Planeta Wikimedia

Um projecto vivo que dá vida

2009-12-11T01:20:07+00:00

Desesperado ao perceber que sua esposa acabava de entrar em trabalho de parto em casa, o britânico Leroy Smith resolveu contar com a ajuda da internet, mais especificamente do Google. O futuro papai digitou então no mecanismo de busca “how to deliver a baby” (ou “como fazer um parto”, em português) para saber por onde começar

(…)

Depois de seguir o guia detalhado que encontrou na Wikipédia, Emma deu à luz em segurança uma menina, de 2,8 Kg, que ganhou o nome de Mahalia Merita Angela Smith.

fonte

Portugueses e a internet

2009-12-02T20:10:58+00:00

Um interessante estudo sobre os internautas portugueses.

O recurso à Wikipédia como fonte de informação é também considerado notável uma vez que perto de um quarto dos internautas usa essa ferramenta pelo menos uma vez por semana.

É uma boa noticia para Wikipédia e para a Wikimedia Portugal, tem uma grande “mercado” para “explorar”.

Olhares

2009-11-25T23:42:50+00:00

Hoje aproveitei para fazer uma prospecção de mercado para uma actividade da Wikimedia Portugal, andei a ser o site Olhares. É uma comunidade portuguesa ( e alguns brasileiros) de fotógrafos do género do Flickr, mas fiquei com a ideia que é uma comunidade muito fechada, no sentido dos membros serem geralmente fotógrafos profissionais ou amadores com muito jeito para tirar fotografias. Quase todas as fotos postadas tem uma grande qualidade artística, isto não significa que site não presta, pelo contrário, é um site com uma óptima qualidade.

Tudo isto indicava que haveria muito poucas fotos com licença Creative Commons, mas o site não dispõem de nenhuma ferramenta para pesquisar ou organizar as fotos com licença livres. Como não existe, tive de pôr as mãos à obra, tive que pedir uma ajuda a Deus para auxiliar nas buscas. Com um pequeno script que ia buscar os links da foto da busca do Google, depois com o link, o script ia buscar o url da foto à pagina do Olhares.

E o resultado foi este:

A conclusão que eu cheguei é que existem mais fotos em creative commons que eu esperava, o resultado superou as minhas expectativas, mas continuo com a mesma ideia, o Olhares é um site com fotografia artística com pouco utilidade para a Wikimedia Portugal a não ser para o local para encontrar fotógrafos.

Mas isto trouxe outros resultados, sofri um bloqueio do Google, agora sempre que faço uma pesquisa tenho que provar que sou humano

Projecto futuro

2009-11-23T15:48:51+00:00

Finalmente nos últimos dias tive algum tempo para desenvolver um novo projecto para a Wikipédia Lusófona, ainda está numa fase inicial…

Já à vários que anos que eu tinha a ideia de criar este projecto, mais vale tarde que nunca Está divido em duas partes, a parte de recolha de dados em Python e um site em php+mysql

em breve poderá haver novidade, depende do meu tempo livre

Jimmy Wales é premiado pela Fundação Nokia

2009-11-05T19:37:30+00:00

A Fundação Nokia concedeu nesta terça-feira seu prêmio anual ao criador da Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, “por suas contribuições para a evolução da Worl Wide Web como uma plataforma participativa e verdadeiramente democrática”, de acordo com comunicado da fundação.

Para a Fundação, Wales é “um indivíduo que tem contribuido de forma singular para acelerar a colaboração online e a interação de milhões de pessoas em todo o mundo, assim como para democratizar a troca de informações”.

Desde sua criação, em 2001, a Wikipedia evoluiu graças a colaborações espontâneas dos internautas, até converter-se em um dos sites mais consultados na internet, com uma média de 330 milhões de visitas ao mês.

fonte: Terra

Habemus Papam

2009-11-04T21:27:04+00:00

Foi hoje divulgado a acta da 1º assembleia geral da Wikimédia Portugal.

A associação recentemente criada e está a dar os seus primeiros passos, o início é sempre o mais complicado e o mais chato, tratar de burocracias legais.

Boa sorte a toda a direcção.

Wave Teste

2009-10-24T19:15:14+00:00

Abaixo uma Wave Teste. Julgo que só pode ser vista se tiverem uma conta Google Wave activada.

Year: 2009 Week: 41-42 Number: 120

2009-10-24T01:10:12+00:00

Technical news

[Wikimedia data sets] - Wikimedia XML data sets have been released on Amazon Public Data Sets. This should help Wikimedians who do analysis on project data.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/wikimedia-xml-data-sets-released-on-amazon-public-data-sets/

[Media Features Gadget] - there is a "New Media Features" gadget on Commons. When it is enabled, you can test out the new media developments from the Kaltura sponsorship.

[Click Tracking Deployed] - click tracking has been deployed for the edit toolbar. This collects information about which buttons are clicked on the toolbar during editing for the Usability Initiative.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/click-tracking-on-edit-toolbar-deployed/

[Babaco: Now ready] - preview of the second set of usability features, Babaco, is now available through user preferences. Be sure to try out the new tools.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/babaco-is-ready-for-tasting/

[Book creator updated] - the new version of the Book creator interface has been deployed within the Wikimedia projects. The extension is now a lot more intuitive and useful.

http://blog.pediapress.com/2009/10/create-books-easily-new-version-of-book.html

[WP Mobile Update] - Hampton Catlin, the Wikipedia Mobile developer, posted a blog entry detailing the updates done to the Mobile interface this month.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/october-mobile-update/

[en.wp: FlaggedRevs update] - two people, William Pietri and Howie Fung, have been signed on as contractors to help with the deployment of Flagged Revisions on the English Wikipedia.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-October/104938.html

Request for help

[Perspectives from other projects] - the Wikipedia Signpost is calling for editors active in one or more non-English Wikipedias to write accounts comparing governance, process and policy, and editing culture across languages. The key questions are: how is it different working on another Wikipedia?; and what could English Wikipedia learn from that project—and vice versa?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-10-12/From_the_editor

Foundation

[Bookshelf Project: Manager Announced] - Frank Schulenburg (Head of Public Outreach) announced that Wikimedia's Bookshelf Project will be led by Marlita Kahn. The Bookshelf project aims to develop a slate of basic educational materials -- print, online and video -- to attract new authors and editors to Wikipedia.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-October/055518.html

[Office hours] - the log of the Office Hours with Mike Godwin, the Foundation's General Counsel, has been published.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-October/055517.html
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2009-10-09

[Job openings] - two job openings are now open: Chief Development Officer (a fundraising-related position) and Code Maintenance Engineer (a technical position).

[Wikimedia Report Card] - Erik Zachte has published the first Wikimedia "report card" that aims to help everyone get a quick overview of trends in the Wikimedia projects.

[Multimedia Usability: Product Manager] - Guillaume Paumier ("guillom") has been announced as the Project Manager for the Ford Multimedia Project.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-October/055659.html

[Report to the Board August 2009] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, has published her Report to the Board for October 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-October/055639.html

[OpenMoko Launches WikiReader] - OpenMoko, a company that previously created an open source smartphone, has just launched The WikiReader, a dedicated reader device with an offline copy of the entire English Wikipedia (without images) stored on a small chip.

Community

[Nobel Prize] - when announcing the recipients of its Nobel Prize, the Nobel Prize committee used free photos from Wikimedia Commons to depict two of the prize winners.

http://bit.ly/2BWN4Q

[German ArbCom dissolves] - the German Wikipedia has dissolved its Arbitration Committee. On projects that have them, the Arbitration Committee (or "ArbCom") is the final step in on-site dispute resolution.

http://bit.ly/3hg64n

[Wikinews: new Main Page and skin] - in addition to selecting "Vector" (the Usability skin) as its default skin, Wikinews has also created a new Main Page design. There are even "copy us" and "social networking" links on the page, like other news sources.

[Academy: Telugu wiki] - on October 6, the first Telugu Wikimedia Academy was held in Chirala, India.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2009-October/000209.html

[Wiktionary lookup gadget] - A new gadget is being developed on English Wikinews and slowly being spread to other wikis. The gadget looks up the wiktionary definition for the language of the wiki you are reading, but what it returns is the definition in your user-preferences language.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WN:WiktLookup

[Bing search] - Bing.com, the Microsoft search engine, is offering "Bing Reference", a way to search "enhanced Wikipedia articles". The Wikipedia Signpost has a detailed story on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-10-12/Bing_search

[WikiTrust demo now live] - demos of WikiTrust are now up on some Wikipedias. WikiTrust is a Firefox add-on that changes the color of the text based on how reliable or unreliable it seems to be.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikiquality-l/2009-October/000560.html

Media

[Encyclopedias + China] - CNN published a very good article about the situation in China with regards to Wikipedia and other encyclopedia sites.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/14/wiki.china/

[Meet Jimmy Wales] - the newspaper of Yale, a prestigious university in the United States, recently interviewed Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia).

http://www.yaledailynews.com/scene/interview/2009/10/09/meet-jimmy-wales-founder-wikipedia/

[Real fight becomes Wikipedia War] - a rivalry fight on a college campus turned into a big edit war on the English Wikipedia.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/crosscampus/2009/10/10/war-over-bladderball-extends-wikipedia/

[Wikipedia + Olympics Committee?] - Wikipedia seems to be at the center of a recent copyright battle between a photographer and the International Olympics Committee.

http://ragesoss.com/blog/2009/10/09/wikipedia-and-olympics-committee-heading-for-collision/

Did you know...
...about the proposal for global sysops on Meta-wiki?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_sysop

Quote

"I really have no idea what most of those languages are, but I'm also super happy to support them." - Hampton Catlin, Mobile Wikipedia developer, after reporting the localization status of the Mobile Wikipedia site.

Editor(s): Casey, Alex Corrector(s): None Thanks to: Frank, Cary, Daniel, Philippe, Rodrigo, Liam, Infodisiac, Signpost, Tomasz, Sage, Michael Dale, Nimish, Bawolff, ShakataGaNai, ErikZ, Naoko, Arjun, Brianmc, Sage, Phoebe, Hampton, Sue, Jay, Luca, Erik, Greg Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.wikizine.org

Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]].

Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Google Waves

2009-10-24T01:06:37+00:00

Já ando a testar o Google Waves. Já li qualquer coisa sobre integração de ondas e projectos Wikimedia, mas não me recordo onde. Promete ser uma ferramenta interessante de colaboração, mesmo no universo Wikimedia.

Ele são gadgets, extensões, bots. Falando em bots, existe já um ligado às coisas da wikipédia. O wikifier-wave-bot:

A simple Google Wave robot that replaces specific text with a link to Wikipedia or the Wikipedia definition contained in the article

E isto é só mesmo o começo. Promete muito mais.

Entretanto, enquanto escrevia isto, lá cheguei a alguns links de interesse:

Extensão Google Wave
Uma extensão que permite colocar Waves embebidas no MediaWiki

Extensão MediaWiki-Wave
This extension provides a WYSIWYG interface where multiple people can edit the same MediaWiki article using Google Wave technology

Uma proposta na wiki da planeamento estratégico da Wikimedia

Para já é tudo.

Actualização das páginas órfãs

2009-10-18T03:45:13+00:00

A pedido do Lijealso, aqui vai uma actualização das estatísticas incompletas da Wikipédia lusófona para o caso das páginas órfãs.

Constatou-se que o dump utilizado anteriormente era insuficiente, pelo que se descarregou a tabela pagelinks, desta vez do dump de 20091015. Para se excluir os redireccionamentos, importou-se também a tabela redirect.

