Using #Wikidata in #OmegaWiki

Wikidata knows about the existence of #Wikipedia articles. One really nice side effect is that OmegaWiki will point you to the article in your language, Arabic in the example, even when OmegaWiki does not have a translation in your language.
Thanks,
       GerardM

A challenge for #Wikidata

Not only #Wikipedia but also #Wikisource and #Wikiquote are in need for the #Wikidata treatment. OmegaWiki can demonstrate why. Julius Caesar has an article in all the languages with a translation. All that is needed is a link to Wikidata where Julius is known as "Q1048".

Linking to the quotes of Caesar on Wikiquote is not so easy; it has to be done for each language to the Wikiquote where there are quotes by Caesar. This is also needed for Wikisource for books or other publications. You may notice that Julius Caesar is a writer and a person. A writer publishes and any person may produce quotable quotes.

The challenge for Wikidata is to go the extra mile and rid us from those pesky interwiki links... on all the Wikimedia projects. These links can in return be used on all the projects. It also makes searching more interesting... Julius Caesar; what do you want? An article about him, his sources, his quotes..

What we at OmegaWiki would like is for Wikidata to go even further and incorporate our data. This will be a big benefit because it will allow people to search in Nepali for जुलियस सिजर and have a similar result at no extra cost as in English.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Denny, I do not agree

#Wikidata is a wiki and consequently Caesar can have a capitol according to Denny's blogpost. While I applaud the sentiment, it is not really practical.

Denny is the big man for Wikidata and he is a human and, he can be both right and wrong. So let me suggest why I do not support him in this and, let me suggest a compromise.

The one thing that will help is when there are classes and when those classes have attributes. For instance; a country has a national anthem, a capitol, a currency, a head of state etcetera. When you state that Caesar is a country, it then follows that he has a capitol, a currency, a head of state.. For Wikipedia this is really powerful. When all the countries have been labelled as such, it is easy and obvious to fill in the missing values for use in an info-box. The most valuable part of it is, that these values can be translated for use in info-boxes in other languages. Yes, the values can have their own Wikipedia articles as well as a label to use in an info-box.

When a label is used in an info-box, in any language, these labels are obviously of higher value than the  labels that are not used. So Denny can have his way and as long as labels are values when they are used in a Wikipedia all the extra labels will not be very much in the way. Hard-drives are cheap. It is possible to have classes with associated labels. These classes can be a associated with a particular info-box.

This is what Julius Caesar looks like at OmegaWiki. As you can see it is linked to Wikidata, it is linked to Wikipedia and, it is linked to Commons. It would be so cool when we have the best of both worlds in a joined project.

Please Denny, lets cross the Rubicon.
Thanks,
      GerardM

What statistics for #Wikipedia

The question was: "What statistic inspires you most". My answer; it depends what hat I am wearing.

The statistic that means a lot to me are the page views. However, they do not truly show how many PEOPLE view the pages. There are the bots that spoil the view. But there is so much history there.. Even with the bots you get a picture of growth.

However, wearing another hat, I want to see an aggregation of views of GLAM objects for the GLAM's we cooperate with. This is so vital for making the point that Wikipedia is making cultural heritage visible. It is the one argument everyone "understands".

Yes, there are many languages but for this I want to know how well does MediaWiki work for a language and this can be found best in the stats at translatewiki.net.

Really Erik, there is no one statistic that is best. There are horses for courses. What is vital that the statistics can be trusted. If anything, improved reliability of the data is what would help us most.
Thanks,
       GerardM

More traffic for the smaller #Wikipedia projects

The biggest Wikipedia in pageviews is the English language Wikipedia. Last month it generated 49.36% of all the traffic. This left 40.34% for the numbers 2 to nine and 10.3% for all the other Wikipedias.

Traffic is growing really well; 19% on a year to year basis for all the Wikipedias and 20% for the English Wikipedia. What the chart to the left shows is that slowly but surely the "other" languages are doing better than the top 10.

The current picture will change as it did in the past. Consider that the Dutch Wikipedia was bigger than the Chinese Wikipedia. The Dutch is growing at 16% while the Chinese is powering up the ladder with a healthy 46%.

