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On the eve of the next Wiki Education Speaker Series, we’re looking back at the powerful conversation between our most recent panelists, each bringing their professional and personal passions to improving a content area all too often neglected on Wikipedia and beyond.

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Moderated by Wiki Education’s Senior Program Manager Helaine Blumenthal, the panel of scholars and advocates gathered virtually to shed light on the ongoing efforts to expand and enhance disability-related information on Wikipedia.

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“We know that when you can better inform families and their loved ones that experience disability, it results in better healthcare,” said panelist Ryan Easterly, Executive Director of the WITH Foundation. “We’ve all been to a doctor’s office, not understood something they’ve said to us, and turned to Wikipedia. Our support of this work acknowledges that, and acknowledges what a powerful tool Wikipedia is when it comes to healthcare information.”

Thanks to a strategic partnership grant from the WITH Foundation, Wiki Education continues to build upon efforts to improve and expand Wikipedia’s coverage of healthcare for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This initiative includes a series of Wiki Scientists courses that teaches experts in intellectual and developmental disability (I/DD) healthcare, including adults with lived experience of I/DD, to contribute their expertise to Wikipedia. 

One such expert is Diana Boling, a registered nurse and professor at Xavier University School of Nursing, who shared her experience learning to edit Wikipedia as a Wiki Scientists course participant herself. 

“Much of my [Wikipedia] journey has been fueled by curiosity,” Boling explained. “Where can I show up better? How can I be a better nurse? How can I be a better neighbor or human?” 

Echoing Easterly’s reflection of Wikipedia’s real-world influence, Boling emphasized the critical connection between Wikipedia, scholarship, and lived experience.

“As many of us know as scholars, our textbooks don’t always capture information in the most accurate or useful ways,” said Boling. “Educators, particularly nurses and other healthcare providers, need to be educated about how we can leverage Wikipedia. And hopefully folks with lived experiences are contributing to it, which can then help healthcare providers reach their patients in meaningful ways rather than in stereotypical, less effective, or sometimes even alienating ways.”

As an early editor of Wikipedia, the first blind administrator on English Wikipedia, and now the technology program lead at the Braille Institute, panelist Skylar Covich has brought his own lived experience and expertise to the online encyclopedia for many years. His contributions include article creation and improvements for notable individuals within blind culture, organizations for the blind, and access technology for the blind.

Covich also encouraged individuals with lived experience to review the Wikipedia articles related to their own conditions and help fill the gaps.

“There are things that could be added about the experiences of what it’s like [to have these conditions] that are less in the medical field and more in the cultural field,” Covich noted. “The references are out there, it just takes effort.”

Panelist Terri Hlava’s students are more than familiar with the research efforts needed to contribute to Wikipedia – the Arizona State University professor has incorporated a Wikipedia assignment into her Policy Advocacy and Disability courses in the School of Social Transformation, as well as the course Justice and Disability: The Social Construction of Disability.

“[The assignment] has been just tremendous for team building, trust building, community building, and knowledge building throughout the process,” said Hlava. “We always have presentations at the end of class, and it’s really been lovely to see the students have so much confidence in what they’re saying and be so proud of what they’ve done.”

Hlava loves the moment where her students realize the scope and reach of their work on Wikipedia.

“We go online as a class, and they see how many zillions of times their articles have been looked at,” said Hlava. “And then without fail, their jaws dropped to the floor and they gasp in amazement. I love that for them.”

As the webinar reached its end, the panelists were asked to share what made them hopeful for the future of disability representation on Wikipedia. Easterly emphasized opportunities to engage new editors, Covich acknowledged the historic growth of Wikipedia’s coverage in this topic area, and Hlava and Boling shared that the panel discussion itself gave them hope.

“Opportunities like this to share, to educate, and to travel the landscape together more often and more deeply,” answered Hlava.  

Catch up on our Speaker Series on our YouTube channel and join us for our next webinar tomorrow, June 10!

Gaps & Growth: Enhancing Latino/x/é and Latin American content on Wikipedia

Tuesday, June 10, 2025
9:30am Pacific / 12:30pm Eastern
REGISTRATION

Live interpretation from English to Spanish will be available to attendees during this webinar.

Brechas y crecimiento: Mejorando el contenido latino/x/é y latinoamericano en Wikipedia

Martes, 10 de junio, 2025
9:30am Pacífico / 12:30pm Este
INSCRIPCIÓN

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. 

Visit learn.wikiedu.org to explore our editing courses for subject matter experts.

Communication when done right is powerful! Whether it’s pitching an idea to a group of investors, leading a movement, or advocating for a cause, how communicate is done can make all the difference

The Africa Wiki Women, recognising that communication has the power to drive change, inspire action, shape perceptions, and produce tangible results. centered the April Edition of the AWW Skill–Up Workshop on “The Art of Public Speaking.”

The session featured Winnie Kabintie as the guest trainer; a journalist and communication specialist with more than a decade of experience in the media industry. Community leaders from Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Madagascar, Gambia, and other parts of Africa convened for the workshop.

Through the interactive session, Winnie unpacked how public speaking can be a game changer for leadership, advocacy, and community development. Key insights also cut across techniques for projecting confidence, structuring content, and engaging diverse audiences. Emphasis was also placed on the element of consideration in communication and the importance of asking the 4 W’s and 1H questions in the process of communicating:

• Who do you want to communicate to?
• What exactly do you want them to know and do with that information?
• Why should it matter to them?
• Where is the best platform or context?
• How can you deliver it in terms of clarity, structure and relevance?

Participants gained fresh perspectives on how they can utilise public speaking to drive sustainable impact across societies. And also had a good opportunity to give a sneak peek into their first public speaking experience.

Become a part of the Africa Wiki Women Community today by registering as a member. To stay in the loop of the community’s activities, follow on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

I joined the ESEAP Strategy Summit 2025, held in Manila, Philippines from May 23 to 25, 2025. ESEAP is an affiliate organization of Wikimedia in East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific region. I joined the ESEAP Conference 2024 held in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia last year, and interacted with many Wikimedians in the region. Unlike last year’s conference, which anyone could attend, this Strategic Summit is positioned as a strategic conference to discuss and shape the future of the Wikimedia movement in the region. I joined as a member of the Wikimedians of Japan User Group.

The three-day summit was attended by 87 Wikimedians from 21 countries, and 16 sessions were held to discuss issues in the ESEAP region from various angles. Regarding the governance of the ESEAP Hub, a detailed explanation was given of the newly proposed “Liaisons” representing specific communities, and many questions were asked. There were also reports on the actual collaboration and various activities in the region, and we were able to learn from each other about specific collaboration methods.

As for sessions from regions other than ESEAP, Barbara Klen, a staff member of the CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) Hub, gave an online talk on the history and overview of CEE. I was also able to talk with the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Macej Nadikiewicz from Poland and Lorenzo Rosa from Italy. I also had a lively talk with Jorge Vargas, a staff member of the Foundation from Colombia in South America.

Among the participants were many people from ESEAP countries, including Malaysia, whom I had met last year, and I was able to renew friendships. It was also nice to meet participants from Myanmar for the first time. Several people called out to me, saying that they had seen the recent Let’s Connect Learning Clinic. A local Filipino young man said that he likes wearing Japanese kimonos and showed me his wearing photo. I found out that Johnny Alegre, who is about the same age as me, is a jazz guitarist, and when I told him about my musical experience, he gave me a CD of his own work. And Badette, who is also my roommate, is also about the same age, and when I gave her a postcard with a haiku by Masaoka Shiki on it, she sent me a haiku in English that she had written herself on SNS after returning home, which was a happy accident. It was an event where I enjoyed learning and meeting various people. I’m looking forward to the Conference 2026 in Taiwan.

From May 2 to 4, Wikimedia Colombia participated for the first time in the Wikimedia Foundation’s Hackathon, an annual event that brings together technology enthusiasts, developers, free knowledge activists, and members of the Wikimedia community—whether technical or not, even those initially unfamiliar with Wikimedia projects—to collaborate, learn, and build tools that make free and open knowledge more accessible.

This year, the meeting place was Istanbul; a magical city, a bridge between Europe and Asia, and an ancient place where past and present coexist. Cosmopolitan, vibrant, historical: cradle of empires and an eternal city. In this diverse setting, Wikimedia Colombia brought its energy, vision, and a concrete challenge.

A Meaningful Challenge: Making Historical Memory Information in Colombia Visible and Preserved

Under the coordination of the Technologies and Communities Program (WMCO), Colombia arrived with a mission: to create at least 120 new items in Wikidata, with a specific ontology that would make the investigations of the JEP (Special Jurisdiction for Peace) on extrajudicial executions in Colombia, known as “false positives,” more understandable, accessible, and reusable.

To reach this goal, weeks of collaborative work and community preparation were behind us, thanks to the support of Nathaly Montoya, Sofía Corredor, Bernardo Caycedo, Manuel Franco, Nikolay Martínez, Mariana Lozano, and Angie Ballesteros. In the two months leading up to the event, we gathered in a space we called the Minga de datos: a meeting and collective work space where we, as members of Colombia’s Wikimedia community, sat down to review, verify, and structure information contained in the JEP’s rulings, especially for this opportunity, Ruling 128.

The Minga de datos is not just a technical meeting space: it’s an exercise in memory, listening, and responsibility. Together, we cleaned data, designed a specific ontology, and ensured that the information we were going to incorporate into Wikidata rigorously reflected the facts, with a focus on human rights and the victims’ dignity.

The goal was clear: to contribute to Project 6402+, a web memorial under construction that seeks to dignify the lives and names of victims of extrajudicial executions in Colombia. That number, 6,402, is not a statistic: they are stories of people killed and falsely presented as combat casualties by state agents. They are open wounds that deserve truth, justice, and memory.

In Istanbul, that preparation bore fruit. With the help of Wikimedia colleagues like André Barbosa (Wikimedia Portugal) and Antonin Delpeuch, we managed to incorporate key information into Wikidata, transforming Ruling 128—a fundamental document in the investigation of these crimes—into an accessible, structured, and linked source of free knowledge. A crucial step so that more people, from different disciplines, geographies, and languages, can learn about, study, and not forget this painful chapter of our recent colombian history.

Making this data visible is not just a technical act. It’s a form of symbolic justice. It’s contributing to a living memory, from a global platform, using free technology and in community.

A Community That Speaks in Many Accents

One of the great achievements of this edition was the strong Latin American presence. It was inspiring to meet colleagues from Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, among others. Each with powerful projects, brilliant ideas, and the common desire to share, build, and liberate knowledge.

We discovered tools like Paulina, which allows identifying which works are in the public domain in multiple countries through queries in Wikidata, generating accessible and multilingual lists. Or Quichwabase, a cloud-based Wikibase instance dedicated to the Quechua language and community: a clear example of how technology can be put at the service of linguistic and cultural diversity.

What Istanbul Leaves Us

We returned with more than technical learnings and new items in Wikidata. We returned with a firmer conviction: free technology, when built in community, can transform the way we understand, share, and defend knowledge. Participating in this hackathon was a first step, but also an affirmation: from Colombia, from Latin America, we have much to contribute, and we are powerful and diverse voices that deserve to be heard.

The 2025 hackathon was organized by the Wikimedia Foundation in collaboration with the local Wikimedia affiliate and the Wikimedia User Group of Turkey (WMTR).

It all began with a student thesis.

Back in 2015, Saul Hoffman, a student at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, was deep into his research on how Wikipedia could be used as a tool to boost critical thinking, collaborative skills and research abilities among students. As part of his work, he organized a Wikipedia editing event and invited educators and librarians to join.

One of the attendees was Loretta, a librarian with 30 years of experience, and expertise in electronic resources, institutional repositories and information literacy courses for students. From the moment she clicked “edit”, something clicked for her too.  

“I realised the enormous potential this activity had as a teaching tool”, she says, “Writing, editing and translating an article gives students a way to put their language skills into practice, It helps them learn about cultures, which are often underrepresented, critically evaluate sources, to learn how to use the bibliographic resources and experiment with knowledge-sharing activities in an open collaborative environment.” . 

Inspired, Loretta began weaving Wikipedia into her bibliographic research courses.  Her focus? Articles on topics overlooked or not well developed in Italian Wikipedia (such as Japanese theatre, multicultural London, and more). She also began organizing events promoted by Wikidonne and centered on women’s biographies and cultural themes, such as Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, women writers of crime fiction, and artists from the Sinsombrero movement or Japan’s Edo period. Her students also worked on individual Wikipedia contributions, as a part of their assignment.  

Over the course of three years, 317 students participated in those activities and over 400 articles were  added to Wikipedia. 

And something else started to shift. The academic view of Wikipedia began to change.

