On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <pute...@mccme.ru> wrote: > You may think by now we are in the free information world, and the players of > the 1980 Japanese ice hockey team are on Wikipedia. (snip) > Japanese Wikipedia, as far as I can tell, is not better. A team of mystery > persons.
Try then the freely editable knowledge base. :) Two of them [1] are now on Wikidata: http://tinyurl.com/zganwzg http://tinyurl.com/jgdnxwu (click "Execute" to see the list) Happy birthday and thanks for sharing your stories - an excellent way to celebrate. -Yusuke [1] Herb Wakabayashi - apparently, a Canadian who was naturalized to Japan later - is not in the query results. That piece of information is missing on Wikidata and I couldn't find a credible source to cite immediately. On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <pute...@mccme.ru> wrote: > On 2016-01-15 00:30, Mardetanha wrote: >> >> Dear Fellow Wikimedians >> I would like to congratulate you on Wikipedia's 15th birthday, it was >> historic moment for all of us, I am glad to let you know we had a >> celebration in Tehran and we were the first country to celebrate it. >> you can find images here >> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_15_in_Iran >> Mardetanha >> _______________________________________________ >> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: >> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines >> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, >> <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > > > I feel like today is time for stories, and I guess this thread is exactly > the place we can share some stories today. I wish everybody does, since this > is a nice way to celebrate 15y. > > It could be in principle anything remotely Wikimedia related. For example, > the highest real-life rank of a person I ever blocked on Wikipedia was a > member of the European parliament (or someone impersonating him). But these > stories mainly reveal human stupidity, and today we want to talk more on the > human knowledge. Therefore I am going to spend my daily quota of wikimedia-l > post for smth else. > > I was born in 1967 in the Soviet Union and I am coming from a pre-internet > generation. I first used internet in 1995 or so, past my PhD degree. > However, I was always interested in learning things, this is probably why I > later joined the Wikimedia movement. And I was a pretty advanced-knowledge > teenager, knowing things my peers would normally not know anything about, > and I was interested in all kinds of stuff: from exact sciences to history > and languages and to geographical names. It was really painful to get any > non-mainstream information. Let me give you a couple of example of the > problems I encountered. > > One was languages. Well, for mainstream foreign languages like English or > German it was relatively easy to find textbooks and dictionaries. They were > nothing like modern means of language learning, for example the Teach > Yourself series, not even speaking of online courses. Other languages were > more difficult. Some languages were impossible. Well, I grew up in Moscow, > which had a 10M population, and there were couple of libraries where I > presumably could find dictionaries of even uncommon languages, but these > were difficult to get in (normally one had to be 18 yo), they did not let > the books out of the building, and for a number of practical reasons they > were not really an option. On the other hand, I was hiking a lot in Central > Asia, and I was suffering from inability to understand what the local Turkic > names (in Kazakh and Kyrghyz mainly) mean. Well, you learn soon that Ak-Suu > means "White river", meaning "aq" is white and "suu" is a river, but this is > about it). So what I did I searched all available literature at home and > around including the school library, and came up with a list of about 100 > words. This was my own, personal, self-made Kyrghyz-Russian dictionary. It > was weird, since, for example, did not include verbs, and it did not help me > to speak Kyrghyz in any sense - and I still do not - but it was fine to > understand the names and to feel kind of like at home. Now we have of course > professional dictionaries available online. (Kyrghyz is still not in a > Google translate though). > > The second story. For whatever reason, when I was about twelve, I needed to > have Japanese names. I do not remember why I needed them, but Japanese names > were notoriously difficult to find. The books I had available only mentioned > a few individuals. The newspapers rarely wrote about Japan, and again only > mentioned a few individuals. Then there happened the 1980 Winter Olympics in > Lake Placid, and Japanese team entered the ice hockey tournament. (They > ended up last). There was a sports newspaper which I had access to, which > published the results of the games, and of course ice hockey was at the time > a great deal in Russia (on that Olympics, the Soviet team lost to the US > team in the finals, which is still considered to be a major fuckup), but > apparently they did not publish all the names of the players, only last > names of those who scored a goal. Japanese rarely scored, and there was my > tough luck. But them the same newspaper opened a hotline - one could phone a > certain number, and they would answer any question related to the results of > the Olympics. I thought this is my chance. I was dead afraid calling people > I do not know, but I still collected a piece of paper, a pen and phoned. A > nice female voice answered, and I said I would like to have names of the > Japanese ice hockey team players. The nice voice answered that the team is > too big, and their policy is not to give long answers. That was the end of > it. > > You may think by now we are in the free information world, and the players > of the 1980 Japanese ice hockey team are on Wikipedia. Well, check them. The > names are there (it takes a while to find the list of names on the English > Wikipedia - I believe the only article they are listed is [[Japan at the > 1980 Winter Olympics]]), but only one of them - [[Herb Wakabayashi]], who > died last year - has an article. Japanese Wikipedia, as far as I can tell, > is not better. A team of mystery persons. > > Happy 15y celebrations. > > Cheers > Yaroslav > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