There are many languages that have the potential to move on in the traffic rankings. This may be because the content in those languages improves or because the infrastructure in a country changes. I have reliable information that in India mobile traffic went from 55m to 85m in a matter of 6 months and this while it is too soon to attribute this to Wikipedia Zero. This is not obvious from the statistics published for India.

In a way I have been cheating; the numbers in the charts above exclude mobile traffic. This is because these numbers make it more obvious how well the "other" languages are doing. However, as you can see something similar is happening when mobile traffic is included.

With Wikipedia Zero growing in relevance, it seems obvious that content that is relevant to the people who use this service will grow in demand. As this is addressed in the languages people read, it will mean that the growth of popularity of Wikipedia articles will continue for some time. I also expect that the "other" languages will become more relevant and assertive.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikivoyage #statistics II

The first month of Wikivoyage statistics is in. The page views statistics are now regularly updated. There is now a baseline to compare future months with. Last week I blogged about Wikivoyage statistics and at that time traffic was expected to reach 12.8 M. As you can see in the screen dump, it ended up at 17.3 M.

Over time Wikivoyage will become increasingly Wikivoyage. It will slowly but surely morph into something that can be distinguished from Wikitravel. Once that process is well under way, I am sure that there will be a growing public for this Wikimedia project.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#CLDR gets the sorting right

When you sort, order will be created in the predetermined way. Another word for such a predetermined way is called the "collation order". When you sort tea, you make sure that only the tea leaves of sufficient quality are left. The characters in the words determine where the word can be found in a sorted list.

The collation order is a standard and, the CLDR is the name of the standard. Unicode, the organisation behind the CLDR has made a big change in the order. From now on, the character of the script of the language take precedence over the Latin script.

This change affects many languages and, there is a document mentioning them all.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikivoyage #statistics

Page views are now also collected for Wikivoyage. At this stage it is indicated that they are page views from non-mobile devices. It is likely that the mobile page views will follow at a later date; Wikivoyage is after all the resource for people who are travelling or are about to travel.
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

#Wikipedia traffic includes #mobile

Once upon a time, there was the encyclopaedia that could. It lived on the Internet and people approached it from their laptop or computer. Statistics showed how it grew in the different languages. At a later date there was this application in Ruby on Rails that provided a better experience for people reading Wikipedia on mobile phones. It was significantly different and it showed great potential. The statistics for mobiles were available separately. There was even a statistics page combining the two.

Nowadays, the Wikipedia experience on mobile phones has improved a lot. As a result the mobile traffic in January 2012 is 14.7% of total traffic and, the traffic from mobile phones is responsible for most of the growth in traffic for Wikipedia.

It is quite reasonable to show the all inclusive statistics from the Wikipedia statistics page. Obviously the breakdown in traffic from mobile and non-mobile is relevant. They are important for the people who care for these numbers. The Wikipedia traffic does include traffic from mobile and the combined statistics show most clearly that the appetite for quality information is still growing after all these years.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Depression and Aaron and all the others

A lot has been said about the untimely death of Aaron Swartz. It is sad that a life with so much promise comes to an early end. I met Aaron at Wikimania, he presented there as well.

Aaron like me and many other Wikimedians suffered from depression. The circumstances were not favourable for him; there was a real chance for him to go to jail. He could not cope with that possibility, he committed suicide.

Depression is a killer. For the people prosecuting Aaron, his case was business as usual. Now that he is dead, they have come to realise that Aaron was anything but usual.

Many of the people who read and edit Wikipedia suffer from all kinds of psychiatric disorders. For many of them being a Wikimedian is therapeutic.

If anything I wish that more people realise that many people who suffer from psychiatric disorders do contribute to the common good.
Thanks,
      Gerard

#Wikidata is used on the Hungarian #Wikipedia

The Wikipedia in Hungarian is the first Wikipedia that makes use of Wikidata for its interwiki links. This is great news because the bots that update these links are no longer needed. This will make it much easier to resolve the many issues that exist with the old interwiki approach.

The way to update interwiki links on the Hungarian Wikipedia is now by updating Wikidata. Recently many of the messages that support Wikidata have been localised in Hungarian making it much easier.

