Planet Wikimedia

A real measure of popularity

2009-11-06T19:50:21+00:00

Today it was revealed that Wikipedia editor Durova is almost as famous as Barack Obama. According to Wikipedia:Database_reports/Pages_with_the_most_revisions, Barack Obama has 18,522 edits, making it the 104th most edited page on the English Wikipedia. User talk:Durova follows closely behind at 14,324 revisions, ranking it at number 163 on the aforementioned list. Durova's talk page is the fourth most edited user talk page on enwiki, behind only Jimbo, SandyGeorgia, Dr. Blofeld, and of course Raul654.

This means that Durova is roughly 77.33% as popular as Barack Obama. It's amazing what Wikipedia will do.

Palenque revisited

2009-11-06T10:58:52+00:00

The bas relief at Palenque has deteriorated a lot since 1787 when Ricardo Almendáriz sketched it. Thanks go to Infrogmation for spotting this 2008 photograph of the same panel.

And here's another look at the digitally restored version of the 1787 drawing.

[guest] AntWeb goes CC-BY-SA

2009-11-06T04:55:27+00:00

Waldir has previously guest-blogged here and I am happy to welcome him back for his second post. Congrats on helping make this cool project happen! —Brianna

Image by AntWeb, licensed CC-BY-SA-3.0

written by Waldir Pimenta

Did you know that the most venomous insect in the world is an ant? That’s right. One sting from the Maricopa Harvester Ant is equivalent to twelve honey bee stings — the required amount to kill a 4.5 pound rat.

I found that over a year ago, through University of Florida’s Book of Insect Records. I immediately headed to Wikipedia to see what it had to say about it, but to my surprise there was no such article! I thus started one from scratch, using some information I found in several ant-related websites. Eventually people started adding information to the article, up to the point that it contained a fairly good collection of information about this fascinating species. But still one thing was missing — something that single-handedly could make the article ten times more useful: an image.

So, when searching for images to illustrate it, I found the fantastic images from AntWeb, a project from The California Academy of Sciences, which aims to illustrate the enormous diversity of the ants of the world. I was especially happy to find that they were using a Creative Commons license — but soon after I was disappointed to find that the specific one they used (CC-BY-NC) was not appropriate for Wikipedia (or, more generally, free cultural works, and thus discouraged by Creative Commons itself).

So I sent them an email suggesting them to change the license. When they replied, I found out that they actuallly had been internally discussing license issues for quite a while. I kept in touch, and made sure to let them know the advantages of having their work showcased in such high-traffic websites as Wikipedia, Commons or WikiSpecies.

I like to think that my two cents helped in their decision, some time later, to not only change their license to CC-BY-SA, but also upload all their images to Commons themselves! This was part of their overall mission: “universal access to ant information”. Before, the AntWeb project focused only on digitization of content and development of the web portal; but now they also decided to “export” AntWeb content to improve access. Putting the images and associated metadata in Commons was an example their outreach initiatives.

This was very welcome by the community, and there was a lot of input on how best to perform the mass upload in order to make the images easy to find and be used to illustrate articles and other relevant pages. The process took several days, but finally, over 30,000 images were uploaded, full with EXIF tags, taxonomic data, and geographic information when available.

This is just the beginning, though! As usual in the wiki world, you can help! There are articles to be illustrated in the various Wikipedia language versions (Magnus’ FIST tool comes in handy for finding them!). There are WikiSpecies pages to be illustrated. There are categories in Commons to be created to allow the ant category tree to be navigated and have every ant image reachable through it. And more importantly, there are these great news to spread and let people who are interested in ants know that they can now count on what’s possibly the greatest online repository of free, high-quality ant images.

Many thanks to Brian Fisher, AntWeb Project Leader, who coordinated the license change process, Dave Thau, AntWeb Software Enginer, who wrote the upload script and performed the upload, and to all the AntWeb staff for their outstanding work!

StatusNet Sphinx search work in progress

2009-11-05T13:47:13+00:00

I’m retooling StatusNet’s Sphinx search engine support to pluginize it and better support multiple sites… Putting some notes up on the wiki.

Would love to see any additional issues or suggestions from folks using, or wanting to use, Sphinx for their SN instances!

Goals

2009-11-05T11:17:52+00:00

Awadewit is among the Wikipedians I most admire: a prolific contributor of high quality articles on scholarly topics, and a joy to work with. She's completing her dissertation in eighteenth century children's literature this year, so as a gesture of thanks for her hard work I've done a little restoration for her today. She surprised me last month by saying she's actually used my restorations as examples in the introductory undergraduate classes she teaches. Well here's something closer to her real world scholarship: a William Blake illustration for Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life.

"Wow - they look so different from the Blake versions - so much softer" was her first reaction. After a moment of poking through the bibliographic notes I confirmed a suspicion: this is indeed the Blake version, scanned from his original sketch for the frontispiece.

Here's wishing the digital file were higher resolution. The Library of Congress has been digitizing its collection for fifteen years; some of the older digitization isn't quite at the technical excellence of their recent work. Equipment and formats have changed, and their staff has gotten better at it. So this might be a viable featured picture candidate at English Wikipedia but the higher Wikimedia Commons technical requirements would exclude it from serious candidacy.

Nonetheless, a medium resolution file is usually less work to restore--the smaller damage just doesn't show up at this resolution. So I did a quick restoration for Awadewit to cheer her on through the final months of the dissertation. First, let's have a peek at the version of this image which appeared in the printed edition.

This is basically a mirror image of the sketch. Maybe the Library of Congress has been spoiling me: the file that was in use at the Wikipedia article was less than 50 kilobytes. It's stained, faded, yellowed, and suffers from distortion, plus the crop is so tight that it would be difficult to correct the problems if the filesize were large enough to work with.

