Minh’s Notes tag:notes.1ec5.org,2008-08-20://2 2021-05-17T21:44:56Z Human-readable chicken scratch Movable Type 5.2.13 The copyeditors’ consensus tag:notes.1ec5.org,2021://2.2309 2021-05-01T19:00:00Z 2021-05-17T21:44:56Z For three years, English Wikipedia editors passionately debated whether to prominently spell Vietnamese names with Vietnamese diacritics. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ From 2011 to 2013, English Wikipedia editors passionately debated whether to prominently spell Vietnamese names with Vietnamese diacritics. Should there be an article on “Vung Tau” or “Vũng Tàu”, “Dien Bien Phu” or “Điện Biên Phủ”, “Dang Huu Phuc” or “Đặng Hữu Phúc”, “pho” or “phở”?

In its early years, Wikipedia’s content management software, MediaWiki, adopted then-state-of-the-art Unicode support to accommodate a quickly growing roster of foreign language editions of the encyclopedia. Drunken with this capability, English Wikipedians systematically embedded inscrutable IPA pronunciations in lede paragraphs, umlauts in the names of heavy metal bands, and zalgo text when signing their own names in discussions. But somehow the privilege of advanced Latin typography didn’t extend to Vietnamese people and places without a great deal more controversy. Superficially, the disagreement was over article titles, but due to how Wikipedia is written, any decision would gradually affect links to those titles, other mentions in running text, and articles translated into other languages.

The debate spread across dozens of discussion pages as editors attempted to get individual articles renamed, to put facts on the ground supporting their positions. One of the most prolific editors on Vietnamese topics eventually got banned for using disingenuous sockpuppet accounts to manufacture consensus to their liking. Even Jimbo Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia, weighed in with exasperation at the “excessive”, “ridiculous”, and “appalling” sight of stacked diacritics in English.

Wikipedia prides itself on being descriptive, rather than prescriptive. It relies on other reliable sources instead of trying to ascertain the truth by itself. One common refrain was that English-language published works routinely strip diacritics from Vietnamese names as a matter of policy. By 2012, some niche book publishers had begun printing Vietnamese diacritics. But the Associated Press stubbornly stuck to the basic English alphabet, the New York Times admitted accent marks for only a few favored European languages, and National Geographic specifically singled out Vietnamese for second-class status. News organizations heavily influenced the debate because their daily articles accounted for so many Google search results. Somehow, some of the most hastily written documents in the entire publishing industry was to set the typographical standard for the most deliberatively written reference work in history.

Ultimately, all the spilled ink came to nothing: per project policy, a lack of consensus means preserving the status quo. In practice, many articles have remained titled with diacritics, because diacritics distinguish completely unrelated words in every case. But editors have had to tread carefully around latent controversy when titling new articles or trying to make existing titles more consistent. The encyclopedia that anyone can edit has some advice for you: don’t go there.

The issue of diacritics on names is inherently personal for me, but I didn’t take offense at the many melodramatic, misinformed comments against Vietnamese diacritics. Surely the excess consonants and syllables in Welsh names would’ve elicited the same calls for simplification. My vote was essentially a sigh of resignation. I knew English language purists could only delay the effects of globalization for so long.

I had already seen these forces cut the other way, pressuring the Vietnamese Wikipedia to eschew the traditional names for overseas people and places in favor of bewildering, often unpronounceable English spelling patterns. Otherwise, it might’ve had to mimic the Vietnamese government’s official encyclopedia, which tries so desperately to hold the line on traditional phonetic spelling that it effectively invents its own novel alphabet: “Anhxtanh” (Einstein), “Penziat” (Penzias), and “Uynxơn” (Wilson) all contribute to the discussion on “Bich Beng” (the Big Bang). Imagine a generation of schoolchildren recalling the role of “Rudơven” (Roosevelt), “Tơruman” (Truman), and “Sơcsin” (Churchill) in World War II. Why would an English encyclopedia stop at stripping diacritics? Why not make Vietnamese names truly intuitive through phonetic respelling?

Sure enough, the tide is slowly turning. In 2019, the AP – which not long ago insisted on ``eyesore quotation marks'' – began to incorporate diacritics into personal names. As a wire service, its style guide has outsized influence. Yesterday, I was surprised to see the Times Opinion section publish its first-ever byline with Vietnamese diacritics, right on the homepage. The article contains several references to Vietnamese people, places, and terms replete with diacritics. Rather fittingly, the op-ed by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai calls attention to a far more serious double standard in the lack of compensation to Vietnamese Agent Orange victims. Even if the extra attention to typographic detail doesn’t make its way into the print edition, due to typesetting constraints, I hope it’s the start of a trend online.

Yes, it’s Minh, like with a G at the end.

Some Vietnamese diacritics also appeared a few weeks earlier in this interactive in the Arts section, and more recently in a Hawaiian name in the Sports section, both articles dealing with issues of identity.

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Cover to cover tag:notes.1ec5.org,2021://2.2308 2021-04-18T09:30:00Z 2021-04-18T09:32:48Z I keep getting more deeply involved in the monumental task of completing OpenStreetMap because, paradoxically, it’s unfinishable. Even a pandemic, for all its horrors, presented an opportunity to make a difference through mapping. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ It was homesickness combined with an interest in roads that got me into OpenStreetMap originally, but I keep getting more deeply involved in the monumental task of completing the map in every imaginable way because it’s for a good cause and because, paradoxically, it’s unfinishable. Even a pandemic, for all its horrors, presented an opportunity to make a difference through mapping.

Tragedy of the commons

For several years after I moved to Silicon Valley, I kept contributing to OSM’s coverage of Ohio and never paid much attention to its coverage of my new surroundings. I assumed the capital of high tech would have an open-source map fully figured out by now. But in fact, when I finally got around to zooming into my part of San José in 2015, it had basically been untouched since the initial nationwide import of the Census Bureau’s low-quality road data, with far less detail than one would find in many Midwestern cities. It was reminiscent of how Google Maps and other proprietary maps had long neglected my hometown in Ohio. I guess everyone around here made the same assumption I did.

OSM is a far cry from proprietary maps. For one thing, we don’t have product managers deciding which cities should get a dedicated surveying team based on market potential or good PR. Perhaps that is how OSM’s corporate mapping teams prioritize, but they don’t have boots on the ground, so they can only help in so many ways. Setting priorities for the volunteer grassroots mappers, the ones who can really transform a map into something eye-catching and unexpected, would be harder than herding cats.

To my chagrin, Silicon Valley has an unearned status as the book cover of every world map out there. All too often, a product manager making purchasing decisions for a tech company will judge a world map solely on how it performs as they search and run errands in their neighborhood – which more often than not is somewhere in the Bay Area, right in Google’s backyard. A poor first impression here means OSM never gets a chance regardless of its coverage elsewhere. If only they knew about our gems, our labors of love, in random other parts of the world!

Mapping on a shoestring

By now, OSM’s map of Silicon Valley is also a labor of love. As soon as I started mapping in San José, I wanted to get it up to par with Cincinnati, but this time I didn’t have the advantage of knowing my way around town. I was never as bad a driver as when I struggled to jot down notes at stoplights or dictate to my phone while training my eyes anywhere but the road. It didn’t help that I kept saying the shop was on the right when I meant left – or was it right? As soon as I could get through my backlog of voice recordings, I’d have to resurvey the same places because new restaurants had replaced the old ones.

A few of us grassroots mappers found each other by chance and set up shop within Code for San José, even though mapping doesn’t really involve coding. We started scheming to build out the kind of superb coverage one would expect from an OSM community ten times our size. We copied some 3,500 miles of sidewalks, 250,000 buildings, and 200,000 addresses from local government databases, instead of mapping them by hand as larger communities often do. We’re like a scrappy startup (with no hope of a business model).

Blind spots

With streets, sidewalks, and buildings, San José now has a respectable level of coverage on OSM compared to other major U.S. cities. But these days, an ordinary user would consider a street map lacking businesses and other points of interest to be akin to chartjunk. Ask anyone who works on map and navigation software and they’ll tell you that most user feedback has nothing to do with the color scheme, turn instructions, or estimated travel times – it’s about the relevance and accuracy of search results.

Until this year, our approach to mapping businesses largely entailed collecting street-level imagery, then waiting for people to enter the businesses manually using the collected imagery. Occasionally, one of us would drive around taking notes, or a business owner would spam the map with an advertisement. (We’ll take what we can get.)

This organic approach helped us cover roughly 20% of the businesses in Silicon Valley. This shortcoming is by no means unique to this part of the country. I think it’s fair to say a lot of mappers have come to view comprehensive POI coverage as a Hard Problem and unattainable luxury.

Worse than being incomplete, our POI coverage was extremely uneven. You could generally rely on OSM for prominent, car-culture-friendly businesses like gas stations, but not for professional services or healthcare. Downtown areas and some suburbs had dense POI coverage, but working-class, minority neighborhoods and new suburban developments had sparse coverage.

