en.planet.wikimedia

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

• In Catalonia, parties in favour of independence win a majority in regional elections.
• German car maker Volkswagen is found to have rigged their diesel test results.
• Pope Francis visits eastern United States following an earlier visit to Cuba.
• A stampede at the annual Hajj in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, kills more than 1,100 people.
• A total lunar eclipse is witnessed over half of the world.

Catalonia votes

Junts pel Sí, led by the incumbent President of Catalonia Artur Mas, won most of the seats. Image by Generalitat de Catalunya, in the public domain.

Catalonia, an autonomous community in the east of Spain, held its regional parliamentary elections on September 27. The election was announced by President of Catalonia Artur Mas in January, with the intention being to focus the vote on the community’s independence aspirations. Together for Yes, headed by Mas, finished the day with 62 seats, six short of a majority; they are likely to form a coalition with the left-wing Popular Unity Candidacy. The result, though not conclusive, is likely to put pressure on the Spanish general election scheduled for December.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Catalonian parliamentary election, 2015

Volkswagen in emissions scandal

Volkswagen CEO, Martin Winterkorn, resigned in the wake of the announcement. Image by Volkswagen AG, in the public domain.

German car maker Volkswagen (VW) was last week found to have used software designed to circumvent emissions tests in the United States. Around 11 million cars were carrying software which could detect when they were undergoing emissions tests, and activate pollution controls which were otherwise dormant. CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned from the company in the wake of the announcement, and VW stocks fell 20% the day after news broke. VW announced plans to spend $7.3 billion to cover the costs of the scandal on September 22.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Volkswagen emissions testing scandal

Pope Francis tours the United States

Pope Francis met US President Barack Obama during his time in the country. Image by the White House, in the public domain.

Following a trip to Cuba last week, Pope Francis visited the United States between September 22 and 27. It was the seventh papal visit to the country since it established full diplomatic relations with the Holy See in 1984. During his trip, he made appearances in Washington, DC; New York City, including the United Nations headquarters; and Philadelphia. In a speech delivered to Congress, he discussed a range of issues including immigration, protection for persecuted religious groups including Christians, poverty, capital punishment, and climate change.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Pope Francis’ visit to the United States

Stampede at the Hajj kills hundreds

A stampede at the annual Hajj, a mandatory pilgrimage forming one of the pillars of Islam, resulted in the deaths of at least 1,100 people in Mina, Saudi Arabia. It follows a crane collapse on September 11, which killed 111. It is the deadliest such incident since a stampede in 1990, which resulted in 1,426 deaths. The root cause of the stampede is unclear, but it coincides with multiple obstacles including the hottest temperatures recorded in Mecca for twenty years. Almost a thousand further people are thought to have been injured, while more than a thousand others are as yet unaccounted for.

Learn more in these related Wikipedia articles: 2015 Mina stampede, Hajj

“Supermoon” lunar eclipse

The moon typically appeared red in the sky thanks to Rayleigh scattering. Image by Frank Schulenburg, in the public domain.

A total lunar eclipse took place between September 27 and 28, seen over the Americas, Europe, Africa and parts of Asia. It coincided with a “supermoon“; mid-eclipse, the moon was just 59 minutes past its closest approach to Earth in 2015. The moon appeared up to 12.9% larger in some areas, as well as taking on a red hue due to Rayleigh scattering and the refraction of that light by Earth’s atmosphere into its umbra. It was the final in a tetrad, or four lunar eclipses in a series; the next such eclipse will take place in 2033.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: September 2015 lunar eclipse

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

Joe SutherlandCommunications Intern Wikimedia Foundation

Building bridges between digital, scholar and open culture: Educational editathon at the Museo del Bicentenario. Photo by Giselle Bordoy WMAR, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Delia Vazquez, a teacher trainer and a high school teacher, always considered that she was lacking a theoretical foundation that allowed her to defend and argue for Wikipedia’s use in the classroom—something that would allow her to “move away from the prejudices that are common among my colleagues.” With this feedback in mind, and a formed idea of the audience we wanted to address, we designed an education program for Wikimedia Argentina, which has aimed to change the perceptions of Wikipedia in educational contexts, and emphasize the key role open culture has in education.

As digital culture is already a topic in the education agenda—Argentina mandates the inclusion of technology in the classroom—our first strategy was to articulate skills and values related to collaborative production and open licenses. To this end, we designed teacher training workshops (online and in-person). Mario Cwi, a high school teacher and a coordinator of education technology area in his school, defied his own preconceptions about Wikipedia when he took part our training. By exploring the matrix and understanding Wikipedia from behind the scenes, such as looking at article edit histories and reading discussion pages, he and his colleagues dared to publish their own content and open them for discussion with other editors. “This is how we discovered something wonderful that we missed: Wikipedia is much, much more than a giant online encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a space that promotes the development of collective intelligence and participatory culture,” Mario told us.

We also interacted with students through edit-a-thons and WikiWorkshops, getting them to edit and participate in editing several Wikimedia projects—not just Wikipedia.

We focused our efforts on creating a unified approach among the digital and scholarly cultures, related to the free culture, as we found a gap in knowledge around what free licenses mean—a gap that was also linked to a general ignorance about Wikipedia as a platform that goes far beyond the collaborative construction of knowledge. This is a point that even today has not found traction in educational contexts.

Shared lesson: Build a common foundation to collaborate

We began with favorable circumstances, as Argentina’s technology in education policy meant that each student was issued a netbook. However, digital access does not always equate with real access—we found gaps in actual knowledge, competencies, and practices.

Unfortunately, having a pro-digital political climate does not necessarily mean that the distributed laptops will be connected to the Internet, will be used for critical or creative purposes, or used in any sort of educational sense. Argentina’s policy had, in practice, been altered to mere material access to technological tools. Moreover, we faced strong misconceptions and negative opinions about the use of technology in general, and specifically about Wikipedia. This made it hard to forge a unified foundation of digital experiences from which to build on with our education program.

Where do we go from here?

This context made us reconsider the activities we wanted to bring to the classroom. After the first experience, we focused on listening to what other involved actors had to say about their discourses and experiences.

We took a step back and started on a more elementary stage, including (among other things) considering that many times there is no Internet connection. In a scene like this, it is difficult to talk about digital practices, like editing Wikipedia; we were often forced to use cellphones and alternative ways to connect. At the same time, we had to deconstruct negative discourses by using the mainstream media and addressing problematical situations as users, like getting edits reverted with no further explanation of why.

Given these difficulties, the program took far longer to complete than when we first envisioned the program. Still, once we implemented the new strategies, the ownership, reflections, and interests of participants became genuine, and the teachers we worked with became motivating agents, or as we like to call them: Wiki Ambassadors.

Melina Masnatta, Education Coordinator, Wikimedia Argentina
María Cruz, Learning & Evaluation Communications Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation

Find this and other shared lessons on Wikimedia Argentina’s progress report.

«What I learned» is a blog series that seeks to capture and share lessons learned in different Wikimedia communities over the world. This knowledge stems from the practice of Wikimedia programs, a series of programmatic activities that have a shared, global component, and a singular, local aspect. Every month, we will share a new story for shared learning from a different community. If you want to feature a lesson you learned, reach out!.

The first hearing in Wikimedia v. NSA was held on Friday. Image by Joe Gratz, public domain.

On Friday, September 25, 2015, the first hearing in Wikimedia v. NSA took place in Alexandria, Virginia. Both sides presented oral arguments regarding the government’s motion to dismiss our lawsuit against Upstream mass surveillance.

The arguments focused on the plaintiffs’ standing to bring the case. The Judge asked several questions of both sides. The plaintiffs were represented by Patrick Toomey of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who argued that WMF and our fellow plaintiffs have demonstrated that we have standing and that the case should proceed. The government suggested that our allegations are “speculative” because the true scope and operation of the Upstream program remain classified. The Judge did not rule at the hearing, but we will provide another update when the ruling is announced.

We would like to thank the Wikimedia community for its support, and our excellent pro bono counsel at the ACLU and Cooley, LLP for all their hard work on behalf of the Wikimedia movement. Regardless of the outcome of this particular hearing, we are at the beginning of a long road, and we are proud to walk it in defense of the fundamental right to privacy and free expression.

Jim Buatti, Legal Fellow
Aeryn Palmer, Legal Fellow
Wikimedia Foundation

Special thanks to all who are supporting our efforts in this matter in a variety of ways, including Patrick Toomey (ACLU), Jameel Jaffer (ACLU), Alex Abdo (ACLU), Ashley Gorski (ACLU), Aarti Reddy (Cooley), Amanda Levendowski (Cooley), Patrick Gunn (Cooley), Ben Kleine (Cooley), and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Victoria Baranetsky, Zhou Zhou, Oliver Keyes, Kevin Leduc, Faidon Liambotis, Andrew Otto, Dan Andreescu, Grace Gellerman, Dario Taraborelli, and, of course, Legal Director Michelle Paulson and General Counsel Geoff Brigham.

Participation from over 200 community members in the Reimagining WMF grants consultation led to planned changes to WMF’s grants programs illustrated by the above graphic. Image by Chris Schilling, freely licensed under CC-by-SA 4.0

Last month, the Wikimedia Community Resources team offered an idea for restructuring the WMF’s grant programs. The existing system for distributing community resources was at times difficult to explain, understand, maintain or engage with, and so we suggested an idea for improving grants as a whole. Through multiple channels, the team gathered 245 responses during the consultation between 17 August and 7 September 2015. The team took some time to understand the concerns, endorsements, and suggestions the community provided, and made important changes to the idea accordingly. There is also much to share about effectively running consultations more generally, a topic that will be featured in an upcoming blog post.

The consultation featured an idea for restructuring the grant programs that included three funding types with several options within each funding type: Event Grants (with the Large Event, Small Event, and Travel Support options); Project Grants (with the Seed and Growth options); and Annual Plan Grants (with the Full Process and Simple Process options). The consultation also included a survey that asked people with experience with grants about their experiences and priorities. The final report contains information about the methodology, analysis, findings, and material changes to the grants programs. In this post, will outline some key findings from the final report.

Key findings

Overall, respondents liked the idea, the funding types offered, and the ways they could use the funding. On the other hand, most respondents expressed at least a few concerns or had useful suggestions about how the idea could be improved. A few of the major concerns brought up are around specific aspects of the idea not being clear enough, like the distinctions between grant types and what exactly they covered. Respondents are understandably concerned that the new structure not take up too much time from volunteers, and offered many concerns and suggestions about limiting the time volunteers would need to spend learning or engaging with the new structure. There were more than 60 specific suggestions during the consultation, as well as several ideas for different structures we might consider!

We used all of this information to improve the idea by enhancing the things people liked, addressing concerns, and implementing suggestions. For instance, participants expressed concern that there were too many options in the idea, which may be confusing for applicants. As a result, we simplified Project grants into a single structure rather than two separate options. Also, participants favored the idea of small and accessible grants up to $500 that were originally grouped as an “Event Grant.” We increased that limit to $2000 and created a separate category for these funds called Rapid Grants, which can be used both for events and projects.

Since the consultation included a survey as well as a place to respond in the IdeaLab, the team got some interesting insights into how people experience grants. This was some good information for understanding better the priorities of respondents. For example, we discovered that respondents rated achieving impact as very important, along with speed in the application process and simplicity in the application process. Respondents rated these much more highly than community participation. This led us to some concrete ideas about what we should prioritize in the new structure, since we realized we needed to focus community participation more on the biggest and most complex grants and have simple and speedy options for other grant types and options.

Another major theme is around supporting applicants and grantees better. There are the greatest number of suggestions about applicant support, and especially around providing more personalized support and being able to direct applicants to the right grant type for them through tools like a wizard. There was also a question specifically about the types of non-monetary support that are important to them. Connections, budget guidelines, and online resources are seen as most important, and the need for more targeted support for specific topics is also emphasized.

The team is glad to know that most grantees (about 51%) found the grants experience overall easy and 55% described the grants experience as above average or excellent. Below you can see some aspects of the grants process that people rated specifically, to get an idea of where some of the pain points are. While getting grants processed is ranked as easy, reporting and collecting global metrics are ranked as more difficult. These areas may need to be improved, or may need more support.

Chart showing ratings of ease and difficulty for different aspects of the grants process. Image by Winifred Olliff, released into the public domain.

Next steps

Since respondents liked the idea but had a few concerns, we made substantive changes to the original proposal on IdeaLab to enhance what people liked about the idea and fix what didn’t work (see the top graphic):

• Rapid Grants. To provide quick support for opportunities throughout the year. Up to $2000 for low-risk experiments and standard needs (meetups, etc) that don’t need broad review to get started.
• Project Grants. To promote experiments and sustain ideas that work. Up to $100,000 for 12 months. There will be different guidelines and support systems for experiments (seed) and established projects (growth), but one application process.
• Annual Plan Grants. To support organizations in developing and sustaining effective programs. Up to $100,000 for 12 months through a simple process, and full process for larger or unrestricted grants.
• Conference and Travel Support. To support organizers and travelers attending conferences. Travel, kits and guidance, funds and merchandise, to foster community connections and learning.

This new structure and the development of related plans around the grants process will proceed gradually over the next year, according the following timeline:

• 1 October 2015: Open applications for Simple Process Annual Plan Grants pilot (applications due 1 November for grants starting 1 January)
• March 2016: Preliminary evaluation of Simple Process Annual Plan Grants based on first application phase
• March – June 2016: Finalize changes to Full Process Annual Plan Grants based on simple process pilot and consultation feedback
• July 2016: Implement changes to Full Process Annual Plan Grants for round 1 2016/2017 applicants
• July – September 2016: Transition Individual Engagement Grants + Project and Event Grants to Project Grants and Rapid Grants
• March 2017: Evaluate Simple Process Annual Plan Grants pilot with data from first round of grant reports

Results

The Reimagining WMF grants consultation was a success: participants offered a lot of thoughtful feedback that has reshaped the grant programs into something better, which better reflects the ideas and priorities of the people who use grants. As this new structure is implemented over the next year, we will continue to develop plans with communities. We hope this outcome will lead to improved experiences for grantees and applicants, and that this structure will better address the needs of contributors. On top of that, as an added value, this consultation has been a great learning experience. Several best practices and lessons about consultations with communities have emerged over the last month that we will be sharing soon on this blog, and may help Wikimedia organizations run consultations with their local communities.

I want to express my gratitude to everyone who took the time to provide feedback and ideas, and who engaged in a conversation with us about how we can best serve communities through grants.

If you have questions about this report, conclusions, or the methods of this consultation, please ask them on the report talk page or in the comment section below.

Chris Schilling
Community Organizer
Wikimedia Foundation

Kian right now is a tool that can give probability of having certain statement based on categories but the goal is to become a general AI system to serve Wikidata.

Huge number of items without statement always bothered me and I thought I should write something that can analyse articles and take out some data out of articles.

It uses AI to extract data, I have never seen something like this in Wikipedia before. The main advantage of using AI is adaptability. I can now run Kian on languages that I have no idea about them. 

Another advantage of using AI is having probability which can be useful in lots of cases such as generating list of mismatches between Wikipedia and Wikidata that shows possible mistakes in Wikidata or Wikipedia.

With each run of Kian Wikidata becomes better. After a while we would have so much certainty in data that we can assure Wikipedia and other third party users using our data is a good thing

First is generating possible mistakes and building a quality assurance workflow. 

Another one is adaptability of adding broad range of statements with high accuracy.

We can build a system to create these articles in languages such as English since using Kian now we have data about those articles.

Let me give you an example: Maybe there is an article in Hindi Wikipedia, we can't read this article but Kian can extract several statements out of that article. Then using resonator or other tools we can write articles in English Wikipedia or other languages.

Plans about Kian. What I'm doing to make Kian better. Hopefully we would have a suggesting tool using Kian very soon.

We have a instruction in github you only need an account in Wikimedia Labs

Yes, right now it uses autolist which makes it up-to-date.

Autolist, Wikidata can't go on without this tool.

15.09.2015-21.09.2015

Night life map developed by Lisa Stolz in her Bachelor thesis. [1]

Mapping

• Ahmed explains the aim and  status of the Grass&Green project.
• Using Taginfo you can find a lot of nonsense, for example: yes=no, as shown by Simon Poole.
• Badita Florin looked up how many POIs have more than 100 (!) tags for one object, which mainly turned out to be lighthouses.
• Martijn van Exel has equipped his challenge “Fix U.S. railway crossings” with new tasks and calls for repairing. (via @mvexel, @maproulette)
• You would like to create a new challenge for MapRoulette and you know bit of Python? You can do it now easily with Martijn’s guidance for MapRoulette API Wrapper. (via @maproulette)
• Thomas Hills describes his experiences and problems in teaching new mappers and tries to simplify the process with his own guidance.

Community

• GaiaGPS wrote a tutorial on how to upload GPS traces and use them to improve the data. In a previous blog post they explained how and why you should create an account.
• Elliott Plack reports about some vandalism (deletions and fictional data from a TV series) in Baltimore, USA. The user got blocked by the DWG, but returned under another login and continued vandalising (twice).
• Daniel Koć proposes a totally different idea to distinguish between the different types of “footways” in order to make  better rendering possible.
• Python Argentina “Argentina en Python” collected so much data with OSMTracker for Android, that they cannot process all data by themselves. They set up a website and Dropbox account and are asking the community to help  map the data from the GPS tracks, audio notes and videos they collected.

Imports

• Imre Samu presents his findings to recognise strange imports with the help of taginfo .

Events

• OpenStreetMap France will participate in the International Geography Festival in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges from October 02 until 04. There? Why? That’s why. The program can be downloaded here.
• Rafael Avila Coya holds a lecture at the regional government of Galicia in particular on the topic HOT.

Humanitarian OSM

• Drishtie Patel and Dan Joseph from the US Red Cross report on their work in a township near Cape Town.
• Mapping roads and structures in California because of the Valley Fire in California.
• HOT calls  JOSM Mappers to help with the completion of the road network in Tanzania.

Maps

• [1] Lisa Stolz designed a map specifically for nightlife as part of her bachelor thesis at Hochschule Karlsruhe in collaboration with Geofabrik. Geofabrik provides a temporary map of the new style, but is looking for someone who wants to operate and maintain the new style in the long term.
• Wikimedia Maps, a tile service of the Wikimedia Foundation has arrived in beta status. It is a basic map style for the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation (eg Wikipedia, Commons, …). Technically it is the vector and raster-tile server of Karthotherian, various Mapbox-components and Mapnik3.

switch2OSM

• Strava switched from  Google Maps (incl. Street View) to Mapbox. Some premium subscribers “remain frustrated“. Many of the complaints, however, have little to do with OSM itself. Often poorer satellite images and the lack of Street View is the problem. We would like to remind you that this was similar to the change of Geocaching.com from Google Maps to OSM.

