Now I can retire...

My image of Taliesin West
(from Wikimedia Commons)

Previously, I have written about how Encyclopedia Britannica introduced a free access scheme for bloggers. Nifty. But this flows both ways. EB is also moving to make use of resources available to it.

Point in case, the image at right.

As I am sure other people do, I periodically search for my own name using Google's search capabilities. Well, the other day, on the second page of the search (may not still return results) I found this link ... Turns out that EB chose to use my image to illustrate their article on Taliesin West! (Taliesin West was architect Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and school in the desert in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA from 1937 until his death in 1959.)

So now I'm rich, right? Well no. That image, as you can see, is freely available on Commons, for anyone to use, as long as the license (in this case the GFDL 1.2) is honored. Which it is.

So am I upset? Nope! I'm delighted. This is how it's supposed to work. Free images are made free so that people can USE them. EB has properly atttributed the image and thus is free to use it as they see fit.

Maybe it's a bit ironic that EB is using a free image FROM a WMF site to illustrate an article which is supposedly better than the same article on Wikipedia. (which by the way, currently uses someone else's version of basically the same composition)... and, better or not, clearly is in competition.

But it's nifty! Got any other examples? I wonder who else has been honored this way?

By the way, here are both articles, you decide which is better:

• Wikipedia's version is here.
• Encyclopedia Britannica's version is here.
  

In all honesty, I have to say EB wins this one. What do you think?

FSM and gumption

FSM car thingie.
Image from Commons
So I got a Flying Spaghetti Monster thingie to stick on the back of one of our vehicles. Amazon has them but I am sure they are elsewhere as well.

But I don't have the guts to actually put it on. Grand Rapids, as you may know, is a big time part of the Bible Belt... and I'm not sure how well received such, um... blasphemy would be received.

We got a hard time for having a "No W" sticker (a W with a line through it, which of course shows that we are not the biggest fans of our dearly beloved George W. Bush...) on the back of our car a few years ago, and nothing has changed since.

No W!
Image from CommonsStill, it does seem a good way to show where our beliefs lie. I'll have to find the gumption to actually get it on there sometime soon.

Do you have any beliefs you're not quite willing to share with the world by displaying them on the back of your car?

Blog till you drop?

I've got to get me some of these pencils!
Image by kaurjmeb via FlickrI know that people make money from blogging. (not me, unless you count the 34 cents in AdSense revenue (or whatever it is, I try not to look) I've gotten so far) But I had no idea that there were "blogger sweatshops"...

The New York Times reports that people are burning out, and other outlets are also talking about how some blogges have actually died.

That seems messed up to me. While I've gotten some comments about my update frequency and about the quality of my posts... I'm doing this blogging thing for me, not for pay. As soon as it's not fun any more, I will stop. That's as it should be I would think.

Does this frenzy to work, to make money at blogging have anything to do with WMF projects or with free content in general? Well, I'm not sure. Money? not so much... people shouldn't be creating content for the money... but obsession? I've talked about obsession before and how it ties into doing what we like to do. I am sure I'm not the only Wikipedia editor who has looked at the time in shock, wondering how it got so late! It is easy to lose track during a good work session on an article, a policy page, or what have you, but it's important to keep a sense of perspective. As with anything else, some rotation is good as well... don't JUST hang out at Requests for Adminship, or the Articles for Deletion pages or Featured Article Candidates or whatever... take some breaks.

That's one of the reasons I'm glad I have multiple hats to wear within Wikimedia Foundation projects... when I tired of the hurly burly of the English Wikipedia, there are always pictures to categorise or upload (after all, I've got plenty of old pictures!) over at Commons, or things to do at Meta, or the like. But I also have my other obsessions too. Oh, and a real life and a job and a family and bills to pay. That sharpens the perspective I think.

How about you? How do you keep a sense of perspective?

More whining about images

Remember the other day when I was telling you about my old pictures? So I uploaded a bunch of them. In particular I found some loco photos. No, not crazy people, locomotives...

Turns out I had some good pics (or at least detailed pics) of the locos that Union Pacific had on display in Omaha, Nebraska, their DDA40X, 6900, and their 4-8-8-4 Big Boy 4023.

