Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-09-30/On the bright side

There are many opportunities to discuss bad news, problems, and concerns in the Wikiverse, and I think that having candid discussions about these issues is often important. Many days I spend more time thinking about problems than about what is going well. However, also I think that acknowledging the good side and taking a moment to be appreciative can be valuable.

I encourage you to add your comments about what's making you happy this month to the talk page of this Signpost piece.

Wikidata and medical data

Visual content

• Butterfly takeoff in slow motion, uploaded by Japanese Wikipedia contributor User:Phonon.b
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  "Columns in Turkish baths, Salamis, Northern Cyprus", by User:Podzemnik, who is a native speaker of Czech and identifies as "Librarian, photographer, nomad, hiker".
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  "Window in Fira, Santorini, Greece", by German Wikipedia contributor User:XRay

Text content

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  Martin Luther King, Jr.
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  William Least Heat-Moon
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  C. J. Cherryh

• Selected anniversaries for English Wikipedia noted that 28 August was the anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech by American civil rights activist and religious minister the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• English Wikiquote of the Day for 28 August: "At any particular moment in a man's life, he can say that everything he has done and not done, that has been done and not been done to him, has brought him to that moment. If he's being installed as Chieftain or receiving a Nobel Prize, that's a fulfilling notion. But if he's in a sleeping bag at ten thousand feet in a snowstorm, parked in the middle of a highway and waiting to freeze to death, the idea can make him feel calamitously stupid." —William Least Heat-Moon
• English Wikiquote of the day for 1 September: "People ask where writers get ideas. Take my advice. Some cool, clear night, drive to a country place where city lights don’t block your view. Turn off the car lights. Get out and look up. And see our real neighborhood." —C. J. Cherryh

About these individuals, according to English Wikipedia: "Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. Born in Atlanta, King is best known for advancing civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, tactics his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi helped inspire. King led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott… He led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. He helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech."

William Least Heat-Moon "is an American travel writer and historian of English, Irish, and Osage ancestry". He earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Missouri and worked as a professor of English. He wrote an autobiographical travel book, Blue Highways, that was well received. According to the article about Blue Highways, "Stories that arose from Least Heat-Moon's research as well as historical facts are included about each area visited, as well as conversations with characters such as a Seventh-day Adventist evangelist hitchhiker, a teenage runaway, a boat builder, a monk, an Appalachian log cabin restorer, a rural Nevada prostitute, fishermen, a Hopi Native American medical student, owners of Western saloons and remote country stores, a maple syrup farmer, and Chesapeake Bay island dwellers."

"Carolyn Janice Cherry (born September 1, 1942), better known by the pen name C. J. Cherryh, is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has written more than 80 books since the mid-1970s, including the Hugo Award-winning novels Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988), both set in her Alliance-Union universe. She is known for "world building", depicting fictional realms with great realism supported by vast research in history, language, psychology, and archaeology. Her series of fantasy novels set in the Alliance-Union universe, the Morgaine Stories, have sold in excess of 3 million copies."

Wikidata discussions

Regarding the concept known as federation (more information in this month's In focus report – ed.)

• https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2019-September/013405.html
• https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2019-September/013406.html

Regarding multilingualism on Wikidata

• https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2019-September/013407.html

MediaWiki "Timeless" skin

• The final report for the grant for the Timeless skin was published by User:Isarra

Off wiki

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  The chemical structure of morphine
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  Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia

• How data analytics has reduced the risk of opioid addiction in the City of Philadelphia

A request for contributions to this publication

I enjoy writing WMYHTW, and I am grateful for the feedback that I occasionally receive. However, there are a few things that are lacking. One is participation from others. I am trying to avoid WMYHTW threads effectively being "What's making Pine happy this week?" instead of "What's making you happy this week?". I cannot know everything good that happens in the Wikiverse, and I would love to see greater diversity of stories in WMYHTW. Also, writing WMYHTW in this level of detail is surprisingly time consuming for one person, which is another reason that I would be appreciative if other people would add small pieces of good news to the content of WMYHTW. Regrettably, I cannot continue to have this publication require so much time from me that writing this is effectively a part time unpaid job, including adapting the content of these emails for The Signpost. Your participation would be very much appreciated.

