It’s been 9 months since my last Wikidata map update and once again we have many new noticable areas appearing, including Norway, South Africa, Peru and New Zealand to name but a few. As with the last map generation post I once again created a diff image so that the areas of change are easily identifiable comparing the data from July 2017 with that from my last post on October 2016.
The various sizes of the generated maps can be found on Wikimedia Commons:
Photo by Sayan Sanyal, CC BY-SA 4.0.
“Butterflies have always enthralled human eyes, thanks to their exquisite and diverse texture and coloration, beauty, seemingly amazing metamorphosis, and carefree flight,” says Ananya Mondal, who goes by Atudu on Wikimedia projects.
Mondal, who by profession is a clinical nutritionist, is certainly not immune to this phenomenon. The large diversity and variety of butterfly species in her home region of West Bengal, India, has fueled such an interest in them that she is now known as the “Butterfly Wikimedian.” Still, her hunger for more knowledge was not met by Wikipedia at the time. She had several questions—like just how many species of butterflies are there in West Bengal, and if there were species yet to be uncovered—that she wanted answers to.
She decided to take matters into her own hands by adding one more question: could there be better documentation of these creatures on Wikimedia sites, particularly on her native Bengali Wikipedia?
Photo by Sayan Sanyal, CC BY-SA 4.0.
As it turned out, Mondal was able to answer that for herself. She created Wiki Loves Butterfly, a two-year effort to improve Wikimedia’s coverage of butterflies in West Bengal. Along with her co-leader Sandip Das, Mondal drew up copious amounts of documentation to support the project before it launched in March 2016. This included subject bibliographies, lepidopterists, and prime butterfly spotting locations in the region, in addition to a list of amateur and professional photographers who were active in the subject area.
“Of note,” Mondal says, “I included these people, with widely differing fields and areas of expert, as edit-a-thon and wiki contributors. I then used that to initiate an extensive Wikimedia outreach program.”
Photo by Tamaghna Sengupta, CC BY-SA 3.0.
With these individuals, along with several Wikimedians and students, Mondal went out into the field. “I followed the activities of people involved to get suggestions for best practices,” she says, and accomplished several other tasks:
The Wiki Loves butterfly’s first part ran from March 2016 to June of this year, and saw ten new users, over a hundred new articles, 650 images—nearly half of which are used on Wikimedia projects, and nearly fifty have been noted by the community for their quality. 163 individual species have been captured on film, 30 of which had no photograph on Wikimedia Commons before, and 13 of which had no article on the English Wikipedia.
The second part of the project is running from now until March 2018, and you can join.
Ed Erhart, Editorial Associate, Communications
Wikimedia Foundation
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The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 11 July. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 12 July. It will be on all wikis from 13 July (calendar).Meetings
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July 8, 2017
Semantic MediaWiki 2.5.3 (SMW 2.5.3) has been released today as a new version of Semantic MediaWiki.
This new version brings an enhancement for environments with multiple relational databases and improves action "purge" used to manually rebuild semantic data on pages. It also provides bugfixes and further increases platform stability. Please refer to the help page on installing Semantic MediaWiki to get detailed instructions on how to install or upgrade.
July 8, 2017
Semantic MediaWiki 2.5.3 (SMW 2.5.3) has been released today as a new version of Semantic MediaWiki.
This new version brings an enhancement for environments with multiple relational databases and improves action "purge" used to manually rebuild semantic data on pages. It also provides bugfixes and further increases platform stability. Please refer to the help page on installing Semantic MediaWiki to get detailed instructions on how to install or upgrade.
I’m the kind of dev that dreads configuring webservers and that rather does not have to put up with random ops stuff before being able to get work done. Docker is one of those things I’ve never looked into, cause clearly it’s evil annoying boring evil confusing evil ops stuff. Two of my colleagues just introduced me to a one-line docker command that kind off blew my mind.
Want to run tests for a project but don’t have PHP7 installed? Want to execute a custom Composer script that runs both these tests and the linters without having Composer installed? Don’t want to execute code you are not that familiar with on your machine that contains your private keys, etc? Assuming you have Docker installed, this command is all you need:
docker run --rm --interactive --tty --volume $PWD:/app -w /app\ --volume ~/.composer:/composer --user $(id -u):$(id -g) composer composer ci
This command uses the Composer Docker image, as indicated by the first composer at the end of the command. After that you can specify whatever you want to execute, in this case composer ci, where ci is a custom composer Script. (If you want to know what the Docker image is doing behind the scenes, check its entry point file.)
This works without having PHP or Composer installed, and is very fast after the initial dependencies have been pulled. And each time you execute the command, the environment is destroyed, avoiding state leakage. You can create a composer alias in your .bash_aliases as follows, and then execute composer on your host just as you would do if it was actually installed (and running) there.
alias composer='docker run --rm --interactive --tty --volume $PWD:/app -w /app\ --volume ~/.composer:/composer --user $(id -u):$(id -g) composer composer'
Of course you are not limited to running Composer commands, you can also invoke PHPUnit
...(id -g) composer vendor/bin/phpunit
or indeed any PHP code.
...(id -g) composer php -r 'echo "hi";'
This one liner is not sufficient if you require additional dependencies, such as PHP extensions, databases or webservers. In those cases you probably want to create your own Docker file. Though to run the tests of most PHP libraries you should be good. I’ve now uninstalled my local Composer and PHP.
To get started, install Docker and add your user to the docker group (system restart might be needed afterwards):
sudo apt-get install docker sudo usermod -a -G docker YOURUSER
by Gerard Meijssen (noreply@blogger.com) at July 08, 2017 08:44 AM
27/06/2017-03/07/2017
OSM Node Density 2014 – 2017 and the differences 1 | data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL, Imagery © Martin Raifer, CC-BY 3.0, overlay © Mapbox
(automatic translation) on a local newspaper. However, on the Japanese mailing list, their tagging manner (
name=AED and tourism=information were added on emergency=defibrillator) was criticized (automatic translation) to be “tagging for the renderer”. After a discussion, problematic tags were removed. His justification on that tagging is explained at a changeset discussion.
. (automatic translation)
the poster “Pre-elimination Malaria in Pacific Coast, Colombia” with the result of the project “Herramientas, formación y redes encaminadas a disminuir la carga por malaria en Colombia”. Best regards to all involved in the #MapatónXGuapi initiative that generated the needed geodata.direction=* tag on viewpoint rendering.
Mapbox’s latest SDK release for Android and iOS brings in the possibility of 3D map visualisation for mobile devices.
The current release status of software around OSM can be found on the OSM software watchlist.
the platform ToxicSites. It includes a map that provides information about pollution in the U.S., aggregating information from several sources. an article about the fastest moving island of the world: Trischen island, which shifts to the east about 30-35 meters per year.| Where | What | When | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seattle | Complete The Map Challenge, Mapillary image mapping | 2017-06-23-2017-07-31 |  |
| Toyonaka | 【西国街道#07】豊中の歴史マッピングパーティ | 2017-07-08 |  |
| Kampala | State of the Map Africa 2017 | 2017-07-08-2017-07-10 |  |
| Rennes | Réunion mensuelle | 2017-07-10 |  |
| Lyon | Rencontre mensuelle ouverte | 2017-07-11 | |
| Passau | Niederbayerntreffen | 2017-07-11 |  |
| Berlin | 109. Berlin-Brandenburg Stammtisch | 2017-07-13 | |
| Tokyo | 東京！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第10回 向島百花園 | 2017-07-15 | |
| Łódź | Spotkanie sympatyków OpenStreetMap i Walne Stowarzyszenia | 2017-07-15 |  |
| Bonn | Bonner Stammtisch | 2017-07-18 | |
| Lüneburg | Mappertreffen Lüneburg | 2017-07-18 | |
| Nottingham | Nottingham Pub Meetup | 2017-07-18 |  |
| Scotland | Edinburgh | 2017-07-18 | |
| Champs-sur-Marne (Marne-la-Vallée) | FOSS4G Europe 2017 at ENSG Cité Descartes | 2017-07-18-2017-07-22 | |
| Champs-sur-Marne (Marne-la-Vallée) | Mapathon Missing Maps @FOSS4G, ENSG Cité Descartes | 2017-07-19 | |
| Karlsruhe | Stammtisch | 2017-07-19 | |
| Leoben | Stammtisch Obersteiermark | 2017-07-20 |  |
| Urspring | Stammtisch Ulmer Alb | 2017-07-20 | |
| Spoleto | OpenStreetMap e open data a Spoleto | 2017-07-21-2017-07-22 |  |
| Bremen | Bremer Mappertreffen | 2017-07-24 | |
| Boston | FOSS4G 2017 | 2017-08-14-2017-08-19 | |
| Aizu-wakamatsu Shi | State of the Map 2017 | 2017-08-18-2017-08-20 | |
| Patan | State of the Map Asia 2017 | 2017-09-23-2017-09-24 |  |
| Boulder | State of the Map U.S. 2017 | 2017-10-19-2017-10-22 | |
| Buenos Aires | FOSS4G+State of the Map Argentina 2017 | 2017-10-23-2017-10-28 |  |
| Lima | State of the Map LatAm 2017 | 2017-11-29-2017-12-02 |  |
Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropriate.
This weeklyOSM was produced by Anne Ghisla, Nakaner, Peda, PierZen, Polyglot, SK53, SomeoneElse, Spec80, TheFive, derFred, jinalfoflia, keithonearth, kreuzschnabel, muramototomoya.
Photo by Tom Murphy VII, CC BY-SA 3.0.
Sometimes it can feel as if the world is changing more quickly than ever, and it’s easy to forget that we’re living at the very forefront of a historic timeline of knowledge creation that has evolved through centuries and across cultures, languages, and technologies.
The Wikimedia Foundation recently hosted three “brown bag” discussions with experts on the evolving history of knowledge sharing, providing valuable context for understanding the modern challenges of today and the opportunities to sustain and build the global Wikipedia community of tomorrow. Each of our invited experts (Panthea Lee, Adam Hochschild, and Uzo Iweala) echoed key aspects of other projects which the Foundation has organized as part of its broader effort to understand the future of Wikimedia.
Below is a summary of the two major themes which came out of the discussions, each of which has been posted with the full videos and transcripts.
Our trust in both the sources and methods of distribution of information continues to evolve. People have shifting attitudes toward the trustability of traditional knowledge institutions and more often prefer to use personally-tailored channels to discover and share information with people we trust. This is especially true of younger readers, a focus of our discussion with Panthea Lee, lead designer at Reboot, a research design firm that helped launch the New Readers project in Nigeria and India.
“We see a lot of young people following vloggers and bloggers … that have built up trust in certain ways that may not see Wikipedia content as credible or easy to use,” Lee mentioned, noting that a possible future aspect to the Foundation’s work might build ways to incorporate modular Wikipedia resources and tools into channel-based communities where younger readers discover, create, and share information they trust with people who they trust more than traditional publishers.
Weakened trust in traditional education institutions may be accelerating an interest in personal knowledge creation and sharing, as well. “People are hungry for alternative sources of knowledge,” said Uzo Iweala, a physician, author, Foundation advisor, and CEO and editor-in-chief of Ventures Africa.
Expanding to new readers can also carry a challenge of verification. Sources of knowledge that may be considered of lower value in certain communities, like oral storytelling, are trusted, primary sources in others. Iweala shared a personal example: “We can trace back [my own lineage] to maybe the 1400s, but no one would believe because the start of that is in the 1800s, when the British came in and started keeping paper records. But the stories go back way, way further.”
Creativity in the face of obstacles can inspire brilliant new methods of knowledge sharing. Adam Hochschild, co-founder of Mother Jones, reviewed the history of knowledge sharing, providing a few powerful examples of how people have created solutions to information-sharing barriers.
Hochschild pointed to his study of London in the month of February 1788, where “half the debates on record are about slavery or the slave trade.” Adam wanted to know what caused the dramatic spike in the recorded discussion of slavery. His search led him to discover a remarkably brilliant use case in format-based activism.
“A very well organized small group of ardent abolitionists began experimenting” with use of pamphlets and inspired the creation of a famous poster (below), he told us, depicting the stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the regulated slave trade act of 1788.
Poster via the Library of Congress, public domain.
Hochschild said that the poster helped strengthen the public support to end slavery:
| “ | The printing of black and white graphics had been around, you know, for a century. But they began using this for their purposes, and one result of all that you’ve seen as a famous poster of a slave ship … You read memoirs from this period and you find many people writing about the impact it had on them when they first saw the slave ship poster. | ” |
In a more modern example of innovation in storytelling-based solutions to recording and sharing knowledge, Hochschild pointed to The People’s Archive of India, which documents exactly the kind of information that local news organizations have avoided historically, such as traditional songs which scholars can now use for research.
It’s a bit overwhelming to think about all the stories which have never been shared only because there isn’t a way to do so yet. The good news is that history, and the work of communities around the world today, show that it’s possible to build a future for knowledge sharing across new generations and cultures. All we need is creativity, dedication, trust, and an acknowledgement that things will change again.
Have you changed the way you discover and share information you trust? We invite you to learn how to join us in the discussion about the ways we participate in knowledge sharing, and tell us about the challenges you face (and your favorite creative solutions).
Margarita Noriega, Strategy Consultant, Communications
Wikimedia Foundation
Videos and transcripts from each brown bag are available on Commons.
Debian Stretch was officially released on Saturday[1], and I've built a new Stretch base image for VPS use in the WMF cloud. All projects should now see an image type of 'debian-9.0-stretch' available when creating new instances.
Puppet will set up new Stretch instances just fine, and we've tested and tuned up several of the most frequently-used optional puppet classes so that they apply properly on Stretch. Stretch is /fairly/ similar to Jessie, so I'd expect most puppet classes that apply properly on Jessie to work on Stretch as well, but I'm always interested in the exceptions -- If you find one, please open a phabricator ticket.
The WMF and the Cloud team is committed to long-term support of this distribution. If you are starting a new project or rebuilding a VM you should start with Stretch to ensure the longest possible life for your work.
After working with us as an interim Content Expert in March, Shalor Toncray joined us this month in a full-time capacity. In her role as Content Expert, Shalor supports classes in the humanities and social sciences.
Early in the month, Outreach Manager Samantha Weald and Classroom Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal attended the Teaching History in the 21st Century conference, hosted at the University of California, Berkeley. We presented alongside Catherine Kudlick, Director of the Paul K. Longmore Institute on Disability and Professor of History at San Francisco State University, about teaching with Wikipedia assignments in the history classroom.
Educational Partnerships Manager Jami Mathewson and Samantha visited Louisiana to join faculty at various universities in the area. At Xavier University of Louisiana, a group of instructors will work together in a faculty learning community in the academic year 2017–18. Their theme for the year is “Making knowledge public using educational technology,” so several of them will be incorporating Wikipedia assignments into their classes. Jami and Samantha joined for a two-day workshop about assignment design, understanding Wikipedia, and how to make the most of Wiki Ed’s tools. Since Xavier University paid to bring Wiki Ed’s staff to campus, we took the opportunity to visit nearby Tulane University and Louisiana State University. Samantha presented to instructors at Tulane, and we joined LSU’s Summer Institute, run by our partners from Communication across the Curriculum.
The following week, Samantha was a keynote speaker at Fordham University’s Faculty Technology Day. She presented about how Wikipedia assignments can develop students as digital citizens. Attendees learned about digital literacy and how they can enhance their pedagogy to build this skill in the classroom. We’re excited to work with more instructors who value media and digitally literate students as we continue supporting them in the Classroom Program.
Status of the Classroom Program for Spring 2017 in numbers, as of May 31:
Though a number of courses on a quarter system are still active on Wikipedia, the vast majority of our Spring 2017 cohort have completed their Wikipedia assignments.
With the summer approaching, the Classroom Program team will be evaluating how we did during Wiki Ed’s most successful term to date. While growth is certainly one marker of success, we want to ensure that we continue to improve the quality of both our support and our students’ Wikipedia contributions. Toward this end, Helaine will spend time this summer reflecting on what went well during the Spring 2017 term and what projects and procedures are worth revisiting. In particular, we’ll be looking at ways to provide better support for the grading and assessment of Wikipedia assignments as well as thinking about how to best support different assignment types and class structures. We’ll also evaluate the success of Wiki Ed Office Hours, an initiative we launched in Fall 2016 to provide instructors with an opportunity to interact with Wiki Ed staff on a monthly basis using a video conferencing platform. We want to make sure that the support we offer is useful to our instructors as well as our staff, and the summer is an ideal time to examine our current practices and implement any changes for the Fall term. We will also be looking closely at the results of our Spring 2017 instructor survey to refine and expand our materials and resources.
Student work highlights:
A student in David Sartorius’s History of the Caribbean class wrote an article on coartación, a system of manumission — where a slave owner frees his slave(s) — in Latin American slave societies. During this process, slaves would make a down payment to their owner and set a price for the cost of their freedom, conferring on them the status of “coartado.” The slave owner would then be unable to raise the price for the coartado’s freedom, nor could they treat a coartado as they would other slaves, effectively limiting or restricting the owner’s power. Coartados were granted special rights and privileges, such as receiving a portion of any money the master received for renting the coartado to others for work. Owners were also obligated to pay for the support of the coartado until they paid off the total cost of freedom. It was more common to see women and urban slaves seek manumission, as it would often be easier for them to gain outside employment.
Carie King’s class on Advanced Writing and Research chose to work together on a single article: Danforth Chapels. These chapels were created using funding provided by the Danforth Foundation, which was created in 1927 by William and Elizabeth Danforth, the former of whom co-founded the Ralston Purina Company. Twenty-four chapels were built across the United States, fifteen of which were built on colleges and universities, with the first constructed in 1941. The Danforth Foundation had only three requirements for the chapels: they must include religious imagery, they must have a plaque with the inscription “Dedicated to the worship of God with the prayer that here in the communion with the highest those who enter may acquire the spiritual power to aspire nobly, adventure daringly, serve humbly.”, and the Danforths must be allowed to have a say in the chapel’s design. While the chapels tended to focus predominantly on Christian iconography, the chapels were also designed to accommodate other faiths. Out of the twenty-four chapels built, three have been torn down to make way for other buildings and two have been designated National Historic Landmarks.
