UTF-8

UTF-8 is a character encoding capable of encoding all possible characters, or code points, in Unicode.

The encoding is variable-length and uses 8-bit code units. It was designed for backward compatibility with ASCII, and to avoid the complications of endianness and byte order marks in the alternative UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings. The name is derived from: Universal Coded Character Set + Transformation Format – 8-bit.

UTF-8 is the dominant character encoding for the World Wide Web, accounting for 86.2% of all Web pages in January 2016 (with the most popular East Asian encoding, GB 2312, at 0.9% and Shift JIS at 1.1%). The Internet Mail Consortium (IMC) recommends that all e-mail programs be able to display and create mail using UTF-8, and the W3C recommends UTF-8 as the default encoding in XML and HTML.

UTF-8 encodes each of the 1,112,064 valid code points in the Unicode code space (1,114,112 code points minus 2,048 surrogate code points) using one to four 8-bit bytes (a group of 8 bits is known as an octet in the Unicode Standard). Code points with lower numerical values (i.e., earlier code positions in the Unicode character set, which tend to occur more frequently) are encoded using fewer bytes. The first 128 characters of Unicode, which correspond one-to-one with ASCII, are encoded using a single octet with the same binary value as ASCII, making valid ASCII text valid UTF-8-encoded Unicode as well. And ASCII bytes do not occur when encoding non-ASCII code points into UTF-8, making UTF-8 safe to use within most programming and document languages that interpret certain ASCII characters in a special way, e.g. as end of string.

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is an online repository of free-use images, sound, and other media files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used across all Wikimedia projects in all languages, including Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikivoyage, Wikispecies, Wikisource, and Wikinews, or downloaded for offsite use. The repository contains over 30 million media files. In July 2013, the number of edits on Commons reached 100,000,000.

History

The project was proposed by Erik Möller in March 2004 and launched on September 7, 2004. A key motivation behind the setup of a central repository was the desire to reduce duplication of effort across the Wikimedia projects and languages, as the same file had to be uploaded to many different wikis separately before Commons was created.

Several sister projects (e.g. Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Spanish, Basque, Polish, Czech and Slovak Wikipedias) moved all their media content to Commons and stopped allowing local uploading. Some projects, such as the English Wikipedia, have more compliant copyright policy and allow to upload and keep files which are not acceptable at Commons, e.g. fair use images.

The Long Game

"The Long Game" is the seventh episode of the first series of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who that was first broadcast on 7 May 2005 on BBC One. It was written by executive producer Russell T Davies and directed by Brian Grant.

In the episode, alien time traveller the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and his companion Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), having been joined by near-future genius Adam Mitchell (Bruno Langley), land on Satellite 5 in the far future. Satellite 5 is a space station that broadcasts news across the entire human empire. However, the Doctor notices that the station is suspicious: there are no aliens, and those who are promoted to Floor 500 seem to disappear. The Doctor and Rose discover that the Editor (Simon Pegg) and an alien are controlling the rest of humanity by way of the press. Meanwhile, Adam makes a mistake that forces the Doctor and Rose to take him home.

The concept of "The Long Game" was originally submitted by Davies to the Doctor Who script office in the 1980s. Davies had also been interested in doing a storyline about a failed companion. In addition, critics have pointed out that the story is a satire on the media. Production for the episode took place in November and December 2004, with some location filming in Coryton, Cardiff. "The Long Game" was watched by 8.01 million viewers in the UK and received generally mixed reviews from critics.