Kendal museum for wikipedians.

Posted on August 25, 2023 by geniice

For wikipedians its not that great. Owned by South Lakeland District Council but operated by Kendall college I guess that makes it a university museum. And the scope of the collection pretty much aligns with that. Unfortunately much of the collection is of fairly common items that have better coverage elsewhere.

The taxidermy collection while reasonably broad lacks anything really uncommon. The Thylacine might be of interest if anyone compiles a complete list of surviving specimens. The Helsfell Cave wolf is of interest and the cave is probably notable. They are however nice enough to include a complete listing of what they have on their website if anyone wants to check.

The Kentmere Viking boat might be another viable topic. Sadly despite its interesting history I doubt the John Hamer mineral collection meets notability standards. On top of that there are a few hoards and a few things that might be relevant to place history articles such as the Witherslack sword. So ultimately its not that there is nothing but that there is a fairly limited amount and what there is would need to be worked at.

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Bovington tank museum

Posted on July 7, 2023 by geniice

Or as it insists on calling itself the tank museum. The good news is that this museum contains a lot of notable items (it has one of the best tank collections on earth). The bad news is that its been pretty mined out. A lot of wikipedians have visited the museum over the years including as part of a wikimedia UK project in 2014.

Most things available to be photographed have been photographed and most things to be written about have been written about. The photo environment also isn’t the best. Tanks are large vehicles which means the usual issues of photographing indoors (not being able to get far enough away, uneven lighting) are compounded. The museum does run a couple of event days where tanks are driven outside which can provide a much better photographic environment. Indeed given the right weather its possible to take some of the best tank photos Wikipedia is going to get. Another wikipedian has already written rather more lyrically than I can about the experience there.

There are items in the museum’s collection that Wikipedia could still use photos of (or better photos of in some cases). The Morris-Martel, the T14 Heavy Tank and Excelsior. Problem is none of them are currently on display. There are also a few tanks that lack articles such at the L1E3 amphibious tank.

So overall a great museum if you like tanks but for Wikipedians you are probably going to need to plan in advance if you want to get much out of it.

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Manchester Museum for Wikipedians

Posted on June 29, 2023 by geniice

Manchester museum is a university museum. Which tends to mean a collection of things that 19th century collectors thought were collectable. It also has a natural history collection. The closest equivalent elsewhere would probably be the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery. On paper this looks quite hopeful for Wikipedians but in reality is means a collection that overlaps with other museums that have better collections. When looking for photos there isn’t that much we don’t already have better coverage of. There are a few individual objects that like the Sebek-khu Stele have articles but these are rare.

This rarity however the museum is probably a good choice for wikipedians looking for ideas. The skeleton of Maharaja the Elephant meets you in the entrance area and is one of a number of animals from the Belle Vue Zoological Gardens who’s remains are now in the museum’s collections. Quite a few of whom are notable.

Many of the museum’s mummies have been studied enough for biographies to be written (although the museum using a wordpress blog for much of its material complicates things there). There are a number of fossils where we don’t have articles on their genus (Palaeosmilia Murchisoni for example). Some of the historic (and not so historic locations) of excavations could be expanded. The Riqqeh tombs over in egypt but more locally (to Manchester) the Alderley Sandhills Project.

Probably of most interest to a Manchester based wikipedian who wants an ongoing project but doesn’t want to deal too much with local history.

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Museums for Wikipedians

Posted on June 15, 2023 by geniice

Museums for Wikipedians

I’ve been planning for some years to write reviews of museums from the point of view of wikipedians. Or more accurately their utility to wikipedians.

So what is the utility Wikipedians are looking for? Ultimately its content. Either (and perhaps most prominently) in the form of things that can be photographed and the images used in articles or inspiration for things to write about.

So from the point of view of wikipedians the ideal museum would consist of a series of well described encyclopedic items. Preferably isolated and with smooth flat lighting.

Obviously this isn’t what most museums are trying to do and what the wikipedian is looking for can clash with modern (and historic) museum design. For example a learning space tends from the POV of the average wikipedian to be empty space. Obviously its important for organised visits like school trips. Equally the concept of narrative is far less important. Wikipedia tends to focus on classes of objects or individual objects. Trying to tell a coherent story of the history of fooshire is more likely to to be a matter for books. The concept of the Encyclopedic museum does exist but is somewhat controversial (its critics tend to argue its an excuse for opposing repatriation) and requires a fairly large collection to be viable.

Notability requirements are also an issue. The vast amount of reliable sources covering military history mean that any museum with a military weapon collection is likely to have something of use. On the other hand unless there are a bunch of sources on gas stoves that I don’t know about, Leicester’s Gas Museum otherwise excellent collection is going to be of limited utility to wikipedians.