While self-cleaning surfaces sound like something a person who hates housework might dream up, they constitute a real class of natural and synthetic materials. Natural materials in this category include lotus leaves, butterfly wings and the feet of geckos. There was no Wikipedia article about this topic until it was created by students in Edmund Palermo’s Biology in Materials Science class. And if self-cleaning surfaces sound like science fiction, four-dimensional printing might be even more challenging to wrap your mind around. Created by another group of students in the class, the article explains that 4-D printing is a form of 3-D printing that incorporates the ability to transform after they have been printed, in response to certain circumstances. Bioglass 45S5 is a form of glass that can be directly bonded to bone. It can be used to reconstruct and regenerate bone and tooth enamel. Students made substantial improvements to the article by expanding it and reworking parts of it. Resilin, a protein produced by insects and other arthropods, is the most efficient elastic protein known. A student group expanded a short, three-paragraph article into something substantial by adding sections about the occurrence of the protein, its amino acid structure and composition, potential clinical applications, and work with the protein in genetically modified organisms. Other student groups substantially expanded the limpet, natural fiber, fibril, trabecula, surgical mesh, and soft robotics articles.
May began with the announcement that the Deep Carbon Observatory would be sponsoring a Visiting Scholar. The Deep Carbon Observatory is an interdisciplinary initiative through which about 1,000 chemists, physicists, geologists, and biologists from 35 countries explore the quantities, movements, forms, and origins of carbon deep within Earth. As part of its commitment to disseminate knowledge with the broader science community and with the public, we’re excited that it will facilitate the improvement of deep carbon-related subjects on Wikipedia through the Visiting Scholars program. See Community Engagement Manager Ryan McGrady’s blog post announcement for more information.
We also announced the placement of a new Visiting Scholar at Brown University’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Eryk Salvaggio, who edits as User:Owlsmcgee. Regular readers of these reports or our blog likely recognize Eryk’s name from his tenure as Wiki Ed’s former Communications Manager. He has previously made substantial contributions to a number of articles on Japanese culture, women in the arts, and political prisoners, and will be using Brown’s resources to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of an important academic area: ethnic studies. Read more about this Visiting Scholars collaboration in our blog post.
Existing Visiting Scholars continued to make excellent contributions to Wikipedia. George Mason University Visiting Scholar Gary Greenbaum brought two articles up to Wikipedia’s highest level of quality, Featured Article. The Vermont Sesquicentennial half dollar is a commemorative fifty-cent coin struck in 1927, marking the 150th anniversary of Vermont’s independence. The coin’s obverse depicts Vermont leader Ira Allen and the reverse, controversially, includes an unspecified big cat. Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. was a 1928 case concerning the question of liability to an unforeseeable plaintiff. When railroad employees helped two men board a train, one of the men dropped a package which exploded, causing a large scale to hit Helen Palsgraf. Palsgraf sued the railroad company, winning $6,000 from a jury. The decision was upheld on first appeal, but overturned when the company appealed a second time. Chief Judge Benjamin Cardozo wrote that the employees did not have a “duty of care” to Palsgraf because they could not have foreseen the harm when assisting the man with the package.
Northeastern University Visiting Scholar Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight is a prolific Wikipedian. This month she created or improved many articles on women writers, including nine “B-class” articles, which places them in the top 2.7% of all articles by quality. Emma Augusta Sharkey (1858-1902) was a writer, journalist, dime novelist, and storyteller who was one of a small group of women writers of her era who earned more than $6,000/year for her writing. Florence Huntley (1861-1912) was a journalist, editor, humorist, and occult author from Ohio. Ella Maria Dietz Clymer (1847-1920) was an actress and poet in New York City best known for her time as president of the women’s club Sorosis. Hattie Tyng Griswold (1842-1909) was a Massachusetts-born author and poet known for works like Apple Blossoms, Waiting on Destiny, Lucile and Her Friends, and The Home Life of Great Authors. Using pen names “Australia” and “Lucrece,” Cora Linn Daniels (b. 1852) was an author, editor, bibliophile, and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Harriett Ellen Grannis Arey (1819-1901) was an educator, author, editor, and publisher from Vermont. Ellen Russell Emerson (1837-1907) was an author and ethnologist from Maine who became the first woman to be an elected member of the Society Americaine de France. Lucinda Barbour Helm (1839-1897) was an author, editor, and religious activist from Kentucky who founded the Woman’s Parsonage and Home Mission Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Louise Manning Hodgkins (1846-2935) was an educator, author, and missionary newspaper editor from Massachusetts who taught at Lawrence College and Wellesley College and served as editor of The Heathen Woman’s Friend.
In early May, Director of Programs LiAnna Davis was invited to speak at Diablo Valley College in Pleasanton, California, on the topic of fake news. LiAnna was joined on the panel by East Bay Times education reporter Sam Richards, UC Berkeley e-learning and information studies librarian Cody Hennesy, California State Senator Bill Dodd, and student trustee Kwame Baah-Arhin. The panel was well received, and a video of it is available.
Later in the month, Ryan was invited to organize a session, “Integrating Wikipedia into the Curriculum,” at the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Adjunct Summer Institute in New York. Ryan was joined by two other Wiki Ed program participants, Iris Finkel of Hunter College and Anne Leonard of the New York City College of Technology, who shared their experiences assigning students to contribute to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.
Also in May, Ryan and Helaine sent out the fourth monthly newsletter to program participants. We piloted the newsletter as a way to stay in touch with instructors, disseminate information about ways to get involved, build community by sharing instructor publications and activities, and otherwise provide an update of what’s going on at Wiki Ed. The final newsletter solicited survey responses to gauge its effectiveness and determine whether we should continue the project in the next fiscal year.
Blog posts:
External media:
May was devoted primarily to bug fixes and refinements, maintenance work, and shoring up the technical foundations of the Dashboard. This work included upgrading our Ruby on Rails version to the latest release, and beginning a migration to the industry-standard Redux library for our client-side JavaScript code, along with several performance improvements and better handling of inconsistent data about individual articles and revisions.
With a support contract from the Wikimedia Foundation, we also started work in late May on a set of bug fixes and design improvements that affect the Wikimedia Programs & Events Dashboard, a fork of the Wiki Ed Dashboard software.
Beginning May 30, Product Manager Sage Ross, along with Wikimedia Foundation Design Researcher Jonathan Morgan, is mentoring three summer interns — Sejal Khatri, Keerthana S., and Medha Bansal — for design and coding projects to improve the Dashboard.
Research Fellow Zach McDowell finished writing a white paper summarizing the Student Learning Outcomes Fall 2016 research, along with preliminary analysis. Along with the white paper, Zach has prepared the data for release, including codebooks, sample analysis, and data visualization. The report is in final draft form as of the end of the month, for release in June.
In addition, Zach is preparing to give a talk at the New Media Consortium conference in Boston on June 14 along with Joseph Reagle on the research.
Research Assistant Mahala Stewart wrapped up her contract with us at the end of the month. Mahala was a great help with Zach’s analysis work, and we thank her for her help and wish her the best.
For the month of May, our expenses were $136,618 versus our approved budget of $162,925. The $26k variance is the net result of continued savings in staffing vacancies ($30k) and travel ($7k) offset by the timing of Professional Services ($15k).
Our year-to-date expenditures were $1,623,232. We continue to be well below our budgeted expenditure of $2,081,427 by $458k. As with the monthly variance, a large portion of the variance is a result of staffing vacancies ($226k), as well as additional savings in Professional Services ($53k); Travel ($95k); Marketing and Fundraising Events ($30k); Board and Staff meetings ($46k); Staff Development ($26k); and Printing ($19k). These were slightly offset by higher expenditures for temporary help ($13k); additional rent ($21k) and unforeseen government filing – legal fees ($10k).
In May, Wiki Ed received a $99,996 grant from the Wikimedia Foundation as part of their Simple Annual Plan Grant funding. The grant covers the time period of May 1 to September 30, 2017.
Executive Director Frank Schulenburg, Director of Development and Strategy TJ Bliss, and LiAnna engaged in a four-hour workshop on strategic communications for our forthcoming fundraising campaign with our media firm, PR & Company. Based on the workshop, we’ve created a strategic messaging guide that we will use in conversations, LOIs, and other engagements with potential funders.
Current priorities:
In May, Frank and the members of the senior leadership team finalized the first version of the annual plan and budget and sent it to the board. Board members then provided feedback via email and phone calls. The second and final version of the document was sent to the board at the end of the month. The board will vote on the 2017–18 plan and budget during its upcoming in-person meeting in San Francisco. Frank also attended board committee meetings and collaborated with board chair Diana Strassmann in planning the event in San Francisco.
In preparation for next fiscal year’s major campaign, Frank met with Eric Newton, Innovation Chief and Professor of Practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Arizona State University. As a result, Wiki Ed will partner with the Walter Cronkite School on a number of grant proposals.
Frank also created and submitted a grant report and a letter of intent, and engaged with a number of existing donors. Starting in June, TJ Bliss will support Wiki Ed’s development work.
by Gerard Meijssen (noreply@blogger.com) at July 05, 2017 05:16 PM
I’m excited to announce that TJ Bliss has agreed to join Wiki Education Foundation as Director of Development and Strategy. Many of us have gotten to know TJ from his former role as our program officer at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and I couldn’t be happier that he’s decided to join our team.
In his new role, TJ is responsible for overseeing our development strategy, developing relationships with key decision makers in the philanthropy community, and working with Wiki Ed’s board on creating our next organizational strategy. TJ has spent the last three years overseeing the Open Educational Resources portfolio at the Hewlett Foundation. Prior to his time at Hewlett, TJ was the Director of Assessment and Accountability for the State Department of Education in Idaho. He was also a member of the Open Education Group at BYU and the OER Policy Fellow at the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. TJ has a Ph.D. in Education, a Master’s Degree in Biology, and Bachelor’s Degree in Molecular and Microbiology. As a master’s student, he authored the Wikipedia article on Nematology. While he didn’t have any help from a faculty mentor on this, he wishes he had!
Outside of work, TJ enjoys spending time with his five little kids, playing tennis, jamming on the cello and piano, and riding his bike up mountain grades. TJ also enjoys cooking, watching BBC dramas, and researching his family history (sometimes simultaneously).
Welcome, TJ!
Photo by Ruby Mizrahi/ Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0.
On 26 April this year, Vinicius Siqueira celebrated the tenth anniversary of his first edit on Wikipedia. In the last decade, he has helped grow the Portuguese Wikipedia by creating hundreds of articles, making several thousand edits, and helping his fellow students learn how to edit. Over the years, Siqueira has charged himself with different tasks within the Wikipedia community as his aspirations changed.
At the age of fourteen, Siqueira joined Wikipedia. His first edit was to create an article about Mário Neme, a Brazilian writer. He followed this edit with nearly 40,000 more in the next ten years, which included creating over 650 new articles. At that time, Wikipedia played a dual role in Siqueira’s life by encouraging him to dig for information and share what he learned with the world. Siqueira shared with us his memories about his early days on Wikipedia:
“It started spontaneously, pushed by my curiosity and desire to discover and learn new things. I wrote and translated many articles in Portuguese. In the meantime, I’ve realized how big this project is and how important it is for people to find accurate information on anything in their own homes for free.
I believed that I was part of a revolution, a sense that every single person has the right to access information. The belief that knowledge should not be restricted by boundaries or barriers made me a lover of Wikipedia as a knowledge sharing tool. Many volunteers around the globe with this same passion created the biggest encyclopedia in the world. I love being part of this!”
Siqueira’s efforts kicked off with translating articles from the English and Spanish Wikipedias to grow the Portuguese Wikipedia, choosing topics of interest to him. However, once he started university, he redirected his energy towards a more specific discipline.
“I studied medicine and started to write more about medical topics,” he recalled. “It is very important to have accurate information [about medicine] in every language in the world, so that people can get informed about their health. … Wikipedia plays an important role on the internet by providing this advice free of charge.” Studying medicine not only influenced Siqueira’s contributions to Wikipedia; it helped with Wikipedia’s outreach to new communities on his campus.
In 2012, Brazil was one of the first countries to adopt the Wikipedia Education Program, where educators assign their students to edit Wikipedia as part of their class requirements. Siqueira was Wikipedia’s Campus Ambassador at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) where he taught his fellow students the editing basics.
“Thanks to this program, … the Portuguese Wikipedia has dozens of quality articles about physics (which used to be a weak area in the project),” says Siqueira. “The program helped us maintain good relationships with professors at the largest university in Brazil as well. That helped spread the word about Wikipedia to hundreds of students.”
Besides editing Wikipedia articles and reviewing edits made by new users, Siqueira is a member of Wikimedia User Group Brazil, where he helps the community organize events and projects to support the movement in his country. Despite demands on his time as a senior medical student, there is always something that encourages him to keep contributing to Wikipedia.
“There is something that makes my eyes shine and I feel really proud when I see someone reading or citing something I wrote on Wikipedia,” Siqueira said. “I’m from Brazil, a developing country where Wikipedia is a vital source of information because it’s free. People can get access to information on the internet, using data on their mobile phones or school networks, etc…. Wikipedia is a revolutionary tool for people in the world because it has made access to knowledge easier than ever before.”
Interview by Ruby Mizrahi, Interviewer
Profile by Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation
by Ruby Mizrahi and Samir Elsharbaty at July 04, 2017 10:37 PM
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
Changes this week
EventStreams is a new way to show activity on Wikimedia wikis. It works with the recent changes feed. It will do more things later. It will replace RCStream. Tools that use RCStream should move to EventStreams before 7 July. Tech News wrote about this in the 2017/07 issue. [2]Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Wiki NYC had a board meeting yesterday Saturday 1 July 2017 from 10-6pm at Ace Hotel on 28th Street. I am writing to describe the mood and focus of it. The significance of this meeting is that it is the first board reflection on our first year after having a significant budget, and looking forward to having confirmed funding for the next year, and for being together after various challenges and confirming that we all support each other personally and for our shared organizational goals.
The attendees were
Richard, Pete, Jim, and David have been supporting the development of the NYC Wikipedia chapter since 2007. They are the base of chapter organization and have participated in whatever has happened in the past 10 years. Ann, Ximena, Megan, Abhishek and I have been around Wiki NYC for about 5 years. Alice, Sherry, and Esther have been involved for about 2 years. Chuck was coming as an outsider to help discuss nonprofit governance, but as he has supervised my work at Consumer Reports, he has followed Wiki NYC activities since 2012. I like that the chapter has a committed base to keep it stable. I like that it has attracted various professional participants who bring their expertise to the group and also leverage the chapter to advance their fields of knowledge. I like that it is open enough that newer professionals join our group and find participation useful. At this point we have 11 people who serve on the board, but a pool of about 30 people who actually participate in some organizational governance, and maybe 100 people total who ask about matters of chapter organization. For each of the past three years, Wiki NYC has presented about 100 public events a year with about 2000 attendees a year. Perhaps there are 1500 people who have attended at least 3 Wiki NYC events. I enjoy spending time with the chapter organizers, and our event participants, and the guests who come to our programming. Many people around me say the same things. Participation in Wiki NYC to me is highly positive, encouraging, and friendly, and the organization means a lot to me.
It seems evident to me that Wiki NYC is an organization at the center of many people’s hopes and good wishes. While the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco develops the software and keeps the website operational, they do not touch the content of Wikipedia or participate in person to person conversations about how experts can share their information in Wikipedia. This Wiki NYC chapter focuses on that – we approach all sorts of organizations and ask them to integrate whatever information they have into Wikipedia. While software can act at scale to help people engage with the website, Wiki NYC facilitates the human interactions which lead people to leverage the online platform to deliver their information to Wikipedia’s large and relevant audience. I share information from Consumer Reports on Wikipedia. At this board meeting, the attendees advocated for better relationships between Wikipedia and NYC’s museums, libraries, universities, professional societies, research institutes, community organizations, foundations, and scientific academies. The mood at the meeting was that Wiki NYC is uniquely positioned to assist centers of information with distributing their information on Wikipedia. The organizations with the highest quality content generally have insufficient audience reach, while Wikipedia has great audience reach but needs higher quality information. Collaboration seems mutually beneficial.
Chuck Bell is a programs director at Consumer Reports and has acted as a liaison between CR and various nonprofit partners. Among other appointments, he is on the board of Nonprofit Quarterly, a magazine which presents journalism and research about the cultural of nonprofit organization. These and other experiences have made him a witness to all sorts of nonprofit management styles, and he began the board meeting by asking everyone tough questions about what Wiki NYC should try to accomplish and what objectives are a lesser priority and ought to be postponed until the chapter develops in other directions first. Wiki NYC has casually developed governance plans in the past, but this facilitated conversation was more serious and helped everyone more fully understand that Wiki NYC has a history of higher impact than typical other nonprofit organizations. Many individuals and organizations are looking to the collective Wikipedia editing community in NYC, and Wiki NYC is providing the service of convening these conversations so that individual contributors can advance their own good works.
We talked about the chapter’s budget. Although Wiki NYC had been operating since 2007, it only had its first significant funding for 2016-17 and in the amount of about $70,000. Prior to this, the chapter had organized events whenever we had donors to provide space and catering. What changed over time is that in 2007, the Wikimedia Foundation had a budget of less than $1,000,000 for everything it does. Even at that time Wikipedia among the 10 most popular websites in the world, and now 10 years later, Wikipedia has been a thought and opinion leader for 10 years which is an entire generation of global human thought. Having one billion regular readers is an almost unimaginable capture of attention, and all of us feel highly encouraged that Wikipedia is promoting nonprofit values without advertising and in the service of the community rather than any corporate interest. In 2017 the Wikimedia Foundation had a budget of about $80,000,000, so if they can give a little cash to a volunteer community group to get greater access to whatever information the top institutions in NYC have to share, then it is worthwhile for them to support outreach in this city. For 2017-18 they provided $80,000. There are other Wikimedia community organizations in the United States, but for example, the next largest community group is in Washington DC. NYC has a population 10 times that of DC and the NYC chapter has at least 10 times the participation from individuals and institutions, and is 10 times as productive. In the United States there really is no competition with NYC as a city with cultural influence. It is nice to do wiki in the United States, and it is nice to do wiki in NYC. The opportunities here are exciting.
