TheDJ writes

Wikipedia birthday cakes during the celebrations  in Amsterdam (Derk-Jan Hartman, CC-BY-SA 3.0 ) So here we are... One day after the 10 year anniversary of Wikipedia and I think that I'm not the only Wikipedian who will testify that it has been a great couple of days. Lots of online friends meeting in real life at one of the 450 or so events , lots of very nice press attention for our once so humble project and just all out fun. Myself I participated in the first Dutch Hackathon . The day kicked of Friday 14th, at 10 in the morning in the offices of Kennisland in Amsterdam. Since I was working on friday, I joined in on the fun at around 18:30 during pizza-time. There were about 15 or so developers as well as a dozen or so Wikimedians and people from a Wikipedia editing workshop that took place during the day. They assisted in the brainstorming, provided feedback and were kind enough to drink beers with us :D Several projects had been selected in advance and a great deal ...

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 ...