Feb 26, 16:58 UTC
Resolved - This incident has been resolved.

Feb 26, 16:25 UTC
Monitoring - A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.

On February 24, the DEM-Debate partners – Wikimedia Europe, the University of Amsterdam and Eurecat – Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya – gathered at the European Parliament in Brussels for the final event of the DEM-Debate project. 

This was the occasion for the researchers to showcase their analyses and offer their conclusions after they conducted an investigation that lasted 18 months. 

The research is a combination of a legal and computational analysis of the fact-checking and content moderation practices used by Wikipedia during the 2024 European Parliament elections to address disinformation. Its aim was to produce policy recommendations that could inform future legislation able to safeguard community-driven, free knowledge initiatives.

In view of future revision of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and as a concrete solution to strengthen the information integrity in Europe, the research highlights how community-governed platforms, and in particular the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, contribute to a reliable, pluralistic online information ecosystem. 

The research offers concrete guidance to lawmakers when adopting new legislation as well as to regulators when implementing the current rules.

If you did not have the chance to follow the event, you can watch the recording here.

The sustainability of a language in the twenty-first century depends not only on the richness of its literary heritage but also on its visibility and accessibility within digital spaces. Telugu literature, with its extensive and multilayered tradition spanning several centuries, requires systematic representation across open digital knowledge platforms to ensure its continued relevance and reach. In recognition of this necessity, the research project titled “Wikipedia – Usage in Telugu Literature” was undertaken as part of my M.A. Telugu (Fourth Semester) Major Project at Osmania University.

The primary objective of this study was to examine how the Wikimedia ecosystem can function as an organized digital framework for the preservation, documentation, and dissemination of Telugu literary knowledge. By situating Telugu literature within collaborative online platforms, the project seeks to highlight the role of digital knowledge systems in sustaining linguistic heritage and promoting scholarly engagement.

Scope of the study: a comprehensive Wikimedia approach

The present study did not limit its scope to Wikipedia alone; rather, it examined the wider Wikimedia ecosystem and its potential contribution to strengthening Telugu literature in digital environments. Wikipedia was analyzed as a collaborative encyclopedia that documents literary personalities, movements, genres, critical traditions, and historical developments. Wikisource was evaluated as a digital library dedicated to preserving public-domain Telugu texts and ensuring free access to rare and valuable works. Wiktionary was studied as an evolving lexical resource that supports vocabulary development and linguistic research.

 Wikimedia Commons was explored as a repository of visual and media resources, including manuscript images, author portraits, and documentation of literary events. Wikiquote was considered for its role in curating notable quotations from Telugu literary figures. Wikibooks, in particular, was assessed as a platform for developing structured learning resources, instructional materials, and academic content related to Telugu language and literature.

 Special emphasis was placed on Wikibooks due to its potential for creating open-access scholarly materials such as guides to Telugu prosody, grammar, literary criticism, and research methodologies. The study further examined how Wikibooks can function as a bridge between formal classroom instruction and collaborative digital authorship. Through a collective analysis of these platforms, the research proposes an integrated framework for digital literary engagement and knowledge dissemination.

 Academic Framework and Guidance

The project was carried out under the supervision of Dr. S. Raghu, Assistant Professor, Department of Telugu, Osmania University, whose scholarly guidance ensured intellectual rigor, analytical depth, and methodological precision throughout the study. The work also benefited from the encouragement and technical insights of Mr. Nethi Sai Kiran, Founder of Boli Cheto Foundation, whose experience in digital knowledge initiatives contributed significantly to shaping the practical dimensions of the research. The thesis was completed with the broader objective that it should extend beyond the scope of academic evaluation and serve as a functional framework for students, scholars, and researchers.

From Thesis to Published Book

Six months after its submission, the research was revised and subsequently published as a book titled “Wikipedia – Usage in Telugu Literature.” Published by Boli Cheto Foundation, the work transformed academic research into a structured and accessible guide for digital participation in Telugu literary scholarship, thereby bridging the gap between theoretical study and practical application.

 The book was formally released at Osmania University during the valedictory session of a Wikisource workshop. The release was officiated by Prof. Surya Dhananjay, Vice Chancellor of Veeranari Chakali Ilamma Women’s University, marking a significant milestone in the scholarly journey of the work and underscoring its academic and institutional recognition.

The publication systematically elucidates the following dimensions:

• The principles and methods through which students can responsibly use and contribute to Wikipedia.
•  The process of digitizing texts and preserving literary works through Wikisource
• The role of Wiktionary in fostering lexical expansion and linguistic development
• The importance of media documentation using Wikimedia Commons
• The function of Wikiquote in structured literary quotation documentation
• The creation of educational and instructional resources through Wikibooks.

Inclusion in the Telangana state wide Undergraduate Curriculum

One of the most notable achievements of the book is its inclusion in the Telangana State Undergraduate First-Year curriculum under the lesson titled “Wikipedia Usage Methods.” This incorporation extends to universities functioning under the Telangana State higher education system, including Osmania University, Telangana University, Palamuru University, Kakatiya University, Mahatma Gandhi University, and Satavahana University. The inclusion represents a significant step toward institutionalizing digital literacy within Telugu language studies, ensuring that undergraduate students gain an understanding of both the academic and technological dimensions of knowledge creation.

National Library Distribution and Archival Recognition

Following its positive reception, the book was reprinted, and copies were submitted to major libraries across India, including Connemara Public Library (Chennai), National Library (Kolkata), Mumbai Central Library, and Delhi Public Library. An application was also submitted to the Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation (RRRLF) for formal recognition. Furthermore, the book has been permanently archived at the Telangana State Archives and Research Institute, thereby securing its status as a reference resource for future scholarly work.

A Structured Digital Vision

“Wikipedia – Usage in Telugu Literature” represents a systematic effort to align traditional literary scholarship with contemporary digital platforms. By documenting the functions and academic relevance of Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, and Wikibooks within a unified analytical framework, the book provides a practical roadmap for sustainable digital engagement in literary studies. From academic research to published volume, from publication to curriculum integration, and from classroom learning to archival preservation, the work demonstrates how literary scholarship can meaningfully evolve within the digital age.

Curling is considered the pinnacle of winter sports, gripping everyone’s attention so intensely it’s nicknamed “chess on ice.” It’s famous for its slippery ice, the nail-biting tension as the stone teeters on the edge of going further, and the frantic sweeping. 

As part of the 2026 Winter olympics editathon in Korean Wikipedia, we are currently improving the content and photos of documents related to this Olympics. We believed that an offline curling experience gathering would provide a valuable opportunity for neurodiverse individuals and general users to participate together while gaining hands-on experience with curling. Therefore, we gathered at the Uijeongbu Curling Arena with ten neurodiverse editors and general users to participate in this event to get some curling experience, and contribute in curling related Korean Wikipedia articles.

Before the event began, all participants first met at a cafe for a warm-up. While the Wikipedia editors quickly started editing on their laptops, the neurodiverse editors were unable to do so. This demonstrated that the future direction of the neurodiverse photo walk should focus less on overly exploration-based programs and more on linking the experience and its results to editing on Wikipedia.

We met Referee Shin Mi-seong, who would be assisting us with the curling experience. While the curling rink was being prepared, Referee Shin explained the theory of curling. Despite the rules potentially being somewhat challenging for neurodiverse individuals, one participant persistently asked questions to confirm their understanding, ultimately grasping the curling rules almost perfectly. It was a scene where the deep focus characteristic of neurodiverse individuals truly shone. Based on this interest, we hope the curling rules will be reborn through the hands of neurodiverse individuals, from a neurodiverse-friendly perspective.

After the ice resurfacing, we gathered our rental equipment and headed down to the rink. Even after stretching beforehand and wearing rubber bands on our curling shoes and knee pads, I felt a bit dizzy. Especially since ice skating involves intense light reflection and requires excellent muscle coordination, I imagine it was incredibly difficult for everyone. However, the neurodiverse individuals followed the referee’s instructions without showing any signs of struggle and took breaks on their own when they needed to. It was the moment that shattered the stereotype that ice skating is dangerous for neurodiverse people.

This event has enhanced the main image for the Uijeongbu Curling Arena article. We anticipate that more articles will be enhanced with these photos going forward. Furthermore, over 80 photos have been uploaded, compared to the previous state where no photos of the Uijeongbu Curling Arena existed. Five neurodiverse contributors made an impressive 56 uploads to Wikimedia Commons. Regular users also contributed to Wikipedia articles such as the 2026 Winter Olympics and Uijeongbu Curling Arena. True to the spirit of the Curling Contribution Challenge, many curling-related articles about events, arenas, and athletes have been significantly enhanced.

As neurodiverse individuals, this photo walk was an opportunity to shatter the prejudice that neurodiverse people face risks, to mingle freely with general editors, and to take and edit photos together. We also aim to gain opportunities to experience more sports. Through this, we hope to bring Wikipedia users and neurodiverse individuals together, taking a step closer to the goal of diversity—one of the core values of the Wikimedia movement.

On 3 February 2026, WikiClub Tech SHUATS celebrated 25 years of Wikipedia at Sam Higginbottom University of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences, Rewa Road, Naini, Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Twenty five years ago, on 15 January 2001, Wikipedia began as an open knowledge experiment. What started as a simple, community edited encyclopedia has grown into a global public infrastructure that millions rely on every day. Its growth was not inevitable. It was built by volunteers, editors, developers, organizers, and communities who believed knowledge should remain free and accessible.

