Damaged goods

This is a stereoscopic picture of a building being built in Tel Aviv. This is the White City, in these days a world heritage site, being constructed.

When you look at this picture it is obviously damaged. For normal Wikipedia usage, steroscopic pictures are not needed. So only one frame needs to be restored. The second frame however is still valuable as it shows the parts missing in the first frame.. With some clever copy pasting, a reasonable result will be achieved.

Stereoscopic pictures are not needed for Wikipedia, but that does not mean that someone else is not interested in restoring the second frame as well. Saving the restored file in a format that is not compressed ensures that only the second frame needs to be restored. So having the intermediate files is in the interest of Open Content and Open Collaboration.
Thanks,
GerardM

Shōki is shockingly big

Shōki  is a featured picture candidate on the English language Wikipedia. It is also a whopping big file, it is 53.5 Mb. When I tried to look at it, it crashed my system. This is a JPG compressed file and this file is not usable for people truly interested in assessing the quality of restored pictures. The original file is much bigger.

Of interest is that in order to show the picture, a new template had to be created because of the dimensions of this Japanese woodcut.

When you load the full sized picture from Commons, you have to wait a long time before you get an impression of the picture. At the library of Alexandria, Open Source software was demonstrated that used an algorithm that builds up the image by first giving an outline and then adds details.

PS this is a much reduced version of the unrestored image.
Thanks,
      GerardM

What is on the menu

Today I read an article about the "mouse man", a scientist who had a big influence on the research of cancer and genetics. His Wikipedia article does not have a picture.. It looks boring and this is probably because there are no appropriately licensed pictures around. There are not even pictures of laboratory mice...

Pictures illustrate, and having great illustrations make great articles a lot more accessible. When we are lucky, we can find material that is in the public domain. Museums and archives are the custodians of such material and when we are really lucky, they make quality scans available.

Many of these images are damaged and need restoration. Many of these images are restored by one of a growing group of Wikipedians. Durova is probably the most prolific restorer. It is hard to keep track of all the images she has done.

In order to reach out to other people interested in restoration work, Durova has started to upload her pictures to Flickr as well. The question is if the upload limit will allow her to upload all her work. Flickr has a slideshow so have a look..

To answer pfctdayelise, yes it would be great to have a slide show in MediaWiki as well..
Thanks,
      GerardM

Gaza and the BBC and journalism

For me the BBC is first and foremost the BBC worldservice and the BBC news website. I understand that the BBC is under fire because it will not broadcast a fund-raiser in the aftermath of the latest fighting in the Gaza strip.

It is this same BBC that continues its reporting about the hardships in the Gaza strip. This is what they wrote today. It is great reporting and it demonstrates how the BBC has continued its quality reporting after the abduction of Alan Johnston in 2004 to 2007.

The problem that I find in the reporting about Gaza is, that there is so much less attention about the conflicts elsewhere and the devastation caused by it often on a much bigger scale. The people leaving the Swat province of Pakistan because the Taleban prevents their children from being educated. The genocide that is the cholera epidemic of Zimbabwe. The civil war in Sri Lanka and the trouble with reporting this news.

These conflicts, and sadly many more, do not get the attention Gaza gets. Key in this is journalism. Journalists are needed on the scene before we can get the news in our newspaper, on our website or television. Journalists die in droves. It is the most dangerous occupation. In 2009 journalists died in Russia, the Phillipines, Sri Lanka, Somalia and Gaza. In 2008 63 journalists died.

There are no tweets coming from Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan or Somalia to tell us about what happens. There are no people piling up the pressure to give more attention to these causes like it happens for Gaza. What we need are organisations that bring us the best journalistic intelligence. This is what the BBC does for me.
Thanks,
GerardM

Sadly I will now have to approve your comments :(

One of the gadflies of Wikipedia found it necessary to frequent my blog. He spouted the same kind of "meaningful" prose he got banned for from the en.wikipedia. As my blog is not a platform for his propaganda, he has his own blog, I have found it necessary to change one of the settings on my blog. I now have to publish your comments.

