#Wikimedia - Robin Reineke - #migrants die

Robin Reineke is a founder and the executive director of the Colibrí Center for Human Rights. They work with the Pima County Medical Examiner to identify migrant lives lost. By documenting the lives lost, they make the point that people matter.

Never mind what border, people on opposite sites of the fence or sea think less of the people on the opposite side. In the USA they die in a desert, in Europe they die at sea. When they are in the Netherlands, it is "OK" for them to drift on the streets.

People matter and Robin received the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award on behalf of the foundation she founded. Under normal circumstances, the people of the age that dare to migrate are the power houses of an economy. When they, like the corrupt money are leaving a country its economy is not doing as well as it should.

Accepting money and not people is an indication of double standards. It has everything to do with the corrupt people being of a similar class.

I received this picture from Robin to upload to Commons. At this time it does not work for me.. Sad.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikimedia Foundation - does not get one € of mine

The WMF Fundraiser will be a success. I hope it will be and when you feel like it, please do donate. You can donate by creditcard, by money transfer, by paypal, Please do.

However, I will not make a donation except for the donation of my time. Paying money is comparatively superbly organised in Europe. As a person you can transfer money without cost within Europe. All it takes is knowledge of the IBAN number to transfer to and the name of the entity you transfer money to. Easy peasy.

When you have a website with customers in the Netherlands, you can use a system called iDEAL it has the virtue of being cheap. Wikimedia Foundation does not support cheap.

Paypal and credit cards cost money, they deduce money from the amount given.

In Great Britain an organisation collects money for the WMF for a fee. At the same time there is a UK chapter who could easily organise it for the WMF and in the process hone their skills in fundraising, a skill the WMF wants it to develop anyway.

I refuse to pay these additional costs.

While I hope the WMF collects all the money it wants in the USA, It effectively hands over ownership to the USA and its way of working. There is little consideration for the rest of the world because if there was, they would actively welcome more monetary contributions and partner with its chapters in raising the funds needed for our movement and not only for the Wikimedia Foundation.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - Henri-Guy Caillavet; a French MeP

At #Wikidata several people are adding information about former and present Members of the European Parliament. In the "Mix-n-Match" tool we link information from the European Parliament to Wikidata and, by inference to many Wikimedia projects.

It involves identifying people who were also an MeP. Often items can be merged when multiple articles exist for the same person or Wikidata does not know a person was a MeP.

What is surprising is that the demise of Mr Caillavet is not known on the website of the European Parliament. Linking data will make it easier for them and for us to know about such things in a more timely manner.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - #European #parliament

The European parliament is in many ways a funny institution. Its parliamentarians represent the people of Europe, but the way they are chosen can be ever so different. It reflects the electoral system of the country they are from and as a consequence it is a bit like in Animal Farm where they are all thought to be equal as well.

Compare for instance the UK with the Netherlands; the UK knows electoral districts while the Netherlands has party representation. Arguably a British MeP represents only its district while the Dutch MeP represent a percentage of the population that voted for a specific party.

Wikipedia and by inference Wikidata knows about many European parliamentarians past and present. All of them have a career before and after their term in the European parliament and, to understand them and who and what they represent, it is important to know about this. You may find soccer stars, professors and any other occupation imaginable. You may find career politicians and "self made men/women".

On Wikidata a group of people have an interest in adding information about all MEP's. Once information has been added, it is in principle available in all the languages of the European Union. When your language is not one of them, there is nothing stopping you from adding labels for your language and enjoy as much information as we can bring to you.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Give #Europeana more of a global appeal

The Europeana blog enthuses about "Europioneers" and asks if you know anyone who you would like to nominate someone as one of "Europe’s finest technology entrepreneurs."

Europeana is a great initiative. It brings European culture to the Internet and it is becoming increasingly relevant and useful. Culture is an export product and at one time everything was ready to make the Europeana software available in Chinese and other languages that are not official languages of the EU.

This is still a great idea and the software had been localised in many languages. Several languages were fully localised and then, then it was decided by someone "higher up" that it was not such a good idea after all.

