29/08/2023-04/09/2023

Mapping

• The YouTube channel ‘OSM for History Buffs’ has released a video explaining how to do hedgerow mapping using Field Papers paper maps.
• Włodzimierz Bartczak (Cristoffs) blogged ► about an AI revolution in mapping OSM. He described the tool created by Kamil Monicz (NorthCrab) that uses AI to map pedestrian crossings.
• Christoph Hormann proposed several alternative solutions to overcome the problem of OpenStreetMap’s dependence on a limited number of proprietary sources of aerial imagery.
• Mateusz Konieczny has documented the shop=safety_equipment tag, for shops selling only or primarily this specific type of products.

Community

• Christoph Hormann has commented on the issue of the OSM-Carto discussion taking place on the OpenStreetMap Community forum.
• Heather Leson has written an article about the HOT NGO governance system development plan.
• Koreller has published a ‘North Korea Mapping Guide’. CactiStaccingCrane immediately adapted this guide for use in Vietnam.
• Joost Schouppe, a former board member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, was selected as OpenStreetMap Belgium’s Mapper of the Month.
• The OpenHistoricalMap project has opened a Discourse-powered forum.
• OpenStreetMap US has released the August 2023 edition of its newsletter.
• The UN Mapper of the Month for September is Eduard Reñe Cherto.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The members of the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF) will vote to elect three new board members in December. You can read everything about this election in the OSMF blog, for example who has the right to vote, and the eligibility criteria for board candidates.

Events

• Geomob is holding three meetings in September:
  • 13 London
  • 20 Barcelona
  • 27 Berlin

  The topics for 4 October in Lisbon are also already fixed. Speakers for 9 November in Helsinki can still register.

• umbraosmbr reported that the State of The Map Brazil 2023 has entered the registration ► period. Confirm your attendance by Sunday 17 September.

Maps

• OpenChargeMap provides a map of electric vehicle charging station locations.

Open Data

• Oliver Roick reviewed an analysis of the quality of Overture’s places dataset. He agrees with the conclusion of the analysis that a good ‘minimum confidence threshold’ for filtering data is 0.6.

Software

• Kamil Monicz has published the code for a mass-revert extension designed for osm-revert on GitHub.
• Kaligule blogged about his first experience with StreetComplete.

Programming

• [1] Paul Norman has made improvements to the OpenStreetMap tile server user statistics calculation system. Thanks to these improvements, the statistics file size was reduced from 136 GB/day to 8 GB/day.

Releases

• Eugene, from OsmAnd, blogged about their app’s new terrain map type.

Did you know …

• … that you can create road routes based on OpenStreetMap maps using the plotaroute.com app?
• … that the OSM Queries project is collecting Overpass API queries to use as learning material?

Other “geo” things

• Are you a drone pilot? Do you miss practising? If so, you’ll love ► the offer from Château des Boulard near Chartres, which has converted a golf course into a drone training ground.
• Tyler Vigen went to great lengths to investigate why a footbridge crosses a motorway at a seemingly arbitrary location near Minneapolis. Mappers have responded by updating both OpenStreetMap and OpenHistoricalMap with the bridge and its surroundings.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Maricá	Mapathon – Maricá City		2023-08-24 – 2023-09-24
Bayonne	Rencontre Groupe local Pays basque – Sud Landes		2023-09-08
Amsterdam	Maptime Amsterdam 2.0		2023-09-08
Bengaluru	OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party		2023-09-09
København	OSMmapperCPH		2023-09-10
Chambéry	Mapathon débutant saison 23/24 CartONG		2023-09-11
Zürich	OSM-Stammtisch		2023-09-11
Hannover	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2023-09-11
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 月聚會 #56		2023-09-11
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-09-13
Middelburg	FOSS4G-NL		2023-09-13 – 2023-09-14
Sogamoso	Launch of BusBoy APP: The Public Transport Revolution in Boyacá, Powered by Trufi and OpenStreetMap		2023-09-13
종로1·2·3·4가동	톰톰코리아 제1회 한국 OSM 커뮤니티 대면 모임		2023-09-13
Lorain County	OpenStreetMap Ohio+Michigan Meetup	✓	2023-09-14
Stainach-Pürgg	10. Österreichischer OSM-Stammtisch (online)		2023-09-13
Potsdam	183. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2023-09-14
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2023-09-14
	167. Treffen des OSM-Stammtisches Bonn		2023-09-19
City of Edinburgh	OSM Edinburgh Social		2023-09-19
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)		2023-09-19
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2023-09-20
IJmuiden	OSM Nederland bijeenkomst (online)		2023-09-20
The Municipal District of Kilkenny City	Kilkenny History Mappers MeetUp		2023-09-21
Saint-Barthélemy-de-Séchilienne	Mapping Party in Saint-Barthélemy-de-Séchilienne 38220 France		2023-09-23

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, Strubbl, TheSwavu, YoViajo, barefootstache, conradoos, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

I interviewed Tsuna Lu from Wikimedia Taiwan at the Wikimania 2023 closing party. We communicated in English and sometimes the members of Wikimedia Taiwan supported us.

Interview

Eugene Ormandy: Hi Tsuna! Nice to see you! When did you start to contribute to the Wikimedia project?

Tsuna Lu: In 2014. When I was a high school student, I found a wrong statement in the Wikipedia article of my school. So I fixed it. After that, I learned how to edit on my own. A few months later, I joined Wikimedia Taiwan, which held some editathons.

EO: Great! Could you tell me about your activities now?

TL: I mainly edit Chinese Wikipedia and sometimes contribute to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.

EO: What kind of Wikipedia article do you edit?

TL: Music, education, and computer science.

EO: Oh, are you majoring in computer science?

TL: Yes!

EO: Cool! How about other projects?

TL: I sometimes upload photos of nature or streets of Taiwan.

EO: Fantastic. Then, could you tell me about your motivation? Why do you join the Wikimedia Movement?

TL: When I read news articles, I edit Wikipedia using those articles as references because I think Wikipedia should be constantly updated. Another motivation is to enrich the information about my local community. From this perspective, I teach people in Taichung how to edit Wikipedia and perticipate in Wikimedia Taiwan.

EO: Awesome. This is the last question. What is your vision?

TL: As an editor, I want to enrich Chinese Wikipedia articles about music and Boy Scout. Actually, I have been a member of that for 17 years. As an organizer, I want more people to know how to edit Wikipedia​​. So, I hope to host more editathons.

EO: I’m very happy to talk with you. Thank you so much!

Acknowledgments​​

Thanks to Wikimania 2023, we can meet and have a conversation. I hope our international collaboration and this wonderful event continue. I appreciate many people; Tsuna, members of Wikimedia Taiwan, and Wikimania 2023 staff. Thank you so much!

The very first ever WikiWomen Summit, a multi-day gathering co-designed in feminist solidarity and focused on gender equality, took place during Wikimania Singapore 2023. Its core organizers, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight and Vanj Padilla, welcomed gender organizers and contributors from across the Wikimedia movement. 

On August 15th, attendees joined the Mind the Gap event, an external forum for discussion between Wikimedia Movement and Google held at Google Asia Pacific Office. The event brought together Wikimedians and Google to discuss strategies for making both platforms accessible and inclusive for women and non-binary people, with a focus on enhancing equitable practices, tools and capacity building – making diversity and inclusion central to product development and growing content on the internet.

On August 16th, the program included two thematic tracks: language diversity and gender, and gender organizing. In the first track, the discussion centered on gender bias in artificial intelligence, language inclusion at the intersection of gender, and the importance of equity and agency in the use of structured data on Commons. Tactics on making the Wikimedia projects more equitable and representative of women and non-binary people, strategies on how to be an effective gender organizer, and opportunities for women looking to shape their community and local language Wikipedias were the topics discussed in the second track. You can watch the recording here! 

Hi, I’m Natalia and I was sitting here and thinking that in 2011 I was in Dansk at Wikimania, and we had a WikiWoman lunch, one of the first ones. It was such a small group of us and we were kind of shy about “is it okay that we take this space, that we do it?” and I remember the conversations were actually about how can we create a space with more diversity in this movement, and I’m sitting here at the WikiWomen Summit and I’m a bit emotional because we kind of have this space already, we’re not talking about can we have a diverse space in this Movement: we have it, we celebrate it, (…) we are in a such a different place right now. We are experimenting with how we can build diversity in many different ways through data, images, languages, and isn’t it fantastic that we actually got here? It’s absolutely amazing!

In the afternoon, the solidarity workshop included welcome words from Maryana Iskander, Wikimedia Foundation’s CEO, and keynote speakers María Sefidari and Netha Hussain, who shared learnings from the first WikiWomen Camps (2012 and 2017) and reflected on where we find ourselves now. Netha Hussain highlighted that considerable progress has been made in the Wikimedia movement in terms of facilitating more gender focused spaces, content campaigns, and safety and inclusion, but that it was now imperative to ensure that existing initiatives for the advancement of women in the Wikimedia movement grow sustainably. María Sefidari reminded us of the importance of women joining and leading the Wikimedia movement’s discussions. In her own words: “It’s important that we are present, and that we don’t work in the margins, because sadly, If you are not at the table, rest assured we are going to be on the menu”.

Masana Mulaudzi facilitated an inspiring conversation with panelists Sherry Antoine, Jasverenne Ferrer and Andrea Kleiman about the past, present, and future of making the Wikimedia movement gender equitable. While the gains of the past years of gender-related campaigning were celebrated by panelists, all remarked that there was an opportunity to be inspired to bring more women to the movement through targeting discrimination and harassment, while taking a multigenerational approach. For example, panelist Jasverenne Ferrer remarked that it was her mother, WikiWomen Summit organizer Vanj Padilla, who introduced her to the movement and that more efforts to bring in young women through safer community engagement could facilitate stronger inclusion.

Then we looked to the future with Joy Agyepong, Manavpreet Kaur, Chinmayee Mishra — WikiWomen Camp Core Organizer team —, Käbi Laan and Florence Devouard. Nataliia Tymkiv, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees closed the day’s activities. You can watch the full recording here!

Online and in-person participants were invited to answer a couple of prompt questions: What does it mean to be a Wikiwomen ally and why did you come to the WikiWomen Summit x Wikimania? Answers are reflected in the word cloud below.

Notes for the WikiWomen Summit activities on August 16th can be found on this Etherpad.

Finally, on Saturday, August 19th, it was time for the traditional Women’s Lunch Table, a safe space exclusively for women+ attendees to celebrate their legacy as wikimedians and strengthen and nurture (quite literally, eating together is always fulfilling!) their networks of collaboration and care. Here, Wikimedia Foundation Vice President Yael Weissburg celebrated the growth in the movement focused on gender work, and welcomed diverse, intersectional, and intergenerational learning and solidarity among Wikimedians working on gender.  

Have you uploaded your WikiWomen Summit pictures to Wikimedia Commons? Please do not forget to add them to the convening category.

The next global Wikimedia movement gender-focused convening will be the WikiWomen Camp in India, from Oct 20st – 22nd, 2023. Currently, organizers of this next event are asking to hear from you regarding needs on capacity building: https://www.menti.com/al7kr4s78aum. In case you can’t attend the event, no worries, stay tuned for the documentation sharing post-event and let’s keep the conversation going asynchronously and consistently. 

At the WikiWomen Camp, gender organizers will share common goals to then measure progress at the midterm yearly convening, the WikiWomen Summit. Next year, in 2024, this recurring event at Wikimania will happen in Krákow. See you there!

Did you attend the WikiWomen Summit at Wikimania online or in person? Let us have your feedback and help us shape future events by filling out this survey. The survey is open until 30 September 2023.

In August, 2023, Malaysian Wikimedian Taufik Rosman and Japanese Wikimedian Eugene Ormandy were interviewed by BBC for the podcast “TECH LIFE.”

Interview

The interview was implemented online on August 22, 2023. Wikimedia Foundation staff Junko Nakayama and Vidhu Goyal also join the interview to support the Wikimedians.

Podcast

The interview was published on the next day’s program “Why do smart speakers get facts wrong?” In the interview, two Wikimedians introduced their journeys and interests as Wikimedian of the Year 2023 awardees. You can listen to it on official site or spotify. Wikimedians’ interview starts from 22:30.

Comments from Wikimedians who listened to the podcast

Japanese Wikimedian Takenari Higuchi, a member of Student Wikipedian Community in Waseda University Tokyo, listened to the podcast and made a comment on their Twitter (X). Takenari said that many people seem to wonder why Wikimedians contribute to Wikimedia projects without reward.

Other Wikimedians also gave comments to me.

