Indigenous knowledge on Wikipedia and Wikidata

In a presentation atWikidataCon, rica Azzellini said somethingthat got me thinking: A mountain could also be an instanceof a divine being.

I was born in a town built on the slopes of a single hillstanding beside the sea on the west coast of Trinidad. Though itrises less than 200 m above its surroundings, the hill is the onlyhigh point between a flat plain to the east, and the Gulf of Pariato the west. The hill is also Nabarima, the Guardian of the Waters,and the residence of one of the four Kanobos of the Warao, who arean indigenous people of the area. Knowing this, I headed toWikidata to try to incorporate ricas suggestion.

And I ran into problems immediately. In Wikidata, information ismodeled as part of a triple, where the thing beingmodeled (the particular hill that my home town is built on) isassociated with a property that takes a specific value. In thiscase, the property I was interested in is called instanceof, and its straightforward enough to assign thatproperty the value hill: San Fernando Hill is aninstance of a hill. But its also the residence of aKanobo.

So what, precisely, is a Kanobo? A divine spirit, of a sort. Agrandfather spirit. Theres a part of my brain that handlesunstructured, nonlinear information effectively. But thatdoesnt help much when youre trying to add values toWikidata.

And how do I model residence of a divine being?For guidance, I looked at Mount Olympus, the home of the Greekgods. I tried Valhalla. I even checked out the Apostolic Palace inVatican City. None of these left me the wiser. To model the hillproperly I suspect I would have to model it as an instance of aresidence of a Kanobo, but first I would need tocreate an item for residence of a Kanobo. And to dothat, Id need to create an item for Kanobo. Itsdifficult, Im out of my depth, so I end up going withinstance of a religious site. Whose religion? NeitherWikidata nor Wikipedia will tell you. And even if you found yourway to theWarao peoplearticle onWikipedia, youd learn that they are an indigenous group inVenezuela, with little hint of their presence in Trinidad.Archaeologists like Arie Boomert believe that the Warao were theoriginal inhabitants of Trinidad, but the borders drawn by theSpanish and the British left the Warao cut off, foreigners in whatis by right their homeland.

Across Wikipedia, the connection between indigenous people andtheir lands is cut off. While land acknowledgements have becomecommon, especially in academic settings, theres a large gapbetween knowing whose land youre on and understanding howthose people relate to this land. If were lucky, a Wikipediaarticle will tell us the indigenous name of a particular geologicalfeature, but its extremely rare for the article to documentmore than that.

TheDenaliarticle documents sevenindigenous names for the mountain and group them into twocategories of meaning the tall one andbig mountain but says nothing about howindigenous Alaskans see or relate to the mountain. Its inthe category sacred mountains, but the article failsto explain why. Visit theWikidataitemfor Denali and youll find nothing aboutsacredness or spiritual meanings.

Wikipedia and Wikidata arent notably bad in this regard,but I believe they should be better. Much better. Its aproblem thats systemic its hard to addcontent to Wikidata when the statements dont exist to buildthe relationships. And its harder to add the statements toWikidata when the relevant articles dont exist on Wikipedia.But in the end, its hard to write about Kanobos when youdont actually understand what they are.

Non-indigenous contributors can and should workto improve the coverage of Indigenous content across Wikimediaprojects, but unless the movement includes more Indigenous peoplewriting about their own communities, we will always fall short.That challenge is exacerbated by the fact that Indigenouscommunities arent interchangeable, just asmanitisntinterchangeable with Kanobo.

Native American Heritage Month is a good time to reflect on ourmovements shortfalls in this regard. How do we work inpartnership with Indigenous communities to tell their own stories?And how do we convey an invitation honestly, knowing that oursourcing policies that exclude so much knowledge?

But while we grapple with ideas, we also need action. Do you, oryour colleague teach at Tribal Colleges in the US? Put them intouch with our Wikipedia StudentProgram. Do you know someone who can sponsor a Wiki Scholarscourse or a Wikidata course with a focus on Indigenouscommunities? Please get intouch.

Image credit:DenaliNational Park and Preserve, Public domain, via WikimediaCommons

Three months of Connected Heritage

By Dr Lucy Hinnie, Digital Skills Wikimedian atWikimedia UK.

As we begin to look towards 2022, and move towards the end of2021, we thought it was a good time to reflect on the first threemonths of the ConnectedHeritage project at Wikimedia UK.

In August, Leahand I began our posts as Digital Skills Wikimedians. Our firsttask was to familiarise ourselves with the cultural heritagelandscape in England and Wales, and to identify potentialparticipants for our first series of introductory webinars. Manyemails, tweets and messages were sent out into the world, and wewere lucky to have a great response to our offering.

September was the month of webinar creation: weworked hard to design an hour of content that was welcoming,informative and engaging, and offered an overview of the projectand our vision. We rehearsed with some willing Wikimedia UKcolleagues and developed the presentation into something we arevery proud of!

The webinars started in earnest in October. Wewere blown away by the enthusiasm from participants, and the widevariety of groups and organisations represented. We ran fourwebinars, and engaged with new faces from all over the culturalheritage sector.

November has been busy thus far: we ran anadditional webinar for evening participants, and our first Wikithonfor potential partners who had attended a webinar and wereinterested in the next step. We are in the preliminary stages ofour first partnerships, and broadening our understanding of whatour audience is looking for. The Wikithon in particular was a greatsuccess, with over 10 new editors trained and engaging withWikimedia through Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.

We have another webinar running before the year concludes: ifyoure thinking ahead to 2022, and wishing youdattended one earlier, now is the time! The session will run from2pm on Thursday 2nd Decemberand wed love to see you there. Weve had greatfeedback from participants saying they are feeling more confident,more engaged and positive about Wikimedia and open knowledge.

If youre feeling the end of year burnout already, andwould rather look towards 2022, were one step ahead:weve set up four introductory webinars and a Wikithon! Startyour 2022 with some Connected Heritage, weve got webinarsessions running on 18th January,2nd February,17th February and4th March, and anInternational Womens Day Potluck Wikithon on Friday 11th March.You can sign up now via Eventbrite.

In short, lets talk. We have a meeting calendar set uphere, and you can book in for a slot to chatwith us about your questions regarding your organisational needsand aims. Or you can email us atconnectedheritage@wikimedia.org.uk. Were looking forward tohearing from you.

Tech News issue #47, 2021 (November 22, 2021)

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I am oppressed slam poetry from a Wikipedia sockpuppet

I amoppressed
I am oppressed

The mistake was that I was ignorantof your rules,
no more!
and the gentleman from Pakistan,
who was literally from Pakistan!
framed me

The mistake was that I wasignorant!
of your rules, no more,
and the gentleman from Pakistan, who was literally fromPakistan,
framed me?

But I reject this!
cruel
and
unjustified
punishment

I want to talk to a wiseperson!
you have to
be a judge to be anything but what is happening to me
is a huge injustice

tl;dr a blocked sockpuppet was complaining on their talk page,and it made for some awesome slam poetry.

idea by Tamzin, formatting by TheresNoTime

The post I am oppressed slam poetry from a Wikipediasockpuppet appeared first on TheresNoTime.

2021 Arbitration Committee Elections

Its that time of the year again where we subject thosebrave few to the criticisms of the community at large, and selectthose we wish to represent us on the English WikipediasArbitration Committee.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel ofeditors responsible for conducting the Wikipediaarbitration process. It has the authority to impose bindingsolutions to disputes between editors, primarily for seriousconduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve.

Wikipedia:ArbitrationCommittee

For those of you not familiar with the legalese ofWikipedia, the role of the arbitration committee (ArbCom)can be summed up as the the final word in the enforcement of policy(i.e. editor conduct) and the last line of appeal.

Members of the committee are elected yearly, and either serveone year (50% support) or two year (60% support)terms (for reasons explained here).

Our elections work by appointing candidates in decreasingorder of their percentage of support, as calculated bysupport/(support + oppose), until all seats arefilled or no more candidates meet the required supportpercentage. ^[1] This year,we have eleven candidates for eight vacant seats.

Eh, Im not sure yet really I was goingto do a voters guide (User:TheresNoTime/ACE2021) but frankly thats alot of poring over things. Ill likely make my mind up muchnearer the time, after reading through the answers to thequestions.

ArbCom needs both new members and institutional memory, ideallya majority of those who have never served on the committee beforelest it get stuck in the old ways of doingthings.

The post 2021 Arbitration Committee Elections appearedfirst on TheresNoTime.

Using Wikidata to promote epistemic equity

As a cataloguer for theUniversity of Toronto Scarborough Library, Thami Jothilingam seesinfinite possibilities for Wikidata. Thats why she signed upto take Wiki Educations Wikidata Institute course.

Metadata is foundationalto knowledge creation, as it forms the building blocks of knowledgeinfrastructure, Thami says. Historically, the formand process of this knowledge creation was performed primarily bythe socially privileged groups in a society, which has resulted inepistemic bias in library discovery and access. Wikidata is thelargest global free and open knowledge base that enables anddemocratises the creation of knowledge infrastructure, access, anddiscovery.

Thami says she was also drawn tothe course on a more personal level, too.

As someone who is bothBIPOC and queer and thus belongs to multiple marginalisedcommunities, it is important for me to learn the skills to identifythe absences/silences/erasures in knowledge creation/infrastructureand to also actively find tools to fill those gaps with a vision tocontribute to epistemic equity and inclusivity, she says.I think Wikidata is one of those powerful tools, and Iwanted to learn more about it.

The course gave her thoseskills. Meeting twice a week for three weeks over Zoom, theWikidata Institute provided practical knowledge about Wikidata anda community of other scholars studying alongside her. She says thecombinations of practical, hands-on exercises, coupled with theengaging and thought provoking discussions in class, made this aperfect introduction to Wikidata for her.

I am a cataloguer and acommunity archivist, and learning and exploring the endlesspossibilities of Wikidata and open linked data helped me to rethinkthe metadata creation process, Thami says. I striveto be mindful and conscious of the archival praxis with which Iengage and what informs that praxis what we archive, how wearchive, and how we share/disseminate it. I believe in openknowledge and open access, and Wikidata helps to realise thatvision both individually and collectively. Wikidata also helped meto rethink the entire process how knowledge is organisedand classified, how the ontologies are being made, how todemocratise that process, how to make that knowledge creationprocess open and perform it collaboratively, how to navigate andfind tools to address coloniality of knowledge, how can we developand ensure a praxis with epistemic equity andinclusivity.

