Is Monmouthpedia The Future Of Wikipedia?

One of the central questions the Wikipedia community grapples with is: What exactly is Wikipedia trying to achieve? For example, does it aspire to be a total encyclopedia of everything? What is the appropriate level of detail? 

On Techdirt.

Cardiff Council Welshes on Welsh Culture

Unbelievable:

An action group says it is "aghast" at plans to sell some of Wales' oldest and rarest books.

Cardiff Council could eventually sell up to 18,000 items dating from the 15th Century at auction to raise money for improvements in library services.

Why don't they just ban culture and be done with it?

Welsh TV over IP: Yeah, But Why?

As someone who has a Welsh name and not a little Welsh genetic heritage, I'm a big fan of expanding the provision of material in Welsh. But spending lots of dosh on yet another TV over IP platform ain't the way to do that:

Welsh-language broadcaster S4C (hardly rolling in it, thanks to digital TV launches and falling audiences in the multichannel era) has teamed with VC house Wesley Clover to invest £9.5 in Inuk, an Abercynon-based TV-over-broadband operator.

Inuk packages channels under its Freewire brand, including Freeview stations and some premium channels. Inuk also does VoIP. Both are targeted at student halls of residence (now up to 100,000 students), old people's homes etc.

S4C, which operates in place of Channel 4 on analogue platforms, is funded from advertising and a £97 million annual public grant. The investment comes via its S4CDM commercial unit.

Bizarre how normally sane broadcasters lose their marbles over IP-based solutions.

Welsh Death-Wish

As someone with a Welsh first name, I have always taken an interest in the Welsh language and efforts to promote it and keep it in the land of the living. Alas, this ain't one of them:

Scores of writers are refusing to let their works be scanned for an online archive at the National Library of Wales because they are not being paid.

A year after a near-£1m project was awarded to digitise modern Welsh writing, a dispute between authors and the library has not been resolved.

The library is putting some 3.5m words from 20th Century English and Welsh periodicals and magazines on the web.

But literature promotion agency Academi wants writers to be paid a share.

Academi chief executive Peter Finch said: "It's an extremely exciting programme: what's wrong with it is there is no small sliver in there for paying the writers.

Hello??? The "small sliver" is that your words live on and people can read the bleddy things. Refusing to allow works written in Welsh to be digitised (which costs money) is a sure way to ensure that the language languishes and becomes even more marginal in the digital age. (Via paidContent UK.)

Croeso i Agored.com

This one will make Alan Cox happy:

Agored, a new free office software suite is being launched today by Culture Minister Alun Pugh. The suite, a Welsh and English dual-language version of the OpenOffice suite used worldwide, has been developed over the past two years at the Mercator Centre, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Me, I'm still waiting for the Anglo-Saxon version: "Oft him anhaga, are gebideth...." (Via Erwin's StarOffice Tango.)