Open-Data

• Timo Thalmann hopes to start a discussion about the definition of public tasks in the field of state GIS data. (automatic translation)

Software

• OSM Buildings speaks WebGL. (Demo)
• The new Mapbox Studio, currently still in the closed beta, is designed for experts and beginners as well. The map elements can now be easily changed via point and click.
• Basecamp for Windows  4.5.2 is released.
• OSRM  version 4.8.0 released – Bugfix release 4.8.1 on September 20.
• Proj4Leaflet which provides support for projections not contained within Leaflet itself, now has its own project page.(via @liedman)

Did you know …

• … osmservices, the slightly different link collection of Mathis Rinke? Bet you also find something new from the OSM world.
• … [map] BBCode to create some simple BBCode annotated maps?  The JavaScript library can be integrated into popular form. You can test [map] BBCode here and see an example here.

other “geo” things

• It seems that Apple continues to invest in map technologies.
• Google Home View was yesterday – today the vacuum cleaner robot Roomba 980 is mapping the apartment “passing by“.
• Steve Coast starts a project to collect machine readable spatial data. I would be nice to read something about the license of the collected data.
• The earth’s surface is increasingly under surveillance. More and more start-ups rush into space with their own photo-satellites. Geoawsomeness talks about it.
• You have a city trip in mind? You should always take along a weather dependent map.
• Mashable reports about the effects of climate change. The melting of the continental ice and the resulting rise of the oceans.

weeklyOSM is brought to you by …

Antoine Bello is a well-known French author; his donation is the first time an author has donated an entire year’s royalties to the Wikimedia Foundation. Photo from Antoine Bello, freely licensed under CC-by-SA 3.0.

In Antoine Bello’s 2009 French-language novel Les Éclaireurs, a secret agent from Iceland named Sliv Dartunghuver works for a global organization that is planting fake stories in newspapers, infiltrating the United Nations, and helping support a terrorist organization based in the Middle East.

Praised by French reviewers—Le Monde said the book had “vitality” and “imagination”—the novel was also noteworthy for its unique dedication to Wikipedia. Bello says that the encyclopedia deserved his highest praise because he relied on it to understand real-life doings that form the backdrop to Les Éclaireurs.

This month, Bello took his praise of Wikipedia one step farther: he donated all of his literary earnings from the previous year to Wikipedia. Bello’s gift of $50,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation is the first time in Wikipedia’s history that an author has given us a year’s royalties.

Bello says he is only returning the favor—that Wikipedia astonishes him whenever he looks for information there.

“Every time I use it, I think of the people who have taken the time and devoted long evenings doing that,” Bello says of Wikipedia’s articles. “And I wonder, ‘Who are these people? Why did they do it? What an appetite for knowledge and for sharing it they must have.’  And I feel blessed that people do that.”

Bello, who was born and raised in France and now lives in New York state, has been writing fiction for 20 years. Les Éclaireurs, which translates into English as The Pathfinders, is part of a trilogy of novels that helped burnish Bello’s literary reputation. The trilogy’s last book, Les Producteurs, was published in 2015, and Bello once again used Wikipedia to flesh out historical facts that anchor the novel’s passages. In fact, using Wikipedia changed Bello’s perspective about a subject that Les Producteurs addresses as a subplot: epidemics around the world. Wikipedia documents the full history of infectious diseases, including those in China that killed tens of millions of people during the Middle Ages.

“I was thinking, obviously, about Ebola and AIDS and the Great Plague in Europe in the 14th century, but then you go to Wikipedia, and you see a number of pages about hundreds of other epidemics,” Bello says. “Suddenly, the world looks different. It’s no longer only about Europe and the United States. It’s no longer only about the past 20 years. It’s no longer about Christianity. Suddenly, you realize the world is much, much bigger than you thought. And at the same time, it’s all at your fingertips, thanks to Wikipedia.”

Authors around the world use Wikipedia for research, and many have publicly thanked Wikipedia for its depth of knowledge. In 2013, for example, Seattle writer Aubry Kae Andersen acknowledged Wikipedia in the dedication of her debut novel, Isaac the Fortunate: The Winter. And in 2012, the author Jasha M. Levi praised Wikipedia in the acknowledgements of his nonfiction work, Requiem for a Country: A History Lesson, which describes the 20th-century dissolution of Sephardic life in Bosnia. “Without access to its information,” Levi wrote of Wikipedia, “it would not have been possible for me to make clear to my readers many little-known facts of Yugoslav, European, and World War II history.”

Antoine Bello. Photo from Antoine Bello, freely licensed under CC-by-SA 3.0.

Best-selling romance novelist Nora Roberts, through her Nora Roberts Foundation, has donated to the Wikimedia Foundation. And on social media sites in the past few years, authors have acknowledged their financial contributions to the Wikimedia Foundation with such shout-outs as, “I just donated to #Wikipedia,” hoping that their tweet and hashtag inspire other people to make a similar donation. Bello hopes that his new donation motivates other people—especially other authors—to give back to an online resource whose entire budget is funded by contributions.

Bello says it’s “mind-boggling” that the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation can operate Wikipedia with a staff of 240 and a budget that pales to those of other top websites. “I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to it, because I think people are benefiting from this miracle, and they don’t realize it’s a miracle,” Bello says. “Nobody’s getting paid for it. There’s no advertising. You’re not harvesting my data. And it’s very up to date. I follow tennis, for instance, and when Roger Federer wins a match, five seconds later, it’s in his page. With this donation, and whenever I can, I try to evangelize and tell people how great it is.”   

As someone who has lived in different countries, including Japan, and considers himself “a citizen of the world,” Bello says he appreciates Wikipedia’s depth and breadth. The encyclopedia is in more than 250 languages. About 70,000 active volunteer editors, and thousands of other volunteer contributors, ensure that Wikipedia’s 36 million articles stay current for the site’s 400 million readers.

“I obviously share a lot of the values of the Wikimedia Foundation – the plurality of languages, the tolerance, the openness, universal access to language,” says Bello. “Those are all subjects that are very dear to my heart.”

Bello now writes a new book almost every year. When he’s in the middle of researching one, “I can literally spend hours on Wikipedia, jumping from one subject to the next,” he says. “I will want to write on, say, the recent economic depression, and I will start on one article and then I will see a link to another aspect, like the sub-prime (mortgage crisis), and then inside the sub-prime, I will see something that will catch my eye. And then after a few hours, I’ve noticed that I’ve bookmarked 25 pages. And that I have the substance for 1-2-3 chapters of my book. Of course, then there’s the job of the novelist in making sense of all of that – providing a vision of the world, the unique prism of the artist and the writer. But the material, the raw material, is all there in Wikipedia. And I love it. And I feel so grateful.”

The Wikimedia Foundation is very grateful to Antoine Bello for his spirit of giving. In the world of letters, writers start with a blank page. It takes inspiration to fill the page with meaning. It take inspiration to donate to Wikipedia in an entirely new way.

Jonathan Curiel
Development Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

Very active editor numbers (>100 edits per month) since the English Wikipedia’s launch in 2001. The thick red line symbolises a five-month moving average. Graph by Joe Sutherland, in the public domain.

The English Wikipedia’s population of very active editors—registered contributors with more than 100 edits per month—appears to have stabilized after a period of decline. We’re seeing some of the same trends globally on other language Wikipedias.

On a month-to-month comparison of 2014 to 2015 on the English Wikipedia, very active editor numbers have been consistently higher this year than last year. August’s very active editor total of 3,458 was the highest since March 2011. Globally, five of the last eight months have had more than 10,000 very active editors per month—the first time we’ve seen that consistently since July 2013. Broadly speaking, it appears the number of very active editors has recovered from a mid-2013 drop and, for the moment, is continuing upward aseasonally.

This trend is intriguing and raises several questions.

For example, active editor numbers—those with more than five edits per month—appear to be flat, both on the English Wikipedia and globally. Why are they not rising alongside the number of very active editors? And where are the new very active editors coming from? Are existing editors editing more? Are inactive editors returning?

Today, we are releasing a new dataset (documentation) to invite  community members and researchers to join us in analyzing this trend.  Some potential directions of investigation include:

• Existing editors could be editing more
• Fewer editors could be leaving
• More editors could be coming back
• The community could be reaching its new carrying capacity
• Faster editing as a result of  December 2014’s performance improvements  (“How we made editing Wikipedia twice as fast“) could be enabling more edits
• A temporary resurgence, known more colorfully as a ‘dead cat bounce’

Please let us know what you find.

Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate
Aaron Halfaker, Senior Research Scientist
Wikimedia Foundation

Active editor numbers (>5 edits per month) since the English Wikipedia’s launch in 2001. The thick blue line symbolises a five-month moving average. Graph by Joe Sutherland, in the public domain.

The Wikipedia Visiting Scholars program connects experienced Wikipedia editors with research libraries. Together, they find Wikipedia articles to improve using the library’s digital resources.

I’m pleased to announce that, in light of a strong applicant pool, the University of Pittsburgh has decided to sponsor two Visiting Scholars: Barbara Page (User:Bfpage) and Casey Monaghan (User:Seattle).

Barbara will focus on editing medicine-related topics. She said she was frustrated by her lack of access to information about more obscure diseases that don’t yet have articles, and points out that only 61 of 30,000 articles on medical subjects are Featured Articles (Wikipedia’s highest level of quality). For contrast, there are 815 military history Featured Articles and 193 on video games. She’ll improve those figures using sources provided by the University of Pittsburgh.

Casey will focus on Pittsburgh history. In addition to using academic literature, he plans to utilize the library’s media and data collections.

“As a first step, I would like to upload public domain images of former Pittsburgh mayors from Historic Pittsburgh’s ‘Politics’ collection,” he said. He would use those images to improve articles such as Magnus Miller Murray, which includes maps, but no photographs. “I’m also looking forward to using other University-hosted materials, such as Pitt’s collection of 19th-century Pittsburgh census data.”

The Scholars will be working with Ed Galloway, Head of the University of Pittsburgh’s Archives Service Center.

“The University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh is eager to join this program after having started down a similar path with history student internships two years ago,” Galloway said. “It was a great experience working with Pitt students to improve Wikipedia articles with an eye toward connecting users to the unique collections we have at Pitt. But the bar is raised when considering the opportunity to work with seasoned Wikipedians, who are trusted agents in the Wikipedia world, and know their way around the massive resource. Since much research is serendipity when just clicking from one linked article to the next, we’d like to be in that mix.”

He said that, since more and more students start their research using Wikipedia, the University would like to become part of that ‘research stream,’ which he hopes will guide students to their archival and manuscript collections and encourage those students to ask more in-depth questions.

For information about sponsoring or becoming a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar, see our Visiting Scholars page.

Photo: “University of Pittsburgh tablet2” original photo by Piotrus, edited/uploaded by Crazypaco at en.wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia; transferred to Commons by User:Shizhao using CommonsHelper. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

We are getting to the end of the quarter and it comes with a big bunch of updates and bug fixes.

The translation suggestions feature was deployed to more language pairs:

• English → French
• English → Spanish
• English → Russian
• English → Chinese
• English → Turkish
• English → Japanese
• English → Italian
• Spanish → Catalan
• Spanish → English
• French → English

These pairs are based on the most popular pairs of languages for translation based on Content Translation statistics. There are still several issues with the translation suggestion feature, such as better selection of default languages, changing the selected languages, and others, which we plan to address very soon.

Two issues were addressed in the statistics page:

1. If there were no translations to a language in the previous week, the statistics page would show a growth trend of “NaN%” (“NaN” means “not a number”). This was caused by a division-by-zero bug, and now it’s fixed and the number is shown correctly. (bug report)
2. The titles and the labels of the charts on the Content Translation Statistics page, which was recently revamped, were updated to be more descriptive. Please update their translations to your language. (bug report)

Other notable updates:

• Clicking a link in the source language for which there is no corresponding page in the target language was adding a useless link to the translation. This was fixed. (bug report)
• When using Content Translation in Norwegian Bokmål, the “Find articles missing in your language” (“Finn sider som mangler på språket ditt”) tool was broken because it used a wrong language code. Now it works correctly. (bug report)
• The issue of the server requests that Content Translation makes when loading an article for reading should be solved now (bug report), and it’s not causing irrelevant gray links.

Finally, we congratulate the Catalan Wikipedia upon publishing the 3,000th translated page: Vatersay, an island in Scotland.

Paulina Sanchez started out by becoming a volunteer for the 2015 Wikimania in Mexico City. Today, she’s a die-hard Wikipedia editor and outreach event organizer. Photograph by Victor Grigas, Wikimedia Foundation, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Paulina Sanchez’s beginnings with the Wikimedia movement are far from ordinary. Having been first invited to help organize Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City by a friend, she started out by joining editatonas, which are women-only edit-a-thons run by Mexican Wikimedia volunteers. After just a month, she gave her first workshop on how to edit Wikipedia. Today, in addition to running workshops, she contributes and improves articles on films, literature, female biologists and Chicana feminism in the United States.

Paulina credits her first steps on Wikipedia with Andres “Andy” Cruz y Corro, an environmental engineer and a fellow Wikimania organizer: “After being invited to help organize Wikimania by Andy, I dived right into editing, and about a month after I started editing Wikipedia, I gave my first workshop on how to edit. I didn’t know everything about it, but quickly found that the best way to learn is to teach,” she recalls.

A medical bioscience Ph.D. student at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Paulina admits to being attracted to Wikipedia due to the gap in coverage of female biologists. “There are articles on female scientists such as Marie Curie and all these women who are excellent and very well known, but when I looked for more, for example on [female] biologists on the Spanish Wikipedia, there were just three or so articles, and they were very short. It didn’t measure with the English Wikipedia, which had about 20 articles, but there’s still a gap there, too,” she says.

A video report from the second Editatona held at the Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City in March 2015. Editatonas are women-only edit-a-thons hosted by Mexican Wikimedians that aim to increase gender diversity on Wikipedia. Video by Ivan Martínez, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Aside from her personal interest as a scientist, this gap has affected Paulina on a personal level, too. “This also comes back as a huge social problem, when young women here in Mexico think they can’t be scientists because women scientists are not represented,” she continues. “I have a younger sister … so she says: ‘I have to be an actress or a painter, or something like that.’ And to that I say: ‘No, you can be whatever you want to be.’ “

A graduate of Scripps College in Claremont California, Paulina uses her experience to run editatonas, which she describes as providing a “safe space for women who are either new to the world of technology or new to Wikipedia and who are passionate about feminism—or any other specific subject—and who want to edit. We also bring in other people who know a lot about a particular topic, even if they don’t know anything about Wikipedia, and have them teach us how to approach subjects that can be controversial or delicate for some people.”

Organizing editatonas is also essential in creating a sense of community. “Besides editing, we also have breaks for food: we bring food or order something together, and take breaks from everything, and talk, and see how everything is going,” Paulina reveals. “The word that I like more than ‘community’ is ‘camaraderie’ — not just in person, but also on-line, like on Facebook, Twitter, mailing lists or on Wikipedia itself.”

As part of her work on improving Wikipedia’s coverage of female scientists, Paulina also contributes to Wikimedia Commons, the shared repository of free media. “For some articles, it’s really hard actually finding the person. If they’re alive, … I can contact them to get a picture of their work or of themselves; if they’re no longer here, and their picture is copyrighted, then some time has to pass before we can use those images—that’s a big problem,” she describes.

This leads Paulina to the often complicated relationship between Wikipedia and the scientific community. “It’s a situation where I think us scientists don’t know everything. We don’t know how Wikipedia works, how it’s all checked to make sure that everything has a reference or a good picture, how it’s open and—you know—correct,” she says. “I think it’s really interesting that we have this bias in the science field when people don’t use Wikipedia because it’s not a ‘right’ source. And I think it would be great if we could reach out to a scientific congress and say: hey, use Wikipedia. We have all these resources, and you could help us spread the word.”

When asked about other subjects she edits about on Wikipedia, Paulina openly admits her love of reading. “I also do a lot of editing on books and literature. I love to read, so I make edits on anything Margaret Atwood or Chuck Palahniuk,” she says.

“It’s addicting, editing Wikipedia. It’s just something I love to do.”

Interview by Jonathan Curiel, Development Communications Manager, Wikimedia Foundation
Profile by Tomasz W. Kozlowski, Wikimedia community volunteer

Wikipedians love lists. Thus, my list-generating bot is now active on over a dozen wikis, most of then upon request by users, who have set up quite a variety of lists to generate and update.

However, a few issues with this approach have emerged. Some of them are technical; lists get too long for wikitext, some desired functions are hard to implement, and using templates to set up parameters is awkward. Some issues are social; while several wikis have no problems with bot-generated lists in the article namespace, some (OK, one) communities have concerns, ranging from the data quality of Wikidata, over style issues, to the fact that the list can only be edited via Wikidata, and not directly on the respective wiki.

A proposed solution is to implement Wikidata lists as a tool. This solves the “social issues” by moving the lists outside the wikis, while releasing storage and display options from the limitations of MediaWiki. So, for the impatient: Dynamic Wikidata  Lists.

In this tool, everyone can view lists, and change options like language, columns, and sections on-the-fly; to create your own lists, use your trusted WiDaR login. Lists consist of two parts: The items resulting from a Wikidata Query (there could be other data sources down the line), which is stored in the tool, and updated every six hours, or on demand; and the data in the columns, which is loaded on-the-fly, directly from Wikidata. This is a trade-off; no need to store large amounts of data in the tool, and getting the latest data straight from the source, in exchange for a few seconds of waiting time for large lists. Once a list is loaded, the display can be changed with little or no need to load more data. However, even my largest list with over 4,300 items loads the items in ~10sec, and the labels for the column values in another ~5sec, on my machine.

The “>” icon on top of the list opens the display options, and there are quite a few of those. Seven columns types, three sections types, multiple (sub-)section levels, an option to display the top-level section as tabs, arbitrary precision when using dates as sections (e.g. force birth dates into decades), options to override column titles per language, etc.

Links go the the Wikipedia article in the current language, or to Wikidata by default; columns with links to specific wikis are possible. Preferred statements are shown if present, normal ranks otherwise. Columns can be sorted by clicking on the column header (there is no default sort, as the labels to sort on are loaded after the table is created).

A list, once created, can only be changed by the person who created it; but anyone with a WiDaR login can create a new list based on an existing one, and change it in any way desired. List and default language can be specified in the URL, so you can link to a list from Wikipedia in the local language.