So I uploaded some. See? Well I am fairly... um... fussy, about getting them described just so. Including giving good names, which actually is pretty important. See the problem yet? Well, because I am also lazy, I start uploading by doing one pic, then backspace to get to the same upload form to reuse most of the stuff I entered, just changing the shot description. Soo.... because I was reusing the 6900 images upload form, my Big Boy images are all named "UP BigBoy 6023.......jpg" ... I remembered to change (in 6900) the 9 to a 0, and the 00 to a 23 but I forgot to change the 6 to a 4!...

Sigh.

So now I have to rename all those Big Boy images (every single one has the wrong number), or suffer my sense of order being off.

But renaming images in MediaWiki isn't easy, yet. (maybe someday, there are bugs in the bug tracker about it, in fact bug 709 is one of the oldest bugs extant, we are well over 10,000 now and it has ... 66!!! comments... wow. But I digress.)... to rename, you have to upload a new version and then delete (or tag for deletion) the old image. That's a pain. Probably someone has a bot but I forget.

What to do? Find someone with a bot? do it myself by hand, just say to heck with it? What would YOU do?

Update: (3/30/08) I fixed them by hand. Supposedly someone's working on a bot to do it.

Rooting around in old pictures

More on the topic of images... as I said in "bad pictures" a bad pic is better than none. (1)

I happened to be rooting around in my old Brickshelf (2) folders and I realised I have a bunch of pictures from 2001 and even earlier that I really need to go through and see if there is anything of value in them.

In particular, I was fortunate enough to get a "backstage" tour of NASA's Johnson Space Center in August 2001. Since this was before 9/11, it was a fair bit easier to wangle one's way in than nowadays. I was in Houston, trying to sell stuff to Enron (!!) (3) and a friend of a friend gave us a tour. Sure enough, I have a big folder full of stuff... related to the X-38, to moon rocks, and to shuttle and ISS simulation. Much of it is really bad, blurry and out of focus, but I think I found a few goodies to upload.

Tell me what you think... did I miss any good ones? Any I really shouldn't have bothered with? Got any good stories of neat images you managed to score?

----------------

1 - yes this is another one of these backdated posts, I have to get out of that habit!
2 - Brickshelf is a free resource for hosting (mostly) LEGO related images. The interface is mid 90s' to be sure, but back then we didn't have Flickr, et al.
3 - I still joke that if Enron had bought our stuff back then maybe they wouldn't have went bankrupt.

Bad pictures?

While some say that too many pictures can detract, a picture, any picture, can really add a lot to a Wikipedia article, I think. Compare this version of "Walker (machine)" with this version ... (actually finding where the article on this topic (legged vehicles) was located in the first place may be the subject of a different post, it was a chore). False modesty aside, the picture adds a fair bit of interest to the reader, I think, as well as giving illustration to some of the points made in the article.

I've been sitting on that picture for the better part of two years. It was taken in April 2006 when I visited the U.S. Army Transportation Museum ... see "procrastination" for part of why I sat on it... the other part of why? It's just not a very good picture.. it's blurry, the machine is out of focus, there are distracting elements in the background, the entire machine is not in the picture, the angle is bad, and so on. In fact, it hits most of the reasons why pictures fail to become rated as Quality Images (much less Featured Pictures, which has much stricter standards) at Commons. So that held me back, I was embarrassed.

However, I've realized that I believe what many probably already knew to be true... A bad picture is better than no picture. If you have a free image that would illustrate a previously unillustrated article, use it. The article will be better, and perhaps someone else will be spurred to add a better one to replace it. Another case in point, the U.S. Army Transportation Museum article itself. Compare this version (no pictures) with this version (bad pictures)... a noticable improvement (I added a lot of other stuff as well, to be sure). But that's not the end of the story. Someone else found and uploaded a better picture of the Liberty truck to produce this version. Now, the reason they saw the article is probably the Did You Know process (another blog post topic!) but the point is, they saw my crappy picture, and improved on it.

So then, if you have freely licensed pictures, don't be bashful. Add them to articles that have no pictures, and either they will improve the article, or they will be replaced by a BETTER picture, also improving the article. You can keep your fair use ones, Wikipedia has enough of those as it is. :)

Thoughts?