Really, it's best to restore files that are at least 10 megabytes in uncompressed format. I don't call an image large unless it's more than 100 megabytes. On a fairly frequent basis other Wikipedians ask me to restore material that is only a few dozen kilobytes. I can't produce a featured picture from that; the magic has its limits.

Getting back to this project, though, one issue worth mentioning is how to deal with staining. Stains can be a problem when they occur over important parts of an image. In this instance a large brown stain occurs on the central figure's knee. I've blown this up to about double the original resolution.

This stain consists of two parts: a small deep brown spot surrounded by a much larger faint discoloration. First I got rid of the small spot. The easiest way to do that is with a clone stamp at 35% hardness, but with a careful and steady hand it's possible to get a more natural effect with the healing brush. The healing tool algorithm usually works poorly in the middle of narrow stripes, but if the sample point is the same distance from a line as the destination point the tool can give a pleasant blended effect. It's quite tricky to do this and often takes several tries because if it isn't done just right the tool will create an ugly smear.

Unnatural healing brush smears are a hallmark of poor image editing; that's something to really avoid. If you feel like trying this trick the way to get the feel for it is by backing up through the history when a smear occurs (and you will make smears--a lot of them--so don't feel bad). Don't try to re-heal a smear; it'll only smear worse. Just choose a new source point, try to line it up just so, and eventually the spot will vanish perfectly.

Of course there's still the larger stain. Low intensity stains are basically localized color problems. So I treat this like any other local color correction: choose the selection lasso, set feathering to 10 pixels (which is not very much, but appropriate for a small image), and create an adjustment layer to manually adjust the colors. Think of "brown stain" as "deficient in blue" and nudge the RGB sliders until the colors appear consistent. Don't try to be hasty and copy the same tweaks to the light, medium, and dark ranges: often the best results come from slightly different settings.

With additional work the final version comes out looking like this.

Three cheers for Awadewit and her Dissertation! (Now Awadewit, go finish it). ;)

Announcing WikiWorks

2009-11-05T06:15:54+00:00

I’m thrilled to announce WikiWorks - a MediaWiki-focused consulting company that I just launched. This is my first serious business venture, unless you count Referata. But it doesn’t feel like a huge leap into the unknown, because consulting is already what I do - I’ve done at least some paid MediaWiki work for dozens of sites and companies over the last few years. The difference now is the additional people - WikiWorks is a samll team of programmers around the world, all with significant experience setting up (and, in some cases, developing) MediaWiki; the goal is to make myself expendable, as it were, so projects can run smoothly even if I, or any other one person, can’t work on them at the time. We’re automating the process. Most of us also have other jobs at the moment, but these kinds of projects can almost always be done on a part-time basis, during off-hours; and in-depth projects involving full-time work, should they come, will be handleable in one way or another. The focus is on Semantic MediaWiki-based solutions, though we’re also equipped to take on regular, non-semantic projects.

So - if you’re from a company that would like to set up a wiki the right way, send us an email. If your company has a need for an easily-configured but powerful data integration system, and you would prefer software that’s free to something that costs a million dollars, send us an email. If you have too many Excel spreadsheets flying around the office, send us an email. If you already run a MediaWiki-based wiki, but want to make it nicer-looking, more user-friendly, and more like a true database application, send us an email. We’re looking forward to making some wikis.

Spinal curvature

2009-11-04T21:31:45+00:00

One problem with book scans occurs when the printing goes close to the spine and the page fails to lie flat on the scanner bed. The subject here is a detail from the Mayan ruins at Palenque and the illustration carries particular historic importance: it was drawn by Ricardo Almendáriz in 1787 during the initial excavation of Palenque and his illustrations formed part of the first significant archaeological report in the Americas.

The lower left corner on this image makes it a bit more challenging than the other perspective crops of recent posts because the others could all be corrected with a single perspective crop. This requires multiple perspective fixes. After the first set of changes the lower left corner still curls upward and inward. The effect is most apparent at the horizontal border line. That distortion affects the entire far left column of the image.

We're lucky in one way: other than border, only the lower half of this drawing contains information at far left. So the solution is to select the distorted segment from the seated figure at left and create a new image file solely for that partial figure, then perform a second perspective crop on that segment only. After that, copy and paste the segment to the original image as a new layer and align it so the correction becomes invisible. It's easier said than done.

Here's how it appears after the correction. The change is subtle but it alters the proportions of the figure's hip and spine. Alignment and blending require judicious erasure, partial redrawing of border lines, and minor edits at high resolution.

Other than that the restoration was routine. The drawing is in better shape than most comparable material of the same age, but it still took several patient hours of dirt and stain removal to complete the work.

One of the interesting things about the Almendáriz drawings is that he recorded features which have since been destroyed by exposure to the elements. Comparison against the remaining undamaged bas reliefs shows that his work was unusually accurate for its era. So this remains useful to modern scholars.

Wikimedia launches Bookshelf Project

2009-11-04T19:29:57+00:00

Maybe you’ve been editing Wikipedia for years. Or maybe you made your first edit a few days ago. Whatever your experience, you likely know at least one central fact about editing – that it can be difficult for newcomers to master the skills necessary for contributing to Wikipedia.

We want to change that, and we need your help. That’s why Wikimedia is kicking off a new project, the Bookshelf Project, developed to extend the reach and improve the quality of Wikipedia articles by increasing participation. We’re designing the Bookshelf Project to create a core set of public outreach materials designed to recruit new, high-value Wikipedia contributors. The idea is that by increasing potential contributor awareness, fostering excitement, and providing the training tools new editors need to get started, we’ll draw many more new editors than we do today. And we believe recruiting new high-value contributors to Wikipedia will necessarily increase the usefulness and quality of our encyclopedia.

