Mailing List Archive

Proposal for Wikimedia Weather
Dear All,
I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.

I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe
WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin. Along
with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin
with), contributors could then put their weather where they are. This
could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather
forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects
and anybody else.

Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?

Thanks!

Wikinews User Page <http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Tristan%20Thomas>
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Re: Proposal for Wikimedia Weather [ In reply to ]
Tris Thomas wrote:
> I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe
> WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin. Along
> with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin
> with), contributors could then put their weather where they are. This
> could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather
> forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects
> and anybody else.
>
> Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
>

While this would be very nice if it could be done, I don't see any
realistic chance of it happening. Original reporting on Wikinews is
spotty because there are far too few people going out to give direct
coverage to the stories, even when notable stories in a place happen
only infrequently. We have weather everywhere, everyday, 24/7, and it
is constantly changing. I don't see how there could be enough
dedication to the task to make this fly.

Ec

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Re: Proposal for Wikimedia Weather [ In reply to ]
Wikimedia Norway have had a meeting with Meteorologisk Institutt
(http://met.no) in Norway about using the dataset published by the
institute. Today the dataset is used for the service Yr.no
(http://yr.no), a joint venture between them and Norwegian Broadcasting
Corporation (http://nrk.no). Met said it would be pleased if the data
could be utilized somehow, later this was confirmed by NRK.

The dataset is localized to within 4km in Norway and updated in about 4
hour cycles. There are available lookup for 7.5 million places around
the world, and 700 000 places in Norway. Base data are the HIRLAM model
(High Resolution Limited Area Model) and the EC model from The European
Weathercenter ECWMF. HIRLAM has 10 km resolution of the grid. When
requesting data for named places the data from the grid is interpolated
to build the new weather forecast.

The dataset is made available with an open license, they request
attribution and "truthful reproduction", basically you can't say it is
from Met and falsify the dataset. You can't add a few degrees to make
the weather look better at a certain place and still claim its sourced
from Met. This is analogous to editing a news photo at Commons so its
not a truthful reproduction of the event anymore. There are one
disclaimer for sites with pornographic or racist content which may be
troublesome for a CC-by-sa -licensed site. They do although allow use on
commercial sites. Other than that the licensing should be given due
consideration.

My personal opinion is that they should be kindly asked to make the
dataset available according to CC-by-sa to make reuse easier.

Our proposal to Met/NRK was to make an extension that could be localized
for various languages, based on the XML-data streamed from their site,
and to use something like this for Wikinews. Unfortunately we have not
been able to get sufficient funding for the project. We also need some
backing from the community if this should be considered a viable project.

Short information in english about Yr.no
http://www.yr.no/english/1.2025949

Page about licensing (in Norwegian)
http://www.yr.no/verdata/1.3321307

Page about services available (in Norwegian)
http://www.yr.no/verdata/

Some locations
http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Oslo/Oslo/
http://www.yr.no/place/Bouvet_Island/
http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Finnmark/B%C3%A5tsfjord/Makkaur/
http://www.yr.no/place/United_States/New_York/New_York~5128581/
http://www.yr.no/place/China/Xinjiang/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi/
Page about how the weather forecast is made (in Norwegian)
http://www.yr.no/informasjon/1.3687572

John Erling Blad
Wikimedia Norway

Tris Thomas wrote:
> Dear All,
> I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.
>
> I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe
> WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin. Along
> with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin
> with), contributors could then put their weather where they are. This
> could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather
> forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects
> and anybody else.
>
> Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Wikinews User Page <http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Tristan%20Thomas>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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Re: Proposal for Wikimedia Weather [ In reply to ]
On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 8:01 AM, Tris Thomas<Tris@waterhay.co.uk> wrote:
> Dear All,
> I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.
>
> I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe
> WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin.  Along
> with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin
> with), contributors could then put their weather where they are.  This
> could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather
> forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects
> and anybody else.
>
> Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Wikinews User Page <http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Tristan%20Thomas>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

I can already see it now:

"It is bright and sunny today in XYZ town[citation needed]"

-Chad

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Re: Proposal for Wikimedia Weather [ In reply to ]
ECMWF - European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Centre_for_Medium-Range_Weather_Forecasts

The 4km resolution is from private email correspondence and is for
Northern Europe. The four hour cycle is from memory, it should be four
times a day.

From other correspondance "EVWMF validerer (etterkontrollerer) varsla
sine (som våre byggjer på) på eit overordna europeisk nivå. Dei gjer
sikkert validering på verdsnivå òg, utan at eg har sett rapportar på
dette. Valideringane som blir gjort, viser at prognosane er svært
treffsikre (90-95%) dei fyrste dagane, og at det fell ned mot 60% for
dag 10 i prognosen."

That is, the EVWMF validates their own weather forecasts on a large
scale level and the hit rate for the first few days is around 90-95%.
I'm not sure what they are measuring. Later that goes down to a 60% hit
rate for day 10.

