In February when English Wikipedia (and a few months later, all of Wikimedia) banned usage of archive.today (aka archive.is), there was a bit of a crisis in needing to find alternative archives. For reasons, archive.today was especially good at archiving some difficult websites that weren't available in the Wayback Machine.…
During the most recent "Free Culture Friday" slash World Cup watch party, I spoke to a journalist from the The Athletic and ended up being quoted (and photographed!) in the resulting story, "Welcome to the high-stakes universe of World Cup Wikipedia editing" (gift link): Those editors include sports fans like…
In the mid-1700s, Denis Diderot published his Encyclopédie in France, collecting the work of more than 140 authors to summarize the Enlightenment. It quickly landed on the Catholic Church's banned books list for including contrarian thoughts, and, at one point, his publisher preemptively censored some content without Diderot's knowledge. Around…
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…
In 2018 I announced the creation of my "Skip Mobile Wikipedia" Firefox add-on, which automatically redirects you to the desktop version of the site. At the time it worked on both standard desktop Firefox and in Firefox for Android, life was great. Unfortunately at some point, Firefox stopped allowing arbitrary…
When Taylor Swift's Midnights came out, I had the extremely controversial opinion that Carly Rae Jepsen's The Loneliest Time (released on the same day) was better. So when Parker told me she was coming to New York City (greatest city in the world, btw), I leapt at the opportunity and…
There was recently a request to generate a report of featured articles on Wikipedia, sorted by length, specifically the "prose size". It's pretty straightforward to get a page's length in terms of the wikitext or even the rendered HTML output, but counting just the prose is more difficult. Here's how…
This past weekend at Wikipedia Day I had a discussion with Enterprisey and some other folks about different ways edit counters (more on that in a different blog post) could visualize edits, and one of the things that came up was GitHub's scorecard and streaks. Then I saw a post…
By the time you read this, you'll probably have seen Wikipedia's new layout ("skin"), dubbed "Vector 2022". You can read about the changes it brings. As with most design changes, some people will like it and some people won't. But me? I just feel sad because years ago we had…
There were two prominent stories this week about how rich and famous people tried to influence Wikipedia's coverage, and depending on your point of view, got their way. I think the coverage of both stories missed the mark so I'd like to dive into them a bit deeper. But first,…
The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that hosts and provides other support for Wikipedia and its sibling projects, has been under fire recently for the messaging it uses in the infamous donation banners and the disconnect with how that funding is used. These criticisms are not particularly new, but the tension…
For two straight weeks 9 out of 10 of the top 10 viewed articles on Wikipedia were about the British Royal family. The 10th article was a newly released Bollywood film lmao.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-09-30/Traffic_report
Kiwix is an offline content reader, best known for distributing copies of Wikipedia. I have been maintaining it in Debian since 2017. This year most of the work has been keeping all the packages up to date in anticipation of next year's Debian 12 Bookworm release, including several transitions for…
Posted my freely licensed photos from today's abortion protest in Foley Square at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:May_2022_abortion_protests_in_New_York_CityAdded to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobbs_v._Jackson_Women%27s_Health_Organization#Reactions - we'll see if it lasts (the profanity might be too inflammatory? idk).First time I've used Signal to blur faces for Commons, need to find a different tool (probably GIMP I assume?) that doesn't…
As part of the #Wikipedia #WikiGap editathon today, I created https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Bellows_Pillsbury - she was the president of Planned Parenthood from 1950-1953, served as vice president of the Red Cross and as her last name gives away, she was a hostess at Pillsbury baking competitions.Her husband had an article since 2009,…
