Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2020-01-27/On the bright side
What's making you happy this month?
The content of this Signpost piece is adapted from email threads titled "What's making you happy this week?" that are sent to Wikimedia-l.
We encourage you to add your comments about what's making you happy this month to the talk page of this Signpost piece.
Week of 29 December 2019: Was macht dich diese Woche glücklich?
From User:Clovermoss
This week, I'm thankful that I am going to start collaborating with Pine for On The Bright Side. I have been a fan of this Signpost feature for a long time and I'm excited to help make it happen. I'm also thankful for the photo displayed above. I find that photographs of nature have a tendency to appeal to me, and I think that this one is stunning. I like moss for its unique texture and just for being something that exists. I adore the leaves that can be seen every autumn where I live, and I miss seeing them everywhere I go. However, I'm also thankful for the comforting aspects of winter: hot chocolate, candy canes, and the warmth at home.
From User:Pine
I am grateful to Clovermoss for agreeing to collaborate. I think that readers will appreciate seeing a new perspective and a new writing style. Also, because I will spend less time writing WMYHTW, I think that I will be able to spend a little more time on the pilot phase of NavWiki. NavWiki is progressing slowly but well.
The topic of writing reminds me of a video clip from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In this scene, Captain Jean-Luc Picard receives a visit from the alien "Q". Q is powerful and unpredictable. Here, he offers to help Picard with drafting a speech (Youtube link).
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Patrick Stewart, the actor who portrays Captain Picard -
John de Lancie, the actor who portrayed Q
Finally, some thoughts about listening. Listening can be done casually, aggressively, carefully, poorly, well, and any number of other ways. Clovermoss appears to invest a lot of time and effort in listening. Captain Picard did too.
"One of the things that I’ve come to understand is that as I talk a lot about Picard, what I find is I’m talking about myself. There was a sort of double action that occurred. In one sense Picard was expanding like this and at the same time he was also growing closer and closer to me as well and in some respect I suppose even had some influence on me. I became a better listener than I ever had been as a result of playing Jean-Luc Picard because it was one of the things that he does terrifically well."
— Patrick Stewart, quoted in BBC America
From Amir E. Aharoni
I wrote a proposal to make it possible for templates on Wikimedia sites to be global. It's not a new idea; in fact, it has been requested since 2004, which, if I'm not mistaken, is also the year that templates became available in the first place. But I do think that my proposal to make the global is the most detailed ever.
Now, what makes me happy this week is that the short version of this proposal is now available in 12 languages, including the six official languages of the United Nations, which is nicely symbolic: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Global_templates/Proposed_specification,_short_version
Even though I wrote most of the original text, I really, really want this idea to be "owned" by the whole Wikimedia community and [not] just by myself, so I'm glad that people are helping with translations, corrections, and comments, including negative comments. It is an important thing, and the more people participate in it, the better.
Happy new year! Let's make 2020 the year in which the first global modules will finally start appearing, and make the development of various community tools easier and more efficient for everyone. Cheers!
Week of 5 January 2020: 今週の嬉しいことは何ですか？
From User:Clovermoss
I have smiled several times this week, and I'm thankful for that. I'm thankful for the start of another year and another decade. I have observed and participated in a lot of WikiLove between editors wishing each other a happy new year. I'm excited for what 2020 will bring, as I'm anticipating some important milestones being reached this year in my life.
I saw an interesting thread on the mailing list about an astronaut editing Wikipedia from the ISS, and I'm thankful that my curiousity about Earth and beyond has been piqued. I was one of those kids who used to dream about being an astronaut. I still think of that career path as fascinating, although not one I am likely to take myself. I admire people who follow their dreams, whatever those dreams happen to be.
From User:Pine
Announcement about the availability of statistics for media file requests:
Hi everybody,
Just in time for the holidays, we're announcing the addition of Media Requests to our metrics catalog. Over the last few months we've been working on a dataset offering request numbers for every single image, audio, video and document in the Wiki universe, since 2015.
This means we have 3 new metrics available in the Analytics Query Service:
- Media requests per referrer: e.g. how many images, audio, videos... have been accessed from English Wikipedia in the last month? 73 billion for November.
- Media requests per file: e.g. how many hits did this cool painting get in November? The answer is 483,791 hits.
- Top files by media requests: e.g. what was the most popular video yesterday, December 22nd? Fred Rogers testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications. Fun! You can check out the top 1000 media files for any month or day, for any media type.
