One of the highlights of my Wikimania experience was taking an evening to visit the Eiffel Tower. Standing there and seeing the Eiffel Tower in all its glory felt surreal. I had seen countless pictures and videos of it before, but being physically present was a completely different experience. There is something special about encountering a place, an artefact, or a cultural moment in real life. Being physically present allows us to experience the atmosphere, emotions, and unexpected moments that surround it.

At the same time, not everyone will have the opportunity to visit every museum, landmark, or cultural site in person. This is where digitisation plays an important role. It creates pathways for more people to discover, learn, and connect with culture in ways that may not have been possible before.

This thought stayed with me as I reflected on the growing movement to digitise culture and knowledge. Museums, archives, libraries, and cultural institutions around the world are increasingly making collections available online, allowing people across the globe to discover histories, artworks, traditions, and stories that they may never have encountered otherwise. However, as conversations around digitising culture continue, questions have also emerged about ownership, sustainability, and who benefits from making cultural resources available online.Some people worry that digitising cultural heritage could reduce visits to museums or allow others to benefit financially from cultural resources without adequately supporting the institutions and communities that preserve them.

I see it differently.

Digitisation can create visibility, and visibility can create curiosity. A person may first discover a cultural object, historical site, or tradition through a digital platform. That discovery may inspire them to learn more, visit the location, support the institution, or engage with the community connected to that heritage.

My visit to the Eiffel Tower was a reminder of this relationship between digital discovery and physical experience.

While I went there to see one of the world’s most recognisable landmarks, I experienced something completely unexpected. I witnessed a proposal taking place. It was my first time seeing a proposal happen in person. My married friends usually only tell me about their proposals after they have happened, so most of my experience has been hearing these stories rather than actually being present for the moment. Seeing the preparation, the excitement, and the emotions unfold in front of me was something special. There were also live performances, people gathering, and countless small moments happening around the tower.

These are the kinds of experiences that cannot simply be uploaded or replicated online. A photograph can capture what a place looks like, but it cannot always capture the atmosphere, the emotions, or the unexpected stories that happen around it.

At the same time, our efforts to digitise culture and expand access to knowledge must come with responsibility.

While standing at the Eiffel Tower, I asked a fellow Wikimedian a question. I wanted to know whether he was familiar with the copyright considerations around photographing the Eiffel Tower at night.

I asked him:

“If I take a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night and upload it on Instagram, have I violated copyright?”

His answer was yes. He then went on to explain why.

The Eiffel Tower itself is in the public domain because its original copyright protection has expired. However, the artistic lighting display that illuminates the tower at night has copyright considerations under French law.

This conversation was a good reminder that documenting and sharing culture involves more than simply capturing beautiful images. It also requires understanding the rights, permissions, and responsibilities connected to those images.

This is why licences matter in the world of open knowledge.

Open access does not always mean that every resource can be reused without conditions. Many cultural institutions and creators share materials under licences such as Creative Commons licences, which allow reuse under specific terms, including proper attribution. Other materials may have different restrictions depending on ownership and copyright status.

As users and consumers of digital cultural resources, we have a responsibility to respect these conditions.

Beyond simply following legal requirements, we should also think about how we can support the people and institutions that preserve cultural knowledge. If digital resources inspire research, creativity, education, or even commercial opportunities, there are many ways to give back. This could include donations, partnerships, volunteering, or amplifying the work of museums, archives, and cultural communities.

Digitising culture does not take away the magic of experiencing it in person.

Instead, it creates more opportunities for people to discover, learn, and connect.

Someone may first encounter the Eiffel Tower through a photograph online. That image may inspire them to visit one day. And when they arrive, they may discover not only the monument itself, but also the unexpected human stories, emotions, and experiences that exist around it.

That is the beauty of culture. It is not only what we preserve and share digitally. It is also what we experience, participate in, and pass on.

This year, Paris was the host city for Wikimania and just a direct train away, I was able to participate in person.

Overview

As usual, I used the learning pattern Documenting your event experience, continuously documenting what I was doing, and who I spoke with, along with notes of thoughts that I got (if you want all the details and not this me-centric overview, check out that last link; I have comments on almost every session). There were many side events and some not in the schedule, but it is safe to say that I partook in more than 20 sessions and was listed as a speaker for two others. During the main days, I spent all my time at the venue when there were sessions on the program and didn’t go on any tours. I have later watched another 26 sessions (but am still catching up on sessions that I missed), so I feel that I have really indulged in the conference. I will delve deeper into the different aspects of my Wikimania experience below.

Podcast

I managed to get hold of one of the organizers for the online parts and recorded a pre-conference interview. Per Wikipediapodden tradition, we did record one episode leading up to Wikimania and one episode summarizing it. These two are, as usual, only available in Swedish.

My sessions

Tabular data vs. structured data – How do we get to a win-win solution?

Early session in the main hall, but it got quite full anyway. Tiny struggle with tech before we got started, but then the panel really took off. Lots of good questions from the audience, both online and in person. I hope we managed to raise the conundrum and plant a few seeds for solutions and that this was a good revival of the discussion.

Putting CommonsDB into use

This was part of my consulting with Wikimedia Sverige and a workshop that got even more productive than I anticipated. I also blogged about the experience, so you can read even more details over at: CommonsDB gaining insights at Wikimania.