Most of the money that Wiki NYC gets goes to lowering the barriers for individuals to engage with Wikipedia. When we had no money, local Wikipedia editors had to meet irregularly and in changing locations. Space in NYC is very expensive, and it can be stressful to have everyone change their schedules monthly and make different travel plans to attend every meeting. When we got a budget, we rented some space in Midtown at a cool nonprofit organization. Although we got offers for free space elsewhere, when we accepted offers from bigger organizations they always made overtures to receive favors from us as Wikipedians and otherwise try to influence us. An advantage of us paying a little money to a small nonprofit organization is that they are chill, we can talk to them human to human instead of human to organizational entity, and with them being a smaller organization they cement the Wikipedia culture of keeping our conversations and attitudes at the level of individuals rather than corporate process. Wiki NYC did just have a board meeting about governance, and we did plan the chapter bureaucracy, but part of the bureaucracy that we want to project is a push against hierarchy, corporate privilege, and more regulations. For now, it makes sense for us to create more rules about permitting fewer organizational entanglements in the future.
At the same time, Wiki NYC does have some commitments to supporting a lot of high profile institutions in NYC. Wiki NYC has had significant collaborations with lots of local organizations whose members, supporters, and people contribute to Wikipedia. Organizations which have done multiple instances of programming with Wiki NYC include Consumer Reports, the Met, MoMA, various CUNY schools, METRO, New York Botanical Garden, various NYU departments, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, various Columbia University departments, New York Academy of Medicine, New York Academy of Sciences, Rockefeller University, Brooklyn Public Library, the Guggenheim Museum, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York Public Library, the United Nations Youth Assembly, Touro College, and Center for Architecture and Design. I know that I am missing some organizations, and besides these, many other organizations have experimented with single events and single programs.
A challenge that Wiki NYC faces for the future is how to help all of these organizations understand what their engagement with Wikipedia is doing for everyone’s mutual benefit. Generally, organizations wish to engage with Wikipedia in order to deliver their content to a larger audience. For example, medical students might want to post content to Wikipedia in order to share health information with people who are seeking it online. It is becoming more unthinkable with each passing year, but in 2007 for example, most organizations did not consider communication in the Internet to be a way to share information. Even among those organizations which said that they did want to publish online, few actually did, and even the ones that were doing online publishing were doing it in an immature way that is quite different from how things are done now. The Wikipedia article on any given topic is usually the most requested, published, accessed, and consulted source of information on that topic. However, Wikipedia has its own challenges in communicating its impact. Whereas Facebook and Twitter, for example, have interfaces which assist professional communication managers in understanding all sorts of audience metrics about what people in those platforms are doing, Wikipedia currently has no such interfaces in common use. Wiki NYC has piloted various communication strategies. Typically, if an organization partners with Wiki NYC to share information, then in return, Wiki NYC tries to provide that organization with a report of the audience who accessed their content in Wikipedia and of how the audience responded to it. This is tedious work and some of the money which Wiki NYC gets from the Wikimedia Foundation goes to making it easier for the chapter to provide these reports as a negotiating tool to persuade expert institutions to judge how Wikipedia can help them share information.
All of the people who attended this board meeting have their own reasons for joining. Something that we all have in common is that we all care deeply about making information more accessible, and that we all have seen the power of Wikipedia to make large amounts of high quality information available to people who start using it immediately. I feel like Wiki NYC has a bright future of success in front of it. A comment that came up in the board meeting was that we want to “Make Wikipedia as democratic and accessible as the New York City Subway”, in the sense that Wikipedia is a public amenity which everyone uses while they are doing whatever else is important to them. We are still determining what we ought to do to be more effective but I do feel encouraged about ongoing successes and fun times.
by Gerard Meijssen (noreply@blogger.com) at July 02, 2017 09:00 AM
by Gerard Meijssen (noreply@blogger.com) at July 01, 2017 10:46 AM
Painting by Viktor Vasnetsov, public domain.
A large corpus of content on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and other Wikimedia projects is freely available because it is in the public domain. The public domain is an important pillar of free knowledge, creativity, and innovation as well as an indispensable counterweight to exclusive rights on intellectual property. We all benefit from it as we access this rich body of culture and information, share it, and freely reuse it to create new works.
Once copyright expires (in much of the world, not until 50 or 70 years after the author’s death), works enter the public domain and are then free to be shared and included in the Wikimedia projects. The current length of copyright terms keeps works out of the public domain for easily over one hundred years after their creation. Wikimedians support shorter copyright terms to allow the public to benefit from works sooner, increasing everyone’s free access to knowledge. The public domain, as part of the commons, is not privately owned, but free for everyone to enjoy and benefit from. One challenge that we as a society face today is preserving our cultural heritage and making it available in digital formats that can be shared all over the world. To digitize works, Wikimedians photograph art and documents, scan books, and upload the resulting files to a Wikimedia project, often in collaboration with cultural heritage (or: GLAM) institutions. These efforts benefit us all by allowing everybody access to cultural heritage works, even those who are not able to go to the GLAM institutions where they are physically housed.
Recently, however, the act of digitizing works that are in the public domain to make them available to anyone has caused some controversy. While many museums are adopting new technology to make their collections more available and accessible to a wider audience, others have been concerned that photographs of public domain works in their collections are available freely online. In Germany, for instance, the Reiss-Engelhorn museums have sued the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland over the use of images of cultural artefacts and paintings. Recently, the court has decided that even a photographer’s own images of these works will infringe on the museums’ property. Similarly, in Norway and Germany, institutions have tried to extend control over the use of images of items in their collections through trademarks. And in Spain, copyright law awards 25 years of exclusive rights for certain kinds of mere reproductions of works. In many more countries the legal situation is inconclusive.
These cases and national rules raise larger questions about the balance of exclusive rights and the public domain, and about access to culture and knowledge. How will society benefit from works that are in the public domain in the future if other exclusive rights are threatening to privatize it again? How can the public domain expand to benefit everyone if exclusive rights keep being created and extended to keep works from entering the public domain? How can we make sure that the right to participation in culture and knowledge is promoted and the internet’s promise of bringing valuable content to everyone is upheld?
It is imperative to make sure future generations can enjoy a vibrant public domain. Therefore, the law should not grant new exclusive rights for faithful reproductions and digitizations of works that are in the public domain. European lawmakers are currently debating copyright reform for the EU, and they now have the opportunity to safeguard the public domain from vested interests that threaten to privatize culture and knowledge. We encourage them to adopt rules that guarantee that the public domain will remain free and vivid. Preserving our cultural and scientific knowledge for the digital age is a monumental task for society, but pursuing that preservation should not undermine the ability for all to participate in culture and knowledge. The public domain and exclusive rights are two sides of one and the same equation. We already protect exclusive rights, it is time to balance the equation by protecting the public domain as well!
Jan Gerlach, Public Policy Manager, Wikimedia Foundation
Dimitar Dimitrov, Project Lead, Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU
by Jan Gerlach and Dimitar Dimitrov at June 30, 2017 09:11 PM
We’re pleased to announce two new resources for students contributing to Wikipedia articles about books or films!
One of the ways we support classes working on Wikipedia for a class assignment is through printed handouts and brochures. Wikipedia can be an intimidating place for a new user, and it’s easy to get lost in the many pages of policies, guidelines, essays, and help pages. Every class has access to interactive training through the Dashboard, but sometimes it helps to have a printed guidebook that provides succinct instructions and best practices.
In addition to brochures that provide general advice about editing Wikipedia, we also have a collection of subject-specific handouts. Most focus on a particular discipline or topic area, such as political science or linguistics. Others concern particular types of articles that cut across disciplines, like our handout on how to work on biographies.
Books and films, like biographies, are articles students contribute to in a wide range of classes. In the past, students have contributed to articles like Wenjack, The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975, The Vanishing American, Garden, Ashes, and Passing.
Articles about books and films tend to follow a standard format, with common section headings, organizational themes, and ways of presenting information. These guides summarize these structural elements, and provide more general tips and best practices — as well as common pitfalls — when it comes to references, neutrality, and style.
PDFs of the brochures are available on Wikimedia Commons (books, films). To request printed copies of these handouts for your class, email us at contact@wikiedu.org.
Me, Davit Saroyan, as part of the organizing team of the 2017 Wikimedia Conference (far right). Photo by Jason Krüger, CC BY-SA 4.0.
My story begins with a short episode at the Wikimedia Armenia office. After the 2016 Wikimedia Conference, my colleague Lilit Tarkhanyan sent me a link to a new project from Wikimedia Germany (Deutschland) and said that I should check it out.
The project was their Visiting Wikimedian program, and it became a turning point for me. I explored the project and its requirements, read Teele Vaalma’s previous experience, and felt like it was a crazy idea, one that I had almost no shot at being selected. Still, I also knew that I had to try.
Luckily, there was an opportunity waiting for me: Nicole Ebber and Cornelius Kibelka offered me a three-month internship to work with them.
It took me some time to master how to introduce my new role. I was new not only to Wikimedia Germany but (for the most part) the Wikimedia movement, so it was important to introduce myself properly during each meeting or call. Now I’ll do it for you too:
Hi, my name is Davit Saroyan, the Program Manager of Wikimedia Armenia. I was at Wikimedia Germany because I had been selected to be the 2017 Visiting Wikimedian, where I mostly supported that year’s Wikimedia Conference team—especially Cornelius Kibelka. The Visiting Wikimedian program aims to pass knowledge from the German chapter to other Wikimedia affiliates. After being there for three months, I returned back to use my learnings at my home chapter.
Having made it to Germany, I found myself waiting for a train in an underground station. I would soon work at a foreign organization for the first time in my life. I was excited. I had doubts. I had fears. “Einsteigen, bitte” (Get in, please), the automatic voice said from the arrived train. I got in.
I was introduced to Wikimedia Germany, its departments, activities and people. I entered every department, and staff members were very kind to tell me about their work and experiences. I learned about the amazing and collaborative work they do and how this work comes together to create something great. The working language for me was English, which was unusual and hard. I struggled a lot when communicating and completing tasks, but also felt like I was communicating more and more easily with every new day.
When in the office, I sat with the Event Management team—Daniela Gentner, Wenke Storn and Mona Huber, who were amazing people as always.
Among my first tasks was one that I think of as my first big step toward exploring the Wikimedia movement from the German perspective. I was to draw a large map of the world without borders on one of the drawable walls in the office, marking the locations of every Wikimedia organization with the photos of their board chairs and executive directors.
World map of Wikimedia organizations in the Wikimedia Germany office, drawn by Davit Saroyan.Photo by Elisabeth Mandl, CC BY-SA 4.0.
This task helped me visually express the diversity of Wikimedia organizations, get to know their heads, and understand the distributions of the chapters all over the world (you can clearly see the gaps, I suspect). Having not been to an international Wikimedia conference before, building this graphic threw the movement’s diversity into stark relief.
Another major task given to me was to create an infographic, based on the follow-up page from previous Wikimedia Conferences, that reflected the important topics of the Wikimedia Conference, their connections, and how they have evolved since 2015. I took the colors and design from the Berlin Underground (U-Bahn) map, which I saw every day, researched, mapped the connections, defined the timeline, and used my visualization skills to draw it. Though I had known about some of the turning points before, this poster gave me a clearer view of the whole image of interconnected events in the Wikimedia Movement.
How have the Wikimedia Conference’s main topics evolved since 2015? Infographic by Davit Saroyan, CC BY-SA 4.0.
And finally, when organizing a party quiz game, I had to go through many wiki related pages looking for interesting facts on the Wikimedia Movement. I stumbled upon interesting stories, learnings, and facts that I did not know before.
The most important work I did was to support the design and implementation of the Wikimedia Conference’s program. I will not go into details of the program design because the information is available on Meta, but instead I will highlight my most valuable learnings.
The registration process was almost over, and we had lots of data to work with. Our first task was to analyze the data, identify, and evaluate the needs and find appropriate people who would accomplish this need at the conference. I learned how to analyze and cluster the answers of participants, find key words, group them, and come up with potential topics. Cornelius, who has much more experience in this work, helped me understand how these topics can be transformed into real sessions, how the need can be matched and connected to the potential speakers in order to accomplish this need. These sessions would later form the final conference program.
After designing sessions, finding speakers and having their approval, Cornelius came up with the nice idea of having calls with the speakers to make these sessions better. There are a lot of learnings behind this idea, that’s why I’ve written a learning pattern.
The Wikimedia Conference team noticed my passion for graphic design and started giving me more tasks in that area. This led to me making almost all the signage and posters that people saw at the Wikimedia Conference. I also designed the “How to survive in Berlin” conference guide. All of these would have been impossible without Wikimedia Germany’s style guide.
Long before me, Wenke Storn initiated the “Buddy Project” to make the conference more social by helping newcomers integrate into it. After my arrival, I also became involved in this project, and I later—with Chiara Weiß, a volunteer from the federal volunteers service—were charged with carrying it out. More on the project and what we learned from it is available on Meta-Wiki.
These are the major projects and tasks I worked on during my time at Wikimedia Germany. I have to thank the conference team for their incredible help. They helped me to learn. They helped me to feel welcome.
This will be the most emotional part. After being involved with the conference team for almost three months, I still had little idea of how the conference would actually look like—again, I’d never been to one before. When it began, I was at the registration desk when people started streaming in, and in one of the conference rooms when sessions were running. The atmosphere was magical. The people I’ve emailed, and met only through a screen, are now real. I met many wonderful people in person. I had conversations with many of them about the Wikimedia movement in their communities. I was amazed by the diversity of their communities and activities. I was amazed by the Wikimedia movement as a whole.
The conference was when I realized how connected I was to the conference team that made all of this magic happen. I felt like I could not work or be anywhere else, and I now miss those days, my team, and the German chapter a lot.
My story ends with another flashback, this time at Wikimedia Germany’s office, after the end of the conference. After hugging Daniela, Wenke, Mona and saying goodbye, Wenke told me that “There are two things you should definitely take back with you to Armenia: your memories of Berlin and your pride for being a part of the Wikimedia Conference”.
Davit Saroyan, Program Manager
Wikimedia Armenia
Would you like to be the next Visiting Wikimedian for the Wikimedia Conference 2018 at Wikimedia Germany? The next application process will start in September/October this year. Check the page on Meta for updates.
If you would like to learn more about the Wikimedia Conference 2017 in Berlin and its outcomes, check out the recently published conference report.
Students editing at a Wikipedia workshop. Photo by Essam Sharaf, CC BY-SA 3.0.
The Wikimedia Egypt Prize is a writing contest that aims at improving Arabic content on Wikimedia projects. This year’s edition has encouraged 30 participants to develop their editing skills and create and improve several hundred articles on the Arabic Wikipedia.
Concentrating its efforts on beginner-level, rather than established editors is a distinguishing characteristic from other writing contests. A ground rule has limited the participation to users with under 1000 Wikipedia edits.
“It is an opportunity for newbies that urges them to contribute and provides them with a tolerably competitive atmosphere,” says Walaa Abdel Manaem, a member of the prize committee. She continues:
“This one is different as it is targeted to beginners in general and student editors in particular. We have a writing contest called the Producer Prize on the Arabic Wikipedia, where usually highly-experienced editors can compete, and we have the WikiWomen contest and Somou Prize, both focus on making significant progress in a short amount of time. The Wikimedia Egypt Prize is a short-term contest as well, but the competition is not as fierce as it is mainly for beginner users.”
Beginner contributions, however, doesn’t mean low-quality content. A new article “must be written in clear language, well-formatted, categorized and referenced,” the project page reads. “Any article that doesn’t meet these requirements will not be considered.” More points are given to participants who add an infobox, more links and references to their articles.
Opening the contest for experienced users may have resulted in greater results, but Mohamed Ouda, who had the first idea for the contest, thought that “beginners need more support in order to keep editing.” Ahmed Hamdi Mohi, a member of the prize committee, agrees that the contest “helps both retain entry-level editors and attract many new editors and get them integrated into the Wikipedia community to gain experience in editing.”
The contest started on 1 January 2017 and lasted through 15 April. By the end, the participants had created 493 new articles and improved 220 existing articles. Many participants went above and beyond with their contributions, but ultimately 3 prizes went to:
Photo by Xabier Cañas, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Basque Wikimedians expand Wikipedia in education efforts: During the winter and spring terms this year, the Basque Wikimedians have expanded their education program to the campus of the public University of the Basque Country in Leioa, Bilbao. In the Donostia-San Sebastian campus, Wiki GLAM collaboration continued their 2016 efforts to bridge the gap between Wikipedia, children’s literature and university. More in the This Month In Education newsletter.
Wikidata milestone: Wikidata, the free knowledge base that hosts structured data from Wikipedia and its sister Wikimedia projects has reached 500,000,000 edits. The half-billionth edit was to the Olfr343-ps1 item page, pseudogene in the species Mus musculus (house mouse).
Kenyan Wikipedian named one of Mozilla’s Network50: Wikipedia editor and Wikimedia Kenya board member Alex Wafula was named to Mozilla’s 50 people who made the internet a better place in 2016.
WikidataCon 2017: WikidataCon is the conference dedicated to the Wikidata community that will be held on 28 and 29 October 2017 in the Tagesspiegel venue, in Berlin. Scholarship applications to attend the conference are open through 16 July and program submissions are being accepted through 31 July.
FDC election results: The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) is a diverse body of people reflecting different aspects of the Wikimedia movement, including its geographic, linguistic, and cultural diversity. The committee’s role is to help make decisions about how to effectively allocate movement funds to achieve Wikimedia’s mission, vision, and strategy. This year’s election results have been announced, and Michał Buczyński, Lorenzo Losa, Liam Wyatt, Osmar Valdebenito, and Katherine Bavage have all been elected to the committee. Kirill Lokshin was re-elected as the FDC’s Ombudsperson.
Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves competition concludes: Biosphere Reserves are areas of terrestrial and coastal/marine ecosystems or a combination thereof, which are internationally recognized within the framework of UNESCO’s Programme on Man and the Biopshere (MAB). Wiki Loves Earth has partnered with UNESCO to create Wiki Loves Earth Biosphere Reserves, a photography competition to create free to use images of Biosphere Reserves around the world on Wikimedia Commons, the media site for Wikipedia. The contest was open from 1 May and concludes on 30 June 2017.
Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation
by Gerard Meijssen (noreply@blogger.com) at June 30, 2017 05:43 AM
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| Honnametti rock |
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| Memorial to Randolph Camroux Morris |
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| Grave of Mary Macdonald, wife of Leslie Coleman, who in a way founded the University of Agricultural Sciences. Coleman was perhaps the first to teach the German language in Bangalore to Indian students. |
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| Sidlu kallu or lightning-split-rock, another local landmark. |
by Shyamal L. (noreply@blogger.com) at June 30, 2017 04:36 AM
20/06/2017-26/06/2017
Validator map for sharp turns onto ramps 1 | © Mapbox © OpenStreetMap contributors ODbL
/ CBC 
for mapping boundaries of the First Nations and Inuits (native Americans) territories. Pierre Béland suggests on Talk-ca that there is an equal opportunity for publicity for OSM by highlighting the quality of OSM in the same places.
relations, tags and trail maintenance for the Sentiero Italia, a long-distance path initiated in the 1980s. As guideposts and official sources don’t always coincide, OSM mapping could be the incentive to revive this picturesque route. of Piedmont for hikers and mountain biking that merges OSM to the official regional cartography. The improvements are visible on zoom levels 11 to 15, now much more detailed, and in the inclusion of neighbouring areas’ open datasets.Version 3.0.0 of Nominatim is now out. The result is a much smaller database and improved query response times. The most important feature is undoubtedly the on-the-fly address interpolation, as it makes sense to address blocks of houses that are particularly popular in North and South America. Sarah Hoffmann, aka lonvia told us, that Nominatim has now officially moved to openstreetmap.org on GitHub and nominatim.org is currently being expanded into the official homepage.
| Software | Version | Release date | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mapillary Android * | 3.61 | 2017-06-14 | Next fix of stray images upload problems. |
| Mapzen Lost | 3.0.1 | 2017-06-19 | Bugfix release. |
| Locus Map Free * | 3.24.2 | 2017-06-20 | No Infos. |
| Maps.me Android * | var | 2017-06-21 | No Infos. |
| Maps.me iOS * | 7.3.6 | 2017-06-21 | Bugfix release. |
| OSRM Backend | 5.8.0 | 2017-06-21 | Many changes, please read release info. |
| Mapillary iOS * | 4.7.4 | 2017-06-22 | Two bugs fixed. |
| Kurviger Free * | 1.1.1 | 2017-06-23 | Mapzen map: several improvements, Mapstyle: Kurviger style is the default style. |
| QGIS | 2.18.10 | 2017-06-23 | No infos. |
| Overpass-Turbo | 2017-06-25 | 2017-06-25 | Many changes during the last days, please read release infos. |
| guide4you | 2.0.5 | 2017-06-26 | No Infos. |
| Nominatim | 3.0.0 | 2017-06-26 | New database format. Please read release info. |
Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist. Timestamp: 2017-06-26 18:14:22+02 UTC
(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.
followed a group of enthusiasts of OSM along their thorough mapping wanderings. “A free map of the world”.
Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropriate.
This weeklyOSM was produced by Anne Ghisla, Nakaner, PierZen, SK53, SeleneYang, SomeoneElse, Spec80, derFred, jinalfoflia, keithonearth, kreuzschnabel, wambacher.
Anne Leonard is an Information Literacy Librarian at New York City College of Technology. In this post she reflects on her experience incorporating Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons into her course, Learning Places: Understanding the City.
Interdisciplinary learning and place-based learning are at the heart of General Education at City Tech. For the past several semesters, librarians have been co-teaching Learning Places: Understanding the City, an interdisciplinary approach to investigating the urban built environment through a case study of a specific place, chosen by the instructors. Typically the course is team-taught by 2 or more faculty from different departments; in this case, I taught with a colleague from the department of Architectural Technology. We selected Vinegar Hill, a neighborhood within a 15 minute walk of our downtown Brooklyn campus. This residential and industrial neighborhood contains an electric substation, a small historic district, a public housing project of nearly 1,400 apartments in ten high-rise buildings, and is adjacent to the East River waterfront, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and a thoroughly gentrified upscale loft district. This diversity of land use combined with a rich industrial past and a future facing complex issues around gentrification and sustainability led students to generate compelling hypotheses to test using field research as well as research in New York City’s many special collections and archives. In the past, the Wikipedia assignment was a high-stakes group production of a brand-new article. This semester, the case-study design of the course did not afford this, so I redesigned the Wikipedia assignment to include contributions to Wikimedia Commons. Each field visit to the site we study is a chance for students to document the place through photographs. These images become the content they share through Wikimedia Commons.
When we introduced the assignment, we asked students about their regular use of Wikipedia, whether it be academic or personal. Many said they used it much less frequently than in the past – referencing their high school experiences – as their college instructors had warned them never to use Wikipedia, in one case even threatening to dock their grade if it was determined that sources from the reference lists of relevant Wikipedia articles were used. Understanding this in advance made me realize that we needed to re-introduce students to Wikipedia, so we read together several articles relevant to our site not only to learn about the area, but to consider what content was incomplete or in need of improvement. The Wikipedia assignment has both individual and group work components, and students have a lot of latitude and agency to select articles to edit, revise, and improve with references. Edits, references, and media uploads were individual tasks, and each research team then posted a summary of their work and its relevance to their research topic to the course blog. Some students, proud of their public writing (or perhaps concerned that their contributions would be overwritten or reverted), illustrated their blog posts with screenshots from Wikipedia.
My assumptions about the teaching and learning affordances of Wikipedia were challenged and even broadened with this low-stakes assignment. Most site documentation happened during the 2 or 3 field research visits, which took place early in the semester, before students clearly articulated their hypotheses. Without a specific question or problem yet in mind, students documented freely with their phones, photographing the streetscape, historic residential and industrial buildings, infrastructure, and distinctive features of the place, including wall murals and streets paved with Belgian block. Even without prior exposure to content on Wikimedia Commons, students easily spoke the language shared by much of the Commons content that documents the built environment. Their contributions are vernacular, ordinary – a mural, an intersection, a streetscape of low-rise buildings, sidewalks, and parked cars. Though we did not spend a lot of time in class reviewing existing Wikimedia Commons content on their topics, they naturally adopted a documentary style that is in keeping with much of the Wikimedia Commons content that documents urban places. Their photos made minimal use of filters or panoramic effects, unlike how (I imagine) they present the images from their phones in their day-to-day lives using the filters and effects of social media platforms. By and large, the students wisely grasped how Wikimedia Commons images are intended to communicate without an explicit lesson or discussion, thereby demonstrating the visual knowledge that they bring to the class.
The Wikimedia Commons component of the assignment was simple: select an original image from your own work, assign a Creative Commons license, and assign a relevant category. There was no requirement to add the image to a relevant article, though some students decided that an improvement to their article meant adding one of their images. A new assignment always brings surprises and challenges. I was surprised to see that the most difficult part of the assignment, fully realized by only a few students, was assigning categories to their images. Other surprises included how inconsistently and cavalierly they approached the training; only about half finished the required three modules, but a few completed all 6. Later my colleague commented on the ease with which someone could cheat on the training modules and we agreed to supplement them with a lab, practicum, or quiz, or consider flipping the assignment next time by reviewing the training modules during class time.
I have thought of a number of ways to enrich and extend this assignment in the future; the challenge now is to select just 1 or 2 directions to pursue the next time I teach the course. I think that even more discussion about what constitutes a valuable contribution to the Wikimedia Commons would help students identify even more images of value from their own work. Next time, I would like for class discussion to generate a rubric for students to evaluate their own work and peers’ work. I will also review the assigning of categories and titles for images that give sufficient context to identify the image. Next time, I will participate in the image-uploading assignment along with them; after all, I take part in the field visits and document with my cellphone camera as they do; why shouldn’t I share my work with the class and with the community of Wikimedia Commons users? Students have a responsibility to learn about Creative Commons licenses, and then use that knowledge to choose an appropriate license for their work that they are comfortable with; this is another means to empower them, to encourage their creativity, and then showcase their developing knowledge and aesthetic sensibilities. Assigning Creative Commons licenses to the other content they create, including the site for final projects, would be another way to put this knowledge into practice. Once we review contributions in class, an interesting facet of information literacy comes to light: the gathering and display of metadata, including the timestamp, GPS location, and camera equipment, a jumping-off point to a discussion about privacy and consent, authorship and intellectual property.
by Gerard Meijssen (noreply@blogger.com) at June 29, 2017 06:16 AM
There will be a workshop at the State Library of Western Australia this Saturday from 1 p.m., for anyone to come along and learn how to add just one citation to just one Wikipedia article (or more of either, of course). For more details, see meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiClubWest.
Written by Nour Geres
It has been over a year and a half since Dundee Dental School first established the Wikipedia Editing Project, a student-led effort with the intent of improving dental articles on the site. Students at Dundee first learned of the deficiency and often absence of dental information on Wikipedia from a former Wikipedian in residence with the Cochrane Collaboration. A group of students felt change was necessary as they were disappointed from their own experience of having used Wikipedia to search for dental topics. So they decided to take the lead in establishing the UK’s first continuously running dental Editing Group.
To recruit students, an introductory event was held: a lecture was given on the type of research generally conducted and the type suitable for citation on dental Wikipedia articles. This was followed by a tutorial on how to edit. Those interested then sign up to an Editing Group which met on a regular basis to edit assigned topics. At the end of each semester, groups presented their edits before peers and lecturers. This was an opportunity for our editors to showcase their work and allowed for a chance to discuss the chosen topics and any challenges faced in the process of editing. Since the establishment of the group in early 2016, our students have made a tangible difference for the benefit of their peers, dentists and the general public, through the creation of numerous new pages as well as the expansion and improvement of existing ones. Below is just a small sample of the pages developed by our students:
The dedication and effort demonstrated by our editors at Dundee has been remarkable. Their contribution to the dissemination of evidence based dentistry has sparked the interest of many in the dental community and word quickly spread through news outlets and social media blogs. By February 2017 the Dundee Dental Wikipedia Editing Project expanded to include the growing number of schools joining the cause and so the Wikiepdia Collaboration of Dental Schools was born. The Collaboration now includes the Cairo branch of the University of Dundee (who edit in both English and Arabic), Glasgow, Aberdeen and Manchester Dental Schools in the UK as well as Tufts and Harvard Schools of Dental Medicine and New York University College of Dentistry in the USA. These schools are currently in the process of establishing their own Editing Groups as well as undergoing training, under the guidance of Dundee Dental School, with the aim of having their groups up and running by the coming academic year.
We are thrilled that others have joined our cause and look forward to the unique contribution each school will bring to the Project. Over the coming year we aim to work as an international community of students, dentists and academics to enhance the accessibility of accurate, up-to date, evidence based information through Wikipedia. Our long-term vision is to enable the existence of a large online community of editors that will work collectively to maintain, update and expand information on the Encyclopaedia. We would be delighted if any individuals or schools wish to join and welcome you to get in touch at ngeres@dundee.ac.uk or through our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/WikiCollab/
Photo by NOAA/Satellite and Information Service, public domain.
In April 2002, I was listening to Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” while on a car ride. Up until that point, my 13-year-old mind was convinced that I was going to be a meteorologist one day. This obsession could stem back to August 1992, when I would have heard the name Hurricane Andrew a lot on the news. It was also around age four when I started playing piano.
The earliest storm I remember was Hurricane Erin in July 1995, part of the busy 1995 Atlantic hurricane season. In the path of Erin was where my grandparents and cousins lived, so I followed the storm closely, just like all 297 named storms since then. But during that fateful car ride, my Dad and I listened to Billy Joel’s Millennium Concert. I was enthralled by the complexity of “Scenes,” and for the first time in my life, I considered a career as a musician. Today in 2017, most of what I do is related to music. Still, as my burgeoning piano interest continued, so did my passion for hurricanes.
I came to find that I needed a balance of artistic expression and the cathartic power of nature.
In the days before I knew about Wikipedia, I grew annoyed at the primitive World Wide Web. There were websites on practically everything, but no way to organize the information. I poured through what sources I could find, reading the National Hurricane Center‘s tropical cyclone reports for leisure. I noticed that there were a lot of older storms that I couldn’t find almost any information on. The Atlantic hurricane best track went back to 1851, but the tropical cyclone reports only went back to 1997. I eventually discovered Wikipedia in December 2004 in one of my hurricane research projects. I was surprised the website had coverage on hurricanes back to 1950, but I knew of storms before the start of the naming era. As an anonymous user, I started creating articles on hurricane articles and seasons. In August 2005, I formally joined Wikipedia due to my increasing edits to that year’s record-breaking Atlantic hurricane season. Within a few months, I worked with other Wikipedians to extend Wikipedia’s coverage on Atlantic hurricanes as far back as records went, and we later extended our efforts worldwide as Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones (the WPTC). It was that community of fellow editors that hooked me from the beginning—users who I could talk about storms with and who supported my work. Even today, I talk almost daily with fellow users on Facebook or IRC, a more regular relationship than I have with some of my offline friends.
I’ve had several close calls with hurricanes in real life. The first was in September 2003, when Hurricane Isabel had an outside chance of affecting us as a hurricane. For perspective, New Jersey hadn’t been hit by a hurricane since September 1903, so there was a little whysteria (a portmanteau of weather+hysteria, coined by my brother). We had another close call with Hurricane Irene. I evacuated to my brother’s house, and worried of the potential destruction after we lost power, but it ended up affecting us little. We weren’t so lucky when Hurricane Sandy came ashore in October 2012. I again evacuated to my brother’s house, but we didn’t lose power, so we watched in real time as lower New York flooded, wondering what was happening at home. With $30 billion in damage to my state, I’m still reminded of the destructive power of nature at a local level. It would do no good to lament about the destruction, and instead it inspires me to keep writing.
———
All that said, it was Isabel that consumed my online attention during my first college winter break in December 2006. Five months later, I’d written four featured articles and four good articles—both being markers of high quality—on the hurricane and its effects. This allowed me to successfully nominate Hurricane Isabel as a featured topic. Working on a collection of articles, rather than researching randomly, meant that I would find sources that could be used for multiple articles, and it was quicker to edit because I knew the time period/area better. In fact, I know a lot about the culture, politics, and to an extent even language about a lot of areas around the world.
Tropical cyclones can form in most of the major bodies of water on Planet Earth, as long as the waters are warm enough, including the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean, the waters around Oceania (and Australia), and most of the Pacific Ocean. Curiously, this excludes the waters west of South America; perhaps the lack of tropical cyclones gave the Inca Empire a leg up to become the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. As I’ve studied and written on Wikipedia more, I learned about how tropical cyclones have altered our history. In 1970, a cyclone killed 500,000 people when it struck the province of East Pakistan, now known as Bangladesh. The government’s poor response fueled the country’s independence movement. A near repeat occurred in 1991, when 138,000 people died in Bangladesh. I was alive in 1991, and in the days of satellite and warning, that many people should not die because of a natural disaster that is moving at 28 mph (slightly slower than Usain Bolt‘s record speed in 2009). With proper planning and evacuations, a similar cyclone in 1994 had a death toll just 0.17% of the 1991 storm. Sadly, though, 1970 was not the last time that such a death toll would be seen. At least 138,000 people died in May 2008 when neighboring Myanmar/Burma was hit by Cyclone Nargis. I created the English Wikipedia article on that tropical cyclone, but my edits largely stopped once I realized how big of a disaster it was. At a certain point, other editors came in and filled the article, which allowed me to disengage and recover from the tales of human suffering.
As an example why I still edit, a 10 kilobyte chunk of data was removed from the Nargis article in 2010 and wasn’t restored for three years. Unfortunately, these things happen, but that’s what impresses about the WPTC editors. They are global in their writing, and several of them write for other meteorology WikiProjects, such as tornadoes and non-tropical cyclones. I am immensely proud of the other WPTC editors for their dedication into researching these storms of nature’s fury. Several of them are studying meteorology in college or are even experts in their field. I felt this dedication strongly in 2011, when I participated in and won the annual WikiCup. The experience pit me against many other Wikipedians, several of which were members in WPTC. I was surprised just how many Wikipedians felt passionate about improving articles.
Over the years, I have added to my featured and good article count, but looking back now at my earliest work, I find myself disappointed. There are far too many projects I need to go back and improve, whether that’s due to having access to newer sources or simple things like wording differently. But I have plenty of time and I don’t intend to retire soon.
During my college years, I learned how Wikipedia provided a balance for me, an escape to the stressful studies of being a musician at University of the Arts. A few times, I walked away from Wikipedia, but my breaks would inevitably come to an end as I rediscovered that yearning for learning. I do wonder if my work on Wikipedia might help researchers now or one day. At minimum, I hope the random free time I’ve spent on this website will help someone else looking up the topic.
Oh, and to few people’s surprise, I’ve written a song called “Hurricane,” and I’m writing a musical that features a hurricane in the plot. Thank you, Jimmy Wales, for starting this experimental website way back in 2001. As the digital world spreads across the globe, we need free access to information to empower all 7.5 billion or so people on this one beautiful planet.
Andrew Hink (User:Hurricanehink), Wikipedia editor
Sarah Vital is Business Librarian at Saint Mary’s College of California. In this post she talks about having accounting students contribute to Wikipedia to train them to communicate with a general audience.
On the first day of the class, I walk into a room full of bright-eyed and eager accounting students. They have their accounting textbooks and, even in 2016, they had their calculators. The course they are enrolled in is an accounting “lab.” They were ready to crunch numbers. But I, a librarian and lecturer in business communication, can’t help them with cost-volume-profit analysis. What I’m tasked with doing is helping them develop clear, professional writing.