Now we already know that many Wikipedia readers have never thought about editing the encyclopedia – even though there’s lots of information available about how to do so. Our goal is to reach out to those editors more actively – both to make them feel welcome and give them a great set of starting tools. We hope to seed the knowledge and enthusiasm about contributing to Wikipedia in such a way that it propagates itself.

We have lots of good reasons to believe this dream is achievable. Here’s one reason: we know anecdotally how easy it can be to inspire someone to edit and to share knowledge about editing. For example, during recent user testing for the Usability project, we interviewed a woman who uses Wikipedia daily, mainly to help her daughter with homework. She is an avid fan but had never edited. During the testing, she edited for the first time and immediately became excited about the possibilities of sharing what she knows and loves with others. She understood and was eager to implement Wikipedia’s core tenets of neutrality and verifiability. And she was eager to go home, share her excitement and recruit others to the effort.

Now, we can’t do one-on-one interviews with every possible new editor. But stories like this one suggest that we can leverage our experience with a few editors in ways that will benefit many more potential contributors. And that is the essence of the Bookshelf materials we plan to develop with your help.

We also plan to tap educational resources, since we know Wikipedia is a fact of life in many educational situations, usually as a reference tool. The Bookshelf Project will support additional educational applications by providing model lesson plans to show secondary school teachers and university professors how they can use writing, editing and collaboration in Wikipedia as core curriculum activities. In developing the Bookshelf Educational materials, we will work with subject matter experts to ensure the materials are relevant and applicable.

The Bookshelf Project will include materials to help journalists and other communications professionals do their jobs more easily, including techniques and information to help them be sure the information they use and the copy they write is accurate and up to date.

The Bookshelf materials will be developed in English and will be designed for translation, adaptation and use by volunteers, chapters and educational institutions such as schools and universities. We will use our new Outreach Wiki for the Bookshelf Project. This will be our place to give updates on the project and to get community feedback. There are lots of opportunities to help out, from acting as subject matter experts, to reviewing, and translation and localization.

We look forward to working together with our community on this initiative. If you’ve been in any way successful as a Wikipedia editor, we would value your input and feedback. There’s more than one way to contribute to Wikipedia’s success, but one major way to contribute has to be in the recruiting and training of new editors. The more we do to bring new, talented editors on board, the more comprehensive, reliable, and useful Wikipedia will be.

Marlita Kahn
Project Manager, Bookshelf Project

My monthly chore

2009-11-04T11:01:39+00:00

Every month I write on all the Wikipedias about the quality of their localisation. Some languages I skip, for instance when there localisation is complete. Some languages I do not message because there has never been any localisation for that language.

The Kikuyu Wikipedia is one such. It has 89 articles and many of those are by someone putting his Italian places on the map.. look for instance at this article about
"Zerba".

Kikuyi is spoken by some six million people, mostly in Africa. It will be good when this project has a community of people who are native to the language.
Thanks,
GerardM

Criteria for featured pictures

2009-11-04T09:52:31+00:00

On many of our projects we feature the best illustrations we have. Some of them are photos, some drawings, paintings, etches.. Some are created by our contributors, some are restored by our contributors and we judge them all by the same criteria. We do even when it does not make sense.

This is an enlarged copy of a portrait by William Blake. You can deduce its size because of the structure of the paper. The issues with its restoration where documented here. The original picture is according to the Library of Congress nine centimeters vertically.

This is a small picture but because of the quality scan it is still 2.29 MB in size. This is according to some too small. The size criteria however is reasonable when the focus is solely on digital photography. Digital photography is relatively young and for most of the historic subjects we cover we need the water colours, the pen drawings, the paintings, woodcuts and what not for illustration.

Some of these illustrations are small and like this picture of William Blake, they require a lot of work to be awesome. They make a big difference to the quality of our articles, they enrich our repository of illustrative material much more then another picture of sunset, a bug, a flower or another bunny.

There has to be point to our featured pictures. In my opinion it is to showcase the awesome material that we provide, high quality,freely licensed material for use by anyone who needs it. The current bias for modern digital photography makes us compete with so many other photo stock websites. A battle we lose. The restorations, the illustrations is where we are different. Together with the best modern and old photography we have in Commons a resource that excells.

Now to improve the STUPID biased criteria for featured pictures !!
Thanks,
GerardM

Heritage

2009-11-03T15:37:39+00:00

At right is a spectacular portrait of Willy Brandt, former German chancellor and Nobel Peace Price winner. He was mayor of West Berlin when the Berlin Wall was built. His likeness was nominated for featured picture at English Wikipedia earlier this year, but failed on technical issues. Brandt's portrait was part of a very generous donation from the German National Archive. Yet at 568 × 800 pixels, file size: 47 KB it just didn't meet the minimum criteria.

Several months ago I performed a courtesy restoration on a higher resolution portrait of Konrad Adenauer, which unfortunately can't be uploaded to Commons because the Bundesarchiv retained full copyright over its high resolution digitized files.

So if it's possible, I'd like to renew the request to Bundesarchiv to seek selected copies of higher resolution material. The lighting and expression on this Brandt portrait is brilliant; he deserves attention on the site's main page.

There's another reason to make this request. There's another image that was nominated for delisting nearly two years ago, and it was retained because a cultural institution donated a higher resolution version. Featured content criteria tend to rise over time, and the lower resolution version had been nominated and promoted before the standards changed. It's quite famous.

The final days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Many thanks to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for their assistance. The lower resolution version had been on the route to delisting. Since then the photograph has been featured on several projects including the Turkish Language Wikipedia. It's amazing how far one donation can go toward raising awareness.