• It is a very rare occassion for Wikipedians working in non-English Wikipedias to be covered by BBC. I hope more and more people will realise that Wikipedia, including non-English versions, are run by flesh-and-blood people, not emotionless bots. — User:さえぼー (Dr. Sae Kitamura, Japan)
• As a Wikipedian, I have heard of the Wikimedian of the Year award before, but have been thinking of it as something distant. The Tech Life Podcast is nice in that I came to know more about the award winners, on how they got involved with the Wikimedia Movement, and what were their motivations to contribute. — User:ネイ (Admin of Japanese Wikipedia, Toumon Wikipedian Club Japan)
• Someone who is interested in Taufik words and Eugene is someone who is interested in Japanese classical music. Wikimedia projects have offered them various opportunities to work according to their interests. This, in turn, formed the path to learning, effort, and success. I should underline that the examples in the interview you listened to are actually a very good example of young people contributing to Wikimedia projects according to their interests and discovering their potential. —User:Kurmanbek (Wikimedians of Turkic Languages User Group & Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey)
• I was impressed by their activities with high aspirations to share knowledge. The situation of Wikipedia in Japan is not well known, even though there is an environment where people can use Wikipedia from an early age, lectures on Wikipedia are given, and as a result, this wonderful Wikipedian has been born. There should be more detailed and active communication about the acceptance and spread of Wikipedia in Japan. — User:McYata (Toumon Wikipedian Club Japan)

Acknowledgments

As one of the interviewees, I appreciate many people; BBC staff, Wikimedia Foundation staff, Taufik, and Wikimedians who listened to the podcast. I hope more and more Wikimedians express their ideas or activities on interview.

Dive into our Wikimania Session and learnings from the InnoLab collaboration

At the Wikimania Conference 2023 in Singapore we presented our insights from our cross-affiliate Wikimedia collaboration. Additionally, our session explored our comprehensive Collaboration Playbook, which sheds light on the learnings, setbacks, and triumphs that have shaped our ongoing InnoLab collaboration.

We had the honor to hold a session during this year’s Wikimania Conference in Singapore, an opportunity that allowed us to showcase our cross-affiliate collaboration. In total, we are nine people from six Wikimedia affiliates working together on Re-Imagining UNLOCK, spanning six cultures and three time zones. We have both chapters as well as user groups on board: Wikimedia Argentina, Wikimedia Community User Group Kenya, Wikimedia Community User Group Tanzania, Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda, Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimedia Serbia.

Five of us were there in person at the Wikimania Conference to collectively hold a session about our joint work so far. What made this even more exciting for us was the fact that this was the very first time most of us met face to face – a truly celebratory moment for us! 

In this recorded version of the session, we unveil the first insights and challenges of our collaborative journey thus far. Tune in to discover not only our most significant setback but also how this collaboration started and what our next steps will be. In this session we also share some outcomes of our collaboration the first time, revealing some of the ideas we have been working on.

We are very proud of this collaboration and have therefore created a Collaboration Playbook that serves both as a testament to our shared achievements as well as hopefully an inspiration to others wanting to embark on similar journeys of cooperation and co-creation on their own. This Playbook sheds light on the highlights and learnings that have shaped our collaboration this far. 

In this Collab Playbook you’ll also get to know each and every one of our partners. We have included short interviews with all of us, highlighting our work and our cooperation. 

What would become of Wikipedia and its sister projects without images from museums, libraries, and archives? Pictures from these institutions are able to illustrate a range of different articles, in diverse fields and areas. However, in order to really accomplish that, images should not only be available, but also enriched with data that can make them more findable on the projects. 

And so, for the past few years, the Culture and Heritage team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been involved with Structured Data-related initiatives in order to engage heritage materials on the Wikimedia projects. Our objective, together with the Structured Data Across Wikimedia (SDAW) team, was to support and increase image usage across the projects, as well as to structure Wikimedia to help it reach communities globally.

One of the main projects we worked on together was the initiative with the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). This institution became one of the biggest Wikimedia Commons contributors, with 3.7 million images available on the project, by not only being the main institution in the United States directly uploading files to the platform, but also because of its structured data activities. Since 2020, DPLA has worked on adding and modeling structured data and engaging in discussions around the topic, precisely to make its files (the files from the 300 institutions that contribute to the DPLA’s Wikimedia pipeline) more findable and used on Commons, on Wikipedia, and elsewhere. Currently, DPLA presents around 15 million edits to 50-100 million structured data on Commons statements.

For the 2022 to 2023 fiscal year period, Dominic Byrd-McDevitt, DPLA’s Data and Partnerships Strategist, has been uploading and modeling these statements on Commons, as well as working with Lua-based templates to disseminate this work on the Wikimedia projects. For example, he developed a template that transforms structured data into the summary information shown for the file on Commons, rather than duplicating this information as wikitext. To learn more about the templates developed by DPLA, watch Dominic’s presentation during Wikimania 2023:

Follow this link to view all of the categories for the DPLA’s contributing institutions and files and, on this page on Commons, you can see the modeling guidelines used by DPLA.

This year, DPLA reached a total of 3,618,323 subject statements, greatly exceeding the goal in their grant proposal. These statements include data about copyright status, copyright license, RightsStatements.org statement, creators, subjects, identifiers, contributing institutions, description, title, and collection. These statements have been added with references that allow the user to identify where this data came from (the original institution) and links to the DPLA website.

DPLA’s digital asset pipeline was fully documented on GitHub, including the DPLA ingestion repo, documenting how Wikimedia markup is generated from item records, and ingest-wikimedia, which documents the upload and metadata synchronization.

DPLA also launched DepictAssist, a tool that suggests potential depicts statements, and continued to work on their image citation gadget, which draws from structured data statements. Their citation feature is expected to be completed soon, and earlier versions were shared with more than 100 people, in different events and conferences.

Finally, one of the most important achievements of DPLA’s Wikimedia initiative this year was the development of the DPLA’s Wikimedia Working Group, which became DPLA’s largest working group. It has members from several major US institutions, such as the National Archives and Records Administration, Boston Public Library, Harvard Library, National Agricultural Library, Washington State Library, and others. This group has been helping DPLA in their efforts to contribute to Wikimedia, even organizing a Coffee Chat.

While not part of his work at DPLA, it’s worth adding that Dominic also developed View it!, together with Jamie Flood and Kevin Payravi. This tool, which was also supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, is able to show Wikipedia users all relevant Wikimedia Commons media depicting or related to the article they are interacting with. View It! works by using structured data statements, especially the Depicts property (P180), to suggest those images. These suggestions are available on the top of a Wikipedia article, in a very user-friendly way, or on other projects, such as Wikispecies, Wikivoyage, etc, and even on the View it! separate interface on ToolForge as well.

To learn more about DPLA’s collaborations with the Wikimedia movement, see their own project announcements:

• Leveraging Wikimedia for increased visibility + upcoming coffee chat
• DPLA to make cultural treasures freely available on Wikipedia with new Sloan Foundation support
• DPLA expands Wikimedia work
• Wikimedia Project update 

The digital realm, in its ever-evolving splendour, births an unquenchable thirst for trustworthy, easily accessible knowledge. Answering this call, Code for Africa’s (CfA) Wikipedian-in-Residence (WiR) community has emerged as a beacon for information, especially within the rich tapestry of the African continent. In their most recent webinar titled “WiR Community Onboarding,” held on 09 and 10 August 2023, CfA set out on an expansive onboarding journey crafted specifically for the Anglophone and Francophone communities. This initiative drew an impressive gathering of 21 Anglophone and 16 Francophone participants from  Cameroon, Central African Republic, Kenya, Senegal, Niger, Nigeria, and Uganda.

Group photos taken at the end of the WiR Community Onboarding session

Under the expert guidance of Bukola James and Christelle Pandja, the esteemed Community Coordinators for CfA’s WiR Anglophone and Francophone respectively, this session transcended conventional webinar, transforming into engaging platforms for sharing knowledge. Both coordinators adeptly alternated between the roles of trainers and moderators, ensuring a blend of information and interaction that left participants with not just a clearer understanding, but also a sense of belonging to the CfA’s WiR community.

The session’s scope was all-encompassing, unfolding with an introduction to Code for Africa and a concise overview. This was followed by an exposition of the mission and vision of the Wikipedian in Residence Community (WiR) initiative, an exploration of the intricate WiR organisational structure, and a detailed look into the roles of Community Managers and Coordinators. The significance of community dynamics and effective communication channels was also underlined, emphasising their importance in maintaining a thriving community.

Understanding CfA’s WiR Community

Stepping back to see the larger picture, it’s crucial to appreciate the digital footprint of Code for Africa (CfA). As the continent’s leading indigenous network of civic technology and digital journalism hubs, it is buoyed by over 110 dedicated professionals, ranging from analysts and technologists to digital creatives, all collaborating across 21 African nations. Their collective goal remains steadfast: to harness and champion the transformative power of information in today’s interconnected age.

Before delving into the webinar’s specifics, it’s crucial to comprehend the significance of the WiR community. This initiative by CfA congregates an exuberant network of African Wikipedians dedicated to refining, authenticating, and expanding the African narrative within the vast landscape of Wikipedia and its sister projects. This community is emblematic of collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and mutual growth.

The Onboarding Initiative

Recognising the importance of well-structured onboarding, the webinar was meticulously designed to familiarise its Anglophone and Francophone members with its key tenets. This included an introduction to the WiR community’s guiding ethos, outlining its principles, goals, and aspirations. Furthermore, participants were given a comprehensive tour of the WiR community’s metapage—a centralised hub that serves as a repository of vital information, highlighting community processes, friendly space policies, and participant details via the links below;

The participants were effectively guided on the appropriate ways to navigate and leverage the platform to its full potential.

Connecting the Dots: Communication Channels

A community thrives on connectivity. The onboarding session laid particular emphasis on the diverse communication channels that WiR has established. Participants were introduced to Google groups tailored for each community, a dedicated WhatsApp group, the WIR Slack Channel, and the community’s Twitter handle with a clear intention to facilitate seamless interactions, exchange ideas, solicit feedback, and, above all, foster a sense of belonging.

Community Manager and Coordinators at Code for Africa: Diving Deeper into Their Pivotal Roles

Tolulope Adeyemo: Senior Programme Manager and driving force behind the CfA’s Knowledge Initiatives

Role: As the Senior Programme Manager, Tolulope stands at the forefront of CfA’s Knowledge programme. The Knowledge programme also houses the WiR Community initiatives, which thrive under her able guidance.

Contribution: Her dedicated leadership style has helped shape the direction of the program, ensuring that its objectives align with the larger mission of Code for Africa.

Bukola James: The Community Coordinator  CfA WiR Community initiatives

Role: With my background in Library and Information Science and an experienced Wikimedian, I offer everyday oversight to the CfA WiR communities which include Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa. I provide daily oversight of the community management of Wikimedia programmes while coordinating the WiR Anglophone Community.

Contribution: I coordinate WiR’s operations across various African countries, ensuring that the community is synchronised in its efforts and that the dissemination of information remains fluid and effective.

Christelle Pandja: The Voice of the Francophone, bridging divides and enriching Approaches

Role: Serving as the Coordinator for WiR Francophone at Code for Africa, Christelle plays a crucial part in extending the program’s reach to French-speaking regions of the continent.

Contribution: Leveraging her mentorship experience from the Central Africa Women Techmakers Community, she introduces a distinct perspective. This unique insight enriches WiR’s approach, making it more inclusive and representative of the diverse African tech community.

In-depth Glimpse into Community Channels: 

Benefits and Opportunities

The webinar did not just stop at the operational aspects. Participants were introduced to the myriad benefits and opportunities they stand to gain as active members of the community. Ranging from acquiring new skills, engaging in collaborative projects, and accessing resources, to having their voices echoed in the global Wikimedia space, the onboarding process painted a vibrant picture of possibilities. Some of the community benefits include:

• Bi-weekly and monthly meetups including training webinars to enhance member’s wiki proficiencies.
• Quarterly continental Wiki sessions to offer mentorship and inspiration from leading Wikipedians who have carried out innovative projects. 
• Fellowship opportunities for community members through its wiki projects across the continent. The fellowship includes grants or funding opportunities to conduct research on topical issues to grow Wikipedia Africa and organise Wiki training. 
• Membership badges/barnstars that can be used on various social media platforms and Wiki user profiles, proudly representing active community membership. 

Feedback and Reflections

As is the tradition with all CfA webinars, the session concluded by opening the floor for feedback using a jam board. The responses were positive with Attendees expressing their appreciation, with remarks emphasising the organisation’s diversity, structured communication, and the potential benefits of being an integral part of the WiR Anglophone community.

“I’m glad to learn that CFA is such a diverse organisation with good communication structures. I would love to interact widely for better knowledge.”

Participant A

“It is nice to know about how the WIR Anglophone Community works and how I will benefit from this amazing initiative.”

Participant B

“Yes, I have learned how to navigate the platform. Thank you.”

Participant C

Looking Ahead

With such a robust onboarding process, the WiR Anglophone and Francophone community are poised for growth, greater collaboration, and a significant uptick in contributions to improve Wikipedia and its sister projects in Africa through cross-disciplinary content development, editing, fact-checking and verification of information (on Wikipedia). For those intrigued and willing to be a part of this vibrant community, the community metapage offers all the information you need. Together, under the banner of CfA, the future of Wikipedia in Africa looks promising, inclusive, and more representative than ever.

