We're not migrated yet, but once we are, the prefix: feature will
be /very/ useful for us, I think. Something to look forward to!
-Mike
----
Hi all,
We now have english wikipedia fully migrated to new servers / new
search
backend. We cannot fully migrate other wikis until we resolve
some hardware
issues. In the meantime, here is the overview of new features now
deployed
on en.wiki:
1) Did you mean... - we now have search suggestions. Care has
been taken to
provide suggestions that are context-sensitive, i.e. on phrases,
proper
names, etc..
2) fuzzy and wildcard queries - a word can be made fuzzy by
adding ~ to it's
end, e.g. query sarah~ thompson~ will give all different
spellings and
similar names to sarah thompson. Wildcards can now be prefix and
suffix,
e.g. *stan will give various countries in central asia.
3) prefix: - using this magic prefix, queries can be limited to
pages
beginning with certain prefix. E.g.
mwsuggest prefix:Wikipedia:Village Pump
will search all village pumps and archives for mwsuggest. This
should be
especially useful for archive searching in concert with inputbox
or
searchbox
4) intitle: - using this magic prefix, queries can be limited to
titles only
5) generally improved quality of search results via usage of
related
articles (based on co-occurrence of links), anchor text, text
abstracts,
proximity within articles, sections, redirects, improved stemming
and such
Cheers, Robert
----
Mike.lifeguard
mikelifeguard(a)fastmail.fm
Hi all,
We're hosting three open knowledge events in London this November that
may be of interest to people on this list:
* Workshop on Finding and Re-using Public Information
- Saturday 1st November 2008, London Knowledge Lab
- http://okfn.org/wiki/PublicInformation
* Open Everything London
- Thursday 6th November 2008, The Roundhouse
- http://openeverything.wik.is/London
* Workshop on Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources
- Saturday 8th November 2008, London Knowledge Lab
- http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenScience/Workshop
If you plan to attend a workshop, please add your name to the wiki. If
you plan to come to Open Everything London it might be advisable to book
a ticket as there is limited space.
More details on the events below.
Please circulate as appropriate!
Warm regards,
Jonathan Gray
The Open Knowledge Foundation
---
Open Everything London
======================
On 6 November 2008, London will host an Open Everything event, a global
conversation about the art, science and spirit of 'open'. The
conversation will cover, well, everything. Qualifier: the 'thing' in
question is built using openness, participation and self-organisation.
There are people coming to talk about open technology, media, education,
workplace design, philanthropy, public policy and even politics. These
people want to tell you what they're doing and find out what you're up
to. And they'd like to have lunch with you.
## Details
* When: Thursday 6th November, 0900-1730 and then drinks afterwards!
* Where: The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 8EH
* Wiki: http://openeverything.wik.is/London
* Cost: £15 donation for venue, lunch and refreshments.
* Register: Book your place!
## Speakers
* Glyn Moody
- "...a technology writer. He is best known for his book Rebel Code:
Linux and the Open Source Revolution (2001). It describes the evolution
and significance of the free software and open source movements with
many interviews of all the notable hackers."
* Charles Leadbeater
- "... a leading authority on innovation and creativity. He has
advised companies, cities and governments around the world on innovation
strategy and drawn on that experience in writing his latest book
We-think: the power of mass creativity, which charts the rise of mass,
participative approaches to innovation from science and open source
software, to computer games and political campaigning."
* Rufus Pollock
- Director at the Open Knowledge Foundation, and an economist at
Cambridge University focusing on innovation and IP, with particular
attention to open models of innovation.
The day will include speed geeks, lightning talks, discussions, open
space for breakout sessions and lunch. Other speakers, presenters,
facilitators and organisations who have confirmed include:
* Helen King, Principal Advisor, Shuttleworth Foundation
* Geoff Mulgan, Director of the Young Foundation + Visiting Professor
at University College, London, the London School of Economics and
University of Melbourne + Chair of Involve
* Tom Steinberg, Founder and Director of mySociety
* Charles Armstrong, Founder of Circus Foundation + CEO of Trampoline
Systems
* Kennisland
* One World
* Social Innovation Camp
* Maslaha
* Brave New Collaboration
* NESTA
* Think Public
---
Workshop on Finding and Re-using Public Information
===================================================
* When: Saturday 1st November 2008, 1030-1600.
* Where: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, London, WC1N 3QS.
* Wiki: http://okfn.org/wiki/PublicInformation
* Participation: Attendance is free. If you are planning to come along
please add your name to the list below, or email us.
The UK Government produces and distributes a vast amount of documents
and datasets - from national statistics to environmental information,
from socio-economic data to legal material. Recent technologies allow
this information to be explored, built upon and made accessible in new
ways - whether through visual representation, semantic interlinking, or
through social media applications.
This informal, hands-on workshop will bring government information
experts together with those who are interested in finding and re-using
government information. In addition to focused discussions about legal
and technological aspects of re-use, government information assets will
be documented and tagged on CKAN, a registry of knowledge resources.