The faculty of the Accounting department at Saint Mary’s were very intentional in making the required “Writing in the Discipline” course outside of traditional accounting classes. The quote I heard over and over was “accountants talking to accountants can’t learn how to talk to clients.” This was the driving force behind what I aimed to do with the students in the course. I know that their amazing accounting faculty will teach them accounting principles and practices; as a “lay” person, I would teach them how to explain that all to someone who doesn’t have those hours of study.
Adding to the challenge of eliminating professional jargon was a bit of my own frustration. Students have spent their entire academic careers writing for a specific audience: the teacher. And often, they have one very specific goal for their writing: a grade. What could I do to help students see that their work matters beyond a grade? And how could I encourage them to see an audience beyond just the one reader wielding the grading pen? How could they practice writing clearly and concisely for those who don’t already know background and context to fill in gaps?
Enter Wikipedia. Though already a source very familiar to and much-used by students for curiosity and, sometimes to faculty chagrin, class research, I hoped to use it as a vehicle to have students create and write for a new audience: everyone. Assigning a Wikipedia article to edit and write, I hoped, would be an opportunity for guided experience writing to be read and not writing to be graded.
Still, I went into this new assignment nervously. This was a new project for me, and I really wanted to ease my own anxiety and just fall back into the traditional assignments I had perfected over several semesters. But with the help of already established and tested projects and assignments designed by previously participating faculty and the Wiki Ed staff, I found adding in new content to my syllabus much less daunting. I settled on three very simple ready-made lessons, adjusting them to focus on a few lesser discussed topics in accounting. Each week for three weeks, students had to work individually or in their small groups of three to complete each of the three assignments. In the end, the class had edited several accounting “stubs,” with contributions ranging from simply adding consistency to formatting to adding several paragraphs of content to finding new, verifiable sources to cite.
After the project, I asked the students to write a reflection of the project and the process. The responses were overwhelmingly positive. And the feedback reflected what I had hoped from the beginning. I had wanted them to “write to be read” and not “write to be graded.” What I discovered was community input and critique made so much more of an impact than the final grade they received. Students mentioned the “accountability” they felt when writing something that would be public which is exactly what I had hoped for.
Just one example of this was when one student group noticed that within minutes of adding content — while they worked with me on formatting a citation — someone had removed the addition and noted “not verified.” What an amazing lesson in just how vital citing sources is! A teacher just marks your grade down; in the “real world,” your work can be erased and deemed untrustworthy. They shared how eye-opening it was to be held accountable by being “erased.”
Just as I reflected on this project, Wiki Education Foundation published the findings of a study that corroborated much of what I found, especially in the area of motivation. Before this confirmation, I just had the experiences and reflections of my students. And those reflections alone were certainly enough to continue using this project in the future to help my students understand their work matters.
Image: Photo of Sarah Vital.jpg, by Jen Perez, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
In May, Outreach Manager Samantha Weald and I visited Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge to participate in the CxC (Communication across the Curriculum) Summer Institute, a faculty workshop that introduces attendees to hands-on assignment design for their classrooms. Wiki Ed has worked with CxC faculty at LSU for several years to bring high-quality Wikipedia assignments to LSU instructors and students. Since the fall 2014 term, we’ve worked with CxC to support nearly 700 students who have added 706,000 words to Wikipedia. They’ve made high-quality contributions to articles about natural disturbances, biology, chemistry, geology, women’s studies, and more. The assignments have helped students improve their communication and information literacy skills, which is why CxC faculty like Rebecca Burdette and Dr. Becky Carmichael have encouraged more LSU instructors to incorporate Wikipedia assignments into their syllabi.
At the Summer Institute, we presented about Wikipedia and pedagogy alongside Cristina Caminita, Head of Research and Instruction Services for the LSU libraries. She explained that information literacy is a set of skills and concepts that enable students to do the following:
Wikipedia assignments fit perfectly into this type of training. In order to contribute academic scholarship to Wikipedia, students must follow the above steps. They evaluate Wikipedia’s existing coverage of topics related to their course and interests, and they identify a specific topic (i.e., a Wikipedia article) that is missing information. Once they’ve selected a topic for further study, they must find journals, books, and newspapers to learn the context and find out what information is available on the subject. They synthesize the available literature in their own words so they can share it with the world via Wikipedia. As they read sources and learn more about the topic, they refine their writing and improve their draft. Along the way, they must select sources based on their relevance and reliability.
In the end, they have not only attained knowledge for themselves, but they do something with that knowledge and share it out for others to read. Much of this process is cyclical and iterative, so students must continuously revise their work to communicate with the target audience on Wikipedia. All told, while they have added new information to Wikipedia, they have also, perhaps unknowingly, honed their information literacy skills. As Dr. Carmichael said, information competent students can determine the type of information needed and which information to include for their purpose. A Wikipedia assignment is one clear way to achieve this competency, as students must identify the best sources about a topic, then summarize the most important parts to include in their articles.
We’re already having further conversations with Summer Institute participants who would like to join Wiki Ed’s Classroom Program, and we’re excited to see continued growth of our program in Baton Rouge. If you’re an instructor who would like to learn more about teaching with Wikipedia, please email us at contact@wikiedu.org.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Recent changes
searchfilter parameter. You can add values like searchfilter=insource:foo. It will add that to the user's search query. [1]Changes this week
The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 27 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 28 June. It will be on all wikis from 29 June (calendar).Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 27 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
Just for fun, using ogv.js to render WebM video to a texture in an A-Frame VR scene in iPad Safari
Works in Safari on both iOS and desktop… Doesn’t work as well in Edge in Windows 10; decoding is fine by texture flickers. This might be a general issue with painting WebGL canvases at each other.
Firefox and Chrome use native playback for the WebM.
I keep researching the new VR stuff and thinking “this could be fun, but it’s still too expensive and impractical”. Finally took a quick jaunt to the Portland Microsoft store this morning hoping for a demo of the HTC Vive VR headset to see how it feels in practice.
Turns out they don’t have the Vive set up for demos right now because it requires a lot of setup and space for the room-scale tracking, so instead I did a quick demo with the Oculus Rift, which doesn’t require as much space set aside.
First impressions:
* They make you sign a waiver in case of motion sickness…
* Might have been able to fit over my glasses, but I opted to just go without (my uncorrected blurry vision is still slightly better than the resolution of the Rift anyway)
* Turned it on – hey that’s pretty cool!
* Screen door effect from the pixel grid is very visible at first but kinda goes away.
* Limited resolution is also noticeable but not that big a deal for the demo content. I imagine this is a bigger problem for user interfaces with text though.
* Head tracking is totally smooth and feels natural – just look around!
* Demos where I sit still and either watch something or interact with the controllers were great.
* Complete inability to see real world gave a feeling of helplessness when had to, say, put on the controllers…
* Once controllers in hand, visualization of hand/controller helped a lot.
* Shooting gallery demo was very natural with the rift controllers.
* Mine car roller coaster demo instantly made me nauseated; I couldn’t have taken more than a couple minutes of that.
For FPS-style games and similar immersion, motion without causing motion sickness is going to be the biggest problem — compared to a fixed screen the VR brain is much more sensitive to mismatches between visual cues and your inner ear’s accelerometer…
I think I’m going to wait on the PC VR end for now; it’s a young space, the early sets are expensive, and I need to invest in a new more powerful PC anyway. Microsoft is working on some awesome “mixed reality” integration for Windows 10, which could be interesting to watch but the hardware and software are still in flux. Apple is just starting to get into it, mostly concentrating (so far as we know) on AR views on iPhones and iPads, but that could become something else some day.
Google’s Daydream VR platform for Android is interesting, but I need a newer phone for that — and again I probably should wait for the Pixel 2 later this year rather than buy last year’s model just to play with VR.
So for the meantime, I ordered a $15 Google Cardboard viewer that’ll run some VR apps on my current phone, as long as I physically hold it up to my face. That should tide me over with some games and demos, and gives me the chance to experiment with making my own 3D scenes via either Unity (building to a native Android app) or something like BabylonJS (running in Chrome with WebGL/WebVR support).
This is the second year I haven't been able to attend the Wikimedia Hackathon due to conflicts with my school schedule (I finish at the end of June). So instead I decided I would try and accomplish a large-ish project that same weekend, but at home. I'm probably more likely to get stuff done while at home because I'm not chatting up everyone in person!
Last year I converted OOjs-UI to use PHP 5.5's traits instead of a custom mixin system. That was a fun project for me since I got to learn about traits and do some non-MediaWiki coding, while still reducing our technical debt.
This year we had some momentum on MediaWiki-Codesniffer changes, so I picked up one of our largest tasks which had been waiting - to upgrade to the 3.0 upstream PHP_CodeSniffer release. Being a new major release there were breaking changes, including a huge change to the naming and namespacing of classes. My current diffstat on the open patch is +301, -229, so it is roughly the same size as last year. The conversion of our custom sniffs wasn't too hard, the biggest issue was actually updating our test suite.
We run PHPCS against test PHP files and verify the output matches the sniffs that we expect. Then we run PHPCBF, the auto-fixer, and check that the resulting "fixed" file is what we expect. The first wasn't too bad, it just calls the relevant internal functions to run PHPCS, but the latter would have PHPBCF output in a virtual filesystem, shells out to create a diff, and then tries to put it back together. Now, we just get the output from the relevant PHPCS class, and compare it to the expected test output.
This change was included in the 0.9.0 release of MediaWiki-Codesniffer and is in use by many MediaWiki extensions.
by Gerard Meijssen (noreply@blogger.com) at June 24, 2017 09:31 AM
In his first book, Wikipedia, Work, and Capitalism. A Realm of Freedom?,[1] Arwid Lund, lecturer in the program of Information Studies (ALM: Archives, Libraries and Museums) at Uppsala Universitet, Sweden investigates the ideologies that he believes are shared by participants in peer-production projects like Wikipedia. The author typologizes the ways that Wikipedians understand their activities, including “playing v. gaming” and “working v. labouring,” (113-115) to explore his hypothesis that “there is a link between how Wikipedians look upon their activities and how they look upon capitalism.” (117) Lund characterizes peer-production projects by their shared resistance to information capitalism—things like copyright and pay-walled publishing, which they see as limiting creativity and innovation. His thesis is provocative. He claims that the anti-corporatist ideologies intrinsic to peer production and to Wikipedia are unrealistic because capitalism always finds a way to monetize free content. Overall, the book touches on many issues not usually discussed within the Wikipedia community, but which might be a useful entry point for those who want to consider the social impacts of the project.
Lund uses a combination of social critique and qualitative interviews conducted in 2012 to provide supporting evidence for his thesis. One recurrent theme is that Wikipedia is part of a larger trend in gamification—a design technique developed in Human–computer interaction (HCI) to describe the process of using features associated with “play” to motivate interaction and engagement with an interface. One example he gives is that editors report that they find Wikipedia’s competitive and confrontational elements to be game-like. (143-144) He also claims that Wikipedians’ descriptions of their work and play balance changes as they take on more levels of responsibility and professionalism in the community, such as adminship. Still, it’s highly questionable whether the 8 interviews, which mainly focus on the Swedish Wikipedia, are a sufficient sample size to make his claims scalable.
The culture of Wikipedia valorizes altruism in its embrace of volunteering for the project to produce information for the greater good. Lund argues that Wikipedians’ belief in the altruistic aspect of the project, makes it easy for them to depoliticize their work and to ignore the how Wikipedia participates in the corporate, information economy. To him, Wikipedia is symptomatic of the devaluation of digital work, when in past generations, making an encyclopedia might be a source of income and employment opportunities for contributors.
So, he argues, contributors believe that peer production represents a space of increased autonomy, democracy, and creativity in the production of ideas. But from his view, attempts at a “counter-economy,” “hacker communism,” or “gift economies” (239, 303) are prone to manipulation, because we can’t create utopian bubbles within capitalism that aren’t privy to its influence. Still, peer production projects operate as if creation of value outside of the capitalist system is possible. Lund argues that Wikipedia cannot avoid competition with proprietary companies which see Wikipedia as a threat, and have an interest in harvesting its content for their own benefit. (218) Yet it would be nice if he brought in more examples to make this claim. The reader is left wondering who these corporate interests are, and what exactly they derive from Wikipedia. Having this information would help us understand where Lund is coming from.
Although the word “work” in the title might suggest that Lund focuses on wage labour, the author’s aims are more broad, and he uses the word to connote a variety of aspects of social, value-producing activities. (20) Namely, the production of “use-value,” the Marxist term for the productive social activity of creating things which are deemed useful and thus of value to be bought and sold in the market (even if producers don’t consider their work to be commodities). He draws from Marxist thinkers and semioticians, among them V.N. Volosinov, Terry Eagleton, and Louis Althusser, to unpack different approaches to describing why Wikipedians might feel like they are playing when they are really working. (107-108) Marxists call such assumptions “false consciousness,” but the concept is difficult because it requires us to analyze manifest and latent (discursive and non-discursive) awareness. It would have been useful for Lund to look at how the fields of anthropology or psychology talk about ideology. Both fields have extensively researched the topic. More stringent ethnographic or qualitative methods might have also made his argument more convincing. But, based on the references he provides, it seems that the book’s target audience may be media theorists and social scientists, people who already familiar with Marxist political economy.
Lund makes a compelling case that capitalism instrumentalizes freely-produced knowledge for its own monetary gains. Meanwhile, he says, Wikipedia’s design and its heavily ideological agenda, make it difficult for the community to address the issue. The book is an interesting contribution to ongoing conversations about how Wikipedia and projects motivated by copyleft principles can be defined from a social perspective.
A discussion paper titled “Economic Downturn and Volunteering: Do Economic Crises Affect Content Generation on Wikipedia?”[2] investigates how “drastically increased unemployment” affects contribution to and readership of Wikipedia. To study this question statistically, the authors (three economists from the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim, Germany) regarded the Great Recession that began in 2008 as an “exogeneous shock” that affected unemployment rates in different European countries differently and at different times. They relate these rates to five metrics for the language version of Wikipedia that corresponds to each country:
| “ | (1) aggregate views per month, (2) the number of active Wikipedians with a modest number of monthly edits ranging from 5 to 100, (3) the number of active Wikipedians with more than 100 monthly edits, (4) edits per article, and (5) the content growth of a corresponding language edition of Wikipedia in terms of words | ” |
For each of these, the Wikimedia Foundation publishes monthly numbers. Since the researchers did not have access to country-level breakdowns of this data (which is not published for every country/language combination due to privacy reasons, except for some monthly or quarterly overviews which the authors may have overlooked, but only start in 2009 anyway), “to study the relationship of country level unemployment on an entire Wikipedia, we need to focus on countries which have an (ideally) unique language”. This excluded some of the European countries that were most heavily affected by the 2008 crisis, e.g. the UK, Spain or Portugal, but still left them with 22 different language versions of Wikipedia to study.
An additional analysis focuses on district-level (Kreise) employment data from Germany and the German Wikipedia, respectively. None of the five metrics are available with that geographical resolution, so the authors resorted to the geolocation data for the (public) IP addresses of anonymous edits (which for several large German ISPs is usually more precise than in many other countries).
In both parts of the analysis, the economic data is related to the Wikipedia participation metrics using a relatively simple statistical approach (difference in differences), whose robustness is however vetted using various means. Still, since in some cases the comparison only included 9 months before and after the start of the crisis (instead of an entire year or several years), this leaves open the question of seasonality (e.g. it is well-known that Wikipedia pageviews are generally down in the summer, possibly due to factors like vacationing that might differ depending on the economic situation).
Summarizing their results, the authors write:
| “ | we find that increased unemployment is associated with higher participation of volunteers in Wikipedia and an increased rate of content generation. With higher unemployment, articles are read more frequently and the number of highly active users increases, suggesting that existing editors also increase their activity. Moreover, we find robust evidence that the number of edits per article increases, and slightly weaker support for an increased overall content growth. We find the overall effect to be rather positive than negative, which is reassuring news if the encyclopedia functions as an important knowledge base for the economy. | ” |
While leaving open the precise mechanism of these effects, the researchers speculate that “it seems that new editors begin to acquire new capabilities and devote their time to producing public goods. While we observe overall content growth, we could not find robust evidence for an increase in the number of new articles per day […]. This suggests that the increased participation is focused on adding to the existing knowledge, rather than providing new topics or pages. Doing so requires less experience than creating new articles, which may be interpreted as a sign of learning by the new contributors.”
The paper also includes an informative literature review summarizing interesting research results on unemployment, leisure time and volunteering in general. (For example, that “conditional on having Internet access, poorer people spend more time online than wealthy people as they have a lower opportunity cost of time.” Also some gender-specific results that, combined with Wikipedia’s well-known gender gap, might have suggested a negative effect of rising unemployment on editing activity: “Among men, working more hours is even positively correlated with participation in volunteering” and on the other hand “unemployment has a negative effect on men’s volunteering, which is not the case for women.”)
It has long been observed how Wikipedia relies on the leisure time of educated people, in particular by Clay Shirky, who coined the term “cognitive surplus” for it, the title of his 2010 book. The present study provides important insights into a particular aspect of this (although the authors caution that economic crises do not uniformly increase spare time, e.g. “employed people may face larger pressure in their paid job”, reducing their available time for editing Wikipedia). The paper might have benefited from including a look at the available demographic data about the life situations of Wikipedia editors (e.g. in the 2012 Wikipedia Editor survey, 60% of respondents were working full-time or part-time, and 39% were school or university students, with some overlap).
While human-created knowledge bases (KBs) such as Wikidata provide usually high-quality data (precision), it is generally hard to understand their completeness. A conference paper titled “Assessing the Completeness of Entities in Knowledge Bases”[3] proposes to assess the relative completeness of entities in knowledge bases, based on comparing the extent of information with other similar entities. It outlines building blocks of this approach, and present a prototypical implementation, which is available on Wikidata as Recoin (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Ls1g/Recoin).