Catching up

When the pandemic hit, the county’s first-in-the-nation lockdown threatened to shutter many businesses and render all the years of ad-hoc POI mapping useless, especially in the minority neighborhoods where we were already falling behind. How would we catch up to the proprietary maps now?

Luckily, the county public health department required every business to submit a site-specific protection plan online as a condition for reopening. At a brainstorming session in September, we discovered that the county was publishing these forms on a website, including the name and address of every kind of business, many in the very places we were finding difficult to cover well. It’s as if the county has dropped a phone book in our lap, but this phone book is machine-readable and updated daily with businesses that are sure to be open during the pandemic.

We turned the county’s dataset of forms into yet another massive import. Eventually, this import will result in 20,000–30,000 new POIs, making it the third largest POI import in OSM’s history, larger than most countrywide imports.

Unlike our previous imports, this import is especially labor-intensive because each entry needs to be hand-reviewed for accuracy. So we simplified the workflow so that even the most novice mapper can contribute from the comfort of a Web browser. It’s convenient enough that even I can comfortably contribute despite shying away from the usual import tooling. Now the challenge is to recruit more participants before the pandemic ends and this dataset starts getting stale. If it were just up to the few of us longtime mappers, it would take us years to complete the import, so we really need help.

Though we’re still mired in the 15% range, this import is already making an impact. Whenever an iOS developer tests their location-aware application in a simulator, the simulated routes around Cupertino feature many more POIs than they used to, including childcare centers and offices we never thought to map all this time. The map looks full like never before. It’s a baby step toward changing outside perceptions about OSM. Meanwhile, we seem to be filling in gaps in places like Milpitas and East San José that had gotten neglected all these years. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up covering this county’s many ethnic enclaves better than any other map.

I’m hopeful we can build up an active mapping community that can not only fill in these gaps but maintain our momentum for years to come. In time, the businesses that survive this pandemic will benefit from being included in OSM. Maybe we’ll even serve as a model to other cities’ mapping communities, so that our coverage of Silicon Valley will be more than a mere book cover.

Please help

First, if you aren’t familiar with contributing to OSM, go to openstreetmap.org and create a free user account. Once you’ve logged in, zoom into your neighborhood and click the “Edit” button at the top of the page. Spend a few minutes completing the interactive tutorial to get a feel for editing, then dive in and add missing details to your neighborhood.

Once you’ve gotten the hang of basic mapping, go to this MapRoulette project and follow the instructions to get started. It’s a safely socially distanced activity and a small way to help the local community come out stronger after the pandemic.

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The main course tag:notes.1ec5.org,2020://2.2307 2020-06-07T06:30:00Z 2020-09-19T08:13:03Z Who am I to comment on the terrible things that keep happening in this country? Me, I’m just someone who’s lived a sampler platter of a life. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ Who am I to comment on the terrible things that keep happening in this country? Me, I’m just someone who’s lived a sampler platter of a life. I have just enough musical talent for the honkytonk pianos at the airport, but not enough to survive another lesson. I had Tourette syndrome just enough to be teased at school, but not enough to need medication. I’ve crisscrossed the U.S. enough times to amass a mound of maps, but I was so clueless on my first visit to Europe, two years ago, that I needed help turning on the lights in my hotel room.

I’ve experienced just enough racism to know it still flourishes in this country. As an Asian American growing up in a nearly all-white, conservative Ohio town, I got to know the stereotypes pretty well. My grade school initially dumped me in a remedial English class assuming I didn’t speak my only language. (What I actually needed help with was math.) If I missed a pop culture reference, it was because I needed to “learn more about America”, my country of birth, not because I’m a bookworm. There was the time a white classmate assumed I was a Democrat because I’m non-white, then half-jokingly ridiculed me for sympathizing with slaveowners. (If that sounds absurd, consider that American history teachers dwell on antebellum politics, but they skip the civil rights movement and party realignment of the 1960s, ostensibly for lack of time.)

Racial profiling is not an abstract concept for me or my family. For example, when the town redid the street outside our neighborhood, they stationed a white police officer there for a week to enforce a “Local Traffic Only” sign. The only person she pulled over was my father on his way home. She refused to acknowledge that he lived in our tidy suburban neighborhood. Instead, she booked him and falsely accused him of assaulting her. Ultimately, he got the citations thrown out in Mayor’s Court, but that incident colored our impression of Loveland as just another Reading.

I wonder: do white parents berate their 10-year-old children for leaving a convenience store without a receipt as proof of purchase, worried that, next time, the store clerk will turn around and call the cops on them for shoplifting? I still think of that eagle-eyed store clerk every time a gas pump runs out of receipt paper.

In Ohio, most adults described racial profiling as a hypothesis, the race card as a certainty, and racism in the past tense. That made it difficult to share a different perspective candidly. I do use the past tense to describe these experiences of mine, because upon moving to California and finding a job in Silicon Valley, I’m technically no longer underrepresented and most of the racism I experience is much more subtle. In a sense, I’ve escaped, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.

Sampler

I’m writing about these experiences not because I want your pity, but rather because I don’t want anyone I know to be complacent about racism in this country. It would hit close to home if you knew how it affects the friends and acquaintances of yours who have to suppress their frustration like I suppress my Tourette ticks, just to get on with life. Racism needs to be acknowledged and addressed, led by those who aren’t its victims. As a society, we need to work on not only the symptoms, like racial profiling and excessive use of force, but also the pernicious lack of representation that leads to it. For me, as a coder, addressing the lack of visibility and fair representation is how I can most readily make a dent in systemic racism, because increasingly people rely on software and online services as gateways to society.

When I started working in earnest on Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap and later joined Code for San José, I thought my efforts were about narrowing the digital divide and plugging holes in education, but it turns out everything is interrelated. Now the challenge is to make these open source projects more authentic: not just for marginalized communities but, more importantly, with these communities. An effective code of conduct against harassment is now a baseline expectation, not much to write home about. But what to do about a project that celebrates outdoor mapping as the gold standard, looking down on “armchair” mapping, when a Black person wouldn’t necessarily feel safe surveying by foot or by car in their own neighborhood, let alone an unfamiliar one?

It would be wrong for me to say I feel anything like the weight of racism that the Black community faces in this country – that would be like saying I know what it’s like to be hospitalized for COVID-19 because I had a nasty cold in March. None of the encounters I described above were life-or-death situations, because the model minority myth shields Asian Americans even as it stifles us. I even have the luxury of nostalgia for the town that sometimes embraced and sometimes slighted me. But that awareness makes me all the more concerned about people who are served the full entrée, and more determined to do something about it.

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Local color tag:notes.1ec5.org,2020://2.2306 2020-01-25T03:15:00Z 2020-01-25T18:05:07Z A year ago, I was pretty sure I’d be spending all my free time contributing buildings and turn lanes to OpenStreetMap. I did contribute plenty of them, but I also have a tendency to get distracted by ideas out of left field. During the past year, I wound up contributing several kinds of features to OSM that never make it onto conventional maps. At some point, I took up mapping flags. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ A year ago, I was pretty sure I’d be spending all my free time contributing buildings and turn lanes to OpenStreetMap. I did contribute plenty of them, but I also have a tendency to get distracted by ideas out of left field. During the past year, I wound up contributing several kinds of features to OSM that never make it onto conventional maps. At some point, I took up mapping flags.

A taboo

The first atlas I owned as a kid was The Picture Atlas of the World (Kemp & Delf). The beautifully illustrated maps and infographics endeared this volume to me for years, but it was the colorful ring of national flags around the front cover that made it irresistible to me at the bookstore. It’s a wonder that my parents gave in to my pleas and purchased this atlas, despite the flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam gracing the cover. My grandparents fled the Communists in the ’50s, and they with my parents fled the Communists again in the ’70s. Like many refugees, they longed for Vietnam – especially after searching in vain for Vietnamese food – but hearing about life there today, good or bad, would often elicit dismissive eye-rolling about the Communists.


The Picture Atlas of the World
The flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam appears on the cover of this children’s illustrated atlas. (© Dorling Kindersley, used for critical commentary)

That was in a suburb of Cincinnati where Vietnamese are few and unknown. It was a bit easier for them to put the war behind them when no one around them seemed to know or care about Vietnam. But that wasn’t the case everywhere. Whenever we visited a Little Saigon in another city, I was fascinated by all the steps they had taken to maintain civic continuity with the old country: the major streets renamed “Sài Gòn” and “Trần Hưng Đạo”, the veterans marching in ARVN fatigues on holidays, the South Vietnamese flag raised proudly beside the American flag.


Wilcrest
The City of Houston has renamed the major thoroughfares in its Little Saigon, posting Vietnamese signs of equal prominence as the older, more pronounceable English signs. Here, Wilcrest Drive has been renamed in honor of the unnamed soldiers of the Republic of Vietnam Military Forces (Chiến Sĩ Vô Danh VNCH). OpenStreetMap is the only online map that indicates the Vietnamese name, which is increasingly important for navigation as the English sign fades. (© Mapillary, CC BY-SA)

Later I’d learn that activists have convinced numerous city councils and state legislatures to give the South Vietnamese flag official status, regardless of international diplomacy, usually under a name like “Heritage and Freedom Flag”. The lá cờ vàng ba sọc đỏ is so important to these communities that, once in awhile, some official or business owner will unwittingly spark outrage, protests, and apologies by flying the wrong flag to represent the local Vietnamese American population.


