WikiTambang is a photo taking event hosted by Wikimedia Korea, where participants visit selected city in Korea, take photos of every nook and cranny of the city, and contribute the photos to Wikimedia Commons.

The contents of facilities and cultural heritage sites in South Korea have been databased through the efforts of government agencies including the Cultural Heritage Administration of Korea. The contents of Wikipedia articles can be elaborated using freely available descriptive data from the Cultural Heritage Administration and local signage. With this information, there is a sufficient amount of data in Wikipedia. However, compared to the database, there is a lack of media coverage because cultural heritage sites are left unattended in many parts of the country. 

Photo taken during wikitambang, Top: Pungnammun in Jeonju, bottom: Pocheon Defence bunker

WikiTambang range from self-directed explorations of a city to group photowalks, where participants are organized into groups and travel together to explore the sights. Since 2019, we’ve organized at least one WikiTambang every year, and from 2023, we are organizing two WikiTambang events. At each event, we have an average of four to six users participating and uploading 200 photos. 

Recently in February 2025, We traveled to Yeoncheon and Pocheon, which are close to Seoul but off the beaten path, and participants expressed interest in finding and exploring the hidden cultural treasures and attractions of Korea.

“It was very interesting to turn traveling into contributing to Wikipedia. It also taught me that there are many cultural assets and attractions hidden in the neighborhoods of places you wouldn’t normally think of as travel destinations.” – Comment from participant

We use the framework of Wikitourism to do a variety of activities. We regularly organize Youth WikTambang volunteer programs to explore city landmarks such as museums with Korean artifacts and the Blue House, as well as “infinity photo walk” with neurodiverse people to contribute photos of cultural attractions in South Korea.

While WikTambang has become more successful each year, there are still limitations. First of all, it is necessary to capture the scenery of the city, but so far, WikTambang activities have been focused on cultural assets. This is due to the lack of panoramic freedom in Korea and the fact that it is better to look for cultural assets that have already been database, making it easier to explore and contribute.  

We will continue to organize various WikTambang events every year to distribute freely available media in Korean cities across the country.

The Karavali Wikimedians User Group, in partnership with Tulu Wikimedians and the Wikimedia Foundation, embarked on a transformative journey to preserve and document the cultural heritage of Tulunadu during the Aati month. This initiative, titled the Tuluvas Aati Month Project, captured the unique traditions, rituals, and practices of the Tuluva community through a series of well-structured events spanning December 2024 to January 2025 for educating the Wiki community, Academia, and the common people. This blog reflects the project’s transformative journey, focusing on its purpose to document underrepresented art forms, many of which are at risk of being forgotten and had never been photographed or videographed for digital media which was in my earlier blog Reviving Tuluvas’ Aati Month: Saving the Endangered Mugera Aati Kalenja Tradition. Through events such as the launch in Mangalore, the Edit-a-thon at St. Aloysius University, and grassroots engagement in Puduvettu, the project not only showcased these art forms but also demonstrated to students and communities the processes, challenges, and benefits of such documentation. By emphasizing the research and educational potential of the preserved materials, the project bridged cultural preservation with academia and digital literacy, ensuring that these invaluable traditions are accessible for future study and inspiration.

• December 25, 2024: Launching the Comprehensive Documentation Project

Participants were introduced to the project’s objectives, progress updates, and future plans. Recorded videos showcasing rituals and traditional practices were presented, followed by in-depth discussions on their significance. With over 15 active participants, this session emphasized the importance of digital preservation for sustaining cultural practices. The event primarily engaged Wikimedia communities from Mangalore, establishing the groundwork for subsequent activities.

The project began with a foundational event at the AJ Grand Elite Hotel in Mangalore. This gathering marked the formal initiation of the comprehensive documentation effort, focusing on preserving the diverse aspects of Tulu culture during Aati month.

• January 4–5, 2025: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at St. Aloysius University

In the first week of January 2025, the project hosted a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at St. Aloysius Deemed to be University. This event empowered students to contribute to Wikipedia by creating and enhancing articles on Tulu culture, with a special focus on Aati month traditions.

Ten enthusiastic students participated in the two-day initiative, dedicating their efforts to improve the quality and accessibility of Tulu cultural content. Guided by experts, the participants created well-researched and structured articles, gaining hands-on experience in Wikipedia editing. Engaging 22 editors to improve articles on Aati month traditions, it enriched Tulu-related content on Wikipedia and Wiktionary.

• January 11, 2025: MOU Signing and Cultural Demonstration at SDM College, Ujire

MoU with SDM College(Autonomus), Ujire and Karavali Wikimedians User Group

On January 11, 2025, a landmark event was organized at SDM College(Autonomous), Ujire. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed between the college and the Karavali Wikimedians User Group, symbolizing a formal partnership to promote Tulu culture through academic collaboration.

The program featured an enlightening talk by Dr. Sundar Kenaje, a distinguished folklorist, who highlighted the critical need to preserve intangible cultural heritage. Following this, cultural documentation demonstrations were conducted by Bharathesha Alasandemajalu and Dr. Vishwanatha Badikana, who showcased the process of recording Aati month rituals and traditions. More than 60 postgraduate students from language and journalism departments actively participated, showcasing enthusiasm and motivation to join the Wikimedia movement.

• January 14, 2025: Community Engagement at Puduvettu, Belthangady

The project reached grassroots communities with a documentation demonstration held at Aranya Bhavana in Melinadka, Puduvettu. This event aimed to involve local folk artists and residents in preserving their cultural heritage.

This initiative showcased how we can document living heritage and methods for preserving Tulu cultural practices, including rituals, food, and dance forms unique to the Aati month. The event brought together over 10 folk artists and more than 55 community members, including women and children, who actively participated in the demonstrations and discussions. Karavali Wikimedians User Group emphasized the importance of preserving living heritage and encouraged community involvement in contributing knowledge to Wikimedia platforms. Visual documentation captured during the event is now being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and incorporated into Wiki articles, highlighting how grassroots initiatives can enhance on-wiki contributions while fostering cultural preservation and community engagement.

Significance of Aati Month

Aati month, often perceived as inauspicious, holds profound cultural significance for the Tuluva community. Traditions like Kalenja dances, traditional games, and delicacies are integral to this heritage.

The Tuluvas Aati Month Project meticulously documented these practices to ensure their survival in a rapidly modernizing world. By combining academic precision with community engagement, the Karavali Wikimedians have set a precedent for cultural preservation initiatives. The project focuses on capturing the essence of Tulu culture, emphasizing its unique rituals, traditions, games, cuisine, and other elements that define the Aati month. The monsoon season, during which Aati month occurs, is a period deeply rooted in Tuluva identity. By documenting these practices through videos, audio recordings, photographs, and meticulously written articles, the project aims to ensure their preservation and accessibility for future generations.

The Tuluvas Aati Month Project stands as a beacon of collaboration between academia, grassroots communities, and technological innovation. It underscores the importance of preserving cultural heritage and making it accessible to a global audience.

The main project page is here Tuluvas Aati Month

Wikipedia is far from becoming the sum of all human knowledge until the vehicle to that knowledge, the human languages spoken worldwide, are also well represented on Wikipedia.

The majority of the world’s languages are oral and not written. Text cannot fully express the nuances of a language as compared to audio or video. However, an audio or video without transcription in one language is merely representational to a non-native speaker. Of 7,164 languages spoken worldwide, there are only 354 Wikipedias. We need a descriptive audio or video for each spoken language. The media needs subtitles, making it comprehensible for non-native speakers and readers with disabilities. That is an overly ambitious goal. But often, such goals demand one tiny step at a time! We’re launching OpenSpeaks Archives, an open and public digital language multimedia archive optimised for Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects, focusing on lesser-resourced languages.

In our first pilot, we brought audio and videos in five native, spoken tongues: Kusunda (Gejmehac Gipan) from Nepal and Baleswari-Odia, Bonda (Remosam), Ho and Van Gujjari from India. Each video file is subtitled in multiple languages—at least in one local official language and English. Some of the videos also have closed captions containing subtitles in the language spoken. The videos have enriched Wikipedia in over 20 languages as well as Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons.

The pilot contributed to the maiden launch of Wiki Loves Languages, an edit-a-thon to grow knowledge of languages and speakers in Wikimedia projects. Collaboration with two international archives is underway, acquiring and distributing the media among their networks. The source footage is all unused, archival media from five documentaries—Gyani Maiya (2019), Remosam (2019), Mage Porob (2019), MarginalizedAadhaar (2021) and Nani Ma (2022). The approach and methodology are from OpenSpeaks. The pilot extensively used open source software and identified a list of technological gaps hindering language documentation.

Overall workflow

We combed through raw audio and video recordings from 2014 in our private archive containing content relevant to Wikipedia or Wiktionary. We often recorded audio and video separately and synced them using a non-linear video editor. We made dummy subtitles to identify pauses in spoken sentences and sent those along with roughly edited videos to language experts. They watched the videos, edited subtitles and sent back draft subtitles. We further edited the videos for content and audio, trimming unnecessary parts and adding relevant B-rolls. We translated subtitles and checked with the language experts. Once subtitles were finalised, the videos were exported, converted into WebM, uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and embedded in Wikipedia articles and other places. We checked with the language experts multiple times for accuracy throughout the process.

Gaps this archive addresses

OpenSpeaks Archives will focus on five (and one optional) critical aspects of media production:

1. Descriptive, natural speech recording: a speaker speaking about any topic in conversational language
2. Recordings without background music: to keep spoken words clear unless the recording is of a musical performance
3. Recording to be professionally edited for content: multiple videos merged if needed; unnecessary parts (e.g. interviewer’s questions) moderately trimmed and b-rolls inserted (only in video) without distorting speech flow, making each recording independent and comprehensive; audio lightly cleaned for amplifying speaker’s voice and reducing noise—all such edits while keeping speech natural
4. Output files subtitled, transcribed and subtitles translated in English: spoken sentences transcribed or subtitled in a neighbouring majority language and English using closed captioning (for multilingual subtitling), not burned-in subtitles
5. Upload highest quality recording and embed in Wikimedia projects: Upload videos as WebM and audio as WAV (lossless) to Wikimedia Commons and as .mov (videos only, try for lossless exporting in editing suite) to the Internet Archive or a similar open knowledge online library. Maximise using each video in the maximum number of Wikipedia/other Wikimedia project entries.
6. Get media archived in a noted GLAM institution (optional): Cataloguing media in a noted GLAM institution’s online catalogue helps increase its citation count, increasing its reliability.

Software tools wishlist

This is a list of software we wish we had. Every community-based language archivist would need all or most from this list. We did not have the resources to build full-fledged tools, so we used command-line open source scripts, mostly Python-based. Many archivists might not be adept with such workflows, so standalone tools are dearly needed. It would be nice if some were browser-based, independent of operating systems (work even on smartphones or tablets), and offline to address remote/very low internet bandwidth barriers. We plan to work on these and invite others to contribute, too.

