If you are a reader of Wikipedia on desktop, you might have noticed something new over the past couple of days. The website looks a bit different — it’s simpler; less cluttered; and, hopefully, easier to use. After three years of development, the Wikimedia Foundation has finally released the updated desktop interface for Wikipedia. The new look went live today on English Wikipedia, during the month of its 22nd birthday, and is currently live on over 300 language editions of Wikipedia.

The result of the Desktop Improvements Project, the new look was built with the objective of making our interfaces more welcoming for readers globally, and more useful for new and advanced users across Wikimedia projects. The new design is the culmination of years of research, dozens of consultations with movement groups and volunteers, and thousands of points of feedback from Wikipedia readers. 

The updated interface improves readability by reducing distraction and clutter and making pages easier to read. It introduces changes to the navigation and layout of the site, adds persistent elements such as a sticky header (a header that moves with you as you scroll) and Table of Contents to make frequently-used actions easier to access, and makes some changes to the overall styling of the page. Our data shows that these changes improve usability, and save time currently spent in scrolling, searching, and navigating – all of which adds up to an easier and more modern reading experience, so that more people will love reading and contributing to Wikipedia. 

We are extremely excited for this change and that new audiences will be able to use the desktop site more comfortably. The previous interface, named Vector, had been in use since 2010. When it was developed, it reflected the needs of the readers and editors of the Wikimedia sites at the time. Since then, vast new audiences from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds have begun using the Internet and Wikimedia projects, and our research showed that we were not meeting their needs fully. 

The Vector 2022 interface aims to make changes that include the needs of all audiences – both those who have been using the projects for a long time, as well as those who have joined more recently, or have yet to join. We encourage you to read our blog post on equitable product development to gain more insight into the way we identified the needs and included the voices of our large set of audiences into the product development process. 

The interface was built and tested in collaboration with different audiences and communities across our projects, and inspired by the ideas and efforts that volunteers had worked on and created over the years. We were lucky to partner with many different language communities, such as French Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, and many more, who tested the interface and new features from its conception and gave us their insights, concerns, and questions, so that we could improve and build based on what our readers and communities truly needed.

In the future, we plan on continuing to listen to our audiences and adapt and improve our experiences based on their needs. In many ways, we see this as a new chapter in the development of our desktop site, a beginning marked with a clean slate on which a wide variety of new features can be built, rather than a static interface we will change once again in a decade. We are excited for these changes, and the opportunities they give us in the future to better serve our audiences. And most of all, we are excited to welcome you to the new experience.

To learn more about the updated desktop interface, see the FAQ. You can also share feedback at this link.

Media Contact: Vidhu Goyal, press@wikimedia.org

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, announced today the launch of Wikipedia’s first major desktop interface update in over ten years. The updated interface, which comes on the heels of English Wikipedia’s 22nd birthday (January 15), prioritizes usability and modernizes the Wikipedia experience to make it easier for everyone to access, explore, and share knowledge. The update is rolling out today on English Wikipedia and is already live on 94% of the 318 active language versions of Wikipedia for all desktop users.

In 2022, a global digital trends report revealed that the number of people who are not connected to the internet dropped below 3 billion for the first time. Wikipedia’s new desktop interface was designed to meet the needs of this next generation of internet users, making it easier for everyone, regardless of their familiarity with the internet, to find knowledge that is trustworthy and reliable. The desktop update, created in close consultation with Wikipedia readers and volunteer editors, is part of a steady series of improvements to the Wikipedia reading and editing experiences over the past several years across mobile and desktop devices.

“The Wikipedia desktop update is one of the major improvements the Wikimedia Foundation is making to help people easily access the world’s knowledge, in support of our mission to make sure every person on the planet has free and equitable access to knowledge, regardless of where they live or where they are from,” said Selena Deckelmann, Chief Product and Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. “The changes make it easier for people to find and learn from the work of our incredible volunteers. These features were created with feedback from readers and volunteers from all over the world, aiming to meet the needs of our increasingly diverse audience, while keeping the simple and straightforward feel that millions of people have come to trust over the last 22 years.”

The desktop update introduces a variety of new features, including: 

• An improved search experience that now leverages images and descriptions that makes it easier to find articles on Wikipedia, leading to a 30 percent increase in user searches based on testing
• More prominently-placed language-switching tools that allow multilingual readers and editors to more quickly find their preferred language and switch between over 300 languages 
• An updated sticky header with commonly used links such as Search, Page name, and Sections that move with logged-in users as they scroll. This allows users to focus on reading and editing, and reduces scrolling fatigue with user tests showing a decreased scroll rate of more than 15 percent
• A table of contents that provides context on the article and the ability to navigate throughout the reading experience
  

The updated Wikipedia interface does not remove any previous functionality. It instead introduces new tools to improve the existing website experience through enhancements based on consultation with Wikipedia volunteer editors, data analysis, and user testing.  

More than 30 different volunteer groups from all over the world, ranging from India and Indonesia, to Ghana and Argentina, were engaged throughout conceptualization, product development, testing, and rollout. The improvements were further shaped by global research insights and user feedback. This collaborative model is unique to Wikimedia projects, which, unlike other online technology platforms, prioritizes building with users instead of just for them. 

The Wikimedia Foundation remains committed to the core idea of knowledge equity. Through this central philosophy, the Foundation supports freely available knowledge for communities that have traditionally been excluded from structures of power and privilege, and works to break down the social, political, and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge. 

The updated desktop interface is a realization of our commitment to knowledge equity, and is part of ongoing work to better empower users and improve the experience of reading and contributing knowledge across the Wikimedia ecosystem. The Wikimedia Foundation is collecting feedback from new and existing Wikipedia users to continue developing a desktop experience that meets the needs of the growing global Wikimedia community. 

About the Wikimedia Foundation:

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

Related resources:

• More information about the desktop update on the Foundation website
• The Wikimedia Foundation team behind the new look
• Survey link for feedback about the updated interface

Current proposals like the Cyber Resilience Act[1], the Directive on Liability for Defective Products[2] and proposed amendments to the AI Act include vague and various liability carve-outs for “free and open-source software developed or supplied outside the scope of a commercial activity”. 

Wikimedia projects are run on free and open-source software. The technology is developed both in-house by entities like the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimedia Sverige, as well as by code contributed by volunteers. Our software can be re-used and modified by anyone for any purpose, without asking for permission. 

Definition of free & Open and a coherent wording across laws

We agree with the approach taken by the EU Commission and the co-legislators to protect software and developers as long as it takes place outside the scope of a commercial activity. We believe that coders must be free to review, tinker with and edit software in order to achieve their full potential. We also agree that people and organisations offering software as part of the commercial activity should not benefit from that same carve-out. 

We worry that the current recitals and amendments are all worded differently and lack a key definition. To guarantee legal certainty we therefore suggest that the co-legislators agree on a common wording for the carve-out across the files and include it as an article in the text. We therefore want to propose the following improvements:

• Universal wording: One single wording should be agreed upon and it should be included as an article in one of the acts. The other acts should reference it. Ideally, Recital 10 from the CRA would be taken as a basis.
• Universal definition: Ideally, free and open-source software should be defined as code that is made available to the public under terms that guarantee the freedom to use, study, share and improve the software.

[1]Proposal for a Cyber Resilience Act – Recital 10 

[2]Proposal for a Directive on the Liability of Defective Products –  Recital 13 

[3]Legal Affairs Committee Opinion on the Artificial Intelligence Act

I added a newly-scanned photo to ArchivesWiki yesterday, and none of its images were loading (via InstantCommons). I think I was probably a bit tired, because I immediately assumed that I’m a crap sysadmin who has no business trying to run a wiki.

Coming back to it this morning, it turns out that it was some transient issue with retrieving info from Commons, and it’s now resolved and everything’s working normally again. Like it has for a decade or so. I’ll guess I’ll put off Giving Up till tomorrow.

In two places yesterday I noticed MediaWiki wikis with slightly odd phrasing relating to their site names:

• under the login form a button that says “Join Join the Fediverse” (message userlogin-joinproject) which has a repeated word; and
• in the sidebar of Vector-2022 a box with “On this Example Inc. the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title.” (message vector-language-redirect-to-top) which makes the assumption that there are more wikis with this name (which is true for wiki-per-language setups such as Wikipedia).

There are many other uses of the site name in messages, and of course any wiki with a site name that makes these messages sound funny should probably be overriding the messages locally (as we did on the WMAU wiki where ‘Join Wikimedia Australia’ has a different meaning to ‘Create an account’).

🕑 1 hour 31 minutes

Ariel Gutman is a senior software engineer at Google, as well as a linguist. From May to October 2022, he was one of a group of Fellows, supported by Google.org, who assisted in the design and development of Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia. Several months after that, he co-authored an "evaluation" that was somewhat critical of the project.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Attributive constructions in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic, Ariel Gutman, 2018
• Google.org fellowship announcement, April 2022
• Demo of a Scribunto-based templatic NLG system (video)
  • Rendering of curated Abstract Content
  • Source data for rendering
• "Ariel's goodbye letter", December 2022
• Abstract Wikipedia/Google.org Fellows evaluation, December 2022
• Abstract Wikipedia/Google.org Fellows evaluation - Answer, December 2022
• Grammatical Framework
• Functional programming Wikipedia article
• "One Ring, or a thousand flowers?" - essay by Denny Vrandečić, November 2022

‘WikiWays: a Wikimedia poem’ is a poem by Matt Harvey about contributing to Wikimedia.

On entitlement, toxicity, and burnout in Open Source.

[Toxicity is] rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is likely to make someone leave a discussion.

– Google, Project Jigsaw

I didn’t expect to learn something new from this paper.

I’d hoped it was obvious by now: there’s no room in tech for the brilliant jerk.

But the paper, “‘Did you miss my comments or what?’ Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions,” taught me something new. They took a deep-dive into GitHub comments to name something I’d seen but never had a term for: “entitlement.”

So, let’s do something about entitlement

[Toxicity] can increase the risk of projects becoming abandoned or unmaintained

– Understanding Toxicity in Open Source Discussions

The Open Source software powering the internet is chronically underfunded and understaffed.

We still refuse to learn one of the crtical lessons of heartbleed: maintainers need our support. 

First, Open Source maintainers need money—give them money if they’ve written code critical for you or your company.

But maintainers also need mental space to function.

So, now that we have a term let’s do something about entitlement:

• Add it to your code of conduct.
• And say something when you see it happening.

Otherwise, at best, we’re all doomed to reimplement terrible versions of OpenSSL and ImageMagick forever *shudder*.

---

Thank you to Brennen, Kosta, and Željko for reading the early drafts of this blog. The remaining errors and dumb opinions are mine; all the invisible fixes are theirs.

I’ve been taking short clips from my Flight Simulator adventures and making small (sub-4 megabyte) .mp4 clips that I can upload to the forum or social media. The recordings are 3440×1440 up to 60fps, in HDR, and are both large and long.

I usually trim out clips using the trim tool in QuickTime Player on a Mac (yay fast networks), then save a shorter file I can work with in ffmpeg.

Ended up writing a script to automate this; it’ll pick a bitrate to fit within 3,500,000 bytes (optionally including audio), scale down and crop or pad to 16:9, and tone-map the HDR down to SDR for common-denominator playback.

Because there has to be a cursed element, the script is in command-line PHP. :D

https://brionv.com/git/brion/pack-vid/src/branch/main/pack-vid

A few examples:

03/01/2023-09/01/2023

Breaking news

• Paul Norman announced the release of version 5.7.0 of the OpenStreetMap Carto Stylesheet, the default map stylesheet for the OSM website, on the mailing list and in his blog. All changes can be found there.The most obvious change, as the OSM Ops team tweeted, is the representation of unpaved roads. Unpaved roads will be rendered with a subtle stipple effect to show them as being not paved. The OSM Ops Team says: ‘Unpaved roads with a suitable tag will be styled differently. Change background: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/3399‘.The Ops team goes on to say ‘this unfortunately leaves a dilemma, many regions in OpenStreetMap unpaved is the presumed default in the absence of a surface= tag. But! We can fix this, let us map if roads are surface=paved or surface=unpaved (or more specific types)’.The OSM Ops Team then turned to three organisations with a friendly appeal for help: ‘Germany already has 46% of roads surfaces mapped. Zimbabwe it is only 14%. So let us get mapping road surfaces! How about it? @hotosm @osmafrica @youthmappers’.Ways with no surface tag can easily be found using overpass turbo.

Mapping

• -karlos- blogged ► about ‘area’ as a new object type in the OSM data model, why in his opinion it is a good improvement, and where he expects difficulties to arise.
• Bob Cameron (bob3bob3) described how he takes photos and audio commentaries on the road and processes them automatically to use them at home for improving OSM.
• Bob Cameron (bob3bob3) explained how he tags amenity=parking and highway=rest_area, having generally adopted a formal vs informal categorisation.
• Kai Johnson explained how he distinguishes between highway=service and highway=track.
• Lars Schwarz is experimenting ► with using the 3D Model generated by Polycam to collect infrastructure data for OSM.
• Quite Frankly is embarking on a project to ‘document and update cycle lanes on every street in Melbourne and eventually Victoria in as much detail as possible’ using tagging schemes that he says were developed specifically for the detailed documentation of cycling infrastructure ►. Other tools being used: StreetComplete, iD, JOSM, Vespucci and Hauke Stieler’s Simple Task Manager.
• steveman1123 blogged about his armchair mapping activities and what keeps him motivated while doing so.
• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • emergency=air_rescue_service to tag the buildings and base areas of those groups that use aircraft, either fixed-wing or helicopters, for either aerial Search and Rescue, or Aeromedical Evacuation purposes.
  • emergency=water_rescue for mapping the buildings and base areas, both on and off water, of those groups that are dedicated to the rescue of vessels and/or sailors in distress.
• Voting is open on the proposal to announce proposals on the OSM Community forum as well as the tagging mailing list, until Saturday 21 January.
• Voting on the following proposals has closed:
  • historic=*, to approve a number of values of the historic tag, was not successful with 11 votes for, 15 votes against and 1 abstention.
  • fountain:design=*, for specifying what type of fountain an amenity=fountain is, was not successful with 13 votes for, 8 votes against and 1 abstention.