As part of the course, Thamicreated several new Wikidata items, including one forI. Pathmanabhan Iyer, a collector, publisher, and communityarchivist from Sri Lanka. His 80th birthday was during the course,so Thami felt inspired to create his item in remembrance of hisbirthday. She also created other new items related to the UpcountryTamil community in Sri Lanka.

Sri LankasMalaiyaka Tamilar, or Upcountry Tamils, are the descendants ofnineteenth-century Indian labourers who were brought to work on thecountrys British-owned tea, coffee, and rubber plantations.This community has suffered political disenfranchisement anddiscrimination, while adequate healthcare, education, and economicopportunity remain inaccessible to this day. I have been workingclosely with some grassroots organisations from the community forover a decade now, and it is important to rethink and see past thecolonial and postcolonial traces, and to decolonise the powerstructures that were built through words and languages,Thami says. By creating more data, linked data, particularlymetadata in multiple languages related to social and culturalhistories of marginalised communities, we can develop ethical,equitable, and inclusive models for ontology development, datacreation, access, and discovery.

Thamis engagement withWikidata didnt end with the conclusion of the WikidataInstitute course. Shes now working with a faculty member todevelop a digital history project assignment that involves creatingmetadata from an archival collection. Students will work in groupsto create metadata, and Thami will help move that information toWikidata. Thami also collaborated with UTSC Librarys DigitalScholarship Unit to contribute about 800 entries to Wikidatafrom the S. J. V. ChelvanayakamFonds.

I like when you createnew items and find other items/instances to be linked, andits very thrilling when everything comes together, linked,and you can follow the links as if youre following anarrative, a data narrative in this context, she says.Wikidata is the largest free and open knowledge base in theworld, and anyone from any field of study/work can contribute andengage with it to develop it even further.

Image credit:Loozrboyfrom Toronto, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0,via Wikimedia Commons

Talking strategy with Wikimedia UKs community

Last week I had the pleasure of facilitating an online meetingfor members of our community to help shape the future direction ofWikimedia UK. This was attended by a broad cross section of ourcommunity including staff, trustees, partners, editors and donors.I was particularly pleased to see a number of former staff andtrustees of the charity, all of whom are still closely involved inthe movement.

Aim of the session

Wikimedia UK works on a three year strategic planning cycle, and we are now developingour new strategy for 2022 to 2025. I gave a brief overview of theprocess that the organisation is currently engaged in andwhats happened so far. Our schedule is aligned with ourapplication deadline for funding from the Wikimedia Foundation, forwhich well be applying for multi-year funding for the firsttime.

Introductions

As part of the introductions, everyone shared their aspirationsfor the meeting, with key themes being to make connections,understand Wikimedia UKs priorities and engage with thewider community. The meeting was also another opportunity(following our AGM in July) to introduce our new Chair of Trustees,Monisha Shah. Monisha shared a little of her own background, andwhy access to knowledge is so important to her. She explained thatshe has a portfolio career focused on board roles within the arts,culture and media sectors, following high level roles at the BBC.Monisha emphasised her interest in hearing from the community. Shenoted that she is not active on social media but that volunteerswere welcome to contact her via LinkedIn or the Wikimedia UKteam.

Blue Sky Thinking

After this introduction, we split into three breakout groups tofinish the statement wouldnt it be fantasticif for what wed like Wikimedia UK toachieve in the next three years. This generated lots of great ideasand objectives which coalesced into some key themes, asfollows:

EQUITY

A high proportion of responses to the prompt question above werefocused on equitable participation and representation. This rangedfrom diversifying the UKs editors, administrators andmembership, through to working with small language Wikipedias,delivering diaspora outreach, and supporting initiatives torepatriate knowledge as a form of decolonisation.

CLIMATE

There were several responses focused on the climate crisis, withan aspiration for us to be able to offer wide-ranging and trustedinformation about the climate crisis across multiple languages.There was a question over whether Wikimedia UK should be applyingpressure on the government regarding the crisis. On a practicallevel, it was felt that in the first instance Wikimedia UK needs toidentify what we can do to support editors documenting and sharinginformation about climate change (including those involved withWikiProject ClimateChange)

OPEN KNOWLEDGE

Many responses to the prompt statement wouldnt itbe fantastic if involved the opening up of knowledge andinformation. Under this general umbrella was an aspiration that allpublicly funded institutions should commit to ethical open accessas their default position; and that we are able to addresscopyright law to ensure that publicly funded research has to bemade available under an open licence. Other responses included morepartnerships with heritage organisations, local history initiativesand archives; more Wikimedians in Residence; and more work withdiverse communities and collections. A number of responses werespecifically about images such as every notable structurein the UK having a photo and Wikidata item, and working withexternal partners to ensure an image for every UKarticle.

EDUCATION

Its clear that the Wikimedia UK community remains deeplyconcerned about misinformation and disinformation. There is astrong commitment to helping young people understand how knowledgeis created and shared, and develop information literacy skills.There is also a clear ambition to have an impact on the schoolcurriculum particularly in England (following our successin Wales) and to have more residencies inUniversities.

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AND AWARENESS

A number of responses were focused on the publicsunderstanding of Wikimedia. In particular, it was felt that thereneeds to be more understanding that Wikipedia is a tertiary sourcethat can be edited by anyone, and greater awareness and use of thesister projects, such as Wikisource. It was noted that Wikimedia UKshould have sufficient technical development capacity to beactively contributing to MediaWiki development forWikimedias sister projects. The perennial issue of thedistinction between Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation wasalso raised.

COMMUNITY/MOVEMENT

Two out of the three breakout groups identified an objective todiversify Wikimedia UKs funding base so as to be lessreliant on our core grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. It wasalso suggested that the role of affiliates will be under morescrutiny with the creation of the Movement Charter and GlobalCouncil; and that within that context, Wikimedia UK needs to beclear about its purpose and relevance. Other comments were morefocused on community engagement, with a number of responses arounda theme of developing closer relationships between the affiliateand online communities, and enabling people who engage with ourprogrammes to become more involved with the work of theorganisation, contributing to the movement in broader ways.

Emerging Strategic Themes

After this very productive session, I introduced participants tothe key themes which have emerged from the board and staff awaydays held earlier in the autumn. Once these are finalised, theywill form the basis of our programme development and delivery overthe next three years:

A number of other areas have been identified, which we believeare essential to delivering an effective programme. These are stillin draft form, but include community, advocacy, communications,equity, diversity and inclusion, and organisational resilience andsustainability.

It was encouraging to see the extent of the overlap between thethemes that emerged from the board and staff away days, and thepriorities identified through this community session.

Engaging Volunteers

At this point I handed over to Daria Cybulska, WikimediaUKs Director of Programmes and Evaluation, to lead the finalsession of the meeting. This was focused explicitly on community,and asked participants to respond to the following questions, in aplenary discussion:

These prompted a wide range of responses, contributions andfurther questions. Ive summarised the key discussion areasbelow, all of which have given the team food for thought in termsof volunteer engagement and support:

Wrapping up and next steps

I wrapped up the session by explaining that I would be sharingthe draft strategic framework for 2022 2025 later thismonth (November) and welcome feedback on it. Please watch thisspace for that! And thanks again to everyone who attended. It waswonderful to see people (even if it was over Zoom) and to hear fromour community about whats important to them in the creationof Wikimedia UKs next three year strategy.

A roadmap for Programs public roadmap. Based largely ontheresults of the recent 2021 Programs re currently working on and plan towork on next. For anything were actively working on, it willalso link to the main Issue thread for that feature, which is agood place to ask questions and provide feedback. (TheDashboards Meta talk page is also always a welcome place for questions andsuggestions.)

Im looking forward to getting started on the first coupleprojects on the roadmap: around January, Ill be doing userresearch to develop a clearer idea of what acampaign of campaignsfeaturewill look like, and I also hope to mentor anOutreachy intern to work onenhancing the way the Dashboard presents statistics forWikidata-focused programs.

Programs s key priorities. If you have ideasabout the future of the Dashboard and how it can better serveWikimedians around the world, wed love to hear from you.(And if youre a Rails or React developer or UX designerinterested in helping out as an open source contributor, wedalso love to hear from you!)

A Culture of Sharing: Strategic Support for OER at the Universityof Edinburgh

Many thanks to P-8 Digital Skills Project StrengtheningDigital Skills in Teaching, ETH Zrich and ZHAW forinviting me to speak at their OER Conference 21. Slides and transcript of my talk, whichhighlights the work of Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew,GeoScience Outreach students and Open Content Curation Interns, areavailable here.

Before we get started I just want to quickly recap what we meanwhen we talk about open education and OER.

The principles of open education were outlined in the 2008 CapeTown Declaration, one of the first initiatives to lay thefoundations of the emerging open education movement.The Declaration advocates that everyone should have the freedom touse, customize, and redistribute educational resources withoutconstraint, in order to nourish the kind of participatory cultureof learning, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changingknowledge societies need. The Cape Town Declaration is stillan influential document that was updated on its 10th anniversary asCapetown +10, and I can highly recommend having a look at this ifyou want a broad overview of the principles of open education.

There are numerous definitions and interpretations of OpenEducation, some of which you can explore here.

One description of the open education movement that Iparticularly like is from the not for profit organization OERCommons

The worldwide OER movement is rooted in the human rightto access high-quality education. The Open Education Movement isnot just about cost savings and easy access to openly licensedcontent; its about participation and co-creation.

Though Open Education can encompassmany different things, open educational resources, or OER, arecentral to any understanding of this domain.

UNESCO define open educational resources as

teaching, learning and research materials in any medium,digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have beenreleased under an open license that permits no-cost access, use,adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limitedrestrictions.

And youll see that this definition encompasses a verywide class of resources, pretty much anything that can be used inthe context of teaching and learning, as long as it is in thepublic domain or has been released under an open licence.

This definition is taken from the UNESCO Recommendation on OER,which aims to facilitate international cooperation to support thecreation, use and adaptation of inclusive and quality OER.The Recommendation states that

in building inclusive Knowledge Societies, OpenEducational Resources (OER) can support quality education that isequitable, inclusive, open and participatory as well as enhancingacademic freedom and professional autonomy of teachers by wideningthe scope of materials available for teaching andlearning.

Central to the Recommendation, is the acknowledgement of therole that OER can play in achieving the 2030 Agenda forSustainableDevelopment and particularly Sustainable Development Goal 4: toensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promotelifelong learning opportunities for all.