Người Việt
The South Vietnamese flag flies at equal height with the American and California flags outside the offices of Người Việt, a Vietnamese-language newspaper. (© Codobai, CC BY-SA)

Name that flag

About six years ago, I noticed that some contributors to OpenStreetMap had come up with a standard scheme for mapping flagpoles and the flags that fly on them. According to the scheme, flags are classified as “national”, “regional”, “religious”, etc., and national flags are identified by ISO 3166 country code. It was specific enough to precisely describe most of the flags in my hometown, so I didn’t think much more of these tags after mapping a few American and state flags. I had more important things to contribute to OSM anyways, like redrawing roads that the Census Bureau had turned into abstract art.


Vietnam War Memorial in Houston
The Vietnam War Memorial in Houston’s International District took over the middle of a shopping center parking lot. This being Texas, the flags are large enough to easily identify in aerial imagery. (© WhisperToMe, PD)

But then I started mapping Little Saigons. Nothing marks these communities as indelibly as the South Vietnamese flag. It’s the first thing to map, more important than the buildings and businesses. Yet no one has ever compiled a comprehensive listing of the places where the South Vietnamese flag flies. For that matter, no one has ever made a comprehensive map of these flags. That makes OSM the perfect place to start one.

Unfortunately, when I started mapping South Vietnamese flags, the approved flag tags were too imprecise to identify it, because the community hadn’t considered that a flag could outlast its country. As it turns out, South Vietnam’s ISO country code was VN, but after the war, the ISO obsoleted North Vietnam’s VD and repurposed VN to represent the reunified Vietnam – one of the spoils of war, apparently. I couldn’t simply tag these flags as flag:type=national and country=VN, as the OSM Wiki suggested, without fearing that an OSM-powered map would automatically depict them as Communist flags in the heart of a fervently anticommunist community. Indeed, OSM2World would color the South Vietnamese flag red based on the ISO country code, though it is possible to override the color explicitly.


Vietnamese flag at United Nations Headquarters
As far as I know so far, the only flag of Vietnam that flies outdoors in the U.S. on a permanent basis is the one outside the U.N. headquarters in New York. (© Kriss Omana, CC BY-SA)

A quick search in taginfo showed me that someone had coined a more freeform flag:name key in 2014 and used it ad-hoc on a few flags without documenting the key or campaigning to get it formally approved by a vote. flag:name=South Vietnam was an improvement in that I could make sure other mappers know which flag it is. But there was little chance that a future flag-bearing map renderer would special-case specific values of this key, given the sheer number of flag designs and the fact that the name could differ based on the local language where the flag flies. I needed to pair flag:name with another key set to an external identifier, which a renderer could use to look up machine-readable details in an external database.

I knew of two projects attempting to comprehensively catalog flag designs: Flags of the World and Wikidata. Both contain entries for the flag of South Vietnam, but I figured I’d eventually map other flags that weren’t in either database. My previous e-mail submissions to Flags of the World went nowhere, whereas anyone can create new Wikidata items while mapping. Moreover, Flags of the World lacks strictly unique identifiers: each webpage does have a somewhat memorable URL slug, but multiple flags can be documented on the same webpage. By contrast, Wikidata is organized around unique item identifiers (also called QIDs). It also has an API that makes it easy for software to reliably look up details, such as the flag’s aspect ratio, a scalable image to render, or even the Flags of the World URL slug if necessary.


Usage history of flag:name and flag:wikidata
The Ohsome analysis tool shows flag:name was introduced in 2014 but went virtually unused until last year. flag:wikidata was introduced last year as well, and both keys have rapidly increased in usage. (© HeiGIT, map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL)

flag:wikidata follows the example of several other well-established keys that are set to QIDs, so I could use this key a bunch of times and expect other mappers and renderer developers to intuit the meaning behind it. But just in case, I informally suggested this new key on the man_made=flagpole tag’s discussion page and eventually documented both flag:name and flag:wikidata on their own wiki pages to raise awareness.

Praying for a gentle breeze

Now I needed to get more flags on the map, to prove out the idea of tagging specific designs. I turned my attention back to my hometown and its mundane collection of American and state flags. Actually, I had missed plenty of other flags that needed QIDs for disambiguation: the five flags of the U.S. Armed Forces turned up at veterans’ memorials and outside the homes of many veterans. Some Catholic churches and cemeteries fly the local archdiocesan flag. McDonald’s restaurants fly a familiar Golden Arches flag. The high school I attended celebrates its Barcelonan exchange students with a Catalan flag – but my parents preferred to think of it as the similar-looking South Vietnamese flag.


St. Xavier High School Stadium
St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati flies the flags of rival athletic teams, the three states where its students live, and the countries that send exchange students. Catalonia’s flag flies under the Spanish flag because of the school’s longstanding partnership with a school in Barcelona. (© Eugene Kim, CC BY)

Probably the main reason no one had ever rigorously catalogued individual South Vietnamese flags is that, important as each one may be to a particular community, it isn’t famous enough that word of that individual flag would usually spread across the country. OSM offers a way around that: anyone sitting in their armchair, so to speak, can identify flags in street-level imagery and sometimes even aerial imagery. It took me only a few minutes to find South Vietnamese flags in the most well-known Little Saigon, in Garden Grove, California. But apart from that, it’s still time-consuming to think of Vietnamese shopping districts and scour imagery for a little yellow speck to zoom in on. Not nearly every Vietnamese grocery store would fly the South Vietnamese flag, just as not nearly every mainstream grocery store flies the American flag out front.

As a shortcut, I figured that places of worship catering to Vietnamese Americans would be just as likely to fly flags out front as mainstream places of worship, but much more likely to fly the South Vietnamese flag alongside the American flag. OSM has a lot of places of worship in the U.S., thanks to an import of the federal government’s official gazetteer, GNIS. GNIS is by no means comprehensive when it comes to places of worship, and it brought in lots of long-gone churches. Fortunately, it also has a tendency to call Vietnamese places of worship by descriptive names like “Vietnamese Alliance Church” rather than the actual, diacritic-laden names like “Hội Thánh Tin Lành Việt Nam”. So simply searching for “Vietnamese, United States” turned up quite a few churches, many of which do fly the South Vietnamese flag. I made sure to rename these churches according to signs I spotted in street-level imagery, and in some cases I had to move the church quite a distance from where GNIS had it, so there was a practical benefit in addition to the symbolism of getting flags on the map.


Vietnamese Alliance Church of Midway City
GNIS had this church as “Vietnamese Alliance Church”, but despite subsequent mass bot edits, it had never been tagged as belonging to the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination. It also hadn’t been tagged with its equally prominent Vietnamese name, though many Protestant churches use the same Vietnamese name anyways. (© Märker Geospatial, CC BY-SA)

I turned up more Catholic churches by searching for the names that Vietnamese Catholics most commonly venerate, but in English: “Vietnamese Martyrs”, “Our Lady of Lavang”, “Andrew Dung Lac”. Aside from flags, these search results gave me a chance to micromap other details like outdoor Stations of the Cross. Similarly, I mapped a lot of statues after searching for Vietnamese words that commonly appear in the names of Buddhist temples, like “Phat” (Phật) and “Quang”.


Vietnamese Martyrs Catholic Church in Arlington, Texas
The American, Holy See, and South Vietnamese flags fly outside Vietnamese Martyrs Catholic Church in Arlington, Texas. An outdoor Stations of the Cross is just out of view to the right. By sheer luck, this intersection sports a tornado siren – another hidden map feature I’ve been focusing on. (© Kevin Ewing, CC BY-SA)

I was pleasantly surprised to have access to street-level imagery in most of the localities where I found places of worship to map. That made it much easier to map unfurled flags. Sometimes, though, I had to resort to process of elimination. For example, sometimes the street-level imagery was taken at a time of day when the flags were down, but there was enough of a breeze to unfurl the flags in aerial imagery. From a set of three flags outside a Catholic church, I could often deduce that the one with a dark canton was the American flag, the yellow one was the South Vietnamese flag, and the yellow and white one was the flag of the Holy See. I made sure to tag any other flag I saw along the way, creating a corresponding Wikidata item if necessary.

Ultimately, thanks in large part to OSM’s Nominatim search engine, I managed to map some 45 South Vietnamese flags across the U.S. and Canada, making it one of the most commonly tagged flag designs in OSM. (I did spot a couple Vietnamese flags too, but notably none in the U.S. other than the one outside the U.N. headquarters in New York.) flag:wikidata is now one of the most commonly used Wikidata-related keys in OSM, more common than artist:wikidata and architect:wikidata, identifying Pride flags, Confederate flags, and everything in between.


