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News from the Wikimedia Foundation and about the Wikimedia movement

Posts Tagged ‘multilingual post’

Update from the Wikisource vision development project for May

This post is available in 3 languages: Català  •  Italiano  • English

(This is a post by Wikisource volunteers Andrea Zanni and David Cuenca)

English

Working prototype to represent a Wikidata concept as a way to unify information from different Wikimedia projects. Try it out here

Spring has come for the Wikisource Vision development project. Sun is shining, birds are singing, and wikisourcerors are, as always, relentlessly proofreading. During the month of May, users from all around the world have proofread almost 1,000 pages per day. The Wikisource Vision development project has not been idle either.

Our tech wizard Tpt has developed a little gadget that in the future will allow us to make sister project content–like public domain books from Wikisource–more visible in Wikipedia. The content card is based on a mockup designed during the discussion about a new interface for interproject links. If you want to try it out, follow these instructions. The Wikimedia Foundation’s Pau Giner has kindly designed some less intrusive icons that could be used in a definitive version. Leave your feedback here.

On Wikidata, the work of the “book community” is proceeding steadily. Books properties have been thoroughly debated and most of them created. On another front, the Request for Comments related to references and sources is aiming to have the first working version of the Guidelines for sourcing statements in Wikidata ready for June 15th. These guidelines have sparked a controversy about what to do with unsourced statements, normally imported by bots, and if automatic imports should be required to add reliable sources. This is currently being debated by the community, weighing which is more important for the project at this early stage: data quantity or data quality.

Another topic that has been getting attention this last month is the proposal for a Wikisource User Group. As you might know, Wikimedia User Groups are a new form of association for Wikimedians and free knowledge enthusiasts all around the world. We would like to form a Wikisource user group and we are gathering interested participants and feedback; your opinion on this will be appreciated. The group would be informal, but still a recognized community of Wikisource users and lovers. With the creation of such group, we aim and hope to boost communication, coordination and collaboration among different language Wikisource communities. Common issues are better tackled together, wiki-style.

User:Micru (right) during the Amsterdam Hackathon 2013

Two weeks ago, I attended the Wikimedia Hackathon in Amsterdam, which accomplished the following:

  • After reaching out to some Commons-related participants, the ongoing Google Summer of Code project related to improving the UploadWizard for books will be slightly modified to benefit the community at large. This will be presented soon.
  • Collaboration with the Wikidata team allowed us to characterize the improvements needed in the interface for a better user experience when creating and navigating book data.
  • New insights about how to create an opt-in template and module centralization for Wikisource or other projects. (If you would like to apply for an Outreach Program for Women internship to work on this, contact me or add it to
    https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Possible_projects)

David Cuenca, User:Micru on Wikisource

Notes

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Call for community input on our trademark policy and practices

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English

The Legal and Community Advocacy team is seeking community feedback on the Wikimedia trademark policy and practices, and ways in which they can be improved. In the trademark practices discussion, we point out some concerns with the current policy, what we think works well today, and raise some practical improvements that we feel would benefit everyone interested in our marks. Now, please tell us what you think.

We appreciate and welcome all points of view. The LCA team’s history of community involvement on Wikimedia policies shows innumerable member contributions that have steered our policies and practices.[1] This time, we’re asking for comments as we consider drafting a new policy. The community’s early involvement will guide our course of action in this process from its first stages. We are looking forward to a collaborative, interactive, and international conversation.

Trademark rights function to protect the goodwill of our community’s efforts against harmful uses by third parties. Such uses at best confuse users as to Wikimedia’s involvement in a website, app, or other product. At worst, they willfully deceive users and undermine our values of openness and independence. We are tasked with simultaneously maintaining our marks’ effectiveness for the movement’s myriad uses and furthering these values.

The current trademark policy seeks to balance these interests. It welcomes trademark use by many members of our community, who can make use of the Wikimedia marks in a variety of ways without the need for permission. Further, we are eager to approve uses that require permission, provided they are consistent with our mission. Uses that conflict with the Wikimedia values – say, the use of our marks to sell counterfeit prescription drugs – are not permitted and, if necessary, are fought by our legal team. And our legal team works to protect our community’s rights abroad, where the territorial nature of trademark law could allow a third party to preclude local use by the movement if we do not remain vigilant.

However, our current policy is under stress from several directions. We must be sure to avoid “naked licensing,” where trademarks are found invalid because of a lack of quality control. At the same time, the community’s efforts continue to expand in size and scope.  We must ensure licensing is a frictionless process. All throughout, we must uphold our community values and protect the goodwill of those very values that are expressed through our marks.