“Thanks to these courses, the “reputation” of Wikipedia also improved over time on an academic level”, Loretta notes “Several professors were involved and offered this training activity to their students as a certified internship”. 

“I am pleased to have given many students the opportunity to get to know Wikipedia and how it works. To shift from passive readers to active, shared approach to the production and use of knowledge, placing research, selection, and the use of reliable sources at the center of this work”, she reflects. 

A commitment that continued even after reaching retirement, extending her collaboration to other schools and institutions in northern and central Italy, and this year, the University of Roma Tre, where the internship started with several students is about to conclude with the publication of a wikibook on the History of Italian Feminism. 

But Loretta’s contributions don’t end in the classroom. 

To date, she has authored 164 Wikipedia articles on a kaleidoscope of topics – from the anti-Nazi cabarets in Munich in the 1930s to Burmese women writers and from the ancient Japanese nomadic puppeteers to the Querelle des femmes. 

“I don’t like collecting edits, I like to take my time,” she says. “Most of my articles take a week to a couple of months to write. They’re rarely translations. I focus on little-known subjects and cultures.”

As an active member of the WikiDonne project, Loretta is especially passionate about articles that spotlight diversity – cultural, social, and gender-related. She enjoys writing female biographies, and is also interested in Japanese art and culture. She has written about Pauline Boty, a pop art pioneer; the Japanese Hari-Kuyō festival, which honors broken sewing needles; an impactful essay by Joan Scott, and about Samoan female tattoos.

She hopes her work helps others, especially those who may not have the same resources she does: access to academic libraries, a fast internet connection, or time to spare. And acknowledges the importance of access to scientific resources and the fact that many of them are accessible thanks to the Wikipedia Library project (a valuable initiative that has already been used by nearly 9,000 editors to improve articles across more than 200 Wikimedia projects).

For Loretta, Wikimedia is a way to connect to the values she holds as a librarian: a belief in open access to knowledge, and the importance of developing a critical and conscious capacity for judgement – one that helps people recognise when information or knowledge is being misused or distorted. 

She would like everyone to know that Wikimedia is  “a great community, you can discover and learn about everything, you just need to be a little curious and proactive”.

When asked about the challenges ahead she points to the need of reducing the gender gap and more diversity. She is also wondering about what the future holds with the technological changes around us: “I am concerned about the effects that artificial intelligence and the growing monopoly of information may have on the future of Wikimedia projects. I think that AI is a great opportunity, but we must be prepared to manage it; our challenge is to remain free from external constraints, cultivate diversity, knowledge sharing and quality.”

Thank you for all your important work, Loretta. We are confident that thanks to people like you: curious, dedicated to accuracy, knowledge sharing and passionate, Wikipedia will continue to be a center of human-curated, high-quality knowledge on the internet.

The FGBC Wiki Club recently held a Wikidata training session, sponsored by the Igbo Wikimedians User Group. As FGBC is an all-boys school, the training focused on Nigerian men who have made significant contributions in media, STEM, sports, politics, and education. This initiative aimed to equip  and introduce students and educators to the power of open knowledge and encourage meaningful contributions to wikidata

.

The training took place  at the School Media space  in FGBC and was facilitated by Oby Ezeilo  The students were introduced to the fundamentals of Wikidata, a free and open knowledge base that  acts as central storage for the structured data. The training featured:

• Foundational Learning: An introduction to key Wikidata concepts — items, properties, and statements.
• Hands-on Sessions: Students created and edited Wikidata entries related to Nigerian men in so many fields under the guidance of the facilitator
• Contextual Relevance: Participants focused on improving data about Nigerian topics — including notable personalities in sports, STEM, education, media and politics
• Collaborative Spirit: Breakout sessions encouraged teamwork and critical thinking.

Participants which were students of FGBC Wiki Club engaged in hands-on exercises, learning to structure information using Wikidata properties, statements, and references. The training not only enhanced their technical skills but also deepened their appreciation for the impact of Nigerian figures in different online domains. At the end of the session, students successfully created and improved several Wikidata entries, contributing to the visibility of Nigerian men in media, STEM, sports, politics, and education.

Teachers as Champions of Open Knowledge

Some Teachers at FGBC showed great enthusiasm about integrating Wikimedia projects into classroom learning. They expressed interest in using Wikidata and other Wikimedia platforms to teach topics ranging from history and ICT to research methods.

“This kind of training should be extended to more schools. It builds both digital and civic literacy.”
— Ogbonnaya Bright ICT Teacher, FGBC Abuja

Measurable Impact

Though we had two major challenges limited space and Limited hardwares to work with but By the end of the project:

• 23 students created their first  Wiki account and Wikidata items
• 5 teachers were trained to become future facilitators
• Topics related to Nigeria men saw over 300 new contributions on Wikidata

Looking Ahead

This training is a small but powerful step towards building a new generation of Wikimedians in Nigeria. This event was an inspiring step towards engaging young minds in open knowledge initiatives and ensuring that the legacies of notable Nigerian men are well-documented and accessible globally. With continued support and training, these students are well on their way to becoming active contributors to the Wikimedia projects.

Welcome to “Don’t Blink”! Every month we share developments from around the world that shape people’s ability to participate in the free knowledge movement. In case you blinked last month, here are the most important public policy advocacy topics that have kept the Wikimedia Foundation busy.

The Global Advocacy team works to advocate laws and government policies that protect the volunteer community-led Wikimedia model, Wikimedia’s people, and the Wikimedia movement’s core values. To learn more about us and the work we do with the rest of the Foundation, visit our Meta-Wiki webpage, follow us on LinkedIn or on X (formerly Twitter), and sign up to our quarterly newsletter or Wikimedia public policy mailing list.

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Knowledge is human: Foundation’s new three-year artificial intelligence (AI) strategy puts human first
[Find out more about the Foundation’s AI strategy]

The Foundation has published a new AI strategy that celebrates and centers the volunteers behind Wikipedia’s success. This strategy outlines how the Foundation plans to approach the rapid expansion in the development and use of AI, including what kind of tools we will create for the Wikimedia projects. In the announcement, Chris Albon (Director of Machine Learning) and Leila Zia (Director and Head of Research) share how the Foundation will prioritize helping the volunteers who create Wikipedia to automate tasks and workflows in order to have more time to create, share, and curate knowledge. The Foundation intends to:

• Support Wikimedia moderators and patrollers through AI-assisted workflows for repetitive tasks,
• Improve how information is discovered on Wikipedia,
• Automate translation of common topics so Wikimedia contributors can spend more time sharing their local expertise, and
• Provide guided mentorship for new Wikimedia volunteers to help with onboarding.

The AI strategy reflects deeply-held Wikimedia values and principles. Any future work with AI will prioritize human agency and decision-making, transparency, the use of open-weight and open-source AI models, as well as preserving the fundamental multilingual nature of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. 

We are not the only organization thinking about how AI may influence the future of sharing and accessing knowledge on the internet. Ongoing conversations around AI will have significant impacts on the future of free knowledge and the online information ecosystem that feeds public interest projects like Wikipedia. At a recent lunch lecture held at Columbia University, Stan Adams (Lead Public Policy Specialist for North America) joined the General Counsel of the New York Times for such a discussion in order to talk about how generative AI affects journalism, traditional news media, and the services that rely upon those sources. 

Reporting estimates that “Wikipedia is probably the most important single source in the training of AI models” and that it is one of the three biggest websites used for English-language AIs. At the same time, Wikipedians themselves rely on outside sources like newspapers and academic journals to support their work on the project. Preserving a healthy ecosystem of human information creation, gathering, and sharing in the face of widespread adoption of technologies like generative AI is fundamental.

There are two other concerns worth mentioning. One is the proliferation of content generated by AI online, oftentimes low-quality and riddled with errors, has some people concerned about how it threatens information integrity. The other is a technical phenomenon called model collapse, which is the observation that when AI models are fed on content generated by other AI, the quality of the new model’s content degrades over time. All of these facts are why it is so important that our new AI strategy prioritizes helping our volunteer editors to do their work and that our positive vision for the future of the internet includes protections for knowledge coming from journalism and academic research.

Find out more about the Foundation’s AI strategy.

Sharing lessons from Wikimedians at digital rights conferences around the world
[Read our RightsCon reflections, and learn more about Wikimedians’ participation at the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF) in this Diff blog post]

Attending conferences focused on digital rights is one of the many ways that Wikimedians can share their knowledge and expertise with the world, and also advocate policies that protect and promote public interest projects like Wikipedia. Wikimedians are often in the best position to discuss their work and what policies or regulations affect them, and joining international digital rights forums like these helps them bring unique perspectives to others who also work on these topics across the globe. 

In April, Wikimedians from across Africa attended the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF), a conference hosted by the Paradigm Initiative and held this year in Lusaka, Zambia. Wikimedians’ presentation topics included: empowering women and communities through digital inclusion; using technology to promote information integrity and keep people informed during elections; and setting an example for inclusive artificial intelligence by amplifying underrepresented voices on Wikipedia. This is the fourth year that the Foundation has sponsored DRIF; each year the connections made and lessons learned have proven valuable to the work Wikimedians do all year round. By supporting this event, we also contribute to a broader ecosystem of digital rights activists and civil society organizations who work tirelessly to shape inclusive and rights-respecting policies for the internet.

This month, we also shared reflections from Wikimedians who participated in RightsCon, a conference focused on human rights in the digital age that took place in Taipei, Taiwan, this past February. The Wikimedians attending the conference represented affiliates groups and allies from Africa, Australia, Taiwan, Uganda, and the United Kingdom. In their reflections, they had a lot to say about what they learned and what they were able to teach others. Reflecting on his experience, Liang-chih Shang Kuan (Wikimedia Taiwan) said: 

I was inspired to consider how my insights from RightsCon can be incorporated into ongoing Wikimedia projects. One way […] is preserving Indigenous languages. It was motivating to see how Wikimedians’ work on this issue resonates with a global audience, which highlights the need to continue investing in building linguistically inclusive online communities. […] RightsCon offered a valuable platform to engage with key stakeholders, including human rights activists and journalists, whose work aligns with Wikimedia’s mission.

Our blog post contains more insights from community members as well as reflections from the Foundation’s Global Advocacy team, who highlighted the urgency of protecting digital rights in our current era of shifting geopolitical dynamics and accelerating technological change. In addition, the team shared how there is a global conversation about the need to get creative around fundraising for digital rights organizations and have a positive vision for information integrity.

Read our RightsCon reflections, and learn more about Wikimedians’ participation at the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF) in this Diff blog post.

Discussing human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) at Wikimedia Europe’s (WMEU) General Assembly
[View our presentation about how we identify risks as a part of complying with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA)]

Wikimedians from across Europe and members of the Global Advocacy team joined WMEU for their annual General Assembly, held in Prague, Czechia. At the event, participants gathered to discuss the logistics of coordinating among affiliates, present research about how legal regulations affect Wikipedia’s impact, and share work on important topics ranging from promoting open cultural heritage to AI. 

Ricky Gaines (Human Rights Policy and Advocacy Lead) and Phil Bradley-Schmieg (Lead Counsel) led a discussion on how the Foundation has approached assessing systemic risk as required by the EU’s DSA. They gathered ideas and feedback from the experienced Wikimedians and affiliate leaders who participated about the risks they experience in their work and how to consider these in future risk assessment exercises. Under the DSA, Wikipedia is the only nonprofit website that has been designated as a Very Large Online Platform (VLOP), and it is also the only platform to have received a “positive with comments” result during the first independent audit of our compliance with the DSA. The global human rights impact assessments (HRIAs) we have already conducted—which include our organization-wide HRIA, child rights impact assessment, and soon-to-be-published AI and machine learning (ML) HRIA—help us to identify areas where we can improve the safety and integrity of our projects, while providing a transparent record to hold the Foundation accountable to its commitments. 

The WMEU General Assembly marked an important opportunity to celebrate all of the hard work in which Wikimedia communities in Europe engage, and to build closer collaboration among affiliates to help navigate increasingly shifting legal, technological, and political landscapes that present new challenges for unique community-led, public interest projects like Wikipedia.

View our presentation about how we identify risks as a part of complying with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

Defending privacy for electronic communications in Snap v. Pina legal case
[Read our Diff blog post about the lawsuit and the amicus brief we cosigned]

The Foundation recently filed a “friend-of-the-court” or amicus brief in a case that could have significant implications for the electronic privacy of internet users in the United States (US). The case, Snap v. Pina, involves a dispute about what kinds of private information a court can force online services and platforms to provide during a criminal court case. Here, the defendant in a murder trial requested a subpoena—that is, a demand with the power of the court behind it—for electronic communications that took place on platforms owned by Snap Inc. and Meta Platforms, Inc. Both companies argued that the 1986 Stored Communications Act (SCA)—a leading electronic communications privacy statute in the US—would prohibit service providers from disclosing a user’s private data to anyone. The Court of Appeals of California ruled otherwise, and held that the SCA does not apply to private electronic data held by a platform host when said host uses that data for its own “business purposes,” for instance, targeted advertising.

