Over two months, people across Colombia photographed landscapes, species, and protected areas for Wiki Loves Earth 2026. Together, 237 participants contributed 2,387 images to Wikimedia Commons—placing Colombia tenth internationally and second among participating Latin American countries.

But the numbers tell only part of the story. Behind those 2,387 images was a community effort built around photography, learning, partnerships, and a shared interest in documenting Colombia’s biodiversity as free knowledge.

From looking to documenting: Wiki Loves Earth in Colombia

There are places we know because we travel through them, species we discover when we learn to observe them, and territories we begin to value when we find new ways to tell their stories.

In 2026, the Wikimedia community in Colombia turned its attention to the country’s biodiversity through Wiki Loves Earth, the international photography competition that invites people to document natural areas and natural heritage and share these images as free knowledge on Wikimedia Commons.

The Colombian edition of Wiki Loves Earth 2026 brought that invitation into communities and territories across the country. The result placed Colombia among the ten countries and territories with the highest number of photographs contributed in an edition that brought together participants from 61 countries and territories around the world.

Behind that international result, however, was a local story: people learning, walking, photographing, collaborating, and choosing to look at their territories with new perspectives.

A campaign that grew through community participation

Wiki Loves Earth 2026 in Colombia is part of the work that Wikimedia Colombia carries out through the Technology and Communities Program (TyC) to strengthen the documentation and circulation of free knowledge about biodiversity.

The campaign built on a recent experience: Wikivacaciones 2024–2025, a photography campaign developed within TyC’s biodiversity focus. That initiative brought together 1,345 photographs, 87 participants, and representation from 28 departments of the country.

In 2026, the experience grew substantially. Participants contributed 2,387 photographs—1,042 more than during Wikivacaciones 2024–2025, a 77.5% increase. Participation rose from 87 to 237 people, an increase of 172.4% compared with the previous year.

Growth was also visible across the territory. Based on georeferenced information and the distribution map of the photographs, the campaign reached at least 26 departments and territorial entities of Colombia, including the Archipiélago de San Andrés and Providencia.

The collaboration network expanded as well. More than seven partner and co-organizing organizations took part, including Universidad de La Salle, Museo de La Salle de Bogotá, Instituto Humboldt, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Instituto de Estudios Ambientales (IDEA), Fundación Soy Conservación, and Asociación Primatológica Colombiana.

Together, these figures show how a documentation initiative can also become a meeting point between Wikimedia communities, academic institutions, environmental organizations, and people interested in photography and nature.

Beyond uploading photographs: learning and exploring together

The campaign did not take place only in front of a screen.

During the two-month call for participation, we held two photo walks: one in Sevilla and Caicedoni, around La Rana Rubí Reserve, and another at the Bogotá Botanical Garden. These gatherings brought the campaign into specific places and created opportunities to observe, photograph, and document biodiversity together.

The campaign also included three virtual workshops on how to upload and document photographs on Wikimedia Commons. Held on May 21, June 4, and June 18, the sessions supported participants as they created accounts, uploaded photographs, and documented their files correctly. In total, Wiki Loves Earth 2026 in Colombia included five training and mobilization activities.

In 2026, virtual training was combined with in-person encounters centered on photography. The campaign was therefore not only about receiving images: it also sought to welcome new people into the Wikimedia ecosystem and strengthen the capacities of those already contributing to free knowledge.

Nine photographs, three ways of looking at biodiversity

To evaluate the photographs, we invited a jury composed of Felipe Villegas Vélez, Libardo Muñoz and William Santiago Castillo Acero Together, their backgrounds brought experience in biology, photography, science communication, Wikimedia, and audiovisual production.

The jury evaluated the photographs according to four criteria:

• Technical quality: sharpness, exposure, composition, and use of light.
• Encyclopedic value: usefulness of the image for illustrating content about biodiversity and natural areas.
• Environmental relevance: the image’s ability to reflect the importance of the natural environment and its conservation.
• Originality: creativity and visual approach of the photograph.

The national competition had three categories: Landscapes, Macro / Close-up, and Protected Areas of Colombia. Three winning photographs were selected in each category, for a total of nine images recognized by the jury.

Landscapes

These photographs show some of the landscapes that form part of the country’s geographic diversity and make available images that can be reused to document these territories.

Macro / Close-up

This category offered a closer look at details of biodiversity that often go unnoticed: animal behaviors, organisms, and textures that take on a new dimension when observed through photography.

Protected Areas of Colombia

These photographs help make visible some of the country’s protected natural spaces and the species and landscapes that are part of them.

One final choice: the public’s favorite

The national competition concluded with one final choice: the Public’s Favorite.

Ten photographs were selected for this category, featuring birds, mammals, insects, and scenes from different Colombian ecosystems and territories. Throughout August, the community was invited to vote for their favorites through Wikimedia Colombia’s Instagram account, @Wikimediaco.

Basiliscus galeritus 2026.jpg, byXimmoY, was chosen as the Public’s Favorite, receiving more than 4,000 likes on Instagram.

The public vote extended the recognition beyond the jury’s selection and created an opportunity for thousands of people to discover the participating photographs and, through them, connect with Colombia’s biodiversity.

From Colombia to the international stage

The campaign’s results also reached the international stage. With 2,387 photographs, Colombia ranked 10th among the international entries in Wiki Loves Earth 2026.

It was also the Latin American country with the second-highest number of photographs among the five participating countries from the region, behind only Brazil. Colombian photographs represented approximately 2.87% of the 83,226 photographs registered internationally.

The result reflects the Wikimedia Colombia’s ability to mobilize people around a shared theme and contribute to an initiative with global reach. It also points to something broader: Colombian biodiversity can have a place in global conversations about free knowledge when communities are willing to document and share it.

The story continues beyond the competition

The conclusion of Wiki Loves Earth 2026 does not mean that the documentation of Colombian biodiversity comes to an end. The photographs produced during the campaign become part of a broader effort to build and strengthen a free visual archive of the country’s ecosystems and species.

That work continues through initiatives such as Biodiversity in Colombia, a Wikimedia Colombia campaign that seeks to encourage the documentation and visibility of Colombian biodiversity by releasing photographs of species and ecosystems found in the country.

Wiki Loves Earth images can continue contributing to this purpose by documenting species, landscapes, and ecosystems and making them available for anyone to consult and reuse. The value of a photograph does not end when a competition is over.

An image published under a free license can continue circulating: illustrating Wikipedia articles, supporting educational processes, contributing to research, or helping a species or territory have a freely available visual representation on the Internet.

In this way, Wiki Loves Earth 2026 in Colombia becomes another part of an ongoing process: continuing to observe, document, and share Colombia’s biodiversity as open knowledge.

And there are still many species, landscapes, and territories left to photograph.

Traditional dance and music are not simply performances. They are living forms of cultural knowledge, carried through movement, music, memory, teaching, and community practice. Yet much of this knowledge remains difficult to discover online, particularly when it comes to high-quality audiovisual documentation that can be freely accessed, studied, reused, and connected to other forms of knowledge.

In Lampung, Indonesia, WikiNgigel was created to help address this gap.

Implemented by Komunitas Wikimedia Bandar Lampung through a Wikimedia Foundation Rapid Fund project, WikiNgigel focuses on documenting Lampung’s traditional dance and musical traditions and bringing that documentation into the Wikimedia ecosystem. The project combines field documentation, collaboration with cultural practitioners, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Incubator, community training, and public dissemination.

From cultural practice to open knowledge

The project began from a simple observation: documenting cultural heritage is not only about creating photographs or videos. It is also about making sure that the resulting documentation becomes useful knowledge.

For performing arts, this means preserving more than a single representative image. A meaningful record may include a complete performance, individual movements, performers, costumes, musical accompaniment, the performance environment, and the people who make the tradition possible.

WikiNgigel therefore adopted a layered documentation approach. The project combined high-resolution photography, Full HD performance videos, movement documentation, contextual photography, and dedicated audio recordings.

The intention was to create documentation that could serve multiple purposes: cultural reference, education, research, Wikimedia content development, and future reuse under free licenses.

Documenting culture where it is performed

The main documentation activities took place from 4 to 26 July 2026, covering several locations in Lampung.

The team worked in Bandar Lampung, Panaragan Jaya in Tulang Bawang Barat, and Liwa in Lampung Barat. Rather than treating cultural practitioners simply as subjects in front of a camera, the project worked directly with performing-arts groups and cultural partners.

The documentation covered four traditional dances:

• Tari Bedana
• Tari Muli Siger
• Tari Sigeh Pengunten
• Tari Sembah Batin

The project also documented two important musical traditions:

• Talo Balak
• Gambus Lampung

These activities involved collaborations with Sanggar Nuvusa Etnika, Sanggar Pakem, Sanggar Setiwang, and IMASENIK Universitas Lampung, among other cultural and academic partners.

Documenting beyond a single photograph

Performing arts present a particular documentation challenge: movement happens over time.

A photograph can preserve a gesture, costume, expression, or moment, but it cannot fully communicate the sequence of a performance. For this reason, WikiNgigel prioritized complete performance recordings alongside still photography.

The resulting Wikimedia Commons collection includes full-performance videos of the four documented dances, allowing viewers to observe the choreography as a continuous performance rather than as isolated moments.

The project also recorded individual movements and contextual details wherever possible. This approach makes the documentation more useful for people who may want to learn about the structure, visual characteristics, and performance context of Lampung dance.

For music, the team similarly went beyond visual documentation. Dedicated audio recordings were created for Talo Balak and Gambus Lampung, including several recorded pieces and tabuhan associated with Lampung musical traditions.

Working with cultural practitioners

One of the most important aspects of WikiNgigel was the relationship between Wikimedia contributors and cultural practitioners.

The documentation sessions were not simply production days. They were opportunities for contributors to learn directly from the people who understand the tradition from within.

This collaboration also helped the Wikimedia team understand that cultural documentation requires sensitivity to context. The people involved in a tradition are an important part of its documentation, not merely an additional source of visual material.

Community-led coordination

WikiNgigel was coordinated as a community-led initiative within Komunitas Wikimedia Bandar Lampung, bringing together Wikimedia contributors with cultural practitioners, academic partners, performing-arts groups, and local communities across Lampung.

Deo Bernedy Putra (Xiangliangzai), Project Manager, coordinated the overall implementation of WikiNgigel, working closely with Ahmad Arrofian Taufiq Hilmi (BlueberryCheeseCream), Project Assistant, and the wider project team throughout the documentation and community activities.

Rather than placing the project around a single individual, WikiNgigel relied on a collaborative model in which different contributors and partners brought their own knowledge and responsibilities to the process. This approach was particularly important for cultural documentation, where meaningful results depend on sustained relationships with the communities who practice and preserve the traditions being documented.

Building an organized Commons archive

After the fieldwork, the documentation did not simply remain on personal storage or social media.

The materials were organized and integrated into Wikimedia Commons, where they can be discovered as part of a structured free-knowledge archive.

The project used dedicated categories and contextual metadata to connect photographs, videos, and audio recordings with the traditions and locations they document. This structure is important because cultural documentation becomes significantly more useful when people can find related materials rather than encountering isolated files.

The WikiNgigel collection includes complete performance videos, musical recordings, photographs of performers and costumes, movement documentation, and behind-the-scenes material from the documentation process.

The project therefore treats Wikimedia Commons not merely as a place to upload files, but as part of a longer-term cultural documentation infrastructure.

From Commons to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Incubator

The project’s original targets were designed to connect documentation with knowledge creation and contributor development. They included:

• 150+ Wikimedia Commons media files
• 20 Wikipedia articles
• 20 Wikimedia Incubator contributions
• 30 participants
• 20 active editors

By the end of the project, the documented materials supported a broader Wikimedia contribution ecosystem.

The project recorded 362 newly created Wikimedia Commons files, exceeding the original minimum target of 150 files. It also recorded 20 Wikimedia Incubator pages, while the Wikipedia target was fulfilled through a combination of 61 newly created articles and 61 improved articles.

Participant and contributor development also exceeded the original baseline. The project reached 30 participants and 22 editors, compared with the original target of 20 active editors.

These figures matter, but they are only one part of the project’s outcome. The more important question is what happens when documentation becomes connected to people, platforms, and reusable knowledge.

Taking Wikimedia beyond the upload

WikiNgigel also demonstrated the value of connecting Wikimedia documentation with public communication.

On 16 August 2026, the project team published short promotional videos through @wikibdl, directing audiences toward the full documentation available on Wikimedia Commons.

Within the first 24 hours, the four short videos recorded a combined 3,893 interactions:

• 2,974 likes
• 39 comments
• 238 reposts
• 388 shares
• 254 saves

The response also showed that cultural documentation can trigger personal memories. Viewers connected the dances with childhood experiences, school activities, weddings, scouting, and other encounters with Lampung culture.

In one particularly meaningful interaction, Nyoman Mulyawan, the creator of Tari Sembah Batin, expressed appreciation for the documentation. Another viewer asked whether one of the videos could be reposted on TikTok, creating an opportunity for the team to explain how attribution and reuse work under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

These interactions illustrated an important point: Wikimedia Commons can function as an archive, while social media can become a gateway that brings new audiences back to that archive.

From documentation to community learning

The project did not end with field documentation.

On 12 September 2026, WikiNgigel continued through a seminar and workshop at Universitas Teknokrat Indonesia, organized in collaboration with HIMA Sastra Inggris UTI.

Under the theme “Merawat Warisan Budaya, Membangun Pengetahuan Terbuka” (“Caring for Cultural Heritage, Building Open Knowledge”), the activity connected cultural heritage with Wikimedia contribution practices.

The session included a seminar, practical contribution activities, writing, feedback, and a quiz. Erizal Barnawi, S.Sn., M.Sn., a lecturer in Music Education at Universitas Lampung, contributed as the seminar speaker, while the Wikimedia team introduced participants to the process of transforming cultural information and documentation into open knowledge.

The workshop dashboard recorded 22 editors, 307 edits, 61 newly created pages, 122 edited pages, and 2.21K references during the activity. Participants also contributed two Wikimedia Commons uploads.

This marked an important transition: the project was no longer only documenting cultural heritage; it was helping other people participate in documenting and describing it.

What WikiNgigel taught us

1. Audiovisual documentation works best as an ecosystem

A video, photograph, audio recording, Wikipedia article, and Commons category each provide different kinds of access to the same cultural tradition. Combining them creates a richer and more durable knowledge resource than relying on a single format.

2. Cultural practitioners should be active partners

The quality of documentation depends not only on cameras and recording equipment, but also on relationships with the people who understand the tradition from within. Collaboration helps ensure that documentation remains grounded in cultural practice and context.

3. Documentation quality requires continuous attention

Performing-arts documentation involves more than pressing record. Camera positioning, audio quality, lighting, movement visibility, metadata, categorization, file naming, licensing, and post-production all influence how useful the final archive will be.

This made continuous quality assurance an important part of the workflow, particularly when large audiovisual files were being prepared for Wikimedia Commons.

4. Social media can be a gateway to open knowledge

Short-form social media content does not have to compete with an open archive. When used strategically, it can introduce audiences to a cultural tradition and direct them toward the more complete documentation available on Wikimedia Commons.

5. Mentoring matters after the workshop

Introducing people to Wikimedia is only the beginning. Participants often need additional guidance to understand article structure, references, media licensing, Wikimedia Commons categorization, and the relationship between different Wikimedia projects.

For this reason, continued mentoring is an important part of turning one-time participation into sustainable contribution.

When documentation becomes reusable knowledge

The most significant outcome of WikiNgigel is therefore not simply the number of files uploaded.

The project created a pathway connecting cultural practitioners → field documentation → Wikimedia Commons → Wikipedia and Wikimedia Incubator → contributor development → public dissemination → potential reuse.

That pathway matters for living cultural heritage because traditions are continuously practiced and interpreted. Documentation should therefore not be understood as freezing culture in one moment, but as creating accessible records that can support future learning, research, teaching, and cultural transmission.

The project also showed that quality and openness can reinforce each other. High-quality documentation becomes more valuable when it is placed in an environment where people can discover, study, cite, translate, adapt, and build upon it.

A living archive for a living culture

Lampung’s traditional dances and musical traditions continue to live through the people who practice them. WikiNgigel does not claim to capture everything about these traditions. Instead, it contributes another layer to their digital presence: carefully documented, openly licensed, structured, and connected to a global knowledge ecosystem.

From Bandar Lampung to Panaragan Jaya and Liwa, the project brought Wikimedia contributors together with cultural practitioners, artists, students, academics, and community partners.

The result is an expanding archive where a person can not only read about Lampung culture, but also see its movements, hear its music, encounter its performers, and explore the context in which those traditions continue to be practiced.

That is ultimately what WikiNgigel seeks to build: not simply a collection of files, but a more accessible layer of open knowledge around a living cultural heritage.

Explore WikiNgigel

The complete documentation is available through the WikiNgigel collection on Wikimedia Commons, including full-performance videos, photographs, audio recordings, and supporting documentation.

WikiNgigel on Meta-Wiki: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiNgigel

WikiNgigel on Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiNgigel

Tari Bedana: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiNgigel_-_Tari_Bedana

Tari Muli Siger: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiNgigel_-_Tari_Muli_Siger

Tari Sigeh Pengunten: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiNgigel_-_Tari_Sigeh_Pengunten

Tari Sembah Batin: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiNgigel_-_Tari_Sembah_Batin

Talo Balak: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiNgigel_-_Talo_Balak

Gambus Lampung: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiNgigel_-_Gambus_Lampung

Credits and media attribution

WikiNgigel was implemented by Komunitas Wikimedia Bandar Lampung with support from the Wikimedia Foundation Rapid Fund and collaboration with local cultural, academic, and community partners.

The photographs featured in this story are from the WikiNgigel documentation collection on Wikimedia Commons.

Hero image:
WikiNgigel – Tari Muli Siger – Bandar Lampung (5 July 2026) – 26.jpg
Photo by Xiangliangzai / WikiNgigel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Supporting image:
WikiNgigel – Tari Sembah Batin – Lampung Barat (26 July 2026) – 14.jpg
Photo by Xiangliangzai / WikiNgigel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Supporting image:
WikiNgigel – Tari Sigeh Pengunten – Tulang Bawang Barat (12 July 2026) – 34.jpg
Photo by Xiangliangzai / WikiNgigel, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

For reuse of other WikiNgigel media, please consult the individual Wikimedia Commons file page for the applicable author and license information.

WikiNgigel is a project of Komunitas Wikimedia Bandar Lampung dedicated to documenting Lampung’s living cultural heritage and connecting it with open knowledge.

The Long Night of Museums is an initiative that began in Germany in 1997. This initiative has been held in the city of La Paz since 2007, and as of 2026, seven cities across Bolivia have joined in (El Alto, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Tarija, Sucre, Cochabamba, as well as activities in Potosí and Beni).

The Bolivian Wikimedia team has been participating in this event for the past two years thanks to strategic coordination with the Flavio Machicado Viscarra Foundation. Through this collaboration, we have fostered the spirit of the event by organizing games, challenges, snacks, and activities that highlight Wikipedia as an open educational resource and introduce visitors to figures from both contemporary and traditional Bolivian history.

Usually, this is a night when the whole city comes alive, with a wide range of cultural activities on offer. Movie theaters, museums, bookstores, cultural venues, restaurants, and independent artists take to the streets and organize events such as fairs, concerts, and performances. It goes without saying that this day has a significant economic and social impact—cities simply feel more alive.

This year, social unrest and turmoil stemming from demands by various sectors coincided with the date set by the La Paz municipal government. This situation, which was also unfolding in other cities, had its epicenter of conflict at the seat of government. Despite the initial change to the scheduled date, pressure tactics intensified, and no new adjustment was agreed upon. After 53 days of the blockade, La Paz gradually returned to a cautious sense of normalcy.

During this time, it was impossible to meet or organize activities without being weighed down by the daily conflict. The team’s strategy was to understand the context and continue with virtual initiatives; the “Long Night of Museums” photography challenge shifted its focus to other cities where normal life was still possible. We turned to collaborators, volunteers, and the community in other cities to publicize the initiative and the extended dates. These changes in the event’s planning made it possible to include images from Tarija and Cochabamba.

Continuing with the initiative also meant fighting against pessimism in the face of the current situation. And we believe that this, along with other initiatives, aligned with the collective desire to return to normalcy. Two months later, the Long Night of Museums took place in La Paz as a breath of fresh air. The winning photograph from the challenge launched by the team was a photo of director Jorge Sanjinés, an icon of socially conscious cinema in Bolivia.

We reviewed the achievements of this activity, and even though it wasn’t the challenge that yielded the best results, it was carried out with optimism—and that is always a positive thing. We hope to repeat the same challenge next year and that the results will better reflect how this night is experienced in different cities across the country.

What if a word we add today becomes part of the digital heritage of the Kadazandusun language for generations to come?

On 9th September 2026, 70 students from 15 primary schools across Sabah gathered at Sekolah Kebangsaan Tengkurus in Kota Belud with a purpose that may seem simple, but carries great significance: to document Kadazandusun vocabulary in the digital world through Wiktionary.

This was SoKiD 2.0, short for Sompuruan Komi Boros Kadazandusun, or Kadazandusun Vocabulary Group.

From Vocabulary to the Digital World

Kadazandusun is one of the major languages spoken by communities in Sabah. However, like many heritage languages, its use among younger generations faces various challenges.

In schools, students may still have a limited command of basic vocabulary. Some may recognise a word but have difficulty understanding its meaning, context, or how to use it in a sentence. When vocabulary is limited, learning, writing, and communicating in one’s mother tongue can also become more challenging.

This is where SoKiD takes a different approach.

Rather than simply memorising words, students are encouraged to identify, understand, edit, and document Kadazandusun vocabulary themselves in the digital world through Wiktionary.

This approach is not entirely new. The SoKiD programme was first implemented at the Kota Belud district level in 2025 through the Kadazandusun Wiktionary Workshop. The positive response and feedback from that programme opened the door for it to continue and expand to the state level, bringing together 15 schools from various districts beyond Kota Belud.

What began as a school-based intervention is now showing potential as an approach that connects language, education, and technology.

One Workshop, 15 Schools, Thousands of Words

The SoKiD 2.0 workshop was organised by the Kota Belud District Education Office (PPD Kota Belud) in collaboration with Sekolah Kebangsaan Tengkurus, with the support of 10 Wikimedia Malaysia volunteers serving as facilitators.

Students came from 15 schools:

• SK Tengkurus, Kota Belud
• SK Torintidon, Kota Belud
• SK Melangkap, Kota Belud
• SK Lasau Podi, Kota Belud
• SK Timbang, Kota Belud
• SK Piasau, Kota Belud
• SK Dudar, Kota Belud
• SK Linongkuan, Tuaran
• SK St. John, Tuaran
• SK Kimondou, Ranau
• SK Kauluan, Ranau
• SK Dallas, Pitas
• SK Maringgan, Pitas
• SK Gana, Kota Marudu
• SK Barambangon, Kudat

Over the workshop of approximately two hours, the students did more than simply learn about Wiktionary. They became contributors to an open language resource.

The result?

2,849 new Kadazandusun–Malay words were added to Wiktionary.

In addition, 3,280 edits were made to improve and add example sentences to existing translation pages. On average, around 41 new words were contributed by each editor during the workshop.

These numbers may look like ordinary statistics. But behind every word is a student learning about their own language through Wiktionary. 

Students Are Not Just Learners, They Are Contributors

Among the top contributors was Lestley10 from SK Tengkurus, Kota Belud, who contributed 163 new words. This was followed by Hannah Evangeline Valerie Cornie Bryan from SK Kauluan, Ranau, with 131 new words, and Loevellyca from SK Lasau Podi, Kota Belud, with 102 new words.

Stories like these highlight something important: primary school students can also become part of the open knowledge movement when they are given the space, guidance, and trust to contribute.

In this context, Wiktionary is more than just a website for looking up word meanings. It becomes a learning space where students can see their language as something valuable enough to be documented, shared, and passed on.

SoKiD Is More Than Just a Name

There is something interesting about the name of the programme.

In Kadazandusun, “sokid” means “highland.”

Symbolically, the name reflects the programme’s aspiration to take the Kadazandusun language to greater heights, not only in the classroom, but also in the digital space.

Through Wikimedia, words that may once have been used only in family conversations or within local communities now have the opportunity to be discovered by anyone searching for, learning about, or simply wanting to understand the Kadazandusun language. Perhaps, one day, a student from outside Sabah will type a Kadazandusun word into a search engine and discover the work contributed by these students.

From SK Tengkurus to More Schools

The success of this workshop also brings hope that SoKiD can continue as an annual programme of the Kadazandusun Language Committee, particularly through collaboration with the Kota Belud District Education Office (PPD Kota Belud) and the Sabah State Education Department, with support and guidance from Wikimedia Malaysia.

Madam Lorendah, a Deputy Officer at PPD Kota Belud, also expressed support for this collaborative effort, while Mr Sisom bin Awang, Headmaster of SK Tengkurus, Kota Belud, expressed his willingness to assist other schools interested in implementing a similar programme.

For SK Tengkurus, this journey may have begun with a single workshop. But its goal extends far beyond a one-day programme.

It is about building an ecosystem where students learn the language, teachers provide guidance, communities contribute, and technology helps ensure that the language continues to exist in the digital world.

One Word at a Time

Language preservation does not always have to begin with a large project.

Sometimes, it begins with one word.

One word known by a student.
One word contributed to Wiktionary.
One word that can then be read by someone else.
And eventually, one more piece of a language that does not simply disappear.

SoKiD 2.0 demonstrates that when education and Wikimedia come together, students are not only users of knowledge but they can also become creators and custodians of knowledge.

From the 2,849 new words contributed in a single workshop, this may be the beginning of thousands more Kadazandusun words continuing to live in the digital world.

We, Malaysian Wikimedian strongly encourage and hope to see more programmes like this, bringing more contributors of ethnic languages into the movement and encouraging them to continue contributing and expanding ethnic-language content across Wikimedia projects, especially content from the Kadazandusun community.

One word at a time. One student at a time. One community towards the future.

The instruction was simple, and Matete Lesele had given it many times. Choose an article on the English Wikipedia, he told the students in front of him, and translate it into the language you grew up speaking. Most reached for the wiki in their mother tongue. This student reached for Afrikaans; not her mother tongue. When he pointed her back toward her own language, she told him she couldn’t write it — the school she had gone to never taught her how.

Lesele, a librarian at the City of Johannesburg and a board member of Wikimedia South Africa, repeats some version of that exchange to almost everyone who asks why he does this work. It was the moment a vague worry turned specific. A language can live in conversation, in songs, in the things a grandmother says that no one writes down. But a person who cannot write their own language is unlikely to add it to the places people now go to look — and the largest of those, by a distance hard to overstate, is the one he spends his evenings inside.

That worry is the engine behind the campaign he launched this month. Through September — Heritage Month in South Africa — Lesele is running a translation drive across all ten of the country’s indigenous and Afrikaans-language Wikipedias, asking volunteers to carry articles about South African heritage from English into the languages those articles are missing from. Thirty days, ten wikis, one simple mechanic: translate rather than create, so that no one has to compose from nothing. He chose September because Heritage Month already gathers these languages, and the cultures behind them, under a single banner.

The scale of what he is pushing against is easier to feel in numbers. As of writing this, the English Wikipedia holds 7.2 million articles. Afrikaans has around 130,000. Zulu, the most-developed of South Africa’s indigenous languages online, has about 12,000. Sepedi has 9,000; Xitsonga, roughly a thousand, kept alive by 41 active editors. Ndebele has 330 — the written record, in a country of eleven official spoken languages, that a schoolchild searching in their own tongue would find waiting for them.

Lesele came to this by a route he did not plan. He opened a Wikipedia account in 2014 and left it untouched for six years, until a 2020 campaign for African librarians called 1Lib1Ref pulled him in during the first hard months of the pandemic. He finished among its top 50 contributors across the continent, the only South African on the list. He kept editing, then started teaching others — at library meetups, at universities where he sometimes arrived to assist and ended up leading. On the side, he is building the case for a Wikipedia in Sepulana, his home language, which is not among the official eleven and which, he says plainly, no one else is likely to carry if he sets it down.

The campaign began in an in-between moment, the way a surprising number of them do. At Wikimania he met an editor from India writing one article a day for a hundred days, each in her own language. Her project was one person and one language. South Africa has ten wikis, all of them short of hands at once. A thirty-day, ten-language campaign had come from nothing more than two Wikimedians in a queue, telling each other what they were working on. 

At midnight on the first of the month, the tracking began. Lesele had set up a campaign on the Wikimedia Programs & Events Dashboard (the movement’s own tool for tracking impact in the country, movement and world), which records every edit contributors make across the ten wikis. He checks it each morning the way other people check the weather; on the third day it showed 39 articles from 23 people, a figure he expects to look quaint by the thirtieth. Before the launch, he spent a Saturday walking volunteers through the translation tool by translating a whole article together, English into Sepulana, so they would leave having done the thing rather than heard about it.

One of those volunteers is Lindani Sikhakhane, a librarian from KwaZulu-Natal now based in Johannesburg, translating into Zulu. He has been editing since 2024, and describes the hardest part as staying consistent — and hunting for the Zulu meaning of an English word that doesn’t have a tidy one. The most rewarding part is simpler: finishing an article and knowing the content of a place like his own will now be readable anywhere in the world. To anyone hesitating at the edge of it, he offers the argument the whole campaign rests on. “Focus on your own language,” he says. “It doesn’t mean you have to understand English. Join, and learn as you go.”

What Lesele hopes other affiliates across the continent take from the month is not the campaign so much as the reasoning under it, which travels better than the specifics. The languages are worth the trouble of digitising. The smallest wikis are held up by one or two people who cannot hold them up forever. And nearly every country has a period in its calendar heavy enough to gather volunteers around.

On the thirtieth, he wants a larger number than the one he started with. But pressed on what he is really after, he reaches past the dashboard for something harder to count. He wants his son to be able to read about their heritage, in Sepulana, long after he is gone — and his son’s children after that. The world he is working toward is one where a Zulu speaker can speak Zulu to him and he can answer in Sepulana, and neither has to retreat into English to be understood. It is not, he says, the kind of thing a person builds alone. 

Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on August 28. Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta. Let foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!

Highlights

• Data center switch: All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on September 23 at 14:00 UTC as part of a scheduled switchover to allow for essential maintenance and improvements. A banner will be displayed on all wikis 30 minutes in advance.
• Baseline NPOV Policy: The public conversation regarding the proposed baseline NPOV policy for Wikipedias that do not yet have one has been concluded. Read the summary report and the updated baseline NPOV policy text and enforcement guidance here.
• Save the date. Wikimania 2027 will be taking place in Santiago, Chile, and online from August 18 to 21, with the theme “The Internet we want”. See the Wikimania 2026 coverage highlights and a brief update on what’s ahead.
• Chart extension is now beginner-friendly: Creating graphs and charts previously required manual JSON editing. In response to a Community wish to make the Charts extension more user-friendly, a new Visual mode for adding values has been introduced.

Annual Goals Progress on Engage

See also: Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia

• Introducing TextMatch: Communities are shaping Suggestion Mode with TextMatch to create custom suggestions that are tailored to their own policies and writing conventions. Share your feedback.
• Visual editor becoming default: Design work on the user experience for visual editing for newcomers is underway. This follows visual editor becoming default on English Wikipedia following a community discussion.
• Community Wishlist 2027 consultation: The consultation on the proposed new Wishlist process is closing this week. This year’s cycle plans for wish submissions in late October/early November, triage completed by late November, and voting in early to mid January. Share feedback in any language on the talk page.
• Improved Add a Link feature: Add a Link has been upgraded for English Wikipedia users with improved detection of links that have different capitalization. This will help reduce ambiguous suggestions caused by differences in capitalization in article titles, including articles about cultural goods.
• Wikipedia Android app: Latest release includes updates to the Saved feature, bringing the app’s saving experience closer to iOS and Web. The update redesigns the Saved tab with an “All articles” view, removes the default “Saved” reading list, renames reading lists to “Collections,” and modernizes the article-saving experience.
• Domain change for thumbnails: The domain of URLs for thumbnails is changing from upload.wikimedia.org to thumb.wikimedia.org. The old URLs will continue to work but MediaWiki will advertise the new domain instead. Original files, videos, and transcodes will still be served from upload.wikimedia.org.
• Reading lists rollout continues on desktop: Following the initial deployment to Bengali, Chinese, Czech, and Vietnamese Wikipedias, reading lists went live on Arabic, French, and Indonesian Wikipedias and will go live on English Wikipedia on Sep 14, with all remaining wikis following on Sep 28.
• New features of Pageviews Analysis: Several new features have been added to the Pageviews Analysis tool which allows users to compare pageviews across multiple pages. They include WikiNav which provides insights into how readers of Wikipedia explore the content, editing stats in Siteviews, the ability to lookup articles belonging to a WikiProject, and support for dark mode.
• Article guidance: As part of an A/B experiment, Article guidance is now available in Turkish and Simple English.
• Latest experiments: A current experiment for logged-out mobile readers on Bengali, Czech, English, Farsi, and Polish Wikipedias is testing whether simplifying the Minerva navigation bar improves reader retention. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
• Wikifunctions status updates: Thanks to all contributors, Wikifunctions has now reached 5,000 functions.
• Latest highlights from Tech News: Weeks 36 and 37 of Tech News include the Article guidance feature is now enabled by default for editors with less than 100 edits on Simple English and Turkish Wikipedia.

Annual Goals Progress on Enable

See also: Research newsletter · WikiLearn News · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

• Affiliates and grant funding: Have your say on proposals establishing (1) a new model and set of expectations for movement affiliates; (2) new, connected requirements to determine eligibility for receiving Community Fund grants from the Wikimedia Foundation; and (3) updated criteria for affiliate recognition processes.
• Community Fund reflections: Read the reflections on the fiscal year 2025–2026 of the Rapid Fund and General Support Fund, covering $17.73 million across 427 grants in 90 countries, with 56.2% distributed outside North America and Northern & Western Europe.

Annual Goals Progress on Reach

See also: Wikimedia Apps · Readers

• World of Wikipedia launches: The World of Wikipedia game has been released. It is an online collectible card game where players sort fact from fiction across Wikipedia articles to build their card library. The game is the latest experiment in reaching younger audiences through familiar formats, following Wikispeedia on Roblox and Which Came First? on the Wikipedia app.