The celebration centered around four reflections.
25 years of: knowledge, collaboration, consensus, humanity at its best.

More than 50 participants attended the event. Students and faculty members gathered from across Prayagraj and neighboring colleges to commemorate 25 years of the open knowledge movement. The gathering reflected both curiosity and responsibility. Participants were not just celebrating a platform. They were acknowledging a shared role in sustaining it.

Understanding How Wikipedia Works

Interactive sessions explained how Wikipedia functions behind the interface. Participants explored the principles of neutrality, reliable sourcing, consensus building, and transparent revision history. The broader role of the Wikimedia Foundation was discussed in supporting infrastructure, community safety, and global access to free knowledge.

The conversations moved beyond editing mechanics. They addressed the idea of Wikipedia as a living ecosystem shaped by community governance and collective accountability.

The Power of Open Source Contribution. Reflections by Agamya

Agamya Samuel framed open source not as coding practice, but as public service at scale. Contributing to the Wikimedia ecosystem, he said, means building digital infrastructure that millions rely on every day. A single patch, a resolved bug, or a refined feature quietly improves how the world accesses knowledge.

He reflected on how working with projects like MediaWiki reshapes a developer’s mindset. You stop building for yourself and start building for people you may never meet. Open source teaches accountability, peer review, and long term thinking.

His message to students was simple. Show up consistently. Contribute with intent. The future of open knowledge will be shaped by those who choose to build it.

Building Momentum. Insights by Aditya

Aditya Kumar reflected on the journey of WikiClub Tech SHUATS and the initiatives organized over the past years. He discussed introductory workshops that helped students understand responsible editing practices and content policies.

He shared how editathons and technical sessions created entry points for students from diverse academic backgrounds. These activities transformed curiosity into consistent contribution. He also spoke about the importance of mentorship within the club. Experienced members guiding newcomers ensured continuity and sustained community engagement.

Wikipedia’s Impact on the Community. Perspective by Ankit

Ankit Kumar Verma described Wikipedia as the first doorway to curiosity. For many students, he said, it is where questions begin to take shape and understanding starts to form.

He spoke about how expanding regional and underrepresented content gives visibility to communities often left out of mainstream narratives. Transparent citations, he noted, do more than verify facts. They train readers to think critically.

Editors, he reminded the audience, are not casual users. They are custodians of accuracy. In choosing to contribute, individuals move from consuming knowledge to shaping it. That shift, he said, is what keeps information democratic.

Women in Tech. Representation and Leadership in Action

An exclusive session on Women in Tech, led by Sakshi Rai, shifted the focus from celebration to responsibility. She spoke about the quiet but growing impact of women in technology and open knowledge spaces.

She described how safe, intentional spaces give underrepresented voices the confidence to lead, not just participate. From organizing events to contributing to documentation and code, women are shaping the ecosystem in visible ways.

Diversity, she emphasized, is not symbolic. It strengthens the quality and credibility of knowledge itself. Inclusion must move beyond intention to action. Mentorship, representation, and measurable leadership are what will define the next chapter of open knowledge.

Looking Ahead

The 25 year milestone served as both celebration and reflection. It reminded participants that Wikipedia’s strength lies in community stewardship and shared responsibility.

As Wikipedia moves into its next chapter, the challenge is clear. Sustain participation. Strengthen diversity. Protect reliability.

A special thanks to WikiClub Tech India for their continued support in nurturing campus communities and encouraging young contributors to take part in the global movement.

Twenty five years demonstrate what collective effort can achieve. The next twenty five will depend on those willing to continue building.

Feb 25, 17:24 UTC
Resolved - This incident has been resolved.

Feb 25, 16:40 UTC
Investigating - We are currently investigating this issue.

Some gatherings and experiences renew your passion for community work. Moments where you pause, reflect on how far you have come, and gain fresh clarity about where you are going. Moments that remind you that leadership is not just about organizing activities, but about growth, collaboration, and impact.

The 2026 Community Leaders Retreat of Wikimedia User Group Nigeria was one of those moments for me. Held in February 2026, the retreat brought community leaders together to learn, reflect, and plan for the future.

It was more than just a meeting. It was a space to connect, share experiences, and strengthen our understanding of Wikimedia projects and tools. Each session helped us reflect on our roles as leaders and how we can better support our communities.

One of the highlights for me was learning about the new projects that will be introduced this year. It gave me a clearer understanding of the direction we are heading and how we can align our local activities with the broader vision.

A session handled by Ayokamni on Wikimedia tools stood out to me. Although I have been using some tools, I discovered new ones during the training. I was especially inspired to learn that the HotCat tool was developed by a volunteer editor like me, named Magnus Manske. That example changed my perspective.

It reminded me that contributing to Wikimedia is not limited to writing Wikipedia articles, creating Wikidata items, or uploading photos to Commons. We can also improve the platforms themselves. We can build tools, suggest better processes, and create solutions that make editing easier for volunteers around the world. As we contribute, we can also think creatively about how to make the system better.

Another important part of the retreat was the opportunity for leaders to present their 2025 achievements and share plans for 2026. As the Founder and President of the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria Akwa Ibom Network, I presented our milestones from last year and our goals for this year. It was a proud moment to reflect on how far we have come and to share our vision for growth. In 2026, we are determined to do more, reach more people, and continue telling our own stories through Wikimedia platforms.

Conclusion

The retreat ended with an outing where we had time to network, play games, laugh, and bond. It strengthened our relationships as leaders and reminded us that community building is not only about strategy and planning, but also about connection.

Wikimedia Indonesia once again organized WikiCendekia, a capacity-building program for volunteers of Wikimedia projects. This year, WikiCendekia 2026 was designed for administrators (admins) of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects in Indonesia as a space to share knowledge, skills, and experiences related to adminship of their respective Wikimedia projects. The in-person training was held on 7–8 February 2026 in Surabaya.

WikiCendekia 2026 was implemented through a combination of online and in-person learning, attended by 30 administrators from various Wikimedia projects in Indonesia, including Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wiktionary, and Wikiquote, both in Indonesian and local language editions. The majority of participants were relatively new administrators (<1 year or 1–5 years) in their respective projects. Therefore, we provided “Using Administrative Tools” modules at both basic and advanced levels, enabling new administrators to equip themselves through self-paced learning sessions via the LMS throughout January 2026. Among them, we invited 20 administrators to attend the two-day in-person session. This gathering became an important opportunity for administrators to meet one another, exchange experiences, and strengthen collaboration in managing Wikimedia projects in Indonesia.

Several topics presented during WikiCendekia 2026 were compiled based on a needs assessment shared with administrators. These included creating and running bots (Pywikibot), abuse filters, editing the MediaWiki namespace, and digital safety for administrators in Indonesia. We also collaborated with the Wikimedia Foundation’s Trust & Safety (T&S) team to provide reading materials and presentations on safety-related topics for admins, starting from an introduction to safety on Wikimedia ecosystem to safety considerations for admins, both in general and within the Indonesian context. Hands-on practice of the theories presented was considered by participants to be particularly helpful and directly applicable to their daily administrative work.

“WikiCendekia opens opportunities for new administrators to learn together with experienced administrators.” – WikiCendekia 2026 participant

In addition to presentation sessions and guided practical activities, Cangkruk sessions (peer practice-sharing) were also organized to allow newer administrators to learn technical topics from more experienced peers. Participants shared that they gained new technical insights, ranging from discussions about bot to the process of preparing potential new projects from the Wikimedia Incubator. We also facilitated Warung Kopi sessions, or small-group discussions, focused on real cases, best approaches to handling community issues, and exchanging cross-project perspectives. These sessions helped many participants better understand the complexity and diverse needs of each wiki project. Participants described their experience at WikiCendekia 2026 as memorable, particularly because they were able to interact directly with fellow administrators.

“Discussions during all the Warung Kopi sessions were the most memorable for me because I gained many interesting insights from fellow administrators, both technical and non-technical. In my view, the Warung Kopi discussions were very productive and produced outcomes that I can personally implement in my role as an administrator.” – WikiCendekia 2026 participant

On the first day, we held a Warung Kopi session titled “The future of Wikimedia project adminship in Indonesia” to identify key challenges, opportunities, and strategic directions for adminship in Indonesia. The discussion highlighted issues such as insufficient technical capacity among some admins, increasing vandalism and misinformation, limited representation of administrators in local-language projects, difficulties in translating technical terminology into local languages, and the declining number of native speakers actively contributing to the projects. At the same time, new challenges are emerging with the rise of generative AI and the growing dominance of short-form content that attracts internet users’ attention.

Despite these challenges, the Wikimedia community in Indonesia is rooted in strong foundations. The movement is driven by a shared vision of free knowledge, a spirit of volunteerism, support from global Wikimedia volunteers, and a consensus-based decision-making system. The diversity of projects and the richness of unique content are additional strengths, including the role of Wikimedia projects in preserving Indonesian and local languages. The increasing participation of women in the Wikimedia movement is also a positive signal for diversity and the long-term sustainability of adminship.

WikiCendekia 2026 marks an initial step and reflects Wikimedia Indonesia’s commitment to supporting administrators in sustaining the free knowledge movement, while strengthening the role of local communities in developing and managing Wikimedia projects in Indonesia. Strengthening administrative capacity must be nurtured through continuous learning spaces, open dialogue, and meaningful support for administrators.

