Hello,
What does Foundation-l say, that Wikiquote will be closed? I just have
added some quotes!
I newly created
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ismail_Serageldin
which I am going to use in PR, I think. There is just a problem, or two:
- I cannot find where I originally have my 1103.mpg with the Wikimania
2008 press conference from (url)
- I cannot understand one peticular sentence, I have now let it out
(see brackets). If someone could fill it in...
Notably the quote is not from a 16 year old computer freak who hates
books more than he hates spinach, but from the director of a famous
library! :-)
Ziko
Ismail Serageldin
Director of Bibliotheca Alexandria.
* I do believe that encyclopedias are dead as dodos in the old
fashioned way. Let me just go back, because earlier around I was
interviewed and I said: The book will always be with us. Books - we
used to read in scrolls and then they got invented the codex which is
basically the form of the book. It has not been improved on. It's like
cissors, like a spoon, and like a hammer. It's technology that's
perfect in itself and will remain very good. But: What about the
content inside of it? Now, there are books that you read for
information. And there what you want to do is how to get the
information. And it is infinitely more efficient, of higher quality,
to use digital sources rather than the published sources for
references. So dictionaries and encyclopedias are not going to be done
in this very ponderous way of having old books that by the time they
come out the information in them is obsolute. Second, you have to
search in all of these and open the pages and then you go to an index
and come back whereas you can type to search in. [...] But if you want
to hold in your hand a slim volume, nicely bound, of the love sonnetts
of Shakespeare or historical romans, that's a different story. There
is the book as artifact, there is the joy in holding the book. And
there is an efficiency in the book that you can carry with you in
different ways. But I think that the encyclopedias and the
dictionaries really are providing a service. And that service can be
provided so much more efficiently online that they are bound to
change. And if they don't change themselves and go online themselves
... I mean, the old providers, like Britannica, will go online, will
provide it, and will try to, in fact, compete with the model that
Wikipedia pioneered.
* Wikimania 2008, press conference 0'33 (August 2008)
--
Ziko van Dijk
NL-Silvolde
Hello all,
At the IRC meeting this evening we brainstormed a great deal about how
we can better manage Wikimedia's PR material in the future, and we
established an action plan for the first stage, which I'm summarising
here. Please be bold and get involved in this.
The idea is to tag all of our PR material, whatever the form or quality,
with a hidden category on the wiki it is on. Then, this hidden category
will be linked to on our meta page, [[m:PR material cleanup]]. From
there we can then decide what to do with it all. We just need volunteers
to find this stuff at present.
So:
1) Find PR material - there are some starting locations on [[m:PR
material cleanup]].
2) Determine if the wiki you are working on has [[Category:WMF-COM]]. If
it doesn't, create it from the template at [[m:Category:WMF-COM]] and
put a link to this category on [[m:PR material cleanup]].
3) Add the category to all PR material pages you can find.
I hope this is reasonably clear. Thanks for your help in this.
Sean
--
—Sean Whitton / <sean(a)silentflame.com>
OpenPGP KeyID: 0x25F4EAB7
Hey all,
We're going to hold an IRC meeting on Wednesday at 2030 UTC (standard
ComProj meeting time) to discuss the PR materials cleanup project in
order to get everything in order and to get going.
It'll be in #wikimedia-cpg - do join us if you can.
Thanks,
Sean
--
—Sean Whitton / <sean(a)silentflame.com>
OpenPGP KeyID: 0x25F4EAB7
Hello all,
A project to get involved in:
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/PR_material_cleanup>
"An effort has been started to bring together all the PR and
communications material out there around various wikis and other
locations in one organised space here on meta. It is being loosely
co-ordinated by Sean Whitton and involves ComCom, ComProj and Jay
Walsh. At the moment the project is being planned on this page, which
you are invited to pitch in and edit (discussion should take place on
the ComProj list). When this planning is complete, things will go
ahead per the below plan (which of course can be changed).
The idea is to have a plan and brutally work away at it in order to
get this done in a reasonable timeframe. By focussing on just
PR/communications stuff, we should be able to avoid drifting off and
should be able to finish this project. So, once this page has been
open for planning for a week or so, we'll just get going."
Interested? Go and sign up and contribute to the skeleton and plan :)
Thanks,
Sean
Hello,
A useful element for a leaflet or booklet are short bios of
Wikipedians, to show what kind of people actually contribute. For
example, in my prototype German booklet I present Dr. Josef Winiger
form Switzerland, a philosopher and translator of fictional
literature. His PhD thesis was about the famous 19th century thinker
Ludwig Feuerbach. He is also main author of the article "Ludwig
Feuerbach", and for that he was awarded in 2007 with the
Zedler-Medaille of Wikimedia Deutschland and the Akademie der
Wissenschaften und Literatur (Mainz).
Another one is 15 year old user "Suedwester93" from Münster who is
interested in the history of German resistence, believes that India is
the coming super power and that Loriot is the greatest comedian of all
times. He wrote the articles "Deutsche Botschaft London" and "Salomon
Blumenau".
You see, such short bios include something interesting, something that
makes people curious (a 15 year old encyclopedian? let's have a look
at that articles!). They link the notion "Wikipedia" positively with
real (even if anonymous) persons.
Would it be a good idea to collect such bios at Meta-Wiki, in the
original language and also in English? At the moment, I am looking for
some bios about Wikipedians from other Wikipedias than the German one.
Kind regards
Ziko
--
Ziko van Dijk
NL-Silvolde