Imagine a world where women’s voices shape the stories we tell online. A world where African perspectives paint a richer picture on platforms like Wikipedia. This is the vision that brought Women for Sustainability Africa and Arts + Feminism together in Accra, Ghana.

Anita Ofori

Women For Sustainability Africa, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting Women Empowerment and Environmental Sustainability, collaborated with Arts + Feminism to host its inaugural Arts + Feminism Event. Thanks to Sadik Shahadu who introduced us and whose support together with Zita Zage regional coordinators for Arts+Feminism guided and supported us to host our first event.

The event was held in Cafe Bar Noir in Accra, Ghana, and drew a diverse group of people who care about sustainability, gender equality, and arts. With 28 attendees, including 25 women, the event provided a significant platform for empowerment and knowledge-sharing.

A highlight of the event was a presentation by guest trainer Ruby D-Brown, who introduced participants to Arts Feminism and the gender gap on Wikipedia. She also demonstrated how Wikipedia and Wikidata can be great tools for knowledge dissemination, changing narratives, and addressing biases about women’s issues. Participants learned new skills such as creating Wikidata items about women and improving existing articles about women on Wikipedia.

Our second guest, Max Beganin, an Open Knowledge enthusiast and Climate activist, presented on how women are affected by climate change and how we can address such knowledge gaps on platforms like Wikipedia. 

Executive Director and Co-Founder of Women for Sustainability Africa, Anita Ofori emphasized the urgent need to address the gender gap on Wikimedia projects and called for greater collaboration to ensure maximum  participation and support for women  in the movement. She also encourage participant to put to work what they have learned and leverage on the existing support that will be provided from time to time.

Participants exchanged ideas and shared their views around the topic and meaningful connections among attendees, united by their commitment to sustainability, gender equality, and the arts. The event  was followed by two virtual practical training sessions on editing Wikipedia.

Here was some of the feedback by participants.

I am excited that by myself I have been able to add a few women on Wikidata during the practical session..- Queen

I have had the opportunity to be at this event to meet other women trying to bridge the gap around sustainability. I had the opportunity to see how Wikidata can help us bridge the knowledge gap by contributing to information around gender and sustainability. We also had the opportunity to learn about Arts + Feminism and how they are committed to bridging the gender gap- Grace

I learnt about Wikipedia and Wikidata and sustainability. With Wikimedia I learnt how to create an article on wikidata. I think we should include women in everything we do. It shouldn’t be one-sided because women are also part of the society. I am currently working on an article  on Wikidata- Ama

I have learnt that Art + Feminism is seeking to bridge the gender gap by promoting gender equality and ensuring a more inclusive Wikimedia community. Now there is not much information on Wikidata talking about women who are contributing to sustainability, climate change and all that. So we want to bridge that gap and make sure we encourage a lot of women to join this project. Thank you. – Vivli

The engagements didn’t end there, all participants were enrolled on our Wikipedia Community WhatsApp group for further engagement. The collaboration between Women for Sustainability and Arts + Feminism created a great platform for women to voice their perspectives and contribute their voices. Together, we can rewrite narratives, bridge gender gaps, and champion women, sustainability, and the arts.

Follow Women for Sustainability Africa on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube for more updates.

Gallery

All photos can be accessed on Wikimedia Commons.

Last week, I had the incredible opportunity to delve into the world of digital rights and inclusivity at the Digital Rights and Inclusive Forum (DRIF 24) that took place from April 23rd to 25th, 2024, in Accra, Ghana, as a Wikimedian and representative of the Global Open Initiative Foundation (GOIF). It was an enriching experience that allowed me to connect with fellow Wikimedians from across the continent, share my knowledge of Wikipedia and its sister projects as well as various wiki communities in Ghana with some participants. I experienced some “aha” moments from the discussions that took place, and that made me happy. Plus, I even had the chance to pick up a new dance move!

Some of the topics of sessions I attended included fostering Trust Online in the Year of Democracy: Lessons on Combating Disinformation on Wikipedia, Artificial intelligence and emerging technologies and their impact on civic space in Africa, Artificial Intelligence for the energy transition, Artificial Intelligence and Disability: Reimagining Technology for a More Inclusive Society, and Digital Rights Advocacy: Mobilizing Communities for Change. Here are some key takeaways from these sessions.

Diversity and inclusion in the digital world are more than just buzzwords; they require deliberate action. True inclusivity means consulting with all relevant stakeholders, ensuring genuine public participation, and not just engaging with a select few who are easily accessible. This includes actively involving people with disabilities in the development and digital tools.

Policies, in general, are essential because they go a long way towards influencing wider adoption, but their effectiveness lies in their implementation and evaluation. Rushing to adopt digital policies without considering the context can lead to unintended consequences. It’s crucial to tailor policies to specific contexts to ensure they address the needs of all communities.

Enforcing digital laws should be a top priority. Those who breach digital rights and laws must be held accountable. Legal action should be taken, and the resulting funds, such as fines, should be used for the common good. This includes ensuring accessibility and inclusion for people with disabilities, thereby contributing to a more just and equitable society.

A speaker mentioned that “technology is good; however, it is the people behind technology that make it bad.” With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), there have been many theories regarding its use, with some in agreement and others in disagreement. Regardless, AI is here to stay, and it’s important for all stakeholders to be well aware of its benefits as well as its risks in order to explore it to its best advantage. During my preparation for DRIF, our lights went out, leaving me agitated due to the lack of a simple timetable to plan accordingly. Then, a random thought struck me: why not recommend to the Electricity Company of Ghana to ask ChatGPT to come up with a timetable for Ghana via a tweet? Little did I know that this thought could somewhat be explored. At the session on Artificial Intelligence for the energy transition, I learned about how AI can be used to provide better supply solutions by monitoring household consumption, among other applications.

Knowledge of digital security and rights is important. It’s essential to educate ourselves about them and share that knowledge with others. As I left DRIF, one question lingered in my mind: are people aware of their digital rights and are they protecting themselves enough? On this note, do check out this course on Assessing your digital security risks.

Over all, DRIF 24 was a call to action. It reminded us that the digital world we’re building should be accessible, inclusive, and protective of everyone’s rights. A special thanks to the organisers, speakers, and participants for making it a memorable event. Events like DRIF 24 remind us of the importance of continuous learning and unlearning. They challenge us to reflect on our practices and advocate for positive change. Let’s keep the momentum going and work towards a digital future that is inclusive, secure, and respects everyone’s rights.

In 2023, Dodoma, Tanzania’s capital city, was the venue for the Wiki Student Summit 2023, drawing participants from varied backgrounds, including students, educators, and visionaries. Against the backdrop of Dodoma’s cultural diversity, attendees actively participated in intellectual discussions and explorations. The event facilitated the sharing of diverse narratives, enhancing insights into editors’ experience. Through debates and discussions, attendees forged connections, promoting mutual understanding and empathy across Wikimedia platforms.

As time moves forward, we extend another invitation to participate in shaping the future alongside us. Our commitment made in 2023 indicates ongoing progress and growth. With the onset of a new era, we are ready to delve deeper into exploration and expand our aspirations. To individuals seeking knowledge and connection, we extend our friendship and assistance. The journey persists, driven by our collective goals. Are you willing to join us on this journey together?

2024 Edition

Get ready to join us in a transformative journey of breaking borders and barriers to progress, as the Wiki Student Summit returns in July 2024 in Arusha, Tanzania. We welcome participants from both Tanzania and internationally, the event promises an unforgettable gathering of intellect, creativity, and ambition in the culturally rich tourism city.

Set against the backdrop of Arusha’s stunning natural landscapes and its status as a bustling tourist destination, the Wiki Student Summit is poised to be a celebration of diversity, dialogue, and discovery. Bringing together scholars, educators, and thought leaders, the event offers an opportunity for exploration, learning, and collaboration. As the summit unfolds in Arusha, it symbolizes a call to action for innovation and progress, highlighting the transformative potential of collective effort. Get ready to be inspired, challenged, and empowered as we unite in pursuit of a brighter, more inclusive future.

As each day passes, there’s a growing sense of anticipation for the upcoming Wiki Student Summit. Acknowledging the importance of clarity and preparedness, we assure you that all details, including dates and venue, will be revealed in due course. Our dedication to transparency ensures that participants will have access to all necessary information, empowering them to plan confidently and enthusiastically for the event.

Be assured, dear friends, that as time progresses, details such as dates and venue for our upcoming event will be disclosed. This will enable you to plan your participation meticulously, envisioning the experiences and connections that await.

Event Theme

Let’s explore the core of our gathering: the theme. “Beyond Borders: Collaborating for Positive Impact” goes beyond words, embodying a significant philosophy and a call to action for transformative change. In a world marked by division, the theme offers hope, pointing towards a future characterized by cooperation, empathy, and mutual respect. It urges us to bridge divides, embrace diversity, and leverage collaboration to build a world of harmony and progress.

Exploring the significance of our theme, “Beyond Borders: Collaborating for Positive Impact” reveals its alignment with the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2030 strategy. This strategic plan aims to make human knowledge universally accessible, transcending geographical, linguistic, and cultural barriers. It emphasizes the value of diversity and the need to create an environment where individuals can listen, learn, and collaborate across various divides. By embracing this approach, we unleash the transformative power of unity, advancing towards a future characterized by cooperation and mutual understanding, fostering an enlightened and inclusive society.

Scholarships and Program Submissions

We are pleased to announce the availability of scholarships from 05th April to 20th May, 2024, offering an important opportunity to aspiring scholars. Stay tuned for updates in our meta page, as we will provide the link to apply for these scholarships. Guided by the belief that knowledge should be accessible to all, regardless of financial constraints, we are committed to enabling every passionate individual to participate in this enriching experience.