In general wikipedians are going to have to accept there are going to be large sections of any given museum that don’t have much to offer. The section of the local history museum with much the same collection of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic tools as every other local history museum is unlikely to have much that can be done with. The neolithic pottery on the other hand is where things can get more unique.

Its the useful stuff I’m looking to focus on. Museums don’t lose points for having 3 galleries devoted to sherds of Samian Ware. More broadly being a bad museum for wikipedians doesn’t mean I think it is a bad museum. A geology museum with a big but fairly standard mineral collection is going to run into the problem that wikipedia has probably got those areas covered. I still like that kind of museum.

Finally while not directly related to the content of the museum their publications tend to meet reliable source guidelines. So either in paper or electronic form such publications can add a lot to the value of their collections from the point of view of wikipedians.

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The lead image in the traction engine article in various languages

Posted on October 3, 2022 by geniice

One thing I like to do from time to time is compare the images different languages of Wikipedia are using for the lead image of equivalent articles. While in a lot of cases the pattern is; whatever the english wikipedia was using at the time the article was created that isn’t always the case. And for traction engine it mostly isn’t. One complication is that for many languages it seems the article would be better translated as “road going steam engines” but the results are still interesting.

First off we start with English and Spanish (which appears to be a translation of english). This is my image from the Great Dorset Steam Fair. I went with it as lead image worth as it is a decently clear image of a pretty standard traction engine (not a ploughing engine or showman’s engine).It is pretty isolated and faces left (and thus into the article) with a three quarter view. Its not ideal as the background is busier than I would like and the crop is a bit on the square side since I removed an arena marshal. It was taken during a concerted attempt at great dorset steam fair to take the best traction engine pic possible. Unfortunately they drive round the arena anti-clockwise which makes getting left facing images rather tricky (the engine in the pic is cutting across the arena). This was driven by the previous lead image being rather dark and blury although fairly understandable for a product of 2005. Technology and wikipedians have marched on since then.

Second is Danish. This is a portable engine not a traction engine. It appears that danish is one of those languages where “Lokomobil” refers to any mobile non-railbound steam engine (or at least that is what the article does). The image itself is a black and white period image showing a portable engine at work. There are some who argurage that that is the best way to illustrate the subject. Personally I argue that humans see in colour and thus its best to lead with a colour image if one is available. The quality of the image isn’t the best (I suspect its a second generation copy) but the scene is well laid out and 1895 is very much the time period where these things were in use.

Third is German. It is a traction engine this time. A ploughing engine in fact. Not the greatest image though. Low res, not the sharpest, blown highlights and partially obstructed with a fence in front. Points for facing left though. In practice this wouldn’t have been that untypical for 2005. Which is when the image was added to the article and it has been there since. The machine is apparently in Germany which may help explain the choice of image.

Fourth we have French. “Locomobile automotrice” apparently translates as “Self-propelled locomotive” which would explain why the lead image is a steamroller (although it was described as a traction engine on commons until I fixed it). I think it is a film scan and the quality is certainly OK for 2006 when it was uploaded. However the rear view is an unusual choice for a lead image (although it does show a lot of the working parts better) and facing right it faces out of the article. Like the German one it could probably do with updating.

Fifth is Indonesian . It is a traction engine apparently at a show in Stuttgart. Its somewhat blurred due to camera movement (1/8 of second exposure) And faces right out of the page. Other than that its fairly well isolated, the view isn’t obstructed and the background isn’t overly messy. What I don’t understand is why they swapped out the previous photo of a very similar engine. Yes the front wheel is slightly obstructed but its less blurry.

Sixth is Cornish. The composition is decent with a nice action shot and the engine (which is a traction engine) facing into the article. However its rather low res and the back of the engine blends with the background. My guess is the author decided they didn’t like the then lead in the english language article and chose this from what they could find on commons.

Seventh is Dutch. This is a portable engine. Since its labelled “Locomobiel” the person who added it may not have known the difference. It is however a very good image of a portable engine. Its sharp and well isolated. Any improvement is going to be mostly stylistic. For example a preference for engines that are running rather than the funnel being in the stowed position.

Eighth is Japanese. It does show a traction engine (a showman’s engine). Its facing left into the page. However beyond that I’m not a fan. The obstruction by the fence is fairly minor but I feel its overwhelmed by the structure around it. The colours also look like they have been pushed a bit hard and may have been over-sharpened. A combination of these factors and the existance of better options was why I removed it from the English wikipedia. The engine is in Japan which may explain the choice here.

