>How about this:
>[[Category:1929 births]]
>[[Category:German authors]]
>[[Category:Women]]
>
>and on the article for "The Diary of a Young Girl" we could put
>[[Category:Books by Anne Frank]]
The difference is that there is no automated way to discover that [[Category:Books by Anne Frank]] is a list of [[Books]] or how they're related to [[Anne Frank]]. Categories are meant as a means to group many similar things together; not show relationships between two things. And we could have [[Category:Children of Otto Heinrich Frank]] but that seems a little bit silly.
It's not about reinventing the wheel, but rather figuring out what job we want to do and what tool is best to do it. We can make categories to show relationships, but I don't think it's the best tool for _that_ job.
Matt
---------------------------------
Post your free ad now! Yahoo! Canada Personals
I would like to draft a general (optional!) user survey, to offer in
sections to users who want to fill it out. What do you think? Take a
look at the current survey questions and comment.
I seem to recall a number of smaller surveys have been run in the
past; if you have taken part in (or run) one of these, please link
the surveys to one another, or perhaps create a category for them...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sj/Survey/draft
(I know it's in my user space, but feel free to edit this page mercilessly.)
--
+sj+
Hoi,
The use of .ogg files is a chicken and egg situation. Yes, we want
people to use .ogg files but when there are no .ogg files people will
not download the stuff they need to listen to it. There are many people
who do not upload soundfiles because it is not .wav or .mp3. There are
no sound files because people do not create them.
I propose that we have an ommlette and break some eggs. I have uploaded
some Dutch politicians, and I was really happy with the "George Walker
Bush" soundfile that I together with "Silvio Berlusconi" and "Jaap de
Hoop Scheffer" added to those wikipedia that have an article about these
gentlemen. Today I received the first installment of a large collection
of the pronunciations of Italian politicians from Sabine Cretella. They
are now available on the Commons. :)
What is needed to make this happen is people to record in the .ogg
format, upload it to Commons and make this the standard that it is; the
soundfile to be used on the Wikimedia projects. When we /show /that we
care about this standard, we can ask Mozilla.org to create a plugin. By
showing that we care, we make a difference.
By having LOADS of soundfiles in the .ogg format we can make this format
really relevant.
Thanks,
GerardM
In the grand tradition of actually getting things done on Wikipedia,
Wikipedian KSheka, with some assistance from myself to convert the video
to Theora, has gone ahead and uploaded a video of an "echocardiograph
demonstrating systolic anterior motion of the anterior leaflet of the
mitral value", which, translated, I think means "a video of a beating
heart with a valve that's moving wrongly"
You can see the article with the uploaded video at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertrophic_cardiomyopathy
Now we actually *have* a video in a patent-unencumbered codec uploaded
to Wikipedia, and the ability to make more of them (transcoding to Theora
is pretty straightforward once you've got ffmpeg2theora installed), the
discussion about video I posted at http://meta.wikimedia.org/Video_policy
becomes a little more directly relevant...
>From my point of view, I'd be very interested in people's thoughts on
what we should do to make best use of video (one thing that comes to
mind is that we should always take a still from the video as
illustration, but more thoughts are good)...
Oh, and has there been any progress on implementing code for an approval
process?
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Merkel
robert.merkel(a)benambra.org
http://benambra.org
"And James Hird has just gone after Robert Harvey...that's like Bambi
attacking Bambi"
-- Gerard Whately, Essendon vs. St Kilda, 3/4/2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hoi,
Three people, all very active in Wiktionary, agreed that the
pronunciation of names and places are quit different in the non local
languages. Many wikipedias add how a place is written in the language
where this name is local.
The three people pronounced a few words and, they have been added to
commons. I have also been so bold to add these pronunciations to the
wikipedias that have an article on these illustrious people; they are
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Silvio Berlusconi and George Walker Bush. I have
added some famous Dutch politicians for good measure and, if you want me
to pronounce Dutch words, you can always ask. I am aware that not
everyone in a country pronounce things in the same way, but it is most
often superior to what you make up if you see the characters that make
up the name.
One request, please add those pronunciations of important people, places
etc to Commons, there is no better way of learning how something is to
be pronounced for someone who is not failiar with your language.
Thanks,
GerardM
At Wikinews we use Flickr fairly often, copying properly-licensed
photos to the Commons. Several times now I've even approached authors
of images there and asked them to relicense some good-looking photo to
cc-by or cc-by-sa.
