Planet Wikimedia (en),

Documenting Nigerian Cultural and Everyday Life Through Wiki Loves Africa 2026

Diff — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:00:00 GMT

The Igala Wikimedia Community successfully participated in Wiki Loves Africa 2026 – Rites & Rituals, joining contributors across the continent in documenting and sharing Africa’s stories through freely licensed media. Through a combination of online and in-person activities, the campaign provided an opportunity for community members to learn about Wikimedia Commons, contribute media files, and showcase diverse aspects of Nigerian culture and everyday life to a global audience.

Wiki Loves Africa is an annual photography, video, and audio competition that encourages Africans to document their communities and cultures and make these resources freely available on Wikimedia Commons. For the Igala Wikimedia Community, the campaign served as a platform for preserving local knowledge, telling everyday life story of Nigerians, promoting cultural representation, and introducing new contributors to the Wikimedia movement.

Engaging New Contributors Through Training and Community Outreach

To support participation, the organizing team hosted two campaign events designed to introduce contributors to Wikimedia Commons, free licensing, media documentation techniques, and guide them through the submission process for Wiki Loves Africa 2026.

The campaign began with an online training session held on 13 March 2026 via Zoom, which attracted 19 participants. The session provided an overview of the Wiki Loves Africa campaign, guidance on creating Wikimedia Commons accounts, best practices for photography and media documentation, and practical instructions on uploading files to Commons.

Online launch for Wiki Loves Africa 2026 in Igala community

Physical launch for Wiki Loves Africa 2026 in Igala community

This was followed by a physical training and community meetup on 14 March 2026 at Enspire Hub, Maitama, Abuja. The event brought together 20 participants for hands-on learning, discussions on open knowledge, and practical support for contributors preparing to participate in the competition. The in-person gathering also created an opportunity for participants to network, share experiences, and strengthen community ties.

The campaign attracted 20 participants overall, including 7 new contributors who joined Wikimedia projects for the first time. Through training, mentorship, and ongoing support, participants learned how to contribute high-quality media to Wikimedia Commons and make their work accessible to a global audience.

Capturing and Sharing Nigerian Stories

Participants documented a wide range of subjects that reflect the richness and diversity of daily life in Nigeria. Their efforts resulted in the upload of 237 photographs and 1 audio recording to Wikimedia Commons, contributing valuable open-access resources that can be used across Wikimedia projects and beyond.

One of the highlights of the campaign was a participant-led group photowalk organized in Yola by our community members who joined the campaign launch virtually. The photowalk provided contributors with an opportunity to document local environments, cultural expressions, and everyday experiences while applying the skills they had gained during the training sessions. The activity encouraged collaboration among participants and contributed significantly to the collection of media submitted during the campaign.

The submissions captured elements of community life, cultural practices, occupations, local environments, traditions, and everyday experiences in Nigeria. Together, these contributions help improve the visual representation of Nigerian communities on Wikimedia Commons and ensure that more authentic African stories are accessible to people around the world.

The campaign category and submitted works can be explored through the project page: https://w.wiki/QjuP

Celebrating Outstanding Contributions

At the conclusion of the campaign, the organizing team recognized outstanding contributors whose submissions demonstrated creativity, quality, and strong representation of the campaign theme.

The first prize was awarded to a contributor whose work stood out for its visual storytelling, it captures the ritual of beautifying an African woman submitted by User:Meritkosy.

In a quiet home in Abuja, a woman’s natural hair is skillfully braided in a moment that goes beyond everyday grooming. Rooted in African rites and rituals, hair braiding has long served as a cultural practice that symbolizes identity, community, beauty, and belonging. Traditionally, these intimate sessions created spaces for storytelling, bonding, and the passing down of values from one generation to another. Today, the ritual of caring for natural hair continues to preserve indigenous knowledge and celebrate African heritage while embracing contemporary expressions of self-care and pride.

The second prize recognized another exceptional contribution that effectively captured the everyday life in the market in Nigeria submitted by User:CalebTokula6.

Every morning, people gather at the market as part of a daily ritual of trade, interaction, and community life. The market comes alive with the movement of buyers and sellers exchanging goods, stories, and livelihoods. Beyond commerce, this routine reflects a longstanding cultural practice that sustains families, strengthens social connections, and preserves the vibrant rhythm of everyday life.

The third prize was awarded to User:Obedmakolo whose work added unique value to the collection of media documenting ritual of making money from selling local snacks, daily life of an Hausa young girl.

A young girl sits in a busy market, carefully frying awara, a beloved local Hausa delicacy, as the aroma fills the air around her. Her work reflects more than street food preparation; it is part of a daily cultural ritual that connects food, livelihood, and community. Through practices like these, traditional recipes and local culinary heritage continue to thrive, preserving the rich flavors and identity of Northern Nigerian culture for future generations

These contributions demonstrate the important role community members play in preserving and sharing local knowledge through open platforms.

Building a Stronger Open Knowledge Community

Beyond the media contributions, Wiki Loves Africa 2026 served as a capacity-building initiative for the Igala Wikimedia Community. The campaign provided participants with practical skills in photography, documentation, digital literacy, and Wikimedia contribution workflows.

The involvement of 11 new editors highlights the campaign’s role in expanding participation within the Wikimedia movement and creating pathways for sustained engagement in future projects. By contributing media that represents their communities and experiences, participants became active contributors to the global effort to close knowledge and representation gaps about Africa.

Looking Ahead

The success of Wiki Loves Africa 2026 demonstrates the growing enthusiasm for open knowledge initiatives within the Igala Wikimedia Community. The campaign not only generated valuable media content but also strengthened local participation in Wikimedia projects and encouraged more people to document their communities and cultures for future generations.

As the community continues to grow, the skills, partnerships, and momentum developed during the campaign will support future efforts to preserve and share knowledge through Wikimedia platforms. The organizing team extends its appreciation to all participants, volunteers, and supporters whose contributions made the campaign a success.

Through their photographs, audio contributions, and collaborative activities, participants helped tell stories of Nigerian cultural and everyday life that might otherwise remain undocumented. Their contributions enrich Wikimedia Commons and contribute to a more diverse and representative visual record of Africa.

Documenting Nigerian Cultural and Everyday Life Through Wiki Loves Africa 2026

Diff — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Engaging New Contributors Through Training and Community Outreach

Online launch for Wiki Loves Africa 2026 in Igala community

Physical launch for Wiki Loves Africa 2026 in Igala community

Capturing and Sharing Nigerian Stories

The campaign category and submitted works can be explored through the project page: https://w.wiki/QjuP

Celebrating Outstanding Contributions

At the conclusion of the campaign, the organizing team recognized outstanding contributors whose submissions demonstrated creativity, quality, and strong representation of the campaign theme.

The first prize was awarded to a contributor whose work stood out for its visual storytelling, it captures the ritual of beautifying an African woman submitted by User:Meritkosy.

The second prize recognized another exceptional contribution that effectively captured the everyday life in the market in Nigeria submitted by User:CalebTokula6.

These contributions demonstrate the important role community members play in preserving and sharing local knowledge through open platforms.

Building a Stronger Open Knowledge Community

Looking Ahead

Learning from People Who Work in Open Knowledge

Diff — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Participants, organizers, and speakers at WikiCendekia 2026

Starting My Journey in the Wikimedia Indonesia (WMID) Ecosystem

My internship at the Education Division of Wikimedia Indonesia (WMID) became one of the experiences that changed how I see knowledge, collaborative work, and the learning process itself. At the beginning, I came with a fairly simple understanding of Wikimedia. At the time, I understood Wikimedia mainly as something closely related to Wikipedia. Only later did I realize that Wikipedia is just one of many projects under Wikimedia, as the organization that supports and drives them.

My understanding began to grow during the orientation period for new interns, particularly through the WikiLatih Online sessions, a program that introduces how Wikipedia works while guiding participants to make their first contributions. In this session, the learning focused on editing the Indonesian-language Wikipedia, from understanding article structures and using reliable sources to practicing editing directly. From there, I began to understand the Wikimedia ecosystem more comprehensively. I learned that Wikipedia articles are written by volunteers and realized that contributing to Wikimedia projects is not limited to Wikipedia alone. There are many other projects such as Wikidata, Wikivoyage, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, and initiatives that promote knowledge in local languages, all of which open up wide opportunities for collaboration.

In this context, the Education Division plays an important role through programs such as WikiLatih, WikiLatih Mahir, and WikiCendekia, which became the main focus of my internship. Through this involvement, I had the opportunity to contribute to the development of capacity within the open knowledge community.

Understanding the Work Culture at WMID

In the early stage of my internship, I started learning how to edit articles on Indonesian Wikipedia. This experience helped me realize that editing involves more than writing. It requires finding reliable sources, understanding them properly, and presenting the information in a clear and responsible way. I found this process quite challenging, especially because it demands consistency and attention to detail. At the same time, I also began to understand the working culture at Wikimedia Indonesia. The staff works in an open and collaborative manner while still maintaining professional boundaries, even though the entire process is conducted remotely.

From Preparation to the Implementation of WikiCendekia 2026

WikiCendekia 2026 is a training program designed for administrators of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to strengthen their capacity in managing the projects while also providing a space for them to share knowledge and experiences. The program is a continuation of previous training initiatives such as WikiPelatih and earlier editions of WikiCendekia, and in 2026, it was held in Surabaya. At this stage, I began to learn more deeply about how the program was designed and implemented. At first, I imagined WikiCendekia as an ordinary technical training. However, as the process went on, I began to understand that the program has a more specific focus, particularly in strengthening the capacity of administrators across various Wiki projects such as Wikipedia, Wikisource, and other projects in local languages.

Education team members, Gio and Navee serving as hosts at WikiCendekia 2026

During the preparation process, I was involved in several aspects of organizing the program. At the initial stage, I helped draft the training agenda and prepare guidance documents and administrative materials, including coordinating participants’ travel arrangements. I also served as a point of contact for participants during the preparation period. As the event approached, I helped prepare technical needs and supported the sessions by facilitating parts of the program as an MC and moderator. In addition, I contributed to developing the concept for the event documentation and assisted with the publication process after the program concluded. The preparation process also allowed me to interact more closely with administrators through a series of discussions and coordination meetings. Through these interactions, I began to understand how different roles within the program are interconnected and form a structured workflow.

Organizing Committee at WikiCendekia 2026

Through this program, I also had the opportunity to travel to Surabaya for the first time and meet the Wikimedia Indonesia team as well as several administrators whom I had previously only known through online interactions. Meeting them in person created a different experience and made the learning process feel more tangible. The supportive atmosphere from the team and the community helped me feel more confident in carrying out my role throughout the WikiCendekia program.

Documenting Local Knowledge from Manado

Participants of WikiMaknyus Manado day-2

Beyond my main responsibilities in the Education Division, I also had the opportunity to be involved in the WikiMaknyus program initiated by the Wikimedia Jakarta Community, where I served as a local guide in Manado. WikiMaknyus is a program aimed at documenting traditional cuisines from various regions through photographing dishes and editing related information across several Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikibooks. This activity was also combined with WikiNgamprog, a program that collaborates with various local Wikimedia communities to improve content in regional languages across Wikimedia projects.

Participants of WikiMaknyus Manado day-1

Together with the Wikimedia Jakarta team, I supported both of these activities in Manado. I also invited friends in Manado to contribute to Wiki projects by focusing on local culinary topics, tourist destinations, and vocabulary in the Manado language. The enthusiasm of the participants was clearly visible, especially during discussions about vocabulary and pronunciation from the perspective of native speakers. In addition, I also contributed to editing the Manado language Incubator project as part of an effort to encourage the use of local languages in Wikimedia projects. This experience allowed me to explore various Wikimedia projects while also documenting local knowledge in ways that felt more contextual and meaningful.

Reflecting on My Internship Experience at Wikimedia Indonesia

This internship provided me with diverse experiences, both in terms of professional work and personal learning. Throughout the process, I met people who consistently dedicate their efforts to maintaining and contributing to open knowledge. I also had the opportunity to be involved in various programs that enriched my ability to contribute, from WikiLatih to WikiMaknyus, and to get to know the volunteer community more closely, which I had previously only observed through editing activities and various online engagements. From all these experiences, I learned that open knowledge is sustained through structured processes built on collaboration, communication, and a continuous commitment to learning.

Learning from People Who Work in Open Knowledge

Diff — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Participants, organizers, and speakers at WikiCendekia 2026

Starting My Journey in the Wikimedia Indonesia (WMID) Ecosystem

Understanding the Work Culture at WMID

From Preparation to the Implementation of WikiCendekia 2026

Education team members, Gio and Navee serving as hosts at WikiCendekia 2026

Organizing Committee at WikiCendekia 2026

Documenting Local Knowledge from Manado

Participants of WikiMaknyus Manado day-2

Participants of WikiMaknyus Manado day-1

Reflecting on My Internship Experience at Wikimedia Indonesia

Do What I Mean! Second-Try Suggestions for Wrong-Keyboard and Transliterated Search

Diff — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 08:00:00 GMT

What The Keyboard?

People who regularly use two different writing systems—¹like the Cyrillic alphabet for Russian and the Latin alphabet for English—will sometimes accidentally type with the wrong one, especially on a laptop or desktop. They might type Dbrbgtlbz when they meant Википедия (“Wikipedia”), or type Цшлшзувшф (approximately “Tsshlshzuvshf”) when they meant to type Wikipedia. Obviously, this is a recoverable error like any other typo: delete the mistake, switch to the right keyboard, and try again.

Notes From the DWIM Dim Past

However, this kind of thing happens often enough on Russian and Hebrew Wikipedia that, many years ago, the users there created gadgets to ameliorate the problem; the Hebrew original was given the hackerishly humorous name DWIM, an initialism for “do what I mean”. Every time the UI would show as-you-type suggestions, the gadget would check if there were fewer than 10 suggestions (the maximum that can be shown), and if so it would map back and forth between Cyrillic and Latin (or Hebrew and Latin, depending on the wiki), get additional suggestions for the transformed query, if any, and append them to the original suggestion list.

The DWIM gadgets worked well for a long time, but eventually changes to various on-wiki UI libraries had the side effect of eliminating the Javascript hooks they needed to function, and DWIM was no more.

I’d been tracking “wrong-keyboard” queries for a long time—they can be up to 1%² of fulltext queries on Russian Wikipedia—and the Search Team had been thinking about adding “wrong-keyboard Russian” to our cross-wiki language-detection tools.³ Unfortunately, integrating wrong-keyboard detection into cross-wiki language detection requires additional data workflows that we never managed to work on.

After DWIM had been offline for a while and didn’t seem likely to come back, we decided to recreate it on the search backend for as-you-type suggestions. We also realized the same infrastructure could potentially be used for transliterated searches, too!

Transliteration / transliteratsia / Lipyantaran

For various reasons—that surely vary by language, country, device, or even by individual—a lot of people don’t (or maybe even can’t) type in their native script when searching Wikipedia in their language. There has been a long-standing task to allow searchers on Georgian Wikipedia (a.k.a. ვიკიპედია) to search by typing in Latin or Cyrillic—not in English or Russian, to be clear, but in Georgian, transliterated into the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets. I also filed a task a while back to support searching in Romanized⁴ Hindi after discovering that part of the reason that so many searches on Hindi Wikipedia (a.k.a. विकिपीडिया) get no results is that many seem to be in Hindi, but written in the Latin alphabet.

The DWIM second-try model of transforming a query and adding additional results seemed like it could be a good fit for transliteration, too. There were lots of fun languagey complications—as there always are—but overall it did indeed work a lot of the time.

So, you can now type transliteratsia in the Georgian Wikipedia search box and get a suggestion for ტრანსლიტერაცია (“transliteration”), or Lipyantaran in the Hindi Wikipedia search box and get a suggestion for लिप्यंतरण (also “transliteration”).

By the Numbers

We originally enabled DWIM-like wrong-keyboard second-try remapping⁵ for Hebrew- and Russian-language wikis, then added Latin and Cyrillic transliteration remapping for Georgian, and finally Latin transliteration remapping for Hindi.

The usage patterns for as-you-type suggestions vary by language and wiki—some ignore the suggestions and go to fulltext search results or the default page more than others and some generally like clicking on suggestions more than others.

To keep things simple we’re going to just look at two stats for second-try suggestions:

As a percentage of all “clicks” in the search box at the top of the wiki page. These include hitting return after typing or clicking the “Search” button, clicking “Search for pages containing [your query]” after the suggestions, or clicking on a suggestion.
As a percentage of suggestion clicks, which is limited to just the presented as-you-type suggestions, whether the normal suggestions or the second-try suggestions.

Keep in mind that not all queries get second-try suggestions. There could be too many regular suggestions to have room for second-try suggestions, or there might be no second-try suggestions for a given query. Also, very small projects are excluded from the list because of data sparsity over the sample period.

Without further ado:

Wiki	Second-Try Type	% suggestion clicks	% all clicks
hewiki	DWIM	3.4%	1.8%
hewiktionary	DWIM	1.4%	0.6%
hewikisource	DWIM	2.2%	0.5%

ruwiki	DWIM	3.8%	2.6%
ruwiktionary	DWIM	1.3%	0.7%
ruwikivoyage	DWIM	4.8%	1.8%

kawiki	Translit	4.1%	1.6%

hiwiki	Translit	60.1%	16.3%
hiwiktionary	Translit	10.3%	5.0%

For Hebrew (he) and Russian (ru), the Wikipedia and Wiktionary results are surprisingly similar. Wiktionary sees less usage, probably because there are more titles in Latin script (because there are lots of English, French, Spanish, etc., words in Russian Wiktionary) that can match a Latin query.

Georgian (ka) Wikipedia is broadly similar to Hebrew and Russian Wikipedias, too. Over 1.5% of all clicks in the top-of-page search box and more than 3% of clicks on suggestions is an awesome result.

Then there’s Hindi (hi), which was implemented and evaluated last, but which has the biggest effect! 16% of all clicks in the top-of-page search box and more than half of clicks on any suggestions are from the transliterated suggestions. I feel like this is a huge improvement for searchers while still being indicative of an underlying problem with Hindi/Devanagari input.

Fun Languagey Complications

Hebrew and Russian

The Hebrew DWIM gadget—which I think is the original, at least on-wiki—had a nice character-by-character map that swapped ש and a, נ and b, ב and c, etc. Hebrew doesn’t have an upper/lowercase distinction, so when DWIM was adapted to Russian, they normalized the case before doing their mapping.

Well, that works most of the time, but because Russian has so many more letters in its alphabet, some of them map to punctuation on the US QWERTY keyboard. And while as-you-type search suggestions will mostly⁶ ignore case, as with щ/Щ or o/O, it does not “uppercase” ; (semicolon) to : (colon) so ж and Ж (the same keys on the Russian keyboard) behaved differently from each other. When I noticed this, the Russian Wikipedia gadget did get updated to handle upper- and lowercase better.