A New Chapter

This comprehensive onboarding initiative symbolises the WiR Anglophone community’s drive towards expansion, collaboration, and elevated contributions. Eager to be part of this transformative journey? Dive into the provided resources and amplify Africa’s voice in the digital domain. Join the growing community of a pan-African network of Wikipedia editors who are expert fact-checkers, editors and creators of verifiable content across various Wikimedia projects.

Levi White is an FE Lecturer in Social Sciences at New College Lanarkshire.  After working with Wikimedia UK on the West Boathouse’s “Play Like a Lassie” project, Levi got in contact with Programme Manager Dr Sara Thomas to develop work with the College.  NCL is one of two Further Education partners that Wikimedia UK has in Scotland.

This year marks the 10^th Anniversary of the merger of New College Lanarkshire and as part of this the college offered a large number of free evening courses. One of these courses was the Become a Wikimedian Course which was an 11 week course that was conducted online. Throughout this course 10 students learned how to make positive contributions to multiple Wiki platforms, such as Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

For many years Wikipedia has been viewed in a negative light by educators, however, this course has highlighted what a positive tool Wikipedia can be for learners.  Knowing how to use the platform properly to bolster research is key to its success.  The students quickly understand how Wikipedia can be used as a springboard to delve deep into research on a specific topic. This course used the 12 week syllabus available on Wikimedia Commons to provide a basic structure to the course. We spent the first week exploring the ‘5 Pillars of Wikipedia’ and subsequent weeks looked at creative writing techniques, critical evaluation of Wikipedia articles and research materials. The course also focussed on research skills and allowed the students ample opportunity to work in small groups and peer reviewed each other’s research and edits. 

Furthermore, the course allowed plenty of time for students to make their contributions to Wikipedia. They all felt a great sense of achievement once their edits went live and enjoyed watching the dashboard and seeing the impact their edits were having. 

Lesley-Anne, a student on the course, stated “throughout the course, my eyes have been opened to the world of Wikipedia, and my previous negative perception of how useful a tool it can be has been blown out of the water. From a further education point of view, I can’t emphasise enough how useful this would have been when I was studying for my social sciences HND. It would have been incredible to have been able to enhance my research, writing, referencing and critical analysis skills by putting them into practice at the same time as making meaningful contributions to Wikipedia. I also feel it would be a really useful module for students to take alongside various Access/NC/HNC/HND courses, and I think that the group work and peer review element would undoubtedly help so many students build up their confidence in going forward in their studies. There is genuinely so much that can be gained from participating in the course.” While Ben said he “really enjoyed the course, going through college and university you are taught that using Wikipedia is wrong… however, it is clear that we need to be taught how to use it correctly instead of being shunned away from it. This course offered me the opportunity to be taught a new skill… Fundamentally, I believe that this course… would offer an accessible and easy to use stepping stone to more academic websites for research.”

Hopefully, this course will be offered again at New College Lanarkshire and we can build on the success of this one! Personally, I felt that the student engagement on this course was brilliant. They thoroughly enjoyed the whole research process and having a tangible outcome kept them motived to continue with their edits. 

The post New College Lanarkshire: Become a Wikimedian Course appeared first on WMUK.

A reflection of Nicky Deluggi on her internship with the Human Rights Team at the Wikimedia Foundation.

I joined the Wikimedia Foundation as an intern on the Human Rights Team in December 2022. I had graduated from a Master’s in Human Rights a few months before and was equally nervous and excited about my first gig in the real world. For my first month or so, I disappeared into a rabbit hole of wiki-articles and shared documents, trying to wrap my head around Wikimedia Foundation and the fascinating community it supports. I was amazed by how much this movement gets done – often for so little recognition – and how much good, joy and passion it brings.

At the same time, I was heartbroken at the price some Wikimedians pay for contributing to the sum of all human knowledge: many face persecution, censorship, surveillance, arrests and threats. Others deal with harassment and disturbing content on a daily basis, on top of the stress and workload that comes with keeping the projects accurate, functioning and safe. 

As my team was supporting a persecuted Wikimedian, a thought was brought up to us: “We are building up workflows to protect community members and support their physical and legal safety. But what about when someone’s activity as a Wikimedian affects their emotional safety and wellbeing?” If we want to progress towards a safe and sustainable movement, extensive and accessible resources on psychosocial support and overall well being are non-negotiable.

Having had an interest in sustainable activism for quite a while, I felt drawn to get in on this cause. I started reaching out to colleagues who had worked on community mental wellbeing before. All of them met me with curiosity, warmth and great advice on how to narrow down my ideas into an actually feasible project. We ended up with a plan for a new resource page on Meta-Wiki, collecting all existing Wikimedia Foundation resources on mental wellbeing topics and stocking up on new ones. Thus, the Mental Health Resource Center was born! Here are some of the considerations and challenges that shaped its design:

The page needs to be easy to find and easy to use.
When going through a hard time, looking for help can be a lot. The page will therefore be centralized and accessible, with information displayed sorted by topic or language, and a glossary on mental health terms.

Resources need to cover a wide range of topics.
Besides listing emergency support resources and helplines, the page will include material on mental health in general, stress management, trauma, grief, dealing with harassment and disturbing content and how to support others who are going through a hard time. These thematic categories are not final – they can and should be expanded! (see below)

There is the challenge of multilinguality and multiculturality.
Inner wellbeing can mean different things to different people. Depending on individual and cultural predispositions, mental health can create stigma. It can be a political act. It can be connected to spirituality or to bodily biochemical imbalances. In true wiki-fashion, the usefulness of this project depends on contributions from different backgrounds, aiming to create a multilingual and multicultural information hub that is not limited to one conception of mental wellbeing. Community members are encouraged to add to the page, and here’s how it works!

1. Take a look at the checklist on the talk page and check your resource against the standards listed there.
2. If it is a match, suggest your resource via talk page or email to ca{{@}}wikimedia.org. Also feel free to propose new resource categories, glossary terms and leave feedback on how we can improve the page. 
3. The Wikimedia Foundation’s Trust and Safety team will review and add resources and updates on a quarterly basis. 

Why do we recommend adding resources in this way? The Trust and Safety team will be reviewing the resources and information before it is placed on the Mental Health Resource Center pages. They will make sure the site is reputable and able to handle the traffic of such a large community. 

How you can get involved

There are three things you can do:

1. Take a look at the page and share it with others who might be interested. Encourage them to do the same – sharing the Mental Health Resource Center page will make sure it’s there for those who need it.
2. Send the link to someone who might need some support right now. Sometimes the Internet can be a lonely place and fighting for free knowledge is hard work.
3. Contribute to the space and help it grow! This space is for the care and support of everyone in our movement. This project is just a starting point, and is certainly not complete. It needs more global contributions. What contributions are helpful? You can contribute helpful mental health-related websites, mental health helplines, terms to the glossary or topic areas that need expansion. Or something I didn’t think about here.

As this project launches, I am slowly closing the myriad of browser tabs I accumulated while working on this project. It is becoming very clear to me that while this idea grew, I too grew a lot with it. I am beyond happy I got a chance to create a resource that will hopefully support the inspiring individuals who make up this movement. I want to say thank you to everyone who helped make this happen, especially to Jackie for being my super competent partner, Nhu for always giving me structure and Cameran and the Human Rights Team for supporting and trusting me with this project.

Students numbering 22, participated in a 2-day Wikipedia session dubbed, #WikiForHumanRights New Mexico 2023 where they were scored extra credit as part of a Spring Semester course.

It is widely known that the State of New Mexico grapples with several environment challenges caused by industrial pollution and other harmful pollutants. This is further heightened by seasonal fire outbreaks often caused by extreme drought and climate change.

Participants contributed content (articles and images) about New Mexico portraying the beautiful, forested mountains while creating new articles and improving on existing content on environmental issues.

“I thought to edit Wikipedia you would have to have a degree so was surprised how easy it was to edit. I felt like it was fun to contribute to the site.” says Kelsey, a participant of the training.

Sophia added that, “It is astonishing to me how easy it is to upload images and to edit things on Wikipedia.”

After contributing to Wikipedia, I hope that my images uploaded to the campaign will be useful to other users,” she concludes about her first experience contributing to the campaign and Wikipedia in general.

The project was led by Pamela Ofori- Boateng, a long-term Wikipedia editor and a Graduate Teaching Assistant at UNM, Jesse Asiedu Akrofi, founder of Wiki Update podcast, Francis Quasie an award-wining community member, with the support of other volunteers.

Engaging in the Wiki For Human Rights campaign is an effort to create awareness and introduce Wikimedia to college students enabling them to harness Wikipedia as both a pedagogical tool and as a way to contribute to issues affecting their community.

Indic Oral Culture is currently a new unrecognized user group that is created with the aim of bringing together Indic language enthusiasts for the digitalization of oral culture. Folk songs, folk tales and other aspects of oral culture and tradition are democratic and community based knowledge that are vanishing fast. This is especially relevant in the case of underrepresented languages where oral culture is being engulfed by politics, socio-economic changes, changes in lifestyle etc. This group of individuals is a bid to document and preserve these by creating a media library for the current and future speakers of the language. 

There is a parallel between Wikimedia, a place where every individual can contribute to the sum total of all human knowledge, and oral folk culture which is created and carried forward across generations by the language community. So, the aim is to bring forward the speakers and practitioners of these languages and cultures to document their knowledge system. With this aim in mind, the Indic Oral Culture user group meetups were launched on 26th August 2023. 

The user group met online to discuss their languages and cultures, their challenges, and how they can be digitalized. The participants consisted of linguistics scholars: Pramod Rathor – Braj speaker and a PhD candidate for Linguistics, Sangram Senapati – an avid Wikimedian, Arosma Das – MA in Linguistics, Saqib Ishfaq – Gojri speaker and lecturer in Linguistics at Cluster University of Jammu, Amrit Sufi – Angika Wikimedian, and Priyanka Yadav – Ahirwati speaker and MA in Linguistics. They have been researching the oral culture of their language and how it can be digitalized. These meetings bring them together to share their ideas and experiences, thus fostering a community of practice. 

The participants shared their experiences with volunteering on Wikimedia, creating audio-visuals of their culture, and learning to add lexemes on Wikidata. They were given primary demonstrations for utilizing the Wikimedia projects to create a media library for the audio-visuals and to transcribe them. 

The Oral Culture Transcription Toolkit that provides guidelines on recording audio-visuals of the folk literature, transcribing the text on Wikisource will be utilized to train the participants further.

If you want to be part of the user group and or participate in the monthly meetings, edit the participants section and enter your name there, or contact me at amritsufi2@gmail.com. We are also looking forward to feedback!

Everyone’s been talking about generative AI like ChatGPT and how it will change our lives. But have you considered its impact on Wikipedia?

We’re pleased to announce the next edition of the Wiki Education Speaker Series, regular Zoom-based conversations where we bring together experts in Wikimedia and open knowledge for lively discussions of topics relevant to our communities. Our next Speaker Series is on Wikipedia in a generative AI world, and it’s sure to be a lively conversation!

Our panelists will provide a range of perspectives on what ChatGPT and other generative AI tools mean for Wikipedia and the future of free knowledge projects. They’ll opine on where the AI landscape is going from here. The discussion will be moderated by Wiki Education’s Chief Technology Officer, Sage Ross, and panelists will include:

• Robert Cummings, author of Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia, has been exploring how AI fits into writing pedagogy.
• Stephen Harrison, journalist and columnist for Slate’s “SourceNotes”, has been on the Wikipedia and AI beat.
• Aaron Halfaker, applied research scientist at Microsoft and developer of Wikipedia’s first machine learning systems, is keeping up with the latest developments in AI research.

“Wikipedia in a generative AI world” will take place Friday, September 15, at 10 am Pacific Time. Register today for the discussion.

You can also register for the October event in our Speaker Series, “How cultural institutions use Wikidata to share their data with the world”, as well as watch the recording from our August event, “How teaching with Wikipedia revolutionizes higher education classrooms”, at wikiedu.org/speaker-series.

PHP is big. The trolls can proclaim its all-but-certain “death” until the cows come home, but no amount of heckling changes that the Internet runs on PHP. The evidence is overwhelming. What follows is a loosely organised collection of precisely that evidence.

1. Statistics
2. Anecdotes
3. At scale
4. What about my bubble?
5. Conclusion

Statistics

PHP as programming language of choice

From Language analysis by W3 Techs on the top 10 million websites worldwide:

1. PHP at 77.2%.
2. ASP at 6.9%.
3. Ruby at 5.4%.

Content management on PHP

The bulk of public sites build on PHP via a CMS. By market share, 8 of the 12 largest CMS softwares are written in PHP. The below is from CMS usage by W3 Techs, where each percent represents 100,000 of the top 10 million sites. There’s a similar CMS report by BuiltWith that analyses a larger set of 78 million websites.