Information extraction (IE) from text has largely focused on relations between individual entities, such as who has won which award. However, some facts are never fully mentioned, and no IE method has perfect recall. Thus, it is beneficial to also tap contents about the cardinalities of these relations, for example, how many awards someone has won. This paper[4] introduces this novel problem of extracting cardinalities and discusses the specific challenges that set it apart from standard IE. It present a distant supervision method using conditional random fields. A preliminary evaluation that compares information extracted from Wikipedia with that available on Wikidata shows a precision between 3% and 55%, depending on the difficulty of relations.
See the research events page on Meta-wiki for upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.
Wikimedia Research Newsletter
Vol: 7 • Issue: 3 • March 2017
This newsletter is brought to you by the Wikimedia Research Committee and The Signpost
Subscribe: 
Email 
• [archives] [signpost edition] [contribute] [research index]
This weekend, Outreach Manager Samantha Weald and I head to Honolulu to join plant biology faculty and students at the annual meeting of the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB). When we partnered with ASPB, we committed to increasing the number of students that we support as they improve Wikipedia’s coverage of plant biology-related topics. We’re looking forward to meeting university instructors face-to-face to share with them the pedagogical benefits to students, and how we make it easy to get involved.
Since beginning our partnership in the fall 2015 term, Wiki Ed has trained more than 700 plant biology students to edit Wikipedia. Together, they have added 337,000 words to articles that have received nearly 9 million views. Students have improved Wikipedia’s information about beech bark disease, carnivorous plants, the environmental impact of agriculture, North American azaleas, DNA sequencing, and many more. We’re proud of the great work they’ve done, like the students in Jennifer Blake-Mahmud’s course at Rutgers University who wrote about sexual reproduction and sexually transmitted diseases in plants.
If you’re attending the conference, we’ll be at the education booth in the exhibit hall Sunday through Tuesday. We’ll also be attending the education symposium on Monday, June 26th, from 1:30–3:15pm. There, Dr. Sarah Wyatt, who has participated in Wiki Ed’s Classroom Program, will join her graduate students to share their experiences editing Wikipedia as an assignment. Please come join us at any of these events, or email us at contact@wikiedu.org to schedule an independent meeting. We look forward to bringing more plant biologists to Wikipedia!
The National Security Agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photo by Trevor Paglen/Creative Time Reports, public domain.
For the last two years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been fighting in the United States federal courts to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of Wikimedia users from overly-broad government surveillance. We challenged the U.S. National Security Agency’s (NSA) “Upstream” mass surveillance of the internet, which vacuums up international text-based online communications without individualized warrants or suspicion. Now, in the wake of an important court ruling in our favor, we take a closer look at Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA.
On May 23, 2017, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Wikimedia Foundation has adequately alleged standing to challenge the NSA’s Upstream surveillance of internet traffic and may proceed to the next stage of the case. Specifically, the court found that the Foundation has adequately alleged the suspicionless seizure and searching of its internet communications through Upstream surveillance. The Fourth Circuit’s decision is an important, but still intermediate, victory for online privacy and free expression. In this blog post, we’ll provide some background on the case and the practices it challenges, look at the most recent ruling, and discuss our next steps.
In March 2015, we joined eight other co-plaintiffs (represented pro bono by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)) to file a lawsuit challenging the NSA’s Upstream surveillance practices. However, the events that precipitated our case began much earlier.
In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which regulates the collection of communications that fall into the category of “foreign intelligence information” on U.S. soil. FISA required the government to show probable cause to a court that a particular surveillance target was a “foreign power” or an agent thereof.
However, in 2008, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act (FAA) amended FISA to authorize the government to monitor communications of non-U.S. persons for “foreign intelligence information” without establishing probable cause or making any individualized showing to a court. And in 2013, public disclosures of NSA documents revealed the massive scope of the surveillance practices allegedly authorized by the FAA, including “Upstream” surveillance.
Upstream surveillance involves installing devices at major “chokepoints” along the internet backbone. The NSA then seizes international text-based communications passing through these chokepoints and combs through those communications for so-called “selectors” associated with tens of thousands of targets. Although the NSA claims that Section 702 of FISA authorizes Upstream surveillance, we believe that its scope exceeds what is actually allowed by the statute. This broad surveillance also infringes several provisions of the U.S. Constitution, including: the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech and association; the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures; and Article III, which grants specific powers to the judicial branch of government.
At the District Court, the government asserted that the Wikimedia Foundation and our co-plaintiffs lacked standing. Standing is a legal concept that determines whether a party has alleged a specific injury and has a right to bring a claim in court. The government argued that we lacked standing because we had not plausibly alleged that the NSA actually intercepted and searched our communications. The District Court considered only the standing issue, agreed with the government, and granted its motion to dismiss. We then appealed to the Fourth Circuit, explaining how and why we have standing in this case.
Privacy and free expression rights are fundamental to the Wikimedia Foundation’s vision of empowering everyone to share in the sum of all human knowledge. Our mission depends on maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of user communications and activities, so as to encourage trust among community members and foster the creation and dissemination of free educational content.
In supporting Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects, we communicate with hundreds of millions of individuals who read or contribute to the repository of human knowledge. These communications often contain personally identifying, sensitive, or confidential information about users, our staff, and the Foundation. Suspicionless searches of these communications are like searching the patron records of the largest library in the world.
We strive to keep this information confidential, and always put user privacy first. The Wikimedia Foundation privacy policy limits what data we collect, how much we share, and how long we retain it. We never sell user information or share it with third parties for marketing purposes. In June 2015, we implemented HTTPS across the projects, which permit anonymous and pseudonymous participation as one of their key principles of operation.
We filed this lawsuit as another step in our efforts to stand up for Wikimedia users, and protect their ability to read and share knowledge freely and confidentially.
The Fourth Circuit’s recent decision is a major step in the fight against mass surveillance. Notably, all three judges on the panel found that the Wikimedia Foundation had established standing, by alleging sufficient facts to defeat the government’s motion to dismiss. By a 2-1 vote, however, the panel upheld the lower court’s finding that our eight co-plaintiffs did not have standing. The third judge on the panel would have found that all nine plaintiffs had standing.
This important ruling is the most recent in a series of cases in which U.S. courts have permitted challenges to mass surveillance to go forward. This past October, the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals held that an individual plaintiff had standing to challenge the NSA’s PRISM program, which collects internet communications directly from service providers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)’s Jewel v. NSA case has also scored some legal victories, most recently when a District Court allowed EFF to conduct discovery from the government. Two other courts ruled against the U.S. government’s bulk collection of call records, which helped prompt the U.S. Congress to enact some positive reforms.
These cases partially reverse a previous trend in which courts were less skeptical of government snooping. In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the plaintiffs in Clapper v. Amnesty International did not have standing to challenge mass surveillance on the ground that their claims were too speculative. However, the global surveillance disclosures following the Clapper decision have revealed a great deal about the true scope and scale of the U.S. government’s suspicionless surveillance practices. This information has prompted courts to conclude that Clapper doesn’t foreclose every challenge to government surveillance in the name of national security. Encouragingly, some plaintiffs—like the Foundation in this case—are increasingly afforded the opportunity to reach the merits of their claims, though many continue to face an uphill battle.
These victories come as Section 702 of FISA is scheduled to sunset in December 2017. Section 702 sets out the process the U.S. government must follow for obtaining authorization to target non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be abroad, including their communications with persons in the U.S. It also broadened the scope of surveillance beyond foreign powers and their agents to, for example, any information the government believes relates to the “foreign affairs” of the United States. No particularity or probable cause is necessary.
Regardless of the outcome in the courts, this year’s reauthorization debate represents an important opportunity for reform. Upstream’s many statutory and constitutional deficiencies must be fixed, and we welcome a public conversation about the importance of protecting internet users’ privacy and expressive freedoms.
Even though we have won this appeal, our fight against the NSA’s overbroad surveillance practices is far from over. We are closely reviewing the opinion with our counsel at the ACLU and our co-plaintiffs to determine the next steps, and we will continue to publish updates to keep Wikimedia users informed.
An updated timeline, frequently asked questions, and more resources about this case can be found at our Wikimedia Foundation v. NSA resources page. To view any of the legal documents or decisions in this case, check out the ACLU’s page. Finally, if you want to add your voice to the cause, consider talking about your support on social media, or sharing the ACLU’s infographic about the case.
Jim Buatti, Legal Counsel
Aeryn Palmer, Legal Counsel
Thanks to Allison Davenport and Nick Gross for their assistance in preparing this blog post. Special thanks to all who have supported us in this litigation, including the ACLU’s Patrick Toomey and Ashley Gorski; the Knight Institute’s Jameel Jaffer and Alex Abdo; Aarti Reddy, Patrick Gunn, and Ben Kleine of our pro bono counsel Cooley, LLP; and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Zhou Zhou.
Wiki Ed’s Board of Trustees approved our Annual Plan and Budget for Fiscal Year 2017–2018 at their June meeting. I’m pleased to share the full document here, which both recaps the work we did last year as well as highlights what we plan to do next year (Wiki Ed’s fiscal year runs July 1 to June 30).
Last fiscal year was one of enormous growth for Wiki Ed. Among our achievements:
We look forward to continuing to expand our impact next year. Among our key initiatives laid out in the plan:
To read more about our work last year and this year, I encourage you to read our Annual Plan, which describes our plans in more detail. As always, we will also continue to share our progress through monthly reports to our board, which we also share on our website.
Photo by User:The Photographer (Wilfredo Rodríguez), public domain.
Wilfredo Rodríguez was born in a modest Venezuelan house, not unlike the one seen above, on the small Caribbean island of Margarita. Its size, however, does not measure up to its beauty and cultural heritage—and that’s something Rodríguez, better known on Wikimedia projects by his username “The Photographer,” helps the world understand.
Rodríguez joined the Wikimedia movement over a decade ago, during which time he has contributed over 40,000 images to Wikimedia Commons, the free educational media repository. Unlike many others, he has actively decided to release many of his photos into the public domain, giving up the right to be credited when his work is shared.
His photos have been displayed in some of the world’s largest exhibitions, and hundreds of his photos are promoted by the Wikimedia community as featured photos and quality images, the highest quality markers on the project.
Rodríguez’ early childhood gives us a clue as to what he would eventually bring to that open movement.
Head of an Iguana in Venezuela. Photo by The Photographer (Wilfredo Rodríguez), public domain.
Photo by The Photographer (Wilfredo Rodríguez), public domain.
When Rodríguez was growing up, a spring would continually bubble up from a hill near his house, creating a small river. He found himself fascinated by the natural phenomenon and the animals nearby that depended on it for survival, so much so that he took to carrying a notebook to sketch the trees and iguanas that lived there. In fact, his interest was so keen that his childhood nickname was ‘iguana’.
His childhood was, however, not entirely spent underneath these trees: “I do not remember feeling any lack or need during my childhood,” he says, “but in my adulthood I discovered that my parents sometimes didn’t eat to feed me and my sister during the 1980s crisis in Venezuela. It was a very difficult period for my country, in which I managed to continue studying.”
Photo by The Photographer (Wilfredo Rodríguez), public domain.
Despite the ongoing crisis, Rodríguez was able to attend a local university and chose to specialize in systems engineering, a less preferred yet promising field of study when considering the best job opportunities. Rodríguez excelled in the field and graduated with the second highest scores in his class. Given his photographic interests today, it does not take a rocket scientist to guess what his family graduation gift to him was.
“My first camera was a great financial burden for my family,” he says, “but it was a graduation gift. I remember that it was a generic Chinese brand and could only take three-megapixel photos. Still, it allowed me to do incredible things when using it in combination with magnifying loupes and some improvised binoculars.”
Photo by The Photographer (Wilfredo Rodríguez), public domain.
Though he contributes mostly as a photographer today, Rodríguez’s first steps in the Wikimedia movement displayed a decidedly different area of interest. Rodríguez had first volunteered for Kiwix, the free software that allows searching and reading Wikipedia without an internet connection.
“I believe that something needs to be done to bring this knowledge to the remote areas of my country,” says Rodríguez, as he hopes to mitigate the impact of government censorship and what Human Rights Watch has called the “humanitarian crisis” happening in his country. “Those areas without the internet are in dire need of help,” he believes.
As part of the Kiwix project, Rodríguez installed the software in hundreds of information centers in Venezuela with the support of Emmanuel Engelhart, the developer behind Kiwix, and César Wilfredo, a fellow Wikipedian from Venezuela.
Rodríguez then began to turn his efforts to taking photos of his country and uploading them to Wikimedia Commons. This step was, in his words, “a way to protest” by finding a way to show the challenges of daily life there. “I always thought,” he says, “that what I was trying to show was more important than my life, because what I was doing was going to remain for future generations.” This sometimes included rather dangerous journeys:
I remember climbing the Bolivar and Humboldt peaks at 5000 meters (16,400 ft) above sea level to capture the melting of the mountains’ remaining glaciers. … It took eight days of hiking and climbing with 60-kilogram (130 lb) backpacks. The trip was very difficult and extreme. I had prepared for almost a year, but we still had serious issues with food after one of the members of the team left the group leaving us without food. We continued for 3 more days practically without eating.
I took some good shots; however, above 5000 meters, it is difficult to take pictures because of the lack of oxygen.
The most dangerous thing I did was to travel to ranches in Caracas, though, which was potentially fatal because of crime and anti-government protests taking place at the time of my trip.”
Photo by The Photographer (Wilfredo Rodríguez), public domain.
It is not an easy decision for a photographer to give up their rights in a photo by sharing it in the public domain, especially when there is a long and arduous adventure behind it, but Rodríguez had a different view about this: “I think the message is more important than the author. I know that for some photographers it is important that they receive credit for the photo, and I respect that opinion, but I don’t think about my work this way.”
As a result, Rodríguez had his photos exhibited at the French National Museum of Natural History, Encyclopedia Britannica, local galleries in Maracaibo, and many other places.
Photo by The Photographer (Wilfredo Rodríguez), public domain.
Photo by The Photographer (Wilfredo Rodríguez), public domain.
Photo by The Photographer (Wilfredo Rodríguez), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Wilfredo Rodríguez. Photo by The Photographer (Wilfredo Rodríguez), CC BY-SA 4.0.
Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation
13/06/2017-19/06/2017
pole_climber’s Colour Coded OSM Notes – displayed based on last edit date 1 | © pole_climber, uMap and map data © OpenStreetMap contributors ODbL
boundary=place and, if necessary, to use boundary relations.cycleway=sidepath to cycleway=sidepath:primary. at the FOSSGIS & OpenStreetMap conference 2017 with the title “Detecting vandalism in OpenStreetMap”. (automatic translation) a detailed licensing discussion on the talk-it mailing list.| Software | Version | Release date | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Komoot Android * | var | 2017-06-14 | No infos. |
| Mapillary Android * | 3.60 | 2017-06-14 | More robust EXIF reading, fix of stray images upload problems. |
| Mapillary iOS * | 4.7.1 | 2017-06-14 | Two bugs fixed. |
| OSRM Backend | 5.7.4 | 2017-06-14 | Bugfix release. |
| StreetComplete | 0.12 | 2017-06-16 | New languages: Ukrainian and Finnish, warning dialog if user tries to add information not at his location, bugfixes. |
| Kurviger Free * | 1.1.0-2 | 2017-06-17 | Changes in navigation, geocoding and UI. |
| Simple GIS Client * | 9.1 | 2017-06-18 | Changes for the US Census API service, better memory management for big OSM datasets. |
Provided by the OSM Software Watchlist. Timestamp: 2017-06-19 14:20:12+02 UTC
(*) unfree software. See: freesoftware.
| Where | What | When | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essen | 8. FOSSGIS Hacking Event im Linuxhotel | 2017-06-23-2017-06-25 | |
| Essen | SommerCamp 2017 | 2017-06-23-2017-06-25 | |
| Bremen | Bremer Mappertreffen | 2017-06-26 | |
| Graz | Stammtisch Graz | 2017-06-26 | |
| Dijon | Rencontres mensuelles | 2017-06-27 | |
| Prague | Missing Maps Mapathon in Prague, Paralelní polis | 2017-06-27 |  |
| Leuven | Leuven Monthly OSM Meetup | 2017-06-28 |  |
| Montpellier | Rencontre mensuelle | 2017-06-28 | |
| Digne-les-Bains | {UDOS} 2017 : Université d’été du développement de logiciel libre | 2017-06-28-2017-06-30 | |
| Brest | Mapathon Missing Maps à l’UBO Campus Victor Ségalen | 2017-06-29 | |
| Amstetten | Stammtisch Ulmer Alb | 2017-06-29 | |
| Nantes | Mapathon Missing Maps à l’ENSA | 2017-06-29 | |
| Paris | Rencontre mensuelle | 2017-06-29 | |
| Dusseldorf | Stammtisch Düsseldorf | 2017-06-30 | |
| Rostock | Rostocker Treffen | 2017-07-04 | |
| Stuttgart | Stuttgarter Stammtisch | 2017-07-05 | |
| Essen | Ideenaustausch mit dem RVR | 2017-07-05 | |
| Salzburg | AGIT2017 | 2017-07-05-2017-07-07 | |
| Toyonaka | 【西国街道#07】豊中の歴史マッピングパーティ | 2017-07-08 | |
| Kampala | State of the Map Africa 2017 | 2017-07-08-2017-07-10 | |
| Passau | Niederbayerntreffen | 2017-07-10 | |
| Rennes | Réunion mensuelle | 2017-07-10 | |
| Champs-sur-Marne (Marne-la-Vallée) | FOSS4G Europe 2017 at ENSG Cité Descartes | 2017-07-18-2017-07-22 | |
| Boston | FOSS4G 2017 | 2017-08-14-2017-08-19 | |
| Aizu-wakamatsu Shi | State of the Map 2017 | 2017-08-18-2017-08-20 | |
| Patan | State of the Map Asia 2017 | 2017-09-23-2017-09-24 | |
| Boulder | State of the Map U.S. 2017 | 2017-10-19-2017-10-22 | |
| Buenos Aires | FOSS4G+State of the Map Argentina 2017 | 2017-10-23-2017-10-28 | |
| Lima | State of the Map LatAm 2017 | 2017-11-29-2017-12-02 | |
Note: If you like to see your event here, please put it into the calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM. Please check your event in our public calendar preview and correct it, where appropriate.
