).
• Christian Quest has created a design for a vector rendering stack.

Mapping

• Mapillary has announced its fork of the iD editor, where you can display recognized road signs with an associated image in the editor. Here’s hoping it gets accepted and merged…
• Field Papers, a site for creating printouts that you can take for mapping has been resurrected.
• User Aury88 asks if it would be possible to integrate the editing tags for existing nodes directly on the main page.
• Jorge, one of the GSoC students, has presented the first results of his work (Mapillary plugin for JOSM) and is asking for feedback.
• Peter Dobratz asks if there is a way to obtain a list of all its changeset discussions. He is apparently not the first to ask this.
• The satellite images from Landsat will serve as a basic layer for the OpenAerialMap project (via).
• Minh Nguyen wrote a detailed contribution to the debate about multilingual name-tagging in OSM. He explains the differences between “translation, transliteration and transcription.” He also shows based on translations between Chinese and Vietnamese that an automated approach would be extremely difficult.

Community

• Erica Hagen (a founder of Map Kibera) writes on medium.com a plea for strengthening local structures and less “armchair” mapping.
• The look of the OSM wiki on mobile devices has been improved.
• Arushi Vashist gives an outlook on their work in the 2nd week of the Outreachy program.
• Andrew Hain rewrote the languages bar in the wiki.
• OpenCageData published their profile for Brazil.

Imports

• Rory McCann wants to import place names in Ireland.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The Operations Working Group of the OSM Foundation has launched a fund-raising for much needed new hardware. Half of the required sum has already been reached.

Humanitarian OSM

• A survey on the earthquake in Nepal and mapping for HOT.
• User “dekstop” deals with statistics about HOT and announces that he will publish his findings on a regular basis in the future.
• Approximately 70 percent of the contributors after the earthquake in Nepal are newbies, according to this analysis.

Maps

• [1] Unless you could opt for an OSM-style, then there is now the right map for you.

Open-Data

• Two years after the “Open Data Charter” was announced at a previous G8 summit in Lough Erne, Germany is still at the bottom of the class with regard to open data. (English).
• The World Bank Group, Conveyal, Mapbox and Mapzen founded OpenTraffic, an open platform for traffic data, which has a strong link to OpenStreetMap

Software

• OpenStreetMap on an Apple Watch.
• Kosmtik an alternative to Mapbox Studio?
• House number improvments in mkgmap.
• Major update on OpenRouteService with heavy vehicles routing, accessibility analysis, new client and more
• CAD Mapper an online service to create DXF files (for use with e.g. AutoCAD) with data from OpenStreetMap.
• Tássia Camões Araújo has published instructions to work on an OpenAerialMap plugin for QGIS in her User Diary.
• Use gj2ascii to create maps in an “ASCII code” style.
• Erik Escoffier is working on an animated graphic scale component for Leaflet.
• Vincent Privat (one of the JOSM developers) proposes to blacklist some unsupported problematical JOSM plugins.

Did you know …

• … Dahala Khagrabari, the only third-order enclave in the world (an enclave of an enclave of an enclave!) may soon lose its status.
• … the Imagery Offset Database with map visualisation of all registered aerial shifts?

Other “geo” things

• A historical map of Paris is now integrated in iD of Open Historical Map. (via)
• The FixWikiMaps project has set itself the goal to find obsolete or visually unappealing maps in Wikipedia and improve them.
• The official map of the London Underground is, according to the Daily Express, not as good as the one in Wikipedia.

How a big Hollywood firm altered Naomi Campbell’s entry

Recently, Wiki Strategies was informed about the Wikipedia exploits of public relations firm Sunshine Sachs. Since Wikipedia’s editing history is preserved for all to see, we asked freelance journalist Jack Craver to dig into it. He found no disclosure of the Wikipedia accounts clearly employed by Sunshine Sachs, and found many edits that were clearly biased in favor of the firm’s clients. Here, we present his detailed analysis of one of their clients’ biographies. – Pete Forsyth, Principal, Wiki Strategies

Sunshine Sachs, a leading U.S. public relations firm representing corporations and A-list celebrities, has been using Wikipedia to promote its clients. Edits by its staff include furtive removal and downplaying of well-sourced information, as well as addition of promotional material. It’s impossible to know the extent of the the firm’s promotional work, but we’ve uncovered a number of edits that Sunshine associates made on behalf of clients, from obscure startup companies to big stars such as Mia Farrow and Naomi Campbell.

Many of the edits Sunshine employees have made are innocuous – even helpful. They dutifully updated information regarding their clients’ careers, including new films or albums, often supported by solid references. They rewrote poorly-worded sentences and repaired broken links to references.

But much of their work clearly violated Wikipedia standards. They deleted or sought to minimize unflattering information about their clients – even when supported by multiple references. Moreover, Sunshine Sachs personnel didn’t disclose their relationships with the people or companies whose articles they altered. The most recent edits are direct violations of Wikipedia’s Terms of Use, which have required disclosure of paid editing since July 2014.

One user, who identifies as “Alexdltb,” has made edits since 2012 to articles about a number of Sunshine Sachs clients. His efforts include Farrow, Campbell, singer Sarah Brightman, journalist Mark Leibovich and, most recently, Levo, a web startup. Alexdltb seems to refer to Sunshine employee Alexander de la Torre Bueno, who indeed identifies Leibovich as a former client on his LinkedIn page. However, on his user account page, Alexdtb does not disclose his firm’s relationships with its clients. The only information on the user page is: “This page will document my draft work.”

The changes Alexdltb made to Naomi Campbell’s biography constitute perhaps the clearest example of how he used Wikipedia to further his clients’ interests. After adding two updates about the veteran model’s career, Alexdltb worked to downplay less flattering aspects of her life and work: her multiple convictions for assault and her unsuccessful ventures in music, fiction writing and business.