I will leave this setting for now and I may just remove it at a later date.
Thanks,
     GerardM

CLDR or Common Locale Data Repository needs you

Unicode is best known for its standards about characters. The CLDR is another project of the Unicode consortium, it provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages. It is an extremely helpful resource and at Betawiki we use it more and more in our operations. One of the aspects of the CLDR is the translation of languages in other languages.

For many languages you will not find information in the CLDR. I blogged about a project for the inclusion of African languages before. There are also languages supported in the WMF that we do not have this information for. This makes it more difficult to support these languages in Betawiki and by inference it makes it more difficult to support these languages in MediaWiki.

I wrote to the nice people of the CLDR and expressed our need to include the names of our languages missing in the CLDR. They are willing to consider our special request. They pointed to their policy on what languages are currently supported.

The good news is that we can and will create a list for their approval. The better news is that their policy explicitly states that when someone wants to provide the minimal (level 30) information for their language, it will be accepted. For us as a community, it should be possible to do better then that. At OmegaWiki we have a list of languages with translations that should cover a lot of ground and we should be able to improve on this when we are permitted to include both the translations for other languages and the translations in other languages.

Please check out if your language is properly supported :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Tolerance

To my dismay I read this blog by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch. TechCrunch provide interesting information about the movers and shakers in the start up technology world. It is important that we have this. It is important that we recognise that Michael is a journalist and as such deserves all the respect and protection that so many journalists fail to get and die for.

In another blog, Adam Frost talks about a misunderstanding about they way Barack Obama's name is to be signed and written in American Sign Language. From my perspective the coolest thing about this controversy is that it is only possible thanks to SignWriting.

Michael has had some really nasty experiences. There is no excuse for how he was treated. His tolerance is now at the breaking point. Adam recognised a situation where an injustice was done to a student. He apologised publicly and by doing so he demonstrated understanding and tolerance.

Michael wrote that some things need to change. I can only agree and wish him well.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Approved bug 46247

Brion has approved bug 46247. This bug is about gender. You will be asked to indicate your gender on the preferences. You may prefer to leave it as "not indicated".

There are people who object to collecting irrelevant information and to them I want to say that it is very relevant for many of our Wikipedias. In many languages, particularly the Slavic languages, a male is addressed differently from a female. It is considered impolite to address either in the wrong way. It is for this reason that a request was made to support gender where this matters in the messaging of our MediaWiki software.

The software written by Nikerabbit creates the mechanism whereby a message can be different based on the knowledge of the sex of our public. This does not mean at all that our messages have been changed. We do not even know what languages will make use of our new gender support.

What we have in front of us is that people will proof read the MediaWiki messages and decide that a specific message needs to be made gender aware. They will change the message. For the other languages we will need a bot to FUZZY that message so that people can make the changes for their language as well.

Betawiki now has more then 1000 volunteers working on localisation. Particularly for the languages that want gender support it will be hard work; the first messages will come fast. The ratings for these languages will suffer and slowly but surely the gender support will improve.

The Betawiki developers put a lot of effort in assessing new and changed messages. They now have the added burden of indicating what messages need gender support. What we hope for is that one of our Slavic volunteers steps up to the plate and slowly but surely becomes a Betawiki developer.
Thanks,
GerardM

Jimmy Wales; character approved

The USA Network hands out the "Character approved" awards to the people who change the character of American Culture. They get a sculpture by Bruce Gray and a $10.000 honorarium that will be given to the charity of his choice.

This year our own Jimmy Wales has been considered for this award. Jimmy is now officially an approved character. There is a really nice video made where the approved characters tell their story.

I am happy to approve Jimmy's choice. I know Jimmy well enough that he is the first to acknowledge that Wikipedia is us, the community, so I feel that in Jimmy all our characters are approved. Most of us anyway :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Wikipedia, the missing manual

Today O'Reilly Media, announced the migration of its book about Wikipedia to the English language Wikipedia. As of today, the entire contents of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual (O'Reilly, $29.99) by John Broughton is available for free online for editing and updating just like any Wikipedia entry.

I think this is a great news. I have read the book and it is excellent. This way it becomes even better and more useful. The Missing Manual can be found on en.wp.Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual.
Thanks,
      Gerard

The Pontic Wikipedia

The community for the to be created Pontic Wikipedia, are eager for their project to start. Zaharias has been in contact with me regularly to finalise the issues around the approval process. I came to appreciate him as a hard working Wikimedian. Today he popped up again and mentioned that they have started the process of choosing their admins and bureaucrat. They want to be ready for the moment when they can finally start for real.

