Happy 10th birthday, Icelandic Wikipedia!

It's Second Life's 10th birthday today - the first official (non-beta) release happened on the 23rd of June 2003! Happy birthday, Second Life.

And also, the Wikimedia Foundation turned 10 on the 20th. Happy birthday WMF, too!

Here's to many more years for both.

Calling attention to unsourced and potentially untrustworthy, unverifiable statements on Wikipedia is a worthwhile endeavor, but some people are clearly taking it too far:


( Read more... )

OK, the results of the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2011 competition have been announced!

The winner is this image of Lake Bondhus in Norway; I'd embed a copy, but it's only available under a non-free the Free Art License (with which I'm not sufficiently familiar to be comfortable using the image under its terms, although the fact that ( Read more... )

A fascinating tidbit from Wikipedia, on the intertwined history of certain flap-eared royal fruitcakes and Alfred E. Neuman:

In 1958, Mad published letters from several readers noting the resemblance between Neuman and England's Prince Charles, then nine years old. Shortly thereafter, an angry letter under a Buckingham Palace letterhead ( Read more... )

By way of perlbuzz, here's a quote from Brian Cassidy about how to handle contributions from newcomers to FOSS:

New authors should not be "beaten" for not following standard practices, rather coached and mentored into becoming productive members of our culture. Disciplining new authors is counter not only to our culture, but it goes against the release ( Read more... )

I don't know how I missed this, but the winner of the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2010 competition has been announced. And the winner is:


( Read more... )

For those interested, the second round of voting in the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2010 competition has started.

If you're eligible to vote, why not head over and vote for your favorite? :) There's even a picture from Iceland among the finalists!

For those interested, the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2010 competition has opened; as in the previous years, the Picture of the Year will be chosen from all the pictures that were awarded Featured Picture status that year.

Find out whether you can participate here (the short version: you need to have registered a Wikimedia user account ( Read more... )

Short but sweet, another piece of great writing from Wikipedia:

Like conjoined twins, classes and metaclasses are born together.

Found in the "Metaclass" article (specifically, the section on Smalltalk).