In his first major edit to Campbell’s biography, Alexdltb deleted a reference to the negative reviews of Campbell’s 1994 ghostwritten novel, “Swan.” He deleted the last three words of the following sentence: “Her novel ‘Swan’, about a supermodel dealing with blackmail, was released in 1994 to poor reviews.” In the same edit, Alexdltb deleted a clause that referred to Campbell’s 1994 album, Babywoman, as “a critical and commercial failure.” Alexdltb also deleted the words “ill-fated” from a sentence regarding an unsuccessful restaurant chain Campbell had invested in.

Alexdltb justified the edits thus: “I removed a number of opinionated comments in Campbells (sic) Wikipedia entry. Many of these comment reference articles which are also opinion rather than editorial pieces.”

Indeed, literary and music criticism is a form of opinion. The fact that Campbell’s album and book were critical failures is based on the overwhelmingly negative opinions they elicited from critics. But the comments Alexdltb was deleting weren’t supported simply by stand-alone reviews; they were articles from established publications that referenced the critical consensus.

The 2007 New York Times article supporting the contention that her book was a critical failure not only called the book “truly awful;” it also reported that the novel had received poor reviews, and had won Seventeen magazine’s Super-Cheesy Award.

Similarly, Alexdltb deleted a quote attributed to Campbell, in which the model justified hiring a ghostwriter for the novel because she “just did not have the time to sit down and write a book.” Alexdltb said he made the change because the reference cited for the quote was “not an authentic editorial source.”

This edit highlights the difference between a dispassionate Wikipedia editor and hired gun: if Alexdltb were truly interested in solid references, he could have simply Googled the quote and found immediate confirmation of its authenticity from media outlets like The Guardian, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Daily Mail – any of which he could have added as a reference.

The claim that Campbell’s album “Baby Woman” was a critical and commercial failure was supported by a 2006 article by the Independent, which summarized a Q Magazine list of the 50 worst albums of all time. Better references than the Independent to support the album’s critical failure exist and are not difficult to find. For instance, a 2014 restrospective review in the Guardian begins by asking, “was Baby Woman really so bad?”  and a 1996 New York Times commentary noted that Seventeen “had reviewed her record as a comedy.”

Instead, Alexdltb simply deleted the comment and the reference.

Alexdltb’s removal of the term “ill-fated” from the description of the failed restaurant chain backed by Campbell was also problematic. Try googling the “Fashion Cafe” and you will immediately find articles that detail the chain’s failure in 1998 as well as the subsequent prosecution of the restaurant founders for fraud.

In another instance, Alexdltb sought to remove any mention of Campbell’s notorious legal troubles from the lead section of her biography.

Here’s what he removed from the bottom of the introductory section: “Her personal life is widely reported, particularly her relationships with prominent men—including boxer Mike Tyson and actor Robert De Niro—and several highly-publicised convictions for assault.”

Explaining the deletion for the benefit of other Wikipedians, Alexdltb wrote that “The information, about Campbell’s controversial relationships, that I removed is reported throughout the document and does not belong belong in the exposition as it relates to her personal life, not her identity as a public figure.”

But Wikipedia’s guideline on lead sections is explicit, stating: “The lead should be able to stand alone as a concise overview. It should define the topic, establish context, explain why the topic is notable, and summarize the most important points, including any prominent controversies.” (Emphasis added.)

Alexdltb’s efforts on the Naomi Campbell biography reflect just one example of Sunshine Sachs’ covert efforts to bend Wikipedia’s coverage toward their clients’ interests. Alexdltb also deleted substantiated facts, or added promotional material, to biographies of Mark Leibovich, Mia Farrow, Sarah Brightman, and other Sunshine Sachs clients; and other Wikipedia users, such as Orangegrad and Blue56349, also appear to have a singular interest in promoting the interests of the firm’s clients.

Here are some of the global news stories covered on Wikipedia this week:

• The European Space Agency’s Philae lander awakens from its comet.
• An outbreak of MERS in South Korea results in over 150 cases and 19 deaths.
• Flooding in the Georgian capital Tbilisi kills 15, and releases zoo animals.
• China’s former security chief, Zhou Yongkang, is sentenced to life in prison.
• Omar al-Bashir, president of Sudan, evades arrest for war crimes.

From the editors: This news roundup is a new content experiment for the Wikimedia blog. These news updates are based on content created on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. What do you think about this first example? Please share your feedback in the comments below.

Philae awakens

An artist impression of the Philae lander on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Image by the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, freely licensed under CC-BY 3.0 Germany.

Philae, the European Space Agency lander which made history last year by landing on a comet, woke from hibernation on Saturday (June 13) and made contact with Earth. The Rosetta mission took ten years to reach the comet, arriving in November 2014. After an unexpectedly rough landing, however, Philae worked on the comet for just 60 hours before its battery went flat. It has now accumulated enough sunlight to recharge its batteries and resume operations.

Learn more in these related Wikipedia articles: Philae, Rosetta, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

South Korean MERS outbreak

International preception of South Korean president, Park Geun-hye, has suffered following the outbreak. Photo by the South Korean Presidency, freely licensed under Korean Open Government License Type I: Attribution.

Since May, there have been 150 reported cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in South Korea, the worst outbreak of the disease outside of Saudi Arabia. So far, 19 people are known to have died from the virus. Thousands of schools have been closed across the country as a preventative measure, as well as twenty universities, and almost 4,000 people have been placed in quarantine. International observers have noted the outbreak has had a significant effect on President Park Geun-hye’s public perception.