Having learned about their election, I am happy to endorse Zaharias for the role of bureaucrat. I hope that they can soon start in earnest.

NB the Bugzilla nbr is 16955.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Looking at the larger context of restored images

These two girls are part of a recently restored picture. The detail I am interested in is the hair of these girls. This restoration was done from material available at the Library of Congress. They are part of a collection of images that were used to interest people about foreign places and foreign people. In those days people did not travel. It is pictures like this one that had the first tourists go to Marken. They are still coming.

When original material like this is restored, we share the result at Commons in a compressed format. This is great for the use on Wikipedia and for the re-use on the projects of students. For the restoration process itself it is a disaster. Restoration is a repeatable process and a restoration happens in many phases. By saving the half way products there is room for other restorers to improve on the end result.

The problem is we cannot. The files are too large. The .tiff format is not supported. Quite a lot of development effort is needed to make this happen and this is not likely to happen. So there is a need for plan B.

At Meta we make the case for a http://restoration.wikimedia.org. This project proposal will help grow the community of people who restore images. It will allow them to save the intermediate stages of their work. It will establish the Wikimedia restorations as relevant in the world of archives and musea and this will hopefully open up those organisations to collaborate with us.
Thanks,
GerardM

Comparing former Yugoslav localisations

I was asked if I could write with some regularity something about localisation for a Serbian public. So I am looking more with more interest at the Serbian effort in Betawiki.  I find that there is enough to write about..

When you compare the localisation of these closely related languages, I find that the Serbian language is not keeping up with the others. In a way it is not that easy because there is both the Latin and the Cyrillic script that is to be maintained. The number of articles would have it that the amount of attention the Serbian Wikipedia is getting is much bigger.

bs	Bosanski	100.00%	99.91%	100.00%	39.12%	12.07%	26,057
hr	Hrvatski	100.00%	99.45%	94.58%	35.74%	41.72%	54,003
mk	Македонски	100.00%	98.67%	25.72%	18.78%	74.83%	23,626
sr-ec	ћирилица	100.00%	89.44%	65.61%	23.88%	63.79%	70,702
sr-el	latinica	79.34%	57.72%	7.85%	3.78%	0.34%	70,702

Localisation is one of the most important usability factors. It is one of the few things that our communities can do to improve the user experience; localisation and writing the best articles. The rest is in the hands of the developers.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Opportunities

All the languages that have a Wikipedia, exist on the Internet. You would expect that all the components that are needed to support such a language properly on the Internet are in place. Proper support means that the characters are defined in Unicode and exists in fonts, proper support means that we know how to sort the words in the right way for that language and proper support begins with the knowledge that the language exists. Sadly proper support is not available for all the Wikipedia languages.

I will do (almost) anything to improve this. To support a language properly many separate issues need to be addressed and many of these issues are dealt with separate organisations. The Wikimedia Foundation needs a holistic solution for its languages; the recognition, the characters in a font, the support by a browser and finally MediaWiki to deal with it are all needed to make this work right.

NLnet is a Dutch foundation that financially supports organizations and people that contribute to an open information society. I had approach them to learn if they were interested in supporting a project to help the Wikipedia language to establish themselves fully on the Internet. As they are more inclined to the technical aspects of the Internet, they are sympathetic to the idea but this is not really their thing.

I was really surprised to receive a phone call from Michiel Leenaars today. He told me that the very subject of supporting languages on the Internet was discussed at a conference he attended in Brussels. He spoke about my proposal with a big foundation and they may be interested in considering helping us establish our languages properly..

I am thrilled.

Thanks,

GerardM

The failure that is copyright

Copyright as it is currently practiced is a failure. It is not even handed and it prevents our use of much historic material. A good example is this picture of Aletta Jacobs. It can be found in the archive of the Library of Congress, they make it available in a high quality tiff file. It mentions a photographer, a F. Julius Oppenheim, and nobody knows anything about the man.