We cosigned an amicus brief to challenge this interpretation by the court, focusing on criticizing the “business purpose” view presented to get this important legal precedent right without supporting any of the specific parties to the dispute. This ruling could have severe consequences for privacy online, lessening the protections that services and platforms based in the US have to push back on both national and foreign requests for data by removing some of the steps that require cooperation between the US and foreign authorities to issue a search warrant. This is especially important at a time when foreign governments, especially authoritarian ones, are increasingly pressuring technology companies to comply with their demands, legal or otherwise. Therefore, we asked the court to overturn this new “business purpose” theory of the SCA and protect the privacy and safety of internet users everywhere from governmental repression.

Read our Diff blog post about the lawsuit and the amicus brief we cosigned.

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Follow us on LinkedIn or on X (formerly Twitter), visit our Meta-Wiki webpage, sign up for our quarterly newsletter to receive updates, and join our Wikipedia policy mailing list. We hope to see you there!

At Fosdem 2025 I had the opportunity to arrange the Web Performance developer room together with Dave, Julien and Nazim from Mozilla.

FOSDEM is a completely free and open conference held annually in Brussels, Belgium, dedicated to promoting free and open-source software and knowledge sharing. One thing I particularly like about FOSDEM is that all speakers volunteer their time and expertise, making it truly community-driven. All sessions were recorded, so I'm excited to share the videos here for those who couldn't attend.

Our developer room was fully packed during several sessions, it was great to see that people still care about web performance.

Here are the talks from our Web Performance room this year:

• How browsers REALLY load Web pages - Robin Marx (video)
• Making Sense of the Long Animation Frames (LoAF) API - Andy Davies (video)
• Scheduling HTTP streams - Alexander Krizhanovsky (video)
• Chromium on Android: How we doubled Speedometer & developed the LoadLine benchmark - Eric Seckler, Gurj Bahia (video)
• Collaborate using the Firefox Profiler - Nazım Can Altınova (video)

Enjoy watching the talks!

EduWiki_Nigeria is a a sub-wiki organization that supports education and digital literacy initiatives, providing resources guidance and expertise to help establish and sustain wiki clubs in secondary schools.

On March 9, 2025, Learnovation Network Foundation, in collaboration with EduWiki Nigeria, hosted a seminar themed “Building a Safer Digital Future: The Essentials of Online Safety and Privacy.” The first training session was facilitated by Linason_Blessing, who presented on building a safer digital future: ”The essentials of online safety and privacy”. The second session was led by Oby Ezeilo, co-founder of EduWiki Nigeria and founder of the FGBC Wiki Club. She walked the participants through the establishment of the FGBC Wiki Club in Abuja and its role and activities in promoting safer digital practice.

In today’s digital world, equipping students with essential digital literacy skills is more important than ever. Wiki Club Federal Government Boys College Abuja. The FGBC Wiki Club, established in November 2023 through the collaborative efforts of Oby Ezeilo, Federal Government Boys College (FGBC), and EduWiki Nigeria, is a shining example of how digital literacy initiatives can transform education. This initiative aims to empower students by teaching them how to navigate the digital space safely, access and contribute to open knowledge, and develop research skills.

The Wiki Club was created to bridge the knowledge gap in digital literacy by introducing students to key concepts such as:
✔ Kiwix – an offline Wikipedia reader that allows students to access knowledge without internet connectivity.
✔ Online Safety and Security – educating students on how to protect their privacy and manage their digital footprint.
✔ Information Literacy – teaching students how to evaluate and verify information online.
✔ Digital Citizenship and Media Literacy – promoting responsible online behavior and critical thinking.
✔ Wikimedia and Online Collaboration – encouraging students to contribute to global knowledge through Wikimedia projects.

Strategies

The FGBC Wiki Club employs a variety of strategies to make digital literacy both fun and educational:
✔ Trainings & Edit-a-thons – Students participate in hands-on training sessions to learn digital skills which they also edit on wikidata.https://diff.wikimedia.org/?p=156132
✔ Integration with School Curriculum – Aligning with academic subjects enhances relevance.
✔ Encouraging Active Learning – Students are encouraged to explore, create, and collaborate on digital projects.
✔ Digital Storybook Reading – Students engage with open-source storybooks on platforms like StoryWeaver to foster a love for reading

✔Community engagement-– Students participated in some of engagements some of which are Interhouse sports and African Child celebration.

Community events: Participated in the school inter house sports by organizing a match past where we came second best

Impact on Students

The FGBC Wiki Club has had a profound impact on students, fostering lifelong learning and knowledge-sharing. Some of the key benefits include:
✔ Development of Research Skills – Students learn how to access reliable information and analyze data critically.
✔ Improved Academic Performance – Digital literacy enhances students’ ability to study effectively.
✔ Civic and Community Engagement – The initiative instills a sense of responsibility in students to contribute to their communities.
✔ Enhanced Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving – Students develop the ability to assess information and make informed decisions.
✔ Mentorship and Leadership – Older students mentor younger ones, creating a culture of knowledge transfer.

✔Volunteerism–Thye begin to develop the spirit of volunteering for community engagements

Challenges and Lessons Learned

Despite its successes, the Wiki Club has faced some challenges, including:
➔Internet connectivity

➔ Time commitment

➔ Resource management and availability.

➔ copyright and licensing issues

➔ limited access to devices and space

➔ software and tool limitations

➔ Digital divide

The success of the FGBC Wiki Club highlights the potential for similar initiatives to be adopted in schools across Nigeria and beyond. By embracing digital literacy, schools can empower students with the skills they need to succeed in an increasingly digital world. With more educators like Oby Ezeilo leading the charge, the future of education

29/05/2025-04/06/2025

Mapping

• historic=ceremonial_gate, a tag proposed to represent traditional symbolic gates in East Asian cultural regions (such as Chinese Paifang/Pailou, Japanese Torii, Korean Hongsalmun/Iljumun, and Vietnamese Tam Quan), is currently under discussion.

Mapping campaigns

• Mapillary and HERE announced CompleteTheMap Europe, a collaborative effort to enhance street-level imagery coverage across major European cities. Registration must be completed by Thursday 12 June.
• The OpenStreetMap Russia community has announced ► an upcoming online mapping initiative aimed at enhancing the digital map of the city of Morshansk. The mapathon has been running since Saturday 31 May and will run until Friday 13 June. Participants will use up-to-date resources including 2024 Yandex street-level panoramas and Esri satellite imagery to contribute detailed mapping data to one of the few remaining under-mapped cities in the country.

Community

• Jim Spath shared some progress on improving the display of EV charging stations in Android Auto OsmAnd.
• Kumakyoo advocated for mapping pavements as separate geometries, rather than using the sidewalk=* tag on roads, arguing that in certain cases, this tag alone makes it impossible to accurately determine the layout of pedestrian crossings from OSM data.
• Malle_Yeno blogged his thoughts on wheelchair accessibility mapping: do establishments need powered doors to be accessible? Do we evaluate accessibility at the POI feature level, or in context?
• Andy Townsend thought about using the diameter_crown tag to render trees according to their size.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Operations Team has successfully mitigated a large-scale web scraping attack targeting the OpenStreetMap Wiki. The botnet, which operated through over 2 million unique IP addresses, and is still growing, was aggressively scraping content via proxies. In response, the team implemented a defensive measure by blocking more than 32,000 IPv4 /24 ranges. Members of the community have proposed deploying Anubis, a proof-of-work challenge system, to further protect the wiki from automated scraping. However, discussions are ongoing regarding potential licensing concerns associated with its implementation.

Events

• Katja Haferkorn announced ► the planned formation of the new Programme Committee for FOSSGIS 2026. Anyone interested in joining the Programme Committee is invited to send an email to FOSSGIS by Tuesday 15 July.
• FOSSGIS held ► its first Networking Meeting for Geoinformatics Professionals, FOSSGIS Conference Participants, Members, and Interested Members of the FOSSGIS Community on Wednesday 4 June. The next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday 10 September, again at 6:00 PM (UTC+2).

Education

• Hermann106 shared ► several useful links for learning how to use JOSM.

Maps

• ^[1] Christoph Hormann developed some design concepts for more differentiated depiction of coastal infrastructure based on OpenStreetMap data.
• Tkhir noticed ► that some of Kyiv’s streets are named after fruits and vegetables. Andrii Holovin added emojis in a comment to provide context about the etymology of the names.
• Christoph Hormann has developed a map design capable of rendering aquaculture installations (landuse=aquaculture).

OSM in action

• Costa Line has developed ► an interactive OpenStreetMap-based web map that can be used to track the movements of all the ships in its fleet.
• The Department of Posts under India’s Ministry of Communications has launched the Digital Postal Index Number (DIGIPIN), a grid-based digital address system aimed at modernising postal services and improving address accuracy across the country. The official portal, Know Your DIGIPIN, utilises an OpenStreetMap base map to allow users to conveniently look up their DIGIPIN based on their geographic location.
• Student Justin Fung built an interactive map to help wildfire evacuees. Justin presented his map on CBC News.

Open Data

• In Ukraine, over 1.5 million addresses have already been verified ► in the Unified State Register of Addresses, as the second stage of the project gains speed. The register is being developed with government support and help from UK Dev, the Eurasia Foundation, and the East Europe Foundation. Verified address data will improve map accuracy, reduce errors, and support better public services.

Software

• Project OSRM is developing a new area routing feature that will enable the calculation of optimal routes across walkable open spaces.
• tvbrene has built ‘ExtendedClipboard’, a JOSM plugin that provides up to 10 independent clipboards for storing OSM objects for later selection.
• Tykayn has developed the Mon Commerce OpenStreetMap (My OpenStreetMap Business), a tool that invites POI owners in France, to maintain their OpenStreetMap data. It allows a place to be edited without requiring a personal account (the edits are proxied through the osm-commerce-fr OSM account).

Programming

• Archit Rathod blogged about his upcoming Google Summer of Code 2025 contribution, where he will build a system for incorporating real-time road closure data with OpenStreetMap.
• Ayush Dhar Dubey outlined his plan to modernise the 3D Model Repository as part of the Google Summer of Code 2025.
• Anders Borg has created a Python application that converts Overture map data (based on OSM and other open data) to a cohesive STL model, which can then be modified for 3D printing of a certain map area.
• Victor introduced OsmAnd’s new Highway Hierarchy Routing, a routing engine that segments maps into small clusters with defined border points, enabling pre-calculated shortcuts for faster routing within and between neighbouring clusters.

Releases

• Florian Bischof announced the release of Leaflet 2.0 Alpha. This version marks a major modernisation of the Leaflet codebase, including the removal of Internet Explorer support, legacy methods, and polyfills. It also adopts modern standards including Pointer Events and is now published as an ESM module.
• Organic Maps is ‘back on track’, as they say, after their recent management problems. The May version is now available. This update includes various improvements to the map, including the removal of the referral link to Kayak and minor fixes for Android. Users are also invited to take part in beta testing for the June version, which promises a range of new features.
• CoMaps, a fork of OrganicMaps (we reported earlier), has released a preview version. For now, it is distributed as a downloadable APK file, with plans to release it on F-Droid, Google Play, the App Store, and Accrescent.
• Alexis Lecanu released version 1.12.0 of Baba, a mobile app for contributing to the Panoramax project. This release includes several bug fixes and a newly added street view.
• Volker Krause shared a round-up of the developments over the past two months in KDE Itinerary. Key updates have included enhanced editing capabilities for train and bus trips, the introduction of a new departures view, integration with OpenRailwayMap, and the addition of several new features in the Transitous backend.

Other “geo” things

• Engaging Data has developed ‘Snake on a Globe’, a geography-based twist on the classic snake game. Players navigate the globe to reach apples placed in world cities, testing both strategy and geographic knowledge.

