Barklund.org

The fifth idea for my 365 Social Ideas is a Twitter- and Wikipedia-mashup idea (and some maps): Find out who’s talking about what on Twitter through Wikipedia categories. There are many sites for tracking Twitter trends , but they all require that you know what you’re looking for (or where you’re looking for it geographically). But what if you simply wanted to know what movies people are tweeting about? Or what about bands, musicians, flowers, four-legged mammals, financial institutions, politicians from Guadelupe or any other arbitrarily broad or narrow category of items?

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I’ve been reading up on the matter of the National Portrait Gallery in the United Kingdom and their threatening letters to the Wikimedia Foundation about the legal status of the digitised works created by said public institution.

After reading up on UK copyright law, my judgment is unclear – but mostly in favor of the NPG and thus against Wikimedia.

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It took me quite a while, but I finally managed.

On IRC, the Danish Wikipedia channel on freenode, we have a bot running (built on Linky again built on PircBot). This bot’s primary purpose is to extend socalled wikilinks. That is, when someone writes Someone wrote silly stuff in the [[USA]] article again the bot replies http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA – it expands the bracket-style links to proper URL’s.

The problem was the character encodings. Some use UTF-8 in this channel and others use ISO 8859-1. And how can you make the bot expand links for the Danish term [[Kødpålæg]] when written in either of the two encodings? The correct URL for this word is K%C3%B8dp%C3%A5l%C3%A6g The built-in UTF-8-decoder in Java will replace the “bad characters” with the Unicode replacement character U+FFFD, and thus the previous term written sent by a ISO 8859-1 client with Linky in UTF-8 mode would become K%EF%BF%BDdp%EF%BF%BDl%EF%BF%BDg, and in the reverse situation with Linky in ISO 8859-1 mode, the UTF-8 clients messages would be interpreted to K%C3%83%C2%B8dp%C3%83%C2%A5l%C3%83%C2%A6g. Both are very wrong.

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