Fartei-me entretanto de alternar entre o que estava a fazer e a lista de códigos de domínios, pelo que criei uma pequena tabela auxiliar:

PLAIN TEXT

MySQL:

mysql> CREATE TABLE _namespaces ( id TINYINT NOT NULL, namespace VARCHAR(50), PRIMARY KEY (id) );
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
mysql> INSERT INTO _namespaces VALUES (-2,'Media'),(-1,'Especial'),(0,''),(1,'Discussão'),(2,'Usuário'),(3,'Usuário Discussão'),(4,'Wikipedia'),(5,'Wikipedia Discussão'),(6,'Ficheiro'),(7,'Ficheiro Discussão'),(8,'MediaWiki'),(9,'MediaWiki Discussão'),(10,'Predefinição'),(11,'Predefinição Discussão'),(12,'Ajuda'),(13,'Ajuda Discussão'),(14,'Categoria'),(15,'Categoria Discussão'),(100,'Portal'),(101,'Portal Discussão'),(102,'Anexo'),(103,'Anexo Discussão');
Query OK, 22 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 22 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 0

O resultado deu-me um incrível total de 769854 páginas órfãs, pelo que decidi separá-las por namespace para permitir prioritizar a análise:

PLAIN TEXT

MySQL:

mysql> SELECT p.page_namespace,count(1) FROM page p
-> LEFT JOIN redirect r
-> ON p.page_id = r.rd_from
->
-> LEFT JOIN pagelinks pl
-> on pl.pl_namespace = p.page_namespace
-> and pl.pl_title = p.page_title
->
-> WHERE r.rd_from IS NULL
-> AND pl.pl_from IS NULL
->
-> GROUP BY p.page_namespace;
+----------------+----------+
| page_namespace | count(1) |
+----------------+----------+
| 0 | 12958 |
| 1 | 103645 |
| 2 | 16592 |
| 3 | 568675 |
| 4 | 1954 |
| 5 | 856 |
| 8 | 773 |
| 9 | 17 |
| 10 | 7522 |
| 11 | 1014 |
| 12 | 3 |
| 13 | 27 |
| 14 | 51735 |
| 15 | 1315 |
| 100 | 1190 |
| 101 | 117 |
| 102 | 173 |
| 103 | 1288 |
+----------------+----------+
18 rows in SET (20.90 sec)

O resultado do cruzamento das duas tabelas foi afixado aqui, com uma listagem de 15M para os 12958 artigos no domínio principal. Na verdade, esta listagem foi feita para colar numa página wiki, no entanto tenham em atenção que são 15M, pelo que não recomendo fazê-lo. Têm outras listas (como a mais simples, em formato pageid,namespace,title) nessa directoria.

Nada muda...

2009-10-16T09:19:25+00:00

Faça uma Wikimedia mais feliz! Participe globalmente de seus projetos!

Estava pensando em escrever muita coisa, porém ao clicar em uma página aleatória do Wikiquote achei uma bela citação que acho ser suficiente pra retornar para a comunidade Wikimediana.

Quote:

"Acho que a primeira prova da grandeza de um homen é a sua humildade."

John Ruskin

Year: 2009 Week: 41 Number: 119

2009-10-10T23:39:08+00:00

Technical news

[Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet] - Brion Vibber, the Chief Technical Officer, announced that he's leaving the Wikimedia Foundation after four years.

[Labs: FlaggedRevs] - due to some miscommunications, a lot of people didn't realize that the FlaggedRevs labs test wiki has been active and waiting for people to poke at it for a month. The developers need interested people to be set up as local administrators to try out the per-page stabilization settings (accessed via the "protect" tab); by default most pages do not activate FlaggedRevs in the configuration we're testing for English Wikipedia.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/flaggedrevs-test-wiki-awaits-you/

[Labs: LiquidThreads] - another Wikimedia Labs wiki has been created, this time for Liquid Threads. Liquid Threads aims to clean up the way we communicate about articles, turning talk pages into cleaner/threaded discussion pages.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/mediawikis-new-discussion-system-in-testing-on-wikimedia-labs/

[Supporting translatewiki.net] - the Wikimedia Foundation has hired Siebrand Mazeland as a contractor. He will get paid one day a week to work on translatewiki.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/supporting-translatewiki-net/

Foundation

[WMFI and WMMK] - Wikimedia Suomi (Finland) and Wikimedia Macedonia were recently approved.

[Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner has posted her Report to the Board for the month of July 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055326.html

[Fundraising page demos] - Rand Montoya, the Head of Community Giving, has posted some demos of the new Fundraising pages. Your feedback would be appreciated.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Website_Design

[WMF IRC Office hours] - Following the Wikimedia Foundation Office hours with Sue Gardner, one with Rand Montoya was held on Thursday. The log is available on Meta.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2009-09-25

Agenda

[NO: Academy] - Wikimedia Norway is planning a Wikipedia Academy for October 14-15, 2009.

Community

[DE: New Wikimedium] - Wikimedia Deutschland has published its third newspaper. This German newspaper is intended for sponsors, partners, friends and fans of Wikimedia. It's very visually appealing and even includes content about Wikimedia "around the world".

http://blog.wikimedia.de/2009/09/30/neue-ausgabe-der-vereinszeitung-wikimedium/ (de)

[Bug: Google News and Wikinews] - the recent MediaWiki updates caused yet another problem: now Wikinews isn't being indexed by Google News anymore!

[Translatewiki.net as a WMF project?] - Siebrand asked what Translatewiki (the website where the MediaWiki interface is translated) and the Wikimedia Foundation would gain by translatewiki being made an official Wikimedia project. Gerard offered a few of his own thoughts.

[Wikipedia Journal] - Liam Wyatt made a proposal about a peer-reviewed journal for academics to write Wikipedia articles. It might be interesting to read the proposal and discussions about it.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.research/844

[en.wn "Report"] - an English Wikinews user posted a mini-report about what happened in September 2009 on the project.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikinews-l/2009-October/001671.html

Media

[BD: Chapter planning] - there has been more coverage on the planned Wikimedia chapter in Bangladesh.

http://www.theindependent-bd.com/details.php?nid=144160

Stats

[sr.wn] - the Serbian Wikinews became the largest Wikinews version (by number of articles), ousting the English Wikinews from that spot. This is the second time that a Wikimedia project has surpassed the English version, the first time being the French Wiktionary.

http://wikinews.org/
http://sr.wikinews.org/wiki/Vikivesti_na_srpskom_prve_po_broju_%C4%8Dlanaka -- (sr) Wikinews article on its own milestone

[fr.wikt] - the French Wiktionary has reached 1,500,000 entries.

http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A9coredevance -- 1.5 millionth article

[ru.ws] - The Russian Wikisource has reached 50,000 texts.

[hy.wp] - The Armenian Wikipedia has reached 5,000 articles.

Other news

[Google Search] - Google Search results now actually link directly to the section that you're looking for.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/jump-to-information-you-want-right-from.html

[WikipediaVision] - A student from Helsinki has created "WikipediaVision", a live visualization of anonymous edits to Wikipedia by location. The site combines Wikipedia's Recent Changes feed with Google Maps. Although this seems to have been around for a while, the link has resurfaced after it was exhibited live at MFK in Bern (from April until August).

http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/index.html

[Why do they edit?] - Ziko offers some suggestions on the different reasons people choose to edit (and what/where they choose to edit).

http://zikoblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/29/why-do-they-edit-ego-subject-wiki-and-language/

Did you know ...

...that you can even upload home movies to Wikipedia? Wikipedia's video support is improving, Wikimedians have even been uploading videos of their children illustrating certain Wikipedia topics.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-September/104617.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moro_reflex

Quote
"A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes." -- Mohandas Gandhi

Editor(s): Alex, Casey Corrector(s): Thanks to: Sue, Liam, Kat, jeblad, Rand, Judson, Belayet, Shizhao, bawolff, David, Brion, Otourly, Cary, Sage, Gerard, Signpost, @WikimediaDE, Andrew, Ziko, Erik, Philippe, Filip, Milos, Belayet, Jon, Platonides Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org Website: http://www.wikizine.org

Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]].

Revisita aos dumps da Wikipédia

2009-10-06T00:44:59+00:00

Desta vez em português, decidi dar [alguma] continuidade ao que comecei há uns dias com a importação dos dumps da Wikipédia. Graças à dica do Rei-artur foi fácil extrair a lista de robôs, para excluir das estatísticas.

PLAIN TEXT

CODE:

[myself@speedy ~]# wget 'http://pt.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=allusers&aufrom=A&augroup=bot&aulimit=500&format=txt' -q -O - > bots.tmp
[myself@speedy ~]# cat bots.tmp | grep '\[name\]' | sed 's,^.*\[name\] => ,,' > /tmp/bots.txt

Aproveitei e repesquei os user_id para simplificar as pesquisas sem fazer alterações na tabela user.

PLAIN TEXT

MySQL:

mysql> CREATE TABLE user_bots ( bot_name VARCHAR(25) );
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
mysql> LOAD DATA INFILE '/tmp/bots.txt' INTO table user_bots;
Query OK, 136 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Records: 136 Deleted: 0 Skipped: 0 WARNINGS: 0
mysql> ALTER TABLE user_bots add COLUMN bot_user_id INT;
Query OK, 136 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Records: 136 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 0
mysql> ALTER TABLE user add index idx_t ( user_name );
Query OK, 119134 rows affected (2.63 sec)
Records: 119134 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 0
mysql> UPDATE user_bots ub JOIN user u on user_name = bot_name SET ub.bot_user_id = u.user_id;
Query OK, 134 rows affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 134 Changed: 134 WARNINGS: 0
mysql> ALTER TABLE user_bots add PRIMARY KEY (bot_user_id);
Query OK, 136 rows affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)
Records: 136 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 1
mysql> SHOW WARNINGS;
+---------+------+---------------------------------------------------+
| Level | Code | Message |
+---------+------+---------------------------------------------------+
| Warning | 1265 | Data truncated for COLUMN 'bot_user_id' at row 71 |
+---------+------+---------------------------------------------------+
1 row in SET (0.00 sec)
mysql> UPDATE user_bots SET bot_user_id = -1 WHERE bot_user_id = 0;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 1 Changed: 1 WARNINGS: 0

Não tinha reparado que havia um utilizador/robô com o nome "MediaWiki default" mas, bem, depois de criar a Primary Key ficou com o bot_user_id=0 e, para evitar que coincidisse com o agregado para anonymous, dei-lhe o bot_user_id=-1.

Então agora já estamos prontos a completar a query onde ficámos no último dia (número de edições em artigos distintos em cada namespace por utilizador):

PLAIN TEXT

MySQL:

mysql> EXPLAIN SELECT epn.user_name,epn.page_namespace,epn.edits
-> FROM edits_per_namespace epn
-> LEFT JOIN user_bots ub ON epn.user_id = ub.bot_user_id
-> WHERE ub.bot_user_id IS NULL
-> AND epn.user_id <> 0
-> ORDER BY edits desc limit 20;
+----+-------------+-------+--------+---------------+---------+---------+----------------------+--------+--------------------------------------+
| id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra |
+----+-------------+-------+--------+---------------+---------+---------+----------------------+--------+--------------------------------------+
| 1 | SIMPLE | epn | ALL | NULL | NULL | NULL | NULL | 187624 | USING WHERE; USING filesort |
| 1 | SIMPLE | ub | eq_ref | PRIMARY | PRIMARY | 4 | ntavares.epn.user_id | 1 | USING WHERE; USING index; NOT EXISTS |
+----+-------------+-------+--------+---------------+---------+---------+----------------------+--------+--------------------------------------+
2 rows in SET (0.00 sec)
mysql> SELECT epn.user_name,epn.page_namespace,epn.edits
-> FROM edits_per_namespace epn
-> LEFT JOIN user_bots ub ON epn.user_id = ub.bot_user_id
-> WHERE ub.bot_user_id IS NULL
-> AND epn.user_id <> 0
-> ORDER BY edits desc limit 10;
+----------------+----------------+-------+
| user_name | page_namespace | edits |
+----------------+----------------+-------+
| EMP,Nice poa | 0 | 58138 |
| Dantadd | 0 | 44767 |
| João Carvalho | 3 | 44533 |
| OS2Warp | 0 | 43396 |
| Yanguas,Sonlui | 0 | 37020 |
| Lijealso | 0 | 34157 |
| Rei-artur | 0 | 33863 |
| Tumnus | 3 | 33213 |
| Nuno Tavares | 0 | 31910 |
| Bisbis | 0 | 29886 |
+----------------+----------------+-------+
10 rows in SET (0.76 sec)

Os resultados completos estão aqui.