We eagerly await program submissions from those passionate about creativity and influencing the summit’s narrative, open from 30th April to 15 June 2024 (submit your session via this link). This is your chance to contribute to the diverse range of ideas, themes, and dialogues that will shape our event. Look out for the link to submit your proposals and let your imagination explore the many possibilities ahead.

Let’s Make History Together

Join us to celebrate the wealth of knowledge available and commit to using it for positive change. It’s a call to action to build connections, foster understanding, and envision a world where education is a universal right. Let’s work together to create a society where every voice is valued, diversity is embraced, and the pursuit of knowledge promotes unity, empathy, and progress.

We sincerely invite you to attend the Wiki Student Summit 2024, regardless of your background or level of expertise. Save the date and spread the word, as this event offers a transformative experience towards a more inclusive future. Let’s collaborate on this journey together, where every voice and idea matters in shaping tomorrow’s landscape.

In March 2024, Wikimedia Indonesia marked a significant milestone. In collaboration with the Swedish Embassy and UNFPA Indonesia, Wikimedia Indonesia celebrated Indonesia Wiki Women’s Month 2024, coinciding with International Women’s Day. This year, the focus of Wiki Women’s Month shifted to the vital topic of Sexual Reproductive Health (SRH), addressing the pressing need for reliable SRH information in Indonesia, particularly for girls and young women. Based on the Indonesian Demographic Health Survey 2017, only 12% of girls and 6% of boys aged 15-24 know where to find SRH information and services; and only half can identify the risks of pregnancy. 

Half of young people consider the internet and social media as crucial sources of information on SRH, underlining the necessity of making SRH information readily available online (UNFPA Asia Pacific, 2021). However, alongside this imperative, there is a pressing need to combat infodemics, characterized by the proliferation of information, including misinformation and disinformation, particularly concerning SRH for girls and young women. Thus, ensuring the availability of accurate and relatable SRH information online becomes pivotal in addressing both the information gap and the challenge of infodemics.

Following extensive discussions with UNFPA Indonesia and in alignment with WikiProject Women’s Health, Wikimedia Indonesia chose this theme. Working closely with WMF and Dr. Netha Hussain, Wikimedia Indonesia curated a list of essential women’s health articles. Additionally, UNFPA’s support enabled the participation of the Community of Practice of SRH youth content creators, who facilitated training sessions on SRH issues and provided reliable resources to enhance the quality of Indonesian Wikipedia articles.

Throughout March, Indonesia Wiki Women’s Month 2024 unfolded with a blend of offline and online events, all geared towards augmenting both the quantity and quality of articles focusing on women’s health on Wikimedia projects, notably Wikipedia and Wikidata. The offline segment, held in collaboration with the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences of Udayana University in Bali, featured a cornerstone event: Bincang Perempuan (Women’s Talk). This gathering saw the participation of esteemed guests, including the Swedish Ambassador to Indonesia and Indonesian SRH experts to encourage public participation in bridging the information gap by contributing SRH information to the digital space, including social media and Wikimedia projects. Complementing this pivotal discussion was a series of Wikipedia editing trainings and Edit-A-Thons on the local languages, enriching the program further.

“Thanks to the collaborative efforts with UNFPA Indonesia, the engagement of the Community of Practice of SRH youth content creators has brought valuable insights to Indonesian Wikipedians, fostering the creation of more precise and gender-sensitive Wikipedia articles”

Dian Agustin, the Organizing Team from Wikimedia Indonesia

On the other hand, members of the Community of Practice also expressed their enthusiasm for the event and their eagerness to contribute to Wikipedia, especially on SRH topics. “I am interested in contributing to writing on Bahasa Indonesia Wikipedia on various gender and women’s issues. And I want to share my articles on social media so that more and more people will get involved in writing and sharing women’s issues on Wikipedia,” said Vevi Alfi, a member of the Indonesian SRH Community of Practice from Mubadalah.id.

At the end of the event, Indonesia Wiki Women’s Month 2024 boasted the creation of 144 new articles and the enhancement of 721 existing articles. This event engaged 220 editors and garnered 57,900 article views. It signifies a significant milestone in collaboration with UNFPA Indonesia. As a follow-up to this collaboration, UNFPA Indonesia will also be presenting at the Wikimedia Indonesia’s annual conference (WikiNusantara 2024), further spotlighting efforts to bridge the gender gap in Wikimedia projects and promoting access to quality SRH information in the digital space for girls and young women in Indonesia. By investing in women’s and girls’ access to knowledge, we build a stronger social fabric and empower them to create a brighter future for all.

Imagine an online encyclopedia where talk pages look like article content. What happens on these pages, besides (sometimes rarely) discussions? You are right: anything you can imagine can be true.

Talk pages are as important as content pages on our wikis, as they allow all users to collaborate on improving the content.  Yet talk pages are misused, not understood as discussion spaces, and, sometimes, not used at all. 

During a cross-wikis discussion in 2019, volunteers of all experience levels reported that the current presentation of wikitext talk pages makes them hard to recognize as discussion places. Volunteers also shared that understanding the conversations happening within these talk pages, and identifying what they need to do to participate in these conversations is unnecessarily difficult. 

The Usability Improvements project by the Editing team at the Wikimedia Foundation aims to help all contributors – no matter their experience level – to communicate more easily on Wikimedia wikis and beyond.  The team’s latest efforts on talk page improvements follow the recent release of talk page permalinks and are now being progressively deployed across our projects.

Four major improvements

Four improvements have been added to talk pages.

Improved heading appearance

We changed how the talk page’s main title, adding a space after “Talk:”, and all section titles look, now using Sans-serif. The goal is to distinguish them from the article’s contents. 

The heading for each topic summarises the overall activity of a given discussion: it displays the number of participants, comments, and the date of the last comment. Clicking on the date takes you to the latest comment on the topic.

Action buttons are emphasized 

The buttons for replying, subscribing, and starting a new topic appear in a bolder typeface, instead of looking like a regular link. The brackets that highlighted these links are removed so that they won’t be confused with in-text links.

At some wikis, if the word “Reply” is only one or two characters (e.g. Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Northern Thai, Cantonese), an arrow highlights the button. 

Soon, new options will be provided close to this reply button, like the possibility of thanking a user for a comment. 

The button for starting a new topic on a talk page is not always easy to find. The “new topic” button has been improved in the Vector 2022 skin: a blue button in the sticky header now shows where to start a conversation. 

An improved table of contents

For Vector 2022 users, the table of contents shows the number of comments within a topic, making it easier to spot the most popular discussion topics. 

Meta information at the top of the page

A breadcrumb with meta-information is added at the top of the talk page. The latest comment added, with a date, is highlighted, as is the topic it was posted in. 

Testing improvements that work for everyone

Changing a design can be confusing for some users. To learn whether the suite of desktop talk page design changes were negatively impacting peoples’ experiences using talk pages, the Editing team conducted two analyses to check how user engagement went, through the revert rate of edits at the talk page, and check on the possible negative impact of the improvements. 

Finding 1: Engagement increases

An initial analysis was conducted at Wikipedia in Arabic, Czech, and Hungarian languages. The Usability Improvements features were made available by default. 

The engagement analysis was conducted to determine the revert rate on discussion spaces: 

• 18% decrease in the revert rate of desktop talk page edits for users with under 100 edits
• 17% percent decrease in the revert rate of desktop talk page edits made with visual editor for all editors.

We know that not everyone likes changes in their editing environment. A way to opt-out the improvements is available at any logged-in personal preferences. Out of curiosity, we also measured the opt-out rate: a total of 48 distinct users across all three participating wikis turned the feature off, over a total of 2,122 users who commented on talk pages using the usability improvements.

Finding 2: the improvements have an impact

Then the improvement was tested at 15 wikis, where 50% of users got the improvements, while the remaining 50% continued using the previous design. The objective of this test was to learn what – if any – negative impact the set of Usability Improvements causes.

• 11% decrease in the revert rate of talk page edits (12.5% for users with less than 100 edits)
• 3.3% increase in completion of posting messages
• 16.7% increase in the proportion of talk page views that included an attempt to edit and 19% increase in the proportion of talk page views that included a saved edit (for users with less than 100 edits)

Soon available at your wiki!

A few wikis already adopted these changes, and it is time for the rest of the wikiverse to benefit from them. We started first with the 15 wikis where the feature was tested, providing these changes to all users. The rest of the wikis will follow, with a specific calendar. A series to follow in Tech News!

Remote companies have to work harder at everything.

The effort goes beyond “remote-friendly”—you need remote culture.

But once you have a remote culture, it’s hard to imagine going back. After nine years of working remotely, the only thing I miss about working in person is seeing people’s messy desks.

My desk

This is my messy office as of today. (No cleaning and no judgments 🥹 allowed when sharing your workspace.)

