C T wrote:
>Our class has studied or is studying
>
>Electrical Theory 1 & 2
>Semiconductors 1
>Digital Devices 1
>
>Does Wikistandards cover these topics?
>
>Where can I veiw the efforts already engaged?
>
>Thanks,
>Craig
>
>
>
I think you are mistaking the purpose of what we are doing here. You
originally proposed:
"A place to gather international standards for electricity, electronics,
and robotics. Instead of paying large sums of money to the IEEE and ISO for
access to their standards."
And I was pointing out that I had a similar effort that was more broadly
based as a generic standards repository, that would obviously include
international standards for these specific areas you mentioned.
Trying to start up a new project is obviously challenging, if only to
gather supporters together. I've been working on this proposal since
August, and in truth I've been working on variations of something like
this for almost five years. This isn't something that will happen
immediately. The Wikimedia Foundation is not here to host just any
project, but to foster new projects that are in harmony with the other
projects that are here. A quick look at the list of proposed projects
shows about fifty (50) different projects that have been proposed, most
of them over the past year or so on the current list. There are only
six major projects and four others that are still struggling trying to
get going. Of those four, two are showing signs of trouble, Wikispecies
and the 9-11 Memorial, because of various internal problems and its
limited scope. (I am ignoring Meta and the Foundation websites as
special creatures in their own right).
In addition, the Wikimedia Foundation put up a new policy regarding how
to start a new project, and so far there has not even been a single
project that has been approved through this new process (based largely
on how the Wikinews project was put together, and to avoid the pitfalls
of projects like Wikispecies). If there is some momentum here, I'd like
to see if we can get Wikistandards to be approved by this process, but
it isn't going to happen any time very soon. At a minimum two to three
months, perhaps even longer if just to see if we can get some community
support.
In short, I don't have any specific resources to put forward that would
be able deal with the electronics theory concepts that you are
suggesting, although there are some items in Wikibooks that might be of
some use to you right now. If you know of some standards documents
involving electronics that we might be able to put together, it would be
appreciated. One thing I would have appreciated years ago when I was
taking some Electrical Engineering classes was a book or guide to
7400-series digital logic chips. You can get this information often
from chip manufactures, but an objective guide would have some value on
its own. Please let me know if you have anything currently, or
something that you are debating about in class right now that could be
included.
--
Robert Scott Horning
Word on the street is that CFO Daniel Mayer pushed through another
difficult budget package at this evening's board meeting, with
bipartisan support (that is, from les deux partis"An") :
Hardware: $75K*
Extra hardware/dev projects: $20K**
Hosting: $16K
Developer contract: $8K***
Travel: $5K
Office expenses: $2.5K
Hardware assistance $1.5K
Domain names: $500
Fundraising/Promotion: $500
Miscellaneous: $1K
TOTAL $130K
* $40K of which is explicitly covered by a recent grant from the
Lounsbery Foundation.
** If we meet our fundraising goal; shortfalls will come out of this line iteml
*** Being negotiated; to cover part-time work and perhaps bounties.
More on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_budget/2005/Q1
==Fundraising Drive==
We will have a fundraiser for three weeks starting Friday, Feb 18;
and hope to raise $75k. Discussion of how to display and broadcast
the drive is welcome.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising
Here is the discussion from last September's fundraising meeting :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_meeting%2C_September_2004
--
+sj+
Hello all
This week, I will go to a meeting in France about
sustainable development and new technologies.
There should be many interesting people, some of them
already know us and are already trying to set
collaborations with us.
There should be discussions about how new technologies
could help underdevelopped countries, or about
structuring information on internet (semantic web,
thesaurus, dictionaries...), or about how to improve
accuracy of information available on the net, open
source software, collaborative platforms, e-learning
etc...
This will last two days, but I could only find one day
to get there infortunately. At least, I chose the one
probably most interesting for us.
The organiser of the meeting (Michel Giran of
Planetecologie) invited me for free and will provide
room on his own booth for Wikipedia (booth and
registration was 500 euros otherwise...). Normally, a
poster was done with our logo on it.
