Our team has started to plan our goals for 2023. This has been a great opportunity to wear my systems analyst hat. Traditionally, we’re taught to see the world through the lenses of reductionism thinking. That paradigm defends that the world can be split in small parts, and that analyzing those small parts are the simplest way to understand what we comprehend as the whole. This rationalization and compartmentalization of makes it difficult to visualize relationships and the effect those relationships have on the whole.

College is an important time in a student’s life. Many are figuring out what they think of the world and their place in it, and considering their future career. Classwork that gives students autonomy, empowers them to take part in important conversations on a global scale, and gives them a voice in their own schooling really resonates.

Madeline Utter had such an experience in Elizabeth Guffey’s “Performance and Disability Studies” course at UCLA last term. Students discussed the presentation and treatment of disability within film, theater, and performance. Then, Professor Guffey assigned them to choose a Wikipedia article about a film, TV show, or play they discussed in class and make sure it represented the latest disability research.

Madeline and a partner chose the Wikipedia article about the 1988 film Rain Man, which receives more than 2,000 page views a day. After doing a close reading of the article to figure out where they might rewrite or add to content, they noticed an important omission.

“At times, the film erroneously portrayed Savant Syndrome and autism spectrum disorder in order to advance the film’s agenda,” Madeline says. “Unfortunately, this misrepresentation has led to widespread, incorrect beliefs about both Savant Syndrome and autism spectrum disorder. While the film was revolutionary for its time in portraying developmental disability on screen, it left many holes and potentially caused false ideas about developmental disabilities to spread among viewers.”

So the students decided to correct the public record. They added information to the Wikipedia article about screenwriter Barry Morrow’s inspiration for the film’s main character, Raymond Babbitt, as well as Morrow’s unawareness of the intricacies of the neurodivergent conditions he was portraying. The students also detailed some of Dustin Hoffman’s decisions in playing the character of Raymond Babbitt that have led to public misunderstanding around the connection between autism spectrum disorder and Savant Syndrome. Readers of the article will also find a new section detailing the movie’s legacy, namely that funding for autism research and autism diagnoses increased after its release. The article has now been viewed 465,000 times since the students made these changes.

“I feel that this assignment was more well-rounded and timely than a traditional assignment,” Madeline reflected. “It forced us as students to take a critical look at many of the films and TV shows that shaped America through a lens of disability representation, which isn’t something you get to do for every assignment.”

Madeline graduated in June and says she plans to take what she learned from the assignment into her career in Los Angeles’ film and television industry.

“I feel that I learned many skills from writing this Wikipedia article that I’m already applying in my career. For example, looking at projects through a critical eye, analyzing material through a specific lens (in this case, disability), and applying those ideas to something that can inform others in the future.”

Join the movement and incorporate the Wikipedia assignment into your 2023 course. Visit teach.wikiedu.org and register by December 16th to ensure your spot. We look forward to supporting you and your students.

Mark your calendars! Singapore is calling. Wikimania 2023 will run from 16-19 August, in person and online.

This edition’s theme is: “Diversity. Collaboration. Future.”

Diversity. Wikimania will be an opportunity to showcase ESEAP (Wikimedians of East, South East Asia and the Pacific) as an example of inclusion: different volunteer groups, individuals, and affiliates, at different stages of development, different cultures but closely involved in an equitable way. 

Collaboration. As a distributed growth mechanism, Wikimania will be a way to learn and share new knowledge like wiki-tool usage, organizing events / online campaigns, solving Wiki-related problems and much more.

Future. Wikimania is also significant to many Wikimedians as Wikimania 2023 will also be a forum to discuss implementing the Wikimedia Movement Strategy (#Wikimedia2030) and discuss other future-thinking topics.

The days look tentatively like this:

August 15, Tuesday: Pre-conference (optional day). Trainings, self-organized meetings, casual meet-ups, other activities

August 16, Wednesday: Trainings, self-organized meetings, casual meet-ups, other activities. Opening plenary in the evening

August 17, Thursday: CORE CONFERENCE

August 18, Friday: CORE CONFERENCE

August 19, Saturday: CORE CONFERENCE. Closing plenary in the evening

August 20, Sunday: Post-conference (optional day). Culture and heritage activities, other activities

Scholarships and program submissions are opening in January, so start thinking about this edition’s theme and how your work contributes to it.

Have questions? Write to the Core Organizing Team at wikimania@wikimedia.org.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that hosts and provides other support for Wikipedia and its sibling projects, has been under fire recently for the messaging it uses in the infamous donation banners and the disconnect with how that funding is used. These criticisms are not particularly new, but the tension rose to a new level last month with a "Request for comment" on the English Wikipedia on whether the planned fundraising campaign banners were appropriate.

I didn't end up participating in the RfC because it coincided with a heavy travel period for me and I just didn't have time to read through it all. I also don't find arguing about random parts of the WMF's fundraising strategy to be super useful, I think it's all part of a larger picture on how the WMF allocates resources, and whether those goals and projects are inline with what editors want. (There is also the question of whether editors solely should be deciding what the WMF works on, or whether someone needs to speak up for the silent readers. So like I said, much larger picture.) I used to work at the WMF, and I'd like to think that most of the work I did was valuable and that my compensation was appropriate. A bunch of my former coworkers and friends still work there and I do think that the work they do is also valuable, and they should be compensated appropriately for it.

Anyways, there is one point I want to make, and that's the title of this post: the best way to support Wikipedia is with your time. Yes, if you give $5 or whatever to the Wikimedia Foundation, it's a reasonable investment in humanity's collective future...and there are way worse ways to spend $5. But if you give 30 minutes of your time to Wikipedia by contributing to articles, that's worth significantly more than any cash donation!

You can look through the English Wikipedia's backlog for yourself. There are currently 442,000+ articles tagged as needing more references, 98,000+ that need geographic coordinates, etc. This doesn't even include articles that have fallen out of date and need someone to update them. Over the weekend I was looking up demographics on various U.S. cities and noticed that the majority of articles I looked at were still using 2010 census data instead of the newer 2020 dataset! It was frustrating.

One major criticism of the fundraising banners tends to be that they say your money is going to supporting Wikipedia, when it's actually going to a non-profit that does support Wikipedia^[1], in addition to doing some other things.

So if you want to be sure your contribution is going directly to Wikipedia, donate your time. You will see firsthand where your efforts go, and it'll be way more valuable than any financial donation.

P.S. Editing Wikipedia can become addicting; you've been warned.

^[1] Critics tend to downplay how much money is actually needed to support Wikipedia on a regular basis. And the WMF has done itself no favors by being less and less transparent over the years on what it's up to!

A nature photo-walk rejuvenates you by clearing your mind from the stress and strain of your busy life, intricately connecting you with the refreshing colors and soothing sounds and strengthening your bonding with Mother Nature while giving you first hand information and knowledge about the flora and fauna of the surroundings. A butterfly photo-walk serves all the same with special emphasis only to these flying beauties. 

Unlike expeditions and exploratory field trips, photo-walks are organized as small and budget-friendly trips meant for interested first-timers or people with little experience on the subject, which helps them to gain experience by interacting with and observing the more experienced members of the group.

There are few important things to consider before organizing a butterfly photo-walk.

Look for appropriate hot-spots:

Always look for a safe and well-communicated location with a good prospect for photography. A pre-visit of the location is of great importance to have all the related information ready in mind like accessibility, permission from authority, terms and conditions, entry fee, local transport and eateries, nature of local people, any possibility of local disturbance or hooliganism etc.

Such a venue could be of a wide range from urban nature parks or botanical gardens or or sacred groves with vegetation or local forests to wildlife sanctuaries or reserve forests. It should be conveniently traveled with a 1-2 hours journey to save time and energy of the participants. A safe drinking water source is a must and eateries in proximity can be a plus point.

Fix a date and check the weather:

This is of immense importance in butterfly photo-walks as activities of butterflies are highly affected by weather. For a good prospect a bright sunny, hot and humid day is the best pick. Cold weather and winter season should be excluded as butterflies are least active at that time.

Check for weather updates from reliable weather forecast sites or weather news from television or radio programs to ensure a bright sunny day of 25-28° centigrade temperature which excites butterflies to frisk, dart, hover, puddle, busk, nectar and so on.

Plan your route:

Plan your route in advance to efficiently use the time for photography. As a photo-walk organizer or coordinator, you should always be helpful to other participants to share all possible information on how they can travel and reach the venue and assemble at a pre-destined spot before time from where the entire team will move together.

Know the rules and regulations of your venue:

The photo-walk organizers should have clear knowledge of the rules and regulations as well as the dos and don’ts of the prospective venue and intimate all the participants verbally as well as through pamphlets or cheat sheets before and during the walk. This can avoid untoward incidents and ensure a healthy environment. It is a must to check for any permissions required and to collect them for all participants from concerned forest department officials in case you are planning to venture into wildlife sanctuaries or reserve forests.

Spread the news:

The photo-walk event should be well advertised and propagated in social media for interested persons to know. It should be highlighted what new learnings can the participants take away from the walk. There needs to be a way to register the participants where they can share contact information, which can help you contact them to ensure their participation, arrange for logistics and share necessary information. It is of utmost importance to limit participation as per your capacity as too much crowd can bring nuisance in the wild frightening the butterflies.

This is a Social media banner for Wiki Loves Butterfly Photo-Walk 2022 at Chintamani Kar Bird Sanctuary.
(Souradipta Saha CC BY-SA 4.0)

Bring experience:

Presence of lepidopterists, experienced butterfly photographers or resource persons into your team shall be of immense value to the event as they can help, guide and mentor relatively new butterfly enthusiasts answering their queries about species identification, behavioral patterns, host plants, life cycles etc. Keeping some copies of field guide booklets can increase the value too.

Prepare a smart schedule:

A smart and interesting schedule of the event must be prepared beforehand to ensure utilizing proper time span for each program. It can be like this-

• Gather in a specific meeting point. 
• Brief self-introduction of all participants including the organizers
• General briefing about the purpose of the butterfly photo-walk 
• Expert’s briefing about the world of butterfly
• Exploration and photography in action
• Recess
• Identification of butterfly species and preparing a checklist
• Question and answer session with expert
• Group photos with event banner (if any) or with forest or nature park signboard at the entry gate.

Carry photographic gears:

• Camera and accessories: It is always better to carry a macro facilitated digital camera, preferably DSLR with intermediate macro lenses (90mm-105mm) or long macro lenses (150mm-200mm) or telephoto zoom lenses (55-200mm, 55-250mm, 70-300mm, 75-300mm, 70-350mm etc.) with flash gun, diffuser. For more quick tips on using them, read this Diff post.
• Mobile camera: If any participant does not have any camera, please remember, a smartphone is not great in low light situations. It’s best to capitalize on lighting conditions under which your device best functions. Do not ever use the zoom on your smartphone as the images come out grainy or hazy. Instead, move closer to the subject as much as possible so that you don’t have to rely on the camera. Always try to clean the glass of the lens to avoid a greasy thumbprint.
• Enough memory cards and always try to carry spare batteries if possible.

Dress for the butterflies:

It is better to avoid bright coloured dresses to avoid unwanted attention. Use a camouflage or dark coloured dress instead. A full-sleeved dress prevents irritation caused by wild weeds and poisonous plants. Waterproof trek shoes with good grip covering your entire feet and guarding your ankles are highly advisable. During monsoon months, snake bite protection leggings or gaiters are very essential especially in forests.  

Bring back memories and photographs, leave only your footprints:

It is extremely important to preserve the environment for the butterflies as it is. The participants should be informed to bring metal water bottles to avoid littering disposable plastic bottles. Participants should be strictly instructed to not litter plastic wrappers of food, chocolates etc and to bring them back to dispose of them in appropriate places. Perfumes, deodorants, hairsprays etc. should be avoided because their strong scent destroys the natural fragrances. Making noise during the photographic activity can frighten the wild habitats of the area including the butterflies and break the silence of the environment, which should be avoided at any cost.

Last but not certainly least, and this goes without saying for all participants, respect the nature you photograph. If all photographers practice leaving no trace principles and leave places better than they found them, it will insure these locations and the wildlife that live in them can be preserved for years to come.