1. [PHP] WordPress ecosystem (63%)
2. [Ruby] Shopify
3. Wix
4. Squarespace
5. [PHP] Joomla ecosystem (3%)
6. [PHP] Drupal ecosystem (2%)
7. [PHP] Adobe Magento (2%)
8. [PHP] PrestaShop (1%)
9. [Python] Google Blogger
10. [PHP] Bitrix (1%)
11. [PHP] OpenCart (1%)
12. [PHP] TYPO3 (1%)

E-commerce on PHP

From BuiltWith’s report on online stores, as of Aug 2023:

• WooCommerce for WordPress (24% of global market share)
• Adobe Magento (7% of global market share)
• OpenCart (2% global market share, 24% market share in Russia)
• PrestaShop (2% global market share, 14% market share in France)
• Shopware (1% global market share, 12% market share in Germany)

Anecdotes

Kinsta published a retort demonstrating that PHP is fast, lively, and popular:

Well, first off, it’s important to point out that there’s a big difference between “wanting” and “being”. People have been calling for the death of PHP […] as far back as 2011.

PHP 7.3 was pushing 2-3x the number of requests per second as PHP 5.6. And PHP 8.1 is even faster.

[…] Because of PHP’s popularity, it’s easy to find PHP developers. And not just PHP developers – but PHP developers with experience.

Matt Brown from Vimeo Engineering in It’s not legacy code — it’s PHP:

PHP hasn’t stopped innovating […]. A new wave of backend engineers planned how we might carve up 500,000 lines of PHP into a bunch of [services]. […] Ultimately none of the proposals took hold.

Vimeo had grown many times over in the ten years since 2004, and our PHP codebase along with it […]

Ars Technica tells us: PHP maintains an enormous lead. Ars published a version of the W3 Techs report that includes historical data.

Despite many infamous quirks, the server-side language seems here to stay. […]
Within that dataset, the story told is clear. […] PHP held a 72.5 percent share in 2010 and holds a 78.9 percent share as of today. […] There doesn’t appear to be any clear contender for PHP to worry about.

Lex Fridman put it as follows in an interview with Python-creator Guido van Rossum on his podcast (episode, timestamp):

Lex: “PHP probably still runs most of the back-end of the Internet.”
Guido: “Oh yeah, yeah. […]”

Daniel Stenberg’s annual Curl user survey (page 18) asks where people use curl. After curl’s own interface (78.4%), the most familiar curl binding is PHP. It has been, since the survey’s beginning in 2015. In 2023, 19.6% of curl survey respondents reported they use curl via PHP.

curl (CLI) 78.4%, php-curl 19.6%, pycurl 13%, […], node-libcurl 4.1%.

Ember.js famously originated from the Ruby community. But, as a frontend framework Ember can pair with any backend. The Ember Community Survey reports PHP as the third-most favoured among survey participants, after Ruby and Java.

The Ember survey also asked general industry questions. For example, 24% described their employer’s infrastructure as “self-hosted”, and not at a major cloud provider. This isn’t a representative survey per-se, but may still be a surprise. Especially for folks who rely on social media and conference talks for their sense of what businesses do in the real world. It is more important than ever for companies to have a cloud exit strategy ready (NHS example). You can read how Basecamp’s cloud exit saves them millions of dollars a year.

PHP at scale

The stats cited above measure the number of distinct sites and companies. The vast majority of those build on PHP. But, all that says about their scale is that they’re somewhere in the top 10 million. Does that worry you? What’s in the top 500?

Jack Ellis from Fanthom Analytics in Does Laravel Scale? makes the case that you shouldn’t make choices based on handling millions of requests per second. You’re not likely to reach that, and will face many other bottlenecks. But, it turns out, PHP is one of the languages that does scale to that level.

When we started seeing incredible growth in our software, Fathom Analytics (which is built on Laravel), […] never had moments of “does the framework do enough requests per second?”. […]

I’ve worked with enterprise companies using Laravel to power their entire business, and companies such as Twitch, Disney, New York Times, WWE and Warner Bros are using Laravel for various projects they run. Laravel can handle your application at scale.

Matt Brown again, from Vimeo Engineering in It’s not legacy code:

I’m here to tell you that it can, and Vimeo’s continued success with PHP is proof that it’s a great tool for fast-moving companies in 2020.

Vimeo is also known as the developer of Psalm, a popular open-source static analysis tool for PHP.

From Keith Adams, Chief Architect at Slack Engineering in Taking PHP Seriously:

Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic […].

the advantages of the PHP environment (reduced cost of bugs through fault isolation; safe concurrency; and high developer throughput) are more valuable than the problems […]

Let’s take another look at the W3 Techs report, and this time focus on the size of some single businesses. At the top, we have WordPress which of course powers Automattic’s WordPress.com. That’s 20 billion page views each month (Alexa rank 55 worldwide).

If we move further down the report, to entries with 0.1% market share, we find PHP systems that power massive websites. Yet, these are also the platform of choice for over 100,000 smaller websites.

• #23 CMS: Moodle
• #25 CMS: phpBB, e.g. Google’s Waze Community, ApacheFriends Forum, VideoLAN Forums.
• #31 CMS: XenForo forums, e.g. ArsTechnica.com, MacRumors.com.
• #33 CMS: Roundcube
• #45 CMS: MediaWiki
• #49 CMS: vBulletin forums
• #53 CMS: IPS Community, e.g. MalwareBytes.com, BleepingComputer, and Squarespace.com Forums.

MediaWiki is the platform behind Wikipedia.org with 25 billion page views a month (Alexa #12). MediaWiki also powers Fandom with 2 billion page views a month (Similarweb #44), and WikiHow with 100 million monthly visitors (Alexa #215).

Other major Internet properties powered by PHP include Facebook (Alexa #7), Etsy (Alexa #66), Vimeo (Alexa #165), and Slack (Similarweb #362).

Etsy is interesting due to its high proportion of active sessions and dynamic content. This unlike Wikipedia or WordPress, which can serve most page views from a static cache. This means despite a similar scale, Etsy’s PHP application is a lot more exposed to their high traffic.

Etsy is also where PHP-creator Rasmus Lerdorf is employed. He sometimes features snippets from Etsy’s codebase in his tech talks. (Geek side note: His 2021 Modern PHP talk explains how Etsy deploys with rsync, exactly like Wikipedia did for the past decade with Scap). Etsy’s engineering blog occasionally covers work on their modular PHP monolith, e.g. Plural localisation, or their detailed Etsy Site Performance reports:

Happily, this quarter we saw site-wide performance improvements, due to our upgrade to PHP7.

[…] we saw significant performance gains on all our pages.

What about my bubble?

One could critique the PHP community for not occupying much space in public discourse. Whether PHP core developers, or authors of PHP packages (like Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, Composer, and PHPUnit), or the average engineer using it in their day job… we’re not seen much in arguments on social media.

You also don’t see us give many conference talks prescribing formulas for a stack that will “definitely be better” for your company. If talks by fans of certain JavaScript frameworks are anything to go by, we should believe that most companies use their stack today, and that you should feel sorry if you still don’t. I don’t say that to judge JavaScript. What bothers me is prescriptive messaging without considering technical or business needs, without assessing what “better” means — better compared to what? It’s hard to compare the one thing you know.

The above isn’t to say JavaScript doesn’t have its place. Share your experience! Share your results (and the benchmarks behind them), what worked, what didn’t. Keep searching, keep innovating, keep sharing, and above all: keep pushing the human race forward. That’s free software!

One could question merits through the lost decade and critique on React, but… React holds a 3% market share. Add the smaller frameworks (Vue, Angular, Svelte) and we reach a sum of 5%. Similarly, Node.js as web server holds 3% market share. Does that mean over 90% missed out on This One Trick That Will Boost Your Business?

Lest we forget, this 5% represents 500,000 major websites. That’s huge. Node.js has its place and its strengths (real-time message streams). But, Node.js also has its weaknesses (blocking the main thread). And remember, market share doesn’t say much about scale. It could be powering several organisations in the top 1% (like MediaWiki), or the bottom 1%. Or, be WordPress and power both the top 1% and over 40 million other sites.

Conclusion

Companies young and old, small and big, might not be utilising the software stacks we hear talked about most in public spaces. This is especially true outside the bubble of personal projects and cash-burning startups.

Is PHP the most economic choice for growing and sustained businesses today? Is it in the top three? Does language runtime matter at all when scaling up a business and team of people around it? We don’t know.

What we do know is that a great many businesses today build on PHP, and PHP has proven to be a sustainable option. It stood the test of time. That includes new companies like Fathom that turned profitable in just three years. Like the Fathom article said, most of us will never reach that scale. But, it’s comforting to know that PHP is a sustainable and economical option even at scale. Is it the only option? No, certainly not.

There are languages that are even faster (Rust), have an even larger community (Node.js), or have more mature compilers (Java); but that tends to trade other values.

PHP hits a certain Goldilocks sweetspot. It is pretty fast, has a large community for productivity, features modern syntax, is actively developed, easy to learn, easy to scale, and has a large standard library. It offers high and safe concurrency at scale, yet without async complexity or blocking a main thread. It also tends to carry low maintenance cost due to a stable platform, and through a community that values compatibility and low dependency count. You will have different needs at times, of course, but for this particular sweetspot, PHP stands among very few others. Which others? You tell me!

Further reading

• Choose Boring Technology, Dan McKinley, 2015.
• The Simple Joys of Scaling Up, Jordan Tigani, 2023.
• How to protect yourself from npm, Timo Tijhof, 2019.
• We’re drowning in software dependencies, Ryan Barrett, 2022.
• “Out of the Software Crisis”: Dependencies, Baldur Bjarnason.
• Squeeze the hell out of the system you have, Dan Slimmon, 2023.
• On language choice and maintenance burden at Wikimedia, Tim Starling, 2018.

Update (6 Sep 2023): Regarding HHVM, Wikipedia and Etsy indeed both tried it as PHP5-compatible alternative runtime (no Hacklang). After performance improvements in PHP 7, Wikipedia reverted its roll out and upgraded to PHP 7.2. Etsy also abandoned the experiment and partial use and similarly moved to PHP 7, stating later: “hhvm was a catalyst for performance improvements that made it into PHP7. We are now completely switched over to PHP7 everywhere“.

This post appeared on timotijhof.net. Reply via email

22/08/2023-28/08/2023

Mapping

• Requests have been made for comments on the following proposals:
  • information=public_transport_information_desk for tagging a place where you can get information and help from a public transport company but can’t buy tickets.
  • free_period_products=yes to indicate if a toilet has free period products available.

Mapping campaigns

• ꞴetaNYC has organised a community project to map public facilities in North Brooklyn, New York, USA.

Community

• [1] marche_ck has found a complex crossing on Jalan Sultan Ismail, Kuala Lumpur and sketched out how he imagines he would map it in OSM.
• iigmir discussed some possible OSM tags for tagging ‘Farmer Community Cooperatives’ that they found in the Taiwan, China, Korea, and Japan region. In Indonesia, this is called a ‘Village Unit Cooperative’.
• Jens-Uwe Hagenah blogged ► his thoughts on how to best tag long-distance cycle routes and their signposts.
• barefootstache wrote about their intention to follow up ‘365 days of mapping’ with a series of 100 weekly mapping challenges.
• Kamil Monicz (NorthCrab) commented about the new donation request banner on the main OSM page and on the OSM 2023 budget.
• Contributor OMNIBUS has published a status report on his guidelines for mapping wetlands and flood zones.
• Keen Quispe, of OpenStreetMap Peru, published ► an essay proposing the integration of OpenStreetMap into the educational system’s curriculum.
• Robhubi asked ► himself why Himmelreich, Raaba-Grambach, Germany, is incorrectly mapped in OSM and did some research on this matter. It seems to be an historical anomaly, so he wants to know if it is possible to update its location.

Events

• Anne-Karoline Distel shared her experience of introducing OpenStreetMap to local communities during Ireland’s Heritage Week 2023.

OSM research

• HeiGIT tooted some statistics on the age of OSM objects based on the time of the last edit.

Humanitarian OSM

• A discussion on ‘map data access through HOTOSM Tasking Manager’ has been opened and is seeking public comments on the topic.

Maps

• Brian Sperlongano has announced the release of the tile.ourmap.us community vector tile server. This is a full planet OSM vector tile server that updates approximately every 10 hours, primarily intended for personal, non-commercial use.

switch2OSM

• Josh Carlson tooted that Kendall county, Illinois, is now a corporate support member for OpenStreetMap and celebrates becoming a foundation member.

Open Data

• The AddressForAll Institute, in partnership with Esri, has begun to release open data packages provided by hundreds of municipalities in Brazil and other countries. These are maps of street, plots, buildings, neighbourhood boundaries, address points, and city blocks, which can be loaded onto QGIS or JOSM to improve OpenStreetMap. The data will be available under CC0 and CC-BY licenses. The first city is Cachoeiro do Itapemirim/ES, Brazil. Feedback for future releases is welcome.

