TheDJ writes

By Nicolás García [CC-BY-SA-2.5] , from Wikimedia Commons I've become aware of two cases of old media trying to take back from the Free media movement. The first is the usage of Wikimedia Commons images by Encyclopedia Britannica online . We are very diligent about copyright in Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Multiple groups of people concern themselves with nothing but assessing images and global copyright laws, to make sure our materials are as legal and as Free as they can possibly be. Not so much Brittanica it seems. They happily ignore all license and attribution requirements that these images have, often just giving the username in plaintext (Examples image by Gnangarra , image by Toby Hudson ). For Creative Commons , a full link to the license is required if in any way possible. And just for kindness, a link back to the Wikimedia Commons description page might be nice/a good idea. The Wikimedia sites do the same for Flickr, it's very easy. Britannica, if you are li...

Last year saw the launch of book printing for Wikipedia articles. A very nice feature that allows you to create a collection of articles and print them as a book. Since yesterday you can even get hardcovers . There is also a wonderful "Print to PDF" feature that piggybacks on the book rendering technology. Printing webpages has long intrigued me and the results have always been suboptimal, especially with something as complex as Wikipedia articles. However, the web is moving forward and the printing options for the web are getting better with every browser release. The past few days I was revisiting this issue and I have now added some new CSS to the print stylesheet of MediaWiki which should help browsers detect proper spots to insert pagebreaks and more importantly, where to avoid them. Before pagebreak CSS After pagebreak CSS When your browser supports it, it will try to avoid pagebreaks in images, wikitables and right after headers. It will also try to avoid lo...

For the past few weeks, I have been fixing problems that I run into while testing some of the new video tools that Michael Dale has been developing for the Wikimedia Foundation. As with any new software, especially Javascript tools, there are plenty of issues and since I can find them, I might as well fix some of them, instead of throwing it all back at Michael. This week I ran into one particular annoying issue. For some reason the menu in the new mwEmbed mediaplayer ( Demo of the player ) was flickering under certain conditions on Safari. I created a video that demonstrates the problem. So I was looking trough the code of the player, trying to come up with a reason on why this would behave like this and why only in Safari. I spent a few hours tracking all the events, assuming that some event (like mouseover) for some reason was incorrectly telling the menu to hide itself. I was validated in this line of thought by observing that manipulating some of the Javascript events of th...

Everyone should look at this video of a talk by Cory Doctorow . People who know me, are aware that I am very concerned about our rights online. This is because every day we become more reliable on the Internet than ever before, yet our liberties our curtailed ever more. No one speaks more about this topic than Cory and really anyone in policy making or in the arts industry should hear him out. Perhaps not because he is right, but at the very least because he presents incredibly sensible counterarguments for anything that the copyright industry claims. Nowhere has the problem of the copyright lobbies, become more clearly than in the letter sent by ASCAP last week , in which they try to warn and recruit their members in their fight against the 'copyleft' and 'pirate' movement, which they basically consider equal. However as many have pointed out , Creative Commons is about freedom of choice for producers and consumers of works alike. What the ASCAP letter shows i...

I have been filing and maintaining bug reports in MediaWiki for a while now, trying to communicate issues found by the editor community back to the developer community. Over time, increasingly I have been submitting patches to fix some of the bugs that I find. I never really had the intention to become a MediaWiki developer to be honest, but I guess I filed enough patches that people suggested to me that I should request commit access myself. So last week I sent off an email to Tim Starling and last night I was granted commit access to MediaWiki. I'll be taking this slow, because much of what interests me (the media and file repository work) is unfortunately not well tested on a day to day basis by others, while still able to create quite the havoc if you make mistakes. In other news, I also recently became an administrator on Wikimedia Commons . I'm reasonably active on Commons due to image moves from Wikipedia to Commons and recently I fixed up Cat-a-lot , which is a v...