When I started working on the search-internal DWIM mappings, I realized that this particular complication was even more complicated. Russian keyboard ю maps to QWERTY keyboard . (period), but Russian . maps to QWERTY / (slash) and Russian / maps to QWERTY | (pipe). There are a few other such chains. Fortunately, the way the mapping was set up ignored this ambiguity in favor of mapping toward Cyrillic, which was the more common case. A fun side effect is that the all-punctuation string :','[' on the US QWERTY keyboard maps to Жэбэхэ on the Russian keyboard.

I discovered that Hebrew had similar problems—like Hebrew ת mapping to QWERTY , (comma), Hebrew , mapping to QWERTY ' (apostrophe), and Hebrew ' mapping to QWERTY w.

My solution to this problem has been to break the query into words and if there is any Hebrew or Russian present, map from that script to Latin, but map from Latin to the “host” script of the wiki by default.

Phew, not too hard! And the ticket for Georgian transliteration promised that it would be “fairly easy”.⁷

Georgian

There are several ways to Romanize Georgian. Some are official. Some are academic. Some are even unambiguous and lossless. But none of those are popular. Instead, we have the dreaded “unofficial system” that’s ambiguous and inconsistent, but easy to type and probably not particularly difficult if you actually speak Georgian.

A big problem with transliteration can occur when the language/script you are coming from has more sounds/letters than the language/script you are going to.⁸ For example, Georgian has the letter თ, which sounds like /tʰ/, and ტ, which sounds like /tʼ/. English doesn’t make the distinction between those two sounds!

Fortunately, unofficial transliterations of Georgian do sometimes use uppercase and lowercase letters differently—like using t for ტ and T for თ—or use digraphs and trigraphs (ts, dz, sh, ch, tch). Of course, sometimes the uppercase Latin characters in a query on Georgian Wikipedia are there because the query is properly capitalized English, adding to the confusion.

So, if we are careful about case,⁹ we can map the trigraphs and digraphs, then map the distinct upper- and lowercase letters, then lowercase everything and map the leftovers, then hope we get a match. Hey, that actually works pretty well!

Whew! Now what about Georgian transliterated into Cyrillic? [….twenty minutes later….] Oh how I long for the days of the unofficial system!

I could only find one list of systematic mapping from Georgian to Russian Cyrillic, on Russian Wikipedia, from an academic paper from 1972! It’s clearly designed to turn Georgian names into something a Russian speaker can pronounce reasonably well, not to losslessly preserve the original Georgian spelling or pronunciation.

I checked to see if there were any Cyrillic queries on Georgian Wikipedia. There aren’t a lot, but there are some. Some are clearly Russian and some are obviously names, but it was clear that making a decent effort and handling Cyrillicized¹⁰ input would probably help someone.

I ended up ignoring case, handling a few digraphs, and leaning heavily on context clues to choose between ambiguous options.

And by context clues, I mean something like: if you were untransliterating a phrase back into English and you had a letter that could be either an f or a v, you’d be smart to choose f if the next letter was l, because fl is fairly common and vl is very rare. You would get “Flad the Impaler” and “Flassic Pickles” wrong, but you’d get most things right. At the beginning or end of the word, between certain letters, before or after other letters—all can help you pick. Fortunately, only т vs თ & ტ and п vs პ & ფ needed that level of careful disambiguation. The results are nowhere near 100% accurate, but they are so much better than nothing.

Hindi

The challenges that Hindi offers are similar to those of Georgian, but dialed up to eleven. Like Georgian, Hindi has a lot more sounds than the Latin alphabet has letters. There are also a number of potentially lossless academic and official transliteration systems for Devanagari, though they have even more orthographic variety than Georgian transliteration systems. Here’s a semi-random sample of transliterations for single characters, most of which no one is ever going to just type into a search bar: ī R^i .ll r̥̄ lṛī ṉ ṁ ḥ m̐.

The “unofficial system”—shudder!—use for Romanization is even more difficult for Hindi, possibly in part because so many Hindi speakers also speak and write English, and sometimes freely mix the two. Rather than stick to a single Romanization scheme, some Hindi speakers seem to use their greater familiarity with English to transliterate in ways that follow awful English spelling conventions. And if an English word has been borrowed into Hindi it might be Romanized phonetically or just written in English. (As a native English speaker, I was usually able to get a good sense of the Hindi pronunciation from the transliterations—so the system works fine for humans. It’s just hard on computers.)

There are machine learning models designed to handle transliterated Hindi, and some LLMs can probably do a good job, but those are too computationally expensive for as-you-type suggestions, where we need to generate a suggestion on every keystroke. So, I set out to make something much more lightweight.

Despite my goal of a lightweight system, the idea of context-dependent disambiguation of a couple of characters—as used for Cyrillicized Georgian above—exploded into a full-on set of rewrite rules for Romanized Hindi.

Fortunately, I was able to find an open-source, human-generated Romanized Hindi transliteration data set, which made it much easier to evaluate my rewrite rules as I was working on them. Looking at the data also verified the complexity and ambiguity. The mappings are many-to-many, meaning that not only are there often multiple ways to Romanize a given Hindi word, some Romanizations can map to multiple Hindi words. So without an understanding of context, it might be impossible to accurately transliterate Romanized Hindi back to Devanagari.

There are two saving graces with Hindi. First, statistics. While there are sometimes multiple Hindi words that a given transliteration could map to, one is often statistically much more likely than the other. Second, the multiple words are at least somewhat similar. It’s not like the equivalent of Fred and Maynard having the same transliteration; more like Fred and fried. This is where the ability of as-you-type suggestions to handle typos comes in. fried smit is close enough to Fred Smith to match as a suggestion.

I also ended up taking a moderate number of the most frequent transliterated words in my sample of Hindi queries, about 1400 of them, and just hard-coding their most likely Hindi equivalents. This also insulated common words from tweaks to the rewrite rules that might improve a lot of individual words, but get worse on a few really common words. It might also be faster to just look up really common words instead of running them through all the rewrite rules.

As I said before, the results are nowhere near 100% accurate, but they are so much better than nothing.

A Latin transliteration (middle) of the name of the author’s adopted home state that works for both Hindi (above) and Georgian (below), with corresponding characters colored the same, using colors from the relevant country and state flags—including the ridiculously awesome and awesomely ridiculous flag of Maryland. Note that the full name of Maryland in Georgian transliterates as merilendi.

Future Fulltext Directions

So far, we have replicated (and hopefully somewhat improved) the original DWIM wrong-keyboard functionality for Hebrew and Russian, and expanded the scope to more complex mappings for transliteration in Georgian and Hindi.

However, like the original DWIM gadget, we’re currently still limited to as-you-type suggestions. Submitting a wrong-keyboard query to the fulltext search will typically get few if any results because the query often looks like gibberish. Submitting a transliterated query to the fulltext search is more likely to match something, since the mapping is phonetic, but it’s not a good way to search.

One direction for expanding second-try searching is to consider showing “did you mean” suggestions for fulltext queries. It’s not just a matter of turning it on, though—as always, there are complications.

Because as-you-type suggestions are limited to matching titles, those suggestions can handle one or two typos per query, which can compensate for minor errors in the DWIM or transliteration mapping. Plus, the searcher never sees the exact remapped query used to generate the suggestions; as long as the suggestions are good, it doesn’t matter. And if the remapped query is a complete disaster,¹¹ it generates no suggestions, and the searcher doesn’t see anything amiss.

For “did you mean” suggestions, showing suggestions with ridiculous typos would only further damage their spotty reputation. We also can’t currently filter “did you mean” suggestions that get zero results. I really don’t want to show a typo-riddled suggestion that gets no results! Part of the problem, though, is that we have to search for the remapped suggestion (or at least get the number of results from the search index) to see if it is plausible, and that can be expensive. There is also the issue of prioritizing the sources of possible “did you mean” suggestions—we currently get suggestions from an internal feature of our underlying search engine, from an internal dataset of queries that look like typo corrections, and now plausibly from second-try remapping. We would need to investigate to decide whether a hard-coded prioritization is sufficient, and which order is best—which may vary across languages!—or come up with a very efficient way to rank individual options. That’s not insurmountable, but it isn’t trivial either.

Whether second-try “did you mean” suggestions are useful will probably vary by language and maybe by wiki, since the accuracy and ambiguity of the mappings varies so much between transliteration and wrong-keyboard mappings, and possibly even more so between languages.

More Languages—Help Us Help You!

Another direction for expanding the usefulness of second-try searching is to apply it to other scripts (for transliteration mappings) or keyboards (for wrong-keyboard mappings), which could allow for immediate improvements to as-you-type suggestions on-wiki, and possible future expansion into “did you mean” suggestions.

If you know of a language community that could use this kind of support, let me know in any of the usual ways, or open a Phab ticket and tag Discovery-Search.

And if you love nerding out about this kind of thing, you can check out the Second-Try Searching section of my Notes page, which has recent links to a lot more details on second-try searching, DWIM for Russian and Hebrew, and transliteration for Georgian and Hindi.

__________

¹ Despite it often being treated as a dead giveaway that AI wrote something, human typography nerds—like me!—can overuse em dashes, too! (Here’s a wiki mailing list message from me from 2015 with about 20 artisanal em dashes in it—I typed every one by hand—to prove I’ve pretty much always been this way.) I’m not gonna let AI take credit for my writing—or steal the joy of em dashes from me!

² Discovering that around 1% of Russian Wikipedia fulltext queries appear to be gibberish but actually aren’t was quite surprising! In search, a 1% improvement is often a pretty big deal. For reasonably well-supported languages, it can be hard to make really big improvements to more than 1% of queries if you have a decent stemmer (for inflected languages) and tokenizer (for spaceless languages like Chinese and Thai). Woe unto the heavily inflected spaceless languages.

³ For example, if you search on English Wikipedia for labdarúgó-világbajnokság, mistrovství světa ve fotbale, or 國際足協世界盃 (“football world cup”) they will be recognized as Hungarian, Czech, or Chinese and cross-language results from Hungarian, Czech, or Chinese Wikipedia will be shown. Interestingly, I couldn’t use Wereldkampioenschap voetbal, ワールドカップ, Copa do Mundo, Världsmästerskapet i fotboll, 월드컵, Dünya Kupası, or Giải vô địch bóng đá thế giới as examples because there is so much on English Wikipedia either about the World Cup or in those languages that those queries got too many results to be eligible for cross-wiki results.

⁴ It’s kind of goofy that English often uses the word “Romanization” for transliterating into the Latin Alphabet, but it’s far from the goofiest thing about English. (“However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell every [English] phoneme, and most letters also represent multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context.” And how!)

⁵ People often talk about how German compounds can be so ridiculously long, but really they aren’t that different from long English noun phrases. German just writes them without spaces. I’m not sure which is better. It’s probably easier to parse the elements in English because the words are broken up, but scoping might be easier in German because pieces that strongly go together are attached to each other. It’s a Kopfzerbrechen to be sure.

⁶ There is some exact match logic in there that will re-rank precise matches higher, so that typing Cinemas in the search box on English Wikipedia gives the top suggestion Movie theater (with redirect from Cinemas), but searching for CinemaS (or wild case CiNeMaS or anything that is not an exact match) will give the top suggestion CinemaScope.

⁷ It was not easy. It was not peasy. It was not lemon squeezy. Yet, I didn’t know how easy I had it!

⁸ To be fair, the Latin alphabet doesn’t really have enough letters for all the sounds of English, which is a big contributing factor as to why English spelling is so goofy.

⁹ That is, if we assume sh is being used as a digraph, we would expect it to be uppercased as Sh or SH, but not sH. Things like sH happen more often than I expected—not a lot, but more than I expected—because words sometimes get run together. We can’t catch every corner case, but it’s fun to try.

¹⁰ Cyrillicized is a fun word. Cyrillicization is even better.

¹¹ In fact, this effective filtering of very poor queries is part of how second-try as-you-type suggestions are able to function. For reasons of speed, we have to issue the original query and the remapped query at the same time. So if you search for Википедия (“Wikipedia”) on Russian Wikipedia, there’s a simultaneous second-try search for Dbrbgtlbz, which doesn’t match any titles, so no additional suggestions are generated. By the way, if you do a fulltext search for Dbrbgtlbz on Russian Wikipedia, there currently are two results, both about other software that helps correct wrong-keyboard mistakes and use Википедия/Dbrbgtlbz as an example.

Do What I Mean! Second-Try Suggestions for Wrong-Keyboard and Transliterated Search

Diff — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 08:00:00 GMT

What The Keyboard?

Notes From the DWIM Dim Past

Transliteration / transliteratsia / Lipyantaran

By the Numbers

To keep things simple we’re going to just look at two stats for second-try suggestions:

As a percentage of all “clicks” in the search box at the top of the wiki page. These include hitting return after typing or clicking the “Search” button, clicking “Search for pages containing [your query]” after the suggestions, or clicking on a suggestion.
As a percentage of suggestion clicks, which is limited to just the presented as-you-type suggestions, whether the normal suggestions or the second-try suggestions.

Without further ado:

Wiki	Second-Try Type	% suggestion clicks	% all clicks
hewiki	DWIM	3.4%	1.8%
hewiktionary	DWIM	1.4%	0.6%
hewikisource	DWIM	2.2%	0.5%

ruwiki	DWIM	3.8%	2.6%
ruwiktionary	DWIM	1.3%	0.7%
ruwikivoyage	DWIM	4.8%	1.8%

kawiki	Translit	4.1%	1.6%

hiwiki	Translit	60.1%	16.3%
hiwiktionary	Translit	10.3%	5.0%

Georgian (ka) Wikipedia is broadly similar to Hebrew and Russian Wikipedias, too. Over 1.5% of all clicks in the top-of-page search box and more than 3% of clicks on suggestions is an awesome result.

Fun Languagey Complications

Hebrew and Russian

I discovered that Hebrew had similar problems—like Hebrew ת mapping to QWERTY , (comma), Hebrew , mapping to QWERTY ' (apostrophe), and Hebrew ' mapping to QWERTY w.

Phew, not too hard! And the ticket for Georgian transliteration promised that it would be “fairly easy”.⁷

Georgian

Whew! Now what about Georgian transliterated into Cyrillic? [….twenty minutes later….] Oh how I long for the days of the unofficial system!

I ended up ignoring case, handling a few digraphs, and leaning heavily on context clues to choose between ambiguous options.

Hindi

As I said before, the results are nowhere near 100% accurate, but they are so much better than nothing.

Future Fulltext Directions

More Languages—Help Us Help You!

If you know of a language community that could use this kind of support, let me know in any of the usual ways, or open a Phab ticket and tag Discovery-Search.

__________

⁷ It was not easy. It was not peasy. It was not lemon squeezy. Yet, I didn’t know how easy I had it!

⁸ To be fair, the Latin alphabet doesn’t really have enough letters for all the sounds of English, which is a big contributing factor as to why English spelling is so goofy.

¹⁰ Cyrillicized is a fun word. Cyrillicization is even better.

Wikipedia’s account creation process is broken

Diff — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Wikipedia thrives on the contributions of heroic volunteers. Our editors, fact-checkers, and writers keep the world’s largest encyclopedia accurate and up-to-date. But there’s a rampant problem: fewer people are signing up to help the quest of sharing knowledge. Account registrations have been declining for years, with a 6.7% drop over the past year alone (April, month to month). So yes, it is created by heroes who found their path to create an account.

This isn’t just a numbers issue; it’s a threat to the health of Wikipedia’s contributor community, in every language. Each of them are concerned: when fewer people register, fewer stick around to edit, maintain and curate the encyclopedia, and the cycle of decline continues, even worse.

The Wikimedia Foundation works with communities on solutions to change this trend. Meanwhile, we are also exploring the many small blockers that prevent users from succeeding. The Growth team looks for small but impactful changes that could help potential newcomers to join the quest, no matter if they are readers or future editors.

Most new readers and potential editors come to Wikipedia on their phones, but the mobile account creation experience is below industry standards, where signing up is made easy and clear. The option to create an account is hard to find. It is buried under menus or hidden behind confusing prompts. When (lucky) users do find the registration form, it’s cluttered, outdated, and difficult to navigate, especially on small screens. It is the residence of all sorts of warnings, complex instructions, and, paradoxically, too much greetings!

Many users encounter friction before they even complete registration. Fortunately, many of these barriers can be addressed through straightforward usability improvements.

The Growth team has identified several areas for improvement and has begun testing potential solutions. These experiments focus first on mobile experiences, with successful changes potentially expanding to desktop as well.

The well-hidden account creation process

On mobile, the “Create Account” option is hidden or confusing. Can you find it? There is no sign of it. Enmarking the path is a good way to take the first step, so we added a prominent user icon to the mobile header, so users can find it with a single tap.

Your task: spot the account creation button.

Users know where they are, as Wikipedia is mentioned… three times (header, warning and logo). Is this about logging-in or creating an account?

The overwhelming registration form

The current registration form can feel overwhelming, especially on mobile devices where the keyboard reduces the visible screen space even further. The form includes redundant branding, lengthy help text, confusing warning messages, and dense instructions that make the process frustrating and difficult to complete.

The updated design aims to create a cleaner and more intuitive experience. By simplifying the layout, improving visual hierarchy, and reducing unnecessary text, the form becomes easier to understand and navigate.

Early testing suggests that even small changes, such as clearer instructions, improved spacing, and real-time feedback, can significantly reduce friction and make registration feel more approachable.

As part of this work, the account creation form is also being updated to use Codex, Wikimedia’s design system.

Pick a username… but not this one.

What makes unique humans enter Wikipedia is their unique username. Yes, it is possible to edit with no account, but the benefits of having an account should be highlighted (more on this later).

Finding the right username is an overwhelming task. It must suit you, but also follow some rules.

We introduce a real-time username validation to provide immediate feedback: is the username taken? It is better to check at this step, instead of after you clicked on “create account”!

The team is also testing a shorter and more accessible explanation of the username policy. Instead of directing newcomers to a long and complex policy page, the new approach provides concise guidance directly within the signup experience.

By putting forwards the most important elements from the username policy, we expect a reduction of disruptive or offensive usernames.

Additional improvements include standard usability features such as a “reveal password” option, helping users avoid mistakes while entering passwords on mobile devices.

Oops, I’m logged-out!

Now that you have an account, you are free to log in and out when you want. As it happened to many editors (including several Growth team members), editing without being logged-in assigns you a temp account. Then your edits can’t be re-attached to your main account.

The current logged-out warning message does little to encourage users to sign in: it is just a reminder for users who signed-out! In some cases, it even prioritizes editing without an account before explaining the benefits of logging in.

The redesigned experience better highlights the value of having an account, including saving edits, building a reputation, accessing mentorship, and using personalized features. The login option is also surfaced more prominently for returning contributors, while anonymous editing remains available for those who prefer it.

Is it working? Our A/B test is conclusive: 27% of users created an account, while 16% shifted from a temporary account to a permanent one. Soon, we will deploy the new interface to all wikis.

Future explorations?

The Growth team wants to pursue the work on other improvements. Your ideas are more than welcomed!

One area of exploration is reducing the complexity of the registration process itself, particularly around username and password creation. Breaking the process into smaller, more manageable steps could help reduce abandonment.

