Wikimedia Foundation

These days there is a huge number of requests for closure of wikipedias in African Languages. The issue is controversial as obviously one can look at them from a number of conflicting points of view. From one end you can pretty much say these requests are discriminatory in nature, as they tend to ignore the potential amount of public for information published in such languages and they deliberately ignore the objective problems (low alphabetization, lack of connectivity, to name but the first that come to mind) that slow down the production rate for such projects. On the other end, there is a number of practical problems associated with the management of an empty project, as spammers do not know linguistic boundaries and must be dealt with no matter if you have users for a project or not.

I should start this part with "once upon a time", but this would make you believe it is a fairy tale, well today it is not anymore, it is about to become true, so ... I'll just talk.

Well being one of the initiators of OmegaWiki I think it is time to start writing down how everything started, integrating step by step our adventure in the world of words and dictionaries.

I'd like to dedicate this book to some very special people, those who in some way changed and are changing my life and therefore they will be mentioned only when things are ready.

So we are back. It's been a long trip through unexpectedly different climates, a lot of people met and our first experience of pregnant travel, so also the first trip for our small Maria Catlin-a, although during the trip we did not know whether she was going to be born as a male or a female, she's only 4 months old now, and she'll see her first ray of light in February.

Betawiki is the site on which most of the mediawiki software localization is dealt with. It was born mainly to localize mediawiki, but lately it has started to be seen as a valuable resource for other Open Source Projects. This eventually led to manage the localization of a free Colonization clone called Freecol on the same site.

I admit not having heard anything about Greg Maxwell and his emails until I read this. It seems to have driven lots of people mad, although I would not bet that this was his original aim.

The dialog goes on... pfctdayelise answered to my answer, and once again it would be unfair manipulation if I hid the fact that I admit she has the main point over me. So here we go in public, again.

The comments I get on my blog are among the best sources of thought I had in a lifetime. This morning, in particular, I woke up to read a very short comment that really hits the point. At first I thought to write a quick answer, then I realized that the basic misunderstanding in what I wrote originated exactly from the fact that I had been too quick. So I'll better put it here, to make sure this time I can express exactly what I mean.

pfctdayelise wrote on 2007-06-28 10:25:43 +0200

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Just a quick note on elections. I guess translating all candidate statements made me read and think about it much more than I did 6 months ago, when I first cast my vote.

My position is quite clear: Eloquence, Yann, Kim Bruning.

So we have one more scandal in WMF, this time it's it.wiktionary's turn to get the news. It appears someone nominated his Own Fat Royal Self Bureaucrat of all Wikiditionaries and started to fire everybody else right after that. Just like that. He's firing people. Well, for self-evident technical reasons he couldn't nominate himself to anything more than being a user. To get a bureaucrat flag someone must give it to you, so here we have some questions: Who did it? When? Why?