South Vietnamese flags in OpenStreetMap
It’s no surprise that Houston and Orange County in Southern California are so bedecked with yellow flags, given the very large Vietnamese populations in both areas. But they show up in some unexpected places too, like Greer, South Carolina, and Sundre, Alberta. OpenStreetMap doesn’t record the stories behind these flags, but it could serve as a starting point for research. (© OpenStreetMap contributors, CC BY-SA; map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL)

I look forward to OSM’s coverage of flags increasing dramatically as others find out about this project and scour their own communities for flags. For now, only specialized 3D renderers of OSM data show flags at all. The overpass turbo analysis tool allows you to see the invisible flag data, but it requires some training, such as in a walkthrough I gave at the State of the Map U.S. conference last year. As flag coverage increases, I hope renderer developers will take note and add more sophisticated support for this data.

Raising the bar

I’m not mapping South Vietnamese flags in order to bear witness against Communism or to reopen old wounds. Rather, I want to ensure that Vietnamese American communities are represented on the map where they are today, in a way that’s meaningful to them. They already know where to find phở and bánh mì; what matters more is awareness and recognition. I want OSM’s attention to detail to bring people into the project from a broader range of backgrounds. The OSM community needs more diversity – not only among mappers and developers, but also among users and advocates – to establish the project’s relevance in society and keep it sustainable over the long term.

We need to expand our ideas of what OSM can excel at. Flag data is superfluous – until it represents new knowledge about the world that has never been expressed before or leads to improvements to the surrounding map. If we allow OSM to be judged solely by how well we provide the kind of information that people expect out of proprietary maps, OSM’s legacy will at best be a later, less efficient, less integrated Google Maps, merely a more current, detailed imitation of the paper maps in my collection. To be sure, roads, buildings, and businesses are an important baseline for a layperson’s trust in a map, but a baseline alone doesn’t capture people’s imaginations and spur them to action. Let OSM’s corporate infantry figure out how the project can compete with proprietary data sets on baseline data, while we grassroots mappers focus on mapping something quirkier, something more colorful that gets the next generation hooked on maps.

You can help

To contribute to OpenStreetMap, create a free account on the site, zoom the map into your neighborhood, and click the Edit button at the top. Take the walkthrough to learn the basics of editing OSM data.

To map a flagpole, add a Point and search the feature types for flagpole in the sidebar. The built-in fields so far only let you indicate the flag’s type (flag:type) and ISO country code (country), but you can add the flag:name and flag:wikidata keys manually in the “All tags” section at the bottom of the sidebar. The wiki’s flagpole documentation explains some of the nuances, like the difference between governmental and organisation, and how to find or create a QID in Wikidata.

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The bridge where friends meet tag:notes.1ec5.org,2019://2.2303 2019-02-22T18:30:00Z 2019-02-23T22:28:07Z The Benson Street Bridge, or “Rainbow Bridge”, marks the city limit between Reading and Lockland, Ohio. Residents are fond of mentioning a sign that hangs over the bridge, proclaiming both Cincinnati suburbs to be “Where Friends Meet”. But if you talk to enough people from the surrounding area, you eventually hear whispers about a less friendly sign that used to be posted at the city limit, warning nonwhites not to set foot in Reading. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ The Benson Street Bridge, or “Rainbow Bridge”, marks the city limit between Reading and Lockland, Ohio. Residents are fond of mentioning a sign that hangs over the bridge, proclaiming both Cincinnati suburbs to be “Where Friends Meet”. But if you talk to enough people from the surrounding area, you eventually hear whispers about a less friendly sign that used to be posted at the city limit, warning nonwhites not to set foot in Reading. My mother used to ride the bus with an African American person who still avoided that town, even though she said the whites-only sign hadn’t been up since the 1960s. You can imagine there must’ve been robust enforcement of that policy for it to have wound up on a welcome sign in the first place.

I first heard about her experience while growing up on the other side of town in Loveland. I was still too young and sheltered to take notice of the occasional weird remark or special treatment that in hindsight was almost certainly related to my ethnicity. But that story struck me, because we previously lived in Reading and we went to church and shopped there for several years after. To a child like me, Reading seemed like a perfectly normal community, not the sort of place that only a generation earlier might’ve treated nonwhites like criminals or kept us out.

Benson Street Bridge in 1951
The Benson Street Bridge is pictured in a 1951 book. A replica of this original “Where Friends Meet” sign was raised over the bridge last year. No whites-only sign is visible in the photo. If the sign was indeed posted on Benson Street, it’s possible that it could’ve been posted just after the bridge, remaining out of view, such as where a Neighborhood Watch sign is seen in a photo from 1998 or a roadside welcome sign is seen in Google Street View in 2018.

Reading’s decades-long history as a sundown town goes unmentioned in official town histories. A 1951 book commemorating Reading’s centennial tells some tall tales about Reading’s history but omits any mention of the ban on blacks. Surrounding the mayor’s embellished historical account are advertisements by local businesses praising Reading as a “progressive town”. In fact, it took me many hours of scouring local newspaper archives before I finally found a single published confirmation of the ban, from 1912.

Fear Crowd as Suspect Faces Girls
On July 5, 1912, The Cincinnati Post, a pro-labor paper, mentions Reading’s ban on blacks to explain why an armed mob of Reading villagers would invade neighboring towns to capture a black suspect falsely accused of attacking two white women. Another daily paper, The Cincinnati Enquirer, covered the same incident but downplayed the mob and mentioned nothing about a ban on blacks.

Even if the community felt little need to advertise its ban in the press, those who needed to know about it did get the message. Census records show a purely white Reading, extremely unusual for the area and for a town of its size. Until the 1970s, Reading’s black population was usually nonexistent and never broke two percent of the total population. By contrast, neighboring towns had plenty of black residents, especially Lincoln Heights, the first black-led municipality in the North.

Reading population by race, from incorporation to present
Census 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
White 1,225 1,575 ? ? 3,076 3,985 4,463 5,664 6,079 7,833 12,816 14,213 12,563 11,755 10,579 9,251
African-American 5 0 ? ? 0 0 77 59 0 0 1 60 196 172 361 756
Other 0 0 ? ? 0 0 0 0 0 3 15 30 84 111 352 378
Total 1,230 1,575 2,680 ? 3,076 3,985 4,540 5,723 6,079 7,836 12,832 14,303 12,843 12,038 11,292 10,385

Other communities have had their ugly side too. Loveland was where the KKK held regional conventions and staged photo-ops in the 1960s and 1970s. As recently as the 1990s, when I lived there, they almost put up their cross in front of City Hall, after Cincinnati put an end to their annual rallies downtown. Yet despite the problems African Americans in Loveland may have faced, they were still able to reside there in greater numbers. Reading’s demographics stood apart from its neighbors, a fact that was surely clearer in person than in a federal census report. The sundown town phenomenon was especially pernicious because it was, in a sense, uncontroversial in communities like Reading.

As I continued to search newspaper archives for additional information about Reading’s race relations, I stumbled upon articles about dozens of other towns across the country that had driven out their black residents, either violently or by threat of violence, and become sundown towns. Each time, I edited the town's Wikipedia article to acknowledge the town’s former antagonism towards blacks. In at least one instance, I found that a passage on race relations had already been added to the article, only to be removed by a local resident who perceived it to be “playing the race card”, or blowing out of proportion what was historically a fact of life. But this is not a case of judging yesterday’s norms by today’s morals. Back then, southern Democratic newspapers often mocked northerners and Republicans as hypocrites for criticizing Jim Crow laws but, on the other hand, implementing an extreme form of segregation not often found in the South. Some northern papers also noted the existence of sundown towns with regret. People knew it was wrong.

By now, such policies have been swept under the rug so thoroughly that many current residents are legitimately unaware of their hometown’s sordid past. For them, seeing it suddenly appear in the town’s Wikipedia article can feel like an attack on their own character. But silence can only perpetuate injustice. There’s at least one person who still bears the burden of that long-gone sign at the Reading city limit. She will continue to experience that stigma until the community acknowledges its past and declares a definitive end to institutional racism as publicly as it started. Mentioning sundown towns in these Wikipedia articles is the least I can do to start much-needed dialogue before it’s too late to give people like her some closure.

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Windmills for now tag:notes.1ec5.org,2019://2.2302 2019-01-02T12:34:00Z 2019-02-22T18:37:11Z This April marked ten years since I started mapping for OpenStreetMap. Then as now, mapping has always been a hobby for me, even as I picked up a day job writing OSM-powered software. I seem to have a knack for playing double duty, awkwardly. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ This April marked ten years since I started mapping for OpenStreetMap. Then as now, mapping has always been a hobby for me, even as I picked up a day job writing OSM-powered software.

I seem to have a knack for playing double duty, awkwardly. That was on full display this year, as I juggled personal and employer-sponsored engagements back-to-back at State of the Map U.S. in Detroit, then traveled to WikiConference North America in Columbus to repeat the process. Fortunately, my first trip overseas, for a workshop at the international State of the Map in Milan, was less demanding. It was also an opportunity to witness firsthand the political fault lines running through the OSM community.

For a couple years, some community members have insisted on distinguishing between hobbyists on the one hand, and commercial interests on the other hand, with the phrase “craft mapper”. Some mappers literally wear the term as a badge of pride, in response to a blog post that questioned their influence on the project’s methods and atmosphere.