On November 19, 2022, an editathon named “WikipediaOYA” was held at Oya Soichi Library, a Japanese magazine library. This article describes the details.

Overview

The timetable is as follows.

Management team consists of

• Eugene Ormandy from Toumon Wikipedian Club, Japan (Producer)
• Araisyohei, an administrator of Japanese Wikipedia
• A staff member of Oya Soichi Library
• Some Librarians from other libraries

We held this event only by invitation to prevent the spread of Covid 19 and because of limited working space.

Veteran Japanese Wikipedians such as Dr. Sae Kitamura and a member of Student Wikipedian Community in Waseda Uni Tokyo joined this event and edited the articles about sweets.

It was the second time we held WikipediaOYA. FYI, the report of WikipediaOYA vol.1 is as follows.

Lecture of the unique search system

Firstly, a staff member of Oya Soichi Library explained how to use “Web OYA-bunko” which is an original search engine of this library. They introduced four functions and original index system.

Library Tour

After the lecture, we took a tour of Oya Soichi Library. This library applies a closed-stack system, so usually we cannot see the stacks. However, participants of this event were allowed to tour them.

Participants were overwhelmed by the large collection of magazines. Wikipedia editors were delighted that there were all the magazines they wanted to use for Wikipedia editing. Librarians were surprised at unique bookshelves. Some participants said that they want to live there.

You can watch the bookshelves on Oya Soichi Library’s YouTube channel (Japanese language).

Searching, Editing and Shooting for YouTube

After the tour and lunch, some participants started to edit Wikipedia articles about sweets using Web OYA-bunko. Some editors created new articles and the others added sentences to the articles. Their results are posted on the project page (Japanese Language).

While Wikipedians edited articles, the other participants took a video for YouTube. They shot an interview with a staff of Oya Soichi Library. This video will be uploaded to Araisyohei’s YouTube channel.

FYI, the video we had took at WikipediaOYA vol.1 is as follows (Japanese Language).

Discussion

Finally, we had a discussion with some staff members of Oya Soichi Library. We shared the Wikipedia articles we had edited and how to have used the library. Comments from participants are as follows.

• I was very surprised at the large collection.
• I was happy that all the volumes of my favorite magazine are available.
• I can trace the trend through magazines.
• Oya Soichi Library is helpful for Wikipedia editors.

I was especially impressed that staff members of Oya Soichi Library offered Wikipedia editors another way of searching. For example, when an Wikipedia editor said that they had referred to the Oya classification “16 Social Condition > 009 sweets” to collect information on French chocolate cake, a staff member added that they can also refer to “04 World > 084 Social Condition in France > 004 Food, Clothing, Shelter and Cosmetic“. Moreover, when another Wikipedia editor pointed out that the way magazines feature sweets differs depending on the type of magazine, a staff member advised that they can search limiting the type of magazines.

This discussion highlighted Oya Soichi Library’s abundant materials, unique research system, and excellent reference system. A staff member of Oya Soichi Library commented, “I’m very happy because I don’t usually have many opportunities to hear the voices of users.”

Conclusion

The goal of WikipediaOYA is to satisfy all the participants, Wikipedia editors, Librarians form other libraries and staff members of Oya Soichi Library.

Through this event, Wikipedia editors can learn useful tools and improve Wikipedia articles. Librarians from other libraries can learn the unique system of Oya Soichi Library and give an interview Wikipedia editors, who are very active library user.

Then, what are the benefits for Oya Soichi Library? Our answer is “Highlighting the charm of OYA Soichi Library through editing Wikipedia and archiving them”. So, we edited Wikipedia articles using OYA Soichi Library’s system, shared them at discussion and wrote this report.

I think we achieved the goal. We hope we can hold WikipediaOYA again.

Other languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Deutsch, English,Esperanto, Tiếng Việt, Tyap, français, italiano, magyar, polski, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, فارسی, हिन्दी, বাংলা, ಕನ್ನಡ, 中文, 日本語, 粵語, ꯃꯤꯇꯩ ꯂꯣꯟ, 한국어

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

• A new preference, “Enable limited width mode”, has been added to the Vector 2022 skin. The preference is also available as a toggle on every page if your monitor is 1600 pixels or wider. It allows for increasing the width of the page for logged-out and logged-in users. [1]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 29 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 30 November. It will be on all wikis from 1 December (calendar).
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 29 November at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 1 December at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).
• Mathematical formulas shown in SVG image format will no longer have PNG fall-backs for browsers that don’t support them. This is part of work to modernise the generation system. Showing only PNG versions was the default option until in February 2018. [2][3][4]
• On some wikis that use flagged revisions, a new checkbox will be added to Special:Contributions that enables you to see only the pending changes by a user. [5]

Future changes

• How media is structured in the parser’s HTML output will change early next week at group1 wikis (but not Wikimedia Commons or Meta-Wiki). This change improves the accessibility of content, and makes it easier to write related CSS. You may need to update your site-CSS, or userscripts and gadgets. There are details on what code to check, how to update the code, and where to report any related problems. [6]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

The RightsCon call for proposals is open! Submit your proposal to represent the free knowledge movement at this global summit. The deadline is 12 January, 2023, at 11:59 p.m Pacific Standard Time (13 January 2022, 07:59 a.m UTC; please check your local time).

RightsCon 2023, hosted by Access Now, is a summit that brings together people from around the world to discuss human rights in the digital age. Next year, RightsCon will be a hybrid event, open to online participation as well as in-person for the first time in three years, in San José, Costa Rica. It will take place from 5–9 June, 2023. It is a free event; everyone can apply, and everyone can register to attend. 

This annual event convenes civil society, governments, tech companies, and human rights activists, as well as members of the open source and free knowledge movements. Wikimedians who attend are equally diverse and present perspectives as editors, executive directors of affiliates, as well as Foundation staff. No matter their role, Wikimedians at the summit help other RightsCon participants and audiences understand the value of community moderation and debate, how Wikimedia projects can be a vehicle for documenting key global issues, and why it is important for even more people to become editors and contribute to the projects.

Joining RightsCon is a great opportunity for Wikimedians to hear about developments in the digital rights space, learn about advocacy tactics, and build new relationships. As one Wikimedian explained, ‘it also offers a chance to demonstrate that Wikimedia projects are not simple, dry websites, but a community where knowledge is produced and debated.’ 

How to apply to RightsCon 2023

The call for proposals is open to everyone! Registration, online attendance, and proposal submissions are all free. RightsCon’23 will focus on gender justice, labor, and the environment, particularly in respect to:

• data protection and biometrics;
• technical support and digital security;
• surveillance and facial recognition technology;
• privacy and patient care;
• media literacy and disinformation;
• and, internet access and shutdowns.

Here’s what to do if you want to submit a session . . .

1. Read RightsCon’s guide to a successful proposal. This guide explains the six steps for submitting a proposal, the types of formats that are available, and the evaluation criteria for submissions.
   
2. Make sure your proposed session aligns with the themes of RightsCon 2023.

3. Attend the RightsCon organizers’ open community call on 7 December, 2022 at 9:00–10:00 a.m. Eastern Time (check your local time), that their team will host to answer questions and provide guidance about the application process.
   
4. Submit your proposal before the deadline, 12 January, 2023 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (13 January, 2023, at 07:59 a.m UTC; check your local time).

The Global Advocacy team will do its best to support you when submitting a session. Optionally, you can:

• Send us your written proposal, so that a member of our team can help strengthen it. We are here to help! Email Ziski Putz (fputz@wikimedia.org) with your proposal by 5 January, 2023, at the latest.
  
• Let us know if RightsCon accepts your proposal. We can brainstorm together and offer recommendations on how to structure and plan your session. We will also help publicize accepted submissions through our social media channels and mailing list.

Good luck with your proposal! We look forward to seeing you at RightsCon 2023, representing the Wikimedia communities and helping to promote free and open knowledge!

15/11/2022-21/11/2022

Mapping

• Anne-Karoline Distel is still ‘obsessing‘ about crannógs. She has published the first two of a planned five-part video series on how to map crannógs.
• watmildon outlined the technique they use to find and fix instances where addr:housenumber have been incorrectly tagged as name.
• OSM user blkatbyhh shared a tutorial on how to semi-automatically map landuse features from satellite imagery by using Fiji, which is image recognition software.
• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • office=power_utility to replace office=energy_supplier for tagging the office of a power utility company.
  • emergency=lifeboat_station for tagging the buildings and base areas of those groups that are dedicated to the rescue of vessels and sailors in distress.
• Voting is underway for fountain:design=*, to specify what type of fountain an amenity=fountain is, until Monday 5 December.

Community

• The results of a OSMF member survey on membership prerequisites (we reported earlier) have been published.
• LySioS showed the increase in users of Mastodon. He also points out the instance administered by Amanda McCann. Amanda is looking for a logo for this instance.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The Engineering Working Group has made a call for proposals for a project to add the ability to mute users on the openstreetmap.org website. This would let OSM contributors who receive unwanted messages in their openstreetmap.org message inbox to mute (ignore) private messages from another contributor. This subject was also discussed on GitHub.
• Eligible members of the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF) should receive, on Saturday 3 December, instructions on how to vote to elect four new board members via their registered OSMF email. They can start voting on
  Saturday 3 December after 16:00 UTC. Voting will end on Saturday 10 December at 16:00 UTC when the Annual General Meeting will start in the IRC chatroom #osmf-gm on the IRC network irc.oftc.net.As we reported last week, the OSM wiki has more information and it is also possible to read the candidates’ answers to official questions and their manifestos.
• The ‘Risk of hostile takeover of the OpenStreetMap Foundation’ was the only discussion last week on osmf-talk for the current Board election (with four seats available this year and 11 candidates, some with corporate affiliations). OSMF is the legal owner of the OSM database and hardware. Brian Sperlongano started the discussion by asking Roland Olbricht to clarify a post on the talk-de discussion list where he perceived Roland to favour German over US candidates. Opinions varied widely, others focusing discussion on the risk of a hostile takeover.
• Christoph Hormann wrote, in his blog, about his observations on the past year regarding the OSMF. Among many other facts, he observes an increasing commercialisation of OSMF policy and the increasing dominance of lobbyists in OSMF policy advice.

Events

• The 30DayMapChallenge 2022 on Twitter and Mastodon continued. It is not possible to adequately acknowledge the multitude of outstanding works. The selection we make is purely random and not an evaluation. Please explore the works yourself. franceinfo reported ► on how this challenge, started by a Finnish geographer in 2019, has become a worldwide event.
  • Day 15: Food/drink | Vanessa Tebbitt
    @vanessatebbitt * Meat Consumption and CO2 Emissions | Loore @loore_ko * Traffic lines of Estonian fishing vessels 2019 | Hans van der Kwast @hansakwast * Where to buy Dutch Cheese | bordoray @bordoray * cooked as E(ps)GG:221115 |
  • Day 16: Minimal | ThoNoi @noirothomas * lLe Haut, Le Bas et Le Doubs | MapServer Studio @mapserverstudio * WORLDLE | Peter Gorman @barelymaps * The bridges of Portland, Oregon | Nim – @bbecquet@mamot.fr @nimwendil * 64×64 pixel art Isle of Mull |
  • Day 17: A map without a computer | suǝbbıɹɟ pıʌɐp @dakvid * A pizza in the shape of Australia | BKG @BKG@social.bund.de * Weihnachtsplätzchen/Bolachas de Natal | jcarlson@mapstodon.space Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space * Mapmaking With Children | Dolly Andriatsiferana @privatemajory * Geofiction |
  • Day 18: Colour Friday: Blue | Michel Stuyts @michelstuyts@fosstodon.org * Flow accumulation around Deurne airport | Vikki :verified: @DataScienceNot2@tech.lgbt * Migration paths of some Bluefin Tuna | Xiao Wang @gisXiaoWang * When map meets blue and white porcelain | Keith Jenkins @kgjenkins@mapstodon.space * wait for it … |
  • Day 19: Globe | LUC @LUCtweeting * Elemental Earth | Sam Keast @SouthCrossMaps * Population of Eurasian and African countries | Andrew DC @andrewdc_nz * For All Moon Time | Andrew Tyrrell * Platonic Earth @SouthArrowMaps@mapstodon.space |
  • Day 20: “My favourite …” | Doug G. @douggreenfield@mapstodon.space * Map of my Favorite Maps | ArtisansCartographes @Artisans_Cartos CrossMap Puzzle | Seán @Seaniesan * Geological Map of Ireland |
  • Day 21: Data: Kontur Population Dataset | Benjamin Becquet @bbecquet@mamot.fr * Population of the Netherlands living below sea level | I.K.D @IKEDA_02 * Population Mogadishu, Somalia | Ahmad Zaenun Faiz @zaenun_faiz * Hexagon Penduluk Jawa Tengah |
• HOT shared a HOT unSummit mid-programme report, which has so far included seven event collaborations across six countries.
• OSM contributor Rashid86 reported ► that InDrive.Tech launched a mapping campaign to map small settlements in Kazakhstan from 16 to 23 November, coinciding with the International Geographic Information System Days.