Flickr used to have a web-based search for creative-commons-licensed
images. That search is now for some reason disabled, but I've written
an app for Windows that uses their API and lets you do a (rudimentary)
search for Flickr images matching a particular license (Attribution
and Attribution-ShareAlike obviously are the only ones that work for
the Commons). The tool's homepage is
http://tiredbrain.com/wikinews/flickr/ if anyone else is interested.
-ilya
> From: Sj <2.718281828(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] FlickR
>
> Hey, excellent. Sadly, flickr doesn't want you to be able to
> transclude high-res images from their server... so there's still a
> reason to duplicate images there and on commons.
>
> SJ
>
> On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 00:39:46 +0100, Kurt Jansson <jansson(a)gmx.net> wrote:
> > Andrew Lih schrieb:
> > > There is also a Wikipedia gallery in Flickr:
> > > http://www.flickr.com/groups/48889047191@N01/pool/
> >
> > It says "no permission" if you are not member of the group. So after creating an
> > account, use the following link to join:
> > http://www.flickr.com/groups/48889047191@N01/
> >
> > There is also a Wikipedia-tag:
> > http://flickr.com/photos/tags/wikipedia
> >
> > Kurt
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .
Hi,
has anybody seen this: http://www.flickr.com? It is kind of an photo
blog community, and many photographs are licensed with a creative
commons licence.
Bye, Till
Hiho,
a report for all who were not there...
From 10th to 12th March 2005 Wikimedia was present at the world
biggest computer fair, the cebit in Hannover, Germany. Our booth was
located in the lovely neighbourhood of projects like Debian, KDE,
Gnome and OpenOffice at the Linuxpark. Brockhaus was also present at
Cebit, in the same hall like us. Unlike most of the other open source
projects we had a whole booth for us, with a table for the
presentations computer and leaflets. Decoration and Equipment was
still scarce -- we used the posters left from [[FOSDEM 2005]], Nina
provided her brandnew iBook as presentation computer.
Day one started with a prominent visitor at our booth: Jon Maddog
Hall. And of course he instantly discovered a mistake in
Wikipedia. Looking up his biography in the english wikipedia, he found
his name spelled wrongly -- good occasion to fix this (edit summary:
"spelled my name correctly"). When I logged in to move the page
afterwards, I could see one more time how fast Wikipedia works: RickK
had already moved the page to the correct title (okay, there was some
sort of redirect confusion...).
In the following time the booth crew, Mathias Schindler, Nina,
Southpark (en:Zeitgeist), Marco Krohn and I were busy answering
questions from visitors. Most knew Wikipedia already and were
interested in basic questions like "How do you make sure that no
nonsense stays in?". People also showed lots of interest in the CD,
DVD and print versions. And of course, some wikipedians passed by,
too. A lot of people came with Mediawiki related questions which we
tried to answer as good as possible, sometimes with help from the devs
on IRC. For the next fair, it would be good to have a developer at
the booth.
In the afternoon, I held a presentation about Wikipedia at the
Linuxpark forum. At six we closed down the booth and went together to
the annual Wikipedia cebit meetup in the same old pub as last year,
talking until late night about excellent articles, edit-wars, vfd (the
usual wikipedia chitchat).
The following day, Presroi and I had an radio interview with a
journalist from NDR and were running around a lot establishing
contacts. We left some dutch wikipedia leaflets at the booth of the
Netherlands and I grumbled about myself that I had no info materials
in Arabic to distribute it at the booths of the Arabic
countries. Cebit could have been a possibility for us to promote
wikipedia in those countries with bad internet connectivity and reach
people who actually have internet there.
Saturday, day three was supposed to be the busiest (with reduced
entrance fees for students) but was relatively quiet for us, with people
from berlinux passing by, inviting us to their next conference in Berlin
and so on.
These are the lessons we learned for the next such events:
* Send out a press release at least one week before
* Make a list of things you want to achieve at the event and arrange
appointments beforehand (We were _really_ lucky this time).
* Have a stand crew and a team of people who visit others. Minimum for
big events like Cebit are four people. It happened sometimes that we
were busy explaining wikipedia to a crowd of casual visitors and
behind was someone waiting with something important to say. Good to
be able to divide work then without having to cut one talk off.
* Have at least one person in the crew who can explain the technical
side and answer questions about mediawiki.
* create a wikipedia user account for the event and edit under this
user name. Like this, you can show features like the watchlist
without showing your private one and other wikipedians are
warned.
