The Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF) 2026 will once again bring together digital rights leaders, policymakers, technologists, researchers, and civil society organizations from across Africa and beyond. This annual gathering, organized by Paradigm Initiative, provides a critical space to explore how the internet can remain open, inclusive, and rights-respecting as new technologies and governance frameworks continue to reshape the digital landscape. This year, DRIF will be held in Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire, and its theme will be building inclusive and resilient digital futures.

For the fourth consecutive year, the Wikimedia Foundation is proud to sponsor this important space for collaboration on digital rights and internet governance in Africa. Wikimedians’ active engagement in these topical discussions is essential to highlight the role that the open knowledge movement plays in building multilingual, community-led spaces online that serve the public interest. You can read more about how we engage in these discussions from our experiences at DRIF in past years.

This year, Wikimedians will host and participate in several sessions at DRIF26, including a session in French from Wikimedia Côte d’Ivoire, sharing lessons from across the Wikimedia movement on how collaboration can strengthen digital rights and ensure more people can contribute to the internet and benefit from it. The sessions will cover topics including digital inclusion of youth, open knowledge infrastructure, multilingual internet access, and digital public goods.

Below is a preview of the sessions that Wikimedians and allied partners will lead during DRIF26.

Open Knowledge for Youth Digital Inclusion: Rights, Skills, and Participation

Time & Date: Wednesday, April 15, 2026 @ 10:10 GMT – 11:10 GMT

Presenters: Barakat Adegboye (Wikipedia Education User Group); Nkem Osuigwe (African Library and Information Associations and Institutions); Peace Agada (Library Aid Africa)

Across Africa, young people face persistent barriers to meaningful digital participation. Limited connectivity, inequitable access to digital infrastructure, uneven digital literacy skills, unsafe online environments, and few opportunities to create and share knowledge all contribute to a widening participation gap.

These barriers affect not only access to technology, but also the exercise of fundamental digital rights such as access to information, freedom of expression, and civic participation online. At the same time, research continues to highlight Africa’s underrepresentation in the creation of locally relevant and openly licensed digital knowledge. This session will explore why Wikimedia-based approaches are relevant to anyone working on digital rights and inclusion, even beyond the Wikimedia ecosystem. Community-driven initiatives such as Wikipedia education programs offer practical and low-cost ways to strengthen media and information literacy, encourage youth participation in knowledge creation, and build safer and more participatory digital spaces. Drawing on case studies from organizations including AfLIA and Library Aid Africa, speakers will share practical models—from participatory learning and mentorship pathways to open educational resources—that help young people develop critical digital skills while contributing their knowledge to the global commons.

Participants will leave with actionable strategies for empowering youth to engage with information critically, contribute local knowledge, and exercise their digital rights.

An Internet in Many Tongues: Exploring and Celebrating African Languages through Community-Led Digital Public Goods

Time & Date: Wednesday, April 15, 2026 @ 10:10 – 11:10 GMT

Presenters: Willy Buloso (Wikimedia Foundation); Emmanuel Ngue Um (University of Yaounde); Dr Nkem Osuigwe (Igbo Wikimedians User Group)

What does it take to build a flourishing multilingual internet—one that empowers everyone, everywhere—especially as artificial intelligence raises questions about whose data is used, whose languages are supported, and who ultimately benefits?

This session, co-hosted by the Mozilla Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation, uses AI as a framing device to examine the long-term work required to build and sustain a public-interest internet. Rather than treating technology as an unstoppable force, the session emphasizes that digital systems are designed—and design can be changed by people and communities. Participants will explore how projects such as Wikipedia, one of the internet’s most enduring digital public goods, demonstrate what is possible when openness, collaboration, and linguistic diversity are embedded in technological design. Through case studies from African and Francophone language communities, speakers will discuss how Wikimedians are preserving and expanding underrepresented languages online. At the same time, the Mozilla Data Collective will present emerging models for community governance of sensitive language and speech datasets in an AI-driven ecosystem.

By bringing together community organizers, technologists, researchers, and advocates, this session will highlight the practical work needed—financially, politically, and institutionally—to ensure the internet remains diverse, inclusive, and rooted in the public interest.

Wiki Loves DRIF: Inclusion numérique par la photographie dans les projets Wikimedia

Time & Date: Wednesday, April 15, 2026 @ 13:50 – 14:50 GMT

Presenters: Wikimedia Côte d’Ivoire

Les concours photographiques « Wiki Loves » (« Wiki aime ») – tels que Wiki Loves Africa, Wiki Loves Earth, ou Wiki Loves Folklore – sont organisés chaque année dans les communautés Wikimédia à travers le monde. Leur objectif est de valoriser les cultures et traditions locales à travers des photographies qui reflètent les réalités et la diversité culturelle de nos pays.

Ces initiatives contribuent à construire des avenirs numériques inclusifs et résilients en renforçant les communs numériques ouverts et en améliorant la représentation des cultures africaines en ligne. Lors de cet atelier au DRIF 2026, les participants découvriront d’abord les initiatives photographiques sur Wikimedia Commons, la plateforme collaborative libre qui héberge des millions de contenus multimédias (photos, vidéos, audios) librement réutilisables. Les ressources sont enrichies de métadonnées multilingues, favorisant l’inclusion culturelle et linguistique tout en contribuant à préserver les patrimoines culturels dans un web ouvert.

Dans un second temps, les participants prendront part à un édit-a-thon Wiki Loves, afin de découvrir concrètement comment téléverser des photographies et contribuer au numérique ouvert. Cette activité permettra aux participants de devenir acteurs de la production et de la gouvernance des contenus culturels en ligne.

Linguistic mutualization with Wikidata: strengthening free access to knowledge through interaction between Wikimedia communities

Time & Date: Wednesday, April 15, 2026 @ 16:10 – 17:10 GMT

Presenters: Regine Njiké (Wiki N’zundeuh of WAFTAI, Cameroon); Emmanuelle Guebo Kakou (Wikimedia Côte d’Ivoire); Mark Lapang (Igbo Wikimedians User Group, Nigeria)

This workshop introduces participants to Wikidata, a global open data project that demonstrates how knowledge can be collaboratively collected, preserved, and shared as a public resource.

Recognized by the United Nations as a digital public good, Wikidata provides open, freely reusable structured data that can support innovation, research, and services worldwide. During this session, speakers will demonstrate how open semantic data enables communities to document local realities, languages, and cultural heritage. This structured knowledge also plays an increasingly important role in AI systems, helping ensure that datasets reflect a broader diversity of languages and contexts. Participants will also learn how contributors can document their languages directly on Wikidata. Examples include lexeme documentation projects for Yemba in Cameroon, Baoulé in Côte d’Ivoire, and Igbo in Nigeria.

By sharing experiences from multiple Wikimedia communities across Africa, the workshop aims to inspire more organizations and individuals to use Wikidata to strengthen linguistic diversity and build a richer, more inclusive digital knowledge ecosystem.

Join the conversation at DRIF 2026

The Wikimedia movement continues to collaborate with partners across civil society, education, technology, and cultural sectors to advance open knowledge and digital rights.

If you are attending DRIF 2026, we invite you to join these sessions, connect with Wikimedians from across Africa, and explore how digital public goods can strengthen participation, representation, and access to knowledge online.

Together, we can help shape an internet that truly works for everyone.

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

Updates for editors

• The CampaignEvents extension now includes a new group goal-setting feature, enabling organizers to set and track event goals such as the number of articles created and participating contributors in real time. Similarly, participants can work toward shared targets and see their collective impact as the event unfolds. The feature is now available on all Wikimedia wikis. Learn more in the documentation.
•  The new watchlist labels feature (announced in Tech News 2026-07) is now available via VisualEditor, the source editor, and the ‘watchstar’ (or watch link, for skins that don’t have a star icon). Previously it was only possible to assign labels via EditWatchlist. In all three places it is a new field following the expiry field.
•  View all 23 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where talk pages on mobile with Parsoid are unusable after empty section headers, has now been fixed. [1]

Updates for technical contributors

• The sub-referencing feature, which lets editors add details to an existing reference without duplicating it, will be gradually rolled out to more wikis later this year. Wikis using the Reference Tooltips gadget are encouraged to update their version (typically at MediaWiki:Gadget-ReferenceTooltips.js as shown here) to ensure compatibility. Other reference-related gadgets may also be affected. [2]
• All Wikinews editions will be closed and switched to read-only mode on 4 May 2026. Content will remain accessible, but no new edits or articles can be added. This closure was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation following extended discussions. Read more.
• The Action API has had several formats for requested output. One of them, format=php, is being removed soon. Please ensure your scripts or bots use the JSON format. This removal should affect very few scripts and bots. [3]
• The Special:NamespaceInfo page now includes namespace aliases. For example “WP” for the “Project” (“Wikipedia”) namespace on the German Wikipedia. [4]
•  Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

On February 13, Wikimedia Indonesia, supported by Jakarta-based staff from the Wikimedia Foundation, delivered an introductory session on Wikimedia projects followed by hands-on Wikipedia editing training for young content creators representing all 11 ASEAN member states. The session was part of the ASEAN Y-Impact program organized by the Canadian Mission to ASEAN in collaboration with the ASEAN Foundation.

A Partnership Rooted in Shared Priorities

Wikimedia Indonesia’s involvement forms part of a broader and growing collaboration between the Wikimedia movement and Canada’s diplomatic presence in Indonesia, including the Canadian Embassy in Jakarta and the Canadian Mission to ASEAN. The partnership focuses on advancing shared priorities such as digital literacy, information integrity, youth empowerment, and responsible online participation across Southeast Asia.

As youth content creators increasingly shape conversations across the region, this collaboration reflects a shared understanding: strengthening digital ecosystems requires both institutional support and community-driven knowledge infrastructure.

Moving Beyond Skepticism

The ASEAN Y-Impact Creators program brings together emerging digital leaders committed to driving positive social change. During the session, participants explored how Wikipedia is collaboratively built, how neutrality and reliable sourcing safeguard credibility, and how transparent editing practices can counter vandalism.

The three Wikimedia Foundation staff members supporting the event reflected on how energizing it was to facilitate a session with a room full of Gen Z changemakers. Many participants initially approached Wikipedia with skepticism, questioning its credibility or reliability. Yet as they learned about the volunteer-driven editorial process, citation standards, and transparent revision history, several expressed that they were genuinely moved by the mission of free knowledge. Some shared their willingness to invest more time in reading critically, verifying information before sharing it, and even contributing edits themselves. The experience highlighted how cross-generational dialogue can build trust in open knowledge and inspire more responsible digital participation

This workshop has one of the most diverse participant profiles I have ever met, from all 11 ASEAN countries, or, I must say, SEAblings. I’m quite relieved that the younger generation in ASEAN is still using Wikipedia to search for general knowledge, even though they didn’t know whether it could be edited by everyone until this workshop. Although the workshops were held in English and Simple English Wikipedia, we encouraged participants to contribute in their native languages, as we believe knowledge should be accessible beyond language barriers. Dimas – Wikimedia Indonesia

A Replicable Model for Regional Engagement

This initiative illustrates how diplomatic institutions, regional foundations, and volunteer-led movements can collaborate to strengthen information ecosystems in meaningful ways. Rather than treating digital literacy as a one-off intervention, the engagement combined institutional convening power, regional youth networks, and community-driven knowledge practices

As collaboration between the Canadian Embassy in Jakarta, the Canadian Mission to ASEAN, and Wikimedia Indonesia continues to grow, this initiative offers a practical example of how diplomatic partnerships can support open knowledge ecosystems. In a rapidly evolving digital landscape across ASEAN, that combination of trust, transparency, and cross-sector collaboration may prove essential for the next generation of digital leaders.

To mark 8 March, International Women’s Day, we wish to recognise members of Wikimedia Spain who are helping to increase the visibility of women on Wikipedia by expanding content on their role in culture, science and history through projects linked to open knowledge.

Their work demonstrates that free knowledge is also a powerful tool for advancing gender equality and promoting diversity in information.

Mónica Fernández: raising the profile of Galician women

Mónica has been featured in the newspaper Faro de Vigo for her work writing articles in Galician and Spanish to raise the profile of historical and contemporary women. She is a member of Cuarto Propio on Wikipedia, a feminist group of editors working to reduce the gender gap in the online encyclopaedia.

Thanks to her efforts, over 300 biographies have been written and articles containing sexist bias have been revised, correcting the androcentric language that renders women’s achievements invisible. Furthermore, Cuarto Propio organises editing marathons and discussion groups, creating spaces for collective learning and collaboration for anyone interested in contributing from a gender perspective.

“I like to raise the profile of Galician women and women’s groups,” says Mónica, whose voluntary participation demonstrates how a passion for free knowledge can be combined with professional life and creativity.