Maps

• yvecai celebrated the mapping of over 100,000 km of Nordic ski piste.

Releases

• Nominatim 4.1.1 has been released. This is a bugfix release, which resolves some issues around the updating of databases and search.

Did you know …

• [1] … MapSCII is a Braille and ASCII world map renderer for your console?
• … OpenLayers, a JavaScript library for interactive maps, had their Twitter account locked? Searching for it on Twitter returned ‘This account doesn’t exist’. Twitter requires users to be at least 13 years old and the team has put the date of their first release, which was in 2006, as their birthday. We can confirm the rebirth of @openlayers on Twitter but not their age!

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)		2022-11-28
Natal	Mapeamento de Comunidades no Brasil / Mapping Communities in Brazil.		2022-11-29 – 2022-11-30
Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta	OSMGeoWeek Indonesia 2022		2022-11-30
Łódź	UN Mappers and OSM Poland Mapaton		2022-11-30
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-11-30
Budapest	OSM Weaving: Remote help, Corvin Mall preparation, Mapvent of December (online)		2022-12-01
Cojata	Reunatón Latam		2022-12-03
加古川市	State of the Map Japan 2022 in Kakogawa		2022-12-03
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第34回 渉成園		2022-12-04
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 月聚會 #47		2022-12-05
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-12-05
	Monthly MapRoulette Community Meeting		2022-12-06
City of Westminster	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-12-06
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-12-07
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #42 (Online)	✓	2022-12-06
	HOT Tasking Manager Monthly Meet Up		2022-12-07
Brest	Mapathon en partenariat avec Infini		2022-12-07
Rio de Janeiro	Workshop Mapeamento Participativo e Cartografia Social 2022 / Participatory Mapping and Social Cartography Workshop 2022		2022-12-07 – 2022-12-08
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2022-12-07
München	Mapping Party: Christmas Edition		2022-12-08
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-12-08
Budapest	Corvin Mall in-person survey, Grund: NextCloud Maps, StreetComplete, Snap, IPv6		2022-12-09
Zürich	OSM-Stammtisch		2022-12-09
Berlin	174. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch (hybrid – Test für FOSSGIS 2023)		2022-12-09
	[Online] 16th Annual General Meeting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation		2022-12-10
København	OSMmapperCPH		2022-12-11
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-12-13
Rio de Janeiro	Workshop Mapeamento Participativo e Cartografia Social 2022 / Participatory Mapping and Social Cartography Workshop 2022		2022-12-14 – 2022-12-15
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Meetup		2022-12-15
	Michigan Meetup		2022-12-15
Stainach-Pürgg	7. Virtueller OpenStreetMap Stammtisch Österreich		2022-12-14
Toulouse	Réunion du groupe local		2022-12-17

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

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

Mediawiki developers, have you ever thought, “I wish I could deploy my own code for Mediawiki”? Now you can! More deploys! More fun!

Next time you want to get some code deployed, why not try scap backport?

One Command To Deploy

scap backport is one command that will +2 your patch, deploy to mwdebug and wait for your approval, and finally sync to all servers. You only need to provide the change number or gerrit url of your change.

You can run scap backport on patches that have already merged, or re-run scap backport if you decided to cancel in the middle of a run. scap backport can also handle multiple patches at a time. After all the patches have been merged, they’ll be deployed all together. scap backport will confirm that your patches are deployable before merging, and double check no extra patches have sneaked into your deployment.

One Command To Revert

And if your code didn’t work out, don’t worry, there’s scap backport —revert, which will create a revert patch, send it to Gerrit, and run all steps of scap backport to revert your work. You’re offered the choice to give a reason for revert, which will show up in the commit message. Just be aware that you'll need to wait for tests to run and your code to merge before it gets synced, so in an emergency this might not be the best option.

Extra Information

You can also list available backports or reverts using the —list flag!

If you'd like some guidance on deploying backports, please sign up here to join us for backport training, which happens once a week on Thursday during the UTC late backport window!

Scap Backport In Action

Compare to Manual Steps

For comparison, the previous way to backport would require the user to enter the following commands on the deployment host:

cd /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-<version>
git status
git fetch
git log -p HEAD..@{u}
git rebase

Then, if there were changes to an extension: git submodule update [extensions|skins]/<name>
Then, log in to mwdebug and run scap pull
Then, back on the deployment host: scap sync-file php-<version>/<path to file> 'Backport: [[gerrit:<change no>|<subject> (<bug no>)]]' for each changed file

Example Usage

List backports
scap backport --list

Backport change(s)
scap backport 1234
scap backport https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/1234
scap backport 1234 5678

Merge but do not sync
scap backport --stop-before-sync 1234

List revertable changes
scap backport --revert --list

Revert change(s)
scap backport --revert 1234
scap backport --revert 1234 5678

That's all for now, and happy backporting!

With 8% of the global population and 9% of global internet users, the Latin America and Caribbean region were one of the first areas of the movement that began collaborating together with a regional focus. This region provides us with several lessons about how we can coordinate better together across a region.

Learning Sessions 

We are all part of a global movement that spans regions, languages and communities. This year, as part of the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan, we introduced a focus on regional work as part of the Foundation’s own commitment to advancing knowledge equity and supporting movement strategy. This regional focus will allow the Foundation to better understand localized needs and regional trends as part of our work.

We launched this new approach at the beginning of this fiscal year by improving our coordination on a regional level. Foundation teams working in the regions and partnering with local communities now convene more intentionally around defining the impact that is possible for us to make together in different regions of the world. 

Each quarter, we will meet to discuss regional and historical trends and activities by individual volunteers, Chapters, User Groups, Thematic Organizations, partners organizations in the free knowledge ecosystem. These sessions are an important check-in as part of our Annual Plan, and look at planned work by various teams at the Foundation to prioritize and align resources for focused results and more impactful partnerships. 

Here are our learnings for Latin America and the Caribbean. 

Wikimedia in LAC 

Affiliates 

The Latin American and Caribbean community has been developing projects for over a decade. In numbers, the 42 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean represent 38,000 unique active editors, 7% percent of the global total. There is still room to grow and bring more diverse representation to the region. 

The region has five chapters and eight user groups. Other user groups (not affiliates) also work in the region. In the past, the region has hosted six Ibero-American conferences and was one of the first to talk about regionalized work. 

This year, Wiki Movimento Brasil hosted WikiCon Brasil, the first national conference of the Brazilian community of Wikimedians. The conference theme was “Wikimedia against disinformation,” and it was chosen by the community given the relevance of this discussion, especially in Brazil, which has been suffering for some time with the circulation of fake news and misleading content.

Celebrating leadership in the region 

Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement’s annual conference that celebrates free knowledge projects made possible by the volunteer community. This year we celebrated the leadership of two notable women. 

Olga Paredes, coordinator of Wikimedistas of Bolivia was distinguished as The Wikimedia of the Year for her work above and beyond in teaching and encouraging others to grow the Wikimedia movement and make meaningful contributions to our sum of knowledge.

Anna Torres, executive director of Wikimedia Argentina was distinguished with The Honorable Mention for her work mentoring countless people on regional and global level and also being a leader on the 2030 Movement Strategy. 

Working together in the Region  

In the past year, the Foundation led an initiative called Personalized first day. The newcomer experience marketing  was part of that initiative, and they tested the efficacy of social media ads (bringing users into our projects) and welcoming emails (retaining new users). Going forward welcoming newcomers in the region will continue to be a priority area of work.

Another project part of this initiative was the Add an image project. Included four GLAM events with museum professionals intensively using the “add an image” feature. This involved two events in Argentina, one in Chile and one in Mexico. Across the events, 67 people added images to 278 unillustrated articles in Spanish Wikipedia. 

In addition to these pilot programs on the Wikimedia projects, partnerships and other collaborations provided important avenues for developing new skills and introducing new people to the Wikimedia projects. In 2022, Wikimedia Argentina, with the support of the Inter-American Development Bank and the Wikimedia Foundation, carried out the course “21st Century Skills in Action: Digital Citizenship and Wikimedia Projects”, focused on the development of life skills and digital citizenship through Wikimedia projects. This course was offered free of charge to 216 Latin American youth from 18 countries in the region, of which 74 (44 women and 30 men) completed the course and learned how to use Wikimedia projects as tools to search for information and reduce content and learning gaps related to digital citizenship.

In addition, for the first time in the region, an internship program was carried out to strengthen the learning experiences of the ten most outstanding students of the course. They collaborated for three months with chapters of the Wikimedia movement in the region as well as Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Understanding representation and content gaps in the region 

Content gaps in the region is a strategic line for the work of the affiliates, for that reason the region created several campaigns and resources to fill all the gaps in Wikipedia. This year the guide Wikipedia and LGBTT+ biographies was published by Wikimedia Argentina and the Regional contest Stop! Women Working with 279  images of professional women and trades in Wikimedia Commons. Also happened this year was the lecture Decolonize Structured Data co-host by Wiki Movimento Brasil and Whose Knowledge. 

Support for the movement

Over the last several years, Latin America and the Caribbean has received increased funding from the Foundation. This is a result of the Wikimedia Foundation’s strategy to decentralize resources especially among underrepresented communities. 

During the 2021-2022 fiscal year, under the global grant strategy relaunch, the Latin America and the Caribbean region received a 64% increase this year – going from USD 856,000 to USD 1.4M in the fiscal year 2021-22. In Latin America and the Caribbean, 7 out of 13 affiliates (58%) applied for and received grants.

The major themes of these grants were focused around activities about Education, Culture & Heritage, and Diversity. For example, the work of WikiAcción Perú dedicated to expanding the Wikimedia movement with a specific focus on ecology, gender, and culture, emphasizing the connection with nature and collective memory. Or the work led by a group of Wayúu wikimedians from an indigenous nation that shares territories of Colombia and Venezuela. They build capacities of Wayúu teachers around Wikipedia and who, at the same time, contribute to generating content to enrich the Wikipeetia süka wayuunaiki that is in the incubator.

Support beyond funding

As part of the new funding strategy, efforts have started to use data for collective analysis and spaces for peer reflection, learning, and sharing. Many affiliates and community groups have been actively involved in Let’s Connect peer learning program. The first three community-led Learning Clinics were led by LAC members in Mexico, Peru, and Argentina, around organizational planning, proposal writing, and communications strategies (resources here). In October, a Regional Learning Session brought together 30 grantees, Regional Fund Committee members, and staff to reflect on grantees’ intended impact in the region.

Looking forward

This is a region with the maturity of organizing online initiatives during pandemic season. The work around how to close content persists was consistent the last couple of years and had strived against adversity. So after a pause of three years, Iberoconf is coming back in February 2023. Next year’s conference will take place in Bogotá, Colombia, and part of the goal will be to consolidate a regional governance framework in alignment with the 2030 strategy. 

Help us learn

Is this missing something? Leave a comment below and tell us about the great work in the region.

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Community Resources and Research teams are excited to announce the 2022 Research Fund grantees!

The Research Fund was launched in November 2021 to:

• Expand, strengthen, and diversify the network of Wikimedia researchers globally;
• Fund research initiatives that support the Wikimedia Movement in deeper understanding of the contributions, decision making and building technologies for the Wikimedia projects.