Other updates

See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter

• Celebrate Women 2026: Read the impact of Celebrate Women 2026 as the campaign concluded with 112 events, 238,222 unreverted content edits and 2,499,773,577 bytes added.
• US staff union vote: On Sep 3, eligible Wikimedia Foundation staff in the United States voted in favor of union representation in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election.

Other Movement curated newsletters & news

See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters

Subscribe or unsubscribe 

Members of the Wikimedia community and the African diaspora, preparations for Wiki Indaba 2026 in Abidjan are well underway!

To make sure your journey goes as smoothly as possible, it is important to start taking care of your travel and administrative requirements now.

Here are the two key steps you need to take to enter Côte d’Ivoire:

1. Visa Requirements (Depending on Your Nationality)

Visa exemption

If you are a citizen of a ECOWAS member country (such as Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Mali, and others), you do not need a visa to enter Côte d’Ivoire. A valid passport or national identity card is sufficient.

Visa required

For citizens of other African countries and members of the African diaspora living outside the ECOWAS region, a visa is required to enter Côte d’Ivoire.

The recommended procedure: E-visa

The Ivorian government offers a straightforward electronic visa process:

1. Submit your application exclusively through the official website: snedai.com
2. Complete the application form and pay the visa fee online.
3. Print the “Pre-registration Letter” you receive by email. This document is required to board your flight. Your physical visa will be issued upon arrival at Abidjan airport.

2. Health Requirement: Yellow Fever Vaccination

Côte d’Ivoire has strict requirements regarding yellow fever vaccination.

An International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) showing that you have been vaccinated against yellow fever is mandatory. You may be asked to present it upon arrival at Abidjan airport.

Make sure your vaccination is up to date before travelling!

Need Help or an Invitation Letter?

The local logistics team is here to support you throughout the process, help you verify your supporting documents, or provide you with your official invitation letter.

For any questions, please contact Emmanuelle Guebo directly at emmanuelle.guebo@wikimedia.ci and Evrard Aka : evrardaka@gmail.com.

CLUJ-NAPOCA, Romania — For the first time in its history, Romania will host the annual regional conference of the Wikipedia movement: Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2026. Taking place from September 18 to 20, 2026, at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, the meeting brings together digital rights advocates, researchers, open-knowledge contributors, and chapter delegates from across Central and Eastern Europe and surrounding regions.

The event is organised by Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova User Group in partnership with Făgăraș Research Institute and hosted by Babeș-Bolyai University through its Faculty of European Studies, Office for Open Science, Centre for Students with Disabilities, and the Doctoral School “History. Culture. Civilisation.”

What is the Wikimedia CEE Meeting?

Wikimedia CEE Meeting is the flagship annual conference uniting volunteer editors, tech developers, cultural heritage (GLAM) partners, and community organisers across the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region. Since its inaugural edition in Belgrade in 2012, the gathering has served as the core engine for cross-border cooperation in the region—driving initiatives like CEE Spring, multilingual translation drives, and shared strategies to safeguard cultural heritage and linguistic diversity across Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and sister projects.

Why CEE Meeting 2026 Matters More Than Ever

Held under the slogan “CEE Beyond the Crossroads,” the 2026 conference represents a strategic turning point for knowledge communities in the region: for years, CEE digital spaces have navigated complex geopolitical volatility, digital disinformation, rapid technological disruption, and linguistic fragmentation. Rather than merely pausing to react to external pressures, CEE 2026 marks the collective transition toward intentional empowerment, regional resilience, and shared infrastructure.

By deeply embedding the event into the academic ecosystem of Babeș-Bolyai University—partnering with university bodies dedicated to open science and historical research—the conference bridges the gap between grassroots Wikipedia volunteers and institutional research.

The conference will welcome Bernadette Meehan, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Wikimedia Foundation, who assumed leadership of the global organisation in January 2026. Her in-person participation underlines the strategic importance of Central and Eastern European communities in shaping the global movement’s future policies, equity goals, and technological transitions.

Key Novelties and Program Highlights

Accessibility and Radical Inclusion at the Core: In direct partnership with Babeș-Bolyai University’s Centre for Students with Disabilities, CEE 2026 places physical and digital accessibility at the forefront of its logistics and venue design, setting a new benchmark for regional Wikimedia conferences.

The “Buddy System” for Grassroots Integration: To lower barriers for first-time attendees, emerging communities, and youth participants, the 2026 edition implements a structured peer-onboarding buddy program pairing new contributors with experienced delegates throughout the event.

Event Details

• Dates: September 18–20, 2026
• Host City: Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, Romania
• Main Venue: Babeș-Bolyai University (Faculty of European Studies)
• Official Information & Program Hub: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2026

Media & Inquiries Contact: wmceem2026@icf-fri.org

Reflections on the Wikimedia Malaysia 2026 Strategic Direction Conference

After discovering the Wikimedia platform, I began my journey of promoting and preserving my community’s language, Kadazandusun, through my participation in Wiki Club Kent. The club gave me an opportunity to learn more about the Wikimedia movement and to contribute to the world of free knowledge.

Today, that journey continues with the same mission. Although my time as a student and as a Wiki Club member has come to an end, my passion for contributing remains. I hope to take the Kadazandusun language further into the world as part of this community.

On 30th August 2026, I had the opportunity to participate in the Malaysian Wikimedia Strategy Summit 2026 in Kuala Lumpur, which brought together Wikimedians and community leaders from diverse backgrounds across Malaysia. For me, this was more than just a conference. It was a space for us to pause, reflect on the journey we have taken so far, and envision where the Malaysian Wikimedia community wants to go next.

From Diverse Communities, One Movement

One of the most meaningful aspects of the conference was the opportunity to meet fellow contributors from various communities, including Kadazandusun, Kimaragang, Malay, Chinese, and others. Each community has its own stories, languages, and challenges. Yet, we share one fundamental belief: knowledge should be accessible to and shared by everyone.

The first session, “Movement”, discussed the role of the Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia in expanding the movement within communities across Malaysia. It also explored ways to build partnerships with educational institutions and other organisations, particularly in areas such as language, culture, tourism, and libraries.

How Do We Bring Communities Together?

The second session, “Society”, and the third session, “Ecosystem”, raised an important question: how can we bring more people into this movement?

Among the ideas shared were editing campaigns, gamification, and recognition for volunteers, as well as approaches that are more closely connected to young people who have the potential to continue contributing to and expanding content across Wikimedia projects.

Programmes such as WikiGap Editathon, Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos, and various edit-a-thons demonstrate that communities can grow when we create opportunities for people to contribute according to their interests and abilities.

Wikimedia is also about more than just Wikipedia. Wikidata, Wikisource, and Wiktionary open up even more opportunities for us to build, connect, and preserve knowledge.

Imagining the Future

The discussion about the future was perhaps the most interesting part of the fourth session, “Future”. Over the next one to five years, the community envisions more editors and more content in the ethnic languages of Sabah and Sarawak, as well as the development of tools that can make contributing easier, such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata applications.

Looking further ahead, over the next ten to fifteen years, the aspirations are even greater: establishing Wiki Clubs in more states and educational institutions, creating physical hubs in Sabah, developing more specialised Wikimedia applications, and using Wikimedia data to support the development of local technology and artificial intelligence.

For me, one of the most important dreams is to see ethnic languages continue to grow as languages of knowledge in the digital world.

Hopes for My Community

As part of the Kadazandusun community, I hope that more young people from my own community will come forward and contribute. We have so many stories, terms, traditional knowledge, history, and cultural heritage that can be shared. Our language should not live only in everyday conversations. It should also live in the digital space.

One Day, One Wake-Up Call

The conference lasted only one day, but it left a much longer-lasting impact on me. I returned home with a wake-up call to become more active and committed to editing than ever before, to create more content and encourage more people from my community to contribute as well.

From Wiki Club, I learned about community.

From community, I learned about the movement.

And through this movement, I began to see the future.

Perhaps our contribution today is only a small edit. But when thousands of people do the same, we are building something much greater: a world of knowledge that can be passed on to future generations.

Thank you, Wikimedia Malaysia, for reminding me that every edit is part of a much larger journey.

In our daily life, there are things we do not notice while they are still around us. A mother tongue can be one of them. We grow up hearing it at home, in conversations with family,  jokes exchanged between neighbours, or stories told before bedtime. We rarely stop to think about how many of our memories are carried by the words we inherit. However, when those words begin to disappear, we do realize that a language is never simply a collection of vocabulary, It is a way of remembering who we are.

I am a Sundanese woman, and Sundanese is part of the memory. 

For me, the question of whether the Sundanese language will continue to live is not merely a linguistic question. It is a deeply personal one. It is connected to the kind of world we will leave behind for the generations that come after us. Will they still be able to read old expressions, understand the stories told by their grandparents, recognize the names of plants and places in their own language? Or they simply have the freedom to say, “This is my language.” 

The world around us, however, is changing rapidly. Most of our everyday lives have moved onto screens. We read, learn, work, socialize, watch videos, and exchange information through digital platforms. Languages meet one another there every second. Some have enormous amounts of content behind them; others appear only occasionally, or not at all.

This is where I began to think differently about the future of Sundanese. Perhaps preserving a language today does not only mean teaching children to speak it at home. It also means making sure the language has a place where knowledge can grow.

Talking about language, a language needs books. It needs stories, dictionaries, photographs, historical records, scientific information, local knowledge, and people willing to write in it. It needs a presence in the spaces where future generations will learn and seek information. Likewise with  Sundanese language, it cannot live on only through documents it also needs a home, the digital world.

From the Old Place to the New Home

Women play a special role and have a particularly meaningful connection to the preservation of the Sundanese language. Within families, women especially mothers and grandmothers have traditionally played an important role in passing down the language and cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. A child may first encounter a Sundanese expression through a conversation with their mother, hear stories from their grandmother, enjoy traditional recipes prepared in the kitchen, or listen to songs sung at home.

However, I do not think women’s role should end there. If the spaces where knowledge is produced are changing, our participation must change with them.

Women should not only be the people who pass culture down within families. They can also become the people who document, interpret, question, and bring it into new forms. For example, a traditional story can become a digital story, a recipe can become an audio-visual record, and a forgotten word can be added to a dictionary. Moreover, a local historical site can be photographed or documented, and manuscript can be digitised. Therefore, a piece of knowledge that once existed only in someone’s memory can be placed in a space where others can find it. None of these acts may seem monumental on their own. However, culture is often preserved through small acts repeated over time. This is one reason I became interested in Wikimedia.

Why Women’s Voices Matter

There is another reason why I believe women need to be more visible in this kind of work. Knowledge is never entirely neutral. What ultimately gets documented often depends on what we pay attention to, what we consider important, and whose experiences we consider worthy of being recorded.

If women are absent from the process of documenting knowledge, some aspects of women’s lives may remain underrepresented. Consider the knowledge traditionally associated with women’s everyday lives: household practices, food preparation, childcare, textile traditions, local healing knowledge, oral histories, family stories, and countless forms of labour that rarely appear in formal historical records. These are not insignificant pieces of knowledge. They are part of culture.

When women document them, they are not simply preserving “women’s topics.” They are expanding the picture of what a community considers worth remembering. This is why digital literacy among women matters to me. It is not only about learning how to use technology. It is also about having the confidence to participate in the production of knowledge.

A woman does not have to be a historian, linguist, programmer, or academic to contribute. She can start with the things closest to her: a word her grandmother used to say, a family recipe still kept at home, a photograph of an old building in her village, or a story about the place where she grew up. Even a plant whose Sundanese name is slowly being forgotten, or a manuscript she comes across in a local collection. These can become a starting point, that may seem small and ordinary, but when they are documented and shared, they can become part of something much larger, a broader body of knowledge.

Finding Sundanese in Wikimedia

My involvement in Wikimedia projects, particularly through my work with Wikimedia Bandung, has given me a different understanding about the definition of contribution to the knowledge.

Wikimedia is often associated with Wikipedia, but the movement is much broader than an encyclopedia. Its projects create spaces where people can contribute knowledge in different forms: articles, dictionaries, quotations, historical texts, photographs, audio, video, and structured data.

For languages like Sundanese, these spaces matter. Sundanese has a long literary and cultural history. It has manuscripts, oral traditions, local histories, traditional knowledge, place names, food traditions, agricultural knowledge, and countless words and expressions that cannot be replaced by other languages. For this reason, it needs people who are willing to make that knowledge accessible to others, because a rich cultural heritage does not automatically make its way into the digital world. 

For me, there is something deeply meaningful about that idea. Knowledge does not have to belong to one person. It can be shared. Through Wikimedia Bandung, I’am lucky to be able to meet so many people, from different backgrounds: students, teachers, university lecturers, and members of the wider public. What connects as is not necessarily the same profession or academic background, but a willingness to contribute something to the commons of human knowledge. 

A Language Needs More Than Speakers

A language can remain alive and spoken at home while, at the same time, gradually becoming less visible in the wider public space. This distinction becomes increasingly important in the digital age.

Imagine a young Sundanese speaker is searching online for information about a traditional plant, a historical figure, an old manuscript, a village, or a cultural practice. If the information is available only in another language, the young person may still find an answer, but the connection between the subject and their own linguistic world becomes weaker.

Now, imagine that the same information is available in Sundanese. The difference is not merely linguistic. It says that the language is capable of carrying knowledge. It tells the speakers that their language is not only something used at home or in informal conversation. It can also be a language for history, science, education, culture, and contemporary knowledge.

That is why I see Wikimedia projects as more than digital platforms. They can become places where a language proves that it is still alive.

Wikipedia can provide encyclopedic knowledge in Sundanese. Wiktionary can help document vocabulary. Wikisource can preserve texts that have entered the public domain. Wikimedia Commons can hold photographs, recordings, videos, and other media. Wikidata can connect information in structured forms that can be understood and processed by both humans and machines.

Each project serves a different purpose. Together, they create a kind of digital ecosystem. Besides, within that ecosystem, a language such as Sundanese can find room to breathe.

Wikimedia Bandung and the Work of Continuity

This is where the work of Wikimedia Bandung becomes meaningful to me. The community organizes training sessions, educational activities, cultural documentation programs, documentation of traditional Sundanese food, and projects documenting local flora and fauna using their Sundanese names, along with various other initiatives that encourage people to contribute to Wikimedia projects. These activities create opportunities for people who may never have previously imagined themselves as “knowledge contributors” to take part.

I have seen how a workshop can turn curiosity into contribution. Someone who comes simply to learn can grow into an editor; a student can begin documenting cultural sites; a teacher can bring Wikimedia projects into the classroom. A volunteer may even discover that the language they use every day also has a place as a language of digital knowledge.

The process does not happen overnight. A language is not “saved” by one grand act, but through many small contributions: an article, a photograph, a word, a recording, a correction, or a story that is finally documented. Over time, these pieces become part of something larger.

Perhaps that is what I love most about Wikimedia. Something meaningful and far-reaching does not always come from large institutions, but from the care of ordinary people who are willing to share what they know.

Wikimedia Projects: Keeping the Light Alive

Sometimes I imagine language as a light. It does not disappear simply because one person stops using it, but a light needs someone’s willing to keep it burning.

The Sundanese language has endured because generations before us continued to use, write, sing, teach, and carry it from one generation to the next. Our responsibilities may be different, but the principle remains the same, we have new tools. We have new spaces and we live in a digital world that offers far greater possibilities for sharing knowledge than ever before.

The question is: will we use those spaces?

For me, contributing to Wikimedia is one small answer.

I do not imagine that a single article, dictionary entry, or photograph can determine the future of a language. However I believe that thousands of small contributions can change how visible a language is and perhaps, more importantly, change how the speakers see themselves.

A language which presents on the internet is a language that can be found. A language capability of carrying knowledge is a language that can continue to grow. A culture documented by the people who live within it has a greater chance of being understood from its own perspective.

That is why I hope to see more Sundanese women entering the digital world, not only as users, but also as contributors. We can start with simple things: writing about what we know, documenting what is around us, adding a word, sharing a story or photograph, or improving an article that needs correction. When we know it, why don’t we help others by doing the same?

All of these things may seem simple. Yet, perhaps cultural continuity has always been built in this way not through grand declarations, but through people who quietly decide that something they have inherited is worth carrying forward into the future.

As a Sundanese woman, I want to be one of them. I want the Sundanese language to remain present not only in the voices of our families, but also in the places where future generations go to seek knowledge. I want the language to remain visible, read, heard, and discovered not as a language trapped in the past, but as a living language moving toward the future.

In conclusion, perhaps this is how we can keep the light of Sundanese culture alive in the digital age: not simply by protecting what has been passed down to us, but by creating new spaces for it to continue shining. Wikimedia provides one such space. We can contribute Sundanese-language articles to Wikipedia, write and publish books on Wikibooks, add vocabulary to Wiktionary, help transcribe and digitize Sundanese manuscripts on Wikisource, or document Sundanese cultural heritage through Wikimedia Commons. There are many other ways to contribute. What matters most is that we do not remain mere spectators in the digital world, but take part in shaping the knowledge we will pass on to future generations.

Eri has a mix of a "true confession" and a "wait, really?" today.

The programming language Vala bills itself as a C# like language that compiles into something pretty close to C performance, designed specifically for writing code against Gnome and its associated libraries.

One of the C#-isms in brings in is async/await type semantics. You can yield someAsyncFunction(), which returns control to the caller, allowing it to proceed until the yielded function returns an actual value.

Because it has asynchronous functions, many library functions for handling I/O are already async. So you can make_directory_async, which yields control so you can keep executing while waiting for the filesystem to make your directory.

There are also synchronous versions of those methods. And then there's create_directory_with_parents, which will create a chain of directories for you. That's the synchronous version, and Vala's core library has decided not to provide an asynchronous version of it, which is my "wait, really?" I suspect it's really about the race conditions involved and the risks of things going wrong while doing it asynchronously; all solvable problems, but tricky ones to solve.

But it's the problem Eri had, and this is their solution:

/// Note: does not throw if target already exists
async void create_directory_with_parents_async(File file, Cancellable? cancellable = null) throws Error {
	var to_create = new File[0];
	var? current_target = file;
	while(current_target != null) {
		try {
			yield current_target.make_directory_async(Priority.DEFAULT, cancellable);
		} catch(IOError.NOT_FOUND e) {
			to_create += current_target;
			current_target = current_target.get_parent();
			continue;
		} catch(IOError.EXISTS e) {
			break;
		}
		break;
	}

	for (int i = to_create.length - 1; i >= 0; --i) {
		try {
			yield to_create[i].make_directory_async(Priority.DEFAULT, cancellable);
		} catch(IOError.EXISTS e) {
			// Created by another process
		}
	}
}

If I'm reading this correctly, we start by trying to create the full path to our leaf node. If there's a not found error, we go up one level and try and create that one. We keep trying that until we either run out of parent nodes to try against, or we hit a directory that already exists, or we successfully create a directory. All along the way, we keep appending the current_target to our to_create array.

Once we've gotten that baseline, we then iterate across our to_create array, backwards, creating the shortest non-existent paths first.

This works, but it's ugly as sin. Mostly, it's ugly because we're using exceptions for flow control instead of doing things like checking for file existence, though I suppose those checks may also break our goal of doing all our I/O operations in an async context. I don't know enough about Vala to know the better way of doing this.

Eri writes:

The function works as intended, but trying to trace control flow through the first loop is not pleasant. Ironically, the C mechanism Vala wraps is slightly advanced error codes, which would be nicer to work with in this case

Eri also provides a slightly re-worked version of the main loop, that is at least a bit easier to follow, but still an ugly approach:

	while(current_target != null) {
		try {
			yield current_target.make_directory_async(Priority.DEFAULT, cancellable);
			break;
		} catch(IOError.EXISTS e) {
			break;
		} catch(IOError.NOT_FOUND e) {
			to_create += current_target;
			current_target = current_target.get_parent();
		}
	}

Still, since this is an attempt to patch over a missing core library method and solve a tricky problem about how to handle race conditions, I think absolution is reasonable. It's ugly, it's weird, but it does the job. Go hide it in a box, and never touch its implementation again- except to make it go away.

[Advertisement] Keep the plebs out of prod. Restrict NuGet feed privileges with ProGet. Learn more.

From our anonymous submitter:

Having reached the end of the road at a company increasingly swallowed up companies further east which you'd never believe were still afloat, I found myself headhunted for certain specialty software skills. I was reaching the final few years of my expected working span, so I jumped at the chance. The money was (to me at that time) spectacularly good, so I jumped into it.

It started when my first day was spent by me being sent home for the weeks it was still going to take to onboard me. Not bad, engaged to wait, as it were, and the first 6 months was thus and so.

The man who had interviewed me, call him Fred, was intelligent and urbane, and was a joy to meet. He and I clearly hit it off, and lo and behold I was in. It was he who gave me my first assignment, which was mathematical analysis of their core milk-cow program because they needed to find out what it did, and how it did it, so they could perhaps implement it in a more contemporary language.

So I did that, and was just about to publish my findings with him, when Fred inconveniently dropped dead suddenly. In the what-are-we-going-to-do-now-our-key-man-is-no-more confusion, we contractors were forgotten.

For the next 18 months or so (may have been more, may have been less) I was more or less ignored. I spent the time writing a development environment to work on any part of the program conveniently, all the while sitting next to a man who was constantly, forcefully and repetitiously speaking ill of the managers in his line structure. The ridiculously garrulous boss who inherited me thought little of me, and handed me the little work that came my way with active hostility. One or two good guys, but mostly a cabal of elderly men trying to preserve their little money-spinner as long as they could, and a johnny-come-lately trying to increase (and even introduce) automatic processes was less than welcome. During that time I spent quite some time on TDWTF, submitting a gem or two here and there.

No surprise when they finally kicked my arse away. No love lost there. Now working my last couple of years to retirement as a postie.

No punchline here. I want you to know that dropping dead from work is all too real and can happen to anyone.

[Advertisement] ProGet’s got you covered with security and access controls on your NuGet feeds. Learn more.

It's a holiday here in the US, a celebration of labor, so we're reaching back through the archives for a story about an attempt to be labor saving that was not successful. Original. --Remy

I’ve had to write a few domain-specific-languages in the past. As per Remy’s Law of Requirements Gathering, it’s been mostly because the users needed an Excel-like formula language. The danger of DSLs, of course, is that they’re often YAGNI in the extreme, or at least a sign that you don’t really understand your problem.

XML, coupled with schemas, is a tool for building data-focused DSLs. If you have some complex structure, you can convert each of its features into an XML attribute. For example, if you had a grammar that looked something like this:

The Source specification obeys the following syntax

source = ( Feature1+Feature2+... ":" ) ? steps

Feature1 = "local" | "global"

Feature2 ="real" | "virtual" | "ComponentType.all"

Feature3 ="self" | "ancestors" | "descendants" | "Hierarchy.all"

Feature4 = "first" | "last" | "DayAllocation.all"

If features are specified, the order of features as given above has strictly to be followed.

steps = oneOrMoreNameSteps | zeroOrMoreNameSteps | componentSteps

oneOrMoreNameSteps = nameStep ( "." nameStep ) *

zeroOrMoreNameSteps = ( nameStep "." ) *

nameStep = "#" name

name is a string of characters from "A"-"Z", "a"-"z", "0"-"9", "-" and "_". No umlauts allowed, one character is minimum.

componentSteps is a list of valid values, see below.

Valid 'componentSteps' are:

- GlobalValue
- Product
- Product.Brand
- Product.Accommodation
- Product.Accommodation.SellingAccom
- Product.Accommodation.SellingAccom.Board
- Product.Accommodation.SellingAccom.Unit
- Product.Accommodation.SellingAccom.Unit.SellingUnit
- Product.OnewayFlight
- Product.OnewayFlight.BookingClass
- Product.ReturnFlight
- Product.ReturnFlight.BookingClass
- Product.ReturnFlight.Inbound
- Product.ReturnFlight.Outbound
- Product.Addon
- Product.Addon.Service
- Product.Addon.ServiceFeature

In addition to that all subsequent steps from the paths above are permitted, that is 'Board', 
'Accommodation.SellingAccom' or 'SellingAccom.Unit.SellingUnit'.
'Accommodation.Unit' in the contrary is not permitted, as here some intermediate steps are missing.

You could turn that grammar into an XML document by converting syntax elements to attributes and elements. You could do that, but Stella’s predecessor did not do that. That of course, would have been work, and they may have had to put some thought on how to relate their homebrew grammar to XSD rules, so instead they created an XML schema rule for SourceAttributeType that verifies that the data in the field is valid according to the grammar… using regular expressions. 1,310 characters of regular expressions.

<xs:simpleType>
    <xs:restriction base="xs:string">
            <xs:pattern value="(((Scope.)?(global|local|current)\+?)?((((ComponentType.)?
(real|virtual))|ComponentType.all)\+?)?((((Hierarchy.)?(self|ancestors|descendants))|Hierarchy.all)\+?)?
((((DayAllocation.)?(first|last))|DayAllocation.all)\+?)?:)?(#[A-Za-z0-9\-_]+(\.(#[A-Za-z0-9\-_]+))*|(#[A-Za-z0-
9\-_]+\.)*
(ThisComponent|GlobalValue|Product|Product\.Brand|Product\.Accommodation|Product\.Accommodation\.SellingAccom|Prod
uct\.Accommodation\.SellingAccom\.Board|Product\.Accommodation\.SellingAccom\.Unit|Product\.Accommodation\.Selling
Accom\.Unit\.SellingUnit|Product\.OnewayFlight|Product\.OnewayFlight\.BookingClass|Product\.ReturnFlight|Product\.
ReturnFlight\.BookingClass|Product\.ReturnFlight\.Inbound|Product\.ReturnFlight\.Outbound|Product\.Addon|Product\.
Addon\.Service|Product\.Addon\.ServiceFeature|Brand|Accommodation|Accommodation\.SellingAccom|Accommodation\.Selli
ngAccom\.Board|Accommodation\.SellingAccom\.Unit|Accommodation\.SellingAccom\.Unit\.SellingUnit|OnewayFlight|Onewa
yFlight\.BookingClass|ReturnFlight|ReturnFlight\.BookingClass|ReturnFlight\.Inbound|ReturnFlight\.Outbound|Addon|A
ddon\.Service|Addon\.ServiceFeature|SellingAccom|SellingAccom\.Board|SellingAccom\.Unit|SellingAccom\.Unit\.Sellin
gUnit|BookingClass|Inbound|Outbound|Service|ServiceFeature|Board|Unit|Unit\.SellingUnit|SellingUnit))"/>
    </xs:restriction>
</xs:simpleType>
</xs:union>

There’s a bug in that regex that Stella needed to fix. As she put it: “Every time you evaluate it a few little kitties die because you shouldn’t use kitties to polish your car. I’m so, so sorry, little kitties…”

The full, unexcerpted code is below, so… at least it has documentation. In two languages!

<xs:simpleType name="SourceAttributeType">
                <xs:annotation>
                        <xs:documentation xml:lang="de">
                Die Source Angabe folgt folgender Syntax

                        source = ( Eigenschaft1+Eigenschaft2+... ":" ) ? steps

                        Eigenschaft1 = "local" | "global"

                        Eigenschaft2 ="real" | "virtual" | "ComponentType.all"

                        Eigenschaft3 ="self" | "ancestors" | "descendants" | "Hierarchy.all"

                        Eigenschaft4 = "first" | "last" | "DayAllocation.all"

                        Falls Eigenschaften angegeben werden muss zwingend die oben angegebene Reihenfolge der Eigenschaften eingehalten werden.

                        steps = oneOrMoreNameSteps | zeroOrMoreNameSteps | componentSteps

                        oneOrMoreNameSteps = nameStep ( "." nameStep ) *

                        zeroOrMoreNameSteps = ( nameStep "." ) *

                        nameStep = "#" name

                        name ist eine Folge von Zeichen aus der Menge "A"-"Z", "a"-"z", "0"-"9", "-" und "_". Keine Umlaute. Mindestens ein Zeichen

                        componentSteps ist eine Liste gültiger Werte, siehe im folgenden

                Gültige 'componentSteps' sind zunächst:

                        - GlobalValue
                        - Product
                        - Product.Brand
                        - Product.Accommodation
                        - Product.Accommodation.SellingAccom
                        - Product.Accommodation.SellingAccom.Board
                        - Product.Accommodation.SellingAccom.Unit
                        - Product.Accommodation.SellingAccom.Unit.SellingUnit
                        - Product.OnewayFlight
                        - Product.OnewayFlight.BookingClass
                        - Product.ReturnFlight
                        - Product.ReturnFlight.BookingClass
                        - Product.ReturnFlight.Inbound
                        - Product.ReturnFlight.Outbound
                        - Product.Addon
                        - Product.Addon.Service
                        - Product.Addon.ServiceFeature

                Desweiteren sind alle Unterschrittfolgen aus obigen Pfaden erlaubt, also 'Board', 'Accommodation.SellingAccom' oder 'SellingAccom.Unit.SellingUnit'.
                'Accommodation.Unit' hingegen ist nicht erlaubt, da in diesem Fall einige Zwischenschritte fehlen.

                                </xs:documentation>
                        <xs:documentation xml:lang="en">
                                The Source specification obeys the following syntax

                                source = ( Feature1+Feature2+... ":" ) ? steps

                                Feature1 = "local" | "global"

                                Feature2 ="real" | "virtual" | "ComponentType.all"

                                Feature3 ="self" | "ancestors" | "descendants" | "Hierarchy.all"

                                Feature4 = "first" | "last" | "DayAllocation.all"

                                If features are specified, the order of features as given above has strictly to be followed.

                                steps = oneOrMoreNameSteps | zeroOrMoreNameSteps | componentSteps

                                oneOrMoreNameSteps = nameStep ( "." nameStep ) *

                                zeroOrMoreNameSteps = ( nameStep "." ) *

                                nameStep = "#" name

                                name is a string of characters from "A"-"Z", "a"-"z", "0"-"9", "-" and "_". No umlauts allowed, one character is minimum.

                                componentSteps is a list of valid values, see below.

                                Valid 'componentSteps' are:

                                - GlobalValue
                                - Product
                                - Product.Brand
                                - Product.Accommodation
                                - Product.Accommodation.SellingAccom
                                - Product.Accommodation.SellingAccom.Board
                                - Product.Accommodation.SellingAccom.Unit
                                - Product.Accommodation.SellingAccom.Unit.SellingUnit
                                - Product.OnewayFlight
                                - Product.OnewayFlight.BookingClass
                                - Product.ReturnFlight
                                - Product.ReturnFlight.BookingClass
                                - Product.ReturnFlight.Inbound
                                - Product.ReturnFlight.Outbound
                                - Product.Addon
                                - Product.Addon.Service
                                - Product.Addon.ServiceFeature

                                In addition to that all subsequent steps from the paths above are permitted, that is 'Board', 'Accommodation.SellingAccom' or 'SellingAccom.Unit.SellingUnit'.
                                'Accommodation.Unit' in the contrary is not permitted, as here some intermediate steps are missing.

                        </xs:documentation>
                </xs:annotation>
                <xs:union>
                        <xs:simpleType>
                                <xs:restriction base="xs:string">
                                        <xs:pattern value="(((Scope.)?(global|local|current)\+?)?((((ComponentType.)?(real|virtual))|ComponentType.all)\+?)?((((Hierarchy.)?(self|ancestors|descendants))|Hierarchy.all)\+?)?((((DayAllocation.)?(first|last))|DayAllocation.all)\+?)?:)?(#[A-Za-z0-9\-_]+(\.(#[A-Za-z0-9\-_]+))*|(#[A-Za-z0-9\-_]+\.)*(ThisComponent|GlobalValue|Product|Product\.Brand|Product\.Accommodation|Product\.Accommodation\.SellingAccom|Product\.Accommodation\.SellingAccom\.Board|Product\.Accommodation\.SellingAccom\.Unit|Product\.Accommodation\.SellingAccom\.Unit\.SellingUnit|Product\.OnewayFlight|Product\.OnewayFlight\.BookingClass|Product\.ReturnFlight|Product\.ReturnFlight\.BookingClass|Product\.ReturnFlight\.Inbound|Product\.ReturnFlight\.Outbound|Product\.Addon|Product\.Addon\.Service|Product\.Addon\.ServiceFeature|Brand|Accommodation|Accommodation\.SellingAccom|Accommodation\.SellingAccom\.Board|Accommodation\.SellingAccom\.Unit|Accommodation\.SellingAccom\.Unit\.SellingUnit|OnewayFlight|OnewayFlight\.BookingClass|ReturnFlight|ReturnFlight\.BookingClass|ReturnFlight\.Inbound|ReturnFlight\.Outbound|Addon|Addon\.Service|Addon\.ServiceFeature|SellingAccom|SellingAccom\.Board|SellingAccom\.Unit|SellingAccom\.Unit\.SellingUnit|BookingClass|Inbound|Outbound|Service|ServiceFeature|Board|Unit|Unit\.SellingUnit|SellingUnit))"/>
                                </xs:restriction>
                        </xs:simpleType>
                </xs:union>
</xs:simpleType>

[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!

Apple held its annual September major product rollout today announcing, among other things, updated Apple Watch models with “Audio Intelligence” features. One of those features is “Live Rewind”:

A double press of the Digital Crown shows the previous 15 seconds of a conversation as a text snippet, so the user can catch something they may have missed or are less familiar with. Users can ask Siri about the content of the text or save it to the Siri app to revisit later.

This feature is also coming to iPhone 16 and newer models. Apple swears up and down it is doing all it can to make this private and secure, and I have no reason to believe otherwise. The audio is apparently not actually saved and is, instead, merely transcribed by a dedicated coprocessor. That text is automatically deleted unless the user takes an action to save it, too.

But good luck explaining that to anyone around you after you read back an exact transcript of what they just said. Apple says they should be sufficiently notified Live Rewind is active because “an audible chime plays from the speaker on your Apple Watch, even if your Apple Watch is on silent or you have headphones connected”, plus the watch plays an animation, but it is not clear to me when this happens. It is not shown in Apple’s video. The impression I get is that Live Rewind is always running in the background and these notifications are only played after you double-click the Digital Crown to look at the text.

This feels like a glimpse of how Apple will market its inevitable wear-anywhere glasses product. I do not think it does enough to assuage privacy concerns. I think normal people will continue to react negatively when you tell them you have been passively recording them because, outside Silicon Valley, that is considered gross and invasive.

