Friends - Where they live

Lately #maps are more often the topic of conversation. A friend of mine send me this to indicate where he works. When you compare it with where I live, you get an idea of how much bigger Australia is compared to the Netherlands. Both maps show items that are within a radius of 15km.

Words are expressive but maps, illustrations are really powerful.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Khmer #MediaWiki WebFont support ready for testing

Today a Khmer friend contacted me with questions about WebFonts. He pointed to the support in the Google WebFonts and asked if support could be provided in the MediaWiki WebFonts extension. I asked my friend Santhosh and, within a couple of hours Khmer fonts can be tested on his test wiki.

The fonts are there, it is now for my Khmer friend and his friends to test the functionality provided.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Helping a friend with a #Wikipedia article

Jan Velterop  is a friend. He wanted to write an article in Wikipedia and got stumped with all the technical hurdles. The article was about a person that is relevant; a person that has already articles in the Italian and German Wikipedias. His concept was filled with hyperlinks to Wikipedia articles and there were sources as well.

The article was written in MS-Word and all I had to do was copy and paste the text, make wikilinks out of hyperlinks add some sections and there was a great start.  I am not strong on the citation stuff so I left them in as I found them.

The article is about Alice Ricciardi-von Platen, Mrs Ricciardi was famous for writing about the murder on mentally ill people in Nazi Germany.. She was an observer at the Nuremberg Doktors' trial. The observers wrote two books about this "Wissenschaft ohne Menschlichkeit" and "Das Diktat der Menschenverachtung". Both books were printed in a large volume but not distributed nowadays less then 20 copies exist in libraries.

If any books deserve to be digitised and become widely available it is these books as the prevailing feeling was/is that it was not the doctors who were to blame. Mrs Ricciardi's book "Die Tötung Geisteskranker in Deutschland" was largely ignored for the same reason.

Maybe Mr Velterop can help to make Mrs Ricciardi's book available under a free license otherwise we will have to wait for a very long time before the copyright expires. Having information available about this is what helps make a world conscience.
Thanks,
       GerardM

On #Wikipedia we have no friends

#Facebook is wildly successful because all your "friends" are there. Wikipedia by contrast has a problem growing its community, it is not where you have friends.

Most of my Facebook friends I know because of a mutual Wikimedia interest. Many of these friends I have met and I would consider helping them when asked. Leigh Thelmadatter came to me for help because I advertised myself as a GLAM ambassador.

She is preparing a GLAM partnership with a Mexican museum and, I have enjoyed many an interesting conversation with her and was happy to help her with several Tropenmuseum pictures of Mexican objects.

Conversations among friends are not limited to the business at hand. We talked about education, Mexico, photography, pain in my back ... The photography part provides an other reason how Leigh adds to her Wikimedia relevance; she has uploaded over 5100 pictures taken by her and her husband of the nooks and crannies of Mexico and this makes it an awesome collection.

As she likes the picture of the San Miguel Concá mission very much and as it clearly demonstrates a different style of church, I nominated it for featured picture.

I wish that we could all be friends, Wikipedia friends. I wish I could help my friends who come new to Wikipedia. It will help when you can find the friends that are already there. When you make a booboo as a newbie, it is friends who can help you best settling in, who can make you feel welcome.

Wikipedia is not Facebook, but we can learn from Facebook how to be nice and have friends.
Thanks,
      GerardM