We received applications from 22 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South Americas.

The Fund had a two stage selection process. Stage I applications went through a technical review process by established Wikimedia researchers and a deliberation and discussion stage between the technical reviewers moderated by the Research Fund chairs. The Wikimedia community was invited to provide feedback to Stage I proposals on Meta-Wiki. Regional Fund Committee members were invited to provide their input on a short-list of the Stage I proposals. From the original pool of 35 applications, 13 were selected for a second stage. The applicants were asked to submit more detailed descriptions of their proposed work incorporating feedback from the technical reviewers, regional committees, as well as the broader Wikimedia community. Final review and decision making was completed by the Research Fund Co-Chairs, with nine grantees ultimately awarded funding. Collectively, they will receive 254,920.20 USD to support their work. 

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Research Fund technical review team and the Regional Fund committee members for their valuable input on the proposals. We also would like to thank the members of the Wikimedia community who provided constructive feedback to the researchers to improve their work. 

Below you can learn more about the funded projects.

Projects selected for funding

Using Wikipedia for educational purposes in Estonia: The students′ and teachers′ perspective (Estonia)

This research seeks to examine the use of Vikipeedia (Estonian language version of Wikipedia) in Estonian schools for educational purposes both from the students’ and teachers’ perspectives. The focus is on how students use Vikipeedia both inside and outside the classroom and how teachers have used Vikipeedia’s potential for educational purposes. The research will have a direct impact on the local Wikimedia community in Estonia supporting their educational activities. It also gives a strong foundation to carry on the further studies both in general education schools and universities.

Adapting Wikidata and Wikibase to support clinical practice using Data Science, Semantic Web and Machine Learning (Tunisia)

This project will turn Wikidata into a large-scale biomedical resource by importing information from external resources, primarily PubMed. The grantees will then validate the information in Wikidata for accuracy and consistency. Lastly, they will promote the biomedical applications of Wikidata in the Global South through online capacity building events for the biomedical community and publications.

Slow Editing towards Equity (Netherlands)

This project aims to identify the skills needed by Wikipedians to move equity initiatives through the policy development process. The grantees will evaluate the paths of equity initiatives through the policy development process in five Wikipedia language editions (Arabic, Dutch, English, French, and Spanish). They will collect and analyze both successful and failed proposals that sought to increase knowledge equity. This work has potential to increase understanding of Wikipedia’s policy landscape and how existing practices influence the likelihood of a proposal’s success.

Can Machine Translation Improve Knowledge Equity? A Large-scale Study of Wikipedias across more than 300 language editions (Canada)

This work aims to provide insight into how neural machine translation can be leveraged to bridge knowledge gaps across Wikipedia language editions. This is particularly relevant for low-resourced languages where it is difficult to attract and retain volunteers. This research will provide insights for Wikipedia developer communities that aim to improve machine translation services and related user interfaces. 

Social and Language Influence in Wikipedia Articles for Deletion Debates (US)

This work focuses on understanding the extent to which Wikipedia editors conform to the majority when voting on Articles for Deletion (AfD) pages. The researcher will analyze the sequences of votes on AfD pages, as well as their rationales indicated in the comments, to understand social decision-making practices. 

From the media to Wikipedia: the relationship between Chilean media news and malicious edits made in the virtual encyclopedia during the Social Outbreak of Chile in 2019 (Chile)

This work seeks to understand how Wikipedia content is accessed and shaped by current events (particularly in Latin America) and how the Wikimedia community can respond to vandalism. In particular, the research aims to identify relationships between Chilean media coverage of the 2019 social outbreak with vandalism on Spanish Wikipedia.

Grounding NPOV pillar in post-censored information ecology (Romania)

Over the past four years, the grantees have trained more than 50 librarians to edit Wikipedia and found that they struggled with the principle of maintaining a neutral point of view (NPOV). This research aims to identify why NPOV is difficult to follow and to improve training of new Wikipedia editors.

Wikidata Gender Diversity (WiGeDi) (UK)

The project will study gender diversity in Wikidata, focusing in particular on marginalized gender identities. It will examine how the current Wikidata ontology model represents gender, and the extent to which this representation is fair and inclusive. It will analyze the data stored in the knowledge base to gather insights and identify possible gaps. Finally, it will look at how the community has handled the move towards the inclusion of a wider spectrum of gender identities. A web application will be created to share the results publicly in a user-friendly way.

Future Funding Opportunities

If you are interested in applying for research funds, check out this year’s call for proposals. Submissions are due December 16, 2022. We also encourage you to subscribe to  wiki-research-l mailing list where we will communicate more information about this round of funding and other opportunities and research events.  

Are you looking for an assignment where students:

• can integrate their interests and career aspirations with course content
• feel empowered as knowledge creators
• strengthen digital literacy skills
• embody the principles of inclusivity and equity while producing classwork

If you answered yes to any of the above, hear what Hannah Yang, a third-year student at Northwestern, has to say about the Wikipedia assignment. Through Aaron Shaw’s spring course, Hannah answered the following question on a worldwide stage: “What does it mean to design with inclusivity in mind?” What began as a class research project has become a potential blueprint for anyone with an internet connection and an interest in design.

Hannah chose to overhaul the Wikipedia article about inclusive design, the process by which a designer considers a diversity of users and user experiences when developing a project. It’s a topic that has gained some traction in recent years, which was both exciting and daunting for Hannah as she considered making edits.

“I really wanted to provide a meaningful level of detail and clarity regarding what inclusive design looks like–that is, how it could be put into practice,” Hannah says. She was also particularly interested in distinguishing “inclusive design” from accessible or universal design. “I find that these three ideas are often used interchangeably, but I think that inclusive design is a broader, and perhaps more powerful philosophy, especially when applied not just to products, but also to policies and infrastructure. I think that a crucial idea behind inclusive design is that when a design is inclusive, the experience is better for everyone.”

In the new and improved article, Hannah has made the distinctions between the terms clear. She also added some real-world examples, which weren’t there before, and cited an additional 23 sources.

Given that Professor Shaw let students choose which article to work on (as long as it was related to the course topic), Hannah was able to integrate her long-time interest in design with her coursework.

“Throughout middle school, I ran a site where other website owners could request a review from me regarding their site’s design and content. So I’ve always been discerning about things like navigability and readability, long before I learned any design principles or theories to explain why some sites felt better-designed than others,” Hannah shares. But it wasn’t until she was a college student taking courses on human-computer interaction and design principles that Hannah encountered the concept of inclusive design.

“The topic is something I will certainly carry with me into my career, regardless of what I pursue. I’ve already sought to bring inclusive design into the student organization I lead, both when thinking through our internal processes (such as recruitment and our new member experience) and directly presenting on the topic in our educational programming. Whether thinking about internal company policies in an inclusive manner or producing work that reflects inclusive design principles, researching for this article has provided me with some core considerations to look out for.”

Considering how much Hannah now relies on inclusive design principles in various facets of her life, looking back, it surprises her that the original Wikipedia article wasn’t fully fleshed out. Hannah hopes that now others can benefit from the changes she and her classmates have made.

“Overall, I hope people will come away from the article with a greater sense of the potential scope of inclusive design, and some concrete processes that they could apply to their own lives and work,” she says.

With 10,000 page views since Hannah made edits in February, plus the recent research showing Wikipedia’s effect on real-world behavior, there’s a good chance that Hannah’s hope has already become a reality.

In a Wikipedia assignment, not only do students add academic content to Wikipedia that might not otherwise be included, they also bring their unique perspectives as students of a particular discipline, geographic region, or identity. Hannah, for example, is a Communications major at Northwestern with minors in Entrepreneurship and Integrated Marketing Communications. She was born in Connecticut, grew up in Shanghai, and currently calls Austin, Texas, home. If not for the Wikipedia assignment in Professor Shaw’s course, her interest in design, and her drive to produce well-researched work for the benefit of others, we likely wouldn’t have such a detailed page to learn from. She joins the worldwide community of Wikipedia volunteers (only 22% of whom identify as women), as well as the community of students who have completed a Wikipedia assignment through our Dashboard (70% of whom identify as women and nonbinary).

The assignment also fosters digital literacy and critical media skills at a time where these skills are increasingly important. Students learn about standards for clear, unbiased, and well-sourced writing.

“For me, it was really helpful to practice narrowing down my research into the most important and relevant points,” Hannah says. “I’ve always been quite verbose, so I appreciated the chance to develop a more concise style.”

The majority of students have grown up online and many are transitioning to majority-online universities. An assignment that prepares students to think critically about the information they encounter online and is a good fit for virtual learning too? That’s huge.

In a Wikipedia assignment, students partake in a worldwide ecosystem of volunteers who devote their time to curating, creating, and correcting the largest collection of free knowledge ever. Students bring a valuable perspective to distilling complex topics into plain language and freeing up the plethora of pay-walled knowledge that they can access through their institution. Wiki Education makes this form of teaching digital literacy accessible through our free assignment templates and tools, thereby making more knowledge accessible to the world.

Join the movement and incorporate the Wikipedia assignment into your 2023 course. Visit teach.wikiedu.org and register by December 16 to ensure your spot. We look forward to supporting you and your students.

In this Diff post, we are interviewing Ori Livneh, a Google.org Fellow, Wikipedian for over 17 years, and a Wikimedia technical contributor for over a decade. Ori was supporting Abstract Wikipedia at the Wikimedia Foundation for six months. The Google.org fellowship enables folks from Google to work on open-source projects for non-profits. The fellows joining this project are focused largely on supporting the backend of WikiFunctions. You can learn more about the fellowship on Meta-wiki.

Tell me a little about your background:

I am a software engineer at Google, where I am a member of the TAO (Tools, Architecture, Optimization) team. My team’s mission is to make computing at Google faster and more efficient. In my day-to-day role, I focus on optimizing core libraries — common code that is used in many Google applications. It’s an area where relatively small changes can have a massive impact, because of Google’s massive scale, which I find very gratifying.

Before coming to Google, I spent four years at the Wikimedia Foundation — it’s here at the Wikimedia Foundation where I got my first taste of performance engineering, working on making Wikipedia pages faster to load and to edit. During my time at the Foundation, I was fortunate to have formed and led the first dedicated performance team at the Foundation, which is still growing strong.

What is your role as a Google.org Fellow?:

I’m the Tech Lead (or TL) for the Abstract Wikipedia Google.org Fellowship. This means that I help plan and delegate the technical work that we are doing.

What made you apply for the Fellowship to support the Wikimedia Foundation?:

I first heard of Abstract Wikipedia in 2020, when the project was just beginning to take shape, and was captivated by its potential to dramatically increase the amount of knowledge that is available to people in their own language. Like 95% of the world’s population, English was not my first language, and I vividly recall the experience of using the early web with a limited grasp of English, and how hungry I was for content in my primary language. Although my English has improved a lot since those days, and there is a lot more content available in Hebrew on the web today, I know that for many millions of people the internet has still not delivered on its promise of making all knowledge available at their fingertips. So I was very interested in contributing to Abstract Wikipedia, but not sure how.

When the Google.org Fellowship was announced, I saw that it would be a unique opportunity for me to get involved and have an impact. I’ve been a Wikipedian for over 17 years, and a Wikimedia technical contributor for over a decade, so I have a good understanding of the Wikimedia tech stack, and the social dynamics of how Wikimedia software is developed, and how they are both similar to and different from how things work at Google. The standard term for a Google.org fellowship is six months, which is not a lot of time, especially if you have to spend much of it ramping up. So I felt I was uniquely well-positioned to help the other fellows participating in the program get up-to-speed quickly, and to support them in the course of the fellowship, so that their contributions are as impactful as possible.

What are some lessons you learned from the last 6 months of your Fellowship?:

Prior to the fellowship I had not had a chance to work closely with a program manager or a product manager at Google, probably because my day-to-day work is not specific to any user-facing product. The cohort of Google Fellows included both roles, so that was a new experience for me, and I learned a lot about the value of having folks with these skill sets on one’s team.