This workshop is presented by The Open Knowledge Foundation, the Office
of Public Sector Information (OPSI), the Power of Information (POI)
Taskforce and mySociety. It is kindly hosted by the London Knowledge Lab.
---
Workshop on Finding and Re-using Open Scientific Resources
==========================================================
* When: Saturday 8th November 2008, 1100-1600
* Where: London Knowledge Lab, 23-29 Emerald Street, London, WC1N 3QS.
* Wiki page: http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenScience/Workshop
* Participation: Attendance is free. If you are planning to come along
please add your name to the list below, or email us.
This informal, hands-on workshop will focus on finding and re-using open
scientific resources - including open and public domain data, open
access journal articles, and open educational materials. We will look at
existing tools for discovering open material, metadata standards for
relevant material in different domains, and how researchers go about
looking for the material they need.
In addition to focused discussions about legal and technological aspects
of re-use, open scientific resources will be documented and tagged on
CKAN, a registry of knowledge resources.
The PediaPress technology is now running in all Wikibooks languages.
We have also gone ahead and enabled ODT support, so you can export
collections to edit them in a word processor.
The help is currently available in English and German:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Help:Collectionshttp://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Hilfe:Sammlungen
Help with translating it is appreciated; I've also posted a notice to
translators-l to this effect.
I've created an English example collection:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Eloquence/Collections/Blended_Learning
To get a PDF, ODT or to order a printed copy of that demo, go here:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Collection/load_collection/?colltitle=…
To report bugs, please visit:
http://code.pediapress.com/
create an account, and create a "new ticket". The PP team is very
responsive & helpful. :-)
Known issues:
* Licensing info isn't perfect. This is a tricky one because proper
attribution of collaborative works is generally non-trivial, but we're
working together on improving it.
* There are non-internationalizable strings in the PDF output. The
PediaPress team is working with translatewiki.net to sort this out.
* ODT support is still experimental, so please give lots of feedback
on brokenness.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
OK, so the logo thing has been stagnant for some time now.
Someone should wrap up this section by choosing the winner from
each proposal (maybe dropping the proposals that have very little
support and substituting a popular second choice from the more
active proposals) and set up the last poll to choose between
those alternatives.
Probably [[Wikibooks/Logo/Proposal]] is where that should be
taking place (which means nothing to archive, I think :D ) I'd do
it myself, but I have too much on my plate for the next week or
two and I want this to get done sooner than that. Also, this
serves as a reminder to everyone who forgot about it.
-Mike
--
Mike.lifeguard
mikelifeguard(a)fastmail.fm
The collection tool, PDF export, and print on demand features are now
live on the German Wikibooks edition. PediaPress (who have developed
these open source features) are a German company, and want to
demonstrate the features at the Frankfurt Book Fair, so it made sense
to start in this language. We hope to add the other Wikibooks
languages really soon. Next stop: Wikipedia.
We'll also be adding OpenDocument and DocBook export once we've tested
them a bit on Wikimedia Labs.
Here's an example full length book rendered with the PDF tool:
http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Spezial:Sammlung/load_collection/?colltitle=Be…
(You'll have to click the PDF download button.) As you can see, there
are still some hardcoded English texts to get rid of. In terms of
output quality, formatting of stuff with underlying HTML in the wiki
source texts is the main area of imperfections, since the PDF
generator uses wiki-text as a source and gets a bit confused when it
encounters HTML. But it should generally ignore what it doesn't
understand. If you find cases where it dies, please report them,
ideally through the bug tracker at code.pediapress.com (you have to
register).
This feature will make it possible to maintain the hierarchical
structure of wiki-books through dedicated collection meta-files that
are stored in the wiki. The underlying meta-file in the case above is
this one:
http://de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Benutzer:Eloquence/Kollektionen/Beispiel-Samml…
As you can see, it's a very simple format. These pages can exist
either in the user namespace or in the project namespace, and will be
automatically detected as "collections" that can then be loaded and
exported via the collection toolbox in the sidebar. But for
user-friendly PDF download, it's probably easiest to integrate links
(in the above format) to ready-made collections into templates, like
the existing "printable version" templates.
One of the nicer aspects of this approach is that you can easily have
multiple views on the same Wikibook, or create a book pulling from
multiple sources. But I also see the collection meta-files potentially
useful for other purposes in the future, such as Wikibooks statistics.
When this is available on all projects, I'll write a bit more. If you
want to play with an English language version, there's still a demo
running at:
http://en.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
with a full English Wikibooks snapshot database.
Have fun,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
Hi all.
As pointed out by John, customization of PDFs generated with the
Collection extensioin is
currently not possible by the user.
Our current goal is to generate PDFs with a layout that works for most
of the users out of the box.
Therefore we are happy to adapt the default layout to the community
consensus.
At some point in the (hopefully not to distant) future basic
customization will be possible
with the Collection extension, especially pagesizes for example.
Regards,
Volker
--
volker haas brainbot technologies ag
fon +49 6131 2116394 boppstraße 64
fax +49 6131 2116392 55118 mainz
volker.haas(a)brainbot.com http://www.brainbot.com/