I hope that many Hungarians will find their way to Wikidata and make it a success. It will be awesome once the old interwiki links have gone the way of the dodo. In preparation for that day, you can check out if there are messages in your language that need localisation.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Great news from the #ngadc, they dig the public domain!

" With the launch of NGA Images, the National Gallery of Art implements an open access policy for digital images of works of art that the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images of these works are now available free of charge for any use, commercial or non-commercial. Users do not need to contact the Gallery for authorization to use these images. They are available for download at the NGA Images website (images.nga.gov). See Policy Details below for specific instructions and notes for users."

This is the kind of news that makes for happy reading. It provides a basis for happy collaboration that starts with the GLAM people in our Wikimedia movement. When you read the terms of use for the images that are in the public domain, they make sense.

The realisation that public domain is best expressed by providing the public with access to this important resource. Once the GLAM people have a working relation, there are so many more things that can be done. This is a great step forward and the world is a better place because of it.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Illustrated #Wikispecies Tree

Wikispecies is one #Wikimedia project that is probably the least well known. It exists only in one language; English. It aims to include all the species and all the other levels of the nomenclature of plants and animals.

The nomenclature is a system that relates many different levels together. As the information is available in Wikispecies and, it is possible to present this in a different way. The resulting "tree of life" is really interesting and it deserves attention. Read the announcement on the Wikispecies village pump below and check out the illustration of all apes at the bottom.
Thanks,
       GerardM

I've created an interactive illustrated tree of life based on the Wikispecies data. You can check it out here. (See Village_Pump#Taxon_Tree, especially EncycloPetey's comments, for discussion of what such a tree can and cannot be.)
Apart from being fun to play with, one purpose this can serve is to help spot erroneous links on Wikispecies. For example, the plant family Melastomataceae is currently listed as containing Dionycha, which is a group of spiders. I've already corrected a bunch of these errors locally, so they're no longer visible in the tree linked above. However I wasn't sure how to go about correcting them on Wikispecies. Presumably what the person who entered "Dionycha" intended was something like "Dionycha_(Plantae)", so I shouldn't just delete the link, right? In any case, here is a list of erroneous links I noticed.
If you're interested in using this as a tool for verification, here is an uncorrected version based on the most recent dump (2013.01.05). Some further issues are also discussed there.
-- Lifetree (talk) 03:41, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

The #Wikimedia #Commons featured pictures

I have counted to ten .... waited some more, and more ... and am not happy with the Featured Pictures practices of Commons. They are only about technical considerations and an absolutely stunning picture, a spectacular picture good enough to win the Wiki loves Monuments 2012 world wide competition fails to qualify.

On one level, I do not need to care; it is for that in-crowd to play their game. On the other hand they expect us to cherish their best in the picture of the year. In a world that is not black and white, most of their pictures are nice. Most pictures however do not impress me as much as the winning picture of Wiki loves Monuments 2012.

Multiple languages, multiple scripts in a #Wikipedia article

Many Wikipedia articles describe something "foreign". For instance Moscow is known in the Russian language as Москва. It is a best practice to mention the native name of a subject and include the pronounciation expressed in IPA as well.

When an article includes text in multiple languages, it is important to be able to identify what text is in what language. Several purposes are served in this way. 

• provide support for language technology like web fonts and input methods
• enable data mining for the building of spell checkers.
• create frequency lists for words

The standard for identifying text as being in a specific language in a web page is well defined. At the start of a text the language should be identified and the end of text in that language needs to be identified as well. 

When a Wikipedia article is parsed, such tags make it possible to enable relevant technology for that language. This is of particular relevance for the "smaller" languages because a Wikipedia in that language is quite often the biggest corpus. Research of such a corpus is a lot easier when all words that are explicitly in another language are marked as such. 

Adding such tags is relatively easy. To a large extend bots can be used to add them. Making use of these tags in how MediaWiki works is something else. Tagging is however the first step that needs to be taken and, there is no reason I know of why this can not be done at this time.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata needs #localisation

A lot of hard work has gone in developing Wikidata. It is getting at a stage where the localisation of the "Wikibase - client" extension (only fourteen messages) needs to be done.

