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Showing posts from 2013

downloading folders from google drive.

I wanted to download some course material on RL shared by the author via Google drive using the command line.  I got a bunch of stuff using wget a folder in google drive was a challenge. I looked it up in SO which gave me a hint but no solution. I installed gdown using pip and then used: gdown --folder --continue https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1V9jAShWpccLvByv5S1DuOzo6GVvzd4LV if there are more than 50 files you need to use --remaining-ok and only get the first 50. In such a case its best to download using the folder using the UI and decompress locally. Decompressing from the command line created errors related to unicode but using the mac UI I decompressed without a glitch.

A Tale of Two Hackathons

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Hackathon TLV 2013 (Photo credit: Wikimedia Israel ) It was the best of times ... when due to a generous grant from WM.NL I was able to participate in the 2013 Mediawiki hackathon in Amsterdam . Hackathons are amazing. Regular hackathons in TLV are highly competitive but open source hackathons are incredible. There are unbelievable  levels of energy in these events and opportunities to reach out to very large numbers of participants. When Hackathons include teaching sessions they reduce the learning curves associated with learning new technology - an ever increasing hurdle to participation in FLOSS projects. If the hackathon sessions are taped they can be easily edited and become a powerful method for transferring institutional knowledge locked in the minds of experienced contractors. Once these videos are released they can be combined with tutorials and used for self-instruction by new hackers. Hackathon TLV 2013 (Photo credit: Wikimedia Israel ) As the 2103 h

Wikisym & Wikimania I 2013

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education (image credit: Sean MacEntee ) Thanks to a generous grant by MW.IL and WMF I was able to attend the 2013 Wikisym/Open Sim 2013 which took place at the Cyberport in Hong Kong.  I will not be going into details about all the conference session as I and others will be covering it in detail in Wikimedia's research newsletter syndicated in English  Wikipedia 's signpost as well as on meta.  Goals I came to wikisym 2013 to demo some new technology aimed at supporting educators and their students during formative assessments . Specifically I have developed a number of metrics to assess student activity on wiki.  Cyberport-cinema (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I had written a draft of a paper covering the subject, but since I am more of a developer  than an educator, I was somewhat at a loss to complete the paper before wikisym. My plan was in essence to: Reach out and locate other researchers and professors involved in this domain.  Get feedb

Effects of cognitive surplus on some of all the knowledge

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MIND THE GAP (Photo credit: sarahstierch ) At Wikisym last year I discussed an unpopular opinion that readers who see errors and don't fix them are free riders and how a similar case holds for readers who do neither edit nor contribute to the fundraiser. Of course there are many caveats such as not ever seeing the edit button, difficulties in using the UI and of course the community.  At the time the feedback tool had been launched and this had lowered the bar to participation. Until the community decided other wise - raising the bar to participation and cynically pointing out that in most cases this was worse then free riding - it was encouraging "parasitic" behaviour - participation that was not constructive and which only sucked up resources. As my own experience in the Yoga project was radically different I had not bothered to go into this. One of the questions that tends to come up when considering women and the gender gap is in Wikipedia is:

Finding your friends on Wikipedia

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A segment of a social network (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In my opinion, the most notable missing features of Wikipedia is the ability to network socially . Lack of social features conspire to minimise participants'  social capital (the expected collective or economic benefits derived from the preferential treatment and cooperation between individuals and groups). Lack of networking capabilities is in line with a pervasive attitude that ownership of contributions should be suppressed, external authority ignored and that knowledge matters in the project. Accordingly social costs of participation are growing. Participants in the project have great difficulty in acquiring social capital. The stakes of establishing world opinion tend to outweigh social stakes. Accordingly there is a growing gender gap, under-representation of cultural minorities and disrespect of real world authority. Currently users will try to establish social capital by listing on their user page their m

Tips on working with SQL Fiddle

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C-3PO vs. Data (137/365) (Photo credit: JD Hancock ) Trying to get help with SQL ?  Chances are that you could use the open-source web application  mysqlfiddle.  Usually questions asked on the web leave much to be desired in terms of precision. The good news is that with Sqlfiddle you can set up a copy of the relevant sql schema, add some sample data,  add your best attempt and and share these with the people you are chatting or corresponding with. Next follows an example environment I set up to explore on collecting editor sessionstatistics for wikipedia's undocumented revision_user table. Working with a full environment was not practical. Working with the sqlfiddle actually ended up as a big time saver since testing the queries on a live database would have taken hours. http://sqlfiddle.com/#!2/d2f02/22 It sometimes seems that setting up a Database environment is a bit of an overkill - especially when it is just to ask a question. However if you have a working fiddle it

Mediawiki User edits by Namespace

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\ During work on Orwell01 I got to look through the code of X! counter tool on the WMF toolserver. Mediawiki's API does not expose a method to get a user's edit counts per namespace. When I was chatting with some WMF developer at the Amsterdam Hackathon - I was told that this was not exposed since it was not stored in the database and had to be worked out in an application. And indeed there is a popular edit counter called X! edit counter maintained by User:TParis that does just this. However this edit counter does not expose the namespace stats either in its undocumented API either.... Looking at the code I started to explore the database queries being done and found the following:

Moodle <=< Mediawiki SUL integration - first thoughts

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SUL is  Wikipedia's  Single User Login system The goal is to use it to authenticate moodle users there is one caveat - what happen if  the moodle user has no account. Moodle and MediaWiki account creation require different information. Since we'd like to use MediaWiki's standard which is highly permissive. It is necessary to change  moodle's requirements. Challenges Moodle does not explicitly define an object for setting registration requirements.  This needs to be accomplished by admins via edit a number of files manually.  errors will place the users in a limbo/blocked state... This is implemented differently on different version of moodle. This will break if the changes are overwritten by a system is upgrade. Directions Ideally Moodle should have a registration policy  object which allows the admin to define which fields are required and if they need to be unique . For example Moodle complains if different users share an email adr

Moodle Time Lines

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Teaching History ? One of the requirements for the historical courseware project is to add a timeline for each unit. A time line allows a teacher to capture   the order of events in a way that students can visualize. While events can be ordered in time, they can usually be located in space as well. To account for this duality timelines can be be paired of with a map as well. Putting the two together and we can get interactive animated maps. But this is not the end either. Events on a Time lines may be clustered to indicate types of historical patterns. Last but not least a timeline can be enhanced with some kind of thematic data which is associated with the events. If the events are appropriately tagged then the time line can be faceted accordingly. Date presented in this fashion becomes a powerful dynamic visualization tool more so it it can be made  interactive. Bellow is Charles Minard 's innovative  chart of Napoleon's Russian campaign. This iconic time l

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