I am writing this post from Berlin and the sense of unreality has receded. I really enjoyed every moment of the Wikimania Conference at the Cite Sciences et Industries. I can’t believe there was a point where I thought that the conference would not happen and I was about to turn down the chance to …
Author archives: Derek
Two months into my WIR with Code for Africa
This Wikipedia world can be brutal. But that is to be expected. The last of the five pillars of the movement makes it very clear. “Wikipedia does not have firm rules.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Five_pillars Weirdly enough this approach works for me (perhaps my anarchic self enjoys it the frission and debate). But this community space also is …
Continue reading “Two months into my WIR with Code for Africa”
Wikipedian in Residence
Lerato (🤣🤣🤣) prompted me. I prompted Chat GPT. My WIR (Wikipedian in Residence) Community Coordinator with the African Wikipedian Alliance gave me the final push. I’m starting to record, collect and publish the statistics about the status of “Vernacular Wikipedia”. My dashboard about Vernacular Wikipedia has been placed on Github. Its offers brief information about …
A connected musician
It has been my experience, that when a group of people come together and share their practices with each other, they then can also see the best in their own and each other’s work. They can then encourage each other to cross the barriers and boundaries that hold them back. This is true online and …
Spatial lens (part 3)
The third post is about maps personal cartography and my (fr) “gĂ©omatique” attempts with geodata. I’ll explore a data centred “map”, generated “automatically” with spatial data infrastructure. Instead of a “normal” hand drawn map (see the map of the 19th arrondissement of Paris below), or a map with a particular boundary with labels (see the …
Spatial Lens (part 2)
Maps permit you “…to write the subjective back into the supposedly objective, to take something that’s meant to be neutral, and make it personal again.” Gerald Marx quoted in https://currencynews.co.za/art-of-the-week-gerhard-marxs-landscape-would-be-the-wrong-word/ Maps (see part 1) are more than the distance between places or way to find something. They are also are a vehicles for stories. Making …
How I (wish) I might work
#FolioFriday is a quickly spent hour. Each week I try to focus on my writing and thought. This is when the restless “monkey mind” of mine, appreciates calm and a regular routine. Even happier when my shared writing is in the company of friends. Bit like evening boarding school prep time! FolioFriday allows me to …
Foliofriday – a year later
I published the concept Folio Friday on the in Aug 2022 I registered the domain name FolioFriday (https://foliofriday.africa/ ) about a year ago (Jan 2024). I wanted to build upon the idea of making your thoughts visible. I had not given much thought to how making thoughts visible also made them scrapable, by LLMs. Today …
Uploading images onto Wikimedia Commons
I have a picture of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llandaff_Oratory|Llandaff_Oratory]]. How can I upload it
A visit to Eswatini
I was in Eswatini from the 21-22 May 2025 on what turned out to be my last training event for SWiP. My stay nearby to the Residence of Ndlovukazi (the Queen Mother) at Lobamba, Eswatini was far to brief. Muzi tells me that this is the royal, spiritual, cultural and political heart of Eswatini (previously …