Learn more in these related Wikipedia articles: 2015 Middle East respiratory syndrome outbreak in South Korea, Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus

Flooding in Tbilisi

The aftermath of the floods in Tbilisi, which have resulted in at least 15 deaths. Photo by Zviad Avaliani, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

On Saturday (June 13), the Vere River valley in Tbilisi, Georgia, was unexpectedly hit by major flooding following hours of sustained rainfall. Fifteen people are confirmed to have died as a result of the floods, which also caused severe damage to highways, homes, and the Tbilisi Zoo. Around half the zoo’s animal population was killed in the floods, while several more are alleged to have been killed by police, who were rounding up several animals who were wandering the streets of the city.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: 2015 Tbilisi flood

Zhou Yongkang sentenced to life in prison

Zhou, pictured here on a trip to the United States in 2006, was tried in secret in May. Photo by Barry Bahler, freely licensed as public domain in the United States, as a work of the US Government.

Zhou Yongkang, the former Secretary of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission and a senior member of the Communist Party of China, was convicted on Thursday (June 11) of abuse of power, bribery, and the intentional disclosure of state secrets by the Intermediate Court in Tianjin. Xinhua writes that the total amount of bribes received by him and his family was about 129 million yen, or over 20 million dollars. Zhou was sentenced to life in prison, becoming the most senior-ranked official since the founding of the People’s Republic of China to be convicted of corruption-based charges.

Learn more in these related Wikipedia articles: Anti-corruption campaign in China, Zhou Yongkang

Omar al-Bashir evades arrest for war crimes

al-Bashir, pictured here in 2009, is wanted for war crimes. Photo by Jesse B. Awalt, freely licensed as public domain in the United States, as a work of the US Government.

The president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, evaded arrest on Monday (June 15) after ignoring a South African court ruling forbidding him from leaving the country. al-Bashir was attending a two-day African Union meeting in the country when the High Court in Pretoria ruled he must be arrested under the terms of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in 2009. The warrant relates to his involvement in the ongoing Darfur conflict, and accuses him of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Learn more in these related Wikipedia articles: Omar al-Bashir, War in Darfur

Research stats

Wikipedia pageview statistics show the various spikes in activity on these related news articles. Graph by Joe Sutherland, freely licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

Of this week’s articles, Philae saw the largest spike in pageview traffic on the English Wikipedia, surpassing 27,000 views on June 15. Media attention allowed 2015 Tbilisi flood into second place with more than 20,000 views, while Omar al-Bashir attracted 10,000 views.

Although the article with the lowest pageview peaks of the five, 2015 Middle East respiratory syndrome outbreak in South Korea saw sustained attention this week, after its creation on June 7. Zhou Yongkang spiked at almost 4,000 pageviews on June 11.

To see how other news events are covered on the English Wikipedia, check out the ‘In the news’ section on its main page.

This news roundup is a new content experiment for the Wikimedia blog, based on content created for Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. What do you think about this first example? Is this type of news roundup interesting to you? Should we consider making it a weekly series? Please share your comments below to help us refine this idea.

Joe Sutherland, Communications Intern, Wikimedia Foundation

Photo credits from opening montage: ”제22차 국가과학기술자문회의 -무인 이동체 및 엔지니어링 산업발전 전략보고회- (10).jpg” by the South Korean Presidency, Korean Open Government License Type I: Attribution. ”:Tbilisi Flood 3.JPG” by Zviad Avaliani, CC-BY-SA 4.0. ”Omar_al-Bashir,_12th_AU_Summit,_090131-N-0506A-342.jpg” by Jesse B. Awalt, public domain in the United States, as a work of the US Government.”Rosetta’s_Philae_on_Comet_67P_Churyumov-Gerasimenko.jpg” by the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, CC-BY 3.0 Germany. ”FEMA_-_25380_-_Photograph_by_Barry_Bahler_taken_on_07-27-2006_in_District_of_Columbia.jpg” by Barry Bahler, public domain in the United States, as a work of the US Government.

One of the things we’ve learned about Wikipedia course assignments is that class size makes a difference. Because Wikipedia writing assignments are different from traditional essays and research papers, in-class discussions of the writing and research process are important to keep student editors aligned with Wikipedia’s rules and conventions. We’ve found that even with experienced instructors and upper-division courses, large classes often have a high proportion of students who don’t follow the assignment instructions closely. A large class — especially without smaller discussion sections — is one of the ‘red flags’ we look out for with new instructors who want to join our Classroom Program.

In the past, we’ve discouraged instructors with large classes from doing a Wikipedia assignment at all. But I recently worked with instructor Sasha Welland and her Global Feminist Art course at University of Washington — with more than 100 students — to test out a new type of classroom project. Instead of writing articles, Dr. Welland’s students were asked to do a “gap analysis”, identifying where the holes are in Wikipedia’s coverage of feminist art and artists and what sources could be used to fill those gaps.

You can see the results on the class’s gap analysis page. One of the takeaways is that there’s enormous room for improvement in Wikipedia’s coverage of feminist art topics. (The Art+Feminism campaign, part of the inspiration for this assignment, has been working on this gap for more than a year now.) Some of the gaps that students identified were related to the artists and movements that have been explored in class, but many others were topics the students found on their own — including many artists that Dr. Welland had not known of.

One pattern that I hadn’t expected is the focus on biographies. The instructions gave student broad leeway to explore different kinds of gaps on Wikipedia, from individual artists to movements and media that have major gaps, to “ideological gaps” where Wikipedia’s organization servers to hide or deemphasize topics related to feminist art. However, the great majority of students focused on biographical gaps: articles about women artists that were either missing or significantly underdeveloped.