I'm not sure about how the rest of the world are modeled, the grid
resolution, etc.

John

John at Darkstar wrote:
> Wikimedia Norway have had a meeting with Meteorologisk Institutt
> (http://met.no) in Norway about using the dataset published by the
> institute. Today the dataset is used for the service Yr.no
> (http://yr.no), a joint venture between them and Norwegian Broadcasting
> Corporation (http://nrk.no). Met said it would be pleased if the data
> could be utilized somehow, later this was confirmed by NRK.
>
> The dataset is localized to within 4km in Norway and updated in about 4
> hour cycles. There are available lookup for 7.5 million places around
> the world, and 700 000 places in Norway. Base data are the HIRLAM model
> (High Resolution Limited Area Model) and the EC model from The European
> Weathercenter ECWMF. HIRLAM has 10 km resolution of the grid. When
> requesting data for named places the data from the grid is interpolated
> to build the new weather forecast.
>
> The dataset is made available with an open license, they request
> attribution and "truthful reproduction", basically you can't say it is
> from Met and falsify the dataset. You can't add a few degrees to make
> the weather look better at a certain place and still claim its sourced
> from Met. This is analogous to editing a news photo at Commons so its
> not a truthful reproduction of the event anymore. There are one
> disclaimer for sites with pornographic or racist content which may be
> troublesome for a CC-by-sa -licensed site. They do although allow use on
> commercial sites. Other than that the licensing should be given due
> consideration.
>
> My personal opinion is that they should be kindly asked to make the
> dataset available according to CC-by-sa to make reuse easier.
>
> Our proposal to Met/NRK was to make an extension that could be localized
> for various languages, based on the XML-data streamed from their site,
> and to use something like this for Wikinews. Unfortunately we have not
> been able to get sufficient funding for the project. We also need some
> backing from the community if this should be considered a viable project.
>
> Short information in english about Yr.no
> http://www.yr.no/english/1.2025949
>
> Page about licensing (in Norwegian)
> http://www.yr.no/verdata/1.3321307
>
> Page about services available (in Norwegian)
> http://www.yr.no/verdata/
>
> Some locations
> http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Oslo/Oslo/
> http://www.yr.no/place/Bouvet_Island/
> http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Finnmark/B%C3%A5tsfjord/Makkaur/
> http://www.yr.no/place/United_States/New_York/New_York~5128581/
> http://www.yr.no/place/China/Xinjiang/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi/
> Page about how the weather forecast is made (in Norwegian)
> http://www.yr.no/informasjon/1.3687572
>
> John Erling Blad
> Wikimedia Norway
>
> Tris Thomas wrote:
>> Dear All,
>> I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.
>>
>> I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe
>> WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin. Along
>> with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin
>> with), contributors could then put their weather where they are. This
>> could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather
>> forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects
>> and anybody else.
>>
>> Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Wikinews User Page <http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Tristan%20Thomas>
>> _______________________________________________
>> foundation-l mailing list
>> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>

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Re: Proposal for Wikimedia Weather [ In reply to ]
2009/7/8 Tris Thomas <Tris@waterhay.co.uk>:
> Dear All,
> I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.
>
> I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe
> WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin.  Along
> with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin
> with), contributors could then put their weather where they are.  This
> could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather
> forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects
> and anybody else.
>
> Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?

It would all be importing forecasts from other sources, though. You
can't give a forecast by looking out the window, you can just say what
the weather is now. Why would people use WikiWeather rather than going
direct to those sources which would be more up-to-date and reliable?

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Re: Proposal for Wikimedia Weather [ In reply to ]
Tris Thomas wrote:
> Dear All,
> I don't know whether this has been discussed before, apologies if it has.
>
> I'm interested in people's thoughts on a new Wikimedia project-maybe
> WikiWeather, which basically would do what it says on the tin. Along
> with importing national weather from other sources(especially to begin
> with), contributors could then put their weather where they are. This
> could evolve into many contributors giving very localised weather
> forecasts worldwide, which could be used by many of the other projects
> and anybody else.
>
> Would people be interested in this proposal/have any thoughts on it?
>
> Thanks!
>
> Wikinews User Page <http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Tristan%20Thomas>

Except for forecasts (though it might be interesting to see how wiki
users compare to professional meteorologists), weather is mostly just
data, so computers can generally provide it better than people.

The only way I could see this as possibly being better than existing
services would be if it was set up so that people who had home weather
stations that could connect to a computer could automatically update the
site.

But A) that kind of equipment is expensive (at minimum ~$100 USD for
something that only records temperature) and B) it wouldn't really be a
wiki as the majority of the content would be automatically updated. Only
the forecasts would be human-produced.

Though you'd start to run into the principle of diminishing returns with
that - how much better is a weather report from 2 miles away versus 5
miles away? After a point, it just becomes redundant. And of course we'd
still have to rely on the weather services for things like radar and
satellite images.

--
Alex (wikipedia:en:User:Mr.Z-man)

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