Windmill

To hear it from them, craft mappers seem to be defined by angst about a future where computer vision and machine learning and import bots and teams of paid mappers run circles around hobbyists. But I prefer to focus on the motivation rather than the method: call me a “grassroots mapper”. It’s an important distinction, and not only because I’m a teetotaler.

At its best, grassroots mapping is about leading by example and having fun all the while. Freed from short-term business justifications or even the need to focus on anything at all, grassroots mappers are continually at the vanguard of what’s worth mapping. I don’t have to have a plan for mapping all the restaurants in order to map just a few that keep getting neglected by industry. There doesn’t have to be a point to mapping corn mazes, or lavishing world-class attention upon a provincial town. What looks like tilting at windmills today will before long be the domain of paid mappers and artificial intelligence, as we move onto the next set of ideas to prove out.

Yet grassroots mapping is fundamentally uneven and small-scale, which makes the results suboptimal for just about any practical use case. As a grassroots mapper, I want my mapping to benefit ordinary people. Ordinary people need guarantees around reliability and consistency before they can even consider the special touches we put on the map. It would be unfair and counterproductive to saddle grassroots mappers’ spirits with the daily grind of making the map reliable and consistent. That’s what imports, organized mapping, and bots are for. The map can achieve that level of quality, and we can still have our fun, but only as long as the OSM project remains a big tent, welcoming all the help it can muster.

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I spy a spy tag:notes.1ec5.org,2018://2.2301 2018-09-16T23:30:00Z 2018-10-04T22:18:56Z Recently, I discovered that the author of several Firefox add-ons has turned some of them into spyware designed to steal passwords from unsuspecting users. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ Recently, I discovered that the author of several Firefox add-ons has turned some of them into spyware designed to steal passwords from unsuspecting users. This post details the classic man-in-the-browser Trojan horse attack to raise awareness about shortcomings in Firefox’s WebExtensions API and the process for approving add-ons for distribution via the Firefox Add-ons website.

A gift for Troy

A year ago, Mozilla eliminated the so-called “legacy” extension platform in favor of a new WebExtensions API largely copied from Google Chrome’s extension API. This caused my AVIM extension to become incompatible with Firefox 57 and above, inconveniencing many Vietnamese-speaking Firefox users who depended on it to browse and communicate in their native language. I remain committed to eventually rewriting AVIM as a WebExtension, but there are significant technical hurdles.

In the meantime, two developers took advantage of the void left by AVIM. One created an extension that opens their homepage, from which they served ads alongside a download link for someone else’s desktop-based IME. Another, a self-described cybersecurity practitioner who goes by “domdomrung”, ported several add-ons from Google Chrome to Firefox, including a rudimentary “Vietnamese Input Method” extension. Both authors’ extensions had a blatant SEO character, but that in itself didn’t violate Mozilla’s add-on policies on security and privacy.

Vietnamese Input MethodSafeKids
Vietnamese Input Method (left) and SafeKids (right) on the Firefox Add-ons website

In April, domdomrung published a minor update to Vietnamese Input Method that automatically went out to existing users. The previous month, domdomrung had also updated a “SafeKids” extension that ostensibly provided child monitoring functionality. Buried within both updates were five lines of malicious code that logs users’ keystrokes and sends them to domdomrung’s website. Specifically, the code injects a script onto every webpage that logged each keystroke on any webpage to local storage. Every 3.6 seconds or upon pressing the Enter or Return key, if at least five characters had been typed, the script loads a tracking pixel from domdomrung’s domain, blog.mybloggertricks.org, using an Image constructor.

The putative image’s URL includes the typed characters and the current webpage’s URL. The resource at this URL is not an image but rather an HTML document that redirects to Google. Nonetheless, like any tracking pixel, merely accessing the URL is enough to populate the server logs with the payload. In this case, the payload includes a full browsing history and is very likely to include user names and passwords.

Surprise

Mozilla’s add-on policy requires every add-on to “disclose how the add-on collects, uses, stores and shares user data in the privacy policy” and “expects that the add-on limits data collection whenever possible”. Vietnamese Input Method had no privacy policy. Collecting keystrokes in this way provides no obvious user benefit. It’s impossible to know what domdomrung is doing with the data, but it isn’t difficult to imagine the data being used for nefarious purposes. (Some popular input method extensions do send keystrokes to a server but justify it as a necessary step for predictive suggestions. Such extensions do raise security and privacy concerns but are not necessarily malicious.)

SafeKids privacy policy
Vietnamese Input Method (left) and The SafeKids extension’s privacy policy says one thing in English to get by the review process and another thing in Vietnamese to attract downloads.

Meanwhile, SafeKids has a bilingual privacy policy that attempts to justify keylogging as a legitimate function that gives parents control over their children’s browsing behavior. Parenting questions aside, it’s worth noting that only the English portion of the privacy policy says, “I and mozilla cant not view your log” [sic]. That statement can’t not be true, given how the extension phones home with browsing histories and keystrokes. Similar language is nowhere to be found in the Vietnamese portion of the privacy policy. I suspect domdomrung used this statement to deceive Mozilla Add-ons reviewers who speak English but not Vietnamese. It worked.

A bug in SafeKids makes it possible to identify at least two victims of this extension. The add-on aggressively added the keylogging script to every HTML document, failing to distinguish ordinary webpages from HTML documents serving as rich text editors, which are popular on forums. As a result, the malicious code is present verbatim in forum posts and elsewhere. Where possible, I have notified these individuals of the need to uninstall the malicious add-ons.

In July, a Firefox user left a review complaining about Vietnamese Input Method’s keylogging behavior. However, the add-on remained available for download. On September 1st, I discovered this add-on and reported it to Mozilla, and they removed it a couple days later. However, they haven’t added it to the blocklist, so users who have installed this extension continue to suffer this breach of privacy. On September 9th, I also reported SafeKids to Mozilla. It remains available for download.

Vietnamese Input Method reviews
I wasn’t the first to notice the malicious behavior in Vietnamese Input Method.

On September 16th, I filed Bugzilla bugs 1,491,716 and 1,491,717 to add Vietnamese Input Method and SafeKids to the blocklist, which will quickly disable any existing installations. I urge Mozilla to act promptly to delete SafeKids and blocklist both add-ons.

Thanks to Mozilla for deleting and blocklisting both add-ons.

Prevention and preemption

This incident underscores the privacy risk posed by keyboarding software and undermines Mozilla’s claim that WebExtensions is inherently more secure than the legacy add-on platform that it replaced. Granted, with WebExtensions, a security vulnerability such as AVIM’s 2009 eval() bug can’t as easily escalate into a full-blown attack on the local machine. Still, as long as an extension has access to the keyboard and the network simultaneously, it’s all too easy for an unscrupulous add-on author to steal personal information en masse. The irony isn’t lost on me that my own subsequent efforts to keep AVIM secure through sandboxing frequently drew scrutiny from reviewers, scrutiny that these add-ons clearly didn’t receive.

Mozilla should audit existing add-ons for undeclared tracking pixel usage and reimpose a human review process for add-on updates, just as there was before WebExtensions. A human review process can help ensure that add-on developers aren’t using “clean” first versions as cover for future malicious updates. As it is, WebExtensions and the Firefox Add-ons website give users a false sense of security.

Beyond additional scrutiny, WebExtensions needs a dedicated, secure input method API. Such an API would isolate input method logic in an environment that lacks access to the network or indeed the rest of the webpage. Network access for predictive input methods could require a separate privilege. Ideally, an input method API would work throughout the browser, including in the search bar, as AVIM does. The lack of this functionality is a frequent complaint among users of Google Chrome’s input method extensions, including Google Input Tools and AVIM “lite”.

There is clearly a need for browser-based input method editors, as seen in the former popularity of AVIM for Firefox and the continuing popularity of input method extensions for Chrome. As Mozilla eliminates what’s left of legacy extensions, users shouldn’t have to forego their privacy in order to communicate in their own language. An add-on platform that facilitates legitimate extensions such as AVIM can keep malicious add-on authors from taking advantage of these users.

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Big Apple, bad apples tag:notes.1ec5.org,2018://2.2300 2018-09-04T12:30:00Z 2018-09-10T16:16:07Z After OpenStreetMap gets vandalized, the lesson is to focus on chasing away bad people and building good content. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. For all the good that can come of the “Edit” button on open content sites like Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap – disseminating knowledge, giving a voice to marginalized communities, facilitating humanitarian initiatives – anyone deeply involved with such projects can tell you it all just barely works. It’s a daily miracle that the projects haven’t collapsed under the weight of graffiti, spam, and outright lies. To hear it from countless educators, Wikipedia simply can’t be trusted.