1. Audio/video-to-dummy subtitle creator: Identifies pauses between sentences to create dummy subtitles, which can later be manually edited.
2. Offline, browser-based subtitle editor: A simple, browser-based, offline subtitle editor that creates video subtitles by playing, pausing, and typing.
3. Audio/video file duration calculator: For counting audio/video file duration. Helps with budgeting.
4. Video bitrate calculator (and converter): for sending draft audio/video files with file size constraint (e.g. file sharing on messaging applications) back and forth between video editors and language experts.

As this pilot is almost over, we plan to expand to more languages, involve more community archivists, and involve more Wikimedians. We already have recordings in 20+ low-resourced languages with informed consent from the interviewees. Our top priority would be to bring some of those recordings to Wikimedia projects.

More

• OpenSpeaks Archives
• Files uploaded to the first pilot of OpenSpeaks Archives

—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?  ]
  
• 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.

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

Weekly highlight

• Communities using growth tools can now showcase one event on the Special:Homepage for newcomers. This feature will help newcomers to be informed about editing activities they can participate in. Administrators can create a new event to showcase at Special:CommunityConfiguration. To learn more about this feature, please read the Diff post, have a look at the documentation, or contact the Growth team.

Updates for editors

• Starting next week, talk pages at these wikis – Spanish Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Italian Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia – will get a new design. This change was extensively tested as a Beta feature and is the last step of talk pages improvements. [1]
• You can now navigate to view a redirect page directly from its action pages, such as the history page. Previously, you were forced to first go to the redirect target. This change should help editors who work with redirects a lot. Thanks to user stjn for this improvement. [2]
• When a Cite reference is reused many times, wikis currently show either numbers like “1.23” or localized alphabetic markers like “a b c” in the reference list. Previously, if there were so many reuses that the alphabetic markers were all used, an error message was displayed. As part of the work to modernize Cite customization, these errors will no longer be shown and instead the backlinks will fall back to showing numeric markers like “1.23” once the alphabetic markers are all used.
• The log entries for each change to an editor’s user-groups are now clearer by specifying exactly what has changed, instead of the plain before and after listings. Translators can help to update the localized versions. Thanks to user Msz2001 for these improvements.
• A new filter has been added to the Special:Nuke tool, which allows administrators to mass delete pages, to enable users to filter for pages in a range of page sizes (in bytes). This allows, for example, deleting pages only of a certain size or below. [3]
• Non-administrators can now check which pages are able to be deleted using the Special:Nuke tool. Thanks to user MolecularPilot for this and the previous improvements. [4]
• View all 25 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, a bug was fixed in the configuration for the AV1 video file format, which enables these files to play again. [5]

Updates for technical contributors

• Parsoid Read Views is going to be rolling out to most Wiktionaries over the next few weeks, following the successful transition of Wikivoyage to Parsoid Read Views last year. For more information, see the Parsoid/Parser Unification project page. [6][7]
• Developers of tools that run on-wiki should note that mw.Uri is deprecated. Tools requiring mw.Uri must explicitly declare mediawiki.Uri as a ResourceLoader dependency, and should migrate to the browser native URL API soon. [8]

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

Wikipedia has a significant impact on our everyday lives. The largest free knowledge platform on the internet, we regularly rely on its accessible, up-to-date information to form our opinions, even on critical events such as elections.
While most of the research has focused on how large, commercial platforms address disinformation, less attention has been given to platforms non-profit, community-led platforms such as Wikipedia.
The DEM-Debate project aims to fill this gap by exploring whether, and how, the fact-checking and moderation practices used by Wikipedia during the 2024 European Parliament election have enhanced the reliability of the information ecosystem. It also seeks to determine if these practices can be transferred to other online contexts, fostering an environment that nurtures a more democratic debate.

A new horizon for the information ecosystem

DEM-Debate aims to

• Assess how EU frameworks support free knowledge projects with a community-led model such as Wikipedia’s.
• Identify fact-checking and moderation strategies used by Wikipedia’s volunteer editors to manage disinformation during high-stakes moments like elections. 
• Identify Wikipedia’s transferable practices that can be applied to other platforms and contexts to strengthen democratic debate online.
• Providing actionable insights for policymakers and community-governed projects based on evidence on Wikipedia fact-checking and moderation practices.

Innovative approaches to understanding community-based projects

Through interdisciplinary, transnational research, DEM-Debate will

• Analyse the current EU policies and frameworks are applicable to platforms addressing disinformation like Wikipedia
• Investigate interaction patterns across Wikipedia’s edit histories and talk pages related to elections to identify trends and conflicts
• Engage Wikipedia communities across Europe in a participatory research to map their practices, ensuring that the project’s outcomes are grounded in practical, real-world challenges
• Develop evidence-based recommendations for policymakers and community-based to contribute to a reliable, pluralistic online information ecosystem.

Impacting policy and public interest information

The evidence-based policy recommendations generated by DEM-Debate will inform EU policymakers, supporting future legislation that favours community-driven, free knowledge initiatives. The identified transferable practices will offer solutions for other platforms and community-led projects, promoting a more reliable and pluralistic digital space. 

By analysing what works and what does not in Wikipedia’s fact-checking and moderation model, DEM-Debate will contribute to a more transparent and trustworthy information ecosystem in the European Union.

Explore the project’s outputs

deliverables

events

articles

Wikimedia Europe Partners for Research into Wikipedia’s Practices on Information on Elections

Stay up to date 

If you would like to receive updates on the project or want to get in contact with the team, feel free to drop us an email at [email protected]

Teaming up across sectors to drive positive change

DEM-Debate is a 18 month participatory research initiative run by Wikimedia Europe, the University of Amsterdam and Eurecat – Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya and the Wikimedia communities in Europe. It is supported by the European Media and Information Fund – EMIF managed by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

DEM-Debate kicked-off in September 2024 and will run until February 2026. 

Disclaimer. The sole responsibility for any content supported by the European Media and Information Fund lies with the author(s) and it may not necessarily reflect the positions of the EMIF and the Fund Partners, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the European University Institute. https://gulbenkian.pt/emifund/disclaimer/

To kick off our first Speaker Series event of the new year, Wiki Education brought together a panel of healthcare experts to take us behind the scenes of their own work on Wikipedia and the contributions of their students! 

Joined virtually by attendees from across the globe, our panelists explored how the public and healthcare professionals alike turn to Wikipedia for reliable information, the impact of Wikipedia content on patient-physician communications, and the critical need for ongoing improvement of healthcare topics on the encyclopedia.

Whether our search for information is sparked by something we read in a book, watch on the news, or learn from a medical diagnosis, Wikipedia is the first stop we make online, emphasized panelist Maureen Richards, assistant professor and assistant dean at University of Illinois College of Medicine.

“Patients get a diagnosis, they receive a test result, and they Google it,” explained Richards. “If they have been using Wikipedia in all other facets of their life…they’re going to click on it and believe what it says – which means that those of us who have had the opportunity to study [healthcare] have a responsibility to ensure that information on Wikipedia is accurate and well-founded in scientific research.”

Richards, who first incorporated a Wikipedia assignment into her courses in 2020, noted her appreciation for how the project provides her medical students with the opportunity to practice the language of research and to learn how to synthesize primary literature for a greater audience. 

Like Richards, professor Amin Azzam assigns coursework on Wikipedia to his own medical students. Azzam underscores the critical, real-world nature of the work to his classes by encouraging them to explore the readership trend on any health-related Wikipedia article.

“When you look at article traffic statistics, there’s always a five peaks and two valleys pattern that reoccurs,” noted Azzam, who challenges his students to explain this pattern. “It’s weekdays and weekends, because exactly as Maureen said, people get diagnoses, and then they go home and read about them on Wikipedia. It really is incumbent upon us to make it as accurate as possible.”

Lending her perspective as a new Wikipedia editor herself, physician and policy researcher Gabriela Alvarado echoed the assertions made by her fellow panelists. As Alvarado explained, the platform’s accessible nature is a significant draw for those seeking answers to healthcare questions. She noted Wikipedia’s understandable language, clear visual formatting, and of course, one very simple but powerful characteristic of accessibility – it’s free to read.

“My family members will search for something and a paywall comes up on a journal,” shared Alvarado, who participated in a Wiki Scientists course focused on improving reproductive and women’s healthcare content. “The average person who isn’t affiliated with a school library can’t pay $50 for each academic journal they want to read. It’s a recurring conversation that academics have with themselves – are we screaming into this echo chamber? Why are we doing the work that we’re doing, who’s actually reading it, and who are we serving with our research?”

Just like Alvarado, health researcher Izidora Skracic was compelled to join the Wiki Scientists editing course to help improve public access to critical healthcare information. While Alvarado created a new Wikipedia article on breastmilk storage and handling, Skracic lent her efforts to enhancing high-traffic articles including Unintended pregnancy, Intrauterine device, and Contraceptive implant.

When asked for her best advice for new editors, Skracic recommended newcomers start small and work their way up to large-scale editing.

“In order to start, pick one sentence somewhere on any Wikipedia article that you’re reading, and just say, I’m going to make this sentence better – whether that means adding a citation, adding a second part of a sentence, or just adding more updated information,” said Skracic. “And as you build confidence, go bigger.”

Catch up on our Speaker Series on our YouTube channel, including “The Experts Behind the Edits: Expanding public understanding of healthcare,” and join us for our next webinar tomorrow, February 18!

Beyond the Classroom: Student editors improve Wikipedia
Tuesday, February 18 (10 am PST / 1 pm EST)
REGISTER NOW

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada. 

In October last year, I wrote a post starting to visualize the connections between Wikibases in the ecosystem that had been found and collected on wikibase.world thanks to my bot that I occasionally run. That post made use of the query service visualizations, and in this post I’ll take the visualizations a step further, making use of IPython notebooks and plotly.

Previously I reported the total number of Wikibases tracked in wikibase.world being around 784, with around 755 being active (however I didn’t write down exactly how I determined this). So I’m going to take another stab at that with some code backing up the determinations, rather than just my late night data ramblings.

All of the data shown in this post is generated from the IPython notebook available on Github, on 16 Feb 2025, based on the data on wikibase.world which is maintained as a best effort system.

General numbers

A few things of note:

• “with properties” is used, as a clear indicator that Wikibase is not only installed, but also used in at least a very basic way. (ie, it has a created Wikibase property). I would use the number of items ideally as a measure here, however as far as I can tell, this is hard to figure out?)
• “with more than 10 pages” is my baseline measure of the site having some content, however this applies across all namespaces, so can also be wikitext pages…
• “active users” are taken from MediaWiki statistics, and apply across all namespaces. These numbers also rely on MediaWiki being correctly maintained and these numbers actually being updated. (Users who have performed an action in the last 30 days)
• “link to other wikibases” are links extracted from sites by Addbot either via external links or specific properties that state they are links to other wikibases. (The code is not pretty, but gives us an initial view)

And summarized in words:

• 264 Wikibases with some content that have been edited in the past 30 days
• 194 Wikibases link in some way to other Wikibases
  • Excluding links to Wikidata and Commons, this number comes down to 35 (So Wikidata is very much the centre)

And of course, take all of this with a pinch of salt, these numbers are an initial stab at trying to have an overview of the ecosystem.

