Legal friends! The world needs you. Here’s the graph of readership of All Writs Act on Wikipedia: That’s 45,035 reads yesterday (by humans, not bots).((Big thanks to the tech team for figuring out how to differentiate – not something we could do until fairly recently, at least for public stats!)) That would put it 5th…
There is a small genre of posts around re-inventing the interfaces of popular open source software; I thought I’d collect some of them for future reference: Recent: Drupal WordPress: ma.tt, wp.com Older: Firefox: 0.1 release notes Visual Editor: first blog post I can find (though I’m sure there are many emails), Economist The first two…
tl;dr: I want to liberate people; software is a (critical) tool to that end. There is a conference this weekend that understands that, but I worry it isn’t FSF’s. This morning, social network chatter reminded me of FSF‘s 30th birthday celebration. These travel messages were from friends who I have a great deal of love…
Random thoughts from Wikimania, 2015 edition (2013, 2014): Dancing: After five Wikimedia events (not counting WMF all-hands) I was finally dragged onto the dance floor on the last night. I’ll never be Garfield, but I had fun anyway. The amazing setting did not hurt. Our hosts: The conference was excellently organized and run. I’ve never…
Quick brain dump after a bike ride home: free software took a huge leap in the late 90s and early 00s in large part because of non-ideological advantages that the rest of the world is now competing with or surpassing: Collaboration tools: Because we got to the ‘net first, our tools for collaborating with each…
![By Supercarwaar (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons](http://i2.wp.com/lu.is/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/314px-Uncle_Sam_Wikipedia.png?resize=314%2C180)
It has been a long time since I was able to say to developer friends “come work with me” in anything but the most abstract “come work under the same roof” kind of sense. But today I can say to developers “come work with me” and really mean it. Which is fun :) Details: Wikimedia’s new…
Flickr recently started selling prints of Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike photos without sharing any of the revenue with the original photographers. When people were surprised, Flickr said “if you don’t want commercial use, switch the photo to CC non-commercial”. This seems to have mostly caused two reactions: “This is horrible! Creative Commons is horrible!” “Commercial…
It has been nearly a full decade since Jon Udell’s classic screencast about Wikipedia’s article on the Heavy Metal Umlaut (current text; Jan. 2005). In this post, written for Paul Jones’ “living and working online” class, I’d like to use the last decade’s changes to the article to illustrate some points about the modern Wikipedia.1 Measuring…
Primarily what I did during Wikimania was chew on pens. However, I also gave some talks. The first one was on Creative Commons 4.0, with Kat Walsh. While targeted at Wikimedians, this may be of interest to others who want to learn about CC 4.0 as well. Second one was on Open Source Hygiene, with…
A collection of semi-random notes from Wikimania London, published very late: The conference generally Tone: Overall tone of the conference was very positive. It is possibly just small sample size—any one person can only talk to a small number of the few thousand at the conference—but seemed more upbeat/positive than last year. Tone, 2: The one…