wikicrowd

2025 Year Review

by
This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series Year Reviews

Well, I’m still not back on a boat as I was in 2023… Where to start…

Lightbug

I havn’t written a whole lot about Lightbug yet on this blog, but its still been a fun year of new developments at, and I think it’s time to share some of them with pictures ;)

We released small handheld RTK device, with programmable ESP32 onboard, giving high precision accuracy, in a nice small package.

I’v enjoyed seeing how folks have been using these devices, from tracking lane changes in cars, to finding accuract path positions, or traking things around race courses.

You can find the documentaiton to read through on the docs site, a fancy looking marketing booklet on the website or look at some of the code examples for the programmable ESP32 also on the docs site.

Hopfully this year I’ll get to the point of writing my GPS, RTK, phone etc comparison blog post, comparing the tracks recorded from a bunch of different devices to compare accuracy etc.

Given my open source / open data interests, I do wonder if this will end up being useful for the OpenStreetMap community.

Now we also developed and worked on the ZCard device, though this has primarily remained inhouse, or for show and conferences and workshops. So much so, that there isn’t even a picture of one on the Lightbug website yet, but here is one sitting on one of our tshirts bak at MWC earlier this year, where we had a demo application running on it, allowing basic interactions from a web page.

Think of it kind of like a Flipper Zero in a way, but running the same hardware and firmware stack as the rest of the Lightbug devices, at a fraction of the price, focued on developers. Buttons, Lights, Eink screen, but more importantly, cellular connectivity (GSM LTE CAT 1), LORA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and more.

The primary processor, and high levels SDKs take care of the complexities of connectivity, power management and eink screen renderings, and give you a high level API for interacting the the device in many ways, such as drawing on the screen, communicating over LORA, or connecting to a server to send and receive data.

Wikimedia

Meanwhile, in my non work Wikimedia volunteer time, I have the privilege of attending both Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi, as well as the Wikimedia Hackathon 2025 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Read more

Wikimedia Commons Depicts statements over time

by

Wikimedia Commons now uses Structured Data on Commons (SDC) to make media information multilingual and machine-readable. A core part of SDC is the ‘depicts’ statement (P180), which identifies items clearly visible in a file. Depicts statements are crucial for MediaSearch, enabling it to find relevant results in any language by using Wikidata labels, as well as having pre precise definition and structure than the existing category structures.

SDC functionalities began to roll out in 2019. Multilingual file captions were introduced early that year, enabling broader accessibility, followed by the ability to add depicts statements directly on file pages and through the UploadWizard.

Although there are numbers floating around showing a general increase in usage of structured data on Commons, there didn’t seem to be any concrete numbers around the growth in use of depicts statements.

I was particularly interested in this, as must tool WikiCrowd is steadily becoming a more and more efficient way of adding these statements en masse. So I decided to see what data I could come up with.

Read more

WikiCrowd for 2025

by

I wrote the first version of WikiCrowd back in 2022 and haven’t really iterated on it much since, beyond adding the odd new set of image categories, and removing features that I decided were not optimum.

At the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon however, WikiCrowd came up as both an entertaining little game to show people during beers, and also a project similar (ish) to something Daanvr was working on (I think it was Suggestion-Engine-Commons-prototype ?)

Upgrades

During the hackathon, and in the weeks following, WikiCrowd went through quite a number of changes

  • The YAML config files for the pre-calculated depicts statements are now on Commons for all to edit
  • Generation of the questions has been spruced up to stop it breaking as it gets deeper into category trees
  • Generation can now be triggered in the UI, as can deleting pending questions
  • The old one by one image mode was removed, and instead replaced by a grid mode
  • More categories and depict options were added
  • A custom grid view was added, allowing users to specify their own category and or Wikidata item
  • Ability to zoom in on an image being displayed
  • Addition of “levels” of questions
  • Display of Wikidata labels and descriptions in the UI (Making use of the new REST API)

Read more

WikiCrowd at 50k answers

by

In January 2022 I published a new Wikimedia tool called WikiCrowd.

This tool allows people to answer simple questions to contribute edits to Wikimedia projects such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.

It’s designed to be able to deal with a wide variety of questions, but due to time constraints, the extent of the current questions covers Aliases for Wikidata, and Depict statements for Wikimedia Commons.

Read more

A first look at WikiCrowd

by

I have quite enjoyed the odd contribution to an app by Google called Crowdsource. You can find it either on the web, or also as an app.

Crowdsource allows people to throw data at Google in controlled ways to add to the massive pile of data that Google uses to improve its services and at the end of the day beat its competition.

It does this by providing a collection of micro contribution tasks in a marginally gamified way, similar to how Google Maps contributions get you Local Guide points etc. In Crowdsource you get a contribution count, a level, and a metric for agreements.

While I enjoy making the odd contribution when bored out of my mind and enjoy looking at the new challenges (currently at 2625 contributions), I always think that data like this should just be going out into the world under a free licence to benefit everyone.

So finally, introducing WikiCrowd, an interface, and soon to be app, that I developed over the new year period.

WikiCrowd Overview

WikiCrowd is hosted on toolforge and can be found at https://wikicrowd.toolforge.org/ (Source code on Github)

In order to contribute, you need some knowledge of the world, a Wikimedia account and that’s it!

Screenshot showing the wikicrowd application, listing various groups of questions users can contribute to

Read more