“May we continue to interact with one another, both within this forum and beyond!” – User:Salsa66syifa, one of the WikiCendekia 2026 participant

When I found out that I had passed as one of the participants of WikiCendekia, my primary mission was to gain as much knowledge as possible about managing Wikipedia projects. This program is very suitable for me, a relatively new project administrator on Wikipedia. So far, I’ve only learnt independently by reading Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines. Sometimes, I consult with my seniors in the community about how to deal with users who do not comply with Wikipedia’s terms and policies.

Honestly, WikiCendekia program has been very helpful for me in gaining a deeper understanding of the wiki projects I manage, especially since my technical skills as an administrator are still quite lacking. At this time I manage two wiki projects: Indonesian WikiQuote (WQID) and Indonesian Wikipedia (IDWP). And I’m trying to transfer the knowledge I gained from managing IDWP to WQID based solely on my personal experience.

I learned that managing two projects doesn’t necessarily mean implementing the same principles. Each project has its own characteristics. While IDWP serves as a hub for other wiki projects, it doesn’t mean it is the sole authority in determining the policies and regulations for the smaller projects under it.

Every terms and policies for smaller wiki project should be formulated collaboratively until consensus is reached. The establishment of these terms and policies also takes into account the user traffic within each project. Therefore, not all projects require immediate consensus on these terms and policies as soon as they release from the incubator.

The main focus of a small wiki project being managed is to develop it so that other users find it easier to contribute. Then, gradually, we developed terms and policies that helped project contributors contribute in a better way..

Releasing a project from the incubator is certainly different from maintaining it. Maintaining a newly released wiki project requires several contributors who willingly continue contributing and keep the project growing. This is not easy and requires extra patience, especially when there are still relatively few contributors.

A presenter at one of the WikiCendekia sessions explained that project administrators can submit proposals to define policies for their projects. It needs at least 3-5 people to establish a policy for a small wiki projects. After that we can decide together whether these terms and policies are suitable to implement or not.

However, even if a policy has already been approved by consensus, it can still be changed in each wiki project. If someone objects to that, he must submit a new policy proposal with a clear basis. Other contributors then respond with their own arguments until we reach a new policy consensus.

From the discussions I had with several project administrators during The Sysop 101: How to Be a Firm Administrator without Demotivating Contributor session, it’s concluded that not all wiki projects especially the small ones need to have terms and policies as long as there are no users who commit repeated violations. Therefore, the terms, policies, guidelines, or essays on a wiki project aren’t designed from the beginning. They’re usually created after a violation has occurred.

From this I learned that Wikipedia is democratic. It doesn’t belong only to a certain group of people, but to everyone whose contributions deserve to be valued. WikiCendekia program helped me understand that administrators aren’t merely “police officers” patrolling Wikipedia, but also protectors and mentors who support other contributors who want to participate in liberating knowledge.

This is just one of many tasks carried out by administrators of Indonesian Wikipedia and its sister projects. Admins also have to struggle against lots of AI-generated articles from contributors. I’ll share it in another post as part of the experiences I gained from participating in WikiCendekia.

Wikimedia Bangladesh is a volunteer-driven affiliate of the global Wikimedia movement, working to expand free knowledge in Bangla and make information more accessible to everyone. By supporting contributors, building communities, and collaborating with institutions, the chapter plays a key role in strengthening open knowledge ecosystems across Bangladesh.

The year 2025 stands as one of the most dynamic and meaningful chapters in Wikimedia Bangladesh’s journey. It was not simply a year measured by programmes, statistics, or outputs—it was a year shaped by people. Volunteers who stayed up late to review articles, photographers who documented heritage in the field, community organisers who travelled across districts, and institutional partners who opened access to knowledge that had long remained locked away.

At its core, 2025 was driven by a shared conviction: that free knowledge in Bangla must not only exist but flourish—accessible, inclusive, and reflective of the diverse realities of Bangladesh and the wider Bengali-speaking world.

From nationwide contests and institutional collaborations to grassroots community initiatives and large-scale digitisation efforts, Wikimedia Bangladesh demonstrated how a volunteer-led movement can create impact that is both measurable and deeply human. The year showed that when structured planning meets community passion, the results extend far beyond individual projects and contribute to the long-term sustainability of the Wikimedia movement.

Expanding Free Knowledge: A Year of Tangible Outcomes

In 2025, Wikimedia Bangladesh implemented a wide and carefully coordinated range of activities spanning content development, capacity building, outreach, and institutional engagement. These collective efforts resulted in the creation and improvement of more than 10,000 pages across Wikimedia projects, alongside the upload of over 70,000 photographs and media files to Wikimedia Commons. In parallel, more than 3,000 individuals were directly engaged through workshops, contests, meetups, trainings, edit-a-thons, and public awareness programmes held both online and offline across the country.

What makes these outcomes particularly significant is not only their scale, but their focus. The initiatives were intentionally aligned with strengthening Bangla-language knowledge platforms—an area that continues to require sustained attention in the global open knowledge ecosystem. Contributions expanded across Bangla Wikipedia, Bangla Wikisource, Bangla Wiktionary, Bangla Wikibooks, Bangla Wikiquote, Bangla Wikivoyage, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata, ensuring that knowledge in Bangla became more comprehensive, reliable, and accessible to readers, researchers, and learners.

This growth was not merely quantitative. It reflected a gradual improvement in content quality, thematic diversity, and community participation. New contributors entered the ecosystem through contests and workshops, while experienced editors focused on improving existing articles, reviewing quality content, and mentoring newcomers. As a result, the year marked a balanced progression—expansion of knowledge accompanied by stronger editorial standards and community maturity.

Landmark Advocacy: Opening Government Archives to the Public

Among the many milestones of 2025, the collaboration with the Press Information Department (PID) of the Government of Bangladesh stands out as a historic achievement for open knowledge in the country.

Through sustained advocacy, dialogue, and trust-building with government stakeholders, Wikimedia Bangladesh successfully facilitated the release of more than 60,000 official government photographs into the public domain. These images, documenting national events, governance, public programmes, and state activities since 2015, represent one of the largest public domain media releases in Bangladesh’s history.

The significance of this initiative goes far beyond numbers. For years, visual documentation related to Bangladesh’s governance, public institutions, and national life remained underrepresented on Wikimedia platforms due to licensing restrictions. The PID release directly addressed this long-standing gap, enabling educators, journalists, researchers, and the global public to access freely licensed visual materials related to Bangladesh.

To ensure sustainable integration of this massive archive, Wikimedia Bangladesh also expanded its technical capacity by operating a dedicated upload bot that systematically processed and uploaded over 62,000 images with structured metadata. This initiative demonstrated the chapter’s growing technical self-reliance and its ability to manage large-scale digital content workflows while maintaining accuracy, consistency, and policy compliance.

Flagship Contests That Strengthened the Wikimedia Ecosystem

Content development remained a central pillar throughout 2025, driven by a series of thematic contests that mobilised contributors from across Bangladesh and beyond. These initiatives served not only as content generation campaigns but also as entry points for new volunteers and skill development platforms for existing editors.

The Amar Ekushey Article Contest 2025 once again proved to be one of the most effective community engagement programmes, attracting over 400 participants—many of whom were newcomers to Wikipedia. The contest resulted in the creation of hundreds of new articles, significantly expanding Bangla Wikipedia’s topical coverage while nurturing a new generation of contributors.

Similarly, the Bangla Wikiquote Contest, Wikibooks Writing Contest, Wiktionary Entry Contest, Wikivoyage Article Contest, and thematic editing campaigns collectively enriched multiple Wikimedia sister projects. These contests strengthened linguistic resources, educational materials, travel documentation, and structured lexical knowledge in Bangla.

A particularly remarkable outcome was observed in the Wikibooks Writing Contest, which produced 1,385 new books and over 1.1 million words of educational content. This contribution significantly enhanced the availability of open learning resources in Bangla for students, educators, and self-learners.

Beyond the numbers, these contests cultivated editorial discipline, peer learning, and long-term engagement. Participants were not only creating content but also learning sourcing practices, neutrality, formatting standards, and collaborative editing workflows—skills that directly contribute to the sustainability of the Wikimedia ecosystem.

Preserving Culture and Heritage

Cultural and heritage documentation emerged as another defining focus of Wikimedia Bangladesh’s activities in 2025. In a digital era where local knowledge often remains underrepresented, the chapter placed strong emphasis on documenting biodiversity, heritage, and cultural landscapes through freely licensed media.

The second edition of Wiki Loves Bangla, organised in collaboration with West Bengal Wikimedians under the Bangla WikiMoitree initiative, highlighted the shared cultural and ecological heritage of the Bengal region through the theme “Birds of Bengal.” The campaign witnessed strong cross-border participation and resulted in 1,800 image uploads to Wikimedia Commons, including the documentation of 421 bird species from across Bangladesh, West Bengal, and Assam.

This initiative did more than enrich visual repositories—it strengthened regional collaboration, improved documentary photography skills, and contributed to biodiversity awareness through open knowledge. The freely licensed images are now being used to enhance articles across Wikipedia and related platforms, ensuring that regional ecological knowledge reaches a global audience.

In addition, multiple photowalks were conducted across Dhaka, Panchagarh, and heritage sites such as Old Dhaka, which contributed hundreds of freely licensed images documenting architecture, cultural landmarks, museums, and public spaces. These efforts ensured that Bangladesh’s visual and cultural identity is better represented within global knowledge platforms, while also encouraging contributors to actively document their surroundings through an open knowledge lens.

Strengthening Communities and Decentralising the Movement

One of the most transformative developments of 2025 was the continued decentralisation of the Wikimedia movement in Bangladesh. Rather than concentrating activities in a single city, Wikimedia Bangladesh invested in strengthening regional communities and local leadership structures.

