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
Nice to hear about it, Mardentanha. Great news!
Bangladesh has planned to celebrate it in a few hours. :-)
More later. Till then, keep celebrating people.
T.
Tanvir Rahman Wikitanvir on Wikimedia
On 15 January 2016 at 00:30, Mardetanha mardetanha.wiki@gmail.com 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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
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@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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
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.
(snip)
Japanese Wikipedia, as far as I can tell, is not better. A team of mystery persons.
Try then the freely editable knowledge base. :) Two of them [1] are now on Wikidata: http://tinyurl.com/zganwzg http://tinyurl.com/jgdnxwu (click "Execute" to see the list)
Happy birthday and thanks for sharing your stories - an excellent way to celebrate.
-Yusuke
[1] Herb Wakabayashi - apparently, a Canadian who was naturalized to Japan later - is not in the query results. That piece of information is missing on Wikidata and I couldn't find a credible source to cite immediately.
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
About the celebration in Tehran, I think this video https://twitter.com/ablomof/status/687618946699231233 is worth watching :)
P.S. The hashtag we used for the celebration #wikipedia15fa is now being used widely by everyone \o/
Best
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 2:03 PM Yusuke Matsubara whym@whym.org wrote:
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
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. (snip)
Japanese Wikipedia, as far as I can tell, is not better. A team of
mystery persons.
Try then the freely editable knowledge base. :) Two of them [1] are now on Wikidata: http://tinyurl.com/zganwzg http://tinyurl.com/jgdnxwu (click "Execute" to see the list)
Happy birthday and thanks for sharing your stories - an excellent way to celebrate.
-Yusuke
[1] Herb Wakabayashi - apparently, a Canadian who was naturalized to Japan later - is not in the query results. That piece of information is missing on Wikidata and I couldn't find a credible source to cite immediately.
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Here’s my piece talking about Wikipedia @15 that ran on The Washington Post this morning.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/01/15/wikipedia-ju...
I’ll post some personal reflections later. Happy 15th all!
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 8:31 AM, Amir Ladsgroup ladsgroup@gmail.com wrote:
About the celebration in Tehran, I think this video https://twitter.com/ablomof/status/687618946699231233 is worth watching :)
P.S. The hashtag we used for the celebration #wikipedia15fa is now being used widely by everyone \o/
Best
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 2:03 PM Yusuke Matsubara whym@whym.org wrote:
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru wrote:
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. (snip)
Japanese Wikipedia, as far as I can tell, is not better. A team of
mystery persons.
Try then the freely editable knowledge base. :) Two of them [1] are now on Wikidata: http://tinyurl.com/zganwzg http://tinyurl.com/jgdnxwu (click "Execute" to see the list)
Happy birthday and thanks for sharing your stories - an excellent way to celebrate.
-Yusuke
[1] Herb Wakabayashi - apparently, a Canadian who was naturalized to Japan later - is not in the query results. That piece of information is missing on Wikidata and I couldn't find a credible source to cite immediately.
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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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In the tradition of originality that belongs to Wikipedians, here for your enjoyment there is a video of a XVII century version of "Happy Birthday, Wikimedia": https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Happy_Birthday_Wikipedia_2016_-_Flav...
Here's the audio version: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Happy_Birthday_Wikipedia_2016_-_Flav...
The song was recorded during Wiki Loves Monuments Italia ceremony on 11th December, which was also the ceremony for the 10th birthday of Wikimedia Italia. It's also nice because it was the week we understood "Happy Birthday" is in the public domain :-)
Have a nice 15th, y'all.
Aubrey
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 3:00 PM, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
Here’s my piece talking about Wikipedia @15 that ran on The Washington Post this morning.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/01/15/wikipedia-ju...
I’ll post some personal reflections later. Happy 15th all!
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 8:31 AM, Amir Ladsgroup ladsgroup@gmail.com wrote:
About the celebration in Tehran, I think this video https://twitter.com/ablomof/status/687618946699231233 is worth
watching
:)
P.S. The hashtag we used for the celebration #wikipedia15fa is now being used widely by everyone \o/
Best
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 2:03 PM Yusuke Matsubara whym@whym.org wrote:
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod@mccme.ru
wrote:
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. (snip)
Japanese Wikipedia, as far as I can tell, is not better. A team of
mystery persons.
Try then the freely editable knowledge base. :) Two of them [1] are now on Wikidata: http://tinyurl.com/zganwzg http://tinyurl.com/jgdnxwu (click "Execute" to see the list)
Happy birthday and thanks for sharing your stories - an excellent way to celebrate.
-Yusuke
[1] Herb Wakabayashi - apparently, a Canadian who was naturalized to Japan later - is not in the query results. That piece of information is missing on Wikidata and I couldn't find a credible source to cite immediately.
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod@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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org
?subject=unsubscribe>
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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Le 15/01/16 14:31, Amir Ladsgroup a écrit :
About the celebration in Tehran, I think this video https://twitter.com/ablomof/status/687618946699231233 is worth watching :)
P.S. The hashtag we used for the celebration #wikipedia15fa is now being used widely by everyone \o/
Best
Wonderful !!! Big smile.
Flo
<small>(where are the women ?)</small>
On Fri, 15 Jan 2016 03:00:50 +0330 Mardetanha mardetanha.wiki@gmail.com 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
Happy birthday, Wikipedia! It's such a great resource.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
Mardetanha, thank you for kicking off the celebration from Tehran. Congratulations Wikimedians of the world on your massive achievement.
Lila
On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 3:30 PM, Mardetanha mardetanha.wiki@gmail.com 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Thanks for sharing, my friend!
2016-01-15 10:55 GMT-06:00 Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org:
Mardetanha, thank you for kicking off the celebration from Tehran. Congratulations Wikimedians of the world on your massive achievement.
Lila
On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 3:30 PM, Mardetanha mardetanha.wiki@gmail.com 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Lila Tretikov Wikimedia Foundation
*“Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.”* _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Just concluded our WP15 celebrations. Was having happy moments with fellow Wikipedians from HK and Taipei and sharing our vision and thought on the future of Wikipedia. We cut a cake and sang a birthday song[1] to Wikipedia, just as our Italian counterparts did. We wish that Wikipedia can serve to spread more knowledges that are yet to known for us, so as to serve people all around the world well, and a tremendous 15 years ahead. This would need efforts from all of us. Let’s work on.
Best wishes from Hong Kong,
Leung Chung-ming (User:春卷柯南) Chinese Wikipedia
1. https://www.facebook.com/krislcc/videos/vb.582339226/10153400584709227/?type... https://www.facebook.com/krislcc/videos/vb.582339226/10153400584709227/?type=2&theater
Ivan Martínez galaver@gmail.com 於 2016年1月16日 上午1:04 寫道：
Thanks for sharing, my friend!
2016-01-15 10:55 GMT-06:00 Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org:
Mardetanha, thank you for kicking off the celebration from Tehran. Congratulations Wikimedians of the world on your massive achievement.
Lila
On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 3:30 PM, Mardetanha mardetanha.wiki@gmail.com 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Lila Tretikov Wikimedia Foundation
*“Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.”* _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- *Iván Martínez*
*Presidente - Wikimedia México A.C.User:ProtoplasmaKid @protoplasmakid*
Hemos creado la más grande colección de conocimiento compartido. Ayuda a proteger a Wikipedia, dona ahora: https://donate.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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