Mentxu Ramilo: Wikipedia with female proper names

Mentxu has been featured in Naiz, which highlights her work with WikiEmakumeok, a project that creates and improves biographies of Basque women and women from around the world. Her recent work has resulted in articles on figures such as Luisa Roldán and María de Maeztu being featured on Wikipedia’s front page, thereby increasing their global visibility.

Furthermore, Mentxu combines her experience with training new editors, teaching them to edit with rigour and reliable references, and promoting projects such as the “Wikimedia & Entretejidas” workshop, which highlights migrant and refugee women as narrators of their own stories.

“Step by step, we have been narrowing the gender gap on Wikipedia,” explains Ramilo, demonstrating how collective effort translates into more women being represented and better documented in the encyclopaedia.

Modesto Escobar: Women Creators at the Prado

The Creadoras en el Prado project, led by Modesto Escobar and published by the Prado Museum, highlights women working in the arts and cultural fields. Using data mining tools and artificial intelligence, over 10,000 women have been identified in the Prado Museum’s collection and library, with each entry linked to Wikipedia and Wikidata.

The project, carried out in collaboration with the Sociological Analysis Group at the University of Salamanca, aims to increase the visibility of female authors and highlight their artistic and intellectual works, which have traditionally received less recognition.

The records provide detailed information on their lives, works and occupations, and facilitate the planning of edit-a-thons and the drafting of new articles, thereby increasing the presence of women in art and culture.

Celebrating their contribution to the Wikimedia movement

At Wikimedia Spain, we wish to recognise the dedication, creativity and hard work of these individuals, who demonstrate that free knowledge is also a tool for equality. Their contributions not only enrich Wikipedia and Wikidata, but also inspire new female editors and Wikimedians to join the mission of making all knowledge visible, free from gender bias and barriers.

On this International Women’s Day, we celebrate their stories, their articles, their projects and their tireless drive for a more inclusive, diverse and free Wikipedia for everyone.

In February–March, the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) was hosting an exhibition of photographs from the special category “War destroys monuments” of the Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine photo contest, which is organized annually by Wikimedia Ukraine.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is in its fifth year, and in addition to its human toll and economic impact, cultural monuments have suffered as well. Just on 24 March 2026 a Russian drone strike hit a building in the area of the 17th  century Bernardine Monastery within the World Heritage property of Lviv. “L’viv – the Ensemble of the Historic Centre” was included on the UNESCO list in 1998 and added to the organisation’s List of World Heritage in Danger in 2023. The attack on Lviv was a part of the largest and longest aerial assault on Ukraine since the beginning of the full scale invasion in 2022. The city that houses a large percentage of Ukraine’s cultural heritage was attacked in broad daylight in front of the whole world¹. 

Overall, over four years of full-scale war, Russian forces have destroyed or damaged 1,685 cultural heritage sites in Ukraine, according to the most recent data from Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture. Since 2023, as part of the Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest, we have been documenting the consequences of Russian crimes against Ukrainian cultural heritage through the special category “War destroys monuments.”

The exhibition, organized by Viadrina University, featured 20 photographs of destroyed and damaged monuments from various regions of Ukraine submitted for this special category. They included, for example, a photograph of the ruins of the wooden Church of the Nativity of the Theotokos in Viazivka village, Zhytomyr Oblast destroyed by Russian shelling on March 7, 2022, or a photo of the “Store”, a historical building on Constitution Square in Kharkiv damaged by a Russian missile strike on March 2, 2022.

“The pictures presented here tell a visual story of the toll of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on cultural heritage – places of worship destroyed in wartime, residential buildings and educational institutions under fire, libraries, theaters and monuments damaged and so on. Rockets, missiles, drones… Four years of documenting crimes against Ukrainian civilians and cultural heritage,” the authors of the exhibition note.

The exhibition was initiated by Renata Hanynets, a participant of Wiki Loves Monuments in previous years, a doctoral candidate at the Chair of Heritage Studies at the European University Viadrina, and a staff member of the Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies Frankfurt (Oder) – Berlin (KIU).

“Since Russia started its full-scale invasion, Ukraine has not left the front pages of the world’s newspapers. The focus has been on human losses, the humanitarian catastrophe, and the destruction of infrastructure. Yet the loss of cultural heritage often remains in the shadows. Destroyed museums, burned archives, damaged churches, and historic buildings do not always make it into the media spotlight, even though their destruction represents not only a material but also a symbolic loss.

War destroys not just buildings – it destroys memory, historical continuity, and cultural identity. The destruction of heritage is an attempt to strip a community of its cultural foundation. The idea for the exhibition arose from the need to show that behind every ruin there is a story – architectural, artistic, human – that matters to us,” says Renata Hanynets.

The exhibition was located in the main building of Viadrina University (HG).

The most recent Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest took place in Ukraine in October 2025. The results of the 2025 contest are still being finalized, but you can read about the results of the special category for 2023 and 2024.

“European University Viadrina offers a space for cultural projects and student organisation ASTA can help financially if they consider projects worth attention. I thought that it is a perfect opportunity to show the photos in order to encourage curiosity about the war in Ukraine and current state of cultural heritage. I worked more as a mediator between Wikimedia Ukraine and Viadrina University. I contacted Wikimedia Ukraine to ask for permission to use the photos as well as advice on how to exhibit them better, asked the exhibition coordinator at the Viadrina for a possible time slot and applied for the ASTA individual grant. 

The layout was made during blackouts in Ukraine, but I never heard any complaints from anyone, it was even funny once when I asked for something additional there was a response ‘yes, please tell what you need I have a powerbank for 30 more minutes’. From my side – it took just a few clicks to order printing, collect my order from the post office and only one hour to put the photos into the frames and give them to staff to hang them on the wall…” Renata Hanynets reflected on the organising process.

The exhibition aroused considerable interest among both students and university staff, as well as among the city’s residents. An additional factor in attracting attention was the presence of Chairs at the university, the Entangled history of Ukraine (the only one in Germany) and the Chair of Heritage studies, as well as newly established Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies Frankfurt (Oder) – Berlin (KIU) which enhances the relevance and sensitivity of this topic. At the same time, the interest is also explained by the fact that since the beginning of the full-scale war, a significant number of refugees from Ukraine have been living in the city.

• You can check the pictures from the exhibition at Wikimedia Commons at Wiki Loves Monuments 2026 in Ukraine/War destroys monuments.

Notes:

1. Following the Russian attack on Lviv, UNESCO issued a statement that they are deeply alarmed and reminded that that cultural property is protected under the 1954 Hague Convention and the 1972 World Heritage Convention, although that statement did not name Russia as a perpetrator. The Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, a government agency, called for Russia’s membership of UNESCO to be revoked adding that “constant attacks on the cultural heritage of Ukraine, which is under UNESCO protection, are a deliberate policy of the Kremlin, aimed at destroying Ukrainian national memory and cultural identity”. ↩︎

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

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

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Demonstrating Wikimedia’s value in critical conversations about artificial intelligence (AI)

AI has seen an explosion of development and investment in the past few years. It is being adopted by governments and businesses, and is also changing how people browse the internet and discover new information. For the Wikimedia projects, this rapid shift in online behavior has affected how readers discover the projects, creating new challenges to how we attract and retain volunteer editors. Meanwhile, many AI search tools and content generators scrape Wikipedia for up-to-date information, taxing our servers without giving anything back.

We have begun to adapt to this new landscape, partnering with technology companies through Wikimedia Enterprise and experimenting with ways to inspire new generations of Wikipedia readers and contributors. There is still work to be done to ensure the sustainability of our projects in this new era, however.

Governments are also reacting to the opportunities and threats posed by these new technologies, investing in positive uses and regulating harmful ones. That makes now the most important time to make sure that the voices of community-led, public interest projects are heard in these important decisions about how the future of the internet will be shaped.

That is why the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia affiliates are showing up to policy spaces and conversations where these important decisions are happening.

Discussing how to protect the open web in the age of AI at State of the Net
[Learn more about the State of the Net conference and how we are protecting our infrastructure from AI crawlers]

Making a mark at India’s AI Impact Summit
[Read more about our goals for the AI Impact Summit]

This February, another pivotal moment for the future of emerging technologies was the global AI Impact Summit, held in India. The Summit brought together governments, industry, and civil society to discuss how AI can support global economic and social development. Wikimedia Foundation staff from several teams participated in both the Summit and pre-Summit events to deliver one fundamental message: “Open knowledge, collaborative and transparent, is essential for trustworthy, inclusive AI.”

On a high-level panel presented by Open UK and Open HQ, Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia and member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees) explained how open source technologies can support the creation of resilient AI systems for the corporate and the public sectors alike. In particular, the panel explored how governments can avoid overreliance on proprietary AI while building their digital strategies by focusing instead on developing and supporting open source technologies and open knowledge.

Building on Wikipedia and Wikidata’s recognition as digital public goods, Jimmy and the rest of our team shared at the Summit how open source projects are already serving as a critical source for AI research and development worldwide. They discussed how to protect these vital sources of human-created knowledge in a world of rapidly advancing technologies that sometimes threaten the sustainability of these sources.

The Summit presented a unique opportunity for us to share both the needs of the Wikimedia volunteer community and the value of their work. It also allowed us to make connections with civil society organizations, open source projects, technology companies, and governments to advocate the need for projects like ours to be centered when planning national digital strategies. The world is experiencing a wave of new ways to access knowledge: Supporting public interest projects and digital public goods is crucial to ensuring that the systems being built now remain grounded in representative and trustworthy information contributed by humans for human benefit.

Read more about our goals for the AI Impact Summit.

Making connections between open knowledge and digital rights

In a time of rapid technological advancement and an alarming shrinking of human rights across the world, it is more important than ever that Wikimedians are able to share lessons they have learned from their years of experience supporting truth, transparency, and trust online. Freedom of expression, and the people behind open knowledge like journalists, academics, and even Wikimedia volunteers, are under attack. Our response needs to include making strong connections with others facing the same threats we are, and sharing knowledge and tactics for addressing these problems and upholding digital rights for future generations.

Highlighting open knowledge sessions at RightsCon 2026
[Read more about our participation in the conference]

Our team has been busy preparing for RightsCon 2026, one of the largest conferences focused on digital rights in the world, which takes place from 5–8 May. RightsCon is a regular venue for Wikimedians to connect with others who are also working toward a better digital world. Recently, we highlighted a number of sessions by Wikimedians and our partners that have been accepted onto the conference schedule, creating a menu of options for attendees interested in open knowledge work and all of the digital rights issues that surround it. 

From 5-8 May, Wikimedia Foundation staff and volunteers will contribute to important conversations about AI governance, information integrity, coalition building, and equitable access to knowledge. From workshops on closing knowledge gaps on Wikipedia to dialogues on safeguarding the digital commons in the age of AI, these sessions highlight how the free and open knowledge movement intersects with global digital rights debates.

Close partners of ours who will join these sessions or host their own include: Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation, Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information (CELE), Derechos Digitales, the Digital Public Goods Alliance, Paradigm Initiative, Global Partners Digital and more. This impressive lineup brings decades of expertise to the new questions and issues facing open knowledge online today. 

Registration for the hybrid conference is currently open, so whether you want to join us in person or participate online, sign up today to gain access to this trove of insight and experience in fighting for digital rights and free knowledge.

Read more about our participation in Rightscon 2026.

Sharing our experience defending digital rights at the TEDIC Bootcamp
[Learn more about the work TEDIC does in digital rights]

Amalia Toledo (Lead Policy Specialist for Latin America and the Caribbean) joined the 2026 edition of the yearly Bootcamp hosted by TEDIC, a digital rights organization based in Paraguay. At the event, Amalia facilitated a session designed to provide participants with concrete knowledge and skills to effectively address human rights challenges in the digital age, particularly those affecting free expression.

During the session, she explained some of the key legal frameworks in Latin America necessary to preserve rights online, and highlighted threats to free expression online like disinformation and abusive copyright enforcement. As the host of a now 25-year-old project, it is important that the Foundation share lessons learned and our experiences defending against attacks on open knowledge with others who are facing such threats. 

Learn more about the work TEDIC does in digital rights.

Envisioning the future of open digital ecosystems in the European Union

Contributing to the European Commission call for evidence on open digital ecosystems
[Read our submission to the call for evidence]

In February 2026, the Foundation responded to a call for evidence from the European Commission about how to better support the future of open digital ecosystems in the European Union. In the Foundation’s submission we highlighted a few important messages:

• The value of open source for developing technological skills in EU Member States’ societies and of contributing to digital resilience at the national level;
• The importance of investment in a flourishing digital commons as a source of trust and diversity in the open information ecosystem; and
• The need for financial support for digital public goods to make them sustainable in the face of new technological developments.

We are encouraged to see that much of our feedback was shared by others. The Open Future Foundation has started collecting and analyzing the more than 1600 responses to this consultation, grouping these into a few key themes: 

• The need for sustained, predictable investment in open source infrastructure at the national and regional level;
• The recognition of open source as more than just a type of license, and that the digital commons requires acknowledgement and support to thrive; and
• The use of public procurement as a method of digital sovereignty and a major support for an open digital ecosystem.