Of particular interest is the localisation in Hungarian; they are likely to get the Wikidata functionality implemented as one of the first.

As always, localisation of software is done at translatewiki.net. As always there is more that you can do for your language.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The growth in traffic of #Wikipedia from #mobile phones

A growth of 44% compared with the previous month and a growth of 142% compared to the previous year is exceptional. The traffic of 3,709 M in December 2012 is up from 372 M in July 2010 in other words there has been a tenfold growth in less than 2 years.

It does vindicate the effort that goes in making MediaWiki look good on mobile phones.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#MediaWiki for dyslexic people

#Wikipedia states: "It is believed that #dyslexia can affect between 5 and 10 percent of a given population". There are some 315,113,038 USAmericans and therefore there are something like 23,633,478 people in the USA who have a problem with Wikipedia; they find Wikipedia hard if not impossible to read. 

The Website of Dyslexia USA has on its information pages a very simple drop down box. It offers 8 different background colours. Each background colour helps a different group of people with dyslexia. 

It is a cheap and easy way of growing the numbers of readers of Wikipedia in the USA. Add to this the Open-Dyslexic font we are waiting for and we help them to the resource that has been there for all the rest of us.

PS It will work for people in other countries or who speak other languages too.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Dutch #government loves #WikiLovesMonuments

When a small country like the Netherlands runs the Wiki loves Monuments competition for three years in a row, you would think everything has been photographed. You would think that every monument has been described. Because of  the great cooperation with the governmenmental organisation for Cultural Heritage (RCE), it has been quite clear how many monuments there are; from the start there were lists compiled from its databases.

Obviously the RCE has its own photos of most of the monuments; they are used to do whatever is needed to maintain the necessary information. The RCE has been taking pictures for many years. Currently there are some 555.000 images in its collection. All of them are now available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 NL license. All of them will be uploaded to Commons. 

With all these images available on Commons, this collection is available to people from all over the world who want to learn about the Dutch cultural heritage and its monuments. As this is a cooperation with the RCE, it comes with references to the RCE database where much more information can be found.

Some images like the one to the right show exceptional moments like the three pictures showing the hoisting of the church tower of the church in Bodegraven in April 1973 ( 1 2 3)

Add to the over half a million pictures from the RCE the pictures of Wiki loves Monuments and there is an obvious challenge; how to find the pictures of the same object. The good news is that the RCE numbers were available on the list.. A Commons picture of the tower in Bodegraven standing tall can be found here.

Combining all the related information is relatively easy to do in a database.. Maybe, one day Wikidata will be the platform making all these connections for us.

The RCE has given us a great gift, it is for us to use it and make it available in a usable way.
Thanks,
        GerardM

Fixing a lamp with #3Dprinting

The next #copyright battle ground is likely to be all about 3D-printing. Consider the story of the IKEA lamp in Wired; the shade was broken and a designer created a dozen new shades. New shades were printed at a cost of $5,- and the availability of a 3D-printer for several hours.

When a design can be exactly replicated at will there is no need for the factories or shops of IKEA. Consider the impact on retail shops; there is no need for a lot of storage room; all that is needed is a powerful 3D-printer to provide customers what they want.

Obviously factory produced goods are cheap. The cost of a product is very much in things like transport, distribution, overhead and breakage. At this time 3D-printed goods are more expensive to produce. This will change and a new cottage industry will come to exist.

Designs owned by global players can be easily copied and changed and there is little to prevent this from happening. Obviously there will be a lot of copyright posturing and industries expecting royalties because 3D printers are there just to rip off the rights holders...

Ah well, it is the likely way of progress. I however like the notion of more local production.
Thanks,
    GerardM

A #font for people with #dyslexia III

Yesterday I met a teacher. I also met someone who was a counselor in Mali. She was really enthusiastic about the news that there is a freely licensed font that works especially well for people who suffer from dyslexia.

Today I received a mail where I was told that the availability of the Open-Dyslexic font will be the basis of a possible project in Mali.
Thanks,
      GerardM

A #font for people with #dyslexia II

The good news is: the Open-Dyslexic font will be part of the initial roll out of the "universal language selector". The font is already available for some 25 languages on Wikidata and translatewiki.net where the "universal language selector" is already deployed. These languages are listed below.