One reason I'd love to be able to upload a better resolution version of Adenauer or Brandt is for balance; not everybody in Germany during World War II agreed with the government's policies at that time. Adenauer and Brandt were among the people who helped rebuild Germany into a respectable country again. It takes a special sort of leadership to steer a country that had gone off on such a bad course back to stability and democracy.
----
Image credit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_B_145_Bild-F057884-0009,_Willy_Brandt.jpg

Statistics for October

2009-11-03T09:57:30+00:00

A new month brings new statistics. translatewiki.net shows continued growth, the traffic for Wikipedia has grown by 9% to 11,586 M and the total number of articles grew with 2% to 14.2 M. These are numbers that show that we are doing well.

The English Wikipedia grew last month by 0.1 million articles while the other Wikipedias grew by 0.2 M. Its traffic grew by 1% and the other Wikipedias grew with 2%. For me it means that the English Wikipedia is doing well.

At the bottom of the "monthly page views" Wikipedias are grouped together by size. This is my favourite part of this page because of what it does not show. You expect that such a ranking is stable but when you observe it regularly, you will see how the composition of these groups change.

On the Total Articles view, you will find that slowly but surely the October numbers are added as they become available. As Erik Zachte, our statistics guru, always says the number of articles are not that important and he is certainly right for our bigger projects. It is quality that makes the difference when people are to return to these projects. However for most of the smaller projects we do not have the quantity to attract our readers.

When you look at the smaller projects, you will find that the traffic is erratic, the growth in articles can be big and monthly changes in traffic of up or down more then 20% seem to indicate a lack of maturity. Given that the trend is typically upwards, we are likely to make a big difference with many of our smaller wikipedias.
Thanks,
GerardM

Volume 5, Issue 44 – 2 November 2009

2009-11-03T09:13:52+00:00

Article contest: Durova wins 2009 WikiCup
Conference report: WikiSym features research on Wikipedia
Election report: 2009 ArbCom elections report
Audit Subcommittee: Inaugural Audit Subcommittee elections underway
Dispatches: Wikipedia remembers the Wall
News and notes: Strategic planning, November conference, brief news and milestones
Discussion report: Discussion Reports and Miscellaneous Articulations
WikiProject report: Project banner meta-templates
Features and admins: Approved this week
Arbitration report: The Report on Lengthy Litigation
Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

The WikiCup is about quality and, Durova is a winner

2009-11-03T08:31:10+00:00

For a few years now there is the WikiCup, a competition on the English Wikipedia aimed at creating quality content. It runs from January until the end of October and it generates a great amount of featured articles, featured pictures, did you knows, good articles ... all in all around 1.500 pieces of quality content.

I am really pleased that Durova won.. It is a massive boost for the restoration movement as it demonstrates the appreciation for great quality illustrations. It is not that Durova only contributed with illustrations but it is certainly what she is known best for and what made her win.

With the WikiCup 2009 secured, Durova will retire from the WikiCup, she indicated that she wants to spend more time on working on and the promotion of content collaboration with GLAM's. We would like to see more content from more museums and archives from all over the world and, in order to make this happen, digital restorations of what they have to offer makes a difference.

To make the whole restoration movement scale, we need to recruit in the whole world people interested in this. It is much easier when working with Arabic museums or archives when you speak Arabic and you can translate annotations into Indonesian for material from the Tropenmuseum when you speak Indonesian. In order to make this happen we have to coach people and teach them how to do this.

Congratulation to Durova, may you bewitch and beguile with your splendid work for a long time to come !

Thanks,

GerardM

Software, West Coast-style

2009-11-03T05:46:52+00:00

I had an action-packed trip to California about a week ago. First was the 2009 Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, which turned out to essentially be an open-source development conference, sponsored in an extremely generous way by Google. It took place at the Google campus, AKA the “Googleplex”, which I saw a long time ago back when it was the SGI campus, but now looks rather different. What can I say - for all the talk of cutbacks, it looks like Googlers still have it pretty good. The cafeteria food was so good, it made me just want to stay in the cafeteria all day.

The conference itself was quite interesting. I especially liked the talks about the non-development aspects of open source software, like the discussions on
marketing and inter-project communication (I wrote the notes for both of those sessions, which I don’t think is a coincidence because I was interested in those topics to begin with). It was eye-opening to see that every open-source project, even the established ones with foundations and business models and lots of users (all categories that potentially describe both Wikimedia and MediaWiki) struggle with the same issues of gaining “buzz” and coordinating decisions that regular software companies, for better or worse, have professionals handling.

I also got to spend with my brother and his wonderful family. And yes, I did go to this party, which was awesome (it was essentially a party full of people at various software startups, which you would never, ever see in New York); and, separately, I went to this great vegetarian restaurant as well.
After the weekend, it was time to head to the new MediaWiki office in San Francisco, where I met for two days with the members of the Wikipedia Usability Initiative. We had some very interesting and fruitful discussions, all on the subject of the template forms project, which is what I’m involved with. Lots of discussions about naming, which is always trickier than it seems!

In what really is a coincidence, earlier today I released the TemplateInfo extension, which is the first draft of my section of the work for the template-forms project. Hopefully it’ll end up on a gigantic website before too long.

Update: Oops, I forgot to post a link to the photo of all GSoC Mentor Summit attendees. Can you spot me? Hint: I’m in the back row, right next to the tree, in a blue hoodie.

1f63

Because We Can builds a 3D sign globe for Wikimedia

2009-11-02T23:18:10+00:00

Our build/design friends from Because We Can over in Oakland have done some great work for us over the past two years – including some nice entry-way desks, tables, and advice on how to make our humble space look nice. They’re also an open company that blazes a trail in using open-source software and providing open-source designs. But recently they finished a particularly special, signature production job for us, our brand new Wikipedia globe sign, now hanging in our offices at 149 New Montgomery in San Francisco.

