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(a)whym.org> wrote:
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter
<putevod(a)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(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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