Dear All, I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.
I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin. Along with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin with), contributors could then put their weather where they are. This could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects and anybody else.
Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
Thanks!
Wikinews User Page http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Tristan%20Thomas
Tris Thomas wrote:
I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin. Along with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin with), contributors could then put their weather where they are. This could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects and anybody else.
Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
While this would be very nice if it could be done, I don't see any realistic chance of it happening. Original reporting on Wikinews is spotty because there are far too few people going out to give direct coverage to the stories, even when notable stories in a place happen only infrequently. We have weather everywhere, everyday, 24/7, and it is constantly changing. I don't see how there could be enough dedication to the task to make this fly.
Ec
Wikimedia Norway have had a meeting with Meteorologisk Institutt (http://met.no) in Norway about using the dataset published by the institute. Today the dataset is used for the service Yr.no (http://yr.no), a joint venture between them and Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (http://nrk.no). Met said it would be pleased if the data could be utilized somehow, later this was confirmed by NRK.
The dataset is localized to within 4km in Norway and updated in about 4 hour cycles. There are available lookup for 7.5 million places around the world, and 700 000 places in Norway. Base data are the HIRLAM model (High Resolution Limited Area Model) and the EC model from The European Weathercenter ECWMF. HIRLAM has 10 km resolution of the grid. When requesting data for named places the data from the grid is interpolated to build the new weather forecast.
The dataset is made available with an open license, they request attribution and "truthful reproduction", basically you can't say it is from Met and falsify the dataset. You can't add a few degrees to make the weather look better at a certain place and still claim its sourced from Met. This is analogous to editing a news photo at Commons so its not a truthful reproduction of the event anymore. There are one disclaimer for sites with pornographic or racist content which may be troublesome for a CC-by-sa -licensed site. They do although allow use on commercial sites. Other than that the licensing should be given due consideration.
My personal opinion is that they should be kindly asked to make the dataset available according to CC-by-sa to make reuse easier.
Our proposal to Met/NRK was to make an extension that could be localized for various languages, based on the XML-data streamed from their site, and to use something like this for Wikinews. Unfortunately we have not been able to get sufficient funding for the project. We also need some backing from the community if this should be considered a viable project.
Short information in english about Yr.no http://www.yr.no/english/1.2025949
Page about licensing (in Norwegian) http://www.yr.no/verdata/1.3321307
Page about services available (in Norwegian) http://www.yr.no/verdata/
Some locations http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Oslo/Oslo/ http://www.yr.no/place/Bouvet_Island/ http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Finnmark/B%C3%A5tsfjord/Makkaur/ http://www.yr.no/place/United_States/New_York/New_York~5128581/ http://www.yr.no/place/China/Xinjiang/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi/ Page about how the weather forecast is made (in Norwegian) http://www.yr.no/informasjon/1.3687572
John Erling Blad Wikimedia Norway
Tris Thomas wrote:
Dear All, I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.
I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin. Along with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin with), contributors could then put their weather where they are. This could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects and anybody else.
Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
Thanks!
Wikinews User Page http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Tristan%20Thomas _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
ECMWF - European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Centre_for_Medium-Range_Weather_Foreca...
The 4km resolution is from private email correspondence and is for Northern Europe. The four hour cycle is from memory, it should be four times a day.
From other correspondance "EVWMF validerer (etterkontrollerer) varsla
sine (som våre byggjer på) på eit overordna europeisk nivå. Dei gjer sikkert validering på verdsnivå òg, utan at eg har sett rapportar på dette. Valideringane som blir gjort, viser at prognosane er svært treffsikre (90-95%) dei fyrste dagane, og at det fell ned mot 60% for dag 10 i prognosen."
That is, the EVWMF validates their own weather forecasts on a large scale level and the hit rate for the first few days is around 90-95%. I'm not sure what they are measuring. Later that goes down to a 60% hit rate for day 10.
I'm not sure about how the rest of the world are modeled, the grid resolution, etc.
