The 35th episode of Wiki Africa Hour titled Does the Wikimedia Movement Contribute to the SDGs?; Ruby Damenshie-Brown hosts a discussion with various Wikimedians about the movement’s role in achieving the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The conversation explores community-driven projects that support sustainability and identifies ways to enhance participation within Wikimedia communities. Guests share their personal motivations for engaging with SDGs, highlighting key initiatives like WikiFocus Environment, and examine challenges faced by different User Groups in promoting awareness and action toward these vital global goals. 

The WikiAfrica Hour In Focus segment was an Inspiring Open interview by Donia Domiaty with Ruby Damenshie-Brown.

“When we are working with SDGs, we are working for us and also for the future.” – Emmanuelle Guebo Kakou

“I think there is more that we can actually achieve in Wikimedia than just contributing and adding articles. There’s a very huge social aspect to it. So the fact that it came and brought people together …  we still see different people, different cultures, different types of people contributing to Wikimedia. [This] is contributing to a very large aspect of SDG16, [which] is one of the first that I see really working within the community.” – Romeo Ronald Lomora

Guests included:

Jan Ainali, Wikimedians for Sustainable Development UG

Active since 2006, founder of Wikimedia Sverige, and former chairman and executive director. Co-founded Wikimedians for Sustainable Development and runs a Swedish Wikipedia podcast. Named Swedish Wikimedian of the Year in 2021, and leads Open By Default consultancy.

Emmanuelle Guebo Kakou, Wikimedia Cote d’Ivoire

A contributor since 2014, Emmanuelle engages in content creation, training, and event organizing. Active in open-source, she worked on the Creative Commons translation team and served as a Wikipedia trainer for the EmpowerHer campaign by Code For Africa.

Sandra Hanbo, WikiForHumanRights Arabic ambassador

Coordinator for a user group of 50+ members, handling administration and finances, with two years’ experience. Master’s student in Info-bionics engineering, skilled in Python, Matlab, C#, and mechanical engineering software.

Romeo Ronald Lomora, WikiForHumanRights podcast coordinator

Committed to making expert information accessible, Romeo leads Open Knowledge South Sudan. He supports initiatives on Wikimedia, OpenStreetMap, and podcasting to foster collaboration on issues like human rights, education, and climate change.

This WikiAfrica Hour episode’s guest host is Ruby Damenshie-Brown

Ruby is an open knowledge advocate and Wikipedian since 2019. She is the Anglophone Africa Regional Coordinator for the WikiForHumanRights campaign and co-founder of Africa Wiki Women, with a focus on gender equality and climate action.

WikiAfrica Hour is a monthly live broadcast where Africa’s Wikimedians talk to, learn from and explore topics related to the Wikimedia movement in Africa. It is a production of Wiki In Africa to support the development of the Wikimedia movement across Africa.

Episode notes:

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development- Meta

Africa Environment Programs 

Category:AKI Africa Environment 2023 – Wikimedia Commons

WikiForHumanRights – Meta

WikiForHumanRights/Join Community Events – Meta

 Shortcutting the Identify topics for impact.webm 09:37 video/webm

Campaigns/Organizer Lab – Meta

| WikiLearn

As we continue our series of interviews with key figures for the #SheSaid 2024 campaign, we are thrilled to introduce Masana Mulaudzi, a prominent member of the feminist movement from South Africa. Currently serving as the Senior Manager of Campaigns Programs at the Wikimedia Foundation, Masana has been at the forefront of advocating for gender equality and empowering marginalized voices.

Could you tell us about yourself?

My name is Masana Mulaudzi, and I am currently the Senior Manager of Campaigns Programs at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that supports Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. I am from Johannesburg, South Africa, where I live with my beloved daughter Elikia. I am an active contributor and volunteer in the feminist movement globally, and for the past 15 years I’ve been working to support and build up the resiliency of global movements to respond to some of the great challenges and opportunities of our time through the lens and ethic of mutual care and solidarity. 

Could you tell us about your role as Senior Manager of Campaigns Programs at the Wikimedia Foundation and how it intersects with initiatives like #SheSaid?

The #SheSaid campaign is one of the most exciting campaigns in our movements, to elevate and make visible the intellectual contributions and thought leadership of women around that world. #SheSaid contributes to building up a knowledge base that reflects the contribution women make to society globally, which is often overlooked.  The Wikimedia Foundation’s Campaigns Programs team supports organizers in our movement to build and scale the impact of their campaigns to address knowledge equity. We hope to support #SheSaid through providing access to tooling and programme design support, collaborations and resources that can advance knowledge equity (and gender equity specifically). Over the past year, the Campaigns team has focused its efforts on providing programmatic, tooling and strategic support to organizers working on the gender gap. We hope that through this support, we can support our movement in growing the content, contributors and solidarity for gender gap efforts going forward. 

What strategies does the Wikimedia Foundation have in place to ensure more inclusive and diverse campaigns, both in terms of content and participation?

We have many streams of work devoted to advancing knowledge equity, inclusion and diversity. We welcome everyone who shares in our mission, and believe that “[t]o build the sum of all knowledge, we need to embrace human diversity.” Our inclusive practices cut across all Wikimedia Foundation workstreams and priorities. Below are a few examples:

Our values, the Movement Strategy, and the consultative annual planning process form the bedrock of our strategy to support inclusivity and diversity in our movement and our work. 

In line with these guiding documents and principles, over the past few years some of the work we have supported to advance inclusion and diversity, includes:

• The Organizer Lab, focusing on gender and sustainability, to advance targeted support to organizers looking to improve their skills and practice for community engagement.
• The Inclusive Product Playbook  is used by our Product teams to check if their practices welcome members of the community with diverse experiences, ensure their processes and practices are inclusive and equitable.
• The provision of community resources for campaigns focused on the recruitment and retention of newcomers from diverse backgrounds in our movement.
• The co-facilitation of movement learning spaces, such as Let’s Connect, to ensure broad engagement and knowledge sharing across our community of volunteers.
• Consultative annual planning discussions, engaging across regions and in multiple platforms to hear from different community members on our collective vision and mission for the work of the Foundation. 

In your view, how has the #SheSaid campaign contributed to addressing gender gaps on Wikimedia platforms, particularly Wikiquote?

I believe that #SheSaid is an important knowledge equity campaign in our movement in the gender domain and bridging the gender gap for contributors.

It has become a pillar of inclusive campaigning in our movement. Their focus on easier-to-access projects like Wikiquote, facilitating editing and contribution activity makes it easy for new contributors to participate in our movement. What do you see as the biggest successes of the #SheSaid campaign since its inception, and how does it align with Wikimedia Foundation’s broader goals?

As mentioned above, the focus on accessible tasks for newcomers and experienced editors drive our ability to close the gender gap in contributors and content. The Wikimedia Foundation is committed to advancing gender equity in our movement, and #SheSaid has helped us understand the best orientation of tasks for contributions in the gender gap space. 

What role does the Wikimedia Foundation play in supporting grassroots efforts like #SheSaid, and how can local organizers leverage Foundation resources for greater impact?

The Foundation provides an array of support to campaigns like #SheSaid. We hope to be able to support the campaign organizers at the grassroots level access, shape and utilize improved campaign tools like the event registration, event invitation, and collaboration list. Beyond this, we continue to provide community resources to organizers and applicants who meet the minimum criteria. Moving forward, we hope that #SheSaid grassroots campaign organizers will access ongoing support from the Foundation in campaign design, peer learning spaces and partnership activation.

What metrics or indicators does the Wikimedia Foundation use to measure the success of campaigns like #SheSaid?

The Foundation does not directly measure the success of campaigns like #SheSaid, unless these are captured in grant applications that include metrics that applicants provide to us. Nevertheless, we are following metrics in content creation, newcomer activation, diversity and participation. 

How does the Wikimedia Foundation support the creation of content in underrepresented languages, especially when it comes to documenting women’s voices?

We provide support to multilingual content creation through the development of tools and processes that can increase the ability of community members to translate content for their local audiences. For example, this year the Foundation is exploring a hypothesis to make translation-related recommendations to editors on crucial topical areas – to ensure that a broader spectrum of contributors can close knowledge gaps.

From a leadership perspective, what challenges have you encountered in fostering gender diversity across Wikimedia platforms, and how have you addressed them?

Our movement is representative of the many challenges with advancing gender equity that exist in society. Mainstreaming gender-inclusive norms and practices is synonymous with addressing structural challenges: 

• making the contributions and documentation about notable women and non-binary people visible, as well as the topics that they care about;
• addressing the need for safe and welcoming spaces for women and non-binary people to contribute online; 
• collectively addressing harmful norms and beliefs about women and non-binary people (and their role in society); 
• and making it a shared priority of all Wikimedians to facilitate gender diversity and inclusivity.

As with the African proverb, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time”, addressing gender equity requires that we take incremental, but meaningful and accountable steps towards our goals. Last year, we spent significant time listening and experimenting with different tools, programmatic and strategic approaches including supporting the WikiWomen Summit at Wikimania and the WikiWomen Camp. This year, we want to ensurevthe strategic gains taken last year are representative of the diversity of women and non-binary people in our movement, and that the strategic priorities identified include as many voices and shared ownership as possible. Other priorities include ongoing efforts to support organizers working on gender to access tools and programme support, community resources and peer learning spaces to advance their work.

What is your favorite women-empowering quote?

One of my recent favourite quotes is by American poet, Audre Lorde: “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

Read more about the campaign and the fifth edition in our #SheSaid 2024 Launch diff and don’t forget to follow us on social media:

• Website: www.wikiloveswomen.org
• Twitter: @Wikiloveswomen
• Instagram: @WikiLovesWomen
• Facebook Page: @WikiLovesWomen
• Facebook Group: Mind The Gender Gap
• Telegram Group: WikiGenderGap

Strategy

I created a first draft of the strategy for 2030 by moving the ideas we came up with at our last meeting. It’s not fully fledged, but perhaps it is good enough to provoke a reaction, or to see what is missing when we get down to annual planning.

Newsletter

While not packed with content, I did manage to get a newsletter for October sent.

Social Media

This month, after a discussion I initiated, we opted to deactivate the Twitter account @wikisusdev: Internet Archive.

On a more constructive note, I also engaged a new moderator in the Facebook group. I truly hope to be able to get more people involved like this, by taking on quite small tasks. Not only will it unburden me, but my ambition is that it will increase the sense of belonging, community and agency in the process and development happening in all these ends.

This is the second half of my ninth report of my New Year’s resolutions.