• en - English,
• af - Afrikaans
• ca - Catalan
• cy - Welsh
• da - Danish
• de - German
• es - Spanish
• et - Estonian
• fi - Finnish
• fo - Faerours
• fr - French
• ga - Irish
• gd - Scottish Gaelic
• hu - Hungarian
• is - Icelandic
• it - Italian
• lb - Luxembourgisch
• mi - Maori
• ms - Malay
• oc - Occitan
• pt - Portuguese
• sq - Albanian
• sv - Swedish
• sw - Swahili
• tr - Turkish
• wa - Walonian

Many languages are missing in the list. For me the lack of nl - Dutch is obvious. But I do not have to break a sweat to come up with languages like sr-Latn id tl li gl fy sl. Languages like Indonesian or Tagalog are spoken by hundreds of millions of people. 

When you consider that languages with special characters like Icelandic and French are in this list it is obvious that many more languages are already supported by this font. When you consider that the WMF has good relations with the creator of the font it is more than likely that missing characters for your language can be added  to the font.

So check out first if all the characters used in your language are supported by the Open-Dyslexic font. If it is, ask for it to be enabled either by making the request on the support page of translatewiki.net or by requesting them on bugzilla. You can also send a mail with this happy news to all the teachers you know. When it is not, identify the missing characters and, ask nicely for them to be added.

Open Source is such a wonderful enabler. Consider; not only is this font available to all the teachers and the sufferers of dyslexia, it is also available for use on websites like Wikipedia. Given that our aim is to share in the sum of all knowledge this is an important step in the right direction.

Thanks,

       GerardM

A #font for people with #dyslexia

Today I was able to make some difference. I met a teacher who is specialised in children with "special needs". The conversation got onto the subject of language technology and I mentioned the existence of the Open-Dyslexic font.

She was so happy to learn about the existence of this font. She asked me to send details today so that she can install the font on her pc tomorrow. This week she is going to meet some thirty persons who will be happy to learn about the existence of this freely licensed font as well. A lot of children are going to benefit.

I cannot wait for the Wikimedia Foundation to make the Open-Dyslexic font available for use on its wikis. It will affect so many more people. It is likely to be mentioned in the international press; it is that relevant.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Tagging #British paintings in public ownership

Another great British initiative: adding tags to the entire national collection of oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom. What makes this project relevant is the huge number of volunteers collaborating on this.

The Public Catalogue Foundation has something to say about copyright. Sadly they are wrong. They say:

Is there copyright in the photographic image as well as copyright in the actual painting?
Yes, there is. The photographer uses training and skill to photograph a painting and he or she holds copyright in that photographic image. However, as part of its agreement with collections, the PCF agrees that its photographers will hand over copyright in all their photographic images for collections’ own use.

There is a word for this point of view: copyfraud. When this point of view is typically British, it is just that.

The PCF may claim copyright on the tags added to the paintings. There is no mention about this.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikivoyage pictures; the fun of being there

The coin dropped for me. Once Wikivoyage is a running Wikimedia project, it is about travelling, going on a holiday, seeing the sites. All these articles need their illustrations. I think that this is to be expected. It is obvious to me what kind of pictures they can be.

Many of them will be holiday pictures and, there is nothing wrong with that. These pictures will have a use, they illustrate Wikivoyage.

What I like about it is that they broaden the horizon of Commons and hopefully inject Commons with many more fun images.

The Commons challenge will only become more relevant; what will it take to make it the wiki where everyone can easily find a great and appropriate media file.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Depressed because of a #photo #competition

In many a #Wikipedia there is an article for almost every subject. All these articles need illustrations and  Commons is where these illustrations are stored. Some subjects are hard to illustrate. Subjects like depression or schyzophrenia for instance.

In my home town there was a competition to create something that expresses depression. There were prizes to be won and the jury included a professional photographer. There were many great entries to the competition. Having a professional photographer in the jury however was a mistake.

When you run a competition, there is a point to it. This contest had the intention to bring attention to the subject of depression. This means that the winning picture has to be published. Obviously it should be part of the conditions of entering the competition. It wasn't.