I also learned a lot about Natural Language Generation (NLG), a field I had no exposure to prior to the Fellowship. One of the highlights of the Fellowship for me was hearing a talk by Maria Keet, a professor at the University of Cape Town and a volunteer contributor to Abstract Wikipedia, about the limitations of various extant NLG systems. Most NLG systems were designed primarily around English and a handful of other prominent languages, and Maria showed how these designs fall apart if you try to use them to model indigenous South African languages like isiXhosa and isiZulu.

What’s next for you after your Fellowship?:

I’ll be going back to my previous role in software optimization and transitioning back to the role of a volunteer contributor to Wikimedia projects, which I hope to continue to do in my spare time.

To learn more about the work towards Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions, visit the project’s page on Meta-wiki: Abstract Wikipedia#Participate. 

Google.org, Google’s philanthropy organization, supports nonprofits that address humanitarian issues and apply scalable, data-driven innovation to solving the world’s biggest challenges. The Google.org Fellowship enables Googlers to complete full-time pro bono technical work to accelerate the social impact of nonprofits and civic entities. 

Цей пост також доступний українською мовою.
Этот пост также доступен на русском языке.

On 22 November 2022, a Moscow Court rejected a case filed by the Wikimedia Foundation (“Foundation”) challenging a court verdict to impose a fine on the Foundation for failing to remove “prohibited” information from the Russian Wikipedia article about the Russian Invasion of Ukraine (2022). The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that hosts Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects, will continue to explore all legal options to challenge this decision before higher Russian Courts. The information at issue remains fact-based, verified and improved by Russian speaking volunteers from all over the world.

“Accurate and reliable information is critical for people, especially in a time of crisis. Russian-language Wikipedia is a crucial second draft of history, written by and for Russian speakers around the world. We will challenge any attempts to control and restrict this access to knowledge,” said Jacob Rogers, Legal Director at the Wikimedia Foundation. “When governments attempt to suppress all points of view other than their own, they violate the human right to free expression and education and contribute to disinformation. We will continue to stand against such action.”

This case is one of several others pending before the Russian Courts including an appeal against a verdict where the Foundation was fined a total of 5 million rubles (the equivalent of approximately USD $82,000/-) for refusing to remove information from several Russian Wikipedia articles: Russian Invasion of Ukraine (2022), Battle for Kyiv, War Crimes during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Shelling of Hospital in Mariupol, Bombing of the Mariupol Theater, and Massacre in Bucha. On 1 November 2022,  the court fined the Foundation an additional 2 million rubles (the equivalent of USD $33,000/-) objecting to content in two other Russian Wikipedia articles related to the ongoing invasion:  Evaluations of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (2022) and Non-violent resistance of the civilian population of Ukraine during the Russian invasion. These articles continue to be reviewed and improved via volunteer led content moderation processes. 

The Foundation argued in its case that information on Wikipedia does not constitute disinformation, as found by the initial order, and should be protected under the freedom of expression. The information in the articles aligns with Wikipedia’s standards of neutrality, verifiability, and reliability, citing valid secondary sources. Its removal would therefore constitute a violation of people’s rights to free expression and access to knowledge.

The ongoing escalation of takedown requests, fines and tactics to influence access to Wikipedia on Russian search engines are part of an ongoing effort by the Russian government to limit the spread of reliable, well-sourced information that runs contrary to government’s narratives. We have not complied with any orders from the Russian government to date, and are committed to stand by our mission to deliver free knowledge to the world. 

Once we receive the court’s reasoning in the coming weeks, the Foundation will evaluate what arguments are available to us and prepare a filing with the higher Russian Courts to review the case. For more information, please see our previous statements on 13 June 2022,1 March 2022 and 3 March 2022.

This statement was updated on 25 November, 20:30 UTC.

🕑 36 minutes

Nathan Brewer is the archival and digital content manager at the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) History Center. He manages the IEEE's Engineering and Technology History Wiki.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• IEEE Wikipedia article
• Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ETHW)
• ETHW Innovation Map
• ETHW Timeline
• IEEE Milestones Wiki
• List of IEEE Milestones
  • Public Demonstration of Online Systems and Personal Computing, 1968 ("Mother of All Demos")
  • Milestones selfies

Each year, I tell myself I’m going to write a useful guide for this fun little event, and each year I fail to do so. So instead, as a treat, you get to see what my self-nomination statement would have been! Exciting. /s

TheresNoTime

It appears that ill-advised ArbCom runs seem to be a habit of mine — my standing for election in 2015 was destined to fail, but coincidently may have prompted me to run for adminship the year after, so silver linings and all that…

This year, my hat finds itself ambling to the ring after an ArbCom case in which I lost my functionary permissions, having held them on and off since 2017.

To say this puts me “on the back foot” in an election may be the understatement of the year, but I do wish to make it clear this is not a “protest candidacy” — on the contrary, this experience has highlighted to me a number of areas where improvements could and should be made, as others have already begun to point out in their statements.

My strengths lie in the areas of investigation & prevention of harassment and abuse, and in the reduction of bureaucracy and its attendant overreach — I have very little interest in policy wonk work, and would instead strive to see a slimmed-down Arbitration Committee which can focus on important local issues, whilst building on how we as a project work with the global community. I believe my position as a steward (since ~2018) lends itself to further bridge this gap to the English Wikipedia’s ArbCom.

Disclosures

• I maintain a list of my other accounts at this disclosures page.
• I have already signed every NDA going.
• I am employed by the Wikimedia Foundation.
• I remain in compliance with the ANPDP.

Yeeeaaah, I didn’t think it would go down so well either…

The post 2022 Arbitration Committee Elections appeared first on TheresNoTime.

This post is also available in English.
Этот пост также доступен на русском языке.

22 листопада 2022 року суд міста Москви відхилив апеляцію Фонду Вікімедіа (далі — «Фонд»), в якій оскаржувалося рішення суду про накладення штрафу на Фонд за те, що він не видалив «заборонену» інформацію зі статті російської Вікіпедії про російське вторгнення в Україну (2022). Фонд Вікімедіа, некомерційна організація, яка здійснює хостинг Вікіпедії та інших проєктів вільних знань, продовжуватиме вивчати всі правові можливості для оскарження цього рішення у вищих російських судах, імовірно, звернеться з наступною апеляцією до російського Касаційного суду. Інформація у статті, про яку йдеться, залишається такою, що ґрунтується на фактах і є перевіреною та покращеною російськомовними волонтерами з усього світу.

«Точна та достовірна інформація є надзвичайно важливою для людей, особливо під час кризи. Російськомовна Вікіпедія — це ще один важливий проєкт історії, написаний російськомовними людьми в усьому світі, і написаний для них самих. Ми будемо оскаржувати будь-які спроби контролювати та обмежувати доступ до знань», — сказав Джейкоб Роджерс, директор з юридичних питань Фонду Вікімедіа. «Коли уряди намагаються придушити будь-яку точку зору, що відрізняється від їхньої власної, вони порушують право людини на вільне вираження поглядів і освіту, а також сприяють поширенню дезінформації. Ми й надалі будемо протистояти таким діям».

Ця апеляція є однією з кількох інших, які знаходяться на розгляді в російських судах, включаючи апеляцію на рішення, згідно з яким Фонд був оштрафований на загальну суму 5 мільйонів рублів (еквівалент приблизно 82 000 доларів США/-) за відмову видалити інформацію з кількох статей російської Вікіпедії: Російське вторгнення в Україну (2022), Битва за Київ, Воєнні злочини під час російського вторгнення в Україну, Обстріл лікарні в Маріуполі, Бомбардування Маріупольського театру та Різанина в Бучі. 1 листопада 2022 року суд оштрафував Фонд ще на 2 мільйони рублів (еквівалент 33 000 доларів США/-) за вміст двох інших статей російської Вікіпедії, пов’язаних із триваючим вторгненням: Оцінки вторгнення Росії в Україну (2022) і Ненасильницький спротив мирного населення України під час російського вторгнення. Ці статті продовжують переглядатися та покращуватися через процеси модерації вмісту під орудою волонтерів.

Фонд у своїй апеляції стверджував, що інформація у Вікіпедії не є дезінформацією, як було встановлено першим рішенням суду, і що ця інформація повинна бути захищена з огляду на свободу вираження поглядів. Інформація в цих статтях відповідає стандартам Вікіпедії щодо нейтральності, можливості перевірки та надійності, з посиланнями на дійсні вторинні джерела. Тому її видалення означало б порушення прав людей на вільне вираження поглядів і доступ до знань.

Неприпинна ескалація запитів на видалення, штрафи, а також тактика впливу на доступ до Вікіпедії в російських пошукових системах — є частиною постійних зусиль російського уряду, спрямованих на обмеження поширення надійної і підтвердженої авторитетними джерелами інформації, яка суперечить наративам уряду. На сьогодні ми не виконали жодних розпоряджень російського уряду та зобов’язуємося продовжувати виконувати свою місію з надання світові вільних знань.

Як тільки ми  отримаємо найближчими тижнями аргументацію суду, Фонд оцінить, які аргументи нам доступні, і підготує подання до російського Касаційного суду для перегляду справи. Для отримання додаткової інформації, будь ласка, перегляньте наші попередні заяви від 13 червня 2022 р., 1 березня 2022 р. та 3 березня 2022 р.

November 29th sees the return of Giving Tuesday, where for 24 hours, Wikimedia UK will be calling on the generosity of our supporters to raise funds for our work in promoting and developing knowledge equity.

Knowledge equity refers to the expansion and diversification of valued knowledge. It looks to engage with the understandings, expertise and experiences of communities who have historically been excluded from social discourse.

Systemic bias and historic repression are key reasons for this marginalisation, yet by increasing knowledge equity on platforms like Wikipedia we all benefit from the shared resource we’ve improved.

Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has developed into a central hub for the world’s knowledge to coexist, accessed across the planet and enabling us to learn, contribute and share. As the validity, trustworthiness and editorship of Wikipedia has grown, so has its reach and diversity of content. With over 260 million page views per month, the online encyclopaedia has become an almost all-encompassing source of information.

Helping Wikipedia to represent the sum of all human knowledge is no simple task however. The systemic biases and cultural inequalities we see in the world around us are reflected in Wikipedia’s content. These biases are widely varied, relating to gender, culture, geography and religious worldviews among others. In addition, the biases on Wikipedia and its sister projects like Wikidata are both internal and external. Factors such as the availability of published sources, internet accessibility and political censorship result in a highly unbalanced level of engagement with Wikimedia across the world, the result being that European and North American issues and culture are covered more extensively. 

Knowledge Equity is a strategic focus for Wikimedia UK – our work in this field has resulted in a significant impact on the breadth and quality of cultural content on Wikimedia projects, as well as the diversity of groups and communities engaging with open knowledge. Together with key collaborators we have worked extensively on closing the gender gap, preserving minority languages, and delivering projects that increase access to underrepresented cultural heritage.

Our work with community groups, museums, galleries and educational institutions has made significant contributions to addressing inequality and knowledge gaps on Wikipedia.

For example, our partnership with the Khalili Collections – launched in 2019 – led to a research project in 2021 focusing on the diversity of visual arts content on Wikipedia. The research undertaken by Dr Martin Poulter and Waqās Ahmed highlighted significant biases, showing that Wikipedia gives many times more coverage to visual art from the Western tradition than for all other cultures’ visual art combined. Through this research, we have been able to propose actions that will give Wikipedia a more global perspective on visual arts. It also highlights to the global community of editors where the knowledge gaps lie, resulting in work to significantly improve articles on previously underrepresented culture. 

Through a University Arts London (UAL) staff secondment, the Decolonising Wikipedia Network was formed. The network ran training events for staff and students so they could play an active role in the decolonisation of knowledge, making their Wikipedia editing a form of knowledge activism. We also run our annual Celtic Knot conference, showcasing innovative approaches to open knowledge and open data that support and grow Indigenous language communities

Supporting Wikimedia UK for this year’s Giving Tuesday will enable us to continue engaging new organisations, communities and individuals to deliver impact through these unique projects. Together we can support communities across the UK to create and share knowledge, wisdom and experience where systemic bias and other barriers have previously inhibited representation.

The post Knowledge equity – Giving Tuesday is your chance to expand and diversify knowledge online appeared first on WMUK.