Govdirectory – collaborating for impact

A follow-up from the poster last year, this time trying to incorporate even more of the collaborative aspects of the WikiProject. Unfortunately, my poster was one of the ones farthest away from where people were passing by, but since they were up the entire conference, I think many people got a chance to see it. What was good this year was that they had made it easy to unmount and bring along home, so now I can still enjoy it.

Virtual room – lunch session

The organizers did some live streams where they invited speakers for a kind of after-match commentary/interview. It was quite fun, and I was also scheduled for a morning session, but that failed due to technical problems.

Wikimedians for Sustainable Development

While the user group Wikimedians for Sustainable Development didn’t organize any official user group sessions, many members were presenting, and even more people in the community had sessions related to the sustainable development goals. So once again, I created a subpage where I roughly categorized them by SDG goal and type of session. By a bit of a chance, I also managed to squeeze back in a lunch meetup (that had first been rejected due to limited space) that we called Climate change, environmental issues & sustainable development lunch. It was well attended, and I got positive energy from seeing so many in the movement working in the same topic space.

Overall impressions

This was my 18th Wikimania and I must say it was quite a solid one. The venue was good, the scheduling worked nicely, and the hallway track opportunities were perhaps the best so far. I still think there is more potential in connecting the online participants into the conference. Not everyone can go; this year it was attenuated by it selling out super quickly, so a huge part of the community is not there in person. The only big fail was the catering, as the labeling and knowledge by the staff made this, in my opinion, the second worst Wikimania food-wise.

P.S. Videos are still being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and after that all Eventyay content will be migrated to the Wikimania wiki, so expect a few link changes on this post (and possible glitches when there is work in progress).

• From the team: July and Wikimania Have Come and Gone
• Brazil report: Strategic Workshops, Academic Publications, and Bidding Farewell to NeuroMat
• Colombia report: Colombia at Wikimania 2026: panel on how the far-right affects open knowledge institutions
• Egypt report: From Al-Ahram to Zamalek: Exploring Archives and Art Galleries
• France report: GLAM Presentations at Wikimania 2026 + Wiki Fashion Show
• New Zealand report: Launch of Wikifying a Conference handbook; Wikipedia Workshop at Te Toi Uku
• Poland report: GLAM-Wiki partnerships continue opening collections
• Sweden report: At Wikimania and copyright process
• Switzerland report: Faces and Masks – the interwoven relation, Wikimania Paris
• UK report: Wikimania report + New articles in Hindi
• USA report: GLAM USA Report (Past & Upcoming)
• Biodiversity Heritage Library report: Updates on work by BHLWiki Working Group members
• Memory of the World report: Academic paper in preparation
• Wiki Knowledge Park report: Preserving Islamic Cultural Heritage: The GLAM and Metadata Impact of Wiki Loves Ramadan 2026
• Calendar: August’s GLAM events

Updates for editors

•  A new ChartWizard is now available on Wikimedia Commons for users interested in creating charts from their own data. The wizard makes the Chart extension more beginner-friendly by allowing editors to create charts, such as bar and pie charts, without needing to use JSON. Users can still switch to the JSON editor if they prefer. Feedback on the new tool is welcome on the wish talk page.
•  View all 19 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where the Wikipedia iOS app’s Picture of the Day widget displayed the same image every day instead of updating daily, has now been fixed. [1]

Updates for technical contributors

• Math formula SVG images will soon be generated in the browser instead of on the server. MathML continues to be generated on the server and renders in the browser without JavaScript. Wikibooks will see this change on 12 August, Wikisource on 19 August and Wikipedia from 20-27 August. You can try this by selecting “Client side MathJax rendering (for browsers with limited MathML support)” in your preferences. This change is part of deprecating RESTBase and deprecating Mathoid. [2]
• Category pages will soon support sorting entries by the time they are added to a category. This will make it easier to find recently or long-standing categorized pages. It will also improve workflows for maintenance categories such as deletion backlogs and other time-based review tasks. You can use cldsort=timestamp URL argument in category view to sort the entries. [3]
• Gadgets and user scripts on Wikimedia wikis may now use ES2018 features and ES2019 features in JavaScript code. Previously, the platform only allowed up to ES2017. MediaWiki validates the source code to protect functionality from syntax errors and to ensure scripts are valid in all supported browsers. [4]
•  Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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

30/07/2026-05/08/2026

Mapping campaigns

• Uber has proposed, on the OSM Community forum, an organised editing activity to improve pedestrian mapping in 21 countries. Various mappers criticise it due to a lack of details and because Uber has a poor track record in the UK.

Community

• Rphyrin made an Overpass Ultra script for viewing image=* tags in OpenStreetMap.
• MideaFind has used OpenStreetMap data to collect the locations of stores that might sell portable air conditioners.
• Andrea Grandi explained why Book Corners won’t sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap. Pieter Vander Vennet responded in his blog.

Imports

• Oscar Car Rental announced ► that they are planning an organised editing activity to add their 93 missing car rental locations in Germany, along with performing some data maintenance.

OSM research

• Marni Davis documented Atlanta’s immigrant population in the late 19th century, visualising their neighbourhoods on an OpenHistoricalMap basemap.

Maps

• ^[1] Victor Rotariu and his team are developing a live urban heat map that estimates street-level thermal conditions at a resolution of roughly 25 metres. This data will power a new ‘Cool’ routing mode. Rather than selecting only the fastest or shortest cycling route, Cool mode will identify the route with the lowest estimated heat exposure. The goal is simple: help cyclists avoid the hottest streets, enjoy a more comfortable ride, and arrive at their destination with less sweat on hot summer days.