This year’s Wikimedia CEE Meeting was held in Istanbul from 20–22 September under the slogan “A Bridge to Knowledge!”. There was a record attendance of 195 participants from more than 40 communities and affiliates, including delegates from closely associated communities outside of the region of Central and Eastern Europe, who had the opportunity to learn from each other, share experiences and exchange ideas. The conference took place at the Museum Gasworks.

Changes and novelties

The main novelty in this year’s conference was the introduction of demonstrations as a new session format. At past conferences, many speakers used the lecture format to demonstrate a tool, a workflow or a programme. However, a lecture proved to be too short and insufficient to meet the requirements of one such session, so it was necessary to introduce a new format with a longer duration. The demonstration format was introduced for the first time at Wikimania 2023 where it was positively accepted.

Other changes this year were the abandonment of language intepretation from English into Russian and vice versa due to the low benefit against the high cost from the previous year, the move of the main social event from the evening of the second day to the evening after the closing ceremony so that participants do not find it difficult to attend the sessions of the last day, and the admission of delegates from Iranian Wikimedians User Group as an affiliate representing a neighbouring regionally unaffiliated like-minded community.

A brief recap of the conference

As usual in the past, a pre-conference Learning Day took place on 19 September, which consisted of workshops on group facilitation, capacity building and brief introduction to the Wikimedia movement. The main part of the conference followed in the period 20–22 September. It consisted of numerous talks in the format of lectures, workshops, demonstrations, panels, roundtables and lightning talks that were held in three parallel tracks across halls named after the largest cities in Turkey—Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. There were also several plenary sessions, and a couple of posters were displayed in the venue. All sessions were documented on etherpads and recorded, while the sessions that were held in the Istanbul hall were live-streamed on YouTube via the Wikimedia CEE channel.

The conference began with a video documenting Wikimedia CEE Meeting’s chronology. Afterwards, the chair of the organising committee Zafer Batık welcomed participants, followed by Başak Tosun from the programme committee, Nataliia Tymkiv as chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees and Erkan Saka from Istanbul Bilgi University. Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia Foundation’s CEO Maryana Iskander prepared pre-recorded talks as well. During the opening session, it was announced that Thessaloniki had been selected as host city for Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2025. Shortly after the opening ceremony, Barbara Klen, Toni Ristovski and Philip Kopetzky from the CEE Hub presented an overview of the current state of Wikimedia Central and Eastern Europe. The rest of the programme covered a wide range of topics in the thematic areas of technology, education, GLAM, partnerships, outreach, governance, strategy, research, advocacy and others. Sessions that attracted particular attention were those pertaining to the artificial intelligence in relation to the Wikimedia movement. The programme also included a one-session board training aimed at improving governance within affiliates and an interactive workshop with deliberations on the future of CEE Hub’s programmes. At the closing of the conference, Mārtiņš Bruņenieks of the Latvian community was announced as a celebrated Wikimedian from the CEE region.

Outside of the main programme, a four-hour boat tour along the Bosphorus Strait, which included a dinner and a party, was organised on the evening of the last day. The boat embarked from Kadıköy and sailed to the Bosphorus Bridge before returning back. During the tour, participants had a nice sunset view of the historical peninsula as well as Karaköy and Beşiktaş neighbourhoods with close approaches to the Dolmabahçe Palace, Çırağan Palace and Ortaköy Mosque.

What comes next in the CEE region?

In the upcoming twelve-month period, the CEE Hub will continue to support the CEE communities through the implementation of its annual plan. At the end of November 2024, the second in-person meeting of the Youth Group will be held in Prague. The preparations for next year’s Wikimedia CEE Meeting have already started, and the conference is planned to take place in Thessaloniki in September 2025.

The Fante Wikimedians Community participated virtually in WikiIndaba 2024, an annual regional conference that brings together African Wikimedians and enthusiasts from across the continent to collaborate, learn, and advance African Wikimedia initiatives. The conference, hosted in Johannesburg, South Africa, from October 4–6, 2024, marked its 10th anniversary. While some attendees received scholarships to attend in person, others joined via live-streamed sessions.

On the second day of the conference, October 5, 2024, the Fante Wikimedians Community organized a virtual participation session at Duapa-Workspace in Takoradi. The event lasted from 9:20 AM to 1:45 PM and included presentations and discussions focused on Wikimedia projects across Africa, emphasising expanding African languages in the digital realm.

One of the key highlights was the live-streamed “Wiki Women’s Lunch” in the Injabulo Room, led by Ruby Damenshie-Brown and Jael Boateng from Open Foundation West Africa. This session, which started at 9:30 AM, provided valuable insights into effectively engaging women in community projects and promoting inclusivity.

Another significant session was a conversation on “Governance Models in Africa’s Wikimedia Movement” held in the Ubuntu Room. Panelists included prominent leaders from various African Wikimedia communities, such as Isla Haddow-Flood (Wiki in Africa), Donatien Kangah (Wikimedia Cote d’Ivoire), Sandister Tei (Wikimedia Ghana), Dumisani Nduabane (Wikimedia South Africa), Geoffrey Kateregga (Wikimedia Uganda), and Sadik Shahadu (Dagbani Wikimedia). During this 60-minute session, each panellist shared their unique experiences and challenges, offering insights into effective governance models within the Wikimedia movement.

Despite some challenges with internet connectivity, the virtual event was a success. It gave the Fante Wikimedia community an invaluable opportunity to engage with the larger African Wikimedia movement, deepen their knowledge, and acquire new skills to further promote Fante Wikipedia and African language projects.

Wikidía is the annual meeting of the Wikimedia movement in Colombia, which brings together volunteers from different regions of the country with the aim of strengthening ties, overcoming political-administrative boundaries and collectively building projects that promote the democratization of knowledge. At Wikimedia Colombia, aligned with our institutional principles and values, we have put people and communities at the center of our work. With the interest of expanding our reach beyond the administrative centers, in August 2024 we decided to hold the event simultaneously in four territories: Riohacha, Medellín, Bogotá and Leticia. 

This year’s version, in addition to bringing the vision of the Wikimedia movement to the four territories, also sought, together with the people of the community, to create a space to listen and desing -that is, to design and dream- the future strategy of Wikimedia Colombia. In the different venues, dreams and discussions arose on topics such as the democratization of knowledge, the challenges of connectivity in the territories, the dissemination of heritage and the recognition and appreciation of local knowledge. Of course, the environmental issue was present in the dreams of several venues, as well as the vindication of the conuntry’s linguistic diversity on the Internet. Something that surprised us at Wikidía was to see how education was positioned as a transversal component in all the discussions, together with topics such as accessibility to knowledge, and the strengthening of the community.

The routes and collective constructions of the four territories are a fundamental part of Wikimedia Colombia’s ‘Dreamsign (soñar-diseñar in spanish) posible futures’ strategy, which have been put in dialogue with the diverse realities of the territories in which we are located in Colombia. We recognize social inequities, climate change, the advance of technological developments based on artificial intelligence, as well as our linkage with the recommendations of Wikimedia Movement and its strategy for 2030, the Sustainable Development Goals and national initiatives in areas such as education, culture and their intersection with technology. We  will soon share more information about our strategy at this link.

In this publication, the Wikimedia Colombia team will collectively share what happened in each of the Wikidía 2024 venues and also the conclusions and lessons learned from the community meeting designing the future of Wikimedia Colombia. At the end we will share the graphic narratives of each venue.

Riohacha Venue

This venue brought together the Caribbean node, so the participants came from different sectors of the Department of La Guajira (Maicao, Manaure, Punta Remedios and Riohacha), from Barranquilla, and two people from the Department of Bolivar.

The initial dreams were consolidated into five dimensions linked to thematic areas such as education, culture, environment, technology and human rights. Finally, as a collective we dreamed of connectivity in intersection with culture and education, as well as the decentralization of knowledge. 

These dreams are linked to the challenges and interests of teachers, activists, members of LGBT collectives, as well as cultural managers who are in the territory, and who propose practical solutions for the integration of technology and education as drivers of change, as well as paths with an interest in the decentralization of knowledge and equity.

In short, being able to dream together with the community allowed us to approach a deeper understanding of local needs, and to consolidate a shared vision of a more connected future, in which Wikimedia Colombia has a fundamental role in the transformation of the territories

Medellín Venue

The Medellin venue focused on fostering the meeting between the long-standing community and interested people with less experience in the Ecosystem. Thanks to this, we were able to connect with other free software communities, research groups in digital sciences and humanities, among other people who contributed from their perspectives and work experiences in the Colombian Andean region.

Dreaming the future of Wikimedia Colombia together with people who are just joining the movement was a great challenge: to think the organization beyond the Wikimedia tools and adapt its principles to a local context. We dream of a country where the democratization of knowledge and free access to information strengthen the paths we can walk together.

These paths highlighted the importance of rurality and the communities that live in those areas. We focused on different strategies to build knowledge from the knowledge of these communities, proposing new conversations about the need to open spaces that amplify their voices.

The crossovers between the dreams that emerged highlighted the importance of the recognition of fundamental human rights and the urgency of conceiving media education as a solution to balance representation in digital ecosystems.

Bogota Venue

In Bogota, 23 people linked to WMCO participated with high expectations to meet, for the newer ones, and to meet again for the older ones. Reflecting on the future of the country motivates us to contribute to its development, creating tools to support children, building bridges between indigenous, rural and urban communities, and ensuring the protection of local culture. Despite the challenges ahead, we look to the future with hope and see opportunities to build together paths to overcome them. More than one hundred dreams were shared on culture, education, technology, nature and economy for this country of the future. It was a great effort, but we managed to focus on five of them.

We dream of developing digital technologies created from the needs and capacities of the territories. With sustainable food landscapes where diverse ways of seeing and being in the world can listen to each other. We imagine a country where knowledge is available in the 68 native languages that Colombia still has. We also dream of plural educational spaces, where teachers and students learn from each other and from the world, supported by technology. We dream of a country where the multiple expressions of culture are recognized with equal value and bridges are built between local, regional and national culture.

Thanks to this meeting we discovered a shared interest in influencing at the local level, favoring access to tools that meet the particular needs of regions and communities, but we also discovered that we want to influence from the local level, generating spaces of creation where these regions and communities transform epistemes, technologies and relationships based on their knowledge. We also learned that WMCO is seen as a catalyst for encounters: we are bridges that connect different social sectors, different ways of understanding the world and diverse initiatives.

Leticia Venue

The Wikidía of the Leticia branch had nine participants, who were organized into four groups respectively: environment, culture, technology, education and human rights. Within each group there was a dream rain to imagine the future of the next three years.