Wikipedia has developed this nice tradition that on April Fools' Day , content on the Main Page should be TRUE and link to actual encyclopedic articles, instead of being simple jokes. So today's Featured article , is on Wife selling  and although the practice might come across as unbelievable, awkward and unrealistic, it is all part of our history. The Topics in the news  are all recent news events, though not of the usual importance and the wording is more playful than on other days. Similarly,  Did you know  contains not a single lie. Lastly the Picture of the day , featuring a picture of a "GET FAT" advertisement campaign as a secret to beauty. Unthinkable perhaps in current times, but very real in 1895. Just cliches, obfuscation and wordplay are used to trick the reader into making assumptions, that though understandable, are simply incorrect. The page is probably one of the most carefully prepared main pages of the entire year. All selections have to adhere ...

Today I was greeted with a new interface for Youtube. It seems that there are a lot more collapsible elements now, and the biggest functionality change seems to be a new "like" vs. "dislike" option, where we used to have the "Favorite" button. There are also new Share buttons, and there is a nice toggle for "Autoplay" of your recommendations. I'm not sure yet if I like everything, it seems to require a bit more work to be perfect, but with all the functionality of Youtube, this probably is a good thing.

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative is finally making good progress on their template folding and template editor. Much of what the project has been doing with the edit screen has been in preparation of this work. The editor now folds complicated templates into a small block. One of the sandboxes the project uses now has the code deployed and it seems to be working quite well. Be aware that this is a development platform, and that browser peculiarities might not be fully dealt with yet. It is also NOT final. The wiki editor with folded templates. You can unfold the block, by clicking on the arrow to show the template code, or you can click the block and you are presented with a template editor that makes it easier to change the values of the template. This should be very helpful, because research showed that much of the trouble people had with editing Wikipedia, was the complex code on the edit pages. The template code is by far the most obscure and complicated code of all our wik...

This week at SXSW (South by Southwest Conferences & Festivals), the Open Video Alliance presented a new campaign and portal for video on Wikipedia . The project is called "Let's get video on Wikipedia" and available at http://www.videoonwikipedia.org . The goal is to make it easier and more understandable how to upload video for usage in Wikipedia and is made possible by the Open Video Alliance , the Wikimedia Foundation , Kaltura , Miro and Mozilla Drumbeat . (Blog and press releases: Open Video Alliance , Miro , Wikimedia Foundation ) In some ways this project resembles a bit Wikiportrait , a project to help people upload their own portrait photo for usage in Wikipedia articles. Video On Wikipedia tells you what steps you need to take in order to create and upload a video for usage on Wikipedia. It also attempts to explain why uploading video for Wikipedia is different from uploading to most other places, a good bit of evangelism for Free and Open formats for ...

Michael Dale has been working hard on a new media player for the mediawiki projects. This media player is based on the HTML 5 <video> tag . You can compare it to the demo players of Youtube and Vimeo and DailyMotion . It should support Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome 3, Opera 10.5 and if you install the Xiph QuickTime components it works with Safari 4 for the Mac. If your browser doesn't support HTML5, the player will use the JAVA cortado player , like it does in the old version of the Ogg player. Recently both Apple and Firefox introduced Fullscreen support for the <video> tag in their development versions of the browsers, and these features can now be used with the new player for Wikimedia. The controls automatically show and hide, and you can even add and display subtitles with it. How do I test it ? It is rather easy, you go to this example video . If you want to enable it for all videos, you need to be registered on Wikimedia Commons or the English Wikipedia . You ...

As some may know, I have been working a lot on Wikimedia Mobile as of late. It's interesting to work on this software, because it has to support so many devices, languages and wiki's. So far the project hasn't been to good at informing the various Wikipedia communities, on how they can participate in making the mobile version of their community's Wikipedia. I have now started a draft of how to translate the software, create a mobile home page and how to do the redirects for supported mobile devices. When I have refined the information, I will probably move it to meta . If you have a better idea, please let me know. Also, take a look at the documentation for readers .

I have tried it many times before, but I guess you have to persist. I find blogging difficult. I often spend too long on writing it and don't post often enough. Twitter is more my thing, because it is just short blurps. Still lately I have found that Twitter is not enough. I have ideas and comments that I feel I need to write down in more than 140 characters and many of them have to do with Wikipedia. So I'll attempt it one more time. Topics will mostly be Wikipedia, online rights and software development, but other issues might come up. Welcome everyone.