The Welsh Assembly

Front view of the Senned

On my January visit to Cardiff I chanced upon the second devolved parliament of Britain that is not housed in an ordinary building (I haven't yet had the chance to visit Belfast, but I imagine Stormont to be a more traditional building). The Welsh National Assembly building is located in the bay area of the town next to the iconic Millenium Centre.

The debating chamber's walls become the roof

The building was finished in 2006 and it projects the image of transparency, openness.One also notices the prominent use of natural materials such as wood and glass. The steps in front of the glass portal of the building covered by the wavy, overhanging roof made of wood are inviting to the public and fit well into the area with the sea nearby and the rainy English weather. The whole building suggest looking out to the sea, the people and looking forward to the future, as well as invitingly offering shelter.

Slovakian Parliament

National Council of the Slovak Republic

On my last trips to Bratislava unfortunately I didn't get to visit the Slovakian Parliament's building. It is located in the best possible place of the town, next to the castle. Unfortunately, it is quite an uninteresting (from outside), gray, concrete building next to the imposing castle so most tourists probably don't even realize its significance and head directly through the gate on the opposite side of the street to the castle grounds.

The Chaos

I am studying for my English phonology exam and I wanted to share what I'm going through, so here's a poem by Gerald Nolst Trenité (IPA version; one of the many video adaptations).

Awkward Situations for Men

Ever since I caught a glimpse on a fine summer afternoon in London of Danny Wallace's attempts to create his own country I have been hooked on his humour and "special boy projects", like accidentally founding a cult or saying yes to everything.

I have found the book versions of his escapades quite funny (less so with his later attempts to revisit some old friends or find the center of the universe) so I am having great hopes about his adventures in the New World, which should come out in book form in about a month and will hopefully become a TV series on ABC I guess in the autumn, if all goes well.

Peru, OLPC and Wikipedia

Web: La Selva from Web on Vimeo. Hat tip to Jimmy Wales.

Berlin

Holocaust memorial

Reichstag

Last week I was in Berlin for the 2010 Wikimedia Conference. This has been my third visit to Berlin and probably the most enjoyable, so far.

The conference was very productive and made more enjoyable by the presence of all those people who stayed because of the ash cloud. I am sure we can convert some of the energy of the conference into cool events here in Hungary.

Best of all, after many night-time sightseeing tours in Berlin I had the chance to look around during the day in the fine weather. Hopefully, at my next visit I will also have the time to visit some of the museums of Berlin.

Combating link rot on Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

One of the main principles of Wikipedia is verifiability, the idea that any fact you find in an article can also be found in a reliable external source (that's why there are so many footnotes in any given Wikipedia article). These external sources can either be offline paper products or more often than not online web pages. Unfortunately, web pages often change or become unavailable, a process nicknamed link rot , which goes counter to the ability of verification.

One way to combat link rot and to ensure that a reader can always find the sources used to make up a Wikipedia article is to rely on online archiving services such as the Internet Archive or WebCite. The solution to the problem is to submit each linked web page to the archives' attention to make sure they will have a copy of the referenced webpages in the eventuality that they become unavailable.

There is no automatic way to submit all links on a Wikipedia to an archive and different projects have come up with different solutions. The English Wikipedia used to send every new link added to the various articles to the WebCite archive (to the point that said archive had to increase server capacity). The French Wikipedia have devised a way to link to an archived version of linked pages at the Wikiwix search engine, but I don't know the particulars.

So far the Hungarian Wikipedia doesn't have a systematic way of eliminating dead external links. As a first step in the right direction I slightly modified a component of the Pywikipedia framework to go through every single page in the Hungarian Wikipedia and send every external link to the WebCite archive. The method was inefficient because I am not a programmer and both Python and the WebCite website often crashed. (The ideal program would have used the external links database dump that contains only the links without the irrelevant article text.)

As a results of my efforts the vast majority of the external web pages that were linked from the Hungarian Wikipedia and were alive at the end of 2009 can now be found in the WebCite archive. (Such as this copy of the Nobel prize website.) I will run my program periodically to include new links added to articles.

The logical extension of my work would be to include the links to the archived versions next to the links themselves if a page dies. This could be done either manually or automatically, however I haven't the expertise or time to make this happen.