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