Media requests is, in terms of absolute numbers, a huge dataset, so the per file and top metrics are still being loaded with data all the way to 2015. We expect this loading to finish in mid January.
You can read more about this in Wikitech. As usual if you have any questions about the dataset or the new metrics please send them our way here on the list or via Phabricator.
Happy holidays!
Francisco + the A team
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Francisco Dans (él, he, 彼)
Software Engineer, Analytics Team
Wikimedia Foundation
Week of 12 January 2020: Qu’est-ce qui vous rend heureux cette semaine?
From User:Clovermoss
I'm thankful this week for discovering an interesting task force: Wikipedia:Women in Green. The goals of this task force involve creating GA-class articles on women and women's works. One of the goals for this year is 20 new GAs. I've known about Wikipedia:Women in Red for a while now, and I'm thankful for the work everyone has put into both Women in Green and Women in Red. I'm amazed at the hard work that went into the creation of 14,480 articles for January–July 2019, and I'm looking forward to updated statistics for WiR for August-December 2019.
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Logo for Women in Red -
Logo for Women in Green
From User:Pine
This week marks the 19th anniversary of the launch of Wikipedia. I would like to highlight a 2019 editorial by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the world wide web, that was published in The New York Times. The title of the editorial is, "I Invented the World Wide Web. Here's How We Can Fix It." Berners-Lee writes, "I wanted the web to serve humanity. It's not too late to live up to that promise... I had hoped that 30 years from its creation, we would be using the web foremost for the purpose of serving humanity. Projects like Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap and the world of open source software are the kinds of constructive tools that I hoped would flow from the web." Berners-Lee goes on to advocate for making improvements to the Web. I invite you to read the entire editorial.
Wikipedia is a high profile success story for the Internet and for humanity. Concidentally, next week English Wikipedia is likely to have its six millionth article. Here's a toast to honor those who have made this place be as amazing it is.
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The world's first web server -
A cluster diagram of websites' relations to Wikipedia in 2004 -
The current Wikipedia logo -
The current OpenStreetMap logo -
Tim Berners-Lee announcing the launch of the World Wide Web Foundation -
Web servers of the Wikimedia Foundation
Week of 19 January 2020: Co sprawia, że jesteś szczęśliwy w tym tygodniu?
From User:Clovermoss
This week, I learned about Wiki Loves Monuments. The wording kind of sounded familiar at first, but I wasn't sure why. I didn't really know what Wiki Loves Monuments was and now I'm thankful that I do. A lot goes into a good photograph and really good photographs have a way of striking me with awe in a way that's hard to describe with words.
There were 25 announcements for the top winners and the winner was announced on January 14th. I love the way the sunlight shines in through the windows – it seems surreal, and it's almost like I'm standing there myself. I don't know what the temperature would be like inside the church, but I felt slightly cold looking at it. I'd imagine there isn't any heating currently in the building because it's abandoned, although maybe I'm thinking too much about details like that?
From User:Pine
The 15th of January is the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was a civil rights leader in the United States. Every year, the first Monday after his birthday is a U.S. national holiday. English Wikiquote selected a quote from him as its Quote of the Day for 15 January 2020. Although my memories of this are vague, I think that my elementary school used the holiday as an occasion for students to learn about history. I am thankful for my teachers who taught us civics and the responsibilities of citizenship in a republic.
Regarding translations
Skillful translations of the sentence "What's making you happy this week?" would be very much appreciated. If you see any inaccuracies in the translations in this article then please {{ping}} User:Pine in the discussion section of this page, or boldly make the correction to the text of the article. Thank you to everyone who has helped with translations so far.
Your turn
What's making you happy this month? You are welcome to write a comment on the talk page of this Signpost piece.
Discuss this story
News cycles and the 6 million article milestone
In case anyone wonders about this, "On the bright side" and What's making you happy this week? have weekly cycles that start at 0:01 UTC on Sundays, while current schedule for The Signpost calls for publication on the last Saturday of the month. The six millionth article was published on 23 January, which was after that week's WMYHTW had been published to Wikimedia-l and the corresponding content was in this Signpost issue's "On the bright side". The next issue of "On the bright side" in The Signpost will include coverage of the 6 million article milestone that is similar to this WMYHTW email that User:Clovermoss sent to Wikimedia-l. ↠Pine (✉) 04:48, 28 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]