⌥ Permalink

Michael Crider, PCWorld:

[…] So somebody at LG decided that, in addition to the basic monitor driver and management app delivered to its users via Windows Update, it would slip in an additional program, “LG Monitor App Installer.” This extra bit of software includes McAfee, or an ad for it — as if there was any difference.

C. da Costa, Gadget Review:

This is bigger than one bad app. LG and Samsung smart monitors run the same operating systems as their smart TVs — webOS and Tizen — both already built for automatic content recognition and ad targeting. Acer’s monitor privacy policies permit sharing device data with advertisers. The trajectory mirrors the rise of free-to-play gaming: low barrier to entry, monetization creep once you’re locked in.

These findings were based on a Gamers Nexus investigation in July. But it is not an isolated incident.

This week, Gamers Nexus followed up with another blockbuster showing how LG’s smart televisions find other devices on the same network and, in some cases, record their activity; and, because they can recognize what is being played onscreen, LG tracks everything you watch, too. It is presumptively allowed do this because it presents a bunch of user agreements that anyone can bypass without reading, enables tracking by default, and buries all the opt-out stuff. Oh, and there is more.

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica:

The video also demonstrated an LG TV’s ability to record sound around it, even when the TV isn’t online.

“We were even able to capture microphone audio while the TV was unplugged from the network. Burke said the audio was reportedly stored locally via plaintext, which could potentially allow the data to be sent to LG [if] the TV connects online again.”

LG told Harding it is only listening for the wake word, but Gamers Nexus was able to capture audio in a variety of different ways because there are so many microphones and, in many cases, so many vulnerabilities in LG’s software. If I had one criticism, it is that Gamers Nexus connects the voice recording and transcription to LG’s ads service — an apparently real-life version of the conspiracy theory. I do not think there is not enough evidence to support that, even as speculation.

The transformation of seemingly every major company into, ultimately, vendors for advertising is an outcome basically everyone hates. The televisions tested by Gamers Nexus are thousands of dollars in Canada. That exchange of money used to be where the relationship ended, assuming the product did not need servicing. Now, though, selling ads on the screen itself prints so much money that it is nearly impossible to buy something different. You cannot vote with your wallet when advertisers are paying more.

⌥ Permalink

Heather Burns:

I cannot tell you how much it disgusts me that so much of the archival footage from September 11 has now been age-gated and restricted as “mature” or “sensitive or adult” content, as in this example from this Reddit film archive.

It’s history. It’s archival footage of history. It’s a thing that happened.

If you were in school in 2001, there were probably televisions playing live news coverage in your classroom or in the hallways. There were in mine.

I am with Burns, and with the greatest of respect — she was there that day. But that particular subreddit is an unfortunate example as, while I do not think it should be age-gated, it should be moderated far better. So many of the users there are not treating it as an archive or a way of learning, but as a puzzle where they can play detective.

⌥ Permalink

Aaron Vegh and Ben Rice McCarthy have been steadily updating Indigo since they launched it in May. In the latest version, you can now swipe between different filtered timelines, the scroll position is synced between devices, and there is a new lower price point if you use it exclusively for a single network.

As for me, the one big thing I wanted at launch was the ability to easily switch between multiple accounts, and this was added some time ago. It works exactly as you might expect: you can group sets of your own accounts — my personal Bluesky and personal Mastodon are one set, while my Pixel Envy accounts are in another — and just toggle the two sets.

This is one of my very favourite iOS apps. Just a great piece of software made by some great people.

⌥ Permalink

Brian Krebs:

A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. KrebsOnSecurity also has learned that the New Orleans field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today launched an official inquiry into the source of the images.

Mike Masnick, of Techdirt, reports the company in question is IDScan:

You cannot do age or identity verification safely. It always creates some sort of record and that set of records will always become a target. That’s what happened here. And it’s what will happen with any such systems.

Dan Gillmor on Bluesky:

If you support “age verification” online, you are supporting a system that GUARANTEES privacy meltdowns — endangering all of us — because the giant databases of scanned IDs are perpetually hacked by criminals who sell private data.

I am opposed to identity verification, but this argument is not particularly effective for me because there are incredibly low-risk solutions. In Canada, for example, we have an interbank service called Interac that offers an identity verification service. I am not naïve, but I would entirely trust this bank-based system to verify me on a regular basis. In fact, I already do — like many Canadians, I use my banking information to log into government websites. Maybe this relatively safe proxy for a centralized identification system is unique to Canada.

I imagine this argument lands fairly well for lots of people elsewhere, however. The rapid introduction of age verification laws has produced a market for these businesses, but handing your identifying information to some random third-party should terrify you, as it is exactly the behaviour any security expert warns against doing. You have no idea who is able to access that scan of your driver’s license or what they can do with it. And, as it turns out, neither do some of these companies, either.

⌥ Permalink

I skipped August's Recently because this summer has been relentless, mostly in the positive sense. July and August were filled with bike rides, 5K races, friends in town, life changes and logistics.

For a friend's birthday, we rode the rickety Coney Island Cyclone, which was faster and more intense than I remembered it. But it's been 18 years since the last injury on the coaster, and the rider was partly at fault: good enough for me.

I rode my first proper randonneuring ride: 200km (124mi) to all of the beaches around Brooklyn. It was pretty challenging, as you'd expect, but I didn't 'find my limit' for endurance, but I did find my limit in terms of how many gels & ride-nutrition packets I could consume before sugar becomes repulsive. I do still heartily endorse maple syrup packets for ride nutrition: compared to the space-age fuels that all taste like fruit or coffee, it's an identifiable substance that tastes like you'd expect.

And, not pictured, but I ran a bunch of 5Ks. Haven't hit my goal this year of going sub-20, but got close in the last one - 20:15. I'm not giving up yet, because the weather is getting better and Brooklyn has a lot of 5K options.

Listening

Duffy x Uhlmann has been in my rotation for a year now and the new album has all the things I like from the combination. This and Shrunken Elvis go along well together and both have been hits at dinner parties.

This album from Frances Quinlan, the frontperson of Hop Along, went under the radar, but it's so good. I've also been playing Hop Along's send album Get Disowned. I really like everything that this band has put out. It's a product of Philadelphia but I hear some of the elements that drew me to DC post-punk in the turn-on-a-dime songwriting.

Watching

This video, 'The surprising truth about what motivates us', is kind of an artifact of the 'Obamaverse', as one of my friends would put it. It's by Daniel Pink, a writer-speaker-self-help kind of guy, and it's accompanied by one of those realtime hand-illustrations. There are lots of reasons to tune it out as YouTube filler.

Still, I thought it was pretty cool for two reasons: first, it connected directly with Andrew Kelley's video, which is the next one. And it connects with my feelings about incentives and how most simple incentives are counterproductive. And second, the drawing is real. I'm so used to the artificial version of this visual style that it took a minutes to realize that the it wasn't AI or some 'drawing hand' style of video essay, it was a real person making quite nice illustrations: specifically Andrew Park.

Found myself nodding along to every bit of this interview with Andrew Kelley. His values and motivation are so nice to encounter in this current phase of tech. He's kind of a role model, which is something that I used to find trite in my early career but I'm coming around to. As Adam Neely pointed out in his video, a lot of the people heavily using Suno (an AI music tool) could not cite any role models, and defaulted to a sort of enclosed, self-centered stance. I see this with engineering too: it's hard to discern what values or talents the people at 'the forefront of the industry' have that I want. Finding personal qualities as something to imitate instead of desires and possessions (cue the segue into Girard's Memetic theory) seems like a better way to live.

Reading

What strengthens a relationship? Almost always, it is personal investment. Perhaps an AI agent might be better at predicting what my father will want for his birthday than I am, but it definitionally cannot give him my time and consideration. Love is not just a feeling; it is a way of paying attention.

Elizabeth Lopatto in The Verge picks apart Mark Zuckerberg's weird, sad view of humanity. It's worth a read even just for the incredible opening anecdote.

Home of the titular 100 foot waves. Which existed when I was a kid of course, but the larger world didn’t know about them yet. They were our secret. My grandfather and I would walk to the lighthouse and watch the waves hitting against the cliffs and he’d tell me that these were the biggest waves in the world. I didn’t believe him, of course. I thought it was standard grandpa hyperbole. But I also didn’t want to believe that I was seeing the biggest of anything. Not yet. I wanted the really great things to be in the future. Something to aim for. Which means I missed out on some great things that were right in front of me.

Mike Monteiro's newsletter is always beautiful and melancholy, and this is a really nice edition of it.

I read and highlighted a few other articles but they were all saying things about AI, mostly about how it makes the world worse and makes people feel bad. I won't add those to the pile because I don't want that kind of content to dominate what I mention, even if it does dominate what I read.

Elsewhere

For the Val Town blog, I wrote about our experience with the bug bounty program. It's been a very interesting experience. Val Town has a pretty difficult security surface: in contrast to Mapbox, which was mostly a read-only API, it's a very read-write system with many access controls. At the center of the product is a sandbox that we want to keep secure. And because we're living in the AI age, a single bit of functionality can be exposed via REST API, React Router loaders, tRPC, and MCP. Building a model layer and a shared authorization layer - modeled after Oso - has helped a bit.

But the reports still come in. It's pretty wild how AI factors into it: I'd say that 100% of the vulnerability reports used AI to write the report itself. From the best reporters, the vulnerabilities come with screen recordings and evidence, and it's clearly not all-robot. But - I suspect that other people manning help desks & bug bounty programs know this experience - it's jarring to go three replies into an email conversation with someone and they suddenly stop using an LLM to write their emails and the voice completely changes, from hyper-literate to abbreviated and misspelled.

I also wrote about our new authentication scheme that makes vals require login and makes it possible to manage permissions to val applications, not just their code. It was pretty fun to implement, and the sixth or seventh time working with HMAC schemes I'm starting to get a natural grasp on them.

Logic for Programmers has now been out for a month! To celebrate, I'm releasing the entire second chapter, "A Crash Course in Logic", for free on my blog. Read it here!

What happens when people who are working to promote, preserve, and develop different languages come together?

They share experiences, learn from one another, discuss the challenges they face, and look for practical ways to strengthen their communities.

That is what the Language Diversity Conference 2026 is about.

From 2 to 4 October 2026, Accra, Ghana, will host the inaugural Language Diversity Conference under the theme

“Strengthening Language Communities in the Open Knowledge Movement.”

The conference will bring together language activists, Wikimedia contributors, researchers, educators, community organizers, and others working to ensure that languages that are often underrepresented online have a place in the digital world.

Language is not only about communication. It carries our history, culture, traditions, and knowledge. Yet many Indigenous and minoritised languages still have limited representation on the internet. This makes it important for language communities to take an active role in documenting their languages and making knowledge available in them.

The conference will provide an opportunity to discuss some of these issues, including language documentation, digital accessibility, Wikimedia projects, artificial intelligence, speech-to-text technologies, language rights, partnerships, and community-led approaches to language development.

A community spotlight: Dagbani Wikimedians

The Dagbani Wikimedians User Group (DWUG) is one of the communities contributing to this conversation.

Over the years, Dagbani Wikimedians have worked to increase the presence of Dagbani and other Ghanaian languages in the digital space through Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, training programs, edit-a-thons, Wiki Hubs, and other community activities.

The journey has also involved supporting the growth of other language communities. These experiences have shown the importance of local people taking ownership of the development and documentation of their languages.

At the Language Diversity Conference, members of the Dagbani Wikimedians community will share some of these experiences.

Among the sessions is “Language Rights Online: Preserving Dagbani Heritage,” which will look at the development of the Dagbani Wikimedia community, its work in the Wikipedia Incubator, community mobilization, Wiki Hubs, and the use of tools such as Mozilla Common Voice and Spell4Wiki. The Dagbanli Dictionary: Building a Sovereign Digital Language Infrastructure for an African Language session will also highlight efforts to build an independent digital foundation for Dagbanli by making the language’s words, meanings, and linguistic knowledge more accessible in the digital space. 

There will also be a session on Sopala, an offline learning initiative designed to support Dagbani education in communities where internet access can be a challenge.

For DWUG, this conference is, therefore, an opportunity to share what we have learned, listen to other language communities, and explore ways of working together.

Come and meet the people working to give more languages a stronger presence in the digital world.

An adaptation of Polis for the Wikimedia ecosystem, currently a live prototype. This post continues after ‘We need to innovate with Wikimedia decision-making‘. This prototype is part of the Next25 initiative attempt to arrive at more constructive attitude towards decision making.

We have a lot of decisions to make in the next year in our movement. As the number of visitors to Wikipedia is dropping, the internet around us is changing rapidly. This means that as a movement, we will have some hard decisions to make where we go. As WMF Executive Director Bernadette Meehan summarized: we need to evolve, but in ways that strengthen our mission. 

As I laid out in my last post, we need better processes to make decisions than the Request for Comments. This is true for deciding on our outdated policies in our many communities (how do we welcome new contributors, how do we handle AI, what is the bureaucracy that we can handle as a less-active community?) and on directions for our movement (what should be our priorities? Are there opportunities for new projects? What technology should we develop, and what should it look like?).

Today, I would like to introduce one prototype that could play a role in a more constructive approach to making decisions. 

Often, our current mechanisms focus on a single, large-form proposal, bringing out our critical thinking. There are many ways to improve our decision making, and I would like to see this as a part of a larger effort to experiment with that. Don’t assume that a single process can serve is in every decision, but rather pick the tool that fits the task. 

In my last post, I outlined some recommendations for how we could improve our processes. None of this is hypothetical. The civic-tech world has spent the last decade building and testing exactly these ideas — most famously in Taiwan, where the vTaiwan process used a tool called Polis to find unexpected common ground on regulating Uber.

How it works

This brings me to the prototype we have been working on: Proto, an adaptation of Polis for the Wikimedia ecosystem, running on Toolforge with your regular Wikimedia login. Polis (for example: pol.is) is a well-known innovation that has been used in many citizen engagements, including vTaiwan. We have built on top of it to make it fit a wiki’s needs better: to be more encouraging about editing the statements, and to add argument mapping.

The process consists of three phases: 

• Respond to atomic statements and find the statements that the community already agrees on, and the ones that divide.
• Collect relevant arguments for the most important statements. 
• Collect an informed opinion mapping by showing the most important statements with their selected arguments.

Separate the phases

A system like Proto can be used to collect valuable input on a complex topic, before solidifying a draft. The phase separation gives ideation, refinement, and preference measurement each their own home. With the outcomes of this process, you could organize a more informed voting process on-wiki.

Make participation accessible (atomic statements)

The core mechanic is deliberately simple. A conversation (for example, a new policy dealing with blocking temporary accounts) starts with a question and a set of short, atomic statements — one claim each (“A temporary account should be warned at least once before being blocked for vandalism”). 

Participants respond agree, disagree, or pass on each statement, and can submit statements of their own: to improve the phrasing of existing statements, or to fill a gap. That’s the whole interaction: no threads, no replies, no walls of text to catch up on. Joining a conversation on day twelve is exactly as easy as joining on day one; if you return later, you simply weigh in on whatever new statements have appeared since. Rapid responding make it easier to participate. 

Notably, the same design serves both ends of the scale: a small group gets an honest reading of the people it could never get to write talk page comments, while a large wiki gets a way to digest thousands of voices that no closer could. And the process is composable — an organizer can stop after the opinion mapping and already walk away with something valuable.

(A practical challenge will be how to connect the process to the wiki – notifications and talk page messages are likely the best bet.)

Decouple opinions from identity

Behind the scenes, the responses build an opinion map. Statistical clustering reveals the groups of participants who tend to respond alike — and, more importantly, the statements that are supported across those groups. Instead of amplifying the sharpest disagreement the way a threaded discussion does, the system is designed to surface hidden consensus. 

Your response is private while the conversation runs; opinions become visible as clusters, not as named individuals to follow or oppose. A faction that shows up to swing the outcome doesn’t silently shift a headcount — it appears on the map as exactly what it is. Private responses remove herding and anchoring — and let people disagree with the regulars without it becoming personal. 

Collect the arguments

Where Proto goes beyond standard Polis is in what happens after the opinion mapping. The organizer can curate a small set of the most informative statements — the points of strong consensus and the genuine fault lines — and open an argument layer: participants write and rank short pro and con arguments for each featured statement. No threading here either; just the community’s best reasoning on both sides, sorted by usefulness.

And as an optional final phase, an informed opinion poll: a fresh round on just the featured statements, with the strongest arguments displayed alongside. Comparing the before and after even lets us see whether exposure to arguments actually changed minds — something our current processes are incapable of measuring. Rather than just focusing on whether we like the proposal, consider also what others might think of as relevant arguments. 

One thing Proto deliberately is not: a vote. While everything may feel like voting, it is much more about mapping where the agreement and disagreement are, and collecting arguments in an equitable manner. From there, we have a solid foundation to draft policies from, and to figure out how to compromise between the views on the table. It may also expose where more conversation is needed, and where we already agree and only a vocal minority pushes back. The report from the tool is meant to inform the final step of the policy process on-wiki — because at that point, a Request for Comments or an opinion poll may actually make sense.

An invitation

This is one way of doing consent-building differently, but the underlying principles stay the same. I would invite you to try it, and to think about it from a constructive perspective: how would you improve it? Let us know, on metawiki.

The prototype is live at proto.wiki , and what it needs now is reality: some groups willing to run a real consultation on a real question. If your wiki, WikiProject, or group has a policy discussion that has been stuck for years — and whose hasn’t? — I would love to talk.

Twenty-five years ago we built an encyclopedia. I refuse to believe that the way we made decisions in 2004 is the best we can do in 2026. The editors who join us next year deserve rules they can actually read, trust — and change.

From 23 to 27 August 2026, Wikimedia Tunisia User Group, in partnership with the Association of Culture and Science in Metlaoui, organized Wikipedia Camp Tunisia 2026 at the Camping and Holiday Center in Bkalta, Tunisia.

The camp was the realization of a dream that had been growing within the Tunisian Wikimedia community for several years. Its main inspiration came from the successful WikiCamp Armenia, a pioneering project that brought Wikimedia contributors together through learning, collaboration, and community-building activities. The Armenian experience demonstrated how a camp could create a strong environment for both newcomers and experienced Wikimedians to learn from one another and contribute together.

Inspired by this model, Wikimedia Tunisia began developing the idea of creating a similar experience in Tunisia.

From workshops to the camp

The camp was developed in cooperation with the Scouts of Tunisia. Before the camp, a series of workshops was organized for young participants from different Scout groups. These workshops introduced participants to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects and encouraged them to discover how they could contribute to free knowledge.

Following these activities, participants who showed the strongest interest and engagement were selected to take part in Wikipedia Camp Tunisia 2026.

This approach allowed the camp to bring together young people who had already gained their first experience with Wikimedia projects while creating an environment where they could continue learning and improving their skills.

Five days dedicated to free knowledge

Throughout the five-day camp, participants took part in a wide range of activities focused on Wikimedia projects.

Editing sessions were organized on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons, allowing participants to put their newly acquired knowledge into practice. They worked on improving articles, adding and enriching structured data, uploading and documenting media, and discovering the links between the different Wikimedia projects.

One of the most important outcomes was the creation of new articles on Arabic Wikipedia about Tunisia, with a particular focus on sports-related topics. Participants also worked on Wikidata, creating new items and improving information about books and authors using data from the National Library of Tunisia database.

These activities showed participants how different Wikimedia projects can work together: information researched for Wikipedia can be structured through Wikidata, while institutional sources such as library databases can help improve the quality and coverage of Wikimedia’s structured knowledge.

Learning from Wikimedia Libya

The participation of two representatives from Wikimedia Libya was one of the highlights of the camp. Their presence created an opportunity for exchange between Wikimedia communities in the region and added valuable experience to the program.

They organized a presentation about Wikidata, Wikidata items, and the role of Wikidata in relation to Wikipedia. The session helped participants understand that Wikidata is not simply a database, but an important part of the Wikimedia ecosystem that supports and connects information across different Wikimedia projects.

A second presentation focused on user rights on Arabic Wikipedia. The Libyan Wikimedians explained the different rights available to contributors, their importance, and how participants could develop their editing experience and become more involved in the community.

The session also encouraged participants to take the next step in their Wikimedia journey by requesting appropriate user rights on Arabic Wikipedia. By the end of the camp, several participants had already submitted requests for user rights, demonstrating the practical impact of the training and the motivation created during the event.

Building the future of the Wikimedia movement

Wikipedia Camp Tunisia 2026 was more than a five-day event. It was an experiment in community development and a step toward creating a new generation of Tunisian Wikimedians.

The journey that began with inspiration from Armenia and continued through workshops with the Scouts of Tunisia has now resulted in a Tunisian WikiCamp of its own. The experience demonstrated the power of bringing young contributors together, giving them the tools to contribute, and connecting them with experienced members of the Wikimedia movement.

For Wikimedia Tunisia, the camp represents not an endpoint, but the beginning of a longer journey. The participants now have the opportunity to continue contributing to Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and other Wikimedia projects—and to share what they have learned with others.

From Armenia to Tunisia, the idea of WikiCamp has travelled across communities, adapted to a new context, and created new opportunities for free knowledge and collaboration in Tunisia.

Meetups (Kopdar) are always highly anticipated moments for Wikimedia volunteers. Aside from being a space to connect, meetups often spark extraordinary collaborations. Not too long ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a very unique meetup event titled WikiRempah in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia on Sunday, August 9, 2026.

True to its name, this event highlighted the richness of spices and culture, but with an interesting cross-cultural twist: we documented the culinary and cultural heritage of Eastern Indonesia, yet channeled it into Sundanese-language Wikimedia projects and other global platforms. This activity was not just about editing; it was a contribution marathon involving four Wikimedia projects simultaneously.

Crafting Recipes and Visualizing Flavors

The first session, which was highly memorable for me, was culinary documentation. Eastern Indonesian cuisine, famous for its rich herbs and spices, was the main star. We went to an authentic Eastern Indonesian restaurant, photographed, and documented these signature dishes, then uploaded the best visuals to the Wikimedia Commons repository so they could be freely used by anyone. One example I uploaded was a photo of a Ayam Woku Khas Sulawesi.

Pijri Paijar, Ayam Woku khas Sulawesi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

We then moved on to the Sundanese Wikibooks project, which is currently still in the incubator. There, we worked together to write down these authentic Eastern recipes in Sundanese. Translating the spice measurements, cooking methods, and ingredient names into our mother tongue offered a unique sensation, as if we were serving Eastern Indonesian flavors right in the kitchens of the Sundanese people. On that occasion, I tried writing down the recipe for grilled skipjack tuna (ikan cakalang bakar).

Bridging Cultural Heritage to the Sundanese Wikipedia

After being satisfied with crafting recipes, the meetup’s focus shifted from the dining table to historical sites. Eastern Indonesia has an abundance of cultural heritage sites whose histories are vital to the civilization of the archipelago. Unfortunately, information regarding these sites is still very minimal, especially in regional languages.

This is where we contributed through the Sundanese Wikipedia. We wrote and expanded new articles discussing cultural heritage in the eastern part of Indonesia. Writing about geographically distant topics in Sundanese is a tangible manifestation of Wikimedia’s mission: freeing knowledge for everyone, in the language closest to them. I wrote several titles, including Bénténg Middelburg (Middelburg Fort), Bénténg Amsterdam (Amsterdam Fort), and Bénténg Barneveld (Barneveld Fort).

Bringing the Dictionary to Life with the Sounds of Spices

The highlight of this WikiRempah Meetup, and in my opinion the most interactive activity, was the voice recording session. Since the overarching theme was “Spices,” we compiled a long list of vocabulary related to spices and typical Indonesian cooking ingredients.

Using the Lingua Libre software, we took turns recording the pronunciation of this spice vocabulary one by one. The atmosphere became very lively and fun as we had to ensure our Sundanese articulation sounded clear and precise. After the recording process was complete, the audio files were not just left there. We immediately embedded them into the existing entries in the Sundanese Wiktionary.

Now, the digital dictionary does not only present text but also “speaks.” Anyone looking for entries about spices in the Sundanese Wiktionary can instantly hear how the word is pronounced orally by a native speaker. Some of the recorded words included lauk (fish), sagu (sago), and sampeu (cassava).

A Comprehensive Contribution Experience

Oceanmuse, Kopdar WikiRempah Bandung, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY 4.0

Participating in the WikiRempah Meetup gave me a new perspective on how the Wikimedia ecosystem works. From a culinary dish and a historical story, we could unpack them into photos on Wikimedia Commons, recipes on Wikibooks, encyclopedic articles on Wikipedia, to audio pronunciation recordings on Wiktionary and Lingua Libre.

This activity proves that contributing to the Wikimedia movement is never boring. There is always room for creativity, cross-cultural collaboration, and new ways to preserve the richness of the archipelago in the digital realm. Endless thanks to the organizing committee for this incredibly valuable and memorable opportunity. My hope is that a multi-contribution meetup model like WikiRempah can inspire other communities to keep exploring!

• Wikidata MCP Server
• Wikidata Embedding Project
• Wikidata Vector Database

2026. Aug. 9th (Saturday)

Under the storm of Typhoon Dolphin, COSCUP 2026 commenced, bringing partners from around the world together to celebrate the value of open technology. The Conference for Open Source Coders, Users & Promoters (COSCUP) is one of the biggest open source events in Taiwan. This year, one topic dominated the community: Artificial Intelligence, or Agent in the concurrent stage.

This year, our joint track of Wikidata and OpenStreetMap not only showcased how our respective platforms contribute to the open community, but also explored how open data and open technology can support the rapidly developing world of artificial intelligence.

One highlight was our presentation with our partner from Wikimedia Deutschland, focusing on the Wikidata MCP Server and the Wikidata Embedding Project.

Artificial Intelligence has come to the stage like a storm and quickly become one of the most discussed technologies across every industry. No matter which side of the fence you are on, one thing is the same: we want to know more about it and how it may affect our lives.

However, much of the discussion throughout the internet is filled with empty buzzwords and misinformation from companies with various interests. The problem is not necessarily malicious intent but the fact that people, including the sources they are quoting, simply do not have enough access to the information they need to understand the technology they are discussing.

Just like previous technology ‘booms’, such as cryptocurrency and NFTs, Artificial Intelligence, and now the so-called Agents, is a market phenomenon of attention crowding around something new and potentially profitable, and thus money floods in. However, unlike its predecessors, AI is ‘real’ in a sense that it has the potential to reshape, and possibly damage, many systems of trust that we humans have built through centuries of mutual understanding and respect for ourselves and others.

AI Agents are not inherently disruptive or destructive; it is how we use them that is causing all the trouble. If we want the technology to become a tool for a better future, we first need to understand how the tool works.

The Problem with LLMs

A Large Language Model, or LLM, at its simplest, is an algorithm that predicts words based on the material it has been provided. Its strength comes from recognizing patterns in a given language and mimicking the ‘natural language’ according to the probability of words appearing together. But this also reveals its fundamental limitation.

All it captures is the distribution of words appearing in languages, not necessarily the why and how behind them. It can produce an answer that looks and sounds correct without having any understanding of whether the information corresponds to reality or is actually true. Hallucinations, gibberish, and blatantly false answers are ultimately extensions of this limitation.

The man in the box never understands Chinese; it just appears to.

This does not mean we need the LLM to become a genie in a lamp that knows everything. The bottleneck is never the generation of more knowledge. It is discovering, retrieving, and acting upon the right information. To achieve this, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel of synthesizing the generation of natural knowledge; instead, what we need is to have the preexisting systems align properly.

And this is where Wikidata comes into play.

A Beacon for AI Agents

Wikidata is a Knowledge Graph: a machine-readable database where information is connected through controlled and structured relationships. It is designed to work across languages, interfaces, databases, services, and users — human and machine.

More importantly, its information is human-pruned and anchored in reality. It can provide explicit and exhaustive relationships, traceable sources, and continuously updated information. This makes Wikidata particularly valuable to LLMs. Rather than leaving an AI Agent to decide whether a string of text is factual or fictional, it can reference Wikidata for additional information.

LLMs excel at semantics, but that strength is inherently imprecise. A Knowledge Graph provides the controlled structure underneath it. Instead of asking an Agent to know everything, we can let it discover relevant information through the web of knowledge and crawl through information more efficiently than we humans could.

This is where the Wikidata Embedding Project aims to establish its influence.

The project prepares a vector database from a Wikidata dump and an MCP Server that allows AI Agents to access knowledge residing in it through a standardized and LLM-friendly interface. It combines the fuzzy discovery capabilities of AI with the structured and human-pruned knowledge of Wikidata.

The advantage is not only accuracy. LLMs are trained primarily on mainstream data, with limited information from less represented communities. Wikidata can provide access to knowledge beyond an Agent’s original training, including information from smaller communities that would otherwise be extremely difficult for an AI to discover and access.

By equipping an Agent with Wikidata, it is like a sailor on a misty sea finally seeing the light of a beacon. The Agent can still navigate on its own, but it now has a solid reference point so it won’t get lost as long as it can see the light.

The Current and the Future

Wikidata is still one of the youngest WikiProjects. Though volunteers around the globe are working diligently, there are still gaps in the Knowledge Graph. If we want Wikidata to become the backbone to power the next generation of Artificial Intelligence, we still have a long journey ahead of us.

The emergence of AI Agents brings as many opportunities as it does challenges. For Wikidata Taiwan, our work is becoming increasingly relevant to making sure Taiwan’s audience and data won’t get left behind in the ever-changing landscape of Artificial Intelligence.

The challenge is not simply to make AI more powerful. It is to make sure that the knowledge it discovers is reliable, traceable, and based on reality, and most importantly, fair.

I’m Berkay, also User:Piyanist on Wikimedia projects. I have been contributing to Wikimedia projects since 2020. I’m member of the Wikimedians of Turkic Languages User Group, CEE Youth Group, and WikiPortraits.

My Wikimedia activities mainly focus on edits and corrections to Wikipedia pages related to my area of interest, adding cited informations, photography, Commons, youth-related projects, and topics related to music and culture.

In this report, I will share my experiences, observations, and highlights from Wikimania 2026. I will also describe the events I enjoyed the most during the conference.

Wikimania 2026 in Paris was my first Wikimania. I had attended other Wikimedia events before, but this was my first time experiencing Wikimania itself. During the conference, I joined sessions related to my interests, volunteered as a photographer at some activities, met new people and spent time again with friends I already knew from the CEE community. Some of the sessions also gave me new ideas about how I want to contribute in the future, especially through photography, youth activities and music.

The time between sessions was also an important part of the conference for me. During coffee breaks, meals and while moving around the venue, I met Wikimedians from many different countries and had conversations that I probably would not have had through scheduled sessions alone.

And of course there was also no shortage of small things to bring home. I collected stickers, pens, postcards, badges, notepads and other materials from different Wikimedia communities and projects, along with considerably less permanent souvenirs in the form of snacks and food. I kept some of these for myself, but I also plan to use many of the printed materials, stickers, and other items as materials for events we organize in the future. They can help me create a more visual stand where people can see different Wikimedia communities, projects and events instead of only hearing about them.

During Wikimania, I moved between many different sessions and activities. Sometimes I stayed until the end of a session, while at other times I left to see something else. Below are the sessions that I enjoyed the most or that gave me ideas about things I may want to work on in the future.

AI, Wikidata and the opening ceremony

One of the first sessions I attended was “If AI becomes the first web interface, how can the Wikimedia movement adapt? Communities’ levers.”

The discussion focused on how different Wikipedia communities are dealing with generative AI. Matthias Schindler shared an example about a tool made to check ISBN numbers in Wikipedia references. The tool helped identify articles containing fake references generated by AI. Some of the text looked normal, but the books used as sources did not actually exist.

The speakers also discussed how language communities can experience AI differently. One point I found interesting was that language models can flatten different perspectives instead of understanding the context of each language and community. The discussion was not simply about accepting or rejecting AI. It was also about understanding where these tools fail and keeping human review in the process.

After that, I attended Philippe Saadé’s “Wikidata MCP: Grounded SPARQL Query Generation.”

He demonstrated how a language model can make a basic mistake while still producing something that looks technically convincing. In one example, a model trying to find female physicists who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics initially selected the QID of a dog breed instead of the Nobel Prize.

The workflow presented in the session separated discovery, structure inspection, SPARQL generation and validation. This made it easier to see where a mistake happened instead of only looking at the final answer.

Later, I attended the opening ceremony, which also celebrated Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary.

UNESCO’s Mariya Gabriel spoke about knowledge as a public good and about the responsibility of AI systems that depend on open knowledge. Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan talked about the people behind Wikimedia. She reminded us that readers normally only see the finished article. They do not see all the discussions, photos, translations, corrections and other work that happens behind it.

Jimmy Wales talked about assuming good faith and making newcomers feel welcome. He also spoke about freedom, equity and the importance of keeping Wikipedia reliable. He also discussed misinformation bubbles and unequal access to information. One point that stayed with me was his description of Wikipedia’s role in the age of AI: its value is not simply providing the fastest answer, but providing information that can be checked and verified.

He also described Wikipedia as something built gradually through edits, lines of code and discussions rather than around one person.

The ceremony continued with the Wikimedian of the Year awards. I photographed all of the award recipients and later uploaded my photographs to Wikimedia Commons. You can access these photos from the following Commons category

A morning inside the Sainte-Geneviève Library

The next morning, I joined an organised visit to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.

We met at the Wikimania venue early in the morning, received public transport tickets and travelled to the library together. Before entering, I walked around the Panthéon area with other photographers and took street and architectural photographs.

Inside the library, we visited the main reading room as well as storage and archive areas normally closed to the public. In the reading room, Pauline Rivière showed us the old book lift: a big wheel and rope system that once carried books up from the storage in a small box. She told us that the architect did not want staff walking around the reading room, because he found it not aesthetic, so the librarians asked the minister for extra stairs to make their work easier. In the storage areas, the books are shelved in little “waves”, so that small books do not get lost between two big ones. The old card catalogues are also still in use, because some records are not in the online catalogue. One massive old door even hides its lock; only a small trick of the architect opens it.

In the lower levels, we saw large collections of books, archive materials and older reproduction formats. Pauline showed us the microfilm archive: before digitisation, books and newspapers were copied on small reels, and readers can still use them today. She also explained how physical collections are digitised and made available through the Genovefa digital library. The library holds around two million documents in three buildings. When a reader requests a book, the request is printed in the stacks and the book is sent up with a small lift, in about twenty minutes. The rolling shelves stay only on the lowest level, because anywhere else their weight would harm the foundations of the building.