Já agora, para finalizar, a tão afamada lista de wikipedistas por número de edições:

PLAIN TEXT

MySQL:

mysql> CREATE TABLE edits_per_user SELECT rev_user,count(1) as counter FROM revision GROUP BY rev_user;
Query OK, 119134 rows affected (12.61 sec)
Records: 119134 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 0
mysql> SELECT u.user_name,epu.counter
-> FROM edits_per_user epu
-> LEFT JOIN user_bots ub on ub.bot_user_id = epu.rev_user
-> JOIN user u on epu.rev_user = u.user_id
-> WHERE ub.bot_user_id IS NULL ORDER BY counter desc limit 10;
+----------------+---------+
| user_name | counter |
+----------------+---------+
| anonymous | 3119758 |
| EMP,Nice poa | 176338 |
| OS2Warp | 163751 |
| Dantadd | 105657 |
| Lijealso | 90025 |
| Yanguas,Sonlui | 89152 |
| Rei-artur | 83662 |
| Mschlindwein | 75680 |
| Bisbis | 75361 |
| Nuno Tavares | 73141 |
+----------------+---------+
10 rows in SET (0.05 sec)

Os resultados completos estão aqui.

Revisita aos dados estruturados

2009-10-03T14:36:47+00:00

Há alguns dias num mergulho profundo sobre a utilização de wikis em campos específicos deparei-me com uma "foto" da Wikipédia muito interessante, aqui, que ilustra, entre outras coisas, a actividade na Wikipédia, a vários níveis: Visualizing Science & Tech Activity in Wikipedia:

Fonte: A Beatiful WWW

O website, A Beatiful WWW, dedica-se à extracção e representação dos volumes de informação distintos que conhecemos hoje. Eu já tinha falado nisto e descobri, entretanto, que o Google disponibiliza uma API de representação de dados estruturados.

Consigo pensar numa série de brincadeiras para isto Imaginem, por exemplo, juntar isto tudo, logo agora que a Wikimedia vai estar empenhada em manter os conteúdos disponíveis no Amazon Public Data Sets!..

Olhem aqui um exemplo do que pode ser feito, desta vez com Hadoop e Hive: Hot Wikipedia Topics, Served Fresh Daily.

Importing wikimedia dumps

2009-09-28T01:48:26+00:00

We are trying to gather some particular statistics about portuguese wikipedia usage.
I proposed myself for import the ptwiki-20090926-stub-meta-history dump, which is a XML file, and we'll be running very heavy queries (it's my task to optimize them, somehow).

What I'd like to mention is that the importing mechanism seems to be tremendously simplified. I remember testing a couple of tools in the past, without much success (or robustness). However, I gave a try to mwdumper this time, and it seems it does it. Note however that there were schema changes from the last mwdumper release, so you should have a look at WMF Bug #18328: mwdumper java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Invalid contributor which releases a proposed fix which seems to work well. Special note to its memory efficiency: RAM is barely touched!

The xml.gz file is ~550MB, and was converted to a ~499MB sql.gz:

1,992,543 pages (3,458.297/sec), 15,713,915 revs (27,273.384/sec)

I've copied the schema from a running (updated!) mediawiki to spare some time. The tables seem to be InnoDB default, so let's simplify I/O a bit (I'm on my laptop). This will also allow to speed up loading times a lot:

PLAIN TEXT

MySQL:

mysql> ALTER TABLE `TEXT` ENGINE=Blackhole;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Records: 0 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 0
mysql> ALTER TABLE page DROP INDEX page_random, DROP INDEX page_len;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Records: 0 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 0
mysql> ALTER TABLE revision DROP INDEX rev_timestamp, DROP INDEX page_timestamp, DROP INDEX user_timestamp, DROP INDEX usertext_timestamp;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)
Records: 0 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 0

The important here is to avoid the larger I/O if you don't need it at all. Table text has page/revision content which I'm not interested at all. As regarding MySQL's configuration (and as a personal note, anyway), the following configuration will give you great InnoDB speeds:

PLAIN TEXT

CODE:

key_buffer = 512K
sort_buffer_size = 16K
read_buffer_size = 2M
read_rnd_buffer_size = 1M
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 512K
query_cache_size = 0
query_cache_type = 0
bulk_insert_buffer_size = 2M
innodb_file_per_table
transaction-isolation = READ-COMMITTED
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 2700M
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 20M
innodb_autoinc_lock_mode = 2
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 0
innodb_doublewrite = 0
skip-innodb-checksum
innodb_locks_unsafe_for_binlog=1
innodb_log_file_size=128M
innodb_log_buffer_size=8388608
innodb_support_xa=0
innodb_autoextend_increment=16

Now I'd recommend uncompress the dump so it's easier to trace the whole process if it's taking too long:

PLAIN TEXT

CODE:

[myself@speedy ~]$ gunzip ptwiki-20090926-stub-meta-history.sql.gz
[myself@speedy ~]$ cat ptwiki-20090926-stub-meta-history.sql | mysql wmfdumps

After some minutes on a Dual Quad Core Xeon 2.0GHz and 2.4 GB of datafiles we are ready to rock! I will probably also need later the user table, which Wikimedia doesn't distribute, so I'll rebuild it now:

PLAIN TEXT

MySQL:

mysql> ALTER TABLE user modify COLUMN user_id INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.12 sec)
Records: 0 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 0
mysql> ALTER TABLE user DROP INDEX user_email_token, DROP INDEX user_name;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)
Records: 0 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 0
mysql> INSERT INTO user(user_id,user_name) SELECT DISTINCT rev_user,rev_user_text FROM revision WHERE rev_user <> 0;
Query OK, 119140 rows affected, 4 WARNINGS (2 min 4.45 sec)
Records: 119140 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 0
mysql> ALTER TABLE user DROP PRIMARY KEY;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.13 sec)
Records: 0 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 0
mysql> INSERT INTO user(user_id,user_name) VALUES(0,'anonymous');
Query OK, 1 row affected, 4 WARNINGS (0.00 sec)

It's preferable to join on INT's rather than VARCHAR(255) that's why I reconstructed the user table. I actually removed the PRIMARY KEY but I set it after the process. What happens is that there are users that have been renamed and thus they appear with same id, different user_name. The query to list them all is this:

PLAIN TEXT

MySQL:

mysql> SELECT a.user_id,a.user_name FROM user a JOIN (SELECT user_id,count(1) as counter FROM user GROUP BY user_id HAVING counter > 1 ORDER BY counter desc) as b on a.user_id = b.user_id ORDER BY user_id DESC;
....
14 rows in SET (0.34 sec)
mysql> UPDATE user a JOIN (SELECT user_id,GROUP_CONCAT(user_name) as user_name,count(1) as counter FROM user GROUP BY user_id HAVING counter > 1) as b SET a.user_name = b.user_name WHERE a.user_id = b.user_id;
Query OK, 14 rows affected (2.49 sec)
Rows matched: 14 Changed: 14 WARNINGS: 0

The duplicates were removed manually (they're just 7). Now, let's start to go deeper. I'm not concerned about optimizing for now. What I wanted to run right away was the query I asked on Toolserver more than a month ago:

PLAIN TEXT

MySQL:

mysql> CREATE TABLE `teste` (
-> `rev_user` INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
-> `page_namespace` INT(11) NOT NULL,
-> `rev_page` INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
-> `edits` INT(1) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
-> PRIMARY KEY (`rev_user`,`page_namespace`,`rev_page`)
-> ) ENGINE=INNODB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 ;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.04 sec)
mysql> INSERT INTO teste SELECT r.rev_user, p.page_namespace, r.rev_page, count(1) AS edits FROM revision r JOIN page p ON r.rev_page = p.page_id GROUP BY r.rev_user,p.page_namespace,r.rev_page;
Query OK, 7444039 rows affected (8 min 28.98 sec)
Records: 7444039 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 0
mysql> CREATE TABLE edits_per_namespace SELECT STRAIGHT_JOIN u.user_id,u.user_name, page_namespace,count(1) as edits FROM teste JOIN user u on u.user_id = rev_user GROUP BY rev_user,page_namespace;
Query OK, 187624 rows affected (3.65 sec)
Records: 187624 Duplicates: 0 WARNINGS: 0
mysql> SELECT * FROM edits_per_namespace ORDER BY edits desc limit 5;
+---------+---------------+----------------+--------+
| user_id | user_name | page_namespace | edits |
+---------+---------------+----------------+--------+
| 76240 | Rei-bot | 0 | 365800 |
| 0 | anonymous | 0 | 253238 |
| 76240 | Rei-bot | 3 | 219085 |
| 1740 | LeonardoRob0t | 0 | 145418 |
| 170627 | SieBot | 0 | 121647 |
+---------+---------------+----------------+--------+
5 rows in SET (0.09 sec)

Well, that's funny Rei-artur's bot beats all summed anonymous edits on the main namespace I still need to setup a way of discarding the bots, they usually don't count on stats. I'll probably set a flag on the user table myself, but this is enough to get us started..

Year: 2009 Week: 37 Number: 118

2009-09-27T01:48:34+00:00

Technical news

[Image renaming re-enabled] - Image renaming has been re-enabled for administrators on all Wikimedia projects.

[LocalisationUpdate deployment delayed] - The deployment of LocalisationUpdate, an extension meant to keep the localized messages as up to date as possible, was delayed after it killed the entire site. You don't have to be a tech to interpret the blog post graph as "bad news".

[Feature deployment updates] - Brion mentioned that the system administrators are starting to maintain a list of feature & extension deployments that they're rolling out in the very near future (and their status) on the Wikitech wiki.

[MakeSysop Removed] - MakeSysop, the old extension for managing user rights, has been disabled on Wikimedia sites.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20291

[CTO Job Opening] - back in issue #115 we reported that the current Chief Technical Officer position would be splitting into two, with Brion's position being changed to something with more of a MediaWiki software focus. The job opening for the new CTO position has been posted on the Foundationwiki.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Chief_Technical_Officer -- job opening
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/cto-position-split/ -- reminder about the details of the split

Request for help

[Strategic Planning CFP] - the Strategic Planning Team has released a call for participation. The CFP was distributed through a CentralNotice with a link to a letter from Jimmy Wales and Michael Snow, but there is also a blog post giving more details on the process.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/22/help-shape-the-future-of-wikimedia/

Foundation

[Jennifer Riggs leaves] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, announced on Thursday that Jennifer Riggs would be leaving the Wikimedia Foundation. Jennifer was the Chief Program Officer and, although she has made good contributions so far, she and Sue decided she wasn't the right fit for the job.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055215.html

[Wikimedia and OneWebDay] - September 22 was OneWebDay, a day that aims to highlight the critical importance of protecting the values and principles of an open, participatory web. In a blog post, Jay Walsh used the OneWebDay initiative to thank Wikimedia's huge volunteer force.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/22/wikimedia-and-onewebday/

[New volunteer position] - the Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a local volunteer to help catalog customer service correspondence at the local office in San Francisco.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Volunteering:Customer_service_clerical_volunteer_(RPP)

Agenda

[Wikimedia Staff office hours] - after the success of the Strategic Planning "Office Hours", the Wikimedia Foundation has decided to hold its own as well. Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, will be online to answer questions in #wikimedia-office on freenode. The "office hours" will be between 15:30 and 16:30 PDT (UTC 22:30 to 23:30) on Friday, September 25, 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055246.html

[Wikis Take Manhattan] - the third Wikis Take Manhattan, a planned scavenger hunt and free content photography contest in New York City, will be held on Saturday, October 10, 2009.

Community

[Chapters reports] - Lodewijk Gelauff reminded the community about the chapters-reports mailing list and highlighted a few of the ones he thought were the most interesting.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055242.html

[European Heritage Days] - "European Heritage Days" are held in several European countries. On these days, many buildings notusually open to the public are open for visiting, as are the workshop of certain artisans. Some French Wikipedians found a way to take advantage of this by running a sitenotice mentioning the event and pointing out that the general public can help Wikipedia get more photos.