The formal recognition of the Dhaka Wikimedia Community and the launch of the PUST WikiClub marked important milestones in expanding structured engagement beyond traditional contributor bases. These initiatives created sustainable platforms for collaboration, training, and outreach at both regional and institutional levels.

Alongside these developments, six active regional communities across the country played a crucial role in grassroots engagement. Regular meetups—both online and offline—were held in cities including Dhaka, Rajshahi, Mymensingh, Sylhet, Dinajpur, and Rangpur. These gatherings provided spaces for peer learning, strategic planning, mentorship, and collaborative discussions, engaging around 180 active contributors throughout the year.

The WikiNandini initiative also continued to support women contributors through dedicated meetups and workshops, fostering a more inclusive and supportive editing environment. By encouraging participation from diverse backgrounds and regions, Wikimedia Bangladesh strengthened community ownership and reduced dependency on centralised coordination.

Capacity Building and Leadership Development

Recognising that sustainable growth depends on skilled contributors, Wikimedia Bangladesh placed strong emphasis on training and leadership development in 2025. Throughout the year, workshops were organised on Wikipedia editing, Wiktionary entry creation, Wikibooks writing, copyright awareness, digitisation workflows, and open licensing practices.

Hands-on training sessions in locations such as Kushtia and Chandpur brought Wikimedia engagement to new geographic areas, involving students, teachers, researchers, and local knowledge enthusiasts. These programmes not only improved editing skills but also raised awareness about the broader principles of free knowledge and open culture.

A major highlight was the inaugural Wiki Leaders Training 2025 held in Cox’s Bazar. This two-day intensive programme brought together emerging leaders from multiple regions and focused on leadership development, community health, outreach strategies, and long-term programme sustainability. Through interactive sessions and collaborative planning exercises, participants were equipped to lead local initiatives and strengthen regional Wikimedia communities.

The training established a strong foundation for future leadership within the Bangla Wikimedia movement and reinforced the importance of decentralised, community-led growth.

GLAM Partnerships: Digitising Cultural Memory

GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) initiatives gained notable momentum in 2025, reflecting Wikimedia Bangladesh’s growing engagement with cultural institutions.

Digitisation efforts at the historic Shah Makhdum Institute Public Library preserved rare books, archival documents, and historical materials by making them freely accessible through Wikimedia platforms. These fragile resources, once limited to physical access, are now available to a global audience of researchers, students, and knowledge seekers.

Another significant initiative at the National Archives of Bangladesh enabled participants to scan and upload public domain maps, historical letters, and archival documents. This activity not only enriched Wikimedia Commons with culturally significant materials but also strengthened institutional collaboration and awareness of open licensing practices.

These partnerships demonstrated how community-driven initiatives can contribute to preserving cultural memory while expanding global access to historically valuable knowledge resources.

Celebrating Language, Knowledge, and Community

The year was also marked by meaningful celebrations and strong public engagement, reflecting the cultural and linguistic roots of the Wikimedia movement in Bangladesh. Ekushey WikiGathering was organised across five cities to observe International Mother Language Day, where volunteers directly engaged with the public and encouraged contributions to Bangla-language knowledge on Wikimedia platforms. These gatherings carried profound symbolic significance, linking the legacy of the Language Movement with the contemporary mission of free and open knowledge in Bangla.

Simultaneously, the 21st anniversary of Bangla Wikipedia was celebrated through year-round programmes in multiple regions. These events brought together Wikimedians, students, researchers, and knowledge enthusiasts to reflect on more than two decades of collaborative knowledge production. The celebrations not only acknowledged past milestones but also inspired new contributors and strengthened the collective commitment to preserving and advancing the Bangla language in the digital knowledge space.

Publications

In 2025, Wikimedia Bangladesh continued to prioritise documentation, transparency, and community storytelling by publishing three editions of its official online magazine, WikiBarta. The magazine functioned as more than a publication—it served as a living archive of the community’s journey, capturing major programmes, partnerships, reflections, and volunteer experiences throughout the year.

Each edition helped extend the impact of key initiatives beyond immediate participants by sharing stories, lessons learned, and community insights. By highlighting volunteer contributions and documenting institutional progress, WikiBarta preserved organisational memory while strengthening engagement among contributors from diverse regions. As a public-facing record of activities and impact, the publication reinforced accountability and enhanced the visibility of Wikimedia Bangladesh within both national and global Wikimedia networks.

Impact on the Global Wikimedia Movement

The impact of Wikimedia Bangladesh’s 2025 activities extends well beyond national boundaries. Through the expansion of Bangla-language content, large-scale public domain releases, strengthened regional communities, and institutional partnerships, the chapter contributed meaningfully to the global mission of free and open knowledge.

More importantly, 2025 demonstrated a scalable and sustainable model—one that is decentralised, volunteer-led, and partnership-driven. It showed that impactful growth is not achieved solely through large programmes, but through consistent community investment, inclusive participation, and long-term vision.

Behind every article, photograph, workshop, and meetup were volunteers who chose to contribute their time, skills, and passion to a collective cause. Their efforts not only strengthened Wikimedia projects in Bangladesh but also enhanced the global visibility of the Bangla language, culture, and knowledge.

As the movement moves forward, the achievements of 2025 will remain a strong foundation. They serve as a reminder that when communities collaborate, institutions embrace openness, and volunteers lead with purpose, the advancement of free knowledge becomes not just possible—but truly transformative.

Read the full Annual Activity Report 2025.

I guess this could be the last post in the blog (probably for a very long time).

Even simpler to read and understand

🕑 23 minutes

It's another BTB Digest! Hear clips from five recent episodes. Cormac Parle notes the challenges in structured data in Wikimedia Commons, Vera de Kok reminisces about her early years as a Wikimedia photographer; Stephen Harrison cautions against dismissing AI encyclopedias; Brian Wolff summarizes the philosophy of JavaScript gadgets, Shlomit Lir points out the tension between equity and neutrality, and more!

The Developer Outreach team is happy to announce that we will be migrating the Tech Blog into Diff. This move will allow us to provide better support and more visibility for the incredible work of the technical community. Diff is the community news and event blog supported by the Movement Communications team. Diff sees about 20,000 visits a month and has 1,200 email subscribers. 

• What will happen to the Tech Blog content?
  • All Tech Blog posts will be accessible on Diff, clearly tagged with “techblog”. Old links will automatically redirect to their new location. New posts with a technical focus will be tagged with “techblog” so they will be easily discoverable.You’ll be able to find all techblog posts – old and new – on the landing page at https://diff.wikimedia.org/techblog 
• When is this happening?
  • The migration should be complete in April 2026.
• How do I submit a blog post with a technical focus?
  • For now, please hold your post until we complete the migration.
  • After the migration is done: The process remains the same. For WMF staff, talk to your manager about your interest in writing a blog post so they are not surprised when you ask them to approve it once it is written. For folks outside WMF, if you are part of a team or other larger organization, be sure they are aware and approve. Then, see the Diff submission process and select the category “Technology” and the tag “techblog” when writing your draft. After you submit, the Developer Outreach team will review your draft. When it’s ready to go, we will schedule your post to be published.

We’re excited for the Tech Blog to evolve and thank the Movement Communications team for helping us make this possible!

Diego Fleury Mendible may have been the one to create Wikipedia’s new article on the estrobolome, a part of the human gut microbiome, but he’s quick to give credit to his inspiration for the project.

As he considered topics for his Wikipedia assignment at North Carolina State University last term, Fleury Mendible’s mother joined the brainstorming session, bringing her own interest in microbiology and recent reading on the gut microbiome to the conversation.

“I took the inspiration from my mom for the topic,” explained Fleury Mendible. “Her father was a geneticist, and I can definitely see his fervor for science seeping through her. This article felt like my own way of channeling that learning and curiosity into something that can help others learn about a topic. Crafting this article helped me feel closer to both of them, even through my own work.”

But Fleury Mendible hasn’t always studied the life sciences — he completed his bachelor’s degree in political science before beginning his graduate studies in physiology this year. To push himself to fully engage with the materials and to test his understanding, he decided to take on the additional challenge of developing a brand new article.

“I chose to create an article because this was one of my first experiences with microbiology in general, so I thought that putting lots of work and research into crafting something of my own would be a great way to learn how to apply the concepts we were discussing in class,” said Fleury Mendible. “It did end up helping those concepts to stick and sharpen my understanding.”

For Fleury Mendible, the real challenge wasn’t just searching for high-quality, peer-reviewed sources appropriate for Wikipedia, but also ensuring his understanding was shaped by the research rather than starting with his preliminary understanding of the topic.

“It can be tricky to find articles that fit [the] criteria without trying to conform the details of the papers to preconceived notions about any given topic,” he noted. “In a chicken-before-the-egg scenario, I did not want to find articles that fit what I thought I knew about the estrobolome; rather, I wanted to take what I knew and have it evolve through reading about it in the literature.”

Using this approach, he built the article from as neutral a point of view as he could. That focus, along with the other Wikipedia guidelines and standards he learned throughout the project, gave him a deeper appreciation for how the online encyclopedia functions and grows.

“From the neutral tone and solid sources required to the scrutiny of thousands of reviewers, this forum is one where people can learn about the ever-changing world we live in,” said Fleury Mendible. “The learning modules [in the assignment] encouraged being okay with scrutiny and changes in articles, and to me, that is the core of what Wikipedia is. We can learn, grow, and change while maintaining a learning environment fit for anyone. The fact that it is free and held up by people who contribute simply for the community is amazing too!”