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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

• The display of non-free media in the search bar and for article thumbnails in Special:Search has been deactivated. Further details are in T320661.

Changes later this week

• There is no new MediaWiki version this week.
• Some wikis will be in read-only for a few minutes because of a switch of their main database. It will be performed on 22 November at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis) and on 24 November at 07:00 UTC (targeted wikis).

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

08/11/2022-14/11/2022

About us

• Attention Telegram-Group admins: Matthias, from the weeklyOSM team, has created a Telegram-Bot. The bot does nothing more and nothing less than announce the publication of new issues of weeklyOSM – usually on Sundays.If you are interested in using this service for your Telegram group, an admin must add this bot as a member of the group. After that, a message to info @ weeklyosm dot eu is necessary so that Matthias can make your Telegram group known to the bot. The following Telegram groups have already joined OpenStreetMap, OpenStreetMap India, OpenStreetMap Korea, and OpenStreetMap Taiwan.

Mapping

• French OSM mappers are having a discussion about mapping advanced stop lines (cycleway=asl), especially the elements’ order where traffic lights are separately mapped. LeJun asked about it on the wiki but received only two opinions. If you have one, feel free to share it. A proper proposal for this tag might be necessary in the future.
• Kai Johnson has been using the US Bureau of Land Management’s transportation dataset to fill in backcountry routes in Southern California. Their diary post explores some of the difficulties encountered.
• Martijn van Exel gave us an update on his October OSM-related activities.
• The following proposals are waiting for your comments:
  • street parking revision to deprecate and replace the parking:lane=* and parking:condition=* schema for mapping street parking spaces.
  • deposit_ring=* for indicating if a waste basket has a Pfandring ►.
• Voting is underway for the following proposals:
  • highway=scramble, for indicating that a path needs use of hands to travel over, until Tuesday 22 November.
  • Standardising the tagging of manufacturer:*=* and model:*=* of artificial elements, until Sunday 27 November.
  • archaeological_site=*, to replace the site_type=* key for tagging the type of archaeological site.

Community

• OSM user fititnt has proposed an idea on how to improve the quality of OpenStreetMap data access by using semantic web technology.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The Foundation members will vote in December to elect four new board members from 11 candidates. The Candidates’ answers to official questions and manifestos are now available. More information about the Board election is available on the OSM wiki.The election will be followed by the Annual General Meeting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF) that will be held online in the IRC chat room on Saturday 10 December 2022 at 16:00 UTC.

Events

• The 30DayMapChallenge 2022 on Twitter continued. It is not possible to adequately acknowledge the multitude of outstanding works. The selection we have made is purely random and not an evaluation of merit. Please take a look at the works yourself, also available on Mastodon.
  • Day 8: Data: OpenStreetMap | Dominik Weckmüller @DomeGIS * Tutorial to create a 3D-map | flotsam @researchremora * Hiroshima, Japan, showing rivers, roads, and buildings | Helen McKenzie
    @helenmakesmaps * When was #openstreetmap last updated in London? |
  • Day 9: Space | T-map Studio @tmapstudio * NASA headquarters in Washington DC | Neil Southall @neilsouthall@mastodon.social @neilcfd * Commercial buildings in Dublin City Centre | Ceren Dolma @ceren_do * Highlighting Women in Space |
  • Day 10: A bad map | VizArt @hellovizart * Equalized elevation: geographically incorrect, but pretty 🙂 | Python Maps @PythonMaps * Can anyone guess what this is? | Wei @WeiDuhun * Map with almost everything |
  • Day 11: Colour Friday: Red | Kaluba Micheal @micheal_kaluba * Wetlands Data for Uganda | Margarita Hohun @margarita_hohun * Welcome home, Kherson | Julian Hoffmann @Julian_H0ffmann * Carte des vins de France |
  • Day 12: Scale | Romain T. @Romainsologne * Scale of European Union countries | GIScienceHD + HeiGIT @GIScienceHD * OpenStreetMap Building Completeness in Urban Centers | Ceren Dolma @ceren_do * Minneapolis Downtown | Wendy Shijia @ShijiaWendy * PLANETS
  • Day 13: 5 minute map | 3D Geoinfo @TU Delft @tudelft3d * Five minutes cover area from the BK Faculty at TUDelft
    | Dan Karran @dankarran * A snapshot of 5 minutes of updates to OpenStreetMap | Brandon Plewe @bplewe * 5 minute map
    | GIScienceHD + HeiGIT @GIScienceHD ofr1tz *
    A map of Dar es Salaam building levels in under 22 seconds |
  • Day 14: Hexagons | Helen Schmidt @helenschmidt * United States Google Search Internet in ‘Hexagon’ | Dolly Andriatsiferana @privatemajory * Lake Itasy | Lac Itasy | Farihy Itasy | Ansgar Wolsing @ansgar@vis.social @_ansgar * Football Pitch Surfaces | A.A. Smith @_aasmith * Tennessee Population x Elevation | jcarlson@mapstodon.space Josh Carlson @jcarlson@mapstodon.space * Bedrooms in Kendal County

Maps

• Dongha Hwang (LuxuryCoop) has made ► a map showing all the names that include either of the two Korean words (‘sageori’ in blue dot, ‘negeori’ in red dot) that mean ‘crossroad’ using overpass turbo and MapCSS. 카토그램 has made ► a set of maps showing n-way intersections (n from 3 to 10) in South Korea.
• The OpenIndoor map will help you see the insides of buildings if they are described in the OSM database. Of course, it does not tell (yet…) how many cabinets and TVs, or other interior elements, are inside, but it can provide information about the number of floors and where the stairs and doors are located. More details about this project are available on GitHub.
• Peter Karich, co-founder of GraphHopper, announced the release of GraphHopper Maps, a web-based route planner powered by the GraphHopper routing engine.

Software

• The GeoDesk team announced their release of a new spatial database engine, designed specifically for OpenStreetMap data. Key strengths include cross-platform support, a compact file format, fast imports, queries that are 50 times faster than SQL, full support of OSM features (including relations), and modest hardware requirements. You can build geospatial applications based on the GeoDesk Java toolkit, or use the standalone utility to query OSM features and export them in a variety of other formats. GeoDesk is free and open source.
• For users that are experiencing problems updating the official Java release from Oracle, rtnf has described how he updated Java on his computer to use the ‘Azul Platform Core’ package instead of Oracle’s and thus get rid of the deprecation message at JOSM startup.

Programming

• The French government recently voted for the systematic use of photovoltaic panels on parking lots with a capacity greater than 80 places. Christan Quest has run a quick fetch of the OpenStreetMap data in Île-de-France and found 1806 parking lots totalling 5,000,000 m². Further calculations lead to an estimated possible energy production of 1 TWh / year, enough for about 1% of the region’s population.

Releases

• The November release of Organic Maps (OSM based) is available for iOS and Android. Some important changes are fixes for handling KML files, detection of current position, and showing speed cameras on tap. As always map updates, bugfixes in search and routing and improvements in translations are included.
• [1] Pascal Neis’ ‘Unmapped Places of OpenStreetMap‘ has just been updated with the latest OSM data. The map shows village nodes (place=village) that don’t have any streets (residential, unclassified or services) within a 700 m radius. As noted in the comments, it’s also useful as a place to discover poor-quality imports that should be reverted.

Did you know …

• … the two articles about osm2pgsql / postgis programming from Jakob Miksch How to replicate an OSM database (the easy way) and How to convert polygons to points (suggested by bufferclip) ?
• … there is a web application that shows charging stations for electric cars in Germany? You can switch between the data bases [B]undesnetzagentur (Federal German Net Agency) and [O]SM.
• … that the right and left banks of rivers match the perspective of a vessel drifting with the flow of the river? This perspective sometimes leads to the right bank of a river being on the left side of a map of that river, usually when the river flows north to south, such as the Dnipro does.
• … the daily word puzzle ‘Wordle’? You can test your geographical knowledge with Worldle, which also offers you six chances to guess correctly. There’s now an FAQ on the site, including details of how to access previous puzzles.

Other “geo” things

• Climate TRACE has released a interactive map of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. The data shown comes from multiple sources including satellites, sensors, public and commercial datasets.
• Great Britain’s Ordnance Survey (formerly a government department, now a government-owned company) has commented about how the direction of Magnetic North (as viewed from Great Britain) is moving, East across the UK. Magnetic, Grid, and True North will align along a line running from Langton Matravers to Berwick-Upon-Tweed over the 12 months from August 2023.
• You can watch The Map, a 10 minute documentary about the redesign of New York City’s iconic subway map.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Dublin	Pub Meet		2022-11-21 – 2022-11-22
Grenoble	Atelier positionnement GNSS temps réel		2022-11-21
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-11-21
서울	Let’s map Korea (렛츠맵코리아)		2022-11-22
Barcelona	Geomob Barcelona		2022-11-22
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-11-23
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-11-22
Gent	Meetup @ TomTom Gent		2022-11-23
Lima	Gestión popular de riesgos de desastres y OpenStreetMap LATAM 2022		2022-11-24 – 2022-11-27
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-11-25
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2022-11-26
福岡市	「Mapping Hour」 in OSC2022 Online Fukuoka		2022-11-26
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第33回 佛光寺		2022-11-27
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)		2022-11-28
Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta	OSMGeoWeek Indonesia 2022		2022-11-30
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-11-30
Cojata	Reunatón Latam		2022-12-03
加古川市	State of the Map Japan 2022 in Kakogawa		2022-12-03
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第34回 渉成園		2022-12-04
	Monthly MapRoulette Community Meeting		2022-12-06
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-12-07
City of Westminster	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2022-12-06
	HOT Tasking Manager Monthly Meet Up		2022-12-07
Brest	Mapathon en partenariat avec Infini		2022-12-07
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2022-12-07
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2022-12-08
Zürich	OSM-Stammtisch		2022-12-09

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

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

Deploying HTTP/2 support to the Wikimedia CDN significantly changed how browsers negotiate and transfer data during the page load process. We found regressions in performance during the transition and are sharing the lessons we learned.

Hello, HTTP/2!

In 2016, the Wikimedia Foundation deployed HTTP/2 (or “H2”) support to our CDN. At the time, we used Nginx- for TLS termination and two layers of Varnish for caching. We anticipated a possible speed-up as part of the transition, and also identified opportunities to leverage H2 in our architecture.

The HTTP/2 protocol was standardized through the IETF, with Google Chrome shipping support for the experimental SPDY protocol ahead of the standard. Brandon Black (SRE Traffic) led the deployment and had to make a choice between SPDY and H2. We launched with SPDY in 2015, as H2 support was still lacking in many browsers, and Nginx did not support having both. By May 2016, browser support had picked up and we switched to H2.

Goodbye domain sharding?

You can benefit more from HTTP/2 through domain consolidation. The following improvements were achieved by effectively undoing domain sharding:

• Faster delivery of static CSS/JS assets. We changed ResourceLoader to no longer use a dedicated cookieless domain (“bits.wikimedia.org”), and folded our asset entrypoint back into the MediaWiki platform for faster requests local to a given wiki domain name (T107430).
• Speed up mobile page loads, specifically mobile-device “m-dot” redirects. We consolidated the canonical and mobile domains behind the scenes, through DNS. This allows the browser to reuse and carry the same HTTP/2 connection over a cross-domain redirect (T124482).
• Faster Geo service and faster localized fundraising banner rendering. The Geo service was moved from geiplookup.wikimedia.org to /geoiplookup on each wiki. The service was later removed entirely, in favor of an even faster zero-roundtrip solution (0-RTT): An edge-injected cookie within the Wikimedia CDN (T100902, patch). This transfers the information directly alongside the pageview without the delay of a JavaScript payload requesting it after the fact.

Could HTTP/2 be slower than HTTP/1?

During the SPDY experiment, Peter Hedenskog noticed early on that SPDY and HTTP/2 have a very real risk of being slower than HTTP/1. We observed this through our synthetic testing infrastructure.