Some things of note in this picture in no particular order:

• The desk and stuff on it
  • Ikea Markus chair and Trotten standing desk
  • My laptop—Framework 13 AMD
  • Vortex Race 3 Keyboard with Cherry MX clear switches
  • Logitech ERGO rollerball mouse
  • Ugmonk analog – the most straightforward productivity system I’ve found.
  • Field notes expedition edition – “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”
  • Endless recorder notebook – this notebook is slowly supplanting my Leuchtturm1917.
  • Micron 08 pens
  • Elgato wave mic arm with a cheapo Amazon Basics microphone. When you spend all day in meetings, it’s important to sound good.
  • Nikon D610 with 24–70mm f/2.8 lens for video calls
    • The camera sits atop a Manfrotto 244 Variable Friction Magic Arm attached to the desk via Manfrotto super clamp – see how many magic arms you spot on the International Space Station (answer: bunches)
  • The small red things in the foreground are USB data blockers—USB adapters with the data lines removed. I usually keep these in my travel bag.
  • The white cube is an ODISTAR Desktop Vacuum Cleaner.
  • dretec timer, for when I have the will to pomodoro.
  • Post-Its®. So many Post-Its.
• On the shelf
  • Perplexus maze ball held in place by a third-hand kit for soldering
  • My trusty ThinkPad X230
  • Lots of old notebooks and thank you cards
  • On the top shelf are some posters and essential reminders: “DON’T BECOME BITTER AND JADED” and “DON’T LET ADULTHOOD CORRUPT YOU.”
• My overflowing homelab rack
  • Startech 6U wall mount
  • Mikrotik hEX RB750Gr3 5-port Ethernet Gigabit Router
  • Ubiquiti edgeswitch 16
  • Synology DS212—yes, from 2012(!), it’s still kicking thanks to 2×6TB Western Digital Red NAS HDDs.
  • Gigabyte mini PC – 16GB RAM, 1TB NVMe, balancing precariously atop the Synology. The PC runs a handful of VMs: PiHole, HomeAssistant, Grafana, and Prometheus.
  • 2×Raspberry Pi 3B+s doing not much of anything
  • CyberPower CPS1215RMS Rackmount Surge Protector
  • $6 clamp work light with a $60 hue bulb bouncing light off a Neewer 43 in. reflector to light my video calls
• On the floor
  • Home Depot homer bucket, storing my Weaver arborist throw weight and line which is crucial for my job as an engineering manager.
  • A trash can with a lot of dryer sheets
  • An old dog bed

None of these are affiliate links since no one would want to be affiliated with this mess.

On my Wikipedia user page, I keep a list of the Online Communities courses I’ve taught. The capstone project for the course is to make a significant contribution to Wikipedia—the students then reflect on the experience relative to what they’ve learned about online community.

I first taught this in 2014! That’s about a decade of working with the great people at Wiki Edu on 15 courses and ~200 articles. (Thank you Helaine, Brianda, Ian, Sage, Shalor, Adam, and Ryan.) Here are a handful of the excellent contributions from this semester:

• 2023 Paris bedbug infestation
• Bengals’ & Chiefs’ rivalry
• The Mamba Mentality: How I Play
• Chinese New Year customs in Singapore
• Body doubling
• Snapchat dysmorphia
• Undecuple meter

The Movement’s Charter Ambassadors program has contributed to expanding access and dissemination of the Charter, promoting debates about its contents, translations, expansions and improvements in consultations and spaces within the community.

Today, April 30, ends the most recent public consultation campaign and requests for community feedback on the newest version of the Movement Charter, an initiative of the Wikimedia Movement that seeks to define roles and responsibilities of the community and Movement bodies, such as Wikimedia hubs, as well as proposing the creation of a Global Council.

The Movement’s Charter Ambassador program encourages Charter ambassador leaders in their local communities, whether through translation work or by organizing community consultations and conversations with the community. This was the case organized by me for the second time this year. I had already had experience as an ambassador for the Charter in one of its last published versions, and this time the content was much larger and more substantial.

Thus, double consultation work was carried out via an asynchronous consultation form (survey), as well as making myself available to schedule conversations and carry out group debate activities about the new contents of the Charter. My concern and greatest interest in being part of the Movement Charter ambassador program is my understanding of how deeply important the formation of this document and the discussions and resolutions formulated by it is for the direction of the Wikimedia Movement. The Charter sets out to say who is responsible for what, in what way, and under what values, which is very strong in a global, plural and multilingual movement such as the Wikimedia Movement.

In the first initiative I took as an ambassador for the Charter, I did so together with another colleague, and on a smaller scope, addressed to WikiMulheres+, a group of Portuguese-speaking editors. This time, the scope was expanded in terms of scope of action, but reduced in terms of location, focusing especially on the Brazilian community and its relations with the Charter.

The choice to create a survey to consult the community comes from the understanding that an asynchronous contact can contribute to the response rate, as respondents can make their best choice. For the group conversation, it was decided to build a partnership with the Calibra project, Capacitação de Lideranças Brasileiras, which brings together Lusophony wikimedistas, mostly Brazilian people, to hold a virtual meeting to present the Charter and debate its contents. The meeting lasted around 1h 45min and was attended by 11 people, with support from food vouchers for attendance at the event.

In quantitative terms of community engagement, a result well below expectations was obtained. There were 9 responses to the survey, one individual meeting and one group conversation. In total, around 15 people were reached, as some who responded to the asynchronous form were also in the group conversation. Posts were made on the Village Pump and on several user discussion pages, which did not have much effect. However, this seems to be a bigger movement than simply a problem with the Brazilian community, but it demonstrates that there is a gap between the agendas that are dear to the Movement and the communities themselves.

This can be demonstrated by the lack of knowledge that the majority of the community has regarding the Charter. Few know it, and those who do do not understand its purposes and content very well, which in terms of governance and dissemination of content, is a serious problem.

This point definitely shows how important the Charter Ambassadors program is and how important the mobilization effort should be regarding not only the Charter, but the debates on the governance of the Wikimedia Movement. The conversation with the Calibra members proved to be very rich, mainly because it presented the debate on the Charter and the discussions on how the logic of administration of the Wikimedia system and the Wikimedia Foundation itself takes place.

There seems to be a real demand for more formative debates on governance topics with the community, seeking to reach users who are interested in these topics but do not yet know them, as stated by one of the participants in the conversation at Calibra.

I feel very grateful to have been able to play this role and I hope that the Charter’s drafting committee takes advantage of the contributions that will soon be published here, in addition to the comments already present in this text.

Since its launch in 2011 as a community-led initiative, The Wikipedia Library has been giving Wikimedians free access to paywalled research. We now provide access to over 100 paywalled resources with content in more than 33 languages. As the Foundation’s dedicated partnerships manager for the library, I am constantly working with communities and partners to expand and diversify the content in the library. With so many pending, available, and expanding collections, I wanted to start sharing some regular highlights on what’s been going on with the library recently. With that in mind, here are the highlights from the first quarter of 2024!

(To qualify for access to The Wikipedia Library, an editor must be in good standing with the community, have edited for more than 6 months, made more than 500 edits overall, and been active in the last month.)

New partnerships 

Over the last three months we developed partnerships with four organisations, adding a total of six new collections to the library:

• We partnered with British Online Archives in January, providing access to a wide range of primary sources within the humanities and social sciences. This resource was suggested by contributor Rob Kam and attracted 80 upvotes but it was difficult to establish contact with the Archives. Recently, our friends at The British Library (see The British Library Loves Manuscripts on Wikisource) connected us to the right people. Some of the most accessed collections so far include: Prosecuting the Holocaust: British Investigations into Nazi Crimes, 1944-1949; The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News 1874-1970; and India, Uprising and Reform 1879 to 1910. This partner is in the Library Bundle, so their content is available instantly to all eligible editors. 
• Mohr Siebeck is an established academic publisher focused on the humanities and social sciences and based in Tübingen, Germany. Wikimedia Deutschland initiated this conversation and convinced Mohr Siebeck to join the library. This partner is also in the Library Bundle, giving instant access to all eligible editors.  
• Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, is now providing access to their English and Hebrew editions, as well as The Marker, a Hebrew-language business newspaper. These collections are also available in the Library Bundle for all eligible editors. 
• Bristol University Press is providing access to books, journal articles and collections from across the social sciences for Wikimedia editors. This partner is also available in the Library Bundle.

If there is a resource that you would like to see in this list in the future, please suggest or upvote it. 

Extending access

In the last quarter, a few of our partners renewed their partnership, or extended access to more journals and/or volunteers:

• Having joined the library in August 2023 as a pilot, De Standaard, a leading Flemish daily newspaper published in Belgium, extended access for another year. 
• Taylor and Francis, a leading publisher of academic journals, has now extended our access to all their journals. In a press release announcing this update, Martin Wilson, Head of Content at Taylor & Francis, said: “Wikipedia is the first port of call for so many of us when we want to find out about a new topic and Wikipedia editors do an amazing job helping to keep it as accurate and up to date as possible.”
• Finally, one of our most frequently cited resources, British Newspaper Archives and Findmypast, agreed to move to the Library Bundle, giving instant access to all eligible editors. Access was previously limited to just 300 editors for each and had unforeseen complications related to account subscriptions. The EZProxy configuration is in progress for these two collections and will shortly be available in the Library Bundle.

Sharing our progress

In the last quarter, we updated the Suggest partners page in The Wikipedia Library to increase transparency. As suggestions gather more upvotes, we’ll add a linked Phabricator ticket that will allow you to follow our progress towards establishing a partnership. See, for example, the recently closed Bristol University Press Phab ticket. These partnerships can take a long time to materialise, so we appreciate your patience. 

Looking ahead

We recently started a conversation with Research4Life, which provides institutions in low- and middle-income countries with access to around 203,000 leading journals and books in the fields of health, agriculture, environment, applied sciences and legal information. We’re exploring ways we could work together to expand access to paywalled resources. In the meantime, you might find that you already have access to resources via one of their academic affiliations.

I’ll post another quarterly update in July. 