Reflecting on the project, Fleury Mendible underscored how the Wikipedia assignment stands apart from other coursework in both scope and stakes.

“This was unlike anything I have done in a classroom setting before,” said Fleury Mendible. “From the moment I read about the assignment, it felt like an opportunity to make something my own while contributing to the knowledge of the world. I really enjoyed the freedom granted to us as students.”

Although his academic path will keep him busy (he plans to attend medical school next!), Fleury Mendible didn’t hesitate when asked whether he’ll continue editing Wikipedia.

“Of course! I am proud of my work and would love to stay involved with it,” he said. “I look forward to seeing what the community will contribute and how this article will evolve over time.”

Our support for STEM classes like Diego Fleury Mendible’s is available thanks to the Guru Krupa Foundation.

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

Prepare your fingertips, laptops, and remember to hydrate, because the next edition of Celebrate Women* is almost here, and we are ready to edit Wikipedia quite a lot and help to close the gender gap! 💪

Every year, the Wikimedia community gathers to celebrate women in March, during Women’s History Month, and in celebration of International Women’s Day (8 March). We meet both online and in-person and take part in edit-a-thons, workshops, training sessions, and much more. The extravaganza happens all around the world, with events on every continent. 

This year, the campaign will happen from March 1st to 31st. We already have many special edit-a-thons being organized, but many others will be added to the official page from now until the end of March. 

If you are thinking about participating, check all the events listed here and register individually for the ones you are interested in. If you would like to know more or be connected to the campaign during the month and in a long-term capacity, consider registering using the header at the top of the page by clicking the blue button: “Register for event”.

New to Wikipedia and want to take part? Check this diagram:

Some highlights from the campaign so far

On March 5, at 13:00 UTC, get ready to start! The Wikimedia Foundation will host a kick-off celebration that will work as a welcome session for both organizers and participants. Here are the details:

Celebrate Women* welcome session:
– 📆 Date: March 5
– ⏰ Time: 13:00 – 14:00 UTC (check your timezone here)
– 📍 Registration: here

Other than that, we have exciting events happening in the community. Running the entire month, Wiki in Africa and Wiki Loves Women are organizing the 6th edition of the ISA Tell Us About Herː Women In Sports. The goal is to add better descriptions to photographs of women in sports that are already available on Wikimedia Commons. This event highlights the importance of making women visible in terms of visual knowledge and representation on Wikipedia.

Wikimedia Mexico is the chapter that launched the idea of edit-a-thons – or in Spanish, “editatonas”. This year, they are honoring the tradition with five events during the month: one per week until the middle of April, each of them highlighting women from different regions in Mexico. The highlight goes to the one on March 7 about Mexican women artists: Editatona Mujeres artistas mexicanas 2026.

Art+Feminism has been a great Wikimedia organizer, hosting many events for multiple years as part of their own campaign. In 2026, they are partnering with Wikimedia LGBT+ for a panel discussion and Wikidata training centering  Queer Women in Arts. The gathering will take place on March 6 at 16:30 UTC. Find the Zoom registration here.

Are you organizing an event?

If you are organizing or planning to organize an event during Celebrate Women* 2026, we’ve got you! 

First, note that it’s important to add your event to the proper subpage so that it’s visible on the main landing page. Add your event to this subpage.

Second, if you are using the Outreach Dashboard during your event, we have created a campaign that you can attach to your program: Campaign: Celebrate Women 2026.

And, finally, the Wikimedia Foundation is also planning two training sessions for Wikimedians organizers: 

Event Registration and Collaborative Contributions session:
This session aims to equip organizers to effectively accomplish event registration, metrics tracking, outreach, and sustained community engagement.
– 📆 Date: 26 February
– ⏰ Time: 13:00-15:00 UTC (check your timezone here)
– 📍 Registration: here

We hope to see you and/or your events during the campaign! 

For questions, please contact gfontenelle@wikimedia.org.

I had the opportunity to participate in Wikiversary 2026, organized to celebrate Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary.

For many, this milestone represents 25 years of building the world’s largest open knowledge platform. For me, it became an opportunity to contribute not only through participation but through reflection. It was my first conference and my first event with the Deoband Community Wikimedia. Traveling to Delhi felt both exciting and uncertain. Yet what I found was an environment of warmth, intellectual depth, and genuine support.

That space gave me the confidence to raise an important question.

Centering Confidence and Leadership

As part of the program, I presented:

“Confidence and Leadership: Analysing Women in the Wikimedia Ecosystem.”

With two years of experience in Wikimedia, I chose to examine a structural challenge:

Why are women still underrepresented in technical and leadership spaces in India’s Wikimedia ecosystem and what can we do differently?

Rather than focusing on “low participation,” I reframed the discussion around progression. My presentation explored:

• Entry-level barriers
  
• Retention challenges after the first 1–2 years
  
• Gaps in transitioning into technical roles
  
• Limited visibility of women technical mentors
  
• Confidence and safety concerns
  
• The implementation gap between policy and practice
  

The goal was not to assign blame, but to analyze patterns and propose solutions.

Beyond Participation: The Retention Gap

Women are joining Wikimedia. They are volunteering. They are contributing meaningfully. But long-term growth often becomes unclear. Many contributors face:

• Inconsistent mentorship structures
  
• Limited technical guidance
  
• Confidence gaps that widen over time
  
• Unclear leadership pathways
  

If we celebrate entry without strengthening retention and progression, we risk losing dedicated contributors before they reach their full potential. To address this, I proposed:

• Structured mentorship pathways
  
• Clear leadership pipelines
  
• Safer and more intentional discussion spaces
  
• Increased visibility of women in technical roles
  

Because inclusion must extend beyond participation it must support advancement.

A Response Rooted in Reflection

Before presenting, I anticipated mixed reactions. Conversations about representation and structural gaps can be sensitive. Instead, the response was overwhelmingly thoughtful.

Participants appreciated the solution-oriented framing. Many shared similar observations about retention challenges, invisible labor, and the shortage of visible women mentors in technical spaces. The discussion did not become defensive it became reflective.

That experience reinforced an important lesson: when complex issues are addressed constructively, they strengthen community dialogue rather than divide it.

Learning from the Broader Movement

Wikiversary 2026 was also a space for learning.

Sessions explored diverse themes Wikimedia Commons, AI and digital futures, growth strategies, knowledge equity, and language communities including Urdu Wikimedia.

For the first time, I engaged more closely with the Urdu ecosystem. It highlighted how linguistic diversity enriches the Wikimedia movement and expands access to knowledge.

The dedication of young contributors, in particular, demonstrated how deeply invested the next generation is in shaping Wikimedia’s future.

My Contribution to the 25th Anniversary

Wikipedia’s 25th birthday is not only a celebration of scale it is a moment to reflect on sustainability. My contribution to this milestone was not measured in edits or metrics.

It was measured in the willingness to raise a structural question about inclusion and leadership. If the first 25 years of Wikipedia were about expanding knowledge, the next 25 must focus on expanding equitable participation in shaping that knowledge. Retention, mentorship, technical access, and leadership pathways are not peripheral issues they are central to the movement’s long-term strength.

Wikiversary 2026 reminded me that contributing to Wikimedia also means contributing to its evolution. Sometimes, the most meaningful contribution is not adding a page but helping improve the system that allows others to thrive. As Wikipedia moves into its next quarter-century, conversations about inclusion, confidence, and leadership must remain at the heart of our collective growth.

Gratitude

I am deeply grateful to the Deoband Community Wikimedia and the organizer, Aafi, whose dedication and thoughtful coordination made this experience possible. Their commitment behind the scenes reflects the spirit that sustains Wikimedia.

It was my first conference but more importantly, it was a reminder that courageous conversations can build stronger communities.

And that, for me, was the most meaningful way to celebrate 25 years of Wikipedia.

The Global Open Initiative Foundation (GOIF) began the year with its first community meetup in January, marking Wikipedia’s 25th birthday. It wasn’t just a celebration— it was a moment for members to reconnect, reflect, and set the tone for the months ahead.

Reconnecting with the community

After months without a shared space, seeing familiar faces again and meeting new ones felt timely. In attendance were participants including editors and volunteers from Pidgin, Ewe, and Twi Wikipedia. Discussions centred on programs outlining strategies, goals and key activities.

The session became a space for reflection, where some participants shared their Wikipedia journey, challenges in editing, articles created, milestones reached, and lessons learned along the way. 

Why this work matters

A significant takeaway from the program was the commitment to improving Ghanaian content on Wikipedia. From documenting culture and tradition to closing gender gaps in local-languages. Inclusion and engaging more female editors remain a core priority of Global Open Initiative Foundation. Additionally, supporting contributors and strengthening editing skills. These initiatives reflect a broader goal: building sustained pathways for contributors to engage with Ghanaian knowledge on Wikimedia projects.

Feedback from participants

Participants feedback were practical and forward-looking. Many called for more hands-on training, greater developer involvement, training on other Wikimedia projects such as Commons and regular in-person workshops with hybrid options for those unable to attend physically.

Looking ahead

Upcoming initiatives discussed include AfroCuration 2026, focusing on Highlife music and artistes; monthly workshops for librarians and other volunteers; and the continued development of a web application documenting supreme court cases in Ghana.

As a volunteer, this meetup was a reminder of why these spaces matter. Beyond metrics and programs, it was about reconnecting with the community, with a shared purpose and with work still ahead. It set the tone for a year that promises collaboration, learning, and deeper contributions to Ghanaian knowledge on Wikipedia.