Jeffrey and Jillian have put together a nice blog post that provides a detailed run-through on how they lovingly crafted the sign using their in-shop CNC robot and meticulous hand-painting. It brings our new space together in an exciting way, and yes – if you walk right up, not only does it glow, but you can help piece together that magnificent globe.

We’ll have more news to share about the Wikipedia puzzle globe in the coming weeks, but for now we’re happy to be able to share the inside scoop on how this lovely sign came together.

Jay Walsh, Communications

Using Statistics

2009-11-02T11:48:38+00:00

If you want to know about the state of the MediaWiki localisation, there are the group statistics. If you want to know how a particular language is doing, there are the language statistics on the Portal for a language. These are the statistics for the Indonesian language.

Statistics are nice but it is too easy to get too much of them. When you are an admin of a Wikipedia, the most you want to know is how is my language doing and what does that mean for me.

Yesterday a message was posted on all the Wikipedias informing how their language is doing. Many localisers went to translatewiki.net and as a consequence of the work done yesterday and today, two languages are now fully localised, for several languages all the "most used" messages have been localised and, tomorrow all these localisations will be live on all the WMF projects.

Statistics help in understanding the status quo. They provide arguments about what to do next or they provide the yardstick to measure our accomplishments by. Both are important, but learning what to do enables people to make a difference.
Thanks,
GerardM

When you've seen one Edwardian field marshal, you've seen 'em all

2009-11-02T11:02:05+00:00

Props to Roger Davies! The Library of Congress staff has emailed to confirm that they will be correcting their records regarding the identity of the man in the recently promoted featured picture at right. This is not Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener but Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts. Roger Davies noted differences in age and facial structure, and in particular the Victoria Cross at lower right which Roberts received, but not Kitchener. Roger Davies also found two reliable sources for Earl Roberts as the subject of this poster: the Smithsonian Institution and VADS (a joint project of the Imperial War Museum, the British Arts & Humanities Research Council, and Manchester Metropolitan University).

The updated information should be available at the Library of Congress website within a month.

In the meantime we'll need to do a little bit of housekeeping at the wikis because the featured picture candidacies and the relevant filenames all contained Lord Kitchener's name.

This goes to show that reliable sources aren't always perfect. With good reference works it is possible to improve the data that major institutions can share regarding their collections. Here's another recent example: a portrait of John Surratt that the Library of Congress is updating per my feedback.

John Surratt was a Confederate spy who conspired to kidnap Abraham Lincoln in 1864 and who was suspected of conspiring in Lincoln's assassination. His mother Mary Surratt was hanged by the United States Federal Government for her part in the Lincoln assassination plot. John Surratt survived by fleeing to Europe and serving as a Papal zouave; the statute of limitations on most of his activities had expired before he was identified and extradited.

The Library of Congress had misidentified him as the son of "Annie Surratt" and had misidentified his uniform as an Egyptian Army zouave rather than a Papal zouave. The LoC record also dated this photograph "between 1860 and 1875". The source Lincoln's Assassins: Their Trial and Execution by James L. Swanson and Daniel R. Weinberg narrows that time frame to 1866-1867 because the photograph was taken by an American photographer and was sold during Surratt's 1867 trial. Swanson and Weinberg also confirm the other corrections. The Library of Congress staff recently wrote with thanks for the corrections; their website should be updated within a few weeks.

I've started a restoration on Surratt's portrait but gotten sidetracked. Interested in completing the project? Welcoming collaborators; coaching available.

In the bigger picture, this sort of assistance constitutes a significant motivation for cultural institutions to digitize their collections for the public. For example, a Swedish archive called Regionarkivet recently uploaded several dozen high resolution public domain photographs by major nineteenth century photographers to Wikimedia Commons in the hope that volunteers would locate more information about the material. When this type of effort succeeds it achieves the best goals of the free culture movement. I encourage everyone who can provide assistance to join the effort. Digital editing skill isn't required; all it takes is a little research.

Not that it matters, but I've given Roger an award for his research. If people like this I could submit it for formal barnstar approval.

Bright ideas

2009-11-01T19:18:02+00:00

It can be delightful to root through obscure corners of the Library of Congress website and unearth something special such as a high resolution full book scan of a beautifully illustrated volume. This self-portrait of William Blake comes from Songs of Innocence and Experience, published 1794. He's an important painter and poet; Wikipedia ought to have a featured portrait.

Every restoration has its challenges. The main challenge in this one is that the aged paper does not lie flat. Scanner light is highly directional so digitization enhances small buckles in the original image. You'll see this as a series of bright and dark horizontal bands near his forehead, chin, and chest. The example below is an interim save after initial dirt and scratch removal.

Distracting, isn't it? The brightness gradient tool can be used here, but it only helps a little bit. The page itself is slightly brighter at the lower left corner. So one quick gradient adjustment at a very slight setting is a first step toward correcting the problems. In this instance I used about 2% opacity. Most of these issues have to be solved another way.

The solution here is to look at each buckled area in terms of what it changes about the image: brighter above, darker below. This can be fixed incrementally with multiple feathered mask selections in a series of brightness adjustment layers: brighten the dark sections and darken the light sections. The trick is to make plenty of layers, draw each one separately, and to change just a little bit at a time. This restoration went through 30 adjustment layers, with feathering staring at 40 pixels and decreasing to 25 and 10 pixels, nudging the brightness about two notches at a time (sometimes one and never more than three). The direct result of that follows:

That's more like it: almost like taking a gentle iron and pressing the paper flat (which of course we don't dare do to the actual physical copy). The final restoration added only moderate changes to curves and color balance.

