Open Wiki Blog Planet

Gerard Meijssen: #Unicode on sorting French topic lists

GerardM — 2010-07-30T16:32:00+00:00

A list extracted from the French #Wikipedia is used for "Unicode Technical Note #34". This document presents a case study of collation issues, using data from a French language topic list to illustrate alternative orders and how to obtain them. It also discusses implementation issues for ordering lists of this type.

Even though the document is quite interesting, I would have been thrilled when collation for a language like Hindi, Kannada or Burmese was chosen.
Thanks,
GerardM

Blog on Wiki Patterns: Redesigning the Airline Boarding Pass

2010-07-30T15:20:49+00:00

Designer Tyler N. Thompson conducted an experiment to redesign airline boarding passes for finding information quickly in the crowded, hectic airport environment. Here’s his original boarding pass, and one of the reader-submitted redesigns:

Figure 1. Current Boarding Pass

Figure 2. Redesign by David Yoon

(Via Graphicology and Timoni Grone)

Blog on Wiki Patterns: The Un-Identity of e-Book Readers

2010-07-30T14:21:22+00:00

Kevin Maney points out that, unlike books with their varied and descriptive covers, e-Reader devices conceal the identity of what you’re reading:

…the Kindle lets readers down with respect to one subtle but powerful element of the traditional book’s appeal: its role as an identity marker. Pulling out a particular book on an airline flight or in a doctor’s office can mean staking a claim to being a particular kind of person. Likewise, the books lining your living room or office can tell others about your interests and background. But on the Kindle, no matter what you’re reading, all anyone else will see is an unchanging plastic device.

(Via Clive Thompson)

Gerard Meijssen: A story to tell

GerardM — 2010-07-30T09:44:00+00:00

The Indonesia Wayang is a well known theatrical tradition. To remain relevant, it is important that it keeps its relevance. UNESCO designated Wayang Kulit a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity.

With a history that goes back many, many centuries Wayang kept its history and it maintained its relevance by including contemporary references and story lines. It may be not that hard to guess what kind of story is told with this Wayang puppet..

We just received this magnificent treasure from the Tropenmuseum and it shows how Wayang kept its relevancy. What makes the Tropenmuseum more then just a museum is that they give attention to the modern expressions. An expression that presented the theatre world of Ki Enthus Susmono earlier this year. A world where Batman, George Bush, Osama Bin Laden and the Tsunami have found their place.

When traditions like Wayang constantly renew themselves, the Wikipedia need to reflect this, Commons needs to illustrate this. I hope that we will gain the freely licensed pictures that show the vibrancy of this magnificent art.
Thanks,
GerardM

Pictures of the Day: Pictures of the Day - July 30

2010-07-30T06:03:09+00:00

commons.wikimedia.org:

Mimas Cassini.jpg from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by The High Fin Sperm Whale

de.wikipedia.org:

Androsace studiosorum.JPG from commons.wikimedia.org, provided by Boronian

en.wikipedia.org:

White peach and cross section edit.jpg from en.wikipedia.org, provided by MPUploadBot

Wikimedia Technical Blog: MediaWiki version statistics

2010-07-30T04:34:23+00:00

Some kind people at Qualys have surveyed versions of open source web apps present on the web, including MediaWiki. Here is the relevant page from their presentation:

For the original see:

https://community.qualys.com/docs/DOC-1401

And the press release:

http://www.qualys.com/company/newsroom/newsreleases/usa/view/2010-07-28/

They make the point that 95% of MediaWiki installations have a “serious vulnerability”, whereas only 4% of WordPress installations do. While WordPress’s web-based upgrade utility certainly has a positive impact on security, I feel I should point out that what WordPress counts as a serious vulnerability does not align with MediaWiki’s definition of the same term.

For instance, if a web-based user could execute arbitrary PHP code on the server, compromising all data and user accounts, we would count that as the most serious sort of vulnerability, and we would do an immediate release to fix it. We’re proud of the fact that we haven’t had any such vulnerability in a stable release since 1.5.3 (December 2005).

However in WordPress, they count this as a feature, and all administrators can do it. Similarly, WordPress avoids the difficult problem of sanitising HTML and CSS while preserving a rich feature set by simply allowing all authors to post raw HTML.

If you are running MediaWiki in a CMS-like mode, with whitelist edit and account creation restricted, then I think it’s fair to say that in terms of security, you’re better off with MediaWiki 1.14.1 or later than you are with the latest version of WordPress.

However, the statistics presented by Qualys show that an alarming number of people are running versions of MediaWiki older than 1.14.1, which was the most recent fix for an XSS vulnerability exploitable without special privileges. There is certainly room for us to do better.

We have a new installer project in development, which we hope to release in 1.17. It includes a feature which encourages users to sign up for our release announcements mailing list. But maybe we need to do more. Should we take a leaf from WordPress’s book, and nag administrators with a prominent notice when they are not using the latest version? Such a feature would require MediaWiki to “dial home”, which is controversial in our developer community.

Domas Mituzas: on primary keys

2010-07-29T23:45:38+00:00

5.1.46 has this change:

Performance: While looking for the shortest index for a covering index scan, the optimizer did not consider the full row length for a clustered primary key, as in InnoDB. Secondary covering indexes will now be preferred, making full table scans less likely.

In other words, if you have covering index on * (which is quite common on m:n mapping tables), use it rather than PK. As I have spent my time getting indexing right and having PKs be based on primary access pattern and SKs on secondary access pattern, I hereby not welcome the new change that suddenly reverses the behavior in late GA version.

Not good, when mysqldump queries end up taking 6 days instead of previous half an hour, not good at all.

Update: Oh, MariaDB has this reverted, from their change log:

mybug:39653: reverted as invalid

If only upstream MySQL would take note ;-)

OmegaWiki: #Conceptwiki

GerardM — 2010-07-29T19:49:00+00:00

The ConceptWiki environment is an umbrella for several categories of professional data. It is hosted by NBIC / the Concept Web Alliance and it provides a rich environment with many types of data that have a bio-medical background.

The software it uses is very similar to the one used by OmegaWiki. This is due to the long association between people behind OmegaWiki and the ConceptWiki. It used to be that there was no room for multi-lingual content in the ConceptWiki but that is changing.

The hosting of OmegaWiki and the ConceptWiki used to be on the same server. this made it easy to connect OmegaWiki translations to ConceptWiki ontological content. For a concept like yaws you find many translations at OmegaWiki, you also find a link to the Wikipedia article and a mapping to the UMLS part of its database.

Indonesian dance mask

There is no Commons category yet on the subject, otherwise you might find this mask depicting the face of a sufferer of this disease.

The plan is to bring OmegaWiki and the ConceptWiki closer together again. I hope that the ConceptWiki will become a multilingual resource and we are going to start by sharing resources.
Thanks,
GerardM

AboutUs: Make Pay-Per-Click Ads Work for You

2010-07-29T18:42:51+00:00

Pay-per-click, or PPC, can be a great strategy for driving the right people to your website.

But writing good ad copy isn’t easy. Christian Bullock, a senior account executive at search engine marketing firm Amplify Interactive, provides step-by-step instructions for writing effective PPC ads. Do it right, and you’ll get people clicking through to your site at the very moment when they’re seeking what you have to offer.

Christian has tons of experience creating PPC ads. He’s also certified by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft as a marketing and advertising professional. Use his tips, and you’ll be writing better PPC ad copy in no time at all. Bonus: Christian includes a link to a useful ad-writing tool on Amplify Interactive’s website.

Do you have some expertise in online marketing you’d like to share with business owners? Is there a topic you’d like us to cover? Send me an email: Aliza@AboutUs.org

Working Wikily: Acting bigger by activating networks

2010-07-29T16:39:42+00:00

This post is third in a short series being published at the Intrepid Philanthropist. You can find the original here.

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the Strategy Landscape, an innovation that the Monitor Institute has been developing to help funders better “understand their context”—one of the 10 next practice areas we discuss in our new report, What’s Next for Philanthropy. The next practices represent principles and behaviors that are particularly well suited to the more networked, dynamic, and interdependent landscape of public problem solving that is now emerging. They’re approaches that we believe have the potential to become the widely accepted best practices of tomorrow.

The idea is that if the last decade was mostly about funders improving their individual organizational effectiveness and capacity, the work of the next 10 years will have to build on those efforts to develop next practices that also help funders ACT BIGGER and ADAPT BETTER.

ACT BIGGER, because given the scale and social complexity of the challenges they face, funders will increasingly look to other actors, both in philanthropy and across sectors, to activate sufficient resources to make sustainable progress on issues of shared concern. No funder alone, not even Bill Gates, has the resources and reach required to move the needle on these types of wicked problems.

And ADAPT BETTER, because given the pace of change today, funders will need to get smarter faster, incorporating the best available data and knowledge about what is working and regularly adjusting what they do to add value amidst the dynamic circumstances we all face.

My colleague Barbara Kibbe will be blogging after the summer about some of the ways that funders are beginning to think about adapting better, so I thought I’d write over the next day or two to explain a little more about what we mean when we talk about acting bigger.

In the report, we highlight five key ways that funders are beginning to act bigger:

Understanding the context. Strong peripheral vision—seeing and developing a shared understanding of the system in which they operate—will be critical to helping funders build and coordinate resources to address large, complex problems.
Picking the right tool(s) for the job. Funders have a wide range of assets—money, knowledge, networks, expertise, and influence—that can be applied deliberately to create social change.
Aligning independent action. Philanthropies are developing new models for working together that allow for both coordination and independence. Funders don’t necessarily need to make decisions together, but they do need their efforts to add up.
Activating networks. Advances in network theory and practice now allow funders to be more deliberate about supporting connectivity, coordinating networks, and thinking about how the collective impact of all of their efforts can produce change far beyond the success of any single grant, grantee, or donor.
Leveraging others’ resources. Funders can use their independent resources as levers to catalyze much larger streams of funding and activity from other sources by stimulating markets, influencing public opinion and policy, and activating new players and assets.

The Strategy Landscape tool I discussed yesterday was an example of how funders are now beginning to develop new ways of understanding their context: how individual foundations and donors are learning to put the problem—not themselves and their organizations—at the center, and to try to recognize their role as actors within a larger ecosystem of stakeholders working on the issue.

Today, I’m going to talk briefly about another one of the next practices: activating networks.

Although the individual grant is the typical unit of analysis for most foundations, the success of any single grant or organization is rarely sufficient to move the needle on a complex problem. We’ve all felt the irony when successful programs are lauded while the system they aspire to change continues to fail.

Funders are well positioned to support connectivity and to coordinate and knit together the pieces of a network of activity that can have impacts far beyond the success of any one grant, grantee, or donor. And advances in network theory and practice now allow funders to be much more deliberate about supporting and participating in networks and in thinking about how the collective impact of a coordinated portfolio of grants can produce more significant change.

One of my favorite examples of how funders are already using networked approaches to act bigger comes from the Barr Foundation in Boston. The foundation’s Barr Fellows program aims to explicitly build a stronger network of civic leadership in the Boston area by providing fellowships and other activities to cohorts of nonprofit and other area leaders. The program offers the fellows a three month sabbatical and a number of retreats and other connective activities, including an international trip, over the course of three years. The idea is to help the fellows build the trust and relationships that, once they return to their jobs (refreshed and inspired), will allow them to self-organize and work together in the future as needs arise. Instead of simply supporting a group working on a single, specific issue, Barr is building the bonds and linkages that create a robust network that can respond more effectively to challenges of all sorts over time.

The Fellows program is just one example of how Barr is explicitly building networks to advance its programmatic goals. In other cases, they’ve used social network mapping to help groups of local green and healthy building advocates better recognize common goals, and have supported “network weavers” to help build local connections and capacity around after school programming.

Barr is just one foundation working on the cutting edge of networks. At the Monitor Institute, we’ve been working with a number of different funders over the last several years, particularly the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, to develop tools and training curriculum that help them and their grantees better understand, build, support, and work as part of networks.

If you’re interested in learning more about how funders and nonprofits can use networks to advance their work, there are a growing number of great resources out there: Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s new book The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change (or Beth and Allison’s respective blogs), Pete Plastrik and Madeleine Taylor’s Net Gains: A Handbook for Network Builders Seeking Social Change, Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, and even the Monitor Institute’s own Working Wikily article (and its accompanying blog).

Blog on Wiki Patterns: “At Least iPod, if Not iPad Generation”

2010-07-29T15:18:16+00:00

Patrick Wintour, describing new British PM David Cameron in The Guardian:

Cameron feels at least iPod, if not iPad generation: relaxed appearances on the networks, dinner with Washington Post columnists, and meetings with all the key congressional leaders…

Blog on Wiki Patterns: A Thought on Inspiration and Aspiration

2010-07-29T14:53:38+00:00

Whitney Hess:

Inspiration is necessary in order for aspiration to grow. But only until we’re filled with aspiration, self-initiated and self-defined, do our careers, and lives, really begin to transform, allowing us to transform those around us in turn.

OmegaWiki: Endangered African languages

Kipcool — 2010-07-29T12:38:00+00:00

Sorosoro is a program that aims at studying and documenting endangered languages.

They have recently published videos of native people giving some vocabulary in four endangered African languages: Punu, Mpongwe, Akele and Benga. The words are about body parts, numbers, colors and common phrases.

I have enabled these languages for editing at OmegaWiki and added all the words mentioned in the videos. By doing so, these translations are not only available to people speaking English, French or Spanish (the three languages of the video), but to all the other languages at OmegaWiki.

We now have 28 expressions in Akele and Benga, 59 in Mpongwe and 78 in Punu.

If you know about more resources (vocabulary) for endangered languages, you are more than welcome to mention them.

Thanks,
Kipcool.

EditMe: Recycle Bin for Deleted Pages and Attachments

2010-07-29T12:17:22+00:00

A small change made today makes it a bit simpler to keep your EditMe sites tidy.

Piotr Konieczny: Briding of global digital divide

Piotr Konieczny — 2010-07-29T12:14:43+00:00

I was looking at some archival stats on Internet usage.

Compare the Top 10 Internet languages in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and the latest (Dec 2009 for me, your mileage may vary as that link is dynamic).

Look at the 2004 numbers: it is very much the core, developed, First world, China aside.

Still, its pitiful penetration numbers aside... what was (is?) wrong with France, Spain and Portugal? Their penetration numbers are China-like (~10%), whereas the rest of Europea was around 50%.

Now, look at 2010. In addition to China, whose penetration number have improved greatly (from 2004's 8% to 29.7%), note the inclusion of Arabic (17.5%) and Russian (32.3%).

Oh, don't get confused with langauges and countries. I was for a moment shocked with low penetration numbers for French, Spanish and Portugal, but remember - those languages are spoken in many periphery, developing, Third World countries in Africa and Latin & South America- thus the pitiful results (here are EU stats, and here is a breakdown for Spanish language, for example).

One of the most interesting numbers, for me, is the diminishing percentage of English-speakers as the % of Internet users - from 35.9% in 2004 to 30.1% in 2009.

And how about tripling of Internet users totals in non-Top 10 languages (from 100m to 300m), or nearly doubling of Internet users totals (from 800m to 1,400m) in that period?

Around 2006 the stat site started to report "Internet Growth for Language (since 2000)". For 2006, it was 128% for English, 346% for Chinese, 436% for non-Top 10 languages, and 189% for all languages. In 2007, Arabic enters the chart, with 940% growth (!). For 2009 we have 251.7% for English, 1162% for Chines, 2297% for Arabic, 525% for non-Top-10 languages and 400% for the world.

Global digital divide still exists, no doubt about that. But it is being bridged, as the rest of the world is catching up. 'bout time...

PS. Here's an interesting take on this from The Economist.

Appropedia Blog: Tell your friends

2010-07-29T08:02:12+00:00

Today I chatted to a stranger at an Indian diner, and when I mentioned Appropedia, he asked me to send him some links for his friend, who is a wastewater engineer.

I'll share my message here, in case you know a water or wastewater engineer, or other knowledgeable person, and perhaps to prompt you to invite knowledge friends to contribute.

Hi ------,

Nice to meet you today. A few links for your friend -----, from our collaborative website, Appropedia.org:

Greywater treatment.

Wastewater (category - no nice front page yet). Here's an example of a great set of pages: Arcata marsh (case study).

Water

Note that it covers all kinds of contexts, and there is an emphasis on cost-effectiveness and applications where resources are limited.

If he is interested or knows anyone else who might be, we' re always in need of people to click "edit" and share their knowledge.

Thank you,

------

Blog on Wiki Patterns: Photos: President Obama’s Motorcade in Lower Manhattan

2010-07-29T02:01:38+00:00

This was a fun way to end a busy day. As I was walking home, the President’s motorcade came down Houston Street on the way to an event in Greenwich Village. I took the first photo using an iPhone, and went out later with my Sony Alpha 300 to catch the motorcade leaving Manhattan.

East Houston Street, 7:17 PM – Presidential State Car (top right) followed by secret service car.

FDR Drive South, 8:55 PM – Presidential State Car (left) following secret service car.

FDR Drive South, 8:55 PM – NYPD squad cars and secret service SUVs follow the President to the Downtown Manhattan Heliport.

Gerard Meijssen: #Tropenmuseum brings us "stock-puppets" and more

GerardM — 2010-07-28T22:01:00+00:00

The collections that we were happy to receive in #Commons were typically old photographs or pictures of all kinds. This time the Tropenmuseum brings us something new: pictures of objects. Objects like these amazing wayang puppets.

screenshot from the Commons category

There are manuscripts in many languages on many materials, statues, Korans, jewellery, weapons, miniatures, musical instruments, textiles, pottery, proclamations, designs for silver jewellery ... the list goes on.

A paddy field fisherman with a fishing rod.

This new collection is vast. Multichil started to upload the new pictures and really, there is so much that it will take real effort to grasp what it is that we received from the Tropenmuseum.
Thanks,
GerardM

Daniel Kinzler: Neo4j

Daniel at BrightByte — 2010-07-28T20:15:03+00:00

Free Content

neo4j is a graph database written in Java (neo4j.org). I recently poked at it a little to see if it could be used to make fast queries over Wikipedia's category structure.

The Problem

Using the category structure when searching content on Wikipedia, or when looking for maintenance task in a specific topic area, has long been a pending item on the wishlist of a lot of people. Some years back, I wrote catscan to address the issue, but it's slow, truncates results, prone to failure, and generally ugly. So I'm looking for better ways to do this, and neo4j looks like an option.

But first off, a closer look at the problem: Categories on Wikipedia are not tags: they can't easily be combined (intersected), but they can put into relation to each other (making subcategories). A category can be a subcategoriy of several other categories: American Writers may be a subcategory of American people and Writers. By convention, there should be a single root category, and there should be no circles in the category structure, so the resulting graph is a directed graph that has no circles and is (weakly) connected. This is alsy called a poly-hierarchy. However, there is nothing that actually prevents circles, and nothing that forces the structure to be connected. So, both loops and islands may occur.

The most wanted feature now is commonsly called deep category intersection: we want all pages that are contained in two categories, while also considering all of their subcategories. Formally, this is the intersection of the transitive closure of the two categories alon the subcategory-relation. Calculating the transitive closure is typically done by recursively evaluating all subcategories. However, this is something traditional relational database systems are particularly bad at - it's only possible with lots of individual queries, which makes the proces quite slow.

== The Idea == [...Neo4j...]

EditMe: Display Recent Changes to the Current Page

2010-07-28T16:39:43+00:00

A new include script is now available that displays recent changes to the current page. You might include this in your site's Menu area to provide insight into what's been going on with the page being viewed.

Working Wikily: Tools: making It easier to work in new ways

2010-07-28T16:28:54+00:00

This post is second in a short series being published at the Intrepid Philanthropist. You can find the original here.

Before I dive into some of the different “next practices” highlighted yesterday that we think may become important parts of philanthropy’s future, I wanted to first say a few words about one of the key pieces of what I think it’ll actually take for funders to start acting bigger and adapting better over the next decade.

Change in philanthropy is especially hard. As organizational theorist Edgar Schein puts it, the only time that organizations learn and change is when the normal level of “learning anxiety”—the anxiety produced by having to shift and learn something new—is trumped by “survival anxiety”—the anxiety produced upon realizing that if you don’t adapt or improve you’ll be forced out of your position or out of business entirely.

Among many endowed philanthropic institutions, there is almost never a threat that raises survival anxiety, which means, in turn, that there is nothing that forces philanthropic organizations to get over their learning anxiety in any consistent way. The result is a field in which many of the most powerful players have few (if any) incentives to prompt adaptation and behavior change.

For years, we’ve joked that this dynamic has left philanthropy with a unique set of “learning disabilities” that get in the way of change in the field. In What’s Next for Philanthropy, we look deeply at a number of these different barriers: funders’ need for independence and control, their insularity and inward focus, the cumulative effects of caution and risk aversion, the challenges of time and inertia, and the dangers of an unspoken competition for reputation and credit.

Because the field is both voluntary and independent by nature—unconstrained by the need to please political constituencies or maintain shareholder value—these challenges add up to a situation where there is no pressure that forces any one actor to respond to another, to learn, or to change course. Individual philanthropists and institutions can act without much reference to the success or failure of their efforts or to what others do.

The result is a system with no natural mechanism for coordinating effort, for learning, for sharing knowledge about what does and doesn’t work, or for adapting to shifting circumstances. And given that learning and adaptation are optional in philanthropy, it’s hard for the field to overcome the inertia of the status quo.

Which is why I’ve become obsessed over the last year or so with tools. Is it possible to facilitate change in philanthropy by building tools that make it easier for funders to do the “right” things and harder to do the “wrong” things? The status quo is typically the easiest road to follow. But what if we could create new tools that make the path to new behaviors just as easy?