The discussion touches on these, and many more specific, issues around our trademark policy and practices. So far, we have seen discussions on community logos, use of the marks by bloggers and news organizations, and the practicalities of trademark licensing for our diverse and decentralized community.  These issues and any others around the use of our marks are a part of this early-stage conversation. We hope that community involvement at this point in time will ensure that the final policy reflects the issues most important to the Wikimedia community.

Feel free to leave your comments on the discussion page, which we hope will serve as a sounding board for sentiment regarding our trademark policy and practices. The legal team is grateful for the opportunity to hear your thoughts and benefit from your knowledge and perspective. We will review your comments and take them into consideration as we contemplate drafting a new policy for further community comment.

We anticipate closing the comment period in a few months. However, we value international participation and, if more time is needed to allow for translations (and please, help in these efforts) or comments, we will take that into consideration.

We appreciate and look forward to your thoughts.

Matthew Collins, Legal Intern, Wikimedia Foundation
Yana Welinder, Legal Counsel, Wikimedia Foundation

  1. Our discussions on the proposed terms of use, conflict of interest guidelines, political and policy affiliation guidelines, and legal fees assistance program all featured robust community participation.

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Wikimedians help translate renowned classical music lyrics to Ukranian, throw free vocal music concert in Kiev

This post is available in 4 languages: English 7% • українська 100%Español 7% • На русском языке100%

English

Wiki-Concert on 15 May 2013. O. Dondyk and A. Bondarenko on a stage. Photo by Jbuket

There is a lengthy tradition of translating the lyrics of renowned classical music to Ukrainian. Its early beginnings may be traced to the late 19th century, and subsequently throughout the 20th century: Rylsky, Lukash, Starytska-Cherniakhivska, and Borys Ten. However, because they haven’t been published, these translations continue to remain relatively unknown. It is exactly for this reason that Wikimedia Ukraine aims to popularize their Ukrainian translations through the publication of scores, through the performance of the works themselves and through the release of the audio recordings of these. A first step in this direction was the publication of Bortniansky’s opera Le Faucon (1786) within the World Classics in Ukrainian Project, with its Ukrainian translation by Strikha (1990).

The concert on May 15th encompassed a wide range of styles and genres. Most of the works (songs of Schubert, Schumann, Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Puccini and Rachmaninoff) were performed in the poetic translation by Yuri Otroshenko. The concert featured several contemporary works by Oksana Yevsiukova, based on poems by Tetiana Cherep and Marina Popova, and a work by Andriy Bondarenko, based on lyrics by L. Carroll (translated by V. Korniyenko).

The soloists were “People’s Artists of Ukraine” Mykola Koval and Stepan Fitsych, “Honored Artists of Ukraine” Natalia Krechko, Oksana Dondyk and Oksana Yevsiukova. Andriy Bondarenko (piano), Andriy Diomin (clarinet) and Vasyl Babych (cello) were accompanists. There was much applause from the audience, and after the final “Drinking Song” from Verdi’s opera “La Traviata,” audience enthusiasm prompted the performers to repeat the song as an encore.

One of the concert’s organizers, Andriy Bondarenko, a member of Wikimedia Ukraine and the Ukrainian Composer’s Union, said that the concert was unique. “After the Kiev Opera House rejected the Ukrainian translations in the early years of independence, there was virtually no performance of classical music in our native language. Exceptions have been rare: the only opera you could hear in Ukrainian in the National Opera theatre is Rossini’s “Barber of Seville.”

In 1994, Ukrainian singer Anna Kolesnyk performed songs in the Ivan Franco theater, Kiev. Meanwhile, the results of the concert were fascinating – not only because the singers performed well, but because the audience was able to understand what they were singing about!”

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Wikipedia education projects in Thessaloniki

This post is available in 2 languages: Greek 7% • English 100%

In English

For three years, more than 200 students at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki have analyzed or enriched Wikipedia. Both the students and Wikipedia gain a lot from this relationship.

The first contact of the university’s educational program with Wikipedia was through the postgraduate program in Web Science, through which the Greek version of DBpedia was developed and was further enriched and improved. After presentations to postgraduate students on the workings of templates in MediaWiki, they were able to create new infoboxes, improve old ones, and create the ontology for entering information from Wikipedia to DBpedia. The same was done for another two years. In parallel, the students also created some important articles on mathematics.