There are, undoubtedly, things left to do; the next big one will be to allow Wikidata editing directly from within the tool. I hope this tool will, in addition to the bot, give everyone the power and flexibility to create and manage Wikidata-based lists, help improve Wikidata statements, and maybe even convert the occasional Wikidata nay-sayer

The featured image when the Swedish Wikipedia hit two million articles—a springbok. Image by Yathin S Krishnappa, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

This blog post is the first in a series celebrating milestones across all Wikimedia projects.

The Swedish Wikipedia hit two million articles on September 5, only the second language edition of Wikipedia to reach this milestone. The final stretch was celebrated with a custom-made globe icon, as has become something of a Wikipedia tradition. The two millionth article was “Iro (mountain)“, one of many bot-created articles created in the weeks leading up to the milestone; it documents a 1061m-tall mountain in South Sudan.

Jan Ainali, of Wikimedia Sverige, says that the community is aware of the role of bots in getting to this milestone, but that it is still to be celebrated. “The community is aware of the special case that [the Swedish Wikipedia] is,” he says. “That being said, most are quite happy that the Swedish version is able to serve so much content, and that the feat that Lsj [the creator of Lsjbot] has achieved is huge.”

The Urdu Wikipedia community made serious headway on its goal of 100,000 articles, reaching the 80,000 article milestone on September 9. The Armenian Wiktionary has doubled in size in just five months, and is now at over 90,000 entries.

You can read all of the Wikimedia project milestones, and get more information, on the Wikimedia News page on Meta-Wiki.

Other selected milestones

September 22
The Swahili Wikipedia has reached 30,000 articles.

September 19
The Armenian Wiktionary has reached 90,000 entries, having doubled in size since April of this year.

September 17
The Oriya Wikisource has reached 200 text units.
The wiki for Wikimedia Estonia has been moved from et.wikimedia.org to ee.wikimedia.org.

September 14
The Cantonese Wikipedia has reached 40,000 articles.

September 10
The Serbian Wiktionary has reached 30,000 entries.

September 9
The Urdu Wikipedia has reached 80,000 articles.

September 7
The Kyrgyz Wikipedia has reached 40,000 articles.
The Serbian Wiktionary has reached 20,000 entries.

September 6
The Malayalam Wikipedia has reached 40,000 articles.

September 5
The Swedish Wikipedia has reached 2,000,000 articles.

September 3
A new interwiki prefix, policy:, has been added to the interwiki map, for linking to the new Wikimedia Public Policy website.

September 2
The Min Nan Wikipedia has reached 40,000 articles.

Joe Sutherland, Communications intern, Wikimedia Foundation

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

• Syriza wins a snap legislative election following prime minister Alexis Tsipras’s resignation last month.
• Despite opposition, Japan promotes legislation allowing its military to engage in foreign conflict.
• A severe earthquake strikes off the coast of Chile, leading to 14 deaths.
• In a coup d’état, the Regiment of Presidential Security detains the President and Prime Minister of Burkina Faso.
• In the Rugby World Cup, Japan records a shock first-ever win over South Africa.

Syriza wins new Greek mandate

Vangelis Meimarakis, standing against Alexis Tsipras‘s party, conceded defeat. Image by Tm, freely licensed under CC-BY 2.0.

Following Alexis Tsipras‘s resignation as Prime Minister of Greece in August, his party Syriza won in a snap election on Sunday. His party retained its majority, but was six seats short of an absolute majority; it was instead able to reedit its coalition government with the Independent Greeks. Turnout was the lowest seen in Greece since democracy was restored in 1974 at 56.6 percent, which analysts blamed on voter apathy and fatigue. It was the third national vote this year, following a scheduled election in January and a referendum on a European Union bailout in July.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Greek legislative election, September 2015

Japan re-allows military force

Shinzō Abe, pictured in 2013, cited the Islamic State group’s activities as partial cause for the legislation. Image by Chatham House, freely licensed under CC-BY 2.0.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe and his ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Monday promoted legislation that will allow Japan to enter into foreign conflict. It reinterprets passages in the Japanese constitution relating to attacking in self-defence, instead allowing the military to provide “collective self-defense” abroad for the first time since World War II. Abe cited the beheading of two Japanese hostages by the Islamic State group as reasoning for the legislation. However, it is not without its critics; surveys of experts found the majority of them believed the move was unconstitutional.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: 2015 Japanese military legislation

Earthquake strikes in Chile

The resultant tsunamis led to widespread flooding and damage to hundreds of buildings. Image by Gobierno de Chile, freely licensed under CC-BY 2.0.

An earthquake with a moment magnitude of 8.3 struck off the coast of Chile at almost 8pm local time on September 16. The quake lasted for at least three minutes, and sparked tsunami warnings in various countries both near and far from the epicenter, including the United States, Ecuador, New Zealand, and Japan. The shock was felt as far away as São Paulo in Brazil, and immediately resulted in blackouts in nearby Chilean cities. Tsunami waves up to 15 feet (4.5 m) high were reported along the coast, and resulted in severe damage to areas near the cities of Coquimbo, Tongoy and Concón. A state of emergency was soon declared in Coquimbo, where large fishing boats were swept into the streets.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: 2015 Illapel earthquake

Coup d’état in Burkina Faso

Gilbert Diendéré, pictured in 2010, led the coup. Image by Master Sgt. Jeremiah Erickson, U.S. Air Force, freely licensed under public domain.

Burkina Faso‘s transitional president, Michel Kafando, and incumbent prime minister, Yacouba Isaac Zida, were detained in a coup d’état on September 16. The coup was staged by the Regiment of Presidential Security, led by Gilbert Diendéré to form a temporary military dictatorship in the country. It comes in the wake of last year’s Burkinabé uprising, where a populist movement overthrew long-time president Blaise Compaoré. Compaoré himself came into power in a 1987 coup. In spite of the coup, elections are planned for October.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: 2015 Burkinabe coup d’état

Japan claims historic rugby union win

Fullback Ayumu Goromaru scored 24 of Japan’s points during the upset. Image by 埊, freely licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

Japan’s national rugby union team, then ranked thirteenth in the world, defeated two-time Rugby World Cup champions South Africa 34–32 on September 19, a result the BBC labelled “arguably the biggest upset in rugby union history”. Ayumu Goromaru scored 24 of Japan’s 34 points throughout the game to guide them to their first World Cup win, and their first win over a southern hemisphere team, since 1991. It is South Africa’s first opening-day loss in a World Cup for twenty years, and had only ever lost World Cup games to New Zealand, Australia, and England before Japan’s win.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Japan national rugby union team

Photo montage credits: “Mandataria_recorrió_borde_costero_escuchando_a_afectados_por_el_terremoto_(21503021501).jpg” by Gobierno de Chile, CC BY 2.0.; “Burkinabe Col. Gilbert Diendéré, 2010.jpg” by Master Sgt. Jeremiah Erickson, public domain; “Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan (9092387608).jpg” by Chatham House, CC BY 2.0.; “EPP_Summit,_Brussels,_July_2015_(19444614659).jpg” by EPP, CC BY 2.0.; “Goromaru crop.jpg” by 埊, CC BY 4.0. Collage by Andrew Sherman.

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

Joe SutherlandCommunications InternWikimedia Foundation

Last week, Outreach Manager Samantha Erickson and I joined instructors at the University of San Francisco for a faculty luncheon. We discussed how to bring Wikipedia into a classroom and the many benefits of the assignment.

Dr. Jonathan Hunt, an instructor in the Rhetoric and Language department, told us that the online training seemed like a great way to introduce students to the community behind Wikipedia. He compared Wikipedia’s community to any other community his students might join, even temporarily. He remarked that he would never take students into a physical community without first explaining the community’s norms and expectations. He would also advise students to respect those community values and best practices, especially if they wished to be treated as a part of that community. Likewise, we know students fare better on Wikipedia when they have been exposed to and strive to follow Wikipedia’s cultural norms.

In a discussion about student learning and motivations, we heard from Dr. David Silver, who teaches interdisciplinary courses in Environmental Studies, Media Studies, and Urban Agriculture. This term, his students are improving Wikipedia articles about San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

Dr. Silver’s course is a first-year seminar, and at first, students were hesitant to admit they’d even used Wikipedia. Now, after studying Golden Gate Park for weeks and comparing their learning to existing Wikipedia content, the students are excited to engage in public scholarship about a park that is (literally) in their back yard. While learning about Wikipedia’s neutrality policies, students identified biases in existing articles, often in ways that surprised their instructor.

The discussion and interest proved yet again that a Wikipedia assignment can be a great fit for any academic topic. Attendees at the luncheon represented a range of disciplines and departments at USF. That included Rhetoric and Language, Modern Languages, Psychology, International Studies, Media Studies, Chemistry, Art History and Museum Studies, and the university library.

Wikipedia serves as a tool to achieve comprehension in any topic, while cultivating media literacy, critical thinking skills, writing development, and collaboration among peers and other editors. Wiki Ed can help instructors design and implement such an assignment.

With insightful instructors like Jonathan and David leading the charge, we can’t wait to see our programs grow at the University of San Francisco!

Last week we deployed a change that reduced the number of server requests that Content Translation makes when loading an article for reading (bug report). This introduced another bug, however: in some cases incorrect gray links with language codes such as “en-us” appeared in the list. This change was reverted, so wrong links don’t appear any longer, but the extra request is back as well. This should be fixed soon, hopefully without breaking other things.

Highlights

• Executive Director Frank Schulenburg and Senior Manager of Development Tom Porter discussed Open Educational Practices and the upcoming Wikipedia Year of Science with the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House. They also met with representatives of the National Science Foundation.
• We have formally announced our partnership with the American Society of Plant Biologists, a professional society dedicated to advancing the plant sciences. Our work with ASPB will increase public access to plant biology research, and create positive learning experiences for their university students.

Programs

Educational Partnerships

Wiki Ed formed a partnership with the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), which will bring more science students to Wikipedia during 2016’s Year of Science. We’ve engaged several plant biologists to teach in our Classroom Program for upcoming terms. These plant scientists and their students will add important research to Wikipedia, making information available to people outside of the discipline.

Wikipedia Content Expert Adam Hyland attended the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) national meeting in Boston. He and Dr. Ye Li, University of Michigan’s Chemistry Librarian, presented the benefits of Wikipedia as a teaching tool during a symposium on Wikipedia, collaboration, and education. That symposium attracted speakers from the Wikipedia community, academia, and government. We’re working with ACS to expand our impact on chemistry articles in the Year of Science.

Outreach Manager Samantha Erickson and Educational Partnerships Manager Jami Mathewson have been recruiting instructors for our Classroom Program. This term, 47 instructors have joined through educational partnerships, conference presentations, or targeted outreach, compared to 26 instructors last term.

Classroom Program

Status of the Classroom Program for the Fall 2015 term in numbers, as of September 1:

• 84 Wiki Ed-supported courses had Course Pages (33, or 39%, were led by returning instructors)
• 493 student editors were enrolled
• 281 students successfully completed the online training
• Students edited 85 articles

This month has been busy, as we’re bringing new courses in through our improved course dashboard. By simplifying the course creation and tracking process, we can better support our oncoming courses. We’re already pleased to see that in less than a month, more than half of enrolled students have already completed the online training. We think that’s a result of the dashboard’s tracking features, which allows instructors to easily track students as they complete the training.

Though most students haven’t started editing Wikipedia, Content Experts Adam Hyland and Ian Ramjohn have been helping instructors choose articles for their students to work on. They’re also helping Classroom Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal review assignments to ensure that each class follows our best practices.

Student work highlights:

We saw good work from Growing Up Girl at Michigan State University. By focusing on female film-makers of color and their films, students in this summer course helped to expand underrepresented subjects on Wikipedia.

• Caucasia (Novel) was expanded from 868 to 2109 words.
• Connie Porter was expanded from 232 to 1172 words.
• Students created the new article A Map of Home consisting of 660 words. They did a particularly good job of avoiding original synthesis, which can be challenging for articles on books and films.
• In addition to expanding Red Doors from 385 to 585 words, students added sourcing where the article had none.
• Jean Kwok was expanded from 356 to 745 words.

Community Engagement

Community Engagement Manager Ryan McGrady spent August researching potential Visiting Scholars sponsors, and working with Jami and Samantha to develop outreach strategies tied to the Year of Science.

There has been good news from sponsor institutions throughout the month. In light of a strong applicant pool, the University of Pittsburgh has decided to sponsor two Visiting Scholars. These Scholars will work with the University’s Archives Service Center, Special Collections and Center for American Music to develop articles related to Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania history, including Pittsburgh-focused articles related to urban renewal, childhood during the industrial era, music composers, theater, or significant literary figures; Colonial American history; historic American songs; or Philosophy of Science.

Meanwhile, George Mason University, a 2014–15 pilot program participant, will sponsor its scholar for another year. Sponsors of the other four open positions are at various stages of the selection process, which is going smoothly.

Program Innovation, Analytics, and Research

Summer Seminar pilot

With the Summer Seminar in Psychology complete, we’re evaluating the program with an eye to future pilots. Twenty psychology experts enrolled in the course, and 13 completed the student training. In three weekly sessions, Ian and Helaine reviewed the basics of editing Wikipedia. They discussed particular challenges of editing in the psychology field. We’re awaiting responses to the survey distributed to participants to guide our final report.

Participants created eight articles and edited 24 in August. User:Glorytohypnotoad added 260 words to Self Expansion Model as part of the seminar. We appreciate the enthusiasm and input from participants in the course!

Summer Fellowship

Andrew Lih wrapped up his summer fellowship at Wiki Ed’s office in late August. While in San Francisco, Andrew helped us determine a strategy for collaboration with galleries, libraries, archives, and museums on university campuses to improve Wikipedia’s coverage. Andrew’s expertise in teaching, universities, museum collaborations, and Wikipedia provided much insight to staff discussions. We’re also excited to collaborate with Andrew in the coming months on a proposedpanel session at WikiConference USA. Thank you to Andrew for the hard work this summer!

OpenSym 2015 evening reception and poster session

As part of OpenSym 2015, Wiki Ed hosted a reception and poster session at our offices on Wednesday, August 19. Attendees showcased six posters and one live demo in our house, with more than 60 attendees enjoying hors-d’œuvres, drinks, and interesting discussions about open collaboration, wikis, Wikipedia, education, and more.

Program Support

Communications

Communications Manager Eryk Salvaggio created a final plan for restructuring the Wiki Education Foundation website this month. The new site will serve as a more intuitive portal with added context around each of our programs, and offers new pages for fundraising, partnerships, and support.

Eryk has also compiled and shared preliminary text for a new guidebook, Editing Wikipedia articles: Biographies, which has been posted to Wikipedia for input from Wikipedia editors. Feedback will be compiled into the final draft.

Blog posts:

• The Roundup: Women scientists (August 3)
• 91% of instructors say they’ll teach with Wikipedia again (August 4)
• Welcome, Victoria Hinshaw! (August 5)
• True stories from Wikipedia classrooms (August 5)
• Debut of our new tools in-person at ASPB conference (August 5)
• Hacking and collaboration at Wikimania (August 12)
• Wiki Ed announces ASPB partnership (August 14)
• The Roundup: Helping out (August 17)
• Wiki Education Foundation at OpenSym 2015 (August 18)
• The Roundup: A room with some page views (August 24)
• Monthly Report for July 2015 (August 24)
• Thank you to OpenSym 2015 (August 25)
• Join us at WikiConference USA! (August 25)
• The Roundup: Sharing science (August 31)

Digital Infrastructure

As instructors and students put the new dashboard system through its paces, Wiki Ed’s Product Manager, Digital Services Sage Ross and the WINTR development team have been fixing bugs and user experience problems.

We started work on a new ‘just-in-time help’ feature. That feature, testing now, will highlight student work that needs attention. The first iteration identifies drafts that may be eligible for Wikipedia’s Did You Know process. Planned features include: identifying articles that are ready to move into mainspace; flagging suspected plagiarism; and providing content experts and instructors a way to send help material to editors whose work needs attention.

We’re planning a new system of training modules that will integrate into the dashboards. That tool would replace the on-wiki student training. Eryk completed a report that outlines needs and improvements for that system, based on staff feedback and instructor surveys.

Finance & Administration / Fundraising

Finance & Administration

For the month of August, expenses were $235,920 versus the plan of $234,472. The slight overage was primarily due to catching up on expenditures that had been budgeted for the previous month.

Year-To-Date expenses are $499,942 versus the plan of $525,891. The $26K variance is the result of savings in “Promotional Items” ($7K), our “All Staff Meeting” ($4K) and timing delays on “Audit” fees ($10K) and “Staff Development” ($7.5K).

Our current spending level is averaging at 95% of planned.

Fundraising

• In late August, Frank and Tom met with Dipayan Gosh, Senior Policy Advisor at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) of the White House. During our visit at the White House, we discussed Wiki Ed’s role in Open Educational Practice and the how the White House could support the upcoming Wikipedia Year of Science. Later that day, Frank and Tom met with representatives of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington to discuss future funding opportunities.

• During the month of August, Tom and Development Associate Victoria Hinshaw developed numerous internal processes that leverage the functionality of Wiki Education Foundation Salesforce fundraising module. Use of this technology will help the fundraising staff gage effectiveness as the fundraising team’s work continues to develop a sustainable funding base.

• Also in August, the development team planned the first Wikipedia Year of Science awareness-building event, currently scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C. in early October. Several Wiki Education Foundation board members are now actively engaged in fundraising activities.

Office of the ED

• Current priorities:
  • Securing funding for upcoming major programmatic initiatives
  • Filling the Director of Programs position

• Supported by m/Oppenheim, a local nonprofit executive search firm, we narrowed down the list of potential candidates for our Director of Programs position. As a result, the interview process will begin in early September and we expect the position to be filled within the next two months.

• Also in late August, a delegation of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research led by State Secretary Cornelia Quennet-Thielen visited Wiki Education Foundation’s office in the Presidio. Frank gave a presentation outlining the current and future work of Wiki Ed and answered questions about Wikipedia and open licenses. Subsequently, Frank attended a evening reception at the German Consulate General and connected with high-ranking officials in German research, university administration, and science policy.

Visitors and guests

• Andrew Lih, associate professor of journalism at the American University School of Communication in Washington D.C. and Wiki Education Foundation Summer Research Fellow
• Haitham Shammaa, Wikimedia Foundation
• Dirk Riehle, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Open Source Research Group, Applied Software Engineering, and about 60 OpenSym conference attendees
• Cornelia Quennet-Thielen, State Secretary and Department Head at the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
• Frank Petrikowski, Unit International Exchange in Higher Education, German Federal Ministry for Education and Research
• Karsten Hess, Science & Technology Attaché, German Embassy, Washington D.C.
• Antje Metz, German Consulate General San Francisco

There are specific rules for when you can edit the English Wikipedia for money. Image by Erik Zachte, freely licensed under CC-by-3.0.