The problem is that the barriers I mentioned above make adopting new tools in philanthropy extremely difficult. Top-down, centralized, sector-wide tools and infrastructure are often rejected, even if they could improve performance. And at the same time, bottom-up innovations—individual foundations creating specific solutions to their particular problems and circumstances—rarely spread or scale. One foundation’s innovation remains just that: one foundation’s innovation.

For funders to truly begin acting in new ways, we will need to begin to merge top-down and bottom-up mindsets to develop new tools and platforms that help individual funders do their own work better, while at the same time designing with interoperability in mind. That way the data and knowledge gathered by one actor can be integrated with that gathered by others, with modest investments of money and time. Since many funders face similar issues, tools and behaviors developed to solve specific problems—but with an interoperable mindset—can begin to build useful and healthy platforms, standards, and conventions that cross institutions to add up to something more powerful than just multiple individual solutions.

Over the last two years, we’ve been working with the Rockefeller Foundation to experiment with developing these types of new, interoperable tools.

The first innovation we’ve produced, the Strategy Landscape, was created as a way of helping visualize the strategies and grants both within, and across, foundations. The project aimed to solve a key internal challenge that the Rockefeller Foundation was facing: how to help people understand the connection between its different programs’ strategies and their grants. It was an important issue for Rockefeller, but also a problem faced by many other funders as well.

So we began building a tool that could help the foundation easily visualize and understand how the strategies and grants of each of its various initiatives are aligned. But we designed the tool with special attention to interoperability—how it could also be used by, and across, other funders. When seen as a collective platform, the tool actually becomes more than just an assortment of individual maps that allow us to better understand each foundation; it allows us to start mashing the maps together so we can see the entire landscape of strategies and grants across the different funders.

In the past, foundations have done their work essentially flying blind, unclear about what others with similar interests are doing, and without a clear picture of the ecosystem of funders around them. It simply took too much effort to know what everyone else was doing. You could spend all day on the phone or in meetings with other funders trying to find out what they’re funding, and still only come out of it with a vague sense of what they’re up to.

The Strategy Landscape aims to make it simple for funders to see what their peers are supporting, making it easier than ever before to see gaps and overlaps between foundations, to identify new opportunities for coordination and collaboration, and to develop strategy with an understanding of the larger system in which they operate. The goal is to make it so easy to see and understand the broader context that you would actually have to make a choice not to see the landscape of funders around you.

The first prototype of the Strategy Landscape is now being developed to map philanthropic funding flows related to climate change across more than a dozen funders, and we will be testing it with numerous other issues over the coming year.

But we also hope that the tool will help to kick off a wave of new innovation in philanthropy—the first of many new approaches that will span across all of the different areas of next practice that I’ll be discussing over the next few days.

Jeroen De Dauw: Maps and Semantic Maps 0.6.5 released

2010-07-28T16:01:41+00:00

Maps and Semantic Maps 0.6.5 are now available for download. This release contains mainly internal changes to improve code modularity and fix some security concerns. Several bugs have been fixed as well, and a new hook has been added to Semantic Maps. This hook will get you the map format as default one for queries where you only ask for coordinates when using SMW 1.5.2 or above. For a full list of changes since 0.6.4 see changes to Maps and changes to SM. Everyone running 0.6.2 or older is advised to upgrade as soon as possible.

This release is notable for it being the first one in which I’m happy with the code-base as a whole. It took me a year to get here, but now I think the way the mapping extensions work is good and solid. This means you can now extend Maps and not be afraid the code will be incompatible in a few weeks due to changes. This also means that I’ll be focusing more on actual functionality rather then refactoring in future releases. I’ll be progressively building a little guide that explains how the extensions work from a developers perspective and how to extend them.

I might release another minor update in the 0.6.x series if any significant issues are found in 0.6.5. Further plans are finishing up a bunch of changes I’ve started to make in Validator, which I’ll probably release as 0.4 then, and to start working on Maps and Semantic Maps 0.7, which would aim at adding new features and improving existing ones. A likely new feature I’m particularly looking forward to implementing is several tag extensions that do the equivalent of the current parser functions added by Maps. The timetable for all this depends a lot on which other things I get cough up in (I’ll probably continue putting effort into the deployment stuff for my GSoC project) and what kind of funding will be available.

Downloads:

Maps 0.6.5 [zip - 7z]
Maps and Semantic Maps 0.6.5 [zip - 7z]

You can also view the release announcement at the documentation wiki.

Gerard Meijssen: Failing #statistics (finally)

GerardM — 2010-07-28T09:49:00+00:00

Now that Erik Zachte announced issues with the statistics as published, it is a good moment to reflect. It is the aim of the Wikimedia Foundation to double its reach in five years time, doubling our traffic. The expected result is expressed numerically and consequently we require hard numbers.

There are numbers of Wikimedia's traffic by the likes of Alexa and comScore, so there are alternative numbers providing us with a second opinion. Their numbers while good are no alternative for the numbers needed for our own purposes.

The numbers are used in many ways and for many audiences. They are important for the GLAM's that contributed material to us. These same numbers provide the arguments to other GLAMs to work with us. They are used to learn how a competition is doing. They provide background numbers when we talk to the press on many subjects.

Our statistics are vital. When I asked for a slot for a panel discussion at Wikimania about statistics, the numbers ended up being quite different. I am now at a loss how to appreciate the numbers we have. I understand that some statistics will be approximated to what they should have been. Other numbers will not receive such royal treatment.

This mishap is painful and I really hope it is felt that way. As we have several people working professionally on statistics, as many studies are done based on the numbers we provide, as the Toolserver is another resource that relies heavily on us accruing the right numbers, it is fair to call statistics one of our primary processes.

For our other databases we have redundancies, I hope that we will learn from those responsible for the accumulation of data that our statistics are based upon how our data collection will be made more robust in the future.
Thanks,
GerardM

Wikimedia Technical Blog: MediaWiki 1.16.0

2010-07-28T08:26:36+00:00

We are proud to announce the first stable release of the 1.16 series. Selected changes that may be of interest since MediaWiki 1.15 are:

Watchlists now have RSS/Atom feeds. RSS feeds generally are now hidden, since Atom is a better protocol and is supported by virtually all clients.
It’s now possible to block users from sending email via Special:Emailuser.
The maintenance script system was overhauled. Most maintenance scripts now have a useful help page when you run them with –help.
AdminSettings.php is no longer required in order to run maintenance scripts. You can just set $wgDBadminuser and $wgDBadminpassword in your LocalSettings.php instead.
The preferences system was overhauled. Preferences are stored in a more compact format. Changes to site default preferences will automatically affect all users who have not chosen a different preference.
Support for SQLite was improved. Some broken features were fixed, and it now has an efficient full-text search.
The user groups ACL system was improved by allowing rights to be revoked, instead of just granted.
A new localisation caching system was introduced, which will make MediaWiki faster for almost everyone, especially when lots of extensions are enabled.

By default, this new system makes a lot of database queries. If your database is particularly slow, or if your system administrator limits your query count, or if you want to squeeze as much performance as possible out of Mediawiki, set $wgCacheDirectory to a writable path on the local filesystem. Make sure you have the DBA extension for PHP installed, this will improve performance further.

MediaWiki 1.15.5 was also released today. Both MediaWiki 1.15.5 and 1.16.0 contain important security fixes. For further details please read the release announcement.

Guillaume Paumier: WikiSym 2010

2010-07-28T00:46:36+00:00

Two Three weeks ago, I attended the WikiSym 2010 conference. WikiSym is the “International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration”; it’s sort of the “Academic Wikimania”, where people researching wikis, Wikipedia and generally open collaboration get together and share their findings.

The WikiSym 2010 banner, designed by yours truly (except for the logo, by David Bailey).

WikiSym & Wikimania in Gdańsk

I couldn’t attend WikiSym the previous years for various reasons, the main one being money: they were too far away and the registration fee was too expensive. This year, WikiSym was collocated with Wikimania in Gdańsk, Poland, so it was a perfect opportunity for researchers & Wikimedians (or “practitioners”, as researchers call them) to get together and meet. We have to thank my friend Phoebe Ayers for that, who was this year’s Chair/Organizer of WikiSym.

I was pretty excited because WikiSym seemed to be at the crossroads of two of my circles: academia & open collaboration. I was also really looking forward to meeting researchers: the Wikimedia Foundation is currently engaged in an effort to include research into their decision-making process in order to make it more data-driven. Thus, it was the perfect time to try and build awareness, understanding and relationships between the two communities.

Open space schedule boards at WikiSym 2010

Program & Sessions

The symposium was a mix of regular conference talks and an unconference-style Open space track. I wasn’t necessarily a big fan of the unconference style, but one of the most productive discussions I had (about quality assessment tools) actually happened in a group I walked in a bit randomly. I was a bit disappointed by the quality of some talks, but overall the event was great.

One major issue, though, was the number of conflicting talks: there were up to eight concurrent open space sessions, conflicting with each other, as well as with the main sessions and workshops. It was just impossible to take part in everything one was interested in. While this is a usual problem with large events, I didn’t expect to have this issue in a relatively small conference like WikiSym.

I gave a presentation entitled Understanding the users of Wikimedia Commons, a summary of the user research I did for the Multimedia usability project, and it was pretty well received. The audience particularly liked the video I showed from our UX study. The supporting slides are available on Commons (download the PDF – 504 KB). Unfortunately, the presentation wasn’t recorded, but it was similar to the one I gave at Wikimania, whose recording will be available soonish.

Me trying not to burst into song, being on stage in such a nice Concert hall (CC-by-sa by Blue Oxen Associates)

Not as open as you might think

The second day ended with a discussion in the “Open circle” about copyright. Specifically, the participants asked if they could publish their work (that they presented at WikiSym) under a free license. I was particularly interested, since I had had the very same discussion a few months before.

« Open circle » at WikiSym 2010

In March 2010, I submitted a scientific paper to WikiSym about my work. I had written papers for scientific journals & conferences before, but it was the first time I submitted one in this specific field of research. As a consequence, I was quite happy when my paper was accepted.

Then came the copyright transfer issue. WikiSym partnered with the ACM to publish the proceedings of the conference, and the ACM asked me to transfer my copyright to them. While this is fairly standard in the scientific publishing industry¹, I was surprised by this requirement considering the field of research involved (open collaboration and free knowledge).

I shared my concerns with Phoebe and with Felipe Ortega (Chair of the Program Committee), who reached out to the ACM. The ACM wouldn’t let me release my work under a free license such as Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (CC-by-sa). I felt my research belonged to the Wikimedia community, and I didn’t want to enclose my work within the ACM’s intellectual property prison.

Hence, I refused to sign the copyright transfer form, even though it meant not being able to present my work at WikiSym. In the end, thanks to Phoebe & Felipe’s efforts and discussions with the WikiSym committee, I was allowed to present my work, but only as a lightning talk, and it wasn’t included into the conference proceedings.

I do hope, though, that at some point we’ll be able to move towards a more open access & reuse model², in accord with the philosophy of open collaboration and free works.

Notes

Standard and outrageous, but you don’t have much flexibility when your degree or career depends on it, unless your employer/university encourages you to publish in Open Access journals (like the MIT does). ↩
“Gold”, and not just “green” open access. See The ACM is NOT Open Access, by Michael Mitzenmacher, for more information, and More on the Author Addendum Kerfuffle (and Counterproductive Over-Reaching), by Stevan Harnad, for an opposing view. ↩

Erik Zachte: Wikimedia page views, some good and bad news

2010-07-27T23:31:41+00:00

First the good news: there is new summary report for Wikimedia page views that presents trends for nearly all projects on a single page.

Now the bad news: a few days ago it was established that the server that collects and aggregates log data for all squids could not keep up with all incoming messages, and hence underreported page views. When I suggested that recent page view trends looked very suspicious Tim Starling and Mark Bergsma quickly analyzed the cause and fixed server overload. Kudos to them. For April - July 2010 I could still infer the amount of underreporting from available log files. Counts for these months have been corrected. For earlier months, possibly from Nov 2009 till March 2010 counts are still too low. For details on the error correction see this pdf.

Reports affected: all wikistats reports that are based on dammit.lt hourly log files are affected, notably page view reports and server request reports. The same goes for the monthly Report Card. Earlier editions of the monthly server request reports are not yet corrected like the page view trend reports (maybe just a notice will be added), and of course even though absolute numbers are too low, comparisons are not affected (e.g. market share per browser or OS) . Other sites that build on these log data will be also affected, notably stats.grok.se , trendingtopics, amaglamate.

Gerard Meijssen: A skin for a vertical script

GerardM — 2010-07-27T22:18:00+00:00

The continued work that is done to enable #SignWriting is awesome. The SignWriting script is written top down and, this needs to be reflected in the user interface, the skin. I love the design..

I wonder what a Wikipedia logo would look like :)

Anyway, here is also the video that goes with the blog post. It is in ASL and, the actual blog post does not feature the new skin yet... :)
Thanks,
GerardM

AboutUs: Help Google Find Your Web Pages

2010-07-27T19:15:01+00:00

Sitemap for EnergyTrust.org

You’ve put time, energy — and maybe even money — into building a website for your business. Now how do you tell search engines you’re here?

AboutUs community manager Kristina Weis shares the ins and outs of building a simple HTML sitemap in her latest article for website owners. She explains how a sitemap can up your chances of having your site appear in search results, and tells you how to figure out which type of sitemap is most appropriate for your website.

We want to offer AboutUs.org visitors the best guidance and expertise about using the web to grow one’s business. Please let us know what you want to read about — or let us know what you could write about — by sending me an email: Aliza@AboutUs.org.

Working Wikily: Innovating next practices for philanthropy’s next decade

2010-07-27T18:09:15+00:00

This post is the first in a short series being published at the Intrepid Philanthropist. You can find the original here.

When the Monitor Institute first started its exploration of the evolving “future of philanthropy” ten years ago, I was one of its funders, a program officer at the Packard Foundation. A big part of what we were trying to do was to create an urgency and an awareness that the world around philanthropy was changing, and that if philanthropy was going to remain relevant and achieve its potential in the coming years, the field—and the institutions and individuals within it—were going to need to change too.

Now, ten years and a financial crisis (or two, if you want to count the dot-com bust) later, I’m working on the other side of the coin. The challenge is no longer about convincing anyone that the world around philanthropy is changing. An intimidating range of forces—blurring sectoral roles, new connective technologies, and globalization—are transforming the landscape of public problem solving. We face “wicked problems” (to borrow the language of design theorist Horst Rittel)—large, complex social and environmental challenges that don’t adhere to traditional geographic and disciplinary boundaries, and where both the problem and the solution are often unclear and shifting.

And in this new landscape, the question isn’t about whether and how the world is changing. It’s about how funders can have a greater impact in a world that’s already shifting—and will continue to do so.

But as organized philanthropy in the United States hits its century mark, what’s quite remarkable is that many of the field’s core principles and practices remain remarkably similar to the ones created by John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie when they first created the foundation form 100 years ago. The world around philanthropy is changing much, much faster than philanthropy itself.

So the pressing question for today, and for the future, is about how funders can begin to institute, adapt, and invent practices and approaches that will better fit the emerging environment in which they work. For philanthropic and civic leaders looking to cultivate change in today’s rapidly shifting landscape, simply tweaking the status quo and adopting established best practices won’t be enough. Funders will have to pioneer “next practices”—effective approaches that are well-suited to tomorrow’s more networked, dynamic, and interdependent context.

In our new report, What’s Next for Philanthropy: Acting Bigger and Adapting Better in a Networked World, Katherine Fulton, Barbara Kibbe, and I have put forward our best thinking about the shifting landscape for philanthropy, and about ten key practices and principles that we believe can help funders achieve greater impact in the coming decade. We feel that while the cutting edge of philanthropic innovation over the last decade has been mostly about improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and responsiveness of individual organizations, the next practices of the coming 10 years will have to build on those efforts to include an additional focus on coordination and adaptation—how funders can act bigger and adapt better.

We highlight five practices that funders can use to act bigger:

Understand the context
Pick the right tool(s) for the job
Align independent action
Activate networks
Leverage others’ resources

And five approaches to help them adapt better in the coming decade:

Know what works (and what doesn’t)
Keep pace with change
Open up to new inputs
Share by default
Take smart risks

These practices are by no means new; innovative funders have been doing many of these things, and doing them well, for years. And we certainly don’t pretend that the list is in any way comprehensive. But we believe that these ten practices represent what Chip and Dan Heath (in their new book Switch) refer to as “bright spots”—instances where new strategies are showing especially great promise, especially as emerging tools and approaches catch up with the aspirations of funders in the new context.

Over the next few days, I’ll dive a bit deeper into a number of these next practices, and hope you’ll join me in starting to think intentionally about how we might innovate new ways of working that will become the best practices of the coming decade.

Ziko van Dijk: Ziko

2010-07-27T13:20:10+00:00

Recently, I heard that some teachers find Wikipedia articles (in German) too long and too complicated to use them at school. When I asked a school expert, he had another objection.

It became customary in the German states that pupils have to write a high school paper at the end of their school career. The idea is (among others) to lead pupils to the basics of scientific work, citing sources. But what “sources” are you allowed to use? General reference books, local newspapers, leaflets of commercial and non profit organisations?

The official sites of the 16 German school ministries did not provide an answer, so I asked an expert recommended by North Rhine-Westphalia’s ministry.

Mr. Philipp Portscheller said that high school papers can deal with very different subjects; some pupils write about a theatre project, others about genetics or the acceleration of trains in a station. So there cannot be unified catalogues of what to use as source.

“Wikipedia is popular among pupils, but there are problems when dealing with it, because [Wikipedia] treats subjects at large, and in the end it would be sufficient, when we talk purely about the content, to print the Wikipedia [article].”

Knowing that, the tasks given to pupils are set up in a way that an encyclopedia can be used, but that it does not mean the core of the subject, Mr. Portscheller said.

Aaron Swartz: You Don’t Know John (Maynard Keynes)

2010-07-27T12:46:43+00:00

From the right, Gary Becker writes:

Keynes and many earlier economists emphasized that unemployment rises during recessions because nominal wage rates tend to be inflexible in the downward direction.

From the left, Matt Yglesias writes:

…the Keynesian prescription is not only for the government to run deficits in response to recessions, but to run surpluses in expansions. Thus, the Clinton administration’s fiscal policies were arguably “Keynesian” but the Reagan and (especially) George W Bush administrations were implementing an agenda that flew in the face of Keynes’ ideas much more clearly than anything Angela Merkel’s ever done.

Neither of these are true at all. Pretty much the very first thing Keynes says in the general theory is that downwardly-inflexible nominal wage rates (sticky wages) are a good thing. And he spends a large part of chapter 8 denouncing the practice of saving surpluses (sinking funds).

So where do they get this stuff? While these aren’t the views of Keynes, both these views are held by the so-called “New Keynesians” — people like Paul Krugman and Greg Mankiw, who have tried to shoehorn a moderate version of Keynes into classical economics. These proponents are rather more prominent than more traditional Keynesians like Jamie Galbraith, so political commentators hear their view and assume it’s a faithful representation of Keynes’ own.

Perhaps Keynes was wrong — after all, we shouldn’t slavishly follow the scribblings of some defunct economist. But if so, we should tell the truth and admit we’re disagreeing with Keynes, not expounding his ideas. (Both Yglesias and Becker have not run a correction, despite my emails.) Furthermore, we should actually engage with Keynes’ argument.

On sticky wages, Keynes says that if nominal wages could fall, then nominal costs would fall, which would mean that nominal prices would fall, which means that real wages would end up staying the same.¹ But, even worse, if there was no stickiness at all, nothing would stop nominal wages from falling further and further until eventually everyone was paid zero.² I have never heard the New Keynesians respond to this argument.

On the question of surpluses, Keynes criticizes them as a pointless reduction of aggregate demand. They create unemployment because they take money out of circulation for no real purpose. It’s just supposed to sit around until a “rainy day” when the economy isn’t doing so well. But when that rainy day comes, the reason the economy isn’t doing well is because people are out of work. If that’s true, you can simply print more money to get them back to work without any ill effects. (Printing money only causes inflation at full employment.) You don’t get any benefit from having taken the money out of circulation earlier.³

Both these seem like strong arguments to me. Perhaps that’s why it’s easier to pretend they don’t exist.

Chapter 2:

…if money-wages change, one would have expected the classical school to argue that prices would change in almost the same proportion, leaving the real wage and the level of unemployment practically the same as before, any small gain or loss to labour being at the expense or profit of other elements of marginal cost which have been left unaltered.

↩
Chapter 21:

If, on the contrary, money-wages were to fall without limit whenever there was a tendency for less than full employment, the asymmetry would, indeed, disappear. But in that case there would be no resting-place below full employment until either the rate of interest was incapable of falling further or wages were zero. In fact we must have some factor, the value of which in terms of money is, if not fixed, at least sticky, to give us any stability of values in a monetary system.

↩
Chapter 8:

We must also take account of the effect on the aggregate propensity to consume of Government sinking funds for the discharge of debt paid for out of ordinary taxation. For these represent a species of corporate saving, so that a policy of substantial sinking funds must be regarded in given circumstances as reducing the propensity to consume. It is for this reason that a change-over from a policy of Government borrowing to the opposite policy of providing sinking funds (or vice versa) is capable of causing a severe contraction (or marked expansion) of effective demand.

[…]

Or again, in Great Britain at the present time (1935) [thanks to] the principles of “sound” finance [sinking funds are so large] that even if private individuals were ready to spend the whole of their net incomes it would be a severe task to restore full employment…The sinking funds of local authorities now stand … at an annual figure of more than half the amount which these authorities are spending on the whole of their new developments. [footnote giving the amounts] Yet it is not certain that the Ministry of Health are aware, when they insist on stiff sinking funds by local authorities, how much they may be aggravating the problem of unemployment.