Our next step for this trial assignment is to put these gap analyses to use. The students wrote proposed content for each gap they identified, and sources that, in most cases, will easily satisfy the Reliable Sources and Notability rules on Wikipedia. We’re hoping to work with another art and feminism class — or maybe several — in the fall term, and use these gap analyses as a jumping off point for an article writing assignment. Finding appropriate topics that are accessible to students, underdeveloped on Wikipedia but with solid sources, is one of the tougher parts of running an effective Wikipedia project. With the results of this gap analysis assignment, I’m hopeful that we’ve found a way both to get large classes involved with useful Wikipedia assignments and to make it easier for writing-focused classes to get a head-start on finding great topics to work on.

This spring, we worked with bestselling author Stephen Baker, who had a longstanding — but easily corrected — Wikipedia problem. We guided him in adding citations and making some updates to his biography, which had been flagged for insufficient citations since 2008.

Prior to working with us, Baker assiduously followed the unofficial advice often given by Wikipedia editors, including founder Jimmy Wales: when you have a conflict of interest, limit your efforts to discussion about the article; don’t edit the article yourself. Some Wikipedia editors go further, suggesting that it’s impossible for somebody in a conflict of interest to make worthwhile contributions.

But for more than six years, Baker’s hands-off approach completely failed; while a handful of citations were added by others in that span, they fell far short of being the best references for the biography. So, with our guidance, he took a more direct approach, and simply improved the biography.

Baker reflected on this project in a blog post, “Editing my Wikipedia bio.”

Baker is like many of our clients. As his blog post makes clear, he respects Wikipedia as a place for neutral information, not self-promotion: “I thought to fiddle with your own page was a bit pathetic, the ultimate selfie,” he says. His inclination to abide by Wikipedia’s rules, both written and unwritten, is  reflected in the short note he left on the biography’s talk page in 2008, and in the 6+ years he patiently waited for a response, making no further edits.

And yet, the changes he wanted were not promotional. His primary goal was to directly address the request for better reference sources. With our guidance, he ultimately added more than 10 citations to a biography that had previously contained only five; his additions included sources like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the LA Times – far more substantial than the initial five links. How long should the subject of an article wait for a response to a talk page inquiry, before taking a more direct approach? We would say: not six years. In a case like this, a week or so would have been plenty.

Often, prominent people approach Wikipedia as a platform to promote their own interests, with little regard for its editorial policies and practices — for instance, author Philip Roth. But many others approach Wikipedia with respect and admiration. We admire Stephen Baker’s dedication to Wikipedia’s rules and spirit. His heart was in the right place all along; all he needed was a little guidance in how to navigate Wikipedia’s social and technical labyrinth. With that guidance, he was able to make a few improvements that satisfy the site’s exacting standards, and also satisfy his own wishes for the article.

The Association for Psychological Sciences was one of the first academic associations to see the potential for an initiative promoting the improvement of content on Wikipedia. In 2011, they kicked off their APS Wikipedia Initiative, and four years later, it’s still going strong. In May, Wiki Education Foundation staff attended the APS Annual Convention to talk with APS members about furthering our engagement.

In the four years we’ve supported APS courses in our Classroom Program, we’ve learned that psychology topics present special challenges, but some classes can make great contributions. We’re focusing our teaching efforts on psychological science courses that are one of the four options:

• graduate-level courses
• 400-level or capstone courses
• assignments for Honors students
• non-biomedical courses (e.g., history of psychology)

We’ve found it is extremely challenging for courses to make positive contributions to psychology articles on Wikipedia when they operate outside of these criteria. Courses that don’t fit these four categories were discouraged from participating in the Classroom Program, but we’re excited to engage psychology experts in other ways.

The idea of focusing on courses like the history of psychology was particularly well-received at the APS Convention. Many of the instructors we spoke with thought the Wikipedia assignment in this class was a much more useful assignment compared to a traditional poster project — and provides students an opportunity to help close Wikipedia’s gender gap by writing articles on women psychologists.

The APS Wikipedia Initiative, though, is about more than just teaching with Wikipedia. Their goal is to improve the content publicly available about psychology research, and so they see potential in both the Classroom Program’s high-level courses that can make a big difference as well as in calling on APS members (professors and graduate students) to edit Wikipedia themselves.

To support this initiative, we’re starting a small pilot this summer, in which Wiki Ed staff will lead a Summer Seminar. In this four-week program, APS members who are interested in editing Wikipedia articles will take a course on how to contribute. Convention attendees were particularly excited about this, and several have followed up with us to find out more about the project. Preliminary conversations suggested we should spend a significant amount of time on Conflict of Interest, as many members wanted to write about their research; when staff explained Wikipedia’s policies forbidding this, however, members were amenable to focusing on other topics instead. Our goal for the seminar is for experts to learn how to edit psychology articles on Wikipedia and contribute high quality work throughout the program.

APS is hopeful that the Summer Seminar will not only improve quality of Wikipedia articles on psychology but also identify members who could support the development of content gap lists in psychology, indicating whether the article needs an expert to expand (making it something for a potential second Seminar to tackle) or whether it could be appropriate for a student editor from the Classroom Program.

We will post more information about the Summer Seminar as it gets underway later this summer.

This post was written by User:Rodw and User:Hchc2009

Everyone knows something about the Magna Carta. Wikipedia’s article about the medieval charter has existed since January 2002, when User:F. Lee Horn began a text on what he described as a “landmark document in English history, as well as in the history of democracy”. Over the years the article grew and matured, via over 5,000 edits, until in November 2014 this article in the Observer highlighted the forthcoming 800th anniversary of the events of 1215, predicting a surge in interest by the public, schools and the media. As a result several discussions started on the article’s talk page about what was needed to make the piece a comprehensive, reliable, high quality reference work for the worldwide users of Wikipedia.