At the end of August, volunteer editors on the English Wikipedia blocked 381 user accounts for so-called “black hat” editing—or more specifically, undisclosed paid advocacy. As the Wikimedia Foundation’s blog post defined it, undisclosed paid advocacy is “the practice of accepting or charging money to promote external interests on Wikipedia without revealing their affiliation, in violation of Wikimedia’s Terms of Use.” Other news accounts have added allegations of an “extortion scam,” as the Guardian described it.

This question and answer-style piece comes from one of the English Wikipedia’s administrators, Robert Fernandez. It details what individuals can and should know about paid editing on Wikipedia. These guidelines apply only to the English Wikipedia and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Who is in charge of Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is a free, open access encyclopedia written and operated by volunteer editors. These volunteers do much more than create and edit articles—they also make sure that the site remains reliable, neutral, and accurate by enforcing Wikipedia policies and guidelines. The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organization which supports the technology and people behind Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The Wikimedia Foundation does not set editorial policy for Wikipedia.

I received an email from Wikipedia offering to create and monitor my article for a monthly fee. What should I do?

Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation should never send you an email advertising paid editing services. The Wikimedia Foundation does not offer Wikipedia editing services of any kind in exchange for fees, although it does seek charitable donations to keep Wikipedia running. Although some individual editors may engage in editing services in exchange for money, they must follow Wikipedia’s rules (more on that below), and their activity is not endorsed by the community of volunteer Wikipedia editors or the Wikimedia Foundation.

As Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, told the Guardian, “If anybody emails you asking for money pretending to be Wikipedia, alarm bells should ring … Everything about Wikipedia is free.”

If you receive an email fraudulently soliciting services purporting to be from Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation, please forward it to the Wikimedia volunteer team at info@wikipedia.org.

What are Wikipedia’s rules for paid editing?

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Terms of Use, covering Wikipedia and all other projects supported by the Foundation, require that all paid editing be disclosed. That disclosure must take the form of statements on the editor’s user page, accompanying all paid contributions in the edit summary, or a disclosure on the article’s talk page.

English Wikipedia policies also require that all content, paid or otherwise, be neutral, not promotional, not violate rules about living individuals, and be supported by reliable sources, such as reputable newspapers, magazines, or academic literature.

Should I hire a paid editor who does not disclose their paid editing activity on Wikipedia?

No.

Disclosure is required by Wikimedia’s Terms of Use, so if you choose to hire someone to edit Wikipedia and that person does not disclose this fact, they are violating the Terms of Use. Breaking the rules can result in a paid editor being banned from Wikipedia, and the article you paid for might be deleted.

Many prominent public relations firms have reaffirmed their organizations’ commitment to following our Terms of Use. In 2013, eleven major PR agencies committed to an agreement to follow “ethical engagement practices,” including disclosure, when editing Wikipedia. In 2014, the president of the United Kingdom’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) said that “there is zero gain to be had for any public relations firms or their clients in subverting the rules of any online community” such as Wikipedia.

Failing to properly disclose paid editing can have other negative consequences for the subject of a Wikipedia article. When violators of the Terms of Use are found and blocked, it often results in significant negative media coverage. For example, when the major PR firm Sunshine Sachs was discovered editing Wikipedia without appropriate disclosure, media coverage focused on specific edits they made to articles removing negative information, proving embarrassing to Sunshine Sachs clients like Naomi Campbell and Mia Farrow.

Someone told me it was better not to disclose, saying that sometimes Wikipedia “targets” paid articles.

Not disclosing paid editing will not prevent others from editing an article about you or your business. Regardless of whether or not you pay for a Wikipedia article or for “monitoring” services, other people are going to edit the article in question. That’s how Wikipedia works. It’s an open, collaborative project that anyone can contribute to.

While Wikipedians are generally committed to useful and positive interactions, “assuming good faith” of other editors’ motives, sometimes individual editors disagree. Such encounters may be a negative experience—especially for people who are unfamiliar with how Wikipedia works. Assuming good faith is an important means of reducing conflict, although some friction is a part of the normal give and take of editorial collaboration.

Should there be a Wikipedia article about me or my company?

Maybe, maybe not.

It may be tempting to want a Wikipedia article about you or your company due to the prominent placement of Wikipedia articles in search engine results. But Wikipedia is first and foremost an encyclopedia, and not every person or business in the world will or should appear in an encyclopedia.

What goes in—and what stays out—of the English Wikipedia depends on a Wikipedia guideline known as “Notability.”  Sometimes people take offense at the word “notability,” thinking that Wikipedia is saying that they or their business are not important to their field or community, but that’s not what Wikipedia editors mean. To an editor, it is just a way of measuring whether or not a particular subject belongs in an encyclopedia, and Wikipedia editors have developed benchmarks for notability in particular fields, such as actors or athletes. If you wish to have a Wikipedia article, please review both the general and specific notability guidelines first.

A major factor in notability on Wikipedia is coverage from reliable secondary sources. Your own webpage, or another publication you created or paid for, is considered a primary source. If there are no secondary sources about you or your business, Wikipedia guidelines and policies currently indicate you should not have a Wikipedia article.

You should also consider that a Wikipedia article may not be the most efficient use of your advertising budget. Are potential customers for a hardware store, consulting business, or restaurant, for example, going to be searching an encyclopedia for these goods and services? Or will it be more effective to focus on a sector-specific resource, such as Yelp, Facebook, or Urbanspoon?

Wikipedia is, after all, an encyclopedia—not a commercial directory.

Robert Fernandez
English Wikipedia administrator

The views expressed in this post are not necessarily those of the Wikimedia Foundation or Wikipedia; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section below.

The omnipresent smile in today’s photographs has its roots here. Photo from the National Library of Wales, public domain.

The photograph is simply labeled “Willy.” It features a young man with close-cropped hair and dressed in fine clothing, including a collared shirt and jacket. Willy is looking at something amusing off to his right, and the photograph captured just the hint of a smile from him—the first ever recorded, according to experts at the National Library of Wales.

Willy’s portrait was taken in 1853, when he was 18. He was captured on film because he was born into the Dillwyn family from Swansea in Wales, whose photography hobby was inspired by relative-by-marriage Henry Fox Talbot, who invented salt print and the Calotype. Two members of the family were particularly notable: Willy’s father, John Dillwyn Llewelyn, was a botanist who took the earliest-ever photographs of Wales.

This particular photograph, however, was taken by John’s sister Mary, who is important in her own right for being one of the first female Welsh photographers. She was among the first to avoid the formal photography used during that time, favoring smaller cameras with short exposure times that could capture informal moments. With this method, she took photos of Willy smiling, the first-ever pictured snowman, and the famous “peeping” girl—perhaps the world’s first photobomb (see photo, bottom of this page).

This image is just one of 4,500 that the National Library of Wales has released onto the Wikimedia Commons, free for anyone in the world to use. The library’s Jason Evans asserts that these images “are hugely significant to the history of Wales and photography in general. Not only do they highlight Wales’ mid-19th century status as one of the most innovative, industrialized, and technologically advanced countries in the world, but they provide a rare snapshot of life at that time.”

Willy’s smiling image, part of a collection from Mary Dillwyn, “are particularly valuable as such images are so rare from that time. … images like the ‘smile’ and the ‘snowman’ are the first of their kind and that means they will always inspire and capture the imagination,” says Evans. He doesn’t seem to be far off the mark: their images have already been viewed more than six million times.

Six months into the Wikimedian-in-Residence, plenty more than smiles and snowmen have been uploaded. Video by the National Library of Wales, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Evans’ six-month tenure as the library’s Wikimedian-in-Residence, specialized positions that place Wikimedia editors in culture heritage institutions, has been aided by its commitment to open access—the first priority in their 2014–17 strategy document, titled Knowledge for All (pdf), is “access,” including a goal to “further enhance the interfaces that make it possible for users to access and benefit from these materials.” Releasing content on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons segues nicely with this plan.

These images have been selected by Evans with an eye towards displaying aspects of the library’s collections and illustrating Wikipedia articles. This has resulted in, as Evans told me, “images that span more than a thousand years of history. These range from “family snaps to formal portraits and photo journalism … early illuminated manuscripts, including a sequence of miniatures portraying the battles of Alexander the Great … [and] maps, paintings and early Welsh newspapers.” These will be joined by extracted illustrations from digitized Welsh newspapers, for which a specialized automated tool is being developed.

Once this content is properly categorized, described, and added to articles, it becomes an “educational tool,” Evans says, for teaching about Wales and photography. He’s personally used it to bring in people for training sessions and edit-a-thons at the library, resulting in new or improved articles on topics like Y Wladfa, the Welsh colony in Patagonia (the far southern region of South America).

Look for more of the National Library of Wales’ content—which includes six million books, periodicals and newspapers, 25,000 manuscripts, and nearly one million visual pieces; Evans calls it “one of the great libraries of the world”—on Wikimedia sites over the next six months. Evans is open to collaborating with other institutions and editors; get in touch with him on Wikipedia.

Evans’ position is jointly coordinated between the National Library and Wikimedia UK, an independent organization that supports the Wikimedia movement in the United Kingdom.

Ed Erhart
Editorial Associate
Wikimedia Foundation

What was perhaps the world’s first-ever photobomb was captured on film by photographer Mary Dillwyn. Photo from the National Library of Wales, public domain.

“When you see the gardens from above… it truly reveals all the intricacy, all the details of that work.” Video by Victor Grigas and Reetta Kemppi, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

With a plethora of images available online, it’s easy to think that sharing and using those photos ends with just a click and a save. But using licensed photos without going through the proper procedures can land you in hot water, especially with many images requiring permission or even payment every time they are used.

That’s why Lionel Allorge, a photographer and programmer from France, began to release his photography under free licenses to Wikimedia Commons.

Unlike conventionally copyrighted images, images released under Creative Commons licenses do not require permission with every use. In fact, anyone is allowed to share the images or videos freely, as long as the terms of the license are met.

Allorge, a member of Wikimedia France, became interested in licensing his pictures in this way because he was intrigued by the concept of free licensing. He says he had became frustrated by the tedious process of obtaining permission to use photos he’d found online.

He began to upload his pictures to Wikimedia Commons, and has since provided photos of his hometown as well as of monuments around France.

“I took pictures for Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM), a yearly event where people try to take pictures of places that are of historical interest,” says Allorge. “In France, we are pretty rich with these monuments, so it became kind of like a game to try to take a picture of all of them.”

The Palace of Versailles in Paris is just one example of the numerous Allorge photographed for WLM. In fact, many of the monuments are much lesser known, and photographing them has proved to be a unique challenge.

One of Allorge’s favorite and more recent endeavors involved working with the ToucanWings team to shoot Versailles from the air. Aerial photographs of the palace exist, but those photos were not free to use.

Allorge, along with the ToucanWings team, took many aerial shots of the Palace of Versailles in Paris. Photo by ToucanWings, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

“Everybody was pleased with what we did, especially the people [who run the Palace of Versailles],” he says. “Before, they had to pay to use photos from the sky taken by professionals. Now, because the photos [we took] have a free license, they can reuse it whenever they want.”

Allorge has more recently become involved with “GLAM” projects, where he films and photographs those who work in museums.

“We are working with ceramic factory called Sèvres near Paris, well known for their traditional French ceramics,” explains Allorge. “We are filming the people making those ceramics so we can save that knowledge for future generations.”

He says being able to contribute to Wikipedia in an area that is not a part of his profession has been refreshing. What’s even more exciting for Allorge is how wildly perceptions of Wikipedia have changed over time.

“At first, everyone was suspicious about Wikipedia, not knowing whether it is truthful. But now most people I know trust it as the first place to go when you want to find out about something,” he says.

Because Wikipedia has actively dealt with vandalism on its pages and continues to run without running advertisements, Allorge says his trust in Wikipedia has grown stronger. He adds that it is remarkable that so many, including himself, are dedicated to growing Wikipedia into a accessible and diverse source of knowledge.

“I think the main success factor of Wikipedia is really that it is free as in beer and free as in freedom,” he adds.

Profile by Yoona Ha and Joe Sutherland
Interview by Victor Grigas, Wikimedia Foundation Storyteller

Several major Content Translation software updates were deployed this week.

The first version of the new article suggestions feature is deployed on the Portuguese Wikipedia. It shows a “Suggestions” button in the translation dashboard, in addition to “In progress” and “Published”. In this first version, clicking the Suggestions button will show a list of featured articles in the English Wikipedia that don’t yet have a version in Portuguese. We plan to add more languages and more types of suggestions in the near future.

Several major updates were done to the Content Translation Statistics special page:

• The number of pages that were published and later deleted is now shown. (task description)
• The trend of translations per week is now shown in addition to the all-time tally. (task description)
• The numbers of published translations and translations in progress were shown in separate charts. This was taking too much space, so now they are shown in one chart in different colors. (code change)
• The numbers of translations to the current wiki’s language and to all languages were shown in the same chart, which made understanding the number for the current language hard, because by now it’s usually much smaller than the tally for all languages (you are translating a lot! It’s great!). Now these charts are separated, so you can clearly see the growth for your language separately. (code change)
• Language names in the bar charts were sometimes overflowing on other chart elements. The display was adjusted so that now this shouldn’t happen. (bug report)

Another issue of note: Every time an article was loaded for reading, Content Translation was loading extra information from the server in order to display the gray interlanguage link that help you translate an article to your language. It is now possible to display this link without making this request, so we removed it and Content Translation will waste less time and bandwidth. Thanks to the tireless technical contributor Derk-Jan “TheDJ” Hartman for noticing this. This, however, introduced another problem: in some cases incorrect gray links with language codes such as “en-us” may appear in the list. We hope to fix this soon.

We’re committed to the open access movement. Photo designed at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, and JakobVoss, public domain.

On Friday, Elsevier, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, announced its recent partnership with the Wikipedia Library—a program that helps editors access reliable sources to improve Wikipedia. The collaboration gave 45 ScienceDirect accounts to Wikipedia volunteers, to use the database’s scholarly literature for research when writing and editing the encyclopedia. The announcement led to a valuable and constructive conversation about open access and the Wikimedia movement.

Wikipedia editors receive free access to content through more than 40 partnerships with publishers in many different fields through a program called the Wikipedia Library. These partnerships allow editors to use otherwise restricted content to improve Wikipedia and to share that knowledge with the public. In order to make this possible, the Wikipedia Library often partners with organizations that haven’t fully embraced the open access movement, and Wikipedia’s editors then add links to their restricted content. As part of a movement committed to open knowledge, why does the Wikipedia Library do this?

First, in the short term, the Wikipedia Library has to serve our readers and editors as best we can, and that means giving them as much access as possible to the best research today. Collaboration with publishers is a compromise: editors summarize paywalled content for our readers, sharing information on Wikipedia that may otherwise never be represented. Citations to these resources do create greater visibility for those publishers, but Wikipedia editors are in no way required to cite them and are encouraged to use open-access sources as well.

While we eagerly await the day when all of the world’s knowledge is truly free, Wikipedia’s volunteer editors need a foundation of high-quality research to create and curate articles for the site’s hundreds of millions of readers each month, even if if that research is sometimes behind a paywall. Editors have received nearly 5,000 accounts from the Wikipedia Library’s partners, and have enriched thousands of articles with their content. Having access to good sources, regardless of whether they are open access, provides an essential tool for ensuring Wikipedia reflects the most current and accurate information.

Whenever an editor cites a partner’s paywalled source, we expect that they include thorough original citation information, including an indicator of any access restrictions, and a link to the version of the content on the partner’s site. These citations allow a reader to track down the version that is most accessible to them.

Unfortunately limited or restricted access is common in today’s research climate. The best research materials may be behind paywalled online holdings or in expensive print journals and monographs. Wikipedia editors will use closed access materials if they are the best sources for advancing our mission of sharing knowledge. As Wikipedian Martin Poulter explained: Wikipedia aims to be an open-access summary of all reliable knowledge—not a summary of only open-access knowledge.

Second, in the long term, we believe that the Wikipedia Library’s work with publishers encourages the publishing community to explore more open-access strategies that share their content with the world. It’s a gradual opening, but citations on Wikipedia bring public attention to paywalled sources, raising demand for easier public access.

Some of our partners have asked us to support access opportunities tied to their donations as well. Newspapers.com encouraged Wikipedia editors to use their “clippings” function, which allows subscribers to turn articles into fair-use, free-to-read webpages, so that they are available to readers without an account. Another partner, Newspaperarchive.com, followed their example by building a similar tool. These changes grow out of the significant pressure that the open-access and scholarly communities have placed on publishers to improve accessibility.

We contribute to this evolution by actively seeking collaboration and support from the open knowledge movement’s biggest advocates: universities, libraries, archives, and the network of organizations that support open-access efforts. Our collaborations with OCLC, SPARC, OA Button, CrossRef, Internet Archive, and Digital Public Library of America allow us to further the dissemination of library and open resources. Using our growing network we help communicate the important shift towards open-access resources.

We will continue raising the profile of open-access projects. The efforts of the Wikipedia Library advance our common mission, and are complementary to the vision of full open access that we also wholeheartedly support.

Third, we’re still looking for ways to improve the ways in which we share free and open information with the world. Wikipedia is a work in progress and needs the help of a diverse community of collaborators to take further action. We have ideas about improving the impact of open access on Wikipedia, but we need your help to realize them:

• Wikipedia can better communicate to editors the importance of open access (OA) as a way for editors to access reliable and scholarly sources while improving the experience of sharing knowledge for readers.
• Wikipedia editors need more support in finding and identifying OA sources, pointing out the availability of OA within donated publisher resources, providing links to pre-publication or open repository versions of published research where available, or including ‘see also’ links for closely related OA works.
• Scholars can create more research initiatives that measure the dynamics between Wikipedia and peer-reviewed literature in terms of impact on editors and readers.
• Developers can experiment with new tools for Wikipedia readers to find the latest OA research for Wikipedia entries on emerging topics and incorporate full-text discovery services like the Open Access Button, even integrating them as a search tool next to each paywalled reference.
• The Wikipedia Library can try to arrange free access for all incoming Wikipedia traffic to paywalled articles, or at least an extended preview or open access excerpts for the versions we cite.
• There are likely many more opportunities, and we need you to share those ideas with the community (please do so through email, or on Wikipedia).

This October, we’ll be co-hosting a global virtual editathon with SPARC to improve our coverage of open access topics on Wikipedia. We would love that you participate. We want more collaborations that engage the community in exploring these issues together with us.

