ragesoss

I’ve been using Wiki FM lately, a simple mashup of Last.fm and Wikipedia. (Thanks goes to Florence Devouard, who pointed this site out on the English Wikipedia mailing list.)

In addition to discovering new music (and rediscovering music I haven’t listened to in a long time), I’ve been filling in gaps in Wikipedia’s music photography. There are many band and musician articles that either don’t have photos or are using non-free promo shots, while Flickr has freely-licensed photos that could be used. And for many others, there are fan-made photos that Flickrites would release under a free license if asked. It’s a nice way to work on some of Wikipedia’s image problems without it feeling like drudge work.

Unexpectedly, today has been my lucky day on the Wikipedia front page.

Two nights ago I tried my hand at photographing the lunar eclipse. With plenty of experimenting, I got one image of totality I was pretty happy with (above): a one-second exposure, with my camera propped up against the back of a laptop to maintain the right angle. Longer exposures (and many of the one-second exposures I tried) had too much motion blur; shorter exposures or with higher ISO were too dark/noisy. I put it up on the February 2008 lunar eclipse page, as one of many observations from different times and places. A little while later, I got a message informing me that the image was being used for “In the news” to illustrate the eclipse on the Main Page. It’s also now the lead image for the eclipse article.

Then at midnight UTC, February 22, “Today’s featured article” clicked over to Rachel Carson, my last major Wikipedia project. See how it changed during it’s 24 hours in the spotlight. I’m going to reverse the two most significant changes, the softening of the bit in the lead about the environmental movement and the deleted sentence about the Reagan administration’s attacks on the environmental legacy of the of the 1960s, both of which are well-supported by the sources used for the article. But since it’s apparently a point of contention, I’ll add more backing for the Reagan bit, from something about Reagan rather than Carson.

The Carson article apparently inspired an ASCI portrait of her.

I went to bed last night with the express intention of focusing all of today’s energy on the Johannes Kepler Wikipedia article. The article, which I re-wrote almost entirely from scratch and replaced the old version with in mid-December, and have been gradually improving with the help of others in the meantime, was nominated for Featured Article status by a passerby about a week ago. This slipped under my radar until just recently (as I was still recovering from qualifiers and working on my Wii Tennis skills to avoid mental exertion), but it garnered a lot of positive feedback… despite not being finished. I had planned to spend spring break working on it casually, for a final push toward featured quality (and completeness), but the Great Wikipedia Spirit had other plans.

Anyhow, I spend some time working out the language kinks after waking up in the mid-afternoon. Then I took a break and stopped by one of those interesting but rarely-visited (by me, at least) areas of Wikipedia, the Humanities Reference Desk. I gave my two cents on what a self-motivated student interested in art history should be reading, and the proverbial three hours of fascinated clicking later, I had found my way to an interesting topic that, horror of horrors, didn’t have a Wikipedia article! So now there is a short, unsourced article about the Hockney-Falco thesis, but still no discussion of the historiographical and philosophical legacy of Kepler. (Although, the Hockney-Falco thesis is only two degrees of Wikipedia from Kepler: the Hockney-Falco thesis is about optical aids to drawing like the (click-1) camera lucida, which was first described by (click-2) Johannes Kepler in Dioptrice… a fact I did not know before this evening, despite writing the Kepler article. Wiki works in mysterious ways.)

In other Wikipedia fun (as opposed to the Wikipedia work I ought to be doing to finish the Kepler article), I recently started a trend at Featured pictures candidates (where I learned, and am learning, everything I know about photography). Now a number of editors are demanding adequate extended captions for featured image candidates, and new nominations are starting to appear that take this into account. Hooray for context!

The FPC process on English Wikipedia is an interesting beast. As with Featured Articles, the standards for Featured Pictures have risen enormously over the last two years or so. And the way editors at FPC analyze pictures, and what they expect out of a good picture, is quite different than what a random viewer values in an image. The most dramatic example of this is the Picture of the Year on Wikimedia Commons. Commons has a separate featured picture process (which unlike on Wikipedia, does not take encyclopedicity into account), and it recently held a well-publicized vote for the best picture of the 321 that achieved featured status in 2006. The winner (below) was not yet an FP on Wikipedia, and its subsequent nomination only stood a chance of passing FPC (which it did not) in deference to its Picture of the Year status; it was widely criticized on both technical and aesthetic grounds.