Images that have nuanced brightness or staining issues can be an exception to the usual time allocation in digital restoration. Usually the bulk of restoration time goes into dirt and scratch removal. In this instance dirt and scratches were minimal, but layered masks required plenty of attention. The most difficult instances I've restored have needed as many as 200 brightness adjustment layers to correct for this type of problem.

Part 2: Making Wikipedia “GLAM-friendly”

2009-11-01T13:51:43+00:00

Coming after part 1 this post is about what’s been happening in the Wikimedia world that will make us more “GLAM friendly”.

We already know that newbie editors have difficulty in the first place due to being bitten by older editors - as has been described and demonstrated. But, at least as far as editors to Wikipedia coming from the gallery, library, archive and museum sector (GLAM) goes, things are getting a little bit friendlier.

1. Advice for the Cultural Sector a.k.a. [[WP:GLAM]]

With the help of some dedicated editors (special thanks to johnbod, johnuniq and uncledougie) I’ve put together a “one stop shop” advice page for professionals from the GLAM sector coming to Wikipedia wanting to edit.

I do not consider it to be complete or finished but I do think it is now ready enough for a more prime-time audience. Not really an essay, wikiproject, or policy page, it’s more of a place for people to seek advice written in terms that they can (hopefully) relate to. So, whilst the advice written there isn’t unique or qualitatively different from the advice on other pages across Wikipedia, it brings together all of the information relevant to people from the GLAM sector, gives relevant examples, and provides a forum for asking questions to people who are interested in improving GLAM-WIKI relations.

In the future this page may grow. It might gain a “GLAM noticeboard” for actions needing attention or perhaps it might become a place where GLAM representatives can meet Wikimedians who are wiling to be wiki-mentors. We’ll see where it takes us. One good suggestion (by Pharos) was the creation of a GLAM userbox that could be used by professionals as a shorthand to indicate that they understand the rules about declaring a CoI.

Something quite interesting happened when I tweeted that this page was now published with the words:

“Gallery, Library, Archive & Museum folks, please check out http://bit.ly/3k2KoY My attempt to make #Wikipedia a #GLAM-friendly place.”

This was re-tweeted by a series of museum sector people (which is awesome) but the phrasing was changed to this:

“Wikipedia now encouraging…” implies that we weren’t before, which gives me some insight into how unwelcome GLAM professionals felt. I never wrote the words “now encouraging” but I’m pleased that that is how the GLAM sector sees it. On the other hand it worries me that they felt discouraged or not allowed to participate before.

2. Conflict of Interest guidelines update

Similarly, the Conflict of Interest guideline has been updated to include a new section that specifically states:

“Museum curators, librarians, archivists, art historians, heritage interpreters, conservators, documentation managers, subject specialists, and managers of an academic special collection (or similar profession) are encouraged to use their knowledge to help improve Wikipedia.” [This is repeated in the aforementioned advice page]

For the last few weeks there has been a section in the “non controversial edits” heading that referred to “archives, special collections or libraries” being allowed to add links back to their collection in certain circumstance. This has now been removed and replaced with the broader statement that people in aforementioned kinds of professions are specifically encouraged to edit Wikipedia. I had received feedback from the first wording that because the word “museum” was not included that museum professionals thought they had been intentionally excluded. This was not the case and the new wording makes this clear - professionals across the cultural/collections sector are encouraged to edit.

There remains significant concern that this policy will bring forth a flood of linkspam from cultural institutions linking out to everything in their collection. So PLEASE, GLAM-folks, focus on writing content in the articles themselves rather than “go crazy” by merely placing lots of links to your institution’s website. Of course, you can reference your website’s collection as part of your work but if someone looking up your edit history (yes, everyone’s edit history is available for view e.g. Jimmy Wales’) and finds that the only thing a GLAM professional’s account has ever done is link back to the same organisation’s website, that might result in a push for more restrictive wording on the CoI guidelines.

Worse still, there is a worry that pseudo-museums will point to this policy and use wikilawyering to add external links to items of dubious notability:

3. Multimedia usability meeting

Later this week there will be a three-day meeting in Paris to hothouse the issues surrounding the use of multimedia in Wikimedia projects. The specific context is the grant given by the Ford Foundation regarding multimedia usability. The team for this grant is now coming into shape and this meeting will kickstart their efforts. First and foremost the multimedia usability team will be working out better and more efficient ways to upload (and mass-upload) images to Wikimedia commons. But, beyond that there are many other things that they might be able to tackle which are of specific relevance to GLAM organisations. If Flickr Commons has major cultural institutions queuing up to upload their own photographs under a free license then surely Wikimedia can get some of that love too. Unlike Flickr (owned by Yahoo! inc.) Wikimedia has the huge advantages, from the GLAMs point of view, that we have no advertising, are non-profit and can provide excellent contextualisation of their cultural works within Wikipedia.

Part 1: Making Wikipedia “GLAM-friendly”

2009-11-01T12:49:38+00:00

Recently there has been a flurry of activity in the Gallery, Library, Archive and Museum (GLAM) sector about how they can be more “Wikipedia-friendly” both directly and indirectly. But, what’s been happening in the Wikimedia world to make it more “GLAM-friendly”? Actually, a fair bit.

[This is the sign outside "the Domain", a public park in Sydney, but I would like to think that it applies equally to the Public Domain of creative works. Creative works should be used, not just admired from behind a fence].

But before I get to that (in part 2), here is blogpost part 1. listing just some of the things coming out of the GLAM sector that Wikimedians might be interested in.