I’m autistic.

Don’t panic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six: I am very interested in certain things. Like, very. Some of those things are nearly lifelong, most notably languages, music, and public transit. Some are coming and going, like dog breeds (early 1990s), the history of Russian nationalism (from 1999 until 2004 or so, and occasionally coming back), Pink Floyd discography (coming and going every year or two), history of Scientology (coming and going from 1997 until 2014 or so), Free Software (since 1998), the Perl programming language (from 1999 until 2009), editing Wikipedia and related projects (since 2004), Belarus (since 2006, and still intensifying), Catalonia (since 2007), and various other things.

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

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

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

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

And that’s the end of the list.

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

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

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

Autism explains a lot about me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Release-Engineering-Team of the Wikimedia Foundation just deployed an upgrade of Wikimedia Phabricator.

It includes a few changes:

• Autocomplete proposals in tasks: List involved users first
• User Profiles:
  • Projects box: Always show "View All" button and number of projects
  • History: Expose previous names of renamed users to admins only
• User settings:
  • Personal API Token field: Auto-select token on click
  • Never show annoying timezone offset notification when user set UTC
• Tasks: Restore "subtask created" entry creation in parent task timeline
• Conduit API:
  • Fix HTTP 200 error setting non-string task points
  • Add many missing parameter descriptions to the docs
  • Convert numerous "Frozen" methods to Deprecated methods
  • Convert nearly all Unstable methods to Stable
  • (admins only) Allow filtering call logs by caller type (e.g. bots)
• Search:
  • Fix using Typeahead Custom Fields (e.g. "Other Assignee")
  • Project search: Make results adhere to project status dropdown value
• UI: Replace ambiguous "owner" strings with "assignee" or "author"
• Flags UI: Replace PNG flag images with SVG versions
• File Transforms: Hide "Available Transforms" when none are supported
• Dashboards: Chart Panels: Add proper chart key validation at least
• (admins only) Projects: Expose users' MFA status in Project Members list
• (admins only) Config: Display each setting's config source on All Settings page
• Misc bug fixes, code cleanup, CSS cleanup, etc.

Downstream dependency tree of tasks: T404375: Update to Phorge upstream / Arcanist upstream to 2025-11-12 code

Upstream changelogs:

• https://we.phorge.it/source/phorge/history/master/
• https://we.phorge.it/source/arcanist/history/master/

We also recently deployed some changes to reduce the load created by aggressive web crawlers: Browsing code repositories in Diffusion asks for login, and viewing project workboards requires login. This creates some inconvenience for users but helps us to keep services available.

If you have comments or questions about Phab, please bring them up on the Phabricator Talk page!

12/02/2026-18/02/2026

Mapping

• Comments are requested on the proposal bicycle_parking=absent. This tag aims to document that no bicycle parking is available around a feature, for example a shop or station, making such gaps in infrastructure discoverable in data analyses. Related discussion is also taking place on the forum.

Community

• Clifford Snow introduced the ‘Safe Routes to School’ initiative, which supports families who want their children to walk or cycle to school in a safe way. The project focuses on identifying the most suitable routes and collaborating with local authorities to make those routes safer. The team is currently looking for additional volunteers to improve the data. Those who would like to contribute can join the #safe-routes-to-school channel on the OSM US Slack.
• OpenCage has published an interview with Nicolas Collignon, CEO of Kale AI, a company developing urban delivery routing solutions powered by OpenStreetMap.
• Anne-Karoline Distel showed how to add information about what is or was quarried at a quarry in OpenStreetMap, noting that such data can be valuable for historical research, whether in industrial, social, or even church history.
• Marcelm005 has proposed a project to map the Lincolnshire ER Routes, emergency routes that enable people to quickly evacuate from flood-prone areas.
• rtnf is trying to learn how OSM tile servers work.
• The OpenStreetMap US community is currently deliberating on the most effective method for querying OpenStreetMap objects based on their geometric shapes.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

• The next OSM Foundation Board meeting will take place on Thursday 26 February 2026 at 13:00 UTC.The meeting will be accessible through the video room.The topics to be covered are:
  • Chairperson’s report
  • Secretary’s report
  • Treasurer’s report
  • 2026 board face-to-face meeting update
  • French cadastre changes and release of code updates for ‘OSM components’ on GitHub
  • Creation of an OSMF Coinbase account for BTC donations
  • Potential statement/policy for OSMF’s participation with other parties in proposals for EU-funded projects, and related topics:
    • Draft blog post: OSMF approach to EU-funded project collaborations
    • Potential OSMF participation in Horizon Europe CSA (GeosTeX)
    • European Institute of Technology (EIT) communications
    • 2026 Sovereign Tech Agency call for tenders
  • Request for comments for GERS as an OGC Community Standard
  • Guest comments or questions.
• The Marche Region (Italy) reported ► about its recent entry among the supporters of OpenStreetMap as a ‘Silver Member’. This is the first time that an Italian public body has officially recognised the usefulness of OpenStreetMap and decided to actively contribute to its financial support.

Local chapter news

• OpenHistoricalMap has kicked off their first donation drive to help fund technical development and operations.

OSM research

• A Danish survey conducted in January 2026 found that in Denmark, OpenStreetMap contained approximately 20,878 km more paths, footways, and tracks than the official Danish road network dataset, GeoDanmark Vejmidter. The survey was carried out by the Danish organisation GeoDanmark.
• A new study published in Nature Communications uses OpenStreetMap land use and AOI data to help classify 110 million buildings across 109 Chinese cities, demonstrating how open, community-mapped data supports national-scale urban inequality analysis and evidence-based planning.

Maps

• kafked has presented his side project rename.world on Hacker News. rename.world is a MapLibre-based map where users can click any place and propose new names. Around 40,000 renames have already been submitted; the non-commercial project runs on SvelteKit, with self-hosted vector tiles, and is explicitly not intended for navigation.
• The Welikia project shows the native ecology of New York City (i.e. what it was before settlement), using OSM as base map. The project is maintained by the Urban Conservation team at the New York Botanical Garden.

OSM in action

• ^[1] At the News-Infographics-Analytics-Maps 2026 conference in Berlin, data visualisation journalist Ferdinand Holsten presented how the German news magazine DER SPIEGEL has built its own open-source mapping stack based on MapLibre and Protomaps. This allows DER SPIEGEL to host tiles for interactive maps independently of commercial services such as Mapbox. The presentation, which is now available as a video on media.ccc.de, outlines the workflow from data preparation to tile generation and the integration into an interactive storytelling. Ferdinand Holsten has kindly provided us with an automatic translation of the presentation into English.
• Jake Coppinger (UrbanSpectra) has published a map tracking community and government projects across a river catchment, utilising OpenStreetMap data (Sydney, Australia).
• rbb24, part of public service broadcasting in Germany, naturally uses ► OpenStreetMap, with correct attribution, in its reporting of locations.

Open Data

• HeiGIT reported that it has published new open and ready-to-use global risk assessment datasets, with the objective to simplify risk analysis by removing major technical barriers to data preparation. These datasets are designed for easy use with the risk assessment QGIS plugin and enable humanitarian stakeholders to conduct multi-hazard, evidence-based risk assessments to support anticipatory action.
• Xiong et al. have published a dataset, which contains a topologically connected representation of the European high-voltage grid (220 kV to 750 kV) compiled from OpenStreetMap data extracted with overpass turbo.

Software

• sylvester_aswin has introduced their project Map Frame, which allows users to generate minimalist map posters based on OpenStreetMap data. Any location worldwide can be selected and downloaded as a 4K PNG (3600×4800); the first poster is free, additional downloads cost one US dollar.
• Carlos Froh introduced OnRouteMap, a web tool that helps find petrol stations, supermarkets, snack bars, drinking fountains, and similar places along your uploaded GPX track.
• The solo developer thattechiedude, from Hudson Valley, has presented ROLLIN, a map platform rating locations from 0–100 based on six features such as wheelchair access, accessible toilets, and lifts. The project uses OpenStreetMap data, cross-references Google Places, and adds community verification, and offers a free API tier for developers.
• Terence Eden, the developer of OpenBenches, has recently implemented a login with OpenStreetMap function in OpenBenches.
• Ulf Rompe has developed ‘What Did You Do‘, a simple tool that shows the number of OpenStreetMap edits made by each software application within a certain period of time.

Programming

• Thomas de Wolff has introduced his Go library geo/osm on Reddit, offering fast parsing of OSM PBF files through handwritten protobuf decoding, optimised readVarint and readSint routines, and custom zlib decompression. The library can skip specific object types, generate file statistics, and extract geometries by region filter, making it suitable for building custom renderers.
• In response to recent Overpass API service instability, Matt Whilden has developed microcosm, a GitHub Actions script that retrieves a narrow slice of OSM data and updates it nightly.
• Andy Townsend discussed the difficulties encountered in setting up your own Overpass API server.

Did you know that …

• … you can zoom one-handed in Organic Maps?
• … you can easily submit a brand to the Name Suggestion Index project by using NSI Submit a Brand?
• … there is a Mastodon instance run by and for OpenStreetMap contributors that is funded by the OSMF?