Upcoming Events

Country	Venue	Where	What	Online	When
	The Shoe Cafe	Perth	Social Mapping Sunday: Thornlie-Cockburn Link		2025-06-08
	Cafe Mellemrummet	København	OSMmapperCPH		2025-06-08
	Gol Market	New Delhi	17th OpenStreetMap Delhi Mapping Party		2025-06-08
	MozSpace Taipei	臺北市	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #77		2025-06-09
	United Platforms	Budapest	2025 júniusi OSM találkozó Budapesten		2025-06-10
	Woodbine Food Hall	Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2025-06-11
	Online	San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2025-06-11
	Brasilia		Encontro Mensal dos Mapeadores Brasileiros do Openstreetmap		2025-06-11
	Voraussichtlich: “Variable”, Karolinenstraße 23	Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2025-06-10
	De Klinker	Nijmegen	LUGN154: OSM lightning talk bij Linux Nijmegen		2025-06-10
	Parramatta – Level 6,150 George Street, Parramatta	Sydney	Social Mapping Event in Parramatta		2025-06-11
	Bitwäscherei Zürich	Zürich	176. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich		2025-06-11
	Schweizerisches Rotes Kreuz, Schindlergut, Zürich	Zürich	Missing Maps Zürich Mapathon		2025-06-11
	Online		Mappy Hour OSM España	✓	2025-06-12
	wechselnd, siehe Event Website	München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2025-06-12
	Online		OpenStreetMap Midwest Meetup	✓	2025-06-13
	Das Labor, Alleestraße 50, Bochum	Bochum	Bochumer OSM-Treffen		2025-06-12
	Online	Stainach-Pürgg	17. Österreichischer OSM-Stammtisch (online)	✓	2025-06-12
	Université de Tours, Campus des 2 Lions-Portalis	Tours	State of the Map France 2025		2025-06-13 – 2025-06-15
			UN Mappers #ValidationFriday Mappy Hour		2025-06-13
			OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2025-06-13
	Savignyplatz, Else-Ury-Bogen 597, 10623 Berlin	Berlin	204. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2025-06-13
	Le 97	Besançon	Apér’OSM Bourgogne-Franche-Comté		2025-06-14
	Kadamtala More (towards Beguntari)	Jalpaiguri	3rd OpenStreetMap West Bengal Mapping Party		2025-06-15
			Missing Maps London: (Online) Mid-Month Mapathon [eng]		2025-06-17
	Dotty’s	Bonn	188. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn		2025-06-17
	Online		Lüneburger Mappertreffen	✓	2025-06-17
			Missing Maps – DRK & MSF Online Mapathon		2025-06-18
	Boston, Massachusetts, US	Boston	State of the Map US		2025-06-19 – 2025-06-21
	France Service Pays des Ecrins		Atelier cartopartie – Pays des Ecrins		2025-06-19
	311 Verona, Verona	Verona	MERGE-it 2025		2025-06-20 – 2025-06-22
	freiLand – machBar (Haus 5)	Potsdam	Jugendhackt: OpenStreetMap – die Welt für alle auffindbar machen (12–18 Jahre)		2025-06-20
	Remiges Technologies, Ghansoli, Navi Mumbai	Navi Mumbai	OpenStreetMap workshop at FOSS Meetup Mumbai		2025-06-21
bi	Online	Rumonge	OSM Africa June 2025 Mapathon – Map Burundi	✓	2025-06-21
	Kanchenjunga Stadium	Siliguri	4th OpenStreetMap West Bengal Mapping Party		2025-06-22
	Chembur	Mumbai Suburban	3rd OpenStreetMap Mumbai Mapping Party		2025-06-22
	Kuriosum	Hannover	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2025-06-23

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by MarcoR, MatthiasMatthias, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Philippine Wikimedia Community User Group, a registered non-stock non-profit organization dedicated to promoting unrestricted access to knowledge within and beyond the archipelago. This article is the final part of a three-part series on the PhilWiki Community’s 10 Milestones, marking 10 amazing years.

10 MILESTONES OF THE PHILWIKI COMMUNITY

And for our last three significant achievements in the previous decade, we have the following:

8 – Ilocandia cuisines captivated Wiki Loves Food PH for 3 years in a row

Veteran photographer Jesse Alegre of Vigan, Ilocos Sur, has won all top prizes in the last three editions of Wiki Loves Food Philippines, earning him a spot in the Wiki Loves Philippines photography contests “Wall of Fame”!

Alegre’s photographs of Ilocandia cuisine have consistently captivated Wiki Loves Food PH since 2022. The food photography competition celebrates Filipino cuisine and cooking traditions, running annually from November 1st to December 31st. The competition aims to showcase the diverse flavors of the Philippines, with Ilocandia cuisine being a popular and featured aspect of the Filipino culinary landscape. 

In the latest Wiki Loves Food PH edition, the final jurors picked Alegre’s appetizing photograph of Vigan Empanada as the best entry. The local snack is well-known in the Ilocos Region, whose main ingredients include vegetables such as papaya or cabbage, meat, and eggs. He also captured 2nd prize with his entry, entitled Balicucha, a type of candy made from sugarcane that serves as a perfect natural sweetener for coffee and tea. 

Winning photographs in Wiki Loves Foods PH and other Wiki Loves Philippines photography contests are carefully selected, taking into consideration the technical quality, originality, and usefulness of the image as an illustration on Wikipedia. 

The competition is inspired by Wikimedia India’s Wiki Loves Food gastronomic photography competition.

The panel of jurors from 2022 to 2024 consisted of local and international members from the Commons Photographers User Group and the PhilWiki Community, as well as experts in various fields of the arts. They are Bijay Chaurasia, Bright Ayisi, Jaturawit Rodcheewan, Mrb Rafi, Nirmal Dulal, Shreya Dwivedi, Sophia Coghini, Wasiul Bahar, Elbert Baeta, Irvin Sto. Tomas, Michael Andrew Embestro, Kaloi Garcia, and Ferdinand Isleta of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).

9 – Wiki Takes the City goes to the City of Smiles, Paris of Negros, and the City in the Forest

New cities served as the location of the back-to-back-to-back Wiki Takes the City editions in Bacolod, Silay, and Puerto Princesa City. The offline event involves photographers, where participants compete to take as many photographs as possible of sights in a particular locale for Wikipedia articles that require them.

International Wiki Loves Folklore winner Herbert Kikoy and international Wiki Loves Earth winner organized Wiki Takes Bacolod and Silay in October 2024. The photowalk was then followed by Team Wiki Loves Birds PH’s participation in an international bird photography race in Puerto Princesa City in November 2024. 

These fun-filled photo scavenger hunts were the latest photography outreach activities of the PhilWiki Community in the Central Philippines, coinciding with the Masskara Festival and the 7th International Bird Photography Race at the Puerto Princesa Underground River, respectively. 

Wiki Takes Bacolod participants, who comprised Cebu-based photographers known as Putowalkers, captured a total of 177 free-licensed images as a result of the 2-day photography hunt in Bacolod City and Silay City, the hometown of WLE international winner Mark Kineth Casindac, who served as a guide. 

Team Wiki Loves Birds PH conducted an outreach activity in Puerto Princesa City to increase the quality and quantity of free licensed images of bird species on Wikimedia Commons. The team consisted of Wiki Loves Philippines 2022 top winners Raniel Jose Castaneda (WLE PH 2021, WL Fashion PH 2021-2022), Michael Angelo Luna (WLE PH 2022), and Alvin Casitas (WL Monuments PH 2022), who won the Best in Uniform award. They captured a total of 80 images of various bird species found in Palawan.

During the 2022 Wiki Loves Earth campaign, Kikoy also led an outreach activity at the Olango Island Wildlife Sanctuary in Lapu-Lapu City, Cebu.

The PhilWiki Community has conducted similar activities in Iriga and its neighbouring towns (2015); Kawit and Trece Martires in Cavite, Legazpi, Ligao and Tabaco in Albay, and San Pascual, Masbate (2018); Virac, Catanduanes and Taal Volcano, Batangas (2019); Naga, Manila and Lapu-Lapu (2022); Vigan and Laoag (2023). 

And finally!

10 – WikiWomen Filipinas: Fostering diverse participation and inclusivity

In December 2023, the PhilWiki Community launched WikiWomen Filipinas, a support group for Filipino women Wikimedians, intending to foster the engagement of women in diverse fields and align with the Wikimedia movement’s commitment to inclusivity and enhanced representation of women across its projects.

Then, board secretary Glenda Perico-Brioso, the chair of the diversity program committee, organized the Wiki Women Meet-up 2023 in solidarity with the nationwide 18-day campaign to end violence against women, as led by the Philippine Commission on Women. The meet-and-greet event was attended by youth and women sectoral leaders, young professionals, and mothers, including two grandmothers.

President Maffeth Sto. Tomas and around 100 women from different parts of the world gathered at WikiWomen Camp 2023 to discuss strategies for reducing the gender gap on the internet. The conference was held from October 19 to 22 in New Delhi, India, bringing together individuals who identify themselves as women from different countries within the Wikimedia movement, leaders of their respective communities, and those with substantial experience and proven engagement in addressing the gender gap.

Past board chair Zaira Hila, board secretary Glenda Perico-Brioso, current board secretary Bernadette Roco, board treasurer Marife Altobano, and staff Judith Arendaing have represented the PhilWiki Community at various regional conferences, namely: ESEAP Conference 2022 in Sydney, Wikimania 2023 in Singapore, ESEAP Conference 2024 in Kota Kinabalu, Wikisource Conference 2025 in Bali, Indonesia, and ESEAP Strategy Summit 2025 in Manila, Philippines.

Photo: WikiWomen Filipinas launch last December 2023, WikiGap Campaign PH 2024 at Sideboard Cafe, and WikiGap Campaign PH 2025 at Ragazzi Hotel. These activities are being attended by youth leaders, educators, and other professionals.

The PhilWiki Community has maintained a gender-diverse board since 2021, following the election of Leah Sumalinog and Cris Fragata Gomez to the board. Cris would then become the first woman to serve as board chair. In 2023, Maffeth Opiana Sto. Tomas became the first female head of the organization. She is currently serving her third term as the president.

These are the 10 significant achievements that the Philippine Wikimedia Community User Group has accomplished over the last decade, and we are proud to have achieved them as an organization.

Happy 10th anniversary, PhilWiki Community!

The Philippine Wikimedia Community User Group extends its gratitude to all the participants, volunteers, partners, and supporters for their commitment to making information accessible in the Philippines and beyond as it celebrates 10 years of participation, collaboration, and friendship.

Some of the past collaborations between the PhilWiki Community and organizations from 2019 to the present.

Banjar Wikimedia Community, through the Dana Wiki program by Wikimedia Indonesia, has successfully carried out a project called WikiBanua 2.0 over a six-month period from December 2024 to May 2025 focused on documenting cultural heritage, local landmark, natural tourist attaraction, and public facilities in South Kalimantan, including places in the Meratus Geopark area. This project was a continuation of WikiBanua 1.0 in October 2023 to March 2024 focused on documenting rivers in Banjarmasin, Banjarese culinary, and tombs of Banjarese public figure. In WikiBanua 2.0, it was carried out by five community member: Ilham Mufti Laksono (User:Ilham Mufti Laksono), Arief Rahman (User:Ezagren), Mico Andriamin (User:Gladius Oceanus), Muhammad Syahrul (User:Sibiru45), and Radhian Nur Rahman (User:Radramboo)

What has been implemented?

The documentation activities offcially carried out on December 22, 2024, where we traveled to Central Hulu Sungai Regency, South Hulu Sungai Regency, and Tapin Regency. In these regions, we documented varios historical buildings, monuments, cemeteries, woship places, and others. This was done until December 25, 2024. Then, documentation activities was continued on on January 22, 2025 to January 28, 2025, where we documented monuments, parks, tombs and cemeteries, worship places, schools, and others in Tanah Bumbu Regency and Kotabaru Regency. After that, the documentation was continued by each member until April 2025.

In addition to documentation on Wikimedia Commons, we also added information about the objects we documented to the Wikidata, Indonesian Wikipedia, and Banjarese Wikipedia. This effort aims to enrich the information about cultural and natural wealth in South Kalimantan which is still very limited in the Wikimedia projects.

What has been achieved?

Through this project, we have successfully documented 200s objects consisting of historical and cultural sites, regional landmarks, natural tourist attractions, public facilities, and others. All of these objects are represented in a total of 460 photos in Wikimedia Commons (this number does not include team photos), which exceeds our target of 120 objects in 240 photos. In addition to that, we have successfully added and developed 388 Wikidata items, 68 articles in Indonesian Wikipedia, and 63 articles in Banjarese Wikipedia related to the photos. This number also exceeds our target of only approximately 50 Wikidata items, 50 articles on Indonesian Wikipedia, and 50 articles on Banjar Wikipedia.

Tim WikiBanua 2.0, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Lessons learned

This project has taught us many valuable lessons. We realize that there are still many potential cultural and natural riches in South Kalimantan, such as cultural heritage, regional landmarks, natural tourism, and others, that have not been documented through Wikimedia projects. This is what became our idea to carry out this project, so that many people can find out information related to this topic. We also hope that this project idea will inspire many people to contribute to the development of this topic in Wikimedia projects.