We hope that by contributing our voice alongside many other open source, public interest projects, the European Commission will recognize the value of these shared, public interest resources and the need to provide support for the open source ecosystem for everyone’s mutual benefit.

Read our submission to the call for evidence.

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“Don’t Blink” is written for you!
[Take our one-minute survey and help us meet your interests and needs]

We are always interested in what you, our reader, has to say. That is why we made a short multiple-choice survey about our monthly advocacy recap. Whenever you want, let us know what information can help you join us in protecting and promoting free and open knowledge.

Learn more about how we use your feedback in our survey privacy statement.

Take our one-minute survey and help us meet your interests and needs. Thank you for reading!

________

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

March 2026 saw the EduWiki Hub actively contributing to a range of global and regional conversations, engaging educators, librarians, and Wikimedia communities in exploring how open knowledge can transform teaching and learning. Across different platforms and audiences, these engagements created space to share experiences, build partnerships, and spotlight the role of Wikimedia in shaping more open, collaborative, and inclusive education systems.

The month began with participation in the AfLIA Open Education Week Virtual Summit on 4 March 2026, where the EduWiki Hub, represented by Bukola James and Barakat Adegboye,  presented “Libraries as Gateways to Open Knowledge: Advancing Open Education in Africa through the EduWiki Hub.” The session explored how libraries can serve as entry points to open knowledge by connecting educators and learners with Wikimedia platforms. It highlighted community-centered knowledge production, digital skills development, and sustainable partnerships that support open education practices across Africa.

On 7 March 2026, Rita Maliqi represented the EduWiki Hub at the ESEAP Monthly Community Call, a space that brings together members of the Wikimedia ESEAP Hub and the wider movement to share updates and explore collaboration opportunities. During the call, the EduWiki Hub’s work was introduced, highlighting ongoing initiatives such as the mentorship program, knowledge showcases, workshops, the EduWiki newsletter, and the monthly Open Educational Resources documentation effort. Upcoming opportunities for engagement were also shared, while the session opened space for strengthening connections and exploring collaboration between regional and thematic hubs.

The Hub continued its engagement on 18 March 2026 at the Open Education Talks 2026, with Barakat and Bukola presenting “Empowering Open Education through Wikimedia: The EduWiki Hub Experience.” This session focused on how the Hub connects educators, institutions, and communities to open knowledge, offering practical examples of how Wikimedia can be integrated into teaching and learning. The hub also submitted a poster that is displayed on the event’s Digital Poster Wall throughout and following the event. We received recognition from the organizers following the presentation.

Later in the month, on 26 March 2026, the EduWiki Hub participated in the Northeast OER Summit 2026 with a session titled “Scaling Open Collaboration: How the EduWiki Hub Connects Local Education Initiatives to Global Open Knowledge.” The presentation highlighted how local education efforts can connect to global Wikimedia ecosystems, emphasizing collaboration, scalability, and shared learning across regions. 

Across these engagements, the EduWiki Hub continued to highlight the value of Wikimedia as both a teaching tool and a platform for collaborative knowledge creation, while building partnerships and strengthening its presence within global open education spaces.

As the year unfolds, the EduWiki Hub will continue to show up in spaces where open knowledge and education intersect. Keep an eye out for upcoming engagements, including participation at the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum in Abidjan from 14 to 16 April 2026, as we continue to connect communities, share experiences, and expand the reach of Wikimedia in education.

26/03/2026-01/04/2026

About us

• We made a mistake last week regarding the proposed safari service road tag. The proposed service=safari tag is to be used in combination with a highway=service tag.

Mapping

• Comments are requested on this proposal:
  • highway=service + service=safari to map dedicated service roads in safari parks.
• The following proposals are up for a vote:
  • man_made=cable_landing_station, to standardise the mapping of submarine cable landing station locations in OpenStreetMap. The tag is intended to help map this important infrastructure for international data connections more accurately (voting until 14 April 2026).
  • aerodrome:classification=*, to classify aerodromes more precisely according to their use and significance (e.g. international, regional or local) (voting until 16 April 2026).

Mapping campaigns

• The new UK Quarterly Project for Q2 2026 focuses on mapping and improving address data in OpenStreetMap. The Wiki page provides ideas, datasets, tools, and resources to support contributors.

Community

• Raquel Dezidério Souto published in her OSM user diary about a new partnership between the Virtual Institute for Sustainable Development – IVIDES.org®, the IVIDES DATA® IT consulting, and the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP, São Paulo, Brazil), which aims to develop a collaborative micromapping effort with OpenStreetMap and uMap, envolving three communities that were severely affected by the major disaster that occurred in 2023, on the Southern Coast of São Paulo.
• assanges has analysed Taiwan’s OpenStreetMap phone‑number data, highlighting inconsistent separators, missing or malformed country codes, and proposed normalising all numbers to the E.123 format for consistency reasons.
• Anne-Karoline Distel explained how they started mapping ‘hogbacks’, medieval grave markers from the 10th to 12th century, in OpenStreetMap using the tag historic=hogback. These rare objects, mainly found in northern England, are intended to be more easily identifiable through dedicated tagging.
• ^[1] Koreller shared a diary post highlighting some of the lesser-known features and keyboard shortcuts in JOSM, including parallel drawing, precise angle construction, and transferring object history. The collection demonstrates how plugins and shortcuts can enable more efficient and accurate mapping workflows.
• Marcus Jaschen, developer of bikerouter.de, talked about the development and functionalities of his BRouter-based route planner in the bike podcast Antritt.
• Christian Quest presented a proof of concept that uses Geocalib to automatically correct tilted 360° images, such as those captured by helmet-mounted cameras, and apply corrections to entire sequences. The bot has already processed tens of thousands of images, applying heuristics to propagate corrections from individual fixes to larger image sets.
• rphyrin reported on his experience of attending the OpenStreetMap Local Chapters and Communities Congress 2026, providing a resume of the questions and answers (Q&A) posed by the organisers during the meeting.
• Christoph Hormann has extended his Musaicum project, which uses high-resolution satellite data to create detailed mosaics, to include Greenland.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• Minh Nguyễn informed mappers that the operations team has installed the DiscussionTools extension. This extension adds a number of little features to make discussions on the wiki talk pages more intuitive. The extension has releases for both the version of MediaWiki used by the OSMF, and for the latest version of MediaWiki.

Local chapter news

• The OpenStreetMap US has launched a story map competition – the State of the Map US Narrative Map Competition, inviting the global community to create map-based storytelling projects. Participants are encouraged to submit narrative-driven maps, with selected entries showcased at the State of the Map US 2026.
• The Associació Catalana de l’OpenStreetMap has applied to become an official Local Chapter of the OSM Foundation and has opened a public discussion on the OSM Community forum. Due to overlapping areas of interest, feedback is especially requested from existing Local Chapters in Spain, France, and Italy.

Events

• The organisers of the Graz Linux Days 2026 have published their full programme, featuring talks and workshops on open source and free software. The event takes place in Graz (Austria) on 10 and 11 April and will include several sessions related to OpenStreetMap and geodata.
• The University of Zaragoza is hosting a humanitarian mapathon on Tuesday 7 April in collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières, OpenStreetMap Spain, and local mapping groups. The event will take place both in person and online as part of the regular ‘MappyHour’ sessions.
• The programme for the State of the Map US 2026 has been published. The event will be held in Madison, Wisconsin from 11 to 13 June. There is a great line-up this year with 80+ presentations covering a breadth of topics from motivating mappers, to open POI’s, to safeguarding America’s open infrastructure data, and much more.

OSM research

• A Scientific Reports study explored integrating OpenStreetMap with satellite and environmental data in a unified deep learning framework for urban analysis. OSM serves as a key geospatial layer supporting tasks such as land-use mapping, building extraction, and traffic modelling.
• HeiGIT reported that they conducted a controlled experiment to measure how humans modify AI-generated road geometries at the atomic level by using both independent and cross redundancy mapping.

Maps

• The platform Blitzortung provides an interactive map showing lightning strikes worldwide in near real time. The data comes from a non-commercial global network of around 1,800 volunteer-operated detection stations and is visualised on maps including OpenStreetMap-based layers.
• The Climate Action Navigator and Heal apps, maintained by HeiGIT, help cities assess how well urban environments support walking under hot conditions and other evaluations related to the climate change and extreme weather conditions.
• The platform Electricity Maps provides an interactive map displaying the current electricity mix, carbon intensity, and energy flows for countries in near real time. It allows users to explore where electricity comes from and how emissions and renewable shares evolve throughout the day.

OSM in action

• Steven Reid has programmed an interactive 3D visualisation of the earth directly in the browser. Users can explore global geodata and switch between different visualisations, using OpenStreetMap as one of the data sources.

Open Data

• The Instituto Geográfico Nacional – IGN (Spain) has released ► two PMTiles files for mobile app, which are available for download and using under the licence CC-BY 4.0.
• Quincy Morgan posted on LinkedIn that Pinhead, a collection of .SVG map icons, is available freely on Wikimedia and can be used in projects documented on Wikipedia or Wikidata. Pinhead is also now available in the QGIS map icons collection.

Software

• Evan Applegate posted about the experience of generating web maps with OpenFreeMap, after following a tutorial on PMTiles, created by Ben Welsh, a data journalist and editor based in New York.
• Alexandre Cavaleri’s pull request has been merged, meaning a long-distance inline skating profile will be available in brouter-web with the upcoming version 1.7.9. The profile is specifically tuned to strongly prefer smooth asphalt and avoid unpaved surfaces, based on real-world long-distance skating data.
• EoGIS, a web mapping platform maintained by Vatalysteau SAS, is now fully operational and Yann Justeau wrote ► about the micromapping, its challenges and opportunities, and some difficulties related to cartographic activities developed by small public administrations.
• Crosstalk Solutions has unveiled Project Nomad, a system designed, amongst other things, for offline navigation based on OpenStreetMap data. The project combines local routing and mapping components to enable navigation without an internet connection, for example in remote areas or emergency situations.
• François Lacombe presented the Gespot , a Web map which is aimed at mapping light poles and electric infrastructure, at Rencontres OpenStreetMap and territoires, held in Brest on 24 March. This initiative has a partnership with OSM-Fr and the source code is available on GitHub.
• While experimenting with ways to speed up Layercake builds (a collection of thematic OpenStreetMap data extracts in cloud-native formats) Jake Low has developed a DuckDB extension for reading OpenStreetMap .PBF files.

Programming

• Astrid Emde reported that the Community Sprint at FOSSGIS 2026 resulted in multiple contributions to open-source projects, including a pull request for Mapbender and work on the QGIS Qt6 update. The sprint also provided newcomers with an opportunity to ask questions and actively participate in development.
• Ivovic’s BetterBike-Turns aims to improve turn instructions in bicycle routing and make them more intuitive. It uses OpenStreetMap data to generate more realistic and cyclist-friendly navigation guidance.

Releases

• Marcus Jaschen has released version 2026.7 of Bikerouter, introducing a completely rebuilt elevation profile chart. The new implementation adds multiple features and improves the visibility of highlighted route segments in analysis mode.
• The CoMaps team released version 2026.03.23-5, including updated OpenStreetMap data along with improvements to speed limit handling, road shields, and multilingual display. The update also enhanced navigation and UI on Android and iOS and added new map features.
• Alexis Lecanu (aka ravenfeld) has released version 1.20.1 of the Baba app, mainly featuring bug fixes, including improvements to photo display and GeoVisio link parsing. This update also included numerous dependency upgrades such as MapLibre, Kotlin, and various Android components.

Did you know that …

• … the OpenStreetMap Foundation names its servers after dragons? It is inspired by the phrase ‘here be dragons’, a medieval practice of putting illustrations of dragons on uncharted areas of maps where potential dangers were thought to exist.

OSM in the media

• CHIP reported ► on the Ping Pong Map based on OpenStreetMap and other data.
• Hasi Jain discussed the power of big tech in the 21st century, related to the cartography of regions of the globe and its impact on the citizenship.
• In its latest episode , the French podcast Projets Libres gave the floor to two representatives of the French Fédération des Pros d’OSM (FPOSM). The guests, Florian Lainez (CEO of junglebus) and Marina Petkova (co-owner of dynartio), presented the actions, values and members of this association of OpenStreetMap professionals as well as the dynamics surrounding OSM.

