Guillaume Paumier (Posts about articles-en)

My life as an autistic Wikipedian

Guillaume Paumier — Thu, 30 Jul 2015 00:14:00 GMT

Two years ago, I discovered that I was on the autism spectrum. As I learned more about myself and the way my brain worked, I started to look at past experiences through the lens of this newly-found aspect. In this essay, I share some of what I've learned along the way about my successes, my failures, and many things that confused me in the past, notably in my experiences in the Wikimedia movement.

Introduction

This is a picture of me taken when I was 4, in nursery school, the French equivalent of Kindergarten.

I don't have many memories about that time, but my parents remember that, while I wasn't usually enthused about going to school during the week, I would often ask to go on Saturdays, because most of the other kids weren't there.

It wasn't that I didn't like them; it was because the school was much quieter than during weekdays, and I had all the toys to myself. I didn't have to interact with other children, or share the pencils, or the room. I could do whatever I wanted without worrying about the other kids.

I didn't know it at the time, but it would take me nearly 30 years to look back at this story and understand how it made complete sense.

Today

I'm now 32 years old, and a lot has changed. Two years ago, after some difficulties at work, my partner decided to share his suspicions that I might be on the autism spectrum. I knew little about it at the time, but it was a hypothesis that seemed to explain a lot, and seemed worth exploring.

Sure, the subject had come up before a few times, but it was always as a joke, an exaggeration of my behavior. I never thought that label applied to me. One problem is that autism is usually represented in a very uniform manner in popular culture. Movies like Rain Man feature autistic savants who, although they have extraordinary abilities, live in a completely different world, and sometimes aren't verbal. The autism spectrum is much more diverse than those stereotypical examples.

After I started researching the topic, and reading books on autism or autobiographies by autistic people, I realized how much of it applied to me.

It took a bit longer (and a few tests) to get a confirmation from experts, and when it came, many people still had doubts. The question that came up the most often was "But how was this never detected before?" Autism is generally noticed at a much younger age, and it seemed that for most of my life, I had managed to disguise myself as "neurotypical," meaning someone whose brain works similarly to most people.

The current prevailing hypothesis to explain this, based on an IQ test taken as part of the evaluation process, is that I am privileged to have higher-than-average intellectual capacities, which have allowed me to partly compensate for the different wiring of my brain. One way to illustrate this is to use a computer analogy: in a way, my CPU runs at a higher frequency, which has allowed me to emulate with software the hardware that I'm missing. What this also means is that it can be exhausting to run this software all the time, so sometimes I need to be by myself.

As you can imagine, realizing at 31 that you are on the autism spectrum changes your perception dramatically; everything suddenly starts to make sense. I've learned a lot over the past two years, and this increased metacognition has allowed me to look at past events through a new lens.

In this essay, I want to share with you some of what I've learned, and share my current understanding of how my brain works, notably through my experience as a Wikimedian.

One caveat I want to start with is that autism is a spectrum. There's a popular saying among online autistic communities that says: "You've met an autistic, you've met one autistic." Just keep this in mind: What I'm presenting here is based on my personal experience, and isn't going to apply equally to all autistic people.

"Taipei Wm2007 Guillaume.jpg," by Cary Bass, under CC-By-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons.

The picture above was taken during Wikimania 2007 in Taipei. I was exploring the city with Cary Bass (User:Bastique) and a few other people. Looking back at this picture now, there are a few things I notice today:

I'm wearing simple clothes, because I have absolutely no sense of fashion, and those are "safe" colors.
I'm carrying two bags (a backpack and a photo bag), because I always want to be prepared for almost anything, so I carry a lot of stuff around.
I'm sitting down to change a lens on my camera, because it's a more stable position to avoid dropping and breaking expensive gear. I've learned that this habit of using very stable positions is actually a mitigating strategy that I developed over the years without realizing it, to compensate for problems with balance and motor coordination.

Spock

A good analogy to help understand what it's like to be autistic in a neurotypical society is to look at Mr. Spock, in the Star Trek Original Series. The son of a Vulcan father and a human mother, Spock is technically half-human, but it is his Vulcan side that shows the most in its interactions with the crew of the Enterprise.

Some of the funniest moments of the show are his arguments with the irascible Dr. McCoy, who calls him an "unfeeling automaton" and "the most cold-blooded man [he's] ever known." To which Spock responds: "Why, thank you, Doctor." [1]

As a Vulcan, Spock's life is ruled by logic. Although he does feel emotions, they are deeply repressed. His speech pattern is very detached, almost clinical. Because of his logical and utilitarian perspective, Spock often appears dismissive, cold-hearted, or just plain rude to his fellow shipmates.

In many ways, Spock's traits are similar to autism, and many autistic people identify with him. For example, in her book Thinking in Pictures, Temple Grandin, a renowned autistic scientist and author, recounts how she related to Spock from a young age:

Many people with autism are fans of the television show Star Trek. [...] I strongly identified with the logical Mr. Spock, since I completely related to his way of thinking.

I vividly remember one old episode because it portrayed a conflict between logic and emotion in a manner I could understand. A monster was attempting to smash the shuttle craft with rocks. A crew member had been killed. Logical Mr. Spock wanted to take off and escape before the monster wrecked the craft. The other crew members refused to leave until they had retrieved the body of the dead crew member. [...]

I agreed with Spock, but I learned that emotions will often overpower logical thinking, even if these decisions prove hazardous.

—Temple Grandin [2]

In this example, and in many others, Spock's perception filter prevents him from understanding human decisions mainly driven by emotion. Those actions appear foolish or nonsensical, because Spock interprets them through his own lens of logic. He lacks the cultural background, social norms and unspoken assumptions unconsciously shared by humans.

The reverse is also true: Whenever humans are puzzled or annoyed by Spock, it is because they expect him to behave like a human; they are often confronted with a harsher truth than they would like. Humans interpret Spock's behavior through their own emotional perception filter. They often misunderstand his motives, assume malice and superimpose intents that change the meaning of his original words and actions.