[Wirtualna Polska] - in our last issue we reported that there were a few problems with the local press when Orange Poland launched its branded Wikipedia mirror. The Polish Wikipedia community has written a statement that they hope will clear up the confusion.

http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:O%C5%9Bwiadczenie_nt._Wikipedii_na_WP (pl)
http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedysta:Wpedzich/O%C5%9Bwiadczenie -- English translation

[IRC: GC Review] - the new IRC Group Contacts have published a review of the last three months, highlighting what they've done, what they plan to do, and how you can help.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Group_Contacts/Noticeboard#3_month_review

[WMFR + Cultural institutions] - David Monniaux gave an update on what Wikimedia France has achieved with cultural institutions in France. He also highlighted some issues that they ran into.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.commons/5147

Media

[Where Wikipedia Ends] - Time Magazine published an article questioning if Wikipedia is a victim of its own success. The article includes a few quotes from Wikimedia Foundation representatives.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1924492-1,00.html

[Jimmy Guest Blogs] - Jimmy Wales guest-blogged on the Huffington Post about what the mainstream media gets wrong about Wikipedia and why.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jimmy-wales/what-the-msm-gets-wrong-a_b_292809.html

[Small Businesses & Wikipedia?] - Small Business Search Marketing, a blog about small businesses, published an article about whether or not "small businesses" should have a Wikipedia article. The article actually mentions quite a few English Wikipedia policies too.

http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/should-small-business-have-wikipedia-article/2311/

[German courts and wiki] - a German website attempts to teach its readers how to more accurately cite Wikipedia -- by using the permanent link to the article.

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Wikipedia-korrekt-zitieren--/meldung/145444 (de)

[Wikipedia Falsified from Parliament] - the Swedish media reports that articles of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia have been falsified from computers placed in the Swedish parliament.

http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/International/nyhetssidor/artikel.asp?ProgramID=2054&format=1&artikel=3116556

[Strategic Planning] - the Harvard Business Blogs published a good post about Wikimedia's Strategic Planning Initiative.

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/09/one_fine_winter_saturday_in.html

[Chinese trademark donation] - Hudong (a large Chinese encyclopedia) donated the Chinese trademark of Wikipedia to the Wikimedia Foundation.

http://sev.prnewswire.com/computer-electronics/20090922/CNTU04822092009-1.html

[Grass Is Greener on a Million Little Wikis] - a humorous article from Wired.com explains what the article "Grass" on the English Wikipedia would look like in different "language" Wikipedias (ranging from Limerick Wikipedia to "Even More Simple English" Wikipedia).

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/09/alt-text-million-little-wikipedias/

Stats

[hi.wp] - The Hindi Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.

[ca-wp] - The Catalan Wikipedia has reached 200,000 articles.

http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaval_de_Solsona

[cbk-zam] - The Zamboanga Chavacano Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.

[translatewiki.net hits one million] - Translatewiki, the website for translating the MediaWiki software, has reached a million translations. Congratulations to the Translatewiki staff and all of their translators!

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2009/09/when-size-is-good-cool-million-for.html

[Forget articles, it's editors] - Erik Zachte, the maintainer of Infodisiac (the Wikimedia statistics website), wrote a blog post about how we should stop focusing on the article count. Instead, we should be focusing on the number of editors the site has (and other aspects of community participation).

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/09/partipication-level-a-new-metric/

Other news

[WikiMarriage] - two Wikimedians got married this weekend: Arne Klempert (akl) and Delphine Ménard (notafish). Arne is currently a member of the Board of Trustees and Delphine is the former Chapters coordinator and current Treasurer of Wikimédia France. Congratulations to the new WikiNewlyweds!

[PediaPress: Job opening] - PediaPress, Wikimedia's partner in printing personal "Collections" of Wikipedia articles, is hiring. The job matches the predominant skills of Wikipedians and is specifically looking for "wikifriendly" people, you may want to apply.

http://blog.pediapress.com/2009/09/hiring-community-and-communications.html
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikis_Go_Printable -- background information about the partnership

[FR: GNU GPL Legal Win] - the GNU General Public License, a widely used free software license, has been held up by a French court. (They ruled in favor of the author of the content rather than a company who used it.)

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2009/09/big-win-for-gnu-gpl-in-france.html

Did you know ...

...that the Wikipedia Mobile interface provides anonymous statistics about its use? The stats page provides total traffic, average page serving speed, and more.
http://stats.m.wikipedia.org/

Quote

"I am not asking you to explain Wikipedia here, I'm asking for a vision!" - Femke Halsema

(The Chair of the Netherlands's Green Party interrupted the presentation of the new government budget to Parliament with that when the Prime Minister referred to the many committees that are going to search for potential budget cuts.)

Editor(s): Alex, Casey, Thanks to: Sue, Sage, Brianna, Leinad, Pharos, Dcljr, Hampton, Sj, Erik Z, Lodewijk, Rjd, Brion, Cary, Submarine, Philippe, Eugene, Gerard, Janson, Anders, Nihiltres, Frank, Amgine, David, Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org, Website: http://www.wikizine.org

Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]].Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Year: 2009 Week: 36 Number: 117

2009-09-17T02:30:25+00:00

Technical news

[Software updates] - Brion is in the process of updating the Wikimedia sites with several weeks of new updates.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-September/045179.html

[Mobile survey] - the Wikipedia Mobile team is running a survey, hoping to get feedback on their progress so far and suggestions for future additions.

http://bit ly/LBXdK
http://m.wikipedia.org/

[Sever donations] - do you know of a non-profit that needs servers? The Wikimedia Foundation is donating 35 servers (over 3 years old) that aren't fast enough to run our sites anymore, but would probably work fine for smaller projects.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/server-donation-time-again/

[TIFF support] - the tech team is adding full TIFF support in the near future. This support will help MediaWiki render TIFF images (an image format widely used by museums and in scientific research) so that users can view them in their browsers.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/full-tiff-support-is-comming/

Foundation

[Board Minutes] - the minutes for the April and June Board meetings have now been published. You can view them on foundationwiki.

[Wikimedia IRC meeting] - the new three new Board members held an introductory meeting on IRC where they introduced themselves and answered questions. A full log is available on Meta and minutes are to come.

[Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, published her Report to the Board for the month of June.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/054904.html

[Foundation-l LSS] - The latest summary for foundation-l has been posted on Meta-Wiki, thanks to Phoebe. In addition, you can now also follow updates to the LLS on identi.ca, either from the site there or via RSS.

[Orange Poland] - the Orange partnership has expanded into Poland. Unfortunately, though, there were a few issues with local press during the launch (see the foundation-l post).

[Usability Beta Status] - Naoko Komura, Program Manager for the Usability Initiative, gave an update on the status of the usability updates (the "Try Beta" link). She also included statistics on how often they were enabled/kept enabled.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/09/14/usability-beta-status/ -- blog post

[Omidyar Grant] - the Wikipedia Signpost has an article further explaining the nature of the Omidyar Grant of US$2 million to the Wikimedia Foundation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-09-14/News_and_notes

[Job openings] - the Wikimedia Foundation has three job openings, as of press time, including a software developer, project manager, and development associate.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings

[Transcom] - the translation committee has released another newsletter summarizing open requests.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/2009-September/001004.html

Legal

[WMIT being sued] - Wikimedia Italia, the Italian chapter, has been sued for €20,000,000 over a possibly defamatory article. WMIT is in no way connected to the article or edits in question, but they still have to pay the legal fees and fight a court battle due to the Italian legal system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gianfranco/Wikimedia_Italia_sued_for_20,000,000_%E2%82%AC -- unofficial summary (en)
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bar/Discussioni/Sabato_19,_a_Roma,_abbiamo_bisogno_di_te -- community notification (it)

Community

[University course about WP] - a university course solely devoted to Wikipedia has recently been started in Sweden.

http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Press_release_August_30,_2009

[Translatewiki.net update] - Gerard and Niko both published blog posts giving updates on Translatewiki, the site for translations of the MediaWiki software.

[Office Move] - the Wikimedia Foundation officially announced its upcoming office move (to be completed in mid-to-late October). It has also publicized the address, something the Foundation has shied away from in the past.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-September/055204.html

[Improving Foundation-l] - Foundation-l, the mailing list intended to discuss Foundation issues, has started a request for comment. Do you know ways the mailing list could be improved or replaced?

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Improving_Foundation-l

[Restoration Discovery] - Durova, one of the people on Commons who works on restoring images, received a pleasant surprise. While restoring a photo, she discovered that there was actually human remains in picture. This discovery has been noted in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Library of Congress even credited her in its bibliographic record.

http://durova.blogspot.com/2009/09/synergies.html

[WMBD Meeting] - Wikimedia Bangladesh (a planned local chapter) had a meeting on September 10

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Bangladesh/Online_Meeting_2009-09-10

Media

[Biggest blunders] - CNN has assembled a list of "Wikipedia's Biggest Blunders".

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/tech/2009/09/06/wikipedia.biggest.blunders.cnn

[Wikipedia grows up] - the UK Telegraph wrote an article saying that Wikipedia and the Internet are growing up.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/6122514/Wikipedia-and-the-Internet-grow-up.html

[Strategic Planning] - the New York Times covered the new Strategic Planning Initiative and the other consultants that are helping professionalize the Foundation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/business/media/31link.html?_r=2

[Editing For Beginners] - the Australian Lifehacker wrote an article trying to teach beginners how to contribute to Wikipedia.

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/09/wikipedia-editing-for-beginners/

[Wikipedia reacts to outburst] - a reporter for the New York Times wrote a blog post describing the Wikipedia community's response to a US Representative shouting at the president during his speech.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/wikipedias-rapid-reaction-to-outburst-during-obama-speech/

Stats

[Commons reaches 5 mil] - just in time for its 5th birthday, the Wikimedia Commons has reached 5 million files. See the blog post and chapter press releases for more information.

[Wikistats Portal 2.0] - Erik Zachte, maintainer of Infodisiac (a set of Wikimedia statistics), wrote about a recent overhaul of the statistics portal.

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/09/wikistats-portal-20/

[Wikipedia's Growth Animated] - all the Wikipedias grow at different rates and have started at different times. How can we compare them other than just by the numbers? Erik Z has updated an animation that shows this growth visually.

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/09/wikipedias-growth-animated/

[vi.wp] - the Vietnamese Wikipedia has reached 100,000 articles.

http://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-11

[th.wp] - the Thai Wikipedia has reached 50,000 articles.

[cs.ws] - the Czech Wikisource has reached 10,000 pages.

http://cs.wikisource.org/wiki/Ilias/Zp%C4%9Bv_p%C3%A1t%C3%BD

[bo.wp] - the Tibetan Wikipedia has reached 1,000 articles.

http://tinyurl.com/bowp1k

Other news

[Semantic Web Problem] - TechCrunch wrote a humorous article centering the unfortunate results when robots try to get meaning from Wikipedia text.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/02/netbase-thinks-you-can-get-rid-of-jews-with-alcohol-and-salt/

Did you know ...

...the first public cell phone call was made on April 3, 1973 by Martin Cooper?

Quote

"Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." -- Theodore Roosevelt

Editor(s): Casey, Alex, Corrector(s): Rjd0060, Thanks to: Ainali, Mike, WikimediaMobile, infodisiac (Erik Z), Hampton, Mathias, Sj, Gerard, Durova, Austin, Sue, Marcin, Rand, Frieda, Tanvir, David, Phoebe, Naoko, Brion, Kat, Signpost, Mxn, and Daniel Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org

Website: http://www.wikizine.org Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.

Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Wikipédia colorida

2009-09-16T08:15:26+00:00

Embedded video from CNN Video

Subarrendamento?

2009-09-04T20:34:41+00:00

Mais uma história interessante que começou a circular:

Wikimedia Foundation subletting space?

Year: 2009 Week: 34-35 Number: 116

2009-08-29T16:16:46+00:00

Technical news

[Tech Update] - Brion posted an update on the status of a few projects, before shipping off to Wikimania.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/weekly-wiki-tech-update-pre-wikimania-edition/

[Commons: ImageAnnotator] - Wikimedia Commons added a new gadget: an Image Annotator, where users can place comments *onto* images (like flickr).

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator

[Bugs] - Trevor Parscal, of the Usability Project, gave an update on the Usability Beta by saying that more than 40,000 users have now participated in the process.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/squashing-the-bugs/

[iPhone app released] - the Wikimedia Foundation released its own official iPhone/iPod application for Wikipedia, in addition to the regular mobile interface.