The professional photographer told the winner that the picture was of professional quality and that it is worth money. The result is that the picture is only available on the Intranet of the organisation running the competition.

The picture you see did not win.. It does show the Almere skyline. The weather was a bit depressed as well. Thanks Tamar for sharing your picture that "also ran". For me this picture is much more the winner because it is available.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Celebrating the Dead, Wiki Style!

In Mexico, the dead are celebrated once a year during an event called “Día de Muertos”or Day of the Dead. It is a syncretism of indigenous beliefs with Catholicism. While it is observed in almost all of Mexico (and now parts of the United States), how it is celebrated varies from one place to the next. For example, local observance can last from one to three days. The “day” is 2 November, but those who observe three days begin on 31 October. Preparations for the event begin well before this and usually include the creation of an altar called an “ofrenda” (offering) which includes traditional Mexican foods, fruits and other produce in season and if at the home, photos of the deceased being honored along with offerings of things in life that they enjoyed. At my home, my mother’s photo is accompanied by Milky Way candy, Pepsi, a cup of tea and even a pack of cigarettes. In addition to ofrendas, it is traditional to clean and decorate family graves on this day and even spend a day or night there. During the month of October, many schools and cultural institutions sponsor events as well.

The library at my school, ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México in Mexico City, wanted to participate in some way with Wiki Loves Libraries which occurs in October and November. We decided one of the best ways we could introduce working with Wikipedia to students was to sponsor a photo contest, similar to Wiki LovesMonuments, themed for this holiday. While there are a number of photographsalready in Wikimedia Commons, they do not really begin to tell the story of this very rich tradition. The contest has three categories with prizes: 1) the best photo (which I call the “Wow” category) 2) the most original photograph (of something no one else thought to take a picture of) and 3) the student that uploads the most photographs of different things to Commons between the contest period which is 5 October to 5 November 2012. The three categories are there to encourage different kinds of photography, not only good pictures with good cameras and techniques, but photos of local traditions, preparations and more as well as increasing the breadth of photographic coverage. It not only allows students who don’t have access to expensive cameras and training a chance to win, it also aims to capture images and themes which are not already in Commons.

The wiki page for the event is at http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_Portal/Projects_and_Programs/ITESM-Campus_Ciudad_de_M%C3%A9xico/Wiki_Loves_D%C3%ADa_de_los_Muertos

Open #Wikipedia for people who are #Dyslexic II

Great ideas are not uncommon. I am really happy to learn that Reedy had the idea to support the Open-Dyslexic font in MediaWiki before me. As you can see in the screen shot, progress has been made.

It is now just a question of dotting the i and crossing the t and pushing it out.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Open #Wikipedia for people who are #Dyslexic

We have the technology to make an important improvement for the usability of Wikipedia. The technology exists in the ability to provide web fonts from within MediaWiki. The opportunity is to improve the readability for people who are dyslexic.

What it takes is to enable web fonts functionality on for instance the English Wikipedia and allow the use of the Open-Dyslexic font. The license is a bit weird for a font but it is within what the WMF is comfortable with; the CC-by license.

It should not take long to appreciate why this is a good idea.. it should not take too much after that to help people with dyslexia.
Thanks,
    GerardM

About the #quality of #Wikipedia

Sometimes a new item is too good to be true... and then again..

I have no comment about the relative quality of Wikipedia compared to Congress's $100M research service. What I find of interest is the implied value that is put on the quality of Wikipedia. Eh, I assume the value is $100M a year.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Use Europeana's TimeMash for #WikiLovesMonuments

#Europeana has a rich repository of images of many, many monuments. They show what monuments looked like once upon a time.

Wiki loves monuments is a photo competition where people are take pictures of monuments what they look like at this day and age.

The TimeMash application adds a dimension to the pictures that can be taken; it helps photographers make pictures from the same angle. The combination is powerful; pictures taken in this way are more interesting.