OSM in action

• A 23-year-old student developer from South Korea has created a navigation app for finding shade covered areas, which has shot to the top of the App Store’s navigation apps. The app uses OpenStreetMap data to plot routes.

Software

• HeiGIT presented their latest update on the roadmap toward the new ohsome API 2.0, outlining the next steps in the evolution of the ohsome platform for analysing OpenStreetMap data. The update introduced planned developments, improvements, and future directions aimed at creating a more flexible, efficient, and sustainable API for OSM history data analytics.

Releases

• The CoMaps team published release 2026.07.16, which is now available via Codeberg, F-Droid, Google Play, and the iOS AppStore. This version adds a preview of turn-by-turn directions when creating a route, adds lane guidance and improved next turn descriptions for iOS/CarPlay, per-transport-mode routing options, support for more OSM tags, and many further bug fixes and improvements.
• Organic Maps July 2026 has been released, bringing a collection of bug fixes and general improvements.
• A note for mappers resolving notes: Organic Maps version 2026.07.15 has fixed a long-standing issue, where notes left inside large forest polygons and road lines would always move to the centre of the object. Notes are now added at the user’s click location.
• Tina announced that OsmAnd Astronomy, currently available in the OsmAnd Android 5.4 beta (on paid plans Maps+ and OsmAnd Pro), now includes tools for exploring solar and lunar events. Users can move through a timeline to preview upcoming astronomical events, check eclipse visibility from any location on Earth, and watch exactly how each solar or lunar eclipse will unfold before it actually occurs.
• HeiGIT reported the release of Ohsome-Planet version of 1.3.1, codename ‘Baarle-Hertog‘. This tool is designed to facilitate the transformation of raw OpenStreetMap history data into the geoParquet format, making it more accessible for spatial data analysis.

Did you know that …

• … the OSM Apps Catalog allows you to browse a list of thousands of various map apps?

OSM in the media

• BRUZZ, a local newspaper in Brussels, commented ► on the rise in recent years of private swimming pools in residential neighbourhoods. They praised OSM volunteers for having mapped them and showed maps with their locations.
• Heise’s c’t Open Source Spotlight newsletter reported ► on CoMaps and interviewed OSM community member Bastian Greshake Tzovaras about CoMaps, OSM and free software in general.

Other “geo” things

• Google had integrated its AI image generator ‘Nano Banana 2’ into Google Earth. They removed it two days later after people started abusing it, as the BBC reported.
• The Times of India explained how Polynesian navigators crossed the Pacific Ocean by reading the stars, ocean swells, winds, birds, and clouds to find their way.
• In response to the recent news about Moroccan migrants crossing into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, OpenCage reshared their previously published geo-trivia posts about Spain and Morocco.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
		Online	Racha Mapping Party	2026-07-27 – 2026-08-09
	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM’s 22nd Birthday × OSM India Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-08-08 – 2026-08-09
	臺北市	國立臺灣科技大學研揚大樓412-1教室	COSCUP 2026 State of the Map Taiwan 2026 / Wikidata Community Summit 2026	2026-08-09
	New Delhi	Indian Coffee House, Connaught Place	OSM’s 22nd Birthday × OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.30	2026-08-09
	大阪市	11F, Urban Net Midosuji Building, 4-2-13 Awajicho	OpenStreetMap関西カンファレンス2026 / OSM Kansai Conference 2026	2026-08-09
	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-08-09
	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #91	2026-08-10
	Zürich	Bitwäscherei Zürich	190. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich	2026-08-11
	Hamburg	Voraussichtlich: “Variable”, Karolinenstraße 23	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2026-08-11
		temporärhaus	OSM-Stammtisch Ulm/Neu-Ulm	2026-08-11
			Missing Maps Online Mapathon von Ärzte ohne Grenzen	2026-08-12
	München	Echardinger Einkehr	Münchner OSM-Treffen	2026-08-12
			UN Mappers Mappy Hour	2026-08-13
		Hochschule Rhein-Sieg	OSM auf der FrOSCon 2026 in Sankt Augustin	2026-08-15 – 2026-08-16
	Hannover	Hannover Congress Centrum	OSM auf der Maker Faire Hannover 2026	2026-08-15 – 2026-08-16
		Stadt- und Waagenmuseum Oschatz	Kartenwerkstatt Oschatz	2026-08-16
	Magdeburg	Netz39 e.V. , Leibnizstraße 32, 39104 Magdeburg	3. OSM Stammtisch Magdeburg	2026-08-18
			Missing Maps London Mid-Month for Advanced Mappers (no training provided) (Online) [eng]	2026-08-18
	Chemnitz	Kaffeesatz, Chemnitz	OSM-Stammtisch Chemnitz	2026-08-18
	Bonn	Dotty’s	203. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn	2026-08-18
	Derby	The Brunswick, Railway Terrace, Derby	East Midlands pub meet-up	2026-08-18
		Online	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)	2026-08-18
	Karlsruhe	Vogelbräu Karlsruhe	Stammtisch Karlsruhe	2026-08-19
	Amsterdam	TomTom HQ	Maptime Amsterdam: 2026 Summertime Maptime	2026-08-20
	Potsdam	MachBar	Potsdamer Mappertreffen	2026-08-21
	Stadtgebiet Bremen	Online und im Hackerspace Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen	2026-08-24

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

This weeklyOSM was produced by HeiGIT, MatthiasMatthias, Nakaner, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, TrickyFoxy, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Rajshahi Public Library, Bangladesh, established in 1884, is one of the oldest libraries in Bangladesh. Over more than a century, it has collected a wide range of books. When we opened the first old books in Rajshahi Public Library for GLAM project, it was clear that numerous books were at least a century old. That was when we realized this is the best place for GLAM.