In HTTP/1, all resources are considered equal. When your browser navigates to an article, it creates a dedicated connection and starts downloading HTML from the server. The browser streams, parses, and renders in real-time as each chunk arrives. The browser creates additional connections to fetch stylesheets and images when it encounters references to them. For a typical article, MediaWiki’s stylesheets are notably smaller than the body content. This means, despite naturally being discovered from within (and thus after the start of) the HTML download, the CSS download generally finishes first, while chunks from the HTML continue to trickle in. This is good, because it means we can achieve the First Paint and Visually Complete milestones (above-the-fold) on page views before the HTML has fully downloaded in the background.

In HTTP/2, the browser assigns a bandwidth priority to each resource, and resources share a single connection. This is different from HTTP/1, where each resource has its own connection, with lower-level networks and routers dividing their bandwidth equally as two seemingly unrelated connections. During the time where HTML and CSS downloads overlap, HTTP/1 connections each enjoyed about half the available bandwidth. This was enough for the CSS to slip through without any apparent delay. With HTTP/2, we observed that Chrome was not getting any CSS response until after the HTML was mostly done.

This HTTP/2 feature can solve a similar issue in reverse. If a webpage suffers from large amounts of JavaScript code and below-the-fold images being downloaded during the page load, under HTTP1 those low-priority resources would compete for bandwidth and starve the critical HTML and CSS downloads. The HTTP/2 priority system allows the browser and server to agree, and give more bandwidth to the important resources first. A bug in Chrome caused CSS to effectively have a lower priority relative to HTML (chromium #586938).

We confirmed the hypothesis by disabling SPDY support on the Wikimedia CDN for a week (T125979). After Chrome resolved the bug, we transitioned from SPDY to HTTP/2 (T166129, T193221). This transition saw improvements both to how web browsers give signals to the server, and the way Nginx handled those signals.

As it stands today, page load time is overall faster on HTTP/2, and the CSS once again often finishes before the HTML. Thus, we achieve the same great early First Paint and Visually Complete milestones that we were used to from HTTP/1. But, we do still see edge cases where HTTP/2 is sometimes not able to re-negotiate priorities quick enough, causing CSS to needlessly be held back by HTML chunks that have already filled up the network pipes for that connection (chromium #849106, still unresolved as of this writing).

Lessons learned

These difficulties in controlling bandwidth prioritization taught us that domain consolidation isn’t a cure-all. We decided to keep operating our thumbnail service at upload.wikimedia.org through a dedicated IP and thus a dedicated connection, for now (T116132).

Browsers may reuse connections for multiple domains if an existing HTTPS connection carries a TLS certificate that includes the other domain in its SNI information, even when this connection is for a domain that corresponds to a different IP address in DNS. Under certain conditions, this can lead to a surprising HTTP 404 error (T207340, mozilla #1363451, mozilla #1222136). Emanuele Rocca from SRE Traffic Team mitigated this by implementing HTTP 421 response codes in compliance with the spec. This way, visitors affected by non-compliant browsers and middleware will automatically recover and reconnect accordingly.

Further reading

• When Network is Faster than Cache, Simon Hearne, 2020.

Originally published on techblog.wikimedia.org.

This post first appeared on timotijhof.net. Reply via email.

Last month, I had the great pleasure of presenting alongside three of our Student Program faculty at the 2022 Open Education Conference. With its goals of opening up and increasing access to knowledge, the Wikipedia assignment is, at its heart, an open education resource and open pedagogical tool. The session really brought to life how the Wikipedia project can play out in different educational settings. Lisbeth Fuisz, Lecturer in the Writing Program at Georgetown University, focused on how she teaches with Wikipedia in her classes on Children’s literature and banned books. Kathleen Shepperd, Associate Professor of History at Missouri University of Science and Technology, explored how the Wikipedia assignment plays out in her History of Science courses taken largely by engineering students who are unaccustomed to longer writing assignments. Stephanie Turner, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Clair, discussed how she uses the project in her science writing courses where students are often preparing to enter various medical fields.

To learn more about what these incredible instructors in our program had to say about their experiences running the Wikipedia assignment, watch the session here.

Thank you again to Lisbeth, Kathleen, and Stephanie for joining me at this year’s conference and for all you and your students do for Wikipedia!

The Dagbani Wikimedians User Group has successfully organized Wikidata’s 10th anniversary with its sister communities in Tamale, Ghana. The event brought together some members of the Dagbani Wikimedia, the Gurene Wikimedia, and the Moore Wikimedia communities in one place for the first time to celebrate the 10th birthday of Wikidata in Tamale.

Wikidata is one of the Wikimedia Foundation’s multilingual projects that everyone collaboratively edits. Like any other Wikimedia project, such as Wikipedia, it is a common source of open data that anyone else can use under the CC0 public domain license. “Wikidata is a wiki that runs on the MediaWiki software and the Wikibase set of knowledge graph MediaWiki extensions.”

Wikidata went live on October 29, 2012, and has since become one of the most important projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. Turned ten years old in October 2022, and after bringing new energy into the open source system, there are various celebrations across different parts of the world where people are brought together to appreciate the achievements of their communities and also to talk about Wikidata to the rest of the world to get more people to contribute to it. These get-togethers and birthday events take several forms in different parts of the world, such as meetups, workshops, discussions, live streams, and editing campaigns. It is a new effort to provide a database of knowledge that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike.

The Tamale version of the celebration by the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group and its two sister communities was a combination of the meetup, workshop, discussions, and editing campaign in three parts. The first part involved the participants from all three communities, numbering over 80, embarking on a mini float with a team of scouts following and directing traffic so participants could walk freely in one of the principal streets of Tamale, the northern regional capital of Ghana. The float was in the form of a health walk from the event center about 5 kilometers away and back. The walk started at 6:00 a.m. and ended at 8:00 a.m. It was fun and meant to prepare, energize, and make participants stay fit and active for the remaining planned activities of the event for the day, as well as to announce and create awareness among the public about the anniversary. After the mini-float, the Executive Director of the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group, Sadik Shahadu, led participants to do some stretching exercises before taking some rest and preparing for the other planned activities.

In the second part of the celebration, participants, targeted mainly at newbies or community members with little knowledge, were taken through an overview of Wikidata, basic Wikidata editing skills, and an introduction to some tools via toolforge.org that they can use to edit with ease and in a more fun way. This was to get participants to understand and appreciate Wikidata, how it is done, what it does, and why it is worth celebrating. The facilitator, Dnshitobo, after showing participants how to edit on Wikidata, tasked each participant to create at least one item and add labels, descriptions, and statements. The other team members and community leads went around to assist participants who had some challenges during the process. The session ended at 3:00 pm, and participants could not hide their joy and said that Wikidata deserved celebration.

The last part was the celebration of the birthday with a cake cutting, playing indoor games, and dinner. The Executive Director, Sadik, led the cake-cutting amidst birthday songs and cheers. Some of the indoor games played were a singing competition between one representative from each of the three language communities, a pick-and-act competition among the communities, and a chair dance competition. The final round of the celebration was the party or dinner, where participants were served different local dishes and drinks.

The Executive Director, Shahadu Sadik, the Program Coordinator, Yussif Abdul Rasheed, and the Communications Manager, Mohammed Awal Alhassan, as well as some participants, granted interviews to Saganity TV, a satellite television station that was around to cover the event for both their English and local language news bulletins.

Sadik noted that the event exceeded his expectations and that the credit first goes to the Wikimedia Foundation for funding the event and to the team for their immense contribution of ideas that ensured a super exciting event from the beginning to the end. The program coordinator also expressed his sincere appreciation to the three community members, especially those who traveled several miles from other regions across Ghana to participate in the event. He congratulated everyone for the show of commitment and passion that made the event a success. The communications manager, for his part, recounted the activities of the event from beginning to end. He noted that the job is always easier to execute when there is a team of selfless and committed people who work with more good hands. He also thanked everyone for their various contributions to the event’s success.

Wikimedia’s Beta Cluster (aka deployment-prep) needs to be replaced with something competely different. The Beta Cluster Wikitech page describes the projects' ambitions like this: The Beta Cluster aims to provide a staging area that closely resembles the Wikimedia production environment. It runs MediaWiki and extensions from their master branch, allowing developers and power users to test new code before it goes live on Wikimedia websites. This was written in early 2013, nearly a decade ago.

01/11/2022-07/11/2022

Mapping campaigns

• At the request of OpenStreetMap Ireland, Włodzimierz Bartczak blogged about the lessons learnt from collecting AED data in Poland.

Mapping

• rtnf shared a tutorial on how to display OSM data as a Wikipedia interactive map by using Kartographer > , a Mediawiki extension to display GeoJSON-based interactive maps.
• OSM contributor Graptemys blogged on his process of revising restaurant cuisine tags in Canada using JOSM.
• historic_bruno wrote about how his bridge tagging method has progressed over time and suggested some helpful links.
• A request has been made for comments on amenity=street_vendor, a proposal to deprecate street_vendor=* and to tag mappable street vendors with amenity=street_vendor, vending=* and opening_hours=* instead.
• Voting is underway for the following proposals:
  • to deprecate amenity=healthcare,clinic,dentist,hospital,doctors,pharmacy and introduce the approved healthcare=* as a main feature, until Saturday 19 November.
  • to deprecate man_made=drinking_fountain, until Friday 18 November.
• Voting on the following proposals has closed :
  • castle_type=citadel, a tag for historic fortifications inside cities that served as defensive cores, was approved with 10 votes for, 1 vote against and 1 abstention.
  • amenity=mailroom, a tag to identify the location of shared mail rooms, receiving packages or letters, at a university, an apartment building complex, or in an office building complex, was approved with 15 votes for, 1 vote against and 0 abstentions.

Community

• Jochen Topf shared his progress on the osm2pgsql cartographic generalisation project.
• OSM Belgium has named Patricia Solis as their Mapper of the Month.
• Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, many have switched to the alternative and FOSS protocol named Mastodon. Amanda McCann has been hosting a Mastodon-instance for quite a while (en.osm.town) where many contributors and official accounts live, such as OpenStreetMap, State of the Map, JOSM, MapComplete, MapRoulette, Osmose QA, Open Inframap and many regional accounts such as LATAM, BE, Guyane, Swiss, Pyrénées-Orientales, Catala, Berlin+Brandenburg, Missing Maps Slovakia,OSMChina and weeklyOSM as well.
• Amanda McCann is running the very successful OSM ‘home base’ (tech speak: instance) of the Twitter alternative Mastodon. She is looking for a logo for the Mastodon instance.
• [1] JazMichaelKing is maintaining ‘Mastodon Near Me’, a directory of Mastodon and Pleroma instances aimed at regional users.

Events

• The 30-Day Map Challenge has been running since 1 November. Topi Tyukanov opened the challenge on Day 1 with wind farms. Unfortunately, we can only present a few examples. A bot from Topi Tjukanov retweets every post marked with the hashtag ‘#30DayMapChallenge’.
  • Day 1: Points

  | samia @samiasab90 * Languages of London | @gontsa * Destroyed cultural heritage of Ukraine | にゃんこそばデータ可視化 @ShinagawaJP * Railwaystations in Japan 1872–2022 |

  • Day 2: Lines

  | Abdoul Madjid @issa_madjid * Every African airport connected to
  its 10 nearest neighbors | Eric Armijo @rcrmj * Rios en Bolivia | @nordaufnordost * Flights to Madagascar |

  • Day 3: Polygons

  | Marcel Reinmuth @GIScienceHD * isochrones (2h) by openrouteservice | D&G Place-Names
  @dgplacenames * Buildings in Dumfries | Nicolas Lambert @neocartocnrs * Countries and People in Africa |

  • Day 4: Colour Friday: Green

  | Xemartin Laborde @XemartinLaborde * green canopy global map | Stan McShinsky @smcshinsky * world moss map | ᴘᴏᴋᴀᴛᴇᴏ ᴍᴀᴘs @pokateo_ * Greenland in ten different projections |

  • Day 5: Ukraine

  | Keith Jenkins @kgjenkins * Outgoing shipments under the Black Sea Initiative | Daniel B. @DOh_Bams * Super sleek street map of Kiev (Kyiv) | gontsa @gontsa * Forests of Ukraine |

  • Day 6: Network

  | Julian Hoffmann @Julian_H0ffmann * Global Submarine Cable Network | Wendy Shijia @ShijiaWendy * Shanghai Metro | Cécile @CecileMatusiak * Travel to work |

  • Day 7: Raster

  | Boris Mericskay @BorisMericskay * cuisine=crepe en France | D&G Place-Names
  @dgplacenames * NX96 100 Piece 3D Puzzle | Urban Analytics Lab @urbanalyticslab * Global Building Morphology Indicators |

• The State of the Map Nigeria will take place from 1 to 3 December in Port-Harcourt, Nigeria.
• The Trufi Association hosted a webinar ‘Digitalising Informal Transport in the Global South’ as part of the UN Habitat’s ‘Urban October’.