Mapping campaigns

• User kubahahaha has created several MapRoulette quests for populating OSM with Polish government data, published under the CC0 licence. Multiple TagFix and Cooperative challenges are available. Discussion on tagging is ongoing in the Polish OSM Community forum.

Community

• Ciarán Staunton (DeBigC) is full of praise for Anne-Karoline Distel (b-unicycling), who has contributed a whopping 5,000,000 changes to OpenStreetMap. Also read her blog post about this jubilee.
• Courtney Williamson asked for feedback on the proposed changes to the OSM data model (we reported earlier).
• Ronald Ontiveros, from Mexico, is the UN Mapper of the Month for January.

Events

• The next OSM hack weekend in Karlsruhe, Germany, will be held / on 25 and 26 February. Surely you have some unfinished OSM projects or some good ideas for new ones. Bring them with you to Karlsruhe. You will find people to discuss the details with you, or to build something with.

Education

• The UN Maps crowdsourcing team is offering a free online training workshop, in French, about ‘OpenStreetMap and Humanitarian Mapping’, open to anyone who is new to OpenStreetMap. Registration and is open until Tuesday 31 January 00:00 UTC. The two hour workshops will be held every Thursday starting 2 February for nine weeks, a total of 18 hours.
• AddisMapTransit and OpenStreetMap Ethiopia held a series of training workshops for OpenStreetMappers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

OSM research

• Simon Poole noted that fewer people signed up for OpenStreetMap last year and presented some interesting figures and thoughts. Paul Norman, from the Operations Working Group, contributed detailed numbers on where new users come from.

Maps

• [1] Valhalla, a global routing service hosted by FOSSGIS e.V., is now part of the routing selection (with foot, bike and car profile) on the OSM website. For more information there is a wiki page, Simon Poole’s comment on the OSM Community forum, and the GitHub repository.
• Romain de Bossoreille has generated a map Space Industry around the World using data from The Space Devs, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap.

Open Data

• The value of the new road detections datasets provided by Microsoft (as we reported earlier) was discussed on the OSM Community forum.

Software

• User NorthCrab announced the release of ‘osm-revert’, a tool to perform changeset reversion with a simple web interface requiring merely an OSM login, the id of the changeset to be reverted, and the comment for the new changeset. Tom Hughes, an OSM website maintainer, expressed doubts as to whether a ‘point-and-click’ reverter is a good idea.

Programming

• Inspired by Overpass Ultra (we reported earlier) rtnf attempted to install MapLibre GL Native on their Android platform. They documented some of the gotchas that need to be circumvented in order to get a working installation.
• SK53 described a method to find steep paths, which may need review on OSM. In a follow-up he enhanced his process to calculate the slope angles likely to be encountered by walkers.
• TreeTracks has published an article on how Overpass can be used to perform data analytics with OpenStreetMap. As an example, the road infrastructure in cities is compared to that found in the Australian bush.

Did you know …

• … Lejun’s list of geographers represented on Mastodon? On GitHub you can find a collection with many other disciplines and communities ranging from African studies to a community server dedicated to circuses.
• … there is a tool that generates RSS feed links for the various OpenStreetMap Quality Assurance sites for a given area?

OSM in the media

• The Swiss magazine PCtipp published ► ‘six tips for beginners’ in OpenStreetMap on its blog.
• Alex Seidel published ► an article about the Neukölln street map (which we have reported before) in the Kartographische Nachrichten, a newsletter for professional cartographers.
• Heise.de, a German IT news site, asked ► three questions of TomTom’s Michael Harrell in connection with Overture Maps and OpenStreetMap in a commercial guise.

Other “geo” things

• OpenCage has published a new ‘geoweirdness’ – this time on Croatia.
• The Bexhill OpenStreetMap website has added a page describing the origins of street names in the Bexhill area. The information was collected by local historians over several decades, but will be very interesting to enthusiasts of the name:etymology tag in understanding how streets got their names.
• Overture Maps this week:
  • Steven Feldman interviewed Marc Prioleau from Meta on the GeoMob Podcast.
  • James Killick published his ideas on Overture in a blog post.
  • Dorothea has created a summary of what has been published about Overture.
• Meduza, a Latvian blog, reported, in an article referring to TASS, about a ‘bill to ban maps that “call Russia’s territorial integrity into question”‘.
• HERE has introduced ‘Unimap’, mapping technology designed to create maps automatically.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Seattle	World Railway Mapping Online Quarterly Meetup.		2023-01-14
臺北市	OpenStreetMap 街景踏查團工作坊 #6		2023-01-14
Budapest	OSM Weaving: Remote help, Aranyvölgy pipeline preparation (online)		2023-01-16
Grenoble	Rencontre du groupe local de Grenoble		2023-01-16
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 月聚會 #48		2023-01-16
Lyon	Rencontre mensuelle Lyon		2023-01-17
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-01-18
	159. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2023-01-17
London	Geomob London		2023-01-18
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe		2023-01-18
Dar es Salaam	State of the Map Tanzania		2023-01-19 – 2023-01-21
Budapest	Hiking by the pipeline between Normafa-Stop Shop-Aranyvölgy		2023-01-21
Toulouse	Réunion du groupe local de Toulouse		2023-01-21
	Downtime		2023-01-22
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)		2023-01-23
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2023-01-24
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2023-01-25
	[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2023-01-26
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)	✓	2023-01-28
南区	京都！街歩き！マッピングパーティ：第35回 六孫王神社		2023-01-29
Windsor	OSM Windsor-Essex Monthly Meetup		2023-01-31
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-02-01

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, SK53, Strubbl, TheSwavu, YoViajo, conradoos, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Saitama Prefectural Omiya High School and Saitama Prefectural Fudoka High School in Japan collaborated to host Wikipedia Town in June and November 2022. This is the first initiative of its kind in Japan, as there have been no initiatives in which several schools have held the event simultaneously or consecutively. It should be noted that the age range covered by Japanese senior high schools is mainly from 15 to 18 years, which corresponds to grades 11 to 13 in the UK. Na.

Connectivity with education policy in Japan

In the past few years, many policies for young people have been implemented in Japan, such as lowering the voting age and the age of adulthood, while at the same time the need for citizenship education has been strongly emphasised. At the same time, the GIGA Schools Programme was presented, setting out a policy for ICT education for pupils and students from elementary to high school, i.e. from the age of 6 to 18. Today, based on this policy, one tablet, PC or other terminal is lent to each student at school, and many programmes have been created both inside and outside school. In addition, the concept of ‘digital citizenship’ has been proposed as a way of education in the advanced information society, and its implementation is being built. Most recently, ‘comprehensive study time’ has also been established, where students are expected to discover social issues on their own and play a part in creating a sustainable society, and are expected to acquire the thinking skills to do so.

The content regarding these programmes (instructional plans) is left to the school establishment and teachers, and a wide variety of initiatives are being developed in different parts of the country. There are also several examples of initiatives that share the Wikipedia approach and seek to foster digital citizenship.

The Wikipedia Town held in Saitama Prefecture this time was selected as a programme with the following objectives: to “cultivate the basis for inquiry activities through fieldwork and literature research” and “create opportunities for interaction with people outside the school, including cooperation with other schools, with the help of the school library and external organisations”. Wikipedia Towns in Japan have expanded greatly through the writing of information about the town by many hands, including those of its residents. This is an example of an editathon on the theme of a town with a school, involving high school students who are not necessarily direct residents of the town.

First time held

School teachers and school librarians from the school side, Wikipedians including members of the Waseda Wikipedian Circle in addition to Araisyohei, and Academic Resource Guide Inc. as co-ordinator of the inquiry learning programme.

The first editathon took place on 25 June 2022. In the first half of the programme, members of the Waseda Wikipedian Circle gave a lecture on how to conduct a literature search and how to create texts, which must be done before starting to edit Wikipedia. Specifically, they gave an overview of “Google Scholar” and “Research Navi” provided by the National Diet Library, as well as how to use search operators (OR search, NOT search, etc.) to search for literature. In addition, in writing the articles, the three main Wikipedia policies of “verifiability”, “neutral point of view” and “no original research” are taken into account: “clearly state the source, and do not use words such as “excellent~” or “overwhelmingly successful”. It was explained that the only description should be “what is stated in the source material”, avoiding statements that are impressions such as “great -” or “overwhelming victory”.

Teachers from each school then stood in front of the students and explained the elements and methods by which the text of a Wikipedia article needs to be structured. The theme of this year’s event was ‘How to do academic writing’, and when we asked the teachers what they thought afterwards, they said that they had not had much opportunity to explain the content and were a little worried about whether their students had understood it or not. However, the participating high school students ended up writing articles that exceeded their expectations.

[Interview by Omiya Keizai Shimbun (Japanese)] Wikipedia Town at Saitama Prefectural Omiya High School: deepening regional learning through editing.

The themes for the articles to be written were selected mainly from the respective host schools and their surroundings, including [[ja:埼玉県立大宮高等学校]] (Saitama Prefectural Omiya High School), [[ja:埼玉県立不動岡高等学校]] (Saitama Prefectural Fudoka High School), [[ja:加須うどん (Kazo Udon) and [[ja:總願寺 (Soganji Temple). Materials collected from schools, municipal and prefectural libraries were laid out at the schools where the event was held, and the participating students engaged in editing work while paying attention to what they had learnt in the guidance. The day’s events were covered with videos in the local media and on the municipality’s official SNS, showing the depth of interest in the event. After the event, several students and school officials were interviewed.

Interviews with participating pupils

This time I first learnt that Wikipedia can be edited for the first time. As I researched the topic to edit, I felt that my knowledge was deepening, so I felt that I would like to do it again on another topic. At the same time, because Wikipedia articles can be easily edited, it is important to update them with the correct information and methods, and I hope to be more careful about how I use the internet.

Nonoha TAKATSUGU (Fudoka High School : 11th grade)

In this article, we looked at Seikyun Gakuen (成均学園), the predecessor of the Omiya High School for Girls. The name of the school is said to mean that the students were to achieve all the qualities of a good wife and wise mother in an equal manner. The idea of a ‘good wife and wise mother’ also made me realise that at the time of its foundation, unlike today, there was still the idea that women should do housework rather than work.

Before I participated, I hadn’t had much contact with Wikipedia, so I didn’t really understand what Wikipedia Town was all about. When I heard that I could find out about the history of Omiya High School, I was much more excited about what it was all about and thought it was quite fun. There were a lot of new things I learned as I was researching, and I was kind of like ‘huh (surprised)’. It was fun to participate.

Omiya High School: Aya NAKAMURA (10th grade)

I am in the music club (brass band) and we had a concert and an alumnus came, he is 52 years old senior and he told me about his high school days back then, although there is already a huge age difference. Reading the material, he recalled that he said, “In my time, boys and girls were separated, there were about eight classes of boys and two classes of girls.” I got curious and looked it up.

When I actually looked into it, I found a description of a protest by students who wanted the school to be fully co-educational, and who protested to the advisor of the student council. I had heard that some of them were against it, but I thought that since we were in the same school building, they would still want to be in the same classroom.

When I attended, I realised that I had only been at the high school for a few months, so I knew nothing about the history, but I knew that there was a brief history posted in the corridors of the school, and that there was a description of the integration of the girls’ and boys’ schools. However, it was interesting to learn about the deeper part of the school’s history, such as how the girls’ high school was created and that the boys’ high school was originally connected to the Katakura Silk Cocoon, a commercial facility in Saitama New Urban Centre.

Riko SAKUMA (Omiya High School: 10th grade)

Impressions held by teachers and librarians

The teachers and librarians who participated in the first session from the schools also gave their feedback. Although all of the participants had read Wikipedia before, it was probably an excellent opportunity for them to learn about how to disseminate this information.

The event was organised with the cooperation of many people who had heard about the Wikipedia Town initiative and agreed with the idea of trying it at their school. This time, the main theme was ‘School History’ with the aim of updating the school’s history, and the students were immersed in old documents that they were seeing for the first time with great interest. I think they found it interesting to read not only information from the internet, but also paper documents. There were many things that I myself did not know and many documents that I saw for the first time, so there was a lot to learn. In the future, I would like to link this to fieldwork while walking around the city, and I would also like to convey to the students the appeal of learning about the local area.

Rina TANAKA (Omiya Senior High School: teacher)

I collected material from the school because I wanted to update the Wikipedia article on the school, but I was quite confused by the criteria for secondary sources. In the end, I was relieved to find that I could use out-of-date magazines using city and county histories, but found it difficult to update the school page using Wikipedia’s source criteria. Thanks to the suggestion that primary sources could also be used, everyone was interested not only in paper sources, but also in graduation albums from over 90 years ago and school newspapers that are no longer available. This initiative was a good experience, with the fun and tension of being able to immediately output what we had researched. If there is a next time, I would like them to try updating it with information from the internet. I think it will make a clear difference, as you will be looking at something completely different from paper documents.

Eriko HOZUMI (Oomiya Senior High School: school librarian).

This is the first time we have participated in the Wikipedia Town initiative as a school. Students do not often have the opportunity to read the local history of the area where their school is located. However, this time, I think that the fact that they were ‘updating their own Wikipedia’, which they use on a daily basis, was a great motivation for them to take part in the activity. In fact, they seemed to be more enthusiastic about reading old materials than we had imagined, and there were many new insights and discoveries. In inquiry learning, it is important to know the previous research on the topic first, but I myself felt that it was difficult to give them access to books. I felt that Wikipedia Town was a very good initiative to compensate for this while having fun at the same time. Thank you very much.

Mika ISHIDA (Fudoka High School: teacher).

On the day, I was impressed by the way the students noticed the detailed differences between the materials and discussed them within their groups, even though they dealt with the same subject matter. Through updating Wikipedia, which can be accessed by people all over the world, I feel that the students were able to learn the responsibility, difficulty and satisfaction of communicating accurate information to others. As a librarian, I was happy to see local materials, which are not usually accessible to students, being put to good use. In the future, I expect that by making a good choice between paper and online information depending on the matter I want to research, I can deepen my research even further.