We also saw historical documents, rare books and materials connected to preservation and digitisation. For me, the most impressive piece was a planetary clock made in southern Germany at the end of the 16th century – one of the very few surviving in the world, and still working, showing the movements of the planets. The photos I took of the library and the archive area during these events are in this Commons category.

Pauline Rivière explained how physical collections are digitised and made available through the Genovefa digital library. We also saw historical documents, rare books and materials connected to preservation and digitisation.

Photo: Microfilm boxes of the French news magazine L’Express (1996–2014) in the microfilm storage of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, during a Wikimania 2026 guided visit. Piyanist | CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography and WikiPortraits

“Behind the Lens: WikiPortraits on a Global Scale”, presented by Kevin Payravi, Jennifer 8. Lee and other WikiPortraits contributors.

The problem behind WikiPortraits is simple: many Wikipedia biographies still have missing or poor photographs, but taking a good photograph of a notable person often requires being at the right event and having media access. WikiPortraits helps photographers attend and cover these kinds of events, so that useful photographs can later be uploaded under free licences and used across Wikimedia projects.

WikiPortraits now has more than 200 photographers from over 40 countries, and together they have uploaded more than 95,000 photographs. The group covered over 180 events in 2025, and another 169 events had already been covered in 2026 by the time Wikimania took place. These photographs are also widely used, receiving around 400 to 500 million views every month.

One part of the model was especially relevant to me. WikiPortraits encourages photographers to begin with events in their own area. As they build experience and a portfolio of Wikimedia work, the group can help with accreditation for larger international events. For some major coverage, there can also be support with travel or accommodation.

This connected closely with my own photography work. In Türkiye, I already photograph musicians, artists, concerts and other events. Until now, these photographs were usually produced for artists, organisers or their own media use, and I had not really connected this part of my photography with Wikimedia Commons.

The session made that connection much clearer for me. When licensing and other conditions are suitable, I hope to make some of my future artist and concert photography useful on Commons as well.

For me, this is a practical way to connect photography work I already do with my Wikimedia activities instead of treating them as completely separate things.

And after that session, I joined WikiPortraits. For me, this was one of the sessions I enjoyed most at Wikimania 2026.

Indigenous knowledge and responsible sharing

“Respecting Indigenous Knowledge in Open Spaces.”

The panel discussed Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property and Indigenous Data Sovereignty. The speakers explained why open knowledge is not only about copyright or whether something can technically be uploaded.

Cultural context, consent and the communities connected to that knowledge also matter.

The Wikimedia Australia team presented a guide that helps contributors think about culturally sensitive material and whether a source is culturally appropriate. One of the practical ideas was to ask not only whether material can be uploaded, but whether uploading it is the responsible choice.

Thérèse Ottawa also spoke about the Atikamekw-language Wikipedia project in Canada and its connection with education and language revitalisation. The project included work with younger people and schools, helping the language remain active in a digital environment.

This session connected with what I had seen at the library. Digitising cultural material can help more people access it, but we also need to think about how that material is shared.

CEE Youth and ideas for future activities

Youth participation was another part of my Wikimania programme.

“Bring in the Youth! Discussing Ways to Support Youth on a Regional Level.” Participants shared examples from different regions and talked about mentoring, universities, informal activities and ways to support young contributors who may not have an active local community around them.

One example I liked was the use of simple social activities such as board game meetings. These meetings helped young Wikimedians get to know each other, and some later developed projects together. The discussion also looked at the role of regional groups in connecting young people who may otherwise feel isolated in their local Wikimedia community.

Later, I joined the CEE Youth session and workshop.

The CEE Youth social media working group currently has eight volunteers from different countries. The team meets once a month, talks through Telegram and works with a shared content calendar. The speakers were also quite open about volunteer burnout. Sometimes volunteers simply need to take a break from their responsibilities for some time.

During the workshop, we talked about who we actually want to reach through social media and what could make the content more interesting. We also discussed how the work could be divided between more people instead of relying too much on one person.

Meeting WikiOrchestra

At the end of the day, I went to the WikiOrchestra rehearsal and met the conductor, Lukas Mezger

I told him that I am playing the piano and composing musics. I also mentioned that I had composed the opening music for the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024 in Istanbul.

There is also a separate diff post on this topic here:

We talked with Lukas about music at Wikimedia events and possible future collaborations. I had discovered the information about the closing choir late, but after our conversation Lukas invited me to join.

Manuscripts and the closing ceremony

On the final day, I attended “From Wikilontar to Wikisami: How Regional Partnerships Power Community-Led Growth in Bali”, presented by Carma Citrawati and Sakti Hendra Pramudya.

The session explained how work around Balinese manuscripts developed through local community participation and wider partnerships. The discussion was not only about scanning documents. It also focused on trust, local leadership and giving communities a role in decisions about their own cultural heritage.

For me, this connected naturally with both the Sainte-Geneviève Library visit and the Indigenous knowledge panel. All three showed different sides of digitisation and cultural heritage.

After the session, I studied the score for “Oh, Wikipédia!” and joined the WikiOrchestra and choir rehearsal. I spent hours working on the music, pronunciation, stage positions and performance.

Near the end of the closing ceremony, the WikiOrchestra and choir went on stage and we performed the song together.

Performing with the choir at the main amphitheater stage, became one of the most memorable parts of my first Wikimania.

Lukas and I also talked about future music projects. I also plan to continue composing original music for Wikimedia events when there is an opportunity. For me, music is not only something separate from Wikimedia activities.

After the ceremony, we joined the Wikimania 2026 group photo.

On the final day of Wikimania, there was another very literal example of how many small contributions can create something much larger. Wikimania participants worked together on a giant version of the Wikipedia Puzzle Globe outside the venue. When it was finished, the puzzle covered around 100 square metres and had 944 pieces. It was one of the largest jigsaw puzzles ever assembled in France. It later became the backdrop for the final group photo.

I also kept one of the puzzle pieces as a souvenir. Together with the badges, postcards, stickers and other things I collected during the week, it will probably become one of the more unusual pieces of my future student club stand.

Looking back at my first Wikimania

My first Wikimania included discussions about AI, photography, cultural heritage, youth activities and music.

But the experience was not limited to the sessions. Meeting Wikimedians from different countries during breaks, seeing the projects people brought with them and simply spending time with other contributors were also important parts of the week.

I returned from Paris with several ideas for what I want to do next, like connect more of my photography with Wikimedia Commons and WikiPortraits, become more active in CEE Youth and youth-related activities, and continue exploring ways to bring music into Wikimedia events.

I also want to continue contributing to the topics I already edit while trying these different forms of participation.

One useful part of Wikimania for me was seeing that some of the things I already do outside Wikimedia can also become Wikimedia contributions.

The week ended with the group photo, the giant Puzzle Globe (Of course, I took one puzzle piece with me.) and the memories and small objects I brought home from Paris. It was a memorable end to my first Wikimania.

Introduction

On 2 September 2026, the new Wikimedia CEE Hub Steering Committee began its term, following several months of nominations, eligibility checks, community engagement and voting. Eight members were elected: four by individual community members and four by CEE affiliates, and two more were later co-opted.

But this election was also a first test of putting the CEE Hub’s governance model into practice. We had the rules; we still needed to build the process around them. That meant establishing an independent Electoral Commission, translating eligibility rules into practice, working with two different electorates, and building Fala, our own voting tool on Wikimedia Toolforge.

From rules to an election

The election had two constituencies: individual CEE community members and CEE affiliates, each electing four members. That made eligibility one of the first practical challenges. Community voters had to meet both Wikimedia activity requirements and demonstrate a connection to the CEE community, while affiliates had to designate representatives to vote on their behalf.

To oversee the process, an independent three-member Electoral Commission was established: Antanana as Chair, Bencemac and Gdarin. The Commission verified candidates and voter eligibility, interpreted the rules when unclear cases appeared, supervised the election, and ultimately certified the results. Hub staff supported the process and its technical implementation, but decisions about eligibility and the application of election rules remained with the Commission.

Thirteen candidates entered the nomination process, and after the eligibility review, twelve were confirmed for the final ballots: six Community candidates and six Affiliate candidates.

Building Fala

One of the biggest practical questions was how to run the vote itself. The election had two different electorates, different eligibility rules, preferential voting, and the possibility that one person could be eligible to vote in both categories.

Instead of adapting the election to the limits of an existing tool, we built Fala on Wikimedia Toolforge. Voters logged in with their Wikimedia accounts, eligibility could be checked through the system, and Community and Affiliate voting were handled separately. Voters could also return and update their ballot before the deadline.

Privacy was part of the design as well. Fala recorded who had voted and when a ballot was submitted or updated, but it did not keep the voter’s candidate selections or rankings linked to their identity.

Building Fala also strengthened the Hub’s ability to run its own governance processes independently. We were not limited to whatever an existing election platform happened to support; we could build the voting process around the rules and needs defined by the CEE Hub itself.

Voting and results

Voting was open from 6 to 20 July 2026. On each ballot, voters could rank as many or as few candidates as they wanted. The candidate ranked first received six points, the second five, and so on, while unranked candidates received no points.

Fifty-two community members voted in the Community election, while 15 CEE affiliates participated through their designated representatives. The Electoral Commission then certified the results, including the  rules used to decide the winner when two or more candidates received the same number of votes in the Affiliate election.

The elected members were Shahen Araboghlian, Magda Barascu, Wojciech Pędzich, Mārtiņš Bruņenieks, Gorana Gomirac, Toni Sant, Klára Joklová and Vera Pelhan. They later co-opted Iglika Ivanova and Armen Mirzoyan, completing the ten-member Steering Committee.

The first meeting of the new Steering Committee took place on 2 September 2026, which marked the official start of its term. That is also when they selected the Chair: Toni Sant and Co-Chair: Vera Pelhan.

What we learned

The clearest lesson was how difficult it can be to turn governance rules into something a voting system can actually verify. Some criteria, such as account age, edit count and block history, could be checked directly from Wikimedia data. Others could not. For example, eligibility through membership in approved CEE mailing lists could not be verified by existing voting tools such as SecurePoll. That problem led directly to Fala: voters log in with their Wikimedia account, verify their email with a one-time code, and the address is checked against a whitelist built from the approved mailing lists. In other words, the election rules themselves shaped the architecture of the tool.

A different lesson came from affiliate participation. Some eligible affiliates never nominated a representative and therefore never voted. That showed us that simply giving affiliates a formal role in governance is not enough; they also need to see the election as part of their own responsibility and engage with the process early enough. After the election, the Electoral Commission followed up directly with non-participating affiliates to understand why they had dropped out. For future elections, earlier contact, clearer expectations and more active follow-up with affiliates will probably matter as much as the voting system itself.

What comes next

The election also made us think more broadly about how the CEE Hub puts its governance into practice. If the Hub is going to make more of its own decisions through formal community processes, it needs infrastructure that can support them. In some cases, the available tools were designed for different purposes; in others, there was simply no dedicated tool for the kind of internal decision-making the Hub needed.

For that reason, we decided to build Iskara, a voting tool for internal CEE Hub decision-making. The aim is to give the Hub greater independence in implementing its governance and a practical way to run its own votes when they are needed. Fala was our first experience of building such infrastructure around a real governance process; Iskara takes that experience further and applies it to the Hub’s internal decision-making more generally.

To learn more about the Steering Committee and internal governance of Wikimedia CEE Hub, check out the dedicated Meta page.

Imagine a world in which every woman on the planet finds a representative and diverse sum of all human knowledge about women+* available on Wikipedia and on the internet. This is what the Celebrate Women campaign has been trying to accomplish since 2022. 

Every March, during Women’s History Month and in celebration of International Women’s Day (March 8th), the Wikimedia community gathers both online and in person to edit and improve the content available on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects about women+. The editing happens as part of edit-a-thons, workshops, training sessions, and many other types of gatherings, which are spread around the world, with events on every continent. 

For 2026, we had one of the biggest campaigns so far. Considering all the gatherings globally, we had 112 events listed on the official page, which were divided into these sections: 

• Global: 21 events
• Africa: 20 events
• Asia: 15 events
• Europe: 38 events
• Latin America: 12 events
• Middle East: 1 event
• North America: 3 events
• Oceania: 2 events

These numbers clearly demonstrate the global impact of this campaign, as well as serve as a testimony to Wikimedia’s reach and potential for collaboration, even when the world seems to be divided. In 2026, our communities were able to not only come together, but also edit and collaborate towards that one single goal.

In the last few years, this purpose was also achieved. By checking the pages for the previous campaigns, we had 59 events in 2025, 100 in 2024, and 121 gatherings in 2022. However, when we also consider the Programs & Events Outreach Dashboard campaigns (see more about this topic below), we have another 144 events in 2022; 137 events in 2024; 171 events in 2025; and 155 events in 2026. 

For 2026, we were able to assemble some statistics. In terms of engagement, considering the P&E Outreach Dashboard and gatherings using Event Registration (a new CampaignEvents feature), we were able to identify that this year’s campaign assembled 207 organizers and 2,658 event participants, which can be divided into:

• Beginner (less than 10 lifetime edits when participation begins): 1,388 users
• Junior (>= 10, <100 edits): 435 users
• Experienced (>= 100, <300 edits):  189 users
• Very experienced (>= 300 edits): 647 users

When it comes to content, or knowledge being added or improved through events, we had 238,222 unreverted content edits and 2,499,773,577 bytes added. After a few months from the end of the campaign (March 31, 2026), we have a total of 32,388 undeleted content pages added.

Celebrate Women is also responsible for increasing the number of events held in the Wikimedia community. Considering Event Registration usage only, we can see in the next image a major increase from 2025 to the 2026 campaign, and a peak in February and March compared to last year.

In March 2025, we had 152 events created using Event Registration, while in March 2026, we had 251 events. This is a 65% increase. However, for Celebrate Women, it’s also important to consider February, when a good portion of the events are created for organizers in preparation for the early March events, especially around International Women’s Day. In February 2025, 130 events were created, while in February 2026, 240 events were created. This is an 84.6% increase.

Wikimedia Foundation’s support in 2026

Celebrate Women is a community campaign and the result of volunteers and community members from all over the world. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has been helping this campaign by providing support for communities and organizers.

In 2026, we started the support by renovating the Celebrate Women portal. We changed the campaign’s header, reorganized it, and even added a press toolkit tab to help organizers develop a media plan or get media coverage from local journalists and media outlets. This new page includes sections about how to explain Wikipedia and the gender gap, key Wikipedia and gender gap facts and figures, inspiring gender stories, and a list of campaigns and groups dedicated to decreasing the gender gap on the Wikimedia projects. 

We also added resources and guides for how to use the CampaignEvents features, Content Translation Suggestion feature, and Central Notice Banner Editor. Additionally, we collaborated with the WMF Comms team on social media posts, which were shared throughout March on the Foundation’s channels.

We also contacted major gender organizers and community members (via email and talk page) and discussed the idea of adding the Event Registration header to help us understand the campaign’s participation. With Event Registration, the campaign reached 617 registered participants. According to the Connection team, who developed this feature, Celebrate Women 2026 is currently the 3rd biggest event in terms of participation so far, only behind Wikipedia 25 Virtual Celebration, with 3,187 participants, and the Africa Wiki Challenge 2025 with 790 participants.

During the pre-campaign community consultations, we received a request to not only have an Event Registration way to track the campaign, but also an Outreach Dashboard campaign dedicated to 2026. We created the campaign here.

Later, we chose to understand the impact of previous Celebrate Women years using the Outreach Dashboard too. We created campaigns dedicated to 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 and decided to search and include all gender events organized during those years using the dashboard. Now, we can better understand the impact of the gender content gap efforts for the past 5 years. 

Finally, by using Event Registration, we were able to communicate with the 617 participants who registered. Once a week, we sent a reminder with the events that were taking place that week, divided into regions, and including day, time, place, and how to register. This established a recurring way to connect with community members and remind them about the campaign as a month-long commitment.

Wikimedia Foundation’s events

The Wikimedia Foundation also organized three events to support the community in organizing their Celebrate Women gatherings. We planned the campaign’s kick-off event and 2 pre-campaign trainings dedicated to Wikimedia organizers.

• On February 25, we had the Content Translation training. This session aimed to empower organizers with the skills to use Content Translation, with a focus on the article suggestion feature. 

• On February 26, we had the Event Registration and Collaborative Contributions session. The training aimed to equip organizers to effectively accomplish event registration, metrics tracking, outreach, and sustained community engagement. 

• On March 5, we held the campaign’s Welcome Session, which covered the 2026 campaign, some of its events, and some of Wikimedia’s Gender Gap milestones presented by Chinmayee Mishra. Participants also learned a bit about Event Registration, Content Translation, and two tools that help organizers with small but powerful edits: Gender Bias Detector and Wikipedia Microtask Generator. 

On the page for the three events, all the resources are available: recordings, slides in different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French), and other useful information.

WikiWomen+ Summit 2026

In August 2026, the WikiWomen+ Summit 2026 took place during Wikimania’s pre-conference day. At this gathering, we were able to present about the Celebrate Women and the impact of this campaign in the context of Wikipedia’s content gender gap. 

Please find the recording for this presentation on YouTube. The slides are also available on Wikimedia Commons.

To understand more about the campaign or to stay tuned, check out the Celebrate Women portal on Meta-Wiki.

* The usage of the “+” sign after the word “women” means we are including anyone who identifies as a woman in some way, that being a cis woman, transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, or any gender identity not listed here.

The #SheSaid campaign 2026 officially launched on 1 September and will run until 31 December 2026. Now in its seventh edition, #SheSaid continues to grow as a global campaign, bringing together participants from around the world to add and improve women’s voices on Wikimedia projects.

As part of Wiki Loves Women, an initiative of Wiki in Africa, #SheSaid works to address the gender gap on Wikiquote by making women’s words, experiences and perspectives more visible and accessible.

This year is particularly special: Wiki Loves Women is celebrating 10 years of making women visible in the world’s largest open knowledge ecosystem. #SheSaid is part of this decade-long journey, building on the contributions of thousands of participants who have helped bring women’s voices into the Wikimedia movement and beyond.

More than numbers, SheSaid is a story of collaboration

Six editions. More than 42k contributions. 22 languages from English to Assamese. More than 25 communities from Indonesia to Italy, Ghana and beyond. . 

#SheSaid is more than just the numbers. It is a story of people coming together across languages, countries and cultures, united by one purpose: to make women’s voices more visible.

That spirit of collaboration has taken #SheSaid beyond Wikimedia. FrancAutrices, a card game created through a collaboration between Les sans pagEs, Wiki in Africa and French Wikiquote editors, brings the words of Francophone women writers to new audiences. The game features quotes from Wikiquote, alongside portraits of the authors by French illustrator Claire Gaudriot and a design by South African designer Theresa Shaw.

FrancAutrices is one example of how a contribution to an open platform can become the starting point for something new, connecting communities, cultures and audiences around women’s voices.

A community favourite

The Wikimedia community has celebrated the story of # SheSaid. At Wikimania 2026, the campaign was selected as one of “Wikimedia’s Coolest Projects”.

For this award, in-person and online attendees were invited to vote for the projects that best represented the creativity, diversity and collaborative spirit of the Wikimedia movement. The contest was revived in memory of its founder, Deror Lin, as part of the celebration of 25 years of Wikimedia.

Being chosen among the three coolest Wikimedia projects is a meaningful recognition of what the #SheSaid community has built together.

A campaign for everyone

As this year’s campaign begins, we’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has contributed to #SheSaid over the years; every quote, edit, translation, event and conversation has helped shape this global campaign and made a significant impact on Wikiquote. SheSaid belongs to everyone who takes part in it, and through this collective effort, women’s voices continue to find their place in open knowledge.

The story continues, and everyone can be part of it. Whether you contribute a quote, improve Wikiquote, organise an activity, translate content, or encourage someone else to participate – join us!

Be part of #SheSaid 2026 and help write the next chapter of this global story.
#SheSaid … Give Her A Voice!

Don’t forget to follow us on social media:

• Website: www.wikiloveswomen.org
• Twitter/X: @Wikiloveswomen
• Instagram: @WikiLovesWomen
• Facebook Page: @WikiLovesWomen
• Telegram Group: WikiGenderGap

A reflection from Wikimedia Kenya User Group on why skills development, shared leadership and opportunities for growth are essential to building resilient communities.

There was a point during Wikimedia Kenya User Group’s recent team-building day when somewhere between the conversations, laughter and uncomfortable moments of reflection, the room changed. The titles and responsibilities that usually defined us seemed to fall away, and for a while, we were simply what we had spent years trying to build: a community.

We spent the day competing in well-crafted games, laughing at our desperate attempts to win and the missteps that cost us points, while discovering just how differently each of us approaches a challenge. But beneath the fun, the activities revealed something more important; they showed us how much we rely on trust, communication and listening to work towards a common goal, and how leadership is not always about taking charge, but also about knowing when to step back and make space for someone else.

The people in that room were not only campaign organisers delivering projects and programmes. They were also members of the Core Team supporting Wikimedia Kenya UserGroup’s mission and governance. That made the day about more than team-building but also an opportunity to reflect on how we work together, the kind of leaders we want to become, and ultimately, the kind of community we are building.

“I really enjoyed the team-building activity because it gave us a chance to step away from our usual roles and understand each other differently. It reminded me that building a strong community is also about building trust within the team, understanding the different strengths each one brings to the table, reflecting on and learning from our mistakes, creating space for different people to belong and learning how to support each other better.”  Terry Boke, Community Organiser & Core Team Member

Building Communities Means Investing in People

It is easy to measure a growing community through the number of new contributors, articles created, events delivered, partnerships established or campaigns completed. But behind every one of those numbers are people: people who need the confidence to take initiative, the skills to do it well, the opportunity to take responsibility, and a community that recognises their potential and gives them room to grow.

For Wikimedia Kenya, leadership development is therefore not a separate activity sitting alongside our programmes. It is part of how we are building a resilient and sustainable community.

We don’t just want volunteers whose contribution is limited to editorial work. We want to build a community of people with the skills, confidence and agency to take on different roles, lead initiatives, solve problems and shape the direction of the movement. Whether they are organising campaigns, building partnerships, mentoring others, contributing to governance or creating knowledge, we want people to see themselves not just as participants, but as active contributors to the growth and future of the community across Kenya.

That means mentorship, nurturing talent and creating opportunities for people to practise leadership before they are formally given a leadership title. It means developing the skills to communicate strategically, make decisions, work across different perspectives, take responsibility for outcomes and, just as importantly, make space for others to contribute and lead.

This thinking is reflected in our 2026/27 Strategic Plan, which recognises leadership development as an important part of building a resilient and sustainable community.

From Team Building to Communicating for Impact

Drawing on more than a decade of experience in strategic communications, community building and leadership development, I wanted to inspire the team to think about how we could strengthen the way we work and grow as a community. I therefore led a practical session on “Communicating for Impact: From Strategy to Community Engagement,” built around a simple question:

How do we translate Wikimedia Kenya User Group’s strategy into action, communicate more effectively, engage our community meaningfully, and ensure that we can see, measure and document the impact of our work?

For people taking on leadership and coordination roles, communication is not simply about writing better outreach emails, designing social media posts or making event announcements. It is about understanding people and audiences, listening well, building trust, navigating differences, working collectively and creating the conditions for others to contribute and lead. It is also about connecting the decisions we make and the work we do every day to Wikimedia Kenya’s strategic priorities and the wider movement’s goals.

Developing these skills is an essential part of developing people who can take on greater responsibility, support others and help shape the future of the community.

We explored a simple progression:

Strategy → Communication → Engagement → Action → Impact

The aim was to help us see that communication cannot sit separately from strategy. It should help people understand the purpose behind our work, see where they fit and feel empowered to contribute.

What stood out to me was not simply what people learned, but how quickly the boundaries between training, team building and strategy began to disappear. The conversations moved naturally from how we communicate to how we work together, take responsibility and create opportunities for others to contribute. The session became a practical exercise in leadership development, building the skills needed not only to deliver our work, but to shape what comes next.

That shift was reflected in the feedback from one of our Core Team members:

“This was really great for understanding the bigger picture of our work and learning how to move more strategically. I feel empowered to think differently about how I plan and engage with the community and external stakeholders in future projects and campaigns that I lead.” Faith Mwanyolo, Core Team Member & Lead Organizer, Wiki Loves Africa

One practical lesson from the communications training was the need to make strategic alignment part of our planning process, rather than something we consider after a project is already underway. Going forward, we want every project and campaign to begin by asking how it advances the Wikimedia Kenya Strategic Plan and contributes to what we are working towards as a community.

To support this, we are developing a standard project planning template for organisers and a review checklist for the Core Team. The template will help teams identify the strategic objective their project contributes to, the activities they will undertake, the outputs they expect to deliver, the outcomes they aim to achieve and the metrics they will use to track progress.

The checklist will provide a consistent and transparent approach to reviewing internal proposals, helping us assess not only whether an activity is well designed, but also how clearly it contributes to our strategic priorities and how responsibility for results is shared.

The intended outcome is a more deliberate approach to how we plan, implement and evaluate our work. Over time, this should help us understand which activities are contributing to our goals, where we are making significant progress, where gaps remain and where we need to adapt.

Four Lessons That Have Shaped How We Build Our Community

For emerging communities, especially those building themselves with limited resources, investing in leadership can easily become an afterthought-something to address once the community is larger, programmes are more established or funding is more secure.

Our experience over the past five years has taught us something different: leadership development is not something that should follow community growth; it is one of the things that makes sustainable growth possible. As more people develop the skills and confidence to take responsibility, lead others and shape the direction of the community, growth becomes something the community can build and sustain collectively.

Below are four lessons that have shaped how we build our community.

1. Make leadership development part of the strategy

Don’t wait for people to emerge as leaders by accident. Create deliberate opportunities for mentorship and for people to take responsibility, experiment, make decisions and learn from experience.

Leadership grows when people are trusted with meaningful roles and supported as they take them on. This also means recognising that people develop at different stages and may need different opportunities to grow—from taking on their first organising role to leading a major campaign, mentoring others or contributing to governance.

2. Don’t separate team building from organisational development

Games, reflection and informal conversations can reveal things that formal meetings don’t. A team that understands how its members communicate, solve problems and respond under pressure is better equipped to collaborate when the real work begins.

Team building therefore has a role beyond creating a good atmosphere. It can help people understand one another’s strengths, identify areas where they need to work differently and build the trust needed to share responsibility.

3. Connect activities to purpose

People taking responsibility for campaigns and community activities should understand not only what they are doing, but why it matters and how it contributes to the community’s wider goals and the Wikimedia movement’s strategy.

When people understand the connection between an edit-a-thon, partnership, training or outreach activity and the bigger organisational goal, they are more likely to take ownership of the work and see how their contribution fits into the community’s growth.

As one of our Core Team members reflected:

“When we understand why we are doing something and how it contributes to our wider goals, the work takes on a different meaning. We are no longer just delivering activities; we are making deliberate contributions towards the kind of community and movement we want to build.” Lebu Ayiga, Community Organiser & Core Team Member

4. Create room for leadership to move

Volunteer burnout can quietly undermine growing communities when too much responsibility rests on a small number of committed leaders. Those who help build a community can easily become the people expected to organise every campaign, solve every problem and keep everything moving. Over time, this can limit both their capacity and the community’s growth.

We have learned that investing in people also means creating room for leadership to move. This means creating pathways for members to take on new responsibilities, develop the skills and confidence to lead, and step back when others are ready to step forward.

For us, this is not only about preventing burnout. It is about building a wider base of people who can share responsibility, mentor others and take on greater leadership roles. When leadership is shared, the community becomes less dependent on individuals and better able to sustain its growth.

Invest in Leaders at Every Stage

Wikimedia communities are built around knowledge, but they are sustained by people. If we want our communities to grow and remain sustainable, we have to invest in people at every stage of their journey.

That means creating pathways for new leaders to emerge, while also giving existing leaders opportunities to deepen their skills, take on new challenges and progress into new roles. Leadership development should create space for people to build confidence, share responsibility, mentor others and continue finding meaningful ways to contribute.

Leadership should not be viewed only as a pathway towards replacing one person with another. People who have already taken on leadership responsibilities also need opportunities to learn, evolve and take on new challenges. In a volunteer movement, creating those opportunities can be just as important to sustaining engagement as bringing new people into leadership.

Over time, this creates resilient communities where people at different stages can continue to grow, contribute, lead and support others.

Winnie Kabintie is the Executive Director, Wikimedia Kenya User Group

One of the downsides of having written here for six years now is that my messy, ever-growing text file of topics for future articles contains a bunch of ideas that have been there for about six years. Part of the problem is that I just have to scroll so far up to even see them now, part of it is that some of them are on topics where I do not feel equipped to write a good formal treatment. So let's consider this an easy, breezy episode of Computers Are Bad as I knock out one of those items.

One of these O. G. topics, line three, is "avalanche technology." I will admit that I am a little fuzzy on what this originally meant, but I have a few good guesses. First, though, let's just take a step back and talk a little bit about the practicalities of the avalanche. For a lot of you, avalanches are probably a pretty abstract issue.

For me, as well—I snowboard but I'm not that good at it, and the kind of mid-tier ski area where you will find me tumbling down the hill (Ski Santa Fe, towards Totemoff's) manages their slopes to avoid the potential for avalanche as much as possible. This requires some expertise in avalanche risks and it's never quite perfect, but it's pretty good. Snow that is regularly groomed by machines like PistenBullys will become coherently packed such that avalanches can't really propagate. The bigger risk on groomed ski slopes generally comes from up above, and here in New Mexico our mountains are of such a height that we're usually starting down from the very top anyway.

Still, avalanches pose a real hazard. The Department of Homeland Security, when it can be distracted from terrorizing well-meaning migrants, tells us that avalanches claim about 28 lives each year in the United States. Globally, the number is much larger, and avalanche fatalities seem to be generally more common in Europe. I'm not sure if that reflects European weather, geography, or recreation habits more, but it's the way things pan out and means that Northern Europe tends to be the center of avalanche technology (as it is in alpine technology in general).

We tend to associate avalanche hazard most of all with recreation, and that's definitely fair: the highest risk of avalanche probably comes about in cross-country skiing, where it's fairly common to traverse the lower part of slopes that have otherwise received very little disturbance. Most avalanches occur during storms, as the snow falls and piles up, which is of course not when recreationists are most likely to be present. You can't rely on this, though. One of the ways that an avalanche can initiate is when lots of snow is piled up on a slope on a nice sunny day—good recreation conditions! Various things like water following the ground or stratigraphic layers of different types of snow from different storms can create a condition of uneven melting. Snow that is under the surface might liquefy faster than snow that is closer to the surface. This "detaches" the upper level of snow from the ground, and when it happens over a wide area, that upper level of snow can let loose all at once. This type of avalanche is relatively rare, but they happen without warning in otherwise good weather, so it's much more likely that people will be caught. Further complicating the situation, the proximity of people can be a factor in initiating these avalanches.

Here in the Mountain States, though, avalanche risk often manifests in another context: transportation. As Americans, cars and highways are among our most esteemed achievements, and decades of engineering accomplishment allows us to drive through, over, and even under much of the Rocky Mountains even during the winter. Landscape modifications, chemical measures, and the brute force of snowplows keep roadways clear—but not the slopes above them. Avalanches cascading down onto highways are a major concern in the Mountain States, especially Colorado which has the most impressive set of mountains and mountainous highways.

Forecasting

Some of the things, then, that we might call "avalanche technology" are the techniques used to prevent, mitigate, and warn of potential avalanche. Much of the work is institutional. On the recreational front, this falls mostly with the US Forest Service's National Avalanche Center and a loose confederation of regional organizations such as our own Taos Avalanche Center, here in New Mexico. One of the main functions of these organizations is education: posting warning signs, spreading awareness, offering training courses and materials, and so on. They also tend to employ avalanche specialists, who use a combination of meteorology and specialized snow observations to determine when avalanches are most likely. This can lead to posting warnings or closing areas entirely.

Avalanche specialists in the recreational field are, in this area, joined by a substantial cadre of avalanche specialists employed by state Departments of Transportation. They apply the same techniques with an eye towards avalanches that could affect mountain pass highways. Those highways may be closed in extreme circumstances, but in transportation even more than in recreation it is common to use, shall we say, "active measures" to prevent avalanches. We will discuss this later, but first, let's briefly talk about how avalanche hazards are forecast.

I am not going to go into much detail here, because I frankly do not know much about it, but I do want to touch on a couple of things that are solidly in my wheelhouse. One of these is SNOTEL. Forecasting avalanche risk requires a solid understanding of the general amount of snowpack in the mountains, which can be very tricky to acquire since when snow is heavy getting up there to take measurements becomes a very time-consuming and potentially hazardous venture.

Avalanche forecasting is just one of many functions served by the SNOTEL or Snow Telemetry system, a 1960s-era network of hundreds of sensor sites throughout mountainous parts of the United States. SNOTEL was originally designed to help with forecasting spring meltwater flows, which is why it falls under the aegis of the Department of Agriculture, but as with any good sensor network there are now a lot of different stakeholders.

The tricky thing about SNOTEL, and remember here that it dates back 60 years, is the snow. SNOTEL sites are way up there, inaccessible during winter, so they are designed to be installed and serviced during summer and to operate autonomously until the next summer. SNOTEL instruments are solar powered, but more interesting are the communications arrangements. The initiation of the SNOTEL project predates a robust set of earth observation satellites, to say nothing of cellular or other digital radio networks. But the whole purpose of SNOTEL is to provide snowpack data when the snow is still there, so real-time reporting is critical.

SNOTEL was thus one of the first applications of meteor scatter, a fascinating form of radio communication that will probably get its whole own article one day. Here is the summary: SNOTEL data collection sites, in convenient locations like towns, transmit a VHF carrier or "pilot" signal up towards the sky. Occasionally, but more often than you would think, a meteor enters the Earth's atmosphere and burns up, leaving a trail of ionized gas behind it. This ionized gas is, if you remember previous discussion of troposcatter, reflective to RF energy. Some of the "pilot" signal is thus scattered back down towards earth. When a SNOTEL site receives the pilot signal, it knows that a meteor has just entered the atmosphere and this scattering is happening, so it quickly transmits a data packet towards the sky. Ideally, this data packet is reflected by the same meteor trail such that the data collection site can receive it. If this all sounds rather stochastic and chancey, it is, but enough meteors enter the atmosphere and data packets can be sent quickly enough (and tried multiple times) that it works pretty reliably for low-bandwidth telemetry data.

