The first technology presentations from last weekend's Wikimania conference in Gdansk have begun to be published. They include "Why your extension will not be enabled on Wikimedia wikis in its current state and what you can do about it" (pictured), which gave advice to developers, particularly of extensions. This came in the form of instructions on security and scalability, for example, that all inputs should be escaped to prevent SQL injection. Also published were the slides from "Geodata in Wikipedia and Commons", which outlined how Wikimedia is going about geocoding its images and then utilising this data.
Following on from last week's import of Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) images, this week the technical preparation for a mass upload of map images created by the Ordnance Survey (OS), the government body responsible for mapping in the United Kingdom. The files, provided by the OS as part of their OpenData initiative under their own free licence, will be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by OrdnanceSurveyBot in both native TIFF form and JPG form for easier use and display across Wikimedia Projects.
Unlike with the BNF, however, the release was not the result of a specific partnership, but of years of campaigning by the wider open data community in the UK. The Ordnance Survey website notes that the selection of maps it agreed to release to the public, under a free licence on April 1 2010, represents some "of the most detailed mapping datasets available for Great Britain". The free licence is compatible with the Creative Commons 3.0 licence; this means that all derivative works can be licensed as CC.
Note: not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
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Dent by Catrope about the coverage of his presentation: [1]. Regards, HaeB (talk) 18:46, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
- Such is the reward for presenters who make their presentations easy for lazy journalist-types to find! - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 19:07, 20 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Roan's presentation on extension development is great. I'm a novice developer, and it's really easy to forget about that kind of stuff. Reach Out to the Truth 19:47, 22 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]