Other “geo” things

• Heise reports that Android is introducing a 24-hour delay as a security requirement for sideloaded apps. The delay will not apply again after switching devices. This may affect OSM-related apps, which are often distributed outside official app stores such as via GitHub or F-Droid.
• The Bibliothèque Nationale de France has just opened ► the exhibition ‘Imaginary Maps: Inventing Worlds’, with more than 200 historical maps and works drawn from mythical, literary, television, and video game universes on display throughout the exhibition, ranging from medieval parchments to maps of Middle-earth, from Thomas More’s Utopia to the realms of Final Fantasy. It is an invitation to journey to the boundaries of reality and fiction, which implicitly questions how we interpret, understand, and shape our own world. The catalogue has been published ►. The Dossier de presse is also available freely.
• Thomas Weibel has developed Isoswiss, a pixel-art styled isometric map of Switzerland.
• Several media outlets have reported on North Oaks (Minnesota), a US city absent from Google Street View since 2008, after authorities threatened legal action over street-level imagery captured on private roads. The unique situation stems from all streets being privately owned; a filmmaker recently attempted to map the area using a drone, sparking debate about privacy and the limits of digital mapping (we reported earlier).
• Big Think explored star forts, which were developed from the 15th century onwards in response to cannon warfare. They were designed with geometric bastions to eliminate defensive blind spots. This design dominated European military architecture for centuries and can still be seen in the layout of many cities today, although it later became obsolete due to advances in weapon technology.
• In a NASA article the SWOT satellite is shown to be able to derive detailed maps of the seafloor from measurements of ocean surface height. Subtle variations in sea surface elevation caused by gravity differences above underwater features allow scientists to detect previously unknown structures such as seamounts and abyssal hills.
• The Los Angeles Times reported that an El Segundo resident was arrested after installing unauthorised stop signs at a neighbourhood intersection. He took this step after months of unsuccessful attempts to get city officials to address his safety concerns, claiming the intersection had become dangerous for children and that he had witnessed several near-collisions involving them. This situation raises questions about OpenStreetMap’s ‘map what’s on the ground’ principle, as signs physically present may not always be officially authorised.
• Quarticle outlined the transition from traditional GIS systems to modern real-time routing platforms. The article explains how contemporary architectures combine dynamic data, APIs, and scalable infrastructure to support applications such as navigation and logistics.
• Yandex described how its new storage and indexing methods for map tiles enables handling up to 80,000 requests per second from a single server. This approach simplifies infrastructure by avoiding backend rendering and leverages object storage, such as S3, to deliver multiple map variants at scale.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India – Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-04-04
	Tucson	Wave Archive	A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations between Eric Theise, Jeffrey Gordon Evans, Hannah Joyce, and Steev Hise	2026-04-04
	Lucknow	Café Coffee Day, Hazratganj	OSM Lucknow Mapping Party No.3	2026-04-05
	Zaragoza	Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Unizar) & online	Mapatón humanitario	2026-04-07
	Salzburg	Bewohnerservice Elisabeth-Vorstadt	OSM-Treffpunkt	2026-04-07
	Richmond	Shockoe Hill Cemetery	Shockoe Hill Cemetery mapping with MapRVA	2026-04-07
	Dublin	Online	Easter 2026 Map n Chat	2026-04-07
			Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng]	2026-04-07
			iD Community Chat	2026-04-08
	Essen	Verkehrs- und Umweltzentrum	Essen OSM-Treffen	2026-04-08
	Oslo	Royal Gastropub	OSM-Vår-pils	2026-04-09
	Albuquerque	Guild Cinema	A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations between Eric Theise, Kenneth Cornell, and Clifford Grindstaff	2026-04-09
	Berlin	Restaurant Split	214. OSM-Stammtisch Berlin-Brandenburg	2026-04-10
	Zürich	Bitwäscherei Zürich	186. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich	2026-04-10
	Paris	MSF France (Paris 19e), France	MSF-CARTONG: Nuit de la Géographie	2026-04-10
	Berlin	Wikimedia e.V. Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24,10963 Berlin	OSM Hackweekend Berlin-Brandenburg 04/2026	2026-04-11 – 2026-04-12
	Braunschweig	Stratum 0	Braunschweiger Mappertreffen im Stratum 0 Hackerspace	2026-04-11
		Armadale Park Cafe	Social Mapping Sunday: Armadale Train Station	2026-04-12
	Milano		Editathon e mapathon alla Milano Marathon 2026	2026-04-12
	Antwerpen		Camera’s in kaart brengen	2026-04-12
	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-04-12
	Meerut	Haldiram’s, Garh Road, Meerut	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.28 (Meerut)	2026-04-12
			Missing Maps : Mapathon en ligne – CartONG [fr]	2026-04-13
	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #87	2026-04-13
	München	Echardinger Einkehr	Münchner OSM-Treffen	2026-04-14
		Oloron-Sainte-Marie – La Friche	Cartopartie à Oloron-Sainte-Marie – Projet SYSTOUR	2026-04-15
		Oloron Sainte Marie	Une cartopartie dédiée à la mobilité durable dans les Montagnes Béarnaises	2026-04-15
		MJC de Vienne	Rencontre des contributeurs de Vienne (38)	2026-04-15
	Karlsruhe	Chiang Mai	Stammtisch Karlsruhe	2026-04-15
			Online Mapathon von ÄRZTE OHNE GRENZEN	2026-04-15
	Freiburg im Breisgau	CCCFR, Adlerstr. 12a, Freiburg (Grethergelände)	OSM-Treffen Freiburg/Brsg.	2026-04-16
		Golem, Avane, Empoli	Mapping Day ad Empoli	2026-04-18
		Dijital Bilgi Derneği	OSM-TR Meet-Up – OSM League Pit-Stop	2026-04-18
	Chennai Corporation		Mapping Party @ Chennai	2026-04-19

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, Raquel IVIDES DATA, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred, izen57, mcliquid.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

On 24 March 2026, the EduWiki Knowledge Showcase brought together educators, Wikimedians, and community members for a 90-minute session filled with shared experiences, insights, and creative reflections on Wikimedia in education. At the heart of the conversation was a simple but powerful idea: how educators, communities, and Wikimedia affiliates are using open knowledge to shape learning across diverse contexts.

The session was facilitated by the EduWiki Hub team, with moderation by Rita Maliqi and Barakat Adegboye. It brought together 74 participants from across the globe, including Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), East, Southeast Asia and the Pacific (ESEAP), Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Northern and Western Europe (NWE), North America (NA),South Asia (SA), and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) regions, reflecting the growing global interest in Wikimedia in education. Live interpretation was available in Arabic, Bahasa Indonesian, French, Hindi, Portuguese, and Spanish, enabling broader participation across diverse linguistic communities. This multilingual support was made possible through collaboration with partners, including the ESEAP Hub, whose support was particularly instrumental in facilitating Bahasa Indonesian interpretation.

The showcase opened with a creative contribution by Belvin Tawuya from Wikimedia UK, who explored information literacy and its role in navigating today’s digital knowledge landscape. He also highlighted the role of Wikimedia UK in advancing a broader understanding of knowledge creation, working collaboratively with educators and policymakers. This was followed by a presentation from Anton Protsiuk, Programs Coordinator at Wikimedia Ukraine, who provided an overview of Wikimedia Ukraine’s education program. He shared insights into building a strong community of wiki educators, developing online courses for teachers, and designing sustainable models for integrating Wikipedia into formal education systems.

A second creative contribution by Oby Ezeilo, titled “The Day My Students Edited the Internet,” offered a reflective and personal perspective on introducing students to Wikipedia editing and the transformative impact of contributing to open knowledge in a secondary school setting.

The session continued with a presentation by Dr. Walaa Abdel Manaem from the Egypt Wikimedians User Group, who shared her extensive experience leading Wikipedia education programs across Egyptian universities. She highlighted the scale and impact of these initiatives, including thousands of new articles created, and emphasized the importance of empowering educators and students to actively participate in knowledge production.

An interactive question and answer session followed, allowing participants to engage directly with the speakers, exchange ideas, and reflect on how these approaches could be adapted within their own contexts. Participants raised questions around youth engagement and retention within the movement, with presenters sharing practical insights drawn from their experiences.

The session concluded with closing remarks and EduWiki Hub updates, reinforcing opportunities for community engagement and continued collaboration.

The EduWiki Knowledge Showcase continues to serve as a platform for sharing practices, amplifying community voices, and strengthening connections across the Wikimedia education ecosystem.

The recording and additional resources are available on the Meta page.

Get involved!

The EduWiki Hub invites you to be part of its initiatives:

• Become a member of EduWiki: EduWiki Membership Registration
• Submit your Wikimedia Education stories to the Education Newsroom
• Subscribe to the Education Newsletter to have This Month in Education delivered to you: Here
• Follow us on social media: Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Telegram

Fast forward to 2026, this charity is probably the best known charity in the Netherlands, it supports disadvantaged children and this year it focuses on loneliness. Loneliness is closely linked to suicide. The numbers for suicide are not pretty; suicide is rising year over year. There is less funding for care so what to do?

The charity commissioned research on how to prevent loneliness. It is truly scientific, done by a reputable organisation, reputable scientists, and as can be expected with plenty of citations. The paper is in Dutch but hey, is Google not your friend?

For this Dutch paper there is a Scholia. Effectively it provides an interactive view, when citations are added, the view will change because of an added cited work, a cited author. When papers are attributed to an author and multiple works happen to be cited, the Scholia evolves and the author is credited for all the papers cited. 

For an NGO this is quite powerful because papers like these underpin the value of their work. It  provides a strong argument to support its work and contribute as a donor or volunteer.

Thanks,

         GerardM

Presented by Art+Feminism in partnership with Wikimedia LGBT+

This Women’s History Month we organized a very special panel followed by a workshop in partnership with Wikimedia LGBT+ titled Queer Women in the Arts. With the presence of the visual artists Ad Minoliti, Ana Raylander Martis dos Anjos and María Belén from the Archivo de la Memoria Trans Argentina, we were able to spark a rich discussion on visibility, memory, and representation of queer women in arts and technology. 

This event was part of the Wikimedia Celebrate Women calendar and our campaign “What Would a Truly Feminist Internet Look Like?” (2025–2026). In addition, through a workshop facilitated by Vic Sfriso (Wikimedia LGBT+ and WMAR) and Freddy Veloz (Wikimedia LGBT+), we learned together how to address these issues on Wikidata, a project on which we have been focusing during the second year of this campaign to explore data structure, governance, and models.

LGBT+ women constitute a historically invisible and marginalized group that has survived and continues to survive by organizing within a community with a deep understanding of the importance of preserving collective memory and their personal histories. Therefore, nothing could be more fitting than to celebrate this month with a panel that facilitates these shared experiences.

Opening the panel, Ad Minoliti (they/them) shared their project Feminist School of Painting (2018), which sought to rethink physical educational spaces and how they were, or were not, organized to provide an environment where creativity and learning could flourish. Beyond that, the feminist school aimed to question how the methodologies and narratives of traditional art schools center the cis-male figure and his way of thinking.  

Building a bridge with more traditional institutions, Ana Raylander Martis dos Anjos (she/her) discusses the challenges she faces in her work as an artist when exploring these themes, drawing on her experience with an exhibition project at the museum in the city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. 

Still on the topic of memory, Maria Belén Correa (she/her), an Argentine trans activist who founded the Archivo de la Memoria Trans, shared with us her experiences, challenges, and lessons learned over nearly 15 years of work with a community that has learned to archive in order to keep the stories of trans people in Argentina alive. The archive, which today holds approximately 6,000 items dating from the early 20th century to 1990, can be consulted online. 

We left this panel with the idea that even in distinct contexts and practices, for queer women, art and technology address the urgent need to construct, preserve, and challenge narratives about their own lives and creative work. Whether by rethinking educational methodologies, challenging traditional institutions, or creating community archives as a form of resistance, all initiatives point to the centrality of memory, representation, and autonomy in the production of knowledge. 

For the Wikimedia community, the lesson is that the practice of editing also becomes a political exercise in reimagining more inclusive and sustainable structures, where these stories not only survive but are recognized in all their complexity and power.

Email us at [email protected] to join the campaign. The internet is the battleground where our stories, histories, and futures are shaped. Either we fight for it, or we let it be shaped for us. The choice is ours. Let’s rewrite the rules together.

Hello, I’m Tsaag Valren, and those who know me will have seen my username on french Wikipedia articles about horse breeds. What’s less well known is that I also contribute to Wikidata to reconstruct the pedigrees of the world’s major horse breeds. I presented part of this work at the French-speaking Wikiconvention in Quebec City in 2024.

How about a little genealogical journey on horseback, taking you through France, the United States, Russia and Hungary? The French Wikipedia provides a comprehensive overview of the world’s horse breeds, from the best-known ones, such as the Thoroughbred you see at racecourses, to the lesser-known ones, such as those Canadian ponies abandoned on a sandbank in the 18th century. Whether we are talking about racehorses or ponies at risk of extinction, knowing their pedigree is extremely important for managing inbreeding in these animals and the potential genetic diseases that might result from it. In the case of small populations of animals threatened with extinction, this work is vital to the preservation of this animal heritage shared by all humanity.

