While I hate to interrupt the usual bickering, recriminations, and complaining that I've come to expect from this mailing list, I just wanted to point out this little gem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_music
It's the current Collaboration of the Week and, if the trend continues, will probably be a featured article soon enough.
The reason I single this particular article out is because I think this article *really* highlights how good Wikipedia can be. I really do like the clickable graph of the lifespans of major classical composers (in other words, you click on the name and you go to that composer's article). It also has almost a dozen full length songs (Many of them put there by Raulbot in last week's classical music grab-and-dump binge)
Britannica, eat your heart out.
--Mark (Raul654)
Oooh, aahhhhh. I like it! EasyTimeline is a pretty useful little plugin. That Erik Zachte really knows where his towel is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Timeline_Classical_Composers_Famous http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/EasyTimeline.
Thanks for lightening the mood... though I feel compelled to point out that our multimedia and "hey, cool!" offerings still pale in comparison to those of Encarta and BO.
SJ
On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 23:31:43 -0500, Mark Pellegrini mapellegrini@comcast.net wrote:
While I hate to interrupt the usual bickering, recriminations, and complaining that I've come to expect from this mailing list, I just wanted to point out this little gem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_music
It's the current Collaboration of the Week and, if the trend continues, will probably be a featured article soon enough.
The reason I single this particular article out is because I think this article *really* highlights how good Wikipedia can be. I really do like the clickable graph of the lifespans of major classical composers (in other words, you click on the name and you go to that composer's article). It also has almost a dozen full length songs (Many of them put there by Raulbot in last week's classical music grab-and-dump binge)
Britannica, eat your heart out.
--Mark (Raul654)
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Sj-
Thanks for lightening the mood... though I feel compelled to point out that our multimedia and "hey, cool!" offerings still pale in comparison to those of Encarta and BO.
Only if by multimedia you mean videos and "flashy interactive stuff". The Wikimedia Commons is already 14 gigabytes large and growing rapidly. This, according to my count, currently includes about 40,000 GIF, JPG and PNG images and over 3,000 .ogg sound files. The data I have for Encarta says that it has 20,000 pictures and 1,000 sounds. Furthermore, many of our images are very high resolution, whereas Britannica and Encarta compress things down to screen res. True, a lot of that stuff is not linked from anywhere else, though on the other hand, all the wikis have their own local repositories in addition to that.
We suck at videos, though. Part of the problem is that once we increase the file size limit on Commons, people will upload all the stuff that is on archive.org and similar free archives. That may well be our long term goal (*cough* world domination *cough*), but in the short term we should probably have a policy like "Don't upload very large files if they are easily availabe from an existing, free resource".
As for interactive content - we need native SVG support in at least one major browser before this becomes feasible, unless we want to use something like Flash, where the only decent implementation is non-free.
Regards,
Erik
Erik said:
We suck at videos, though. Part of the problem is that once we increase the file size limit on Commons, people will upload all the stuff that is on archive.org and similar free archives. That may well be our long term goal (*cough* world domination *cough*), but in the short term we should probably have a policy like "Don't upload very large files if they are easily availabe from an existing, free resource".
Are there any plans on cooperating with archive.org?
Fredrik
On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 14:07:48 +0100, Fredrik Johansson fredrik.johansson@gmail.com wrote:
Are there any plans on cooperating with archive.org?
I don't know of any plans to cooperate directly with archive.org, but archive.org will be hosting the files of ourmedia.org, which will be, amongst other things, a video repository, when it launches (not sure when that's happening now), and there has been discussion of how we could cooperate with them. See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Collaboration_with_ourmedia
Angela.
Sj wrote:
[..] Thanks for lightening the mood... though I feel compelled to point out that our multimedia and "hey, cool!" offerings still pale [..]
Which reminds me, I recently recorded a nice bit of audio of a muezzin calling muslims to prayer at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.
Problem is the audio is trapped inside a .avi video file from my video camera... wasn't there a tutorial somewhere about all the tricks and tips you can get up to to get video/audio from the formats provided by popular consumer gadgets into acceptable free formats?
If we don't have one, I am willing and only too able to play the role of dumbo to try out a newly written tutorial on.... :)
Pete
Mark Pellegrini said:
While I hate to interrupt the usual bickering, recriminations, and complaining that I've come to expect from this mailing list, I just wanted to point out this little gem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_music
It's the current Collaboration of the Week and, if the trend continues, will probably be a featured article soon enough.
It needs a cleanup.
A paragraph that caught my eye: "Ancient music is monophonic music after prehistoric music. In European musical history, the era of ancient music begin in 1500 BCE, ended in 476 CE, and was followed by the Early music era." Gibberish.