The challenge was to preserve these works without harming the original books and to make their knowledge available beyond the walls of the library. This idea led to the Wikimedia GLAM Project at Rajshahi Public Library, where I joined as a Wikimedian in Residence. The project aims to identify public domain books, digitise them carefully, and make them available through Wikimedia projects, including Wikimedia Commons and Bengali Wikisource.

The possibility of starting a GLAM project at Rajshahi Public Library was explored on 29 April 2026, when members of the Wikimedia Bangladesh visited the library. The visiting delegation comprised Masum-Al-Hasan Rocky, Program Coordinator of GLAM in Bangladesh, Manik, Assistant Coordinator of the Rajshahi Wikimedia Community, and myself . We discussed the library’s collection, preservation needs, and the possibilities of digitising suitable books. On 30 April 2026, a meeting was held between representatives of the Wikimedia Bangladesh and the library’s authorities regarding the proposed collaboration. After reviewing the plan, the library authority provided permission to begin the GLAM project on 2 May 2026. The first scanning work started on 6 May 2026. Using a CZUR ET25 Pro scanner, I scan selected books and process the images using my personal laptop before preparing them for upload.

Each file requires careful attention to page order, image quality, metadata, and copyright information. The digitisation process requires much more than simply scanning pages. Before a book is selected, it must be examined carefully. We check whether the book is suitable for scanning and whether it can be confirmed as being in the public domain. Between 6 May and 31 July 2026, we scanned more than 20,000 pages from around 100 books. These books have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and are being prepared for proofreading on Wikisource.

Through Wikisource, volunteers can convert scanned pages into Unicode text, correct errors, and make the books readable.

The most difficult part of this work is not operating the scanner. It is deciding when a book should not be scanned. Many books in the library are very old and have suffered from years of deterioration. Some have been damaged by insects. Others have lost their first or last pages, which often contain important information such as the author’s name, publication year, and publisher. Without these details, confirming copyright status can become impossible. Some books are so fragile that turning the pages itself creates a risk of damage. In these situations, preservation must come before digitisation.

There are also books where previous repairs created new challenges. Some volumes were rebound in a way that covered parts of the printed text near the spine. Technically, removing the binding and scanning individual pages could solve the problem, but doing so could permanently damage already fragile books. For this reason, we follow a simple principle: a digitisation project should never harm the collection it is trying to preserve.

When scanning books, the airflow from a ceiling fan can sometimes cause the pages to move, resulting in blurred images. This is a significant challenge, especially in a tropical country like Bangladesh, where working without a fan during the hot season is extremely difficult. As a result, we have to scan books very carefully to ensure that the pages remain still and the images are not blurred.

The work at Rajshahi Public Library is still continuing. During the project, we have identified around 100 additional books that may be suitable for future digitisation. Our long-term goal is to preserve all eligible public domain books from the library’s collection and make them available through Wikimedia projects. However, the vision extends beyond a single institution. The experience gained from this project can help develop similar GLAM initiatives in other libraries across Bangladesh. Many libraries in the country hold rare collections that remain unknown to the wider world. By preserving these pages today, we help ensure that future generations can continue to read, learn, and discover the voices of the past.

Wikipedia’s credibility relies on its sources. To help editors reliably evaluate external references, a group of us at WikiCredCon 2025 built WikiSignals.org, a searchable database of website credibility indicators. Our goal is to include the trove of reference-reliability data in Wikimedia. But their lack of structured data and accessibility is an obstacle. This is our appeal to the community for help helping you. We need the community’s assistance with four proposals:

1. Wikimedia: Create a standardized, machine-readable template for Reliable Sources pages.
2. Wikipedia: Make external-link count by website domain easy to machine-harvest.
3. Wikidata: Populate missing news-source data in Wikidata, especially from Wikipedia article Infoboxes. 
4. Wikidata: Extend the news-source related properties in Wikidata.

Reliable/Perennial Sources

Wikipedians have spent 25 years defining reliable sources. Only 15 language projects (out of 347 active projects as of July 2026) have their own Reliable Sources Page (RSP). These lists have little coordination. Their formats vary wildly. At least six tools harvest the RSPs, including the popular Cite Unseen and Unreliable Source Detector. We each have our own parsing methods and frequency. This is inefficient.

A shared, standardized, consensus-based, and machine-readable template for RSP data would go a long way for projects in other languages to have their own RSPs. A Phabricator ticket related to this proposal is already underway.

Further, it would give language projects more visibility in how others classify domains. Currently, domains spam-blocklisted in one language are used in thousands of external links in another, a problem we suspect is partly driven by the lack of a shared resource.

External-link counts

We view a website’s external-link count — the total times its domain appears in the References, Citations, Notes, or External link sections — as a critical signal of credibility, proportional to Wikipedians’ trust in that site.

Currently, three services return a domain’s link count: a search form, the Quarry SQL tool, and an API. The language-agnostic reference risk model gives a related count of how many pages cite that domain. However, each has limitations: the search can’t limit results by namespace (e.g., articles only), Quarry lacks API access, the API’s pagination loops hit limits for high-count domains (complicated further by miser mode), and the reference risk model has not been updated since 2024.