This time, I first learnt that Wikipedia can be edited, and I felt my knowledge deepen as I researched. I would like to do it again, and at the same time, I hope I can be more careful about how I use the internet because it is so easy to edit.

Mina IGUSA (Fudoka Senior High School: school librarian).

For ongoing efforts

The school considered holding a second event to include the transmission of the new coronavirus infection. As a result, it was decided to hold the second event on 23 November. It was decided that a significant number of people would attend. As we did not have enough people to support the writing of Wikipedia on the day of the meeting, we decided to ask for the cooperation of working and university student members of Code for SAITAMA, who are involved in activities related to civic tech in Japan. Those who cooperated enjoyed themselves with the participants and participated as support staff on the day of the event. Some of them had previously written articles for Wikipedia Town in Kumagaya, Saitama Prefecture, and were a great help to the support system on the day.

In the previous event, the format was that teachers, school librarians and Wikipedians were responsible for organising the event, but for the second event, some students from both schools were asked to participate in the management of the event, as there were many high school students who had experience in editing the first event, and the day was run by the high school students themselves. In this way, the aim was to plan, prepare and manage the event so that high school students could enjoy it. In practice, the high school students were responsible for everything from the reception desk on the day of the event, to chairing, preparing manuscripts, collecting materials and deciding on the themes to be covered in the editathon, while teachers and school librarians also accompanied them. Outside of the official meetings, both sides kept in touch with each other using social networking services and made repeated preparations for the day of the event.

In the course of their preparations, they chose [[ja:大湯祭]] (Daito Festival), a festival at the Hikawa Shrine near the Omiya Library in Saitama City, the venue for this event, and [[ja:白井助七]] (Sukeshichi SHIRAI), a person who contributed greatly to the development of Omiya, as the subjects for their articles. When they initially chose this subject matter, the teachers and support staff, including myself, were very anxious about whether we would actually be able to gather the materials and whether we would be able to get to the writing of the article, although there were some adult participants. However, once the town walk was over and they entered the working time, the high school students took the material in their own hands and continued the writing process by asking questions to the adults who participated in the project with them when they did not understand something.

As a result of the respective preparations that were promoted, the event was able to be held face-to-face, but also with the participation of about 30 students and community members from both sides.

As is the case every time, the editathon is always a race against time, and when the time limit arrives, the writing has to be forcibly terminated. I had thought that the task of how to read through the material and summarise it in writing within that time limit would be a difficult one for high school students. However, it seems that high school students of Generation Z, with their well-developed social networking services, did not feel much rejection in this respect.

Pupils who met for the first time offline seemed to enjoy it a lot. The pupils who presented their impressions said.

• I went on a town tour and got to know the deep Omiya. I was able to go to a café with my friends, so it was a fulfilling day.
• It was worthwhile because the students were able to take the initiative in the preparations.
• I think it will be more fun if we increase the number of participants in the future.

Teachers from the participating schools were also asked for their feedback, which contained many suggestions for the future.

I had heard interesting information from the students so far and was interested in it. I actually took part in it and honestly enjoyed it. I actually liked looking at Wikipedia, and I was impressed by the fact that this is how they make it, but there is not a lot of literature. I was impressed by the fact that everyone participated in making it, that so much effort was put into it, walking around the town of Omiya and reading the documents. It was a time when I recognised a lot of things: making the documents, having them researched and put out.

Fudoka High School: Aya MORI (teacher).

I have spent a long period of time in Omiya, but there was a lot I did not know. There were many new discoveries. I liked the style of learning in which I started to wonder what this was all about and then researched the materials. I felt that investigating what I had walked, asking questions and learning more about it will lead to the future. At the same time, the activities of walking and researching need to continue in the future.

Omiya High School: Chiaki KOJIMA (teacher).

At the venue, they were talking about “the site where information is born”. The morning’s town walk was designed to “broaden our eyes to see the local area”, and tomorrow the students will start their school trip to Kyushu and Sanyo, travelling from place to place. Having a perspective on the history of the area makes life more enjoyable. Commuting to school can also be fun.

Saitama Municipal Urawa High School: Tomoaki Fujishiro (teacher).

Yuko Hasegawa, a university teacher who worked as a librarian at the Prefectural Library and Fudoki, said: ‘Today, local materials have been given new life again by your hands here. Information is born here. The information, which seems to be a single giant, grows in the hands of each and every one of you.” She commented.

in the end

Currently, in Japan, the ‘promotion of lifelong learning‘ for the population, including young people, involves communities and society working together to provide learning opportunities, and the recent development of various projects in collaboration with the Wikimedia Project and GLAM is linked to ‘lifelong learning and the revitalisation of society and local communities’.

Wikipedia Town, a collaboration between Saitama Prefectural Omiya High School and Fudoka High School, the first time held with each school connected online, and the second time held in Omiya Ward, where Omiya High School is located.

When asked about their vision for the next and third round, the teacher in charge of the project said, “In 2023, we would like to hold the event in Kazo City, where the prefectural Fudoka High School is located”. The distance between the two schools is more than 20 km in a straight line and about one hour apart by train. Nevertheless, it would be a very meaningful activity, not only from the perspective of citizenship education, but also from the perspective of peer-to-peer education, for both teachers and students from the two schools to interact, learn and research the history of the town by themselves and publish the information in a Wikipedia article. We believe that building a mechanism to enable such activities to continue could be one of the strategies of the Wikimedia Foundation’s campaign on education. In this context, we will continue to explore what kind of cooperation Wikimedians can or should provide.

For students hoping to pursue medical careers, distilling science into plain language for a general audience is an invaluable skill. Collaborating with peers about how best to communicate important concepts is also important. And practicing writing these explanations for a real-live audience of thousands is even better. When students learn to adapt course content and add it to relevant Wikipedia articles, they accomplish these learning outcomes and more, all while familiarizing themselves with existing literature in their field.

Kedarnath Malapati is a fourth year, on track to be Masters student, in epidemiology at the University of Georgia. He recently added scientific information about the monkeypox virus to Wikipedia as part of Dr. Jennifer Walker’s Introduction to Microbiology course. Kedarnath says he is hoping to pursue pediatrics, and he understands the challenges of communicating what he knows to a general audience. This project encompassed those difficulties. Considering that the public consults Wikipedia for medical information more than any other online resource and that 8,000 people have already visited the monkeypox virus article since Kedarnath and his group updated it, he’s already doing a great job.

Building science communication skills

“We’re in a weird position as students. We can see from the perspective of people who haven’t gone to college and then also from the perspective of the people who have graduated from it and have gotten their degrees and PhDs. We’re the middle ground,” Kedarnath says. “Editing Wikipedia was a nice way to fill that gap, because when you read a research paper you’re like, ‘What is going on?’ When I’m translating a research paper into a Wikipedia article, I take that into account. I want a person to be able to read it once, instead of the five times I read over the research, and understand what’s going on.”

Becoming familiar with the current peer-reviewed research

Before the assignment began, Dr. Walker created a list of articles students might work on. At a first glance, it wasn’t obvious to Kedarnath and his group what they could add to the article on the monkeypox virus.

“We didn’t know much about this virus, we hadn’t really talked about it in class yet. And so we thought, ‘What do we add that’s unique to what’s already there?’ Just looking at it from a layman’s perspective, it looked fine, like it had all the information you needed. But as we researched into the virus itself, we realized there was actually a lot that we didn’t know about that we could tell other people.”

So the group dove in. First, they had to get a sense of the research landscape and understand current scientific consensus around the virus.

“I wanted to figure out just how many research articles there were about it. Because, initially, our professor said that many of these viruses don’t have much research on them. That’s why it’s been difficult for them to have information on Wikipedia.”

That was a big draw for Dr. Walker in choosing to pursue the assignment in the first place. “In my opinion, the bigger impact [even more than how many page views the article might get] is my students’ gains in understanding how to go about finding peer-reviewed materials and communicating with fellow Wikipedia editors to agree upon.”

After extensive research, Kedarnath and his group were able to identify what was most vital to include in their edits.

“We ended up putting up pertinent stuff like how the virus evades the immune system in a host cell. We thought that was pretty important because it does it differently than other viruses. One of the interesting parts is that it’s a DNA virus, but it uses its own machinery instead of using the cell’s machinery. We wanted to add stuff like that—how is this virus unique from other viruses?”

Kedarnath looked at Wikipedia’s article for the Epstein-Barr virus as an example of typical structure and information.

“Comparing our article to other articles, or our virus to other viruses, gave us a good baseline of what to do. And it was interesting too because we had other schools work on our article as well. Another school was set to start as we were finishing our articles. I was like, ‘I wonder what they’re gonna add!'”

Practicing consensus-building and collaboration

As opposed to a typical essay, working with other students to embed new information into pre-existing content required a totally new approach to collaboration. The group didn’t start from the beginning of the article, but rather jumped around to different sections as they uncovered additional gaps in the information. This sort of creative, comprehensive study more closely mirrors the scientific research process “in the wild”, so to speak. One asks oneself, ‘How can I build upon what’s already out there?’

Instead of splitting the article into parts for each group member to work on, which some groups have success with, Kedarnath and his classmates decided to all work holistically, at the same time, allowing their interests to guide them. “Just having the freedom to choose whatever part of the article you wanted to tackle was nice.”

He says he’ll take this approach to collaboration into his other classes, especially what he learned from discussing changes with his group and coming to a consensus about the best way forward.

“It’s not like writing a group essay in a Google doc where you split it up into parts like, ‘you take the methods section, I’ll do the introduction.’ This was different because there wasn’t necessarily a methods section or an introduction. It was just different parts about how this virus works. And we actually ended up collaborating on how we should word it. It was definitely different from a normal group essay, but that was a good thing. I felt like I had more of my group’s assistance and I talked to them more than I would normally.”

Developing skills for a chosen career

Kedarnath wants to go into public health work to see this exact kind of science communication in action.

“I can understand what’s going on in the public sphere and explain to my patients why I’m suggesting they do things. You don’t want to tell a patient you’re not supposed to eat a high carb diet and expect them to change. You don’t tell them, ‘You have to get this vaccine or this shot.’ They might wonder, ‘Why do I have to get this booster shot? I already got this shot once.’ And you have to explain to them that this is how your immune system works. The antibodies run on cycles where it goes up and then you have to reinvigorate them with another dose to make it happen again. When you give someone an explanation, it really helps them build habits that are better for them. So interacting with the general public is a good skill to have. You can be as smart as you want, but to get someone to believe in what you’re telling them to do, you have to explain in a way they understand why they are doing what they’re doing.”

Want to run a Wikipedia assignment in Spring 2023? The deadline to join our free program has been extended! Submit your course by January 16 to ensure your spot. Visit teach.wikiedu.org to find out more about how you can incorporate a Wikipedia project into your syllabus.

This post is also available in English.

Le persone donano a Wikipedia per tanti motivi diversi. La Wikimedia Foundation, la fondazione senza scopo di lucro che gestisce Wikipedia, garantisce che ogni donazione ricevuta venga investita per essere di servizio a Wikipedia, ai progetti Wikimedia e alla nostra missione relativa alla conoscenza libera. 

Sebbene molti visitino Wikipedia quotidianamente, non è sempre ovvio cosa ci sia dietro alla possibilità di accedere al sito. Ecco sette motivi per donare alla Fondazione che chiariscono anche chi siamo, cosa facciamo e perché le vostre donazioni sono importanti.

1. Siamo una fondazione senza scopo di lucro e i lettori e i donatori da tutto il mondo ci aiutano a rimanere indipendenti.

Molte persone si sorprendono quando scoprono che Wikipedia è ospitata da un’organizzazione non-profit. In realtà è l’unico sito web nella top ten dei siti più visitati al mondo a essere gestito da un’organizzazione non-profit. Questo è importante perché non siamo finanziati dalla pubblicità, non facciamo pagare un abbonamento e non vendiamo i vostri dati. La maggioranza dei nostri fondi deriva da donazioni (in media 15$ a donazione) di persone che leggono Wikipedia. Molti lo fanno attraverso i banner per le donazioni che vedono sul sito. Questo sistema preserva la nostra indipendenza, riducendo la capacità di una singola organizzazione o persona di influenzare i contenuti di Wikipedia.

Da tempo seguiamo le buone prassi del settore non-profit e abbiamo sempre ricevuto le valutazioni migliori da gruppi come Charity Navigator per l’efficienza e la trasparenza finanziaria. Pubblichiamo inoltre relazioni annuali sulle nostre finanze e sulla raccolta di fondi che possono essere esaminate da chiunque.

2.  Wikipedia aiuta milioni di lettori e funziona a una frazione del costo di altri grandi siti web. 

Wikipedia conta oltre 16 miliardi di visualizzazioni al mese. Abbiamo gli stessi livelli (se non maggiori) di traffico globale di molte compagnie for-profit, pur avendo solo una frazione del loro budget e del loro staff. 

Alla Wikimedia Foundation lavorano circa 700 persone. La maggioranza di loro lavora per garantire tempi di caricamento rapidi, connessioni sicure e migliori esperienze di lettura e modifica sui nostri siti. Si occupano della manutenzione del software e dell’infrastruttura su cui gestiamo alcuni dei siti più poliglotta del mondo, con contenuti disponibili in oltre 300 lingue. Sebbene la nostra missione e il nostro lavoro siano unici, in confronto lo strumento di traduzione di Google supporta attualmente 133 lingue; Meta ha più di 70.000 dipendenti e Reddit ha più di 1.400 dipendenti.

3. Le donazioni dei lettori sostengono la tecnologia che rende possibile Wikipedia e i miglioramenti all’infrastruttura con cui le persone leggono, modificano e condividono la conoscenza su Wikipedia. 

Dare voce ai progetti per la conoscenza libera richiede una tecnologia in grado di mantenere i siti funzionanti e rilevanti, un supporto dedicato ai volontari e lo sforzo volto a proteggere gli utenti e mantenere la conoscenza libera.