We’d like to encourage temporary users to create full accounts at key moments, like after they make their first edit. Our initial explorations highlight what they gain: a permanent identity, access to more tools and services (like reading lists, suggested edits or a mentor), and a stronger connection to the community. Or, for what matters to most of them: getting credit for future edits, building a reputation as an editor or tracking their edit history.

Many readers are also unaware of the features available to registered users. Future work may explore surfacing tools such as Reading Lists to logged-out readers while showing how creating an account unlocks a more personalized and connected experience.

A better account creation journey will not solve contributor decline on its own. But reducing friction, improving clarity, and making participation feel more welcoming can help more curious readers take the first step toward becoming contributors. Maybe we should start with another stop users face: suggesting usernames?

And curious minds are one click away from learning more about this project and sharing their ideas and feedback.

Wikipedia’s account creation process is broken

Diff — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Many users encounter friction before they even complete registration. Fortunately, many of these barriers can be addressed through straightforward usability improvements.

The well-hidden account creation process

Your task: spot the account creation button.

Users know where they are, as Wikipedia is mentioned… three times (header, warning and logo). Is this about logging-in or creating an account?

The overwhelming registration form

Early testing suggests that even small changes, such as clearer instructions, improved spacing, and real-time feedback, can significantly reduce friction and make registration feel more approachable.

As part of this work, the account creation form is also being updated to use Codex, Wikimedia’s design system.

Pick a username… but not this one.

What makes unique humans enter Wikipedia is their unique username. Yes, it is possible to edit with no account, but the benefits of having an account should be highlighted (more on this later).

Finding the right username is an overwhelming task. It must suit you, but also follow some rules.

We introduce a real-time username validation to provide immediate feedback: is the username taken? It is better to check at this step, instead of after you clicked on “create account”!

By putting forwards the most important elements from the username policy, we expect a reduction of disruptive or offensive usernames.

Additional improvements include standard usability features such as a “reveal password” option, helping users avoid mistakes while entering passwords on mobile devices.

Oops, I’m logged-out!

Is it working? Our A/B test is conclusive: 27% of users created an account, while 16% shifted from a temporary account to a permanent one. Soon, we will deploy the new interface to all wikis.

Future explorations?

The Growth team wants to pursue the work on other improvements. Your ideas are more than welcomed!

And curious minds are one click away from learning more about this project and sharing their ideas and feedback.

Welcome, Derek!

Wiki Education — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:00:18 GMT

Wiki Education is pleased to welcome a new staff member to our team, Derek Bigelow!

Derek Bigelow

As our new Programs Operations Specialist, Derek will manage the systems, data, and communications infrastructure at the heart of our programs. From guiding participants through their first engagement with Wiki Education to maintaining the data integrity that informs our decision-making, this role shapes the experience of our participants at every turn.

Derek brings a wide array of email, marketing, and operations experience to Wiki Education, including work across the tech, travel, and nonprofit sectors. Most recently he led merchandising strategy and operational efficiency as a program manager at Chewy and previously served as the Email and Digital Marketing Specialist at Cascade PBS.

Derek earned his Bachelor’s degree in Business Management and Marketing from Daemen University and is looking to further his education with a degree in Nonprofit Leadership in the coming years.

Derek has called Seattle home since 2005 where he enjoys exploring the city and natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest, playing sports with friends, attending concerts, and tinkering with his list of ever-growing hobbies.

Diff — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Participants of the English Wikipedia 101 Workshop in Accra. Image by: Owula kpakpo, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

May has been packed with activity at Wikimedia Ghana User Group (WMGH), from our English Wikipedia 101 Workshops in different parts of Ghana, to the start of Saturday editing sessions in Accra and the launch of the Wiki Loves Places campaign. There are also some exciting opportunities for the community and organisers!

Read on for the highlights!

The Ghana Edits Wikipedia Roadshow Went to 4 Regions in May!

This May, the Roadshow bus made stops in 4 regions in Ghana including Bolgatanga, Cape Coast, Kumasi and Accra, introducing participants to the basics of Wikipedia editing and ways to improve content about Ghana online.

Participants also explored the different ways to contribute, learned where their impact was most felt and published their first edits!

New editors in Cape Coast, Ghana. Image by: Pnelson (WMGH), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Participants editing for the first time in Kumasi, Ghana. Image by: Pnelson (WMGH), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A big Wiki love to all who made it possible to host workshops simultaneously across regions. Your support continues to help us strengthen editing capacity equitably across Ghana.

Saturday Editing Sessions for the Community & New Editors Commence

Weekly Saturday editing sessions are now underway at the Work from Home Workspace in Accra.

The pilot session took place on 23 May 2026 and will run through to June. Participants with no prior editing experience were trained while existing editors in the community connected in person after months of online editathons.

New and exisiting editors from the Editing Session. Image by: Owula kpakpo, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The sessions also give newer editors a chance to practice editing and build confidence. We look forward to welcoming more new editors and seeing more members of the community join us in upcoming sessions.

English Wikipedia 101 with Newcomer Growth Features

Image by: Pnelson (WMGH), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

On 30 May 2026, WMGH hosted an exploratory English Wikipedia 101 workshop at the Work From Home (Workspace) in Accra!

Participants learned to edit independently with Wikipedia’s Newcomer Growth Features and shared feedback about their experience. They also explored Wikipedia reading through the mobile app, and signed up for the Global Reading Challenge.

The session offered valuable insights into the newcomer experience with the tools while equipping participants with knowledge of key editing guidelines and the skills to continue contributing to free knowledge online.

Participants from the event. Image by: Pnelson (WMGH), Image by: Pnelson (WMGH), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Wiki Loves Places in Ghana – 2026

Wiki Loves Places aims to document places in Ghana on Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and OpenStreetMap, using photos with location information on them. The campaign launched on 28 May 2026, will run through June, and is open to everyone!

Contributors can photograph schools, hospitals, roads, markets, and many more. Top contributors will receive rewards!

Check out how to participate! Image by: Pnelson (WMGH), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Learn more and participate: w.wiki/NfY4

Opportunities for the WMGH Community this May

Through the Shared Community Resources Program, WMGH is supporting members of the community as well as organisers in Accra, Ghana to host events in June. The program supports mission-aligned communities in Ghana by sharing resources which they may lack funding for.

Free refreshments and Lunch for Your Wikimedia Event
Up to three organisers will receive event space, refreshments and lunch to host Wiki-related events. If you have an event you want to host, we’d love to hear from you! To apply, email: team[@]wmgh.org.

Looking Ahead

We are excited about the new additions to our community and we encourage members of the regional nodes they belong to, and the larger community, to support and mentor them as they contribute to closing knowledge gaps and improving content about Ghana.

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

Warmly,
Wikimedia Ghana User Group

Diff — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Participants of the English Wikipedia 101 Workshop in Accra. Image by: Owula kpakpo, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Read on for the highlights!

The Ghana Edits Wikipedia Roadshow Went to 4 Regions in May!

Participants also explored the different ways to contribute, learned where their impact was most felt and published their first edits!

New editors in Cape Coast, Ghana. Image by: Pnelson (WMGH), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Participants editing for the first time in Kumasi, Ghana. Image by: Pnelson (WMGH), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A big Wiki love to all who made it possible to host workshops simultaneously across regions. Your support continues to help us strengthen editing capacity equitably across Ghana.

Saturday Editing Sessions for the Community & New Editors Commence

New and exisiting editors from the Editing Session. Image by: Owula kpakpo, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

English Wikipedia 101 with Newcomer Growth Features

Image by: Pnelson (WMGH), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

On 30 May 2026, WMGH hosted an exploratory English Wikipedia 101 workshop at the Work From Home (Workspace) in Accra!

Participants from the event. Image by: Pnelson (WMGH), Image by: Pnelson (WMGH), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Wiki Loves Places in Ghana – 2026

Check out how to participate! Image by: Pnelson (WMGH), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Learn more and participate: w.wiki/NfY4

Opportunities for the WMGH Community this May

Looking Ahead

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

Warmly,
Wikimedia Ghana User Group

Iterative Improvements (June 2026)

Phabricating Phabricator — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:05:40 GMT

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

If you use a web browser more than 11 years old: Please upgrade. Visiting Phabricator now requires Chrome 36, Edge 14, Safari 12, Firefox 39, Opera 23 or newer, in order to have the webfont rendered.

Some of the bug fixes and improvements:

Projects UX:
- Render project tags of archived milestones in Disabled style
- Set parent project color for milestones in autocompletion fields
Project workboards:
- Milestone creation: Propose importing previous milestone's columns (by Valerio)
- Scroll only long left sidebar instead of page (by A smart kitten)
- Hide the arrow on collapsible column headers on Safari browser (by A smart kitten)
- Do not create a second default workboard column on an existing disabled board
Conduit API:
- Many improved, clearer error messages for invalid input
- Docs: List the available Supported Values for more select field options of Edit endpoints
- Settings: Add a Copy button to Personal API Token dialog
- Settings: Allow setting a custom name for Conduit Tokens
- maniphest.search: Support outputting subtasks (dependsOn)
- maniphest.search: Support outputting parent tasks (dependedOnBy)
- project.search: Support outputting alternative project hashtags
Dark Mode: Should be finally pretty usable under "Personal Settings > Display Preferences > Accessibility"
Files:
- Increase maximum Image File Transform pixel dimensions
- Always show 'Authored By' (by Valerio)
- Disable numerous interactions for temporary files
- Fix wrong image file dimensions in "Default Alt Text"
Diffusion repository browsing: Display associated project tags on repository main page
UX:
- Prevent accidental closure of some form popups (by Valerio)
- Object selection dialog: Fix word-break on long titles
Global Feed: Show Additional Details link in Feed (by avivey)
Phame blogs: Add text/html self link in Phame atom feed
Passphrase: Allow filtering credentials by author (by Valerio)
Search:
- Fix missing user results in "open items" search results
- UX: Display Query Errors also below the Search form area
Account Registration UX: Provide specific details why a username is invalid (by Pppery)
Pholio Mocks:
- Fix altered breadcrumb and header on validation error (by Valerio)
- Do not allow to unset the image title (by Valerio)
For Admins only:
- Policies: Introduce Named Reusable Policies (by avivey)
- Use Security Session instead of MFA Token for comment removal
- Allow filtering Bulk Job Query results by status
- Require Multi-Factor Auth to Disable/Enable apps (by Valerio)
- Allow user account creators to send Email Invitations (by Valerio)
- All Settings page: Grey out settings of disabled applications
For folks who enjoy code interaction: "Personal Settings > Developer Settings" offers a "Developer Tools" mode
Translations: Numerous internationalization support improvements (by Pppery)
many other small fixes and future PHP compatibility improvements
numerous small accessibility, performance, CSS fixes/improvements

Downstream deployment task: T410849: Update to Phorge/Arcanist upstream 2026-06-01

Upstream changelogs:

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

Viewing the ESEAP Conference Through the Eyes of People with Neurodiversity

Diff — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Korean Wikimedians attended the ESEAP Conference 2026, held in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, from May 15 to 17, 2026. Held at the conference was successfully hosted under the main theme of “New Era of ESEAP: Pioneer the Future Together!”. Among the participants included two neurodiverse individuals (Real_riism and Shula) from South Korea. Here, we take a look at the conference through the eyes of these neurodiverse participants.

Discovering diversity through a variety of sessions and refreshments

The conference was held in three locations: the main room and two smaller rooms. It was great that attendees could choose a room based on their interests to attend lectures or participate in workshops. Just when I started to feel my energy levels dropping during the conference, there were morning and afternoon tea breaks, so I was able to enjoy snacks and drinks throughout the event. Even if you aren’t neurodivergent, everyone would welcome and appreciate such well-provided snacks and meals. While there were certainly many familiar foods, upon closer inspection, there were many dishes I was trying for the first time in Kaohsiung, which made it feel fresh and exciting. I was particularly impressed by a drink similar to Korean sikhye, but made with mung beans instead of rice grains.

Doing phototaking volunteer work.

All participants selected as scholarship recipients for the conference were required to perform volunteer work, and our neurodiverse participants were assigned the role of photographers. This volunteer work required a DSLR or mirrorless camera; while Real_rism, who has been using a camera for three years, was able to take photos easily, However Shula had no prior experience operating a mirrorless camera. Before leaving for the conference, with Real_rism’s help, we took the time to learn everything from basic camera operations to the three elements of photography. The world of photography we first encountered was surprisingly wonderful. We practiced portrait photography by taking portraits of each other, just as we would at the conference.

While volunteering as a photographer, I was asked to take photos of the lightning talks. When Real_rism had to leave early due to health reasons, Shula stepped in and took photos diligently.

Of course, I couldn’t take photos of every participant or every talk. I wasn’t allowed to take photos or record participants wearing red lanyards or during talks marked “No Recording,” which made the time I spent with them feel even more precious.

Meet fellow neurodivergent from ESEAP region.

With the help of other Korean participant’s support, Real_rism was able to exchange business cards and chat with other neurodiverse individuals. In particular, Professor Kitamura Sae, who specializes in Japan’s samurai era, showed great interest in the neurodiversity project and expressed a desire to establish a user group for neurodiverse individuals in Japan. Later, Professor Sae took the stage during the neurodiversity project presentation and asked about the purpose of the Infinity Edit-a-thon.

Give a presentation regarding neurodiversity

Above all, what made me most proud as a person with a neurological diversity was that Real_rism gave a presentation at the conference venue on the third day. The topic was: “Recording Neurodiversity: Beyond the boundaries of Wikimedia and Neurodivergent communities”.

Neurodiversity is a perspective that views neurological differences as part of human diversity, but it is also closely linked to identity, culture, community, and social movements. Neurodiversity prompts society to rethink how it understands difference and diversity, without denying the existence of disabilities.

According to the presentation, neurodiverse individuals in Korea have been unilaterally defined and documented by other groups, such as researchers, doctors, the media, and institutions. However, the neurodiversity project introduced here has consistently created opportunities for neurodiverse individuals themselves to document their own language, experiences, and history. Currently, this project is carrying out various activities, including Autism Pride Day, edit-a-thons, photo walks, lectures, and pamphlets. These activities share the common goal of enabling neurodiverse individuals to participate socially, intellectually, and culturally.

Listening to the presentations together allowed us to reflect once again on the significance of these activities, and it was a truly meaningful experience. Even though Real_rism spoke with a trembling voice due to nerves, they managed to keep the presentation exactly within the allotted 15 minutes, which really showed how much effort they had put in.

A Conference That Ended on a High Note

Here are some reflections from participants with neurodiversity:

Shula: As a person with a neurodiverse condition, I was worried about catching an early morning flight the day after the conference ended, but the organizers arranged a taxi to Kaohsiung Airport, so I was able to return home without any issues. It was a wonderful experience where all my colleagues from Wikimedia Korea who traveled with me checked in on each other’s well-being and actively participated throughout the conference.

Real_rism: After a heartfelt farewell, I checked out at 4 a.m. to catch my early morning flight the next day and hurriedly hopped into a taxi. The moment I arrived at the airport and passed through immigration, I could feel the beautiful sunlight spreading across the duty-free area. Seeing that light, I truly felt that coming to the conference had been the right decision, and it felt as though all the fatigue I’d been carrying had vanished.

Viewing the ESEAP Conference Through the Eyes of People with Neurodiversity

Diff — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Discovering diversity through a variety of sessions and refreshments

Doing phototaking volunteer work.

While volunteering as a photographer, I was asked to take photos of the lightning talks. When Real_rism had to leave early due to health reasons, Shula stepped in and took photos diligently.

Meet fellow neurodivergent from ESEAP region.

Give a presentation regarding neurodiversity

A Conference That Ended on a High Note

Here are some reflections from participants with neurodiversity:

Skills, Growth, and Impact: My Wikimedia Experience

Diff — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Before joining the Africa Wiki Women On-Wiki Skills Mentorship Program, I had little knowledge about Wikimedia platforms and how they function. I was curious to learn new digital skills and explore opportunities that could help me grow personally and professionally. Joining the program became a turning point for me, as it exposed me to a world of knowledge sharing, collaboration, and online contribution.

Skills

During the mentorship program, I gained valuable skills in using different Wikimedia platforms such as Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. I learned how to edit and improve articles, upload media files properly, and contribute meaningful information online. The program also improved my research, communication, and digital literacy skills. Through assignments and practical sessions, I became more confident in navigating online tools and contributing responsibly to open knowledge.

Growth

The mentorship program contributed greatly to my personal and academic growth. At first, I found some tasks challenging because everything was new to me, but with consistency, guidance from mentors, and continuous practice, I improved over time. The experience taught me patience, teamwork, and the importance of continuous learning. I also became more confident in sharing ideas and participating in collaborative activities with others.

Impact

The Wikimedia Mentorship Program has had a positive impact on my life. It opened my mind to the importance of free knowledge and how individuals can contribute to educating people around the world. The skills and experience I gained have inspired me to continue contributing to Wikimedia projects and to share what I have learned with others in my community. This program has not only empowered me digitally but has also motivated me to keep learning, growing, and making meaningful impact

Conclusion

Overall, my experience in the Africa Wiki Women On-Wiki Skills Mentorship Program was insightful, educational, and inspiring. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn from experienced mentors and connect with other learners. The journey has equipped me with valuable skills, increased my confidence, and encouraged me to contribute positively to the digital world.

Through my experience, I hope others will understand that learning new skills and contributing to open knowledge is possible for anyone who is willing to learn and grow. I encourage others to take advantage of opportunities like this mentorship program, remain curious, and never be afraid to step outside their comfort zone. With dedication, consistency, and the right guidance, anyone can develop valuable skills, make meaningful contributions, and create a positive impact in their community and beyond.

Skills, Growth, and Impact: My Wikimedia Experience

Diff — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Skills

Growth

Impact

Conclusion

Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 10

Diff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:37:39 GMT

Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on May 8. Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta.

Highlights

Community Wishlist discussion: Product & Technology introduced changes meant to increase the number and complexity of wishes fulfilled, including the disbanding of the Community Tech team. They are engaging in discussions about a proposed direction for the wishlist from community members. Includes ways to structure annual voting, better tracking of wishes, removing focus areas, and staffing updates.
Digital Public Goods: The Wikimedia Foundation has become a member of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA).
Better bot detection: A trial of hCaptcha on several Wikipedias, including English, French, and Japanese, showed it can effectively detect and deter bad-faith automated activity, on its own and by giving checkusers and stewards signals to look into. Based on these results, hCaptcha will be rolled out across all wikis. See the project page for technical information about the implementation and privacy protections.

Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure

Example of the Attribution Framework recommendations.