Here at the University of Edinburgh, we believe that openeducation and the creation of open knowledge and open educationalresources, are fully in keeping with our institutional vision,purpose and values, to discover knowledge and make the world abetter place, while ensuring that our teaching and research isdiverse, inclusive,accessible to all and relevant tosociety. The Universitys vision for OER is very muchthe brain child of Dr Melissa Highton, Assistant Principal OnlineLearning and Director of Learning and Teaching Web Services. Ourstudent union were also instrumental in encouraging the Universityto support OER, and we continue to see student engagement andco-creation as being fundamental aspects of open education. Thiscommitment to OER is more important now than ever, at a time ofcrisis and social change, when we are emerging from a globalpandemic that has disrupted education for millions, and wereembracing new models and approaches to teaching and learning.

In order to support open education and the creation and use ofOER, the University has an Open Educational Resources Policy, whichwas first approved by our Education Committee in 2016 and reviewedand updated earlier this year. Our new policy has adopted theUNESCO definition of OER, and the update also brings the policy inline with our Lecture Recording and Virtual Classroom Policies. Thepolicy itself has been shared under open licence and is availableto download along with several of our other teaching and learningpolicies.

As one of the few universities in the UK with a formal OERpolicy, this new policy strengthens Edinburghs position as aleader in open education and reiterates our commitment to opennessand achieving the aims of the United Nations SustainableDevelopment Goals, which the University is committed to through theSDG Accord.

Its important to be aware that our OER Policy isinformative and permissive. It doesnt tell colleagues whatthey must do, instead its aim is to encourage staff andstudents to engage with open education and to make informeddecisions about using, creating and publishing OERs to enhance thequality of the student experience, expand provision of learningopportunities, and enrich our shared knowledge commons. Investingin OER and open licensing also helps to improve the sustainabilityand longevity of our educational resources, while encouragingcolleagues to reuse and repurpose existing open materials expandsthe pool of teaching and learning resources and helps to diversifythe curriculum.

In order to support our OER Policy we have a central OERService, based in Information Services Group, that provides staffand students with advice and guidance on creating and using OER andengaging with open education. The service runs a programme ofdigital skills workshops and events focused on copyright literacy,open licencing, OER and playful engagement. We offer supportdirectly to Schools and Colleges, work closely with theUniversitys Wikimedian in Residence, and employ studentinterns in a range of different roles, including Open ContentCuration interns. The OER Service also places openness at thecentre of the universitys strategic learning technologyinitiatives including lecture recording, academic blogging, VLEfoundations, MOOCs and distance learning at scale, in order tobuild sustainability and minimise the risk of copyright debt.

And we also manage Open.Ed a one stop shop that provides accessto open educational resources produced by staff and students acrossthe university. We dont have is a single central OERRepository as we know from experience that they are oftenunsustainable, and it can be difficult to encourageengagement. Instead, our policy recommends that OERs areshared in an appropriate repository or public-access website inorder to maximise their discovery and use by others. The OERService provides access to many channels for this purpose on bothUniversity and commercial services, and we aggregate a show case ofEdinburghs OERs on the Open.Ed website.

We dont have is a formal peer review system for openeducational resources. The review process that differentmaterials will undergo will depend on the nature of the resourcesthemselves. So for example we trust our academic staff to maintainthe quality of their own teaching materials. Resources created forMOOCs in collaboration with our Online Course Production Service,will be reviewed by teams of academic experts. OERs created bystudents in the course of curriculum assignments will be formallyassessed by their tutors and peers. And if these resourcesare shared in public repositories such as our GeoScience OutreachOERs, which Ill come on to say more about later, they mayalso undergo a second review process by our Open Content CurationInterns to ensure all third-party content is copyright cleared andno rights are being breached. While open content shared onWikipedia is open to review by hundreds Wiki admins, thousands offellow editors, and millions of Wikipedia users.

As a result of this strategic commitment to OER, we have a widerange of open education practices going on across the University,but what I want to focus on today are some examples of integratingopen education into the curriculum, through co-creation and OERassignments.

Engaging with OER creation through curriculum assignmentscan help to develop a wide range of core disciplinary competenciesand transferable attributes including digital and informationliteracy skills, writing as public outreach, collaborative working,information synthesis, copyright literacy, critical thinking,source evaluation and data science.

One way that colleagues and students have been engaging withopen education is by contributing to Wikipedia, the worldsbiggest open educational resource and the gateway through whichmillions of people seek access to knowledge. The informationon Wikipedia reaches far beyond the encyclopaedia itself, bypopulating other media and influencing Google search returns.Information that is right or wrong or missing on Wikipedia affectsthe whole internet and the information we consume. Sharingknowledge openly, globally and transparently has never been moreimportant in building understanding, whether about the Covidpandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, or other criticalissues. And the need for a neutral platform where you can gainaccess to knowledge online for free has never been more vital inthis era of hybrid teaching, remote working, and homeschooling.

Working together with the Universitys Wikimedian inResidence, Ewan McAndrew, a number of colleagues from schools andcolleges across the University have integrated Wikipedia andWikidata editing assignments into their courses. EditingWikipedia provides valuable opportunities for students to developtheir digital research and communication skills, and enables themto contribute to the creation and dissemination of open knowledge.Writing articles that will be publicly accessible and live on afterthe end of their assignment has proved to be highly motivating forstudents, and provides an incentive for them to think more deeplyabout their research. It encourages them to ensure they aresynthesising all the reliable information available, and to thinkabout how they can communicate their scholarship to a generalaudience. Students can see that their contribution will benefit thehuge audience that consults Wikipedia, plugging gaps in coverage,and bringing to light hidden histories, significant figures, andimportant concepts and ideas. This makes for a valuable andinspiring teaching and learning experience, that enhances thedigital literacy, research and communication skills of both staffand students.

Heres Dr Glaire Andersen, from Edinburgh College of Art,talking about a Wikipedia assignment that focused on improvingarticles on Islamic art, science and the occult.

In a year that brought pervasive systemic injustices intostark relief, our experiment in applying our knowledge outside theclassroom gave us a sense that we were creating something positive,something that mattered.

As one student commented, Really love the Wikipediaproject. It feels like my knowledge is actually making a differencein the wider world, if in a small way.

Other examples include Global Health Challenges Postgraduatestudents who collaborate to evaluate short stub Wikipedia articlesrelated to natural or manmade disasters, such as the 2020 Assamfloods, and research the topic to improve each articlescoverage.

History students came together to re-examine the legacy ofScotlands involvement in the TransAtlantic Slave Trade andlook at the sources being used in evaluating the contributions ofkey figures like Henry Dundas but also balancing this against andpresenting a more positive view of Black History by creating newpages such as Jesse Ewing Glasgow.

And Reproductive Biology Honours students work in groups topublish new articles on reproductive biomedical terms. Being ableto write with a lay audience in mind has been shown to beincredibly useful in science communication and other subjects likethe study of law.

And I want to pause for a moment here to let one of our formerReproductive Biology students to speak for herself. This is SeniorHonours student Aine Kavanagh talking to our Wikimedian Ewan abouther experience of writing a Wikipeda article as part of a classroomassignment in Reproductive Biology in 2016.

And the article that Aine wrote on high-grade serous carcinoma,one of the most common and deadly forms of ovarian cancer, whichincludes 60 references, and diagrams created by Aine herself, hasnow been viewed over 130,000 times. Its hard to imagineanother piece of undergraduate coursework having this kind ofglobal impact.

Last year, in collaboration with Wikimedia UK, the UK chapter ofthe Wikimedia Foundation, our Wikimedian co-authored the first everbooklet dedicated to UK case studies of Wikimedia inEducation which you can download under open licence here.Also many of the resources Ewan has created during hisresidency, including editing guides and inspiring studenttestimonies, are freely and openly available and you can explorethem here.

Another important benefit of open education is that it helps tofacilitate the co-creation of knowledge and understanding.Co-creation can be described as student led collaborativeinitiatives, often developed in partnership with teachers or otherbodies outwith the institution, that lead to the development ofshared outputs. A key feature of co-creation is that is mustbe based on equal partnerships between teachers and students andrelationships that foster respect, reciprocity, and sharedresponsibility.

One successful example of open education and co-creation in thecurriculum is the Geosciences Outreach Course. This optionalproject-based course for final year Honours and taught Mastersstudents, has been running for a number of years and attractsstudents from a range of degree programmes including Geology,Ecological and Environmental Sciences, Geophysics, Geography,Archaeology and Physics. Over the course of twosemesters, students design and undertake an outreach project thatcommunicates some element of their field. Students have anopportunity to work with a wide range of clients including schools,museums, outdoor centres, science centres, and community groups, todesign and deliver resources for STEM engagement. These resourcescan include classroom teaching materials, websites, communityevents, presentations, and materials for museums and visitorcentres. Students may work on project ideas suggested by theclient, but they are also encouraged to develop their own ideas.Project work is led independently by the student and supervised andmentored by the course team and the client.

This approach delivers significant benefits not just tostudents and staff, but also to the clients and theUniversity.Students have the opportunity to work in newand challenging environments, acquiring a range of transferableskills that enhance their employability. Staff andpostgraduate tutors benefit from disseminating and communicatingtheir work to wider audiences, adding value to their teaching andfunded research programmes, supporting knowledge exchange and widerdissemination of scientific research. The client gains aproduct that can be reused and redeveloped, and knowledge andunderstanding of a wide range of scientific topics is disseminatedto learners, schools and the general public.The Universitybenefits by embedding community engagement in the curriculum,promoting collaboration and interdisciplinarity, and forgingrelationships with clients.

The Geosciences Outreach course has proved to be hugely popularwith both students and clients. The course has receivedwidespread recognition and a significant number of schools andother universities are exploring how they might adopt themodel.

A key element of the Course is to develop resources with alegacy that can be reused by other communities and organisations.Open Content Curation student Interns employed by theUniversitys OER Service repurpose these materials to createopen educational resources which are then shared online throughOpen.Ed and TES where they can be found and reused by other schoolteachers and learners. These OERs, co-created by ourstudents, have been downloaded over 69,000 times.

Heres Physics graduate and one of this years OpenContent Curation Interns, Amy Cook, talking about her experience ofcreating open education resources as part of the GeoscienceOutreach course.

Were hugely proud of the high-quality open educationresources created and shared by our GeoScience students and OpenContent Curation Interns, so we were delighted when this collectionwon the Open Curation Award as part of this years OEGlobal Awards for Excellence.