On Thursday, Mapbox and its customers fell victim to very prominent vandalism in OpenStreetMap, in which the label for New York City got renamed to something juvenile and offensive. A few weeks earlier, Wikimedia Maps was also affected by the same act of vandalism, which included numerous slurs, frustrating Wikipedia administrators who felt that OpenStreetMap doesn’t have its act together. Both episodes were painful for me to witness, as a longtime proponent of collaboration between the Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap communities and, obviously, as a Mapbox employee. In the days since, there’s been quite a bit of discussion in the OpenStreetMap U.S. Slack workspace about how OpenStreetMap and the consumers of its data could better prevent or mitigate such attacks. Even someone seeking credit for the attack has joined in with suggestions for improving “security”. True to form, there have been renewed calls for Wikipedia-style article protection or Google Maps–style moderation. But either approach is a poor fit for an open project built on geographic data.

Nevv York
Is it a feature or a bug that the New York City node can be so easily modified? If not for the project’s openness, it’s unlikely that this city’s name would have been translated into so many languages and that the surrounding neighborhood would have gained so much detail.

A Wikipedia article can be protected, disabling the “Edit” button for everyone except administrators, quite effectively preventing it from being vandalized. But what would the equivalent be on OpenStreetMap? Protecting a single feature, such as the New York City node, would only invite a vandal to place an asinine node right next to it. (On Wikipedia, you can create a “Nevv York City” article full of junk, but nothing would ever link to it, so the impact would be minimal.) Protecting the area around the New York City node, meanwhile, would deprive that city’s residents of the ability to contribute local knowledge to the project. OpenStreetMap is still incomplete enough that we can’t afford to lock down any portion of the map, not least a fast-changing city full of potential contributors.

The Wikipedia community has always viewed article protection as a public admission of failure, only to be used as a last resort. Given that the project’s slogan is “an encyclopedia that anyone can edit”, why should so many important articles be permanently closed to editing? Wikipedia has tried to replace after-the-fact countervandalism with several different moderation systems. The most recent was finally adopted by the German Wikipedia but was only adopted on a limited basis on a handful of articles at the English Wikipedia. Meanwhile, countless pages remain permanently protected. To say that moderation hasn’t taken off is quite an understatement.

What’s more, instituting a peer review process for OpenStreetMap would entail more than just flipping a switch. While verifying a Wikipedia edit might entail spot-checking cited sources, OpenStreetMap prizes unpublished local knowledge, so to truly review changes and stave off hoaxes could in many cases require in-person visits. Google Maps and Foursquare, two commercial, crowdsourced mapping projects, actively recruit locals to spend all their time curating and groundtruthing, yet they still suffer from rampant vandalism. OpenStreetMap already encourages groundtruthing, but any hard requirement along those lines would either be roundly ignored or lead to the immediate death of the project.

To be sure, there’s more to countervandalism than locking things down. The vandalism that propagated to Wikimedia Maps, then Mapbox, lasted less than two hours on OpenStreetMap before the community reverted the changes and banned the vandal’s user account. Mapbox has deployed increasingly sophisticated tools, including machine learning, for automatically detecting and blocking vandalism that does make it past the OpenStreetMap community. Wikipedia has done much the same for its content to good effect, which is why its administrators found it so frustrating that vandalism would still work its way in via embedded maps.

Last week’s incident was an exception, proving the adage that an adversary only has to get lucky once. That style of vandalism would probably have been caught by Wikipedia’s extensive system of blacklists and abuse filters, which prevent vandals from even saving blatantly bad edits. But a persistent vandal – this one used JOSM, the OpenStreetMap editor so advanced I steer clear of it – will eventually find a way around any blacklist or filter. And if the goal is to reduce the amount of time that a vandal’s work remains on the site, then any solution will also have the undesired effect of helping the vandal learn new tricks faster, like a virus that evolves more rapidly in a Petri dish.

For my part, I think the OpenStreetMap ecosystem places far too much emphasis on bad actions while doing very little to identify and block bad actors. As a Wikipedia administrator for the last 15 years, I’ve seen firsthand the lengths that people will go to evade content-based countervandalism. If you do battle long enough with a persistent vandal, it’s only a matter of time before well-meaning contributors give up due to the inconvenience of avoiding benign words and any article of interest. You can maintain the project’s health much more effectively by targeting the malicious individual.

At any given time, a bewildering number of IP addresses and IP address ranges are blocked from editing either temporarily or permanently. Open proxies are blocked on sight. There are even tools for ferreting out sockpuppets and sleeper accounts and blocking them proactively, along with rigorous accountability to prevent administrators from abusing ordinary users’ privacy. OpenStreetMap needs to adopt similar antiabuse tools based on user identities, if it is to have any hope against the hoards of script kiddies that now realize the map is subject to vandalism.

But more than any technical solution, the best approach I’ve found to fighting vandalism requires no software changes at all. OpenStreetMap needs to double down on building the most jaw-droppingly detailed map imaginable. At Wikipedia, articles on uncontroversial subjects suffer from less frequent vandalism as they develop from stubs into detailed articles. You’d think a more complete encyclopedia article would give the vandals more to tear apart, but in fact the opposite is true. I see this trend most clearly with articles about high schools, a favorite target of vain and profane adolescents:

High school article vandalism, September 2017–2018
This chart suggests that the most frequently vandalized Wikipedia articles about high schools are stub articles (up to around a thousand words) as opposed to more fully developed articles. Specifically, the chart counts the number of times an abuse filter was triggered within the past year, normalized by the number of page views during that time period (to account for some schools being more well-known than others). The abuse filter doesn’t track every instance of vandalism that occurs on the article; even better, it tracks edits that the wiki blocks outright, as well as those that the wiki flags for human review. I chose a time period of one year because vandalism of school articles waxes and wanes according to the school calendar.

A school article tends to be vandalized by two groups of people: the school’s own students and those of the school’s sports rivals. I suspect the former group is far less likely to vandalize an article that represents their school surprisingly well. I’m unsure why the rival schools’ students also tend to leave the article alone, but I wonder if it’s because the article’s length and detail makes it look like less of a toy to be kicked around. Maybe an article or a map needs a critical mass of credibility to stave off these acts of immaturity. If so, that’s good news for OpenStreetMap, because so many of the community’s efforts – importing building footprints, adding turn lanes and speed limits, refining the cartography of popular map renderers – are primarily about parity with user expectations and thus about building trust with the user.

OpenStreetMap would do well to ignore calls to indiscriminately lock down content or lock out good-faith contributors. Technical barriers to entry are never a sound way to grow a community-oriented project. Instead, with a modicum of well-considered, identity-based antiabuse measures, the project’s contributors can go about their business, drowning out the vandals that already make too much of their dumb luck.

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Minutes from the last minutes of 2017 tag:notes.1ec5.org,2017://2.2299 2017-12-31T19:43:00Z 2018-09-10T10:12:02Z 2016 paved the way for a 2017 that took me in a couple new directions but mostly fell along the same themes. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ 2016 paved the way for a 2017 that took me in a couple new directions but mostly fell along the same themes.

This summer, I traveled to the Wikimania conference in Montréal to continue promoting closer ties between the Wikimedia and OpenStreetMap movements. There’s a long road ahead, but tight coordination between the projects is feeling more inevitable now than it did back in 2015.

Mapbox also sent me to State of the Map U.S. in Boulder to make the case that OpenStreetMap needs a mobile software ecosystem to stay relevant. I’m still busy crafting that OSM-powered map library for iOS. But business needs sent me on a detour building a turn-by-turn navigation library to complement it. Well I love detours, or longcuts, as I remind myself after forgetting to make that left turn for the dozenth time. Maybe I need a smartphone after all.

Then again, I love the fact that I can be an unabashed roadgeek and get paid for it. The U.S. road system is fantastically idiosyncratic, so the state of the art in navigation software falls quite short still. My typical hobbyist obsession with route shields and the like can ultimately benefit the motoring public through better software.

When it comes to navigation, my job formal qualifications amount to riding shotgun on the hour-long bus ride home from school – lest I get motion sickness – plus navigating from the backseat during road trips, keeping one eye on the radar detector and the other on the Watchman. But if nothing else, those experiences help me counter the Calicentrism that shows up in surprising ways in this field.

Speaking of California, OpenStreetMap’s coverage of San José is really looking up these days. As I briefly mentioned in Boulder, our coverage of points of interest is beginning to rival more established sources. To prove it, I manually counted the entries of the local phone book, thereby cementing my reputation among Mapboxers as a phone geek.

Mozilla finally killed off support for the extension platform that made Firefox a household name and kept the browser relevant during all these years of Chrome hegemony. Mozilla couched it as a speed boost, but Vietnamese speakers quickly discovered my keyboarding extension, AVIM, among the casualty list. They really have no good alternative for writing in their language. Hopefully I’ll be able to revive AVIM atop Firefox’s new extension architecture (really, Chrome’s) in the new year. It’ll involve some lobbying and mucking around in Firefox internals, which is a road I didn’t anticipate taking when I took over that extension a decade ago.

Another hobby of mine succumbed to technical debt this year: the blog you’re reading. It’s hobbling along again, thanks to a last-minute upgrade. But it’s only a matter of time before I have to move it off Movable Type. It’s been a solid 15 years or so.

Time flies. I flew a bit this year too, but not enough to shake the roadgeek out of me.