Autism

You're probably familiar with the conceptual models of communication. In many of those models, communication is represented as the transmission of a message between a sender and a receiver.

In a basic communication model, the sender formulates the message, and transmits it to the receiver, who interprets it. The receiver also provides some feedback.

An oral discussion involves a lot more signals from nonverbal communication, like tone of voice, facial expressions and body language.

If you apply this model to an oral conversation, you quickly see all the opportunities for miscommunication: From what the sender means, to what they actually say, to what the receiver hears, to what they understand, information can change radically, especially when you consider nonverbal communication. It's like a 2-person variation of the telephone game. In the words of psychologist Tony Attwood:

Every day people make intuitive guesses regarding what someone may be thinking or feeling. Most of the time we are right but the system is not faultless. We are not perfect mind readers. Social interactions would be so much easier if typical people said exactly what they mean with no assumptions or ambiguity.

—Tony Attwood [3]

If this is the case for neurotypical people, meaning people with a "typical" brain, imagine how challenging it can be for autistics like me. A great analogy is given in the movie The Imitation Game, inspired by the life of Alan Turing, who is portrayed in the film as being on the autism spectrum.

Historical accuracy aside, one of my favorite moments in the movie is when a young Alan is talking to his friend Christopher about coded messages. Christopher explains cryptography as "messages that anyone can see, but no one knows what they mean, unless you have the key."

A very puzzled Alan replies:

How is that different from talking? [...] When people talk to each other, they never say what they mean, they say something else. And you're expected to just know what they mean. Only I never do.

Autistic people are characterized by many different traits, but one of the most prevalent is social blindness: We have trouble reading the emotions of others. We lack the "Theory of mind" used by neurotypical people to attribute mental states (like beliefs and intents) to others. We often take things literally because we're missing the subtext: it's difficult for us to read between the lines.

Liane Holliday Willey, an autistic author and speaker, once summarized it this way:

You wouldn't need a Theory of Mind if everyone spoke their mind.

—Liane Holliday Willey [4]

How are you?

Many languages have a common phrase to ask someone how they're doing, whether it's the French Comment ça va ?, the English How are you? or the German Wie geht's?

When I first moved to the US, every time someone asked me "How are you?," I would pause to consider the question. Now, I've learned that it's a greeting, not an actual question, and I've mostly automated the response to the expected "Great, how are you?." It only takes a few milliseconds to switch to that path and short-circuit the question-answering process. But if people deviate from that usual greeting, then that mental shortcut doesn't work any more.

A few weeks ago, someone in the Wikimedia Foundation office asked me "How is your world?," and I froze for a few seconds. In order to answer that question, my brain was reviewing everything that was happening in "my world" (and "my world" is big!), before I realized that I just needed to say "Great! Thanks!."

"Small talk" by Randall Munroe, under CC-BY-NC 2.5, from xkcd.com.

Privilege and pointed ears

This is only one of the challenges faced by autistic people, and I would now like to talk about neurotypical privilege. I'm a cis white male, and I was raised in a loving middle-class family in an industrialized country. By many standards, I'm very privileged. But, despite my superpowers, being autistic in a predominantly neurotypical society does bring its lot of challenges.

The most common consequence I've noticed in my experience, and in accounts from other autistic people, is a feeling of profound isolation. The lack of Theory of mind and the constant risk of miscommunication make it difficult to build relationships. It's not anyone's fault in particular; it's due to a general lack of awareness.

Imagine that you're talking to me face to face. You don't really know me, but I seem nice so you start making small talk. I'm not saying much, and you need to carry the discussion over those awkward silences. When I do speak, it's in a very monotone manner, like I don't really care. You try harder, and ask me questions, but I hesitate, I struggle to maintain eye contact, and I keep looking away, as if I'm making stuff up as I go.

Now this is what's happening from my perspective: I'm talking to someone I don't really know well, but you seem nice. I don't know what to talk about, so I keep quiet at first. Silences aren't a problem: I'm just happy to be in your company. I don't have very strong feelings about what we're talking about, so I'm speaking very calmly. You're asking me questions, and of course it takes a while to think about the correct answer. All this "eye contact" thing that I learned in school is taking a lot of mental resources that would be better used to compute the answer to your question, so I sometimes need to look away to better focus.

This illustrates one of many situations in which each person's perception filter caused a complete disconnect between how the situation was perceived on each side.

There are also many professional hurdles associated with being on the autism spectrum, and autistics are more affected by unemployment than neurotypicals [5]. I'm privileged in that I've been able to find an environment in which I'm able to work, but many autistics aren't so lucky. It's been well documented that people in higher-up positions aren't necessarily the best performers, but often people with the best social skills.

With that in mind, imagine what the career opportunities (or lack thereof) can be for someone who is a terrible liar, who has a lot of interest in doing great work, but less interest in taking credit for it, who doesn't understand office politics, who not only makes social missteps and angers their colleagues, but doesn't even know about it, someone who's unable to make small talk around the office. Imagine that person, and what kind of a career they can have even if they're very good at their job.

Casual relationships with colleagues and acquaintances are usually superficial; the stakes of the water cooler discussions are low, so people are more inclined to forgive missteps. However, friendship is another matter, and for most of my life, I have hardly had any friends, unless you use Facebook's definition of the term. Awkwardness is generally tolerated, but rarely sought after. It's not "cool."

Most of those issues arise because you don't have a way of knowing that the person in front of you is different. At least Spock had his pointed ears to signal that he wasn't human. His acceptance by the crew of the Enterprise was in large part due to the relationships he was able to develop with his shipmates. Those relationships would arguably not have been possible if they had not known how he was different.

Computer-mediated communication

Let me go back to that conceptual model of face-to-face communication. Now imagine how this model changes if you're communicating online, by email, on wiki, or on IRC. All those communication channels, that Wikimedians are all too familiar with, are based on text, and most of them are asynchronous. For many neurotypicals, these are frustrating modes of communication, because they're losing most of their usual nonverbal signals like tone, facial expressions, and body language.