An updated web

My October post included some basic visualizations from the query service of wikibase.world.

However, it’s time to get a little more fancy and interactive. (As well as showing all wikibases, not just the linked ones)

• This graph shows the 777 wikibases mentioned above
• Links between nodes represent links between wikibases
• Size of the node represents the number of active users
• Colour of the node represents the host of the wikibase (see key)
• Hover over nodes to see more information

Some things of note:

• Wikibase.cloud currently hosts the most wikibases (by far), but more on that later
• Many of these sites according to MediaWiki currently have 0 active users, however they all have some level of content
• The most active sites in terms of users often include large sections of the content / site that are also not Wikibase focused (regular articles and pages)

Host metrics

As can be seen in the web above, wikibase.cloud currently hosts the most wikibases, roughly 91% of the wikibases that have been collected on wikibase.world.

The other host groups currently are, unknown, independently hosted, The Wikibase Consultancy, Wikimedia Foundation, Miraheze and Wikimedia Cloud services.

Coming up second and third as recorded on wikibase.world is the “unknown” category, and also the “independently hosted Wikibase category”. However these groups are pretty vague and don’t really help us understand how or where these sites are hosted.

Looking at this generic concept of “host” as a slice through the ecosystem, we can see that the Wikimedia Foundation hosted wikibases have the most active users by far. These 63k users (across Wikidata and Commons) potentially contain duplicates that work across both of the projects.

Excluding these WMF sites, we see that the group with the most active users, at around 887, comes from the independently hosted wikibases. Looking specifically at these wikibases, they are often the sites that have lots of non-wikibase content alongside the wikibase entities.

Wikibase.cloud comes in third with 448 active users, but as with the WMF sites, there is likely some duplication in this number with users that have multiple sites.

Trying to look at content, the only mildly useful number I have collected in wikibase.world so far is the number of properties.

Interestingly, here we can see that the total number of properties defined outside of Wikidata, now exceeds the number of properties defined within Wikidata (currently around 21.5k), vs the roughly 80k external.

Of course, there will be lots of duplicates and properties that are ultimately the same as others, but looking into that would be for another day.

Versions

Most wikibases are on 1.39.7. This is every wikibase.cloud wiki, as well as one other non wikibase.cloud wiki.

The current MediaWiki and Wikibase release is actually 1.43, so wikibase.cloud (and 91% of the ecosystem by site) is currently 4 versions behind.

Excluding 1.39.7, the next most installed version is 1.39.11 with 8 sites, notably these are 4 security releases ahead of the cloud sites.

Continuing to exclude wikibase.cloud by excluding 1.39.7, and deciding to ignore the different security releases, we can see 1.39 (the previous LTS version) is on 35% of “other” wikibases.

This is followed by 1.35 which is on 15% of these “other” wikibases (though this is only 10 sites).

So, 50% of non wikibases.cloud wikibases are on the LTS version of MediaWiki and/or Wikibase (33 sites).

Wikibase suite?

I have always been interested in trying to figure out how many people actually use “wikibase suite” as it is currently peddled by Wikimedia Deutschland, rather than installing Wikibase from source (the old-fashioned and arguably less complicated way). And as mentioned above, “host” on wikibase.world really doesn’t reflect how a site is actually installed.

Using the data on wikibase.world for version information that is extracted from the MediaWiki version information (summarized in this query) what was processed for 777 sites in my notebook for this post, we see.

In my data set, there are currently 37 different installed versions on wikibase sites, that looks something like this: 1.27.0-rc.1, 1.28.2, 1.32.5, 1.33.0, 1.34.1, 1.34.2, 1.34.4, 1.35.1, 1.35.2, 1.35.3, 1.35.4, 1.35.5, 1.35.7, 1.36.1, 1.37.0-alpha, 1.38.5, 1.39.1, 1.39.10, 1.39.11, 1.39.2, 1.39.3, 1.39.4, 1.39.5, 1.39.6, 1.39.7, 1.40.0-wmf.26, 1.40.1, 1.41.0, 1.41.1, 1.41.4, 1.42.1, 1.42.3, 1.42.4, 1.43.0, 1.43.0-wmf.7, 1.44.0-wmf.15, 1.44.0-wmf.16

We can also use a little API call, and a bit of code to come up with a similar list of released docker images as part of the “wikibase suite” release system.

curl -L -s 'https://registry.hub.docker.com/v2/repositories/wikibase/wikibase/tags?page_size=1024'|jq '."results"[]["name"]'

And once throwing this through a little bit of data processing, we can come up with a similar list of versions that have been released as part of the “wikibase suite” release system: 1.29.0, 1.30.0, 1.31.0, 1.32.0, 1.33.0, 1.34.0, 1.35.0, 1.35.2, 1.35.4, 1.35.5, 1.35.7, 1.36.3, 1.36.4, 1.37.6, 1.38.5, 1.38.7, 1.39.1, 1.39.10, 1.39.5, 1.39.6, 1.39.7, 1.39.8, 1.40.1, 1.40.2, 1.40.3, 1.41.0, 1.41.1, 1.41.2, 1.42.1, 1.42.3

If we link these two lists of installed versions, and versions that can be installed using suite, we get a table showing the potential installs that are making use of the current suite installation method (with a few rcs etc trimmed out)

Version	Installed	Suitable	Overlap	Installations
1.28.2				1
1.29.0
1.30.0
1.31.0
1.32.0
1.32.5				1
1.33.0				1
1.34.0
1.34.1				1
1.34.2				1
1.34.4				1
1.35.0
1.35.1				2
1.35.2				3
1.35.3				1
1.35.4				1
1.35.5				2
1.35.7				1
1.36.1				1
1.36.3
1.36.4
1.37.6
1.38.5				6
1.38.7
1.39.1				5
1.39.10				2
1.39.11				8
1.39.2				1
1.39.3				1
1.39.4				3
1.39.5				2
1.39.6				1
1.39.7				712 (711 cloud)
1.39.8
1.40.1				1
1.40.2
1.40.3
1.41.0				1
1.41.1				2
1.41.2
1.41.4				1
1.42.1				3
1.42.3				1
1.42.4				1
1.43.0				2

Summarizing the data, and excluding the wikibase.cloud installations.

• Wikibase Cloud instances: 711
• Other wikibases on versions that can be installed using suite: 33
• Other wikibases on versions that can NOT be installed using suite: 33

So 50% of these “other” checked wikibases can certainly not be making use of “suite”. And of the 33 sites that might possibly be using “suite” as they are on the same version at least, probably 50% are installed via other means, so the “suite” installations probably account for ~16 of the wikibases in wikibase.world at a guesstimate, with ~50 using other methods and 711 using wikibase.cloud.

Though there is no way to tell for sure.

An element of time

Both this and my last post show the wikibase ecosystem as a simple snapshot in time, and really the interesting thing would be to check in throughout time, seeing how the ecosystem hopefully continues to expand, become more active, and become more connected.

This entire post revolves around an IPython notebook (with a few extras at the end) that started off by ingesting all items in Wikibase.world from a simple XML export from Special:Export (which I have archived on archive.org).

With any luck, in the future I’ll be able to start running the same data producing code over a variety of these XML snapshots and start to show the ecosystem evolving. But that is for a future post!

If you do notice anything slightly off, or think of anything else that could be added, let me know. Go an get involved in wikibase.world, and “click that subscibe button” if you don’t want to miss the next post .

Edits

I’ll try and keep a record of edits and things that have been identified relating to this post here…

• 5 seconds before posting: It turns out that I didn’t include the “wikibase-docker” host very well in the notebook, which lead to wikibase.imfd.cl not being represented very well throughout. Now fixed in the notebook, and it does pop up a little in the updated web.

Wikimedia Europe is keen to share that Wikipedia has been recognised as a digital public good. It is an important recognition for community-led free knowledge projects, which will help our advocacy efforts. In these troublesome times for the information ecosystem, it is of utmost importance defending free knowledge and access to information through the safeguard of alternative platform models, like distributed and community-led online encyclopedias, that proved their resilience.

This post was originally published on the Wikimedia Foundation website and can be accessed here.

Wikipedia has officially been recognized as a digital public good (DPG) by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), a multistakeholder initiative that maintains a Registry of Digital Public Goods: open source-software, data, AI models, standards, and content created for the public interest.  The DPGA is endorsed by the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General in support of open source technologies that contribute to the advancement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This recognition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia hosted by the nonprofit organization the Wikimedia Foundation, highlights its unique role in advancing global access to a free and open source of trusted knowledge in the public interest. 

According to Liv Marte Nordhaug, CEO of the DPGA Secretariat:

“Wikipedia’s recognition as a digital public good is a testament to the power and importance of open access to knowledge. Wikipedia stands as a prime example of how technologies can drive equitable and unrestricted access to information, accelerating the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals worldwide.” 

Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia and only top-visited website operated by a non-profit organization, contains reliably sourced information that is shared, maintained, and verified by a global community of nearly 260,000 volunteers in over 300 languages.

“The Wikimedia Foundation works with affiliate organizations and volunteer Wikipedians across the world to advocate for policies that protect and support Wikipedia and other digital public goods upon which the free knowledge ecosystem depends,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, Vice President of Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation. “We look forward to working with the Digital Public Goods Alliance, along with other organizations and communities that create and maintain digital public goods, to build a better internet that serves the public interest.”

In 2024 Wikimedia Foundation staff along with Wikipedia volunteers from around the world participated in the UN General Assembly’s Summit for the Future and the drafting of the Global Digital Compact—the UN’s blueprint for global governance of digital technology and artificial intelligence. 

In an open letter in early 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia affiliates called on UN Member States to:

• Protect and empower communities to govern online public interest projects.
• Promote and protect digital public goods by supporting a robust digital commons from which everyone, everywhere, can benefit.
• Build and deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to support and empower, not replace, people who create content and make decisions in the public interest.

The recognition of Wikipedia as a digital public good strengthens these advocacy efforts and affirms Wikipedia’s role in the broader global movement for an internet that protects and promotes community-led spaces. The Wikimedia Foundation will continue working with the UN and other international institutions, governments, and civil society partners to ensure that digital public goods like Wikipedia are protected, supported, and accessible to all.

Over the past week I have spent some time writing some code to start running a little bot on the wikibase.world project, aimed at expanding the number of Wikibases that are collected there, and automating collection of some of the data that can easily be automated.