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Finding Wilson Boulevard tag:notes.1ec5.org,2017://2.2298 2017-05-21T23:35:07Z 2018-09-10T10:19:55Z About 18 years ago, my family took advantage of Labor Day weekend to make our first day trip to Chicago, to finally see the bustling Vietnamese community whose clearance we had happily bought for years. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ An overflowing bánh mì, a tray of tender bánh da lợn, a can of soybean milk: my treat after every monthly trip to the little Vietnamese grocery across town. Mekong Market was my Sunday Bible school of Vietnamese culture in a childhood as distant from Asia as one could imagine, in Cincinnati. Snacks, sauces, and canned foods defying translation lined the shelves; in the refrigerator, a variety of mystery meats wrapped in aluminum foil each bore the same place of origin: Chicago.

One Labor Day, my family made a trip up to Chicago to finally see the bustling Vietnamese community whose clearance we had happily bought for years. We made a lot of road trips back then, often just spur-of-the-moment driving through the peaceful countryside. But since we were headed five hours away to an unfamiliar city, we needed to plan ahead. As the resident map enthusiast, I was to find directions to the Vietnamese supermarket in Chicago using our new Internet connection. We’d enjoy some phở for lunch and bring back enough fresh ingredients to avoid Mekong Market for a little while.

A search for “Vietnamese markets in Chicago” on AltaVista turned up an article from The Washingtonian describing a cluster of supermarkets, phở restaurants, and bakeries on Wilson Boulevard. I pasted the street address into MapQuest, specified “Chicago” and “Illinois” to make sure I got the right “Wilson”, and printed out the directions. (As one did back in those days: in the car, we kept a radar detector where a phone or GPS unit would normally be holstered today.)

Bánh mì thịt nguội
A Vietnamese cold cuts sandwich (bánh mì thịt nguội).

Five hours later, we arrived in Chicago and crawled up and down Wilson Avenue. If a Vietnamese supermarket or two were to be found along this street, it couldn’t have fit very easily inside any of the modest townhouses that lined the street from end to end without interruption. I noticed, too, that the entire length of the street was numbered in the 8000 range, as opposed to the 6700 block on which this supermarket supposedly stood. My father pulled the car aside and called the supermarket’s phone number on his cell phone. I could understand just enough Vietnamese to make out the voice on the other end: “I’m in Northern Virginia – what in the world do you want me to do for you?”

As my father held his tongue – Grandma was in the back seat – we wandered aimlessly around that part of town until we happened to spot some Vietnamese signage. There, just a few minutes away from Wilson Avenue, were the supermarket, phở restaurant, and bakery we had been hoping for, by sheer luck.


In the years since, I moved to San José, California, home to one of the largest populations of Vietnamese Americans in the country. Bánh mì shops here are as commonplace as cafés. In fact, the only reason I ever notice them is that I also became immersed in OpenStreetMap, an online project that draws maps the way Wikipedia writes an encyclopedia. I found a niche mapping “flyover country” and made it my mission to improve coverage of communities underserved by commercial map vendors, among them ethnic enclaves in San José, Orange County, and elsewhere.

Last month, I happened to be in Washington, D.C., and, on a lark, decided to visit Wilson Boulevard for real. It had been almost eighteen years since my last attempt, but despite having since moved to a city with a large Vietnamese population and plenty of Vietnamese food, I figured seeing this street in person would give me some closure. Fortunately, the same Metro line that took me almost to the airport also took me almost to Eden Center, the Vietnamese shopping center that had teased me back in grade school.

Parking aisles
No Vietnamese shopping center would be complete without a kitschy gate.

I had always imagined Eden Center to be more of a bazaar than a strip mall. Nonetheless, it has almost everything you’d expect from a center of Vietnamese social life: a dearth of parking, a man singing karaoke to an impromptu crowd out front, a father treating his daughters to the kumquats that hang from a decorative tree nearby. On the other hand, there are no elderly men playing cờ tướng in front of the shops, as one often finds in California. (One wall bears an enormous warning against gambling and suggests area casinos as alternatives.)

Like similar centers in Orange County, Eden Center is steeped in war history. Each aisle in the parking lot bears the name of a South Vietnamese general.

Parking aisles
At the intersection of Nguyễn Khoa Nam and Trần Văn Bá “Avenues”.

The South Vietnamese flag flies proudly beside the American flag. As it was the week before the anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, a banner spanning the two flagpoles honored South Vietnamese war heroes.

South Vietnamese heroes banner
The banner reads, Thành Kính Tri Ân Anh Hùng Tử Sĩ Việt Nam Cộng Hòa Vị Quốc Vong Thân (“With Gratitude We Revere the Martyred National Heroes of the Republic of Vietnam”).

I thoroughly field-surveyed Eden Center for OpenStreetMap, noting the restaurants, jewelers, beauty salons, travel agencies, and karaoke bars tucked away in the center’s “mini-malls”. Before leaving, I bought a bánh mì, a piping hot tray of bánh da lợn, and a can of soybean milk for the road.


The whole reason I got involved with “citizen mapping” is that proprietary map sources – the ones we take for granted as being complete, accurate, and up-to-date – actually fall so short when it comes to places beyond San Francisco, beyond the central business districts, beyond the tourist traps.

Eden Center on Apple Maps
Apple Maps includes only a few shops, but they’re all in the wrong places and some are no longer open.

Eden Center on Google Maps
With the same indoor mapping style it applies to every mall, Google Maps makes it look like it has spectacular coverage of Eden Center. But it’s just walls: most of the shops are still in the wrong location and some have closed.

Eden Center on Baidu Maps
I found it surprising that Baidu Maps has coverage of this area on par with Apple Maps, but it too has misplaced and outdated points of interest.

OpenStreetMap didn’t have a lot of detail about Eden Center until I ventured there last month, but now it’s complete, accurate, and up-to-date. Even the parking aisles are named.

Eden Center on OpenStreetMap, before and after
After my visit to Eden Center, OpenStreetMap gained so much detail in the area that there isn’t enough room to display most of the points of interest with proper icons and labels. (Left: before; right: after)

Eden mini-malls on OpenStreetMap, before and after
(Top: before; bottom: after)

Eden Mini Mall on OpenStreetMap, full detail
One of OpenStreetMap’s advantages as a human-curated map database is an attention to detail. The abundance of diacritical marks in Vietnamese are essential to comprehension, so this Vietnamese-American community will find it helpful that OSM includes the diacritics, even though this shopping center is located in a predominantly English-speaking city.

OpenStreetMap may have a long way to go before it can even dream of breaking people’s Google habits. But for now, I’m happy to have finally made it to Wilson Boulevard and made it easier for others to do the same – minus the detour.

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Minutes from the last minutes of 2016 tag:notes.1ec5.org,2016://2.2297 2017-01-01T07:38:25Z 2017-01-01T08:42:05Z A blog post authored on December 31st is all but guaranteed to be a year in review. But I’ve procrastinated on updating this blog for well over a year, so you’ll get more than you bargained for. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ It feels wrong to leave my blog hanging on such a brief note about new employment, especially now that I no longer have to keep nearly as many secrets about what I do in front of the computer screen. A blog post authored on December 31st is all but guaranteed to be a year in review. But I’ve procrastinated on updating this blog for well over a year, so you’ll get more than you bargained for.

As my last post suggests, I’ve been preoccupied with maps all this time. Specifically, I’ve been developing an iOS Cocoa Touch library for utterly customizable maps with an incredibly creative team. It wasn’t my intention to delve into iOS development after leaving the Cupertino orchard. After all, I had only started using a smartphone a few months prior. It was only a matter of time before I gave into temptation and ported the library to macOS. Now I have an excuse to write AppleScript!

To me, the most important feature of these map libraries is that they’re based on OpenStreetMap data. Libraries like Mapbox’s are a conduit for the OSM community’s unparalleled, mostly labor-of-love mapping to find their way into the lives of ordinary folks who don’t obsess over maps. I have a lot more to say about why OSM matters, but it would take this post far into manifesto territory, so that’ll have to wait until next year.

Last year, I got an opportunity to share ideas for nurturing the OSM community at, of all places, the United Nations headquarters in New York. It was my first time I’d ever spoken at a conference – I guess it showed. The conference scene also took me to Mexico City and San Diego, where I introduced a small sliver of the Wikimedia community to OSM and its community. The Wikimedia and OSM projects are drawing much closer together, and we’ll finally start to see some of the concrete benefits of that relationship in the new year.

AVIM, my Vietnamese input method extension for Firefox, gained some long-needed features this year, like support for multisyllabic loan words. But the future of that beautiful extension is in doubt, because Mozilla is dead-set on sunsetting the only browser extension platform that’s more than a toy. It’s a pity; the end of AVIM in Firefox will chip away at Vietnamese speakers’ ability to use their native language as a first-class citizen on the Web.

So it’s with mixed feelings that I careen into 2017, but only because 2015–16 was so swell. I’m sure you’re already looking forward to my next last-minute update in approximately one year.