At the campus of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, a few metres away from the School of Mathematics, there is the Medical School. In the undergraduate course in Medical Education for two years, students were given the assignment to translate articles from English to Greek Wikipedia. Targeting the quality rather than the quantity of translated articles, students formed groups of two or three to work on the same article. This provided the advantage of having multiple editors, which helped in problem solving and copywriting by the students themselves. From a list of suggested topics, many have chosen to translate featured articles from the English Wikipedia, and in several cases the translation is in no way inferior to the original entry. It seems that they have not been recognized as featured articles in Greek Wikipedia simply because no one thought to suggest them!

Editing workshop at the School of Mathematics.

Following the previous experience, the same working model was also applied this year to the undergraduate section of the School of Mathematics. But this time it was ehnanced not only with the possibility of editing each article by many students, but in addition to on-campus training on Wikipedia, we have Online Ambassadors whose purpose is to guide and advise students and help them with whatever problem they have. For the suggested topics for translation, priority was given to articles assessed as being of higher quality classes and Top to Mid importance. It seems that this will be yet another a successful project that will enrich Greek Wikipedia with a number of valuable articles.

The translation of Wikipedia articles is something that aids the students by putting them in contact with the terminology of their science, for example with medical terminology which is particularly difficult. Especially in this area, the general consensus is that no one can easily translate texts with medical terms without having a direct affiliation with medical science, at minimum be a medical student. So this case has benefit for both sides: students learned the medical terminology better in both languages ​​and Wikipedia gained quite nice articles that otherwise would have been difficult to create. Also, in both medicine and mathematics, students had the opportunity to work on popular texts aimed at the general public rather than at some academics such as their professor, and therefore use a different way of writing.

These programs were made possible through cooperation with OKFN-Greece and the professors at AUTH that showed interest in the program. Certainly there have been other efforts at other universities in Greece, but with less impact, at least for the Greek Wikipedia. These programs are important milestones for future expansion and operation of similar programs at other universities in Greece. Besides that, with every step we move towards something even better, following the guidelines of the Wikipedia Education Program. Already one of the professors has expressed interest in the inclusion of a comprehensive program of more weeks for the next year. We may see something good!

Konstantinos Stampoulis – User:Geraki

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Preparing for VisualEditor on all Wikipedias

This post is available in 5 languages: English BanglaDeutschespañolfrançais

 
Visual_Editor-logoAfter several years of development and testing, VisualEditor, the new visual interface to edit Wikipedia pages, will soon be available in “beta” form for all users. This lets Wikipedia editors create and modify articles visually, using a new system where the articles they edit will look the same as they show for reading, and their changes show up as they enter them — like writing a document in a word processor.

VisualEditor removes the need to learn complex wiki markup, and so simplifies editing for both new and experienced editors. We hope that this will open up editing to more people, and along with other efforts will encourage more editors to start and continue to contribute.

We plan to enable it for all logged-in users of the English Wikipedia in early July, later that month extending it to logged-out users, and then the other Wikipedias. Ahead of rolling out VisualEditor in July, we will be carrying out a test of VisualEditor for some randomly-selected new accounts on the English Wikipedia beginning on 17 June. During this testing period, we will be monitoring the impact on users, listening to feedback, and solving problems.

The “alpha” prototype was previously available only to users with a registered account who opted in to test out VisualEditor. First made available on the English Wikipedia in December 2012, it was extended to 16 more language editions in April, and will be made available on all remaining Wikipedias later this week. A lot of valuable feedback has been provided by the early testers of this alpha, and we would like to thank them for their help.

Visual HTML editors are now common on the Web, but building one for Wikipedia (and its sister sites) has been a challenge in itself, due to our specialized requirements and the need to integrate with our existing software, MediaWiki. Behind the scenes, VisualEditor heavily relies on Parsoid, a new complex software component for MediaWiki that translates between wiki markup and annotated HTML+RDFa.

We need your help!

What you can do to help: over the past few months, we have asked you to try out the alpha version of the VisualEditor, and many of you did. Since then, it has changed significantly, and so we’re asking that you try it again. It’s very important that we fix as many critical issues as possible prior to the deploying for everyone in a few weeks’ time — of course, we’d love to fix them all, but that may not be possible. So please, enable the VisualEditor (it’s in your preferences, under the editing tab — check the box labeled “Enable VisualEditor”) and submit any bugs that you find. Your early testing means that we can ensure a better VisualEditor and a smoother deployment for everyone.