In online discussions, most of the nonverbal communication disappears, leaving only words. This can frustrate neurotypicals, but is much closer to the native communication model of autistic people.

However, this model of computer-mediated communication is much closer to the communication model of autistics like me. There is no nonverbal communication to decrypt; less interaction and social anxiety; and usually, no unfamiliar environment either. There are much fewer signals, and those that remain are just words; their meaning still varies, but it's much more codified and reliable than nonverbal signals.

What there is online, instead, is plenty of time, time that we can use to collect our thoughts and formulate a carefully crafted answer. Whereas voice is synchronous and mostly irreversible, text can be edited, crafted, deleted, reworded, or rewritten until it's exactly what we want it to be; then we can send it. This is true of asynchronous channels like email and wikis, but it also extends to semi-synchronous tools like instant messaging or IRC.

It's not all rainbows and unicorns, though. For example, autistics like me are still very much clueless about politics and reading between the lines. We tend to be radically honest, which doesn't fly very well, whether online or offline. autistics are also more susceptible to trolling, and may not always realize that the way people act online isn't the same as the way they act in the physical world. The Internet medium tends to desensitize people, and autistics might emulate behavior that isn't actually acceptable, regardless of the venue.

Autism in the Wikimedia community

Of course, one major example of wide-scale online communication is the Wikimedia movement. And at first glance, Wikimedia sites, and Wikipedia in particular, offer a platform where one can meticulously compile facts about their favorite obsession, or methodically fix the same grammatical error over and over, all of that with limited human interaction; if this sounds like a great place for autistics (and a perfect honey trap) well, it is to some extent.

For example, my first edit ten years ago was to fix a spelling error. My second edit was to fix a conjugation error. My third edit was to fix both a spelling and a conjugation error. That's how my journey as a Wikipedian started ten years ago.

Wikipedians are obsessed with citations, references, and verifiability; fact is king, and interpretation is taboo. As long as you stay in the main namespace, that is. As soon as you step out of article pages and venture into talk pages and community spaces like the "Village Pump," those high standards don't apply any more. There are plenty of unsourced, exaggerated and biased statements in Wikipedia discussions.

That's in addition to the problems I mentioned earlier. As an autistic, it can be hard to let go of arguments about things or people you care about. It's often said that autistic people lack empathy, which basically makes us look like cold-hearted robots. However, there is a distinction between being able to read the feelings of other people, and feeling compassion for other people.

Neurotypical people have mirror neurons that make you feel what the person in front of you is feeling; autistic people have a lot fewer of those, which means they need to scrutinize your signals and try to understand what you're feeling. But they're still people with feelings.

If you're interested in learning more about autism in the Wikimedia community, there's a great essay on the English Wikipedia, which I highly recommend. One thing it does really well is avoiding the pathologization of autism, and instead insisting on neurodiversity, meaning autism as a difference, not a disease.

Conclusion

Steve Silberman, who wrote a book on the history of autism, presented it this way:

One way to understand neurodiversity is to think in terms of human operating systems: Just because a PC is not running Windows doesn't mean that it's broken.

By autistic standards, the normal human brain is easily distractible, obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail.

—Steve Silberman [6]

But still, neurodiversity has a cost. Sometimes, you'll be offended; sometimes, you'll be frustrated; and sometimes, you'll think "Wow, I would never have thought of that in a million years."

As I mentioned earlier, I believe Spock was only able to build those relationships over time because people were aware of his difference, and learned to understand and embrace it. Spock also learned a lot from humans along the way.

My goals here were to raise awareness of this difference that exists in our community, to encourage us to discuss our differences more openly, and to improve our understanding of each other.

There is a lot I didn't get into in this essay, and I might expand on specific points later. In the meantime, I'm available if you're interested in continuing this discussion, and you should feel free to reach out to me, whether in person or online.

Live long and prosper. 🖖

"ISS-42 Samantha Cristoforetti Leonard Nimoy tribute," by NASA, in the Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.

2014 in review, and the year ahead

Guillaume Paumier — Mon, 23 Feb 2015 07:24:15 GMT

In 2014, I posted a few photos, I continued to work on technical communications at Wikimedia before a role change, I learned more about myself, I moved to California, and I hiked a lot.

2014 in failures

Let's begin with what didn't work and get it out of the way. In January 2014, I started posting some of my photos on this site. I have accumulated tens of thousands of photos over the past eight years, but published only a small fraction of them. By starting to publish a selection of them here, my goal was to create a momentum that would encourage me to process my backlog and publish my collections here and on Wikimedia Commons.

The photos didn't last, but they might come back.

The momentum didn't really last, though, and I ended up stopping after posting only seven photo articles. In retrospect, I think the issue wasn't really the photos themselves, but rather the accompanying texts. I've acknowledged this failure, and recently decided to retire the “Photo” section of this website. The photos are still online, but I've removed the navigation shortcut to that section.

I may resume posting photos in the future, although it's not a priority at the moment. If I do, I might change the format of the posts and only feature the photos with a very short text, if any.

2014 in work

During most of 2014, I continued to work as Technical Communication Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia.

Part of this work involved reviewing technical posts for the Wikimedia blog; I notably edited and published a series of candid essays written by students who participated in the Google Code-in program. In their “discovery reports”, they outlined their first steps as members of the Wikimedia technical community, and provided a newcomer's perspective on tools and processes regularly used by experienced contributors.

I also continued to assemble monthly engineering reports, and to put together the weekly technical newsletter, which celebrated its first anniversary in May. I also worked with André on the Project management tools evaluation, which eventually led the Wikimedia technical community to migrate to Phabricator.

I attended the Zürich hackathon, as well as Wikimania, the annual Wikimedia conference, whose 2014 edition was in London. At Wikimania, I presented on Tech News and put together a poster so that attendees could learn about it even if they couldn't attend the presentation.

In September, my role at the Wikimedia Foundation changed, and I started working on other projects, most notably the File metadata cleanup drive. The drive is an initiative to decrease the number of files (on Wikimedia sites) whose information can't be read by programs.