Software

• MapTiler has released a map style editor to make it easier for users to design their own maps.
• Ben Clark announced the release of Rapid version 2.1 that includes two new features that will bring more attention to map data gaps:
  • A 3D building renderer in an inset map
  • The ability to load and visualise more custom data with protomaps MPTiles support.
• Sarabjeet Sodhi blogged about supporting Vespucci preset extensions in JOSM. Vespucci utilises the JOSM preset format but has extended the configuration to work better outside of the narrow realm of JOSM. These extensions include deprecated, regions, exclude_regions, value_type, and alternative.
• ybon gave an update on uMap, which has been integrated in a French state incubator, and has received quite a few updates: custom overlays, anonymous edit links sent by email, facet search, dashboards, and profile updates – to name only a few. He also listed what is planned next and how you can contribute by coding, testing, translating, or funding.

Programming

• darkonus shared a script that can enhance your experience with JOSM on MacOS by enabling a dark mode theme.
• miku0 has posted a final update on their Google Summer of Code project enhancing Nominatim’s address search in Japan.

Releases

• Mapilio street-level images are now integrated into the OpenStreetMap iD Editor.

Other “geo” things

• Yandex is looking ► for a developer to work on their OpenStreetMap content moderation system. The work is in a hybrid format: 3 days in the office, 2 days at home, flexible schedule; main offices are in Moscow and Belgrade.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Maricá	Mapathon – Maricá City		2023-08-24 – 2023-09-24
Localidad Teusaquillo	Volvamos a cerrar notas de OSM en Colombia – Notathon		2023-09-02
Stadtgebiet Bremen	Mappingparty in Bremen		2023-09-03
	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2023-09-05
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #51	✓	2023-09-05
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2023-09-06
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2023-09-06
Stadt Dornbirn	OpenData + OSM Meetup Vorarlberg		2023-09-06
Amsterdam	Maptime Amsterdam 2.0		2023-09-08
Bengaluru	OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party		2023-09-09
København	OSMmapperCPH		2023-09-10
Zürich	OSM-Stammtisch		2023-09-11
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata 月聚會 #56		2023-09-11
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-09-13
Middelburg	FOSS4G-NL		2023-09-13 – 2023-09-14
Stainach-Pürgg	10. Österreichischer OSM-Stammtisch (online)		2023-09-13
Lorain County	OpenStreetMap Ohio+Michigan Meetup	✓	2023-09-14
Potsdam	183. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2023-09-14
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2023-09-14

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Elizabete, MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, TheSwavu, TrickyFoxy, YoViajo, adiatmad, barefootstache, derFred, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Recently there has been a small effort on the Release-Engineering-Team to encode some of our institutional knowledge as runbooks linked from a page in the team's wiki space.

What are runbooks, you might ask? This is how they are described on the aforementioned wiki page:

This is a list of runbooks for the Wikimedia Release Engineering Team, covering step-by-step lists of what to do when things need doing, especially when things go wrong.

So runbooks are each essentially a sequence of commands, intended to be pasted into a shell by a human. Step by step instructions that are intended to help the reader accomplish an anticipated task or resolve a previously-encountered issue.

Presumably runbooks are created when someone encounters an issue, and, recognizing that it might happen again, helpfully documents the steps that were used to resolve said issue.

This all seems pretty sensible at first glance. This type of documentation can be really valuable when you're in an unexpected situation or trying to accomplish a task that you've never attempted before and just about anyone reading this probably has some experience running shell commands pasted from some online tutorials, setup instructions for a program, etc.

Despite the obvious value runbooks can provide, I've come to harbor a fairly strong aversion to the idea of encoding what are essentially shell scripts as individual commands on a wiki page. As someone who's job involves a lot of automation, I would usually much prefer a shell script, a python program, or even a "maintenance script" over a runbook.

After a lot of contemplation, I've identified a few reasons that I don't like runbooks on wiki pages:

• Runbooks are tedious and prone to human errors.
  • It's easy to lose track of where you are in the process.
  • It's easy to accidentally skip a step.
  • It's easy to make typos.
• A script can be code reviewed and version controlled in git.
• A script can validate it's arguments which helps to catch typos.
• I think that command line terminal input is more like code than it is prose. I am more comfortable editing code in my usual text editor as apposed to editing in a web browser. The wikitext editor is sufficient for basic text editing, and visual editor is quite nice for rich text editing, but neither is ideal for editing code.

I do realize that mediawiki does version control. I also realize that sometimes you just can't be bothered to write and debug a robust shell script to address some rare circumstances. The cost is high and it's uncertain whether the script will be worth such an effort. In those situations a runbook might be the perfect way to contribute to collective knowledge without investing a lot of time into perfecting a script.

My favorite web comic, xkcd, has a lot few things to say about this subject:

Potential Solutions

I've been pondering a solution to these issues for a long time. Mostly motivated by the pain I have experienced (and the mistakes I've made) while executing the biggest runbook of all on a regular basis.

Over the past couple of years I've come across some promising ideas which I think can help the problems I've identified with runbooks. I think that one of the most interesting is Do-nothing scripting. Dan Slimmon identifies some of the same problems that I've detailed here. He uses the term *slog* to refer to long and tedious procedures like the Wikimedia Train Deploys. The proposed solution comes in the form of a do-nothing script. You should go read that article, it's not very long. Here are a few relevant quotes:

Almost any slog can be turned into a do-nothing script. A do-nothing script is a script that encodes the instructions of a slog, encapsulating each step in a function.

...

At first glance, it might not be obvious that this script provides value. Maybe it looks like all we’ve done is make the instructions harder to read. But the value of a do-nothing script is immense:

• It’s now much less likely that you’ll lose your place and skip a step. This makes it easier to maintain focus and power through the slog.
• Each step of the procedure is now encapsulated in a function, which makes it possible to replace the text in any given step with code that performs the action automatically.
• Over time, you’ll develop a library of useful steps, which will make future automation tasks more efficient.

A do-nothing script doesn’t save your team any manual effort. It lowers the activation energy for automating tasks, which allows the team to eliminate toil over time.

I was inspired by this and I think it's a fairly clever solution to the problems identified. What if we combined the best aspects of gradual automation with the best aspects of a wiki-based runbook? Others were inspired by this as well, resulting in tools like braintree/runbook, codedown and the one I'm most interested in, rundoc.

Runnable Runbooks

My ideal tool would combine code and instructions in a free-form "literate programming" style. By following some simple conventions in our runbooks we can use a tool to parse and execute the embedded code blocks in a controlled manner. With a little bit of tooling we can gain many benefits:

• The tooling will keep track of the steps to execute, ensuring that no steps are missed.
• Ensure that errors aren't missed by carefully checking / logging the result of each step.
• We could also provide a mechanism for inputting the values of any variables / arguments and validate the format of user input.
• With flexible control flow management we can even allow resuming from anywhere in the middle of a runbook after an aborted run.
• Manual steps can just consist of a block of prose that gets displayed to the operator. With embedded markup we can format the instructions nicely and render them in the terminal using [Rich][7]. Once the operator confirms that the step is complete then the workflow moves on to the next step.

Prior Art

I've found a few projects that already implement many of these ideas. Here are a few of the most relevant:

• braintree/runbook
• codedown
• rundoc

The one I'm most interested in is Rundoc. It's almost exactly the tool that I would have created. In fact, I started writing code before discovering rundoc but once I realized how closely this matched my ideal solution, I decided to abandon my effort. Instead I will add a couple of missing features to Rundoc in order to get everything that I want and hopefully I can contribute my enhancements back upstream for the benefit of others.

Demo: https://asciinema.org/a/MKyiFbsGzzizqsGgpI4Jkvxmx
Source: https://github.com/20after4/rundoc

References

[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Release_Engineering_Team/Runbooks "runbooks"
[2]: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_deployment/Train_deploys "Train deploys"
[3]: https://blog.danslimmon.com/2019/07/15/do-nothing-scripting-the-key-to-gradual-automation/ "Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation by Dan Slimmon"
[4]: https://github.com/braintree/runbook "runbook by braintree"
[5]: https://github.com/earldouglas/codedown "codedown by earldouglas"
[6]: https://github.com/eclecticiq/rundoc "rundoc by eclecticiq"
[7]: https://rich.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ "Rich python library"

Policymakers lacking knowledge about developmental disability issues turn to Wikipedia before writing laws. Healthcare practitioners consult Wikipedia while making diagnoses and treatment plans. Journalists writing about care of developmentally disabled adults fact-check their stories using Wikipedia. What they find there matters. And right now, there’s room for improvement.

A 2015 study concluded that “Wikipedia appeared to be the most utilized online healthcare information resource” in the world. And yet, there are only about 100 articles (out of 6.6 million) that cover developmental disabilities. Thanks to a $55,000 grant from the WITH Foundation, we plan to work with a passionate group of experts to change that.

We’re thrilled to announce that the WITH Foundation has not only renewed–but generously increased–their support of our initiative to improve healthcare and disability-related articles on Wikipedia, ensuring that the world’s largest free information resource is as equitable and accurate as possible. 

“We are pleased to continue our support for this project. We appreciate the partnership with Wiki Education as they work with self-advocates and disability healthcare professionals to enhance healthcare and disability information on Wikipedia.” – Ryan Eastery, Executive Director of WITH Foundation

In three WITH-sponsored Wiki Scientists courses, we will support 45 experts, including more self-advocates (adults with lived experience of I/DD), as they expand between 30 and 40 high-value Wikipedia articles about disability healthcare. Nearly all of the existing Wikipedia articles about adult developmental disabilities are rated as a “start” or “stub” class, meaning the article has a lot of room for improvement in quality and depth of information. 

There’s plenty of work to be done, but thankfully this cohort of experts will be building upon previous iterations of these courses. The WITH Foundation funded a similar project in 2019. The highest rated Wikipedia article in this topic area, Developmental disability, was expanded by experts previously enrolled in WITH Foundation-supported Wiki Scientists courses. Three of the top Wikipedia articles on developmental disabilities have received over 170,000 pageviews to date in 2022 alone, indicating strong public demand for helpful resources on related topics.

We’ve also seen a strong demand among disability healthcare professionals, experts, and self-advocates to be part of this initiative. In 2019, we received almost twice as many applications than there were seats available for the two Wiki Scientists courses. In total, 31 experts improved 43 Wikipedia articles on developmental disabilities and related topics. All work from these courses are available on Wiki Education’s online Dashboard.

Join us!

We are now seeking participants in these courses who can add accurate, reliable information about developmental disabilities to Wikipedia. We welcome individuals with developmental disabilities to participate, either as course participants if they are academic experts, or by recommending the course to people in their networks. In addition to working with some of our existing partners, we’d love to connect with organizations we haven’t yet collaborated with, especially healthcare and disability studies groups.

If you or your organization is interested in participating in any capacity, please email Jami Mathewson, our Director of Partnerships, at jami@wikiedu.org.

Let’s make a lasting impact

As a recent study has shown, Wikipedia articles have the power to influence hundreds of scientific articles and become highly cited in scientific literature. Researchers have also found that when groups of Wikipedia editors improve a specific content area, the pageviews of those articles and other linked ones increase by 12%. The work from our Wiki Scientists courses will remain accessible on Wikipedia going forward, impacting the public’s understanding of important healthcare and developmental disability studies topics and creating a snowball effect on the amount of healthcare resources available in the future.

THIS IS NOT A REAL FINISHED PRODUCT.

– Erohead, birther of Beepy

The Beepy is a handheld Linux console designed by artists and built for nerds.

From the first announcement, Beepy’s creator—SQFMI—was candid about the device’s lack of polish.

“Buyer beware!” was a direct quote.

But I snagged one anyway. And so far, the punishment has been minor.

What I dislike

Day one: I breezed through the “Getting Started” docs and readied myself for hacking.

Then the keyboard wailed “aaaaaaaaaa” at me until I rebooted.

Off to a bad start.

Undeterred, I took to the Beepy Discord, where I found solace among other new and confused Beepy owners.

Thanks to the active Discord community, I was clued into to the fix: downgrade all the things.¹

While this experience was bumpy, everyone in the discord was helpful and awesome—I’m grateful for all the volunteers assisting us wayward nerds.

I’ve contributed some pending documentation changes to pay it forward.

Final verdict

I’m a sucker for pocket-sized Linux devices. And a glutton for a certain kind of punishment.

The Beepy is not a finished product, but that’s the whole point.

It scratches an itch I’ve always had: the desire to hack alongside like-minded nerds, all tilting at our joyless monolithic slabs.

Do you ever wonder where Wikipedia articles come from? With a world of knowledge to represent, it’s a big question. At Wiki Education, we are especially concerned with Wikipedia being an equitable and representative resource. Whether it’s a museum of paintings, a library full of volumes of books, or an online encyclopedia, systematic bias is inherent in every collection and Wikipedia is not immune to it. So when we think about where Wikipedia articles come from, another question we must answer is how do we ensure Wikipedia has articles to make it a more representative resource?