Finally we have Finnish . If you wanted an action shot of road locomotives then you couldn’t do much better. Yes it faces out of the page (great dorset steam fair going clockwise strikes again) but its a well composed photo showing some serious heavy haulage. Conventionally it might be better if the engines were a bit lower down to follow the rule of thirds but I think it still works. Personaly I prefer a single isolated example for the lead but in shorter articles that may mean losing the ability to show the range of designs.

Wikidata uses a perfectly decent film scan image although not perhaps as isolated from the background as it could be.

I’m not arguing that all the articles should be changed to use the english image. Asside from the obvious conflict of interest different language communities will have different priorities and I don’t speak any of the languages in question so there may well be things that I’m missing.

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How bad is Chia going to get?

Posted on May 6, 2021 by geniice

For those less interested in hard drive prices Chia is a newish cryptocurrency that is mined on hard drives. Similar to the old burst coin.

Given what traditional cryptocurrency did to GPUs the question is what is it going to do to hard drive prices. Exact numbers are impossible since they depend on the ongoing price of Chia and behaviour of the miners.

Headline figure is that at current prices Chia can be expected to use about 100 Exabytes of storage over the next year or about 10% of annual hard drive production. At current prices its going to get pretty bad. I can’t predict how bad but I really doubt there is anywhere close to 10% slack in the hard drive production market.

That figure does ignore the cost of electricity which would take us to about 95 Exabytes and more significantly ignores the fact that that much buying would case the price of storage to rise (but I have no way to calculate that).

The calculation

The calculation is based on the fact that chia mints 9216 new coins per day (in pairs for some reason). Current price is ~$600 per coin. Resulting in $5529600 total per day or $2.019 billion per year. A year seems a reasonable upper limit for miners to get a return on their initial investment (hard drives don’t hold their second hand value well). Prior to Chia storage was around the $20 per TB mark and at that price $2.019 billion pays for around 100 Exabytes.

Electricity for storage appears to be in the region of 10kWh per TB per year at a price of $0.12 per kWh that bumps the price of storage up to $21.2 per TB which reduces the amount to 95 Exabytes. The impact of the cost of motherboards, NVMe drives to write to the drives and land to store the whole thing is beyond my ability to estimate.

If instead of looking for return of initial costs in under 1 year miners focus purely on electricity costs then Chia maxes out around 1.6 Zettabyte (higher depending on the price of electricity and the amount stolen). Global annual hard drive production is only around 1 Zettabyte.

Current growth rate

According to this chart Chia is currently taking about a day to add 500 Pebibyte. In units we are more use to that amounts to 562950 terabytes or nearly two wikimedia commons. At that rate we will be reaching the 100 Exabyte mark in around 180 days.

How much it needs to fall not to be a problem?

Using the above calculation $64 per coin would result in a 10 Exabyte pool or about 1% of global hard drive production which might not be too bad.

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Handbreak now supports webm

Posted on January 17, 2021 by geniice

Handbrake has long been the best option for those that want to transcode files to a commons friendly format while not messing around with the command line. Unfortunately it output files in the Matroska container (.mkv) and the easiest way to get them into a format that commons supported involved messing around in the command line with ffmpeg. However with version 1.3.0 Handbrake now supports webm directly simplifying transcoding.

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An image for Pinchbeck from commons

Posted on June 30, 2020 by geniice

I’ve been aware of Pinchbeck for some years after seeing an example of a Pinchbeck hairband at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. The Wikipedia article on the alloy has needed a pic since 2005. Unfortunately my pictures from Bristol sucked due to missing focus and simply not holding the camera still (in my defence I was running on about 2 hours sleep and trying to visit all the museums in Bristol).

Getting a photo of Pinchbeck suffers from a problem of being sure what you are photographing is actual Pinchbeck. The term seems to be used to label 3 different things. You have true kvlt pinchbeck from the original Pinchbeck family, approximately contemporary imitations and then a random collection of vintage brass.

To be on the safe side I wanted a photo of the first option. This rules out simply buying some since the well provenanced stuff is expensive and for the rest I don’t have the expertise to dig through. Museum materials seem a better option but being somewhat reflective it tends to photograph poorly under museum light. Birmingham museums has some but the lighting in that section isn’t the best (although that can be countered to a fair extent).

Finally I tried a commons search. I don’t usually do this because a lot of the time you don’t get anything and the quality can be rather mixed (the best commons search engine remains the english wikipedia). On this occasion though After a lot of photos relating to the pumping station and the village in Lincolnshire I found this clock made by the son of the original Christopher Pinchbeck. Definitely true kvlt Pinchbeck

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Wikipedia, right, but on the blockchain round 2

Posted on December 6, 2017 by geniice

Well its more a re-launch of Everipedia which has been around for a while. Everipedia is essentially an attempt to make money by starting with a mirror of wikipedia and then going forward with no notability standards. Income attempts are by charging people for article writing services and adverts.