A process of collaborative editing took place over the next few months, with User:Merlinme, User:GrindtXX, User:Hchc2009 and User:Rodw making multiple contributions, although the editing and discussion on the talk page involved many more. Along the way there were extensive discussions about which were the highest quality academic sources to draw upon, getting the balance of the language right on the most sensitive issues, and how to best present the complex details of the medieval legal terms. External help arrived in the form of the British Library, who released some beautiful images of some of the documents, and Hereford Cathedral, who spotted a long standing mistake in part of the article, prompting a fresh flurry of research and discussions. More crowd-sourced assistance emerged through the Guild of Copy Editors‘s User:Jonesey95, who improved much of the prose. The article was nominated as a good article and reviewed by User:Tim riley, finally passing on 30th January this year.

The national and international interest in Magna Carta has been reflected in the readership of the refreshed article, which has received as many as 10,213 hits a day in recent weeks, which equates to over 1 million page views per year. Wikipedia’s 10,000-word article is one of the very few fully referenced, rigorous, general purpose overviews of the charter, complementing specialist academic sites such as the Magna Carta Project and those of museums and cathedrals. With a number of new specialist studies being published in 2015, the article will inevitably require updating during the coming year to keep abreast of the academic literature, and may potentially reach featured article status – but that is one of the wonders of the wiki: anyone can help by editing it!

 

Drs P or Heinz Hermann Polzer was a flamboyant Dutch author, artist. His texts, his songs are hilarious and he was well loved by many. Drs P came to my school and it was certainly one of the concerts I loved most in my life.

Today I learned that Drs P died. In order to reduce the number of degrees to Kevin Bacon, I spend some effort in his honour and added many of his well deserved awards.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The bot that updates the list of Dutch people who died in 2015 will update the list when details are added. This recent diff shows how relevant this is. For many people additional details were added like the place of death,

Given attention to such details is relevant if only because of the several tools that link places in this way to visualisations. :)
Thanks,
     GerardM

Edmund Bacon has two sons known to Wikidata; Kevin and Michael. By adding information to the father, fewer steps will remain between Kevin Bacon and many other items. To add information I read the article and was able to add one school and two awards.

One of these awards, the Frank P. Brown Medal was awarded to several truly great architects. I am sure there is an easy connection between some of them and Rem Koolhaas. Mr Koolhaas was the architect to the City Center of Almere where I live :)

In the mean time, Popcorndude rose to the challenge and came up with the first routine to calculate how many degrees of separation exist between any Wikidata item and Kevin Bacon. His answer for Julius Caesar is 5.

I applaud the effort, the challenge now is to make this functionality available to ordinary people like me. I want to run this routine and see how I can improve connections. After all, the six degrees of separation has it that there are no more than six.
Thanks,
      GerardM

There is this famous game where everyone is said to be no more than six steps away from Kevin Bacon. There is even an article about it.

It struck me that it would be nice to know how far away any Wikidata item is from Mr Bacon. The original game is about other actors and makes use of the IMDb but there is no reason not to use Wikidata. One reason to use Wikidata is to see how the shortest paths to Mr Bacon can be optimised.

One obvious way is to document everything there is to know about Mr Bacon.. like that he had a father. It opens up the world of architecture to Mr Bacon..

Adding information is one thing, it takes boffins to come up with a routine that finds the shortest path. I am sure they are competent, for them it may only be a matter of being challenged.. The great thing is that the combination of adding relations and boffins will make for many challenges, for instance how to link Mr Bacon to Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar with the shortest path.
Thanks,
     GerardM

As I mentioned before, the Princess of Asturias Award used to be called differently.  It has awards in different areas and as you can see in the illustration, the change in names has had its effect in some but not in other parts.

It is easy to understand why issues like this arise. Most people or organisations received the "prince of Asturias award" so it is utterly confusing why it can no longer be shown. On the other hand the award is now called the "princess of Asturias award" and it makes sense to make that name change.

Anyway, it is a flaw in Wikidata that this cannot be properly addressed.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Every three months, Wiki Ed staff reflect on the work they’ve done, and the challenges they faced along the way. These Quarterly Reviews are also a good way for us to share these accomplishments and goals with our stakeholders.

We’ve published three of these Quarterly Reviews, from the third quarter of this fiscal year, to share. That includes the first Quarterly Review for our Outreach Pilot, and third Quarterly Reviews for both Digital Infrastructure and our Classroom Program & Educational Partnerships teams.

Our Outreach Manager, Samantha Erickson, reported on her work with student groups, and how the program has adapted since its launch.

Our Product Manager for Digital Services, Sage Ross, spoke about projects that are underway, such as fine-tuning our dashboards and course pages, to those which are still in development, including an online help system for instructors, and much more.

In the Classroom Program & Partnerships Review, we reviewed the Spring 2015 term up to March, and examined our strategy for working with academic associations and universities.

I am proud of the work these teams have done, and at how far we have come in such little time. Our team shares a commitment to learning from and adapting our work, which I believe is clear in these reports.

Frank Schulenburg
Executive Director

To be truly free, access to knowledge must be secure and uncensored. At the Wikimedia Foundation, we believe that you should be able to use Wikipedia and the Wikimedia sites without sacrificing privacy or safety.

Today, we’re happy to announce that we are in the process of implementing HTTPS to encrypt all Wikimedia traffic. We will also use HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) to protect against efforts to ‘break’ HTTPS and intercept traffic. With this change, the nearly half a billion people who rely on Wikipedia and its sister projects every month will be able to share in the world’s knowledge more securely.

The HTTPS protocol creates an encrypted connection between your computer and Wikimedia sites to ensure the security and integrity of data you transmit. Encryption makes it more difficult for governments and other third parties to monitor your traffic. It also makes it harder for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to censor access to specific Wikipedia articles and other information.

