World Press Freedom Day

Every year on the third of May it is World Press Freedom Day. It is difficult to find to find the appropriate verb for this day. You want to celebrate press freedom except, in many countries there is nothing to celebrate. In those countries there is everything to hope for, remembering the days when there was a more free press or envying the countries where the press is more free.

As I am preparing this blog, I find myself considering what is worst, the 99 journalists killed in 2009, or the 136 who were in jail on December 1, the 573 journalists arrested.. I could illustrate all three. Reading the interviews of journalists who have to deal with a lack of press freedom is also sobering..

It is a mistake to think that press freedom is only about elsewhere, journalists in the USA have been victimised by law officials who flaunt the law. In a country where the press is truly free, such officials would have to face the law.

I blog and, in a way I am like a journalist, I report, editorialise and I am happy to have my worldwide public. My subject matter is a niche but I report about what I consider relevant. In order to keep this freedom, it is important to raise the issue of a free press. A free press is essential to be free, to make up your  opinion and to be heard.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Lucid Lynx

I installed Lucid Lynx, the latest iteration of #Ubuntu. It installed itself nicely, everything still works. The little light shines blue like it should om my Compaq..

It took its time to install, but hey I installed a wee bit more then just an operating system..
Thanks,
      GerardM

No politics please ...

At #translatewiki.net we take care of two things; internationalisation and localisation. Our developers work hard to make sure that the localisations can be presented grammatically correct for the languages we support and our community works hard to localise for their language.

The objective of all this is that people will find it easy to use the software that is localised. The most optimal situation is when all messages are localised in the target language. In order to deal with a situation that is all too often suboptimal, we have fall back languages. For some languages we have chains of such fall backs that all ultimately end with English.

Some people are annoyed with the choice we have made in such a chain. There are many ways we can accommodate people; when people want to seriously work on a specific type of localisation eg "formal German" they are welcome to work on it. The choice for a fall back in such situations is what makes sense; the German localisation is the most reasonable choice.

When people complain about the visibility of fall back texts, our standard answer is; localise the missing messages and the next day everything will be fixed at the WMF projects. Sometimes people complain about the fall back language itself. When the motivation is political, we are not impressed; what is important is that the readers understand the fall back language and when they do, it serves its purpose.

You can promote your language by providing the best localisation possible. Localising at translatewiki.net ensures that your work is available the next day at all the WMF projects, at all the MediaWiki installations that run LocalisationUpdate and ultimately at all the MediaWiki installations that don't.
Thanks,
     GerardM

I care but I POSITIVELY hate this crap

English #Wikipedia's featured pictures is a truly valuable asset in the struggle to create more free content. Each featured picture is among the best in its class and, there is only one such every day that gets the attention of millions of people.

Its value is recognised in the attention it gets from GLAM. It is a celebration of the effort in getting an image just right and the recognition thereof by fellow Wikipedians. This recognition is a motivator for some and consequently I think little of the proposal to remove the credits on these featured pictures.

It is a petty move that suggests that there is an appearance of "content ownership" and that our practices should be all the same. This is utter folly, our practices should reflect what is best in a specific situation and the suggestion of content ownership is negated by the free license of the material.

Sedum rubrotinctum by Noodle snacks

Pictures are typically the work of one person and consequently it is ok to celebrate their efforts. We should be proud of those who prove to be among our best.

Thanks,

     GerardM

Erik Möller is my friend

With dismay I learned about about the horrible nonsense spouted about Erik. I read his composed reply on his blog and, I am proud to call him my friend.

I am proud to call him my friend not only because we know each other for so long, because of the many projects we worked on together, because of us drinking together (me a beer, Erik a soft drink) but because I know Erik to be a "Mensch", a person of integrity.

We have had our fair share of disagreements and I know I have irritated Erik at times but these disagreements were about details, about priorities never about our core values. I testify from my own observations that few people are as dedicated as Erik in promoting and working towards our goal of sharing knowledge to all people everywhere.
Thanks,
      GerardM

CD dowloaded 4390 times in 10 days

Talk about pent up demand, 500 #Wikipedia articles have been put on a CD and within 10 days, there have already been 4390 downloads. Guess what would happen if all of the Malayalam Wikipedia would be available in this way..