[SmartWikiSearch] - Smart Wiki Search, a "concept similarity" search, tries to make your Wikipedia search experience better by finding other Wikipedia pages that discuss the same or similar concepts to the one you searched for.

http://www.smartwikisearch.com/

Request for help

[Wikipedia Signpost RfC] - the Wikipedia Signpost, the English Wikipedia's newspaper, is looking for comments about what is their mission, purpose and where they should go from here. Feedback is appreciated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/About#Where_does_the_Signpost_go_from_here.3F

[Multimedia Usability Meeting] - we previously reported on the upcoming Multimedia Usability Project by Wikimedia France, suggestions and feedback are being requested on Meta-Wiki. There is also a planning event to take place in October 2009.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_Usability_Project_Meeting_October_2009

[Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, published her report to the board for May 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054008.html

[New "labs" sites] - two new "labs" sites have been created to test out the flagged revisions and reader feedback extensions. In general, "Wikimedia Labs" is the name given to sites created to test out new extensions before they are used on Wikimedia wikis.

[Hewlett Foundation grant] - the Wikimedia Foundation received a US$500,000 grant towards operational support from Hewlett Foundation. The grant's purpose is to allow the Foundation expand its work bringing free educational content to everyone on the planet.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Hewlett_Foundation_grant_August_2009

[Omidyar Network Grant] - the Omidyar Network gave a grant of up to $2 million over two years to the Wikimedia Foundation. The grant will support Wikimedia's key goals: to bring free educational content to every person on the planet, to engage and empower more people to author that content and to continually increase the quality and breadth of the information provided through Wikimedia?s projects.

[New board members/officers] - at Wikimania, the Board of Trustees officially accepted the results of the election, welcoming Samuel Klein (Sj) and thanking Domas for his service. Kat Walsh has also taken the position of executive secretary. In addition to these community-selected board members, an "expertise" seat was filled with Matt Halprin.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054318.html
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/user:Mhalprin -- biography of Matt

[Wikimania 2009] - Wikimania 2009, the international Wikimedia conference, ended this week in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Even if you were not there, you can enjoy it too with twitter, flickr photos, and presentation videos.

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23wikimania+OR+%23wikimania2009 -- twitter for #wikimania2009 or #wikimania
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/wikimania2009/ -- flickr
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimania_2009_presentations -- videos of the presentation

[WikiExpedition 2009] - a summary (in English) of the recent Polish Wikimedian's "WikiExpedition" was published.

http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiekspedycja/Summary

[mediawiki/ IRC cloaks now available] - the Group Contacts are now offering "mediawiki/" IRC cloaks for developers.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/054120.html - mailing list post
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Cloaks -- IRC cloak explanation

[GLAM-WIKI Recommendations] - now that the GLAM-WIKI conference is over, Liam Wyatt (the conference coordinator) has compiled a list of recommendations to "GLAM", to Wikimedia, and to the government. This list is based on the discussions and findings at the conference.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GLAM-WIKI_Recommendations

[Wikimedia UK blog/twitter] - Wikimedia UK, the British chapter, has started a blog and twitter account.

[WMES: Planning Reboot] - Wikimedia España, the planned Spanish chapter, has had a planning reboot. Join the mailing list if you're interestd in creating a Spanish chapter.

http://lists.wikimedia.org.ar/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-es

[WMSE: Image donation] - Wikimedia Sweden has helped Regionarkivet (the municipal archive of the Gothenburg area in Sweden) upload some of its most prized images to the Wikimedia Comons.

[Chapcom membership update] - the Chapters committee (those charged with coordinating the chapters, especially with getting new chapters started) welcomes two new members. Milos Rancic and Lodewijk Gelauff replace the seats of Carlos Barcenilla and Michael Bimmler, who recently resigned.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapters_committee

[Wikinews ArbCom] - Blood Red Sandman, Brian, Brian McNeil, Cirt, Cspurrier, and Tempodivalse were elected to the Arbitration Committee on the English Wikinews.

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Arbitration_Committee/2009_elections

[Wikimedia Belgium Meeting] - Wikimedia Belgium, the proposed Belgian chapter, had a coordination meeting on August 28. The English and French minutes are available.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediabe-l/2009-August/000006.html

Awards

[UK Wikipedia Loves Art - prizes] - Wikimedia UK's Wikipedia Loves Art project finally announced its winners.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediauk-l/2009-August/004565.html -- mailing list post
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2009/08/wikipedia-loves-art-prizes/ -- WMUK blog post

Media

[Generate PDFs from Wikipedia] - Lifehacker.com covered the ability to creates PDFs and Multi-Article Books using PediaPress, something that happened a while ago.

[Tale of another Mangalore on Wikipedia] - some commentary on a local Wikipedia Academy in Mangalore, India.

[Health Care and Wikipedia] - Columbia Journalism Review compliment's the English Wikipedia's coverage of the American "health care debates".

http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/health_care_and_wikipedia.php

[Wikimania 2009] - a pre-Wikimania article about Wikimania 2009 and the Wikimania idea.

http://www.en.argentina.ar/_en/science-and-education/C954-wikimania-2009-in-argentina.php

[Wikinews: The unsung news source] - Wikinews got a favorable blog post that includes a Q&A and explanation of the project.

http://perspective.cfezra.com/?p=105

[AP tries to rival WP?] - apparently the Associated Press is going to try to rival Wikipedia in the search results. The AP will hold back some content from member websites and hope that Google will rate it higher due to the increased number of links to that page.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/how-the-associated-press-will-try-to-rival-wikipedia-in-search-results/

[Wikiversity media coverage] - Wikiversity is in the news again, with a whole article devoted to it. According to the article, "Wikiversity" is to be a university for every Internet user. Some professors are smitten with it - others are skeptical.

http://www.tagesspiegel.de/magazin/wissen/Wikiversity;art304,2876731 (de)

[Inkblot Poster] - remember the controversy on the English Wikipedia because there were copies of the Rorschach inkblot tests in the article? Well, according to the New York Times, te doctor who helped publish the 10 inkblots is being investigated by his local doctors? organization after it received complaints that his actions were unprofessional.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/business/24inkblot.html

Stats

[enwp: 3m] - the English Wikipedia has reached 3,000,000 articles with the creation of "Beate Eriksen", a Norwegian actress.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/17/3000000/

[cswikt] - the Czech Wiktionary has reached 10,000 entries.

http://cs.wiktionary.org/

Other news

[Growing Wikipedias] - Hausa Wikipedia, one of the African-language Wikipedias, was previously in danger of being closed but now it's growing very quickly. This comes at an interesting time, there have been recent foundation-l discussions about the process for closing projects.

http://hausaonline.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/hausa-wikipedia-is-growing/ -- Hausa Wikipedia
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/175836 -- mailing list thread
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_closing_projects -- current project closing process

[Wikipedia Diver] - a new Firefox add-on gives you a visual history of everywhere you've been on Wikipedia, and organizes it down to the day, order, and session in which you visited the sites, making it easy to revisit old entries.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-10315483-248.html

[Enterprise Wikis] - a blog post gives 8 more reasons to use a wiki for you internal corporate site.

http://www.ikiw.org/2009/08/21/8-things-you-can-do-with-an-enterprise-wiki/

[Citizendium founder ready to leave] - Larry Sanger, the founder of Citizendium (another encyclopedia created to rival Wikipedia) and one of the first contributors to Wikipedia, is ready to leave his project and move on.

http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/08/citizendium-founder-ready-to-jump-ship/

Editor(s): Casey, Alex, Corrector(s): MarkW, Thanks to: Too many to name. Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org

Website: http://www.wikizine.org Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.

O dinheiro faz o mundo girar?

2009-08-25T23:11:54+00:00

Omidyar Network today announced a grant of up to $2 million over two years to the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, one of the world’s top 5 most visited websites. The Wikimedia Foundation has also appointed Matt Halprin, a partner at Omidyar Network, to its Board of Trustees.

Já está a dar que falar...por exemplo na lista electrónica da Wikimedia Foundation.

Esta combinação de 2 frases dá muito que pensar.

Assumam a boa-fé.

IPs

2009-08-17T16:31:18+00:00

Já foram relatados vários casos de edição em artigos por parte de IPs que geraram alguma controvérsia, nomeadamente por causa de conflitos de interesse, por virem de redes de alguma forma relacionadas com os artigos.

De vez em quando detecto alguns.

Desta vez, foi um artigo que tentei salvar das páginas para eliminar, tentando colocar o máximo de referências possível.

A edição em causa, retirou todas as referências do artigo, eliminando também a última frase da biografia (por sinal, a mais referenciada de todas).

Estranhando a situação, decido fazer, como muitas vezes acontece, fazer um WHOIS ao IP.

E desta vez saiu BINGO.

O que vale é que não é um PM, presidente de um banco, ou afins.

Year: 2009 Week: 33 Number: 115

2009-08-14T05:53:28+00:00

Technical news

[Tech Update] - the sysadmins posted a tech update of what happened last week and what will be coming up this week and beyond.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/weekly-wiki-tech-update/ -- techblog post

[clone $brion;] - Brion Vibber, the current Foundation CTO, announced that they want to split his position into two. There will be a new Chief Technical Officer and Brion will become the "Senior Software Architect"; more information about the responsibilities of each can be found on the blog post.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/cto-position-split/ -- techblog post

["Try Beta"] - Have you noticed the new "Try Beta" link at the top of Wikimedia project sites? The usability team is proud to introduce the new skin, Vector, and the newly enhanced edit toolbar. Check it out and give them your feedback!

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/try-the-usability-beta/ -- techblog post

[pl.wp: Report a Problem] - The Polish Wikipedia has put together a neat little pop-up tool for reporting errors in articles. (The "Zgłoś błąd" link in the sidebar.)

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-August/102708.html -- post on wikien-l

[MW.org: FlaggedRevs] - MediaWiki.org is currently testing out Flagged Revisions in their Manual and Help namespaces.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-July/043806.html -- reason for FlaggedRevs
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-August/044582.html -- brion telling about it being enabled

[Image Annotations] - a hack for Wikimedia Commons allows for image annotations, just like Flickr has them, be sure to check it out!

http://ur1.ca/8tik -- example image
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Gadget-ImageAnnotator -- help page

[MediaWiki Wave] - a new project, "MediaWiki Wave", has been launched. It attempts to find a way for Google Wave, a communication and collaboration tool in development, to work with and make the best of MediaWiki.

http://mediawikiwave.blogspot.com/ -- blog
http://code.google.com/p/mediawikiwave/ -- project code

Request for help

[BBC & Wikimania] - this is a weird request for help, because it doesn't come from the community. The BBC's "Digital Revolution", an open and collaborative documentary on the way the web is changing our lives, wants to come to Wikimania 2009 but can't make it! They're looking for people to film some content for them, are you going to Wikimania and interested? Visit the blog post for more information and contact them ASAP.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/digitalrevolution/2009/08/wikimania-2009-are-you-going-w.shtml

Proposals

[Global sysop opt-out] - a new proposal about global sysops has been created and feedback is requested!

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_sysops/opt-out_proposal

Foundation

[Report to the Board] - Sue Gardner, the Executive Director, has published her report to the Board of Trustees for April 2009.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/053920.html

[Board Election Results] - the results of the Board of Trustees elections have been released; the three winners are: Ting Chen (Wing), Kat Walsh (Mindspillage), and Samuel Klein (Sj). The Election Committee started a "post-mortem" section to collect commentary for future elections. Your comments on what went wrong and what went right will be highly appreciated.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Results/en -- results
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Board_elections/2009#Post_mortem -- post mortem

Agenda

[IN: WP Takes Chennai] - Are you in India? Love Wikipedia? Got a camera? Then participate in 'Wikipedia Takes Chennai' this Sunday (August 16).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Takes_Chennai

Community

[WMFR: Multimedia Usability] - Wikimédia France has announced a new Multimedia Usability Project. It is intended to support and compliment the Wikimedia Foundation's project funded by the Foundation.

[MW Translation Rally] - Translatewiki.net, the site that coordinates translations of the MediaWiki software, is running a translation rally. Contribute 500 MediaWiki translations and share in 1,000 Euro!

[WikiExpedition] - the Polish community has had its first annual WikiExpedition. The ten-day journey to the Polish region of Podlasie (northeastern part), focusing on collecting material that would be used to enrich Wikimedia project content with photographs, has brought gigabytes of photos and tons of material.

http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiekspedycja (pl)
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiekspedycja#Wikiekspedycja_w_mediach -- media coverage (pl)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikiekspedycja_2009 -- images

[New wikis] - a large number of new projects were created this week: 5 content projects and 2 chapter wikis. The 5 content projects were Sorani Wikipedia (ckb), Western Panjabi Wikipedia (pnb), Mirandese Wikipedia (mwl), Acehnese Wikipedia (ace), Turkish Wikinews (tr) and the 2 chapter wikis, Wikmedia Ukraine (ua) and Wikimedia Colombia (co; in planning).