Other languages: Deutsch, English, Ghanaian Pidgin, Tiếng Việt, español, français, italiano, norsk bokmål, polski, português, português do Brasil, svenska, čeština, русский, українська, עברית, العربية, فارسی, বাংলা, 中文

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

• The appearance of talk pages changed for the following wikis: Azerbaijani Wikipedia, Bengali Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, Persian Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, Hindi Wikipedia, Indonesian Wikipedia, Korean Wikipedia, Dutch Wikipedia, Portuguese Wikipedia, Romanian Wikipedia, Thai Wikipedia, Turkish Wikipedia, Ukrainian Wikipedia, Vietnamese Wikipedia. These wikis participated to a test, where 50% of users got the new design, for one year. As this test gave positive results, the new design is deployed on these wikis as the default design. It is possible to opt-out these changes in user preferences (“Show discussion activity”). The deployment will happen at all wikis in the coming weeks. [1]
• Seven new wikis have been created:
  • a Wikipedia in Betawi (w:bew:) [2]
  • a Wikipedia in Kusaal (w:kus:) [3]
  • a Wikipedia in Igala (w:igl:) [4]
  • a Wiktionary in Karakalpak (wikt:kaa:) [5]
  • a Wikisource in Burmese (s:my:) [6]
  • a Wikisource in Malay (s:ms:) [7]
  • a Wikisource in Georgian (s:ka:) [8]
• You can now watch message groups/projects on Translatewiki.net. Initially, this feature will notify you of added or deleted messages in these groups. [9]
• Dark mode is now available on all wikis, on mobile web for logged-in users who opt into the advanced mode. This is the early release of the feature. Technical editors are invited to check for accessibility issues on wikis. See more detailed guidelines.

Problems

• Kartographer maps can use an alternative visual style without labels, by using mapstyle="osm". This wasn’t working in previews, creating the wrong impression that it wasn’t supported. This has now been fixed. [10]

Changes later this week

• The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 30 April. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 1 May. It will be on all wikis from 2 May (calendar). [11][12]

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

On April 19, 2024, Africa Wiki Women hosted the 2nd Inspire Inclusion 2024 Campaign. The online session continues with “major edits on Wikipedia.” The training session was led by Muib Shefiu, the Founder of Afrodemics, and moderated by Linason Blessing. The session attracted over 35 participants, including project leads and community members from Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Tanzania, Rwanda, and the Republic of Congo. Bukola James provided a succinct overview of the campaign, which was followed by a theoretical presentation on performing major edits on Wikipedia.

Key highlights

The session began with Linason Blessing providing a recap of the previous session, the campaign launch, setting the stage for the day’s topic. Muib Shefiu then led the presentation and training on “Major Edits on Wikipedia.” The presentation delved into the essence of major edits, emphasising the significance of going beyond the surface of Wikipedia’s aesthetics to enrich its content with valuable insights.

Muib elaborated that major edits encompass various actions such as creating a new article, adding new sections to existing articles, introducing new headings or subheadings, and modifying narratives. He highlighted essential considerations before undertaking major edits:

• Neutral Point of View: Emphasised the importance of maintaining objectivity by avoiding contentious statements and refraining from presenting opinions as facts.

• Reliable and Verifiable Sources: Muib underscored Wikipedia’s acceptance of references solely from credible sources. He cited examples like national dailies, Peer-Reviewed journals, and published books with ISSN or ISBN as reliable sources suitable for referencing on Wikipedia.

• Notability of Subjects: The trainer elucidated the General Notability Guidelines and Specific Notability Guidelines, providing participants with a comprehensive understanding of the criteria for notable subjects on Wikipedia.

Following this, Muib transitioned to the practical session, demonstrating how to craft a Wikipedia article from inception. He also showcased major edits by adding sections and paragraphs to existing articles. He then guided participants in translating articles from English into other languages, enriching the platform’s multilingual content.

During the transition from the presentation to the practical session, the trainer responded to questions from participants, providing clarifications and insights. He also addressed further inquiries at the conclusion of the practical session.

To conclude the session, Bukola encouraged participants to commence their editing activities and emphasized the importance of completing the attendance form. She also provided a brief overview of the criteria and scoring system, as outlined on the event metapage, to ensure participants’ understanding.

For those who may have missed this session or are interested in revisiting it or previous sessions, recordings are available on our YouTube channel. You can explore more about the project on our meta page and register here to participate in prioritizing Wikipedia articles and Wikidata entries related to the Women’s March in Africa.

• Read the full charter ahead of the call on April 26
• Be ready to share thoughts and ideas in the call, we are happy to share and hear from different perspectives
• You can put your insights on the discussion page

The conversations were successful, the participation were diverse

The first conversation were successful and the participants got the opportunity to learn more about the movement charter

Participants in the second conversation were eager to know more and engaged more .

18/04/2024-24/04/2024

Mapping

• Clay_C discussed the process of mapping pipelines using US government data, specifically from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. He outlined a detailed workflow for using JOSM to download and map pipelines within specific US counties, thereby increasing the accessibility and utility of the data for OpenStreetMap projects.
• Wikimedia Italia has published ► a short tutorial on how to start contributing to OpenStreetMap.
• The proposal for shop=tortilla is up for discussion.
• The proposal to set the key open=* is in the voting phase until Tuesday 7 May.

Mapping campaigns

• OpenStreetMap Belgium is hosting a mapathon on Wednesday 8 May, at 7 PM in the Muntpunt Café, Brussels, with an aim of reducing the number of open map notes in Belgium.

Community

• Branko Kokanovic shared a detailed guide to optimising the use of the Insta360 ONE RS 1-inch camera for capturing and uploading street-level imagery to Mapillary, including tips on camera handling, video splitting, and improving GPS tracking accuracy using software solutions such as Geoapify for map matching. The images can also be uploaded to Panoramax.
• Now that the call for contributions has closed, the State of the Map France 2024 is opening ► their platform for managing proposals for speakers and presentations using the ‘Pretalx’ software.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation’s Communications Working Group has provided an update on how to request support for social media posts or other communications. They have provided a detailed template for submissions aimed at streamlining the process of promoting community stories and events on OSM’s official social media channels.

Events

• FOSSGIS e.V. is currently seeking locations for the 2026, 2027, and 2028 FOSSGIS conferences. Interested parties have until Sunday 30 June to submit their applications via email, as detailed in their Call for Location document.
• The IVIDES Institute will be hosting ► an online workshop on the mapping of waterways in OpenStreetMap on Friday 10 May, at which Séverin Ménard (UN Mappers/UNGSC) will be participating. The call for registration is open ► and details can be found on the event page.
• The State of the Map US 2024 will be held at the University of Utah 6 to 8 June. Registration is now open and the conference programme has been announced.
• Swiss OpenStreetMap will hold a presentation and discussion on the upcoming report from the SBB and BAV (Bundesamt für Verkehr) on use of OpenStreetMap on Thursday 2 May from 5 to 6 pm.

Education

• Anne-Karoline Distel showed, in a short video, how you can support OpenStreetMap by capturing public notes.
• The IVIDES Institute held ► an event on importing points of interest into OpenStreetMap. Dr. Raquel Souto commented ► about this workshop in her diary, saying that she included, as an example, a subset of the 2022 Brazilian Demographic Census’ official data.

Maps

• The Agroecology map currently shows and describes 541 locations worldwide where ecological principles are being applied to agroecosystems. The same information is also available through an Android app.
• bopjesvla has developed Tiny World Map, a world map designed specifically for web applications that prioritise offline functionality and operate efficiently with limited bandwidth.
• Christoph Hormann explored potential future trends in map design within OpenStreetMap, critiquing the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s historical and current map rendering strategies. Hormann highlighted the challenges and limitations of the transition to vector tiles, which reduces operational costs but shifts a significant amount of data processing to the user side, potentially complicating map design and data management. The discussion also highlights the tension between technological efficiency and creative control over map design.

OSM in action

• Jacek Gęborys has created several maps visualising the accessibility of railway stations in various major cities. He used QGIS with OpenStreetMap as a source for the stops, in particular with the Overpass API, which allows you to automate the fetching of data and GraphHopper for calculating isochrones.
• The Russian OSM community has noticed that the mobile application lessy.app is using OSM data rendered in the style of Yandex.Maps.
• euroPathfinder and Barthwo, two active mappers, took part in the seminar ‘Route 3.0 and OpenStreetMap’ at the invitation of the Saarland Tourist Board ►. In their blog post euroPathfinder briefly presented ► Thomas Froitzheim’s seminar, in which Saarland tourism experts were trained to check the correct mapping of hiking and cycling tour routes in OSM. The tools used were uMap, BRouter Web, GPX Viewer and WayMarkedTrails.

Programming

• Rtnf has archived the OpenStreetMap help website before its planned shutdown.

Releases

• GraphHopper version 9.0 has been released. It comes with an improved GPX export, updated translations, many bug fixes, more route hints, and conditional access information.
• Aerosoft and Thera Bytes have launched a new PC farming simulation ‘Global Farmer‘, which lets players build farms anywhere in the world using OpenStreetMap data, incorporating real agricultural parameters and challenges.
• Roland Olbricht has announced the release of Overpass Version 0.7.62, including newly completed documentation on the user_touched filter and museum (attic) data, along with a detailed component overview for local server instances.

Did you know …

• … about the tools that allow you to select a bounding box, on a reference map, through a visual interface?
• … that the OpenStreetMap wiki has an A to Z to help you figure out how to tag objects?
• … that the Changelog page, on the the OSM wiki, documents recent changes to tagging strategies, listing new tags that have been added, modified, or deprecated?
• … that it is possible to create a city map with the help of OSM data? No? MyOSMatic is the solution for you!
• … that you can generate a specially styled OpenStreetMap-based map for the purpose of surveying an area by utilising RenderMyMap?