A better way to give credit: The Wikimedia Attribution Framework and API makes it simple for developers to fairly credit volunteer contribution. When anyone encounters Wikimedia content, we want them to know that it comes from our projects, and they are invited to participate.
Baby Globe joins the Reading Challenge: The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps released the 25-day reading challenge, to drive readers engagement through reading milestones. To track their reading streak during the challenge, users can add a widget featuring Baby Globe to their home screen.
Account security: The Foundation is technically enforcing that all privileges that enable users to take security- or privacy-sensitive actions can only be held by users who have enabled two-factor authentication. Logging in with passkeys is quicker than logging in without two-factor authentication. In addition, logged-in users can see a banner encouraging them to confirm their email address. These changes secure individual accounts as well as communities and the wikis.
Incident reporting form: The Foundation began a trial on English Wikipedia of the incident reporting form. 60% of unblocked logged-in users see a new Report button, allowing them to report conduct issues.
Encouraging account creation: Following a successful account creation experiment, an improved logged-out edit warning message will be deployed to all Wikimedia wikis this week. The change will only affect logged-out users on mobile web who open an editing session.
Wikimedia Android App: The Wikipedia Android App is at the Phase 1 of redesigning its Home Feed. The new feed includes two tabs: Community, featuring refreshed Explore content, and For You, with personalized reading recommendations based on reader interests and activity. The For You feed refreshes daily with updated suggestions.
Better discovery of images: The Image Browsing beta feature was rolled out for all Wikipedias on mobile following two successful experiments. The beta feature will include a carousel of all an article’s images at the top of the article, with controls for editors to exclude images from the article’s carousel or to exclude an article from the feature entirely.
Reading Lists feature: The Foundation is conducting an experiment to show the reading lists feature, which is still in development, to logged-out mobile readers to test whether it encourages account creation at a higher rate compared to the watchstar button. The experiment was launched on May 18 on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu wikis, and will run for a month.

A design mockup of what the share card looks like.

Testing Suggestion Mode: Suggestion Mode was released as an A/B test for newcomer editors on the mobile website at ~15 Wikipedias. The experiment will measure its impact on the proportion of newcomer mobile web edit sessions that result in constructive (un-reverted) article edits. It will also evaluate the feature’s impact on editor retention and monitor changes in revert and block rates.
Wikifunctions now supports Wikidata references: References in Wikidata statements are now available on Wikifunctions, and you now can use external links in Wikifunctions-generated citations. This allows the use of more than 1.3 billion references available in Wikidata and adding them as citations to individual statements in Abstract Wikipedia.
Pilot wikis adopting Abstract Wikipedia: The Abstract Wikipedia team has identified five potential pilot wikis to assess their interest in adopting abstract articles on their wikis. The pilots are Malayalam, Bengali, Dagbani, Arabic, and Indonesian Wikipedia. If your community is interested in becoming a pilot, let us know on Meta.
Latest experiments: An upcoming experiment is testing whether we can serve readers better when a footnote click in read mode shows the full bibliographic information rather than flying them to the reference list. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 20, 21, 22, 23 include an experiment to test a new Share Card feature that allows readers to create visually engaging cards from Wikipedia articles and share them online See also the 92 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.

Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support

Tech blog moved to Diff: The migration of the Techblog to Diff is now complete: 138 posts going back over a decade have been successfully migrated. Diff is now happy to welcome technology-focused blog posts with renewed vigor.
What’s new in the Wikipedia Library: Access to the American Psychological Association was renewed and collections from the Harvard Business Review and Swiss Media Database (Swissdox) are now available to editors who are eligible for The Wikipedia Library.
New course on WikiLearn: A free self-paced online course, designed for researchers who want to make their field more visible on Wikipedia, was launched on WikiLearn. Share “Wikipedia for Researchers” if you work with early-career researchers, teach in an academic institution, or support open knowledge communities.
Wiki Mentor Africa: The first edition of Wiki Mentor Africa – Women Tech Summit brought together over 315 registered participants across Africa to learn, explore, and grow in tech together.
Let’s Connect Learning Clinic: If you missed it, you can now watch the recording of the Let’s Connect Learning Clinic “How to support up-and-coming groups in the movement as a long-time Wikimedian” with Wikimedistas El Salvador.
Community Conferences: Registration for WikiConference North America and Queering Wiki Conference is now opened. Call for Speakers for the Queering Wiki is also opened until June 30.

Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness

See also: Progress on the annual plan

Sharing the Form 990s: The Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Endowment published their Form 990s, covering the fiscal year that ran from July 2024 to June 2025. The Form 990 is an annual form required of all nonprofit organizations in the United States. You can read the highlights on Form 990 for the Foundation and Form 990 for the Endowment on Meta-Wiki.
Wikimedia Enterprise: Wikimedia Enterprise’s free API accounts gets a substantial upgrade across the Snapshot and On-demand APIs, including free access to Structured Contents Snapshots.
Structured Contents: How Databricks Parsed Wikipedia to Markdown with Python.

Board and Board committee updates

See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter

Board selection process: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is reviewing and improving how it selects new members. The goal is to ensure that there is the right mix of expertise and community representation on the board. Join the conversation on 16 June at 17:00 UTC, and share your ideas on the talk page.

Other Movement curated newsletters & news

If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation’s work, contact us!

Subscribe or unsubscribe to the Bulletin

Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 10

Diff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:37:39 GMT

Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on May 8. Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta.

Highlights

Community Wishlist discussion: Product & Technology introduced changes meant to increase the number and complexity of wishes fulfilled, including the disbanding of the Community Tech team. They are engaging in discussions about a proposed direction for the wishlist from community members. Includes ways to structure annual voting, better tracking of wishes, removing focus areas, and staffing updates.
Digital Public Goods: The Wikimedia Foundation has become a member of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA).
Better bot detection: A trial of hCaptcha on several Wikipedias, including English, French, and Japanese, showed it can effectively detect and deter bad-faith automated activity, on its own and by giving checkusers and stewards signals to look into. Based on these results, hCaptcha will be rolled out across all wikis. See the project page for technical information about the implementation and privacy protections.

Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure

Example of the Attribution Framework recommendations.

A better way to give credit: The Wikimedia Attribution Framework and API makes it simple for developers to fairly credit volunteer contribution. When anyone encounters Wikimedia content, we want them to know that it comes from our projects, and they are invited to participate.
Baby Globe joins the Reading Challenge: The Android and iOS Wikipedia apps released the 25-day reading challenge, to drive readers engagement through reading milestones. To track their reading streak during the challenge, users can add a widget featuring Baby Globe to their home screen.
Account security: The Foundation is technically enforcing that all privileges that enable users to take security- or privacy-sensitive actions can only be held by users who have enabled two-factor authentication. Logging in with passkeys is quicker than logging in without two-factor authentication. In addition, logged-in users can see a banner encouraging them to confirm their email address. These changes secure individual accounts as well as communities and the wikis.
Incident reporting form: The Foundation began a trial on English Wikipedia of the incident reporting form. 60% of unblocked logged-in users see a new Report button, allowing them to report conduct issues.
Encouraging account creation: Following a successful account creation experiment, an improved logged-out edit warning message will be deployed to all Wikimedia wikis this week. The change will only affect logged-out users on mobile web who open an editing session.
Wikimedia Android App: The Wikipedia Android App is at the Phase 1 of redesigning its Home Feed. The new feed includes two tabs: Community, featuring refreshed Explore content, and For You, with personalized reading recommendations based on reader interests and activity. The For You feed refreshes daily with updated suggestions.
Better discovery of images: The Image Browsing beta feature was rolled out for all Wikipedias on mobile following two successful experiments. The beta feature will include a carousel of all an article’s images at the top of the article, with controls for editors to exclude images from the article’s carousel or to exclude an article from the feature entirely.
Reading Lists feature: The Foundation is conducting an experiment to show the reading lists feature, which is still in development, to logged-out mobile readers to test whether it encourages account creation at a higher rate compared to the watchstar button. The experiment was launched on May 18 on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu wikis, and will run for a month.

A design mockup of what the share card looks like.

Testing Suggestion Mode: Suggestion Mode was released as an A/B test for newcomer editors on the mobile website at ~15 Wikipedias. The experiment will measure its impact on the proportion of newcomer mobile web edit sessions that result in constructive (un-reverted) article edits. It will also evaluate the feature’s impact on editor retention and monitor changes in revert and block rates.
Wikifunctions now supports Wikidata references: References in Wikidata statements are now available on Wikifunctions, and you now can use external links in Wikifunctions-generated citations. This allows the use of more than 1.3 billion references available in Wikidata and adding them as citations to individual statements in Abstract Wikipedia.
Pilot wikis adopting Abstract Wikipedia: The Abstract Wikipedia team has identified five potential pilot wikis to assess their interest in adopting abstract articles on their wikis. The pilots are Malayalam, Bengali, Dagbani, Arabic, and Indonesian Wikipedia. If your community is interested in becoming a pilot, let us know on Meta.
Latest experiments: An upcoming experiment is testing whether we can serve readers better when a footnote click in read mode shows the full bibliographic information rather than flying them to the reference list. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 20, 21, 22, 23 include an experiment to test a new Share Card feature that allows readers to create visually engaging cards from Wikipedia articles and share them online See also the 92 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.

Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support

Tech blog moved to Diff: The migration of the Techblog to Diff is now complete: 138 posts going back over a decade have been successfully migrated. Diff is now happy to welcome technology-focused blog posts with renewed vigor.
What’s new in the Wikipedia Library: Access to the American Psychological Association was renewed and collections from the Harvard Business Review and Swiss Media Database (Swissdox) are now available to editors who are eligible for The Wikipedia Library.
New course on WikiLearn: A free self-paced online course, designed for researchers who want to make their field more visible on Wikipedia, was launched on WikiLearn. Share “Wikipedia for Researchers” if you work with early-career researchers, teach in an academic institution, or support open knowledge communities.
Wiki Mentor Africa: The first edition of Wiki Mentor Africa – Women Tech Summit brought together over 315 registered participants across Africa to learn, explore, and grow in tech together.
Let’s Connect Learning Clinic: If you missed it, you can now watch the recording of the Let’s Connect Learning Clinic “How to support up-and-coming groups in the movement as a long-time Wikimedian” with Wikimedistas El Salvador.
Community Conferences: Registration for WikiConference North America and Queering Wiki Conference is now opened. Call for Speakers for the Queering Wiki is also opened until June 30.

Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness

See also: Progress on the annual plan

Sharing the Form 990s: The Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Endowment published their Form 990s, covering the fiscal year that ran from July 2024 to June 2025. The Form 990 is an annual form required of all nonprofit organizations in the United States. You can read the highlights on Form 990 for the Foundation and Form 990 for the Endowment on Meta-Wiki.
Wikimedia Enterprise: Wikimedia Enterprise’s free API accounts gets a substantial upgrade across the Snapshot and On-demand APIs, including free access to Structured Contents Snapshots.
Structured Contents: How Databricks Parsed Wikipedia to Markdown with Python.

Board and Board committee updates

See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter

Board selection process: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is reviewing and improving how it selects new members. The goal is to ensure that there is the right mix of expertise and community representation on the board. Join the conversation on 16 June at 17:00 UTC, and share your ideas on the talk page.

Other Movement curated newsletters & news

If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation’s work, contact us!

Subscribe or unsubscribe to the Bulletin

Dagbani Wikimedians User Group Trains BACE Wiki Hub Members on Wikipedia Editing

Diff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:31:42 GMT

The Dagbani Wikimedians User Group organized a practical Wikipedia training session for members of the BACE Wiki Hub on 6 June 2026. The training formed part of ongoing efforts to equip new and existing contributors with the skills needed to effectively contribute to Wikimedia projects and support the growth of free knowledge.

The session began with a recap of the previous training. Participants reflected on lessons learned from earlier sessions and discussed how they had applied those skills in their editing activities. The recap also provided an opportunity for the facilitator Alhaj Darajaati to address questions and clarify concepts that participants found challenging. This helped create a smooth transition into the day’s training topics.

One of the highlights of the training was the creation of ten new Wikipedia accounts for participants who were joining the Wikimedia movement for the first time. The newly registered editors consisted of five females and five males, demonstrating a balanced representation of participants. The addition of these new contributors marks an important step in expanding the editing community and encouraging more people to contribute to open knowledge platforms.

The training focused on several key aspects of Wikipedia editing. Participants were introduced to the process of adding sections to Wikipedia articles to improve article organization and readability. They also learned how to create interlinks between articles, an important feature that helps readers navigate related content across Wikipedia.

Another topic covered during the session was the addition of databoxes, commonly known as infoboxes. The facilitator explained the role of infoboxes in presenting key information in a structured format and demonstrated how editors can add and manage them within articles.

Participants were also trained on how to add references to Wikipedia articles. Emphasis was placed on the importance of verifiable and reliable sources in maintaining the credibility of information on the platform. The facilitator guided participants through the process of inserting citations and ensuring that information added to articles could be traced to trustworthy sources.

The training further explored the process of adding images to Wikipedia articles. Participants learned how images can enhance the quality and visual appeal of articles while also supporting readers’ understanding of the content. The session included guidance on selecting appropriate images and correctly placing them within articles.

To reinforce the concepts taught during the presentations, the training concluded with a hands-on editing session. Participants were given the opportunity to practice the skills they had learned by making edits, adding references, inserting images, creating sections, and linking articles. Core team members from the User Group provided one-on-one support and feedback throughout the exercise, ensuring that participants gained practical experience.

The training reflects the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group’s commitment to building the capacity of emerging editors and strengthening community participation in Wikimedia projects. Through regular training and mentorship, the group continues to create opportunities for individuals to acquire digital knowledge-sharing skills and contribute meaningful content to Wikimedia platforms. The engagement with BACE Wiki Hub members represents another important step toward growing a vibrant community of editors dedicated to preserving and sharing knowledge.

Dagbani Wikimedians User Group Trains BACE Wiki Hub Members on Wikipedia Editing

Diff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:31:42 GMT

Celebrating 1Lib1Ref Australasia 2026

Wikimedia Australia news — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT

1Lib1Ref Australasia 2026 saw impressive growth this year thanks to our WANZ partnership

9 June 2026.

Sophie Sparrow (WANZ) & Ali Smith (WMAU)

1Lib1Ref Australasia 2026

Wikimedia Australia (WMAU) and Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand (WANZ) ran #1Lib1Ref Australasia from 15 May to 5 June 2026, the Southern Hemisphere window of the global "One Librarian, One Reference" campaign. The two chapters partnered for a second year, pooling staff resources, training, sharing workshops and inviting library and information professionals across both countries to add citations to Wikipedia.

Organisers in both countries drew on their partnerships within the GLAM sector to promote the campaign, with a particular focus on libraries. Both the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) and the Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa (LIANZA) helped get the word out. Targeted messaging called on Librarians and Information Professionals as the perfect people to get involved and help ‘improve the internet’ while contributing to free and accessible knowledge for all.

Canberra Meet up participants

The recent rise in the use of AI models to access information online supported our call to action. The need for verified, trustworthy information has never been greater, and Wikipedia relies on volunteer editors to keep content relevant and reliable. The campaign included a mix of online and in-person sessions:

Intro to Wiki Referencing online workshop, 21 May, co-led by Pru Mitchell (WMAU) and Tamsin Braisher (WANZ).

Pru is a librarian and educator from Australia, and Tamsin is a researcher and Wikimedian in Residence in New Zealand. Together they guided participants on the best ways to enhance Wikipedia’s references, covered the basics for beginners, and also explored using some of Wikipedia's automatic citation tools to streamline editing.

Cite Right drop-in editing workshops online on 22 May, 29 May and 5 June.

WMAU held three hands-on drop-in editing sessions for new editors to drop in, chat, learn and edit together! In small groups, new editors were guided on how to add references and citations to Wikipedia. Editors were encouraged to share their edits and screens during the calls to receive feedback.

Five in-person events across Australia and New Zealand, including Melbourne, Canberra, Dunedin, Ōtautahi Christchurch, and Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, were held in Libraries, led by local wikimedians for their colleagues.

A video was made of the Introduction to Wiki References session and is available on YouTube and Wikimedia Commons.

Across the three weeks, the Outreach Dashboard recorded 37 editors, 210 articles created, 4,540 articles edited, 11,700 edits, 4,170 references added, 485 Commons uploads, 1.32 million words added, and 2.91 million article views!

This year saw impressive growth compared to 2025, with increases in all areas. The number of articles edited, number of total edits, and number of words added all more than doubled.

	2024	2025	2026
Articles created	9	112	210
Articles edited	299	908	4.54K
Total edits	853	4.82K	11.7K
Words added	61.4K	500K	1.32M
References added	945	2.61K	4.17K

Both WMAU and WANZ are thrilled with how #1Lib1Ref Australasia grew in its second year, and we want to thank every librarian, information professional and new editor who gave their time to add references and strengthen Wikipedia.

This article also appeared in This Month in GLAM May 2026, 9 June 2026.

In the news

1Lib1Ref Australasia 2026 Imagine a world where every librarian added just one more reference to Wikipedia. We are partnering with WANZ to do just that!

A Trans-Tasman partnership for #1Lib1Ref News on Diff: this year, Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand (WANZ) and Wikimedia Australia (WMAU) are teaming up to run a joint campaign.

Two Years of Success: The Story of WikiMed in Egypt

Diff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Within the broader efforts aimed at bridging the gap in Arabic medical content on the internet, the WikiMed Workshop (part of the global Wiki Project Med) emerged as one of the leading educational initiatives organized by the Wikipedian Editor Project as part of the activities of the Egypt Wikimedians User Group. The workshop presented a practical model that combined academic training with volunteer knowledge contribution, targeting students in medical disciplines and empowering them to produce reliable encyclopedic content on Arabic Wikipedia. The workshop was not merely technical training in editing; rather, it sought to build a new generation of editors capable of simplifying medical sciences and presenting them in precise and accessible language for the Arabic reader. Over the course of two consecutive years, 2025 and 2026, this initiative outlined the features of an ambitious knowledge project extending beyond classrooms into the broader sphere of free knowledge.

Final ceremony of 1st WikiMed workshop, Alexandria, 24 April 2025

The Idea and Planning

Ahmed Naji and Donia El-Domiaty at Qena workshop

The idea of the workshop emerged in response to the evident shortage of Arabic medical content compared to its counterparts in other languages. It was the result of a collaboration between Donia El-Domiaty, a physician, Arabic Wikipedia editor, and founder of the Wikipedian Editor Project, and Ahmed Naji, a physiotherapist and administrator on the encyclopedia, following a training workshop organized by the Wikimedia Egypt Group in Qena on February 1, 2025.

The workshop targeted students of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, physiotherapy, and other medical specialties from both inside and outside Egypt, giving it a distinctly regional character. The training program was built around regular virtual sessions held via Google Meet, which included explanations of Wikipedia’s policies and editing mechanisms, alongside continuous follow-up with participants through dedicated communication groups to ensure guidance throughout the writing and editing process.

The First Workshop

The first workshop began with two interactive meetings on February 10 and 12, 2025, carrying from its very first moments the signs of a promising project. The organizers were keen to establish a flexible schedule that accommodated students’ academic commitments, particularly those of Alexandria Faculty of Medicine and Benha Faculty of Physiotherapy students, who formed the workshop’s first core group of participants.