This weeklyOSM was produced by Anne Ghisla, Nakaner, Peda, PierZen, Polyglot, SK53, Spec80, derFred, jcoupey, jinalfoflia, keithonearth, vsandre, wambacher.
The demarcations of human sexuality have become a major issue in the culture wars, but for plants, sexual diversity is the norm. There are plants with “perfect” flowers that are completely hermaphroditic, with fully functional pollen and eggs produced in the same flower. There are monoecious plants, which produce both male and female flowers. There are dioecous species, with individuals that only produce male or female flowers. And then things start to get complicated. Gynodioecy is the phenomenon in some plant species in which individuals are either female or hermaphroditic. A student in Jennifer Blake-Mahmud’s Sex in the Tree of Life class converted the short, one-paragraph article on gynodioecy into a substantial, informative article.
Some of this diversity is on display in the genus Silene, a widespread genus of small wildflowers. In addition to monoecious, dioecious and gynodioecious species, Silene includes trioecious and andromonoecious species. Some even display more than one type of sex determination. If you want to know more about all of this, check out the sex determination in Silene article that a student in the class created.
When people think about sexually transmitted infections, they rarely think about plant disease, but that’s precisely how Microbotryum violaceum infection of Silene latifolia is usually classified. Silene latifolia is a small flowering plant that is native to Europe, western Asia and North Africa. It was introduced into North America and has become widespread. Microbotryum violaceum is a smut fungus, a parasitic fungus which takes over the anthers of infected plants and uses them for spore production. Pollinators visit the flowers and transmit the fungal spores instead of pollen (thus making the infection sexually transmitted). This article is also the handiwork of a student in the class.
And then there are figs. Figs have a complex reproductive cycle in which fig wasps lay their eggs in fig flowers. The wasp larvae parasitize the flowers, and female wasps emerge covered with pollen and go off to find another fig to pollinate, lay their eggs in, and die. Almost every fig species (and there are about 800 of them) is pollinated by a single species of fig wasp. Both fig and fig wasp are completely dependent on one another in order to reproduce, and unsurprisingly, pairs of fig and fig wasp species have coevolved. If you want to learn more about this, you can check out the reproductive coevolution in Ficus, which was also created by a student in the class.
While natural selection and sexual selection are thought of as the main drivers of evolutionary change, social selection has been proposed as an alternative to sexual selection. While sexual selection applies to mate choice, and puts the choice in the hands of only one gender, social selection is transactional – one individual offers something in exchange for the opportunity to reproduce. Thanks to the work of a student in this class, you can now learn more about this model of evolutionary change on Wikipedia.
To learn more about how to get involved, send us an email at contact@wikiedu.org or visit teach.wikiedu.org.
Image: 20140427Silene latifolia2.jpg, by AnRo0002, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Back in the dark ages of Labs, all instance puppet configuration was handled using the puppet ldap backend. Each instance had a big record in ldap that handled DNS, puppet classes, puppet variables, etc. It was a bit clunky, but this monolithic setup allowed @yuvipanda to throw together a simple but very useful tool, 'watroles'. Watroles answered two questions:
#2 turned out to be especially important -- basically any time an Op merged a patch changing a puppet role, they could look at watroles to get a quick list of all the instances that were going to break. Watroles was an essential tool for keeping VMs properly puppetized during code refactors and other updates.
Alas, the puppet ldap backend fell into disrepair. Puppetlabs stopped maintaining it, and Labs VMs were left out of more and more fancy puppet features because those features were left out of ldap. So... we switched to a custom API-based puppet backend, one that talks to Horizon and generally makes VM puppet config more structured and easier to handle (as well as supporting project-wide and prefix-wide puppet config for large-scale projects.)
That change broke Watroles, and the tool became increasingly inaccurate as instances migrated off of ldap, and eventually it was turned off entirely. A dark age followed, in which puppet code changes required as much faith as skill.
Today, at last, we have a replacement. I added a bunch of additional general-purpose queries to our puppet configuration API, and we've added pages to the OpenStack Browser to display those queries and answer both of our previous questions, with bonus information as well:
The data on those pages is cached and updated every 20 minutes, so won't update instantly when a config is changed, but should nonetheless provide all the information needed for proper testing of new code changes.
Photo by Natalia Szafran-Kozakowska/Wikimedia Poland, CC BY-SA 4.0.
In Greek mythology, sibyls were oracle women with divine inspiration who could prophesy future events and were symbols for wisdom and insightfulness.
They are also the namesake for the ‘Sybillas’, annual national awards for the most innovative and valuable work by museum professionals across Poland, presented by the National Institute of Museology and the Ministry of Culture.
This year, Faras in Wikipedia was one of the candidates in the Digitization and New Media category. The category prize went to the National Maritime Museum in Gdańsk, with their effort to contribute the museum’s digitized collection on Wikimedia Commons where the only runner-up was the National Museum in Warsaw and their Faras in Wikipedia project.
The winners, and up to four shortlisted candidates, are selected in 10 categories like exhibitions, conservation and restoration, and education. Over 250 projects were submitted to the competition.
Faras in Wikipedia was coordinated by Wikipedians, volunteers, and National Museum staff. The museum uploaded a wide range of images to Wikimedia Commons that display the newly renovated Faras Gallery, individual wall paintings and artifacts from the Faras Cathedral, and documentary photos of the archaeological excavation work conducted in Faras in the 1960s.
The images were used to illustrate several dozen new Wikipedia articles about the Gallery, the treasures it hosts, and the achievements of Polish archaeologists. They were written by a group of volunteers—students and specialists in archaeology, cultural studies and art history.
The participating volunteers got to know more about the history of the gallery and its artworks. Maria Drozdek, the Wikipedian in residence at the National Museum, taught them basic editing skills on Wikipedia at the same time.
The project has significantly improved the quality of Wikipedia articles about the Faras Gallery at the National Museum in Warsaw, Polish archeologist Kazimierz Michałowski, artworks from the Faras Cathedral, such as Saint Anne or Bishop Petros with Saint Peter the Apostle and many others. Contributions were added in Polish, English, Russian, Belarusian, and other languages and Aleksandra Sulikowska-Bełczowska, curator of the Nubian Collection at the NMW, helped proofread the material added by volunteers.
The project concluded with the ‘Digital Museum’ conference, which discussed the Faras project, a bilingual publication, and other open GLAM projects.
The Sybillas acknowledges equal participation in the project by both the museum and the participating Wikipedians. Drozdek was the first Wikipedian-in-residence to be hired by a Polish museum. The success of projects at the National Museum was surprising for the GLAM Wikipedia community, which is looking forward to future projects that can share knowledge about the treasures of Polish art and culture.
Marta Malina Moraczewska,
Wojciech Pędzich
Wikimedia Poland
Photo by Elitre, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Bologna hosts an editathon on videogames and science-fiction movies: Last month, the Cineteca di Bologna, a movie and videogame archive in Italy hosted an editathon (editing workshop), where the participants worked on improving Wikipedia articles about science-fiction movies and videogames. The event was attended by experienced Wikipedia editors in addition to gamers and film enthusiasts. The event resulted in improving many Wikipedia articles.
Wikimedians in Poland get together for their annual meeting: Nearly 70 wikimedians gathered in Bydgoszcz, Poland for the annual Wikimedia Poland (Polska) conference. The conference took place from 2nd till 4th June. Participants attended a variety of workshops, presentations and panel discussions. Some part of the program focused on practical editing workshops, while, the largest part was focused on organizing live events. Wikimedia Poland’s general assembly saw volunteers, board members and staff discussing achievements, challenges, projects and future plans of the chapter.
Photo by Nevenka Mancheva, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Macedonian Wikipedians hold a series of architecture editathons: Last year, Wikimedians in Macedonia partnered with the architectural design center in Macedonia on organizing editing workshops with a special focus on architecture. The workshops aim at improving the content on Macedonian Wikipedia about architecture. The most recent event in this series was a two-day editathon on 23 and 24 May 2017, where the attendees spent the first day learning the editing basics while the second day was dedicated to improving Wikipedia pages.
Wikimania 2017: The annual conference of the Wikimedia movement will be held this year on 9-13 August at Le Centre Sheraton Montréal in Canada. The venue will host most of the conference, hackathon, meetups, and pre-events. Most of the foundation staff and scholarship recipients will be housed there as well. Early bird discounted registration for the conference is now open until 10 July and the draft program for the conference has been posted on Wikimania 2017 website.
Wikimedia Affiliations Committee is open to candidates: The Affiliations Committee, the committee responsible for guiding volunteers in establishing Wikimedia chapters, thematic organizations, and user groups, is looking for new members.
The Committee members help review applications from new groups, answer questions and provide advice about the different Wikimedia affiliation models and processes, review affiliate bylaws for compliance with requirements and best practices, and advise the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees on issues connected to chapters, thematic organizations and Wikimedia user groups. More information about the Committee, membership requirements and how to apply can be found on Wikimedia-l.
Compiled and edited by Samir Elsharbaty, Digital Content Intern
Wikimedia Foundation
by Marta Malina Moraczewska, Wojciech Pędzich and Samir Elsharbaty at June 20, 2017 07:18 PM
Anne McClanan is a Professor of Art History and Digital Humanities at Portland State University, where she has incorporated Wikipedia assignments into several classes since 2011.
Since I first taught with Wikipedia-based research assignments in 2011, the process has gotten a great deal simpler for both teachers and students. My reasons for having the students create Wikipedia entries, rather than write traditional research papers, will be familiar to others who have followed this path. It allows students to hone their research skills, their ability to write to context, and to engage in an endeavor that feels (and is) more purposeful. They create a lasting contribution to the openly available resources on the topic, and take very evident pride in this work. Moreover since students in art history classes tend to be mostly female, it offers a way to impart to a cohort otherwise not well-represented in the world’s largest OER a skillset that can lead to future participation once the class is over.
In the range of content I teach at a large public university, I have discovered that the courses that present the best fit for Wikipedia writing assignments are those that are a little outside of the main canon of greatest hits in art history (for example, Sienese art had better opportunities than Florentine art, Byzantine art better than Gothic, etc). I’ve used these assignments most frequently for Byzantine art history, since it had the largest disconnect between notable topics with abundant scholarly writing and coverage on Wikipedia. I realized how much opportunity there was when an initial survey of a standard textbook, Robin Cormack’s Byzantine Art, found that only half of the key works illustrated from the period had Wikipedia entries. My students have also created new or expanded existing Wikipedia entries for courses in Gothic Art, Trecento Sienese Art, and Digital Humanities.
The Wiki Education course dashboard structures the students’ training in how to create and edit entries, but parallel to that, additional assignment materials are housed on my course LMS site. Before the term begins, I scout out topics ripe for new entries or expansion. Other professors I know have students discover potential topics on their own, but given the ten-week quarter system at my school that exploration phase just doesn’t seem feasible. The students follow a research trajectory similar to that of traditional papers, in which they submit preliminary bibliographies in week 3, full drafts with peer review in week 7, revised versions week 9, and then, only after getting the thumbs up from me on the revised version, do they post their material to Wikipedia. Looking at examples from the winter 2017 quarter, students created new entries on more comprehensive topics such as Byzantine glass as well as on specific objects and sites. Some instead expanded existing entries such as those on Lazarus Zographos and Daphni Monastery.
Honing the ability to critically evaluate information is a central pedagogical goal in my classes, so I require student research to be grounded in peer-reviewed sources, with the same rigor as in my other courses’ non-Wikipedia research assignments. Teaching the students how to think critically about their sources is time-consuming, and inevitably I have individual meetings with many students who haven’t undertaken this kind of research before. In these sessions and final evaluations, though, students report feeling much more motivated to push hard on their research because they know that it will have an audience of the whole world on Wikipedia. Moreover, when I encounter students later, sometimes years after the class, they often say that they still check their Wikipedia entry, and when I hear that I know all of the work involved was well worth it.
Image: Byzantine Glass and Silver-Stain Bracelet.jpg, by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
We are currently in the final stages of deploying Thumbor to Wikimedia production, where it will generate media thumbnails for all our public wikis. Up until now, MediaWiki was responsible for generating thumbnails.
I started the project of making Thumbor production-ready for Wikimedia a year and a half ago and I'll talk about this journey in a series of blog posts. In this one, I'll explain the rationale behind this project.
The biggest reason to change the status quo is security. Since MediaWiki is quite monolithic, deployments of MediaWiki on our server fleet responsible for generating thumbnails aren't as isolated as they could be from the rest of our infrastructure.
Media formats being a frequent security breach vector, it has always been an objective of ours to isolate thumbnailing more than we currently can with Mediawiki. We run our command-line tools responsible for media conversion inside firejail, but we could do more to fence off thumbnailing from the rest of what we do.
One possibility would have been to rewrite the MediaWiki code responsible for thumbnailing, turning it into a series of PHP libraries, that could then be run without MediaWiki, to perform the thumbnailing work we are currently doing - while untangling the code enough that the thumbnailing servers can be more isolated.
However such a rewrite would be very expensive and when we can afford to, we prefer to use ready-made open source solutions with a community of their own, rather than writing new tools. It seemed to us that media thumbnailing was far from being a MediaWiki-specific problem and there ought to be open source solutions tackling that issue. We undertook a review of the open source landscape for this problem domain and Thumbor emerged as the clear leader in that area.
The MediaWiki code responsible for thumbnailing currently doesn't have any team ownership at the Wikimedia Foundation. It's maintained by volunteers (including some WMF staff acting in a volunteer capacity). However, the amount of contributors is very low and technical debt is accumulating.
Thumbor, on the other hand, is a very active open-source project with many contributors. A large company, Globo, where this project originated, dedicates significant resources to it.
In the open source world, joining forces with others pays off, and Thumbor is the perfect example of this. Like other large websites leveraging Thumbor, we've contributed a number of upstream changes.
Maintenance of Wikimedia-specific Thumbor plugins remains, but those represent only a small portion of the code, the lion's share of the functionality being provided by Thumbor.
For operational purposes, running parts of the wiki workflow as isolated services is always beneficial. It enables us to set up the best fencing possible for security purposes, where Thumbor only has access to what it needs. This limits the amount of damage possible in case of a security vulnerability propagated through media files.
From monitoring, to resource usage control and upstream security updates, running our media thumbnailing as a service has significant operational upsides.
3rd-party open source projects might have features that would have been low priority on our list to implement, or considered too costly to build. Thumbor sports a number of features that MediaWiki currently doesn't have, which might open exciting possibilities in the future, such as feature detection and advanced filters.
At this time, however, we're only aiming to deploy Thumbor to Wikimedia production as a drop-in replacement for MediaWiki thumbnailing, targeting feature parity with the status quo.
Where does performance fit in all this? For one, Thumbor's clean extension architecture means that the Wikimedia-specific code footprint is small, making improvements to our thumbnailing pipeline a lot easier. Running thumbnailing as a service means that it should be more practical to test alternative thumbnailing software and parameters.
Rendering thumbnails as WebP to user agents that support it is a built-in feature of Thumbor and the most likely first performance project we'll leverage Thumbor for, once Thumbor has proven to handle our production load correctly for some time. This alone should save a significant amount of bandwidth for users whose user agents support WebP. This is the sort of high-impact performance change to our images that Thumbor will make a lot easier to achieve.
Those many factors contributed to us betting on Thumbor. Soon it will be put to the test of Wikimedia production where not only the scale of our traffic but also the huge diversity of media files we host make thumbnailing a challenge.
In the next blog post, I'll describe the architecture of our production thumbnailing pipeline in detail and where Thumbor fits into it.
Last Sunday, I gave a talk on Wikipedia at Villupuram GLUG. We had around 30 participants. Got few School Teachers, Writers, Media people too.
Started the session with a game. Started a story with one line. Asked everyone to continue one line after another. Thus the story was built collaboratively.
This experience helped them to understand how wiki pages are being written. Explored about wikipedia history, Foundation, Languages, /various wiki projects like wikisource, wiktionary etc.
Explained about issues by copyright, Creative commons license and Commons.
Then, Poet Ramamurthy expressed his thoughts about wikipedia and public contributions.
Journalist Ko.senguttuvan shared his thoughts on copyrights. He requested all to document their knowledge so that the next generation can use it. He presented me a book he wrote about his Journalism experiences.
Teacher Dhilip narrated his efforts on enhancing the government schools with various ICT activities.
Then, we started the practical sessions. Asked all to create an account on wiki. Then, explored about the pages, history, talk page, visual editor, language tools. Asked them to edit the page for villupuram and asked to add few points.
This was a very initial intro session. Hope they get some idea about wiki ecosystem.
Thanks for the organizers, Puduvai GLUG and Villupuram GLUG. They are doing great activities there by introducing Free Software every sunday.
Special thanks to Karkee, Khaleel and Sathish for great efforts on this event.
Few Photos are here – https://goo.gl/photos/JwXmZwYN1QCvnDfH8
Thanks for Dinamani Newspaper for writing about the event.
ORCID is an increasingly popular service to disambiguate authors of scientific publications. Many journals and funding bodies require authors to register their ORCID ID these days. Wikidata has a property for ORCID, however, only ~2400 items have an ORCID property at the moment of writing this blog post. That is not a lot, considering Wikidata contains 728,112 scientific articles.
Part of the problem is that it is not easy to get ORCIDs and its connections to publications in an automated fashion. It appears that several databases, public or partially public, contain parts of the puzzle that is required for determining the ORCID for a given Wikidata author.
So I had a quick look, and found that, on the ORCID web site, one can search for a publication DOI, and retrieve the list of authors in the ORCID system that “claim” that DOI. That author list contains variations on author names (“John”, “Doe”, “John Doe”, “John X. Doe” etc.) and their ORCID IDs. Likewise, I can query Wikidata for a DOI, and get an item about that publication; that item contains statements with authors that have an item (“P50”). Each of these authors has a name.