In September, my role at the Wikimedia Foundation changed, and I started to work on other projects, like the File metadata cleanup drive.

2014 in self-discovery

2013 had been a turning point for me, in that I had discovered that I was likely on the autistic spectrum. In 2014, a few experts officially confirmed that hypothesis. When asked why this had not been detected earlier in my life, the prevailing hypothesis was that I had unknowingly compensated this social blindness by a higher potential, as suggested by tests performed in 2013. I like to think of it as having my my own emulated emotion chip.

I feel like I deserve a membership card or something.

Throughout 2014, I continued to research and read on this topic. Doing so, I've continued to better understand my blind spots, and explored what I now refer to as my “super-powers”, a fancy way of characterizing the unique way in which my brain works.

Notably, I started reading on a variety of specialized topics I was not familiar with but intrigued me. Doing so, I discovered that I was very fast at picking up and understand new concepts and disciplines. I had had a feeling that that was the case for a long time, but experimenting with this skill was particularly fun and rewarding (I've recently been reading about Civil engineering and Human spaceflight).

2014 in transatlantic move

The biggest change in 2014 was our emigration from France to the US. As part of my role change at the Wikimedia Foundation, I relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area (again). The relocation process was easier this second time around, in part because my partner was able to relocate with me this time, and also because we decided to get organized.

Transitioning from a completely-remote environment to a tech open-space has required some adjustments, but overall we're very happy to have relocated.

2014 in physical activity

I do go outside sometimes, and as someone intrigued by the concept of Quantified Self, I try to keep metrics about my life whenever possible. Physical activity is one of the easiest things to track thanks to dedicated mobile apps.

I love to hike and I occasionally run. In 2014, I knew we were going to relocate to sunny California, so I decided to take advantage of the snowy Alps while we were still in France.

It had been years since I had skied downhill, but after a couple of days it all came back and I enjoyed it a lot. I also started snowshoeing, which was a really nice complementary activity. Where downhill skiing involves sprints and adrenalin, snowshoeing involves endurance and beautiful lesser-used forest trails.

Activity	Distance (km)	Distance (mi)
Running	178 km	110 miles
Hiking (inc. snowshoeing)	163 km	101 miles
Downhill skiing	105 km	65 miles
Cycling	49 km	30 miles
Cross-country skiing	21 km	13 miles

The year ahead

2015 is already well underway, but it's not too late to mention what I'm planning to do this year.

Regarding my work at the Wikimedia Foundation, I'm continuing to lead the File metadata cleanup drive, and I'm hoping to continue to drive down the number of files missing machine-readable metadata. I also have a few smaller projects in the pipeline, notably the Template taxonomy.

Regarding personal work and recreation, I've started to learn Spanish again. My goal is to be able to handle basic communication by Summer, when I may visit Mexico City. Hopefully, by then, I'll be able to say more than “¡Hola!”, “Soy una tortuga” and “El elefante come la manzana”.

I've also decided to learn to play the piano; we'll see how far I can go in one year. Considering that I'm a total beginner, I can only make progress!

This year, I'm starting (from scratch) to learn to play the piano.

Last, I intend to continue to populate this site with historical and new content. My current priority at the moment is finishing to write about past projects before embarking on new ones, but I do think there will be room to post new content before next year's “year in review” post.

Transatlantic move II

Guillaume Paumier — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 00:25:18 GMT

Where our heroes embark on their second move a quarter of a world away, but not before planning it thoroughly.

In previous episodes

I lived in San Francisco for a year in 2009–2010, when I first started working for the Wikimedia Foundation on the Multimedia Usability Project. Unfortunately, I had to move back to France because my partner couldn't get a visa at the time.

When I first came to the US, I didn't have a bank account, a social security number, or a credit history. My knowledge and understanding of American culture was limited to what could be gleaned from movies and TV series.

In 2009, we spent the first few nights after we arrived in a hotel, and our reservation ended before we could find a place. We managed to find temporary accommodation for two more weeks, which gave us enough time to find the apartment where I lived for a year.

I remember this period being a very stressful time because of all the uncertainty. Last year, I was offered the opportunity to transition to a new position at the Wikimedia Foundation, and as a consequence to relocate (back) to San Francisco. When we made the decision to come live in the Bay Area again, we also decided to do things differently this time around.

A staged process

Any move requires planning. Moving to a new country 9,400 km away (5,800 miles) requires a lot of planning.

A critical issue when moving is usually that, during the same time period, you need to leave your place, and find a new one, and do all that while packing your belongings.

Instead, we decided to decouple the “leaving Toulouse” part from the “arriving in San Francisco” part. Our visas wouldn't be ready until September, but we decided to leave Toulouse in July. The plan was to stay at my father's house in Normandy during the transition period.

Having this buffer period turned out to be a great decision. It allowed us to focus on leaving our place in Toulouse without having to worry about finding a place just yet, and it gave us a lot of flexibility with regard to shipping our belongings and flying to San Francisco.

My father's house in Normandy was going to be mostly unused during that period, and living in Normandy for a few months would also be an opportunity to catch up with the rest of the family.

Leaving Toulouse

Leaving our old apartment in Toulouse was the easy part. We gave notice to our landlord and scheduled our milestones based on when we'd be leaving. Because we didn't have to worry about finding a new place just yet, or choosing what to take with us to the US, it made things a lot simpler.

Our two-part move meant that we had two opportunities to go through our belongings and decide what to bring, and what to leave behind.

There were few parking spaces in the street of our apartment building, so we needed to park the moving van directly on the street. We contacted the city services in advance and they allowed us to temporarily block traffic in the street while we loaded everything.

One thing we didn't expect, though, was that “having permission to park on the street” didn't actually mean “being able to park there”. It turned out that work on the utility lines was happening in our street at the same time, and on moving day the whole street was filled with trucks, vans and other heavy equipment.