Over the past week, the bot has imported 650 Wikibase installs that increases the total to 784, and active to 755.

I mainly wanted to do this to try and visualize “federation” or rather, links between Wikibases that are currently occurring, hence creating P55 (links to Wikibase) and P56 (linked from Wikibase).

251 Wikibases seem to link to each other, and Wikidata is very clearly at the centre of that web.

Many Wikibases only link to Wikidata, but there are a few other notable clusters, including Wikimedia Commons (but see the improvements section below, as some of these may be false positives).

I’m not sure why Q2 didn’t render the label, but Q2 is Commons in the below image.

Others such as LexBib, MaRDi portal, PersonalData.io, Librarybase, R74n and more also seem to have multiple connections (more than one)

Here is a fairly nice SPARQL query that can get you these links in their current state, in a table…

PREFIX wwdt: <https://wikibase.world/prop/direct/>
PREFIX wwd: <https://wikibase.world/entity/>

SELECT ?wikibase ?wikibaseLabel ?linksTo ?linksToLabel
WHERE {
    ?wikibase wwdt:P3 wwd:Q10.
    ?wikibase wwdt:P13 wwd:Q54.
    ?wikibase wwdt:P55 ?linksTo
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}   

Runnable here: https://tinyurl.com/28dor4qe

The scripts

Very briefly, there are a collection of scripts that import Wikibases found via a variety of methods (I’m open to new ideas if you have them).

• wikibase.cloud: which exposes an API of all currently active installations
• wikibase-metadata.toolforge.org: which as some data collected about usage of “Wikibase Suite” installed elsewhere
• google: with some painfully long, crafted search terms that match the few things identifying a Wikibase that might get indexed.

These scripts import a very bare-bones version of an Item, such as [1], [2], [3]…

Once the data is in wikibase.world, a separate process loads all currently active Wikibases, and tries to add and refine information.

• Load the site and see if it is a 200
• Try to normalize the URLs a bit if possible
• Try to detect and record the host
• Add an inception date, based on the first logged action by MediaWiki
• Add entity types and tools used (sometimes)… (extensions to come soon?)
• Add links to and from other Wikibases based on some External Identifiers, and all URL properties.

The code makes use of wikibase-edit and wikibase-sdk written by maxlath. They were a pleasure to use, really simplify Wikibase APIs down to basics, which is all I needed here.

Improvements

There are many other elements of data that could be added, and that also would be nice to be able to filter by across all Wikibases, such as number of entities, number of users, date of first Wikibase edit etc. I plan on slowly trying to tackle these parts moving forward.

There are also possibly a few issues with the current process

• Not all External Identifier properties are currently inspected. Only those that have a formatter URL property defined, and also that have that formatter URL property exposed via WikibaseManifest (so the WikibaseManifest extension is also a requirement)
• All URLs are inspected for known domains, and these may link to NON Wikibase and NON entity pages. Such as a URL that just links to https://commons.wikimedia.org would currently appear as a link…

Currently, I have just been running the scripts locally, but I’ll aim to set them up on GitHub Actions so they run weekly perhaps?

And let’s pretend that I wrote the code in a nice tidy way, haha, naaah

That will come (if this all still seems like a good idea)

06/02/2025-12/02/2025

Mapping

• Requests for comments have been made on this proposal:
  • traffic_sign:id=* to explicitly reference official traffic sign identifiers, improving data accuracy and interoperability with external databases.
• The proposal to add golf=out_of_bounds, for mapping the area designated as being outside the boundaries of a golf hole, is open for voting until Saturday 22 February.

Mapping campaigns

• Mapbox has thrown down the gauntlet to the German mapping community, claiming that there are roads in Germany that are yet to be mapped. The contributors wish them luck and hope that Brian Sperlongano has popped enough corn for all of us.
• In response to recent disruptions in the US Federal Government disruption of foreign assistance, HOT is launching a 90 day campaign of ‘Open Maps for Humanitarian Needs’, inviting volunteers to map.
• YouthMappers at Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia is set to host a mapping party in Bandung, aiming to document and identify local plant species.

Community

• Just van den Broecke was interviewed by OpenCage regarding the OpenStreetMap Alpumapa Workshop.
• jbcharron shared ► a series of Overpass queries aimed at improving associatedStreet, a relation used to link streets with houses for addressing purposes.
• Gregory Marler has made a video detailing his experience of mapping Perth, Scotland, using EveryDoor and KeypadMapper.
• Amanda McCann and Milvus emerged as joint winners in OpenCage’s January 2025 edition of #fridaygeotrivia. This month’s challenge asked participants to name country pairs sharing a land border of less than 50 km in total length.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation has announced that eight new entities, including ESRI, Meta, Microsoft, Niantic, and QGIS, joined its Corporate Membership Programme in 2024, contributing at various levels to support OSM’s infrastructure and community efforts.

Events

• IVIDES.org® has opened the pre-registration for the Green Open Data Day 2025 event, to be held on March 31, 2025, in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), as part of the initiatives celebrating open data around the world. You can consult the program and register today. In-person and remote activities are planned to map trees with OpenStreetMap and to remind people of the importance of vegetation cover in the face of the current climate crisis.
• Open Knowledge Brasil is looking for proposals suggesting open data events, including those associated with OpenStreetMap, to celebrate Open Data Day 2025. Ideas are needed by Monday 17 February.

OSM research

• Héctor Ochoa-Ortiz and Barbara Re, from the Università degli Studi di Camerino (Italy), have explored why and how commercial organisations contribute to OpenStreetMap, identifying five key ways: data editing, tool development, event sponsorship, OSM-related funding, and community building. These approaches are motivated by both business needs (for example, improving data quality) and social values (fostering community engagement). The paper also addresses challenges such as governance barriers and technical limitations that have led to alternative initiatives such as Overture Maps.
• Niroshan and Carswell have published a paper with an analysis of machine learning approaches, focusing on their application to updating OpenStreetMap.
• McKeen and others have published an article about the evolution of humanitarian mapping within the OpenStreetMap community, in the Scientific Reports. The authors concentrated on the editing of buildings and roads in specific countries. The analysis of temporal patterns revealed the impact of major disaster activations for the 2013 Typhoon Haiyan, 2014 West Africa Ebola Crisis, 2015 Nepal Earthquake, and 2017 Mexico Earthquake – as well as Hurricanes Irma and Maria around the same time. Subsequent disaster activations showed less engagement from the OSM community except during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Outside of crisis times, the trend-cycle analysis revealed that humanitarian mapping experienced sustained growth regarding monthly added buildings and highways from 2012 to mid-2017. However, the trend-cycle analysis further depicted a consolidation phase since mid-2017.

Maps

• ^[1] -karlos- (aka DerKarlos) has revived his old 3D-rendered OpenStreetMap project ‘OSM go’ by integrating Panoramax images after Mapillary’s API shutdown, and is now exploring other improvements, including better 3D rendering techniques and possibly rewriting the project in Rust or Zig. You can view the Brandenburg Gate, one of Germany’s most famous landmarks. There is an ‘OSM go’ project page on the OSM wiki and at GitLab.
• After several months of research and server-intensive mapping, Charlie Plett has completed the British Empire’s territorial boundaries in OpenHistoricalMap.

OSM in action

• OK Klima ► has created a map that shows the current situation (mobility, energy, consumption, buildings, food system) of the municipalities in Switzerland in relation to the Paris climate agreement. OpenStreetMap data was used as the basis for calculating ► some of the indicators.

Programming

• Sarah Hoffmann has been selected for the one-year pilot of the Sovereign Tech Fellowship programme by the Sovereign Tech Agency. The fellowship will provide support for the maintenance of Nominatim, Photon, osm2pgsql, and pyosmium throughout the next year. Congratulations Sarah!
• Matthias Schwindt, from GPS Radler, explained ► how to install and use alternative OpenStreetMap maps on the Garmin Fenix 8 watch, covering different installation methods, map activation and usability, as well as insights into Garmin’s Outdoor Maps+ subscription service.

Releases

• Nominatim 5.0.0 has been released, completing its transition to a Python package by removing the PHP front end and bundled osm2pgsql, while introducing a reworked osm2pgsql import style configuration, better integration with osm2pgsql-themepark, and new pre-processing hooks for search queries, including improved handling of Japanese addresses.
• Version 1.6.0 of the Panoramax Android app Baba has been released. This version brings GNSS support for phones without Google services, better notifications for picture uploads, and allows saving to external storage.
• GeoCompas.AI has introduced the SAMGEO-API, a service designed to streamline geospatial AI Data generation using the SAM2 module, which promises to enhance workflows for mapping projects with tools like DS-Annotate and the JOSM Magic Wand plugin. OSM contributors have talked about their user experiences on the OSM Community forum.

Did you know that …

• … the geocompx project is a community-driven effort to provide resources for learning and teaching geocomputation in multiple programming languages? Geocomputation with R and Geocomputation with Python are available as open source books, with Geocomputation with Julia in development. The making maps section of the books describe various cartographic packages. The interactive maps are based on Leaflet and OpenStreetMap.

OSM in the media

• Eleven Landesamt für Geoinformation und Landesvermessung Niedersachsen (Hannover Germany) trainees have supported ► the Missing Maps project by mapping 1387 buildings in OpenStreetMap to aid humanitarian efforts. Guided by the German Red Cross, they focused on flood-prone areas near Montréal and other global regions, gaining valuable technical and social insights.Contributors from Québec were a bit surprised to read of this emergency call on the HOT Tasking Manager. Pierre Béland tooted suggesting that next time they might concentrate on climate change in Europe.

Other “geo” things

• Eva-Maria Weiß looked ► at the 20-year history of Google Maps and highlights the convenience of navigation and travel planning, while ethical concerns have been raised ► regarding data protection, corporate influence and the decline of independent map alternatives.
• The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has called for nominations for the 2025 Sasakawa Award for Disaster Risk Reduction. Nominations must be submitted by Friday 28 March.
• Aurelio Morales has shown ► how to create maps in QGIS using DeepSeek, the new Chinese open-source AI.
• India’s newly launched navigation satellite has not reached its intended orbit due to an engine problem and is now in the wrong orbit, creating challenges for the country’s satellite navigation system. Currently, the Indian Space Research Organization is developing alternative mission strategies to utilise the satellite for navigation in an elliptical orbit.
• Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan have developed a new indoor navigation system for drones, utilising reflected radio waves.
• A study has analysed tuberculosis (TB) diagnostic gaps in Cameroon by integrating national TB notification data with geospatial datasets from OpenStreetMap and WorldPop. The findings reveal that 53% of TB cases and 50% of rifampicin-resistant TB cases remain undiagnosed, highlighting disparities in diagnostic tool distribution. The study underscores the need for better resource allocation and targeted interventions to improve TB detection in high-burden regions.
• The QGIS Resources Hub has a new website, which you can use to discover and explore the resources.
• Christoph Hormann has extended the coverage of his Musaicum satellite imagery to include the North Atlantic islands.