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Mapbox tag:notes.1ec5.org,2015://2.2295 2015-03-04T06:00:00Z 2017-01-01T08:54:35Z A couple weeks ago, I started at Mapbox, a startup focused on advancing open data and GIS technology. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ Last month, I left a job tending orchards in the idyllic foothills of Cupertino, eager to finally paint. I landed at Mapbox, a startup focused on advancing open data and GIS technology. Everyone thinks they know maps: either an unwieldy relic of another era or (heh) a solved problem. But geospatial data is essential to a variety of industries, and smart tools to present and analyze it are going to be a big deal. Mapbox is leading the way, and we’re doing it the right way.

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A nation of handouts tag:notes.1ec5.org,2015://2.2296 2015-02-15T00:00:00Z 2015-02-16T10:20:44Z Years ago, I started to collect government-issued road maps, procuring them for free by stopping by roadside welcome centers and signing their guestbooks. Look what happens when I take the collection out of its shoebox. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ Years ago, I started to collect government-issued road maps and atlases, procuring them for free mostly by stopping by roadside welcome centers and signing their guestbooks. Cartotourism requires a bit of tact: you don’t just waltz in and demand a government handout; you have to fein profound interest in the captivating state you’ve just entered. (Under the “Purpose of Visit” column: “Just passing through.”)

Pile of maps
Most states publish elegant highway maps at a cost of a few cents per copy. The more enterprising states turn them into splashy advertisements for theme parks and other attractions, easily recouping printing expenses.

Admittedly it’s a bit perverse that I would care so much about the free map amid all the signs proudly advertising free coffee, Coke, or orange juice. But evidently I’m not alone. For me, the maps proved useful during road trips, even after a GPS device displaced the family radar detector. After hours of counting cows and spotting barn ads along the most remote stretches of I-65, even the highway department could somehow keep me entertained. Something about the way they managed to cram so many names and symbols onto one large sheet of paper.

Kentucky Unfurled
For the most part, these are high-quality maps with clear cartography.

This summer, the collection grew to 58 specimens issued by 27 states, four national parks, four counties, plus Ontario and the former Metro Toronto. Some are nearly 30 years old and have the tears to prove it. The collection sports two official bike maps, a beautiful “agritourism” map, and a completely bilingual map. (Ontario’s is half in French; Louisiana’s wishes it were.) Naturally, the two maps of Texas are by far the largest in my possession. Over the years, I’ve also lost a few maps, including one that proclaimed, “There’s More Than Corn in Indiana!” Indeed: I picked it up at a rest stop nestled amid soybean fields.

Occasionally, I try to do something more interesting with the collection than keep it in a burgeoning shoebox. This time, I made it into a single U.S. map, fashioning states out of the maps they issued. It’s a map made of maps:

Map of Maps
This U.S. map is deformed to the point of resembling a cartogram.

You’ll notice that the arrangement is rather uneven. My collection is heavily skewed towards the Southeast, mostly because I traversed it almost annually during my childhood, but also because the West and New England are quite stingy when it comes to maps. I must’ve discarded California’s map; it was just a page in a travel guidebook. And the only “welcome center” I could find in Rhode Island was a Mobil station selling Mobil maps.

Map tiles
Come see the South! Play golf in North Carolina, race horses in Kentucky, smell the wildflowers in Arkansas, and admire Tennessee’s custom chrome.

Perhaps a more interesting project would be to spread out all these maps and stitch together a mosaic of the U.S. It’ll have to wait until I can find enough floor space to unfurl Texas.

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Hardly knew ye tag:notes.1ec5.org,2015://2.2294 2015-02-11T15:00:00Z 2015-02-11T18:49:02Z If you only know me from this blog, I have been pretty mum about that nine-to-five part of me. Well, today is my last day tending orchards in Cupertino. Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/
Ready

Since my earliest days in high school, I have kept Minh’s Notes readers apprised of many things, teaching you how to manually create a snow day, dupe me and sound important in the process, and triple your learning rate. Reader, you are worth every minute I spend writing to you (or using writer’s block as an excuse for not writing to you). But if you only know me from this blog, I have been pretty mum about that nine-to-five part of me.

Today is my last day at Apple. (It’s a fruit company – heard of it?) That mostly means no more product giveaways to this blog’s most insightful commenters. In a little over three years, no one ever qualified, sorry. It also means the Xcode team has one fewer engineer to help sort through fan mail. Apparently they’re called “bug reports” outside Cupertino, which explains the… expressivity I’d see sometimes. I have a lot to get used to.

As for where I’m going, that’ll be the topic of a later note, following the same protocol whereby your bank sends you your PIN in one envelope followed by an explanation of that PIN in another envelope after you’ve misplaced the first. All I can say is it has little to do with the startup idea I had back in 2009.

But man, how cool would that’ve been!

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Lowercase history tag:notes.1ec5.org,2014://2.2293 2014-10-14T06:40:23Z 2014-10-14T08:37:33Z Minh Nguyễn http://notes.1ec5.org/ Among my many roles in the Wikipedia project, I play the part of historian. Not the kind who obsesses over Civil War battles and World War I artillery, building up infoboxes the size of the USS Enterprise. That’s History, uppercase. No, I add historical content to non-history articles – lowercase history. Most articles need lowercase history to provide essential context and flavor. It’s not enough to know how things are; we need to know how things got that way and how we found out about it.

Over the past three months, I more than doubled the prose in “Flag of Ohio”, mostly by elaborating on the circumstances around the flag’s adoption. The resulting text demonstrates the power of lowercase history to link diverse topics together, in this case, the state seal, the flags of Cincinnati and Cuba, and President Garfield. I even drew up a big GIF of the proper way to fold an Ohio flag, because GIF.


Folding the flag of Ohio
The flag of Ohio is officially folded in 17 steps, easier said than done.

Once in a while, there’s even a chance to advance scholarship on a topic. Scouring Google Books led me to long forgotten accounts of an earlier Ohio flag. (It’s actually pretty boring, just a white rectangle with some details on it. I’m glad it never took off.) My sudden activity on that article attracted the attention of another editor, who gradually ate away at a factoid all my social studies teachers in school had repeated as fact: that Nepal and Ohio were the only country and state, respectively, with non-rectangular flags. In fact, there are plenty of counterexamples, from European naval ensigns to the Qing dynasty’s triangular Yellow Dragon Flag.

In another case from earlier this year, I finally quashed the silly misconception that phở is based on a French soup and even named after it. Apparently no one in the English-speaking world, not even the OED, had bothered to check with scholars fluent in Vietnamese to see whether the historical literature backed up that myth. (For the record, Cantonese speakers had much to do with the name, while the dish evolved from a Vietnamese water buffalo soup called xáo trâu. Eww?)

It’s more difficult for a Wikipedia editor to write about lowercase history than to write about the present, because Wikipedia has a stringent policy requiring “verifiable” sources. It’s easy to find websites, books, and reviews raving about phở and easy for another editor to double-check that source. But as soon as you start writing about lowercase history, you run up against all sorts of barriers: paywalls for year-old news articles, paywalls for decade-old news articles, ditto for century-old news articles that should’ve been out of copyright for generations.

Thankfully, Google (Books, Scholar, News Archive Search), HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, and various national library websites do provide access to a huge number of sources for free, if you happen to be looking for something in the right time period. If you’re looking into local or regional history, subscription databases offer even more. Depending on the state of their budget, your local library may provide access one or two good subscription databases. If not, there’s The Wikipedia Library, but you have to apply for access.

Still, searching this wealth of sources can be difficult because OCR is nowhere near as good as you’d expect in 2014, and it’s virtually absent from older or foreign-language documents. So sometimes the best sources can only be found with some guesswork: what kind of publication would cover the topic and in what years? What appears to be an original source might turn out to be regurgitated from a decade earlier, in which case the investigation starts anew.


First State Flag
I came across this Enquirer blurb (subscription required) while searching for details on Ohio’s first flag. It nearly had me going, until I saw the date: April 1, 1905, three years after the familiar double-tailed flag was adopted. Does it qualify as an April Fool’s joke if the humor is a bit stale?

There’s also the problem of bias in historical sources. I came across a great deal of vitriol directed at the flags of Ohio and Cincinnati when they were introduced and came away thinking that they were poorly received at first. In fact, it wasn’t so lopsided, but of the subscription databases I had access to, the only one covering that time period was for a highly partisan Democratic newspaper. Both flags were introduced by Republicans. (These days, that paper, The Cincinnati Enquirer, has about as much edge as that former Ohio flag.) For the phở article, too, I had to remain mindful that some French- and Vietnamese-language sources were more interested in claiming the soup for their country than establishing the truth.

Lowercase history is the most inefficient, time-consuming way to expand an article but the most effective way to increase its quality. Very often, it forces you to square competing narratives and question the assumptions that underlie the contemporary description of a topic. It also builds the reader’s trust by increasing the number and variety of sources beyond the low-hanging fruit that anyone could find via Google search.

These days, at the English Wikipedia particularly, it’s easy to feel that all the good topics have been written about. But the truth is that most of those articles still have plenty of room to grow. If you toss out labels like amateur historian, I think you’d find that writing a coherent encyclopedia depends in large part on how many fields of study you can lowercase.

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