OSM in the media

• [1] ZDNet reviewed ► Panoramax, the digital commons platform, sponsored by IGN and OpenStreetMap France, which offers a free alternative to services such as Google StreetView. It features nearly 18 million terrain view photos contributed by various entities and aims to provide an open, decentralised system for sharing geolocated, ground-level photos under free licences that can be used for various applications, including urban infrastructure management.

Other “geo” things

• Wikidata’s ‘Coordinate Me 2024’ is an international competition taking place in May that encourages participants to improve or create new Wikidata items that have a coordinate location property, focusing on a variety of countries to improve global data coverage.
• swissinfo.ch explored the significant contribution of Swiss cartography and a Swiss entrepreneur, Samuel Widmann, to the development of Google Maps. It highlights Switzerland’s long tradition of detailed and accurate mapmaking, which laid the groundwork for the creation of global geodatabases and ultimately influenced modern digital mapping technologies. The story also details how Swiss innovations in map accuracy and aesthetics were crucial before Google acquired Widmann’s company, Endoxon.
• Google Maps is rolling out new features with the intention of addressing the common concern of locating charging stations, which are of interest to the owners of electric vehicles.
• Pierre Blanchet, from Meteory, has developed a machine learning model to monitor hedges across France by using aerial imagery.
• An article on TradingView explained the concept of mapping on a blockchain and discusses its potential to improve the accuracy, privacy, and security of geographic data compared to traditional GPS systems by using decentralised methods of data verification and storage. The article does not include the obligatory xkcd cartoon.
• ORBIS, the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World, is an interactive tool hosted by Stanford University that simulates the logistics of travel and communication in ancient Rome. It allows users to calculate travel times and costs across various routes and modes of transportation, such as roads, rivers, and seas, based on historical data and geographic models.
• Actueel Hoogtebestand Nederland (Current height data Netherlands) provides an interactive viewer of detailed topographic data covering the Netherlands with approximately 950 billion measurements. This tool allows users to explore a high-resolution point cloud of the Dutch landscape, offering visualisation options such as height, intensity, reflections, and feature classification.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Aachen	5. Treffen Aachener Stammtisch 2.0		2024-04-25
Potsdam	Radnetz Brandenburg Mapping Abend #6		2024-04-25
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2024-04-26
Prishtinë	Kosovo TomTom Editing Party		2024-04-26
Bengaluru	OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party		2024-04-27
	OpenStreetMap visual impaired accessibility initiative – kickoff (online)		2024-04-27
Fianarantsoa	State of the Map Madagascar		2024-04-28 – 2024-04-29
Brno	Missing Maps Mapathon at the Department of Geography		2024-04-29
Fianarantsoa	OSM Africa April Mapathon – Map Madagasikara		2024-04-30
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-05-01
Dresden	OSM-Stammtisch Dresden		2024-05-02
Essen	FOSSGIS-OSM-Communitytreffen 2024 Nummer 20		2024-05-03 – 2024-05-05
Bochum	OSM-Workshop		2024-05-05
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #64		2024-05-06
	Encontro OSM Brasil (online)		2024-05-08
	Missing Maps London Mapathon		2024-05-07
München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2024-05-08
Lorain County	OpenStreetMap Midwest Meetup	✓	2024-05-09
Bruxelles – Brussel	Notes meetup		2024-05-08
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2024-05-08
Rio de Janeiro	Oficina de mapeamento de waterways no OpenStreetMap – YouthMappers UFRJ		2024-05-10
Mainz	OpenStreetMap-Stammtisch Mainz		2024-05-11
	SotM Asia 2024 monthly meeting		2024-05-11
Zürich	163. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich		2024-05-13
Grenoble	Réunion groupe local Grenoble : Panoramax – L’alternative libre pour photo-cartographier les territoires		2024-05-13

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, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, derFred, euroPathfinder, mcliquid, renecha, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Wikimedia UK is seeking volunteers to help with the organisation and running of the 2024 Wiki Loves Monuments competition, which will run again this year in September.

Wikimedia UK have participated in the international photo competition since 2013, where participants upload images of listed buildings & scheduled monuments to Wikimedia Commons. The UK has a 4-nation competition, and then submits the top images to the international competition. In 2023, over 13,000 UK images were uploaded to the competition.

There’s a variety of different opportunities for community members to be involved in the competition, from small tasks to bigger ones, and we’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in joining the team!

There’s lots of ways to get involved, depending on your skillset and your availability.

Smaller tasks

• Categorising and sorting images during the competition
• Screening images before the judging process

For those with a little more time

• Producing web content to promote the competition

For those who’d like a bigger project to work on

• Reviewing and updating the data on Wikidata
• Running small events to engage people in the competition

Running the competition (behind the scenes work)

Reviewing & updating the data on Wikidata before the competition starts. The competition relies on lists from heritage bodies in Scotland, England, Wales & Northern Ireland. A good deal of data already exists in Wikidata, but there may be additional sites to add, sites to remove or re-categorise, and the quality of the data generally could be improved:

• This work needs to take place before the competition kicks off in September, so could be worked on between May-August. 
• We have some suggested workflows and ideas for checking and improving the data, but are also open to ideas! We’re looking for people who have some degree of familiarity & comfort with Wikidata, including bulk upload / editing and data modelling. We can also provide training in OpenRefine if volunteers would like to use that tool. 
• Ideally we’d like to put a small team of volunteers together to work collaboratively on this part of the project, rather than one person being expected to do everything. We’re happy to work with folks’ availability, but as a general guideline we’d like to start this process in May, and be finished by the start of August. (If we finish earlier that’s a bonus! But we want to offer flexibility.) 
• We’d also like to have regular check-in meetings (probably on zoom), and would be available to help, coordinate and answer questions throughout.  

Helping to categorise and sort images during the competition itself:

• When images are submitted to the competition, they’re placed in the main country category, however they do need to be checked, and it can be helpful if additional data can be added.
• We’re looking for a group of volunteers who would be happy to check in on the category for multiple days during the competition, and check around a dozen images each time. This is a role where all contributions would be very much welcomed, whether that’s one day or ten days!

After the event, screening images before judging:

• When it comes to judging we have two main stages. The first stage is preparing a long-list of 100-200 photos for the judging panel to look over. We need as many volunteers as possible to check over images to make sure they’re eligible and grade them. Each image is seen by multiple people. This takes place in October and sometimes November – each volunteer contributes a couple of hours.

Public engagement with the competition

We’d love to have more voices producing website and social media content about the competition:

• Would you like to write a blog post to advertise the competition, about what heritage means to you? Record a couple of minutes of audio on why you took a picture of a particular building? Make a short video about participating in the competition? Please get in contact if you have ideas!
• We’d like to have some content available to post in August in the run up to the competition, as well as to post throughout the competition in September.  We’re very happy to chat about ideas for content, as well as scheduling.  

Running small events to engage with the competition:

• In the past, we’ve run photo walks paired with a Wikimedia Commons training / upload session, and it would be great to have at least one of these running in each part of the UK. We’re looking for folks who could be event organisers or trainers to make this happen. 
• This is a bigger task, and we have some funding available to support volunteer grants for items such as venue hire, admin time, and travel expenses (around £250 per event).
• There’s a lot of scope for creativity in how these events would run – you could partner with a local library or museum, a meetup group or a group of students, for example. 
• These events should take place in September (ensuring that all uploads were made in time to be eligible for the competition), but planning would need to start in July to allow for advertising & marketing time in August. 

If you’re interested in any of these volunteer opportunities, please fill in this google form, and we’ll be in touch to organise a chat!

The post Call for volunteers for Wiki Loves Monuments 2024 appeared first on WMUK.

By Lucy Moore, Archeologist, Curator and Wikimedian

Between 15th and 17th March 1974 a ground-breaking transgender rights conference was held in Leeds. Entitled ‘Transvestism and Transsexualism in Modern Society’, it was the first conference organised by trans people to address their needs. To mark the 50th anniversary of the conference, Leeds City Museum hosted a day of recognition and celebration organised and curated by Leeds-based artist and activist GossipGrrrl. 

As part of the programme, volunteer Lucy Moore led a short workshop introducing people to Wikipedia editing. With only an hour’s slot in a packed programme, which included performances of music by Leeds-born composer Angela Morley to celebrate her centenary.

In preparation for the event, Lucy started an article on English Wikipedia for the conference, which featured in the Did You Know … section on 16 March, and was swiftly translated into Spanish by User: MiguelAlanCS. Muchos gracias!!!

The group had a short introduction to what Wikipedia is, basic guidelines, and a short demo on how to add content. It was then straight over to the group, with the goal of getting a few people to make one edit! Our good intentions were scuppered by an IP bloc, but many avoided it, and were able to start making changes. This included adding references to the conference to a range of pages, including: 

• Beaumont Society
• Leeds Beckett University
• University of Leeds
• Della Aleksander

One attendee, who’d previously done some noble work de-orphaning articles, started a new page for the American organisation Full Personality Expression, a precursor of the Beaumont Society.

While we edited, one attendee mentioned how when she was transitioning, Wikipedia was one of the first places she went for medical information, but that there were many gaps. This was especially true for health and social care. These include no mention on the page for dementia about the challenges that trans people can face when diagnosed and as the disease progresses. Neither are trans women mentioned in pages for prostate or prostate cancer (which can cause issues for trans women as well as cisgender men) nor for cervical screening (trans women may receive invitations for screenings). Nor is there information available, apart from on Reddit, about how hormones prescribed for trans people interact with medication for epilepsy. 

The group also talked about the need for lived experience to be better represented on Wikipedia. One way we discussed how this might be addressed is through media uploads to Wikimedia Commons of images and/or oral histories in audio or film. 