* Prepare for no sleep (five hours are real luxury).
* Don't forget your business cards, Repeat: Don't forget your business
cards. Ah, and make sure you don't run out fo business cards.
* a small bowl with gummibärchen or other sweets doesn't cost much and
is a nice gesture for visitors (idea stolen shamelessly from the KDE
people). You only have to make sure that the stand crew doesn't eat
them all.
* last but not least: for next year, we want a sofa and book shelves.
Pictures: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cebit_2005
This report on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cebit_2005
greetings and good night,
elian
Message: 11
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 20:29:05 +0100
From: Gerard Meijssen
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] The role of a wikipedia for a language like
Hopi
To: wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org
Message-ID: <4231F181.60408(a)gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Delirium wrote:
> Ulf Lunde wrote:
>
>> I also wanted to say that I agree that gerard Meijssen's point is very
>> important: The wikipedias are indeed culture-bearers for their
>> respective populations, and not just for humanity as a whole!
>
> I disagree that this should be the case, and to the extent that it is,
> feel it should be corrected. Languages are not culture, although they
> have connections with it.
>
Languages are not culture ?? Encyclopedias most certainly are !! Please
consider what words are used in a culture. The English used reflects the
culture the person speaking or writing comes from. The idea that you can
divorse culture from language is odd. When comparing articles on the
same topic the diffferences are sometimes huge.
> If we wanted languages to be identified with culture, then we should
> split some up, and have a "United States" wikipedia as a
> culture-bearer for the U.S., a "French Canadian" Wikipedia as a
> culture-bearer for French-Canadians, and so on. But we don't, and to
> the extent possible keep these together. In essence, the only reason
> we have separate Wikipedias at all is because of language
> barriers---when languages are similar enough to keep together (as with
> the French spoken in Canada vs. France vs. Algeria), we do so.
>
> Or do people actually seriously think we *should* have separate
> Wikipedias catering to different cultures?
When we have an encyclopedia with articles that are acceptable to all
people who speak a language, we aim to achieve a neutral point of view
and provide more extended information. We want to maintain one wikipedia
bridging the divide between the cultures that use a language. Given the
virtually limitless amount of harddrive capacity we have articles on
cricket and honkbal. We are happy to host any topic that is of intrest.
What this discussion is about, is not about en: or fr: It is about Hopi.
By having a Hopi or a Dutch or a Frisian wikipedia, you allow many
topics to be narrated with a Hopi, Dutch or Frisian point of view. Not a
non-neutral but with a Hopi, Dutch or Frisian point of view. This is
good because certain things that are true from an English perspective
are plain different and non-neutral from another culture point of view.
To put it bluntly, the words mean different things, they have different
conotations denying people a resource like that is like denying that
languages differ and that languages reflect a culture.
The UN has a mother language day. This day is to celebrate the diversity
of the cultures of the world. All languages have a need for good
information, that is what wikimedia aims to provide. The argument that
the Dutch can read and write English and do not their own wikipedia is
great. It only reminds me of a recent tiff I was in, where I was accused
of not being able to express myself in English... So please allow me to
read and write in Nederlands and, I will not be asking for a wikipedia
in Westfries. :) And I do apologize for my poor English (or was it
apologise ...)
I would almost accept your point if you agree to only read French or
Chinese in future. You will find how much it will divorce you from the
culture that you live in.
Thanks,
GerardM
I agree with Gerard here. I believe scn.wiki serves to explore certain topics from a Sicilian perspective. Why? Rely on the English wikipedia to be NPOV about matters relevant to Sicily? Yeh, right! Do that and you may be excused for thinking that Frederick II never set foot in Sicily and was entirely uninfluenced by his education and upbringing in Palermo (in fact he was educated in Rome according to en.wiki!! the discussion page even questions whether he could possibly have spoken 9 languages - but if they knew anything about medieval Sicily, they would not bother asking the question); that the Sicilian language pretty much stopped developing during the Saracen epoch (with Norman French, Catalan and Spanish, after many paragraphs, being mentioned briefly in one closing line as "influences"); that "Trinacria" may not have come to exist as the Greek name for the island because of the triangular shape of the island - surely this can't be so because it predates proper
cartographic technology, i.e. if the English, Americans, or North Europeans didn't do it first - as if a bunch of southern Europeans could have managed it!
NPOV? Please, spare me.
pippu d'angelo
---------------------------------
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