I started posting on Twitter in the early 2010s; it was primarily very useless things. I unofficially left in 2018 when I joined mastodon.technology (I had a cross-poster going for a while, but mostly stopped checking Twitter). And when that shut down in late 2022, I co-created Wikis World and have been posting there ever since.
A good chunk of my Twitter posts were deleted when I set up Semiphemeral and mastodon.technology is entirely gone.
I had kept account exports for each of them and have now selectively imported my posts onto my blog: twitter-archive and mastodon-archive. It was a fun trip down memory lane.
The actual export was pretty straightforward, Twitter's archive came with a built-in HTML viewer, which was nice for picking which posts to archive. For Mastodon, I used Mastodon Archive Viewer (Zero's fork). I've included links to the Wayback Machine on the individual posts for convenience, but most of them are not individually archived.
I've thought about doing a POSSE setup, and maybe I will eventually, but for now I feel okay with microblogging solely on Wikis World (in some sense it is partially my "Own Site"). I hope in the future Mastodon lets you take your posts with you so I don't need to manually archive them again.
I racked up 526 edits and created 8 new articles on the English Wikipedia over the past year. 2024 was a relatively quiet year for my editing (in 2023 I had 1,137 edits). I really tried to take the Marie Kondo aproach to it: I only edited if it sparked joy.
The eight article creations, plus one split, in chronological order:
- While watching Michigan win the 2023 National Championship, I saw Bill Hancock appear on TV, so I created his article. (Easy guideline: if someone appears on a nationally televised sports broadcast, they're probably notable.)
- I ressurrected the article on Project Maven, the Pentagon's project to use AI, etc. that multiple Google employees had walked out over back in 2018. I didn't write the text myself, I took it from the existing article on the Artificial intelligence arms race.
- Created Wedding of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant, because it was basically on par with British royal weddings. (And then successfully defended it from deletion.)
- Learned about Jeep ducking, which of course led to writing a Wikipedia article and obtaining an accompanying photo.
- We went to the Montauk Point Lighthouse, which has a nice museum about itself and found there was a whole room dedicated to Giorgina Reid and no article for her.
I submitted this article to be featured on the main page's "did you know" section, to which it received rave reviews from my fellow editors.
- Unfortunately I learned about Jack Limpert when he died. He's credited with shaping the "city magazine" format (another missing article I researched but still haven't written yet), but really I was more impressed that he succesfully figured out Deep Throat's identity as Mark Felt back in 1974.
- There aren't very many dogs notable enough for articles, but Ben Herbstreit was one; I had known about him for a year now, but only realized he was notable after he died.
The tribute ESPN put together is one of the saddest videos you'll ever watch.
- I saw a tweet claiming that China's 12345 hotline was a fantastic government service. I couldn't find any non-state media sources to back it up, but it was notable, similar to the US and Canada's 3-1-1.
- Tanking is easily one of the worst parts about professional sports, so I was pretty excited when the PWHL adopted the Gold Plan.
I try to write about subjects I don't already know a bunch about. Doing so helps less of my personal bias and opinions slip in and helps reinforce Wikipedia being an amateur project. I'm far more likely to do a better job at solely summarizing what sources say if that's literally all I know about a subject.
Once I've found a subject, itt usually takes me around two to three hours to write an article from scratch. Most of the time is spent searching for and reading sources and then ~30 minutes to write it all up.
This may seem counterintuitive, but I try to ensure that all the articles I create are incomplete. I don't add infoboxes, categories, WikiProject banners, etc. I'll often leave links to sources that are useful but that I didn't include on the talk page, with editorial suggestions.
I think it's important that there are always easy ways for people to get involved with editing, and leaving "basic" elements of an article out provides an easy pathway. Along the same vein, I'll proofread the article once before saving, but if I spot a minor error afterwards (like, a grammar or spelling error, not a factual mistake), I'll just leave it.
For every new article I created this year, I wrote a short Mastodon post with a link (example), which did a decent job at getting my followers to improve them :)
I've primarily been helping out as an administrator at the Redirects for discussion process, which is perenially backlogged. I find it incredibly interesting because most of the subjects tend to be rather niche, with people trying to assess whether a redirect is useful for navigation or not, in addition to plenty of other factors.
Some fun examples: BÄ«n, Tighten, Asplode.
As part of Boba Quest 2025 🧋, I'm trying and reviewing a new boba shop each week.
I've tried Chun Yang Tea once before, but that was nearly two years ago, so this was basically a fresh start.
It's right next to the Vernon-Jackson 7 station, at 49-10 Vernon Blvd. I'll try to make this my last boba shop along the 7 in Queens for a while.
Chun Yang primarily serves fruit teas, which are not really my cup of tea (ha, ha). On the plus side that means most of their drinks are dairy-free. I opted for a black tea latte with boba, less ice and 100% sweet. The person taking my order initially prompted me to confirm 50%, I replied 100%, which I feel might explain what happened.
- Boba: 1/4 the boba was barely flavored. Texture was passable.
- Tea: 2/4 it was as if the tea was only sweetened halfway. (I double-checked and the label said 100%.)
- Bonus: 0/1 there's a small bar to stand and drink, but no seating. They also have a similar gift card discount like I'Milky has, but this isn't as good: it's $5 free if you buy a $50 giftcard while I'Milky was a free drink, so a $7-8 value.