Upcoming Events

Where	What	Online	When	Country
Richmond	MapRVA Meetup		2025-02-14
Pankow	200. Berlin-Brandenburg OpenStreetMap Stammtisch		2025-02-14
Moers	I Love Free Software Day Community-Hackday vom 14. – 16. Februar 2025 im JuNo, Moers Repelen		2025-02-14 – 2025-02-16
東区	State of the Map Japan 2024		2025-02-14
Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend		2025-02-15 – 2025-02-16
	Panoramax monthly international meeting		2025-02-17
Budapest	OSM térképest 2025-02-18		2025-02-18
	Missing Maps London: (Online) Mid-Month Mapathon [eng]		2025-02-18
Lyon	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon		2025-02-18
Arlon	Réunion Province de Luxembourg		2025-02-18
San Jose	South Bay Map Night	✓	2025-02-19
Bonn	185. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn		2025-02-18
Lüneburg	Lüneburger Mappertreffen	✓	2025-02-18
	[Online] Map-py Wednesday		2025-02-19
Hannover	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2025-02-19
Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe		2025-02-19
Guadalajara	A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations between Eric Theise, Maria Del Carmen Camarena, Eliud Ernandes, and Gustavo Larroyo		2025-02-20
	OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2025-02-21
Guadalajara	A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations between Eric Theise, Zyanya Yax, and Chino Ortega		2025-02-22
Derby	East Midlands pub meet-up		2025-02-25
Granada	Introducción a OpenStreetMap		2025-02-25
Amsterdam	Maptime Amsterdam: End of Winter Mapping Party		2025-02-26
Düsseldorf	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)		2025-02-26
Flensburg	2. Open Data Day in Flensburg		2025-03-01
	14th OSM Delhi Mapping Party (Online)		2025-03-02

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, TheSwavu, barefootstache, derFred, jcr83, mcliquid.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

The guide Open Content: Navigating Creative Commons Licenses provides people working in science, education, culture and public institutions with information about what open content licenses are and how they can be used to make content freely accessible. The publication by Dr. Till Kreutzer, published by Wikimedia Deutschland and the German UNESCO Commission, is now available in English.

Click here to view the PDF with the option to download

It has been over 10 years since the first edition of the practical guide Open Content was published. Over the years, members of the Open Content community have translated it into various languages, including Indonesian and Finnish. Since then, Open Content has grown immensely in importance in the realms of education, science, culture and the media, to name a few. Given the increasing technological challenges that permeate our digital world and make it more complex, Open Content licenses are more important than ever; they enable access to knowledge, information and culture while also making it possible to share content in a legally compliant manner.

Using content legally

In its expanded and revised version, the guide explains Creative Commons licenses and clarifies how they’re used. Readers will learn about the legal principles on which they are based and how to choose the right license for their individual needs. First, Till Kreutzer explains the general principles and objectives of open licensing and gives an overview of the various Creative Commons license modules (for example, CC BY and CC BY-SA); he explains the topics of public domain and CC0 licenses in more detail. The guide also provides brief overviews of other forms of intellectual property law, such as patents and trademarks, but the publication’s main focus is on the practical use of free licenses and open content. In addition, the guide offers tips on how to find free content online and ends with a helpful glossary of terms.

Available digitally and in print

The practical guide Open Content: Navigating Creative Commons Licenses by Till Kreutzer is available as an openly licensed and free PDF. You may also request a print version by emailing [email protected]. 

About the guide’s author: Dr. Till Kreutzer is a lawyer, legal scholar and publicist. He is co-founder and managing partner of the law firm iRights.Law and co-founder of iRights.info, the internet portal for consumers and creatives on copyright in the digital world.

This text was written by Sarah-Isabella Behrens (wikimedia.de) and Georg Fischer (iRights.info) and is published under license CC BY 4.0.

In late 2023, an article claimed that Wikipedia is one of the fastest websites in the USA. Flattering, right? I've been measuring web performance for over a decade, I couldn't help but wonder: How did they measure that? How do you know that Wikipedia is one of the fastest websites? The article does not say anything on how they did measure it.

I went to the Web Performance Slack channel (yes, there's a dedicated place where web performance geeks hang out). I asked the question:

“Has anyone seen the data or the actual “study” done by DigitalSilk about the fastest loading US websites? https://www.technewsworld.com/story/craigslist-wikipedia-zillow-top-list-of-fastest-us-websites-178713.html - I can only find references to it and a screenshot, nothing else?”

Not providing references? That's not Wikipedia! We're all about citations and verifiable sources. No one on the Slack channel knew anything about how the test was run. But then, one of the channel members took action: Stoyan Stefanov emailed the journalist and actually got an answer!

Methodology
The most visited websites based on web traffic were ran through Google's PageSpeed Insights tool, to find out how long it takes for each site to load in full on average“

So, while it's flattering to see Wikipedia crowned as one of the fastest websites based on Google's PageSpeed Insights tool, I couldn't help but feel a tricked. They seemed to rely on the onload metric. That's a metric that, in the web performance world was regarded as old and not correlating to user experience since 2013.

Understanding the limitations using the onload metric, let’s shift our focus to modern metrics that better reflect real-world user experiences: Google Web Vitals

Google Web Vitals

Google Web Vitals is Google's initiative to focus on the metrics that matter to users and also affects Googles core ranking system. Unlike the old-school onload time, Google Web Vitals better measure aspects of real world user experience.

The core metrics at the moment are three metrics:

• Large Contentful Paint (LCP) - when in time is the largest element painted on the users screen. For Wikipedia that is very often a paragraph, but sometimes its an image element or a heading.
• Interaction To Next Paint (INP) - measure the responsiveness of page, meaning that a page responds quickly to user interactions. For Wikipedia the responsiveness can be slow depending on the amount of JavaScript we ship, event listeners or click events.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) - measure the visual stability of the page. That means it measures if content is moved around. In the Wikipedia case this means when campaigns runs and we move the content of Wikipedia.

Google also have two other web vitals, two metrics that are important for the user experience but not listed as core:

• Time To First Byte (TTFB) - measure the time between the request for a resource and when the first byte of a response begins to arrive. For Wikipedia TTFB depends on where the users are in the world and how far it is to the closest data center.
• First Contentful Paint (FCP) - measure the time from when the user first navigated to the page to when any part of the page's text/images painted on the screen. For Wikipedia this is often text.

Google pay special attention to the 75th percentile of those metrics. It was chosen because "First, the percentile should ensure that a majority of visits to a page or site experienced the target level of performance. Second, the value at the chosen percentile shouldn't be overly impacted by outliers.". But what does the 75 percentile mean for us at Wikipedia?

The 75th percentile at Wikipedia

Now let’s put the 75th percentile into perspective by applying it to Wikipedia’s vast global audience.

Imagine that there were 100 people visiting Wikipedia. Each person got a different user experience because of their device, the internet connection and how we build Wikipedia. For some users the experience will be really fast, for some it will be slower.

The 75th percentile focus on the worst experience of the best 75%. If you take all 100 users and then sort the experience from fastest to slowest, the 75th experience is where you draw the line. This means that 75% of the users had a better or equal experience and 25% had a worse one. So, how many users are in that 25% for us? We measure unique devices and not users so lets use that.

Well, for Wikipedia, those 100 users are actually 1,5 billion unique devices per month and 24 billion page views.

That means if we look at the 75 percentile and we see that a metric move we know that at least 6 billion page views per month ( 24 billion × 0.25) is affected. And 375 million unique devices (1.5 billion × 0.25).

That is many devices. Suppose we have a regression of just 100 milliseconds in the 75th percentile. That is at least 375 million devices are experiencing this delay. Collectively, those users are waiting an extra 434 days. Yes, over a year of extra wait time for the users with the worst experience because of a (tiny) 100 ms change.

Is the English Wikipedia the fastest website in the USA according to Google Web Vitals?

With the metrics Google collects from different web sites, you can compare different sites with each other! The metrics are available per domain (not user country), so we can not compare if the English Wikipedia is one of the fastest web sites in the USA, but we can compare the English Wikipedia against other web entities with users all around the world.

However before we do that, I want to point out that "Is the English Wikipedia fastest website in USA according to Google Web Vitals?" is a very exclusionary question to ask since:

• The English Wikipedia is used in more places than the USA
• There are many Wikipedias for other languages out there and we should not only focus on the English Wikipedia. We need to make sure that everyone independent of language has the same user experience.

Looking just at "Are we fast in the USA" we leave out a big part of the world. So today we gonna look at the English Wikipedia compared to other web sites and then also look at Wikipedias all around the world to see what kind of user experience all users have.

But first let's talk about how Google also categorises these experiences as good, needs improvement, or poor by setting specific limits for each metric. With Googles definitions we can see how many of our users have different kinds of experiences. In the data I will show, green means good, needs improvement yellow and red means bad/poor experience.

We collect all data that is available through the Chrome User Experience API and you can see that in our Chrome User Experience dashboard. There's a lot of metrics, so I will focus on just the Largest Contentful Paint today.

First let's look at the actual 75 percentile Largest Contentful Paint. We compare against a couple of other web sites. Lower numbers are better. Green is good. We will start to look at the numbers for mobile.

Mobile

This graph highlights that Wikipedia's mobile LCP performance is nearly as fast as Google's, which is quite remarkable!

We can also look at how many of our users have a slow/bad experience.

Wow we can see that we have less users in percentage with a bad experience than the rest of the sites. However the graph shows a small percentage of mobile users experiencing suboptimal LCP. For a website of Wikipedia's scale, this small percentage translates into millions of users, we need to be even better!

I wonder if it's the same for desktop users? Lets look at the 75 percentile again.

Desktop

Again we can see that Wikipedia is almost the fastest, outperforming many major websites! We seem to be fast on both mobile and desktop.

Yes we are really fast! Can we open the champagne and celebrate?

Are we the fastest site known to human kind?

Well I would take it a little easy here before we start to brag. Do you remember how we calculated how many users are left out when we use the 75 percentile? I would be careful with a web site with so many users. I would say that: "The English Wikipedia is really fast compared to other web pages looking at the Largest Contentful Paint at the 75% percentile for Chrome users that Google collects metrics from".

Another way of looking at the data we get from Google is to see how many users have a bad experience using Wikipedia. By taking the ones that need improvement and poor experience, we can see how many users in percentage we need to move to having a good experience.

First let's look at Largest Contentful Paint again for desktop users. This time we look at the number of users in percentage that have a non good experience per wiki.

And then we look at the same for mobile.

We can see that on desktop and mobile we have Wikipedias where we as developers have work to do to give more users a good experience.