In the end, we managed to squeeze in our van during the workers' lunch break. We loaded it in a record one hour, thanks to half a dozen friends of friends who came to give us a hand at the last minute.

A few months in the Normandy countryside

We arrived in Normandy the next day and proceeded to set up our living quarters at my father's. It took a little skill to essentially merge two homes into one, so some of the boxes lasted a bit longer than expected, but we managed to set up our own space without disrupting the house's equilibrium too much.

I set up a makeshift office in a hallway where I worked for the first few weeks.

As we settled in, we also made a few improvements, notably to organize the house a bit more.

This is how a guest room gets Stolmened.

We had never stayed in this house more than a few days at a time, mostly for the holidays. This time, we were able to take advantage of the beautiful Summer weather to explore the area on the week-ends.

Living in Normandy for a few months became an opportunity to explore the area during beautiful Summer week-ends.

I also went through some of my old stuff to clear out boxes, notes from college, and generally put my affairs in order before leaving, since I knew we wouldn't be able to come back very often (or very long).

My Air Tech Claw Rig (8868) and beloved Mission Commander (6986) are now stored away, patiently waiting to be built again the next time I visit.

As October approached, we started focusing on preparing the second leg of our move, and finding a place in the San Francisco bay area. We quickly realized that the pace at which Craigslist ads were being posted and taken down meant that we'd have to be on site to do any kind of proper house-hunting. The good news was that we could leave Normandy at any time, since we didn't have to give notice.

Arriving and settling in in the Bay Area

Knowing from experience that we'd need a few weeks to find a home, we looked for temporary accommodation on Airbnb from France, and stayed in Berkeley when we arrived.

This time around, we didn't have to worry about setting up a bank account and getting a social security number, so that made things a bit easier. We still didn't have a credit history, though, so many Craigslist postings were out of our reach.

We eventually found a great place in the North Bay that was both affordable and in a great setting, and we've been living there since.

We now live in the North Bay, farther from the office, but in a much quieter setting.

Cultural acclimation has been smoother this time, partly due to having lived here before. The excellent “Life in the USA” site has been of great help as well. Touted as “the complete web guide to American life for immigrants and Americans”, it has provided us with incredible insight into the American culture, and I recommend it to anyone who's immigrating to the US. Also, this time my partner was able to get a visa (thank you, United States v. Windsor) so this has obviously made the transition much less stressful.

Living in the North Bay involves a longer commute than when I was living downtown, but this hasn't been a deal-breaker so far. I would obviously like to be able to live closer to work, but I'm currently willing to have a long commute if that means living in a quiet area and in a more affordable home. (The rent of the one-bedroom I used to rent in San Francisco has doubled since 2010.)

The longer commute provides time to get ready for work in the morning, and a welcome break in the evening.

It's now been four months since we moved, and we're mostly settled. We've had to adapt our routines to a new set of constraints, but we're glad we moved. We hope to explore the area a bit more as Spring and Summer approach, and roam the beautiful parks and trails of northern California.

42,812 photos

Guillaume Paumier — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 15:56:17 GMT

42,812. That's the number of files currently residing in my “photos” folder. They span seven years of photography, three continents, and an evolving mix of taste, experience and equipment. This mosaic marks the inauguration of the gallery section of this site, where I'll be sharing the pictures I like the most.

To be fair, many of the photos sitting in my hard drive are similar to each other. I often take series of nearly-identical pictures to increase the likelihood of getting at least one good shot out of the lot. This can be, for example, when taking photos in low light without stabilization, or when photographing a moving subject like a flying plane, a running squirrel or a babbling politician. There's also, in the lot, quite a bit of actual duplicates that exist in different formats.

Nonetheless, that's a fair amount of photos, and I'm slowly sorting, rating, tagging, describing, geolocating and uploading them all (mostly to Wikimedia Commons). One thing I've noticed that helps me process my photos is to have a routine, like dedicating a few hours every week to that activity. It can be a pretty intense and exhausting task, though, and I'm probably more likely to stick to it if I do it for shorter periods of time but more regularly.

Therefore, I've opened a dedicated gallery section on this site, where I'll be posting some of my photos a few times a week (ideally, once a day, but I'll start with a less ambitious goal).

To inaugurate this gallery, it seemed fitting to start with a representative sample of my body of work so far. I've therefore created a photographic mosaic, i.e. a photograph made of thousands of smaller photographs, picked for their color and composition, and assembled to reconstruct the pattern and color of a larger picture.

The mosaic above shows the "Painted Ladies": famous Victorian houses near Alamo Square, in San Francisco. It's composed of 22,059 of my other pictures, automatically picked by a program from the pool of 42,812. I used the excellent (and open-source) Metapixel tool to prepare the images and assemble the mosaic. Below is the original photo I took in June 2010.

Original picture, taken with a point-and-shoot camera.

The original photo is quite ordinary, and yet I really like the mosaic that was generated from it. The mosaic almost transforms the picture into a pointillism painting, which makes it much more interesting. The mosaic's colors appear washed out compared to some of the saturated colors of the original, but it actually contributes to the painting appearance.

It's my first time making a photo mosaic, so I've experimented a bit with the settings but didn't dive into them too much. For example, the small pictures composing the mosaic are all squares, regardless of their original aspect ratio (usually 3:2 or 2:3, or 4:3 for my older photos), which means that nearly all of them are squeezed. It's not too much of a problem in this case, but I'll want to retry assembling mosaics while conserving the images' ratio. There's a minimal distance of 50 between identical images, but several items of a series may be closer. I've also slightly favored chrominance over luminance in the color matching algorithm.

I've experimented with different pattern images, i.e. the source image whose pattern is reconstructed from the smaller ones. I like some of the other resulting mosaics, so I've included them below. I have a few others, but today I'll stick to the San Francisco theme.

Below is a mosaic showing the famous Golden Gate Bridge, seen from San Francisco's Presidio. It's composed of 11,094 pictures. The original photo actually made it to Wikimedia Commons a mere five weeks after it was taken.

The results aren't as good on images with gradients, but this one is still pretty nice.