It is possible to have both images on Commons and even used in the projects. The challenge is to register and link such pictures and to have a tool to switch between such images.
Thanks,
     GerardM

The need for both #OpenID and #OAuth

Many words have been used on the merits of OpenID and OAuth. There are many misconceptions and many of those have everything to do with perspective. In order to get a better understanding I asked on the Wikitech mailinglist a use case for OAuth. The answer I received helps.

OpenID is an identity management system. It allows users to authenticate to one site using another site as their identity. A use case for this is, for example, using your Facebook account to log in to Wikipedia. This may be useful, as it would allow users to more easily register for Wikipedia

OAuth is a third-party authentication and authorization system that allows outside applications to do stuff on behalf of a user. The reason for this is because currently toolserver applications, etc. authenticate to Wikipedia using a plaintext username and password, which is extremely insecure for a number of reasons I will not elaborate on here.

When you read the answer, there are some observations to make. The most obvious is how do you assure that the software that is to use OAuth will be secure. Given the power of many Toolserver tools how do you make sure that only trusted people make use of the Toolserver functionality.

Enter OpenID, it does provide identity management. OpenID is able to provide more information than just "this is indeed the indicated identity" as part of the "OpenID Attribute Exchange". When the Wikimedia Foundation implements OpenID as a service, it will be possible to identify the users that have a "bot flag" on the user profile. 

As it is, the Toolserver tools are not necessarily secure. With OAuth it will become even less secure to run the software because it will be the software itself that includes the authorisation to run, never mind its configuration, never mind how it is used or by whom. When OpenID authenticates users, it becomes possible to ensure that only people with a bot flag can run Toolserver software on the production Wikimedia projects.

To make the use of the Toolserver tools secure, it is necessary to complement OAuth with OpenID. Oauth in isolation will make the Toolserver tools easier to use but it does not make them more secure to run.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia Commons, a relevant history

A long long time ago when Commons the wiki was created, it was only a dream. The dream was to have one place where all the images could be shared freely among all the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

It was a dream with really practical implications. At that time sharing a picture meant uploading the same picture to another wiki. At that time removing a picture because of a copyright violation was removing it on one wiki and perhaps on one or more wikis as well. This was an inexact process with inadequate results. The dream of Commons was to store a file once and use it on any wiki. The dream of Commons was that administrative procedures would be significantly enhanced because everything could be done once and everything could be done right.

Commons was created and it took several months before pictures on Commons were available on the WMF projects.

Today Commons fulfils much of this promise. Media files are shared on all the WMF projects, you can even enable this functionality on external MediaWiki wikis. Most of the duplicate files have been deleted and a single copy only exist on Commons. Nowadays the administrative procedures are much more effective. Everybody involved in Commons will agree it is not perfect, far from it but, Commons is thriving nonetheless.

This notion of adventure that existed in the Wikimedia Foundation seems dead. I am convinced it should be revived. There are some signs that it is possible ... in things like moving towards agile development ...

More later
Thanks,
     GerardM

a #threat assessment for #Wikipedia

The people who take care of mail send to Wikipedia are often informed that Wikipedia is not secure; "everybody can edit Wikipedia". This is actually intentional because Wikipedia is the encyclopaedia that everybody can edit. The real risk is when people do not recognise they are invited to edit. This is a genuine issue and it is something that receives a lot of attention.

When you consider security for Wikipedia, the people most at risk are its editors. There are several threats they are exposed to. Several of these are issues computer security can deal with.

• threat to the anonymity of a registered user
• threat to user credentials

When the potential threats are evaluated, it is important to realise that the severity of these threats is not obvious. It matters considerably where you reside, what your ethnicity is or what your belief system is. It is important to minimise any threats because once people no longer feel free to contribute it will damage the "neutral point of view" that gives Wikipedia much of its relevance.

With the implementation of SSH it has become considerably more difficult to learn what a person is doing when working on Wikipedia. This has been a real improvement. However, user credentials and particularly passwords are considered not really secure. Read for instance what Wired had to say about them. It is explained that improvements can only be expected when changing the infrastructure of online security. This will probably do a whole lot more good than lecturing people about how they should change their behaviour.

The question is if the WMF is open for such considerations. So far the talk is about "Nascar" ?!?! to me this sounds remarkably like bikeshedding and is very much beside the point.