As a last example I want to share the interaction to next paint data for mobile. This is interesting because here JavaScript comes into play and there are many things we can do on our side to give the user a better experience.

We see that for almost every Wikipedia, 5% of the users have a not so good user experience.

Summary

Wikipedia's performance story is one of scale and precision. By focusing on Google Web Vitals, we've seen how milliseconds of delay can impact millions of users. Metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Interaction to Next Paint (INP) can provide valuable insights into real-world user experiences, guiding us to optimize for both mobile and desktop users.

With billions of page views monthly, even the smallest regressions in performance ripple across the globe. Yet, Wikipedia stands as a benchmark of speed in the US, rivaling even the likes of Google. This achievement underscores the importance of continuous monitoring, fine-tuning, and maintaining a user-first perspective in web development.

As we celebrate, we also need to acknowledge the challenges. Moving the needle for those users with "non-good" experiences remains our mission. By using data and ongoing analysis, we can ensure that Wikipedia stays fast, accessible, and enjoyable for everyone, everywhere.

Since July 2023, Women Association for Technology and Innovation (WAFTAI) is actively implementing Wiki N’zuñdeuh, a promotion and saving initiative of the cultural identities of the Cameroon people. In this initiative, WAFTAI is being accompanied by partners; which are Cameroon Ministry of art and culture (MINAC), Wiki Loves Museums, Kiwix, Cameroon Institutes of fine arts, and some museums. On the following lines, we share with you the highlights of Wiki N’zuñdeuh.

What is Wiki N’zundeuh?

Definition

Wiki N’zuñdeuh is a program which has as its objective the promotion of production, access and  exploitation of knowledge around culture through the projects of Wikimedia and Kiwix technology. Based on the gender approach, this project has the merit of seeing in majority women taking part. The registering analysis reveals 21 new editors of which 14 are women thus 66.7% of women representative.

Program key domains

Wiki N’zuñdeuh interfered in axes notably culture, education and tourism.

Culture is the central object of this program. The knowledge produced is related to the cultural domain. It includes notably knowledge on museums, festivals, traditional dances, stories and many more.

Education is the second axis, it comes to enlighten the production views and the exploitation of knowledge. The focused schools of the program notably the Institutes of fine arts of higher éducation (IBAI Garoua and IBA of Nkongsamba) have the merit to conciliate the other two axes. The participating students and teachers are at a time who produce through edi-a-thons, upload -a-thons, data-thons and who in a large dimension exploit them through Reading Wikipedia in the classroom.

Wiki N’zuñdeuh integrated tourism as the third axis. It is the result of the preceding axis facilitating the access and exploitation of knowledge produced. Products of technology are upcoming, this is the case of QR-code which would be created according to the tourists’ different languages.

Through the Kiwix technology, a mobile application is witnessed with a goal of rendering internet access everywhere, at every time, anywhere and even in localities with no internet access.

Methodology of the put in plan of the program for the first year 

Documenting on culture is the central point of this program, for this has defined a way that will facilitate us to attain this goal. It brings different activities from the diagnostic to the training session.

Diagnostic

To document culture, the ideal would be to know it, understand it and experience it. Discovering the Cameroon museum universe helps us to really understand the realities of museums and equally to verify the information. The diagnostic held from the 10th, August to the 20th, September 2024, was based on secondary data furnished by MINAC. With the help of the diagnostic, an evaluation with experts in the domain of museum brings out the existence of about 40 museums in Cameroon of which 15 exist on Wikipedia and 29 on Wikidata. Still on the aspects of museums, some specifities were brought out to know the categories of museums. They are public, private and communitarian and integrate in the register of ethnographic and/or contemporary museums. All these informations help us to produce a documentation which takes into account the context. The elements have been introduced in the documentation template of the different Wikimedian projects (Wikidata, Wikipedia, Commons Wikimedia and soon WikiVoyage)

Guided visit

If the diagnostic had as goal to facilitate the understanding of the culture environment  by the project team, the guided visit held on the 26th, October 2024, the day of the project launching had as fonction to bring the editors in the museum field and also in the Wikimedian World what we call “Socio-Wikimedian immersion“. The participant had a practical approach to the Commons Wikimedia project. After the different museal mediation and the views, a great part was given to training sessions and to uploads. Starting the program by guarded visits help editors develop a practical and heuristic interest for the program.

Training and contribution sessions

Digital is the base of our organisation, the technological approach is prioritized for this activity. We have opted for the training. The experienced trainers who accompanied the program intervene very often online and the training assistant facilitates in the rooms. This strategy in addition to permitting the editors to accomodate to the numerical principles assures the backup of trainers. Participants through this strategy acquire abilities in animation technics of online and physical training. The issue of internet network forced some experienced trainers to also move to training  rooms. The working sessions are cumulative, that is the training and contribution sessions. The editors are in totality the new contributors. Launched on 26th October by Commons Wikimedia. The training and contribution sessions are in multiples. They are based on projects like Wikipedia, Wikidata and soon WikiVoyage. With a goal of ensuring a good acquisition of skills, the follow up sessions are organised the thursday which follows the training weekend. These moments are occasions to find solutions to the different problems of editors and boost those that don’t still meetup.

Diversity and Inclusion

The approach on diversity and inclusion was taken into consideration as well as on the object of the program as by the editors.

The object of this year’s program is the museums. We have targeted all the museums of  Cameroon so different cultures since museums are cultural identities. A major point brought out during our training is that of the 15 museums existing on Wikipedia, no museum from the Far North of Cameroon figures. This has been taken into account in the project since articles on the museums of that part will be created.

For the editors, it is important to signify that this approach was one of the reasons for the choice of partner schools. It is in the issue of including the different social groups that we have solicited a partnership with a school in the Far North Cameroon (Institute of Fine arts and Innovation Garoua- IBAI). This implies that the spatiotemporal and cultural realities are Taken into account in the project. Beside the cultural diversity, the linguistic and religious ones are brought up. The editors are of French and English expressions; Christians, Muslims and traditionalists. 

Challenges and high tips of Wiki N’zundeuh 

We faced large difficulties which were treated as the project was going on. We share with you the majors:

Lack of computers

Of the 21 new publishers registered, only 6 have a permanent computer, even though owning a computer was one of the prerequisites for taking part in the programme. Unfortunately, as confirmed by a teacher in IBAN,

”if we should only respect the order of selecting only students having computers, this program would be done with less than 5 students because the majority of the students don’t have computers”.

The same remark was done by the IBAI administration. This observation also implies that the students have limited knowledge in the numerical domain. Although the students’ phones are not always highly performant for technology and lesser for contributions (particularly for Wikipedia), trainers do their best to transmit the Wikimedian knowledge in this context. Knowing the difficulty, we have decided to give rewards to the three best contributions that are one computer each.

Difficulty of holding the Reading Wikipedia in the classroom 

The Reading Wikipedia in the classroom has a goal to help teachers understand the knowledge production process through the Wikipedia project, equally to train on the exploitation technics in the room of the knowledge produced by Wikimedian editors on Wikipedia. Being in the fine and arts domain, we wanted to prioritize the didactic methodology through Wikipedia. This was not possible due to the prejudices about the university world in general and great schools in particular of this free encyclopedia. To solve this problem, with our experts, we thought that instead of Reading Wikipedia in classroom train teachers on WikiVoyage through WikiLearn is more advantageous. These schools have for example needs in tourism, WikiVoyage help as a useful tool for this sector. It was thought a project Wikimedia for Education (WFE) which integrates read WikiVoyage and many more. This will permit in a specific way to the didactic method in these fine and arts schools and to further ensure a good quality of knowledge produced.

Fight against prejudice and misinformation

The program for this new year was hardly accepted in schools due to the prejudices they have on the encyclopedia. They talk about a lack of information. In addition to the production of knowledge, we have carried out awareness to the administration, to teachers and students on what is Wikimedia and particularly Wikipedia and other projects. On our social network and even during our working sessions, we have multiplied the fight against these stereotypes and misinformation. The editors are invited to produce documentation based on credible sources. We celebrate here the work of experienced trainers and the administrators in the Wikimedian projects (Wikipedia, Wikidata…) who strengthen this fight through the checking of contributions. The editors, who at the beginning of the project; used to discredit Wikipedia, support  that “Wikipedia is the most difficult project and requires more care and discipline during the contributions“. The prejudices fade gradually in the university sectors through IBAN and IBAI.

Community membership

The project as mentioned above was accompanied by the government of Cameroon through the Ministry of Art and Culture (MINAC). In addition to this accompaniment, communities involved in the program. We were touched by the consideration of the promoters and museum directors. During our launching activities, the promoters didn’t stop manifesting their joy of having such an initiative in Cameroon. Receiving calls from traditional leaders and museum promoters is a great source of motivation.

The move towards the documentation of cultural aspects in Cameroon through the Wikimedian projects is launched. We are thankful to all those who accompanied us in this initiative we think principally of the experienced trainers and Wikimedian administrators who work so that the contributions should be of good quality. Thanks also to all our partners, to the editors, to the Wiki N’zuñdeuh teams and to our followers.

Three sentence summary

Prepare for a very hard read. You will not understand anything the first time you read the book. If you're like me, you will not like the book and you will not want to read it the second time.

Book Club

This was the sixth book in our T247665: QTE book club and the first one that wasn't on software testing. We were reading it for three months, from November 2022 to January 2023. The club meets once a month for an hour long discussion. We had three very interesting discussions. Some members of the club like the book, some don't. This is by far the oldest book we've read. It was published in 1975.

Random thoughts

It's one of those books that you have to read once just to get an idea of what the book is about. Then you have to read it at least one more time. I've read it once and I've had enough of it for now. I'm not sure I know what the book is about. Maybe I'll read it again in the future. Maybe.

According to my notes, in 2022 I've read over 100 books. Only 5 got a 2-star rating. 4 were kid's books I didn't like. The fifth 2-star book was this one.

This book was recommended in Lessons Learned in Software Testing (5-star rating from me), so I was expecting much more.

According to Wikipedia, this is one of the two of the author's most famous books. The second one is The Psychology of Computer Programming. I've read his Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing (twice) and really liked it (4-star rating).

Goodreads and Amazon reviews say I'm not alone in not liking the book. But, at both sites, the book has a great average rating (3.96 and 4.2).

I usually sort books in fiction and non-fiction. Or, practical and non-practical. This book looked like a practical book, but I didn't get anything practical out of it. Maybe it's not the book. Maybe I just didn't put enough effort in the book. Maybe I've approached it wrongly, expecting it to be a practical book.

Usually, when I read a practical book, I summarize each chapter. That's what I did for this book. Well, I've tried. I've struggled with chapter summaries for the first three chapters, then gave up for chapters four to seven.

Quotes

All that said, there are good quotes in the book.