Education

• Martijn van Exel demonstrated in a tutorial how to tag parking=surface efficiently using MapRoulette.

OSM research

• On this week’s episode of Geomob Podcast Ed chats with Tobias Jordans about a parking data project in Berlin. It’s something you may not have considered, but data about parking spaces and their use can have a big impact on urban dynamics. Tobias explains how city planners, NGOs, and politicians pushing for positive changes can all benefit from accurate parking data. Using OpenStreetMap, Tobias and his colleagues are making it easier to record, retrieve, and update information about parking spaces in Berlin. Listen in to find out about the challenges, learnings, and how you can bring this project to your city.
• ‘Digital civic engagement, open data, and the informal sector: a think piece’, a journal paper authored by Marc Hasselwander, Mwendwa Kiko, and Ted Johnson, has been published in Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives.

switch2OSM

• The Office for National Statistics, the UK’s largest independent producer of official statistics, has published a map showing ‘migration movements’ on an OSM derived base layer.
• TomTom announced its new mapping platform and ecosystem called the TomTom Maps Platform. The new map will be a pool of different databases, including OpenStreetMap, in order to become ‘the smartest map on the planet’. Public release is expected by mid-2023. A discussion on the
  OSM Community forum has already started.

Software

• Baremaps is a toolkit for creating custom vector tiles from OpenStreetMap and other data sources using Postgis and Java. The development takes place on GitHub.
• Francisco Rodríguez-Sánchez and Jesús Sánchez-Dávila have published CityShadeMapper, an R package to create shade maps from OpenStreetMap and LiDAR data. A demo is available for Sevilla.
• Stamen has begun work on improving MapLibre Native, an Open Source SDK for rendering maps, with funding from AWS.

Programming

• Gustavo Soares has presented his ‘redesign project’ for the OSM website. The comments on GitHub issue are worth reading.
• Timothée Giraud has released version 4.0 of the osrm R package. This major release resulted from improvements to the Open Source Routing Machine API.
• Sarah Heidekorn reported that the oshdb (OpenStreetMap Historic Data Analysis) now contains more than 10 billion objects.

Releases

• MapTiler Server 4.2 now has many improvements to give you more control over your maps.
• Roland Olbricht released Overpass API 0.7.59.1 to correct a performance regression in 0.7.59 on systems that are disk bound.
• Brandon Liu outlined what’s new in PMTiles version 3.

Did you know …

• … that Natural Earth data doesn’t quite have the correct boundary for Ukraine? The participants of the #30DayMapChallenge faced difficulties on Day 5, Ukraine, because the Natural Earth dataset lacks complete data about the Ukrainian borders.
• … there may have been another ‘TerribleMaps’ competition on Twitter alongside the 30DayMapChallenge? 1, 2, 3.
• … Martijn van Exel is sharing his daily OSM tips? The tips will be pretty random; some technical, some community related, and some highlighting interesting OSM uses.

Other “geo” things

• Vox has published a video with a brief overview of how hiking trails are designed and what designers take into account when designing a trail.
• Following the recent changes at Twitter, numerous people, including geographers, have moved to a Mastodon instance, which is part of the Fediverse. Rob Kitchin from The Programmable City started a curated list of Mastodon geographers’ accounts before eventually making it into a blog post. As a remainder, even if moving instances is a breeze on Mastodon, please follow the etiquette and try to sign up for other instances apart from the main one, being mastodon.social, such as en.osm.town administered by @amapanda.
• The Chartered Institution of Civil Engineering Surveyors spoke with the Maxar News Bureau on how satellite imagery combats misinformation and increases global transparency, as well as warning of a potential food crisis as a result of the war in Ukraine.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
	OSM Indoor Meeting		2022-11-14
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle Lyon		2022-11-15
	157. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2022-11-15
City of Edinburgh	OSM Edinburgh Social		2022-11-15
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2022-11-15
Fort Collins	CSU GIS Days Humanitarian Mapathon		2022-11-17
Greeley	UNC GIS DAY MAPATHON		2022-11-17
Roma	Incontro dei mappatori romani e laziali – novembre 2022		2022-11-16
Zürich	Missing Maps Zürich November Mapathon		2022-11-16
Berlin	Missing Maps – DRK & MSF Online Mapathon		2022-11-16
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe		2022-11-16
Ville de Bruxelles – Stad Brussel	FOSS4G & State of the Map Belgium		2022-11-17
Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta	OSMGeoWeek Indonesia 2022		2022-11-17
Letterkenny Municipal District	Online Map & Chat: Manor, Co Donegal, Ireland		2022-11-17
Zürich	10 Jahre SOSM mit Fondue-Abend		2022-11-17
Bahi	Improve the map of Tanzania with tomtom and MapRoulette	✓	2022-11-18
Grenoble	Atelier positionnement GNSS temps réel		2022-11-21
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2022-11-21
서울	Let’s map Korea(렛츠맵코리아)		2022-11-22	kr
Barcelona	Geomob Barcelona		2022-11-22
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2022-11-23
City of Nottingham	OSM East Midlands/Nottingham meetup (online)	✓	2022-11-22
Gent	Meetup @ TomTom Gent		2022-11-23
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2022-11-25
福岡市	「Mapping Hour」 in OSC2022 Online Fukuoka		2022-11-26
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第33回 佛光寺		2022-11-27
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)		2022-11-28
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2022-11-30
Cojata	Reunatón Latam		2022-12-03
加古川市	State of the Map Japan 2022 in Kakogawa		2022-12-03
京都市	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第34回 渉成園		2022-12-04

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Lejun, LuxuryCoop, PierZen, Strubbl, Ted Johnson, TheSwavu, TrickyFoxy, YoViajo, andygol, derFred, richter_fn, rtnf, 冰觞沐雨.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Back in 2019 I wrote a blog post called Your own Wikidata Query Service, with no limits which documented loading a Wikidata TTL dump into your own Blazegraph instance running within Google cloud, a near 2 week process.

I ended that post speculating that part 2 might be using a “pre-generated Blazegraph journal file to deploy a fully loaded Wikidata query service in a matter of minutes”. This post should take us a step close to that eventuality.

Wikidata Production

There are many production Wikidata query service instances all up to date with Wikidata and all of which are powered using open source code that anyone can use, making use of Blazegraph.

Per wikitech documentation there are currently at least 17 Wikidata query service backends:

• public cluster, eqiad: wdqs1004, wdqs1005, wdqs1006, wdqs1007, wdqs1012, wdqs1013
• public cluster, codfw: wdqs2001, wdqs2002, wdqs2003, wdqs2004, wdqs2007
• internal cluster, eqiad: wdqs1003, wdqs1008, wdqs1011
• internal cluster, codfw: wdqs2005, wdqs2006, wdqs2008

These servers all have hardware specs that look something like Dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v3 CPUs, 1.6TB raw raided space SSD, 128GB RAM.

When you run a query it may end up in any one of the backends powering the public clusters.

All of these servers also then have an up-to-date JNL file full of Wikidata data that anyone wanting to set up their own blazegraph instance with Wikidata data could use. This is currently 1.1TB.

So let’s try and get that out of the cluster for folks to use, rather than having people rebuild their own JNL files.

Getting the JNL file out

At least one of the query service backends in Wikidata production is normally used for testing. At this current point in time that is wdqs1009.

In order to safely copy the JNL file blazegraph needs to be stopped. This was done in coordination with the WMF SRE team and the WMF Search platform team as currently, first Puppet needs to be disabled, and then systemctl stop wdqs-blazegraph.service run.

The first route out of production was via another host that had 1.1TB of disk space free, so the file was copied to that host using some internal tool. From there I used s3cmd to copy the large file into a Google cloud bucket.

Process	Time
Copy between machines	3 hours
Copy to a bucket	4 hours
Copy of a compressed version to a bucket	1 hour 45 minutes

In the future, we can probably eliminate this initial copy to a second machine before copying to a Google cloud bucket, as the copy via s3cmd appeared to take a similar amount of time and could likely be added to the query service hosts.

Another thing to note here is that the JNL file does compress rather well, and a compressed version of the file could be useful for some use cases, as I will detail below, downloading 1.1TB is not always a cheap thing to do. However, the process of compression and decompression here also takes multiple hours.

addshore wikidev 1.1T Sep 5 17:11 wikidata.jnl addshore wikidev 342G Sep 6 21:02 wikidata.jnl.zip addshore wikidev 306G Sep 6 22:04 wikidata.jnl.pbzip2.bz2 addshore wikidev 342G Sep 5 17:11 wikidata.jnl.gz

Code language: CSS (css)

The Google cloud bucket

The initial bucket for this blog post is just called addshore-public-test-us and is a public bucket in the US, however Requester pays is enabled. So if you want to download from this bucket, and there is a network egress charge, it will be billed to your Google cloud project.

Whenever a user accesses a Cloud Storage resource such as a bucket or object, there are charges associated with making and executing the request.

Normally, the project owner of the resource is billed for these charges; however, if the requester provides a billing project with their request, the requester’s project is billed instead.

Requester Pays: cloud.google.com

Of course, storing a 1.1TB file is not without a cost. For the month of September storing a single JNL file in a cloud bucket for folks to be able to download in public costs roughly €30. For now I

Downloading the JNL

NOTE: Downloading the JNL outside of Google Cloud will result in ~€121 to your Google Cloud project

Making use of the gsutil tool the command you need is:

gsutil -u [YOUR_PROJECT_NAME] cp gs://addshore-public-test-us/wikidata-2022-09-05.jnl [LOCAL_PATH_ON_MACHINE]

Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

[YOUR_PROJECT_NAME] should be replaced with the name of a Google cloud project that you will use for billing.

[LOCAL_PATH_ON_MACHINE] should be replaced with a path on the machine that you are running gsutil on that you wish to copy the file to.

From the reports of folks trying this so far downloading to a Google Cloud machine took 4-5 hours, and downloading to a machine not within Google cloud infrastructure took roughly overnight.

Thanks to @epoz & Simon for the testing.

Using the file

You must use the wdqs flavoured blazegraph to be able to read this JNL file, and ideally, you would use the exact version that generated the file in the first place.

You can read more about how to run your own wdqs flavoured blazegraph at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_Query_Service/Implementation/Standalone

You can find the latest docker images for wdqs maintained by Wikimedia Deutschland at https://hub.docker.com/r/wikibase/wdqs/tags

I recommend running blazegraph first so that it generates a new JNL in the location that it wants to. Then turn it off and swap that file out for the file that you have downloaded. Turning blazegraph back on you should then be able to query all of the data. If you already know where the JNL file would be for your installation you can go ahead and put it there right away!

Next steps

For now, I will not schedule into my calendar for this copying process to be done, however, I’ll try to leave the wikidata-2022-09-05.jnl file in place for at least the month of October 2022. On the whole, it’d be great if someone else could foot the bill, perhaps even the bill for folks downloading the file.

Extracting the JNL from Wikidata production was rather painless, though it does need some human intervention that would be good to minimise.

It could make sense for this JNL file to periodically end up on dumps.wikimedia.org rather than only heading out to this Google Cloud bucket. That would also avoid the issue of needing to have folks that download the file pay for the data egress.

I still want to experiment with a 1 liner or a button push which could see you with a fully loaded endpoint to query to your heart’s desire as fast as possible. The thing that currently worries me here is the report that it took 3-4 hours to download this file from the bucket onto a VM even within the Google cloud infrastructure. I imagine I may have to do something with images, be that container, disks or something else.

Want to help cover the costs of this experiment so far? Buy me a coffee!

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