Pioneering is about breaking ground and, translatewiki.net did this for the world, Europe and Europeana. Given that Europe's finest technology entrepreneurs can be nominated, I nominate Siebrand Mazeland not only for his unrecognised work for Europeana but also for the important work he and his team do for the internationalisation and localisation of software and for the platform where people actually can do this work.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#ImpactOCR - A #font using #unicode private use characters

When really old historic texts are digitised and OCR-ed, the images of letters found are mapped to the correct characters. Characters are defined in Unicode and when a character is NOT defined, it is possible to define them in the "private use" space.

As part of the Impact project, really old texts have been digitised, texts in many languages. At the recent presentation it was mentioned by two speakers that there were characters used in the Slovenian and Polish language that are not (yet) defined in Unicode. As part of their project, the missing characters were defined in the Unicode private use area and the scanning software was taught to use them.

With the research completed, with the need for all these characters and their shape defined, it will be great when these characters find their way in Unicode proper. When the code points for the missing characters are defined and agreed, the OCR software can learn to recognise the characters at the new code points, a conversion program can be written for the existing texts and it will be more inviting to include these characters in fonts.

Now that the project is at its end, it is the right moment to extend the Latin script in Unicode even further.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#ImpactOCR - Citing a #newspaper

#Wikipedia has this rule: "Citation needed". Much of the news is first published in newspapers. When a citation is needed about something that happened, it is in the newspaper where you will find it mentioned and there may be many chronological entries on the same subject describing how something evolves.

A lot of research and development has gone in the optical character reading of newspaper of the Impact project. As this project has ended and has evolved into a competence centre, its last conference was very much a presentation of what the project achieved.

From my perspective, it produced a lot of software much of it open sourced and all of it is implemented and embedded in the library, archive and research world. It is a world that finds its public for the work done in the Impact project very much in the research world. The general public can benefit as much, what has to be clear is how it could benefit.

Though Europeana newspapers some 10 million newspaper pages will be made accessible. These pages are scanned and to make them really useful they undergo optical character recognition. This is exactly where the Impact project has its impact; as the OCR technology improves, more words are correctly recognised and consequently more content of the newspapers can be discovered.

The results can be improved even further when the public helps train the OCR software recognise characters for specific documents. As citing sources for Wikipedia is an obvious use case for historic newspapers, there are many people who are willing to teach OCR engines to do a better job. For those articles that are found to be particularly useful, proofreading can improve the results even further.

With a public that is involved in improving the digitised and OCR-ed texts everybody will be a winner including the scientific research on these texts.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Scanning sources; the conference

Who is going to he Impact event at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Hague? This was a question on one of the GLAM mailing lists. Living close by and having an interest in the digitisation and transliteration of source material made it obvious for me to volunteer. From what I understand from its website, the conference will inform me on the latest developments and many of the best practices. Obviously, I will blog about my understanding of them.

At the Alexandria Wikimania, many Wikimedians visited the scanning operation at the Library of Alexandria. They had an "assembly line" where books were scanned in an industrial process. This is quite different from the scanning operations employed by Wikisourcerers. Scanners targetted for home use are used often combined with the OCR software that came with them. At the Berlin hackathon I learned that it is best to OCR a document at the latest moment. OCR software is getting smarter and the improvements are noticable. I also learned that OCR is available from within many of the Wikisource projects.

Going to a conference is one thing, going well prepared is another. It will help when I have a better understanding in the operation of Wikisource, when I know about what we do well and where we can improve. It will help me understand the relevance of what will be presented in the Hague.

To be prepared, I will have to learn more about Wikisource and I will blog about what I learn.
Thanks,
    GerardM

We love libraries and #Europeana and, they love us

European librarians have decided that the meta data on all books published in Europe will be made available under a CC-0 license through Europeana. The details can be found in this PDF.

Reading the text, makes it quite plain why Europe can be so wonderful. This is not only the librarians making a statement, it is the European commissioner Mrs Neelie Kroes who backs this up politcally.

As practically all books are published in Europe and as the Google book scanning project operates in Europe as well, it is not only English books that will find their meta data on Europeana.

My favourite quote from the PDF:

It will mean that Wikipedia can use the metadata, linking it to all sorts of articles....

Yes, we love Europeana, we would be thrilled to help the world find the way to the culture it promotes, our culture it promotes.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Europeana calculating for public domain

It is often pertinent to know if something is in the public domain or not. Europeana brings us a calculator that helps you decide for 13 European countries at this time. Calculators for more legislatures will follow.