Philippe Beaudette, Director, Community Advocacy
James Forrester, Product Manager, VisualEditor and Parsoid
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Creating an open database of public art in Sweden

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English

Statue of Gustav II Adolph in Stockholm. Photo by: Lars (Lon) Olsson.

When we first looked at organising Wiki Loves Public Art (WLPA) in Sweden, together with Europeana, we figured that it wouldn’t be much different from how we had organized Wiki Loves Monuments in previous years. We would just need to get lists of all the public artworks in Sweden. As there is a government agency called The National Public Art Council Sweden (Statens konstråd), we thought all we’d need to do was contact them and get the data from them.

We soon found out that the situation was quite different. Although Statens konstråd does have lists of public artwork, they are limited to fairly recent art and only that art which the agency itself has purchased. The vast majority of the works of art are the responsibility of the individual municipalities, along with the agencies and companies charged with the maintenance of public buildings, such as train stations. There also isn’t a standardized format for how to record the works of art, nor a requirement to record them at all. Fortunately, Public Sector Information (PSI) legislation in Sweden is such that we can request this data from each of the public bodies holding the information.

Sjöormsfontänen by Axel Ebbe. Photo by: Hedning.

After receiving a grant from Sweden’s Innovation Agency (Vinnova), we set out to build a database that could hold all of the information we were going to collect. We also added an API to allow developers easy access to the data and to enable them to build other applications with it. We are also working on connecting the database to Wikipedia and Wikidata. This is similar to how the lists work in Wiki Loves Monuments, which provide a natural place for viewing the information and putting it in a larger context. It also allows the information to be further improved: volunteers can add coordinates, create descriptions and fix typos.

The project has also had the added benefit of making any municipality we contact aware of open data and the PSI legislation. Many of them have said that they’ve had internal discussions regarding best practices for handling requests for open data, which has spread awareness of the importance of open data within the organisations. Several municipalities were also delighted to find out that there is an interest in the public art they maintain. They have sometimes used this as an opportunity to update their own records or have expressed an interest in sharing the user-generated information that will be added to the works of art. By the time the preparations for Wiki Loves Public Art 2014 get started we expect to have a decent proportion of all public art in Sweden in the database. The generated lists should be able to serve our needs as a basis for the competition.

If we were going to run Wiki Loves Public Art 2014 the way we had originally envisioned running it in 2013, we need a centralised source of standardised information. The need for, and usefulness of, such a database goes beyond the WLPA contest. Schools can use an open database to identify local art or art elsewhere in Sweden by a local artist. Researcher could use it to look at trends in public art. Reporters could use it as an investigative tool when looking at local government spending. Adjoining municipalities could pool their resources when negotiating services, such as restoration and maintenance of works of art.

And these are just a few of the use cases we quickly thought of. The true benefit of an open database is that it can be used by anyone for any idea they might have.

Municipalities of Sweden colored based on their status in the Database. See image page for key. Image by: Lokal_Profil.

So if your country is in a similar situation where the relevant information is fragmented between many parties, perhaps this is the solution also for you. All code developed for this project is open source, making your life much easier. So the main thing you would need are volunteers to request the information and to then pre-process it into a usable form (don’t underestimate the time needed for either of these two steps!). You might even be able to find external funding for a similar project in your country.

Of course we’d be happy to share the lessons we have learned, so if you are interested just get in touch!

André Costa
GLAM-technician / Developer, Wikimedia Sverige

For more information and updates see the project page on our wiki.

A quick glimpse of some of the database features

From an early point we knew that we needed a way of clearly marking which content came from an official source and which had been user-generated. The solution was to build the database in two layers, giving you three choices in how to view the information:

  1. Strict view, with official information only;
  2. Normal view, which makes no distinction between user-generated and official information;
  3. Enhanced view, which is similar to the Strict view, but displays user-generated information for the fields where official data is missing.

In addition to this, we added a mechanism that exports all of the changes to the official information from a given source. This allows an interested municipality to import some, or all, of the corrections or enhanced information. If these are then incorporated by them, the changes are upgraded to official status.

The database is also designed to keep a record of the copyright status of the artwork as well as whether it is inside or outdoors. The result of this is that we can build lists that detect whether images of the artwork are allowed on Wikimedia Commons, and also whether these should be marked with a Freedom of Panorama template. Just what we need for running Wiki Loves Public Art in 2014!