That would become possible when the Malayalam content would be available for the Wikireader. The Wikireader people are testing with content in other languages. This does include support for the Greek and the Cyrillic script.

It would be really great if the Wikireader is also able to support the Indic languages, it is a big market and Internet access is not everywhere a given.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Investment 101 .. put money in growth

Conventional wisdom has it that the English #Wikipedia has plateaued. The same is true for the German and the Japanese Wikipedia. From an investment point of view, there are two reasons to put money in stagnant properties: to maintain the value of the property and to grow a property even further.

English is going down even in the USA

The English language Wikipedia is currently the most valuable resource for the WMF, but when you look at the trends, its traffic as a percentage is going down in most countries. At the same time the endemic languages are growing.

One of the truisms of investment is that you invest in where the biggest growth is, this would benefit languages like Russian, Spanish and Portuguese. The problem is that this does not help any of the other languages including English. So there is a need for a different approach.

Considering the formulated approach of leaving local things to chapters, the WMF can invest in technology and approaches that are neutral to languages but promote growth. A truly multi-lingual Commons, improved usability for MediaWiki and Commons, tools that identify demand..

There is only one aspect where language targeted investment makes sense; this is where a level playing field is established. This is where we fix issues that prevent a language to be properly expressed on the Internet.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The anonymous coversion rate

For #Wikipedia, editors are its most valuable resource. Theory has it that there is a conversion rate whereby anonymous editors become registered and a more visible part of the community. This is the theory and, when it works like it does for the Russian Wikipedia and the English Wikipedia it works beautifully.

When you compare these Russian statistics with those for the Malayalam or the Hindi Wikipedia the absence of anonymous edits is striking. The question is why are there so few anonymous edits.

With so few anonymous edits, there will be no conversion to registered editor. This means that other strategies are needed to grow the community. Having people available to spread the word about "the encyclopaedia that everyone can edit" is one. Making it as usable as humanly possible is another; the usability project is doing what it can. A third is what the Indonesian chapter hopes to achieve by training Wikipedians and make it sustainable by making it a "train the trainer" project as well.

These new statistics from Erik Zachte help to appreciate such diversity. They truly enrich what is already an important resource.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Translatewiki.net is working on a new main page

As #MediaWiki is no longer the only application localised at translatewiki.net, many of its community feel that the presentation and the structure should reflect this. Several people have been working on a draft for a new main page and, we think it looks nice.

There are several things that need to be resolved;

• information that used to be on the main page needs to go elsewhere
• the new main page must be localised and it has to be readied for this
• how do we target developers new to translatewiki
• does this look good in all browsers (we had IE issues)
• does this provide the best usability

Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wardriving, #Google vs the Wire

Wardriving is: "the act of searching for Wi-Fi wireless networks by a person in a moving vehicle, using a portable computer or PDA." The best known objective is to find an available Wi-Fi network to connect to the Internet.

Another objective is to geo-tag Wi-Fi networks. This has been done on numerous occasions and it resulted in maps that include overlays to Google maps like this map of Seattle.

There are use cases for such maps; for the purpose of law enforcement, it shows where a person is connected to the Internet and for advertisement, it shows where a person is connected to the Internet. On its own, it is a little thing. When you look at it in the context of what has been so brilliantly documented in the Wire, it is part of a technological fight against crime and when you look at it in the context of Google, it is part of the increasingly sophisticated way of serving locally relevant adverts.

Slowly but surely personal privacy becomes less private. People, organisations and organisations can address you because they know where you are. The weather is fine, I may take my bike and without a mobile, you may think I am at home because my laptop will be left turned on... I hope nobody cares, will miss me as a result and get annoyed ...
Thanks,
      GerardM

ፊደል means #script or #alphabet

The Amharic and Tigrinya #Wikipedia use the Ge'ez or ግዕዝ script. I asked Merhawie at some stage about font support for the script. The existing open font for the Ge'ez alphabet is incomplete and needs to either be replaced or added to.