So I have added a clickable link to the articles on various horse breeds on the french Wikipedia, which leads to a family tree created using the Wikidata Graph Builder. The example below is the most famous horse in Russia, the Orlov Trotter. All current Orlov Trotters are descended from the same founding stallion, Smetanka. By clicking on this link, which appears directly in the French Wikipedia article, you can visualise the lineage of this founding stallion.

This graph is constructed using the P22 property in Wikidata, in exactly the same way as VZP10224 did with Thoroughbreds; please refer to their post for details of the method used to construct the graph :

I tested another method of visualising these datas, the classical genealogical tree, using a model that links Wikidata and Wikipedia in the article on Hungarian Shagya horses, an endangered and prestigious breed that traces its lineage back, in particular, to a Syrian stallion called… Shagya.

This time, it’s a template originally created for humans, but it works very well for horses too. As you can see, horses that already have their own article on the French Wikipedia automatically have a clickable internal link.

Our journey on horseback would not be complete without an example of a very large graph featuring a very large draught horse, which is currently useful for research purposes. It concerns the French Percheron breed of horse, which is notable for having been exported in large numbers to the United States. This graph took months of work to create the Wikidata items corresponding to horses recorded in paper pedigree registers dating back to 1883:

It is available in this format and as a partial family tree via the Wikipedia article dedicated to this founding stallion, Jean-le-Blanc.

If you’re interested in animal populations, and even if horses aren’t your thing, please do feel free to reproduce this work; this data visualisation also works for wild orcas, red pandas and pangolins.

I’m autistic.

Don’t panic.

If you’ve known me for some time, I’m exactly the same person I’ve always been. There’s a wide consensus that people are born this way and remain this way for life. The only difference is that now you and I know that my kind of personality was described by some doctors in some books, and they gave it a name.

I was formally diagnosed by a doctor of psychology in January 2026, which is also the month I turned forty-six. For a bunch of reasons that are too long for this post, I’ve suspected that this is the name for what I am since at least 2015. I became almost sure about it in the middle of 2025, which is when I also decided to get a formal diagnosis. Some friends to whom I spoke about this ask me what led to this, and I’ll write about it separately someday.

Some people who know me may be very surprised to read that I’m autistic. Others will be surprised that it took me so long to figure it out. I understand both. When I read old posts in this blog, for example, I see how many of them are very typical autistic things to write, and I just wasn’t aware of it. Maybe I’ll make a list of those posts someday.

Humanity comprehends autism better these days than it did forty years ago. But not all people comprehend it well yet. I barely comprehend it well myself, as I’m only in the beginning of the journey to really grasp it. It’s quite possible that I’m writing some nonsense in this post! If you think that I’m wrong about something, do feel free to send me a correction as a comment or a private email.

Autistic people who are more similar to me are often told that they “don’t look autistic”. I don’t like hearing it, and the same is probably true for most of us, but I do understand why people think like that. Autism looks very different in different people. Some autistic people aren’t able to speak, and some do; some aren’t able to have families or jobs, and some are. And so on. That’s why it’s called a “spectrum” these days.

So what does it even mean? Autism is complex to describe. Compare it to left-handedness, for example: a consistent preference for using the left hand for writing and other fine motor tasks. That’s it, one short sentence. Autism is described as a much longer list of traits, and, very importantly, they must come as a bundle.

Described narrowly, and closely following the definition in the DSM, the guidebook that psychologists in the United States use to classify conditions, my kind of autism basically means the following seven things:

One: I have various difficulties with talking to people. They are not always huge, and perhaps if you talk to me, you won’t even notice them. Or perhaps you will. If you don’t notice them, please trust me that I do feel them constantly. Lots of people throughout my life, including people who love me, pointed out the unusual nature of my communication style to me, sometimes more kindly and constructively, and sometimes less so.

I often have great difficulty starting a conversation, especially when there are many people around. Or even when there’s just one person, but I’m not sure about something. And when I do speak, I sometimes say things that people get offended by, even though I absolutely didn’t mean to offend or patronize—I just meant to be direct or precise, which is supposed to be a good thing, but in that context, someone decided that it’s bad and misunderstood me. I completely fail to understand small talk in all languages (although perhaps it’s more related to item 2 or 3 in the list).

You may think that it’s just “shyness” or “awkwardness”, and in simple human language it’s kind of correct, but “autism” is more scientifically defined, and here’s the really important part: since it comes with a bunch of other traits, which are described later in this list, and which aren’t obviously related to “shyness”, it is, well, not just “shyness”. (Also, someone once described me as having “the opposite of stage fright”, and in some contexts this is a very good description, so I’m not always “shy”.)

Two: I have various difficulties understanding nonverbal communication. I usually understand spoken and written language well, often too well: I understand what people say literally, and I don’t easily “read between the lines”, whether written or spoken. It also repeatedly frustrates me that people read too much between the lines of what I said, which results in their “hearing” things I didn’t actually say or mean. I intensely crave harmony and coherence between what is said or written and what the reality is.

I’m also often bad at understanding facial expressions, hand gestures, and other elements of body language. It’s not like I don’t understand them at all, but throughout my life, people told me countless times that they tried to hint something to me, and I didn’t understand what they thought I should have. I also have trouble making gestures or facial expressions myself: people very often say that I have a weird smile or that they think that my face is angry, even though I’m totally not angry at that moment.

Related to this is also the fact that I cannot maintain eye contact for more than a split second with anyone except exactly three people: my spouse and two children. (Difficulty with eye contact is probably one of the best known autistic traits, but in the DSM, it’s a part of this wider trait.)

Three: I don’t entirely understand relationships, both professional and personal. Even with people I love the most. I have some friends, but not a lot. It’s not even necessarily bad, but it’s definitely noticeable. And if I wanted to make more friends, I wouldn’t totally know how; it happens according to some magic that I don’t get. It’s kind of easier for me to make friends based on shared interests (more on that later), and while having shared interests is probably helpful at making friends for all people, it’s much more acute for me. When I do get closer to a person, it’s hard for me to understand if they are a friend or just a good acquaintance with whom I have a shared interest. I also get fatigued after meeting with many people, for example, at family gatherings, or work and school events—not because I don’t like those people, but because being next to people, even people I love, quickly tires me.

Four: I often make all kinds of seemingly meaningless repetitive movements or sounds, and over the years people have told me many times that they are unusual or even disturbing. A few examples of repetitive things that I do are shaking my fingers and hands, especially the middle and ring fingers on the right hand; drumming with my teeth (if only I could record the amazing jazz, funk, and classic rock beats I make there!); twisting my facial hair; repeating weird words, usually when no one is listening; fidgeting with coins, guitar picks, nail clippers, or other small things. (If people tell me that those things are disturbing, I do my best to stop myself when I’m next to them. Autism is not a good excuse to disturb people if the autistic person can reasonably avoid it. But note that the word “reasonably” does a lot of work here: I can usually do it, and if I can’t, then I can usually just walk away. But some autistic people cannot, so please treat them with understanding, patience, and kindness.)

Five: I really love routines and certain ways of doing things, and I really hate being forced to change them without an exceptionally convincing reason. Example 1: I go to the same supermarket most of the time, and my shopping list is organized not just by the things I want to buy, but also by the sequence in which I’ll find them on my way from the entrance, through the aisles, and to the cashier, and I get horribly annoyed when a product I often buy is moved to another shelf. Example 2: I do most of the kitchen work at home, and I have a very specific way of organizing everything in the drawers, cupboards, and the dishwasher, and if something is not in its right place, I’ll get either horribly confused and dysfunctional, or very upset and possibly screaming (which is not good, but it may happen, and I cannot quite control it). Example 3: I hate moving to a new house or even moving furniture within the house. Those are just three examples out of dozens.

Six: I am very interested in certain things. Like, very. Some of those things are nearly lifelong, most notably languages, music, and public transit. Some are coming and going, like dog breeds (early 1990s), the history of Russian nationalism (from 1999 until 2004 or so, and occasionally coming back), Pink Floyd discography (coming and going every year or two), history of Scientology (coming and going from 1997 until 2014 or so), Free Software (since 1998), the Perl programming language (from 1999 until 2012 or so), editing Wikipedia and related projects (since 2004), Belarus (since 2006, and still intensifying), Catalonia (since 2007), and various other things.

(Comment 1: To avoid any misunderstandings, it doesn’t mean that I am, or ever was, a Russian nationalist or a Scientologist. Comment 2: I don’t really know why some things become a special interest and others don’t. As far as I know, no one does. I think it’s one of the most interesting questions about autism.)

Seven: I experience sensory perception of some things that is different from the way most other people experience them. There are sounds that I hear well even though people next to me hear them very faintly or not at all. Sometimes those sounds greatly disturb me, even though they don’t disturb anyone around nearly as much. For example, the noise of aluminum snack packages and plastic bags makes me either unable to do anything or very irritated. And lately, as my son got into solving Rubik’s cubes, the sound of those things has been the absolute bane of my existence. Those things, which to most people are not much more than easy-to-ignore rustling or whirring, make my ears feel they are being jackhammered. Headphones sometimes help with this a bit, but not always.

Another related issue is that lightbulbs above a certain brightness (above 3000 K and 1000 lm) make me nearly blind and cause me great discomfort, even though others find them pretty usual or even convenient. Strobe lights at concerts are a disaster, too: I love concerts, and most concert lighting is fine, but strobe lights make me unable to look at the stage. And the smell of some home or office cleaning supplies completely overwhelms my senses to the point that I can’t function very much, even though other people in the same place barely notice it.

I also easily notice wrong spelling, punctuation, or fonts in texts—I wrote about an example of this here a few weeks ago. This may sound unrelated to other things in this list item, but my psychologist told me that it is related, so I guess it is.

And that’s the end of the list.

See how I said that I’m describing it “narrowly”, and I still had to write a list of seven items, with many sentences in each of them? That’s what makes autism complex, and it’s just the tip of this iceberg. The list above goes according to the seven basic autism diagnostic criteria in the DSM, which is the mainstream scientific, academic, professional definition. Those seven criteria appear on the first page of the Autism Spectrum Disorder description in the DSM; there are ten more pages of details, a lot of which are very interesting, and to a lot of which I conform, too, but this post is already getting too long.

But I really should also mention that in addition to the formal academic definition, there’s also the autistic culture, or, more widely, the neurodivergent community culture. It has loosely defined its own informal, but pretty well-pronounced traits, such as wearing (or not wearing) certain clothes, eating (or not eating) certain foods, having certain relationship practices, etc. It also has its own jargon words, such as “catastrophizing”, “delayed processing”, “double empathy”, “monotropism”, “shutdown”, “spiky profile”, “stimming”, and many more. I can’t find any of these terms in the DSM (although maybe I didn’t search well), but they are making their way into academic articles on the topic, and some of them may become completely mainstream and scientific someday. (Here’s one glossary of this jargon, here’s another. I love glossaries! Maybe I’ll compile one myself.)

This culture has developed in the last few decades, as the autistic community came together online and in real life and started figuring out things about itself that mainstream scientists and therapists were too slow to get. While it definitely doesn’t mean that the informal autistic community is right about everything or that its members agree about everything, I do get the impression that even though most people in it are not professional psychologists or neurologists, it is remarkably robust at understanding itself. Discovering this online community in 2025 was one of the most empowering things that ever happened to me; I feel like I absolutely belong there.

Autism explains a lot about me.

My love for editing Wikipedia, for example: a broken link, a poorly organized category of articles, an incorrect reference, a typo, a missing article about a topic I am familiar with—I’ve always known that I have a heightened sensitivity to those things, and I just couldn’t give it a name. When I saw that wikis let me easily correct them, I started doing it, and couldn’t stop. I’m certainly not saying that one has to be autistic to edit Wikipedia, but I’ve heard lots and lots of people saying over the years that there is a disproportionate number of autistic people among Wikipedia editors, and many of them possibly aren’t aware of their autism, just like I wasn’t aware of mine. (A lot of these claims are hypothetical or anecdotal, but I could find two data-driven surveys that substantiate this: Dutch Wikipedia editors survey 2018 and German Wikipedia editors survey 2025; if you know about more research on this, please do tell me.)

The same goes for my enormous love for languages and letters and texts and books—I learned to read early (thanks, mom!), and reading and writing were a fantastic way to learn and communicate at my own pace, without having to synchronize with people who keep talking and saying unexpected things. Books—and later, websites—have always been wonderful for me because I can reread them if I didn’t understand something, and they won’t get tired of my clarification questions.

Language in general fascinates me because it is the infrastructure of people’s communication, and I love how it is completely arbitrary, yet systematic; studying Linguistics in the university explained it all so well to me. Different linguists have different reasons for going into this field, but for me, an easy explanation is that trying to understand something about this infrastructure is my overcompensation for having frequent misunderstandings with so many people. And foreign languages are wonderful, too, because I’ve always felt different from most people, and foreign languages are one of the most notable and beautiful ways in which people are different and diverse. Each foreign language is a puzzle that can be solved with some effort, and solving this puzzle is endlessly rewarding. Put those things together, and bam, I became the specialist on languages in Wikipedia.