Unfortunately, as interesting as meteor scatter is, it's mostly been obsoleted by general technological advances in radio communications. SNOTEL was probably the largest meteor scatter network in the world¹, but is no longer: all SNOTEL sites now use other means of reporting data. The most common is probably the generic data collection capability of GOES, NOAA's main fleet of "weather satellites." GOES satellites actually serve many purposes related to earth observation, and one of them is telemetry collection from instruments on the ground. If you've ever come across a USGS stream gauging station or another mysterious hut in the middle of the woods with a cylindrical or conical antenna pointed at the sky, it's transmitting data upwards for reception by a GOES satellite. The GOES earth segment collects all of the little data packets the satellites receive into files which are distributed to the various organizations that report data this way. If you are so inclined, you can also receive this data yourself as the satellites rebroadcast it in batches, but most users don't bother since NOAA will do that part for you.

Even that might be fading away: newer SNOTEL sites apparently use the cellular network for data reporting, unless it's not possible to get a signal, but that's becoming less common over time even in the Colorado mountains. The major benefit here is that the cellular network is low latency and very high bandwidth, which makes it feasible for example to view cameras installed at the SNOTEL sites.

With the data part discussed, let's take a quick second look at the data collected. Temperature, humidity, pressure, wind, liquid precipitation are all measured as usual, but SNOTEL adds a couple of specialty features. Soil moisture and evapotranspiration (basically evaporation rate of water from soil) sensors provide more data on how saturated the ground is, an ultrasonic or optical instrument pointed down from atop a post measures how deep the snowpack is, and a funny looking contraption called a snow pillow takes perhaps the most important measurement. The snow pillow is basically a big rubber balloon that gets inflated on the ground, and then covered with snow. By measuring the air pressure from the snow pillow, the SNOTEL station effectively weighs the snowpack, which combined with its height gives the density or water content of the snow. This varies widely depending on the specific weather when the snow falls, and remember that stratigraphic differences in density are one of the factors that's important in the likelihood of a surprise avalanche, so collecting this water content information as snow falls allows forecasters to remotely estimate whether or not the snow conditions are hazardous.

That is, of course, supplemented by good old fashioned techniques like sending out avalanche specialists with shovels and meter sticks to take a look at the snow themselves. DOTs often have technicians doing a regular tour of mountain pass sites, where they curate plastic tubs and boxes of snow from various storms so that they can get a hands-on impression of what the different layers under the snowpack are like. They also take samples to weigh, perform some tests to measure mechanical properties of the snow, there's basically a whole bag of tricks, but ultimately there is also a subjective element of how "good" or "bad" things look. This is born of experience and is one of many reasons to value our state employees.

Mitigation

Within the recreational context, one common approach to mitigation is simply to avoid the area. Especially for backcountry skiing areas, avalanche centers might post warnings or work with the operator to close the area entirely when forecasting shows that conditions are favorable for an avalanche. Warnings might be more useful than you think, since besides reducing the number of people in the area they should also prime people to recognize particularly risky slopes or signs of snow that is becoming unstable. Avalanches can occur without any surface signs of instability, but in practice there often are some signs, so of course keeping an eye out is better than nothing. Warnings also make people more likely to carry safety equipment, discussed later, which improves the chance of self-rescue if things really do go wrong.

But there are also, shall we say, kinetic options. Many of the methods of modern alpinism evolved during the Second World War, and so did a good portion of the mitigation equipment. Once snow becomes unstable enough that an avalanche could occur, it is basically waiting for something to set it off. Popular media concepts that loud noises will trigger avalanches are, well, fictional, but the point stands that people moving around or especially operating vehicles can trigger avalanches, as can basically random happenstance. You can mitigate the risk of an avalanche by going to unstable areas and intentionally triggering them, or at least trying to, basically the same way that a bomb squad might handle an unstable explosive by exploding it. Better that it go off when you expect it than when you don't.

A classic method, still in some use today, is repurposed artillery. State DOTs and ski area operators own a surprisingly large inventory of M101 Howitzers, a 105mm artillery gun that dates more or less to a 1910s German design but was widely fielded by the US during the Second World War. The avalanche application is simple: when you find a slope with unstable conditions that could pose a hazard, you shoot at it. The concussion from the impact, and often from an explosive round, puts a lot of pressure on the snow that will likely break it loose if it's possible to do so. You just have to make sure you set up outside of the resulting avalanche.

The main problem with this method, which everyone agrees is a whole lot of fun, is that the M101 has not been manufactured since 1953 and, in general, the supply of cheap Army-surplus artillery has dried up. The Howitzers are aging out, and other methods are replacing them. Some of these are similarly dynamic: dropping small improvised bombs from helicopters, for example, which is a very common method in Colorado today. Even just hovering a helicopter over a slope can sometimes trigger an avalanche, although a bit of dynamite makes this a lot more reliable. If you have noticed the surfeit of high-explosives bunkers and unexploded ordnance warnings in some parts of the Colorado mountains, well, now you know why. It can feel a little bit like a very slow-running war.

Even these methods are being replaced by more modern and cost-effective ones, though. A French alpine engineering company called MND manufactures a system called Gazex, which is a bit like an airport bird canon on steroids. Gazex units are pre-installed in avalanche risk areas (by helicopter, for example), and then, under remote control, they mix oxygen and a combustible gas and set it off in a big tube pointed at the ground. The force created is similar to an explosion, but the whole thing is easier to handle (since it uses gas cylinders rather than high explosives) and remote control makes everything cheaper for the operators. MND recently introduced a new version of the system called O'bellx (I assume this reads better in French), which is even more portable, albeit comically egg-shaped. This seems to be catching on with ski areas, and MND also emphasizes that the portable design and low-impact installation makes it suitable for areas like national parks with acute natural preservation concerns. Basically, you can remove them at the end of every winter, so that you aren't leaving equipment scattered around your beautiful mountains.

There are also a number of other mitigation approaches that are less fun, so I will devote less attention to them, but you can find them done around here. Structures similar to snow fences, built high up on a slope, provide an "anchor" for the snow that prevents it coming loose enough for an avalanche. There are many variations on this idea, for example using steel cables supporting nets. Another approach is to permit the avalanches to start but prevent them from reaching areas where they cause harm, either by building wall or dam-like structures (I do not believe this is common in the US as I am not aware of any examples) or by putting corridors like highways inside of "snow sheds" that are sturdy enough to allow the avalanche to simply flow over. This latter method is much more common in Europe than here, but you can find some examples on US railroads, which are often in more difficult terrain than highways.

Warning

One of the more interesting developments in avalanche technology are warning systems. Avalanches wouldn't pose much hazard if people knew that they were coming; what makes melt-triggered avalanches so dangerous is that they can be very unexpected. One of the methods that avalanche safety courses teach is to recognize signs of snow masses that have already started to slide, shift, or collapse on themselves. This would indicate that conditions are favorable for an avalanche and that disturbing or going below the snow is quite dangerous. The usual surface signs are cracks, caused by the snow starting to slide apart, but these cracks can be tricky to see even when they are present.

Another indication of avalanche potential is subsidence, or the snow surface starting to drop in level, or any motion of the snow surface downslope. These effects can start minutes or hours before the real avalanche occurs, but they are subtle and often slow, so humans are unlikely to notice them. Fortunately, machines are well adapted to this task. Several vendors offer radar systems that monitor snow slopes for any shifting, and can sound a siren or another alert if things start to move. Like earthquake warning, the actual lead time provided by these systems is not very well known and could be quite short, but something is better than nothing.

Other technologies, like LIDAR and acoustics (e.g. geophones), can be applied to a similar task. I have even heard of older systems that used thin wires or brittle metal bars embedded in the snow, as part of an electrical circuit that would break if the snow started to move ². Such systems can be quite sophisticated, and MND's sales materials suggest things like closing gates on highways when an avalanche is detected. The current state of the art in radar detection uses pulsed Doppler operation, which can be very sensitive to movement in all kinds of directions. All that said, these don't seem to be popular in the US. I couldn't readily find any installations in this country.

As a final note on this topic, national alerting systems like NAWAS and the Emergency Alert System have defined message types for avalanche warnings. In practice, these are very rare, as it doesn't usually make sense from a time or area perspective to put out an avalanche warning through mass media channels. That said, they do happen, usually on the (fortunately rare) occasion that forecasters predict a high risk of avalanche in a town or other populated area. In that case, the procedure is to evacuate the town, and that's exactly the kind of situation that NAWAS/EAS/NWS All Hazards/etc. are intended for.

Rescue

And finally, we reach the topic that I believe led me to put "avalanche technology" on the list to begin with: technical aids to rescue. Avalanches are, in a certain sense, not that dangerous. They can move at formidable speeds (60+ miles per hour often reported), but snow is relatively soft and low-density. Injury from being crushed or striking against something is certainly a possibility, but the bigger hazard of avalanche is usually when you become buried.

If you are buried in snow, and there are no rescuers or they cannot find you, it can be extremely difficult to work your way out and you are likely to succumb to some combination of asphyiation, exhaustion, and hypothermia in the process. That might sound silly but keep in mind that you have just been buried by an avalanche, probably have a variety of minor injuries, have become disoriented, etc., and you try to dig yourself out of feet of snow in that situation. You really need someone on the surface to come help you out. That's why standard avalanche safety equipment includes a probe and a shovel—a probe for finding people (just a metal rod you use to poke under the snow, basically), and a shovel for getting to them.

The problem is that probing a large area of snow is a very slow process, and even if you were right next to someone before an avalanche, you probably don't know where they ended up afterwards. This is an area where radio technology can be extremely helpful.

The concept of avalanche beacons or avalanche transponders dates back to at least 1968. Dr. John Lawton was an engineer at an aerospace research lab now known as the Calspan Corporation, where he worked on a variety of interesting aviation problems ranging from weapons targeting to meteorological research. Lawton was quite an aviation enthusiast, making the news in 2013 for celebrating his 90th birthday by flying his Cessna Skyhawk over the US-Canada border 90 times. That's a bit of a peculiar way to entertain yourself, but anyone who is still flying themselves around at 90 has clearly found a way to stay vital. His lifelong investment in aviation is emphasized by the fact that he started his winding cross-border journey at the airport he owned.

What is not so well documented is his interest in alpinism, but he must have had some affection for the mountains. He did some kind of research work in Europe related to triggering avalanches by dropping explosives from light aircraft, and whether that put the topic on his mind or something else, he also came up with the first commercial avalanche beacon. Commercialized by his company Lawtronics, the "Skadi" transmitted a tone at 2.275 kHz. Groups of people traveling in the mountains could each carry a Skadi unit, and if anyone was lost in an avalanche, any of the other units could be switched to a receive mode and the person located by simple amplitude search. That is, walking around the snow until you find the spot where the tone comes in the loudest, at which you point you start probing and digging.

This same method is still used today, although the radio system has been standardized at 457 kHz. Modern avalanche rescue systems like the "Barryvox" from Mammut or the Black Diamond Recon X are direct descendants of Lawton's Skadi device, using 457 kHz and digital direction finding techniques (like the use of multiple perpendicular directional antennas to compute a likely heading to target) to speed things up and make radiolocation more user friendly. Because the 457 kHz system is an international standard, they ought to work about the same regardless of manufacturer. That's important in real-world scenarios where the people doing the rescuing might be from a whole different group than the one affected by the avalanche.

Modern avalanche beacons are probably one of the closest real-world products to the way that "radio beacons" tend to work in movies and videogames. The reality is of course messier, especially if there are multiple victims, but in principle a digital avalanche beacon in receive mode can show an arrow on screen that you follow until you are standing on top of the buried person. You know if you're getting closer when they beep more. Neat.

Technological development continues apace, and some newer avalanche beacons also support a second protocol called W-Link. W-Link is actually surprisingly poorly documented, presumably because it appears to be proprietary to Mammut (the only non-Mammut beacons that support it seem to have been joint venture projects with Mammut). W-Link is a digital protocol that operates in the ISM band, introducing the downside that ISM bands are not internationally standardized. This means that US and European-market beacons will always be compatible for conventional 457 kHz operation, but two beacons with W-Link support may not be able to use that protocol if they were sold for different regulatory markets.

The upside of W-Link is that the digital protocol lets the beacon send significantly more information. This includes a unique serial number for the beacon, which allows the receiver to discriminate between pulses being received from two or more beacons at the same time—a radical improvement in the ease of locating multiple people, as conventional direction finding techniques really struggle when you cannot discriminate between multiple targets. You can end up with a "swinging needle," while the W-Link devices are capable of locking to a single target at a time. As this implies, you can also determine how many people are buried, and ignore beacons that turn out to be unimportant (because they are discarded on the surface, or carried by a rescuer, etc).

Perhaps the most interesting feature of W-Link is that some W-Link beacons will use an accelerometer to detect motion, and report whether or not any motion is present. In theory, this allows rescuers to prioritize their efforts by focusing on beacons that report motion, meaning that they are carried by people who are still alive. These enhanced capabilities of W-Link seem to have led to enough controversy that the Wikipedia article devotes much of its length to ethics discussions, and manufacturers have put out position papers on their decisions to implement or not implement certain W-Link features. The concern is that W-Link may give rescuers more information on which to prioritize rescue in a discriminatory way, perhaps by searching for victims with (more expensive) W-Link beacons before less expensive conventional beacons, or by using knowledge of W-Link serial numbers to prioritize the search for specific people.

In practice, I think these ethical concerns are more theoretical than actual, because penetration of W-Link technology doesn't seem all that high and most actual beacons only implement the very most basic features. The ability to display the serial numbers of individual beacons, for example, is pretty much limited to a USB dongle/software package that Mammut sells to organizations like ski patrols that loan out avalanche beacons and need to keep track of their inventory, check battery levels, etc.

Avalanche beacons are not the only radio-based approach to avalanche rescue. Around a decade after Lawton developed Skadi, a Swiss engineer designed a system called RECCO. If you have read my articles on loss prevention, I can succinctly explain RECCO by saying that it is just RF electronic article surveillance applied to the outdoors. If you have not, let's get into a little bit more detail.

If you make an antenna that is a small loop, and then put a nonlinear device like a p-n diode in it, you end up with an antenna that behaves asymmetrically with regards to the phase of the radio wave passing over it. Intuitively, we can say that energy freely flows one way around the antenna, but not the other. The energy going that way becomes trapped, and gets re-emitted at at a harmonic frequency to the one that excited the device. This general principle is known as non-linear junction detection, and it has all kinds of interesting applications in fields like technical security, but its most common application is as one of the common types of retail anti-theft tagging.

RECCO is basically a retail loss prevention system aimed at the ground. RECCO tags, called "reflectors" in RECCO parlance, are a simple foil antenna and diode, which makes them cheap and durable. They are so cheap, and compact, that some brands of alpine gear (especially in Europe) build RECCO tags right into products like snow pants and ski boots. Dainese even offers a bicycle helmet with one. The RECCO detector emits a powerful and very directional RF field in an ISM band, and then monitors for the characteristic harmonics emitted by an excited tag.

This technology is not RFID, although it is conceptually similar, and has some of the same downsides such as a tendency for tags to be undetectable if they fall in the wrong point in the phase of the exciting field. For that reason, RECCO recommends that you have two reflectors at different locations on your person. The other main downside of RECCO is that it shifts most of the complexity into the detector, so they are relatively large and expensive. That's not so bad when you consider that detectors only need to be carried by ski patrol and SAR organizations. Rescuers basically aim the detector around until it picks up a signal, and then walk that way until they are aiming the detector straight down. That's where they dig.

RECCO has even designed a detector that can be underslung by a helicopter, although its 100 meter range will require some sporty flying. The RECCO system is generally much more popular in Europe than in the US, but penetration is increasing here, and RECCO publishes a list of SAR organizations with detectors that now includes a number of helicopters in the US and many major ski areas.

I view RECCO as having a bit of a belt-and-suspenders relationship with traditional avalanche beacons. Avalanche beacons are more common, and all beacons also function as receivers, so "buddy rescue" by a bystander is far more likely with beacon technology. On the other hand, RECCO is usable over a longer range (although not radically longer) and the detectors are more directional and potentially faster to use. Most avalanche centers seem to recommend that you carry both, although the traditional avalanche beacon is more important.

Finally, let's consider a couple of other pieces of avalanche safety equipment, which will lead us to consider efficacy.

The core avalanche PPE consists of a probe and a shovel, and both are available in collapsible form for portability. Besides locating technologies, though, the major innovation in avalanche safety is the avalanche airbag. These are backpacks that you wear with a parachute-like ripcord. When you pull it, the bag inflates into a big airbag behind you. There are two ways this is helpful: first, the airbag will tend to float on moving snow, making it less likely that you are buried. Second, if you do become buried, you can deflate the airbag to leave you with a void in the snow. This gives you more air to breath, and room to move, making it more likely that you can dig yourself out.

Avalanche airbags remind me a bit of the motorcycle airbags, as far as being very cutting-edge but also, you know, kind of questionable when it comes to efficacy. Manufacturers of airbags often advertise a 50% reduction in fatalities, but we have to take those numbers with a grain of salt.

One of the problems with safety technology for extreme risks is that the actual risk event just doesn't happen very often. In less abstract terms, people are not caught in avalanches all that often, so the total number of people who have been caught in an avalanche while wearing an avalanche airbag just isn't that big. This limits the confidence we can have in efficacy findings.

Well, I tracked down the paper that the 50% number comes from, and it's not actually that bad. They identified 424 people caught in severe avalanches, roughly half of which had avalanche airbags, and found that the airbags reduced mortality by 50% for people who successfully deployed them, and 41% overall given that there were various situations where they were not triggered or failed. The sample size is not huge, but it's bigger than I expected, and even at the bottom of the 95% confidence interval you still see a meaningful mortality reduction of around 10%.

So, avalanche airbags seem to work, but they do cost around $1,500, so make of that what you will. Another interesting number from that paper is actually a bit of an aside: of the sample of people considered, 99% had avalanche beacons! A basic avalanche beacon can be had for about $250, which is pretty similar to cheap satellite messenger or very basic PLB ³.

On the other hand, the passive nature of RECCO tags translates to a price advantage: a standalone reflector that you can clip to your pack only costs $30, which frankly still feels like a ripoff considering the simplicity of the design. I wonder if a RECCO detector would pick up enough RF EAS tags sewn into your clothing. Or shoplifted. One of the amusing things, though, is that despite being the cheap option (or perhaps beacuse of it), RECCO is relatively poorly backed by data. The number of actual rescues using RECCO remains small, although the development of the helicopter-based detector will probably lead to more successful uses.

Or, you know, just stay out of the mountains. They may be calling, but you don't have to go.

Astute readers noticed last week that this editor (that is to say, me) had his own error'd failure to remember what day it was. Thank you for pointing it out promptly, and then proceeding to send in a bunch of examples of other sites calendar failures. Misery loves company!

Traveler's travails, from C_Chell "Trying to complete the form on https://www.ihg.com to tell when I plan to arrive at the hotel, I can't complete the form because of this little time problem."

"You Have -1 Month(s) To Order!" announces dragoncoder047. "Ah, GradImages... the company that told all graduates that they'd get a free 5x7 but tried to charge me for it, then refused to honor my "unsubscribe" request and is *still* emailing me to this day... Can't do date math? Par for the course."

"Stansted Temporal UI design" shared by Michael R. "While waiting for a friend to arrive at Stansted I see this. I better fire up the DeLorean to pick her up at 00:06 tomorrow."

While he was hunting through the website, Michael R. also found that "The Stansted airport website seems to suffer from Directional Confusion."

Nothing wrong with the calendar here, but Slaoput simply opposes mandatory existence. "I was filling out a form that said the Birthdate is optional, but when I hit submit I found out it was required. (I guess technically you have to be born to fill out the form.)"
NOT TO BE!

A common option for retrofitting heating and cooling into older homes is a mini-split, frequently tied to a heat pump. They're (relatively) cheap to install, energy efficient, and can be added without substantial modifications to the home. They also, annoyingly, are mostly controlled via IR remotes, making them challenging to wire up to home automation or even a household thermostat.

People have made solutions, and today's code comes from one of those solutions. Which, I want to stress, this code comes from an open source project for home automation, so it's not the code that's wrong, here. At first I thought it was, and had a moment of, "I'm not going to pick on some hobby project," but then I realised the hobby project points at a deeper issue.

// temperature helper these are direct mappings based on the remote
float toFahrenheit(float fromCelsius) {
    // Lookup table for specific mappings
    const std::map<float, int> lookupTable = {
        {16.0, 61}, {16.5, 62}, {17.0, 63}, {17.5, 64}, {18.0, 65},
        {18.5, 66}, {19.0, 67}, {20.0, 68}, {21.0, 69}, {21.5, 70},
        {22.0, 71}, {22.5, 72}, {23.0, 73}, {23.5, 74}, {24.0, 75},
        {24.5, 76}, {25.0, 77}, {25.5, 78}, {26.0, 79}, {26.5, 80},
        {27.0, 81}, {27.5, 82}, {28.0, 83}, {28.5, 84}, {29.0, 85},
        {29.5, 86}, {30.0, 87}, {30.5, 88}
    };

    // Check if the input is in the lookup table
    auto it = lookupTable.find(fromCelsius);
    if (it != lookupTable.end()) {
        return it->second;
    }

    // Default conversion and rounding to nearest integer
    return roundf(fromCelsius * 1.8 + 32.0);
}

Okay, I am going to pick on their code a little bit; using float as a key in a map is asking for trouble, because rounding errors are going to surprise you. But honestly, failing to find the key you're looking for is better than the opposite, since that actually does the correct thing. Because if you look carefully at the table, you'll see that it's wrong.

18C, for example, should be 64F. Well, 64.4F, but we're rounding to an integer. The choice here is to roughly map every 0.5C increase to a 1F increase, which is not the conversion factor. They try and correct- note how the table mostly steps by 0.5C, but skips 19.5C.

The opposite direction is similarly bad:

// temperature helper these are direct mappings based on the remote
float toCelsius(float fromFahrenheit) {
    // Lookup table for specific mappings
    const std::map<int, float> lookupTable = {
        {61, 16.0}, {62, 16.5}, {63, 17.0}, {64, 17.5}, {65, 18.0},
        {66, 18.5}, {67, 19.0}, {68, 20.0}, {69, 21.0}, {70, 21.5},
        {71, 22.0}, {72, 22.5}, {73, 23.0}, {74, 23.5}, {75, 24.0},
        {76, 24.5}, {77, 25.0}, {78, 25.5}, {79, 26.0}, {80, 26.5},
        {81, 27.0}, {82, 27.5}, {83, 28.0}, {84, 28.5}, {85, 29.0},
        {86, 29.5}, {87, 30.0}, {88, 30.5}
    };

    // Check if the input is in the lookup table
    auto it = lookupTable.find(static_cast<int>(fromFahrenheit));
    if (it != lookupTable.end()) {
        return it->second;
    }

    // Default conversion and rounding to nearest 0.5
    return roundf((fromFahrenheit - 32.0) / 1.8 * 2) / 2.0;
}

Here, we can be off by as much as a 1C, which is certainly a noticeable feeling.

At first glance, I thought this was just a misguided attempt at optimizing the lookup. For common values, do a lookup instead of calculating because it's faster. Seems like the kind of mistake a hobby project might make, and definitely not a WTF. But it's the comment which corrects me: these are direct mappings based on the remote.

These remotes usually have a display. So when you see on the remote that you're trying to set the temperature to a comfortable 72F, the remote is actually sending 22.5C to the unit. That's the actual temperature being sent.

Now, why on Earth does the remote behave this way? Well, I haven't cracked one open to read off the part numbers, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the microcontoller in the remote doesn't handle floating point operations all that well. So it almost certainly does use a lookup table to decide what signal to send, and the lookup table is populated by "good enough" approximations of temperature conversions. There aren't a lot of places that use Fahrenheit, so being "close enough" is a reasonable solution. If you want accurate temperatures, use SI units, not "freedom units".

In the end, I'd say that neither the hobby project, nor the remote control are the WTF here; locales that insist on using weird ass units are.

[Advertisement] ProGet’s got you covered with security and access controls on your NuGet feeds. Learn more.

Rachel joined a new team which was proudly "metrics driven". When she first met with her boss, Zane, he explained his thinking.

"We need to be data-driven to make good decisions, right? We're a manufacturing company. We make widgets. At the end of the day, we need to make the most widgets for the lowest cost of goods sold. So we track that, and that feeds into every decision."

The team oversaw an automated production line, which meant the software was a mix of robotics, embedded firmware, high-level web based monitoring tools, and thickets of dreaded PLC code. And because you can't build an entire factory for test purposes, they only way they could test real-world scales with real-world data was to roll changes out to production. They could simulate, they could run tests on subsets of the system, but a change in the production line software couldn't truly be validated until it rolled out into the real world.

Rachel's first task on the new team involved making some changes to their metrics dashboard. It was viewed as a good way to get her feet wet with the new team. As it turned out, the metrics dashboard was a Google Sheet, with a complex series of formulas that involved multi-level INDEX functions- essentially querying the spreadsheets like they were a database. Why not use an actual database? Oh, they did — six actually — but the company obeyed Remy's Law of Requirements Gathering: "no matter what the requirements the users ask for, what they really wanted was Excel". The database data was pulled into the spreadsheet for reporting.

Now, a complicated sheet pulling in data from not one, but six different databases, they must have a pretty complex model to explain how changes to their software would impact productivity. And since they needed to model the software to make predictions about how it'd behave in production, that model must be extremely useful.

Of course it wasn't. The only metrics they tracked were output metrics, variations on "widgets produced per unit time". There were some performance metrics, so you could maybe potentially identify "oh, our overall throughput dropped because unit 5 became a bottleneck and started taking 1.5 extra seconds per widget", but nothing that actually helped you understand how the complex system made decisions. Or even why unit 5 was taking longer.

For example, there was an automated quality control scanner. It examined widgets as they came off the line, and rejected defective ones based on a computer vision algorithm. Did that subsystem record why it rejected a widget? No, it did not. The CV model was able to tag widgets with a defect category based on what it saw, but that information didn't get recorded anywhere. In fact, it didn't even record how many widgets got rejected. The only way to know was to have an operator on the assembly line count widgets in the bin manually. Since that ate up a bunch of an operator's time, it never happened unless the developers begged for it. And since the operator still couldn't answer the question "why was this widget rejected", it wasn't all that useful anyway.

Every change to the software was scored against the overall output metrics. This meant that when Rachel was ready to push out her first software change, something that would record how many widgets were rejected and why, whether or not it could be deployed was dependent on seeing the change improve, or at least not regress, the widgets-over-time scores. But the widgets-over-time were a noisy metric; it varied based on which operators were working any given shift, or based on supply chain constraints. Or sometimes, based on when one of the machines was last calibrated- theoretically something that happened on a set schedule, but really was up to the operators. This meant the first three times Rachel rolled her code out for a test run, the metrics regressed. Nothing she changed should have impacted the metrics, but the metrics regressed due to environmental issues.

This meant making a simple change could take weeks, because you could only do final validation on the real system, which means you had to mark off a block of time for a test run, you could only run a handful of tests a day, and if metrics regressed you had to account for that before you could release the software for actual production use.

Over the first few months, Rachel added instrumentation to the code. Anything along the way to generating an output widget, she recorded. The hope was that once they had enough data, they could build a useful model of the system. Unfortunately, Zane had other ideas.

"So, you haven't improved our metrics," Zane said. "Which, I remind you, we're a metrics driven organization. Every change needs to improve our metrics."

"Sure, but I'm gathering more data so we have a better idea of what makes our metrics tick. We don't know why our system does some of the things it does, because we don't record any logging about the decisions it makes."

"Right, but we already gather the key metrics."

"But you don't gather the data that tells you why those metrics are what they are!"

"Sure," Zane said. "But those aren't our key metrics."

That, unfortunately for Rachel, was where things landed. Understanding their complex system was a low priority. Pushing top-level metrics without understanding what fed into them, that was the priority. That didn't mean Rachel was powerless: any time she made a change that she thought might help the top level metrics, she also made sure to add instrumentation that explained how that change behaved. It was the compromise that kept Zane happy: she released features that impacted the top-level metrics, but she also made the system more observable.

[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!

Today's representative comment ran out of room.

int maxLen = getColumnSize(session, "audit", "text_value1") - 16; // Leave some room for

No, it isn't continued on the next line and just got trimmed out, except perhaps by a careless merge. This is the entire comment.

Clearly, written by David Chase, the creator of "The Sopranos".

There are so many things we might be leaving room for. We could leave some room for dessert. Leave some room for activities. Leave some room for the holy spirit. Leave some room for improvisation.

[Advertisement] ProGet’s got you covered with security and access controls on your NuGet feeds. Learn more.

All I can say in response to our anonymous submitter's story is, ALMOST?!

With the World Cup being hosted in North America this year, I remembered this story that happened back in 2014. At the time I was working in Brazil, for a company that builds software systems for public services. And, with the World Cup being hosted there, in came the opportunity for local agencies to invest in modernization, with pretty much a blank check to get new services, so long as it was deployed before the end of the World Cup. And so the sales people did what they did best, and went around trying to upsell whoever would be willing to buy — no matter our actual capacity for developing the things.

So it was that I was pulled into this new fancy digital system for the police force of a state capital. However, we had only about 4 engineers available, and what they sold was a project estimated for a team of 20, to be delivered in 3 months, with no room for delay. And it wasn't just our core C&D product, but this massive thing with customized public-facing websites, live tracking of the position of different police cars delivered to a tablet in each car, automated reporting, etc.

First thing: We received a pile of 24 resumes, and were told to choose 16 of those. Maybe 3 were acceptable, but we had to waste 1 month hiring and onboarding 13 other people who were worse than useless. Classic man-month problem. We eventually had to tell management that nothing would be delivered this way, so they did the very best next thing: fly us to this other city, so we could work embedded there, in full crunch mode for the delivery. We pretty much worked 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week, for those next 2 weeks.

Another situation: they wanted this system where people could take a photo of an incident in progress, and submit via this app + website, to be verified by an operator in real-time. We nicknamed it the "dick-pic encyclopedia." Even worse, we only had the budget to run a single server, so this thing receiving public traffic would live in the same system that was tracking police car locations. Luckily they were convinced it was a bad idea so it was only ever online for a short period of time.

Next, was the police car tracking. This was done by a tablet installed in each car, which would be sending and receiving location information. But, 1 week before our deadline, we were hitting a serious bug: everything was working when we ran the tests ourselves, but the cops would report very weird bugs when testing it in the field. So we asked to do some field debugging, and I went on a ride-along. Things were working pretty much fine everywhere, so I asked to be taken to where he remembered seeing the tablets fail—to which the policeman just decides to drive off straight into one of the favelas around the city. I guess I can cross out "doing debugging in a police car passenger seat in a notoriously dangerous neighborhood" off my bucket list. Root cause: turns out cellphone connections would be pretty spotty in those areas, which we weren't handling properly.

Either way, we delivered something on time that was severely below spec, and very much over-budget. Company tried to squirm out of paying overtime (was told that we would gain "prestige" by doing those extra hours), but I put my foot down and left that job shortly after. Last I heard they actually got sued for this and a bunch of similar projects, and almost went under.

[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!

Peter G. shared with us yet another ordering bungled example of. "Should really say "please engage in an Easter egg hunt to find your language"."

"Google can't count" claimed Peter S.. It adds up. "Yet another proof that 0=1, this time from Google."

"Thanks, Microsoft" groused Ivan "Ever since Microsoft ate university e-mail services worldwide and became responsible for major free software mailing lists, quality of service has been steadily dropping. In order to report delivery problems to Outlook, you need a Microsoft account. You're prevented from creating it at first because of "suspicious activity". Once you're in, the contact address is pre-filled for you with an invalid email. Once you fix that in the web developer toolbar, fuck you anyway! I think the form isn't actually expected to work; the fact that the request was submitted is an error. The only thing missing from the experience is the "beware of the leopard" sign."

"Mango Math" needs a bit of money math for the rest of the world to understand. Michael R. muttered "I will buy it by the slice then." The joke here is on the tip of my tongue. Explainer: the new pence is one hundredth of the decimal pound. No shillings no more, decreps! At that ratio, 3p per slice of cheesecake would indeed be far less dear than four pounds for the whole thing, barring translucent slices. Alas, the reality is simply the boring fact that the price is 3p per gram. Not as funny but I'm chuckling imagining Michael's transparent serving of diet cheesecake. I'll leave it up to you to decide if a gram really counts as an "item".

Clint clucked "Got this email from Bigbadtoystore. Lots of links available for preorder!" I think the talented website builders behind the New Mexico DOT have been busy.

Some time ago, Charles shared with us some awful PHP, aka the most common sort. Today's code sample is maybe a little too big to sum up, but I'll let Charles take a crack at it.

It's so bad that even analyzing and laughing at it feels impossible. But it’s so bad, I couldn’t not share it.

I’m the only one handling all the IT-related tasks at my company, and I don’t have anyone here to vent or laugh about this kind of thing with. So, I figured, why not share it here? I’m hoping it’ll provide at least a little bit of catharsis or some dark humor.

To make sure the confidentiality of the codebase was respected, I took the liberty of generalizing it. You might notice some inconsistencies, but that’s just me trying to keep things neutral while protecting the original structure and functionality. Apologies if it looks a bit patchy – the goal was to avoid revealing any specific details or sensitive code.

The whole block is north of 400 lines, and it's doing a lot. Or well, maybe it's not, as you'll see.

Let's star with the outermost layer.

$resm_data = $data_source->fetchData("group=" . $item_id);
foreach ($resm_data as $key => $value) {
// rest of the code here
}

We fetch data from a data source, presumably a database, passing our condition as a string, which reeks of probable SQL injection, but I don't know what library they're using. I also note they're using the key/value style of array iteration, but never actually check the key.

    $option_id = $value->option_id;
    $resm_details = $detail_source->fetch($option_id);
    if ($resm_details) {
        $label = $resm_details->{"label$lang"};
        $description = $resm_details->{"description$lang"};
        $category = $resm_details->category;

Nice little bit of "meta" programming to get their localization working, it'll fetch labelen or labelde as needed. Definitely not a horrible, dangerous way to solve that problem.