↩

Wikipedia Signpost: Wikipedia Signpost – Volume 6 Issue 30 – 26 July 2010

2010-07-27T03:13:32+00:00

News and notes: New interwiki project improves biographies, and other news
In the news: Wikipedia leads in customer satisfaction, Google Translate and India, Citizendium transition, Jimbo’s media accolade
WikiProject report: These Are the Voyages of WikiProject Star Trek
Features and admins: The best of the week
Discussion report: Controversial e-mail proposal, Invalid AfD
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Single page view
PDF version

EditMe: Product Release: Page Organizer Redesign

2010-07-27T02:16:57+00:00

A new release today makes managing the content on your EditMe site even easier. You can now view and manage the entire tree navigation from the editor of any page with simple drag and drop.

Samuel Klein: Afghanistan memos

2010-07-26T22:37:24+00:00

Not papers, but still: Wow. (The Guardian on Wikileaks)

David Gerard: Link pile.

2010-07-25T23:29:43+00:00

Wikipedia is TERRORIST!!!1! (The court tells him to go away [PDF].)

“Let’s you and him fight! … What do you mean, you’re going to cooperate? Cowards!”

Boy, is Citizendium dead. Specifically, the comments: aggrieved academics burnt by CZ versus the North Korean press office. Car crash television. The objective numbers, with graphs and post-mortem.

New RationalWiki: Adi Da, arXiv, Biofeedback, Ezekiel’s wheel, Luboš Motl. Also, InstantCommons is way cool.

By the way: reward quality investigative journalism and give WikiLeaks some cash. And buy these issues of NYT, der Spiegel and the Guardian and tell them why.

Sue Gardner: suegardner

2010-07-25T18:38:49+00:00

Since joining the Wikimedia Foundation, I’ve hired about 25 people. That means I’ve read thousands of CVs, done hundreds of pre-interview e-mail exchanges and phone calls, and participated in about 150 formal interviews.

With each hire I’ve –and the Wikimedia Foundation as a whole has– gotten smarter about what kinds of people flourish at Wikimedia, and why. The purpose of this post is to share some of what we’ve learned, particularly for people who may be thinking about applying for open positions with us, or participating in our open hiring call.

Let me start with this: The Wikimedia Foundation’s not a typical workplace.

Every CEO believes his or her organization is a special snowflake: it’s essential that we believe it, whether or not it’s true. And when I first joined Wikimedia, my board of trustees would tell me how unusual we were, and I would nod and smile. But really. Once I worked through some initial skepticism, it became obvious that yeah, Wikimedia is utterly unique.

Viewed through one lens, the Wikimedia Foundation is a scrappy start-up with all the experimentation and chaos that implies. But, it’s also a non-profit, which means we have an obligation to donors to behave responsibly and frugally, and to be accountable and transparent about what we’re doing. We’re a top five, super-famous website, which brings additional scrutiny and responsibility. We work closely with Wikimedia volunteers around the world, many of whom are hyper-intelligent, opinionated, and fiercely protective of what they have created. And, our role is to make information freely available to everyone around the world — which means we are more radical than, at first glance, we might appear.

None of those characteristics is, by itself, all that unusual. (Except the super-smart volunteers. They are pretty rare.) But our particular combination is unique, which means that the combination of traits that makes someone a perfect employee for us is unique as well. Here’s what I look for.

Passion for the Wikimedia mission. This is obvious. We’re facilitating the work of millions of ordinary people from around the world —helping them come together to freely, easily, share what they know. We’re responsible for the largest repository of information in human history: more than 16 million articles in 270 languages, accessible to people all over the world. If people aren’t super-excited about that, they have no business working with us.

Self-sufficiency and independence. The Wikimedia Foundation is not a smoothly-sailing ship: we’re building our ship. That means roles-and-responsibilities aren’t always clear, systems and procedures haven’t been tested and refined over time, and there isn’t going to be somebody standing over people’s shoulders telling them what to do. People who work for the Wikimedia Foundation need to be able to get stuff done without a fixed rulebook or a lot of prodding.

That’s normal for all young organizations.

But we’re looking for more than just self-sufficiency. We have found that a streak of iconoclasm is a really strong predictor of success at Wikimedia.

Wikipedia is edited by everyone: contributors represent a dizzying array of socio-political values and beliefs and experiences, as well as different ages, religions, sexualities, geographies, and so forth. In our hiring, we tell people that it isn’t a question of whether working at Wikimedia will push their buttons; it’s just a question of how they will respond once it happens. People who’ve never examined their own assumptions, who embrace received wisdom, who place their trust in credentials and authority: they will not thrive at Wikimedia. And people who are motivated by conventional status indicators: a big office, a big salary, a lot of deference — they won’t either.

An inventive spirit. People who fit in well at Wikimedia tend to like new ideas, to be curious, and driven towards continual improvement. This manifests in simple, obvious ways – they read widely; they like gadgets and puzzles; they make stuff for fun. They are optimists and tinkerers.

Openness. At Wikimedia, we look for evidence that applicants have deliberately stretched themselves and sought out new experiences – maybe they’ve lived outside their home country, they read outside their comfort zone, they’ve explored other belief systems.

Openness means people like to be challenged. They like kicking around ideas, they naturally share and communicate, they’re not defensive or unhealthily competitive. They’re comfortable interacting with a wide range of people, and people are comfortable with them.

Lastly, we look for orientation towards scalability. The Wikimedia Foundation is a very small group of people. It achieves impact by working through and with large numbers of volunteers – the millions of people around the world who create 99.9% of the value in the Wikimedia projects. So in our hiring, we look for people who are oriented towards scale: who reflexively document and share information, who write easily and fluently, who take advantage of channels for mass communication and who instinctively organize and support the work of others.

If I ran Der Spiegel or Yelp or the ACLU, the traits I’d be looking for would be different. (When I worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the people I hired were quite different from the ones I hire today.) And this list will change over time, as the organization changes. This is the list that works for the Wikimedia Foundation, today.

Filed under: Hiring, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia, Workplace Culture

Domas Mituzas: MySQL versions at Wikipedia

2010-07-25T18:36:44+00:00

More of information about how we handle database stuff can be found in some of my talks.

Lately I hear people questioning database software choices we made at Wikipedia, and I’d like to point out, that…

Wikipedia database infrastructure needs are remarkably boring.

We have worked a lot on having majority of site workload handled by edge HTTP caches, and some of most database intensive code (our parsing pipeline) is well absorbed by just 160G of memcached arena, residing on our web servers.

Also, major issue with our databases is finding the right balance between storage space (even though text is stored in ‘external store’, which is just set of machines with lots of large slow disks) – we store information about every revision, every link, every edit – and available I/O performance per dollar for that kind of space needed.

As a platform of choice we use X4240s (I advertised it before) – 16 SAS disks in compact 2u package. There’s relatively small hot area (we have 1:10 RAM/DB ratio), and quite a long tail of various stuff we have to serve.

The whole database is just six shards, each getting up to 20k read queries a second (single server can handle that), and few hundred writes (binlog is under 100k/s – nothing too fancy). We have overprovisioned some hardware for slightly higher availability – we don’t have always available on-site resources – the slightly humorous logic is

we need four servers, in case one goes down, another will be accidentally brought down by fixing person, then you got one to use as a source of recovery and remaining one to run the site.

Application doesn’t have too many really expensive queries, and those aren’t the biggest share of our workload. Database by itself is minor part of where application code spends time (looking at profiling now – only 6% of busy application time is inside database, memcached is even less, Lucene is way up with 11%). This is remarkably good shape to be at, and it is much better than what we used to have when we had to deal with insane (“explosive”) growth. I am sure, pretty much anything deployed now (even sqlite!) will work just fine, but what we used has been created during bad times.

Bad times didn’t mean that everything was absolutely overloaded, it was more that it could get overloaded very soon, if we don’t take appropriate measures, and our fundraisers were much tinier back then. We were using 6-disk RAID-0 boxes to be able to sustain good performance and have required disk space at the same time (or of course, go expensive SAN route).

While the mainstream MySQL development with its leadership back then was headed towards implementing all sorts of features that didn’t mean anything to our environment (and from various discussions I had with lots of people, many many other web environments):

utf8 support that didn’t support Unicode
Prepared Statements that don’t really make much sense in PHP/C environments
unoptimized subqueries, that allow people to write shitty performing queries
later in 5.0 – views, stored routines, triggers
etc…

… nobody was really looking at MySQL performance at that time, and it could have insane performance regressions (“nobody runs these things anyway”, like ‘SHOW STATUS’) and a forest full of low hanging fruits.
From operations perspective it wasn’t perfect either – replication didn’t survive crashes, crash recovery was taking forever, etc.

Thats when Google released their set of patches for 4.0, which immediately provided incredible amount of fixes (thats what I wrote about it back then). To highlight some of introduced changes:

Crash-safe replication (replication position is stored inside InnoDB along with transaction state) – this allowed to run slaves with innodb log flushing turned off on slaves and having consistent recovery, vanilla MySQL doesn’t have that yet, Percona added this to XtraDB at some point in time
Guaranteed InnoDB concurrency slot for replication thread – however loaded the server is, replication does not get queued outside and can proceed. This allowed us to have way more load pointed towards MySQL. This is now part of 5.1
Multiple read-ahead and write-behind threads – again, allowed to bypass certain bottlenecks, such as read-ahead slots (though apparently it is wiser just to turn off read-ahead entirely) – now part of InnoDB Plugin
Multiple reserved SUPER connections – during overloads systems were way more manageable

Running these changes live have been especially successful (and that was way before Mark/Google released their 5.0 patch set which was then taken in parts by OurDelta/Percona/etc) – and I spent quite some time trying to evangelize these changes to MySQL developers (as I would have loved to see that deployed at our customers, way less work then!). Unfortunately, nobody cared, so running reliable and fast replication environments with mainline MySQL didn’t happen (now one has to use either XtraDB or FB build).

So, I did some merging work, added few other small fixes and ended up with our 4.0.40 build (also known as four-oh-forever), which still runs half of shards today. It has sufficient in-memory performance for us, it can utilize our disk capacity fully, and it doesn’t have crash history (I used to tell about two 4.0 servers, both whitebox raid0 machines, having unbroken replication session for two years). By todays standards it already misses few things (I miss fast crash recovery mostly, after last full power outage in a datacenter ;-) – and developers would love to abuse SQL features (hehe, recently a read-only subquery locked all rows because of a bug :-) I’m way more conservative when it comes to using certain features live, as when working at MySQL Support I could see all the ways those features break for people, and we used to joke (this one was about RBR :):

Which is the stable build for feature X? Next one!

Anyway, even knowing that stuff breaks in one way or another, I was running a 5.1 upgrade project, mostly because of peer pressure (“4.0 haha!”, even though that 4.0 is more modern from operations standpoint).

As MediaWiki is open-source project, used by many, we already engineer it for wide range of databases – we support MySQL 4.0, we support MySQL 6.0-whatever-is-in-future, and there’s some support for different vendor DBMSes (at various stages – PG, Oracle, MS SQL, etc) – so we can be sure that it works relatively fine on newer versions.

Upgrade in short:

Dump schema/data
Load schema on 5.1 instance
Adjust schema, as we can do it, set all varchar to varbinary to maintain 4.0 behavior
Load data on 5.1 instance
Fix MySQL to replicate from 4.0 (stupid breakage for nothing)
Switch master to 5.1 instance

We had some 5.0 and 5.1 replicas running for a while to detect any issues, and as there weren’t too many, the switch could be nearly immediate (English Wikipedia was converted 4.0->5.1 over a weekend).

I had an engineering effort before to merge Google 5.0 patches into later than 5.0.37 tree, but eventually Mark left Google for Facebook and “Google patch” was abandoned, long live the Facebook patch! :)

At first FB-internal efforts were to get the 5.0 environment working properly, so 5.1 development was a bit on hold. At that time I cherry-picked some of Percona’s patch work (mostly to get transactional replication for 5.1, as well as fast crash recovery) – and started deploying this new branch. Of course, once Facebook development focus switched to 5.1, maintaining separate branch is becoming less needed – my plan for the future is getting FB build deployed across all shards.

The beauty of FB-build is that development team is remarkably close to operations (and operations team is close to development), and there is lots of focus on making it do the right stuff (make sure you follow mysql@facebook page). The visibility of systems (PMP!) we have at Facebook can be transformed into code fixes nearly instantly, especially when compared with development cycles outside. I’m sure some of those changes will trickle to other trees eventually, but we have those changes in FB builds already here, and they are state of the art of MySQL performance/operations engineering, while maintain great code quality.

Yes, at Wikipedia we run a mix of really fresh and also quite old/frozen software (there will be unification, of course), but…. it runs fine. It isn’t as fascinating anymore as years ago, but it allows not paying any attention for years. Which is good, right? Oh, and of course, there’s full data on-disk compatibility with standard InnoDB builds, in case anyone really wants to roll back or switch to the next-best-fork.

Samuel Klein: Perseverance, integrity, and a pinch of tact

2010-07-25T03:53:28+00:00

We Schorr miss you, Daniel.

Titoxd: Sometimes interesting stuff happens

Titoxd — 2010-07-24T04:24:38+00:00

IMG_9182, originally uploaded by Titoxd.

I've worked on many current-event articles in Wikipedia; however, I cannot remember when a current event happened close enough to me to actually be able to observe it unfold in real time. That happened on Tuesday when the Town Lake west dam collapsed; while I was not on campus at the time, I did track it as soon as news broke on wiki (although to be honest, I reverted the initial reports since nobody in the traditional media had reported it online at the time).