Open-access content on Wikipedia is very important to us, because Wikipedia itself is an open knowledge project. For the longevity and sustainability of Wikipedia, it’s important that the public engage in debates around open access and have a nuanced understanding of the evolving state of access to knowledge. Today we have an encyclopedia to write, but as open access is increasingly embraced we are and will be advocating for it right alongside you.

Jake Orlowitz and Alex Stinson
The Wikipedia Library (email, Twitter)
Wikimedia Foundation

Ruqin Ren had always seen Wikipedia as a great starting point for her homework. She knew it was popular, and innovative, but had never paid it much thought. It wasn’t until 2012 — after she’d earned her BA degree in Beijing and began her master’s degree at Georgetown University — that she had good reason to take a closer look.

Dr. Adel Iskandar’s course, “New Media: Dissidence, Innovation, Community” required students to contribute Wikipedia articles about war and violence journalism.

“As part of the class assignment, we needed to really learn how to edit wiki articles and participate in the online conversation around each topic,” Ruqin told us. “That gave me a great opportunity to closely observe and think about how collaboration or conflict resolution works in an online knowledge community.”

She liked the material she was studying, but she was more drawn to the dynamics of the community.

“People learn to collaborate or resolve conflicts in the process of making a piece of a good article,” she said. She watched Wikipedians discuss topics and make decisions with fascination. That’s when she decided, in her own words, that “Wikipedia is not only a platform — it is the subject.”

Ruqin decided to write an empirical piece examining the collaboration structure of Wikipedia, and how it influences the performance of the community as a whole: “It’s the editors’ interactive social relations that collectively shaped Wikipedia into what it is now.”

That paper ended up becoming her writing sample when she began applying for PhD programs. She was admitted to several prestigious communications schools, and is currently attending the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications.

We met Ruqin when she was taping a poster to our wall as part of OpenSym 2015, and discussing her research, “The Evolution of Knowledge Creation Online: Wikipedia and Knowledge Processes.”

“My research is still in studying online community network dynamics, collective knowledge production, using social network analysis, semantic analysis and other computational techniques,” she told us. “So it all started with that class!”

Ruqin hopes her research will have a practical impact on how people understand networks, and how to engage conversations in online communities. One area she’s exploring is applying what she’s learned from the Wikipedia experience to other learning practices.

Ruqin says she’s likely to use a Wikipedia assignment in her own syllabus designs.

“We learned to strategically plan before writing; how to collaborate with fellow students in the same article; conflict resolution — how to politely review and modify others’ works. Additionally, students feel a sense of contribution.”

We’re always excited by academics embracing Wikipedia as a topic of study. But we’re especially pleased to see the benefits of Wikipedia assignments taking root in a new generation of academic researchers and thought leaders in education.

Like many people, I've often thought of selfies as artifacts of the immature or self-obsessed. Granted, we all have pictures of ourselves, including some taken at arms length. Similarly, we are all somewhat preoccupied with ourselves and our appearance. But those who complain of selfies are speaking of the daily posting of self-portraits to social media. I don't get too upset about them; I've never been tempted to write a screed or shame anyone because of them. I agree with some of the articles in a recent IJoC that we seem to be in the midst of a media-generated moral panic. Ultimately, I find them relatively harmless; as people mature they seem to replace them with pictures of babies or pets! (That's true of me.)

Recently, Val and Noah, two folks I respect and who often challenge my thinking, defended selfies as a type of self-acceptance. I've also been watching YouTube beauty videos from atypically beautiful people including Princess Joules, Stef Sanjati, and Lizzie Velasquez. I think "good for them," even if I cringe a tiny bit at the cosmetically-dependent notions of femininity.

I am sympathetic to some of the selfie defenses. In my article on Fake Geek Girls, I followed Kristina Busse in noting how women's and girls' expressions of geekiness is often policed by men. I don't know if empirically women are more likely to post selfies, but that seems to be the presumption. Accordingly, Se Smith argues that selfie policing is another example of the discounting of women's activities. Similarly, some argue the selfies are often low tech, and those who criticize them do so from the privileged position of a high(er)-brow culture. I'm happy when more women are behind the lens, even if they remain in front of it too.

I'm especially sympathetic to calls for self-acceptance given my own manifold insecurities. I've never considered myself near the circle of the "beautiful people." Even so, if we accept that selfie shaming is a gendered type of policing, does that mean we must condone all selfies? Aren't some selfies still a reflection of a narcissistic or celebrity obsessed culture? Also, aren't they still kind of annoying when they dominate our feeds? And aesthetically, many are blurry and dull. This led Aanand Prasad to argue we should "take better selfies"; "Also, take more of them. But better." While I sometimes appreciate a selfie, I've never wished my feed had more of them. And to say we need more selfies only heightens the complaint most people have with them.

If I simply took my own portrait, people might think it odd, but that's about it. Selfies are controversial because their posting is a social act. Maybe the poster is asking for some type of acceptance, validation, or support? But when does this cross the line into fishing for flattery? We should be cautious of selves built upon flattery. The poster also might be seeking to make others envious? I'm comfortable with the policing of nakedly vain or invidious displays. Another theory is that the poster seeks to transcend acceptance. In posting a selfie, they are saying: this is me, deal with it. I think my punk styling was a bit like that: I'm going to dress in a way that is comfortable for me but freaky to you, and I don't care what you think anyway. However, I accepted the weakness of this argument when a friend asked me if I'd still have a mohawk if I lived on a deserted island. No, I probably wouldn't. The palm trees wouldn't care if I was different, so I doubt I'd bother. I do care what people think, even if it's only to tell them I'm trying not to care.

In short, the self-acceptance argument could be understood as: we accept the importance of appearance, but we want to diversify or queer the standard of what is celebrated. The counter-argument is that we should move beyond appearance all-together.

I'm continuing to reconsider my (largely uninformed) view on selfies, but I'm not yet convinced that they are all wonderful manifestations of self-acceptance. As Senft and Baym wrote, "celebrating all selfies as empowering makes as little sense as denigrating them all as disempowering."

I work for Consumer Reports. Of course I cannot speak for the organization, but I am at Consumer Reports because I care about nonprofit media, and I wish to share some of my thoughts about the state of nonprofit publishing including Consumer Reports’ position among its peers in nonprofit media.

This week Rubert Murdoch purchased media assets of the National Geographic Society, a highly respected nonprofit organization best known for anthropology, nature, and animal journalism. The purchase includes their magazine and video documentary trademarks. Commentators are talking about how National Geographic is no longer a nonprofit publication, for example at The Guardian.

Consumer Reports is one of the few popular media outlets left standing. I wish that being popular and nonprofit were a bigger part of the Consumer Reports brand, because there are only a few big nonprofits out there, and I would call Consumer Reports big. In my opinion, Consumer Reports has until the present made the public relations decision to be modest, and trusted that the relevant audience would recognize their authority without the organization doing much to describe itself. Even right now, it might be the most popular paid-subscription publication in the United States. I do not have the internal Consumer Reports’ numbers at hand, but at its height, I think we had about 8 million combined subscribers to the print and online editions. Right now numbers have dropped, but I am fairly sure that we have not fewer than 3 million print subscribes and 3 million subscribers to the online edition. There are a few things odd happening here – one is that many publications combine subscriptions to print and paper, and if CR did that, then we could claim 6 million subscribers. We have separate subscription lists – almost no publications do that – but in my view, we could and should because the information published is almost the same. If we did any kind of subsciption disclosure, then we could appear in lists like [http://auditedmedia.com/news/blog/2014/february/us-snapshot.aspx this industry report of the most popular American magazines] or Wikipedia’s article for “List of magazines by circulation“. It might be the case that from about 1950-1990 that Consumer Reports was the most popular magazine in the United States, and maybe even the world (unless there was some magazine in India or China with national distribution), but in my time at Consumer Reports I have never seen the subscription numbers framed in that way. It just has not been a priority for the organization. I regret that CR does not appear at all in rankings of magazines by popularity, because I feel that Consumer Reports is losing authority as people in newer generations forget the reputation that it held among older generations. Even with the current number of subscribers, Consumer Reports still might be the most popular subscription publication in the United States. The other contenders for that title have dubious counting systems – the AARP magazine mostly comes with membership to the organization, and not by an explicit request to subscribe. The Game Informer magazine is mostly distributed to anyone making a video game purchase at Game Stop, and again, not by a person making a subscription purchase. Better Homes and Gardens subscriptions are mostly at a discount (cheap or free) because that magazine’s source of revenue is mostly ads and not subscriber request. So if a magazine subscription is defined as someone paying full price for a subscription to a magazine, and not getting on a mailing list as part of some package promotion, then more people purchase Consumer Reports subscriptions than any other magazine. Or perhaps I am wrong or missing data – even with me working at Consumer Reports sometimes it is hard for me to understand our place in the industry, and perhaps I am misunderstanding something, but I think not.

Regarding other nonprofit media outlets – for media companies, both PBS and NPR are experiencing major corporate changes particularly as fewer people support their affiliate system and more people want to access their content online. Switching to online has been a major disruption for them, because people who would give to their local PBS/NPR affiliate during fundraisers no longer are doing that. This profoundly disrupts their operating model and content creation network. Nonprofit public broadcasting has a troubled future without major changes. The stability of PBS is important because it is the only major nonprofit television organization in the United States, and NPR is the only major nonprofit radio organization. I feel that Consumer Reports is comparable to these two as it is the major nonprofit magazine.

As a reminder – there are almost no noncommercial websites which get a lot of traffic. Among the top 500 websites by traffic as currently listed by Alexa Internet, only a few are at least somewhat noncommercial. Wikipedia and Archive.org are the true nonprofits, BBC, NIH.gov (National Institutes of Health), and the US Postal Service are government websites, IKEA and WikiHow purport to be commercial assets of charitably managed organizations. Nonprofit representation online is almost dead already, and what remains will shrink to make room for commercial interests before it will have a chance to grow again. Consumer Reports holds an Alexa rank of 1600, which is a success in some ways. The Pareto Principle says that for any group, 20% of the members will get 80% of the attention, and the other 80% of the member will get the bottom 20% of the attention. Wikipedia is the only nonprofit website getting any of that 80% attention share, and all other nonprofit websites will compete for that bottom 20% of public attention. I wish that online there could be nonprofit media synergy in which all the major media outlets – Wikipedia, PBS, NPR, and Consumer Reports – could collaborate somehow to mutual benefit in all media.

It is possible to be more popular only be being popular and I wonder if Consumer Reports has something to leverage. From some perspectives, Consumer Reports seems less popular, but phrased in other ways, Consumer Reports has a compelling background. Now that National Geographic is for profit, Consumer Reports is almost certainly America’s most popular nonprofit subscription magazine. It might also be the world’s most popular nonprofit subscription publication.

These are just thoughts. I am not sure.

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

• Following a sudden leadership spill, Malcolm Turnbull becomes Prime Minister of Australia.
• A crane collapses onto the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, killing more than 100.
• Several European Union member states reinstate border controls in the wake of a surge in migrants.
• Anti-austerity campaigner Jeremy Corbyn is elected as Leader of the Opposition in the United Kingdom.
• Scientists announce the discovery of Homo naledi, a species of early human.

Turnbull usurps Australian Prime Ministership

Malcolm Turnbull bested current Australian prime minister, Tony Abbott, in a leadership election yesterday. Image by Veni Markovski, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

The ruling Liberal Party of Australia, led until yesterday by Tony Abbott, had a surprise leadership spill on September 14. The spill, or snap leadership election, was proposed by Malcolm Turnbull, Minister for Communications under Abbott. In a vote, his party elected him their new leader, and thus Prime Minister of Australia, by 54 votes to 44. It follows weeks of rumours and speculation in the Australian press, with Turnbull refusing to rule out a move to oust Abbott during that time. In a press conference following the result’s announcement, Turnbull affirmed his government would uphold much of Abbott’s policies, ruling out an early election. Turnbull’s success means that Australia will have had four Prime Ministers in just three years.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Liberal Party of Australia leadership spill, September 2015, Malcolm Turnbull

Crane collapses at Grand Mosque

The Masjid al-Haram, or the Great Mosque of Mecca, attracts millions every year. Image by XXXshatha, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

A mobile crawler crane collapsed at the Masjid al-Haram, or the Great Mosque of Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on September 11 at around 5:30pm local time. The crane collapsed into the roof of the mosque during powerful winds. 111 people in total were killed in the incident, the majority of them pilgrims; the mosque was and still is preparing for the annual Hajj, an essential pilgrimage for Muslims requiring a visit to Mecca at least once in their lifetime. A further 394 people from all over the world were injured in the incident. Saudi Arabian King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud confirmed an investigation would be made into the incident and that the results would be made public. Some onlookers criticised the very presence of the cranes for putting pilgrims’ lives in danger and for “damaging history” through redevelopment of holy sites.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Mecca crane collapse

EU countries temporarily pull out of Schengen

Refugees fleeing Syria flooded a train station in Vienna. Image by Bwag, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

As the European migrant crisis worsens, several European Union member states temporarily established border countries to “limit the current inflows” of migrants into the countries. Several countries had in recent weeks defied the Dublin Regulation, which states that migrants registered in one country moving onto another illegally would be returned. On September 13, following a surge of 13,000 migrants into Munich, Germany established border controls along the border with Austria, forcing the Czech Republic to bump up security along their border with Austria. The following day, Austria did the same along their border with Hungary. Though rare, the Schengen agreement allows for such moves, which have previously been applied by Estonia and Malta in lieu of high-profile visits.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: European migrant crisis

Leftist Corbyn becomes leader of opposition

Jeremy Corbyn, initially the outsider for the role, is now the leader of the British Labour party. Image by Garry Knight, freely licensed under CC-BY 2.0.

The Labour Party, the United Kingdom’s second-largest party and the Official Opposition, announced the results of its leadership election on September 12. Standing were Labour MPs Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Jeremy Corbyn, and Liz Kendall. Burnham, the Shadow Health Secretary was for a long period of time the favourite to win, while Corbyn, the most left-wing of the four candidates, was the outsider. However, a surge of support in August propelled Corbyn into the lead and, despite arguments that voters were registering for membership of the party simply to vote for him, he emerged as the comfortable winner with almost 60 percent of the vote. After his appointment, Prime Minister David Cameron called the party “a threat to our national security, to our economic security and to the security of your family”, while others compared his win to the surge of the Scottish National Party.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Jeremy Corbyn Labour Party leadership campaign, 2015, Labour Party (UK) leadership election, 2015

New genus of human discovered in South Africa

Photos of the holotype of Homo naledi‘s jaw and head. Image by Berger, et al., freely licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

Paleontologists working in the Rising Star Cave system in the “Cradle of Humankind” site in South Africa unearthed fifteen sets of hominid remains, provisionally assigned to the genus Homo—which also comprises humans. Their cranial shape is thought to be similar to early Homo species, and their hands are thought to be better equiped for object manipulation than those species in the Australopithecus genus. Their bodies are thought to have been deliberately disposed of in the cave system upon their deaths. which provides some insight into their behaviour. The fossils have not yet been dated, and some experts argue further analysis is needed before they can be definitively placed into the Homo genus.

Learn more in the related Wikipedia article: Homo naledi

Photo montage credits: “Wien – Völkerwanderung am 5 Sep 2015, Westbahnhof.JPG” by Bwag, CC-BY-SA 4.0; “Homo naledi.jpg” by Berger, et al., CC-BY 4.0; “Jeremy Corbyn No More War.jpg” by Garry Knight, CC-BY 2.0; “Malcolm Turnbull 2014.jpg” by Veni Markovski, CC BY-SA 4.0; “Masjid al-Haram.jpg” by XXXshatha, CC-BY-SA 3.0. Collage by Joe Sutherland

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

Joe SutherlandCommunications InternWikimedia Foundation

On this blog, I use freely licensed images whenever practical. But if that were a rigid policy, I’d be unable to show you this sketch, published by the Friends of the Columbia Gorge in 2002, of the proposed casino location.

Starting in 2008 I wrote a Wikipedia article on a proposed casino, to be built in the Columbia River Gorge. I wrote the article because I believed it was an important topic (and an Oregonian reporter and a Harvard scholar agreed); but according to an argument by Michael Eisen, advanced yesterday in the Ars Technica article “WikiGate” raises questions about Wikipedia’s commitment to open access, it “should be difficult” for me to write an article like that.

Why?

Today, the article I started has 17 footnotes; and in spite of my deep personal commitment to open (freely licensed) content, not a single one of the articles I cited was published under a free license. Many are not even available online without a paid subscription. In other words, none of them is an instance of what’s known as “open access (OA) publishing,” in which the publisher permits republication with minimal copyright restrictions.

Is it strange that I should write an article that cites non-OA articles? I don’t think so. In choosing the topic, I — like many Wikipedians — was making a conscious effort to counter what is known as FUTON (FUll Text On the ’Net) bias. I was specifically trying to shed some light on a topic that was opaque to many stakeholders (in this case, the citizens of Oregon and Washington). A great deal of the information about this important topic was unavailable on the open web; my purpose in writing the Wikipedia article was to bring that information out into the open. Indeed, the result — intentionally — was a freely licensed article published on the open web. In other words, an “open access” article, rooted in non-OA sources.

FUTON bias is a fact of the modern world. If some information can be easily found by a Google or Bing search, while other information requires a subscription and, therefore, a more focused search, the openly available information will be easier to find. Wikipedia, a project whose central vision is explicitly devoted to “the sum of all knowledge,” should resist this kind of bias at every opportunity.

Eisen’s position is rooted in the long-term effects of using OA or non-OA sources. He was distressed to find that Wikipedia was working with publisher Elsevier, to help them give 45 Wikipedia volunteers free access to otherwise non-free scholarly articles. To be fair, Eisen did not argue that Wikipedia editors should never use proprietary databases, or that we should avoid citing copyrighted source materials altogether. Rather, his position is that Wikipedia as an institution should not endorse free access for Wikipedians to such databases, and that Wikipedia as a publication should not include links to articles that are unavailable on the open web.

But even this position overlooks Wikipedia’s core purpose. Although Wikipedia values openness and free licensing in both its editorial culture and its policies, the very first policy states that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; as such, Wikipedia is devoted to all knowledge — not merely knowledge whose expression meets a certain criterion of openness.

When I discussed this with Eisen on Twitter, it turned out his position was rooted in a concern that access would be given out in consideration of how much Wikipedians link directly to Elsevier’s articles. But that is not the case. The page outlining the conditions for gaining access explicitly states that Wikipedians “must follow scholarly and/or Wikipedia best practices when using those source (sic) for their work“.