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20181 -- bug: content projects
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19533 -- bug: ua.wikimedia.org
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19609 -- bug: co.wikimedia.org

Media

[Usability Feedback] - Mashable, "the social media guide" has posted an article covering Wikipedia's recent usability release.

http://mashable.com/2009/08/07/wikipedia-redesign/

[Wikipedia's on the wane] - the Sydney Morning Herald and the Guardian both ran an article about a new California study related to Wikipedia. The study found the number of new articles added a month was on a steep decline and new contributors were being pushed out by the rusted-on Wikipedia elite.

[Wikimanía] - a Spanish technology site reports on Wikimania and Richard Stallman's keynote ("the Father of the Free Software Movement")

http://www.infobaeprofesional.com/notas/85723-El-padre-del-software-libre-dara-una-conferencia-en-Buenos-Aires.html&cookie (es)

[GLAM-WIKI coverage] - the GLAM-Wiki conference in Australia has gotten a lot of media coverage, and the organizers are keeping a list on their site. One of the articles has an interesting analogy from Liam Wyatt, "People who like sausages or obeying the law shouldn't see either being made, and the same goes for encyclopedias - it's a messy process but the outcome is good." Tim Starling has also posted a report on what he saw while he attended.

http://glam.wikimedia.org.au/ -- glam coverage listed
http://wikimedia.org.au/w/images/5/52/GLAM-WIKI_twitter_hashtag_transcript.pdf -- 59 page pdf with all the #glam-wiki tweets
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-August/053946.html -- Tim's report

[Wikiversity] - Wikiversity was mentioned in a news article! The Colombia news site, Unviersia, ran an article entitled: "Web 2.0 to share and build collective knowledge" and used Wikiversity as one of its examples.

http://www.universia.net.co/noticias/mas-noticias/web-2.0-para-compartir-y-construir-conocimiento-colectivo.html (es)

Stats

[sr.wn 10k] - the Serbian Wikinews has reached 10,000 articles and is now the second largest Wikinews.

http://tinyurl.com/srwn10k -- ten thousandth article

[pt.wp 500k] - following closely behind the Spanish Wikipedia (es), the Portuguese Wikipedia has also reached 500,000 articles!

Quote

"Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were." - Cherie Carter-Scott

Editor(s): Alex, Casey, Corrector(s): Ryan, MarkW, Thanks to: Techman224, Wpedzich, Naoko, Erik, Brion, Milos, Pharos, @wikipedian, private musings, Sage, Siebrand, Julien, NuclearWarfare, Liam, Lijealso, Gerard, Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org
Website: http://www.wikizine.org, Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.

"A" votação ou "A" hora

2009-08-11T08:57:21+00:00

Há muito tempo em conversa informal que uma votação do fair use deveriam ser verificadas todas as contas votantes... para se averiguarem quais os fantoches que por ali andariam.

De acordo com a heurística do rei-artur à partida muitos fantoches estão identificados, mas, daquilo que vi em termos de distúrbio mental enquanto fui verificador, acredito que muitos se deram ao trabalho de conquistar o direito ao voto com proxys diferentes. E à partida palpitaria para resultados semelhantes aos do rei-artur, ambos os lados têm gente apanhada mas o pró dominaria. Sim, é discriminação e não sei que mais...

Citei, há muitos posts, e por outras palavras, que pela wiki.pt como na vida, "se queres ser bom, morre ou ausenta-te", há sempre os bons, os maus e os que se foram embora e são deificados.

Só há meses passei a ter net em casa, editei sempre do trabalho. Editei com o braço partido, editei do estrangeiro, editei quando estava de férias, editei quando estava a trabalhar durante o suposto período de férias, e com directas em cima, editei quando tinha dois trabalhos, e muitas outras gabarolices...

Foi giro. Não gosto muito do que leio, não suporto muito do que se passa, e como não tenho força nem um milionésimo do entusiasmo inicial, só mesmo o vício que me faz ler as polémicas e não os artigos, prefiro, como tantos outros, ir. A wiki.pt é grande, vai continuar a crescer, e eu, espero definhar de pequenino...

A importância da Wikipédia enquanto fonte de dados e não [tanto] de informação

2009-08-10T02:08:02+00:00

Tão cedo comecei a ganhar destreza na Wikipédia, não pude evitar lamentar-me com o desperdício, em termos de esforço, da criação de artigos em texto corrido a partir de dados na forma bruta - não havia, aparentemente, grande forma de contornar. Com efeito, os artigos da Wikipédia são pautados por relações intrínsecas de dados sobre determinado assunto, e digeridos numa determinada língua para que nos sejam facultados na forma de informação, o que faz com que se tornem mais ou menos eloquentes, menos brutos, mas menos isolados, menos reutilizáveis. Por exemplo, IIRC Jorge, um dos pioneiros da Wikipédia lusófona, teve um esforço imenso em criar as Freguesias e Municípios de Portugal, em pequenos, sucintos, artigos com tanto português quanto se poderia gerar a partir de alguns dados do INE. O problema é que os anos iriam passar, e não haveria forma de actualizar esta informação a não ser fazendo-o manualmente um a um, porque entretanto alguém mudaria o formato do português. Mais tarde, no projecto da criação dos municípios brasileiros, orientado IIRC pelo E2m, alguém se terá apercebido desta dificuldade, e surgiram então os artigos com horríveis marcações (exemplo), provavelmente para alimentar bots que fariam parsing dos dados e fariam a substituição. Mas neste caso, como alguém barafustou meses mais tarde, a edição tornava-se terrível especialmente para os novatos, que se a medo editavam, então quando viam aquelas marcações fugiam!

Demorar-me-ia apenas 6 meses a aprender a trabalhar com bots e a perceber a utilidade das predefinições - a tal ponto que era conhecido pelo maluquinho das predefinições [desculpem não facultar referências, mas teria que procurá-las nos primórdios dos meus milhares de edições...] - para convencer-me que "já que perdemos tempo a fazer isto, faça-mo-lo de forma estruturada, aproximando-nos da linguagem das máquinas, sem prejuízo para a edição, e lancei-me no esforço de fazer isso mesmo: ressuscitando as freguesias e municípios com dados estrutrados.

Terminada esta tarefa, foi altura de iniciar a criação de artigos com base na informação estruturada, mantendo-a siponível (na verdade, houve séries de artigos que foram mesmo feitos com predefinições e, com uma passagem final, foram instanciados com subst:). Mas a informação estruturada iria agora manter-se, e mesmo que não constasse no texto corrido, seria sempre acessível (e facilmente actualizável) nos quadros informativos - basta correr um bot com um simples search & replace por dados actualizados.

Creio que hoje, quiçá por estar mais normalizado em termos de estética (o pessoal, sem querer, foi-se habituando a estes quadros informativos) do que pelos benefícios tecnológicos, já poucos ousam fazer qualquer artigo deste género (do género que se baseia em dados estruturados para constituir informação) sem uma predefinição: temos as Cidades, os Animais (sempre difíceis devido às várias formas de classificação, mas enfim..), os Asteróides, etc.

Mas isto porquê? Porque hoje descobri um projecto interessantíssimo: a DBpedia que, segundo a visão do Tim Berners-Lee, o autor da World Wide Web, é o primeiro passo para aquilo que ele chama de Linked Data: chegámos a um ponto em que as interrelações de informação estão mais do que estabelecidas - mas e as interrelações de dados? O engraçado é que somos vários a pensar assim: OK, uma página web tem, de facto, informação, mas como é que podemos usá-la fora do contexto dessa página - e em grandes quantidades? Será que esses dados - e o esforço de publicá-los - estão condenados a serem só aquilo: inúteis para terceiros? É que extrair informação de páginas de múltiplas fontes não-estruturadas é virtualmente impossível (pode bastar mudar uma vírgula ou uma cor de texto para que o parsing falhe) e obrigar cada pessoa que deseje usar a informação a ter que construir mecanismos que extraia essa informação parece-me um gigantesco desperdício de recursos.. aliás, uma das aplicações que se projectava para o XML/XSL é que ele substituísse o HTML mais tarde ou mais cedo, mas parece que isso nunca vai acontecer.

Então o que Tim Berners-Lee propõe é que a disseminação da informação seja complementada com os dados em bruto que a gerou - ou disponibilizada de forma a que estes possam ser reutilizáveis. E isto é particularmente importante num momento em que há imensas comunidades a gerar conteúdo - é curioso como do trabalho humano passámos para o PC e evoluímos para arquitecturas distribuídas e de escala, e destas evoluímos para plataformas distribuídas em que o factor humano pode ser também (novamente) gerador de substância a uma escala muito, muito maior... mas isto é outro post, noutro dia..

Deixo-vos este artigo interessante sobre a Web semântica, onde se expõem várias formas de relacionamento de dados que se podem obter da web, de forma semântica, e como eles estão (ou podem vir) a ser utilizados:

Vale a pena ver, especialmente para quem, como eu, acha que vivemos numa era dos diabos em que tudo pode acontecer, inclusivé uma

Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web

Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

Bem [h]ajam

2009-08-08T19:16:40+00:00

Ora um passarinho veio-me avisar que andava para aí uma votação para implementar uma coisa qualquer, "restrito qualquer coisa", assim semelhante ao fair use anglófono, coiso e tal.

Já me tinham avisado para não ler a proposta se não quisesse ter um ataque de riso que poderia comprometer as vias aéreas e possivelmente o coração. Mas não pude resistir. Uma semana em descanso.

O Sr, V. já não anda por cá há algum tempo. Mas a vampirização wikipédica já há muito que se se afigurava no horizonte. Essa estirpe desconhecida, que tolda a mente dos mais incautos, verifica-se ser bem mandada e manipulada. Digamos que o fluir normal da wikipédica foi de repente assolado por um terremoto de epicentro desconhecido.

Há quem diga que são os "New Kids on the Block" dos tempos modernos. Tenho aqui uns lencinhos ultra suaves em cima da secretária se for necessário, se alguns começarem para aí a fungar do nariz. Sem dúvida uma legião que se assumiu como fã dos mangás às 7h00 da manhã e que necessitam um livrinho da Turma da Mónica para adormecerem tranquilamente e sem pesadelos. Já lhes chamaram de DC "Cómicos".

No entanto, ainda restam os tais cantinhos tranquilos que não sofreram os ímpetos das pretensas tempestades. Aí os ventos são calmos porque as consciências estão tranquilas e os ideais imaculados.

Bem [h]ajam.

Google Translator Toolkit

2009-08-07T18:55:25+00:00

Traduzir artigos de outras Wikipédias para a Wikipédia da Língua Portuguesa é uma forma corrente de, pelo menos, dar um arranque aos artigos com conteúdo. Tomei agora conhecimento do Google Translator Toolkit que, muito embora proponha traduções simplistas, decerto irá ao encontro de muitos editores: torna possível rever e retocar a tradução — que é como sabemos — em dual view, para além de integrar um dicionário de acesso rápido.

Mas o que é fantástico é que a Google propõe aproveitar as correcções para melhorar o seu próprio motor de tradução. Mais um brilhante exemplo de como as comunidades podem gerar mais-valias para os projectos, ao contrário da visão tradicional. Aqui fica o vídeo de demonstração.

Ainda não testei, mas está na calha

Year: 2009 Week: 32 Number: 114

2009-08-06T22:22:16+00:00

Technical news

[Full downtime] - All of Wikimedia's services (sites, mailing lists, etc.) were down on July 31 at 12:00 (UTC) to allow the primary router at the Tampa hosting facility to be rebooted.

[SysAdminDay] - System Administrator Appreciation Day was held on July 31st; it's the day where you appreciate and thank all the system administrators who make your lives easier!

http://www.sysadminday.com/

[Override this function] - on August 6, users were temporarily getting the message 'Override this function' when visiting pages on Wikipedia, due to a server only partially getting an update. The issue was supposedly fixed but the sysadmins are still getting reports, it needs further investigation of the problem.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20081

Request for help

[WikimediaMobile] - Wikimedia Mobile, the mobile interface for Wikipedia, has started accepting translations on betawiki. Help is greatly appreciated in localizing it for your local Wikipedia.