Circa il 43% del nostro budget è destinato al supporto diretto per la manutenzione di Wikipedia e dei siti Wikimedia. Questo include il supporto all’infrastruttura tecnologica che consente miliardi di visite mensili a Wikipedia, nonché ai circa 160 membri del personale tecnico di Wikimedia Foundation che contribuiscono alla manutenzione dei nostri sistemi, occupandosi di affidabilità del sito, software, sicurezza e altri ruoli.

Poiché Wikipedia è disponibile in 300 lingue, ha bisogno di una tecnologia multilingue all’avanguardia per permettere ai suoi lettori e ai suoi utenti di leggere e contribuire alla conoscenza nella loro lingua preferita. I finanziamenti rendono possibile anche migliorare l’esperienza degli utenti su Wikipedia e sostenere la crescita delle comunità di utenti volontari a livello globale, in modo che le persone che accedono a Wikipedia trovino informazioni pertinenti, accurate e utili.

4. Ci siamo adattati per soddisfare le nuove esigenze in un panorama tecnologico in continua evoluzione e per rispondere alle nuove minacce globali.

Internet e il mondo tecnologico che ci circonda sono in continua trasformazione. Nel corso degli anni, abbiamo aumentato i nostri investimenti per tenere il passo con l’esplosione del traffico online, le nuove sfide che minacciano la nostra missione e l’evoluzione delle preferenze degli utenti.

Se consultavate Wikipedia con regolarità durante i suoi primi dieci anni on line vi sarete probabilmente imbattuti in un messaggio di errore. Grazie ai nostri costanti investimenti in tecnologia, questo non accade più. I nuovi investimenti consentono a Wikipedia di gestire più facilmente picchi di traffico record, evitando di interrompere l’esperienza di lettura o di modifica.

Ci siamo anche adattati ad affrontare nuove sfide, dalle sofisticate tattiche di disinformazione, alla censura governativa, fino agli attacchi informatici e alle leggi che regolamentano le aziende che ospitano siti web. I nuovi protocolli di sicurezza ostacolano i malintenzionati che vorrebbero trarre vantaggio dai nostri siti, mentre il nostro staff legale ci aiuta a proteggere la nostra missione di conoscenza libera.

Più della metà del nostro traffico adesso arriva da supporti mobili. Gli assistenti vocali sfruttano sempre più spesso Wikipedia per soddisfare le esigenze di conoscenza dei loro utenti. Noi continuiamo a evolvere per andare incontro a queste preferenze.

5. Gestiamo le nostre finanze in modo responsabile e bilanciamo le esigenze immediate di Wikipedia con la sostenibilità a lungo termine. 

Se avete più di un conto, probabilmente non utilizzerete il vostro conto corrente nello stesso modo in cui utilizzate un conto deposito. Il primo è probabilmente destinato alle spese quotidiane, mentre il secondo è probabilmente destinato alle emergenze, ad esempio a un guasto improvviso dell’auto, o agli obiettivi finanziari a lungo termine come la pensione.

La situazione è più o meno simile per le organizzazioni non-profit. Abbiamo due conti che noi consideriamo come conti deposito. La nostra riserva è come un fondo per le emergenze, ad esempio in caso di crisi economica.

Il nostro fondo di dotazione è un fondo permanente a lungo termine. I proventi degli investimenti di questo fondo sostengono il futuro di Wikipedia e dei progetti Wikimedia. Questi fondi sono accantonati per particolari scopi a lungo termine. Tuttavia, utilizziamo la stragrande maggioranza delle donazioni che riceviamo dai lettori di Wikipedia per sostenere il lavoro quotidiano che svolgiamo nel corso dell’anno.

Avere riserve finanziarie sane e avere un buon fondo di capitale circolante è considerata una buona pratica per le organizzazioni di tutti i tipi. Il Board di Wikimedia Foundation ha recentemente definito la nostra politica sul capitale circolante, pensata per sostenere il nostro lavoro e fornire supporto agli affiliati e ai volontari in caso di spese non pianificate, emergenze o mancate entrate. Ci permette inoltre di avere un flusso di cassa sufficiente a coprire le nostre spese durante l’anno.

6. Sostenere Wikipedia significa aiutarla a diventare più rappresentativa di tutto il sapere mondiale. 

La Wikimedia Foundation sostiene individui e organizzazioni in tutto il mondo con finanziamenti per aumentare la diversità, la portata, la qualità e la quantità della conoscenza libera. Rispetto a due anni fa, abbiamo aumentato del 140% il sostegno finanziario diretto al nostro movimento di volontari. Di recente, abbiamo apportato modifiche ai metodi di assegnazione delle nostre entrate per essere più inclusivi nei confronti dei nuovi e più piccoli affiliati Wikimedia.

Pur riconoscendo che ci sono ancora grandi lacune da colmare, la conoscenza su Wikipedia è diventata più rappresentativa del mondo, così come i redattori che contribuiscono al sito. Ciò è dovuto agli sforzi programmatici costanti dei volontari e degli affiliati Wikimedia e di tanti altri soggetti, molti dei quali hanno ricevuto finanziamenti, formazione e altri tipi di sostegno dalla Fondazione.

Rispetto al 2019, nel 2021 la nostra comunità di utenti volontari è cresciuta del 58% nell’Africa subsahariana, del 21% in America Latina e nei Caraibi e del 14% in Asia orientale, nel Sud-est asiatico e nel Pacifico.

Perché la rappresentanza globale degli utenti volontari di Wikipedia è importante? È importante perché Wikipedia è il riflesso delle persone che vi contribuiscono. Prospettive diverse creano conoscenze di qualità superiore, più rappresentative e rilevanti per tutti noi.

7. I contributi dei lettori ci fanno andare avanti.

Le persone che danno il loro contributo a Wikipedia — attraverso donazioni, parole di sostegno, modifiche o altri modi di contribuire — ci ispirano ogni giorno. Tutti noi della Wikimedia Foundation vogliamo cogliere l’occasione per ringraziarli. Vorremmo condividere alcuni dei nostri messaggi preferiti dai donatori nel corso degli anni. Speriamo che vi commuovano tanto quanto hanno commosso noi: 

“Sono stupefatto dalle capacità di Wikipedia! Quando leggo articoli medico-scientifici su un monitor, ne ho sempre un altro aperto su Wikipedia per controllare il significato e il background della terminologia sempre più oscura in questi settori. Wikipedia non è solo il più grande progetto collaborativo della storia dell’umanità, è il migliore!”

Donatore dagli Stati Uniti

“Vi prego di accettare i miei più sentiti ringraziamenti per continuare a portare avanti Wikipedia, per non aver permesso che diventasse proprietà personale di qualcuno, per averne mantenuto l’integrità, la qualità e la sacralità, per averla resa accessibile a chiunque e in tutto il mondo. Capisco quanto possa essere difficile non scendere a compromessi e andare avanti, soprattutto nell’odierno mondo digitale alla ricerca del profitto.”

Donatore dall’India

Speriamo di aver contribuito a farvi capire meglio quanto siano importanti per Wikipedia le donazioni dei lettori. Se hai domande, consulta le nostre FAQ. 

Se sei in grado di donare, puoi fare una donazione a Wikipedia all’indirizzo donate.wikimedia.org.

To celebrate Wikipedia’s 22^nd birthday on Sunday 15 January, the University of Leeds is sharing poems inspired by conversations between two poets, postgraduates in the Faculty of Biological Sciences, and staff in the Library and Digital Education Service:

• WikiWays: a Wikimedia poem by Matt Harvey takes a playful look at Wikipedia to encourage everyone to ‘share their knowledge’ through the Wikimedia suite of sites…‘not just Wikipedia, all Wikimedia’.
• Manifold Wonder: a Wikimedia a poem by Francesca Beard takes a metaphysical look at open knowledge and Wikimedia, ‘a database of shared ownership, made not for profit but to profit all’. 

The poets were invited to contribute to a Wikimedia Champions project (funded by Research England) that is seeking to embrace Open Education as part of the University of Leeds Libraries ‘Knowledge for All’ 2030 strategy.

Hira Khan, one of the postgraduate researchers on the project, said: “This project is an amazing initiative and is a great starting point for me, as a scientist, to fulfil my responsibility in making science more accessible and understandable. The Wiki family is a much more regulated and robust source of information than I previously anticipated. I believe there is a heavy misconception on how Wiki is regulated and is usually referred to as an ‘untrustworthy source’. It was quite enlightening to see otherwise.”

Beth Soanes, another postgraduate researcher on the project researcher, commented: “Working on this Wikimedia project alongside my research has been a truly enriching experience… Going forward, I would like to continue to provide Wikimedia Commons with figures and schematics to aid articles in my area of interest… I will also continue to use Wikimedia as a resource myself, and hope to contribute to Wikidata in particular more and more throughout my career. I am especially interested in open accessibility in science, and see this as a new frontier in science communication.”

Wikipedia: the world’s largest free online encyclopaedia

Contributors to Wikipedia have sought to support free knowledge, open collaboration, and trust on the internet. In times when disinformation and polarisation have been challenging our trust in information and institutions, Wikipedia is as relevant as ever. 

Today on Wikipedia, more than 55 million articles can be accessed in over 300 languages, for free, and without advertisements, all created by volunteers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wikipedia saw record-breaking increases in daily traffic with a growing community of medical professionals contributing knowledge about COVID-19 to the platform. Studies have shown that Wikipedia is one of the most-viewed sources for health information, and its role in providing trusted access to information about COVID-19 in the pandemic led to a milestone collaboration with the World Health Organization in October 2020.

“In a world where information is increasingly commoditised, Wikipedia’s model has always been based on the belief that knowledge belongs to all humans,” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said. “Wikipedia forces us to step outside of our echo chambers and contend with what a shared understanding of the world could really look like. After all, a Wikipedia article is the same no matter who or where you are in the world, and if something isn’t right in the article, you can change it.”

The post Poems championing free knowledge inspired by University of Leeds students appeared first on WMUK.

University Students Wikimedians is a community based on Colleges and Universities students currently operating in Tanzania with the vision of reaching as many students as possible and engaging them in the Wikimedia Foundation projects and free knowledge sharing. The Community is run through Wiki Clubs in different educational institutions. This episode focuses on the leadership in Wiki Clubs being a reflection of different USW Club Leaders.

As a Wiki club leader, you have the opportunity to work with a diverse group of people who are passionate about knowledge and education. Our club is dedicated to improving the quality and accessibility of information on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Each day brings new challenges and exciting projects to work on. One of my main responsibilities is to organize and facilitate club meetings. This involves planning agendas, leading discussions, and providing support to our members as they work on editing and contributing to Wikipedia.

In addition to leading meetings, you also work on outreach and recruitment efforts to bring more people into our club. This can involve hosting information sessions, participating in community events, and working with local schools and organizations to spread the word about our club and the importance of Wikipedia.

One of the things you will love most about being a Wikimedia club leader is the sense of community and collaboration within our group. We are all working towards a common goal of improving and expanding knowledge, and it is truly rewarding to see the impact of our efforts.

Being a Wiki club leader can be demanding at times, but it is also extremely fulfilling. I am constantly learning new things and developing my skills, and I am grateful for the opportunity to make a positive impact on the world through my work with our club.

Why be a Wiki Club Leader?

Being a Wiki club leader comes with several benefits, both personal and professional. Some of the benefits of being a Wikimedia club leader include:

1. Leadership experience: As a club leader, you will have the opportunity to develop your leadership skills and gain experience in managing a group of people.
2. Professional development: Being a club leader can also provide opportunities for professional development, such as learning new technical skills or developing your communication and organization abilities.
3. Personal fulfillment: Participating in a Wikimedia club and contributing to the free sharing of knowledge can be a personally fulfilling experience. As a club leader, you can help others have a similar experience and make a positive impact in your community.
4. Networking: As a club leader, you will have the opportunity to connect with other like-minded individuals and build a network of contacts within the Wikimedia community.
5. Recognition: Leading a Wiki club can also bring recognition within the community and on your resume, as it demonstrates your dedication to the Wikimedia mission and your leadership and organizational skills.

Maintaining Wiki Clubs.

Here are some tips for maintaining a Wiki club:

1. Communicate regularly with members: Make sure to keep in touch with club members and provide updates on upcoming meetings, events, and projects. This can help to keep members engaged and informed.
2. Foster a welcoming and inclusive environment: Encourage a culture of respect and inclusion within your club, and make sure that all members feel welcome and valued.
3. Set clear goals and objectives: Determine the focus and priorities of your club, and work with members to set specific goals and objectives. This can help to keep your club focused and on track.
4. Plan a variety of activities: To keep members engaged and interested, try to plan a mix of activities, such as editing sessions, workshops, and social events.
5. Encourage participation: Encourage all members to get involved and contribute to the club. This can help to create a sense of ownership and pride among club members.
6. Seek out resources: Look for resources, such as funding, meeting spaces, and support from local organizations, to help sustain your club’s activities.
7. Stay up to date: Keep abreast of new developments and best practices within the Wikimedia movement, and incorporate them into your club’s activities as appropriate.

Challenges

There are several challenges that Wiki club leaders may face in their role, including:

1. Time management: As a club leader, you may have a lot of responsibilities and tasks to juggle, including organizing meetings, recruiting new members, and working on outreach and community projects. It can be challenging to manage your time effectively and ensure that you can attend to all of your responsibilities.
2. Leading a diverse group: Wikimedia clubs often have members with a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. It can be challenging to facilitate discussions and lead the group in a way that is inclusive and respectful of all members.
3. Staying up to date: Wikimedia projects are constantly evolving, and club leaders need to stay up to date on new policies, guidelines, and best practices. This can be a challenge, especially if you have a busy schedule.
4. Sustaining membership: It can be difficult to maintain a consistent and active membership in a Wikimedia club. Club leaders may need to work on recruitment and retention efforts to ensure that the club remains vibrant and engaged.
5. Finding resources: Depending on your location and the resources available to your club, you may face challenges finding funding, meeting spaces, or other resources needed to support your club’s activities.

In conclusion, being a Wiki club leader is a rewarding and challenging role that requires a range of skills and responsibilities. From organizing meetings and facilitating discussions, to outreach and recruitment, club leaders have the opportunity to make a positive impact on the world through their work with Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. If you are considering becoming a Wiki club leader, remember to stay organized, be inclusive, set clear goals, and seek out resources to support your club’s activities. And most importantly, have fun and enjoy the sense of community and collaboration that comes with being a part of a Wikimedia club.