Furthermore, access to the free accounts is approved not by an Elsevier or even a Wikimedia Foundation employee, (correction: in the Elsevier case she does work for the Foundation, unlike some other access partnerships) but by a longtime Wikipedia volunteer. I asked her; she affirmed that she considers only the stated requirements when giving out the accounts.

All in all, I think Wikipedians and OA advocates alike can agree that the discussion prompted by the article was worthwhile and healthy. But the outcome, I believe, illustrates that when Wikipedians take on a project that could conflict with closely held values, they have usually thought it through. That’s not to say Wikipedians always get it right, or that there’s no room for debate; but on licensing issues in particular, I think Wikipedia usually does a good job of balancing complex, and sometimes competing, concerns.

The article Pellegrino Turri, translated from English to Italian by user MassimoGuarnieri, is the 20,000th page published using Content Translation since the tool was first enabled as a beta feature in January 2015.

Turri was a 19th-century Italian inventor best known for building one of the first typewriters, which he made for a blind friend of his, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano. Their story also inspired a novel, The Blind Contessa’s New Machine by Carey Wallace.

About 1200 articles have been published every week in all languages since the the Content Translation beta feature was enabled in Wikipedia in all languages in early July.

We are enormously thankful to each and every one of the many hundreds of people who are participating in this: new editors and veteran Wikipedians who translate articles, help others make translations better, report constructive bugs, write translation guides adapted to their home wikis, making useful feature suggestions, and fixing technical issues in their wikis that breaks ContentTranslation. We are humbled to see that our work is helping the editors community to fulfill Wikimedia’s famous mission statement—a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

Stay tuned, as we are going to announce more updates that will make the translators’ and the editors’ work even more efficient and comfortable.

01.09.-07.09.2015

Marble Maps for Android [1]

Mapping

• User maning reminds us of “passive data sources” for mapping.
• The discussion on this User Diary entry by deejoe confirms that the Great Lakes of North America are best mapped with “natural=coastline”.
• Orthophoto littorale V2, a collection of aerial images for the French coast, is available since some weeks. They will soon be available for use in JOSM. The benefits of this imagery is that it gives a consistent view of the coast, taken at low tide and the same meteorologic conditions. (via talk-fr)
• The aerial layer of Mapbox, which is available for mapping on OpenStreetMap for quite some time, includes now new, high resolution imagery of New Zealand.
• Mapbox advertises its “OSM QA Tiles” as a basis for parallelised data analysis with turf.js. The tiles are available for download on osmlab.github.io or can be produced with the help of Minjur and tippecanoe. The German Wochennotiz  recommends the use of it
• Brian Prangle (of Mappa Merica) describes a new project that will run in collaboration with the Birmingham City Council : an Urban Traffic Monitoring System. He is looking for input on the proposed wikipage.
• Joachim (Jojo4u) asks the tagging mailing list for input on the Site relation proposal, which he tries to revive.
• A suggestion from Trimble for a tuck tuck vehicle as a mapping mobile for OpenStreetMap .
• The discussion about deleting abandoned railroads (we reported on several occasions) is a never ending story. Russ Nelson complained to the talk list that motivated potential rail road mapper will be scared.
• Jakob Mühldorfer asks how one should map the Oktoberfest in Munich.

Community

• Ilya Zverev complains that Xxzme still makes rogue edits in the wiki after his ban of 3 months.
• Math1985 created a wiki page with all chains of shops in Netherlands. The list is discussed on the Dutch forum. In the past he worked on the wiki for retail chains in Great-Britain which was initially created by SK53.
• Christian Rogel asks the French community to map more outreach facilities (“groupe de service communautaire” and “agent de proximité” in French). He states that a lot of places operated by e.g. “Secours catholique”, “Croix-Rouge” (non-medical facilities) and “Armée du Salut” are missing.
• Tristam Gräbener, who works for a train-booking company, wants to make a nice map of railways. He knows the transport style from Andy Allan, but thinks that the local lines are too much emphasized. He asks for help. 
• The GraphHopper blog has moved.
• DEBIGC reports about the MapLesotho-Mapillary Challenge.
• Peter Karich and Stefan Schröder the developers behind the open source projects GraphHopper and jsprit received one of the five main awards in the “start-up competition – ICT Innovation” of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy on Friday, September 9th at the Internationale Funkausstellung in Berlin for their business idea “Graph Hopper Directions API“. The award is endowed with 30,000 Euros. Congratulations!

Imports

• Albin Larsson has deleted the two largest multipolygons of CLC06 land use Import in Finland. They were 80 x 120 km across and most of the time they were broken. He now records slowly and by hand the new areas, meanwhile, the map retains bright spots.
• Sander Deryckere updates the database behind the tool for the address import in Flanders with the latest information from AGIV CRAB. In case you are interested, the approved procedure for the import can be found on the wiki.

Events

• From September 4th – 6th State of the Map LatAm took place in Santiago de Chile.
• The videos from the event are available, but all with the same title

Humanitarian OSM

• HOT announces the alpha release of their export tool.
• A one-day “open mapping workshop” was organised in Castries, St. Lucia and Kingston, Jamaica as part of the World Bank-DFID cooperation for Open Data Support in the Caribbean.
• The President of Tanzania visited personally the Africa Open Data Conference. (via @RamaniHuria)
• Tyler Radford tweeted about mapping at #africaopendata for flood resilience.
• Raimondiand calls for mapping Syrian refugee camps. He has started to map one in Iraq.

Maps

• Under the auspices of the White House an open-source map of the United States has been published along with source code.
• Marta Poblet describes OpenStreetMap as a figurehead in an article about the importance of spatial data.
• Open Knowledge Ireland has visualized together with the OSM community waiting lists of hospitals.
• With Map On Shirt you can print T-shirts or pillows with an OSM map section of your choice.

Software

• [1] Dennis Nienhüser released the free beta of Marble Maps, the Android port of the KDE Application Marble Virtual Globe.
• Version 2.16 of Route Converter was released.
• Rory McCann has published split-large polygon.
• Wille Marcel presented in Santiago de Chile his python package osmcha. It allows you to inspect more accurate suspicious ChangeSets.
• MapSurfer.NET 2.2 was released.
• The Geometalab of the Hochschule Rapperswil started osm2vectortiles, a toolchain for generating MBTiles.

Other “geo” things

• An article on MarketWatch.com for using indoor positioning in shopping malls and why techniques like iBeacons from Apple are not as successful as initially thought.
• Google “tracks your every move“.  See your moves in your timeline. Did you know that? Do you like it? If you don’t like it, you can deactivate tracking on the timeline link above.
• The Israeli company PhantomAlert has accused the Google subsidiary Waze, which determines the flow of traffic on roads by crowdsourcing, of having unlawfully used POI data from PhantomAlert. Easter Eggs are mentioned as evidence. VICE reported and Spatially Adjusted describes the Easter Eggs and cite the OSM Wiki.
• Competition works. Google introduced a new pricing plan. Maybe a result of Foursquare’s switch2OSM.
• Lisa Gutermuth gives a presentation on their research regarding Privacy in the use of satellite imagery in agriculture.

Students from Michigan State University improved Wikipedia’s content this summer by contributing information related to female filmmakers and authors of color.

As part of Terrion Williamson’s course “Growing up girl: Coming of age in women’s literature and film,” students contributed two new articles and help expand 15.

Highlights include the article on Caucasia, a novel about multiracial sisters growing up in Boston during the 1970s. Student editors expanded that article from 868 to 2109 words.

Students contributed biographies of two authors. One, Connie Porter, is an African-American author of young adult novels. Her entry grew from 232 to 1172 words. An article about Jean Kwok, the Chinese-American writer of the best-selling novel Girl in Translation, is nearly five times larger, thanks to student editors.

The article on the 2008 Randa Jarrar novel about a young girl growing up in Kuwait, Egypt, and Texas, A Map of Home, didn’t exist until students tackled it for an assignment. The article is now 660 words long.

Finally, students added sources to an unsourced article about the film Red Doors, about a Chinese-American family in New York.

Thanks to these students for helping to share information about people and stories that are often missing from Wikipedia.

Photo: “MSU Abbot Hall sign” by No machine readable author provided. Lovelac7~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). – No machine readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Content Translation developers are preparing to deploy the first version of a major new feature: Translation suggestions. This means that there are a few new strings to translate in Content Translation’s own user interface .

To make it possible to deploy this feature in your language with full translation, please do the following:

1. If you haven’t already, create an account at translatewiki.net and follow the instructions to get translator rights.
2. Check the ContentTranslation localization statistics for your language.
3. If your language is not at 100%, click your language’s name and translate all the untranslated strings. Simply click the English string, type the translation and save.

That’s it! Your translations will be live on Wikipedia in your language within a couple of days.

The Content Translation tool is being continuously developed and new strings are added every few days, so it’s a very good idea to do the above at least once a week to ensure that Content Translation is fully localized all the time.

For more information about the user interface localization of Content Translation and other MediaWiki see the following articles:

• Translating MediaWiki
• Localisation guidelines for translatewiki.net
• Amir Aharoni’s Quasi-Pro Tips for Translating the Software That Powers Wikipedia

• Argentina report: Two edit-a-thons
• France report: August in Brittany
• Germany report: Sharing is Caring
• Mexico report: Pilot program to make freely licensed animation clips
• Spain report: Museum of African Art “Jiménez-Arellano Alonso”; Wiki Loves Monuments in Spain
• Sweden report: Odd submarines, new strategy and an old contest
• UK report: QRpedia AWOL; RSC holds another edit-a-thon
• Special story: New toolkit on Photo Events documents best practices, strategies and more
• Open Access report: Wikipedia as an amplyfier; horse face recognition, rhythm perception, fossil rodent teeth
• Wikidata report: Wikidata this month
• Calendar: September’s GLAM events

A Wikipedia workshop was held at Monash University in Melbourne, as part of the WikiD project.

WikiD: Women, Wikipedia, Design is an international education and advocacy program working to increase the number of Wikipedia articles on women in architecture and the built environment. The project includes running writing and editing workshops in Melbourne, New York and Berlin and providing architecture-specific guides that build on existing resources.Wikipedia:Wikiproject_Women_Wikipedia_Design

22 participants registered, and around 20 were able to attend on the day. Two Wikimedia Australia members were also on-hand to train the attendees on the ins-and-outs of editing Wikipedia.

The next event is currently being planned, and will be held next month.

Project pages

• Wikipedia:Meetup/WikiD Writing Workshop Melbourne September 2015 — The meetup
• Wikipedia:Wikiproject Women Wikipedia Design/Tasks — The list of articles

Rich has made more than a million total edits to Wikipedia. Photo by Stephen B Streater, freely licensed under CC-BY 3.0.

In my effort to interview leading Wikipedians in different languages, I approached Rich Farmbrough, a leading English Wikipedian in terms of edit count with over a million edits to his personal credit, in addition to several million bot-assisted edits.

Rich developed a passion for English Wikipedia the moment he discovered the project as early as 2004. A supporting factor for Rich was his prior experience on bulletin boards. “From about March 2012, with some gaps, I have been a full-time Wikipedian,” he says.

Born and brought up in the London borough of Enfield, Rich holds a degree in Mathematics. His professional pursuits resulted in diverse roles such as a professional in car insurance, e-commerce and academia. On the personal front, Rich is a family man with a wife and grown up children.

As a proactive contributor on Wikipedia, Rich has made several analytical studies related to the project. He’s looked at the number of pages under different namespaces and the percentage of source bytes in each namespace. He is especially concerned about the ratio of male to female editors on Wikipedia over the years.

As well as his studies, Rich is of course heavily involved in editing Wikipedia. He has created articles for monuments and statues in southern England, improved the coverage of the Abbots of Shrewsbury, and still creates redirects from pseudonyms. He is technically sound, and has worked on bots and templates for Wikimedia projects as well as external sites. And it’s not just English that Rich is interested in.

“To investigate the difficulties of working with other languages, I needed a language that I didn’t have any familiarity with,” he says. “I have always been interested in Swahili, but knew virtually nothing about it. I found the Swahili community small but very welcoming. I was able to create some stubs for Tanzanian politicians, and later for places in Botswana. Actual translation, even in a limited way, will need some significant work.”

He also helped in providing missing templates, especially for the Nepali, Newari and Swahili Wikipedias.

Rich has heavily contributed to a variety of different projects across Wikimedia sites, and is keen on working further. Some of these include his work on WikiProject Ghana, tagging GFDL maps with the correct license, filling gaps on the Rainbow List (a list of the most influential LGBT people in the UK), correcting ISO 639 language codes, creating an exhaustive list of viruses, cleanup of ISBNs in articles, as well as fixing spellings, combating vandalism, and correcting formatting and hyphenation.

But despite everything Rich has achieved on Wikipedia, he remains a humble and open-minded person. He is keen on enlisting new editors, and has participated in a number of meetups and outreach events. Rich ended his interview in true Wikipedian style, with a message for new editors: “Be bold, be patient and be kind,” he says—the three quintessential traits which inevitably lead to initiative, cooperation, and a constructive approach to any Wikimedia project.

Syed MuzammiluddinWikimedian

Wikipedia editors were invited to have their say in the 2012 survey. Photo by Romain Bréget, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

How much time do Wikipedians spend contributing each week? What motivates them most to contribute to the free encyclopedia? Do editors consider the Wikimedia Foundation to be part of the community, and see it as going into the right direction? These questions formed part of the most recent general Wikipedia editor survey, which was conducted in October/November 2012 in 17 languages, receiving up to 17,000 responses per question.

Many of its results have already been shared internally and publicly since, also as part of a blog post addressing the question “How many women edit Wikipedia?“. In this post we are highlighting some further results, and publish the full top-line reports with response percentages for each question. An anonymized dataset from this survey has been released to enable others to do their own analysis.

The questionnaire consisted of two parts: A set of questions on users’ experience editing Wikipedia (mostly repeated from the two 2011 editor surveys, and including demographic data), and a second part asking about the community’s satisfaction with the work of the Wikimedia Foundation.

A few highlights from the first half of the survey:

How much time do editors spend contributing to Wikipedia?

Histogram of responses to the question “How much time have you spent contributing to Wikipedia during the last seven days (approximately)?” (n = 9173)

Histogram (population pyramid) of respondents’ ages. The median age was 31.

For the first time in this survey, we asked users to estimate how much time they spend on contributing to Wikipedia (restricted to the last week preceding the survey, so as not to make it too hard on their memory. As in the preceding survey from 2011, we excluded logged-in users who said they had never edited before). The results show that many users browse Wikipedia logged into their accounts even in weeks where they are not making any edits. On the other hand, there is a substantial number of contributors who devote large parts of their available time to Wikipedia.

The average time spent per week was 5.8 hours, the median was 2 hours. And comparing with the number of edits made, the average time spent per Wikipedia edit is 12 minutes. (As a caveat, this only reflects edits made on the language version of Wikipedia where the editor took the survey, and of course does not account for the many kinds of contributions that do not consist in a wiki edit, like organizing a Wikipedia event, filing a bug for Wikipedia’s underlying software, or contributing code).

The median age of Wikipedia editors in this survey was 31 years. (As with other such surveys, keep in mind that this refers to respondents in this particular survey and can strictly speaking not be generalized to the entire WIkipedia community, for example because the survey was not available in each and every of Wikipedia’s more than 250 languages. For an example of demographic results from this survey that are more representative, restricted to specific countries, see the aforementioned post on gender data.)

The single most motivating factor for contributing to Wikipedia

“If you had to name one thing that motivates you most to contribute to Wikipedia, what would it be?”

Many studies have examined empirically what motivates people to volunteer their time editing Wikipedia. But almost all of these research efforts have either confined respondents to predefined answers, or were small-scale qualitative studies. In this survey, Wikipedians were invited to describe, in their own words and their own language, the one thing that motivates them most to contribute. Over 8000 did so. A multilingual analysis of word occurrences grouped these responses into 15 topic areas. Not surprisingly, the most frequent one (lead by words like “free” and “access”) related to the Wikimedia mission (and vision) about free access to knowledge. But the simple satisfaction of adding and editing content, or more self-centered motives of personal fulfillment, also play an important role.

User opinions about the Wikimedia Foundation

Here are some excerpts from the second half of the survey:

“All in all, do you think the Foundation is generally headed in the right direction, or is it off on the wrong track?”

Overall community opinion about the Foundation’s work was very positive at the time of the survey. But there was a high ratio of respondents who did not feel well informed enough about WMF to form an opinion, or were otherwise on the fence. Also, more experienced editors tend to have more skeptical, if still in the majority positive views. On the other hand, respondents who considered themselves well-informed about the Foundation’s work had a more favorable view than those with low awareness. (Keep in mind that these results represent a snapshot in time and may differ if the survey would be taken today.)

“How much do you agree with the following statements? … The Foundation and its staff are part of the Wikimedia community.”

A clear majority of editors see WMF as part of the Wikimedia community at large.

Respondents were also given a list of possible priority areas for WMF at the time (e.g. making editing easier, recruiting new editors, keeping existing editors, defending content on Wikimedia sites against legal threats) and asked to rate them by importance (or as inappropriate for the Foundation). Apart from this given list, editors were also invited to add their own ideas in a free-form question. We did a qualitative categorization (PDF) of 1730 multilingual write-in responses to this question about about activities that users want WMF to prioritize. From the conclusions:

• Issues related to Content and Community represent over 50% of total responses regarding WMF’s priorities.
  • Concern over the quality, completeness, accuracy and neutrality of content is reflected within the Content category.
  • The need to assess and improve the performance of Admins and the “friendliness” of the Community highlight the Community category.

Compare also the more recent results of the 2015 strategy consultation that we published recently.

An overview of the available material from the 2012 survey:

• Topline report for the first half of the survey (editing experience) PDF
• Topline report for the second half (satisfaction with WMF), including some additional analysis, PDF
• WMF Priorities (free-form response analysis)
• Anonymized dataset
• Some technical notes about the survey process and data
• Project page for the 2012 editor survey and other material on Wikimedia Commons

For other surveys of Wikipedia editors, see this list or search the research index on Meta-wiki.

Tilman BayerSenior AnalystWikimedia Foundation

A small update about ContentTranslation for the middle of September, as we prepare for big new features.

• It could happen is some cases that the article selector would be displayed in the translation interface. This was fixed. (code change)
• The domain of the Belarusian Taraškievica Wikipedia was renamed from be-x-old.wikipedia.org to be-tarask.wikipedia.org. Because of this it wasn’t possible to publish articles to this Wikipedia (bug report). This was fixed, however there is still another bug with link adaptation, which we hope to fix soon.
• Publishing to the recently created Wikipedias in Southern Azerbaijani (azb), Konkani (gom), and Northern Luri (lrc) didn’t work. This was fixed; thanks to Marko Obrovac and Alex Monk for the help with this. (bug report)

Soon to come:

• A significant update to the statistics page.
• The deployment of first version of the translation suggestion feature.