1. “Collections are for use, but is Wikipedia the prime outlet?” by Josh Hadro at LibraryJournal.com This article states that:

“Special collections are for use…However, opening up digitized special collections to the broadest possible usage isn’t always easy, according to participants, though others stressed the importance of libraries making their collections’ presence known on popular sites.”

It goes on to explicitly discuss the possibility of working with Wikipedia in linking out to library’s special collection archives.

2. “Five rules for museum content” by Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney (with whom Wikimedia Australia has worked closely with in the past). These “rules” are that museum content (not limited to object but also the information about those objects) should be:

Discoverable - it is where I am and where I look for it.

Meaningful - I can understand it.

Responsive - to my interests, mood, location.

Usable/Shareable - I can pass it on.

Available in three locations - online, onsite and offsite.

Combine these simple rules with the Powerhouse Museum’s funky new strategic plan (2009-2012) which calls for “Dissolve boundaries between exhibitions, programs, publications and web content” and “Increase the level of collection information available through open access…” and you have a museum that is trying to lead the way in being open to Wikipedians using and reusing their content.

3. Similarly, the Smithsonian museum has released its new strategy which calls for the creation of the “Smithsonian commons” (on their own blog) (on the Creative Commons blog) which calls for:

“Establish a pan-Institutional policy for sharing and using the Smithsonian’s digital content, with particular focus on Copyright and Public Domain policies that encourage the appropriate re-use and sharing of Smithsonian resources.”

4. The National Library of Australia is creating a “Copyright Status Calculator” which will AFAICT, automate much of the process of determining the copyright status of works in their collection and they intend on making it open source. Once modified for the local copyright laws/exceptions this could be a boon to the staff in GLAM institutions with the often thankless task of undertaking copyright assessment. This program is simple enough to explain but the devil is in the detail. It combines the metadata for the collection item with a flow-chart logic of copyright law. So long as the metadata is in a consistent format the system could conceivably chew through a large proportion of the collection relatively quickly giving precise information. All edge-cases could then be dealt with manually. Very cool. Currently, every single photograph in their collection contains this standard phrase, irrespective of the copyright status of the photo:

“You may save or print this image for research and study. If you wish to use it for any other purposes, you must complete the Request for permission form.” [See my previous post "the digital rail-gauge" for more extensive rant on this topic ]

With that kind of automated tool institutions with large collections can safely make more nuanced access statements on most of their collection without increased labour time of individually checking records.

5. Responses to the “GLAM-WIKI recommendations” are starting to come in. Catherine Styles who was with the National Archives of Australia at the time of the conference has recently published her personal response to the recommendations and they are awesome. They point out that in many cases Wikimedians would love to help and do things, in our own esoteric way, that would otherwise cost the institution considerable time and money e.g. digital restoration and metadata cleanup. A theme running through the response is a desire to see a toolkit or training package developed specifically for the GLAM sector to understand all the interlocking issues being raised. Not simply “how to edit” but also more fundamental things like “why not non-commercial”.

5a. Another response to the GLAM-WIK recommendations that will be published soon (and I’m very excited to have heard this) is that the National Library of Australia has convened a high-level committee to make a formal response. As an organisation that already integrates Wikipedia into many of their services (more than anyone else worldwide as far as I know) they are in a fantastic position to really engage with these recommendations. For example, how many libraries do you know that put the Wikipedia biography of the person in their catalogue search records:

Karachay-Balkar

2009-11-01T01:43:11+00:00

A request was made for the localisation of the Karachay-Balkar language at translatewiki.net. As this was a new language, some technical bits had to be done, and Iltever was given translator rights.

In record time, within a day, all the localisation necessary for a first project were completed. Only after the localisation was the language added to the "Request for new languages" list. The request has the status of "open" because the language committee has to consider the eligibility of the request, but it is likely that this is another Wikipedia that is waiting to happen soon.
Thanks,
GerardM

Happy Halloween

2009-10-31T12:56:41+00:00

As a Wiki Witch I can't really let the day pass without a note about today's picture of the day. This one was created in 1892 to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the Salem witch trials. The revisionism here is really delightful: an innocent defendant, clad in white, calls down divine lightning to smite her accusers. Manacles spring open in the background while the prosecutor drops to the floor and the judges rise to their feet in amazement.

Possibly next year's Halloween featured picture will be one of the Édouard Manet illustrations for "The Raven."

Happy Halloween.

The proof of the pudding for LocalisationUpdate

2009-10-31T12:16:33+00:00

Don Alessandro was really helpful fixing one issue with the LocalisationUpdate. But the proof of the pudding is that all his localisations become available in his Wikipedia. It did not.

Roan found that there was another thing preventing his "crh-Cyrl" messages from being selected. The dash "-" was used in one part of the software while an underscore "_" was expected elsewhere.

Roan fixed this yesterday, and Don Alessandro reported that LocalisationUpdate now works dashingly.
Thanks,
GerardM

English Wikinews adopted the usability beta as default

2009-10-30T23:32:21+00:00

Earlier today, English Wikinews adopted the usability beta as a default interface. The usability team is thrilled that en.wikinews community has reached the consensus to be the first adopter of the usability beta as default. We will continue enhancing the interface to simplify and make it easy to navigate and edit. Our sincere appreciation goes to the entire en.wikinews community for embracing our work. It is a great day for the usability team. We feel blessed.

Naoko Komura on behalf of the entire usability team
Program Manager, Usability Initiative

Custom Covers For PediaPress Books, Finally!

2009-10-30T18:01:10+00:00

Today is a great day. Today is the day when we say hello to custom covers for PediaPress books. Today is also a sad day, because we say goodbye to our old but beloved orange and blue covers. We've loved them, we've hated them, well, they have been part of our story, they have been the face of PediaPress for the past two years. We'll miss them, but we felt that we needed to give you the opportunity to make covers that really would adapt to the books you were making. After all, custom books should feature a custom cover, right?

