Wednesday, July 18, 2012

James Randi and Madonna

There are two names I doubt you will see in the same blog title.  Been having a great day/night.  Fresh from TAM 2012 I've got all my pictures uploaded as well as videos.  And I'm all organized with the Wikipedia World project.  People are starting to arrive, I'm placing them in the World group where only English is spoken, and we have groups set up for each language.  At the moment we have; English, Spanish, German, Russian, Turkish, Portuguese and French.  People are still arriving home from their vacation in Las Vegas, so we will probably see a lot more activity in a week or so.

So, the first edit we were going to work on was to get the IIG tribute to James Randi photo over onto all the Randi pages we could.  I asked people at TAM to translate one sentence.  "The Independent Investigations Group [[IIG]] tribute to James Randi TAM9, July 2011".  I didn't plan this very well as I asked people to translate onto a piece of paper.  Once they gave them back to me, I realized that I do not know how to write all that out, plus I had a very hard time reading handwriting.

Some people emailed me the translation and that allowed me to copy and paste.

So how did I do this when I can barely speak English, and what does it have to do with Madonna?

First I opened up the Edit page of the English James Randi page.  And copied the edit for the picture that I left months ago.  It looks like this in English.

[[Image:JREF TAM9 Beard Photo.jpg|thumb|300px|The Independent Investigations Group [[IIG]] tribute to James Randi TAM9]]

Once the picture is loaded to WikiCommons any language can use the image.  So this part is what the photographer (me) named it.

 JREF TAM9 Beard Photo.jpg

Okay then I went to the Spanish James Randi page.   Clicked on the "editar" tab which is in the exact same place as "edit" in English.

I found the place I wanted it to be located and then pasted in the English (above) edit.  Then changed the caption to what someone sent me on email.  I think it was Patrick Mahoney, but not sure at the moment as several people sent me this caption.

It looks like this

[[Image:JREF TAM9 Beard Photo.jpg|thumb|350px|Un tributo a James Randi, dado por el grupo independiente de investigación durante TAM9 (La Junta Asombrosa, edición 9) en julio del 2011]]

I hit preview which is located in the same place as it is in English.  Here it is called mostrar previsualizacion.

Then I wrote "photo" in the reason for edit area and hit save (grabar la pagana).

I was feeling pretty proud of myself but only slightly because I already speak Spanish, so wanted to try something more difficult.

Noticed I have a translation from Ken Archbold in Russian, sitting on my email.

I went to the Russian James Randi page (took me a while to figure out what the word Russian looks like when written in Russian, but I have a son and they always want to appear smart so he pointed it out to me "Русский".  I clicked on the edit page tab which is labeled in a way that I would only know was correct because it was in the same place in English.  And because when I clicked on it, the edit page opened up.

Now I was really in trouble.  I have no idea how to write "image" in Russian.  Possibly it would have worked if I just did it in English, but I decided to find a page that would have pictures on it in the body of the page.  So I went to the Russian page for Madonna, opened up her "edit" page and found an edit for a picture.  Looks like this

[[Файл:Madonna 1990 cropped.jpg|thumb|180px|Мадонна во время [[Blond Ambition World Tour]] в [[1990 год]]у]]

So as you can see the format is the same as in English.  I simply removed the Madonna picture (Madonna 1990 cropped.jpg) and pasted in the Randi Beard jpg.  Then I removed the writing about Madonna that would be the caption area.  Мадонна во время [[Blond Ambition World Tour]] в [[1990 год]]у

Then pasted in Ken's text, and was left with this.

[[Файл:JREF TAM9 Beard Photo.jpg|thumb|180px|Должное Джеймсу Рэнди от независимой группы исследования в TAM, июля 2011]]

I "previewed" the edit and didn't like how small it looked so I raised the px to 300.  I don't do things in a small way.

I didn't know what to put in the "reason for edit" area, so just left a ?  I suppose I could have written in English "photo added" and most editors would understand.

Anyway, Nix caught the bug and went ahead and took care of the Portuguese James Randi page.

Everyone involved in the World project is going to become VERY familiar with this tool.  http://stats.grok.se/

So lets just see for fun, how many people are going to be viewing the photo we just uploaded?

You must copy the name of the page you are trying to look at exactly, and you must pick the language.  Here is what July 2012 looks like in Russian  for James Randi.

I think you get the idea. 

Here is a link from Lei Pinter (who is at the English only WP page) she thought this would be helpful to everyone, Inline interlanguage links.  

There is nothing keeping others from adding pictures to other pages.  If you get in trouble just don't "save" the page.  Or if you mess it up really bad, someone who has that page on a watchlist will clean up your mess with only two clicks of the mouse.  


One more thought, wonder if I'm going to see an surge in hits to this blog because I mentioned Madonna?  If so I better add a few more


Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Bacon, George W. Bush, President Obama, Mitt Romeny

4 comments:

  1. Thank you Rian van Lierop for putting up the IIG JREF beard picture on James Randi's Dutch Wikipedia page. http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you İstem Fer for getting it on the Turkish Wikipedia page. http://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pablo Fuentes's FIRST EVER edit on Wikipedia is this one on Randi's French page! http://fr.wikipedia.org/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sorry wrong URL above this one correct.
    http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi

    ReplyDelete