The registration numbers reflected the level of interest, as more than one hundred students applied, including participants from outside Egypt, serving as an early indication of the initiative’s expanding reach. Thirty-five participants attended the first session, including the administrator Alaa, who is actively involved in documenting medical content.

As the sessions progressed, the workshop evolved beyond simple training into a genuine learning space, where participants practiced transforming complex medical knowledge into solid encyclopedic content. By April 22, 2025, the results were remarkable: 105 high-quality articles had been created, and 17 others improved, with a total exceeding two million bytes of added content.

The successes were not limited to numbers alone. Five participants obtained the “Autochecked” right, while the first-place winner obtained the “Editor” right, reflecting the quality of the workshop’s outputs. The workshop concluded with an award ceremony in Alexandria on April 24, at which participants were honored, and their achievements were showcased. The event then transformed into a cultural experience through a visit to the Alexandria National Museum as part of the GLAM activities sponsored by the Egypt Wikimedians User Group.

The Second Workshop

The second workshop came as a natural continuation of the first workshop’s success, but with clearer signs of maturity and a more focused vision. It began with an introductory meeting on November 20, 2025, and continued into the following year, in a longer cycle that allowed for deeper training.

Although the number of registered participants exceeded only fifty, the results were even stronger and more impactful. Participants succeeded in creating 151 high-quality articles and improving 15 others, with total content exceeding 2.9 million bytes, surpassing the previous edition in both quantity and quality. Three participants also obtained the “Editor” right, providing further confirmation of the high standard of training delivered by the workshop.

This edition reflected a qualitative transformation: participants were no longer merely trainees, but active contributors to the construction of Arabic medical content, capable of independent production and collaborative work within the Wikipedia environment.

The workshop concluded with an in-person session in Alexandria on April 25, 2026, which included a variety of activities, among them the “Wikimedia Commons Basics” workshop presented by Donia El-Domiaty to introduce participants to the mechanisms of uploading and documenting images. The field tour then gave the experience a different dimension, as participants visited the Citadel of Qaitbay, the Maritime Museum, and the Alexandria Aquarium as part of GLAM activities, documenting their visit with photographs that were later uploaded to Wikimedia Commons alongside the creation and improvement of related Wikipedia articles, forming a practical extension of the idea of free knowledge.

2nd workshop final ceremony

Honuring participants

At Alexandria Aquarium

Toward a Replicable Model

EWUG souvenir

The WikiMed experience reveals significant potential for development into a sustainable annual program, and even into a model that could be applied in other Arab countries. The initiative also opens the door to integrating medical students into volunteer knowledge work, contributing to the long-term improvement of Arabic medical content.

Between 2025 and 2026, WikiMed was not merely a training workshop, but an integrated educational experience that demonstrated how medical knowledge can be built collectively and presented to the Arab world in accurate and accessible language. It represents a confident step along a long path toward richer Arabic content, led by a new generation of physician-editors.

Media

Links on Meta and Wikipedia about the workshop, as well as an article about the first workshop on Diff in Arabic:

Two Years of Success: The Story of WikiMed in Egypt

Diff — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 07:00:00 GMT

Final ceremony of 1st WikiMed workshop, Alexandria, 24 April 2025

The Idea and Planning

Ahmed Naji and Donia El-Domiaty at Qena workshop

The First Workshop

The Second Workshop

2nd workshop final ceremony

Honuring participants

At Alexandria Aquarium

Toward a Replicable Model

EWUG souvenir

Media

Links on Meta and Wikipedia about the workshop, as well as an article about the first workshop on Diff in Arabic:

Mediawiki-feeds revisited

Sam Wilson: Wikimedia — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 06:18:00 GMT

Murdoch
2026 June 9 (Tuesday), 2:18PM
· mediawiki-feeds · RSS · Toolforge · Wikimedia ·

Yesterday someone messaged me about an issue with a wonky little tool I wrote ten years ago. I actually the thing, because it creates feeds for a couple of things I follow on wikis, but as is often the way with RSS-related code I'd forgotten all about it — it just keeps working and doesn't need any changes.

But I fixed it up a bit to sort out their issue, and in doing so also upgraded a few bits of it and moved the code to GitLab. It also seems that on 22 March this year it got popular for some reason: twenty-two thousand hits in a day. I guess it was stupid scrapers, but I'll look a bit closer and also try to sort out some more aggressive caching.

Traffic to the tool over the last 12 months. (I'm not quite sure how to make the toolviews tool show with more contrast; there are actually axes in this image!)

← Previous

My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss
(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds).
Email me at sam samwilson.id.au or leave a comment below…

Artistic impressions

Catching Flies — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 05:42:37 GMT

Art in black and white is something that is always striking. In early times, when printing technology was still underdeveloped, the woodcut was the choice for illustration. Particularly interesting are the early illustrations of animals and plants. One of the earliest and best known examples of animal illustration printed using the woodcut technique was that of Albrecht Dürer. His rhinoceros of 1515 is something that has been widely written about. First done in ink (facing left) it was converted by the printmaking technique of the woodcut into a classic image (facing right due to the process by which it is made).

The BBC has a nice piece on the history of this rhinoceros and its significance.

Looking at the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London in the 1840s gives one a good idea of how intricate the art of the woodcut had become by then. Print makers had moved from wood to limestone - using the technique of lithography. With colour washes and multiple impressions on paper they were able to produce colour prints or chromolithographs. The black areas were covered with wax or oil and the uncovered areas were treated with weak acid causing the areas to be depressed. The block was then painted using flat rollers and then pressed on to paper (once for black and white and multiple times for colour) to produce the prints. The process sometimes involved the use of a delineator, a colorist and a printer. One could argue about who among the three is the actual copyright owner here ! The process was expensive but the results were spectacular. The expense meant that journals like the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London had options for subscribers to opt for versions with or without the plates. One of the downsides of the technique was in the representation of molluscs and crabs which are often not bilaterally symmetric. Most snail shells, for instance, are coiled so that when the apex is above the aperture opens to the right - so called dextral and only the rare few have left-handed coils (termed sinistral from which is derived the word sinister). Mirrored images aside, the masters of the art produced works that continue to have a life-like glow. Modern exponents like Robert Gillmor continue to produce such amazing works with modifications to this basic technique such as the Linocut.

Here is a sampling from the 19th century. Click on the images for viewing them in better resolution.

G. H. Ford
Ford seems to have specialized in black and white illustrations of reptiles and amphibians.

W. Mitchell

John Gerrard Keulemans (1842 - 1912)

Thriponax kalinowskii

Spilornis cheela pallidus

Calyptomena hosii

W. Purkiss

Ornithoptera victoriae

Joseph Wolf (1820 - 1899)

Anathana elliotti

Joseph Smit (1836 – 1929)

Note: Smit (and possibly his son Pierre) was responsible for many of the woodcuts that are used in the Fauna of British India (edition 1) and reused in the Fauna of British India (edition 2) as well as in Ali & Ripley's "Handbook".

Lamprocolius

Testudo trimeni

Frederic Moore (1830 - 1907)

Moore's greatest contribution to India was the Lepidoptera Indica, a work that he did not live to see to completion. Those who have seen the images in this work will not fail to be impressed. Most of the illustrations here were made by his son F. C. Moore. Moore senior also appears to have been artist, but it appears that considerable care is needed in identifying the works of the two. More than two hundred years later, the butterflies in his tomes seem almost ready to fly out of the pages.

All of the above images (and more by Gould, Richter, Hewitson, Westwood) are on the Wikimedia Commons image repository and being in public domain are ready for reuse in yet another century.

Postscript
7 June 2011 - Found out that Frederic Moore's son was F. C. Moore
and the Biodiversity Heritage Library has completed the scanning of Lepidoptera Indica
The original scans are linked below
Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 (copy of 3)
Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 6 Volume 7
Volume 8 Volume 9 Volume 10

1 November 2011 - All the images from Lepidoptera Indica volumes 1 to 10 have been extracted and can be found under the following category on Wikimedia Commons
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Lepidoptera_Indica

Further reading

* Allmon, WD (2007) The evolution of accuracy in natural history illustration. Archives of natural history 34 (1): 174–191.
* Terms and techniques

Moving Plants

Catching Flies — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 05:10:02 GMT

All humans move plants, most often by accident and sometimes with intent. Humans, unfortunately, are only rarely moved by the sight of exotic plants.

Unfortunately, the history of plant movements is often difficult to establish. In the past, the only way to tell a plant's homeland was to look for the number of related species in a region to provide clues on their area of origin. This idea was firmly established by Nikolai Vavilov before he was sent off to Siberia, thanks to Stalin's crank-scientist Lysenko, to meet an early death. Today, genetic relatedness of plants can be examined by comparing the similarity of DNA sequences (although this is apparently harder than with animals due to issues with polyploidy). Some recent studies on individual plants and their relatedness have provided insights into human history. A study on baobabs in India and their geographical origins in East Africa established by a study in 2015 and that of coconuts in 2011 are hopefully just the beginnings. These demonstrate ancient human movements which have never received much attention from most standard historical accounts.

Inferred trasfer routes for Baobabs - source

Unfortunately there are a lot of older crank ideas that can be difficult for untrained readers to separate. I recently stumbled on a book by Grafton Elliot Smith, a Fullerian professor who succeeded J.B.S.Haldane but descended into crankdom. The book "Elephants and Ethnologists" (1924) can be found online and it is just one among several similar works by Smith. It appears that Smith used a skewed and misapplied cultural cousin of Dollo's Law. According to him, cultural innovation tended to occur only once and that they were then carried on with human migrations. Smith was subsequently labelled a "hyperdiffusionist", a disparaging term used by ethnologists. When he saw illustrations of Mayan sculpture he envisioned an elephant where others saw at best a stylized tapir. Not only were they elephants, they were Asian elephants, complete with mahouts and Indian-style goads and he saw this as definite evidence for an ancient connection between India and the Americas! An idea that would please some modern-day Indian cranks and zealots.

Smith's idea of the elephant as emphasised by him.

The actual Stela in question

"Fanciful" is the current consensus view on most of Smith's ideas, but let's get back to plants.

I happened to visit Chikmagalur recently and revisited the beautiful temples of Belur on the way. The "Archaeological Survey of India-approved" guide at the temple did not flinch when he described an object in the hand of a carved figure as being maize. He said maize was a symbol of prosperity. Now maize is a crop that was imported to India and by most accounts only after the Portuguese reached the Americas in 1492 and made sea incursions into India in 1498. In the late 1990s, a Swedish researcher identified similar carvings (actually another one at Somnathpur) from 12th century temples in Karnataka as being maize cobs. It was subsequently debunked by several Indian researchers from IARI and from the University of Agricultural Sciences where I was then studying. An alternate view is that the object is a mukthaphala, an imaginary fruit made up of pearls.

Somnathpur carvings. The figures to the
left and right hold the puported cobs in their left hands.
(Photo: G41rn8)

The pre-Columbian oceanic trade ideas however do not end with these two cases from India. The third story (and historically the first, from 1879) is that of the sitaphal or custard apple. The founder of the Archaeological Survey of India, Alexander Cunningham, described a fruit in one of the carvings from Bharhut, a fruit that he identified as custard-apple. The custard-apple and its relatives are all from the New World. The Bharhut Stupa is dated to 200 BC and the custard-apple, as quickly pointed out by others, could only have been in India post-1492. The Hobson-Jobson has a long entry on the custard apple that covers the situation well. In 2009, a study again raised the possibility of custard apples in ancient India. The ancient carbonized evidence is hard to evaluate unless one has examined all the possible plant seeds and what remains of their microstructure. The researchers however establish a date of about 2000 B.C. for the carbonized remains and attempt to demonstrate that it looks like the seeds of sitaphal. The jury is still out.

Hobson-Jobson has an interesting entry on the custard-apple

I was quite surprised that there are not many writings that synthesize and comment on the history of these ideas on the Internet and somewhat oddly I found no mention of these three cases in the relevant Wikipedia article (naturally, fixed now with an entire new section) - pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact theories

There seems to be value for someone to put together a collation of plant introductions to India along with sources, dates and locations of introduction. Some of the old specimens of introduced plants may well be worthy of further study.

Introduction dates

Pithecollobium dulce - Portuguese introduction from Mexico to Philippines and India on the way in the 15th or 16th century. The species was described from specimens taken from the Coromandel region (ie type locality outside native range) by William Roxburgh.
Eucalyptus globulus? - There are some claims that Tipu planted the first of these (See my post on this topic). It appears that the first person to move eucalyptus plants (probably E. globulosum) out of Australia was Jacques Labillardière. Labillardiere was surprized by the size of the trees in Tasmania. The lowest branches were 60 m above the ground and the trunks were 9 m in diameter (27 m circumference). He saw flowers through a telescope and had some flowering branches shot down with guns! (original source in French) His ship was seized by the British in Java and that was around 1795 or so and released in 1796. All subsequent movements seem to have been post 1800 (ie after Tipu's death). If Tipu Sultan did indeed plant the Eucalyptus here he must have got it via the French through the Labillardière shipment. The Nilgiris were apparently planted up starting with the work of Captain Frederick Cotton (Madras Engineers) at Gayton Park(?)/Woodcote Estate in 1843.
Muntingia calabura - when? - I suspect that Tickell's flowerpecker populations boomed after this, possibly with a decline in the Thick-billed flowerpecker.
Delonix regia - when?
In 1857, Mr New from Kew was made Superintendent of Lalbagh and he introduced in the following years several Australian plants from Kew including Araucaria, Eucalyptus, Grevillea, Dalbergia and Casuarina. Mulberry plant varieties were introduced in 1862 by Signor de Vicchy. The Hebbal Butts plantation was establised around 1886 by Cameron along with Mr Rickets, Conservator of Forests, who became Superintendent of Lalbagh after New's death - rain trees, ceara rubber (Manihot glaziovii), and shingle trees(?). Apparently Rickets was also involved in introducing a variety of potato (kidney variety) which got named as "Ricket". -from Krumbiegel's introduction to "Report on the progress of Agriculture in Mysore" (1939) [Hebbal Butts would be the current day Airforce Headquarters)

The following have been listed as pre-1861 introductions in Lal Bagh (from the centenary souvenir, 1957):

Grevillea robusta (1857, presented. by Y. Rohde.)
Araucaria excelsa (1857)
Amherstia nobilis (1859)
Anona muricata
Averrhoa Bilimbi
Poinciana regia
Cassia florida
Carica papaya
Parkinsonia aculeata
Eriobotrya japonica
Casuarina equisetifolia
Castanospermum australe
Araucaria Bidwilli
A. cookii
A. cunninghamii
Cupressus species,
Damara robusta,
Bixa Orellana,
Hibiscus rosasinensis,
Gossypium barbadense,
Coffea arabica,
Vanilla aromatica,
Pisum sativum,
Arachis hypogaea,
Medicago sativa,
Daucus carota
Brassica oleracea
Lactuca sativa
Solanum tuberosum
Beta vulgaris
Myrtus communis
Corypha umbraculifera
C. australis
Ammomum angustifolium
Macadamia sp.
Podocarpus longifolia
Pinus longiolia,
P. sylvestris,
P. pseudo-strophilus
Allamanda cathartica
Achras sapota
Persea gratissima
Java fig
Swietenia mahogani (mahogany was first introduced into Bengal in 1795 from the West Indies)
litchi
guava
pineapple
tobacco

Introduced between 1861 and 1874

Averrhoa carambola
Swietenia mahogani
Parkia biglandulosa
Joannesia princeps (Anda gomesii )
Kigelia pinnata
Crescentia alata
Filicium decipiens
Caesalpinia pulcherrima
Ceratonia siliqua
Magnolia grandiflora
Theobroma cacao
Lantana odorata
Fragaria vesica
Prunus persica
Prunus communis
Pyrus malus
Pyrus communty
Eugenia jambos

After 1874 (by John Cameron)

Boehmeria nivea Hooker (1874)
Coffea liberica
Helianthus annuas Linn, (1875)
Adansonia digitata Linn., from Calcutta
Bursaria spinosa Cav. Tristania conferta R.Br., both from. Adelaide
Clausena Wampi Blanco from Ceylon (1876)
Couroupite guranensis
Enchylaena luxurius,
Bambusa vulgaris from Calcutta (1877)
Prosopis juliflora
Pithecolobium saman from Ceylon
Trapa bispinosa from north India (1878)
Mahinot Glaziovii from the Royal Botanic Garden, Calcutta (1879)
Colvillea racemosa (1880)
Erithryxylum coca
Barringtonia speciosa trom Ceylon (1881)
Cyphonandra betacea
Cola acuminata (1884)
Artocarpus incisa (1886)
Castanea vulgaris
Hevea Spruccana
Carissa edulis from Kew
Sechium edule from Ceylon1
Monstera deliciosa from Kew
Myroxylon penniferum from Kew
Glycine hispida
Landolphia watsoni from Kew (1887)
Albizzia moluccana from the Moluccas (1892)
Paspalum notatum from Calcutta (1900)

Further reading

Johannessen, Carl L.; Parker, Anne Z. (1989). "Maize ears sculptured in 12th and 13th century A.D. India as indicators of pre-columbian diffusion". Economic Botany 43 (2): 164–180.
Payak, M.M.; Sachan, J.K.S (1993). "Maize ears not sculpted in 13th century Somnathpur temple in India". Economic Botany 47 (2): 202–205.
Pokharia, Anil Kumar; Sekar, B.; Pal, Jagannath; Srivastava, Alka (2009). "Possible evidence of pre-Columbian transoceanic voyages based on conventional LSC and AMS 14C dating of associated charcoal and a carbonized seed of custard apple (Annona squamosa L.)" Radiocarbon 51 (3): 923–930. - Also see
Veena, T.; Sigamani, N. (1991). "Do objects in friezes of Somnathpur temple (1286 AD) in South India represent maize ears?". Current Science 61 (6): 395–397.
Rangan, H., & Bell, K. L. (2015). Elusive Traces: Baobabs and the African Diaspora in South Asia. Environment and History, 21(1):103–133. doi:10.3197/096734015x1418317996982 [The authors however make a mistake in using Achaya, K.T. Indian Food (1994) who in turn cites Vishnu-Mittre's faulty paper for the early evidence of Eleusine coracana in India. Vishnu-Mittre himself admitted his error in a paper that re-examined his specimens - see below]

Dubious research sources

Singh, Anurudh K. (2016). "Exotic ancient plant introductions: Part of Indian 'Ayurveda' medicinal system". Plant Genetic Resources. 14(4):356–369. 10.1017/S1479262116000368. [Among the claims here are that Bixa orellana was introduced prior to 1000 AD - on the basis of Sanskrit names which are assigned to that species - does not indicate basis or original dated sources. The author works in the "International Society for Noni Science"! No idea about that term, wonder if that was a typo for "non-science"! ]
The same author has rehashed this content with several references and published it in no less than the Proceedings of the INSA - Singh, Anurudh Kumar (2017) Ancient Alien Crop Introductions Integral to Indian Agriculture: An Overview. Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy 83(3). There is a series of cherry-picked references, many of the claims of which were subsequently dismissed by others or remain under serious question. In one case there is a claim for early occurrence of Eleusine coracana in India - to around 1000 BC. The reference cited is in fact a secondary one - the original work was by Vishnu-Mittre and the sample was rechecked by another bunch of scientist and they clearly showed that it was not even a monocot - in fact Vishnu-Mittre himself accepted the error - the original paper was Vishnu-Mittre (1968). "Protohistoric records of agriculture in India". Trans. Bose Res. Inst. Calcutta. 31: 87–106. and the re-analysis of the samples can be found in - Hilu, K. W.; de Wet, J. M. J.; Harlan, J. R. Harlan (1979). "Archaeobotanical Studies of Eleusine coracana ssp. coracana (Finger Millet)". American Journal of Botany. 66 (3):330–333. Clearly INSA does not have great peer review and have gone with argument by claimed authority.
PS 2019-August. Singh, Anurudh, K. (2018). Early history of crop presence/introduction in India: III. Anacardium occidentale L., Cashew Nut. Asian Agri-History 22(3):197-202. Singh has published another article claiming that cashew was present in ancient India well before the Columbian exchange - with "evidence" from J.L. Sorenson of a sketch purportedly made from a Bharhut stupa balustrade carving - the original of which is not found here and a carving from Jambukeshwara temple with a "cashew" arising singly and placed atop a stalk that rises from below like a lily! He also claims that some Sanskrit words and translations (from texts/copies of unknown provenance or date) confirm ancient existence. I accidentally asked about whether he had examined his sources carefully and received a rather interesting response which I find very useful as a classic symptom of the problems of science in India. More interestingly I learned that John L. Sorenson is well known for his affiliation with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and apparently part of Mormon foundations is the claim that Mesoamerican cultures were of Semitic origin and much of the "research" of their followers have attempted to bolster support for this by various means. Below is the evidence that A.K.Singh provides for cashew in India.