My Linux support for the Ge'ez script

Some 34 million people use this script for their language and it is an obvious inhibitor for the Internet. There are already two Wikipedias that use this script. When we enable our Wikipedias by supporting the missing characters, we are likely to get attention from people that we need to grow our community.

To put the potential in perspective, the Dutch language is spoken by some 22 million people and the Dutch language Wikipedia is currently the 10th biggest Wikipedia
Thanks,
        GerardM

The whole #wikimedia domain is blocked in #Iran

Not only #Commons but the whole Wikimedia domain is blocked in Iran. Consequently websites like Meta, Strategy and Usability are no longer available. Our Iranian community can no longer influence the road that is ahead of us.

This saddens us because they are part of us, they are part of our world. We could propose a Geograph project for Iran. In this way we would learn more about Iran in the same way we learn about the United Kingdom and Germany. In the end you can only demonise another people and an other culture when you do not know them.
Thanks,
      GerardM

£3.99 a month for #Facebook ... what a #scam

A friend asked me to "join a group" protesting a monthly fee for Facebook. I googled and found that there is a scam trying to get you to an outside website in order to get some malware on your PC. There have been several such scams and currently they ask for £3.99, funny as the pound is a British currency and Facebook is American.. $3.99 is what I would have expected.

So why are people afraid of Facebook asking for a monthly fee? Maybe this is because its "value" of multiple billions of dollars cannot be explained. Much of it is in its ability to sell adverts, to sell information about people and because it takes your data prisoner.

The high valuation of Facebook is tolerated because of its growing audience and its growing traffic. It is about to subsume the Wikipedia content and what is of no monetary value to the Wikimedia Foundation will become valued and monetised traffic sustaining Facebook. There are similarities with a pyramid scheme and when this proves to be the case, the high hat will not have money popping out but a customary bunny.
Thanks,
       GerardM

"Results from the past offer no guarantee for the future ..."

This is part of a mandatory quote when products of the financial sector are advertised in the Netherlands. In life insurance, it is calculated what average result can be expected. As an individual you can improve your odds with a proper diet, exercise and staying out of any firing lines.

When you plan a strategy for a multi-faceted organisation like the Wikimedia Foundation, numbers give a baseline, something to measure against. However as we decide to focus on what has the biggest impact, what is known to work best, we ossify. We expect all our smaller Wikipedias to grow in a similar way, some do and some don't.

We do know that we can influence results but in order to do this we first need to be convinced what is to be done. Numbers will not help us because they at best show the impact after the fact. A good example is the effect of the LocalisationUpdate extension. It has had a measurable impact on the quantity of MediaWiki localisations at translatewiki.net and, there are indications that this had an impact on the traffic on some Wikipedias but sadly there are no hard numbers that establish a relation between traffic and localisation.

The aim of the Wikimedia Foundation is to increase the reach of our projects. This means that we want to have more traffic. When you look at the official WMF documents, you find this list that is incomplete. The reason given is that the source for these numbers is not that great outside of the first world. It is however not the only source, Alexa is more informative. So with numbers from elsewhere, we have more of a clue about our impact in a given country and consequently we are better able to "measure" the evolution of our impact.

When numbers are available, we can look for anomalies. Why does the Indonesian Wikipedia outperform all the Indian Wikipedias combined. According to Alexa the impact of Wikipedia is higher in India.. and, it is not that they do not know their English in Indonesia. Problematic is the support for the scripts of the Indian languages. This showed itself when we tried to support  the mobile Wikipedia interface and it showed in the problems realising the 500 article Malayalam Wikipedia CD. The Indonesians have fewer editors but many more readers ...

There may be other factors as well but, is it not simpler to fix the known issues first? We know that many of our languages are badly supported, the fact that Wikipedia supports more languages then the CLDR makes that sufficiently obvious. What does it take to support our languages? What does it take to overcome the bias that has us only support the Wikipedias that are already big? What does it take to make Wikipedia a platform that will truly bring the sum of all knowledge to everyone?
Thanks,
      GerardM

This does not completely answer the question, what does it take to invalidate a strategy. More is needed to do that.