We also learned that the enthusiasm and dedication of the project organizers and the support of the community were key to the success of this project. In the midst of the busyness of each committee, we have worked hard so that this project can be implemented well so that we can achieve results that exceed the target even with limited funds. We also greatly appreciate the advice and assistance from the members of the Banjar Wikimedia Community in making this project a success so that the committee gains new insights related to this project.

Next steps

We see great potential in continuing this project. We hope that knowledge related to the natural and cultural riches of South Kalimantan will continue to grow across Wikimedia projects, especially Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Indonesian Wikipedia, and Banjar Wikipedia. We believe that the content related to this supports and enriches information for many people, including educators, students, researchers, and the general public.

Regarding the continuation of this project, the Banjar Wikimedia Community has planned to continue it through a program through the Rapid Fund program that we submitted at the end of April 2025, namely WikiBanua 3.0. The plan is, we will implement this project from July 2025 to January 2026 and will reach neighboring provinces, such as Central Kalimantan and East Kalimantan. Through this project, we also intend to involve more volunteers in Banjarmasin and other areas to collaborate and contribute to the goal of freeing knowledge. We are confident that this effort will result in more content being produced related to the cultural and natural wealth of Indonesia, especially on the island of Kalimantan.

Health impacts our lives and determines the quality of life in any nation,  individuals need to be informed to make healthy choices and this is why Dr Tesleemah led the project Visibility of health articles in Nigeria on English Wikipedia  2.0 between 1st of March 2025 and 1st of April, 2025 alongside her team members Taofeeq Abdulkareem and Abdullahalaba.

This project aims to incorporate medical editors from Nigeria into the Wikimedia Movement and to bridge the gap of health content in Nigeria on the largest online encyclopedia

One crucial step taken during the project was the recruiting of new health editors from University College Hospital Ibadan during one of the physical sessions held on the 15th of March, 2025. The health editors were medical students studying optometry, pharmacy,  medicine and surgery, veterinary medicine, microbiology and biochemistry at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

The first edition of the project was held between the 27th of April, 2024 to 7th of June where health editors from the University of Ilorin teaching hospitals were recruited from Kwara state, Nigeria as it was the first project,  the focus was on the translation of health content from English Wikipedia to local languages, wikidata and uploading medically related content on Wikimedia common. 50 articles were translated during this project involving 50 health editors.

Building on the training held for the health editors during the first edition of the project and further sessions held in the 2.0 version of the project, the focus was on creating new articles on English Wikipedia and 100 articles related to health were created.

Late March 2025 witnessed a series of health challenges in Nigeria ranging from Heat waves and Diphtheria outbreak which also happened while the project was going on, the organizers took the bull by the horns and added these crucial topics among the articles to be created by the participants and later on, omoshebi Joseph created an article on Heat wave in Nigeria and Outbreak of Diphtheria in Nigeria.

Beyond the project, the organizer, Dr Tesleemah aims to set up an African health initiative which will bridge the knowledge gap on health advocacy and disease prevention in Africa across Wikimedia projects.

You can read more about the project on the dedicated meta page

In April 2024, I took a two-month sabbatical from work. During this period, and in the year that followed, I dedicated significant effort to improving my skills. Having spent nearly 20 years in software engineering, I’ve witnessed substantial changes in the field. Opportunities to learn and practice new skills don’t always arise naturally at work. While I made a conscious effort to dedicate time each day to reading and learning, finding time for hands-on practice remained a challenge. I set specific goals: to deepen my understanding of system architecture and modern design approaches, explore high-performance programming, and integrate AI into my development process. Here’s an update on my progress.

I started using AI-assisted coding tools and have deeply integrated them into my daily workflow. Specifically, I began using GitHub Copilot with VS Code. Thanks to GitHub’s open-source support program, I received a free Copilot license. This single change has boosted my productivity at least twofold. For experienced software engineers, these tools are incredibly powerful because we already understand the underlying architecture and the trade-offs of different solutions.

I also began learning Go, a compiled, statically typed programming language. I took on some personal projects, rewriting them in Go. Subsequently, I built internal tools for work and practiced designing large-scale systems, such as a “Factoids” system. Along the way, I learned many new concepts and programming styles, and I’ve now reached a solid level of proficiency in Go.

After getting comfortable with Go, I moved on to learning Rust. Rust has a reputation for being difficult to learn, but my experience with Go was a significant help, as there are many overlapping concepts between the two languages. While Go aims for simplicity, Rust takes a different approach. It forces you to think carefully about your code, variables, scope, and how data is passed around. You spend more time at the compilation stage, but once your program compiles successfully, you can be confident it will run correctly without unexpected issues in testing or production. This has been a refreshing and enjoyable experience. After achieving good proficiency in Rust, I found little reason to continue using Go. Rust addresses many of Go’s perceived shortcomings and boasts a larger ecosystem of libraries.

Learning a high-performance programming language has had some interesting side benefits. It introduced me to many efficient algorithms and optimization techniques that I had previously overlooked when working with higher-level and scripting languages. I also learned about different compilation targets, including building web frontends using WebAssembly (Wasm). Another unexpected benefit was the people I encountered. The communities around high-performance programming languages often attract highly productive and intelligent software engineers, and I’ve had the chance to connect with many of them. Following their work and writings has been incredibly educational.

Being part of this community also sparked my interest in their coding workflows and tools, particularly mouse-free, terminal-based, and very fast coding environments. I had always avoided tools like Emacs and Vi (the predecessor to Vim/Neovim), but I decided to learn and master Neovim, a popular choice among many skilled programmers. It took a significant amount of time and effort, but I now use Neovim for all my coding. My current setup includes Kitty (a terminal emulator), Neovim, Fzf (a fuzzy finder), Ripgrep (a fast search tool), Lazygit (a Git client), Tmux (a terminal multiplexer), and other similar high-speed tools. Neovim also has excellent Copilot integration, but I’ve recently been using Aider, which integrates well with my other terminal-based tools for AI-assisted programming. Neovim taught me to approach code editing more semantically, rather than as plain text editing. Thanks to Tree-sitter and its text objects, editing operations become semantic manipulations of code structure, not just text.

I had been using KDE Plasma as my desktop environment for the past 15 years, with some time spent on GNOME as well. Recently, I decided to upgrade to a tiling window manager-based desktop. A few months ago, I moved to Hyprland. It has been refreshing to build a comfortable desktop environment tailored to my preferences. The collection of small yet powerful components that make up such an environment (e.g., window manager, Hyprpaper (for wallpaper), Waybar (for status bars), Swaync (for notifications), etc.) and their incredible customizability is quite an experience. It reminds me of the enthusiasm in the early days of the KDE and GNOME development communities. I feel reinvigorated to be part of a highly skilled community of young developers pushing the FOSS-based desktop experience forward.

And, here’s a glimpse of my “rice”:

This dedicated period of upskilling has been a profound reminder that in the dynamic world of software engineering, continuous learning is not just beneficial, but essential. The journey has been challenging yet immensely rewarding, and I’m excited to carry this momentum forward, tackling new problems with renewed vigor and an expanded toolkit.

What’s the connection between explosives, major depressive disorder, and chest pain? I wouldn’t have known until I reviewed some student work from last semester.

If you’ve taken an advanced cell biology class, you may have heard of cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cyclic AMP), a molecule that’s related to ATP (the “energy currency” that mitochondria turn sugars into) and adenine (one of the bases is DNA), but you probably haven’t heard of its less well-known cousin, cyclic guanosine monophosphate (just cyclic GMP among friends). 

Much like cyclic AMP, cyclic GMP is what’s called a “second messenger” in cells. First messengers include molecules that carry messages around the body, from the organ where they’re produced to the cells where they actually have an effect. These include things like hormones.

While these “first messenger” molecules can travel around the body, most can’t get into cells. (Cells protect themselves by being very picky about the kinds of molecules they allow in.) Instead of entering the cells, these molecules attach to specific receptors on the cell surface, triggering the release of the second message – for example, cyclic GMP. 

While some small molecules like nitric oxide are able to enter the cell, they still depend on second messengers like cyclic GMP to cause things to happen inside the cells. 

Once activated, second messengers can set various processes in motion. Cyclic GMP, for example, can switch protein kinases on. Protein kinases are proteins that cut specific bits off other enzymes, which can either make those enzymes active (think about it like pulling the pin on a fire extinguisher) or inactive (like cutting the cord off an electric appliance).

While cyclic GMP was discovered only two years after cyclic AMP, research into cyclic GMP was largely overshadowed by Earl Wilbur Sutherland’s work on cyclic AMP, which won him a Nobel Prize in 1971. It’s hard to compete with that kind of publicity, but cyclic GMP had its own moment in the sun when Robert Furchgott, Louis Ignarro, and Ferid Murad were awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine based on their work with cyclic GMP and nitric oxide (which helped explain how nitroglycerine work for heart disease).

Before a student in Dixon Woodbury’s Biophysics class started working on it last fall, Wikipedia’s cyclic guanosine monophosphate article wasn’t in bad shape.

The average reader might have found it challenging and a bit dense, but it seemed to include most of the important parts – sections about the molecule’s biosynthesis, its function, degradation, and its ability to activate protein kinase. It would take someone with some depth of knowledge to recognize some of the gaps in the article, and figure out how to fill them – and the Brigham Young University student was up to the challenge.

The student editor added a section about the discovery of cyclic GMP and the work that won Furchgott, Ignarro and Murad a Nobel Prize. They also added sections detailing cyclic GMP’s role in cardiovascular disease, major depressive disorder, and the way certain pathogens manipulate it to help them evade the immune system.

As they added information and improved the quality of Wikipedia’s cyclic GMP article, the student editor made this knowledge available to a much wider swath of the public (including me).

And that let me solve a mystery that has tugged at the back of my mind for decades – how does nitroglycerine, an explosive, help people with angina? I now know nitroglycerine releases nitric oxide, which triggers the release of cyclic GMP. And that sets in motion a series of steps that cause muscle cells to relax, which relieves their chest pain.

What mystery might your students help solve, just by editing Wikipedia?

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.

🕑 50 minutes

Edward Chernenko is a software developer, with extensive experience in MediaWiki development and consulting. He is also the administrator of Absurdopedia, a Russian-language humor wiki that is part of the loosely-affiliated Uncyclopedia family.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Абсурдопедия (Absurdopedia)
• Uncyclopedia
• Edward Chernenko user page on mediawiki.org
• Moderation MediaWiki extension
• AWS MediaWiki extension
• CreatePageUw MediaWiki extension

People should try to compare the quality of the kernel git logs with some other projects, and cry themselves to sleep.

– Linus Torvalds

I’ll never remember your project’s commit guidelines.

Every project insists on something different:

• Conventional commits
• Problem/Solution format
• Gitmoji
• The twisty maze of trailers in the Linux Kernel

But git commit templates help. Commit templates provide a scaffold for commit messages, offering documentation where you need it: inside the editor where you’re writing your commit message.

git config --global \
    commit.template '~/.config/git/message.txt'

[includeIf "gitdir:~/Projects/Wikimedia/**"]
    path = ~/.config/git/config.wikimedia

# 50ch. wide ----------------------------- SUBJECT
#                                                |
#     "If applied, this commit will..."          |
#                                                |
#     Change / Add / Fix                         |
#     Remove / Update / Document                 |
#                                                |
# ------- ↓ LEAVE BLANK LINE ↓ ---------- /SUBJECT

# 72ch. wide ------------------------------------------------------ BODY
#                                                                      |
#     - Why should this change be made?                                |
#       - What problem are you solving?                                |
#       - Why this solution?                                           |
#     - What's wrong with the current code?                            |
#     - Are there other ways to do it?                                 |
#     - How can the reviewer confirm it works?                         |
#                                                                      |

#     TRAILERS                                                         |
#     --------                                                         |
#     (optional) Uncomment as needed.                                  |
#     Leave a blank line before the trailers.                          |
#                                                                      |
# Bug: #xxxx
# Acked-by: Example User <[email protected]>
# Cc: Example User <[email protected]>
# Co-Authored-by: Example User <[email protected]>
# Requested-by: Example User <[email protected]>
# Reported-by: Example User <[email protected]>
# Reviewed-by: Example User <[email protected]>
# Suggested-by: Example User <[email protected]>
# Tested-by: Example User <[email protected]>
# Thanks: Example User <[email protected]>

$ TAB=%x09
$ BUG_TRAILER='%(trailers:key=Bug,valueonly=true,separator=%x2C )'
$ SHORT_HASH=%h
$ SUBJ=%s
$ FORMAT="${SHORT_HASH}${TAB}${BUG_TRAILER}${TAB}${SUBJ}"
$ git log --topo-order --no-merges \
      --format="$FORMAT"
d2b09deb12f     T359762 Rewrite Kurdish (ku) Latin to Arabic converter
28123a6a262     T332865 tests: Remove non-static fallback in HookRunnerTestBase
4e919a307a4     T328919 tests: Remove unused argument from data provider in PageUpdaterTest
bedd0f685f9             objectcache: Improve `RESTBagOStuff::handleError()`
2182a0c4490     T393219 tests: Remove two data provider in RestStructureTest

Jun 2, 12:17 UTC
Resolved - This incident has been resolved.