We use that again to get our currency figured out. That lets us do number formatting. So much number formatting code.

        if ($category == 0) {
            $cost = $resm_details->{"cost" . $currency};
            $child_cost = $resm_details->{"child_cost" . $currency};
            $cost_info =
                $mot[101] . " : +" . number_format($cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol . " - " .
                $mot[102] . " : +" . number_format($child_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
        } elseif ($category == 1) {
            $cost = $resm_details->{"cost" . $currency};
            $child_cost = 0;
            $cost_info = $mot[101] . " : +" . number_format($cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
        } elseif ($category == 2) {
            $cost = 0;
            $child_cost = $resm_details->{"child_cost" . $currency};
            $cost_info = $mot[102] . " : +" . number_format($child_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
        } elseif ($category == 4) {
            $cost = $resm_details->{"cost" . $currency};
            $child_cost = 0;
            $cost_info = $mot[500] . " : +" . number_format($cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
        } elseif (
            $resm_details->{"cost" . $currency} == 0 and
            $resm_details->{"child_cost" . $currency} == 0
        ) {
            $cost = 0;
            $child_cost = 0;
            $cost_info = "";
        } else {
            $cost = $resm_details->{"cost" . $currency};
            $child_cost = 0;
            $cost_info = $mot[200] . " : +" . number_format($cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
        }

What is the $mot array? Why am I jumping to seemingly random locations in that array? Clearly it contains some headers for our output.

Anyway, there's plenty of HTML string munging happening too, don't you worry.

        if ($location == 1) {
            $quantity_block =
                '<div class="quantity-container">
                    <input type="text" value="1" id="quantity-' . $option_id . '" class="qty-control" name="quantity" min="1" max="1">
                    <div class="increase button">+</div>
                    <div class="decrease button">-</div>
                </div>';
            $quantity = 1;
        } else {
            $quantity_block = "";
            $quantity = "all";
        }

And then there's this little treat for parsing the time stored in our database: $time_data = json_decode($resm_details->time_data); That tells me they're storing date times as strings, so that's fun.

There are also a couple more bon mots as they build a drop down list:

            $departure_select = '<option value="-1">' . $mot[300] . '</option>';
            $arrival_select = '<option value="-1">' . $mot[301] . '</option>';

And then there's this monstrosity:

        // Add the main option to the template
        $TEMPLATE->SET_BLOCK_VARIABLES("Block_OPTIONS", [
            "ID" => $option_id,
            "QUANTITY" => $quantity,
            "LABEL_CLASS" => $label_class,
            "ACTION_CLASS" => $action_class,
            "LABEL" => $label,
            "DESCRIPTION" => $description,
            "QUANTITY_BLOCK" => $quantity_block,
            "COST_INFO" => $cost_info,
            "HOST_COST_DISPLAY" => $host_cost_display,
            "COST" => $cost,
            "CHILD_COST" => $child_cost,
            "LOCATION" => $location,
            "CATEGORY" => $category,
            "HOST_CLASS" => $host_class,
            "EXTRA" => $extra,
            "HOST_EXTRA" => $host_extra,
            "TIME_CHECKED" => ($has_times == 1) ? 'selected="' . $option_id . '" checked="true"' : '',
            "TIME_BLOCK" => $time_block
        ]);

All the nonsense that we concatenate together above gets shoved into some sort of template. And after that, that's where the good stuff starts. Because guess what? We have to do the same thing for child items.

        $resm_children_data = $data_source->fetchData("parent=" . $option_id);
        foreach ($resm_children_data as $child_key => $child_value) {
            $child_option_id = $child_value->option_id;
            $resm_child_details = $detail_source->fetch($child_option_id);

That's right, it's the same block of code, not quite copy/pasted, since they needed to put the word child in everything.

                // Add the child option to the template
                $TEMPLATE->SET_BLOCK_VARIABLES("Block_OPTIONS.Block_OPTIONS_CHILD", [
                    "ID" => $child_option_id,
                    "QUANTITY" => $child_quantity,
                    "LABEL_CLASS" => $child_label_class,
                    "ACTION_CLASS" => $child_action_class,
                    "LABEL" => $child_label,
                    "DESCRIPTION" => $child_description,
                    "QUANTITY_BLOCK" => $child_quantity_block,
                    "COST_INFO" => $child_cost_info,
                    "HOST_COST_DISPLAY" => $child_host_cost_display,
                    "COST" => $child_cost,
                    "CHILD_COST" => $child_extra_cost,
                    "LOCATION" => $child_location,
                    "CATEGORY" => $child_category,
                    "HOST_CLASS" => $child_host_class,
                    "EXTRA" => $child_extra,
                    "HOST_EXTRA" => $child_host_extra,
                    "TIME_CHECKED" => ($child_has_times == 1) ? 'selected="' . $child_option_id . '" checked="true"' : '',
                    "TIME_BLOCK" => $child_time_block
                ]);

And now, if you liked the child record, guess what? Those children have got siblings. What can I say, it's a big family.

                $resm_sibling_data = $data_source->fetchData("parent=" . $parent_option_id);
                foreach ($resm_sibling_data as $sibling_key => $sibling_value) {
                    $sibling_option_id = $sibling_value->option_id;
                    $resm_sibling_details = $detail_source->fetch($sibling_option_id);

And that means, yes, we also use that template thing again:

                        // Add the sibling option to the template
                        $TEMPLATE->SET_BLOCK_VARIABLES("Block_OPTIONS.Block_OPTIONS_CHILD", [
                            "ID" => $sibling_option_id,
                            "QUANTITY" => $sibling_quantity,
                            "LABEL_CLASS" => $sibling_label_class,
                            "ACTION_CLASS" => $sibling_action_class,
                            "LABEL" => $sibling_label,
                            "DESCRIPTION" => $sibling_description,
                            "QUANTITY_BLOCK" => $sibling_quantity_block,
                            "COST_INFO" => $sibling_cost_info,
                            "HOST_COST_DISPLAY" => $sibling_host_cost_display,
                            "COST" => $sibling_cost,
                            "SIBLING_COST" => $sibling_extra_cost,
                            "LOCATION" => $sibling_location,
                            "CATEGORY" => $sibling_category,
                            "HOST_CLASS" => $sibling_host_class,
                            "EXTRA" => $sibling_extra,
                            "HOST_EXTRA" => $sibling_host_extra,
                            "TIME_CHECKED" => ($sibling_has_times == 1) ? 'selected="' . $sibling_option_id . '" checked="true"' : '',
                            "TIME_BLOCK" => $sibling_time_block
                        ]);

Someday, I hope the person who wrote this learn about methods and function calls. Maybe they could write their own one day.

In any case, here's the whole thing:

$resm_data = $data_source->fetchData("group=" . $item_id);
foreach ($resm_data as $key => $value) {
    $option_id = $value->option_id;
    $resm_details = $detail_source->fetch($option_id);
    if ($resm_details) {
        $label = $resm_details->{"label$lang"};
        $description = $resm_details->{"description$lang"};
        $category = $resm_details->category;

        // Process cost based on category
        if ($category == 0) {
            $cost = $resm_details->{"cost" . $currency};
            $child_cost = $resm_details->{"child_cost" . $currency};
            $cost_info =
                $mot[101] . " : +" . number_format($cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol . " - " .
                $mot[102] . " : +" . number_format($child_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
        } elseif ($category == 1) {
            $cost = $resm_details->{"cost" . $currency};
            $child_cost = 0;
            $cost_info = $mot[101] . " : +" . number_format($cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
        } elseif ($category == 2) {
            $cost = 0;
            $child_cost = $resm_details->{"child_cost" . $currency};
            $cost_info = $mot[102] . " : +" . number_format($child_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
        } elseif ($category == 4) {
            $cost = $resm_details->{"cost" . $currency};
            $child_cost = 0;
            $cost_info = $mot[500] . " : +" . number_format($cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
        } elseif (
            $resm_details->{"cost" . $currency} == 0 and
            $resm_details->{"child_cost" . $currency} == 0
        ) {
            $cost = 0;
            $child_cost = 0;
            $cost_info = "";
        } else {
            $cost = $resm_details->{"cost" . $currency};
            $child_cost = 0;
            $cost_info = $mot[200] . " : +" . number_format($cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
        }

        $location = $resm_details->location;
        $label_class = $location == 1 ? "has-quantity" : "no-quantity";
        $action_class = $location == 1 ? "active-with-quantity" : "active-no-quantity";
        if ($location == 1) {
            $quantity_block =
                '<div class="quantity-container">
                    <input type="text" value="1" id="quantity-' . $option_id . '" class="qty-control" name="quantity" min="1" max="1">
                    <div class="increase button">+</div>
                    <div class="decrease button">-</div>
                </div>';
            $quantity = 1;
        } else {
            $quantity_block = "";
            $quantity = "all";
        }

        $has_times = $resm_details->has_times;

        if ($has_times == 1) {
            $time_counter++;
            $time_data = json_decode($resm_details->time_data);

            $departure_select = '<option value="-1">' . $mot[300] . '</option>';
            $arrival_select = '<option value="-1">' . $mot[301] . '</option>';

            $departures = $time_data->departures;
            $arrivals = $time_data->arrivals;

            foreach ($departures as $dep_key => $departure) {
                $departure_select .= '<option value="' . $dep_key . '">' . $departure . '</option>';
            }

            foreach ($arrivals as $arr_key => $arrival) {
                $arrival_select .= '<option value="' . $arr_key . '">' . $arrival . '</option>';
            }

            $departure_block = '<div class="col-half time-select-' . $option_id . '" style="padding-right: 0;">
                <select class="form-control time-departure" style="text-align: center;">' . $departure_select . '</select>
                </div>';

            $arrival_block = '<div class="col-half time-select-' . $option_id . '" style="padding-left: 0;">
                <select class="form-control time-arrival" style="text-align: center;">' . $arrival_select . '</select>
                </div>';

            $time_block = '<div class="row time-container">
                ' . $departure_block . $arrival_block . '
            </div><small class="error-message time-error">' . $mot[302] . '</small>';
        } else {
            $time_block = '';
        }

        $host_cost_display = "";
        $extra = $resm_details->extra;
        $host_extra = $resm_details->host_extra;
        $host_class = "";

        if ($extra == 1) {
            $extra_cost_1 = $resm_details->{"cost" . $currency . "_1"};
            $extra_cost_2 = $resm_details->{"cost" . $currency . "_2"};

            $default_extra = $host_price == 0 ? $extra_cost_2 : $extra_cost_1;
            $cost_info = $mot[101] . ' : +<span class="extra-cost">' . number_format($default_extra, 2, ",", " ") .
                "</span>" . $currency_symbol . " - " . $mot[102] . ' : +<span class="child-cost">0.00</span>' . $currency_symbol;

            $host_class = " extra-option";
        }
        if ($host_extra == 1) {
            $host_cost_display =
                '<span class="host-cost">' . $mot[500] . ' : +<span class="host-price">0.00</span>' . $currency_symbol .
                "</span><br>";
        }

        // Add the main option to the template
        $TEMPLATE->SET_BLOCK_VARIABLES("Block_OPTIONS", [
            "ID" => $option_id,
            "QUANTITY" => $quantity,
            "LABEL_CLASS" => $label_class,
            "ACTION_CLASS" => $action_class,
            "LABEL" => $label,
            "DESCRIPTION" => $description,
            "QUANTITY_BLOCK" => $quantity_block,
            "COST_INFO" => $cost_info,
            "HOST_COST_DISPLAY" => $host_cost_display,
            "COST" => $cost,
            "CHILD_COST" => $child_cost,
            "LOCATION" => $location,
            "CATEGORY" => $category,
            "HOST_CLASS" => $host_class,
            "EXTRA" => $extra,
            "HOST_EXTRA" => $host_extra,
            "TIME_CHECKED" => ($has_times == 1) ? 'selected="' . $option_id . '" checked="true"' : '',
            "TIME_BLOCK" => $time_block
        ]);

        $resm_children_data = $data_source->fetchData("parent=" . $option_id);
        foreach ($resm_children_data as $child_key => $child_value) {
            $child_option_id = $child_value->option_id;
            $resm_child_details = $detail_source->fetch($child_option_id);
            if ($resm_child_details) {
                $child_label = $resm_child_details->{"label$lang"};
                $child_description = $resm_child_details->{"description$lang"};
                $child_category = $resm_child_details->category;

                // Process cost for child category
                if ($child_category == 0) {
                    $child_cost = $resm_child_details->{"cost" . $currency};
                    $child_extra_cost = $resm_child_details->{"child_cost" . $currency};
                    $child_cost_info =
                        $mot[101] . " : +" . number_format($child_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol . " - " .
                        $mot[102] . " : +" . number_format($child_extra_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
                } elseif ($child_category == 1) {
                    $child_cost = $resm_child_details->{"cost" . $currency};
                    $child_extra_cost = 0;
                    $child_cost_info = $mot[101] . " : +" . number_format($child_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
                } elseif ($child_category == 2) {
                    $child_cost = 0;
                    $child_extra_cost = $resm_child_details->{"child_cost" . $currency};
                    $child_cost_info = $mot[102] . " : +" . number_format($child_extra_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
                } elseif ($child_category == 4) {
                    $child_cost = $resm_child_details->{"cost" . $currency};
                    $child_extra_cost = 0;
                    $child_cost_info = $mot[500] . " : +" . number_format($child_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
                } elseif (
                    $resm_child_details->{"cost" . $currency} == 0 and
                    $resm_child_details->{"child_cost" . $currency} == 0
                ) {
                    $child_cost = 0;
                    $child_extra_cost = 0;
                    $child_cost_info = "";
                } else {
                    $child_cost = $resm_child_details->{"cost" . $currency};
                    $child_extra_cost = 0;
                    $child_cost_info = $mot[200] . " : +" . number_format($child_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
                }

                $child_location = $resm_child_details->location;
                $child_label_class = $child_location == 1 ? "has-quantity" : "no-quantity";
                $child_action_class = $child_location == 1 ? "active-with-quantity" : "active-no-quantity";
                if ($child_location == 1) {
                    $child_quantity_block =
                        '<div class="quantity-container">
                    <input type="text" value="1" id="child-quantity-' . $child_option_id . '" class="qty-control" name="quantity" min="1" max="1">
                    <div class="increase button">+</div>
                    <div class="decrease button">-</div>
                </div>';
                    $child_quantity = 1;
                } else {
                    $child_quantity_block = "";
                    $child_quantity = "all";
                }

                $child_has_times = $resm_child_details->has_times;

                if ($child_has_times == 1) {
                    $child_time_counter++;
                    $child_time_data = json_decode($resm_child_details->time_data);

                    $child_departure_select = '<option value="-1">' . $mot[300] . '</option>';
                    $child_arrival_select = '<option value="-1">' . $mot[301] . '</option>';

                    $child_departures = $child_time_data->departures;
                    $child_arrivals = $child_time_data->arrivals;

                    foreach ($child_departures as $child_dep_key => $child_departure) {
                        $child_departure_select .= '<option value="' . $child_dep_key . '">' . $child_departure . '</option>';
                    }

                    foreach ($child_arrivals as $child_arr_key => $child_arrival) {
                        $child_arrival_select .= '<option value="' . $child_arr_key . '">' . $child_arrival . '</option>';
                    }

                    $child_departure_block = '<div class="col-half time-select-' . $child_option_id . '" style="padding-right: 0;">
                <select class="form-control time-departure" style="text-align: center;">' . $child_departure_select . '</select>
                </div>';

                    $child_arrival_block = '<div class="col-half time-select-' . $child_option_id . '" style="padding-left: 0;">
                <select class="form-control time-arrival" style="text-align: center;">' . $child_arrival_select . '</select>
                </div>';

                    $child_time_block = '<div class="row time-container">
                ' . $child_departure_block . $child_arrival_block . '
            </div><small class="error-message time-error">' . $mot[302] . '</small>';
                } else {
                    $child_time_block = '';
                }

                $child_host_cost_display = "";
                $child_extra = $resm_child_details->extra;
                $child_host_extra = $resm_child_details->host_extra;
                $child_host_class = "";

                if ($child_extra == 1) {
                    $child_extra_cost_1 = $resm_child_details->{"cost" . $currency . "_1"};
                    $child_extra_cost_2 = $resm_child_details->{"cost" . $currency . "_2"};

                    $default_child_extra = $host_price == 0 ? $child_extra_cost_2 : $child_extra_cost_1;
                    $child_cost_info = $mot[101] . ' : +<span class="extra-cost">' . number_format($default_child_extra, 2, ",", " ") .
                        "</span>" . $currency_symbol . " - " . $mot[102] . ' : +<span class="child-cost">0.00</span>' . $currency_symbol;

                    $child_host_class = " extra-option";
                }
                if ($child_host_extra == 1) {
                    $child_host_cost_display =
                        '<span class="host-cost">' . $mot[500] . ' : +<span class="host-price">0.00</span>' . $currency_symbol .
                        "</span><br>";
                }

                // Add the child option to the template
                $TEMPLATE->SET_BLOCK_VARIABLES("Block_OPTIONS.Block_OPTIONS_CHILD", [
                    "ID" => $child_option_id,
                    "QUANTITY" => $child_quantity,
                    "LABEL_CLASS" => $child_label_class,
                    "ACTION_CLASS" => $child_action_class,
                    "LABEL" => $child_label,
                    "DESCRIPTION" => $child_description,
                    "QUANTITY_BLOCK" => $child_quantity_block,
                    "COST_INFO" => $child_cost_info,
                    "HOST_COST_DISPLAY" => $child_host_cost_display,
                    "COST" => $child_cost,
                    "CHILD_COST" => $child_extra_cost,
                    "LOCATION" => $child_location,
                    "CATEGORY" => $child_category,
                    "HOST_CLASS" => $child_host_class,
                    "EXTRA" => $child_extra,
                    "HOST_EXTRA" => $child_host_extra,
                    "TIME_CHECKED" => ($child_has_times == 1) ? 'selected="' . $child_option_id . '" checked="true"' : '',
                    "TIME_BLOCK" => $child_time_block
                ]);

                $resm_sibling_data = $data_source->fetchData("parent=" . $parent_option_id);
                foreach ($resm_sibling_data as $sibling_key => $sibling_value) {
                    $sibling_option_id = $sibling_value->option_id;
                    $resm_sibling_details = $detail_source->fetch($sibling_option_id);
                    if ($resm_sibling_details) {
                        $sibling_label = $resm_sibling_details->{"label$lang"};
                        $sibling_description = $resm_sibling_details->{"description$lang"};
                        $sibling_category = $resm_sibling_details->category;

                        // Process cost for sibling category
                        if ($sibling_category == 0) {
                            $sibling_cost = $resm_sibling_details->{"cost" . $currency};
                            $sibling_extra_cost = $resm_sibling_details->{"sibling_cost" . $currency};
                            $sibling_cost_info =
                                $mot[101] . " : +" . number_format($sibling_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol . " - " .
                                $mot[102] . " : +" . number_format($sibling_extra_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
                        } elseif ($sibling_category == 1) {
                            $sibling_cost = $resm_sibling_details->{"cost" . $currency};
                            $sibling_extra_cost = 0;
                            $sibling_cost_info = $mot[101] . " : +" . number_format($sibling_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
                        } elseif ($sibling_category == 2) {
                            $sibling_cost = 0;
                            $sibling_extra_cost = $resm_sibling_details->{"sibling_cost" . $currency};
                            $sibling_cost_info = $mot[102] . " : +" . number_format($sibling_extra_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
                        } elseif ($sibling_category == 4) {
                            $sibling_cost = $resm_sibling_details->{"cost" . $currency};
                            $sibling_extra_cost = 0;
                            $sibling_cost_info = $mot[500] . " : +" . number_format($sibling_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
                        } elseif (
                            $resm_sibling_details->{"cost" . $currency} == 0 and
                            $resm_sibling_details->{"sibling_cost" . $currency} == 0
                        ) {
                            $sibling_cost = 0;
                            $sibling_extra_cost = 0;
                            $sibling_cost_info = "";
                        } else {
                            $sibling_cost = $resm_sibling_details->{"cost" . $currency};
                            $sibling_extra_cost = 0;
                            $sibling_cost_info = $mot[200] . " : +" . number_format($sibling_cost, 2, ",", " ") . $currency_symbol;
                        }

                        $sibling_location = $resm_sibling_details->location;
                        $sibling_label_class = $sibling_location == 1 ? "has-quantity" : "no-quantity";
                        $sibling_action_class = $sibling_location == 1 ? "active-with-quantity" : "active-no-quantity";
                        if ($sibling_location == 1) {
                            $sibling_quantity_block =
                                '<div class="quantity-container">
                    <input type="text" value="1" id="sibling-quantity-' . $sibling_option_id . '" class="qty-control" name="quantity" min="1" max="1">
                    <div class="increase button">+</div>
                    <div class="decrease button">-</div>
                </div>';
                            $sibling_quantity = 1;
                        } else {
                            $sibling_quantity_block = "";
                            $sibling_quantity = "all";
                        }

                        $sibling_has_times = $resm_sibling_details->has_times;

                        if ($sibling_has_times == 1) {
                            $sibling_time_counter++;
                            $sibling_time_data = json_decode($resm_sibling_details->time_data);

                            $sibling_departure_select = '<option value="-1">' . $mot[300] . '</option>';
                            $sibling_arrival_select = '<option value="-1">' . $mot[301] . '</option>';

                            $sibling_departures = $sibling_time_data->departures;
                            $sibling_arrivals = $sibling_time_data->arrivals;

                            foreach ($sibling_departures as $sibling_dep_key => $sibling_departure) {
                                $sibling_departure_select .= '<option value="' . $sibling_dep_key . '">' . $sibling_departure . '</option>';
                            }

                            foreach ($sibling_arrivals as $sibling_arr_key => $sibling_arrival) {
                                $sibling_arrival_select .= '<option value="' . $sibling_arr_key . '">' . $sibling_arrival . '</option>';
                            }

                            $sibling_departure_block = '<div class="col-half time-select-' . $sibling_option_id . '" style="padding-right: 0;">
                <select class="form-control time-departure" style="text-align: center;">' . $sibling_departure_select . '</select>
                </div>';

                            $sibling_arrival_block = '<div class="col-half time-select-' . $sibling_option_id . '" style="padding-left: 0;">
                <select class="form-control time-arrival" style="text-align: center;">' . $sibling_arrival_select . '</select>
                </div>';

                            $sibling_time_block = '<div class="row time-container">
                ' . $sibling_departure_block . $sibling_arrival_block . '
            </div><small class="error-message time-error">' . $mot[302] . '</small>';
                        } else {
                            $sibling_time_block = '';
                        }

                        $sibling_host_cost_display = "";
                        $sibling_extra = $resm_sibling_details->extra;
                        $sibling_host_extra = $resm_sibling_details->host_extra;
                        $sibling_host_class = "";

                        if ($sibling_extra == 1) {
                            $sibling_extra_cost_1 = $resm_sibling_details->{"cost" . $currency . "_1"};
                            $sibling_extra_cost_2 = $resm_sibling_details->{"cost" . $currency . "_2"};

                            $default_sibling_extra = $host_price == 0 ? $sibling_extra_cost_2 : $sibling_extra_cost_1;
                            $sibling_cost_info = $mot[101] . ' : +<span class="extra-cost">' . number_format($default_sibling_extra, 2, ",", " ") .
                                "</span>" . $currency_symbol . " - " . $mot[102] . ' : +<span class="sibling-cost">0.00</span>' . $currency_symbol;

                            $sibling_host_class = " extra-option";
                        }
                        if ($sibling_host_extra == 1) {
                            $sibling_host_cost_display =
                                '<span class="host-cost">' . $mot[500] . ' : +<span class="host-price">0.00</span>' . $currency_symbol .
                                "</span><br>";
                        }

                        // Add the sibling option to the template
                        $TEMPLATE->SET_BLOCK_VARIABLES("Block_OPTIONS.Block_OPTIONS_CHILD", [
                            "ID" => $sibling_option_id,
                            "QUANTITY" => $sibling_quantity,
                            "LABEL_CLASS" => $sibling_label_class,
                            "ACTION_CLASS" => $sibling_action_class,
                            "LABEL" => $sibling_label,
                            "DESCRIPTION" => $sibling_description,
                            "QUANTITY_BLOCK" => $sibling_quantity_block,
                            "COST_INFO" => $sibling_cost_info,
                            "HOST_COST_DISPLAY" => $sibling_host_cost_display,
                            "COST" => $sibling_cost,
                            "SIBLING_COST" => $sibling_extra_cost,
                            "LOCATION" => $sibling_location,
                            "CATEGORY" => $sibling_category,
                            "HOST_CLASS" => $sibling_host_class,
                            "EXTRA" => $sibling_extra,
                            "HOST_EXTRA" => $sibling_host_extra,
                            "TIME_CHECKED" => ($sibling_has_times == 1) ? 'selected="' . $sibling_option_id . '" checked="true"' : '',
                            "TIME_BLOCK" => $sibling_time_block
                        ]);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

[Advertisement] ProGet’s got you covered with security and access controls on your NuGet feeds. Learn more.

Kevin sends us an exception handler from C++. Let's see if we can spot what's going wrong:

catch (Exception::Deadlock)
{
   retry;
}

When we catch a deadlock happening, we retry. That's not a keyword in C++, and looking at how it's used, it has to be some kind of macro, and I suspect that the macro is hiding a goto underneath it.

The real problem, though, is that we suspect we're in a deadlock situation. That means this thread is waiting on a resource held by another thread which is waiting for a resource held by this thread. Neither train may continue until the other has passed. So this retry only works if it releases the resource held by this thread (letting the deadlocking thread proceed). But does it?

Not according ot Kevin. The code already had a pile of deadlocks in it, so they brought in a highly paid consultant to try and fix them by reordering access and tracing where mutexes were causing issues. This retry just jumps back up to the top of the block, without releasing any resources. It "seems the consultant wanted to add some deadlocks of their own," Kevin says.

[Advertisement] BuildMaster allows you to create a self-service release management platform that allows different teams to manage their applications. Explore how!

Dan Luu, after finding one wrong prediction after another made by Ed Zitron, comparing him to mediocre futurists, and exploring his writing style:

That last sentence really sums up Zitron’s position. “There are so many guys to be mad at the moment”. In this talk, he throws in this jab at Andreesen and blames Andreesen for Meta, Google, and Microsoft pursuing growth. In reality, if Marc Andreesen had never existed, Meta, Google, and Microsoft would almost certainly still be trying to grow so we of course cannot actually blame Andreesen for these companies trying to grow. There’s just this thing that he says is bad, and in his usual style, he pulls some person and says they’re the evil villain that’s to blame for this, and then moves on to the next non sequitur.

Instead of more carefully scrutinizing Zitron’s record, outlets like Vanity Fair are publishing soft interviews with him where he gets to make predictions like “large language models, when you remove all of the insane financialization, it’s probably a $30 billion-a-year industry”. Oh, sure, they ask a single question about wrong predictions since 2024, but he brushes it off by saying he has learned lots in those two years — Luu documents incorrect predictions all the way up until November 2025, after which “most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future” — and ends the interview by saying “[w]hat comes after the A.I. bubble is actually a little scarier”. Ominous.

The beauty of Zitron’s voluminous output, for him, is that there is a vast difference between what he actually writes and what people remember. Financial experts and more reputable journalists have raised plenty of concerns about how much money is being spent on developing this infrastructure, and how highly these companies are valued. But the words Zitron writes are far more incendiary and conspiratorial than many seem to remember. It is frustrating to see his many media experiences filling the role of the A.I. skeptic when there are far more qualified, sober, and accurate options. We have enough boosters; this is an industry that is co-signed by the world’s most powerful economies. We deserve better A.I. criticism in popular media.

⌥ Permalink

William Bishop of Pew Research:

Between scrolling, notifications, and messages, smartphones can be hard to put down. Just over half of U.S. adults say they spend too much time on their smartphone, according to a Pew Research Center survey from May and June 2026. About a third of adults say their smartphone use is about right, while just 3% say they spend too little time using these devices.

Notably, 70% of smartphone owners in the U.S. aged 18–29 say they believe they use it too much. I am skeptical of public polling — maybe we are societally more approving of shaming our own device use — but this also tracks with what I hear casually from friends and family. Anecdotally, many people I know have expressed that they want to be on their phones less often.

But the editors of Andreessen Horowitz’s It’s Time to Build newsletter — hosted on Substack, a platform they are investors in — believe this behaviour actually indicates people are very happy. Ruby Thelot, professor of design and media studies at New York University and “astute tech observer”, says the heavy use of social media platforms, like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram — Andreessen Horowitz invested in both, and Marc Andreessen is on Meta’s board; none of this is disclosed — is simply evidence we love them:

People en masse are getting on social media, by choice. From 2016 until now, the number of social media users has grown from 2.5B to close to 6B people. Enshittification isn’t real. It’s three TikToks in a trenchcoat, and, maybe, a book deal. It’s good for discourse but does not describe actual reality and user patterns.

Returning to Instagram. The average daily usage showcases an increase in time spent on Instagram every day as well. Users are coming back for more, in a highly competitive attention arena, year after year.

There is a lot of assumption in these two paragraphs, and I think the “close to 6B people” is worth examining to start. Thelot attributes this statistic in the chart above to Backlinko. It cites no source, but a web search indicates to me this originates with Manochi’s DataReportal, which disclaims “‘user identities’ may not represent unique human individuals” because, as the company explains on the sixth slide of its report, it may count multiple social media accounts or business accounts as individual identities. These are not necessarily people, and Manochi says it is improper to compare figures year over year as Thelot does. (And, to be fair, which Manochi also does on slide 321.)

A lack of rigour is not unique to this data point.

Thelot next shows a chart indicating daily Instagram use rose from 25 minutes in 2017 to nearly 34 in 2026. This is, to Thelot, simply evidence that people like using it and want more. But, to return to the Pew poll above, it seems that people do not feel good about spending more time on their smartphones. Though Pew did not ask (PDF) about social media specifically, roughly half of respondents aged 18–29 said it negatively affects their productivity. And, according to slide 337 of that Manochi report, 30.7–44.0% of people say they use social media to “fill up spare time”, trending higher for younger generations. It is plausible that more younger people are spending increasing amounts of time on social media apps and they do not feel good about it. In other words, the time spent numbers are not a good proxy for enjoyment or value.

Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media:

People need to be on Linkedin to find jobs. Municipalities and news organizations share important updates on social media first. You might be pulled onto Facebook or WhatsApp against your will because your local school or community of parents congregate there. That doesn’t mean they like it. It is possible to hate something with your entire being and still participate in it.

Regardless of whether you call it “addiction” or some kind of compulsive behaviour, it is plausible many people dislike their own actions but struggle to change them. It is also possible these products are designed to take advantage of that to extract more time out of each user.

⌥ Permalink

Kalley Huang, New York Times (gift link)

John Ternus became Apple’s chief executive on Tuesday, succeeding Tim Cook, the company’s leader for the last 15 years. The long-anticipated handoff, Mr. Cook has said, will be “perfectly smooth.”

[…]

This summer, Apple hired Nate Gatten from American Airlines to lead government affairs, replacing Kate Adams, who will retire this year. Laura Legros, a hardware engineering vice president and deputy of Mr. Ternus’s before retiring from Apple in 2022, has rejoined the company, three people familiar with her hiring said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Ms. Legros, who reports to Mr. Ternus, could act as his adviser and emissary to various parts of the company, the three people said.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple’s Phil Schiller is no longer going to run the App Store or oversee product events, reports Bloomberg. Schiller isn’t leaving Apple, but he is narrowing his responsibilities and working on unspecified projects.

Employees at Apple told Bloomberg that 66-year-old Schiller appears to be taking another step toward retirement.

Cook and Ternus each sent pretty anodyne company-wide memos about the transition. Cook’s tenure was the longest of any CEO in Apple’s history and he was the one who turned it from a successful company into a global behemoth.

The thing I have liked about Apple — one of the things that made me a longtime customer and someone who writes about the company — is that it has historically been a very simple kind of business: it designs products and sells them to people, mostly. Every one of its peers is a more complicated business. They often balance the needs of massive institutional and government customers, advertisers, or two-sided marketplaces.

That change began in the latter years of Jobs’ tenure and accelerated under Cook. Most software, including operating systems, was accounted for as part of device purchases, and was turned into a software-as-a-service model. Its subscription-based business became a revenue growth centre, which was important for Wall Street because it was a way to turn the company’s successful but inconsistent device sales into predictable money printers. And there are now ads and upsells throughout the operating systems, which are shown to all users regardless of how much other money they have already given Apple.

Ternus has inherited that Apple. Regardless of how much he gives off the vibe of a cool Californian — by way of Philadelphia — who just cares about the best stuff, he is also selling ad space and making sure more people upgrade to Apple One.

⌥ Permalink

Joel Dryden, in a CBC News article with the headline “On the Road With Pro-Independence Albertans, One Small Town at a Time”:

The restaurant owner, who gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic, has hit the road this summer to talk independence, travelling with a group of people who also support the idea of Alberta becoming its own nation.

[…]

On the back of the vehicle, a Bible verse printed in script: Jeremiah 29:7 — “Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”

Mike Skerrett, in a 2018 McSweeney’s article with the headline “I Traveled to a Diner In Trump Country to Write Another Article On Whether the President’s Supporters Still Want to, Quote, ‘Smash My Libtard Face In'”:

I came to this diner, The No Safe Space Café, to get a taste of the Real America. This America exists outside the liberal echo chambers, somewhere with real diversity of thought: The opinions of straight, white, Christian men.

Chris Scott — the “restaurant owner” driving the separatist campaign bus with Dryden aboard — has previously called the CBC “liars, thieves and Federalist bootlickers” who publish “drivel”. Replace the U.S.-centrism of the McSweeney’s piece with a Canadian vibe, and is it really all that different?