Chapter 1. The Problem

The first step to knowledge is the confession of ignorance. We know far, far less about our world than most of us care to confess. (p. 10)

Any field with the word “science” in its name is guaranteed not to be a science. (p. 32)

Chapter 2. The Approach

If you never say anything wrong, you never say anything. (p. 47)

Chapter 3. System and Illusion

What is a system? As any poet knows, a system is a way of looking at the world. (p. 55)

Chapter 4. Interpreting Observations

The Lump Law: If we want to learn anything, we mustn’t try to learn everything. (p. 105)

Chapter 5. Breaking Down Observations

The Axiom of Experience: The future will be like the past, because, in the past, the future was like the past. (p. 141)

Chapter 6. Describing Behavior

Count-to-Three Principle: If you cannot think of three ways of abusing a tool, you do not understand how to use it. (p. 191)

Chapter 7. Some Systems Questions

These, then, are the three great questions that govern general systems thinking, the Systems Triumvirate:

1. Why do I see what I see?
2. Why do things stay the same?
3. Why do things change? (p. 221)

New project will support students’ coursework across healthcare professions to improve content

When searching for information on health-related topics, people turn to Wikipedia more than any other source. While it may come as no surprise that the general public visits Wikipedia for answers to questions and to inform their decisions as healthcare patients or caregivers, healthcare experts including providers, researchers, and instructors also often utilize the online encyclopedia within the context of their professional work. 

Given the impact and reach of Wikipedia’s healthcare content, it’s imperative that the information is accurate, up-to-date, high-quality, and trustworthy. Thanks to a new project supported by the Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award Program, an initiative of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), Wiki Education will collaborate with higher education faculty across healthcare professions to support their students in the impactful work to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of healthcare topics. 

The two-year project aims to significantly enhance the quality of openly accessible information on critical topics including stroke prevention, postpartum care, and radiation therapy. 

Drawing on the rigorous evaluation of medical research available in PCORI-funded Systematic Reviews, the postsecondary students will improve Wikipedia articles by developing and adding new content, as well as adding missing citations to existing content as needed. The faculty and students will join Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program and receive our staff guidance, curriculum, subject-specific resources, and digital tracking tools to support their coursework on Wikipedia. 

In addition to supporting the student editors’ contributions to Wikipedia, we’ll also explore their perspectives on their Wikipedia experiences to better understand how to improve future student engagement with this work.

To aid our engagement with key stakeholders, Wiki Education will form a Medical Community Advisory Committee composed of health professions faculty and students. The group will provide strategic guidance throughout the project, including ideas for outreach initiatives to reach medical educators, reflections on the results of surveys and focus groups, and suggestions for ensuring sustainability of the project.  

PCORI is an independent, nonprofit organization with a mission to fund patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) that equips patients, their caregivers and clinicians with the evidence-based information they need to make better informed health and health care decisions. The Wiki Education Engagement Award project is part of a portfolio of projects that PCORI has funded to help disseminate PCORI-funded research findings. 

This new project builds upon previous work through which we trained medical professionals and health professions students how to add the high-quality information from the systematic reviews to Wikipedia, working to ensure articles include research on patient-centered outcomes. Their collective contributions to improve more than 40 medical articles across Wikipedia have been viewed more than 11 million times.

We express our gratitude to PCORI for their support of this new project, and encourage any interested instructor to visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into their courses. This project is funded through a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) Eugene Washington PCORI Engagement Award (EADI #38991).

This is Nikos Likomitros, a Greek Wikimedian. In my first Wikimania, I met many people, and decided among many other things to conduct some interviews with Wikimedians from minority languages. So I elected to interview Ramjit Tudu for this purpose, one of the most active Wikimedians in Santali language, thus having a good knowledge of the project and its qualities.

Having been aware of this interesting community, which gave birth to the very first Wikipedia in an Adivasi language in India, I asked him some questions to learn more about the project. This is by far the fourth interview of a Wikimedian that I am publishing on Diff, and I am planning to do more in this and the next years. For my interviews I give a strong emphasis on minority languages and other communities that have done interesting things, yet they aren’t very well known. Below is the transcript of the interview.

Ramjit explains, that the project began in 2012, and they decided to accelerate the creation of the project in 2017. The project went live in 2018. So I asked: How you connected and formed a team? Ramjit tells me, that he was very far from his team. So he engaged with them and helped them with editing and then, they established contact with the Odia community which provided them support. Then they did their first workshop, and introduced people in to the movement.

After the approval, Ramjit explained that they embarked on a strategy to promote the Santali language through relevant places such as social media, and people began to be interested in contributing on it. Some partnerships were able to be made and the community started to consolidate. The Santali Wikimedians have a user group, that the Wikimedia Foundation recognizes. They are doing various programs, and they receive support from CIS-A2K (editor’s note: it’s an organization that provides multifaceted support to Indic communities). The community, given that the language is spread among multiple countries and not within a united geographic area, and thus social media play a significant role in the cohesion of the community.

Afterward, I asked Ramjit about the public presence of the Santali community, and the outreach activities. They have conducted outreach to universities, and also they have been in touch with Santali language writers through various events to promote the Santali language. In general, the presence of the Santali language on the internet is not very good, because of a low amount of speakers, and the fact that it coexists with other bigger languages in its locales like Bangla or Hindi, however, Santali is taught as a lesson in university. The Wikipedia in Santali language is struggling, but they are also active in event organising and they have approximately 10 active members which conduct various activities. In the future, they are aspiring to collaborate with universities where Santali is taught, as there is a large potential to bring new users in the community.

The Santali community, as we can see, has managed to build a solid community, and the potential is high for sure. The interview was taken in August, however I published it now, as my university-related liabilities didn’t allow me to do it earlier.

In a quiet corner of the internet, over a decade ago, a group of six passionate Brazilian Wikimedians began building something remarkable. Despite being physically distant in cities such as São Luis, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, they were driven by the belief that knowledge should be free, accessible, and collaborative. What started as informal gatherings of editors and small-scale projects has now grown into something much greater.

Earlier this year, Wiki Movimento Brasil – now to be known as Wikimedia Brasil – was officially recognized as a Wikimedia chapter, a milestone that cements its role in the global free and open knowledge movement. This occasion marks its evolution from a voluntary informal User Group to a formal, registered nonprofit organization, significantly enhancing its ability to champion free knowledge throughout Brazil.

What does it mean to be a chapter?

Wikimedia chapters are independent, nonprofit organizations dedicated to supporting Wikipedia and its Wikimedia sister projects as well as their mission in their respective regions. They work to promote free knowledge, organize local initiatives, and strengthen community participation in the movement, outreaching the greatness of contributing to such an important cause.

As a chapter, Wikimedia Brasil now has the resources and structure to amplify its impact and ensure the long-term growth of free knowledge in Portuguese. With its headquarters in São Paulo, Wikimedia Brasil joins 37 other recognized Wikimedia chapters worldwide, becoming the most recent addition to this global network. The last country to be recognized as a chapter was Colombia, back in 2019.

Winning photos from Wiki Loves Monuments Brazil.

Valério Melo, president of Wikimedia Brasil, sees this recognition as both an honor and a big responsibility.

“In addition to our volunteer work as wiki editors, we chose to become Wikimedia Brasil to represent our country’s Wikimedia community while respecting and collaborating with other user groups and projects,” he explains. 

More than just a title, this new status is a commitment to a sustainable and independent growth.

“We understand the responsibility that comes with this role,” he adds, “ And our goal is to support initiatives that strengthen equity, reliability, and the security of the open internet’s sociotechnical infrastructure.” 

Wikipedia has long played a vital role in Brazil, with millions of people relying on it every day for information. Portuguese Wikipedia now hosts over 1.1 million articles, being one of the most visited sites in their continental-sized country.  

Given the community’s presence in a country of vast continental dimensions, encompassing diverse contexts, cultures, and experiences best understood by those directly engaged with their local communities, governance is naturally decentralized. This territorial approach is integral to the group’s organizational culture, aiming to empower diverse voices and strengthen the sense of community while amplifying underrepresented knowledge. To achieve this, the community remains committed to engaging new editors in regions that have yet to participate, with a particular focus on promoting gender equity within Portuguese Wikipedia.

For years, this work was driven by an informal network of volunteers. In 2013, a small but determined group launched Wiki Movimento Brasil, an effort to connect editors and promote Wikimedia projects locally. By 2024, with 43 associate members and a growing contributor base, it became clear that the movement had outgrown its early structure. In response, the community adopted a highly participatory governance model with subcommittees, ensuring alignment with a collaboratively designed strategic plan based on a theory of change. Transitioning into a chapter was not about gaining a new title but about achieving greater stability, providing more support for volunteers, and building stronger partnerships.

Winning photos from Wiki Loves Cultura Popular 2024 Brazil

Wikimedia Brasil’s voluntary work over the years has shown they are well-prepared for this new role. The chapter emerges from the strength of its community. Whether through the thousands of edits made by these individuals—each bringing their own expertise and thematic interests—or through the excellent projects conceived and implemented by them and their groups, Wikimedia Brasil chapter is built by genuinely committed people.

Their commitment to diversity is evident in GLAM outreach efforts, educational programs, and community support across Brazil that engage both urban and rural areas. Strong partnerships with organizations like Coalizão Direitos na Rede and the Creative Commons Global Network highlight their leadership in open-knowledge advocacy and civil society engagement. With transparent governance, elected leadership, and a proven track record of initiatives like WikiCon Brasil and GLAM-Wiki projects, Wikimedia Brasil has the structure and dedication to make a lasting impact.

What’s next for Wikimedia Brasil?

Wikimedia Brasil is already organizing the second edition of “WikiCon Brasil 2025: Strengthening Digital Public Goods” with the goal of showcasing how their practices as Wikimedians differ from those established by major digital platforms and raising awareness about the fact that public-interest projects, like those within Wikimedia, enable the creation of a more horizontal, collaborative, responsible, and healthy online environment.

The new chapter values human interaction and grassroots collaboration, that’s why they chose to participate in the project of a global platform for exchanging knowledge, skills, and services with peers. The Capacity Exchange (CapX) was developed to enhance peer-to-peer learning and build capacity in the movement in accessible ways. It is meant to support the Wikimedia ecosystem by connecting movement organizers to strengthen affiliate and movement governance and help to coordinate affiliate activities to have lasting positive impact on Wikimedia projects. At the same time, Wikimedia Brasil recognizes the importance of connecting and strengthening the Portuguese Wikimedia community, the group expanded its leadership development initiative, which is now Calilu, and is supporting the organization of the Portuguese Wikimedia Party.

As Wikimedia Brasil moves forward, it builds on the dedication of its founding team and the community that has grown around it. Now, as a recognized chapter, expanding its reach, strengthening collaborations, and creating a real world impact. More than a reflection of their beginnings, this milestone highlights how far they have come and what is possible next.