Jun 2, 11:32 UTC
Identified - We are working on a fix.

22/05/2025-28/05/2025

Mapping campaigns

• Séverin Ménard shared a new blog post ► about the ongoing building damage mapping in Mayotte, with statistics for each of the territory’s 17 communes, including hourly updated pie charts showing mapping progress and the damage classes. The preliminary results reveal the heterogeneity of the damage across the communes and show that the north-eastern coasts were not necessarily the areas most severely affected.
• The newly added Mastodon account ‘OpenStreetMap Wiki Proposals’ toots when proposals are open for voting, with its latest toot being: ‘A new OpenStreetMap Wiki proposal aims to improve power circuit routing by introducing standardised relations for circuits and line sections, enhancing electrical grid modelling’.

Community

• Peter has calculated the year when the sun first stopped setting on the British Empire, based on the boundaries in OpenHistoricalMap (we reported earlier).
• Peter Brodersen has developed a prototype route planner for Denmark that avoids roads named after men. It was made possible by using the OSRM routing engine and the Wikidata entries referenced by the name:etymology:wikidata OSM tag.
• After logo submissions and a community voting process, Unique Mappers Network has unveiled the official logo for State of the Map Nigeria 2025.
• Faced with the limited storage capacity of his older Garmin device, which can hold only one map at a time, Pascal Neis has developed custom minimalist Garmin maps based on OpenStreetMap data to ensure they remain small enough to fit.
• In a recent instalment of the Mapper Diaries vlog series, Gregory Marler talked about his participation in the second UK quarterly project of 2025, a healthcare-themed mapping campaign, by mapping neighbourhoods in Dundee City, Scotland.
• Christoph Hormann offered his views about the ways diverse cultures collaborate within OpenStreetMap, highlighting the challenges that arise from these cross-cultural interactions.
• KhubsuratInsaan’s diary entry reflected on mapping in India, highlighting the difficulty of identifying house numbers. The comments discuss whether street plans may be used for OpenStreetMap.

Local chapter news

• The OpenStreetMap US May 2025 newsletter has been published. The highlights are the improvements to the OSMCha, the support program for participation in the SotM US 2025 and the celebration of the OSM US’s 15th anniversary.
• Oliver Rudzick and Katja Haferkorn released ► a report on the 23rd FOSSGIS-OSM Community Meeting, held in May 2025.

Events

• OpenStreetMap contributors are organising a collaborative mapping workshop called Kartenwerkstatt Augustusburg, to improve regional map data and foster community engagement in Augustusburg, Germany.

OSM research

• HeiGIT reported that a new paper was published in African Transport Studies. This study investigated the impact of school sessions on traffic congestion in Nairobi using openrouteservice, an open-source routing engine that utilises OpenStreetMap data to model road networks. Results highlighted how children’s mobility needs are often overlooked in transport planning.

Maps

• The author of Maps Interlude presents various socio-economic factoids on maps, with their latest showing the origins of Havard’s international students during the previous Trump presidency in 2018.
• Christoph Hormann introduced another extension to his Musaicum satellite image mosaic coverage, which includes the European Arctic islands: Svalbard, Franz Josef Land, and Novaya Zemlya.

OSM in action

• The World Heritage Journeys Europe portal has adopted OpenStreetMap and Mapbox for their maps of world heritage catalogued by UNESCO and the European Union.
• Where Filmed’s ‘Filming Places Near You’ feature lets users discover nearby filming locations via an interactive web map powered by OpenStreetMap and Leaflet.

Open Data

• Ralph Straumann commented on grid’s interview with Jennings Anderson, a software engineer at Meta, noting that it’s overall an interesting – albeit clearly insider – perspective on the Overture Maps Foundation, OSM, and the evolution of geodata in general.

Software

• [1] Rphryin published his first JOSM map style: LastUpdated. It displays the last update time of each OSM way shown on the screen. This is useful for checking whether a particular mapping area has been updated recently.
• Andrii Holovin has developed osm-diff-state, a tool designed to find the state file corresponding to a specific diff in the OpenStreetMap minutely/hourly/daily replication feeds.
• The team behind Contour has launched a browser-based GIS platform that uses natural language commands to perform spatial analysis and mapping, aiming to simplify traditional GIS workflows and make spatial tools accessible without coding.
• András Zlinszky explained how to load Sentinel-2 true-colour satellite imagery into the Locus Map app using its Web Map Service feature.
• HeiGIT, in collaboration with the Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy, have worked on the LaVerDi Project, which integrates freely available satellite data with crowdsourced OpenStreetMap data to support continuous, large-scale land cover monitoring and improve the detection of landscape changes in Germany.
• To celebrate its 15th anniversary, OsmAnd has published some of its growth statistics.
• GeoObserver introduced ► Radinfra.de, a new platform that visualises Germany’s cycling infrastructure using open data and user-friendly maps.

Programming

• Researchers at the University of Freiburg have developed Loom, a tool for efficient multi-modal route planning using OpenStreetMap data, enabling detailed and customisable transport network analysis.
• OMP explained how they built a custom OpenStreetMap-based map service using mbtileserver.

Releases

• Jake Low explained the latest upgrade to OSMCha, highlighting the performance improvements achieved by building augmented diffs instead of using Overpass queries.
• The Panoramax mobile app v1.7.1 has been released. The app is now available on F-Droid and is being prepared for iOS. Highlights of the new changes: app info is added to the EXIF data of uploaded pictures and there is a new settings page and splash screen.

Did you know that …

• … there’s an OpenStreetMap Bluesky feed? It allows you to see posts featuring the hashtags #osm and #openstreetmap.
• … you can open a random OpenStreetMap note from any country of your choice?
• … the OpenStreetMap API has a rate-limiting feature that prevents new users from committing large, potentially damaging changesets? After it was implemented in the backend, some user-facing apps, such as iD, had to make adjustments to support this change. As a result, users running older versions of the editor may find their large changesets disappearing into thin air without any clear explanation or error message.

OSM in the media

• Game developers have integrated OpenStreetMap data into simulation games like City Bus Manager and Global Farmer, enabling players to build and manage real-world-inspired transport and farming systems while encouraging contributions to improve map accuracy.
• Gregory Thomas, of the San Francisco Chronicle, reported that Megan Gardner has ridden every publicly accessible road in San Mateo County – a feat spanning 2,800 miles. To accomplish this feat, Gardner relied on Wandrer, a social mapping platform built on OpenStreetMap data. The app turns everyday walks, hikes, and bike rides into personal quests, awarding symbolic points and rewards to users who go the farthest. Participants can track their progress and compare standings on leaderboards showing who is covering the most ground and where.

Other “geo” things

• The mapShare creators have launched a platform that lets users share and discover custom Google Maps, helping travellers find curated local recommendations such as sightseeing spots and photo locations, with strong initial coverage in Japan.
• Rainer Follador has developed ‘delta-relief’, an project designed to enhance the visualisation of SwissTopo’s LiDAR data by highlighting subtle terrain variations for easier interpretation. It has been implemented as an interactive online map, with a portion of the data from eastern Switzerland now available to the public at lidar.cubetrek.com.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	What	Online	When
	Chanakya Puri Tehsil	17th OSM Delhi Mapping Party (Online)		2025-06-01
	Heidelberg	Rhein-Neckar OpenstreetMap Treffen		2025-06-02
	Salzburg	OSM Treffen Salzburg		2025-06-03
		Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng]		2025-06-03
	Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2025-06-04
		iD Community Chat		2025-06-04
		OSM Indoor Meetup		2025-06-04
	Brno	Kvartální OSM pivo		2025-06-04
	Säffle kommun	Svenskt återkommande communitymöte	✓	2025-06-04
	Augustusburg	Kartenwerkstatt Augustusburg		2025-06-07
	København	OSMmapperCPH		2025-06-08
	Chanakya Puri Tehsil	17th OSM Delhi Mapping Party		2025-06-08
	中正區	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #77		2025-06-09
	Salt Lake City	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2025-06-11
	San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2025-06-11
	Hamburg	Hamburger Mappertreffen		2025-06-10
	Sydney	Social Mapping Event in Parramatta		2025-06-11
	Stainach-Pürgg	17. Österreichischer OSM-Stammtisch (online)	✓	2025-06-12
	Bochum	Bochumer OSM-Treffen		2025-06-12
	München	Münchner OSM-Treffen		2025-06-12
	Tours	State of the Map France 2025		2025-06-13 – 2025-06-15
		UN Mappers #ValidationFriday Mappy Hour		2025-06-13
		OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2025-06-13
	Berlin	204. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2025-06-13
	Besançon	Apér’OSM Bourgogne-Franche-Comté		2025-06-14

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by Elizabete, MarcoR, 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 part of Wikimedia UK’s work in the area of information literacy, in late 2023 we partnered with the BBC and the Royal Society to plan, programme and host a two day invitation-only workshop with high level policy makers, broadcasters, academics, practitioners and other stakeholders working in the field of information literacy.

The topic was ‘Building resilience to future emergencies and disinformation through adult media literacy’, and the aim was to develop a set of recommendations for policy makers and organisations working in related fields. Wikimedia UK brought our extensive network within information literacy and worked closely with the Royal Society to shape the agenda, while also acting as hosts and facilitators for the event which our Chief Executive, Lucy Crompton-Reid, chaired alongside the BBC’s Ros Atkins.

We are delighted to share the summary note from the workshop here.

The post Wikimedia UK and the Royal Society host workshop on information literacy and future health emergencies appeared first on WMUK.

From AI leaders, engineers, inventors, environmentalists, and designers (just to name a few!), we’ve explored the stories behind the Wikipedia assignments that bring new biographies of historically excluded figures in STEM to Wikipedia.

And when it comes to improving representation on Wikipedia, there’s no doubt that adding new articles to the encyclopedia makes an impact. But not nearly as visible are the small edits made by student editors to underdeveloped biographies already found on the site – and even a short contribution can influence the accuracy and completeness of an article.

Just ask master’s student Gillian McGinnis, who completed a Wikipedia assignment as part of her Foundations of Information Science course at the University of Arizona this semester. As she first learned to edit Wikipedia, McGinnis made a small addition to the article for American atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon – small, but incredibly important, explained the information science major.

“Looking at Dr. Solomon’s list of awards in the Wikipedia article was impressive,” said McGinnis, who was already familiar with atmospheric chemistry data and research. “After doing some research, I was surprised that there was no mention in her article of her receiving the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur – especially since this is an incredibly honorable award, and foreign recipients are not common.”

Improving Wikipedia’s coverage of women in STEM helps to showcase their contributions in the field over the centuries, particularly if they were initially overlooked or previously omitted from formal recognition in their subject, emphasized McGinnis. 

“Representation matters, and because Wikipedia is free and accessible to a wide audience, improving these articles [about women in STEM] may help to inspire and encourage other women and girls interested in STEM,” said McGinnis.

Like McGinnis, classmate Tushar Vimal kicked off his coursework on Wikipedia by making a small yet significant edit of his own. In appreciation for computer scientist Lixia Zhang’s contributions to internet architecture, Vimal chose to improve the article about Zhang, adding her election to the National Academy of Engineering.

“I don’t think only a specific group of people have advanced STEM,” explained Vimal, reflecting on the importance of small edits like his for historically excluded figures. “People from all kinds of backgrounds have made meaningful contributions. Whether their work solved big problems or smaller ones, they all played a role, and they deserve to have their work represented equally and neutrally on platforms like Wikipedia.” 

And McGinnis and Vimal weren’t the only students to improve representation and fill gaps in STEM biographies with small but impactful edits this term. 

From Victor Valley Community College and UCSB to Florida State University and Middle Georgia State University, postsecondary students from all corners of the country have been lending their new editing skills to improve articles of underrepresented figures in STEM.

This spring, student editors have made small but meaningful contributions to biography articles like chemical engineer Daniela Blanco, medical technologist Paulette Dillard, computer scientist Augusta H. Teller, and microbiologist Harold Amos, among many others – and often sparked new edits for the articles by other Wikipedians along the way. 

The student work outlined in this story is part of a larger Wiki Education initiative sponsored by the Broadcom Foundation, which supports the creation of new biographies of diverse people in STEM on Wikipedia.

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.

