Wikimedia news for December 2017

[ericbarbour]

http://www.military-technologies.net/20 ... -projects/

WMF programmer Stephen Niedzielski pats himself and his fellow cult members on the back for being soooo clever about designing iOS and Android apps for WP reading. Whoo.

https://netzpolitik.org/2017/wikimedia- ... 3-dateien/

WMF is now allowing the upload of MP3 audio files because the patents ran out. Only lazy people would care, I suspect, since the OGG format works well enough for this job. If your browser can't handle OGG audio in 2017, you're really screwed.

[ericbarbour]

Ever heard of Everipedia? No excuse, because Larry Sanger's now the CIO of Everipedia.
Something something "blockchain". Blecch. The Overused Jargon Of The Decade already.

https://www.wired.com/story/everipedia-blockchain/
https://www.inverse.com/article/39088-w ... cyclopedia
https://www.coindesk.com/encyclopedia-b ... -creation/

“The ability to be a stakeholder in the encyclopedia they edit and get real monetary value back, it’s really exciting to me.” The value is more than literal, however. Blockchain’s primary advantage, as with turning money into a decentralized commodity, is that it turns Everipedia into a peer-to-peer resource. No more centralized server (and no more server costs). “If everyone on the team got abducted tomorrow,” Foselius says, “the site would keep running.” And perhaps most importantly, distributing the site to users around the world means that Everipedia effectively becomes uncensorable. In nations like Turkey and Iran, where Wikipedia is currently censored, users can contribute to Everipedia—and, yes, get a little crypto-scratch while they’re at it.

Yeah, of course they're scraping WP content. And if this works it might be more reliable than the looney-toon feudal bureaucracy running most Wikimedia projects. Maybe.

[Kumioko]

I say any site/organization who thinks they can improve and challenge the WMF should give it a try. Competition is good and the WMF sites have become so hostile and for so long that a lot of people have been turned off of using them.

[ericbarbour]

"The Congressional Intern Secretly Vandalizing Wikipedia"
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-congr ... -wikipedia
Not really news but worth putting here, because Jimbo used it as a pretext to lie to the press again.

When bored congressional staffers edited the Wikipedia entry for Donald Rumsfeld to call him an “alien lizard” and to dub Lee Harvey Oswald a “Russian Puppet,” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales misappropriated blame on Congress’ “IT staff,” rather than its interns.

“There is a belief from some of the [Wikipedia] community that it only provoked someone—some prankster there in the office—to have an audience now for the pranks, and actually encouraged them rather than discouraged them,” he said.

Standard issue Jimbo bullshit--blame the other guy and deny everything. And he gets away with it.