The Teahouse

Featured images

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  French Wikipedia picture of the day for 1 September: a Menger sponge illuminated with ray tracing
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  English Wikipedia picture of the day for 2 September: Pied kingfisher (Ceryle rudis leucomelanurus) female. The photo was taken at the Chambal River in India.
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  Commons picture of the day for 3 September: an escalator in Umeda Sky Building, Osaka Prefecture, Japan.
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  English Wikipedia picture of the day for 4 September: "Wells Cathedral's nave, viewed from the entrance, in Somerset, England."
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  English Wikipedia picture of the day for 5 September: "Mammillaria spinosissima, also known as the spiny pincushion cactus, is a species of flowering plant in the cactus family Cactaceae, endemic to the central Mexican states of Guerrero and Morelos."
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  English Wikipedia picture of the day for 6 September: social worker, civic activist, and Nobel Prize winner Jane Addams
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  Hindi Wikipedia picture of the day for 6 September: "Caravan in the Desert, Morocco, Sahara"
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  French Wikipedia picture of the day for 7 September: "Veraison (the onset of ripening) of Zinfandel grapes in Dry Creek Valley..."
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  French Wikipedia picture of the day for 8 September: self-portrait of the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh

Breaking news coverage of weather incidents

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  Geostationary imagery of Hurricane Dorian (05L) taken by the GOES 15 satellite
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  Track map of Hurricane Dorian of the 2019 Atlantic hurricane season
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  NOAA 5-day track and intensity forecast cone for Hurricane Dorian. See the file history.
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  South Carolina National Guard briefing
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  Puerto Rico National Guard preparations
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  An emergency operations center
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  Florida National Guard preparations
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  Helicopter preparations
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  U.S. Coast Guard Cutters Angela McShan and Moray

English Wikipedia seems to have some highly active weather enthusiasts who cover topics such as Hurricane Dorian, along with many people who are willing to write about breaking news stories. Although weather emergencies are bad news, English Wikipedia's timely and detailed coverage of them is good to see.

Operation Enduring Encyclopedia

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  A community election of stewards
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  A checkuser examines evidence in a sockpuppet investigations case
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  An oversighter with a collection of prohibited content
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  Recent changes patrol and New pages patrol
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  Edit filter managers
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  English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee hearing room
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  An administrator working on arbitration enforcement
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  Wikimedia Foundation servers
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  An information systems technician monitors network activity

• Password requirements were strengthened for Wikimedia user accounts to deter users from having any of the 100,000 most common passwords. See Phabricator:T151425.
• Wikimedia Foundation staff and community members responded with considerable energy to a distributed denial of service attack on 6 September 2019. See Phabricator:T232224 and this email.
• Preparations are underway for English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee elections in December 2019.

English Wikiquote of the day

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  Grandma Moses
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  A fireboard that was decorated by Moses in the year 1918
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  Grandma Moses postage stamp from the year 1969

Off wiki

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  Nyota Uhura
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  Spock
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  Leonard McCoy
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  Spectrogram of humpback whale song
• Video of a humpback whale singing

Humility is a virtue. I felt irritated by my errors in the WMHYTW emails that I sent last week to on Wikimedia-l 1 2, but I reminded myself that "to err is human", and even "professionals" make mistakes. This (Youtube link) is a collection of bloopers from the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. If you saw the movie then you'll probably appreciate the bloopers more, but even if you haven't seen the movie, you can probably understand some of the humor. A few explanations about the bloopers may help. Commander Uhura was supposed to say that sensors were receiving whale song; the movie was directed by Leonard Nimoy who also acted in the movie as Mr. Spock; and one of the film's settings is the fictional Cetacean Institute which in the movie held two humpback whales. My favorite segment of the blooper reel involves the discussion of "exact change", although more relevant to last week’s WMYHTW is that, as Dr. McCoy said, nobody's perfect.

Closing comments To reduce the time that I spend adapting WMYHTW for both Wikimedia-l and The Signpost, and to reduce errors in these emails, this week I first drafted this issue of WMYHTW on wiki. Adapting the content from wiki format to email format seems to be somewhat faster than adapting from email format to wiki format. However, after this week, I will likely be spending much less time on WMYHTW for the foreseeable future. I have bills that need to be paid.