At present, we rely on a kludged combination of API and Quarry results for an incomplete count. We propose creating an easily accessible way to get a domain’s external-link count totals, for a specific language and for all languages. Community wishes to add and update that data are included in the Community Wishlist.

Wikidata

Wikidata has more than 92,000 entries for news-related organizations. Currently, though, most of those entries lack critical credibility-related data.

Some of that missing Wikidata is in Wikipedia Infoboxes. The community needs an effort to populate this information in Wikidata, and existing information from Wikipedia article Infoboxes is one place where we can start.

We’ll be uploading WikiSignals’ wealth of data (on 70,000+ domains) into Wikidata in the coming months. However, there’s no place to store a key type of information. Adding this property would help Wikimedians evaluate reference reliability: 

• ‘indexed by’ — We need a property to indicate that a news source is included in a vetted list of legitimate media, such as Global Project Oasis. This is a valuable reliability signal, but we currently have no way to connect the index with the indexed item. Our request for comment is on Wikidata.

We’re not experienced Wikimedians and need assistance shepherding these new-property proposals. We can share our work harvesting RSP data and external-link counts. Please join us: Help us help you.

What I Learned About 3 Zero-Funding Programs You Can Do. Link of session slides (Google slides)

I’m a volunteer with the Wikimedia Tanzania community, I contribute to Wikimedia Commons, Lingua Libre, Wikidata and Swahili Wikipedia. I attended Wikimania 2026 in Paris on a Tandem Scholarship funded by Wikimedia Deutschland. As someone engaging to grow our local community, I went into this workshop curious about what’s possible without a budget at all and left with more than I expected.

There are countless knowledge gaps out there that volunteers and communities can start closing today, with the knowledge we already have. And often, that work is exactly what opens doors to bigger platforms, partnerships, and more opportunities in the movement.

Asaf Bartov’s workshop had 3 parts but I will share about two first parts.  

1: A streamlined contribution campaign for complete newcomers.

The mechanic: recruit people with no editing background, and teach them the basics of contributing through structured data-entry on Wikidata, using tools like Cradle or Tabernacle. These tools enable rapid start, and real contributions a newcomer can make a genuine edit almost immediately, without first wading through wikitext syntax or policy pages. At the end of the campaign, you collect the names of everyone who’s interested in becoming an ongoing member of the community.

What shifted for me wasn’t the mechanics themselves. It was a message on one of the slides (FAQ)

Q: Are you saying we shouldn’t ask for grants?
A: No! By all means ask for grants! I am just reminding you there are always things you can do without any funding, too.

Q: Wouldn’t it hurt our chances to get a grant, if we are seen to do work without a budget?
A: No! On the contrary: a track record of effective work without funding would encourage a grant officer to empower you further with funding!

That reframed something, I’d been treating community growth as something that needs funding first, momentum second. This session flipped that order. The highest-leverage growth work often costs nothing but coordination — and doing it well can make the case for funding later, not the other way around.  

2: Documenting your government on Wikidata
the goal is to Improve your own country’s documentation of public contact points on Wikidata GovDirectory by network with government officials, encouraging them to keep the resources up-to-date.

If your government has a public commitment to accessibility, you can try contacting the people/agency specifically tasked with ensuring this accessibility, and suggest to them that GovDirectory is one good vehicle for achieving this accessibility.

You can start here: –

1. In Wikidata, go to [[WD:GD]]
2. Find your country
3. Run some queries, see if the information is current.
   For example, is the number and names of current ministries correct? Are there embassies missing? Social media accounts missing?
4. Fix all the things!

Just over two months ago, we introduced three tools built by and for community language documenters: Subtitler, Tome, and Bento. They were alpha/beta then. We want to update that all three are now stable, thanks to our fellow technical contributors. We’re also introducing a fourth tool, the OpenSpeaks Media Dashboard (OMD), to help documenters see how media files are used across Wikimedia projects.

Subtitler, Tome, and Bento: from alpha to stable

OpenSpeaks Subtitler is our flagship tool and a subtitle editor. In addition to captioning/subtitling, it can now fetch audio, video, and subtitle files from Wikimedia Commons, edit and machine-translate subtitles, and upload the subtitles back to Commons. It has gotten simpler: load a file, caption it, translate it, publish it, without leaving the tool. A side-by-side translation panel with machine-translation assistance is in place, too. Our future plan is to add a feature for automatic speech recognition (ASR)-assisted rough drafts, though ASR is still weak or absent for Indigenous and various local languages.

OpenSpeaks Tome now supports both metadata and licensing agreements. The metadata section has five tabs: Basic Info, Production, People, and Subtitles. The People tab captures what the Oral Knowledge Framework actually asks for: gender, birth year, Wikidata QIDs, and named roles for interviewers, interviewees, transcribers, and reviewers. Import covers OpenSpeaks Archives XML/JSON, Commons wikitext, ELAR’s Lameta/OPEX, and LAC’s BLAM/CMDI; export covers Commons wikitext, OpenSpeaks JSON, Markdown, and HTML. Within the tool, we have made a major addition: a language database mapping ISO 639 codes to standard and endonym names and language varieties/dialects. This list is prepared by cross-checking against Glottolog and Wikipedia. It’s small, but exactly the kind of infrastructure oral-knowledge work has had to improvise around for years. Now, any user can type the first few characters of a language/language variety/dialect name and choose from a list. We plan to use this list in Subtitler and other OpenSpeaks tools, and others can use it too.