Aletta Jacobs died in 1929. As it is possible that this image is still under copyright, this picture will not be accepted in Commons. The biography of Dr Jacobs was published in 1924, clearly no longer under copyright, and it is published on the Internet under copyright by the "Digitale bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren" (dbnl). The problem is that they have the audacity to claim copyright. They claim copyright on everything they publish including work from the Middle Ages.

Copyright is a failure because important material like this picture of Aletta Jacobs are lost to us while people effectively steal the rights to her works by being bold. The dbnl does great work by making literature available on the Internet, they lose their goodwill by taking what is not theirs to take.

I found this image in the archive of the library of Congress, Durova restored it for me as a favour. I am disappointed that such unclear copyright prevents her work from making a difference.

PS this picture is a PNG.
Thanks,
GerardM

The clock has it wrong

Kamusi, is the Swahili word for dictionary. Kamusi is also the name of a great project for Swahili dictionaries. The Kamusi project has been around for quite some time, they had a great time at Yale university, and last year became independent at kamusiproject.org because both the kamusi.org and the kamusi.com project were taken.

As of today Kamusi can be found at kamusi.org, the story behind it is a great read and a happy story. As a service to its readers, Kamusi would be happy to redirect from kamusi.com. Sadly it is extremely likely that this domain has been cyber squatted by GoDaddy.

Anyway, the Kamusi project will have to change their merchandising, they are a sign of their time.
Thanks,
GerardM

Securing a place for a language in cyberspace

For a language to survive in our modern world it needs to establishing on the Internet. Having a Wikipedia in a language is considered to be the gold standard of Internet presence. In order to be ready for a well functioning language on the Internet, many things have to be considered and taken care of.

Unesco has published a book called "Securing a place for a language in Cyberspace". If you are interested in this subject, it is a must read book. The book is available in English, French, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese.

You would expect that all the issues discussed in this book have been covered for the languages supported by a Wikipedia. This is however not the case. Several of our languages have problems that are hard to resolve unless resources are dedicated to go for a complete solution.

The problem of supporting a language has many facets. Most organisations take care of only one aspect and leave the rest to others. The Wikimedia Foundation in contrast has an interest in a holistic solution for its languages. In order to get involved, the WMF must make such an holistic approach a priority.

It is often wondered why certain languages do not function. It is obvious to me that when the chain of MediaWiki, browser, Unicode, font is broken, the effect will be that people will not recognise the opportunity that Wikipedia provides.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Expectations

Today Michael Snow gave prominence to an idea of the WMF Swedish chapter to make 2009 the "year of the picture". We should have more and better illustrations. I love the idea and I responded on the Foundation-l.

I have been writing and phoning all day, and for relaxation I went to the English language Wikipedia. Today's featured article is about Edgar Allen Poe. I read it and I looked at the illustrations..

The size of the picture is great, but it is damaged. It surprised me that such a picture is part of a featured article. Hanging out with people who are into restorations certainly has raised my expectations of what gets featured.
Thanks,
       GerardM

The Linguists

If a program is going to be aired on PBS on Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 10PM. When the message is deemed to be so important that they ask me to a join a Facebook group, the message must actually be quite desperate. In many ways it is, in another way it is a celebration of what is still there.

All you want to know about the Linguists can be found here. Background information is also available... Now how do I and all the other people not living in the US get to see it ?
Thanks.
     GerardM

Closed curtains

Yesterday, as part of the News Year event of three Dutch Open Content organisations, we had a guided tour of de Wallen, the famous red light district of Amsterdam. Even though the area is world famous, there is much more then meets the eye. Our guide was able to provide us with an astonishing wealth of details and, us being mostly Wikipedians we noticed the friezes in the classicist style, we wondered if next to the head of Zeus it was Hera where others had only eyes for the scantily clad ladies in the many windows. I must say they reminded me of a Patti Page song.

On a more serious note the relative merits of a red-light district were mentioned. With a decreased official tolerance for prostitution, more and more illegal brothels pop up all over the country. The girls are typically illegal and often forced in to prostitution.

At the end of the tour we made a group photo in front of a house with the curtains drawn. It is certain that Paul has an alibi as well, he took the picture ... :)
Thanks,
      GerardM