Worth examining the religious motivation of Sorenson through the life of a close associate - here

PS: 2026 - following some discussions on Wikipedia, I came across Dorian Fuller's review/critique of the book World trade and biological exchanges before 1492.

Tracing some ornithological roots

Catching Flies — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:58:18 GMT

The years 1883-1885 were tumultuous in the history of zoology in India. A group called the Simla Naturalists' Society was formed in the summer of 1885. The founding President of the Simla group was, oddly enough, Courtenay Ilbert - who some might remember for the Ilbert Bill which allowed Indian magistrates to make judgements on British subjects. Another member of this Simla group was Henry Collett who wrote a Flora of the Simla region (Flora Simlensis). This Society vanished without much of a trace. A slightly more stable organization was begun in 1883, the Bombay Natural History Society. The creation of these organizations was probably precipitated by the emergence of a gaping hole. A vacuum was created with the end of an India-wide correspondence network of naturalists that was fostered by a one-man-force - that of A. O. Hume. The ornithological chapter of Hume's life begins and ends in Shimla. Hume's serious ornithology began around 1870 and he gave it all up in 1883, after the loss of years of carefully prepared manuscripts for a magnum opus on Indian ornithology, damage to his specimen collections and a sudden immersion into Theosophy which also led him to abjure the killing of animals, taking to vegetarianism and subsequently to take up the cause of Indian nationalism. The founders of the BNHS included Eha (E. H. Aitken was also a Hume/Stray Feathers correspondent), J.C. Anderson (who was a Simla naturalist) and Phipson (who was from a wine merchant family with a strong presence in Simla). One of the two Indian founding members, Dr Atmaram Pandurang, was the father-in-law of Hume's correspondent Harold Littledale, a college principal at Baroda.

Shimla then was where Hume rose in his career (as Secretary of State, before falling) allowing him to work on his hobby project of Indian ornithology by bringing together a large specimen collection and conducting the publication of Stray Feathers. Through readings, I had a constructed a fairytale picture of the surroundings that he lived in. Richard Bowdler Sharpe, a curator at the British Museum who came to Shimla in 1885 wrote (his description is well worth reading in full):

... Mr. Hume who lives in a most picturesque situation high up on Jakko, the house being about 7800 feet above the level of the sea. From my bedroom window I had a fine view of the snowy range. ... at last I stood in the celebrated museum and gazed at the dozens upon dozens of tin cases which filled the room ... quite three times as large as our meeting-room at the Zoological Society, and, of course, much more lofty. Throughout this large room went three rows of table-cases with glass tops, in which were arranged a series of the birds of India sufficient for the identification of each species, while underneath these table-cases were enormous cabinets made of tin, with trays inside, containing series of the birds represented in the table-cases above. All the specimens were carefully done up in brown-paper cases, each labelled outside with full particulars of the specimen within. Fancy the labour this represents with 60,000 specimens! The tin cabinets were all of materials of the best quality, specially ordered from England, and put together by the best Calcutta workmen. At each end of the room were racks reaching up to the ceiling, and containing immense tin cases full of birds. As one of these racks had to be taken down during the repairs of the north end of the museum, the entire space between the table-cases was taken up by the tin cases formerly housed in it, so that there was literally no space to walk between the rows. On the western side of the museum was the library, reached by a descent of three stops—a cheerful room, furnished with large tables, and containing, besides the egg-cabinets, a well-chosen set of working volumes. ... In a few minutes an immense series of specimens could be spread out on the tables, while all the books were at hand for immediate reference. ... we went below into the basement, which consisted of eight great rooms, six of them full, from floor to ceilings of cases of birds, while at the back of the house two large verandahs were piled high with cases full of large birds, such as Pelicans, Cranes, Vultures, &c.

I was certainly not hoping to find Hume's home as described but the situation turned out to be a lot worse. The first thing I did was to contact Professor Sriram Mehrotra, a senior historian who has published on the origins of the Indian National Congress. Prof. Mehrotra explained that Rothney Castle had long been altered with only the front facade retained along with the wood-framed conservatories. He said I could go and ask the caretaker for permission to see the grounds. He was sorry that he could not accompany me as it was physically demanding and he said that "the place moved him to tears." Professor Mehrotra also told me about how he had decided to live in Shimla simply because of his interest in Hume! I left him and walked to Christ Church and took the left branch going up to Jakhoo with some hopes. I met the caretaker of Rothney Castle in the garden where she was walking her dogs on a flat lawn, probably the same garden at the end of which there once had been a star-shaped flower bed, scene of the infamous brooch incident with Madame Blavatsky (see the theosophy section in Hume's biography on Wikipedia). It was a bit of a disappointment however as the caretaker informed me that I could not see the grounds unless the owner who lived in Delhi permitted it. Rothney Castle has changed hands so many times that it probably has nothing to match with what Bowdler-Sharpe saw and the grounds may very soon be entirely unrecognizable but for the name plaque at the entrance. Another patch of land in front of Rothney Castle was being prepared for what might become a multi-storeyed building. A botanist friend had shown me a 19th century painting of Shimla made by Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming. In her painting, the only building visible on Jakko Hill behind Christ Church is Rothney Castle. The vegetation on Shimla has definitely become denser with trees blocking the views.

So there ended my hopes of adding good views (free-licensed images are still misunderstood in India) of Rothney Castle to the Wikipedia article on Hume. I did however get a couple of photographs from the roadside. In 2014, I managed to visit the South London Botanical Institute which was the last of Hume's enterprises. This visit enabled the addition a few pictures of his herbarium collections as well as an illustration of his bookplate which carries his personal motto.

Clearly Shimla empowered Hume, provided a stimulating environment which included several local collaborators. Who were his local collaborators in Shimla? I have only recently discovered (and notes with references are now added to the Wikipedia entry for R. C. Tytler) that Robert (of Tytler's warbler fame - although named by W E Brooks) and Harriet Tytler (of Mt. Harriet fame) had established a kind of natural history museum at Bonnie Moon in Shimla with Lord Mayo's support. The museum closed down after Robert's death in 1872, and it is said that Harriet offered the bird specimens to the government. It would appear that at least some part of this collection went to Hume. It is said that the collection was packed away in boxes around 1873. The collection later came into possession of Mr B. Bevan-Petman who apparently passed it on to the Lahore Central Museum in 1917.

Hume's idea of mapping rainfall
to examine patterns of avian distribution

It was under Lord Mayo that Hume rose in the government hierarchy. Hume was not averse to utilizing his power as Secretary of State to further his interests in birds. He organized the Lakshadweep survey with the assistance of the navy ostensibly to examine sites for a lighthouse. He made use of government machinery in the fisheries department (Francis Day) to help his Sind survey. He used the newly formed meteorological division of his own agricultural department to generate rainfall maps for use in Stray Feathers. He was probably the first to note the connection between rainfall and bird distributions, something that only Sharpe saw any special merit in. Perhaps placing specimens on those large tables described by Sharpe allowed Hume to see geographic trends.

Hume was also able to appreciate geology (in his youth he had studied with Mantell ), earth history and avian evolution. Hume had several geologists contributing to ornithology including Stoliczka and Ball. One wonders if he took an interest in paleontology given his proximity to the Shiwalik ranges. Hume invited Richard Lydekker to publish a major note on avian osteology for the benefit of amateur ornithologists. Hume also had enough time to speculate on matters of avian biology. A couple of years ago I came across this bit that Hume wrote in the first of his Nests and Eggs volumes (published post-ornith-humously in 1889):

Nests and Eggs of Indian birds. Vol 1. p. 199

I wrote immediately to Tim Birkhead, the expert on evolutionary aspects of bird reproduction and someone with an excellent view of ornithological history (his Ten Thousand Birds is a must read for anyone interested in the subject) and he agreed that Hume had been an early and insightful observer to have suggested female sperm storage.

Shimla life was clearly a lot of hob-nobbing and people like Lord Mayo were spending huge amounts of time and money just hosting parties. Turns out that Lord Mayo even went to Paris to recruit a chef and brought in an Italian, Federico Peliti. (His great-grandson has a nice website!) Unlike Hume, Peliti rose in fame after Lord Mayo's death by setting up a cafe which became the heart of Shimla's social life and gossip. Lady Lytton (Lord Lytton was the one who demoted Hume!) recorded that Simla folk "...foregathered four days a week for prayer meetings, and the rest of the time was spent in writing poisonous official notes about each other." Another observer recorded that "in Simla you could not hear your own voice for the grinding of axes. But in 1884 the grinders were few. In the course of my service I saw much of Simla society, and I think it would compare most favourably with any other town of English-speaking people of the same size. It was bright and gay. We all lived, so to speak, in glass houses. The little bungalows perched on the mountainside wherever there was a ledge, with their winding paths under the pine trees, leading to our only road, the Mall." (Lawrence, Sir Walter Roper (1928) The India We Served.)

A view from Peliti's (1922).

Peliti's other contribution was in photography and it seems like he worked with Felice Beato who also influenced Harriet Tytler and her photography. I asked a couple of Shimla folks about the historic location of Peliti's cafe and they said it had become the Grand Hotel (now a government guest house). I subsequently found that Peliti did indeed start Peliti's Grand Hotel, which was destroyed in a fire in 1922, but the centre of Shimla's social life, his cafe, was actually next to the Combermere Bridge (it ran over a water storage tank and is today the location of the lift that runs between the Mall and the Cart Road). A photograph taken from "Peliti's" clearly lends support for this location as do descriptions in Thacker's New Guide to Simla (1925). A poem celebrating Peliti's was published in Punch magazine in 1919. Rudyard Kipling was a fan of Peliti's but Hume was no fan of Kipling (Kipling seems to have held a spiteful view of liberals - "Pagett MP" has been identified by some as being based on W.S.Caine, a friend of Hume; Hume for his part had a lifelong disdain for journalists. Kipling's boss, E.K. Robinson started the British Naturalists' Association while E.K.R.'s brother Philip probably influenced Eha.

While Hume most likely stayed well away from Peliti's, we see that a kind of naturalists social network existed within the government. About Lord Mayo we read:

Lord Mayo and the Natural History of India - His Excellency Lord Mayo, the Viceroy of India, has been making a very valuable collection of natural historical objects, illustrative of the fauna, ornithology, &c., of the Indian Empire. Some portion of these valuable acquisitions, principally birds and some insects, have been brought to England, and are now at 49 Wigmore Street, London, whence they will shortly be removed. - Pertshire Advertiser, 29 December 1870.

Another news report states:

The Early of Mayo's collection of Indian birds, &c.

Amidst the cares of empire, the Earl of Mayo, the present ruler of India, has found time to form a valuable collection of objects illustrative of the natural history of the East, and especially of India. Some of these were brought over by the Countess when she visited England a short time since, and entrusted to the hands of Mr Edwin Ward, F.Z.S., for setting and arrangement, under the particular direction of the Countess herself. This portion, which consists chiefly of birds and insects, was to be seen yesterday at 49, Wigmore street, and, with the other objects accumulated in Mr Ward's establishment, presented a very striking picture. There are two library screens formed from the plumage of the grand argus pheasant- the head forward, the wing feathers extended in circular shape, those of the tail rising high above the rest. The peculiarities of the plumage have been extremely well preserved. These, though surrounded by other birds of more brilliant covering, preserved in screen pattern also, are most noticeable, and have been much admired. There are likewise two drawing-room screens of smaller Indian birds (thrush size) and insects. They are contained in glass cases, with frames of imitation bamboo, gilt. These birds are of varied and bright colours, and some of them are very rare. The Countess, who returned to India last month, will no doubt, add to the collection when she next comes back to England, as both the Earl and herself appear to take a great interest in Illustrating the fauna and ornithology of India. The most noticeable object, however, in Mr. Ward's establishment is the representation of a fight between two tigers of great size. The gloss, grace, and spirit of the animals are very well preserved. The group is intended as a present to the Prince of Wales. It does not belong to the Mayo Collection. - The Northern Standard, January 7, 1871

And Hume's subsequent superior was Lord Northbrook about whom we read:

University and City Intelligence. - Lord Northbrook has presented to the University a valuable collection of skins of the game birds of India collected for him by Mr. A.O.Hume, C.B., a distinguished Indian ornithologist. Lord Northbrook, in a letter to Dr. Acland, assures him that the collection is very perfect, if not unique. A Decree was passed accepting the offer, and requesting the Vice-Chancellor to convey the thanks of the University to the donor. - Oxford Journal, 10 February 1877

Papilio mayo

Clearly Lord Mayo and his influence on naturalists in India is not sufficiently well understood. Perhaps that would explain the beautiful butterfly named after him shortly after his murder. It appears that Hume did not have this kind of hobby association with Lord Lytton, little wonder perhaps that he fared so badly!

Despite Hume's sharpness on many matters there were bits that come across as odd. In one article on the flight of birds he observes the soaring of crows and vultures behind his house as he sits in the morning looking towards Mahassu. He points out that these soaring birds would appear early on warm days and late on cold days but he misses the role of thermals and mixes physics with metaphysics, going for a kind of Grand Unification Theory:

And then claims that crows, like saints, sages and yogis are capable of "aethrobacy".

This naturally became a target of ridicule. We have already seen the comments of E.H. Hankin on this. Hankin wrote that if levitation was achieved by "living an absolutely pure life and intense religious concentration" the hill crow must be indulging in "irreligious sentiments when trying to descend to earth without the help of gravity." Hankin despite his studies does not give enough credit for the forces of lift produced by thermals and his own observations were critiqued by Gilbert Walker, the brilliant mathematican who applied his mind to large scale weather patterns apart from conducting some amazing research on the dynamics of boomerangs. His boomerang research had begun even in his undergraduate years and had earned him the nickname of Boomerang Walker. On my visit to Shimla, I went for a long walk down the quiet road winding through dense woodland and beside streams to Annandale (now apparently called Anna-Dale), the only large flat ground in Shimla where Sir Gilbert Walker conducted his weekend research on boomerangs. Walker's boomerang research mentions a collaboration with Oscar Eckenstein and there are some strange threads connecting Eckenstein, his collaborator Aleister Crowley and Hume's daughter Maria Jane Burnley who would later join the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. But that is just speculation!


1872 Map showing Rothney Castle

The steep road just below Rothney Castle

Excavation for new constructions just below and across the road from Rothney Castle

The embankment collapsing below the guard hut

The lower entrance, concrete constructions replace the old building

The guard hut and home are probably the only heritage structures left

I got back from Annandale and then walked down to Phagli on the southern slope of Shimla to see the place where my paternal grandfather once lived. It is not a coincidence that Shimla and my name are derived from the local deity Shyamaladevi (a version of Kali).

The South London Botanical Institute

After returning to England, Hume took an interest in botany. He made herbarium collections and in 1910 he established the South London Botanical Institute and left money in his will for its upkeep. The SLBI is housed in a quiet residential area. Here are some pictures I took in 2014, most can be found on Wikipedia.

Dr Roy Vickery displaying some of Hume's herbarium specimens

Specially designed cases for storing the herbarium sheets.

The entrance to the South London Botanical Institute

A herbarium sheet from the Hume collection

Hume's bookplate with personal motto - Industria et Perseverentia

An ornate clock which apparently adorned Rothney Castle

A special cover released by Shimla postal circle in 2012

Further reading

Collar, N. J.; Prys-Jones, R. P. (2012). Pioneers of Asian ornithology. Allan Octavian Hume. BirdingASIA. 17: 17–43.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Octavian_Hume

Postscript

An antique book shop had a set of Hume's Nests and Eggs (Second edition) and it bore the signature of "R.W.D. Morgan" - it appears that there was a BNHS member of that name from Calcutta c. 1933. It is unclear if it is the same person as Rhodes Morgan, who was a Hume correspondent and forest officer in Wynaad/Malabar who helped William Ruxton Davison.
Update: Henry Noltie of RBGE pointed out to me privately that this is cannot be the forester Rhodes Morgan who died in 1919! - September, 2016.

Incidentally, the Simla naturalists' Society must have had its home in Chapslee Estate, which was where Ilbert lived and I had the privilege of having a look at the interiors of one of this last remaining heritage mansion in Shimla. The society evidently had numerous lulls and starts with the movements of interested members.

The Bombay Gazette, 3 June 1887 page 4

Crowdsourced Indian geology in the 1800s

Catching Flies — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:57:09 GMT

Crowd might be a bit of a stretch for less than a hundred contributors but George Bellas Greenough (1778 – 1855), one of the founders of the Geological Society of London produced the first geological map of India which was posthumously published in 1855. Greenough was the first president of the Geological Society of London and was reportedly best known for his ability to compile and synthesize the works of others and his annual addresses to the Society were apparently much appreciated. He was however entirely against the idea that fossils could be used to differentiate strata and in that he failed to admire William "Strata" Smith who produced the first geological map of England. One obituarist noted that Greenough was an outspoken critic of theoretical frameworks and a "drag" on the progress of the science of geology!