HTTPS is not new to Wikimedia sites. Since 2011, we have been working on establishing the infrastructure and technical requirements, and understanding the policy and community implications of HTTPS for all Wikimedia traffic, with the ultimate goal of making it available to all users. In fact, for the past four years, Wikimedia users could access our sites with HTTPS manually, through HTTPS Everywhere, and when directed to our sites from major search engines. Additionally, all logged in users have been accessing via HTTPS since 2013.

Over the last few years, increasing concerns about government surveillance prompted members of the Wikimedia community to push for more broad protection through HTTPS. We agreed, and made this transition a priority for our policy and engineering teams.

We believe encryption makes the web stronger for everyone. In a world where mass surveillance has become a serious threat to intellectual freedom, secure connections are essential for protecting users around the world. Without encryption, governments can more easily surveil sensitive information, creating a chilling effect, and deterring participation, or in extreme cases they can isolate or discipline citizens. Accounts may also be hijacked, pages may be censored, other security flaws could expose sensitive user information and communications. Because of these circumstances, we believe that the time for HTTPS for all Wikimedia traffic is now. We encourage others to join us as we move forward with this commitment.

The technical challenges of migrating to HTTPS

HTTPS migration for one of the world’s most popular websites can be complicated. For us, this process began years ago and involved teams from across the Wikimedia Foundation. Our engineering team has been driving this transition, working hard to improve our sites’ HTTPS performance, prepare our infrastructure to handle the transition, and ultimately manage the implementation.

Our first steps involved improving our infrastructure and code base so we could support HTTPS. We also significantly expanded and updated our server hardware. Since we don’t employ third party content delivery systems, we had to manage this process for our entire infrastructure stack in-house.

HTTPS may also have performance implications for users, particularly our many users accessing Wikimedia sites from countries or networks with poor technical infrastructure. We’ve been carefully calibrating our HTTPS configuration to minimize negative impacts related to latency, page load times, and user experience. This was an iterative process that relied on industry standards, a large amount of testing, and our own experience running the Wikimedia sites.

Throughout this process, we have carefully considered how HTTPS affects all of our users. People around the world access Wikimedia sites from a diversity of devices, with varying levels of connectivity and freedom of information. Although we have optimized the experience as much as possible with this challenge in mind, this change could affect access for some Wikimedia traffic in certain parts of the world.

In the last year leading up to this roll-out, we’ve ramped up our testing and optimization efforts to make sure our sites and infrastructure can support this migration. Our focus is now on completing the implementation of HTTPS and HSTS for all Wikimedia sites. We look forward to sharing a more detailed account of this unique engineering accomplishment once we’re through the full transition.

Today, we are happy to start the final steps of this transition, and we expect completion within a couple of weeks.

Yana Welinder, Senior Legal Counsel, Wikimedia Foundation
Victoria Baranetsky, Legal Counsel, Wikimedia Foundation
Brandon Black, Operations Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation

This spring, we’ve been piloting a program with student clubs to encourage students to contribute text and images to Wikipedia articles as part of their extracurricular activities. Field trips and workshops at UC Berkeley and the University of Arizona were successful at bringing enthusiastic students together to edit, and in May, we brought workshops to four more student groups: University of California Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum Club, Portland State University’s Lambda Pi Eta (National Communication Association undergraduate honor society) chapter, and Oregon State University’s Hydrophiles club and Pi Alpha Xi horticulture club.

One of the key learnings we’ve had from this pilot program is that students are enthusiastic about editing Wikipedia as part of their club activities, and they think the program is a good way to build skills for their members while providing more people access to information on topics they care about. In Wiki Ed-led workshops, members of these four clubs learned how to edit Wikipedia for the first time.

“Editing Wikipedia was surprisingly simple and gave me a sense of purpose,” says Kim Shearer-Lattier, interim president for Oregon State’s Pi Alpha Xi horticulture club. “It feels good to know that my students and I can provide free information to others that may not have access to the resources available to us.”

Kim’s views are echoed by other club members after we led workshops with them.

“There is satisfaction in getting feedback about how many people have read the article I edited,” says Oregon State Hydrophiles member Erica Kemp. “I really like knowing small edits and pictures can have a widespread impact. When I publish my thesis research, few people will read or cite my work (it’s very rare for a master’s thesis to make a scientific breakthrough) but I’m looking forward to editing more in Wikipedia because people will be exposed to new information without needing to purchase expensive peer-reviewed access. I can also lose a lot of unnecessary scientific jargon!”

And it’s not just text that students can add, but also images.

“I definitely see Wikipedia as a platform for our club members to engage with art and our community,” says UCSB’s Lauren Cain. “It is fun editing Wikipedia to gain more out of our field trips then simply going and snapping a few pictures for scrapbooks. I imagine I’ll be proud to see my photos where none existed on a Wikipedia page before and point out to my peers what difference I made.”

The Portland State Lambda Pi Eta club members also saw the impact that contributing content to Wikipedia could have on their careers, and cited that as a valuable skill that all students should get. In fact, the club president told us she encouraged other clubs to edit Wikipedia as well.

“While at a national conference I told a group of interested students about this educational experience and how it can enhance the resumes of members,” Amelia Hill of PSU says. “I wanted to let my fellow scholars know the power of Wikipedia and be able to understand the impacts that editing and creating pages can have with potential employers.”

Despite this enthusiasm, however, we’ve struggled to get students to continue editing Wikipedia content outside the context of our staff-led workshops. When our staff has arranged and led workshops, students in these clubs have added valuable information to Wikipedia articles related to club topics, and they’ve expressed excitement and enthusiasm at the prospect of continuing editing. But once we leave the campus, the editing seems to stop as well. Post-workshop surveys have suggested students struggle to find the time to continue editing, meaning a valuable learning for us in this pilot program is that initial enthusiasm doesn’t translate into content added to Wikipedia.

We’re currently evaluating the learnings from the pilot program, and will be publishing a more comprehensive final report on our experiences running the student clubs pilot this term later this month.