I originally had written a complaint about how the the store was super fogged up to the point where my glasses fogged up and I couldn't even read the menu and would've given it a negative point if the score wasn't already so low. But then a few days later I had lunch elsewhere and the same thing happened, so I guess it's just a heat thing (it's very cold outside) and I won't hold it against them.
Total: 3/10. Unfortunately this is one of the only boba shops in the Hunters Point area but I don't plan to stop by again.
As part of Boba Quest 2025 🧋, I'm trying and reviewing a new boba shop each week.
This week I tried Bobba Hubba for the first time. It's across the street from the Jackson Heights–Roosevelt Avenue station,
so it's reachable by the 7, E, F, M, and R trains, plus the Q70 SBS if you're itching for boba right after landing at LGA (or right before you leave).
For some reason Google Maps
has the address as 4032 75th St in Flushing, but according to The New York Times's neighborhood map, it's
on the border of Jackson Heights and Elmhurst.
I didn't realize until I walked in, but it also doubles as a gaming cafe! And they had a few empty claw machines too.
Anyways, let's get to the boba! Bobba Hubba had a sign advertising their top 4 drinks, so I ordered from the top of the list: a brown sugar milk tea. I wasn't asked about my sugar or ice preferences, so it
was the default.
- Boba: 2/4 the boba was flavored well but too chewy.
- Tea: 4/4 I think it's really hard to mess up brown sugar milk tea, especially because I'm not the person to complain if something is too sweet.
- Bonus: 0/1 maybe it was just late and dark outside, but the ambiance inside was not really a place I'd stick around. I didn't see anything about loyalty programs.
Total: 6/10. If I was in the area and craving boba, I wouldn't mind popping in again, but I wouldn't go out of my way to stop by.
P.S. There's now a dedicated RSS feed for all Boba Quest entries. I'll aim to regularly post them on Wednesdays.
I am a strong believer the free software and free culture movements and have basically dedicated my life to them. A significant part of that has been getting the opportunity to create free content as part of my job, first at the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and now at the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF).
When I started at the WMF in 2013, the first contract I signed with them contained two key provisions (the rest of the contract was pretty important too, just irrelevant to this blog post). First, all content I created would be released under an OSI-approved license (for software) or a Creative Commons ShareAlike license (for everything else). The copyrights would be jointly owned by myself and the WMF. And second, I would own any patents, and the WMF would need my permission to use them in an offensive manner.
To be clear, these were terms that were in the "standard" WMF contract at the time, I didn't come up with them (it's unclear how standard they actually were, I've spoken to people who joined the WMF before me and never had them). When I rejoined the WMF in late 2020, they were no longer present and I negotiated them back in. And then a year later, in late 2021, I successfully negotiated similar terms into my contract with FPF.
I've posted the exact terms that are in my FPF contract on my website and will aim to keep that up to date if things change. As I've stated there, I am not a lawyer so please don't treat this as legal advice. While this has been reviewed by lawyers, they all worked at the organizations I was negotiating with, so they weren't my lawyer.
Software Freedom Conservancy started an intiative called "ContractPatch" to help fellow developers negotiate with employers for terms that benefit free software. It hasn't really materialized in the way that it was advertised, but I'm happy to contribute (it's a bit overdue really).
I'm not sure how useful my experience is for others; both of the non-profit foundations in question basically develop only free software, so the negotating wasn't really a struggle. Conservancy wrote a nice blog post explaining the difference of having copyrights be owned by your (for-profit) employer versus a charity. Unsurprisingly, they didn't really go into the scenario of having a charity as your employer :)
Practically speaking, this doesn't really get me that much code wise. I work on established free software projects that cannot be unilaterally relicensed and yes, in the long-term, keeping copyrights with charitable foundations is a good thing. So it's mostly a feel good thing that I jointly own my copyrights. The biggest thing is that all the non-code projects I work on are freely licensed too, like conference presentations, articles, etc.
And none of them were ever going to bother filing patents on my work, so that's a freebie. But I can still feel good about doing my part to disarm software patents.
As part of Boba Quest 2025 🧋, I'm trying and reviewing a new boba shop each week.
To kick off Boba Quest 2025 🧋, I'm reviewing I'Milky — my go-to in Long Island City (Queens). It's at
22-43 Jackson Ave., right next to Trader Joes and reachable by the 7, E, M and G trains via the Court Square station. It's incredibly small,
there's just barely enough room for 6-7 people to order and wait, but not hang around.
I ordered a jasmine green milk tea with boba, 80% sugar and 30% ice (I would normally get more ice, but it was literally below freezing outside).
- Boba: 3/4 the boba is solid, it was a good consistency and sweet. I was impressed that the boba was still at near-ideal consistency despite me waiting 20 minutes to drink it.
- Tea: 4/4 the tea is really excellent, it's basically my benchmark of what I expect jasmine milk tea to be.
- Bonus: 0/1 it's a pretty tiny place; there's no formal reward system, but if you buy a $50 giftcard, you get 1 drink free (there's also a 10% student discount Mon-Fri).
Total: 7/10.
For completeness, I'll mention that they have both dairy-free (fruit teas) and caffeine-free (milks) options. While not the best boba I've ever had in NYC, I'Milky is quite good and rather consistent. Assuming they do a similar
Easter promotion as last year, I'll review them again in April.