With support from the Nielsen Foundation’s Data for Good grants program, we have been developing a free and open Wikipedia resource that encourages editors to create articles to improve representation of diverse groups and topics on Wikipedia. There are some amazing projects that are working to address this issue on Wikipedia that have been around for a few years — Women in Red, Art + Feminism, Black Lunch Table — to name a few. It’s our hope that this tool can complement the work of these projects.

For example, Women in Red, uses Wikidata, a linked data knowledge base that connects all language versions of Wikipedia, to generate lists of articles that could exist in English Wikipedia, but don’t yet. Taking a page out of their book, we are creating a resource that allows community members to do the same thing, but with a broader set of demographic variables. In addition to individuals who identify as women, we have constructed pages that list thousands of potential articles based around sexual orientation, nationality, disability status, and ethnicity.

These lists query the other language versions of Wikipedia and pull only the results that don’t have English language articles. From there, community members can select individuals and generate English language versions of the articles. Since these articles exist in other language versions of Wikipedia, the idea is they already pass notability – a major requirement for articles to exist – and have references. The article writing process will still take time, but it saves some effort not starting from scratch. Check out our resource here.

I know what you’re thinking — can this get any cooler? And the answer is yes! Wiki Education has been developing and maintaining the Dashboard for the past few years. The Dashboard allows instructors and individuals to create courses that are scoped to a set of students/Wikipedians/edit-a-thon attendees, etc. – basically any set of individuals that want to participate in whatever the course is. Another feature is the ability to frame a course around a list of articles. Using the same query from our resource, anyone using a Dashboard can scope it to one of the lists we’ve developed. The idea here is to encourage Dashboard users to select articles about underrepresented groups or individuals and write them for English Wikipedia. Follow this link for an example of an article-scoped Dashboard. Heads up — clicking the PSID list will take some time to load because it is large.

And this, my friends, is one place where Wikipedia articles come from.

To review: we’re building a tool that encourages community members to write articles to increase the visibility of diverse groups and topics on Wikipedia. We’re doing this using Wikidata, queries, a list tool called Listeria, articles scoping on the Dashboard, and the hard work of anyone taking a Dashboard course or attending an event that uses the Dashboard. Although systemic bias and underrepresentation will remain a significant problem on Wikipedia and beyond, we hope this tool can push new and old users alike to edit in a way that helps to improve representation on the platform. As the community and these tools mature, we also hope others can refine and adapt it to their specific needs. An amazing thing about pulling from Wikidata is users can narrow and expand queries to generate new lists. For example, these lists are configured to improve English Wikipedia, but in a snap they can point to other language versions.

We’re still tinkering and ironing out the wrinkles, but we hope to have this up and running soon. Get ready to make some edits.

We are thrilled to finally welcome Tilda Udufo, our mentor advocate, into our team this August. As of today, the majority of the Outreachy team is located in the global south! One of the first things Tilda and I talked about when we had the opportunity to meet each other was how I wasn’t as involved with her hiring process as the other organizers, and why. I had the privilege to interview Tilda in the final stages of our community mananger hiring process.

I was recently a guest on the podcast Between the brackets. The podcast usually covers MediaWiki related topics, but from time to time, also have Wikimedians as guests. It was a lot of fun, since we talked about almost all the things I am currently involved in. We mostly talked about the Foundation for Public Code, Wikidata, Govdirectory, Wikimedians for Sustainable Development but also a bit about AI and Abstract Wikipedia.

If you want to have a listen, find it in your podcast player, or listen directly here: https://betweenthebrackets.libsyn.com/episode-155-jan-ainali
(or select a service of your choice in Wikidata).

🕑 60 minutes

Jan Ainali is a codebase steward for the Foundation for Public Code. On the side, he's an all-around Wikimedia editor, enthusiast and evangelist, with a special focus on Wikidata. He co-founded the Wikimedia Sverige chapter, co-created the Wikidata-based online resource Govdirectory, and co-hosts the (mostly Swedish-language) podcast WikipediaPodden, and that's not even everything!

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Wikimedia Sverige
• WikipediaPodden
• Wikipedia Weekly live Wikidata editing playlist
• Foundation for Public Code
• Govdirectory
• Semantic Web Wikipedia article (with Tim Berners-Lee quote)
• Wikimedians for Sustainable Development
• OpenRefine
• Foundation for Public Code's Standard for Public Code

Summary

• Install debugging packages: apt-get -y install php7.4-common-dbgsym php7.4-cli-dbgsym
• curl -o ~/php-gdbinit https://raw.githubusercontent.com/php/php-src/php-7.4.30/.gdbinit
• gdb <your php command>
• Enter run then once the command has failed: bt and zbacktrace

The Beta-Cluster-Infrastructure is a farm of wikis we use for experimentation and integration testing. It is updated continuously: new code is every ten minutes and the databases every hour by running MediaWiki maintenance/update.php. The scheduling and running are driven by Jenkins jobs which statuses can be seen on the Beta view:

On top of that, Jenkins will emit notification messages to IRC as long as one of the update job fails. One of them started failing on July 25th and this is how I was seeing it the alarm (times are for France, UTC+2):

(wmf-insecte is the Jenkins bot, insecte is french for bug (animals), and the wmf- prefix identifies it as a Wikimedia Foundation robot).

Clicking on the link gives the output of the update script which eventually fails with:

+ /usr/local/bin/mwscript update.php --wiki=wikifunctionswiki --quick --skip-config-validation
20:31:09 ...wikilambda_zlanguages table already exists.
20:31:09 ...have wlzl_label_primary field in wikilambda_zobject_labels table.
20:31:09 ...have wlzl_return_type field in wikilambda_zobject_labels table.
20:31:09 /usr/local/bin/mwscript: line 27:  1822 Segmentation fault      sudo -u "$MEDIAWIKI_WEB_USER" $PHP "$MEDIAWIKI_DEPLOYMENT_DIR_DIR_USE/multiversion/MWScript.php" "$@"

The important bit is Segmentation fault which indicates the program (php) had a fatal fault and it got rightfully killed by the Linux Kernel. Looking at the instance Linux Kernel messages via dmesg -T:

[Mon Jul 24 23:33:55 2023] php[28392]: segfault at 7ffe374f5db8 ip 00007f8dc59fc807 sp 00007ffe374f5da0 error 6 in libpcre2-8.so.0.7.1[7f8dc59b9000+5d000]
[Mon Jul 24 23:33:55 2023] Code: ff ff 31 ed e9 74 fb ff ff 66 2e 0f 1f 84 00 00 00 00 00 41 57 41 56 41 55 41 54 55 48 89 d5 53 44 89 c3 48 81 ec 98 52 00 00 <48> 89 7c 24 18 4c 8b a4 24 d0 52 00 00 48 89 74 24 10 48 89 4c 24
[Mon Jul 24 23:33:55 2023] Core dump to |/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-coredump 28392 33 33 11 1690242166 0 php pipe failed

With those data, I had enough to the most urgent step: file a task (T342769) which can be used as an audit trail and reference for the future. It is the single most important step I am doing whenever I am debugging an issue, since if I have to stop due to time constraint or lack of technical abilities, others can step in and continue. It also provides an historical record that can be looked up in the future, and indeed this specific problem already got investigated and fully documented a couple years ago. Having a task is the most important thing one must do whenever debugging, it is invaluable. For PHP segmentation fault, we even have a dedicated project php-segfault

With the task filed, I have continued the investigation. The previous successful build had:

19:30:18 ...have wlzl_label_primary field in wikilambda_zobject_labels table.
19:30:18 ...have wlzl_return_type field in wikilambda_zobject_labels table.
19:30:18        ❌ Unable to make a page for Z7138: The provided content's label clashes with Object 'Z10138' for the label in 'Z1002'.
19:30:18        ❌ Unable to make a page for Z7139: The provided content's label clashes with Object 'Z10139' for the label in 'Z1002'.
19:30:18        ❌ Unable to make a page for Z7140: The provided content's label clashes with Object 'Z10140' for the label in 'Z1002'.
19:30:18 ...site_stats is populated...done.

The successful build started at 19:20 UTC and the failing one finished at 20:30 UTC which gives us a short time window to investigate. Since the failure seems to happen after updating the WikiLambda MediaWiki extension, I went to inspect the few commits that got merged at that time. I took advantage of Gerrit adding review actions as git notes, notably the exact time a change got submitted and subsequently merged. The process:

Clone the suspect repository:

git clone https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/extensions/WikiLambda
cd WikiLambda

Fetch the Gerrit review notes:

git fetch origin refs/notes/review:refs/notes/review

The review notes can be shown below the commit by passing --notes=review to git log or git show, an example for the current HEAD of the repository:

$ git show -q --notes=review
commit c7f8071647a1aeb2cef6b9310ccbf3a87af2755b (HEAD -> master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)
Author: Genoveva Galarza <ggalarzaheredero@wikimedia.org>
Date:   Thu Jul 27 00:34:03 2023 +0200

    Initialize blank function when redirecting to FunctionEditor from DefaultView
    
    Bug: T342802
    Change-Id: I09d3400db21983ac3176a0bc325dcfe2ddf23238

Notes (review):
    Verified+1: SonarQube Bot <kharlan+sonarqubebot@wikimedia.org>
    Verified+2: jenkins-bot
    Code-Review+2: Jforrester <jforrester@wikimedia.org>
    Submitted-by: jenkins-bot
    Submitted-at: Wed, 26 Jul 2023 22:47:59 +0000
    Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda/+/942026
    Project: mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda
    Branch: refs/heads/master

Which shows this change has been approved by Jforrester and entered the repository on Wed, 26 Jul 2023 22:47:59 UTC. Then to find the commits in that range, I ask git log to list:

• anything that has a commit date for the day (it is not necessarily correct but in this case it is a good enough approximation)
• from oldest to newest
• sorted by topology order (aka in the order the commit entered the repository rather than based on the commit date)
• show the review notes to get the Submitted-at field

I can then scroll to the commits having a Submitted-at in the time window of 19:20 UTC - 20:30 UTC. I have amended the below output to remove most of the review notes except for the first commit:

$ git log --oneline --since=2023/07/25 --reverse --notes=review --no-merges --topo-order
<scroll>
653ea81a Handle oldid url param to view a particular revision
Notes (review):
    Verified+1: SonarQube Bot <kharlan+sonarqubebot@wikimedia.org>
    Verified+2: jenkins-bot
    Code-Review+2: Jforrester <jforrester@wikimedia.org>
    Submitted-by: jenkins-bot
    Submitted-at: Tue, 25 Jul 2023 19:26:53 +0000
    Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda/+/941482
    Project: mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda
    Branch: refs/heads/master

fe4b0446 AUTHORS: Update for July 2023
Notes (review):
    Submitted-at: Tue, 25 Jul 2023 19:49:43 +0000
    Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda/+/941507

73fcb4a4 Update function-schemata sub-module to HEAD (1c01f22)
Notes (review):
    Submitted-at: Tue, 25 Jul 2023 19:59:23 +0000
    Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda/+/941384

598f5fcc PageRenderingHandler: Don't make 'read' selected if we're on the edit tab
Notes (review):
    Submitted-at: Tue, 25 Jul 2023 20:16:05 +0000
    Reviewed-on: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/WikiLambda/+/941456

Or in a Phabricator task and human friendly way:

• 19:26 Handle oldid url param to view a particular revision
• 19:43 AUTHORS: Update for July 2023
• 19:59 Update function-schemata sub-module to HEAD (1c01f22) for T335583
• 20:16 PageRenderingHandler: Don't make 'read' selected if we're on the edit tab

The Update function-schemata sub-module to HEAD (1c01f22) has a short log of changes it introduces:

• New changes:
• abc4aa6 definitions: Add Z1908/bug-bugi and Z1909/bug-lant ZNaturalLanguages
• 0f1941e definitions: Add Z1910/piu ZNaturalLanguage
• 1c01f22 definitions: Re-label all objects to drop the 'Z' per Amin

Since the update script fail on WikiLambda I have reached out to its developers so they can investigate their code and maybe find what can trigger the issue.

On the PHP side we need a trace. That can be done by configuring the Linux Kernel to take a dump of the program before terminating it and having it stored on disk, it did not quite work due to a configuration issue on the machine and in the first attempt we forgot to run the command by asking bash to allow the dump generation (ulimit -c unlimited). From a past debugging session, I went to run the command directly under the GNU debugger: gdb.

