If I understood well, the content of the online edition of Britannica
became free (as in "free beer", of course). They are putting some
irritating screen with recommendation to buy access to their edition
every 10 seconds (or so), but, in fact, it is possible to copy-paste
the content somewhere else and read it. Hm. Wikipedia doesn't have
that irritating screen. (OK, banner is irritating, but it is not of
that kind ;) )
Does anyone have some more informations about it? Also, may someone
(who owns some newer edition of Britannica: paper or electronic)
check, let's say, this link [1] and confirm that this is the complete
article.
[1] - http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/268173/Hittite-language
In the upcoming days until new years we will be moving our servers and
other equipment in the Amsterdam data center location to a new data
center. Unfortunately this might result in some down time and hiccups of
certain web sites & services, although we will try to keep this to a
minimum.
On Sunday the 28th, between 09:00 and 11:00 UTC we will migrate our
network in Amsterdam to new equipment. All services located there will
be unreachable for a brief period. Traffic for the main wikis will be
rerouted to the Florida cluster however, and should remain unaffected.
In the days after we will be moving the servers themselves. Some
services, such as the mailing lists server, the subversion server and
the toolserver cluster, will be down for a number of hours while the
equipment is being moved. Traffic for the wikis should again remain
largely unaffected.
We hope to have the entire migration finished before we enter the last
few hours of 2008... and start 2009 with a clean sheet. Happy Holidays
everyone!
--
Mark Bergsma <mark(a)wikimedia.org>
System & Network Administrator, Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all,
As most of you know we've been working on Wikipedia video tutorials
during the last few months. The general idea behind producing video
tutorials is the belief that videos make learning much easier than
text based online help pages, at least for some audiences. We are
therefore producing a number of videos demonstrating the basics of
Wikipedia editing and increasing the public understanding of Wikipedia
and Wikimedia.
For this purpose we would like to distinguish between two sorts of
video tutorials:
* Guided tours: designed to raise the public understanding of
Wikipedia and Wikimedia as well as to encourage people to view
Wikipedia as friendly. All guided tours will be presented by
moderators in order to appear more trustworthy, friendly and
encouraging. They will be produced as high quality videos by a
production company commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation.
* How-to videos: aimed at explaining basic features of the Wikipedia
user interface. How-to videos shall be produced as screencasts with a
speaker explaining every single step.
In a nutshell think of (a) guided tours as videos aimed at giving the
audience a look behind the scenes and to encourage them to join us as
editors and (b) how-to videos as tutorials to enable newbies to make a
successful start on Wikipedia.
(a) Examples for guided tours may be:
* Editing Wikipedia is easy!
* Why does Wikipedia work even though anyone can edit it?
* What motivates the volunteers behind Wikipedia / Wikimedia?
* What you should know about Wikimedia - the organization behind Wikipedia
(b) Examples for how-to videos may be:
* How to create a user account
* The basics of Wiki markup
* How do I upload images?
* How to find information about a certain topic on Wikipedia?
On 19 November 2008, the shooting of the very first Wikipedia guided
tours video tutorials took place. We are very happy that we found in
Hendrik John of Living Colour film production an experienced filmmaker
who managed not only the shooting but also everything related to the
development (including the casting of Theresa, our moderator in the
first two videos) and the pre-production (like hiring the crew and
building the set).
A big thanks goes to Lennart Guldbrandsson, the president of Wikimedia
Sverige, who helped us a lot with his experience in filmmaking and
scriptwriting. Thank you Lennart - I always enjoy our collaboration!
To give you a look behind the scenes I produced a short 3 minute
making-of video that provides some insights on how complex the
production of guided tours may be. You can watch it online:
* http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_video_tutorials_making-of_…
(11.7 MB, better quality)
* http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_video_tutorials_making-of_…
(6.2 MB, lower quality)
and also on
* http://vimeo.com/2554962
* http://fschulenburg.blip.tv/file/1493287/
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgJTndVjSYc
Currently, the two video tutorials are in the process of
post-production (assembling the film, adding visual effects etc.) and
we hope that they will be online soon.
All this would have not been possible without the funding of Wikimedia
Deutschland. The German chapter not only paid all costs for the video
production but also my travel expenses.
So, please join me in thanking Wikimedia Germany for the financial
support and ... enjoy the making-of video :-)
Frank Schulenburg
Head of Public Outreach
NB. This mail address is used for public mailing lists. Personal
emails sent to this address will get lost.
>From another provider of data, information and even knowledge. "Thank
you for ibiblio" notes to UNC are in order.
- d.
--------------------
Subject: Happy 2009 from ibiblio
I'm jumping in between Christmas and New Year's to thank you for your
contributions to ibiblio and for your support in the past year.
We've had a period a great growth over the past few years especially
as seen here:
2002 2006 2008
800 Collections 1600+ Collections 2500+ Collections
3 million ftp+www/day 15+ million 16+ million ftp+www/day
1 terabyte of data 8 terabytes of data 13 terabytes of data
1 large server 22 www/vhost servers 25 www/vhost servers
2 database servers 5 database servers 7 database servers
4 radio stations 6 radio stations 6 radio stations
In fact, the 2008 figures were taken at mid-year and we've grown since then!
ibiblio is lways eclectic as our newest contributors, The African
Elephant Experts Group
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.african-elephant.net%2F and
Pachyderm - the Journal of the African Elephant, African Rhino and
Asia Rhino Specialist Groups
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http://www.pachydermjournal.org%2Findex.php…
show.
We, you and ibiblio, offer granular bits of everything to everybody in
the world; that is our strength and your gifts, a combined
independently managed set of miscellanies for a loosely connected
world.