Other “geo” things

• Emmanuel Mathot and Jonas Sølvsteen wrote on the Development Seed blog about the release of the ‘EOPF Sentinel Zarr Explorer’, a framework for spatial analysis based on Sentinel images. The cloud-based geospatial project is funded by the European Space Agency through the Copernicus Space Component programme, and was developed by a consortium led by Development Seed and EOX, with community outreach led by thriveGEO.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
	Karlsruhe	Geofabrik, Amalienstraße 44, 76133 Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend February 2026	2026-02-21 – 2026-02-22
	Belfast	School of Geosciences, Queen’s University Belfast	Belfast Mapathon	2026-02-21
		TAK Kadıköy Tasarım Atölyesi	OpenStreetMap Outdoor Editing	2026-02-21
	Toulouse	Artilect – 10, Rue Tripière – Toulouse	Rencontre OSM Toulouse	2026-02-21
	Kalyani Nagar	TomTom Pune Office, India	OSM Mapping Party at TomTom Pune, India	2026-02-21
		Atelier Vélo Utile	Rencontre OSM Saint-Brieuc	2026-02-21
	Mumbai	High Point restaurant, Lokhandwala Market, Andheri	OSM Mumbai Mapping Party No.7 (Western Line – South)	2026-02-22
			Missing Maps : Mapathon en ligne – CartONG [fr]	2026-02-23
	Saint-Étienne	Zoomacom	Rencontre Saint-Étienne et sud Loire	2026-02-23
	Olomouc	Přírodovědecká fakulta Univerzity Palackého	Únorový olomoucký mapathon	2026-02-24
		Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-02-24
	Derby	The Brunswick, Railway Terrace, Derby	East Midlands pub meet-up	2026-02-24
	Berlin	Online	OSM-Verkehrswende #72	2026-02-24
	City of Edinburgh	Guildford Arms, Edinburgh	OSM Edinburgh pub meetup	2026-02-24
	Praha	Fakulta Elektrotechnická ČVUT v Praze	Missing Maps Mapathon na ČVUT v Praze	2026-02-25
	Hannover	Kuriosum	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover	2026-02-25
	Luxembourg	neimënster, Luxembourg & online	MSF Luxembourg hybrid Mapathon	2026-02-25
	Düsseldorf	Online bei https://meet.jit.si/OSM-DUS-2026	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)	2026-02-25
	Seattle	Seattle, WA, US	OpenThePaths 2026: Connecting People and Places Through Sustainable Access	2026-02-26 – 2026-02-27
	Essen	Fahrrad-Messe Essen, Halle 5, Show-Truck	Vortrag: Mitmachen bei OpenStreetMap, der Basis vieler Outdoor-Apps	2026-02-26
	Milano	Building 3A Ground Floor – Politecnico di Milano	PoliMappers Maptedì	2026-02-26
	Zürich	Meta Zurich Office	Mapillary: Celebrating 3 Billion Images	2026-02-26
		Online	Asamblea General Ordinaria – Asociación OpenStreetMap España	2026-02-26
	Santa Clara	Santa Clara University	Friends of MSF Mapathon	2026-02-26
			UN Maps Validation Friday Chat & Map	2026-02-27
	Essen	Fahrrad-Messe Essen, Halle 5, Show-Truck	Vortrag: Mitmachen bei OpenStreetMap, der Basis vieler Outdoor-Apps	2026-02-27
	Potsdam	Hafthorn	Potsdamer Mappertreffen	2026-02-27
	Ferrara	Cimitero monumentale della Certosa di Ferrara	Ferrara mapping party	2026-02-28
	Messina	Messina	Mapping Day @ Messina	2026-02-28
	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India – Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-03-01
	Milano	Building 4A, Room Fassò – Politecnico di Milano	PoliMappers Maptedì	2026-03-03
	Salzburg	Bewohnerservice Elisabeth-Vorstadt	OSM-Treffpunkt	2026-03-03
	Lille	Salle Yser, MRES, 5 rue Jules de Vicq, Lille	Rencontre OpenStreetMap à Lille	2026-03-03
			Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng]	2026-03-03
			iD Community Chat	2026-03-04
			OSM Indoor Meetup	2026-03-04
	Brno		Kvartální OSM pivo	2026-03-04
	Stuttgart	Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen	2026-03-04
			OSM US Mappy Hour: OpenHistoricalMap in North America	2026-03-04
		Online	OpenHistoricalMap in North America	2026-03-04
	Flensburg	Offener Kanal Flensburg	3. Open Data Day Flensburg	2026-03-05
			OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting	2026-03-06
	Gent	Wijgaard	OpenStreetMap meetup in Gent – Pre-VLA-congres editie	2026-03-06
		Hogeschool Odissee Hospitaalstraat 23 Sint-Niklaas	Vereniging Leraars Aardrijkskunde (VLA) conference 2026	2026-03-07
	Perth	Espresso Perk U Later	Social Mapping Sunday: Moort-ak Waadiny / Wellington Square Perth	2026-03-07
	Perth	Espresso Perk U Later	Social Mapping Sunday: Moort-ak Waadiny / Wellington Square Perth	2026-03-08
	Delhi		OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.27 (East Zone)	2026-03-08
	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-03-08
	London	Social Sciences Centre – Western University	Friends of MSF UWO Mapathon	2026-03-09
			Missing Maps : Mapathon en ligne – CartONG [fr]	2026-03-09
	Brno	Geografický ústav, PřF MUNI, Brno	Březnový brněnský Missing Maps Mapathon na Geografickém ústavu	2026-03-09
	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #86	2026-03-09

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

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

Feb 20, 23:33 UTC
Resolved - This incident has been resolved.

Feb 20, 19:44 UTC
Monitoring - A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.

Feb 20, 19:28 UTC
Identified - The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.

Feb 20, 19:03 UTC
Investigating - We are currently investigating this issue.

I am a type designer using non-conventional approaches to type design. Since 2020, I have been experimenting with parametric type design approaches based on a modernized MetaPost approach. I have written extensively about this approach in this blog. I have also published a paper¹ on that.

One of the drawbacks of the MetaPost-based approach is that MetaPost is quite old, actually older than me. It was written in the 1980s. MetaPost was actually a modernization on top of MetaFont by Knuth. It did not have SVG support, but that was added in 2024. MetaPost is written in literate programming language WEB, then generating Pascal code from it. Hence the tooling and developer experience around it is quite suboptimal. Extending it is also almost impossible.

Open your social media feed. Within thirty seconds you will likely have seen something engineered to provoke you — a post calibrated by an algorithm to raise your cortisol, confirm your suspicions about the “other side”, or send you spiralling into an outrage loop that keeps you scrolling. This is not a bug. It is the business model. Platforms built on advertising revenue seem to have discovered, empirically, that anger and anxiety are among the most reliable engines of engagement. So their algorithms are optimised for both.

Now open Wikipedia. You land on an article. At the top, perhaps, a small notice: “This article’s neutrality is disputed.” Or: “This article needs additional citations.” Or nothing at all — just the text, the citations, the talk page quietly humming in the background where a numerous strangers are negotiating the phrasing of a single contested sentence. This, too, is not an accident. It is the result of deeply intentional architectural choices — choices that point in precisely the opposite direction from the attention-advertising economy.

The contrast is worth dwelling on, because the stakes are high. We are living through a crisis of epistemic commons: the shared pool of facts, interpretations, and frameworks that democratic societies need in order to function. Social media has accelerated the fragmentation of that commons. Wikipedia, for all its imperfections, is one of the serious attempts to maintain it.

What “architecture” actually means

When technologists speak of the “architecture” of a platform, they mean the ensemble of design decisions — technical, social, economic — that shape how people behave within it. Architecture is not neutral. A street with wide pavements and humped or narrowed crossings makes cars slow down, even without an explicit speed limit. Similarly, a platform’s architecture powerfully determines whether its users tend toward collaboration or conflict, toward nuance or simplification, toward shared reality or tribal bubbles.

Social media platforms share several architectural features that, in combination, tend to produce polarisation. Content is ranked by engagement metrics, and emotionally charged content earns more engagement. Users receive personalised feeds that gradually filter out more nuanced perspective. Sharing is frictionless, rewarding speed over accuracy. Identity — who you are, which tribe you belong to — is constantly at stake in every interaction, making every disagreement feel existential. And the whole system is monetised through advertising, which means the platform’s financial incentive is to maximise time on site, not to serve users’ long-term wellbeing or society’s informational health.

Wikimedia projects share none of these features. They carry no advertising. They do not rank content by engagement. They have no algorithmic feed, no personalised filter bubble. They do not surface content designed to provoke. The architecture is, at its core, the architecture of a library — not a stadium.

one article per person

The perhaps most foundational design principle of Wikipedia is that there is one article per language about a person, a thing or a group. So there is one article in English about a politician, but also one article in Estonian about a football club. Regardless whether you love or hate said politician or football club, you will be looking at and editing the same article. This design doesn’t allow “filter bubbles” to grow. It forces people to come to together, disagree or agree, in the same space. They must find a common version, a common set of facts that they accept.

There is also a Neutral Point of View policy — NPOV in wiki shorthand. It requires that articles present all significant perspectives on a topic fairly and without editorial advocacy, attributing views to their sources rather than asserting them as objective truth. This is, on its face, an almost utopian demand. Neutrality is contested; every choice of which perspectives count as “significant” is itself a political act. Wikipedia’s editors argue about this constantly, and the arguments are sometimes fierce.

The talk page: dissent as collaboration

But here is the crucial thing: the argument happens not on the article itself, but on its attached talk page. Talk pages are open, the disagreement is not suppressed, but it is not kindled either. It is structured. And the goal of the structure is always the same: to produce an article that a reader with no stake in the outcome can trust as a fair account.