I went to the lake to take pictures of the rupture's aftermath, and I've posted all of them on Flickr. I also posted one in the Wikimedia Commons, and to my delight it has been used by other people in the online community. :) So it feels rather different to be "reporting" on news than to be searching for photographs or articles in the news...

~~~~

Samuel Klein: Citizendium: failure to thrive, in search of peace

2010-07-24T00:59:53+00:00

After early months of interest and glory — peaking in a spike in mailing list traffic that was moderated for being too active — Citizendium’s growth ~~all but shut down~~ levelled off and has declined steadily since 2008. Now it is looking for a long-term home.

I have mixed feelings about Citizendium. I was excited about it in 2006 — at first blush, it offers a serious alternative for expert editors who want to contribute to free knowledge but feel unappreciated or unwelcome at Wikipedia. And in general, compatibly-licensed alternatives to Wikipedia are a very good thing – the whole point of using free licenses is to encourage reuse. But to succeed on the scale of its original dreams, Citizendium must overcome its insularity and make good on its core promise of quality. Not unlike Wikipedia, it is currently known as much for its humorous highlights as for its best work. And it faces the same problems with difficult and misguided editors — some who have quite solid credentials — only with a much smaller community to handle that workload.

I still hope for a proliferation of cousin projects, all competing to find the best way to spur collaboration around free knowledge. There is so much to explore in the way of how to create welcoming communities for different audiences of writers and creators. Community atmosphere, and a limitation in the types of knowledge that can be easily shared, are among Wikipedia’s major bottlenecks. It is welcoming to a narrow[ing?] audience, and if this does not change it may face its own dramatic slowdown in participation – more joyful models are welcome. (My recent favorite, in style, tools, and atmosphere: fotopedia.)

The questions that inspire Citizendium remain: How can we expand collaborative production of educational works to topics that require rare expertise in a field? How can we verify new works as quickly as they are produced, and how much does this speed depend on the commonality of the knowledge involved?

Verification processes are time-consuming, as the slow but steady output of Nupedia, CZ, and even Veropedia show. Since 2006, CZ has produced roughly 150 verified articles (almost triple Nupedia’s output and, well, 150 more than Wikipedia’s own). The featured article and peer review processes on various language Wikipedias are likewise nororiously slow.

CZ and others try to accomplish this by raising the bar for personal credentials of contributors, and increasing the personal responsibility of a group of meta-editors for the quality of work in a topic. Some common dilemmas:

Verifying expertise is difficult without it.
Experts face demand on their time from many projects.
Past expertise is no guarantee of future quality of work.
Professional reputation can be tied to a particular theory.

And a dilemma special to Wikipedia’s commitment to NPOV: experts often have strong opinions about which theories are right and wrong in their fields. How can they contribute in peace to a discussion whose end result will not take a position on which is right?

Two thoughts:

One barrier to participation is the qualification expected of reviewers. We could learn much from how Law Reviews are published, I expect, since the field of Law is unique in depending on its students, still pursuing their degrees, to oversee and produce the most distinguished reviewed publications in the field.
Another is the inflexibility of a “yes/no” review system. Less permanent and reversible ways to validate information can be based on guidelines for fine-grained citation and annotation, and a visible place for review and analysis of a text linked prominently from it. Moreover a review process that formally places works on a spectrum of completion and verification can offer more useful and detailed information than a stamp of approval.

These ideas draw on work by the current assessment process used widely on the French and English Wikipedias. I would be interested to hear thoughts from people familiar with law reviews and other large-scale review processes, or with the CZ verification process or that of other educational wikis.

Working Wikily: The “Green Revolution”: a case of being blinded by the new

2010-07-24T00:03:11+00:00

“New” is a powerful force for getting people excited. New technologies often create new winners and losers, and in the rush to be a winner, or at least find out who the winners will be, many of us end up getting a little ahead of ourselves. This pattern has been on full display in the past year as the complete story of Iran’s “Green Revolution” has emerged. Many of the most respected media outlets in the U.S. reported on the protests in Iran as being powerfully accelerated by the use of Twitter, and the State Department famously asked Twitter to postpone its scheduled maintenance out of concern that the downtime could hamper the protesters’ coordination. But now it turns out that it just wasn’t so: as documented in Foreign Policy and elsewhere, the tweeting was happening outside of Iran, serving only to spread the news from Iran to the world and hardly—if at all—used by the dissidents themselves. There were those who raised questions at the time. For example, we quoted Gaurav Mishra in an interview with BusinessWeek arguing that Iranians’ use of the tools remains “somewhat limited” but that the story was getting attention because “the international media loves [the] social-networking world.”

I think this is an important cautionary tale for anyone leading an organization who is trying to answer the often-asked question: “What’s your social media strategy?” The dangerous answer is, as we’ve mentioned here before, “We’re going to get on Twitter, start a Facebook group, and launch a blog.” Those are answers that focus on the tool, not the outcome. We see the same issue when we talk to people about innovation, which is a process that is often mistaken for a goal. New technology is just like a new process: a means to an end that should always be used with care to serve your underlying organizational needs.

Why is it so common to confuse the two? One reason is the fear of “grasping the nettle,” hoping that the new process or technology will mean that your problem will simply vanish. Another reason, often ignored, is that we in the West tend to have a kind of lightweight messianism in how we see technology. To my eye, part of the reason why the story of the “Twitter revolution” was so easily believed was because many see new technology as simply making the world better. Technology represents progress, an idea that has a special place in American culture, and that feeds into a common attitude that when there’s new technology available that simply using it should solve the problem at hand. But that’s rarely the case and especially rare when the technology is designed to improve the way we interact. The opportunities we see in those technologies for improved relationships, and the ways we grasp those opportunities, have far more impact than the tools’ mere presence. When we fall in love with the newness of a technology, as the media did with Twitter, we can easily be blinded by that unconscious belief that it will simply whisk us off into a brighter world. But of course, new technologies merely open the door. It is up to use to step through.

AboutUs: The Social Web Can Help You Grow

2010-07-23T19:15:08+00:00

Sometimes it seems like every business on the planet has a Facebook page or a Twitter feed — or both. But it’s one thing to set these up, and another to use these popular social networking tools effectively.

Pick up some tips on using these popular social sites from AboutUs community manager Kristina Weis. She shares ideas for what news you can share, and advice for building real relationships with your customers on both Facebook and Twitter.

AboutUs uses both Facebook and Twitter to communicate what we’re doing, and to listen to what our community members have to say. Our experience has been very positive, and yours can be, too.

Guillaume Paumier: Wikimedia Multimedia UX testing videos

2010-07-23T09:29:54+00:00

Over the past few months, I’ve been coordinating the preparation of a formal User experience (UX) study for the Multimedia usability project. Basically, it means observing how “real” users interact with the Wikimedia Commons in order to improve it. Videos of the testing have now been published in order to share them with the community.

The observation room at the testing facility; the testing is happening in the background, behind the semi-transparent glass (CC-by-nc by Neil Kandalgaonkar).

Getting there

We reached out to some UX firms and published a Call for proposals in February. Several firms submitted proposals; after serious consideration, we chose to work with gotomedia, a San Francisco-based firm that seemed to align best with our goals & values.

The study was planned to take place in March, but was postponed because the prototype was not ready. In the meantime, we asked some of our co-workers to test it in order to uncover the most obvious flaws & bugs.

Goals & testing conditions

A few weeks ago, the actual testing eventually took place. We tested ten users: five locally in San Francisco, and five remotely within the US. We considered conducting similar testing abroad, in order to identify language-specific issues; but in the end, it turned out that we wouldn’t learn a lot by simply replicating the same test script.

Multilingualism on Commons (and Wikimedia websites generally) is a huge piece of work that deserves dedicated efforts, and dedicated UX studies. The main reason for which we decided to hold the testing halfway through the project, and not at its very beginning, was that we could test both the current upload interface, and our prototype.

On the one hand, during our preliminary research phase, we identified a large number of issues with the current interface; but we still needed to formally record the user experience and validate our preliminary conclusions. On the other hand, we wanted to do a reality-check with our prototype, to see if the direction we had chosen was appropriate, and to identify areas of improvement.

Highlight videos

The testing sessions went pretty smoothly. The gotomedia folks did a fantastic job at preparing the “highlight videos” in time for our conferences in Gdańsk (WikiSym & Wikimania). The audiences really liked them, although we didn’t have time to show all of them.

Highlight videos are edited summaries of the main findings of the study. In our case, we have three highlight videos: one about the testing of the current interface on Commons, one about the testing of the prototype, and the last one about how we could improve the prototype.

Long story short: the current interface is a nightmare, and the prototype is way better, even if there are some minor things to improve. The good news is, all the items to improve were already planned features at the time of testing, and they have either already been added, or will be before the upload wizard is released.

Namely, one of the main remaining issues is the fact that users don’t really understand copyright and free licenses. That’s why we’ve been working on a licensing tutorial at the same time, to be released jointly with the new upload wizard.

See for yourself

The highlight videos are now available on Wikimedia Commons; per our agreement with gotomedia, all the videos were released under the Creative Commons Attribution – Share alike 3.0 license.

In the tradition of Wikipedia’s Neutral point of view policy, we’ll try to upload the unedited videos to Commons as well, in order to let the community draw their own conclusions.

If you would like to draw our attention to things we’ve missed, or even edit your own highlight videos yourself, you are warmly invited to do so. You can watch the highlight videos below (if it works) or on Commons. The links to Commons are available below if you want to download the video files on your computer.

Your feedback and comments are much welcome.

Current interface highlight video

Prototype highlight video

Room for improvement highlight video

Files

Current interface testing: File page on Commons – Download OGV file (4m11s, 29.89 MB)
Prototype testing: File page on Commons – Download OGV file (5m32s, 35.43 MB)
Room for improvement: File page on Commons – Download OGV file (3m51s, 23.02 MB)

David Gerard: Nazi Goatse, part 94.

2010-07-22T19:05:54+00:00

Wikimedia has set up an investigation into the question of contentious content on the projects. Sexual content, violent content, pictures of Muhammad. The stuff that’s legal, but whose very existence offends people.

My sympathy goes out to the poor sods charged with the study. I’d be hard put to think of a more poisoned chalice. No matter what they come up with, they will be called Nazis and worse. And whatever they come up with will change no minds whatsoever and be hideously distorted — if they said “the best thing for Wikimedia is a goatse at the top of all pages,” someone would say “yes, and this is why anyone advocating images purporting to be Muhammad should be beheaded.”

The meta talk page has already been swooped upon by the usual participants and reduced to somewhat worse than uselessness.

I can reiterate my basic argument, as father of a three-year-old and stepfather of two teenagers.

The Wikimedia communities are sufficiently painstaking in making sure everything is educational and in context that I’d happily let my daughter in front of Wikimedia unrestricted. Anything sexual or horrifying would be informative and in context.

The community works incredibly hard to make the contentious stuff good. Any kid who looks up “fuck” on English Wikipedia will come away considerably educated, for example!

The last shock I got from Wikipedia was when I followed a link on another site to Cock ring, and was confronted with a large, shiny, erect penis. With, of course, a cock ring on it. Not something I’d care to have pop up on the screen at work … on the other hand, I have no reason to be going to an article on cock rings at work. I think the article was entirely reasonable and the use of the picture was entirely reasonable.

Then there is the issue of important photos of war and so on that are absolutely horrifying. They should be in the encyclopedia, even if merely describing some of them makes my stomach do flip-flops.

I think experience shows that the Wikimedia communities take their responsibility to educate seriously enough that “Wikipedia is not censored” is sufficient in practice. I have seen no cases that would lead me to think otherwise.

As noted in the most recent foundation-l reiteration of the Muhammad image discussion, Wikimedia has a firm bias to more information rather than less. It’s right there in the mission statement. Increasing, not decreasing, knowledge is why the community is here at all. If you go against the statement and expectation that more information is better than less information — even if the information is horrible and shocking — the community will not accept it. If the Foundation forces filtering on the community, the community will get up and leave. As Milos Rancic noted, implementing any of the recommendations on that meta talk page will promptly lead to a fork. As it should — insulting your community in such a manner is an excellent way to get rid of them.

Filtering should be left to third parties. The SOS Children Wikipedia for Schools is an excellent example, and it’s quite popular and won’t get a teacher fired. Other than that, I’ve seen no evidence of actual demand for a filtered Wikimedia from end users — only from people who want to filter the projects themselves at the source.

One perennial proposal is for images in given categories to be hidden from view for logged-in users. This is an idea I like, as it puts control in the hands of the viewer rather than third parties. All it requires is someone to code something that passes muster with Tim and Domas as unlikely to melt the servers.

Jeroen De Dauw: MediaWiki Deployment: Modifying the new installer

2010-07-22T17:09:00+00:00

I got a new diagram!!!1!11!! It’s based on my previous one, but slightly more elaborate, and a lot less messy, as I now used Dia to create it

Legend:

Striped lines: Existing components where code will be copied from, or based upon.
Full lines: Components of the complete deployment model.
Thick full lines: Core components (of the deployment model) that I definitely want to have completed during GSoC.

Since my previous post about my Google Summer of Code project I have been poking at the new MediaWiki installer to see what’s there already, how it is there, and how I can integrate it with the above deployment model. I’ve made a bunch of style and documentation improvements while going over the code, and renamed some things to make more sense. And I had Tim Starling clean up a bad svn commit I made

So what I’m doing now is splitting the current ‘Installer’ class, which is part of the new installer, into 2: Installer and CoreInstaller. Installer will hold general installer functionality and be part of the whole deployment model, while CoreInstaller will hold installer functionality specific to core, and will be part of the new installer. After that I can create an initial version of CoreInstallers counterpart: ExtensionInstaller.

AboutUs: Followed Links Return to AboutUs.org

2010-07-22T17:00:47+00:00

You might remember our May announcement that we would cease following external links on AboutUs.org, pending a review of our policies and practices. We’re happy to say that we’ve completed the review, and we’re once again selectively following external links on our site.

As before, the default for our site is not to follow external links until an editorial review by our staff determines that they offer real value to AboutUs.org visitors. We’ve resumed following links on all pages created by community members that we’d previously reviewed and that had followed links.

As we said in the original blog post, our decision to no-follow stemmed from the confusion we’d caused by following external links in content we’d been paid to create. We had given the impression of selling links, an activity that’s frowned on by Google, and one that we ourselves don’t endorse.

We still won’t be following links in any content we are paid to create.

As always, we welcome edits by community members who want to share their knowledge of websites. If you edit the AboutUs domain page for a website you think is great, you may request an editorial review by emailing DoFollow@AboutUs.org. If you’ve added good information to the AboutUs page, one of our staff will review the website you’ve written about. We’ll follow the links if we agree the site is valuable for AboutUs visitors.

Our goal is to create a place for people who want to find websites on the topics that interest them, and for website owners and operators who want to promote their sites. We made the decision to resume following external links so we could serve you better.

—-
Note: Two days ago, community manager Kristina Weis emailed a handful of people who had contacted us personally about the change to no-follow, letting them know that we have returned to following external links after an editorial review. Carter Cole blogged about the change. We’ve heard from a few more people that they’re happy we’re following links again.

If you have any questions or concerns about link following on AboutUs.org, email Help@AboutUs.org.

EditMe: Spotlight On: Learn it in 5

2010-07-22T13:04:56+00:00

With 75 percent of Millennials, or people ages 18-29, using social media, Learn It In 5's powerful library of how-to videos, produced by technology teachers, helps teachers and students create classroom strategies for today's 21st century's digital classroom. Mark Barnes tells us why he's selected EditMe as the platform for this new community site for teachers in this latest installment of Spotlight On: Learn It In 5.

Guillaume Paumier: Wikimedia at KDE Akademy 2010

2010-07-22T09:28:32+00:00

Three weeks ago, I attended the KDE Akademy 2010 conference in Tampere, Finland. My colleague Parul also came along. We gave a talk entitled Wikimedia User Experience programs: lowering the barriers of entry. Basically, we presented the work done as part of the Wikipedia usability initiative, and the Multimedia usability project.

and it was fun.

Shared values & challenges

It might seem odd for Wikimedia to be presenting at KDE Akademy: Wikimedia is mostly about online content, while KDE is mostly about desktop software. Yet, they share common goals & values.

On the one hand, a common criticism made against KDE is its feature creep: the tendency to allow for maximum customizability in KDE often comes at the price of simplicity and ease of use.

On the other hand, MediaWiki, the software on which rely Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia websites, suffers from the same flaws: it has always been “designed” by developers. As a consequence, the interface reflects the implementation model, and often doesn’t match, or even conflicts with, the user’s mental model. The Wikimedia Foundation recently started to include user research and design as part of their development cycle, where user experience is taking a increasingly critical role.

Our presentation at Akademy was an opportunity to share experience. Both KDE and Wikimedia communities struggle to improve complex interfaces, and both communities have a lot to learn from each other.

Wikimedia and KDE also have more practical ties: Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. and KDE e.V. used to share an office a few years ago. I’ll take this opportunity to thank Claudia Rauch for inviting us to submit a proposal for Akademy this year.

Presentation slides & video

Thanks to KDE e.V. and their awesome volunteers, the full video of our talk (and the follow-up discussion) is available, along with all the other videos, from the Akademy schedule page. A slightly edited version is also available from Wikimedia Commons; you can also download the file to your computer (Download – OGV, 162 MB). Or, you can watch it below, if it works.

The presentation slides aren’t very useful alone, but they’re also available on Commons if you want to take a look or watch them alongside the video (Download – PDF, 2.2 MB).

Meeting the KDE community

I’ve had some interaction with the KDE community before. I used to live in the same city as one of the lead KDE developers, and we belonged to the same LUG. I’m also familiar with the digiKam community, with whom I’ve been working on and off.

Besides our presentation, Akademy was also an opportunity to get together with the “gearheads”, to discuss collaboration opportunities, and of course to get my debugging duck.

« Take the duck from your desk, look at your code and explain to the duck - line by line - what it does. »

Working hand in hand

We had planned to hold a more hands-on workshop to discuss practical common projects between the two KDE & Wikimedia communities. Unfortunately, I had to leave Tampere early to fly to Gdańsk for WikiSym & Wikimania. I didn’t have much time to explore the city either, which is a pity; Tampere is a quaint little city, and the surroundings looked really charming.

I would still like to work on common projects, as I think there’s a huge potential for a better integration of Wikimedia websites with the desktop. Since I’ve been thinking about this for a while, I have a few ideas of my own: mass upload tool, offline wiki editor, desktop widgets (e.g. for Wiktionary, FAOTD, POTD), application plugins (e.g. to find media files from Commons from within an application), instant messaging with other Wikimedia editors, etc. That said, I would also like to collect ideas & feedback.

So, what Wikimedia content would you like to access from your desktop? For what use? What desktop tool would facilitate your editing or reading of Wikimedia projects?

OmegaWiki: So we like #Commons

GerardM — 2010-07-22T00:15:00+00:00

Yesterday Kipcool surprised us with a more visible link to Wikipedia, today he added Commons to it as well. Commons is essentially different in that there is only one link to Commons per concept.

When you look for pictures of a horse at Google or Bing, it makes a big difference in what language you are looking for that animal. If you look for instance for an "សេះ" you will find far fewer horses.

This is what it looks like in Arabic. As there is an annotation referring to the Arabic Wikipedia article, the Arabic article is selected.
Thanks,
GerardM

EditMe: Ways to Wiki: Create Happy Clients

2010-07-21T16:47:21+00:00

Email is not an effective medium to run an entire business or consulting project. Here are three reasons why using collaboration sites as client portals can really supercharge your consulting efforts and create happy clients.

OmegaWiki: So we like #Wikipedia ...

GerardM — 2010-07-20T21:46:00+00:00

Every now and then, I am happily surprised with new functionality for OmegaWiki. This time Kipcool made our existing Wikipedia visible. When there are references to a Wikipedia article, he will point you to the article in your language.

The expression dólar shows the Dutch Wikipedia article for me. It will show the Spanish article for Ascander and the English article for Kipcool (the French and German article are not linked yet).

The link is added to the page with Javascript. This prevents additional load on our server. I hope you like it, it is an other excellent reason to dig into our annotions.
Thanks,
GerardM

AboutUs: Win New Business with Email

2010-07-20T19:11:01+00:00

If you own a business, it’s smart to send emails to customers and prospects who have opted in to receiving them. Sharing product updates and company news can bring people back to your website. Do it right, and they might even mention you to their friends.

AboutUs community manager Kristina Weis sends an email newsletter to our community members whenever we have something interesting to share. Her new article, Tips for Sending Email Newsletters, offers her hard-won wisdom about how to get the best results from your email marketing efforts.

In fact, Kristina is sending out the latest AboutUs newsletter this week. If you’re already on the list, you’ll receive it soon. If you aren’t, you can easily sign up for all our news and tips.

Have you learned something important about promoting your business on the web? Would you like to author an article on AboutUs.org? If so, contact Aliza@AboutUs.org.

User:Bawolff: image metadata

Bawolff — 2010-07-20T19:38:51+00:00

I thought I'd write a blog post about my google summer of code project. I've never been much of a blogger, but I see lots of my fellow gsoc'ers blogging, so I thought I'd write a post. My project is to try to improve mediawiki's support for image metadata. Currently mediawiki will extract metadata from an image, and put a little table at the bottom of the image page detailing all the metadata (for example, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%C3%89cole_militaire_2545x809.jpg#metadata ).

However this is far from all the metadata embedded in an image. In fact mediawiki currently only extracts Exif metadata. Exif metadata is arguably the most popular form of metadata, so if you're going to only extract one, Exif is a good choice. Every time you take a picture with your digital camera, it adds exif data to your picture. Most of this type of data is technical - fNumber, shutter speed, camera model, etc. You can also encode things like Artist, copyright, image description in exif, however that is much more rare.

What I'm doing is first of all fixing up the exif support a little bit. Currently some of the exif tags are not supported (Bug 13172). Most of these are fairly obscure tags no one really cares about, but there are some exceptions like GPSLatitude, GPSLongitude, and UserComment.

I'm also (among other things) adding support for iptc-iim tags. IPTC-IIM is a very old format for transmitting news stories between news agencies. Adobe adopted parts of this format to use for embedding metadata in jpeg files with photoshop. Now a days its being slowly replaced by XMP, but many photos still use it. IPTC metadata tends to be more descriptive (stuff like title, author, etc) in nature compared to how exif metadata is technical (aperature, shutter speed) in nature.

My code will also try to sort out conflicts. Sometimes there are conflicting values in the different metadata formats. If an image has two different descriptions in the exif and iptc data, which should be displayed? Exif, IPTC, or both? Luckily for me, several companies involved in images got together and thought long and hard about that issue. They then produced a standard for how to act if there is a conflict [1]. For example If both iptc and exif data conflict on the image description, then the exif data wins.

Consider [[File:2005-09-17 10-01 Provence 641 St Rémy-de-Provence - Glanum.jpg]]