At the same time, we face new challenges. Some are obvious; the
economy and budgets everywhere have taken a nosedive since September
of this year. Some are less so; we will have a new Dean (the search is
just opened at the School of Information and Library Science) and a
new Chancellor at UNC (Holden Thorp who does understand what ibiblio
is about, but will be feeling budget pressures immediately).
Much of our ability to support you comes from your support of ibiblio.
That need not be in for form of money, which is of course always
welcomed and encouraged; it could be in the form of thanking UNC and
NC officials for ibiblio services and for the university's support of
ibiblio.
Thanks for your part of making ibiblio wonderful for over 16 years and
happy 2009.
Paul
Well where will it stop? If we have a project, we should have a memorial project for all disasters. I echo Mr. Bimmler in his concerns about the motives behind this proposal.
________________________________
From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2008 2:12:25 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] New project proposal: Soviet Repressions Memorial
> 2008/12/24 Michael Bimmler <mbimmler(a)gmail.com>:
>
>> A project which is motivated in such a way cannot possibly be anything
>> else than biased...and indeed, the very concept of memorials is
>> biased: Why should we have a memorial of the victims of Soviet
>> Repression, when we don't have a memorial of Nazi victims, victims of
>> the Armenian Genocide, victim of the Rwandan Genocide, victims of
>> various repression regimes in South-East Asia and China, victims in
>> Darfur, Chad, the Central African Republic etc. etc.
>> No one can sensibly suggest that we can have memorial sites for every
>> "repression" (in lack of a better word) in history and thus, we had
>> better none, in my opinion. (Yes, in other cases I argued and would
>> argue that it is better to have "something" than "nothing", but in
>> this case, I'm afraid I am not convinced of the merits of the proposal
>> at all and of the propriety of the motives behind it)
>
>
> Yes. However, it could be a valuable wiki to create privately. Generic
> hosting is (a) really cheap (b) often includes MediaWiki out the box.
> The wiki is unlikely to be vastly overloaded, so cheap hosting would
> do for a start.
>
> See http://www.sep11memories.org/wiki/In_Memoriam for a memorial
> project for victims of the World Trade Center attack, for example.
>
> Although started with a strong POV, such a project could nevertheless
> accumulate material of high quality historical and scholarly interest.
>
>
> - d.
I support this project, and don't think it should get pushed off into
some obscure corner of the internet. We should host it. We should host it
because we stand against totalitarian repression; and reject the position
that some knowledge, knowledge of the consequences of totalitarian
repression, is to be repressed and not readily available.
Fred Bauder
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
There is something seriously wrong with the figures for some wikipedias in
the new wikistats reports. The figures for some wikis are much too low. When
comparing csv files (raw counts) produced in May 2008 and produced recently
it is quite easy to tell the difference. For some wikis the data for months
up to May 2008 are equal in the old and new files, for other wikis the
counts are completely different for any month from the start of the wiki.
I am truly sorry that I did not spot this earlier. The scripts that handle
basic data gathering have not changed recently. Instead I have been
completely focused on optimizing the reporting scripts and adding
presentation logic. I have restored the May 2008 version of wikistats. I
will start to investigate tomorrow. For now Happy Xmas :)
Erik Zachte
Hi Brian, Brion once explained to me that the post processing of the dump is
the main bottleneck.
Compressing articles with tens of thousands of revisions is a major resource
drain.
Right now every dump is even compressed twice, into bzip2 (for wider
platform compatibility) and 7zip format (for 20 times smaller downloads).
This may no longer be needed as 7zip presumably gained better support on
major platforms over the years.
Apart from that the job could gain from parallelization and better error
recovery.
Erik Zachte
________________________________________
I am still quite shocked at the amount of time the english wikipedia takes
to dump, especially since we seem to have close links to folks who work at
mysql. To me it seems that one of two things must be the case:
1. Wikipedia has outgrown mysql, in the sense that, while we can put data
in, we cannot get it all back out.
2. Despite aggressive hardware purchases over the years, the correct
hardware has still not been purchased.
I wonder which of these is the case. Presumably #2 ?
Cheers,
Brian
Well, yes. (Who thankfully are not gross incompetents at the actual
management to the degree he was.) And it turns out that remaining
politically neutral is one of the best things we can do as well as the
cheapest and easiest, because we have the moral high ground and we're
not going away. And as economics shifts to information, we have
credibility to the skies. "Information wants to be free" means "it
leaks like a gas" and "running a Great Firewall is like trying to
carry air in a bucket".
Abandoning neutrality as a general operating principle (manifested as
NPOV on Wikipedia, variants on other projects where that doesn't make
direct sense) would be a disaster. Possibly a greater one than putting
ads on the site (and I wouldn't object to ads on the site, but I
realise enough people despise them that it'd be utterly unworkable).
Can you and Kurt come up with a proposal that doesn't abandon our
fabulously useful and marketable air of neutrality?
[We will leave for the moment post-modernist arguments about the
impossibility of neutrality, or the quite accurate argument that
running an Enlightenment-style encyclopedia project is itself pushing
a huge and detailed point of view in all sorts of ways. You know what
I mean by the question.]
Oh, and Merry Christmas. That's CHRISTMAS, as detailed in the King
James Version! [* may not be 100% verifiable or not original research]
- d.
Hey Kurt, I didn't bother putting that troll sockpuppet of you under
copyleft license because of your retirement. As a present for the free
world, maybe I'll do that for Christmas.
"I'll get you my pretty, and your little sockpuppet too." - The Wiki Witch
of the West.
- Durova
--
http://durova.blogspot.com/