[Flickr tool maintainers] - Bryan Tong Minh posted a request for co-maintainers for his flickr tools on the toolserver. The bots are written in Python and use the mwclient library to edit and upload.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2009-August/004976.html

[Best practices team] - "Best practice in public outreach" is a collection of articles describing experiences in winning new volunteers, partners, content and audiences. The group will help coordinate the creation and enhancement of the best practices documentation pages on Meta-Wiki, which will help share the knowledge about engaging new target groups or deepening relationships to new Wikimedians. Volunteers are needed!

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Best_practices_documentation_team

[BLP task force] - Cary Bass is in the process of launching a new task force on Biographies of Living People (as a result of the board resolution on the subject). The task force will be focusing on the English Wikipedia, but its recommendations and guidelines will probably be useful on other projects too. Volunteers are needed, see the blog post for more information.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2009-August/102667.html -- call for volunteers
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Biographies_of_living_people -- resolution

Proposals

[Strategic Proposals (Call)] - the Strategic Planning team has sent out a call for proposals. They'd like to encourage people to put their ideas into proposals for what the Wikimedia movement should be doing over the next five years. What's more is that you can write it in the language of your choice.

Foundation

[Guidestar] - the Wikimedia Foundation has finally received a profile on GuideStar, one of the largest American databases for non-profits. Be sure to visit the profile and write a review!

http://tinyurl.com/wmfGuidestar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GuideStar -- article on the site

[Usability: Babaco] - the Usability team is preparing for its next release and has some new designs and ideas that need feedback from users, community members, and interested parties.

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/29/the-abcs-of-usability/ -- blog post
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Babaco_Designs -- designs

[Transcom newsletter] - the Translation committee (the people whose job it is to coordinate translations of Wikimedia Foundation-related items) has released its newsletter, which is a summary of open requests. If you speak another language, please look and see if there's anywhere that you can help out!

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/translators-l/2009-July/000982.html

[LSS: foundation-l] - a new list summary of foundation-l posts between July 16-31 has been published. Phoebe has also posted a request for help, reminding others that she's not the only one who can do it and there are other lists that could be summarized too!

Legal

[EFF&NPG update] - Another update on the National Portrait Gallery legal issue, the Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, Fred von Lohmann, has posted a legal analysis of the situation.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/07/eff-defends-wikipedi

Agenda

[PL: pl.wp meeting] - the Polish Wikipedia is having its annual working meeting in Sopot, Poland from September 11-13.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GDJ_2009 (pl)

[SE: Book Fair] - Wikimedia Sweden will have a booth at the largest book fair in Scandinavia with 100,000+ attendees. The fair will be September 24-27, 2009.

http://se.wikimedia.org/wiki/Projekt:Bok_och_Biblioteksmässan_2009 -- WMSE's page about the booth (sv)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothenburg_Book_Fair -- enwp article about the fair

[JP: Conference] - Wikimedia Conference Japan has opened up its official website and has finalized its details: November 22 at Tokyo University!

http://www.wcj2009.info/ (ja)
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Conference_Japan/en -- summary on Meta (en)

[BE: Fosdem] - FOSDEM, the FOSS conference, has announced the dates for its 2010 conference: February 6-7, 2010

http://www.fosdem.org/2010/

Community

[GLAM-WIKI] - GLAM-Wiki, Wikimedia Australia's conference for galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and how they can collaborate with Wikimedia, is being held this week (August 6-7) and a live "play-by-play" can be found via twitter.

https://twitter.com/#search?q=%23GLAM-WIKI -- twitter posts
http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/230/glam-wiki-day-one -- blog post summarizing day 1

[Simple Wikipedia] - this little known Wikipedia works since 2004 on a encyclopedia that is using fewer words and easier grammar then the English Wikipedia. The small community has managed to get again at the 54,000 articles mark, after falling down 2000 articles due to a quality cleanup. For those who find other Wikipedias has become to large to be happy there a small project like Simple could be attractive.

http://simple.wikipedia.org

[WMNL: Partnership] - just in time for GLAM-WIKI, Wikimedia Nederland officially announced a partnership with the Tropenmuseum (one of the largest museums in the Netherlands). This new partnership will bring over 2100 high quality images to the Wikimedia Commons!

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/05/wikimedia-netherlands-and-the-tropenmuseum-bring-2100-images-to-the-commons/ -- blog post and press release

[Wiki-Conference NY] - Archive.org is hosting a few videos of the proceedings at Wiki-Conference New York, so far Jimmy Wales's keynote and Cary Bass's OTRS presentation have been published but more will come soon.

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=Wiki–Conference%20New%20York

[IRC Meeting] - a general IRC meeting was hosted by the Group Contacts. There was a high number of participants (~80 people) and a wide array of topics, from contacting the GCs and new cloak options to public logging and alternate channel management techniques.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC/Group_Contacts/Meetings/August_2009

[WMDE: Report from the Office] - the new Executive Director of Wikimedia Deutschland, Pavel Richter, has published his first "Report from the Office" on the WMDE blog. He shares his new priorities and introduces himself.

http://blog.wikimedia.de/2009/07/31/1-bericht-aus-der-geschaftsstelle-juli-2009/ (de)

Media

[GLAM-Wiki] - As described above in the "Community" section, GLAM-WIKI is being held this week and it has been covered by a few media outlets.

[Judges & Strippers] - Wiktionary was quoted when defining a lap dance in a legal case!

[Anecdote] - there's a nice, thoughtful blog post from a paleontologist/geoscientist and his experiences with contributing to Wikipedia.

http://triassiccritters.blogspot.com/2009/08/contributing-to-wikipedia-as.html

[Experts obliged?] - experts and people who find errors in Wikipedia are obliged to correct them, a blog post says. "Whether you like it or not, Wikipedia is the source that people go to for information."

http://blog.k1v1n.com/2009/08/if-tree-falls-in-forest-part-1.html

[We're NC-17] - Apple has rated us NC-17! Wikipanion, an iPhone/Pod application giving access to Wikipedia (nicely formatted with extra features), featured a warning when downloading: "Rated 17+ for the following: Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes".

http://dougpete.wordpress.com/2009/08/01/covering-your-click/ -- blog post about this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NC-17 -- in case you have no idea what we're talking about

Stats

[comScore: down to #5] - Facebook is now the 4th largest site in the world and has pushed the Wikimedia Foundation down to the 5th largest web property. Wikipedia is still far above an beyond the most popular non commercial website. By the way; the ranking of Wikizine is 50% up to become the 2,983,528th most popular site :) (Source:Alexa)

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/04/facebook-is-now-the-fourth-largest-site-in-the-world/

[African Wikipedias] - Swahili Wikipedia "has raced ahead with great momentum" and surpassed Afrikaans as the largest African Wikipedia by number of articles. There's also stats about the other African Wikipedias and sister projects.

http://www.greenman.co.za/blog/?p=614 -- blog post
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Africa -- African languages

[Wikipedias] - the Spanish Wikipedia has reached 500,000 articles, the Lithuanian Wikipedia has reached 90,000, and the Latin Wikipedia reached 30,000 articles with the addition of "Magninovilla".
[EN Wikinews] - Not really a direct goal of Wikinews to have many "articles" but nevertheless the English language Wikinews has surpassed 15,000 news stories.

http://en.wikinews.org

Other news

[wikiHow&MediaWiki] - wikiHow showcased an interesting article (on its twitter feed) about how to make a MediaWiki skin, worth a read if you're ever in the need for a new skin. :-)

https://twitter.com/wikiHow/status/3111069632

[Mobile Feedback] - the Mobile Wikipedia site requested feedback from its users and got a few interesting results, you might get a laugh out of them!

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/amusing-mobile-feedback/

[Correction: WMUK&Schools] - we previously reported that the new WMUK schools project was about revisiting its "Wikipedia Version for Schools" project. This is actually a new initiative, one focused on going into schools and teaching the staff and students how to effectively use and contribute to Wikipedia.

http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Initiatives/Schools_project

[Wiktionary users] - Dvortygirl posted an interesting blog post about the type of users who are attracted to writing a dictionary. She found that most of the people in the #wiktionary IRC channel all shared similar characteristics to her (and a Dutch Wiktionary visitor), more information in the blog post.

http://dvortygirl.blogspot.com/2009/08/wiktionary-type.html

Quote

"About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all." - Rita Mae Brown

Editor(s): Casey, Alex, Walter , Thanks to: Cary, David, Brianna, Phoebe, Bryan, Steve, Brion, Sage, Hampton, Signpost, Naoko, Bark, ErikZ, Jay, wikihow, Mecredis, Liam, Jessica, Pavel, Leinad, Mile K., Dvortygirl, St-Lemur , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is a nearly Weekly publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time) Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Year: 2009 Week: 31 Number: 113

2009-07-30T22:10:48+00:00

Technical news

[arwp: New namespace] - the Arabic Wikipedia Community has agreed to create a new namespace called "Supplement". It will contain most of date pages (days, months, years, decades, etc.), disambiguation pages and lists to give the exactly number of encyclopedic articles. There are about 6000 pages that will be moved to the new namespace. It may be possible that your community would like to apply the same idea.

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19357 -- bug report
http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project:Supplement -- guideline of namespace

[Commons: Off-site archive] - A off site archive for Commons and the XML snapshots will be added. Thanks are due to eBart consulting and User:Milosh for proving a backup server and storage array at their colocation facility in Europe. This server will store archives of our publicly available data of Wikimedia Commons and the XML snapshots.

http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/07/were-adding-an-off-site-archive-for-commons-and-the-xml-snapshots/ -- techblog post

[Passwords plz] - Watchlistr.com was an outside site that asked for Wikimedia passwords in order aggregate user watchlists across all projects for them. Although in this case it did not have a malicious intent, use of external sites asking for passwords place in risk the accounts used. Users are asked not to share their user password with any external site. Not even toolserver tools are allowed to request your password for any service. The site has now been shut down, and further analysis revealed that it had important vulnerabilities. Magnus Manske has created an alternative tool for people to use if they liked this feature.

http://www.watchlistr.com/
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-July/044238.html -- initial thread
http://magnusmanske.de/MetaWatchlist/ -- alternative proposed by Magnus

[TS: Multi-maintainer tools] - the toolserver is pushing multi-maintainer tools and will be actively discouraging single maintainer ones. They want to encourage collaboration amongst toolserver users and make tools last even when one of the users disappears

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.toolserver/1515

[SVN account requests] - there's a new process for requesting SVN accounts to the MediaWiki source code. Brion announced that he'll be going through the queue every week, so if you have request throw them up on MediaWiki wiki. ;-)

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/44683 -- mailing list post
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Commit_access_requests -- requests

Proposals

[Geonotice + Wikinews/Commons?] - Sage Ross recently proposed something interesting: using an opt-in geonotice (notice that displays based on the location of your IP) to show local reporting or photographing opportunities. Hopefully this will help with one of the great frustrations that inhibit original reporting.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-July/044367.html

Foundation

[Board elections: Voting] - the Foundation's Board elections has finally entered into the voting phase (voting is open until August 10) and translation is continuing. Visit the Meta pages for election information (including a "Questions" page), the Wikipedia Signpost also has interviews with the candidates.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009#voters -- voter requirements
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Translation -- translation page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-07-27/Board_elections#Candidate_interviews -- signpost interviews

[More donation buttons] - the second round of donation button designs has been posted, feedback is appreciated to determine which designs we'll end up using!