OpenSpeaks Bento was released as a stable version on 1 July 2026. Its three original utilities are intact as tabs: Organise renames and organises files correctly within folders; Duration helps assess the duration of individual audio and video files, as well as the total audio and video duration; and Compress helps compress files for easy sharing with colleagues. The v.1.0 added a fourth tab, Analyse Media, which can pull codec, resolution, loudness, and SHA-256 checksum data for archival-quality checks. Bento also adopted Wikimedia’s Codex design system in this release, fixing accessibility issues. It still remains an offline utility and works after being loaded once.

Introducing OpenSpeaks Media Dashboard

We’re adding a fourth tool to our tool suite—OpenSpeaks Media Dashboard (OMD).

While our other tools serve the language speaker and Wikimedia communities alike, OpenSpeaks Media Dashboard is primarily for Wikimdian-language archivists. It helps Commons contributors visualise the impact of their contributions by showing statistics.

Input a Wikimedia Commons category containing audio, video and images and run it: it queries Wikimedia’s public APIs in real time, showing which pages across Wikimedia projects use those files, how many people viewed those pages each month, in which language editions, and in which Wikimedia projects, and by which file types. You can see monthly pageview charts, a project breakdown, a file-type view, a table of the most-viewed pages, and export the visualisation as SVG or PNG, or the raw query results as CSV. Most importantly, it can produce an analysis report in wiki code that can be edited to create an on-wiki report. Reports for a particular category can be shared via a link or QR code if one prefers to test themselves. The only downside is it queries live and stores nothing between runs, due to not having a server. As Wikimedia’s pageview processing lags by several weeks, the statistics may be slightly outdated, though that is not an issue introduced by this tool. It faithfully transforms what can be queried in a human-readable manner.

Why did we build this? Impact for oral knowledge work begins with counting the files uploaded. But counting readers helps to understand what that knowledge means to the readers. We hope that OMD can help documenters and project coordinators see how their Commons uploads are used across various Wikimedia projects and language editions. Non-language documentation projects that see image, audio and video contributions can use OMD too. We have used several tools, including GLAMorous, GLAMorgan, and GLAM Stat Tool – Cassandra in the past. But analysing the data took longer, so we started working on OMD to enable quick periodic analysis. The tool has its own built-in help tab, just like Subtitler (to be done soon), Tome, and Bento, which have self-contained user help pages. Check out OMD at https://omd.toolforge.org and let us know whether it works or where it breaks.

Thank you, Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Hyderabad

Indic Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 kindly invited us to mentor community developers Arpitha Bhandary and Govind Lal T. L to improve the OpenSpeaks tool suite. During 25–28 June, we joined 56 other fellow Wikimedians at the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad. For three days, Arpitha and Govind fixed countless bugs and built new features into Subtitler and Tome. We were joined by Bharathesha A from the Tulu Wikimedia community, who shared many useful insights drawn from his experience documenting Tulu cultural events, whereas Jnanaranjan Sahu, a long-time Odia Wikimedian and an advisor to OpenSpeaks, provided technical guidance and mentorship.

Arpitha wrote afterwards that the hackathon “was more than just a hackathon… it was an experience I’ll always cherish,” and that what stayed with her most was the mentorship: “not once did anyone make me feel discouraged.” Govind called it “three amazing days” and said contributing code that will benefit the community was a rewarding experience.”

Bharathesha supported the project as an editor throughout, giving Arpitha and Govind the community-side read on what documenters actually need. Jnanaranjan Sahu co-mentored the OpenSpeaks track with me. Though Ranjith Siji, the lead developer for Subtitler, couldn’t attend in person, he reviewed and merged the pull requests that came out of the hackathon. Opino Gomango, our OpenSpeaks Fellow for eastern Indian languages, also shared input to improve Subtitler, as he has been one of the earliest testers of the tool since its inception.

What we need from the Wikimedia community

• Testers: try Subtitler, Tome, Bento, and Media Dashboard with real recordings and real Commons categories, and tell us what works, what breaks and what can be improved.
• Wikimedians working with audio, video, or oral history on Commons: tell us where these tools fit into your workflow, and where they don’t and why.
• Developers: Subtitler and Tome still have open questions around ASR and deeper Commons/Wikidata integration. You can help us integrate them.
• Community documenters and coordinators: if you’re writing an impact or grant report, try OMD in your project’s Commons category and tell us whether the numbers are actually useful to you.

You can do all of the above on the discussion page of our tool page on Meta-wiki.

Links

• OpenSpeaks Subtitler: tool (repository)
• OpenSpeaks Tome: tool (repository)
• OpenSpeaks Bento: tool (repository)
• Media Dashboard: tool (repository)

Wikimedia UK has been informed of a data security incident involving Beacon CRM, the platform we use to manage our contacts database.

Beacon detected the incident on 29 July 2026 and informed us on 3 August. Beacon’s current understanding is that compromised login details were used to access its systems and download copies of database backups. Their investigation is ongoing and, at this stage, we are not aware of the information having been published online or misused.

Beacon has secured its systems and is investigating the incident with external cyber-security specialists. It has also informed the relevant authorities.