We were really fortunate to get financial support from Wikimedia UK, which paid for transport costs for some participants, as well as some gorgeous stickers! Leeds City Museum provided tea and coffee for us too. Feedback included: 

“I think it’s really important to preserve our history, especially since Wikipedia is such a widely used resource.”

“It was lovely to meet and chat with other like-minded people!”

One month on…

Together, we work to ensure that Wikimedia reflects the world in all its diversity. Your support makes this possible, donate today.

The article begun for Full Personality Expression was featured in the ‘Did you know ..?’ section on the front page of English Wikipedia

Inspired by how images can illustrate lived experience, Lucy also met up with new editor Katie to show her how to upload pictures of LGBT events she’s attended to Wikimedia Commons. Here they are, still smiling, after two hours of editing!

The post Making trans histories public with Wikipedia appeared first on WMUK.

From randomized control trials to years of intensive content analysis, the featured scholars in our most recent Speaker Series webinar brought a range of research studies and findings to answer our two-part question, “What can we learn from Wikipedia and how do we move it forward?”

Wikipedia can shape the world, not just reflect it, according to research by panelist Neil Thompson, director of the FutureTech project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Our experimental studies about Wikipedia have demonstrated the ways Wikipedia content makes its way into other knowledge production systems,” said Thompson, who led randomized control trials to examine the impact of Wikipedia content on scientific publishing and case law. In both studies, Thompson’s findings were clear: Wikipedia content influences real-world decisions and behaviors – in the case of his research, the decisions made in a court of law or in the development of scholarly publications.

“Because of Wikipedia’s scope, and how it is used and trusted, it has a lot of effect on the world,” said Thompson. “It’s pretty exciting, but it also speaks to the importance of getting the content as right as we can.”

Panelist Kai Zhu’s own research curiosities led him to explore how editing Wikipedia articles generates more attention paid to those articles and related articles, and the role of hyperlinks in driving this process.

“Wikipedia is not only a collection of textual content, but it is also a network of knowledge,” said Zhu, an assistant professor at Bocconi University, who emphasized the importance of the hyperlink structure of Wikipedia. “When there is a new link created, not only will more people read the linked article, but it also brings more content contribution because of that visibility.”

When panelist Shira Klein jumped into a Wikipedia talk page discussion in 2018, she never predicted it would lead to a two-year collaborative research study and a subsequent publication with nearly 55,000 views and counting. 

“The skirmish [on the talk page] was the tip of the iceberg,” said Klein, associate professor of history at Chapman University, who joined a debate between editors to support the citation of “Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz,” a book published by Princeton University Press and Random House in 2006. This experience led Klein to discover a group of editors working systematically to simplify and distort Holocaust history on the English-language Wikipedia.

In her research, Klein found that misleading information about Jews in Poland has been added to Wikipedia despite its policy violations, noting how the organized efforts of groups of editors to maintain the misinformation can lead to unchecked distortions in articles.

Along with her co-author, Klein studied 25 public Wikipedia articles and nearly 300 back pages, including noticeboards, arbitration cases, and talk pages. Together with interviews with editors and statistical data from Wikipedia, the analysis demonstrated how the addition of content that violates Wikipedia policies can evade scrutiny, leading to distortions and misinformation.

“One thing I’m curious about is what other areas on Wikipedia have this burning issue,” said Klein. “Is there a correlation between the amount of disinformation on a topic and the amount of dispute it has triggered on Wikipedia?”

For more than ten years, panelist Rosta Farzan has studied the social experience of new Wikipedia editors, including why people begin to edit and what helps them not only continue to edit but also contribute higher quality content to articles. According to Farzan’s research, intentional socialization practices for new editors can lead to their long term engagement with Wikipedia. 

Farzan, an associate professor in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, emphasized the positive impact of the structure and support provided by Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program. 

“The students feel proud of working on Wikipedia articles,” said Farzan. “Newcomers who join through classes are more likely to continue editing on Wikipedia compared to other comparable newcomers. They write more, they write better quality, and they stay on Wikipedia longer.”

Interested in hearing more from the panelists and other featured scholars? Catch up on our Speaker Series programs on YouTube and be sure to join our next webinar, “Wikipedia and Education, globally”, on Tuesday, May 14, 10 am PDT / 1 pm EDT.

🕑 1 hour 28 minutes

Dr. Moritz Schubotz (developer username Physikerwelt) is head of research at the mathematics department at FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure. He is the author or co-author of the MediaWiki extensions Math and MathSearch, and the Mathoid application, among others.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Dr. Moritz Schubotz CV and publications
• Math MediaWiki extension
• MathSearch MediaWiki extension
• MathML Wikipedia article
• MathJax Wikipedia article
• Mathoid
• The MaRDI (Mathematical Research Data Initiative) Portal (Wikibase instance)
• zbMATH Open
• Wikimedia Community User Group Math

O Pacto Digital Global é uma oportunidade única e crucial para moldar nosso mundo digital de uma forma que promova o interesse público e apoie o desenvolvimento sustentável para todas as pessoas, em todos os lugares.

 
Nós, as pessoas signatárias desta carta aberta, apelamos aos Estados-Membros da ONU para que adotem uma visão positiva para um futuro da Internet que apoie e empodere comunidades diversas em todo o mundo para criar e operar projetos de conhecimento livre e aberto. Os projetos da Wikimedia, incluindo a Wikipédia, a enciclopédia on-line, disponibilizam para o mundo o maior repositório livre e aberto, multilíngue, intercultural e universalmente acessível de materiais educacionais já criado. Os projetos da Wikimedia geridos pelo voluntariado têm formado um ecossistema liderado pela comunidade que defende a integridade da informação. Estes projetos servem como infraestrutura pública digital para conteúdo enciclopédico, neutro e de licença aberta em mais de 300 idiomas.  

A experiência de mais de duas décadas da Wikipédia nos ensinou que a Internet precisa ser aberta, global, interoperável e inclusiva para poder servir a toda a humanidade. Para isso, três compromissos essenciais devem ser incluídos no texto do Pacto Digital Global:

*Para assinar a carta, por favor, preencha este Formulário do Google. Para detalhes sobre como as informações que você compartilha neste formulário serão tratadas, consulte esta declaração de privacidade.

Co-signatários

The post Carta aberta para proteger a Wikipédia e outros projetos de interesse público no Pacto Digital Global appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.

There’s been a recent surge in news reports about schools, including those in Kerala, incorporating AI into classrooms. For example this news titled “Kerala School Introduces IRIS: India’s First AI Teacher Robot” Today, I learned about a teacher training program organized by the Kerala Education Department. The program focuses on training teachers before students on AI tools. While I generally support teacher training on new technologies that can potentially improve teaching or save time, I’m curious about the specific problems AI is expected to solve.

 Last week I went to Portland for the MediaWiki Users and Developers conference (nee EMWCon). This is primarily a conference for people doing stuff with MediaWiki outside of Wikimedia. I had a blast.

I always enjoy conferences on the smaller side. They feel so much more personal. This year's conference had Ward Cunningham as the guest of honour. Ward was a fascinating person to meet and get to talk to.

I also must say hats off to the organizers - conference ran smoothly, venue was great, food was amazing. Seriously some of the best food I've ever had at any Wikimedia conference.

This was also my first time in Portland. Portland is a beautiful city. I didn't have a huge amount of time to explore the city, but I did manage to go to the Chinese garden, which was absolutely stunning. I also loved how many interesting murals there were in the city. Even the graffiti seemed prettier than normal.

 

I think my favourite talk was Jeffery's. He demo'd using LLMs to answer questions based on the content of the Wiki. The demo deities weren't fully in his favour, but I think it also demonstrated an important point that LLMs are cutting edge technologies that don't always give the expected answer 100% of the time. In any case, he did a great job presenting.

I did get the sense that I think some participants were disappointed that there was very little representation of WMF management (whether "real" management or product management) at the conference. Birgit did give a remote talk and Selena did come to a happy hour event after the conference, but neither really participated.

I don't think the participants necessarily wanted anything from WMF management, but there is a little bit of a feeling of being unseen. Many of the conference goers use MediaWiki for their own purposes and are interested to know what WMFs plans are for the future and how it will affect them (as do we all).

I think some participants were hoping to maybe make some connections for better mutual understanding and just reduce uncertainty about what is on the roadmap for MediaWiki. In theory Birgit's talk was about the plans for MediaWiki, but I suspect it was too laden with annual planning corporate buzzwords for anyone to figure out what it actually meant concretely.

The flip side of that of course is that open source is a do-orcracy. The corporate MediaWiki users as a general rule do not contribute back to MediaWiki core all that often, which is the price of admission to the various power structures of MediaWiki.

Create Camp

23 April 2024 — Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, along with 12 Wikimedia affiliates, published an open letter calling on United Nations (UN) Member States to include commitments in the forthcoming Global Digital Compact that can allow online public interest projects, such as Wikipedia, to thrive. By protecting these projects and the communities that create them, the international community can ensure that the digital environment advances sustainable development and human rights.

The Global Digital Compact, which is being developed through a consultation process involving governments, the UN system, the private sector, civil society, grassroots organizations, academia, and individuals, aims to “outline shared principles for an open, free, and secure digital future for all.” It is the most comprehensive attempt ever at creating a vision for a shared approach to governing digital technologies. Set to be agreed at the Summit of the Future in September, this compact among UN Member States will help structure the future of digital cooperation and regulation for many countries around the world.