#Commons is blocked in #Iran

Commons, the biggest resource of freely licensed educational media-files has been blocked in Iran. Commons as you may know is the shared media repository used by all the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, most notably Wikipedia.

With 6,489,509 freely usable media files Commons is the premier source for illustrations of projects of students of all ages worldwide. The pictures at Commons have been contributed by volunteers from all over the world and they give an unequalled coverage of every country and every culture.

The flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran as seen in Iran

In order to improve on the educational qualities of Commons, representatives of the Wikimedia Foundation are in ongoing discussions with museums to open up the cultural heritage of our world, we have welcomed several important collections in order to strengthen the free and educational nature of Commons.

The flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran as seen in the rest of the world

We are saddened that the Iranian students are deprived of such an important educational resource and we hope that the decision to block Wikimedia Commons will soon be reverted.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Mündung der Lauchert in den Lauchertsee

I was happily surprised when I learned that Geograph has a German sister project. The British project covers some 76.3%, the new German project already 1%.

Both projects advertise their CC-by-sa credentials and, both projects inform the world that their material is available for use in Wikipedia. The British images can be found on Commons, and the German images as well.

© Copyright Hansjörg Lipp and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

All the Geograph pictures come with geo-tagging. They are another large collection that provides provenance to this type of data.. Another example that the existing absolute lack of discussion with OpenStreetMap is plain silly.
Thanks,
       GerardM

The gospel according to John

#SignWriting enables the writing of sign languages, all sign languages. The only way to learn if it is for real or just an academic exercise is .. do people write and do people read.

The bible has always been one of the first books that is translated in a language. The gospel according to John is now available both as a book and for reading on the web.

That is the writing part





This video shows Ed, Ed is deaf from birth, he does not know SignWriting in depth but he got interested and studied it a little. He then reads chapter 3, verse 16 from the "gospel according to John" from the book.

Have literature, can read!!
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Feedjit Recent visitors

Recently Google translate was added as a function to this blog. Since then I have seen a growth in the number of visitors to my blog.

The Feedjit recent visitors show a sliding window of visitors and, as more Asian visitors show up, I see fewer American visitors. It is obvious from this map that Europe is "my" heartland.

The business model of Feedjit is one where they inform about traffic on your website. Lately, they ask people to identify themselves as a guest to my blog with a facebook, twitter or other account.

I am not sure what to think of it.. On the one hand it is nice to know when my ma or my sister have visited, but it is also the kind of information I do not need to know, and I do not want it to be aggregated for my blog and up for sale.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The #location of the Ruïnekerk is 52°40'10"N, 4°42'1"O

The Ruïnekerk is one on a list of monuments in Bergen (NH). This list is available on the Dutch Wikipedia and, this list was provided to the Dutch chapter by what can be considered the "copyright holder" for this data.

This is a well defined subset of clean data that exists in a Wikipedia. The problem that we face is that we do not know for many data-items who the copyright holder is. This is not only a problem in the free content world, it is no less a problem in the commercial world.

In Techcrunch there was an article proposing an open database with the kind of data we want to express in OpenStreetMap format. The funny thing is that almost all these commercial organisations have much of their data because of the cooperation of the public. That is in and of itself not enough of a reason to make such an open database freely licensed. What should be convincing is the ability of mashing data .. particularly with Wikipedia.
Thanks,
     GerardM

A #keyboard to enter "foreign" characters ..

#Google announced new functionality for people who search text in a different script.. "ISO 9995" is the ISO standard defining layouts of computer keyboards. It is a great and honest way of enabling people to enter search items..

Russian keyboard layout

The idea is lovely and, when this "virtual" keyboard is available not only on their search bar but also as an entry method for where the cursor is.

I would love for Google to go overboard and support scripts like the one for  Javanese, for Malayalam, Kannada and Nepali.. As the list goes on and on, I will not go overboard but, you get the idea..
Thanks,
      GerardM