Talk pages can be quiet or ferociously busy, depending on the sensitivity of the topic. Articles about contested political figures, historical atrocities, scientific controversies, or living persons can have talk pages running to hundreds of thousands of words, with years of accumulated deliberation visible to any reader who cares to look.

When it works — and it works more often than critics expect — it works because the architecture creates incentives for convergence rather than divergence. To “win” an edit dispute on Wikipedia, you do not need to defeat your opponent or be “louder”. You need to write a sentence that they can accept.

This is radically different from the incentive structure of a social media argument, where winning means humiliating the other side, accumulating likes, and retreating to your corner with your followers’ approval. On Wikipedia and its sister projects, you don’t follow other users’ accounts. You add articles to your “watchlist”, meaning that you get a notification when something changes,

The talk page is, in a sense, the soul of the Wikimedia model. It externalises disagreement — moves it out of the article and into a dedicated space — while preserving a record of why decisions were made. An editor who wants to change a contested passage must engage with the reasons it was written that way, must respond to objections, must propose compromise. The system does not guarantee good outcomes; bad-faith actors exist, and some topics resist consensus indefinitely. But the system is structurally biased toward resolution rather than escalation.

An invitation

None of this is to suggest that Wikipedia is perfect. It has well-documented biases in the demographics of its contributor community, which skews heavily male and heavily from the Global North. Some topics are covered with extraordinary depth and rigour; others are thin, outdated, or shaped by the particular preoccupations of whoever happened to care enough to write them. The deliberative processes that govern the projects can be slow, exhausting, and sometimes hostile to newcomers. These are real problems that Wikimedia communities around the world are actively working to address.

But the architecture — the fundamental design choices that determine what incentives editors face and what outcomes the system is biased toward — is sound in ways that matter enormously right now. Wikipedia does not make money from your outrage. It does not show you a personalised reality. It does not reward you for defeating an opponent. It rewards patience, citation, and the willingness to sit with a stranger across a talk page until you find the sentence you can both live with.

In an information environment defined by fragmentation and bad faith, that is a quiet radical act. And it is an act anyone can join. The edit button is right there. Consider this a personal invitation!

There’s a story behind every Wikipedia edit. This here is just one out of many millions. It starts from an award for LGBT reality TV stars and ends with Biblical Hebrew vowels and a village in Cornwall.

Apparently, there’s a thing called “Queerties”, an award given out by the Queerty magazine to LGBT media personalities, and one of the categories is “Reality TV star”.

I don’t follow the LGBT culture very deeply, so I wasn’t familiar with the Queerties before today, but I did watch all the episodes of Love on the Spectrum, and I do follow some of its participants on social media. And one of them, Pari Kim, is a nominee.

Pari is awesome for a lot of reasons, and the main ones are that like me, she lives in New England, and like me, she loves trains. Especially the MBTA Subway and the MBTA Commuter Rail, colloquially known in this area as “the T”.

I found out about this because I follow Pari on Instagram, but another name in the nominees list caught my eye: “Zelah”. It sounded Hebrew. It is quite common in the United States and some other traditionally Christian countries to give children obscure Biblical names. I got curious and found that in the Bible, it’s not a name of a person, but of a place. The English Wikipedia has an article about it: Zelah, Judea. Wikipedia articles usually have the native spelling of foreign names, but surprisingly, this English Wikipedia article didn’t have a Hebrew spelling.

I looked it up in the Hebrew Bible, and added the spelling to the English Wikipedia: צֵלַע. It perplexed me a bit that it’s spelled with -h in the end, even though the original name doesn’t end with ח or ה, which are usually transliterated as h, but with ע, which is usually not transliterated in the end of the word, as in Joshua, Bathsheba, and Elisha. I should explore why is it like that.

Anyway, I added the Hebrew spelling to the English Wikipedia article. But I wanted to be more thorough, and I checked in which other language there’s an article about this Biblical place. The only such language was Russian.

The Russian article was more curious. It did have Hebrew spelling in the beginning, but it was written backwards! The article’s author probably didn’t really know Hebrew and tried to write it correctly from right to left, but got doubly confused. I fixed it, but then I noticed that the name appears in the article again, also written backwards and making an incorrect claim: that a variant of this name “Zelah Eleph” is written in one word in Hebrew. It may be written as one word in some ancient translations, but not in Hebrew—it’s definitely two words in the Hebrew text. So I fixed that, too.

As I was writing this blog post, I double-checked the Hebrew spelling of that name in the Bible and realized that I actually wrote the vowel signs incorrectly: it’s not צֵלַע, but צֵלָע. So I fixed them yet again.

As a little follow-up, I checked for other people and things named “Zelah” in Wikipedia. I didn’t find much, but there’s a village with that name in Cornwall. Wikipedia says that the origin of this name is uncertain, and the Biblical place is one possibility. I didn’t have much to add to that, but I did notice that the articles mentions Akademi Kernewek, the organization for the Cornish language, and there was no link from the article about the village to the article about the organization. So I added it. It’s a tiny thing, but it will make finding the article about the organization a little bit easier.

And that’s really the point. People sometimes wonder why on Earth do we invest our free time in writing about obscure things on Wikipedia. Here’s my motivation: I learned about a Hebrew name that I didn’t know, and I had to dig through Biblical verses, concordances, and dictionaries to find its correct spelling. Now that I added the Hebrew names to the Wikipedia articles, it will be a bit easier to learn for the next person who is curious about it. Making it easier for other people to learn things that interested me is my motivation.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, there’s another thing in which Pari Kim is like me—we’re both autistic. I figured it out myself only very recently. The next post on this blog will probably be about that.

Previous “Yak Shaving” posts:

• Wikipedia, a Jamaican Jew, and Yak Shaving
• Yak Shaving, part 2: Wikidata, Busiati col Pesto Trapanese, and Other Slow Food

Picture a parasite. The animal you picture probably isn’t the same as what someone else does, it probably fits E.O. Wilson’s description: “predators that eat prey in units of less than one”. 

But the hoverfly Microdon mutabilis is a different kind of parasite. Adult flies linger close to ant colonies, and their larvae feed on their eggs and larvae. Rather than being a parasite in the typical form, they are social parasites — in essence, very bad houseguests who exploit the social bonds of an ant colony. 

When Saty Paynter-Tavares had to pick a Wikipedia article to improve as part of her Insect Diversity and Evolution course, Wikipedia’s short article on Microdon mutabilis seemed like an obvious choice.

Paynter-Tavares is a senior and entomology major at Cornell University. In the semester before she did the Wikipedia assignment, she worked on a curation project working on flies in the genus Microdon and found their biology and life history to be fascinating.

Female Microdon mutabilis flies use chemicals produced by the ants to locate a suitable nest for laying their eggs. Their small, slug-like larvae fly under the radar while wreaking havoc on ant eggs and larvae since their hosts apparently can’t recognize them as invaders.

Reflecting on her goals for the project, Paynter-Tavares said, “I really wanted to highlight the life history and biology of Microdon mutabilis — its host specificity and myrmecophilous lifestyle is one of the quintessential features of this species and is what makes it so interesting. There are a lot of avenues for further research associated with these traits alone.”

Anyone who’s ever been a student is familiar with the challenge of getting big projects completed on time. This can be doubly challenging on Wikipedia, where in addition to the desire to find one more source, you’re surrounded by Wikipedia itself with its innumerable rabbit holes. With that in mind, Wiki Education designed the Wikipedia assignment to mitigate this problem. 

As Paynter-Tavares put it, “We were fortunate to have a timeline and activities provided to us, so it was easy to stay on track by completing smaller tasks throughout the semester. I first assessed the original article to see what was already available, then I conducted research and jotted down notes from peer reviewed sources I consulted in a separate document. By having all the information laid out for me in bullet points, it was a lot easier for me to synthesize the information and flesh out the article.”

As they contribute to Wikipedia, students expand the body of information that’s out there for people to use as a starting point for further work. In the case of this hoverfly, there’s a lot that’s still unknown, and students like Paynter-Tavares help to highlight the research still needed.  “I wanted to add to the repertoire of easily accessible knowledge to highlight the potential for further systematics and conservational studies for this species,” said Paynter-Tavares.

Microdon mutabilis can only be distinguished from Microdon myrmicae, a closely-related species, by the anatomy of the pupa. Until 2002 they were both thought to be part of a single species. The article said this before Paynter-Tavares started improving it, but it did so in a manner that was neither particularly informative nor accessible: “See references for determination.”

Here again, Paynter-Tavares had something important to contribute. “I already have a strong background in the biological sciences, but this article was helpful for communicating my knowledge in a way that is accessible to those who might not have a strong science background.”

In writing for more general audiences, she also built skills that might be useful in her future. “I see myself being most fulfilled in a career involving evolutionary biology and scientific outreach, and would love to work at a zoo, museum, or research station.”

Finally, doing this kind of work engages students in what they’re writing while giving them agency.

Reflecting on her experience, Paynter-Tavares said, “I really enjoyed this assignment compared to a traditional assignment. It was a lot easier for me to be engaged because it was largely self-driven on a topic that I found interesting.” 

Not only was she able to find an interesting topic relevant to her major in entomology, but she also appreciated the research and writing process, all building up to her article contributions.

“I enjoyed compiling all the information that I learned into one cohesive document,” Paynter-Tavares explained. “It was really satisfying to see my article come to fruition after the countless hours of researching and drafting.”

Our support for STEM classes like Saty Paynter-Tavares’ is available thanks to the Guru Krupa Foundation.

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