There are a few preliminary step to debug the PHP program, at first one needs to install the debug symbols which lets the debugger map the binary entries to lines of the original source code. Since error mentions libpcre2 I also installed its debugging symbols:

$ sudo apt-get -y install php7.4-common-dbgsym php7.4-cli-dbgsym libpcre2-dbg

I then used gdb to start a debugging session:

sudo  -s -u www-data gdb --args /usr/bin/php /srv/mediawiki-staging/multiversion/MWScript.php update.php --wiki=wikifunctionswiki --quick --skip-config-validation
gdb>

Then ask gdb to start the program by entering in the input prompt: run ⏎. After several minutes, it caught the segmentation fault:

gdb> run
<output>
<output freeze for several minutes while update.php is doing something>

Thread 1 "php" received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x00007ffff789e807 in pcre2_match_8 (code=0x555555ce1fb0, 
    subject=subject@entry=0x7fffcb410a98 "Z1002", length=length@entry=5, 
    start_offset=start_offset@entry=0, options=0, 
    match_data=match_data@entry=0x555555b023e0, mcontext=0x555555ad5870)
    at src/pcre2_match.c:6001
6001    src/pcre2_match.c: No such file or directory.

I could not find a debugging symbol package containing src/pcre2_match.c but that was not needed afterall.

To retrieve the stacktrace enter to the gdb prompt bt ⏎:

gdb> bt
#0  0x00007ffff789e807 in pcre2_match_8 (code=0x555555ce1fb0, 
    subject=subject@entry=0x7fffcb410a98 "Z1002", length=length@entry=5, 
    start_offset=start_offset@entry=0, options=0, 
    match_data=match_data@entry=0x555555b023e0, mcontext=0x555555ad5870)
    at src/pcre2_match.c:6001
#1  0x00005555556a3b24 in php_pcre_match_impl (pce=0x7fffe83685a0, 
    subject_str=0x7fffcb410a80, return_value=0x7fffcb44b220, subpats=0x0, global=0, 
    use_flags=<optimized out>, flags=0, start_offset=0) at ./ext/pcre/php_pcre.c:1300
#2  0x00005555556a493b in php_do_pcre_match (execute_data=0x7fffcb44b710, 
    return_value=0x7fffcb44b220, global=0) at ./ext/pcre/php_pcre.c:1149
#3  0x00007ffff216a3cb in tideways_xhprof_execute_internal ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#4  0x000055555587ddee in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1732
#5  execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53539
#6  0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#7  0x000055555587de4b in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1714
#8  execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53539
#9  0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#10 0x000055555587de4b in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1714
#11 execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53539
#12 0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#13 0x000055555587de4b in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1714
#14 execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53539
#15 0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#16 0x000055555587c63c in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_UNUSED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1602
#17 execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53535
#18 0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#19 0x000055555587de4b in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1714
#20 execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53539
#21 0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#22 0x000055555587de4b in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
    at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:1714
#23 execute_ex (ex=0x555555ce1fb0) at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.h:53539
#24 0x00007ffff2169c89 in tideways_xhprof_execute_ex ()
   from /usr/lib/php/20190902/tideways_xhprof.so
#25 0x000055555587de4b in ZEND_DO_FCALL_SPEC_RETVAL_USED_HANDLER ()
 at ./Zend/zend_vm_execute.Quit
CONTINUING

Which is not that helpful. Thankfully the PHP project provides a set of macro for gdb which lets one map the low level C code to the PHP code that was expected. It is provided in their source repository /.gdbinit and one should use the version from the PHP branch being debugged, since we use php 7.4 I went to use the version from the latest 7.4 series (7.4.30 at the time of this writing): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/php/php-src/php-7.4.30/.gdbinit

Download the file to your home directory (ex: /home/hashar/gdbinit) and ask gdb to import it with, for example, source /home/hashar/gdbinit ⏎:

(gdb) source /home/hashar/gdbinit

This provides a few new commands to show PHP Zend values and to generate a very helpfull stacktrace (zbacktrace):

(gdb) zbacktrace
[0x7fffcb44b710] preg_match("\7^Z[1-9]\d*$\7u", "Z1002") [internal function]
[0x7fffcb44aba0] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateString(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb44ac10], array(7)[0x7fffcb44ac20], object[0x7fffcb44ac30], object[0x7fffcb44ac40], object[0x7fffcb44ac50]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:1219 
[0x7fffcb44a760] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateProperties(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb44a7d0], array(7)[0x7fffcb44a7e0], object[0x7fffcb44a7f0], object[0x7fffcb44a800], object[0x7fffcb44a810], NULL) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:943 
[0x7fffcb44a4c0] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateKeywords(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb44a530], array(7)[0x7fffcb44a540], object[0x7fffcb44a550], object[0x7fffcb44a560], object[0x7fffcb44a570]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:519 
[0x7fffcb44a310] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateSchema(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb44a380], array(7)[0x7fffcb44a390], object[0x7fffcb44a3a0], object[0x7fffcb44a3b0], object[0x7fffcb44a3c0]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:332 
[0x7fffcb449350] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateConditionals(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb4493c0], array(7)[0x7fffcb4493d0], object[0x7fffcb4493e0], object[0x7fffcb4493f0], object[0x7fffcb449400]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:703 
[0x7fffcb4490b0] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateKeywords(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb449120], array(7)[0x7fffcb449130], object[0x7fffcb449140], object[0x7fffcb449150], object[0x7fffcb449160]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:523 
[0x7fffcb448f00] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateSchema(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb448f70], array(7)[0x7fffcb448f80], object[0x7fffcb448f90], object[0x7fffcb448fa0], object[0x7fffcb448fb0]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:332 
<loop>

The stacktrace shows the code entered an infinite loop while validating a Json schema up to a point it is being stopped.

The arguments can be further inspected by using printz and giving it as argument an object reference. For the line:

For [0x7fffcb44aba0] Opis\JsonSchema\Validator->validateString(reference, reference, array(0)[0x7fffcb44ac10], array(7)[0x7fffcb44ac20], object[0x7fffcb44ac30], object[0x7fffcb44ac40], object[0x7fffcb44ac50]) /srv/mediawiki-staging/php-master/vendor/opis/json-schema/src/Validator.php:1219

(gdb) printzv 0x7fffcb44ac10
[0x7fffcb44ac10] (refcount=2) array:     Hash(0)[0x5555559d7f00]: {
}

(gdb) printzv 0x7fffcb44ac20
[0x7fffcb44ac20] (refcount=21) array:     Packed(7)[0x7fffcb486118]: {
      [0] 0 => [0x7fffcb445748] (refcount=17) string: Z2K2
      [1] 1 => [0x7fffcb445768] (refcount=18) string: Z4K2
      [2] 2 => [0x7fffcb445788] long: 1
      [3] 3 => [0x7fffcb4457a8] (refcount=15) string: Z3K3
      [4] 4 => [0x7fffcb4457c8] (refcount=10) string: Z12K1
      [5] 5 => [0x7fffcb4457e8] long: 1
      [6] 6 => [0x7fffcb445808] (refcount=6) string: Z11K1
}

(gdb) printzv 0x7fffcb44ac30
[0x7fffcb44ac30] (refcount=22) object(Opis\JsonSchema\Schema) #485450 {
id => [0x7fffcb40f508] (refcount=3) string: /Z6#
draft => [0x7fffcb40f518] (refcount=1) string: 07
internal => [0x7fffcb40f528] (refcount=1) reference: [0x7fffcb6704e8] (refcount=1) array:     Hash(1)[0x7fffcb4110e0]: {
      [0] "/Z6#" => [0x7fffcb71d280] (refcount=1) object(stdClass) #480576
}

(gdb) printzv 0x7fffcb44ac40
[0x7fffcb44ac40] (refcount=5) object(stdClass) #483827
Properties     Hash(1)[0x7fffcb6aa2a0]: {
      [0] "pattern" => [0x7fffcb67e3c0] (refcount=1) string: ^Z[1-9]\d*$
}

(gdb) printzv 0x7fffcb44ac50
[0x7fffcb44ac50] (refcount=5) object(Opis\JsonSchema\ValidationResult) #486348 {
maxErrors => [0x7fffcb4393e8] long: 1
errors => [0x7fffcb4393f8] (refcount=2) array:     Hash(0)[0x5555559d7f00]: {
}

Extracting the parameters was enough for WikiLambda developers to find the immediate root cause, they have removed some definitions which triggered the infinite loop and manually ran a script to reload the data in the Database. Eventually the Jenkins job managed to update the wiki database:

16:30:26 <wmf-insecte> Project beta-update-databases-eqiad build #69029: FIXED in 10 min: https://integration.wikimedia.org/ci/job/beta-update-databases-eqiad/69029/

One problem solved!

References:

• T342769: Beta update.php fails due to PHP segfault in libpcre2-8.so.0.7.1
• A similar debugging session I had to do for update.php back in 2021 {T296539#7531235}
• 2006 notes by @tstarling from whom I have learned about gdb and the PHP gdb config: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/GDB_with_PHP

I've returned from (very hot and humid) Singapore where Wikimania was held this year. The primary reason I was there on-site was the Wikimedian of the Year stuff (I was awarded the tech award last year), but the rest of the conference was great too. Jay and I on-stage for the awards ceremony. Image by Zack McCune, CC BY-SA 4.0. Unlike the main Wikimedia Hackathon (which I attended too this year), Wikimania is primarly not a technical event.

15/08/2023-21/08/2023

Mapping

• Riiga’s proposal to extend the opening_hours tag, to include workdays and any workday before a day of rest or a public holiday, can be commented on.

Community

• User 38446 described how they use OpenStreetMap for the organisation of orientation trainings using OOMapper.
• Anne-Karoline Distel blogged about ‘mass paths’, either shortcuts or paths dating back to a time when Catholics in Ireland were forbidden to attend mass/school, and how she maps them in OpenStreetMap.
• A request to introduce chat channels to the OSM Community forum has been declined by the forums governance team. Their rationale behind this decision is that simply enabling chat channels on the forums without a comprehensive global strategy in place would likely yield minimal results in addressing the specific issue that has been identified. As a result, they do not intend to pursue this initiative at this time. Instead, the team has encouraged all members to actively initiate a distinct conversation within the General talk section.
• jidanni pondered why the labels on Brown Avenue, in Evanston, IL USA, flip back and forth, in contrast to its neighbouring fellow north-south streets. He discovered it is because it wavers sightly back and forth over true north.
• Pierre Béland’s diary entry ‘Trend of OSM Objects Edited with focus on Organised editing’ presented compilations of statistics by country for 2022-Q2 to 2023-Q2, using data from Pascal Neis’s osmstats website, and analysed trends by continents. Monthly statistics (csv format) are available for this period from GitHub.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation has published version 2 of their strategic plan. You can contribute your opinions, criticisms, and suggestions through the OSM Community forum.
• The OpenStreetMap Foundation has a new donations page that explains how to make a donation to support the project, as well as how to join the Foundation. Please share this URL and help us encourage those who benefit from our map and its data to give time and money to support OSM.

Events

• The Organisational Committee of SotM announced that State of the Map 2024 will be held in Nairobi, Kenya, from 6 to 8 September 2024.

Education

• In his dissertation, at the RWTH Aachen, Philipp Schulz studied [PDF] the construction of 3D maps based on OSM data. His aim was to make the planning of wind farms easier. He focused on how to create 3D shapes for buildings, including roofs, and how to create curved roads and trees.
• Trufi Association and Mobility Hub have launched a free course on how to map public transport in OSM, one of the most powerful things an OpenStreetMapper can do. The course is currently only available in Spanish; an English version will be available later this year.

Maps

• Amanda McCann has made a map showing with coloured sets how all the waterways in OSM are topologically connected as watersheds. It is called ‘OSM River Basins‘.
• Stamen explained what happened behind the scenes in their map style design process for Amazon Location Service.

Software

• Gabboxl has released gtfs-osm-import, an application to import GTFS data into OpenStreetMap.
• Android Broadcast, a YouTube channel about Android development, interviewed Organic Maps developer Roman Tsysyk, in which he shared the peculiarities of Android development.

Did you know …

• … that you can access a detailed list of recent donations to OpenStreetMap?

Other “geo” things

• James Killick talked about his experience on the Apple Maps development team and explained some of the negative effects of crowdsourcing map data, as demonstrated by the quality of business listings on Google Maps (No mention of OSM).

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Maricá	Mapathon – Maricá City, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil		2023-08-24 – 2023-09-24
Town of Cottesloe	Social mapping Saturday: Cottesloe		2023-08-26
Localidad Teusaquillo	Junta Bimensual OSM LATAM – Agosto August		2023-08-26
Kalyani Nagar	GeoPune OSM Mapping Party		2023-08-26
	Public Transport Mapping Workshop		2023-08-26
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	✓	2023-08-28
Salzburg	Salzburger Stammtisch		2023-08-29
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-08-30
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2023-08-30
Tiranë	OpenStreetMap Community Sprint		2023-09-01
Localidad Teusaquillo	Volvamos a cerrar notas de OSM en Colombia – Notathon		2023-09-02
Stadtgebiet Bremen	Mappingparty in Bremen		2023-09-03
	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2023-09-05
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #51	✓	2023-09-05
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2023-09-06
Stadt Dornbirn	OpenData + OSM Meetup Vorarlberg		2023-09-06
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2023-09-06

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 Mannivu, MatthiasMatthias, Michael Montani, PierZen, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, conradoos, derFred, isoipsa, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

For wikipedians its not that great. Owned by South Lakeland District Council but operated by Kendall college I guess that makes it a university museum. And the scope of the collection pretty much aligns with that. Unfortunately much of the collection is of fairly common items that have better coverage elsewhere.