Not much has been written about the history of the making of the Greenough map of Indian geology - it was begun somewhere in 1853 and was finally published in 1855, consisted of four sheets and measured 7 by 5¾ foot. A small number of copies were made which are apparently collectors items but hardly any are available online for anyone wishing to study the contents. The University of Minnesota has a set of scanned copies of three-fourths of the map but if you want to read it you need to download three large files (each of about 300 MB!) . I decided to stitch together these images and to enhance them a bit and since the image is legally in the public domain (ie. copyright expired), I have placed it on Wikimedia Commons. There really is a research need for examining the motivations for making this map and on how Greenough went about to produce it. He apparently had officers of the East India Company providing him information and he seems to have sent draft maps on which they commented. There is a very interesting compilation of the correspondence that went into the making of this map. It has numerous errors both in geology as well as in the positions and labelling but is definitely something to admire for its period. Thomas Oldham representing the professional GSI in India was particularly critical while heading a committee (that included Henry "Cyclone" Piddington) to examine the map.

One has to lament that nobody has made a more up-to-data geological guide to interesting formations, fossil localities and so on.

Here is a small overview of the 1855 map. You can find and download the whole image on Wikimedia Commons.

You can zoom into this image and enjoy the details by using this viewer that uses the Flash plugin or this one that is Flash-free.

An even higher resolution stitch can be found here (with the zoom-viewer here)

PS: November 8, 2016 - just created an entry in Wikipedia for Henry Wesley Voysey (with the only known portrait of the man when no likeness has been recorded by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography!) who is wrongly claimed by D T Moore to have made the first geology map of India - covering a part of the Hyderabad region (1821) but the two known copies of that map disappeared from Calcutta and London. An older geology map is by Benjamin Heyne published in 1814.

😃April 11, 2018 - thanks to David G. Bate, there is now a complete map in the French digital library. The above image is now complete.

PS 6-May-2022: Some years ago I had collected examples of crowd-sourcing in science from India, and had misplaced them. So here is another example where the Asiatic Society of Bengal was trying to study barometric pressure trends across the country by distributing "philosophical instruments" to collaborators across India. From Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Volume 5. 1836.

Naturalists in court and courtship

Catching Flies — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:52:40 GMT

The Bombay Natural History Society offers an interesting case in the history of amateur science in India and there are many little stories hidden away that have not quite been written about, possibly due to the lack of publicly accessible archival material. Interestingly two of the founders of the BNHS were Indians and hardly anything has been written about them in the pages of the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society where even lesser known British members have obituaries. I suspect that this lack of obituaries can be traced to the political and social turmoil of the period. Even a major two-part history of the BNHS by Salim Ali in 1978 makes no mention of the Indians founders. Both the founders were doctors with an interest in medical botany and were connected to other naturalists not just because of their interest in plants but also perhaps through their involvement in social reform. The only colleague who could have written their obituaries was the BNHS member Dr Kanhoba Ranchoddas Kirtikar who probably did not because of his conservative-views and a consequent fall-out with the reformists. This is merely my suspicion and it arises from reading between the lines while editing the relevant entries on the English Wikipedia. There are some rather interesting connections.

Sakharam Arjun

Dr Sakharam Arjun (Raut) (1839-16 April 1885) - This medical doctor with an interest in botanical remedies was for sometime a teacher of botany at the Grant Medical College - but his name perhaps became more well known after a historic court case dealing with child marriage and women's rights, that of Dadaji vs. Rukhmabai. Rukhmabai had been married off at the age of 11 and stayed with her mother and step-father Sakharam Arjun. When she reached puberty, she was asked by Dadaji to join him. Rukhmabai refused and Sakharam Arjun supported her. It led to a series of court cases, the first of which was in Rukhmabai's favour. This rankled the Hindu conservatives who believed that this was a display of the moral superiority of the English. The judge had in reality found fault with English law and had commented on the patriarchal and unfair system of marriage that had already been questioned back in England. A subsequent appeal was ruled in favour of Dadaji and Rukhmabai was ordered to go to his home or face six months in prison. Rukhmabai was in the meantime writing a series of articles in the Times of India under the pen-name of A Hindoo Lady (wish there was a nice online Indian newspapers archive) and she declared that she would rather take the maximal prison penalty. This led to further worries - with Queen Victoria and the Viceroy jumping into the fray. Max Müller commented on the case, while Behramji Malabari and Allan Octavian Hume (now retired from ornithology; there may be another connection as Sakharam Arjun seems to have been a member of the Theosophical Society, founded by Hume and others before he quit it) debated various aspects. Somewhat surprisingly Hume tended to being less radical about reforms than Malabari.

Dr Rukhmabai

Dr Edith Pechey

Dr Sakharam Arjun did not live to see the judgement, and he probably died early thanks to the stress it created. His step-daughter Rukhmabai became one of the earliest Indian women doctors and was supported in her cause by Dr Edith Pechey, another pioneering English woman doctor, who was a BNHS member went on to marry H.M. Phipson. Phipson of course was a more famous founder of the BNHS. Rukhmabai's counsel included the lawyer J.D.Inverarity who was a big-game hunter and BNHS member. To add to the mess of BNHS members in court, there was (later Lt.-Col.) Kanhoba Ranchoddas Kirtikar (1850-9 May 1917), a student of Sakharam Arjun and like him interested in medicinal plants. Kirtikar however became a hostile witness in the Rukhmabai case, and supported Dadaji. Rukhmabai, in her writings as a Hindoo Lady, indicated her interest in studying medicine. Dr Pechey and others set up a fund for supporting her medical education in London. The whole case caused a tremendous upheaval in India with a division across multiple axes - nationalists, reformists, conservatives, liberals, feminists, Indians, Europeans - everyone seems to have got into the debate. The conservative Indians believed that Rukhmabai's defiance of Hindu customs was the obvious result of a western influence.

J.D.Inverarity, Barrister
and Vice President of BNHS (1897-1923)
Counsel for Rukhmabai.

It is somewhat odd that the BNHS journal carries no obituary whatsoever to this Indian founding member. I suspect that the only one who may have been asked to write an obituary would have been Kirtikar and he may have refused to write given his stance in court. Another of Sakharam Arjun's students was a Gujarati botanist named Jayakrishna Indraji who perhaps wrote India's first non-English botanical treatise (at least the first that seems to have been based on modern scientific tradition). Indraji seems to be rather sadly largely forgotten except in some pockets of Kutch, in Bhuj. I recently discovered that the organization GUIDE in Bhuj have tried to bring back Indraji into modern attention.

Atmaram Pandurang

The other Indian founder of the BNHS was Dr Atmaram Pandurang Tarkhadkar (1823-1898)- This medical doctor was a founder of the Prarthana Samaj in 1867 in Bombay. He and his theistic reform movement were deeply involved in the Age of Consent debates raised by the Rukhmabai case. An obituary termed him as a "mild Hindu" (this is essentially code at that point to indicate that he was not a "sanatanist"). His organization seems to have taken Max Muller's suggestion that the ills of society could not be cured by laws but by education and social reform. If Sakharam Arjun is not known enough, even lesser is known of Atmaram Pandurang (at least online!) but one can find another natural history connection here - his youngest daughter - Annapurna "Anna" Turkhud tutored Rabindranath Tagore in English and the latter was smitten. Tagore wrote several poems to her where she is referred to as "Nalini". Anna however married Harold Littledale (3 October 1853-11 May 1930), professor of history and English literature, later principal of the Baroda College (Moreshwar Atmaram Turkhud, Anna's older brother, was a vice-principal at Rajkumar College Baroda - another early natural history hub), and if you remember an earlier post where his name occurs - Littledale was the only person from the educational circle to contribute to Allan Octavian Hume's notes on birds! Littledale also documented bird trapping techniques in Gujarat. Sadly, Anna did not live very long and died in her thirties in Edinburgh somewhere around 1891.

It would appear that many others in the legal profession were associated with natural history - we have already seen the case of Courtenay Ilbert, who founded the Simla Natural History Society in 1885. Ilbert lived at Chapslee House in Simla - now still a carefully maintained heritage home (that I had the fortune of visiting recently) owned by the kin of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Ilbert was involved with the eponymous Ilbert Bill which allowed Indian judges to pass resolutions on cases involving Europeans - a step forward in equality that also led to rancour. Other law professionals in the BNHS - included Sir Norman A. Macleod and S. M. Robinson. Justice Herbert Mills Birdwood was a keen botanist. L.H. Bayley was also a BNHS member.

We know that at least a few marriages were mediated by associations with the BNHS and these include - Norman Boyd Kinnear married a relative of Walter Samuel Millard (the man who kindly showed a child named Salim Ali around the BNHS); R.C. Morris married Heather, daughter of Angus Kinloch (another BNHS member who lived near Longwood Shola, Kotagiri) - and even before the BNHS, there were other naturalists connected by marriage - Brian Hodgson's brother William was married to Mary Rosa the sister of S.R. Tickell (of Tickell's flowerpecker fame); Sir Walter Elliot (of Anathana fame) was married to Maria Dorothea Hunter Blair while her sister Jane Anne Eliza Hunter Blair was married to Philip Sclater, a leading figure in zoology. The project that led to the Fauna of British India was promoted by Sclater and Jerdon (a good friend of Elliot) - these little family ties may have provided additional impetus.

In 2014, someone in London asked me if I had heard of an India-born naturalist named E.K. Robinson. At that time I did not know of him but it turns out that Edward Kay Robinson (1857?-1928) born in Naini Tal was the founder of the British (Empire) Naturalists' Association. He fostered a young and promising journalist who would later dedicate a work to him - To E.K.R. from R.K. - Rudyard Kipling. Now E.K.R. had an older brother named Phil Robinson who was also in the newspaper line - and became famous for his brand of Anglo-Indian nature writing - a style that was more prominent in the writings of E.H. Aitken (Eha). Now Phil - Philip Stewart Robinson - despite the books he wrote like In my Indian Garden and Noah's ark, or, "Mornings in the zoo." Being a contribution to the study of unnatural history is not a well-known name in Indian natural history writing. One reason for his works being unknown may be the infamy that Phil achieved from affairs aboard ships between India and England that led to a scandalous divorce case and bankruptcy.

Times of India 7 May 1885. p. 5.

Times of India, 9 July 1885

The Bombay Gazette, 7 November 1884. Note that Kirtikar is present at the early meetings alongside Sakharam Arjun.

Postscript: 18 March 2022 - came across Hugh Fletcher Palin (16 February 1858, Poona - 8 February 1909, Lahore) who wrote a Birds of Cutch (1878). Palin's father Lt-Gen Charles Thomas Palin (6 February 1823- 14 March 1892) also wrote on the birds and plants of Kutch for the Bombay Gazetteer (volume 5, 1880). A sister of Hugh, Ethel Frances, married the son of Herbert Mills Birdwood. A brother of Hugh, Colonel Gilbert Walter Palin (29 September 1862 - 31 December 1946) married Florence, daughter of Charles Swinhoe.

German influences in Indian ornithology

Catching Flies — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:50:40 GMT

I have noted before that many non-English works in science, even from Europe, are often given a quick pass-over in English works and cases range from the failure to cite junior synonyms in taxonomic monographs [ Ixos fisquetti Eydoux & Souleyet, 1842 from a French source has been ignored as a synonym of Pycnonotus priocephalus (Jerdon, 1839) by nearly all taxonomists] to glossing over major contributions like those of the German anatomist and cladist Max Fuerbringer. Some of this may be due to the wars but there is a sense that even much later works often do not give enough credit where it is due.

Some inkling of how German research was actively ignored during the war years can be found in T.B. Fletcher's address at a meeting of entomologists in 1919 where he called attention to Sir George Hampson's decision to not cite any German papers in a taxonomic revision.

T.B. Fletcher's call to boycott German literature and products.
Report of the proceedings of the third entomological meeting : held at Pusa on the 3rd to 15th February 1919 (1920)

In Tim Birkhead's preface to his history of ornithology, Ten Thousand Birds, he notes the ratings of his friends for the most influential ornithologists:

"David Lack was the clear leader (30 votes), followed by Ernst Mayr (23), Niko Tinbergen (21), Robert MacArthur (11), Peter Grant (11), Nick Davies (11), Erwin Stresemann (11), Charles Sibley (11), Konrad Lorenz (9), and Donald Farner (8)."

Title page of Volume 7 part 2 of Handbuch der Zoologie (1934)

This is obviously a questionable sample size but the presence of three Germans in the list (with Stresemann at the root of the academic genealogy of the other two - Mayr and Lorenz) should be a useful indicator. A much richer view of influence and the genealogy of ornithology in Germany can be found in the writings of Jürgen Haffer. Haffer, who died a few years ago, was a student of Ernst Mayr who in turn was a student of Stresemann. Stresemann's influence was far-reaching, extending into India through Salim Ali who spent some time with Stresemann at the Zoological Museum, Berlin. An invitation to visit Berlin for a Wikipedia-related meeting allowed me to pursue my research on Stresemann's work and the Salim Ali connection. Ali notes in his biography that it was through the Germans and their Heligoland observatory that he picked up his studies of live birds in the hand and ringing.* In 1914, at the age of 25, while still a doctoral student in medicine, Stresemann was offered the task of writing an entry on the birds in the Handbuch der Zoologie series since the bigger names in German ornithology were too busy to take up the job. This offer from the series editor Willy Kükenthal was to be crucial in his later career. The draft version which followed a structure suggested by Kukenthal arrived in 1920, delayed by the First World War, and when it was published in 1934, it consisted of 900 pages. The book led Stresemann to his future career in the Berlin museum picked in preference to many other bigger and dominant names. In producing the book, Stresemann had clearly conducted a great deal of research into the literature, both new and old, before him which also led him to later reflect on the historical development of ornithology - leading to another magnificent work which was also translated into English as Ornithology from Aristotle to the Present - a (signed) copy of which apparently went to Salim Ali and was passed on to the late S.A. Hussain (who mentioned it over a coffee one evening not too long ago). Now Birkhead's ornithological history does not do a good job of telling us what went into Stresemann's Handbuch der Zoologie. This book had 2200 printed copies but only 536 were sold by 1934 and 156 in 1944 and the remaining copies were burnt at the end of World War II because its publisher Dr Wilhelm Junk was Jewish (see Bock, 2001). I browsed through a copy of the book in the library of Zoological Museum at Berlin and have extracted the table of contents which gives a good overview of the topics covered (I have removed the page numbers and hopefully there are no major transcription errors, use translate.google.com to see what they mean but be prepared for mis-translations):

Stresemann (left) in Finland during the Ornithological Congress of 1958. Photo from the Alexander Wetmore album courtesy of Smithsonian Instituion / Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Einleitung [Introduction]
Definition
Erforschungsgeschichte [Research history]

Haut und Hautgebilde [Epidermis]
Haut: Cutis - Epidermis - Schnabel [beak] - Stirnplatten - Nagel [nails]: Zehennägel- Fingernägel - Sporen - Federn [feathers] - Konturfedern [contour feathers] - Augenwimpern [eyelash], Tastfedern - Pelzdunen - Puderfedern [powder down] - Pinselfedern - Fadenfedern - Afterschaft - Nestdunen - Stellung der Federn [position of feathers] - Anordnung der Federn [arrangement of feathers] - Schwingfedern [flight feathers] - Deckfedern [coverts] - Diastataxie [diastaxy] - Afterflügel - Oberarmdecken [upper wing coverts] - Steuerfedern [control feathers] - Mauser [moult] - Schnelligkeid des Federwachstums [rate of feather growth?] - Mauserperioden [moult period]- Umfang der Mauser - Doppelte und dreifache Mauser [double and triple moult] - Reihenfolge des Federwechsels [sequence and - Abhängigkeit der Mauser von äusseren und inneren Einflüssen - Schuppen [scales]: Deck-, Lauf-schuppen - Fersenschuppen - Hautdruesen - Färbung von Haut und Hautgebilden [colours of skins and skin formation]: Melanine und Lipochrome - Bildungsort der Lipochrome - Periodischer Faerbungswechsel [periodic colour change] - Federzeichnung - Farbenindruck - Schillerfarben - Farbaberrationen [aberrant colours] - Komplizierte Mutationen

Skelett [Skeleton]
Schädel [skull] - Ersatzknochen - Deckknochen - Bewegungen im Schädel - Unterkiefer - Zweiter Schlundbogen - Driter Schlundbogen - Pneumatizität der Schädelknochen [pneumatization of the skull] - Wirbelsäule [spine] - Rippen - Brustbein [sternum] - Schultergürtel - Vordere Extremetität - Pneumatizität des Rumpf [pneumatization of the hull] - und Extremitätenskeletts - Ossifikation der Markknochen [Ossification of the medullary bone]

Muskelsystem [Muscular system]
Viszeralmuskulatur - Somatische Muskulatur - Augenmuskulatur [eye muscles] - Parietale Muskeln - Glatte Federnmuskeln [smooth feather muscle] - Hautmuskeln [skin muscles] - Rote und weisse Muskulatur - Muskelkerne

Nervensystem [Nervous system]
Rückenmark [spinal cord] - Spinalnerven [spinal nerves] - Gehirn [brain] - Gehirnnerven III-XII - Kleinhirn [cerebellum] - Mittelhirn [midbrain] - Zwischenhirn [Diencephalon] - Vorderhirn [forebrain] - Autonomes Nervensystem - Paraganglien - Parasympathisches System

Sinnesorgane [Sense organs]
Hautsinnesorgane [skin sensory organs] - Geschmacksorgan [taste organs] - Geruchsorgan [olfactory organs] - Hörorgan [hearing organ] - Labyrinth - Scheckenteil - Vestibularteil - Bogengangteil - Mittelohr - Paratympanisches Organ - Äußerer Gehörgang [external ear canal] - Auge [eyes] - Retina - körper - Akkomodation - Cornea - Sclera - Bulbus - Augenmuskeln - Lidapparat - Assoziation beider Augen - Augendrüsen [eye glands]

Verdauungssystem [Digestive system]
Mund-Rachenhöhle - Zunge - Histologie der Mund-Rachenhöhle - Drüsen - Faerung der Mundhöhle Oesophagus - Magen - Druesenmagen - Muskelmagen - Innervierung des Magens - Darm - Duodenalschleife - Ileum - Diverticulum caecum vitelli - Blinddärme - Enddarm - Struktur der Darmwand - Kloake - Bursa Fabricii - Innervierung des Darmes - Verdauung - Leber - Pankreas

Klementaschenderivate und Thyreoidea [Endocrine? and Thyroid gland]

Atmungsorgane [Respiratory system]
Atemweg - Pharyngo-nasale Luftsäcke - Kehlspalt - Stutzgerüst des Kehlkopfes - Trachea - Freie Bronchien - Syrinx - Syrinxmuskeln - Innvervierung der Syrinx - Sexualdimorphismus im Syrinxbau - Lunge - Pulmonale Luftsäcke [pulmonary air sacs] - Histologie der Luftsäcke - Bronchialbaum - Physiologie der Atmung - Funktionen der Luftsäcke - Thoraxbewegungen - Kammerung der Leibeshöhle

Zirkulationsorgane [Blood circulation]
Herz - Wärmeschutz -Schutz gegen Ueberhitzung - Körpertemperatur - Arterien: Schicksal der Aortenbögen -Arterien der vorderen Extremität - Arterien der hinteren Extremität - Intersegmentale Arterien - Arterien des Darmkanales - Arterien der Nieren und Keimdrüsen - Venen: Embryonale Entwicklung - Gebiet der Vena cardinalis posterior - Gebiet der Vena cava posterior - Gebiet der Vena hypogastrica - Nierenpfortaderkreislauf - Gebiet der Venae portae - Gebiet der Vena cardinalis anterior - Gebiet der Vena jugularis - Gebiet der Vena vertebralis communis und Vena subclavia - Blutzellen:   Leukozyten und Erythrozyten -Thrombozyten - Lymphgefäßsystem — Milz

Urogenitalsystem [Urinogenital system]
Harnapparat — Harn — Nebenniere — Geschlechtsapparat. Entwicklung: Urgeschlechtszellen - Entwicklung der Keimdrüsen — Entwicklung des Müllerschen Ganges - Zustand beim Männchen: Hoden — Reste der Urniere beim Männchen - Nebenhoden - Samenleiter - Übertragung des Sperma - Phalloides Organ - Zustand beim Weibchen: Schwund des rechten Ovars und rechten Ovidukts - Geschlechtsumwandlung - Ovar — Reste von Urniere und Wolffschem Gang beim Weibchen — Ovidukt

Keimzellen [Germ cells]
Ei. Eierstockei — Dotterbildung - Große Wachstumsperiode des Eies - Bilateraler Bau der Oozyte und des Follikels - Follikelsprung - Hau des Reifeies - Sekundäre Eihüllen -   Kalkschalc - Färbung der Schale - Schalendicke - Eiform - Legeakt- Eiweiß - Verhältnis des Dottergewichts zum Eiweißgewicht - Zusammensetzung des Eiweißes - Eigröße - Spermium.