Same for music. Music is a sensory delight, and I now understand that I probably experience it far more intensely than other people do. When it has any kind of rhythm, it stimulates my body. When it has no clear rhythm, it stimulates my thinking (my favorite example of such piece of music is Piece for Jetsun Dolma by Thurston Moore, but there are many others). That’s why, for example, I love going to concerts, but I usually (albeit not always) prefer to do it alone: I’m there for the music itself, not for socializing. And that’s why music in general, and specific artists in particular (not only Sonic Youth and Pink Floyd, far from it) become my special interests and I easily learn their discographies, including full track lists, by heart. Is it any wonder that the first articles I edited in Wikipedia—in English, in Hebrew, and in Catalan—were about musicians?

Same for public transportation systems. Those are systems, they are largely predictable, they aren’t chaotic like cars, their maps and schedules can be learned by heart. When I was eight or so in the late 1980s, I learned the map of the Moscow Metro with around 120 stations by heart. It wasn’t even intentional—I just wasn’t able not to learn it after taking the metro frequently and looking at this map. I could also take long bus rides in Moscow with my eyes closed and say exactly where the bus is at any time because I feel all the turns and stops. Like, I actually did it several times for fun, and my parents and friends were weirded out.

And the smell of subways! It’s more or less the same in the whole world. Some people don’t enjoy it, and I can understand why, but to me, it’s wonderful. When I moved to Israel, which didn’t have a working subway at all in 1991, I missed it, but when the Carmelit, the subway in Haifa, was reopened, I entered it and felt that wonderful aroma again. I’ve always known that it was not nostalgia for Moscow—it was the aroma of a system that I can appreciate. (Theoretically, I could put this special interest together with Wikipedia, too, but I don’t actually do it much. I only contribute a little to writing about subways and other public transit systems on Wikipedia. The people who do it are absolute heroes. I can’t tell for sure, of course, but it is quite possible that, um, some of them are autistic.)

Ironically, my great and prolonged interest in Wikipedia is perhaps a thing that delayed my realization that I’m likely neurodivergent. Being in the Wikipedia community and interacting with quite a lot of people who openly call themselves neurodivergent made me repeatedly wonder: “What’s special about them? Their description of how they experience the world is very similar to how I experience the world, and I’m not neurodivergent.” That was a mistake: I experience the world like that, and my neurodivergent friends experience the world like that, but most other people don’t. Which means that I am neurodivergent. I fully realized it only in 2025.

And one more thing. As I was reading the seventeen-page report that the psychologist gave me in the end of the diagnostic process, I found the part called “Behavioral Observations” particularly fun to read. It described how I behaved during the evaluation process in the psychologist’s office and how I filled the online forms for it. Among other things, it said:

He used the word “curious” many times throughout the evaluation.

This is a very good description of me, because I love being curious! I love discovering things, being asked an interesting or relevant question, and enthusiastically and explicitly acknowledging that something is, as a matter of fact, curious. At least to me. Some people would also describe this as a “verbal stim” in the autistic community jargon, and it’s perhaps appropriate. However, verbal stims are sometimes meaningless. While I do say meaningless words sometimes, when I say that something is curious, I mean it. And that’s also the most central thing that Wikipedia is about: truly endless curiosity, wanting to learn things, adding pieces to the perpetually incomplete puzzle, and sincerely wanting to help other people to learn those things more easily and freely.

Am I going to write a lot about autism here now? At the moment, I don’t plan to start writing explicitly about autism a lot. I mostly plan to keep writing nerdy things about Wikipedia and languages and maybe music and maybe random things from my life. In a way, this blog has been mostly about autism all along, just without calling it by this name, because I didn’t know it myself. But go figure, now that I know that it’s an important part of my personality and identity, perhaps I’ll start writing specifically about it.

Am I happy that I got the diagnosis? Yes, I am. Perhaps someday humanity’s attitude to this will completely change, and the diagnosis will have a different name, or become completely unnecessary. But with the way we work now, I’m happy to understand my personality better and have a name for it.

How is this understanding going to change my life? I don’t know! At the moment, I just hope that the few more decades that I probably have in this universe will be easier to navigate now that I know all this stuff. And maybe it won’t be much easier, and that’s OK, too; I’ve learned something, and if you’ve read at least some of this post, you’ve learned something, too. If it makes you behave more kindly to autistic people or to learn something interesting about yourself, that’s already a good thing.

(I was also diagnosed with ADHD, but I don’t yet have an idea of how to write a blog post about it. Trust me, however, that it’s very meaningful, too.)

As the Swahili Wikipedia (SWWP) successfully navigates the post-100,000 article era, it is imperative to shift our focus from mere article count to the core metrics of velocity and strategic consistency. The journey beyond the milestone is not a passive coasting period but a critical phase demanding rigorous analysis of our community’s momentum and the allocation of our strategic resources.

The foundational pillars of the national community remain robust and active, a testament to sustained local engagement. Key groups such as Wikimedians of Arusha, the Kilimanjaro Wiki Community, Wikimedia Community TZ, and the Tanzanian University Students Wikimedians continue to support encyclopedic growth and outreach initiatives. However, the data reveals a divergence in momentum, with one project experiencing a strategic paradigm shift driven by the Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili User Group (JWK). This group has strategically shifted its focus, moving from the traditional, cyclical growth of the encyclopedia to a high-speed revitalization of a different, yet equally vital, linguistic resource: the Swahili Wiktionary.

1. The Swahili Wikipedia (SWWP): The Post-Milestone Plateau

The achievement of 100,000 articles on June 23, 2025, was a monumental success. Yet, in the subsequent months, the Swahili Wikipedia’s growth has settled into a phase of distinct fluctuation, often referred to as the “Post-Milestone Plateau.” While new article count milestones continue to be surpassed, the crucial “Articles Per Day” (APD) metric indicates a clear cooling of momentum when compared to the intense collaborative efforts that characterized the period leading up to the 100K target.

SWWP Growth Velocity (June 2025 – March 2026)

Observation and Analysis: For a significant portion of late 2025, the daily creation rate frequently struggled to surpass the 20 articles per day threshold. While data from early 2026 indicates a slight improvement and bursts of higher activity, the overall pace remains inconsistent. This fluctuation suggests a need for targeted initiatives to re-energize the contribution base and diversify article creation methodologies beyond the large-scale creation efforts that typified the pre-milestone push. Sustained, consistent organic growth must now become the central focus to ensure the encyclopedia continues to expand in both quantity and quality

2. The Swahili Wiktionary (SWWKT): The “Jenga” Acceleration

In stark contrast to the steady, slower pace of the encyclopedia, the Swahili Wiktionary (SWWT) has become the epicenter of the most dramatic and effective growth in the Swahili Wikimedia movement’s recent history. The Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili User Group identified the Swahili Wiktionary as a crucial, yet dormant, project and initiated a comprehensive, high-velocity intervention. This effort has successfully transformed SWWT into the fastest-growing Swahili linguistic database in the history of the Wikimedia language projects.

The Strategic Gap: Data-Driven Success

View the statistics page: https://sw.wiktionary.org/wiki/Maalum:Takwimu

The data clearly illustrates the difference in strategic focus and resultant growth rates. While the Wikipedia’s average growth rate has hovered in the lower double digits (APD), the Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili initiative on Wiktionary has been able to sustain a massive average of 250 entries per day.

This concerted, methodical campaign has achieved exponential scaling: in a remarkable period of just seven months, the project has grown from approximately 15,000 entries to over 73,000. This phenomenal success is the result of a dedicated, focused strategy that leveraged both community effort and advanced content generation methods, proving that exponential growth is achievable with a singular, committed vision

3. Future Plans: The July 2026 Indigenous Pilot

The successful revitalization of the Swahili Wiktionary has established a new model for project growth. As the movement drives toward its ambitious June 30, 2026 goal of 100,000 Wiktionary entries, attention is already shifting to the next frontier of linguistic preservation: the indigenous languages of Tanzania. Starting in July 2026, Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili will spearhead a pivotal Pilot Project focusing on four specific indigenous languages selected from Tanzania’s rich linguistic tapestry of over 120+ ethnic dialects.

This phase represents a profound transition—from strengthening a national lexicography (Swahili) to initiating genuine, grassroots linguistic preservation efforts. The pilot project aims to establish a replicable and scalable model by focusing on three primary objectives:

• Documentation and Digitization: To systematically document and digitize the vocabularies of endangered tribal languages, ensuring their long-term digital survival.
• Multi-Dialectal Bridging: To create a robust, searchable, and multi-dialectal framework within the Swahili Wiktionary structure, effectively creating a linguistic bridge that connects the national language to its many source dialects.
• Scalable Model Establishment: To establish a proven, scalable methodology for indigenous language documentation that can be replicated and deployed across other African nations facing similar challenges of linguistic heritage erosion.

Conclusion
While reaching milestones like 108,000 Wikipedia articles provides a sense of collective accomplishment, the definitive narrative of the 2025-2026 period is the dramatic acceleration of the Swahili Wiktionary. This achievement, decisively led by Jenga Wikipedia ya Kiswahili, serves as a powerful case study demonstrating that dedicated, focused effort can yield exponential growth and strategic impact within the Wikimedia ecosystem. The community has not only revived a critical project but has also refined its methodology. Come July, this proven, high-velocity strategy will be applied to the very roots of Tanzanian heritage, initiating a new era of indigenous language preservation.

Each term, hundreds of postsecondary faculty across the U.S. and Canada launch Wikipedia assignments with a free suite of materials and support from our team at Wiki Education. While some are newcomers trying the assignment for the first time, other faculty return to the assignment year after year as an established cornerstone of their syllabus. And when a professor brings the project back, each new group of students can pick up where the last left off — and the impact of that work can compound significantly.

Undoubtedly, this is the case for University of California Berkeley professor Juana María Rodríguez, who has assigned the project to 159 students throughout seven courses, empowering them to make an incredible collective contribution to Wikipedia’s coverage of LGBTQ+ history.

The big numbers:

• 332,000 words added
• 3,580 references added
• 588 articles edited
• 63 articles created

And probably the most staggering impact number from Dr. Rodríguez’s Wikipedia assignments over the years? Her students’ contributions have received more than 96,600,000 pageviews. 

Their work hasn’t gone unnoticed — several media outlets have covered Dr. Rodríguez’s coursework on Wikipedia in recent months. In addition to the big impact numbers, they’ve spotlighted her reflections on the assignment, including the learning outcomes she notes as her students work to contribute well-sourced, fact-based knowledge to the encyclopedia.

For Rodríguez, the assignment offers the opportunity to spark critical reflection about knowledge production, sharpen her students’ skills in research and writing, and significantly broaden the reach of their coursework.

“I want my students to think of themselves as not just consumers of knowledge, but as being able to produce knowledge as well,” Rodríguez has explained, underscoring her motivation to return to the Wikipedia assignment term after term.

Rodríguez’s series of Wikipedia assignments are a powerful reminder of the cumulative impact instructors can make on public knowledge — and on the generations of students they empower to contribute to it. 

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course or know an instructor who may be interested? 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.

Apr 2, 14:27 UTC
Resolved - This incident has been resolved.

Apr 2, 11:17 UTC
Investigating - We are currently investigating an issue which is causing a number of edits to Wiki's to fail. Investigation continuing and updates to follow.

—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

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.

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

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

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 ]

Kunhikannan died at the rather young age of 47

 

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 (Gobind Ram Dutt - Personal Assistant to the Imperial Entomologist. Studied several solitary wasps.), E.S. David (Entomological Assistant, United Provinces), K. Kunhi Kannan, Ramrao S. Kasergode (Assistant Professor of Entomology, Poona), J.L.Khare (lecturer in entomology, Nagpur), T.N. Jhaveri (assistant entomologist, Bombay), V.G.Deshpande, R. Madhavan Pillai (Entomological Assistant, Travancore), Patel, Ahmad Mujtaba (head fieldman), P.C. Sen First row: Capt. Froilano de Mello, W Robertson-Brown (agricultural officer, NWFP), S. Higginbotham, C.M. Inglis, C.F.C. Beeson, Dr Lewis Henry Gough (entomologist in Egypt), Bainbrigge Fletcher, Charles A. Bentley (malariologist, Bengal), Senior-White, T.V. Rama Krishna Ayyar, C.M. Hutchinson, E. A. Andrews, H.L.Dutt

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

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

Further reading

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

A few days ago I was listening to some of the talks at MUDCon (The MediaWiki conference aimed at non-Wikimedia uses of MediaWiki).

During James Hare's talk about a project to keep track of various Miraheze wikis using Wikibase (The software behind Wikidata), he briefly mentioned that WikiApiary has been down forever, and that maybe a Wikibase approach would be better instead of the previous Semanitc MediaWiki approach (Semantic MediaWiki is an extension to MediaWiki that allowing annotating links with the "relationship" the link represents and querying those relationshops).

