Detailed Map of Europe
Also, some Wiki[m|p]edia insider baseball
I have spent the last week working on this detailed map of Europe. It is 30+ hours of work in the making and I am excited to show it to you all. I especially enjoyed using the size, color, weight of the font used for different labels to differentiate between different kinds of features. However, outside of the map’s title and the credits ribbon in High Alpine, all text is typeset in Bell Topo Sans.1 The data comes from various public domain sources created both by the US Government and private individuals.
One of the interesting parts of this map shows not reality, but how I see the world as an American Citizen. If you are a committed nationalist of several stripes, you will invariably react negatively to this map. For example, I show Kosovo as an independent country but Crimea as a breakaway region of Ukraine instead of as part of Russia. Additionally, I use the standard English names for places even if those aren’t favored by everyone. There is probably something in here that everyone will disagree with and that is okay. Every cartographer makes choices throughout the map making process that reflect their point of view. It is impossible for a map to only show the facts on the ground.
I encourage everyone to download the map and zoom in on it. There are lots of tiny details that you miss looking at it embedded in an email or a web page. You miss the interplay between the urban areas and the major rivers. The way the railroads cut through the highlands. You understand why the history of Europe includes 1000 years of Poland getting invaded by one country or another.
Wikimedia Movement Charter Drafting Committee Elections
The Wikimedia movement has decided to elect a committee to write a Movement Charter (MC) that will govern how the new Global Council (GC) works. Nobody knows what this new GC is going to do at this drafting committee pretty much gets to decide that. Also, nobody knows if the GC replaces the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) board, answers to the WMF Board, replaces a host of existing community committees, or is the Board’s equal. Therefore, the members of the MC drafting committee are extremely important to the longevity of the Wikimedia Movement.
70 people are running for 7 slots. This is information overload. Also, I have limited knowledge of who is running since this is a global cadre of people and I mostly edit the English Wikipedia. Therefore, I need to sieve 70 people down to 7 in a systematic way.
The first thing I am doing is excluding everyone with less than ~10,000 edits. This is harsh and mean, but there are too many people to evaluate individually. At about 10,000 global edits, I think an editor probably understands how the Wikimedia Movement works. That cuts me down to 35 editors.
I am uninterested in people whose pitches revolve around them sitting on some movement affilate’s board. The movement affiliates have 6 slots that their Holy Roman Empire-style electors are supposed to choose. People who do mostly affiliate work should go through that process.
There are three “tentpole communities” of the Wikimedia movement: English Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, and French Wikipedia. At least one person on this committee should represent the unique views of each of these communities.
I am only interested in people who have been trusted by some portion of the community in the past. Anyone that I am going to choose should have successfully gone through some sort of vetting process in the past.
With those things in mind, here are my seven top choices in no particular order:
Schiste: Former WMF Board member. From the French Wikipedia. (France)
Lyzzy: Former WMF Board member. From the German Wikipedia. (Germany)
Risker: English Wikipedia advanced permission holder. Former member of the Funds Dissemination Committee. (Canada)
Galahad: Member of the Ombuds Commission. From the Spanish Wikivoyage where they are an Admin and Bureaucrat. (Venezuela)
Sky Harbor: Former member of the Affiliations Committee. From the Tagalog Wikipedia where they are an Admin and Bureaucrat. (USA via the Philippines)
Nehaoua: From the Arabic Wikipedia and Arabic Wikisource where they serve as an Admin on both projects. (Algeria)
Tgr: Checkuser on the Hungarian Wikipedia. Also, a WMF Staff member, but very active in the community (USA via Hungary)
If you can not support any of those candidates, I also think these people would also make good members of the committee:
Titodutta: English Wikipedia admin (India)
Yair Rand: English Wiktionary admin (Canada)
Theklan: Basque Wikipedia Admin and Bureaucrat (Spain)
Astute observers will notice that both fonts were created by Sarah Bell. She is one of my favorite font designers for maps.