Wikimedia UK has revoked and reconnected all Beacon integrations and security keys, including connections with forms, payment services and email platforms. We have also reported the incident to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Following an internal risk assessment, we have decided that the information currently available and the type of data we hold do not warrant contacting all members, donors and other contacts directly. We do not store sensitive personal information, dates of birth, bank details or full payment-card details in Beacon. We have contacted our volunteers directly because their records may include information about their volunteering relationship with Wikimedia UK, as well as basic contact details.

There is no action that individuals need to take at this time. However as a general precaution, please remain alert to unexpected emails or messages claiming to be from Wikimedia UK or Beacon. 

Beacon is continuing its investigation and strengthening its security measures. We will monitor developments closely and will contact individuals directly if further information identifies a specific risk or action they should take.

We recognise that incidents of this kind can be unsettling. Please be assured that we are doing everything within our control to protect your information and maintain the highest possible standards of data security.

Anyone with questions or concerns can contact us at: info@wikimedia.org.uk.

The post Statement on Beacon CRM security incident appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

July for Wikimedia Ghana User Group was a month of collaboration, learning, and community participation. We localized Wikimedia features for Ghanaian language Wikipedias, took our Wiki Loves Places 2026 campaign to the streets through a photo walk, and connected with the global Wikimedia movement during Wikimania 2026.

Here’s what we’ve been up to!

WMGH Hosted a Localization Workshop to Translate Suggestion Mode Feature to Ghanaian Pidgin

On 11 July 2026, we hosted a localization workshop to translate interface messages of the Suggestion Mode feature under Edit Check for the Ghanaian Pidgin Wikipedia through Translatewiki.net.

Both new and experienced contributors learned how to translate on translatewiki and explored best practices for producing high-quality translations.

By the end of the workshop, all 110 messages for the Suggestion Mode feature had been translated into Ghanaian Pidgin. We look forward to localizing more of Wikimedia’s widely used features to make them more accessible for contributors.

Read more on Diff: Localization of Wikimedia Features: Translating Suggestion Mode for Ghanaian Language Wikipedias

Wiki Loves Places – Kukun Photo walk

We partnered with Kukun, a workspace and cafe in Accra, Ghana, to take the Wiki Loves Places campaign to the streets of Osu Ako-Adjei on 18 July 2026 in a photo walk. 

Participants worked in groups, using physical maps to explore the neighbourhood and captured geotagged photos of roads, landmarks, businesses, and other places in the area.

These photos will help improve free online maps and make Osu Ako-Adjei easier to find and explore. We thank everyone who participated! Every photo helps make knowledge about Ghana more freely accessible.

Check out event photos and geotagged images here: Wiki Loves Places 2026 Osu Ako-Adjei Photo walk

Wikimania 2026

Wikimania 2026 brought together Wikimedians from around the world to learn, share ideas, and connect. 

To help our community get the most from the conference, we curated recommended virtual sessions covering topics that support individual growth of contributors to the community development as a whole. 

Wikimedia Ghana User Group also contributed a session, “Supporting Participation or Creating Transactional Engagement? Rethinking Internet Data Refunds as Volunteer Support”, exploring approaches to sustainable volunteer support in participation.

We hope all who participated found the sessions inspiring and have fresh ideas to share and apply within our community.

Opportunities!

Wikimania 2026 Swag Giveaway

Wikimedia Ghana User Group will be giving away Wikimania 2026 swag to members of the community. Community members who joined virtual Wikimania sessions are eligible for a Wikimania 2026 swag giveaway. More details about the giveaway will be announced soon.

Check out giveaway swag here: Wikimania 2026 Swag- Giveaway

Find Articles to Edit with SuggestBot!

Not sure what to edit on Wikipedia?

SuggestBot recommends articles that need improvement based on your editing history and interests, delivering  personalized article suggestions directly to your Wikipedia talk page!

Read our step-by-step guide on how to set up SuggestBot and start receiving article recommendations today: Guide 

Looking Ahead

We look forward to more opportunities to learn, collaborate, and grow together through workshops, campaigns, and other community activities in the months ahead.

As always, thank you for every edit and effort that helps expand the sum of all free knowledge. 

Warmly,
Wikimedia Ghana User Group

Oliver Wunsch is an associate professor in the Art, Art History, and Film Department at Boston College.

A few months ago, a student stopped by my office at Boston College to discuss the sources for her Wikipedia Assignment research project. She was enrolled in one of the art history courses in which I ask students to revise and expand a Wikipedia article on an artwork related to our course’s themes. She had taken seriously my requirement that she base most of her research on physical books from the Boston College library, and she proved the point by stacking them on my desk when she arrived to talk. I asked whether the trip to the library had gone smoothly. She replied that it had gone well, even though it was the first time she had checked out any books during her time at college. She then said something that I found puzzling: “I felt like I was in a movie about college.” I asked what she meant, and she pointed out that nobody carried books around campus in real life, at least not anymore. She had only seen it in movies, presumably old or inaccurate ones.

Why do I make my students engage in this antiquated ritual of taking out books from the library? In part, I insist on it because many of the most important art historical sources remain books that, for the time being, are not fully accessible online. But in recent years, with the rise of artificial intelligence, I have come to see this practical necessity as secondary to a deeper goal: to show students that the process of acquiring a piece of information changes its value and meaning; knowledge gleaned from a scholarly book, full of footnotes and supporting evidence, carries a different significance from something generated by ChatGPT.  