This reminded me that WikiApiary existed, and i thought i would try to give it a kick. For those who don't know, WikiApiary is/was a site that tracked what public mediawiki isntances were out there and what extensions they had installed.

I had already gotten server access years ago (People wanted me to help but i never really did). The status of the site was sort of up but extremely flakey and timing out all the time.

Web server concurrency

If you've been paying attention to web hosting at all in the last while, you know that AI scrapper bots are the bane of everyone's existence.

Initially I assumed that was what was happening here. I may have been partially wrong on that, but i think it was a contributing factor.

One of the most common performance problems with MediaWiki is people setting up apache to use the default max 150 threads. If a large spike in traffic comes in, all the threads fight over resources and everything becomes really slow, causing even more threads to pile up, slowing everything down to a halt. Even worse if you don't have enough memory and have swap enabled, you end up with swap death (This server did not have swap enabled, but i mention it because its such a common failure case). Its often better to try and process a few requests at the time and make the other requests wait their turn than to try and do too much all at once and accomplish nothing.

 To address this, I installed varnish. Varnish is a great piece of software that lets you cache recently used pages, reducing server load significantly in general. It can also help by deduplicating requests to a certain extent, if two people request the same page at the same time, it will just send one request to the backend so the backend doesn't get overloaded processing the same page twice for two separate people

It can also set a maximum number of requests in flight to the backend. This can make sure that the backend doesn't get too overloaded.

One of the less used features of varnish is the ability to set up multiple backends. I like to use this to setup different backends for different classes of requests. For WikiApiary I setup four - likely bots, non-normal article views (e.g. diffs, history, special), normal article views, logged in users & images. For each of these I had different back-ends with a different number of max requests at one time. For bots, i set it to at most one. Mostly in case of false positives. My bot metric is just using an old version of chrome. Comparatively, normal page was given 15 and non-normal pages 3. Thus bots should not be able to take down the site, at worse they could just take down requests in the same class as them. I gave effectively no limit (actually 60) for logged in users and requests to static resources like images that are super cheap to serve.

As a special case, I outright blocked facebook's AI scrapper as it was being super aggressive. I also blocked logged out access to Special:Browse. I hate outright blocking things for logged out users; how can lurkers become contributors if you block them from everything? However, Special:Browse was using OFFSET based paging and was super expensive to render while at the same time being linked everywhere and a very common spider target.

This is what I ended up with for the varnish config:

  backend default {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "8088";
    .max_connections = 60;
    # Unfortunately the version of varnish i have is too old for .wait_limit
    # and .wait_timeout. However if you're doing something like this with small max connections, you definitely want a wait queue to even out spikes.
#    .wait_limit = 10;
#    .wait_timeout = 10s;
}

backend page {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "8088";
    .max_connections = 15;
#    .wait_timeout = 30s;
#    .wait_limit = 60;
    .first_byte_timeout = 200s;
    .between_bytes_timeout = 300s;
}

backend bot {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "8088";
    .max_connections = 1;
    .first_byte_timeout = 200s;
    .between_bytes_timeout = 300s;
}

backend special {
    .host = "127.0.0.1";
    .port = "8088";
    .max_connections = 3;
 #   .wait_timeout = 60s;
 #   .wait_limit = 15;
    .first_byte_timeout = 120s;
    .between_bytes_timeout = 200s;
}
# access control list for "purge": open to only localhost and other local nodes
acl purge {
    "127.0.0.1";
}

# vcl_recv is called whenever a request is received 
sub vcl_recv {
        # Serve objects up to 2 minutes past their expiry if the backend
        # is slow to respond.
        set req.grace = 500s;

        set req.http.X-Forwarded-For = req.http.X-Forwarded-For + ", " + client.ip;

        set req.backend_hint= default;

        # This uses the ACL action called "purge". Basically if a request to
        # PURGE the cache comes from anywhere other than localhost, ignore it.
        if (req.method == "PURGE") {
            if (!client.ip ~ purge) {
                return (synth(405, "Not allowed."));
            } else {
                return (purge);
            }
        }

        # Was crawling very fast.
        if ( req.http.User-Agent ~ "^meta-externalagent" ) {
                return (synth( 403, "No crawling please" ) );
        }
        
        # Pass requests from logged-in users directly.
        # Only detect cookies with "session" and "Token" in file name, otherwise nothing get cached.
        if (req.http.Authorization || req.http.Cookie ~ "([sS]ession|Token)=") {
            return (pass);
        } /* Not cacheable by default */

        if ( req.url ~ "^/w/index.php\?(.*&t|t)itle=Property:.*&limit=\d*&offset=\d\d\d\d" ) {
                return (synth( 403, "Log in to view more" ));
        }

        # rate limit < chrome 136. MSIE. Opera. (Note samsung browser is chrome 136)
        # Also applebot, only rate limiting instead of blocking because it is well behaved.
        if (req.http.User-Agent ~ "(Chrome/[0-9][0-9]\.|Chrome/1[012][0-9]|Chrome/13[0-5]|Opera|MSIE|Applebot)" && req.url ~ "^/(wiki/|w/index.php|w/api.php)" ) {
                set req.backend_hint = bot;
        } elsif (req.method == "GET" && 
                ( req.url ~ "^/w/index.php" || req.url ~ "^/wiki/Special:" || req.url ~ "/wiki/.*\?" || req.url ~ "^/w/api.php" ) &&
                !( req.url ~ "(Special:CreateAccount|Special:UserLogin|Special:RecentChanges|Special:Random)" )
        ) {
                set req.backend_hint= special;
        } elsif ( req.method == "GET" && req.url ~ "^/wiki/" ) {
                set req.backend_hint= page;
        } elsif( req.method == "POST" && req.url ~ "(^/w/api.php|Special(:|%3A)Browse)" ) {
                set req.backend_hint= special;
        }

        if ( req.method != "GET" ) {
                return (pass);
        }

        # normalize Accept-Encoding to reduce vary
        if (req.http.Accept-Encoding) {
          if (req.http.User-Agent ~ "MSIE 6") {
            unset req.http.Accept-Encoding;
          } elsif (req.http.Accept-Encoding ~ "gzip") {
            set req.http.Accept-Encoding = "gzip";
          } elsif (req.http.Accept-Encoding ~ "deflate") {
            set req.http.Accept-Encoding = "deflate";
          } else {
            unset req.http.Accept-Encoding;
          }
        }
 
        return (hash);
}

sub vcl_pipe {
        # Note that only the first request to the backend will have
        # X-Forwarded-For set.  If you use X-Forwarded-For and want to
        # have it set for all requests, make sure to have:
        # set req.http.connection = "close";
 
        # This is otherwise not necessary if you do not do any request rewriting.
 
        set req.http.connection = "close";
}

# Called if the cache has a copy of the page.
sub vcl_hit {
        if (!obj.ttl > 0s) {
            return (pass);
        }
}

# Called after a document has been successfully retrieved from the backend.
sub vcl_backend_response {
        # Don't cache 50x responses
        if (beresp.status == 500 || beresp.status == 502 || beresp.status == 503 || beresp.status == 504) {
            set beresp.uncacheable = true;
            return (deliver);
        }   
        if (beresp.http.Set-Cookie) {
          set beresp.uncacheable = true;
          return (deliver);
        }

        if (!beresp.ttl > 0s) {
          set beresp.uncacheable = true;
          return (deliver);
        }
 
 
        if (beresp.http.Authorization && !beresp.http.Cache-Control ~ "public") {
          set beresp.uncacheable = true;
          return (deliver);
        }

        set beresp.grace = 2h;
        return (deliver);
}

  

Request Limits

However, I still saw lots of slow requests piling up. Sometimes DB queries seemed to take longer than the request stayed open, which was very pointless as the user had gone away by the time it was done.

Ideally the user would not be able to trigger super slow requests, however in a system like SemanticMediaWiki where the user is allowed to make arbitrary queries (and quite frankly a questionably optimized DB schema) its going to happen.

So the important thing is to make sure if a query that can't be answered in a reasonable amount of time happens, that we stop processing it instead of just wasting resources on it. This is extra important as slow requests can have a cascade effect; the first request is slow taking up a lot of resources making other requests at the same time slow down. Throughput falls and suddenly more requests come in also slowed by the general business of the system. Basically a traffic jam happens.

To deal with this I did two things:

• Install php-excimer package and set $wgRequestTimeLimit to 300. This allows MediaWiki to gracefully set a time limit for itself. Unlike php's execution_time, the php-excimer extension allows handling the timeout gracefully and also applies the timeout to wall clock time instead of cpu time (Important because in an overload, the CPU might be split amongst many php processes so only a little cpu time might have passed)
• Set mariaDB's max_statement_time config to 200 seconds. This is the max amount of time a query can take before it is killed. This ensures that a run away query is time limited. You have to be careful though since this config is global, you'll want to disable it before running any sort of DB maintenance.

This helped a bit to prevent things from piling up. However queries were still slow and when i looked at iotop & top it seemed like mariadb was using excessive CPU & Disk I/O but almost no memory.

Almost no memory? That doesn't seem right for a database. I'd missed the obvious thing: innodb_buffer_pool_size was set to only 128 MB! This is one of the most important settings for MariaDB/MySQL performance. It effectively determines how much RAM the DB users (while one time of ram anyways, kind of the important one). The server had 23GB of ram and the DB was limited to 128MB. No wonder queries were slow. Traditional advice is for a dedicated server this value should be 80% of the server's RAM. We have to subtract from that for the RAM MediaWiki needs as both were on the same server, but nonetheless this needed to be way higher. I upped it to 11GB and query speed increased by orders of magnitude almost instantly.

I also noticed that the temporary table in memory size was really small. This doesn't matter much for vanilla mediawiki, but for extensions like SemanticMediaWiki that do a lot of user defined queries that sort through many results this is really important, so I bumped max_heap_table_size, tmp_table_size and tmp_memory_table_size to 800MB.

The Database

Back in 2010, I wrote a small Python 2 script to reconstruct the first 10,000 Wikipedia contributions; they had been lost, but Tim Starling found some old UseMod database dumps. The result was rough: no wiki markup rendering, no links between pages, and bare-bones HTML. Sixteen years later, and with the help of Claude (Opus 4.6), I’ve addressed most of those issues. Enjoy!

Wikipedia 10K Redux (revamped)

19/03/2026-25/03/2026

Mapping

• Two proposals are waiting for your comments:
  • The cable_landing_station=* proposal to map landing points of submarine cables.
  • The highway=safari_service_road proposal to describe specific service roads in safari parks.
• The proposal flashing_lights=* is still open for voting. The proposal intends to indicate the precise design of flashing lights.

Mapping campaigns

• Following the Morshansk online map party ► in 2025, the Russian community is organising another online map party ► from 29 March to 11 April. The community will be working to eliminate one of the last major blank spots on the map: the Kunyinsky District of the Pskov Region. This year’s innovation is a new tool for coordinating zones during collaborative mapping, written specifically for this event. We invite everyone to participate, both beginners and experienced participants!

Community

• In the sharply worded, normatively charged, and at times speculative opinion essay ‘The City in the Data Lab’, mobileGEO offered an activist analysis of OpenStreetMap as an increasingly central digital infrastructure used for routing, research, and humanitarian missions, among other things. At the same time, they addressed the dependence on a small number of volunteers in core areas, such as server operations and software, as well as issues of governance and data equity.
• A forum post discussed introducing new tools for discussions on the OSM Wiki, including the MediaWiki DiscussionTools extension already used on Wikimedia projects. The aim is to provide more structured commenting and improve participation, with implementation currently being discussed as an Operations Working Group issue.
• Christian Quest announced the creation of the Panoramax Foundation to establish an open source platform for georeferenced street level imagery. The foundation is to be launched as a non-profit organisation and will be supported by partners such as the INRIA Foundation and IGN France. Its aim is to promote decentralised server structures, establish a global meta-catalogue, and strengthen cooperation between authorities, companies and NGOs. Members can actively shape technical development and governance (via the GeoCommuns Forum).
• In a blog post by the ‘OSM Verkehrswende’ initiative, Tobias Jordans explained ► that Panoramax requires additional infrastructure and coordination. The goal is to further expand this open-source alternative to commercial services and promote its use for mapping, traffic planning, and data analysis.
• Marina Petkova wrote ► about the release of the guide OpenStreetMap et territoires (OpenStreetMap and territories), produced by the Fédération des pros d’OSM. The video record of the session can be watched online. There is also a publication about the ODbL titled Tout savoir sur la license ODbL.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The OpenStreetMap Foundation Board has approved a new contractor to revamp the GNSS traces feature on the OpenStreetMap website, aimed at renewing the infrastructure for GNSS traces and complying with privacy regulations. The payment comes from the Sovereign Tech Fund, and the rate has been discussed with the Personnel Committee and Core Software Development Facilitator.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap US announced the release of the Pedestrian Working Group Schema 1.0, defining a tiered tagging system for mapping pedestrian infrastructure. The schema provides detailed guidelines for features such as pavements, crossings, and kerbs, aiming to support use cases from basic navigation to accessibility-focused routing applications.