On commons the metadata table looks like:

Camera manufacturer	CASIO COMPUTER CO.,LTD
Camera model	EX-Z55
Exposure time	1/800 sec (0.00125)
F Number	f/4.3
Date and time of data generation	14:21, 28 September 2005
Lens focal length	5.8 mm
Orientation	Normal
Horizontal resolution	72 dpi
Vertical resolution	72 dpi
Software used	Microsoft Pro Photo Tools
File change date and time	14:21, 28 September 2005
Y and C positioning	1
Exposure Program	Normal program
Exif version	2.21
Date and time of digitizing	14:21, 28 September 2005
Image compression mode	3.6666666666667
Exposure bias	0
Maximum land aperture	2.8
Metering mode	Pattern
Light source	Unknown
Flash	Flash did not fire, compulsory flash suppression
Color space	sRGB
Custom image processing	Normal process
Exposure mode	Auto exposure
White balance	Auto white balance
Focal length in 35 mm film	35
Scene capture type	Standard
Contrast	Normal
Saturation	Normal
Sharpness	Normal
North or south latitude	North latitude
East or west longitude	East longitude

But on my test wiki the table looks like:

Camera manufacturer	CASIO COMPUTER CO.,LTD
Camera model	EX-Z55
Exposure time	1/800 sec (0.00125)
F Number	f/4.3
Date and time of data generation	14:21, 28 September 2005
Lens focal length	5.8 mm
Latitude	43° 46′ 21.35″ N
Longitude	4° 50′ 1.34″ E
Orientation	Normal
Horizontal resolution	72 dpi
Vertical resolution	72 dpi
Software used	Microsoft Pro Photo Tools
File change date and time	14:21, 28 September 2005
Y and C positioning	Centered
Exposure Program	Normal program
Exif version	2.21
Date and time of digitizing	14:21, 28 September 2005
Meaning of each component	Y Cb Cr does not exist
Image compression mode	3.66666666667
Exposure bias	0
Maximum land aperture	2.8
Metering mode	Pattern
Light source	Unknown
Flash	Flash did not fire, compulsory flash suppression
Supported Flashpix version	0,100
Color space	sRGB
File source	DSC
Custom image processing	Normal process
Exposure mode	Auto exposure
White balance	Auto white balance
Focal length in 35 mm film	35
Scene capture type	Standard
Scene control	None
Contrast	Normal
Saturation	Normal
Sharpness	Normal

Most notably, GPS information is now supported. As a note, the wikipedia links for camera model are a commons customization, which is why they don't appear on my test output.

As another example, consider [[file:Pöstlingbahn TFXV.jpg]]. On commons, it has no metadata extracted. (It does have some information about the image on the page, but this was all hand-entered by a human). On my test wiki, the following metadata table is generated:

Image title	Triebfahrzeug Nr. XV der Pöstlingbergbahn bei der Rangierfahrt an der Bergstation
Author	Erich Heuer
Date and time of data generation	8 April 2006
Copyright holder	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/de/deed.de
Headline	Pöstlingbergbahn Triebfahrzeug XV
Special instructions	Eastman Kodak Company, Kodak CX7430; 1/181 sec; F 9.51; Farbmanagement; 640 x 526 Pixel
Source	Erich Heuer, Dresden
Object name	Pöstlingbahn TF XV
City shown	Linz-Pöstlingberg
Province or state shown	Oberösterreich
Country shown	Republik Österreich
Keywords	Bergbahn, Pöstlingbergbahn, Linz

I'm almost done with iim metadata, and plan to start working on XMP metadata soon. If your curious, all the code is currently in the img_metadata branch. You can also look at the status page which I will try to update occasionally.

Cheers,
Bawolff

Jeroen De Dauw: MediaWiki.org user page 1 year

2010-07-20T01:57:13+00:00

Today my MediaWiki.org user page is one year old – I created the first version on July 20, 2009. With my SVN account also approaching it’s first birthday, I can now say I’m doing MediaWiki development for a year. A lot has happened in this year.

I created the Maps and Semantic Maps extensions, and have continues releasing big and small updates the whole year long. At the end of 2009 I created the Validator extension to facilitate parameter handling in Maps and Semantic Maps. In early 2010 I was contracted by the Wikimedia Foundation to create the Storyboard extension, and by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to do work on Semantic MediaWiki. In May 2010 I started working on my Google Summer of Code 2010 project to create an extension management platform for MediaWiki. In between all these things I made various contributions to other extensions, including Semantic Forms, Semantic Internal Objects, Page Object Model, Semantic Compound Queries, Semantic Result Formats and Approved Revisions.

Next to all the code I created and released, I also attended several events and gave a number of presentations. These events include SMWCamp 2009 in Karlsruhe, the Berlin developers workshop in April and Wikimania 2010 in Gdansk.

I’m currently all time MediaWiki comitter #18, with 1080 commits. Looking forward to all the awesome stuff I can do in the coming year

Samuel Klein: Hamming on doing great work, in any field

2010-07-19T23:43:56+00:00

Read this transcript of a great public speech about how to do great science, by R. W. Hamming. This sort of good advice is timeless… as are many of his works.

Wikipedia Signpost: Wikipedia Signpost – Volume 6 Issue 29 – 19 July 2010

2010-07-19T17:23:20+00:00

News and notes: Politician defends editing own article, Google translation, Row about a small Wikipedia
In the news: Wikimania, Former Wikimedia employee looks back, Editing controversial articles
Vandalism: Vandalism edits fool media and a government, become object of bets
WikiProject report: Up close with WikiProject Animals
Features and admins: The best of the week
Arbitration report: ArbCom to appoint CU/OS positions after dumping election results
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Single page view
PDF version

Jeroen De Dauw: MediaWiki testing with PHPUnit

2010-07-18T22:26:46+00:00

I figured having some unit tests for Maps, the MediaWiki extension to work with geographical data and display it by embedding dynamic maps into your articles, would be beneficial to it’s quality. It’s pretty hard to try cover all possible use cases with manual tests, and consumes a lot of time in any case. I therefore decided to try create some tests for the coordinate parser and formatter class, as it’s arguably the core feature of Maps.

I started off by trying to install plain PHPUnit, which is the most commonly used unit testing framework for PHP. This took me a while, as you are supposed to install it using PEAR (PHP Extension and Application Repository), a repository tool for PHP applications, and has never used this before. After two hours or so of messing around, I got both installed Then I went on investigating how I could best integrate this into my work-flow, and discovered that PHPUnit comes bundled with Zend Studio, seamlessly integrated, working completely out of the box o_O.

I then wrote a test case for the coordinate parsing and formatting class of Maps. I had a hard time getting it to work, as I needed to include MW itself, as the class uses MW functions. After some non-constructive discussion with several fellow MW devs I found a way to get it to work by including the maintenance script entry point, and tricking MW into thinking the call was made from a CLI. I now have a test case for the coordinate class, with tests for most of it’s functionality. Some more test data, and maybe some extra tests would be nice. A tricky thing in the case of this class is founding errors, which are hard to take into account, especially if you only want to allow them to a certain degree.

This particular test case is already paying off, as it made me find 3 subtle errors in coordinate parsing or formatting, that did not show up in my manual tests, as I was not covering the test data causing the issues.

I’m now planning to maybe write test cases for the distance parser to, which should be rather easy to do. I probably won’t create any others for Maps, as it’s rather time consuming, and I have a lot of other things to do right now. When I create new classes that are suited for unit tests in the future, I’ll definitely write tests for them as I build them up though, as it’ll not cost a lot more time then doing manual tests, and will ensure the classes are really solid.

Ziko van Dijk: Ziko

2010-07-18T20:54:54+00:00

On Sunday (July 18th), a major German inner city highway became a piece of community art. The Ruhrschnellweg A40 from Duisburg to Dortmund was inhabited by countless organizations and citizens who presented themselves. And the “Wikipedia Stammtisch Ruhrgebiet” was part of the action. Thanks to Wikimedia Deutschland and Pedia-Press, but above all to our main organiser Benutzer:Wuselig! (pictures)

Wikimedia blog: Work at Wikimedia, Community Department Open Call

2010-07-17T22:03:46+00:00

At Wikimedia we are always looking to innovate – to try new things and see how they work. For instance, right now we’re re-thinking how we fill open positions in our newly formed Community Department. Rather than focus on traditional resources for hiring new talent, we have decided to put out a call to the broad, global audience that visits our projects. We’re focused on casting our net widely – in many languages and countries. Our goal is to find interesting people; people who have unique experience and skills and are interested in working with us.

In order to do this we’re going to try out a few different things, including the addition of a banner to our projects inviting people to Work at Wikimedia/Wikipedia. Keep an eye out for the banners. If you’d prefer to not see them, just click “hide” and it will disappear into the background. If you’re interested though, click through and you’ll find a form with the opportunity to tell us a little bit about yourself.

Here is some information from the Community Department outlining what they are looking to do with this call for submissions:

This year, the Community Department will be hiring for a series of important senior and entry level positions. All positions will involve collaborating and communicating with Wikimedia project contributors and users intensively and publicly, grappling with problems that no one has ever solved before, navigating technological and social challenges and opportunities, and dealing with a high level of complexity and uncertainty. Candidates should have extremely high levels of skill and comfort in communication (especially writing), qualitative and quantitative analysis, management and self-management. Candidates who are not already deeply immersed in online collaborative communities will have to show an aptitude for quickly gaining a deep understanding of our communities’ technologies, practices, traditions and culture — and to become trusted and productive members of the Wikimedia community and movement.

We are especially looking for:

Current Wikimedia community contributors, readers and leaders,

Insightful observers of Wikimedia and other collaborative communities,

People with specialty skill sets (e.g. statistics, ethnography, and probably a lot other things we’ve never thought of),

People belonging to language communities of new and growing Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects,

People with insight into reaching groups currently underrepresented in Wikimedia contributor communities.

Ideal candidates for positions at Wikimedia Foundation’s Community Department:

Have a passion for online communities, self-organizing systems, open and collaborative enterprises, democratic and consensus based societies, and emergent and participatory governance structures — and desperately want to see them succeed and prove the cynics wrong.

Have thought enough about this stuff to have their own opinions and theories on various problems and opportunities facing Wikimedia and other online communities.

Are equally strong dealing with qualitative and quantitative knowledge and research.

Are self-directed, self-motivated, efficient, upbeat, optimistic, and extremely good with people. Wikimedia Foundation staff face intense pressures in highly-demanding roles. While the Wikimedia Foundation team strives to be mutually supportive, it only works when each individual is self-driven to overcome the challenges they face.

Are knowledgeable about software development processes and with database and web technologies.

Are creative non-linear thinkers who will sometimes fight for seemingly crazy ideas by backing them up with logical argument and data.

Are systems-thinkers who love to think about workflow and technology systems inside organizations.

Are multilingual, especially in major world languages and languages with large or growing Wikipedias.

Have insights and experience reaching groups currently underrepresented in Wikimedia communities.

If you are interested in submitting your information for consideration for our Community Department please visit this page and fill out the form.

Thanks for your interest!

-Daniel Phelps, Human Resources & Philippe Beaudette, Community Department

T. Mills Kelly: Be Careful What You Wish For

2010-07-17T21:39:32+00:00

I remember the first time I heard that the history department where I was working on my PhD was going to offer an introductory course called “World History.” Several of us in the TA office had a good chuckle over that one…After all it was hard enough to teach the first or second half of Western Civ/US History. How could anyone offer a course that included the entire world? As I remember, we scoffed at the notion and, well pleased with ourselves, concluded that was World History doomed to fail.

One more example of why historians shouldn’t predict the future…

And, irony of ironies, starting August 16 I will take over as Director of George Mason’s Global Affairs program–a multi-disciplinary program with 650 BA students and 25 MA students in a new graduate program. I’ve been running the MA program since it’s inception last year and have enjoyed it immensely, but am more than a little nervous about taking over our College’s fourth largest undergraduate major.

Why, you might ask? For one thing, I’m going to run a very large undergraduate program with no faculty. Such is the nature of multi-disciplinary studies in America. With no faculty, it will be difficult to plan a consistent curriculum for our students. For another, I’m not sure how one assesses the results of learning in a multi-disciplinary context. Regular readers of this blog know that learning is at the top of my list of concerns when it comes to our students and the curriculum they are following. I can already foresee a new reading list growing in front of me.

So if you have any good suggestions for books, articles, or whatever that will help me make sense of how to assess learning in a multi-disciplinary undergraduate program, please suggest them in the comment field below. I need all the help I can get…

Chad: Updaters

2010-07-17T14:12:45+00:00

I blogged about picking up Tim’s new installer branch last summer. I worked on it with a lot of help from Max and demo’d it in Berlin. Since Berlin, Ævar, Siebrand and Mark have joined in and it’s getting a whole lot closer to being done. It’s in trunk, the installation runs pretty smoothly. Updates are still a pain in the ass.

Database upgrades suck when you have to maintain them for multiple DBMSes. In working on the new installer (and associated updater refactoring), we’ve come up against a very annoying wall: maintaining versioned updates for databases gets to be difficult. With varying levels of support, the only schema that is guaranteed to work–provided someone didn’t break trunk–is mySQL. We maintain a list of of patch files to be applied, in order, on each upgrade. This list is kept up to date for mySQL; SQLite generally just works with mySQL’s syntax so it’s pretty close behind in support. Postgres tends to lag a few hours or days (and maintains its own set of update sequences, actually). Oracle doesn’t do patch files, but does update its default schema…so updates aren’t really possible except manually. Ibm_Db2 is all but abandoned, and Mssql was removed.

I briefly experimented with abstracting the whole schema to a big array of table definitions, but this was going to take too much work so the work was split off into a branch. One day I’d like to go back to this–done properly, it would cure our schema woes forever. Left with no other solution, Max forced the current updaters to run from the web, grabbing the output and throwing it back at the user. This is bad for a couple of reasons.

Updates can take a long time to run, especially if you have big tables. The fact that we run every update every time you try to upgrade wastes cycles.
It makes it impossible to localize along with the rest of the installer, all of the updaters output is hardcoded.
Without a clearly defined interface, it’s hard to get information back to the user and they’re left reading the output from update.php. Did the script warn or fail completely? Can we proceed?

So I decided to refactor things a bit. First I changed the updatelog table to contain an optional ul_value column (it already had ul_key). I moved the array of updates into their own class, so we can at least visually separate the list from the implementation. I then moved some of the core logic out of updaters.inc into a new Update class. Issue number one is pretty much mitigated now, since the new class logs which updates are performed, so it won’t needlessly repeat updates. Issues 2 and 3 are more possible now, since we could (haven’t yet) implement an output callback system like I did for Installer::performInstallation().

SQLite was easy, and Oracle just has a dummy implementation for now. Postgres is another beast entirely. Like I mentioned above, it maintains its own update sequence. Parts of it make sense, parts of it don’t, but none of it is designed like the others. Basically needs to be rewritten entirely.

For the new-installer to be complete by the time 1.17 rolls out, we need to pick up the pace. The time for new features is pretty much over and we need to start closing up the last few bugs. Updates are a blocker still. They’re a bit better than they were, but it’s still got a lonnnggg way to go before we’re done maintaining patch files for each DBMS. As always, bugs in the new installer can go here or in Bugzilla.

Sue Gardner: suegardner

2010-07-17T02:06:26+00:00

Every non-profit has two main jobs: service delivery (which is the mission work, the reason the non-profit exists) and revenue generation (how you pay for the costs of service delivery). If a non-profit is lucky, the two are aligned and support each other. But that’s rare — it’s more common for them to be completely disconnected, and often they’re in flat-out conflict.

When I started working at the Wikimedia Foundation in 2007, I wanted us to experiment with revenue generation. So we spent about two years doing a bit of everything: making friends with grant-making institutions, cultivating major donors, developing business deals, and running various forms of online fundraising including our annual campaign, mobile giving, and so forth.

The stand-out winner was online fundraising. It makes perfect sense: Wikipedia has 371 million unique visitors every month, and if even a tiny fraction of those people donate, we will easily cover costs. And that’s exactly what happens. New graduates give us 50 or 100 dollars for helping them as they go through school. Little kids donate, or their parents donate on their behalf. And all kinds of ordinary people around the world give every day, because they used Wikipedia to help them plan a trip, or understand a medical condition, or settle a bar bet, or get a job, or satisfy their abstract intellectual curiosity. People use it and they like it, so they want to make sure it sticks around.

So, the “many small donations” model makes sense for Wikipedia, because it aligns fundraising with the rest of the Wikimedia movement: it makes it global, and it empowers ordinary people. It also enables us to stay focused on our own mission and strategy, rather than being pulled off-course by large funders’ needs and desires. It makes us independent. It creates the right incentives: it supports us being accountable and responsive to readers. It reduces the risk that donors will grow (inappropriately) to be more valued by us than editors. It’s scalable, it minimizes risk and it’s replicable and transferable – so, it enables us to help equip our chapter organizations to fundraise too.

So, newly this year, the Wikimedia Foundation is reorienting our revenue generation strategy towards small donors, away from institutional support and earned income. This is good: there are lots of happy consequences. One is that I personally will have more free time.

Practically all Executive Directors complain that they spend way too much time fundraising. I never really felt that way. Wikipedia has never spent a single dollar on advertising, and so it hasn’t necessarily been well understood. I find people have all kinds of misconceptions about Wikipedia, and there are lots of interesting things about it that they don’t know: I’m happy to help them understand it better.

But there is an opportunity cost to fundraising – essentially, any hour that I spend thinking about donor cultivation, is an hour I’m not spending thinking about the work we’re trying to get done.

So I’m happy that beginning this year, I will have more time to dedicate to talking to Wikimedia editors, and thinking about the work Wikimedians are engaged in. This blog is part of that. I plan this year to do more “office hours” on IRC, to have more unstructured time to talk with Wikimedians, and to spend some time writing here.

I’m looking forward to it :-)

Filed under: Fundraising, Revenue, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia

Jeroen De Dauw: Zend Server for more awesomeness

2010-07-17T01:02:07+00:00

About a year back I decided I had to change my development environment from working on a remote server with a simple text editor to something more solid, if I wanted to do serious PHP development.

I went for Eclipse as IDE, which is without a doubt the most awesome IDE out there, as it’s completely open source, robust, and has a lot of extensions that make it usable for an awful lot of languages. For PHP there is the open source PHP Development Tools Project, and the commercial Eclipse based IDE build on top of this, Zend Studio. At that point having my development environment as mobile as possible was rather important, as I often occupied machines other then my laptop or my own desktop. Therefore I put both Eclipse and my server on an usb.

Now, a year later, a lot has changed, and I finally updated my tools accordingly. First of all, I’m now also using Linux, and plan to leave Windows into the dust bin soon, so prefer tools that work on both operating systems. Secondly, I now only develop on my laptop and own desktop machine, so portability is not as important any more. Also, I’m now doing a lot more serious PHP development as I was doing a year ago, and would benefit a lot from more decent debugging, testing and profiling tools.

What I did was throwing out my mobile web server and install Zend Studio, together with Zend Server Community Edition (which is free). They integrate in such a way that you can do code tracing, work with breakpoints, profile code, ect, all out of the box. If you are developing PHP applications like me and in search for a good tool, I can definitely recommend this. Zend Studio isn’t free, but it’s worth the price. Not going into a complete list of awesome stuff PDT and Zend Studio include, but this blog post, although a little dates, does a good job at it.

It’ll take me a while to integrate these features into my work-flow, as I’m not used to having them available, but I expect this to start paying off rather soon then late Also waiting on a new release of Zend Studio build on Eclipse 3.6 (Helios).

(O yeah, can’t write a post about Eclipse without saying: NetBeans fails )

Ziko van Dijk: Ziko

2010-07-16T14:11:37+00:00

So who or what is 'shit' here?

Once upon a time, I argued with a Wikipedian, let’s call him Johnny. As some German (and certainly also other) Wikipedians believe, it is okay to call an article ‘shit’ if that is their judgement.

I, on the contrary, think that this is a personal attack against the writer of the article; it is just two small steps from ‘this article is shit’ via ‘you are the author of a shit article’ to ‘you are shit’.

But Johnny contested that and held up the freedom of speech. Calling an article ‘shit’ can never be a personal attack, it is a proper judgment about an article, not about the author. The author cannot feel being attacked at all. It’s simply a different opinion about article quality.

So what, I insisted, if you are visiting a friend? You can’t say ‘your curtains look shit’ either. But why not, Johnny answered. The friend could never be attacked by such a statement, maybe the producer of the curtain, and even he couldn’t. You simply have a different taste, then.

I gave up. It would not have helped to explain to him that a person is defined by his or her actions, tastes, opinions. The link between these things and the person is always there and should be considered when criticising.

Some time later, I met Johnny again. We had a nice conversation, and I suddenly I said: ‘Hey, your glasses look really shit!’ He saw my serious face and wanted to know: ‘Wh-what? Do you think they are dirty?’ – ‘No, that’s not the point. But they are so old-fashioned and stupid. Did you choose them by yourself?’

Johnny became quite upset, and finally shouted at me: ‘Shit yourself!’

Then I found it more than necessary to tell him that I was just trying out his reaction, referring to our argument about the phrase ‘this article is shit’. He smiled like a farmer with tooth ache and declared his reaction wrong, that he should have taken my alleged opinion more relaxed, yeah.

Well. I know that this is Panzerfaust pedagogics. I apologised, and I promise that I’ll never do this again. I just enjoyed the satisfaction so much.

Shankbone: Looking Glass Magazine publishes Black Issue with Shankbone article on cover

2010-07-16T01:55:18+00:00

I photographed for Wikipedia the awesomely huge anti-Proposition 8 demonstration organized by Andy Towle and Michelangelo Signorile back in 2008. One of my favorite photographs from the protest was this one.

Is gay the new black? I was approached by Looking Glass Magazine to write an article about that and the relationship between the ‘black community’ and the ‘gay community’.

I had a lot of complicated thoughts about the topic, and I tried to lay them out simply. It’s a difficult onion to peel. Below is the press release for the ‘Gonzo Anthropology’ magazine’s summer Black Issue:

_______________________________________

New York (PRWEB) July 9, 2010 — Looking Glass Magazine, since 2007, the quarterly “Gonzo Anthropology” journal launches its Black Issue this summer along with new online features. The new issue provocatively features Blacks vs. Gays: What’s the Real Problem? on the cover. The article, by David Shankbone, takes an objective look into new research and asks what lies at the foundation of America’s “culture-wars.” Also included is an “anthropology of fashion” report detailing the history of the black dandy, an original comic book art and fiction from N. Steven Harris, and a featured exclusive interview with poet Amiri Baraka. (Veteran sound engineer Arya Sundar produced the video, which appears on the website.)

“It’s not an attempt at controversy, we are just doing what we always do,” said editor in chief Michael Merriam. “We are getting to the bottom of something in our culture.”

Merriam is no stranger to controversy. Last year, he crossed swords with HBO’s publicity department over an interview in which Bored to Death writer Jonathan Ames was tied to a chair and interrogated by dominatrix JoYin Shih as a feature for the magazine. HBO refused to allow Looking Glass to print photographs of the event.

Merriam denies that there was any real conflict. “They didn’t want us to use photos, so we didn’t, but we didn’t compromise the text at all. Ames had a great time, Yin had a great time, we ran a terrific interview. That’s all.”

Merriam created Looking Glass in 2007 as a pet-project as he worked on various magazines (he’s a former editor in chief of Time Out Istanbul). Looking Glass spiraled into its print and digital form in 2008 following a New Yorker Talk of the Town profile of Merriam’s work in digital publishing and the launch of a fashion magazine for the iPhone.

Looking Glass Magazine was initially conceived to contain twelve sections. “We wanted to laser in – find ultra-niche counter-cultural content,” says Merriam. Though the traditional model of print magazine publishing is rapidly changing, Merriam contends there are no plans to abandon the print edition. “On the contrary, we are always expanding it. Jay Kristopher Huddy creates an extraordinary visual experience out of it, and the magazine just keeps getting more intense every quarter,” he said. “We are completely devoted to print, and we believe it’s the best way to serve our readers.”

Online, at www.lookingglassmagazine.com, two new sections appear this month: a sports section and a science fiction section. The Playing Field is edited by ESPN’s Eno Sarris, who also writes for FanGraphis, Bloomberg Sports and RotoWorld. “The tagline for this blog is ‘the anthropology of sports,’ and it’s a good way to sum this thing up,” said Sarris about the new blog’s in-depth, brainy, and sophisticated perspective on athletic culture.