The dreams revolved around knowledge about the Amazon and the challenges in terms of appropriation of knowledge by children and young people in the territories; the documentation of the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Amazon, as a contribution to the visibility, recognition and appreciation of the heritage we have as a country; the construction of contents that represent local knowledge and traditions, and that are aligned for the visibility of more inclusive narratives and the preservation of the linguistic diversity of the territory; finally, facing the challenges of access and high school dropout rates, we dream of developing strategies that allow us to circulate educational materials that allow access to both teachers and students of content relevant to their context.

This version of Wikidía leaves us with important reflections related to issues of access, both to the Internet in areas far from the administrative centers in the country, as well as to education, culture and technology. Developing processes in the Amazon involves management and mobilization of wills, given that in addition to the challenge of access to the territory, so is the configuration of Colombia as a centralist country. Therefore, from WMCO we identified that the realization of processes in the Amazon, requires the mobilization and establishment of alliances within and outside the Wikimedia movement, in addition to a high investment in resources, since the territorial processes in rural areas have taught us that there are no short-term results, but we need to consolidate processes that can be sustained over time and be appropriated by the communities.

We thank all the people who participated in Wikidía 2024 in its four venues, designing possible futures for the Wikimedia movement in Colombia. Click here to see the best images of Wikiday 2024 on Wikimedia Commons or on our Instagram account @wikimediaco

In Leticia: Tania Yimara, Abel, Ivonne Andrea, Andrea Claire, Yohana Alexandra, Daniela, Gory Hernando, Gabriel Bernardo, Sergio Andrés and Pilar.    

In Medellín: Carlos Alejandro, Iván Camilo, Juan Sebastian, Jhon Alexander, Juliana, Lorena, Maria Paulina, Almary, Paola, Mariana and Ana María.

In Bogota: Cristhian, Diego, María Xue, Profesora Sara, David, Juan Pablo, Nathaly, Jerson, Vladimir, John, Manuel, Luis Fernando, Hector, Karo, Leonardo, Pilar, Martha, Luis, Wilson, Margarita, Nestor, Manuel y Camilo. 

In Riohacha: Luis, José David, Leonardi, Pedro, Umut, Itan, Jaineris, Juan, Morelis, Neima, Libardo y Joander. 

Eiko Strader is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the Director of Graduate Studies in Public Policy and WGSS at the George Washington University. She began incorporating Wikipedia assignments into her Gender, Welfare, and Poverty course in 2021. 

What is feminist praxis? 

To start discussing potential answers to this question, we can first look up the word, praxis, in Wiktionary, and review its definitions. In English, praxis can mean “the practical application of any branch of learning,” but there are other uses and definitions. To dig further, we can check out the reference, which at the time of this writing takes us to the Oxford English Dictionary. From there, we can find out how meanings and uses have changed overtime and across subjects. We can also see how the word praxis in politics and philosophy has been used to mean the application of theories and ideas to sociopolitical activities. If you have access to multiple dictionaries or editions, we can compare different uses and definitions across sources. Now we are one step closer to discussing what feminist praxis may be.

Next, we can explore how the word praxis is used across different contexts via Wikipedia. We find out that the term is often used to describe “the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, realized, applied or put into practice.” If we recognize that praxis refers to a series of actions in relation to different ways of thinking, reasoning, and understanding, we can explore what that process may entail, how these processes change, and what their ultimate goals may be. We can also evaluate how this understanding emerged by examining the references listed at the bottom of the article and discuss relevant sources that could potentially be included. Then we can delve deeper into what feminism may look like in practice, how feminist ideas may evolve, and what ultimate aspirations of feminist praxis may entail. 

Could incorporating Wikipedia assignments be part of feminist praxis? 

Despite unequal access to digital technology, free online resources like Wiktionary and Wikipedia are remarkable for fostering critical conversations without paywalls. If you are a faculty working at a higher education institution, you likely have access to lots of research materials like books, peer-reviewed articles, journals, periodicals, databases, archives, and media through the university library. However, that is not the case for most people. Facts and information are expensive and not always accessible. I often joke with my students that I write papers that hardly anyone reads, and I am sure many faculty feel the same way. If you are not part of some established research ecosystem, most knowledge products are inaccessible, which makes it harder for the general public to learn new ideas and unfamiliar topics that are important for engaging in critical dialogues. 

While Wikipedia boasts an impressive amount of free content, it also suffers from significant gaps. One of the most frequently highlighted issues is gender bias on Wikipedia, largely due to the fact that men make up the majority of contributors. That is probably old news for many but given the geographical reach and the volume of traffic to Wikipedia, it’s crucial for educators to reflect critically on the knowledge production process and address this bias. Doing so will ensure that Wikipedia becomes a more reliable and comprehensive source of encyclopedic information. With the goal of fostering more informed and inclusive discussions about social issues, I started incorporating Wikipedia assignments into one of my graduate courses during the Fall of 2021, during the shift from virtual to in-person learning. 

I believe incorporating Wikipedia assignments can contribute to feminist praxis.

Wiki Education’s focus on social impact resonated with me during the public health emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the rapid evolution of scientific knowledge, misinformation, and the exacerbation of disparities. I thought my students and I could contribute to equitable knowledge access by updating references, filling content gaps, and learning to navigate open collaboration. I share my experiences below.

My course is a discussion-based graduate course that meets weekly and requires students to submit an original analytical paper at the end of the semester. To encourage students to start their research early, I had them find, review, and improve existing Wikipedia articles related to their research interests rather than creating new entries. In my class, students learn about the terminology and concepts related to welfare states and poverty, various strategies for tackling social welfare issues, with the goal of interrogating the link between welfare regimes and gender inequality. Therefore, students have access to scholarly sources that could be referenced to improve existing articles related to welfare and poverty, while recognizing the role of gender. For example, a student noticed during initial review that an article on pandemic unemployment lacked data points on women, and another observed that an entry on red tape and administrative burden could benefit from additional references on equity implications. These observations shared during weekly class discussions underscore the importance of ongoing review and improvement to ensure that Wikipedia becomes a reliable and inclusive source of information.

I used Wikipedia assignments as part of the participation grade, recognizing that the contributions made by students may not always remain. Given Wikipedia’s open structure, I emphasized the importance of students completing training modules and exercises, and through completion, they earned participation points. Learning to evaluate Wikipedia articles, make revisions, and conduct peer reviews is just as valuable as sharing contributions publicly. Both activities help connect theory with practice. To encourage collaborative learning, I grouped students with similar research interests for peer reviews. On several occasions, students got to share and compare their references, which also helped them make progress on course paper. 

Because the final analytical paper carried more weight in the course grade, some students focused on making small but important edits, such as adding newer references and correcting grammatical errors to improve readability, but many went further. A student described the intersecting challenges faced by women, youth, and LGBTQ+ people who are experiencing homelessness in California and another expanded on the intricate ways welfare programs affect poverty. Many students also addressed racial bias and geographical disparity on Wikipedia by detailing the impact of Real ID Act on marginalized communities, incorporating government statistics published in Spanish to unpack machismo in Puerto Rico, adding new information on poverty in Indonesia, and providing additional details on public child care programs across countries. After addressing content gaps, students developed their own analytical papers to advance their original ideas and arguments, which were graded separately. 

I am still learning and experimenting with Wikipedia assignments. Navigating between Wiki Education dashboard and Wikipedia interface can be difficult, and instructors may need to carve out some class time to assist students having technical difficulties. Aligning Wiki Education training modules and exercises with course schedules also requires some trial and error, like moving deadlines, but I believe Wikipedia assignments have been useful for my students and I to think more critically about knowledge accessibility and implications of content gaps. Most importantly, incorporating Wikipedia assignments has given us the tangible opportunity to collectively experiment and discuss what it’s like to connect theory with practice in the era of social media. I am excited to continue this journey with my students, hopefully inspiring informed and inclusive dialogues about our future along the way. I am proud of my students for making a difference by contributing to more equitable knowledge access and engaging in feminist praxis. 

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your courses? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada. Apply by December 1, 2024 for priority consideration for spring 2025.

Another year on from the last generation of the Wikidata map, @tarrow and @outdooracorn spent some time in preparation for the Wikidata birthday to prepare a new map (see git commits).

The latest images have already been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and appear in the Wikidata map commons gallery.

In this post, I’ll have a look at what has changed in the past year that is visible from the map!

Previously I have generated diffs that highlight areas that have changed, overlaid on the map in pink.

This year, we have a version which only highlights the changed areas on a white canvas, making the intensity of change easier to spot.

Getting a trusty world map up alongside, we can see that:

• Lots of growth in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, New Zealand, Easter Australia, Some areas of India
• The USA sees growth primarily on the east coast
• Europe sees growth, very notably in France, Spain and Italy
• The continent of Africa has a particular set of north western regions that see growth. At a guess, Nigeria and Cameroon
• Much harder to see, but I think Northern Peru? Iceland! South Korea

Indonesia and the area surrounding looks rather impressive.

The map isn’t all about item locations, but also their relations. In order to see these you’ll have to go and have a look at the tool online at https://wmde.github.io/wikidata-map/dist/index.html

The comparison view below shows you relations between items that use “shares border with” P47. You can see that someone has spent a lot of time adding all of the relations for Australia.

I look forward to this map being generated yearly for the birthday.

Maybe at some point I need to generate a few new animations!

Author: Aline Blankertz, Policy and Public Sector Advisor, Wikimedia Deutschland

We all use online platforms, from Google Search to WhatsApp to Microsoft Office. It is about time that users also get a say in how they work. In reality, we are far from this. But the direction is clear: platform councils can make decisions according to democratic principles.

It is a truism by now that the big digital corporations are too powerful: their market capitalisation exceeds the gross domestic product of many countries, they have billions of users, make billions in quarterly profits and use these profits to exert political influence.

There is broad consensus in society that their power and harmful effects must be limited. The EU has introduced many regulations and control mechanisms to this end, from the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act to stricter merger control and legal action against competition violations and tax avoidance.

But the efforts up to this point are too fragmented and diluted by lobbying power. Too little is changing in the balance sheets and products of Big Tech. So how can we tame these powerful infrastructures of our daily lives and make the platforms more compatible with the public interest?

We need more democratic governance

Academic research has explored the potential role of platform councils and considers them to be ‘a powerful tool to bring people and their problems into platform norm-making processes – if they are implemented correctly’. The researchers point to a need for new institutions in which users themselves, civil society or academic expertise are represented.

Collective governance is an essential feature of public-interest digital policy. This is also feasible for global projects that have similarly high user numbers as Big Tech‘s platforms.