It might seem paradoxical that I seek to impart this message while asking my students to write articles for Wikipedia, which has historically served as the preferred information source of underprepared students across the world. When I ask my students at the beginning of the semester what first comes to mind when I say Wikipedia, many of them recall teachers in high school who told them not to use it. Yet Wikipedia’s traditional association with poorly researched papers belies the platform’s sophisticated policies around citation practices and reliable sources. It is these policies that have turned Wikipedia into a powerful ally in my effort to demonstrate to students not only that books still matter in the age of AI, but also that how you learn a fact matters as much as the fact itself.

Among the Wikipedia policies that I have found useful in conversations with students about AI, the most salient one has been the requirement of verifiability. The policy is simple enough to explain to students: a reader should be able to verify that the facts and claims in a Wikipedia article come from reliable sources. Wikipedia editors therefore need to include inline citations to their sources, and when citing books or long articles, they should point readers to the specific page numbers where the information appears. I sometimes expand on the principle by saying to students that every Wikipedia article needs to be easy to reverse engineer. Anyone should be able to figure out how the editors of the article put it together from its source material. Such a principle, of course, runs directly counter to the nature of large language models, whose processes of text generation are hardly transparent. The power and peril of generative AI lie precisely in the fact that, unless explicitly connected to a retrieval system or source database, it does not typically answer questions by gathering information from a specific source; instead, it generates text by predicting likely sequences of words based on patterns in its training data and the prompt itself. This design makes LLMs excellent at producing plausible replies that are very often true yet impossible to verify by tracking information back to its source. For this reason, the logic of generative AI runs counter to the principle of verifiability, and it makes good sense that Wikipedia’s current policies prohibit using LLMs to generate or rewrite article content, apart from limited uses such as copyediting one’s own writing. 

Policies, of course, only get you so far. If students don’t understand the reason for a rule, or if they don’t believe you can enforce it, they are unlikely to take it too seriously. I therefore spend substantial time early in the semester showing students some of the limits of LLMs in generating verifiable research. For example, I recently demonstrated to students how the current version of ChatGPT would respond if I enlisted its help for research on Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, the topic of one student’s Wikipedia article. While ChatGPT provided a competent overview of the sculpture and an impressive bibliography composed mostly of real sources, it faltered when I asked it to connect information about the sculpture to specific sources. Rather than cite the most important books in the bibliography that it had just produced, it instead provided links to various websites, some more credible than others. When I then asked why it had not cited any of the authoritative books on the topic, which offer much more extensive analysis of the sculpture than the online sources, it acknowledged a limitation: “most major Michelangelo books… are not fully readable online, so I can’t responsibly ‘cite’ them.”

I wish I could say that these demonstrations have completely dissuaded students from using AI on the assignment. In truth, I still have several students each semester who turn to LLMs when drafting their articles. Here, I am grateful that Wikipedia allows students to work on drafts in “sandboxes,” where I can typically identify issues before students publish anything to Wikipedia’s public-facing “mainspace.” I also appreciate the Pangram AI detector built into the Wiki Education dashboard, which scans these sandbox drafts and notifies both the student and me of any suspicious text. When I follow up with students about these issues, I do not generally make direct accusations about AI use or seek confessions, especially since no AI detector is 100% accurate. Instead, I focus on the question of verifiability. In my experience, almost all the passages flagged by the AI detector fail the verifiability standard. When I check the sources that the student has cited, I usually cannot find the information in the source, at least not on the cited page. In the few cases where the cited source does correspond to the flagged text, then the source is almost always a website and not one of the more authoritative publications on the topic. I can then remind the student of our conversations earlier in the semester about the importance of verifiability and reliable sources for maintaining Wikipedia’s credibility. This approach serves several purposes. First, it allows me to avoid lengthy, antagonistic debates about whether the student used AI. Second, it ensures that we concentrate on ways to remedy the problem rather than on culpability. And most importantly, it shifts the focus to the underlying issue of what makes writing trustworthy. 

Working through these questions of evidence and credibility with students has had unexpected benefits beyond the Wikipedia Assignment itself. Students often draw upon our Wikipedia conversations about AI later in the semester when we discuss trust and truth in visual representation. Students made those connections this past spring toward the end of my course The Medium Shapes the Message: Materials and Technologies of Visual Communication. In the final unit, we turned to digital images in the age of AI, seeking to establish some techniques for evaluating the veracity of images today. One day, I provided my students with a group of about twenty pictures of Boston College students around campus, half of which came from our campus photographer and the other half of which I generated using AI. When students discussed how they might authenticate the images, one student made the connection to the principle of verifiability: just as we check the credibility of a Wikipedia article by tracing information back to its source, we might verify a photograph by comparing inconspicuous background elements against architectural details or landscape features actually present on campus. 

In that moment, it became clear that the conversation about AI use in the Wikipedia project amounted to something bigger than enforcing an anti-cheating policy. It pushed the class to think much more deeply about the relationship between knowledge, representation, and authenticity. Another student, I should note, drew upon the lessons of the Wikipedia project to arrive at an even simpler means of separating the real photographs from the fake ones: only in the AI-generated images of Boston College students did we see anyone carrying any books, presumably because the AI model had been trained on stock imagery from an earlier era. I imagine the models will catch up soon. Or perhaps, with renewed interest in verifiable sources, we may see a few students walking across campus with books in hand once again.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia Assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada. Priority deadline for fall 2026 courses: Wednesday, August 12, 2026