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Category Archives: Wikimedia

Reductionism

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

While I do occasionally write Wikimedia tools “to order”, I wrote quite a few of them because I required (or just enjoyed) the functionality myself. One thing I like to do is adding images to Wikidata, using WD-FIST. Recently, I started to focus on a specific list, people with awards (of any kind). People with […]

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Musing on lists

Thursday, June 4, 2015

As some of you may know, I write the occasional tool to help support Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons, and other projects in the WikiVerse. Most of my tools work on the same basic principle: Get some data to start with, think about it, and present a result. The input data is often a list of pages […]

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Red vs. blue

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Recently, @notconfusing has been living up to his name by presenting us with preliminary results from the Wikipedia Gender Inequality Index. For me, that report is also an annoyance, because I was not aware this was going on, and had started to prepare my own research, with intend to publish, about the same topic. Fact […]

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Content Ours, or: the sum of the parts

Monday, December 8, 2014

Open source projects like Linux, and open content projects like Wikipedia and Wikidata, are fine things indeed by themselves. However, the power of individual projects is multiplied if they can be linked up. For free software, this can be taken literally; linking libraries to your code is what allows complex applications to exists. For open […]

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Picture this!

Monday, November 24, 2014

Recently, someone told me that “there are no images on Wikidata”. I found that rather hard to believe, as I had added quite a few using my own tools. So I had a quick look at the numbers. For Wikidata, counting the number of items with images is straightforward. For Wikipedia, not so much; by […]

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The way is shut

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

So I saw a mail about the new, revamped Internet Archive. Fantastic! All kinds of free, public domain (for the most part) files to play with! So I thought to myself: Why not celebrate that new archive.org by using a file to improve Wikidata? After all, I just have to upload it to Commons! Easy, […]

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The Men Who Stare at Media

Monday, August 18, 2014

Shortly after the 2014 London Wikimania, the happy world of Wikimedia experienced a localized earthquake when a dispute between some editors of the German Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation escalated into exchanges of electronic artillery. Here, I try to untangle the threads of the resulting Gordian knot, interwoven with my own view on the issue. […]

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Evacuation

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Wikimedia Commons is a great project. Over 21 million freely licensed files speak a clear language. But, like all projects of such a magnitude, there are some issues that somewhat dampen the joy. The major source of conflict is the duality of Commons: on one hand, it is a stand-alone repository of free files; on […]

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The Games Continue

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Two weeks after releasing the first version of The Wikidata Game, I feel a quick look at the progress is in order. First, thank you everyone for trying, playing, and feedback! The response has been overwhelming; sometimes quite literally so, thus I ask your forgiveness if I can’t quite keep up with the many suggestions […]

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The Game Is On

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Gamification. One of those horrible buzzwords that are thrown around by everyone these days, between “cloud computing” and “the internet of things” (as opposed to the internet of people fitted with ethernet jacks, or those who get a good WiFi signal on their tooth fillings). Sure enough, gamification in the Wiki-verse has not been met […]

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