I spent the last few days fighting with software to
manage to print business cards and leaflets, and must
say I am *very* proud of the result (eh :-)). The
resulting leaflet is informative, colorful, high
quality printing and fun. I hope other people will use
it as well. Normally, they should not need any update
for a reasonable number of months, and if necessary,
update under Quark Xpress should be easy (as long as
you do not try to mix old macintosh software and
recent PC software... but never mind).
When I came back from Algeria, I had a whole set of
pictures (only part of them have been uploaded yet and
none is labelled :-)). Among these pictures, a photo
of flower of the Thora Thora, a tree which may be
found in Sahara. I just put the picture on my user
page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:Anthere)
A few days later, I found that the picture on the
french wikipedia has flowered in a full article about
the thora thora, which I discover, is also known under
the sweet name : Pommier de Sodome (see the reason for
this name on the french article...). Thanks Jeantosti
: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pommier_de_Sodome
I could not resist taking this article as an example,
for being about african flora, for being a very nice
example of our botanic section, and for the little
cultural background. And also, because it was enough
that I put a picture on my user page for this article
to miraculously appear.
Anyway, the resulting pdf which may be printed is
about one mega in size. Where could I host it so that
other people might use it later to print more leaflets
if they wish so ?
Second point is that I had unfortunately to rework
James business cards, because ... of non-operability
between european format and american format :-(
So, now I do have on my computer a high quality
Wikimedia logo and business card models in european
format (adobe illustrator files) which could be easily
reused if needed. Again, where could I host this so to
avoid that anyone has to do this job another time.
Between James cards and mine, we shoud cover 99% of
usual format (I might mention that I basically
followed James design at first, but finally made a
couple of changes).
Ant
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
I've been working on a new project proposal, and I've considered trying
to demonstrate what the site would look like by creating a few wiki
pages and putting a little content together. Rather than going through
the whole hassle of trying physically setting up the website as a demo
on my own server, and because I don't have a 24/7 internet connection at
the moment, I'd like to demonstrate what I think the website could look
like by setting up some content pages demonstrating the concept.
Right now, I've put together the following page:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/WikiStandards
Before I start really pushing forward and adding content, I wanted to
ask the foundation community if this is an acceptable practice, and just
where, perhaps, I should put this content. While I started this on
Wikibooks, now that I've been reflecting on this a little bit I'm
thinking this perhaps should be on meta for now, simply because this
really is a different thing and is a project proposal.
If it is acceptable to do something like this, I'd also like some
guidelines regarding mainly how much content should be on a demo site
like this. Obviously this is something that is just starting out, but I
also don't intend to make this a working sub project either and treating
this as a fully-funtional wiki in its own right. In this case I think
it will be easier for me to explain what I am proposing by actually
showing real content and how it could be useful to the Wikimedia
community in general. If the project gets approved, it would also be a
good way to seed the new project right away.
I'm also suggesing a minor change to the new proposal policy and making
a demo project as a part of the proposal process. Obviously if there
are software changes that have to be made this can't be done on the demo
side, but a great deal can be done with the tools already available.
For most of the proposed projects, it would show if it is a serious
proposal or simply some wishful thinking that you had daydreaming one night.
--
Robert Scott Horning
I've set up a poll at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/China
to help decide whether we need a formal vote among the Chinese users or
all users before launching the Chinese Wikinews edition (because of the
risk of censorship). Please vote.
Regards,
Erik
The Bulgarian edition of Wikinews is now set up at:
http://bg.wikinews.org/
An announcement has been posted on the Bulgarian Wikipedia Village Pump,
as well as on the user talk pages of all interested users (all users who
signed up had user pages on bg:, and several had far more than 200 edits).
I'd like to ask the Board to discuss in the meeting tomorrow what steps
are required to decide whether the Chinese Wikinews should be launched.
Regards,
Erik
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:HURD_first_program_banner.jpg
"This image or document is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Specifically, it is licensed under the Creative Commons ShareAlike License,
colloquially known as "cc-sa"."
