Re: [Wikimedia-l] Wikipedia's 15th BD

On 2016-01-15 00:30, Mardetanha wrote: 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(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>