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Documenting the Eurovision Song Contest 2013 for Wikimedia

This post is available in 4 languages: English 7% • Svenska 100%Deutsch 7% • 中文 100%

English

I got an idea in May, 2012, as the Eurovision Song Contest was ending and Loreen had just been named the 2012 winner, with her song Euphoria. Because Loreen represented Sweden, the 2013 contest would be held in my country. This would create an exciting opportunity for me and Wikipedia, because my home is in Gothenburg, and I could take really good photos for the Wikimedia Commons database.

Loreen after she won in 2012.

Photo: Vugarİbadov

Licence: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported.

Eurovision Song Contest is well documented on Wikipedia. The contest was started in 1956, and currently has Wikipedia articles in 91 languages[1], many including information on artists and their songs, statistics, voting history, the rules and points awarded. My idea started here because there are not many photos and the quality varies; occasionally someone sitting in the audience at the show manages to take a photo with their phone, but there were not many quality images. Using the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license, anyone would be free to copy, distribute and edit my photos, as long as I am attributed and new versions of the photos have the same license.

The most common use of photos on Wikimedia Commons is in Wikipedia articles, and photos enhance the articles. My goal was to make it possible to have really good, professional photos of every artist in the Eurovision Song Contest 2013. Newspapers, magazines, websites and other media outlets that did not send a photographer to Malmö could also use my photos from the database.

I applied for photo accreditation and, at first, my application was denied because the Head of Delegation saw me as a fan and not as a serious photographer. Then some members of Wikimedia Sverige managed to explain my intentions and the purpose of my application. When I was finally approved, it meant that I had the same rights as all the other 1700 photographers and journalists at the contest.

Emmelie de Forest after winning the Eurovision Song Contest 2013.

Photo: Albin Olsson

License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported

It has been an amazing week, and a very successful project. I took thousands of photos and right now over 500 are uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. They are categorized under: contestants, countries, rehearsals and/or press conferences. All of them are also under the category Photos taken by Albin Olsson during the Eurovision Song Contest 2013. There are close-ups of almost all of the artists, photos of the artists performing their songs on stage, and also videos I filmed.

The 2013 Eurovision Song contest winner was Emmelie de Forest, from Denmark, with her song “Only Teardrops.” My photograph of de Forest has already been used in 36 different languages on Wikipedia, including Japanese and Chinese.

Since non-freely licensed material is not permitted on Wikimedia Commons, I couldn’t upload the songs or videos containing the songs, but I filmed more than 32 clips where 12 of the artists present themselves. All in English, but 11 of them in at least one other language (you can find the videos in the commons category Videos from Eurovision Song Contest 2013 and I might add a few more). It feels really cool that the Wikipedia articles don’t just have a nice photo at the top of their infoboxes, but a short video too.

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Gallery of Honour competition to spread free knowledge in Russia

This post is available in 2 languages: На русском языке 7% • English 100%

In English:

Logo of the “Association of Honorary Citizens, Mentors and Gifted Young People”

The Gallery of Honour of Southern Russia and Eastern Ukraine is a public organization that holds the Gallery of Honour competition, an important event for supporting youth talent and for strengthening connections between generations. The competition is dedicated to the people and history of Southern Russia (Southern and North Caucasian Federal Districts) and Eastern Ukraine (Lugansk oblast and Donetsk oblast). In the first two tours, the participants were expected to use sites like YouTube; the third and final tour will feature cooperation with Russian Wikipedia, the best way to accumulate and distribute the knowledge.

The first two tours attracted more than 600 people from Rostov oblast, Volgograd oblast, Astrahkan oblast, Krasnodarskiy kray, Stavropolskiy kray, Ingushetia, Dagestan, Northern Ossetia-Alania, Chechnya, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kalmykia, Adygea, Moscow and Ukraine.

The Gallery of Honour of Southern Russia and Eastern Ukraine and Wikimedia Russia (the official Wikimedia chapter here) hope that the final tour will be attended by even more people, as editing Wikipedia is open to everyone. The competition is unusual for Wikipedia; article writing competitions don’t usually yield such big prizes (250,000 rubles, or roughly $8000 US).

The competition is taking place from May to October 2013; scientists, artists and some of the best-known Russian Wikipedia article authors will be invited to enter the jury.

On June 3rd, 2013, at 14:00, Interfax (Rostov-on-Don, Budennovskiy 60Б, 11th floor) will hold a press-conference about the competition’s start. Full rules will be available at Википедия:Галерея Славы Юга России и Востока Украины soon. Webinars will be organized to make participation easier for those who haven’t edited Wikipedia before.