The letter released today highlights how Wikipedia’s community-governed model can serve as a roadmap for a better internet. Wikipedia is made and maintained by a global community of over 265,000 volunteer contributors who set and enforce policies to ensure that information on the platform is fact-based, neutral, and attributed to reliable sources. Over the last 20 years, Wikipedia’s human-centered content moderation model has established an unparalleled resource for reliable information in over 300 languages; its 62 million articles are viewed more than 15 billion times per month worldwide. Volunteers vigilantly defend against information that does not comply with the rules that they themselves have established and agreed upon. Furthermore, their volunteer-led process of content moderation is open and transparent. 

Wikipedia is also the only website in the top-ten most-visited global websites to be run by a nonprofit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation. The letter’s signatories, which include the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia affiliates, are calling on the drafters of the Global Digital Compact to include three key commitments that can help ensure an open, global, interoperable, and inclusive internet upon which public interest projects such as Wikipedia, and the people who create them, depend:

1. Protect and empower communities to govern online public interest projects. 

Free knowledge projects such as Wikipedia should not be rare. UN Member States should — through regulation, public policy, funding, and other resources — support a world where diverse online communities can build and govern their own public interest projects, designing them to be equitable and contributing to a healthier online information ecosystem. 

2. Promote and protect digital public goods by supporting a robust digital commons from which everyone, everywhere can benefit.

Digital public goods such as Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects aim to make multilingual and intercultural information freely accessible to everyone. A thriving public domain that enables the sharing of free and openly licensed content for everyone to use and reuse is key to advancing many Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

3. Build and deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to support and empower, not replace, people who create content and make decisions in the public interest.

AI and machine learning tools should support, and not replace, the work of humans. They should be designed and deployed in a manner consistent with international human rights standards, ensuring clear and consistent attribution. Such tools should also ensure participation and control by affected communities through transparent, accountable, and open processes.

Read more about these commitments in our open letter.

“As the world’s largest repository of human knowledge online, Wikipedia powers today’s digital knowledge ecosystem. It is one of the most important sources for training Large Language Models, and much of the information available from internet search engine results, voice assistants, and more comes from content on Wikimedia projects,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, VP of Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation. “Through the Global Digital Compact, we have the opportunity to safeguard the best of the internet — open, community-led online spaces that are built in the public interest. We’re calling on UN Member States to embrace these three commitments. In doing so, they will not only protect Wikipedia; they will protect the right of communities anywhere in the world to build new online projects that serve the public interest in a manner that is responsible, ethical, and inclusive.”

“The Global Digital Compact represents a critical moment for everyone who contributes to and cares about Wikipedia to shape and safeguard the internet we desire,” said Patricia Díaz Rubio, Executive Director of Wikimedia Chile, one of a dozen Wikimedia affiliates to sign onto the letter. “We urge other Wikimedia affiliates and volunteers to seize this opportunity to secure a global agreement that protects and empowers online communities, promotes digital public goods and commons, and harnesses the transformative power of emerging technologies in a way that serves the public interest.”

The publication of today’s open letter builds on efforts from the Wikimedia Foundation over the last two years to help shape the Global Digital Compact, including input into a number of consultations and a comprehensive written submission in April 2023. 

Organizations and individuals committed to supporting the future of online public interest projects are encouraged to sign the letter*in support. To learn more, see this blog.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

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

For media inquiries, please contact press@wikimedia.org.

About Wikimedia affiliates 

Wikimedia affiliates are a global network of groups that support Wikipedia, Wikimedia projects, and the mission of sharing free knowledge globally. They range from more formally established groups, like chapters, which often have their own staff and governance systems, to more informal groups of volunteers, such as user groups. There are currently 188 Wikimedia affiliates around the world.

*To sign the letter, please complete this Google Form. For details on how the information you share in this form will be handled, see this privacy statement.

Related content

Open letter to protect Wikipedia and other public interest projects in the Global Digital Compact

Sign the letter

Visit our Advocacy page and learn more about our initiatives

Learn more

The post Wikimedia Foundation and global communities call on UN Member States to protect Wikipedia and other public interest projects in the Global Digital Compact appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.

The Global Digital Compact is a unique and pivotal opportunity to shape our digital world in a manner that advances the public interest and supports sustainable development for everyone, everywhere. 

We, the signatories of this open letter, call on UN Member States to embrace a positive vision for the internet’s future that supports and empowers diverse communities everywhere to build and operate free and open knowledge projects. The Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, provide the world with the largest free and open, multilingual, intercultural, universally accessible repository of educational materials ever created. The volunteer-run Wikimedia projects have formed a community-led ecosystem that champions information integrity. They serve as digital public infrastructure for openly licensed, neutral, encyclopedic content in over 300 languages.

Wikipedia’s experience of over two decades has taught us that the internet needs to be open, global, interoperable, and inclusive in order to serve all of humanity. To that end, three essential commitments should be included in the text of the Global Digital Compact:

*To sign the letter in your individual capacity, please complete this Google Form. For organizations wishing to sign, please get in touch with us at csciubbacaniglia@wikimedia.org. For details on how the information you share in this form will be handled, see this privacy statement.

Co-signatories

Related content

Wikimedia Foundation and global communities call on UN Member States to protect Wikipedia and other public interest projects in the Global Digital Compact

Read more

Visit our Advocacy page and learn more about our initiatives

Learn more

The post Open letter to protect Wikipedia and other public interest projects in the Global Digital Compact appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.

11/04/2024-17/04/2024

Mapping

• [1] Christoph Hormann demonstrated his work during the recent Karlsruhe Hack Weekend to improve the way addresses and entrances are displayed. His modifications include more differentiated entrances icons and a new address rendering strategy. Alternative styles are available in the repository on GitHub.
• Sven Geggus has re-activated his unique map of campsites in OpenStreetMap that have been mislabelled, which had been offline for two years. It shows campsites that mistakenly contain other campsites.
• SeverinGeo argued that terrain and highway mapping is better suited for beginner mappers than building mapping, due to its relative ease and the limited availability of high-quality satellite imagery for buildings.
• The vote on the extended tagging of traffic_sign was cancelled and the proposal withdrawn. Up to this point, there had been 8 votes in favour, 26 against, and 4 abstentions.

Mapping campaigns

• GoWin wrote about a craft mapping campaign with students from the University of Bohol, Indonesia. The on-site observations were recorded on fieldpapers. The georeferenced photos, collected with OpenCamera, were uploaded to Panoramax.
• The Hub de Mapeo Abierto, from HOT, organised an outdoor mapping party in Medellín as part of #OpenDataDay.
• Contrapunctus offered practical advice on organising OpenStreetMap mapping parties, highlighting key areas such as choosing safe and practical locations, effective announcement and invitation strategies, necessary equipment, and efficient teaching and mapping techniques.

Community

• C-RadaR discussed ► various topics in their April edition:
  • Anna, from netzpolitik.org, addressed the inclusion of children in discussions on IT security and encryption.
  • Oliver, from the German Amateur Radio Club, detailed a training weekend for emergency radio communications.
  • Tobias, along with weeman, explored developments in the StreetComplete app, designed to improve OpenStreetMap data.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OSMF provided details on the timing and effect of the shutdown of OAuth 1.0a and HTTP Basic Auth on OpenStreetMap.
• The Board of the OpenStreetMap Foundation will meet for two days in Frankfurt on 26 and 27 April 2024. Topic suggestions for this meeting can be submitted via the forum.
• The OpenStreetMap Foundation blogged three reasons to join the OSMF as a member:
  • You can nominate to serve as a member of the OSMF Board and influence the strategic plan and some of OSM’s finances.
  • You can vote in the annual Board elections, as well as on other foundation initiatives.
  • To help grow and diversify the OSM membership worldwide.

Events

• France’s national cartography institute is launching ► a major cartography competition, in which participants are invited to use the BD TOPO ► to create a cartographic, computer graphic, or artistic narrative on the subject of France’s territorial continuities and disparities.
• Cyberjuan introduced the programme and academic programme committees for SotM Latam 2024 ►, to be held on 7 and 8 December at the Instituto Federal do Pará in Belem, Brazil.

Education

• GOwin facilitated a workshop in Iloilo, Philippines, to train local disaster agencies in field mapping.
• The IVIDES Institute has held a short course on collaborative mapping with OpenStreetMap, which focused on disaster risk reduction (DRR) for civil defence employees from several states of Brazil. Dr Raquel Souto commented ► on this training in her diary, saying that she has written a preliminary list of features related to DRR and their corresponding tags.
• Carston Hernke explored sourcing data to map parcel lockers in Berlin. He covered data from Overture Maps and OpenStreetMap, using DuckDB to query and convert the data, and preparing to visualise the mapped data.

Humanitarian OSM

• OSM India, in collaboration with OSM West Bengal and OSM Jalpaiguri, has launched a mapping project to map all sorts of roads and buildings along the estimated path of the 31 March tornado.
• Supaplex discussed the use of three OpenStreetMap projects to map areas affected by the 2024 Hualien earthquake in Taiwan. These initiatives will focus on mapping buildings, roads, and waterways to aid recovery and rebuilding efforts. They will consider donating recent satellite imagery to improve mapping accuracy. There are also plans to organise on-site mapping events to support local communities once conditions have stabilised.