So far success seems to have been fairly limited. Low alexa rank and a fairly low rate of linking from reddit a fair number of which focuses on stuff of interest to reddit’s nastier sub communities. It also has the issues you would expect of something with no notability standards and has become a popular platform for the likes of 4chan to libel people

Still I’ve seen worse.

So where does the block-chain come in? Mostly in the form of what appears to be (or what is at leasdt marketed as) a relaunch which uses much the same language as Lunyr. Decentralised, censorship resistant and on the block-chain. In practice this seems to boil down to them thinking about hosting on the interplanetary file system (so Lunyr again).

One trick they have beaten Lunyr on is hiring wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger who’s name is apparently enough to get your press release read. Quite how a project that claims to be removing gatekeepers is meant to work with a guy who’s previous project (Citizendium) was effectively a nested pile of gatekeepers I’m not sure.

What this is all in aid of is an initial coin offering. Called IQ, the coin’s nominal use case appears to be buying the right to challenge edits on the wiki (although things are at the unpublished draft stage). How they plan to make that something people would want without completely breaking the wiki system is unclear but I personally doubt they will ever have enough traffic for it to matter. If they get their coin out before the ICO bubble bursts they might raise some cash (after all they have the advantage of a product that actually sort of exists) otherwise not so much.

Everipedia is a project that has been trying to compete with wikipedia for 2 years now even as someone who keeps an eye on wikipedia competitors its barely on my radar. I don’t see anything in the relaunch that would change that.

As for Lunyr they continue to update their advertising system but since everything is still a behind a closed alpha its hard to say what’s going on. They are though apparently having issues with spotting bugs in their software due to CryptoKitties messing up the Ethereum blockchain. They’ve also apparently been removed from the Liqui cryptocurrency exchange but I really doubt that will matter to anyone beyond the unfortunate compulsive gamblers who trade the thing.

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Monkey selfies and Technollamas

Posted on November 21, 2017 by geniice

The monkey selfie is back thanks to a This American Life program. While it mostly deals with Slater vs PETA and gets that right its coverage of wikipedia’s role is more questionable. Techdirt has the details of that:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20171113/00185238602/monkey-selfie-photographer-says-hes-now-going-to-sue-wikipedia.shtml

From the copyright nerd POV the most interesting fallout is Technollama’s attempt to do an analysis of the case under UK law:

https://www.technollama.co.uk/the-monkey-selfie-strikes-back

While I broadly agree with their analysis (although I think they underestimate the differences between civil and common law copyright) a lot rests on the statement “If we believe Slater’s own telling of the story”. The reality is Slater’s telling of the story has been inconsistent. The initial version had the monkey picking up the camera and the whole thing being unplanned. There are reasons to be sceptical of the camera on a tripod claim. In particular one of the shots shows Slater resting his left hand on a tripod. I don’t exactly travel light in photography terms but I don’t carry more than one tripod unless I have a car with me (and even then the second tripod is a mini one). Other photos in the series were taken at different heights which again suggests a tripod wasn’t used. Technollama also argues for selected the lens aperture. Its possible. With wide angle lenses its hard to judge the depth of field well enough to tell. However the exposure (checked the lighting) jumps around a fair bit between pics depending on how much of the money is in shot (most obvious by looking how light the leaves are in the background). A fairly clear sign of the camera controlling the exposure (a human would be more likely to under expose a touch to try and avoid blowing the highlights before trying to bring the shadow detail out in post).

Post brings us to Slater’s actions after the picture was taken. My feeling is that this is Slater’s strongest case. None of the images are at the camera’s native resolution or even the same ratio as the camera’s native resolution suggesting some rotation and cropping. Its impossible to say if the colour balance has been changed. Does rotation and cropping qualify for copyright? Perhaps although the UK’s Intellectual Property Office ,“it seems unlikely that what is merely a retouched, digitised image of an older work can be considered as ‘original’”. Does cropping and rotating count as merely retouching the older monkey produced image? How would the courts rule? I don’t think there is any direct case-law yet.

In the meantime we are getting a bunch of emails to OTRS blaming wikipedia for Mr Slater’s issues and financial position. This is I’d argue somewhat unfair. The raising of the the issue of the image’s copyright status started with techdirt not us. More broadly the problem is due to the changing nature of the wildlife photography market. We now live in a world where you have a bunch of people who can afford high end camera gear and actively enjoy taking it to strange places and taking pictures of wildlife with it it. While these people have always existed in the past it wasn’t easy for them to offer their images for sale. Now it is. Being in the right place with a decent camera and the ability and willingness to sell you photos isn’t worth what it once was.

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