Projects of free knowledge, above all Wikipedia, show that this is possible. The communities that make up the online encyclopaedia are continuously developing it and also discuss issues such as knowledge equity and how to deal with artificial intelligence. To negotiate this, the communities have rules – just as in a democracy. We can also establish similar principles for digital corporations.

Building on experience and experiments

A platform council can enable various forms of digital co-determination, including full self-administration. The idea is not new. It relies on established principles of democracy that have long been tried and tested outside the digital world in the form of trade unions and works councils.

A range of existing institutions can serve as inspiration for how councils could make digital platforms such as Instagram, Amazon, Google Maps and the like more democratic, open and safe. German broadcasting councils control the content of public broadcasting programmes and are often referred to as practical examples. In the gaming sector, councils can represent player interests.

The most publicised example is Meta’s Oversight Board: It is designed to clarify particularly difficult questions regarding the rules for content moderation on Facebook and Instagram. The board’s decisions only relate to individual cases. Meta can ignore more general recommendations and has done so in the past, for example, in the case of recommendations that the board formulated in the context of conflicts in Ethiopia.

In the young debate about platform councils, the focus has so far been on social media councils for content moderation. However, because platforms play such a central role in shaping many types of interactions, there is a strong argument to broaden the scope of collective governance decisions. The biggest challenge for the democratic governance of platforms is probably to involve the relevant and affected groups – and to negotiate conflicts of interest according to democratic rules. This requires some form of experimentation: The current German government had even planned to ‘establish platform councils’ in its coalition agreement, but has not implemented this yet.

A suitable council for every platform

Since platforms fulfil different functions, no single council can fit all platforms. What decisions a platform council should be involved in differs across platforms. However, a basic rule should apply to all of them: the interests of users and consumers must be represented as well as the concerns of people and groups affected by platforms. This can be done through civil society organisations and associations. In addition, academic experts should provide input to empirically substantiate debates and decisions.

The scope of a platform council is a political decision about how much weight to assign to social interests alongside or instead of profit maximisation. A council could have a very limited influence on decisions regarding data access or the design of algorithmic recommendations. However, it could also be involved in core business decisions.

What this might look like can be seen by taking a look at two much-used platforms: Google Maps and Amazon’s sales platform.

Guided by a platform council: Google Maps

Google Maps influences individual mobility and the mobility planning of municipalities and sharing providers, the use of local services and tourism. Advertisers who pay for prominent display in the app, such as restaurants or retailers, are increasingly playing a role. The platform also has an indirect effect on car manufacturers and petrol stations.

There is currently no transparency in Google Maps – let alone any influence – over why the app shows users certain routes, modes of transport and search results. We can only assume that users’ interests are weighed against the advertising revenue and commission that Google collects from mobility providers. For example, Google owns shares in the sharing provider Lime whose services have long been displayed as the preferred mode of transport

A platform council responsible for data governance would have a rather narrow scope. It could decide how and to what extent the platform collects usage data and to what extent Alphabet is allowed to pass it on. Such a council could also decide that other map providers or urban planning departments should be given access to real-time data in order to improve their services, such as bus routes. When making such decisions, a platform council could also consider how granular such data should be in order to prevent the movement patterns of individuals or groups from being traceable.

Broadening the platform council‘s scope could allow it to determine the parameters according to which search results are designed and selected on Google Maps. Currently, a green leaf indicates the ‘environmentally friendly’ route. However, this is based purely on Google’s goodwill and is not externally verifiable.

An even broader scope could include the core operations of Google Maps. Such a platform council would decide on data, algorithms and connections to other products and platforms. This would be compatible with unbundling Google Maps from the Alphabet group. In this case, a platform council could also take steps to integrate Maps with the non-commercial community project OpenStreetMap.

A Prime platform council: Amazon

Amazon offers countless products on its sales platform, from koala costumes to 3D printers, some from its own production and some from third-party suppliers. Amazon combines these with its own warehouses and logistics, along with an increasing amount of advertising. Platform decisions also affect employees (from highly paid technical experts to precariously employed logistics staff) and customers (some with and some without a Prime subscription).

Currently, Amazon is free to design the platform as it wishes. In recent years, some barriers have been added through antitrust law and the Digital Markets Act at the EU level. But Amazon can freely set prices (for its own products) or charge commissions (for third-party products and for logistics and other services). And the company can design search results and suggestions – including ads. It is completely opaque how Amazon balances the interests of the parties involved. It is plausible that Amazon uses its large customer base to ask third-party providers and advertisers to pay up.

A platform council with a narrow scope could focus on the design of recommendation algorithms. It could set parameters for such an algorithm, such as the proportion of advertising, the weighting of price, rating and commission. Or it could decide to allow algorithms from external providers, such as Greenpeace or consumer associations.

A broader scope could include decisions on data access and use, for example, whether less data should be used for advertising and more data should be made available externally – such as for market analyses. A platform council could have a say in how employment relationships are structured, similar to trade unions – from issues such as workplace surveillance and delivery times to wages.

A council could also get a say in core business decisions, for example, whether the focus should be on further growth or whether other indicators should be given more weight – such as reducing resource consumption or avoiding waste.

Let’s work together to tame Big Tech and build alternatives!

Making platform governance collective can go hand in hand with other approaches. The power of large corporations should continue to be limited by breaking them up, taxing them adequately and reducing their lobbying influence. It is also important to build public-interest alternatives.

Ideally, platforms governed by councils will coexist with public-interest alternatives, giving people a range of good options. We already know that community-based platforms operate according to fundamentally different principles. We see this in the decentralised fediverse with the social medium Mastodon. The OpenStreetMap project and, of course, Wikipedia are further examples of collectively governed projects. These and other currently small platforms could grow more easily if they were not in competition with large, profit-oriented platforms. What is more, the latter repeatedly buy up potential competitors or keep them small through exclusivity agreements or other measures.

There are many ways in which we can manage platforms collectively. There is a lot to learn. But we know the principles of negotiating different interests and should apply them to our digital infrastructures. We can start with narrower scopes and expand them over time. More societal control can only make platforms better. It is high time for us to demand control – and for policymakers to create the necessary legal framework.

About the author: Aline is an applied economist with expertise in the data and platform economy. As part of the policy team at Wikimedia, she works on creating suitable conditions for free knowledge, e.g. through data access and free software. Previously, she led analyses on online platforms, privacy and algorithms at Oxera. She was co-chair at an organisation for data collaboration and spent two years at a digital policy think tank.

The shared web proxy used on Wikimedia Cloud VPS now has technical support for using arbitrary domains (and not just wmcloud.org subdomains) in proxy names. I think this is a good example of how software slowly evolves over time as new requirements emerge, with each new addition building on top of the previous ones.

According to the edit history on Wikitech, the web proxy service has its origins in 2012, although the current idea where you create a proxy and map it to a specific instance and port was only introduced a year later. (Before that, it just directly mapped the subdomain to the VPS instance with the same name).

There were some smaller changes in the coming years like the migration to acme-chief for TLS certificate management, but the overall logic stayed very similar until 2020 when the wmcloud.org domain was introduced. That was implemented by adding a config option listing all possible domains, so future domain additions would be as simple as adding the new domain to that list in the configuration.

Then the changes start becoming more frequent:

• In 2022, for my Terraform support project, a bunch of logic, including the list of supported backend domains was moved from the frontend code to the backend. This also made it possible to dynamically change which projects can use which domains suffixes for their proxies.
• Then, early this year, I added support for zones restricted to a single project, because we wanted to use the proxy for the *.svc.toolforge.org Toolforge infrastructure domains instead of coming up with a new system for that use case. This also added suport for using different TLS certificates for different domains so that we would not have to have a single giant certificate with all the names.
• Finally, the last step was to add two new features to the proxy system: support for adding a proxy at the apex of a domain, as well as support for domains that are not managed in Designate (the Cloud VPS/OpenStack auth DNS service). In addition, we needed a bit of config to ensure http-01 challenges get routed to the acme-chief instance.

As part of a new Future of Language Incubation initiative to support language onboarding, Wikipedia is now live for five languages: Pannonian Rusyn, Tai Nüa, Iban, Obolo, and Southern Ndebele!

Overview

The Future of Language Incubation initiative is an effort aimed at implementing recommendations to streamline the technical infrastructure and build social pathways that support language incubation, with a focus on equity and closing knowledge gaps, crucial for the long-term sustainability and inclusiveness of our movement. These recommendations aim to simplify the technical setup for creating language wikis and improve each phase of language incubation—before, during, and after. They include automating language additions, enabling new wiki features, enhancing the editing experience in Incubator, and streamlining wiki creation. On the social side, they focus on fostering inclusive communities and exploring ways to make Incubator more welcoming, with improved discoverability and orientation resources. These recommendations emerged from extensive conversations with staff and community members. This initiative represents a collaborative effort involving various WMF departments and teams, including Language and Product Localization, Research, Product Analytics and Data Persistence SRE, and Community Programs.

As part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Annual Plan for 2024-2025, several ongoing experiments are designed to address the cumbersome technology and workflows associated with the incubation process. Key areas of focus include:

• Lengthy and manual processes for request creation, approval, and wiki site setup.
• Technical limitations of the Wikimedia Incubator, the sole centralized platform for incubating languages, which currently lacks modern features such as Content Translation, Wikidata integration, and Growth features available on other Wikimedia wikis.

The goal of these experiments is to implement and test different approaches to find what works to overcome challenges in the language incubation space (such as how currently it takes a really long time for wikis to graduate from Incubator), and ultimately explore ways to simplify the current incubation process. As of April 2024, the average duration for a language wiki to graduate from the Incubator stands at 4.4 years (e.g., Fon Wikipedia) and could be significantly longer based on the challenges the community is trying to resolve during the process.

Enabling New Wiki Features for Incubator

One of the initiative’s key experiments aims to provide Incubator wikis with access to new features that enhance editing activity. To achieve this, five new languages meeting minimum selection criteria were fast-tracked for approval by the Language Committee and graduated from the Incubator. The selection criteria included metrics such as the number of edits, new pages created, average monthly active editors, and time spent in the Incubator over the past three months. The requirements included that the wiki must be a Wikipedia, have at least two active editors, and at least 30 edits in the last three months. This initiative sampled five wikis from different clusters to represent a range of activity levels, from newly incubated wikis to those with established histories. Full details are available in this report.

Approved Languages

The Wikimedia Foundation teams collaborated closely with the Language Committee to gain approval for this experiment and successfully graduate the selected wikis from the Incubator. The progress of these five Wikipedias can be tracked here. 