John
John at Darkstar wrote:
Wikimedia Norway have had a meeting with Meteorologisk Institutt (http://met.no) in Norway about using the dataset published by the institute. Today the dataset is used for the service Yr.no (http://yr.no), a joint venture between them and Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (http://nrk.no). Met said it would be pleased if the data could be utilized somehow, later this was confirmed by NRK.
The dataset is localized to within 4km in Norway and updated in about 4 hour cycles. There are available lookup for 7.5 million places around the world, and 700 000 places in Norway. Base data are the HIRLAM model (High Resolution Limited Area Model) and the EC model from The European Weathercenter ECWMF. HIRLAM has 10 km resolution of the grid. When requesting data for named places the data from the grid is interpolated to build the new weather forecast.
The dataset is made available with an open license, they request attribution and "truthful reproduction", basically you can't say it is from Met and falsify the dataset. You can't add a few degrees to make the weather look better at a certain place and still claim its sourced from Met. This is analogous to editing a news photo at Commons so its not a truthful reproduction of the event anymore. There are one disclaimer for sites with pornographic or racist content which may be troublesome for a CC-by-sa -licensed site. They do although allow use on commercial sites. Other than that the licensing should be given due consideration.
My personal opinion is that they should be kindly asked to make the dataset available according to CC-by-sa to make reuse easier.
Our proposal to Met/NRK was to make an extension that could be localized for various languages, based on the XML-data streamed from their site, and to use something like this for Wikinews. Unfortunately we have not been able to get sufficient funding for the project. We also need some backing from the community if this should be considered a viable project.
Short information in english about Yr.no http://www.yr.no/english/1.2025949
Page about licensing (in Norwegian) http://www.yr.no/verdata/1.3321307
Page about services available (in Norwegian) http://www.yr.no/verdata/
Some locations http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Oslo/Oslo/ http://www.yr.no/place/Bouvet_Island/ http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Finnmark/B%C3%A5tsfjord/Makkaur/ http://www.yr.no/place/United_States/New_York/New_York~5128581/ http://www.yr.no/place/China/Xinjiang/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi/ Page about how the weather forecast is made (in Norwegian) http://www.yr.no/informasjon/1.3687572
John Erling Blad Wikimedia Norway
Tris Thomas wrote:
Dear All, I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.
I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin. Along with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin with), contributors could then put their weather where they are. This could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects and anybody else.
Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
Thanks!
Wikinews User Page http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Tristan%20Thomas _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 8:01 AM, Tris ThomasTris@waterhay.co.uk wrote:
Dear All, I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.
I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin. Along with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin with), contributors could then put their weather where they are. This could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects and anybody else.
Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
Thanks!
Wikinews User Page http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Tristan%20Thomas _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
I can already see it now:
"It is bright and sunny today in XYZ town[citation needed]"
-Chad
2009/7/8 Tris Thomas Tris@waterhay.co.uk:
Dear All, I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.
I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin. Along with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin with), contributors could then put their weather where they are. This could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects and anybody else.
Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
It would all be importing forecasts from other sources, though. You can't give a forecast by looking out the window, you can just say what the weather is now. Why would people use WikiWeather rather than going direct to those sources which would be more up-to-date and reliable?
Tris Thomas wrote:
Dear All, I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.
I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin. Along with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin with), contributors could then put their weather where they are. This could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects and anybody else.
Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
Thanks!
Wikinews User Page http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Tristan%20Thomas
Except for forecasts (though it might be interesting to see how wiki users compare to professional meteorologists), weather is mostly just data, so computers can generally provide it better than people.
The only way I could see this as possibly being better than existing services would be if it was set up so that people who had home weather stations that could connect to a computer could automatically update the site.
But A) that kind of equipment is expensive (at minimum ~$100 USD for something that only records temperature) and B) it wouldn't really be a wiki as the majority of the content would be automatically updated. Only the forecasts would be human-produced.
Though you'd start to run into the principle of diminishing returns with that - how much better is a weather report from 2 miles away versus 5 miles away? After a point, it just becomes redundant. And of course we'd still have to rely on the weather services for things like radar and satellite images.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org