These are just some examples of the way that open education andOER have been integrated into the curriculum here at the Universityof Edinburgh, and I hope they demonstrate how valuable co-creatingopen knowledge and open educational resources through curriculumassignments can be to develop essential digital skills, corecompetencies and transferable attributes. There are many moreexamples I could share including academic blogging assignments,open resource lists, student created open journals, open textbooks,and playful approaches to developing information and copyrightliteracy skills. Hopefully this will provide you with someinspiration to start thinking about how you can integrateengagement with OER in your own courses, curricula and professionalpractice.

The missing bedrock of Wikipedias geology coverage

TheCatoctin Formationis ageological formation that extends from Virgina, through Maryland,to Pennsylvania. This ancient rock formation, which dates to thePrecambrian, is mostly buried deeply under more recent geologicaldeposits, but is exposed in part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Anduntil a student in Sarah CarmichaelsPetrology and Petrographyexpanded it thisSpring, Wikipedias article about the Catoctin Formation wasonly two sentences long. Now, thanks to this student editor,Wikipedia has a readable, informative, and well-illustrated articlethats almost 2,000 words long.

Despite having almost 6.4 million articles, there are stillplenty of topics that are missing from Wikipedia. But it stillsurprises me when an entire class finds a lane as empty as this onedid. In addition to working on two stubs, students in the classcreated 15 new articles.

TheRoosevelt Gabbrosis anintrusive igneous rock formation in southwestern Oklahoma. A gabbrois a magnesium and iron-rich rock formed by the cooling of magma.The Roosevelt Gabbros are named after the town of Roosevelt inKiowa County, Oklahoma, and are one of the geologic formations thatmake up the Wichita Mountains. Other new articles created by theclass includeRed Hill Syenite, an igneous rockcomplex in central New Hampshire, theAshe MetamorphicSuitein Ashe County, North Carolina andtheCentral MontanaAlkalic Province, a geological province occupying much of themiddle third of the state of Montana.

Content related to geology and mineralogy on Wikipedia isunderdeveloped. Fromindividual mineralsto a600,000 km²geological basin,student editors in past classes have been able to create newarticles about broad, substantive topics. And where articles exist,a lot of them are stubs.

Wiki Educations Wikipedia Student Program offersinstructors in geology and mineralogy and other subjects the opportunity to fill these content gaps by empoweringstudents to contribute content as a class assignment. For moreinformation, visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Image credit:AlexSpeer, CC BY-SA 4.0,via Wikimedia Commons

The Digital Services Act could require big changes to digitalplatforms. Here are 4 things lawmakers need to know to protectpeople-powered spaces like Wikipedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia,applauds European policymakers efforts to make contentmoderation more accountable and transparent. However, some of theDSAs current provisions and proposed amendments also includerequirements that could put Wikipedias collaborative andnot-for-profit model at risk.

Wikipedias system of open collaboration has enabledknowledge-sharing on a global scale for more than 20 years. It isone of the most beloved websites in the world, as well as one of the mosttrusted sources for up-to-date knowledge about COVID-19. All of this is only made possible bylaws that protect its volunteer-led model. But now, thatpeople-powered model is getting caught in the cross-fires of theDSA proposals.

The current DSA framework is designed to address the operatingmodels of major tech platforms. But a variety of websites,Wikipedia included, dont work in the same way thatfor-profit tech platforms do. Applying a one-size-fits all solutionto the complex problem of illegal content online could stifle adiverse, thriving, and noncommercial ecosystem of onlinecommunities and platforms.

We are calling on European lawmakers to take a morenuanced approach to internet regulation. There is more to theinternet than Big Tech platforms run by multinational corporations.We ask lawmakers to protect and support nonprofit,community-governed, public interest projects like Wikipedia as theDSA proceeds through the European Parliament andCouncil.

We are ready to work with lawmakers to amend the DSA package sothat it empowers and protects the ability of all Europeans tocollaborate in the public interest.

Protect Wikipedia, protect the peoplesinternet.

Here are four things policymakers should know before finalizingthe DSA legislation:

DSA provisions remain overly-focused on removing content throughprescriptive content removal processes. The reality is thatremoving all illegal content from the internet as soon as itappears is as daunting as any effort to prevent and eliminate allcrime in the physical world. Given that the European Union iscommitted to protecting human rights online and offline, lawmakersshould focus on the primary cause of widespread harm online:systems that amplify and spread illegal content.

A safer internet is only possible if DSA provisions address thetargeted advertising business model that drives the spread ofillegal content. As the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugenemphasized in her recent testimony in Brussels, the algorithms driving profits for ad-placements are also at theroot of the problem that the DSA is seeking to address. Newregulation should focus on these mechanisms that maximize the reachand impact of illegal content.

But lawmakers should not be overly focused on Facebook andsimilar platforms. As a non-profit website, Wikipedia is availablefor free to everyone, without ads, and without tracking readerbehavior. Our volunteer-led, collaborative model of contentproduction and governance helps ensure that content on Wikipedia isneutral and reliable. Thousands of editors deliberate, debate, andwork together to decide what information gets included and how itis presented. This works very differently than the centralizedsystems that lean on algorithms to both share information in a waythat maximizes engagement, and to moderate potentially illegal orharmful content.

In Wikipedias 20 years, our global community ofvolunteers has proven that empowering users to share and debatefacts is a powerful means to combat the use of the internet byhoaxers, foreign influence operators, and extremists. It isimperative that new legislation like the DSA fosters space for avariety of web platforms, commercial and noncommercial, tothrive.

Wikipedia has shown that it is possible to create healthyonline environments that are resilient against disinformation andmanipulation. Through nuance and context, Wikipedia offers a modelthat works well to address the intricacies required in contentmoderation. Yes, there might be disagreement amongst volunteers onhow to present a topic, but that discussion yields better, moreneutral, and reliable articles. This process is what has enabled itto be one of the most successful content moderation models in thisday and age.

Brit Stakston, media strategist and Board member of WikimediaSverige

The draft DSAs Article 12 currently states that an onlineprovider has to disclose its terms of serviceits rules andtools for content moderation and that they must be enforcedin a diligent, objective, and proportionate manner.We agree that terms of service should be as transparent andequitable as possible. However, the words objectiveand proportionate leave room for an open, vagueinterpretation. We sympathize with the intent, which is to makecompanies content moderation processes less arbitrary andopaque. But forcing platforms to be objective aboutterms of service violations would have unintended consequences.Such language could potentially lead to enforcement that would makeit impossible for community-governed platforms like Wikipedia touse volunteer-driven, collaborative processes to create new rulesand enforce existing ones that take context and origin of allcontent appropriately into account.

The policies for content and conduct on Wikipedia are developedand enforced by the people contributing to Wikipedia themselves.This model allows people who know about a topic to determine whatcontent should exist on the site and how that content should bemaintained, based on establishedneutrality and reliablesourcing rules. This model, while imperfect, keeps Wikipedianeutral and reliable. As more people engage in the editorialprocess of debating, fact-checking, and adding information,Wikipedia articles tend to become more neutral. Whats more, volunteersdeliberation, decisions, and enforcement actions are publiclydocumented on the website.

This approach to content creation and governance is a far-cryfrom the top-down power structure of the commercial platforms thatDSA provisions target. The DSA should protect and promote spaces onthe web that allow for open collaboration instead of forcingWikipedia to conform to a top-down model.

Article 14 states that online platforms will be responsible forremoving any illegal content that might be uploaded by users, oncethe platforms have been notified of that illegal content. It alsostates that platforms will be responsible for creating mechanismsthat make it possible for users to alert platform providers ofillegal content. These provisions tend to only speak to one type ofplatform: those with centralized content moderation systems, whereusers have limited ability to participate in decisions overcontent, and moderation instead tends to fall on a singular bodyrun by the platform. It is unclear how platforms that fall outsidethis archetype will be affected by the final versions of theseprovisions.

The Wikipedia model empowers the volunteers who edit Wikipediato remove content according to a mutually-agreed upon set of sharedstandards. Thus while the Wikimedia Foundation handles somerequests to evaluate illegal content, the vast majority of contentthat does not meet Wikipedias standards is handled byvolunteers before a complaint is even made to the Foundation. Onesize simply does not fit all in this case.

We fear that by placing legal responsibility for enforcementsolely on service providers and requiring them to uphold strictstandards for content removal, the law disincentivizes systemswhich rely on community moderators and deliberative processes. Infact, these processes have been shown to work well to identify and quickly remove bad content. Theresult would be an online world in which service providers, notpeople, control what information is available online. We areconcerned that this provision will do the exact opposite of whatthe DSA intends by giving more power to platforms, and less topeople who use them.

The best parts of the internet are powered by people, not inspite of them. Article 12 and 14 would require platform operatorsto seize control of all decisions about content moderation, whichwould in turn incentivize or even require the use of automaticcontent detection systems. While such systems can supportcommunity-led content moderation by flagging content for review,they cannot replace humans. If anything, research has uncoveredsystemicbiases and higherror-rates that are all-too-frequently associated with the useof automated tools. Such algorithms can thus further compound theharm posed by amplification. Automated tools are limited in their ability to identify fringe content that may beextreme but still has public interest value. One example of suchcontent are videos documenting human rights abuses, which have been demonstrated to be swiftly removed. Theseexamples only underscore the need to prioritize human context overspeed.

Therefore, European lawmakers should avoid over-reliance on thekind of algorithms used by commercial platforms to moderatecontent. If the DSA forces or incentivizes platforms to deployalgorithms to make judgements about the value or infringing natureof content, we all as digital citizenry miss out onthe opportunity to shape our digital future together.

On Wikipedia, machine learning tools are used as an aid, not areplacement for human-led content moderation. These tools operatetransparently on Wikipedia, and volunteers have the final say inwhat actions machine learning tools might suggest. As we have seen,putting more decision-making power into the hands of Wikipediareaders and editors makes the site more robust andreliable.

It is impossible to trust a perfectalgorithm to moderate content online. There will always beerrors, by malicious intent or otherwise. Wikipedia is successfulbecause it does not follow a predefined model; rather, it relies onthe discussions and consensus of humans instead ofalgorithms.

Maurizio Codogno, longtime Italian Wikipediavolunteer

We urge policymakers to think about how new rules can helpreshape our digital spaces so that collaborative platforms likeours are no longer the exception. Regulation should empower peopleto take control of their digital public spaces, instead ofconfining them to act as passive receivers of content moderationpractices. We need policy and legal frameworks that enable andempower citizens to shape the internets future, rather thanforcing platforms to exclude them further.

Our public interest community is here to engage with lawmakersto help design regulations that empower citizens to improve ouronline spaces together.