Southern Ndebele (nr)

Visit: nr.wikipedia.org – Southern Ndebele is one of South Africa’s 11 official languages, with around 1.1 million native speakers. It has achieved 135 content edits and has 3 active editors after 4,124 days in the Wikimedia Incubator.

A contributor from the Southern Ndebele community, User:Bobbyshabangu expressed heartfelt appreciation for the initiative, stating:

“I cannot put into words how precious a gift this experiment is to the South African editing community. We have advocated for this for ten years, and to see this experiment happening this year is simply divine. I am looking forward to supporting the Isindebele Wikipedia even more going forward.”

Obolo (ann)

Visit: ann.wikipedia.org – Obolo is mainly spoken in Nigeria, with about 318,000 native speakers. It has 106 content edits and has been supported by 3 active editors for 1,774 days in the Incubator.

Iban (iba)

Visit: iba.wikipedia.org – Iban is predominantly spoken in Malaysia, with smaller populations in Brunei and Indonesia, totaling around 2,450,000 native speakers. It has achieved 415 content edits and has had 4 active editors over 2,870 days in the Wikimedia Incubator.

Tai Nüa (tdd)

Visit: tdd.wikipedia.org – Tai Nüa is spoken across several Southeast Asian countries and parts of China, with around 720,000 native speakers. With 503 content edits, it has spent 1,056 days in the Wikimedia Incubator, supported by 4 active editors.

Pannonian Rusyn (rsk)

Visit: rsk.wikipedia.org – Pannonian Rusyn is a Slovak language primarily spoken in Serbia and Croatia, with some communities in the United States and Canada. It has approximately 20,000 native speakers and has achieved 1,167 content edits. After 816 days in the Wikimedia Incubator, 9 active editors are working to help it thrive.

One positive outcome from this experiment is that it has sped up the approval process for certain languages. For example, previous requests for approval for the Iban, Obolo and Southern Ndebele languages, which had stalled in the growing backlog or lost momentum due to community inactivity, gained traction as the project steering committee actively advocated for their meeting the experiment’s minimum criteria.

What’s Next?

Looking ahead, the next steps for this experiment involve monitoring content growth and community engagement on the newly approved wikis. We will compare the progress of these production wikis against those still in the Incubator, following an established measurement plan. At the end of the three-month pilot period, we will conduct a review to assess the status of each wiki and determine whether adjustments are needed to support their ongoing growth and sustainability. Additionally, we are exploring experiments aimed at reviewing the current wiki site creation process and improving it to support a more simplified workflow. This will help creators of new wikis better sustain the process over time. We are also documenting journeys of languages, before, during and after incubation as part of these efforts. Stay tuned for more updates on the Future of Language Incubation page on MediaWiki.org.

Join us in welcoming these new Wikipedias to our movement!

Over the years, many Wikimedians have formed partnerships with various cultural, educational, and GLAM institutions across numerous countries, working as Wikimedians in Residence to bridge knowledge gaps, and engage these institutions in Wikimedia projects. Wikimedians in Residence have successfully transferred knowledge to different Wikimedia projects using various implementation models and methods.Among the successful partnerships are those with UN agencies, the first of which was UNESCO, where John Cummings became a WIR in 2015. UN agencies possess a vast repository of knowledge in their archives, including documents, photos, artifacts, and publications.

WIPO: a UN agency offers a wealth of content that is highly valuable to Wikimedians

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is one of the 15 specialized UN agencies. It was created to promote and protect intellectual property (IP) across the world, by cooperating with countries as well as international institutions. Its activities are numerous. As a promoter of IP, it produces many publications, general guides, case studies, success stories, and other texts meant for the general public, of particular interest to Wikimedia, as well as in-depth analysis of specific economic sectors and annual reports rich in indicators, facts and figures.

WIPO administers 26 international treaties addressing a wide range of intellectual property issues, from the protection of audiovisual works to establishing international patent classification systems. Some of these treaties, such as the Berne Convention, have a direct impact on the work of Wikipedians.

In addition, WIPO provides global services for registering and protecting intellectual property across countries, resolving transboundary IP disputes, and maintaining a comprehensive reference database on IP matters. However, these particular activities are less directly relevant to the Wikimedia movement.

It’s worth mentioning that one of WIPO’s core missions is to host forums that foster discussions and shape international IP rules and policies. Unfortunately, Wikimedia is currently blocked from participating as a permanent observer in these crucial discussions.

What matters in this report is the wealth of resources provided by WIPO, which can be used to improve Wikimedia projects on the topic of intellectual property.

A very interesting fact is the decision by WIPO to adopt an Open Access Policy in November 2016, in support of its commitment to the sharing and dissemination of knowledge and to make its publications easily available to the widest possible audience. As such, except for some content published under more restrictive terms, new WIPO online publications started being issued under an Attribution 4.0 International CC license (CC BY 4.0) allowing their content to be copied into Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Many of the productions done by WIPO are published in several languages, the 6 official languages of the United Nations (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and Chinese), which provides lots of opportunities to extend the coverage of IP topics beyond the English language and facilitate translation of content whilst using the exact terminology used by experts.

The WIPO Partnership: A Model of Success

WIPO started collaborating with Wikimedia in 2021; in 2022 and ongoing,  Florence Devouard began as a WiR, attached to the WIPO Publication and Design Section, headed by Charlotte Beauchamp. Florence started by exploring the depths of WIPO resources to improve various articles on the English Wikipedia. She worked closely with different experts to transfer their content or seek their review of existing articles to identify knowledge gaps or incorrect content. She also trained some of the experts to equip them with skills to update articles related to their expertise later on their own. As article quality improved, she also translated the core articles to the French Wikipedia; in 2023, Salvador Alcantar joined to work on the Spanish Wikipedia, and in 2024,  Mervat Salman joined the team to work on the Arabic Wikipedia. Not only did this team of 3 manage the content in Wikipedia in 4 languages, but they also added content in Commons and Wikidata.

What makes the collaboration with WIPO unique is that the content is shared in four different languages. The team doesn’t only look at WIPO’s archives, but also continually updates the content as new indexes, reports, and publications are released. What is unusual in that collaboration compared to other frequent institutional collaborations is that the team works with experts from the legal sector primarily, not from the communication/marketing sector, which means that the need to source facts, figures, or statements is second nature to them, discussions around “licenses” and “credits” are free-flowing, and the language used in many reports tends to be very direct and detailed-oriented. Before Wikipedia’s involvement, only WIPO’s publications were tagged under a CC BY 4.0 license. The first outcome of the collaboration was to get the website terms of license updated in 2022 to better reflect the choice of the Open Licence and we are currently seeking a slight change of terms in an attempt to reach perfection 😉

Collaboration with WIPO experts has been another success, as they help identify key resources and prioritize the creation or updating of content. They understand that wikifying their materials enhances access to their publications, news, and updates, ultimately advancing the goal of raising awareness about the significance of their work.The team members work in harmony to ensure that their efforts are aligned. Through regular meetings and online discussions, they continuously review and agree on priorities. The team recognizes the importance of unifying their efforts and keeping the WIPO team regularly updated on their progress. This model may encourage other UN agencies to partner with Wikimedia, making their valuable content accessible and freely available to all through Wikimedia platforms. The experience was shared in several instances. For instance, it was briefly shared with wikimedians in a video during Wikimania 2022.  

In June 2023, FAO and WIPO co-hosted an IGO workshop on Open Access in Rome. The workshop focused on the opportunities and challenges of data licensing, as well as exploring Wikipedia with Wikimedians. It featured presentations and discussions from experts representing Creative Commons, Wikimedia, UNESCO, FAO, WFP, WIPO, and the World Bank. Additionally, a hands-on learning session dedicated to Wikipedia allowed participants to deepen their understanding. The workshop offered opportunities for attendees to participate in breakout sessions, ask questions, and share their own experiences and insights.

Finally, a panel (Partnering with intergovernmental organizations creates new opportunities for the Wikimedia Movement) was hosted during Wikimania 2023, by Florence Devouard (WIR WIPO), with several invited speakers::

* Charlotte Beauchamp (WIPO)
* Valerie Lafon (OECD)
* Ian Denison (Unesco)
* Suzanne Lapstun (FAO)
* Wikimedia Sweden representative

The panel was the opportunity for various representatives of several intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) to share their experience with Wikimedia and talk about how Wikipedians could engage with the IGOs (slides, video).

Believing that knowledge should always be shared, the WIPO-WiR team is eager to share their experiences with colleagues interested in becoming Wikimedians in Residence, as well as with any agencies seeking to make their content accessible to the world. They are dedicated to collaborating in efforts to enhance global knowledge accessibility.

Florence Devouard, Salvador Alcántar, Mervat Salman

Further Reading

We recommend this page to see a selection of core pages we improved and which we invite the general community to translate into their language: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiProject:United_Nations/WIPO

On September 2023, the first Wikipedia workshop in Ethiopia took place in Addis Ababa. The workshop’s focus was on empowering participants with the skills needed to contribute to Wikipedia with a theme centered on improving the coverage of Ethiopia’s natural parks on Wikipedia.

During the workshop, volunteers were introduced to the basics of editing on Wikipedia, learning essential skills such as creating new articles, adding references, and improving existing content. Participants also encountered technical challenges, including IP block issues, which temporarily hindered their contributions. However, these obstacles were addressed by the organizers and the admins of Wikipedia, ensuring that all participants could continue their valuable work without interruption. This experience provided valuable lessons in navigating Wikipedia’s guidelines and technical aspects, further empowering the volunteers to contribute effectively.

The success of the workshop was bolstered by the support of the Open West Africa Foundation. Their expertise was invaluable in promoting best practices for content creation and editing, setting a groundwork for future workshops and nurturing the growing Wikipedia community in Ethiopia. Additionally, the venue for the workshop was generously provided by the National ID Program Ethiopia, a strong advocate for open-source platforms through its use of MOSIP, an open-source identity management platform aimed at providing foundational digital identification in Ethiopia.

As Ethiopia’s first event of this nature, the Wikipedia Workshop is a beacon for future collaborative knowledge initiatives. It is the budding of the movement in a nation in the nascent stages of forming dedicated user groups. The momentum from this event is expected to inspire future Wikimedia initiatives across Ethiopia, contributing to the broader goals of free and open access to knowledge.

Learn more about the Wikimedians of Ethiopia User Group on Meta-Wiki.

Is the Wikimedia Summit over? How will affiliates move the Wikimedia Movement forward? What is the status of the Movement Charter?

In the 35th episode of WikiAfrica Hour, aired on the Friday 24th May 2024, Erina Mukuta as the guest host ensured that our guests answered these questions and more. 