Democracy is one of the fundamental values of the EU and today, as never before, it needs to be preserved and nurtured. Wikimedia Europe welcomes the European Commission’s initiative to adopt a European Democracy Shield to uphold the Union’s founding values.

We are convinced that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects have a great role to play in the everyday efforts to nurture European democracy and to make the digital information ecosystem more resilient. We explained how in our submission to the public consultation launched by the European Commission. 

Our submission

When drafting our submission to the public consultation, we focused our attention on four main aspects. First, we explained how the application of the “Wikipedia Test” can help to defend and promote the fundamental right to freedom of expression and information in the online sphere. Second, we clarified the importance of recognising and promoting the Wikimedia projects’ and volunteer communities’ efforts to strengthen digital and media literacy skills and safeguard the integrity of the online information ecosystem. Third, we explained why the public interest contributions of Wikimedia volunteer editors need protection from strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs). Fourth and lastly, we highlighted the importance of promoting human-centered artificial intelligence (AI), and making sure that the digital commons—including Wikipedia and other reliable sources of openly licensed journalism and research—used to train large language models (LLMs) are protected and that these sources receive proper attribution.

conclusion

The protection of European democracy goes hand in hand with an effective protection of free and open knowledge projects such as Wikipedia, which are governed by a community of volunteers who are exclusively driven by the goal of serving the public interest in Europe, and beyond. 

—I suppose you are an entomologist?—I said with a note of interrogation.

—Not quite so ambitious as that, sir. I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name! A society may call itself an Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad title as that to himself, in the present state of science, is a pretender, sir, a dilettante, an impostor! No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp.

The Poet at the Breakfast Table (1872) by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. 

A collection of biographies with surprising gaps (ex. A.D. Imms)

The history of Indian interest in insects has been approached by many writers and there are several bits and pieces available in journals and various insights distributed across books. There are numerous ways of looking at how people viewed insects over time. One of these (cover picture on right) is a collection of biographies, some of which are uncited verbatim accounts from obituaries (and not even within quotation marks). This collation is by B.R. Subba Rao who also provides a few historical threads to tie together the biographies. Keeping Indian expectations in view, both Subba Rao and the agricultural entomologist M.A. Husain play to the crowd in their early histories. Husain wrote in pre-Independence times where there was a need for Indians to assert themselves before their colonial masters. They begin with mentions of insects in ancient Indian texts and as can be expected there are mentions of honey, shellac, bees, ants, and a few nuisance insects. Husain takes the fact that the term Satpada षट्पद or six-legs existed in the 1st century Amarakosa to make the claim that Indians were far ahead of time because Latreille's Hexapoda, the supposed analogy, was proposed only in 1825. Such one-upmanship (or quests for past superiority in the face of current backwardness?) misses the fact that science is not just about terms but  also about structures and one can only assume that these authors failed to find the development of such structures in the ancient texts that they examined. Cedric Dover, with his part-Indian and British ancestry, interestingly, also notes the Sanskrit literature but declares that he is not competent enough to examine the subject carefully. The identification of species in old texts also leave one wondering about the accuracy of translations. For instance K.N. Dave translates a verse from the Atharva-veda and suggests an early date for knowledge on shellac. Dave's work has been re-examined by an entomologist, Mahdihassan. Another organism known in ancient texts as the indragopa (Indra's cowherd) supposedly appears after the rains. Some Sanskrit scholars have, remarkably enough, identified it, with a confidence that no coccidologist ever had, as the cochineal insect (the species Dactylopius coccus is South American!), while others identify it as a lac insect, a firefly(!) or as Trombidium (red velvet mites) - the last for matching blood red colour mentioned in a text attributed to Susrutha. To be fair, ambiguities in translation are not limited to those dealing with Indian writing. Dikairon (Δικαιρον), supposedly a highly-valued and potent poison from India was mentioned in the work Indika by Ctesias 398 - 397 BC. One writer said it was the droppings of a bird. Valentine Ball thought it was derived from a scarab beetle. Jeffrey Lockwood claimed that it came from the rove beetles Paederus sp. And finally a Spanish scholar states that all this was a gross misunderstanding and that Dikairon was not a poison, and - believe it or not - was a masticated mix of betel leaves, arecanut, and lime! 

 

One gets a far more reliable idea of ancient knowledge and traditions from practitioners, forest dwellers, the traditional honey-harvesting tribes, and similar people that have been gathering materials such as shellac and beeswax. Unfortunately, many of these traditions and their practitioners are threatened by modern laws, economics, and cultural prejudice. These practitioners are being driven out of the forests where they live, and their knowledge was hardly ever captured in writing. The writers of the ancient Sanskrit texts were probably associated with temple-towns and other semi-urban clusters and it seems like the knowledge of forest dwellers was never considered merit-worthy by the book writing class of that period.

A more meaningful overview of entomology may be gained by reading and synthesizing a large number of historical bits, and there are a growing number of such pieces. A 1973 book published by the Annual Reviews Inc. should be of some interest. I have appended a selection of sources that are useful in piecing together a historic view of entomology in India. It helps however to have a broad skeleton on which to attach these bits and minutiae. Here, there are truly verbose and terminology-filled systems developed by historians of science (for example, see ANT). I prefer an approach that is free of a jargon overload or the need to cite French intellectuals. The growth of entomology can be examined along three lines - cataloguing - the collection of artefacts and the assignment of names, communication and vocabulary-building - social actions involving the formation of groups of interested people who work together building common structure with the aid of fixing records in journals often managed beyond individual lifetimes by scholarly societies, and pattern-finding a stage when hypotheses are made, and predictions tested. I like to think that anyone learning entomology also goes through these activities, often in this sequence. Professionalization makes it easier for people to get to the later stages. This process is aided by having comprehensive texts, keys, identification guides and manuals, systems of collections and curators. The skills involved in the production - ways to prepare specimens, observe, illustrate, or describe are often not captured by the books themselves and that is where institutions play (or ought to play) an important role.

Cataloguing

The cataloguing phase of knowledge gathering, especially of the (larger and more conspicuous) insect species of India grew rapidly thanks to the craze for natural history cabinets of the wealthy (made socially meritorious by the idea that appreciating the works of the Creator was as good as attending church)  in Britain and Europe and their ability to tap into networks of collectors working within the colonial enterprise. The cataloguing phase can be divided into the non-scientific cabinet-of-curiosity style especially followed before Darwin and the more scientific forms. The idea that insects could be preserved by drying and kept for reference by pinning, [See Barnard 2018] the system of binomial names, the idea of designating type specimens that could be inspected by anyone describing new species, the system of priority in assigning names were some of the innovations and cultural rules created to aid cataloguing. These rules were enforced by scholarly societies, their members (which would later lead to such things as codes of nomenclature suggested by rule makers like Strickland, now dealt with by committees that oversee the  ICZN Code) and their journals. It would be wrong to assume that the cataloguing phase is purely historic and no longer needed. It is a phase that is constantly involved in the creation of new knowledge. Labels, catalogues, and referencing whether in science or librarianship are essential for all subsequent work to be discovered and are essential to science based on building on the work of others, climbing the shoulders of giants to see further. Cataloguing was probably what the physicists derided as "stamp-collecting".

Communication and vocabulary building

The other phase involves social activities, the creation of specialist language, groups, and "culture". The methods and tools adopted by specialists also helps in producing associations and the identification of boundaries that could spawn new associations. The formation of groups of people based on interests is something that ethnographers and sociologists have examined in the context of science. Textbooks, taxonomic monographs, and major syntheses also help in building community - they make it possible for new entrants to rapidly move on to joining the earlier formed groups of experts. Whereas some of the early learned societies were spawned by people with wealth and leisure, some of the later societies have had other economic forces in their support.

Like species, interest groups too specialize and split to cover more specific niches, such as those that deal with applied areas such as agriculture, medicine, veterinary science and forensics. There can also be interest in behaviour, and evolution which, though having applications, are often do not find economic support.

Pattern finding

Eleanor Ormerod, an unexpected influence in the rise of economic entomology in India

The pattern finding phase when reached allows a field to become professional - with paid services offered by practitioners. It is the phase in which science flexes its muscle, specialists gain social status, and are able to make livelihoods out of their interest. Lefroy (1904) cites economic entomology in India as beginning with E.C. Cotes [Cotes' career in entomology was cut short by his marriage to the famous Canadian journalist Sara Duncan in 1889 and he shifted to writing] in the Indian Museum in 1888. But he surprisingly does not mention any earlier attempts, and one finds that Edward Balfour, that encyclopaedic-surgeon of Madras collated a list of insect pests in 1887 and drew inspiration from Eleanor Ormerod who hints at the idea of getting government support, noting that it would cost very little given that she herself worked with no remuneration to provide a service for agriculture in England. Her letters were also forwarded to the Secretary of State for India and it is quite possible that Cotes' appointment was a direct result.

As can be imagined, economics, society, and the way science is supported - royal patronage, family, state, "free markets", crowd-sourcing, or mixes of these - impact the way an individual or a field progresses. Entomology was among the first fields of zoology that managed to gain economic value with the possibility of paid employment. David Lack, who later became an influential ornithologist, was wisely guided by his father to pursue entomology as it was the only field of zoology with jobs. Lack however found his apprenticeship (in Germany, 1929!) involving pinning specimens "extremely boring".

Indian reflections on the history of entomology

Kunhikannan died at the rather young age of 47

A rather interesting analysis of Indian science is made by the first native Indian entomologist, with the official title of "entomologist" in the state of Mysore - K. Kunhikannan. Kunhikannan was deputed to pursue a Ph.D. at Stanford (for some unknown reason two pre-Independence Indian entomologists trained in Stanford rather than England - see postscript) through his superior Leslie Coleman. At Stanford, Kunhikannan gave a talk on Science in India. He noted in that 1923 talk :

In the field of natural sciences the Hindus did not make any progress. The classifications of animals and plants are very crude. It seems to me possible that this singular lack of interest in this branch of knowledge was due to the love of animal life. It is difficult for Westerners to realise how deep it is among Indians. The observant traveller will come across people trailing sugar as they walk along streets so that ants may have a supply, and there are priests in certain sects who veil that face while reading sacred books that they may avoid drawing in with their breath and killing any small unwary insects. [Note: Salim Ali expressed a similar view ]

He then examines science sponsored by state institutions, by universities and then by individuals. About the last he writes:

Though I deal with it last it is the first in importance. Under it has to be included all the work done by individuals who are not in Government employment or who being government servants devote their leisure hours to science. A number of missionaries come under this category. They have done considerable work mainly in the natural sciences. There are also medical men who devote their leisure hours to science. The discovery of the transmission of malaria was made not during the course of Government work. These men have not received much encouragement for research or reward for research, but they deserve the highest praise., European officials in other walks of life have made signal contributions to science. The fascinating volumes of E. H. Aitken and Douglas Dewar are the result of observations made in the field of natural history in the course of official duties. Men like these have formed themselves into an association, and a journal is published by the Bombay Natural History Association[sic], in which valuable observations are recorded from time to time. That publication has been running for over a quarter of a century, and its volumes are a mine of interesting information with regard to the natural history of India.

This then is a brief survey of the work done in India. As you will see it is very little, regard being had to the extent of the country and the size of her population. I have tried to explain why Indians' contribution is as yet so little, how education has been defective and how opportunities have been few. Men do not go after scientific research when reward is so little and facilities so few. But there are those who will say that science must be pursued for its own sake. That view is narrow and does not take into account the origin and course of scientific research. Men began to pursue science for the sake of material progress. The Arab alchemists started chemistry in the hope of discovering a method of making gold. So it has been all along and even now in the 20th century the cry is often heard that scientific research is pursued with too little regard for its immediate usefulness to man. The passion for science for its own sake has developed largely as a result of the enormous growth of each of the sciences beyond the grasp of individual minds so that a division between pure and applied science has become necessary. The charge therefore that Indians have failed to pursue science for its own sake is not justified. Science flourishes where the application of its results makes possible the advancement of the individual and the community as a whole. It requires a leisured class free from anxieties of obtaining livelihood or capable of appreciating the value of scientific work. Such a class does not exist in India. The leisured classes in India are not yet educated sufficiently to honour scientific men.

It is interesting that leisure is noted as important for scientific advance. Edward Balfour, also commented that Indians were "too close to subsistence to reflect accurately on their environment!"  (apparently in The Vydian and the Hakim, what do they know of medicine? (1875) which unfortunately is not available online)

Kunhikannan may be among the few Indian scientists who dabbled in cultural history, and political theorizing. He wrote two rather interesting books The West (1927) and A Civilization at Bay (1931, posthumously published) which defended Indian cultural norms while also suggesting areas for reform. While reading these works one has to remind oneself that he was working under Europeans and may not have been able to discuss such topics with many Indians. An anonymous writer who penned a  prefatory memoir of his life in his posthumously published book notes that he was reserved and had only a small number of people to talk to outside of his professional work. Kunhikannan came from the Thiyya community which initially preferred English rule to that of natives but changed their mind in later times. Kunhikannan's beliefs also appear to follow the same trend.