And since we mentioned statistics, we hope that you are expecting the 20,000th translated page to be published as eagerly as we are. Who will translate it, about which topic, and between which languages? We shall probably know next week.

We’ve seen growing interest in writing Wikipedia articles about historic and contemporary figures. We’ve shared great stories from courses that contribute biographies of women artists, American and Canadian historical figures, journalists, and women virologists.

Editing biographies on Wikipedia has special rules and approaches. There are unique expectations when writing about historical and living people.

That’s why Wiki Ed worked with experienced Wikipedia volunteers to create a handbook for biographies. In that guide, students will find:

• an overview of good editing practices
• how to find notable figures with reliable and plentiful sources
• critical thinking tips for evaluating sources
• special considerations for writing about living people

The handbook suggests an outline for historical biographies. Ahead of our upcoming Year of Science initiative, we’ve included advice for covering contemporary scientists.

You can download the handbook as a .pdf through Wikimedia Commons, and print copies are available, also free of charge, to courses registered through our dashboard system.

This book joins our existing suite of materials for specific subjects, including ecology, medicine, psychology, sociology and women’s studies. You can see the full list of our resources here.

To request print copies, or to discuss adding a Wikipedia assignment to your course, email samantha@wikiedu.org.

Jimmy Wales. Photo by Victor Grigas, licensed CC BY-SA.

Please scroll down for Jimmy Wales’ responses to this on Facebook and Quora, outlined in red.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales is, unsurprisingly, frequently approached by reporters as a top authority on the site. For instance, the article “Wikipedia struggles to save its soul,” published in the Financial Times last week, which covers last week’s exposure of 381 “sock puppet” accounts used to edit Wikipedia covertly, evading the kind of disclosure required by last year’s amendment to the site’s Terms of Use (ToU).

But Wales is also a political advocate in the Wikipedia sphere; and some of his views are out of step with common practice and formal policy. He can be less than diligent about the distinction. The FT piece illustrates the issue starkly: after consulting Wales, reporter Murad Ahmed inaccurately represented the proposed-and-rejected “Bright Line” principle as the actual core rule on Wikipedia:

There is, however, a clear contender for “the one rule”: the paid editing amendment to the site’s Terms of Use passed in 2014. That amendment does indeed require disclosure of paid editing, but it does not prohibit paid editors from directly editing Wikipedia articles.

Wales’ words have caused similar confusion for many years, dating back to 2006, when he famously wrote:

It is not ok with me that anyone ever set up a service selling their services as a Wikipedia editor … the idea that we should ever accept paid advocates directly editing Wikipedia is not ever going to be ok. Consider this to be policy as of right now.

In many organizations, a founder and board member like Wales would be in a strong position to make the rules. This, presumably, can explain why a reporter would take Wales at his word about the site’s policies, rather than seeking out additional views. But for better or worse, Wikipedia’s unique governance model affords Wales less influence than he might otherwise have. On the topic of paid editing and and others (such as his role in founding Wikipedia), Wales has often inflated the status of his own opinions.

Update, 6:22 am PDT, Sept. 8, 2015

Jimmy Wales responded to this blog post in the Facebook group Wikipedia Weekly:

He later responded on Quora as well:

Here are the highlights from the Wikimedia blog in August 2015.

Hundreds of “black hat” English Wikipedia accounts blocked following investigation

Hundreds of ‘black hat’ accounts on English Wikipedia were found to be connected during the investigation. The usernames (green) and IP addresses (yellow) have been removed from the image. Graph by James Alexander, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

After weeks of investigation, volunteer editors on English Wikipedia announced on August 31 that they blocked 381 user accounts for “black hat” editing. In addition to blocking these “sockpuppet” accounts—a term that refers to multiple accounts used in misleading or deceptive ways—the editors deleted 210 articles created by these accounts. With these actions, volunteer editors have taken a strong stand against undisclosed paid advocacy.

The Hunt for Tirpitz

The German battleship Tirpitz shortly before being launched into the sea. When it entered service in 1940, it was one of the largest and most modern battleships in the world. Photo from the German Federal Archives, freely licensed under CC-by-SA 3.0.

Wikipedia editor and administrator Nick Dowling has written three featured articles on English Wikipedia about the Royal Navy’s attempts to sink the German battleship Tirpitz during the Second World War. He talks about the obstacles he faced, and how he overcame them.

My life as an autistic Wikipedian

Guillaume sitting on a bench. Photo by Cary Bass, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Two years ago, Wikipedia editor Guillaume Paumier discovered that he was on the autism spectrum. As he learned more about myself and the way his brain worked, Guillaume started to look at past experiences through the lens of this newly-found aspect. He shares some of what he has learned along the way about his successes, failures, and many things that confused him in the past, notably with regards to his experiences in the Wikimedia movement.

Content Translation updates from Wikimania 2015

Content Translation session at Wikimania 2015. Photo by Amire80, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Wikimania 2015—the eleventh edition of the annual gathering of Wikimedians from around the world—was recently held in Mexico City. The Wikimedia Foundation’s Language Engineering team participated in the Hackathon and Wikimania sessions, hosting several talks and two translation workshops. The primary focus was the Content Translation project—interacting with users, understanding their issues, and raising awareness about this new article creation tool.

Content Translation is available as a beta-feature for all logged-in users on Wikipedias of all languages. You can follow the instructions on how to get started with the tool. Additional help is available in the FAQ section. We also invite participants to our testing sessions and you can also help translate the UI messages for Content Translation. You can provide feedback on the project talk page.

Using Wikipedia to preserve indigenous languages of Colombia

The group of the participants. Photo by Diego F. Gómez, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

The User Group Wikimedistas de Colombia gathered this past June in Bogotá, Colombia, to begin discussions on the ways Wikipedia can be used to document and share endangered indigenous languages in the country. Indigenous language speakers came from all over Colombia to share their experiences, knowledge, and resources to help.

Participants brainstormed the impact Wikipedia could have on the indigenous languages of Colombia, including the use of the site as a way to help younger generations of indigenous language speakers access articles and media in their own languages. This would help bridge the gap between indigenous languages and education, where Spanish dominates the classroom as the spoken language.

When cultural heritage gets a digital life

Coding da Vinci featured 20 different projects and made 600,000 files available to the Wikimedia Commons. Photo by Thomas Nitz/Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland, freely licensed under CC BY 2.0.

An additional 600,000 free files are now available for use on the Wikimedia Commons thanks to Coding da Vinci, a recent cultural data hackathon held at Berlin’s Jewish Museum. They range from century-old films to recordings of mechanical pianos, World War II photographs, scans of dried flowers, and other art and heritage, all sourced from German museums, archives, and libraries.

Andrew ShermanDigital Communications InternWikimedia Foundation

Photo Montage Credits: “Encuentro de Activistas Digitales de Lenguas Indígenas – Colombia 2015 – 3.JPG” by Diego F. Gómez, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.; “Taipei_Wm2007_Guillaume.jpg” by Cary Bass, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.; “OrangeMoody-BubbleGraphCombined-Nolabels.jpg” by James Alexander, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.; “Coding da Vinci 2015 – Preisverleihung (18880680843).jpg” by Thomas Nitz/Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland, freely licensed under CC BY 2.0.; “Wikimania Translathon 20150718 162444.jpg” by Amire80, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.; Collage by Andrew Sherman.

For versions in other languages, please check the wiki version of this report, or add your own translation there!

28.07. – 31.08.2015

La Habana, Cuba, 2007 and today [1]

Mapping

• Tyndare asks on the french mailing list how to to tag the difference between Boulanger and Boulangerie, i. e. between bakeries that make their own bread or just sell it. Jean-Baptiste Holcroft points him to a proposal that was created a while ago after a similar discussion on the tagging mailing list (automatic translation).
• Geofabrik added a new layer for waterway errors to their OpenStreetMap Inspector.
• Tony asks the Australian mailing list what to do with unauthorised bike trails in national parks.
• Marc Zoutendijk presents his traffic signs map on the Belgian mailing list. This starts a discussion (automatic translation) on how details of traffic signs can be tagged properly, as well on how the traffic sign database of the government might be used.
• Martijn van Exel puts a new Maproulette challange online to fix railway crossings across the USA.
• User eclass reports about his work in Djibouti.
• Osmose, the French QA-Tool, now available for all of Europe
• Derick Rethans is working on an improved terrace plugin for JOSM, called uberterrace.
• Marc Zoutendijk’s keeps on investigating and reporting about weird tagging.
• Baditaflorin created a map style that shows the number of revisions and tags on ways and nodes.
• Tordanik presents a proposal for detailed tagging of types of paving stones. 
• Florian LAINEZ asks on the French mailing list for a simple tool to extract statistical information from the OpenStreetMap database. Example queries are the number of restaurants in France and the number of hotels in Switzerland. Taginfo is too complex. 
• Eric Fischer updated the Mapbox tiles for tracing fromTiger 2015 data.
• Daniel Koć starts a discussion on the problems with the shop and amenity keys on the tagging mailing list.
• RasterFilters is a new plugin for JOSM that allows to run a filter on images, developed during Google Summer of Code.
• Chetan Gowda from Mapbox talks about 3D buildings. Example: Amba Vilas Palasts.
• CheckAutopista ( a quality assurance tool for motorways) launched version 2.
• Mateusz Konieczny coins the term trolltag for tags that contradict the definition of the main tag.
• Ahmed Loai Ali from the Universität Bremen presents his research project Grass & Green.

Community

• Allroads asked the Dutch Forum for experiences on making pictures with drones for OSM. (automatic translation)
• Several French mappers once again complain on the mailing list about the mapping practices of the employees of Se Faire Connaître. They will be contacted again and asked to follow OpenStreetMap’s rules of conduct. (automatic translation)
• User mboeringa gives examples on the Dutch forum where bad 3D mapping breaks 2D maps. (automatic translation)
• Michael shows draft designs for a OpenRailwayMap logo.

Active Members per Month … and Year of Registration

• Pascal Neis published his OpenStreetMap Crowd Report 2015.
• Matthieu Gaillet is the Belgian mapper of the month. He did a lot of work on the Eurovelo 6 cycle route and the new pedestrian area in Brussels.
• User M!dgard has made a proof-of-concept of a collaborative tool for welcoming new mappers in a specific region and looks for people to build the platform. After reading the request on the Belgian mailing list, Marc Zoutendijk proposes a less automated workflow on the Dutch Forum. (automatic translation)
• PeeWee32 started a page to list all maps that can be used for mapping in The Netherlands. There are instructions to show the map with OpenLayers and in JOSM. He also warns that not all maps might be used to extract data. Furthermore in case data can be extracted he warns that one has to compare the date of the map with the data in OpenStreetMap before making updates.
• Peter Reed writes down  conclusions on his analysis of retail mapping in the UK. He gives some ideas on how we can improve mapping of retail features and which tools are needed.
• Se Faire Connaître reacts on the mails from the French community. They describe the improvements they made to their process since the first problems in November last year, o.a. a better, manual verification instead of a fully automatic import. They now use a number of sources for POI geocoding. However, there are still a few hundred POIs that have to be repositioned with their new algorithm. They also promised to  place POIs in the correct spot from the beginning (right now some POIs are added first and later placed correctly). A few days before this reaction, Philippe Verdy states that in many other cases the DWG would have been contacted to ask to block the user. 
• Xapitoun writes that during the past two years, OpenStreetMap followed of all stages of the construction of the first viaduct in Haiti, named “le viaduc de Delmas“.
• Michal Migurski describes one of the methods to extract church data from OpenStreetMap.
• Mappa Mercia reports about the OSM London Hack weekend.
• Lester Caine is trying to setup a tile server to preserve the current rendering as the proposed colour scheme for roads does not look familiar for British users.
• Christian Quest presents a beta version of a new type of Osmose tests for missing roads based on BANO data.
• Pascal created a new site which shows all mappers who mapped during the last 7 days. You can browse the site by country: USA or Ecuador.
• The Instituto Panamericano de Geografia e Historia together with NOSOLOSIG and Geoimagina produced a lecture series about GIS. The talk from Daniel Orellana from the University of Cuenca about OSM is online.
• Mapbox adds running and cycling routes from Runkeeper to its mapping software.

• Christoph Hormann writes on the current state of glacier mapping in OpenStreetMap.
• Mateusz Konieczny proposes mechanical edits for surface=woodchip to surface=woodchips and surface=soil to surface=dirt on the tagging mailing list.
• SEO-Spam in OSM? Here a guide for all spammers who don’t know the nofollow attribut.

Events

• User maning talks about a mapping party in Butuan, Agusan del Norte, Philippines.
• Save the Children organised an OSM training program in Dhaka.
• During Maptime Summercamp NL 2015 from August 17-25 people learned to use Mapbox, CartoDB and some other tools.

Humanitarian OSM

• Lisa Marie Owen talks in her diary about Global Validation Procedure (i. e. Missing Maps)
• Martin Dittus posted a series of interesting diary entries over the past month:
  • HOT validation as prerequisite for community growth
  • Design proposal for a HOT quality assurance support tool
  • How many HOT contributors never complete their first task
  • HOT contributions by Missing Maps volunteers
• Patrick Meier published a draft “Guidelines for Humanitarian UAV Missions” and asks for feedback.
• The Directions Magazin published an article “Building Knowledge with People Power & Remote Sensing“.
• Mhairi Ohara reported the end of the 10th round of the Outreachy Program. Interns were involved in a number of OSM projects including OpenAerialMap, the tasking manager, the export tool and LearnOSM. More information can be found on the sides of the HOT project.

Imports

• User maning explains why he is against an import of administrative boundaries from GADM in the Philippines.
• The French community discusses the import (or use in Osmose – not decided yet) of the data of OpenFlights. The license is ODbL, but not for commercial use. Someone will contact OpenFlights to see whether the license can be changed. During the discussion, another data source is mentioned: OurAirports, which is “public domain” and was imported before. They link to the licenses in the discussions, and the licenses are in English. A comparison between the 2 sources is available.
• Rafael Ávila Coya, an experienced imprter would like to import road network data via the Tasking Manager. The data were collected previously with GPS from the Tanzanian health service.
• Jotham notified the community of a successful import of wells in South Sudan.

• Some more imports last month:
  • Ottawa, Canada
  • Taiwan
  • Adressimport in York County
• For those who find the Import Guidelines too strict, there is again an example of a poorly made import.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Frederik Ramm points out that this year still a general meeting of OSMF will take place, on the part of the Executive Board is also elected.
• Paul Norman published the minutes of the first public sitting of the OSMF board. Appended to the protocol is an audio recording of the meeting.

Maps

• [1] Martijn van Exel puts his then and now map back online, in time for OSM’s 11th birthday.
• … and here’s another new OSM-based Geo-Search Engine – Oscar.
• Hans Hack has built a landuse tool based on OSM data.

• RobJN presents (in the northern hemisphere’s Summer) the “Winter Gritting Map“.
• The version 2.33.0 of OpenStreetMap Carto with many new features has been released. Simultaneously started a larger discussion on trees and forests.

• Birmingham Modernist is a OpenStreetMap-based map for brutalist and modernist buildings in Birmingham

#switch2OSM

• Strava switches to a Mapbox solution, but there are lot of complaints from users on the quality of the satellite images and the loss of StreetView.
• An animated OSM map on economist.org shows the development of start-ups in Silicon Valley from 1995 by 2015.
• EventZoom now offers the possibility to represent historical events on OSM.

• The Ecuadorian government uses in the current outbreak of Cotopaxi Volcano a few kilometers south of Quito a number of OSM maps to inform the public of imminent threats by lahars. The maps highlight information about secure areas, medical care, shelters and escape routes.

• The multi-destination routing service RouteXL now migrated with all components on OSM-based technology

OpenData

• Opensource.com writes about open source map portals and data.
• SRTM elevation data with a resolution of one arc second have now been released for crisis regions.
• DataCite has provided DataCite Labs Search, a new search portal for scientific research.

Software

• Mapzen reports on innovations in the routing API Valhalla.
• Anonymaps laments the demise of the CartoCSS style language because of changes to Mapbox Studio design.
• Simon Poole reports on the current development progress of Vespucci 0.9.7.
• Omniscale works on a map frontend for Magnacarto.
• Joost Schouppe reported difficulties and solutions in converting shapefiles and POLY files when multipolygons contained.
• Polyglot describes how one can link to OSM data from Wikipedia. (automatic translation)
• TobWen asks whether the fast update of PostgreSQL was still unusable.
• Extracting raw GPS data from OpenStreetMap – an LGPL tool from the University of Heidelberg.
• Jochen Topf reports about new features and the improvements in taginfo.
• Tom MacWright writes about his progress at Mapbox Studio.
• Zool blogs of their work on a mobile app.

• Michael Zangl created OpenGL-View for JOSM during his GSoC project. He asks to test it.
• Telenav has released Wheelnav for iOS. The app will help you navigate by wheelchair.
• MAPS.ME, a crowd sourced and mobile map app (iOS and Android) launched “walking directions” (via Ubergizmo)
• OpenSeaMap App for iOS is now available.
• EB Dirigo Version 1.0 released. Android  4.4 or higher is requiered – an iOS version is planned.

• This year’s Google Summer of Code is over. Seven of the eight OpenStreetMap projects have been successfully completed.

Warm thanks to all the Students and Mentors who have taken part in the Google Summer of Code Project.  [1].

• Mapbox explains how one can deal efficiently with very large amounts of data.

Did you know …

• … the largest hedge in the world? In OSM as an attraction, but not (yet) as a hedge.

• … Yohours makes mapping opening hours easy. It is similar to the Opening Hours plugin for JOSM.
• … the YouTube Channel  of Tutoriais from OpenStreetMap Brasil
• … that Pierre-Yves Berrard created a bookmarklet to switch between OpenStreetMap and Google Maps

Other “geo” things

• The story of the map of France in five hexagons.
• Maps enter the fourth dimension, real time maps.

• Open Maps for Everyone gets support from Knight Prototype Fund to create an OSM-lite prototype for collaborating on that data that does not belong in OpenStreetMap.
• The liberal party of Belgium (OpenVLD) wants to allow freedom of Panorama for personal and commercial use. It would become legal to share pictures on social media, share them on websites and print them in publications. At this moment tourists taking pictures of e.g. the Atomium in Brussels have the risk of getting fined. Although in most cases the owner of the right allows pictures for personal use. (automatic translation)
• Stefan Keller announced on Twitter that GeoCSV is now fully supported by GDAL / OGR 2.1 and a QGIS plugin. The format is one of the candidates for the shapefile challenge, under which a technologically superior successor to the old shapefile format is to be found.
• The service called maptiks provides detailed data on the use and performance of online maps, available among others with OpenLayers and Leafletjs.
• The Google Earth blog explains why maps in China are displaced and what is GCJ-02.
• MapQuest changed its open APIs, SDKs and licenses.
• Alex Barth explains how Mapbox is using anonymous data from RunKeeper to improve OpenStreetMap data.

