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Showing posts from November, 2010

Media establishment fighting back

By Nicolás García [CC-BY-SA-2.5] , from Wikimedia Commons I've become aware of two cases of old media trying to take back from the Free media movement. The first is the usage of Wikimedia Commons images by Encyclopedia Britannica online . We are very diligent about copyright in Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Multiple groups of people concern themselves with nothing but assessing images and global copyright laws, to make sure our materials are as legal and as Free as they can possibly be. Not so much Brittanica it seems. They happily ignore all license and attribution requirements that these images have, often just giving the username in plaintext (Examples image by Gnangarra , image by Toby Hudson ). For Creative Commons , a full link to the license is required if in any way possible. And just for kindness, a link back to the Wikimedia Commons description page might be nice/a good idea. The Wikimedia sites do the same for Flickr, it's very easy. Britannica, if you are li

Printing Wikipedia

Last year saw the launch of book printing for Wikipedia articles. A very nice feature that allows you to create a collection of articles and print them as a book. Since yesterday you can even get hardcovers . There is also a wonderful "Print to PDF" feature that piggybacks on the book rendering technology. Printing webpages has long intrigued me and the results have always been suboptimal, especially with something as complex as Wikipedia articles. However, the web is moving forward and the printing options for the web are getting better with every browser release. The past few days I was revisiting this issue and I have now added some new CSS to the print stylesheet of MediaWiki which should help browsers detect proper spots to insert pagebreaks and more importantly, where to avoid them. Before pagebreak CSS After pagebreak CSS When your browser supports it, it will try to avoid pagebreaks in images, wikitables and right after headers. It will also try to avoid lo