Have you ever been a leader in a Wiki Club? what was your experience? Kindly share your experience in the comments section below.

Write us an email at hello@uswiki.africa or reach us via WhatsApp at +255685261018. Connect with us on our social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

The Wikimedia community in Northern and Western Europe (NW Europe) is one of the oldest and most established communities in the Wikimedia movement. Spanning 26 countries, the region is home to some of the largest reader and contributor populations in languages other than English, who continue to contribute and help shape our unique movement. It is also responsible for the earliest internationalization of Wikipedia – German, Catalan, and French Wikipedias were created two months after English Wikipedia, with Swedish Wikipedia in short succession. Combined with a strong presence of Wikimedia chapters and experienced movement organizers, Northern and Western Europe is a powerhouse when it comes to sharing free knowledge, and advocating for change to do so more equitably. 

As part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s new approach to annual planning, we’re sharing updates about the movement’s work across regions. Let’s take a deeper look at Northern and Western Europe. 

Contributors

Northern and Western Europe plays an outsized role in Wikimedia contribution compared to its share of the global population. The region is digitally advanced and well connected compared to many other parts of the world; while it has 5% the global population, it is a full 9% of internet users. This trend is even more stark when it comes to Wikimedia, where 31% of global editors live in NW Europe. Such strong participation in free language contribution underscores what a significant role European languages, culture, and topics play on the wikis.

Yet within this broad grouping of 26 diverse countries, there is significant variation in population size, land mass, and language. The largest language communities have about 8,000 members, while the smallest have closer to 80. These dimensions tend to play out in terms of the contributor communities, where most editors, particularly in languages other than English, are concentrated in larger more populous countries with a national language. Some examples include:

• Italian Wikipedia is primarily edited from Italy, which is home to 6,000 of 7,000 global editors. 
• Swedish Wikipedia is primarily edited from Sweden, which is home to 720 of 1,000 global editors.
• Finish Wikipedia is primarily edited from Finland, which is home to 690 of 1,000 global editors.
• Norwegian Wikipedia is primarily edited from Norway, which is home to 420 of 630 global editors. 
• Dutch Wikipedia is primarily edited from the Netherlands, which is home to 930 of 2,000 global editors. (Belgium is in second place with 390 editors).
• Germany is home to 5,000 of the approximately 7,000 global editors on German Wikipedia

The United Kingdom, Spain, France and Portugal all spread their languages around the world through colonization, and now these languages reflect differing patterns in terms of where editors are based. Most editors of Portuguese Wikipedia live in Brazil, not Portugal, while a plurality of editors from Spanish Wikipedia live in Spain (3,000 of 10,000 global editors). Spain is also the nearly exclusive home to small language communities from other languages spoken in Spain, such as Catalan (670 of 1,000 global editors), Basque (280 of 430 global editors), and Aragonese (20 of 40 global editors). Despite the widespread use of French around the world, most editors of French Wikipedia live in France (5,000 of 8,000 total). Unsurprisingly, only 6,000 of 56,000 global active editors to English Wikipedia are in the UK, placing the country between the United States (22,000 editors) and India (4,000 editors). 

Finally, the far northern countries away from mainland Europe have very small editor populations for local languages, most of whom seem to live abroad. Only 10 of 80 global editors to Faroese Wikipedia live in the Faroe Islands, and 30 of 120 editors of Icelandic Wikipedia live in Iceland. In Greenland, the local languages of Kalaallisut (30 editors) has no editors at all – they are evenly split between Brazil, Poland, and the United States with 10 editors each. 

Affiliates

Northern and Western Europe is home to over 33 Affiliates groups, including 14 chapters, and one of the two thematic organizations in the movement: Amical Wiki. In total, this wide variety of affiliates makes up about 20% of movement affiliates globally, and 37% of all chapters. 

The large number of chapters in the region is no surprise, considering that this is the region in which the first chapter – Wikimedia Deutschland – was created in 2004. It was followed shortly by two other chapters from the region: Wikimedia France and Wikimedia Italia. These chapters are independent, legally incorporated organizations working within a specific geographic focus. They are mature entities, typically have at least at least 20 members, employ their own staff benefit from diverse funding sources.  

With more than 100 000 members, Wikimedia Deutschland is not only the oldest, but also the largest chapter in the movement, and is active globally. For example, it supports Wikidata, the fastest growing Wikimedia project, and strongly supports Movement Strategy efforts, including playing a leadership role in advancing the second phase of the movement strategy process.  Wikimedia Deutschland’s Movement Strategy and Global Relations team publishes papers around different strategy elements, and the MOVE podcast aims to be an easy and interesting source of information about everything strategy-related. 

Similarly, other chapters in the region are also heavily engaged in global affairs. For example, Wikimedia Austria works to transfer capacities to other regions or affiliates through fiscal sponsorship, and Wikimedia Norge organizes the Language Diversity Hub. All of the regional affiliates work towards furthering the movement’s mission and vision through projects, engaging the local community of editors, and advancing the movement’s 2030 Strategy. 

Regional Grantmaking

Looking at the history of grantmaking in the region, Northern and Western Europe has received over $37.2 million in annual grants since 2009. In 2022 the region received around $3.83 million in grants (which is an increase from 3.24 in 2021). This region has the highest participation in the Foundation’s grants program. Moving forward, the NW Europe affiliates have established an important goal of diversifying resources and developing additional fundraising strategies.

Grant-funded activities in Northern and Western Europe span a wide range from reducing knowledge gaps and increasing the diversity of contributors to the Wikimedia projects in Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Northern Sámi, to General Support Fund grants  in a variety of countries, as well as research grants like working on Wikidata Gender Diversity. 

The region has an especially strong tendency to prioritize work in the GLAM (Gallaries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) arena. The affiliates of NW Europe work with many cultural institutions, both large and small. For this reason, it is unsurprising that  that the thematic hub working on providing tools and services around content partnerships is being created in NW Europe! Developed by Wikimedia Sweden, the Content Partnerships Hub will support work across the globe, and provide, among other services, a partnership helpdesk, which will offer mentorship and support to anyone working on establishing partnerships. 

Affiliates and communities in the region have long been engaged in public policy advocacy on a regional level, helping to shape European policies that affect our movement.  In 2013, affiliates engaged in policy work established an entity with a long name and noble goals. The Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU have worked in Brussels to monitor EU policy, inform Wikimedia entities, facilitate movement discussions around public policy, and most importantly, help EU legislators understand the distinctive approach towards free knowledge and content moderation taken by the Wikimedia movement. They have also laid the foundation for Wikimedia Europe – a brand new entity in the Wikimedia Movement set up to further its policy goals in the European Union. 

WMEU, created by more than 20 affiliates from the region, will be a Belgium-registered organization, with an aim of shaping European legislation and regulation that affect free knowledge and access to information, supporting affiliate fundraising, and building more movement capacity in that area. 

Readers

Readership in NW Europe is strong, with countries in the region making up a full half of the top ten countries by total monthly pageviews. The United Kingdom (950 million pageviews) is in third place behind the US and Japan, followed by Germany (906 million pageviews) in 4th place, France (609 million pageviews) in 6th place, Italy (536 million pageviews)  in 7th place, and Spain (326 million pageviews) in 10th place.

These pageviews matter – Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects are how readers all around the world gain access to free knowledge, and that knowledge is available in hundreds of languages. The Wikimedia projects are also a reflection of the beliefs and information that we share collectively across languages and borders. So what are people in NW Europe reading about for the month of November 2022? 

Unsurprisingly, topics related to the World Cup are high on the list! The Netherlands, England, Wales, Poland, France, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal all played in the world cup this year. The respective content pages about the FIFA World Cup are the most viewed content pages in Italian Wikipedia (“campionato mondiale di calcio” with over 1,500,000 views), German Wikipedia (“Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft 2022” with over 1,300,000 views), and Polish Wikipedia (“Mistrzostwa Świata w Piłce Nożnej 2022” with over 1,600,000 views). French Wikipedia, however, takes the prize for the greatest football enthusiasm. The current top article,“Coupe du monde de football 2022”, has nearly 2 million views, followed by “Qatar” with nearly 600,000 views, and the page for French football coach, Hervé Renard, who manages the Saudi Arabia national team and has over 500,000 views. 

Conclusion

So how can the Wikimedia movement build on and support the ongoing work of volunteers and affiliates in Northern and Western Europe? Within the Wikimedia Foundation, we are working to understand how we can better grow audiences and contributors as well as support our affiliates within specific areas. Some questions we are looking at include:

• How can we build on the work around GLAM and the gender-gap being led from NW Europe?
• What capacity building support is needed for affiliates to achieve financial sustainability beyond the grants programme?
• What does it take to grow and diversify readership within the region?
• How can European chapters better support more nascent affiliates within and outside the region?
• What voices are missing in existing efforts? Are there existing partnerships worth strengthening or new ones worth building?

Please share your thoughts on what’s missing in the comments below, and we will share an update in the coming months.

Happy new year from the Global Data & Insights team! As we enter 2023, we wanted to reflect on our 2022 survey findings about on-wiki feelings of safety and experiences of harassment across the Movement. This post will be the first of a multi-part series exploring the Community Safety and Community Insights survey data on this topic, so look out for our next post in February.

In March 2022, we began conducting the single-question Community Safety Survey on 5 Wikipedias: English, Farsi, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. The survey asked logged-in editors on each Wikipedia language project, “In the last 30 days, have you felt unsafe or uncomfortable contributing to Wikipedia?” and was repeated 3 times over the course of 2022. We will be exploring the combined data here, while the individual results of each 2022 survey can be found on the Community Safety reports page.

Likewise, from June through September 2022, we collected data for the Community Insights survey, which invites active editors across wiki projects to help us better understand our global movement. The full report for the Insights survey will be available later this quarter, while we focus specifically on the safety and harassment questions in this post.

Core findings:

• For each wiki, survey results were similar across multiple waves in 2022. This stability suggests that each language project has a collective “sense of safety,” rather than safety sentiments being driven primarily by individual incidents and events.
• Users with higher edit counts are more likely to report both feeling unsafe and being harassed. 

Why do we measure feelings?

In short, feelings matter, and not just for individual well-being. Collectively held sentiments sway global economic markets (Nowzohour & Stracca 2020) and shape national elections (Redlawsk & Pierce 2017). Collective feelings change our behaviors, and those behaviors have global ramifications which can shift how we engage with each other. In online communities, feelings impact how and to what extent we interact online (van Schaik et al. 2018). Safety sentiments can be shaped by interactions among users, by reading how others interact even if an individual is not engaging, by government actions regarding online expression, and dozens of other factors. In turn, feeling safe or unsafe on an individual level can mean the difference between making an edit, taking a break, or slowly disengaging from the community. When it spreads to our collective sense of a space, these individual actions have widespread effects. 

Let’s get to the results!

2022 Community Safety surveys

For this analysis, we combined the three Community Safety surveys from March, June, and September to understand safety perceptions for the entirety of 2022. This grouped data tells us something like, “What percent of users on this language Wikipedia are feeling unsafe or uncomfortable at any point in time?” We also categorized responses by edit count ranges (5-99, 100-999, and 1000+ lifetime edits on the wiki) so that we can look at whether safety sentiments differ among more or less active editors. 

Due to global cultural and linguistic differences in how people respond to survey questions (Kemmelmeier 2016), we discourage comparisons across wikis. Instead, we invite members of each community to consider why we are seeing the results we are seeing on their project and what might be done to improve feelings of safety in their language spaces.

Figure 1. Percent of users who responded “Yes” to the question “In the past 30 days, have you felt unsafe or uncomfortable contributing to Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)?” across three 2022 surveys, split by lifetime edit count and grouped in total.

Figure 2. Percent of users who responded “Yes” to the question “In the past 30 days, have you felt unsafe or uncomfortable contributing to Wikipedia (fr.wikipedia.org)?” across three 2022 surveys, split by lifetime edit count and grouped in total.

Figure 3. Percent of users who responded “Yes” to the question “In the past 30 days, have you felt unsafe or uncomfortable contributing to Wikipedia (es.wikipedia.org)?” across three 2022 surveys, split by lifetime edit count and grouped in total.

Figure 4. Percent of users who responded “Yes” to the question “In the past 30 days, have you felt unsafe or uncomfortable contributing to Wikipedia (pt.wikipedia.org)?” across three 2022 surveys, split by lifetime edit count and grouped in total.

Comparing these overall 2022 results to the quarterly meta.wiki reports, we see stability across the year on each wiki, suggesting that the percent of users feeling unsafe is neither increasing nor decreasing substantially. In the combined 2022 data, we see that higher editing activity results in higher chances of users feeling unsafe or uncomfortable in each language space. 

Based on these results, we draw two key conclusions:

• Stable results across the year imply that broad understandings of safety are part of the collective consciousness of a wiki. This means that safety sentiments are widespread and durable across time, indicating that they likely stem from the social structure of the communities rather than from singular events. Addressing collective feelings of unsafety thus means addressing how we interact structurally. Interventions need to be community-specific in identifying what and how to change, in addition to broader initiatives such as the Universal Code of Conduct and technical interventions such as IP editing restrictions.
• Across these projects, we see that users with higher edit counts are more likely to report having felt unsafe. This indicates that although outside factors likely contribute to users feeling unsafe, editing interactions also affect users’ sense of safety. Seasoned editors may be better able to recognize an interaction as unsafe or uncomfortable, while higher editing activity may result in more potential for exposure to an uncomfortable interaction. 

Insights survey affirms relationship between safety and editing activity

We find a similar pattern in the Community Insights survey, increasing our confidence in the above findings. Of note: questions asked in Community Insights refer to the past year rather than the past 30 days, and the survey samples “active contributors” who made at least 10 edits in the three months before the data collection. In doing so, these questions answer something more akin to, “How many active users across the globe have felt unsafe or uncomfortable in the last year?” and “How many active users across the globe have experienced harassment in the last year?”