Thanks,

     GerardM

#OpenID for the USERS of #Wikipedia, PLEASE

Again a discussion about the use of OpenID for the Wikimedia projects flared up. From my perspective the one perspective missing is the one of a computer user who is fed up with the failed security that is provided by passwords.

The problem is that systemmanagers only consider security in isolation. It is the solution that is to be adopted for their system or systems. Obviously in a perfect world, a user will have a separate password for each website or program. The world is not perfect and most people use one or a few passwords for everything. The world is not perfect and passwords of many big websites have been uncovered by hackers. Consequently many passwords used by Wikimedia contributors can easily be guessed by the bad guy who are in the know.

The problem with passwords for a user is that they are unmanageable. Too many systems and websites, too many interfaces seriously impact the security wherever passwords are implemented to provide security. It is theatre and the fool is the part you have to play.

OpenID provides a serious alternative. It allows for a single place with a single password that authenticates to any and all websites and services that accept security in this way.  It is a serious alternative as long as any and all accept other OpenID. It will be really welcome when the WMF considers security for its 456 M users. It is obvious that a large percentage also frequent websites like LinkedIn and solidify the argument to implement OpenID.
Thanks,
     Gerard

#Font support by #Google and #Wikimedia

The quality of the Amiri font has been recognised by the Wikimedia Foundation for some time; it has been provided in the Web Fonts extensionn for some time and recently in an other bit of "read the whole article to get to the good news" it became part of a Wikimedia supported jQuery library for web fonts.

Google has also recognised the Amiri font; they make Amiri available through their "early access" program. Google supports multiple (freely licensed) Arabic fonts as web fonts. The biggest difference for me between the two programs is that the WMF library has your server provide the fonts while the Google offering has the fonts provided through the Google infrastructure.

Both Google and WMF support fonts for many scripts. The question is what they will do when the font has technical requirements that are more than usual.

Recently the Tuladha Jejeg font for the Javanese script was given a free license and the Wikimedia Foundation will assess if they will include it in their Web fontd extension. There may be a technical problem; it makes use of the SIL Graphite technology. The question is to what extend do browsers support this technology.

When Google is serious in supporting the rare scripts, the opportunity to support the Javanese script through the Tuladha Jejeg font may be reason enough to put some extra effort in enabling support for SIL Graphite.

<grin> One may hope for Google to do more good, we know they can</grin> <seriously> For the WMF there is hardly another option when they are to support Javanese </seriously>
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Internationalisation is more than conversion of numbers

A friend read my last blogpost and pointed me to a recent presentation about the current best of breed internationalisation for JavaScript. He had been testing the new jQuery internationalisation library published by the Wikimedia Foundation and was astonished that the one thing "everybody" does was missing.

His question was: "where is the conversion of numbers and dates?". Obviously MediaWiki "does" the conversion of numbers and dates, it is just not part of the library that enables what is most crucial for us in Internationalisation; the translation of the messages in more than 280+ languages.

My friend Andrew was thinking of extending the library with the conversion of numbers and dates. It makes sense to have them included however, forking this really new library at this early time is "evilish". Talking to Santhosh, the developer of this library is the thing to do. It is, because in this way any future improvements in the existing 280+ languages or the missing 6000+ languages will be shared by anyone who updates to this library.

YES, I know jQuery is Java and not JavaScript. But I also know that my friends at the Wikimedia Foundation support the localisation of their JavaScript.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#jQuery and #Internationalisation of YOUR application

There has been a lot of good news about jQuery this week.

• The Khan academy announced that they are providing training for computer science and they started with jQuery
• A Webmonkey report states that jQuery is installed on half the internet websites
• Hidden in a Wikimedia blogpost is the news of a library to provide a full i18n framework that supports parameter replacements and grammar-, plural-, and gender-dependent translations.

The news of this jquery.i18n library is wonderful news. As it is the same software as used for the internationalisation of MediaWiki, it represents the current knowledge of the 280+ languages that have their Wikipedia.

When your software is open source and when you adopt this library to implement internationalisation, you are that much closer to make use of that wonderful community at translatewiki.net. They are already doing a great job for many applications, why not yours?

Thanks,

      GerardM