Humanitys knowledge is, more often than not, stillinaccessible to many: whether its stored in privatearchives, hidden in little-known databases, or lost in the memoriesof our elders. Wikipedia aims to improve the dissemination ofknowledge by digitizing our heritage and sharing it freely foreveryone online. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequentinfodemic only further remind us of the importance ofspreading free knowledge.

Pierre-Yves Beaudouin, President, WikimediaFrance

How to get in touch with Wikimedias policyexperts

Tech News issue #46, 2021 (November 15, 2021)

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Improving Wikipedias coverage of the climate crisis

As the COP26 summit comes to a close, many people are reflectingon what we can do to help solve the climate crisis. For somestudent editors in Wiki Educations Wikipedia StudentProgram, they already have: theyve helped shape theworlds understanding of climate change and its impacts bysharing scientific information on Wikipedia. While some of theclasses working on the topic have focussed specifically on climatechange, others have been introductory-level compositionclasses.

Graduate students in Gunnar Schades TexasAMclimate change classtook on a host ofimportant topics. The student who re-wrote theClimate change in Texasarticle was able toflesh it out into an excellent article which addresses both thechallenges Texas faces and some of the mitigation approaches.Another, who worked on theMedia coverage of climate changearticle,was able to add information about coverage of recent events likethe Trump Administration and the Australian wildfires.

Other students chose to focus on the science of climate changeand its impacts. Thehistory of climate change sciencehelps tocontextualize what has been done, and can help readers understandthe long history of climate science.Greenhouse and icehouse Earthare the twostates that the Earths climate has fluctuated between.Understanding these two states is important for forecasting futureclimates, now clearer on Wikipedia thanks to that studenteditors work. TheGlobal temperature record,Polar amplification, andTropical cyclones and climatechangearticles highlight the more obvious impacts ofclimate change; all were improved by student editors.TheClimate change and ecosystemsarticle looksat the impact of climate change on the natural systems human lifedepends on.

Effects of climate change on humansand therelatedEffects on climate change on humanhealthare helping to connect the impacts of climatechange to readers. Finally, theClimate change artlooks at climate changein another way, delving into some of the ways we react ashumans.

Erin LarsonsClimate Changeclass at Alaska PacificUniversity worked on articles related to mechanismslikeCO₂fertilization effect,theMethane chimneyeffect, andtheTree creditsarticle. A Fordham Universitystudent in Paul BartlettsEnvironmentalEconomicsclassClimate engineering.

Yale University students in HeleneLandemoresDemocracy, Science, and ClimateJusticeclass focused on a different set of articles. Onestudent expanded thePublic opinion on climate change, addinginformation about public perceptions of climate change in India tothe article. Other students expanded theCarbon taxandClimate change policy in the UnitedStatesarticles.

Matthew BergmansIntroduction to Policy Analysisclass atthe University of California at San Diego made important additionsto theEconomics of climate changemitigationandClimate change policy inCaliforniaarticles adding information about a series ofbills passed in the state. Other students contributed totheGreenhouse gas emissions by the United States,theUnited States withdrawal from the ParisAgreement, and theSan Diego Climate Action Plan.

Students from the University of California at Merced in MichelleTonconisExtinction Events and Stewardshipclassalso worked on theEffects of climate change onhumansarticle; as humans, this topic is close to home forall of us.

While classes like these, which had a science or policy relatedto climate change are likely to contribute a lot to the topic,its an issue that almost everyone is aware of, and manyclasses with a more general focus were also able to make goodcontributions.

A University of Massachusetts Boston student in BrittanyPetersonsComposition 102class, for example, wasable to improve theClimate change in the UnitedStatesarticle, while a College of DuPage student editorin Timothy HenningsensResearch, Writing, and the Production ofKnowledgeclass was able to improve theEffects of climate changearticle.

One of the participants in Joseph A. RosssFreshman Seminarat the University of NorthCarolina at Greensboro worked on theIndividual action on climatechangearticle.

All told, students from a wide range of backgrounds chose towork on articles related to climate change, demonstrating the factthat especially for younger people, climate change has a hugeimpacts on their lives and their futures. By improving theinformation available to the public, student editors can helppeople understand the topic, and cut through a lot of themisinformation that continues to persist in the space.

If youre a university instructor wondering what you cando about the climate crisis, join these instructors! Ask yourstudents to improve Wikipedias coverage of climate changetopics. Visitteach.wikiedu.orgto get started.

Image credit:InsureOur Future, PDM-owner, via Wikimedia Commons

Sabina Nowak a Polish scientist, an expert on European wolves

When the notability and the quality of a Wikipedia article isassessed, it is obvious that an encyclopedic article is not bestserved with a list of papers Dr Nowak contributed to; the Scholiatemplate provides more in depth information. However, Scholia onlyfunctions when the papers are known and attributed.

In Wikidata, there were two items that needed to be merged.Three papers were linked, an additional nine could be attributed.Additional identifiers were added, of particular significance isGoogle Scholar as it knows many if not most of the papers of ascientist.

Adding missing papers is easy; you search with a DOI for thepaper and when Wikidata does not know it, it is suggested to add itusing thequickstatements tool. The best bit is that whenCrosRef knows the ORCiD identifier for an author, it will eitheridentify the author or will add the ORCiD identifier as aqualifier.

Adding the Scholia template to any Wikipedia article aboutpublished scholars makes sense; the data is a "work in progress".It changes as more papers and co-authors become known. It is alsoan invitation to our communities and scientists to improve both theWikipedia article and the data represented in the Scholias for anyscientist.

Thanks, GerardM

SMW at ENDORSE conference

SMW at ENDORSEconference

March 16, 2021

Semantic MediaWiki will be presented at the European DataConference on Reference Data and Semantics (ENDORSE).

On March 18, 2021 (day 3), between 16:55 and 17:25, Bernhard Krabina will present"Linked Open Data with SMW". For the program, see this webpage for the detailedprogram of the conference.

This Month in GLAM: October 2021

How we learned to stop worrying and loved the (event) flow

Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is probably the most common way toaccess Wikidatawell, data. Its basically an openSPARQL endpoint, so it allows everybody (and I do meaneverybody) to ask for any data contained within this vastgraph of knowledge. You want to know about all the famous cats?Check. List of all Pokemon?Heres your very own Pokedex! Why not go a bit meta and find a list of scientificpapers on Wikidata? We got thattoo!

Unfortunately, hosting an open query engine comes with a bunchof limitations and provisions.

For some this may sound obvious: Wikidata is not Wikidata QueryService (and vice versa). Whether you belong to that enlightenedgroup or not, there still may be some subtle distinctions here thatarent immediately evident.

Wikidata itself is a service built on Wikibase. You can access any entity andsee triples that comprise it. For every page like this one, you can find a pagelike this.They contain (mostly) the same information, but one is designed tobe readable by humans, the other by applications and services (andtech-savvy humans). The latter represents the data as provided andused by WDQS but its not what youll actuallyget from WDQS.

To be able to serve SPARQL queries, we first need to feedBlazegraph, WDQSs backend RDF engine, WDQS forour current situation, the backend RDF engine, Blazegraphthedata it needs. We use TTL (also called Turtle, because why not?)format, but we do not feed the data directly from Wikidata (or itsWikibase). The process, which we call munging,isnt exactly complicated; at a glance, it sorts out thedata, strips the types (not required for SPARQL), and validates theinput.

Once prepared, the data is indexed in Blazegraph, which mostlyinvolves heavy denormalization into specific data structures (Iwont go into detail here).

Thats it! Easy, right? Not when youre at 11Btriples, dozens of instances of Blazegraph, and a constant flow ofchanges all while users are banging on your serviceit isnt.

Feeding the data into Blazegraph sounds simple enough until youlearn that Blazegraph doesnt represent the data likeWikidata does. It doesnt contain entities; it containstriples. When an entity gets edited, it may gain some triples, andit can lose some triples. In the end, we cannot simply feedBlazegraph new triples. We need to remove stale ones as well. Sohow can we do that?

The answer is really easy: just check with Blazegraph to seewhich triples it has or not, feed in the new ones, delete the oldones and call it a day. Problem solved!

The funny thing about problems with easy solutions is that, atscale, they often dont have easy solutionsthinkeating a hamburger vs eating ten. Feeding Blazegraph isntexactly like eating hamburgers. While you can always get nine morepeople into a diner (depending on your COVID-19 lockdown situation)to help with those, Blazegraph doesnt allow more than onethread to update its indices. Additionally, parts of the processare read/write exclusive, meaning that writes interfere with readsand vice versa.

With changes constantly flowing in and Blazegraph getting slowerdue to the sheer size of the data and users querying the service,WDQS inevitably started to lag behind.

As I mentioned in the beginning, WDQS is a very popular way ofaccessing Wikidata. So much so that having it lag behind Wikidatawas a huge user experience issue. We had to implement some way offixing that.

There are two things you can do if you want to synchronize twodata streams, or in our case, changes made to Wikidata and dataindexed in WDQS. You can speed up the slower one (WDQS) or slowdown the faster one (Wikidata). While the second option sounds lessthan optimal, its also much faster to implement and takesinto account multiple sources of lag so that was themechanism that ended up being implemented.

Most services out there implement some kind of a throttlingmechanismbasically a way to make sure that the trafficdoesnt overwhelm the service. Its no different withWikidata. Apart from your usual query traffic throttling, it alsoimplements a throttle on writes. Maxlag is the name of theparameter that drives that throttle. This is the maximal value ofupdate lag between Wikidata and services that serve its data. WDQSis the biggest contributor to that lag.

To put it bluntly, WDQS slows down how fast a bot or a user canedit Wikidata. Obviously, we mostly think about bots herenotonly do they account for most of Wikidatas traffic, buttheir rate of changes is also vastly larger than what humansgenerate. WDQS was already slowing down Wikidatas growth andwe didnt want that.

The current WDQS update process has its own issues, too. Themain one is that it isnt really scalable. On top of that, itis known to occasionally lose updates, mostly due to the eventualconsistency of downstream data sources. We could spend time tobetter account for them and work on making the update processscalable, but it wouldnt really make sense. We would stillneed to deal with the fact that Blazegraph doesnt like ususing it to resolve entity differences. Including all of that in aneffort to improve the existing updater sounded like a full-onrewrite. We decided to do an actual full-on rewrite.

Obviously, replicating the current design of the updater made nosense even if we worked on making it more scalable because the design itself had fatal flows. We still hoped that wecould find some low-hanging (or about 2.5 meter / 8.2 feet hanging)fruit by making the update process work more closely withblazegraph and thus fixing some of the most pressing issues. Wesoon realized that tying WDQS closer to Blazegraph is the oppositeof what we should be doing. It was clear that we might be movingaway from that technology at some point.