Figure 5. Percent of active Wikimedia contributors who reported having felt unsafe or uncomfortable contributing in the year preceding the survey, by edit bin for the last year.

Among Community Insights respondents, we see a progressive increase in reports of having felt unsafe among users who have contributed more edits during the course of the year (Figure 5). This gives further evidence that interacting on-wiki is a risk for feeling unsafe, alongside all external factors and broadly held sentiments.

Figure 6. Percent of active Wikimedia contributors who reported having been harassed in the year preceding the survey, by edit bin for the last year.

Finally, we see a clear trend where users who made more edits within a year were likewise more likely to report having been harassed (Figure 6).

What’s next? Join us in our learning journey to explore the intersections of on-wiki safety and harassment

In many ways, the result that higher-activity editors are more likely to report feeling unsafe or being harassed on-wiki is not surprising. Interacting more often means more chances for a negative exchange to occur. However, this singular point of data leaves us with more questions. Are higher-activity editors also taking on more intensive roles on their wikis, which might account for these differences? Are specific demographic groups more likely to feel unsafe? In the next posts in this series, we will look further into the 2022 Community Insights safety and harassment questions. We look forward to continuing the conversation, and welcome your perspectives on the Community Safety Talk Page or privately to our email at surveys@wikimedia.org.

Note: Farsi Wikipedia data is not reported in this post, as we temporarily paused data collection in September 2022.

Being the eldest and most common Wikimedia project, Wikipedia has been a starting point for many newly established Wiki communities. This is due to its popularity to many, not just the editors/members but also not Wiki members. Being ranked in the top ten most visited sites worldwide make it a place of interest to many.

Since the start of the University Students Wikimedians (USW) community back in May 2021, all of its communities (Morogoro, Dodoma, and Iringa regions) have all been focusing on contributing to Wikipedia mostly the Swahili version. Below is a look back on the standing statistically in the Wikipedia Project:

It has been a quite long journey from the beginning of the project as an experimental project back in 2019 to be fully operational in May 2021. The community has had students from different institutions joining the movement and volunteering to contribute to the Wikimedia Projects.

As a community, we have been able to collaborate with other communities in Tanzania in making sure that the above statistics are achieved. We were able to work closely with the Wikimedia Community Arusha with whom we’ve done close interactions in different programs.

Also, we participated and had members from the Wikimedia Community User Group Tanzania participating in our activities thus enhancing knowledge sharing among the members. Much thanks to the Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili community most of who are administrators who have played a great role in shaping the USW members. Some photos from different events.

So out of Wikipedia what else?

The Wikimedia Movement hosts more projects than just Wikipedia. The University Students Wikimedians (USW) would love to contribute to other projects in the coming season two. And yes we are ready to board some new projects.

On 17^th December we celebrated the Wikidata10 birthday through which we introduced the community to the Wikidata project. The project is still new to many of the members in Tanzania compared to Wikipedia, however, we are currently seeking experienced editors in the project to provide training to the members.

However, in the coming season two, we hope also to cover the Wikiquote project together with Wikidata while collaborating with the Wikimedia Community Arusha on contributing to the WikiVoyage project. Find photos below from the Wikidata event:

Write us an email at hello@uswiki.africa or reach us via WhatsApp at +255685261018. Connect with us on our social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn

Read our last article via the below links:

– USW S1E2: What it takes to build a Wiki Community in Tanzania [Part 1].

This blog post was inspired by the individuals who work tirelessly to organize and move forward the Wikimedia communities in the Central Asia region. Please meet @Nataev – a long term Wikimedian from Central Asia sharing about their work in the Uzbek language community.

When did you start editing Wikipedia and how did it all start?

I started editing Wikipedia in 2009 when I was studying in the USA. The English version of the article about my hometown of Isfana (renamed Razzaqov in March 2022) was so small that I decided to improve it. Then I realized that you can not only write articles, you can also upload photos on Wikimedia Commons. The first three years, I mostly wrote about Central Asia in the English Wikipedia, and then I noticed that the section of Wikipedia in the Uzbek language was poor. In 2012, I became an administrator of the Wikipedia section in Uzbek language. Currently I am more actively editing in Uzbek, English, Russian, Turkish and Kyrgyz. It turns out I’ve been editing Wikipedia for 13 years now.

In 2020, Wikimedians of the Uzbek language User Group was established.

On December 15, 2020, we founded the Wikimedians of the Uzbek language User Group. A user group does not have to be located in a particular country. For instance, I am a citizen of Kyrgyzstan and live in Kyrgyzstan, while other members of the group live in Uzbekistan. Since there are also many Uzbek speaking people in other countries of our region, in Tajikistan and in Kazakhstan, we decided to set up a language section. Our group received a small grant from the Wikimedia Foundation and organized Central Asia Month. People created content in Uzbek about Central Asia for a month, and we rewarded the winners at the end. We also organized a Wikipedia Book Month marathon where people wrote about books in Uzbek for a month.

Participation of the Wikimedians of the Uzbek language User Group in the 2022 WikiScholarship Edit-a-thon.

In 2019, the president of Uzbekistan issued a decree on improving digital content in the Uzbek language. Various government agencies came to understand that Wikipedia is part of the digital content. For a while, the agencies themselves developed template articles on Wikipedia, and that was noticeable by the quality of the articles. Then we were contacted by the Agency for Youth Affairs staff in order to discuss with the admins and also with the community about a possible collaboration. 

At first, of course, we had our doubts, as this is the state agency and we had no experience in cooperating with state agencies previously. I consulted with other Wikimedians from Europe and Russia. It turns out that this is a normal practice, you just need to agree in advance that there will be no thematic restrictions by the state. 

The Youth Affairs Agency offered their support and started a huge edit-a-thon – WikiScholarship from May to December 2022. Active participants received a one-time $5,000 scholarship for the first prize. You can learn more about the results of this work here. On behalf of our User Group, we evaluated the content of the articles. 

As part of the WikiScholarship edit-a-thon, we also organized two camps with 150 participants in both. It was awesome. Participants were students, teachers, but mostly young people from the regions of Uzbekistan. We spent a week learning how to edit, create articles, participated in entertaining games, had meetings with celebrities, and played sports. In the first round of training, we created more than 8,000 articles over a week, and in the second round over 20,000 articles. The Youth Affairs Agency organized everything and invited three Uzbek-speaking administrators from Kyrgyzstan as well.

On average, 10,000 new articles were created per month. For the first time ever, we launched a wiki audio project, started uploading photos, writing articles about women, about sports – a lot of cool projects are going on. The main goal is to keep the community engaged after the edit-a-thon. We have about 900 people in our Telegram group every day discussing something, which means our community has increased. 

More than 200,000 Wikipedia articles in the Uzbek language. 

On November 26, 2022 the number of articles created in the Uzbek language Wikipedia exceeded 200 thousand. Thus, the Uzbek section ranked fifth among Wikipedia’s in the Turkic languages, after Turkish, Tatar, South Azerbaijani and Kazakh. There are now many articles that were not on the Uzbek section of Wikipedia before. We are very pleased that Uzbek-speaking users can now find information on many topics they are interested in. We are also pleased to see a noticeable increase in the number of participants who want to contribute to Uzbek-language content.

Looking to the future, how do you envision collaboration and cooperation among the language communities of Central Asia? 

I think it’s time to work together, for example, there are communities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) – they know each other, they do joint projects regularly. Our region, in my opinion, is also ready for collaboration between language communities. Before this, we had a very small community, and so far Kyrgyz, Tajik and Turkmen communities are still not large. But almost everyone has a phone, everyone is connected to the Internet. 

If in 2009 being in the U.S. I knew it was a cool project, years later in 2015 it also became relevant in our country and people started paying attention. So, the time has now come to unite, organize events together and write projects together. I myself am probably a good example. I, a Kyrgyzstani citizen, speak six languages, including Uzbek. Since it’s my native language, I’m in the Uzbek Wikipedia, let’s say, more of an editor. But on the other hand, I can also work in Kyrgyz. We have another administrator from Kyrgyzstan who knows Kyrgyz very well and recently was granted the administrator rights on Kyrgyz Wikipedia for three months. There is so much we can do together. 

Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2023 are now open until Sunday, 5 February! Wikimania 2023 will be held in Singapore from 16–19 August.

Wikimania is the annual global gathering of Wikimedia contributors that takes place in person and online. This year, we aim to be inclusive for Wikimedians worldwide in line with this edition’s theme: “Diversity. Collaboration. Future.” 

Scholarships for Wikimania 2023 are available in different types for traveling to Singapore:

• Full scholarship: travel, accommodation, and registration are provided;
• Partial scholarship: accommodation and registration are provided.

All scholarship recipients are covered by Wikimedia Foundation Travel Insurance Policy. 

Whereas scholarship recipients have historically written a report to fulfill scholarship requirements, this year they will have the opportunity to do volunteer tasks during Wikimania. The Committee will work with recipients to find a volunteer role that suits each recipient’s skills and experience. Scholarship recipients opting to volunteer rather than write a report will be asked to volunteer for 2 hours over the course of Wikimania, with the option to volunteer more hours if desired. 

Apply now! Make sure to share your experiences during your Wikimedia movement journey and support with links. Newcomers to Wikimedia will be considered. The deadline to apply for a scholarship is 5th February, end of the day anywhere in the world. Applicants will be notified of decisions in May.

Read more on Wikimania Wiki.

Have questions? Write a message to wikimania-scholarships@wikimedia.org.

Survey privacy statement

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and the 5th most visited website on the internet. It’s a volunteer-driven, user-generated encyclopedia. The English-language Wikipedia, which is the most popular language version of Wikipedia, has more than six million articles, and Wikipedia exists in more than 300 languages.

Users who have registered as contributors on Wikipedia are frequently regarded as editors, with varying levels of access. These access levels are also known on Wikipedia as “permissions.”

Some permissions, such as “rollbacker” and “pending change reviewers,” may be granted by any administrator, whereas others, such as “administrator,” “checkuser,” “oversighter,” “bureaucrat,” and “steward,” are only granted to users who have earned the community’s trust. They are granted by community consensus achieved via a structured or semi-structured process.

Wikipedia administrators have the technical tools to delete and undelete pages, block and unblock users, and protect pages. They can grant certain permissions, such as “rollbacker,” “file mover,” and “pending change reviewers,” to other users.

Wikimedia stewards are users who have been granted access to the interface of all public wikis operated by the Wikimedia Foundation..

They are elected annually between January and February by the global Wikimedia community and must have a minimum of 80% support from the voters.

Users who are elected as stewards are highly trusted users who are required to disclose their identity to the Wikimedia Foundation and must sign a confidentiality agreement governing their access to the private information of other users. In the past, stewards were officially confirmed by the WMF Board of Trustees after the community selection.

They have the ability to perform a variety of functions on Wikimedia Foundation public wikis. This includes granting user rights, fighting vandalism and spam, performing checks on projects without local checkusers, globally blocking and locking IPs and users, and implementing global ban requests and other matters of global consensus.

Most of these technical tasks are carried out by stewards behind the scenes and are thankless. Currently, there are a total of 37 stewards.

Recently, one of the stewards, Martin Rulsch, posted on Facebook about his 15-year anniversary as a Wikimedia steward. He is the longest-serving steward on the Wikimedia project.

It would be interesting to learn about his journey as a Wikipedia contributor and steward for more than 15 years.

Q. How long have you been a Wikipedia editor?

Funnily, I cannot remember having used Wikipedia before my first edits in the German Wikipedia in August 2005—but some presentations at school that I recently discovered prove my mind wrong. A month later, I registered my user account and kept that name until today. Slowly, I started with editing some articles about music and chemistry, my favorite subjects at the time.

When one of the articles I had listed on my watchlist got vandalized, I was looking for help from other users with advanced rights, the administrators. I couldn’t cope with other people destroying the work of other volunteers who worked for the greater good. So I decided to help out in this field in order to assist my fellow Wikimedia colleagues.

Curious as I am, I wanted to learn about these processes in other Wikimedia projects, too. In 2007, I started editing English Wikipedia, but soon after I realized that more help was needed with supporting the hundreds of smaller Wikimedia wikis. Although we didn’t have many tools that could help us back in those days (some of them I had to code myself), the best way to accomplish that was as a Wikimedia steward. So I applied for that role, received the needed support, and was finally approved by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.

In December 2022, I became the first Wikimedia steward to serve for 15 consecutive years.

Q. Being a Wikimedia steward comes with a lot of responsibility. How do you manage your time volunteering as a Wikimedia steward?

Over the years, you will get some experience on how to handle the many different roles you have had. Aside from my work as a Wikimedia steward, I’ve been a local administrator on German and English Wikipedia, as well as the media archive Wikimedia Commons, and I have some global user rights. On Wikipedia, I wrote some articles that were evaluated as good or featured articles, embedded thousands of my photos, coded some scripts, served on various juries, organized some events (from local community meetups to larger conferences or photo sessions with stakeholders in politics or the cultural sector), and did a lot of outreach to the press.

My standard quote in press interviews is that “Wikipedia is the best hobby in the world”. Not because we are amateurs (many of us really dive deep into their topics and become professional-likes), but because of the freedom we have in using our time for Wikipedia and its sister projects. There is no deadline and no pressure from some higher hierarchy on how to spend your time on the projects. Accordingly, I do what I can to support my fellows, have some fun, or clean up the mess. There aren’t many stewards around, but I’ve gained some experience and now try to assist where I can. 

Q. How do you deal with harassment relating to your work as a Wikimedia steward?

Most of my stewards fellows contribute to global Wikimedia projects under a pseudonym, which keeps harassment out of our personal lives the majority of the time. We are, however, all accustomed to onwiki harassment, particularly from vandals, whom we combat in our global or local activities. There were times when I was attacked on a daily basis on the English Wikipedia. Back then, I used my real name more often, but when I got a disgusting phone call, I decided to remove it from the most obvious places.

But as you can imagine, for some of my activities like event management, outreach to the press (or here on diff), etc., I still use my real name. For my work at Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, I use a staff account with my real name. All in all, I don’t want to make it too easy for vandals to try and annoy me. Fortunately, I haven’t had major issues recently.