Now, we have two lists of authors (one from ORCID, one from Wikidata), both reasonably short (say, twenty entries each), that should overlap to some degree, and they are both lists of authors for the same publication. They can now be joined via name variations, excluding multiple hits (there may be two “John Doe”s in the author list of a publication; this happens a lot with Asian names), as well as excluding authors that already have an ORCID ID on Wikidata.
I have written a bot that will take random DOIs from Wikidata, query them in ORCID, and compare the author list. In a first run, 5.000 random DOIs yielded 123 new ORCID connections; manual sampling of the matches looked quite good, so I am adding them via QuickStatements (sample of edits).
Unless this meets with “social resistance”, I can have the bot perform these edits regularly, which would keep Wikidata up-to-date with ORCIDs.
Additionally, there is a “author name string” property, which stores just the author name for now, for authors that do not have an item yet. If the ORCID list matches one of these names, an item could automatically be created for that author, including ORDIC ID, and association to the publication item. Please let me know if this would be desirable.
Since 2010, more than 36,000 students in the U.S. and Canada have edited Wikipedia as a class assignment. It’s easy to quantify their impact to Wikipedia: they’ve added more than 30 million words (or two-thirds of the last print edition of Encyclopædia Britannica) on a range of academic subjects that were either underdeveloped or entirely missing. But what does contributing to Wikipedia mean for the students? That question has been more difficult to answer. Until now.
To better understand the types of skills students obtain from contributing to Wikipedia as a course assignment, the Wiki Education Foundation sponsored Dr. Zach McDowell, of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, to conduct a study of our program participants during the Fall 2016 term. After careful analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data, the study found that Wikipedia-based assignments enhance students’ digital literacy and critical research skills, foster their ability to write for a public audience, promote collaboration, and motivate them more than traditional assignments. Students also gain a valuable understanding and appreciation for a source of information they use every day: Wikipedia.
In an age when fake news is increasingly prevalent, it is critical that students learn how to differentiate reliable sources of information from the unreliable. The study found 96% of instructors thought the Wikipedia assignment was more or much more valuable for teaching students digital literacy than traditional assignments, and 85% thought the Wikipedia assignment was more or much more valuable for teaching students about the reliability of online sources. As one student participant in a focus group said about learning to write for Wikipedia and having to understand sourcing guidelines, “It raises an awareness of what is good information, what is bad information … you have much more of a questioning mentality and you’re a lot more conscious of the validity of the information that you read.”
According to the study, 79% of instructors thought the Wikipedia assignment was more or much more valuable for teaching students to write clearly for the general public. While most of our students may never have to write for a large public audience in their future careers, they will have to share information with their colleagues, managers, stakeholders, and other professional constituents in a clear and concise manner. When students contribute to Wikipedia, they recognize that their work may be read by a broad and diverse audience. They are compelled to ensure that their contributions are comprehensible to a wide variety of readers. In the words of another student in a focus group, “I think it’s going to help you in pretty much any field that you go to because anywhere you go, you’re going to have to write things. You’re going to have to do research and present things in a way that people can understand whether they’re part of your field or not. … I think having that skill of getting a bunch of information and then putting it together in a way that’s understandable to a big amount of people is important.”
The study found that when students contribute to Wikipedia, they learn to be accountable for their own words, but come to understand that results are achieved most effectively through a cooperative spirit. They become adept at receiving as well as offering criticism, and they learn that relinquishing some level of ownership over your work is a path to improvement. There are few professions where individuals work in a vacuum, and contributing to Wikipedia gives students the courage to both accept input and offer up their own viewpoints. Said another study participant: “I always thought of research as a very solitary thing, like someone in a library basement looking through books and stuff. So, knowing that Wikipedia has this whole community of people who are researching and adding to things just changes how I think about it, I think. I never really thought of it as a collaborative endeavor and now I know that it can be, it’s kind of interesting to see it that way.”
Students spend countless hours writing dozens of papers throughout their college careers — papers that are typically read only by the instructors and that never see the light of day again once the term is over. When students contribute to Wikipedia, their motivation is twofold, the study found. Because they know that their contributions will be available for the general public to read, they feel compelled to ensure the accuracy and reliability of their work. At the same time, they have a sense of pride that something they produced may help others and live well beyond the classroom. “When you think about someone else reading your work, you don’t want there to be errors in it, you want it to be relevant. I think it just encouraged me to look back at everything and get input from other people and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite,” a focus group participant said. Responsibility and pride encourage students to produce work that is meticulous, well-researched, and thorough. Not only can they share their work with friends, family, and colleagues, but they can truly say that they’ve published something — a feat most undergraduates rarely get to experience.
The study found that students’ perceptions of Wikipedia improved after contributing as part of a Wikipedia-based assignment. “I do see it as way more credible of a source than I did before. It definitely proved to me that you have to be legit. The monitoring of information is a lot more prevalent than I thought,” said one focus group participant. Wikipedia is a site that most students use on a regular basis, whether they have been discouraged from doing so or not. When students contribute to Wikipedia, they learn how to use the site more effectively. They can identify good Wikipedia entries as well as those that may be in need of improvement. They understand how to use the site as a starting point for research and how to judiciously use the information they glean from Wikipedia.
Students can play a critical role in improving academic content on Wikipedia. Unlike the population at large, they have access to countless library resources that are often behind prohibitive paywalls. This study confirms that contributing to Wikipedia as part of a course assignment can play a significant role in helping students to develop critical academic as well as professional skills, and that students are more motivated and derive more satisfaction from contributing to Wikipedia as compared to traditional writing assignments.
For more details, read the full report on Student Learning Outcomes using Wikipedia-based Assignments. Thank you again to Dr. McDowell for your diligence and commitment to this project. The data for the study is also released under an open license, and we encourage other scholars interested in the learning outcomes of Wikipedia-based assignments to conduct further research and inquiries using this robust data set. We hope that this research is just the beginning of many studies to come.
Photo by Jami Mathewson/Wiki Education Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Instructors in more than 90 countries worldwide assign their students to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment. Today, the Wiki Education Foundation (Wiki Ed) is releasing the results from the most comprehensive study ever undertaken to evaluate student learning outcomes from Wikipedia assignments. The study concludes that Wikipedia assignments provide students valuable digital/information literacy, critical research, teamwork, and technology skills, and students are more motivated by these assignments than they are by traditional writing assignments.
Wiki Ed is an independent nonprofit organization that supports college and university faculty in the United States and Canada to assign their students to edit Wikipedia articles. In 2016–17, Wiki Ed sponsored Dr. Zachary McDowell at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (now at the University of Illinois at Chicago) to conduct a research study on the student learning outcomes for students in Wiki Ed’s program. With approval from the University of Massachusetts Amherst Human Research Protection Office, Dr. McDowell conducted a mixed-methods research study using surveys and focus groups on students and instructors participating in Wiki Ed’s program in the fall 2016 term. That term, more than 6,000 students in more than 270 courses edited Wikipedia as a class assignment.
See the full report on Wikimedia Commons..
Among the study’s findings:
These findings demonstrate the value that comes from learning to edit Wikipedia for the first time, something critical for program leaders within the Wikimedia movement. A large student learning outcomes study provides program leaders trying to convince new instructors, administrators, or organizations the data behind the skills that can come from learning to edit Wikipedia articles.
The full research report and all of the data, codebooks, and other documentation from the study are freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. We encourage others to conduct additional analysis on the data, and hope to continue to advance our understanding of student learning outcomes from Wikipedia-based assignments with future research.
LiAnna Davis, Director of Programs and Deputy Director
Wiki Education Foundation
Another thing I’ve been researching is safe, sandboxed embedding of user-created JavaScript widgets… my last attempt in this direction was the EmbedScript extension (examples currently down, but code is still around).
User-level problems to solve:
Low-level problems to solve
Meta-level problems to solve
Isolating user-provided scripts
One way to isolate user-provided scripts is to run them in an interpreter! This is potentially very slow, but allows for all kinds of extra tricks.
JS-Interpreter
I stumbled on JS-Interpreter, used sometimes with the Blockly project to step through code generated from visual blocks. JS-Interpreter implements a rough ES5 interpreter in native JS; it’s quite a bit slower than native (though some speedups are possible; the author and I have made some recent tweaks improving the interpreter loop) but is interesting because it allows single-stepping the interpreter, which opens up to a potential for an in-browser debugger. The project is under active development and could use a good regression test suite, if anyone wants to send some PRs.
The interpreter is also fairly small, weighing in around 24kb minified and gzipped.
The single-stepping interpreter design protects against infinite loops, as you can implement your own time limit around the step loop.
For pure-computation exercises and interactive prompts this might be really awesome, but the limited performance and lack of any built-in graphical display means it’s probably not great for hooking it up to an SVG to make it interactive. (Any APIs you add are your own responsibility, and security might be a concern for API design that does anything sensitive.)
Caja
An old project that’s still around is Google Caja, a heavyweight solution for embedding foreign HTML+JS using a server-side Java-based transpiler for the JS and JavaScript-side proxy objects that let you manipulate a subset of the DOM safely.
There are a number of security advisories in Caja’s history; some of them are transpiler failures which allow sandboxed code to directly access the raw DOM, others are failures in injected APIs that allow sandboxed code to directly access the raw DOM. Either way, it’s not something I’d want to inject directly into my main environment.
There’s no protection against loops or simple resource usage like exhausting memory.
Iframe isolation and CSP
I’ve looked at using cross-origin <iframe>s to isolate user code for some time, but was never quite happy with the results. Yes, the “same-origin policy” of HTML/JS means your code running in a cross-origin frame can’t touch your main site’s code or data, but that code is still able to load images, scripts, and other resources from other sites. That creates problems ranging from easy spamming to user information disclosure to simply breaking if required offsite resources change or disappear.
Content-Security-Policy to the rescue! Modern browsers can lock down things like network access using CSP directives on the iframe page.
CSP’s restrictions on loading resources still leaves an information disclosure in navigation — links or document.location can be used to navigate the frame to a URL on a third domain. This can be locked down with CSP’s childsrc param on the parent document — or an intermediate “double” iframe — to only allow the desired target domain (say, “*.wikipedia-embed.org” or even “item12345678.wikipedia-embed.org”). Then attempts to navigate the frame to a different domain from the inside are blocked.
So in principle we can have a rectangular region of the page with its own isolated HTML or SVG user interface, with its own isolated JavaScript running its own private DOM, with only the ability to access data and resources granted to it by being hosted on its private domain.
Further interactivity with the host page can be created by building on the postMessage API, including injecting additional resources or data sets. Note that postMessage is asynchronous, so you’re limited in simulating function calls to the host environment.
There is one big remaining security issue, which is that JS in an iframe can still block the UI for the whole page (or consume memory and other resources), either accidentally with an infinite loop or on purpose. The browser will eventually time out from a long loop and give you the chance to kill it, but it’s not pleasant (and might just be followed by another super-long loop!)
This means denial of service attacks against readers and editors are possible. “Autoplay” of unreviewed embedded widgets is still a bad idea for this reason.
Additionally, older browser versions don’t always support CSP — IE is a mess for instance. So defenses against cross-origin loads either need to somehow prevent loading in older browsers (poorer compatibility) or risk the information exposure (poorer security). However the most popular browsers do enforce it, so applications aren’t likely to be built that rely on off-site materials just to function, preventing which is one of our goals.
Worker isolation
There’s one more trick, just for fun, which is to run the isolated code in a Web Worker background thread. This would still allow resource consumption but would prevent infinite loops from blocking the parent page.
However you’re back to the interpreter’s problem of having no DOM or user interface, and must build a UI proxy of some kind.
Additionally, there are complications with running Workers in iframes, which is that if you apply sandbox=allow-scripts you may not be able to load JS into a Worker at all.
Non-JavaScript languages
Note that if you can run JavaScript, you can run just about anything thanks to emscripten. A cross-compiled Lua interpreter weighs in around 150-180kb gzipped (depending on library inclusion).
Big chart
Here, have a big chart I made for reference:
Offline considerations
In principle the embedding sites can be offline-cached… bears consideration.
App considerations
The iframes could be loaded in a webview in apps, though consider the offline + app issues!
Data model
A widget (or whatever you call it) would have one or more sub resources, like a Gadget does today plus more:
Widgets likely should be instantiable with input parameters like templates and Lua modules are; this would be useful for things like reusing common code with different input data, like showing a physics demo with different constant values.
There should be a human-manageable UI for editing and testing these things. See jsfiddle etc for prior art.
How to build the iframe target site
Possibilities:
Abuse and evil possibilities
Even with the security guarantees of origin restrictions and CSP, there are new and exciting threat models…
Simple denial of service is easy — looping scripts in an iframe can lock up the main UI thread for the tab (or whole browser, depending on the browser) until it eventually times out with an error. At which point it can potentially go right back into a loop. Or you can allocate tons of memory, slowing down and eventually perhaps crashing the browser. Even tiny programs can have huge performance impact, and it’s hard to predict what will be problematic. Thus script on a page could make it hard for other editors and admins to get back in to fix the page… For this reason I would recommend against autoplay in Wikipedia articles of arbitrary unreviewed code.
There’s also possible trolling patterns: hide a shock image in a data set or inside a seemingly safe image file, then display it in a scriptable widget bypassing existing image review.
Advanced widgets could do all kinds of fun and educational things like run emulators for old computer and game systems. That brings with it the potential for copyright issues with the software being run, or for newer systems patent issues with the system being emulated.
For that matter you could run programs that are covered under software patents, such as decoding or encoding certain video file formats. I guess you could try that in Lua modules too, but JS would allow you to play or save result files to disk directly from the browser.
WP:BEANS may apply to further thoughts on this road, beware.
Ideas from Jupyter: frontend/backend separation
Going back to Jupyter/IPython as an inspiration source; Jupyter has a separation between a frontend that takes interactive input and displays output, and a backend kernel which runs the actual computation server-side. To make for fancier interactive displays, the output can have a widget which runs some sort of JavaScript component in the frontend notebook page’s environment, and can interact with the user (via HTML controls), with other widgets (via declared linkages) and with the kernel code (via events).
We could use a model like this which distinguishes between trusted (or semi-trusted) frontend widget code which can do anything it can do in its iframe, but must be either pre-reviewed, or opted into. Frontend widgets that pass review should have well-understood behavior, good documentation, stable interfaces for injecting data, etc.
The frontend widget can and should still be origin-isolated & CSP-restricted for policy enforcement even if code is reviewed — defense in depth is important!
Such widgets could either be invoked from a template or lua module with a fixed data set, or could be connected to untrusted backend code running in an even more restricted sandbox.
The two main ‘more restricted sandbox’ possibilities are to run an interpreter that handles loops safely and applies resource limits, or to run in a worker thread that doesn’t block the main UI and can be terminated after a timeout…. but even that may be able to exhaust system resources via memory allocation.
I think it would be very interesting to extend Jupyter in two specific ways:
It might actually be interesting to adopt, or at least learn from, the communication & linkage model for the Jupyter widgets (which is backbone.js-based, I believe) and consider the possibilities for declarative linkage of widgets to create controllable diagrams/visualizations from common parts.
An interpreter-based Jupyter/IPython kernel that works with the notebooks model could be interesting for code examples on Wikipedia, Wikibooks etc. Math potential as well.
Short-term takeaways
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Problems
Changes this week
irc.wikimedia.org has to be rebooted. This will probably happen on 21 June. It may be postponed. Some tools use this to get the recent changes feed. They will not work when it is down. [2] Special:PageData will be an entry point for machine-readable page data. [3] The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 20 June. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 21 June. It will be on all wikis from 22 June (calendar).Meetings
You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 20 June at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.Future changes
CSS in templates will be stored in a separate page in the future. You can now see how the TemplateStyles extension works on Beta Labs.Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
by Gerard Meijssen (noreply@blogger.com) at June 18, 2017 09:04 PM
Tomorrow, Sunday, 18-06-1983, I am giving a talk at Villupuram on “Introduction to Wikipedia”.
Inviting you all to the event. Thanks for Villupuram GNU Linux Users Group and Puduvai GNU Linux Users Group for organizing this event.
Date : 18-06-2017 Sunday
Time : 10.00 am
Venu : Bodhi IAS Academy,
Shanthi Nilayam
No:10, Vishvalingam Layout,
Villupuram – 605602
Contact : 995 253 408 Three , 750 227 341 Eight
Hoi,The import of data from GeonNames into Wikipedia has been controversial. People say that the quality of the GeoNames data is not "good enough". It resulted in the deletion of thousands of articles from the Swedish Wikipedia. I am not Swedish, I did not follow their discussions but the problem is it sours collaboration with other parties because "their data might not be 100%".His answer is everything I could hope for:
This happened in the past, I care for the future. In Wikidata we do link to GeoNames (example Almere [1]).
There are several ways in which we can help each other and potentially even benefit from a collaboration. Wikidata is licensed with a CC-0 license and therefore GeoNames can have all our data and do with it as they please.
My initial proposal is for a comparison of the shared data. The data where GeoNames differs from Wikidata is potentially problematic. Concentrating on these differences together will improve both our and your data.
Would you be interested?
Thanks,
GerardM
Gerard Meijssen
Hi GerardNot only is there an interest to collaborate; Marc is checking the links in Wikidata referring to GeoNames and as can be expected he finds issues. As I asserted, this is to be expected and collaboration is the only way forward for optimal results.
Thanks a lot for your email. A couple of weeks ago I have started to parse the wikidata extract and look for the matching attributes. Unfortunately I got interrupted and have not yet looked at the result of the parsing. I will continue as soon as I find the time.
The goal is to add the wikidata identifier to the alternatenames table with pseudos language code 'wkdt'. What I have noted so far is that sometimes the geonameids in wikidata go the wrong concept. For instance going to the city feature when the article is speaking about the administrative division or vice versa. This is one of the things I would like to check before adding the wikidataid as alternatename. GeoNames also has links to wikipedia.
I don't think wikipedia should import all geonames features, not all of them are relevant enough to justify a wikipedia article.
Best Regards
by Gerard Meijssen (noreply@blogger.com) at June 17, 2017 08:19 AM
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