First, Nonny Ntlahla and Donia Domiaty (the new WikiAfrica Hour facilitator) shared the WikiAfrica Hour News. Then, it was time for some serious conversation. After an action-packed Wikimedia Summit in Berlin, the future of affiliate gatherings seemed to hang in the balance. Our guests chatted about what they got from the Wikimedia Summit and the future of these events for Wikimedians.  Finally, we discussed the current status of the long-awaited Movement Charter.

The new WikiAfrica Hour In Focus segment heard from African Wikimedians who were delegates at the Summit.

“Wikimedians managed to spend three days talking about strategy and at the end to actually agree on something. I was extremely positively surprised to see that.” —Eva Martin

“Once I prepared to be a member of the MCDC, I read a 600 page book on strategy. And the biggest takeaway I got from that is that the most important and neglected part of strategy is alliances. And I think I felt a strong sense of alliance at the Wikimedia Summit. And I hope we can push that forward because we’re much stronger together than we are.” — Richard Knipel

Guest included:

• Eva Martin – Program Coordinator of WMDE. She  joined Wikimedia Deutschland’s Movement Strategy and Global Relations team in September 2021. Since then, she have been working with partners and colleagues on diverse projects to support the implementation of our Movement Strategy.
• Ciell – member of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee. She has been a Dutch Wikipedia admin since October 2006, a Commons admin since 2009 and a Central Notice admin on Meta since 2017. She has been a member of the Dutch VRT (former OTRS) team since 2008. she was on the board of the Dutch Wikimedia chapter WMNL for a year, and attended Wikimania 2012 (Washington), 2014 (London), 2016 (Esino Lario), 2017 (Montreal), 2018 (Capetown), 2019 (Stockholm), 2021 & 2022 (both online) and 2023 (Singapore).
• Richard Knipel – member of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee. He is active as User:Pharos on English Wikipedia and other projects through SUL, and has also helped with organizing Wikimedia New York City. 
• Rajene Hardeman – member of the Future Affiliate Gatherings Team. She is a data analyst, librarian, knowledge juggler, and advocate. WLUG Steering Committee Chair, 2022. Wikimedia NYC board member. She is a member of AfroCrowd and a former guide for WebJunction online training course: Wikipedia + Libraries, Better Together.
• Aafi – member of the Future Affiliate Gatherings Team. He has been a Wikimedian since March 2019. He is the founder of the Deoband Community Wikimedia, an AffCom-recognised affiliate user group. 

This WikiAfrica Hour episode’s guest host is Erina Mukuta, wikimedian in the Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda. She co-created the user group and is a training and event coordinator for it. 

African Wikimedians interviewed at Wikimedia Summit 2024 include:

• Aboubacar Khoraa- Guinea Conakry user group
• Dnshitobu- WikiMaps user group
• Fawaz Tairou- Benin user group
• Georges member of the Movement Charter Drafting Committee
• Jael Serwaa Boateng- Executive Director of Open Foundation West Africa
• Adel Nehaoua- Arabic Speaking Region 
• Olatunde Isaac- Yoruba Wikimedia User group
• Sadik Shahadu- Dagbani user group

This WikiAfrica Hour episode aired live: check out our Website or the WikiAfrica Hour meta page to watch this or previous episodes.  All WikiAfrica Hour episodes are available on YouTube.

Episode notes:

• WikiAfrica Hour
• Wiki In Africa
• Wikimedia Summit 2024 on meta
• Movement Charter
• Movement Charter Drafting Committee

Happy birthday Wikidata and, many happy returns.

When you start enriching the data for a Dutch urologist, an academic who published quite a number of scientific papers, obviously there must be many co-authors. Many of them are yet to be identified, at this moment for Jakko A. Nieuwenhuijzen there are some 339 still to be added.

The main consideration is what has the biggest impact. As a colleague of Mr Nieuwenhuijzen is known at Google scholar, adding papers for him brought new publications to Mr Nieuwenhuijzen and many of his co-authors. Enriching data for these co-authors makes the graph more complex.

At some point more precision in the data for a single author is no longer worth the effort. When you then find an other urologist with many papers not yet attributed and many co-authors where Wikidata does not know the gender yet, focus shifts and many more edits make their way into Wikidata.

Many of these co-authors are of the same institute but people from elsewhere find their place in these graphs as well. Many are Dutch but as urology knows many international collaborations this is reflected in the expanding number of co-authors. 

As a topic is developed in this way, it easily results in thousands of edits. As many subject are  researched in this way, the enriched data is there for the world to use. This data is only of value when there is a public. Sharing in the sum of all knowledge has always been what we stand for. Sharing freely and widely generates us a a both public and a future.

Thanks,

      GerardM

From college professor and nonprofit executive to writer, editor, and podcast producer, there’s no doubt to the breadth of Dale McGowan’s expertise – and now, to the benefit of all, he’s added Wikipedian to the list.

This summer, McGowan enrolled in an eight-week Wiki Scholars election course to bring his professional experiences and personal passion for accessible, nonpartisan information to Wikipedia. Throughout the course, he and his classmates worked to improve content related to candidates, voting behavior and participation, proposed laws, political parties, and other topics relevant to U.S. elections.

“I’ve had to develop both a knowledge base and the ability to find answers to what I don’t know so I can accurately represent the complex collision of politics, culture, and law in that sphere,” said McGowan of his work at Center for Election Innovation & Research, which helped build his confidence to edit Wikipedia articles with high readership.

When reflecting on his motivation to join the course, his answer was simple.

“Wikipedia is one of the greatest contributions to global civilization, period,” said McGowan. “A chance to develop greater skills as an editor was unmissable.”

During the course, McGowan created a new Wikipedia article for an event that had a profound effect on him years ago – the memorial event that followed the death of Minnesota U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone in a plane crash in 2002, just 11 days before he was to stand for re-election.

“That memorial, as much as the crash, changed the course of the election and impacted national politics in several ways,” said McGowan. “I was geekily delighted when the article was assessed as B-class.”

And McGowan’s editing momentum on Wikipedia only grew stronger after the final meeting of his Wiki Scholars course. 

Since the end of the course, McGowan has improved articles focused on state elections, including Mississippi, Alabama, and New Hampshire, and added several new paragraphs to the early voting article. His contributions to the article’s lead section help readers understand how early voting over the course of several days can lead to a smoother election process than when voters cast their ballots on a single day.

While at first intimidated by the prospect of changing information on articles, particularly those with millions of monthly page views, McGowan’s editing jitters have subsided over time.

“I’ve added substantial content around early voting, voter registration methods, mail voting, the Freedom of Information Act, election security, voter-verified paper ballots, and more,” said McGowan. “I’ve looked at historical page view data, and many of these pages balloon 50-200 times in views shortly before an election. It’s gratifying to get accurate and current information where people can find it.”

Editing Wikipedia has become a significant and fulfilling part of his daily work, McGowan explained. 

“For much of history, so much knowledge has been the purview of the privileged elite,” he noted. “It is terrifically rewarding to participate in the democratization of knowledge that is the heart of the Wikipedia project.”

McGowan encourages other subject matter experts to engage with Wikipedia, emphasizing the incredible reach of Wikipedia.

“Wikipedia is the most commonly-accessed source of knowledge on Earth,” explained McGowan. “It is the first result in almost every online search. There is no greater way to disseminate accurate knowledge of your field than by improving related content on Wikipedia.”

And fortunately for us all, McGowan looks forward to sharing his knowledge with Wikipedia long term.

“I’ve wondered for years how I might stay involved in the life of the mind when I retire in a few years,” said McGowan. “Now I know!”

Interested in learning how to add your own expertise to Wikipedia? Explore Wiki Education’s upcoming courses for subject-area experts.

Looking to empower your students by incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada. Apply by December 1, 2024 for priority consideration for spring 2025.

On Tuesday, 29 October, Wikidata turns twelve, and I had been thinking about creating a small birthday gift to celebrate. Earlier, I had experimented with creating an animated background to use in our Editing Wikidata live streams, but never got one that worked well. But the thought popped up again, and perhaps I could do something different.

As it were, another thought I had also been pondering was how to do a refresh on the older web slides I used to present and if I could use the animated background I have on aina.li. Two thoughts turned into one, and I made an animated Wikidata background for the web.

As a demo, I deployed it to GitHub pages, to show it in full use, but the real treat is in the code for anyone to reuse.

Yes, it is a bit silly, and not hugely useful for the sum of human knowledge, but a celebration has to be a bit fun too. So happy 12th birthday Wikidata, I hope you enjoy all your gifts.

When Wikidata will be split up in a "science" part and "all the rest", scientists who have a Wikipedia article will need to be part of the "rest" as well. This is necessary as all Wikipedia articles have a link to Wikidata because of the "interwiki" mechanism.

It follows that there will be an over abundance of USA scientists and there will  hardly be any scientists of Africa or South America. 

Some data about scientists is likely to be considered to be part of "all the rest" awards for instance. Are these scientists who received an award to be known in two data sets? Some scientists had a career as an athlete.. an other reason for duplication. It is hard enough to maintain the interwiki links and existing duplication within Wikidata, it will become exponentially more difficult when another data set is added.

When the creation of Wikimedia Commons was considered, similar good reasons led to hesitation and prevented us to bite the bullet for quite some time. Commons started with the creation of a Wiki, a MediaWiki patch that showed a picture in a Wikipedia and it then took a long time for most of the duplicate pictures to be only in Commons. It was not technically perfect but it was done perfect in the wiki way.

I hope that we will bite the bullet this time as well. With a new unrestricted wikibase, the old batch jobs can be dusted off and make good for the years of academic data we missed. I pray that Scholia will become functional soon after. 

I will still be able to do my Wikidata thing.. projects like African politicians, Muslim countries and their rulers (past and present).. Awards that can do with an update obviously including science awards.. I will not be bored but maybe I will be working .. maybe not.

Thanks,

       GerardM

17/10/2024-23/10/2024

Mapping

• Andy Mabbett has raised a concern about a remote mapper repeatedly closing an unresolved OpenStreetMap note regarding a cemetery. The mapping was done using aerial imagery, which does not capture the full extent of the cemetery, and Andy questioned how to properly escalate this issue. He highlighted that some parts of the cemetery are only visible in non-free imagery and that the mapped area is incomplete. The OSM-talk mailing list seems to have been orphaned since the forum was set up, however Andy got a few replies. This shows that the list is still being read.