The taxidermy collection while reasonably broad lacks anything really uncommon. The Thylacine might be of interest if anyone compiles a complete list of surviving specimens. The Helsfell Cave wolf is of interest and the cave is probably notable. They are however nice enough to include a complete listing of what they have on their website if anyone wants to check.

The Kentmere Viking boat might be another Sadly despite its interesting history I doubt the John Hamer mineral collection meets notability standards. On top of that there are a few hoards and a few things that might be relevant to place history articles such as the Witherslack sword. So ultimately its not that there is nothing but that there is a fairly limited amount and what there is would need to be worked at.

Last week, the yearly Wikimedia conference Wikimania took place, and while I was not there in person, I was very much participating in the hybrid components of it. In general, it went quite smoothly, and I hope that all future Wikimanias will learn from this to enable more remote participation. This has two advantages. First, people who would otherwise not been able to join at all can join and second, people who would otherwise have needed to fly to go to the conference can enjoy it from their home.

Overview

Following the learning pattern Documenting your event experience, I continuously documented what I was doing, watching and participating in, along with notes of thoughts those brought me. In total, I partook in 77 sessions and organized another 3 myself during the conference. I have later watched another 12 sessions and have 22 still on my backlog, so the conference will stay in my mind for quite some time. I will delve deeper into the different aspects of my Wikimania experience below.

Podcast

This year, I did not do any special interviews like I did in Stockholm but as per Wikipediapodden tradition, we did record one episode leading up to Wikimania and one episode summarizing it. These two are, alas, only available in Swedish.

My sessions

63% done – 365 climate edits

This session, about making a climate related edit on the Wikimedia projects every day for 365 days in a row, was a prerecorded lightning talk, which made it possible for me to be very active in the chat. However, no complex questions there, but at least a few cheers. Hopefully, more people will join in on the campaign as they come back to normal routines after Wikimania.

Add your country to the Wikidata Govdirectory

Here we presented the workflow of adding a new country on the Wikidata side of Govdirectory. It turned a bit chaotic due to no moderation in the physical room and odd use of Zoom rooms, but i think at least it shows the steps in a helpful way. For now, the video is only available in the long stream, I’ll update the blog post when I can embed the video here. We did not use any slides, all the information is on the project page. It was pleasing to see both Bulgaria and Morocco being worked on in the day after the talk.

Livestreaming editing

Perhaps the most fun session of these for me, as it went very smooth, and my panelists were all lovely and professional. We were discussing why we were livestreaming ourselves editing, what we think is the value in it, and gave a few tips. Very meta, and triply so, as this session in itself was livestreamed. Here too, the video is only available in the long stream for now, and we didn’t have any slides.

Wikiproject Govdirectory

Differently from the other Govdirectory session, this was a poster session. It was based on the one I used at WikiCon NL last fall. I’ll include a version below, but you can also view the full pdf. This one was printed in A2 size and displayed in the expo session in the main hall. So far, I haven’t got any feedback from it yet, which I choose to interpret as the information was clear.

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development

While the user group Wikimedians for Sustainable Development didn’t have any particular sessions by themselves, many members were organizing sessions and even more people in the community had sessions related to the sustainable development goals. They were so many that to get an overview for myself, I created a subpage where I roughly categorized them by SDG goal and type of session.

Hackathon

I had hoped to be a bit more productive in the Hackathon, but I mostly got stuck hacking on one function for the new Wikifunctions project. Not that it was that much hacking that I did, but rather since it was a non-trivial, I learned a lot about how the system will work in practice. This feels very valuable, as now I can speak about it with some hands-on experience.

Other sessions

There were far too many sessions for me to get a comprehensive overview of them all. But I did like the high amount. It feels like a very healthy community when there are over 300 sessions of high quality. In hindsight, I also appreciate the many different tracks, as it allowed for many aspects to shine. Of course, I too experienced Fear Of Missing Out, when there were several interesting sessions happening at the same time. It was somewhat mitigated by the knowledge that all the sessions also will be available for eternity, so it boiled down to selecting which sessions I was most likely to interact in. I ordered them for my own overview on my user page. Unfortunately, even though there was a separate chat for each virtual room, there wasn’t always someone available to bridge questions in the chat to the speaker.

Eventyay – the conference platform

It was great to see Wikimania being run on a free and open source platform, Eventyay (and also using Pretalx for the submission process). I am also happy that the event is still available there. It was also great to see developers from the Eventyay project hanging around answering questions and documenting bugs as they were discovered. I found one that they also fixed during the event and made another feature request.

While a huge step forward, there were still some serious issues with selected components. In particular, speakers were connected using Zoom. Not only is it proprietary, but their recent changes in Terms of Service make me, and others, hesitant to use it. I understand that it has a feature for using live translators, but this is an issue we should help solve as it is so important for our movement.

What’s next?

As usual, a Wikimania leaves you with loads of inspiration and ideas. So what will I try to do next?

• The talk Intensive Wikidata usage in Wikivoyage – problems, experiences, wishes (video) showed of an interesting script that can make it possible for users to easily compare the values in an infobox with the values on Wikidata. I will investigate if this is something we can use on Swedish Wikipedia as we have several infoboxes that are able to get data from Wikidata.
• The entire track about the different Wiki Loves campaigns was inspiring, particularly the talk Wiki Loves in Numbers (video), and I will contact Wikimedia Nederland to see how we can get a Wiki Loves Earth going here in 2024.
• Finally, the talk Motivating volunteers and retaining newcomers – case study of Wikimedia Ukraine’s “wiki condensed milk” program (video) was so heart-warming that I would like to gauge the Swedish community what they would think about this and if Wikimedia Sverige might help administer parts of it.

Oh, and I will, of course, go to Kraków next year, as I can easily reach it by train.

08/08/2023-14/08/2023

Mapping

• The ‘adoption’ of roads, paths, or squares is a common practice in the USA and Canada. Partytax has written a proposal on this and has requested comments.
• Voting on the proposal ‘Wheelchair lifts and ramps on platforms‘, proposed by wielandb, ends on Monday 28 August.
• The proposal ‘Extended playground equipment’ by Supaplex030, Tordans, Ygramul was accepted with 51 votes to 0.

Community

• adreamy has started a collection of places that mimic terrain or are shaped like something, for example a peninsula in a park in North Korea that has the shape of South Korea.
• The Turkish OSM community has published a collaborative map on Felt for crowdsourcing. Its imagery layer is more up-to-date based on location. A blog post ► explaining how to contribute is also available.
• jmty8 has done a nice job in repairing a roundabout in OSM.
• KingViks reflected on their journey with the HOT Field Mapping Tasking Manager, gaining invaluable experience in data collection within the Shyira Sector, Nyabihu District, of Rwanda.
• The community has taken OpenStreetMap’s 19th birthday as a reason to congratulate, reflect, and look back in several blog posts.
• Dean Howell acknowledged OSM’s 19th birthday on Neowin with an outlook, ‘As OSM approaches its 20th year, its growth and commitment to providing access to high quality map data is a shining example for other open source projects’.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• You are welcome to join the next monthly video-meeting of the OSMF board that will take place on Thursday 24 August at 15:00 UTC. The video room opens 20 minutes before the meeting starts. The preliminary agenda is on the wiki and is also where the draft minutes will be added.

  The topics to be covered are:

  • Treasurer’s report
  • Secretary’s report
  • Strategic plan
  • Moderators’ recommendation to the Board of Directors
  • Monthly presentation – Map4SaintLucia and/or OSM community in the Caribbean.
• The OpenStreetMap Foundation pointed out the different membership types or donations available to support OSM’s stability, quality, and independence.

Education

• On 12 July Marcel Reinmuth and Alec Schulze-Eckel, from HeiGIT, held a workshop introducing open geodata and its use in humanitarian aid and disaster risk response at the Summer School Disaster Risk Reduction 2023 event hosted by the Environmental Campus of UAS Trier. During the workshop, participants learnt how to visualise and create their own web map by querying and extracting OSM data, and combining that data with other geospatial information. The workshop resources are available upon request.
• The Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology has provided a guide on how to visualise ohsome quality analyst API results in QGIS using the ohsome dashboard.

OSM research

• Lars Reckhaus has examined the suitability of OpenStreetMap for location analyses in the context of residential real estate projects.
• The Big Spatial Data Analytics team at HeiGIT has combined data from their OSHDB and the OSM changeset database to produce a more enriched and comprehensive database for exploring OSM editor statistics. The dataset allows investigation of the number of edits, active contributors and the editing software used for mapping in OSM.
• Sachit Mahajan has published a preliminary article on greenR (Green Index Quantification), an open source R module that uses OSM data to quantify urban greenery on streets.
• The Big Spatial Data Analytics team at HeiGIT has developed, in cooperation with the Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT), a new dashboard for monitoring contributions to OSM in real time called ohsomeNow stats. The dashboard replaces the Missing Maps Leaderboard and provides a comprehensive overview of how much mapping took place at certain mapping events and campaigns.

Maps

• LySioS discovered a type of walking map made in the style of a metro map called Metrominuto in Pontevedra, Spain (we reported earlier). Inspired by that, they have created their own maps and described ► the process in detail.
• Piotr Strębski presented ► their ‘OpenStreetMap for pets’ project – mapping places related to pets: animal shelters, veterinary offices and clinics, animal parks/runs, crematoria, and cemeteries.
• Ilya Zverev shared ► his opinion on present and future map development.

switch2OSM

• David Rutland gave six important reasons he sees to use OSM instead of GMaps.
• The NHVR Route Planner of the Australian National Heavy Vehicle Regulator is now powered by OpenStreetMap.

Open Data

• UndueMarmot analysed the accuracy of Overture’s POI data around their home.

Software

• After a six month development process, Sarah Hoffmann (lonvia) presented the rewritten search frontend now available on Nominatim. She also explained the changes that have been made to the Nominatim API.

Releases

• K.Sakanoshita has improved their Easy Changeset Viewer, which helps visualise OpenStreetMap edit history for a specified time.

Did you know …

• [1] … that amateur radio operators are keen to explore new technologies and mapping is one of them? Many applications make use of OSM, such as the APRS position tracking service with its APRS-Map, which shows the location of KiwiSDR receivers, or the popular Repeater Map, which shows the position of amateur radio repeater stations. But amateur radio operators are not just consumers of OSM, they are also contributors. You can find them everywhere, writing for weeklyOSM, just mapping, or on the OSMF board. So it is not surprising that there are amateur radio features in OSM community projects, such as the optional QTH locator layer, a special geographic co-ordinate system, on the OpenTopoMap. Radio amateurs have also produced their own map to check the propagation conditions on the various radio bands they use.

OSM in the media

• Noraly, aka ItchyBoots, arrived in Ghana and is planning and navigating with OsmAnd.

Other “geo” things

• Michael Grothaus claimed, on FastCompany, that Google Maps has become an eyesore. He outlines five examples of how the app has gone astray.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
	Recording milk churn stands for Ireland’s National Heritage Week 2023		2023-08-12 – 2023-08-20
Salt Lake City	OpenStreetMap Utah Birthday Map Night		2023-08-17
Lorain County	OpenStreetMap Ohio Meetup	✓	2023-08-17
Singapore	OpenStreetMap and Wikimedia: Awesome Together!		2023-08-17	sg
Singapore	Giving Contexts to Places We Love – The Power of OpenStreetMap and Wikidata		2023-08-17	sg
Windsor	Every Door Mapping Party: Walkerville		2023-08-18
The Municipal District of Kilkenny City	Heritage Week Heritage Mapping Clinic		2023-08-17
Zehdenick	Getting started with OpenStreetMap (talk)		2023-08-18
Localidad Teusaquillo	Volvamos a cerrar notas de OSM en Colombia – Notathon		2023-08-19
Hannover	Maker Faire Hannover 2023		2023-08-19 – 2023-08-20
	2nd OSM Delhi Mapping Party		2023-08-20
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2023-08-23
Maricá	Mapathon – Maricá City, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil		2023-08-24 – 2023-09-24
Rapperswil-Jona	14. Mapathon & Mapping Party Rapperswil		2023-08-25
Town of Cottesloe	Social mapping Saturday: Cottesloe		2023-08-26
Localidad Teusaquillo	Junta Bimensual OSM LATAM – Agosto August		2023-08-26
Kalyani Nagar	GeoPune OSM Mapping Party		2023-08-26
Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen (Online)	✓	2023-08-28
Salzburg	Salzburger Stammtisch		2023-08-29
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2023-08-30
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2023-08-30
Localidad Teusaquillo	Volvamos a cerrar notas de OSM en Colombia – Notathon		2023-09-02

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, Nordpfeil, PierZen, SeverinGeo, TheSwavu, TrickyFoxy, adiatmad, barefootstache, derFred, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.