The science fiction section, a blog called The Observatory, features new fiction by Blair Kroeber and by award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor, as well as an exclusive interview with Samuel R. Delany. The magazine also will encourage writers to submit stories and pay them SFWA minimum or higher for original fiction.

Publisher Paul Nowak, who is also a video game designer, has his own take on Looking Glass and its journalistic mission. “We think of our readers as users and culture hackers.

Issues of LGM are like cultural strategy guides. It makes sense. Video games use context to heighten the sense of importance around certain objects–that’s what we do for our advertisers.”

The print edition can be purchased throughout the United States at the $4.99 price point, and will be available at San Diego Comic Con. Archives can be viewed at www.lookingglassmagazine.com

Possibly related posts

Samuel Klein: Zuck Strikes Back at Systemic Bias

2010-07-15T19:38:53+00:00

At TED Global. (The original Zuck, of course.)

ScienceRoll: Bertalan Meskó

2010-07-15T13:31:12+00:00

A few weeks ago I started a series under the name Social Media Journal Club in which I share peer-reviewed articles that focus on using social media in medicine or healthcare. Enjoy!

Web 2.0 and social software: the medical student way of e-learning.

Wikipedia and osteosarcoma: a trustworthy patients’ information?

The English version of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has been recently reported to be the prominent source of online health information. However, there is little information concerning the quality of information found in Wikipedia. Therefore, we created a questionnaire asking for scope, completeness, and accuracy of information found on osteosarcoma.

Health Information Technology to Facilitate Communication Involving Health Care Providers, Caregivers, and Pediatric Patients: A Scoping Review

This scoping review was designed to map the health literature about HIT used to facilitate communication involving health care providers and caregivers (who are usually family members) of pediatric patients with health conditions requiring follow-up.

A content analysis of smoking fetish videos on YouTube: regulatory implications for tobacco control.

This study examined the prevalence, accessibility, and characteristics of eroticized smoking portrayal, also referred to as smoking fetish, on YouTube. The analysis of 200 smoking fetish videos revealed that the smoking fetish videos are prevalent and accessible to adolescents on the website. They featured explicit smoking behavior by sexy, young, and healthy females, with the content corresponding to PG-13 and R movie ratings.

Online Communication Between Doctors and Patients in Europe: Status and Perspectives

Use of the Internet to communicate with a known health professional is still rare in Europe. Legal context, health policy issues, and technical conditions prevailing in different countries might be playing a major role in the situation. Interest in associated eHealth services is high among citizens and likely to increase.

Text and structural data mining of influenza mentions in web and social media.

Mirror, Mirror on my Facebook Wall: Effects of Exposure to Facebook on Self-Esteem.

Abstract Contrasting hypotheses were posed to test the effect of Facebook exposure on self-esteem. Objective Self-Awareness (OSA) from social psychology and the Hyperpersonal Model from computer-mediated communication were used to argue that Facebook would either diminish or enhance self-esteem respectively. The results revealed that, in contrast to previous work on OSA, becoming self-aware by viewing one’s own Facebook profile enhances self-esteem rather than diminishes it.

Wikimedia blog: Update on Translation Toolkit

2010-07-15T00:11:14+00:00

Earlier today the folks over at Google provided an update on their progress using Translation Toolkit with volunteers and translators to improve the article count in smaller language versions of Wikipedia, including Arabic, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Swahili, Tamil and Telugu. Google is a passionate believer in the need to translate and bring more high quality works of text to less-represented languages on the web.

Michael Galvez, a Product Manager from Google, presented the recent findings of these efforts at this year’s Wikimania in Gdańsk – which wrapped up on Sunday, July 11 of this year.

From Michael’s post:

We believe that translation is key to our mission of making information useful to everyone. For example, Wikipedia is a phenomenal source of knowledge, especially for speakers of common languages such as English, German and French where there are hundreds of thousands—or millions—of articles available. For many smaller languages, however, Wikipedia doesn’t yet have anywhere near the same amount of content available.

Google is reporting an increase of about 16 million words so far due to the efforts of local volunteers and translators using the Translation Toolkit. In Hindi Wikipedia these efforts have resulted in an increase in size of about 20 per cent. They continue their work directly with volunteers from these language projects, and continue to expand the capabilities of the translation toolkit in new languages.

A big thanks for the ongoing efforts of the volunteers and translators, and to Google for continuing to invest time and resources in this great translation system.

Jay Walsh, Communications

T. Mills Kelly: When Students Assess Scholars

2010-07-14T15:09:42+00:00

What happens when students assess the work of scholars in a public, i.e. online, forum? To what degree to student assessments have an impact on professional reputations, on promotion decisions, or on resource allocations?

I’ve been mulling this question over for the past week because about a week ago I received a somewhat testy email from someone who thought that an entry in a Zotero group library on an article she had published was, to use her words, “sloppily and misleadingly summarized on Zotero…even my name was misspelled.” She then asked, “If this is the way Zotero is going to operate, it simply isn’t good enough. What must one do to see that it is corrected? Must authors look for such problems on Zotero?”

As it happened, the entry she objected to was written by a student in a class taught by a colleague, not by me, and so she was asking the wrong person for help (I pointed her to my colleague so she could engage with him over this issue). But her email–notwithstanding a misunderstanding about how “Zotero is going to operate”–raised the question I posed above.

Should we care that students are reading our work and then writing about it online for good or ill? One could take the position that any writing about our work is proof that our work is being assigned and read — a good thing. Or one could worry that negative commentary on our work from those who might be less qualified to comment on it that we would like might have negative consequences for us — a bad thing.

After thinking about it for a week, I’ve decided that I am completely unsympathetic to the latter argument for several reasons. First, it proceeds from a viewpoint that I reject, namely that student views of our scholarship don’t or shouldn’t count. In American higher education we are fond of describing our students as both students and partners in a learning enterprise and if that is really true, then we have to take seriously what our students have to say. Sure, a review of my book by someone who knows a lot about what I’m writing about is more useful in many ways, but that is not to say that a review of my book by an undergraduate student is not useful just because he or she hasn’t spent a decade or two studying the arcana of Czech history.

I read and re-read the summary of the article that sparked my thinking and there is no negative criticism of the author or her research methods to be found there. But what if the student had also said something like, “Unfortunately, the author’s findings are obscured by intensely boring academic prose.”? We’ve all wanted to say something like that from time to time about a book or article we are reading/reviewing, but professional courtesy holds us back (most of the time). Perhaps the unfettered voices of our students might just hold us to a higher standard when it comes to writing about our subjects in clear and compelling ways?

I also reject the reviews by students are bad argument for a second reason. The purpose of the academic endeavor is to create and circulate new knowledge and the target audience for most of that endeavor is our students. We want them to engage with our work so that as they mature as scholars, business people, government employees, or whatever they chose to do, they can make better informed decisions about their own work and lives.

And the way this generation does that is online. Period. To argue that student work, flawed or perfect, should not be posted online is to argue for a return of the typewriter.

Finally, the whole point of the article in question was that more needed to be done to increase digital collaboration between scholars, librarians, and archivists. If limits are to be placed on that collaboration, then we might as well forget the entire effort. Digital media today are collaborative by their very nature, so I think it’s time we all get on that bus and accept that embracing digital technology means embracing it for all the good and all the less than good. So I guess I find it a little surprising that an author whose own work argued for more collaboration doesn’t like it when that collaboration isn’t up to a standard she has set.

Brianna Laugher: A(nother) happy Wikimania

Brianna Laugher — 2010-07-14T14:50:08+00:00

Well, I am back from two long flights from Europe, home from my fourth Wikimania. It was the first one entirely funded from my own bat, too, if I recall correctly. I remember back in 2007 when I first considered going to Wikimania in Taipei. I only really dared because I had recently spent a stint in Beijing studying Chinese, and it seemed like it was going to be rare for Wikimania to be even remotely in my neck of the woods. (Which has held true.)

And since then, I was kinda hooked. It was that first Wikimania that really made me feel “wow, these are my people!” It was after that that I started this blog, too.

photo by ragesoss

Now considering my recent spinning down within Wikimedia I wondered if I should go to this Wikimania. But the chance to see so many of my wiki friends once again was irresistible. So I decided to take my own “farewell tour”. And I got to see nearly everyone I looked for. One notable exception was Dror, the Israeli “ambassador”. Wikimedia Israel will host the next Wikimania but I don’t think I will be there. Oh well. Another time, Dror! You were missed!

I preceded this Wikimania with a brief trip in Europe, spending 1 day in Germany, 3 in the Netherlands and 4 in Denmark. It helped to reduce the effect of the crazy “ZOMG foreign countries!” overreaction brought on by jet-lag and excitement.

This Wikimania was marked, unlike the others, with some trepidation in the lead-up, caused by late organisation of the registration and accommodation. Well, I’ve made my complaints. At the end I can say the annoying parts will fade away, and what will remain are the warm conversations, interesting presentations and crowded cobblestones of ul. Długa.

I was still lucky to meet some familiar names for the first time: Millosh. Nemo bis. Dvortygirl (well I did not formally meet you, but it was nice to hear your lightning talk!). Philippe. Cbrown1023. (!!) Ragesoss. (!!!) Ariel Glenn. And that is just the ones I remember who conveniently listed themselves as attendees. Oh and Kartika, the Indonesian award winner who friended me on Facebook. :) If I listed all the people I was happy to meet again I would certainly leave off names I did not intend.

It’s funny what people remember of you. A Polish guy (sorry I have forgotten your name) came up to me to thank me for writing about the WMPL wiki-expedition idea.
And when I met my roommate, Beatriz from Argentina, she initially did not know who I was. “I used to be the president of Wikimedia Australia,” I said as background. “Oh… you made a video for us!” she said, remembering a short video I made, at Patricio’s request, for Wikimedia Argentina’s first general meeting as an official chapter (I believe). We were both chapters recognised around the same time. Now I have no idea where that video is but I am sure it was short, cheap and cheerful. It makes me happy to think what an easy thing it was for me to do and that people might still remember me by it two or more years later.

Patricio also gave me a birthday present, a book of short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, including La biblioteca de Babel. (Of course, Spanish Wikipedia administrators are known as librarians, which is endlessly charming.) According to what en.wp says about it, it looks like a story I will enjoy very much.

…Just as soon as I learn Spanish. On my flight from Frankfurt to Bangkok I thought, with renewed enthusiasm: I should learn Spanish. But, I am pretty sure that decisions made on cross-continent flights, as with those made while drunk, can’t be held against one. So, we’ll see. :)

I will hopefully make separate posts about a couple of subjects, including the sessions I saw and the documentary premiere. But if Real Life intervenes again, well, I have said this much. :)

Wikipedia Signpost: Wikipedia Signpost – Volume 6 Issue 28 – 12 July 2010

2010-07-14T02:05:22+00:00

UK COI edits: British politicians accused of WP cover-ups
News and notes: Board changes, Wikimania, Public Policy Initiative
In the news: Foundation plans, David Barton, dangerous occasional glitches
Discussion report: Article ownership, WikiProjects vs. Manual of Style, Unverifiable village
WikiProject report: WikiProject Apple Inc.
Features and admins: The best of the week
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Single page view
PDF version

Sage Ross: Wikimania 2010

2010-07-14T00:17:59+00:00

Free Knowledge in the City of Freedom. Staying out until dawn was not uncommon.

I am writing wrote this on the plane back from my first Wikimania. Wow! An amazing experience!

First off, I couldn’t have written my ROFLCon blog post if I had been to Wikimania already. What is true of the social dynamic of Wikipedia meetups for (mainly) the English Wikipedia community–that we tend to be on the introverted side, and it takes a while for people to open up–doesn’t translate to the international scope and scale of Wikimania. Wikimedians there were warm and friendly from the get-go. Maybe it takes a critical mass of sociality before introverts start to open up, rather than merely time. So bigger is better.

Organizationally, things were modestly chaotic. For the most part this was fine. The one real fail was that many attendees were unexpectedly kicked out of their dorms early, and I heard that a group of them ended up spending one night in a public park.

It’s really a shame that Wikimania hasn’t been held in North America since Wikimania 2005 in Boston. That was before the real upswing of Wikipedia’s popularity, and the majority of active American and Canadian Wikimedians have never had a chance since they joined to attend a nearby Wikimania.

Filmakers Scott Glosserman and Nic Hill with Jimmy Wales

One of the highlights of the conference was the premiere of Truth in Numbers?, a documentary about Wikipedia that’s been about 5 years in the making. It’ll be released publicly later this year. Reactions from Wikipedians were mixed and complicated, although during the screening itself it felt like a very positive reaction. The film gives a lot of focus to some shallow or misleading lines of criticism, and on an intellectual level, it comes off as largely anti-Wikipedia, contrasting the reasonable-sounding arguments of mature critics with the naive optimism of youthful Wikipedians. (For the most part, the critics’ arguments are easily answered, but the counter-arguments are a little more sophisticated than what can be explained well in a documentary aimed at an audience with little Wikipedia background.) Emotionally, though, I felt that Wikipedia–or rather, the Wikipedians–win in a landslide.

The Truth in Numbers? filmmakers also plan on releasing all the used and unused footage–full interviews with Wikipedians from around the world as well as important critics and supporters–so that others can re-edit and re-purpose it. There are many stories that could have been told in Truth in Numbers? I think the film is emotionally satisfying and it’s strong by the standards of the documentary genre. Comparing it with other documentaries about weird communities, it’s far better than, say, Revolution OS, but not quite to the level Darkon or Spellbound. I’m excited to see what else might come of it. A film intended to tell the history of Wikipedia would be quite different, and a film about the politics and values and philosophy of the Wikimedia movement would be different yet again. Hopefully the licensing of the extra footage will be free enough that the Wikimedia community can actually use it.

It was so great meeting many of the people I’ve known only online. Really, Wikimedians are the awesome-est people in the world. A whole year is too long until Wikimania 2011 in Haifa, Israel. Hopefully I’ll be able to make it to Wiki-Conference New York in August to hold me over; last year’s was great, and this year’s should be even better.

Open Space discussion on Strategy

I took a few pictures, which seem to have been well received. They’re all on Wikimedia Commons, too, along with 1000 others. As a default, I didn’t add names for anyone but Wikimedia board and staff, since many Wikimedians may not like having named pics publicly available. But let me know and I’ll add your name to your pic, if you like.

Sage Ross: New city, new job

2010-07-13T23:33:38+00:00

Whew! It’s a been a hectic few months since I blogged last!

Pittsburgh, our new home

Faith, Brighton and I bought a house and moved to greater Pittsburgh in late May (Glenshaw, to be precise). I have to call Faith “Dr. Honey”, instead of just honey; she has her M.D. now and is serving an anesthesiology residency at UPMC. Pittsburgh is awesome. The people are quite friendly (if rather more sexist and religiously conservative than New Englanders, on average). The “Pittsburgh Left” is both charming and dangerous. And I started a vegetable garden!

I’m not yet finished with my dissertation, but with the necessary move to Pittsburgh and the need to pull in at least some income, my options seemed limited. Academic positions were basically a non-starter. I was looking into jobs as a lab tech or a photographer or an in-home child-care provider, and there are actually some jobs in the Pittsburgh area (moreso than in much of the country). None looked too appealing. But the perfect opportunity opened up for me at perfect time.

I can has job?

In June I took a position with the Wikimedia Foundation: “online facilitator” for their 17 month “Public Policy Initiative“. In short, I’m part of a team focused on creating a Wikipedia Ambassadors program and developing good ways to get professors and their classes involved with improving Wikipedia content. (As a pilot, we’re starting with public policy professors in the U.S., but we hope to expand the scope of the programs we’re starting after the basics are in place.) I tell people I’m the head of the Pittsburgh Office of the Wikimedia Foundation. If you’re a Wikimedian in the Pittsburgh area, let’s get together some time; I’m going to try to start having regular Pittsburgh wiki and free culture meetups, which have never really happened before.

Finally, Wikimania. It deserves a post of its own…

Working Wikily: New Monitor Institute report: “What’s Next for Philanthropy: Acting Bigger and Adapting Better in a Networked World”

2010-07-13T22:40:22+00:00

The world around philanthropy is changing much, much faster than philanthropy itself. An intimidating range of forces—globalization, shifting sectoral roles, economic crisis, and new technologies—are changing both what philanthropy is called upon to do and how donors and foundations will accomplish their work in the future. For philanthropic and civic leaders looking to cultivate change in today’s rapidly shifting landscape, simply tweaking the status quo won’t be enough. Funders will have to pioneer “next practices”—effective approaches that are well-suited to tomorrow’s more networked, dynamic, and interdependent context.

With this in mind, we are pleased to announce the publication of the Monitor Institute’s new report, What’s Next for Philanthropy: Acting Bigger and Adapting Better in a Networked World. The piece updates our 2005 report, Looking Out for the Future, and represents more than a decade of work by the Institute in exploring the evolving “future of philanthropy.” It highlights the changing context in which funders now operate, and identifies ten emerging next practices that can help funders of all sorts increase their impact over the coming decade.

Funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, What’s Next for Philanthropy argues that while the cutting edge of philanthropic innovation over the last decade has been mostly about improving the effectiveness, efficiency, and responsiveness of individual organizations, the next practices of the coming 10 years will have to build on those efforts to include an additional focus on coordination and adaption—acting bigger and adapting better.

We hope you find the report helpful and look forward to hearing any feedback you might have.

Shankbone: Fire Island 2010 (photos)

2010-07-12T05:30:45+00:00

On July 9th I turned 36 and I was invited to spend it on Fire Island. It was an amazing birthday full of new and old friends. I took Ernesto with me, who is also the model I used to illustrates the body on Wikipedia (for example, his well-formed teeth are used as an illustration of human teeth on over 40 Wikimedia pages).

Here are a few shots of my birthday weekend. It’s great to be 36!

Nonie reading on the deck with swans.

The amazingly talented Shequida.

Good times: Michael, Nonie, Rafael (w/o head), David and Ernesto at the Belvedere for a party.

Ernie, Shequida and Chris at the Hotel Belvedere.

Ernie and Nonie freaking to “Bad Romance”

Michael, Ernie and Rafael

Click here to check out more Fire Island photos on my Flickr.

Possibly related posts

Brion Vibber: Yet another iOS mulititasking explanation post

2010-07-12T01:46:00+00:00

There’s been a lot of confusion about just how multitasking works in the iPhone’s latest iOS 4.0, and just what the limitations on background processes are. Most of the articles I’ve seen attempting to clarify it have concentrated on the addition of the new suspend state and how apps being background vs suspended vs terminated relates to the task list interface. That helps with the end-user confusion, but to me has just made it even more confusing from the developer’s perspective — I want to know what my app will be able to do in this brave new multitasking world, and what its limitations are going to be.

I’ve gone ahead and actually looked at the documentation (RTFM); here’s some notes… (Impatient readers may wish to skip to the summary at the end!)

Application state lifecycle

First, let’s go ahead and put those “background” and “suspend” states into perspective…

Not running

On screen?	no
Running?	no
In memory?	no
Resources	none

In the beginning, there was nothing… Before your application is started, it just doesn’t exist in the system yet.

An app that’s not running has no way to execute code, but popup notifications may be shown on its behalf by a registered server application or from earlier scheduling.

When your app gets launched, your code gets loaded into memory and you transition into: Active state

On screen?	yes
Running?	yes
In memory?	yes
Resources	as you like

Your app is large and in charge! Your code and data are in memory, code is being executed, and you’ve got free control over the user interface, audio, network, etc.

There’s also an inactive state when the system takes over the UI and event loops for stuff like showing the incoming phone call dialog; your app is temporarily paused from the UI, but all your resources stay intact and you’ll get them back soon.

When it comes time to switch apps (through the home menu, task list, or programatically), your app loses control of the screen and enters the… Background state

On screen?	no
Running?	yes
In memory?	yes
Resources	restricted*

Your code is still running, but you’ve got no access to the screen, and various resources start getting cut off. Usually this is a temporary state giving an application a chance to save data, close out unneeded resources, and generally tidy up before being suspended completely.

There are some special exceptions which can allow an app to run in background state for prolonged time, which is where the really interesting stuff comes in. We’ll get to that soon!

When we’re done with background state, the OS can put your app to bed; now it’s in… Suspend state

On screen?	no
Running?	no
In memory?	yes
Resources	mostly freed

This is the biggest change in iOS 4: after your post-switchaway cleanup, the app remains in memory so it can be continued at a moment’s notice.

Previously, after your app did a little cleanup on the way out it would be terminated and all its memory and network resources freed. Instead, the app is now simply stopped at this point, but with the explicit warning that it may or may not ever be continued.

If the app is reactivated from suspend mode, anything you kept in memory is still there — you have a lot less work to do to reestablish your application’s running state than when relaunching the process.

But you may die before you wake, in which case you’re back to…

Not running state.

If the system needs more memory to assign to another application, or gets shut down, your suspended app will be terminated without being woken to inform it.

You need to be prepared for termination before entering suspend state… but really, you’re already writing code that assumes it could crash at any time and saves state at intervals and key points so it won’t lose user data, right? Um, right?

Background mode limitations

So just what are the limits of what you can do while running in background state? The docs mix together a lot of strict limits along with recommendations for being a good citizen; I’ve tried to split them out here:

YOU CANNOT (technical restrictions on what you can do):

Can’t make OpenGL calls; they will terminate your app.
Can’t accept new connections on a listening socket.
Can’t use shared system resources like the Address Book (it sounds like they might sorta work if still open, but you could get terminated if there’s a conflict.)
Can’t use external accessories — you must register for and handle disconnection events.

YOU SHOULD (recommendations for behaving well):

Should be prepared for loss of connectivity — open network connections could be torn down at any time.
Should save your state, since your app could be terminated due to memory pressure.
(You should be saving state during regular operation anyway to protect against application or system crashes, power failures, etc. Programs that assume orderly shutdown are asking for trouble!)
Should avoid updating your windows and views; it’ll work but since your UI is hidden it’s a waste of time & battery.
Should normalize your UI state — cancel modal alerts, hide temporarily shown passwords, etc.
Should “do minimal work” while in background.

Reaching the user when not on screen

iPhone OS 2 introduced networked push notifications, where — through the magic of the internet — your app’s web services can trigger a notification dialog on the phone, even if your application is no longer running. iOS 4 extends this to local background tasks; if your app is in the background state, it can pop up a notification immediately without needing to go out to the network.

You can also schedule a future notification at any time (up to 128 scheduled per app), which will trigger even if your app has been terminated — obviously handy for alarms, calendars, and timer apps.

Notifications are limited in that they alert the user, not the app. If you were suspended or not running when the notification came, you won’t be woken unless the user pushes the button that opens your app.

When in background…

Any app can start up background task threads, which will block the background->suspended state transition.

This is primarily intended for orderly shutdown tasks, like completing that photo uploading to Twitbook or syncing mailbox state to a server after reading a bunch of messages. The system actually gives you a time limit, and will terminate your app if you don’t declare your tasks complete when the time limit’s up! Once you’re done, you’re forced to suspend… absent other triggers, your app is going to stay that way until the user switches back to it or it’s terminated.