Maps

• On 14 April at 17:08 UTC, TheRukk, who is most likely a mapper based in Italy, uploaded changeset 150 million to OpenStreetMap. In this changeset, he used the StreetComplete editor to clarify the road surface of the section of road at the intersection around the Porta San Felice gate, Bologna.
• Last week we reported on the migration of the Deutsche Post locations map from a market competitor to OpenStreetMap. Daniel-j-h has taken a closer look at the technical solution used to build the map and published his analysis on Mastodon.
• Christoph Hormann discussed the history of digital map design, highlighting that while digitalisation has brought significant benefits such as increased efficiency, and accessibility to a wider audience. It has resulted in a considerable loss of design skills and cartographic techniques, many of which had been developed and refined to very high standards in earlier centuries.
• Christoph Hormann reviewed the evolution and diversity of map design within the OpenStreetMap community, examining various projects and styles that highlight both historical developments and current trends in cartography, focusing on different regional and technical approaches to map design.
• juminet tooted the new symbol renderings for Belgian businesses such as breweries and chip shops.
• Christopher Beddow explored the evolution of cartography in an article on unstructured reality, discussing how modern mapping techniques, such as the use of digital twins and symbolic maps, blend empirical data collection with symbolic representation to both capture and abstract reality, enriching our interaction with geographical information systems.

OSM in action

• PamPam has provided tools for creating simple, interactive maps that allow easy customisation and sharing of maps to enhance interactive geographic storytelling.
• Rihards Olups presented some real-world applications of OpenStreetMap, including:
  • A fire department that used OSM to map all the houses and fire hydrants in their area and uses OsmAnd to find the nearest hydrants and determine the best routes.
  • A rescue dog handler who has created their own OSM leaflet app to plan their missions.
• ls65536 has developed a virtual sailing navigation simulator that uses real geographical and near real-time weather and ocean data. It also has the ability to set up races to compete against others.

Software

• Michel Stuyts has created a user script that adds an OpenStreetMap link to Google search results for geographic locations in the European Union, following the changes in March 2024, when Google removed such links to its own maps.
• rtnf has built song lyrics that capture the essence of OSM well. Musically, this could be quite exciting, as this AI prototype shows. Surely we have musical mappers who can do this by people for people? But the choir? A task for the upcoming SotM perhaps 😉 JOSM also has its own song.
• Kamil Monicz talked about the recent improvements and future plans for his OpenStreetMap-NG project. Highlights include faster GPS trace uploads, new trace editing features, and easier navigation. Kamil also mentioned upcoming features and thanked community members and sponsors for supporting the project.
• Ilya Zverev, the developer behind well-known tools such as EveryDoor and Level0, has reminded us of his browser plugin for the fast editing of tags in OSM (we reported earlier). This plugin allows tags to be corrected much faster, without the loading times of the iD editor, and eliminates the need to copy URLs into Level0.

Programming

• Sam Woodcock from HOT described, in his diary, how the new ODK entities, introduced into the ODK field data collection Suite in 2023, can be used to track OSM objects, collect information about these and eventually update OSM tags for these objects.The HOT Field Mapping Tasking Manager example (background OSM map without attribution) shows how a Server and a Mobile tool from the ODK suite are used to coordinate field teams and collect data from the field. These two tools are available free and open source for any organisation that wants to deploy its own server. Paid hosted services are also available.
  • The ODK Central server stores survey data and lets teams coordinate field data collection. Entities can be stored with geometry and properties.
  • The Android ODK Collect application can be used offline to collect data in the field.

Releases

• OsmAnd 4.7 has been released for Android and iOS. The Android version comes with faster offline navigation, extracted route tags from OpenStreetMap data, and OAuth 2.0 for OSM login. The iOS version has a redesigned tracks menu (long press to upload changes to OpenStreetMap) and many new widgets.

Did you know …

• … the Babykarte? This is a map showing relevant POIs and information for parents and guardians of infants and toddlers (0 to 3 years of age).
• … that if you see outdated map tiles on OpenStreetMap then reloading the page without cache might help you?On Windows and Linux this can be done using the keyboard shortcut CTRL+F5, on macOS CMD+SHIFT+R (or CMD+OPTION+R for Safari). In Firefox for Android, hold down the page reload button.If these keyboard shortcuts are not available to you, then open the site in a private window (incognito mode).
• … that there is a wiki page with a detailed guide to mapping North Korea using satellite imagery? This guide focuses on various elements such as transportation, land use, and specific structures such as buildings and monuments. It also offers specific tagging recommendations for contributors to ensure accurate and standardised map entries, and discusses the challenges of mapping in a region with limited local data contributions.
• … the Open Brewery Map? A map that shows all the breweries mapped in OSM.
• … that you draw a circle with a specified radius around a point on the map by using this tool?

OSM in the media

• Anne-Karoline Distel has completed an extensive photographic survey of Kilkenny City, capturing 360° street-level imagery that is now available on Mapillary. This volunteer effort, supported by a European Camera Grant from Meta, aims to improve OpenStreetMap data by focusing on areas accessible to pedestrians and cyclists.

Other “geo” things

• The city council of Barcelona has organised the removal of a bus route from Google and Apple maps. This decision was made in response to resident complaints about being unable to return home due to the bus being constantly filled with tourists on their way to Park Güell, the city’s second most popular attraction after the Basílica de la Sagrada Família.
• In episode 229 of the Geomob podcast, Steven interviewed Sean Wiid about UP42, a geospatial marketplace that simplifies access to commercial geospatial data and processing algorithms. UP42 aims to address the issues of complexity and fragmentation in the earth observation and geospatial industry. Sean explained that UP42 is a user-friendly platform, which differentiates itself from competitors by focusing on providing an accessible interface and API for customers.
• You can learn how to use GeoParquet with Apache Sedona to improve Overture Maps data efficiency. This tutorial explains how GeoParquet improves spatial operations and data interoperability.
• The Overture Maps Foundation has released a first beta version of its global open map dataset, which integrates multiple open data sources and includes 54 million points of interest and 2.3 billion buildings. The dataset is designed to complement OpenStreetMap by providing users with a ready-to-use geospatial dataset.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Rio de Janeiro	Oficina de importação de POIs no OpenStreetMap, a partir de um arquivo de pontos – YouthMappers UFRJ		2024-04-19
	Arricchire i dati di OSM con i linked open data: impariamo a usare QLever		2024-04-20
臺北市	OpenStreetMap Taiwan x Help.NGO Crisis Mapping for Hualien Earthquake mapathon		2024-04-22
	iD Community Chat		2024-04-24
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)		2024-04-24
Wien	71. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch		2024-04-24
Aachen	5. Treffen Aachener Stammtisch 2.0		2024-04-25
Potsdam	Radnetz Brandenburg Mapping Abend #6		2024-04-25
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2024-04-26
	OpenStreetMap visual impaired accessibility initiative – kickoff (online)		2024-04-27
Fianarantsoa	State of the Map Madagascar		2024-04-28 – 2024-04-29
Brno	Missing Maps Mapathon at the Department of Geography		2024-04-29
Fianarantsoa	OSM Africa April Mapathon – Map Madagasikara		2024-04-30
Dresden	OSM-Stammtisch Dresden		2024-05-02
Essen	FOSSGIS-OSM-Communitytreffen 2024 Nummer 20		2024-05-03 – 2024-05-05
Bochum	OSM-Workshop		2024-05-05
臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #64		2024-05-06

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 MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, darkonus, derFred, euroPathfinder, mcliquid, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Wiki Education kicked off the month in Chicago, where four political scientists from across the country joined Scholars & Scientists Program Manager Will Kent for a panel discussion at the 81st annual Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) conference.

For refugee resettlement expert Shyam Krishnan Sriram, participating in the panel, “Being a MPSA Wiki Scholar: Sharing Political Expertise on Wikipedia,”  was an opportunity to break from his typical engagement with the conference.

“The MPSA is an important conference and I have attended a dozen times in the last two decades,” said Sriram, assistant professor of political science at Canisius University. “When it was suggested to come together as a panel, I jumped at the chance because this professional development side of the conference is important to me – not just presenting original research.” 

Reflecting on their experience as participants of a recent Wiki Scholars course, each of the four scholars noted the importance of editing Wikipedia as a strategy to combat misinformation, particularly during the 2024 election year. Panelists also initiated conversations about the role Wikipedia can play in disseminating research, its relationship with artificial intelligence and large language models, and the challenges of biases against Wikipedia. 

“We agreed during the panel that the number one challenge was a vast amount of misinformation about Wikipedia and its legitimacy as an academic source,” noted Sriram. “We still have a lot of work to do!”

Panelist and doctoral student at the University of Georgia Yao Yao agreed, underscoring the importance of educating academics and students on the immeasurable value of Wikipedia.

“As a PhD student, I believe it’s crucial to challenge the notion that students should be discouraged from using Wikipedia,” said Yao, an American politics scholar. “Instead, we should educate them on how to leverage its benefits effectively.”

From her first day in the Wiki Scholars course, Yao was drawn to the “inclusive and collaborative nature” of the Wikipedia community, embracing the chance to question her assumptions, gain practical skills in content creation, and join the worldwide group of editors dedicated to sharing knowledge. 

“One aspect of the course that particularly resonated with me was its emphasis on overcoming bias and fostering confidence in editing Wikipedia,” said Yao. “I also appreciated the opportunity to learn the intricacies of article editing, even though some processes seemed complex initially. The course provided valuable guidance on editing various elements such as images and charts, which has expanded my skill set and deepened my understanding of content creation on Wikipedia.”

An idea championed by panelist Muhamad Hassan Bin Afzal, visiting professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Service at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, the group plans to collaborate on a writing project which will examine the topics they discussed at the conference.

“The participants were so fun, engaged, and curious, and we’re even in talks about developing a paper for publication,” said panel chair Jacqueline M. Keil, assistant professor of political science at Kean University.

Wiki Education staff also engaged with all MPSA conference attendees from our booth in the exhibition hall. Both Kent and Wiki Education’s Communications and Outreach Coordinator Colleen McCoy connected with political science experts from across the globe, sharing information about our upcoming Wiki Scholars & Scientists professional development courses and the opportunity to teach with Wikipedia in our Wikipedia Student Program.