⌥ Permalink

Here is a list of headlines; perhaps you will spot a theme:

• “Six new Apple products will launch early this year, here’s what’s coming”

• “Apple has five all-new products launching this year, here’s what’s coming”

• “Apple will launch 20+ new products this year, here’s what’s coming”

• “Apple has rare updates coming soon for these three products”

• “Apple launching 5+ new products over the next several weeks”

• “Seven new Macs will launch this year, here’s everything coming”

• “Apple still has over a dozen products in the pipeline for 2026, here’s what’s coming”

• “Apple has six new products that could launch soon, per rumors

• “Apple has 10+ new products rumored to launch first with John Ternus as CEO”

• “Here’s everything Apple has coming this May, and what not to expect”

• “Apple will launch 15+ new products this fall, here’s what’s coming”

• “Apple has five new products coming that could launch at WWDC”

• “Next year to be Apple’s ‘biggest product year’ ever, here’s what’s coming”

• “Apple has five products launching this fall that we’ve waited a long time for”

• “Apple will launch five new products next month, here’s what’s coming”

• “Apple will launch 10+ new products soon, with September event coming”

• “Apple is about to launch five new products that I’m very excited for”

• “Apple will launch 15+ new products this fall, here’s what’s coming”

• “Apple has announced 11 new products in 2026 so far, with more coming soon”

All of these since January — and I excluded most rewrites of articles by Mark Gurman, Ming-Chi Kuo, and other well-known Apple rumour writers. Also, my list does not include articles about products rumoured to be announced at specific events. They also have another thing in common: nearly all are by Ryan Christoffel, who seems to have taken up the 9to5Mac beat for making listicles of Apple products that could be updated in the future. Cool.

Careful readers might think I listed one of these articles twice — the “15+ new products this fall” one. But this is because Christoffel originally published it in May, and then changed the date on it to August after making a few changes.

I do not know who this is supposed to serve. Maybe this is a play for search engine traffic or A.I. chatbot citations. Maybe it works pretty well, too, and maybe I should be less cynical about these kinds of churned-out listicles in a time when A.I. search features are capturing traffic that used to go to third-party websites. Or maybe this is all just filler when there is nothing newsworthy but you need to publish a dozen or so articles daily.

Update: D. Griffin Jones, formerly at Cult of Mac, says on Bluesky:

It’s a secret third thing: Google Discover, Google News, Flipboard, Apple News, and other algorithmic aggregators. Articles like that tend to reach a much broader audience.

“One listicle a day” was our goal at Cult of Mac before I was laid off. It’s a tough time out there for independent blogs. The Google AI overview is devastating.

I obviously have no authority to give business advice. I would only point out that it is disappointing to hear about chasing referral strategies. One would think the pivot to video era would be treated as a cautionary tale and not something to repeat — if one, I suppose, is not responsible for staff and paycheques.

⌥ Permalink

Alex Skopic, at Current Affairs, wrote about the functional use and abuse of stimulants by people who are overworked. I stumbled upon it by way of the latest issue of Web Curios, and I think the general thrust of the article is something I find noteworthy enough to link to it. Alas, it is sloppy in the details.

The second paragraph is a good place to start. Skopic dumps a litany of numbers about declining affordability and the difficulties of modern life; among them:

[…] And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 21.6 percent of Americans now work longer than 40 hours a week, with a beleaguered five percent working as many as 60 hours. […]

The way this is phrased — “now work longer than 40 hours a week”, emphasis mine — may give the impression this figure is a new high, either historically or at least in recent memory. But it is not. This figure has been declining for at least twenty years. In 2005, the BLS reported 27.9% of people employed in nonagricultural jobs in the U.S. worked 41 or more hours; by 2015, that was down to 24.8%, compared to 21.6% in 2025. The same drop is also present for workers committing 60 hours per week or more: 7.2% in 2005, 6.3% in 2015, and 5.4% in 2025.

I am not selectively quoting here. I picked ten and twenty years ago for comparative convenience, but you can check the intervening years and find a clear trend. The misuse of this data point is a poor choice when there is perhaps an interesting narrative in reconciling the declining percentage of overworked U.S. adults with the proliferation of highly caffeinated beverages, mysterious energy shots, and powders and supplements of questionable substance.

This is the kind of sentence that made me begin searching up all kinds of stuff in this article. It raises doubts, making me do the kind of work all of us should probably do any time we read something, but do not because we decide we have better things to do. Well, I decided this is what I was going to do today. I am going to skip past the health claims because they are not in my wheelhouse — double-checking easily verified numbers is something I am more comfortable with — and I will jump to this part:

Monster Energy, for instance, seems to think it owns the word “monster.” In 2009, the company threatened to sue a small brewery in Vermont for selling a beer called the “Vermonster,” claiming it infringed their trademark rights. That was at least a beverage, but in 2020 they did the same thing with video game company Ubisoft, forcing them to change a game’s title from “Gods and Monsters” to “Immortals Fenyx Rising.” In 2023 they once again targeted the gaming industry, this time over an independent game called “Dark Deception: Monsters and Mortals”; according to the developers, the drink company wanted them to “agree to never use a green & white logo on a black background for any game we ever make. So they own the colors green & white too apparently.” In all of these cases, Monster’s legal claim is shaky at best — but with a revenue of $7.9 billion in 2025, they have enough money to bankrupt anyone who tries to take them to court, so it doesn’t matter.

Monster Energy is an aggressive litigant when it comes to protecting its trademarks, but it does not always succeed. Glowstick Entertainment, makers of “Dark Deception: Monsters and Mortals”, fought and won its trademark case. Also, I think it would have been useful for Skopic to cite cases where Monster Energy lost — or likely would have lost — but the defendant went out of business anyhow. For example, in a 2022 case against a store with “Monster” in its name, the energy drink company would have been unlikely to prevail (PDF). Even so, a search of state records showed the company was ultimately dissolved. No matter whether this was directly connected to the litigation, it is a stronger argument for having “enough money to bankrupt anyone who tries to take them to court” than this evidence-free article.

Also, it is kind of weird that Coca-Cola — a company which owns 21% of Monster Energy after the latter acquired Coke’s energy drink portfolio, has a line of teas and coffees, and whose namesake beverage used to contain cocaine and still contains caffeine — goes entirely unmentioned in this piece. Perhaps it is too obvious, or feels like too much of a stretch. But it is strange to dedicate a paragraph to Monster’s trademark battles, which has nothing to do with the thesis of this piece, and leave the Coca-Cola stone unturned.

I wish an editor took another pass on this article as I think there are points that could be clarified, facts that desperately need checking, and interesting narratives that could be teased out. Skopic notes, for instance, the supposed incompatibility of sleep with an economy based on relentless production and consumption. It is true that we cannot make or buy things in your sleep, nor can we provide revenue-generating services, but sleep itself is an enormous business. We are encouraged to spend thousands of dollars on beds and mattresses because less expensive options are insufficiently rest-promoting, and then we should spend more money to wake up and keep ourselves alert throughout the day.

I find all of this baffling, even as — perhaps especially as — a daily coffee drinker. I get that people have different relationships with caffeine and alcohol, so do not take this as anything greater than my feelings-based vibe, but I have never really understood these as functional products. Coffee, when made well using the kinds of beans that I like, is a delicious beverage regardless of its effects. Wine is sort of similar to me. They both have effects, of course, but I think of those as a kind of warning sign: if I have consumed so much coffee or wine that it noticeably changes how I feel, I have probably had too much. This makes them, unlike energy drinks, a delicious treat for me. Your mileage may vary.

⌥ Permalink

An un-bylined Canadian Press report:

U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” as tensions with Canada worsen.

Elect stupid people and get stupid policies. This report contains a good explanation of the name’s history, and also has a deliciously petty map illustrating where the border is drawn.

Like the moronic Gulf of Mexico relabelling, expect digital mapping companies like Apple and Google to fall in line. MapQuest, a holdout on that change, also says it will keep the correct name. I still think maps should reflect government names regardless of whether they were assigned by a thumb elected by the world’s least responsible country, but I sympathize with MapQuest’s stance.

Update: Just like that, Google has updated its map to reflect “Lake America” when using a U.S. map, “Lake Ontario” in Canada, and “Lake Ontario (Lake America)” elsewhere. Google’s concession — and, soon, Apple’s — is a good reminder to all users that the U.S. may be the most powerful country in the world, but it is no longer a leader.

Update: Apple has also updated its map.

⌥ Permalink

Apple, after previously saying it would move Hide My Email to the private.icloud.com subdomain:

After further consideration and reviewing community feedback, iCloud+ Hide My Email addresses will remain on icloud.com.

The whole point of an email address like this is that it can be used anywhere someone does not want to provide an address that can be tied to them or remarketed to, or if they want to be able to cut off communications. This change, if implemented, would have made these addresses basically useless. I am glad to see this was reversed.

⌥ Permalink

In September, the European Commission began pondering how to correct its 2009 privacy law that resulted in cookie permission banners littering the web, with the resulting proposal announced in November.

Jennifer Rankin, the Guardian:

EU officials said users would remain in control of their data on the internet, but new rules on cookies — the internet files that are stored on a user’s device so a website can remember them — would make life simpler by ensuring one-click consent. “I think we can all agree we have spent too much of our time accepting or rejecting cookies,” [Henna] Virkkunen said.

This was not the first time the Commission had attempted to correct for the permissions pollution that resulted from the e-Privacy Directive. In 2020, its efforts were focused on ineffective consent options like, as reported at the Verge, “a cookie consent policy with no obvious way to opt out of tracking”. I still see many websites, like the Verge itself, providing no meaningful consent for third-party tracking.

This time, though, the Commission said it was trying to make cookie consents less prevalent by allowing, for example, simple statistical cookies without any consent, and it was going to give users an option to decline tracking universally. When I looked into the changes in November, it seemed like this signal could be ignored by publishers and media companies who would be free to ask for consent anyway. As of May, it seemed this proposal was moving forward by requiring consent management platforms to respond to browser signals. By summer, however, things had changed.

Ernestas Naprys, Cybernews (“Article 88b” refers to the universal browser signal proposal):

Google suggested ditching Article 88b.

“Article 88b should be deleted. Retaining this provision risks anchoring the Omnibus to a proven-failed architecture, Google’s position reads.

“It will drastically impair the ability of most websites to monetize content and drive client acquisition. The resulting low consent rates and severely restricted data access.”

Meta suggested removing the entire Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive. This rule is why we have cookie banners in the first place, as it requires website operators to obtain clear user consent before storing or accessing their information.

It was not just U.S.-based companies that argued against better user privacy controls. According to noyb, French, German, and Polish representatives were in alignment with Google’s position, which ultimately led to its scrapping. All three countries are home to companies that would be affected by this regulation. None, however, are as big or as powerful as Google or Meta.

Privacy-defending organizations are understandably not impressed. They have launched Kill the Cookie Banner to drum up support for legal recognition of a browser signal. In the U.S., five state governments say the Global Privacy Control must be respected. At a browser level, it is only implemented in Brave, DuckDuckGo, and Firefox, but it seems that Apple is working to add it to Safari, and it seems it is being actively worked on for Chromium, too. The European Commission should throw its weight behind this control, too.

⌥ Permalink

Felix Kent, Defector (gift link):

[…] I believed then and still believe that operating a car is too difficult for human beings. This is obviously not true at the level of making a car move. Making a car move is easy. A rat can make a car move. But the level of skill involved in driving really well is not dissimilar from that required to be a concert pianist, if the pianist-centered movies I’ve watched are to be believed. Now imagine that in most parts of the country leading a normal life required more or less constant piano playing. Now imagine that playing the piano badly killed people.

Just about everything we do to make driving a car easier instead seems to make people complacent. The lanes on roads are wider than they need to be to account for lateral imperfection, and then there are wide berms so that someone may drive completely off the road in relative safety. Cars that are enormous, heavy, hulking things do not allow drivers to feel their weight because of myriad assistance features that make it possible to steer with a single finger.

But driving is a skill. Like any skill, it is something people will have varying degrees of success learning. Some people simply cannot drive, whether on a temporary or permanent basis. We can bet the farm on autonomous vehicles which, though seemingly capable in warm and dry urban settings, are an expensive and individualized answer that exacerbates all the other problems of car dependency. It is also a risky bet as, like any technology, current performance is not indicative of future gains. Public transit, on the other hand, is a proven technology that, among other things, strengthens the social contract while giving everyone the ability to move around a city.

⌥ Permalink

“zedeus”:

On 24 August 2026 cease and desist letters have been sent by X Corp. demanding a permanent takedown of Nitter instances and the project’s repository.

Nitter mirrors X; it powers websites like XCancel which remains online and functional as of writing. (Update: A few hours after I published this, XCancel says it was also told by X to shut down its service.)

This is not surprising but it is very stupid. Companies like X and Meta are very happy to scrape the web at unprecedented scale and without permission, but have zero tolerance for the same to be done to them by, in effect, individual users. That is not because they are protective of the creative works users have contributed to these platforms. It is simply because users are not trusted to use the platforms. X does not permit third-party readers, and neither does Instagram, because their value does not come from us using these services as we wish, but from how they dictate we must. Bafflingly, however, some argue they should face little responsibility for those choices.

⌥ Permalink

Jeffrey Kopp, of CNBC, wrote a short profile of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, whose name you may have heard even if you do not live in her district of Northern California. That is because her district covers such areas as San Francisco and Silicon Valley, so her rulings on the many cases heard there have a disproportionate impact on U.S. technology policy.

These policies should catch the attention of people in the U.S., of course; it is also a factor to be mindful of in the rest of the world. The boundaries and limitations surrounding the behaviour of some of the most impactful companies in the world are decided by a relative handful of people, among whom are the justices of the Northern District of California. This article is not a deep examination of such consequences — but I would love to read that story, if it exists.

⌥ Permalink

Now that it has been a couple of years since Apple began requiring administrators to sign in to the News Publisher dashboard or risk their accounts losing their role, there are a few things we have learned:

1. These notifications arrive on an approximately five-month schedule, perhaps a couple of weeks longer.

2. News Publisher has little additional functionality that requires or would encourage signing in on a more regular basis if you do not use Apple’s special format.

   In my case, I cannot even see the articles I have published, nor are there analytics. I checked on a device that is not my own and I can see that recent articles are broadcasting to Apple News just fine from my website, but there is effectively nothing in News Publisher reflecting that.

3. Apple News is still frighteningly limited from a publisher’s perspective. It launched eleven years ago and there is still no way to set a custom URL in News Publisher or, in fact, anywhere. That is, this website’s Apple News link is https://apple.news/TAjcS0c5sRV2HYftzmJ6UMQ instead of, say, https://apple.news/pixel-envy. It is not a function of size, either — here are the URL slugs of a few publishers you definitely recognize: ThfiauYLtQlOfqyiHkempkw, TVKIb0N6iSsOyGSnR4zF1Kw, and TUKgA_OjuTe20v1ndDwQjxQ. Catchy.

   This limitation also extends to the URLs of individual stories. It is the kind of basic functionality that exists on every other public-facing platform I can think of that a publisher might use, but Apple does not support because its “Services” business prints money anyway.

I still do not know what happens if I fail to sign into News Publisher five months from now, other than that my role becomes reduced to an editor. There is nobody else authorized with News Publisher, so I guess I simply lose administrator access forever if, every five months, I complete the necessary busywork of signing in.

⌥ Permalink

I finally got around completing a long pending project idea: A diffusion image generation model implemented on a microcontroller. See blog article and repo.

Context: Placemark is a tool that lets you view, create, and edit geospatial (map) data. I ran it as a company for a while and open sourced it when I shut down that company.

Yesterday Placemark got a pretty big PR from Birk Skyum, replacing its dependency on Mapbox GL JS with MapLibre, along with some other improvements. Birk is one of the cofounders of MapLibre^[1] and a generally prolific open-source contributor.

It's merged and live, and you can see it in action at placemark.io. This meant swapping out both the Mapbox frontend code as well as switching to a different tile service - we're now using OpenFreeMap for tiles, OpenMapTiles-based styles, openrouteservice for the routing drawing mode, and MapTiler for the satellite layer. Forks of Placemark no longer require a Mapbox API token to work, but they do require a MapTiler token to support Satellite tiles, and an openrouteservice token to do route-drawing.

The big upside here is that this makes Placemark cleanly open source: all of its dependencies have proper open source licenses like MIT, ISC, Apache-2.0, BSD-3-Clause, or similar^[2]. Mapbox GL's license is not open source and requires the developer to have a Mapbox account and follow their Terms of Service. So: you can now fork Placemark and build cleanly-licensed open source applications on its codebase. I recommend it!

You'll notice some visual changes: MapTiler's satellite sources and processing are different than Mapbox's, and the OpenFreeMap styles are a bit different. I hope that it's not a disruptive change for anyone relying on the tool.

Along with this, Birk removed the deck.gl dependency that had been bothering me for a few years, and swapped out the routing functionality for a more permissive provider. It was a really great contribution, and resolved an issue more than two years old. Great stuff, and much appreciated!

Previously

• Earlier this month, Placemark code got readopted into geojson.io, which was also very cool
• Rewind to the 2024 Placemark open source release post

Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the Space Shuttle's cargo bay, providing lab space for astronauts and experiments.1 Because Spacelab was a European project, it used a French-built minicomputer, the Mitra 125 MS,2 rather than the Shuttle's main computers, IBM-built AP-101 systems. For storage, the Spacelab computer contained 128 kilobytes of RAM. Rather than silicon memory, the computer used magnetic core memory, with each bit stored in a tiny ferrite ring. In this article, I take a close look at this computer's core memory system.

The illustration below shows how Spacelab fit inside the Shuttle's cargo bay. The pressurized laboratory is the cylindrical module in the front of the cargo bay, connected to the Shuttle by a tunnel. Experiments were mounted on pallets behind the laboratory. The laboratory held three identical Mitra computers.3 One computer managed Spacelab itself, while the second computer managed the experiments. The third computer provided a backup in case of failures.

The photo below shows the core memory stack, removed from the computer. The core memory stack takes up roughly a third of the computer. The entire side panel of the computer detaches, and the core memory unit slides out. Since the computer is cooled by conduction, firmly attaching the core memory stack to the side panel kept it cool. The core memory stack consists of seven boards: a driver board, four core plane boards, a second driver board, and an interface board. Each board has two 160-pin connectors that plug into a large daughter board on each side, providing extensive connectivity between the boards. The daughter board on the right has another 160-pin connector that links the memory stack to the rest of the computer. (These connectors are the long blue connectors in the photo.)

How core memory works

One of the hardest problems for early computers was storage. Computers of the late 1940s and early 1950s stored data through techniques such as sound waves in mercury, spots on a CRT screen, or spinning magnetic drums, but these all had limitations. What computers needed was dense, inexpensive storage that was fast, reliable, and could be accessed randomly.

During World War II, Germany developed special magnetic alloys that could "flip" from one magnetic state to another. After the war, American researchers realized that these materials could be used for storing binary data: "It was completely obvious that you could make a memory with this material," in the words of Jan Rajchman. Different aspects of core memory were patented by various inventors (including independent inventor Frederick Viehe, An Wang at Harvard, Jan Rajchman at RCA, and Jay Forrester at MIT), leading to expensive patent battles. (IBM ended up paying $400,000 to Wang—who used the money to build the computer company Wang Laboratories—and $13,000,000 to MIT.) I view Jay Forester as the most important inventor, developing the design of practical core memory, researching magnetic materials, and building the first core memory in 1953 for the groundbreaking Whirlwind computer.

Core memory is based around a tiny toroidal magnetic core, one per bit.4 A core can be magnetized clockwise or counterclockwise to store a bit. The core can be magnetized by threading a wire through the core: running a current through the wire produces a magnetic field that magnetizes the core, while running a current in the opposite direction produces the opposite magnetization.

A key problem with core memory was how to wire the cores without an absurd number of wires: if each core had a separate wire, just 16 KB of storage would require over 100,000 wires. The solution was called "coincident current addressing". The cores are arranged in a grid, with horizontal and vertical wires, as shown below. By running a current through one horizontal wire and one vertical wire, the single core at the intersection was selected. But wouldn't that magnetize all the cores along the horizontal and vertical wires? The key was that the cores were constructed from special magnetic materials with a property called hysteresis: a small current leaves the core completely unchanged, while a larger current flips the core's magnetic state. The currents through the horizontal and vertical wires were carefully selected so each wire had half the current necessary to flip the core; where the wires intersected, the two currents provided sufficient magnetic field to flip the core.

The next step was reading the core. A sense wire was threaded through all the cores in the two-dimensional plane. To read a core, the X and Y select wires were driven to flip the desired core to the 0 state. If the core was already in the 0 state, nothing happened. But if the core was originally in the 1 state, the magnetic field changed as the core changed state. This induced a small current in the sense line, indicating that the core held a 1. Note that reading the value of a bit destroys that value. Thus, a core needs to be rewritten after reading, to restore the original data.

To access a word of memory at a time, core planes were combined into a three-dimensional stack (below). Since each plane held one bit of the word, a 16-bit word would have a stack of 16 planes. All the planes shared the signals to drive the X and Y lines, so a one-word column through the stack was accessed in parallel. Each plane had a separate sense line to read out the bit.

But how do you write different values to the different bits? The trick was to put an "inhibit" line through all the cores in a plane, running the inhibit line in the opposite direction to the X lines. Putting a current through the inhibit line would cancel out the current through the X line, preventing the core in that plane from being modified. To summarize, a read-write cycle consisted of first energizing a pair of X and Y lines to select a word and write a 0 to the column of cores in that word. The sense lines provided a readout of the bit values. Next, the X and Y lines were energized in the opposite direction to write a 1 to the cores. At the same time, the inhibit lines were energized for each plane with a 0 bit. Thus, the cores either flipped back to 1 or stayed at 0, as required. Many core memories, such as the one below, used a shared wire for sense and inhibit, so there were three wires through each core.

The final ingredient to make core memory practical was the diode matrix. The X and Y lines require driver circuits that can produce fast, bidirectional high-current (e.g. 600 mA) pulses. A core memory plane can have hundreds of these lines. Providing a separate driver for each wire would be very expensive, especially in the vacuum tube era. The solution was to put separate drivers at each end of the wire, with each driver supporting multiple wires. For a trivial example, suppose you have 9 vertical lines. Put three drivers (A, B, and C) on the top, each connected to three wires, and three drivers on the bottom (1, 2, and 3), each connected to three wires. By energizing a driver at the top and a driver at the bottom (e.g. B and 1), the corresponding wire will be energized. Now, N drivers on each side control N² wires, supporting N⁴ cores in total.

Unfortunately, it's not quite that easy. Current can take "sneak paths" through the cores, such as the path in pink above. The solution is to add diodes to ensure that current can't take the wrong path. Since a wire needs to be driven with currents in both directions (to flip cores both ways), two diodes are required on each wire, as shown below, one in each direction. Each matrix input (A, B, etc.) is replaced with two inputs, one to drive each direction. (The horizontal wires also require diodes, not shown.)

Since each wire requires two diodes, core memories used many diodes. Fortunately, diodes were small and inexpensive, so a large quantity of diodes was manageable. The photo below shows the diode stack for the computer used in the Saturn V rocket, the Launch Vehicle Digital Computer.

Originally, core memories were tediously constructed by hand. For the Whirlwind computer, it took a full 40 hours to wire a 64×64 core plane. Companies such as IBM soon developed automated techniques to manufacture core memory, and the price dropped by a factor of two every two years, similar to Moore's Law.5 Core memories became fast, inexpensive, and reliable, and were the most popular form of main-memory storage until semiconductor memory took over in the 1970s.

The Spacelab computer's core memory

The Spacelab computer's memory was manufactured in 1980, a late date for core memory, so it is advanced and high density. The photo below shows one of the four core plane boards from the computer. Each board holds 16K of 18-bit words (32 KB), so the computer has 128 KB of RAM in total. The computer is a 16-bit computer, but each word also has a parity bit and a "storage protect" bit, bringing the total to 18 bits. (The storage protect bit provided write protection on a word-by-word basis, preventing programs from being accidentally overwritten. Because core memory is nonvolatile, a program could be loaded into memory once and would be immediately available every time the computer was powered on.)

The core memory board is arranged with 1024 vertical (Y) wires and 288 horizontal (X) wires, supporting 294,912 lithium ferrite cores. These very thin wires are soldered to tiny pads on the printed-circuit board. The board supports 18 bits, which is visible as 18 alternating stripes of green and copper because alternating sense lines have different colors. The board has 36 sense lines: the left and right halves of the board have independent sense lines to reduce noise, so the board has 36 sense lines for 18 bits. The sense wires pass through four holes in the board (green arrows) and are soldered on the back of the board.

The photo below shows a close-up of the cores. Each core is approximately 32 mils (0.8mm) in diameter, the same as the IBM System/360 cores shown earlier. However, the cores are stacked much closer, with only a small gap between cores. The X and Y select lines are copper-colored, while the sense lines are green. (The wires are all enameled to prevent short circuits.) The sense wires loop around at the left, forming a single circuit through each bit section. Half the Y lines form loops at the bottom; the other half form loops at the top. Thus, each Y line passes through the plane twice in a U-shaped path, which will turn out to be important.

The other side of each circuit board holds the sense amplifiers and the diode matrix for the core plane. The diode chips are the square black packages, each containing 16 diodes for 8 core lines.6 In the red-outlined regions, one end of each vertical U-loop is connected to a diode chip; the lines of diagonal holes are the vias that pass each signal through the board. The other end of each vertical U-loop is connected to one of the blue board connectors on the side; these vias are in the blue-outlined regions. The horizontal lines use the diode chips and vias in the green regions. One end of each line is connected to a diode chip, while the other end is connected to a board connector through traces on the other side. Note that some vertical lines connect to the diode chips at the top of the board, while others connect at the bottom. Similarly, some horizontal lines connect at the left while others connect at the right.

The central region (yellow) holds 18 sense amplifier chips, the black DIP integrated circuits, each containing two amplifiers.7 The white packages are resistor packages, holding multiple resistors to bias and terminate the sense amplifier lines. The wires from the sense amplifiers are connected as twisted pairs that are soldered to the board right next to the corresponding sense amplifier chips. Using twisted pairs for the whole distance prevents the wires from picking up electrical noise, which could overwhelm the tiny signals in the sense wires. The sense wires pass from one side of the board to the other through four holes in the board (yellow arrows), and then are glued down as they traverse a significant distance on the board. (It must have been difficult to manufacture the board without breaking the tiny, fragile wires.)

Detecting signals on the sense lines is tricky because the pulses are very small, a few millivolts. Because the sense lines run next to the X drive lines, they can easily pick up noise from the high-current pulses on the X lines. To minimize this noise, the sense lines cross each other between two plane sections, forming a "bow tie", as shown below. The result is that an X line runs next to the positive sense line for half the length and the negative sense line for the other half. Thus, the induced noise cancels out.

The core memory in the Spacelab computer used a different architecture from a typical core memory, improving performance by eliminating the inhibit line. This architecture was called a 2½D memory.8 If you're familiar with core memory, the lack of inhibit lines may seem puzzling: how do you write 1 to some bits and 0 to other bits? The trick is to have separate X driver circuitry for each bit.9 When writing data, the X lines are only energized for bits that receive a 1; the other lines are left unenergized, so the bits remain at 0. The disadvantage is that instead of one set of X driver circuits, you now need one set for each bit, a factor of 18 more for an 18-bit word. However, with the development of core drivers on integrated circuits, the cost of the additional driver circuitry became less significant.

The memory system used an technique called phase reversal to cut the number of vertical drivers in half. Recall that pairs of vertical wires are joined by a U-connection. By driving the wire in a particular direction, the left side or the right side of the pair can be selected. For example, the drawing below shows how the two wires select the left core, but not the right core. In the left core, both currents go through the core in the same direction, inducing a magnetic field in the toroid.10 But in the right core, the two currents cancel out, so there is no magnetic field created. But if the current in the vertical loop is reversed, the right core will be selected, rather than the left core. The point is that instead of using two drivers for the vertical wires, one driver is used, reversing the current to select the left or right core.

The diagram below shows the complex wiring for X drive wires. Each band of 16 wires corresponds to one bit in the 18-bit word, and has a separate sense wire. The top band of 16 X lines is connected to four contacts on the board connector; each contact is connected to four X lines through the curving PCB traces. The bottom band of 16 X lines is wired to diode modules on the other side of the board, connected through the round vias. (Each wire has the opposite connections—diode module or board connector—on the other end.)11 One group of four X wires is energized through the connector, while four wires are energized through the diode matrix, selecting one of the 16 X wires in the group.

Other boards in the memory stack

The memory stack has seven boards in total, arranged as a driver board, the four core planes, a second driver board, and an interface board. I haven't examined these boards in detail, but I'll give some preliminary information. The photo below shows one of the two driver boards. It provides the high-current pulses for the X and Y select lines. The board is crammed with specialized core memory driver chips12, along with a few logic chips to control the drivers. It has separate drivers for the two ends of the select lines, allowing the matrix selection described earlier.

Since there are two driver boards and four core memory boards, at first I thought that each driver board controlled two core memory boards. The configuration turns out to be more complicated, with one more layer of matrix selections to cut the number of drivers in half. To simplify slightly, consider the X lines on a core board to have left ends and right ends, both of which must be energized to activate a line. For the left ends, the first driver board powers core boards 1 and 2, while the second driver board powers core boards 3 and 4. The right ends are shuffled: the first driver board powers core boards 1 and 3, while the second driver board powers core boards 2 and 4. Now, if the first driver board powers the left and right ends, core board 1 is the only one with both ends active. If the first driver board powers the left ends while the second board powers the right ends, core board 2 is activated. Similarly, core board 3 or 4 can be activated. The point is that since each set of drivers is connected to two core boards, two sets of drivers are required instead of four.

The final board is the interface to the rest of the computer. It has many transistor arrays in DIP packages, along with many resistors. It seems that the board uses discrete transistors to drive the bus, rather than using interface chips, which is unexpected. The board has some wire-wrapped jumpers in the lower center region, presumably for configuration.

Conclusions

Core memory had a long life, surviving even as computers migrated from vacuum tubes to transistors and then integrated circuits, but eventually semiconductor memory made it obsolete.13 Core memories lasted even longer in aerospace applications since it had two key advantages over semiconductor memory: it retained data even without power, and it was resistant to radiation. The Spacelab computer, manufactured in 1980, was near the end of core memory's reign, so it is more advanced than a typical core memory system, with higher density, extensive use of integrated circuits, and the 2½D architecture. But eventually the high density, low cost, and low power consumption of semiconductor memory won out. In 1991, the Space Shuttle flew with upgraded main computers, the IBM AP-101S that used semiconductor memory instead of magnetic core. Spacelab's Mitra computers were also replaced, using the AP-101SL, which was based on the AP-101S but modified to support the instruction set and peripherals of the original Spacelab computer.14 Although core memory is now firmly in the past, it still lives on in the expression "core dump".

I plan to investigate the Spacelab computer some more. For updates, follow me on Bluesky (@righto.com), Mastodon (@kenshirriff@oldbytes.space), or RSS. Credits: Thanks to Steve Jurvetson for providing the Spacelab computer. Thanks to CuriousMarc for photography and help disassembling the computer. AI statement: Despite the presence of the em dash, no AI was used in the writing of this article (details).

Notes and references

Project Zomboid recently released their long-awaited Build 42. I set out to see if I can discover any vulnerabilities in the multiplayer component of the game. I ended up discovering three distinct vulnerabilities which allow a malicious server to execute code on connecting clients in Project Zomboid 42.20.3.

On 15 August 2006, Wikiversity opened a new space within the Wikimedia movement: a place where people could not only access educational resources, but also create, share, and participate in learning together.

Wikiversity had grown out of work within Wikibooks and became an independent Wikimedia project in August 2006. Its creation expanded the educational possibilities of the movement beyond textbooks, with a focus on both learning resources and learning activities in English and other languages.

Twenty years later, that idea remains at the heart of Wikiversity.

Its motto, “Set learning free,” captures an approach to education built around participation, collaboration, open resources, and the ability for learners and educators to shape the learning environment themselves.

But what does learning in the open actually look like?

Find learning resources for teaching and learning

One of the simplest ways to use Wikiversity is to find and adapt learning resources. The project hosts lesson plans, course notes, reading lists, problem sets, activities, simulations, teaching aids, and other materials that educators and learners can use and develop.

For example, Student Success: Information Literacy introduces learners to library resources, database searching, digital media evaluation, evaluating online sources, academic honesty, and citation. It combines explanations with multimedia resources and activities that can support the development of research and information literacy skills.

Resources like these can be used as they are, adapted to meet a particular learning need, or developed further by other educators and learners.

That ability to build on what already exists is an important part of learning in an open environment.

Build a learning experience

Wikiversity is not limited to individual learning materials. Educators can also use it to bring together the different elements of a course or learning environment.

A Wikiversity course can include a syllabus, learning objectives, readings, activities, assignments, discussions, and other supporting materials. The project’s School and University Projects page documents examples of educators and institutions using Wikiversity in formal teaching and student assignments.

SPIR608 Political Simulation and Gaming, an open educational resource supported by the University of Westminster, shows what this can look like in practice. The module combines lectures, game playing, workshops, tutorials, presentations, and group discussions. Students analyse political simulations, participate in role playing exercises, research historical and contemporary conflicts, and eventually create and play test their own political simulation prototypes.

This shows how Wikiversity can become more than a collection of pages. It can become a shared learning environment, structured around a subject, a course, or a particular group of learners.

Learn by doing

Perhaps one of Wikiversity’s most distinctive features is its emphasis on learning by doing.

Learners can edit pages, contribute to course-related projects, write papers, conduct research, discuss what they are studying, and collaborate with others. Instead of simply consuming educational content, participants can become involved in creating and improving it.

Over the years, this approach has supported a wide range of school and university projects, including Technical Writing, Design for the Environment at the University of Toronto, Instructional Design at Indiana University, and Media Literacy at Temple University.

Wikiversity has also provided space for learners and educators to explore emerging subjects, including Artificial Intelligence.

This approach brings learning and knowledge creation together. Learners do not simply study existing knowledge; they can question it, contribute to it, document what they learn, and share their work with others.

That is one of the ideas that makes Wikiversity part of the wider Wikimedia ecosystem: learning can itself become a form of knowledge creation.

Explore research and scholarly learning

Learning on Wikiversity can also extend into research.

The project supports research activities and provides spaces where learners and educators can explore questions, develop ideas, and share their work. This reflects an aspect of Wikiversity’s original vision: creating not only educational resources, but also opportunities for people to learn through research and participation.

One example is Introduction to Scientific Journalism, an open course that connects scientific journalism with contributions to Wikimedia projects, giving participants opportunities to develop their skills while contributing to open knowledge.

Another is An introduction to the use and needs of Research Groups with WikiEducation tools on Wikiversity. The research examines how Wikiversity could support Scientific Research Groups through shared resources, documentation, collaboration, and the dissemination of research. It draws on questionnaires, interviews, and literature review to explore the needs and experiences of research groups using or considering Wikiversity.