This mosaic is a bit more vibrant than the one of the Painted Ladies, because the original image is more saturated. I like the original because it has strong red-green-blue components, but the strong blue mostly disappears in the mosaic. The original also contains more color gradients, which don't look so nice in the mosaic; the whole sky is pretty noisy, and the artistic vignetting is exacerbated, particularly in the lower right corner.

Part of the sky's noise is due to the minimal distance of 50 images between two identical ones: this causes groups of images to be repeated in waves that become noticeable from afar. It's possible to increase the minimal distance, however that drastically increases the processing time needed to create the mosaic.

The third and last mosaic (below) shows the same issues of gradients and repeating waves in the sky and sea; you can compare with the original. However, it highlights something that isn't obvious in the previous mosaic, and that's the impressive quality of Metapixel's matching algorithm, which makes it possible to make out the bridge's suspension system, and even individual cables. I'm also quite fond of the grain added by the mosaic to the rusty chain and pillars in the foreground.

It's possible to make out the bridge's suspension system and individual cables, thanks to Metapixel's matching algorithm.

To wrap up: I like the additional potential of creativity provided by mosaics as a medium, and I'll probably play with them again in the future. But for now, after this introduction, I'll start posting individual photos, many of which have been hinted at in the mosaics. I've quite enjoyed rediscovering forgotten pictures as I was exploring the super-high resolution versions of the mosaics, and I hope you'll enjoy them as well, as they start popping up in this gallery.

Subscribe to Tech News

Guillaume Paumier — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 18:42:50 GMT

If you've ever wanted to be kept informed of technical changes likely to impact your Wikimedia experience, you'll want to subscribe to Tech News, a weekly newsletter than can be delivered directly to your talk page.

Tech News is a weekly tech newsletter about Wikimedia sites delivered on your talk page and translated into many languages.

The amount of technical activity happening across the Wikimedia movement as well as the number of different discussion venues make it increasingly more difficult and time–consuming to monitor changes relevant to one's involvement in Wikimedia projects. Understanding technical issues and discussions is especially hard since they contain a lot of jargon terms and are mostly conducted only in English.

Tech News is intended to make it easier to keep track of such noteworthy changes and understand them better. By using jargon–free language, we aim to reach regular Wikimedia contributors who are most likely to be affected by upcoming software and configuration changes.

The newsletter is assembled by Tech ambassadors, a group of technically-minded volunteers who help other Wikimedians with technical issues, and act as bridges between developers and local wikis. They're the ones who monitor technical changes across numerous (and scattered) channels and put together the high-level, plain English summary.

Volunteer translators are the other unsung heroes of Tech News. They've been doing an amazing job, which we are very thankful for: not only have they translated every issue so far into around 10 languages on Meta-Wiki (making the newsletter available for users speaking languages other than English), but their responsiveness has even allowed us to distribute translated versions of the newsletter to subscribers on their wikis.

Four issues of the newsletter have been published so far, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Heartwarming comments have for instance described the newsletter as "clear, concise and useful info all in one." Readers have generally welcomed the initiative, and have provided feedback that helped us further improve the format of the newsletter.

The Wikipedia Signpost has already started making use of Tech News, and we're hoping that, along with their counterparts in other languages, the Signpost writers will join forces with us to monitor technical changes.

There are a few ways in which you can contribute to Tech News: by translating the latest issue into your language, adding relevant information or links to the next issue, or just by sharing the news with your community.

If you'd like to subscribe to Tech News, add your username to our global delivery list or sign up for the wikitech-ambassadors mailing list to get more frequent updates. If there is local consensus, it's also possible to receive the newsletter directly on your local community discussion page.

The Architecture of Open-Source Applications

Guillaume Paumier — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:45:27 GMT

The second volume of the Architecture of Open-Source Applications book, which includes a chapter on MediaWiki, is now available online and on lulu.com.

The Architecture of Open-Source Applications is a collection of technical essays detailing the architecture of twenty-four major open-source applications. This is the second volume of a series that aims to help developers understand how great and large programs are constructed, and the decisions (or accidents) that led to the way they now work. The series draws inspiration from books used by architects that feature case studies of the great buildings of history.

This volume contains a chapter detailing the inner workings of MediaWiki, the wiki software that powers all Wikimedia sites, including Wikipedia. The writing of the chapter was coordinated by myself and Sumana Harihareswara. While I put together the majority of the content, it wouldn't have been possible without the initial knowledge-sharing effort made by many Wikimedia engineers and volunteer MediaWiki developers, who also reviewed and improved the several revisions that the text underwent.

The chapter on MediaWiki is available on the book's website, along with the other chapters from both volumes. Its content was integrated into the documentation on mediawiki.org (at MediaWiki history and Manual:MediaWiki architecture) when it was completed in November 2011.

Greg Wilson and Amy Brown, the book's editors, contacted the Wikimedia Foundation in August 2011 to offer to feature MediaWiki in the second volume. We chose a very collaborative approach to writing the chapter to ensure that the content was accurate and thorough, and also to split the workload among subject matter experts.

This volume dives into the inner workings of other tools familiar to the Wikimedia community, like Git, GNU Mailman, nginx and Puppet. All of the book's content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution license, similar to the license used on Wikimedia sites. It is freely available for reading online at http://www.aosabook.org, and you can also order a print from lulu.com. E-book and PDF versions will be available for purchase shortly. All royalties from purchases are donated to Amnesty International.

This is the second book published this year that contains a chapter written by Wikimedia staff, after the publication of Open Advice, a collection of essays, stories and lessons learned by members of the Free Software community.

I hope the chapter on MediaWiki, and also the rest of the book, will prove useful and interesting to the Wikimedia community and other developers. If you enjoyed it, learned from it, or would like to see more publications of this type, let us know!

Open Advice book

Guillaume Paumier — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:24:23 GMT

The Open Advice book, a collection of essays, stories and lessons learned by members of the Free Software community, is out. It notably contains a chapter I wrote on software usability.