English Wikiquote of the day for 15 September

Images

• Maps and photos of Brazil
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  Topographic map, by German Wikipedia contributor User:Captain Blood based on various mapping tools
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  Map of Köppen climate types, by User:Redtitan
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  The Palácio do Planalto, the official workplace of Brazil's president, by User:Gastão guedes
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  Oil platform P-51, by Brazilian public news agency Agência Brasil
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  Municipal Theater of São Paulo, by User:The Photographer (also known as User:Wilfredor)
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  Jaguar at the Piquiri River, the Pantanal, Brazil, by User:Charlesjsharp
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  Iguazú Falls, by User:Enaldo Valadares
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  Abismo Anhumas (Anhumas Abyss), by User:Caioribeirovilela
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  Aerial view of the Amazon rain forest, by Neil Palmer of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture

Pictures from Armenia

Other recent pictures of the day on English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons

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  Schönbühel Castle (Schloss Schönbühel) in Schönbühel-Aggsbach, Lower Austria, in a photo by User:Uoaei1
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  The Kiss (Der Kuß), a painting by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt. The scan of the painting was made by the Google Art Project, and it was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by User:Crisco 1492.
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  Elizabeth L. Remba Gardner, a member of the United States Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), in a photo that was probably taken during World War II. The image was uploaded by User:Junkyardsparkle, and edited by User:Hohum and User:Bammesk.
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  Cinnamon: sticks (ceylon cinnamon from Sri Lanka), powder, and flowers. Created from 31 images stacked with CombineZP. The image was created by User:LivingShadow.
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  Fog in a valley in National Nature Park Synevir, Zakarpattia Oblast, Ukraine, seen in a photo by User:Rbrechko.

Plans being considered for code review office hours

WMF is considering reviving office hours for code review or events that would serve a similar purpose. See https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2019-September/092565.html.

Discovery of interstellar comet 2I/Borisov

This comet is the second interstellar object known to be observed in our solar system. The comet was discovered by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Vladimirovich Borisov (Russian: Генна́дий Влади́мирович Бори́сов) in Crimea. The English Wikipedia article regarding the comet was created by User:Kheider shortly after midnight on 11 September 2019, which is on the same day as, and perhaps as soon as a few minutes after, the publication of an article about the comet in the popular astronomy magazine Sky & Telescope. A blurb regarding the comet was published on English Wikipedia's main page in the section "In the news".

• Known interstellar objects
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  Animation of interstellar objects 2I/Borisov and ʻOumuamua. Click through to the file in order to see the gif animation that was created by User:Tony873004.
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  ʻOumuamua is the small white dot

Wiktionary humor

The Wiktionary Word of the Day for International Talk Like a Pirate Day 2019 was "yo-ho-ho".

Wikiquotes

A Wikilibrarian's story

• Oregon State University
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  The Valley Library of Oregon State University
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  Presentation about Wikipedia and the Wiki Education Foundation at The Valley Library in 2015
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  College basketball: Oregon State Beavers vs. University of Oregon Ducks

The change of seasons

There are a variety of ways to define seasons, including meteorologically and culturally. For those in the northern hemisphere, the autumnal equinox was on 23 September this year; the autumnal equinox marks the transition from astronomical summer to astronomical autumn. For those in the southern hemisphere, 23 September was the spring equinox, which marked the transition from astronomical winter to astronomical spring.

Awhile back I learned of a Scandinavian practice called kulning, which involves using songs to call herds of cattle over long distances. Here is a video (Youtube link) that shows cattle being summoned out of the field with a kulning call for the last time of the year in September 2017.

Here are a few music selections for the transition from summer to fall:

• "Summer End | Chill & Jazzhop", by Fantastic Music (Youtube link)
• "Summer's Gone", by Bob Bradley & Thomas Balmforth (Youtube link)

And for the transition from winter to spring:

(The performances linked below feature John Harrison on the violin, and the Wichita State University Chamber Players. The conductor was Robert Turizziani. The performance rights release was received by Wikimedia Commons via OTRS.)

• Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8, RV 269, "La primavera" (Spring) — Movement 1: Allegro from The Four Seasons, composed by Antonio Vivaldi
• Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8, RV 269, "La primavera" (Spring) — Movement 2: Largo from The Four Seasons, composed by Antonio Vivaldi
• Concerto No. 1 in E major, Op. 8, RV 269, "La primavera" (Spring) — Movement 3: Allegro from The Four Seasons, composed by Antonio Vivaldi

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  Title page from Vivaldi's Cimento dell' Armonia e dell' Inventione, volume 2, 2nd violin part (1725)
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  Autumn in France
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  Spring in South Africa

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.

What's making you happy this month? You are welcome to write a comment on the talk page of this Signpost piece.