You can also register to receive an event for “significant location updates“, which will wake or even relaunch your application when the cell network has noticed that you’ve moved a non-trivial distance. This avoids running down the battery with the GPS if you want updates but don’t really need to be watching it continuously.

Special backgrounding modes

An app can declare itself to have certain types of backgrounding characteristics, which can allow some additional behaviors in background state. Since these are pre-declared in the code-signed app bundle, you need to be aware of what affect they’ll have on your app’s runtime behavior, and will have to run the App Store approval gauntlet with an extra bulls-eye on your forehead.

Background audio mode

Normally, the system audio frameworks cut you off when transitioning from active to background state. If your app is marked as a background audio app, you get two perks:

Audio in/out continues to work in background state.
Suspend is blocked while playing audio, so you can keep running in the background arbitrarily long.

If audio is not active, your app will still be able to suspend — so a music player that’s paused, or reaches the end of its playlist in the background, can free its resources.

Articles I’ve seen have had a lot of vague language seeming to indicate that apps in this mode can “only” play audio and do nothing else, which might imply that there’s some kind of wacky alternate API for bg audio — this is not true. The docs recommend avoiding unnecessary work while playing background audio to keep resource usage down, but there’s no artificial restriction beyond the general limitations on backgrounded apps.

You’ll still use the same old network interfaces, the same old audio APIs, etc; reportedly it only took an hour to port Pandora’s iPhone player to use background audio.

Background VOIP mode

The VOIP mode is really about management of long-running network clients — an actual VOIP app will probably need to also mark itself as needing background audio. Your app will still get suspended if the user switches away with no active call, but gets a few special abilities:

Sockets you register as VOIP control channels will stay live when your app is suspended. If data comes in, you’ll be woken up — this lets you handle an incoming call.
You can register a timeout to be woken at intervals, so you to send keepalive pings if needed.
The app is automatically launched in the background on boot, so you can connect to the server.
The app is automatically relaunched on non-zero exit code, so a one-off app crash won’t break the VOIP service.

Note that while this mode sounds ideal for IM/chat apps, connections to real-time update streams for social networking clients, etc, I suspect that Apple would not actually approve such apps.

Continuous location mode

Navigation apps, GPS tracers, etc may need a more direct way to monitor the GPS for location changes while backgrounded. This is similar to the background audio mode:

Continue to use the regular location services APIs…
…while you’ve got it active, suspend will be blocked and you can remain in background mode arbitrarily long.

GPS has a particularly bad reputation for running down the battery, so if you’re just looking to ping 4square or something you should probably use the “significant location updates” event registration instead.

Summary

Now that we’ve seen something about how it all works, let’s take some sample cases and ask whether they’ll actually do what we need… So what do we need?

I’m a media player (Pandora, Airfoil Speakers, etc)

Can I continue playing audio after switching away?
- Yes — mark your app as requiring background audio, and it’ll stay backgrounded on switch.
Can I keep communicating with the network while playing audio?
- Yes! But if you’re doing other stuff not needed for your audio and Apple notices, they may not approve your app.
Can I start playing audio later on after having been backgrounded, like an alarm clock?
- No — if you’re not playing audio at switch time, you’ll still get suspended. You could schedule a local notification to alert the user and they could push a button to launch your app and then you could play the music. Ewww!
Can I keep a socket open to listen for other computers to connect and send me audio to play?
- No — your listening sockets will be closed, and you’ll have been suspended anyway as above.

I’m a VOIP client (SIP clients, Skype etc)

Can I keep an active call going after switching away from the app?
- Yes — mark your app as requiring background audio, and a running call will be able to keep on going.
Can I maintain a connection to my server to listen for incoming calls?
- Yes — mark your app as needing VOIP mode, and set the special flag on your control channel after setting up the connection.
Can I be automatically launched on boot, so I can open that connection?
- Yes — mark your app as needing VOIP mode, you’ll be automatically launched if you
Can I maintain a listening socket to receive direct SIP calls?
- No — all listening sockets will be closed in the background. You need an existing connection to a server which’ll send a packet down when there’s an event.
Can I auto-answer calls?
- I’m not 100% sure on this one; if the system fully foregrounds you to handle incoming events so you can show an “incoming” screen then yes, otherwise I don’t think so.

I’m an IM or social networking client (AIM, Meebo etc; StatusNet, Twitter, Facebook, etc)

Can I finish uploading a post in the background if the user switches apps before it’s done?
- Yes — do it from a background task thread, and notify the system when you’re done and ready to be suspended.
Can I poll my server in the background to check for updates?
- No — you’ll need to pair with a server component and use networked notifications to alert the user.
Can I keep a socket open to listen for real-time updates from my server?
- No — in theory the VOIP mode would allow this, but Apple would have to approve your app’s using it for non-VOIP use.
Can I be woken to check status when the physical location has changed?
- Yes — you can register for significant location updates and be woken or launched to check if you need to perform any actions.

I’m any kind of server:

Can I listen for clients while in the background?
- No. Your listening sockets will be closed, and any Bonjour service stuff will be torn down.
Can I finish up an existing client connection after switching away?
- In theory this ought to work, if the operation can complete in a background task thread before you’re forced to suspend.

I’m any other bit of software:

Can my app be woken at a specified time?
- No. You can set a notification to display at a given time, but user interaction will be needed to wake or launch your app.

Whee!

Ziko van Dijk: Ziko

2010-07-10T20:00:44+00:00

Christian Wulff (Martina Nolte, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Do you know the name of the current German president? Your chances are higher if you speak one of the languages bg, ca, cs, da, de, dsb, en, es, et, fi, fr, hsb,id, is,it, ja, lt, lv, ms, nds, nl, no, pl, pt,ro, ru, simple, sr, sv, th, tr,uk, yo, zh.

Those Wikipedia’s have an article “President of Germany”, and Christian Wulff is mentioned as the current officeholder. He has been elected on June 30th and inaugurated on July 2nd, this year.

If you speak eo or ka, then you still live in the interregnum of Jens Böhrnsen. The president of the Federal Council fulfilled the president’s duties from May 30th to July 2nd.

According to the Wikipedias in be, gl, he and it, Horst Köhler is still in office, the president who was elected in 2004, reelected in 2009 and resigned on May 30th. Latin Wikipedia does not mention a name at all.

I did the test just now, on July 10th in the evening. This means that more than a week after Wulff’s inauguration most of the language versions (which have that article at all) did the update. A small number still presents Köhler.

Creating an article is one thing, maintaining it a different one. In 2002-2005, Wolfgang Clement was federal minister of economics. All of the articles that exist on him in different language versions tell us that. The articles in de, en, fr, ja, la, nds, ru and tr also mention that he left his party in 2008, the articles in fa, nl, no and pl never heard about.

Wikimedia blog: The Royal Cup bridges Wikipedia and the British Museum

2010-07-10T12:51:07+00:00

A dispatch from Australian Wikimedia volunteer, Liam Wyatt, who recently completed a term as the first-ever Wikipedia-in-Residence at the British Museum in London.

The Royal Gold Cup, today’s feature article on the English Wikipedia, is not only a fascinating object but it is also the culmination of an innovative project between the British Museum and Wikipedia.

For the last month the British Museum has been host to a volunteer Wikipedian in Residence – a pilot project aimed at building a mutually beneficial and proactive relationship between two communities that share a common heritage. Wikipedia is “the free encyclopedia” since 2001 and the British Museum has provided free entry “to all studious and curious persons” since 1753.

A london based Wikipedian, editing under the name Johnbod who is the principal author of Royal Gold Cup, is the first recipient of a prize offered by the museum for new feature quality content about objects in their collection.

This article was created only a month ago as a result of the museum offering a Backstage Pass tour for UK local Wikipedians. The one to one relationships built from this day have resulted in not only new Wikipedia content but a greater understanding in both communities of the needs of the other. A mutually beneficial relationship was created. Other recipients of this prize and also featured today are the articles Rosetta Stone in the Latin Wikipedia and Epifania in the Catalan Wikipedia.

Other major events run as part of this burgeoning relationship included the Hoxne Challenge – a focused day of writing on the article Hoxne Hoard. This event posed the challenge to create top quality content in a short space of time if the experts, literature and Wikipedians are brought together in the same room. Video of the event released by the British Museum under cc-by-sa.

Jonathan Williams, keeper of the department of Prehistory and Europe at the British Museum said of this project,

“I am delighted with the amazing results of the British Museum’s new relationship with Wikipedia. We’ve learned a lot about how Wikipedia works, and about how it can be such a great resource for people who want to learn about history and archaeology. And I have had my eyes opened to the potential audiences the Museum can reach by working more closely with the Wikipedia community.

During its 600 year history, the Royal Gold Cup has belonged to kings of France, Great Britain, and Spain. But being on Wikipedia’s mainpage has to be its finest moment yet!”

In recognition of the value of Wikpedia’s top quality content the British Museum have also featured the Royal Gold Cup on their main page and included a link back to Wikipedia from their catalogue reference.

To read more about the British Museum – Wikipedia project, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM

-Liam

Ziko van Dijk: Ziko

2010-07-09T13:12:02+00:00

Historian Peter Haber, PhD, is a Wikipedia-fan. To him, reading Wikipedia is even natural as earlier reading Brockhaus encyclopedia. Many colleagues are skeptical, but they never talk about it. So he and his students in Vienna examined some articles closely. His conclusion: Wikipedia is not so suitable for its core task – giving comprehensive guidance to get started about a subject.

What? Wikipedia is not the best first step to learn about a new subject, historian Peter Haber says.

Haber criticizes that the English language article about Engelbert Dollfuss mentions at large the shortness of this Austro-Fascist chancellor. This happens hardly in the article in German.

Another example for different national views, according to him, are illustrations chosen for the articles about the “Cold war”. The article in German has a sober map, the article in English shows Reagan and Gorbachev (the conflict subsiding), the Russian one a list of the block partners (with a long pro-Soviet list).

Factual errors are not the problem, according to Haber, there are some but you would find them also elsewhere. He finds it more important that Wikipedia has its flaws where everybody believes it is strong: Wikipedia is not so good in providing a first overview about a complex subject:

“It is a most sophisticated task to briefly introduce to a historical subject. Such contributions are not suited for collaborative creation.” (Zeit interview, July 8th, 2010)

Because, when several authors come and add something, the texts grow. You don’t need to be a trained historian to collect facts, but have to be skilled to present something complex.

The seminar in Vienna has checked for about 20 articles on history. The quality of the articles is divers, Haber says. But the Wikipedian who has a look at the student’s presentations has the same impression. One of Haber’s students is clearly a Che Guevara fan, I wonder what his presentation sounded like.

Articles based on works in only one language? Wikipedia finds it okay, Haber doesn't.

And the notes about national differences are based on single cases. Is it really more than incidental that the article in English mocks about the shortness of Dollfuss? Are all of the Russian Wikipedians really living in pro-Soviet nostalgia? Is it English Wikipedia that tries to suggest a harmonic end of the cold war, and not a single author who chose one of many possible illustrations? Wikipedians and non Wikipedians will have to wait until the end of the year for the complete survey, to see whether such observations have a substantial basis.

Wikipedia articles refer usually only to literature in the same language, Haber criticizes. According to him this is problematic from a scientific point of view. Actually most Wikipedia guidelines say that one should primarily refer to works in the reader’s own language. Here we come to the main questions: What is Wikipedia, what does it claims to be, and how readers use it?

Haber’s sound remarks repeat to a certain degree what Roy Rosenzweig wrote in 2006 about Wikipedia: not a lack of accuracy, but verbose speech is the problem. Like Rosenzweig Haber warns that historians should care more about Wikipedia:

“It is here where the popular knowledge on history is produced, not in expensive, voluminous essays.”

Phoebe Ayers: onboarding

2010-07-09T12:27:32+00:00

Late yesterday afternoon I was seated on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees as one of the two chapter-selected seats. I am still a bit in shock. I was up on stage at the Board panel this morning; I am looking forward to conversatons all weekend.

I have also been closing out WikiSym, which has been running the last three dasy. It has been a (I hope) great iteration of WikiSym. It’s been going smoothly … but I have been on my game as general organizer, dealing with detail after detail for the last couple of weeks. Now, however, I’m doing it with three hours of sleep and the stress of being seated on the Board. I have been up on stage with a mic at least six times in the last 12 hours, winging it pretty much every time…. It’s been intense.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way. As I said in my speech this morning, thank you to the chapters for seating me, and to Michael Snow for his amazing tenure on the Board. We have a hard and exciting couple of years ahead.

Shankbone: Lady Gaga at Madison Square Garden (photos)

2010-07-09T03:32:38+00:00

Last night a good friend of mine scored me a free ticket to see Lady Gaga at Madison Square Garden for the Monster Ball. I hate to sound trite, but words don’t do Gaga justice so I will just say that it was amazing.

When I go to events like this I struggle with whether or not to sneak my good camera in so that I can take some nice Creative Commons photos of one of the most inspiring artists working today. To bring a clunky DSLR means that I no longer feel like a spectator to the event as much as a documentarian. I don’t sit back and enjoy the show (or dance in the aisles as I did last night) but instead I’m always on the lookout for crisper photos, better angles. It can make an event I am in the middle of feel far away.

Since my Creative Commons project is more-or-less officially over (with exceptions), I left the DSLR at home and brought my Samsung cameraphone. Obviously, the photos aren’t so great, but my own personal experience was so much better without the DSLR.

Me and Brooke with Gaga in the background. Thank you to the security guard who took this photo and then promptly told us to go back to our seats.

She is actually playing the piano she is on top of in the photo above.

Brett and Brooke having a blast.

Possibly related posts

Wikimedia blog: Wikimedia announces new Board appointments

2010-07-08T23:33:42+00:00

Today at the kick-off of our 6th annual Wikimania conference in Gdańsk, Poland, we were pleased to announce changes to our Board of Trustees. We have a new Board Chair, Ting Chen, new Vice Chair and Treasurer, Stu West, and a new Secretary, Samuel Klein. The Board today announced that it has appointed two Chapter-selected seats to the Board, Phoebe Ayers, a long-standing Wikimedia community member, and the re-appointment of Arne Klempert. This is the first time the new Chapter-selected seat process was used to select the two new members. A short Q&A provides further details about the changes.

In a release sent earlier today, Board Chair Ting Chen recognized the long-standing contribution of former Board Chair Michael Snow, who held that post since early 2008.

The Board is meeting in advance of this year’s Wikimania conference, the global gathering of Wikimedia project supporters from around the world.

A huge thanks to the longstanding and substantial contribution from Michael Snow, and a warm welcome to Phoebe Ayers.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Brion Vibber: Firefox font rendering differences between Ubuntu, Mozilla packages?

2010-07-08T17:56:57+00:00

Has anybody else encountered this? Subpixel antialiasing on text seems to be a lot more aggressive when running Mozilla’s packages of Firefox and Thunderbird than when running the Ubuntu packages:

I originally noticed it when running Mozilla’s Thunderbird 3 packages on Ubuntu 9.10, but originally chalked it up to “weird stuff from 32-bit apps sometimes acting weird”, but both the 32-bit and 64-bit Firefox 4.0b1 packages are doing it to me on Ubuntu 10.04.

Is there some difference with the bundled libraries, or some custom Ubuntu or Debian patch that changes the behavior? And can I change it??? I’m liking Firefox 4 so far but this text is just awful on my eyes.

Updated 2010-07-13: Commenter noted this bug, which looks like it may be it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/379761

Ryan Lane: JSBreadCrumbs 0.5 released

2010-07-08T15:42:05+00:00

JSBreadCrumbs is a MediaWiki extension that will add a trail of navigation breadcrumbs below the navigation tabs.

Another train ride, some more coding… This is a bugfix release. The following has changed since 0.4:

Changed the display of site names to (site name) from site name: to make a visual difference between project namespace, and site name

Hopefully, this will make it clearer that the site name isn’t a namespace, but a different wiki.

To download the extension, do so via the extension distributor on the extension’s page at mediawiki.org.

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Brion Vibber: Freedom, compromise, and geek fights

2010-07-07T22:14:11+00:00

I’ve seen a rash of complaints lately about some absolutist flame wars and trollfests in various parts of the free & open source software community, and it leaves me kind of sad when I see people whose work I respect jumping around and saying hurtful things to each other.

I understand, of course… us geeks tend to like absolutes. Absolutes are often very handy in an engineering context — this algorithm is more efficient with our data sets under these constraints; that algorithm is less efficient. This hard drive performs better for this server load; that one is worse. We unfortunately have a tendency to apply the same sort of arguments when we don’t have a clear-cut context… and there may be legitimately different answers for different people. Which programming language is best? (The one I’m most productive in!) Which mobile gadget is best? (The one that I would buy for my needs!) Which operating system is best? (The one I like to run my applications or tune to my preferences!) Which voting system is best? Which political system is best? Which religion is best?

We quickly fall into unwinnable circular arguments where the participants talk past each other. Not only are these unproductive; they can create very angry, adversarial communities that tend to drive away new members. Especially where participation is self-selected and involves both technical and ideological goals — like free software and Wikipedia communities — there’s a constant danger of ugly geekfights.

I’ll admit I’ve flamed my share of people who disagreed with me on the Internet — more so at 21 than at 31! — but I’ve always tried to keep myself in check by reminding myself of an incident in my youth…

When I was a young lad, I was raised in what is sometimes called a Post-Christian environment. As middle-class white Americans, we inherited some of the outside trappings of the old Christian civilization of medieval Europe, but we were never really religious. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, assumed “Yahweh” when someone said “God” instead of asking “which god?”, and understood that the “Bible” is the default holy book, with one section where GOD HATES SHRIMP and another where JESUS LOVES YOU. But we only had a token prayer at dinner, and only went to churches as tourists or funeralgoers; the one time I got dragged to my grandparents’ regular Sunday services at a Lutheran church I found the whole thing incomprehensible. Bible stories sometimes got presented to me as cultural background, but no more so than other religious tales like the similarly-ancient Greco-Roman myths which nobody believes are literal truth.

As a 14-year-old or so, I assumed that this was the normal, natural way that everyone in our post-Englightenment science-based Western culture was raised. Someone who believed in any particular religion — so concluded my adolescent brain — must then be either ignorant or stupid. If they were ignorant, then surely explaining the true facts to them would make them give a quick facepalm and finally join the 18th century. If they didn’t get the explanation, then either my explanation wasn’t good enough (let’s try it again!) or they’re just stupid and it’s time to write them off entirely.

Eventually I started realizing that my assumptions didn’t actually hold. One day, a schoolyard discussion about science and philosophy (as only 9th-graders can philosophize… poorly!) resulted in a classmate declaring that “Darwin was a jerk!” for putting forth his theories on biological evolution. Yes, one of my honors-level classmates wasn’t just religious, he was a creationist. I knew he wasn’t an idiot — he was a bright kid who did great in math, science, literature, and history. I knew his parents weren’t idiots — they were smart, successful people. But this smart, successful family believed things I found to range from the odd to the silly to the downright insane.

I’ve never been convinced about religion — and definitely not creationism! — but that day I started to learn that believing things I find to be obviously wrong doesn’t make someone an unintelligent or malicious person, even if I can point to a heap of evidence that totally convinces me how wrong they are.

At best I could accuse him of being wrong and not having the same set of assumptions and values in his decision-making process that made the opposite conclusion so obvious to me. Given time, education, and a changing environment, he might change his mind, or he might not. But my arguments weren’t doing it, and weren’t going to do it, yet I couldn’t dismiss him entirely as an idiot.

I was instead going to have to just deal with someone being wrong.

This was probably the most important lesson I’ve ever learned. It’s hard, and I mean hard, to practice it, especially as a techie geek.

But it’s one of the foundations of our modern pluralistic democracies, and basically comes down to the social contract of “don’t oppress me, and I won’t oppress you”. My freedom to be an agnostic/atheist comes with the responsibility to tolerate Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc… and even Creationists, to an extent. I’m willing to accept that compromise because they’re bound to it, too — it keeps “them” from ostracizing me as a heretic, burning me at the stake, stoning me to death, or just refusing to let me vote, own property, or run for public office just for being an agnostic/atheist, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, etc. We just have to work out a reasonable compromise — we teach the actual state of science in public-school science class, and it’s up to each religious group to explain to their children the specific ways, if any, that their religious worldview differs from centuries of evidence-based scientific research so that even the creationist kids still learn the cultural context of how our post-Enlightenment society works, even if they disagree with it.

So please… before you go flaming people for being traitors to the cause, or not getting it, or whatever… consider whether what you’re saying is actually going to add anything useful to the conversation, or if you’re just piling more noise on a never-ending geekfight. If we can avoid killing our neighbors over fundamental religious differences, we really ought to be able to live with someone else occasionally saying something nice about a product line you dislike.

WikiProject Oregon: pediapress and thesaurus

2010-07-07T16:40:52+00:00

Today I depart for Wikimania, the annual international user conference for the Wikimedia family of projects. I don’t know if there will be wifi on my flight, but it doesn’t matter, because I’ll be reading some Wikipedia articles anyway.

Packed in my carry-on is a glossy red paperback courtesy PediaPress, a really fascinating new publisher that prints books using wiki content. The team at PediaPress was kind enough to send me a book created from English Wikipedia articles.

Creating Your Wiki Book

Being a wiki enthusiast and editor myself, this was a book about Wikipedia, made up of Wikipedia articles. Pretty meta, right? If reading about Wikipedia or other wikis isn’t your thing, PediaPress has an extensive catalog filled with arts, culture, history and every other kind of reference.

For my bet though, the most interesting part of PediaPress is the ability to create your own custom book made up of whatever Wikipedia articles are important to you. Using the Book Creator tool, you can curate your own wiki book.

The Future of Publishing

This sort of personalized content is easy to get online but is less common in the print world. I think that what PediaPress is doing with . These inexpensive, easily modified books created from wiki content have potential applications more serious than amusing book nerds like me.

I certainly know educators who would love to hand their students a textbook they’ve custom tailored to fit the desired curriculum. Like all Wikimedia content, these books also show great promise in areas where either there are no traditional textbook publishers or where they are too expensive.

The PediaPress book is as nice as any paperback I ever bought locally or online, and is actually pretty meaty at more than 300 pages. The book arrived in good shape and is a pleasure to read, especially for those (like myself) that have held out against the e-book reader phenomenon. Sometimes, there’s nothing like a good book in your hand.

Brion Vibber: Nexus 1 + Froyo notes & iPhone 4

2010-07-07T16:14:32+00:00

The Android 2.2 “Froyo” update finally came through over the last few days for Nexus 1 owners. After a few days of on-and-off usage, some notes to add to my initial review of the N1 running 2.1:

What’s new:

Speed: Things definitely feel snappier than they used to, but not really in a firmly quantifiable way. I’ll try another head-to-head scrolling test after a bit, but I can still expect to see the N1 way behind on that — scrolling still feels jerkier, and usually slower, than on an iPhone.
Tethering: For me, this was one of the main the killer features that pushed me to actually buy the N1, and I’m very happy to see it working! AT&T might finally have gotten around to enabling tethering for the iPhone, but they’ve shot themselves in the foot by making it cheaper to buy a new Android phone instead of the $20/month to not get a bandwidth limit increase on your iPhone. Over your 2-year contract, that comes to $480 wasted on AT&T… and it still wouldn’t power your Wifi iPad while the Android will! Sorry, guys. I know which features I want.
Screen: my background image is still pretty badly banded, but gradients in the web browser look smoother. There may be piecemeal improvements in how images get rendered and dithered for fullcolor output, but it’s still a bit inconsistent.