Deciding to base the architecture around event streaming was anext logical step. Incoming changes are already available asstreams; you can read more about them here. Notany old event processing would do, though. We wanted the newupdater to actually be aware of the state of entities so it wouldactually know which triples to remove and which to add.

Thats how the idea of using Flink was born.

Featured imagecredit: File:Pika Ladakh 2017-08-06, TizianaBardelli, CC BY-SA4.0

This is part one of a three-part series. Read part two here. Read part three here.

The trouble with triples

Like plants, Wikidata entities can be small, with just a stemand a leaf, or large, with many branches and dense foliage. To knowhow a plant evolves as it grows you need to capture its stateswhile it changes; for plants, a solution is offered throughtime-lapsephotography. To track the changes made to an entity in Wikidatato the triplestore, a similar approach is used: take a snapshot ofthe entity after every edit and send it as a whole to thetriplestore.

But as the entity grows the size of the data required to be sentto the triplestore grows as well. This is inefficient as individualchanges made to Wikidata entities are small. Generally, only oneleaf is added, removed, or changed in a single edit. The new WDQSStreaming Updater makes it possible to identify what has changed onthe entity after an edit and only ship this information to thetriplestore.

Spotting differences between two snapshots can be challenging.Fortunately, the semantics of an RDF document can be expressedusing the settheory, and its relative complement operation could not find a betteruse case.

We, the Search Platform Team, thought that it would be trivialto capture the difference between two versions of the same entity.We evaluated some previous attempts at defining a patchingtechnique (TurtlePatch andRDF-patch) for RDFstores and whether they would meet our requirements:

Unfortunately, none of the techniques we evaluated could meetour requirements when it comes to RDF blanknodes. In the context of the WikibaseRDF model, blank nodes are used to denote the concept ofSomeValue (mistakenlyreferred to as an unknown value in the UI). In the RDFspecification, blank nodes are locally scoped to the file or RDFstore where they are used, and so do not have persistent orportable identifiers. Because blank nodes are thus notreferenceable, the triples using them cannot be deletedexplicitly.

Since the triplestore we use does not allow tracking theidentity of the blank nodes, we decided to experiment with skolemization,the approach suggested by RDF 1.1, and the patching techniques weevaluated. Unfortunately, there was no reasonable way to do thiswithout introducing a breaking change, so we attempted toease the transition by introducing the wikibase:isSomeValue() custom function. We alsoprovided a test service athttps://query-preview.wikidata.org for users and botowners to anticipate any potential problems for their usecases.

Conceptually, what we had to build seemed relativelysimplean updater that would consume a stream of changes madeto the entities, fetch the RDF of each entity and generate a difffrom the previously seen version, and apply it to thetriplestore.

However, complications arose as we got into the details, andthis led us to evaluate Flink, a stateful streaming processor, to do the job.

A novice Flink developer discovering all the cool stuff thatFlink can do (Curriculum Vitae, Marble Run by Alex Schmid, photocredit Gwen and James Anderson, commons link)

Building diffs requires reconstructing the revision history of aWikidata entity, and the Mediawiki event bus can assist us withseveral topics:

Because events may not be well ordered in their individualtopics, and also because we read from multiple Kafka topics withvarying throughputs, we cannot simply process them as we read them.Instead, we have to reorder them so that the events can beprocessed in the same order seen in the revision history.

Flink provides a handy time window operator for this; we decided to use tumbling windows for their simplicity and for their ability toroute late events to a side output.

With events properly ordered we can then determine whatoperation we want to perform:

These operations require keeping the state of what waspreviously seen and knowing that we can also detect somediscrepancies. For instance:

Similar to what we do for late events, we capture suchdiscrepancies in a side-output for later analysis andreconciliation.

Generally speaking, writing a Flink application is quitestraightforward once you fully understand its core concept of watermarks.

When building a Flink application you will rapidly learn thatyou cannot claim victory without running a backfill test. Simplyput, backfilling means reading historical events stored in theinput queues. What we learned here is that Flink is optimized forthroughput and will consume events as fast as it can, putting allthe components of the pipeline under maximum load.

If the components are not fast enough to handle the throughput,Flink can apply back-pressure to instruct the source components toslow down. Back-pressure is not something you want to see in normalconditions (real-time speed), but it is a necessary evil whenbackfillingespecially when the Kafka throughput is highcompared to what your pipeline can handle. It allows Flink to keepevents outside of the pipeline when they dont have a chanceof getting processed in a reasonable amount of time.

It is a bit like deciding to start waiting on a 200-meters line atthe entrance of the Louvre a few dozen minutes before they closethe doors. You may be a bit disappointed to realize that you waitedfor nothing and will have to come back the next day.

This is basically what happened during the first backfill testwe did. By using windows to re-order the events, we stopped thepropagation of the back-pressure. Events are added to the windowstate, and this is very cheap compared to the rest of the pipeline.Unfortunately, these windows have to be fired at some point. Sincewe have to deal with idled sources, the watermark may jump ahead intime very quickly causing too many timers to be fired at the sametime and moving millions of events to the next part of thepipeline, which is the slowest.

This caused a vicious cycle: when all the timers were applied inone go, they blocked the checkpoint barriers for too long, causingthe pipeline to fail. With the timers being held in the savedcheckpoints, there was no way to recover from them; it was toolate.

The solution was to reconnect the flow between operators(removing the need to buffer and create timers) so that theback-pressure could be propagated to the source. The idea wassimply to partially re-order the events. Since most events (95%)are well ordered and deletions are relatively rare, we couldadvance most of the events without buffering them. Unfortunately,for this, we had to give up some nice high-level features likewindows and write our own process function. We would like to thankVerverica for their helpon this project by providing training and support.

Dealing with small RDF patches provides several advantages. Thesize of the payload sent to the triplestore is a lot smaller thanwith a full reconciliation techniquewhich sends the wholeentity graph. It also allows you to batch more edits together. Ourtesting shows that between 5% and 20% of the triples can becompressed, thanks to batching.

Detecting some discrepancies and inconsistencies becomespossible, too. When applying the RDF patch, the triplestore is ableto tell us how many mutations were actually performed compared tohow many were expected.

Performance-wise we saw a noticeable increase in throughput (upto nine times faster in the best case scenario) with an average of3600 edits per minute, while our initial goal was only 1000edits.

Other metrics on the Blazegraph servers saw favorable shifts aswell:

Working with smaller patches gives us more flexibility in tuningthe throughput. In the current system, the payload sent to thetriplestore can be very large, and we had to limit the number ofentities updated in a single batch because of that. Did you knowthat you can list the longest pages of a wiki using Special:LongPages?Can you guess the size of the longest item onWikidata? Now that we have smaller payloads (ten times smalleron average), we can trade latency for throughput or vice versa bybatching more or fewer patches together depending on ourneeds.

So yes it makes a big difference!

The good news is that we finally had a fully functioning stream ofRDF changes that could be applied to the triplestore much fasterthan the current system; the bad news is that it was far from beingdone, as we still had to find a home for Flink in ourinfrastructure.

Featured image credit: File:Three leaves (293686026).jpg, CaitrianaNicholson, CC BY-SA2.0

This post is part two in a three-part series. Read part one here. Read part three here.

Getting the WDQS Updater to production: a tale of productionreadiness for Flink on Kubernetes at WMF

We created a Streaming Updater for Wikidata Query Service(WDQS), and it runs on FlinkAwesome, right? The newStreaming Updater will help keep WDQS up and running as Wikidatacontinues to add information daily.Developing a plan for a new updater was exciting, and deploying thenew updater had a lot of lessons learned about Flink in productionenvironments.

The Streaming Updater was running on YARN in the analytics cluster for the beta users, and we neededto get it to production, aka Kubernetes (K8s). Our Site ReliabilityEngineering (SRE) team joked that we were deploying a job runner(Flink) on a job runner (Kubernetes).

We thought we could easily deploy a nice Flink applicationcluster on Kubernetes! No problem, right?Just bundle thatStreaming Updater jar in the existing base Flink image.Thats what the cool kids do.

Haha nope. We had to rebuild the wheel.

Since the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) K8s cluster only allowsbase images from the small selection of internal base images, andthey dont allow plain Dockerfiles,we used an internal tool called Blubber.Dockerfiles can vary wildly from developer to developer and inorder to have standards around layered filesystems, caching,directory context, obscure config format, and inheritance, not tomention testing, Blubber is used to avoid common pitfalls. Blubberis a fun templating tool that takes your YAML file and turns itinto a WMF-approved Dockerfile. Then theres a WMF pipelinethat takes your nice Dockerfile, creates your image, and loads itinto the WMF docker registry, which is all pretty nice.

Great! It took some time adjusting the official Flink base imageto our needs, but we had an image that we could put in a Helm chart. Now, wewere good to go!

Again, not at all.

WMF Helm charts follow certain standards, and theres alot of boilerplate bits that are intended to be helpful for people.But for an app that is running another app, theyre not thathelpful. The charts were tweaked, merging the best of the Flink K8s docs with the WMF Helm chart standards.

But we still werent quite ready.

Flink does stateful computationand needs somewhere tostore said state. Flink doesnt need to store a ton of datalike how a database does, but it does need to store checkpointsthat ensure that the data computation happening is secure andconsistent. We decided to go with OpenStack Swift sinceit was already supported by the Foundation. That required adding anauthorization for Swift to the Flink filesystem plugin. Failedevents and other types of events that didnt work outcant be stored in Swift, so those needed to go to Kafka.That happens via the WMF event platform.

And then theres the whole running in production thing.How would we stop a Flink job when we wanted to update theStreaming Updater job? Could we stop it and have a savepoint? Couldwe resume from a savepoint? Theres not much we could findonline about managing stopping and restarting jobs from savepointsoutside of, make your Flink cluster highlyavailable.

Highly available for Flink does not mean 24/7uptime. It means that if the job manager is stopped in any way, thejob can resume from the last savepoint. Thats great, butthat still didnt answer the question of what would happen ifwe chose to stop the job (to upgrade, etc).

This is where the Flink session mode comes into play. When youdeploy Flink as a session cluster, you decouple the jar from theFlink application. Then you can stop the Flink job with a savepointwithout having to take down the whole application cluster.

Just when you thought there were no more blockers:Surprise!