I don't know where you found that it is CC-SA (BTW this isn't the licence a
use), but if you somehow derived this info from my article, then please take
a closer look and ensure you understood it right:
http://portal.wikinerds.org/gnu-hurd-l4-first-program
This image was found on http://www.marcus-brinkmann.org/banner.jpg
I asked Marcus via email and he had no problem to use the pic on my site. I
also asked at gnu.org about the Hurd logo and they told me it's freely
redistributable.
On the copyright notices posted on my article I say that only the text is
CC-By-SA-2, the images are fair use.
Please note that notices in individual articles override site-wide notices. In
addition, my site is in a transitional period as we just started to allow
multilicensing and using a page-based copyright scheme.
Also, it would be better to cite as source the brinkmann's site and not my
site, since I also got it from there.
--
NSK
http://portal.wikinerds.org/slashdotting2005feb4
C T wrote:
>I am finding the real trick is to getting people involved. I have over a
>year left in this academic program, and a lot can be accomplished in that
>time frame. Especially with a classroom of participants.
>
>Besides this class and several others are in serious need of an educational
>tool. To be apart of creating such a resource would have tremendous
>benefits.
>
>If we build it, can it be integrated with something larger?
>
>Thanks,
>Craig
>
>
>
The big advantage that working with a project like this, hosted by the
Wikimedia foundation (or some other 3rd party), is that even when you
move on to bigger and better things in your career, the items that you
work on here will still be around. I have been involved with too many
university or college projects that are really quite neat, but because
of changes in administration policy, students graduating, or professors
retiring, the servers that host these projects get turned off and the
information from the project lost.
The "Big Picture" of what I'm trying to do with Wikistandards is to
provide resources that you don't have to pay extra money for just to be
able to "peek" into how something works. From my experience, the more
open and publicized a standard becomes, and the easier that a company or
group of individuals has to be able to find and implement that standard,
the more likely it will be used. Unfortunately there are a number of
people who for various reasons want to shut down the spreading of
knowledge, particularly hard-won engineering knowledge that is often
supplied in standards documentation. It is also seldom, because of NDAs
and quite expensive standards documents, that these propritary documents
will make it into an educational setting.
From the prespective of an instructor, it would still be useful to
create specifications and standards documents in a classroom setting for
projects that the class is working on. By having a resource like this
where these standards are archived, students from other classs, or even
other universities, could look at these ideas and build upon them. In
some cases, perhaps you want to simplify a specification for a classroom
setting to make it easier to implement, or to emphasis a particular
design approach. Besides, there are many situations even in private
industry where you are struggling to find and define standards for a
project similar to what you are working on. Even if the standards
document is poorly designed, it at least gives a starting point to start
arguing what changes should be made and what things to improve. There
is nothing worse than having a totally blank piece of paper and no
previous experience to draw upon.
I hope this is the "something larger" that you were looking for. I see
a huge need for this as a commercial application engineer, and while my
employers were willing to pay for ISO standards, it was still a major
hassle to go through the red tape to get them purchased, especially
since they were often viewed as a "capital expense" like paying for new
compilers or design tools. While I see the industrial applications on a
project like this, I can also see huge benefits from having educational
institutions participate as well. I also want to point out that most of
the early RFCs that form the foundation of the internet were written by
college students, including undergraduates as well as grad students.
Wouldn't it be neat if we could help become a catalyst for something
else like the internet?
--
Robert Scott Horning
I have modified the rules at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/Start_a_new_edition
New: At least 3 signing users have to be Wikimedia regulars (>200 edits
+ 3 months participation in a project) in the language they vote on.
Now formally written down: After creation, a message will be sent to
wikinews-l, foundation-l and the Wikipedia Village Pump in that language.
If these rules are acceptable, they should be merged into the policy for
new languages. I also think the requirement of a "reporter" should be
taken out, it seems somewhat over the top.
On a different note, I am happy with the progress of the new editions.
Swedish, Spanish and Dutch now have very professional looking homepages
and a regular output of stories. Translation from one Wikinews edition
into another seems to be more common than direct translation of
Wikipedia articles.
Regards,
Erik
