Recent content in : My heart is a Turing machine: A blog by Jens Ohlig
One of the least favorite parts for learners of German are the grammatical genders . At times it can feel like a tiny bureaucratic prank designed to test a learner’s patience. Articles seem to obey secret laws: der Tisch, die Tür, das Mädchen. While there are patterns, there are also enough exceptions to make confidence wobble. For learners, the frustration is not just remembering vocabulary, but…
Knowledge Production on Wikimedia Projects with Artificial Intelligence (whatever that means) 
 There’s no doubt that what we refer to as “Artificial Intelligence” is changing knowledge production. English Wikipedia has recently adopted a policy which prohibits the use of Large Language Models to generate or rewrite article content. A little before that, German Wikipedia…
Hugo is becoming my favorite static site generator . It’s what this blog is running on. 
 It really only took a few minutes to make it generate pages in the Gemini hypertext format (“gemtext”). Now you can read my blog in a wonderfully obscure way on the other, lesser known Internet: 
 gemini://tilde.pink/~johl/ 
 Eventually, I rolled my own solution for Hugo (it’s really…
The 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) takes place in Hamburg from December 27th to December 30th. Check out the Wikipedia article to see what kind of conference/experience it is. 
 The program of talks, performances, and workshops is absolutely massive. No matter how well you plan your visit, you will miss things and that’s okay and part of it all. It would be almost unfair to single…
I’m typing this blog post on a tiny, cute, but powerful purple ARM computer in the hope that I will never have to buy a whole new machine to replace it. It’s called the MNT Pocket Reform , and it’s a compact 7-inch laptop with open hardware documentation and a modular internal architecture. It includes a clicky mechanical keyboard and a trackball within a portable form factor. 
 
 My…
I went to the Berlin Fediverse Day . Here are some notes, because not everything is about overly long posts: 
 
 Bookwyrm is something I should check out. And it uses Inventaire for unique book and author IDs (which means it indirectly uses Wikidata). The presentation by Jascha was delightful. 
 I liked a lot how flohmarkt turned out, as it came out of a Prototype Fund project . 
…
For the last day of Wikimania, I saw a talk/panel called “ Bridging the Digital Divide: The Role of Libraries in Supporting Open Knowledge in Underserved Communities ” which once again made me realize how much libraries and Wikipedia have in common – it’s like the first are a brick and mortar version of the latter. 
 After that, I helped a Wikimedian from Indonesia to…
I’m brimful of new ideas and it’s mostly because of two talks I attended – and of course the conversations I had. 
 The one very inspiring talk I want to highlight was “ A Model of Peer-Produced Knowledge Commons Lifecycles and Governance ” by Benjamin Mako Hill . His talk was about a phenomenon that can be observed on all Wikipedias: After a steep growth, the number of…
Today was filled with less presentations and talks for me. I watched “ Wikidata: a whirlwind tour through the land of Wikidata-powered apps ” by Lydia, though. I highly recommend the slides to get inspired with what you can build with the knowledge base of structured data. 
 I also listened to a panel on AI (again!). One piece of statistics that blew my mind was that 42.1% of…
Wikimania is the annual conference that brings together the global community of volunteers who build and maintain Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. This year it takes place from 6–9 August 2025 in Gigiri , Nairobi , Kenya . 
 I met a volunteer from Ghana who asked me for support for his Fante language group that wanted to use Wikidata and I think I was able to connect him to the right…
The title says it all: “ I don’t speak Swahili, but I love data ”. 
 In preparation for Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi, Kenya I looked into the Swahili language. I can now greet people, say “thank you”, and I can say who I am and where I’m from, but that’s about it. 
 Swahili is a part of the Bantu language family. A series of migrations that happened…
A very German question is “when is Tagesthemen on tonight?”. The longer, more in-depth news program on German public-service television is a good starting point or summary for the news of the day. In days long gone, you would probably look up the air date in a printed TV program guide, but in the age of Internet and data, there should be a better way. 
 From Propaganda to Public…
Every year on May 25th, fans of the late British author Douglas Adams celebrate Towel Day — a quirky, heartfelt tribute to the man behind “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. On this day, people all over the world carry a towel with them wherever they go. In Adams’ sci-fi universe, a towel is described as “about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.”…
One of my most favorite places in the world is Monster Ronson’s Ichiban Karaoke in Berlin-Friedrichshain. It’s a wonderful, kitschy, and kind place to sing in karaoke booths. And it has an open API for its song catalogue. If you want a machine-readable version of all the ABBA songs on their machines, you can get it by querying a special endpoint . 
 In the early 2000s, much of the…
We need stories. Stories that we can tell each other or listen to, and that entertain us. We can learn from some stories. Sometimes we don’t fully understand a story, but it remains as an echo, a mood. From this mood, new ideas may arise and the desire to go deeper into the topic. Abstract Wikipedia , Wikidata , and Wikifunctions are not always easy to explain. Wikifunctions is a new project…