Everything in the WMF Kubernetes cluster has to be deployed inboth of our data centers. But Flink isnt designed formulti-region. Honestly, the whole discussion about working withmultiple data centers and how a Kubernetes-powered Flinkapplication might work in that environment deserves a separate blogpost on its own, so Ill spare the details here. In the end,we decided on a solution that puts a separate Streaming Updater ineach data center thanks, to which we didnt need toworry about pushing the data across the world. It also made moresense to us, because our Kafka instances are mostly separated thatway as well (with the help of the Mirror Maker, a part of Kafkathat can synchronize topic data between data centers).

Deploying the Streaming Updater, while by far the mostcomplicated part of the process, wasnt all that we needed todo. At the time, WDQS used the old update process and the serviceitself was serving live traffic.

The initial plan we came up with was relatively easy:

1. Depool (remove from the load balancer) a single datacenter.

2. Disable the old updater.

3. Reload the data on all hosts.

4. Enable the new Streaming Updater.

5. Pool that data center back.

6. Repeat for the other data center (simplifying step three bycopying the data from the already migrated data center).

Unfortunately, it turned out there was a flaw in this plan. Sofar, we assumed that a single data center could handle all thetraffic. It turned out that that isnt always the case andturning off a data center in a way that it cannot be immediatelyplugged back in could result in a catastrophic, long-term WDQSfailure.

In light of that, we decided to change the approach and plug outone host at a time to transfer the data from another, alreadymigrated host. It meant some inconsistencies along the waythe old updater was known to lose updates and the new onefared much better, but that sounded better than potential (andprobable) service-wide downtime.

In the end, we were, again, surprised by the performance of thenew solution. While we had some initial delays to the migrationprocess, once started, it actually went much faster than weexpected. Thepost-import catch-up took 24 hours compared to the two weeksusually required by the old system. Then the rest of theprocess to replicate the Blazegraph data across the server fleetwas done in four workdays, about half the time we assumed it wouldtake!

Work that started more than a year and a half before (with theresearch phase starting way before that), was finally done.

Its somewhat hard to celebrate remotely, but due to anamazing feat of logistics, all around the world (Thanks, Janet! ), we got cupcakes

The Streaming Updater is meant to be a more stable, scalable,and consistent solution to our update process. Its now beendeployed for more than two weeks and its clear that italready fulfilled at least part of that promise.

We decided that with the current setup, our Service LevelObjective (SLO) for WDQS is to have an edit latency under 10minutes at least 99% of the time. The graph below shows thefulfillment of that objective, calculated over a day for a periodof 90 days. The vertical blue line denotes the lastinstances deployment of the new Streaming Updater on 18 Oct2021 note that the instability after that is caused by theone-day calculation period.

Its clear that the stability is better, at least so far.Its not perfect yet, because our backend, Blazegraph, stillhas its issues and affects the latency in general, but theStreaming Updater is doing its job.

Looking back, we should have started with a Flink sessioncluster and not worried so much about bundling the StreamingUpdater jar. That takes away a lot of network dependencies andother ephemera. We were so focused on the Streaming Updaterapplication that we allowed that to drive all of our decisions. Ofcourse, there are needs that are new updater-specific that domatter, but just getting Flink working first would have made somethings more apparent.

It felt easier to have a barebones version of Flink that wasused for Beta testing running with YARN. It takes one line to spinup a Flink cluster, but that cluster in no way is ready for aproduction environment. Focusing on having a production suitableFlink cluster earlier would have been better since we had to end upchanging our application architecture to accommodate differentproduction requirements, like multi-datacenter and using Swift.

Everything else that came up didnt really feel likesomething we could have known about before. If yourethinking of getting Flink deployed in your production environment,I would see if its possible to have a separate K8s clusterfor it. Of course, all of our applications are namespaced, butFlink as an application has different security concerns than theaverage application.

Flink is complex and so is Kubernetes, so putting them togetheris not the simplest process, along with the other moving parts ofstorage and multiple datacenters. Figuring out the Flink joblifecycle and maintenance has been tricky, especially for along-running job, but overall better than having an update scriptthat leaves stale data in the Wikidata Query Service.

Deploying a stateful application can be tricky, but the benefitsof Flink and being able to scale the update process is worth it.With Flink, WDQS will be able to receive updates as they happenwhich means less load on Blazegraph since updates are incrementalversus handling a bunch of changes at once from a dump. Theknowledge gained from using Flink with Kubernetes will be helpfulto the Foundation, since other teams have been following thisprocess carefully and hope to utilize Flink for their ownsolutions.

Featured image credit: File:Elakala Waterfalls Swirling Pool Mossy Rocks.jpg, Forest Wander,CCBY-SA 2.0

This is part three of a three-series. Read part one here. Read part two here.

The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts

Should online communities require people to create accountsbefore participating?

This question has been a source of disagreement among people whostart or manage online communities for decades. Requiring accountsmakes some sense since users contributing without accounts are acommon source of vandalism, harassment, and low quality content. Intheory, creating an account can deter these kinds of attacks whilestill making it pretty quick and easy for newcomers to join. Also,an account requirement seems unlikely to affect contributors whoalready have accounts and are typically the source of most valuablecontributions. Creating accounts might even help community membersbuild deeper relationships and commitments to the group in waysthat lead them to stick around longer and contribute more.

In a new paper published in Communication Research, Iworked with Aaron Shaw providean answer. We analyze data from natural experimentsthat occurred when 136 wikis on Fandom.com started requiring useraccounts. Although we find strong evidence that the accountrequirements deterred low quality contributions, this came at asubstantial (and usually hidden) cost: a much larger decrease inhigh quality contributions. Surprisingly, the cost includeslost contributions from community members who hadaccounts already, but whose activity appears to have been catalyzedby the (often low quality) contributions from those withoutaccounts.

A version of this post was first posted on the Community Data Science blog.

The full citation for the paper is: Hill,Benjamin Mako, and Aaron Shaw. 2020. The Hidden Costs ofRequiring Accounts: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from PeerProduction. Communication Research, 48 (6): 77195.https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650220910345.

If you do not have access to the paywalledjournal, please check out this pre-print or get in touch with us. Wehave also released replication materials for thepaper, including all the data and code used to conduct theanalysis and compile the paper itself.

Filling gaps in marine biodiversity

Reef-building corals rely on photosynthetic symbionts to be ableto build reefs. Soft corals, which dont rely on thesesymbiotic algae, are able to grow in much deeper water. In the caseofPrimnoa pacifica, this meansthat are are able to live in cold, dark waters as much as 6 kmbelow the ocean surface. Student editors in RandiRotjansMarine Biologyclass took a short stub andconverted it into avery substantial articleabout thiskeystone species in sea bottom ecosystems in the Gulf ofAlaska.

Before students in this class started editing, the article aboutthe genusPrimnoaconsisted of just a singlesentence (along with an infobox):Primnoais agenus of soft corals in the family Primnoidae. A reader who triedto look up information on this genus would have found almost nouseful information and no link toPrimnoapacificaor mention of any of the other four species inthe genus. Because Wikipedia ranks so high in search enginerankings, people trying to learn moreaboutPrimnoamight have ended up with lessinformation than they would have had if they had clicked on anotherlink. Fortunately, students in this class also expandedthePrimnoaarticleinto somethingthats substantial, informative, and useful to readers.

All told, student editors in this marine biology class were ableto make significant improvements to 50 Wikipedia articlesincludingPhronima sedentaria(aspecies of amphipod),Elacatinuspuncticulatus(a goby),Ulva australis(a speciesof sea lettuce),Canthigasterrostrata(a pufferfish) andOphiocomascolopendrina(a brittle star). Species articles onWikipedia tend to have a fairly standard layout (which you can seein ourEditing Wikipedia articles aboutspecieshandout), and this makes it easy for studentsto understand where to slot various pieces of information into anarticle.

Species and genus articles remain areas with a lot of gaps onWikipedia. By adding species articles to Wikipedia, students canhelp people to understand their importance in ecological contextsor to conservation. If Wikipedia has no article about a species orjust has a short stub, it can be difficult for people to get asense of the role or importance of the species. And because manypeople expect Wikipedia to be more or less complete, the fact thatan article doesnt exist about a topic is often interpretedto mean that the topic is unimportant. So when student editors workon species articles, theyre doing important work informingthe public.

To learn more about assigning students to edit species articles,visit teach.wikiedu.org.

Image credit:q.phia,CC BY2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Outreachy report #26: October 2021

Highlights We finished reviewing initial applications We openedour contribution period We worked really hard on our job postingand our hiring process I gave a talk about remote working andOutreachy and joined a panel about the role of computing in apost-pandemic world at SECOMP 2021 I interviewed one LFX mentorabout their experiences with the program This months reportwill be a bit different.

Why library catalogers should learn Wikidata

Linked data is one of thehot topics in the library cataloging world right now, saysDominican University library and information science professorKaren Snow. Thats what prompted Karen to take one of WikiEducations recent Wikidata Institute classes.

The Wikidata Institute meetstwice a week for three weeks and provides participants a detailedintroduction to Wikidata, the open linked datarepository.

I felt it was essentialfor me to keep up-to-date on linked data projects that my studentsneed to know about, Karen says. The course contentmade it really easy to get started making edits in Wikidata. I alsoappreciated the synchronous Zoom sessions twice a week to talkthrough Wikidata issues with others who were also novices. Therewas no judgment, only encouragement, which really helped me getover my initial fear!

As part of the course, Karenedited several Wikidata items for cataloging-related people,especially those from the critical cataloging movement, suchas Hope A. Olson and Sanford Berman.

It has been funresearching some of my favorite topics! she says.What I like most about editing Wikidata is that I feel likeI am making a positive contribution to the linked datacommunity.

As someone who teaches in alibrary and information science department, Karen feels courseslike ours are important professional development. Prior to takingour course, she said it was difficult to imagine how linked datawould change library cataloging processes on a purely practicallevel.

How linked data willaffect library catalogs is still murky to me, but working withWikidata has helped me appreciate the practical potential of linkeddata, she says. I can imagine that otherprofessionals would gain similar insights working withWikidata.

While the openness of Wikidatais a bit of a challenge as a library cataloger whohas spent many years learning to follow standards, Wikidatasmore open approach still gives me a bit of anxiety Karen says the thing about Wikidata that daunts her the most is theenormity of the undertaking. Her own edits are a small dropin the massive information bucket, she says. Nevertheless,shes committed to continuing to add to Wikidata. Sincewrapping up the class, shes continued to edit Wikidataitems, including creating her first brand new item.

It was terrifying andexciting! she says.

To take a course like the oneKaren took, visit wikiedu.org/wikidata.