Emerging communities are at the heart of the Wiki movement, playing a key role in building and sharing free knowledge. However, their growth is often limited by a lack of learning and collaboration opportunities. What if you could join a program designed to equip you with the right skills, expand your network, and strengthen your community?

Fotamana, Wikimedia Côte d’Ivoire’s immersion program, offers leaders of emerging Wiki communities in Africa a opportunity to enhance their skills, engage with other movement actors, and promote open knowledge and information integrity. With expert guidance and tailored resources, participants will deepen their knowledge, discover best practices, and collaborate with peers to build a stronger and more inclusive movement.

Don’t miss this opportunity! Applications are now open. Join us and be part of this transformative journey.

Apply here: link to application form by February 21, 2025.

In November 2024, I was granted one of the Sheldon Werner Summer Studentship positions at Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, joining a cohort of five Wikipedia students. I was new to editing and created a Wikipedia account for the first time. Tasked with developing content on Wikipedia related to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s histories over this ten-week programme, I first needed to decide what my focus within Auckland’s histories would be. Fortunately, within the first few days of my studentship, I was introduced to the Women in Red movement and knew that I wanted my outputs to contribute to the commitments of this project.

The first article I wrote was on the Charlotte Museum, the only museum in the world dedicated solely to lesbian culture and history. Located in the heart of Auckland, on the vibrant Karangahape road, I was surprised that a page had not already been written about this distinctive space. However, I quickly discovered why this was the case – there was a huge lack of secondary sources available on the Charlotte Museum. Considering the nature of this highly unique institution, I thought I would be producing a thorough, detailed article covering its history, influence and legacy, but this was not to be the case. In fact, after attempting to use as many sources as possible but coming up with very few – and finding most information through links on the Charlotte Museum’s website – my article was flagged a short time after publishing for relying excessively on references to primary sources.

I was slightly discouraged, but it was an important lesson to learn that the lack of literature on underrepresented communities has a direct impact on efforts to produce open-access knowledge. It made me think, how am I supposed to get underrepresented stories out onto Wikipedia if there are so few sources written on these places, people or communities?

I decided that going forward, I would continue to draw primarily on my art history background and mainly dedicate articles on women artists and public art. Some of these articles were not particularly extensive, nor were they anywhere near a complete summation of people’s lives or artworks histories, but I felt empowered nevertheless in amplifying the visibility of artists on Wikipedia. I was able to edit and expand on Mary Wirepa’s page, correcting unsubstantiated and unsourced claims and contributing new information from sources previously unused on her page. I also provided a more substantial overview of the life and work of Lois White, highlighting her contributions as an artist more significantly.

I then turned my focus toward contemporary women artists who are from or practice in Auckland, knowing the contentious history of how contemporary artists are often undervalued, and how this can be especially true for women. I got my first C-class article from my article on Tyla Vaeau, a master tattooist (or Tufuga Tātatau). The final article that I completed for this internship was on the statue A Māori Figure in a Kaitaka Cloak which was the first public art commission awarded to a woman – Molly Macalister. Contributing accessible knowledge on esteemed women in our society and artworks that have been salient in Auckland’s history was not only rewarding but inspiring, knowing that writing such knowledge can generate new or expanded ideas on such topics in the future.

Wikipedia taught me the value of starting something. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and it doesn’t have to be complete, but sharing the information you do have freely is critical in ensuring that people have access to a vast range of information on their own histories, their own land, and the people and places that came before them.

Photograph of Ōwairaka, Statue of a Cloaked Woman, 2024

Feb 12, 2025  ― Wikipedia has officially been recognized as a digital public good (DPG) by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), a multistakeholder initiative that maintains a Registry of Digital Public Goods: open source-software, data, AI models, standards, and content created for the public interest.  The DPGA is endorsed by the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General in support of open source technologies that contribute to the advancement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This recognition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia hosted by the nonprofit organization the Wikimedia Foundation, highlights its unique role in advancing global access to a free and open source of trusted knowledge in the public interest. 

According to Liv Marte Nordhaug, CEO of the DPGA Secretariat: 

“Wikipedia’s recognition as a digital public good is a testament to the power and importance of open access to knowledge. Wikipedia stands as a prime example of how technologies can drive equitable and unrestricted access to information, accelerating the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals worldwide.” 

Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia and only top-visited website operated by a non-profit organization, contains reliably sourced information that is shared, maintained, and verified by a global community of nearly 260,000 volunteers in over 300 languages. 

“The Wikimedia Foundation works with affiliate organizations and volunteer Wikipedians across the world to advocate for policies that protect and support Wikipedia and other digital public goods upon which the free knowledge ecosystem depends,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, Vice President of Global Advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation. “We look forward to working with the Digital Public Goods Alliance, along with other organizations and communities that create and maintain digital public goods, to build a better internet that serves the public interest.”

In 2024 Wikimedia Foundation staff along with Wikipedia volunteers from around the world participated in the UN General Assembly’s Summit for the Future and the drafting of the Global Digital Compact—the UN’s blueprint for global governance of digital technology and artificial intelligence. 

In an open letter in early 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia affiliates called on UN Member States to:

• Protect and empower communities to govern online public interest projects.
• Promote and protect digital public goods by supporting a robust digital commons from which everyone, everywhere, can benefit.
• Build and deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to support and empower, not replace, people who create content and make decisions in the public interest.

The recognition of Wikipedia as a digital public good strengthens these advocacy efforts and affirms Wikipedia’s role in the broader global movement for an internet that protects and promotes community-led spaces. The Wikimedia Foundation will continue working with the UN and other international institutions, governments, and civil society partners to ensure that digital public goods like Wikipedia are protected, supported, and accessible to all.

For media inquiries, please contact [email protected]. 

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed on internet policy and Wikipedia’s future.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

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

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The post Wikipedia Recognized as a Digital Public Good appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.

🕑 1 hour 11 minutes

Selena Deckelmann has been the Chief Product and Technology Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation since 2022. Before that, she worked for around 10 years at the Mozilla Foundation, eventually reaching the position of Senior Vice President, Firefox.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• Mozilla Foundation Wikipedia article
• Media knowledge beyond Wikipedia: Response from the Selena Deckelmann, CPTO at the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikimedia Commons talk page discussion)
• "Wikipedia’s value in the age of generative AI" (July 2023 blog post by Selena)
• Abstract Wikipedia project page on Meta-Wiki

To celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science (today!), we’re taking the opportunity to look back at some of the incredible impact made by our program participants as they seek to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of women in the sciences. 

Even if you haven’t yet taught with a Wikipedia assignment, enrolled in a Wiki Scholars & Scientists editing course, or engaged with other efforts to improve the world’s go-to online encyclopedia, Wikipedia’s persisting gender gap probably comes as no surprise to you – a gap that extends from its content across disciplines to its content contributors themselves. Over the years, Wiki Education’s programs and resources have empowered academics, students, and subject matter experts to move the needle on this imbalance, and today we’re reflecting on just a snapshot of their work to expand the coverage of women in science.

One of the most straightforward and impactful ways to enhance Wikipedia’s coverage of underrepresented notable figures is to create new biographies for those who lack their own articles or to improve existing biographies. And year after year, professors like Glenn Dolphin at the University of Calgary empower their students to do just this.

Last term, Dolphin incorporated his eighth Wikipedia assignment into his annual Introduction to Geology course, charging his students with the mission of creating new Wikipedia articles and improving existing content about famous women geologists and other underrepresented people in the field. In his most recent course alone, Dolphin’s students improved or created articles for 37 women scientists, including geologist, politician, and diplomat Judi Wakhungu and micropaleontologist Helen Jeanne Skewes Plummer. Over the years since he first taught with Wikipedia, Dolphin’s students have added more than 350K words and 3,330 references to Wikipedia, creating content that has been viewed 2.63 million times.

Unlike Dolphin, biologist Emily Sylwestrak at the University of Oregon was new to incorporating the Wikipedia assignment into her pedagogy last term, but she too tasked her students with the mission to create new biographies of women in the sciences. Thanks to the efforts of Sylwestrak’s class, we can now learn about prominent female figures in fields such as marine biology (Natalya Gallo, Ana K. Spalding) and chemistry (Sibrina Collins, Cynthia Chapple).

And as Wiki Education’s curriculum emphasizes, improving representation is not just about creating articles or adding new sections to existing articles. By citing more sources authored by female scientists, taking a critical eye to the weight of existing sections, adding links to other related articles, and considering the role of images on Wikipedia, editors can also make significant impact on this topic area through smaller edits.

While Wiki Education supports hundreds of faculty each term to assign their students Wikipedia coursework, faculty and other subject area experts across the world also enroll in our professional development courses to improve content through their own contributions. 

Thanks to support from the American Physical Society, we’ve offered 10 courses since 2019 to teach scientists how to add their expertise to Wikipedia, many of whom have focused their efforts on enhancing the coverage of women in sciences. 

Prior to the work of the course participants, prominent female scientists including Leticia del Rosario, the first Puerto Rican woman to earn a PhD in physics, and Silke Bühler-Paschen, a solid-state physicist, were absent from Wikipedia, and the content of others with existing articles was limited. Throughout the courses, participants transformed Wikipedia’s existing coverage of figures like chemist Ka Yee Christina Lee, materials scientist Julia R. Greer, and astronomical sciences professor Gillian Knapp, and so many others, expanding the world’s understanding of women’s contributions to the sciences.

Today, we celebrate the efforts of all who have worked to improve representation of women in science  – and all who will read their stories on Wikipedia and be inspired to follow their own professional dreams. 

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.

• Africa report: Guinea-Bissau Heritage from Commons to the World
• Albania report: Wikimedian in Residence at the Qemal Baholli Public Library in Elbasan (October – December 2024)
• Aruba report: Wikipedia on Aruba project has officially begun!
• Brazil report: Wiki Loves Maranhão
• Germany report: Exploring Wikidata & Building Community for Cultural Heritage Professionals
• Indonesia report: Celebrating Public Domain Day 2025 in Indonesia
• Italy report: New Wikimedia Italia Grant for GLAMs
• Netherlands report: 3 Million Dutch Cultural Heritage Images in Commons & 400,000 RCE images now in higher resolution & Usage of DBNL in Dutch Wikipedia articles
• New Zealand report: Student led Edit-a-thon
• Poland report: GLAM-Wiki 2024 in Poland: Achievements, Collaborations, and Impact
• Serbia report: Wikimedia Serbia: Advancing GLAM collaborations and digital heritage
• Switzerland report: Swiss GLAM Programme
• UK report: Cairo Geniza
• USA report: Wikipedia Day
• Biodiversity Heritage Library report: BHL-Wiki Working Group January monthly highlights
• Special story: Join the Global GLAM Call – Tuesday, February 11th, 13:30 UTC!
• Memory of the World report: To the front page!
• Wikidata report: Wikidata at WikiLibCon 2025
• Calendar: February’s GLAM events