Events

• The FOSSGIS 2026 presentations are available online.

Maps

• Mlvln described his workflow for a Berlin streetscape map using area=highway data. He combined QGIS with the Overpass API, but switched to Geofabrik’s OSM extracts after his computer could no longer process the raw data. Using Osmose and Python scripts, he filtered tags such as surface=asphalt or amenity=waste_basket and converted HStore fields for visualisation. His goal: a zoom level-dependent tile map – but hosting and regular updates remain open problems.
• Henri97 introduced the portal-streuobst.de ►, a new map designed to support the mapping and analysis of orchard meadows based on OpenStreetMap data. The project aims to help validate NABU’s estimate of around 250,000 hectares and encourages community feedback and contributions.

OSM in action

• The Geo3D Library is a central hub for publicly available online 3D geological models. It is maintained by the Polish Geological Institute and the National Fund for Environmental Protection and Water Management. It includes OpenStreetMap, Carto Light and OpenTopoMap as basemaps.

Open Data

• Qi Zhou and others have published an open dataset of inland docks along the Yangtze River based on OpenStreetMap data and high-resolution satellite imagery. Using YOLO models they detected 3,562 docks with high accuracy and provided the results as bounding boxes and polygon geometries for further analysis.

Software

• A new security report highlighted CVE‑2026‑2580, affecting the WP Maps – Store Locator WordPress plugin by Flipper Code, which is used with OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, and Mapbox. The issue allows outsiders to access sensitive website data on sites running plugin versions up to 4.9.1, so site owners and developers are encouraged to update and review their map setups promptly.
• [1] Héctor Satrústegui explained how to optimise OpenStreetMap tiles for eInk devices such as Meshtastic or Meshcore. The approach uses Maperitive to generate tiles and a Python script to convert them into greyscale or black-and-white formats, improving performance and usability on low-resource hardware.
• The new iD tagging schema release v6.15.0 includes sidewalk= as a road property, multiple new icons (building under construction, covered reservoir, honey shop and more), animal=horse_walker was added, shop=butcher and other recovered their fields, making it easier to find many objects, and the deprecation of landuse=basin was stopped.

Programming

• d0min0 introduced Drakkar.one, an embeddable map widget that works without API keys, cookies, or Google services. It uses OpenStreetMap data and serves vector tiles as PMTiles via Cloudflare infrastructure, offering a low-cost and privacy-focused alternative to Google Maps embeds.
• Pascal Neis outlined a custom processing pipeline to analyse the full OpenStreetMap planet and generate vector tiles. The approach considers historical object versions and prepares the data for efficient visualisation and analysis workflows.
• The Infra Plan team released on GitHub bim-tile-overlay, a JavaScript library that renders map tiles such as aerial imagery or OpenStreetMap beneath 3D BIM models in Autodesk Viewer. It handles coordinate transformations from local model space to WGS84, computes visible tiles in real time, and projects them in sync with the camera view.
• tristanmk introduced Simple Routing, a low-cost routing API service built on OSRM and VROOM, targeting small projects and developers. The platform aims to bridge the gap between limited free APIs and expensive commercial services by providing shared infrastructure with transparent pricing.
• zorun presented a project implementing an OsmAnd plugin that calculates pedestrian routes based on shade coverage to improve comfort in sunny conditions. The plugin relies on custom-generated shade data, and currently works only for Nantes. The diary entry highlighted usability and integration challenges identified during testing.

Releases

• In a blog post the GraphHopper team introduced improvements made to elevation data handling, enabling more accurate slope and distance calculations. These enhancements particularly benefit use cases such as cycling and hiking routing, where precise elevation profiles are essential.
• The developers of Vespucci released version 22 beta, introducing numerous bug fixes and stability improvements, including handling of Overpass queries, uploads, and UI behaviour. The update also added features such as enhanced tag filtering, image upload support, and improvements to changeset tagging.
• The iD team released version 2.39.0, introducing improvements such as expanded recently used presets, clearer validation messages, and enhanced geometry editing. This release also included multiple bug fixes, updates for street-level imagery, and technical modernisations in the codebase.

Other “geo” things

• Apple has announced plans to introduce advertising in Apple Maps, allowing businesses to pay for promoted placements in search results and recommendations. Advertisements will be clearly labelled and, according to Apple, not linked to personal user data, as part of a broader expansion of its advertising business.
• In their paper ‘Bench marks of change’, Catherine Porter, Margaret O’Sullivan and Elizabeth Gabbett analysed the survival and loss of Ordnance Survey benchmarks in County Limerick, Ireland. Using GIS, historical cartography, and participatory methods, the study finds that over 90% of these historic survey marks are no longer visible and interprets their disappearance as an indicator of broader landscape and environmental change.
• Chronotrains is a Web map which shows how far you can travel by train, from a specific city, for example Berlin. You can select a European city and specify the travel time.
• The EO Glossary of Terms and Definitions serves as a reference for everyone involved in Earth Observation. It covers a wide range of terms, concepts, and definitions relevant to EO disciplines including remote sensing, satellite imagery, geospatial analysis, calibration and validation, climate adaptation, and more. It includes more than 30 recognised databases and you can see a graph with the hierarchy involving the terms.
• The Guardian published a video about how Google Maps search algorithms shape the types of restaurants people find and frequent.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
	Chemnitz	Neues Hörsaalgebäude, TU Chemnitz	Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2026	2026-03-28 – 2026-03-29
		Online	Псковская картопати 2026	2026-03-29 – 2026-04-11
	Hannover	Kuriosum	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover	2026-03-30
	Saint-Étienne	Zoomacom	Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire	2026-03-30
	San Jose	Online	South Bay Map Night	2026-03-31
	Stuttgart	Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen	2026-04-01
		Le Schmilblick, Montrouge	Réunion des contributeurs de Montrouge et du Sud de Paris	2026-04-02
	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India – Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-04-04
	Lucknow	Café Coffee Day, Hazratganj	OSM Lucknow Mapping Party No.3	2026-04-05
	Zaragoza	Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Unizar) & online	Mapatón humanitario	2026-04-07
	Salzburg	Bewohnerservice Elisabeth-Vorstadt	OSM-Treffpunkt	2026-04-07
			Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng]	2026-04-07
			iD Community Chat	2026-04-08
	Essen	Verkehrs- und Umweltzentrum	Essen OSM-Treffen	2026-04-08
	Zürich	Bitwäscherei Zürich	186. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich	2026-04-10
	Paris	MSF France (Paris 19e), France	MSF-CARTONG: Nuit de la Géographie	2026-04-10
	Berlin	Wikimedia e.V. Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24,10963 Berlin	OSM Hackweekend Berlin-Brandenburg 04/2026	2026-04-11 – 2026-04-12
	Braunschweig	Stratum 0	Braunschweiger Mappertreffen im Stratum 0 Hackerspace	2026-04-11
		Armadale Park Cafe	Social Mapping Sunday: Armadale Train Station	2026-04-12
	Milano		Editathon e mapathon alla Milano Marathon 2026	2026-04-12
	Antwerpen		Camera’s in kaart brengen	2026-04-12
	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-04-12
	Meerut	Haldiram’s, Garh Road, Meerut	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.28 (Meerut)	2026-04-12
			Missing Maps : Mapathon en ligne – CartONG [fr]	2026-04-13
	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #87	2026-04-13

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by MarcoR, MatthiasMatthias, PierZen, Raquel IVIDES DATA, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred, izen57, mcliquid.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Your laptop has ripgrep, installed via cargo install. ruff is there too, via uv tool install. golangci-lint came from go install. bash-language-server was npm i -g. Neovim was a tarball download. Kitty was a curl script.

Six months later you get a new machine, or you just want to upgrade or reinstall. What do you even have installed? How did you install each one? Which version? Good luck.

This is a small system that answers those questions — a single Makefile that declares every tool you care about, grouped by purpose, with one command to install anything.

“The power of Wikipedia in shaping people’s awareness is so important because even the smallest bit of research can make a difference.” -Jamilah Thomas, senior, East Carolina University

Consider the number 14,809 — the number of articles under the scope of WikiProject Indigenous peoples of North America that seeks to “encompass all current, historic, ethnic, legal, and cultural aspects of the many groups collectively described as Indigenous peoples of North America.” For the English Wikipedia, this represents only 0.21% of all articles on the English Wikipedia. Even the creation of a single article in an underrepresented topic area can set off ripples of impact, which is why, as one of Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Experts, I was beaming with curiosity and excitement when I saw the article that East Carolina University student editor Jamilah Thomas created as part of her Wikipedia assignment. 

Aware of the lack of representation in Hollywood and on Wikipedia, Thomas was inspired to create the article on the early 20th century Native American film organization, War Paint Club.

But her journey to the War Paint Club was not so simple. A senior majoring in English with a minor in Film Studies, Thomas shared she initially wanted to create the biography article for Native American actress White Bird. Like many editors that attempt to write about underrepresented topics on Wikipedia, Thomas ran into an unfortunate but all too familiar roadblock, one that I witness editors run into time and time again, and that I myself have encountered when editing — not enough published reliable secondary sources on the topic (in this case, White Bird).

“I found myself wanting to know more about White Bird as a person besides her contributions,” explained Thomas. “But I decided I could only focus on the War Paint Club due to the lack of sources found. I asked myself questions like who created the organization? Why was it formed?”

For Thomas, creating the War Paint Club article was key to shedding light on the history of Native Americans in Hollywood and the figures that supported this community. 

“I hope that readers understand how this club was important for Native American actors in early Hollywood,” said Thomas. “White Bird, a major founder, did so much for the community at the very beginning.”

Thomas understood the impact she made by filling in this content gap of Native American film history. I was impressed that even though she was unable to create the biography on White Bird, she quickly hatched a plan to plant the seed for others in the community to develop this little corner of the encyclopedia. 

When reflecting on her editing experience, Thomas spoke like a true Wikipedian. 

“The power of Wikipedia in shaping people’s awareness is so important because even the smallest bit of research can make a difference,” said Thomas. “Just by adding the War Paint Club to Wikipedia, I have now also introduced White Bird as well. Even if we have come so far from early Hollywood representation, we still have a long way to go and the War Paint Club proves that these discussions should still be had.”

Throughout the project, Thomas honed her skills in research, time management, and summarizing information in her own words. The student editor shared how this preparation aligned well with her future goals of becoming an archivist, especially when it came to the research portion of the project.

Like many of the student editors we work with, Thomas at first felt insecure and a bit worried about sharing her work to the public facing platform. But her feelings quickly changed after getting over that hurdle and mustering the courage to press publish. 

”This project ended up being more fun than I thought it would be,” said Thomas. “The feeling that I contributed to adding a topic that once didn’t exist on Wikipedia was wonderful!” 

Even though the class assignment is over, Thomas is already thinking about diving into research mode once again to improve Wikipedia’s coverage on White Bird and the War Paint Club, and my Wikipedian heart couldn’t be happier to hear this!

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course or know an instructor who may be interested? 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.

Discover NeoWiki, MediaWiki MCP, and Wikibase extensions. We recap our recent MUDCon talks.

MUDCon (MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference) is a community conference that runs twice a year. We have been attending since the early days, when it was still called SMWCon. You can read our recap of the Fall 2024 edition in Vienna.

On early Anglo-Saxon burials in Sussex where the grave goods don't match the osteological sex, and why the standard archaeological response of calling it an anomaly isn't good enough. Oh and I'm writing a paper.

Mar 25, 15:09 UTC
Completed - The scheduled maintenance has been completed.

Mar 25, 15:00 UTC
In progress - Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.

Mar 25, 13:41 UTC
Scheduled - The SRE team will run a planned data center switchover, moving all wikis from our data center in Texas to the data center in Virginia. This is an important periodic test of our tools and procedures, to ensure the wikis will continue to be available even in the event of major technical issues.

The switchover process requires a brief read-only period for all Foundation-hosted wikis, which will start at 15:00 UTC on Wednesday March 25th, and will last for a few minutes while we execute the migration as efficiently as possible. All our public and private wikis will be continuously available for reading as usual, but no one will be able to save edits during the process.

🕑 1 hour 15 minutes

Noam Cohen is a journalist and writer who has written extensively about Wikipedia since 2007 for publications including The New York Times and Wired. He is the author of the 2017 book The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, which was just released in paperback form with a new introduction by the author.

You can also see this interview in video form, on YouTube.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

• The Know-It-Alls website
• Noam Cohen's Wikipedia user page
• "Wikipedia:Noam Cohen" page (includes links to Noam's articles about Wikipedia)