Image credit: HalloweenHJB, CC BY 3.0, viaWikimedia Commons

e-Privacy: our quick fix to help nonprofits and protect consent

The ePrivacy Regulation could potentially makecommunications better by setting a firm standard on how onlinetools can and cannot be used in profiling and surveillingindividuals. We became directly interested in the proposal for aregulation when we realised that the proposed rules on how ourchapters and affiliates can communicate with their supporters areambiguous. Here is the breakdown of the problems and waysout.

The Regulation concerning the respect for private life and theprotection of personal data in electronic communications (a fullname of a Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications, orePrivacy Regulation) is now subject to trilogue negotiations.We specifically look into provisions on the scope of directmarketing. As much as we dont market anyservices or products for sale to individuals, we all want to keepin touch with our supporters. According to the ePrivacy proposalsuch communication falls under the definition of direct marketing.This concerns organisations in our movement that contactindividuals to solicit donations or to encourage them to volunteerin various ways in support of our movementsmission.

Currently in several Member States, based on the ePrivacy Directive and subsequent national laws,nonprofits have the right to contact individuals who they were intouch with before, on an opt-out basis. It means that while theypresent a new initiative or a fundraising campaign, they need toprovide the contacted people with a possibility to refuse receivingsuch information in the future.

We want to maintain this opportunity, if the provisions of theePrivacy Regulation include communication by the nonprofits beconsidered direct marketing, as it seems to be the case now. Afterall, Wikimedia chapters around Europe need to be in touch withtheir supporters in alignment with privacy protections.

It is evident from the European Commissionsproposal that the legislator meant to include nonprofits in theopportunity that they already enjoy in many Europeanjurisdictions.

In the draft, this framework is provided for commercial entitiesthat will be able to continue to use these electronic contactdetails for direct marketing of its own similar products orservices only if customers are clearly and distinctly given theopportunity to object. Concretely, the proposal states that naturalor legal persons may use electronic communications services for thepurposes of sending direct marketing communications to end-userswho are natural persons that have given their consent [art. 16(1)].It also provides that the sender may use these electronic contactdetails for direct marketing of its own similar products orservices only if customers are clearly and distinctly given theopportunity to object [art. 16(2)].

From the reading of these provisions it seems that thelegislator may have forgotten the non-profit activities such ascollecting donations that are neither tied to information aboutproducts nor received in exchange for services. Why shouldntthe nonprofits enjoy equal rights?

Looking further into the text, the proposed recital 32 statesthat direct marketing refers to any form of advertising, and inaddition to the offering of products and services for commercialpurposes it also applies to messages sent by non-profitorganisations to support the purposes of the organisation. However,the permission to use e-mail contact details as outlined in art.16(2) itself is only further elaborated upon in recital 33 whichdirectly refers to existing customerrelationship and offering of similar products orservices (emphases added).

As we see from recitals 32 and 33, the text is ambiguous. Thereis a danger that the permission will not be interpreted as applyingto messages sent by non-profit organisations to support thepurposes of the organisation they dont havecustomers nor do they offer products or services in the commercialsense.

The current wording results in elevated risk of a courtinterpretation. If a nonprofit acts on the understanding based onrecital 32, somebody may challenge that decision based on thenarrower scope of recital 33. This would put a considerable burdenon both the nonprofits in member states and those who operate on anEU-wide scale.

The solution is to bring parity between communications oncommercial relationships and those undertaken by non-profitorganisations to support the purposes of the organisation. It canbe done by introducing nonprofits into recital 33. Even better,they should also be mentioned in article 16(2).

It is evident from the European Commissions proposal thatthe legislator meant to include nonprofits in the opportunity thatthey already enjoy in many European jurisdictions. Here we have aclear case where an intervention is easy and in alignment with theobjectives of all parties in the trilogues. We are asking Membersof the European Parliament and Members States to introduce thishelpful tweak that is in practice a quick fix.

Tech News issue #45, 2021 (November 8, 2021)

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This weeklyOSM was produced by Nordpfeil,NunoMASAzevedo,PierZen,SK53,Strubbl,TheSwavu,arnalielsewhere,derFred.

Production Excellence #37: October 2021

Howd we do in our strive for operational excellence lastmonth? Read on to find out!

There were 4 documented incidents last month. This is currentlyon average, compared to the past five years (per Incident graphs).

2021-10-08 network provider
Impact: For upto an hour, some regions experienced a partialconnectivity outage. This primarily affected the US East Coast for~13 minutes, and Russia for 1 hour. It was caused by a routingproblem with one of several redundant network providers.

2021-10-22 eqiad networking
Impact: For ~40 minutes clients that are normally geographicallyrouted to Eqiad experienced connection or timeout errors. We lostabout 7K req/s during this time. After initial recovery, Eqiad wasready and repooled in ~10 minutes.

2021-10-25 s3 db replica
Impact: For ~30min MediaWiki backends were slower than usual. For~12 hours, many wiki replicas were stale for Wikimedia CloudServices such as Toolforge.

2021-10-29 graphite
Impact: During a server upgrade, historical data was lost for asubset of Graphite metrics. Some were recovered via the redundantserver, but others were lost as the redundant was also upgradedsince then and lost some in a similar fashion.

Remember to review and schedule Incident Follow-up work in Phabricator, which arepreventive measures and tech debt mitigations written down after anincident is concluded. Read about past incidents at Incident status on Wikitech.

Norwegian blue

298 bugs were up on the board.
We solved 20 of those over the past thirty days.

How many might now be left unexplored?
We also added new bugs to our database.

Half those bugs are pining for their fjord.
The other 23 carry on, with their dossiers.

All in all, 301 bugs up on the board.

In October, 49 new tasks were reported as productionerrors. Of these, we resolved 26, and 23 remain unresolved andcarry forward to the next month.

Previously, the production error workboard held an accumulatedtotal of 298 still-open error reports. We resolved 20 of those.Together with the 23 new errors carried over from October, thisbrings us to 301 unresolved errors on the board.

For the month-over-month numbers, refer to the spreadsheet data.

Take a look at the workboard and look for tasks that could useyour help.

ViewWorkboard

Issues carried over from recent months:

Thank you to everyone who helped by reporting, investigating, orresolving problems in Wikimedia production. Thanks!

Until next time,

Timo Tijhof

Hey, I actually wrote the wiki article on that!

Pamela Kalas is an Associate Professor of Teaching in theDepartment of Zoology at the University of British Columbia (UBC),Vancouver. She would like to acknowledge the two UBC staff whosupported the assignment from behind the scenes: Will Engle(Strategist, Open Education Initiatives) and Ria Namba (OpenEducational Resources Developer), as well as the Wiki Educationteam. Evan Warner is a PhD candidate in Genome Science andTechnology and a Graduate Teaching Assistant at UBC.

We first incorporated a collaborative Wikipedia assignment intoour medium-size, upper-level biology class two years ago. Theintention was to give students an opportunity to learn somethingabout a relevant topicand practice synthesizing thisinformationby expanding a Wikipedia stub of their ownchoosing. Seeing the students enthusiasm for this assignmentand the excellent work that they produced (about 22,000 words and218 citations contributed), we decided to repeat it in the 2020-21academic year, and take a more deliberate approach in documentingstudents experiences and their perceived learning.

A thematic analysis of their final reflection assignmentsconfirmed our anecdotal observations: students reported anoverwhelmingly positive experience filled with enthusiasm,excitement, and pride about making an authentic contribution tosuch a major information source that they themselves regularly use.In their own words:

It is really satisfyingto go look at the page and see all my hard work for anyone to useand benefit from! I am really proud of the work I put in and hopethat students will be able to use this information to understandDNA constructs better. It is super exciting and I hope that theinformation stays up on the page.

I feel really good aboutit. As mentioned before, it feels good to be contributing to awebsite that I benefitted lots from in myundergrad.

I feel that itsone of the most meaningful projects Ive done for schoolwork! Often I write papers and complete projects just to present infront of class. With this Wikipedia page, I actually feel likeIm contributing back to the scientific community and helpingothers learn about this topic. Hopefully Wikipedia projects likethis one will be implicated in more classes in thefuture.

Although the course has been generally well-liked for manyyears, this is certainly the first time that an individualassignment has received such high praise from students!

Interestingly, when prompted about sharing what they learnedabout Wikipedia, most students expressed interest or surprise indiscovering how the editing process works, and in many cases thisaltered their views about Wikipedia and its credibility as aninformation source. And it was not only the students becoming moreeducated about Wikipedia; there were some a-hamoments for the teaching team, too! Considering how ubiquitousWikipedia has become in our lives, this was a wonderful opportunityto all learn together about how its articles come to be.

Students also identified several skills that the Wikipediaassignment helped them improve, including: researching informationand evaluating sources, knowledge translation, andteamwork/collaboration skills that not only align manycompetencies deemed essential for biology graduates, but are alsoamong the most relevant and transferable trans-disciplinaryskills.

While a number of these skills can be developed and practiced instandard university assignments, the unique element of having areal (and large!) audience seemed to enhance students levelof care and investment in the assignment, as illustrated by thiscomment from a course alumna:

There is a higher burdenof responsibility when producing something that will go out intothe world versus something done just for a grade. I cared a lotmore about the accuracy in the Wikipedia assignment than I didabout my other assignments, because a mistake I made couldpotentially confuse someone else.

It is often challenging for instructors in STEM disciplines toconvey the importance of transferable soft skills, and havestudents take them as seriously as they should be. By elicitingenthusiasm and a sense of purpose, Wikipedia assignments can serveas excellent tools to engage students with soft transferable skillsin a deep and meaningful way. We would recommend this type ofassignment to any colleagues!

Image credit: Xicotencatl, CC BY-SA 4.0,via Wikimedia Commons

QA about doing a PhD with my research group

Ever considered doing research about online communities, freeculture/software, and peer production full time? Its PhDadmission season and my research groupthe Community Data ScienceCollectiveis doing an open-to-anyone QA about PhD admissions this Friday November 5th.Weve got room in the session and its not too late to sign upto join us!

The session will be a good opportunity to hear from and talk tofaculty recruiting students to our various programs at theUniversity of Washington, Purdue, and Northwestern and to talk withcurrent and previous students in the group.

I am hoping to admit at least one new PhD advisee to theDepartment of Communicationat UW this year (maybe more) and am currently co-advising(and/or have previously co-advised) students in UWs Allen School of Computer Science Communicationhas a deadline for PhDapplications of November 15th this year.

Theregistration deadline for the QA session is listed as today but well do whatwe can to sneak you in even if you register late. That said, pleasedo register ASAP so we can get you the link to the session!