handyfloss

Wikipedia seems to be temporarily down… see below (click to enlarge):

How will the western civilization survive this!

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The Wikimedia Foundation is raising funds again. You can read an appeal from the Board Chair, Florence Devouard, and the corresponding press release.

To contribute, click the banner below, and follow the instructions you’ll find in the page you’ll arrive to.

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I just read, by chance, a very interesting essay a Wikipedia administrator wrote in his personal page. It deals with people spamming or vandalizing Wikipedia, for fun or for personal promotion/economical benefit.

I’ll quote the intro paragraph:

Let’s face facts: Wikipedia has become an important force on the Internet. If you’ve got a business to run or a belief to circulate there’s a big temptation to hit that edit button and do your thing. You’re on your honor here. Most people have honor, which is why Wikipedia is huge and (usually) pretty darn good, but then there’s that thought - what if you could harness this site and make it work for you?

You aren’t the first person to get that idea. And hello there, I’m a Wikipedia administrator.

Read more in the whole essay.

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As of today, I have reached my first year of (English) Wikipedia contributions under the identity isilanes. I have accumulated over 2100 edits in that time, and created over ten new pages, not counting dozens of pictures of chemical structures I have made for chemistry articles.

Other contributions could be the logo of my University (UPV/EHU), that appears at its wikipedia page, many vandalism warnings to misbehaving users and disambiguation of links.

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Following my recent trend of using the blog to talk about myself, instead of about the FLOSS that gives name to the blog, and after the Wikipedia fever I talked about some days ago, I write again to say that I have surpassed the 2000 edit count in Wikipedia, as you can see following this link.

Still, as crazy and monomaniac it sounds, guess what category of Wikipedia I belong to, regarding edit count? “Prolific editors”, maybe? Or “Wikipedians with over 1000 edits”? Or “Top X Wikipedia editors”? No! I belong to “Wikipedians with fewer than 5000 edits” :^(

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Yesterday was the last day of May, and an incredibly fruitful month ended, regarding my Wikipedia edits. As you can see in the previous link, I was 75 edits short of making 1000 edits that month! Approximately one half of all the edits I have done in Wikipedia in one year (in 18 days it will be the birthday of my first edit as Isilanes), where done in May 2007!

This huge (for me) amount of edits was possible due to the kind of activity I have had in Wikipedia as of lately. I realized there are a lot of chemical structures in Wikipedia that are of low quality, and I started to improve them. The main flaw of low q images is that they are done in raster format (PNG, GIF, JPEG). This implies that they lose quality upon magnification, and that the larger they are, the more space they occupy. In contrast, vector graphics (e.g. SVG) offer a perfect quality regardless of magnification, with a constant file size, no matter what output size we ask of them.

Actually, there is a page in Wikipedia specifically devoted to listing the (chemical) images that, due to being easily translated to SVG (most chemical skeletal formulae fall in this category), and showing a low quality, are suitable for being substituted by SVG counterparts.

Once I found this page, I started using the superb free software programs ChemTool and Inkscape to draw SVG counterparts for many structures. For each structure, a file has to be uploaded, the article including the raster image has to be modified to include the SVG instead, then the raster image has to be tagged as already superseded by a SVG, and depending on the case, it can be tagged with a proposal for deletion. In that case, it has to be included in a page listing the images and media for deletion, and the original uploader of the image should be notified, as a polite measure. This implies a bunch of edits per superseded image.

A great part of my May edits also correspond to the fact that I modified a previous SVG image that was to replace a PNG of some Free Software logos. Apparently the “old” SVG had some errors, which I corrected:

PNG version of the SVG image

This logo picture was used by a tag that appears in all articles related to free software, and I starting changing the appearance of the old pic in every tag with the new pic. The result: a whole lot of edits.

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Me acabo de pulir los 142 links ambiguos a La Rioja que había en la Wikipedia, visitando las 142 páginas (bueno, en alguna página había más de un link) y haciendo que dichos links señalasen hacia la entrada de la Wikipedia a la que el autor quería haber señalado (en el 99% de los casos “La Rioja (autonomous community)”, aunque hay una provincia, y su capital, con ese nombre en Argentina también). Lo he hecho, lógicamente, con el método del mvs, que menciono en el post anterior, a más de un link por minuto de media :^)

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I am currently doing some link disambiguation work for the Wikipedia, and as such, I have to find and replace the same strings many times, in many articles. The on-line Wikipedia edition is in general fine, but one would love to be able to use vim, for a task such as the one I’m taking. To do so, one can make use of mvs.

The mvs program allows us to download a Wikipedia article, save it as a file, then upload it again, after manipulating the file the way we want.

To log in to our Wikipedia account:

mvs login -d wikipedia.org -u username -p password

To download article “X” (beware the .wiki extension):

mvs update X.wiki

We can then edit X.wiki:

vim X.wiki

Then check it:

mvs preview X.wiki
firefox preview.html

And finally upload it:

mvs commit -m 'Your comment goes here' X.wiki

For more info, read the Wikipedia text editor support page

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