The book was just announced at FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, in Brussels over the week-end.

About 50 authors from many different projects of the free software community were brought together by Lydia Pintscher, the book's editor, who started the project in early 2011.

A year and 380 pages later, the book is now available, and tries to provide an answer to the question: What's the key thing you would have liked to know when you started contributing?

Authors answer that question for many topics, ranging from "Writing patches" to "Documentation for Novices," to business models, conferences, translation, design, and more.

I contributed "Learn from your users," a chapter on user experience and usability testing. You'll also recognize other names from the Wikimedia community, like Evan Prodromou, Markus Krötzsch and Felipe Ortega. You can learn more about the book and the authors on the book's website.

All the content of the book is released under the same license as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. You can download the book for free as a PDF file, order a print from lulu.com if you prefer paper books, or fork the text on GitHub. I hope you'll like the book, and it'll prove useful, whether you're new to the world of software, or you're a seasoned contributor already.

Wikimedia Commons gets user galleries

Guillaume Paumier — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:54:49 GMT

A long-awaited feature has just been added to Wikimedia Commons by volunteer developer Bryan Tong Minh.

I just found out that a long-awaited feature for Wikimedia Commons had been enabled a few weeks ago. I'm talking about user galleries, i.e. the ability to list recent uploads by a user to a MediaWiki-powered wiki.

As if often happens, such a tool has been available on the toolserver for years (see an example), and a link to this tool was added to the default Commons interface for user pages.

Nonetheless, a "user gallery" feature built in MediaWiki, similar to the list of one's edits, was still missing. We touched the subject during the Multimedia usability project, but we had to focus on the uploader.

A feature request was opened in our bug tracker back in 2005. This morning, while reading my bugmail, I saw a notification about this bug, saying the feature had been added in 2010 and deployed recently.

The new user galleries list recent uploads for any user, including thumbnails and basic information.

It turns out it was added by Bryan Tong Minh, a MediaWiki developer particularly active in multimedia features; he's also the one who wrote the GlobalUsage extension a few years ago, which provides a list of all the pages around Wikimedia sites where a file is included.

It was already possible, in MediaWiki, to list files (in reverse-chronological order) through the Special:ListFiles special page. Bryan added the ability to filter this list by user, effectively creating a user gallery (r65013). He then added thumbnails to the page (r75582). The feature was enabled on Wikimedia sites (including Commons) as part of the deployment of MediaWiki 1.17.

So, it is now possible to see the gallery of uploads by a certain user (see an example). Want to see your gallery? Go to Special:MyUploads. Neat, heh?

The gallery is also accessible through the small "uploads" link at the top of your contributions list.

This feature is a huge step forward in terms of usability. During our interviews & testing, most people were wondering where their uploads had gone once the upload was completed. I'd like to thank Bryan, and all our awesome volunteers, for their work in making MediaWiki better.

The next step will probably be to add a shortcut to the gallery in the user's top-right menu, as well as in the "Toolbox" menu in the sidebar. Maybe not on all wikis, but it would definitely be useful on Commons.

Further improvement could include the prettification of the page, perhaps similarly to Flickr, and the possibility to get the code to insert the image in a wiki page, as we do at the last step of the Upload wizard.

Actually, once that is done, we could pretty much replace the last step of the upload wizard by the gallery page, only with a thank-you message at the top. What do you think?

Wikimania 2010 notes

Guillaume Paumier — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 06:16:04 GMT

It's been a few months since Wikimania 2010 in Gdańsk. I had a few notes I wanted to share, but I was waiting for the Wikimania videos, which were never delivered. I'll just go ahead and publish my notes now.

I went to Wikimania with my staff hat on, mainly to present and discuss the Multimedia usability project. I briefly presented the results of our research, then went on to demo the Upload wizard and play videos from our UX study.

The supporting slides are available on Wikimedia Commons; you can also download the PDF directly (2.36 MB).

I also submitted and coordinated a UX panel to provide a venue for users to ask their questions to the UX team. During this session, both the panel and the audience took notes collaboratively, which we found was a pretty effective means to maintain audience engagement!

The venue for the event was lovely; after WikiSym, hosted at the Music Academy in Gdańsk, having Wikimania in the Polish Baltic Philharmonic was awesome. Then again, I'm biased towards concert halls.

Program & Sessions

I wasn't necessarily a big fan of the "Wikimania madness" concept at first: I personally hate to be rushed through something. But if you prepare your 30-second intro, the idea actually works quite well — provided everybody plays by the rules and speaks for only 30 seconds.

The overall program was awesome; with all due respect to the previous Wikimania conferences I attended, whose program was great too, I feel this year's Wikimania was the best in terms of quality of talks. Huge props to the Program team!

The downside of it, obviously, was that it was extremely difficult to choose between concurrent sessions. For example, I missed the sessions about Talk pages and LiquidThreads, Semantic MediaWiki and Semantic Result Formats. I have some thoughts on how to solve this dilemma that I'll publish later.

On Friday evening, we had the opportunity of attending a gala concert performed by the Gdańsk Baltic Philarmonic, directed by Felix Reolon. I'm hoping the recording will be made available, but in the meantime there's an portion of the concert on YouTube. The concert was lovely, even though the audience didn't necessarily measure up.

Many Wikimania sessions were better than the ones I attended at WikiSym. Harel's talk about Conflicts between chapters and communities was both painfully accurate and delightfully funny. I feel a large part of the audience recognized themselves in both groups.

Another highlight was the presentation of the German mentoring program, by Tim Moritz Hector and his friends from the German-language Wikipedia. Their system seems to be fairly effective, and this talk was particularly relevant in a context where many criticize the unfriendliness of established editors towards inexperienced participants, but few act on it.

I was eager to watch the world premiere of Truth in Numbers, the documentary about Wikipedia, whose early cuts I had had the opportunity to see at Wikimania 2007 in Taipei. I ended up being quite disappointed, and the audience had mixed feelings about it overall.