Entomologists meeting at Pusa in 1919 Third row: C.C. Ghosh (assistant entomologist), Ram Saran ("field man"), Gupta, P.V. Isaac, Y. Ramachandra Rao, Afzal Husain, Ojha, A. Haq Second row: M. Zaharuddin, C.S. Misra, D. Naoroji, Harchand Singh, G.R. Dutt (Personal Assistant to the Imperial Entomologist), E.S. David (Entomological Assistant, United Provinces), K. Kunhi Kannan, Ramrao S. Kasergode (Assistant Professor of Entomology, Poona), J.L.Khare (lecturer in entomology, Nagpur), T.N. Jhaveri (assistant entomologist, Bombay), V.G.Deshpande, R. Madhavan Pillai (Entomological Assistant, Travancore), Patel, Ahmad Mujtaba (head fieldman), P.C. Sen First row: Capt. Froilano de Mello, W Robertson-Brown (agricultural officer, NWFP), S. Higginbotham, C.M. Inglis, C.F.C. Beeson, Dr Lewis Henry Gough (entomologist in Egypt), Bainbrigge Fletcher, Charles A. Bentley (malariologist, Bengal), Senior-White, T.V. Rama Krishna Ayyar, C.M. Hutchinson, E. A. Andrews, H.L.Dutt

Entomologists meeting at Pusa in 1923 Fifth row (standing) Mukerjee, G.D.Ojha, Bashir, Torabaz Khan, D.P. Singh Fourth row (standing) M.O.T. Iyengar (a malariologist), R.N. Singh, S. Sultan Ahmad, G.D. Misra, Sharma, Ahmad Mujtaba, Mohammad Shaffi Third row (standing) Rao Sahib Y Rama Chandra Rao, D Naoroji, G.R.Dutt, Rai Bahadur C.S. Misra, SCJ Bennett (bacteriologist, Muktesar), P.V. Isaac, T.M. Timoney, Harchand Singh, S.K.Sen Second row (seated) Mr M. Afzal Husain, Major RWG Hingston, Dr C F C Beeson, T. Bainbrigge Fletcher, P.B. Richards, J.T. Edwards, Major J.A. Sinton First row (seated) Rai Sahib PN Das (veterinary department Orissa), B B Bose, Ram Saran, R.V. Pillai, M.B. Menon, V.R. Phadke (veterinary college, Bombay)

Note: As usual, these notes are spin-offs from researching and writing Wikipedia entries. It is remarkable that even some people in high offices, such as P.V. Isaac, the last Imperial Entomologist, grandfather of noted writer Arundhati Roy, are largely unknown (except as the near-fictional Pappachi in Roy's God of Small Things)

Further reading

• Balfour, Edward (1887). The agricultural pests of India, and of eastern and southern Asia, vegetable and animal, injurious to man and his products. London: Bernard Quaritch.
• Ball, V. 1885. On the identification of the animals and plants of India which were known to early Greek authors. The Indian Antiquary. 14:274-287, 303-311, 334-341
• Barnard, Peter C. (2018). Bat-Fowlers, Pooters and Cyanide Jars: a Historical Overview of Insect Collecting and Preservation in MacGregor, A. (Ed.).  Naturalists in the Field . Brill.
• Clark, J.F.M. (2001). Bugs in the System: Insects, Agricultural Science, and Professional Aspirations in Britain, 1890-1920.  Agricultural History 75(1):83-114.
• Dave, K.N. (1950) Lac and the lac insect in the Atharva veda. Int Acad Ind Cult Nagpur, 16 pp. [Dave incidentally, is also the translator and interpreter of another problematic work on ornithological knowledge in ancient Indian literature] 
• Dover, Cedric (1922) Entomology in India. The Calcutta Review 3(2):336-349. [Dover makes a plea for greater funding for entomology: Like Magda, Queen of Sheba, whose devotion to Learning made her set out for Jerusalem, the capital of the kingdom of Solomon, they have entered the domain of Science not with the object of any financial benefit to themselves but for their love of Knowledge. They have worked in the interests of Science alone, yet certain branches of their work has saved India millions of rupees, while other, have added large sums to her coffers. Is it not then up to the Government to improve the status of entomology in this country and to make it a more lucrative profession?  ]
• Elias, Scott A. (2014) A Brief History of the Changing Occupations and Demographics of Coleopterists from the 18th Through the 20th Century. Journal of the History of Biology 47(2):213-242. [A nice examination of livelihoods]
• Essig, E.O. (1931) A history of entomology. New York: The Macmillan Company.
• Farber, P.L. (1976). The type-concept in zoology during the first half of the nineteenth century. Journal of the History of Biology 9(1):93–119.  
• Hewitt, C. Gordon (1916). A review of applied entomology in the British Empire. Annals of the Entomological Society of America. 9(1):1–33.
• Howard, L.O. (1930). A history of applied entomology (Somewhat Anecdotal). Smithsonian Institution. Publication 3065.
• Husain, Mohamad Afzal (1938). Entomology in India, past, present and future. Current Science 6(8):422-424. [This is a summary, for the full address see - Husain, M. Afzal (1939). "Entomology in India: Past, Present and Future."  Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Indian Science Congress, Calcutta, 1938. pp. 201–246]
• Lefroy, Maxwell (1904). Historical summary in Report of the Entomologist to the Government of India.
• Lienhard, S. (1978) On the meaning and use of the word indragopa. Indologica Taurinensia 6:177-188.
• Lockwood, J.A. (2012) Insects as weapons ofwar, terror, and torture. Annual Review of Entomology 57:205-227.
• Mahdihassan, S. (1986). Lac and its decolourization by orpiment as traced to Babylon. Indian Journal of History of Science 21(2):187-192.
• Melillo, E. D. (2013). Global Entomologies: Insects, Empires, and the “Synthetic Age” in World History. Past & Present, 223(1):233–270. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtt026
• Moses, S.T. (1925). Insect pests and some south Indian beliefs. Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society. 26(1):15-19.
  
• Rao, H. Srinivasa (1957) History of our knowledge of the Indian fauna through the ages. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 54:251-280.
• Rao, B.R. Subba (1983). Systematic entomology in India - past, present and future. Current Science 52(21):997-1000.
• Romero, D.B. (2007). El díkairon en la obra Indika de Ctesias de Cnido. Propuesta de identificación. Emerita 75(2):255-272.
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2017). Malarial Subjects. Cambridge University Press. [Open-Access]
• Roy, Rohan Deb (2013). Quinine, mosquitoes and empire: reassembling malaria in British India, 1890–1910, South Asian History and Culture, 4(1):65-86. doi:10.1080/19472498.2012.750457
• Service, M. W. (1978). Review Article1: A Short History of Early Medical Entomology. Journal of Medical Entomology, 14(6):603–626. doi:10.1093/jmedent/14.6.603 
• Smith, Ray F.; Mittler, T.E.; Smith, Carroll N. (1973). History of Entomology. Annual Reviews Inc. ISBN 0824321017.
• Sorensen, Conner (1988). The Rise of Government Sponsored Applied Entomology, 1840-1870. Agricultural History 62(2):98-115. 
• Sutter, P. S. (2007). Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire? Isis, 98(4):724–754.

An index to entomologists who worked in India or described a significant number of species from India - with links to Wikipedia (where possible - the gap in coverage of entomologists in general is large)
(woefully incomplete - feel free to let me know of additional candidates)

Carl Linnaeus - Johan Christian Fabricius - Edward Donovan - John Gerard Koenig - John Obadiah Westwood - Frederick William Hope - George Alexander James Rothney - Thomas de Grey Walsingham - Henry John Elwes - Victor Motschulsky - Charles Swinhoe - John William Yerbury - Edward Yerbury Watson - Peter Cameron - Charles George Nurse - H.C. Tytler - Arthur Henry Eyre Mosse - W.H. Evans - Frederic Moore - John Henry Leech - Charles Augustus de Niceville - Thomas Nelson Annandale - R.C. Wroughton -  T.R.D. Bell - Francis Buchanan-Hamilton - James Wood-Mason - Frederic Charles Fraser  - R.W. Hingston - Auguste Forel - James Davidson - E.H. Aitken -  O.C. Ollenbach - Frank Hannyngton - Martin Ephraim Mosley - Hamilton J. Druce  - Thomas Vincent Campbell - Gilbert Edward James Nixon - Malcolm Cameron - G.F. Hampson - Martin Jacoby - W.F. Kirby - W.L. Distant -  C.T. Bingham - G.J. Arrow - Claude Morley - Malcolm Burr - Samarendra Maulik - Guy Marshall

 

Edward Percy Stebbing - T.B. Fletcher - Edward Ernest Green - E.C. Cotes - Harold Maxwell Lefroy - Frank Milburn Howlett - S.R. Christophers - Leslie C. Coleman - T.V. Ramakrishna Ayyar - Yelsetti Ramachandra Rao - Magadi Puttarudriah - Hem Singh Pruthi - Shyam Sunder Lal Pradhan - James Molesworth Gardner - Vakittur Prabhakar Rao - D.N. Raychoudhary - C.F.W. Muesebeck  - Mithan Lal Roonwal - Ennapadam Sundara Narayanan - M.S. Mani - T.N. Ananthakrishnan - Muhammad Afzal Husain

Not included by Rao -   F.H. Gravely - P.V. Isaac - M. Afzal Husain - A.D. Imms - C.F.C. Beeson

 - C. Brooke Worth - Kumar Krishna - M.O.T. Iyengar - K. Kunhikannan - Cedric Dover

PS: Thanks to Prof C.A. Viraktamath, I became aware of a new book-  Gunathilagaraj, K.; Chitra, N.; Kuttalam, S.; Ramaraju, K. (2018). Dr. T.V. Ramakrishna Ayyar: The Entomologist. Coimbatore: Tamil Nadu Agricultural University. - this suggests that TVRA went to Stanford at the suggestion of Kunhikannan.

I wrote the first version of WikiCrowd back in 2022 and haven’t really iterated on it much since, beyond adding the odd new set of image categories, and removing features that I decided were not optimum.

At the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon however, WikiCrowd came up as both an entertaining little game to show people during beers, and also a project similar (ish) to something Daanvr was working on (I think it was Suggestion-Engine-Commons-prototype ?)

Upgrades

During the hackathon, and in the weeks following, WikiCrowd went through quite a number of changes

• The YAML config files for the pre-calculated depicts statements are now on Commons for all to edit
• Generation of the questions has been spruced up to stop it breaking as it gets deeper into category trees
• Generation can now be triggered in the UI, as can deleting pending questions
• The old one by one image mode was removed, and instead replaced by a grid mode
• More categories and depict options were added
• A custom grid view was added, allowing users to specify their own category and or Wikidata item
• Ability to zoom in on an image being displayed
• Addition of “levels” of questions
• Display of Wikidata labels and descriptions in the UI (Making use of the new REST API)

The addition of the grid view really increases the speed that depicts statements can be made, and only seems to improve the flow and focus for the user.

It’s very easy to look at a grid and determine what is or is not a cat, and not having to wait for a page reload or image reload is lovely with the preloaded rows below the fold on the grid.

The custom view (which is currently accessible via a button at the bottom of the home page) opens up the tool for use by all, even for small categories, without having to generate the questions ahead of time, and without having to edit YAML anywhere…

Search is integrated for the Commons categories, and Wikidata identifiers, as well as a couple of sanity checks and the ability to automatically look up the other half of the information you need (id or category).

For example, this like will take you to a custom grid of sunflowers that you can try to tag with depicts statements… https://wikicrowd.toolforge.org/questions/depicts/custom?category=Category%3ASunflowers&auto=1

Hackathon leaderboard

During the hackathon, Siebrand really powered ahead with the number of depicts being added. In fact, Siebrand tagged more things during the hackathon than everyone else combined!

Here is the leaderboard for May 2–4, 2025

Overall leaderboard

Looking at all answers since the tool was created, where users have made more than 100 answers PMG is still top, with Siebrand close behind in second (overtaking me in only a matter of weeks).

Answers over time

The tool has been around for quite a number of years now, it’s had periods of time when the generation has broken, and periods of time during events where it gets lots of use.

I’m looking forward to the custom view hopefully increasing the tools usefulness, and perhaps it can be linked to directly from Wikidata and or Commons for people to use from category pages or Wikidata items.

We are now at 239k answers, and 163k edits, woop woop!

But you can really notice the increase in rate since the grid mode was introduced!