Embryonale Entwickelung [Embryo development]
Befruchtung - Furchung - Gastrulation - Primitivstrelfen -Kopffortsatz - Mesoderm -Orientierung der Embryonalanlage - Drehung auf die linke Seite -Eihäute-Dottersack- Resorption des Dotters -   Gefäße des Dottersackes - Amnion -Serosa -Allantois - Gefäße der Allantois - Eiweißsack - Bau der Eiweißsackwandung - Resorption des Eiweißes - Verbindungen der Allantois gefäße - Stellung des Embryo im letzten Drittel der Bebrütung - Schlüpfakt -Abbau lies Schalenkalkes - Aufnahme des Dottersackes in die Bauchhöhle-Stellung des Eies während der Bebrütung-Physiologie der Hmbryonalentwickeluug - Ent-Wickelungsdauer -Brutdauer.

Postembryonale Entwickelung [Post-embryonic development]
Nestflüchter und Nesthocker - Dottervorrat - Gewichtszunahme - Nahrungsmenge - Erste Befiederung - Nestlingsdunen - Färbung des Dunenkleides- Tragdauer des Jugendkleides -   Eigenschaften der ersten Plugfedern - Färbungs entwickelung - Nestlingszeit - Proportionsverschiebungen -   Nahrungsaufnahme der Jungen - Leitmale

Geschlechtsdimorphismus [sexual dimorphism]
Geschlechtschromosomen - Zahlenverhältnis der Geschlechter - Gynandromorphe - Sexualhormone -Geschlechtsunterschiede in der Färbung - Größenverschiedenheit der Geschlechter - Geschlechtsunterschlede im Skelettbau - Geschlechtsunterschiede und Werbung - Unterschiede im Stimmapparat - Periodischer Wechsel des Geschlechts-dimorphismus- Geschlechtsunterschiede im Mauserverlauf - Geschlechtsdimorphismus und Brutpflege - Übertragung männlicher Eigenschaften auf das Weibchen - Rassenunterschiede im geschlechtlichen Färbungsabstand - Mutative Vergrößerung des Geschlechtsdimorphismus

Fortpflanzung [Reproduction]
Werbung. Erreichung der Geschlechtsreife - Fortpflantungsperiode - Zusammenhalt der Geschlechter- Verlobung- Balz - Psychische Selektion- Begattung -Nest. Ort der Eiablage - Nestbautrieb-    Nestform-    Standort des Nestes- Baukunst als ererbte Anlage - Baustoffe - Verarbeitung der Baustoffe - Dauer des Nestbaues - Aushöhlen von Holz und Erdreich - Benutzung von Ameisen- und Termitenbauten [use of termites and termite nests] - Fehlen des Nestbautriebes - Wiederbenutzung des alten Nestes — Bautätigkeit nach Brutbeginn - Organveranderungen zur Nestbau-Zelt — Ei: Eiabläge und Klima -    Eierzahl [number of eggs] — Beziehungen zwischen Eigewicht und Zahl der Eier [Relations between egg weight and number of eggs] — Nachlegen - Nachgelege — Brut [brood] — Polyandrie — Legeabstand - Bebrütung - Schutzfärbung der Eier -   Anteil der Geschlechter am Brutgeschäft — Bebruting durch beide Gatten - Ablösung beim Brüten — Verständigungsmittel der Gatten - Triebhandlungen im Dienste der Brutsicherung — Bebrütung durch nur einen Partner -      Brutflecke - Kompensation mangelnder Brutflecke — Bebrütung über die normale Brutdauer hinaus -   Schlüpfakt — Jungenpflege — Verhalten der Nesthocker - Verhalten der Nestflüchter -   Zusammenhalt der Familien — Geselliges Brüten - Polygynie — Ehelosigkeit — Geselliges Leben der Pinguine — Erbrütung der Eier durch Bodenwarme - Brutparasitismus — bei Cuculiden — Färbunganpassung der Kuckuckseier — Größenanpassung der Kuckuckseier — bei Icteriden - bei Ploceiden — bei Indicatoriden — bei Heteronetta — Rasche Embryonalentwickelung der Brutschmarotzer — Schädigung der Wirtsvögel.

Lebensdauer [life spans]

Tag- und Nachtvögel [day and night birds]

Ernährung [nutrition]
Nahrung — Nahrungswahl — Nahrungsaufnahme — Erweiterung von Spalträumen — Bogenförmige Schnäbel — Zusammenspiel von Schnabel und Zunge — Mundwerkzeuge der Nektarsauger — Saugakt — Ornithophile Blüten — Zungen-apparat der Spechte — Nahrung der Spechte — Mundwerkzeuge der körnerfressenden Passeres — Mundwerkzeuge der Papageien — Jagd auf fliegende Beutetiere — Nahrungsaufnahme bei den Raubvögeln— Scharren — Nahrungsaufnahme aus dem Wasser — Vorrat-Sammeln — Zerkleinerung der Nahrung durch Zerrupfen oder Zerschlagen — Prüfung der Nahrung mit dem Geschmackssinn — Tastsinn im Bereich der Mundwerkzeuge — Bildung des Werkzeuges nach dem Bedürfnis — Ausnutzung der Nahrung. Zellulosereiche Nahrung — Darmbakterien — Fleischnahrung — Gallen-farbstoffe - Resorption und Anbau pflanzlicher Farbstoffe — Endozoische Samen-verbreltung durch Vögel

Stoffwechsel und Energiewechsel [Metabolism and energy metabolism]
Chemie des Eies — Zusammensetzung des Dotters — Zusammensetzung des Eierklars — Zusammensetzung von Schalenhaut und Kalkschale — Stoffwechsel des Embryo— Stoffwechsel des Erwachsenen. Erhaltung des ernährungsphysiologischen Gleichgewichts — Mineralstoffwechsel — Eiweißabbau und Harn — Grundumsatz und Leistungszuwachs — Periodisches Schwanken des Fettansatzes — Stoffwechsel im Hunger — Hungerresistenz und Körpergröße — Wasserhaushalt.

Bewegung [Movement]
Bewegungen der Wirbelsäule — Brustwirbelsäule — Halswirbelsäule — Schwanzwirbelsfiule — Bewegungen der hinteren Extremität — Schlafstellung - Ortsbewegung: Laufen und Hüpfen — Gang — Ortsbewegung der Schwimmvögel auf festem Boden — Klettern — Bewegungsform und Bauplan — Längenverhältnis der Zehenglieder — Längenverhältnis von Lauf und Unterschenkel — Bewegungen der vorderen Extremitat — Flügelskelett — Schultergürtel — Schultergelenk — Ellenbogengelenk — Handgelenk — Gelenke zwischen Mittelhand und Fingern — Flügelmuskeln — Muskeln zur Bewegung des — Muskeln zur Bewegung des Vorderarms — Muskeln zur Bewegung der Mittelhand und der Finger — a) Ursprung am Oberarm — b) Ursprung am Vorderarm — c) Ursprung am Metacarpus — Flügelfläche — Propatagium und Metapatagium — Schwungfedern — Bau der Schwungfedern — Spannung der Schwungfedern — Wirkung des Luftdruckes an den Federstrahlen — Erteilung des Vortriebes — Flug: Ruderflug — a) große Vögel — b) kleine Vögel — Flügeltypen — Hubflügel — Schnellflügel — Schwebeflügel — Zahl der Flügelschläge — Zusatzbelastung — Hüpfender Flug — Schwebeflug der Kleinvögel — Gleitflug — Schwirrflug — Rütteln — Flugleistung — Flugarbeit — Ausnutzung der Windkräfte — Statischer Segelflug — Dynamischer Segelflug — Änderung der Höhe — Änderung der Richtung — Abflug — Landüng — Aufgaben des Schwanzes — Verlust des Flugvermögens — Schwimmen — Tauchen — Fußtaucher — a) Kormorane — b) Podiceps, Colymbus, Tauchenten — Flügeltaucher — Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Tauch- und Flugvermögen — Tauchleistungen

Tonerzeugung [Sound generation]
Syrinx und Trachea als Zungenpfeife — Akustik der Zungenpfeifen — Akustik der immwerkzeuge der Vögel — Wirkung der Stimm-Muskeln — Paarige und unpaarige Stimmapparate — Veränderung des von den schwingenden Membranen erzeugten Tones — Resonanzapparate — Biologische Bedeutung der Stimmlaute — Instrumentalmusik

Geographische Verbreitung [Geographical distribution]
Alter des Vogelstammes, der Arten und Rassen — Arten-Zahl — Ausbreitungsschranken
— Verbreitungsmittel — Räumliche Sonderung der Populationen als Vorbedingung der
Artenvermehrung — Artvermehrung als Folge ökologischer Umstellung — Diskontinuierliche Verbreitung als Ergebnis erdgeschichtlichen Geschehens — Regionale Verbreitung der Vögel

Wanderungen [Migration]
Ökologische Ursachen der Wanderungen — Winteraufenthalt — Dauer des Aufenthaltes im Überwinterungsgebiet — Ökologische Ansprüche an das Winterquartier — Traditionelles Festhalten am Winterquartier — Beziehungen zwischen Urheimat und Winterquartier — Überwandern südlicher Populationen durch nördliche — Unbeständige Lage der Winterquartiere — Winteraufenthalt der Albatrosse — Räumliche Ausdehnung des Überwinterungsgebietes — Wanderwege — Ökologisch begründete Umwege — Schleifenförmiger Zugweg — Historisch begründete Umwege — Verlassen der traditionellen Zugbahnen — Breite der Zuggebiete — Leistungen: Beispiele für lange Wanderwege — Beispiele für lange Flugstrecken — Häufigkeit und Dauer der Rasten — Vergleich der täglichen Flugleistungen während der Brutzeit und der Zugzeit — Energiequellen — Orientierung — Optische Orientierung — Flug in großen Höhen — Richtungssinn — Richtungsgefühl und Richtungstrieb — Andressiertes Richtungsgefühl — Artgedächtnis — Steigerung der Orientierungsfähigkeit durch Selektion — Verdriftung — Aufsuchen neuer Brutgebiete — Veranlassung zum Aufbruch — terscheidung zwischen Wettervögeln und Instinktvögeln — Verkettung von Zugtrieb und r;pflanzungszyklus — Zusammenhänge zwischen Zugtrieb und endokrinem System — Beeinflussung des Zuges durch meteorologische Faktoren — Windrichtung — Beziehungen zwischen Zugzeiten und Dauer des Fortpflanzungszyklus — Beziehungen zwischen Zugzeiten und Länge des Wanderweges — Veranlassung zur Einstellung der Wanderung — Trennung nach Alter und Geschlecht — a) im Herbst — b) im Frühjahr —Geselliges Wandern —Zug und Mauser — Stammesgeschichtliches Alter der Zugvögel

Parasiten [Parasites]
Vermes: Trematoden — Cestoden — Nematoden — Acanthocephalen — Pentastomiden — Arthropoden: Acari — Flöhe — Wanzen — Fliegen — Mallophagen

Stammesgeschichte [Evolutionary history]

Stresemann's work is also well illustrated and it makes use of graphs to show how conclusions were arrived at. For instance there is a graph that shows the numbers of male and female larks collected at Danish lighthouses which points to protandry in Spring migration. It clearly was a truly illuminating and broad overview of ornithology in the 1930s and one that was widely appreciated. It is unclear if Salim Ali went through the contents of this work. The only major biography of Stresemann is by Jürgen Haffer, Erich Rutschke and Klaus Wunderlich - all three of whom are no more. Their biography includes several interesting sections but the ones that stand out are by Haffer and include scientometric approaches to examining the life and work of Stresemann. Unfortunately most of the book is in German and there is only a short summary in English. Haffer provides a chronological view of Stresemann's research focus over time using a graphical timeline.

A chronology of Stresemann's research focus from Haffer et al., 2000.

Haffer's phylogeny of avian taxonmy

Photo: Z thomas (Creative Commons)

Haffer notes that one of Stresemann's major activities was his review of literature and I think this kind reflective approach is especially important to the development of any field. It is clear that this showed the direction for further research for ornithology in Germany. The fact that Germany was at the forefront of ornithology can also be noted by the persistence of many technical terms from German that are still in use in ornithology like zugunruhe (or migratory restlessness). In fact it was Stresemann who coined the German word "einemsen" in 1935 for describing the then undocumented behaviour of birds anointing themselves with live ants. Salim Ali who was clearly in touch with Stresemann at that time found a suitable English verb for it as "anting" in a note published in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society - a word that has stayed ever since in the English ornithologist's dictionary.

The correspondence archive** at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin has only two letters from Ali to Stresemann [Reference: S IV Nachl. Stresemann/Akte Salim, A.; MfN d. Hub, HBSB]. One written (typed) on 24 July 1964 is in response to a letter of condolence to Salim Ali on the death of Loke Wan Tho. The other (29 April 1966) is a bit of an apology for not studying the moults of birds:

33 Pali Hill, Bandra
Bombay-50
29 April 1966

Dear Stresemann,

Many thanks for the prompt reply to my query about age, moult, and leg colour in Philomachus. This clarifies the position nicely.

I feel guilty and unhappy not to make fuller use of the exceptional opportunities one gets for studying moults etc. when handling such large numbers of birds for ringing. But unless we can have a much larger team of helpers in our migration study camps than circumstances permit - including some devoted entirely to moult study - this is very difficult. We have to collect arthropod parasites and blood samples from the birds for virus studies, and the various operations connecting with ringing - measuring, weighing, etc - use up all the time and facilities available. How, and for how long, to detain the birds during and after all these operations without harming them, when several hundred birds have to be dealt with under more or less alfresco conditions is another problem. All the same it seems a great pity that such wonderful opportunities cannot be more fully utilized!

With warmest regards, Yours ever
Salim

As can be seen from the graph of Haffer, Stresemann really moved into the study of moult towards the 1960s and until the end of his life. He was greatly aided in his research on moult by his (second) wife Vesta, an ornithologist in her own right about whom rather little has been written. Salim Ali notes in his autobiography that Stresemann was his guru and that he routinely wrote enquiries to which detailed replies would be sent without fail but in a difficult cursive handwriting. Perhaps someone can find the archives of Ali's letters and see what is to be learnt there. Ali notes that Stresemann was warm and welcoming in his letters even before he met him, a reason for Ali to choose Berlin over the British Museum. He also wondered how Stresemann managed to keep up with his correspondence given the number of people who wrote to him.

I suspect that a reflection on the state of knowledge of Indian birds with respect to their patterns of moult will not be particularly uplifting but reflect we must. The maintenance of a system of privileges (most often passively by not fighting against privilege) for a few ringers will ensure the poverty of local expertise that still continue.

The entrance to Waldfriedhof Dahlem (4 April 2017)

That afternoon, I went round to Waldfriedhof Dahlem (the Dahlem forest cemetery) to look for Stresemann's grave - which curiously is shared with that of his guru Ernst Hartert. It must be the only tombstone shared by two unrelated ornithologists. Actually Stresemann had wished to be beside his mentor after his death and was cremated with the ashes interred into the grave of Hartert. The grave is maintained by the Berlin district but despite weaving through the blocks, I failed to spot it!

* Ali's early ringing in India included field assistance from the Swiss ornithologist Alfred Schifferli (1912–2007, for a biography in German see - apparently Schifferli's namesake father essentially founded Swiss ornithology and a son Luc also continued in the same field) - there is a mention in Zafar Futehally's auto-biography of a field assistants who had grouped the the three bird-ringers as the three "Alis" that included "Schiffer-Ali" !
** Salim Ali evidently gifted about 200 bird specimens to the collection of the Berlin museum, the species list suggests that it was mostly from peninsular India.

Acknowledgements

Wikimedia Foundation invited me to attend the Wikimedia Conference at Berlin. I visited the archives of the Museum für Naturkunde on the 4th of April and the library on the 5th of April 2017. Thanks are due to Dr Sabine Hackethal and Sandra Miehlbradt, archivists at the Museum of Natural History Berlin for tracing the correspondence between Ali and Stresemann and for allowing their contents to be shared here. Thanks are also due to Martina Rißberger, librarian at Museum für Naturkunde Berlin for access to the Handbuch der Zoologie 7-2 and the biography of Erwin Stresemann. Thanks also to Kalpana Das for assistance.

References

Ali, Salim (1930) The ornithological station at Heligoland. A short account and some reflections. J. Bombay Nat. Hist. Soc. 34:743-751.
Bock, Walter (2001) Erwin Stresemann (1889–1972).—Leben und Werk eines Pioniers der wissenschaftlichen Ornithologie. The Auk 118(3):805-806.
Haffer, Jürgen; Erich Rutschke and Klaus Wunderlich (2000) Erwin Stresemann (1889–1972).—Leben und Werk eines Pioniers der wissenschaftlichen Ornithologie. Acta Historica Leopoldina 34. (465 pages)

Postscript
One of the reasons for posting this is to point out that Indian scientists and amateurs alike have a rather narrow view of the field of ornithology. In fact at a meeting to consider founding an ornithologists association many big names were asked if poultry came under ornithology and those present decided that their field and organization should restrict themselves to the study of wild birds. Even today bibliographic compilations on India routinely skip references to parasitology, ethno-ornithology, paleontology, molecular biology, behaviour, biomechanics and a host of other areas while tending to focus on bird records and regional avifaunal lists - the last was one of the things that Stresemann explicitly banned from the Journal fur Ornithologie during his editorship!