Online/offline
Poor blog. For the past week I have been relatively occupied with “real life” stuff. Also, the cycle of my tolerance for mailing lists, in particular, has dipped from “a necessary evil that still produces the occasional gem” back to “tedious”. Probably the tenor is always much the same and it is only my reaction that varies. Nonetheless, I suppose this cycle reinforces my energy for “real life” stuff.
On Sunday Wikimedia Australia had its incorporation meeting. Thanks to a last minute offer we even had a proper conference call. Besides Melbourne we also had people participate from Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and Hobart, as well as a decent number of people participating via proxy votes. The enthusiasm is contagious.
A tangent: It seems alternately disappointing and thankful, but always true, that a “real life” factor – in fact, even a voice factor – leads people to self-discipline, or self-censor. It’s good where it stops people being belligerent, but bad where it leads people to not voice real concerns they have. Whether that be for fear of hurting someone else’s feelings, or fear of speaking out of turn, and whether those concerns are grounded or not… if they are grounded, then the group is worse off for not hearing them and thus having the chance to contemplate them. If they are not grounded, that individual is worse off for not feeling they have an opportunity to air them. So, how do you encourage the tentative but discourage the testy… a perennial question.
WikiProject so effective, it skews study results
Banksia spinulosa, public domain.
Seriously, how cool is this story?
The paper is Scientific citations in Wikipedia by Finn Årup Nielsen— the paper itself is dual-licensed GFDL and CC-BY-SA — and it analyses the cite journal template uses from the April 2007 database dump. The author compares the prevalence of Wikipedia citations to general scientifier community citations.
The success of WikiProject Banksia causes a noticable outlier:
The one circled in red is Australian Systematic Botany.
Australian botany journals received a considerable number of citations…in part due to concerted effort for the genus Banksia, where several Wikipedia articles for Banksia species have reached “featured article” status.
Right now, there are six. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the “rest” of Wikipedia to catch up.
The number of people working on this project, you can count on one hand and still have fingers left over.
The Banksia gallery on Wikimedia Commons, and category, are also impeccably sorted and organised (and detailed!).
It makes me smile to be able to report this, because it shows how much just a few dedicated souls can achieve, by quietly and steadily busying themselves.
And it’s damn cool. Congratulations, WikiProject Banksia.
Flickr + Powerhouse Museum -> Tyrell Today
I just said There’s also dozens of photos of landmark Sydney buildings and streets. It would be a fascinating project for someone to try and take a photo from the same position today.
…and it exists! Tyrrell Today.
| Argyle Cut, Sydney | |
|---|---|
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| c. 1880-1900. | November 22, 2007 |
and on Google Maps:
(link)
Awesome.
Links for 2008-04-13
Tidbits from the mailing lists:
- RfC: What should the WMF Research Goals be? Got some nifty ideas? Make sure you add them.
- Board meeting report from Florence.
- I muted a few mailing list threads recently. I highly recommend this practice for the sake of your sanity, but at the same time if anyone feels like summarising one or two in a breezy but fair(ish) way, that would be neat.
And elsewhere:
- The Nambour Chronicle and North-Coast Advertiser, of the Queensland Sunshine Coast, has released “the entire full text run of this newspaper from 1903 to 1955”. [Although I note that by “full text” they actually mean “you can download a PDF of a page”, which is good, but not text as such.] You have to register to download pdfs, but it’s free. What a fantastic resource for researching Australian history! I remember scanning through microfilm in my university library’s basement… this is going to be a real improvement! (via)
- Images for the future – A Dutch mob whose goal is maximum availability of the audiovisual material to everyone. Cool. They just this weekend held a “working conference” called Economies of the Commons: Strategies for Sustainable Access and Creative Reuse of Images and Sounds Online. Hm, I wonder if any Wikimedians took part in this… (via)
- Where to Find Open Data on the Web from ReadWriteWeb
- LearnSVG ebook is now a free (as in beer) download, available in English and French. It’s quite technical and contains about a million zip archives inside zip archives, for some reason.
Powerhouse Museum takes part in Flickr's "The Commons"
Flickr’s The Commons rolls on. First it was the Library of Congress, this time it’s the Tyrrell Collection from the Powerhouse Museum (“science+design”) in Sydney. There’s only 200 images released so far (unlike the 2000-odd released by LoC), but the promise of 50 more to come each week, AND (geogeeks get ready), maply goodness!
In the screenshot above, the pink dots represent images by the Powerhouse Museum. You can zoom in and out of the map; clicking on a pink dot brings up that image’s thumbnail. You can also click on the greyed-out thumbnails in the strip in the lower half of the screen, and see the corresponding pink dot highlighted on the map.
Possibly Flickr has had all this map stuff for a while. :) I may have missed it. At any rate, the ‘neat’ factor comes from having more than one dot any given map, and also the contrast between today’s map data and photographs from 100 years ago.
Originally I was going to just link to this, but I had a browse through it and found so many cool images that I’m sure have no counterpart on Wikipedia, that I wanted to give it some more space. Panning for gold. Woolshed. Trams down King Street. Bondi Beach in your Sunday finest. Cutting down a tree you couldn’t even reach around. They’re all c1900.
There’s also dozens of photos of landmark Sydney buildings and streets. It would be a fascinating project for someone to try and take a photo from the same position today.
Now if only Flickr would hurry up and add “No known copyright restrictions” to its API…! Then we can slurp them up all the more efficiently.