While it is fun to play with such functionality, it would be nice if the calculator would not only work for a country but would also be available in the language of that country. At translatewiki.net we are ready to localise this as well as other Europeana functionality.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#wikilovesmonuments and there are plenty of them

The 2011 is going places; last year half the monuments of the Netherlands had their pictures taken and this year cameras are to be aimed at the monuments of Europe. There is a beautiful new logo, the planning is already under way for some time.

September is the month when everything will be ready and the current planning can be found on Commons. Obviously you can take pictures already but for these pictures to be part of the photo competition, they have to be uploaded in September.

Monuments are not only to be found in the countries with chapters. The fact that lists with monuments in Belgium are compiled is quite exciting. Then again, many people visit Belgium for fun, history and Trappist so why not bring a camera?

In the Netherlands Wiki loves Monuments will end with a conference in November, there will be presentations, prizes and the opportunity to meet fellow Wikimedians. I hope and expect that similar fun will be had in most of Europe.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Wiki loves monuments can do with monumental efforts

#WLM is organised by #Wikimedia chapters. So what if there are no chapters. Does that mean that a country is not on our map of Europe?

When the question: "does your country have monuments" can be answered with a "yes",  we like to have pictures and articles about the architecture, the architects, the monuments of your country.

It is relevant to understand what organising a Wiki loves Monuments takes. The original project was only possible because volunteers of the Dutch chapter reached out to the Dutch national monuments organisation. The list they provided was analysed and published on the wiki with geo data and references to the Monuments databank and the existing pictures of buildings were matched with this list. Press releases were written, prizes were found and a committee of judges was formed and yes, there was a party.

All this proved to be a serious effort and several people worked really hard over many months to make this happen. When your country does not have a chapter and you think you can pull it off with fellow Wikimedians, your country may be added to the list. When monuments are not organised on a national scale, there may be a need for regional outreach. As a country is bigger more regional involvement is needed anyway.

The WLM competition is European in nature. The effort it will take to pull it off on this scale is Herculean. It is an effort that like Catalan castells reaches for the sky.
Thanks,
       GerardM

I stepped royally into it ....

When I blogged about Wikilovesmonuments.eu I was happy to inform about the plans for an European photo competition. I am sad that some countries are not able to participate and I expressed my hope that Italian regions will allow us to do our thing in their area.

The Spanish chapter is participating and, for a chapter newly formed this is really amazing. Organising an event like this does take a serious amount of effort.

Responses to my blog post show that not everybody is happy with European chapters taking an initiative.

This is not a Spanish bull but an Hereford

As I understand it, some Catalans feel excluded. They have their own chapter and apparently do not consider themselves part of Spain. While I can appreciate such sentiments to some extend, Catalonia is not the only region that may feel a bit separate. The Basque region is even better known for its independent sentiments.

Wikimedians are meant to work together. With sentiments a bit spirited, they can use their energy and try to outdo each other. What Wikipedia can represent the architecture of the Iberian peninsula best. Promoting the Catalan or Basque monuments will be easier because they speak Spanish as well.

The Spanish chapters and communities will have to work as a federation. From a marketing point of view people go on a holiday to Spain and end up enjoying its varied culture when they are lucky. When they are not, all they see is the beach and the bars. Then again, they do not need Wikipedia to decide where to go and what to do.

My message then and now is the same; enjoy Europe's cultural heritage and take part in the Wiki loves Monuments competition where you can.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Plan your #holidays with Wiki loves #Monuments in mind

When you are playing the tourist, it is nice to be on a mission, when you are not only moving about "because that is what you do" but  when your movements have a purpose. Wiki loves Monuments can give you such a purpose.

The Wikimedia chapters of Europe are working together in one big photo competition to document the architectural heritage of Europe. Some countries like Belgium do not take part because there is no Belgium chapter and others like Italy do not take part because their laws assume copyright of Italian monuments.

This Belgium problem can be solved by its Wikimedians.

Italy deserves a quite different response. Just do not go. Ignoring Italy as a travel destination because your pictures are not yours to license is quite appropriate. A solution may be found in cooperation with the regional authorities in Italy; when this allows us to ignore such silly dictates from Rome, you will find it amazing what the Italian country side has to offer.
Thanks,
       GerardM