Mirror of mailing list post on wikitech-l and related lists

I’ve been passing the last few days feverishly working on audio/video stuff, cause it’s been driving me nuts that it’s not quite in working shape.

TL;DR: Major fixes in the works for Android, Safari (iOS and Mac), and IE/Edge (Windows). Need testers and patch reviewers.

ogv.js for Safari/IE/Edge

In recent versions of Safari, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft’s upcoming Edge browser, there’s still no default Ogg or WebM support but JavaScript has gotten fast enough to run an Ogg Theora/Vorbis decoder with CPU to spare for drawing and outputting sound in real time.

The ogv.js decoder/player has been one of my fun projects for some time, and I think I’m finally happy with my TimedMediaHandler/MwEmbedPlayer integration patch for the desktop MediaWiki interface.

I’ll want to update it to work with Video.js later, but I’d love to get this version reviewed and deployed in the meantime.

Please head over to https://ogvjs-testing.wmflabs.org/ in Safari 6.1+ or IE 10+ (or ‘Project Spartan’ on Windows 10 preview) and try it out! Particularly interested in cases where it doesn’t work or messes up.

Non-JavaScript fallback for iOS

I’ve found that Safari on iOS supports QuickTime movies with Motion-JPEG video and mu-law PCM audio. JPEG and PCM are, as it happens, old and not so much patented. \o/

As such this should work as a fallback for basic audio and video on older iPhones and iPads that can’t run ogv.js well, or in web views in apps that use Apple’s older web embedding APIs where JavaScript is slow (for example, Chrome for iOS).

However these get really bad compression ratios, so to keep bandwidth down similar to the 360p Ogg and WebM versions I had to reduce quality and resolution significantly. Hold an iPhone at arm’s length and it’s maybe ok, but zoom full-screen on your iPad and you’ll hate the giant blurry pixels!

This should also provide a working basic audio/video experience in our Wikipedia iOS app, until such time as we integrate Ogg or WebM decoding natively into the app.

Note that it seems tricky to bulk-run new transcodes on old files with TimedMediaHandler. I assume there’s a convenient way to do it that I just haven’t found in the extension maint scripts…

In progress: mobile video fixes

Audio has worked on Android for a while — the .ogg files show up in native <audio> elements and Just Work.

But video has been often broken, with TimedMediaHandler’s “popup transforms” reducing most video embeds into a thumbnail and a link to the original file — which might play if WebM (not if Ogg Theora) but it might also be a 1080p original which you don’t want to pull down on 3G! And neither audio nor video has worked on iOS.

This patch adds a simple mobile target for TMH, which fixes the popup transforms to look better and actually work by loading up an embedded-size player with the appropriately playable transcodes (WebM, Ogg, and the MJPEG last-ditch fallback).

ogv.js is used if available and necessary, for instance in iOS Safari when the CPU is fast enough. (Known to work only on 64-bit models.)

Future: codec.js and WebM and OGVKit

For the future, I’m also working on extending ogv.js to support WebM for better quality (especially in high-motion scenes) — once that stabilizes I’ll rename the combined package codec.js. Performance of WebM is not yet good enough to deploy, and some features like seeking are still missing, but breaking out the codec modules means I can develop the codecs in parallel and keep the high-level player logic in common.

Browser infrastructure improvements like SIMD, threading, and more GPU access should continue to make WebM decoding faster in the future as well.

I’d also like to finish up my OGVKit package for iOS, so we can embed a basic audio/video player at full quality into the Wikipedia iOS app. This needs some more cleanup work still.

Phew! Ok that’s about it.

Every day, millions of Europeans are breaking copyright law. Due to an obscure rule known as Freedom of Panorama, those innocent snapshots of modern buildings you’ve taken in countries such as France and Belgium are breaches of copyright. While the UK has this freedom, we are at risk of losing it in the ongoing copyright reform negotiations taking place in the European Parliament.

A report on copyright reform by Julia Reda MEP is attempting to harmonise EU copyright laws and to introduce UK-style freedom of panorama across the EU. In a statement in favour of common sense, the report calls for the Parliament to: “ensure that the use of photographs, video footage or other images of works which are permanently located in public places are permitted.”

However, there are a number of MEPs attempting to introduce a non-commercial clause into the freedom of panorama rules which would mean that freedom of panorama is useless. In some cases it would mean that posting your holiday snaps on Facebook or using them to illustrate Wikipedia articles is illegal.

“Many of us have cameras and computers built into our phones,” said Michael Maggs, Chair of Wikimedia UK. “Digital photography and technological improvements make it easy to share our images online. This non-commercial exception to freedom of panorama not only prevents Europeans from sharing their content, it removes existing freedoms from UK citizens.”

In the UK and other countries, such as Germany, the right of freedom of panorama is protected, so those photos you’ve taken in public spaces are fine. But other countries such as tourist hotspots France and Greece, do not have an equivalent right. There, any unapproved photograph of a modern public building is an automatic infringement of the architect’s copyright in the building design. Taking and uploading your own photos of those buildings is unlawful unless approved in writing by the copyright holder.

It becomes even stranger in some cases. For example, you can share a photo of the Eiffel Tower because of its age – but only if it is taken during the day. If the photo is at night, the lighting is considered a separate installation and falls foul of Freedom of Panorama.

Worryingly, it’s not just holiday snaps where this becomes an issue. Wikipedia, a website many of us use every day, cannot even use these images for free educational purposes.

“The problem we have today is that many Wikipedia articles about buildings and monuments cannot be appropriately illustrated when the structure is located in a country without Freedom of Panorama,” Maggs said. “It’s important that the European Parliament takes care of freedom of panorama. We support the very long-standing right of UK citizens and visitors to these shores to take photographs of buildings in public places and to do what they want with their own photos without having to seek permission from any third party commercial rights holder.”