Wikiversity also hosts WikiJournals, where scholarly articles can undergo external peer review before being published in an indexed, citable, open access format.

These examples show how learning can move beyond the classroom: a question can become a research project, a course activity can become an open contribution, and work developed by learners can become part of a wider knowledge ecosystem.

Learning that remains open

A learning resource does not have to remain fixed. A course does not have to belong to a single classroom. A learner does not have to remain only a consumer of information.

On Wikiversity, educational materials can be created and adapted collaboratively. Courses can evolve. Learners can participate in shaping the resources they use. Educators can share what they develop with others. And learning activities can contribute to a growing body of open knowledge.

For educators looking to experiment with open and collaborative approaches to teaching, Wikiversity offers many examples through its School and University Projects. WikiConecta, a free course for university educators, is one example of how learning resources can remain openly available beyond the original course and participants, allowing others to explore and build on them.

Learners can also explore resources such as the Open Educational Resources lesson, German Home Immersion School, and UrSchool to see different approaches to self-directed and community-based learning.

For subject-based and university learning, examples include Environmental Ethics, Programming with Wikidata, and Hindi Literature.

The EduWiki Hub also maintains an OER Documentation page that brings together resources and examples from across the Wikimedia education community.

Twenty years of learning in the open

Twenty years after its launch, Wikiversity with over 166,000 learning modules on the platform, continues to embody a simple but powerful idea: learning does not have to happen behind closed doors.

It can be created, shared, adapted, questioned, and developed together.

That is what makes Wikiversity’s model relevant today; not simply as a repository of educational materials, but as a space where learning and knowledge creation can happen together.

Set learning free.

Happy 20th anniversary, Wikiversity!

This Diff post is brought to you by the EduWiki Hub team, as part of our ongoing effort to highlight practical ways Wikimedia projects can support teaching and learning. As Wikiversity celebrates 20 years of open learning, we hope this overview helps educators and learners discover how the project can support courses, learning activities, research, and collaborative knowledge creation.

Across Africa, teaching people how to edit Wikipedia is only the beginning. Africa Wikipedian Alliance (AWA)’s learning programme is exploring what contributors need to stay, grow and eventually lead.

Opening a Wikipedia account is easy. Learning to use it well is not.

A new contributor must learn how to judge the reliability of a source, navigate unfamiliar editing tools and make changes without disrupting the work of others. This often brings up harder questions. How should an editor respond to artificial intelligence that produces polished prose and invented citations with equal confidence? How can a patroller protect Wikipedia from vandalism without driving away a beginner who has made an honest mistake? What does it take for an African language to become not merely visible online, but usable across the systems on which digital knowledge increasingly depends?

These questions are at the heart of the work of the African Wikipedian Alliance (AWA): building communities capable of creating, protecting and sustaining their own knowledge.

Between February and May 2026, the African Wikipedian Alliance brought together 256 participants from its Anglophone and Francophone communities for eight learning sessions. The subjects ranged from AI and source editing to gender inclusion, storytelling, Wikidata and African-language infrastructure.

For many people, Wikipedia is the first stop when they want quick information about a subject, event or public figure. Far fewer know about AWA, a community of contributors, organisers, and knowledge advocates working to strengthen participation, leadership, and knowledge equity across Africa’s Wikimedia ecosystem.

When producing text becomes easier, judgement matters more

The arrival of generative AI has unsettled some of the basic assumptions of online knowledge production. It can translate a passage, improve its grammar or suggest the structure of an article in seconds. But, as we have often seen, it can also fabricate a source, distort a fact or produce a confident answer that is not supported by evidence.

For Wikipedia, a platform built on verifiability, this presents both an opportunity and a problem..

During AWA’s February anglophone session, “AI + Wikipedia: The Good, the Bad, and the Best Practices,” (Google Drive) participants examined how AI tools can assist with translation, summarisation, grammar and the early structuring of articles. They also considered the risks: fabricated facts, invented citations and misleading content that may initially appear credible.

Rather than presenting AI as either “good” or “bad,” the discussion encouraged contributors to think critically and ethically about how these tools are used. AI can assist editors, but it cannot replace human judgment, verification, and responsibility. At a time when misinformation and synthetic content continue proliferating online, the lesson was that AI is only useful when people know how to use it responsibly.

The francophone community tackled a related subject of patrolling. Patrollers review recent changes, detect vandalism and help maintain the quality of Wikipedia’s articles. At their best, they are caretakers of collaborative knowledge: people who protect quality while helping new contributors understand where they went wrong.

A damaging edit is not always an act of vandalism. It may come from a newcomer who does not yet understand Wikipedia’s rules or technical conventions. Treating those situations in the same way can protect a page at the expense of someone who was trying to improve it.

In both sessions, the technical tools were secondary. The real subject was responsibility: when not to trust a machine, when to undo a contribution and when a new editor simply needs guidance. Editorial quality and community health are not competing priorities. Over time, each depends on the other.

A language needs more than articles

If the February sessions were concerned with protecting knowledge, the language sessions asked who has the infrastructure to produce it in the first place.

Much of the internet treats language as content: words that can be translated and placed on a page. But for a language community seeking a sustained presence on Wikimedia, translation is only one layer of the work.

Editors need an interface they can use. They need agreed terminology, reliable sources and a community large and active enough to sustain a project. The language must also be represented in digital systems that can recognise its words, grammatical forms and meanings.

Expanding African languages and knowledge representation

AWA’s March sessions introduced participants to the Wikimedia Incubator and TranslateWiki. The Incubator allows communities to begin developing Wikimedia projects in languages that do not yet have independent sites. TranslateWiki enables contributors to localise the interfaces through which people navigate and edit those projects.

The work can appear administrative: translating menus, testing pages and building a consistent body of content. Yet these are the foundations on which an independent language project may eventually stand.

AWA returned to the question in April through a session on lexicographical data in Wikidata. Participants were introduced to lexemes, forms and senses-the structures used to describe a word, the shapes it takes and the meanings it carries in a machine-readable form.

Here is why the distinction matters: A word recorded only in an article can be read by the person who finds it. A word represented as structured data can potentially be connected to dictionaries, translation systems and other language technologies. It becomes easier to search, reuse and link across platforms.

Language work in this sense, is infrastructure work. It determines which communities can do more than appear on the internet: which can participate in building the systems through which knowledge will be organised and retrieved.

For African languages that remain poorly represented online, the stakes extend beyond Wikimedia. As digital tools become more deeply embedded in education, communication and public life, languages absent from their underlying systems risk becoming less usable in the spaces those tools create.

Being admitted is not the same as belonging

Building the right infrastructure also means building strong communities and creating the social conditions that allow people to participate consistently.

During AWA’s International Women’s Day discussions in March, contributors, fellows, organisers and movement leaders from the English and French speaking communities considered what sustainable participation looks like for African women in digital knowledge communities.

Training was part of the answer, but only part. A person may learn how to contribute and still lack the time, financial support, mentorship or recognition needed to remain involved. She may be welcomed as a participant without being given a meaningful opportunity to lead.

The discussions identified access, visibility, funding and mentorship as interconnected needs. They also raised the importance of care work: the often-unrecognised labour that supports families, organisations and communities, but can limit the time women have available for volunteer-led digital projects.

Inclusion cannot be measured simply by whether the door has been opened. A new editor is not integrated into a community simply because an account has been created. They need the resources, relationships and room to grow.

Communities must be able to tell their own stories

Some forms of community work can be easily counted: articles edited, references added or data entries created. Other forms such as mentorship or organising local networks are however invisible. Processes that are developed by one group can often disappear because the experience was not documented.

AWA’s April Francophone session focused on Diff, the Wikimedia movement’s platform for community news and learning. Participants considered how to structure an article, record measurable results and use photographs and testimony to communicate what a project accomplished.

When community work goes undocumented, the lessons can disappear, organisers cannot learn from the experience and future participants cannot see the history they are joining.

Storytelling is therefore part of a community’s infrastructure, too. It preserves memory, circulates knowledge and allows people to describe their work in their own terms.

That capacity is especially important in a movement concerned with representation. Communities seeking greater control over how African knowledge appears online also need greater control over how their own contribution to that work is understood.

From using tools to shaping a movement

By May, the programme had turned towards the mechanics of independent contribution.

To an experienced editor, headings, references, templates and wiki markup are just ordinary elements of a Wikipedia page. But to a newcomer looking at dense source code for the first time, they can make the platform feel closed and forbidding.

In the Anglophone source-editing session, participants were shown how breaking a page into its component parts can make an apparently complicated whole become a sequence of manageable decisions.

The francophone Wikidata session approached independence from another direction. Participants learned how structured data connects information across Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikivoyage and other projects. A well-structured item can help knowledge travel across languages and platforms rather than remaining confined to a single page.

These are practical skills that every contributor should have, but their knock on effects are much greater. Contributors who understand the tools can work with greater independence, and, with experience, they can help newcomers, lead training sessions, organise projects and strengthen the systems on which others rely.

One session is rarely enough, and even eight sessions cannot resolve the structural barriers facing African Wikimedia communities. Training is just a starting point, one that can open a path towards transformation.

Monthly meetups can help people move from observing the Wikimedia movement to contributing to it; and, in time, to shaping where it goes next.

Join the AWA community here to connect with Wikimedians across Africa and take part in future learning sessions.

The Igala Wikimedia Campus Outreach was successfully implemented across three higher institutions in Kogi State:

• Kogi state Polytechnic Lokoja
• Federal Polytechnic Idah
• Prince Abubakar Audu University, Anyigba

The outreach served as a capacity-building initiative designed to recruit, train, and mentor new Wikimedia contributors while promoting the documentation of Igala language, culture, history, and notable personalities on Wikimedia platforms. Through practical editing sessions, mentorship, and collaborative learning, participants gained the skills required to contribute quality knowledge to Wikipedia and related Wikimedia projects.

Project Objectives

The primary objective of the outreach was to increase the number of active Igala Wikimedia editors and improve the availability of Igala-related knowledge on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Specifically, the project sought to:

• Train new editors in Wikipedia editing and Wikimedia policies.
• Increase the number of contributors to the Igala Wikimedia community.
• Document and preserve Igala language, culture, history, and notable personalities.
• Improve the quality and accessibility of Igala-related content online.
• Build a sustainable campus-based Wikimedia community through mentorship and continuous engagement.

Project Activities

• Attah Igala – Traditional rulership and the history of the Igala Kingdom.
• Igala Language – Grammar, dialects, and language usage.
• Idah, Kogi State – Historical significance, culture, and landmarks of the ancestral home of the Igala people.

Participants also improved existing Wikipedia articles and enhanced Wikidata items relating to Igala language, places, and distinguished personalities. These contributions help bridge the existing knowledge gap affecting indigenous Nigerian languages on Wikimedia platforms.

Mentorship and Community Growth

Mentorship remained a central component of the outreach. Experienced Wikimedia volunteers provided continuous guidance throughout the training sessions, ensuring that participants understood editing standards and best practices.A significant outcome of the mentorship process was the growth in participants’ confidence and editing skills. Many attendees joined with little or no prior Wikimedia experience but successfully progressed to independently creating and improving articles by the end of the outreach. This demonstrates the importance of sustained mentorship in retaining new editors and strengthening the local Wikimedia community.

Experience

The outreach was both impactful and inspiring. Participants showed enthusiasm throughout the training sessions and demonstrated a genuine interest in preserving and promoting Igala knowledge online. The collaborative atmosphere encouraged peer learning, teamwork, and active participation.It was particularly rewarding to observe participants transition from beginners to confident contributors capable of independently editing Wikipedia. The project also strengthened relationships among the participating institutions and laid the foundation for future Wikimedia activities within the campuses.

Benefits and Impact

The outreach produced several positive outcomes, including:

• Increased awareness of Wikimedia projects among students and academic communities.
• Development of new editing skills among participants.
• Improved representation of Igala language, culture, and history on Wikipedia.
• Strengthened collaboration among campus communities and the Igala Wikimedia user community.
• Contribution towards reducing the content gap affecting indigenous Nigerian languages.
• Establishment of a growing network of volunteers committed to documenting Igala knowledge.

These contributions will continue to benefit researchers, students, and the wider public by making reliable information about the Igala people more visible and accessible globally.

Challenges Encountered

Despite the success of the outreach, several challenges were experienced during implementation:

• Inconsistent internet connectivity affected editing sessions in some locations.
• Limited availability of laptops among participants reduced hands-on participation.
• Power supply interruptions occasionally delayed training activities.
• Some participants required additional time to fully understand Wikipedia editing guidelines and policies.
• Time constraints limited the depth of practical editing during some sessions.

These challenges were addressed through mentoring, flexible training schedules, collaborative editing, and continuous follow-up support after the events.

Outcomes and Contributions

The outreach successfully expanded the Igala Wikimedia community while increasing the quantity and quality of Igala-related content across Wikimedia projects.

Project Metrics Indicator

• Campuses Reached 3
• New Editors Trained 102
• Articles Created 514
• Articles Improved 516
• Total Edit Contributions 2.64k
• Commons upload 266

See also: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event:Building_Igala_Wikipedia_Community_Through_Campus_Engagement

Next Steps

The Igala Wikimedia Outreach continues to play an important role in promoting language equity and representation within the Wikimedia movement. Future activities will focus on:

• Sustaining mentorship for newly recruited editors.
• Organizing advanced editing workshops and edit-a-thons.
• Expanding the outreach to additional tertiary institutions and communities.
• Encouraging regular contributions to Wikipedia and Wikidata.
• Building long-term partnerships with educational institutions to strengthen the Igala Wikimedia community.

Conclusion

The Igala Wikimedia Campus Outreach successfully achieved its objective of empowering new contributors to document and preserve Igala knowledge on Wikimedia platforms. Through training, mentorship, and collaborative editing, participants contributed meaningful content that enriches Wikipedia and improves global access to information about the Igala people, their language, history, traditions, and achievements.The project represents a significant step toward addressing the underrepresentation of indigenous Nigerian languages online while building a sustainable community of editors committed to preserving Igala heritage for future generations. Continued mentorship, institutional collaboration, and community engagement will further strengthen the impact and sustainability of this initiative..

As we get closer to the next Wiki Loves Monuments competition in Iran, we wanted to take a moment to look back at the 2025 edition.

A year has passed since photographers across Iran once again took part in Wiki Loves Monuments Iran. The 2025 edition was organized by the Iranian Wikimedians User Group, with the help of volunteers and members of the Wikimedia community. The competition invited people to photograph Iran’s registered cultural and historical monuments and share their images freely on Wikimedia Commons.

We now have some distance from the competition and its results. This gives us a good chance to look at what happened, what we learned, and what we want to take with us into the next edition.

Wiki Loves Monuments Iran 2025

The Iranian competition ran from 1 to 31 October 2025.

During that month, participants contributed 2,513 eligible photographs. In comparison, the 2024 competition received 2,722 eligible photographs.

This was a small decrease, but the number of uploads tells only part of the story.

Iran has more than 33,000 registered monuments, spread across the country. Some are famous and already have many photographs. Others are much less known, and many still need better documentation on Wikimedia projects.

The goal of Wiki Loves Monuments is not simply to collect as many photographs as possible. We want to create a useful and freely available visual record of cultural heritage. A good photograph can illustrate a Wikipedia article, help people learn about a monument, or preserve a view of a place that may change in the future.

This was also an important lesson from our 2024 competition. Each edition helps us understand a little better how we can improve the contest and how we can encourage people to document more of Iran’s cultural heritage.

Selecting Iran’s finalists

After the competition ended, the national jury reviewed the photographs and selected the ten images that would represent Iran in the international round.

The first-place photograph showed Dayr-e Gachin Caravanserai, photographed by Hossein Pourakbarian.

Second place went to Mohammad Ataei for a photograph of the historic district of Gorgan, and third place went to Hadi Dehghanpour for a photograph of Arak Bazaar.

The ten selected photographs covered different parts of Iran’s heritage. They included caravanserais, historic urban areas, mosques, a bazaar, a castle, a monastery and other monuments.

These ten photographs then moved on to the international stage of Wiki Loves Monuments.

An exceptional international result

The 2025 international competition brought together photographs from 56 national contests. In total, almost 228,000 images were contributed by around 4,000 photographers around the world. Each national competition could send up to ten photographs to the international round.

The final result was especially memorable for Iran.

Four photographs from Iran were selected among the international winners, including both first and second place.

The Iranian winners were:

• 1st place: Dayr-e Gachin Caravanserai, by Hossein pourakbarian
• 2nd place: Mehmandust Tower, by Mehdi Akbari
• 5th place: Arak Bazaar, by Hadi Dehghanpour
• 22nd place: Seyyed Mosque in Isfahan, by Siavash Banaei

The full international results are available on Wikimedia Commons.

Seeing an Iranian photograph take first place was already something to celebrate. Having photographs from Iran in both first and second place made the result even more special.

The first-place photograph of Dayr-e Gachin Caravanserai had also won first place in the Iranian competition. It was chosen as the best image first by the national jury and later by the international jury.

But another result was just as interesting for us.

The photograph of Mehmandust Tower, which finished second internationally, had been ranked sixth in the Iranian competition.

This is a good example of why each country sends ten photographs to the international round instead of only its national winner. Different juries can see different strengths in a photograph. An image that places sixth in one jury may become one of the strongest photographs in the international competition.

The same happened, to a smaller degree, with other Iranian finalists. The photograph of Arak Bazaar was third nationally and fifth internationally. The photograph of Seyyed Mosque was fourth nationally and later finished 22nd in the international results.

For us, this showed the strength of the national top ten as a group, not only the strength of the first-place photograph.

More than the winning photographs

The international results were a great achievement for the photographers and for Wiki Loves Monuments Iran. But the winning images are only a small part of what the competition produced.

The 2,513 eligible photographs from the Iranian competition are now part of Wikimedia Commons.

They are freely licensed. They can be used on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. They can also be reused outside Wikimedia by anyone who follows the terms of their licenses.

Many of these photographs will never win an award, but that does not make them less useful.

A clear photograph of a little-known monument can be more valuable to Wikipedia than another beautiful photograph of a landmark that already has hundreds of images. A photograph can also document a building, detail, landscape or condition that may not look the same ten or twenty years from now.

This is one of the reasons Wiki Loves Monuments continues to matter.

What we learned from 2025

Looking back, one lesson is clear: the success of Wiki Loves Monuments cannot be measured only by the number of uploads.

Iran received fewer eligible photographs in 2025 than in 2024, with 2,513 compared with 2,722. At the same time, the photographs selected by the national jury had an exceptional result internationally.

This does not mean that the number of contributions is unimportant. We still want more people to take part, and we want to document more monuments. But we also want to help participants create photographs that are useful for Wikimedia projects.

The international results also reminded us of the importance of having a strong and varied national selection. The ten photographs sent to the international round should represent different photographers, places, styles and ways of looking at cultural heritage.

Another important goal is to encourage more photography of less-documented monuments.

With more than 33,000 registered monuments in Iran, there is still a great deal of work to do. Famous places naturally attract photographers, but Wiki Loves Monuments can have an even greater long-term impact when participants visit places that have few photographs or no useful images on Wikimedia Commons.

We also want to keep making the connection between photography and open knowledge clearer.

Uploading a photograph is an important first step. Correctly identifying the monument, adding useful information, using the right monument ID, and eventually adding the photograph to Wikipedia articles can make that contribution much more useful.

Looking toward the next edition

As the next Wiki Loves Monuments Iran approaches, we want to build on what we learned from both 2024 and 2025.

We want to reach new photographers while welcoming returning participants. We want to encourage people to explore monuments that receive less attention. We want more high-quality photographs, but also more photographs that fill real gaps in Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia.

Most of all, we want to continue building a free visual record of Iran’s cultural heritage.

The international success of the 2025 competition gave us something special to celebrate. Four Iranian photographs were among the international winners. Two of them took the first and second places in the world.

But the lasting result of the competition is much bigger than four photographs.

It is the thousands of freely licensed images that are now available to everyone.

The Iranian Wikimedians User Group would like to thank every photographer who participated, the members of the national jury, the volunteers who helped organize the competition, and the international Wiki Loves Monuments community.

As we prepare for the next edition, we hope even more people will join us in photographing, documenting and sharing Iran’s cultural heritage.

There are more than 33,000 monuments to document.

There is still a lot to photograph.

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

Updates for editors

• The Special:CreateAccount page has been simplified as part of ongoing work to modernize the account creation experience. The panel showing project statistics no longer appears next to the form on desktop and mobile web. Multiple account creation experiments show that a simpler form helps newcomers complete registration. [1]
• In order to improve page performance, images now load when they are viewed. This means images lower down an article will not load if a reader never scrolls to that part of the page, which may affect some image-related metrics. [2]
•  View all 42 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where image thumbnails in Abstract Wikipedia could fail to display after the corresponding file was moved on Wikimedia Commons, has now been fixed. Thumbnails will now update correctly when files are moved. [3]

Updates for technical contributors

• User Info card is a feature that helps patrollers see information about user accounts. So far, it has been available only in places such as page history, logs and recent changes. Now, it’s possible to place it in the page content as well, using the {{#uic:}} parser function. It can be particularly useful in templates like {{Userlinks}} (or their specialized variants), as it will make it easier to see the context about a user on various noticeboard pages. The card will be displayed only to users who have it enabled in their preferences. [4]
• Due to user security and privacy risks, we have disabled access to Special:MyPage URLs when specifically using action=raw. If you are impacted by this, consider whether you can use an alternative approach. Special:MyPage URLs can still be accessed and used without action=raw. Specified user page URLs (e.g. User:Myusername) can still be used with action=raw. [5]
• Due to an update, the thumbnailing software has been improved. This includes upgrading librsvg to 2.60 and ImageMagick to 7, as well as resolving a number of long-standing thumbnailing bugs like rendering errors. [6]
•  Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

The difference in the number of women editors and men editors on Wikipedia affects the representativeness of articles and the quality of content, to the detriment of the project’s aspiration to create a universal encyclopedia that compiles all human knowledge. Only a fraction of those who edit are women, and there are entire countries in Latin America whose local reality, municipalities, communities, and history barely appear on Wikipedia.

The Escuela de lideresas of the UG Muj(lh)eres latinoamericanas en Wikimedia was founded on a simple premise: to create a safe space exclusively for women from different Latin American countries where they could learn, without feeling embarrassed or intimidated, the technical and editorial tools of Wikipedia and its sister projects. The school’s mission is to develop editing and management skills, foster women’s leadership, and provide support to women’s communities to collaborate with Wikimedia projects, so that they can sustain the Wikimedia community in Latin America in the long term and, at the same time, reduce the content gaps that disproportionately affect some countries in the region.

El Salvador is an example of a double absence: gender-based and territorial gap. In this new training program, one of the participants, Kat, from El Salvador, identified a specific gap: following the legislative reform that restructured the country’s territorial organization in 2023, several of the new municipalities had no article of their own at all, or had only scattered mentions on other pages. From this observation came the idea of creating three new articles about the municipalities of Santa Ana Oeste, Santa Ana Norte, and Santa Ana Este. Kat researched, looked for official sources, read the new Special Law for Municipal Restructuring, verified demographic and geographic data, and applied Wikipedia’s policies on reliable sources and encyclopedic style that she had learned during the school’s training sessions. She also learned how to categorize and correct articles.

Other articles created by Kat include Las 14 familias de El Salvador, a term coined by the press to describe the Salvadoran oligarchy, and Las Dignas, a feminist political organization founded in El Salvador in 1990. She is now drafting a rather ambitious article on the history of feminism in El Salvador. Each of the articles that Kat created during the training represents Salvadoran territory that was previously, in terms of free knowledge, practically invisible. When a locality does not have an article on Wikipedia, it does not appear in search results, does not feed voice assistants or artificial intelligence systems that are now trained on this open data, and remains outside the shared knowledge ecosystem that millions of people consult every day.

In addition, Kat created an article about Brenda Cerén and another about Claudia Ortiz on Wikiquote, and has been learning to edit Wikidata. She also uploaded photos of her country to Wikimedia Commons. Kat tells us about her experience in her own words:

Bubulina26, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

P: Before participating in the Women Leaders School training sessions, did you have any previous experience in writing, research, or history?

A: -I have been a Wikipedia reader for almost my entire life, for academic reasons and simply out of curiosity. When I want to learn more about a topic, I go to Wikipedia to read. I studied social communication, so we did cover a lot of national and international history, as well as writing techniques. That helped me feel “at home” during the courses and familiar with some resources such as Google Scholar and academic repositories.

P: What motivates you to edit?

A: -I like to think that there are more women and people in general like me who are curious. I want to give them a starting point on the topics I edit, so that they can then do further research and, hopefully, contribute so that the cycle of learning continues.

P: What topics did you edit, and why did you choose those topics?

A: -I have edited articles related to the area where I live. It is little known, and through the links within other articles, it can gain greater visibility. I am also interested in topics related to feminist organizations and national history. I came to these topics when I noticed the “red links” within other articles, especially because they refer to important, interesting, and useful topics that no one had yet had the opportunity to create. When I saw my first article published, I felt proud of my effort, even though on Wikipedia we are all really anonymous. Seeing the article you researched and corrected published, learning about the topic along the way, and knowing that people visit it is a really wonderful feeling.

P: How did you feel, and what difficulties did you encounter when editing?

A: -For now, only paid resources have been an obstacle, because some publications are restricted and can only be accessed by purchasing permission, so you have to work with what is available. Another challenge is finding time to edit, between work and other commitments. Even so, it is worth trying. During the course, I felt welcome. At all times, I felt like an equal, and that the course was a place to learn. There is no need to be ashamed of making mistakes or asking questions, no matter how simple they may seem. From the facilitator to the other participants, we all helped each other. In addition to learning how to write an article from scratch, I learned very useful tricks that make editing easier, resources and websites that can help, things that should not be done while editing or that a published article should not contain, among other things.

P: What would you say to another woman who is thinking about starting to edit but is still hesitant?

A: -It is necessary for women to be editing Wikipedia. For a long time, we have been made invisible in art, science, and many other spaces, both as people and in terms of the topics that interest us. Editing Wikipedia is an opportunity to share what you know or to complement and contribute to biased or incomplete articles.

After 21 years as a Wikimedia contributor, I consider myself a veteran Wikimedian. I have attended many Wikimedia conferences around the world, but Wikimania always feels special. They create incredible opportunities to meet fellow Wikimedians, listen, and learn. However, the highlight of the event for me this year was not the main conference itself, but a pre-conference event: the WikiWomen+ Summit, where I was also honored to give a talk.

The WikiWomen+ Summit brought together fellow Wikimedians in Paris, as well as online via the livestream chat channel. We gathered to reflect on and discuss gender equity, empowerment, and closing content gaps within the Wikimedia movement. This year, participants of the Summit were invited to wear something yellow to celebrate WikiWomen, and I proudly wore my yellow shirt.

During the icebreaker, we shared stories about the first articles we ever wrote and whether we had ever experienced the deletion of a biography about a woman we created. When the talks began, I learned more about the Celebrate Women Campaign and fell in love with its vision, which is deeply inspired by Wikimedia’s overall mission: “Imagine a world in which every single woman can freely share in the sum of all knowledge, and where representative information about all women and non-binary individuals is accessible to everyone, everywhere.”

Sukkoria’s presentations gave us a lot to think about in a short time, from what could potentially go wrong from a WikiWomen+ perspective to how we can responsibly integrate generative AI into wiki workflows.

Leila Zia from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) gave a presentation about Wikipedia readers, revealing that women are underrepresented not only as editors but also as regular readers. I was surprised by this statistic: roughly 65% of readers are reported to be men. This was the first time I had seriously considered what we can do to encourage more women to become frequent Wikipedia readers. 

Among the many great tools and projects introduced at the summit, we were also introduced to a new Wiki Gender Stats tool. I was delighted by Natacha’s roleplay, which brilliantly illustrated what features were needed and why male editors with technical skills often struggle to understand and prioritize those needs. Her roleplay perfectly captured the moment when women decided to take charge:

In my presentation, I addressed how governance and editorial decisions on Wikimedia projects can have consequences far beyond individual content disputes. I shared my concerns about contributors, particularly women+, being blocked or banned because of off-wiki disputes rather than their actual editorial work, and discussed how this can affect both content neutrality and the health of our communities. I explored these questions further in my presentation, “How Editorial Decisions Reach Beyond Wikipedia”, which you can watch here.

This blog post is an interview with Sana Sabir (User:CosmicCodex) reflecting on how WikiWomen+ Summit 2026 influenced her perspective on community, technology, AI, and women’s participation in Wikimedia. She highlights the importance of women supporting one another, the value of human-curated knowledge in the age of AI, and the many ways women can contribute to technical spaces without being programmers. Most importantly, Sana shares concrete plans to take her learnings back to her community through workshops, translation, documentation, and efforts to address knowledge gaps. 

For young Wikimedians, in-person events offer something that online collaboration often cannot – the chance to build genuine relationships, find mentors and peers, exchange ideas across communities, and return home with the confidence to turn inspiration into action. Over the years, the WikiWomen+ Summit has been one such space where women and allies from across the Wikimedia movement come together to share experiences, learn from one another, and explore how they can shape a more inclusive and sustainable future for free knowledge. 

As part of the WikiWomen+ Summit Core Organizing Team, I spoke with Sana about her experience at the Summit, the sessions that influenced her thinking, and the actions she plans to take after returning to her community.

Finding strength in community

When asked about the most valuable part of the Summit, Sana’s answer was not about a particular session or speaker. It was about the women she met.

“The women themselves. Being surrounded by resilient, welcoming leaders who uplifted and encouraged each other without judgment was transformative.”

For Sana, one of the most powerful aspects of the Summit was the openness between participants. Whether someone was an experienced Wikimedian or relatively new to the movement, people were willing to share, discuss, care and support one another.

That experience gave her a stronger sense of belonging within the global Wikimedia community.

Rethinking Wikimedia’s role in the age of AI

One session that particularly changed Sana’s perspective was Christophe’s talk on the next 25 years of Wikimedia.

The discussion about artificial intelligence made her reconsider how she viewed the relationship between AI and Wikimedia. Rather than seeing AI only as a challenge, she came away thinking about the unique value of human-curated and contextual knowledge.

As AI becomes increasingly widespread, Sana believes that Wikimedians have an increasingly important role to play in safeguarding & preserving knowledge that is grounded in human experience and context.

The idea of Wikimedians as “spearheads of knowledge” particularly stayed with her.

It shifted her perspective from asking how Wikimedia might simply respond to AI to thinking about what human contributors can uniquely provide in an increasingly automated information environment.

Looking for what is missing

Another important takeaway for Sana was the need to focus not only on what exists in Wikimedia projects, but also on what is still missing.

Inspired by the discussion around Women in Red, she wants to bring this approach into her own community by organising workshops that help contributors identify gaps in local knowledge.

For Sana, this means looking for overlooked subjects, stories, and perspectives that may not yet be adequately represented.

This idea connects the work of individual contributors with a much larger question: whose knowledge gets documented, and whose stories remain invisible?

Making technology more accessible

Experience and insights from this year’s Summit also prompted Sana to think about the challenges women continue to face in Wikimedia’s technical ecosystem.

She highlighted issues including translation gaps, AI-related bias, copyright transparency, declining readership, and the need for more women to participate in technical contribution.

But one of her strongest takeaways was that technical contribution does not have to mean becoming an expert programmer.

Bee Piovesan’s session particularly influenced this perspective.

Sana realised that women can contribute to Wikimedia’s technical ecosystem in many ways: by usage of translating tools, documenting them, improving accessibility, and helping communities build or use technology that responds to their actual needs.

“I don’t need to be an expert coder; I can contribute by translating tools, documenting them, and making them accessible to other communities.”

For someone who wants to see more women participate in the Wikimedia technical ecosystem, this can be an important shift in thinking. Technical spaces can become more inclusive when contribution is understood beyond writing codes.

An unexpected lesson about editing

Not every takeaway from the Summit was technical.

One moment that surprised Sana was hearing contributors describe editing Wikipedia as something that could be personally meaningful and even therapeutic.

Some contributors shared how focusing on one edit at a time could provide attention, purpose, and a sense of visible progress.For Sana, this offered a different perspective on editing. Contributions are not only about adding knowledge to Wikimedia projects; they can also be personally fulfilling.

It was an unexpected reminder that community participation can affect contributors in ways that go beyond the measurable output of edits or uploads- Satisfaction is a success too 🙂

What should come next?

When asked what she would like to see at a future WikiWomen+ Summit, Sana had a practical suggestion: more hands-on workshops for non-technical participants.

She would like women to have more opportunities to learn how to translate, document, and work with Wikimedia tools, rather than feeling that technical contribution is reserved for experienced developers.She also suggested exploring ways to make Wikipedia more reader-friendly for women, particularly in conversations around gender gaps in readership.

For Sana, inclusion is not only about bringing more women into existing spaces. It is also about making those spaces easier to understand, participate in, and shape.

“You don’t need to code”

Sana’s message to women who are interested in Wikimedia but have not started contributing is simple:

There are many ways to begin: editing an article, translating a tool, documenting technical resources, or helping others use Wikimedia projects.

She encourages women to start small and find a form of contribution that feels meaningful to them.

It is a message that reflects one of the central themes of her Summit experience: there is no single correct way to become a Wikimedia contributor.

Turning a Summit into action

Perhaps the clearest indication of what the Summit meant to Sana is what she plans to do next.

Her first step is to share her learnings with the women of Wiki Club AMU and discuss what their community could address together.

She also plans to document and translate a Wikimedia tool for her community, simplify complex articles to make them more accessible, and continue exploring editing as a personally meaningful practice.

These are concrete actions that connect the Summit to community work beyond the event itself.

When asked to describe her WikiWomen+ Summit 2026 experience in one sentence, Sana called it:

“An empowering revelation that women can code, translate, document, heal, and lead in shaping the future of knowledge, addressing AI bias, simplifying language, and building tools we actually need.”

Her answer brings together the different ways she now sees participation in Wikimedia: through technology, documentation, translation, community building, and leadership.

The Summit gave her new perspectives, but the next step is turning those perspectives into action.

And perhaps that is one of the most valuable outcomes of a community event—not simply leaving with new ideas, but returning home with the confidence and motivation to do something with them.

About the interview

This interview was conducted by Gauri Gupta on behalf of the WikiWomen+ Summit Core Organizing Team.