What is a custom cover?

Well, it's very simple really, instead of having a set cover for your book, you have now the possibility to compose the cover that suits your book's content, your mood, or the occasion.

Once you've collected your book, on Wikipedia for example, and you've clicked the button "Order as a printed book", you'll be taken to the PediaPress Website and will land on the custom cover manager.

The first step is to choose the color of the background you want for your book. You can try out a few color schemes.

Once you've chosen your background color, you can add a picture to your cover. At this stage, you have the possibility of adding pictures present in the articles that compose your book. The pictures will display in a row under your cover, and you can scroll right and left to choose the picture you want. The cover manager only displays pictures that are of a high enough quality to look good on your cover (excluding very small pictures or pictures of low resolution). Of course, we want your book to look as good as possible.

And that's it, once you've decided that the cover and the pictures were the right one, all you have to do is order, and you will receive your book just as you've designed it. Take a look at the books we've already made!

Have fun exploring the possibilities of the new custom cover manager! And as always, don't hesitate to give us feedback on this new feature by clicking the feedback button on the right of our website or by commenting this blogpost!

Obscene ? It is certainly legal !

2009-10-30T15:06:10+00:00

Some images became icons representing important moments in the past, the little boy in the ghetto of Warsaw, Douglas McArthur returning to the Philippines and Dorothea Lange's picture of despair of the recession of the thirties.

Most people know the original black and white. An important picture and a featured picture on Commons and the English Wikipedia among others. It being in black and white is considered by some as underlining the misery.

This picture can also be found on Commons.. It has been coloured and it gained a different atmosphere. This picture by Dorothea Lange is in the public domain and consequently it is perfectly legal to make this derivative. The provenance is ok; a reference is made to the original at the Library of Congress. But I am in two minds; on the one hand it is a derivative done in good taste, on the other hand it feels like sacriledge..
Thanks,
GerardM

The best of news from ICANN

2009-10-30T13:58:01+00:00

I am absolutely positely ecstatic with the news that URLs can be completely in other scripts. This is important news because it will make it that much more easy to use the Internet. Many people do not know a language that is written in the Latin script and so far they have been forced to use this script in order to use the Internet.

This will no longer be the case.

The Wikimedia Foundation wants to be the number five in reach in all countries in the world. They spend a lot of effort in making our software more usable. This is an easy and obvious way to reach out to so many more people. This video explains what it is, the BBC in its reporting explains how it helps .. truly this is one solution that is obvious and welcome and, it will bring us more people to our Wikipedias, Wiktionaries and other projects.

This is truly great news.
Thanks,
GerardM

A matter of perspective

2009-10-30T13:50:13+00:00

Today's challenge began when GeraldK asked for help getting a featured picture about the Winter Olympics. He's active with the Olympic Games project and is hoping to have something run on Wikipedia's main page in time for the 2010 Olympic Games. The Bundesarchiv material he suggested was far too small for consideration: ranging from 21 KB to 51 KB. Normally 10 MB would be the minimum for my work.

So Staxringold found a 32 MB poster from the Works Progress Administration about the bobsled run at Lake Placid, New York. Lake Placid hosted the Winter Olympics in 1932 and 1938; its bobsled run was converted to public use after the 1932 Olympics.

So we've got a technically adequate file that fits the topic. It comes with a problem: the dimensions aren't rectangular like they ought to be. This is how it looks after 0.7 degree counterclockwise rotation.

This demonstration crop leaves a little background to help illustrate the problem. If you look carefully enough, the caption itself is slanted in conjunction with the distortion. There's an elegant solution to this in the form of a software option which mainly serves the different purpose of perspective control.

When perspective distortion is a problem it usually appears in architectural photography. Back in the days of film photography people corrected for it with a view camera or a perspective control lens. In the digital era this usually gets corrected with software. The same software controls can help the Lake Placid poster too.

In Photoshop this is called perspective cropping. Perspective cropping allows the editor to drag corners into non-rectangular shapes. Then the software performs calculations to generate a rectangular result. To access the perspective crop, select the regular cropping tool and drag a crop selection. A toolbar option will appear above with a check box for "perspective". Check that box and the perspective adjustment becomes possible. In our situation that means aligning cropping tool with the corners of the poster. Just place one corner of crop selection directly onto each corner of poster, then crop. GIMP software users can get a similar effect from the Perspective Tool. Below is the result after additional edits.

Much more satisfactory and probably fairly close to how the poster looked when it was new. If the distortion had been more severe we might have supplemented the perspective crop by separately rotating the poster caption. But this was a fairly mild instance and the perspective crop did the job.

What causes this distortion, you may wonder? Many of the items from the Library of Congress poster collection were photographed for preservation purposes during the film era. These posters were already old and fragile at the time of the photography and they may not have laid perfectly flat. A slight rise or buckling resulted in the distortion. So if the digital file was made from the slide film rather than from the original, the same problems get translated into digital format.

----

Photo credits:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cathedral_Notre-Dame_de_Reims,_France.jpg

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cathedral_Notre-Dame_de_Reims,_France-PerCorr.jpg

History

2009-10-30T00:06:33+00:00

Every edit on the wiki, every revision, and every comment stays… forever. There is nothing one can do to hide it, save few exceptions. There are always tracks.

Footprints

Take for example this arbitration case… five years later it remains.

Instead or creating history… one could consider sitting down with fellow contributions.

For Wikipedia, or any other wiki is in the real world. Bosses, friends, colleagues, and other interested parties may be watching as well.

Happy editing!