Community

• Anne-Karoline Distel came across an article with a map without attribution in her local newspaper and showed how she proved that its data came from OSM.
• lhirlimann participated ► in the monthly meeting of the OpenStreetMap Toulouse, France, community on Saturday 19 October. During the session, roptat presented the Public Transport Network Analysis tool, which helps map and verify public transport routes in OSM. The group also discussed their upcoming involvement in DevFest Toulouse ► and Capitole du Libre.
• Negreheb blogged about his project to capture 360° images of the city of Salzburg, Austria, for Mapillary and possibly for Panoramax.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation Annual General Meeting was held on Saturday 19 October. The board has released several reports including:
  • OSMF AGM – 2023 Minutes
  • Treasurer’s report (2024)
  • FY 2023 full accounts
  • FY 2024 profit and loss (draft)
  • FY 2024 balance sheet (draft)
  • Personnel committee’s report (2024)
• Guillaume Rischard has published his OpenStreetMap Foundation 2024 chairperson’s report. Regrid, QGIS, and Calimoto were welcomed as silver corporate members in 2024. Efforts have been pursued for more diversity in the Foundation’s membership. The Board has worked on internal policies and guidelines. On the finance technical side, the budgeting system has been improved, with expenses rapidly getting reconciled with the budget, with regular finance reports being useful both for the Board and for fundraising. Work about map attribution and the vector tile project was also presented.
• Steve Coast, who had previously lobbied against the OSMF offering tile services, has again criticised the OSMF’s direction, stating that the GBP 373,000 (USD 483,000) raised in the last fundraising campaign should not be used for the OSM tile server to provide a free tile service, and that the OSMF should focus on completing the map instead. This idea was not well received by the community and various people argued in favour of maintaining the status quo. The 2024 budgeted cost for the standard tile layer was GBP 8,700 (USD 11,000). The 2025 cost is likely to be about GBP 4,200 (USD 5,400).

Events

• Shizuoka Prefecture (Japan) held ► the Open Data Chubu Region Workshop on Wednesday 25 September, to promote and raise awareness about open data. The event included an OpenStreetMap mapping party where participants walked around the area near Fujieda Station, gathered information, mapped it in OpenStreetMap, and presented their results.
• The upload of the recordings from State of the Map 2024, held in Nairobi, Kenya, has started. You can find the growing playlist here.

OSM research

• Niels van Berkel and Henning Pohl have investigated the tensions that the use of large-scale automated edits and bots bring to editors in OpenStreetMap. They analysed more than 15 years of discussions from OSM mailing lists about bots and automated edits. From this data, they identified and analysed several recurring themes related to the topic of automated edits.

Maps

• Christoph Hormann has introduced several new symbol designs for various point barriers in the OSM-Carto Alternative Colours map style, a fork of the OSM Carto style that uses a different colour scheme and cartographic approach. His design approach builds on the original concepts used for rendering barriers in the early versions of OSM Carto.

OSM in action

• [1] The Biennale Arte 2024, in Venice, Italy, is running until Sunday 24 November. So there’s still time for last-minute travellers to visit. The Biennale is using OSM to guide visitors to individual exhibition spaces.

Software

• Eugene introduced the 3D GPX track feature on OsmAnd, which displays route elevation along with visualisations of speed, altitude, slope, and heart rate. This feature offers a comprehensive view, helping users analyse their performance and better understand route dynamics in a 3D visualisation.

Programming

• Kamil Monicz shared some updates on the current development of OpenStreetMap-NG, which is his personal alternative to the OpenStreetMap code base, including the implementation of OAuth2 and personal access tokens, a tag diff mode for easier review of tagging changes, and high-resolution feature icons.
• Andy Allan delivered a presentation to the London Ruby Users Group on his experience as a software maintainer for the OpenStreetMap website codebase.

Releases

• Christian Quest, from OSM-France, presented several new features of Panoramax 2.7. The new features include a user leaderboard and an updated upload API, which handles sequence splitting and duplicate image removal. Christian also announced that ESRI has worked on integrating Panoramax into its ArcGIS software. Panoramax is an open-source platform that provides geolocated street imagery via a decentralised architecture, similar to Google Street View, but self-hosted and without restrictive use conditions. There are several Panoramax instances, including the French and global versions, where users can upload images and share them via APIs.
• HeiGIT announced new features for the ohsome Quality API and Dashboard, expanding its data quality assessment tools. Previously, it had used three indicators: data currentness, mapping saturation, and a building and road comparison with reference data. The latest update introduced a fourth indicator, attribute completeness, which shows the percentage of features in an area with specific additional attributes.

Did you know …

• … that there’s a mail template, which you can use if you find a project using OpenStreetMap data but lacking proper attribution?
• … that SuperTuxKart, a free and open-source 3D racing game, can use OpenStreetMap data for levels?

Other “geo” things

• France’s National Institute of Geographic and Forest Information (IGN) is aiming to create a digital twin of France, in order to better understand ecological evolution. You can better understand it by reading the interview ► with Sébastien Soriano, IGN’s general director.
• ORF Burgenland reported ► on the opening of a GNSS checkpoint in St. Margarethen, Austria. These checkpoints allow smartphone users to verify the accuracy of their device’s location services by comparing with precise, pre-measured coordinates.
• In their latest edition of the #geoweirdness trivia thread, OpenCage showcased the world of linguistic maps and atlases, which chart variations in vocabulary and sentence structure across different geographical regions.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2024-10-25
Bologna	OpenStreetMap al Linux Day di Bologna		2024-10-26
中正區	台北城內商家mapping party暨慶賀MozTW 3.0喬遷之喜		2024-10-26
Rio de Janeiro	(Online) Mapeamento Colaborativo com OpenStreetMap e uMap (Minicurso)		2024-10-26
Mumbai	Mumbai Mapping Party		2024-10-26
City of South Perth	Social Mapping Sunday: Perth Zoo FREE TICKETS		2024-10-27
Strasbourg	Strasbourg 2ème Atelier de cartographie sur OpenStreetMap		2024-10-28
Saint-Étienne	Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire		2024-10-28
	Bremer Mappertreffen		2024-10-28
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-10-30
	OSMF Affiliation Models brainstorming		2024-10-30
Amsterdam	Maptime Amsterdam: Autumn mapping party		2024-10-30
Wien	73. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch		2024-10-30
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)		2024-10-30
	OSM-Deutschland Vernetzungstreffen 30.10.2024		2024-10-30
Moers	Community-Hackday am 1. – 3. November 2024 im JuNo, Moers Repelen		2024-11-01 – 2024-11-03
Berlin	OSM Hackweekend Berlin 11/2024		2024-11-02 – 2024-11-03
Hobart	FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2024		2024-11-05 – 2024-11-08
	Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng]		2024-11-05
Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2024-11-06
Potsdam	Radnetz Brandenburg Mapping Abend #10	✓	2024-11-06
Salzburg	Maker Faire Salzburg 2024		2024-11-09
Zürich	169. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich		2024-11-11
中正區	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #70		2024-11-11

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

As our movement matures, people who were there at the beginning, age. They get other priorities, they get sick, operated upon and as a consequence have a windfall of time to do more work at Wikidata. 

I did a similar job for a dear fellow Wikimedian.. It is now my turn, my chirurg is in this picture and as I add missing co-authors this picture becomes more complex. It will also become more complex when existing co-authors are enriched with new and linked papers.

With Wikipedia there is the promise that even though the information will evolve, all the work people have put in will be there in future and enable people to read/study the subjects each editor cared for.

The data of Wikidata as it is will be split in parts. For the best of reasons but once its structure is broken, the tools that bring structure to the data will be broken as well. The same tools that enable the enrichment of the data will be broken. Much of my Wikimedia legacy will be lost because there will no longer be a public enabled to learn about scholarly works in a Wiki way.

For a few years now this sword of Damocles has hung over Wikidata. As a consequence the potential of Wikidata is not being realised. The data could be so much richer when automated processes bring free knowledge together. References in Wikipedia  indicating later papers and improve its quality. 

As long as I can I will do my Wikidata thing; hope is eternal.

Thanks,

       GerardM

I presented a paper titled “Parametric type design in the era of variable and color fonts” in the Grapholinguistics conference 2024. The conference was held in Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice from 23rd to 25th October 2024. The conference was a hybrid event with both physical and virtual participation.

G21C (Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, also called /gʁafematik/) is a biennial conference bringing together disciplines concerned with grapholinguistics and, more generally, the study of writing systems and their representation in written communication. The conference aims to reflect on the current state of research in the area and on the role that writing and writing systems play in neighboring disciplines like computer science and information technology, communication, typography, psychology, and pedagogy. In particular it aims to study the effect of the growing importance of Unicode with regard to the future of reading and writing in human societies. Reflecting the richness of perspectives on writing systems, G21C is actively interdisciplinary. It welcomes proposals from researchers from the fields of computer science and information technology, linguistics, communication, pedagogy, psychology, history, and the social sciences.

My paper was about the use of MetaPost for parametric type design. I demonstrated how MetaPost can be used to generate variable fonts and color fonts. Abstract version of my paper is available at here. My slides are available at https://santhoshtr.github.io/grafematik2024-presentation/.

It was an honor to present my work in a conference where Prof Donald Knuth was also present as keynote speaker.

This is my second presentation in the Grapholinguistics conference. I presented my work on Malayalam orthographic reforms: impact on language and popular culture in the Grapholinguistics conference 2018.

Oct 24, 14:02 UTC
Resolved - Traffic back to baseline, root cause investigation is still ongoing but the incident is resolved.

Oct 24, 13:52 UTC
Update - We are continuing to monitor for any further issues.

Oct 24, 13:49 UTC
Monitoring - We have repooled the primary datacenter for read traffic and are monitoring the situation while investigating the root cause.

Oct 24, 11:33 UTC
Update - We shifted read traffic to the secondary datacenter, which helped with the overloaded database. We are still investigating the root cause.

Oct 24, 11:02 UTC
Investigating - Reading and editing is affected. We are investigating the issue.

Last month, Wiki Education’s Speaker Series kicked off the new academic year with the roundtable “Wikipedia & Social Justice: How students are enhancing representation and equity” featuring four professors from across the U.S. The scholars reflected on their experiences empowering students to improve Wikipedia while simultaneously exploring classroom conversations about knowledge equity, social justice, and the role of the online encyclopedia. 

For panelist Mack Scott, visiting assistant professor of slavery and social justice at Brown University, incorporating the Wikipedia assignment into his courses like “This is America” and “Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Studies” gave students the chance to participate in a more meaningful project.

“Students have expressed how much they enjoy the assignment and how much harder they work on it,” said Scott. “They know that it’s not just me looking, and they feel the need to get it right – it adds more significance and more importance.” 