The current European Parliament review of copyright is ongoing, with reforms expected to follow soon.

I read that Alan Bond died. He was quite famous for many reasons. He was a businessman that got caught and it is why the Wikidata description reduces him to "Australian fraudster".

It reminded me of the critique for a particular fruit to be called a fruit. This was done by using automated descriptions. The one thing forgotten in this critique is that a banana is therefore a fruit in any language. Mr Bond is only an Australian fraudster according to a text that is only there in English. Wikidata does not corroborate it. It does not mention the other things he achieved. It did not even mention that he was married..

Ah well, what to say. I am sure that when Mr Bond was still alive he would laugh wryly.
Thanks,
     GerardM

• Arabic region report: World Digital Library, Arab Peninsula Regional Group meeting
• Argentina report: Wikimedia Argentina
• Catalan areas report: ORCID
• France report: GLAM, all over the place!
• Germany report: Make a (GLAM) change!
• Italy report: Wikimedia Italia still works with BEIC Library and bibliographic data
• Macedonia report: Wikiexpedition on bicycles and visiting one of the most remote areas in Macedonia
• Netherlands report: Birds and Expeditions
• Poland report: The Józef Burszta Digital Archives donation
• Spain report: Edit-a-thons about Contemporary artists and St. James’s Way
• Sweden report: Slow GLAM-month in Sweden
• UK report: Progress on an image release from the Bodleian; National Library of Scotland residency comes to an end; and Glasgow Museums develop a Wiki Working Group
• USA report: Wikipedian at the Centers for Disease Control – NIOSH
• Open Access report: New Topic Page; Open Access and the humanities; Wikimania & Wikidata
• Wikidata report: SPARQL and arbitrary access are coming
• Calendar: June’s GLAM events

When improving quality is the name of the game, the Princess of Asturias Awards has several opportunities to have fun.

Like many other awards it is not singular in its scope. Many Wikipedias have articles for each category. Arguably the award is not the "Princess of Asturias Award" as some Wikipedias have it.

When the award was conceived, it was named after the prince who was next in line to become king of Spain. The Prince became king and he will be most likely be succeeded by a princess. It is why the name was changed. Wikidata is not smart enough to know that such name changes take place, It is why basic information like a name can be utterly confusing.

When you add information for this award, there is all the information added in good faith on the award itself. It is redundant but removing them means that the link to Wikipedia articles are lost.

Tough. Such links are what people expect of Wikidata..
Thanks,
      GerardM

Stephen Hawking received many awards. Given that Wikidata registers such things, it is no wonder given Mr Hawking's prominence that some 27 have been registered.for him.

One of them was the "Princess of Asturias Awards". It is however a grouping of awards not a single one. Mr Hawking received the "Princess of Asturias Award - concord" award. I did add this award to the item for Mr Hawking and I removed the grouping.

Some people disagreed because, the old statement was sourced. It did not matter that it was wrong, the only thing that mattered that it was sourced. Funnily enough it was pointed out to me that the source was right; it said that Mr Hawking received the concord award. It was just Wikidata that was wrong..

So I wonder what the value of a source statement is. It is apparently OK to indicate on Wikidata what it does NOT say on the source.  It is so confusing.. I am sure that when Mr Hawking hears about this he will just smile.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Brooklyn College student Gillian Kramer’s interest in Theater History compelled her to enroll in Dr. Amy Hughes’ two-term class on the subject in the 2014–15 academic year. Dr. Hughes asks students to improve articles on Wikipedia as a class assignment, so Gillian’s become good at writing theater history articles on Wikipedia.

In the first term of that course, Gillian contributed to the article on Spanish Golden Age theatre.

“I was very nervous to begin my first major edit,” she admits. “I felt like I couldn’t possibly be qualified to edit information that anyone in the world might read and believe. I had no idea how the coding worked, or how to do basically anything. As I went through my first course I learned a ton!”

By referencing other high-quality articles, training videos, and other resources, she started revising. In the end, she added ten new sources and new sections on themes, playwrights, actors, costumes, and cultural relevance. You can see the article before she tackled it, and after.

Having climbed the learning curve on her first article, she wanted to tackle her next subject from scratch.

“Starting from nothing gave me great freedom to make it any way I wanted. I looked at a lot of highly rated articles on similar subjects to figure out how I wanted to structure the new article,” she said. “I worked in my sandbox to make sure that, when I put up the first major portion, I felt good about it. Beginning the second article, I felt excited and confident. I couldn’t wait to do the research.”

Gillian chose to create the article on sentimental comedy, a movement responding to a perceived immorality of theater in the 17th and 18th centuries.

“The biggest challenge was finding reliable, citable information,” she says. “Sentimental comedy is an obscure topic that few scholars write on, and even fewer agree on. I wanted the article to be comprehensive but struggled to find the details I knew I was missing.”

To find the 18 sources she’d use as the foundation for that article, Gillian found herself chasing after information both online and in her library.

“I tried to follow the trail back through sources — by looking at books and scholarly materials mentioned and referenced in less reliable, but easier-to-find sources. Then, I’d go through each lead to see if it had any worthwhile information, or any other useful sources that I could look to next. It was like solving a mystery and I found it fun!”

Those 18 sources became the backbone of a deep and comprehensive summary of the topic. And it’s clear that the experience has given her a confidence and joy in finding and sharing her research.

“I’m quite curious and value factoids, but had never imagined that I had what it takes to be an editor before I was assigned this project in the fall,” she says. “Instead of the audience being just my professor, it was the entire world. Knowing that somewhere an article I edited might help bring theater and information to a new viewer is so rewarding, and really inspired me to give my all to the project.”