Q. You recently celebrated your 15-year as a Wikimedia steward. What are your challenges as a Wikimedia steward?

Sadly, the challenges haven’t changed much over the years: We are a very small group of highly specialized (often technical) individuals who are loosely connected for that reason. Most of us are lone fighters who must rely heavily on good tools in order to serve the large global community efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately, there is not as much support as we would need, despite the impact our role has. I’ve already mentioned my own involvement in creating some of the tools more than a decade ago. Of course, the situation has changed much over the years, but we could have the potential to help much better and avoid trouble resulting from our impactful activities. I like to deal with challenges, find solutions, and help out when I am needed. I often move along with good memories, friends, and countless experiences when I find everything working in a good way.

Nowadays, this lack of governance within the stewards group is tackled in various ways: our group gets support from the Wikimedia Foundation with direct contacts, manages monthly digital meetings, occasionally collects technical needs, and so on. But our group also takes further steps forward: Members of our group and supporters have been assembled in the Wikimedia Stewards User Group, which has been recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation as a Wikimedia affiliate, which will allow us to ask more formally for grants and allowed us to participate in the annual conference for Wikimedia affiliates, the Wikimedia Summit, for the first time. Within our group, new processes for decision-making have been introduced for testing. We will see in the future if these steps will show some further improvements.

Q. Has there ever been a time that you considered quitting as a Wikimedia steward? If yes, did it result from an incident that you can remember?

Finally, an easy question to be answered: No, I still enjoy helping out in this group with my experiences and filling some of the gaps. But I notice that in recent years, some fellows have joined the group who might be more effective in supporting the group internally as well as externally. As long as I still enjoy it and the fellow community entrusts me to fill out this role, I am happy to offer my time and experiences and continue to serve.

Q. You are one of the most experienced Wikipedia editors and functionaries. Do you have someone within the Wikimedia movement you would consider a role model?

The Wikiverse is a giant cosmos with countless dedicated people who spend their time for the greater good. I have found my best friends here; I have grown from the responsibilities I was entrusted with, and I am grateful that I can give back a little. But I know very well that others are so much better at writing articles, creating new technical solutions for long-standing challenges, encouraging people to join, lobbying for our needs, and many other activities than I am.

Over the years, I tried out most of what you can do in the Wikiverse and met many impressive volunteers, as well as staff members from various Wikimedia affiliates. I hope I showed my gratitude wherever I could, and I hope the people I’m thinking of right now know they are remembered. We are all pieces in this puzzle, and I hope that I also play my part here and can be a role model for somebody else, too.

Q. Do you have any advice for Wikipedia contributors who are aspiring to volunteer as a Wikimedia steward?

Stewards have collected suggestions on a metawiki page. In a nutshell, we are looking for experienced, active community members who hold or have held administrator rights. For global and internal conversations, a minimum knowledge of English is helpful, but we also look for missing languages in the group. In more recent years, many successful applicants had a technical background, which helped them as individuals in their global tasks but also as group members through the tools they might be able to develop. However, as indicated before, some applicants with a background in community governance who want to strengthen the entire group are also very welcome.

As with many new roles, beginners often don’t know where the journey will lead them but later find their place where they can be of help. Therefore, I want to encourage those who have not decided to apply yet to talk with current stewards about their thoughts (because my understanding of the role is just my individual one) or to be bold and just give it a try. More helping hands are needed in order to further the group.

Since writing about WikiApiary last, I didn’t have much time to work on it. In the meantime, denizens of the MediaWiki Stakeholders chat room (join us!) have mentioned more than once that it wasn’t very responsive.

In the past few days, I finally took the chance to look at in terms of server resources rather than just an SMW or website problem. This way finally led to some results.

Load was pretty high on the machine even though there wasn’t that much traffic. We’re talking a load in the 30s or so. Running top showed that there were a lot of apache processes running, consuming a lot of memory and sending the machine into swap.

A quick investigation into apache settings showed the problem:

       MinSpareThreads          25
       MaxSpareThreads          75
       ThreadsPerChild          25

Changing those settings to 5, 25 and 5, respectively, meant fewer resources were being used out of the gate, so load quickly fell to below 10 and the site became more responsive since there was less thrashing going on inside the box.

We still have work to do on the bots. I’m going to be working with at least two other people on that this year. One of the first steps is using the Cloud Services to set up the crawlers.

Photo credit: Vitalii Bashkatov, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

• Argentina report: Ongoing projects with open culture
• Croatia report: A YEAR in REarVIEW!
• Denmark report: Edit-a-thon on contemporary Danish artists from the former Yugoslavia
• India report: CIS-A2K launches GLAM projects in Aurangabad, Maharashtra
• Indonesia report: Digitalization in Deli Serdang and Yogyakarta; #1Lib1Ref Workshop; Structured Data Marathon
• Italy report: Museo Egizio – collection import
• New Zealand report: The Great Macron War, Critter of the Week, and West Couast Wikisource
• Nigeria report: WikiLovesLibraries Nigeria:An initiative beyond 1Lib1Ref for Librarians in Nigeria
• Poland report: The first European GLAM Coordinators online meet-up; New articles on the collection of Wawel Royal Castle; Results of Wiki Loves Monuments 2022
• Portugal report: Wikibase in social sciences and Public Domain Day celebrations
• Spain report: Wikidata Birthday and ongoing projects
• Sweden report: Musikverket; Media literacy graphics; Reports for project and to project partners
• Switzerland report: Swiss GLAM Programme: look back to 2022
• Uganda report: GLAM in Uganda 2022
• UK report: Khalili project year in review
• USA report: Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon: International Volunteer Day; ICP x Art + Feminism
• AvoinGLAM report: Introducing Wiki Loves Living Heritage
• Content Partnerships Hub report: Helpdesk; IGO/INGO
• Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons report: View it!: New FULL version is ready to launch
• WMF GLAM report: GLAM-Wiki Con 2023, DPLA’s new Sloan Foundation funding, and more
• Calendar: January’s GLAM events

Our code review system Gerrit has several caches, the largest ones being backed up on disk. The disk caches offload memory usage and persist the data between restarts. As a Java application, the caches are stored in H2 database files and I recently had to find how to connect to them in order to inspect their content and reduce their size.

In short: java -Dh2.maxCompactTime=15000 ... would cause the H2 driver to compact the database upon disconnection.

context

During an upgrade, the Gerrit installation filed up the system root partition entirely (incident report for Gerrit 3.5 upgrade). The reason is two caches occupying 9G and 11G out of a the 40G system partition. Those caches hold differences to files made by patchsets and are stored in two files:

An easy fix would have been to stop the service, delete all caches, restart the service and let the application refile the cold caches. It is a short term solution, long term what if it is an issue in the application and we have to do the same all over again in the next few weeks? The large discrepancy also triggered my curiosity and I had to know the exact root cause to find a definitive fix to it. There started my journey of debugging.

They are all empty?

When looking at the cache through the application shows caches are way smaller at around 150MBytes:

  Name                          |Entries              |  AvgGet |Hit Ratio|
                                |   Mem   Disk   Space|         |Mem  Disk|
--------------------------------+---------------------+---------+---------+
D gerrit_file_diff              | 24562 150654 157.36m|  14.9ms | 72%  44%|
D git_file_diff                 | 12998 143329 158.06m|  14.8ms |  3%  14%|
                                               ^^^^^^^

One could assume some overhead but there is no reason for metadata to occupy hundred times more space than the actual data they are describing. Specially given each cached item is a file diff which is more than a few bytes. To retrieve the files locally I compressed them with gzip and they shrunk to a mere 32 MBytes! It is a strong indication those files are filled mostly with empty data which suggests the database layer never reclaims no more used blocks. Reclaiming is known as compacting in H2 database or vacuuming in Sqlite.

Connecting

Once I retrieved the files, I have tried to connect to them using the H2 database jar and kept doing mistakes after mistakes due to my completely lack of knowledge on that front:

Version matters

At first I tried with the latest version h2-2.1.214.jar and it did not find any data. I eventually found out the underlying storage system has been changed compared to version 1.3.176 used by Gerrit.I thus had to use an older version which can be retrieved from the Gerrit.war package.

File parameter which is not a file

I then wanted to a SQL dump of the database to inspect it using the Script java class: java -cp h2-1.3.176.jar org.h2.tools.Script, it requires a -url option which is a jdbc URI containing the database name. Intuitively I gave the full file name:

java -cp h2-1.3.176.jar org.h2.tools.Script -url jdbc:h2:git_file_diff.h2.db'

It returns instantly and generate the dump:

CREATE USER IF NOT EXISTS "" SALT '' HASH '' ADMIN;

Essentially an empty file. Looking at file on disk it created a git_file_diff.h2.db.h2.db file which is 24kbytes. Lesson learned, the h2.db suffix must be removed from the URI. I was then able to create the dump using:

java -cp h2-1.3.176.jar org.h2.tools.Script -url jdbc:h2:git_file_diff'

Which resulted in a properly sized backup.sql.

Web based admin

I have altered the SQL to make it fit Sqlite in order to load it in SqliteBrowser (a graphical interface which is very convenient to inspect those databases). Then I found invoking the jar directly starts a background process attached to the database and open my web browser to a web UI: java -jar h2-1.3.176.jar -url jdbc:h2:git_file_diff:

That is very convenient to inspect the file. The caches are are key value storages with a column keeping track of the size of each record. Summing them is how gerrit show-caches finds out the size of the caches (roughly 150Mbytes for the two diff caches).

Compacting solutions

The H2 Database feature page mentions empty space is to be re-used which is not the case as seen above. The document states when the database connection is closed, it compact it for up to 200 milliseconds. Gerrit establish the connection on start up and keep it up until it is shutdown at which point the compaction occurs. It is not frequent enough, and the small delay is apparently not sufficient to compact our huge databases. To run a full compaction several methods are possible:

SHUTDOWN COMPACT: this request an explicit compaction and terminates the connection. The documentation implies it is not subject to the time limit. That would have required a change in the Gerrit Java code to issue the command.

org.h2.samples.Compact script: H2 has a org.h2.samples.Compact to manually compact a given database, it would need some instrumentation to trigger it against each file after Gerrit is shutdown, possibly as a systemd.service ExecStopPost and iterating through each files.

jdbc URL parameter MAX_COMPACT_TIME: the 200 milliseconds can be bumped by adding the parameter to the JDBC connection URL (separated by a semi column ;). Again it would require a change in Gerrit Java code to modify the way it connects.

The beauty of open source is I could access the database source code. It is hosted in https://github.com/h2database/h2database in the version-1.3 tag which holds a subdirectory for each sub version. When looking at a setting, the database driver uses the following piece of code (code licensed under Mozilla Public License Version 2.0 or Eclipse Public License 1.0):

60     /**
61      * Get the setting for the given key.
62      *
63      * @param key the key
64      * @param defaultValue the default value
65      * @return the setting
66      */
67     protected String get(String key, String defaultValue) {
68         StringBuilder buff = new StringBuilder("h2.");
69         boolean nextUpper = false;
70         for (char c : key.toCharArray()) {
71             if (c == '_') {
72                 nextUpper = true;
73             } else {
74                 // Character.toUpperCase / toLowerCase ignores the locale
75                 buff.append(nextUpper ? Character.toUpperCase(c) : Character.toLowerCase(c));
76                 nextUpper = false;
77             }
78         }
79         String sysProperty = buff.toString();
80         String v = settings.get(key);
81         if (v == null) {
82             v = Utils.getProperty(sysProperty, defaultValue);
83             settings.put(key, v);
84         }
85         return v;
86     }

When retrieving the setting MAX_COMPACT_TIME it forges a camel case version of the setting name prefixed by h2. which gives h2.maxCompactTime then look it up in the JVM properties an if set pick its value.

Raising the compact time limit to 15 seconds is thus all about passing to java: -Dh2.maxCompactTime=15000.

Applying and resolution

7f6215e039 in our Puppet applies the fix and summarize the above. Once I applied, I restart Gerrit once to have the setting taken in account and restarted it a second time to have it disconnect from the databases with the setting applied. The results are without appeal. Here are the largest gains:

The gerrit_file_diff and git_file_diff went from respectively 12GB and 8.2G to 0.5G which addresses the issue.

Conclusion

Setting the Java property -Dh2.maxCompactTime=15000 was a straightforward fix which does not require any change to the application code. It also guarantee the database will keep being compacted each time Gerrit is restarted and the issue that has lead to a longer maintenance window than expect would not reappear.

Happy end of year 2022!

References:

• T323754: Investigate Gerrit h2 cache being way too large
• 2022-11-17 incident report: Gerrit 3.5 upgrade
• H2 Database Features: Compacting a Database
• SettingsBase.java for version 1.3.176
• operations/puppet.git change 865023

27/12/2022-02/01/2023

Mapping

• TrickyFoxy wrote, on telegra.ph, an article on ‘Why you should try Every Door’.
• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • emergency=fire_water_inlet for mapping an inlet to a building’s firefighting system.
  • place=sea to deprecate the use of a closed way or multipolygon to map a marginal sea or named portion of an ocean in favour of using a place=sea node.
  • shop=yarn to tag a business primarily selling yarn and supplies for knitting or crochet.

Mapping campaigns

• [1] The new quarterly project for the UK has started. The UK community will be working on fixme and Notes over the next three months.

Community

• feyeandal highlighted the contributions of university clubs with local chapters of YouthMappers in the OSM-Philippines community in 2022 and shared a short reflection about the impact of YouthMappers in a local context.
• A new ‘Communities’ tab has been added to the main page of openstreetmap.org. You can see it in the upper right corner. The tab links to a single location that lists formal Local Chapters, as well as the other OSM communities. Read more about its background on the OpenStreetMap blog.
• On the request of Andrii Holovin, the OSM Ops Team created a short URL for community.openstreetmap.org. The quiz we reported on last week could now be extended with c.osm.org.
• OSM Belgium announced their mapper of the month: lusdavo.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OSMF OWG (Operations Working Group) has published their spending plan for 2023.