When she first introduced the assignment in 2017 while teaching at Howard University, Arizona State University’s Tracy Perkins wanted to give her students a real-world project and a much larger audience for their coursework. She also recognized the opportunity to engage her students in discussions surrounding Wikipedia and social justice within the context of the course.

“Wikipedia has been a very rich place to talk with them about different forms of knowledge inequality and knowledge distortion, and how that happens, and where that happens in academia and the press in particular,” said Perkins, noting how similar dynamics influence what and how content is shared on Wikipedia. 

Similar to Perkins, the other panelists use the assignment and the idea of Wikipedia itself to prompt powerful classroom dialogues. Delia Steverson, who specializes in 19th and 20th century African American literature at the University of Alabama, begins by asking her students a straightforward yet not-so-simple question: What is knowledge?

“How do we think we acquire knowledge?” said Steverson, continuing the line of questions she asks her students. “What does it mean to create knowledge? We have a very fruitful discussion about how and what we think about what actually is knowledge.” 

Panelist Jennifer Stoever taught with the Wikipedia assignment for the first time this spring at Binghamton University, incorporating the project into her course “Black Women and Creativity.” Stoever challenged her students to consider how underrepresented histories have been kept out of the academic and media publications that serve as sources for Wikipedia articles.

“[My students] are like, well, why don’t oral histories count?” said Stoever. “And that took them a step even farther back into the production of knowledge and the politics of knowledge production – we had some really incredible conversations. History is only as equitable as its sources and its writers.”

Each panelist also emphasized how courses of all disciplines can engage in the work to improve representation on Wikipedia – not just those which explicitly cover social justice topics. 

“Looking at knowledge production as a collective mission is key,” said Stoever.

Enhancing Wikipedia content related to historically underrepresented or misrepresented people and topics has been a driving force for Wiki Education since its inception, noted roundtable moderator Helaine Blumenthal, who manages the Wikipedia Student Program. 

When emphasizing a reflection made by Scott, Blumenthal summed up the critical influence of Wikipedia and its contributors: “The way we write about the past affects how we think about the present.”

Catch up on our Speaker Series on our YouTube channel, including “Wikipedia & Social Justice: How students are enhancing representation and equity,” and join us for our next program tomorrow, October 24!

Open Source Tech: Building the Wiki Education Dashboard

Thursday, October 24 at 9:30 am Pacific / 12:30 pm Eastern

REGISTER NOW

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada. Apply by December 1, 2024 for priority consideration for spring 2025.

🕑 1 hour 10 minutes

Asaf Bartov is the lead program officer for the Emerging Wikimedia Communities project of the Community Development Team at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• "Wikimania 2019 - Asaf Bartov" (episode of the podcast Scuola di Pensiero)
• Project Ben-Yehuda
• Nemala initiative
• WMF Community Development Team
• WikiLearn
• Wikimania 2023 program
• "Defending our wikis against weaponized generative AI" (talk by Asaf at Wikimania CEE Meeting 2024)

10/10/2024-16/10/2024

Breaking news

• Guillaume Rischard shared the OpenStreetMap Foundation 2024 chairperson’s report.
• Craig Allan, Laura Mugeha, Maurizio Napolitano, and Héctor Ochoa Ortiz have been elected as new OpenStreetMap Foundation board members. A total of 740 ballots were cast out of 1,971 eligible voters in this election.

Mapping

• There are several useful tutorials on iD editor and JOSM in Japanese. For example, Kisaragi’s tutorial ► on how to split an area on OpenStreetMap using the iD editor and Kohei Otsuka’s guide ► to splitting and joining OSM objects in JOSM.
• Requests for comments have been made on these proposals:
  • brt=* for indicating if a route=bus is a bus rapid transit service.
  • to deprecate busway=* for bus lanes.
  • access_key=* to describe places that are accessible using a (centralised) key system.
  • public_transport=access_space for mapping areas within a stop place such as a concourse or booking hall, immigration hall, or security area that is accessible by passengers, but without direct access for vehicles.
• Voting is underway on the proposal sac_scale=strolling, indicating a wide and smooth trail, until Tuesday 29 October.

Community

• In ‘It Started with a Road – Global South Version’ the Trufi Association imagines OSM and transportation justice transforming cities in the global South BEFORE car culture becomes endemic.
• Justine shared her experience of participating in State of the Map 2024, held in Nairobi, Kenya.
• Raquel Dezidério presented ► a proposal for harmonisation between the variables in Brazil’s National Register of Addresses for Statistical Purposes and OpenStreetMap tagging, specifically for educational establishments. Raquel asked for comments on the OSM Community forum. On the forum there is also another request for comments on the standardisation of addresses in Brazil.
• Valerie Norton has expressed frustration about people mapping remote areas by guesswork, perhaps prompted by the iD editor’s listing of ‘issues’ in yellow.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap US launched the Community Project programme to support volunteer-run projects and technologies that benefit the OpenStreetMap community. OpenStreetMap Americana, a project inspired by the cartographic aesthetics of American paper maps, has been chosen as the first OSM US Community Project.

Events

• With November approaching it’s time again for the #30DayMapChallenge, a chance to create maps based around different themes each day of November, posting using the hashtag #30DayMapChallenge. Stamen blogged some of their highlights from 2023 and 2022, if you would like to see samples of the work from previous years.
• Oliver Rudzick and Katja Haferkorn shared ► a report from the 22nd FOSSGIS-OSM Community Meeting, held on 3 to 6 October in Essen, Germany.

Maps

• Maeool tooted that Cartes, an OpenStreetMap-based online map, now supports a globe view feature when zoomed out, powered by the MapLibre GL v5 pre-release.

Software

• HOT has added MVT and PMTiles as formats to their Export Tool, along with the option to include metadata elements such as timestamp and user information.

Programming

• Tykayn has improved their Mapillary export script to be able to retrieve Mapillary sequences from multiple users and import them into Panoramax in bulk. They offered to do this for anyone who wanted it, and were able to rescue over 14 million photos. Tykayn gave a presentation > explaining the implications and methods used at the State of the Map France.
• Edward Betts delivered a talk at GeoPython 2024 on using Python-based tools to help link Wikidata and OpenStreetMap.

Releases

• Christoph Hormann announced that v5.9.0 of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on the OSM website) has been released. He says: ‘Once changes are deployed on openstreetmap.org it will take couple of days before all tiles show the new rendering.’ So stay tuned.He outlined the new changes in his email:
  • Adding rendering of shop=hearing_aids with a dedicated symbol
  • Restoring rendering of name labels for natural=reef
  • Adding rendering of lines with barrier=jersey_barrier
  • Removing rendering of railway=preserved in favor of interpreting railway:preserved=yes on other railway=*
  • Removing rendering of shop=jewellery as synonym for shop=jewelry
  • Adding rendering of leisure=dance with a point symbol and label
  • Interpretation of transport mode specific access tags on roads/paths.
• Christoph Hormann blogged about the new release of OSM Carto, where he explained that we have solutions for some very old problems now.

Did you know …

• … mediawiki2latex? After the WikCon in Wiesbaden, Germany, the author Dirk Hünniger adapted this software, originally written for Wikipedia, to our OSM wiki so it can be used to create very good .pdf files.
• … that Thunderforest offers ten different map tile set styles based on OpenStreetMap data?

Other “geo” things

• France’s IGN offered ► us some excerpts from Maxime Blondeau’s soon to be published book Géoconscience, a work richly illustrated with surprising maps and immersive photographs, which reveal the vital and fascinating nature of our common habitat, the Earth.
• Harel Dan tooted that there is an Easter egg in QGIS that allows you to play a 15 panel slider game, with your map, if you type ‘bored’ into the coordinate box.
• In response to Hurricane Helene’s devastating effects across multiple states, the US Geological Survey (USGS) has activated its landslide event team and collected images and data in the southern Appalachian Mountains. This information was shared across multiple state and federal agencies to inform, prioritise resources, and better predict future events. The data can be accessed by the public on a newly launched USGS Landslide Observations Dashboard Map.
• TeleGeography maintains an interactive and regularly updated Submarine Cable Map. These submarine cables keep us connected, but they can also occasionally become sources of friction.
• Jacquelyne Germain, from Smithsonian Magazine, reviewed Native-Land.ca, an interactive map that shows the location of Indigenous territories around the world.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend October 2024		2024-10-19 – 2024-10-20
Cabecera Municipal Duitama	Estado del Mapa – Duitama 2024		2024-10-19
Yelahanka taluku	OSM Bengaluru Mapping Party		2024-10-19
Nonnweiler	Craftmapping Höckerlinie Otzenhausen		2024-10-19
	Spatial Girls Network Webinar Launch		2024-10-19
Kalyani Nagar	OSM Mapping Party at TomTom		2024-10-19
Toulouse	Rencontre du groupe local de Toulouse		2024-10-19
	[Online] 18th Annual General Meeting of the OpenStreetMap Foundation		2024-10-19
Amsterdam	A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations Between Eric Theise and Edward Schocker		2024-10-19
Mumbai	Mumbai Online Remote Mapping Pre-Party		2024-10-20
Berlin	DRK & HeiGIT Online Beginner Mapathon		2024-10-22
Berlin	OSM-Verkehrswende #63	✓	2024-10-22
City of Edinburgh	OSM Edinburgh pub meetup		2024-10-22
Flensburg	OK Lab Flensburg Community OSM Treffen		2024-10-23
Lübeck	147. OSM-Stammtisch Lübeck und Umgebung		2024-10-24
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2024-10-25
Bologna	OpenStreetMap al Linux Day di Bologna		2024-10-26
中正區	台北城內商家mapping party暨慶賀MozTW 3.0喬遷之喜		2024-10-26
Mumbai	Mumbai Mapping Party		2024-10-26
City of South Perth	Social Mapping Sunday: Perth Zoo FREE TICKETS		2024-10-27
	Bremer Mappertreffen		2024-10-28
Saint-Étienne	Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire		2024-10-28
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2024-10-30
	Tentative: OSMF Affiliation Models brainstorming		2024-10-30
Amsterdam	Maptime Amsterdam: Autumn mapping party		2024-10-30
Wien	73. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch		2024-10-30
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)		2024-10-30
Moers	Community-Hackday am 1. – 3. November 2024 im JuNo, Moers Repelen		2024-11-01 – 2024-11-03
Berlin	OSM Hackweekend Berlin 11/2024		2024-11-02 – 2024-11-03

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Elizabete, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, derFred, miurahr, rtnf.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.