There will be several categories for competition: best articles about biographies, human settlements, and historical and cultural events. Authors and uploaders of the best images will be encouraged. There are also special prizes for teachers and mentors of younger Wikipedians. An odd prize, “The smartest,” will be awarded to the city that has the highest participation rate (per 1000 inhabitants).

Anastasia Lvova, Wikimedia Russia

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First Wikimedia hackathon in Tel Aviv, Israel

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עברית 7%English 100%

English

On Thursday, 23 May, just one day before the big Wikimedia hackathon in Amsterdam, Wikimedia Israel held its first hackathon in Tel-Aviv.

Hackathon TLV 2013 - (31).jpg

Israel has a thriving software industry, as well as a healthy Wikipedia editing community. Despite this, there are relatively few software developers in Israel who work on Wikimedia-related projects, so the primary purpose of this event was to show new people who are skilled in programming and web design how they can contribute their talents to our free knowledge projects.

Wikimedia Israel already organized a hackathon as part of the Wikimania 2011 conference, which was held in Haifa, but this was the first time that such an event was produced in Israel independently of other events.

Google Israel kindly gave us the venue – the hacking space in their Tel-Aviv Campus building, which is perfect for such events: cozy, simple, with comfortable tables, a lot of power strips and good wifi. About thirty people showed up for the event. Their skills were varied and quite surprising. There were not just PHP and JavaScript developers – these languages being the most important in MediaWiki – but also experts in DevOps, integration testing, Python scripting, data visualizations and design.

Hackathon TLV 2013 - (64).jpg

In the best hackathon style, the event focused less on talks and more on code, but I was very happy to host one guest talk by Mushon Zer-Aviv, a developer of the freely licensed Alef font, designed as a modern Hebrew and Latin typeface for the web.

So, most importantly, what did the event accomplish? Among other things: fixes for two MediaWiki bugs, both made by new developers; improved automatic tests for JavaScript components; a prototype for a script that enriches Wikipedia with data from Open Knesset, a database of information about the Israeli parliament based on open-source technology; and a new template in Lua, also made by a developer who is completely new to the language. I had the feeling that most of the participants became genuinely interested in joining the community of MediaWiki developers.

I want to use this opportunity to give my very sincere thanks to the people who helped me organize the event: Chen Davidi, Itzik Edri and Dorit Shafir-Diamant, who were instrumental in organizing the event’s logistics; Michal from Google Israel for providing the venue; and also to Yair Talmor, Chezi Reshef, Yael Meron, Elad Alfassa, Oren Held, Moshe Nachmias and Yair Podemasky, who very kindly volunteered to help with setting up the venue, handled the registration and cleaned up at the end of the day.

The event was very satisfying, and we hope to have another one soon!

Amir E. Aharoni, Wikimedia Israel

Go on a Wikipedia scavenger hunt with Wikipedia Nearby

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English

The Nearby feature in Vatican City

We are quick to use mobile applications to find places that fulfil our needs, whether it’s a place to grab a coffee that your friend recommends, where the nearest bus stop is, or where to go for a perfect first date.

But how hard have you thought about the history of your neighborhood, or the events that have shaped the place where you live? There is a wealth of information all around you as you read this blog post. There are historic sites, parks, museums, theatres, cafes and religious buildings. Thanks to the terrific work of our editor community, Wikipedia has accumulated a massive amount of location data associated with its millions of articles; until now we have not fully taken advantage of this information.

We are happy to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation mobile team has been working on a Nearby page to surface this information. Along with the goal of bringing awareness of the surrounding areas to our existing readers, we hope that this simple tool can attract new editors to these articles, whether it is to update the information on the exhibits in a local museum, or simply to add a photo of a nearby park that is in severe need of a properly licensed lead image.

Look out for the camera icon to show those articles that need your photos

As a first pass, the mobile team has focused on using the Nearby page to surfaces articles in close proximity that lack images, inviting users to add one. Upon visiting those pages, the user will be prompted to illustrate the article, which they can do quickly and easily if they’re on a mobile device that supports taking and uploading photos.

The Nearby feature, although designed with the Wikipedia mobile experience in mind, also works on the desktop version of Wikipedia. In the future, we envision this as a useful step in the editing onboarding process, helping new users learn about editing by encouraging them to improve an article on a topic nearby.

Help make Wikipedia more beautiful, vibrant and educational for all our readers! Explore your local area and find the pages near you that need a photo or updated information. Stay tuned to the Wikimedia blog for more opportunities to contribute via the mobile web, coming soon.

Jon Robson
Software Engineer, Mobile
Wikimedia Foundation

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