Staff are people, too

The thing I like most about Wikimania is obviously the Wikimedians. Many of them interact a lot online, and sometimes become friends. Yet, most of them never get to see each other in person except once a year at Wikimania. This gives the event a rare intensity that I was looking forward to.

Unfortunately, I didn't have too many opportunities to catch up with Wikimedians I know, or to meet new ones. When I talked to some of my Wikimedian friends online afterwards, they told me they had been reluctant to "using my time" for "just socializing" because it had become "more precious" since I was an employee, and not "just" a volunteer.

While it was very nice of them to have that concern, I was still a tad disappointed. Wikimania is about meeting people, socializing and catching up with friends, more than attending presentations. Employees are not different than volunteers in that regard, especially when they've been long-time Wikimedians.

In a nutshell: Don't hesitate to hang out with me (and other employees) at Wikimania next year!

Wikimedia Commons licensing tutorial

Guillaume Paumier — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 06:17:35 GMT

A few days ago, I announced the publication of the English version of an illustrated licensing tutorial for Wikimedia Commons. The tutorial was developed as part of the Multimedia usability project I've been working on for the past year. This article invites you on a behind-the-scenes tour of the licensing tutorial project.

Context

Because all Wikimedia projects are based on free licenses, Wikimedians have developed a particular expertise in this field, and in copyright in general. One of my favorite quotes about Wikimedians is from Sue Gardner's keynote session at Wikimania 2009 in Buenos Aires:

You all know more about copyright law than any sane, sensible human being.

We do. And it's hard to remember how little we knew about copyright a few years ago, when we had just started to edit. Back then, most of us had never heard about the GFDL, or about Creative Commons. Back then, we had never heard of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. or the Place des Terreaux case.[1]

Copyright law is an incredibly complicated topic, especially in an international context. We've grown accustomed to it, but the learning curve is very steep for new users.

Wikimedians generally like to be thorough, but we can't expect new participants to read dozens of documentation pages before uploading a picture.[2] We needed to create a high-level introduction that presented the basics without misrepresenting the complexity of copyright. No jargon, no legal precedents, no country-specific idiosyncrasies. There would be no "freedom of panorama" or "threshold of originality" here.

During the early stages of the licensing tutorial project, we even decided to ban the words "copyright" and "free licenses" altogether: they're misunderstood and misinterpreted so often that we chose to explain these concepts in plain English, using practical examples. It was also consistent with our wish to provide plain-English descriptions of licenses in the upload wizard.

I started with a purposely short list of main points that we wanted to cover in the tutorial, and asked experienced participants to review them. The list was effectively a summary based on my own experience and a review of the existing instructions and documentation available on Commons. Then, we met with our illustrator to discuss the general approach and to agree on the rough content.

A collaborative effort

Finding an illustrator wasn't an easy task. We had several non-negotiable requirements, listed in our Call for proposals. For example, we needed to find an artist willing to release their final artwork under a free license. We also had time and budget constraints.

With the help of Jay Walsh (our Head of Communications), we were able to find a talented illustrator who aligned with our values and met our requirements: Michael Bartalos, an illustrator from San Francisco, who had notably done some pretty awesome work for the California Academy of Sciences.

Michael was extremely accommodating with our hands-on, iterative and open process. Wikimedians are used to completely open, very inclusive processes, but it isn't as natural in other fields, particularly in art-related disciplines. In the world of illustration, in particular, you usually try to keep all your preliminary and in-progress artwork secret to prevent other people from stealing your still-rough ideas.

Luckily, Michael and I were able to find a middle ground. We agreed not to publish the in-progress designs, and he agreed to let us share them privately with members of our community interested in providing feedback.

I explained the context and reasons honestly on the Commons mailing list and Village pump, and the participants were very sympathetic to these constraints. I invited people to sign up if they were interested in providing feedback, so they could receive a link to the artwork. Most of the people who signed up did write useful comments, and all of them respected our request not to republish it. The feedback they provided was very constructive and of high quality.

We went through this process a few times, first to comment on the general approach and content, then to focus on specific details of wording and graphics.

I found that it helped immensely to ask specific questions to commenters. I structured the page into specific sections and most commenters naturally added their feedback in the appropriate place. I initiated the sections with my own comments, in order to save other people's time.

Some comments were similar, while others were in disagreement. The preparation made it easier to provide the illustrator with a consolidated summary to help him work on the next version without having to deal with long discussions and contradictory statements.

Translation and localization

Once the English version was ready, the translation process started. Casey Brown and I prepared the translation framework and provided detailed pieces of advice, in order to inform translators and help them with this particular translation request.

I used to be a Wikimedia translator myself, and I knew how effective they were. Still, I was amazed to discover that, after only three days, about 20 translations of the text had been completed. Furthermore, they had already integrated the translations in about a dozen localized versions of the artwork.

As it turns out, the coordination page containing advice and instructions proved to be very helpful to translators, and well worth the time I had invested in it. About eighteen localized versions are available now, and more are underway.

What's next?

The real test, of course, will be when new participants are presented with the tutorial. Will they like it? Will they read it, or jump directly to the next step? Will the tutorial be successful in helping them learn what we want to teach?

So far, we haven't formally tested it. We were hoping to conduct a study on the tutorial and the latest version of our upload wizard prototype, but we had to postpone it. I do hope we'll be able to measure the impact of the tutorial at a later point. Still, the enthusiasm with which the tutorial has been welcomed is, it seems, a good sign.

I hope this summary will be helpful to people conducting similar projects. I feel the interaction with the rest of the community has been quite smooth during the whole project. It would be presumptuous to think it was only because I've been a long-time community member myself, but it sure helped to speak the same language as the users'.

More generally, the Multimedia usability project was the first engineering project of the Wikimedia Foundation with a Product Manager on its team. I feel this role has played a critical bridging role between the users and the rest of the team, to everyone's benefit. I'd love to see this happening more regularly in WMF-driven projects.

My own lessons learned, in a nutshell:

Trust the Power of The Crowd.
Collaboration is worth the effort.