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2009/Donation_buttons_upgrade

[Audit Committee] - the new members of the 2009-2010 Audit Committee have been announced.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053280.html -- foundation-l post

[wm2009: Registration] - Media Registration for Wikimania 2009 has opened. For regular registration, there is a new update: it is also possible to extend your stay past the Wikimania dates, but you need to contact the hotel directly.

http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration#Accommodations -- extending stay options
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimania_2009_Media_Registration -- media registration

[Strategy: "Office Hours" & Wiki] - the Strategic Planning team has announced their "office hours" which are teams that they will be on the channel to answer questions and participate in discussions, everyone's invited! The team has also "soft-launched" their wiki (most of its content is also available for translation).

http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_Office_Hours
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/40527 -- soft-launch post

[TS donation] - the Wikimedia Foundation has awarded a US$40,000 grant to the Toolserver toward improving the toolserver's reliability. With that money they will buy three database servers, so they can keep two copies of each wiki database instead of just one. This should greatly improve the availability of up to date data in the wiki databases.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/toolserver-l/2009-July/002278.html -- announcement
http://journal.toolserver.org/entry/2009/07/29/wikimedia-foundation-grants-40000-to-the-toolserver/ -- blog post
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/WM_DE/Improve_toolserver_reliability -- original grant application

[Active ombudsmen?] - there was a discussion on the DE Wikipedia (and then foundation-l) about whether or not the Ombudsmen commission (the group that hears privacy violations) is actually fulfilling its mission actively.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/40241

Community

[NY Wiki-Conference] - the first New York City Wiki-Conference was a success with more than 100 people attending. The Signpost has a write-up about the event and there was also a twitter "report" with the tag #nywikiconference.

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23nywikiconference -- twitter feed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-07-27/Wiki-Conference -- signpost update

[Institutions editing] - the Tropenmuseum, a Dutch museum, was preparing to upload images to the Dutch Wikipedia until it's account was blocked due to its name. Erik Möller (User:Eloquence, Deputy Director WMF) suggested on Commons-l that this is something we want to avoid -- "these institutions are helping expand our content, we should Assume Good Faith and let our first impressions be friendly and professional".

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2009/07/tropenmuseum-is-blocked.html -- Gerard's blog post on the museum
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.commons/5006 -- Erik's commons-l post

[WMUK: Schools project ML] - Wikimedia UK has started a new mailing list for its schools project, dedicated to creating a Wikipedia version with selected articles for schools. Interested parties are welcome to subscribe.

http://wikimedia.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/schools-project-l_wikimedia.org.uk

Media

[Wikipedia flawed, but that's okay] - Wikipedia is a flawed and incomplete testament to the essential fallibility of human nature. An interesting blog post from the BBC about Wikipedia being okay. ;-)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/digitalrevolution/2009/07/wikipedia.shtml

[Mobile Wikipedia tips] - Wikipedia Expert Tips: How to Keep the Facts at Your Fingertips. The article talks about different ways to serve Wikipedia content, from tweaking the skin to a random article screensaver to mobile phone versions.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/168655/wikipedia_expert_tips_how_to_keep_the_facts_at_your_fingertips.html

[NIH] - a few more media outlets have covered the National Institutes of Health Academy with article titles ranging from "Should you trust health advice from the web?" to "NIH Gets Schooled on Wikipedia".

[CK-12 Foundation] - Jimmy Wales joined the Advisory Board of the CK-12 Foundation, a Silicon Valley non-profit organization with a mission to provide online up-to-date and standards-aligned textbook content to K-12 students around the world.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/jimmy-wales-joins-advisory-board-of-ck-12-foundation,897842.shtml

[NPG] - the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies has sided with the National Portrait Gallery *against* Wikipedia, as the NPG incident continues.

[Jimmy on CNN Money] - Jimbo did a piece on "CNN Money" where he talked about Wikipedia's non-profit status and it's usability and stategic planning projects.

http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2009/07/28/n_co_wikipedia_wales.cnnmoney/

[Rorschach censors] - the New York Times covers the Rorschach controversy: whether or not we should include the ink blot tests in our articles (for "ethical reasons").

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/technology/internet/29inkblot.html

[WP has poor photos?] - the NY Times ran an article a few weeks ago called: "Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It's a Desert for Photos" which pointed out that Wikipedia has some trouble with good quality pictures in its articles (especially ones of celebrities). This caused a bit of controversy on the mailing lists, with image contributors complaining that the Foundation didn't steer the article in the right direction -- highlighting good works instead of bad ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/arts/20funny.html -- article
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053282.html -- mailing list thread

Stats

[50k] - the Galician and Nynorsk (Norwegian) Wikipedias have both reached 50,000 articles.

[mhr.wp] - the Meadow Mari Wikipedia is less than a month old and already has over 500 articles (almost 600)!

http://mhr.wikipedia.org/

Other news

[Facebook] - the Wikipedia fan page on Facebook, managed by Cary Bass (Bastique) Volunteer Coordinator WMF, now has a URL. If you use Facebook, make sure to add yourself as a fan.

[Wikipedia Art] - some awesome posters/t-shirts from last year have resurfaced, they display people with a common theme: "I [edit] Wikipedia". They show ordinary people surrounded by words that display their editing interest depending upon their personality.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeeperez/sets/72157604803121347/

[Attracting newbies?] - David Gerard pointed out an interesting article with tips about attracting newbies and making them effective. Although the author is talking about software development, it definitely could relate to our projects.

http://denise.dreamwidth.org/23600.html

Did you know ...

... parody is the highest form of flattery?

[Bigipedia] - BBC Radio launched a "broadwebcasting" show parodying the internet by mocking pop-ups, search boxes and other aspects of online activity. Produced and directed by Pozzitive, the four-part series is called 'Bigipedia' and has taken its inspiration from Wikipedia. If you can appreciate British humor, check it out.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00lpr29/Bigipedia_Episode_1/ -- first episode (30 min)

Editor(s): Casey, Alex, Platonides , Thanks to: OsamaK, Rand, Stu, Sage, Daniel Kinzler, Skenmy, Frederic, Brion, Jay, Philippe, David, River, Roan, Galio, Cary, Signpost, Gerard , Contact: reply or http://report.wikizine.org , Website: http://www.wikizine.org , Wikizine.org makes no guarantee of accuracy, validity and especially but not limited to, correct grammar and spelling. Satisfaction is not guaranteed.
Wikizine.org is published by [[meta:user:Walter]]. Wikizine is a irregular publication as long as there is noteworthy news (and time)
Content is available under the GNU Free Documentation License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html and also the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

Year: 2009 Week: 30 Number: 112

2009-07-19T22:39:47+00:00

Technical news

[Media server problems] - there were some media load problems on all the sites, which caused "extreme slowness or temporary inaccessibility". The sysadmins took advantage of this downtime to redo the way we access media files internally which will help reduce the impact on the rest of the site when load problems on the file servers occur, and also spreads out the load among multiple servers to improve things even more. They had to shut off all uploads for a while to get this done!

[Wikipedia Weekly interviews the Usability Team] - Wikipedia Weekly, a podcast for and by Wikimedians, interviewed the Usability team.

[MediaWiki:Sharedupload change] - MediaWiki:Sharedupload became MediaWiki:Sharedupload-desc-here. Admins in other projects should rename the first one to the second in order to customize messages for images from Commons. (That's the text shown when a Commons image is shown on another project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Doorknob_buddhist_temple_detail_amk.jpg )

Request for help

[Translation of the week] -- the Translation of the Week needs help! If you speak another language and would like to translate "History of pizza" into your language, TOTW is for you. ;-)

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Translation_of_the_week

Foundation

[Board elections] - the candidate deadline for the elections to the Board of Trustees has been extended to July 27 due to some technical issuets for which the CentralNotice had to be turned off. The questioning of the candidates has also begun and translation is ongoing.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Candidates -- candidates
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Candidates/Questions -- questions
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Translation -- translation

[New "Strategic Planning" Staff] - the Foundation announced that they filled two positions for their Strategic Planning project.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053165.html -- project manager
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053168.html -- facilitator

[National Portrait Gallery] - the English National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in London (UK) has threatened to sue a U.S. citizen, Derrick Coetzee. The legal letter followed claims that he had breached the Gallery's copyright in several thousand photographs of works of art uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons, a free online media repository. More information in the extremely detailed Wikinews article. *Update*: The WMF and NPG have entered into good-faith negotiations, according to Erik Moeller.

[Academy: NIH] - the Wikimedia Foundation announced and had its first Wikipedia Academy (outreach event to teach people to become contributors) in the United States this week.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/NIH_and_WMF_announce_first_WP_Academy_July_2009 -- press release
http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23nihwiki -- twitter coverage from the event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academy/NIH_2009 -- project writeup

[Advisory Board changes] - Angela, chair of the Advisory Board, has updated the "Advisory Board" page to show that 8 members have left, bringing the current total to 15 advisory board members.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/?diff=39660

[Fundraising 2008: Post-Mortem] - Rand Montoya, the Foundation's Head of Community Giving, has posed a post-mortem (basically "what went wrong, what went right and what can we do better?") on the 2008 Fundraising Drive.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2008#Post_Mortem_for_the_2008_Annual_Fundraiser

Community

[Board elections: Inspiration] - some Wikimedians suggested that it might be better if prospective candidates knew *why* they should run for board member; what's it really like to be one? Stu West (appointed member, treasurer) responded and explained why serving on the Board is rewarding.

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2009-July/053211.html

[wm2009: schedule & flu] - the Wikimania 2009 team posted two updates this week where they created a draft schedule for the conference on their wiki and posted a message about swine flu concerns to a few mailing lists.

http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schedule -- schedule on wiki
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimania-l/2009-July/001433.html -- mailing list post (swine flu)

[Open Source Schools] - Wikimedia UK's secretary is presenting a piece on the subject of "using Wikipedia in schools" at the Open Source Schools "un"conference in Nottingham (UK) next Monday 20th July. If you're in the area, it sounds like it'll be interesting! (Conference admission is 55 pounds.)

http://opensourceschools.org.uk/node/11659 -- presentation
http://www.ncsl.org.uk/lcc-map.pdf -- venue

[Spotlight] - Many projects must have there projects to improve the quality if an article. The English Wikipedia has there project "Spotlight". It not a new thing, the started end of 2006. But the news is that it has lost it {{historical}} - label. The spot is again on!

http://en.wikipedia.orgwiki/Wikipedia:Spotlight

Media

[Rorschach Test Censorship] - English Wikipedians had an interesting argument about whether or not to include the Rorschach ink blot tests in the article on the subject. No, it's not because of licensing, the files are in the public domain. It's actually about ethics, people are worried it will ruin the validity of the tests. The Wikipedia discussion was picked up by blogs/news outlets.

[WikiWars Conference] - the first conference to be held in Bangalore (India), called WikiWars, invites participation from users, scholars, academics, practitioners, artists and other cultural workers, to share their experiences, ideas, experiments, innovations, applications and stories about Wikipedia

http://cis-india.org/research/conferences/wikiwars

[NPG Coverage] - the user who was threatened with legal action by the National Portrait Gallery is keeping a list of media coverage.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Dcoetzee/NPG_legal_threat/Coverage

[WLA/NL] - The Dutch Wiki loves art initiative by Wikimedia Nederland ended and gained a total of 5447 photos of art objects from 45 museums photographed by no less than 292 enthusiastic volunteers. In a few weeks the pictures will become available on Commons, but the pictures can already be viewed on flickr.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/wikilovesart/

Stats

[en.wp] - Erik Zachte, Wikimedia status guru and owner of infodisiac.com, has published new wikistats data for the English Wikipedia for the first time since October 2006. This also allows publication of much wanted totals for all wikipedias combined, and trend forecasts.

http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/07/new-statistics-for-the-english-wikipedia/ -- blog post #1
http://infodisiac.com/blog/2009/07/new-statistics-for-the-english-wikipedia-2/ -- blog post #2 (in-depth technical post)
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaEN.htm -- new tables (click "charts" on the upper right to see pictures too)

[sv.wp biographies] - LA2 posted some research on the breakdown of articles on the Swedish Wikipedia. The Wikipedians found out that 26.6% of articles are biographies and that the overall ratio of biographies is 1 woman to 4 men (but that ratio gets worse as you go back in time).

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-July/044149.html -- mailing list post
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA2-gender-age.png -- gender vs. age graph

Other news

[New Book] - a new freely licensed book has been launched about wikis in the workplace.

http://WikiWhileYouWork.com

[LSS: foundation-l] - two new list summaries for the foundation-l posts have been posted, covering the second half of June and the first half of July.

Did you know ...

... that there is an easy solution to Wikipedia's vandalism problems?

According to one humorous website, "ALL WE NEED TO DO is direct our vandalism entirely to the article about chickens. Imagine a Wikipedia free of vandalism!"
http://www.everytopicintheuniverseexceptchickens.com/

Note: that is a humorous website. It does not mean you are allowed to ... with Wikipdia's chickens.

Quote

"Try to learn something about everything and everything about something." - Thomas H. Huxley

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