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.
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:
(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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