Back in April, Wiki Ed launched a partnership with the Midwest Political Science Association. Together, we set our sights on improving Wikipedia’s political science coverage.

As we approach an election year, it’s hard to overstate the importance of Wikipedia as a resource for information about issues and candidates. We heard from many instructors in the political science field that their Wikipedia assignments encourage students to identify a local issue and share neutral, fact-based information about that issue through Wikipedia. Students develop a deeper level of understanding of a local political issue, and communities have access to the information they need to make informed decisions.

MPSA’s members are experts in their discipline, which is why we’re engaging them in our programs. They identify important content gaps in Wikipedia articles about global and local government, political analysis and theory, public law, international relations, and local civic issues. They find the gaps, and students in related courses improve or create those articles.

Wiki Ed has a long history with political science topics. Our 2010 pilot program targeted public policy instructors and courses. Since then, we’ve supported more than 100 courses within the discipline. Student editors have contributed fantastic overviews of theoretical topics, such as the article on Constitutional patriotism written for a course at Pomona College. Students at Texas State University researched and expanded the article on Street-level bureaucracy, doubling the number of reliable sources used for the article. These are two courses among the many that have made an impact on the public’s knowledge and awareness of political science.

Yet, there’s still tremendous work to be done to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of political science information.

Students can make a difference. But they’ll also see the difference in their own learning. By sharing their work with an audience, they practice critical communications skills as they share their knowledge with a real audience. They apply their knowledge in a new context, develop real research and writing skills, and apply information literacy through a careful curation of sources.

We’re still looking to support more political science courses for the current term. If you’re interested in developing a syllabus that lets students apply their learning while expanding public knowledge of the political sciences, please contact Samantha Erickson at samantha@wikiedu.org.

Screenshot of Wikipedia Android app, highlighting the link preview feature. Photo by Dmitry Brant, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Have you ever gotten lost on Wikipedia? You know the feeling: you start with one topic, then you start clicking links. Eventually, you’re reading about apricots, which lead you to William Shakespeare, and suddenly you can’t remember where you started (hint: it might be toothpaste). This network effect happens thanks to the vast amount of knowledge on Wikipedia, all connected by links. It can be incredibly fun, but what if you want to return to where you started?

A new update to the official Wikipedia app for Android helps readers easily explore topics linked in an article without leaving the original page. Now, you can view previews of linked Wikipedia articles simply by tapping a link. A window will appear featuring the first few sentences of the article and an image gallery, so you can quickly get the gist of the topic. If you want to explore further, you can easily continue to the article you’re previewing. Otherwise, just tap the ‘Back’ button on your Android device, or slide the window away to return to the original article.

The preview window also provides options for saving the article for offline reading and sharing the article on your favorite social networks.

Tapping one of the image thumbnails will take you to a full-screen image gallery where you can swipe between all the images from the article.

User testing of our app has shown as much as a 30% increase in engagement as measured by number of links tapped with this new feature. While currently available only on the Android app, the Foundation plans to release it on the iOS app in the future and is exploring mobile web options.

The “article preview” concept has been in development and testing at the Wikimedia Foundation for quite a while: a similar feature, known as “hovercards,” has been available as a beta feature on desktop for logged-in users since early 2014, and another feature called “navigation popups” has been around even longer.

Other recent updates on the Wikipedia app for Android include improved tabbed browsing and language switching. You can now press and hold links to reveal a menu that lets you open the link in a new tab, in addition to saving the linked article for later reading offline, and sharing the link with other apps. Press the ‘Tabs’ button near the top-right of the toolbar to see the tabs that are currently open.

If you are a multilingual reader and would like to search for articles in different languages, we’ve added a convenient button for switching your current search language. Simply tap ‘Search Wikipedia’ in the toolbar, and notice the language button on the right.

So, go nuts! When reading your next article in the app, tap on as many links as you like, open as many tabs as you want, switch languages, and feel confident that you won’t lose your place—all while getting the information you need to know.

Dmitry Brant
Software Engineer / Product Owner
Wikimedia Foundation

All screenshots by Dmitry Brant, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

“Full” and “disclosure”: they’re two words that go together like peanut butter and jelly. Disclosure is meaningless unless its scope is appropriate. Has anybody called for Hillary Clinton to pick whichever email messages she’d like show to the public? No! If you need my home address to send me something, will it help you if I just give you the street number, without the street name? Of course not! The scope of any disclosure has to enable others to meaningfully evaluate something. If it doesn’t, the act of disclosure is pointless.

Drawing by Nicholas Boudreau, licensed CC BY

When it comes to editing Wikipedia for pay, though, some believe that the mere disclosure that a conflict of interest exists is sufficient when advocating for changes. And that little details like who’s cutting the checks can be left aside.

But the consensus among Wikipedia’s volunteer editors, and the staff of the foundation that supports it, says otherwise. As covered here previously, a recent request for clarification brought a resounding endorsement of the thorough disclosure required by the site’s Terms of Use (ToU) for over a year.

While the strong consensus for substantive disclosure should not come as a surprise to those who follow the issue, it is important for two reasons: (1) The ethical constraints that have long been held by a broad consensus of parties are now spelled out in greater detail, and with a finer point, than before; the links above should make worthwhile reading for anybody interested in conflicts of interest and Wikipedia. And (2) Paid Wikipedia editors, who proclaim their expertise in ethical Wikipedia engagement when marketing their own business enterprises — but whose routine practices violate the basic rules of the site — have now received a very clear message, and now have reason to adjust their practices. As we discussed yesterday, several are already doing so. We at Wiki Strategies are taking the opportunity to review and refine our practices, as well.

But this case is also important to us, in that it highlights the crucial difference between our approach — which was designed to not merely meet, but to greatly exceed Wikipedia’s standards, and that has not changed since we incorporated in 2009 — and that of Wikipedia writing and editing agencies, who frequently aim for the bare minimum disclosure, and as a result often come up short. (I discussed several such agencies in yesterday’s piece.)

Since the founding of Wiki Strategies in 2009, we have used a model in which we do not make edits to Wikipedia — not to articles, not to talk pages — on behalf of our clients. Nor do we lobby on their behalf by other means, e.g. by privately emailing Wikipedia editors on their behalf. We work exclusively with clients who clearly disclose their conflict of interest (COI), and who proactively seek feedback for substantial changes. In nearly every case, our clients use their real names as their usernames, or prominently listed on their user pages; and they state unambiguously who they work for. This was our practice for five years before the ToU required it, and it has not changed. (See more in this previous blog post , and in our statement of ethics.)

I should note the one thing that is rarely disclosed in our projects: our involvement. We are of course proud of the work we do, and in an ideal world, would be happy to talk about it; but for the most part, our clients prefer not to invite a public discussion around how they have learned to engage with Wikipedia. The decision to hire us should not subject a company to greater scrutiny than anybody else gets (nor to less scrutiny), so we typically advise our clients not to bring it up. We train our clients in how to improve articles, jump through Wikipedia’s many technical hoops, interpret Wikipedia jargon, and more, while adhering to a high standard of integrity.

I began this week’s blog series to explore the implications of Wikipedia’s, and the Wikimedia Foundation’s, clarification of the ToU update requiring disclosure. But unexpectedly, the “Bright Line” concept was thrust into the forefront by a news story. The Bright Line — which would prohibit paid editors from working directly on Wikipedia articles — was proposed and rejected as an update to Wikipedia policy in 2013; but a story in the Financial Times repeated a mistake often made in media reports, conflating this failed proposal with the actual policy passed in the ToU amendment.

Since this confusion does not seem to be going away, I’ll explore it in greater detail. Next week, I will compare our approach, various Wikipedia policies, common Wikipedia practices, and the Bright Line (which many firms do adopt, in spite of its not being required).

Stay tuned!

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

Model Naomi Campbell in 2008. Photo CC BY-SA 3.0, Georges Biard.

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.

In August, longtime Wikipedia-editor-for-hire David King appealed to the broad community of Wikipedia editors and, simultaneously, to the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation, asking if it was OK for him to skip disclosing specifics called for by the site’s Terms of Use (the identity of the company and other entities involved in the financial transaction). The answer came swiftly in both venues: “no,” said Wikipedia’s volunteer administrators; “no,” said a recently-elected Trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation; “no,” said a staff lawyer for the Foundation — it’s not OK.

Both the formal language of the Terms of Use, and the consensus among Wikipedians about what constitutes proper behavior, clearly stated that King’s approach was out of compliance. The Terms of Use amendment uses unambiguous language: “…must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation…” It was enacted on the strength of a thorough, public debate (a process which was clearly legitimate, even though I opposed the outcome). And in case that’s not enough, the implications of the Terms of Use amendment are further clarified in an accompanying FAQ.

King acknowledged the rebuke the next day, and committed to adjusting the approach his firm Ethical Wiki takes to improve its compliance with the Terms of Use.

Yesterday I described how one Wikipedia writing firm, David King’s Ethical Wiki, recently found that its practices ran afoul of Wikipedia’s Terms of Use (ToU), and announced changes to its practices. How do other agencies offering Wikipedia services approach similar issues? Here, I will explore the approaches of several other Wikipedia services.

First, on our own work: the Wiki Strategies model has never involved directly editing Wikipedia (neither articles nor talk pages) on our corporate clients’ behalf. But we do advise our clients, and our students as well, on how to properly disclose their affiliations. Our approach both predates (by five years) and exceeds the standards of last year’s ToU update. Notably, almost every one of our clients uses their real name on their Wikipedia account, which we believe establishes an important measure of accountability in the (non-Wikipedia) professional realm.

Next, let’s consider one paid Wikipedia editor, whose work relates to two Fortune 500 companies, among others. On their user page, the editor describes their commitment to the principle of transparency as “incredible,” and yet never mentions their own real name. Following the discussion around Mr. King’s approach, this editor did update their account to note what agency they work for, and to improve the disclosure of who their clients are.

Another agency’s staff do indeed provide full disclosure, but in some cases that disclosure has become buried in talk page archives, and is thus not easy for a reader to find. The staffers’ user pages mention the professional connections. Since the disclosure is not required to be preserved in any specific way, and since the user page declarations are redundant of the disclosures on the article talk pages, I see no ToU violations in these cases. I do see room for improvement in the nature of the disclosures, but to be fair, there is surely room for improvement in all of our business models.

There are also independent paid Wikipedia writers who make no disclosure whatsoever. Some, like one interviewed in the Wikipedia Signpost in March 2015, merely dabble in paid Wikipedia work; they don’t claim any special expertise or leadership in the Wikipedia or public relations worlds, and they sometimes plead ignorance of the disclosure requirements.

Other Wikipedia services (often called “black hat”) operate with no regard for the disclosure rules, or any of Wikipedia’s rules, except as obstacles to be routed around in serving their clients’ interests. This is a risky approach; over the years, numerous news reports have cried foul when undisclosed paid editing is discovered, and Wikipedia has blocked a number of such accounts from further editing.

Wikipedians in Residence — Wikipedians who have embedded themselves in galleries, libraries, archives, museums, universities, and non-profit organizations — occupy a professional realm with some similarities to the agencies considered above, but also some differences. Since such organizations are typically more closely aligned with Wikipedia’s mission than corporations are, Wikipedians in Residence have often worked openly on Wikipedia without controversy. There have been exceptions when they neglect to disclose their roles clearly; but since the ToU amendment passed in 2014, increased awareness has helped Wikipedians in Residence and their host institutions refine ethical and effective standards around this kind of work.

Most of the agency workers mentioned in this blog post decline to provide their real names on their Wikipedia user accounts. While maintaining anonymity violates no rule, it does offer some insight into a service’s disposition toward transparency, which likely impacts the extent to which volunteer editors are to collaborate with them.

In recent years, the ethics and implications of paid Wikipedia work have been deliberated in many venues, both within and outside the Wikipedia community. We have seen many nuances, widely varying opinions, and various business models.

But when Wikimedia amended its Terms of Use last summer, it created a simple standard that all Wikipedians and professionals connected to this issue should rally behind. Although the requirements around disclosure are not a panacea, they do establish an important and simple unifying principle, and they should be embraced by anyone claiming to have Wikipedia’s best interests at heart.

Stephen Colbert depicted in a WikiWorld cartoon by Greg Williams; the photo is freely licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5.

The comedian Stephen Colbert and Wikipedia have a complicated relationship. The two are very different—one has an army of supporters, has received multiple awards, and is generally beloved by the Internet. The other is Stephen.

As far as we know, Wikipedia and Stephen first met publicly in July 2006. Wikipedia was in the midst of a massive growth spurt; it had surpassed one million articles only two months before. Colbert was still in the early months of his own satirical news show, The Colbert Report (a spin-off of the The Daily Show), and had recently performed a controversial set at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.

On July 31, 2006, Colbert took aim at Wikipedia during his “The Wørd” segment. His new neologism of the night was “wikiality”—in essence, truth by consensus.

He called on his viewers to go to Wikipedia’s entry on elephants and edit it to note that the animal’s population in Africa had tripled in the last six months, and they did so. Wikipedia editors were still dealing with vandalism from Colbert’s call days later—and one-off cases continued for months. The cleanup extended to wholly unrelated articles like Elefant (band) as well.

In fact, an editor going by the name “Stephencolbert” was blocked for making two edits mentioned on the show hours before it aired. It is not known whether this was Colbert himself, or an opportune audience member, although he did mention (3:13 and reply) being ‘blocked for vandalism’ in a 2007 interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Three days later, he returned to the topic of Wikipedia, claiming that “Latchkey kids are more likely to be crazy, I read it on Wikipedia. Look it up.” A Wikipedia administrator watching the show knew what was coming and protected the article on latchkey kids within fifteen seconds.

Thus began the Colbert-Wikipedia relationship, and we returned the attention. In the month after “wikiality” debuted, the article on the Colbert Report was edited more than 800 times and at times even had separate sections for wikiality and “truthiness,” another term popularized by Colbert.

In January 2007, he took on the site directly for an early and controversial case of paid editing. When Microsoft offered to pay an Australian programmer to help “balance” articles on two file formats, Colbert responded by coining the word “wikilobbying,” or “when money determines Wikipedia entries, reality has become a commodity.”

Colbert perhaps did not know how prescient his words would be. Just this week, seasoned Wikipedia administrators banned nearly 400 user accounts for “black hat” actions—or making promotional edits to articles, without disclosing their conflict of interest. In this case, Wikipedia editors agree with Colbert. Wikipedia is not a commodity, and its integrity is not for sale.

Over the years, Colbert has come back to Wikipedia several times—in fact, Wikipedia has a full article section dedicated to Colbert’s attention to the site. During his interview with Jimmy Wales, Colbert admitted that he thought Wikipedia was “an amazing thing, the first place I go when I’m looking for knowledge” before slipping back into to character to add, tongue-in-cheek, “when I want to create some.”

Stephen, you tried to claim that you’re no fan of encyclopedias. We knew better. Good luck on the new show, and we’ll be there to protect the sum of all knowledge when you next decide to talk about us.

Ed Erhart
Editorial Associate
Wikimedia Foundation

A version of this blog post that was automatically sent out via email accidentally omitted the quotation marks around the paragraph beginning “You see, any user can change any entry …” We regret the error.

So my Wikidata list-generating bot Listeria has become popular in certain circles, creating and updating lists of artworks, species, or ORCID ID holders. With the introduction of the Wikidata SPARQL service, Wikidata queries are becoming more mainstream, and lists are a logical next step.

At the same time, many Wikipedians lack an awareness of Wikidata, and hesitate to go there and edit. Micro-contributions are a way for people to improve Wikidata without much fuzz, but are “hidden” in external tools.

So I added a little bit of code to Listeria. The output now contains a few minor extras, like class names for table cells. These are then used by JavaScript code to allow adding and editing of information in Listeria table cells, right on Wikipedia. Label, description (where unavoidable), item links, dates, coordinates, strings, and images are supported. Simply add

importScriptURI("//www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User:Magnus_Manske/wd_edit.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript");

Dialog to add an item link

to your common.js page on Wikipedia, hover over a Listeria-generated table cell, and you will see add/edit options. Clicking on those will open a dialog to find/enter a value, validated through Wikidata itself. Clicking OK adds this information to Wikidata. Done! (Because of the table being static wikitext, your addition will only show after the next Listeria update, but it is already on Wikidata proper.)

The JavaScript code is adaptable, meaning it could be used to let people edit Wikidata-based infoboxes etc. Of course, it would be much more effective to have this enables for all Wikipedia users, and with more Listeria lists around. But for now, I am content with this being a demo, which may inspire “official” functionality be the WMF, in a few years’ time.

We are happy to announce that Apertium-based machine translation is enabled in Wikipedia since September 7 for the following language pairs:

• French to Catalan
• Catalan to French
• Italian to Catalan
• Spanish to Esperanto
• French to Esperanto
• Catalan to Esperanto
• Norwegian Nynorsk to Danish

As always, we’d like to remind our users that machine translation is only an assisting tool, and we strongly encourage all translators to check the machine-translated text carefully for mistakes and correct them before publishing.

The quality of the machine translation may vary between different language pairs and different topic areas. We welcome your feedback about this.

Apertium is free open-source software, so you can improve its support for your language or add a brand new language pair. You can contact Apertium developers easily on the #apertium IRC channel on the Freenode network.

In Jyana S. Browne’s Modern and Contemporary Japanese Theatre course at the University of Washington, students study Japanese playwrights who actively sought social change through public engagement. Those students engage the public on their own, as well, by contributing information on those playwrights to Wikipedia.

Student editors have created well-researched articles about award-winning playwrights Yoji Sakate and Rio Kishida. Interestingly, the work of these student editors is actually more comprehensive than the entries on the Japanese Wikipedia.

The style section of Toshiki Okada now includes several scholarly viewpoints where it had previously only included one; the article as a whole has 24 when it once only had six. Likewise, the article on Kobo Abe, a writer whose sensibility has been compared to Franz Kafka, has been greatly expanded to include biographical information more details about his career.

Thanks to Jyana Browne and her students for these meaningful contributions to the representation of Japanese theater on the English Wikipedia.

Photo: “Flag of Japan” by Toshihiro Oimatsu from Tokyo, Japan – The sun and the moonUploaded by Smooth_O. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.