Otherwise, the OS isn’t mind-blowingly different, but definitely has a lot of nice little bumps. Ars Technica has a general review of Froyo on the N1 if you want to peek at a few other under-the-hood changes.

Update: There’s also a notification system that looks like a very flexible superset of what the iPhone platform has, which might be very nice for things like sending realtime updates to our upcoming mobile client without it having to poll in the background. That ain’t much useful to users yet, but we’re sure gonna use it in future!

Compared to the iPhone 4

Of course, Apple’s been moving as well. iOS 4 is out for the existing iPhone 3G and 3Gs, and the new iPhone 4 is available and busy fighting a reception issue scandal.

iOS 4 on my iPhone 3G feels like a very nice incremental improvement. Things aren’t radically different, but it’s definitely a bit nicer: folders have helped organize home screens by moving out rarely-used apps, background processing is a big help for a few apps (like Pandora!) and there are other niceties like threading in the mail reader.

I haven’t picked up an iPhone 4 for personal use yet, but I did swing through an Apple store the other day (when the crowds had died down a bit!) to check it out. There are only a couple of interesting user-visible hardware changes beyond the case change:

My favorite is the awesome, awesome high-resolution display. I am really looking forward to this pixel density being available on desktop-size screens… some day we can stop worrying about pixels and just have text and graphics that look good.

There’s some talk that HDTV has actually set display technology back for large formats; I’ve seen only a handful of commercially-available monitors that venture much beyond 1920×1080, and those are all to gain extra desktop space not to improve density/sharpness.

The screen on the Nexus 1 is visibly sharper than the iPhone 3Gs, but even with my slightly blurry vision is visible pixelated at smartphone-usage distances from my eye. The iPhone 4 really, literally, truly moves it into the realm where pixels no longer matter; as this level of display technology makes it out into the broader market, I think it’s going to make a big difference in what we’re comfortable reading on a small screen.

The front-facing camera & video calling support is the primary selling point in Apple’s current ad campaign; the nice saleslady demoed it for me, and the quality’s pretty good for what it is. But honestly I don’t see myself ever using it as more than a gimmick; I’ve had a webcam on my laptop for 5 years and have never been on a video chat that’s not about trying out the video chat feature. Perhaps Apple will prove me wrong — and like with video chats on computers, some people get a lot more mileage out of it than others. I can certainly see if I had a small child we’d probably be on with my parents a lot more often — my mom doesn’t need too many real-time updates on the cats.

There’s also an improved main camera, which may be a nice extra but isn’t a killer feature for me — the current phone cameras are adequate (though not great) and aren’t main selling points for me.

Appropedia Blog: Poverty in a rich country

2010-07-07T14:51:18+00:00

I'm in Jakarta, and discussing the state of Indonesia (you know, solving the world's problems after dinner). The most pertinent comment:

"This is not a poor country. It's a rich country with lots of poor people."

As in many other countries, there's no sign of a major change in the distribution of wealth any time soon. So is there hope for the majority of Indonesians? Fortunately, yes. For one thing, economic conditions in absolute terms seems to be picking up; and importantly, health and quality of life are not a simple matter of money. Kerala is a fascinating alternative model of development.

I've been spending time here since 1995, late in the Soeharto era, and I've seen many changes for the better, and a few big changes for the worse. I like to think of myself as a realistic optimistist - I know that things can and do go wrong, but it's possible to choose a different path.

Wikimedia blog: Wikimania and WikSym kick off in Gdańsk, Poland

2010-07-07T11:22:15+00:00

Gdańsk, Poland is currently filled with several hundred wiki enthusiasts, as the city plays host to two of the major wiki-focused global conferences this week: Wikimania, the official conference of Wikimedians and the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, and WikiSym 2010, the 6th international symposium on wikis and open collaboration. This is the first time that both conferences have been coordinated to take place at the same time and in the same city.

Wikimania 2010

Wikimania 2010 is the 6th annual international conference for Wikimedia’s volunteers, collaborators, and stakeholders – focusing on discussion about Wikimedia’s projects and the core, free operating software, MediaWiki. The conference starts Friday, July 9 and runs for three days into Sunday, July 11. Over 300 participants from around the world are expected to attend and deliver over 50 presentations on topics within three conference tracks (knowledge, infrastructure, and people) that include subjects like offline viewing of Wikipedia, semantic MediaWiki, increasing participation on projects, and expanding Wikimedia’s global volunteer network.

Wikimania 2010 will also include for the first time an orchestral recital of the work of Władysław Szpilman, as a memorial on the tenth anniversary of the composer’s death in July, 2000. Szpilman, a world-renown composer and performer, authored the memoir, The Pianist, which inspired the film directed by Roman Polański. This year will also include the first film premiere at Wikimania, the debut public screening of Truth In Numbers, The Wikipedia Story, a documentary film three years in the making by filmmakers Nic Hill and Scott Glosserman.

Also for the first time this year, Wikimedians converged in London, and throughout Europe, for wiki-train: a coordinated, rolling-wiki meetup on rails that brought a few dozens wikimedians together to ride from London to Gdansk. A highlight video reel is available on Wikimedia Commons.

Wikisym 2010

The sixth annual conference of Wikisym, is the gathering of academics from around the world focusing on wikis and digital collaboration systems, which now include over 300 different formats of wikis and online collaboration tools. This year’s program includes dozens of open-topics, as well as two keynotes by Wikipedian and author Andrew Lih, and Cliff Lampe, Assistant Professor in telecommunications, media and information studies from the University of Michigan. Wikisym takes place July 7 through July 9.

Host city: Gdańsk

Gdańsk, the 1000-year old port city in Northern Poland has deep historical and multicultural roots. The birthplace of Poland’s Solidarity movement and the first city to experience World War II, Gdańsk and the tri-city region are home to over 800,000 residents. The area is one of the major industrial and cultural centers of Poland. It’s a musical capital (home of the Chopin music festival), and a historic center for commercial trade throughout eastern Europe. The complex history of Gdańsk is described in great detail on its English Wikipedia article, including the unique debate about the accurate use of the city’s name (Gdańsk or Danzig?), through history.

The local coordination teams for Wikimania and Wikisym deserve our great thanks for producing two conferences that bring together 100s of passionate wiki enthusiasts from all over the world. Congratulations, and good luck!

Jay Walsh, Communications

Wikipedia Signpost: Wikipedia Signpost – Volume 6 Issue 27 – 5 July 2010

2010-07-06T15:42:07+00:00

News and notes: WMF expansion, community hires, award for MediaWiki, admin recall
In the news: Accidentally anonymized donation, democratized learning and more
Wikimania preview: Gearing up for Wikimania in Gdańsk
WikiProject report: WikiProject Children’s Literature
Features and admins: Approved this week
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Single page view PDF version

Brion Vibber: The Awful Tooth: missing Wikimania

2010-07-05T19:36:07+00:00

Let that be a lesson to all the aspiring young computer programmers out there: stay in school, and brush your teeth!

I’ll unfortunately be missing this year’s Wikimania and WikiSym conferences in Gdansk, Poland as I’m recovering from a tooth extraction. It seems to be going ok, but it’s got me totally wiped out — I can barely make it across San Francisco by bus, this ain’t time for me to hit the planes.

Those of you who’re also coming to OSCON in Portland later this month, I’ll see you there. The rest of you, I’ll catch ya on the internets!

The sad, sad tale

So when you’re a young man or lady, at some point you have to make a lot of Important Life Choices, such as what to do about your wisdom teeth. These molars are pretty far back in the mouth, and not hugely useful in actual chewing. Moreover, they’re more likely than other teeth to suffer from either bad impaction when they’re new (coming in at funny angles, or butting up against other teeth and screwing things up — they’re entering an already-full mouth) or bad decay later on (since they’re hard to reach they can be hard to clean, greatly increasing the chances of decay).

My teeth were coming in reasonably straight, so as a lad I made the decision to leave them. For many years this served me just fine, but SECRET TOOTH DECAY was my enemy, stealing into my jaw in the night to chip away at one of the ol’ wizzy teeth. A few weeks ago the decay crossed some limit and basically the side of the tooth fell out to reveal a gigantic cave system rivaling Carlsbad Caverns.

Other minor cavities were easily patched up by my local dentist, but this one was gonna need a removal. I was hoping I could push it back until after my packed June-July travel schedule, but it started acting up again last week when I was in Montreal for RecentChangesCamp and to coordinate the StatusNet 0.9.3 release.

Rather than wait and hope it didn’t crack, collapse, or get infected while zipping about Central Europe, I thought I’d better go ahead and get it taken care of while I was on the ground in SF for a few days. If I was lucky, I’d be recovered enough to pack myself up with some painkillers and still make it, and if not I’d have time for a fuller recovery before OSCON.

The actual procedure was quick and easy — local anesthetic does wonders, and I got over my fear of dental procedures as a kid (I find it quite interesting to sort of follow along, actually). Recovery though… well, let’s be honest. Recovering from a wisdom tooth removal is gonna lay you out a bit. This is pretty much a best case — upper jaw, not impacted, reasonably exposed, other teeth not affected. But between the pain, the mental fuzziness from the vicodin treating the pain, and the general tiredness from the body redirecting some of its efforts to healing a wound, I’m still pretty out of it a few days later. It’s particularly aggravating for a knowledge worker liker myself — the wound itself doesn’t prevent me from doing what I do, but the medicine means I just can’t concentrate enough to get much done either for work or fun! Grr!

So… BRUSH AND FLOSS YOUR WISDOM TEETH REGULARLY if you got em!

Ryan Lane: JSBreadCrumbs 0.4 released

2010-07-05T11:33:56+00:00

JSBreadCrumbs is a MediaWiki extension that will add a trail of navigation breadcrumbs below the navigation tabs.

I was on the train for a long time yesterday, and got a chance to fix some bugs. This is a feature and bugfix release. The following has changed since 0.3:

Added different site name support (when breadcrumbs are enabled on wiki farms, and they share the same cookie path)
Added support for preferences
- Users can enable/disable bread crumbs
- Users can enable/disable the prepending of site name onto titles
- Users can set the number of bread crumbs to display
Delete cookies on log out
Removed some global preferences (replaced with default user options)
Fixed localization issue with namespaces
Only output Javascript/CSS when using the Vector skin

The usual methods should be used to download. See the extension’s page on mediawiki.org for download options.

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Appropedia Blog: The Future We Deserve

2010-07-05T05:27:12+00:00

The Future We Deserve is "a curated collaborative collection of 100 essays about the future." The contributions are being coordinated on Appropedia - see The future we deserve.

From the homepage :

The Future We Deserve is a new book project about collaboratively creating the future we deserve. We will be working together at internet scale on internet time to brainstorm and barnstorm our way towards an image of a world we all believe in, a world of fairness, collaboration and living within a harmonious balance with nature. The book is open to all contributions — essays about technology, politics, working examples of better ways and fantastic ideas which just need to get done.

The print edition will be created together, as we collaborate to select and coordinate what goes into the final book. We'll use open licenses and crowdfunding to lower the barriers to collaboration, and do our level best to make the book the start of a ongoing journey together into the future we are shaping with our lives.

This is creating The Future We Deserve.

Wikimedia Technical Blog: Wikimedia projects down due to power problem in primary data center

2010-07-05T03:55:57+00:00

Starting at 0:10 UTC on July 5th, the Wikimedia Foundation suffered from
intermittent, partial power failures in the internal power network of
one of its main data centers in Tampa, Florida. Due to the temporary
unavailability of several critical systems and the large impact on the
available systems capacity, all Wikimedia projects went down. The power
situation stabilized at 1:12 UTC, and systems and services recovery has
been taking place since. We expect all projects to be back online and
editable around 4:00 UTC.

Seth Finkelstein: Wikipedia Is Down, And I Feel Fine

2010-07-05T02:40:18+00:00

Wikipedia is down. I feel fine. My life is unaffected. I have no great anxiety or discomfort. Life will continue along, and the site will almost certainly return sometime in the future. This is apparently an uncommon feeling.

I was going to "retweet" the explanation on twitter by "Wittylama":

Not only is #Wikipedia down, but also Commons and everything by WMF. the AirCon is down in the server room in Florida - Overheating.

But the restrictions of Twitter put me off - it's not conversation!.

Update: There's a "wikimediatech" status feed

Update2: And it returns ... if you even noticed ...

Chad: What wikis mean to me

2010-07-04T18:43:41+00:00

I haven’t blogged in awhile, but I’ve got some free time today and a lot on my mind.

Sometime in 2004 or 2005, I first head of Wikipedia. It was this online encyclopedia with a lot of interesting articles. And the links! Oh the links; they transport you quickly to topics you’ve never even heard about. I soon learned that this marvelous resource was editable by people just like you an I. I was already familiar with free software, so the crowd-sourcing aspect was a concept I was already familiar with.

Becoming more involved, I joined the ranks of the editors and then administrators seeking to organize, revert and discuss the ever-growing content that formed the encyclopedia. My use of e-mail skyrocketed, as I found myself participating in long-winded mailing-list discussions about the intricacies of fair-use media and whether or not joke articles should be preserved. I also tried poking at the software, since it too was open source and asking for contributions.

Somewhere around this time, I became disenchanted with Wikipedia. Perhaps the administrative processes had taken their toll, or maybe I was just tired of arguing. I had never been a good writer (on or offline) so I couldn’t “get back to writing articles” or something of that nature. Facing a void, I turned to Veropedia.

Veropedia was a now-defunt venture by Danny Wool, myself and a few others to showcase the very best of what Wikipedia had to offer. Scraping (yuck) static versions that had been proofread and then using those for display to the end user. Vero was looking for a new developer, so I stepped up. I spent about a year or so working on the project and actually made some decent milestones. I managed to get a Lucene-based search going as well as ported our entire article validation script to PHP from Perl. Our technology was a hodgepodge of scripts, mostly because the original developer thought MediaWiki had too much overhead for our needs. Planning out a MediaWiki-based phase 2 of our software became the new goal.

So I started getting more involved with MediaWiki development. I got commit access, and started working on various bugs that were hindering Veropedia development–sidebar: I originally discovered the libxml2 entity bug while working on some customizations for Special:Import. And so Veropedia kind of just stayed the same while I chugged away at MediaWiki. Somewhere along the line I stopped really caring about Veropedia. I was busy with work, school and now I’d taken up MediaWiki development in my spare time.

Veropedia is dead. At least Veropedia as I’ve known it is dead. Actually, the server I had it living on just got shut down today. I’ve still got the leftover backups lying around, but the site itself is down. Danny still has the domain names if he ever wants to use them again, but I’m done with it. It’s not a wiki.

And that’s really what it’s all about to me at this point. Some point while working on MediaWiki, I realized that that was what I really wanted to do. Work on wikis. Veropedia wasn’t a wiki. Arguments on mailing lists and talkpages aren’t wikis. Collaboratively editing text is what MediaWiki does and what I’m proud to help support. I’ve started working with the Foundation on a contract to support FlaggedRevs/Pending Changes and it’s exciting to make the move from being a volunteer.

I really think that workflow systems like the one I’m helping to support really improve the wiki model. They help pages be as open as possible to editing while still allowing editorial control. And producing free, high-quality content is really what MediaWiki is designed to do. I think it’s pretty cool that I can help make that happen.

Appropedia Blog: Geek Moment: Shiny New CrunchBang Linux

2010-07-03T17:54:57+00:00

CrunchBang Linux is an operating system based ona philosophy of lean code and usability. It doesn't aim to be the easiest version of Linux, but for someone with a moderate amount of computer ability it's straightforward and not bloated.

The upcoming version switches to the proven and stable base of Debian. This is version 10, named “Statler,” (naming is based on Muppet characters) and the alpha version available now has been receiving an enthusiastic reception from the CrunchBang community - a number commenting that it's more stable than many distros' final releases.

Now, while I'd love to see a stable Linux distro that works for everybody, a version that works extremely nicely for semi-geeks like myself is very, very welcome.

via Release Notes - CrunchBang Linux 10 Alpha 2 ~ CrunchBang Linux Wiki.

Shankbone: Huge dead rat in New York (photo)

2010-07-03T13:59:18+00:00

I stumbled across this unlucky fat fellow on East 6th Street on my way to breakfast this morning. I would estimate that he was about two to three pounds.

Licensed Creative Commons 3.0 attribution

Possibly related posts

The WikiWorks Blog: New MediaWiki extension: Approved Revs

2010-07-03T00:59:33+00:00

Approved Revs is my latest MediaWiki extension (with some important code contributions made by Jeroen and others), released about a week ago; version 0.2 just came out today. It’s a simple extension, that just lets administrators mark a single revision/version of any wiki page as the “approved” one – so that, when users go to that page, what they see is the approved revision, not necessarily the latest one.

It’s a simple concept, and hardly original: you may be aware that there’s already an extension that does this – FlaggedRevs, which is already in use on a growing number of language Wikipedias; maybe a dozen currently – not yet the English-language one, but it’s probably just a matter of time. What’s different about Approved Revs is just its simplicity – FlaggedRevs puts in place an entire framework for evaluating the quality of any specific revision. That sort of framework approach makes sense for very large sites, like Wikipedia, where decisions about which version to approve have to be done out in the open, and agreed to by many people. For smaller sites, the framework of FlaggedRevs could be overkill – in fact, my first thought to create a new extension came after trying to install FlaggedRevs and getting scared off after around the 3rd paragraph of the documentation (though to be fair, that’s what some people have said about Semantic MediaWiki as well).

Anyway, I think Approved Revs will be an important extension, because it enables an element of workflow, something that MediaWiki has generally lacked. When you create a website with a standard CMS solution like Drupal or WordPress, you can easily save a page or posting in draft form before it gets “published”, i.e. made viewable to the public. And you can have different user types, so that one set of people is responsible for writing the content, and another is responsible for approving it. In MediaWiki it’s a different world: whatever the last thing that a user wrote, whether your user base is a small group of employees or the whole world, is what everyone sees. This of course offers a big advantage in immediacy, but for some organizations it’s just not acceptable. So Approved Revs could open up the use of MediaWiki to content-management situations where previously it wasn’t a possibility.

And yes, if the page contains semantic data, it’s the data from the approved revision that gets stored by SMW, which is great. (The same behavior could be true of FlaggedRevs – I don’t know.)

Liam Wyatt: End of my residency

2010-07-02T16:23:21+00:00

[This is part of a series of posts from my time as
"Wikipedian in Residence" at the British Museum.]

Today is my last day at the British Museum as the “Wikipedian in Residence” project draws to the end of its five-week pilot. On Monday I head off to ~~Gdańsk~~ ~~Danzig~~ Gdańsig for Wikimania 2010 to present about what I’ve learned here.

This post will highlight some interesting outcomes from my time here and also lay some ideas for how this kind of project could be run elsewhere.

Interesting outcomes from this project that you might not know about:

Looking at the quantitative reporting, June represented the single biggest month both in terms of organically generated pageviews to British Museum articles in Wikipedia and also in terms of clickthroughs to the BM catalogue.^[1](See more about these stats at my previous blogpost.)

Not only did many Wikipedians write in asking for the assistance of curators at the “one on one collaboration” page, but a couple of BM departments “pitched” notable objects and asked if any Wikipedian would like to come on-site to write an article. The first result of that has been today’s creation of the article Isabella Brant (drawing). A piece by Reubens with his first wife on the front and his second wife on the back!

At the time of writing this, there have been 901 edits and 114 footnotes added to the article Hoxne Hoard since the day I announced the “Hoxne Challenge” event. This is a ratio of one new reference for every nine edits which is a fantastically strong showing over such a number of revisions. The article is currently a Feature Article candidate.

[The "empress" pepper pot - most famous object from the Hoxne Hoard.
The article about the object itself is also a byproduct of the "Challenge" event. Photo by BabelStone, CC-zero]

During the Hoxne Challenge we took what I believe to be the first video of Wikipedians editing in the wild. It is a timelapse of the editing process and can be viewed in .ogg format here. It is also the first use of a Creative Commons license by the British Museum.

OpenMoko, the people behind the Wikireader (effectivley the closest thing you’ll get to a Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galazy) generously gave us five Wikireaders for this project. Not only were they used extensively during the Backstage Pass day but they are now being used as part of the schools programe at the British Museum’s Samsung Digital Discovery Centre.

[One of the Wikireaders in action during the "backstage pass" tour. By Mike Peel, CC-by-SA]

There are many other things that have resulted from this month-long collaboration some of which are tangible (or at least digital) whilst many are more difficult to quantify. A lot of people, from both communities, now feel that the other is not quite so scary, not quite so exclusivist, not quite so antithetical to their way of doing things. Of course, I have no proof of this other than comments that people have made but I do hope that this month marks a turning point in the way Museums and Wikipedia (and by extension, the free-web and the GLAM sector) see each other - as potential allies rather than as potential threats.

Running this project elsewhere

The key thing that I would recommend you look at if you are interested in running a similar project in your own museum (or if you’re a Wikipedian wanting to work at your local museum) is to know the rules of engagement. You need to both be aware of what you want to achieve, what are potential conflicts-of-interest, what areas of policy overlap and what diverge.

The way I defined the scope of my time here was:

“The project is to identify ways of building a sustainable relationship between the museum and the Wikimedia community that is both mutually beneficial and in accordance with both communities’ principles.”

There are a lot of keywords in that but they’re all relevant. What they mean in practice is:

Sustainable = it’s not “all about me” but also about what happens afterwards. It’s important that resident not attempt to “own” or control subjects just because they are related “their” museum. The project should not burn-out either community from being interested in each other into the future.

Relationship = Building a relationship is more than just asking for a donation of multimedia content. It’s not a fire-and-forget thing, but a meeting of two communities of practice.

Mutually beneficial = there must be direct benefit to the Museum and not just to Wikimedia otherwise the project is just a charity-case rather than something that can be pointed to by management as fulfilling part of their strategy. The trick is identifying things that are beneficial to both rather than just one or the other.

Both communities’ principles = that is, as an officially affiliated volunteer you’re responsible to both organisations to give advice that you know will not undermine either. You might be able to convince a museum to release images (for example) but if you do this by making false promises then you’ve undermined the relationship/trust. This section is also important when dealing with Conflict of Interest issues as it means you cannot be obliged to willingly undermine one community or the other.

Addressing these points are crucial to making sure you remain in good standing with both communities which is itself crucial to making the project a success.

Nevertheless, be prepared for hostility. From both directions. There are some (though not many) in the museum sector who believe that working with Wikipedia or free-culture community will undermine the role of the professional cultural institution. Equally, there are some in the Wikipedia community who believe that working with museums will undermine the encyclopedia’s independence.

I’ve heard the phrase “but we must preserve the integrity of our collection” used in reference to museums arguing for control but equally I have heard the same phrase used by Wikipedians arguing why they should not interact with outside organisations. I’ve also been accused of having a conflict of interest, of being a paid-editor, of breaking UK tax law and taking the place of someone else more qualified to take the role. cf. Haters gonna hate.

Overall

Now that this month has passed (too quickly) I can safely say that I’ve never felt more engaged and able to contribute to both sectors than whilst working here. I hope other people take up the challenge and become in-house Wikipedians around the world as this spreads mutual trust and understanding. There are several other things in the works that are not ready for announcing yet but stay tuned for further British Museum - Wikipedia goodness in the future

–Liam Wyatt,
Volunteer Wikipedian in Residence, British Museum.
(not any more).

^[1]The largest month ever coincided with the release of the Indiana Jones Film “temple of the crystal skull” in 2008 with several million people arriving at the Wikipedia article Crystal skull which is actually about the British Museum object - not the film. However! A considerable number of those people subsequently visited the British Museum website which was no accident.