Thanks for sharing! I was bicycling through New York and stopped in Lake
Placid in 2005 to buy a pair of running shoes (long story, but I still have
them, though they are really worn down now) and in the sports store and
local (Carnegie) library they are still proud of those Olympics and talk
about them as if it was yesterday. They get lots of "Olympics tourists" and
oddly, probably know the names of all the gold-winning athletes in their
heads by now, supported of course by Wikipedia. The big names for me at
that time were Eric Heiden and Piet Kleine, who they knew about, but for
them (as I guess for pretty much everyone else in the world) the big names
in skating were the ice hockey players.
My biggest usage of Wikipedia outside my home today is looking up food
ingredients in stores on mobile. When I was a teenager I had a friend with
an allergy who would get really sick eating foods with nuts in them. It was
remarkably hard to find out what had nuts, and generally you could only
find this out after the fact (bought it, ate it, got sick, took the
packaging to the library, repeat). Even the fast food places couldn't tell
you. Now I have a brother with an allergy and no matter where we are in the
world we can find out what the ingredients mean on the packaging. I think
that is a huge leap forward, even though sometimes I wish I didn't know
what is in some foods, because I dare to eat less and less of what is on
store shelves today.
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 9:42 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod(a)mccme.ru>
wrote:
On 2016-01-15 00:30, Mardetanha wrote:
Dear Fellow Wikimedians
I would like to congratulate you on Wikipedia's 15th birthday, it was
historic moment for all of us, I am glad to let you know we had a
celebration in Tehran and we were the first country to celebrate it.
you can find images here
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_15_in_Iran
Mardetanha
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I feel like today is time for stories, and I guess this thread is exactly
the place we can share some stories today. I wish everybody does, since
this is a nice way to celebrate 15y.
It could be in principle anything remotely Wikimedia related. For example,
the highest real-life rank of a person I ever blocked on Wikipedia was a
member of the European parliament (or someone impersonating him). But these
stories mainly reveal human stupidity, and today we want to talk more on
the human knowledge. Therefore I am going to spend my daily quota of
wikimedia-l post for smth else.
I was born in 1967 in the Soviet Union and I am coming from a pre-internet
generation. I first used internet in 1995 or so, past my PhD degree.
However, I was always interested in learning things, this is probably why I
later joined the Wikimedia movement. And I was a pretty advanced-knowledge
teenager, knowing things my peers would normally not know anything about,
and I was interested in all kinds of stuff: from exact sciences to history
and languages and to geographical names. It was really painful to get any
non-mainstream information. Let me give you a couple of example of the
problems I encountered.
One was languages. Well, for mainstream foreign languages like English or
German it was relatively easy to find textbooks and dictionaries. They were
nothing like modern means of language learning, for example the Teach
Yourself series, not even speaking of online courses. Other languages were
more difficult. Some languages were impossible. Well, I grew up in Moscow,
which had a 10M population, and there were couple of libraries where I
presumably could find dictionaries of even uncommon languages, but these
were difficult to get in (normally one had to be 18 yo), they did not let
the books out of the building, and for a number of practical reasons they
were not really an option. On the other hand, I was hiking a lot in Central
Asia, and I was suffering from inability to understand what the local
Turkic names (in Kazakh and Kyrghyz mainly) mean. Well, you learn soon that
Ak-Suu means "White river", meaning "aq" is white and "suu"
is a river, but
this is about it). So what I did I searched all available literature at
home and around including the school library, and came up with a list of
about 100 words. This was my own, personal, self-made Kyrghyz-Russian
dictionary. It was weird, since, for example, did not include verbs, and it
did not help me to speak Kyrghyz in any sense - and I still do not - but it
was fine to understand the names and to feel kind of like at home. Now we
have of course professional dictionaries available online. (Kyrghyz is
still not in a Google translate though).
The second story. For whatever reason, when I was about twelve, I needed
to have Japanese names. I do not remember why I needed them, but Japanese
names were notoriously difficult to find. The books I had available only
mentioned a few individuals. The newspapers rarely wrote about Japan, and
again only mentioned a few individuals. Then there happened the 1980 Winter
Olympics in Lake Placid, and Japanese team entered the ice hockey
tournament. (They ended up last). There was a sports newspaper which I had
access to, which published the results of the games, and of course ice
hockey was at the time a great deal in Russia (on that Olympics, the Soviet
team lost to the US team in the finals, which is still considered to be a
major fuckup), but apparently they did not publish all the names of the
players, only last names of those who scored a goal. Japanese rarely
scored, and there was my tough luck. But them the same newspaper opened a
hotline - one could phone a certain number, and they would answer any
question related to the results of the Olympics. I thought this is my
chance. I was dead afraid calling people I do not know, but I still
collected a piece of paper, a pen and phoned. A nice female voice answered,
and I said I would like to have names of the Japanese ice hockey team
players. The nice voice answered that the team is too big, and their policy
is not to give long answers. That was the end of it.
You may think by now we are in the free information world, and the players
of the 1980 Japanese ice hockey team are on Wikipedia. Well, check them.
The names are there (it takes a while to find the list of names on the
English Wikipedia - I believe the only article they are listed is [[Japan
at the 1980 Winter Olympics]]), but only one of them - [[Herb
Wakabayashi]], who died last year - has an article. Japanese Wikipedia, as
far as I can tell, is not better. A team of mystery persons.
Happy 15y celebrations.
Cheers
Yaroslav
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