Events

• jomo participated in the Fireshonks conference in December where he talked about how to improve skills and knowledge in the OSM ecosystem. He showed various editors, validators, parsers and other tools for both general and more specific purposes and also shared some tips and tricks that he has learned during several years of OSM mapping.

Maps

• Raster map provider Tracestrack announced that they have started to render country-specific motorway shields. Shield reference text is selected randomly from ref, nat_ref and int_ref. The style can be explored via Map Explorer.

Open Data

• Microsoft released new data on missing roads based on fresh (2020–2022) aerial imagery.
• mmd has wiki’ed blog posts from various people in the OSM community in a very long thread on Overture and asks others to make additions.

Software

• Victor Shcherb (CEO of OsmAnd) published the OsmAnd 2023 ‘New Year Resolutions’.
• IzzyOnDroid tooted that the Every Door editor has made it to the Android app store F-Droid.
• Overpass Ultra is a fork of the popular tool overpass turbo. The developers note that ‘because it uses MapLibre GL JS instead of Leaflet, it can be used to visualise significantly larger Overpass API results than overpass turbo’.
• In his diary, Jiri Vlasak (qeef) summarised what happened in the development of Divide and map. Now. over the last year, and outlined the plans for 2023. Divide and map. Now. helps mappers by dividing a big area into smaller squares that people can map together.

Programming

• Xavier Olive released Cartes, which is a ‘Python library providing facilities to produce meaningful maps’. Xavier provides documentation and an Anaconda Python package.
• Gero Gerke started a series of blog posts about implementing an OpenStreetMap data vector renderer using WebGL.
• RGCosm is a new minimal ‘Reverse Geocode for OpenStreetMap’. According to the developer’s Hacker News announcement: ‘ChatGPT wrote most of the code for me. Created it in about three hours, where the time is combined with creating the DB, and testing it with the rest of the code for a different project’ (sqlite3 + python + pyosmium).
• richlv linked to his script that brings back Mapillary’s vanished feature to create a GPX file from image sequences.
• A small update to the openstreetmap.org website now makes it possible to verify your OSM user account on Mastodon. A toot by Pieter Vander Vennet explains how to do this.

Did you know …

• … this map of Russian river basins ?
• … the monthly Geotrivia game hosted by OpenCage on Mastodon? The next game is scheduled for 27 January 2023.

Other “geo” things

• The Bomann Museum in Celle (Germany) is hosting ► the exhibition ‘Die wahre Vermessung der Welt’ (The True Measurement of the World) about the mapping of the Kingdom of Hanover by Carl Friedrich Gauss. The exhibition runs until 30 May 2023.
• Google is working on an Apache-2.0 licensed project named forma, which is a ‘parallelised experimental Rust vector-graphics renderer’. One of their examples is to render a big SVG of Paris nearly instantly. Bert Temme shared videos of the renderer’s speed by comparing the Chrome Browser with forma.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
København	OSMmapperCPH		2023-01-08
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2023-01-09
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter Stammtisch		2023-01-10
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2023-01-10
Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2023-01-12
Berlin	175. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch	✓	2023-01-12
Seattle	World Railway Mapping Online Quarterly Meetup.		2023-01-14
	159. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2023-01-17
London	Geomob London		2023-01-18
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe		2023-01-18
Dar es Salaam	State of the Map Tanzania		2023-01-19 – 2023-01-21
Budapest	Hiking by the pipeline between Normafa-Stop Shop-Aranyvölgy		2023-01-21
Toulouse	Réunion du groupe local de Toulouse		2023-01-21
	Downtime		2023-01-22
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)		2023-01-23
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen	✓	2023-01-25

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, SK53, Strubbl, TheSwavu, derFred, tordans.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

The world uses Wikipedia to learn about every subject, and medical content is no exception. Medical content is accessed on Wikipedia more than the websites of the NIH, WebMD, Mayo Clinic, NHS, WHO, and UpToDate. And we know from research that people make real behavioral decisions from what they read on Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s wide readership, instant availability, and source verifiability makes it one of the most powerful vehicles for reaching patients, practitioners, and caregivers with medical research. That’s why the Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Awards program, an initiative of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), has offered Wiki Education funding support for our project disseminating PCORI-funded Systematic Reviews through Wikipedia.

PCORI is an independent, nonprofit organization authorized by Congress in 2010 to fund research that will provide patients, their caregivers, and clinicians with the evidence-based information needed to make better-informed healthcare decisions. They have a successful history of funding projects that help develop a community of patients and other stakeholders equipped to participate as partners in comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) and disseminate PCORI-funded study results. Through the Engagement Award Program, PCORI is creating an expansive network of individuals, communities and organizations interested in and able to participate in, share, and use patient-centered CER.

Wiki Education is the only organization that has demonstrated an ability to improve medical and science content on Wikipedia in a systematic and scalable way. We have perfected programmatic work to engage subject matter experts to improve Wikipedia content over the last 12 years. We are a trusted partner for university instructors, academic associations, and the medical editing community on Wikipedia.

For this project, Wiki Education aims to improve the quality of health information available on Wikipedia about historically underrepresented topics, such as maternal and mental health. To accomplish our goal, we will train medical students in graduate-level classes to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment through our Wikipedia Student Program and partner with subject matter expert organizations to run Wiki Scientists courses that train medical experts on how to edit Wikipedia. Our existing network of medical faculty and partner organizations, including associations like the Society of Family Planning and Association for Psychological Science, will use PCORI-funded Systematic Reviews as key citations for these Wikipedia articles. In collaboration with the University of California San Francisco’s Dr. Amin Azzam, we will champion Wikipedia editing as a class assignment among medical school faculty. We will recruit new participants for both programs to cite more PCORI-funded Systematic Reviews. Wikipedia articles edited through this project are expected to receive millions of page views annually.

According to Greg Martin, PCORI’s Acting Chief Engagement and Dissemination Officer, “This project was selected for Engagement Award funding because it will involve stakeholders in actively disseminating PCORI-funded research results to those who can use this information to inform healthcare decisions. We look forward to working with Wiki Education throughout the course of their 2 year project.”

In the age of disinformation and misinformation, Wikipedia has shone as a beacon of fact-based, neutral information. Even YouTube, Facebook, and other social media sites use it for their consumer-facing fact-checking links. The public trusts Wikipedia to provide them accurate information. With this project, we can ensure that important medical topics have information from and links to high-quality PCORI-funded Systematic Reviews.

For more information about PCORI’s funding to support engagement efforts, visit their website.

You’ve seen this spider, right? It lives in close proximity to humans and is one of the most common spiders in North America. You may have even Googled it to see if it’s poisonous, whether you knew the name or not. If you typed something like “spider with orange spots” into the search bar, you would find the Wikipedia article for the bold jumping spider. But before September 2022, the article was actually quite underdeveloped. That’s when a University of Maine student, Kaylee Hussey, began revamping it as part of Dr. Erin Grey’s class assignment.

Dr. Grey’s zoology course explores the evolution, diversity, morphology, life history, and ecology of invertebrates. As part of the course, students update a Wikipedia article related to an invertebrate species. They conduct a literature review and incorporate their research into an existing article format, providing Wikipedia’s thousands of daily visitors with scientific information from behind paywalls. Kaylee, who just completed her degree in wildlife ecology with a concentration in conservation biology, noticed many gaps in her choice of article. Important information about the bold jumping spider’s life cycle, diet, and taxonomy was missing.

“This was surprising to me, given how widespread and prevalent they are in human-occupied areas,” Kaylee says. “I was particularly surprised that the article provided only limited information on the spiders’ hunting behavior and vision, as these are key features of the Salticidae family.”

So, combing through more than 20 academic sources and reflecting on what information was most important to include, Kaylee went about correcting that. With our Authorship Highlighting tool, you can see that she’s now responsible for the majority of the article.

The Wikipedia assignment fits STEM-focused courses well, requiring students to summarize complex scientific content in their own words. For many, they are writing for the public for the first time and must rethink how to describe concepts for someone who is unfamiliar with their field of study.

“One of the most important skills I learned in the assignment was how to synthesize and distill complex scientific research into language that is accessible and understandable to a general audience,” says Kaylee.

Writing skills are essential for students who wish to enter STEM fields after their college years. They’ll be creating reports and grant applications, writing annotations on code, and publishing papers. Without an ability to communicate their ideas clearly, concisely, and accurately, they won’t be successful.

Wikipedia is not only a powerful tool for fostering these job skills in students, it also gives them a chance to communicate science to the public. The article about bold jumping spiders alone reaches about 400 daily visitors. The other articles that Dr. Grey’s students worked on have received almost 300K total views since the end of the course. These students have made a tangible difference for the public’s understanding of science.

Having the skills to communicate ideas clearly and effectively can also establish a young scientist with their colleagues. Students who pursue STEM careers must be prepared to speak in an accessible language where other scientists can follow their logic enough to collaborate and review their work. The Wikipedia assignment lets students practice describing complex concepts in plain language, with the added bonus of informing thousands of potential readers in the process.

“Research papers often contain specialized terminology and concepts that are intended for experts in the field. This makes it difficult for the general public to understand research and interpret it correctly,” Kaylee notes. “Additionally, many journals require you to pay in order to access these articles. This exclusivity makes it difficult for non-experts who want to learn about these topics to do so! Wikipedia is a great tool for communicating research to the public because it uses language and concepts that are understandable to non-experts and it is free. It also allows ideas from many sources to be combined and filtered to convey information that is reliable and significant. Writing this Wikipedia article really allowed me to improve my skills! I hope to write more articles in the future and make a difference.”

When the public has access to accurate, well-sourced scientific information, the possibilities are exciting. And Kaylee has a personal interest in making academic research more open.

“Ensuring that scientific research is inclusive and accessible is important for increasing public engagement and support for research,” Kaylee says. “It’s also important that information is available to everyone that is interested in learning about it! As a first generation student, I am passionate about making sure that science is not exclusive and is welcoming to everyone.”

Through the assignment, Kaylee was also able to renew her passion for her desired field and potentially inspire others.

“I hope to become a wildlife biologist and share my knowledge with a wide range of audiences to influence policy as well as encourage people to appreciate wildlife. I hope that readers will gain a deeper understanding of the complexity and uniqueness of spiders. They are often underestimated and feared, but I hope that readers will come to appreciate their unique way of existing and perceiving the world. It is interesting to try and imagine what it would be like to have eight eyes that have different capabilities. It makes you appreciate how they see the world differently than we do. Plus I hope readers will think they’re as cute as I do!”

Want to run a Wikipedia assignment in Spring 2023? The deadline to join our free program has been extended! Submit your course by January 16 to ensure your spot. Visit teach.wikiedu.org to find out more about how you can incorporate a Wikipedia project into your syllabus.

🕑 1 hour 28 minutes

Simon Stier is a researcher at Fraunhofer ISC in Germany, as well as a freelance software developer and consultant. He is the developer of the MediaWiki- and Semantic MediaWiki-based Open Semantic Lab platform.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research (ISC)
• Open Semantic Lab on GitHub
• "Robotic sense of touch enabled by dielectric elastomer sensors and machine learning" (video about research project), YouTube
• OpenSemanticLab MediaWiki extension
• "OpenSemanticLab - SMW for Science and R&D" talk by Simon at SMWCon 2022, YouTube
• Multi-Content Revisions in MediaWiki
• JSON Editor tool

Toolforge Bundle version 1.4.6 is released.

Another nostalgia+practice project I’m poking at on the Atari 800 XL is a Mandelbrot fractal generator, which I’m still in early stages of work on. This is mostly an exercise in building a 16-bit integer multiplier for the MOS 6502 processor, which has only addition, subtraction, and bit-shift operations.

The Mandelbrot set consists of those complex-plane points which, when iterating over z_i+1 = z_i^2 + c (where c is the input coordinate and z_0 = 0) never escape beyond |z_i| > 2. Surprisingly this creates a really cool shape, which has been the subject of fascination for decades:

To implement this requires three multiplications per iteration, to calculate zx^2, zy^2, and zy*zx. Famous PC fractal program Fractint used for low zooms a 16-bit integer size, which is good because anything bigger gets real slow!

For higher zooms Fractint used a 32-bit integer and 29 fractional bits for Mandelbrot and Julia sets, which leaves a range from -4..3.9, plenty big enough. For the smaller 16 bit size that means 3.13 layout, should be plenty for a few zooms in on a 160×192 screen. :D Multiplication creates a 32-bit integer with twice the integer bits, so 6.26 with a larger range which covers the addition results for the new zx and zy values.

These then need to be shifted back up and multiplied to get zx^2, zy^2, and zy*zx for the next iteration; the boundary condition is zx^2 + zy^2 >= 4.

imul16

Integer multiplication when you have binary shifts and addition only is kinda slow and super annoying. Because you have to do several operations for each bit, every cycle adds up — a single 16-bit add is just 18 cycles while a multiply can run several *hundred* cycles, and varies based on input.

Note that a 650-cycle function means a runtime of about a half a millisecond on average (1.79 MHz processor, with about 30% of cycles taken by the display DMA). The whole shebang could easily take 2-3 ms per iteration with three multiplications and a number of additions and shifts.

Basically, for each bit in one operand, you either add, or don’t add, the other operand with the corresponding bitshift to the result. If you’re dealing with signed integers you need to either sign-extend the operands to 32 bits or negate the inputs and keep track of whether you need to negate the output; not extending can be faster because you can assume the top 16 bits are 0 and shortcut some operations. ;)

Status and next steps

imul16 seems to be working, though could maybe use more tuning. I’ve sketched out the mandelbrot iteration function but haven’t written it yet.

Another trick Fractint used was trying to avoid having to go to max iterations within the “Mandelbrot lake” by adding a check for periodic repetition; apparently when working with finite precision often you end up with the operations converging on a repeating sequence of zx & zy values that end up yielding themselves after one or a few iterations; these will never escape the boundary condition, so it’s safe to cut off without going to max iterations. I’ll have to write something up with a little buffer of saved values, perhaps only activated by an adjacent max-iters pixel.

Once the internals are working I’ll wrap a front-end on it: 4-color graphics display, and allow a point-n-zoom with arrow keys or maybe joystick. :D